Disreputable People

by Penelope Rowe

  The bus trip over was, much as I had expected, not pleasant. The young hoodlum behind the wheel of the bus was working to rule and refused to open the middle door so I had to force my way up the aisle to the front door. Even so he let that bus give a nasty jerk before I had fully alighted. Just as well I had packed my basket securely.

  Suellen lives up Derby Street which, if you know it at all, is in an appalling condition, with tree roots cracking the pavement, dangerous overhanging branches, and very poor street lighting. I’ve tried to get her to complain to the Council but I may as well be talking to thin air. All this notwithstanding, Suellen’s mortgage is huge and she insists she intends to stay right in that house and pay it off. Pride!

  It’s about a block and a half of unpleasantness before you get to the house. But, believe you me, you can hear it long before you see it! The noise! I don’t know what the neighbours think! Children yelling, screams, the sounds of things breaking, and then you come around the kerb and there they all are, barefoot half the time, Ferdy with no pants once, playing rough-house on the public street!

  Where was I? Oh, yes. I tried to make myself heard. I called for them to come and help me carry my things but they took no notice and just then I was hit about the face and shoulders by a huge handful of cotoneaster berries. Ferdy! There he stood, grinning crazily, tearing another clump of berries off the bush, getting ready to throw some more.

  ‘Now, that’s enough, Ferdy,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t throw things at one of your guests, would you?’ Only then did I notice that he was dressed rather oddly, in a tulle tutu and a tinsel crown. He dropped rather dramatically to the footpath, intertwined his legs and informed me, ‘I’m a mermaid.’ Well! Then Banjo and Blade (did you ever?!) attacked me from behind and tried to pull up my skirt. ‘Stop that at once,’ I said and pressed against the fence. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ The three of them raced away in a screaming bunch so I went up the path to the door. It was wide open but I did not just walk in. I never do. I believe the privacy of the home should be respected and I always wait to be ushered in. So, I gave the bell a light tinkle and went yoo-hoo.

  ‘Come in,’ yelled a voice. Suellen’s. But I waited, giving the bell another light tinkle. I heard a tut of exasperation, and my niece stomped down the hall. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, rather ungraciously. ‘Come in. Come in.’ Mmn. I handed her the cake tin and took my smock out of my bag. I learned my lesson long ago about the need to protect my clothes from the ravages of those children. It’s a practical smock, rather like those pretty ones with the big neck-bow that the Darrell Lea lasses wear but mine has long sleeves as well.

  I followed Snellen down the back of the house to the kitchen. I can’t imagine why but they seem to live in the kitchen although it is incomplete. Suellen’s husband, Bob, was in the throes of renovating it when he took off. (I have not got to the bottom of this ‘desertion’ yet.) He only got as far as smashing holes in a couple of walls so it’s rather like being entertained on a demolition site. I tried to make a joke of it only last week. ‘Kitchen-sink drama,’ I said to Suellen. ‘Look Back in Anger.’ She’s never been quick on the uptake. Even less so these days. Still, it’s warm. Gets the last of the afternoon sun. That’s something, I suppose.

  Suellen had a party table set out and small noisy boys were crawling round underneath it, trying to tip it over by hunching and bumping their shoulders against it. I often think it’s a pity Suellen didn’t have a little girl. There were two or three other women there too, lounging against the bench tops or sitting on them. Their names escape me for the present. All I know is they are often there when I arrive, drinking wine, saying coarse things about their husbands, and why they aren’t in their own homes looking after their own children and getting the dinner on, I do not know.

  ‘Like a glass of wine?’ asked Suellen.

  ‘No, dear. A cup of tea.’ I heard that tut sound again, but really, drinking at this hour, barely five o’clock and the children waiting for their party.

  ‘Would you like me to put the food out, dear?’ I asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Suellen. ‘I’ve cooked. We’re killing two birds. Party and dinner in one. Chook.’

  She dunked a tea bag in a large mug of hot water and gave it to me. I do not approve of tea bags myself but when in Rome …

  ‘A slice of lemon?’ I asked. One of the women leaned through the back window and pulled a lemon from the tree out there. She handed it rather casually to me so I cut the slice myself. Another of the young women was breastfeeding her baby. I have nothing against breastfeeding in public but this young woman was sipping wine at the same time. All right, I am not a mother, but it can’t be healthy. I just thought it was worth mentioning it to her in passing but she shrugged and held out her glass for a refill!

