The Maskeys, page 13
At the top of the stairs, Leanne heard Eric still snoring. She knocked on Rodney’s door and, entering in, found him huddled on the window seat. ‘I’m just getting your bowl and mug,’ Leanne said.
‘Sorry about before. First hot shower I had in – forever.’
‘You look better.’
‘Thanks. I feel better too.’
She admired his face; his shampooed hair falling across his forehead. ‘You look like a boy.’ She smiled. ‘Spruced up for Sunday school.’
‘I’m a man,’ Rodney said.
‘Of course, I didn’t —’ She blushed and fell silent, remembering the sight of Rodney’s chest, and the dark thatch of hair that started at his navel and ended at the top of the towel he’d been wearing. It was a recollection that inspired a feeling in her. Clumsily, she took the bowl, spoon and mug from Rodney, and thought it best to make for the door. ‘I thought you’d be angry with me, I mean us, you know. You’re a prisoner.’ She hesitated on the way out.
‘It ain’t your fault,’ Rodney said.
‘I know, but —’
‘That fella your fiancé?’
‘Jay?’ Leanne said, about to leave. ‘Yes. We’re getting married.’
‘Lucky man.’ Rodney looked at her hands. ‘Don’t see a ring.’
She smiled awkwardly at her bare hand. ‘Can’t afford one yet. Might not get around to tying the knot for years, anyway.’
He enjoyed the sight of her blushing. ‘Will you be bringing my lunch?’
She couldn’t articulate a response to that question. She flicked a shoulder and left.
Gayle walked in. ‘Someone’s taken Duncan’s notice from the window downstairs,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about that?’
‘Why would I, Mrs —?’ Rodney said.
‘Well, it’s a bit fishy, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe, Mrs Reynolds – but how would I know?’
Exasperated, she turned on her heels and left the room. When she locked the door on Rodney, she followed the sound of Eric’s snoring to her bed. No normal snore: more like a well erupting in muddy earth beneath the rotting timbers of a derelict bridge.
She resisted the urge to stab him.
9
After displaying the birdbath among Hilda’s other works, mother and son left the Potter’s Gallery, with brusque waves for George as they went. Billy was keen to ditch his mother; he could do nothing right for her in the gallery, and he realised that with all the shit going down in her and George’s lives, it was going to be better if he laid low. What was it to him, anyway, if she left George?
Hilda told her son to drive to a nearby carpark, behind the town supermarket. She had a small list of items she needed for the evening meal. She hurried up the lane that linked the carpark to Main Street. But as she made briskly for the crowded store entrance, her heart sank when she saw two buskers setting up.
They faltered on spotting Hilda approach. She considered returning to the ute but, after hesitating just a moment, she lifted her chin and pushed on.
The male of the twosome, on sighting Hilda, touched his female partner reassuringly on the elbow. Hilda took a deep breath. She’d had quite a morning of it already but kept her head high. It was nothing less than what her dead children, Flicker and Morgan, would have expected of her.
Relieved to make it past the local musicians without incident, she entered the bustling store. She took her time inside, scanning the shelves for the few items she needed, and others she didn’t, as the musical couple began to play.
She joined a queue and waited patiently to be served. On receiving her change, she stiffened her spine and exited the store.
The music stopped. And the female busker launched into an ugly tirade. Her companion counselled her to reconsider. ‘Don’t, Topaz,’ he said. ‘The kids are dead.’
Hilda walked on.
Topaz snatched her strumming arm away from her friend and yelled in a volume louder than the street, ‘I don’t give a fuck! I’m glad your LITTLE SHITS are dead! They got what they deserved.’
‘Come on, Topaz,’ her friend said.
‘It was them little bastards on their bike that caused my Lance to skid off the embankment. They killed him!’
The eyes of the street upon her, Hilda froze. ‘You don’t know that, Topaz,’ she said, without turning to face her assailant.
‘The whole fuckern TOWN knows it. Everyone heard them hooning about that night. Everyone. I know what fuckern happened. He swerved to miss your two little cunts.’
