The House That Was Eureka (5 page)

‘With everything!’

That morning Evie felt like a sightseer in a foreign city. It was lovely, plodding slowly because of Sammy, looking at new things, like someone in a documentary. She didn’t even know where the main street was.

Evie could see the boy Noel in the distance, in his school trousers and his black polo-neck jumper. She could’ve caught him up but didn’t bother. Then he turned down a lane.

Right at the end of the street Sammy and Evie passed a porch that had a thin old man sitting in the sun on the gas-meter box.

‘Mornin’,’ he said. He had a parrot in a big wire cage and was poking lettuce in to it.

‘Good morning,’ Evie said. At Campbelltown you didn’t see many old people. And you never saw someone just sitting outside their house. And strangers usually didn’t talk to you.

‘Hello,’ said Sammy. ‘I’m Sammy.’

He was still sitting there when they came back. ‘Afternoon,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ said Evie.

‘We went to the park,’ said Sammy. ‘We had to ask a lady where it was, cause Evie didn’t know and we were lost.’

‘New in the street?’ the old man said.

‘We only moved in last night.’

‘What number?’

‘203.’

‘Ah,’ said the old man. ‘The house that was Eureka.’ He looked up and Evie felt him watching her.

‘What’s
your
name?’ Sammy said, but Evie took her hand and walked more quickly now down the street. It was a bad habit for the kid to get into, Evie thought, talking to strange old men.

Lunch-time now and Noel came home from school. He felt a bit more cheerful about despot-duty today.

‘Surprise-surprise.’ Noel chanted to himself.

When Noel was a tiny kid and couldn’t eat his porridge, the despot would serve it up to him again cold at midday.

‘You should count yourself lucky to have anything, boy.’

And at tea-time again if Noel didn’t eat it at midday. If he didn’t eat it then, he went to bed with nothing. That was in the days when the despot was in charge of Noel, instead of vice versa. Right from when he was a baby Mum had had to work because Noel’s father was dead, and so Mum had been out all day and hadn’t known what went on. Sometimes the despot was okay and played games with him, but on her bad days she used to lock him in his room for just about anything. And Noel could still taste the glug of her cold porridge.

Noel got the bowl out of the fridge. A cold crusty skin had formed on the top. Lovely. Noel pushed aside the rhubarb pie that was meant to be the despot’s sweets.

‘Mummy, I’m hungry…’

Noel used to tittletat to Mum when she got home; but the despot always told Mum that the boy was a can’t-help-himself-liar.

‘Oh dear, Noel. Nanna says you wouldn’t eat your tea.…Maybe a jam sandwich wouldn’t hurt.’

‘Eating between meals,’ the despot warned. ‘That’s what makes him sleepwalk, you know.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Mummy.’

As Mum always seemed to believe the despot, Noel just gave up. Mum was totally under the despot’s thumb. She was a small woman, always tense, ready to flee, like a little lizard.

Noel could still taste the porridge. And hear the speech that always accompanied it.

‘...If you’d been here, boy, when one in three was out of work, you’d know what it is to tighten your belt. Cruel it was then. Four days I once went, with nothing to sustain me save a little black tea.’

...The taste of that speech over the porridge. The stories of joining up slivers of soap, of boiling up the one lamb shank all week, of thinking it Christmas to get a choko. Noel had been brought up on Depression tales the same way other kids have Cinderella.

‘Well, my lady.’ Noel put the porridge on the tray. ‘You may just find the Depression days returning.’ There was macaroni cheese in the oven to be warmed up, but bugger her. ‘
Cruel it was then…
’ Noel chanted.

Noel knew he was vicious, the way he was acting to an eighty-seven-year-old woman. But what about the way
she’d
acted when it was
him
that was weak?

Noel heard voices from the kitchen next door, was distracted, lost some of his anger.

‘Oh bugger it.’ He relented, and warmed up the macaroni. But she could still have the porridge for her sweets.

A scream came through the kitchen wall.

It was that girl, yelling full blast at the other kids. Noel had quite liked her. She looked ordinary, and listened to him. Noel decided to skip school that afternoon and go in there; then changed his mind and decided to go up the music shop instead. Plenty of time.

