“I’ll call you, Loretta,” he mutters as he turns to follow her, but she finishes the conversation for him. “You certainly will not. Goodbye.”
“Whoa.” I flop back in my seat at the table. “Have you read the newspaper lately?”
“The Shire Herald? Of course not. That’s five minutes of my day I don’t want to waste.”
“I’ll have to go to the library.”
Helen pours more champers into my glass while I spoon up another velvety mouthful of the tiramisu.
“I’ve got news. I had a date too,” Helen says.
I stare, open-mouthed, which must be disgusting considering what I’m eating.
“Last week. At the Thai restaurant down the road. I had green curry. We drank two bottles of wine. Then we had another date on Saturday. And spent a day together.”
“Don’t make me ask.”
“Peter Rudnik.” She grins at me.
I think that, in my thirteen years here, I have met every living person within twenty minutes’ drive of Gunapan. Who is Peter Rudnik? It’s obvious Helen expects me to know. “And . . . it was good?”
“It was fun. He relaxes when he’s out of that environment. He’s got a good sense of humor. And we’re exactly the same height.”
I’m starting to suspect. “So he’s not gay, then?”
“Definitely not. And he’s some kisser. Found that out at the end of the night on the first date.”
“At the end of the day, you mean.”
“Oh, ha ha. Everyone has things they say all the time. It’s a habit.”
“You sly dog. You kissed the grade-three teacher!”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’m jealous.”
“I know,” she says triumphantly.
“Actually, I have a prospect of my own.”
“A biker?”
“No, this one drives an Audi. He’s widowed, a tragic light plane crash that only he survived. His grown-up children put in together to console him with a beach house at Sorrento and an annual trip to Tuscany.”
Helen is still grinning.
“Are you going out again?”
“Wednesday on a picnic. It’s school holidays, so he’s free for two weeks.”
“I’m very, very jealous.”
“I know.” If she was grinning any wider her face would split.
“If you get together with him, seriously, he has to join the Save Our School Committee Mark II.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“In fact, he has to be an office-bearer.”
“I like him.” She shakes her head at me and I laugh before plunging my spoon deep into the tiramisu.
“Eat up,” I tell her. “You’re going to need your strength.”
“For what?”
“For when you start the horizontal foxtrotting.”
Helen belts out a laugh and has to catch bits of tiramisu in her napkin. “Too late. We’ve already practiced the foxtrot, the waltz, and the barn dance.”
24
“LOOKING A BIT the worse for wear,” Norm says when I lean in the doorway of the shed.
“Tired,” I mutter. Last night with Helen was fun, but I got home and cried about the kids and their bullying and how the mayor’s wife told me I should be looking after them better and woke up ten times during the night and thought I heard a murderer coming in the back door and lay rigid for five minutes with my heart hammering until I realized it was Terror and Panic burping and butting each other on the outside stairs. Now that I’m up and about, the sparkly morning light has penetrated my exhausted hungover head and is making my brain wrinkle.
Norm stands up and pulls a seat from underneath a pile of newspapers, which cascade gracefully down to form a new pile on the ground. He empties the dregs of a cold cup of tea outside the shed door, wipes the rim of the cup on his shirt hem, and switches on the kettle.
“Hey, are any of those newspapers current?” I ask, remembering what the mayor’s wife said last night.
“You saw it, then?” Norm’s smiling.
“What?” I’m starting to hate myself for this word.
He points to a sheet of newspaper tacked to the cupboard door at the back of the shed. I get up and walk closer so I can read it. It’s the front page of Saturday’s edition of the Shire Herald. A perfect specimen of Norm’s thumbprint in oil adorns the margin.
“‘Councillors Need Probe,’” I read aloud and laugh. “They shouldn’t let that cadet write the headlines. Last night the mayor’s wife nearly punched me out, I guess because of this.”
“Apparently,” Norm says with a feigned look of horror, “not all our councillors are as honest as they should be.”
