Slights (8 page)

  Lee came through the door. He'd been at the pub; he'd told me he wasn't going to show up. Their mum wouldn't let Tim come, even though he wanted to. Lee and I shared a good friendship. Neither of us expected or demanded anything. We weren't disappointed with rejection or overjoyed with acceptance; we just carried on. I like things that way. I like to be able to do things if they need doing, and not have people beholden to me. I hate it when people think they owe you something. Lee and I liked to go out to pubs, to sit quietly and drink. We never felt we had to talk to each other. We had been going out for a couple of years, since his 16th birthday, when it was legal and we didn't have to worry about being caught.

  Lee took one look at the scene in my house and said, "Let's go down the pub." Brilliant suggestion. I didn't say a word to Peter, snuck out the back door. No one noticed.

  The pub was full, rowdy, almost too much. At least no one knew me. No one would tell me how sorry they were. I watched Lee's face slacken and redden, watched the people around darken or lighten, depending on who they were. I liked using drunkenness as an excuse, too; you could get away with anything. Knocking people so their drinks spilled everywhere, stepping on people's toes.

  I was coming back from the toilets and there was this tall, blonde man standing alone at the bar. I fell against him, he grabbed me. I reached up and kissed him. A big, sweet bourbon kiss.

  Lee saw it, but he wasn't confident enough to come over and make a claim. That wasn't my aim; I didn't want him jealous. All I wanted was the feel of this big man.

  He was there alone; that was the two sentences of conversation we had.

  "Are you alone?" I said.

  "Are you?" he said. I nodded. He took my hand and we left. My house, people gone. He was gone in an hour, maybe two.

The next morning I went out and uncovered more treasures. I found a damaged glass cufflink, a pair of half-rotted Spiderman underpants, a bath plug and a tiny silver spoon. I was inside washing the things in the laundry sink when I got a phone call from a local department store. Tim had been caught shoplifting, and he told them I was his sister. I guessed didn't want his parents there to ream him out so I went along with it. I caught the bus to the store, put up a good case; the police hadn't been called, so I knew we were dealing with a bit of a softie. I said how good Tim usually was, for an eleven year-old, how Dad had lost his job and we were struggling. I said it was Mum's birthday soon and Tim was probably stealing for that.

  "She has odd taste in music, then," said the manager. He fanned out some rough stuff.

  "Oh, Tim," I said. "You shouldn't pinch stuff for me." We gave each other a big hug. I tried to fake crying but couldn't; in retrospect that was probably a good thing. Less is more, they say.

  I offered to pay for the CDs but the manager wouldn't hear of it. "I hope your Dad gets back on his feet soon," he said, and that saddened me, because my Dad was dead and would never be at work.

  We went home on two buses. Tim said, "Where's the lecture?" but I had no idea what he was talking about. "Oh, yeah, that's really something I'm into," I said. I grinned at him. "Listen, don't worry about it. It's just another event in the rich vat of life." It made me feel quite sad, though, talking about Mum's birthday and knowing she'd never have another. I was in the mood for a celebration. For her birthday one year Peter and I put on a special show. "The Elopement of Mum and Dad." We only did it once. Mum got too upset.

  We both put on as many of our clothes as we could, and waddled down the stairs. We all laughed so much we didn't get started for about half an hour, and Peter and I kept cracking up, having to stop the show.

  Mum stopped laughing and didn't start again. We didn't realise till the end how upset she was. I actually didn't realise at all; I was totally excited by my acting.

  I danced around the room, throwing gear off, trying to cover every object in the room with an item of clothing.

  "Stop it, Stevie," Peter said. He had his arms around Mum.

"Why?"

"Mum's upset."

  "No, she's not, she loves it, don't you Mum?" and I went to dance in the backyard.

at twenty

I don't know if I had the shortest career a checkout chick ever had, but I must have come close. Three weeks and two days into it, I knocked a mountain of spaghetti cans flying for the third time. I had already smashed the plate-glass near the information booth when a trolley went out of my control, and when marching proudly out in my uniform I had fallen over and cut my lip, splashing blood all up aisle seven.