There was plenty of time. By that Friday fortnight Evie still hadn’t got around to fixing her room properly. She had her bed and stuff from Campbelltown now, but she hadn’t painted the walls or made any curtains. She’d just stuck an old blanket of Sammy’s up over the window.

‘What you find to do all day beats me,’ Ted always said. ‘But whatever it is, it must keep you flat out. Christ knows, it’s not as if you’re much help to your mother with the housework.’

Ted was wrong about the housework: Evie thought she did lots. But he was right, in a way, about the rest. Whatever it was that Evie did with her days, Evie didn’t know either.

Evie should have had lots of spare time, but she didn’t. She’d walk Sammy to the play centre. Then she’d go home and clean up for an hour or so. But then she should be free from about half-past ten till she had to pick Sammy up at two-thirty. Four hours each day to do something in. To fix up her room, or maybe do something proper about looking for a job. But the days just wandered past Evie, the time in them disappearing on things she had to do before she could do anything.

‘I do so do things,’ Evie told Ted that third Friday night, after tea.

‘Like for example what!’ Ted had been worse than usual, this last week. Really moody. Even snapping at the girls.

‘Like the Monday after we moved in, for instance, I had to go to the dole office, to get my file transferred over from Campbelltown.’

That had taken so long she’d run the risk of being late picking Sammy up on Sammy’s first day.

...Finding her way to the post office, looking up the phone book to find out where the local dole office was, going home to get the street directory, remembering when she got home that of course the directory was in the car, finding her way to the Newtown library, looking up the street directory there to find out how to get to Parramatta Road, Camperdown…

By that time it had been half-past one and there wasn’t time to get there and then back in time for Sammy.

‘Okay,’ Ted said. ‘So you fixed all that up. Then what?’

‘But I didn’t fix it up.’ Evie didn’t bother with the details because Ted hated details. ‘I did it on Tuesday.’

Again not bothering to explain that you walk about four kilometres to get down there and then you get a number and then you sit down and wait an hour or two till it’s your number’s turn, and then you talk at the desk and fill in forms. So it was half-past one again when she finished and there was no time to go all the way up to the Commonwealth Employment Service at Newtown to fill in the other set of forms that had to be transferred.

‘Okay, so after two days Miss Brilliant had her form filled in. And on Wednesday?’

‘No,’ said Evie, ‘on Wednesday I did the other form. Up at the other office.’ Admittedly that only took an hour, and then she’d spent half an hour wandering around the noticeboards, reading ads for qualified plumbers and couriers with their own vans and à la carte chefs and factory hands with seventy-nine years experience and well-groomed temps with refs. Then she’d gone home and slept.

(Slept. Or maybe not slept. It hadn’t
felt
like sleep, to feel like a flame; it felt more awake than most of Evie’s time.)

‘And on Thursday,’ Evie went on (skipping over the sleeping), ‘I went down the Newtown CYSS centre, to see what was going on.’

Mum knew that CYSS was some sort of government thing, so it was always a good alibi, when talking to her. Back at Campbelltown, Evie used to go to CYSS sometimes with Roseanne; Ted called it the Dolebludgers’ Club. Like going down the Catholic Club, or the RSL.

‘Going down the Dolebludgers’?’ he’d say, his eyes sarcastic on her. ‘Be sure to tell me, when you get a good win on the pokies.’

Ha ha. Very funny. The real joke was the CYSS itself. Commonwealth Youth Support Scheme. As if a fancy name would work some sort of magic. Mum thought it was something about training you, or teaching you how to get a job. Ha, ha, Evie laughed to herself.

Ted snorted now at the mention of CYSS, but Mum said, ‘Oh good, love’ – encouraging but vague. She was taking up the curtains from the old place to fit the windows here. ‘Anything useful?’ Mum sometimes tried to feed Evie lines, to get Ted off Evie’s back. (Off Mum’s back too.)

‘Oh. Yes. No. Maybe.’ Keep it vague. Evie had screwed up her courage and gone down there. She felt shy, going somewhere full of strangers. She went in, and there was a guy running around with a video camera, and a fattish-sort-of girl running after him with a sound-thing. The girl was like a dog on a leash, connected to him via the sound-cord. They looked about twenty-five and you could tell they were in charge of the place. The guy was good-looking.

Evie had looked at the noticeboards to see what was going on. Macrame, yoga, the usual sort of stuff. Training you for all the yoga and macrame factories out there in the world.

