Dot And The Kangaroo

PART I

BACKGROUNDS

1

Dot And The Kangaroo

    Like, I go into the kitchen at home and she’s nailed to the bench like usual and she goes: “Dot, you’re going over to your Aunty Kate’s this summer.”

    Aw.

    “Righto, then, Mum. Like, why?”

    “Well, that’s one of the reasons. I can’t take another summer of hearing ‘like’ come out every time you open your blessed mouth!”

    Like, aw.

    “Like, no worries.”

    “Dot, it is impossible—impossible—to combine that stupid Aussie ‘no worries’ expression, which by the way is meaningless, with that ludicrous American ‘like’!”

    Goddit. ’Course, I just done it, right? Only if I point that out we’ll have a row, I can see she’s spoiling for one, and I’m not gonna give her the satisfaction.

    “So, ya wamme to, like, ring Aunty Kate?”

    “Dot, you’re doing it,” she warns.

    Gee, am I?

    “Eh? Aw. Sorry. So shall I?”

    “Ring Kate in Adelaide? On the phone your poor father’s paying a small fortune for, what with you lot running off at the mouth with verbal diarrhoea all hours of the day and night,”—here we go again—“as if we were millionaires?”

    Right. Goddit. So I just turn up at Aunty Kate’s. She’ll love that.

    “Kate and I have arranged it between us,”—gee, have ya?—“and she’s expecting you. You don’t make interstate calls, get it?”

    “Wab?”

    “And stop eating those carrots!”

    I’m not! I only took a teeny, weeny, tiny—Forget it. “Sorry. What was that about interstate calls, again?”

    “You don’t make them!” she screams.

    Yeah, I do, just the other day I rung Isabelle, she’s my best friend, because she’s gone up to Brizzie to her Aunty Maeve’s for the Chrissie hol— Oh. Goddit, goddit.

    “Right. Goddit.”

    She breathes heavily but I’m not impressed, I’ve been watching her do that for twenty years solid and the excitement wore off like about eighteen back, geddit?

    “So—uh—ya wamme to pack my shtuff or, li’ tha’?”

    “Will you stop eating those carrots!”

    All right, I will.

    “I've shtob’—uh, stopped. Ya want me to pack?”

    “Don’t shout, I’m not in the next paddock.” –Don’t know if she says that because she’s always said it or because her mum’s mum grew up on a farm and she always said it, or what, but anyway she always says it. Given that we live in the middle of a very boring, middle-middle Sydney suburb, it’s not all that effective. Not to mensh, not appropriate. “I’ve washed the things you can take, they’re on the line.”

    Look, I am capable of bunging my own clothes in the flaming washing-machine, for Pete’s sake! And two years back she had a screaming fit because she claimed none of us great, useless lumps round this joint ever— What the heck. Let her, if she’s that daft. Anyway, Dad reckoned that the screaming fit was brought on by the menopause that she claimed she wasn’t having, and made her go to the doc. Of course she never took the stuff the doc prescribed, that’s chemical and bad for you, she got on round to the health food shop with my cousin Rosie’s best friend Joslynne’s Mum that’s a health food nut and bought something else that was fifty times the price and not subsidised by the government, but anyway, she hasn’t been so mad since. Whether it’s the power of suggestion or the stuff really works, no-one in this nuclear family’s asking, I can tell ya.

    “And,” she notes evilly, “I threw those awful khaki shorts out.”

    Aw. Didja? Aw. “Um, they weren’t that bad.”

    “They were disgusting. When are you going to wake up and realise you’re a girl?”

    Actually I’ve always known that. Never had any urge to be nothing else. No use pointing out to her generation that one pair of daggy khaki shorts has no effect on the gender. So much for burning their bras and all that crap. Not that Dad reckons she was ever into that as such, because look at her. And the pics from back then prove that she’s only gone up, make that out—insert obligatory male snigger—three sizes since having all of us. Words to that effect.

    Now I come to think of, wasn’t Aunty Kate— “Hey, Mum, wasn’t Aunty Kate gonna go off to England this Chrissie?”

    “She’s put it off.”

    Aw. Put it off. Right. Uh—why? They got the dough: Uncle Jim’s retired on a giant super pay-out plus and what his dad left (megabucks, he was practically a miser), and every time they sell the house, like, they’re always moving, they make twenty thou’ or so on the deal. And she spends it on more crap to put in the new one, which is always much bigger and shinier and horribler than— Gee, ya goddit, didja? Good on ya.

    “And don’t say ‘Chrissie’: it makes you sound like a moron!”

    Gee, everybody round here says it, Mum.

    “At least your Aunty Kate’ll get you out of a few of those stupid habits,” she notes with grim satisfaction.

    Aw, gee, is that why I’m going? Couldn’t of guessed. “Train or bus?”

    “What?”

    “Are you sending me by train or bus?”

    “I'm certainly not sending you on the Indian Pacific, if that’s what you’ve got in your noddle!”

    Ugh, bus all the way to flaming Adelaide, I’ll have like bed-sores on my bum by the time—

    “You can fly,” she states grimly.

    EH?

    “Those buses aren’t safe,” she states grimly.

    She’s right, there. Though the Pacific Highway’s worse than the route between here and SA. But who’s arguing?

    “Righto. Good. Um, why’d she put off the trip?”

    “I don’t, know, Dot,” she says with a sigh.

    Don’tcha? That’s a first: thought you and Aunty Kate were like, twin souls? They aren’t actually twins: there’s a tribe of them, I’ve got aunties on Mum’s side all over the country, well, means you’re never short of a few rellies to drop in on when the caravan parks have palled, eh? Two of them, Aunty May, she’s Rosie’s mum, she’s okay, and Aunty Allyson, like dire would be the best word to describe her, they live in Sydney, too. But Aunty Kate, she’s a fair bit older than Mum, she lives in Adelaide. Only funnily enough her kids, they’re all grown up now, they don’t live there any more. Like, she’s not the Aunty Allyson sort, the brains of a hen and the personality to match, but kind of the grim aunt sort. If you haven’t got one of those you’re bloody lucky. Never been known to take the side of a niece or nephew, even by marriage, against their elders and betters—a phrase frequently to be heard on her lips, yep—in living memory.

    And just in case you were thinking twenty’s too old to be packed off to SA to stay with grim aunts, bear in mind that you’re only legally an adult in Oz at 18. Reality says otherwise. The government’s got it really sewn up, see, because they sucker you into voting for them by letting you legally drink and drive (not to mention the additional revenue from the beer tax), but don’t provide the jobs for you to get out and get your own flat, not even sharing, and don’t subsidise your uni studies enough for you even to pay for food, let alone get out and ditto. Geddit? Thought ya might of, yeah. So all us uni students have to like, take these huge full-time and highly underpaid jobs that we have to pretend are part-time if anyone asks at uni, and try to fit in our swot around them. In the intervals of grafting off the parents, right. Which gives the parents the right to send us off to our grim aunties. Gee, ya got that. Not that anybody at uni does ask, not any more. Jay Coates from next-door but one, he’s doing some sort of economics crap and we often get the same bus, he reckons that one of his lecturers has given up taking the roll in her tutes, she just marks everyone present. Like, if you thought it was all shiny button-down-collared males teaching the Ec stuff, you were wrong, see, they’re all in shiny well-paid employment in the shiny downtown towers; nearly all of his lecturers are women. Like, doing it part-time while the hubby pulls down megabucks in a shiny downtown— Boy, ya got that, too, eh?

    Me? Strictly maths, thanks. I’m gonna be a government statistician and always be in work. Dad reckons if I’m going that far I might as well set my sights on being a Taxing Woman, given that I’m pretty taxing anyway (joke, hah, hah), but that’s perilously close to Ec and Business Studies, so thanks but no thanks.

    I admit I’m doing a minor in Drama but that’s only because when I rolled up to sign on for my second year there was this bloody woman that wouldn’t sign my course card because there was nothing creative on it. I ask you! You don't go to uni to be creative, you go to learn something solid that hopefully’ll pay the fucking gas and electricity bills and the bloody mortgage for the rest of your natural. Anyway, most of the creative courses were full, fancy that. See, all these dim bimbos that passed nothing at school and scraped into uni by the skin of their teeth sign up for them, imagining they’re gonna skive off at the government’s expense—that or their parents’, right—for three or four years. –Bimbos of both sexes. Make that all sexes. Only funnily enough Drama wasn’t full.

    No, well, when I got there, complete with my revised course card, I found out why. There was this extremely up-himself joker that made you do an audition. Not officially, no: this is the last decade of the 20th century, for Chrissakes, you don’t have to have any aptitude to get into a uni course, you only have to have the sort of marks that are required for the subject. Low, in the case of crap like drama. Very high in the case of possibly even greater crap like medicine and law, that do require swot for several years but not the power of actual thought. So, like I say, this creep made it clear that it wasn’t an official audition, nevertheless making very sure he scared the bejasus out of anything that mighta thought it was signing on for a year’s rest, or even that was keen but not very brave. As pricks that think they’re gonna scare the bejasus out of people that are a lot younger, less self-assured and far, far less trendy that their trendy selves are exactly what make Dot Mallory see red, I stood up to him and did the fucking audition. When it was over he said in a stunned voice: “Have you read Ibsen?”

    “Some, yeah. So?”

    “Uh—” He had a look at my marks, and blinked, so up his. “What subj— Oh, Maths.”

    “Yeah. Look, I’m taking this course, because my marks qualify me. And if you try and stop me—”

    “I’m not trying to stop you, dear,” he said, sort of heavy, y’know? “Far be it from me to try to stop anything that’s actually read some Ibsen. Barrack-room lawyer or not.”

    “Good. Sign here, thanks.”

    So he signed with his bloody gold-nibbed Parker, I kid you not, and I got out of it fast.

    Well, I am going to the courses, I stuck it out grimly last year, but this year, this is the third year of my B.A. and if I wasn’t doing all those part-time jobs I coulda crammed in a few more courses and finished, it wasn’t so bad, because we didn’t have to do so much of the flapping the arms and legs and thinking ourselves round or ducks (just like kinder, right), or whatever the fuck ludicrous idea just happened to drift into our totally unprepared tutor’s head that arvo. And we did get to read a few plays. Well, bits of them, but I got the books from the library—the uni library’s ace, they got stuff going back to the First Fleet, practically, well, it is Australia’s oldest uni—and read the whole things. According to Dad it might help me to attain a few vestiges (you can’t attain vestiges, but who gives a rat’s?) of an education not to say maturity, so when Mum tried to say I was wasting my time he stuck up for me. I’m not wasting my time, I’m on top of all the maths stuff, they go far too slow in all those courses. Which reminds me—

    “Hey, I gotta be back in Feb, we got the show, ya know.”

    “So-called. All right, calm down, Kate knows. You’ll be back in good time for it. And kindly don’t ask her to sew your costume for you.”

