Tree Palace (18 page)

‘You too.’

Shane puckered his lips to whistle blithely down the steps but his heart was so sunk there was only an air sound.

21

Moira took her fancy cup and saucer into the L-shape and threw them on the ground. She had a square of cardboard for placing on top. She used a brick from the barbeque for smashing on the cardboard and thereby smashing the crockery and the connection to Alfie Tweedie to pieces.

Midge didn’t interfere. The anger in her made him wince with every blow but he didn’t say anything. He helped her scoop the shards into a plastic bag. He offered to put them with the rubbish for disposal in town.

Moira grabbed the bag off him and said she’d deal with it. She intended standing in the doorway of Alfie’s and shaking the contents out and spitting on them.

‘That might cause trouble, Moira.’

‘Good.’

‘He’ll say it’s us being threatening to him. Could make it worse for us and worse for Shane.’

That made sense. Moira could have screamed her hatred of Alfie. She would have if she thought it wouldn’t scare Mathew from sleep. Instead she took the rattling bag of bits to their shanty toilet and flicked up the wooden lid and emptied the bag down the stinky hole. As close to justice as she had. She would have dealt with the Alfie pot plants that way but didn’t need to—they’d died in the heat.

Late afternoon Elisha Kay arrived. Limpy met her with his scampering hysteria and hung back in his usual coward’s arc. Moira expected it was police cataloguing more evidence but seeing it was a lone girl and the girl had glasses, she summed her up as a social worker and ordered Rory to go inside. She told Zara to get in the tent and be quiet.

Ideally Mathew would be out of sight for such a visit but he was in Moira’s arms finishing feeding. At least he looked settled and not starved or neglected. She decided to make a performance of him by standing her ground and rocking side to side: this baby’s as loved and spoilt as any baby. She made Midge hold up his hand and fuss that he was shielding the sun from him.

When Elisha said who she was and why she was there Moira didn’t believe her. She thought it was a trick to win her over.

‘Here’s my card.’

Moira pretended to read it and grunted and let Midge take a look. He nodded that the girl appeared truthful.

‘Why couldn’t you get him off?’ Moira’s lips hardly parted from bitterness.

‘I’m very sorry if you’re not satisfied,’ Elisha said, sarcastically. She looked at her wristwatch and turned to walk to her car, muttering, ‘Wasting my fucking time coming here.’

She had red boots that went over her ankles. They were covered in dust and she cursed herself for not changing out of them.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Moira. ‘I didn’t mean to be smart. Midge, get a rag from the kitchen. And bring a glass of water for the girl.’

She asked her if she’d like to sit down, if she’d like a cup of tea. Elisha said no thank you, she was busy. She looked about the place and had to resist being disparaging: Tree
Palace
?

‘Shane was keen for you to know his movements. He’s in a cell at St Arnaud police station. A van’s on its way up from Melbourne to get him. He’ll go down to Melbourne to the assessment centre. They’ll decide what to do with him from there. That can take a while, days, weeks. My guess is Marnaroo, the prison near Bendigo. It’s lower security and he’s not violent so they’ll treat him less hardcore.’

Midge gave her water and she sniffed it and sipped. She waved her hand to stop flies landing in her mouth. She handed the glass back. ‘Well, that’s about it. It’s all I can do. Oh, and I’ve got his coat and tie for you.’

She went and got them and handed them over.

‘Give her the rag, Midge,’ Moira said. ‘For your nice boots.’

Elisha flicked the dust off each boot with the rag and wiped the heels clean, standing on one leg to do it. She almost toppled, and Moira held Mathew tighter and freed a hand and steadied her.

‘You can arrange visits. Bendigo’s a couple of hours. Not that far.’

Moira gave Elisha her card back.

‘Keep it,’ Elisha said.

‘Thanks. You can keep the rag.’

Elisha was holding the rag away from herself. She thought Moira was mocking her.

‘For your nice boots,’ Moira said.

‘Listen, ring my office and we’ll let you know Shane’s movements. They still got public phones in Barleyville?’

‘They got two,’ said Midge.

‘There you go, then.’

As Elisha drove off Midge reached over and took the card from Moira for safekeeping as he could read it.

