Читать книгу The Paradise Stain - Nick Glade-Wright - Страница 10

Prone in the well worn armchair in his daughter’s living room, Barry Kant, grandfather and family man, held the newspaper between index fingers and thumbs, arms stretched to their limit, eyes straining to focus .

‘Left my wretched specs behind. Still can’t get used to keeping them with me.’

Melinda replied with a preoccupied ‘Mm.’

Barry was waiting for Rosie to finish her morning nap. Melinda was in the adjoining kitchen juggling bread baking, dish washing and surface clearing before Rosie awoke; she was always amused at how far her daughter’s little sticky fingers could spread themselves. Barry adjusted his weight onto his left buttock and with a searching hand located one of Rosie’s plastic horses, beneath the other, lost in the folds of the cushion.

‘Just love the smell of home cooking.’

‘Mum taught me everything I know,’ Melinda replied wist fully. She was eight years old when she’d baked her first loaf of bread. Now, with memories of her mother, the practice for Melinda was more than just making loaves.

Barry stretched his legs out on the well heeled patch work ottoman, complementing the blue family suite, more a bleached grey now. He and Sarah had given the ensemble to Melinda when she’d partnered up with Mungo four years ago. The sofa, having borne the weight of the family at the cottage since she was a youngster, was permeated with rich memories from her country upbringing, so it didn’t matter to Melinda that it wasn’t really their style. Not that they could afford one yet. Mungo’s musical pursuits were still being developed and they had agreed to give it a couple more years with her earning sufficient bread winning money as a teacher as long as he put aside two days a week to be with Rosie.

Each time Barry drove past the green belted Domain and into the shabby surrounds of Lutana to visit his daughter he felt disappointed in their decision to live there. The sixties’ government housing was still cheap when they paid the deposit in 2007 on the wholly unremarkable hip roofed, grey Besser block box, saved only from total blandness by a stubborn walnut tree in the otherwise bare backyard. Creativity was loose but money was tight, end of story. It was close to the city by Tasmanian standards, and Mungo’s DIY skills were definitely improving, the brass number four screwed to the fence out the front was testament to that. He had even managed to put the screws in without drilling first into the gate post. Skilled with an assort ment of tools, a hammer proved useful for the final fastening.

Melinda had found stubborn feet to dig in against her father’s resolve for them to move south of the city, to ‘a more reputable suburb where the word culture has some meaning’.

It didn’t help that Mungo loved the sport of ‘taunting the father in law’. Six months after they’d moved in, and the battle of wills was at its peak, he gleefully mentioned that Lutana alongside the infamous Chigwell had found itself in the list of top ten bogan suburbs in Australia, alongside Albion Park in New South Wales and Dandenong in the smog soaked sprawling outer reaches of Melbourne.

‘Don’t tell me there’s actually somebody who sits at a desk and compiles those statistics as a job?’ Barry had countered.

‘Must be. And, until recently, Frankston, that other Victorian piece of work, was up there too. But then Franga embarked on a marketing push to show the city was perking up. I LOVE FRANKSTON stubby holders and T shirts made those die hard bogans real proud for a while, until of course they realised there were a few too many lattes being served up in cafés around the joint. It’s amazing how prejudice can be formed by a simple cup of coffee.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so proud to be part of it with your musical sensibilities,’ Barry had answered, appealing with another tack. But he knew he was clutching at straws, besides, and this was the crux of his dilemma, his own father still lived not three minutes’ walk away.

‘Does it really matter which side of the tracks you live?’ Mungo pursued. ‘The chiggas, and virtually anyone who lives in the northern suburbs, that you seem to want to disassociate with, albeit with their moccasins, mullets, and flannies, aren’t so much removed from your average 4x4 driver for steep drive ways to nouveau riche brick monstrosities in ‘poash’ Sandy Bay. And you can be sure they’ll all be rubbing shoulders at the footy screaming the same obscenities at the umpire.’

An article on page four of the paper about the homeless eighteen year old girl, Minnie Donovan, had caught Barry’s eye. Editorials recently had given much ink time to homelessness in Hobart, describing the phenomenon as a complex issue, more than not having a job to support renting, owning or indeed feeling part of a family unit.

Mackelroy had intended to get the girl on BKS but before they could make her an offer she had drugged herself silly before cutting her wrists with a serrated bread knife, concluding her short life in a tepid, crimson bath .

The constant line up of wretched people itching to get on the show had started to weigh on Barry’s stamina. This latest holiday break hadn’t come too soon. But now, Vince already on the phone with the next contestant and his holiday almost over, it was all starting again. He had become uncertain about whether he still wanted to keep hosting, feeling dismay at society’s insatiable need to bask in other people’s misery.

