There were some big wooden display cabinets with glass tops. I swept the duster across their surfaces with a flourish and looked inside; they were lined with a heavy-looking black cloth. It appeared they contained artefacts of our town, from across the ages. Each object had a label beside it, handwritten and yellowed with age. Mrs Dobbs and the other oldies must have spent a lot of time on this, but it looked so bad.
They had worked so hard at building a museum so fifteen people a year could look at a bit of old thresher or other ancient farm machinery, mildewy black-and-white photographs of crumbling houses and weatherworn folk in colonial garb, the old bones of some explorer who, let’s face it, probably contributed to the massacre of local Indigenous people. What was the point? This weird museum and all these people working away for nothing suddenly made me feel terribly sad.
I whacked the duster a few times against one of the glass cabinets. Gusts of dust and those little sparkly fairies that appear in shards of light escaped and tickled my nose. I half forced a cough and used it as an excuse to wipe my eyes, in case anyone was looking.
Usually Clover’s dad, Nick, came to Australia just once a year, for a tour of music festivals and side gigs. This time he’d decided to come a month earlier than the rest of his band, and Mum was like a woman with a bonnet full of bees trying to make the place spick, span and sensational. I laid low and tried to be invisible.
‘Adelaide, get up.’
‘You vacuumed here already.’ I didn’t look up from my book.
‘I vacuumed here the other day,’ she specified. ‘Clover has been playing here since then and there’s Ears’s fur and I don’t even want to think about his poo pebbles and who knows what grot that child brings in on her boots.’
‘In her boots, more likely,’ I said.
And in a moment of perfect poetic justice, Clover passed industriously by the window clutching her gumboot before her in both hands, as though carrying a bouquet or a chalice. The boot was filled with soil.
Mum put her hands over her face and made a noise not unlike a cow.
I got up from the rug to stand next to her and we leaned against the window to see more. My sister had one boot on, and just a sock on the other foot. The sock was sopping wet and dragging along the ground. I laughed. ‘She’s a real credit to you.’
‘He’s going to think I’ve let her run completely wild,’ Mum muttered. She only muttered like a crazy lady when she was stressed.
‘Do you think he doesn’t know you? He knows we’re unruly, slobbish women.’
She shifted from left to right, holding the vacuum hose, seemingly unable to decide what move to make next.
I reached out to her. ‘I’ll vacuum. You deal with the dirt monster.’
Mum smiled.
‘Or the other way around, I don’t mind.’
She put her arm around me. ‘Thanks, honey. You get the dirt monster and hose her down, will you?’
‘My daddy is coming, my daddy is coming,’ Clover said over and over, shoving broken-off bits of pine tree into the top of her soil-boot like she was planting a garden. She sang as she headed determinedly towards the hose, ‘D. A. Daddy-O and Daddy was his name-o!’
I hoisted her away. While she squawked crossly a bit, ten minutes later she was happily throwing bubbles around in the bath. I had just pushed her muddy clothes into the corner of the bathroom with my toe when I heard a car pull up out the front.
At the sound of the handbrake going on Clover stopped, sat up straight, her eyes wide. She looked at me, her mouth an O.
‘Car!’ She scrambled out, sending water slopping up the edges of the tub. ‘My daddy is here.’ Without even waiting for me to put her clothes on or even dry her a little, she took off running down the hallway, bubbles all the way down her back from hair to heel.
I followed with a towel.
Mum threw open the front door. We stood there framed by it like some kind of opening credits pose of a cheesy family TV show.
Nick unfolded himself from the driver’s side door of a shiny red rental car and shouted ‘Hi!’ as he pulled on his worn leather jacket. He always wore it. It had creases and cracks like wrinkles in the leather.
But when Mum and Clover ran to him I hung back. I felt shy, in a way, as though they had more right to him than I did. And perhaps that was true.
