Time's Long Ruin (13 page)

Bits no one would miss: bombs.

And then I'd remind him of the push-mower he'd put together. ‘Maybe it's a spare spring,' he'd said, staring at the leftover part. ‘After all . . . it works.'

As Mum looked at him with her arms crossed. ‘It must go somewhere.'

‘You tell me!'

I painted the underside of the Stuka white. As I folded my legs I knocked the tin of paint and it spilt over the newspaper I'd laid across Mum's discount Axminster. Once, when I was painting a Spitfire, I spilt a whole bottle of gun-barrel grey on her carpet. I tried to clean it with a rag but it smudged. So I waited a few hours, got a pair of scissors and tried to trim the grey fibres. Then there was a sort of grey crater that she discovered anyway. She blew her top and locked me in my room for a whole afternoon. When Dad got home he came in and looked at the crater. ‘Mum wants me to discipline you,' he said. Then he noticed the model. ‘Hey, that's looking good . . .'

As Mum listened on and thought, Hopeless bloody husband . . .

The stain's still there, to this day, reminding me of Mum, and how she handled things. Of how she was unconcerned about world wars but devastated by a carpet stain. And how Dad, in comparison, just took things as they came, suggesting we bring the mower into my room to finish the job properly. He'd seen a whole world of children's bodies and decapitated lorry drivers, and had worked out what really mattered.

He stuck his head through my door. ‘Nice Stuka. Where are those damn Poles?'

I looked at him, confused.

He smiled. ‘Gotta go to work.' He came over and kissed me on top of the head. Then he paused, breathing deeply, as I smelt the fresh oil in his hair. ‘Man of my life,' he whispered. ‘Man of my life,' I repeated.

‘Best in the world.'

‘Best in the world . . . Dad.' I shook my head.

‘What, you're too old now?'

‘It's dumb.'

He smiled, and ruffled my hair, and was gone.

I was left with another day of school holidays, another eight hot, stew-scented, fly-blown hours full of familiar things: jigsaws that were finished in five minutes flat,
The
Magic Pudding
, again, and Schubert's
March Militaire
on my Nippergram. This was my favourite piece of music, played again and again, until the hiss was louder than the music, until the crevices in the vinyl had opened like the ones in the mortar.

But wonderful anyway. I sat painting, imagining Mr and Mrs Himmler dancing together in their Cedar Street living room, humming Schubert's melody as they held their bodies stiff and attempted their best landler. As Heinrich suddenly realised they were being watched from the front door by their milkman, smiling at them through the flywire as he measured milk into jugs. As Heinrich closed the door with a Hmph and a click of his heels. As I started to realise I'd been spending too much time around Janice.

Mum showed Anna and Gavin into my room and said, ‘Janice has gone to her friends for the day.'

I looked at her as if to say, So?

‘Liz is busy at the shops.'

I put the lid on the white paint and looked at Gavin. ‘Don't touch this, it's wet.'

Mum disappeared and Anna came and sat beside me on the floor. ‘I have an idea,' she said. ‘We could make some money.'

‘How?' I asked.

Twenty minutes later we were sitting in chairs at the street end of our driveway. Anna had used my white paint and the back of the Stuka box to make up a sign:
Lemonade,
One Penny
. She'd filled six empty lemonade bottles with warm water from the rainwater-tank and lined them up on the footpath. Then she'd brought out a bag of lemons and a knife. She'd cut a few in half and squeezed some juice into each bottle. She'd taken a few mugs from our cupboard and lined them up ready. Then she'd made me get my Nippergram, bringing it outside to our Thomas Street shop and connecting it via four extension cords passing through my bedroom window.

And there we were, as Schubert clanged and hissed away, waiting for someone to stop and part with their hard-earned money. The first was Rosa, coming outside to sweep leaves from her path. She saw us and waddled over, broom in hand. ‘Is that real lemonade?' she asked.