It’s hard to be shocked. Everyone knows local councils are about people making sure their friends’ building projects are approved and traveling overseas on “research” missions and getting their names in the paper.
“But Vaughan? I can’t believe Vaughan is corrupt.”
“It’s not Vaughan. He’s all right. But he’s been letting the others get away with things. We all have. I’m not putting up with it anymore, Loretta. They’ve gone too far.”
“There’s oil all over the newsprint on this, Norm. I’ll read the article at the library. Where’s Justin?”
“He’s at work. Got two weeks at the abattoir. Hates it.” Norm glances at the dashboard clock attached to a car battery on the bench. “His shift will be over soon.”
An odd smell is permeating the shed. Usually it smells of metal and oil with a hint of old hamburger. I sniff and try to figure it out, but my senses are out of whack today. It seems to be a clean smell. In this shed where every surface is marked with the liquid tools of Norm’s trade—oil, petrol, grease, beer, and tea—it is a very odd smell indeed.
“Has he been cleaning up in here?”
“Justin? Not in here. He knows better than to mess with my filing system. Mind you, he keeps that room of his tidy. Must be all those years in a cell.”
Norm turns off the whistling kettle and pours hot water into my cup, then drops a tea bag into it. He offers me milk, but I always think it’s wise to stay away from dairy goods that have been sitting opened in Norm’s shed for any length of time.
“It’s quiet at my place, Norm. Terror’s missing Melissa. She stands at the back door burping, then she chases Panic around the yard.”
“She’s a goat. Goats burp and play. And the kids have only been away two days.”
We sit in the warm shed blowing on our tea and sipping it slowly. I move my feet closer to Norm’s two-bar radiator under the table.
“Have you—”
Norm raises his hand for me to stop speaking. He nods toward the transistor, where the race caller is screaming like an assault victim. We wait until the caller has reached his highest pitch and sobbed out the result. Norm sighs.
“Bloody old nag. Knew it wouldn’t win.”
“So why did you bet on it?”
“Justin did. He’s done his tenner. I told him he should put five each way on that old crock, but he likes to put his money on the nose. So, Loretta, heard you had a word with the kids.”
How is it, I ask myself, that everyone knows these things about me? I talked to my children on Bald Hill out of sight and hearing of everyone except the fat black crow hopping around the rubbish bin, and somehow Norm has heard about it.
“I see,” I answer huffily. “And what did I tell them?”
“They’ll be all right now. Things get out of hand, that’s all. Kids don’t know how to stop. Yep, I think it’s going to be fine.”
He reaches under the table and pulls out an old tin.
“You deserve a biscuit.” It takes him a while to pry the lid off the tin, but when he does, a delicious aroma of orange-cream biscuits drifts out.
“How old are these?” I turn my biscuit over and examine it for signs of mold. It’s worth asking, because I’m fairly sure that lid was rusted on.
“Those use-by dates are a con so we
’ll throw things out. Don’t take any notice of them, Loretta.”
While Norm talks I can feel something happening in my head. Like a depth charge. A thought begins deep in my tired and fuzzy brain stem, working its way through the left and right hemispheres and out to the surface. I become convinced that the smell I caught before was antiseptic. Antiseptic is a smell I have never experienced in Norm’s vicinity. And it smells like my mother. The connection sparks. Or it would do if I had any spark left in my brain. What happens is more like an underwater explosion. The smell is what I smelled back when we visited Mum in hospital.
“Heard you went into town last week,” I say casually before slurping some hot tea. It tastes good and bitter. I take another sip. The caffeine is definitely helping to wake me up.
“I think that’s Justin now.” Norm inclines his head.
All I can hear is a faint whine somewhere down the road. Out in the yard the dogs start barking as if they know Justin’s coming too. He’s lengthened their chains and started feeding them more regularly. Norm told me he even walks them sometimes.
“By the way, has that dog near the gate changed color?”
“He washed them. He’s turning them into bloody lapdogs.”
“Right. He’s probably booked them in for a spa and massage too.”
