Читать книгу The Household Guide to Dying - Debra Adelaide - Страница 17

On the second day in Amethyst I stayed in the motel room. Outside, the day was sweet and inviting, the far north autumn being so kind. But I spent a long time having a bath, using up the inadequate mini-bottles of shampoo and body wash. I dried off with two of the bathtowels, draping the third around me instead of a robe. I lay down on the bed to read through the local brochures and leaflets for drycleaners, Chinese takeaways and day trips to gemstone mines. I raided the mini-bar for its mini-chocolates and made a cup of teabag tea, then a cup of instant coffee with long-life milk, pouring each down the bathroom sink when they tasted as bad as I expected. Finally I got dressed and took a mineral water out to the balcony, which overlooked a lily pond and the fenced-in pool. Close by was the run and kennel of the sleepy labrador.

I had to think about returning to my old caravan in Mitchell’s camping park, but I could only do it step by step. Sitting there, I mentally traced through the route to the home I’d lived in for eight years but not seen for fourteen. I would drive out of this motel, turn left, then right, then left again. Straight up, it would take less than five minutes to get there. There would be a sign, Amethyst Caravan Park, probably faded now. Then past the front fence, along the gravel path, past the shed that Mitchell once used as an office, I’d skirt the stand of palms to pass the laundry.

I kept getting to the laundry. No further.

I fetched another drink and the two-pack of chocolate chip biscuits. I ate one and tossed the other down to the dog.

When I lived there I loved that laundry, ancient though it was. The other residents included an elderly couple who had installed a Hoover twin tub behind their van, a retired council worker who took his washing into the town laundromat every fortnight, and an ever-circulating collection of young men who spilled over from the circus, and who slept at the caravan park but tended to use the circus’s facilities. So apart from the visitors and tourists, I was the only person to use the laundry regularly and I made it my domain. I would soak my clothes and linen in one of the tubs, poke it all about with the old wooden spoon, then rinse and squeeze it out by hand. For really dirty things, I would light the copper, feeding it with scraps of timber and wads of old newspaper until the place took on the feel and smell of some sort of laboratory, bubbling with potent liquids and thick with a chemical mist. I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Left to my own devices, who knew what I would produce?

Nothing more than clean clothes, of course. After Sonny came along I would settle him in his basket by the doorway so he could have his face kissed by the sun while I stirred and rubbed and squeezed. Back then I could spend hours washing if I wanted, pegging sheets and baby blankets out on the old rope line propped behind the laundry, gathering in the loads of sweet-smelling clothes before the sun started to go down, setting out the ironing board in the annexe and performing the unnecessary task of ironing sheets and tea towels. I knew it was pointless – as if a baby cared how well-ironed his things were – but I always did it. I pressed Sonny’s cotton bibs and lawn wraps with more care than I’d ever ironed a silk shirt or a pair of trousers. Somehow it seemed important to do this. Just as later it became vital not to let him go out barefoot. I was never going to be mistaken for trailer trash and no one was ever going to pity me or my circumstances. Maybe it was observing this dedication to the task that made Mitchell offer me the job of cleaner and manager and all-round caretaker, as he’d started up a new business in town which was keeping him away for long hours. Or maybe he was more observant than that.

It must be hard, managing on a single mother’s pension, he’d said a few months after the birth.

The payments had only just started coming through, thanks to my recent move interstate and the usual bureaucratic inertia. By that stage I was waiting at the post office in town every second Thursday, was first in the queue at the bank. I didn’t dare to think what it would cost when Sonny needed more than breast milk and baby clothes.

I could do with the help, he said, allowing us both to pretend it wasn’t charity.

Mitchell didn’t tell me there was a man contracted to mow the caravan park grounds. One morning I was on my knees by the front gate, Sonny parked in his pram beside me, and hacking at runners of grass that had snaked across the path almost overnight in the warm moist weather. I was using a pair of stiff secateurs I’d found in the laundry, and after ten minutes I was already sweaty and hand sore, when a man pulled up in a utility. He got out and looked at me for a moment, then brought out a pair of long-handled shears.

These’ll do a much better job, he said, offering them to me.

Fine, I said, tossing the old secateurs onto the grass. Feel free to take over. Turning my back on him, I wheeled the baby away.

Nice to meet you too, he called after me. The name’s Archie, by the way.

My rudeness didn’t seem to have bothered him, for the times I saw him after that he just waved or said hello and continued mowing or clipping. Mitchell only wanted me to keep things in order, so I retreated to the back of the grounds. I could tidy the gardens there and leave Archie to do the more professional jobs around the front. One steaming afternoon I wheeled the pram in from the street, hot and tired, aching for a cold beer, one luxury I kept in my tiny fridge. I found Archie dripping with the effort of lopping the huge fig that grew at the front gate. It was too hot for hostilities. I fetched us both a beer and we sat in the shade admiring his work. After that it became a bit of a ritual. Soon I started to look forward to it, in a wary sort of way. He never mentioned a girlfriend. In fact, while we chatted amiably enough, neither of us discussed personal matters, not then. Later on he told me about a woman he sort of saw, but that it was difficult, on again and off again. Really difficult.

How do you mean, difficult? I asked.

Put it this way, he said. There’s competition.

You mean she has someone else?

Something like that.

So why doesn’t she make a choice, him or you?

When Archie laughed I first thought that her other person might have been a woman. And how obtuse and smallminded I must have sounded.

Well, that’s not really possible. She’s in love with a dead man, as far as I can tell. And I’m getting a bit sick of it.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and sighed. I felt like poking him to explain more, until he started to hum tunelessly, Love me tender, love me blue…

Not Pearl? I said.

Do you know her?

Of course. Mitchell sent me to her soon after I arrived. Half the books I’ve got are from her place.

Pearl was dark, beautiful, dreadlocked. Her book exchange shop – her day job – was in the front room of her house, which was a mini Graceland. Her night job was president of the Amethyst and District Elvis Fan Club, and the district was so vast it took her away a lot, organising talent quests and commemorative shows and memorabilia swap meets and whatever else Elvis fans did. I felt I owed Pearl a great deal, since she gave me complete freedom with her odd collection of books – mostly picked up from country town fêtes, street markets and car boot sales – and charged me almost nothing. If she and Archie…well, if it came to that, it would not even be a competition.

That was when I told him about Van – though, as Van was something of a notorious figure, he already knew most of what there was to know – and that was also when I made it clear that no man was ever going to get into the pores of my soul like that again.

Much later, when Sonny grew so fond of Archie, it became harder. I seesawed for a few years between thinking Archie and I could be a real couple, and thinking that maybe I only thought that because it would make it easier for me and Sonny. Thinking that if I agreed to move in with Archie it might only be because it would suit me, with Sonny growing and the caravan becoming increasingly impossible, not because I wanted him for his sake alone. Thinking that I didn’t really know what I was thinking. The thinking revolved around and around in my mind like a mouse on a wheel. Strangely, it didn’t seem to bother Archie. Which was why I read so much. Easier to enter someone else’s dilemmas or questions or nightmares than confront or solve my own.

I told Sonny only what I judged he needed to know, since complete honesty, I’d found, was not always the best option with children. One day, his goldfish, the best pet a caravanliving mother could manage for a child, floated to the top of its bowl and commenced putrefying. Sonny seemed to cope with the fact of Jaffa dying, but the idea that the fish’s body then laid solemnly in the good earth – in a patch adjacent to the caravan and marked by a banana tree I had recently planted – would be prone to worms, bacteria and other elemental onslaughts made him sob for hours.