Tree Palace (22 page)

Midge looked at her and took a few seconds to answer. ‘Yeah, there is something.’

‘I wonder what it is?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Do you reckon I look, you know, terrific?’

He lowered his eyes, embarrassed. ‘You look fine.’

‘A bit of a bloom about me?’

‘You look fine.’

He stood up and left the house. She laughed to Mathew that seeing Midge blush was priceless.

She was also jealous of Rory and when he got home she made him suffer a little. ‘Do you see anything different about me?’

‘Nah.’

‘Look harder.’

‘I am.’

‘You’re not. You’re eating.’

‘Yeah, you look different.’

‘Bit of a bloom about me?’

He slurped on his tub of noodles and nodded.

‘You don’t want to waste it when you feel a bit of bloom. When is it they’ve got that school business, that parent-and-teacher thing? Next week? I think a nice outing is called for, Mathew, don’t you? A parent-and-teacher outing will have to do. Show ’em all what a bit of bloom looks like.’

Rory halted his chewing and stared at Moira, a cud of noodles on his tongue, trying to decide if she was joking.

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘Nope.’

‘You going into my school?’

‘Yip.’

‘No.’

‘You ashamed to have your mother seen with you?’

‘No. They’ll tell you I’m stupid.’

‘I don’t mind that. I know that already. I’ll have to get myself something new to wear. Not your Salvos rubbish. Something nicer. We’ll try Barleyville Gifts and Apparel, shall we, Mathew?’

‘You never go to stuff like school meetings.’

‘You can always complain to Shane, I suppose. You and him being such good buddies.’

30

Zara didn’t come home for three nights. Midge drove to the supermarket to check on her, not going in past the sliding doors. He hung back, peering, trying not to trigger the sensor.

Eventually she saw him and ignored him. He went to her counter on the pretence of buying chewing gum. ‘I was worried,’ he said.

‘I’ve been at Brent’s house. He rents a place with mates. Now go.
Go
.’ She spoke with the fake smile used for customers.

In the car park he saw a truck being unloaded—milk crates, boxes of butter and orange juice. The truck door had a sign: Romano Cartage
.
The lad doing the lifting, was he lover boy Brent? Midge hid behind fence palings and called out
Brent
, ducking down as the boy turned. So, it was him. Midge took a deep breath of Ventolin. Too old for her, must be in his early twenties. Black hair long and swept behind his ears. Skin of the continental kind, off-white with an oiliness in it. Curly tattoos, green-black blade shapes down the forearms. Midge wouldn’t have liked him if he was Jesus.

There was no point discussing Zara with Moira. Moira’s view was quite plain: if the girl wants her own life, to hell with her. Besides, the house door was closed when he walked by. It was closed a lot recently, which made him feel shut out. Which was exactly what Moira was doing—keeping things private for doing the honours. He thought it was Shane’s letter still bothering her.

When Zara finally did show up she assumed the closed door meant Moira had not finished snubbing her. The late sun was flaring on the caravan. The L-shape and the house were watery blue and might have looked welcoming if not for the sight of the closed door. She’d hiked from the crossroads with cool breeze on her all the way. She was yawning, tired from her nights away, but the breeze was a tonic and she was excited and smiling to herself, thinking, Do I knock or do I have some fun?

She didn’t knock. She took a small toy from her bag, a pair of mechanical boots no bigger than her palm. It had a knob you wound up to activate the spring. She wound it and the boots marched off her hand and she had to catch them. She placed the toy on the top step and stood back while it marched with a rasping noise.

She laughed and Rory jumped from the caravan and laughed too. Midge looked through the caravan window. He laughed. Moira opened the door, sling and baby across her.

Zara kept laughing but this time it was at the sling, working out what it was and what it contained. She stopped laughing and went to the step and wound the toy again. It marched on.

‘I got this from work, for Mathew. They got other toys but this looked clever and stuff.’

Moira said nothing.

‘And it’s, like, plastic and stuff. Won’t smash if he chucks it about.’

‘Mathew don’t chuck things about,’ said Moira. She patted the sling and was about to close the door.

‘Can I give him a demo?’

‘Don’t bother him.’

‘Just for a sec. See what he does.’

‘He’s sleeping.’

