‘Oh, shut up!’ the Chinese girl says.
They sit in the park with their takeaway coffees because the owner of the café bans them from coming back in.
The other one’s name is Tess and what the three of them have in common, apart from babies and prams, is that they were all shunned by the mothers’ group.
‘Secret Service Caterina stopped posting on the Facebook page, so I figured we were all meeting at the community centre,’ Yolanda says. ‘But Tess was the only one there.’
‘Let’s not talk about them again.’ Tess gives her daughter very sensible snacks out of colour-coded containers. Toto’s hoeing into a not-so-sensible chocolate-chip muffin. ‘They weren’t the type of people I’d ever want to hang out with anyway so I’m angry at myself for caring.’
‘Yeah, just because we pushed babies out of our vag doesn’t mean we have anything in common,’ Yolanda says, going after her daughter, who’s a future sprinter for sure. Both baby girls have been walking for months and Toto tries to follow them every time but falls on his face. Rosie notices that they say words as well while Toto is all sounds and gibberish. She worries he’s going to be the last baby to do every thing. Knows it’s her fault for doing it all wrong. She wrests the muffin from between his fingers because he’s heading for the sandpit.
‘That pram’s going to kill you,’ Yolanda tells her as they move their stuff over to the pit. ‘There’s an inner west mums’ page on Facebook where you can get a better one for a good price.’
‘Rosie’s not on Facebook,’ Tess says. She seems to have picked up a lot of information during mothers’ group despite her silence. She’s from Wagga and worked in HR for the council there, but her husband was offered a town planner job for Leichhardt Council and they decided to move.
‘Are there many Chinese people in Wagga?’ Rosie asks, politely.
‘I have no idea,’ Tess says. ‘My family’s Vietnamese.’
Rosie avoids Yolanda’s stare. She can imagine how loaded it is with disapproval. Yolanda’s also from the country and Rosie makes a point to remember how to say Kamilaroi, because Yolanda speaks about being part of that nation. She talks about being homesick for family and how lonely it is in the city and Tess agrees. Rosie wants to tell them that she’s from the city, but just as homesick for family. And lonely.
‘Where’s your mob from?’ Yolanda asks.
‘I have a grandmother in Italy,’ Rosie says. There’s no response after that, as if it’s her fault for not having enough family to fill the silence.
The wind has picked up and both Tess and Yolanda remove baby puffer jackets out of the bottomless pits of their bags.
‘Your bub needs to be in layers now that it’s getting cold,’ Yolanda says.
Toto’s sucking on his muffin-mixed-with-sand-covered fingers.
‘At least he’s not crying anymore,’ Tess says, handing Rosie a wipe.
‘I took him to Tresillian.’
‘What was the problem?’
‘Back molars,’ Rosie says. ‘So I guess it’s an I-told-you-so, Yolanda.’
Yolanda is instantly pissed off. ‘You don’t know anything about me, so don’t presume I’m going to say that.’
‘I know enough.’
‘No, you don’t!’
‘Bet you’re a teacher.’
Yolanda stares at Rosie. She’s only a couple of years older, but has a look in her eye that belongs to someone who’s fifty.
‘You do sound like one, Yolanda,’ Tess says. ‘And in saying that, I loved all of mine.’
Yolanda teaches PE, which is why she wanted to slap cardio mum across the face every time she gave out dangerous training advice. She’s also the oldest of twenty-three cousins so she’s used to dishing out the threats and advice.
‘Are you on your own?’ she asks Rosie.
‘No. Sort of.’
Yolanda takes out her phone. ‘Give me your number.’
Rosie gives it to her and a moment later, the phone rings in her bag.
‘Just in case.’