    Ooh, good idea, she’s a neat sewer!

    “No, ’course not. Um, so is it tonight?”

    “Is what tonight?” she sighs, cutting up potatoes very, very, very— Oh, be for potato salad, bugger, thought for a moment she’d fallen off her perch and was gonna make one of those ace Spanish omelettes like what Joslynne’s Mum makes.

    “My plane.”

    “What?”

    “My plane, like, my flight. To Adelaide?”

    “What? No! Good grief! Do you imagine I’d—” She raves on but I've stopped listening. Maybe I could think up a real good excuse to get on down to Aunty May’s and just pop next-door to see Joslynne’s Mum, like round about teatime, before I go…

    “Eh? Yeah, yeah, keep ya hair on, I’ll lay the table.” Uh—hadn’t I better get those things off the line first? If they’ve been out there all day they’ll not only be stiff as cardboard with permanent wrinkles, the Sydney sun’ll have faded them to Kingdom Come. On second thoughts, who gives a rat’s?

    I go into the dining half of the kitchen-dining room, like there’s only a low bench dividing them so I can't escape her eagle eye, and lay the table.

    “Dot!”

    “What?”

    Rave, rave. Aw. Do they really? Would Aunty Kate really? I re-lay the table, putting the pudding spoons beside the knives… Gee, that looks weird. “Eh?”

    “Don’t say ‘eh’ like that!”

    How’d I oughta say it, then?

    “I said, put the cruet out!”

    The what? Oh, goddit, goddit, we’re practising for Aunty Kate. …I dunno where the fuck the thing is. Uh—sideboard?

    “Not that good silver set!”

    Is it? “Uh, it’s going to waste in there, Mum.”

    “At least it’s not getting broken by your brothers!”

    She’s got a point. Well, Tim’s past that stage, he’s the oldest, he’s nearly twenty-seven, just finishing off his Ph.D. part-time, quote unquote, while he works at his chosen profession of forensic toxicologist—don’t look at me, his relations are not responsible for his career choice and frankly, the mere smell of the place turns my stomach before I’ve even got as far as looking at the muck on his microscope slides. (According to the blokes at his work, the stink’s the Cannabis Section burning the stuff, and though on average I wouldn’t take any of their words the earth was still turning on its axis, in this instance I see no reason to doubt it: by law they have to pour some filthy muck on it so as they can’t actually enjoy the experience. Why the air-conditioning then has to duct the smell through the building at the taxpayers’ expense…) Tim’s married, having latched onto the notion that having a female slave earning a full-time wage plus and doing all the housework for you is a goer when the party of the first part is a male post-grad student. I don’t care if this is the Nineties, I've never met a female post-grad student that managed to acquire a male slave, and my cousin Rosie, who is a female post-grad student, due to finish next year, reckons that this is because no so-called liberated Aussie female has yet managed it.

    Anyway, as I say, Tim’s past the stage of breaking anything breakable on sight and in fact him and Narelle have got a flat of their own, though managing to come and bludge off Mum and Dad for approx. three nights out of six. Not out of seven: on Sundays they always go to her mum and dad’s, rain or shine, bush fires or electrical storms, Wendi (Narelle’s sister) in labour or… Geddit? Well, yeah, there is a fair bit of it about.

    –Yeah, that is “Wendi”, I agree it’s oddish, but then, who am I to talk, with a handle like “Dorothea” in the last decade of the 20th century? Added to which, however firm-minded one may be about being called only “Dot”, and believe you me, I'm firm-minded, the world is full of cretins determined to address one as “Dotty” and then fall about laughing themselves silly.

    It was a boy, if ya must know. Tim and Narelle always stay until ten-thirty and then her dad gets up, creaking and groaning, makes a couple of feeble jokes about the lateness of the hour and his rheumatics, one being as true as the other kind of thing, and shows them out, locking and bolting the front door after them—but very fortunately on this particular Sunday night Wendi was delivered of Jason William Andrew Harris a whole forty mins before the witching hour, so, in-laws not being that high in the order of things, at ten-twenty-nine Narelle was just able to ring Mum up and impart the news in a gasp before her cad got up, creaking and groaning— Yeah, there is a fair bit of that about, too, in the last decade of the 20th century.

    What was I— Oh, yeah, the boys. Jimbo and Danno. (Sigh. Poor old Mum thought that “James” and “Daniel” were such nice names.) The thing is, there’s five of us altogether and it was meant to be four, the twins were gonna be Margaret or Felicity, why she was convinced it was gonna be a girl, don’t ask. Then when the doc broke the glad tidings, boy was he a man with guts, they were gonna be Margaret and Felicity. Oops.

    They were an accident anyway, they’re miles younger than the rest of us, only eleven, and yes, they are a pair of right little tearaways, and no, nothing is safe from their great boots and great fists and tendency to play football in the house…

    Mum’s found another cruet, not the best set. Actually it’s got more glass and less metal… Oh, who gives a rat’s, at least once the boys have broken it it’ll never be able to put in an appearance on the tea table again, will it? I put it in the middle of the—

    “It’s empty!” she snaps.

    Ye-eah… Oh, right: Aunty Kate would never… Uh-huh. Yeah. Blah, blah, rave, rave, rave…

    I finally manage to get on out of it and go into the family-room and spread out the paper that my poor father never gets to look at first. It’s a rag, anyway, dunno why we bother…

    “OW! Don’t do that!”

    “Don’t up-end yourself over my paper, then, Dotty-Daddles,” he says, grin, grin, boy, does he think he’s funny.

    “Shuddup. And look out, she’s got a cruet on the table and she made me put the spoons all funny.”

    “Mm? Oh. Would this be anything to do with your Aunt Kate?”

    “Yeah, yeah, she’s broken the bad news, you can stop looking over your shoulder like a nervous two-year old.”

    “You been to Randwick with your Uncle Jerry again?” he spots me.

    “He needed me. One of his tic-tac men was down with—”

    Aw. Will my mother really? Oh—no, first it’ll be your head, will it, Dad? Gee. Better not  tell her, then, hadn't we?

    “And you can take that look off your face!” he finishes, grin, grin. “They’ve got antennae, ya know. Sniff you out.”

    “Yeah, yeah.”

    He sits down in his big chair with a sigh. “Let me have that paper, and for the love of Mike, get me a beer.”

    Obligingly I get up and give him the paper, though noting: “I’d say you’d had enough already.”

    “Not if your mother’s been on the blower to your Aunt Kate McHale, I haven’t,” he sighs.

    He’s got a point. And with that and the cruet— I get us each a beer, brilliantly waiting until Mum’s attention is on the stove so that she can pretend she doesn’t know I’m getting one for myself as well.

    “Make the most of it. Kate doesn’t let Jim knock ’em back, ya know,” he warns, sinking what I’d say is a good quarter of the can at one blow.

    “Balls, last time I was over there, he—” I break off hurriedly: Mum’s come in.

    “Must you encourage that girl to drink beer?” she greets her helpmate and provider.

    “Hullo to you, too, Cruella,” he sighs.

    “Stop that,” says Mum, trying to look dignified and only looking as if she’s going to laugh. She’s very like Aunty May: they’re both short, plump, fair women, and me and Rosie, alas, have inherited it. Well, the hair’s not bad, naturally curly, if hard to manage, but it’s definitely not Nineties physiology. Supposing that one wants to look like an anorexic model.

    “Come and give us a kiss, Sal, for God’s sake,” he sighs.

    Mum gives in and comes to give him a peck on the cheek, at which Dad pulls her very firmly onto his knee and kisses her properly. Gee, after twenty-six years of marriage (Tim beat them to it) wouldn’t you think they’d of got bored with it? Not judging by the way she’s giggling—no. Just as well the twins aren’t in here or we’d be deafened by the cries of disgust.

    “Where are the kids?’ he says cautiously, apropos.

    Mum’s very flushed. “Mm? Oh—the twins are in their room, didn’t you hear that stupid electronic dongy-knocker thing going as you came in?”

    “Video games,” I translate helpfully.

    “I got that, thanks, I don’t live in the nineteenth century all of the time. Where’s Bernice the Ballerina?”

    “Don’t call her that, Andy,” sighs Mum. –It was somewhat justified, she nearly got called Bernice, her name’s Deanna. Possibly Dad’s claim that Mum is besotted by Captain Picard has some truth in it, because where else could she of got it from? Deanna’s fifteen (meant to be the Benjamin—right) and mad on, you guessed it, lee ballay.

    “Madame Pinchot called an extra rehearsal for their stupid Christmas show,” she sighs.

    “What else?” he admits. “Ya want me to pick her up, love?”

    “No, it’s all right, Janyce Hardwycke’s mother’s doing it, poor martyred woman,” she admits.

    Dad winks at me. “This’d be the same martyred Mrs Hardwycke that’s married to the Fred Hardwycke that donated a whole gymnasium to ruddy St Agatha’s only last year, would it?”

    “No, he’s her father-in-law,” retorts Mum promptly, getting off his knee. “We won’t wait for Deanna. Dot, go and haul the twins off those stupid hunks of machinery and make them wash their hands before tea.”

    “And have a piss,” notes Dad fairly.

    “Don’t say that, Andy, the kids copy you.”

    “Eh? ’S’all right, your sister Kate’s still in Adelaide, Sal,” he says in surprise.

    I nip out quick before I can actually laugh. Poor old Mum, Dad can be a bit of a hard case. Specially when he’s in a good mood. Or full of beer—right.

    To everyone’s surprise, though not to the twins’ interest, of course, Bernice the Ballerina actually gets home while the rest of the family are still eating. Or in the twins’ case, gutsing. That’s a whole sausage that Danno’s trying to shove into his gob.

    So Dad goes: “Go and wash your hands before you sit down, Deanna.”

    “We always wash and change after practice,” says the ballerina, looking down her nose.

    “Never mind that, you’ve been in the car—all right, Jimbo, the pristine Mercedes of the thrice-blessed Hardwycke family—nevertheless. Go—and—wash,” he says clearly, as the ballerina’s looking blank,

    Pouting, she waddles out, duck-fashion.

    “Graceful,” he notes, wresting the potato salad off Danno before it can vanish in the direction of the sausages. –You’re wondering why hot sausages in the middle of a steaming Sydney summer? Your family hasn’t got any growing boys in it, that’s for sure. Great eaters, they are. Omnivorous, they are not, report in this instance hath a lying tongue, somewhat like Rumour. Sausages, chips, hamburgers, not necessarily in order of preference, bought pies, mashed potato, anything that looks like pudding except Narelle’s trifle, dunno what she does to it but I’m with them, it sure is weird. Uh… Vegemite sandwiches. Cornflakes. Uh… In Danno’s case, Mum’s potato salad, yeah. That’s about it, sorry

    What? Junk food, cakes and biscuits are not part of the staple diet in this house, thanks! Of course they’ll eat them, they’ll eat them till the cows come home! That’s not the point!

