The End of the World (3 page)

When I show the committee members the letter at the next meeting they hoot like owls. ‘Fully understand!’ ‘Take this opportunity!’ It’s like a party, they laugh so much.

‘I told you it wouldn’t work,’ Brenda says.

‘It’s just a step,’ I tell her. ‘The first step. It’s a game. We make a bid, they try to negotiate us down.’

‘Sure,’ Brenda says, ‘like we’ve got real negotiating power.’

‘Shut up, Brenda,’ Norm says.

Helen is here again but the grade three teacher is missing so Helen is downcast. No, she’s more than downcast. Her high hair has flagged. Perhaps the heat in the air has melted the gel. Whatever happened, the fluffy creation that brushed the architrave when she walked in has flattened out like her spirit and Helen’s slumped in the orange plastic chair beside me, motionless except for the occasional crackle as she winkles another Kool Mint from her open bag, pretending no one can hear the sighs and crunches of her working her way through the packet.

‘I’ve written another letter,’ I say. ‘This time, I’ve copied it to our shire councillors, the local member, the prime minister, the headmistress, the school board, all the teachers and all of the parents at the school.’

There is silence. Kyleen opens her mouth and closes it when Maxine jabs her in the ribs. Norm flips through the pages of minutes in his hands. The air is close and still and next door at the Church of Goodwill meeting someone is talking loud and long in a deep voice.

‘I spent our whole budget on photocopying and postage,’ I say. ‘You’ll get the letter in the mail tomorrow.’

‘Is that why we haven’t got biscuits?’ Kyleen says.

‘I buy the biscuits,’ Martine answers. ‘I didn’t have time, that’s all.’

We fall back into silence.

Eventually I speak. ‘We could give up. Let them close the school–we can carpool to get the kids to Haddon Primary.’

No one moves. Brenda’s staring at the floor. I’m expecting her to jump in and agree with me. Her house is painted a dull army green and her clothes are beige and puce and brown. Her kids stay out on the streets till eight or nine at night as Brenda turns on light after light and stands silhouetted in the doorway with her cardigan pulled tight around her, waiting for them to come home. She turns up to my meetings as if she is only here to make sure nothing good happens from them. But tonight she reaches over to pat me on the knee.

‘Loretta, I know it won’t work, you probably know deep down it won’t work, but you can’t give up now,’ she says.

Kyleen stands up and punches the air, as if she’s at a footie match.

‘That’s right! Don’t give up, Loretta. Like they said in Dead Poets Society, nil bastardum,’ she pauses, then trails off, ‘carburettorum...’

‘Grindem down?’ Norm finishes.

Norm’s cleaning motor parts with kerosene when I knock on the tin frame of his shed.

‘Knew it was you. You should try braking a little earlier, Loretta,’ he says without looking up.

‘Norm, what happened to your forehead?’

‘Bloody doctor chopped off half my face.’

‘Oh God. Skin cancer?’

‘Not any more,’ he says, reaching up to touch the white bandage, which is already covered in oily fingerprints. ‘They think they got it all.’

He dunks the engine part into the tin of kerosene and scrapes at it with a screwdriver. I want to hug him, but he and I don’t do that sort of thing. I’m going to buy him sunscreen and make him wear it. I’ll buy him a hat and long-sleeved shirts. I can’t imagine life without him.

‘Mum, I found some,’ Melissa says from the door. She’s shading her eyes with her hand and watching Jake teetering on top of a beaten-up caravan, his arms whirling like propellers.

‘Jake, don’t move,’ I scream.

My toe stubs a railway sleeper as I bolt toward the caravan.

He was probably fine until I panicked. His eyes widen when he looks down and realises how high he is. His first howl sets off the guard dogs. His second howl sets off car alarms across town. By the time Norm and I coax him down we’ve both sustained permanent hearing loss. I hold him against me and his howls ease to sobbing.

‘Come on, mate, it wasn’t that bad,’ Norm says, lifting Jake from my grasp and swinging him down to the ground. ‘I’ll get you a can of lemonade.’

Jake takes a long, hiccuping breath followed by a cat-in-heat kind of moan as he lets out the air.

‘Mum! I told you, I found some.’ Melissa pulls me, limping, to the back of the yard.

My toe is throbbing and I’m sweating and cross. I wonder why I don’t buy a couple of puce cardigans and sink back into the land, like Brenda or that truck.

We drag the bits of tin to the shed where Jake is sitting on the counter listening to the Golden Oldies radio station while Norm scans Best Bets.

