Riggs Crossing (11 page)

Chapter 29

Daddy, Terry, the Loser, and the mango smell. That memory hums in my brain for a few days, then dims as the remaining mangoes spoil and have to be thrown out.

A few weeks later, it comes back to me. Not as a mango smell, but as a scared, tight feeling in my ribcage.

It happens when we’re in the van, going to the Westgardens Metro. Lyyssa is driving down the street. I’m in the front seat next to Lyyssa because I made it to the car before Cinnamon. Cinnamon is sitting behind me, staring angrily at the back of my head. Karen and Shane are sitting in the very back seat, playing some stupid game with a neon yellow rubber ball that they keep throwing back and forth. ‘Careful with that ball, kids!’ Lyyssa calls, turning around and craning her neck to look at them, which causes her to cross the centre line, which makes another driver swerve to avoid her and sound his horn. Karen and Shane start screaming ‘Eeee! Eeee!’ pretending that we’ve actually had a wreck.

‘Ohhh . . . Shhhugar!’ Lyyssa exclaims, her cheeks flushing, conscious of having Set a Bad Example. I turn to look at Cinnamon. She glares back at me and rolls her eyes, like she’s embarrassed to be seen with all of us.

I’m not the sort of person you’d be embarrassed to be seen with, but Karen and Shane are. Karen’s wearing a pair of hot pink shorts that are a size too small. Her fat white thighs spill out of them like disgusting, overstuffed sausages that have split their casings. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’s wearing a frilly white midriff top, and flip-flops on her enormous feet.

Shane is wearing his usual jeans and three T-shirts, despite the thirty-eight-degree heat. The outermost T-shirt is the one Mrs Rowles wouldn’t let Shane wear that day they went to the zoo, the one with the bald wrestler who’s giving the finger with both hands.

Lyyssa is the sort of person who likes everything to go according to plan, so when we come up to where the street is being torn up and we have to follow a detour, she gets all flustered. There’s a big orange sign marking the next turn, but Lyyssa drives right past it, biting her lip, her face tense with worry. I saw her miss the turn, and I’m sure Cinnamon did, too, but neither of us says anything. It’s hopeless trying to distract Lyyssa once she’s got a certain idea in her head. The minute Lyyssa saw that street being torn up, our shopping trip was immediately classified in her mind as a ‘disaster’, something that she had to save us from, something requiring a messy and complicated solution. That’s why she missed those huge, obvious signs pointing which way to go – she was too busy frantically trying to remember if there were any emergency flares or tinned food rations in the glove box in case we ended up stranded all night in darkest Marrickville.

Lyyssa turns right for no reason, follows the street for a while, then turns left for no reason. Then she stops the car and makes a fake cheery announcement about ‘stopping for a breather’, and pulls a street directory out of the glove box. As she’s paging though it, trying to figure out where the hell we are, I look out the window and notice something.

We’re across the street from a three-storey, red brick building. Not pretty dark red brick, ugly bright red brick, like that stuff that is made to look like brick, but really peels back from the side of the shabby building like some weird kind of exterior wallpaper. I get a funny feeling as I stare at the building. Then I remember – I’ve been here. Daddy brought me here. There was a man with stringy hair. A man Daddy didn’t like. A loser.

‘Of course!’ Lyyssa shouts, startling me. ‘Yes, yes, I know where we are, nothing to worry about kids, we’ll be there in no time.’ Nobody’s paying any attention. Cinnamon’s in a sullen daydream, Shane and Karen are playing with the rubber ball, and I’m staring at the entrance of that ugly brick building.

We drive off to the Metro, Lyyssa finds a parking space, and we go in. Cinnamon buys lip gloss, mascara and semi-permanent home hair colour from the chemist. Karen buys a huge box of Maltesers from the grocery, a yo-yo and blow-up plastic pillow from the toy store, and a battery-operated pen that lights up from the Two Dollar Shop. That’s Karen for you. Maximum goofiness for the minimum amount of money.

Shane spends all his money on one thing – a heavy-duty rechargeable flashlight that he finds in the camping section of the sporting goods store. Kind of a weird choice for an eight-year-old kid, but at least he picked something that’s good quality.

