by Rose Hartley
‘I am a Strong Woman,’ I informed her through a mouthful of grease.
‘Good. Then you’ll easily be able to manage your own life from now on.’
She took her hands out of the suds, wiped them with a tea towel, and shoved a piece of paper in my face.
‘What’s this?’
‘A budget.’
‘A what?’
The handwritten lines were grainy from being photocopied. She must have already filed the original away in the ‘loser’ drawer. There were lines for rent, food, clothes, utilities, phone bills, dental, doctors’ visits, credit card repayments, health insurance, contents insurance, car insurance, petrol, car servicing and registration, vet visits, internet, and a tiny column for ‘dining out and entertainment’. Each ‘i’ and ‘t’ was jauntily dotted and crossed in the spirit of helpfulness and generosity.
‘I’ll talk you through it now, and then you can go and wash off your panda eyes,’ she said.
I rubbed the bags under my eyes and my fingers came away with flecks of black. I must have forgotten to wash my mascara off. This was too much the day after a break-up. I handed the piece of paper back and she took it in her tired, arthritic hands. I couldn’t remember a time when my mother didn’t have knobbly knuckles like a farmer.
‘Mum, I can’t deal with this right now.’
‘Don’t talk American to me. You sound like one of those awful reality TV teenagers.’
‘Whatever.’
‘There it is again! Whatever,’ she mimicked. ‘I don’t care if you can’t deal right now, you’re damn well going to. You’re taking over all these bills from me. All of them. I’m not paying your mobile phone bill, or even your health insurance.’
I licked melted cheese from my index finger. ‘You’re the one who took out private health cover for me. What if I get arthritis like you and need a knee replacement? I’ll be on the wait list for years, hobbling around with a stick like a gypsy. You hate gypsies. Would you really do that to me?’
She said nothing, just stood with her arms folded across her faded shirt with the mismatched buttons.
‘You know I’ll never call you if I have to pay my own phone bill,’ I said.
‘I don’t care. I’ll call you.’
‘I won’t answer.’
‘You will or I’ll clobber you. Anyway, you’ll be needing your weekly meals from me once you enter the real world.’ Mum set her mouth in a determined line. I recognised her expression as one I wore often.
‘Jesus,’ was all I could say.
‘Don’t swear.’
‘It’s not a swear word.’
‘Well, don’t say it. I’ve calculated that if you don’t eat out or drink alcohol, you could break even on $43,000 per year before tax. If you want to have a little fun on your weekends you should try to get a job earning fifty grand, just to be sure. It’s unfortunate you didn’t get your Commerce degree because PricewaterhouseCoopers probably won’t take you with just a diploma, but I’ve done some googling and took the liberty of sending your résumé to a recruitment agency in Abbotsford. You’ve got an appointment with them at three pm.’
‘You did what? Mum, I don’t even have a résumé.’
‘Well, I took the morning off work to make you one.’
‘You impersonated me? That’s a pretty crazy effort to go to just to make me pay some stupid bills.’
‘Some stupid bills?’ Mum’s face darkened. ‘I’ve been paying your stupid bills for almost thirty years. I’ve been working so that you can bludge through uni, pay for your worthless cat’s dental work, and go on boozy nights out where you cheat on your boyfriend and humiliate me as a mother!’
I was angry. She not only wanted to throw me out into the seething waters of the world without a life jacket, but to tie a lead weight to my foot and chuck me into the shipping lane in front of an oncoming tanker. And she was making me feel guilty.
‘Fine!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll become a stripper. Would you like that?’
She laughed. ‘Go ahead and try. They’d throw you out on the first night. You have to be fit to be a stripper. You’d fall off the pole!’
She was still laughing when I stormed into my room. I looked around. Blue and white bedsheets. White wardrobe. Chipped dressing table with a teenager’s girly mirror. Bronze spoons for coming third – always third – in high school swimming competitions. I didn’t want this stuff. A house in the suburbs. A respectable job. Children. A divorce.
