Slights

by Kaaron Warren

  "You liked him."

  "Well, anyway, he was there. They all asked about you. None of them knew what happened. There were some cops there, writing notes, making everyone feel guilty, even if they hadn't done anything."

  That was supposed to make me feel guilty, I suppose. I said, "So what did the shoe-guy have to say?"

  "He asked me how my feet were. That's the first thing he said, how are those feet of yours? Sounds like he went a bit down hill after Mum kicked him out. He got a job in the shoe department of some big shop, but he said they sold mainly vinyl shoes, and people tried them on without socks. He said it was disgusting."

  "He was pretty disgusting, don't forget."

  "He's married now, to a woman with tiny little angel's feet. He said to me, 'Not as lovely as your Mum's.'"

  I shrugged. I'd received Dad's big plates o' meat. "He told you all this in how many minutes?"

  "Oh, I gave him a lift home. He got there by public transport, can you believe it? A train, two buses and a long walk."

  "I'm sure he had the right shoes for it."

  "Oh, ha ha. He lives in a flat with his wife and kid. Ugly kid. The wife doesn't speak English very well but he likes that. They don't talk; everything's non-verbal. He said it made him very happy."

  "Yeah, and makes it harder for her to get away. So the kid was ugly?"

  "Yeah, bit of a slug. You know. Just sat around not talking. I smiled at it and it blinked like I was insane."

  "Poor old shoe man. Were there lots of shoes in his house? Did he have a shoe tree?"

  "They take their shoes off at the front door and leave them there. I didn't do it but they didn't say anything."

  Peter hated to take his shoes off. There is no deception to be had in socks or bare feet.

  "He asked me to stay for tea and I said, 'I've got family to get to.' He said, 'Oh, Little Stevie. Little Stevie.' It was like his wife recognised your name. She came over, rested her hands on his shoulders. He started crying, Steve, I swear. Tears ran down his face and he's going honk honk. I said, 'Oh, well, must be off,' like I was there on a social visit. 'Thanks for coming,' he says, snot running down his face. It was pretty disgusting."

  "Who else was at the funeral?"

  Peter looked away. "I wasn't going to tell you about her."

  "Who?"

  He coughed. "The garden lady. Do you remember her? Eve?" It was astonishing he would imagine I could forget her, when he was the one who threw me to her in the first place. Peter never warned me about Eve. I'll ask him why one day. I'll ask him how he could have led me into that woman's clutches. Was he so terrified he was happy for me to go in his place? That didn't work well; she had us both, then.

  I followed Peter home from school one day when I was ten, hoping to catch him at something disgusting. Doing detective work to find out why he was always so late.

  He collected stones, ate some Twisties. I picked up the packet he discarded. When Mum was cooking the casserole, I asked her to put the Twistie packet on a tray and put it into the oven for a few minutes. It shrank beautifully. I told her I wanted to make a collection and the kids at school would give me their empty packets. That was okay, Mum said. So long as I wasn't eating the rubbish myself.

  Every time I followed Peter after that he had a packet of something. He'd stop when he rounded the corner from school, shuffle through his school bag and pull out his treasure. I collected and shrank them all, then presented them to him in a pile.

  "I know plenty," I told him. I told Mum I was training to be in the softball team so had to practise after school. Ages later, Mum said, "Whatever happened to the softball thing? You were so keen for a while there. Didn't you get in the team?"

  "Yeah, they picked me," I said. This was a good answer.

  "I'll come and watch you practise one time."

  I knew where I was on those missing afternoons, and I didn't want her finding out. "Nah, don't worry, Mum. It's pretty boring if you're not playing."

  Peter went to the same house every afternoon, a neat one, not like ours. Nice flowers in lines and the lawn all green and even. As I got older, I heard gossip about the woman who lived there, though I never added our stories, Peter's and mine.

  In high school, the boys talked about mowing her lawn; she had a different boy every week, made them strip their shirts off and work in the garden till they glowed with sweat. Then she summoned them inside, where she gave them an envelope full of money and a glass of beer, regardless of their age. Before they were allowed to enter and drink their beer, they had to clean the tools; rake, spade, shovel, mower, and stack them in the garage. I heard of rebellion just once; a boy who said, "That wasn't part of the deal." She said, "And we must stick to deals," paid him his money, sent him away, never hired him again. Peter and I put the things away and took a bubble bath afterwards.

  Eve the garden lady was in control of her boys; had them terrified. Most were strangely coy about the activities which followed the beer drinking. I think perhaps nothing at all happened, that perhaps she talked to them, or asked them questions, perhaps embarrassed them with her interest. I think perhaps the more boys who visited her without saying what happened, the more boys were too frightened to admit nothing went on. I imagined whispered conversations between two boys, one sleeping over, restless on the floor, one comfortable in a known bed.

  "You know when you went to mow the lawn?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did you ever tell anyone what happened?"

  "Nah. Did you?"

