by Joy Dettman
It’s good talking to him out of that house, like they learn heaps more about Karen, who is an only child. She’s got her own hairdressing salon and a posh new car, and she and Martin live for free at her parents’ farm. That’s how Martin got to know her; he and his boss built their new mansion and it took them six months to build it too, because Karen’s father kept changing his mind about stuff.
‘Imagine being an only child with rich parents,’ Lori says.
‘It has its fringe benefits,’ Eddy says with a sort of yearning in his voice.
One day he’ll go back, be an only child with fringe benefits. One day. Every time Mavis gets a letter from Eva, the kids watch him. They know he’s thinking about going. But he doesn’t go, though he’s calling their house purgatory now instead of pigpen.
They’re so careful. Neil has been warned to behave at school because if the teachers smell a rat, they’ll send more than letters for Mavis; they’ll send the cops around to let her out and things will go back to the bad old days, and nobody wants the bad old days back, do they?
Neil makes a face, Timmy shakes his head and Matty says, ‘Dow,’ shakes his head too, and sucks hard.
The nights are too cold or wet to do much walking, but Mavis’s ex cigarette money is crowding the jam jar. They count it one night and discover they’ve got more than enough for a little television advertised in the wet junk mail, so they buy it, wheel it home in Matty’s pram and plug the old video player into it, then Jamesy goes up the manhole to connect a new cable. And the television works and, God, it’s good to have the shows back again. The little kids would sit in front of that box all day if the twin on house duty let them. They do one wet Thursday.
Mick and Lori come home from school and find them still sitting in their pyjamas. Eddy has been repairing the wall, mutilated by Mavis’s couch. He’s sealed it with the cornflakes packet and pasted over the lot with newspaper. It looks solid enough and Eddy reckons he’s going to paint it if it ever dries.
They cut Mavis down to five Valium, then to four per day, which she takes in coffee now. Donny bought them a huge tin-full and no one else wants to drink the stuff. It’s, like, months out of date. Anyway, things have settled into a routine; Mavis still yells, yells double when they give her salads, but only things like, you wait, you little bastards. Those sorts of things. She doesn’t yell as much as she used to and she hardly ever yells for cigarettes.
The kitchen door is still off its hinges but the kitchen is warm enough. Mick had tons of wood delivered before the rains came, and they’ve hung an old blanket over the doorframe and another one as an outside door for the little passage between the kitchen and the brick room. Those blankets keep the cold out almost as well as two doors, except when the wind is blowing in from the south, but the stove never goes out, so warmth has crept through the house.
Mavis
I have just returned from speaking with my psychiatrist and he suggested that I write out what is in my heart. Loathsome, depraved, obese slut born of corruption, born with the mark of the demon on her brow. I cursed you then, and wished you dead, so die, you obese cow, and give me back my sons.
You made a mockery of my childhood. You alone were responsible for Mother’s illness. And when I chose to live the life Mother dreamed for me, you turned the man of my choice from me with your gaping legs. Fat, filthy, fecund freak.
Do you know the best day of my life was the day Mother’s will was read. The joy, the pure pleasure I felt seeing your face when you learned the truth. And his face too, watching him run, his filthy little tail between his legs. She placed a barb in your depraved heart that day, didn’t she? and I laughed.
You won’t beat me, you repulsive whore. They are my sons. Mine. One way or the other, I will get them back.
Eva
Dear Mavis
A brief line to advise you of the seriousness of Eva’s present situation. If she is to get over this final disappointment, her doctor has advised me to get her away from the house for a few months. We fly out on Sunday for a tour of Europe. If you decide you’ve had enough of the boys, contact Watts. He’ll make the necessary arrangements.
Sincerely,
Alice Blunt
Wow! Phew! Relief! They’re going. Eddy claims the two letters, reads them over and over then tosses them onto the table. The decision to go or to stay now taken out of his hands, he’s looking more than a bit stunned.
‘I hope she doesn’t stop paying the money into my bank account,’ he says.
