by Joy Dettman
That’s all she’d got, and when the bastard rolled off her, he’d said what he’d taken her out to lunch to say.
‘My in-laws are celebrating fifty years of marriage tomorrow night. I’ve been given an ultimatum, my pet. They’re meeting me here at four thirty.’
‘Your in-laws?’
‘Maureen and the children. I’m driving them up to Echuca.’
She was his life, not his bitch of a wife and her kids. She meant more to him than his stuffed-up life which she’d allowed to become her own stuffed-up life.
‘Fridays are mine,’ she’d said, and felt like his mistress, like his Friday night mistress.
‘Her father isn’t a well man. It may be the last time we see him.’
Then the bastard had looked at his watch.
‘If you go up there with her, it’s over, David,’ she’d said.
‘We have time for a shower, but insufficient time to argue, my pet,’ he’d said.
She wasn’t his bloody pet or his Friday night fling. She hadn’t showered with him. She’d dressed, called a taxi, slammed the hell out of his doors then left.
Beautiful little pill. She could feel it dissolving her anger, feel it untangling the coil of stress in her lungs. She loved his pill but hated him. She was going home. She was packing up tonight and leaving before the traffic got bad in the morning, and stuff him and his cow of a wife.
*
There was a queue of traffic waiting to make a right-hand turn onto Burwood Highway, a dozen cars, trucks and vans in front of them when Bob invited Sarah to his mother’s birthday party on Saturday night. She shook her head.
‘She’d like you to come,’ he said.
‘Marni,’ she said.
‘I mean both of you. It’s just family, and a couple of Mum’s mates. There’ll be kids everywhere.’
Marni would want to go so she could wear the new dress they’d bought for Samantha’s party, a cute girly dress that showed her legs and her emerging shape. The tram stop was a minute away from Bob’s mother’s front door. They could go for an hour or two and come home before dark – if it wasn’t raining.
‘What time?’ Sarah asked.
‘We’re walking in on her at seven thirty,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t know anything about it.’
They made the turn onto Burwood Highway, then took a roundabout route to Mrs Vaughn’s driveway, and Raymond’s Commodore was parked again in the Hyundai’s space.
‘Whose car?’ Bob asked.
‘Her son. We can’t make her car start. She don’t driving far enough to charge her battery, so he take sometime to drive … a long way.’
‘You drive?’
‘I can. No licence.’
She’d taken a twenty from her purse while he’d been concentrating on the road, and held it scrunched in her hand until they were in the driveway, when she opened his glove box, tossed the note in, and was out the door, her back turned to his argument.
Thought he’d left until she attempted to close the gate. Marni was outside, watering the daphne, and probably pleading with it not to drop its last half-dozen yellowing leaves.
‘It needs shade,’ Bob said.
They moved the pot into the shade between the unit and the western fence, and he spoke again about his mother’s party, and of course Marni wanted to go.
‘We will come for little while,’ Sarah sighed.
‘I’ll pick you up at a quarter past seven,’ he said, and was gone, when Marni took the hose around to the daphne’s new home and found the two twenties in its pot.
‘What’s this?’
‘Bugger! I give him for petrol!’
‘Forty dollars!’
‘For last week and today.’ Sarah took the notes, put them into her purse and removed the TattsLotto ticket. ‘The TattsLotto man say we winning something.’
‘When?’
‘Maybe the week when I don’t get the job.’
‘How much?’
Sarah shook her head and they went inside. ‘Have a look, Marni. Maybe from February.’
‘What did he say, Mum?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘He is Indian man. Talk funny. It look like, You have a win.’
‘He didn’t say Powerball or anything like Powerball?’
‘Why?’ Sarah opened a carton of eggs and found four. There was plenty of lettuce. A sharp knife got rid of the browning outer leaves while Marni turned on the laptop. It took time to warm up and decide to go, and lately, each time it showed a flickering light, they were pleasantly surprised. Had to take its battery out last week and give it a shake and a blow.