She saw Midge cocking his head to one side, making his way across the L-shape, frowning with disapproval. She held out her hand, palm up, to Zara. ‘I’ll give it to him later.’

‘Promise?’

She handed Moira the toy. The thing sprung to life with a burst of weak marching. Moira dropped it. Zara picked it up and thought, You’re not going to show him, are you? The first word babies speak is meant to be ‘mumma’. He’ll call Moira that. She, Zara, will just be another name in general circulation.

She went into the tent and sat on her bed. The empty-arms feeling had come back. Stronger than ever. Holding Brent helped make the feeling go. If he was with her now she would hold him and ask him to hold her tightly, please. Just hold without meaning to go to bed.

Sometimes in bed, lying awake, she held herself around the tummy, and there, below her ribs, was the shape of Mathew, of where he had been in her. The remembered weight. Then the empty-arms feeling would start and she hugged herself. Then she hugged Brent, but he wasn’t what the emptiness meant.

Those plastic boots haunted Moira all night. She put them in the rubbish but they marched through her dreams. Good dreams such as reliving breastfeeding Mathew, lots of glow and tenderness in their vivid cinema. They were invaded by the mechanical rasp and stomp. A terrible sense of being alone and lost to the world. She dreamt about Shane being happy without her, not languishing but lounging in his prison cell. She woke up and did the breastfeeding for real, yet she resented those boots for spoiling the gentle perfection.

Her remedy was to head into town in the morning and find a new dress that would go with her blooming. Zara had met lover boy at the crossroads during the night. Midge had also gone out around the same time for reasons he wouldn’t say. He was home now and that left him free to do some chauffeuring.

She had him perform on-off duties at the shower hose for her first and she cut Rory’s sandwiches and got him pedalling away to school. She put on make-up, cut her toenails and found some old nail polish she thought might be dried and useless. After shaking the bottle there was enough red to paint her fingers and feet. She brushed her hair into a ponytail held in her fist and threaded it through a rubber band. She had no jewellery but given her skin was shining there seemed no lack of adornment. Her eyes were natural greenstone. Along the shoulder straps of her bra sunburn was more gold in colour than raw skin. Same for her neck and the gold V of her cleavage.

31

Summer was definitely retreating and letting the autumn mists in. The sky was higher and you no longer drove into it and through it; you drove under. You could not drive through the mist no matter how fast the car. The mist kept the same distance from you. It was a great judge of measurements. It contained surprises—kangaroos hopping out and up and over a drooped fence—but the distance gave you warning, about one hundred metres.

At the town silos the pigeons flashed out of nowhere because the mist obscured their air world. The silo tops were high in the new grey heavens. The plains wind seldom gave up its right to blow, but it was doing so now. Not a tree branch moved. The flag on the town hall was rag-limp.

Midge let Moira out at the gifts and clothing shop. From habit he went to help her extract the pram, then saw it wasn’t there: she had that body-pram, that funny-looking sling.

‘I’m thinking I’ll go put petrol in the wag,’ he said. ‘I’ll go visit Shane on my own. Maybe tomorrow or the day after.’

Moira knew she was expected to respond. She was tempted to, but she held out. Her swinging between seeing Shane and denying him the pleasure was not settled. The dream about him happily lounging as implied in his letter, though just a dream, did not help. It played on her as if true fact.

‘I said, I’ll visit on my own.’

‘Go, then.’

‘You’re not interested?’

‘I got better things to do than go visiting jails, thank you very much.’

Midge stood by the wag and watched Moira walk off. He wanted to call, ‘You got no loyalty,’ but that leap of anger was beyond him. The best he could do was slam the wag door, and even that made him apologise to the door. He lurched and hopped into stride and his hip made a click-lock sound. He was glad to be going in the opposite direction to someone not loyal. She could stick her reading and writing lessons till further notice.

The one person Moira could rely on was Mathew. That was her boast to herself. He put her first. He took her as his mother. Even the girl in the shop recognised it. She was a kid herself, Zara’s age. She presumed them mother and child. ‘Hello, little one. Aren’t you cute, sleeping there against mummy.’ She asked to part the sling for a better look and Moira proudly gave her permission.