The whine is becoming a throb. A rhythmic pulsing throb powering down the road toward us.
“What is that noise?” The throb sounds a little like what was happening in my head all night as I lay awake fretting.
“The boy bought himself a Honda 500cc on the never-never.”
Justin pulls up outside the shed with a spurt of gravel, swings his leg over the bike, and eases off his helmet. Norm’s already poured him a cup of tea by the time he gets inside the shed. Justin nods at me as he pulls out a chair from behind a cupboard. Norm’s shed is like a magician’s trunk. Whenever you want something you reach under the table or behind a cupboard, and presto, there it is.
“Have you told her?” he says to Norm.
Norm shrugs and turns up the radio. Justin reaches over and turns it back down again.
“Tell her.”
“What am I, a child?” Norm’s using his long-suffering voice, the one he puts on whenever he complains about the poor return on scrap metal.
I’ll sit quietly and mind my own business while they bicker. I wonder how Norm’s enjoying being a parent again. At least he’s past the stage of cleaning up vomit. And he doesn’t have to drive Justin to school and back every day. If we moved closer to the school Melissa and Jake could walk. I’d save a good forty minutes each day, which I could then use sewing chic evening wear and looking after my skin. My scrag-woman image would slowly fade. I’d learn to walk with my head up and my shoulders back, instead of hurrying around like the hunchback of Gunapan. But we could never afford a proper yard that close to the school. What would we do with Terror and Panic? I’ve grown rather fond of the goats. They’re excellent listeners. Of course, they’re not the perfect pets. They do burp a lot. Sometimes it’s alarmingly loud. And they shed. Not to mention the poo problem. But they seem so smart. I wonder if they can be house-trained?
“Loretta?”
I pick up my cup of cold tea and smile at Justin. “Sorry, off in a dream.”
Justin looks down at the table. Norm clears his throat.
“I’m going to lose my hair,” Norm mutters.
“It’s a bit late to be realizing that.” I look at his fast-receding hairline.
“From the chemo,” Justin adds.
The whole shed seems to slide sideways. I feel the cup wobble in my hand and I reach up with my other hand to grip it and lower it carefully to the table.
“Chemo?” I repeat.
“The big C. In the liver.” Norm sounds tired.
“Liver?” My voice sounds like an old record.
Justin lays his hand on mine. He closes the palm and fingers tightly over the top of my hand and nods at me. One of the dogs in the yard barks and the rest follow, growing louder and crazier until one starts howling.
“Customer.” Norm pushes himself up off the seat.
“I’ll get it, Dad.” Justin waves Norm down.
My hand is instantly cold when Justin takes his away. He swings the door open and a gust of chilly air swirls around my ankles.
“Liver cancer? But you’re not a drinker.” I should have noticed how thin Norm’s got.
“There’s only a sixty percent chance the chemo’ll work. I don’t want to do it, Loretta. Remember when Jim from the railways had the stomach cancer and they gave him chemo? And he looked like shit and he said he felt like shit and all his hair fell out and he couldn’t eat and then he bloody died anyway. What’s the point?”
“Sixty percent, that’s the point!” I answer hysterically. “Norm, what are you talking about? Of course you’ll have it. Don’t be stupid.”
“If it wasn’t for Justin making me swear, I don’t think I would.”
“Not for me? Not for Melissa and Jake?”
“Exactly. I don’t want your kids to see me looking half-dead. I’d rather they remember me like I am now.”
“Stupid, you mean? You want them to remember you as the stupid man who wouldn’t get treatment?”
“Settle down, Loretta. I said I was getting it, didn’t I? Justin’s made me promise.”