Hilda was tempted to deck Topaz.
Her male companion looked apologetically at her and tried his best to discourage his friend from saying anything more. The whole fuckern town seemed to be hearing the row. Serenade paused in a reading she was doing for a tourist. George watched lamely from the other side of the road: too slow, too crippled, too past it to render any type of support. He watched his wife pick up pace, and in no time, Hilda was back with Billy.
She threw her groceries onto the floor of the ute.
‘What took you?’ Billy asked.
‘Just get me home.’ She trembled.
When they arrived, he reversed straight back out.
His mother went inside and, leaving her groceries on the kitchen table, poured herself some water from the tap. She gulped it down and became afflicted with an uncomfortable sensation along one of her arms. She rubbed at it. The unpleasant feeling caused her to whimper.
Her two dead cunts suddenly appeared before her as they often did, with accusations for their flawed mother.
‘How could you do that to Dad, Mum?’ Flicker, accused from the grave.
‘Yeah, Mum – how?’ Morgan, too, judged.
Hilda took her guilty conscience to the fridge. She found a bottle of savvy and filled a glass.
10
Gayle was standing at her open bedroom door, holding a plate with a meat pie upon it. She watched Eric snore. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was afternoon already. Rolling her eyes, she entered the room. After putting the plate down on the bedside table, she sat on the bed’s edge and nudged him gently. ‘Wake up,’ she said.
Smelling warm food, he awoke and yawned deeply.
‘It’s time you started your day.’ She smiled as she watched him rub his eyes.
He outstretched his long arms and propped himself up on his pillows, ready to eat.
‘You know,’ Gayle said, ‘my son did not respect me. I think he thought because I didn’t have a man that, somehow, I was inferior.’
‘You’re thinking about Duncan?’ Eric said, yawning again.
‘You see, I made a decision never to tell him the truth about his father – fact is, because I was scared about how similar they were. Stupidly, I know now, I made the mistake of letting Duncan continue to believe that his mother was just some slut who hooked up with a random, in Portugal, got home and found she was pregnant.’
‘You never talk about him – who was he?’ Eric asked, not completely forgetting about the pie.
‘A poet. We met in a Lisbon market.’
‘Really?’
‘I saw him stealing fruit; I stole some too. How we laughed. It was an instant attraction for me. So, when he invited me to move into his tent, I did. I was at a loose end, up for every experience, and shacking up with a foreign poet ticked a few of my boxes.’ Gayle reached for the small framed photo of her son and herself that reminded her of happier times. ‘He may have been a poet,’ she whispered, ‘but one of the Romantics, he was not. No Keats. I learnt quickly how violent he could be. Another sexually potent man that I’ve been drawn to: dark, tall and strong. But cruel. Maybe that stemmed from the fact of his poetry being bad.’ She sighed. ‘I couldn’t tell. I didn’t understand Portuguese. But the recitations he did in the campground, the other drifters seemed to enjoy.’
Eric rubbed sleep from his eyes.
‘I did a real crash course in me, that summer; I’d buried both my parents the previous year. I was twenty-one and newly alone. And living in a Portuguese campground with no one around who knew me; no one who would ever miss me should I be throttled. No friends to judge the choices I was allowing myself to make. No one who’d ever known me – not Dad, certainly – no one would ever have believed I’d let myself become romantically involved with such a loser as him. To let myself become humiliated like that. I wouldn’t have believed it either. But I guess, in that tent of his that we shared, in my mental state at the time, it all belonged. And it all makes some sort of warped sense to me now: the boozing, the violent lovemaking, the fights, the tearful apologies – God knows, it was happening in other tents! It was my one big mistake. And I think we’re all allowed one big mistake. But then I fell pregnant.’
Eric glanced at the pie again.
‘So that was my second,’ Gayle said, putting the picture down. ‘Do you think a child can tell, in utero, when he’s not wanted?’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ Eric said.
‘When did you find out?’