    “What’s she done to her hair?” asks Dad, not with that much interest, eating potato salad.

    “Mm? Oh: Ber—Deanna. I couldn’t stop her,” sighs Mum.

    “Dyed,” I explain helpfully. “Janyce Hardwycke looks even worse.”

    “Even more peculiar, ya mean!” says Jimbo with a hoarse laugh. He and Danno laugh hoarsely.

    Ignoring this completely, in fact you’d swear he never heard them, in fact he’s so used to then he probably didn’t, Dad says limply: “But young Janyce had the most beautiful auburn curls! Like the Titania in Derry Dawlish’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

    “Georgy Harris: yes,” agrees Mum, also limp. “Well, don’t look at me. The girls have all got hold of this stupid idea that black hair, scraped back with a bucket of gel—”

    “Gel? Be fair. Or mousse.”

    “Shut up, Dot. That black hair scraped back until the flesh of the face strains over the bones is the ballerina-like thing.”

    Ma Pinchot to a T. “Wonder who they could of got it off?”

    “Shut up, Dot! It could be worse, Andy,” she says without conviction. “Some girls of her age are into drugs or—or unsuitable boys.”

    “I grant you the unsuitable boys, I saw young Janyce on the train with a bald creature covered in spots and nose rings just the other day, but name one St Agatha’s girl that’s on drugs!” he challenges.

    She can’t, of course. Ole Nosy Parker, Ms Parker to you, she sacks anything that even looks like looking at a drug, into the bargain having their parents on the mat, I kid you not. When I was in the Sixth Form (like what lesser schools, i.e. the rest of the country, call Year 12), she sacked Rosemarie Grainger without a second thought just because she was caught smoking pot in the Mall on a Saturday, not even in school uniform. And her Dad’s a prominent barrister, the sort that sits on Royal Commissions for like a cool thou’ an hour, but did that phase Ole Nosy Parker? Did it Hell as like. Rosie reckons it was just as bad in her day, even though they had a different ole bag as headmistress back then.

    “Rosemarie Graing—”

    “Not in the dim, distant past, Dot,” he sighs.

    “No, well, Ole Nosy Parker got shot of her, P.D.Q. She’s at uni now, didja know? But even Ole Man Grainger’s megabucks couldn’t pull enough strings for her to get into law.”

    “That’s probably actionable, Dot,” he warns.

    “Yeah. Still fuddling what little mind she’s got with burnt green matter.”

    “Who is?” demands Deanna suspiciously, coming in and sitting down. “Just one slice of ham, please, Mum.”

    “Dumb Rosemarie Grainger, who else?”

    “Oh—her. Pauline Grainger says she’s going to get engaged to that Terry Devane.”

    “Uh—think you mean his son, love,” objects Dad. “Terry’d be nearly my age.”

    “No, Dad,” says his fifteen-year-old daughter in a tolerantly bored voice. “John Devane’s going round with that awful Turner girl that imagines she’s a super-model, you’re always seeing her picture in the papers, and Gary Devane’s gay.”

    “So he can’t get married,” agrees Jimbo unexpectedly.

    “Uh—” Dad decides to let that one pass. “Terry Devane? Young Rosemarie?”

    “It happens.”

    “Shut up, Dot! For God’s sake—! Well, what happened to his first? –Sal?”

    “Mm? I don't know, dear, I don’t keep up with all these legal beagles.”

    Dad’s a solicitor, he does conveyancing, mostly, though I have to say his heart isn’t in it. He swallows and corrects feebly: “Legal eagles, love.”

    “Is it?”

    Helpfully I explain: “Yeah, like that real dumb film with Robert Redford, I think he's dumb anyway, why does he always have to be the nice guy, and, um, Debra Winger, she was totally wasted in that part, and that dumb blonde.”

    Dad looks fixedly at my head.

    “She played a dumb blonde, ya nana. She was in Steve Martin’s version of Cyrano, Dad.”

    He brightens. “Oh, yes! A lovely girl!”

    We’ve lost Deanna. “What?”

    “Roxanne,” I explain kindly.

    “Oh! Darryl Hanna!” Kindly the ballerina gives us a brief biog., following through with the entire low-down on just what is wrong with the face, the figure and blah, blah.

    “Yes,” says Dad limply. “Uh, if we can get back to our muttons, wasn't one of us wondering what happened to Terry Devane’s first?”

    So Mum goes: “We don’t know, Andy. –Have some potato salad, Deanna, carbohydrates give you energy, and you can’t say you haven’t used up a lot this afternoon.”

    The ballerina takes a very small spoonful of potato salad and then heaps her plate with lettuce.

    “Didja know lettuce is a soporific?”

    “If that’s one of Tim’s, Dot, we don’t want to know,” warns Dad.

    “No, I read it somewhere.”

    “Only if taken in very large quantities,” says Mum with a sigh. “Doesn’t anyone want jellied beetroot?”

    We all go: “No!”

    “Dunno why you made, it really,” adds Dad airily.

    “I didn’t, Jill Henderson gave it to me.”

    “Kyla and Peta’s mum?”

    “Yes. Why, Dot?” she goes in a steely voice, like, am I gonna say in that case I’ll eat it?

    “I was just wondering if she mentioned how Joslynne’s Mum is.”

     Dad doesn’t even have to think about it, he just goes: “Daft as a brush.”

    “Shut up, Andy! –And must you call the woman Joslynne’s Mum?”

    Eh? “Like, she is.”

    “Rosie always calls her that, she’s picked it up from her,” says Dad with a grin. “Mrs Gridley-Smythe,” he says in refeened tones.

    Aw. Yeah. Mrs Gridleh-Smaythe, I’m gonna sound a real nana going round saying that, eh? “Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

    Danno come to and goes: “He’s only Mr Smythe, though.”

    “Go to sleep again,” sighs Dad.

    Jimbo kicks him under the table. “Like Mrs Elephant-Walker and Mr Walker, dickhead!”

    “Stop that!” shouts Dad before battle can be joined. “And don’t let me hear you using that expression at your mother’s dinner table again, or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”

    “Pooh! I heard y—” Jimbo catches his eye, and stops.

    “Anyway,” adds Dad very limply indeed, “it isn’t ‘Elephant-Walker’, it’s Elphinstone- Walker.”

    “Close enough.”

    “Shut up, Dot,” he groans.

    Why is everyone always telling me to shut up? “Are we ever gonna get any pudding, Mum, or are you just gonna sit there mooning over Mrs Henderson’s beetroot forever and a day?”

    “It’s very tasty, actually,” she says with a sigh, getting up. “But if you won’t, you won’t. I suppose I’ll have to lie to the poor woman again.”

    “Mum, if you go on lying to her—” I catch Dad’s eye and shut up like a clam.

    “Twins, bring your dishes out, please!” she says loudly.

    Scowling and shuffling, they drag themselves to their feet.

    “Take Dot’s.”

    “Aw-wuh! Why can’t she—”‘ Jimbo meets her steely glare and subsides. He takes my plate.

    “Danno. Danno! Take your father’s plate!”

    Danno takes Dad’s plate and they shuffle through to the kitchen.

    “She’s gonna let them lick out the cream bowl, they must know that, are they complete morons?” I wonder, not bothering to lower my voice though they’re just the other side of the divider, well, and behind the fridge door. Well, if people object to taking your plate they can lump hearing your honest opinion of them, lazy little sods.

    “Yes!” Dad and Deanna chorus. They look at each other and grin pleasedly. In spite of the ridiculous scraped-back hairdo, suddenly I can see why everyone says Deanna looks very like Dad. He’s like in his mid-fifties, thin, darkish, with little slanted brown eyes, and though hers are much bigger and she’s got five metric tonnes of muck on the lashes and lids, à la Ma Pinchot, they’re exactly the same shape as his. And she’s got his thin face and pointed chin whereas Mum and Tim and me have all got round faces. The twins are more like Dad and Deanna: thin, and in their case, sharp, rat-like faces. The rest of us have all got blue eyes like Mum’s, so Dad must carry the recessive gene, too—elementary genetics. The twins’ noses are too squashed and unformed to tell but perhaps when they’re older they’ll be like Dad’s: it’s rather nice, high-bridged but quite small. Deanna hasn’t got his nose, she’s got the same nose as me and Mum and Rosie and Aunty May: small and very straight. His hair’s grey now but Mum reckons that when he was young it was the same brown as Deanna’s. And their smiles are very, very similar.

    “What are you grinning about, Dotty-Daddles?”

    “Genetics.”

    “God! Ask a silly question—!” He gives up on me as a bad job. “How was school, Deanna?”

    So she goes: “All right. Mrs Jeavons has got a new car.” So much for anybody that was expecting to hear about what she learned. Well, woulda been a short speech—yeah. So she describes the English teacher’s car in detail. Anybody that was waiting to hear whether they got through A Kind of Loving—it’s nearly the end of term and they had their exams yonks back and poor Ma Jeavons imagines she’s introducing them the easy way to something approaching English Lit.—would be disappointed but neither us of was, so we aren’t. Dad just smiles valiantly, not being into cars, or consumer goods of any kind, actually. If it wasn’t for the face, it’d be hard to believe she was his—yeah. But then, look at the tiny pinheads fighting over the cream bowl as Deanna speaks.

    So I go: “Got your exam results yet?”

    The ballerina looks down her straight nose and the resemblance to Dad disappears, to be replaced by a much stronger one to ruddy Aunty Kate. “They’re not due till the end of the week, don’t you remember anything from school?”

    “Try not to,” I admit.

    “That’ll do, Dot. Not worried, are you, Deanna, love?”

    “’Course not,” she says without interest.

    “Nah, she’ll get straight C’s, same as ever,” I concede.

    Dad tries to smile but fails. “Mm. Well at least she passes, unlike some.”

    “You wanna try making them do their homework, instead of spending hours on the phone trying to get tomorrow’s hot tips out of Uncle Jerry.” –Rosie’s dad. He’s a bookie: Grant & Marshall, Turf Accountants. Old man Grant’s been retired for yonks, Uncle Jerry’s Marshall. Doing bloody good, too, Aunty May’s always buying new furniture and crap and she’s planning to build on an extension and put a pool in. Dunno if she can swim or not, and I know Rosie’s hopeless, but the rest of us rellies’ll be grateful, that’s for sure.

    I gotta get going, they better hurry up with that pudding. “OY! Are you hatching that pudding out there?”

    “Don’t shout at your mother, Dot!”

    I wasn’t, I was shouting at the bloody tw—Forget it. She’ll of gone broody over the pair of little horrors, she often does that—had them too late, is the usual family conclusion. Anyway, she brings it out. Fruit salad and ice cream. The ballerina refuses cream on her fruit salad. Mum takes a smallish spoonful: Joslynne’s Mum—beg pardon, Mrs Gridleh-Smaythe—will of been ear-bashing her about bad cholesterol again. In between puffing at the pot from those plants she keeps on the windowsill in the bog—right. I take a large, make that two large spoonfuls, my engine needs stoking.

