by Cate Kendall
Mim laughed inwardly and shook her head as James rabbited on, flipping through his paper to get the Coast and Country section out.
His father had been right. ‘Now that you’re married to James,’ he’d warned Mim on their wedding day, ‘life will never be boring.’
‘Yabbies! You’re kidding, it’s got yabbies! Awesome!’ Charley and Jack hurtled down the hill, racing each other to the dam.
‘What are yabbies, Mum?’ asked Chloe, walking through the paddock in her shiny new Disney Princess gumboots, clasping Mim’s hand.
‘Um, they’re kind of like mini crayfish.’
‘Ohhh, like in sushi,’ said Chloe. Mim smiled at the agent, from Satchwells, Balnarring, apologetically. ‘City kid,’ she explained.
‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you how to catch yabbies if you want,’ and he walked ahead with Chloe to where the boys were standing at the water’s edge.
‘Well, what do you think?’ James asked Mim.
‘It’s perfect,’ said Mim. She smiled up at James as they walked towards the children, who were listening to Roy’s explanation, when she stepped squarely into a cow pat. ‘I will need more appropriate footwear, however,’ she said ruefully as she tried to wipe the cow poo off her brand-new suede high-heeled boots. ‘For some reason, I thought Country Road was the perfect choice for today’s expedition.’ She laughed at herself and gave up the futile task.
James had given notice at work and the Woolcotts had put their house on the market. And, although they currently had no income and would soon have no roof over their head, they both felt strangely liberated by shedding the burden of city living.
They turned to look up at the old farmhouse. It was eighty years old and had been renovated several times, resulting in a warren of little rooms and corridors. Charley had already discovered ‘the chamber of secrets’ hidden under the stairs. It would do while they planned their own renovation, and the original façade could easily be retained, Mim noted with her keen designer eye.
The boys screamed in delight and Mim and James looked up to see them running towards the back of the property. ‘Kangaroos, Mum, look!’
Sure enough, a small mob of greys were heading away from the wild male Woolcott children in graceful leaps.
‘Kangaroos! Well, that seals the deal for me,’ said Mim, hugging James around the waist as he put his arm around her shoulders.
The boys, having given up their kangaroo chase, were screaming playfully at each other, hollering at the tops of their lungs, and it didn’t bother Mim one bit. For a start they were about 200 metres away by now, and also they were boys, they were supposed to be a bit wild and crazy from time to time, and now they could go for it – at a safe distance – thanks to all this glorious space.
‘Well, Roy,’ said James, putting out his hand to shake the agent’s, ‘we’ll take it. Good work, you found a place that suits us perfectly.’
‘It’s my pleasure. When you outlined what you wanted I thought of this straight away,’ said Roy smiling broadly.
The three children came running over to their parents, breathless with excitement, flushed cheeks glowing. They were covered in cow manure and dirt from the rolling-down-the-hill race they’d just enjoyed.
‘Have a look at you lot!’ said Mim. ‘Looks like I’ll be trading ladies’ lunches for laundry!’ And not minding one bit, she thought, as a lump rose in her throat, and she watched her happy, beautiful children take off at full pelt once again.
Present Day
Mikki Cooper was the luckiest woman alive.
She really believed it was true. Coming home to her one-bedroom flat in Carnegie (her flat, her very own) she said a quiet thank you to the universe for her good fortune.
Even better, as she stepped through the door, there in the poky hall was their wedding photo, and she couldn’t help but smile again at how blessed her life felt.
She walked into the living room, past the blue modular couch, and tossed her keys into the fruit bowl on the bench of the galley-style kitchen. She opened her canvas handbag and rummaged to the bottom to find the present she’d bought Nathan that day. It was their seven-year anniversary – even though they’d only been married six months, she wanted to celebrate the day they first met.
She smiled at the memory as she dug some wrapping paper out of the bottom drawer.
Nathan had been at the mission for one of his regular meet-and-greet sessions. Mikaylah had been so fucked up; man, had she been fucked up. She still got a chill down her spine when thinking how close she’d come to dying anonymously on the streets in those days.
At that stage it had been more than a year since she’d been into the St Kilda mission. After that encounter with her so-called mother she’d given it a wide berth. She’d found a crew over in Smith Street, Collingwood, who had a squat and a good supply – and that was all that ever mattered in those days.
Then she’d hooked up with a dangerous crowd who lived precariously on the edge. One day she scored some evil shit with them and found herself dumped in an alley over the other side of town. They’d left her for dead in a street not far from the St Kilda Angels, so when she finally came out of it, Mikaylah had staggered into the mission for some food and shelter.
She scuttled in the back door, like a scared bug, lined up for a steaming bowl of tomato soup and found an empty seat away from everyone else.
It was a miserable, comfortless Melbourne day and the centre was packed. Mikaylah huddled at the edge of a table and concentrated on hunching over her bowl. A dero sitting next to her shouted out in the midst of drug-induced hallucinations and lurched towards the front of the room yelling incoherent obscenities.
