The Home Girls (13 page)

In the bustle of everyone getting out and the hiss of the train pulling in he was able to sniff deeply without detection and waggle his nose dry on his sleeve.

Passing through to his office he swooped an arm over a glass partition and plucked up some tissues from someone's box grateful for the feel of them on his nostrils.

A clerk named Gail was at his cabinet looking for a file, a paper cup of coffee in one hand and the fingers of the other sprayed out holding a cigarette.

“Hi there,” she said. “Tim Thomas wants to cancel and I think Jack wants you to go and see him and see if you can change his mind.” She shut the cabinet with a twist of her hip. “The best of British.”

“I should ring home first,” he said. But he only stared at the phone.

Gail stood looking at him, her face and slightly prominent teeth pushed forwards between the peaks of her heavy hair.

“Oh God, I forgot!” he said.

“What?” she said very interested.

“I came in the train. I got no car today. I couldn't—I mean it wouldn't—”

“You can take mine,” she said taking keys from a deep skirt pocket and laying them on his blotter.

“Oh thanks,” he said putting his hand over the keys as if they were her hand.

“Love,” he said inside his throat not sure if she should hear.

She turned and went out with lowered lashes carrying her coffee with care.

He watched her back and thought of her moving in with him and the girls. He stripped her of her black jumper with the high collar touching her ears and put her in a flowered apron. He saw her putting the living room in order clearing the floor of toys with the little girls swooped on top of her.

She was laughing and trying to get free. The dinner table was set with table napkins at jaunty angles on bread and butter plates and silver winking and every now and again there was a gentle spit from meat roasting in the oven.

He saw them together putting the girls to bed and smelled the girls' clean hair and clean sheets. Later he closed the bedroom door on Gail and himself. Watching her while she tossed her hair back and sat down to work his eyes pulled her jumper down over her naked shoulders. His thighs strained inside his pants. Oh my God my God, he said inside him.

We would keep the two cars he thought driving hers towards Tim Thomas, New and Used Vehicles. No, we would sell one and have no debts. He steered his mind from the bills piled under and around the clock on the kitchen shelf.

Tim Thomas left him standing holding his plastic folder (there was nothing in it relating to this visit but he usually carried it) while he finished a conversation with another caller. He took his time staring at the tips of his shoes, waggling his hands inside his pockets and looking past the boy's cheek at the car posters on the wall.

Chris looked at the stairs going up to a flat over the premises. The door had a brass knocker and he pictured Gail again in her apron with a finger covered by a rag polishing away at the knocker. The little girls were pressed against her legs watching. Tim Thomas had given them the flat rent free in return for a little bit of caretaking at the weekend. The girls went to a nearby nursery school.

He and Gail took turns at delivering and collecting them. They kept both cars he decided now. Of course. The sale of the house at a very good price took care of all his outstanding debts.

Tim Thomas was ready for him.

“I told them I cancelled for this week. I got nothing new to advertise. I told 'em.” He fiddled with papers on his desk and twisted about.

“I know,” Chris said his eyes travelling up and down the stairs before returning to Thomas's putty coloured chin.

“It's OK, Mr Thomas,” Chris said his voice gentle as a girl's. “I just called to see if we could help in any way at all.”

“Well—” Thomas was unable to look into the boy's blue eyes. Suddenly he threw a pencil across his desk. “Damn it! I don't want to lose the space—”

Chris moved to go his eyes back on the brass knocker.

“I'll tell 'em. Thanks, Mr Thomas.” He slipped out aware that Thomas was watching his back with dissatisfied eyes.

Back in his office he looked about wildly for telephone messages. There was nothing. But the phone looked as if its creamy ear could hold some dark and terrible secret.

It rang. He took it up, listened a while, said it was OK and laid it down.

Gail came in then and saw his large swimming eyes.

“That was Thomas,” he said. “He told me down there he was taking the ad then rang to say he wouldn't.”

“What a bastard!” Gail said putting a file back in his cabinet.

“Gail!” he said and her hair swung round followed by her face.

