by Joy Dettman
‘She’s one of the oldest ones.’
‘An abo? You’re shacked up with an abo!’
‘Shacked up, living together, sharing a life . . . I love her.’ I speak the ‘L’word only to bait her, and how well I succeed.
She is on her feet, her height lending her power. She thumps the table and Pete’s book jumps. ‘You love her. You were always determined to bring this family down, you little slut. It’s in your blood. You’re like your cursed father and always were. Love?’ she snarls, and on her lips it is surely a four letter word. ‘Obsessed by filth, the bloody lot of you.’ She picks up Pete’s book, tosses it at his head.
He catches it, smoothes a page then hands it to me as we watch her walk to the stove. I wink at him, place the book beneath my handbag. ‘Why didn’t you use your own name?’ I ask. ‘Why call yourself James Peters?’
He makes no reply, but winks towards the stove where our mother is lifting a baking pan from oven to hob. A leg of lamb impaled on a large fork, it is carried dripping to a plate. Fat sizzles, smokes. My mother is pleased with the sizzling. She kicks the oven door shut, stabs the meat that is me.
‘God knows, I tried to raise you kids decent, I slaved my guts out to keep this place together after your father deserted me, and what do I get for it?’
God knows we have heard this lament too many times before, I think to reply, but Pete stands, bumps the table, spills my tea. He has never been a party to family wars. He looks at the clock. ‘It’s time to pick up Lyn. Want to come for a ride?’ he asks, offering me escape.
I shake my head. I have already escaped.
Pete was the first born, Lyn the last. I am the middle-man, buffered from the wicked queen on either side. She enmeshed them in her snare of guilt and duty. She could not net me.
Lyn turned twenty-three two weeks ago. She looks older, her hair now worn short, sensible, like Mother’s hair. Her shoes too are sensible, like Mother’s shoes. She will grow old in this town. Will she grow sensible? She lights a cigarette, sucks life from it, as does Mother. Their blue smoke is slow to coil free; both resentful of its escape, they hold it long in their lungs attempting to possess it to the end.
‘She’s shacked up with some abo woman. They’re in love,’ my mother scoffs, needing to get Lyn on side, and fast. Lyn, who had greeted me with a smile, now eyes me, blows a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling.
‘Johnny married Janey Johnstone less than six months after you left town, you know?’ she says.
‘Pete told me,’ I reply, studying my sister’s hand and the cigarette in it, identical to our mother’s. I look at my own hand, at Pete’s, pleased that we have our deserter’s hands. Where is he? I have blamed him for his desertion since I was ten years old. Today I blame him only for not taking us with him when he ran.
Their smoke begins to irritate my eyes. My lungs ache with it as Lyn continues to speak of Johnny. I rub my eyes, nod, smile, watch her mouth, already setting into Mother’s bitter lines, but I do not listen until she says, ‘They didn’t have any kids.’
‘I wonder why not?’ My mother’s tone is sarcastic as she picks up the carving knife, carves the meat. ‘Did you get rid of it?’
‘It?’
‘You were three months gone with his bastard when you took off. I asked you a question.’
‘Yes?’ I reply – to her former question or to her statement.
She eyes me but says no more, and I turn to Lyn, ask about her job. Mother walks to the stove where her constant anger spills out onto the dinner plates. Meat is flung, lumpy mashed potato served with a dip and a hard flip, boiled pumpkin slopped to one side – gravy thin and mean to douse surviving flavour.
I look at the wall behind her. It is grey with smoke and with her miserable existence, and I think, fool, martyr – fall down, wall; crush her and set my siblings free.
‘Eat your dinner,’ she snarls. ‘Stop your talking and eat your dinner – all of you.’
Pete and Lyn eat. I play with the potato. I build castles, then flatten them. I place a spot of pumpkin on my tongue but can’t swallow it. The pumpkin and this place are choking me. Then I push my chair back and walk to the door.
‘You’re staying the night?’ Pete asks.
‘There’s no bed for her here,’ Mother says.
‘Oh, a slut can always find a bed, Mum,’ I say.
‘Christ! Will you give it a rest – both of you. She hasn’t been home in seven years, Mum.’