    “Gotta go.”

    So Mum goes: “What? Where to?” Like, this hasn’t happened every Thursday night for the last— Forget it. Hormones.

    “Mum, it’s Thursday. Darien needs me at the service station.” It’s only local: late-night shopping Thursday in the suburbs, ya see, everybody’ll be filling up.

    “Dot, it’s not safe, stuck out there all hours of the night!”

    “Balls. There’s two of us, see, that deters the ra—” Just in time I catch Dad’s eye. “Robbers and hold-up men. But if you insist, I’ll take one of the twins’ Uzis.”

    “They’re only plastic,” says Mum limply.

    “Yeah, but they look real good since I doctored them up for them.” See, Tim got them for them last Christmas, he’s quite a generous brother when he bothers to think about it—not often, true—and I was flat broke, so my contribution was to make them look real. Actually I ended up spending so much on the special paint to go on top of the plastic and then the special paint that looks like metal, and the black paint that went artistically into the hollows— Yeah. Even though Bob Springer from Mitre 10 at the Mall let me have it at mate’s rates because I work for him on Saturday mornings.

    “Well—Be quiet, twins! Um, yes, take one, dear,” she says limply, not having grasped that it’s a leg-pull, oh, dear, dear, dear. Poor old Mum. “Only put it in a bag, Dot, they look so real from a distance, we don’t want the police taking pot-shots at you.”

    Right, this’d be the police that took fifty min to turn up when Darien’s Dad was held up last y— All right, it happens. But he was on his ownsome and the silly sod hadn’t locked the bulk of the takings in the safe before settling in for the night with his Walkman and the racing paper.

    Like, why not? No skin off my nose. So I go into the twins’ rat-hole—Christ!—ignoring the shrieks, and grab up Danno’s, since Jimbo’s got a bit knocked off it in the last round of Rambo or Star Wars or whatever and the grey plastic’s showing. On second thoughts, she’s right, the cops will shoot on sight, so I shove it into my glowing purple and yellow nylon carryall that I got real cheap off Bob Springer, they were running a special, buy some roof-paint crap costing megabucks and you get a free one, only the whole neighbourhood wasn’t flocking to repaint their tin roofs, not even for a free nylon carryall, funny, that.

    “Hey, that’s a real rat-hole in there, you wanna get them to clean it out once in a blue—”

    But Dad goes: “Get GOING, Dot!”

    So I get going. A wink’s as good as a nod to a blind woman, eh? The servo’s not far but I take my push-bike, no way am I gonna ask for it by walking home in the wee small hours. Like, Darien’s dad’s ordered him not to spend hours taking me home in his car, but anyway the passion-waggon’ll probably be in dock, as usual.

    … Yep, it’s in dock, all right, in fact it’s in the lube bay and he’s under it.

    “Hey, you fellow, thare! Ay wish to fill up may Roller, can’t one get service in these Awstralian parts?”

    “Get knotted, Dot!”

    Hullo and good evening to you, too, Darien. “Hey, there’s a lady here, she wants to fill up her Merc, do we take Diners’ Club?” –Round here it’s usually MasterCard or Visa or fill ’er up quick from the self-serve and scarper before Darien notices, regardless of the array of security cameras his Dad’s put in.

    His head pokes out. “I said, Get KNOT— Oh. Sorry. Yeah, we do, only check it’s current, right?”

    Current? Darien, she’s driving a huge new shiny Merc, even bigger than Uncle Jerry’s, and she’s emanating, what’s something bigger than wafts, um, gusts, no, clouds, right, clouds of like Guerlain or, um, Chanel, or, um— Forget it.

    So I go back over to the driver’s window and, staggering slightly as the French fumes hit, go: “Yeah, we do take Diners’ Club, lady, you wanna go ahead and fill ’er up?”

    At this moment Steve Carter from down the road drives up in his newish 4WD and sticks his head out his window and hollers: “Hey! DOT! Move that Merc on, it’s blocking the pumps!”

    So it is. “Hey, lady, you wanna move on a bit? Go up to the next pump, right? That’s got Super.”

    She doesn’t move. “Is it self-serve?”

     Put it like this, Darien’s dad’d kill us if ya just grabbed it and scarpered. “Yeah, but we gotta check the amount ya rung up.”

    She ignores that, the concerns of us little people at the mercy of hold-up men and rapists and purse-snatchers and muggers are of no interest to a Double Bay-type lady in a huge shiny new Merc slathered in Fr— All right, self-evident.

    “Can’t you do it for me?”

    Gracious. “Yeah, righto. Only move ’er up, wouldja?”

    As a huge concession she moves ’er up and Steve Carter duly hollers: “About time!” Followed by loud echoes from the three more that are trying to pull in behind him.

    So I take a good squiz at the Diners’ Club card but it means less than nothing to me. Well, looks genuine enough. I fill ’er right up, not asking how much she wants, and bung it on the card, not offering to wipe the windscreen or check the tyres or nothing.

    “Slumming, are ya?” I ask, holding the card at a tempting distance.

    “What?” she says crossly, not asking me how much that come to, Christ, coulda put anything on it.

    “Like, down here slumming, are ya? How’s Double Bay?”

    “Very funny,” she says coldly. “May I have my card back?”

    “Yeah, sure. Watch yaself.”

    The automatic window shoots up the minute the card’s in her mitt but I was expecting that, see. And off she lumbers, Jesus, the woman cannot drive. What a waste of a lovely car.

    Steve pulls up beside me. “What a waste. Gold Card, was it?”

    “No, Diners’.”

    He grins weakly. “That’d be right. Catch the plates?”

    “Nope, I was too busy trying to figure out whether that card was current, Steve.”

    He grins. “DAHLIA.”

    “Huh?”

    “Dee, Ay, Haitch, Ell, Eye, Ay,” he spells laboriously.

    “Fuck me.”

    “Any time, Dot!” –Grin, grin. Funnily enough Mrs Carter isn’t with them but there’s a disgusted cry of “Da-ad!” from Princess Diana Carter and Prince Harry Carter, in the back.

    “How much was that, Steve?”

    “Twenny litres,” he owns morosely.

    Shit. Must be down to their last bean, local rumour’s right, as usual. Well, he would go and buy the thing— Generously I give his windscreen a squirt with the good stuff and polish it off beautifully with the clean rag. “Check ya tires?”

    “Why not?” he says morosely. I check the tires and they need air so he moves on over to the free air and I go inside and ring up his twenny litres. And pick up a couple of Mars Bars while I’m at it.

    So I go: “Here—” But before the word’s out of me mouth they’ve deafened me with screams of “YAY!” and are unwrapping them.

    “Um, thanks,” says Steve weakly, leaning on the thing. “Um, didja, um, I mean, well, it was a kind thought, Dot, but didja put it on the”—barely repressing a wince, poor bastard—“card?”

    “Nah, ’s’on the house.”

    He sags. “Thanks.”

    “No prob.” And I go and get on with it…

    “Put it in the safe.”

    “But I gotta count it!”

    “Darien, we’re sitting here in this glass box at eleven-forty-four p.m. all lit up like Christmas for the benefit of the hold-up men, only a cretin would sit there counting the money! Put it in the safe!”

    “But Dad says I gotta count it first!” he wails, great male wimp that he is.

    “Is he here at the mercy of the muggers and heist men? No! Put it in the safe!”

    He musta got the point because he’s gone out back to put it in the safe.

    Gee, now he’s gonna count the Crunchie Bars and Mars Bars and packets of M&M’s, is he? Well, let him.

    So ten minutes of muttering and heavy breathing pass, and he goes: “How many of these have you eaten?”

    “If ya mean since ya last counted them, Scrooge, none.”

    Confidently he goes: “You mean Uncle Scrooge.”

    Literate little fellow, in’e? “Whatever. I never ate none of them, see, but I give my allotted share to Diana and Harry Carter.”

    “What a waste.”

    Something like that, yeah. “Rhonda Innes been round here lately with that fat brother of hers in tow?”

    “Oh,” he says sheepishly. “That’s right, she was here, earlier on— She was only filling up the Honda!” he adds quickly.

    Darien, read my lips: I don’t care what she was filling up. I, D,O— No, well, she’s dumb as they come and the Honda’s silverized purple, but she is gorgeous if you like Courteney Cox lookalikes with red streaks in their hair that their mates at New Wave Hair down the Mall done while they were waiting for the suburban mums to trickle in. And there’s no doubt Darien does like them.

    “I believe you, thousands wouldn’t. You can put the dough for what you give them in the till now, thanks, no way am I gonna have your Dad blame me for nicking—” He’s putting the money in the till, great male wimp that he is. Why doesn’t he stand up to his fucking Dad and tell him that if he has to slave all night and half the day as well in his bloody servo, he’s entitled to as many— Oh, well. We can’t all have guts.

    I think it’s sunk in that I’m not gonna pursue the Rhonda Innes topic because he ventures: “Um, what’ll happen when your little brothers come round on Sunday and find out you gave their Mars Bars to the Carter kids?”

    “Nothing, because I won’t be here, Mum’s sending me off to stay with Aunty Kate in SA.”

    “Hah, hah,” he says uneasily.

    “True. You wanna split the price of a packet of M&M’s?”

    Cautiously he counts his change and agrees.

    So we go Dutch on a packet of M&M’s and he goes: “It’s not true, is it?”

    I’m reading the label. “Can’t be, the laws on food labelling aren’t due to come in till about 2003, didn’tcha know?”

    “Hah, hah. Um, is it true?”

    “Yeah, why would I joke about something like that? It’s the late afternoon flight, that’ll mean I miss out on tea here and get in to Adelaide too late for tea there, but that’s the airlines for ya.”

    “Um, yeah. Um, is it Qantas or Ansett?”

    “What’s the diff?”

    “Very funny.” –Like, varying the theme slightly. “Um, why?”

    “Part of Mum and Aunty Kate’s joint campaign to turn me into a little lady, whaddelse?”

    “I wish you’d be serious for half a minute, Dot!”

    “I am. Unfortunately. –Well, go on, can ya think of another reason?”

    No. Right.

    “What about your job? Who’s gonna do Sundays?”—Gee, can’t guess, Darien.—“Dad’ll make me do it!” he wails.

    Gee, no kidding?

    He broods over the counter, absent-mindedly eating M&M’s. Eventually he goes: “Don’t you care?”

    Like, I did see that one coming, so I go: “Nope.”

    “What about me?” he says sulkily.

    Don't care about you, neither, Darien, hasn’t that sunk in yet? “Nope.”

    “You're really horrible, Dot Mallory!” he bursts out, sounds like one of the ruddy twins.

    “Yep.”

    “I must say, I thought, after—” He breaks off, pouting.

