by Joy Dettman
‘So what I am doing that is wrong? Tell me, my friend. Is my fault that we have nothing left of our marriage? Chris, he says is my fault. He say I am too fat, I wearing wrong clothes, I doing my hair wrong. He buy the diamond earrings and I don’t wear them, because I know why he is buying them. All day I am working. What for do I need earrings? I want to walk on the beach with him and hold hands with him. Do you think I am talking like a crazy woman?’
I shake my head, shrug, and she tosses her hands in the air and hurries on as I stoop to study a piece of green glass worn smooth by the sand and the years.
I study it for longer than necessary, until she is well ahead, for I have no answer. There is no answer. Like so many of our generation, she has been seduced by the happily ever after myth of childhood, and I am now watching her become a statistic of reality. As she forges ahead I see her staring at her hands. She seems obsessed now by her empty hands.
‘My father, he wanting me to marry old man with a bald head,’ Tessa confides one cold afternoon. ‘Marry him? No, I tell to my father. That old man is too ugly. I choose Adonis instead. I choose that bastard. You see how his hair is still very thick? There is no grey in him. And his skin is so . . . so soft and young. Is it because he is living his life by the night. No sun is burning him? Maybe I buy a rinse, eh? I will be young again. What you think, my friend?’
I am stitching seed pearls onto a bridal gown. I hold them in my mouth, my tongue an extra finger. My firstborn will marry in spring.
‘I have finished with work,’ Tessa says. ‘I tell him today. I say, you can have the fugging shop, you so bloody young and smart, you see how good you can make money with no Tessa to make your fugging books and pay your bills. You see this.’ The sleeve of her heavy cardigan is dragged high and a bruised forearm forced between my eyes and my work.
I spit seed pearls onto the floor and swallow one. ‘Not Chris?’ I murmur.
‘Who you think does this thing? You think I got toy boy to belt me round while we make good sex? Here. You like this one?’ In my lounge room, she unzips her jeans and exposes her buttock and a hip. It’s black and blue. Then jeans up, her cardigan is off, and I see her shoulder has been gouged deep by contact with a sharp edge.
‘Is my fault.’ She shrugs her clothing back into place. ‘He says I am a bad wife because I do not give him a son.’ She nods, zips her jeans. ‘Shit lying man . . . I am a bad wife for him because I am more smarter than my husband. He likes the silly blondie womans with the bleach hair who spending his money then makes lying to her husband. Well, I am finish with work, my friend. Maybe he will sell the shop, ah? Maybe he will come for holiday with me and we will fall in love again, eh?’
Tessa is weeping. In all the years we have been neighbours I have never seen her weep before today.
‘Yesterday I try to remember if Thea says Greek words or the bloody Australian word first. I have no . . . no memory of my babies’ words. Was I a bad mother to work so hard so I cannot remember my babies’ words? Now my Marina will have her baby and I am crying because I can’t remember when was the last time Chris kiss me goodnight. He has the other woman, you know. She is a blondie bitching woman and she is too young . . . or I am too old, my friend. Today I have a knot in my heart and it is squeezing it in two pieces. I don’t want to leave my house. I want us to make a good family for our grandchildren.’
‘I will give you the new phone number for my beach house,’ Tessa says. ‘I have move . . . leave that bastard man.’ She is weeping again.
‘When I go to shopping, I look at the people,’ she says. ‘I look at the man and the wife and some are holding their hand. It cuts my heart like a knife. My hands are empty. Always now my hands are empty.’
Seven months after she moved away I see a woman walking to my door and I don’t recognise her. She is slim, her hair is blonde. She is wearing an expensive frock and diamond earrings and she sits in my kitchen, chain-smoking, chain-talking.
‘He came to my side at the christening and he said, “Hello, my wife”. I know then he is still part of my life. So I come home. Is better for the children. And he has changed. Yes, I am sure he has changed.’ Her eyes will not meet mine. They wander the kitchen like trapped birds, seeking escape. ‘Do you think that man can change?’ she asks.
