by Emily Brewin
She retracts the knife blade and heads across the store, planning the groceries she’ll buy before she goes home. Mitchell calls for help on the intercom, making her roll her eyes. She rounds the corner into aisle five and there he is. The bloke Mitchell was banging on about, standing side-on up the other end, scoping out the registers. Mitchell’s there too, serving the elderly couple, one nervous eye on the man. She’d know him anywhere. The slope of his shoulders and the way his fists hang like weights at his side. Joel.
The sight knocks the wind from her and for a moment she thinks she might fall. All the strength she’s built up over the years leaches away until she’s wobbly and spineless again. She leans, the shelf beside her holding her upright. She should bolt but she’s forgotten how.
He’s wearing a baseball cap and showy white sneakers, and looks like a shoplifter. Mitchell spots her and points at Joel, in a way he probably thinks isn’t obvious.
She wants to signal to him to stop but knows it’s only a matter of time before Joel turns around and spots her standing beside the instant noodles. It’s hard to see past that moment, his narrowed eyes accusing her of leaving him. He always said he’d hunt her down and here he is, true to his word.
Mitchell stops gesturing when Joel glances at him. She can see the slant of his nose, crooked from a fight and the deliberate way he lifts his hand to scratch it. She remembers those hands, the mass of them on her body, the pinch and twist and fiery pain they could inflict. She imagines them around her neck again and drops the Stanley knife. It clatters to the ground so that he begins to turn.
‘Can I help you?’ Dulcy confronts him in her clipped English.
He looks at her instead. Dulcy stands a little straighter, her black eyes sizing him up from chest height. She means business and crosses her arms.
Rosie takes a step back. A small one at first, then another, bigger and bigger until she’s almost halfway down the aisle.
She’s just about to run when he calls.
‘Rosie!’
It stops her in her tracks.
Then there are footsteps, like the ones she heard walking home from the station that night, each heavier than the last. They bring her back, make her blood boil. She doesn’t have to take what he wants to dish out. He strides towards her with narrowed eyes. This time she’ll stand her ground. It’s her territory after all, the store, the regulars, the flats across the yard, even Mitchell, staring at them like a dullard from behind the till.
‘Stop!’ she says, short and brutal.
But he doesn’t. He keeps coming, the fluoros above streaking his skin. The store fades away and suddenly he’s so close she can see the scar in his eyebrow from crawling through a broken window one night. The fear, and the sense she won’t escape him no matter how hard she tries, is suddenly paralysing. He puts a hand out to grab her.
‘Don’t you dare.’ Her muscles unlock and she steps back.
‘I just …’ His face is thinner, worn-out in a way that’s satisfying. He isn’t immortal. Instead he looks like an oversized teenager, in his bad tracksuit and cap, his hair still curling around his ears like it did a decade ago.
‘Fuck off,’ she spits, almost daring him to come closer. He doesn’t, so this time she steps forward.
‘Hey …’ Dulcy warns from somewhere nearby.
Rosie doesn’t listen. She wants to take a fist to his face for all the times he did it to her and then some, to have his jaw crack with the force, to feel the absolute satisfaction of it. The fact he might deck her back doesn’t even register, she hates him that much.
‘Go on,’ he says, as if reading her mind, eyes blazing, Petey’s eyes. They throw her off, mystify her for a moment so she forgets who she’s looking at.
It’s long enough for Dulcy to grab her arm and yank her backwards. ‘Leave,’ she snaps at Joel. ‘Or I call the police.’
Next thing she knows Joel is hurrying away, his ridiculous high-tops squeaking a path to the door and out into the night.
Rosie bolts, pushing past a man with a hot roast chook until she reaches the staffroom. It’s dark inside. She wedges herself into the space between the locker block and the lime green wall and squeezes her eyes shut tight.
When Dulcy finds her, Rosie’s thinking of Petey curled up on the end of Mr Granthall’s couch. She’s recalling the shape of his ears and the velvet texture of the skin inside his elbow.
The light comes on and she jumps.