She starts cooking again. Tonight, Martha’s out at her middle-aged netballers’ training night, so it feels good to have the kitchen to herself and Rosie makes some of the dishes her mum taught her. Caponata, sugo, parmigiana. She figures if she freezes it all, they can live on it for the next month or so. Jimmy’s back in Sydney and he fixes the highchair Rosie found outside someone’s house for council pick-up. When he’s done with the chair, he gives it a good clean and fits Toto into it. In the past couple of weeks, he’s fixed the cot railing that never worked because Rosie bought it second-hand on Gumtree, as well as the mini mover with a wonky wheel. He’s functional and Rosie hasn’t come across a functional guy since her father.
When Jimmy doesn’t have furniture to fix he stands around in that fidgety way, as if he doesn’t know how to take it easy around her. Rosie puts a plate of caponata close to where he’s standing at the breakfast bar. He points to himself and she just ignores him, goes back to soaking the breadcrumbs for the meatballs. He sits down and starts eating, reaches out for the bread so he can wipe the plate clean like some sort of peasant. He knows the food and she figures it’s the Italian best-friend connection.
‘Can we talk about money … without it being awkward?’ he says, picking up Toto’s water bottle for the fourth time. Toto thinks it’s a game and Jimmy lets him play.
‘I’m on a pension,’ she tells him and he shakes his head.
‘No. No pension.’
She puts down the mince that she’s rolling and washes her hands because she needs to be focused. ‘It’s not really your decision,’ she tells him.
‘I can give you money every week,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to be on a pension.’
‘Let’s keep it uncomplicated.’
His stare is unrelenting. She can tell he’s trying to rein something in.
‘I come from four generations of handouts,’ he finally says. ‘I don’t want him being part of that cycle.’
‘And I come from hard workers so he’ll be taken care of. Don’t worry.’
‘You’re making this about you.’
‘And you’re not?’
The mood is broken only by the water bottle on the ground again. Rosie picks it up before Jimmy does and puts it in the sink. Toto’s unimpressed and starts howling.
‘I don’t want to sit around every week waiting for you to give me money,’ she says. ‘It’ll mean I owe you something.’
He stands up abruptly and she thinks he’s going to leave.
‘If you’re suggesting what I think you are, I don’t work that way. You owe me nothing.’ He unbuckles Toto from the highchair and puts him into the mini mover and Rosie can’t believe he’s giving in to Toto so easily.
‘I don’t like borrowing money,’ she says. ‘I don’t like owing money. The moment I start working, I won’t need the pension.’
‘No one’s judging you, Rosie.’
‘What would you know?’ she says. ‘I grew up in this area. Everyone’s judging me.’
‘If it’s Martha –’
‘Don’t bring up Martha as if she’s your best mate!’
Toto’s ramming the mini mover into every piece of furniture he can find and laughing with the delight that comes with noise and destruction.
‘He’s going to be a revhead,’ Jimmy says, and he laughs and there’s that part of Toto again. The part that makes Rosie a little sad because it means her son doesn’t completely belong to her anymore. Jimmy looks up and she sees a flash of something in his eyes and it makes her wonder if his heart leaps when she texts him.
When he says goodbye to Toto he presses a kiss to his brow. It’s the first time Rosie’s seen intimacy between the two.
‘I like your hair, by the way,’ he says at the door.
She shrugs. ‘It’s easier this way.’
But she’s lying because the haircut makes her feel cool in a way that she hasn’t felt for a long time.
She’s
run out of containers to store the last of the pasta, so she puts it on a plate and covers it with foil. Martha comes home and Rosie can hear murmuring at the front door. Coach Whinger must be out there with her. He’s nothing like her dad, who never complained a day in his life. Rosie stays in the kitchen and waits, because she needs to get the business side of things sorted out. Finding out that money was owing on the house was a game changer.
‘How much are the mortgage payments?’ she asks, when Martha finally walks into the kitchen.
Martha makes a sound of disbelief and shakes her head, before putting her head in the fridge.
‘Where’s my couscous salad?’
‘I chucked it. It was stinking out the fridge.’
Rosie shoves the foiled plate towards her because Martha can’t cook to save her life, and Rosie doesn’t want to see food go to waste.
