The Home Girls (11 page)

Maud raised hers too leaving the tips of her toes barely touching the floor.

Mabel glanced from one pair of feet to the other and looked around her own two great white blobs on Maud's carpet.

Irene's feet remained glued to the floor and her eyes on the thin opening at the doorway.

Maud followed her gaze and half rose.

“Perhaps we could close the door while we have our tea?”

“Close it if you want to! Don't worry about me!” cried Mabel.

“I do worry about you Mabel,” Maud said. “I worry about all of you.”

“You worry about me all right!” said Vera.

“I worry about you most of all, Vera!” Maud said.

“Well thanks very much but don't worry about me!” said Vera.

“We're all like sisters. I say that all the time,” said Maud.

Mabel lifted her arms from the chair arms and dropped them over the side where they hung like two huge floral bats.

“You said it last Wednesday in the queue for the matinee,” Mabel said. “You said ‘you and I are like sisters, Mabel. We're even closer than sisters!'”

“Youse went to the pictures!” cried Vera darting her eyes from one to the other and seeing Maud lower her eyes and Mabel wave her sleeves.

“We were all in here last Thursday and youse had been to the pictures the day before and not a word was said! Did Irene go?”

Irene did not shake her head. She didn't need to. Her beatific gaze was fixed on the pencil of light through the doorway. Maud and Vera looked too and lifted their feet.

Angrily Vera clamped hers down and Maud jumped.

“Dear me,” she said looking around the floor.

“Dear me all right!” cried Vera. “Do you know what I did on Wednesday afternoon?” She plunged inside the neck of the navy blue crepe for a handkerchief and blew her nose. “I sat by the window and watched the bloody traffic go by! That's what I did!”

“It wasn't that much of a programme, was it Mabel?” Maud said.

Mabel swung her bat like arms up and down and arranged a small smile on her face.

“We thought of asking you to come along,” said Maud. “Didn't we Mabel?”

“I don't remember if we did,” said Mabel opening and shutting her little ginger eyes.

“Irene's not getting upset about it,” said Maud with a soothing little smile taking in both Irene and Vera. “Are you dear?”

“She wouldn't be upset!” said Vera. “She'd be busy rat sitting!”

“What rat sitting?” cried Mabel lifting her feet so suddenly and violently some of the white flaked off her shoes and scattered on the floor.

“Irene's got a rat!” said Vera. “Hasn't she Maud?”

Maud wet her lips and looked towards the kitchen where the electric jug should be plugged in, avoiding Mabel's snapping accusing eyes.

“Maud knows about Irene's rat,” said Vera with great calm and only a cursory look around the skirting board and her feet just clear of the floor.

Mabel raised her feet and wound them around the legs of her chair. The white cleaner streaked the brown polished wood.

“Oh, Mabel my best chair!” cried Maud. “I'll have to get that off before Bert gets home!” She moved forward as if to go at once for a cleaning cloth but sat back and lifted her feet an inch or two from the floor.

Mabel leaned back and rolled her ginger head on the chair back.

“Oh dear that sounds so funny!” she said stretching both legs out with her feet well above the floor.

Maud's eyes clung to Mabel's closed eyes.

Then she opened them and leaned foward.

“Tell Bert I marked the chair, Maud! He won't mind!”

“You don't know my Bert, Mabel!” Maud cried.

“Don't say ‘my Bert' Maud! It might become a habit. And habits are hard to break!” Mabel with her large arms loose over the chair arms rolled her head from side to side, her eyes closed again.

Maud had gone white.

Vera saw and put her head back too and laughed raising her feet with abandon and clapping her boat shoes together.

“There's more than one rat scuttling about the building!”

“My little rat doesn't scuttle anywhere! He just comes to me!” Irene cried.

“It's a ‘she' don't forget!” said Vera.

Irene intending to lean forward towards Mabel jerked sideways until she hung over the edge of the settee. She addressed the corner of the room past Mabel's chair.

“Don't tell Henderson! Don't tell Henderson!”

