I stood in her driveway and faced her in the doorway. The street and the whole suburb was so quiet at that time, I didn’t need to talk very loud. In a strong whisper, I said, ‘I saw you, you know, with the jerry can.’
The screen door opened and she heaved her giant mass out towards me.
‘I didn’t mean for it to happen.’ Her voice sounded high and thin, like a young girl’s.
‘But I saw you,’ I said.
‘I doused the petrol around, and I was gonna light it up, but I changed my mind. I couldn’t do it.’ She let out a pent-up sigh, she had that glassy panic in her eye that I sometimes see in the mirror and I could tell she had been up all night thinking about it. ‘I couldn’t do it with kids in the house,’ she said.
I wanted to say something mean, something to make her realise what she’d done, but I couldn’t think of anything. I felt tired now and all I could wonder about was if the little girl had died in her sleep or if she’d woken up.
‘I haven’t stopped thinking about her, you know. Akira.’ Melita took a few steps towards me. I tried to look at her face, but my eyesight wasn’t very good these days and I was having trouble adjusting to the morning light.
‘But why did you do it?’
‘I didn’t want a meth lab around here, around my kids.’ She shook her head and looked at the ground. She was higher than me on the driveway, which sloped up to her door. ‘If you tell the cops I’ll lose my kids. I know I probably deserve to, but those kids are all I’ve got.’ I looked down at her iridescent white feet on the sandy driveway paving, then I turned and started walking across the road to my house.
***
I’d been thinking about it for a while; what kind of tree would Akira be? Something hardy and native, something statuesque and bold. The next day, after the kids came home from school, I told them we would plant a tree on the verge out the front of the vacant block next door. I went around to all the neighbours and told them I was planting a tree for Akira. We all took turns digging a big hole. I worked the silky oak out of its pot. Its white exposed roots looked fragile and delicate. I passed the tree to Justin and the twins and they dropped it in the hole. All of us pushed the dirt around it with our hands. We all stood looking at it for a while, the old lady from next door and her grandsons, Melita and the kids, the Aboriginal family that lived next to her, the man from the corner. It was the perfect spot for it. Even though it had only just been planted, it looked right; strong and robust. A welling up started in my chest as I watched the cool, silvery leaves shining in the afternoon sun.
Clean
Summer remembered the exact point at which it had all started. It was a Monday afternoon at Francine’s house, she grabbed a chair at the kitchen table. Toys and crayons and dirty plates were scattered all over. A large puddle of blue sticky liquid had gone dry on the floor nearby. In front of her Francine put her hand to her chest and breathed out hard. ‘The baby is in your bag,’ she said quickly, though she couldn’t see Summer’s bag or the baby. Summer got up and walked around the kitchen bench to see the one-year-old behind the lounge; the contents of the bag were all over the floor and he had a tampon in his mouth. Summer remembered looking around and thinking it was like someone had picked up the whole house and shaken it. She could tell by the way Francine sat with her eyes fixed on the edge of the kitchen bench that she had something to say. Summer sat back down at the kitchen table and Francine moved a pot of tea towards her. ‘Well, Pete’s leaving me,’ she said. ‘He’s found a place.’
‘So it’s final?’ Summer raised her eyebrows. Pete had threatened to leave before but she didn’t think he would actually go through with it.
‘And before you say anything,’ Francine raised her voice above the children who were jumping off the back of the couch onto the lounge-room floor, ‘I’m keeping the house, I’ll take on more cleaning.’
‘You can’t take on more with the kids.’
Francine shrugged and Summer watched her chin dimple and her lips purse hard across her face. The tears she was trying to keep down came up and filled her eyes. Summer waited for them to drop but they didn’t, it was like her face sucked them right back up from where they’d come.
‘Hey,’ Summer whispered. She put her hand on Francine’s forearm. She wanted to say whatever it was you said in these situations, but panic stopped her. Four kids? she thought, and one with autism; a massive mortgage, no family support? Her brain raced in search for something positive to say. Then she remembered what her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor had said to her a few years back. ‘Sometimes you just have to feel like complete and utter crap, and nothing I say is going to make it any better.’