  "Nah. I didn't know what to say."

  "Me neither."

  "Because I didn't know what happened to the others."

  "Me neither. So what did happen to you?"

  "I dunno. What happened to you?"

  "Nothing, really."

  "Me neither."

  That's what should have happened. I don't know what did happen to those boys. I know the woman's garden was very neat for many years. She became a joke as we all got older, as she became elderly rather than middle-aged.

  I think perhaps she mostly liked children.

  I followed Peter to her house three times.

  He was crying the third time he came out of her house. He managed to control himself before he got to our street. He stopped on the corner and seemed to be stroking out the wrinkles in his clothes.

  I teased him at dinner. Teased and teased until he began to cry again. He wouldn't look at us and he hardly ate a thing.

  "Ate too many Twisties," I said. "Ate another mother's tea. Don't you like Mum's tea any more? Don't you love Mum?" I swung my feet till my school shoes kicked the underside of the table. Every second word I kicked and plates and glasses rattled.

  "Tell her to stop it," said Peter.

  "Tell the lady? Tell the lady to stop what? Stop doing bad smells?"

  Mum giggled. She loved crude jokes; now she could laugh at them without Dad stopping her with a grown-up's look.

  Then I blew raspberries at Peter till he was so angry he stopped crying.

  Mum had been laughing; she always thought I was funny. She said, "Oh, Peter. Do you think your father would have cried at the table like that?"

  "I never cry," I said.

  "Yes, Stevie's my little strong girl," she said. She smiled fondly at me, her eyes crinkling in a way Peter never got to see. She had to work for my love; Peter's she got just for being alive.

  After dinner, I followed him to his room and jumped on his bed.

  "Peter's got a girlfriend, Peter's got a girlfriend."

  "Shut up."

  "Is she a nice lady?"

  "None of your business."

  "Tell me or else I'll tell Mum you go to a lady's house."

  Peter said, "I'll take you to meet her if you like. She's very nice."

  With those words, he offered me up for sacrifice. One day I'll ask him why he did that. He should have protected me no matter what.

  On my first visit to Eve, she was very nice. Peter left me alone; snuck away. She sta
red into my eyes, looking for something.

  She gave me lemonade to drink. We sat down on her pretty bed and she held my hands.

  "You're much sweeter than your brother," she said. She tore open a brown paper bag; lollies spilled out.

  "Your brother eats many of these. I'm surprised he can eat his dinner."

  "Sometimes he doesn't. He eats too many Twisties."

  She laughed. "Too many Twisties. Peter's a good boy, though. Very kind. He makes me very happy. Does he make you happy?"

  I shook my head.

  "He does lovely things to me. He rubs powder into my feet. My husband doesn't like to do that. And he washes my hair in the bath. And I wash his hair, too. Sometimes he arrives here a little grubby from school. You look like you might be a bit dirty, too."

  I couldn't smile; I had a face full of lollies.

  Peter and I never discussed the things which happened to us at Eve's house.

  We had to dance around in these special clothes and she took home movies of us. The clothes she dressed us in were too small. We looked like we had doll's clothes on. Her children had died when they were younger than us.

  She told us to wave at Daddy but our Daddy was dead.

  "Daddy's coming in now. You children better go and play." But all there was was Lisa Sargeant's brother, who was much older and very handsome with that perfectly flawing scar on his chin, but still only a kid. As we left, he stared after us, and I think I've been on the inside of a look like that. I wanna go with you. Don't leave me here alone. We left him there to be the Daddy.

  I tried never to arrive dirty at Eve's place, because I didn't want a bath, but the time they drained the creek nearby was the chance of a lifetime.

  Every kid who had any control over parents was there. Kids said there was gold at the bottom of the creek, bodies, dead kids, treasures for all.

  There was a car, a push bike, three headless dolls and a bunch of wallets. We scrabbled on the creek bed, searching for clues, until the people chased us off. Then I went to Eve's and had a bath, but it was worth it.

  We always had to leave when Eve's real husband Harry came home. We had to be out that damn door and gone before his car hit the driveway. Once I pretended to leave but hid in the alcove near the front door, behind the plants. It was very, very dark there. When you first walked in from sunlight, you were blind. It was that dark. You had to stand a moment, only just inside, and wait for sight to return. She'd say to you, "Come on, don't dilly dally letting the flies fly in," and made you feel like you were scared.

  I hid there and didn't move, wanting to know what happened to the house when I wasn't there. Was she a robot who stopped moving? I also wanted to see what the husband was like. I wanted to know whose brother he was. Bang bang front door, clunk of something.

  Noises.

  It was hard to identify what was going on.

  I'm told my great-grandfather was wonderful at picking sounds. He had perfect hearing. It was his party trick; people would try stranger and stranger sounds and he always got them.

  I'm good with faces. Not as good with sounds. So it took me a while, crouched there behind the shiny ferns, smelling dirt and old furniture polish, to realise the thumping and the shouting meant he was beating her up.