I turn away. My own eyes are leaking. A tear seeps free to trickle down the side of my nose, tickling all the way. I walk into my laundry and run water into an empty bucket while I wipe at useless tears. I can’t hear her; I can’t speak to her above the sound of running water.
I add detergent to the bucket, toss in a clean hand towel then make much ado about rinsing it cleaner while I try to erase evidence of my own tears.
‘I’ve missed you, my friend,’ I call, my voice tested for control and found wanting; I run more water into the bucket until I can laugh again at futility.
‘We are rip up, all apart – losing everything we working so hard for. “Hello, my wife”, he say at the christening. I make his words mean, “Hello, my darling wife. I love you”. The bastard toss to me the breadcrumbs and I gather them up and try to hold them together without spreading too much butter, eh? You are my wife, his words only say. Your place is for cook dinner and wash clothes so I go to her looking like the big man.
‘Is over. Is finish. That bitchy woman has got guts to make telephone to him at my home – at my home! “Is Christos there?” she is asking me! You know what I say to her? “Ha,” I say, “sorry, darling, he is out with his eighteen year old tonight. I think is you turn tomorrow. Hold on. I will look in his book”. Ha. That bitch. I hope I cause big, big trouble for him.
‘We don’t go to the judge. They just taking more money. We are agree, we selling this house. He will keep the shop. I will have the beach house.’
My friend Tessa lives alone now. Her house is far from my suburb, but today I have driven there. I park my car and for minutes watch her walking slowly along the beach. She is picking up seashells and bottle tops and juggling them in her hands.
The Gravedigger
‘Where do you hail from, lad?’
His words were aimed at me and I didn’t feel like talking. I leaned at the bar fingering a full glass, wanting him and the world to get lost. The second beer had gone the way of the first; I was trying to nurse this one.
‘I’m speaking to you, lad. Where do you call home?’
I turned me back on the silly old bastard, lifted me glass and poured that beer down. Home was a sore point. Home was no place. Home was me van and me bed-roll. I got slotted into the system around the age of four, went from foster care to training centres, then finished me education at the bluestone college with the big boys.
That’s where I found the book. I’m no reader, never was, but it didn’t have enough big words in it to put me off, just pictures of the outback, and as the weeks wore away the months and turned them into years, it got so I could smell the heat and freedom in that book.
‘What do you do for a crust, lad?’
The old bastard wouldn’t leave me alone. If he was determined to get an answer, I’d give him one.
‘The state’s always paid me bills, Pop. I’ve got no complaints with it. I’m on me long service leave at the moment, so piss off out of me face, will you.’ That shut him up for a full two seconds while I went back to soaking up cold beer and to dreaming.
When I got out of the joint, I tried everywhere to buy that book. It was out of print, so I bought a van that still had a bit of life in it. I was going to find out for meself what freedom smelt like. I’d seen a good bit of the eastern states, stopping long enough to keep the dole coming while dodging trouble when I could, then up the back of no place, me van started kicking its last.
The land looked as dead as the kangaroos and empty beer cans decorating both sides of the bitumen strip that cut its way between stunted grey mulga and naked red loam. Hell’s own rubbish dump couldn’t’ve looked or smelled much worse. I thought I was a goner, could see the headlines: DUMB
BASTARD DIES IN DESERT.
It’s uncanny, but a few times now I’ve reckoned me van has an instinct for self preservation. Sounding like a traction engine, snorting steam and blowing smoke, she kept her bald tyres turning long enough to roll into a tin shed opposite a pub. I left her there, due to the pub’s veranda owning the only patch of shade in town. All I wanted to do was celebrate me reprieve with a beer, and there’s this bald-headed, verbose old bastard sitting there, stirring anything that moved.
‘So you’re taking a holiday on our taxes, are you, boy?’
You get out of the habit of looking an ugly bastard in the eye where I’d been. I sighed, real deep, then turned to face him, sort of slow.
He must have been seventy, but was tall and broad as a barn with a face hacked from the backside of a termite mound, and not one solitary hair to mar the billiard ball polish of his dome. He was the biggest, ugliest old bastard I’d ever seen, but I’m no midget. I eyeballed him over the top of me glass, itching to give him a clip under the ear, just as a warning to lay off me, then I saw his eyes laughing at me from between sun-dried corrugations. They knew me. Those bloody old eyes knew my life story.
