Mimi and the Blue Slave

by Catherine Bateson

  ‘The poor mite,’ a voice said close to me, ‘she’s worn out with it all.’

  Ableth lifted me up. He smelt of aftershave, which was odd for a pirate, I thought, but his shoulder was comfortable and I leant my aching head against it. I didn’t think I could walk – my legs wobbled like masts in a gale. Ableth bundled me into the car and my mother leant in and did the seatbelt up around me.

  ‘Thanks, Guy,’ she said, ‘thanks for everything.’

  Hours later, or so it seemed, I stumbled up the stairs to my own bedroom. Mum hauled my clothes off and my pyjamas on and tucked me into bed. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, but she managed a watery smile.

  ‘We’ll be okay, Mimi. We’ll be okay. You know that, don’t you?’

  I couldn’t say anything, so I blinked twice. She seemed to know that meant yes because she kissed my forehead before drawing the curtains and leaving me in the darkness.

  Waves crashed around me. The ship was going down. I could hear the cries of drowning sailors. Water poured into my cabin, over my head. I tried to swim, but my arms were weighed down by the water and I couldn’t move no matter how hard I struggled. In the end I had to surrender. I slid deeper into the water, which was hot, then arctic cold. It took me deeper and deeper and then there was nothing.

  When I woke up it was daylight and the seagulls outside were crying and wheeling in the early light. My mouth was dry and without thinking of my head or my throat, I sat up and swallowed some water. I was hungry. For a minute I was almost giddy with the sheer pleasure of feeling well. Then I remembered my father was dead and my heart began to hurt all over again.

  The aunts drove Mum crazy. Aunty Ann told her what to do all the time and Aunty Marita kept talking about grief and giving Mum crystals to wear and herbal tea to drink.

  ‘You’ll have to get someone in to help with the shop,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘You won’t manage it by yourself, Lou.’

  ‘Rose quartz,’ Aunty Marita grabbed Mum’s hand and tried to slip a bracelet on her wrist, ‘for self-love. Pity I don’t have any citrine. That promotes clarity of thought.’

  Mum wrenched her hand away from Aunty Marita. ‘No thank you,’ she said impatiently. ‘Marita, I don’t want to wear your crystals. I won’t wear it.’

  ‘Lou, darling, please!’

  ‘Mimi and I are going out for a while,’ Mum said, ‘to clear our heads. Come on, Mimi.’

  We drove along the beach road to the next suburb.

  ‘Cake?’ Mum asked, parking the car. ‘I need a coffee. If I have to drink another cup of blasted licorice swamp-water I’ll jump out of a high window.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Sorry, but really! They’re mad. Both of them. I can’t stand another minute. They have to go. Or maybe we should.’

  ‘Should what?’

  ‘Go.’ Mum said, ‘Inside or outside table?’

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know, anywhere. Just for a week. Would you like that?’

  ‘A holiday?’

  ‘Well, sort of, I guess. A break.’

  We only went on holidays from Boxing Day until five days after New Year. We didn’t even go away on weekends. The shop had to stay open.

  ‘To the beach?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘If you like. Or the mountains? Somewhere we’ve never been before.’

  I knew Mum really meant somewhere we hadn’t been with Dad.

  ‘Would we stay in a hotel? What about the shop?’

  ‘We’ll close it,’ Mum said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  If it hadn’t felt disloyal to my father, I would have been excited.

  The aunts greeted Mum’s decision with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘You can’t be serious, Lou,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘Close the shop for how long?’

  ‘Just a week,’ Mum said. ‘People would expect that anyway.’

  ‘You’re running a business, Lou.’

  ‘I do understand that.’

  ‘What I worry about, Lou darling,’ Aunty Marita said, ‘is the fact that you’re running away from your grief. But you can’t. You have to live with it.’

  ‘I’m not running away,’ Mum said. ‘We’re just having a break.’

  ‘We could keep the shop open,’ Aunty Ann said, ‘couldn’t we, Marita?’