Dulcy reaches in and helps her to a plastic chair at the table. Rosie puts her head in her hands and whimpers. She knows it’s only a matter of time before he comes back.
Isobel
ISOBEL YANKED THE STRIPED SCHOOL TIE from her neck and threw it on the floor. She’d had enough. Enough of scratchy uniforms, of being chosen last for netball, of pretending Jennifer’s jokes at her expense were funny. They weren’t. None of it was.
‘Why don’t you tell her to go jump?’ Alexis asked in the canteen line at lunchtime. But it was hard to explain the panic Jennifer struck into her heart. She had power over the other girls so it was better to stay on her good side. After a year and a half at Nottingham, Isobel had finally mastered the art of pretending she didn’t care, even when she did.
At home, all her mother wanted to hear was that school was going well. It was in the tight pull of her smile and the stiff way she rested her hands on her hips. Isobel shrugged and acted blasé in a way that felt powerful. But some days the pretending got too much.
‘I’m hungry,’ Lachie called from his spot in front of the telly, obviously forgetting their mother was still at work. He’d be at high school next year too, a Nottingham for boys, with fees to match. Their parents already worked Saturdays.
‘Get some food then,’ she yelled before slumping onto the bed.
On Sunday mornings her mother still listened to rock’n’roll and gossiped over the fence to the neighbours, but her sparkle never lasted long. Mostly she looked tired.
So the school stuff stayed bottled up until it was easy to believe that her hair was crap and her chest too flat and her mother too … much. Her teachers’ praise was the only thing that kept her afloat. Plus, good grades equalled fewer questions at home.
The front door opened then clicked shut.
‘Hi, kids,’ her mother called before poking her head around the bedroom door. Bags full of groceries swung from her arms, sending the flared sleeves of her minidress askew. ‘How’s your day, duck?’ She leaned against the doorframe heavily and lowered the groceries to the floor.
Isobel grimaced then kicked off her shoes.
Her mother crossed her arms, sending her tinny bangles into a frenzy, then arched her brow like a question and walked to the bed.
The coppery scent of the factory still lingered on the surface of her skin as she sat down and put an arm around Isobel. Isobel stiffened then slowly surrendered until her head rested on her mother’s shoulder. Once she gave in, it was easy to let the layers of toughness peel away.
‘I don’t want to go to Nottingham anymore …’
Her mother brushed her fringe from her eyes and sighed while Isobel waited. For a long time, there was nothing except for the low hum of the telly down the hall. She glanced uncomfortably at her solid white desk under the window. It was covered in textbooks and biros, with scratch-and-sniff stickers stuck to its drawers.
‘I’ve haven’t told you much about Nannie Essie, have I?’ her mother asked finally.
Isobel shook her head. Her mother rarely talked about Nannie Essie or her childhood, except to say she’d grown up in Collingwood, in a house with a corrugated bathroom and no running water.
‘She was magic …’
Isobel blinked, too old to believe it.
‘She could make a meal out of anything, potatoes, onions, leftover sausages, puddings out of stale bread. If there were apples she’d sprinkle them with sugar and bake them. She’d magic meals for the six of us every night of the week, out of nothing.’
Her arm slack
ened.
‘I thought it was magic anyway, until I was old enough to realise we were just dirt poor and that Nannie Essie didn’t have a choice.’
Isobel shifted uneasily as a Countdown poster fell off the wall opposite and fluttered to the floor. What did Nannie Essie and her baked apples have to do with anything?
‘When your grandad buggered off, I left school to help feed my brothers and sisters.’ She exhaled. ‘I was about your age. Fourteen.’
Lachie called again from the lounge room, ‘Is that you, Mum?’
They sat for a moment, her mother gathering up the pieces of her past to make sense of herself again. ‘Yeah, duck, I’m coming,’ she replied finally, before pecking Isobel on the cheek, a gentle full stop to the conversation.
