“Well, if I was twenty years older…” I told her with a half-grin.
She laughed—as did most of the people listening—and waved her hand dismissively at me. “Twenty? Twenty? You shameless flatterer. Here, have another mandarin, they’re full of Vitamin C.”
I glanced sideways at Mrs Dejanovic; she was still cross-checking her orders like nothing had happened. I didn’t know what to make of it.
I got some insight when I went out to the carpark at lunchtime: I was sitting in the peace and quiet of my car working away at my muesli bar, when I spotted Mrs Dejanovic coming out of reception and going to sit in her car, too. I had thought she was doing exactly what I was, just trying to get out of the noise, but when I walked past her car on the way back inside, she had the drivers’ seat wound back and she was sleeping.
That’s right, I thought, stopping to look at her for a second. She works night shift as a cleaner just like Mum used to.
I was so distracted thinking about it that I nearly walked straight into the women’s toilets—a habit that was really difficult to break—and then, red-faced, quickly high-tailed to the men’s.
The factory obviously had a lot more men than women because there were several guys already in the men’s and, despite the fact there was a long row of urinals, there was only one cubicle. Naturally, it was already occupied. Hyper aware of how I looked—I could see my smooth face in the mirror, and it was in very stark comparison to all the rough chins and beards around me—I waited impatiently for the cubicle to be free. Several men passed through the toilets while I waited, and every single time someone looked at me, every single time, I felt like their eyes would be able to see right through my clothes. I was just waiting for someone to say, “Hang on—!” and for them all to chase me out of the factory brandishing pitchforks.
I was busy squinting down at the pair of feet I could see under the wall of the cubicle and wondering what the hell that guy was up to, when three more men walked into the toilets.
To my horror, I recognised one of them.
“Hey, look who it is!” Mr Dejanovic, dressed in his work shirt and overalls, greeted me and then gestured at me to his two friends. “This is Briana’s boy. They’re trialling him in the office today.” They nodded at me.
I smiled tightly at the three of them, and then glanced nervously at the cubicle again. Hurry up, I thought, sweating.
One of the men laughed good-naturedly. “So that’s who he is! I saw him walking down the gangway with Vera and I thought he was one of the auditors. Why are you wearing that suit? You don’t need to wear that getup all the way out here.”
They were all looking at me, and I realised he expected me to answer. My throat felt like sandpaper. “It’s the only work clothes I own,” I rasped, feeling excruciatingly self-conscious.
Mr Dejanovic’s two friends looked a bit surprised by that as they continued to the urinals, so he explained, “He used to work for Frost.”
Their eyebrows jumped as they unzipped. “What are you doing here, then?” one of them asked, and before I could look away, I got a really sudden and unwelcome eyeful of Mr Dejanovic that I did not need to see. I couldn’t stop myself from going bright fucking red.
Mr Dejanovic noticed but thank god didn’t guess why. “He quit his job to be an artist, which by the looks of things didn’t work out so well for him.”
“What a waste of a good job,” his friend lamented, sighing, as I stared at the ceiling to avoid any more embarrassment. “This is why they shouldn’t give those jobs to kids straight out of school. They don’t appreciate them.”
“They also don’t have families to support or mortgages to pay,” Mr Dejanovic’s voice agreed. “Or have any idea what hard work is. They just want everything handed to them on a silver platter.”
“That’s exactly right: my kids are just hanging around waiting to inherit my house, I think.”
“Sounds just like my house,” Mr Dejanovic said dryly, which made me look down from the ceiling in surprise.
They’re not inheriting your house, I thought, frowning, you’re about to lose it because of Andrej’s gambling, and Bree isn’t ‘hanging around’, you basically told her to get out unless she could pay board!
I wasn’t going to say anything of course, but Mr Dejanovic saw that movement and locked eyes with me in the mirror in warning. It was such a fierce stare that it actually made the breath catch in my throat. To hammer it home, he said, “Maybe I’ll just sell it and move to the mountains so they wait a bit longer before trying to bury me!”
