by Joy Dettman
‘She’s out of smokes,’ Alan said.
‘Or going down to Vickery’s to sign the block away,’ Jamesy said.
Who cared why or to where she was going? She’d gone. The kitchen would be their own for at least another hour, and the meat in that stew needed that hour to become tender.
It was bubbling again when Lori returned to the brick room for eggs. She put a dozen on to boil and broke eight into the deep baking dish. She was beating in sugar when Matty came in to tell her that Ali-oomph had put his bombs into his car.
‘That’s good,’ she said and opened two cartons of long-life milk.
‘Will he blow up some people with them, Lori?’
‘He hasn’t got any bombs. Make yourself useful and get me the half-bag of bread from the en suite.’
She was buttering multiple slices when Timmy came in with his own news. ‘Neil just fell off Eddy’s bike and his knee is all bloody.’
‘That’s what happens to show-offs,’ Lori said. She repeated the same words to Neil when he came limping in but finished off the bread pudding and slid it into the oven before doing what Henry would have done. She took the cake tin out of the cabinet. No cake in it, or not in her lifetime, but cotton wool, Betadine, a bandage or two and an assortment of bandaids. She lectured as Henry would have, aware they were his words as they came from her mouth.
‘Bikes are machines, built to get you faster from point A to point B. They’re not toys and shouldn’t be treated as toys.’ But she wasn’t Henry. She wasn’t Mavis either. She wasn’t certain yet who she was, only that she was someone very different from both of her parents, so she deviated from Henry’s well-known script. ‘And you can stop scaring Matty with your stupid bomb stories too.’
‘His brown case was heavy enough to be full of weapons of mass destruction,’ Neil argued.
‘He went oooomph when he put it in his car,’ Matty said.
‘It’s Mavis’s car, not his,’ Neil said.
‘Did he take his cases?’ Lori asked Timmy, mildly interested now.
‘He put them in the boot and lifting them up hurt his back.’
If Timmy had seen him load those cases, then those cases had been loaded. They were leaving. Maybe Lori had scared them off with her Immigration Department lie.
‘Did she take her case?’ she asked.
‘You broked it,’ Matty said.
‘I broke it, not “broked”,’ Lori corrected – as Henry would have. He wouldn’t have put the axe through it. Lori had taken delight in doing it. ‘There’s no such word as “broked”. Say it again and say it properly.’
‘You . . . broke it.’
‘How much paint did you take off Eddy’s bike?’ she asked Neil as she added a second bandaid.
‘It threw me. I didn’t throw it,’ Neil said.
‘I saw you speeding down the levee. When we move to St Kilda, Eddy will want that bike back, so you’d better look after it for him.’
Vinnie and Mick were home. Apparently two good right legs hadn’t worked as well as a left and a right. Vinnie lifted the lid off the stew saucepan and gave it the taste test, and Neil wanted a taste.
The potatoes were mashed, the laptop plugged in, emails were coming through. Two from Alan’s girlfriend. He’d met her down at the river while fishing, or while her father had been fishing. They’d been in contact since last Easter. One came through from Eddy. Lori read it off the screen while Mick and Vinnie started making sandwiches for lunch, Mick mean with the butter, Vinnie lavish with the mayonnaise, Mick applying home-grown lettuce leaves, Vinnie forking out a can full of beetroot slices while the little kids peeled plastic from plastic cheese slices. No tomato. They were still expensive. No onion either, unless Lori peeled and sliced one. She liked onion, so did the work of peeling, of halving, then the fine slicing of it. She sliced still warm boiled eggs and added them to the sandwiches, added plenty of salt and pepper, then put lids on and pressed down hard with a palm. Paper towels ripped from the roll; they did double service as plate and serviette.
Martin came in, his eyes asking the question before his mouth.
‘They went out at around eleven,’ Lori said.
He was going out tonight. He disinfected the shower cubicle, scrubbed the tiles, cleaned the mirror, washed the floor before shaving and showering.
Everyone showered that afternoon while the bathroom was clean. Lori washed her hair and then stood outside the bathroom door, threatening Vinnie with no stew if he dared to come out with a bald head.
