Maggie's Going Nowhere

by Rose Hartley

  Josephine read a passage from the Bible, something about men trading sheep for wives.

  ‘Now,’ Agnes began, looking uncomfortable, ‘I hope that by the end of this special Prayer Time we feel closer and more connected to each other by sharing something about ourselves that may surprise our colleagues. Today was Bunny’s idea, so perhaps we will ask her to go first.’

  Bunny cleared her throat. I looked at the clock and hoped this wouldn’t take too long.

  ‘My story’s not about me so much,’ she began, and I didn’t believe her for a second. ‘But it’s about life. The sacredness of life. I support the freedom to be born – that is, I’m part of what people refer to as the pro-life movement.’

  I knew there was a reason this girl gave me the creeps.

  ‘I believe in direct action to influence people’s choices in this important decision – and I’m proud to say that just last week at the East Melbourne clinic, we saved a baby’s life by convincing the mother to ask for God’s help instead of killing her unborn child.’

  Direct action? I nearly lost my cool. Jen and I had gone with our friend Siobhan to the East Melbourne clinic when she was twenty-one and needed an abortion quick-smart after her boyfriend had done a runner. The street had been lined with Bunnys, shouting and holding pictures of dead babies. Someone filmed us walking into the clinic, trying to block our path. Siobhan moved to Tasmania not long after.

  Bunny picked up her guitar. ‘I hope you don’t mind, I’ve written a song about life in all its preciousness and glory. I’d like to sing it for you because I think music is the best way to open hearts and change minds. It’s called “Every Heartbeat”.’

  Of course, Bunny. Of course. We’d love to hear your song. She strummed the guitar and broke into her ode to embryos.

  ‘Every heartbeat is precious

  Tiny as it seems

  We’re all children in God’s hands

  You’re a sacred seed . . .’

  I had to give it to her, it wasn’t quite as bad as ‘We All Love Jesus’, but then she went for a high note and missed by a long shot. By the time she’d finished we were ten minutes into Prayer Time.

  ‘Right,’ Agnes said. ‘Uh, thanks for sharing that, Bunny.’ She had the look of a woman who’d recently eaten a dodgy oyster. ‘Boris?’

  Boris’s voice was so soft I could hardly hear about how he used to work for a bank in New York before the Global Financial Crisis, and subsequently had a nervous breakdown and found God. When did bottling things up go out of fashion? I wondered. I shifted slightly in my chair. It squeaked as if I’d dragged it across the room, and Bunny shot me a withering look. Slowly, I inched my leg towards Rueben’s and pressed it ever so gently against his jeans.

  Christine went next, fiddling with the beads in her necklace and blinking hard.

  ‘My ex-boyfriend murdered his wife,’ she blurted.

  Holy shit. This was too much for me. I took a pen from my top pocket as Boris started to rub Christine’s shoulder. All eyes were locked on Christine, so no one noticed when I started writing on a scrap of paper.

  I need to get out of here. Changed mind re: bathroom bang?

  As I wrote, Christine was detailing how she found the wife’s bones in a hard-shell suitcase in the garage after living with the guy for four years.

  ‘I thought he was a nice man,’ she finished. ‘He seemed like a really nice man.’

  Well, I thought. If even nice men murder their wives, how do you tell who to sleep with? Might as well go for the sexy ones if you’re risking your life either way.

  I passed the note, hidden in a dirty tissue I found in my pocket, back to Rueben. His fingers brushed mine as he took it, lingering just a little longer than necessary. The room was silent. He didn’t unfold the tissue.

  It came to my turn and I flicked a look in Agnes’s direction. She seemed anxious, as if she was expecting another heavy story. The faces on either side of her were attentive, the minds behind them ticking over, desperately thinking of the saddest story they could tell. They all wanted those sympathy sighs and pats, too.

  I knew my lie about six toes wasn’t going to cut it.

  ‘Um, you may not know that I live in a caravan.’ A few eyebrows raised. ‘Yeah, um, it’s a 1962 hand-built aluminium ten-footer and it’s shaped like a trapezoid. And it has a speed stripe. I used to have trouble from the police wanting me to move along because I park it on the streets of Collingwood, but now they’re used to me.’