Marni left it to get its act into gear and went into the bedroom. Sarah watched a second light flicker on. In April, when she got her holiday pay, they’d buy a new laptop and a sim card for Bob’s old mobile.
They’d bought their flat-screen television at Christmas time, with Crow’s bonus. It took up less space than the bulbous old model it had replaced, which would have had to be replaced anyway when the television channels stopped broadcasting analogue signals.
Years ago, when she’d lived with the Clark family, she’d watched sitcoms, watched their action. She knew now why the Clarks used to laugh at Everybody Loves Raymond. They showed replays of that show now, with subtitles. They played old movies with subtitles. They were all new to Sarah.
And Marni was back at the computer, watching it with one eye and watching the contestant on Deal or No Deal with the other. He had six cases to open; one contained the two hundred thousand dollars and another one the seventy-five. The bank’s offer was forty thousand.
‘No deal,’ the contestant said.
‘He will lose a green,’ Sarah said.
‘He might have one of them in his case,’ Marni, the incurable optimist, said. They watched him choose fourteen, and it was the seventy-five thousand.
The bank offer still went up to forty-two. ‘Deal,’ Sarah urged.
‘No deal,’ the contestant said.
‘He’s brave,’ Marni said.
‘He is gambler,’ Sarah said. ‘Boiled egg with tuna salad?’
‘Boiled eggs in cups. We haven’t had them for ages.’
Boiled eggs were easy. Sarah turned on the rear hotplate, always relieved when she felt it begin to heat. She placed four eggs into a small saucepan and allowed the tap to run over them until the water ran hot.
‘You’re wearing a dress to that party, Mum?’
‘Jeans,’ Sarah said.
‘Dress, and your good shoes,’ her little dictator instructed. ‘Because I want to wear mine.’ She clicked the mouse. ‘Danni Lane wore a gorgeous dress to Samantha’s party and she left her hair hanging. She’s got yards of it. She said it used to be short when she lived in America and she never used to wear dresses. They lived on a ranch and rode horses.’
‘Her mother? Ride horses?’
‘She didn’t say her mother did. She said she took her to Disneyland, and Graceland – Elvis Presley’s house.’ She clicked again. ‘She’s been everywhere – the Grand Canyon even, and New York, with both parents, and now she’s not even allowed to see her father unless it’s at a police station.’
‘Why?’
‘Because her mother told a judge that he tried to kidnap her. She said she’s a hostage in her mother’s war game.’
The eggs were boiling. Sarah adjusted the temperature, set her timer for five minutes, then placed two slices of bread into the toaster.
‘It would be awful having a father you weren’t allowed to see, or if you found out that your mother had found a sperm donor father for you on the internet and that he had kids splattered all around the world—’
‘What!’
‘Internet sperm,’ Marni said. ‘They order it online and it gets posted to you in a bottle – or something.’
‘That what you learn at school!’
‘Samantha said it. She said there was this gay woman in a magazine who ordered some, and she found out later that he’d posted his sperm off eve
rywhere … like her baby had twenty or thirty brothers and sisters—’ She stopped talking then, stopped clicking the mouse and stood, knocked her chair over in her haste to get away from the laptop, which she was eyeing as if it were about to explode.
‘Turn it off. At plug!’ Sarah said, afraid of fire, and when Marni didn’t move, Sarah moved towards the solo power point, provider of power to an overloaded power board.
It wasn’t smoking. She couldn’t smell burning, and Marni was crying and pointing to the laptop’s screen with a lotto ticket. Sarah took it from her, glanced at it. It wasn’t one of theirs. She bought a system seven in the Saturday night draw. The ticket she held had four rows of numbers.
‘I found two dollars near the escalator,’ Marni howled. ‘I was going to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘I had your purse … to buy Samantha’s present, and we only paid ten dollars for two pair … of earrings … me and Maria.’ And Marni’s howling mouth became unreadable. Her finger wasn’t, and it was pointing at the laptop’s screen.
