Hope: An Anthology

by The Brotherhood of St Laurence Hope Prize

  I try to picture Mum, after three Saturday afternoon vodka lemonades, her eyes glazed and a slight wobble in her walk. I see her hanging on my arm at Mal’s front door, with no idea, and getting into the lounge room only to have a huge group of people she hasn’t seen for ages jumping out at her with smiles and hugs and expectations that she’ll behave well and not get too drunk or cry or leave. From there I can only see her hiding, or not hiding at all and embarrassing all of us.

  ‘It’s such a nice idea, Mal.’ I smile at him, the biggest smile I can give. ‘I just don’t know if she’d be able to cope with it.’

  Mal nods his head. His smile has gone and he looks so worried that I know he wishes he didn’t say anything at all. He never likes to point out how Mum isn’t really very okay sometimes.

  ‘I think she’ll love it. I’m sure she’ll cope, she’ll have a lovely time, won’t she? She’s not as fragile as we make her out to be, Maree.’

  He’s looking at my cup and spooning sugar after sugar in my coffee and I don’t take sugar but I can’t seem to remind him right now. Maybe he’s right about Mum. I’m so used to the way George and Kane talk about her, the way they hardly speak to her unless it’s to tell her she’s stupid or useless.

  ‘I think it’d mean a lot to her, Maree.’

  ‘Okay. Yeah. I think it’s a great idea. Let’s do it.’

  That night I dream that Mum vomits all over the carpet at the surprise party and makes Mal clean it up with his favourite tea-towel. She’s laughing as I wake up, and I can still hear her when I finally begin to fall back into sleep.

  I tell Kane about the party with a pint of Coopers in my hand.

  ‘Mal wants to throw Mum a surprise fiftieth,’ I say, after we’ve talked shit for an hour in the pub and Kane is starting to do that sideways sitting he does when he’s about to bolt. The three beers I’ve had have filled my body with a sweet dance, and I hardly care about his reaction.

  ‘Fuck off, Maree. That’s a terrible idea.’

  I can see that he really is pretty concerned by the suggestion. His golden face is doing the opposite of smile; a sort of grimace that is half anger, half tired sadness. I know exactly how he feels.

  ‘Mal thinks she’ll be fine.’

  He groans. ‘Mal thinks Mum isn’t Mum. All these years he hangs around, trying to make her something she isn’t. This is a perfect fucking example.’

  I don’t really know what he means.

  ‘Look, I love Mal, you know that,’ Kane is holding my arm now as he speaks. His brown eyes watch me. ‘I just wish he’d leave Mum alone.’

  I walk back from the pub to my flat feeling tipsy in the late summer dusk, my feet barely touching the ground and my smile dreamy. Just below the surface, Kane’s words fizz and bubble.

  The party is on a Saturday, and when I get to Mal’s in the afternoon to help him set up, there are already balloons filling up the lounge room like silent, coloured heads, staring at me and reminding me that this is a bad idea.

  Mal is pepped. Mum used to say we were pepped when we were smaller and it was one of those nights when we had this strange, naughty energy running through our veins. She’d laugh her head off as we dived into the couch and tried to do flips off the edge of it onto the mattress we brought out when friends stayed over, and would only tidy up once we’d all flopped into bed.

  ‘Maree! I was just wondering if I should make a happy birthday sign or not?’

  As always, I can’t bear to say no to someone who is excited. It’s a problem I have, I think mostly to do with how scared I am that someone will be disappointed because of me. I’m not going to begin to try to change that today, with Mal standing in front of me in his crisp, clean Penguin shirt with his carefully combed hair, his belly saying hello beneath the pale yellow knitted cotton.

  ‘Sure!’ I say, at once too brightly and not brightly enough.

  ‘I’ll go and grab one from that party shop on Wellington Road,’ he tells me, grabbing a bunch of keys from the table near the front door. ‘There’s juice and beer and nibblies in the fridge. I’ll be back soon!’

  I sit down as soon as I hear his car back out of the driveway. I have to move a few of the balloons to make enough room for my bum and I drop them at my feet where they bounce dismally to a stop near the fireplace. I hope Kane and George will be here soon.