  ‘Wow,’ Bunny said. ‘That’s amazing. Does it have a shower?’

  Hey, no one else had questioned the confessors. This wasn’t 60 Minutes.

  ‘Uh, I park behind my friend’s house and shower there.’

  ‘Does it have a toilet?’ asked Josephine.

  ‘No. Same deal.’

  ‘What if you have to go in the night?’ asked Bunny.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘All right, thanks for sharing, Maggie,’ said Agnes. ‘We better keep moving. Rueben?’

  ‘My mum was runner-up in the Miss Australia pageant in 1979,’ Rueben said.

  Everyone oohed. That explains his good looks, I thought. The gratitude on Agnes’s face at such a short and pleasant secret was heartwarming.

  ‘Well, thank you, everyone, that’s the end of the getting-to-know-you session,’ she said.

  ‘Wait, what about you?’ I asked.

  Agnes shifted irritably. ‘Well, I’m a member of the North Fitzroy yarn bombing association,’ she said. ‘We knit colourful covers for telegraph poles and trees.’

  Aw, how cute. My appreciation for Agnes’s sensible shoes and plain manner went up a notch. I stretched, hoping she would wrap things up. Work would be a relief at this point. Rueben had unfolded my note and read it, but he hadn’t written a reply.

  ‘And now we come to the business end of this afternoon’s session,’ Agnes said. ‘I want to update you all on the financial situation that I mentioned earlier.’

  Uh oh.

  ‘It’s not so good at the moment,’ she continued. ‘There’s a lot more competition in the non-profit space. Those fashionable water charities and thousands of cancer fundraisers are eating into our market share. To be quite frank, we need to bring in more revenue, or cut back on our costs. Both, preferably.’

  My heart sank. No question, she was talking about job cuts. Not that I, as a volunteer, would be booted from the Angels, but I had been banking on landing a paying job soon to clear my Centrelink debt.

  ‘The shop is spending too much money and time sorting through donated junk and having rubbish removed. We’re going to have to install security cameras and prosecute anyone who dumps waste in the op shop bins.’ Josephine sucked in a breath at the word ‘prosecute’. I supposed it was unchristian. Agnes ignored her. ‘Bunny, how are the letterbox drops going?’

  Bunny looked startled at the question. She opened her mouth but before she could invent something, Agnes continued.

  ‘We need to be more aggressive in the lead-up to next year’s winter campaign. This year’s was a complete bust; we didn’t even reach half our target. I have here samples of the Salvos’ mail – direct mail, mind you, not unaddressed mail. I know it costs a bomb and we don’t have the budget for it – but look at the ideas behind their letters. Why aren’t we doing anything similar?’

  The Salvos had a million-dollar marketing budget at their disposal, and the direct-mail pack boasted a fold-out paper blanket, colour pictures of cold homeless people, personal stories, coupons and a return envelope. We could never afford something like that.

  Josephine piped up. ‘Agnes, I worry about this talk of moneymaking. We’re not a business, we’re a charity doing God’s will. We need to look to our roots and find that passion. What would Jesus say about competing with the Salvos, who do God’s work too? Would he approve of us trying to take “market share”?’

  ‘This is not a halfway house for lost Christians!’ Agnes snapped. ‘We’re here to help the poor, not save
our own souls. Our purpose is to get results for people living in poverty, and that means reducing our overheads and increasing donations. Efficiency! If you’re not on board with that, you should question why you’re here at all.’

  Rebuffed, Josephine sank back into her chair, red-faced. Silence in the room. My mind started ticking over, and I thought of my Centrelink debt. I shot Bunny a sideways glance. Her mouth was hanging half open and I realised that, although she was in the office three days a week, she did absolutely no marketing for the Angels at all. All she did was get kudos for working in a charity while she wrote bad songs about Jesus. Her job was there for the taking, if someone was canny enough to take it.

  ‘Agnes,’ I asked cautiously. ‘How much money, exactly, do we need to raise to cover our expenses?’

  ‘We need an extra twelve thousand dollars by the end of the year to cover our running costs or we’ll have to close one of the shelters, probably the men’s shelter. Next year I want to aim to increase our revenue by sixty thousand dollars.’