While all the men were laughing with him and I was hoping the ground would just open up and swallow me, the door to the stall finally swung open. I pushed past the poor guy coming out of it and fled inside, standing in the safety of those four walls while I listened to the three of them complain about children of today. Even after their voices had long since disappeared, I didn’t come out of the cubicle until I was 100% certain they were definitely gone and I wouldn’t just look like I’d seen a ghost.
Mrs Dejanovic was already back in the office by the time I returned from lunch. She didn’t look up as I came in, but I could see clearly that she’d put some concealer under her eyes, because it was one of those cheap ones that wasn’t matched to her pale skin. “I emailed you some tables that need completing,” she told me neutrally when she saw I was looking at her.
Mutely nodding, I sat back down at my desk to do them.
Through the afternoon, the conversations people started to have were about the weekend; who was having who over for dinner, whose husband was working this weekend, and what so-and-so in Spare Parts said about whose daughter, and can you believe it? While they were chatting, my mind turned to the weekend as well—or more accurately, Monday. Monday when Seung would want to take a payment from me.
The threat of Seung’s ‘scary’ collectors managed to help me work up enough courage to ask Mrs Dejanovic about payday. “Excuse me,” I said uncertainly, leaning towards her desk. She made a non-committal noise to indicate she was listening while she flipped a page. “Which day do you get paid on here?”
“Tuesdays,” she said, and as my heart dropped into my stomach, she added, “but normally it comes in on Monday night at about eight. Why?”
Because you’re not the only one with debt collectors after you, I thought. “Just curious.” I paused. “Will I get paid for today next week?”
This time, she sat up and looked across at me, eyes narrowed. I spent the entire duration of the several seconds she was considering me sweating. “Lilly?” she said loudly, making me jump. Lilly’s face peeked over the partition behind us. “Will Min get paid for today next week?”
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, good point. Thanks for reminding me.” She disappeared behind the partition for a moment and I heard papers rustling. When she appeared again, she stood up and reached over the partition, handing me a manila folder. “This is your welcome pack,” she told me as I accepted it. “Your letter of offer, Tax File Number forms and all the essential info. If you bring it back all filled in on Monday we should be able to pay you.”
It was like having a weight lifted off my shoulders. “Okay, thank you,” I said, smiling down at it. I didn’t miss that Mrs Dejanovic was still watching me as I turned back to my desk.
Knock-off was 5pm, and boy was everyone ready to head out the door on the dot of five. That was unfamiliar; I’d spent so long at a job where you just stayed until the work was finished.
Mrs Dejanovic stayed behind after everyone had left and disappeared into the toilets, and since I was feeling so much relief about how soon I’d be paid, I thought I should take the opportunity to thank her for getting me a job in the first place. When she appeared again, she had a different, much older shirt on, and had her hair tied back. She looked a bit surprised to see me still hovering around my desk, and self-consciously smoothed down her old shirt like she was embarrassed to be seen in it. I knew what that was about; she was headed off to her second job, c
leaning high schools or whatever Bree had said she did at night.
“I just wanted to thank you for everything you did to get me this job so quickly,” I told her as graciously as I could to explain why I was still here. “I didn’t get the chance before.”
She packed up her handbag and shut her computer down, looking at me a little warily. “We needed someone quickly. As you can see, there is a lot of work.” She nodded a goodbye, and then walked past me. “Pull the door shut behind you. It locks automatically at quarter past.”
I stared after her as she left, feeling uncomfortable. There had to be a reason why she didn’t say, ‘you’re welcome’ or even ‘my pleasure’ like Bree did, didn't there? It felt like an intentional omission, which made me feel like I wasn’t welcome at all. But if I wasn’t welcome, she wouldn’t have made such an attempt to get me starting here as soon as possible, would she? Maybe I really had blown it with the ‘nothing’s changed’ comment, after all? I sighed. I had enough mind games from my own mother, I didn’t need them from someone else’s.
