by Joy Dettman
Two days later her washing machine was delivered along with a new bedroom suite.
‘Where do you think the money is coming from to pay for that?’ Sissy asked.
Earmuff clad, Amber failed to hear the question. She failed to dose Reginald when he could no longer rise to get his pills. Dosed herself each morning with one of his anxiety pills. They and the earmuffs altered her perspective. She ordered two outdoor blinds, one for the kitchen, one for her bedroom window. She ordered blackout drapes, peacock blue for the sitting room, dusty pink for her own. She bought two cans of spray deodorant and with it sprayed Sissy’s frocks, sprayed her bed linen. With multiple spray packs of weedkiller she sprayed along all the fencelines and around her clothes line. Sprayed the dog when he pushed aside a lose paling to poke his nose through, the better to bark. He was a big dog who would require more than one loose paling to squeeze through. For an hour, there was a war of wills at that narrow gap. The dog moved before Amber’s spray pack was empty.
Sissy’s well-shaped eyebrows became one. The roots of her hair grew through steel grey. She turned the deodorant spray on Amber one afternoon. She snatched her earmuffs and smashed them beneath her shoe. Amber took an extra pill, caught a bus and bought another two pairs, both red.
It came to a head, as an abscess will always come to a head if given time. Reginald’s stumps became infected and an abscess developed in his groin. Again an ambulance carried him away. Alma and Valda came to pack his case and collect the pills his women had not been supervising. They stared at Amber’s earmuffs but understood why she wore them. Alma turned the television off. Sissy screamed at her to get her interfering nose out of her house. She did. She walked out to the backyard to turn the hose on the barking dog. Accustomed to weedkiller, the pure hose water incited him to riot. He was halfway over the fence before Alma ran.
‘Something needs to be done about that animal,’ she warned.
Something needed to be done about the indoor animal, who barked and howled just as loud and long. She accused the Duckworths of cutting Reginald’s toes off by expecting him to mow a lawn. She blamed them for her bedraggled state, for her mono eyebrow, accused Alma and Valda of applying for that house in the middle of nowhere where there was no tram, no bingo, no nothing and now no car and only doing it because they wanted a murderer to have her own bedroom.
‘It wasn’t of our doing, Cecelia,’ Alma said. She and Valda, along with a dozen others, had been subjected to Sissy’s phone attacks. ‘You wrote multiple letters to the department demanding to be moved.’
‘You liar! I didn’t write to anybody!’
‘Your cousin Steven’s son has seen your letters, Cecelia.’
There’d always been a Duckworth capable of gaining required information. Amber backed off to the kitchen to cut steak into neat cubes for a stew.
‘Steven’s son said that you harassed the department, that your file is an inch thick,’ Valda said.
Sissy wasn’t dumb. She’d never been dumb. She rose from her couch, knowing who had harassed the Housing Commission for that cursed three-bedroom house.
The steak landed on the floor. Amber vacated the kitchen then the yard. The dog barked. Alma and Valda packed a second case for Sissy and they took her away – and forgot Reginald’s pills.
Amber glanced at the lined-up bottles while picking up cubes of steak. She didn’t cook her stew that night, but found occupation in making neat slits in each cube and carefully inserting into each cube one of Reginald’s pills, in the main his heart pills, minute things. She added a few painkillers, but not those for his anxiety. They found a new home in her handbag.
At midnight, Number 10’s house in darkness, Amber took a bowl of steak outside to the paling fence where she eased the swinging paling to the side. The dog rose to investigate, so she tossed him a bloody treat. Perhaps he recalled similar flying manna the day Reg cut off his toes. His snuffling told her he’d found the steak so she tossed another cube, and continued tossing. He was eating out of the bowl before it was empty. She may well have made a friend for life.
Slept well that night. It was after nine before she rose from her bed.
The dog didn’t.
