The Three of Us

by Kim Lock

  Thomas, refusing to be intimidated into inaction, defended his family – and himself – by way of a seething fury. He simmered for three days, then came home from work one afternoon and said, ‘I have an idea.’

  57

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

  Thomas jumped. Mr Bagnoli’s son, Robert Bagnoli Jr, rarely came into the store, let alone spoke to Thomas directly. But now, early on a cloudy Tuesday morning, on the other side of Thomas’s desk in the cramped space Thomas called his office, stood Bagnoli Jr, arms crossed and glaring. The man was an image of Bagnoli senior minus seventy odd pounds. (Thirty-five kilograms, Thomas reminded himself. He had better get used to metrication, whether he liked the blasted system or not.) Like his father, Bagnoli Jr was short and block-like, and moved with the gruff, determined gait of a man very much convinced of his own right to existence.

  ‘My father died last night.’

  ‘What?’ Thomas half-rose from his chair. ‘How?’

  ‘Heart attack.’

  ‘Christ.’ Thomas sank back down, stunned.

  Bagnoli Jr’s gaze skated over the walls, the ceiling, and back to Thomas. ‘Shit of a spot you’ve got here. Stinks like arse.’

  ‘Fertiliser factory,’ Thomas mumbled. ‘Over the highway. Comes through the vent up there . . .’ His boss was dead. Bagnoli was dead. ‘Listen, sir –’

  ‘Bob.’

  ‘Right, Bob. My god, I’m terribly sorry for your loss. What happened?’

  ‘Last night. Heart attack. Wasn’t his first, but has proven to be his last.’

  Thomas stared at the man in shock. Now what?

  ‘The funeral is Thursday. The store will be closed for a few hours.’

  Thomas didn’t know what to say. He heard the front door buzzer sound, announcing a customer entering the store, and he pictured one of the reps in the showroom greeting the customer, smiling, leading them to a product. Oblivious, hopeful for the sale. Bagnoli was dead, yet people would still need toasters and fridges and vacuum cleaners. Sales reps would still need their wages.

  Bagnoli Jr went on, ‘In the meantime, business will continue as usual. That’s what the old man would have wanted. This place can run without him.’

  Thomas blinked. Bagnoli was as much a part of the running of the whitegoods store as the products inside the store. This twit impersonating Bagnoli would know that if he had spent more than a sniff and a piddle of time doing the job he was supposed to be doing as Bagnoli senior’s second-in-command.

  Oh, Christ, Thomas thought, with the sensation of the floor giving way. This prick would now be his boss.

  Immediately, Thomas thought of his family. After being summarily kicked out of her knitting group, Elsie was devastated. It wasn’t only the humiliation and the fear of further reprisal or ostracisation that caused his wife’s melancholy, but the loss of something she had found fulfilling, something she was skilled at. Camaraderie through craft.

  ‘Mullet, I know you know the ropes. Look,’ Bagnoli Jr thumped his palms on the desk and leaned towards Thomas. ‘Let’s not bullshit ourselves that I want any of this. I don’t. I never have. But it’s mine now so I get to say what happens.’

  Thomas and Aida had been encouraging Elsie to find another group, or even to start her own. Poach some of the ladies from Mrs Watson’s group – run classes, teach her skills to others. But how far had Gloria Watson’s smear campaign gone? Further than women’s circles? Had Bagnoli Sr heard, but by chance appreciated Thomas enough to protect him? If so – what now?

  ‘Right,’ Thomas said again, feeling dizzy.

  Bagnoli Jr glared at him. ‘I say: you run it. I want you to run the whole show. Kit, caboose and crap house.’

  The buzzer sounded again. The same customer leaving, or another customer entering. Invisible motes of crushed dried offal floated between them. Thomas looked on.

  ‘Did you hear me, Mullet?’

  Thomas blinked. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You good with that?’

  ‘You . . .’ he cleared his throat. ‘You would like me to oversee things for the time being, sir?’

  ‘Bob, shit, you hearing me?’

  ‘Right, sorry –’

  ‘Not for the “time being”, I’m saying I want you to take over management of the store. Entirely.’ He spread his arms wide, demonstrating a broad expanse of time. ‘Now and into the future.’

