by Rose Hartley
‘Is that my teapot in the gutter?’
Chapter 3
Watching my mother behind the wheel is a painful thing. She is alert, stretching forward, straining her head this way and that, like a pelican watching for fish guts to be thrown its way. She waits exactly five seconds after touching the indicator to change lanes, and she tuts and shakes her head when someone cuts her off.
‘Bloody geriatric,’ she says. Then she stretches her head even further forward to get a better look at the culprit and bears her disappointment in silence when they turn out to be her age.
I grew up feeling like a foreigner in my own home. I don’t know why, really. My mother came from money; she inherited the big house in Camberwell. My dad was a gambler, a philanderer and a drinker. I should have felt right at home with the illicit sex and the money that wasn’t ours, but I didn’t. My mum wanted a daughter who got married at twenty-five and repeated all her mistakes. My dad wanted someone to rant to when the divorce got ugly. My brother wanted to get the hell out of there and make shoes in Brussels. I just wanted to have sex on the couch and listen to good music.
The trees in Camberwell are huge. Beautiful plane trees that shade the wide streets and provide cover for men stepping out of their Mercedes and women coming home from their cosmetic surgeons. I used to count the spaces between the shadows thrown by the leaves while I walked home from school, debating which water polo player I should try to sleep with next. Often, I would skip dinner at home altogether in favour of hanging out at Jen’s place, where her mother and father were equally awful but at least they weren’t mine.
We pulled up to the front gate. Mum parked at the kerb and yanked the handbrake up without a word. She put a hand to her hair, brushing flat the flyaway greys, and got out.
‘Wanna help me with my stuff?’ I called after her. No answer.
My mother’s house always has the sensation that someone is in the next room. It’s dark, a poorly built 1920s fright with haphazard additions and a deep backyard. The floorboards creak even when no one is walking on them, and there’s always the sound of a tap dripping in the laundry or kitchen, or the flapping of sheets on the line in the side courtyard. Mum likes to leave the television on at night, which drives me mad. Always somebody talking.
I gathered up the clothes from the back seat of the car and carried them into my old room, where the bed was already made. Dot wandered in and promptly sat on the pile of clothes, which I’d dumped on the floor.
‘Good choice, Dot. No need for me to put anything away, ’cause I’ll be outta here soon.’
It was a lie, unless I found a new boyfriend in record time.
Here’s the thing. I was on Centrelink. I got student support of around 200 bucks a week. ‘Earning’ 200 a week, with no rent to pay and hardly any bills, I could just squeak by. The catch was I either had to live with my mother or find a boyfriend who was too nice to make me pay rent. But even the tiniest, rat-and-asbestos-infested studio apartment on Easey Street cost 300 a week. If I paid rent on my own apartment, I would have had approximately negative 100 bucks a week.
I turned to find Mum standing in the doorway, hands on her wide hips.
‘Family meeting in the kitchen,’ she said.
‘Family meeting?’ I looked around. ‘What, is Harry here?’
‘No. He’s still in Belgium.’
‘So you mean, you and I sit at the kitchen table? Is that a meeting?’
‘Five minutes. We’ll be discussing your downward mobility.’
She left, and I sighed. With my brother permanently stationed in Europe, I was the recipient of an unfair amount of my mother’s wisdom.
Five minutes later, I was seated opposite her at the round kitchen table.
The Tudor-style kitchen was cavernous, full of cupboards that wouldn’t close and holes hidden by the fridge. A mouse’s paradise. Sure enough, I saw a mouse trap on the floor, the kind that the mouse runs into with a little door at the back to shut it in without killing it. Mum couldn’t bear to kill mice. She’d let them out at the end of the street after dark when the neighbours couldn’t see, and they’d run right back in again a few days later. Dot would sort that out.
Mum fixed a pair of glasses to her snub nose. Her cheeks were flushed. Before her on the table lay a lined notepad with a long, illegible list written in pencil.
She cleared her throat.
