The Fine Color of Rust

by Paddy O'Reilly

  “Getting cooler at last,” I remark as I hang my jacket on the peg behind the door. “How come you’re still here?”

  “Have to get this stuff out to the parents.”

  With five teachers and three part-time staff in the tiny office of the Neighbourhood House you’d think we’d be falling over each other, but our schedules rarely cross. Apart from running into her when I was dragging the minister around town, I haven’t spoken to Tina for a month. She comes in to teach the Basic Education students who arrive by bus once a week to learn cooking and housekeeping skills. They race up to the office counter and push their round grinning faces in through the window. They are always laughing and joking except when they throw a tantrum and Tina has to physically restrain them.

  Her son, Damien, sits beside her now, stuffing envelopes and licking the flaps with his sloppy tongue.

  “Hi, Loretta,” he says, smiling with drool running down his chin.

  “Damien, clean up your face for heaven’s sake.” Tina holds out a tissue to him.

  “Do you ever go to shire meetings?” I ask Tina.

  “God no, why?”

  “Just wondering. I’m trying to find out about this development and no one knows anything but gossip.”

  “I heard there’s some commercial secrecy thing.”

  “See? I bet you don’t even know what it is.”

  “It’s a resort with a golf course and a spa and accommodation. Everyone knows that.”

  “But we’ve got a golf course!”

  “It’s not for us, Loretta. It’s a resort for rich people. From outside, you know, who come to the resort and stay a few days and get pampered and go home.”

  “That’s crazy. Gunapan’s an ordinary town in a dry country on a dry road that’s been in drought for seven years. Why would anyone want to come here?”

  “Loretta, stop being dense. I told you, they won’t come to Gunapan. They’ll probably come by helicopter or limousine or something. We’ll never see them. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But the water!” I’m almost shouting now. “They’re taking the water!”

  “No, they’ve got their own spring,” Tina says, sounding as cross as me. “They’re not touching our water.”

  “But . . .” There’s no point shouting at Tina. Doesn’t anyone understand that the water under the ground should be ours? For Gunapan people and the farmers around us, water is life: water is crops, it’s native animals surviving drought, it’s one swimming pool for a thousand people. It’s community. Those wealthy people will pour the water into perfumed spa baths and carve it into ice sculptures for parties. They’ll use it to wash their already pristine recreational vehicles and hose stray leaves off the driveways of the resort.

  “They say it’ll generate twenty jobs for locals.” Tina nods. “That bush land was a tip anyway. People dumped their rubbish there. It stank.”

  “Not before, it didn’t. It used to be beautiful. It was green and quiet and cool.” Of course, I get it now. It was green and cool when everywhere else was dry and hot because it had water underneath—the spring. Smart developers.

  “Oh my God, he’s back,” Damien says to me in a monotone, still with a goofy grin. He’s obviously repeating what he’s heard, and Tina flushes a deep red.

  “Did I tell you to clean up your face?” she says sharply.

  “Who’s back?” I ask.

  “I can’t bear it, I’ll have to do it myself.” She stands up and grasps Damien’s hand to pull him toward the bathroom.

  The phone starts ringing as soon as I sit down at the desk.

  “Do you have patchwork classes?”

  “I can’t pay my power bill and they say they’re going to cut me off next Monday.”

  I wander out to the kitchen for a cup of tea and stand by the window while the kettle boils. Sometimes this job wears you down. Everyone wants something. Outside the window a horse is straining over the barbed-wire fence of the paddock next door trying to reach a clump of green grass. The fence is decorated with shredded plastic bags that have been caught there in the wind. The earth of the paddock is baked like the brown dry top of a burned pie.

  Back in the office, the phone rings again.

  “Is that you, Loretta?” Helen asks.

  “Mmm,” I answer, my mouth full of teddy bear biscuit.

  “He’s back.”

  “Mwah? Phoo?”

  “Him! The bastard!”

  “Phoo oo meem?” I don’t want to believe her. Why would he come back?

