by Joy Dettman
Ross covered the mouthpiece. ‘Leave her be,’ he said. ‘Leave her. They’re trying to raise Sleiman. He’s on his way here, they think.’
Addressing the Situation
Sally was in the long walkway when Sleiman came poncing towards her. He’d looked like a thirty-year-old parrot eleven years ago, and she hadn’t looked at him since. He’d had a wife then, but she’d flown the coop with his little fledglings.
Sally walked by him, her face turned to the wall. He preferred to speak to Ross anyway. Ross Bertram had a bit of money and to a Sleiman, money spelt class. Sally and her mother were bulk-bill nobodies. The two men followed her to the new building, the doctor speaking gravely to Ross, his parrot beak managing a private school accent.
At the main entrance Ross took her arm, drew her feet to a stop. ‘I think you ought to listen, Sally,’ he said.
‘She is refusing to admit herself voluntarily for further psychotherapy, Miss De Rooze.’
He always managed to take the tall from her name. They were all the same, he and his brothers; they thought they owned this town and everyone in it. Doctor, lawyer, banker, there was a Sleiman finger stirring every pie.
Her open palm waving his words away, she glanced at his shoes. Maroon. They matched his trousers. Her eyes continued to scan up. Pea-green jacket. Yellow shirt. Beaky nose, an overly long top lip. Her eyes roved up to the face, the sparse hair. His feathers had fallen; now the reptile within was attempting to get out through his scalp. Dry, freckled, scaly scalp. She looked at his eyes, reptilian, droopy lids, then she turned away from him to the rain, a heavy shower beating itself to death again on grey concrete.
‘She needs to be at home, Miss De Rooze.’ He oozed concern, crawly concern. ‘It is a difficult situation for you, I can understand this,’ he said, his hands interlocking, his fingers squirming. But he held them back, controlled them. ‘She asked me to speak to you today.’
She shrugged, glanced at the moving mouth. Beaky little mouth sucking on seed. His jaw stretched forward, stretching his neck as his long top lip attempted to hide his buck teeth. They all had buck teeth, inner beaks. They needed a dentist in the family.
‘There is . . . is no simple answer in these cases, and at this stage I am not certain that further psychiatric treatment is warranted.’ He wrung his hands and one reached out to touch her. She stepped back quickly, well out of reach, and turned, her shoe squealing on the tiled floor as she opened the door and walked outside. They followed her.
‘Are there any other relatives who can assist with her care?’
‘No.’ Ross replied.
Wind whipped the rain now, driving it beneath the small shelter. Wetting, weeping rain. But clean. Free. Sally turned her face to Melbourne, wanting its freedom.
‘She’s pulling the old emotional blackmail bit again. You know that as well as we do,’ Ross said.
‘Since the intruder, she is afraid to live alone. She needs to be with family.’ Sleiman stretched his lips in what served as a smile.
Sally lit a cigarette. She couldn’t have freedom so she’d have smoke.
‘There is an excellent network of support in Melbourne. The situation . . . will need to be addressed.’
Good old ’90s jargon. He was full of it. The world was full of it. She sucked smoke, blew it at the rain. She’d been addressing this situation for twenty years. She’d been looking at the big picture too. She sucked more smoke, sucked it deep.
Ross was talking. Let them work it out between them. Two men, speaking importantly, tossing a glance at bulk-bill Sally then dismissing her. People were walking in, walking out, gawking at her.
They’d always gawked at her when one of the welfare flock had come knocking on Mummy’s door, mouths parroting jargon. Carers who didn’t care. They had their own to care for; their own at home in their safe little houses.
Out of sight, out of mind, little Sally. Starve her. Drag her out of school, drag her out of bed. Pack her up in newspaper. Pack her off to someplace.
She felt the sting of self-pitying tears but she sucked smoke and stared at the sleaze. Saw his hands when she had been an embarrassed eighteen and she’d gone to his surgery to ask for the contraceptive pill. He’d got her on his examination table and assaulted her with those white hands.
Always someone forcing her to do what she didn’t want to do.
Not any more. Not any more.
