by Rose Hartley
Something about his speech made me uneasy. I met his eyes and he was watching me thoughtfully.
‘I worry about you too, you know, Maggie. Jen says you go into things seeing the end before it begins.’
‘Jen said that?’
He smiled. ‘None of my business. I guess if you date worthless people like Sean then it never matters if you lose them.’
I stopped dead. ‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry. I’m feeling kinda burned, seeing Lisa and Simon together for the first time.’
I wondered if I would be doing Dan a favour by pointing out that Lisa clearly still had feelings for him, or if he’d be better off staying away from her and the potential heartbreak. Give him all the information and let him make his own mistakes, I decided.
‘Lisa was definitely jealous tonight,’ I said.
He flushed. ‘You reckon?’
‘She kept touching your arm and following you around the room.’
‘She always used to do that when we were together.’
‘Yeah, but you’re supposed to stop doing it when you break up.’
‘Oh.’
‘So?’ I said.
‘So what?’
‘So what do you want to do? Do you want to keep fake-dating and see if she goes mad with jealousy and leaves Simon?’
‘That seems a bit evil,’ he said.
‘It is a bit evil. Do you want to do it?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Great. Thing is, I need something from you if I’m going to keep up this ruse.’
He sighed. ‘What now?’
‘Do some work on my mother’s house.’
‘Maggie, I’m trying to make a living here, I can’t work for free.’
I waved an arm scornfully. ‘I don’t mean fix the whole place up. Just do a bit of tinkering here and there, so she’s pleased with me and writes me back into the will.’
‘Won’t I be the one she’s pleased with, though? I’ll be doing the work. Maybe she’ll write me into her will.’
‘If she does, I’ll marry you. Don’t worry, you can still have affairs with Lisa.’
Dan kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ll think about it. Goodnight.’
I waggled a finger at him. ‘You owe me for tonight. Putting up with Sarah Stoll and my ex, getting outed as a caravan-dweller. You owe me a fixed front gate at my mother’s house.’
He crossed the street to catch the last tram.
‘Oi,’ I shouted after him. ‘What were you whispering to my mother about the other day?’
He waved as the tram doors creaked open for him but didn’t answer. I watched the tram leave, the red glow of taillights crawling down Smith Street like a caterpillar.
That night I heard the sounds I’d been dreading since Jono arrived.
I woke at four in the morning, stomach churning with the good wine, mouth dry as a sock. The caravan smelt musky, that earthy, urine-y smell that rabbit warrens get when there are too many rabbits and not enough warren. How had I managed to create that smell all by myself? I had no water in the caravan, so, floor creaking, I slipped on an oversized T-shirt and thongs and opened the door into the cool night air. The pedestrian gate to Jen’s backyard was sagging on its hinges and normally made a racket when it scraped along the concrete, so I opened it as slowly as I could, pushing it gently and lifting it off the ground.
They were making so much noise I needn’t have bothered.
Jen sounds like Minnie Mouse getting rammed by a rhinoceros when she has sex. It’s all high-pitched squeaks and gasps. Jono wasn’t making much noise aside from the occasional grunt, but the cool breeze floated it right over to my delicate ears. They’d left the windows open.
I quietly unlocked the back door just as a hand spanked a warm, fleshy thigh with an audible slap. In the moonlight I saw that the door to her study was ajar. I walked to the bathroom as quietly as I could and filled a glass of water at the sink.
By the time I left, the sounds had stopped, hopefully of their own accord and not because they’d realised there was an intruder in the house. I snuck out softly and quickly, eager to get back to the caravan, although the rabbit-warren smell seemed even stronger now. I put the glass of water next to the bed and thought about what Dan had said at the end of the night. If you date worthless people, it doesn’t matter when you lose them. I guess he could have been talking about Sean, or Jono, or Lisa, but he could also have been talking about me.
My memory skipped to the moment Sarah had repeated the word caravan and I had to close my eyes. Even in the dark, my face burned. By the end of the night, everyone would have known that I lived in a caravan, and in the morning Sarah would get busy texting people, telling them the news about Maggie and her pathetic life.