  Nobody spoke. I suppose no one except Agnes ever kept account of how much money it actually cost to run the shelters and the op shop.

  ‘How many times a year do we ask our supporters for money?’ I asked. ‘Like, send them letters?’

  Bunny looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Agnes just mentioned our winter campaign.’

  ‘But . . . is that it? Is that the only time we contact our donors?’

  ‘They support us through the op shop at other times of the year,’ she said defensively. ‘And it’s very expensive to send letters.’

  ‘What about emails? How often do we email them?’ Silence. I persisted. ‘Do we even collect email addresses?’

  ‘That’s a very good question, Maggie,’ Agnes said.

  Holy shit, what century was this charity operating in that they didn’t even collect email addresses?

  ‘Well, why don’t we send another letter before Christmas?’ I said. ‘I don’t mean a fancy direct-mail pack like the Salvos, I mean just writing a plain old letter to our supporter base. I can write up something similar to the Salvos’ winter appeal – just change it to make it a Christmas theme – and we can mail it in bulk to save on costs. And then we can think up some ways to increase our supporter base. Maybe have a look at the average income of our supporters and see how we can target people with higher incomes who have more to give. Like, Camberwell types.’ Like the guy next door to my mother who sold his gold mine in 1996 for two hundred million dollars and now collects vintage Ferraris as a hobby. We need to target him, is what I didn’t say.

  I waited with bated breath.

  ‘That’s an excellent thought, Maggie.’ Agnes beamed. ‘If you could write a draft letter, that would be fantastic. Can you have it ready to show me next week?’

  ‘Yep.’ Phew.

  ‘I’ll add an email sign-up to the website and online donation forms,’ Rueben said.

  ‘Wonderful.’ Agnes beamed at him.

  Bunny looked mutinous but I didn’t care. I needed a job more than she did, and if people didn’t donate to the Nicholson Street Angels then I wouldn’t even have a volunteer position. Prayer Time disbanded and we returned to our desks, some of us more sprightly than others.

  ‘Nice suggestion,’ Rueben said in a low voice. ‘Did you think that up on the fly?’

  I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘I have no bloody idea what I’m doing,’ I hissed. ‘Help me.’

  He laughed. ‘Of course I will. We’ll bring the Angels into the twenty-first century together. Watch out for Bunny, though, I thought she was about to stab you.’

  ‘Hide the butter knives,’ I said.

  At five to five I shut down my computer and packed up. ‘So your mum was a beauty queen?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘You think I’m hot.’

  ‘Don’t get ideas.’ I slung my bag over my shoulder.

  ‘I’m already having ideas.’ He winked.

  ‘I gave you those ideas,’ I said. ‘And I notice you didn’t respond to my bathroom suggestion. You better watch out or I might give up on you.’

  ‘So do you want me to have ideas or not?’ he asked, as I left.

  ‘Peas out, man,’ I called over my shoulder.

  Chapter 17

  Over the next week and a half, Rueben and I put our heads together to write the fundraising letter. We brought in as many examples of other charities’ imploring letters as we could find, brainstorming ways to plagiarise them without being too obvious about it. Even my mother helped, sending me letters she received from animal charities with cute pictures of bandaged koalas and skinny dogs. Rich people loved to give to animal charities, I discovered. I suspected in my mother’s case she didn’t believe poor human beings deserved her money. People must have done something to land themselves in a mess, whereas animals were always innocent. I raised these suspicions with Rueben and Agnes.

  ‘Pretty sure your theory is correct,’ Rueben said.

  ‘Can confirm,’ Agnes added. She had come into our office to drop off an example of an Oxfam fundraising letter.

  ‘The women in the shelter didn’t bash themselves up,’ I said indignantly. ‘And the dudes in the men’s shelter haven’t exactly had the best chances in life.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Rueben said. ‘But it wouldn’t kill you to pander a little if it brings in the money we need.’

  ‘You need to get across that they’re victims of circumstance,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Like this.’ Rueben pointed to one of the Salvos’ emotive personal stories.

  ‘I can do that.’ I cracked my knuckles and got to work.

