by Joy Dettman
‘Like, as in Babe the pig?’ she said. ‘Gee, tell him thanks, like, heaps.’
She still hates girly clothes, won’t wear them, wears jeans or shorts and faded T-shirts, still dresses like a boy. She can paint, she can use Mick’s drill to put up curtain rails, she’s the best cook, and more inventive – though Eddy does his share. She can sew a bit, chop wood. She’s one of the boys, yet not one of them, doesn’t want to be a boy any more.
She always hated school, right from first grade, and hated everyone at school, but this year with Leonie it’s been different, and she’s really excellent at computer studies, actually gets decent reports, due to Eddy, who is more than half computer.
What’s going to happen to the computer when Mavis gets out? What’s going to happen to Eddy? Will he pack up his computer and go? Not that he talks much about St Kilda now, except when he needs money. He wants to get the telephone connected so he can get on the Internet, which would be good, but expensive. Lori is still a mean-arse with money though they’ve got tons of the stuff. Mick has opened his own account and all of that stored money is making Lori feel safer, though she’ll probably never feel truly safe about money again. That’s the main reason she can’t make herself open the green door. If she and Mick had a thousand dollars each in their accounts she might open it – but that wouldn’t be enough to buy food for a month and pay the rates, and what about the other bills? Getting the phone connected would be one more bill.
Vinnie wants to get it connected and says he’ll pay for it so his boss doesn’t have to drive around to tell him if there is work or no work. And it would be great to be able to get up on the Internet.
But if they let Mavis out and they’ve got the phone on –
‘God!’
To Lori, that computer has been like some benevolent God that moved in and did its bit in helping to sort her out. It’s got a spell check, which frees her mind, allows it to go beyond spelling and into the inside of what goes on in her mind. There has always been a heap of stuff going on in there, but a sort of confused heap that never would come out right, and she’s never worried much if it came out right or not. The only time she ever gets good marks for assignments is when Eddy or Alan do most of them, when they look up all the stuff she is supposed to look up.
What goes into her head during class sort of gets added to the mess already in there – if it’s interesting enough. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s just bullshit, and she gets mad, and opens her big mouth again, says what she thinks, which people shouldn’t do these days – it’s like the truth has to be gagged, and everyone’s mouths stuffed full with politically correct talk, which drivels out on cue. Deep inside, most people don’t feel politically correct; they are too worried about money and surviving, except when they get dressed up to go out. Then they put it on and it’s like they are putting on pointy-toe stiletto shoes which half cripple the wearer, but they are the fashion so the people have to grin and bear the pain until they get home again and kick the buggers off.
Lori prefers sneakers and bare feet – at home and when she goes out.
The Accidental Metaphor
Mavis keeps on walking and the treadmill keeps on working. It wasn’t expensive; things don’t have to cost a fortune to be worth owning – like the house. It’s old and the floors shake a bit and a grown-up probably would have replaced a heap of the boards before they painted it, but it’s a good old house and it looks so dignified, so peaceful, like an old lady who has lived a hundred years, like she’s seen so much that nothing is going to surprise her now. She just sits there at the end of the street, looking out at the world, sort of accepting of all things, and not even worrying about what is going to happen next week or next year. She’s been there, done that, now she’s just enjoying her old age.
So Easter comes and so do the tourists, and school breaks up for two weeks, which will be the last of the good-weather holidays for a while – and the teachers know it. They hate kids enjoying holidays so they give out heaps of assignments. A lot of kids complain, not just Lori, but the rotten teachers are all clones, all taught to justify big assignments by saying they are preparation for the hard years of eleven and twelve. As if Lori is even thinking of doing years eleven and twelve.
Eddy does most of two assignments; Lori adds a bit, just to make Eddy’s words sound less like his words and more like her own, but the third assignment is on multiculturalism, and she just refuses to go along with what Eddy is writing. Pure refuses.
‘Give old Crank Tank what she wants and you’ll get what you want,’ he says.