‘Have you got any paint for this tin? I’m going to make signs for the school.’

Norm shakes his head. ‘You’re a battler, Loretta. And I suppose I’m expected to attach them?’

‘To the fence,’ I say.

One of my best dreams is the Beamer man. Beamer man powers his BMW up to the front of the house and snaps off the engine. He swings open his door, jumps out and strides up my path holding expensive wine in one hand and two tickets to Kiddieland in the other.

‘We’ll need the children out of the way for a week or so,’ he explains, ‘while I explore every inch of your gorgeous body.’

I run my hands down my effortlessly acquired size-ten torso.

‘Taxi’s here. Have a lovely week,’ I say to the kids.

As they run gaily to the taxi, clutching their all-you-can-eat-ride-and-destroy Kiddieland tickets, Beamer man closes the front door and presses me against the wall.

‘Mum, you’ve painted “Save Our Schol”. And you’ve got paint on your face,’ Melissa interrupts to tell me before I get to the good part.

Why did I decide to do this in the front yard? My arms are smeared to the elbows with marine paint, and I’m in the saggy old bra I swore I’d never wear outside the house. Imagine if Harley man or Beamer man went by.

I have a terrible thought. Did Norm mean battler or battleaxe?

My Mother-in-law in the Family Tree

My husband’s mother can’t pronounce my name. She tries to say Dorothy but the word comes out all mashed so she has taken to calling me Doh. Her native tongue is harsh and guttural. The language is full of ughs from the back of the throat and chopped syllables. When she says Doh it sounds like a command, like an expletive, like Homer Simpson venting his frustration. ‘Doh,’ she shouts. She always shouts, as if she is still in the village where she was born, calling out to her neighbour across the bamboo grove. ‘Doh, I make sticky rice. Where pot?’

I look at my husband, a suave, urbane computer analyst, and I can hardly believe this short fat loud woman is his mother. At night he arrives home from work and his mother presents him with a drink or a snack. They speak their language in rapid barks, but he is looking over the top of his squat mother’s head to see me. When I come home from work it is my son, Sean, who runs to me. He is six years old and we are his whole world. His mother, his father, his grandparents. My husband, Dan, is my mother-in-law’s whole world. I watch her sometimes as she fusses around him and I am overawed by the amount of love she holds for him in her body, like muscle tissue, hard and fierce and tensile.

Here in this Melbourne suburb, the neighbours on one side have a Zen garden of polished white river stones. Tasteful granite statues of Buddhas and curved shapes like triple-mounded buttocks line the edge of the sea of stones. Weeds are dealt with swiftly. On the other side the neighbours nurture exotic succulents with flowers of orange and yellow that burst out one day only to disappear overnight. Before my husband’s parents came to live with us, our garden was the local disgrace. Fat untended hydrangeas and straggly geraniums had overrun the garden beds and patches of dirt and yellowed couch grass marred the lawn.

‘So, how’s it all going with your parents-in-law?’ my neighbour, Narelle, said when I stood with her in the supermarket, the after-work shoppers flowing around us.

‘Oh it’s fine. My mother-in-law’s always busy. And my father-in-law potters about, you know.’

Narelle reached across me and picked a packet of instant porridge from the shelf.

‘They’re busy in the garden, then?’

‘They love the vegetable garden. Where they come from, you know...’

‘I see them sometimes, when I’m home in the daytime.’

There was a pause and I wanted to bolt. Something was coming. I wanted to run home and feel Sean’s chubby arms around my neck and smell the garlic and chilli my mother-in-law would be frying up in the pan.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’d better...’

‘I noticed your mother-in-law yesterday shimmying up a tree in your yard. She’s unusually agile, isn’t she?’

There is a kind of nut that grows on a tree in our backyard that Ma, as we all now call her, likes to grind and cook into food. The nuts are poisonous when they come down from the tree. They can only be eaten after a long process of boiling and leaching in ash. Days later they arrive at the table in a thick brown spicy curry. The curry tastes nutty and bitter at once. It is an acquired taste and demands a level of courage. It took me months before I would try it, and months more before I let Sean have any. He loved it.

‘Yum, poison nut curry,’ he says. Once he climbed a chair and tried to reach into the bowl where the nuts were soaking. Ma slapped his hand away with a ferocity that relieved me.

‘No touch,’ she shouted. ‘Sean no touch.’