  “I saw him. He was driving down past the supermarket toward the bridge. He’s cut his hair, but it was him. Same car, the CRX.”

  For a moment there is silence on the line.

  “I’m coming to the House. Don’t move.” Helen hangs up.

  I can’t move. I can’t even swallow the teddy bear biscuit that’s turned to dry crumbs in my mouth. What will happen when Jake and Melissa see their father? Does he want to take them? Would they go with him? Does he want to come back to us?

  By the time Helen arrives I’m molded to the orange plastic office chair. My husband’s return has flipped me back into the old Loretta, the Loretta who fretted and chewed her fingernails and smoked a packet of Winfields a day and rang around people’s houses trying to track down her husband to ask him to bring back some milk, but in reality to find out where he was. The Loretta who nagged her children and let her hair go lank and was too nervous to even try to find a job because she knew she was too stupid to keep one. Just like that, the old Loretta is back because her husband is.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.” Helen plonks a second strong cup of tea on the desk in front of me.

  The tea is too hot to drink, but I take a scalding sip anyway to loosen the biscuit clag welded to the roof of my mouth.

  “I’m not thinking anything. I can’t think,” I tell her. My scalp is so tight I feel like a ballerina.

  “Do you want me to follow him, find out what he’s doing?”

  I shake my head.

  “Do you want me to kill him?”

  I nod. Then laugh a little. “And trash the CRX. Have you got any idea how much money he spent on that car?”

  “I kind of guessed when I saw him licking the trim one time.”

  I choke on my tea.

  “Good to laugh in times of crisis,” she says, thumping me on the back.

  After Helen heads off, I work hard for the rest of the day, trying not to think of him. His name barely crosses my mind. After all this time and after hearing everyone else call him “that bastard” and “whatshisname” and “the ex” so often, he has become those things to me. Even though the children and I carry his surname, Boskovic. What a surname for someone called Loretta. He turned my name into a tongue-twister. I try not to think of him, and I spend half the day running to the toilet because I think I’m going to throw up and the other half having flashbacks of our life together, the stomping angry life made for us by that bastard.

  In the evening, as I’m dishing up macaroni and cheese with bits of vegetable cunningly hidden inside, I tell the kids that their father has been seen around town.

  “Is he coming to visit?” Jake asks, as if this is some distant friend of the family.

  “Of course he is.” Melissa is so excited she drops a spoonful of macaroni in her lap. “He’s come back for us. I knew he’d come back.”

  I make another slice through the crusty bread-crumb top of the macaroni and cheese and serve myself a massive helping.

  “I’m sure he’ll call soon,” I say finally.

  But he doesn’t. Three days pass. Every day I think this will be the day he calls. People ring to tell me what he’s doing. He drank at the pub Wednesday and Thursday nights. He played pool. He visited this bloke and that bloke, he took his car to Merv Bull to have the injectors cleaned, he bought four hubcaps from Norm. He met a woman who got off the bus late on Friday night and kissed her, then went back to his pub room with her.

 
Melissa’s mood is black by the end of the week.

  “It’s you,” she accuses me. “He doesn’t want to see you so he won’t come around.”

  She’s only eleven years old, I keep telling myself. “He’s busy, that’s all. He’ll be around soon.”

  Meanwhile, all I can do is go on doing what I always do. At the Neighbourhood House I sit in on the creative-writing class. Ruth, the teacher, asks one of the students to read her list aloud to us.

  “The List of Pleasing Things. Looking out from my window on a moonlit night and seeing the silhouette of a kangaroo and her joey beyond the trees in the yard. Getting a handmade card from my granddaughter with the r in Christmas written backward. The scent of the sea on the breeze of a cool change, even though the coast is hundreds of miles away. Finding my photograph in the local paper after an event. The sound of the door closing after the last guest has left the house.”

