by Joy Dettman
Yours faithfully
M J Smyth-Owen
‘And that’s the last one,’ Eddy says. ‘That typewriter is ratshit.’ Everything is ratshit now; he’s picking up a lot of Willama expressions and finding a few new ones of his own.
He starts looking in the local papers for second-hand computers, focusing his frustration on computers. Like, he says, if they can afford to buy a television and a truckload of mill-ends, then they can afford to buy a second-hand computer. He could do everybody’s homework twice as fast if he had a computer. They could all learn to use it and move into the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. What’s wrong with them, for Christ’s sake? Do they want to stay Sticksville hillbillies all their lives?
After a week of it, Lori has had enough. ‘Go back to your fucking computer then, and to mad fucking Eva. After what she wrote in that letter about her own sister, she’s sicker than Mavis, and if you want to go back to her, you’re fucking sicker than her. We didn’t ask you to come up here anyway, and we’re getting pure fucking sick of you always slinging muck at our place as if you think you’re better than us.’
‘Slinging muck? There’s so much muck around that there’s nowhere to sling any more of it.’
‘Go then. Get out and fuck off and see if we care.’
No one likes to see those two arguing and they’ve been doing a bit of it lately. The rest of the kids go quiet. They’ve seen too much arguing. They know where arguments can lead.
Maybe Eddy knows he’s gone too far. Lori only uses that F word when she’s really riled up. ‘Go?’ he says. ‘Just when I’m starting to fit in?’ And he gets down on all fours and pig squeals, grunts around her feet, and when she kicks him, he crawls to the fridge and writes ‘computer’ on the magnetic list, adds ‘pig food’.
They chase him and get him down and write ‘computer’ all over him with Mick’s pen from the magnetic list thing. They cover him with ‘computer’ and waste half the pen, but they’re laughing and he’s still pig squealing and snorting.
The rotten stuff washes off him. They should have used biro.
The Visitors
Something had to give, and it gave. The school, some sticky-nosed neighbour or Eva must have dobbed, because the department of child services writes to Mavis, like, will Mrs Smyth-Owen please call them at this number? She doesn’t call, so she gets another letter. If they do not hear from Mrs Smyth-Owen in the next week, she will be receiving a house call.
Of course they don’t hear from her, though at times the neighbours are still hearing plenty because the Valium is getting low. And why the hell didn’t the doctor write repeats on his Valium prescriptions like he did on his Aropax and fluid pills?
Eddy calls Donny at the supermarket one Friday and asks him to go to the doctor and say he’s got bad nerves. Donny comes up for a flying visit. He’s got plenty of weird food and some supermarket executive stress pills, but Mavis is not acting like a stressed executive and the pills taste like poison when crushed, anyway.
They pack the food away and give him a script the silverfish have been nibbling on. It’s not out of date, though, and the all-night chemist near the high school gives him the pills. Four Valium a day slows down Mavis’s cursing.
There’s controlled panic in the house now. Every car that drives down the street is suspect. Even the new Jehovah’s Witness couple are eyed with suspicion when they turn up at the front door on Saturday. Eddy opens the door a crack and tells them that his mother is out and that he’s not allowed to open the door. They push a God book through the crack and Eddy takes it back to the kitchen, tosses it onto the table with everything else. ‘You’re dead in the water if anyone walks in on this,’ he says.
‘You always say you’re dead, as if it doesn’t even concern you,’ Alan says, and keeps on looking for Matty’s mislaid dummy, which might stop him whingeing around Lori’s knees while she’s trying to make Mavis’s breakfast. Timmy finds the dummy, which was on the floor with everything else. He plugs that whinge. The kids turn to him, see him, know that he’s been finding that dummy and plugging that whinge for years now. He’s such a no-trouble, good little kid – too good for his own good. He even looks good – someone would adopt him fast.
Mick is walking the kitchen looking at the benches, at the news-papered patch where the couch hole used to be. He walks slow through the house, the others tailing him. They are all seeing stuff they don’t want to see today. Like the beds are just mounds of blankets, except Eddy’s, which is a top bunk. It’s made up with sheets and a quilt and it looks so alien. They pick up stuff as they walk, then put it down again, kick it to another place. It’s impossible to undo this mess. Like, where do they start?
