by Joy Dettman
Everyone would think, what a nutty family.
She tried to tell Mummy about the fire, like it was just a dream and if she told about it, then it would go away. She tried to tell.
‘Silly Shane, well, he threw my Teddy over the back seat, Mummy, and Teddy was lonely, and I undid my seatbelt and climbed over the seat and over the boys and into the back, and I didn’t tread on them, and –’
Mummy yelled at her to stop, but Sally couldn’t stop. She wanted to talk all the bad-dream pictures and the bad-dream smell out so she could stop shivering.
‘Daddy said I could get Teddy, Mummy, and I nearly got him in my hands, and I was near the back window, and then Shane said about the kangaroo, and it was an immense big one.’
Then Mummy did her bad screaming thing, so Sally didn’t talk any more, like Daddy never talked any more when Mummy did that screaming.
She’d really wanted to tell about the kangaroo that just jumped on the car, and about how she thought it was a Shane trick when he said kangaroo, like with the owl. Maybe Daddy thought it was a Shane trick, too. She wanted to tell about the big tree, and the giant Bang! And about . . . like flying . . . like being a fairy, flying away between the moonlit trees, and the slippery slide on the long grass, but more than wanting to tell, she didn’t want Mummy to do that screaming again, so she didn’t talk any more.
She wasn’t hurt at all. That was the baddest, baddest part. She should have got hurt bad, like broken arms and legs, and Mummy might kiss her better.
It was after a while that Sally and Mummy went home to the beautiful house but there wasn’t anybody in it. Except people who came. Lots of sad things happened then, like funerals and pictures in the newspapers, and there was school again and after a bit the pictures in Sally’s head got all hard, like the old newspaper when you mixed up glue with it and you made things with it, then left it in the sun till it dried and got stiff, and even if the news words and pictures were all still locked in there, you couldn’t get them out because they were all stuck together.
That’s when the fire dreams started. They came into her bedroom every night and she couldn’t scream about them either.
Other strangers started walking through their beautiful house a bit later, and one family came in with a fat girl. They poked into everything, even the wardrobes and cupboards, and the lady and the girl talked too loud and they turned up their noses at everything. Sally saw them do it, and she heard the man who was trying to help Mummy sell the house.
‘Desperate to sell,’ he said to the fat girl’s father. ‘Nice big rooms,’ he said.
‘No garage,’ the man said.
That was because Daddy didn’t get time to get the garage. That was for next year and now there wasn’t going to be next year.
The man took the people and the fat girl with the glasses into the boys’ room. The bunk beds in there were painted blue. Then the man took the strangers to Sally’s room, Sally’s very own beautiful room, and she hated them looking in her wardrobe. They looked at her quilt that was made of swan’s-down, its cover sprinkled with pink flowers, and they looked at her curtains, and they pulled at them, and turned up their noses again. They didn’t even like the pink wallpaper that Sally had picked for herself.
‘We’ll strip and paint it, Carol, and build some shelves for your toys.’
Sally didn’t want Carol Rigg’s toys in there, didn’t want her Teddy put on the bed. Sally’s Teddy used to sleep there. No more Teddy with his nodding head and his bright bead eyes. He’d gone to be a star with Daddy and the boys.
They were not under the marble blanket in the cemetery that she saw every time she went there with Mummy. They were not down there and she wouldn’t let them be down there. Nicky would get his asthma, and Robby always had to have a night-light, and Sally just would not go back to that stupid place again. Not ever again. She would not. She hated the cherubs Mummy had ordered for the boys. The stupid things made her get so mad, because she knew that Shane would have hated them. He would have wanted a Superman tombstone instead of three stupid naked babies with potbellies. Sally didn’t like Daddy’s tombstone either, because it had Mummy’s name already on it, under his.
Glenda Jean De Rooze. United in death. 1950–19–
‘One day I’ll sleep here with him,’ Mummy said.
