Out on the street, everything is closed and dark: the chicken shop, the surf shop, the bank. Even the pub, which overflows in January, is shut tonight for lack of customers. It’s a dead little town, especially at this time of year, when the sea is cold and the colour of a five cent piece. But the sky is clear and the stars are out, thousands of them.
Not that Benny, or Big Dave, or even Jube who goes nuts for stars, who lives by her daily horoscope, would know it. It was hours ago that they drew Gran Donna’s curtains across the window. Hauling the rings along the rod as her sherry glasses – round-middled and short-stemmed, just like Gran Donna – chattered on the sideboard before settling down onto Gran Donna’s couch, three in a row.
The stars are up there all the same, though, even if no one’s looking: stars like diamonds, like winking eyes. Stars like the stars on the cover of Gran Donna’s Star Wars Trilogy boxset.
Gran Donna herself is not in the room. She hasn’t joined them for the weekly draw since Big Dave decreed the front half of the house a no-smoking zone. No matter that it’s her house – if he catches her in the lounge room he goes wild.
‘Either quit your filthy habit or stay out,’ he’d bellowed the last time she’d stuck her head through the door, waving his fists at her.
So while the rest of them watch for their numbers, she sits in the kitchen sucking at her tobacco pipe and blowing smoke into the fireplace.
The Powerball music tings; it’s the sound of coins falling onto other coins. ‘Sixty-five!’ shouts Big Dave as the last ball tumbles into place. Jube lines up the tickets and runs her finger across them, her french-polished nail with its painted white moon whispering over the little squares of paper.
‘Well?’ Big Dave asks, leaning over her.
Jube furrows her brow, and double-checks the numbers on the television. Her eyes widen. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she says, and it comes out more like breath than words.
‘What is it?’ Big Dave bellows.
‘It’s Benny’s.’
All three of them stare at the ticket.
‘Benny’s?’ says Big Dave, grabbing the slip of paper.
On the screen, the studio lights glare off the row of coloured balls. Big Dave stares hard at them and then down at the ticket, mouthing the numbers to himself. When he looks up, his eyes are as wide as his sister’s.
Benny looks at Jube. He looks at Big Dave. Could the numbers really be his? He waits for the room, and the coloured ball growing large inside him, to burst.
But nothing bursts. For a drawn-out moment, nothing happens at all. Nobody screams out, or cheers; nobody says a word. The heater hisses. The sherry glasses, with their cut-crystal sides like Gran Donna’s argyle jumper, gaze emptily. Only the television sings, and now that the draw is over, its song is about flat-bottomed tacos.
Then Big Dave clears his throat.
‘Benny has never won a thing in his life,’ he says. ‘Not a raffle. Not a spelling bee. Not even a game of Connect Four.’
‘It’s true. He’s a born loser,’ says Jube, and the way she says it it’s as if he’s out of the room – in the bathroom, maybe, or getting a glass of water – not sitting next to her with a warm bit of his thigh against hers.
‘He’s actually unlucky,’ says Big Dave. ‘Remember the holiday we had at the snow? When Benny was caught in an avalanche, and broke both his legs?’
Jube and Big Dave laugh.
When they have stopped laughing, the room falls quiet again. Quieter than it did last week after nobody won.
Jube grabs Benny’s hand and slaps the winning ticket into it like she’s never been so disappointed with him in all her life. Like he’s back in high school and she’s his teacher, not his younger sister, and the ticket is a detention slip for failing his exams. Like the windfall, which was descending so quickly a moment ago, so heavily that the air’s seams strained to hold it, hasn’t landed in his hands at all but whistled through his parted fingers.
Benny takes the ticket off his palm. His skin stings from where Jube slapped it. He turns the ticket over, stares at the blank white square of paper. He turns it back and brings it up close, an inch from his nose, to read the single sentence written in tiny font beneath the numbers. He has never noticed it before, so faint and small are the letters.
You could be a winner, it says.