A plunger of coffee sits untouched next to the plate of almond croissants she’d picked up from the French patisserie near home. She thought her father might like something different but he just wants a cup of milky tea in his favourite mug. A chipped, discoloured thing with a Western Bulldogs emblem half-scrubbed from the front of it. Even then he hardly drinks.
‘These are good,’ Lachlan says into the silence, a sliver of nut caught at the side of his mouth.
She offers her father one too. When he refuses, she bites awkwardly into it.
None of them mention her mother but it’s coming, with the pent-up feel of a storm, and suddenly the croissant is sickening. She puts it back on the plate, half-eaten.
Lachlan is down from Sydney again, following their most recent phone call.
‘We have to face facts,’ he told her late one night, ‘Mum’s getting worse.’
There was concern, but beneath it he was terrified their father might ask him to help care for their mother. Pregnancy had tipped the balance of power in Isobel’s favour, it seemed.
He found a hospice on the internet and sent her the link, a website so full of soft-focus images it resembled a golf club rather than a place people went to die. It was in a good suburb though. And this, they agreed, was the least they could do.
But really, it’s difficult to imagine their mother in such a place. Soft focus was never her style. Her wardrobe was a case in point, a clash of patterns and prints so flashy it strained the eye. She shimmered, sometimes too brightly.
Isobel agreed to visit the hospice with Lachlan anyway. It was as pallid as promised, as if the colourless walls symbolised the failing souls inside. It smelt of death too. Or at least that’s what she thought it must be, something between bathroom bleach and overcooked vegetables.
In the vast communal area, a nurse urged Lachlan to try out a state-of-the-art lounge chair, which moulded itself to his shape.
‘Perfect,’ he muttered nervously from its depths as a couple of glassy-eyed oldies watched silently from a table nearby.
It was hard to tell if he was referring to the chair or the hospice. She stood next to him, afraid to breathe too deeply, and focused on the baby, a beginning as opposed to an end.
‘Mum will fit right in,’ Lachlan continued, as if they were booking her in for an art class. He pressed a button on the control panel and the chair spat him out.
She should have laughed but she had to try not to cry instead.
Lachlan pours a coffee and takes a careful sip.
Her father sits opposite, head bowed so she feels like an awkward teenager, waiting for him to speak.
‘We’ve found a place for Mum,’ she says suddenly. ‘Somewhere she can be cared for properly when the time comes.’
Their father looks up finally, frowning.
‘You’re already struggling.’ She observes his five o’clock shadow and the wrinkled shirt he’s wearing, sure it’s the same one he had on last time she saw him.
He clears his throat gruffly.
‘We need a plan,’ Lachlan adds. ‘She wouldn’t want to be a burden.’
Isobel glares at him. He shrugs his shoulders.
Her father interrupts them with a loud sob, then another, so she tucks her face into her chin and glances at Lachlan. Crying is the last thing she expected. He once hammered a nail through his thumb without batting an eyelid. Yelling, yes, but crying? Shame washes over her like soapy water. It’s mortifying, watching him fall apart in front of them.
‘Dad?’ Lachlan says gently.
She should offer comfort but she’s forgotten how to touch him. When she was a child, he’d throw her so high in the air she thought she could fly before grasping her in a hug that took her breath away.
‘Dad,’ she says sternly instead, hoping to God he’ll pull himself together. ‘We really do have Mum’s best interests in mind.’
He splutters and turns red, fine grey hair quivering around his head. ‘What would you two know about your mother’s best interests?’ He thumps a fist on the coffee table. It’s oddly comforting. ‘She needs to be here, at home, with me.’
Lachlan crosses his arms.
‘She worked her fingers to the bone for you two. Stuffed her hands in that factory so you could both have those fancy school educations you seem to be making the most of.’
Isobel recoils at the mention of her mother’s hands, the permanently curled fingers, as if she’s still threading cable through a tube. She loves and hates them. They strike at something deep inside her.
‘That’s what mothers do,’ she snaps, even though she knows it’s not always true.
Her father shakes his head. ‘You’re selfish.’
She holds his gaze despite withering inside.
