by Peter Twohig
‘Here, have a drink,’ said Mrs H.
This all made Mum cry even louder. She sounded like she was going for the record.
‘That’s the girl. Bloody house was a death trap. Best to start again.’
‘Dead right. Come on, have a smoke and drink up. Bugger the house, eh?’
‘It’s not the bloody house …’
‘First that swine of a husband, then the bloody fire.’
‘Rotten little bugger. I hope they find the little nutcase.’
‘It’s not the fire. And it’s not Bill. Well, I s’pose it is Bill in a way, bugger him.’
There was one of those big silences you get when the TV croaks in the middle of the Indian attack on the wagon train.
‘I’m pregnant.’
3 The Little Match Girl
I knew all about pregnancy. When Johnno Johnson’s cat got pregnant, it became very lumpy; basically, it ended up being one big lump. And when Douggie Quirk’s big sister, Maureen, got pregnant (except she wasn’t so much pregnant as ‘having a baby’), she was put in a special home for girls who were having babies. Mums couldn’t get pregnant, of course, but they could be ‘expecting’, which was slightly different, as it meant that they were expecting to get lumpy, not expecting to go to Hell, which is what being pregnant meant (unless you were a cat or a dog). So I couldn’t understand why Mum said she was pregnant when she was actually expecting, as I knew that mothers could not be sent to Hell. I decided that she must have made a mistake. That is something girls tend to do when they’re upset, which is the reason why it is always the magician who gets to saw the girl in half, and not the other way round. But call it what you will, it’s always bad news.
As I stood on the porch, listening through the gloom behind Mrs Carruthers’ screen door, I felt my face swell with redness as I heard the reactions of Mum’s friends. Mrs Hutchinson thought it was just like Bill — that’s Dad — to shoot through at a time like this, which even I could see was what Sister Valerian called piffle, as Dad had shot through for the last time — been chucked out, actually — just before Christmas, and that had been because of his girlfriend, Mrs Bentley. I think.
Mrs Hutchinson said that all the men in our family had sex on the brain. I thought that was going a bit far, as I had only ever heard Dad say that two of them had sex on the brain: one of my Uncle Berts — I had two that I knew of — who was keen on wearing dresses, and had even turned up at our place wearing one once (it was primrose). Also, Uncle Maury, who’d been flattened by Dad for something to do with Mum, and had shot through to Tasmania. So, just the two. The others I was less sure about, pending correct weight. Although there was Uncle Clive, who was a bus driver and had a funny way of talking. But Mum once told me that he wasn’t keen on ladies, so that let him off the hook. She always talked about him as if she was in church, and never talked about him at all when Dad was around, which was the same with most of my uncles. Anyway, all this sex on the brain stuff had whiskers on it, as Mrs Hutchinson would have nothing to do with men, so I wondered if she really knew what she was talking about.
Though Mum and I weren’t mates, of course, I couldn’t remember a time when we hadn’t been living together, and she would occasionally give me the odd hug or kiss, especially when other people were looking, and all the time back in the Tom days. Since then, I suppose you could say that, even though she didn’t like me anymore, we were still sort of friends (though the kids I hung around with would laugh themselves silly if they heard me say that — except Luigi, who was always telling his mother that he loved her, even when I was standing right there). She used to be different, that’s all I’m saying.
Which is why I felt so bad — because I knew from the way Mum was carrying on that on top of everything else she was very unhappy about expecting, and that she blamed Dad for the whole thing, which I thought was a liberty, as Dad always did as little as possible when he was around. I had also worked out that this was the sort of mess they send girls to homes for, when they are not married. But as Mum was not a girl anymore, she was just going to have to get lumpy right there in Richmond, with everyone knowing that Dad had shot through. I had grasped the situation.
I blamed myself, really. I’d had a lot to do with some of the scarier things that had happened in the area over the past few years — I have a knack for making bad things happen — but that’s no reason for God to go crazy. Yet he does. He sees young Blayney down here, going about the business of being a superhero, and says to himself: ‘Hello, time for that young scalliwag’s life to take a turn for the worse. I’ll just wheel out one of my juiciest practical jokes.’ Hence Mum’s tummy, which is where it was all going to happen — not that I wanted details.