*
It’s the biggest jackpot they’ve ever had! It’s the biggest ever because no one has won it in years! It’s the largest amount ever won in Australia! That no one else in the whole country has chosen the same numbers as Benny is amazing in itself; but for it to happen this week, when the amount is enormous, is the most improbable thing to occur in the history of Powerball!
The media are quoting startling figures now that Benny’s won. They’re referencing the cost of vast infrastructure projects, and the GDP of smaller nations. As if the digits lined up like that – stretched out across the front page of the Telegraph – don’t speak for themselves.
On The Morning Show they devote an entire segment to what Benny could buy with the money. They make up lists of expensive things in interesting combinations –
a Mercedes Roadster and a Boeing 747,
a Vanuatu island retreat and a Collette Dinnigan wardrobe,
a Hilton Hotel and a lifetime’s subscription to the Women’s Weekly
– things that also happen to be products of the companies that sponsor The Morning Show.
On The Evening Show they ask callers to ring in with lists of inexpensive things that Benny could buy a whole lot of. The phone lines are engaged for three hours. Twenty-five million Paddle Pops, is one suggestion. One million, two hundred thousand squeegie mops. Seven million, five-hundred thousand caramel-flavoured cappuccinos.
*
In an empty phone room, Big Dave is spraying disinfectant onto a cloth. He squirts the cloth and the liquid foams and bubbles. He slaps the cloth onto a table and the bubbles burst.
It’s Monday. Big Dave always works in the phone room on a Monday. Every Monday, before the other staff arrive to take calls from dissatisfied customers of the insurance company that employs them, he wipes down the headsets. When he has finished with the headsets, he wipes down the touch pads on the phones. He’s always happy to do it – more than happy, in fact, to contribute to the hygiene of the office, even though he is Floor Manager and arguably above menial tasks like cleaning.
But this Monday he feels differently.
The phone on the desk rings. Big Dave wrenches it from its cradle. ‘It’s not even nine o’clock,’ he shouts into the receiver.
And hangs up.
It’s unusual for Big Dave to act this way at work. Rarely is he rude to a customer. At the phone room he makes a special effort to be pleasant and congenial. It’s his pleasantness and congeniality and all-round commitment to company values, in fact, that got him promoted to Floor Manager.
Today, however, he’s sick of being a good employee. For the first time since he started managing the phone room he feels he should not be disinfecting headsets and touch pads. He should not be working at all. He should be rolling up the highway in a new Ferrari: a red one, with alloy wheels and leather seats the colour of milk.
Big Dave pours some more disinfectant onto the cloth. Its fumes, which don’t usually bother him, sting the back of his throat. The taste is metallic and sharp, like a coin: like the money he should have won, which is right now sitting in his brother’s bank account.
Big Dave grits his teeth. He thinks about the millions of dollars, piled up in a safe somewhere under Benny’s name. Towers of it, sitting in bundles in the moisture-free dark.
He pounds a fist against the table, and the row of headsets rattles like dice.
It’s been two weeks since the draw and still Big Dave can’t believe it – that his lousy brothe
r, Benny, is now on the nation’s rich list. Benny, who’s never had a dollar to his name! Whose most prized possession is a stupid toy car, a model DeLorean like the one in Back to the Future! When it comes to money, Benny is the most thick-headed person he knows. It’s no surprise that in two weeks of being a millionaire he hasn’t made a single withdrawal.
Big Dave has a few ideas about how he’d spend the jackpot. And a decent share of his brother’s winnings is not, he doesn’t think, too much to ask for. Not from someone whose backside he covered for four long years in high school.
How many balls did he break in the schoolyard for Benny? How much flack did he cop on behalf of his brother? Benny the loser, who sat on the schoolyard wall reading dumb science fiction books while everyone else played cricket or football – it’s no wonder the other kids picked on him. Benny the layabout, who’s never had a steady job in his life.
It’s simple, really. Big Dave has not worked this hard to progress in the world, to have his useless brother trump him like this.
