by Nick Earls
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Nick Earls is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novels Zigzag Street and Bachelor Kisses, Headgames, a collection of short stories, and several novels for young adults, including After January and 48 Shades of Brown, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000.
His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, as well as being successfully adapted for film and theatre. He worked as a suburban GP and medical editor before turning to writing. Nick Earls lives in Brisbane.
HOUSE of BOOKS
NICK EARLS
Making Laws for Clouds
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia in 2002
Copyright © Nick Earls 2002
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Contents
Acknowledgements
The Night Sky from Battery Hill
The Stormy Deluxe
Making Laws for Clouds
acknowledgements
This time I’d particularly like to thank Jessica Adams for inviting me to be part of the otherwise all-girl anthology, Girls’ Night In. Somehow her Nick(ola) Earls joke led to the story that began this novel, and once the characters were in my head they wouldn’t leave.
Girls’ Night In and its successors have how raised millions of dollars for the international aid agency War Child, and some of the royalties from this novel will go to War Child as well. War Child provides immediate, effective and sustainable aid to children affected by war in order to build peace, resolve conflict and empower future generations.
I’d also like to thank the people at Curtis Brown, Penguin and home who got behind me when I decided this story shouldn’t stop before the nativity play, and should last the whole summer.
the night sky from battery hill
(december)
This is the best summer of my life. This is the summer my mother isn’t always on the bus, and I used to dream about that.
No more of my mother burping and farting and creaking like an old house with all that gas in her. My mother cracking those lame boozy jokes no one gets and smelling something like old fish. She’s a bit of an embarrassment.
My mother sits in the second row on the bus and takes up the whole seat, but mainly on account of her knees. They’re quite far apart, so there’s no room for anyone else. She sits on the window side, but her right knee gets most of the way to the aisle.
It’s the chafing, her thighs chafing. That’s what she says, and she says chafing’s hell and she doesn’t say anything about hell unless she means it. She says if they wanted to make hell hell they could forget the eternal fire and just go for a long hot summer with lots of chafing.
Summer’s when the chafing’s at its worst and she sits on the verandah sometimes, flapping the front of her dress to make a breeze, and she says it’s raw as a skinned possum in there. That’s usually when she calls the doctor. And, since it’s summer, there’s usually fungus involved and I’m off to the chemist to get a big tube of cream soon enough.
The first time she said ‘skinned possum’ my brother Wayne cried. He’s younger than me, and not good with surprises, even when they’re just ideas. He had nightmares about the skinned possum up Mum’s dress, in case it might come out and get him when he was asleep. It took me some talking to get him over it. Now he just asks her not to say it because it makes him want to spew. But lots of things make Wayne want to spew. All his life his stomach’s been on the sensitive side. My mother’s not too bad about that. We make allowances. She says I should always buy groceries with Wayne’s stomach in mind, and not make a fuss about doing it. So, no peanut butter.
Enough about my mother. This is the best summer because she isn’t always on the bus (except on Sundays), and that completely changes the seating arrangements. The regular seating arrangements go like this: front row – Tanika Bell and her mother (who always faces forward, and prays when we come up to intersections), second row – my mother, third row – me and Wayne. I’m older, so I qualify for the window seat, but I give it to Wayne. I should be giving it to Wayne because of his tendency to get motion sickness, but that’s just a good excuse. From the aisle seat of row three my mother isn’t as much in the way, and you can talk to Tanika Bell. See the back of her head the whole way, talk to her sometimes.
So how much better is it when my mother’s not there, and it’s Wayne and me in the second row instead of her? Much much better. From the aisle seat of the second row, you can see every freckle on Tanika Bell’s face when she turns around. And we don’t have all my mother’s noises to deal with.
I’m working right now and I should be concentrating, but it’s Tanika Bell’s face from one row back that I’m thinking about. Working and sweating in this foul summer heat, and the weeds get up knee-high overnight so there’s always plenty to do to keep the roads looking the way they should. I stop for water and some petrol for the Whipper Snipper, then I’m into it again, putting a straight edge back along the Nicklin Way, taking out weeds and the new strands of grass that are pushing out onto the bitumen. That’s ambition for you – grass thinking it can grow over bitumen, take over the Nicklin Way. That’s four lanes of traffic and two of parking.
Things have been better here since Tanika Bell’s father came along and got the job of church caretaker and driver of the minibus. And much better since rehearsals started, since that means bus trips without my mother.