Mabel's hibiscus sleeve fell back to her elbow when she lifted an arm and looked with meditation on a raised hand quite well shaped with nails painted Maud noticed with a wildly beating heart.

“Come to think of it Bert doesn't scuttle about the building either,” Mabel said. “He just comes to me!”

“Oh Mabel, he doesn't!” Maud cried out. “How can you be sure, Mabel?”

Maud looked wildly around her. “Bert goes to work and comes home!”

“So you say Maud,” said Mabel placidly looking at her hand again.

“Oh Mabel, stop joking!” Maud went to stand then sat and looked around her feet as if in search of something but she had forgotten what.

“It's no joke,” said Mabel. “You can't watch Bert every minute of the day Maud.” She paused blinked her eyes rapidly. “Or night.”

“Bert sleeps in his bed all night!”

“All night?”

“He gets up with his bladder! I hear him!”

“You hear him get up
or
go back to bed Maud. Not both.”

“Mabel, stop it!” Maud cried getting up and briefly glancing at her ankles before returning her wide and blazing eyes to Mabel.

“Bert wouldn't hurt anyone! I know he wouldn't!”

“He certainly doesn't hurt me, Maud,” said Mabel. “Quite the opposite.”

“Oh my God!” shrieked Vera rocking herself with delight. “This is better than the pictures! I didn't miss anything after all!”

“She's joking. She's never met Bert!” said Maud.

“You hustle us out of here every Thursday before Bert gets home,” Mabel said. “You don't want us to meet him, do you Maud?”

Maud took a pace or two towards Mabel but stopped before she could stand over her. She did not look at her feet.

“Get out of my house!”

Mabel stood both hands brushing down in a flowing movement her hibiscus dress.

“That's right! Say ‘my house', Mabel! It's a good start!”

“Get out!” cried Maud.

“I'm going,” said Mabel.

“Surely not before you've made a date for the pictures!” cried Vera, but she too was on her feet and just behind Maud when she flung the door open.

They went into the hall with Irene behind when Henderson came towards them on one of his routine inspections of the building.

Maud as if in a race against Mabel cried out: “There's a rat in the building, Mr Henderson!”

No one spoke although Irene was about to. Her gnarled purple hand crushed to her mouth caused nothing to emerge but a thin squeak.

They all leapt and looked at their feet. Henderson had trouble with his legs and they creaked and wavered while his trousers always worn too long seemed in danger of tangling him up.

“It's in Miss Crump's flat, Mr Henderson!” Maud cried. “It's upsetting us all, isn't it Mabel? But Mr Henderson will get rid of it, won't you Mr Henderson?”

But Mabel's head was up and her back towards them sailing away like a floral boat in the direction of her door.

A DOG THAT SQUEAKED

The girl Tad who was nine came into the kitchen and saw her mother ironing.

The sight made her drop her schoolcase with a thud and think of running back and telling her brother Paddy.

He was rolling in a patch of dirt beside the verandah with the dog, a mongrel with a creamy grey coat patched with tan and eyes that apologized for his lowly state.

“Look at the mongrel!” the father had said more than once. “A rump like a wallaby and front paws like a blasted bandicoot!”

The dog rolled eyes desperate with shame, begging the father not to put him out of the kitchen if it was where Paddy and Tad were.

Paddy and Tad (shortened from Tadpole the nickname she got when she was born with a large head and body that whittled away to tendrils with feet on the end) wanted to get between the father and the dog to save it further hurt.

Foolishly the dog would make a squeak of protest which angered the father more.

“Get him out!” the father would say with a swing of his boot sending the dog up the steps—for the kitchen was on a lower level to the rest of the house—yelping and slunking for the patch beside the verandah where it usually lay in wait for the children.

Paddy was now having a glorious reunion with it, his shirt open and dust all over his pants. They snuffled and snorted and murmured and squeaked and it was hard to tell which noise came from the dog and which from the boy.

Tad went to the table and put her chin on the edge squeezing her eyes shut waiting for her mother's kiss.