‘G’day,’ the good-looking guy smiled.

But Evie felt shy and said nothing; she went home and had a little sleep.

(A little sleep; a little nightmare. A little nightmare, not a big one this time. More like an angry dream.

Bang bang.

Evie was hammering. Hammering at a piece of board.

But the nails were going in crooked, getting stuck, and as soon as she got one in one side, a nail would drop out of the other side and her board would still be swinging down.

Evie was in foul temper.

Bang.

Ted was there, but in the dream he was her father.

Bang.

Noel was there, but he wasn’t quite Noel.

Bang.

Evie flamed with hatred.

Bang bang.)

Evie looked at Ted. That look on his red face as he took a swig from his can of KB. Yet she didn’t hate him. She bucked against him a lot, out of habit more than anything else, for when he’d first married Mum he’d tried to be nice to Evie and she’d been jealous of him, and started to fight. Yet in real life she didn’t hate him like she had in that dream. It was as if real life was more like dreaming.

‘And then Friday I went back to the CES, to look at the noticeboards.’ To get ideas for what to write on her form when the time came to lodge it on Monday. Evie had been on the dole well over a year now, and had been knocked back so often that she no longer bothered applying for jobs much, but she had to show ambition to work on her form.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Ted, walking out. Something more interesting than Evie had just come on TV.

‘And then the next Monday,’ Evie muttered on regardless, just feeling like a gripe, ‘I went down to lodge my form and they hadn’t got the stuff transferred and said my cheque would be late, I’d do better to lodge it back in Campbelltown, so on Tuesday I went out there and lodged it a day late so the cheque’ll be late anyway and Thursday I went up to the CES and asked about a job and they got me an interview for next Monday, so I spent all day today getting my clothes ready for that.’ (Leaving out Wednesday when Evie had slept. She really needed to sleep in the daytime now, after dreams and footsteps running through the night.)

‘Did you go and see Roseanne, love, while you were out there?’ Mum just asked that to keep the conversation flowing. Her mouth was full of pins.

‘Yeah.’

‘How was she?’

‘Good.’ Roseanne had spent the whole time talking about some guy Evie didn’t know, and she hadn’t wanted to know anything about Evie. Evie never had any guy to rave about, whenever Roseanne raved.

‘That’s good, love.’

‘By the way, love,’ mum added. ‘What’s the job you’re going for Monday, that you’re fixing some clothes for?’

‘Nude bar-work,’ Evie said, making a casual exit.

‘Smart alec!’ From outside, Evie heard Mum laughing at her.

Evie laughed back. Mum was all right.

Evie went into her room, shut the door, hurled herself on her bed, lay there a while in the quiet and privacy. She might go to sleep. It was still too early for bed even for Jodie and Maria, but Evie felt kind of sleepy and there was nothing else to do. Watching TV meant sitting with Ted and Maria and Jodie, and the alternative was going out, which she couldn’t do. Firstly because she knew nowhere to go and no one to go with, and secondly because she had no money, her dole cheque hadn’t come.

Evie dozed off, woke a couple of hours later. Shook her head to try to remember, but no, there didn’t seem to have been anything this time. Not anything in her sleep that made her wake up, stuck tight to the bed, wanting to cough, desperate for something cold to ease her throat. Not anything like the terrible loneliness as his white face disappeared.

Evie got up and went around to the old outside toilet, behind the scullery. She could hear Noel and his mouth-organ in the toilet next door. The now-familiar whining melancholy of his Dylan songs. Evie sometimes faintly heard him in the daytime, playing in his kitchen.

Evie climbed up on the paling fence and leaned over.

‘What do people do around here, Friday nights?’ she asked when finally he came out.

‘I dunno. Go into town and play Space Invaders. Go to some place if they’ve got money and listen to music. Stay home.’ Noel never asked anyone at school what they did because, whatever it was, he wouldn’t be interested in doing it with them. Music was the only thing, but Noel didn’t like the same sort of music, and also the music places were mainly pubs and Noel was far too short to pretend to be eighteen. (Noel never asked anyone at school what they did because, whatever it was, they wouldn’t want to do it with him. They thought he was a creep.)

‘Do you feel like going for a walk?’ Noel said.