Jacaranda Blue (5 page)

‘It's functional enough, Daughter.' He dismissed her words.

She tossed the cloth into the kitchen tidy, then walked towards the stairs.

‘I don't believe you are well enough to go out today, and certainly not well enough to walk the distance. You should perhaps consider returning to bed.'

‘Perhaps I could take the car?'

‘I may need – '

‘It will only be five minutes away, Father.'

‘I dare say I can leave my work and drive you there – if you are determined to go. I need to fill the tank.'

‘If you'd register the Packard – '

‘It would be seen as wasteful extravagance,' he said, quickly ending that conversation.

‘I'll have to go. I'm already late.'

His head bowed, his frown grown deeper, he looked at her feet, at the floor-covering. He followed a new ripple to the fridge where the linoleum had worn through to show its hessian backing. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes. We need milk. I'll pick some up while we're out.'

‘I'll get the milk.'

In the bathroom, she looked at the basin, rust-stained. It looked like blood. She shivered and turned her eyes away from it. This was a dark room, old. Everything was old. She looked at her face in the mirror. She too was old. Stained.

Behind her, she could see her father's face reflected in the same mirror. He leaned against the door, watching her run the comb through her hair, watching her again wet down her fringe. His mirror image frowned.

The mirror was large, and not so old. She had installed it, hoping it may lend a little light to the room. ‘A wasteful extravagance. I manage well enough with the shaving mirror,' her father had said, but she'd bought it anyway. Bonny helped fix it to the wall with the aid of Len Davis's electric drill and some small green wall plugs. They'd done it six or eight years ago when Stella had been strong enough to argue.

‘You don't look at all well, Daughter. I'll feel happier if I deliver you safely to Miss Moreland's door.'

‘Look at me, Father. Look at me for just one moment. Please see me. I am old. I'm almost as old as my own mother was when I was born,' her reflection replied.

‘And you are in no fit state to drive today.'

‘I was driving at seventeen. I have had my licence for twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years,' she stressed.

‘But you have not driven the new car, and perhaps what I am attempting to say, Daughter, is today is not the best day for you to begin driving it.'

She turned from the mirror and stood facing him, waiting for him to clear the doorway, and when he did, she walked downstairs. His shaggy head shaking, he followed behind her, through the back door and out to the shed.

‘You won't drive through the centre of town, Daughter. You'll go around via the pool. Don't attempt to cross the highway at the railway line. The traffic is fierce there.'

‘As always, I will do as you say.'

At the shed door, she remembered her missing briefs. Heat rushed to her head as her eyes scanned the floor, her leaden feet walking her towards the Packard. Then she smelt him. The stink of his youth was still inside the shed. His sweat. His sex. His footprint was in the drying mud. Heartbeat. Hammer. She turned, ran by her father to the side door where she grasped wood, cowered, unable to run further.

He glanced at her as he walked to his car. ‘Will you get the gates, Daughter?'

Blood was flooding her head, beating in her brain; his command had no power to move her. Her hands covering her face, she trembled in the shade of the jacaranda. She would not open the gates again, allow the outside world in. She didn't want the world. Didn't want to live in such a world. She would stay here. Just stay here. Die here.

The plaintive beep of a horn. And his voice. It would not be denied. She turned to the house, to the gate, then her eyes caught the flutter of blue. They followed the odd spiralling flight as, caught by a breeze, a jacaranda blossom fell to the earth beside her shoe.

‘It's too late,' she said.

‘And while you stand there dreaming, it grows later still.'

She stooped and picked up the flower, cupping it in her palm as she looked beyond it to the tree. ‘It does not bloom in February. Has the world gone mad?' she whispered.

‘Daughter?'

‘It's February. It's blooming, Father. The jacaranda.' He returned to the door, frowning down from his great height. She turned to him. ‘It's too late for it.'

‘I agree. And you are not at your best.' He sighed. ‘I have considerable work – '

‘No.' She shook her head. ‘Do you see it, Father? Look. Do you see it too?'

He followed her pointing finger to a cluster of violet-blue blossom. ‘The trees have a habit of blooming, Daughter.'

‘But never a second blooming. Never in February.'

‘God's hand at work in our garden, no doubt. Now, if you are still determined to go about your visiting, then I suggest you get the gate.'