‘Have a beer, you senile old fart,’ I sneered, and tossed five onto the bar.
‘I’d choke on it,’ he said, and he left.
A few of the younger drinkers were sniggering into their glasses, so I swaggered over to their corner.
‘Who’s he think he is? The world’s fuckin’ conscience?’ I drank another beer, but half an hour later, bored with the company, I’m outside in the heat again, checking on me van.
‘Ya water pump’s stuffed. Pushed ya fan into ya radiator. She’s not going no-bloody-where for a while, mate,’ a pair of sparrow ankles poking out of grease stained boots commented from beneath my van.
‘Can ya fix it?’
‘Got any dough?’ the lanky owner of the boots asked, shooting out, riding a metal creeper and picking on his front tooth with a screwdriver.
‘I’ll have it by next Thursday,’ I said.
‘Righto. The day after that, I’ll do the work. Got me?’
‘Gotcha,’ I said, then like a bloody fool I undid the zip section of me wallet and dug out a fifty I never spent. It was me insurance, me get-back-to-some-place money – and there I was handing it to him.
‘Wash that screwdriver before you go sticking it into me motor,’ I said, taking a last look at me fifty before walking off to find a takeaway.
Lucky to find a general store cum milk bar, wasn’t I?
‘What’a you got to eat?’ I asked the kid behind the counter.
‘What d’ya want?’ she said with a thrust of twin green plums that barely caused a ripple in her t-shirt.
‘Salad roll?’
‘Haven’t got no rolls left.’ The way she said it you could see she was real pleased she had no rolls.
‘Salad sandwich then.’
‘Don’t think we got no lettuce. Mum!’ she hollered. ‘Mum, we got lettuce?’
‘Lettuce? In this bloody weather? Tell him we got beetroot.’ The reply came from the dark depths of a kitchen.
‘Spring roll, pie and sauce?’ I say, starting to work me way down me preferences. ‘Fish and chips?’ It was now a battle of wills between me and a twelve year old kid pushing forty and I wasn’t winning.
‘We don’t look like a fish’n’chip shop to me,’ she said.
‘Yer! Well, I asked you in the first place, what have you got?’ I was hungry, getting uneasy. There was a bloody conspiracy in this town. I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of me neck.
‘Mum’ll make ya a fritz sandwich . . . with beetroot. We prob’ly got onion.’
‘What’s fritz?’
‘Meat, meat-head. Are you dumb or somethink?’ She scratched at one of the green plums beneath her t-shirt while looking at me like I was some sort of sexless moron.
I’d had enough. Without that fifty, money was now a concern and I was trying to kick the habit of helping meself to what was available. I bought a loaf of bread and a hunk of fritz, took me pup-tent and bed-roll down to a bit of a camping ground by the river and made me own sandwich.
There’s only a certain amount of hours you can sleep when you’re in the bush. The birds get going at sun-up. You can waste a bit of time listening to them and a bit more watching a river roll by, wishing you had a fishing line and a willing worm, but I didn’t own a line so I ate another fritz sandwich and at three thirty walked back to town. After a quick look at me van, I wandered over to the pub.
The old bastard was there again. I should’ve ignored him. He was telling this yarn about the big Depression when the only handouts were food vouchers and half the town lived on rabbits. I laughed like a fool with the rest of the drinkers when his tale ended.
‘What are you laughing about, boy?’ he says, turning his bloody eyes on me. ‘Wally from the garage reckons you haven’t got a thing to be laughing about.’
‘Get off me case, Pop.’ I counted me coins onto the bar, intending to suck the beer down slow when it came.
‘Where did you sleep last night?’
‘None of your bloody business.’
‘Might be if a snake crawls into your bed-roll, boy. I’m the gravedigger.’
‘You couldn’t dig your way out of your own heap of shit,’ I snarled. ‘You’re dead from the tongue up and you don’t know it, so keep your interfering mouth shut or I’ll bloody shut it for you.’