The dresses were expensive. Exorbitant by Tree Palace standards—up to one hundred dollars, already marked down from one-fifty. The lowest they went was thirty-five. For that you still got good length and a carved-out fit at the waist, you just didn’t get the best designs and better material. Which hardly bothered Moira because she didn’t mind nylon. As long as the dress smelled new, never worn before, un-Salvos. A dress only she had put on since it left the factory.
Her
dress for once and not a cast-off.

There was one with cherry-blossom patterns that made her heart race. It was forty dollars. Moira said, ‘How ’bout thirty-five?’ The girl was filling in for an aunty and wasn’t sure if she had haggle rights. Normally Moira would cheat her, given the girl’s youth and uncertainty, but the worry of superstition, of tainting Mathew, made her force herself to dig out every cent she had.

She wore the dress from the shop and carried her old one in a shop bag. She felt light-footed and unable to stop grinning.

The street was becoming busy—Barleyville busy. The takeaway man unwound the canvas awning across his window and another shopkeeper swept a broom towards the gutter. The awning across Alfie’s second-hand store was unwound. That bastard was back, business as usual, his sandwich board astride the footpath. To hell with him! She wanted to kick the board over and yell, ‘Alfie is scum,’ but wouldn’t lower herself.

Lorries and utes were pulling into the garage for fuel. Dogs bark-coughed in ute trays and a carpenter climbed a ladder to repair the pub verandah. A smell of burnt onions was in the air. The mist was lifting and through an opening in it a spotlight of rain shone down. The sun and the rain were coming down together. The shower suddenly stopped to give way to the finer weather.

‘That you, Moira? Christ, it is. How you going? Haven’t seen you in bloody ages. Jesus, you look different. Hardly knew it was you.’

Jim Tubbs. He stood there in front of her, hands on hips like an inspector of the street, taking up half the footpath with his hairy bulk and his veiny arms. Grey stubble frosted his chin and dust and sweat had mixed to make thin mud in his wrinkles. You could smell he’d been working—you didn’t need to get close. His body odour had a sniff of horse dung to it.

‘Jesus, you look in good form, Moira. You had one of them facelift operations?’

He laughed from deep in his belly. It made his black singlet shake.

She wanted to step around him but his facelift comment had weakened her momentum. She couldn’t help smiling and taking the compliment graciously. He kept staring at her and said nothing about the sling or the wriggling baby in it—men like him don’t pay attention to children. But he did offer to carry her shopping bag, which was gentlemanly for him.

‘Nice to see you doing good with Shane away. Must suit you.’ He laughed again.

‘I’m all right.’

She couldn’t believe what she was doing—flirting with Jim Tubbs. She had no appetite for him and never had, the big bully who always wore the stink of horse. She should be spitting in his eye too given his recent history with Shane. Instead, she was meeting his eye with hers and getting hot in the face. She was tongue-tied, all because he had noticed her blooming.

‘Been shoeing nags all morning, just finished. I’m heading for some vitamins.’ He nodded in the direction of the pub. ‘Tell you what, Moira. Why don’t you join me? My shout.’

That was going too far, having him shout her drinks. But she did consider the idea. Just for a second. She wiped her palm over her forehead. ‘Nah. Thanks anyway, Tubbsy.’

‘Come on, just one.’

‘Nah.’

‘Come on.’

‘Nah.’

‘If there’s anything I can do for you, Moira, just give a bell.’

‘Ta.’

‘I’m serious. Just give a bell. Maybe I’ll call in one day. Check there’s nothing I can do.’

‘It’s up to you.’

She suddenly felt sick that she was doing this. She was not being unfaithful, but it was unfaithful all the same. Flirting is the same as unfaithful. You don’t need the body involved. All you need is the brain and you can feel guilty enough.

Tubbsy took a step away. His laugh had gone and his brow had risen higher into his scalp. He was looking at Moira’s breasts and there was nothing discreet about his enjoying looking. He was ogling them. She felt dirty under his gaze. Then she felt what he was seeing. She was leaking milk. Her new dress was sticking to her and her right nipple was showing through it above the hang of the sling. She put her arm over herself and turned side-on but he stepped around to face her, still ogling. She turned further and uttered a rushed goodbye. She hurried up the street towards the wag.