Mum met Nick when I was about twelve or thirteen, over at the Petersham Music and Blues Festival. It’s a hippie, folky kind of festival. She loves music that means something, she says. Anyway, Nick’s band had come out from the States to do an Australian tour and somehow they met and got talking and then not long after that I got a sister. I think the band is kind of well-known – but on the small-gig circuit. Not the big-time. Mostly, when he isn’t touring, he lives in Austin, Texas.
When they started going out, Mum was pretty tentative. Emyvale was very interested in the development. Not only did Nick stand out in this town where everyone is white white white (more than once I’d entered a shop just to hear a conversation hastily shushed), but I reckon mostly everyone was waiting to see how my grandparents would react to their daughter-in-law taking up with another man.
It came to be that they were impossibly cool about it. Clover even calls them Gran and Grandad, and they love her to bits.
It had been nearly five years now, but I still wasn’t really sure how serious Mum and Nick were about each other. They didn’t live together, obviously. I’d never heard any talk of it, no mention of marriage or anything. I didn’t know if he was a one-woman guy, or if he was dating other people, or what his intentions were. Mum didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t ever go out with any other guys. Emyvale was in a man-drought, it was said.
Whatever their arrangement, they make a good couple – objectively he’s a handsome guy, and I think she is beautiful. Both of them terrible in any photograph, but what can you do? I have one picture where they look okay, except I’m standing next to them looking bored and rude, and ruining it. When I pinned it up above my desk at school I folded my face under. Mia found it, untucked it and glued a celebrity’s face over mine.
I watched him lift Clover up high, her little legs swinging, and then wrap her in a hug. Then he slid an arm around Mum’s shoulders and pulled her into a smooch. It was romantic like in a movie. There’s something quite weird about watching your mother kiss someone, but I didn’t look away.
Clover had been excited for days about Nick. Now her arms were looped around his neck and she was hanging down his front like a cartoon sloth hanging off its mama. A naked sloth with a nudey bottom.
‘Hey there, Addie!’ Nick said, shifting Clover to his hip and coming towards me with his free arm stretched wide.
I put my arms out and let him hug me. ‘You shaved off your goatee,’ I said. Sometimes it’s hard to say, ‘It’s nice to see you.’
Our house was different with a man in it. I felt this every time Nick came, but more so this time. We’d never been here so long together.
Every morning he’d go outside with a coffee and a cigarette and sit very quietly before doing absolutely anything else in his day. Mum and me, we were very much ‘shuffle into the kitchen and consume enormous bowls of cereal while listening to the radio’ kind of people. We were messy, bed-creased and if we woke up grumpy we just rolled on in with it and shared it around. We rarely stayed grumpy for long, but just didn’t have it in us to preserve other people from our feelings. By the time the cereal was being scraped from the bottom of the bowl and the pot of tea had run dry, we were generally ready to face the day.
Mum would head off for the day at the salon, leaving Nick to watch Clover. If it wasn’t a historical society day, I was meant to study. A fat package had arrived with all the information about my subjects and assignments. I’d even set up my desk and joined the online groups I was meant to. But often I found myself wandering through the house to find someone
to talk to.
Nick always wore black shirts, black jeans, black slacks. Whenever I said he should maybe change it up – ask if he was going to a funeral or something – he would say to me in his weird accent, ‘You wonder why I always dress in black?’
And after enough blank-faced responses he finally got out a Johnny Cash album and made me listen to Man in Black.
‘And me, I’m the black man in black,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Or maybe I just like not having to worry about my clothes matching.’ He hauled Clover over his shoulder and marched out of the room, going, ‘Hut, hut, hut,’ like a marine in a movie.
Our house – though ordinarily big and airy – had started to feel claustrophobic. I felt like Alice, as though my body was starting to outgrow the house and I had to escape before my arms and legs started poking from windows and doors. And as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t stay in my room reading, or lying dramatically on the couch or floor, with one hand resting on my forehead and the other clutching imaginary pearls.