  Aunty Marita looked dubious. ‘What do we know about antiques?’ she asked.

  ‘We wouldn’t buy anything from anyone,’ Aunty Ann said, ‘and we wouldn’t cook your cakes, Lou. But we could sell things and make tea and coffee, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Well,’ Mum said slowly, ‘you can’t actually serve tea and coffee without a food-handling certificate.’

  ‘I’ve got one!’ Aunty Ann said proudly. ‘I got it last year when I did that chocolate-making course.’

  ‘You could make chocolate, instead of cakes,’ Aunty Marita said.

  ‘No making chocolate,’ Mum said quickly. ‘It’ll get too complicated.’

  ‘Okay, no chocolate.’ Aunty Marita sounded a little disappointed.

  ‘Are you really sure about this?’ Mum asked, looking at both of them.

  ‘It would be fun,’ Aunty Marita said.

  ‘Interesting.’ Aunty Ann nodded. ‘I’ve always been a bit envious of you having the shop.’

  ‘I wish you’d told me that when Doug was alive,’ Mum said. ‘You could have minded it while we both had a decent holiday.’

  ‘I thought you’d laugh at me.’ Aunty Ann turned pink. ‘I thought you’d tell me I was interfering and bossy.’

  Mum gave her a quick hug. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Just like that it seemed it was all settled. Mum spent the rest of the evening giving Aunty Ann and Aunty Marita shop lessons. They both found the till hard to use because it jammed every so often. You had to know just where to bang it to get it open. Even I could manage that, but Aunty Ann got quite flustered when she couldn’t get the hang of it.

  ‘You should buy a new one,’ she said on her fifth attempt.

  ‘It’s easy, Ann, give it a sharp blow. There! See?’

  ‘Is this the key to this cabinet? Or that one over there?’ Aunty Marita asked for the third time.

  We had takeaway for dinner because the lessons went on for so long.

  ‘There’s such a lot to take in,’ Aunty Ann said later. ‘I had no idea it was so complicated.’

  ‘You don’t have to do it,’ Mum said quickly. ‘Please don’t feel you have to do it.’

  ‘I want to do it,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘It’s good for the brain to keep learning new things.’

  ‘I’m going to enjoy it,’ Aunty Marita said. ‘I’m looking forward to it already.’

  ‘See how you go tomorrow,’ Mum said, ‘before you really decide.’

  I knew from the looks on their faces that the aunties had already decided. They were going to open the shop if it killed them. Which, I thought privately, it might well do. Aunty Ann had huffed so much and Aunty Marita’s hair was all wild from her running her hands through it the way she did when she was stressed. I wondered how they would last the next day, let alone a week.

  Mum wondered, too.

  ‘I hope they’ll be okay,’ she whispered as she came in to say goodnight. ‘They’re not really naturals, are they?’

  ‘I think they’ll be fine,’ I said, crossing my fingers underneath the bedclothes.

  ‘They’re enthusiastic.’

  The next day, even though we weren’t open, Mum made the aunts go through the whole procedure. She even made them unlock the front door and get the street sign out.

  ‘This is silly,’ Aunty Ann said, pulling the sign along the footpath. It made an ugly scraping noise.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Mum said patiently. ‘It’s important that you know what you’re letti
ng yourselves in for.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve just hauled this out and now I’m going to have to haul it in again,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘You could have just told me that I had to put the sign out.’

  ‘I wanted you to know how heavy it was,’ Mum said. ‘Also you need to know where to put it. I don’t want anyone falling over it and suing us.’

  ‘Could we do the window while you’re away?’ Aunty Marita said wistfully. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a window.’

  ‘Yes, of course you can,’ Mum said.

  ‘Ann, did you hear that? We can do the window!’

  ‘Oh, Lou, thank you.’ Aunty Ann hauled the sign back in, smiling.

  ‘Now,’ Mum said, ‘Mimi and I are going to pretend to be customers. Difficult customers.’

