The Home Girls (12 page)

Paddy halted aware of the error and the dog compromising went and curled up under the safe where there was just enough room for him.

The father hung the towel up and sat down looking at the floor.

“Cowtime!” he said. “Tadpole and Paddymelon!”

The dog made a squeaking noise as if he wanted to be included. Paddy sitting on the step frowned a warning.

The father looked at the whispering kettle. Tad felt a corresponding dryness in her throat.

“Cowtime!” he said again, slapping both hands on his thighs. The dog raised his head and gave a yelp.

The mother blew her nose again. “Help me put the ironing away, Patrick and Freda,” she said. The children felt a chill at the unfamiliar sound of their real names. The dog uttered a low growl reserved for strangers.

The father looked about him. “I might have a drink of water, eh Tadpole?”

“I'll get it for you, Dad,” Tad said.

“You were told to put the ironing away,” the mother said standing up and putting her handkerchief into the neck of her dress as if she wanted it close at hand. “But of course we haven't got a lovely tidy linen press like Dolly McViety.” She sniffed deeply and began to sort the ironing. “We haven't got a linen press at all.”

“We've got the sheet drawer,” Tad said.

This was the middle drawer of the old cedar chest of drawers reserved for the household linen but almost always empty because the sheets were brought in from the clothes line and put on the beds and tea towels and face towels plucked from the basket when they were needed.

“The knobs need fixing,” Paddy said.

The father burst into a laugh which sounded strange in the kitchen.

The mother burst into tears.

The dog jumped up and squeaking and snuffling circled the floor as if it were a circus ring.

Paddy and Tad were torn between concern for the mother's tears and the dog who almost brushed the father's boots with its low slung belly.

“There's no beds made, no tea on—” the mother wept.

“Mum doesn't even know what we'll have,” Tad said with tears in her eyes.

Paddy took an old bald tennis ball from his schoolbag and began to bounce it between his feet. The dog barked with every bounce so Paddy stopped and gripped the ball tightly between his hands.

Outside Strawberry leading the other cows home gave a low bellow.

The father winced as if he too had a full udder.

The mother sat on her chair again and wiped her cheek with her fingers spreading the black mark farther out.

Tad couldn't summon the courage to tell her, although the mother told her over and over to say if there was a black mark on her face from the poker or pots and pans encrusted with soot and grease. “You never know who might come,” she would say meaning Dolly McViety or her brother Henry, the nearest neighbours and just about the only people to call without warning.

“We don't want to be finishing up in the dark, do we Paddy and Tad?” the father said.

The dog gave a low growl, appreciating the seriousness of this event.

The mother stood up, sniffed and tossed her head. “I have to clean up the wash house,” she said. “I have to make it so neat you could do the washing in the middle of the night without a light. Or serve cake and lemonade there like Dolly McViety does.”

The father said nothing.

“Lucky Dolly McViety,” the mother said. “How long since we've had money to spare for a bottle of lemonade?”

Tad and Paddy had a vision of a marble wobbling at the top of a bottle of greenish-white lemonade sweating a little with cold. Saliva came into their mouths.

“Dolly made the lemonade from their lemons,” the father said.

In the small silence the mother took an iron from the stove and an old piece of curtain from the basket.

“Our lemon tree never got a go on,” Paddy said.

The mother swept the iron across the curtain making more tears in it.

She laid it folded on the bank of ironing.

“I'm supposed to make the lemon tree grow I suppose, on top of everything I have to do.

“Why didn't you marry Dolly McViety?” she said.

“Why didn't you marry Henry?” the father said.

Tad got up and went and sat close to her brother on the step. The dog with a squeak and a stretching of his jaws got up too and lay across their feet.

The mother took a fresh iron and held it near her cheek already hot and scarlet.

She began to iron the ironing sheet. Her eyes were cast down and the black showed up more. I should say something, Tad worried although the McVietys would hardly come at milking time.