Rosie was stirring. Barry could hear Melinda in her bedroom, talking gently to her. ‘Yes, Grandpa’s here. No, he’s not going. Yes, you can have some raisins. I know you do, sweetheart. I love Grandpa too.’

Barry rubbed at his eyes. Do I really want to keep breaching old wounds? Am I really making a difference, or am I just caught up in an endless cycle of popularising human suffering as if it’s a damn commodity? It was people’s casual apathy that really troubled him. He had seen it so often in the responses by the studio audience. He lay awake with it at night. Am I just as guilty?

Barry narrowed his eyes to focus on the article again, unable to put it down.

From the hillbilly back sticks of New Norfolk, “ … Ms Dono van had won a massive sum of money in a lottery … ” But it seemed that over a frenzied three years of buying, gambling, drug use and a naive generosity towards an endless stream of new ‘friends’, sprouting around her like malignant mush rooms, she had squandered the lot, leaving herself drowning in debt, homeless, and still illiterate.

She’d hooked up with her first cousin, Shaun Donovan, become pregnant and chosen to abort the pregnancy when she was told the baby had Down syndrome. Her second pregnancy to Shaun produced another Down syndrome child, which she insisted on keeping. It being too much for her cousin, he took his own life shortly after the birth. Shaun’s drinking binge had put him five times over the alcohol limit but he’d still managed to drive his Cortina to the top of a quarry cliff halfway up Mount Dromedary, the place of his daughter’s conception, stop twenty metres from the edge before speeding off into oblivion.

Minnie had been dossing at a friend’s squat and had caught hepatitis through sharing needles and sex with anyone whom she happened to find lying next to her.

‘Jesus. Who needs enemies with friends like that?’ Kant murmured, eying one of Rosie’s soft toys on the floor, and looking up to see if she was in the room.

“The baby girl, who had not been given a name by her mother, had been placed into State care. Her mother, after an incident with a group of drug users and subsequent violent altercation with police, had been placed under State psychiatric supervision where she had committed suicide a week later, the details of her death have not been released yet”, the article stated.

Barry felt little hands tugging at his trousers.

‘Gampa, Gampa, move the paper, I can’t do cuggling. Gampa!’

Barry looked down. ‘Hello little one. There, how’s that?’

He dropped the paper, a dark omen, onto the floor and rear ranged himself, opening his arms to receive his granddaughter, still sleepy and warm from her nap. She had a piece of peeled apple gripped tightly between chubby fingers. Rosie clambered up onto her grandfather’s expansive chest and began fidgeting as a cat does, nestling for perfect comfort. She was proudly two years old, ‘and a three corters’, as she reminded anyone who enquired. She lay her head down under her grandfather’s chin, her wispy fair hair so delicate next to his holiday stubble.

Barry breathed with contentment. To him, Rosie, still untainted by a grimy humanity, counterbalanced the maelstrom of anguish in a world that seemed hell bent on destroying itself. But he feared for her, and prayed that her spirit would never become corrupted.

He kissed her cheek.

‘Gampa.’

‘Mm.’

Rosie began to giggle and wriggle.

‘What are you chuckling at young lady?’ he asked, tickling her on the back of her neck.

Rosie reached up and took hold of her grandfather’s nose, which filled the child’s hand.

‘Gampa, why have you got a big nose with lots of hairs in it?’ She giggled again coyly burying her head deeper under his chin. Then she lifted her head out to peek at her grandfather, her eyes sparkling with impishness.

Barry opened his eyes wide at her. ‘Hmm, let me see.’

Rosie wriggled with delight.

‘I know,’ he said slowly, deeply. ‘It has to be big so all the spiders can sleep there!’

‘You being silly, Gampa. There’s no spiders.’

‘Oh yes, there are.’ And in an even slower and lowered whisper, ‘They are big ones too. You can see their legs sticking out.’ He wiggled his nose. ‘See?’

This emergence of spiky, itching hairs protruding from his nostrils, observed since he had been on his break, was yet another irritation that fed Barry’s nagging unease about the progression of his age. He knew he should have snipped them back last night instead of defiantly refusing to accept their presence. Again.

Rosie began to fidget, tucking her head in and closing her eyes so she couldn’t be seen. Her grandfather wrapped his sturdy arms around her and stood up, shaking her gently. ‘And this giant spider’s going to take you to his web where he’s going to eat you all up!’

Rosie wriggled to get free as he lowered her to the ground. She scampered towards her mother who was drying the last of the pans and slotted herself between her mother’s legs for safety. The aroma of freshly baked bread wafted heavily in the air.

‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. The spider’s going to eat me … what’s for dinner, Mummy?’

‘What’s Grandpa scaring you with now? He’s such a Silly Billy.’

‘Yes, Gampa’s a Silly Billy.’

Barry picked up the pink plastic scissors Rosie had been cutting coloured paper with earlier from the floor and cut out the article about Minnie Donovan, folded it and placed it in his shirt pocket. Back at the coalface tomorrow, where Rosie, with her child’s virtues would disappear completely from his mind. He settled himself on a red painted stool at the kitchen counter, breathing in the yeasty fragrance. Melinda was wiping her hands at the sink. Rosie was now ensconced in her high chair picking raisins, one at a time out of a packet and making patterns with them on the tray.

Melinda whispered something in Rosie’s ear. She stopped fiddling with her raisins and clapped her hands. ‘Happy birth day Gampa. You’re very old now and here is your book that I made with Mummy. It’s a surpise!’

Kant held the stapled stack of coloured papers, covered in scribbles and stickons. Of course, for Kant, the manuscript displayed the secret ingredients of eternal youth and happiness.

‘What a clever girl you are. Did you do this all by yourself?’

‘Yes. Mummy helped me.’

She returned to her raisins which had become scattered on the tray.

Melinda handed her father a bottle of Johnny Walker. ‘Happy birthday, Dad.’

‘Ooh, thanks sweetheart. I’ve run out of this particular medicine!’ He kissed his daughter on her cheek. ‘Very kind of you to spoil me.’

‘Gampa, Gampa, look at your book.’

Kant filed through the pages, commenting astutely on each and every mark, blob of colour, and scribble. On the front page was a self portrait of his granddaughter, a red Texta circle for the head with a single curved line smile that cut through the edges on both sides. There was no body but two long lines came out from the head, the ends of which contained two small circles. From these circles there were at least a dozen smaller lines, little fingers radiating enthusiastically outwards. She’d run out of room for legs, a mere detail.

‘This picture has to be the most optimistic statement of embracing life to its fullest I’ve ever seen,’ Barry enthused, kissing Rosie on the cheek.

‘Don’t be silly, Gampa, it’s Rosie!’

Melinda beamed as she lifted the last two tins of bread from the oven.

‘Smells nice, Mummy.’

‘Thank you, Poppet. It’s a new sour dough recipe I’m trying,’ she told her daughter informatively.

Rosie tilted her head in the way her mother did. ‘Mm.’

‘I can see a master chef in the making,’ Barry said.

Melinda looked at her father. ‘So, who have you got in your sights this season?’

‘Not sure I like your analogy. Vince just phoned in with an African refugee who has … ’ He lowered his voice a little, as if Rosie might understand, and continued, ‘ … a price on his head in Sudan. I’m seeing him tomorrow. There are others according to Vince. Other than that I hope I can ease into it gently. How’s that boyfriend of yours, what’s his name?’

‘You mean Mungo, Dad, you know … my partner!’ Melinda kissed her daughter on the top of her head. ‘I told you Grandpa’s a Silly Billy.’ Then poking her father lightly in the tummy she said, ‘You gave me away to him five years ago, if you remember, in that little ceremony with Mum on Shelly Beach.’

‘Really? Oh yes, that’s right … M u n g o.’ Barry spoke the word slowly with a pinch of friendly scorn, wishing Mungo was present to hear his retaliation. ‘How is the musical guru you support?’

Melinda smiled, again not reacting to her father’s taunt.

Actually, David Smith was Mungo’s real name. He had adopted the nickname whilst he was a student at the conservatorium of music. Obscurely, it was to do with his penchant for riding a bicycle back then, a few too many rough reds one evening with friends, some chatter about bands from the seven ties, in particular Mungo Jerry who sang the Pushbike Song, apparently. David latched onto it, liking the exotic musicality of the word thought it sounded like a Caribbean dance and also that it went hand in hand with the experimental nature of his endeavours.

‘For your information, Mister Skeptic, Mungo and the others have finished setting up the studio in town. The grant they got from the Arts Council helped pay for specialised digital recording equipment,’ Melinda said. ‘Then it was only a few hundred dollars to buy the computer software.’

‘I suppose a normal job teaching music or even playing jazz in a pub would be out of the question, you know, so he can contribute to my granddaughter’s wellbeing.’

‘He’s happy. And Rosie’s just fine.’

‘Yes, Gampa, Rosie’s just fine,’ Rosie chirped.

‘I don’t get it really. Why does he … ’

‘Dad, don’t start! There’s nothing to get. And anyway, since when did you become so narrow minded? You can sound so … out of touch sometimes!’