The drive home was worse than the drive in; I literally sat in traffic watching my petrol gauge slowly drop for an hour and a half. Being bumper-to-bumper for eternity gave me a lot of time to think, and my mind kept drifting back to Monday and paying Seung. I’d probably only have part of the payment, but he’d taken at least $200 extra last time as assurance so I could just ask him to use that. That was the pawnbroker loan taken care of; I was going to be late on my car repayment next week for the first time in four years, though.
I looked around me at the interior of my car. This stupid thing is so expensive that there’s no way I’d be able to afford it unless I’m working full time, I thought. Not with the other loan and my maxed out credit card as well. But I couldn’t work full-time and do my master’s, so what the hell was I going to do?
I probably just shouldn’t go to uni while I’m paying everything off, I realised, and then spent a moment letting that thought settle. It was true: I couldn’t work full-time and fit in all my classes and studio hours. As depressing as that was, there was no way out of it. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on classes while I was worrying about money.
While I was stuck at a single set of lights for three cycles, I googled the census date for my master’s; it wasn’t until the end of August. I breathed a sigh of relief; I could just defer and do it next year when I’d finished paying off that pawnbroker loan. It really sucked to be doing that—I was really looking forward to finally studying art like I’d always wanted to—I needed to be honest with myself. I was supporting Bree now, and I needed to be able to take care of her, too. I’d just have to wait until I’d finished paying off the debt for her fees and then start uni.
Anyway, when I thought about it, working with Bree’s Mum wasn’t terrible. It didn’t even resemble what I wanted to do with my life, but I figured I could probably weather it for a year as long as no one found out that I wasn’t a guy.
By the time I got home, I was depressed, exhausted and hungry. I had expected Bree would have dinner ready by now, but instead, she was bent double over the kitchen table with one of Gemma’s maths text books looking pale and drawn.
She looked up at me as I came in. I could tell immediately she’d been crying.
“It didn’t go so well today?” I asked her, putting a gentle hand on her back.
She leant into it, shaking her head as her lips quivered. “Mr Preston is awful,” she said, and then twisted so she could bury her head in my stomach and give one great, heaving sniff. “He asked me to get up in class first thing. Like, he was hardly in the door. He picked the hardest question, and he made me stand up and try to do it on the board in front of everyone, and he didn’t help at all. Then he spent like ten minutes with what I’d done up there getting people in my class to say what I’d done wrong and come up to fix it. It was…” She shook her head. “I hate him,” she said. “I hate him. And then after the class, he’s like, ‘I hope your boyfriend didn’t make a really big mistake’, and I was like ‘what does that mean?’ but he just turned around and kept walking. Like, why would he say that? Am I too stupid for anyone to date or something?”
I swallowed. Oh, god, the fees... “He’s probably just being nasty, but that’s an unacceptable way to treat a student. I’ll go straight to the Principal to make sure he doesn’t say anything like—”
She shook her head against me. “No…” she said at length. “No. It won’t change anything, and they probably won’t believe you anyway. I haven’t exactly been a star pupil, and he’s been teaching there for ten years.”
I pressed my lips together. I considered doing it anyway, just to be sure he wouldn’t tell her. “Okay.”
Suddenly, she sat up straight. “Oh!” She hurriedly tried to wipe her eyes. “Oh my god, I’m crying all over you and you were working with my parents today! Are you okay? Was it terrible?” she asked, looking up at me with puffy eyes. “Because if it’s awful, you can just not show up on Monday. I mean, they’ll be angry, but—”
“No, I’m definitely showing up on Monday,” I told her. “Because I need to return my welcome pack so I can get paid. About what it’s like to work there, I don’t really know if I’ve been there for long enough to make a call on that yet.” I had a short think. “It’s okay,” I decided. “It’s manageable. The job is straightforward and people are mostly friendly.”