  Thomas’s mind raced. He wasn’t being sacked.

  He was being promoted.

  Store manager? In all his efforts, it was a possibility he had never considered. Head of Sales felt as far as Thomas would ever go, because the final frontiers, the only step higher, would always be held by a Bagnoli. Either the senior or junior variety. How could Bagnoli be dead? Yesterday afternoon he’d been unloading crates of vacuum cleaners in the warehouse; Thomas had interrupted him with a trolley load to sign a purchase order for Remington. There Bagnoli had been, seemingly fit as an Olympic swimmer, paused in his heft of the trolley to deftly take the book from Thomas, sign it, and hand it back, then off he shoved with his crateful of Electrolux. Was his heart giving out on him then? Did he know, wheeling those vacuum cleaners, that it would be his last delivery? Locking up the store last night, was his heart already labouring and misfiring? Thomas pictured the fatal organ inside the man’s ribcage, blood-fattened and faltering. The image made him queasy. We’re only ever as strong as our greatest weakness, he realised.

  Bagnoli Jr was still speaking. ‘Like I said, funeral’s Thursday. I’ve got a heap of paperwork and crap to do with lawyers and accountants but leave all that to me. You, get your shit out of here and take Dad’s office.’

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly,’ Thomas protested, this time getting fully to his feet.

  ‘Don’t argue, just fucking do it. I’m not subjecting myself to this shithole again. So move.’

  ‘Right, then,’ Thomas said. ‘Okay.’

  Bob made for the door, then stopped and turned around. ‘What happened to that other guy, the other sales rep?’

  Thomas was still reeling. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Watson.’

  Thomas looked up. ‘Bert?’

  ‘Yeah, that one.’

  The door buzzed again. Thomas said, ‘A few months ago. Regional transfer. Melbourne.’

  Bagnoli looked surprised. ‘Didn’t realise Dad had that much sway with Electrolux.’

  ‘Oh, he did,’ Thomas said with a nod. ‘Your father was a very respected man.’ He didn’t add, And your father respected me, too.

  Fertiliser odour wafted around and Bob curled his lip. ‘Watson wanted to move away, then?’

  ‘Ah,’ Thomas hesitated, cleared his throat. ‘I think there were some questions raised over some of his, uh, conduct . . . around the secretary.’

  When Thomas had told them his idea, Elsie and Aida were aghast. You can’t do that, Elsie said. He doesn’t really . . . with the secretary, does he? Aida said, warily. But Thomas would protect them. He would protect his family.

  His boss’s son stared at him. Hairs stood up on the back Thomas’s neck. Bagnoli shrugged and walked out. The door slammed.

  Store manager.

  Thomas had worked there for eleven years.

  58

  It was at a charity store that Aida found her first pair of hiking boots.

  Tucked on a rickety shelf alongside a pile of deflated old handbags, the boots appeared barely worn. They looked sturdy, with high sides and thick tread. Aida picked the boots off the shelf, strangely compelled to try them on, and was amused when they fit.

  At first, Aida took walks up past the cemetery, into the farm land beyond. She strolled the dirt tracks between paddocks, jumped fences to search for platypus in creeks. Then she began taking the bus into the hills to explore different bush tracks – the waterfalls about Mt Lofty, the De
vil’s Nose lookout, the scrubby gullies of Warren Tower. Packing a backpack with water and a sandwich, she would be gone for hours.

  Leaving Gawler on the bus, Aida sometimes noticed certain familiar faces. A few other people – a couple of older men, another young woman – had the same enthusiasm as her for hiking through scrub. Eventually, they formed an unofficial group. The Bushwalkers of Gawler, they called themselves – affectionately shortening it to the BOGs.

  The BOGs met one Sunday a month, regardless of the weather, and hiked through conservation parks, old goldfields, along meandering dry creek beds, up and down hills. Aida would return home glowing with ruddy skin, shreds of paperbark in her hair and kangaroo poo ground into the tread of her boots.