There was the smell of heat and scorch and beeswax in the air.

Tad opened her eyes after a while and the mother was spreading an old work shirt of the father's on the ironing sheet.

Her face was shut like a window and her mouth not a kissing mouth.

But her hair was pretty with little gold springs near her ears and temples.

Tad ran a hand down a waterfall of tapes on a stack of ironed pillowslips.

“Don't rumple them up!” the mother said sharply.

Tad saw one of her play dresses looking only partly familiar with the sash ironed flat and the faded parts showing more than before. She went to go out to Paddy and the dog but only got to the door because the mother made a noise and Tad turned and saw her face with the eyes large and round and very blue.

“I'll do this damned ironing if it's the last thing I ever do!” she said.

Tad trailed back and sat on a chair.

“Where's Dad?” she said.

The mother snorted, picked up the father's shirt and flung it back into the old basket Paddy and Tad slept in as babies, now piled high all the time with wrinkled clothes. Tad noticed all the things in view in the basket seemed to be the father's.

The mother picked through the clothes and seemed to get angrier finding nothing but big shirts and rough old trousers.

“I'm not ironing another thing!” she said, and seizing the poker she slapped the irons on the stove sending them skidding to the back.

She sat down and drew a hand down her cheek leaving a black mark. She looked like a little girl who had played in the dirt at least no older than Mimi Anderson the big girl at school who sat by herself in the back seat. Often the teacher sat with her helping her with the hard work she did. No one was allowed to turn around and look.

Tad waited for the mother to say more.

“Your father made me do the ironing,” she said.

This sounded strange to Tad.

“He rode over to McViety's this morning and had lemonade in their wash house!”

Tad felt her throat contract with a longing for lemonade. She and the mother looked at the stove where the kettle was sending out whispery grey breaths.

“There's no tea started,” the mother said. “I can't even think what we'll have!”

“Stew with a crust?” Tad said, and knew at once it was a foolish suggestion.

On stew day the mother pushed the breakfast dishes back and threw the end of the tablecloth over them. She placed a large piece of quivering crimson meat on the bare table and cut it into little squares piling them on an old tin plate. If it wasn't school day Tad leaned over and watched, and unable to handle a sharp knife and squeamish at the feel of raw meat secretly worried about the time she would be married and want to feed her family stew and mightn't be able to.

The ironing was all over one end of the table now and a dish full of washing up at the other end so today was certainly not stew day.

The mother reached over for a clean handkerchief on the pile and blew her nose.

“Henry McViety built Dolly a shelf in the wash house and Henry showed it to your father.” The mother tossed her head. “Dolly came along with a tray of cake and lemonade.”

Tad wondered what kind of cake.

“I was here putting in a new row of beans,” the mother said with a big tremble in her voice. “And then I had to nail two palings on the fence to stop the fowls from scratching the seeds out.”

Tad wished for a big glass of lemonade for the mother when she was done.

“The stove was out and I had to build up the fire again.”

There was the crunch of a big boot near the door and the father ducked inside because the door frame at that end of the kitchen wasn't high enough for him.

“The tadpole girl!” the father said. “Home from school!” He sounded more hearty than seemed necessary.

Tad didn't think she should kiss him since the mother hadn't kissed her. The father kept his eyes on Tad perhaps to avoid seeing the mother who laid a cheek on her hand with the handkerchief prominent.

“Mum did the ironing,” Tad said. She looked at the basket. “Nearly all the ironing.”

The father looked away quickly seeming to search for the dish on an iron frame in the corner under the tap, something he had arranged himself, setting up a small tank on a stand outside and bringing the tap inside by means of a hole cut in the kitchen wall. The children never tired of the story of how he did it as a surprise for the mother when she came home from hospital with Paddy as a baby.

He washed now with much sluicing and dried his hands the way he always did dragging the towel down each finger separately.

Tad wanted his cup of tea steaming on the table with a wedge of cake beside it, and couldn't look at the place where it should be.

Paddy came in and Tad knew by the scratching on the verandah boards the dog was coming too.