‘Once I’m working, I’m paying my share,’ she says, before heading upstairs.
Despite buzz cuts and cooking, the pit of loneliness becomes bigger. She thinks of Jimmy living with friends, or soaking his bread around a noisy kitchen table. She watches people in their workplaces, laughing as they make lattes and dish out panini. Everyone seems to know each other except for Rosie. She thinks it’ll change soon, but can’t see the signs. She goes for another interview and knows it’s the sort of place she could like. So when they ring to tell her that they were impressed but gave the job to a uni student who was studying occupational therapy, she stops believing that she’ll get out of this rut. Stops telling herself that she’s luckier than most because she’s got this house. Sees herself as one of those girls who’ll always be dependent on someone.
At the UTS student centre, she highlights the questions on the application form that she needs to go back to. Lachlan is there to help with a few of them, but most of the others mean she has to search for her school records and official documentation and that’s easier said than done. He asks if she wants to have a coffee and they head over to the Marketplace food court. She organises some fruit for Toto and lets Lachlan buy the coffee and sushi.
‘I think it’s impressive what you’re doing,’ he says, glancing down at Toto.
Rosie’s never been described as impressive. Maybe beautiful and pretty, but however he’s dressed it Rosie’s been paid a compliment and she likes it. Being turned on by one can’t be a bad thing. Better than being turned on by an insult.
‘Can I have your number?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s nothing personal but I don’t want to be tiptoeing into the student centre just because you didn’t ring me. As if I did something wrong.’
‘Okay,’ he says, and then he laughs as if he’s processing it. ‘How about if you say your number out loud and it won’t feel as if you’ve given it to me?’
‘Same thing,’ she says. ‘And you won’t remember it anyway, and then you’ll use that as an excuse.’
‘I have a 98.9 per cent success rate when it comes to keeping promises and honouring conditions,’ Lachlan says. ‘The 1.1 per cent failure mostly revolves around returning library books.’
She can’t help smiling.
‘And I’ve got a great memory for numbers, so try me.’
The next morning, Rosie pushes the pram out onto the street and sees Teresa watering the plants. She’s a hairdresser who now runs her business at home so she and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Bianca, always look like they’ve literally stepped out of a salon. Rosie is about to ignore the greeting that she knows is coming, but the words come out of her mouth before she can stop them.
‘I don’t want to sit in your kitchen because it’ll make me too sad.’
Because it will haunt Rosie with the smell of coffee and the memory of dialect and emphatic gestures. Teresa and Rosie’s mum weren’t just neighbours. They had been best friends from the moment Rosie’s parents moved into the dump next door. As a kid, Rosie remembered often walking to Ramsay Street with them, both women perved on by men driving by.
Teresa folds the hose to stop the water.
‘Can I at least hold him, bella?’
While Teresa has a cuddle, Rosie’s phone beeps and she fumbles for it. She reads the message and it gives her hope because today she has a place she needs to be.
Do you guys want to get kicked
out of another café?
‘We do the garden last, Marta.’
At the house on Dalhousie Street there’s the lawn and then there’s the beyond.
The beyond is what lies at the bottom of the backyard. It’s a vegetable patch gone feral, now sprouting capsicums off the side of the house, tangled with every shrub, creeper and weed known to existence, roots entwined deep and tight, a mockery of humans’ belief that they have some sort of dominance over nature.
Martha rejects every quote, stunned by the costs involved in taming it. Deep down she knows it’s not about the money. Ever since her argument with Rosie about the property, she’s imagined Seb’s voice. Remembered those nights when they’d lie in bed talking about the house. Always the house. ‘It never gets sold, Marta. We finish the garden and that night we sit in the banana chairs and we wait for the solar lights to come on and we say, basta. Next time we move is when they put us in the ground.’
Basta. Enough.
The taming of the beyond will be the completion of Seb Gennaro’s dream.