  The manager was very controlled. Her assistant hissed at me, "You fucking clumsy idiot fucking loser." But Mrs Gibbs said, "Stephanie, I'm afraid we feel that someone as accident-prone as you is not quite suitable to this kind of work."

  "I don't do it on purpose. You can't discriminate against someone because accidents follow them around. My Dad always calls me accident-inclined," I said. Mrs Gibbs smiled. "I like that. Your Dad must be a lovely man."

  "Oh, yes, he is," I said. He was. When I think about it now, I'm not so sure he was being kindly. Accident-inclined, I'm inclined to do it, I do it on purpose. I'd been saying it for years, proud of it, proof of how much my Dad loved me. But what was he saying? I did it on purpose, to get attention or something? That I'm a victim of Munchausen's? I didn't discuss that with my counsellor. She's got no more room to list the syndromes she's matching to me.

  Mrs Gibbs said, "To be honest, Stephanie, I don't think you are suited for other reasons." I wasn't going to jump in and guess what reasons she had in mind. She went slightly red in the face as the silence continued.

  "Well, for example, there was that woman you accosted."

  I told Mrs Gibbs how ridiculous that was. The bloody woman hit me in the back of the ankles with her trolley to get my attention, then she says, "Young lady, I have been looking for three hours for the tinned asparagus. Is it asking too much that it be placed in a less than hidden position?"

  "I tell you what's asking too much," I told the woman. "You expecting me to believe you've been here three hours, but you've got a wet raincoat on, and it only started raining thirty minutes ago. I know that for a fact. It was sunny before that, that's why we're understaffed, people always stay home on the good days. And I'm guessing, from the look of your cheap shoes, that you're looking for the noname asparagus that we got in from Asia. Because the good stuff, the local stuff, is out for all to see. We don't have the cheap stuff anymore. There were reports of tetanus."

  "I beg your pardon," she said. Her shoulders were pulled back and her neck swayed.

  "Will that be all, Mrs Adder?" I said. I giggled about that one all the way home.

  Mrs Gibbs said, "Unfortunately, she was some sort of something high up in the public service, and she kicked up a bit of a fuss."

  "If she's that high up, why's she such a tight arse? Her arse is so tight she needs a straw to shit through."

  Mrs Gibbs found me funny. She liked the fact I was rude and cheeky; she got too many crawlers. She spluttered. "God, you're awful, Steve," she said. I smiled and shook her hand.

  "It's a fair cop. I'll go quiet," I said. One of those stupid lines you pick up in your life. I had an immediate fantasy; Mrs Gibbs asked me out for lunch, a farewell lunch, and when I got there the whole staff had turned up. Crying because I was leaving, giving me personal little presents, each with a private story I'd think of every time I looked at them.

  That's what should have happened. This is what did happen; I got changed into my street clothes, walked out. Said, "Bye, Luke," to one of the guys.

  He said, "Yeah, see ya, mate," and I was gone.

  I didn't want to find another job. I hated the process; dressing up, getting your hair just right, wearing pantyhose, all the pretence which makes them love you.

  I could have left, then. Moved overseas, gone to another state. But there were the bones. I was trapped.

  I went home after getting the sack and started to dig in my backyard. I thought, "More jasmine. I'll dig further up the back, plant more jasmine."

  I found the bones on the fourth day of digging. I dug up my backyard with the intention of planting a sea of jasmine but found bones, instead, and relics. Remnants, reminders, mementoes and rubbish. I hadn't planned to dig so deep.

  I was out there early in the day, feeling the sun move across my body, sweating, breathing that dust smell, and I didn't have any music blaring to destroy my concentration. My train of thought. The yard proved a goldmine of memories. I piled all the things by the back door, until it began to look like a child's stall at a make-believe market. I found chicken bones bitten white and some slightly larger; then I found bones too big for us to have tossed there as meat detritus. I found bones in a shoebox with "MUFFY" written on it. Snails had eaten most of the letters. She never did dig her way out of the cave, where Mum told me she'd gone. I left her in the shoe box and buried her again. I had my own special service. I loved that cat. I tried to say the right things but I'd never heard them said before. Somehow I'd missed all the family funerals.