    Didja, just? In that case my cousin Rosie was right, not that she always isn’t, about the male half, and they do assume that having got it in there, they got the right to own ya soul. Own ya soul and never give you another blind thought in their lives, right.

    “No, well, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve told ya before, I like you but you’re not my type.”

    “Well, if I’m not your type, and you reckon Jay Coates isn’t your type, who is your type?” the exasperated lad may be heard to cry, the echoes ringing round our illuminated glass box in the middle of the Sydney suburban wilderness.

    Ya got me there, mate. Something with more than half a brain between its ears and a bod that ya wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen out with in public on a fine day and, um, dunno. That can think for itself? Too much to hope for. That isn’t possessed by the ambition to settle down on a fifth of an acre or in a dinky little townhouse you can’t swing a cat in, according to the socio-economic group its mum belongs to, and eventually own one point seven kids, a giant sit-on motor-mower half the size of the back lawn, two cars, a boat, a gigantic mortgage, a gigantic insurance policy, and enough superannuation to feed an entire community of back-country Aborigines for the next millennium? Make that feed, clothe and house. I’m never gonna find one of those Downunder, is that for sure or is that for sure.

    But goodness, Dot, if I don’t want that, what do I want? –Assorted female rellies, as if ya couldn’t of guessed.

    Gee, I dunno. I just know what I don’t want.

    He's waiting for an answer, so I go: “Dunno.”

   The lip wobbles. “You might at least do me the courtesy of trying to answer!”

    Blow me down flat, the courtesy? Three whole syllables, an’ all. Look, dickhead, I can't give you an answer because I haven’t got an answer! “Uh—well, someone with a few brains, for a start.”

    “That’s right, rub it in that I never got into uni!” he shouts. Gee, Darien, all the time I was at St Agatha’s you affected to despise up-themselves persons that swotted to pass their exams and be eligible to get into uni. Whether or not they wore glasses, too.

    I’m getting like, fed up with the silly wanker, so I go: “Never got into uni? Never passed Year 11, more like it.”

    He goes into a tirade about his dad never letting him swot and always making him mind the servo and blah, blah, heard it all before…

    “Some of the greatest cretins I know are at uni, that’s no proof of brains. Anyway, I’m too bossy for you. If you were honest with yourself you’d come right out and admit it.” –Of course, he needs someone bossy: that sticks out a million miles. Only unlike girls of the Rhonda Innes type, I’m not the sort that bothers to hide it until you’ve been living together for more than six months and have planned out exactly when you’re gonna get engaged, when and where you’ll have the wedding, when you’ll put the deposit on the house and when you’ll start the first kid. Yeah, there is a fair bit of that about, didja imagine we’re all happy-go-lucky cobbers Downunder?

    Ya know what? I find blokes that need someone bossy, or are looking for another mother, ya could put it that, way, too, dead boring. Fated for spinsterhood, Downunder—you said it, Germaine.

    “Don’t be silly,” he says sulkily.

    So I give up on the whole bit and get out my book and settle down to it—Mr McKenzie does let us sit, during the chilly watches of the night, though the one actually at the counter has to sit on the high stool. It’s far too high for me, I can’t even reach the rung for the feet, but luckily Dickhead Darien thinks he’s Christmas perched on it, what a dickhead.

    Time passes…

    “Leave my M&M’s alone, Darien, you’ve had your share!”

    He leaves my M&M’s alone.

    Time passes…

    “What are you reading?” he bleats.

    Gee, don’tcha just hate dickheads that say that? Actually I’m reading one of Dad’s old uni books: Anouilh’s Pièces grinçantes. I’m in the middle of La Valse des toréadors, ’member the film with Peter Sellers? In English, of course. He was very good, but the play’s better.

    So what would you say, in these circs? Given the remarks that have recently been passed about brains and dickheads—no, come to think of it, didn’t actually call him that out loud—nevertheless. So I go: “A book of Dad’s,” and he comes to peer over my shoulder. He blenches, funny, that.

    “But you’re not doing French!” he bleats.

    Manifestly I am doing French, dickhead. “I’m not doing the cretinous course that passes for a B.A. in foreign languages in the last decade of the 20th century, no, if that’s what ya mean.”

    “You got that off your dad, and it isn’t funny.”

    Dunno that it was meant to be funny, Darien. Leaving school doesn’t mean that you have to immediately forget anything and everything ya learnt there. It isn’t actually a law, evidence to the contrary. “Poncy Sonny Sommers reckons we might do one of these plays next year—in English, of course—so I thought I might as well read them.”

    “I bet that isn’t his real name,” he says sulkily.

    You and the rest of the civilised world, matey. “Yeah.”

    “So why read it in French, if he’s gonna do it in English?”

    Gee, so as not to forget everything I learned at school, and to stretch my brain a bit, and so as not to go mad with boredom in between the job here, and the job making sandwiches and waiting on at Leila’s, and the job helping out Bob Springer at Mitre 10, Darien!

    “All right, don’t answer!” he shouts.

    “Look, I could give you the answer but you won’t like it.”

    “Stop patronising me!” he shouts, tears standing in his big smoky grey eyes, with the great huge, curly, shiny black lashes that at one stage, silly wee feminine me, I thought were really irresistible, y’know?

    “All right, then. I’m reading it so as not to forget everything I learned at school, and to stretch my brain a bit, and so as not to go mad with boredom in between the job here, and the job making sandwiches and waiting on at Leila’s, and the job helping out Bob Springer at Mitre 10.”

    Gee, he doesn’t like it, fancy that. He goes sulkily back to his perch.

    Time passes…

    “There’s a car,” he says with some relief as an ear-piercing horn shatters the smothering peace of suburban Sydney at two thirty-seven a.m.

    “Ya don’t say.” I get up and carefully arrange the Uzi on the counter, leaning beside it in a casual fashion.

    “Dad’ll kill ya if he finds out ya brung that thing.” He squints at the car. “Hey, look at that! Shall I go—”

    “If ya do, your dad’ll kill you. If they haven’t, first,” I note, peering. Oh! “No, I’ll go.”

    “No!” he gasps, grabbing my arm. “Stay behind the plastic, Dot!”

    If you ask me, the plastic’s some cheapo stuff that wouldn’t stop a marshmallow, let alone a real bullet, because Mr McKenzie put it in himself, he’s far too mean to hire a security specialist. And into the bargain borrowed one of the demo drills off Bob Springer to drill breathing holes in it. Well, maybe voice holes. Whatever. It looks genuine enough, sure.

    “It’s my cousin Rosie—Rosie Marshall, ya dickhead.”

    He sags. So it is.

    So I go out and go: “Gidday.”

    “Were you asleep in there?” she goes, grinning.

    “Nah, Darien was making sure you weren’t the Mafia. Hard to tell, in this instance,” I explain, looking hard at the car. Where in God’s name did the bloke find it? And where did she find him, come to think of it. Not that Rosie hasn’t always got some sort of bloke in tow. Can’t keep them off with a stick, kind of thing, not that she tries. Only then they find out that all she’s really interested in is her Ph.D. and her blessed sociology, and she doesn’t want to settle down in a dinky townhouse or even a suburban box newly terracotta-rendered over the Sixties brick and produce one point seven kids for them while simultaneously holding down a boring full-time job and religiously doing their fucking washing and ironing. Like that. So they dump her. Unless the boredom’s already set in and she’s dumped them.

    “This is Hank,” she explains with the lovely smile that turns the male half to jelly. Well, the brain and the knees, not other portions of the anatomy in between.

    He looks like a Hank, come to think of it. “Gidday, Hank.”

    “Hi, Dot,” he grins. “Good to meet you. Rosie’s told me all about you!” Cripes, he is a Yank, where on earth did she pick him up? And, uh, is that a uniform? Didn’t know Rosie was into— Well, she’s tried everything else, true. From genuine surf lifesavers to, uh, the olds believe I don’t know this, a very well-off racing acquaintance, actually horse-owning acquaintance, of Uncle Jerry’s. All of Uncle Jerry’s age and then some. According to her he was bloody good in bed. Well, he’d of had time for the practice, yeah.

    “Hank’s just over here on a secondment,” she’s explaining.

    Right, while the Liberal government cosies up to the Yanks, as per usual. Not that the lily-livered Labor lot were any better. I really admire the way the Kiwis dumped the fucking ANZUS Treaty, y’know? And why the pollies imagine for one minute that if the Reds blow up that ruddy great fenced-off, American-owned satellite tracking station in Outer Woop-Woop, the Yankee Cavalry will come galloping to our rescue, God alone knows.

    “Yeah,” agrees Hank, slinging an arm along the white leather upholstery of the pale blue 1970-or-thereabouts Caddie convertible and brazenly squeezing her bare, plump shoulder. According to all the rest of the females in our extended family Rosie doesn’t care what she looks like. So tonight, it is a warm night, she’s in a blue halter-neck knit top with no bra, a look which according to the aforesaid, girls of her size didn’t oughta. Ya know what? I don’t think the blokes mind. Well, Hank doesn’t look as if he minds. The top looks sort of familiar, well, not in its present metamorphosis, no. Uh—the turquoise side of blue… Goddit. Think it originally belonged to our mutual cousin Wendalyn, that floral patch on one tit has gotta be covering the splodge where Wendalyn’s revolting offspring spewed up Fanta on it before they discovered she’s got an allergy to bright orange dye. Just before. And with it she’s wearing a wide pink belt like no-one in the universe is wearing this year, well, she has got a small waist, for a person with those tits and those hips, and—uh, yeah, the usual very beat-up jeans. And bare feet? All right, bare feet, maybe they’ve been to the beach. And given that she’s given up the flat and gone back home to Aunty May’s and Uncle Jerry’s to concentrate on finishing the thesis— Yeah, beach.

    “Want some gas?” I offer kindly.

    “Will Ole Man McKenzie let us put it on the slate?” replies my cousin with that smile again. Jesus, has she got a green bow in that mophead of tangled yellow ringlets? Uh—yep. With holly attached. Cripes.

    “Christmas,” she explains, following my gaze.

    “Uh—yeah. He’s never heard of the slate, Rosie. Cash or plastic. Thought Americans invented the plastic?”

    “We sure did, honey, and this old gas-guzzler sure does explain why!” he says with a nice laugh. Shirt unbuttoned, no tie, but it is a military-looking, pale khaki shirt. Crew-cut. Not trendy. Bet he is in the arm— No, wait! He’ll be a Marine, she’ll of took one look and been unable to resist the idea of notching up a real, genuine U.S. Marine.

    “Sure,” I agree. “Fill ’er up? –Ya wanna Coke or anything? Go in, Darien won’t be scared, he knows it’s you,” I offer generously.

    So they get out and go in while I fill ’er up. She has got bare feet, and he’s got shoes on only not socks: right.