‘First, there was Billy.’ She looked up. ‘He used to bring you chocolate frogs after school, remember? And drink cups of tea with me. He was so sweet. And you went and bonked that flabby water polo player from Melbourne Grammar and broke Billy’s heart.’
I was dumbfounded.
‘Remember?’ she pressed.
‘Yes, it was tragic. And that water polo player was mean. Whatever his name was. What’s this about?’
‘And then there was Salvatore.’
Salvatore, the gruff country boy who cracked terrible puns. I went out with him for the first two years of my degree, then two weeks before exams I cheated on him with a tall, goofy accountant I met in a bar, with whom having sex was a little like wrestling a live deer.
‘Salvatore had a heart of gold,’ she continued. ‘You told me he used to cook you potato gems whenever you were feeling sad. Or hungover.’
‘Well, he put them in the oven,’ I said. ‘Mum, is that a list? Have you written a list of people I’ve dated?’
She ignored the question. ‘Then there was Jock the greyhound breeder.’
‘The guy who thought feminism ruined society, yeah.’
‘And Gary the amateur football player.’
‘The compulsive masturbator. Seriously, Mum. You’ve written a list.’
‘And Johan the unemployed musician. He used to write you love songs.’
‘And took my Centrelink money.’
‘Not to mention the ones I never heard about. And you cheated on all of them! I thought Sean would be different, but you’re just like your father. No conscience.’
Dot wandered into the kitchen and sat down at Mum’s feet, licking herself in unspeakable places. Then she rubbed her face against Mum’s legs. Mum bent down to coo and pat her, the precious only grandchild, then sat up again, her expression serious.
‘All except Jeremy,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Jeremy. From Grade Ten. You didn’t cheat on him.’
‘Yeah, I know I didn’t cheat on Jeremy, what’s your point?’
‘Well.’ She folded her hands over the ridiculous list. ‘Didn’t he cheat on you?’
My first love slept with Isobel Cartagnon, the prettiest girl in my year at school, less than a month after my father was busted rogering my science teacher, Mrs Moleskin. I was fifteen. It was a rough year.
‘So?’
‘So, do you think perhaps all your cheating has something to do—’
‘No! Fuck Jeremy. Jesus, Mum, go back to night school if you want to become a psychologist, don’t practise on me. You’re hopeless. Anyway, I did cheat on Jeremy.’
‘You told me you didn’t!’ I could almost feel the hot blast of maternal outrage.
‘I lied.’
‘You cried for weeks. I let you have two days off school. You lying toad!’
Toad?
‘Well, it’s karma,’ she continued. ‘Losing your home is karma, and you deserve it. You stole Sean from someone else, you cheated on him and now you’ve lost him. Karma! You’re not a good person, Maggie.’
‘Mum, that’s pretty rough. What, you like Sean better than me? Sean, the autonomous human being who chose to leave his beautiful infomercial-model ex-girlfriend for me because she was going on a six-week holiday to Japan? Why don’t you just disown me and go drink your fat-free bloody Jarrah with him!’
‘I bloody well will!’ she yelled. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m cutting you out of my will. You’re not getting any more cash from me, even after I die. And before you ask, no you are not moving in here.’
&
nbsp; I sat back in my chair. ‘What? But Mum—’
‘Yes?’ she spat.
‘Renting in Melbourne is impossible on student payments. What will I do?’
I didn’t think much of her threat to write me out of her will – as if she’d bother with the paperwork. But I knew from experience that booting me out was serious, and this time I didn’t have a boyfriend’s house to go to. I was like a soccer WAG whose credit card had been cut off, facing the prospect of choosing between her manicure and her spray tan. I didn’t know anything about getting by on my own.
Mum leant forward, a look of dark determination on her face.
‘You want to live the high life in Collingwood, floozying around, you can damn well get a job.’
‘Look, if this is about that thing I just said . . . I was getting a rise out of you. I didn’t cheat on Jeremy.’
‘It not about Jeremy. You’re twenty-nine.’
‘I’m aware.’
‘What about my future grandchildren?’
‘You’ll have to wait.’