‘Do you have any suggestions, Miss De Rooze?’
‘Yeah. I suggest you . . . you look at the big picture,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at it for years and I just decided that I’m not buying it.’ Ross flinched, frowned, but her tongue had come loose and she let it flap a while. ‘And . . . and I also suggest that as you’re her doctor, paid by Medicare to address this particular situation, that you address it, but not to me, because I get enough bloody junk mail already.’
‘Sally!’
She walked away then, walked through the rain away from Bertram disapproval, her hands shaking, her head shaking, her stomach and her legs shaking.
Shouldn’t have said that.
Christ! Who had said that?
Sally De Rooze, that’s who. Sally De Rooze, almost thirty, and angry, and to hell with Bertram disapproval too.
No keys in her bag, she couldn’t get out of the rain and she began hitting her forehead against the cold, wet metal of her car, hitting it hard, hurting it. Then Ross was beside her. He drew her from the car, tried to hold her but she pulled away, found her car keys in her coat pocket and opened the car door, got in. He folded his oversized frame into an undersized seat as the rain grew heavier.
Black sky tonight, black hills in the distance. She’d liked those hills once. They’d locked her mother in. Now they were trying to lock her in.
He lit two cigarettes. ‘Want to go to the pub and grab a drink?’
‘What does it matter what I want? I’m just a commodity. I’m just an article of trade.’
He smoked in silence, waiting. That was the way to handle her moods. Just count to ten and try again. ‘We ought to go to the flat and start packing it. Call her bluff.’
‘Don’t try to beat her at chess, Ross. She’s made her move. I made mine, but she always wins in the end.’
‘We’re going to have to move her in with us when we get married. We’ve always known that.’
I don’t want to marry you, she thought. But what did it matter what an article of trade might want? Marriage was the only long-term solution. Years ago, when they’d planned that wedding, they’d painted the sleep-out, made it fit for her mother.
The key in the ignition, the starter motor groaned and the motor fired. She opened the window to clear the fog, set the windscreen wipers wiping and drove Ross to his ute, then turned her little car towards the only home she clearly remembered.
She’d stopped putting them in her memory bank, allowing them all to merge, the flats, the motels, the towns, the streets, the faces of the part-time families who had fed and housed her until her mother came home from hospital to starve her again.
The old fridge had been with them forever, and the grey laminex kitchen table with its four tubular metal and vinyl chairs, probably bought second-hand thirty years ago. Daddy hadn’t made enough money to buy what Mummy wanted. New furniture had been put in the ‘next year’ basket.
Her hand traced the old table. They’d made furniture too strong in the old days. The laminex was lifting at the edges, and the vinyl chairs were ripped, but the steel legs were strong. She kicked a chair from her pathway as she walked into the lounge room, where she wiped at the dark wood of Grandma’s dining room table.
It was an old suite, but not antique. The chairs had always been too good to be used, except by determined dust. It had followed their every move, followed them from their house in Geelong. Wipe it away one day in Ballarat, and a week later it had tracked them to the next place. Sixteen years ago dust had followed them to Lakeside and, like Sally and her mother, it had settled there.
The ornaments were dulled by dust. Poor worthless dust collectors, they’d be safer in a box. Sally picked up the goose girl, a pretty thing, all pink and white and gold. It looked like fine china, from a distance. When she’d wrapped it that first time, twenty years ago, it had been over three handspans tall, now it was a bare two. She stood there fondling it, dripping tears or rain onto it and onto the paper she’d spread on the dining room table. A heavy drop fell on a supermarket ad, making a paper apple look fresh and dew-wet. Carefully she placed the goose girl base down. She’d always wrapped that one first.
How many times?
She didn’t know. But she knew the goose girl’s shape with her eyes closed. She knew the point of the goose’s bill, the goose girl’s wide-brimmed hat. She knew where the pink china arm curved down to the golden basket with its dozen eggs. She knew it and loved its worthlessness, so she wrapped it well and safe for the next move.