  It was fun being a difficult customer. I made Aunty Marita take nearly every last thing out of one cabinet before deciding I’d buy the very first thing I’d asked to see. She did well, though. She didn’t even glare at me.

  ‘Very well, ma’am,’ she said in an extremely professional voice. ‘Will that be all today?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Is it for ma’am or is it a present?’

  ‘It’s a present,’ I said. ‘Can you giftwrap it, please?’

  ‘Mimi!’ Mum said. ‘We don’t giftwrap.’

  ‘But you should,’ Aunty Marita said. ‘A lot of places do, you know. It’s very convenient.’

  ‘Well, we don’t,’ Mum said.

  Aunty Marita turned back to me. ‘I’m afraid I’m unable to offer that service at this time.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just chuck it in a bag, then.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ Aunty Marita was clearly enjoying herself, ‘you don’t just chuck Royal Worcester in a bag. Where’s the tissue again, Lou?’

  ‘You were wonderful, Marita,’ Aunty Ann said later. She’d almost lost her temper when Mum asked to see three different vases, all of them on high shelves Aunty Ann couldn’t reach. Also, she hadn’t been able to get the hang of the espresso machine, no matter how she tried. ‘Much more patient than I was.’

  ‘You’d be patient with a real customer, Ann.’ Aunty Marita looked at Mum anxiously. ‘Did we pass, Lou?’

  ‘Of course you did!’ Mum gave both of them a quick hug. ‘Mimi and I could stay away for a month.’

  ‘Only if people wanted tea, not coffee,’ Aunty Ann said. ‘I’ll have to practise.’

  We left the next morning. I hardly had time to pack anything. Mum said to just throw clean knickers, jeans and a jumper in the car and not to worry. That was how she packed. I couldn’t do that, so I held us up for an extra hour while I sorted through what I needed to take. By the time I’d finished, Mum was waiting out beside the car, impatiently. Grey clouds scudded across the sky, but despite that she was wearing her big movie-star sunglasses and she’d tied a scarf around her hair as though we were going driving in a sports car.

  ‘My God, girl.’ It was Guy, coming up behind us. ‘You look like a movie star.’

  ‘Guy! You gave me a start. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Thought I’d see how you were going, you and Mimi.’

  ‘We’re going,’ Mum said, ‘just as soon as Mimi can load her stuff into the car. We’re taking off for a week, Guy. The sisters are in charge.’

  ‘The Holy Sisters?’ Guy chuckled. ‘Will there be bargains?’

  ‘Not for you! Not after the whisky at the wake.’

  ‘True. Hello, Mimi. All packed up?’

  ‘It’s only a little bag,’ I said, clutching my backpack.

  ‘She’s taken three hours to pack it,’ Mum told Guy.

  ‘It wasn’t three hours. It was hardly even an hour.’

  ‘Meanwhile a storm’s rolled in,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll be driving through rain, Mimi.’

  ‘I can’t help that. It would have rained anyway, somewhere.’

  ‘She’s right, Lou. It is always raining somewhere. Even if it’s in your heart.’

  Mum slid her sunglasses up to the top of her head. ‘Oh Guy,’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘You’ll get by,’ he said, taking the hand she’d extended to him and bowing slightly over it. ‘You’re a strong woman, Lou.’

  ‘Not anymore. It was okay when he was here, but not now.’

  ‘It will be,’ Guy said. ‘It will be.’

  Mum shrugged and turned to me. ‘Hop in, Mimi,’ she said. ‘I’ll just go and tell the sisters not to sell Guy anything until we can get back and put the price up.’

  It was supposed to be a joke, but her voice couldn’t quite make it work, and I saw Guy slip his hand under her elbow as though she was suddenly very old and couldn’t totter the few steps to the shop door.

  I buried my head in my backpack as though I was checking the contents. I knew everything that was in it. I’d packed and repacked it four times. By the time I’d rearranged everything in all the outside pockets twice, Mum had reappeared.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said, clicking her seatbelt on. ‘I had to make sure the sisters treated Guy well. You know what Aunty Ann can be like. Sorry I gave you a hard time before. This will be good for us, Mimi.’