He didn’t, but he came out asking her to give him a Mohawk cut. She refused. He was starting to look okay, if taller.
Martin had bought a pair of gold earrings for Janet’s birthday, real gold earrings with red stones, from a jewellery shop. To Lori they looked suspiciously like more than a birthday gift for a mate’s sister.
That’s what people did though, spent a fortune on promising to love, honour and all that crap, then decided a year or so later they’d fallen out of love. In Willama, couples traded in partners on new models like they traded in their cars, though Martin would be trading up if he swapped Miss Piggy for any one of Sean’s four sisters. Matty was in love with Angie, the youngest of them. She worked at his ‘school’ – Angie’s school.
‘Are you thinking about trading up?’ Lori asked when the earrings were wrapped in gold paper and tied with blue ribbon.
‘It’s her birthday, smart-arse,’ Martin said. He helped himself to a spoonful of stew before leaving for the party. The Dobsons had a restaurant booking at six.
Vinnie wanted to eat before the interlopers came home. Everything was ready – apart from the silverbeet, which Lori could have lived without. Henry used to boil it to raggy green slime. But they had it growing wild and Mick had picked a huge bunch and left it soaking in a bucket of salty water, which usually got rid of the earwigs. Jamesy claimed to like the stuff, so they allowed him to cook it, barely cook it, his way. He shredded it, tossed it around for a minute or two in butter, added too much pepper, enough salt and a shake of nutmeg. His silverbeet was edible – and supposedly nutritious.
He was melting butter in the frying pan when Lori went into the front of the house to see if Mavis’s case was gone. She opened the front door so she could breathe, and while holding that breath, peered into the lounge room. The empty picture frame was leaning against the fireplace. A nice frame, it was deserving of a nice picture, maybe the shot she’d taken of Nelly’s frosty house, which everyone said was a beauty. She could get it enlarged and framed and take it with them to St Kilda so at least they’d have a little of Dawson Street to look at.
The bedroom door was closed. She drew another breath of clean air, then moving fast, flung the door wide, then flung the stained blackout drapes wide. And that red case was still there. She was on her way back to the passage to breathe when she saw red frizz on a pillow.
He’d gone. She hadn’t.
‘He grew a brain and left you,’ she said.
No movement from that hump of quilt. No snarled reply.
Took a step closer and saw her face, or a part of it.
Perhaps she knew before she flipped back the corner of the quilt. Her hand knew the instant it touched the bare shoulder she’d exposed. Her reflexes flung her backwards to tread on Matty’s foot.
Hadn’t been aware he was behind her. Wasn’t aware of the others crowding the doorway. And every one of their faces knew, or apart from Matty, they knew.
‘Why didn’t she go with him for, Lori?’ he asked.
no more mavis
That’s how it happened. That’s when it happened. At some stage on that very fine Saturday in late October, death had crept into the front bedroom of 108 Dawson Street and caught Mavis napping.
‘She’s carked it, Splint. Get out of there and take the little kids over to Nelly’s,’ Vinnie said.
Would have if she could have. That mouldy threadbare carpet beneath her feet was magnetic and her sneakers were iron moonboots. She couldn�
�t move.
‘He must’ve known she’d croaked before he pissed off,’ Vinnie said.
‘Marrrfiz,’ he’d said. ‘Marrrfiz.’ He’d said it when she and Alan had been in the brick room laughing at Jamesy’s homework, and his Marrrfiz had been dead. When Lori had made the bread pudding, his Marrrfiz had been lying dead in that bed.
Someone must have gone for Nelly. She came. She always came.
‘Have you tried mouth to mouth?’ she asked, pushing her way by Lori to the bed, prepared to attempt that kiss of life.
Mavis’s final earthly kiss to be garlic flavoured? She’d rise from her deathbed and send little Nelly flying.
‘We think he must have known she was dead when he left,’ Mick said.
Like watching them from a great distance while their voices boomed in her ears.