‘Yes. Yes.' She walked to the gate, opening it then stepping back, her eyes turned to the shed and to the jacaranda foliage, visible above its roof. Two more clusters of blue. It was there. It was.

The beep of a horn moved her from the drive to the footpath.

‘Hop in, Daughter. Easier for me to drive you than worrying about the car all afternoon. It's no effort to me at all. Perhaps you'll feel like walking home.'

A shake of her head and she was at the driver's side door, waiting there, waiting, until reluctantly, Martin vacated the seat. His face pink, his jowls trembling, he watched her take his seat, select drive, release the handbrake and slowly ease the car away.

‘The power steering is rabid. Watch the kerbs when you're cornering. And the brake is dynamite. Take care, Daughter,' he called after her. ‘Remember, the car belongs to the church.'

Miss Moreland's house was three long country blocks east and one west. Martin watched the car out of sight. He did not see his vehicle make the turn across the highway. It appeared to be continuing east, travelling towards Dorby.

The minister made his grudging way back to the shed, his mind with his new car. Unmarked yet, it still smelt of the showroom – and he liked it that way. The church supplied his vehicles, and so they should, he thought. Much of his work was out of town. He had given his life to the church, but, had he not chosen to follow his father's vocation, Martin Templeton would have made an admirable motor mechanic. He had a shelf in his study specifically for mechanical books. Each year at the church fete he sorted through the second-hand books for old magazines he could not justify purchasing at the local newsagents. Wallowing in the intricacies of motors was his secret vice.

The Packard, like the house, came to him with his wife, and he had grown to know the old car more intimately than he'd ever known dear Angel. ‘A strange woman,' he muttered, dusting her father's car, loving it, wiping finger marks from its wheel-arch with one of his own outgrown singlets. He kept a bag of rags beneath his workbench, discarded garments he used as polishing cloths and to wipe the grease and oil from his fingers when he delved beneath the bonnet.

On his knees, he was peering beneath the old vehicle when the telephone again paged him.

‘Confound that thing,' he said. ‘Confound its ill-mannered interruptions.' Head up, he counted the rings. Most callers gave up if the phone wasn't answered after twelve rings. He always followed this rule. With effort he stood, listening, counting. The phone continued to ring. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen –

His oily rag in hand, he crossed the garden to the back door, flinging the flywire wide, picking up the phone and bellowing his frustration into the mouthpiece. ‘Hello. Who is this?'

‘Old age pinching this afternoon, Martin Templeton?' an equally peevish voice replied.

‘Miss Moreland. Do forgive my ire. I have been the recipient of innumerable nuisance calls today. Any work I have attempted this morning has been interrupted by some young hooligan with a penchant for telephones. Is Stella there? She has taken the new car. Not familiar with it, I'm afraid.'

‘She's a better driver than you ever were, Martin Templeton.'

‘Has she arrived, madam?'

‘Not yet. Where is she?'

Martin's mind began charting the car's course to Miss Moreland's unit, seeing his small white vehicle smashed on each corner. ‘She left a few minutes before two-thirty. She was . . . is not . . . not herself.'

‘Speak English. Is she sick?'

‘No. No. Luckily she inherited my constitution rather than her poor mother's. She may have stopped off at the centre. I noticed that we were out of milk,' he added, attempting to convince himself, more than the caller. He looked at his clock. Almost fifteen minutes had passed since his daughter had driven away. It didn't take that long to buy milk in Maidenville. He should have put his foot down, refused her the keys. It was six months since the army reunion in Sydney. That was the last time she had driven, and that had been in the six-year-old Ford. Why he had allowed her to drive away today he didn't know. ‘Remind her about the milk. Better still, tell her to give me a call when she arrives.'

‘If she's not here by three, I'll call back.'

‘Thank you. Don't forget to remind her we need milk.' Martin placed the phone down then, his rag tossed to the table, he made his slow way upstairs to his study where he sat scanning through his bible, looking for inspiration. He had barely taken up his pen when the phone jangled again from the hall. ‘That will be Stella,' he said, ‘or the police.' He sprang to his feet and hurried downstairs. ‘Good afternoon,' he said.

There was no reply.

‘Who is this? What do you want? Have you got the right number?'

The caller replied with heavy breathing, and Martin slammed the phone into the receiver.

 

Thomas Spencer was stifling his laughter as he returned to the storeroom of his parents' supermarket. He was supposed to be filling shelves. He did it every Saturday, and he hated it.

