The End of the World Read online

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ Maxine says, and she swings the door half shut so that we’re dizzy with perfume but still having to shout over the frantic clapping of people being saved next door. Maxine shrugs.

  I give the list of apologies and welcome everyone who’s come, introducing the grade three teacher in case the others don’t know him. Helen’s gone pink and glistening like a baby fresh out of the bath. She’ll have a seizure if she’s not careful. I can’t see the attraction. The teacher’s five foot four, stocky, and always says ‘at the end of the day.’

  ‘At the end of the day,’ he says when I introduce him, ‘I am totally committed to this cause.’

  Just in case, I look down at his feet, but no spurs. I read out the list of agenda items. Brenda sighs loudly.

  ‘Do we have to do all this agenda crap? And the motions? I motion, you motion. My Mark’s doing motions you wouldn’t believe and I have to be home by nine in case I need to take him to Emergency.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ I say, ‘because we’re trying to be bloody official. And as you well know, an emergency department that closes at ten in a town half an hour away is one of the reasons we’re here. Soon this town will have no services for a hundred miles.’

  ‘Oh, yes ma’am.’

  I roll my eyes. Maxine rolls her eyes. For a minute I think of us all rolling our eyes like a bunch of lunatics in the asylum and I almost cheer up.

  ‘Item one. I’ve written a letter to our local member about the closure of the school.’ I pause for the inevitable joke about members which, to my amazement, doesn’t come. ‘We need everyone who has kids in the school to sign.’

  ‘It’ll never work,’ Brenda says.

  ‘Does anyone know how to drain the oil from a sump?’ Kyleen pipes up.

  Only another half an hour, I think, and then I can pick up the kids from Brianna’s, drop them at the orphanage and drive straight down to Melbourne. With the experience I’ve got, I’ll land a good job in a centre for adults with attention deficit disorder.

  When I pull up in the Holden at Brianna’s the kids run to the front door, looking pleased to see me. They’re way too quiet in the back seat. They must have done something horrible.

  ‘So did you have a good time?’ I ask. I speed up to catch the amber light and the car roars like a drunken trucker. I can’t make out exactly what Melissa says, but I might have heard the word fight. I think back. Were they limping when they got into the car? Was there blood? I can’t remember anything like that so I turn on the radio and keep driving on the dark highway, listening to the soothing sound of a voice calling Race Seven of the trots, something I’ve learned to love since the radio got stuck on this station.

  ‘Mum?’ Melissa says as we pull into the unsurprisingly Harley-free driveway.

  ‘Yes, sweetie?’

  ‘I don’t ever want to leave this house.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to live in a hundred-room mansion with ten servants and a personal homework attendant?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘I know what it is–you love what I’ve done with the place.’

  ‘Mum, shut up. I’m serious. If Dad sends a letter and we’ve moved we won’t get it.’

  I want to believe he’ll send a letter–to his children, at least.

  ‘Well, that’s settled. We’re staying,’ I say.

  When we get inside the kids brush their teeth without a single protest and climb into bed.

  ‘You OK, Jakie?’ I ask as I lean down to kiss him goodnight.

  ‘Brianna and her boyfriend had a big fight,’ he whispers. ‘I think he hit her.’

  I kiss him twice, then again.

  ‘I’m sure she’s all right,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll call her tomorrow. You go to sleep now.’

  ‘I don’t want bananas in my lunch.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Bananas stink,’ I say, and turn out the light.

  Next morning as I’m packing bananas into their lunchboxes I realise I forgot to thank Norm for the lemons.

  I drop into the yard on the way back from the shops. He’s down the back of the block with three other blokes, all of them standing in a line with their arms folded staring at the body of an old tractor. This would be the matching statue. Bloke standing, feet apart, arms folded, staring at a piece of broken machinery. No idea how to fix it. We could put Him and Her statues either side of the highway coming into Gunapan.

  After they’ve stared at the tractor body in silence for ten minutes, Norm sees me and ambles up.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to sell something?’ I say.

  ‘Not bloody likely. Every month these three are here with some new scheme for making money.’

  ‘None of them happen to ride a Harley?’

  He doesn’t even bother answering, just nods his head at their ute on the road. We step inside his shed for a cuppa. The radio’s on the racing station.

  ‘Harlequin Dancer made a good run from fourth in Race Seven last night,’ I say.

  ‘You need a new car,’ Norm answers, handing me a cup, covered in grease, and a paper towel to wipe it with. ‘Sorry I didn’t get to the meeting, luv.’

  ‘The school’s not your problem,’ I say.

  ‘Course it’s my problem. It’s everybody’s bloody problem.’

  We drink our tea. The three blokes wave as they pass the shed. There’s a protest at Randwick in Race Two.

  ‘I’ve got money on that horse,’ Norm says. He turns up the volume.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one that’ll buy you a bottle of bubbly if it wins the protest. Long odds. Very long odds. Bring me luck, Loretta.’

  The day’s starting to heat up and blowies are banging against the tin roof of the shed. Norm picks up the trannie and holds it to his ear. I look out at the heat shimmering over the piles of junk. Norm’s touching his crusty forehead as he listens for the outcome of the protest. He must win against the odds sometimes, I think–otherwise why bother betting?

  ‘Thank you for your letter of January 9. I fully understand the concerns you have expressed and I would like to take this opportunity to explain how these concerns are being addressed by your Government.’

  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.’

&nb
sp; ‘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.