She doesn’t. When the fifty arrives on Friday, he relaxes, stops looking towards Melbourne and starts talking a bit more like a human being – like he even stops calling the loo a toilet.
So there are no more letters for Mavis; now there are weekly postcards coming addressed to Masters E and A Smyth-Owen. Some of them even contain weird money, and the ten pounds from England turns into almost thirty Australian dollars! Eddy is rich again. Alan won’t touch Eva’s money.
Lori has claimed that last letter and she spends a lot of time attempting to decipher its contents, coming to the conclusion that Mavis probably led a wild life before she pinched Henry, and maybe, if Grandmother’s illness was caused by Mavis, she might have been old when Mavis was born and probably never got over having her – either that or she wanted her to be a boy and she turned out a girl. The ‘born of corruption’ could mean Mavis’s father was a mongrel. But it’s all supposition. There’s nothing concrete.
She learns heaps about Europe from Eva’s cards, like she finds out where some of the countries actually are because Eddy buys a huge map and sticks it on the kitchen wall with Blu-tack so the kids can track Eva and Alice from Greece to Egypt to Germany. They stick the postcards up with Blu-tack, and Neil wants to stick up the pictures he draws at school. He’s excellent at drawing, though one of his pictures looks suspiciously like a giant locked in a brick box.
‘What’s that one about, Neil?’ Lori asks.
‘That’s a grizzly bear with a sore head in . . . in a cage,’ Neil says.
‘With red frizzy hair! Grizzly bears don’t have red frizzy hair. And cages have got bars, not bricks. Don’t you draw any more of those grizzly bears at school.’
‘I drawed one at school and my teacher put it on the wall.’
He was always a troublemaking little bugger. Right from day one, the kids knew that if anyone was going to throw a spanner in the works, it would be Neil. And he’s done it! The stupid little twit pinches a full packet of Valium, which Donny dropped in late on Sunday night, and which got left on the kitchen table. Anyway, Neil takes it to school for ‘show and tell’ and all hell breaks loose.
Jamesy gets called to the office. Neil has had a great ‘show and tell’ time. He’s told how Mavis is locked in the loo, and she can’t get out, and Eddy puts her to sleep with these magic pills so she can’t yell at everyone and kill them.
‘Who is Eddy?’ Jamesy asks.
There must have been some phoning between schools because the high school Smyth-Owens get called to the office. It’s on the intercom, and the last time that happened it was for a family who had to go home, due to their grandfather died. Everyone looks at Lori as she leaves the classroom, like they are thinking her mother is dead. Lori is thinking something worse than that. She’s thinking her mother is out.
No police around the office, no strangers – it’s almost a relief to see the principal, who asks about Eddy.
Eddy, who is supposed to be Alan today, shrugs. ‘Eddy who?’
Mick just shrugs, goes red, looks guilty, but Lori, who is learning a lot from Eddy, and not just about the school’s computers, says, ‘Neil has got a sort of pretend friend who makes him do all the bad things. He probably calls him Eddy. I don’t really know.’
The Valium subject is raised and Lori can’t think fast enough, but Eddy can.
‘Neil must have taken those pills last night, Lori.’ He turns to the principal. ‘Our mother was looking for them everywhere and when she couldn’
t find them she had a setback – which is probably what Neil is talking about. She got so stressed out she had a panic attack and locked herself in the bathroom for an hour, just to get away from the little kids.’
‘She had a . . . a complete nervous collapse when our father died and she’s taking antidepressants, Aropax, and Valium for her nerves, and other stuff,’ Lori says, swallows, looks at her shoes.
The principal talks at them for fifteen minutes about small children and poisoning and drugs, but he’s got bigger drug problems in this school than a packet of Valium. After a bit he calls the state school and tells them that Michael, the oldest boy, will call in at lunchtime to pick up the tablets, as the mother is waiting for them.
Lori dinks Mick around to get the pills, sealed in an envelope that contains a letter for Mavis and some literature about keeping dangerous drugs in a locked cupboard. It’s not the drugs that need to be locked away in their house; they’ve had the dangerous stuff locked away for a while and it’s becoming a bit less visibly dangerous. They can all see the weight coming off Mavis now.