‘You’ll end up bloody barren.’
‘Oh, come on. Barren?’
‘Sean was a handsome man with a good job. You could have had a good life with him.’
‘A good job? Sean’s been an account coordinator for eight years. It’s a job for twenty-two-year-olds out of ad school. He was on forty-five grand!’
‘Oh, and what are you on, moneybags? What’s Centrelink pay you? Ten grand a year?’
I said nothing.
She sighed. A long, slow puffing billy of a sigh to let me know I was endlessly useless. Suddenly she looked older. Mum had been beautiful when she was younger, with long dark hair like mine and heavy-lidded eyes. Now she had a lunch lady’s haircut and a soft middle that was actually very nice to cuddle on the rare occasions she felt like hugging her children. She scrabbled beneath the papers in front of her and pulled out an envelope that she’d clearly already opened. It had the University of Melbourne insignia on the front. I still had most of my mail directed to Mum’s house, since I tended to move often.
‘What’s that?’ I asked as she handed it to me.
‘It’s time to get a job.’
I unfolded the letter.
Most of the time, you’ve got eight years maximum to complete an undergraduate degree. I’d had two official extensions to finish mine, but apparently now the university was as fed up as Sean: after ten years, they were booting me out. Instead of a Bachelor degree in Commerce with a major in accounting, they were bestowing on me a Diploma of Accounting.
I could almost taste the subtext: We hope to never hear from you again.
I lay on the bed in my childhood bedroom. The walls were still as Smurf blue as they were when I was a kid and there was a new crack in the ceiling that looked a little bit like a penis. I contemplated it for an hour or two. So my mother didn’t want me living with her, and the university didn’t want me taking up space in their lecture theatres anymore. That meant the flow of Centrelink money would stop. There was always the jobseeker’s allowance, but it was harder to get and they made you work for it. A gazillion job applications a fortnight, Work for the Dole after six months. On the other hand, the prospect of applying for an accounting job was so painful that I pushed the whole catastrophe out of my mind and thought instead about what my mother had said. I didn’t know exactly how much money I was supposed to inherit, but my mother was an only child and my grandparents had been pretty loaded. There had been a beach house in Portsea and a farm in the Southeast that my mother sold after they died, when I was six or so, and I had memories of my grandmother wearing a lot of diamonds. I didn’t believe Mum was serious about cutting me out of the will. It was just another attempt to harangue me into marriage. You’d think the world’s most vindictive divorce would have put her off the whole institution, but no.
My mother has made many mistakes in her life, but her marriage was the worst one. Her second-worst mistake was to have children. Children – even rewarding ones like myself – were noisy leeches who needed feeding. Her third-worst mistake was to get a job, but she had to because no one else was going to pay her kids’ private school fees. The relentless grind of responsibility warped her into a nagging buzzkill. The curious thing, the part that I always wondered about, was why, if she wanted a life so stable and dull, had she married a man like my father, a man who spent his weekends at the greyhound track and kept a packet of condoms in the glove box for his curious children to find?
Mum was the only one who didn’t see the divorce coming. Dad had never held a job for longer than six months, so he had a lot of free time on his hands, which meant a lot of affairs. The night Dad left for good, he packed his things into Mum’s car, a four-wheel-drive, so that he could take his favourite chair with him, then cheerfully said goodbye to my brother and me.
‘Probably see you in a few weeks,’ were his parting words. Yeah, right.
Mum stood weeping at the kitchen sink, as if she didn’t want to cry onto any surface she’d have to wipe clean after. Two months later, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back, she gave me his panel van. Eventually she stopped saying his name.
Poor Jeremy couldn’t cope with me crying in his arms every afternoon. We’d stopped talking about him and his plans. I was interrupting his homework time and he had ambition, places to go, scholarships to win. I think he slept with Isobel just to shake me off and get his homework hours back. As an exit strategy, it worked.
I guess I learnt it from him. Now when a boyfriend returns from a late night out and seems a little evasive about what went on, or starts getting texts from attractive workmates, I simply pull the eject lever. A make-out session in the alleyway outside The Fainting Chair. Professional relationship sabotage. No going back.