  Ruth has her hands pressed hard to her lips when we look up. Whenever someone reads aloud in the class, we stare at the floor or our feet or our pens and paper on the gray Laminex table. Ruth suggested we close our eyes to listen, but we all seem to prefer to keep some vision. I’m not sure why the others do it. I keep my eyes open but my face down so no one can read what I’m thinking. I’m a plant, a spy, an espionage agent for the committee. They sent me in undercover to find out why three women insist that Ruth’s class in creative writing at the Neighbourhood House continue term after term while everyone else who joins the class drops out after a couple of weeks.

  Today we’re writing lists. Earlier Ruth read out some lists from The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court in the eleventh century. The members of the imperial court were supported by the taxes on the population and their only job was to be royal. Ruth told us that poetry flourished, and art and calligraphy. The days of the people at court were spent in the pursuit of beauty. Moon-viewing parties were common. The ladies caught fireflies in the sleeves of their kimonos.

  “Did you hear the detail in what Shonagon writes?” Ruth had said. “And the honesty? How many of us will admit to being pleased when we’re chosen above the rest, the way Shonagon does when the empress calls her to her side before any of the other ladies? And the wickedness! The one where she talks about finding a letter that is torn up but not so torn up that you can’t piece it back together again—delicious.”

  Now Ruth takes her hands away from her mouth. She reaches out as if she is about to hug the woman who read out her list.

  “Perfect, Eleanor,” Ruth says. “You have found exactly the right tone, the right spirit.”

  Eleanor blushes and laughs. I can imagine members of our committee enjoying this class. After all, they are our own landed gentry.

  “Can you see how the ordinary is also full of beauty?” Ruth asks us, and we nod.

  Next it’s my turn to read aloud. “I don’t think I’ve done it right. Maybe someone else should read theirs.”

  “Now, Loretta,” Ruth says, shaking her head. “In this class, we don’t judge each other. We’re learning together.”

  I shrug my shoulders and pick up my piece of paper. I take a deep breath. Reading out my work makes me feel like I’m in primary school.

  “OK,” I say, and I look around at the four nodding faces of the teacher and my classmates. “OK, I wrote a few things. The List of Pleasing Things. Wednesday night comedy on the TV. A Kmart undies sale. The smell of the Scouts’ sausage sizzle outside the supermarket on a Saturday. Reading my daughter’s diary and not finding anything horrible about me. The jingle of spurs.”

  Ruth wipes her forehead with her hand. It’s warm in here, all right, but not that hot.

  “That’s lovely, Loretta,” she says. “Now, who’s next?”

  Everyone who hasn’t read yet shoots their hand in the air. I remember this moment from school. It’s when someone gives a dumb answer to the teacher’s question and the others all realize immediately that they can do better. My career as a writer is over in thirty minutes. The other class members read out their lists and not one of them has anything as ordinary as Kmart in it. Roses, moonlight, the smell of mangoes, the swish of silk against your skin. Is this why my life turned out the way it did? Perhaps I should work on developing refined taste and lofty thoughts.

  While they’re reading I try to imagine what Norm’s list of pleasing things might be. Finding an abandoned car on the side of the road and the tires still have tread? Or Melissa’s. I think and think but I can’t imagine what my own daughter’s list of pleasing things might be. What kind of mother am I?

  That night at tea I ask Melissa, “If you had to write a list of things that pleased you, what would they be?”

  “Things that please me?”

  “Things that make you feel good.”

  “Why?”

  “I wondered, that’s all. I had to do it today in writing class.”

  “Are you learning to write?” Jake says, and giggles.

  “Very funny, Mr. Top of the Class in Spelling.”

  “I got a hundred percent.”

  “And that’s the hundredth time you’ve told us,” Melissa says.

  “So what would they be, Lissie?”

  “Dad coming back to live with us.”

  “I guessed that might be one. What else?”

  “A pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.”

  I stare at her. “I thought I told you that show was off-limits. That’s American rubbish for grown-ups, not for children.”

  Melissa looks up at the ceiling and sighs.

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No.”

  “I think I did, young lady.”

  “You told me I could never watch that show in this house.”

  I hate children. One minute they don’t know which shoe goes on which foot, the next they’re using logic that would make Aristotle proud.