Back in the kitchen Eddy has got the last bank statement, which was Blu-tacked to the wall. He’s got the ex cigarette money jar down from the top of the cupboard. It’s stuffed.
Lori claims it. She hasn’t counted it in weeks, just pokes each new fifty in and screws down the lid. She digs the notes out now, tosses them onto the table where they lie curled a while. All of that money and what use is it? Money is for food and bills, but they’ve got plenty of food and Mick has paid the bills. What else could that money buy? A bulldozer? A team of cleaning ladies? She’s sorting though the notes, tossing them one by one at Mick, who sits smoothing, flattening, counting while the others stand around.
‘Maybe we could spend a bit, try to fix things up a bit,’ Mick says.
‘How?’ It’s a communal wail.
Mick shakes his head, looks at the back door, still propped against the wall for Mavis emergencies, looks at the old woollen blanket he hung in place of that door; it wasn’t clean when he nailed it up before winter, now it’s filthy. Then he’s on his feet and he’s ripping that blanket down. He gets his tools, his screws and wood glue, and in fifteen minutes the blanket nails are out and the door hinges have been moved up half a centimetre, new holes drilled, extra long screws screwed in and the door grinds shut. He doesn’t know why he didn’t do it before.
‘So what looks the next worst?’ he asks. Eddy falls on the floor, kicks his feet and laughs while he points in six directions at once. They look at the dusty brown curtain doorway to the passage, look at the broken west window, the broken louvres, the broken window in the bunk room, which Henry covered with plastic, which keeps peeling off.
‘Glass is pretty cheap, ’ Mick says.
‘Cheap or not, we can’t bring anyone around here to put in new glass and you can’t do it. You’ll cut your hands off.’
‘Those social worker people are going to come whether we like it or not, Lori, and if they get a look at this place the least they’ll do is take the little kids away,’ Mick says, and he goes for Henry’s old tape measure while Lori swears, says four f words in a row, then adds, ‘And don’t you little kids ever dare say that word. I’m just showing you how bad swearing sounds.’
They measure the broken windows, except Mavis’s, then Lori, Alan and Mick go out to the glass place, where the glazier tells them he’ll have to do the measuring up himself. Mick gives the address. The outside world is coming in to get them and there is not a thing he can do to stop it.
‘Oh, you’re Mavis’s kids,’ the glazier says. He knows the house, Bert Matthews is his uncle. ‘I’ll come around tonight, around five.’
When they get home, Eddy and Jamesy are painting the kitchen wall which has got the newspaper repairs, and they’re using a bucket of blue acrylic paint Eddy found in the laundry. It’s fourteen-year-old exterior paint, which Henry must have bought when he planned to paint the house.
‘It looked pale blue when we opened it,’ Eddy says.
‘But as we dip deeper, it gets brighter,’ Jamesy adds.
And it’s totally bubbled that newspaper. It’s a typical example of kids trying to fix one thing and making two things twice as bad. Most of the east wall is a bubbly bright blue botched-up blotch and the floor is blue spotted.
‘It looks fucking ridiculous,
’ Lori wails.
‘Lori sayed dat bad word,’ Timmy says.
‘Well, it does look bloody ridiculous. We should have known better than to leave you two here by yourselves! You’ve ruined the kitchen and it was the best room we had.’
‘Then we’re up crap creek in a barbedwire canoe, aren’t we?’ Eddy counters, and he keeps on painting.
They are feeling hopeless. It’s over. Mavis is ranting, throwing stuff and doing her own swearing. At four they make her a highly medicated cocoa, which zaps her while the glazier does his measuring. His quote is high, but there’s tons of money in the jar.
‘How much for cash?’ Eddy asks. That’s what Eva used to do.
‘I’ll knock twenty off,’ the glazier says.
‘We’ve got a deal,’ Eddy says, not looking up from his paint job.
The glazier is standing at the back door, eyeing that blue paint – it’s pretty hard not to look at – but they can’t let him keep standing there so they get him into the kitchen and close the door. ‘Where is your mother?’ he says.
‘Out visiting the neighbour. She said to find out when you can do it.’
‘Friday, and I’ll need her say-so.’