For minutes he stood on the cool cement floor, imagining the face of old Templeton. It was almost as good as Stell answering, he thought, visualising the old bull-moose slobbering into the phone. He'd do more than slobber if old Stell ever told him what'd happened. But he knew she'd kept her mouth shut like he told her to because he'd seen the cop car driving down Main Street only half an hour ago. It went straight by.

He reached for a carton of tomato-sauce bottles, and hefted it onto his shoulder as his father walked through.

‘Nice to see a smiling face for a change, Tommy.'

‘You've got a better view than me.'

‘Why don't you use a trolley? You'll drop the lot one day.'

‘She's cool man. She's cool.'

Ronald Spencer continued on through the storeroom, his brow permanently creased in a frown.

‘Nagging old shit,' Thomas muttered. His father was always nagging him to use a trolley. Thomas ignored him. He liked the look of his shoulders beneath the carton, and he stopped now in front of a mirror over the main freezer, shifting the carton to his other shoulder. He stood there, viewing his still new manly physique. Twelve months ago, he'd been one of the smallest in the junior football team. This year he'd be one of the biggest. He looked good too. Girls liked him now. They more than liked him! He hoped Kelly Murphy would walk in and see him flexing his muscles, see what she was missing out on. He was giving her a rest for a while, letting her learn that she wasn't making the rules any more. He was making the rules these days.

Nobody came in.

He walked to the sauce shelves, placed the carton on the floor, then with his Stanley knife, slashed the cardboard carton, waiting for the wound to gape open like a slit throat, to expose the glass veins of clotted red blood. ‘Die,' he hissed, slashing again. ‘Die.'

The whole town must have lived on tomato sauce. Every Saturday of his life he had to fill the tomato sauce shelf. He even dreamed of filling it some nights – of spilling a pool of red to the tiled floor. If a Saturday ever came when he walked past the shelf and found it full, he'd know the world had come to an end and the whole town was dead, pulped, pulverised, blood running in pools down the street and into the drains and on into the river.

‘Blood,' he said, then checked quickly over his shoulder. No-one heard him. His mother was serving a customer.

He didn't know there would be blood with old Stell. From what his mother always said, he was sure she would have been like Kelly Murphy. Hot. Easy. When he'd done it to Kelly the first time there hadn't been any blood, which wouldn't be likely because she'd already had an abortion. Everyone in town knew about it. She and Sean Logan, who used to work after school in Smith's Garden Supplies, had been at it since Kelly turned thirteen. Sean was seventeen. He'd wanted to marry her too and keep the kid, but Kelly's old man was one of the mean Murphys. He wouldn't let Sean get near her, warned him to get out of town or he'd end up under it.

Sean got out, and Kelly started doing it with anybody, just to nark her old man.

She was the first one Thomas had done it to, his second was one of the boarders from Dorby, Leonie someone-or-other. They did it on the night of the school social. Leonie lived in at the school all week, then went back to the farm at weekends.

‘Boring,' the youth said as he carved two deep slits into the shelf. ‘How can they stand being locked in all week?' It was bad enough going to school every day, without staying there at night.

All the out-of-town kids got a late pass on the night of the school social, and Leonie what's-er-name made hay while the sun shone. She made a lot of hay that night; he hadn't been the only one who got onto her. Half the football team had already done it before him, and the other half were lining up for their turn after him. It hadn't been much good, like sharing your condom.

Old Stell was something else. ‘Radical, man,' he said. ‘Animal.'

Animal. The way it was meant to be. None of this sensitive new-age guy bullshit the whole world was pushing down your throat these days. Just hit 'em over the head with a club and drag 'em home to your cave by their hair and give it to them in the dirt.

‘She liked it,' he said to a sauce bottle. ‘She really liked it.' He turned the bottle upside down and rammed its top into the now empty carton. It dented the cardboard, but didn't go through. He looked over his shoulder again before slashing the carton with his knife – a horizontal, and a vertical – then with the bottle gripped before him, he hit the cross dead centre. The bottle penetrated. He ground it in, deeper and deeper, thrusting with his pelvis, grinding it in like he'd ground it into old Stell.

Then the carton collapsed and he almost went down on top of it.

‘Tommy?'

‘What do you want?'

‘What are you doing there?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Can you get some small packets of self-raising flour please? Mrs Wilson is waiting.'