*
It took seven weeks for the doctors and the Duckworths to heal Reginald’s stumps. They returned him and his new pills, his feet shod in toeless sandals. They returned him to a changed house. The floors were carpeted; the worn couch, stained by Reginald’s blood, had been replaced by one of black vinyl, but the bathroom – it didn’t really belong in a Commission house. The elderly green bath with its overhead shower had made way for a boxed-in shower recess with a folding glass door. The gruesome pedestal basin and wall cabinet with its stained mirrored door had given way to a small white vanity unit and a wall to wall mirror, which added both light and size to that tiny room. Its installation had so sorely depleted Amber’s elasticised pocket accounts, Margaret Hooper had applied for her birth certificate. Amber knew Margaret’s date of birth – somewhat later than Amber’s. She’d died in ’69.
Sissy, clad in diabolical floral, returned to Number 12. She believed the Housing Commission had renovated the bathroom in order to tempt her home to their taxpayer-subsidised house. The Duckworths, more worldly folk, didn’t, but, delighted to be rid of Sissy, asked no questions. Nor did the city branch of the Commonwealth Bank when well-dressed, well-spoken Miss Margaret Hooper opened a bank account, only to simplify the cashing of her first pension cheque.
Life improved at Number 12 thereafter. No dog barked, Reginald was back behind the wheel of a reliable car and Sissy was again at his side on pension days, and off to church and lunch on Sundays, her hair again nut brown, her mono eyebrow two.
My dear Lorna,
It is some time since I’ve written. I hope my letter finds you well as it leaves me. You will be delighted to learn that my family and I have moved into a lovely new home in the outer suburbs. Do note, however, that my postal address has not altered . . .
POTATO FRIENDSHIP
Sissy tested the menus in cafés and restaurants on pension days. She tested swollen plates of sweet and sour chicken on beds of fried rice, tested ham, pineapple and cheese pizzas. November was young when she discovered baked potatoes with cheese and bacon bits, buried beneath an avalanche of coleslaw and sour cream. She didn’t like the owners of that small café; they hardly spoke a word of English, but if you held on to your receipt, you could get a slice of cake or a chocolate-iced, cream-filled doughnut and a cappuccino for two dollars.
She ate her fortnightly potatoes alone until January ’84 when the streets and shops were overrun by mothers and their kids, as were the half-dozen tables in that baked potato café. She’d had her eye on a table when she’d ordered, but before the plate was in her hand, a woman with three kids claimed it. There was a table for two against the wall, and only one sitting at it. Her overloaded plate in hand, she had to eat somewhere, so she approached the lone eater.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ The woman had her mouth full, but she shook her head, so Sissy sat down.
‘Very crowded today,’ the woman said when her mouth was empty.
‘I hate school holidays,’ Sissy said.
She ate her potato down to the skin, then ate the skin, wiped her mouth and chin with the supplied paper serviette while watching the stranger use her serviette to wipe coleslaw from her ample breast.
‘Will you look after my chair for me while I get my cappuccino?’ the stranger said.
‘Get mine while you’re about it,’ Sissy said, offering her receipt and two dollars. ‘I’ll have a cream doughnut.’
They discussed doughnuts while cream squelched as it ever had onto Sissy’s top lip. They discussed the size of the cappuccino cups, then the stranger mentioned bingo.
‘Me and Mum used to have lunch here every Wednesday then go to bingo,’ she said.
‘I used to play where I used to live,’ Sissy said.
‘Mum’s dementia has got too bad to take he
r anywhere now.’
‘My mother has had dementia since I was born,’ Sissy said.
Women with a common problem will speak of it. They paid the full price for a second doughnut and cappuccino, and as cream squelched once more they compared mothers and spoke of long dead fathers, and Doveton. The stranger lived in a two-bedroom unit just around the corner from the bus stop. Sissy spoke of her three-bedroom house and her husband, who drove a car, who was probably waiting to drive her home.
*
Reginald had given up waiting at the car. He was seated in a locked cubicle in the public toilets, carefully pouring half of a litre bottle of cheap gin into a litre bottle of lemon cordial, half of which had been emptied into the toilet bowl. He had two small bottles of soda water at his feet, and when done with his decanting, he tilted the cordial to mix the brew, opened a bottle of soda water, poured a little on the floor, then carefully poured enough cordial to fill the space. Another tilt to mix the brew, then the taste test.
Oh, sweet, sweet memories of Port Moresby and black breasts.