She kept her hand on Francine’s forearm and looked out the window at the sharp lines of the neighbouring fence. They were in the cardboard cut-out land of the new developments. Sitting at the kitchen table, Summer envisioned the mortgage belt around them as the leather belt of an obese old man, he loosened a few notches and the bulldozers cleared more land. At that moment, all Summer could think was that underneath all of this used to be desert. Then she thought, how long can it go on like this?
Two weeks later they were at a cleaning job, scrubbing the grout in an ensuite bathroom in a house in Darling Ridge. A few years before they had started a cleaning business together, which, it turned out, had been a good move for two women with little education or employment prospects.
Francine was on her hands and knees scrubbing by the sink and Summer was getting in between the toilet and the wall.
Francine said, ‘You remember that house we used to clean in Seabourne, across from the beach? With the chandeliers and the pomeranian?’
‘Yeah?’ Summer said.
‘Remember the box of money we found? And those Cartier watches?’
‘Yeah, what about it?’
‘Well, you know what it’s like, some of these suburbs, during the day there’s not a single person home for streets.’ Francine scrubbed at the grout furiously.
‘Double income no kids, that’s what you need to live out there,’ Summer added.
‘And people are pretty lax with their home security.’
‘Well, it’s a good neighbourhood; I guess they think they don’t need to worry.’ Summer couldn’t understand why she felt the need to act dumb because she knew exactly what Francine was getting at. But she let Francine talk; in fact, she felt a bubbling up in her stomach, headed towards her chest. It had always been Summer who’d done the crazy things, the things she couldn’t get herself out of, she’d lived for that – for one illicit adventure after the next. Now it was like she was egging Francine on.
They were quiet for a while, only the sounds of hard bristles against the tiles between them. Every now and then they dipped their brushes in the ice-cream container of vinegar between them, and its tangy acidic bite filled the bathroom.
‘Because I’m not moving out of my house,’ Francine said as if the two things were connected.
‘Well, maybe you won’t have to.’
‘Thing is,’ Francine paused, ‘Pete’s redrawn off the mortgage.’
Summer stopped scrubbing, sat up and looked over at her friend.
‘About seventy grand he’s whittled away.’
Summer looked back at the tiles in front of her, enraged. ‘Jeez,’ she hissed. She couldn’t imagine what Pete had needed seventy grand for, he’d stacked warehouse shelves for thirteen years, he had no interests, no motivation, no ambition.
‘What’d he spend it on?’ she squinted at
Francine. Francine frowned, she had moved onto the tiles around the shower screen. ‘Basically the mortgage is bigger than when we started.’
‘Did you ask him, Francine? Did you ask him what he did with seventy grand?’ Summer felt herself getting annoyed at her friend’s lack of emotion.
‘Course I did. He said living expenses.’
Summer shook her head and felt a drop of sweat come off her chin and land on the tiles underneath her.
‘So anyway,’ Francine went on, ‘I’m sick to death of lying awake at night thinking how I’m gonna make these mortgage payments. And you know what I can’t stop thinking about, you know what comes to my mind most nights?’
‘What?’
‘Those Louis Vuitton handbags she had.’
‘Oh come on, Francine.’
‘No, listen, that stuff was real, do you know how much they’re worth? I do, I’ve looked it up on the internet – four thousand a pop! And the Cartier watches?’ she snorted, ‘my God, Summer, I nearly cried when I saw them. Remember I showed you? Remember all those crazy fuckin’ diamond and pearl–encrusted watches? You remember.’
Summer remembered. She remembered that stab of awe that constricted her throat – or was it anger? She remembered catching a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror of the supersized walk-in robe and being revolted by her pockmarked, hard-edged face.
‘Francine,’ Summer whispered, ‘don’t even talk like this.’ She got up from the floor and emptied the ice-cream container down the sink.