Which is why last night he and Benny had a little talk.
Big Dave sighs moodily and scrubs a glob of unidentifiable facial excrement off the plastic. He doesn’t like what he had to say or do last night, not at all. But Benny can only blame himself.
Of course if they’d bought their tickets as a syndicate none of this would have been necessary. He had wanted to do a syndicate but Jube, the selfish cow, had said:
‘If I win a thousand bucks there’s no way in hell I’m splitting it with you.’
He bets that she regrets it now.
If only Benny would hurry up and do as he’s told.
Big Dave wipes down the final phone and screws the lid back on the bottle of disinfectant, not caring that he’s spilt some of it on a chair and that the whole room now smells like a hospital corridor. He could be trout fishing in New Zealand. He could be high-rolling in Vegas. He could be drinking champagne on a yacht bound for the Maldives, his hair blowing giddily in the breeze.
*
A chilly wind has blown in from the water. The Hills hoist creaks as Benny takes the last piece of clothing off the line: a pair of tracksuit pants with a hole in the left buttock. He folds the pants in half and places them with the rest of the clothes in the clothes basket. Cradling it against his chest, he peers out over the shrubs at the back of the garden to the sea.
The beach is deserted except for two people at the southern end near the rocks. One of them is lying on a deck chair while the other one crouches nearby. They must be crazy, thinks Benny, to be out there today, with the promise of rain in the air and the sand hissing up in clouds. The sky is a misty blur, although he can just make out the moon’s skeleton, so pale that it’s almost transparent, like a mint that’s been well and truly sucked on. Everything else is covered in haze. There’s no clear way of telling where the sea finishes and the sky begins.
No horizon: it makes Benny think about the man from Powerball who gave him his cheque. He wore a suit and a tie covered in colourful, numbered spheres. ‘The world is your oyster,’ he’d said, slapping him between the shoulder blades as if he’d known him forever. ‘Nothing is beyond you now.’
Benny lowers the washing basket. He remembers Big Dave in the hallway last night – the heavy press of his arm as he held him to the wall. It was enough to make him lose his breath. Only when he’d started wheezing had his brother let him go.
Benny blinks, and looks up at the sky again, but the sliver of moon has disappeared.
Gran Donna is in the lounge room, watching The Empire Strikes Back.
‘Washing’s in,’ says Benny.
He sits down beside her. She reaches across and squeezes his hand. Her skin is dry and soft like flour. When did her skin get like that, Benny wonders – dry and soft and sort of loose on her bones, so that it shifts against his skin like jelly? One day, he thinks – perhaps one day soon – she’ll be gone, and he’ll be left alone with Jube and Big Dave.
The thought is terrifying.
She releases his hand slowly and picks up her pipe, which she lights with a match.
Benny likes the smell of her pipe. He likes the cinnamon and aniseed waft of the smoke, the way it drifts in whirls and loses itself in the folds of the curtains. He likes, too, the quiet of the house when, like today, Jube and Big Dave are out. He likes the whole town in fact: its seasonal rhythms, the way the sea changes colour with the weather. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
He wonders where Jube is. Big Dave is probably at work. Jube should be at home studying for her exams, but Benny hasn’t seen her since breakfast.
On the screen a shuttle explodes, shattering into a million pieces and rocking the Millennium Falcon. The soundtrack dips and soars.
‘You know, er, this money I’ve won?’ Benny asks Gran Donna when the scene is over. ‘Well, I’ve been thinking. What would you say to a world cruise?’
Gran Donna looks at him blankly, and turns back to the television.
‘You don’t like boats? What about a regular holiday, then? In a five-star hotel like the one we saw on Getaway?’
She reaches for the remote and presses a button with a floury finger. The soundtrack music grows louder.
Benny covers his ears. The empty sherry glasses rattle on the sideboard. The television hums with volume.
*
‘Is this the right angle?’
‘A bit to the left.’
