At the school gate Melissa’s standing with her hands on her hips, lips pursed, squinting into the sun. If she keeps maturing at this rate she’ll soon be a fully fledged Gunapan woman. She’ll have married, had kids, and been deserted by the time she’s fifteen. She and Jake climb into the backseat and I head off in my usual role of chauffeur.
“How come you always sit in the back, Liss?” I ask. “It’s not as if you need a booster seat anymore. You could sit up with me and chat while I drive.” If she’s going to be a Gunapan woman, she’ll need to learn the art of the car nod. A half-nod for acquaintances, a nod for friends, and a knowing head toss for best friends. This can only be done from the front seat. And while driving at speed. Preferably with an arm hanging casually out the window.
“Because you drive like a psycho,” my daughter says casually. “And I don’t want to die.”
The minute that girl gets her license I’m never letting her in my car again.
“Are any of the kids from that new family in your class?”
“What new family?”
I check the rearview mirror. Melissa’s sitting with a back as straight as a ballerina’s and staring at her hands. She’s lying.
“The one from Bosnia Hergesobbler. The foreigners.”
Another glance at the reflection. Jake’s looking out the window.
“Well?”
“Yeah, a girl.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know. There are only sixteen kids in your class.”
“Something. I can’t pronounce it.”
“Well, what do you call her when you want to speak to her?” I’m starting to channel a dull policeman.
“Nothing.”
A modern mother never resorts to violence. That’s why I don’t screech to a halt, lean over the back of the seat, and give my daughter a good thwack over the head. Instead, because I am a reasonable modern woman and a caring mother, I screech to a halt, lean over the back of the seat, and warn Melissa that serious consequences will occur if she doesn’t smarten up and stop avoiding my questions.
“What serious consequences?” she asks.
The serious consequence is that my head may explode, but that’s not going to sway Melissa.
“No TV for a week.” I try not to think about the fact that Melissa is only eleven. If she’s this way now, what will happen when she turns into a teenager? I might have to leave home. Get a flat in the city. Join an exercise class and discover the body that’s been waiting underneath my flab for all these years. I’ll be tired of Beemer Man and Harley Man by then. I’ll be ready for Merc Man. Merc Man has divorced his ungrateful wife and is looking for someone to pamper. “Loretta,” he says to me after we’ve made love on the king-sized bed in his penthouse with views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, “you are one delectable hunk of woman. You know, looking at this taut body, I can’t believe you have children.” “Actually, I don’t,” I’ll tell him. “I sold them.”
• • •
MELISSA’S BEEN CHECKING the letter box every day since Tony left town, and this afternoon I see her pull a few bits of mail out of the box, flip through them, then slip one into her pocket as she looks furtively around at the house. I am not hiding. It is a fluke that I am standing behind the curtain, from where I can see her but she can’t see me. Exactly where I have been while she checked the letter box every day since her father’s visit.
“Bills, Mum,” she says with pretend innocence, dropping a few envelopes on the dresser and heading off to her room.
“Thanks, Liss,” I answer with a winning smile, like a character in an Enid Blyton book. Sometimes I am amazed at how we learn to play these roles, as if we are in a movie.
Tony is too lazy and selfish to try to take the kids away from me, but whenever I think of the possibility, my stomach rolls over and I can feel my insides being rearranged. What if Talee wants them? I wonder. What if Tony and Talee have Melissa over for a visit and Melissa doesn’t want to come home? Or Jake? They’d only have to buy Jake a Lego set and he’d go anywhere with them. Later in the night, when Melissa’s asleep, I sneak into her room and slide the card from under her pillow.
Hi, Liss and Jake,
Hope school’s good and everything is great. Can’t wait to see you again. Say hello to your mum.
Love, Dad and Talee
Which would be fine, except it’s not his handwriting. Miss Happy must have written it. They won’t be coming to take my children. Tony has probably, once again, forgotten he even has children.