We are the Magi, Tanika Bell and me, two thirds of the Magi in the church nativity play. It’s my first speaking part – Magus Three, the carrier of myrrh. But I’ve done three years as a shepherd (non-speaking), so it’s fair enough. People know I’ve earned it. And people probably knew I was shitted off with being a shepherd by now too. If they looked they could tell. The second year I worked hard with that crook, and all it got me was another year as a lousy fucking shepherd. The third year I just made up the numbers, stood there with a broom handle that had had nothing done to it – nothing to make it look like a costume – and I mad
e sure sheep never crossed my mind.
My mother kept making me go. She doesn’t see that sometimes you’ve got to have something to live for to make you keep going back. Some understanding that you’ve got prospects.
I didn’t want to put my name down this year, but my mother made me. ‘Not if I’m no lousy fucking shepherd again,’ I said to her, and she said, ‘Righto, I’ll talk to Father Steele.’
I think my mother’s a pillar of the church – I read that expression in the paper once, and she’s the right size to be a pillar – so the talk with Steelo seemed to do the job. She came back and said they’d put me down for a Magus this year, along with Mattie Hartley and ‘that girl on the bus who talks too much’.
And I said, ‘I thought it was just you on the bus who talked too much,’ mainly to cover the fact that my face had gone red and my heart had started thumping like a knocker on a door and something in my pants was showing some kind of interest in answering.
‘She’ll have to wear a beard, of course,’ my mother said. ‘But she’s the right height for it, I suppose. Joe Bell’s daughter.’
As if I didn’t know who ‘that girl on the bus’ might be.
And that’s when, weeks out from Christmas, this started to look like it might be the best summer of my life. Forget the fact that Steelo makes us do the nativity play exactly the same way every year. Forget the fact that this is year three for me on the council road crew and summers are the worst time by far for doing this job. For me this year is different. I’ve been bumped up to Magus Three, and I’ve got dialogue with Tanika Bell.
I realise I’ve developed the thing my mother calls a ‘soft spot’ for her but, trust me, it’s a hard spot. It’s a good thing these council work shorts are loose in the front or everyone on the Nicklin Way would know exactly how I’m feeling about Tanika Bell right at this moment.
My mother – a woman all made up of soft spots – is pretty quick to pick them in other people, and give them a hard time about it. So it’s best to keep my dealings with Tanika Bell totally professional when she’s around. And to try to keep Tanika out of my mind when I’m at work, since this job involves some fierce equipment sometimes, and requires precision.
Tanika Bell has interesting teeth, some of which only look straight when she’s turning round to talk over the seat. Sometimes in rehearsals she catches me looking at her mouth, and she shuts it. It’s usually open, but in a way that I’d call thoughtful.
I pick up some Bundy rum on the way home, and three bottles of Diet Coke. The Bundy’s on special and that’s the best way to buy it, so I take two. I can always hide one until we need it. It’s not such a long walk from the bottleshop to home, but it’s too long for my mother to take on. I’m fit. Working for the council does that for you. I’m particularly fit in the legs.
Actually, it’s handy that there’s a bus to church, since I don’t know how we’d get my mother there otherwise. We’re early on the route, about a third of the way from the Bell’s place at Battery Hill to the Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla. We get on just before Mrs Vann, who embroiders flowers in the corners of her hankies and always smells of powder. Sometimes she gives us a batch of her date slice. She’s definitely another pillar of the church. The stop after that’s Mr Tooley, who tells lies about being a war veteran and goes to three churches for the food and one more for bingo. Then there’s the Skerritts, who take three rows down the back on the right and always have wet combed hair that’s turned frizzy before the trip home. The Skerritts’ hair drives them close to mad.
‘Hey, we’re the flock,’ Wayne said to me one day when he was about ten, so now that’s pretty much how I think of us – the flock being rounded up for church by Joe Bell’s bus. And we’re not such a bad flock really. Round Christmas, there’s carols. We wind the windows down and we sing and we don’t care if all Caloundra hears us.
It sounds like it runs pretty smoothly, and it does now that Joe’s been in the job ten months, but it didn’t at first. There was a bit of trouble when Mr Marcuzzi retired and my mother realised the new man’s wife and daughter thought they owned the front seat. My mother has a sense of something that I think is called proprietary. It’s to do with owning things. Not that my mother thought she owned the front seat, but she didn’t think the Bells should have it either. She went to Father Steele on that one, not that she wanted to make a fuss. There were people who had been around for years, she said, and it was all a question of who was entitled.
As it turned out, not everyone was as much into proprietary as that. Steelo fixed it somehow. He called it a reshuffle, and by the time it was done we were a couple of rows forward of where we had been (to rows two and three), and Tanika and Mrs Bell had held onto row one. Which Father Steele said was only fair – only fair for Joe – since he had no one but the other Bells on the bus at first, and he might want some conversation.