*
The stranger’s name was Lacy Hopkins and she was a talker. ‘It was supposed to be Lucy. Mum always blamed Dad’s handwriting, and he always blamed the bloke who typed up my birth certificate. Mum used to call me Lucy. Some days she doesn’t know who I am now.’
A woman with a screaming kid and a baby came into the café, and all eyes turned to her.
‘Have you got any kids?’ Sissy asked.
‘I was married for seven years but I couldn’t get pregnant, then my hubby got a girl from work pregnant and he moved in with her. Have you got any?’
‘Humph,’ Sissy said.
Lacy was smaller than Sissy, though not a lot smaller. She was shorter, a few years younger.
‘I get a carer’s pension for looking after Mum, but my brother put her name down at a nursing home. He said his wife is sick of looking after her. And who is she to talk, I’d like to know. They only take her one day a week, or most weeks it’s only one day. I’ve got her for the rest. Have you got help with yours?’
‘Humph,’ Sissy said.
‘He said I can move in with him if we put Mum into a home, but I know how long that would last. I’d have to get a job. I used to be a nursing aide before I got married. I went back to it after he deserted me. There’s always plenty of work for nursing aides at the homes.’
‘How do you put people’s names down at them?’
‘Just go there and fill in a form, or I think that’s what my brother did. He said Mum’s doctor told him to. Doctor Kemp has been looking after her for years. He makes house calls now and he bulk bills us. How long have you been living down here?’
‘Since February.’
‘We’ve been living in our unit coming up three years, and I’d rather live there with Mum the way she is than with my brother – not that I don’t get on good with him. It’s his wife. I mean, I know she doesn’t want me. She just got rid of her last son. They had three and two daughters. I’ve got three great nieces, and one on the way.’
The screaming kid drove them out to the street. They walked together down to the supermarket where they separated, but met up again at the magazine stand where each had picked up a copy of New Idea.
‘I was thinking a minute ago that I should have asked you if you’d like to come to bingo with me on Wednesday. My brother can sit with Mum,’ Lacy said. ‘That’s if you . . . if you’re not doing something better.’
‘I’m never doing anything,’ Sissy said.
They found Reginald waiting in a hot car. Sissy dumped her bags in with his six pack of soda water and his bottles of lemon cordial. Lacy dumped her bags in the boot and when Sissy failed to introduce her, Lacy introduced herself.
‘Reg,’ he said.
Raised in the era of manners, when men lifted their hat to a lady, when they opened car doors, he opened the rear door for Lacy, and when he dropped her off at her unit, he opened the boot and lifted her shopping out.
‘I’ll give you a call if we’re okay for Wednesday,’ she said to Sissy. ‘Nice meeting you, Reg. Thanks for the lift.’
That’s how it began, with a baked potato and nursing homes and Wednesday bingo, where, on her first Wednesday, Sissy won a pair of green towels.
Lacy had lived. She’d done things. She’d flown to Queensland, been to stage shows and, until twelve months ago, she’d gone out to dinner at hotels when they’d had an entertainer who was worth listening to. She’d seen Kamahl. She drank wine and spoke about the night she’d drunk three gin squashes and could barely remember being driven home. Sissy had never stepped inside a hotel. The Duckworths didn’t approve of drinking.
Lacy knew about cheap weekend bus trips to New South Wales to play the pokies. She’d been on a few trips with the girls she’d worked with and had taken her mother on one trip before she’d got too bad to take anywhere.
‘It only costs ten dollars for the bus, the motel room and a cooked breakfast and all you have to do is put a few bob into the pokies. I put in twenty cents one night and won thirty dollars. It paid for my trip and then some,’ Lacy said.
Sissy, having no experiences to offer, listened.
‘We ought to book a trip, Sissy. My brother or one of my nieces would stay with Mum for the night.’
The Duckworths disapproved strongly of poker machines and of any form of gambling but Sissy wanted to do something and, never having gambled, she didn’t know whether she disapproved of it or not. So she rode a bus to Moama with Lacy and rode it home full of approval for poker machines. Her purse was heavy with five-cent coins which had come pouring out of the throat of a machine two minutes after she’d started pulling on its handle.
