From Under the Overcoat

by Sue Orr

  ‘I don’t know … I bumped the jug and it just slipped out of my hands.’

  ‘We’d better get you to the hospital.’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re in shock. You have to get it seen to.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Lotte …’

  ‘No. I said no. You end up there for hours, waiting, then they just dress it. I’ve been before, with burns. They just dress it with burn cream. I’ve got some at home. I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘But the pain …’ Jackson looked at Lotte. Her face was calm.

  ‘There’s no pain. Not really. No real pain,’ she said. ‘Go on, get off to your festival.’

  Jackson shuffled his feet, looked out the window. He ran his hands through his hair. Lotte’s arm was bright pink, blisters forming, that was bad enough. But he’d seen what was underneath the new wounds. Old scars. Not just on her forearm, but on her thin shoulders, across the back of her neck. A deep black bruise which started just under her collarbone, and disappeared down the front of her T-shirt.

  He thought that the words were going to form all by themselves, in the space between them. Who did that to you? The very thought of saying them shocked him back into the moment. Jackson wasn’t the type to get involved in real life drama. Surely that was the essence of good writing — to remain aloof, detached from the pleasures and pain of life? To see it from all angles, to explore all perspectives? Impossible, if one became involved. And there was no arguing with Lotte, when she’d made up her mind about something. Certainly not!

  Besides, he needed to get along to the festival. It was the last day — his last opportunity to mix with other writers. His last opportunity to resolve his writer’s block by discussing Gogol’s ghost with people who might understand the masterpiece.

  So, flustered, inexplicably irritated (which in turn irritated him more), he left.

  Lotte locked the door, turned the lights out and sat at one of the big round tables.

  LOTTE HAD BEEN SHOCKED by the feeling of her father’s hand, the first time he hit her. She was eight years old. That was the thing she remembered most clearly afterwards — the feeling of the rough skin.

  Malcolm, if asked, wouldn’t be able to recall the event, nor the reason for it. Over time, though, he saw that the discipline he inflicted on his daughter for her insolence was having less than the desired impact. The blows appeared to glance off the hard shell forming around the child. Some time — the exact date is neither here nor there — Malcolm, gripped by an especially drunken rage, forgot which of the two females he was punishing: his wife or his daughter. Somehow his vicious revenge for Lotte’s perceived deceit and effrontery turned into an assault of an entirely different nature.

  For Malcolm, this moment marked the transformation of punishment into unfettered, enraged possession. For Lotte, the moment hardly registered. There were, after all, few places left on her body for her father to make his mark.

  YOU MURMUR YOUR DISBELIEF at this reader; I’m sorry, but it’s true. Not only is it true, it’s hardly unusual. You need only pick up a newspaper to find proof of that.

  Gloria smacked Lotte across the face when she told her what had happened. Lotte hated her mother then — hated her for years, until the day Malcolm had broken her mother’s arm. After that, Lotte stopped hating. There was no point, no point at all.

  IN THE LITTLE CAFÉ, on the day of the strange sea fog, Lotte Jones nursed her throbbing arm and felt elation. It started as a tiny pulse in her heart and grew quickly to a thumping beat.

  There was so much in her life she couldn’t control, but something could be done about her eyesight. She needed glasses — not plain-glass glasses like Jackson’s, but her very own ones, suited to her eyes.

  The old Agee jar sat by the till. Someone had written Tips on it with the black indelible marker. It wasn’t Lotte — the jar had been there long before her.

  Some weeks were slower than others — it seemed to her that when things were okay at home, it took a long time for the jar to fill up. But other times — the days when her skin was blue with bruises under layers of cheap orange make-up — the jar filled quickly. She never looked at the customers who put money in it. That was a good luck thing. But when the coins reached the top, she emptied the jar into her bag, and took the money to the dairy down the road to change into notes.

  This was Lotte’s cache: a fund set aside for the worst emergency. The fund built up slowly, over months. Until the day she burned her arm.