He looked at her without speaking straining his eyes against the tears.

A slow red ran into her face.

“Oh, the keys,” she said picking them up from his blotter and going slowly out.

“Don't look now,” she said to Karen the girl at the next desk. “But I just got the come on.”

Karen did look. She was currently without a boyfriend.

“Not for me,” Gail said. “A fruitcake for a wife and two kids!”

But when the red dye left her face her eyes were brighter.

He caught the train at five o'clock and then the bus which dropped him at a corner store three blocks from home.

He went in and picked a pack of sausages from a refrigerator and laid them with a carton of eggs on the counter.

A door behind the counter opened into the rear of the shop where the owners lived. They were a man and wife named Franks.

There was no light on but flames from a fire licked at a black grate. A fat ginger cat sat on an easy chair which sat on a hand hooked rug on linoleum. There was a table covered with an old-fashioned green fringed cloth.

He saw the little girls kneeling by the chair, each with a hand on the cat their tangled hair smooth with brush and comb.

He saw Gail come in (in the apron) with a basin of steaming soup and the girls leave the floor and stand by her peering into the basin.

He removed Mr Franks to hospital with a terminal illness. Mrs Franks unable to run the shop alone sold out cheaply and gratefully.

Gail was busy and happy all day. He saw the four of them while the shop was closed on a Sunday afternoon walking on the reserve linked by their outstretched arms.

He turned surprised to see the dying Mr Franks looking quite robust come through the front door stamping wet leaves from his feet. At the same time Mrs Franks came through the living room shadows up to the counter.

“I thought you'd be back,” she said with irritation.

“I chased the siren down Cook Road and around into Regent Street . . .”

Regent Street. That was the boy's street. He laid his hand on the eggs and held them.

“Well, was it police, fire brigade, ambulance or what?” Still testy she dropped the boy's money in the till with a little clatter.

“It got away from me,” said Mr Franks and he went with head down to stir some oranges in a wire basket and straighten the sign that said they were locally grown and cheap and moved from there to fuss with the magazine stand.

Chris took up his things and ran. She had burned the house down, he thought. My little girls are dead. He saw them outlined in flames beating at a window.

He pulled up panting at his gate and they were at the window. He saw their ecstasy when they saw him. The little one threw back her head and laughed and pointed. The older one's smile made her turned up nose turn up more. They jigged about as if they wanted to break through the glass to reach him.

They raced into the kitchen to meet him there, wrapping their arms around his trouser legs while he peeled the wrapping from the sausages and turned on the stove.

“The stove's a clock!” the little one screamed with laughter when the element began to tick.

He gave them a nurse on each hip moving to the doorway to steal a look into the living room. His wife was on the couch under a rug, her eyes on the television screen. Her heavy body was hidden and her hair spread on a cushion golden in the half light. Her face was turned from his but he saw her cheek fair and smooth as butter.

Moving back to the stove he set the girls gently down.

They brought her to the table while he served the eggs and sausages onto their plates.

They chewed in silence and he moved his eyes over her once or twice then back to his food.

He stripped her of the excess flesh and the old cardigan half falling off her shoulders.

He put her into a white blouse he always liked with a frill that brushed the points of her ears when she moved her neck.

He smoothed her hair and swept it into a knot on top of her head the way she always used to wear it.

He saw the backyard through the window not gloomy and barren but filled with flowerbeds and little waterfalls and stepping stones the way she planned to do it.

He saw a hose playing gently and a light shining through hanging ferns.

It was the water that did it. He had to excuse himself and leave the table and go and look for a handkerchief.

THE LANG WOMEN

Lucy was a thin, wistful wispy child who lived with her mother and grandmother and had few moments in her life except a bedtime ritual which she started to think about straggling home from school at four o'clock.

Sometimes she would start to feel cheerful even with her hands still burning from contact with Miss Kelly's ruler, and puzzle over this sudden lifting of her spirits then remember there was only a short while left to bedtime.

