by Joy Dettman
‘We need that fuse, Lori,’ Mick called through the closed door. ‘The mattress is saturated.’
That’s what moved her, that near new mattress which hadn’t been cheap. She dressed then in warm clothing and after a bit of feeling about she found the fuse in the top drawer, unlocked the door and gave it to Mick.
He’d dressed and strapped on his brace. Everyone was up and dressed, other than the two little kids, who slept on.
They propped the mattress against the computer desk, and within minutes of the fuse being pushed back into its space, the air conditioner was pumping out heat.
The bedroom carpet was soggy. The mobile boys were doing what they could to soak it dry, with the towels from the bathroom. Just another clean-up after Mavis – or after Lori. They were accustomed to clean-ups. Lori fetched more towels, older towels. She took a soggy load out to the washing machine, which wasn’t accustomed to agitating at two o’clock in the morning, but it didn’t complain.
She was standing, staring out the window gap at the caravan wall when Jamesy came out with more wet towels.
‘Dump them in,’ she said, lifting the lid. He did as he was bid but stood on in the doorway, a matchstick youth, long legged, long necked, almost as tall as Lori, with hair much like her own and long enough now to tie back. He hadn’t tied it back, not this morning. It hid half of his face but not his mouth, a wider mouth than her own and even at two in the morning, wearing its cynical half-smile. His eyes too could look cynical, though not tonight.
He didn’t speak, or not for a minute, and when he did he said what Lori had been thinking. ‘She’ll have another one the same as the last.’
Sometimes, there is no reply worth making. She shrugged.
‘Did it have three arms, or did I dream it?’ he asked.
It was the first time he’d mentioned Thirteen. She’d thought he’d forgotten it or blotted it out.
‘Four,’ she said. ‘Or sort of arms. Four sort of eyes too. I think it must have started out attempting to be twins but got screwed up like everything else after Henry killed himself.’
‘Do you know what happened to it?’
She didn’t know. Thought that it had probably ended up in a jar of alcohol, or been dumped into an unmarked hole somewhere. She hoped the latter, or she used to. Didn’t really care right now. Was it worth caring about anything? She sucked in a breath that refused to go deep. Her lungs felt full of raw minced steak.
‘The ambulance men took it away. They would have buried it somewhere.’
‘Will the cops charge her for wrecking Vinnie’s knee?’
‘She’d lie her way out of it,’ Lori said.
*
The air conditioner’s motor thumped on and on and on, guzzling electricity Martin would have to pay for. Sometime during the early morning, Lori slid into that place between sleep and wakefulness, where dreams intersect with reality. The brick walls were real but unpainted, and red, and she was locked behind them with a naked man, and Mavis was in there, laughing, like she had in the hotel room.
Timmy and Matty had been whisked away while she’d dreamed. She did a Mavis that morning, didn’t wake until eleven. The load she’d left in the washing machine was on the clothesline and other than Eddy, the boys had gone to work or school. The air conditioner, still pumping hot air, hadn’t done the orchids a lot of good. Half a dozen of their heads had fallen – and so much for perfection. She picked them up, stood a while looking at them on her palm, then tossed them into the ashes from the last open fire.
futures
Of course Willama lost the grand final, and of course it was a scar on Vinnie’s soul. Martin visited him a few times, but said that Vinnie wasn’t fit to speak to.
Nor was Lori, or she preferred not to speak. She wouldn’t have bothered going to school if she’d been game to stay home alone. No one had seen the parent since the night of the hose, but she’d be back.
Most nights after school Lori shopped for bread and something to put between bread for school lunches, just the basics.
Neil was waiting out the front of Spud Murphy’s gate when she rode home. ‘They’re down the back knocking off a few of his trees,’ he said.
Spud had moved out last weekend. Lori had never seen more than the front of his house and his crazy dogs. She looked around while wheeling her bike down to an unfamiliar back veranda to lean it and her shopping against unfamiliar veranda posts.
Bert was with the boys, supervising the digging up of a tree that he or Mick had sawed back to a man height.