Mum must have felt guilty for laughing at me, because she followed me into the room after a few minutes, the budget replaced with bank notes. No matter how tough her words were, she always caved. Mum was like gravel-coated butter.
‘Here’s the deal,’ she said. ‘You can’t live here, but if you attend this appointment with the recruitment agency and make a real effort to get a job I’ll let you stay for a month while you look for a new apartment. I took out twelve hundred dollars. It’s an advance on the bond you’ll have to pay. It’s the last money you’re getting from me, and I mean it this time.’ She smoothed down the doona. ‘What do you say?’
I saw no way out.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the appointment.’
‘Good.’ She turned to go, then stopped. ‘Oh, and I didn’t mean what I said about Dot. She’s not worthless.’
I took a taxi to Sean’s house to pick up my car after lunch. The blinds on his front window were drawn and the plant on the verandah still hadn’t been watered. My car was where I had left it across the road, and this time the engine turned over without any protestations. I drove to the recruitment agency, which was on a weird, quiet lane off Victoria Street populated by twisted wattle trees and boarded-up houses, and one weedy vacant block protected by a long, tall fence with ‘No Trespassers’ signage stapled to the wire. There’d probably be mid-rise apartments going up there soon. I parked and got out, regarded the chipped decal writing on the dark glass window – Superior Recruiting – and wished I’d bothered to look at the fake résumé Mum had written. Supposedly, this agency would help falsify my qualifications to the point that someone might be duped into hiring me. I checked the time and as I returned my phone to my pocket I accidentally rubbed the slippery bank notes Mum had given me. Probably not the best idea to carry $1200 around in your pocket on the way to Superior Recruiting.
Just as I was about to cross the road, a woman emerged from the building and leant against the wall. She took her phone out and made a call, then lit a cigarette. She looked to be in her early forties, in a suit and dark stockings, with that family-court-dad shoulder hunch. A waft of smoke curled about her head and dissipated in the breeze. As I got closer, I overheard her conversation.
‘No typing speed test this time,’ she was saying. ‘But I’ll get some temp work next week, they think. Reception.’
A shudder ran through my body. There was only one job I dreaded more than accounting, and that was reception. Having to actually talk to people and be pleasant. When I thought of getting an office job, Mum’s face the night Dad left rose in my mind, the shock that turned her white. That look that said, I did everything right and now what? It kept circling until I was seething with anger. Who said I had to live like this? Who said I had to have a job and live in a house and pay taxes? This is the system we are born into and we have no choice in the matter.
Maybe I choose not to be part of it.
It was strange that the people who liked me the most, like my mother, approved of my choices the least. How could it be that the people who wished me well actually wanted me to spend my days in an accounting firm? On the other hand, people who disliked me, like Sarah Stoll, seemed overjoyed that I’d never had a job or a steady place to live. I took a walk around the block to clear my head. My appointment wasn’t for another twenty minutes.
On Nicholson Street, I saw the caravan for sale.
It was small and squat and sat low to the ground, shaped like a triangle with the tip cut off. It was made of corrugated aluminiu
m, silver with a green speed stripe all the way around. Sea-foam green, in fact. The same colour as my car. The handwritten sign leaning against one tyre was asking for $1100.
And I had $1200 cash in my pocket.
Chapter 4
The caravan’s owners were named Wayne and Sheila. They were both inside having a cup of tea when I knocked. Wayne wore his pants hitched up to his nipples. He ushered me in. It was tiny and cramped and the windows were dirty, letting in a brownish filtered light at both ends of the van, which were only ten feet apart. On the left were two brown vinyl seats with a laminate table between them. Directly opposite the door, the kitchen had a sink and gas cooktop with wood veneer cupboards above. To the right was a brown vinyl couch that folded out into a bed, and behind me, opposite the sink, was a slender built-in wardrobe. The faded curtains still showed a hint of 1960s floral glory. I could just stand up straight at the caravan’s highest point, in its centre, but Wayne had to duck his head slightly.