Jen was overjoyed the next morning. She burst into the caravan and climbed on top of me, her hair coiling about her head in strange shapes, like the miniature stone gargoyles in her parents’ backyard.
‘I had sex!’ She wrapped her arms around my neck and flopped there.
‘With who?’ Jen had brought unwelcome sunlight with her when she’d burst through the door, and my head was already pounding.
She gave me a playful tap. ‘Jono! Finally!’ She did a little horizontal dance, knocking the breath out of me, and her dressing gown fell open to reveal wrinkled pink pyjamas with love hearts on them. ‘I told him how sad I was that we hadn’t had sex, so we did it over my desk.’
‘Awww, how sweet.’
‘And now we get to hang out for a whole week before he goes home!’
‘Wonderful.’
Jen rolled off me, smiling and stretching her arms over her head. She was in no hurry to leave, and her good mood would make her generous.
‘What do you want for breakfast? Let’s go out somewhere. My shout. Or I’ll make something.’
I rolled into her and buried my nose in her shoulder. ‘I don’t care. I’m a loser, I’ll eat anything.’
‘Oh, sweetheart. What happened?’
‘Don’t you remember? Sarah Stoll knows I live in a caravan. Everyone knows. I have a Centrelink debt the size of Alice Springs that Rueben assures me is not going away any time soon, and I nearly pass out from the horn every time he speaks, even though I’ll probably lose my job to him. I may as well give up and become a sex worker now, but no one’s going to want to pay me for sex so I’ll have to become one of those girls who wears a sandwich board advertising a coffee and sausage roll for six dollars. Sean and Sarah will come by every day to take pictures and taunt me, and when I’m forty I’ll try to kill myself but fail, and all the cats I ever own will run away.’
She patted me on the shoulder. ‘There there. Dot won’t run away, and if she does I’ll replace her with a cat that looks just like her and you’ll never be able to tell.’ She rolled out of bed. ‘I’ll go get dressed, come round in ten.’
I waited in Jen’s kitchen while she threw on some clothes. Jono greeted me with a nod and a yawn.
‘Woke up with a really sore left ball this morning.’ A sweaty hand emerged from his boxer shorts. He looked at the kitchen bench, then at me. ‘Make me a coffee?’
‘Make your own,’ I said.
‘You know, you’re practically living in Jen’s house for free, you could at least make coffee. Or put a dish in the water and scrub it,’ Jono said, as he took a bite of a muffin that Jen had presumably made. He didn’t wash his hand before he took it and I imagined the muffin now tasted of ball sweat.
‘You know, you’re also living in her house for free, you could make her something for once,’ I shot back.
‘I don’t see you turning down her scrambled eggs.’
‘Well, at least I don’t yell at her to get me a coffee when I’m hungover.’
‘Guys, please!’ Jen hurried in to break up the argument. ‘I’m right here, there’s no need to bicker. Maggie, let’s head to brunch. Jono, we’ll be back in an hour.’
Jono blew Jen a lazy kiss as we left. Something about the gesture was u
ncomfortably familiar. His muffin-eating entitlement disturbed me, and I realised it was because he reminded me of myself. Someday soon, I promised myself, I would repay Jen for all the times she’d looked after me.
Chapter 16
‘Mum, you know that list of my old boyfriends you wrote . . . who was your favourite one on it?’
‘God, you’re just like your father,’ she snapped.
I swivelled in my chair and cradled the office phone between my neck and shoulder. I could feel Rueben watching me out of the corner of his eye but I didn’t care. Agnes was paying a morning call to the teenage mothers at the shelter and I’d run out of mobile credit, so the Angels would have to pay for this phone call.
‘Why am I like Dad?’
‘Because he’s a selfish prick,’ came the instant answer.
The sound of her favourite soap opera was audible in the background, the one with a magical-realist plot element involving a puppet that came to life. Mum had every Friday off work and every Friday she watched the soap without fail.
‘So you’re saying I’m a selfish prick?’