Several seconds of awkward silence stood between father and daughter.

‘Sorry Dad, I … ’

‘It’s okay. I know I’m just … Look, tell me about the music.’

Melinda took a breath. ‘He calls them sound sculptures. It’s cutting edge. Mungy couldn’t do it if he had to do a nine to five. I’m sure Mrs da Vinci didn’t nag Leonardo to get a real job selling pizzas instead of painting.’

‘You got me there.’ Barry smiled. ‘Maybe that’s why Mona Lisa has that supercilious grin.’

Melinda wiped another surface, allowing her discomfort to disperse. ‘Good one, Dad.’

‘Good one, Dad,’ Rosie echoed.

‘Mungy played me a demo the other day. It’s really fascinating stuff and it’s amazing how many dissonant sounds there are around us that we just take for granted. But if you don’t push the boundaries you’ll never achieve anything really great or worthwhile. You’ll just be floating with all the other debris in the current.’

‘Is that what he tells you?’

‘No, Dad, it’s what you used to tell me when I was younger.

Remember?’ ‘Mm, maybe I should heed my own advice then.’

‘I’m happy for Mungy to be doing that. We don’t need tons of money at the moment anyway.’

‘I suppose I’m a bit old fashioned about responsibility for family.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a fuddy duddy, Dad.’

‘Fuddy faddy, fuddy faddy,’ the little sponge in the high chair chortled to herself.

Melinda turned the last bread tin out onto a metal cooling tray.

‘For someone who heads a cutting edge show on the box you can sound so … yesterday. Mungy puts in his share.’

‘Okay, I’m hearing you.’

Barry tickled Rosie under the chin, but she pulled away, sensing her mother’s annoyance. Besides she was concentrating on placing eyes into a circle of raisins.

‘Well, young Rosie Posie, Grandpa has to go now and get ready for work tomorrow. You got a kiss for me?’

‘Mummy, Gampa’s got spiders in his nose … and they’re very big!’

Melinda smiled warmly at her father, giving him a hug. ‘I know. And I’m glad I didn’t inherit that conk! Go on, you silly old thing, off you go. Go and give some money to some poor down trodden wretch. We’re fine here.’

Barry leaned over and blew a raspberry into Rosie’s neck. ‘Old spiders love dark places,’ he whispered.

‘Gampa!’

‘Here, Dad, take a loaf, and these rolls. But eat them soon while they’re fresh.’

‘Thanks. You look after me too well.’

‘Gampa, I like apicot jam.’

‘Me too.’

Barry put his nose inside the packet and breathed in. ‘Mmm. I’ll see you in a week or so; it’s going to be hectic for a while.’

As Melinda walked her father to the front door, three hoodied teenagers on skateboards rattled by on the pavement bouncing affable expletives between each other.

‘Don’t let the show get you down, Dad,’ Melinda said.

‘I’m fine, really. Remember, I’m just the Front Man. It seems it’s what ninety five percent of the population needs to see and hear.’

‘Maybe it puts their own lives into perspective.’

‘Who knows? I’ve always hoped the show might be able to turn some of their lives around. You know, give some hope. But I’m really not sure how long I can keep on doing it. I wouldn’t mind doing something a little less stressful. You know, like baby sitting Rosie. I could even join Mungo’s band and play the triangle! How stressful could that be?’

‘I’d love to see that.’

Melinda had watched the last series. Her father was highly skilled at interviewing vulnerable people revealing their internal scars and bruises, not gratuitously but enough to expose the crucial aspects of their hapless lives, the bottom line being to give them all an equal chance to come away with a hefty wad of money. Melinda recognised it was the stuff of commercial television viewing. Tabloid trash Mungo called it. She even found herself being sucked into the vortex of intrigue. Her students seemed to talk about nothing else these days. And she knew that money alone wouldn’t solve the problems. On the contrary, she believed it even exacerbated them, Minnie Donovan being a testament to that.

Barry kissed his daughter.

‘Oh, I forgot to ask, how’s school?’

‘Started back last week. Pretty good generally. Some of the same old. I lost my mobile on Tuesday only to find it entombed in a slab of wet clay on Wednesday. Didn’t lose anything inside luckily. Hey ho!’

Barry settled in his car. The Audi’s engine fired up, the electric window came down.

‘When are you going to move back south of the city?’ he called out.

‘When you stop asking!’

Melinda came to the car window.

Kant took hold of his daughter’s hand. ‘I don’t like the idea of my granddaughter being brought up in this godforsaken suburb forever. And that’s not a question.’

‘When we can afford it we probably will move to the southern gardens of Eden, but believe it or not we are very happy here, Dad.’

