by Kim Lock
Elsie swallowed her mouthful of sponge. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
3
Aida Glasson tentatively followed her mother across the threshold. Drywall dust coated the linoleum floor and the air was redolent of fresh paint and chalky plaster flushing. Late morning sunlight sieved through plain lace curtains.
Her mother’s heels made a pert clip-clip as they stepped into the empty front room. On the far side the modest kitchen was arranged: bare laminate benchtops, a new electric stove, an empty space where the refrigerator would sit.
Aida fought a flash of panic and turned to her mum. Seeing Aida’s expression, Dorthea Glasson gave her an attempt at a smile.
Setting the suitcase on the floor, her mother said, ‘Your father will bring a refrigerator up tomorrow, so in the meantime you can make do without milk or cold meat. I’ve packed plenty of sardines, there’s bread there and some canned peaches . . .’ Her head bobbed as she glanced about the room, as though mentally assessing the situation and finding it good enough. Her dark hair was set so unyieldingly that it moved as one solid entity along with her head. ‘We’ll bring that small round table for the kitchen here, and I think Dad said he’d bring up your armchair from the living room.’ Dorthea tried for another stiff smile. ‘So you’ll have that bit of home – won’t that be nice?’
Aida swallowed and nodded, not trusting her voice. She walked a slow circle around the rest of the empty space. A dining setting could go there, by the screen door. A couch and perhaps, one day, a television set in that corner.
It was a fantasy image, of course – an imaginary picture for someone else in the future. No ample-cushioned couch or the luxury of a television set would furnish her time here. For Aida there would be only the basics – food, brought weekly by her mother, a roof over her head and walls between which to hide. A calendar on the wall where she could mark off each passing day.
Aida crossed to a screen door off the kitchen and peered down the length of the house, towards the backyard. Knee-high nettles and giant capeweed scrambled amongst leftover builder’s rubble: broken cladding, chunks of unearthed quartz like loose teeth, ochre clods of clay.
‘There’s no fence between the two houses,’ Aida pointed out with dismay. ‘Look – they’re so close together. I could practically spit onto their matching side door. Does anyone live there?’
‘Don’t say spit, it’s unladylike. And I don’t know. Your father has done the best he can at short notice. I’m sure the fence will be up before you get too . . .’ her mother sniffed and checked the integrity of her bouffant. ‘And besides, if I were you I’d not be worrying about matters of the neighbours. Best you keep to yourself.’
Aida said, ‘I won’t show my face in daylight,’ and drew her finger in an X over her heart.
Dorthea ignored her petulance. ‘You won’t be too lonely – I’ll come up every Saturday.’
‘You’ll be too busy.’
‘It’s not forever,’ Dorthea said, becoming sharp. ‘And you know how much worse it could be.’
Aida didn’t answer. She needed to look somewhere other than at her mother. Fishing a cigarette from the pack in her handbag, she paused to light it, then stepped into a narrow hallway leading off the living area. Off one side of the hallway was a bathroom and a laundry, and along the other were two small bedrooms and what had been listed as a ‘study’ but was little more than a broom closet. The bedrooms had thickly piled carpet coloured in a rich bronze, and more generic lace curtains. Standing at the foot of the new bare-mattressed double bed, in the only bedroom with a wardrobe, she heard her mother’s footsteps behind her.
‘Help me get the rest of your bags out of the car. I need to be at Glenda’s for tea at five. And for heaven’s sake, get an ashtray.’
And so Aida did. She helped her mum retrieve the rest of the worldly possessions she’d been permitted to take: a small pile of skirts and dresses, her sewing machine and threads to adjust them in the coming weeks. A handful of novels, a small wireless radio. A bunch of scarves like slippery snakes, stockings. Two sets of bed sheets still wrapped in their store packaging; the quilt she’d made herself when she was thirteen with the red, gold and green fan pattern. Deliberately, in her last act of defiance, the only photographs she’d plucked from her shelves in her bedroom had been those of her childhood pets – a Doberman puppy named Blackie who had lived with her for only ten days before vanishing after he had pooped beneath the kitchen table, and her now-aging tabby cat, Freckle, who would probably not even notice Aida’s absence, who would pay no heed to the quiet step of her parents, now alone in that house again, as they had once been before she was born eighteen years ago.