  Lotte marched to the stack of magazines on the corner of the benchtop. She switched the lights back on and took the top three magazines back to the table. She slowly turned the pages of the first with her free hand.

  The words were fuzzy, but it was a photo she was looking for — a particular photo of a certain woman. The woman was wearing a pair of black-rimmed spectacles with rectangular lenses. The woman’s hands touched at the arms of the spectacles — she had evidently just placed them on her nose — and she was smiling into the distance as though witnessing a miracle.

  Lotte found the page. She took a pen and paper from her bag, and ran her finger down it until she found a telephone number. Squinting, double-checking every digit, Lotte wrote the number. Then she picked up the telephone and pushed the buttons. She took a deep breath as a woman with a friendly voice answered the phone.

  ‘Bryant and Rogers Optometrist.’

  ‘I’m ringing about my eyes,’ Lotte said. Her heart was beating so loudly she was sure the sound could be heard down the telephone.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m having trouble with … judging the distance of things.’

  ‘Well, you’ve rung the right number, dear!’

  Lotte liked the sound of this woman. She liked the singsongingness of her voice. She rushed on.

  ‘Sometimes, you see, I think that things are close when they are far away. And sometimes a thing, for example a person, appears to be on the other side of the room. But I’m wrong, and they’re right next to me … almost on top of me!’

  Lotte stopped. The pleasurable feeling was gone, in its place panic.

  ‘Hello? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I’m sorry.’ Lotte felt her face going red. She was shocked to feel the prickle of tears in her eyes. She wiped them away.

  ‘So … would you like to make an appointment?’

  ‘Yes please. An appointment.’

  ‘When would you like to come in?’

  ‘Oh, soon, please. As soon as possible. Could you tell me though — how much is it?’

  ‘Forty dollars, dear.’

  Lotte couldn’t believe her good fortune. Forty dollars. The amount, more or less, from the tip jar.

  ‘Thank you. That will be fine. Yes, an appointment would be wonderful. Will I be able to take the glasses away with me?’

  ‘The glasses? Oh, I’m sorry … I haven’t made myself clear at all, have I? The forty dollars is just for the appointment. From there, the optometrist will diagnose your problem, and look at your options by way of …’

  ‘So the glasses are extra.’ Lotte interrupted the woman.

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘How much, you know, on average?’

  ‘Well, I suppose, an average pair — nothing fancy by way of frames — an average pair might be two hundred dollars. Somewhere in that vicinity.’

  Lotte said nothing. She looked at her arm, and tried to remember where the old scars and burns had been. The fresh injury had obliterated them, like a duster wiping a blackboard clean.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said after a time. ‘Yes, let’s make an appointment.’

  ‘When would you like to come in?’

  ‘Today, please. I would like to come in today.’

  Lotte sat for a moment, looking out at the fog. Then she left the cafe, her bag under her arm, locking the door behind her.

  READER, WHAT ARE WE to make of this? Lotte Jones, with a grand total of forty dollar
s, making appointments for expensive consultations with optometrists?

  We can tut-tut, we can challenge her to think outside the picture — shop around at some of those new bargain places for a pair of glasses. Seek help, not just for her eyes, but for the other terrible things in her life. We can shout out loud, like children at a pantomime, about social agencies and helplines. But Lotte copes with life a moment at a time. That’s as much as she can manage.

  THE STRANGE SEA FOG was going nowhere. The city’s famous winds — northerlies, southerlies, nor’westerlies, sou’westerlies, sou’easterlies and the rare easterlies — were for once blowing elsewhere. The fog slipped up and over the hills, like icing over a warm wedding cake, towards the city. It sent a white finger into the Mount Victoria tunnel, where cars always tooted.

  It had settled, too, over the airport. It poured over the lip of the runway between the steep hills, then filled the valley. Aeroplanes circled, waiting for a tear in the white blanket so they could land. They buzzed overhead like hungry vultures. Finally, their fuel tanks nearly empty, they gave up the wait and flew off. Below, on the ground, other planes were stranded.