‘I know why you’re asking me about the list. You’re getting desperate and you want to look up one of your old boyfriends to see if any would be foolish enough to let you use him for money again. Your father doesn’t have a conscience and neither do you.’
‘Are you calling me a sociopath?’
‘Sociopaths are charming.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘No. You’re just a run-of-the-mill cheater.’
‘I think that’s a bit unfair, really. Maybe I’m too nice to end relationships that I know are on the rocks, so I just . . . pop on over to the next one.’
Mum burst out laughing. Even Rueben snorted. I shot him a dirty look.
‘Too nice? Stop deluding yourself. How is our agreement going?’
‘Swimmingly. I love the caravan and I love my job.’ It wasn’t until I said it that I realised I had come to like working at the Angels.
Mum didn’t even try to keep the meanness out of her laughter. ‘And Jen’s wedding planning? Have you found her a new dress yet? If you had any money you should have offered to pay for it, since you destroyed an heirloom.’
‘The wedding dress will be amazing. Leave me alone.’ I hung up.
‘Wedding dress?’ Rueben asked. ‘Are you getting married?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘My best friend is marrying a douchenozzle and I had to help her choose a dress to wear while she ruins her life.’
Rueben merely raised his eyebrows.
‘Maybe you should be my date to the wedding. You’d look great in a powder-blue suit,’ I said.
‘I don’t do weddings,’ he said. ‘Marriage is possibly the worst cultural institution ever invented.’
‘I agree, but we could at least have sex in a bathroom or something. You should have come to the engagement party on Saturday night. You might have helped me avoid humiliation, plus the bathrooms in converted warehouses are really something special. This one smelt like frangipani.’
‘How were you humiliated?’
‘Someone I utterly hate discovered I live in a caravan and gleefully broadcasted it to everyone I know.’
Rueben smiled. ‘Always worrying about what people think.’
‘It’s a valid pastime. Humans have evolved to worry about what each other thinks. Social exclusion can be deadly in the wild. If nobody likes you enough to protect you from bears or share their food in a famine, you’re pretty rooted, aren’t you?’
‘Guess that’s why you’re making a list of wronged boyfriends. I imagine there are a few people out there already who don’t much like you.’
‘Idiots, all of them.’
He grinned. ‘I agree.’
A little thrill ran through my body from head to toe when he said that.
At lunchtime I borrowed five dollars from Rueben and bought a bacon and egg sandwich from the corner store. Butter ran down my chin as I ate it at my desk.
‘So why’d you go to jail?’ I asked through a mouthful of egg.
‘Mind your own business.’
None of the grannies had turned up for their shifts in the op shop that afternoon so Agnes ordered us to cover for them, since the office was quiet anyway. In the absence of any customers, we sorted through clothing from the donation bins, tagging and pricing clothes and hanging them on the racks. As we idly sorted the Italian loafers from the vinyl pants, I kept up my line of questioning.
‘C’mon. Why did you go to jail?’
He ignored me and kept working, tagging a 1980s puffball wedding dress at forty dollars and hanging it up.
‘Why? Whyyyyyyy?’
‘Will you shut up if I tell you?’
‘For a good ten minutes.’
He sighed and straightened a pair of sandals. ‘When I was eighteen I stole a car to impress my mates and got caught. Normally you don’t go to prison for stealing a crappy car, especially if it’s your first time, but my court date was at lunchtime and I guess the magistrate was hungry and didn’t like my naughty face. He put me away for thirty days, said it would sort me out.’
‘So that was the first stint.’
‘Yeah. Problem is, it’s hard for ex-cons to get jobs. I just hung around smoking pot for about a year. Then I got the munchies one night and didn’t have money to buy chips, so I grabbed a butter knife out of the kitchen drawer and tried to hold up the service station. I was high as a bear on acid. The stupid guy behind the counter wouldn’t hand over the cash. I got a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and threw them at his head.’
I burst out laughing. ‘What, and they did you for assault?’
