Finding Grace (6 page)

I get up and move the distressed dressing table across the doorway.

I wake
up and see the dressing table pressed up against the doorway and feel like a complete dill. There are scratches on the floor where I have dragged it.

The Grace woman is lying in her bed looking about as malevolent as your average lop-eared bunny.

I am a nutbag.

I manage to get her to the toilet early on, avoiding the linenand clothes-washing cycle of yesterday. I need to shop, so I dress her and we shuffle down the street.

I have hold of the Grace woman by the sleeve of her shirt. She walks very slowly and I have to keep dragging at her arm to make her keep up.

It's hot for late February—hot and humid. The sun is
beaming down like a spotlight through the hole in the ozone layer. I can almost feel my skin being gently grilled.

I'm picking out the rented houses as I'm walking along the street. I think if the grass on the front lawn is more than knee height the property is rented. Across the road I spy a nanna with a big spade vigorously attacking a long weedy tentacle that has crept through her side fence.

There are cats on almost every second veranda. This is a very pro-cat neighborhood. They lie with their paws tucked primly under their chests. Gangs of mynah birds are screaming at them from nearby trees. You can see the pupils of the cats' eyes expanding and contracting like a missile sight.

Mynah birds are the homeys of the bird world. You can hear them in the trees, saying in bird, “Yo! Yo! Wha's up wit you, man! You wanna piece of me, man? Don't go dissin' my posse, or we gonna kick some ass, you know what I'm sayin'?” There are no native birds around here, they have all been driven away by the mynah birds and their gang violence.

I have to go to the greengrocer and the deli to purchase all the “must-have” gourmet items for the Grace woman's daily cuisine.
It's all too much, Toto.

While I am in the deli the Italian lady, all smiles, says, “Good morning, chicken. Can I kkhelp you?” in a really strong accent. I say in return, “No thanks, I'm just grazing.” I meant browsing but she was kind enough not to pick me up on it.

Looking around, I see that blueberries are on special. They're selling a whole box of punnets for nine dollars. It occurs to me that if I had a family to feed and I didn't have
much money I could buy a whole box of whatever was on special and pretend that it was a party. I've never thought of us as poor. Maybe we are? I smiled as I thought about it. Mother has never made us feel poor.

The main street is great. There are all these ancient Italian men grouped on street corners waving their arms about vigorously. This suburb is like a Mafia retirement village.

There are funky twenty-somethings in crisp white shirts and dark glasses, sipping lattes in street cafés, talking on mobile phones. There are herbals wandering about in tie-dyed cheesecloth nibbling at uncomfortable-looking lip rings. There are Goths sweating. It's too hot for Goths to be out and about, but even Goths have to do their grocery shopping sometime.

Everybody here is wearing a costume. It's a parade. This is very different from home, where everyone is dressed in “drab”—whether suits or overalls. At home they are all struggling desperately to conform.

I come from a small place where everybody wants to be the same. Everybody tries to think the same. They band together in ferocious solidarity. Through similarity they bond. Now, here I am where the people unite in their difference—“We are all different from each other,” they cry collectively.

Or maybe they are all pro-cat? “We come from across the globe, we are different ages and have different beliefs, BUT we all choose to spend our lives with cats. We are as one on the whole cat issue!”

My friend Amanda is coming out of a real estate agent's office as the Grace woman and I shuffle past. We were quite
good friends at school, but I haven't seen her for a few months. We are proximity friends. All of our conversations have been location-based. Besides, Amanda is a rosella, and being a sparrow, I don't even comprehend her world.

She leans forward to hug me, but I'm not the hugging type so I step back. She catches me by the upper arms, squeezing and shaking and smiling. We are experiencing that uncomfortable moment when there's physical contact. This is why I am not a hugger.

Amanda's getting married. While she's talking she's darting her eyes at the Grace woman as if she were trying to include her in the conversation.

Amanda is getting married to Bozza, the Neanderthal tiler. She sounds so smug, but I can't think what she has to be smug about. She's waggling her left hand in front of my face, showing me her engagement ring and looking coy.

“Haven't you got a boyfriend yet?” she says, with such pity. I'm just waiting for her to say
Oh well, there are plenty of fish in the sea
or some other appalling cliché. She thinks that getting married is the ultimate goal, and assumes that I do as well.

I choose not to be irritated. Actually, I feel sorry for Amanda marrying Bozza. His real name is Rick, but everyone calls him Bozza. Bozza's the name of a man with a bright future. History is absolutely littered with great Bozzas—Sir Bozza, General Bozza, King Bozza the Magnificent.

Amanda has always been a really pretty girl. She has long blond hair and olive skin, and she blushes a charming, soft, peachy glow across the cheeks (not like the big, bright red, iridescent, lighthouse-strength beam that my moon face emits).

She's also really smart. I always thought she'd get over Bozza and have some kind of career. I thought she'd be sitting at the street cafés sipping lattes with some brooding dark man in a suit.

I could never understand why she liked “Bozza” anyway. I mean, he was good-looking in Year 9, but now that he's getting older he's put on a bit of weight, and the sullen, cool look doesn't really fit with bulgy jowls. And he's still not very smart.