I didn’t mind the look of Tanika Bell from the start, I have to admit it. For the first couple of months, I just got to see the back of her head in the bus on Sundays and say hello a couple of times at the shops. It was my mother who told me to make her welcome and talk to her (so I couldn’t). Later on it was my mother who made me go in the three-legged race with her at the church picnic, since we were the same height. That’s the kind of thing my mother notices. It gave me five whole minutes tied to Tanika Bell, and almost a minute with our arms around each other during the race. We finished fourth, so just out of the places.
After that Tanika would turn round on the bus and talk, often enough that we got used to the idea. Before then it had only happened sometimes. And I’d lie in my hammock at night and I’d wonder what we’d talk about the next Sunday on the bus, and I’d wish that my mother wasn’t there all the time and I’d think about suggesting practice for next year’s three-legged race. And about how Tanika Bell’s body felt with my arm around it. Pretty good.
And on the bus the times when I’d most want my mother not to be there were the times when she’d crack a joke or fart. Whenever she farts on the bus, everyone pretends she hasn’t, because they’re a church crowd. The first time she dropped a bad one when Tanika was looking our way, Tanika stopped talking and stared. Right at me as though it was either my fault or she was forcing herself not to look at my mother, in case it’d give the game away.
I took that to be a hurdle for us, and I knew we’d have to get over it. So when we got off the bus I said to her, ‘Look, we pretend she doesn’t fart. It’s just what we do.’ And she said, ‘Right,’ but maybe meaning it in more of a ‘Right, get away from me, you’re an alien,’ kind of way. Which meant it was still a hurdle.
We didn’t talk properly for weeks after that, not until the three-legged race. I spent quite a few nights lying in my hammock wondering how to let her know that I only fart about the regular amount. That my mother’s different, or I’m different to her, whatever. Gas moves through my mother in strange ways. Maybe it’s because there’s more of her.
The doctor told her to change her eating, which means she now takes a Big Mac out of my pay every week. It’s got salad on it, that’s the reason. And she says her invalid pension doesn’t stretch all the way to a Big Mac. Big Mac, large fries, chocolate shake that actually means.
Sometimes I imagine her insides and they’re like balloons – long sausagey balloons like the ones they twist into animal shapes at American kids’ parties (I’ve seen the movies). Fat squeaky gassy pipes. One day I asked Father Steele about my mother, and he said God made no two of us the same way. Simple as that.
My mother is not a well woman. Parts of her came out – actually came out, they say – when she had Wayne, so we didn’t get to have Shane. My mother and father thought it’d be good to have three and go Kane, Wayne, then Shane, with the beauty of it being that Shane would have worked either way. But then there was the issue of Mum’s parts coming out, and Dad left, so there is no Shane. But I did work out that we’d ended up with three, in our own way – Mum, Wayne and me.
; Wayne feels bad about Mum’s parts, but I took him to Father Steele – since he seemed good on that kind of thing – and Father Steele said with babies in the act of birth you were pretty much guaranteed one hundred per cent innocence, so Wayne was in the clear. And what happened to Mum was just a thing that God would think of as bad luck, but he’ll see her right in the long run.
Then her back went, then she started stacking on the weight, then her back got worse, then things went all the way to chafing. She doesn’t move much now. At least the back pain’s under control most of the time, with the Panadeine Forte and the rum and an occasional dose of what she calls ‘medicinal herbs’. Which we think is probably marijuana, but you’re not allowed to call it that, not even to the guy who comes round with it in a bag. Wayne’s pretty sure it’s marijuana, and he smokes a bit of it sometimes, if he’s had a bad day at school. I don’t, of course, because I’m in a position of responsibility with the council.
Now there’s something I wish I hadn’t said. I wish I hadn’t come up with that thought in my head weeks ago when I was explaining to Tanika Bell about the herbs, because it ended up being the way I said it – ‘a position of responsibility with the council’. I might have even said ‘there’s heavy machinery involved’ (and that might have been a reference I got from a sticker on the Panadeine Forte packet).
Of course, I’m totally embarrassed about it now. I just do verges. Good verges, but still just verges. I’m not the mayor, or anything.
Tanika’s a part-time receptionist for Bob Kotter Realty, the one that goes by the line ‘Bob Kotter – the Most on the Coast’. It was Tanika who told me that Bob Kotter doesn’t do the most on the coast at all – he was just the first one to notice the rhyme between ‘most’ and ‘coast’ and get a patent on it. She says with the places they sell it’s more like ‘Bob Kotter – the Shack out the Back’. Our place was ‘a Bob Kotter home’ (also patented) before our landlord bought it, so Tanika’s never coming over, now that she’s said that. She’s right though. Bob Kotter – the romp by the swamp. He could have that one too if he wanted it. Bob Kotter – the dump by the dump, the bomb by the bombs, the hole in the hole.