  At first it was okay. The rain held off and Mum talked about the lunch she’d packed and how she’d left Guy flirting with Aunty Marita. Then she talked about how she and Dad had first met Guy and what a good friend he’d been over the years.

  That took us to the beginning of the highway. The further we travelled, the quieter Mum became. By the time I was hungry, Mum was crying behind her sunglasses. She’d turned the music up loud as though we were having a good time, but she’d put on one of her sad girl singers and words like heartbreak and leaving floated in the car like airborne tears.

  ‘I’ll be better than this,’ she said when we pulled up for lunch.

  It was raining heavily by then, but Mum didn’t bother taking her sunglasses off. We stopped at a park, despite the rain, and had to eat our sandwiches in a little roofed area Mum called a gazebo. I watched her pick out the tomato from the soggy salad sandwiches, eat it and throw the rest of the sandwiches in the bin. I hoped she would get better.

  ‘It’s a shame it’s raining,’ she said, but didn’t sound as though she meant it.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘it’s okay.’ I didn’t believe that either.

  We got back in the car and Mum turned up the music again. I wished Ableth would talk to me, but he was far away, fishing or dreaming.

  You’re not much of a slave. I sent my thought out to wherever he was, but it was met with only silence.

  So we drove on, my mother and me and the little tears that went with us.

  I’d hoped we were going to stop at Lakes Entrance. I love seeing the little boats there and the pelicans. But we drove through Lakes and onwards, the same music playing and Mum still wearing her sunglasses despite the rain.

  It was nearly dark when we got to Cann River.

  ‘We’ll stay here,’ Mum said.

  ‘Here? Where?’

  ‘The caravan park,’ Mum said, turning into the driveway.

  ‘I thought we were going to stay at hotels,’ I said, trying not to whinge.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Mum said, ‘there’s no hotel in Cann River and I can’t drive a second longer. I’m exhausted.’

  ‘There won’t be a TV or anything.’

  ‘We didn’t come away to watch TV,’ Mum said sharply. ‘We can do that at home.’

  ‘What are we going to do for dinner?’

  In the end we had baked beans on toast. It wasn’t exactly what I expected. Mum made up the big bed at one end of the caravan and I made up the little one at the other end.

  ‘At hotels,’ I said, ‘the beds are made for you.’

  ‘Just make it, Mimi,’ Mum said
and she sounded so tired I felt sorry I’d said anything.

  We went to bed incredibly early. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t even a bedside light so I couldn’t read any of the books I’d brought.

  ‘The caravan park owner feeds the king parrots,’ Mum said into the darkness. ‘You’ll be able to see them tomorrow morning.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘We came here, don’t you remember? You were pretty young, but I thought you’d remember. You loved the birds.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Of course, it may not be the same guy. But if he still feeds them, you’ll see them. Goodnight, Mimi.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mum.’

  I lay there in the dark, unable to sleep. It was all right for Mum. The doctor had given her little tablets to help her, but I had nothing.

  Give her a break. Ableth had come back. She’s sad.

  So am I.

  I know.

  I just wanted us to do something that was kind of fun. Watch some television, have a pizza. Baked beans on toast and going to bed in the afternoon isn’t fun.

  It’s dark outside. Ableth’s tone was remote, as though he wasn’t sure he liked me anymore.

  There might be parrots tomorrow. Why did I care if he didn’t like me? He was my slave.

  You see, he said, parrots are good. Every pirate needs a parrot.

  They aren’t piratical parrots.

  How do you know? Maybe they just haven’t had a chance.

  I couldn’t even raise my eyebrows at him. My eyelids were drooping despite the fact that the sun had barely set outside. I stifled a yawn. How many chances does a parrot need? But it wasn’t a real retort and we both knew it. Ableth stroked his fingers over my eyes and down my face, the way my father used to when I was much smaller. My eyes closed under his touch. I didn’t want them to, but they did anyway.

  You’re my slave!