Mikaylah drew his vacant chair in with her feet, creating a barrier between herself and the rest of the room. Her eyes were on her soup, her arm around the bowl, her legs clutched at the vacant chair when it was tugged. She grabbed the chair tighter – ‘Get the hint, cock-head,’ was her response. The chair was tugged with more force until it was pulled out of her leg-grip.
She glowered and shrank down further.
‘Hi there,’ said a bright, male voice.
Oh, Jesus, a fucking counsellor, Mikaylah thought to herself, and grunted in response.
‘I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute please?’
Mikaylah glared back at the placid brown eyes that were fixed upon her.
Nathan edged the chair over closer to the corner so that he was adjacent to her. The bowl of soup was between them so he sat on his hands for lack of anywhere to comfortably rest them.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked kindly.
‘Awright,’ she lied.
‘We haven’t seen you here before, have we?’ Nathan asked.
Mikaylah shrugged in response. Her hands rested one atop the other behind the soup bowl and the fingers of her right hand pincer-gripped the rim of the over-full dish.
‘I was hoping to tell you about a scholarship program that we’re running at the centre,’ Nathan continued. ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for smart kids like yourself. I was the first recipient of the scholarship and …’
Nathan was on a roll, his eyes were darting around, his face mobile, and his enthusiasm for his story was obvious.
Mikaylah kept her eyes fixed on his face and Nathan mistook this for interest. She was in fact, slowly tipping the bowl away from her so that a thin, hot stream of tomato soup ran over the bowl edge into Nathan’s lap. She was fascinated with how much he was into his story and how long it took him to respond. At least ten seconds, she estimated.
Suddenly he leapt up as the heat of the soup penetrated the denim of his jeans.
‘Holy shit, what’d you do that for?’ he yelled as he ran for a cloth.
‘What’d you sit down and bother me for?’ she’d replied, and slipped out to the alley before he had a chance to return.
Mikaylah’s lips had curved into something like a smile for the first time in years.
She wa
s soon lining up for dinner at the centre most nights. Nathan’s infectious sense of humour and enthusiasm gave her hope for the future. It was Nathan who had given her the nickname of Mikki and it was Nathan who eventually convinced her to join the Salvation Army methadone program. After many months of interminable struggle and many setbacks she had finally beaten her addiction.
She laughed, comfortable in her own lounge room, as she wrapped the mini Andy Warhol print of a can of Campbells Tomato Soup. What kind of guy marries a girl who pours soup on him?
‘My kind, that’s who,’ she said aloud, a girl deeply in love.
Christ, she’d better hurry, she was speaking tonight at the church hall and she still had to read over her notes.
It had been an exhausting year for Liz. To ensure her anonymity as the generous patron of the scholarship fund, she had cut back her hands-on time at the St Kilda Angels and instead devoted her time to running the scholarship programme from home.
The programme had ballooned into an enormous business, with the scholarship being offered at missions and charity groups all over Melbourne. While the counsellors at the mission looked after the recipients of the programme, Liz was in charge of the book-keeping, fund-management and fundraising.
In her role as patron of ‘Street-Smarts’ she hosted many glittering affairs to extricate surplus dollars from Melbourne’s affluent. The wealthy flocked to her events – any excuse to attend an affair hosted by the glamorous Liz Munroe and her famous husband.
She was worn out from the amount of luncheons, blacktie functions and soirees that she’d thrown in the last twelve months, but the outcome had been sensational: the funds were rolling in and the children were being educated.
It was almost a year since Liz had spent any amount of time at the mission and she missed it terribly, although she kept in contact with Tracy via emails and occasional phone calls. But tonight Liz was treating herself. Both children had gone off for sleepovers at friends’ houses and she was taking herself out to her favourite place.
She smiled at the irony as she headed towards St Kilda. Who would have thought eight years ago that her favourite Friday-night destination would be a church hall in St Kilda listening to an ex-junkie talk to street kids.
Mikki jumped on the 67 tram that travelled along Glenhuntly Road, then down Brighton Road, and read through her notes. She was all a-jitter tonight, though this was something she’d done plenty of times before.
The soothing movement of the tram calmed her nerves and she put her head down to read.
The speech outlined Mikki’s last few years on the streets: How desperately she’d been living; foraging in garbage bins for food; stealing anything she could get her hands on; spending everything on drugs.
Then, after she’d got clean, how the amazing opportunity of the scholarship at the St Kilda Angels had come up, how this incredible anonymous philanthropist was offering free education and resources to anyone who could get themselves straight enough to take advantage of it. She wanted to instill in the audience tonight what an awesome gift education was. You could turn your life around with such an opportunity; something that was incredibly rare when you were living on the streets.
Mikki’s speech went on to talk about how she had returned to night school to complete Year Ten, then her VCE, through the support of the mission staff and the generosity of the scholarship that supported her. She’d then moved on to tackling a teaching degree and felt that her life had finally begun.
She stared out blindly at the Glenhuntly Road shops. Of course, other kids weren’t as lucky as she was. Nathan was the sole reason she was alive today. He was the one who had believed in her, who had shown her a way out of the vortex that was sucking her down and pulling her away from hope. Why he kept supporting her when she did everything in her power to push him away was beyond her.