My neighbour chose the right word for Ma’s expeditions. Even though she is not strong, Ma shimmies like a dancer up the tree. She shimmies up with her skirt tucked into her underwear, wrinkled old legs gripping each side of the trunk as she reaches for the next handhold. If you look up you can see her squinting through the branches, out over the suburb. Her face looks like a big yellow paw paw. The first time she climbed the tree she came back down and shouted, ‘Doh, next door full of rock! I give her vegetable!’

My parents-in-law have grown vegetables from what was once grey dust. Papa hoes his way slowly down the lines of leafy greens and yellow and red chillies every Saturday morning with Sean trailing behind him, learning to speak Iban almost as well as he speaks English. Over the last two years I have watched from the back porch, sipping my tea with Ma squatting beside me grinding spices with a mortar and pestle, as the couch grass was tamed and the hydrangeas trimmed back and, finally, uprooted and composted. Sometimes Dan stands behind me with his hand on my shoulder, watching. He tssks.

‘The neighbours are going to start up again,’ he sighs as he watches Papa spread horseshit, found on one of our driving trips, across a newly ploughed bed. Dan has no idea what the neighbours think. They complain to me, whereas to him, the tall handsome Asian stranger among them, they nod and wave, or bob in what seems like a half curtsey to demonstrate how tolerant they are.

Not so with Ma. When she shouts, ‘Hello, Missus,’ at them, they shout back.

‘The rubbish bin goes this way,’ Narelle says in a voice louder than you would expect her neat figure to produce. ‘Or the truck can’t pick it up.’ She seethes at Ma’s singing, at the square of dirt Papa dug into the nature strip.

‘This is supposed to be lawn!’ she enunciates at him when he is on his knees, pulling weeds and coaxing green vegetable from the soil. ‘lawn.’ He nods and smiles as she points accusingly up and down the street where the nature strips stretch on in endless smooth green like rolls of upholstery material. He understands her–his English is much better than Ma’s–and pretends he doesn’t.

But when Narelle talks to me her words are soft and reasonable.

‘They’re lovely people, aren’t they,’ she says. ‘How hard it must be for them here. We all try to help of course. Just small things–helping them with the bins and whatnot.’

My parents-in-law didn’t come to our wedding. Instead, they spent the money on our honeymoon, paying for us to travel to Kuala Lumpur and stay in a five-star hotel that they visited in their uncomfortable best clothes.

On our first meeting we sat in the coffee shop of the hotel, surrounded by brown and cream and tan upholstery. The silver coffee service squatted like a trophy on the table between us, obscuring my father-in-law’s head from my view. A waiter came by regularly to top up our coffee cups. Outside the hotel window I could see the heat shimmer, like a damp hot hand pressing against the window.

‘My mother wants to know if you like the food here,’ Dan said to me.

‘Very much.’

‘She wants to know if all Australian girls are as beautiful as you.’

I smiled. The waiter poured more coffee and we watched the thin brown stream sluice into the china cup in front of my new mother-in-law. Even though Dan had warned me that his parents had moved to Kuala Lumpur from a remote village in Sarawak, I expected his mother to be polite and quiet and elegant like the Malaysian women I’d seen on the plane. But she was sweating and she slurped her coffee so loudly that the other customers kept glancing at us. And she stared at me.

‘What did she really say?’ I asked.

Dan laughed. ‘No, really!’ he protested.

I suspected his mother was making fun of me. I am not ugly, but I’m hardly a movie star. I frowned.

‘It’s the kind of thing people say here. She’s trying to please you.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

He laughed again. ‘Don’t worry, you’re family now. That won’t last.’

My husband arrives home and Ma brings him slippers, as if we are playing out a 1950s American sitcom. She massages his feet when we sit in front of the television at night, and she cuts his toenails.

At first I found this too disturbing to watch. I wandered out to the kitchen where Ma had arranged the pots on the stove for the evening meal, into the study where Ma had tidied Dan’s papers into neat piles, back into the lounge room where Papa was polishing shoes on a carefully laid carpet of newspaper.

‘Doh,’ Ma would shout, ‘Sean need food now.’ Or ‘Doh, where tea?’

I gritted my teeth and slammed utensils around the kitchen and brought a tray back into the room. I secretly named her ‘the poison nut’.

I did stupid things. I bought newspapers from her country to make her homesick. I made sausages and rich casseroles and other foods distasteful to her, night after night, until even Sean asked for a salad. I found myself trying to hoard Sean’s affection.