‘I’m slow. Nineteen.’ He scratched, with a half-smile.
‘Duncan’s father loved me. And he was determined that I should stay in Portugal with him, forever. In a tent! The narcissism of him. Of course, I didn’t let on that back home, I was a servicestation heiress.’
‘So you ran?’
‘Of course. He wasn’t father material. He could make a baby alright, three times a day, but he would not get to be a father to one that I would ever have. Or terminate. Problem was, he never let me out of his sight, and I became desperate that I’d start to show before I could make my escape.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I’ll tell you. One night, I was making us a snack of cheese toasties – we ate a lot of toasties, he wasn’t a food person, and we had no money to speak of – he was a poet – anyway, resenting him so much this night, I left the plastic divider on the cheese as a joke. When I grilled it, the plastic disappeared right into the melt. And I watched him hoover up every mouthful, so stupid and high he was. Anyway, next day I made him another. And when he ate that one too, I just kept doing it. It took quite a few days of making his favourite snack to take him down, but finally all that molten plastic – that he was too drunk and stupid, and deep, and so fucking arrogant, to know he was eating – did the trick alright. His gut blew up like a stinking bloated fish. When his mother saw him, she called an ambulance, and I got my escape.’
‘Not to be fucked with, eh!’ Eric said.
‘I think someone like you should know that about me. Now. Get out of bed. And take this meat pie to our hostage.’
‘I thought it was for me.’
‘It’s not for you,’ Gayle spat. ‘It’s for Rodney – remember?’
Eric put his feet on the floor.
‘Are you doing anything at all today, about selling the dope?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got a bit of PTSD. You know, about the fire.’
‘Eccy Tuesday, more like it. Get some pants on and take this in to the little creep.’
‘Why me?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been doing it since he got here. I’m sick of the sight of him.’
‘I can do it if you like, Gayle,’ Leanne offered, appearing outside the room.
‘What are you doing up here? Get back downstairs.’
Leanne obeyed.
‘Wasn’t my idea to bring him here,’ Eric sulked, as he reached for his jeans.
‘What – we should have let him loose out there? You allowed yourself to be sprung by him.’
‘Shit, Gayle, I know it’s stressful.’
‘Not for you! You SLEEP.’ She tried to breathe. ‘Look, we both know how fights between us end. You disappear, and we don’t see each other for a month. That’s not a luxury either you or I can afford for the time being.’
‘I know. I don’t want to fight.’
‘Just take the weasel his meal.’
She walked off.
‘I love you, Gayle,’ he said, after her.
‘You love yourself!’ she said right back.
Eric belted his jeans and, plate in hand, dragged his feet to their hostage’s room. At the weasel’s door, he picked up the pie and took a large bite from it. Chewing, he let himself in. ‘Breakfast,’ he said, much in the way of a belligerent prison guard.
‘Lunch,’ Rodney corrected. He was disappointed that Leanne was not bringing it to him. He noted the bite taken from it. ‘You livin here now?’
Eric didn’t respond.
‘House is burnt down – guess you gotta sleep somewhere,’ Rodney added to Eric’s back, as he went to leave the room.
He turned. ‘It was you – wasn’t it? That torched it.’
Rodney wore a curious expression.
‘You are Maskey’s bum-boy!’ Eric chuckled.
Rodney drew a deep breath through his nostrils. ‘There’s a bad smell you give off,’ he said. ‘I got a whiff, early on.’
Eric smirked.
‘So, when Mrs Maskey told me all about the affair she were havin with you – I didn’t get what she saw in ya. What the big attraction was.’
Eric blushed and took a step closer to the bed. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re implying,’ he said, glancing back at the door, still ajar.
‘You was close by, that’s all. In easy reach. Fuck me, whiteteeth – didn’t you know? Mrs Maskey tells me everything. Oh yeah. Everything.’
Eric was frozen on the spot.
‘Now. White-teeth. If you want this information to stay here in this room, with me,’ Rodney went on, passing the plate back to Eric, ‘you fetch me a new pie right now. I would like tomato sauce. And I would like a chocolate milk too. And, I will need it brought to me by that nice girl. Not. You.’