  Just then Ferdy came barrelling in, his tutu awry and torn, also wet.

  ‘Blade put the hose on me,’ he roared. ‘Where are my chips?’

  ‘No chips now,’ said Suellen. ‘The chook’s nearly ready. You can have chips then.’ Chips with chook. What next?

  ‘If you don’t give me my chips now,’ said this frightful child, ‘I will not eat them.’ He had his hands on his hips, no less.

  ‘Don’t be worrying your mother,’ I said. ‘Come here and let Aunty Con tidy you up.’ I attempted to pull him towards me but he punched me quite savagely on the forearm and wriggled out of my grasp.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ said Suellen, making no effort to discipline her son. ‘Round up the mob, will you, while I just make the gravy.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. As the most senior there I thought it rather impolite that she should ask me, and I was still sipping my tea. I put my mug down and nearly tripped. Their wretched cat was insinuating itself around my legs and making a disgusting yowling sort of noise. I hate cats. They give me hay-fever. I went out to the front door. ‘Party time,’ I called. Instantly a posse of screaming boys charged past me down to the kitchen. By the time I got back they were scrambling onto chairs, competing for seats, tipping each other off and so on. Bedlam.

  ‘Come on, now, shut up, you lot,’ someone shouted very coarsely. ‘Who wants Coke?’

  ‘Me,’ they all screamed in unison. I covered my ears with my hands and looked over at Suellen. She was concentrating on the gravy, stirring it in the big old baking dish on top of the stove. I have to say that the smell of dinner was quite appetising, although Gravox never measures up to a good pan based gravy. Then I saw it happen as if in slow motion. The cat twined around her legs, made a demented chuckling sound and before my astonished eyes leapt perpendicularly up into the gravy. Up into the gravy! Suellen shrieked with amazement, the children erupted, the cat for the longest moment did a sort of two-step in the pan, Suellen started to laugh and the cat leaped out, upturning the pan. Down came the gravy all over the cat and the floor. I was the only sane one in that kitchen. They were all berserk. The cat fled to the back step, rumbling with ecstasy as it licked its fur.

  ‘I don’t suppose I can use what’s left of the gravy,’ said Suellen, with a twinge of hysteria in her voice. I can only assume she was joking. ‘Too bad. Someone pour me some more wine, for Godsake. Come on, you mob, settle down. Who wants the wishbone?’

  That was the tone of the party.

  I am not one to get huffy but I have to admit I was disappointed about my rainbow’s reception. I had, as you know, gone to considerable trouble.

  ‘Okay, cake time,’ yelled Suellen when she saw that I had lit the candles and was advancing towards the party table. As I attempted to place the cake in front of the birthday boy he stood up on his chair and shouted: ‘You said I could have a Bananas in Pyjamas cake.’ He then slid out of his chair and raced to the kitchen cupboard. I feel quite hurt telling you this bit. He threw open the door, although I could see Suellen trying to obstruct him, and lunged at a shelf where I saw a vulgar yellow banana-shaped cake standing in a cardboard box. ‘Later, Ferdy, later,’ said my niece but the child was havin
g a tantrum and no-one was paying attention to my rainbow.

  I don’t know how the cake fiasco would have ended (I have made no reference to Suellen about that deceitful act on her part) because another frightful child, one Darren by name, yelled that he wanted ‘to do a poo’! What followed I can only describe as a stampede. Every one of those little boys slid off his chair and raced towards the toilet. The instigator of this race will one day, I am sure, become an international footballer. He tackled his nearest rival to the ground, put Ferdy in a headlock, delivered a half-nelson and charged forward, throwing himself at the toilet door. Thereafter, sounds emanated from there that I know are perfectly natural in their place, but hardly at birthday cake time.

  ‘Better blow the candles out before they burn down,’ said Suellen wearily.

  ‘Make those children return to the table,’ I said, trying to assert some sense of order. I was cross and who could blame me. After conferring with the children lined up in the bathroom Suellen returned to us in the kitchen.