‘Where’s Ma?’ he asked me one day when we were on a shopping trip. I told him not to worry about it. ‘I wish she was here,’ he said.

When we got home, he ran to her and hugged her and babbled on about the trip, and as I trembled with rage, like a jealous child, I heard her say, ‘That nice. You have nice time with Mum. That good.’

These days I sit in the front seat of the car next to Papa on our monthly drives, leaving Ma jammed happily between my husband and my son in the back seat, worrying at Papa about something in words I cannot understand. We coast up to the flat plains of the Western Highway and stop to wander through a display home, or pick a weed by the roadside that we will later eat, or marvel at a caravan park.

For a long time Papa and Ma, still shy after their arrival, were uncomfortable in their spacious bedroom with ensuite on the second floor of our house. They discovered caravans on their first Western Highway trips, when Dan was teaching his father to drive.

‘Doh,’ Ma shouted at me when they got back one day. She always travelled with them during the driving lessons, issuing loud instructions to Papa from the back seat as he crept nervously along the left lane of the highway at sixty kilometres an hour, the car rocking in the wind wake of speeding trucks.

‘Doh,’ she shouted. ‘We like caravan. We sleep caravan here.’ She stomped over to a corner of the backyard and pointed at the dirt. ‘Here.’ She kept looking at the ground. ‘Better for you,’ she said in a voice so soft it shamed me.

It took me months to dissuade her. Only when I bought a rocking chair and placed it near the window did she accept the bedroom as her home. She sits there now in the late afternoon and stares at the sky. I wonder if she is remembering or wishing. Or regretting.

It’s not only the neighbours who complain. Now that I have learned to live with my mother-in-law, Dan wants his parents to go home.

‘She’s smothering me,’ he says. He tells me this in whispers at night after we have made love and lie wound around each other under the bedclothes. ‘She doesn’t belong here. She’s too much.’

I can’t imagine how much they sacrificed to send him here when he was sixteen. He went to boarding school, learnt the manners of the privileged classes, gained the confidence of a boy who knows he will succeed simply because of the school he has come from. Even though he arrived speaking broken English and feeling like a refugee, he has cast all that aside and built a career on telling millionaires to smarten up their systems.

‘She doesn’t belong here,’ he says each time he sees Ma shimmying up a tree or trying to haggle in the supermarket or rocking in her chair and staring at the sky, a different sky to the one she used to know. She is starting to show her age. He takes her to the doctor and interprets for her, but he has no language for words like aorta or osteoporosis because he left off speaking the language at sixteen. I ask him what he is saying to her. He blushes, so I know he is lying.

‘I’ve told her she should take it easy,’ he says.

I wonder what he is really telling her.

Last week she said to me, ‘I no want go home, Doh.’

‘You’re happy here?’ I asked.

‘My son here, my grandson. My village, gone. I no like city.’

Before they sent Dan to Australia, Ma and Papa had been forced off their land by a clearing program and re-housed in a large block of flats in Kuala Lumpur. Papa went to work in a factory producing tyres and Ma cleaned houses for wealthy people in a suburb an hour’s bus trip away.

Here, Ma doesn’t believe she lives in a city. There are too many trees and lawns, the skyscrapers can’t be seen from our backyard. She has made her own village of our street. She treats the supermarket like the market at home. She picks up fruit and sniffs it loudly, shakes melons to hear their ripeness, pushes her thumbs into cuts of meat. When she hangs at the top of the tree in our yard, surveying the gardens beyond, she is home. Perhaps this is not the home she loves the best, but it is her home now.

‘I no want go back,’ she repeats, like a child. After a morning in the garden she sits in her rocking chair, swinging back and forth. She is thin now, her wrinkled face floppy with spare skin. Sean runs in when he comes home from school and flings himself onto her frail body and she holds him close then scolds him in her language. He laughs. At six o’clock she gathers herself and comes downstairs to welcome Dan home. These days he frowns and tells her, or at least I think he tells her, to go back and sit down. But she wants to see him settled next to Papa in the lounge room, Sean at their feet.

‘My son need me, Doh,’ she shouts. ‘You lazy girl. No good cook, no good clean. I make good house.’

The worst thing is that it’s true. Slowly, over the last two years, I have let her take over the running of the house and we eat better than anyone I know. Still, when she makes remarks like this the old anger surges and I turn my face away, my cheeks reddening. She hits me affectionately in the arm. ‘No, no, Doh. You good girl.’ She shakes her head vigorously. ‘I no mean bad feeling. You good girl, Doh.’