  So, too, were the international writers attending the festival.

  The festival organisers had worked tirelessly for two years to put the programme together. They had shuffled and reshuffled appearance orders to appease the bruised egos of overseas superstars. They had suffered tiresome demands and woeful ignorance about their own outstanding works. Now, at the end of an exhausting week, they had had enough.

  The budget had been spent. It had been calculated to stretch over seven days — not a minute more. The hosts were uniformly dignified and courteous in manner, but on that last morning, they listened anxiously to reports of the fog. Each had been assigned to look after a special guest and each had tried, for as long as possible, to shield that guest from the news that no one was flying out of the city for the time being.

  The last public session ended. Organisers and visitors gathered at the best hotel in town for the final lunch. The long-suffering hosts listened one more time as their guests settled into chairs and recounted tales from faraway places where the real literary happenings happened. All the time, they looked anxiously outside for signs of wind, a gentle zephyr that might develop into the full-blown gale that would whip the confounded fog and the international writers away.

  JACKSON LEFT LOTTE’S CAFÉ and walked through the fog to his wife’s car. From there, he drove to the centre of town. It was only when he arrived that he realised that thanks to Lotte’s accident he had missed the final session.

  Jackson knew about the lunch. He hadn’t received an invitation — not a written one — but the event had been discussed by literary acquaintances in his presence several times. It was clear to him that he was expected to attend. He parked the car and fed the parking meter.

  The man dressed in winter clothing — the one that had stepped out of the fog outside the café earlier — walked by. He stopped, waved his arms in the air, and shouted loudly at Jackson.

  ‘What do you want?’ he raved. He walked on, then returned. Again, he pushed himself into Jackson’s personal space. ‘What do you want?’

  Jackson knew what he wanted. He wanted an end to the years of writer’s block. He wanted to unleash a torrent of words on the page: words worthy of being described as a tribute to the great Nikolay Gogol.

  That achieved, he wanted recognition — oh, he so wanted that. He wanted people to stop him in the street, to say, Aren’t you the guy … He wanted invitations to writers festivals, to writers festival lunches. Proper, written invitations.

  The doorman at the hotel held the heavy glass door open, waiting for Jackson to enter. But Jackson stayed still, his path blocked by the man in the winter coat.

  The man had stopped shouting, but his eyes didn’t move from Jackson. Accusing, Jackson thought. He’s accusing me.

  Jackson returned to his car. He leaned against it, his hands resting on the bonnet. It was nothing to do with the man in the coat. Lotte was the problem. Her burned arm, her small bruised body. The way she’d glared at him, telling him to get on his way to his festival. Growling, hissing like a tiny dying animal. Defending the only thing left. Dignity.

  What had she said? It’s happened before? Something like that. She was going home to treat the burn.

  Jackson knew where Lotte lived — he’d dropped her off there once, after she was late closing the café. He got back in the car and pulled out into the traffic. He headed for Kilbirnie.

  The house was a small grey bungalow close to the road. There was a low wooden fence with a latched gate. A little concrete path led to the front door. The windows were closed. There was no sign, from the front, that Lotte had arrived home yet.

  Jackson knocked on the front door. No one answered. He returned to his car to wait.

  LOTTE JONES HAD A plan. She got on a bus going to town. She would stop off at a pharmacy for a dressing for her burn. Then she was going to the pub to place a bet. After that, she’d buy the glasses.

  The bus was full of people dressed in summer clothing. The women wore sleeveless dresses, strappy sandals and brightly coloured sunhats. The men wore Tshirts and shorts. Everywhere she looked, Lotte saw goosebumped skin and puzzled faces squinting through the grimy windows at the sea fog.

  When Lotte closed her eyes, her mother appeared. Gloria was staring straight back at her.

