A Home Like Ours

by Fiona Lowe

  Startled, she released him. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  ‘No.’ He zipped his pants. ‘But should you really be on the floor in that dress?’

  His concern for her frock was unexpected, but he had a point. It had cost a bomb and it wasn’t designed for kneeling.

  Pressing her hands on his thighs, she rose. ‘How about you peel me out of this dress, throw me on the bed and have your wicked way with me?’ Please.

  He gave her a long look, his velvet brown eyes caressing her like they’d done so often in the past. Her recently wobbly world steadied.

  He took her proffered hand and together they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Jon shucked off his clothes and she stepped in, kissing him. His penis stirred, pressing against her belly, and Shannon’s words, ‘men are uncomplicated’, came back, reassuring her.

  Smiling to herself, Tara deepened the kiss. He returned it, but without the urgency vibrating inside her that wanted to skip foreplay and go straight to the main game. Jon’s touch was almost languid, as if he had all the time in the world. Normally she loved this focused and dedicated warm-up—a delicious prelude. But she’d spent the day fantasising about this moment and been on high alert, wet and aroused since breakfast. She was about to combust.

  Shut up. Be mindful. Enjoy it.

  His hands played lightly in her hair, scattering pins and releasing her up-do. Then his lips trailed along her neck and his fingers tugged gently on the zipper of the dress. Cool air danced along her spine and she shivered more in delight than from cold.

  Watching his face, she dropped her arms and the dress fell to her hips.

  He groaned.

  She smiled. ‘It gets better.’ She wriggled her hips and the material fell, pooling at her feet.

  The light in his eyes was familiar and welcome. ‘Christ, T.’

  ‘Not bad for a mother of two, right.’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

  And then they were on the bed. He was kissing her breasts and her belly, and then his tongue was flicking and darting in and out of her. She was dancing on the edge of a cliff, pirouetting along the sheer drop, wanting to leap but still connected to earth by the tips of her toes. She heard herself moan, tormented by the promise of release and ravaged by layer upon layer of sensation. Her head thrashed, her belly clenched, and her hands, despite not wanting to hold onto anything, closed around the edge of the mattress.

  And then she was crying out and free-falling, tumbling over and over into a maelstrom of bliss.

  When her breathing finally slowed and the silver spots behind her eyelids faded to black, her vagina twitched, wet and ready to close around Jon and welcome him in.

  She opened her eyes to the warm yellow glow of the bedside lamps. It took her a moment to realise Jon had rolled away from her and she was looking at his back. Snuggling in, she kissed his shoulder, then dropped her hand to his hip and finger-walked towards his penis.

  He moved his thigh, bringing his knee up towards his chest, blocking her touch. ‘It’s been a huge night, T.’

  Her body jolted as if shocked by electricity and her mind grappled with his words. ‘But we’re only halfway.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  Frustration and fury demolished her post-orgasmic glow. ‘It’s not okay! We haven’t had sex in weeks.’

  He rolled over to face her, his mouth unusually hard. ‘What the hell do you call what just happened? It sounded like I just gave you a mind-blowing orgasm.’

  ‘Yes …’ But she craved the intimacy of having Jon deep inside her, feeling him shudder against her as he came.

  She wanted him to hunger for that intimacy too. She needed it to silence the critical thoughts in her head. To prove without a shadow of a doubt that the reason for his distraction over the previous months was connected to his drive to win the award. That it had nothing to do with him not finding her attractive or—

  Her mind swerved away from the horror that he might be getting his sexual gratification elsewhere.

  She needed concrete proof that the last few months were an aberration and now he’d won, everything would return to normal. But nothing about the tension tightening his cheeks or the shadows under his eyes reassured her.

  Despite her disappointment, she remembered something she’d read about not having difficult discussions in bed and naked. Now’s not the time, Tara.

  She reluctantly heeded the warning. ‘Thank you.’

  His mouth tweaked into a tired smile and he dropped a perfunctory kiss on her cheek. ‘You’re welcome. It was a great night.’ He rolled away.