Even in my state of fury, I can see how odd it is that my best friend, the man who is like a grandfather to my children, has told me he’s very ill and my reaction is to want to cut his throat. We both look out through the window at Justin, who’s listening, head bowed, to a bloke talking as he pulls bits off some kind of engine. We can’t hear their conversation from inside because the dogs are still going at full throttle and someone else is driving a pounding ute right up to the door of the shed. Norm heaves himself up off the chair and opens the door.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I look at Norm standing at the door and gesturing the driver to come into the shed, and I want to punch him. I want to slap him. I want to stamp my feet in front of him and scream like a two-year-old having a tantrum. I am furious. I feel as if my heart is about to explode. How dare he be sick? How dare he have cancer?
He comes back into the shed followed by Merv Bull.
“Merv, you remember Loretta, don’t you?”
“Of course.” He lowers his voice and turns away from Norm to speak. “Actually, I was hoping to have a quick word with you if you’ve got a moment.”
“Sorry, have to rush,” I say. Right now, I need to go home and scream. “Nice to see you, Merv.”
I set off smiling and waving goodbye and get into the car and rev the engine so hard it almost has a prolapse. Then I scream backward onto the road before powering off, leaving two smoking streaks of rubber on the tarmac.
25
NORM’S NEWS HAS given me the strength of seven Lorettas. In six days I’ve stormed the post office with letters asking for old and potential new SOS committee members to come to the first meeting. I’ve coaxed sponsorship from the abattoir, the supermarket, the CWA, and the winery outside Halstead for a fund-raising dinner. I’m organizing an auction of donated goods on the night of the dinner. So far Leanne’s put up a voucher for a spell or hex of the winner’s choice, Morelli’s Meats has offered a side of beef, Norm’s repairing a vintage stationary engine that should be ready for the night, the Church of Goodwill is donating a month’s housecleaning, and the local pub is giving a dinner for two.
My children’s absence has also helped to inspire my burst of activity. Terror and Panic have put on so much weight they look like they’re about to have kids of their own. Yesterday I found myself thinking how attractive Terror would look with a ribbon in her beard.
I had dreamed that while Melissa and Jake were away I’d be out at romantic dinners, tossing my newly styled and tipped hair as I laughed and making witty repartee with Merc Man or some other suitably loaded and charming suitor. But I couldn’t even get an appointm
ent at the hairdressers until next Tuesday, and once that part of the plan collapsed, it seemed like I’d have to go on with my old life. I’m not allowed to tell Norm’s news to anyone, even Helen, but I can’t stop thinking about what might happen to him, and I can’t stop trying not to think about it, and I can’t sleep. That adds five more hours in the day to fill.
And on top of all that, I can’t find out anything about the development. I’ve failed Norm completely. I’ve heard plenty of rumors, but no facts.
“Are you sure there’s going to be a pool and spa and sauna?” I asked Kyleen.
“Of course,” she scoffed. “How could you have a top-quality luxury resort without them?”
The whole population of Gunapan, one of the region’s most disadvantaged small towns, has become an authority on what makes a top-quality luxury resort.
“I hope they don’t get Sleepover linen,” Brianna remarked. “It doesn’t last. They’ll have to go better quality than that. And I can’t wait to see what kind of TVs they have.”
“What are you talking about? They won’t let us within shouting distance of the place. Why is everyone being so nice about it?”
“More to the question, Loretta, why are you so mad about it?”
“Because they’re taking our water! Because Norm’s been landed with an Unsightly Property Notice!”
“It’s not our water. Our water comes from the Goonah Reservoir.”
“Which is at fourteen percent capacity. And we go selling off water that bubbles up out of the ground!” I can hear my voice rising in frustration. Soon I’ll be reaching the high notes of opera, only with a kind of whining sound. A lot of complaining goes on around here. We could set up the Gunapan opera company. Performing live every weeknight, the Gunapan Whingers. You pick a topic, we’ll complain about it.
Brianna shrugged. “Anyway, I’m going to get my Responsible Service of Alcohol certificate. Maybe get a job in the bar. I bet those guests will leave good tips.”
“Sure, why don’t you help them suck the water out of our town? Well, I’m not going to put up with it. If I’m going to keep campaigning about the school, I might as well campaign about the development too.”
The Fine Color of Rust Page 18