4
The wedding was a simple affair. Thomas quaked inside his brown suit; Elsie smiled so enthusiastically that by the end of the day, when they collapsed onto the hotel room’s hideously patterned bedspread, giggling and drunk on Jacob’s Creek’s most affordable shiraz, her cheeks were stiff and aching.
Elsie’s parents had paid for the night in the hotel room, and her sisters had left a bottle of crème de menthe on the pillow. A ribbon was tied around the bottle’s neck with a card reading, For the newlyweds – you will need fresh breath!
‘I don’t even like mint,’ Elsie said, holding the bottle at arm’s length.
‘Never mind, love,’ Thomas said. ‘It’s the thought that counts.’
‘The only thinking those two do is of themselves,’ Elsie grumbled, shoving the bottle to the bottom of her case.
‘Maybe now that you’re all married ladies, you might reconnect? Have more in common?’
Elsie doubted it. Rose was only thirteen months older than Lila, but there was six years between Lila and Elsie. The doting the older two had offered Elsie through her early childhood had come to an unambiguous end when Rose, at eighteen, discovered the advantages of her breasts and met her now husband. Rose became a lady and Lila, averse to being left behind, abruptly became one as well. Elsie, a wiry and unendowed eleven-year-old, became a nuisance to their blossoming. Especially so when their mother discovered how much more delightful adult daughters were when they were no longer a matter for their parents, but for their husband.
For three days Thomas and Elsie honeymooned in the city. They strolled along the Torrens and tossed bread to the ducks. Each evening they dined out on steak and chicken breasts and brandy custard. How Adelaide sparkled at night! It may only have been an hour’s drive from Gawler, but it felt a world away. The marriage was consummated (although, admittedly, there had been quite a bit of pre-marital consummation) and as Mr and Mrs Thomas Mullet, they were off to a resoundingly successful beginning.
*
Thomas insisted that Elsie spend the last ten minutes of the drive to their new marital home blindfolded with her own scarf. Elsie couldn’t stop giggling – not even when he tied a hank of her hair into the knot, stinging her scalp, nor when he joked that the way her ears stuck out supported the blindfold perfectly.
The car slowed and swung into a drive. Elsie heard gravel beneath the tyres, and they came to a standstill. The engine shut off.
While Thomas had grown up in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, Elsie had grown up in Gawler. Despite the blindfold, she had followed the car’s turns and had an idea of the area in which they had arrived. Nevertheless, it surprised her when Thomas led her from the car and removed the blindfold, and she saw the rolling sheep and wheat paddocks she had known in her youth replaced by a street of neat new houses. Sprinklers stuttered over clipped lawns, low brick fences.
‘Welcome home, Mrs Mullet,’ Thomas said.
Elsie grinned at him and together they clattered up the front steps. Elsie felt as though she had springs beneath her feet, attached to the soles of her slip-ons. Not a laudable and responsible housewife at all but an indulged child on the morning of her birthday. Thomas fumbled with the key in the lock, pushed open the door and they ste
pped inside.
The front door opened into an unfurnished living area. Light poured through the windows and splashed onto the linoleum, warm and pleasing.
‘There’s not much furniture in the house yet,’ Thomas said, looking sheepish. ‘I’m picking up a lot tomorrow: armchairs, a couch, a sideboard . . . But I’ve got another surprise for you.’ He took her hand and hurried through the room to the adjoining kitchen.
‘Look,’ he cried, ‘the stove is a Frigidaire! It’s the very latest. And the fridge is a Kelvinator,’ he added of the tall, duck-egg blue appliance. With a flourish he pulled the door open and the refrigerator hummed out an exhalation of cold air. The bare wire racks felt icy beneath Elsie’s fingertips.
‘What do you think?’
Overwhelmed, Elsie struggled with a response. ‘It’s perfect.’ Was this really all hers? Only four days ago she’d sat at her mother’s kitchen table, in her childhood home, eating toast with apricot jam prepared by – well, her mother.