  She blinked away tears until she could trust her voice not to waver. ‘I’m so proud of you winning best business.’

  A gentle snore was his only reply.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Helen hung up her apron now the moderately busy lunchtime rush at Boolanga’s Acropolis Café was over. She was looking forward to spending the afternoon in the community garden, despite the prospect of a committee meeting.

  ‘Helen, you want that expired pita bread?’

  ‘Thanks, Con. That’d be great.’

  This hospitable version of Con Papadakos was a far cry from the man she’d met on a warm winter’s afternoon three and a half years earlier. Faint from exhaustion and with five dollars in her wallet plus the fifteen cents she’d found scouring all the crevices in her car, Helen had gone directly from Riverbend picnic ground to the community noticeboard outside the supermarket. There’d been buy, sell and swap notices, information about courses run by the Neighbourhood House, advertisements for local businesses and a note from a backpacker seeking a ride to Melbourne, but no jobs.

  Light-headed and dispirited, she’d walked towards the library to lodge her JobSeeker form. Helen loved libraries. They were a source of free wifi, newspapers, magazines and books, as well as a haven from the heat, the cold and the rain. Each time she visited a library and handed over her City of Melbourne library card, the staff assumed she was travelling and enjoying early retirement. She’d never disabused them.

  On her way down the main street she passed a fish and chip shop. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply, savouring the tempting aroma of hot salty oil. She’d taken to luxuriating in the scents of foods she’d once taken for granted. Now those not-so-special treats were as out of reach as a Prada handbag.

  ‘You okay?’ a woman asked. ‘You need water?’

  Helen opened her eyes. An elderly woman of indeterminate age, dressed head to toe in black, stood in the doorway of the shop.

  ‘I’m …’ But even people she’d once thought of as friends considered the truth to be inconvenient, let alone strangers. ‘A glass of water would be great, thanks.’

  ‘Come.’ The woman disappeared through the PVC insect curtain.

  Helen followed and noticed a handwritten sign on the window: Help Wanted. She didn’t believe in signs—not any more—but she’d be foolish to ignore this one. Years earlier, when she’d met Theo, his parents had owned a fish and chip shop. Despite being an electrician with his own business, he’d worked in the shop on Friday nights to cover the peak period. Starry-eyed and happy to spend any time with him, Helen had allowed herself to be coopted to the cash register. Although Theo and his father manned the fryers, she’d watched and learned, surprising the family when she stepped up to cook after George was hospitalised for heart surgery.

  ‘Here. Sit.’ The woman thrust a cold glass of water into Helen’s hand.

  ‘Thanks.’ She pointed to the sign. ‘You still need help?’

  The woman studied her, then called out in rapid-fire Greek. A man in his forties appeared from the residence behind the shop. His Greek wasn’t as good and this time Helen’s out-of-practice ear caught a few words, including ‘too old, yiayia’.

  Having undertaken a graduate diploma in community services along with other compulsory retraining courses and enduring a year of job rejections, Helen honestly thought she was beyond reacting to the ‘too old’ label with
anything other than benign resignation. But with last night’s trauma still foremost in her mind, dormant frustration surged. It was fast food, for God’s sake!

  She stood and in faltering Greek—a language she hadn’t spoken in a very long time—managed to spit out, ‘You want someone who looks pretty, or someone who knows how to cook and count change?’

  The man’s cheeks reddened.

  His grandmother laughed and opened her arms wide. ‘You Greek?’

  With her name, her dusky skin and dark brown eyes, and before age and grief had stripped her inky hair of its colour, Helen had easily passed for Greek. Taking Theo’s name had added to the illusion. Given everything he’d stolen from her, she may as well use one of the few things he’d left behind.

  ‘I’m Helen—Helen Demetriou—and I can cook everything on the menu.’

  The elderly woman nodded thoughtfully before handing Helen an apron. ‘You cook. We eat. Then we talk.’

  The grandson crossed his arms but stayed silent, clearly not prepared to go against his yiayia.