***
A few days later they were cleaning a house in Woodbridge. Summer was running water from the kitchen tap into the mop bucket.
‘You could get your teeth fixed,’ Francine said. They had only just arrived at the job and it was the first thing Francine had said to her. Summer almost choked on her own breath when she said that. She coughed.
‘Well, you could. You could go to Bali and get your teeth done.’
Summer clenched her jaw and then ran her tongue over the shattered ridges and crevices of her teeth. She couldn’t believe Francine would mention that now. Of course she was embarrassed about her teeth. Seven years of methamphetamine addiction had ravaged her mouth. She never gave a full smile, making sure to always cover her mouth with her top lip.
‘Just don’t, Francine,’ she shook her head and snapped the kitchen tap closed, then hoisted the steaming bucket to the floor.
‘Really, what have you got to lose, Summer?’ Francine was pulling out vacuum cleaner attachments.
‘We could end up in jail for a start, then what are you gonna tell your kids? I mean, maybe life isn’t as peachy as we thought it’d be back in high school, but it could be a lot worse.’
‘Could be a lot better too.’
Summer rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to hear any more about it. Really, she thought, she was finished with trying to grab hold of something bigger in her life. Mostly she was just trying to get through each day, moment by moment, baby steps, all of that, just like everyone else at her Narcotics Anonymous support group.
‘Well, everywhere I look,’ Francine continued, ‘every house I go into, people are in a better financial situation than me. I mean, look around, Summer, you think these people are struggling?’
Summer looked out into the sunken lounge room, past the brand new leather settee and the Turkish rugs to the view of the river.
‘You don’t know that, Francine. Maybe they are struggling, maybe they just hide it really well.’
Francine laughed. ‘Look, it’s not like we’re hurting anybody, everyone’s insured and we see people doing way worse, like this guy on the telly that’s ripped all the oldies off their life savings.’ Summer had seen it on the news the night before too. The Ponzi guy.
‘Please, Francine, this break-and-enter stuff, it’s what drug addicts do, not a working mother of four. I mean, I’ve been there, it’s a tangled web, it’s one thing after another, one lie after another. I know where it ends up.’ Summer plunged the mop head into the bucket.
‘Just listen, just hear me out,’ Francine was shouting, her voice echoed through the massive, sparsely decorated open-plan house. She pointed a feather duster in the air. ‘A couple of grand is nearly three weeks in mortgage payments.’ She thrust three fingers in front of her like she was explaining something to her hyperactive children. ‘That puts me ahead, that means I don’t have to move, and me and the kids don’t have to live in a shit box, in a shitty neighbourhood and rely on welfare. It means I have some self-respect.’ She gestured wildly with the feather duster, then tapped it on the kitchen bench to bring home her point. ‘All I wanted was a nice family home, a safe place that actually feels like a home. And that house is my home.’
‘It’s just a house, Francine. Fuck, they’re all just houses,’ Summer waved her arm towards the lounge room. ‘Maybe you’d like where you moved to, maybe something smaller would be better, we both know it’d be easier to clean.’
‘Is it too much to ask?’ Summer could hear the rage in Francine’s voice and it frightened her. ‘To want to stay in my own home? The home that I’ve worked so damn hard for?’ Francine finally put the feather duster down on the bench then leant against it. ‘Stability,’ she announced, ‘you know what that is? It’s something we never had, our mothers couldn’t rub two cents together, pushed from pillar to post, I don’t want to repeat that kind of history around my kids.’ She yanked at the cord of the vacuum cleaner, then plugged it into the nearby socket. ‘Plus, I’ve got good memories in that house.’
Summer wanted to remind her she had bad memories too, but she didn’t say anything. She wanted her to shut up. Her disintegrated teeth ground hard together in her mouth and she pushed her tongue against them.
‘You know, all that cash was just sitting there, they probably wouldn’t even miss it.’ Francine was putting the wood floor attachment on the end of the vacuum.
‘They probably don’t live there anymore,’ Summer said.