Now she, Elsie Mullet (nee Rushall), was officially a grown-up. A housewife with a brand new Kelvinator that would keep their milk and cream and minced meat cold for days, and would be right there in the middle of the kitchen. (Unlike her childhood home, where the cool room was a walk down the back path through the vegetable garden where feathery carrot leaves dragged cold wetness across her ankles, and inside the smelly old dairy, flies assaulted her as she opened the meat safe.)
Across the kitchen was another door. Anxious to see the yard, Elsie hurried over.
‘The other house is so close,’ she exclaimed, peering through the screen. ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a fence separating the two?’
‘It’s being built soon, I believe.’ Thomas appeared at her shoulder. ‘Bloody tradesmen. Look at the mess they left. I’ll get the mower out tomorrow. But there’s plenty of room down the back there for chooks, and a garden, and a Hills Hoist. Anything you want! Come on, check out the rest of the place.’ Thomas pulled her away from the door and through the house: two bedrooms, one bathroom, ‘Even a study!’ he finished, throwing open the door.
‘It’s so tiny!’ Elsie observed with a laugh. ‘I hope you don’t have to sit down.’
‘Do you like it, darling?’
Elsie took the face of her husband – so hopeful, so apprehensive – in her hands and kissed it.
‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s ours.’
A house of their own in the suburbs. The great Australian dream.
*
The mower belched a few times before it finally roared into life, after Thomas had given it only twelve hearty yanks of the starter cord and three threats of the scrap-metal yard.
Elsie laughed. The day was gloriously late-spring, the sky sharp and clear, and magpies tossed their songs up into the silky air like offerings. Elsie pushed a wheelbarrow through the weeds, stooping to toss in shards of rubble and chunks of rock as Thomas began at the back step, turning the weeds into stubble and shavings.
The backyard was a modest enough size. Elsie straightened, one hand shielding her eyes as she surveyed the rectangular patch of their own earth. She pictured a narrow chook run along the back fence, imagining the fuss of their feathered bodies and the sound of their busy clucks. Their eggs would be smooth and wholesome in her hands. In front of the chook pen, close enough to fork their nutritious manure straight over, a couple of rectangular vegetable plots would run parallel to the chickens, leaving a small strip of space to grow some lawn, maybe one day soon erect a swing set. Mrs Scott from over the road had already popped over to introduce herself and promised to pot up hydrangea cuttings for her; she could plant those in the shade against the other side of the house. One single gum tree soared from the back corner, its narrow trunk thrusting a good sixteen feet before its first branch. Beyond their back fence was the sprawl of open, rolling farm land, yet to be claimed by the suburbs.
Next door, the matching house stood silent. Elsie’s gaze lingered on the invisible boundary between the two houses, mirror-images of each other. Originally a single large title, the previous owner of the block had demolished the old stone cottage that once stood in the middle of the space and subdivided it into two small house blocks, plopping two kit homes down like a child’s Lego creation and walking away with a sizeable profit. Because the subdivision had turned one square block into two narrow, deep rectangles, the houses were placed perpendicular to the road, with their narrow ends facing the street and the two long sides facing each other. Elsie had found it a little disconcerting to look out her kitchen window and see directly into her neighbour’s kitchen window, but once the dividing fence was erected, that issue would be resolved.
The mower roared past, spattering chips of mallow stem and mangled gumnuts onto Elsie’s bare legs. The machine juddered over the uneven ground and Thomas’s arms strained, gleaming with sweat.
Elsie wiped sticky dust from her upper lip and watched Thomas hesitate as he approached the imaginary centre line between the two houses. He hauled the mower ninety degrees and began to shove towards their back fence, but then seemed to change his mind, and continued on in a straight line over to the other house. Elsie took up the barrow handles and hurried over to pick up litter from the other side.
*
An hour later, Thomas and Elsie sat on folding chairs beneath the gum tree on their side of the backyard, cradling glasses of cold beer in their laps and surveying the clean patch of dirt.