  George arrives first. Mal and I have finished getting the house ready and have our legs up on chairs in the backyard, trying to convince each other to take the last seaweed rice cracker. She’s got her long white-blonde hair down and looks pissed off and beautiful. She doesn’t take her sunglasses off.

  ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’ she asks us before we’ve had a chance to say hello and offer her a chair and a smile and the last rice cracker and all the other things we know she’ll say no to.

  We tell her that we haven’t and George tells us that she had a phone call from Mum early in the morning.

  ‘Like really early, like 3am. I didn’t hear it ring but she left a message and she was totally fucking pissed. Crying and shit. I couldn’t understand what she was even saying. And now she’s not answering her phone.’

  Mal stands up and walks over to her.

  ‘Right. Well I’ll go and give her another try now,’ he says and puts his hands on George’s shoulders, guiding her into the nearest garden chair. ‘She’s probably just sleeping it off.’

  Mal heads inside and I don’t know what to say that won’t result in George sneering at me so I just sit there and try to send good thoughts towards Mum, wherever she’s recovering. The sun shadows dancing on George’s hands look beautiful and I save the loveliness for later when I’ll probably need it.

  ‘I don’t even care.’ George has taken off her sunglasses and I feel the shock of her blue eyes in my stomach.

  ‘You don’t need to care. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘This was different. She was screaming through the crying. She’s dead, Maree. I bet you she’s dead.’

  I go to the bathroom, Mal’s bathroom with its hand towels and talcum powder and the Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo behind the spotless shower screen glass. I put the lid down and sit with my skirt pulled down so it won’t stick to my thighs, on the cold white porcelain of Mal’s toilet. Why didn’t she call me at 3am? I reach over and turn the tap on; hot water to make some steam.

  We cancel the party, Mal and Kane and George and I on the couches in the living room dialling number after number on our phones and making excuses we know off by heart. I don’t really listen to the others and just concentrate on making sure the people I’m calling don’t twig that Mum has fucked up again. I don’t want them to think she’s still the same, even though she is.

  I want everyone to stay at Mal’s for the rest of the night, it feels wrong just to go home and act like we aren’t worried and pissed off and scared about where Mum is and what she’s doing. Kane and George reluctantly agree and sit on opposite sides of the biggest couch with their legs lying across each other, George with her headphones on and Kane dozing, his mouth wide open like he’s waiting to be fed. Mal and I whisper in the kitchen on stools, pulling the hard curved skins from pistachios and placing the green baby nuts in a bowl for someone.

  ‘Where do you think she is?’ I ask Mal. I think she’s at the pub, any one of the many she’s been going to for years where she has nicknames for all the bartenders and they hug her when she arrives for a drink. I think we could find her within half an hour, cackling across some wooden bar with whoever will give her a listen, and that she might even come home easily, if we asked her to.

  ‘I think she’s pretty far away right now.’ Mal looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. His skin is falling off his face.

  ‘I think Kane and George have had enough.’

  ‘Have you had enough? I want to know what you’re feeling, Maree. We never hear about that.’

  ‘We never hear how you’re feeling either.’ I don’t want to have this conversation again. Only Mum should
be asking how I am.

  ‘I’m fine. I have faith in your Mum. She’s much stronger than I am.’ His face is mushy, the meaty edges of it are hugging each other the way they do when he’s talking about her.

  I get up from the stool and walk back into the lounge room where both Kane and George have their eyes closed.

  ‘I’ll see you later, Mal,’ I say softly to the front door as I open it and walk out and down the steps. I’m sick of being heard when really I’m not; when really I’m yelling up from the bottom of a well that no one even knows is there.

  It’s three weeks before I see her and when I do she’s smaller in an extravagant way, as if zoomed out. She has a key, and when I get home from work one afternoon she’s lying on my bed sleeping, her sandals thrown abstract like Picasso on the floor.

  ‘Mum,’ I yell in her ear as I shake her, hoping she’s sober, hoping I can say what I actually want to say.

  She opens her eyes.