There was no Sally name on the stones. How come Mummy hadn’t bought four cherubs and stuck Sally’s name on the boys’ stone with number 1970–19–?
How come, anyway?
But she hadn’t. It was like there was no place for Sally any more. Like there was no room left anywhere for her. Like a rubbish tin will do for Sally when she gets dead because she was Daddy’s girl and Mummy had just hated that.
Mummy liked putting things in rubbish tins. Even good things she just . . . just threw them in the rubbish.
After that day, Sally stayed next door with Raelene on Mummy’s cemetery days, and at Raelene’s place they still had nice food smells and laughing time. Laughing was good. It squeezed all of the hurt from out of her tummy and made her think happy thoughts of Daddy, because he’d made a lot of laughing time. Sally helped mix the Christmas cake, and she got to lick the bowl, and she got sandwiches too, and a banana and also a huge handful of sultanas from Raelene’s mother.
Mummy didn’t buy sultanas, or anything, and she didn’t even make Christmas that year. She cried all the time and went to look at the dumb tombstones. And when she wasn’t doing that, she was wrapping up things, packing up the house so the bank could give it to fat Carol Rigg.
Sally helped her with wrapping up, but she was pretending that she was wrapping up Christmas presents for Daddy and the boys. She wrapped the goose girl very well. It was beautiful, but very heavy for her hands, so she had to be careful. She helped wrap Daddy’s photograph and the one of the three boys in their sailor suits, but not any of her pictures.
There were only four more sleeps until Santa came. Before that bad night, she’d asked Santa for a bike. She really wanted a bike and she wondered if Santa knew about the fire, and about them moving to another house on the tenth of January in 1979.
He didn’t give her a bike. She just got a plastic doll from Kmart, because Santa didn’t care about her either now that Daddy and the boys were dead, so she threw the stupid hard old doll straight in the rubbish bin, and Mummy saw her do it and there was screaming and . . . and more sad things.
Some people had to empty their beautiful house on the tenth of January and all their furniture had to get put in storage in Raelene’s father’s double garage next door because with all the screaming, Mummy broke down and went to hospital. Sally got put in storage too, at a stranger lady’s house.
After a bit, the lady took Sally to the hospital to visit Mummy, but Mummy didn’t want to see her. She just screamed, ‘Take her away. Get her away from me.’
She screamed other stuff too, so half the world could hear her, and she didn’t have to tell everybody about that. She didn’t have to tell.
Sally just sucked her thumb until the lady picked her up and carried her away. Someone was always picking her up, just like the rubbish collectors picked up the bins, like she was just rubbish too. The lady told Sally a thousand times not to take any notice of what Mummy said, that it was only because Mummy broke down and she didn’t know what she was saying, and that the doctor was giving her medicine to make her better.
But Mummy knew what she was saying. She knew exactly what she was saying because she’d said it thousands of times before. But not when people were listening.
The lady didn’t take Sally to the hospital again, not for ages, and when she did, Mummy said, ‘My precious little girl,’ and everyone was happy with her and she could come home.
Their first flat was in Geelong and it wasn’t far away from the beautiful house, so Sally still went to the same school and that fat Carol Rigg girl was there too, and every day after school she went home to Sally’s beautiful house and to Sally’s bedroom and to Raelene next
door, and Sally went home to a flat without any cooking smells but plenty of mouse smells.
Mummy liked the mice. She thought the noise they made was Daddy and the boys’ ghosts come out of the ground to talk to her. She’d stand in the little lounge room and talk to the mice, just as if she was talking to Daddy and Shane. She wouldn’t do anything else, though. She wouldn’t wash things and get food in the fridge and she wouldn’t unpack things, so Sally unwrapped all the ornaments and she played pretend. She had to pretend that the hard pictures of the fire were all gone away, because she had to make Mummy stop sleeping and crying and start singing again. Just play pretend until Mummy’s breakdown was better and then the pretend could be over.