‘The place has been sold, that much I know,’ Thomas said, as they both gazed towards the second house. It stood silent and still.
‘Who bought it?’ Elsie asked, slapping at a mosquito stinging her calf.
‘Don’t know. But I don’t think anyone’s moved in yet. I think there’s an old couple living on our other side –’
‘It’s got curtains, see? Someone’s dressed the windows,’ Elsie pointed out. ‘And there, on the laundry windowsill, is that a tin of Ajax?’
Thomas smiled and leaned over to kiss her cheek. ‘Enough slacking off, Mrs Mullet,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the pegs to mark out the veggie beds.’
While Thomas banged around inside the tiny garden shed, Elsie lingered beneath the gum tree, breathing the tang of cut grass and eucalyptus and disturbed soil. Somewhere nearby a neighbour had begun their evening meal and the smell of roasting meat wafted in the air. Staring at the neighbouring house, she took a long swallow of her drink.
Elsie started; beer splashed down her chin.
The curtains over the back door twitched, and for a heartbeat flash of time, Elsie saw a pale face looking out.
5
The kettle whistled and Aida jumped up to snatch it from the heat. Even over the roar of the neighbour’s lawn mower, she found herself cringing at the kettle’s shrill volume.
As she poured hot water into the teapot, she blinked away a sting of tears. This is what she had come to: hiding, stealthy and alone. Afraid to make a sound.
At first she had pleaded, What am I supposed to do? before she had grown angry, disbelieving: It’s my life and You can’t decide for me and Maybe I’ll tell people the truth. But the fury had subsided soon enough, and been replaced by a realisation of necessity and a galloping, terrifying sense of the inevitable.
There was no better alternative.
Aida hadn’t been the one to break the news to her father. Her mother had gallantly taken that bullet, only hours after she herself had found out. Bent with shame, Aida had been unable to bear the prospect of taking a sledgehammer to the loving pedestal her father had always put her on. So, from behind her parents’ closed bedroom door, the news had been delivered through a quiet, tearful murmuring by her mother to her father.
Aida set the lid on the teapot and waited for it to steep. Outside, the lawn mower fell silent. Now she could hear the birds singing. The beat of her own heart felt obscenely loud.
Her father’s reaction she
could not have predicted. While she had expected distress, disgrace and even rage, she had instead received forty-eight hours of stunned silence. For two whole days, her father had looked at her and simply shaken his head. ‘I need some space, kid,’ he said to her eventually. ‘Give me some space to think.’
On the third night, her father had knocked on her door. A hesitant knock, like he wasn’t sure she was in the room. As though he thought she had already left. In one hand he held a suitcase, in the other, a sheaf of papers. Her mother’s face, steely, at his shoulder.
‘This is the best idea,’ they said.
‘But what am I supposed to do?’
‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you got yourself into this situation.’
It was explanation enough.
Oh, she was a lucky girl, Aida knew that. Plenty of others weren’t. To think of the rumoured fates of other girls in a state sent her into a shudder of dread. Downfall, disappearance – botched and bloodied fix-ups. The hastily purchased mortgage deed her father had placed on her dresser was compassion. The weekly supply visits from her mother and the meagre allowance from her father were both practical and kind. The thirty-mile drive from home was a bearable eternity.
And the plans for afterwards would be her mother’s millstone.
‘Everything will be back to normal. Once all this is over,’ her mother had attempted to console her as she’d driven her all the way out of the city, to the far edge of another town. To the simple, unassuming new house that squatted at the fringe of suburbia.
Aida poured her tea and took milk from the refrigerator. As promised the refrigerator had been delivered, last Sunday, the day after she’d snuck into this place. She carried the cup down the hall and peered through the glass in the back door.
The young couple had moved in two days ago. Aida had heard the woman’s excited squeals and peals of laughter, the thud and thump and scrape of furniture being arranged and rearranged. The man had hurried into the backyard, sweeping his arms out like a farmer appraising a crop of wheat. Glints of wedding bands on their fingers, the sparks of love and hope in their ruddy cheeks and tender touches.