Anna, thinking she was clever, replied, ‘A special type.'

‘Ah. How's it special?'

But Anna couldn't say, pulling up the sleeves on her jumper (as she did every few minutes) and saying, ‘If we told people, they'd make their own. Then we'd be out of business.'

‘I filled the bottles,' Gavin added.

‘Did you? Well, in that case . . .' She reached into her pocket and found a penny, handing it over. Anna took it with a smile and handed it to Gavin who checked its authenticity and then put it in his pocket. Anna opened a bottle and explained to Rosa why
her
lemonade didn't fizz. ‘We have the gas removed, so it doesn't make you burp.'

‘Oh,' Rosa replied, taking the mug and tasting it. ‘Best I've ever had. Come on, you've got to tell me how you made it.'

Gavin stood up. ‘No, sorry.' Folding his arms, lifting his head in the air and shaking it. ‘It's a secret.'

‘Please?'

Gavin was caving in. He looked at his sister. ‘No,' she insisted.

Rosa looked at me and winked. ‘Can I take your mug, Henry? Con will want to taste this.'

‘Sure.'

‘I'll drop it back,' she said, turning, crossing the street, calling back, ‘I wish I had the recipe.'

Gavin was still adamant. ‘No, I'm sorry, Rosa, Anna says not to.'

A few minutes later a frail old lady with matchstick legs came hobbling along. Her hair was talcum-white and her face was made up like the china dolls above the Housemans' fireplace. Although it was stinking hot she wore a long, heavy dress. She had a scarf around her neck, a pearl necklace and crucifix earrings that dangled just above her shoulders; she wore stockings to cover her roadmap veins and stiletto heels that kept slipping out from under her, threatening to twist her ankles. She stopped and looked at our lemonade. ‘One penny. What is it?'

‘Lemonade,' Gavin replied proudly.

‘It most certainly is not. Is it even safe?'

‘It's safe,' Anna defended, standing, defiant, the way she'd seen her sister do a thousand times.

‘You can't just sell that. You'll make people sick. Where are your parents?'

‘If you don't want it, don't buy it,' Anna said.

The old lady started hobbling up our driveway.

‘It's lemonade,' Gavin called after her.

She knocked on the door and spoke to my mother. Pretty soon there were raised voices and the door slammed, and then re-opened, and Mum called out, ‘Mind your own business, you old bag.'

Victory! The defiant march played as the old girl walked back down the drive. ‘I could report you,' she said, but Anna just stuck out her tongue. The woman walked off down the road, stumbling as she went, at one point dropping her bag as we broke up laughing.

A day full of familiar things, dragging on like an arithmetic test, the numbers staring up at me like a Japanese phonebook. Gavin sat on our nature strip picking the flowers off strawberry clover. Anna went home to make lunch for us, returning with sandwiches with the bread cut thick and jagged, the ham old and sweaty and the cheese in thick chunks. We sat and ate and drank sweet Tropicana cordial from a mixing bowl, avoiding our lemonade, still warming on the hot concrete.

At one point I asked Anna, ‘Were you scared last night?'

She looked at me defensively. ‘No.'

‘It's okay, we took care of him.'

‘So?' Again, mimicking her sister. ‘We were okay, we didn't need you.'

‘But Janice came and got Dad.'

No reply. Gavin took a handful of clover heads and threw them at me. ‘We were okay,' he said.

‘Sorry.'

And then silence, as we waited for customers that didn't arrive. ‘Come on, Anna, that's enough,' I said.

‘No.'

‘It's been two hours.'

‘Go home then.'

‘I have to watch you.'

‘We don't need watching.'

She was angry, determined, hot beneath her jumper.

‘I'll sit here,' I said, moving under a tree.

No reply. She sat silent, still, in the middle of our driveway, determined to sell the brown lemonade. Gavin came and sat in the shade with me. ‘I know French,' he said.

‘
Comment vas tu?
' I asked.