‘It’s a fig,’ Bert said. ‘It was loaded last year.’
Lingering smell of dog in that yard. Dogs long gone. Spud now living in the new annex built behind the hospital, an annex named The Jones Apartments – for Doctor Jones – so Willama wouldn’t forget him. As if anyone ever would.
‘The developers will bulldoze it,’ Mick said, justifying Bert’s thievery. The tree wasn’t all Bert wanted. He and the boys had already unearthed two bunches of thorny spikes. She checked out their spikes while the fig tree defied two shovels and an axe.
‘Where are you going to plant them, Mr Matthews?’ she asked. He had no space for one weed more in his yard.
‘In our back corner,’ Mick said.
There was space enough down there, though planting anything was a waste of time. As Eddy kept saying, they’d have to move when she came back – and she would.
They got that tree out, by mutilating its roots with the axe, and once free of the earth it was barely manageable.
Bert chose its new home. He supervised the digging of the hole, the hammering in of stakes to hold the tree upright until its roots decided to live or die. He chose the front lawn for the roses, and the boys dug smaller holes on either side of the birdbath.
‘You can’t kill a rosebush,’ he said. According to him, cutting off most of the fig tree’s roots wouldn’t kill it.
He might have been right. Henry’s bonsais had been similarly abused before he’d stuffed them into pots no larger than a cereal bowl. Given earth, two had grown tall, not that anyone would be here to see how tall they grew. As Eddy kept saying, they’d have to move.
She’d bought nothing to cook for dinner but there was a rock-hard lump of minced steak in the freezer. As she removed its plastic, she likened that rock-hard lump to the one in her lungs. The meat would thaw. What was inside her never would.
‘We’re going to be stuck here until the end of November,’ Eddy said that night. He was plugged into his laptop. ‘The tenants’ lease isn’t up until then.’
Martin had agreed to go. He would have gone to the South Pole to put distance between him and those he now referred to as the Kelly gang. He’d been to see Vinnie again. ‘He’s not in a good frame of mind,’ he said.
Who was?
The mattress was back on the bed, the quilt was dry but the carpet smelt like wet dog and mushrooms, and the dusty pink drapes had proved how dusty they were when given water.
Nelly came over on Wednesday with news of Vinnie. Pam, Vinnie’s boss’s wife, had been at bingo where she’d had plenty to say about her lodger and about Merve, her husband, who’d done the wrong thing by driving Vinnie down to watch Willama get beaten last Saturday.
‘She said he came home threatening to murder Mavis,’ Nelly said.
He’d been threatening to decapitate her with the wood axe since he’d turned fourteen. They’d thought he was going to do it the night he’d taken off with Greg, which was why Mick and Lori hadn’t tried to talk him out of going.
That Wednesday, Martin had bigger problems than Vinnie. He’d received another letter from Miss Piggy’s solicitor who was now demanding that he get an independent valuation on Old Red.
He’d bought that ute as a wreck with a green door and a cream bonnet, and he had photographs to prove it. He had a photograph of Sean’s father giving it its first all-over coat of red. Yes, he had paid out big money to professional restorers after his marriage, but if he, Sean and Sea
n’s father hadn’t done the initial work there would have been nothing left of Old Red for the professionals to restore.
And it wasn’t only half of Old Red they wanted. The solicitor had enclosed three pages of the debts incurred to Reginald and Sylvia Kelly during the course of his marriage to their daughter. They not only wanted back rent for Miss Piggy’s hairdressing salon, but back rent for their upstairs apartment, plus payment for meals and laundry provided during Martin’s tenancy. They were out to break him, literally and figuratively.
Then Friday, bloody Friday, and Nelly waiting out the front to gather in the kids as they came from school.
‘She came in a taxi around midday with a dark, foreign-looking bloke.’
‘Like a Taliban with a vulture beak?’ Neil asked.
‘I didn’t see him up close. He had a black beard,’ Nelly said. ‘And he carried in a ton of luggage, like he was moving in.’