‘She left the money to pay you – in advance. Cash. She needs you to do it tomorrow morning. Early,’ Eddy says.
‘I could, I suppose. For cash.’
‘Early?’
‘Eight-thirty.’
He comes at ten, when Mavis is due to wake. Mick and Alan watchdog the glazier while Lori watchdogs Mavis, and Eddy goes to Kmart and buys two rollers, a packet of cheap paintbrushes and four litres of cheap white paint to tone down the blue. He mixes a batch in the laundry bucket, two jam tins of each. It tones it down a bit so he rolls the new mix over the old, gets a few more bubbles, but as it dries, that east wall is actually looking solid.
‘It makes the other walls look filthy,’ Lori says, not yet ready to admit it’s better.
So the maniac starts on the other walls. Then, as soon as the glazier leaves, they all grab a brush or roller and they are into it, painting walls, and themselves, blue, and as soon as it dries it gets another coat.
The ceiling is splattered and smeared by blue, so they paint it too. It only takes about an hour with everyone at it, standing on the table and falling off the table, and it only takes about an hour to dry because with the stove burning and the door back on its hinges, glass again in the windows, the kitchen is stinking hot. They slosh on another coat before dinner and wonder what happened to the day, which sort of disappeared beneath the stink of paint and a bright blue haze. No one went to school, no one cooked a stew for dinner. They eat baked beans late; they smell and taste of blue paint. Mavis gets beans too and hates them, hates her kids, threatens murder, but too bad. She’s going to live for two more years whether she likes it or not.
Eddy is no sleeper. He’s into it already when the rest of the kids start wandering out at eight the next morning. He’s scrubbed all the benches, scraped blue paint off the table, stuck the map back on the wall and made a full border of postcards below it. The eastern wall is the only continuous wall in the kitchen and it looks really excellent.
‘Wow.’ The room still stinks of paint but it doesn’t look like the same room. They can’t believe how clean and bright it looks, the blue water of the map sort of blending in with the blue wall, and covering a bit of it too, and that border of postcards. It looks sort of . . . sort of modern, like it might have been planned. Except the ceiling. They wish they hadn’t painted it, but it’s too late now.
After a fast breakfast they get rid of Neil to school and the rest wag it. Mick and Alan put new screws in the hinges of a couple of cupboard doors, then paint them blue while Lori heads off to buy some white lacy curtain stuff like Nelly’s to cover up the messy window frames. The cheapest she can find is six dollars a metre, but it’s long enough to cut in half. She gets the machine out and stitches a hem on the cut bit and a bit of a heading on the other, and when those curtains are hung on elastic they actually look almost posh, so she rides off to the reject shop to buy a posh white plastic lace cloth for the table.
And it’s perfect. It matches the curtains and ties the room together and looks so good it makes her eyes water, though it might be the fumes coming off the plastic tablecloth, which, as long as you don’t smell or touch it, looks like a proper crocheted cloth, like Nelly has got on her dining room table.
The floor is a mess of spilled blue paint. Eddy wants to rip up the vinyl but Lori won’t let him, due to half the wood underneath it is the old kitchen floor and the other bit is chipboard from when the kitchen stole part of the back verandah. They find Henry’s mop on the vacant block. Neil has been using it for a horse. Lori mops while, ahead of the mop, the boys scrape off blue paint with kitchen knives. The vinyl is a bit worn in places, and it’s got a few rips in it where Mavis’s couch used to live, but it comes clean after three buckets of water. And this room sure makes the others look bad.
The dusty brown curtain over the passage doorway goes next. Eddy tosses it into the hall, then starts work on the bunk room, shooting junk out from beneath the lower bunks with a broom. He finds stuff no one has seen in months. Alan finds Jurassic Park, a book lost a week after Henry died. He wants to read it again, but they won’t let him sit down. Then they are all into shooting stuff out from beneath the beds. Mick finds Vinnie’s long-lost boot and one of Martin’s sweaters, unsighted since he left home. It’s a classy sweater. Mick claims it.
Alan is walking around with the wet mop in one hand and Jurassic Park in the other, so Lori grabs the mop and after a bit she actually finds a decent looking vinyl floor under the dirt in Mick’s room. This is like a haphazard treasure hunt; they do a bit here and a bit there, but stay clear of the lounge – bedroom.