“Dolly would be sitting in her front room now with her sewing,” the mother said. “She never has to go to the yard.”

The father looked at the wall outside of which the dairy was waiting.

“Henry would be there now with a big slab of Dolly's caraway cake under his belt,” the father said.

“I can't imagine anyone eating my cake after Dolly's,” the mother said.

“Henry would,” the father said. “He wouldn't notice whether it was seeds or flies' legs he was eating.”

The children moved closer together. They had a vision of Dolly and Henry as their mother and father. They saw themselves wandering through the scrupulous order of the McViety house. The dog as if bidding them goodbye forever laid his jaws on his paws with a low mournful cry.

“Henry said regards to your Mollie when I was leaving,” the father said.

The mother might not have heard. She took an armful of ironing and walked to the other part of the house with it.

The father stared at the doorway over the children's heads. Bellows from other cows added to Strawberry's painful plea. The father winced.

“Those cows'll bust,” he said.

He looked at Paddy and Tad. “All I said was Dolly was a wonderful housekeeper,” he said.

The dog growled in fearful amazement that one could be so foolish.

The mother returned. She had wiped her face clean of the black smudge and it was all pink and gold and white. You could see the mark of a comb through her forehead full of wheat-coloured curls.

She went to the stove. There was a click as she lifted the metal lid of the teapot, and the sound of a stream of puffing water.

She tossed her head while she tossed away the pot holder.

“Henry McViety can keep his old regards,” she said.

The father stood up. He closed one crinkling brown eye on Paddy and Tad.

Then he saw the dog.

His smile vanished.

“Get that mongrel out!” he cried. “How did it get in? Rump like a wallaby and legs like a blasted bandicoot! Get him out!”

A YOUNG MAN'S FANCY

He woke and saw the empty place in the bed and knew at once he should worry about it.

He turned over away from the sight and thought through his half sleep what she might be doing.

After a while he could bear it no longer and got up and went to the back of the house.

He dodged past chairs in the living room pulled to odd angles. There were toys on the floor, a cup half full of coffee near the leg of the television, a half-knitted garment near a pile of tangled wool.

In the kitchen he saw the toaster showing a line of scarlet and there was a smell of hot metal.

He snapped the power off and let himself out of the house standing in the bleak cold with the yard emerging from the morning fog equally bleak.

There was the clothes hoist and under it a hole dug in the clay. Nearby was a battered doll's pram and a cardboard carton on its side sheltering a few pieces of dolls' furniture. Everything looked colder and more neglected for its film of dew.

He felt eyes. He jumped and so did Mrs Lake next door who had pulled aside a branch of a cassia bush on her side to look at him there shivering in his pyjamas.

She dropped the branch pretending to look into the shrub.

He wanted to say, “Have you seen my wife?” but couldn't bring himself to.

He heard her stops going back onto her porch.

She stopped abruptly and into the silence called out: “Your wife's on the road there, Mr Benson.”

He was as startled to hear her speak as to hear him addressed that way. Hardly anyone called him Mister.

“Thank you,” he said his voice coming out in a croak and went back inside. It was time for him to shower for work.

He couldn't see any clean shirts so he wore the one from yesterday, pushing his tie up under the collar hoping to disguise the dark line from his neck.

He heard some tinkling and knew his wife was in the kitchen.

The door of the little girls' bedroom was shut and he felt relief that they were still asleep.

Should he waken and feed and dress them, he said to the growing fear in his eyes reflected in the mirror. He laid down the hairbrush and went and gently opened their door.

They were there, thank God! At first he thought the little one's cot was empty. But she was curled in a bottom corner with a large rag doll across her rump. He worried that the older one lying half on top of the bedclothes might be cold but he resisted the temptation to cover her and closed the door almost without a sound.

His wife passed him then in her old skimpy dress and cardigan.

Her thongs slap slapped into the bedroom and she shut the door. He felt over himself and yes he had his wallet. But no car keys.