‘You and what army, boy? The bludgers’ army?’ He nodded towards the group in the corner who hadn’t moved since yesterday, his eyes sort of peeping out from the corrugations like a pair of wild violets that knew I wasn’t about to step on them. ‘Look at yourself now,’ he said. ‘Strong as a young bull, got an honest set of eyes on you – when you’ll look a man in the bloody eyes.’ And all the while he’s talking, he’s staring relentlessly into my dishonest set of eyes.
I couldn’t look away. I dunno. I never had a father, but before the state inherited me, I’d kept this hazy sort of memory of an old grandpa’s farm somewhere, and this picture of a wizened-up old coot who used to pat me on the shoulder and call me Sonny. I dunno what came over me, but I got a sudden urge to howl, just like I’d howled when I was four and me old lady, who never did know which one of her clients fathered me, handed me over to a bitch in a navy uniform.
Self pity dragged me deep, but I rode it, I pushed it down, wrapping it in with the tight knot already at home in me gut, and I looked at me glass. It was empty.
‘Give him another one,’ the old bastard said.
‘And don’t think I won’t enjoy it,’ I sneered. ‘I don’t share your hang-ups, Pop.’
‘I’m nobody’s pop, lad. Fred’s me name.’
I downed me beer and walked. And when I got back to me camp the flies had blown the fritz and the fritz was wrapped in with the bread. I tossed the lot into the river, then wished I hadn’t. I was on a downer. Hungry. Hurting. For minutes I considered knocking over the garage, helping myself to the mechanic’s big Ford, burning rubber all the way back to the city. I knew I wouldn’t get far though. There was one road leading in and the same road leading out of this godforsaken hole. I was doing time again, in the glorious bloody outback.
I swore at a couple of hysterical birds, shook the ants out of me bed-roll, crawled in and spent the night imagining every rustle in the grass was a snake rounding up business for old Fred.
Hunger was a rat in me guts the next morning. I knocked off a few figs I found hanging over a town fence, then spent the rest of the day working on me van with Wally, the mechanic, when I wasn’t sitting in his outdoor dunny. River water and figs can humble a man like nothing else. Wally gave me a couple of sheets of newspaper, then doled out a mug of tea and a couple of fritz sandwiches at lunchtime.
My motor hadn’t seized. That was a plus, he said. He’d took the head off, replaced the gasket, and he’d rung through to some place for a water pump, which was coming up with the
mail. I cleaned the radiator out, and he soldered up its holes. We did what we could, but I was stuck there, stuck until me dole got paid in.
I was sitting in the van playing with the radio when I found half a dozen Minties in me glove box, one of them had come unwrapped and stuck itself to a fifty cent coin. I pocketed the coin and ate the Minties. Encouraged, I pulled out the front seat, which netted me half a packet of chewing gum, a perished condom and a dollar fifty.
I reckon I felt a bit like the old diggers when they first struck paydirt. Anyhow, I got the fever. I start ripping out the floor mats and I sight this dollar coin all gummed up with black gunk. I can tell you now that my share of that last service station job never looked so sweet as that dollar coin looked to me that day. Me and me van – as long as we stuck together, I was gunna do all right.
I hadn’t cleaned her since I bought her, but by late afternoon she was clean, and I’d scored enough coins to pay for a half-serve of sausages and chips, and one long pot that I’d make last me all night.
Wally told me that old Fred had a home, and a wife, but as usual I found him holding up the bar. Some old codger had croaked and Fred was waiting for the sting to go out of the sun before he started digging the grave – so he said. I ignored him, ordered and paid for me sausages and chips then walked through to the rear of the pub and sat alone.
Ten minutes later this fat old girl ambles in with a mountain of chips and sausages that didn’t quite cover a T-bone steak, so big it hung over the edge of the plate. Good sense told me to shut up and eat it fast, before its owner turned up. I took a swift look at the mob in the bar. They were staring at me like a pack of hyenas, waiting to cackle.
‘I only paid for a half-serve of sausages and chips,’ I said to the fat dame. It came out real soft, sort of shy.