‘Both of you.’ He glares at Lachlan too. ‘Why don’t you just piss off and leave us alone again? You’ve been happy enough to do it up until now.’ He eases himself out of the armchair and heads down the hall to the bedroom where their mother is sleeping.
‘That went well,’ Lachlan mutters when he’s gone.
She stares at her father’s mug on the table, the deep chips on its rim and the tea stains running down its side, and she knows it’s useless. He’ll never let their mother go.
Rosie
ROSIE WAKES WITH A START one morning to the sound of sirens.
She’s been dreaming of Petey walking in a storm, his parka blood red against the rain. As the weather worsens he begins to run until all she can see of him is a spatter of red against the grey. In the distance, there is howling.
The dream presses on her chest like a stone as she remembers Joel; Joel in the supermarket, searching for her.
She bites hard into the soft cotton flesh of her pillow. He’s after her again. Now she knows it’s true. He’ll keep going until he gets her too, and Petey. She pictures her son in the room next door, the citrus scent of his skin and the pale knot of his hair in sleep. She hates Vera even more now for comparing him to Joel. Petey is love. Joel is hate. They couldn’t be further apart.
She rubs her eyes hard and focuses on the sirens. They’re in the yard below, and she wonders why. The coppers know the flats well, the druggies and deros, people down on their luck but families too. She stares at the coffee-coloured paint peeling off her bedroom wall and switches on the lamp beside her bed. It’s home. And the thought of leaving it because of Joel makes her skin crawl.
‘Muuuum!’ Petey barges through the door and launches himself onto the end of her bed. It creaks then sinks with his weight. ‘Ambo, ambo.’
She humours him. ‘Oh yeah? Where?’
‘Downstairs.’ He goes to the window. ‘Look, Mum, look.’
It takes courage to throw back the thick covers and expose her bare arms and legs to the cold. But she does it, just to hear the thrill in his voice.
She clears her throat and pushes the curtain aside. Below the ambos stop to check the stretcher, their yellow jackets vibrant against the muddy ground and drab buildings in the centre of the yard. There’s a flash of blue too, on the stretcher. Dressing-gown blue, like the one she bought Mr Granthall last week.
‘You shouldn’t worry about me, Rose,’ he said when she handed it to him. But she couldn’t help it.
She narrows her eyes for a better look. She can’t be sure but …
‘Mr Granthall,’ Petey yells in her ear. ‘It’s Mr, Mr …’
It’s true.
‘Granthall,’ Petey continues as she yanks a jumper over her pyjamas and pulls on her ugg boots.
She switches the telly on before she leaves. Danger Mouse flickers to life and Petey’s instantly transfixed.
‘Stay here,’ she commands, though she doesn’t need to.
The screen door slams shut and she turns to find the man from next door standing in her way. His beard is like a hairy donut around his mouth and she’s close enough to tell he had a ciggy for breakfast. Dishes clatter in the flat behind him.
‘Stupid old bastard had a fall or somethin,’ he sneers slightly. ‘That’ll be the end of him.’
She steps back, testing the screen door handle to make sure it’s locked. She hasn’t got time for this shit.
The man peers over the landing and for a moment she thinks he might spit. His wife comes to the door.
‘Did ya hear?’ She gestures at Mr Granthall’s door. ‘Heart attack, they reckon.’
Rosie stares at her, focusing on the way her pink lips stick slightly at the corners when she talks.
‘His dog was goin’ psycho.’ The man steps away from the railing and scratches his crotch. ‘Lucky the missus called triple zero.’
When she gets to the yard, the ambos are pulling away. They’ve got the sirens on but she runs, bashing on the driver’s side door.
‘Where are you taking him?’ she shouts through the window.
The ambo glances at her and mouths what she thinks is the Royal Melbourne then they pull out, blue and red lights flashing, into the traffic.
She imagines Mr Granthall in the back, on a stretcher, staring at the roof. She hopes he’s staring because if he is, he can see, and if he can see, he must be okay. Her throat goes dry.