Nelly’s voice so loud it hurt, but seemingly so far away. Then she did what they always did in movies, covered up that dead face, though in the movies they usually pulled up a bedsheet not a quilt. No top sheet on that bed to pull up and the quilt not long enough. In covering Mavis’s death face, she’d exposed two very dirty feet. They were easier to look at than that dead face.
‘Come out to the kitchen, Smithy.’
Wanted to, but the longer she stood the more pull that magnetic floor had on her moonboots. And her head felt like a pumpkin, balancing on a broomstick, a Halloween pumpkin with its insides gouged out. It had eyeholes, earholes, but its maker had forgotten to cut it a mouth.
Not that it mattered that Mavis was dead, not on any rational level. Though can anyone feel rational about death? Martin didn’t. Nelly must have phoned him before she ran. Heard his ute door close. Heard his footsteps running along the veranda. Heard Vinnie greet him.
‘Splint found her. She’s as dead as a dodo.’
‘She’s in shock. She hasn’t said a word,’ Nelly said.
Lori Smyth-Owen in shock? Lori Smyth-Owen had been shockproofed at birth, shockproofed, waterproofed, weatherproofed and life-proofed. She wasn’t touch-proofed. Touch could break her and fear of being touched by Martin moved her moonboots. She pushed between the boys and got out to the front veranda where the air smelt too thick and clean to go in. Knew she was panting. The boys knew it too. Every one of them was staring at her, thinking she’s a girl, she’s going to bawl.
She’d bawled for days, for weeks, for Henry. Every time she’d thought about him, she’d bawled – but as if she’d shed one tear for Mavis. Anyway, she should have been dead two years ago – and would have been if not for Eddy. He’d delayed her dying. Like E.T. he’d cast a spell over this house and as the dead flowers had come back to life, so had those who’d lived in this house, as had Mavis. For a little while.
‘Her heart must have given out,’ Mick said. ‘Or one of her stents got a clot in it.’
He was feeling something, not loss, just something. His eyes had never been able to hide what he was feeling. He’d lost colour from his face, which made his few freckles look like a sprinkle of coffee granules. His lips weren’t quite attached. He kept rubbing at them, attempting to make them stick.
Vinnie, undisturbed by the matter, was checking out a veranda post’s paint. The three little kids, no doubt told to stay at Nelly’s, were sitting on her fence, as close to the action as they could get without disobeying.
Martin was on his mobile.
Who do you phone when someone dies in their bed? The ambulance? The police? The undertaker? He was talking to someone. ‘We believe she’s been dead for some time,’ he said, then listened. ‘We believed she’d gone out with her friend.’
Her friend?
‘She had a history of heart problems,’ he said to the phone but he kept looking towards Lori. He had the same look in his eyes that Henry’s had worn back in the bad old Greg days, a pleading look for someone to take his cup of poison away.
‘One zero eight Dawson Street,’ Martin said.
As if the police needed that address. Just say Smyth-Owen and they’d come like homing pigeons – or toss a coin to decide who got tonight’s dirty job.
‘They’re on their way,’ he said, his mobile back in his pocket. ‘They’ll do the rest.’
He was approaching Lori again. She jumped down from the veranda and stepped back to the rose, its bud now showing yellow and salmon pink. In a day or two it would open. It was a Peace rose, according to Bert. He’d told them the day they’d stolen it that it had been developed during the war and named when that war ended. He was probably right. He knew a lot of strange stuff about a lot of strange things.
When she’d been small, Henry used to call her his little rose amid the thorns. He’d never written Love from Daddy on her books, but being likened to that rosebud should have been enough. She’d make it enough.
‘Are you okay, Splint?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she said. ‘She was toxic waste, Martin. There’s nothing you can do with toxic waste other than bury it for a thousand years.’
‘She’s dead, Splint.’
‘Does that suddenly turn her into Saint Mavis?’
Cop siren in the distance. Chasing a hoon maybe. No siren necessary if they were coming here.
Too many cars parked in the street tonight. Someone was having a party? Old Red had used up the last space at their kerb, and young Whitey was in their driveway. Nowhere left for a cop car or ambulance to park.
Five vehicles had found space the night Henry hung himself, three cop cars, an ambulance and a fire truck. She’d never found out why the fire truck had been there, maybe they’d been on their way home from a fire and stopped to have a look – as she and the boys had run to have a look.