‘Yeah,' he replied, then muttered low. ‘Let the old bitch wait.'

I didn't know there'd be blood though, he thought. He had thrown his under-daks out this morning, but his old man wouldn't miss 'em in the wash. Plenty more where they come from – they got them wholesale from the supermarket.

He'd gone for a ride around town before he came to work this morning, and he'd dumped his daks in old lady Murphy's garbage can, then ridden his bike on past the minister's house. Nothing was moving there, no cop cars, no nothing. He rode by the cop station too. It was just as dead.

Bloody hick town. Nothing moved before eight. He hated it. Hated it like he hated this lousy supermarket. Hated hearing how lucky he was that his parents were putting money away for him to go to university in Sydney, money they saved by paying him a pittance to do the job they'd have to pay someone else ten dollars an hour to do.

As if they couldn't afford to send him to university without him working, and who but they ever said he was going to go to university anyway? You needed good marks to go to university, and his marks weren't worth shit – not since he'd discovered sex. It was a drug. The more you had, the more you wanted. If they hadn't made him work, then he might have found time for sex and school work.

‘Their fault. Hardly any of the other kids at school are expected to work and study too, and they get a lot more than me for doing nothing.'

His old man and lady expected him to go down on his bended knee and thank them for letting him lug boxes around all Saturday morning and half his holidays, while they doled him out ten lousy bucks a week. Ten bucks? It was nothing. He could get the dole if he left home. He'd be rich. Have a fortune coming in every week.

Never mind, he thought. I take what I'm due.

He unscrewed the top from the small bottle of sauce and slid his finger inside, slid it up and down, up and down, then he withdrew it, smelt it. Squatting there, he looked long at the bloody finger before licking it clean.

His mother was working the checkout and, between customers, she sat around knitting the legs of Stell's stupid clown dolls. Thirty stitches, sixty rows of garter stitch. She could do it blindfolded. He could do it blindfolded! Stell had taught him to knit when he was six or seven, before he knew any better.

He used to watch her stuffing all the bits before she stitched them into clowns. She made him one when he was a kid. For years it had sat on his window ledge and laughed at him – until one day he'd cut its head off.

‘That stopped its laughing,' he said.

She used to let him play in the stuffing, pass her handfuls of it. He could remember the feel of his hands, deep in the white fluffy fake wool stuff that she stored in bales in her shed.

That's why he went there yesterday. Stuffing.

It was his father's fault. He'd sent him around to tell Stell that the new bales of stuffing had arrived, and that he'd drop them around when they closed the shop on Saturday. But he didn't tell her his father was coming for a visit. He did his own stuffing instead. More fun than stuffing clowns.

He chuckled, and again slipped his finger into the mouth of the bottle, feeling the smooth silk of glass, the sucking, the pressure of fluid. Again he licked his finger.

‘Tommy?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What are you doing down there?'

‘Nothing.'

‘I asked you ages ago to get some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson. She's still waiting.'

‘And getting a free read of your magazines while she's waiting,' he said, replacing the bottle top, sliding the sauce to the front of the shelf. A bead of red oozed from beneath the lid. He wiped it away with a finger, licked the finger clean.

‘Who were you trying to call earlier?'

‘No-one,' he said.

‘I heard that Thomas has got himself a little girlfriend,' Mrs Wilson said.

‘Have you, Tommy?'

‘That's for me to know and you to find out,' he replied, adding quietly, ‘Stupid old cow.'

‘Who is she?'

‘No-one. Leave me alone, why can't you?'

‘Get me some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson, then I will.'

Nagging old bitch, he thought but he stood and walked again to the storeroom, returning with a box of self-raising flour packets. He ripped it open, walked to the checkout, tossed one to the bench, then returned to study the packets. They had pictures of scones on the back.

‘Scones in the oven,' he whispered, ‘Maybe I gave the old Stell some self-raising power – got my scones baking in her old oven. I wonder if she's too old.'

His mother was too old, old and fat as a pig. She'd had her bits cut out by old Parsons. Now she had to swallow hormone pills to stop her shrivelling up. He sometimes thought of doing it to her, like his old man used to. He used to watch them doing it when he was a little kid. His old man was so scared he was going to die, like his other five kids had died, that he couldn't sleep unless the cot was in their room. Thomas had slept beside their bed until he was nearly five. And he'd watched them when they thought he was asleep.