    He’s disappointed to discover McKenzie’s Garage doesn’t stock Hershey bars, but relieved to find the Coke’s on ice. And receives my assurance, as I hand him the key to the dunny, that it’s really clean, I look after it myself, with smiling American good manners, God knows what he’s actually thinking of us all. And goes out to it. Let’s hope no muggers are lurking behind there in the dark. Though come to think of it, he looks more than capable of handling any number of muggers.

    “Is he a Marine?” I ask my cousin baldly.

    “Yeah. Major. Quite a good bloke,”

    Right, and is he, given his age and socio-economic bracket, Rosie—she’s shit-hot on socio-economic brackets—a good bloke with a wee wife and one point seven kids back home in Little Rock? No point in asking, though.

    “He reckernised the Uzi!” puts in Darien admiringly.

    “Darien, it’s got “UZI” lettered on its widest part in letters that cover the entire width of the widest—”

    “Without looking at its name!”

    “Good on ’im. Where the Hell did you find him, Rosie?”

    “Well, you know that nice little bar—” No, no, and no. I reckon she knows every nice little bar in the city, not to mention some not-so-nice ones, she once had a thing with a boxer, boy was he rough trade. But, a pussycat, quote unquote, underneath it. But gee, she wasn’t looking for a pussycat with a body like Mohammed Ali’s at the height of his career at that stage in her life, so when he suggested she might like to move permanently into his glossy bachelor pad with a great view of the harbour, she dumped the poor guy. He kept ringing her up and crying down the phone and sending her huge bouquets of red roses, this was during one of her periods back home and Uncle Jerry got real fed up and told her she was a heartless little bitch.

    “What was a Marine doing in a fancy bar like that?” wonders Darien.

    “He’s an officer, cretin-head,” explains Rosie amiably.

    “Be from a nayce background where they use antimacassars and finger-bowls,” I explain, not so amiably.

    Darien relapses into silent pouts. So when Hank’s come back and he’s bravely decided he’ll go, since they’re here to keep an eye on me, read, Hank’s here to rush to his rescue if the muggers strike, Rosie goes: “’Ve you and Darien had a row? Or is it just that you’ve told him Aunty Sally’s sending you over to Aunty Kate’s for Christmas?”

    Boy, no secrets in this extended family, are there? “I s’pose Mum rung Aunty May. No, well, he’s got the pip because of that, but I told him yonks back it was never going anywhere. In words of one syllable, so why he didn’t believe me, don't ask me.”

    “Dot, ya dill, ya went on seeing him every other day, of course he didn't believe you! They’re all like that.”

    “We sure are!” agrees Hank, coming up real close and putting his arm round her and squeezing a tit. She doesn’t seem to mind, funny, that. “See, we take one look at you pretty blonde Aw-sy girls and can’t think nor concentrate nor yet calculate!” –Why’s he grinning at me, mine aren’t nearly as big as hers and I’m not the one that’s wearing a halter-top three sizes too small for me.

    “Ya not wrong about the calculating, but. He rung up a hundred and eighty dollars when a poor lady tried to buy a carton of milk for cash last week, then he panicked because he couldn’t remember how to un-ring it. Hadda get on the blower to his dad eventually; boy, was he ropeable.”

    Given the accent and the vernacular, I don’t think he understood more than half of that, but he grins anyway and goes: “Sure, sure!”

    And Darien comes back and after Coke and ice creams all round that Hank insists on paying for, evidently they don’t have Trumpets back home, he thinks our ice cream’s real good, they go. With a parting injunction from my giggling cousin to give Aunty Kate her love.

    “What’s the betting,” says Darien on a sour note as the noise of the Caddie’s engine dies away into the night, “that she rings you up first thing tomorrow and warns you not to tell your Aunty May about him?”

    “A thou’ to one on. Wouldn’t you, if you were her and had a mother that’s a watering-pot that only wants you to produce grandchildren, like Aunty May?”

    Ignoring the watering-pot bit, he replies sulkily: “It’s natural.”

     All right, it’s natural. I return to my book. He returns to his perch. The silence of the warm suburban night engulfs us…

    There’s no sign of Mum, but Dad’s already up, yawning into the fridge. So I go: “Whadda you doing up?”

    So he goes: “Good morning and did you sleep well to you, too, Dotty-Daddles.”

    “Hah, hah. Well, what are ya?”

    “Your mother had a rough night.”

    “Lucky her.”

    “You can drop that, Dot. I told her to sleep in.” He gets the milk out and looks dubiously at it. “This fresh?”

    “Dunno. The skim is, I brung it home from the servo last night.”

    “Three hours since, more like. Darien bring you home?”

    Are you kidding? And desert the servo for 10 min around four in the morning when it’s never in all its history had a single, solitary customer? –No shift-work round our way. Or not since they closed the shirt factory, like back in the Middle Ages.

    “Nah, I biked.”

    “Just do me a favour and don’t tell your mother that, Dot,” he sighs.

    Are you kidding? That reminds me: “What is all this about rough nights?”

    “Mm? Oh. Not hormonal, this time, those peculiar pills that Joslynne’s Mum”—see?—“found for her seem to do the trick. No: worrying about whether you’ll drive your Aunty Kate out of her tree, I think.”

    That all? “It was all their idea.”

    “You don’t seem that interested, Dotty-Daddles,” he notes cautiously.

    “I’m not.” I inspect the strawberry jam jar. Empty. “Why do the stupid little sods always put the empty jar back in the fridge?”

    He puts an arm round me. “Listen, it’s not that we don’t want you home for Christmas. But Kate’s bloody lonely, with all her brood gone”—what total balls, she’s always dashing off to ladies’ bowls to boss them around, or the Over-Sixties Committee to boss them around, or the Scrabble Club to boss them around, or the you-name-it club to ditto—“and none of them seem to be able to make it over there for Christmas this year”—read, would do anything to get out of it—“so when she rang and suggested it, your mum thought we’d better let you go.”

    Aunty Kate suggested it? Thought it was all Mum’s idea. “Aunty Kate suggested it? She doesn’t even like me!”

    He gives me a bit of a squeeze. “Yes, she does, you nana. Can’t stand dumb people, haven’t you ever noticed?”—No, because as far as I can see, she can’t stand anybody. Put it this way, I never heard her say an approving word about anybody. Except the Queen, don’t think ya can count that.—“She’s got brains, you know, but your bloody grandparents would never have dreamed of sending a girl to uni.”

    “Um, no. Mum went.” In fact, she got her B.A. and then did a post-grad library diploma part-time, after Tim came along, only then I came along and she stopped work for a bit. She’s worked part-time off and on at the local library since: they know her there and know she’s reliable, so long as they don’t give her morning work, she can’t cope with getting the twins off to school and rushing off to a job and frankly, who can blame her? Though I know lots of working mums that do it.

    He gives me another squeeze and releases me. “That was because she’d met yours truly and when it dawned she wasn’t just another dumb blonde, I encouraged her to go.”

    “I geddit. Um, so, was Grandma Leach like, dumb, like, before she went gaga?” –She’s in a home. Usually refuses to recognise her descendants, claimed by some to be the Alzheimer’s, but Dad reckons it’s just spite.

    “Pretty dumb, yeah,” he says with a smile, putting sliced wholemeal in the toaster. “Judging by the photos, very, very pretty as a girl, though: it’ll be where you and your mum, and May and Rosie get it from!”

    Like, I go red like a total nana, what a nana. “Balls.”

    Dad just smiles. “Your Grandpa Leach was a bright old joker, though.”

    Like, he was a wharfie, for cripes’ sakes! I goggle at him.

    “Working-class boys didn’t have the opportunity to go to uni in his day, Dot,” he says mildly. “You ought to read some Australian history.”

    “Um, I seen quite a good dokko on the ABC about the Depression.”

    “Before the bloody government cut their funds back and they had to stop making them, you mean?” he notes sourly. “Yeah. Well, that’s a start. Um… Sal was going on about cooked breakfast for the twins. Uh—French toast, or some such.”

    “Dad, it’s her hormones, ignore her! Give them cornflakes, at least they’ll eat them. Or alternatively, slave over a hot stove for the little cretins. It’s your choice.”

    “Yeah. That jug boiled yet?”

    “Dunno.” I touch it cautiously. “Yeah, musta twitched itself off again.” I pour the water on the brown dust for both of us. “Any marmalade?”

    “Isn’t there some in the fridge?”

    “Couldn’t see any.”

    “I’m not volunteering to invade your mother’s pantry and look for a new jar.”

    “Chicken.” I open the pantry door. “Jesus!” Hurriedly I shut it again. “What’s she stocking up for? Word War III?”

    “Something like that. Well, hormones. Oh, and Christmas is coming up,” he says vaguely, cautiously sniffing the milk.

    “Is it off?”

    “Dunno. Well, given that it was sitting on the bench in full sun when I got up, maybe I won’t risk it.”

    “One of them will of been drinking out of it last night behind Mum’s back, personally I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.”

    “Everyone has everyone else’s germs in a family, Dot,” he says, buggered if I can see why he’s smiling.

    Thanks very much! I, personally, Dorothea May Mallory, do not have the filthy germs of those poisonous, make that cretinous and poisonous, little toads.

    “Yes, you do,” he says, reading my mind.

    Ignoring that, I grab a piece of toast and sit down with it.

    Dad sits down with sigh. “Maybe I won’t make French toast.”

    “I wouldn’t.”

    He eyes me dubiously. “You are going to Leila’s this morning, are ya?”

    “Sure. Why?”

    He looks at my camouflage daks and faded, second-hand, purplish tee-shirt that was a good buy, it’s long enough to serve as a nightie at need. “Where’s your uniform, then?”

    It’s, like, not really a uniform, I mean, she doesn’t provide them, that’d cost her cash money, if you’re waiting on she just orders you to wear a tight black skirt and a white blouse tucked into it on pain of never being employed again in the whole of metropolitan Sydney, kind of thing. “Eh? Oh. Leila said I could hang it up there, saves sweating into it on the train, see? And no risk of spilling stuff on the blouse when I’m making the sandwiches. Geddit?”

    “Mm.” He sips coffee cautiously. “Ugh, muck.”

    “Make some real stuff, then.”

    “Can’t be blowed.”

    Exactly. I eat toast and marg and drink weak Instant with skim milk in silence…

    “Didn’t see the bloody paperboy when you came home, did you, Dot?”

    “I wasn’t that late!”

    “No, I didn’t mean… Well, I couldn’t see it.”

    “Be in the hibiscus tree again.”

    “No, I looked up there.”

    “Uh—on the roof?”

    “More than likely. If he came at all,” he sighs.

    You said it.

    We eat toast and marg and drink weak Instant with skim milk in peaceful silence…

    “Gotta go, Friday’s Leila’s busy day.”

    “I know. Um, Dot—”

    The cat’s got his tongue. “Yeah? What?”