They filled her house that night, her news repeated as one more, and one more joined the horde in her kitchen. When Neil disappeared, they thought he’d gone into the lounge room to watch television, until they went out to stop Martin from going home. Neil stopped him. He came at a run up Henry’s drive.
‘What the hell were you doing over there?’ Lori asked.
‘She’s cooking in our frying pan and drinking something that looks like blood and his cases are in the front passage, a big stuffed navy blue one and a bigger brown one that’s too heavy to lift – and by the look of him, it’s probably full of bombs,’ Neil said. He’d watched news broadcasts too young. He knew about suicide bombers and for a time had been obsessed by them.
Lori crossed over the road to see for herself what was going on in their kitchen. Martin followed her. She spied on them through the sink window. Martin, who wasn’t into spying, went in to confront them.
Steak being served in their kitchen, and a take-away coleslaw, bread too, and butter, real butter.
The parent, about to sit down to her steak and coleslaw, changed her mind when she saw Martin.
‘Get that van off my property tonight or I’ll have it moved,’ she said.
She hadn’t sold Eva’s opals. She was wearing them with her blue-green sweater and a pair of blue floral stretch pants, and that sweater clung where it hadn’t clung two months ago and her ridiculous pants hugged every lump and sag of her backside and thighs.
‘You can’t stay here,’ Martin said to her dinner guest. ‘The house is full of little kids.’
‘It’s my bloody house and I’ll have whoever I want living in my bloody house and you’re not wanted. Move that bloody van tonight or I’ll pay someone to move it.’
The interloper looked hungry. He watched the show, his black eyes darting from one combatant to the other while loading his mouth with coleslaw and steak. To Lori he looked little older than Martin, though a lot heavier, and darker, and as Neil had described, he had a vulture beak nose. He looked dangerous.
Lori got a grip on the back of Martin’s sweater and tried to draw him back from the door, but he hadn’t smelt steak in a while and it smelt good.
‘You’re paid a pension to feed your kids –’
‘And it’s killing you that you can’t get at it, you thieving bantam bastard,’ Mavis answered while her guest cut into his slab of steak. He took no part in the war of words. He didn’t appear to understand what was being said about him, which wasn’t complimentary.
‘Come away,’ Lori said. ‘You’re wasting your breath.’
There’d never been a lot of Martin. Greg’s death, the flu that he hadn’t entirely shaken off and the Kelly gang had worn him down to skin and bone. Lori manhandled him out the back door and walked behind him back to Nelly’s.
‘Call the cops,’ Nelly said.
‘As if they’d do anything,’ Lori said. ‘She should have been locked up for wrecking Vinnie’s knee.’ The police had been back to Dawson Street once, looking for her, but only after Lori had washed her out of the front bedroom.
‘If his cases are still in the passage it might mean that he’s not planning to stay,’ Mick said.
They ate chips and dim-sims and potato cakes in Nelly’s kitchen that night. They drank her tea and used her milk while Neil spoke of steak and coleslaw and that brown case that had felt as if it was full of weapons of mass destruction, so he said. Nelly spoke of Child Welfare.
‘They’ll do something,’ Lori said. ‘They’ll take the little kids again.’
‘You could move your caravan into my backyard,’ Nelly said.
‘I’m going nowhere, Nelly.’
Matty went to sleep on Nelly’s couch. Timmy was half asleep on her floor. They needed their beds. Nelly had no spare beds to offer, so they sat and they talked and they waited for the lights to go out over the road.
It was close to midnight before Martin carried Matty home. Timmy sleepwalked over the road, his hand in Lori’s. No pyjamas that night. The two little ones slept in the clothes they were wearing. Lori changed out of her school uniform into jeans, and when she slid between her sheets it was like those first yesterdays of no Henry when she’d gone to bed each night dressed and ready to run. She didn’t expect to sleep, but bodies take over at times and when she opened her eyes it was morning, Saturday morning, and no school to go to.
Eddy had a place to go. He worked at weekends. Martin had Sean. He took the two little kids with him again. Neil, wanting to go so badly, offered to ride out there in the ute’s tray, under its clip-on tarp.