But they didn’t have a phone at the flat, so there was no phone to ring for Glenda Jean. Mummy never sang again, except for sad songs at night, and she’d wake Sally in the night to say sad things like, shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have. And it got so Sally didn’t like to sleep in case she got woken up for more shouldn’t haves, and when she did go to sleep the fire dreams came, and if she screamed, she woke Mummy, who could scream even worse.
Sally learnt about the counting in that first flat, learnt about counting the fire dreams all away. She’d just count and have, like, magic numbers, so when she got to a special number, she could make a bit more bad dream go away. Sometimes she had to count to thousands until all the dream pictures were gone.
Then one day a man came to their place and Mummy hid under the bed and Sally hid with her, because he was a very bad man, Mummy said, and Sally couldn’t go to school for all the week, and when she did go to school, the bad man came back and Mummy did her screaming so the lady from next door got the doctor and he gave Mummy some more pills.
It was because of the man in the green car that they had to move from that flat. There was the packing up again and a junky old house and a different school, and the house was smelly and its cupboards were full of cockroaches.
Mummy was much better though, with her pills. Well, she was better if she took pills, so Sally made sure she took them. She brought them to her with a glass of water and she wouldn’t go away even if Mummy threw the pills and did her crazy-lady screams. Sally just kept picking up the pills and standing there with the glass of water. Just staring at Mummy and nodding her head until the pills went down.
Mummy was still going to the cemetery, and staying there all day while Sally just watched television. She was nine when the doctor told Mummy that it would be better if they moved right away from Geelong, or the child welfare department might make Sally live with another family.
Only that doctor listened to Mummy’s crying now; most people were sick of listening to it because she’d got a monster amount of insurance money for Daddy and the boys. They had to get a house, the doctor said, and he helped buy the house in Ballarat, and he got people to move the furniture; he got a lady to help Mummy clean the house and help with shopping so there was food in the fridge, which was good.
It was a redbrick, middle-aged house and not so bad, and Sally went to another new school. She didn’t tell anyone about her father and her brothers, or about the welfare ladies. She just wanted to be all new again and stay in the Ballarat house with the happy doorbell forever.
But Mummy had some new people to tell. She told the mailman about her three boys. She told the people at the shops. She howled in the street, in the supermarket, because she once went to Ballarat with Daddy on her honeymoon.
‘Oh, you poor dear, Mrs De Rooze,’ the people all said. ‘You poor, poor dear.’
Sympathy was a bit like the bread from the supermarket. It got stale very fast and it went mouldy so you couldn’t eat it or you got poisoned.
After a bit the lady got sick of all the crying and all the house cleaning, so the not-so-bad house got turned into a terrible house because Mummy broke things when she did her mad bit. After a while that house got sold too, and they packed up the china and Grandma’s dining room suite and they moved to a motel somewhere.
Moving. Moving. Always moving. Always some stupid excuse.
The shops were too far, or that green car was following them, or they had to hide under the bed because someone was knocking at their door, and it was probably only the welfare again; they were always knocking at the door, because people told tales on Mummy and serve her right.
Got to move again. Got to pack up your life in newspaper and go, Sally De Rooze.
The insurance money, that was going to buy them another house, got wasted paying for motels where they lived for weeks, and it paid for the caravan parks and for the storage place to store the empty fridge and Grandma’s dining room suite and all the other junk.
That’s when Sally found out that all Mummy wanted to do was to carve her numbers on Daddy’s tombstone in Geelong.
Sally was eleven. They caught the train to Geelong and booked into another motel for two weeks. At least they were using the insurance money for something good this time. She could visit Raelene and maybe go to the old beach where they used to go with Daddy.
Mummy liked motels because they made her breakfast and she didn’t have to make her bed. She was very happy and singing all the time at the motel. She’d brought her guitar with her and one day Sally was playing it when Mummy came back from the cemetery, and Mummy snatched it.