‘You’re lucky for me,’ Sissy said.
‘You’ve been a godsend to me,’ Lacy said.
Poor Sissy had never been a godsend to anyone. Poor, poor Sissy hadn’t known friendship since Margaret Hooper. Nineteen eighty-four was turning into the best year of her life.
*
Not for Jim. Molly Squire was rejected for the second time that year. He was in one of his silent moods the day Trudy breezed in with Sophie and two males. Jim might have shaken himself out of the doldrums for Trudy, but his house full of youths, he sat alone for the two hours they were there. He walked them out to their car when they left, saw Joe Flanagan’s maroon Toyota pull into the kerb on the far side of Hooper Street and back-pedalled to the house.
‘Off you go, love,’ Jenny said to Trudy. ‘Drive carefully.’ She didn’t want her and her friends to witness a Flanagan brawl.
Jenny had witnessed a few this past year. They weren’t pretty. The most recent of them had been caused by a final payment to Lila for permission to use the leftover photographs in a third witch book. She’d demanded five hundred, then taken off with it and Joe’s car, which he’d reported stolen. Some women don’t know how to handle men, Lila had once said. Some men refuse to be handled, and Lila had struck one.
Jenny watched him drag that well-travelled case from his boot. He didn’t carry it across the road. He pitched it. Too heavy to fly far, it landed hard on the concrete guttering. He pitched a handful of banknotes after it and when Lila stopped cursing him to chase his notes, he took off around the corner, his passenger side door hanging open. Lila chased one flying twenty halfway to Blunt Street before she caught it. Jenny picked up another from the gutter. She picked up a five.
‘Mean old bastard,’ Lila panted. ‘I’ll go him for every penny he’s got.’ She claimed the twenty and the five, retrieved a ten blown into the rose hedge, rolled her loot, tucked it beneath her bra strap, then asked: ‘Who were those blokes with Trudy?’
Jenny had forgotten the blokes and Trudy. ‘What?’
‘Trudy’s blokes?’
They’d broken the mould when they’d made Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman/Macdonald/Flanagan. Her case lay, half on, half off the road, spilling its load. She had two twenty-dollar notes, a ten and two fives to her name but could prob
ably give a better description of Trudy’s male friends than Jenny, who had fed them. What can you do with a woman like that, a woman who laughs when she attempts to pick up her case and everything she owns lands on the road? One hinge had ripped free from the cheap cardboard. There’s nothing you can do with such a woman, other than make her a coffee, donate an old case as a replacement, give her a bed for the night, then buy her a one-way bus ticket to Melbourne.
‘See ya when I see you, eh?’ Lila said.
Jenny waved the bus on its way, praying that Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman/Macdonald/Flanagan wouldn’t come back, that she’d find herself a new bloke, or a job, or the Salvos.
Hope budded in Jenny’s breast that Christmas. No tree that year, no cooking. They ate barbecued chicken in Nobby and Rosemary’s backyard, with their sons and their grandkids and Trudy and Georgie, and on Boxing Day, in Myers, when Jenny saw the back view of a woman who might have been Lila, she grabbed Jim’s arm and walked him fast to the exit.
In January Trudy moved from the Box Hill hospital to Frankston, and Jen and Jim were afraid she’d come across old hospital files which might give up the details of her birth, but she wasn’t there long. In June she flew to India – and why, in God’s name, would anyone choose to go to India?
She was due to fly home the night the doorbell rang at ten, and Jenny feared her plane had crashed when she opened the front door and saw the constable. Then she saw Lila. Didn’t unlock the security door.
‘Look what he did to me!’ Lila wailed.
Jenny could see little through the security mesh. She unlocked it and looked at what he’d done. Old Joe was a dairyman. He’d been raised on a dairy farm. He’d never shorn a sheep in his life and he hadn’t done much of a job of shearing his wife. Lila still had her ears, she still had a few hanks of two foot long hair behind her ears, but the rest was gone.
‘He sat on me and cut it off then he pitched your case into the incinerator and poured petrol all over it. Everything I owned was in it, and he burned it.’