‘So, when they come, we keep the lounge-room door shut and leave Mick’s door open and tell them she’s gone out visiting the neighbours.’
‘Can’t. She’ll hear them.’
They forget lunch, forget Mavis, forget Neil. He finds his own way home from school at four and the kids suddenly realise what Mavis is yelling about. She hasn’t been fed.
It’s a bit like when they had a pet budgie. For a while everyone wanted to feed it, then after a while, everyone forgot to feed it and one day it escaped and magpies got it.
They eat scrambled eggs that night, because the eggs are piling up in the fridge and they have to get rid of them. Mavis didn’t get any lunch so she gets a heap of scrambled eggs, two pieces of dry toast and a pile of sliced tomatoes. She likes the look of that heaped plate and forgets to yell, so they forget to medicate her.
‘Bed. Everyone. We’re going to school tomorrow,’ Mick says.
‘It’s only eight o’clock.’
‘Bed,’ Lori says. She’s asleep on her feet.
It’s Friday, Eddy’s home-duty day, but he’s not staying in. He wraps the little ones in their parkas, disguises himself with Henry’s scarf and hat and reading glasses, lifts the kids over the side fence, and they go to Kmart, where he buys umpteen dozen cheap wire coat hangers. They return home the way they came, over the fence.
The midday movie isn’t suitable for general exhibition but the little kids are too young to know it. He sits them in front of it and starts unpacking his case, hanging his clothes in the wardrobe. By the time the movie is finished, he’s hung his own, plus most of the semi-clean stuff previously chucked, stuffed or kicked into corners.
Lori gets in at four and climbs over a mountain of old clothes he’s marked for the green bin. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘The kids will have nothing to wear.’
‘Lowie’s swearing again,’ Timmy says. That kid is not only good, he’s a goody-goody. She’s the main swearing offender, and she has been trying to teach Neil not to swear so she has to stop doing it. Next week she’ll stop – if she’s still alive next week.
Saturday. Social workers probably don’t work weekends. The washing machine does. Alan hits the supermarket
, buys a million pegs, more washing powder, floor-cleaning detergent and a new mop head. The old one has died of the mange. Lori and Eddy hit the market early on Sunday looking for second-hand sheets and don’t find one.
‘Bugger.’
Come Monday, they dress for school, but no one, other than Neil, is going, unless the department people come. If they do, the plan is, slide the bolt on the green door and everyone take off over the side fence. They’ve got Henry’s old ladder leaning on one side and a metal garbage bin on the other – so they can get Mick over fast.
Eddy’s got the porridge boiling; the kids love his porridge and this morning Mavis gets some, due to she’s awake early. They forgot to medicate her last night.
She’s never eaten porridge. ‘What’s this shit?’ she yells, and there is almost a wail in her voice. ‘You don’t expect me to eat this shit!’ They ignore her. They’ve got bigger problems than Mavis’s taste buds.
The beds are stripped before Neil is delivered to school, and the extra beds and mattresses carried out to the potting shed. Everything gets a wash, sheets and blankets; the washing machine just keeps going and going, but the sun is warm by ten, and there’s a bit of a wind, so stuff from the weekend is finally drying and being brought in to be ironed dry, or hung in front of the stove. At lunchtime they’re eating baked beans with one hand while sorting the washing with the other, making piles of whose is what, and who can use that, and that bloody thing wasn’t worth wasting detergent on.
‘Pitch it,’ Eddy says.
A lot of stuff is getting pitched. The mound of rejects keeps getting higher. They are all saying it now. ‘What about this?’
‘Pitch it,’ voices chorus. The green bin is going to be full this week. So are the neighbours’ bins, at this rate.
Eddy hasn’t run out of hangers yet so Mick fixes up the rail in his wardrobe and Eddy hangs stuff where nothing has ever hung before. The door hinge being broken for years, that door had to be kept locked so it didn’t fall off. Mick cuts a bit of leather from Vinnie’s old boot; one boot isn’t a whole heap of use and it still stinks anyway. He makes a leather hinge, tacks it to wardrobe and wardrobe door. And it works. He’s so inventive.