• • •
NEXT MORNING I ring Helen and tell her about my experience with the new family at the MacInerny house. She’s never met the woman.
“I mean, I kind of know her. I’ve seen her and the kids plenty of times. We nod hello. I just never had a chance to talk to her. She’s a refugee, poor thing. Try the Church of Goodwill. They have that outreach program.”
After work, on the way to the church I drop in at the shire office. Norm’s asked me to get the official documents for the development to use in his next try at getting the Unsightly Property Notice lifted. He’s convinced they’re connected.
“Give me everything you’ve got on the development on the Bolton Road,” I say to the receptionist in my best private detective voice.
She yawns and turns to her computer. “You mean the resort?” she asks.
“That’s it. I’ll have whatever you’ve got. Plans, permits, letters, objections.” That’s odd, I think. “Did anyone object? I don’t remember seeing any notices about this. Aren’t you supposed to be able to object to new buildings?”
“Don’t know. You’d have to ask in Planning about that.” She taps and clicks with her keyboard and mouse, stifling yawns. “Nothing here, sorry.”
“It’s a huge development. Isn’t there anything?”
“Yeah, but I can’t find anything for the public. All the stuff’s in files I can’t access and the manager’s not in today. You’ll probably have to put in a written request.”
Next I head for the church.
The Church of Goodwill shopfront is on the main road between the betting shop and the fish and chippery. Hand-drawn pictures of rainbows and doves are sticky-taped to the window, and Christian rock and roll music blares in distorted waves from a tinny speaker above the front door. Inside, Trudy sits at the desk staring at a computer screen.
“I hate these things,” she says to me when I walk in. “I preferred it when we wrote letters to each other by hand, and added up the week’s offerings in a hardbound book with two columns. I’m not entirely convinced that computers aren’t the work of the devil.”
“Is that right?” I try to look as if I talk about the devil every day.
“I’m joking, Loretta. What can I do for you?”
“Have you ever met the Bosnia Herzabobble people down the old MacInerny place?”
“Mersiha and her family? Yes, of course. They’re part of the Gunapan Revitalization and Welcoming Committee Community Project.”
I might be imagining it, but Trudy seems to be avoiding looking me in the eye. I’ve been getting that feeling a lot lately. As if people are afraid to tell me the revived Save Our School Committee is a waste of time. I don’t know why they’d hold back. They didn’t last time. I distinctly remember Trudy telling me, “That Save Our School Committee is a waste of time, Loretta. Why don’t you do some real work in the community and help clean up Wilson Dam next Saturday?” I wanted to answer that I didn’t feel like contracting tetanus, but I didn’t because Trudy’s a Christian and a good worker in the community and one day I might need her help for Save Our School.
“She’s already on a committee. Oh, that’s OK then. Norm thought she might be good for Save Our School. But if she’s busy . . .”
“She’s not on the committee, Loretta. She’s a refugee, struggling to get herself and her family settled here. Her sponsor is Maxine. Anyway, you must have seen her at the school
and the fair and around the place. Mersiha’s lovely. She’s making a real effort to join in. People are starting to welcome her very warmly.”
“Oh. Well, maybe I could ask Maxine to contact—”
“Actually, Loretta”—Trudy looks at the ceiling as if she’s getting instructions from above—“Maxine and I have been meaning to talk to you. So here you are, and I think I’d better say it.”
“About Save Our School?”
“No.” She takes a deep breath. “About the bullying. Something has to be done.”
“I knew it. I knew it was bullying.” My face is tight with rage. “I’ll do something all right.” I feel the breath blazing out of my nose, hotter and angrier than the snorts of a bull at a matador fight. “They’ll find out no one messes with my kids. I’ll call their father to come and sort it out if I have to. I’m going around to that woman’s place right now.” I want to paw at the ground. The whole room is red.
Trudy stands up and squeezes out from behind the desk. She edges her way between me and the front door.
“Step away from the door, Loretta.”