    “Um, well, look, your mother and your bloody Aunt Kate hatched this scheme up between them before I— What I mean is, I’m bloody sorry about forcing you to give up the holiday jobs. Are you gonna be strapped for cash next year, love?”

    “Dunno. Depends if Leila’ll take me back in Feb.”

    He’s looking at me anxiously.

    “She’ll of had to replace me for the pre-Christmas crowds. Only I’m reliable, see; she might take me back.”

    “Mm.”

    “I’ll find something, don’t worry!”

    “Yeah. Well, I’ll do what I can…”

    “Bulldust, Dad! You’ve got the pair of them growing out of shoes, not to say bloody football boots, every time ya turn round, and she reckons they’re both gonna have to go to the orthodontist next year!”

    “Yes, well, we can’t neglect their teeth.”—Thousand of families do, mate. And who gives a rat’s if the pair of them have teeth pointing down their throats like, talking of which, a bloody rat for their rest of their natural? With those faces, straight teeth aren’t gonna make any diff, believe you me.—“They look enough like a pair of scrawny rodents as it is, without that, poor little brutes,” he sighs.

    Uh—yeah. Sometimes you forget he’s got the parent hormones as well as her. “Yeah. Gotta go or I’ll miss the train. See y—”

    He gets up. “No, hang on, Dot, I’ll drive you to the station.”

    Yeah, righto, if you wanna martyr yourself because of your guilt feelings over Mum sending me off to Aunty Kate’s without a by-your-leave, go right ahead. “All right. In that case I’ll have time to clean my teeth.”

    “Mm. And put some sunscreen on. ‘Slip slop, slap’, remember.”

    Right. Sunscreen in order to be incarcerated in Leila’s making sandwiches for four hours. But I go off to the bathroom and do it anyway, it isn’t worth the aggro of arguing with them. Specially not when the parent hormones and the guilt hormones strike together.

    Gee, Leila’s totally ropeable at being dumped with no notice, thought she would be. But if she’d of taken me on full-time instead of casual, I’d of been able to afford to share a flat and tell Mum and Aunty Kate where to put it, wouldn’t I? So up hers. Anyway, she’s gonna close over Christmas-New Year’s like she always does, and if you were thinking that might of meant holiday pay for yours truly, forget it, casual workers don’t get holiday pay, that’s why they take you on as casual. That and so as they can ring you up at seven-fifteen just as you were about to dash for the train and tell ya not to come in today, it’s raining and there won’t be that much custom, or not to come in today, their niece Tanya’s just come down from Brizzie and she’s gonna do it, or not to come in today, it’s like whatever. Yeah.

    So by eleven-thirty I've made the exact number of sandwiches like what she ordered, so she comes out back and goes: “Get into your uniform, what are you doing, standing around like that?”

    “Acksherly I was wondering if my cousin Rosie could fill in for me, Leila.”

    “Is this the cousin that—” Blah, blah, blah.

    “Well, yeah, but she is a reliable worker, Leila.”

    “I don’t need the sort of reliable worker that chats up my customers, thanks!”

    “Well, she won’t encourage them, only they take one look at her and their eyes go fuzzy and their hormones go into a spin and their—” Cof.

    “Yes?” she says in a steely voice, boy does she sound like Aunty Kate.

    “Nothing. But she won’t encourage them, honest. And she’ll be a draw. Well, with all the pin-striped businessmen in our neck of the woods? And Le Café’s only got that skinny Julia and that spotty Neil on their pavement tables.”

    This is true. She looks thoughtful. “All right, ring her. And hurry up!” –As the bell on the door goes. “That’ll be Mr Macintosh and Mr Haynes, and the rest of them’ll be in any minute!” –Read, in half an hour. Mr Macintosh and Mr Haynes are two prissy middle-aged public servants that always buy their lunches and always get in early to beat the rush.

    So I ring Rosie.

    “Oh, its you, hi. I’m glad you rung, I was gonna ring you.”—Gee, was Darien right after all?—“Listen, don’t mention Hank to Mum, will ya?”—Gee, Darien was right.

    “No. Isn’t she there?”

    “Obviously not, Dot! She’s in the back yard, pegging out.”

    “Eh? Isn’ it a bit late for even Aunty May to be doing the washing?”

    “What? No!” she says with a laugh. “No, she’s not doing the washing, Dot, she did that hours ago, she’s pegging out the area for the new wing.”

    Ugh, last time I heard of it, it was only gonna be an extension. I’m not asking. “Gotcha. Um, how’s the thesis?”

    “Finished it!”

    “I get it, Hank was, like, a celebration.”

    “’Course!” she says with a laugh.

     So I go: “So when’s your viva?”

    “Dunno. Like, when they come back from their three months’ hols?”

    “Right. So, listen, you wanna take over my job at Leila’s?”

    “Is this,” says Rosie with a laugh in her voice, “with the proviso that you can have it back any old time you fancy?”

    Why not, since ya put it like that? “Yeah.”

    “Oh, righto, then. Hey, does she open over Christmas and New Year’s?”

    “Nah. Reopens second week in Jan.”

    “Just as well, Mum’s already had a little weep over you going off to Aunty Kate’s this year.”—EH? I know Aunty May’s a watering-pot, but Jesus Christ!—“So I’m biding my time about breaking the news about these overseas fellowships I’m applying for.”

    “Yuh—Uh—” Flipping heck, can’t she ring a bell or something before coming out with something like that? “Where?” I croak.

    “One’s in America, I won’t get that, there’ll be millions of Yanks up for it, one’s in Scotland, and one’s in England. London. With Mark Rutherford. I’d quite fancy that, his last book was really good.”

    “Jesus, Rosie,” I say limply.

    “I don’t wanna be stuck here at the mercy of that dill Kevin O’Connor and his wandering hands and his stories about how his wife doesn’t understand him, not to mention Mum bringing up the subject of why I didn’t marry Jonno Palmer, he was such a nice boy, fifteen times a day,” she explains calmly.

    Understandable. “Uh—thought Jonno Palmer was a cretin and as near to rough trade as ya can get without acksherly being tattooed or owning a Harley? An’ wasn’ he the one that tried to make you do it without a condom and get you up the spout and chain you to his kitchen sink when ya told him you were dumping him?”

    “Yeah,” she says calmly. “Only Mum isn’t the sort of person you can say that sort of thing to. Added to which, she thinks women should be chained to the kitchen sink.”

    Goddit, goddit. “Yeah. Well, good luck with it. Um, how long will it take?”

    “Dunno, the ads have only just come out. We-ell, given Christmas, three months to process the applications and make an appointment for an interview? If I get as far as an interview!” she says with her cheerful laugh.

    She will, she’s Helluva bright: topped her classes right through putrid St Agatha’s without even trying, straight A’s all the way through uni, First-Class Hons, all that.

    So I go: “You will.”

    “Cheer up, I haven’t gone yet, ya know!”

    No, right. “No. Um, well, you wanna come round today an’ see Leila?”

    “Okay, why not?”

    “Good. Better come after two, when we’ve slackened off.”

    “Okay. –No, tell ya what, I’ll round up Huh—Oh, there you are, Mum! It’s only Dot,” she says smoothly. Boy, is she something. Still, I suppose after going on twenty-six years of it… Yeah, she is young to be finishing her Ph.D. thesis, but being Rosie, she sailed through school and started her B.A. when she was only seventeen. And between you and me and the gatepost, finished her M.A. in 3 semesters instead of 4, spent the fourth starting in on the Ph.D. Anyway, what I was saying, she can handle Aunty May with both hands tied behind her.

    “Yeah hi, Aunty May,” I say resignedly.

    “How are you, Dot, dear?” Blah, blah, such a pity they won’t see me at Christmas, blah, blah.

    “Yeah, um, I gotta go, Aunty May, I’m at work. Can I just speak to Rosie for a mo?”

    “Of course, dear! –Rosie, why didn’t you tell me little Dot was at work?

    I AM NOT LITTLE DOT. Still, what can ya do with women like Aunty May, they’re entirely driven by their flaming hormones.

    Rosie comes on again and goes: “Sorry about that, Dot. Hormonal.”

    So I go: “You said it. So, you gonna jack up Haitch and come and have lunch here?”

    “That’s the plan! Save a nice table for us, eh?”

    “She won’t let me. Gotta go. See ya!” I hang up and hurtle into the uniform and hurtle out.

    “Where have you been?”—The place is entirely empty except for one blue-rinsed lady sitting out under one of our dark green Perrier umbrellas, means you have to sell the stuff but according to her it’s a good deal, drinking a cappuccino.—“Ring Joe, that stupid espresso machine’s started that bloody dribbling again!” she snarls.

    Oh, shit. I dash out back again…

    Twelve-thirty-three. The tables are all full, even the ones inside, there’s a queue for the takeaway sandwiches, and I’ve only had my bum patted three times, is this a record?

    “Right, one green salad with balsamic dressing, one chicken liver salad, two Perriers-lime. What? Yes, the chicken salad comes with crusty Italian bread, sir.”

    I dash in with the slip: “1 gr sal bals, 1 chick liv, 2 P”…

    One-fifteen. Going great guns, the one-o’clock squad’s out in force. It is a lovely day, if ya had the time to stop and look. Just as well these ruddy high-heeled sandals passed on from Wendalyn (last year’s), are well run in.

    “Right, one green salad with balsamic dressing, one grilled chicken with Leila’s Special Salad, two Perriers-lime. Yeah, that does come with bread.”

    I dash in with the slip: “1 gr sal bals, 1 gr chick sal, 2 P”…

    One-thirty-five. Still no sign of bloody Rosie, maybe Hank decided to have a horizontal lunch instead? One table emptied but four hungry lady shoppers, we don’t get so many of them in our neck of the woods, immediately filled it. Ooh, another table— No, filled.

    Dash over and whip the dirty dishes off it. Gee, one of them bitches pinched the carnation. “Carafe of water? No prob! Be back in a min to take your orders.” Shove the menus prominently in front of them, hopefully obscuring the lack of carnation, and shoot inside.

    “Hey, Leila, we lost a carnation again.”

    “Table 2,” she discerns grimly. “I told you they all work out I can’t see it from in here!”

    No, well, if ya weren’t so mean you’d hire another waitress and her and me could take turns to be out there, eh?

    “Take that order through!”

    I take the order for four grilled chicken with Leila’s Special etc through to where poor little Sean’s sweating over a hot stove. Or more often over cold balsamic vinegar dressing—yeah. He’s done a TAFE catering course, poor deluded little sod, and this entitles him to be Leila’s kitchen slave for peanuts.

    Back at the coal-face. No sign of Rosie. Take the order from the carnationless Table 2. And dash in with the slip. “1 gr sal bals, 1 chick liv, 2 P”…

    Two-oh-five. Where is the bloody female? On her back in Hank’s pad—right.