‘That might be how you got around Eva and Alice, but it’s not what I do. I’m not putting my name to that cow-crap.’
‘Do it yourself then,’ Eddy says and he walks off to spend a bit of time doing his stencilling on the bathroom tiles. Lori closes the computer and goes out to Henry’s potting shed to water his plants. Some of the plants are still alive and looking well. She’s been doing a no-no, hitting them with soapy water – God’s creatures or not, they are getting a bath and they don’t like it. Henry’s exotic flowers are thanking her for it, though.
Holidays go too fast. They always did and they always will, and on the final night she still hasn’t written one single word of that bloody multicultural assignment. It’s late, after midnight, and she can’t sleep; she keeps thinking about Henry and Mavis and the house and what they hadn’t done to the house, and why Mavis and Henry hadn’t done it. And she’s thinking about how she sort of loves that dear old house now; even though it had been neglected for so long, all it needed to bring it back to life was a little bit of love. She loves what they’ve done, and she’s so proud of it, and she wishes she could invite Leonie home sometimes – or Mick could invite Paul.
Can’t.
They’ve got to let Mavis out. It’s like locking her in is locking them in too, locking the kids away from living like normal people. But if they let her out, what’s going to happen to the house? What’s going to happen to the bankcard? What’s going to happen to the kids and to Mavis’s diet?
They’ll have to do it, though.
‘God.’ If only she was sixteen, and if she had ten thousand dollars in the bank. ‘If,’ she says. ‘Big eff.’ She rolls onto her back, listens to the house sounds. A window rattling, the roof creaking, the fridge humming. She knows this house, knows all of its sounds – hasn’t slept one night of her life under any roof except this roof. Doesn’t want to, either. Doesn’t want to go to Western Australia, doesn’t want to go to England, just wants this dear old green roof, though there is no way she is going to sleep under this roof tonight; her head is working overtime.
And she still has to do that bloody assignment. She has to write something or old Crank Tank will do her block. What if she uses the bit Eddy wrote and just tones it down? What did he write, anyway?
She gets out of bed, starts up the computer and finds the file. And she’s not handing that in! So she won’t hand anything in, and old Crank Tank can do what she likes, and too bad. She had Lori in year seven and she hated her then, spent most of her life sending her to the principal, and she hasn’t undergone radical brain-altering surgery in the years since, so too bad. When a teacher starts out hating you, they hate you forever and that’s all there is to it.
The decision made, Lori creeps out to the kitchen, pours a glass of milk, drinks it while she walks out back to the brick room window to see what Mavis is up to. She’s not up to much. The light is off, the television off and she’s snoring.
Strange night sounds. Sound of breathing, sound of Matty’s little cough. Sound of a bed squeaking as someone rolls over in the bunk room. It’s like a whole house full of sleep. She tiptoes from room to room, listening at doors. Dark in and dark out tonight, except for the glow from the computer. She creeps into the lounge room to turn it off, but instead sits down and selects what Eddy wrote and deletes it. Just a blank screen now. Nothing. She stares at the screen, then her fingers take off. She can touch-type �
�� actually, she can type faster than Eddy, who can’t touch-type.
Maybe what she ends up writing is brought on by some lack of sleep induced semi-coma, but when all the words are out of her head and on the screen it’s after two o’clock and she sort of likes what she’s written and isn’t quite sure why she likes it, but she runs the spell check then prints it out – without letting Eddy add even one comma; she adds a few with a black pen, probably puts them all in the wrong places, but at least those commas are her own, as the words are her own, and at least it’s done and she’s got something to give old Crank Tank tomorrow. Now maybe she’ll be able to sleep.
So school goes back and the tourists go home and it’s nice when they’ve all gone back where they belong and the town starts settling down to normal. There’s a different feel about Willama after Easter, like it’s snuggling down quiet for the winter, drawing the fog blankets close around its ears.
Teachers might demand that assignments are handed in on a certain day, but that doesn’t mean they have to hand them back on a certain day. Probably too busy making red lines all over Lori’s.
She shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have handed it in. Should have done it the way Eddy said. Just give the people what they want, he said. And that’s bullshit. People aren’t clones yet, so why should they all think like clones, write like clones?
But she shouldn’t have handed it in. She hadn’t mentioned multiculturalism, not once. She’d written about families and houses, and of taking care of your own house and the people who live in your house, and how, if all of the brothers and sisters live by the same rules, and everyone does their share and they don’t try to take more than their fair share, then there are no family wars.
But some family members are greedy. They want to rule the world. Some like red t-shirts and they demand that everyone in the family wear red t-shirts. Some like baggy green shorts and some like heavy black boots, each dominant one trying to force his will on the others.
Individual family members have to be allowed to make small decisions, but individual choice has to be put aside when it comes to caring for the family home, otherwise that house may end up with green spouting, red roof, multicoloured brickwork and striped weatherboards, so it gets to look ridiculous beside its neighbours.
No one has got any pride in a ridiculous house and that’s when the fighting begins and the poor old house begins to fall around their ears but everyone is too busy half killing each other to notice the leaking roof.
Eventually the roof falls in and strangers come to feed the children and find that family another house to live in.
However, unless that warring family has learned from their mistake then they’ll do the same stupid things to their new house while they spend their lives looking west to the sunset, pretending that their old multicoloured house was a palace which they were forced to leave.
This is living a lie. This is not facing facts. Like, if that house was so much better, then why did they leave? Why hadn’t they slept in the rubble until they’d all learned to work together to rebuild it, to paint the boards white and the roof and spouting green, because all it takes is many hands working together to make a tumbledown old house stand tall and proud beside its neighbours.
She had ended up going back to the beginning, like Eddy always does. She’d written how many brothers and sisters can sleep safe at night in a proud house, and how some of them may be big and some may be small, some dark, and some redheads, but when the lights are out at night then you can’t tell which heads are red and which ones are dark because all you can hear is their breathing.
That’s about all she wrote. And the whole thing will probably be red lined, and too bloody bad.
Finally the Crank Tank hands it back and she sort of looks at Lori, like, what are you? She’s pretty old, pretty fat and pure cranky, so Lori ducks her head, shrugs, looks first for the red lines; she always looks first for those red lines. And there are a few and a few red question marks and commas too, but written right on the bottom of the last page, also in red, is ‘An excellent metaphor. Well thought out, Lori’. And in a little red circle, A – .
Old Crank Tank gave it an A – .
She gave it an A – !
Lori can’t stop looking at that A – , and it looks heaps better than the A she got for the assignment Eddy did for her. She’s never before got an A – , not in the whole of her life, not for work she’s done herself. Maybe if she really tried, she could scrape through this year. Nobody gives out medals for being dumb. And school is not so bad, it’s not really rotten bad like it used to be. And some of the teachers don’t hate her. The sports teacher actually likes her, due to Lori always wins the swimming, and the high jump, only because she’s got long legs. She’s fast at running too – though she doesn’t run so fast now when Paul is chasing her. It’s nice having a sort of boyfriend.
She’s got two girlfriends, real, true friends she can say anything to, Leonie and a new one, Shana, who originally came from India. Her family moving to Willama was like . . . like fate, and the way she and Lori sort of clicked from that very first day – even if her father is a doctor. It was like maybe Henry, wherever he is, or his ancestors, sent Shana to Willama as some sort of sign.
She’s really dark, darker than most tribal Aborigines. Anyhow, she and Lori and Leonie are pretty much inseparable these days.
They are sitting, eating lunch and talking about Crank Tank and their marks for the assignment, which gets them onto talking about where their ancestors came from originally. Leonie’s came from England centuries ago. She even had a convict relative who got sent out here in chains in the early eighteen hundreds, and just for stealing one lousy rabbit. All of Shana’s people came from parts of India.