  “Who let you watch it?”

  “Helen. She says I’ll learn how to deal with men.”

  “And Helen’s the champion of dealing with men, of course. Well, I’m telling you now—you are not allowed to watch that rubbish. Life’s not like that. And it’s certainly not like that around here. You go ask for Blahniks at the shoe shop in Halstead and they’ll send you to the delicatessen.”

  “I’m going to Melbourne the minute I leave school.”

  “Don’t think Melbourne’s some great center of sophistication. Remember, I’m from there.”

  That came out all wrong. Melissa’s sniggering. I hate children.

  13

  THE NEXT DAY I’m on the phone first thing. “Helen, how could you let Melissa watch Sex and the City?”

  “She loved it. And I didn’t explain what fellatio is. I told her you’d talk to her about that kind of thing.”

  “Oh God.”

  “She did ask if it was the same as a blow job, but I said to talk to you.”

  “Oh double God. Where did she learn that? She’s eleven!”

  “It’s a new world, Loretta. They know everything. Anyway, I found out. The girlfriend’s only twenty-four.”

  “What?”

  “Tony’s new girlfriend. The one staying with him at the pub. She’s a child bride. Secretary at the place where he was working up in Mildura.”

  “They’re married? They can’t do that. We’re not even divorced yet.”

  “A figure of speech, Loretta. Gee, relax.”

  Now I’m angry. He’s brought his new girlfriend to town, he’s paraded her around, he’s been spending money and hanging out with his mates, and he hasn’t even said hello to his children. I get off the phone from Helen, who’s urging me not to do anything silly, and I ring the House and tell them I can’t come in today.

  First I visit the police station.

  “Have you applied to the Family Court for maintenance?” Bill says.

  “It’s a bit hard to get money from someone who’s disappeared. I mean, I know you can apply, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble.”


  Bill taps his report sheet with his pen. “Not a lot I can do here. I feel for you, love. It’s a common problem in this town.”

  At the Social Security office in Halstead I run into Brenda. She offers me a squashed tomato sandwich from her handbag. She’s brought a blow-up neck pillow.

  “What number are you?” I ask. She shows me her ticket, which says forty-three, and I look at mine, which says sixty-eight. At the counter a man’s getting all steamed up and piling papers on the desk in front of the receptionist.

  “This isn’t a rates notice,” she says flatly. “It’s a title. We need the rates notice.” She leans forward and rubs her forehead. “I’m sorry, Mr. O’Hagan. It’s the rules. We’re stuck with them too. If we don’t follow the rules the whole process goes back to scratch and it takes even longer.”

  “Fuck!” he shouts. He scrunches the papers in his fist and turns to the queue. “Fuck them. Fuck youse. All this for a measly two hundred bucks. Fuck youse all.”

  Back at the Gunapan pub, the barmaid says my husband’s gone out. “With his lady friend. Sorry, Loretta,” she adds.

  For an hour I drive aimlessly around town, then it’s time to pick up the kids from school.

  Tony’s waiting at the school gate with his child bride.

  It’s so hard to walk I feel as if my legs have pins in them. They won’t bend. I swing them around in half circles so I can move forward.

  “Hey, Loretta,” the bastard says. “What have you done to yourself? Been playing footy?”

  “Hello, Tony,” I whisper.

  The child bride thrusts a hand at me. “Nice to meet you, Loretta. I’m Talee.” She’s neat. Pressed jeans and checked shirt. Dinky short hairdo and clean fingernails. Unbitten. My hand slides unwillingly into hers and she grips it for a moment, then lets go. “I’m sorry to surprise you this way, but Tony says he’s been flat out all week and hasn’t called. He’s unbelievable. You must be so cross. I hope you’ll forgive us.”

  My eyes roll across to look at Tony. Everything’s going slow, or else my brain is shutting down. I think I heard her insult Tony, but he’s still smiling. He’s shaved off his sparse ginger moustache and goatee and he seems to have spent money on his teeth. My money. My kids’ money.