  While they hiked, the BOGs didn’t talk a lot. After a polite, friendly catch-up at the rendezvous point, they would strike off up the track, each choosing their own pace, yards lengthening out pleasantly between them as they brushed past acacias, climbed sandstone outcrops, spiked their clothes on thickets of flame heath. Companionable solitude. For Aida, it was perfect.

  And then one Sunday, as the BOGs stood catching their breath on an escarpment overlooking the Hale Conservation Park, one of Aida’s fellow walkers, Jerry Southam, turned to Aida and said, ‘Did I hear you say you lived on Church Street?’

  Aida nodded and took a swig from her canteen.

  ‘My mother lives a couple of blocks away from you, I reckon.’

  That is how Aida came to know Grace Southam, sixty-eight years old, divorcée, and the first outside person to whom Aida would tell everything.

  *

  Jerry Southam’s mother had twisted her knee. Though Jerry could operate her washing machine, and pick up milk and bread from the store, he couldn’t cook for his mother. At the stove, Jerry was worse than useless.

  ‘Toast,’ he laughed sheepishly. ‘I can manage toast.’ And while Jerry’s wife was an excellent cook, the younger Mrs Southam had refused to provide one morsel of her fare to her mother-in-law due to some ongoing, long-standing feud.

  ‘I don’t even know what it’s about,’ Jerry said, morosely. ‘But she won’t cook a crumb for Mum – and even if she did, Mum wouldn’t touch it. Thinks it would be laced with arsenic.’

  The first meal Aida prepared for Grace Southam was a lamb and barley casserole. Next, she roasted chicken drumsticks with lemon and herbs. When Aida made a Shepherd’s pie, Grace Southam, holed up in her armchair with her foot propped on the ottoman, cigarette smoke haloing her head, had remarked about Aida’s last name, and said, ‘I once dated a Shepherd.’

  Aida gulped her tea, hoping Mrs Southam wouldn’t ask about relatives.

  ‘Not the name, dear,’ Mrs Southam added. ‘You needn’t look so frightened. A shepherd, as in, a man who keeps sheep.’

  ‘Oh,’ Aida said, relieved.

  ‘It didn’t last. I’m pretty sure he liked his sheep more than he liked women, if you know what I mean.’

  Tea spurted from Aida’s nose and across the coffee table. Choking and coughing, Aida struggled to regain her breath while Mrs Southam howled with a laughter.

  Even after the older lady’s knee healed and she was able to shuffle around, Aida kept visiting. She found Mrs Southam fascinating, and a delight: forthright, wilful, worldly. Grace Southam had worked as a house-maid, a telephonist, a post-mistress. Married twice, she had been widowed once (the war), and divorced the second one. ‘Turns out he was bedding anything with legs,’ she said. Grace Southam had courted diplomats, soldiers, police officers and even, once, a circus acrobat. Her daughter had run off to Western Australia with a pearl diver. She had lost a baby to croup. ‘I have a history longer than the Queen,’ she said. But despite all that, she wanted to finish up here, in the suburbs, close to her son. Even if his wife was a cranky bitch.

  ‘What about you, dear?’ Mrs Southam asked. ‘Those eyes are too pretty not to have a past.’

  Slowly, haltingly, Aida told her. Jimmy, her baby. Elsie, beloved, and Thomas. The inexplicable three. Her parents, gone. Darling Millicent and Arthur, whom Aida loved like a mother does. Their quietude, their secrecy and hiding. And when she finished by saying, ‘Please don’t tell Jerry,’ Mrs Southam took her hands, looked her in the eye and said she would never betray a woman. Aida knew it was true.

  ‘Besides,’ the older lady said, ‘He still believes his father was the one I married, bless him.’

  59

  Elsie was at the sink, scrubbing a particularly stubborn lump of chook poo from an egg, when the front door opened, and Millie came bustling inside with Aida following close behind.

  Elsie lifted an excited Arthur from where he was sitting beside her on the bench so he could run to Aida and Millie. ‘How was school?’ she said.

  Millie dumped her satchel on the floor and Elsie was about to crossly remind her, as always, that her school bag didn’t go on the floor for someone to trip over and break their neck when the look on Millie’s face stopped her. That, and Aida’s expression: a plea crossed with a warning.