  I kept digging, and I began to pile the bones by the tree in the middle of the yard. It didn't occur to me to stop. For three more days I dug and discovered bones. Two hundred and twenty-three that week.

  There were more the next week.

There are clumps of old jasmine left still, a legacy from my grandparents, and I remember it as a smell from childhood; I can close my eyes when it is in bloom and still picture the backyard clearly. I can close my eyes at the end of the street, stumble along blindly, and still know where to turn into my place. The rest of the street had carefully groomed roses. I can smell jasmine everywhere, even in the smell factory that's the kitchen.

  While my bedroom was often warmer, being right over the kitchen, it often filled with secondhand cooking smells. Something happens to the smell of food when it travels away from the source; it becomes sickening, rancid. When you're in a fish and chip shop the smell is wonderful, hot fat, vinegar, sea smell of the fish. Three steps away and you wonder why anyone would eat there.

  It made me feel sick, early in the morning, or late at night, when Dad would cook up some fatty feast. I'd have to breathe through my pillow and that didn't work, so I'd poke my head out the window and suck in the jasmine in the backyard, if it was in bloom.

  When I'm on my own in the place I can be surprised by smells. I cook cheese on toast downstairs and by the time I go to bed, hours later, my room smells like curdled milk and a house burnt down. And the jasmine saves me again.

  I was digging down deep to find things, it was dark, but always the jasmine led me back to the surface with a scent trail.

  I found a piece of coal carved into a panther and a scissor blade. I could smell the shit pile when the wind blew right, but it was the smell of home.

  Peter called to ask me to the movies, but the movie was crap so we walked out. We tried to get into another movie, get our money back. The woman behind the desk said, "The show is sold out."

  "What show?" I said.

  The woman had not left her seat. She preferred to keep her seat. Her eyes were squinting because her hair was pulled into such a tight bun. "The show now playing. You won't be able to see it."

  She seemed pleased by this; as if I had offended her and she wanted me to be punished.

  It was astonishing how much she hated me.

  Peter had been quieter than usual, and I'm not the type to fill in the gaps, so neither of us spoke. We went and had a beer, then Peter said, "So what happened at the supermarket?"

  I rolled my eyes and punched him. "Is that what's been bothering you? My job? It was crap, I hated it, they sacked me. That's what happened."

  He pinched my cheek. "I'm not having a go, Steve. It's just that I've got this new idea, and I'm wondering if you could help me set it up."

  Turns out he wanted to use his skills at telling people what to do and start running self-motivational courses. Though how they can be called 'self' motivational, when you're paying someone else to motivate you, is beyond me. I would be helping with the boring stuff – mail outs, listing names, all the stuff Maria couldn't be arsed to do. She used her pregnancy as an excuse, as she'd use motherhood as an excuse once the baby arrived.

  It sounded okay, and better than working in an office.

  "It sounds okay," I said.

I found a curtain ring and a bead I recognised from Grampa Searle's well-used abacus.

  My Grampa Searle was always a quiet one. He never lost his love for figures and sat like an addict adding up anything.

  "Did you know that if you bought every sale item on this page you'd be up for $4,281.85?" he said. There was no response; there rarely was to his announcements. He tried to make me and Peter add and subtract.

  "Start with 400. Add 80. Subtract this. Multiply by that."

  We stared at him, and my Dad said, "Leave them alone, Dad. They're not interested. Steve's not even at school yet." Grampa Searle always went quiet when his son spoke. My mum was impressed by it at first, thinking it showed respect. She thought the dad looked up to the son. I always liked Grampa Searle when he wasn't testing me with maths. He gave me private winks, like we shared a secret which didn't need to be discussed. He was the most gentle man I ever knew. For my fifth birthday he gave me an abacus of my own.

  My fifth birthday was the greatest. The Grannies were there, with presents, and Peter swore at Dad in the morning – he said damn, but he said it rudely, tried to make Dad look silly. He got in so much trouble. Then he was quiet for the rest of the day. I laughed at him. He said, "You'll get a belting one day, then see how you like it," but Dad didn't give beltings.