Looking back, I should have thought the whole thing through, should have seen what Mum was really getting at when she told Mrs C and Mrs H that she was pregnant. But I did not. It did not occur to me that Dad might be particularly interested in what Mum had said, because he was no longer a fixture at our house, despite Mum making a few attempts at getting him to stay home and not keep shooting through to his girlfriend’s place up on the Hill. Nor did it occur to me that anyone else in the family might find the whole situation interesting. I just thought it was one of those things that no one was going to talk about, like Granddad’s piles, or Blarney Barney’s prison record. Shows how wrong you can be.
It was just a few days later that the Big Bryant & May Match Factory Visit took place. This was the factory’s open day, when everyone and his dog was allowed to turn up at work with their families and have a huge party and get shown how matches are made. The huge party took place in the cafeteria, which Mum said was the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere, which, when I had a look at the globe of the world, was easy to believe.
The open day had been scheduled to take place at Christmas, but a fire broke out in the cafeteria’s kitchen and set off all the sprinklers, which wrecked the place. I had been wondering ever since if Flame Boy had an aunty working in the kitchen. Then the Metropolitan Fire Brigade turned up and tried to destroy what was left, and in the end had to be thrown out. That’s how it is with fires: there’s no halfway.
Anyway, the Christmas Open Day became the New Year’s Open Day, even though New Year’s Day had been the week before. And I was going. I asked Mum if I could take Jimmy Carson from our old street, and she said no. Mum is basically your no type of person. In other words, ‘maybe’ means no, ‘no’ means no, and, a lot of the time, even ‘yes’ means no. Other words that mean no are: ‘uh-uh’; ‘maybe later’; ‘over my dead body’; and ‘I hope that was supposed to be funny’. Words that mean yes are: ‘don’t be late’; ‘ask your father’ (which is easier said than done); and ‘only if you pay for it yourself’.
Right from the word go nothing was as I had imagined it would be. For starters, the first person I saw was Jimmy Carson, stuffing his face with jelly beans.
‘Any black ones left?’ I asked.
‘Not on this table. They’re all in my pocket.’
‘Don’t forget who told you about the open day.’
‘I won’t: my mum did. Ha ha!’
‘Does your mum work with my mum? I didn’t know that.’
‘Nah. She knows who your mum is, but. I don’t think they know each other. You mum works in the manufacturing part of the factory, and my mum works in the packaging part.’
I’d never heard a kid say manufacturing before, and I wondered if it was a real word.
‘Does she put the matches in the matchboxes?’
‘Dunno. One time she told me that someone got half a finger in their matchbox, and they all got into trouble.’
‘Who?’
‘Dunno, some bloke in Albury.’
‘I’ve heard of Albury. Dad said it was a boring place.’
‘It wasn’t boring that day.’
‘So what happened to the finger?’
‘Mum said they had to throw it away because they couldn’t find a match for it. Get it?’
>
‘Nuh.’
‘Me neither.’
So we stuffed our faces and pockets with lollies, then the grown-ups lined up at the cafeteria and got us lunch on trays and took it to the long tables covered in white tablecloths like the ones that cover the altar rails at Mass. The Christmas decorations were still up on the ceiling, the walls and the tables, so the whole place was red, white and green. And on one wall was an enormous Redheads sign, like on the matchboxes. I thought Flame Boy would have liked that, and I hoped he had some decent tucker, wherever he was.
While lunch was in progress, there was entertainment, which took place on a low stage made of loading pallets covered with sheets of three-ply. The opening act was the local regiment of the Banjo Club, which tossed in the towel after a few numbers, to be followed by the mighty Smacka Fitzgibbon, who made the openers look like they’d learnt to play the banjo by correspondence. The main act was Stan Stafford, whose voice had always reminded me of Burl Ives — Burl without that hurry-up sound.