  It took days of drafting and re-drafting just to write two pages. Meanwhile, Rueben told me about the time he drove to Tamworth and streamed an American country music special that counted down the Top 40 on the charts.

  ‘I had no idea it was so bad over there,’ he said. ‘There was a song that went something like, I love God, my mama and you. That was the chorus.’

  When he sang and you a little shiver went down my spine.

  ‘That’s not as bad as “Truck You”,’ I said. ‘Every time I hear that song I get dumber. I’m putting together a playlist for my best friend’s wedding and I’m tempted to put it on there. Jen’s fiancé is an idiot, he probably loves it.’

  ‘I’ve got a great playlist for weddings,’ he said. ‘I’ll send it to you.’

  ‘Not all country, is it? Jen’s already put the hard word on me to make it mostly pop.’

  ‘Hardly country at all.’

  ‘Does your band play at weddings?’ I felt suddenly shy asking about his band, like I wasn’t cool enough to talk about it. I had to remind myself that they were in their thirties, playing dingy pubs, and were never going to hit the big time. But the music had been good, I remembered.

  ‘We don’t usually, no. Blues and country’s too dreary for weddings. It’s all about break-ups and going broke.’

  ‘You played at Jen’s engagement party, though.’

  ‘That was coincidence. We were already booked to play when she hired the bar.’

  What about wedding rehearsal dinners?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Because I’m supposed to organise the rehearsal dinner too.’

  ‘Have you chosen a venue yet? The owner of The Fainting Chair has just opened a restaurant behind Smith Street,’ he said. ‘I know for a fact there’s going to be a band area, and he’s hired a good chef.’

  ‘Lock it in,’ I said.

  He smiled. I wanted to keep him talking, so I asked who his favourite musician was.

  ‘Lucinda Williams.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Gillian Welch.’

  ‘My second-favourite,’ he said.

  On my way home from work, with sixteen per cent battery on my phone, I finally got through to a person called Fifi at Centrelink. She asked for my case number, which I read
out from a line of numbers I’d scribbled on my forearm in biro earlier in the day, and then asked for the reason for the call. I explained that I had a debt the size of China and I wanted to contest it.

  ‘It was your mistake,’ I insisted. ‘I just kept lodging my student payment claims and you – meaning you people at Centrelink – kept paying them. How was I supposed to know that I wasn’t meant to get the money anymore? Seventy grand is insane.’

  Fifi was sympathetic. ‘It is a sizeable debt,’ she said. ‘But it’s also your responsibility to familiarise yourself with the rules.’

  ‘Seriously? Seven years of mispayments and it’s all my fault?’

  ‘You can lodge a formal appeal,’ she said. ‘Go to the website, download the Review of Decision form. Fill it out, lodge it and wait thirteen weeks for a decision.’

  ‘Thirteen weeks. Do I still get my Newstart payments in the meantime?’

  ‘Tick the box on the form that asks if you need to be paid while your case is being reviewed,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

  I hung up and scuffed my shoe on the pavement as magpies called in the wattle trees above. The debt had lodged in my solar plexus like a piece of undigested stale bread, winding me every now and then with the reminder that my life was rooted.

  In the supermarket, I chose food that didn’t need to be cooked and could be kept out of the fridge for a couple of days. Salad, bread, fruit, peanut butter, chips, boxed wine. The next stop was the laundromat, where I watched my clothes spin in the washing machine. Following the spinning drum was addictive, like looking through a kaleidoscope. With each rotation, I repeated my mantra. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine.

  I took the food and clean clothes back to the caravan and tidied up. Made the bed, put the clothes away in the minuscule wardrobe, lit the candles on the table. Home sweet home. Killer Friday night. My phone was dead and I couldn’t be bothered stealing power from the neighbours. I would charge it tomorrow. As it got dark I settled onto my bed to read by candlelight. I missed having electricity twenty-four hours a day, temperature control, hot water from a tap. I missed having more than half a metre between my bed and the kitchen counter. Dot was coiled around my legs, purring like a motorised heater because I’d just fed her tinned tuna to lure her away from roaming the mean streets of Collingwood. After a while, I rolled over to blow out the candles.