In the end, it was pure boredom that forced me out.
‘Darlings!’ (I’d been reading Nancy Mitford and become awfully 1920s-ish.) I flopped onto the couch. ‘Do let’s do something.’
Mum didn’t even look up from the computer. ‘Do some school work, daaarling.’
I sighed. ‘I’ve finished all the stuff from that first distance ed pack. Anyway it’s the weekend.’
‘Want to run through that Mamie Smith tune again?’ Nick reached towards his guitar case. He was always trying to get us to sing with him. Sometimes it was fun.
But today I shook my head. ‘My throat hurts,’ I said.
‘You could take your sister out,’ Mum suggested.
‘Out? There’s nothing out.’
‘Take her to the playground down at the caravan park.’ She turned towards me, resting her arm on the back of the couch. ‘I’ll stay here and put my feet up.’
‘Feet up, shmeet up. It’s too far.’
‘You could play in the garden. Clover’s been making a cubby.’
‘But, Mum …’
‘Or you could do me a favour …’ and she wondered whether I would go down the street to the salon and pick up the week’s takings so we could do the banking together ready for Monday. Apparently, she had missed the memo that my maths marks had been the first to take a tumble.
It was my knee-jerk reaction to violently oppose this idea, but I supposed banking was different to logarithms. Perhaps I could see the point in it.
Clover and I wandered through town and usually I was all about looking into people’s houses and spending some time admiring the way that the paddocks on the other side of the Emyvale–Hunter Road rolled away in grassy green glory towards the horizon. But now Clover was mostly too big and boisterous for the stroller and there was too much adventuring to do. And so much make-believe.
‘Oooh,’ she said, hopping a little along the footpath. ‘Lava. Hot!’
‘Come on, Bubsy.’ She was so slow.
‘Uh oh, Addie. Lava from the volcano!’
‘Quick then. Let’s race. Can you run fast?’ I pretended to run off.
‘Wait-a-me!’ She took off, her little legs pumping. ‘We are in a hurry.’
Raychel, who worked at the salon the days Mum didn’t, was wearing tiny shorts and a shapeless black singlet and her arms tinkled with spangly gold bangles. She squealed when I walked in. ‘Argh! I love your hair!’ She rushed over and tousled my fringe with her fingers, her long nails scratching gently against my scalp.
My hands flew to my head. ‘It’s pretty scrappy. My friend cut it.’
‘It’s mad! I love it!’ She reached over and picked up a plastic folder from the counter. ‘Here’s what Libby needs. And so you’re back for good!’
‘Well …’ I tried to show a worldly air. ‘For a while, maybe the year.’
On our way home, we were walking along Emyvale’s strip of shops when Clover cracked it and demanded to be carried. I tried pulling on her hand to get her to walk but she just cried and sat down on the footpath – tired from all that running, lava and cubby building, I guess – when someone behind us started talking.
‘Hey, Adelaide Longley. Heard you were back.’ It was Sam McElliot, all grown up, with the guy the boys called Foreskin in primary school. Jarrod Foreman.
‘Yep.’
‘They kick you out of your big city school then, hey?’
I shrugged. ‘So what if they did?’ Clover had stopped crying and was now holding onto my leg and watching.
Sam laughed. He slapped his hand on Jarrod’s back. ‘Fors has given up too.’
I remembered him, vaguely. One of those hyper boys who picked on the girls like it was easy. Who were strong and always ran around during breaks, playing footy and growing sweaty and muddy. But he looked more familiar than that …
‘You almost knocked me off my bike the other morning! In your dumb car.’
Jarrod laughed nervously, but his neck grew red.
‘Anyway,’ said Sam, ‘I’ll look out for you if you want. Show you around and stuff.’
‘Thanks. But I’m not going to go to school here either. Me and classrooms have had enough of each other.’