  Elsie said, ‘What happened?’ but Millie shot her a thunderous look and stormed from the kitchen. The children’s bedroom door slammed.

  ‘That’s bad mannered,’ Elsie said darkly. ‘What’s going on?’

  Aida heaved Arthur up onto her hip. At four years old, he was losing his toddler appearance; now he was long and slender like a cat, and his feet dangled down Aida’s thighs. Aida said, ‘Her teacher told her off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And made her sit in the corner of the classroom instead of playing outside at lunch.’

  Elsie frowned. ‘What for?’

  Aida glanced down the hall, towards the bedroom. ‘Apparently Millie was “rude”. Although I’m interpreting this from a storm of temper in the first minute after she came off the bus. Then she went silent and wouldn’t say anything else.’

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘She’s mad.’ Aida set Arthur down and came around the bench. Leaning against the cupboard, she crossed her arms. ‘I think I made it worse.’

  ‘Give her a minute, then we’ll sort this out,’ Elsie said. ‘No, Arthur you can have a snack when Millie comes out of your room.’ Arthur whined briefly before running off down the hall to try and wheedle Millie out of her room. Elsie picked up the kettle to fill it, but Aida put a hand on her arm.

  ‘I think you need to talk to her right away. At school they . . .’ she stepped back again and sighed. ‘They did family trees today.’

  ‘Oh,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Elsie’s heart raced as she left the kitchen. The children weren’t allowed to slam doors – Elsie had received ringing slaps across her bare calves on the occasions she had lost her temper and done so as a child – but she tamped down that swell of irritation and knocked on the closed bedroom door before opening it.

  The children’s bedroom was divided into halves, with Millie’s bed on one wall, Arthur’s on the other. Between the two beds, a lace-curtained window looked out onto the lavender hedge at the side fence. A strip of wallpaper with elephants, zebras, giraffes and monkeys printed on it ran around all four walls. Each bed had a small dresser at the foot and a bedside table with three drawers and a lamp on top. Alongside Arthur’s bed, toys and chaos littered the floor; a single rubber boot, a scattering of Lego pieces, a small, rattly tin tambourine that Aida was insistent should be confiscated and well hidden. Millie’s bed was an example of order – quilt smoothed flat, two dolls and the stuffed one-eyed bear lined up neatly behind her pillow. About ten inches above her mattress along the wall, brightly coloured pencil sketches and collages of coloured paper were taped in a neat row.

  Millie was sitting cross-legged on her bed. Her pencil box was open in front of her and she gripped a pencil and was scrawling into a scrapbook.

  Elsie sat on the edge of the bed. Millie’s hand stilled but s
he didn’t look up. Across her page was a thickly scribbled thatch of brown, with bursts extending out from the sides of a central trunk. It looked as though Millie had been trying to cover up the entire page with pencil.

  ‘Is that a drawing of a tree?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘It was,’ Millie said. ‘Now it’s just a mess.’

  ‘Want to tell me what happened at school?’

  ‘I hate Mrs Mabel.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘She made me stay inside at lunch, and everyone laughed at me.’

  Elsie felt a flush of hot protective anger. ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘Because she’s horrible.’

  Elsie paused, then tried a different tactic. ‘Aunty Ay said you made family trees today.’

  Millie pushed the book towards her. ‘This was my tree, but I got it wrong. Mrs Mabel said I have to do it again. But I’ve made a mess in my book.’ Her voice broke and the last words came out dangerously tremulous.

  ‘There now,’ Elsie said, anxious to avoid a tantrum before tea. ‘We can take the page out of the book and I’ll help you make a new tree.’ Millie sniffled and Elsie said tentatively, ‘Did Mrs Mabel say why you had to stay inside at lunch?’

  ‘She said I back-chatted. But I didn’t! I just wanted to put Ay on my tree, and I asked Mrs Mabel where Ay should go. But she said that if Ay is your friend who lives next door, she isn’t allowed to go on my tree at all.’

  Elsie gulped. ‘I see.’