  MALCOLM HAD WON BIG on the horses, just a week or so after he had broken Gloria’s arm. Lotte had come home from work and heard her parents’ voices. The conversation was loud, excited. With fear in her heart, she had walked into the kitchen to find her father setting the table with delectable food: cold meats, olives, artichokes, steaming plates of pasta and beautiful breads. Candles lit the room and Dean Martin played on the old stereo in the corner, his voice soaring above the clatter of cutlery.

  At the end of the table sat Gloria. In her able hand was a glass of champagne. Her chin was tilted upwards and her mouth formed a thin, taut smile. Her eyes looked upon Lotte as a queen might look upon her subject. There was no kindness. It was a look of pity, a look reserved for the vanquished.

  Later, her mother had finished the champagne and fallen asleep in the corner of the lounge. Dean Martin crooned on as Lotte cleared the table and washed the dishes. Her eyes were tired and her guard had been down; the dark blur had loomed behind her before she had time to move away.

  LOTTE BLINKED AND HER mother was gone. She shivered. She would have liked to have rubbed her cold shoulders with her hands, but didn’t dare expose her burned arm in the dirty, crowded bus.

  It was twelve-thirty when she got off. The strange sea fog was all around her. Lotte stood quite still for a moment in the street. She closed her eyes and held out her hand and felt the cool, damp air touch the burn. The relief wasn’t enough; her arm was throbbing now.

  The pharmacy was nearby. Lotte bought cream and bandages. She slipped into McDonald’s and dressed her arm in the bathroom. Then she made her way to the pub.

  She loitered near the door, looking in, making sure her father wasn’t inside. It was just as she remembered. Men staring at small television screens placed around the large room. Blue and grey carpet scuff ed bare in some places, like new in others. Rubbish bins dotted here and there, crumpled balls of paper nearby. She bent down without thinking to pick up the paper next to the nearest bin, and thought for a second about Jackson and the wobbly table and his whatever-writers-festival. When she stood up, the manager was looking at her from behind the bar.

  ‘Miss Jones, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Lotte walked to the counter. ‘I need to place a bet,’ she said. ‘I need to win it.’

  She had grown only a little since that first time she had come in. He smiled. ‘How old are you?’ She couldn’t be more than fourteen. That was his guess.

  ‘Eighteen,’ lied Lotte.

  ‘There are no guarantees,’ he said. ‘If there wer
e guarantees, I’d be out of business.’

  ‘This is urgent. It’s for an emergency.’

  ‘How much do you need?’ he asked.

  ‘Two hundred dollars,’ said Lotte.

  ‘And how much do you have?’

  Lotte knew how much she had. She had counted it on the bus. Under the accusing gaze of her mother, she had counted the notes inside her purse.

  ‘Fifty dollars,’ she said. ‘More or less.’

  ‘Four to one,’ said the proprietor. ‘Long odds. Very long odds. You’d better come through. We can discuss the best option.’

  He pushed open a door behind him. The office was small and smelled of a man’s sweat. It had a window, but the blind was down. Around the edges, Lotte could see the white glow of the sea fog outside. There was a desk with a light on it. A computer screen flickered. The sound of a horse-racing commentary came from inside the computer, the monotone drone that reminded her of the suffocating presence of her father.

  The manager opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a thick bundle of twenty-dollar notes. He placed it on the top of the desk, then sat on the edge of it.

  ‘Have you placed a bet before?’

  ‘No,’ said Lotte.

  ‘If you want to be sure of a win, you have to bet on a favourite. The trouble is, everyone else bets on the favourite, too, so the winnings have to be shared among a lot of people.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Lotte.

  ‘On the other hand, you might be lucky enough to have some information about a long shot — an unlikely winner. You put the money on the long shot, take a big risk losing the lot. But if the long shot wins, you’re sweet.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Lotte again.

  ‘So, Miss Jones. Have you got the inside running on a horse?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A long shot.’

  ‘No,’ said Lotte.

  ‘There’s a third option.’ The manager shifted on the desk. He put his hand in his pocket.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s an option where you take no risk, and you win all the money.’ He looked at the wad of cash on the table. Then he looked at Lotte. Slowly, up and down.