We’re milling around trying to decide where to go next when I notice the kitchen supply place. Something about the shiny display of pots in the store window catches my eye, but just at that moment, Karen starts whining that she has to go to the toilet.

‘Lyyssa, I’ll just be in that store over there. I’ll stand outside and wait when I’m done.’ I take off before Lyyssa has the chance to object, leaving her to find a ladies’ room before Karen whizzes her pants.

I go into the store, hoping the clerk didn’t see me with the rest of the Refuge kids. The clerk, or maybe she’s the manager, is a slim, dark-haired woman. She’s wearing a navy blue apron over a white shirt. She smiles at me, then goes back to checking figures on a sheet of paper.

I walk through the shop, careful of breakables like coffee mugs and glass bowls. I think of Clarissa Hobbs’ kitchen, which is filled with gleaming pots and pans. In
Clarissa Hobbs, Attorney at Law
, you occasionally see Clarissa cooking, but you never see a dirty-looking pot. Maybe you’re supposed to assume that Clarissa’s cleaning lady deals with the mess. Does anybody have a kitchen like that in real life?

Daddy never cared about kitchen stuff; I guess most men don’t. At the Refuge, we have drawers full of bent, mismatched cutlery, and a whole cupboard full of plastic containers with no lids and plastic lids with no containers. Some of our dishes are plastic, some are china, and all of them are ugly. There’s a frying pan coated with a layer of cooked-on grease that won’t come off no matter how hard you scrub. I won’t use that frying pan because one day I opened up the cupboard and saw a cockroach sitting in it. The cutting board is a scarred plastic rectangle. And of course, all of our knives are dull.

I walk over to the displays of knives. You can get the whole set that comes in a wooden block, if you have two hundred dollars to spare. I look at the ones that are sold individually. They’re kept locked behind a glass case. There’s a brand that is made out of a single piece of steel that I like the looks of. The larger-sized knives are too expensive, but the smaller paring knife is thirty-five dollars. Exactly the amount I have with me.

‘Excuse me.’

The manager looks up from her stack of invoices.

‘Could I see that paring knife, please?’

The manager hesitates, then comes from behind the front counter with a ring of keys. ‘I’m certainly happy to show them to you,’ she says carefully, ‘but do you know that we’re not allowed to sell a knife to anyone under sixteen?’

‘Not even a kitchen knife?’

The manager shakes her head regretfully. ‘It’s the law. But I can take one out and let you have a look if you like.’

I look at the knives – sharp, ordered and perfect – out of my reach. ‘No, that’s okay,’ I tell her. If I touched them, then I’d only want them more. I look around the shop. There’s a stack of stainless steel woks.

‘How much are those?’

The manager turns to look. ‘The woks? Thirty-nine ninety-five. They have a nice, heavy base. Normally, they go for fifty dollars.’

‘Oh.’

The manager looks at me for a moment. ‘Are you a bit short?’

I nod.

‘How much money do you have?’

‘Thirty-five.’

She smiles. ‘I can let you have it for thirty-five. We have too many of them. That’s why we marked them down.’

The manager takes a wok from the top of the stack, and I follow her to the cash register. She carefully wraps the wok in paper and puts it inside a large plastic bag. ‘You need to season a wok with oil before you use it,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a little pamphlet stuck to the label explaining how to do it.’ She hands me the bag. ‘Not many young people are interested in nice things. I’m sorry I can’t sell you that knife.’

I come out of the store just in time to see Lyyssa walking toward the store with the rest of the Refuge crowd. At least they didn’t make it inside and embarrass me in front of the manager who liked me.

‘My, that’s a big bag, Len!’ Lyyssa says brightly.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘What did you buy?’ she persists.

‘A wok.’

Lyyssa blinks. ‘Well, that’s an interesting thing to buy.’ She turns around. ‘Is everyone ready to go?’

We walk through the shopping centre back to the car park. Karen catches up to me. ‘Can I see what you bought?’

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘And you’re not allowed to use it, touch it, or think about it, either.’ I run ahead toward the van.