After lunch, we went on guided tours — no lighters or matches or lighted cigarettes allowed — which explained why everyone had a quick smoke just before it began. We were told about eighty thousand times that everything in the place was flammable and poisonous, and dangerous (as if that meant something different), and just to prove it, there were signs all over the place. Also, there were more fire hoses, fire hydrants, buckets and firemen’s suits than you could sic a corgi on. In short, it was a kind of heaven for a kid, and I spent the whole tour wondering what would happen if one of the mums went troppo and took a blowtorch to a bin marked LEVEL 5 FIRE HAZARD. I’m still wondering.
It turned out that there were only two places in the whole factory that were safe to be in: the cafeteria, which was actually a dining room, and the office, which turned out to be an office. At one stage we stopped at a tangled mess of pipes and machines that went right up to the ceiling, including one gizmo that had more matches sticking out of it than a porcupine has porcs. Flame Boy would have loved it. But just as quickly as I thought it, I made myself stop thinking it, just in case God was in one of his moods.
Mum said: ‘This is where I work.’ She said it with a faint sigh, the way you do when you’re singing ‘Ten Thousand Green Bottles’ and you forget which bottle you’re up to. This was definitely more information about Mum than I had ever got without her being tipsy.
‘Wow, Mum, is this where you push people around?’
A number of workers swung their heads around like irritable draught horses when they heard that, but Mum gave them the evil eye, and they suddenly found something else to look at.
‘That’s my office, in there,’ she said, pointing to a tiny room with papers stuck up all over the place and a big glass front window.
I went in and looked around. On the wall was a picture of Biscuit and me that was in The Sun last year, when I saved him from drowning in the Yarra. It was already beginning to go yellow. I was disappointed. I would have preferred to see a picture of Tom. I suppose Mum was still missing him too much to go plastering the factory with his photo. I understood. I had one of the two of us with our arms around each other’s neck, looking pretty happy — I think that was the day we discovered sump oil — but I still couldn’t make myself take it out of the drawer, even though I wanted to put it on my dressing table. It was too happy.
I turned around and Mum was standing in the doorway, looking bored and tired, no longer pretty, as she had in the cafeteria. I knew what was going inside her: Dad hadn’t shown up, the way he might have done if it had been the year before’s Christmas Party, as it was supposed to have been; but then, we hadn’t expected him to. But what was worse, people gave her looks. I thought they had a bloody nerve. Also, she was thinking about tomorrow, when the rellies were coming over for Sunday lunch. I’d overheard her tell Granddad that she was going to give them the news. To make matters worse, she was going to have to cook, which is a bit like expecting Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men to repair a wristwatch. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was thinking of going home and sticking her head in the oven, as that was becoming a popular pastime with the local ladies. On top of all that she was pregnant, and I still didn’t like the sound of that.
And then there was Tom. She used to be more or less happy in the Tom days. No, that’s not true: I just said it to see how it sounded. She was just as angry. It’s not all peaches and cream being the mother of twin boys; she was always telling us that. ‘Why did I have to have two of you?’ she often said — not to us, but to God, I think. But what could we do? In the end, God, Solver of Mothers’ Problems (except in the kitchen), got sick of her constant whinging and killed Tom, just to shut her up. You’d think she’d be happy, but no.
I thought I’d cheer her up by pretending to be interested in her little office. Near the door was a wooden cupboard with a lock; that would do nicely.
‘What’s in there?’
Mum took a key out of her handbag and unlocked it, and pulled it open as if it was made of lead. I was expecting to see her strap, for keeping people in line, like at school. Or her special boss’s badge. Or an apple for Monday play-lunch. It was empty.
‘What goes in there?’
‘Nothing.’
It was pathetic. She reminded me of the Little Match Girl, except she probably had enough matches to sink the HMAS Melbourne.