He tapped the door gently with a knuckle and almost at once there was the noise of a lumpy body flung against it and the key turned in the lock.

I'll go in the bus he thought, staring at the little girls' door and willing them to safety behind it.

He went out the back again feeling that he should be carrying something but it was months since she had packed him a lunch.

Over the fence now clearly seen, Mrs Lake was bringing her milk in. Her face was more yellow in the reflected light from the cassia bush and her strange hair had patches of custard yellow showing through the grey.

“I'm locked out,” Chris said. “My wife's in the shower and can't hear. I don't want to wake the girls.” He was pleased with himself for lying so well.

Mrs Lake saw him skinny and fair in his trousers flared out from the knees covering most of his strange shoes round as tennis balls in front.

“Come in and ring up,” she said. “She might hear that.”

“Thank you,” he said only glad because of something to do.

But her phone rang as she entered her front room.

“Excuse me,” she said trying not to look important.

With the receiver to her ear she motioned him on to the kitchen.

There was a pan on the stove with some grease in it and some brown fragments from fried eggs. A pot on the stove bore the homely marks of dribbled coffee. Every home in the world is sane but mine, he thought.

Mrs Lake came in.

“It was my daughter. She got a bedspread off layby and wants me to go across and see it on the bed this morning.” She simpered a little with embarrassment giving him such details. But her yellowy face was full of pride while her eyes avoided his. He thought she might be making a secret and satisfactory comparison between her daughter and his wife.

“Would you like to ring?” she said bustling about clearing the table as if a trifle ashamed she was not further advanced in her day's work.

She put her hands around the coffee pot. “I'll pour you out a cup,” she said.

He didn't move and thought about not going to work but sitting down and asking her for help.

The hot coffee made his eyes water.

“Those little girls,” she said with her back to him wiping down the sink. “The little one. She doesn't say anything but when she sees me she points her finger. Just points her finger.” Holding the dishcloth Mrs Lake pointed her finger the way the child did.

“That's Heather,” he said although Mrs Lake would have known because when they first came to live next door she and his wife talked to each other.

“What's the other one's name?” Mrs Lake said. He got the impression she didn't like the older girl so much.

“Trudy,” he said.

He longed for her to say into the silence that she would take them with her to her daughter's who lived on the other side of the reserve.

The little one would point her finger at interesting objects in the bush like a horse that strayed there and half tame magpies. He pictured the peaceful scene of Mrs Lake and the little girls bobbing along the bush track and smiled as he set down his cup.

“Thank you. I'll go and get the bus,” he said and screwed his wrist to look at the time but hadn't put his watch on.

“You'll get it,” Mrs Lake said bustling ahead of him to the front having noticed his wrists blue with cold and that he was without a jacket.

“My car keys are inside unfortunately,” he said to her back.

“The bus'll do only the damn thing doesn't always come,” Mrs Lake said, “But it'll be here this morning.”

It was as if she couldn't believe his bad luck could extend that far.

“Thanks, Mrs Lake,” he said running down the steps.

“Goodbye, son,” she called after him.

On the bus he dreamed he took the little girls in to her every day. He imagined her scooping them up in her arms loving them equally. He pictured them at the table with her bustling about talking to them while they ate. He moved himself and the girls into the Lakes' house. Mr Lake died he thought with no callous intent as he believed him to be more than sixty. The bus bumped on and the woman next to him glancing at his bony wrists on his kness pulled her mouth down when he sniffed deeply. I hope there is no drip he thought because he had no handkerchief. He put a hand to his nose and felt there was. The woman got up and took another seat.

It allowed him a window seat. He would leave the suburb (too far out) and he and Mrs Lake and the little girls would live in one of the houses flying past the bus. That one, he thought getting a good view of it because it was close by the last bus stop before the railway station. It had a yard at the side sloping down to a little creek. There was a low thick tree half way up the slope blobbed with ripe oranges. Perfect, he thought looking back when the bus moved on.