‘French.
Je suis Gavin.
'

‘Very good.
Je suis Henry. J'habite
along Thomas Street.
Et tu?
'

‘
Je suis Gavin.
'

And then Bill pulled up in his Austin. He got out and walked over to us, smiling. Gavin and Anna made no attempt to run to him, to greet him, as they usually did. He read our sign and said, ‘Fantastic.' He took a few pennies out of his pocket and handed them to Anna who handed them to Gavin. Soon the little ones had forgotten, again. They stood and watched as their dad unscrewed a bottle and drank the warm water. ‘Beautiful,' he said, wiping his mouth, and they both smiled.

‘I filled the bottles,' Gavin said.

Bill messed his son's hair. ‘I could tell.'

‘And I put in the lemon,' Anna offered.

Bill pulled his two children towards him and held them close. ‘You're a credit to your old man,' he said, in a sort of awkward admission of love and devotion. Then he looked at me and asked, ‘Has Henry been helping?'

‘I've been watching them,' I replied.

But there was no thank you. Typical. Once a drunk always a drunk. Lacking grace and gratitude in equal measure. Didn't he know I had better things to do? Instead, he knelt down beside his children and said, ‘Come inside, I have something for you.'

Some sort of bribe, no doubt, I thought. Buying them off with a Yo-Yo or an all-day sucker. Until next time. And when would that be, tonight, tomorrow, and would they forget again, and forgive? I looked at Bill and felt disgusted. How could he just come home like this, without a word of explanation or apology? And how could Anna and Gavin fall for it, when they were so hostile to me? Still, that was life, I figured: people choosing to believe in renovated truths – legless pilots flying Stukas, mortar cracks getting filled, dads on the wagon.

Bill led them back to their house, pulling them by the hand, stopping to get a couple of parcels out of his car. I was left with the lemonade. ‘What should I do with this?' I called.

No reply. So I returned to the shade and drank the last of the Tropicana cordial. I couldn't work out human beings. None of them acted rationally (except Dad, Con and a few others). I wondered whether I should try and become prime minister, to make some laws, to sort people out: no promises you can't keep, no moods, no taking things out on other people, no grog. Make sense. The list went on and on. Like the one in Dad's head, doomed to be forgotten.

Andrew Arthurson rode past my house, looking at my lemonade stall and calling out, ‘What's that?'

‘It's not mine, it's Anna's.'

‘Sure. Is that real lemonade?'

‘It's water, she was pretending.'

He turned and rode past again. ‘So how's yer mum?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Everyone knows about your mum.'

‘What?'

He started circling. ‘People say she's loopy.'

‘She is not. You take that back.'

Andrew laughed. ‘Okay, I take it back . . . Quasimodo.'

I filled with fury. Before I knew what I was doing I'd picked up a lemon and thrown it at him. It flew through the air in a perfect parabola and hit him on the temple. As anger turned to dread I watched as he tumbled from his bike, rolled a few times across the road and then tried to sit up. He held his bleeding temple and fell back on the road. Then he sat up, groggy, trying to work out where he was and what had happened. He looked at me and remembered. ‘You're dead, Page.'

He got back on his bike and rode off down the street, all the time holding his head in his hands.

I knew I should've been happy, but I wasn't. Maybe if Janice was there, we would've been celebrating, but I didn't even have a witness. What a waste. Still, I couldn't help but smile. I'd had a small victory. All at once I was riding a horse, cantering between Frederick the Great and Napoleon, to the martial strains of Schubert, through a field of slaughtered soldiers. And all I could think of was, Bugger, I hope Dad doesn't find out.

I unplugged the extension cords and packed up my Nippergram. Then I took the sign and the bottles inside and retreated to the safety of my room and my unfinished Stuka.

But it didn't do me much good. There I was, after tea, standing on the front porch next to Dad, opposite Andrew (done up with a bandage around his head) and his dad.