When we get home, everyone goes back to their room to hide what they bought, then comes downstairs for dinner. After dinner, everyone goes up to their room to play with the stuff they got. Shane locks himself in his room, turns the light out, and switches the flashlight off and on repeatedly. Karen blows up her plastic pillow, stuffs herself with Maltesers, and doodles on a pad with her new pen that lights up. Cinnamon heads to the showers with two towels and her burgundy hair rinse. I don’t want to season my wok with anybody else around, so I go into the lounge room and turn on
Clarissa Hobbs.

Chapter 30

When I wake up the next morning, the first thing I see is the shopping bag with the wok inside. I remember the Westgardens Metro. I remember the ugly red brick block of flats.

The problem with living in this place is you can’t follow things to their natural conclusion. Yesterday, when I saw that block of flats that I recognised, the logical thing to do would have been to get out of the van and take a closer look. But I couldn’t do it, because I would have had to explain to Lyyssa why I wanted to look at a block of flats that’s especially ugly, and because it would have interrupted our shopping trip, and because Karen probably would have pissed her pants.

Actually, that would have been funny. We could have knocked on the door of the stringy-haired Loser and asked if Karen could use his toilet. Then she could weigh herself on that stupid Mickey Mouse scale of his, then the scale would break because Karen’s so fat, then Karen would cry, then Lyyssa would apologise profusely, and invite the Loser to hop in the van with us to come to the Westgardens Metro, where she’d buy him a new scale. And then I could say, ‘Excuse me, Lyyssa, but perhaps the man would prefer a kitchen scale instead of a bathroom scale. You never know what he uses it for.’

My imagination’s running away with me. I’m going to find that building.

It’s not that far to Marrickville, but once I get there I can’t exactly remember where the block of flats was. I end up on the main shopping street, which is a lot more interesting than the Westgardens Metro. There’s an aquarium shop that sells goldfish for $2.50 and fish that look like miniature sharks for $49.95. There are lots of smelly butcher shops, with lights shining on the meat to make it look even redder. There are Asian supermarkets selling fish balls and bunches of leafy cabbage and stuff that you can’t even tell what it is with Chinese writing on the packet. There are two-dollar shops selling clothes pegs and storage containers and cheap clocks and a battery-operated red and gold cat that waves its paw at you and fake jewels to paste on your fingernails and plastic ice cubes that light up and flash blue, red or green when you put them in a glass of something cold. There’s a doctor’s surgery with no-hopers going in and coming out. There are stern warnings posted in the window of the surgery about how you must bring your Health Care card with you, and that no drugs of addiction or money are kept on the premises. There’s a curtain store. I can hear the lady inside talking on the phone.

There’s a Target. I ignore it. There’s a McDonald’s. I ignore that, too. I go off into a daydream and somehow end up at a supermarket called Banana Joe’s, where I go in to buy a bottled water and maybe a muesli bar or yogurt. Elvis is playing on the sound system. After I’ve been in the store for ten minutes, I wish they’d play something else. But as Clarissa Hobbs says, you should be careful what you wish for. When ‘Blue Hawaii’ finishes, the music changes to Paul McCartney and Wings. I buy a muesli bar and a bottled water and get the hell out of there before ‘Live and Let Die’ gets stuck on a repeating loop in my head. At least the bottled water was only two dollars fifty.

I’ve just about finished my muesli bar and almost remembered that I came to Marrickville for a reason, but something distracts me.

Two Asian men are chatting in Chinese or Korean next to a car. A nice new car – nothing flashy, but not a rust-bucket, either. One of them is taking out his keys to unlock the door. An Aboriginal man coming down the street sees them. ‘Hey!’ he yells. ‘Hey!’ You can tell by the way he’s walking that he’s drunk.

The Asians look at him. How stupid. The first rule with obnoxious drunks is that you don’t make eye contact.

‘HEY!’ The Aboriginal guy yells, even louder.

‘What are you doin’ here? Yellow bastards!’

The Asians screw up their faces, blinking, perplexed. I don’t think they understand a word of English. They look at each other, then look at the Aboriginal guy.
How stupid are you? Aren’t Asians supposed to be smart? Just ignore him, get in the car, and drive off.

‘YELLOW BASTARDS!’ the Aboriginal guy bellows. ‘Get off my land! I OWN THE LAND!’