Compared with my father, Sean was the world’s most responsible man. I wondered if I really came down with swine flu, would Sean feel so guilty he’d take me back? I made a mental note to ask Jen how to get infected with swine flu.
My phone rang. It was a private number, and I debated whether to answer. Could Sean be calling from a hidden number to tell me that, upon reflection, hooking up with some guy in an alley was a totally reasonable response to his flirtation with Sarah? Probably not. I answered anyway.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, is that Maggie?’ The voice was male, and nervous. Telstra, I thought. First-timer, obviously. Being monitored for quality control purposes.
‘Yep, who’s this?’
‘Uh, it’s Dan.’
For a moment, I drew a blank. Who the hell is Dan? My brother’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s husband, right? The plumber?
‘From last night,’ he added.
‘Oh, Dan!’ Of course. Why was he calling me? Surely he wasn’t looking for another awkward tug behind The Fainting Chair?
‘Um, how’s your day going?’ he asked.
Well, Dan, I burnt my bacon, got dumped by my boyfriend, scratched by my cat, thrown out of university, and now my mother is threatening to cut me off. Also, I’m pretty sure I ate some sour yoghurt earlier because I’ve farted thirty times into the doona and now my cat won’t look at me.
‘Fine, thanks.’ I tried to remember what he looked like. Cute and slightly cuddly; cherubic, perhaps? ‘So how are you, Dan? How did you pull up this morning?’
‘Yeah, not too bad, bit worse for wear.’ He sounded relieved that I was making normal conversation. ‘How did your meeting go?’
‘What meeting?’
‘With your editor?’
‘Dan, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What line did I pull on you?’
‘You said you were going to have a meeting with your book editor.’
‘Did I?’
‘You said you’d, uh, written a children’s book? Karate Cow?’
That got a laugh out of me. More like a cackle. God, I’m sounding more like my Year Seven maths teacher every day. She had a cackle like a duck on MDMA. I wondered when I had told him I wa
s a children’s writer. On the way to attacking him in the alleyway, probably.
‘Dan, I was having you on. I’m not a children’s author.’
‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘I suppose you’re not twenty-two, either?’
‘I’m twenty-nine.’
‘Oh.’
I decided to continue ruining his day just for the hell of it. ‘I’ve also just been kicked out of home. And I’m on Centrelink.’
He was silent. Digesting the bile of his disappointment, I suppose, and wondering how to get off the phone quickly without seeming like a jerk.
‘Sounds like you need a drink,’ he said.
What?
‘And dinner,’ I said, wildly optimistic. ‘Really need dinner.’
‘You live in Collingwood, don’t you?’
Er, sort of. I decided not to explain. ‘Yeah.’
‘How about I take you to T-Bird Thursday night?’ he continued. ‘The noodle place on Wellington Street.’
Was he kidding, or just desperate?
‘Are you kidding, or just desperate?’ I asked.
‘Jeez, that’s a bit rough.’
After I hung up I lay on the bed for a while, trying to hatch a plan. My last thoughts before I fell asleep were that unemployment was a moral stance, a form of passive resistance to avoid giving the government tax money to imprison refugee children on Nauru, and maybe Dan would have a cute Victorian cottage that I could stay in just for a little while.
I woke up the next day around lunchtime and waltzed into the kitchen to boast to Mum that I already had a date.
‘Why are you still in your pyjamas instead of looking for a job?’ She plunged her hands into a sink full of soap suds, rattling the pots, while I made a toasted cheese sandwich. ‘Heartless moll,’ she muttered.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Well, I don’t see you mourning your break-up.’
The vinegary sting in her words brought back the memory of Sean touching palms with Sarah in the bar. I was, in fact, feeling pretty low, but there was no way I’d give Mum the satisfaction of knowing it. I helped myself to a Lucozade, taking gulps between spilling sandwich crumbs onto the dull brown tiles as I ate my toastie.