She thanked God for him every day. Even though most of the work, the sheer desperate effort, had been hers alone. Something in her had recognised that this was her last hope: this mission, this man and the future they promised. Every day of her recovery was gut-wrenchingly hard as she struggled to believe in herself enough to let go of the habits that consumed her life and fought against the physical hold they had on her.
It was the hardest work she had ever done: fighting back from nothing and nowhere to somehow reconstruct her shattered self and battle to be whole again.
She knew that she could never really afford to get too smug or complacent. There were still plenty of big issues that dogged her, but with the help of her therapist, who she still saw once a week, she knew she was winning her battles – and that’s why she had finally agreed to marry Nathan – he had first asked her two years ago, but she hadn’t said yes until she’d known she was truly managing her issues, taking responsibility for her destructive behaviour and was in control of her life and addictions.
She raised her hands and rubbed her trademark short cropped pixie haircut and remembered the two crazy streaks of red that she’d stripped in this morning. She grinned. Nathan would love it.
Liz was early and pulled into the alley behind the mission to duck into the kitchen. She had two cartons of tinned salmon that she’d picked up today for the traditional weekend fishcakes. She helped the cook load bags of fresh bread rolls and stockpots of soup into her boot and headed over to the church hall.
Mikki alighted at the junction and walked down Fitzroy Street. Nathan was setting up the chairs and she greeted him with a smile and a hug. After enjoying his admiration of her new hair colour, she went into the kitchen to greet the other helpers.
The hall began to fill and Mikki started to get pre-public-speaking butterflies and nipped into the ladies for a nervous wee.
Tracy stood at the front door to greet arrivals and weed out potential trouble-makers. A couple of off-duty police often volunteered their time and loitered in the audience to protect the vulnerable group. She looked back to assess how the hall was filling up and saw Liz striding towards her.
‘Liz,’ Tracy smiled, and greeted her friend with a hug and a kiss. ‘We’ve missed you, how have you been?’
‘Oh, flat out Trace, so busy, and I’ve really missed being here.’
‘You must have been, but it’s all for a great cause,’ said Tracy with a reassuring smile. ‘Want to have a drink after?’
‘Love to,’ Liz said. She glanced at her watch. She still had time for a quick toilet trip and she made her way down the narrow corridor that ran alongside the kitchen wall.
The toilet door was locked, so Liz knocked.
‘I’m in here, I won’t be long,’ came the voice from within.
‘That’s okay,’ Liz sang out, and leaned on the wall opposite the toilet door to wait.
The dial flicked from engaged over to the green vacant sign.
Her wait was finally over.
Mim shut the garage door and turned inwards to face her house. The scene of devastation that lay before her knocked her for six. Her arms, full of Officeworks bags, dropped; her shoulders slumped. She sighed and just wanted to give up.
Her house, her beautiful house, was a wreck. She’d taken such pride in maintaining a showroom standard for their living space ever since the painstaking renovation had been completed six years earlier, and to see it in such a shambles was heart-breaking. Open packing boxes lined the corridor and every available surface. Kitchen cupboards spilled their guts onto the floors and benches. Stacks of butcher paper waited to wrap precious ornaments. And she didn’t need to go into the bedrooms to know what lay in wait there. Mountains of clothes, bed-linen and accessories towered ready to be allocated to the various bags; op shop, eBay, friends, tip, new house.
So much sorting! So much organising! Then there was the fridge to clean out, the pantry to go through, but they still had four more nights here so only half of it could be done now.
Mim slumped onto the stool at the kitchen bench, shoving aside a partially completed ‘to-do’ list, a tape measure and a wrapped Wedgwoo
d teapot. She dumped the shopping bag in front of her and rolls of masking tape and black markers spilled across the bench, joining the jumble.
Where to start? She’d given up writing the list because it was just so long. Whenever she thought of how much she had left to do she started to freak out. Everywhere she looked, all she could see were more jobs. She gazed towards one of the most daunting tasks: the laundry. It was an exercise in frustration: she needed the clothes clean to pack but as soon as she finished one lot another lot would hit the hamper. And what with the cupboards’ contents all over the benchtops there was no room to do any washing anyway.
Her gaze wandered back from the laundry and was arrested by the door frame.
‘Oh no!’ her hand flew to her cheek. She hadn’t thought of that, her children’s heights were recorded down the edge of the frame. At the start of each term the Woolcotts religiously measured their little ones, usually with much laughter and good-natured competition. They couldn’t take the frame with them … could they? Mim wondered momentarily before she dismissed the thought as foolish sentimentality.
But how could she leave those memories, that record of the kids’ growth? Then she remembered the three-year-old hand prints decorating the back of Charley’s door; the hallway where her babies had taken their first steps; the big oak tree that had served as cubby house, picnic spot, camping ground and school project aide.
It was so much more than a house. It had been their family home; her first real ‘grown-ups’ house … the place she’d brought her baby girl home from hospital.
This wasn’t the first time she’d felt like this since the family had made the decision to move. The sense of loss often overwhelmed her anticipation. But she couldn’t possibly voice these feelings to her mother or her friends; they would think she’d had a change of heart and the last thing she needed to hear was ‘I told you so’.