That night they have one of Henry’s kitchen table lectures. They sit Neil down at the head of the table and threaten to lock him in with Mavis if he ever does anything like that again. Feed him on celery and broccoli and nothing else. Keep feeding it to him until his hair turns green. Then they go to the window and ask Mavis if she would please write one of her letters to Neil’s principal, because he wants to hear from her regarding Neil’s uncontrollable behaviour, and he’d also like to know that she received the enclosed item.
She won’t play ball but she belts into Mick’s timber wall and his floor is rocking.
They medicate, wait forever for the custard to calm her down. It doesn’t, so they start writing drafts of their own letter – which isn’t going to work because that school has received years of Mavis’s mad letters. They pass a packet of chocolate biscuits through the window with a sheet of paper and a biro, and they say, ‘Please.’ It’s their first mistake. Those biscuits bring back memories.
Eddy heads for Henry’s typewriter. He’s super fast on the library computer, but he’s breaking the no-swearing rule trying to get a letter out of the typewriter. They spend two hours over it, five heads together. They make three drafts before it sounds right, sounds like a tame Mavis, full of howevers, then they spend an hour practising her signature, which is on the cigarette note and the withdrawal form Lori still carries in her purse. That signature doesn’t look hard to do, but no one can do it.
They’ve ruined her diet with those biscuits so Eddy makes a pile of pancakes, and they try a bit of bribery. They’ll give her half the pancakes before she signs and the other half after. It’s seriously the wrong thing to do. She’s over her thousand calories, maybe over three thousand with those biscuits and half of the pancakes, and they’ve gone and let her know there are more. She throws a screamer, stabs the back of Eddy’s wrist with the biro when he tries to reclaim his night’s work, which she won’t sign anyway. He doesn’t get the letter. She rips it up, so he stands at the window eating the rest of her pancakes. Which is the third totally wrong thing to do. She starts belting at the door with her shoulder and she’s got the energy now to keep it up.
They get out, head up the street, listening for how bad she sounds. On a scale of one to ten, she’s bellowing at fifteen. Lori and Mick go to Nelly’s and give Martin a call – not that he’s going to do anything.
‘You can at least phone the school for us tomorrow, explain about how she’s had a nervous collapse.’
Nelly is standing close, sort of cleaning, tidying her already tidy kitchen bench, sort of pretending she’s not listening while her ears vibrate.
‘I’ve explained why I can’t get involved, Mick. If I do that, then later on, when she gets out, she’s got proof that I knew about her being locked up. I’m an adult and she hates my guts. She’ll have me in jail for forced incarceration,’ Martin says.
‘What about us?’
‘You’re juveniles. You’re too young to know any better.’
Lori grabs the phone. ‘So let a pack of juveniles who don’t know any better forge her bloody signature.’
Nelly is wiping closer to the phone now and her ears are almost beeping like radar scanners. Lori hangs up while Martin is still talking, and serve him right for running off and getting married.
‘What’s going on?’ Nelly asks.
‘Thanks for the phone,’ Mick says. ‘I’ll bring you over some eggs tomorrow.’
‘What the bloody hell is going on over there? I can hear her banging and yelling from my verandah.’
‘Neil did something wrong, that’s all. We’ve got to go.’
‘Is Martin coming across?’
Lori shakes her head.
‘Do you want me to call the doctor to quieten her down?’
Lori shakes her head and she runs.
It’s after midnight before they get Mavis quiet with a big, hot, highly medicated custard. She finally flakes.
Eddy’s final, final draft reads:
Dear sir,
Neil is a difficult child, as you well know, and a problem to his mother, who is not well and on Valium for her nerves and medication for depression. She is too upset about the trouble he has caused you tonight to write back. Being housebound and not having the telephone connected, she is unable to contact you. Please telephone her doctor if you have any more questions on this matter. His name and phone number are listed below.