    “Right, one green salad with balsamic dressing,”—just for a change—“one chicken liver salad with French bread on the side, two Perriers-lime.” I take a second look at the green salad with balsamic dressing. “Don’t I know you?”

    She looks at me coldly from the top of my blonde mop, down the ex-school blouse (still good, so why not?), the tight black skirt and the tanned bare legs to Wendalyn’s high-heeled black sandals. And back again. “I don’t think so,” she says in the coldest possible voice this side of Absolute Zero.

    “My mistake.” I dash in with the slip. “1 gr sal bals, 1 chick liv, 2 P,” could just photocopy it, really. Hang on, hang on, hang on.. Goddit! Fuck me, it’s the French-perfume lady with the Merc from the servo yesterday! What’s she doing in Leila’s neck of the business-suited woods? Slumming again? Or is the dish that wants the chick liv (it comes with chunks of crusty bread, if he wants to call it French, let him) not a legitimate, as it were, interest?

    Two seventeen. Gee, one empty table that hasn’t been— Oops, hang on, here comes another coup—Her at last. No wonder I didn’t recognise her at first, she’s in a dress. Looks oddly famil— Yep, Wendalyn’s. Pale, um, can ya have pale orange? Like orange ice cream? Wendalyn being three sizes smaller than her and the dress being made of cotton jersey-knit, it looks exactly like what you’d imagine, no wonder Hank’s grinning all over his face.

    “About flaming time! Where you been, or don’t I dare ask?”

    “Thought I wasn’t supposed to turn up until after two?”

    “Hi, Dot,” puts in Hank, looking with interest at the school blouse.

    “Um, hi, Hank,” I mumble. Gee, he’s properly in uniform, this time, jacket and all, is that a sight for sore eyes or is that a sight for sore eyes? French-perfumed Merc Dame over there’s staring at him with her mouth open, well, up hers.

    “Have a menu or two,” I say feebly.

    Hank asks me what I can recommend. So I lie. Well, heck, we wanna make a sale.

    “Right. One Turkish Lamb Shish-kebab with Leila’s Turkish Minted Salad, one Korma Lamb on Couscous with ditto, hold the balsamic vinegar for you, Rosie, one Coke, one pineapple juice. –Yeah, the shish-kebab does come with Turkish bread, Hank.” Dash in with the slip. “1 shish, 1 cous, 2 min sal—1 hold bals, 1 C, 1 pine.”

    “Hang on, Dot! Is this ‘mini-salad’ or ‘mint salad’?”

    “What? Do we serve mini-salads, ya tiny twerp? Mint! And hold the bals on one!”

    “I got that,” he goes huffily. “There’s no Turkish bread, didja tell them?”

    “No, do I want to lose a sale? Shove a bit of olive oil on a couple of lepinja rolls and bung them under the grill for a sec. Like we done last week, remember?”

    “All right!”

    I relent slightly. “It’s only Rosie and her latest. He’s a Yank, he won’t know the diff. And she won’t let on. But that doesn’t mean you can skimp on the meat.”

    “All right! And take this stuff out to Table 4!”

    I go back out and serve Table 4. Then the dish with Merc Dame waves me over.

    “Yeah? Like some dessert? Coffee?”

    Two short blacks—isn’t she watching her caffeine intake along with the rest of it?—and a slice of “black cherry” cheesecake for him. I’m not letting on the mingy helping of cherries is sitting in bright red Aeroplane Jelly so as to save on actual cheesecake, he’ll find out soon enough how revolting it is. –Blow, Hank’s waving at me, don’t say he’s imagining he can change his order, what does he think this is, civilisation?

    “Yeah?”

    Phew, they just want the menus back so as they can think about dessert.

    “Don’t touch any of the cheesecakes,” I warn in a very low voice: “they’re all slathered in a topping of packet jelly.” Rosie looks disgusted but oddly enough, Hank doesn't. “Uh, hang on… Jell-O to you, Hank!” I produce proudly. His face falls ten feet. “Yeah, right. Gotta go, Rich Merc Dame’s glaring at me.” Dash out…

    And so it goes…

    Finally the air clears at about three-forty, well, true, Christmas is coming, but do all these businesspersons’ bosses know about the lunch-hours they take? By this time Hank and Rosie have had two rounds of coffee and are getting stuck into the halva, he’s never had it before, we sure do have exotic desserts out here in Awstralia. Shit, you can buy the stuff neatly wrapped in Gladwrap down the supermarket at the Mall!

    And Leila comes out looking dead beat and collapses onto a chair at their table without asking and orders me to get her a cuppa and something to eat and for God's sake don't let Sean burn it.

    When I come back with an omelette and the last lepinja roll and a helping of green salad vinaigrette, not balsamic vinegar, she hates it even more than Rosie does, she’s telling Rosie she can have the job but not to imagine she’s gonna wear that sort of get-up at work. Rosie doesn't look phased, don’t think anything could phase her: certainly not a mere Leila, fifty if a day, dyed relentlessly black, thin as a lath and with the energy of twenty normal women her age.

    So Rosie goes out the back and within three seconds she’s got Sean eating out of the palm of her hand, but that was to be expected. She tries on my black skirt but as it’s tight on me it won’t do up on her. She’ll borrow one of Aunty May’s. I'm not gonna ask whether she’ll bother to take it in the necessary twenty or thirty centimetres. Kindly she lets Sean show her how to load the dish-washing machine, it doesn’t seem to dawn on the tiny cretin that he is thereby doing part of my job.

    “That was easy,” I admit as we go outside again.

    “Just smile at them, Dot!” she says with that laugh.

    Yeah. Right. Easy for some.

    And she gathers up her gorgeous Hank and they head off to his gorgeous car…

    After quite some time Leila goes, very, very sourly: “Nice for some.”

    So I go: “You said it.”

    And we sit on in the sun for ten mins or so quite companionably, really.

    Bob Springer was really dismayed to hear I’d be gone for all of Chrissie and up to Feb, so it's just as well I rung him yesterday instead of breaking the news this morning, isn't it?

    When the scrum’s over, around twelve-thirtyish, none of the macho do-it-yourselfers and home-handymen round these here parts dare to be late home for Saturday lunch, he leans mournfully on the counter and goes: “S’pose I’ll have to make Kyle help out.”

    He is ya son, Bob. “He’s done it before.”

    “Not competently, though,” he says bitterly. “Ya know his bloody mother reckons he's gonna become God’s gift to accountancy?”

    Look—out. They’re divorced. Not amicably. “Mm.”

    He plunges into the standard “That woman’s ruining him” diatribe but I’m not listening…

    “HEY!”

    Bob’s hand retreats from my bum. “Shit, I’m really, really, sorry Dot, I didn’t mean— I don’t know why I— Um, sorry.”

    Mate, I can tell ya why ya did it, ya divorced acrimoniously from that bitch of a Glenda Springer that’s taking you for megabucks in maintenance that your franchise at this dump can’t support. Poor old Bob. He did have a girlfriend for a bit—I say girlfriend but she was his age and more, Doreen Di Lunghi that owns Gigi’s, the big rival to New Wave Hair, only he couldn’t support her lifestyle: eat out six nights out of seven, takeaways the seventh, down the casino or the pokies or the dogs in between the incessant visits to the pub where she only drinks like margaritas or champagne. A lot more expensive than a lukewarm pizza and cold beer on the sagging sofa in the lounge-room, if ya get my drift.

    “Dot? It is all right, is it?”

    “Eh? Aw. Forget it, Bob.”

    He sags. “Thanks. You’re a good kid, Dot.”

    Maybe. Too young for you, but.

    When I get home first person I see is Dad but no way am I gonna say anything to him. Ya never know with fathers. That time the guy that manages the supermarket down their Mall put his hand on Rosie’s tit Uncle Jerry went berserk, totally berserk, and punched the poor bloke out. I admit she was only seventeen but cripes, she thought it was funny or she’d never of told him.

    Mum’s at the stove. Something special: it’s my last night, and I’ve never spent Christmas away from them—Oh, God. Here we go…

    So the ballerina goes: “I wish I was going,” and pushes something horribly pink and ribboned into my hand at the last min.

    Ya could, for mine. At Aunty Kate’s mercy for every living minute of the day?

    “Can I open it?”“

    “Mm?” She gives a rending sniff. “Yeah—Dad’s sending all your Christmas presents.”

    EH? I’m not a kid, for Chrissakes! “Look, Dad, don’t bother, I’ll have them when I get back.” I unwrap it. Fuck me. Pink soap, pink talcum power, well, the tin’s pink, and a pink face-washer. “Are these really for me? Lovely. Thanks, Deanna.”

    “So as you won’t shame us at Aunty Kate’s. Cos we know you’re too proud to take anything from Mum and Dad, but you gotta have something nice, Dot,” she produces.

    “Y—Uh—” Quote, unquote, that’ll be. Which one of them did she get that off? Mum or Aunty May? Or both?

    “Yeah, thanks. Lovely.”

     Suddenly she flings herself at me and bursts into to tears on my shoulder.

    “That’ll do, Deanna," says Dad.

    Is she— Yep, he’s right, she is starting to enjoy it, little performer that she is.

    “I’ll send you a nice postcard of Adelaide, right? You, too!” I say as loud objections arise from the twins. “Gotta go, that’s the second boarding call. See ya.”

    “At least kiss your mother, Dot!”

    Crikey Dick, Dad, she’s already bawling, do I wanna make her worse? Well, no skin off my nose; I give her a bit of a hug and kiss. “See ya.”

    “If you can’t stand it, ring us, Dot!” she gulps.

    “Balls, of course she’ll be able to stand it, her and Kate are like as two peas in pod. –All right, she doesn’t have to kiss you two,” he notes evilly as the twins are seen to be backing off. “Come here.” He gives me a hug and shoves something shaped like neatly folded money into my hands. “Off you trot, Dot.”

    “What’s this?”

    “Off you trot,” he repeats, turning me round and giving me a shove in the direction of the whatsit.

    So I go. If he wants to sling his hard-earned around—

    17B, this is me, in the middle, just my luck, fat lady by the window, fat man on the aisle. Shit. “Um, ’scuse me—sorry! Thanks!”

   … Shit. Hundred and fifty, is he nuts? Well, conscience money—yeah. I stow it in my wallet and two seconds later Fat Window Lady’s asking me if it’s holiday money, dear, and telling me about her grandkids in SA that she’s going to inflict herself on. Oh, God, all the way to Adelaide? What did I ever do in twenty years of blameless suburban existence to deserve it?

   … Apart from the snake in Tim’s bed. It was dead, anyway.

    … And that time I busted the Hills Hoist after Mum had told me not to use it as a merry-go-round.

    … And that time I got real fed-up with Gaga Grandma Leach accusing all us kids of stealing her money and/or chocs every time we got dragged round to see her at the Home and nicked twenty bucks off the old bat.

    Well, relatively blameless. No worse than most—surely?