‘Shane would have been the singer. He could sing when he was a year old. You sound like a crow with a sore throat,’ she said.
They didn’t go to the beach, or to visit Raelene.
‘Too many memories,’ Mummy said, and after that she took her guitar to the cemetery and Sally stayed at the motel watching television.
But one night, she got clever. She went out for the fish and chips and she didn’t put the change back in Mummy’s purse, and the next day, when Mummy’s taxi left for the cemetery, Sally telephoned her own taxi and she got the man to take her to Raelene’s. She had enough money to pay him too, and enough left for the ride back. She kept taking money from Mummy’s purse after that, and she rang the taxi three times.
Then the two weeks were gone.
That last night at the motel Mummy was so happy. They sat up watching television, and later she sang and even let Sally play the guitar, and she taught her some more chords. Then she said they didn’t have to leave Geelong, ever. Wasn’t that good? Wasn’t that so good?
‘It’s good,’ Sally said, but she knew it wasn’t good. Mummy’s happy wasn’t good; it wasn’t safe.
Mummy laughed and made two big drinks of chocolate milk. But she never ever made food or special drinks, and her eyes looked too bright and starey, like the wicked witch when she offered Snow White the poisoned apple.
She turned into a witch too, and she got mean as a meat axe when Sally tasted the drink and said it was yucky. Mummy said, ‘Drink it!’ and other old stuff, but Sally still wouldn’t drink the chocolate milk, so Mummy drank both drinks herself.
The next morning when the breakfast trays came, Sally couldn’t wake her, but she found an empty bubble pack in the bathroom rubbish bin. It should have been full of pills. That’s when she knew. She ran to the motel office and got the lady to ring the doctor.
The motel lady and man were scared stiff. They ran back to the room and Sally just left them fussing while she telephoned the taxi man, then she scraped the two breakfasts onto one plate and took them outside, and ate everything while she waited for the taxi to come. And when he did, she left her plate on the fence and left Mummy waiting for the ambulance with a whole heap of people running around like chooks with their heads cut off.
She told Raelene’s mother the truth. Mostly. Not about the double chocolate drink though, because that was bad. She had to tell her a bit because someone had to pay the taxi and Sally didn’t have any money. Raelene’s mother paid, and she said, ‘You poor little kid.’ Sally got to stay there, got to sleep in Raelene’s room, got to live there for a whole week.
It was like she had died and gone to food heaven. She at
e huge dinners every day, like three sausages and mashed potatoes and pumpkin and green peas. And they had sweets too, ice cream and peaches, or steamed pudding and custard, and she was allowed to drink as much milk and orange juice as she wanted.
But Mummy wasn’t getting any better and she got sent to Melbourne and Mr Mason was getting sick of being stuck with Sally. Also . . . also, Sally just got to hate having that Carol Rigg living in her house next door, and swinging all day on that swing-set.
Squeak-squawk. Squeak-squawk, all day long.
Squeak-squawk. Squeak-squawk.
Carol Rigg
1981
Sally had watched the house at 29 Carter Street being built. She could remember it when its walls were only frames, and the lawn was only mud; she could remember Grandma and Papa had come one day and they’d all had a picnic of bought cakes and tea in a thermos, then they’d all walked around the house and talked about the rooms. Rotten Carol Rigg might live in this house but it did not belong to her and it never would – not the swing-set, or the fences, and certainly not the passionfruit vines.
Sally picked a green passionfruit and she hammered it on the top of the fence until it broke in half. It had a few pale yellow seeds in it which she licked out, but they tasted like yuck.
The vine was loaded this year. Hundreds, maybe thousands of passionfruit, and all for fat Carol Rigg. Even on this side of the fence there were dozens, so the vine must have been extra loaded on the other side where the roots were. Sally knew exactly where they were. She’d helped plant them when she was four, and she’d helped Daddy put up the trellis so the vines could climb high. Then she’d helped to paint the trellis green.