  I wished Peter was there to hear it. I wished I could run upstairs and watch it. I crawled out to hear better.

  "You mad bitch. I told you to stop bringing kids here. I'll have you locked up, you mad woman. You've gotta stop it."

  Did he know about all those teenagers carefully mowing the front lawn?

  "I'll call the kids' parents if you do it again. I mean it. Leave the poor little mites alone."

  She cried, but she liked to cry. She cried when she made me suckle at her breast.

  After that, I wasn't scared of Harry.

  Eve never tired of my daily visits. She loved to listen to me natter, so I thought up stories on the walk to her place. If I couldn't think of a good story, I told her about a TV show I'd watched, playing all the parts, being descriptive.

  "Who needs a TV with you around?" she said, but she must have been very bored.

  "Yes. I remember her," I said. Peter nodded, as if it was a happy memory we shared. It's hard to connect to that powerlessness. When you're a child, you do as the adults say, unless you're willing to be punished.

  "I didn't talk to her," Peter said. I knew that small rebellion won him a lot. "You're lucky you missed it," he said.

  Lucky I missed my mother's funeral. If that's my luck, I'm in trouble.

  In hospital, the smell of jasmine cheered me. There were flowers from people I'd forgotten or hadn't seen in years. My school teacher Alice Blackburn sent flowers to me in hospital, not to my Mum's dead body. It was frangipani and jasmine from her own garden. The card said, "To remind you of the wonders of life."

  Somehow I knew her card meant the opposite of what it said. We once had a discussion in class, about what a dead body might smell like, because we were reading a series of hard-nosed detective novels, all full of bodies and gore, and wondering about the imagery. She thought dead bodies smelt of frangipani and jasmine.

  The card said, "Call me."

  The police spoke to a lot of people after Mum died, and I had to prove a hundred times that it really was an accident, and one not caused by my imaginary deep-seated hatred of my mother.

  "I didn't hate my mother, I loved my mother."

  "And you didn't deliberately become intoxicated in order to lose your judgement, thus causing the accident?"

  "I wasn't intoxicated. I wasn't even a bit pissy. I only had a couple of drinks."

  "The head waiter at the restaurant where you had your lunch claims you were loud and over-excited."

  "And you find that at odds with my natural character?" I said. Even sitting up in a hospital bed I wasn't scared of them. The cop smiled. I thought he liked me and hoped he'd offer me a lift home when I was well. On the way I'd tell him about Dad and his career, remind him who I was.

  Peter said I was lucky to be Dad's daughter; I got off without a charge. He said if my father hadn't been a cop who died on the job, it would have been manslaughter. He reckoned I was lucky just to lose my licence.

  I think it was because the cop who interviewed me liked me.

  And Mum was a cop's wife, wasn't she? Why didn't they swear to avenge her, if that's why I got off?

  The cops felt sorry for me; they tracked down so many people who said they didn't know me well enough to talk of my feelings for Mum. The cop running it, grey hair, wrinkles, held my hands and stroked me with his thumbs, said, "Isn't there someone who knows you?"

  "Peter," I said. "My brother has to know."

  "We've asked him. He gave us pages about how he felt, nothing about you. What about someone who looks up to you, who might see you as a role model?"

  The only person who'd ever looked up to me was Tim, little Tim who was allowed to be bad when I babysat. And his brother Lee pretended not to care but he did. I'd say he worshipped the air I exhaled.

  "There's a couple of kids I used to babysit. The Walshes."

  Laurie, the young cop, gave me his card and said I should call him if anything came up. I tried to imagine he wanted to see me, that we could drive to a beach cabin which had been in his family for years and listen to the surf. I didn't call him though. Peter put me off, saying how all the cops would know what we did because cops told each other everything.

  My nurse let me walk around looking at the sick people. She didn't know what I was doing and didn't much care. It was the dying I wanted to see. Those in their rooms waiting for one more breath before the last.

  It seemed astonishing that I had been so close to death. All I could see were the faces of the people in that cold room. Two weeks I spent in hospital, then I sat up in bed and said, "I want to go home."

  Didn't the papers love that, too?

  As I was recovering, the cut on my head scabbed and was so itchy I couldn't resist picking and scratchin
g it. It made the scar worse, but it was good to be marked with something. People were sympathetic; they asked me how close I'd come to death. It was like pregnancy; everyone thought my body belonged to them. When the scar was no longer bright red, people stopped asking. They didn't like to. People won't let me tell the story; they think it will upset me. But it's like when you see a cripple, or an amputee, or a sufferer of elephantiasis. It's far better to have a good stare and smile at them than to look away as if there was nothing to see. Everyone knows there is a story to tell, but they won't ask me the questions. Where were you going? Why was your mother with you? Why did you drive so fast? Was she in pain? Were you in pain? Does it still hurt? Do you feel guilty? What was it like to almost die?