  Helen checked the temperature of the oil and hoped with every part of her that cooking fish and chips was like riding a bike. Fortunately, it was a skill that required little dusting off and she’d been permanent part-time ever since. Her frying skills had even won the Acropolis Café a Golden Chip Award.

  Con had no idea she’d arrived in Boolanga homeless and Helen had never enlightened him. He thought she shared the leftover food he offered with friends—only strictly speaking, the women in the parks around the district weren’t exactly friends. They were acquaintances whose shared experience was homelessness.

  Helen had a sixth sense for these women. Their dignity, ringed by quiet desperation, called out to her. They didn’t want charity. They didn’t want anyone to know their car was their home or that all their worldly possessions fitted into a two-dollar-shop bag. It was enough just getting through each day without the added burden of crippling shame that others knew the truth. So twice a week at the end of her evening café shifts, she took food that would otherwise be thrown out, drove to a park and invited people to join her. It wasn’t much but it was one meal free of cost and concern.

  It was also data collection in her fight to disabuse the community that homelessness wasn’t an issue for Boolanga. If she asked the residents of the town about the local homeless, she knew they’d say, ‘None here. It’s a city problem.’ Except it was very much a country problem too. These women were the invisible homeless, overlooked by emergency housing because children weren’t involved. Women like Helen herself who, at a time of their lives when they should be assured of secure housing, were unexpectedly couch surfing, being resented boarders in their adult children’s homes, forced to live in transition communal housing, or, worst case scenario, sleeping rough in their cars or on the street. Homeless.

  Not that Helen ever considered women like Sue, Tracey, Agape, Roxy, Josie and others as numbers, but they came and went often enough for her to know their housing was unstable.

  ‘Drop in around seven. I might have some leftover chicken for you too,’ Con said.

  Helen slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a good man, Con.’

  ‘Don’t go telling anyone or I’ll have all the bleeding hearts wanting things for free.’

  It was a short drive to the community garden and five minutes later, Helen was striding through the decorative gates, breathing deeply and feeling her tension draining away. It happened every time she stood beside her plot.

  Ignoring an unwanted ache in her knees, she bent down and pressed her hands into the rich red-brown loam. Its warmth and power ran up her arms like vines before spreading across her chest and affirming life, just as it did with her vegetables. She silently acknowledged the traditional owners of the land past and present, and gave thanks for finding a haven in Boolanga. She considered herself a local, even though she knew to attain that status she needed a relative in the cemetery. That was never going to happen—she no longer had anyone left to bury.

  Although Helen was grateful to the Papadakos family, it wasn’t her part-time job at the Acropolis Café that had lifted her out of poverty; it was the community garden.

  Soon after arriving in town, she’d noticed a weed-infested garden bed and had boldly taken it over, weeding and harvesting the seeds, bulbs and tubers from the previous occupant’s plantings—garlic, spring onions, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, cabbages and herbs. No one had questioned the long hours she’d spent in the garden and she’d successfully hidden her homelessness in plain sight.

  People had got used to seeing her in the café and they accepted her presence in the garden, happy she was tidying up the eyesore plot. Nothing got under members’ skin more than a weed-infested bed. It was one of few eviction sins.

  As Helen got to know the other plot holders, she’d traded broad-leafed Italian parsley seeds for tomatoes, coriander seeds for broad beans, and potato sets for rhubarb crowns. Eventually, the committee told her she needed to officially join.

  Finding the thirty-five-dollar fee in her fortnightly budget had been tough and she’d bulked out her meals with vegetables for two weeks straight, but it was the hundred-dollar key deposit that had proved to be her nemesis. It was impossible to provide that sum in one go and still eat protein.

  Helen had aimed to set aside ten dollars a week, although five was more realistic. She’d fudged and dodged reminders to pay the key deposit until Judith, who’d never known a day of hunger in her privileged life, had accosted her between the beans and the cabbages. Helen had handed over fifty dollars, feigning ignorance of the full fee. Unfortunately, Con had paid her the night before and Judith’s beady eyes had noticed the extra cash in her wallet and promptly demanded the other fifty. Helen’s fingers had cramped tightly around the note that represented petrol and her phone recharge, but Judith had plucked Dame Edith Cowan out of her hand with the precision of a magpie pulling on a worm.