Then it gets to Lori’s turn and she goes quiet, sort of considers giving up Henry’s BIG secret. But how would they react? It would probably sound as if she was trying to do a Kelly Waters, go black, just so Mick could go to university for free – though Henry would prefer to see him sitting on a drum digging sewerage ditches.
But deep in some place inside, her liver or her kidneys, or maybe in her heart, there’s this need to claim that lost part of who she is – not just the Aboriginal part, but the Indian part too, and the white boy part, that boy Henry who worked for Mr Howie. And one day she’s going to do it. When she’s old enough. She’s going to find Lily, or find some of her other kids, not necessarily to claim them, just to know that they are out there.
‘Where did your people come from, Lori?’
Lori looks up, looks at Leonie. ‘Australia? Where else is there?’
‘I mean before. Everyone came from some place.’
‘Just call me the united nations, the end result of non multiculturalism, which happens when you’re too busy surviving to worry about culture and all that other religious cow-crap.’
‘Get off your soapbox.’
‘Yeah.’ The wind is blowing, tossing her hair, but the sun is hot on her legs, turning them brown, turning Leonie’s red. ‘I’m German mainly, on my mother’s side, plus Scottish, a bit of Irish, English. I’ve got a good dose of Indian on my father’s side, plus Aboriginal and only God knows what else – my father was adopted when he was a year old so nobody knows much about him.’
‘So you’re an Aborigine?’
‘If a few tablespoons of black blood turns you black. I’ve probably got a whole litre of Indian blood but I haven’t noticed it turning me into a Hindu yet.’ She looks Leonie in the eye. ‘Why didn’t you say, oh, so you’re a German? I’ve got a double dose of that – probably at least three litres.’
‘Yeah, well, it didn’t turn you into a blue-eyed blonde, did it?’
‘Heil Hitler,’ Lori says and she clicks her heels.
They laugh, and so much for Henry’s BIG secret.
Two Women
It’s late May and the nights are cold. Last year’s winter tent is miles too big for Mavis so Lori attacks it, turns it into a dressing gown and
replaces it with the huge green tracksuit she bought from the op shop. And Mavis gets it on too. She looks a sight, because the top isn’t long enough, but she also looks proud of herself, sort of struts as she gets off the treadmill and comes to the window for her dinner.
They’re going to have to let her out. Every day now Lori knows that what they are doing is so wrong. What if Paul or Leonie came around one day and no one was home and they climbed over that gate and found Mavis locked in? Lori was only a stupid kid when she bolted that door, but she’s not a kid any more
Paul kissed her the other night, on the front verandah, in the dark, like a proper television-boyfriend kiss. And it was like the night Alan nearly drowned her, like she needed air but couldn’t get any, which might have been due to his nose getting in the way of her nose, or maybe she just held her breath when she shouldn’t have, but her legs felt like jelly snakes afterwards. Anyway, that’s another story.
Mavis is the one Lori is worrying about today; she’s metamorphosing before everyone’s eyes, like Eddy is always saying. And . . . and she actually called Lori ‘Lorraine’ for the first time in yonks instead of smartarsed little bitch or worse. She stuck her head out of the window and called out, ‘Lorraine. Come over here a minute.’
And when Lori went over, Mavis said really quiet, ‘I’ve started again. Have you got any . . . ?’ It was just about women’s business, but it was like they were the only two women in a whole world of men.
‘Don’t need ’em,’ Lori said, then she went to the supermarket by herself and got what Mavis wanted.
‘You should need them by now. What’s wrong with you?’ Mavis said, taking the two small packets.
‘Who cares?’
Today Lori is standing watching Mavis wash her hair in the hand basin. She’s stripped down to her op shop tracksuit pants and a too tight T-shirt, and she’s no pretty sight. All of the spare skin around her waist and back and upper arms is saggy. Her stomach is the worst bit, and her hair, which is long and terrible. She used to have really nice hair. Her face has never been ugly and it’s not wrinkling up, except maybe around the eyes and a bit around the neck, but if she had eye make-up and lipstick –