  ‘Hello sweetheart.’

  ‘Where have you been, Mum?’

  She smiles up at me and winks.

  ‘You can’t keep doing this.’

  She won’t tell me where she’s been or say much at all so we order some pizza and open up the steaming boxes in the sort-of living room, where my housemate keeps his guitars and his piles and piles of pashminas that he bought in India two years ago and plans to sell on eBay once he gets a smart phone to get some good photos of the embroidery.

  She snuggles up to me and pulls the cheese from her first bite of pizza long, until it drapes down and lands on my housemate’s favourite cushion that he made himself out of a couple of Australiana tea-towels.

  ‘Mum, where were you? You just fucked off for three weeks. Everyone was so worried.’

  It was only me who was worried, really. George almost disappeared herself she cared so little and Kane had started drinking big again so he hadn’t been able to provide me with anything more than a slurred hello and goodbye on the phone since the day of the cancelled party. Mal had been so cheery when I’d seen him that I wanted to punch him in the face, telling me she’d be back soon enough, that she was an adult and that he trusted her judgment.

  ‘They weren’t worried, Maree.’ She picks up the long piece of cheese draped across the cushion and lowers it into her mouth, laughing throatily. ‘Georgie and Kane are way past being worried about me.’

  ‘Well Mal was.’

  She laughs again, smacking her hand against her thigh.

  ‘Sweetheart, Mal doesn’t care how I am. He might worry that I’m not at home where he can find me but that’d be it.’

  We sit side by side on the couch and watch the ads on mute and I can feel my edges relaxing. Mum’s body doesn’t seem so small anymore, her arms and thighs and feet are not so far away. It’s been a long time since we sat together and said nothing, just the two of us like we were for those few years when there was only me and her and the memory of my dad. She reaches over and wraps her hand around mine. I can feel her warmth against me.

  About the author

  Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer and social worker. She writes to explore the strangeness of our little world, and is influenced by the underdogs. She has been published widely online, was highly commended in the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction 2016, and is currently working on a collection of ‘echo’ stories inspired by the short fiction of her favourite female writers. Laura lives in Melbourne.

  Machine Man

  Marlish Glorie

  Highly Commended

  Last night I decided it was time to kidnap an old lady. Not any old lady. Not a loud mouth. Not the type you get on the radio. I listen to them all the time at the car wrecker’s yard where I work. They’re always banging on about something. How people have no manners and how everything costs and how useless the youth of today are.

  The boss of the place where I work is called Black Jack. He’s mad about cards, especially poker. I live in a caravan that he owns. It sits beside the office. He lived in it for years so it’s got everything I need. There’s a shower and toilet block out behind the office. I don’t pay rent. I just have to keep an eye on the place at night and on weekends and feed the guard dogs. The yard sits bang smack in the middle of suburbia.

  Once, when Black Jack first started the business it was a light industrial area. Then, about twenty years back, the factories got torn down and replaced with houses whose owners were always bellyaching to the local council about having a car wrecker’s yard in their neighborhood. Black Jack, in a nice way, told the council to fuck off.

  I wanted a mum like the one I saw on TV last night, when I was having dinner. I always have grub in front of the TV. The television set is my family. Sometimes I’ve even thought about changing my surname to TV. Paul TV, that’s me. I was eating lasagna. Frozen dinners are great, well they are once you’ve zapped them in the microwave. If the television set is my family, then my microwave oven has to be my brother. I talk to it enough. People might think I’m being stupid. Say that a microwave can’t hear, and can’t be related to you. Some people suck. Some people have ice cubes for brains.

  I think my ancestors could have been gadgets. I’ve worked in the auto-wrecker’s yard since I was fifteen. It’s my home, metal is my family. Black Jack, my best buddy, tells me ‘that’s cool’. Black Jack is ancient and wise and tells me my ancestors could have easily been gadgets because of all the body piercings I have. He tells me it’s a wonder I don’t spring a leak when I drink a can of Coke. He tells me that all I need now is bolts either side of my neck and I’d look like Frankenstein. Black Jack calls me the machine man because of all the bits of metal I’ve got sticking out of me and that if I ever got lost he’d find me easily with a metal detector.