I think it's that thing that women do where they try to “fix” a man. They find some rowdy dropkick and say, “But he's really sweet on the inside.” They try to fix a man a bit like renovating a house. They find a handyman's dream (ideally with “ocean glimpses”) and try to renovate.

I'm eighteen and know everything—well, not
everything
, but I do know, for example, that leopards rarely change their spots on command. They may sport a nice tartan shawl, if pressed, but earnest spot-changing requires some considerable desire and willpower on the part of the leopard in question.

Amanda has definitely turned out to be a renovator, but I haven't seen that much change. The only thing that's different is that Amanda doesn't call him Bozza anymore; she doesn't even call him Rick. Now she calls him Richard. It's just like slapping a coat of paint on a tin shed and calling it a cabana.

… … …

It turns out that I'm not the only one who can glow a raspberry-colored glow. The Grace woman got sunburned today. I'll have to remember to put sunscreen on her before we go out. I smear her face in aloe vera and she sits in her
wingback chair looking as if she has a shiny red cue ball for a head.

The red light is flashing on the answering machine and I listen to the message.

“Gracey, it's Yvonne. I know it's been forever. One puts these things off and before you know it, it's been so long that you can't bring yourself to phone. I know you're cross, because I didn't even get a Christmas card. You're not allowed to be cross because you haven't phoned either. I'm being the brave one. Now it's your turn. Please call me back.”

I suppose the Yvonne person doesn't know what has happened. I press the Delete button.

Flicking through the Grace woman's CDs, I put on some cool jazz. Most of the CDs are “jazz to sip lattes by.” I wonder if she used to have breakfast in those street cafés?

I put on a white shirt and some red lipstick so I fit in with the music. I feel almost funky for a moment.

I cook some pasta sprinkled with shaved Parmesan. I mush up the woman's with a fork and feed her, squatting down in front of her chair. She chews with her mouth open and looks blankly over my shoulder. I can see pasta mush gathering at the corners of her mouth. I watch the food rolling around her mouth with a nauseated fascination. I give her a drink of water and she holds the glass in two hands, like a child. I take it from her, trying not to touch the Parmesan goo that has accumulated around the rim.

I serve my dinner piled up on a big white plate and eat it outside (CAC
al fresco
, darling).

I sit in the lovely outdoor area out the back that's all paved and has terra-cotta pots filled with herbs and fruit
trees. There's a lion-head fountain on the wall by a little pond. I find a tap under some creeping vines and the water starts to trickle out of the lion's mouth.

It is very pleasant to sit out here while the sun goes down, listening to the jazz and the fountain.

Well, it's pleasant until the neighbors start fighting. There's a lot of swearing. I walk back inside and watch telly instead.

Half an hour later I hear a noise outside. I pull the curtain back just in time to see the bloke from next door lay a boot into their dog's belly. The dog sprawls across the lawn and then scampers yelping down the garden.

Ah, so they are
dog people
. They are not with the rest of the neighborhood on the whole cat issue.

I can see the confusion in the dog's little brown eyes as he peeks out from under the oleander bush. I feel hot anger rising up inside me. I hate people who hurt animals.

The bloke from next door turns around and sees me watching him. He sticks his middle finger up at me and then stalks back into his house.

Charming.

When I go to bed I pull the distressed dressing table across the doorway again. I tell myself that it's to give me some notice if she tries to come into my room, but it's a lie.

Lying in the dark, I have an image of her dragging herself over the dressing table and toward me with her unblinking lizard's eyes, and that's somehow worse. It's an image of malice and intent that is undeserved. I feel guilty, but not guilty enough to move the dressing table back again.

Mr. Preston
took the Grace woman shopping today so that I could go to the uni to buy books and things.

My mother rang as I was leaving. “Mum, are we poor?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Why do you ask that?”

“Well, I've never really thought about groceries before, but now I have to shop and so I know how expensive things are and I saw blueberries on special,” I replied.

I could tell she was choosing her words carefully. “We may not be as fiscally robust as others. Certainly, I have been better off in the past, but things change and you roll with it. You have always had a roof over your head and food
in your bellies. I have always made sure you were happy and healthy. One does the best that one can, and that's all anyone can ask of you.”

“Oh,” I said. She was becoming defensive and that wasn't my intent.

“Besides, riches and success are all to do with your goals. My goal is for both of you to be happy and be able to take advantage of opportunities as they arise and you are and you can. So I am a success. There now.”

Have another lychee.

… … …

Buying textbooks is a very harrowing experience. Not only do I have to spend all the money that I had saved up over Christmas, but also I know that I have to absorb everything in those books within the next fourteen weeks.

When I got home I plonked all the books on my desk. I could hear Mr. Preston in the lounge room singing along to something by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

Mr. Preston was dancing with Grace.

Mr. Preston was whirling Grace around the lounge room. He's quite light on his feet for a big man. I sat down on the lounge to watch them. Grace was staring blankly at Mr. Preston's chest, one hand draped over his shoulder. I looked down at her feet. Sometimes he would lift her off the floor and spin her around. I thought I could see her feet moving, even anticipating the steps that Mr. Preston was going to make.