Jarrod snapped back up and I felt his gaze on me. I couldn’t tell if I felt uncomfortable or not. There wasn’t anything in particular about him, both him and Sam looked essentially the same; they were just Emyvale guys.
But there was something about him. Something uncomplicated. It was like he wasn’t pretending to be anything other than a guy with a stupid nickname.
The guys just kept standing there. I started to walk past. I waved a bit so I didn’t seem too dismissive. ‘Cool. So, see you later, I guess.’
‘See ya, Adelaide.’
‘Bye.’
I hoiked Clover onto my back (she squealed) and kept walking down the street. She was jabbering away and I guess I was distracted because when we passed the chemist I bumped right into someone who was coming out.
Luckily, it wasn’t a little old biddy with fragile bones.
But it was Jenny Dear.
Jenny had been my best friend at primary school – I still had the half-a-heart BFF necklace in a jewellery box on my dresser. The box also contained my first earrings (the ones they pierced the ears with, and which I’d surely never wear again), my year six school-captain badge, various items of cheap jewellery I’d picked up as a kid, and the ring I’d made in science class when we’d learned to use a soldering iron. It was a very ugly ring, and the BFF charm left a green mark on my neck whenever I wore it. The girls at St Thomas’s never had jewellery that left their necks or wrists or fingers green.
Jenny and I hadn’t really spoken in a while.
Her hair was scraped back into a stubby ponytail and she had a tortoiseshell headband on, the kind I’d seen on sale at the supermarket for six dollars for a packet of two. Her face was thin and sharp-cheekboned and her steely blue eyes were kind of frightening above her longish nose and serious mouth.
‘Oh my god, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Oh em gee,’ said Clover. I tried to slip her off my back but she dug her knees in.
‘Sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going,’ said Jenny.
‘Do you work here?’
‘Yep.’ She gestured to her embroidered blouse with the words ‘Lodge’s Pharmacy’ on it.
‘I moved home.’
‘Yeah, Mum said.’
I wanted to ask Jenny about school, what she had been up to, everything. But how do you cover years of not really talking to each other? Especially when some of that time included me pretending not to notice her when I walked down the street, and other times talking so sneeringly about my new school and my new friends and how they went on overseas holidays and had expensive cars and parents with fancy jobs. ‘We can go on
ski holidays with school, and music tours of New Zealand.’ What I didn’t say was that I never got to go on any of the trips because we couldn’t afford it.
I wanted to say, let’s do something soon. Let’s catch up.
But before I could she stepped to one side and said, ‘Anyway, I have to get home. Bye.’ And she was striding off down the street.
‘Bye!’ called Clover.
Another day, another mind-numbing shift of dusting and dithering and elevenses down at the Emyvale Mausoleum. Seven shifts down, only maybe fifty-six to go.
I dropped my bag from my shoulder as I walked through the screen door into the house. The door always banged so satisfyingly.
‘Hey, Addie,’ called Nick, from the lounge room. He was noodling around on his guitar, some repetitive riff, walking his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar.
I waved a hello back.
I caught a frightening glimpse of myself in the big hallstand mirror. The hallstand was covered in hats we hardly ever wore: my old school boater, which I sometimes used in barber-shop singalongs, or when pretending to be a one-woman chorus line because I didn’t have a bowler hat; a catskin hat from the seventies that Mum’s aunty gave her, and that scared Clover (who we were sure was going to be a vegetarian); and a battered Akubra that just appeared one day. My face was all red from the ride and the windy chill, and my hair was madly wild, sticking out hither and thither, on this side a feather, on this side a leaf. I made a few faces for good luck.
‘Hi!’ Mum called out. ‘We’re in here.’
She was beating something in her big mixing bowl and the wee terror was sitting on the bench, playing with the empty eggshells as her legs dangled off the side.
‘Hello, family!’ Stepping on one heel and then the other, I slipped out of my shoes. ‘What are you making?’
Untidy Towns Page 4