‘They do, I drove past and saw that bitch getting out of her Volvo. And I bet that lounge-room window still doesn’t close properly.’ Summer caught Francine’s eye and blinked hard.
‘This is crazy, Francine, totally crazy. They’d trace it back to us. I’ve already got a criminal record.’
***
At home, Summer threw herself on the couch in front of the television, like she did every night. Her whole body ached, joints swollen and hard. She watched Renovation Rescue with the sound off, then Dream Homes by the Sea, then she turned it over to Extreme Home Makeover. She looked around at the haphazard trappings of her one-bedroom unit with disgust. She was meant to call her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor but could not stop herself from staring into the muted TV screen.
Apparently she was depressed; her sponsor had told her it was normal to feel like this when giving up an addiction. Summer thought she might just be bored. She thought her forty-two years on the planet might have gone smoother if someone had thought to inform her that life was actually pretty mundane. Then she would have been ready for it. She would have accepted all the boring tedium thrown at her. She felt that she had always been waiting, in a state of extreme anticipation for something incredible to happen. That’s why she had turned to drugs. Drugs made things incredible, for a while at least. Her mobile phone vibrated in her top pocket. It was her sponsor, Renae.
‘Hi Renae.’
Renae asked how her day had been. She called every day to check in with her. Most days Summer was grateful for it, some days she resented it. Renae said those were the days that the call mattered most.
‘Just feeling a bit low today.’ Summer knew not to tell her about Francine and her crazy idea. Renae would say that was just the kind of talk Summer didn’t need.
‘Maybe you need to get out more. Go to more meetings, meet more people.’
‘I’m too tired for that.’
They’d been through all this before. Renae felt that recovery from a drug addiction affected a person’s motivation. Without the drug she would find even day-today tasks exhausting and tedious.
‘I’ve been thinking about my mum,’ Summer said.
‘That’s good. What about her?’
‘Just, you know, her addictive behaviour. How it’s affected me. I think I miss the drama of being an addict.’
‘Ha, yeah,’ Renae’s voice sounded wistful. ‘But you’re just gonna have to find new things to engage yourself, that’s all, it
’s a big lifestyle shift.’
‘I feel like I’ve spent my whole life just trying to patch up the holes of my childhood, fill them, you know, with drugs, sex, whatever stupid shit I could think of.’ She watched on the television as they revealed the transformed rooms to the homeowner’s shock and elation. That was always her favourite part of the show. ‘I mean, is that what everyone’s doing? In some way or another?’
‘Well, not everyone, I guess, but not everyone had an alcoholic mother and a father they never met. You got a lot of holes, my dear.’
‘It’s just … I don’t know,’ Summer shifted herself to sit upright on the couch, she forced her eyes away from the TV screen.
‘Don’t know what?’ Renae asked.
‘I just don’t see how long it can all go on like this.’
After she hung up Summer went to the bathroom mirror. She curled up her lips and squinted her eyes into hard little slits as she surveyed her teeth. Many of them had fallen out, the rest jutted out of her gums like rotting brown tombstones, reaching up in repulsive desperation. It really was something out of a horror movie, she thought, right there in her very own mouth.
***
Seabourne was one of those well-ordered, over-manicured suburbs that always made Summer feel uneasy. But today was different; she felt as if she owned everything around her and she surveyed it like a newly acquired possession. It was impressive, but at the same time she thought there was something fruitless and ornamental about all its beauty.
It was eleven a.m. and not another human being was in sight; only an SUV in the distance, shiny and sleek, sped down the wide empty road beside her car. She looked at her hands on the steering wheel, large bulbous knuckles, stumpy fingertips that were worn and calloused. Her gaze moved from her hands up to her wrists and her scarred and pockmarked arms. Their state was the product of all her decision-making, good and bad, and so were her teeth. No one else’s fault but hers.
She looked across the road to the house; a white artdeco monstrosity, framed by severe square hedges and an equally severe section of front lawn. Inside, she knew, was a pomeranian and the biggest crystal chandeliers she’d ever seen.
The Whip Hand Page 12