Eric took the plate from Rodney; stunned, he dragged his feet to the door and, facing it, stiffened himself before walking out.
Rodney smiled. Not ashamed of his teeth.
11
George felt useless. In the wake of his wife’s humiliation on Main Street – with still no word of Rodney, and the town crawling with cops – he decided to take a lift home. There, in the kitchen, he found his wife getting busy on a bottle of red while she prepared a pork roast for the family. He stood at the room’s entrance.
‘Do you need something, George?’ she enquired of the gloomy presence hovering behind her.
‘Nope. Are you okay?’
She responded with a shrug and by ripping a piece from a roll of cling film.
‘Good enough,’ he grumbled.
He took his headache to bed.
A little later, Caleb yanked open the kitchen’s screen door, startling his mother, who was lost in thought. She dropped a potato. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ Caleb said, retrieving the half-peeled spud as it rolled toward him and passing it to her.
‘I’m all jumpy, about Rodney,’ Hilda apologised.
Caleb didn’t care to talk about Rodney. There was too much talk about Rodney in the house already. Always had been. He went to the fridge and pulled a yoghurt from it. ‘That smells good – what’s for dinner?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘A roast,’ his mother said, forcing a smile. She reached for her large glass of red.
Caleb didn’t judge the size of the glass too harshly; he only hoped she hadn’t begun her day drinking white – which was exactly what she had done.
She opened the oven door and slid the heavy pan inside.
Caleb downed the yoghurt in three scoops and threw the container in the bin. ‘I’m gonna do some weights,’ he said, moving to the door. ‘Me and Celeste will be down at six.’
Hilda flinched at the mention of his fiancée’s name. She shut the oven door. ‘But Celeste doesn’t like pork,’ she said, standing up to face her son.
He thought. ‘No, she likes pork,’ he said. ‘It’s her favourite, I think.’
Hilda found her glass again. ‘Must be just – this pork – she won’t be liking.’
Caleb was still confused.
‘Don’t bring her down tonight, son,’ Hilda said. ‘I want a night off from her.’
Caleb acquiesced without protest. ‘Sure, Mum,’ he said, disappointed.
‘After the family has eaten, you take her some to the cabin,’ his mother added, as conciliatory as she could manage.
Caleb went out onto the verandah, dreading the shitstorm that Celeste would pelt down when he told her.
Hilda wiped some vegetable scraps from the camphor chopping board and took her drink out into the afternoon sun – unaware that concealed in the shadows of Longwhile’s hallway, Celeste was fuming. She wondered what to do about the exchange she had just overheard.
Noting George’s occasional snores, she crept closer to the main bedroom for a peek. Caleb was banging weights out on the verandah. With no time to waste, she tiptoed into the room, past the sleeping George – ever so quietly.
Sneaking into the ensuite, she opened the bathroom cabinet and did a scan of the medications. Finding a bottle of oxy, she removed a capsule and, careful not to disturb the room’s old boards, made a single squeak as she tiptoed back out into the gloom of the hallway. Ignorant that George had awoken and that his gaze had followed her, when she saw the coast was clear, Celeste dashed into the kitchen. She did not have long to act. Hilda’s glass would need refilling soon.
She broke the cap, grabbed the bottle by the neck and tipped the powder skilfully down the throat of it, without leaving a trace.
Then, at risk of cracking her make-up, she piss-bolted back to the cabin as fast as her legs would carry her.
12
Gayle was at the stove, plating up some early tea for her hostage, when Eric – who was beached on the couch, watching a news bulletin – sang out that a story of interest was coming up. She joined him in the living room, as did Leanne, who had just closed up shop for the day.
The local news report concerned the ongoing police raids of north-coast forests. Operation Blue Fuss had already uncovered several marijuana crops being grown on isolated acres of crown land, the story reported. And the news item went on to say that the blitz would be continuing for several more days.