Moira snatched it from him. ‘I’ll look after it. It’s a link to Shane.’

Midge straightened his back. ‘He’s my brother. That’s my link too.’

‘I’m not going to argue about a card. We’ll both look after it.’

They put it in the kitchen, under the table lid with Midge’s memorabilia.

No sooner was the lid closed than Moira opened it and took the card out. Mathew was asleep and she let him have the big bed to himself, lying on Shane’s side. He might as well have that now it was empty. She sat on her side with the card and tried to read it.

A letter such as
o
looked just as it sounded. It provided little problem in understanding. Same with
s. E
and
k
were not readable. Nor were
r
and
h
. Clumped together into words they were impossible.

‘Midge. Come here. Sit down, here beside me. Read this out.’

He read the card aloud.
Elisha Kay. Solicitor
.

‘All of it.’

He read out the address.

‘So, that says Stawell there?’ Moira asked.

‘No. That says Stawell
there
.’

‘And the word there that begins with
So
. That must be Solicitor?’

‘Yeah. Solicitor.’

‘Point all the words out and read them.’

He did.

She took Midge’s Swan Hill write-up from under the table lid and asked him to read out the first line slowly, read it over and over. ‘If you do it over and over I might have a crack at remembering what words sound like to look at. I can work out a trick for myself and match the shapes the words make with the sounds the words make. Will you help me do that?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I don’t mean just
now
. I mean, make it a regular thing. I’ve had a gutful of always pretending. Let’s give this a go. Maybe I’ll be able to pretend less.’

‘I’m no teacher,’ Midge said. ‘I’m no great reader myself.’

He was flattered that Moira thought him teacher material.

Moira said he’d be teacher enough for her. Good enough for her to get a driver’s licence, maybe, one day. What kind of woman was it who couldn’t write a love letter to Shane when he most needed it! Something in her own handwriting saying personal things. Things she’d never dictate to Midge.

They agreed on it: lessons for half an hour or a bit longer every day.

The headline in Midge’s Swan Hill write-up was ‘Battler Breaks Drought’. They started with that for the first lesson.

Moira looked at the
B
and thought: a boob and belly shape combined. The
t
s were fishhooks. She connected the hook shape with
trout
to remember the
t
sounds.

She worked her way through the three words until each had a shape and a sound. An
r
was road with a dead end turn at the end of it. A
k
was a door key. She set herself homework: she must get the shapes and sounds remembered for instant recall.

22

There was no fixed time when the lessons took place. It depended on Midge. He had duties now beyond being normal Midge. He’d volunteered to be Zara’s transport—to get her to work on time and pick her up when she’d finished. On her first day he was as nervous as she was. He bit a fingernail to the quick as they drove along. At one stage Zara demanded he stop the wag, turn around and take her back home. She couldn’t go through with the job—she wasn’t smart enough. Midge told her that was nonsense. ‘You’re smart and you’re pretty. You’ll show ’em all.’

He drove her to the front entrance and said he’d be right outside if she needed him.

She waited outside Mr Dixchit’s office-storeroom and all she could think of was that she should get out, go. It was a stupid idea, her having a real job. She wanted to pee and clenched her muscles against the feeling. Then Mrs Dixchit arrived, her thick, shiny drapery like a brown wedding dress trailing down. She shook Zara’s hand—more a touching of the fingertips than gripping.

‘Welcome,’ she said. No one had ever used that word to Zara before. A word that said: you’re expected and deserve formal wording. ‘Come this way and we’ll try on a smock.’

The smock was pink, the trainee colour until she was ready for blue. Zara changed in the toilet, then followed Mrs Dixchit past the display shelves, getting a lecture about stacking products—keeping the labels facing forward, oldest used-by dates in front. There was a box of name tags—lots of Biancas and Kaylas, but no Zaras. Mrs Dixchit wrote a tag out by hand, which would do until her trial period, a fortnight, was over.

The cash register was the complicated part. Zara was told to watch how Ivari did it. She was the Dixchits’ niece, taking a year off from uni, and didn’t look right with a blue smock on: what a waste of her dark skin not to have jewels and long flowing clothes, Zara thought. She was un-Indian in her speaking, normal Australian, greeting customers with ‘How’s your day been?’ in a bored, automatic way as she scanned purchases across the beeping red beam.