I take a long, deep breath, swell to twice my size like an angry puffer fish. “I’m going now, Trudy. Get out of my way.”
Trudy presses her back against the door. “I can’t let you.”
“This is not about you, Trudy. It’s about my children. Get out of the way or I’ll throw you through that door.”
“Loretta, listen to yourself. Think about where your children have learned their bad behavior. I had no idea you were this kind of person.”
“My children’s bad behavior? What about that woman’s children? Oh, it’s a lovely welcome for them, even though they’re making my children’s life hell. I know, they’re traumatized by war and everything, but that’s no excuse for bringing their problems here and bullying my kids. I won’t take it, Trudy. Out of the way, please.”
“Oh, dear,” Trudy says. She has slumped against the glass of the door. She reaches out and takes my hand. “Oh, Loretta. We’d better have a cup of tea.”
20
WHEN I ARRIVE, bawling, at Norm’s yard, Justin is by himself.
“Dad’s gone out,” he says. He’s sitting at the table in the shed, listening to the races and using an artist’s paintbrush to paint fire-engine red enamel on an old toy car the size of a shoebox. “Thought your Jake might like this.”
I hiccup in reply. Justin gestures to the seat on the other side of the table, but I shake my head. It’s two o’clock. I have one and a half hours till the kids get out of school and I need to do something, but I don’t know what.
“Cup of tea?”
I shake my head, then nod, then sob, then sniff a long wet snotty sniff.
“When’s Norm back?” I manage to ask.
“Not till later tonight. He’s gone down to the city.”
I wonder what Norm would be doing in the city, but I can’t allow myself to get off track. I have an urgent problem and I have to find a way to fix it.
“My daughter’s a bully,” I blurt out to Justin. “My son’s a follower. They’ve been tormenting the new kids in town.”
Justin nods slowly. I’m still standing in the doorway of the shed, the sun burning the back of my neck in stinging fingers.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Justin nods again. “Seen a few bullies in my time.”
“I’m going home.” I start to sob and hiccup again. “Can you tell Norm I came by?”
“I might follow to see you get home all right. You probably can’t see too well right now. Drive slowly, OK?”
He’s right. My eyes are stinging and smarting, my whole face is swollen. I must look like I’m the one who’s being bullied.
I only bump the veranda lightly when I steer the Holden into the driveway. Justin pulls up in the truck and waves to me, but I don’t want to go into my empty house and cry, so I call him in. He sits patiently at the kitchen table as I start the kettle, lay out the cups and a plate of biscuits, work my way through five tissues, then finally stop crying. I pour the tea and slump into a kitchen chair.
“I’m a terrible mother,” I tell him before I bite into a Chocolate Royal and suck the marshmallow. I’ve lined up the ten Chocolate Royals from the packet in two rows on the plate. Number one is still on its way down my throat when I pick up number two and start to peel the chocolate covering away from the marshmallow with my teeth. It’s not easy to speak with my mouth full of chocolate, marshmallow, and biscuit base, but I do have experience.
“Melissa has been calling the Bosnian kids ‘bush pigs.’ She passes the little girl notes during class with curly pigs’ tails drawn on them. She whispers to them that they should go home to the stinky country they came from. She—” My voice cracks here. I can’t believe this is my daughter. “She tells them they smell bad and that they’re dirty foreigners.”
Justin blows on his cup of tea to cool it down before he takes a sip. “Does she hit them?”
“I don’t think so. You’d better have one of these.” There are only four Chocolate Royals left on the plate. I’m starting to feel nauseated as I suck the marshmallow off the biscuit base of number six.
“That’s got to be a good thing. She doesn’t hit them.”
“Jake follows the younger ones around the schoolyard at recess making squealing noises. They escaped from a war, only to come out here and be bullied by my children! Is it because they’re growing up without a father?”
“Dad said your kids have missed their dad.”