‘Here?’
‘Kind of push your hips up like … mmm, yes, more that way.’
‘How about now?’ asks Jube.
‘Perfect,’ says the photographer from Gentleman’s Eye Magazine, giving her a slow-lidded wink.
Jube balances carefully on both elbows. A metal bit from the deck chair is sticking into her leg. She ignores it. There are goose bumps on her arms and legs from the cold, and her thighs are beginning to shiver, but she tries not to think about how she’d prefer to be wearing her sloppy joe zipped up to her neck instead of the zebra-skin bikini she’s actually wearing. A professional model, thinks Jube, would not be put off by close-to-zero temperatures.
The photo shoot at the beach was the photographer’s idea. His name is George.
‘We’ll have the water as the backdrop,’ he said when he arrived. ‘And you in the foreground on this chair. You said your star sign’s Aquarius, right, sweetheart?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then a water backdrop is perfect.’
‘I’m pretty sure Aquarius is an air sign,’ Jube said.
But George ignored her. Instead he began to sing a song about the moon and seven houses. He is still humming the tune now, as he shoots her with an extended lens from every angle.
Jube sucks in her cheeks like she’s seen the models do on Project Runway. George is clearly an ignorant, over-the-hill hippy as well as being not very attractive, she notes, holding in her stomach and clenching her thighs and bottom; but this is probably a good sign. It probably means he is good at taking photos, since why else would he have gotten the job? As long as the photo is good and she looks thinner than in real life and they photoshop out the birthmark on her shoulder, she’ll be satisfied.
They have already told her what the article will look like. They even gave her a mock-up of the page before getting her to sign a wad of papers at the Gentleman’s Eye Magazine office. After she’d seen the mock-up, Jube had signed the papers immediately.
Millionaire’s Sister: This Lady Luck plans to spoil you rotten, the heading read.
Underneath the heading was a blank space for her photograph, and underneath that there was a fake interview, which went like this:
Q. What do you plan to do with your share of the winnings?
A. Pamper the man of my dreams in my new hot tub overlooking the Pacific.
The w
ay Jube figures it, the article is a kind of insurance policy. She can use it to guilt Benny into handing over her piece of the pie if Big Dave’s little talk doesn’t work. She doubts it will be necessary, though. He’s probably learnt his lesson from the last ‘little talk’ he and Big Dave had, when he borrowed Big Dave’s car without permission. She remembers the funny way his face had looked afterwards: his nose all lopsided, like a squashed pear.
‘Can you straighten out your legs for me, darling?’ says George.
Jube straightens out her legs. She doesn’t care that the interview is fake. She wouldn’t mind having a man of her dreams, or a hot tub to pamper him in. When she gets the money she just might buy a place with a hot tub. Then she could move out of Gran Donna’s house, which she hates. The television doesn’t even have a flat screen! And Gran Donna is old, and she has strange habits that are not acceptable in the modern day, have probably never been acceptable at any point in history.
‘Is your grandma still alive?’ Jube asked her friend Kylie the other week.
‘Dunno. I guess,’ Kylie said.
‘Does she smoke?’
‘Could do.’
‘Cigarettes?’
‘What else would she smoke?’
‘Like maybe, a pipe?’ Jube ventured.
‘Who ever heard of an old lady smoking a pipe?’ Kylie said, and she laughed so hard that she choked on her gum and Jube had to do the Heimlich manoeuvre on her twice.
Jube looks in the direction of George’s camera and presses her lips into a pout.
‘That’s right, sweetheart,’ says George. ‘More of that right there.’
Once she gets the money she will definitely move out. She will live in a penthouse in the city. She’ll get room service every day, and have her hair done twice a week. And she will not feel guilty, not for a second, because she deserves it. If she were to, for example, sell herself on eBay – not for sex of course, she would never do that, but for friendship, say – then the amount of money Benny has won is how much she would get. She is definitely good company. She is a cack – that’s what all her friends tell her.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 12