‘It’s illegal, mate,’ Martin said.
That was the day Neil was officially upgraded to middle-sized. He rode on the back of Lori’s bike to Dick Smith where they borrowed Eddy’s bike. Mick lowered its seat and Neil rode with the rest of them out to the cemetery – not that there was any of Henry out there to visit, or nothing other than a metal plaque that told for how many years he’d lived.
‘Was he that old?’ Neil asked.
‘He was nearly forty when Martin was born,’ Alan said.
‘He must have been more like a grandfather than a father.’ Neil could remember Henry’s presence but not the man.
You do forget. You don’t want to. When people die, when you’re howling buckets of tears at the funeral, you think that you’ll never forget, but time fades faces and after a while you remember only moments. For Lori there were moments that would never fade, moments in the potting shed when he’d sung to his flowers, moments in the kitchen when he’d served his raw burnt sausages.
They called into the supermarket on their way home, to replace Nelly’s teabags and milk and to buy the makings of a fast stir-fry dinner. You could buy packets of frozen stir-fry vegetables. They bought onions, bought four sticks of celery. Nelly had phoned twice, the first time to ask if they were okay, the second time to tell them they could cook themselves a decent meal in her kitchen. You could buy roasted chicken meat at the deli that someone else had already stripped from the bones. They bought a couple of handfuls of it.
Nelly’s frying pan was too small. They needed her largest saucepan for the rice and ended up cooking their stir-fry in her preserving pan, which she only ever used to make jams and chutneys – and she didn’t buy oyster sauce or sweet chilli. She had curry and ground ginger, a can of pineapple pieces and plenty of lemons. It was a different stir-fry but fast and no one left a bean or a grain of rice on their plate.
Nelly copped them and the laptop on Sunday. Alan had homework and he couldn’t use the big computer. He couldn’t use the printer either. Mavis and her refugee were in the lounge room.
Lori was on Nelly’s front veranda watching the house, willing a taxi to arrive and take the interlopers away when Pam, Vinnie’s boss’s wife, turned into Henry’s driveway. She ran through light rain to stop Vinnie from getting out of that car, which he couldn’t do without his crutches. Pam backed out, her passenger side door open. It opened wider when she made a U-turn, drove up Nelly’s drive to her veranda then didn’t hang around to see which way Vinnie went.<
br />
‘I’ll burn the bitch out,’ he greeted his siblings.
‘Not ideal weather for it, Vin,’ Jamesy said.
They directed him and his crutches towards the veranda, got him sitting down. Mick sat with him, just to make sure Vinnie remained sitting down.
‘I’ve never seen him like this,’ Nelly said later in her kitchen.
Few had, but like Henry, Vinnie had been born with a severe case of perpetual motion. With his knee brace and two crutches, when he moved, he looked like a bull elephant attempting to walk on stilts, so he sat and he cursed and the language he used wasn’t G-rated.
‘Given a worst-case scenario, Vin, you’ll end up with a knee reconstruction,’ Mick reasoned. ‘It will heal before the next footy season.’
Good, kind Mick, who’d spent his early years crabbing around on two crutches, who would have agreed to major brain surgery had it made his bad leg grow strong, who would have sold his soul to the devil had it meant he could climb a ladder, was sitting on a cold wet veranda, attempting to make Vinnie feel better.
Lori was halfway out the front door with two mugs of tea when she heard their air conditioner start up. They’d used its heat to dry out the mattress and carpet then forgotten to remove the fuse. Its motor ran until there was a break in the rain, when Lori and Jamesy ran across the road to collect enough potatoes and two cartons of long-life milk – and that fuse.
The potatoes were in the preserving pan and still not boiling when Eddy came in from work. ‘Where’s your microwave, Nelly?’ he asked. They knew she’d won a small microwave at bingo two months ago.
‘I was going to sell it,’ Nelly said. She had a pile of stuff in her sleep-out that she was going to sell one day.
‘I’ll buy it off you,’ big working man Eddy said. He had money in the bank – only because he had no time to spend it.