The register’s screen was like a computer. The keyboard had tiny writing on it, saying
Day’s Specials
and
Receipt Yes
,
Receipt No
. The eftpos and credit gadget had a groove where customers swiped their cards. You weren’t to watch as they entered their secret code.

‘Categories,’ Ivari explained. ‘When you pack purchases you pack meat and vegetables separately. As you do for cleaning products and frozen goods. Categories.’

Zara took up position at Checkout 2 where there was a cardboard sign that read
Attendant in Training
. Mrs Dixchit swiped her security tag against the side of the cash register. The screen lit up:
Welcome
. The till sprung open. She stood behind Zara and said, ‘I will be here if you have questions.’

There weren’t many customers at this time of day. Zara folded her arms to stop her hands shaking from the wait. Then a trolley arrived, filled to the top. A chubby red-haired woman was pushing it.

‘How’s your day been?’

The woman nodded, uninterested in chat.

Beep by beep, Zara scanned and packed the load. She accidentally beeped some things twice. Mrs Dixchit leant over and showed her how to
Delete
. The balance came to $153. The woman paid by eftpos and wanted one hundred dollars cash out in the transaction. Zara had never held one hundred dollars in her hands. She had to take a deep breath to control the thrill.

By the end of the shift her fingers smelled of money. She licked her fingertips to savour the taste of it. Money had no taste, but the smell was like leather.

How’s your day been?
She said it so many times she started to experiment with, ‘Your day been fine?’ ‘Busy day for you?’ ‘You got much on?’

Because Mr Dixchit started Zara out on slower morning shifts, Midge stayed in town rather than make the trip home and back. That allowed him to take care of business matters: he organised his turn on the rotation and rang Elisha’s office every day until they could tell him Shane’s fate.

Marnaroo was indeed the appointed prison. Midge was told to apply to visit—it was not a lawyer’s job to broker visits. He bought good writing paper from the newsagent and wrote a request. Moira stared over his shoulder, watching the words. He also wrote a letter to Shane and put on the top left of the envelope:
Private, from family
. The letter only went for half a page and all it said was all’s well at home. Moira sent her love with a whole line of kisses. She had a vigil now, apart from Mathew’s neediness. She had the postman to wait for, delivering Shane’s reply in his little white van.

Two weeks went by. Three weeks. A month. No white van bearing news from him.

Zara started working more than just mornings. She was efficient enough to serve the busier afternoons and evenings. Midge drove home in that case and did odd chores and tutored Moira. He bought the
Barleyville Gazette
and read the front page to her and she did her best to apply her shapes-and-sounds method. It wasn’t easy and she clenched her fists and cursed her bonehead.

When Midge drove back to town she did her homework and included it in her conversations with Mathew, as if she was the teacher and he the student. She joked as much to him as she recited a syllable. She placed her finger beneath a word and said, ‘Let’s try this again, Mathew.’

She was embarrassed if Rory came in and saw her learning words that even he knew. She distracted him with a chip treat. Or a request to feed Limpy or ride into town with a bag of rubbish for the trotting track bin. She kept a bag ready so he would ride and burn off steam. It was a chore he’d never have agreed to before. He was more co-operative than he’d ever been, as if Shane’s representative now. Except over school.

The new term was starting and Rory refused to go.

‘That’s what Shane promised. He promised I didn’t have to go no more.’

Moira wanted to snap at him to do as she ordered but her cunning hat decided it was better to say, ‘Fair enough’ and ‘I’m glad if you don’t go,’ which made him sit quietly in victory. She had no sympathy for complaints about his uselessness in classes: she was the boneheaded one and he at least could read and write and should be grateful. She worried he might turn boneheaded himself if he didn’t do more schooling. She did not want Mathew having a boneheaded older brother and decided on guilt as a strategy.

‘I just hope they don’t come after us,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The school people. The government. With Shane gone they might ask, Where’s young Rory? I don’t think that’d make Shane happy. But if you don’t want to go to school, that’s up to you.’