So many towns. She started charting the shops, the streets, trying to recall differences. There was the school with the bike sheds down the side and there was the little brick school just over the road. There was the school with that little redheaded male teacher and the school with the old bell.
Funny. She could remember the schools, but not the rooms she’d slept in, except in that first house at 29 Carter Street. Eight when she left it, almost eleven when she’d seen it that last time and pelted Carol Rigg with green passionfruit. She’d had a good aim. Always had a good aim.
The newspaper parcel in her hand, she stared at it. Poor little goose girl, wrapped up again, an anonymous parcel of old bad news. She hated newspaper, hated it. Hated wrapping up her life in it and carrying it away to unwrap in a strange place.
The ornament placed on the table, she picked up the china lady with the blue parasol and the dirty neck. She had come out of a finer mould. A fragile lady, not tough enough for this world, she’d lost her head years ago between someplace and the next. Now she was stuck together with old glue, no longer perfect. The china man might have been perfect. She didn’t look, but wrapped him quickly, then the voluptuous lady with the cat, a chip off the cat’s nose. It had taken a tumble one night, landed on the hearth.
She wrapped the eagle, his wings spread in flight, then the farm boy, a worried lad that one, seated on a grassy knoll with his red apple. He’d lost his elbow when he’d moved to Lakeside, and Sally hadn’t been able to glue his bits together. She’d given up, tossed them in the bin with the new mouse dirt. Now he had a hiatus elbow. The rust-clad shoulder curved down into space. The hand and his apple were grafted to his chest. He couldn’t lift the apple to his mouth any more because he had no elbow to bend.
There had been too much glue in her life. Too much makeshift. Only the Bertrams hadn’t been makeshift. Worthless bitch, she thought. I’ll marry him because it’s the only way out of a fix and I’ll hate him in a year, but I’ll stay with him and I’ll chip away at him until he becomes worthless too.
She turned from the newspaper-wrapped pile to Ross. ‘Sorry.’ He looked at her, quizzically. ‘Sleiman. Sorry if I embarrassed you.’
‘Don’t worry about it. He knows you were upset.’
She wrapped the china wolf, his heavy foot holding down a wide-eyed fawn. Poor little fawn, he’d lost an ear. He’d had it in Geelong. She reached high for the elephant and his red-turbaned Indian rider, lifting them carefully to the table. A weighty one, it had a chip off the old turban. She had smoothed that chip with a nailfile then dabbed on a spot of nail polish. Not quite the right red but close enough given the fact that it had been chosen on the hop from Davis’s pharmacy. The shepherd and his Lassie dog with a glued-on tail, a little white-haired professor reading from his chipped book, the white doves, the dancing lady – they looked good from a distance but, like the dining room setting, they were never destined to become antique. Just junk. Pretty junk.
When she started wrapping the photographs, she turned her head away, closing her eyes while placing the frames face down on newspaper. Her father’s first, a ten by eight. He was wrapped up fast and well, then the three boys in a matching frame. The photographs had always been wrapped after the ornaments.
A large, heavy framed photograph was lifted from its place over the mantelpiece. Her grandmother had sat for that one only a week before she died, so Mummy said. No smile on her face, but she’d had nothing much to smile about with her philandering husband. Probably planning her long jump when the camera clicked. If she’d done it to make her husband feel guilty, it hadn’t worked. He’d still taken off with his girlfriend a week after her funeral.
The smiling Glenda, a bride in an oval frame, Sally eased carefully from the hook above the crystal cabinet. She looked at that one but couldn’t remember that happy face, so much like her own. Different eyes, though, a paler blue and close set. Similar smiles. Same teeth. The same, only different.
‘Tell me that I love her, Ross. Convince me that I care about her. I must, or I’d just run and keep running, wouldn’t I?’
‘She loves you too, in her own way.’
‘Like she loves the microwave – fast and efficient. She prefers the microwave.’
He shrugged, walked out to the back porch for a breath of air, stepping high over boxes of junk and empty bottles. He braved the drizzling rain to empty a large carton into the green bin, then returned to the kitchen, placing the carton on the table where he began filling it with the wrapped ornaments.
