‘Hey,’ he said.
The figure waved, a tinkly little wave from the wrist. Did not look like the C.E.S.
‘Who’s that?’ He picked up a Sidchrome spanner for protection.
‘I’m a ghost.’
Sarkis felt prickly on the neck. Then a match flared and he saw an old woman with a cigarette stuck to her pouting lower lip. She had a big black leather handbag in the crook of her arm, a pink floral dress and a transparent plastic raincoat. ‘We had a poultry farm for twenty years,’ she said. He could smell the meat-fat smell then, from that far away, the Aussie smell, as distinctive as their back yard clothes-lines with their frivolous flags of T-shirts, board shorts and frilly underwear, so different from Armenian washing which was big and practical – sheets, rugs, blankets, grey work trousers and cotton twill shirts.
‘You’re not a very good ghost,’ he told her. He stood, and stepped down into the yard.
‘I’m damned near old enough,’ said Mrs Catchprice, dropping the lit match on to the sodden ground where it sizzled and went out. ‘I’ll be eighty-six in March. You might find it hard to imagine, but we had two thousand birds and this was just the bottom of the property. There was a little natural pond here and a stand of Gymea lilies. I was going to have a flower farm, but there was better money in poultry then, so it ended up being poultry. You had some here yourself, I think … last week?’
‘The Health Department made us kill them.’
‘You’re better off without them. There is nothing nice about poultry. The smell of plucked feathers makes me nauseous now. Who washed the chook-poo off the eggs? Your mother I suppose. I always washed the eggs. I sat at the kitchen table with a bucket and a bowl. You never forget the smell of it on your fingers.’
‘I’ve found your cigarettes here,’ said Sarkis. ‘You smoke Salem. You just take a few drags and throw them away. Do you come from the nursing home?’
‘I’m Mrs Catchprice.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Are you local?’ asked Mrs Catchprice, coming forward to peer at the good-looking young man by the light of the kitchen window. ‘You must know Catchprice Motors.’
He did. He had bought a fuel pump there once from a woman in a cowgirl suit. ‘And that’s where you live?’
‘And where needs be I must wearily return,’ said Mrs Catchprice, throwing her Salem in among the Hydrangeas. ‘Don’t you find the nights are sad?’
‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ said Sarkis.
‘Car!’ said Mrs Catchprice, straightening her back and tilting her chin. ‘Car. I have no car. I walk.’
Walk? Sarkis was young and strong, but he would never walk at night alone in Franklin. There were homeless kids wandering around with beer cans full of petrol. They saw fiery worms and faces spewing blood. They did not know what they were doing.
‘I think I’ll walk with you a bit of the way,’ Sarkis said.
‘How lovely,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Sarkis Alaverdian.’ He was scared. He slipped the Sidchrome spanner into his back pocket. He thought: her family should be ashamed.
17
Mrs Catchprice did not stand in Sarkis’s back yard in order to employ him. Yet if she had set out that night with no other purpose than to rescue a life from the asbestos sheet houses in the real estate development she had once planned, this would have been consistent with her character.
In the days when Catchprice Motors had sold combine harvesters and baling twine, she had taken boys from the Armvale Homes, girls in trouble with the police. She had given them positions of trust, placed a shoplifter in charge of petty cash, for instance. She was erratic – loud in her trust on the one hand but vigilant and even suspicious on the other. She was ready to ascribe to her protégés schemes and deceptions too complex and Machiavellian for anyone but her to conceive of, and yet she could manage, in the same breath, to think of them as ‘good kids’. She was sentimental and often patronizing (she spoke loudly of her beneficiaries in their presence) and what is amazing is not that a few of them never forgave her for it, but that most of them were so grateful for her patronage that they did not even notice.
Mrs Catchprice was their lucky break. Some of them even loved her. And Howie, who had been one, could – despite the complications of his Catchprice-weary heart – still say, ‘You old chook,’ and smile. The first time he ever saw a T-bone steak was at Mrs Catchprice’s table. The first time he took a shit where you could lock the door was in that apartment which was now his home. He was an orphan from Armvale Boys’ Farm. He was given Mort’s Hornby ‘OO’ train set when Mrs Catchprice decided Mort had grown out of it. That was her style. She gave away Cathy’s teddy bear without asking her, not to Howie, to someone else.
Even now, when she no longer had either an executive position or a majority shareholding, it did not take a lot to tip Frieda Catchprice into charity, and when she stood in Sarkis’s backyard on that red loam earth which should have been her flower farm but which had supported instead two thousand laying hens in twenty-three separate electrically heated sheds, charity was the emollient she automatically applied to the sadness she felt. She reached for it, almost without thinking, much as she always pecked at her honey and Saltata crackers in the hope that one more smear of Leatherwood honey might finally remove that metallic taste in her stomach which she secretly and wrongly believed was caused by cancer.
She was a ghost. She told him she was a ghost as a joke, but she meant all her jokes. This is how it was with ghosts – you stood in one life, but you could see another. You were in one world, but not part of it. You visited your past mistakes and tried to undo them. You held your babies to your breasts and suckled them. You sponged them through their fevered nights. You petted them and wept, knowing you were doing something wrong that would result in them growing up without properly loving you.
Sarkis’s backyard was a corner of the second piece of land she had wanted to grow flowers on. It had been within her grasp but what had she done? First she had turned it into a poultry farm, and then she had turned it into a housing development. These things had made her ‘Mrs Catchprice’ but she had wanted neither of them. It was Cacka who wanted them. He aspired to poultry farming like other people dreamed of a beach house or an imported Chevrolet Bel-aire. No one aspired to poultry farms. It was something poor battlers did in the rough scrub outside town, a desperate part-time occupation. It was never clear how the passion for it entered Cacka’s head, but if you went to live at his family’s orange-primed bungalow out at Donvale and listened to the never-ending argument, you would get an education in egg marketing, and one of the first things Frieda learned (after discovering which was Old Mrs Catchprice’s seat) was that the Egg Marketing Board were a pack of little Hitlers who wanted you to pay them fourpence a dozen and wouldn’t let you sell direct to shops without a special permit.
She also learned, pretty damn smart, that Cacka’s mother had no time for chooks.
‘I hope you ain’t an Oprey singer,’ she said to Frieda. ‘I told him already, we won’t have Oprey or the chooks.’
Her boys thought this was very funny, everyone except for Cacka who sat beside his fiancée at the kitchen table, blushing bright red.
Poultry was one of the few species of livestock Old Mrs Catchprice had no time for, and even at sixty-five she was plotting new ways to make a living from her fifty acres and her three strong boys. She had Romney Marsh, some Border Cross, ten Jerseys with some odd scars where you might expect a brand to be, poll Herefords, and half-a-dozen sows she thought Frieda might like to take an interest in. She had the resprayed Ferguson tractor Hughie brought home one night without explaining. She had Cacka and the youngest brother, Billie, advertised in the Gazette as fencing contractors. Also, the family had a few acres given over to wheat and had traded cases of apples with de Kok’s grocery until there were complaints about their codlin-moth infestation.