‘Well, this is it,’ he said. ‘The pump tap doesn’t work. You just get those boxes of spring water. But you can get a gas bottle for the cooktop, that works good. This window here is busted out, we never bothered to get it fixed, but you can get new Perspex made to fit.’
A strange feeling came over me. I was standing in the tiniest, crustiest piece of shit ever to be slapped on a set of wheels and called a caravan, and yet it felt . . . cosy. It had character. It suited me.
It felt like home.
Wayne showed me how to put the jacks up and down and connect the caravan to my panel van’s tow bar.
‘Just put a rock behind a wheel whenever you’re parked and you’ll be right,’ he said.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
Sheila wiped away a tear and rubbed her hand on her tracksuit pants. ‘I’m going to miss this old girl, but we need the money for our kid. She’s having chemo.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take good care of the van.’
I counted out the money and handed it over. Wayne took it and nodded.
‘Ta.’
After they had taken one last look at their beloved and disappeared inside the little tumbledown house it was parked in front of, I connected the caravan to my car. If I went back to the recruitment agency now, I’d only be fifteen minutes late. They probably wouldn’t mind. But going to a recruitment agency to get a job was living in the future. I wanted to live in the now.
I towed the caravan to my mother’s house. On second thought, I parked it further down the street and unhitched it from the car. No point asking for trouble just yet.
Mum got home from work at 6.30 pm and stomped into the kitchen, irritable from dealing with inferior clients. She’d been an accountant for thirty years, the last ten of which she’d spent in a small magazine publishing company that just couldn’t seem to stay in the black financially. She always came home grumbling.
‘Did you see that piece-of-crap caravan down the street?’ she said as soon as she’d put her bag on the counter. ‘I asked the neighbour, he doesn’t know whose it is. I bet some bloody gypsies have moved in. I’m calling the police.’
She grabbed the phone and started dialling the local police station. Goddammit, why hadn’t I parked it further away? I’d spent fifteen minutes disconnecting it from the car so Mum wouldn’t know it was mine but hadn’t considered that she’d take offence to its very existence.
‘Mum, don’t do that. It’s probably someone’s holiday home.’
‘Like hell it is. It’s ten feet long and looks older than I am. In Camberwell, we don’t buy caravans, we buy beach houses. It’ll be full of layabout hippy travellers. They’ll be breaking into houses before you know it.’
I heard the sound of ringing down the line and sighed.
‘It’s my caravan.’
She paused. A tinny voice on the other end of the line asked for her name.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No, I’m not.’
She hung up the phone. ‘It’s not yours.’
‘It is.’
‘When did you buy it?’
‘This afternoon.’
Clouds of fury formed on her face. ‘And how much did you pay for it?’
I swallowed. ‘Eleven hundred.’
She stood silently for a long minute, while the clock above the kitchen bench ticked, counting down the seconds until my doom. Suddenly she lunged for something in her handbag and I flinched. With trembling hands she held out the document she had seized, and I realised it was the budget she had so carefully written out for me. I took it from her. It felt heavier and thicker than it should have, so I lifted the top sheet.
Underneath the budget was a thick wad of paper, official-looking, covered in legalese and stamped with the insignia of a lawyer’s office. It was my mother’s will.
‘I told you that was the last money you’ll ever get from me.’ Her wet-eyed look caused a strange lump to grow in my throat, and I realised there was something else in her expression, fear maybe, as if she could hardly believe she was doing this. ‘I told you I was cutting you out of my will. I hope you don’t regret buying that caravan, because it’s the last purchase you’ll make with my money. No more bond money, or bail money, or whatever else you want next time.’
I flipped through the pages of the will, stunned, but couldn’t see my name anywhere, only my brother Harry’s. ‘Is this permanent, Mum? Because, you know, I plan to live a long time. You might change your mind.’
She paused, angled forward, jaws clenched like a pit bull’s. ‘I might. If you can prove to me that you’re capable of being independent.’
I swallowed. ‘Define “independent”.’