4 The family way
The next day we had one of those big family Sunday lunches at Granddad’s place. It was supposed to be Granddad’s way of welcoming Mum and me to his house. Although we’d had one of these at Christmas, we were having another one, only worse, because this one was to include Aunty Betty, the loudest lady in Melbourne, and my idiot cousin Brendan, who constantly played with a glittery pink yo-yo with a picture of a butterfly on it. Dad had not been invited to lunch, but Nanna Blayney had, and of course Uncle Frank. Officially, none of us was supposed to know where Dad was living, but I knew that Granddad knew. And so did I, of course, having been secretly invited over by Mrs Bentley. I knew that Mum didn’t know, because she had not been arrested for murder lately.
The fact is, Dad would have hated turning up anyway, not because of Mum’s cooking — he was pretty tough underneath, and had been a tankie in the war — but because he thought these lunches were boring. In fact, Dad had considered World War II boring. ‘Boring’ was one of his favourite words. Whenever Collingwood were in front, Dad would say the match was boring; whenever Mum switched on 3LO, Dad said the music was boring. Dad even thought ice-cream was boring. Mum said it was because he spent the first year of the war in Albury, where he spent the first five minutes learning how to drive a tank, and the rest of the time waiting to be told what to do next. By the time he got to North Africa he thought everything was so boring that he renamed the place Albury. He once told Tom and me that he fought at the Battle of El Albury.
As it was his house, and not Mum’s, Granddad also invited both of Nanna Blayney’s husbands, even though he would have known that it’d drive Mum nuts, as she hated to be reminded that Nanna had more husbands than you could poke a stick at. These two blokes, Uncle Seb, who played piano in the Hot Potatoes jazz band, and Uncle Mick, who was a professional punter, got on like a house on fire, if you see what I mean. It was odd to see them together away from Nanna’s, as the last time had been at the wake after Tom’s funeral, when I had become the Family Embarrassment.
I was allowed to ask one of my friends to lunch, so I invited James Palmer, who came from the other side of the river, the posh side, and thought everything was ‘terrific’. In fact, I had noticed that he had made terrific his favourite word, which is something we all did. Most of us had pretty good words, except for Matthew Foster, whose favourite thing was to call everything ‘blinken’, which was a word we suspected his father used (my dad wouldn’t have been caught dead using a word like blinken). My favourite word just then was ‘cool’, and I was determined to use it to death.
There was also a ring-in at thi
s party, if you could call it that, one of Brendan’s non-Taggerty cousins from the country, who was staying with them for the holidays. You could tell that his arrival was a complete surprise to Mum, who was a little put off by it. The kid, whose name was Rex, came from a farm up the bush, and talked non-stop about sticking pigs and chopping off chooks’ heads and doing such horrible things to sheep that Mum suddenly asked him to stop, which I thought she did just in the nick of time, as all this talk about blood was making me feel a bit green around the gills.
By the time the conversation got around to The Great Big Fire, as it was bound to, Aunty Betty was digging deep into the sherry and shouting like a ringer at a two-up game. You could probably hear her over in South Yarra.
‘Jean, now that we’re all here together, Frank and I want to say how horrible we feel about what happened.’
‘Thanks, Betty, Frank —’
‘And we’d like to help you out in any small way we can.’
‘I appreciate that very —’
‘Don’t we, Frank?’
‘Yes, love. We —’
‘And, while we know you’ll be well taken care of by Dad, we’ll … we’ll … But the main thing is, you’re both alive and well, no thanks to Bill.’
‘Darl —’
‘No, Frank, I know he’s your brother and everything but, I mean to say, where in the hell was he?’
‘Bett —’
‘No, I’m sorry, it has to be asked: Where in the hell is he?’
‘Bett, the children.’
‘What? Oh yes. Sorry. Family stuff, boys. Best you close your ears.’
But telling twelve-year-old boys to close their ears to family gossip is like telling the rain to go back up. Still, Aunty Betty took the hint.
‘So, this fire, Jean — I can talk about that, can’t I? — this fire of yours. Have they caught the little criminal who started it?’
‘We still don’t know exactly what happened. But no, they haven’t found him. Some of us are worried that he might be lying injured somewhere.’