‘That was her decision –’
‘No. It was your decision, Mum,’ I say.
‘They’re all your decisions, Mum. James A Peters was your decision,’ Pete says. ‘She’s staying, and that’s my decision. She can have my bed. I’ll bunk on the couch.’
I had a dream once, I dreamed that time would age her, mellow her, that I could come here with Karli, show her where I had grown up. I stand at the door shaking my head, then I walk to my car, drive away fast, the trees, the dust, the bridge a blur as I speed by, crying, laughing at my tears then crying again, until I almost collide with a cattle truck at the intersection.
When the emergency has passed, my car is facing the town, so that is the way I drive. I need a drink, a long, mind-numbing drink – or two.
I look for a car park close to the hotel. A busy night in town, but I sight a gap near the corner, in front of the old takeaway shop. So it is to be salty chips and diet Coke. Six hours to home. Perhaps I’ll drive straight through.
I walk inside, take my place in the queue, my mind already in the city.
‘Two hamburgers with the lot and extra onions.’ Familiar, soft spoken words whisper in my ear, or in my mind. Too often I stood at this counter with him, and always that same order. Only my head playing tricks, but I turn.
He is behind me.
‘Johnny?’ One word; it says too much and quickly I add, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Buying a hamburger.’ He smiles and I watch his mouth, and his eyes above his mouth, and I know every curve, every line. My heartbeat fills me, steals my breath.
‘How long have you been home?’ he asks.
‘Since four.’
‘What will it be?’ The woman is waiting for my order.
‘Two hamburgers with the lot and extra onions,’ Johnny says. ‘And a serve of chips.’
‘Queue jumper.’ I look around for his wife. ‘Where’s Janey?’
He shrugs. ‘Wrap them separate – if you don’t mind, Mrs Morris.’
Together we step back from the counter. People keep crowding in. Many know us, or know of us. They stare, whisper, gossip, as we speak of the weather and the land, and of the city, making hard conversation until the hamburgers are done and wrapped separately.
Johnny pays and we walk together to the street where I search for my keys. They are not in my handbag; they taunt me from the ignition. My car is locked, my windows closed.
‘That’s all I need. That’s the perfect end to a perfect bloody day.’
He touches my arm, then pulls his hand away as if my skin were acid. ‘Relax,’ he says. ‘I’m the local NRMA man,’ and he walks to a modern ute three spaces away, returns with a small toolbox. He opens it, hands me a plastic bag, sticky, dusty, full of bits and pieces.
‘Yours,’ he says. ‘I cleaned out the glove box before I traded the old bomb in. Amazing how much of your life you left in it.’
I reach for that plastic bag, delve deep in search of better days. I find cheap earrings, a comb, a photograph, a book, a nest of hair pins – and a small blue velvet box.
‘That’s not mine.’ I offer the box.
‘I bought it for you and you left it in the glove box with your bobby pins. Toss it in the rubbish if you don’t want it.’
I flip the box open. A fine gold band nestles on a blue satin pillow. A small lonely diamond, locked too long in darkness, fires beneath the street light. I close it away from the light and place it back in his toolbox.
He takes it, aims it at the rubbish bin.
‘Bullseye. So now it’s gone too.’
‘Don’t be crazy. You can’t throw away something precious.’
‘You’re a great one to talk. You invented the bloody game,’ he replies, his attention now on the driver’s side door where he works a moment with his tools. Then my car is open, but I am standing beside the rubbish tin, one hand holding my hair back as I search through cans, bottles and wrappers until I find that small blue box sitting on a half-eaten pie. My eyes accusing him, I take a tissue from my purse and wipe the blue velvet clean.
‘Take it home and give it to Janey.’
‘She cleared out with some bloke from Wagga, decided she didn’t like my suntan – or my job, or my relatives. Had nothing against taking half my house and business though,’ he says. ‘Try it on, Deb. Take it out of that box and try it. Just once.’
I shake my head.
‘I thought I knew everything about you back then – thought I knew your hand as well as I knew my own. Try it on for me. Prove I was wrong about that too.’