‘No moving back in here with me, or moving in with Jen, or sponging off some poor man that you use up and dump. If you can prove to me that you’re capable of living on your own and taking care of yourself – earning your own money – I’ll write you back into the will. You’ve got . . .’ she considered, ‘six months to prove it to me. You’ve already spent the bond money I gave you on a caravan, so I suppose you’d better go live in it. Just like that awful whining country musician you go on about all the time who lived in his car.’
I cleared my throat. ‘You know, that awful whining country musician you speak of is David Allan Coe. He’s an unhailed genius.’
She threw up her arms. ‘An unhailed genius! You told me he wrote a song called “Eff—Effin’ in the Butt”!’ she spluttered.
‘“Fuckin’ in the Butt”,’ I corrected her. ‘Not his magnum opus, I concede, but it has its merits.’
Her face turned red as she pursed her lips so tightly they resembled the very anus about which the great David Allan Coe so eloquently wrote his ode.
‘Get out! Get out of my house!’ she shrieked.
‘Okay, Mum.’
I started to back out of the kitchen slowly. At the last second I veered towards the fridge, pulling the door open so hard the jars rattled in the shelves, and grabbed a bottle of chardonnay that was cooling in the fridge door.
‘Oi!’ Mum shouted.
I slammed the fridge door and sprinted out of the house, bottle in hand. On my way through the front yard, I collected Dot, who hung limp in my arms with the resignation of the defeated.
I towed the caravan back to Collingwood.
A pit of fear opened in my stomach as I rumbled down the freeway. I had not actually planned to start living in the caravan right away. I had planned to deck it out and maybe sleep in it a couple of nights a week when it was parked on Mum’s street to give us both a bit of breathing space. Now that it was clear she was serious about cutting me off there were a few things I had to think about. Number one concerned a bathroom. The caravan didn’t have one. Number two concerned water. The taps in the caravan didn’t work. Number three concerned electricity. I could have gone to a caravan park and had the use of bathrooms, running water and electricity, but caravan parks cost money, were too far from Collingwood and were full of holidayin
g families, cabins on stilts and screaming children brandishing water pistols. And since I wasn’t a holidaying family, I suspected I would be an object of suspicion, or worse, pity.
I had no real answers with which to reassure myself, so with one hand I opened the bottle of wine that was resting on the passenger seat and swigged it, after checking the side mirrors for cops. I thought about moving in with Jen and then remembered what Mum had said about not moving in with Jen. Swigged the bottle again. When I reached my old street I slowed the panel van down to idle in front of Sean’s house. The light was on in the front room but the curtains were closed. I kept going until I reached Charlotte Court, which was a laneway directly behind Jen’s house. It was a tiny, quiet cul-de-sac with a small apartment block on one side and three houses on the other. The car spaces had no time limit, so I backed into one of them. Wayne had showed me how to reverse the caravan, but I was no master at it and the caravan ended up pretty crooked in the parking spot. I put the handbrake on, sat back in the driver’s seat and with silent determination emptied half the bottle of wine into my gullet, before unhitching the car and parking it one spot over.
The pink of the sky was beginning to fade to darkness when I tottered out of the car and opened the caravan door to look inside. It had a tinny, unfamiliar smell about it, like unwashed clothes in the laundry sink. Dot followed me through the door and coughed up a hairball on the floor in protest before jumping onto the table and meowing for dinner. I would have to buy cat food from the supermarket, since I had not thought to steal any from Mum’s house, but first I lay down on the hard vinyl bed with a jumper rolled up as a pillow. The room spun.
Chapter 5
Outside, the sun was coming up. Magpies called to each other over the low hum of cars on the Eastern Freeway, three streets away. I was thirsty and needed to use the toilet, but there wasn’t one. No food, because I had not thought to buy anything except chocolate and cat food when I went to the supermarket at 8 pm the night before, and I’d already eaten all the chocolate. No fridge to use even if I had food, and no electricity to power the fridge I didn’t have. I had no sheets, no towels and no spare clothes.