I want to blame Tony. When he was here he was a bad father and now he’s gone he’s still being a bad father. I wonder if I should try to contact him. He neglected to leave his new address. I suppose I could ring around the country towns near Mildura and ask about a man with unnaturally white front teeth and a child bride.
“He never taught them how to behave. He was always stomping around in a permanent rage.”
Justin nods, looks at his tea.
“How can I teach a little boy to be a good person? That’s a man’s job. Sure, it was fine to leave me, but did he have to abandon his kids?”
Justin keeps nodding, a quiet, calm motion.
“I thought everything got better after he left. We were happier. I thought I could bring them up on my own . . . I always joke about giving away the kids, but they’re my life.”
For a moment we sit in silence as I come around to the truth.
“I’ve done a bad job. I’m the worst kind of mother. I’ve raised monsters.”
“So what do you reckon you’ll do about it?” Justin asks.
“Here, you take this one,” I say, pushing the last Chocolate Royal toward Justin. He shakes his head. As I swallow the last gluey crumbs, I wonder whether I still have that old block of rum-and-raisin chocolate from Christmas in the back of the freezer.
“I think. I think, I think . . . I think I’ll wait till Norm gets back. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”
“Good idea.”
“They probably hate me. That’s why they’re doing this. They hate me and they want to punish me. Unconsciously. You hated your parents, didn’t you? Norm said that.”
Justin sits back in his chair and stares at me. “Of course I didn’t hate them. Did he mean because I wouldn’t see them while I was inside?” He presses his lips tightly together for a moment, breathes in through his nose. “I was ashamed. I was a shitty, ungrateful kid who got caught, and then when they sent me to jail I realized what a fucking idiot I’d been. Sorry about the language.”
I shake my head. That kind of language slides off me after ten years with Tony, who thought “fucking” was the most descriptive word in the English language. For Tony, “fucking” meant good and it meant bad. It meant funny and it meant someone who needed a good kicking. It meant hello or goodbye. Thank you or I never want to see you again. Delicious, or red, or belonging to the human race, or not.
“I told Mum,” Justin mutters. “When I went up to Warrnambool.
I explained why I couldn’t come out when she visited.”
“Because you were ashamed?”
He shrugs and picks up his mug, peers into it, then holds it up high so he can look at the base. “Cracked,” he says. “I’ll get a new one for you.”
“Don’t worry, it’s been like that for years.”
Watching him at the table, I can’t get over the resemblance. Justin hasn’t seen his dad for fourteen years, and yet even the way he holds a cup is identical to Norm. His hands are the same plate shape. He looks off to the side when he’s asking a question and he snorts softly when he doesn’t believe something. And the ears. If he and Norm could learn to move those ears at will they could form a circus act—the Flying Stevenses.
“My friend Helen was going to come around tonight to watch a film after the kids have gone to bed. Maybe Norm and you could come too? To have a talk about this . . .”
He does his look-over-and-out-through-the-window thing while I gather the cups and switch the kettle on for another cup. He is so quiet and still that I feel like a punchy drunk, flailing around and rattling the whole kitchen with every move. I’m not helped by the wonky floor that bounces up and down every time I take a step and sets the kitchen dresser juddering and the plates chattering across the shelves.
So far poor quiet Justin has seen me blubbering, self-flagellating, moaning, complaining, and eating an entire packet of Chocolate Royals in eleven minutes. Prison and its standards of etiquette are probably looking pretty fancy right now.
“I’m not sure Dad’ll be up for it tonight, but I’ll ask him.”
The kettle boils and I pour water onto two more tea bags and settle back at the kitchen table.
“I shouldn’t keep you,” Justin says into his teacup.
The trouble with gentle, calm, quiet people I don’t know well is that I find myself babbling to fill the spaces between bits of conversation. Useless information wells up out of me and dribbles all over the silence.
“I’m starting up the Save Our School Committee Mark II. I want to make it about the development too, because of what they’ve done to Norm.”
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