Yours faithfully,
M J Smyth-Owen
Mick signs it. The M J Smyth-Owen sounds good, sounds grown up, and no one will recognise Mick’s writing – no one can usually understand it to recognise it.
‘They’ll probably think Martin signed it,’ Lori says. He’s an M J too.
Bloody Martin. Bloody Karen. Bloody Bungala. Lori has never been to Bungala, but she hates the tinpot little dump. She’s never met Karen either, and she hates her too. Doesn’t try to work out why she hates her, just does. Hates her like rat poison.
She used to do a lot of thinking, attempt to work out the world, used to like being on her own to live a while alone inside her head. There is no time to think these days, no getting off on her own to do any serious thinking, no sitting beside Henry’s grave either. She hasn’t been out to the cemetery since Eddy came home. Just too much to do. Always something. Too much happening. Too much being scared. Too much to learn. Too much being happy too. Just too much of everything.
Like buying that old sewing machine from the op shop, which the lady let them have for two dollars. It’s ancient and heavy as lead, and they had to borrow a supermarket trolley so they could wheel it home, but it works perfectly. Lori has been practising on it by sewing up ripped sheets, and they are all ripped so she’s got plenty to practise on. There is cooking to get done, and learning how to cook new things. That diet book has been a pure godsend. It’s teaching her heaps about cooking – even if what she serves on the plates doesn’t look a lot like the pictures.
Since Donny started calling in, the cupboards are tiptop full. A lot of the stuff he brings is weird, like he probably picked it up out of the supermarket’s garbage. The last time he brought two packets of seasoned breadcrumbs and twelve tins of sausage and vegetable stew, which tastes nowhere near as good as Lori’s sausage and vegetable stew. They give it to Mavis. It’s got the total fat content and calories it contains written on the side. They use the breadcrumbs with egg and flour to make a batter for the slices of European carp, then they fry it in boiling oil, like at the fish-’n-chip shop. It’s delicious. They tip Donny’s tins of sweet curry stew in with their minced steak stews and create new taste treats. He also brought a pile of slimmer’s jelly. Mavis gets to eat a heap of jelly.
They still stockpile baked beans when they are on special, and condensed milk, not that they use much condensed milk, except on rice with sultanas. Baked beans and condensed milk are hangovers from the old days of emergency rations, or even from the
old days of Henry. Most of what is in the cupboards and freezer has been bought on special, which is better than being forced to buy it when it’s not on special.
Mick is a great list maker. He bought a magnetic list-thing to stick on the fridge and Eddy keeps writing stupid stuff down, like ‘computer’, like any fool thing he thinks of, but his letter has fixed up the school. They don’t hear another word, not for weeks, not for a month. Neil even comes home one night with a stamp on the back of his hand for being good. That’s a first!
Winter is on its last legs when Eva and Alice come back from their trip and start getting legal. Mr Watts is sending his letters again, which are mostly about departments of community services and stuff. All Eva sends is loving letters to her boys. They sort of stir Eddy up more than her killer letters to Mavis, like they get him looking towards Melbourne a lot, get him calling the house ratshit instead of purgatory.
‘Go back to her if you want to and I’ll write and tell her that I’m not going back,’ Alan says.
‘What if we went back for a week?’ Eddy says. ‘They can’t lock us up.’
‘Can’t they?’ Alan says, looking out at the green door.
Eddy sighs, gets out the typewriter and writes another letter for M J Smyth-Owen to sign.
Dear Aunt Eva
I hope you had a good holiday and thank you for your solicitor’s letter. Mavis is still too upset to reply, however, she says to tell you that she has been in contact with the television station and they are interested in paying her for her story. She has also been in contact with legal aid again.
I am very sorry that these new arrangements have upset your nerves so much. So is Mavis. She said to tell you that if you agree to send them back, she would be happy to allow Eddy and some of the younger children to have a week’s holiday with you during the September school holidays, which would allow them to see how the other half live and may help to civilise them, as you did such an excellent job of civilising Eddy, who is a perfect gem to live with.