She was like a human alarm clock which had been set to go off when she reached the gate leading to the farm and purr away until she fell asleep lying against her grandmother's back with her thighs tucked under her grandmother's rump and her face not minding at all being squashed against the ridge of little knobs at the back of her grandmother's neck.

Her grandmother and her mother would talk for hours after they were all in bed. Sometimes it would seem they had all drowsed off and the mother or the grandmother would say “Hey, listen!” and Lucy would shoot her head up too to hear. Her grandmother would dig her with an elbow and say: “Get back down there and go to sleep!” Lucy was not really part of the talk just close to the edges of it.

It was as if the grandmother and the mother were frolicking together in the sea, but Lucy unable to swim had to stand at the edge and be satisfied with the wash from their bodies.

Lucy made sure she was in bed before her mother and grandmother in order to watch.

It was as if she were seeing two separate plays on the one stage. Carrie the mother performed the longest. She was twenty-six and it was the only time in the day when she could enjoy her body. Not more than cleansing and admiring it since Lucy's father had died five years earlier. Carrie was like a ripe cherry with thick black hair cut level with her ears and in a fringe across her forehead. She was squarish in shape not dumpy or overweight and with rounded limbs brown from exposure to the sun because she and the grandmother Jess also a widow and the mother of Carrie's dead husband worked almost constantly in the open on their small farm which returned them a meagre living.

Carrie was nicknamed Boxy since she was once described in the village as good looking but a bit on the boxy side in reference to her shape. When this got back to Carrie she worried about it although it was early in the days of her widowhood and her mind was not totally on her face and figure.

Some time later at night with all her clothes off and before the mirror in the bedroom she would frown on herself turning from side to side trying to decide if she fitted the description. She thought her forehead and ears were two of her good points and she would lift her fringe and study her face without it and lift her hair from her ears and look long at her naked jawline then take her hands away and swing her head to allow her hair to fall back into place. She would place a hand on her hip, dent a knee forward, throw her shoulders back and think what a shame people could not see her like this.

“Not boxy at all,” she would say inside her throat which was long for a shortish person and in which could be seen a little blue throbbing pulse.

She shook her head so that her thick hair swung wildly about then settled down as if it had never been disturbed.

“See that?” she would say to her mother-in-law.

Jess would be performing in her corner of the room and it was usually with a knee up under her nightdress and a pair of scissors gouging away at an ingrown toenail. She never bothered to fasten the neck of her nightdress and it was an old thing worn for many seasons and her feet were not all that clean as she did not wash religiously every night as Carrie did. She spent hardly any time tearing off her clothes and throwing them down, turned so that the singlet was on the outside and when she got into them in the morning she had only to turn the thickness of the singlet, petticoat and dress and pull the lot over her head.

Carrie did not seem to notice although she sometimes reprimanded Jess for failing to clean her teeth. When this happened Jess would run her tongue around her gums top and bottom while she ducked beneath the covers and Lucy would be glad there was no more delay.

It was only the operations like digging at a toenail or picking at a bunion that kept Jess up. Sometimes she pushed her nightdress made into a tent with her raised knee down to cover her crotch but mostly she left it up so that Lucy hooped up in bed saw her front passage glistening and winking like an eye.

The lamp on the dressing table stood between Carrie and Jess so that Lucy could see Carrie's naked body as well either still or full of movement and rhythm as she rubbed moistened oatmeal around her eyes and warmed olive oil on her neck and shoulders.

The rest of the little town knew about the bedtime ritual since Walter Grant the postmaster rode out one evening and saw them through the window. It had been two days of wild storms and heavy rain and the creek was in danger of breaking its banks. Any stock of Carrie's and Jess's low down would be safer moved. Walter on his mission to warn them saw Jess with her knee raised and her nightgown around her waist and Carrie's body blooming golden in the lamplight for they were enjoying the storm and had left the curtains open. Walter saw more when Carrie rushed to fling them together and rode home swiftly with his buttocks squeezed together on the saddle holding onto a vision of Carrie's rose tipped breasts, the creamy channel between them, her navel small and perfect as a shell and her thighs moving angrily and her little belly shaking.