Slowly I do as he asks. I try the ring on my right ring finger, attempt to force it over the knuckle, because he wants me to, and because I want his eyes to smile again, but the ring won’t fit and his eyes won’t smile. I shake my head, hand him the ring.
He takes it and the hand that held it and he slides the solitaire onto my finger. ‘Right hands are always larger than the left,’ he says. ‘What did you do with our baby? Did she get her way about that too?’ His fingers holding my hand are gentle, but they burn my flesh as I stand dumbly there looking at the ring, and at his hand, dark against my own skin, darker than his child’s hand, but oh, so similar.
‘Her name is Karli,’ I say.
Slayer of Vanity
‘A poor bastard is getting as blind as a chicken-yard rat, sunk to his eyebrows in chook shit,’ Jack Burton philosophised, feeling his way through the cluttered passage to the kitchen, where his hands groped wildly for the bottle of whisky on the sideboard. Papers, books, a handbag and other odds and ends obstructing his fumbling aim were swept to the floor.
He never turned the lights on when he wandered in the night. The white electric light flooded too well the dark corners, flushing out half-forgotten truths. He and the night had a covenant. They kept each other’s secrets.
He’d slept like one of the dead until three am, but oblivion bought with whisky wore off faster these days, and he’d awakened with a skull crushing headache. He knew the cure, the cure-all. His hand touched, almost tipped the bottle. A reflex snatch. Held. A priceless thing, this corked bottle.
Decay was eroding his left eyetooth, and he yelped as the tooth bit down on the cork, snarled as he yanked the cork free and spat it onto the floor. Then, lips compressed, his tongue massaging, he felt his way back to the door and the miserly light from the moon.
Six foot plus, his back unbowed by labour, he cut an odd figure in his white t-shirt. It was his only garb and barely covered his backside; still, he’d discovered a new freedom since the last of his kids ran yelping from the shack only a week ago. It was his now. His again. Bare feet dancing on the cold cement of the passage floor, he saluted the empty rooms with his bottle.
His feet were cold. One foot, investigating its surrounds, stumbled on the rag mat his wife placed near the kitchen door. He picked it up and positioned it on the doorstep, then he sat, the mat giving protection to his backside with enough left over to keep his feet from direct contact with the floor. Leaning then, one shoulder against the doorjamb, his throbbing head propped immobile on a rigid neck, he lifted the bottle to his mouth.
A groan of near content escaped him. He drank determinedly, unable to draw the bottle away, feeling the comforting, burning blur of whisky sluicing his throat and settling in the warm swamp of his gut. Almost instantly there was gratification. Tiny fires sent feelers out to singe the nest of termites gnawing at the back of his skull, their teeth white hot.
‘Die you little bastards, die,’ he said, and he sucked on the bottle again. It fitted his large hand well. He could sense its level by its weight, its balance when tilted.
Carefully, he placed it on the floor, close to the wall, and he shook a cigarette from the packet that was never far from his side.
‘Oh God,’ he prayed to his weed, blowing smoke into the dark. ‘Give him a fag and a bottle, and a man’s a bloody king.’ Again the bottle was lifted to his mouth.
It had burned once. Like boiling oil, the whisky had stolen his breath and raged in his throat and gut. ‘Once,’ he nodded. ‘In my youth said the sage as he shook his grey locks. You poor old bastard,’ he commiserated with himself for the years he’d lost. ‘If only a man had known at twenty what he knows now.’
He was only fifty-nine, but his old age would not be kind. The once tall, lithe ladies’ man was evolving into a featureless old drunk. Old age, cruel slayer of vanity.
Jack Burton had never believed in old age. That was for others. He’d believed himself born with a natural immunity to the scourge, but it was a creeping disease and he’d caught the leprous killer.
‘The ugly bastard is the lucky bastard, the ugly bastard who loses his teeth when he’s sixteen, he’s the lucky one,’ he mused, manipulating the aching eyetooth that had now taken precedence over his headache. ‘He’s never had anything to lose, has he?’ he asked the night and his tooth. ‘It’s the poor bastard who’s had it all who can see it all dropping away with his teeth. Ah!’ he commented and again lifted the bottle, sucking on its hard teat with wordless gratitude.