Rosie had wandered out chewing at a bread roll, and wiping at a blob of apricot jam on her front that was seeping south wards. She waved, licked the back of her hand and blew her sticky sentiments towards the car.

The house Melinda and Mungo bought, originally built by the Zinc factory for their workers, was at the end of a nondescript cul de sac. The plan was to do it up gradually over a few years, double their money in five to seven and move nearer to the sea. Melinda even had thoughts of returning to her birth place in the Huon Valley.

She and Mungo were oddities in their street. They were the only family who owned a piano, novels filling the bookshelves and artwork on the walls, albeit dominated by Rosie’s colourful masterpieces. They knew this because over time they had visited all the other houses, making a point of attending as many street parties as they could. There was the Grand Final day sausage sizzle at number ten imperative to find out for whom the hosts barracked. And the infamous Boxing Day fully padded cricket friendly, played on the road, which ended with several broken windows, drunken threats and a punch up between Merv from Number One and Dirk, his enormous Dutch mate. A keg was shared sometime during Easter. Australia Day barbecues were held across the road for some of the Harley Club members, where Southern Cross flags flew proud ly and were draped around anyone who could remain standing. The Queen’s birthday barbecue at the covertly royalist Sanderson’s place three doors up was an easy excuse to crack a slab.

Cranky old Todd Mullins from number six, an ex workmate of Melinda’s grandfather and retired boiler maker from the smelter, who had lived in the area all his working life, had advised them to keep up this practice if they could, so that their house would be taken off the unspoken list for burglaries. On the whole it worked perfectly well, except they did lose a large garden gnome playing a banjo that Ziggy, one of Mungo’s muso friends, had given him for his twenty sixth last year. It was sort of fair enough because the kiddies from number sixteen really needed something for air rifle target practice. Small shards of the happy chappy were found at the base of a fence post near the rivulet where Mel and Mungo would sometimes walk in the evenings.

Later that afternoon Melinda fetched some logs for the wood stove to heat the evening’s water.

‘So much for summer. Come on, sweetheart, come and help mummy get some food ready for dinner. Daddy will be home soon.’

‘Is Gampa coming for dinner?’

‘No, he has to go back to work tomorrow and needs to prepare, and then go to bed early.’

‘Gampas don’t go to bed early!’

*

On the day of the house purchase Mungo had said, ‘We’ve got to be patient, do it up, bit at a time, gradually,’ wondering when they would find it. Not the time, the inclination. Music was his world and the thought of scraping, sanding, painting and hammering sent shivers through his body.

‘A lick of colour will transform it. That’s all it needs in the short term.’ Melinda had inherited her mother’s patience in lean times. ‘And we can dig a pond, surround it with nestling ground covers, plant some pockets of bird attracting natives, you know, grevilleas and callistemons. It can’t be that difficult.’

The place had been vacant for some time so the real estate agent had given them the keys before final settlement. Vandal ism was minimal: a couple of broken windows only, a car’s skid ruts on the front lawn, nothing they couldn’t fill or repair.

‘Natives’ll cope better than exotics with the soil here,’ Melinda said, anxious about what might be released as they dug into their patch.

It had been the contamination of the soil in the area from decades of dusty, noxious fallout from the zinc works that had contributed to the affordability of the place. Of course for the young couple, content in the confines of their own love bubble, it was nothing short of their patch of paradise on earth.

‘We’ll get a truckload of nourishing manure. We can put in raised beds for the veggies, broad beans first. They’ll put some nitrogen back into the soil. And we can start a worm farm too,’ Melinda had enthused, even though inside she knew the task of giving life to soil that had suffered a slow death by poison would be a painstaking one. But she wasn’t going to let a little thing like the sickness of the planet discourage her. Besides she had the dogeared copy of her mother’s self published ‘Love that Dirt’ booklet, all about re establishing and nurturing damaged soils, and the benefit of her mother’s gardening passion falling about her all her life like soft rain in a herb garden.

‘Our example of what’s possible will catch on around the suburb; we’ll take our prize winning pumpkins to the Royal Hobart Show, and eventually property prices will soar,’ she had quipped, half serious.

Mungo hugged her. ‘And the neighbourhood will be enveloped in social harmony, spreading far and wide, infecting the State, then the rest of the country and finally the world, with so much love and peace and a desire to make love and grow nutritious pumpkins that … ’

‘Even the Obamas will want to come and live next door,’ Melinda laughed. ‘Then we can start making babies.’

But they didn’t wait. They chortled like naughty kids, scampering into the house to have unprotected sex on the most comfortable patch of flooring they could find.