  I tell him he wouldn’t. Not here at work, where we’ve got tonnes of busted-up car bodies. He gives me a friendly cuff and tells me to bugger off. He tells me that I need a girlfriend, preferably one who’s into heavy metal. He asks me if I’ve got a hunk of metal hanging off my dick. He knows I don’t. He jokes that still being a virgin at nineteen is criminal. He threatens to take me to a brothel. There’s no way I’d tell Black Jack, or anyone, that I’ve already lost my virginity, and in a way, you don’t want to brag about.

  Instead I tell him that I like being a virgin, and that I’m saving myself for someone special. Black Jack laughs. He laughs a lot, he laughs at everything. He laughs when he’s meant to be serious. He laughs when he’s meant to be sad. Black Jack would laugh at a funeral. I would want Black Jack at my funeral, laughing like a hyena. This is how Black Jack expresses himself, through laughter. And it takes a while to learn how each of his laughs is different. When I told him I wanted a mum, he stared at me, and sort of gave a snort laugh, a laugh that said ‘Tragic’.

  I ignored his snort laugh. What would he know? Nobody knows the play like the player. I like that saying. I heard a tow truck driver say that once and memorised it. My brain’s a magnet; everything sticks to it, except for the school stuff from when I was a kid.

  The old lady I saw on TV last night was nice. I want a mum like her. She was advertising Mother’s Day. She was all soft and snowy-white and she didn’t say anything. She smiled when her daughters gave her presents. I wondered if she had a son.

  When I told Black Jack about her, he grabbed hold of me by my T-shirt and hauled me up so I was real close to him when he hissed at me to stop fantasising about old ladies. That it was sick. That before long I’d be hanging around morgues, wanting to have it off with dead people.

  I told him he was exaggerating. Black Jack answered back with a laugh that said ‘Dill-brain’. Black Jack explained to me that the broad on TV wouldn’t want a kid with bits of metal thingmajings hanging off him, not to mention the dyed orange hair and half his arse hanging out the back of his dacks. It didn’t sit with the establishment. Apparently, I was anti-establishment and didn’t even know it.

  Black Jack’s an awesome guy. He reads the newspaper every day, cover to cover. He’s
cool. He’s the chief. Nut is the other guy who works with me, stripping written-off cars for different parts to sell. Nut’s okay, it was him who put the idea of pinching an old lady into my head.

  One day I happen to say, ‘Wish I had a mum to do my washing and cooking.’

  ‘Geez, ya bloody big girl’s blouse,’ Black Jack yelled back at me while we were taking a car apart. ‘Get yourself a girlfriend, for fuck’s sake – get more than your washing done.’

  ‘There’s plenty of pussy at the old folks’ home around the corner,’ Nut cried out from under the bonnet of a car he was working on.

  While he and Jack were laughing, I was thinking. Nut was right; there were lots of old ladies at the nursing home. Sometimes they’d wheel them out to air out in the sun. I used to see them sprinkled round the lawn like daisies.

  ‘Go kidnap one,’ said Nut.

  Jack and Nut couldn’t stop laughing at the joke. But I thought it was a good idea.

  That night when I was eating dinner in front of TV I got to thinking about what Nut had said. ‘Go kidnap one.’ I took my plate to the sink, and then went to the calendar. Soon it’d be Mother’s Day.

  I’d heard that nursing homes are full of old people, forgotten, left to dribble their days away until they finally cark it, and then their rellos divvy up the spoils and get on with their lives. There were mums out there for the asking. I told myself that it’d be like going to a dog refuge home and picking out a stray mutt. No one would notice if I took an old lady out for a day. It didn’t matter to me if my new mum was old. I had a young mum once. It didn’t work. I was always running away from her until the day Black Jack scooped me up and gave me a home.

  The next day after work I walked to the nursing home that was only about ten minutes away. The nursing staff gave me weird looks when I entered the grounds. I told them I was visiting my mum. One of the nurses, said, ‘You mean your grandmother.’