‘Look at her,’ he suggested to his friend the bottle, pointing it towards the room where his wife lay sleeping. ‘Take her as an example, the ugly old bitch.’
His head lifting suddenly in anger jarred the nest of scorpions into life. He whimpered. His shoulders rounded as he allowed his head to sink slowly down.
‘A man thought he’d caught himself first prize when he caught her, but he copped the bloody booby prize,’ he sneered. ‘Your fertility defeated me, Beauty,’ he muttered, making a mock bow to the crates of eggs piled against the passage wall. ‘You sunk me with your bloody kids and your bloody chooks, that’s what you did.’
He sat on, sucking smoke, sipping whisky, until the ache wandered from his head to the shoulder pressed against the doorjamb.
Slowly then, he straightened, his chin lifting, stretching the sagging skin of his throat, testing for pain while his thoughts wandered back to his youth, to a time when dreams had hope of substance. He thought of Rella, his first woman. His parents had named her the red whore, but for thirty years Jack had called her a friend.
The image of the redhead slapping cream on her neck forced a smile to his lips, and he slapped at his jaw in the dark and laughed at the memory, keeping his laugh low, jealously guarding his stolen night hours.
‘It keeps me looking young, Jacky.’ Rella’s voice was in his mind, encouraging him to laugh again. He’d never had the heart to tell her she was wasting her money on those creams. Her battle with age had been fought until the day she died.
He sighed, shook his head, negating the memories pouring in. ‘We had a pact, you old whore. We were going to go out in a blaze of glory. You opted out, left me here alone for age to weary. It’s got me by the short and curlies and it’s pulling ’em tonight.’
Maudlin tears came then. He let them flow. Sucking again on his bottle, sniffing, wiping his nose and mouth with the back of his hand, enjoying his memories and his tears.
‘You never blamed me, never took me down the old guilt trail. We used to laugh. Christ we had some laughs. Why can’t I laugh now? Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I die? Jesus,’ he sighed and wiped at his mouth with his shoulder. ‘Oh memories that bless and burn.’
His chin cupped in the palm of his hand, his gaze turned towards the slim moon strung low in the black sky. ‘If a man had enough guts, he’d shoot himself and get it over with,’ he told the moon, then dreamed on.
The bottle was feeling light. He lifted it again t
o his mouth, allowing the whisky to wash around his aching tooth, to slowly trickle down an anaesthetised throat.
‘Peace,’ he commented. ‘Sometimes a man would sell his soul for peace. I never knew peace.’ And he sipped again. ‘Only this, the old peace bringer.’ He saluted his bottle and placed it down.
He never left an empty bottle for the morning, just as he never left an empty packet of cigarettes to greet his new day. Always a sip in the bottle, one smoke in the packet. Perhaps this was his only self control.
Mornings he held at bay for as long as he could. He wished himself dead in the mornings, only the knowledge of his bottle and his cigarette moving him from the bed.
His wife’s witless, ‘Jack, love! Breakfast’s ready, love,’ was a death knell to his ears. He hated her in the mornings. He hated her in the afternoons and at night. He hated the sight of the crepey throat and the sagging jowls, and the dried-out breasts that flapped around her waist like a pair of empty shoulder bags; still, with a choice of four beds in the house, he used her bed, and her. And he still woke up screaming, wrapped in her flabby arms, his face buried in the silk of her hair.
‘Ugly bitch,’ he snarled, but memory of her youth, plus the whisky he had put away, now teased at his loins. His old colleague in crime was awakening. ‘Go back to sleep, you rapacious bastard. Be like a blind worm seeking paydirt in a hummock of dry grass tonight,’ he muttered.
He hated women. Hated the power they still had over him. He wanted them still, and he hated himself for wanting them, and he hated them for no longer wanting him.
‘A man should have been a monk, sworn off the bitches, locked himself up in his monastery with his books. The world is a bastard.’
The wind wailed around the confused roof of the house, attempting to find an easy pathway through haphazard hips and valleys. Failing again, it bruised itself on unexpected corners. Loose spouting grasped and tugged at the wind until it turned and howled around the chimney like the hounds of hell on Jack Burton’s bare heels.