  ‘They all say they want to do a poo,’ she said, ‘but a few might be satisfied with a pee.’ No fear! It was like a chain reaction, a contagious disease. We adults just had to wait. I insisted that Suellen return to the bathroom and oversee the washing of the hands. When they were finally marshalled back to the table they would not sit down properly to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ so Suellen said they could give it a miss!

  ‘But they haven’t eaten their cake,’ I protested.

  ‘All the more for us,’ said Suellen. ‘Your rainbows are the best in the world. Who wants a bit?’

  ‘Cake forks, Suellen?’ I hinted.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Aunty,’ she said.

  In my day children played proper games at birthday parties like pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey and at a reasonable hour their mothers took them home. Suellen, however, plugged in a video when darkness fell, put bowls of Smarties on the floor, as if those children were dogs, and returned to the kitchen and her friends. I was, I have to say, appalled. It was high time they were home. There will be a few more deserted wives before too long!

  I did not stay to the bitter end. For all I know they are still at it, gorging themselves on, what was it? Bananas in Pyjamas cake. None of the children responded when I went in to say goodbye to them. They were staring at some kung-fu thing. I bent down to kiss Ferdy goodbye.

  ‘I hate you,’ he said blandly, staring at me hard. ‘You’ve got a furry face.’ Do you wonder I feel hurt and unappreciated? If his mother heard him, she did nothing about it. I’d have given him a good smack if he was my child. And his manner of dressing bothered me, too. I decided to speak up.

  ‘Why is Ferdy in a tutu?’ I asked Suellen as she took me to the front door.

  ‘Search me,’ she said. ‘It’s his favourite dress.’

  the feminist

  ‘This President Clinton kerfuffle,’ said my Aunty Min when I called to see her on her eighty-first birthday. ‘What’s this oral sex business about? I think I should know before I judge him.’

  I laughed. Unintentionally. Nervous.

  ‘Well? What’s the joke?’

  ‘Nothing. Happy birthday.’

  ‘No dear. I’ve known you since you were a little thing. I can tell when you’re not being straightforward. What’s the joke?’

  ‘No joke. Honest.’

  ‘Please explain!’

  How do you tell your eighty-one-year-old aunt about oral sex? You admit you’re beaten and just charge straight in and hope she doesn’t ask too many questions, that’s how.

  ‘Well, I never, did you ever,’ she said when I had finished, and she sat there quietly, a condition hard for her, for a minute or two, digesting what I had said.

  ‘I can see, Alix, that I’m considerably behind the times. It’s time I brought myself up to date. Now, I know you call yourself a feminist. You must teach me all about it.’ And Aunty Min started to chuckle to herself, a habit she has that involves clattering her teeth. ‘Oral sex, indeed. What will they come up with next? Oral sex.’ Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. ‘I need some books and magazines and … what are those magazines you all read? … Cleo is it, and People?’

  ‘No, Aunty Min, not People. It’s not exactly a feminist magazine.’

  ‘No dear? Well, I’m not an intellectual, I know. Whatever you say. You’re the bright one round here. I’m depending on you. This is going to be my new project. Feminism. To see me out. It’s important to shock the brain once in a while at my age. Otherwise you get senile. And I’ve seen plenty of that round here.’

  Aunty Min lives in a retirement village, in her own self-contained unit, and feels pity and a modicum of scorn for the inhabitants of the nursing home section.

  ‘Dear, oh me. Oral sex. Matron didn’t know what I was talking about.’ She chuckled some more. ‘She came round this morning with my birthday floral tribute and I just mentioned it casually. “Oral sex!” she said and I wondered why she sounded so confused. Now I know. Well, Alix, that’s my new project, for my eighty-second year. Oral sex and the works. To keep me young.’

  I didn’t give her the handkerchief sachet and the soap I had thought suitable gifts for an old lady. Instead we went up to the newsagent for a browse through the magazines. Aunty Min chose Cleo, Forum, and the English Women’s Weekly as her starter kit. She took to feminism as if born to it.