“Yeah, people except Mum and Dad,” Bree muttered. “Oh well, it’s only for like seven weeks or something and then you’ll stop and go to uni, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
On that point, I was silent.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. “Why aren’t you agreeing with me?” she asked, looking up at me with those big blue eyes.
I opened my mouth, but it was a second before I spoke. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to tell her right now, but it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t notice, was it? “Well, I was thinking I might give it a year, and then see where I am financially.”
“What?” she asked, spinning around in her chair to face me. She sounded aghast. “You mean stay working and not go to uni?”
I nodded slowly. “Just for a year. Then I’ll reassess where I am, and we’ll see.”
That didn’t help. “No!” Bree told me, her voice straddling two octaves. “No, you won’t! You’re supposed to start uni this year, remember? Sydney College of the Arts, the degree you’ve been dreaming of your whole life? You’ve already waited so long, why would you wait another year?”
I—didn’t expect this strong a reaction from her. Mild disappointment and reluctant understanding, maybe. But this? “Bree, I’m not giving up on it, I’m still going to go, just not this year. I’ve got two people to support now, not just myself. I need to make sure we have everything we need, and I’m not in a financial position to—”
“—Fuck money!” Bree interrupted me. “Don’t you dare say this is because you need to take care of me, because I don’t care about money! We can just flat share in a little room somewhere, even if it’s miles out. We can be poor and do all the things we love. I’ve been fucking broke for two years, so believe me: I’m used to it. I don’t even care if we have to live in a caravan, it doesn’t matter. You can sell your paintings, and I can—”
“—Bree! You’re being irrational, I’m not saying I’ll never go—”
She stood up. “Yes you are!” she said over me, raising her voice. “You say ‘just one more year’ now, but that’s how it starts! That’s how it always starts! Next year you’ll be like, ‘just one more year’, and then before you know it, you’re sixty and retiring and you’ve missed out on your whole life!” When I tried to placate her, she shouted me down. She seemed really upset. “You wanted this so much,” she told me. “You wanted this so much. You cried about it. It was the most beautiful thing, watching you cry and hold that acceptance letter. Why are you giving up on that? Why are you giving up? No!” she said, when I tried to speak. There were tears in her eyes. “Te
ll me, is it something that people do? Do they get to a certain age and just give up on everything they want? Is there some switch that flicks off in people’s heads that goes, ‘hey, time to give up on life’? Because I’m not going to watch another person do that!”
“Bree, I—” I went to put my arms around her.
She pushed me away. “No!” she said and then burst into tears, ran off down the hallway, and slammed the bathroom door behind her. She was sobbing so loudly I could hear it in the living room.
Sighing, I sank down into the chair she’d been in. It was still warm. There was no use in attempting to comfort her, because I didn’t have anything to say to her that would. She’ll understand when she’s finished HSC and I can tell her about the fees, I decided, trying to ignore the sounds she was making. It was so hard to listen to her being this upset, especially knowing I’d caused it.
She didn’t come out all evening; it was only when Rob came home and announced that he was covered in filth and needed a shower that she reluctantly slunk out and went and shut herself in the bedroom instead.
Rob watched her go, eyes wide. “That time of the month?” he asked me in complete seriousness. I pat him on the back as he went into the bathroom, and then tried the bedroom door. It didn’t move; she’d locked it.
I pressed my lips together, and then went and sat out in the living room again. Since there was nothing else I could do for Bree right now, I opened the welcome pack and went through the documents. The salary was less than a third of what I’d been on at Frost, and they wanted to employ me casually, so I guessed there would be weeks when I wasn’t working as much. Paying my debts alone was more than $600 a week, so I didn’t know how I was going to afford my phone, or petrol, or food.
I wonder if Mrs Dejanovic can get me a cleaning night shift as well, I thought wryly, and then sighed. At least I’d have some money for Seung on Monday, that was the main thing. He’d taken $200 extra last time, and since I’d be getting about $150 for today, he could take the extra $120 out and I’d have $30 for petrol. That would have to do.
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