They weren’t Sarah’s numbers. They were the Powerball numbers.
‘We got the third row, Mummy.’
Sarah worked with numbers. She could retain rows of numbers in her mind, but couldn’t retain these. Looked at the third row on the ticket she held in her hand. The Powerball was an eight.
You have a win, the Indian man had said, and Sarah’s stomach rolled over and her heartbeat pounded in her throat.
‘Why you would doing this!’
‘Bob said he had a ticket. And Samantha was saying worse things than internet sperm. And there were boys listening, and Maria wanted to go, and I found the two dollars. And it was up to twenty-eight million and I had your lotto registration card …’ And she flung herself at her mother and clung.
Sarah held her. Marni’s tears always got her own flowing, but not tonight. She stood at the table, eggs and toast forgotten, Deal or No Deal forgotten, brushing her girl’s long wild hair back from her face with her left hand. Her right hand held that ticket.
She didn’t look at it. She didn’t look at Marni’s hair, but beyond it, beyond the grey paling fence, beyond the sky, now black with the promised storm Melbourne had been waiting for all day. She wasn’t thinking storms. She was thinking Perth, and Jillian Jones, and newspapers – and attempting to divide six into twenty-eight.
Bob had mentioned that there had been six winners and that neither he nor his mother had picked one number.
Six wouldn’t divide into twenty-eight, not cleanly.
Through that northern window she saw the first flash of lightning. Perhaps she heard the clap of thunder. She felt it through her girl. Lived through her girl, existed because of her girl, who’d stopped crying to watch the approaching storm.
They were still standing, arms around each other, close, just the two of them, only ever two, watching the window when the rain came and came hard, slanting down, attempting to get through the glass.
Three sixes are eighteen, Sarah thought. Four sixes are twenty-four. Five sixes are thirty. Five was too much, but not much too much.
Six into twenty-eight equals four and four over. Borrow a zero from the black clouds, but six won’t go into forty either, not cleanly. Six sixes are thirty-six, and still four over. Borrow another zero. Borrow as many zeros as you liked from those clouds and you still couldn’t get rid of the remaining four.
Four million – and a row of never-ending sixes.
The devil’s number, 666.
And outside their granny flat, the devil ripped Sarah’s little world apart with lightning, shook her safe little world with thunder while on the old stove four eggs boiled dry in their saucepan.
They’d never know if the contestant on Deal or No Deal had taken the bank’s last offer or if he’d opened the wrong case and lost the lot. Deal was over and the news was on.
Sarah’s name might be on it tomorrow, or had she ticked the anonymous box when she’d registered? Too long ago. Couldn’t remember.
Marni smelled the roasting eggshell. She turned off the hotplate and ran cold water into the saucepan. It filled the room with steam. She closed down the computer, turned the television off, then the power board. Lightning storms could damage electrical appliances.
GET YOURSELF HOME
Sheltered from the sound of rain by the floor above, from the lighting by heavy, black-out drapes, perhaps the final clap of thunder woke Barbara. Still heavy with the residue of drugged sleep, for an instant she was unaware in which bed she lay. Felt for him beside her. Felt only emptiness.
And could smell him. She didn’t know if it was midnight or dawn, only that she had to wash his smell off, then pack her bags and go before he returned from his country jaunt.
Her mobile told her the time. She’d slept for almost four hours. Plenty of time. She’d be out of this place at daybreak and home in Sydney before nightfall.
‘Danni!’
No reply.
That kid lived in headphones. She looked at the stairs and sighed. ‘Damn you, Danni,’ she yelled. ‘If you make me go up there looking for you, you’ll be sorry.’
She went up, and the study door was open. Danni wasn’t at her computer. It wasn’t turned on. Her bedroom door was open. She expected to see her on her bed, texting. Not there, not in her bathroom either. That little bitch hadn’t come home.
She wouldn’t have been expecting Barbara before ten, not on a Friday night. She’d be with Samantha and the boys who hung around that overdeveloped little slut of a girl, and downstairs she went to her mobile.