Sally watched him. Wrapping them in newspaper was one thing, sealing them in a box was another, but while her head denied it, she picked up a green texta and wrote on the cardboard. GOOSE GIRL. That’s what she’d done whenever they’d packed up for a move – easy to find the important items when they got to the next place. Raelene’s mother had taught her that trick; she’d helped pack up the Geelong house.
A cigarette taken from her packet, she lit it while watching Ross’s hands. He was an inexperienced packer; the Bertrams had never moved.
Sally Bertram would never move again.
Sally Marsden might fly north for the winters.
He’d used the last of the paper and was looking around for more. There’d be another pile of it stored in some corner; she and her mother wouldn’t have survived without it. It cleaned windows, lined shelves, lit old stoves, heated water in an ancient chip heater at one of the flats. Somewhere. It polished the school shoes, and made inner soles when school shoes had holes. And it wrapped china. Cheap, disposable, like their lives.
She walked to the laundry, checking the cupboard there; its lower shelf was stuffed with old papers. She removed a bundle, dumping it on the floor at Ross’s feet.
‘She’s been starving herself since I left. There’s nothing in her cupboards. Nothing in the fridge. She probably sat here at night, planning this.’
‘I’m sick of talking about her. I’ve told you what we have to do.’ He left her defrosting the fridge and drove to the Chinese takeaway. He liked his food, and he’d put on weight since she’d left. He’d be a fat old man if he lived long enough to grow old. Near nine he returned, bringing with him a pile of supermarket cartons. They sat in the midst of them eating Chinese and discussing bills, and when Sally pushed her half-eaten meal away, Ross cleaned up her leftovers.
At ten they found the old guitar case beneath more newspapers and a cloud of dust. It had been there, on the top of her mother’s wardrobe, undisturbed for sixteen years. Inside the guitar case was a packet of photographs and a bundle of sheet music; the rubber band that once held them together had perished. Sally took the case back to the kitchen where she wiped it clean with a sponge, squashing escaping silverfish with the same sponge. She mashed a cockroach beneath her foot, then sat looking through the handwritten music while Ross dragged the vacuum cleaner from the cupboard.
She began humming along with the cleaner and, slowly, words she hadn’t thought of in years started playing in her mind. A time warp that guitar case, a part of some life she’d lived. She began singing
the lost words, found written on silverfish-nibbled paper.
Then the vacuum was off and her singing stopped mid-sentence.
‘Is that one of your mum’s songs?’
‘Daddy used to love that one,’ she said. The sheet music placed in a plastic bag, she sealed it, safe from silverfish. A brief glance at the photographs was enough. Shane and Grandma. Sally and Shane, the little girl face scribbled over with red biro. There was one of her father in short shorts, digging in the garden, Sally almost out of frame – not a lot of red biro required to wipe her out of that one. Just the past. Just sad. She sealed them into another plastic bag.
That night she slept in her own narrow bed, her childhood bed, transplanted to many towns before it settled down to grow old and rickety in Lakeside.
‘You go home, Ross.’ She kissed him goodnight, but made no space for him beside her in the bed.
‘Might as well,’ he said.
Empty Rooms
Ross didn’t go home. He found a musty blanket instead, and he lay on the green vinyl couch. It was too hard but, unlike Goldilocks, he had no choice. It was too slippery as well, and the cushions beneath his head were lumpy. He catnapped, and woke, altered his position. Around two he thought of Sally’s mother’s bed and took his blanket in there but the room smelt of her. Stale and bitter. He returned to the couch, where he dozed until dawn.
His back was stiff when he crept in to check on Sally, still sleeping like a baby, soft, soundless sleep, as if in dreams she had no energy to waste on breathing.
He knew her father and brothers had died in a car crash, but little else about her early childhood. What he had learnt of that time had come from his mother. A closed book, Sally; its covers sealed. Rarely did he get to see beneath the seal. She’d planted a passionfruit vine at the farm and told him of the ones she’d left behind in Geelong. She’d spoken of Ballarat when they’d driven there one day to go to a wedding. She’d shown him an old brick house and a school.