‘Well. Unfortunately the peas knocked him off balance and he split his skull open on the counter. So I got done for assault occasioning serious bodily harm as well as armed robbery. I was lucky to only get two years. They could have sent me away for a lot longer.’
I couldn’t help sniggering. ‘Frozen peas.’
‘Poor bastard needed staples in his head.’ He was half smiling.
‘Was he all right?’ I started sifting through an inordinate number of rhinestone brooches, which had burst out of a tortoiseshell jewellery box. They were just begging to be fixed to a woolly yellow cardigan.
‘Yeah, he was all right in the end. He sent me a Christmas card while I was in jail.’
‘A Christmas card, when you nearly turned him into a vegetable?’
‘You’re hilarious. I think he’s religious. Forgiveness, et cetera.’
‘Give peas a chance, and all that. Got it. What did you do after you got out of jail the second time?’
He paused. A brief look of sadness crossed his face. ‘Not much. Worked as a removalist for a while. Did a lot of the kinds of jobs that are okay in your twenties but start to hurt in your thirties.’
‘So you gave up on that, and now you do your twenty hours a week volunteering and Centrelink pays you the Newstart, right? Same as me?’
‘Yep. I’m looking forward to the day I never have to deal with Centrelink again, though.’
‘You mean, the day you get offered a permanent job here and I don’t?’ I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘You want a paid job here?’
‘If it ensures I never set foot in a Centrelink office again, yes.’
‘Stop blathering to your mother during work hours and maybe they’ll give you a job,’ he said.
I huffed and opened up a cardboard box. ‘For an ex-con, you’re a goody two-shoes.’
He lobbed a lacy white bra at me. It caught on my shoulder and flopped over my boob like a bulbous snowflake.
‘Oi,’ I said, trying to disentangle the hooks and eyes, which had caught in a hole in my T-shirt. ‘You’re ruining my look. Who donates their old bras, anyway?’
Rueben looked at the clock. ‘It’s Prayer Time in ten minutes,’ he said. He gently lifted the bra from my shoulder and put it back in the box.
‘I’ve gotta make a phone call f
irst,’ I said.
I should have known better than to try to call Centrelink with only ten minutes to spare. After eight minutes in the hold queue, time I spent trying to decode a piece of graffiti on the wall next to the op shop that said a one-eyed donkey stole my wife and coming up blank, I gave up and joined Rueben on his way to Prayer Time.
It was strangely quiet in the prayer room. Agnes, Josephine, Christine, Boris and Bunny were sitting in a circle with their heads bowed when Rueben and I walked in.
‘Are we late?’ My voice echoed through the silent room and Josephine shot me a dirty look.
‘We’re praying,’ she hissed.
‘What for?’ I asked, stupidly. Everyone’s heads lifted. ‘Sorry, I mean, is this a group prayer, for something specific?’
Agnes folded her hands. ‘We’re praying for the charity’s finances. We had some bad news today, which I will outline at the end of today’s session.’
My stomach dropped. Was this the moment my job prospects folded for good? Not wanting to poke the bear, I took a seat, and Rueben slid into a chair next to me. After an interminable prayer from Boris, which had an oddly rhythmic quality to it, like a Dr Seuss book, Josephine read a ‘motivational’ poem.
‘On a dark and gloomy night
With no end to trouble in sight
When I was sad and crying a river
God said, “Child, I am your giver
Your pain will soon be at an end
Because I will always be your friend
You will rise again like Jesus
And all your good works will please Us.”’
I strongly suspected she’d written it herself.
‘This is a very special getting-to-know-you Prayer Time,’ Bunny said. ‘I hope you’ve all come prepared to spill a little secret – something most people don’t know about you!’
I’d forgotten all about Bunny’s special Prayer Time and hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the little-known fact about myself that I could share. All I could think of was the time I slept with a roadie for Kings of Leon when they did the festival circuit ten years back, probably not an appropriate factoid to share at work, or the time I drove into my mother’s front fence when I was sixteen, hungover and driving without a licence. I decided to lie and say I’d been born with six toes on each foot, or that my middle name was Muriel.