2009
Chapter 4
As if orchestrated by a callous conductor, the morning came crashing into the room. First the warning bells of the railway gates, followed by the blaring horns of the first trains — one city-bound, one headed for Werribee. Then the screech of the exhaust brakes as the semi-trailers, weighed down by replenished tanks from the refineries and the CSR sugar plant, were caught by the lights at the intersection of Francis and Hyde on their way to the freeway. Mrs Nguyễn’s aging alsatian, Wes, his deep bark setting off other dogs in a call-and-response. The rasping cries of the wattle birds. The neighbourhood was waking from its slumber as grumpy as an old man after a big night: joints aching, belly churning, and head screaming. It was 6.05 am. Mandy Neilson sighed and wrapped the pillow around her head to block her ears, and imagined the quiet stillness in the neighbourhood when her grandmother first moved into the house as a young bride in the 1940s, almost seventy years ago.
All her life Mandy had lived in this house, but all her life she had dreamt of moving to the country. A cottage on a riverbank: nothing too grand, something small and isolated, surrounded by bush or forest.
The cottage, the idea of it, she had inherited from her mother. ‘A pie-in-the-sky dream,’ her father, Tom, called it. He wasn’t being cruel, just realistic. ‘Wishing don’t make it so, Sal,’ he said whenever Sal brought it up. In her last year, Mandy’s mother was too sick to get out of bed. By that time, even if they’d won the lotto, or her father picked every trifecta for the whole racing season, there was no likelihood of a cottage for Sal.
Before the illness, Sal was a formidable woman, tall and strong. She ruled the house and was social, and socially minded. Women from the street gathered in her kitchen in the mornings drinking tea, sharing stories and gossip. She volunteered at the school tuck shop once a week and cooked extra food for an elderly neighbour whose children were ruthless and neglectful. Yet in that last year of her life, she became gaunt. Her voice was barely audible; to catch her words, Mandy lowered her ear to her mother’s lips. Sal lost interest in people. Refused to let the neighbours in. She reserved her strength for both her children, John and Mandy, but especially Mandy, her youngest. In the afternoons, after school, Mandy sat on her mother’s bed. They ignored the traffic and Sal’s shallow breathing, and conjured up their dream home: a short stroll to the river where Tom and John could fish, with a large and rambling garden — a section for vegetables and a section for flowers — surrounded by native bush where they could meander without ever seeing another person. They flicked through the magazines Sal’s sisters brought when they came to visit, and tore out pictures of gardens, of furniture. Of cottages like theirs.
Mandy kept her mother’s clippings in an old suitcase under her bed. They were dried and yellowed. They were waiting.
The neighbourhood was going through a real-estate boom, and all sorts of people were moving in. Posh people, her father would’ve called them. Posh and up themselves. Last week, after years of thinking about it, Mandy had organised a property valuation. A woman in a black suit, high heels, and a silk scarf in the company’s yellow and red arrived with a clipboard and a tick-the-box list. She marched through the house, inspecting and making notes. Mandy, embarrassed, sat in the kitchen waiting for the verdict. The house was a dump, a rickety double-fronted weatherboard. Her parents had inherited the mortgage from their parents, and with it the accumulated wear and tear. With the help of a mate who knew a bit about plumbing, her father had moved the toilet inside and put a shower head over the bathtub. It leaned a little to the left, and they hadn’t been able to get rid of the hammering in the pipes.
Mandy had repainted a room or two, but otherwise there had been little upkeep since it was built in the 1920s. It was old and tired. The stumps at the back of the house were rotting, and the hallway sloped downwards. The house couldn’t stand on its own two feet. The roof leaked — over the bath (not such a big issue) and in a couple of places along the hallway. On days when the rain was a downpour, Mandy placed buckets in prime locations before she left for work, just in case. They never overflowed, but once when her daughter, Jo, and Jo’s best friend, Ashleigh, were in the house alone during a storm, they filled the buckets with tap water, right up to the rim. When Mandy came home, she panicked and even rang a couple of local plumbers to get quotes to have the roof fixed, until Jo and Ashleigh broke into a fit of giggles and confessed.
There were cracks in the plaster in every room. Outside, there were missing weatherboards. Mould in the bathroom grew around the base of the bathtub and ran up and down the walls. It couldn’t be stopped, even with bleach and hot water and hours of Mandy’s scrubbing. The first time they moved the furniture in Jo’s bedroom, when she had insisted on redecorating, they were surprised to find that under Jo’s bed the pale carpet was a rich royal blue, and the roses, everywhere else a washed-out pink, were a deep red. At the inspection, Mandy half expected the agent to laugh and say, ‘You think someone will want to buy this dump? Seriously?’ But it seemed even with the traffic and the pollution, even with the Mobil terminal across the road, her run-down house would sell and she would be able to afford a couple of acres somewhere in central Victoria.
She’d sell at the end of the year, once Jo finished school. She hadn’t told Jo; it made sense to wait until after the exams. No point causing her extra stress. Mandy imagined herself sitting in the passenger seat of the removal van, all her possessions stacked in the back. She imagined staring into the rearview mirror as the house, the tanks, and the West Gate Bridge disappeared.
Down the hallway, Jo slept as if the traffic were a soft lullaby sung to her by her mother — though that would’ve been a different mother because Mandy couldn’t hold a tune, and her lullabies, when she’d attempted them, hadn’t soothed Jo to sleep.
‘…romantic thing you’ve ever done? Something to make your partner take notice. Ring us now.’
Without opening her eyes, Jo raised an arm and slammed the snooze button on the alarm. The radio stopped and she slipped further down under the warm doona. The station played top-100 hits, and in between three comedians, the morning radio hosts, delivered endless jokes, mostly at the expense of celebrities and politicians, but also at the expense of a string of people who rang in to tell their stories. The hosts invented silly pranks, and from across the city eager listeners volunteered to participate. There were numerous wedding proposals and even a couple of on-air weddings; people confessed sins and secrets as if the radio weren’t a public broadcasting service, as if there were no possibility of their loved ones discovering they had been betrayed, lied to, deceived. The hosts revelled in devising competitions that required people willing to look ridiculous and foolish — to turn up on the steps of Parliament House in their underwear or to sit all morning in their bathers on deckchairs on the steps of Flinders Street Station. The stunts were childish and not even funny; Jo didn’t consider taking part, no matter the prize. There were times, though, even as she rolled her eyes at these people, when she envied them and their propensity for joy and abandonment — their willingness to be ridiculed and laughed at, to allow their secrets and flaws to be exposed.
‘They’re bogans. Not a brain between them,’ Ash had said one day in response to Jo’s bewilderment that a young woman gave her name and suburb.
‘Bad enough she’s a nymphomaniac with a weird fetish, but telling the whole world, so embarrassing,’ Jo said.