He had never told Martha much about his life before coming to this country, but she knew it was a less romanticised version than that of the older Italians in the area who had migrated in the fifties. Seb would say with great bitterness that there was no future tense in the Sicilian language, and little wonder. Back in the eighties, he would have done anything to take Loredana away from the housing projects and the crime they had grown up with in a place called San Filippo Neri, on the outskirts of Palermo. Deep down, Martha figures he did the ‘anything’, although she never discovered what that was. Seb was a version of Martha’s own father, who never looked back. One changed the spelling of his name; the other bought into the dream of owning something in his life despite it being a hovel. When he first showed Martha photos of what the property looked like when he had bought it, they were still strangers outside the cancer ward of the RPA. She couldn’t quite believe that houses like that had still existed in Sydney back in the nineties. No inside toilet and one liveable room, he told her, but still better than any place he or Loredana had lived in their entire lives.
And now, she’s breaking a promise to him. Martha’s made a couple of calls to local real estate agents to get an idea of where they stand. Today’s agent is all bright-eyed excitement. Until she looks out at the beyond.
‘You’re going to have to do something about that before you put it on the market,’ she says. ‘Do you want to go inside and talk?’
‘I don’t have time,’ Martha says. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere.’
It’s Saturday and Martha and the women have their first netball game. It’s a loss, but not dismal and they’re pretty impressed with themselves. Ewan isn’t.
‘You lost,’ he says, his tone blunt. ‘Do you think a footy player would be cheering about that score?’
‘Fuck off, Ewan,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Can’t we just celebrate not getting carried away on stretchers?’ She’s brought along her twenty-one-year-old doppelganger daughter – one expression fits all. Louise King spends the entire game sitting on the sideline with a hoodie over her head.
‘Can I put an end to your celebration of averageness,’ Ewan says, ‘and ask that you take this seriously?’
He walks away and there’s plenty of muttering.
‘He’s struggling,’ Julia tells them.
The team do that thing where they say goodbye next to Julia and Alana’s car but spend the next forty minutes talking. Martha finds herself telling the others about the house and its beyond and Rosie and the baby and Jimmy Hailler, who looks like he should be in jail, but who took care of her after she had the dog put down.
‘
And she forgot Greek Easter,’ Sophie says.
‘How the hell could you avoid seeing ten thousand Greeks bearing crucifixes in a procession?’
‘That’s an exaggeration, Elizabeth.’
‘Excuse me, St Spyridon. The cops closed down Gardeners Road, Sophie.’
‘If you say this Jimmy guy’s a local, I’ll ask around,’ Alana volunteers.
‘You won’t know him.’
‘Trust me. She’s a Charbel. Alana’ll find a degree of separation,’ Julia says, getting into the car.
‘Drinks Wednesday night?’ Elizabeth suggests, and there’s another twenty-minute discussion at the car window about where they should go.
Later, while Martha’s looking out at the beyond, wearing her brand-new gardening gloves, Ewan texts to say that he’s at the front, and she heads out to see him.
‘Are you over your tantrum?’ she asks.
‘Am I the only person who takes the team seriously?’ he wants to know.
‘I take it seriously,’ she says. ‘Just not the competition.’
‘You want to go for a drive?’ he asks.
‘Where’s your father?’
‘A mate’s taken him down to the club to watch the game.’
‘You don’t want to watch the game?’
‘Not this one,’ he says.
On Cronulla Beach they watch the diehard surfers sit in wait for the perfect wave. More silence. Up until now the list of Ewan Healy traits had been positive apart from a touch of grumpiness and the fact that he can’t remember the song they danced to. But now she has to head the negative list with the word ‘moody’. Martha’s history with moody people began with Julia Healy in high school. An irritating self-indulgent trait that always had her walking on eggshells until she got to an age where eggshell-walking didn’t appeal to her.
‘My father used to take me here for training,’ he finally says. ‘One minute we’d be doing wind sprints up those sand dunes and next he’d tell me to get into the water, no matter how cold, and I’d hit the waves crying, praying that he didn’t notice.’
The Place on Dalhousie Page 10