  ‘Alix, I’m never going to shave my armpits again,’ she told me a week or so after she had been introduced to oral sex. ‘Not that there’s all that much there to shave anymore. But it’s the principle. Can’t do anything about my poor old legs though. The hair stopped growing on them years ago. Pity. All that Silkymit.’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘Silkymit. A thing we used. Sandpaper really. To rub the hairs off. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘I can’t remember, dear. It was so long ago.’

  ‘We use wax these days. It kills.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, Alix! I thought you were supposed to be a feminist! Don’t tell me you submit your lovely body to all that pain, pulling out all the little screaming hairs. I really am very surprised at you.’

  ‘Well …’ I felt a bit phony. ‘I’m not really that much of a feminist, Aunty Min. I mean, hairy legs are so awful on the beach and …’

  ‘No, Alix. I won’t let you. You’re not to do it. If I can leave my armpits, you can leave your legs.’ She sat back smugly in her chair and asked me if I had ever smoked dope.

  ‘That has nothing to do with feminism, Aunty Min.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said wistfully. ‘All the things I’ve missed out on. Still, it’s never too late to learn.’

  ‘You’re not going to take up dope, are you?’ I said with some alarm. I had promised Mum before she died last year that I’d keep an eye on Min, and I was seriously responsible about it.

  ‘Well, dear … No, I’m only teasing you. You always were a serious little thing, weren’t you? Loosen up. You only live once. Don’t worry. I won’t break the law. Never have. Hang on. I tell a lie. I once sent some slimy ham back to the manufacturer in a thick envelope. It would have been pretty rich by the time they opened it. It had to go all the way to Melbourne. But fancy. Trying to sell you slimy ham! I believe that it is against the law to send, what’s it called? offensive matter, through the post, but you have to teach these large multinationals a lesson sometimes.’ Aunty Min’s vocabulary had come more up-to-date recently. ‘Now, dear, let’s go for a drive. Time I took the old chariot for a spin.’

  This was the worst part of my visits to Aunty Min. She adored driving. But things like speed humps and roundabouts were a source of great annoyance to her and she simply ignored them, and travelled in a stately fashion down the centre lane of whatever road we were on, giving way to neither left nor right. These excursions entailed lots of squealing of brakes (from other cars) and hooted abuse.

  ‘Lots of these drivers shouldn’t be allowed on the roads,’ said
Aunty Min serenely. ‘Now let’s go out to Lady Jane Beach. I read they have nude bathing there.’

  ‘It’s quite a difficult walk to get to the actual beach, Aunty Min.’

  ‘Nonsense. Here we go.’ And she executed a sharp right-hand turn across a lane of oncoming traffic and sailed magnificently on down the road to Watsons Bay and the nudist beach.

  As I said, I felt responsible for Aunty Min. She had always been a bit of a ‘one’, as my mother put it. A law unto herself. ‘I would hate to see her become one of those bag ladies,’ Mum said shortly before she died. Why she thought Aunty Min would become a bag lady I did not know. Mum was a great exaggerator.

  I suppose it was just that Min used to get—what was it Mum called them?—enthusiasms. During a machismo enthusiasm, for instance, she had been a co-driver in the Redex trial with a fellow called Gelignite Jack, at a time when ladies simply did not do that type of thing. This had influenced her sense of superiority behind the wheel, but in her eighties it was starting to put her, and me, at serious risk.

  She had spent several years in a convent, in what Mum said was a silly religious enthusiasm, but the nuns couldn’t handle her and had more sense than to try.

  She had married. Briefly. A pig farmer down Wodonga way. But he got the shotgun out one night when he was drunk. Aunty Min threw a piglet at him which distracted him, and she ran out of the piggery, down the highway and hitched a ride to Albury where she rang Mum and came up to us on the night train.

  Min never went back, but because she was a Catholic she didn’t divorce the pig farmer. I can remember that when Mum used to describe someone as ‘Irish as Paddy’s pigs’, they would both think it was a great joke. They were always having a joke together.

  After the drive to the nudist beach which Aunty Min found most instructive—all those lovely bodies—but I found a bit of an ordeal, we drove exuberantly up to the Waverley TAB for Aunty Min to place a few bets. She had a sure-thing tip every week from her butcher.