  It was a group of bored and drunk teenagers and their spur-ofthe-moment decision to raid the garden that had changed Helen’s life. If they’d acted ten minutes later, she would have already left to spend the night in the park across the river—one of seven haunts she randomly rotated to avoid detection. As it was, she’d been reading in the garden’s shelter when they’d tumbled in. The upshot was the police gave the kids a verbal shellacking, the shire offered Helen the position of caretaker, and when she mentioned her graduate diploma in community services they made her the coordinator of the garden.

  Her first job had been supervising the teenagers’ community service. It turned out that two of them had green thumbs. Ignoring the mutterings of some of the committee, Helen had given Trent and Jax their own plot on a three-month probation. Jax was still gardening.

  Her second argument with the committee was reducing the key deposit for people on Centrelink payments. The old guard had dubbed her a bleeding-heart leftie. Far from being offended, Helen wore the moniker with pride.

  And the icing on the cake? The caretaker role came with an old and rundown Victorian cottage at the bottom of the orchard block. Helen didn’t care that the floor sloped, that the stove was the original wood-fired Metters or that the water hammer almost deafened her whenever she turned on the hot tap. The cottage was home, and her car was thankfully only a means of transport.

  Today, with half an hour before the committee meeting, Helen took advantage of the unusual quiet to dig compost into the soil in preparation for new strawberry plants. It was surprising to find the garden empty at this time of day. Normally there was at least one other person tending their bed and Helen was used to being interrupted with questions and complaints.

  She was pushing some hair out of her eyes with the back of her gloved hand when she noticed a woman hovering by the gate. Although she was too far away for Helen to make out her facial features, her vivid clothing of bright greens and blues and the turban on her head made her unmissable.

  Helen loved the way so many women from the Afr
ican diaspora embraced colour. ‘Hello!’ she called.

  The woman glanced around as if she assumed Helen was talking to someone else.

  Helen waved a soil-covered glove and smiled encouragingly. ‘Come in.’

  The woman took a couple of tentative steps and, at Helen’s nod, strode over. ‘Is this your garden?’ Her accent combined with wonder, giving the rise and fall of the words a lyrical beat.

  ‘This bed is mine to use but—’ Helen waved her arm to encompass the large lot, ‘—it’s a community garden so it belongs to the town.’

  The woman’s eyes sparkled. ‘I live in town. So I can grow things too?’

  The committee made the answer to that complicated, but Helen didn’t let complicated overly concern her. For most of her life she’d rigidly followed the rules, too scared to break a single one—until her experience of homelessness taught her that following the rules didn’t protect her one iota. The realisation had generated a profound philosophical shift.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I’m Helen. What’s your name?’

  ‘I am Fiza.’

  ‘What sort of things would you like to grow, Fiza?’ Helen had no idea what constituted African food, and given the continent had—what, forty countries, fifty?—she imagined the food could vary a lot from north to south.

  ‘Maize!’

  ‘That’s like corn, isn’t it?’

  ‘It grows on a cob but it is not as sweet as corn. We use it for dura, asida …’ Her hands flew up, golden rings flashing in the sunshine. ‘Many things!’ Her previously cautious expression was suddenly animated. ‘Do you think I can grow maize here?’

  ‘Maybe. Is it hot enough?’

  ‘I hope so. We moved from Melbourne for the sunshine.’ She shivered. ‘In the camp, they asked us, “Where do you want to live?” We didn’t know Melbourne was so cold.’

  Helen could relate. Up here on the Victorian-New South Wales border, they experienced more sunshine and heat than in the big southern city. ‘You’ll definitely be warmer here. Where are you living?’

  ‘We are in a small flat, but I have three children. I am looking for a house in a nicer part of town. They are not easy to find and when we do …’ She shrugged, the movement loaded with resignation.