That siren was coming closer. She wasn’t going to be here when it arrived.
‘Lori,’ Mick called as she ran. ‘Lori!’
Gone, up and over the levee, only three crows to protest her passing. No wind to whisper sad songs about Mavis, not today, nor did her death cause a ripple in the river. It had been a perfect spring day, warm, clear sky, and Mavis hadn’t seen it.
Lori shrugged her off and walked upstream to where the bank was high, to where the roots of that fallen tree had created that yowie cave. It was never a cave, except in a nine-year-old mind, just a space between the clay bank and the interwoven roots of a long dead tree. A space large enough to hide a nine-year-old when Mavis had been after her with her toaster cord.
Almost twelve the last time she’d crawled into her cave. She’d grown longer since but not a lot wider. Needing to hide tonight from something, she sat, then eased herself down, folding herself into that too small space, no thought of snakes or spiders, not tonight.
It smelt the same as it ever had, earthy, dry, safe. When she’d hidden there on the night after Henry’s funeral, she’d imagined him smelling that same earthy smell.
Another funeral now to pay for – for Martin to pay for. He’d paid cash for Whitey but he had about fifteen thousand left over.
Who’d pay the finance company? They could repossess the Hyundai but it wasn’t in the same condition. She’d marked it with the rake, and the pedal of her bike. Mick would like to own it. He’d get his learner’s permit first try. Maybe Martin and Vinnie would pay it off for him.
It was probably halfway to Sydney by now, more than halfway. Donny had told her once that it had taken him nine hours to get from Albury to Sydney. Albury was three hours from Willama.
They didn’t even know that mongrel’s family name. Ali someone. They knew that his right wrist was in plaster. The hospital, or some nearby hospital might know his name. Vinnie knew what breed of Hyundai it was, and the year it came off the assembly line. The cops might catch him, might charge him with car theft, for not reporting a death.
They’d want to know why Mavis’s death hadn’t been reported earlier. And how could anyone explain that to a normal person?
We were The Borrowers, Lori thought. We were mice trapped in a cage with a pair of boa constrictors. We didn’t question when, why
or where they went, only celebrated that they’d gone, Lori thought.
Couldn’t say that to cops.
They’d want to speak to her. She’d found her. They’d ask her why she hadn’t found her earlier.
Would any normal person believe that a daughter had never set foot in her mother’s bedroom?
When they saw and smelt it, maybe they would.
A pigpen. That’s what Eddy had said of their house the first night he’d seen it.
‘Shiiiiiiit!’ he’d breathed when he’d seen the flesh factory of Mavis, slumped on that old kitchen couch, blowing smoke.
He’d had an attack of hysteria when he’d seen their bathroom. Before he would use it, he’d scrubbed it, and even Lori had been surprised when their old bathtub and basin turned white.
She wondered if Martin had phoned him. He would have phoned Donny, though maybe not until after the police left.
Her mobile always with her, she wriggled her hand into her jeans pocket and slid it carefully out. Six thirty-eight it said. Five-forty the last time she’d stirred her stew. Hoped someone was keeping an eye on it.
Another breath of earthy air sucked in, but like the last breath it wouldn’t go down to where it was needed. She was too curled up for her lungs to expand.
Hadn’t been able to breathe when Henry died, but it wasn’t the same. It was nothing like the same. Losing him had been world ending. Losing Mavis? She’d had nothing to lose – except maybe that one day, the laughter and the hope of . . .
‘The hope of nothing,’ she said, then checked the charge remaining in her battery. She’d used her mobile this afternoon. Tim Buchanan had texted her half a dozen times about going as his partner to his cousin’s twenty-first party. She hadn’t said she would or that she wouldn’t. She’d said she’d think about it. She liked him, and he was tall enough.
The light was changing, daylight seeping away so the edges of the world were not so well defined. In Melbourne the shadow people would be coming up from the pavements –
Eddy would care that Mavis was dead. He might have threatened to throw a dish of roast chooks at her but only because he cared too much.