Get yourself home, we’re packing up, she texted, then waited, expecting a fast reply. Danni wanted to move back to Sydney. No reply, so she sent another.
What the hell do you think you’re doing staying out so late? I need you to pack up your room. We’re going home in the morning.
She plugged her mobile into the charger on her way out to the garage to get the cases. Danni’s schoolbag wasn’t on the washing machine, which meant she hadn’t been home to change out of her uniform.
Dog barking outside. The sitting room window offered a view of the paved communal drive, where that mongrel was yapping his brains out. Its owners were out there, the male and the cripple in the wheelchair, and cripple or not, on a block like this where too many houses were crammed up against each other, residents shouldn’t have been allowed to have dogs.
She closed the drapes, loving the way they slid together at the pull of a cord, the way they met without leaving a gap. Whoever had owned this house before David must have spent a fortune on drapes. She loved the furniture they’d bought, but she’d show him that he couldn’t buy her as his Friday night fool.
She took two cases into her bedroom, left one near the stairs for Danni, then sent a third text.
Answer me now!
Waited for a reply, and when it didn’t come, she picked up her landline phone. Samantha’s home number was in its memory. She found it, hit talk, then stood, foot tapping, until a voice came on the line.
Barbara didn’t identify herself. ‘Is Danni there?’ she demanded.
‘I haven’t seen her today, Barb.’
Bloody Barb. She loathed the abbreviation of her name. ‘Is Samantha home?’
‘She usually comes home to eat.’ Mrs Deadbeat Smith laughed. Barbara had never met her and didn’t want to. She cut the connection, cursed that girl and her mother, and David Crow, and dialled Danni’s mobile number.
In all, Barbara sent five texts and left two voicemail messages, which meant Danni’s battery was flat, or she’d turned her mobile off, and, knowing her attitude lately, it was probably the latter. She’d come home to sleep, so Barbara went to her room and started packing.
*
Sarah and Marni fed Mrs Vaughn late that night, and only after she’d belted on her laundry window to let them know she hadn’t been fed. Cooked her potato and frozen beans in the microwave. Reheated a container of frozen stew, then Marni ran through
the rain to deliver the meal.
They didn’t eat until eight thirty, when they sat down to ultra-hard-boiled egg and lettuce sandwiches.
From time to time they looked at each other, or at Marni’s numbers, written now on scribble paper with the 4,666,666. They didn’t believe in them, not yet, so they ate their sandwiches, drank their tea and struggled to find a word worth speaking.
The winning ticket, beneath the clock on their bedside chest of drawers since Sunday, was now zipped safe into Sarah’s purse, and the purse zipped safe in an inner pocket of the tapestry bag, and the bag not in its usual place, on the floor, in the corner. It hung tonight within Marni’s reach, over the back of her chair, so she could touch it, convince herself that it was there, that tonight was real.
‘Do we need to phone them, Mum?’
‘They know,’ Sarah said.
‘I could go on that school camp if it’s not too late to pay,’ Marni said. ‘You can buy your car.’
‘Licence first,’ Sarah said.
‘I thought that winners got phone calls from TattsLotto.’
‘I got no phone when I register, no computer.’
‘They might have sent someone around to tell us, and Mrs Vaughn hunted them away – or they gave her our money. Can I ask her if someone came?’
‘No.’
‘We can get two iPhones, like Bob’s. We can fly to Disneyland when you get your holidays.’
‘No passport,’ Sarah said.
‘How long does it take to get one?’
‘More than April. Stop, Marni. It … making me feel sick.’
‘Because you can have everything you ever wanted?’
‘Because …’
‘Imagine David Crow’s face when you tell him you’re leaving.’
‘We tell no one,’ Sarah said.
‘The lotto people might.’
‘I know when I write Sarah Carter I will tick anonymous.’
‘I can tell Maria. She was with me when I bought it, Mum.’
‘No one, Marni.’
‘You’re scared someone will kidnap me?’