Finally, those two Asian thickos get in the car and drive away, like they should have had the sense to do in the first place. The Aborigine stares after them. ‘Yellow bastards,’ he says, to no audience except me. Then he starts walking down the footpath. ‘And me?’ he raises his voice again. ‘I’m a bastard, too! I’M A BLAAACK BASTARD!’ he yells, loud enough that you could hear him three postcodes away.

I start to laugh and run in the other direction. I laugh until there are tears running down my cheeks and my sides ache and I can’t run anymore and I have to sit on the front step of a house belonging to somebody I don’t even know, and laugh until I can’t laugh anymore. That Aboriginal guy is so funny he ought to be on television. Too bad Clarissa Hobbs doesn’t really exist. She’d know a TV executive and introduce him.

That running made me tired. I’ve lost interest in finding that red brick building. I get up and head back toward the Refuge.

Once I get back to University Road, I stop to look in the window of a store. The Sun of Life, it’s called. The window display shows a couple of mannequins in dresses. A couple of Daddy’s girlfriends had dresses like that, with flowing sleeves and lace. Around the mannequins are piles of pillows, displays of incense burners, crystals, books about Feng Shui. ‘Crap, all of it,’ I hear Daddy say. I move on.

Further down the street I see a little old man coming toward me, walking the littlest dog I’ve ever seen. The man has short grey hair, and bright blue eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He’s incredibly skinny – I bet he weighs less than I do. The dog is black and brown.

‘What a cute little dog,’ I say to the old man, in spite of myself. I don’t usually talk to people I don’t know.

‘He’s a very good dog,’ the man says. ‘His name’s Harvey. He’s going to see his girlfriend.’ The old man has a funny way of speaking, like a cartoon character. His voice is kind of raspy, and he talks fast.

‘Can I pat him?’ I ask. Daddy always said that you should never touch another person’s dog without asking, because you never know if they bite.

‘Oh, yes, he loves pats,’ the old man says.

I crouch down and let the dog sniff my hand, then I pat him and his little tail goes crazy. The old man is talking about how Harvey’s a happy boy because he got sausages for breakfast. Then the little dog jumps up and balances both his front paws on my knee. When I go to pat him on the head again, the dog licks my hand.

Something hurts me deep inside, like when I was looking at the posters of horses in that girl Anna’s room. I straighten up, quickly say goodbye to the man, and start walking.

‘You be good,’ the old man calls after me.

I don’t want to be rude, so I turn halfway around, force a smile, and wave.

I keep walking past the shops selling flowers and CDs and Indian jewellery and clothes, past a piercing salon, past Chinese and Thai restaurants. Then I come to a Turkish restaurant. A sign says it’s not open until five. In the window, there’s a display of gleaming tea and coffee pots, and things that look like grinders for coffee beans.

A memory, a hundredth of a second long, flits through my mind. The lights are low, and there’s a candle on the table. I’m sitting very straight in my chair, careful not to spill any food on my velvet dress. Daddy is wearing a dress shirt and trousers. A lady with silky blonde hair sitting across from me is looking at me and smiling. ‘
Ah, Mick, look at your little princess.’

A bus roars past and I’m suddenly confused. I stare at the teapots, trying to remember more about that restaurant I visited with my father. But I can’t, so I take another swallow of my mineral water and decide to head back to the Refuge.

I take a slightly different route back, leaving University Road sooner than usual so I can walk down a different side street. The houses in this street are mostly shabby terraces, except for one. The walls are a creamy yellow, and the cast-iron lace is painted a deep, intense blue. The little garden is edged in mondo grass, and has clumps of blue flowers alternating with small bushes and pretty stepping stones. There are a couple of Japanese-looking stone lanterns. Then I notice the plaque by the door.
Nohant
, the house is named. Just like the house Georges Sand grew up in. I only read the first few chapters of that book about Georges Sand that I tea-leafed from the Refuge library, but I remember that much. I start to wonder what sort of people live there. Maybe it’s a married couple who are both French teachers or professors.

A window bangs open; I look up, surprised. A lady is staring at me. She’s maybe fifty, with a flushed, blotchy complexion, bleached hair, and a mean, pinched mouth. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’ she snaps.

Nohant. Georges Sand. Is there something I can help you with?

I shake my head, turn away, and slowly walk back to the Refuge.