Regrettably Her Royal Highness missed out on her opportunity to return to see how the school was going because on the approximate thirty year anniversary of its opening the place was burned to the ground by arsonists unknown, more than likely disgruntled students with nothing better to do on that particular night.
As MacLean drove slowly, looking around for John’s house, teenage girls in obscenely tight track pants pushing prams wandered aimlessly along the barren streets with suspicious stares, puffing cigarettes. Bleak cul de sacs were decorated with skid marks and burnouts, furtive ten year old boys with shaved heads and scraggy mullets played truant in dusty gardens, smoking and chucking rocks at cans and road signs. Rows of young trees along the sides of the road, planted, no doubt, by an exasperated council to supposedly beautify, stood bare of branches, vandalised down to single dead stalks.
John Sturges’ fenceless house was at the end of one such cul de sac. The burnt out shell of a car sat outside the house next door like a well parked meteorite visiting from a remote astral galaxy. A dog was asleep where the driver’s seat had been in more sober days. Weeds grew in the gathered dust around clomps of molten vinyl and tyre rubber, and a rusting shopping trolley, one wheel missing, lay on its side gathering leaf litter and empty soft drink cans.
After he had been in Hobart for only a few months MacLean was staggered by how many staring, standing, lying, and wandering wounded there seemed to be around the city not so different from the broken souls he had written about in the aftermath of civil war. The sobering difference was, Tasmania was a free and beautiful island and yet it was as if these people had become invisible to the rest of the population in the more profligate suburbs.
MacLean squinted in the harsh light as he emerged from the house after an hour. He could hardly wait to report back to Kant. In the curtained depths of this man’s miserable life he’d stumbled upon gold.
Chapter Six
Rosie’s days, with Mrs Gorski the home care lady, were lots of fun. Yetta had become surrogate grandmother to Rosie since Sarah had passed away. Even though she didn’t understand some of the old lady’s words, she loved to hear Yetta talk about a magical place called Poland a long way away on the other side of the world. Sometimes she fell asleep whilst Yetta described little anecdotes about her childhood there.
Mrs Gorski, whose white hair was usually tightly braided like a fancy loaf of bread, had even said that Rosie was grown up enough to put her hands out to hold the skeins of knit ting wool while she rolled them into balls. Once they made a pompom together, by winding colourful lengths of wool around two hollow cardboard sandwiched discs, lots of times, until it was tight and then cut around in between the discs very carefully. The fluffy ball appeared like magic.
‘Yetta, can you sew it on my beanie, pease?’ Rosie had asked. Yetta did, and Rosie told her Mummy later that afternoon it felt funny wobbling on top of her head.
Mungo kissed his family goodbye and left first, his little statement that, although he was only a self actuating musician, it was indeed a real job that required discipline and a regular starting time. And with some assiduous application mixed with fearless creativity, he would one day bring home more than just a few dollars he earned from the weekly gig at Night Owl the nightclub for experimental music. There were also the ‘mate’s rates’ piano lessons he gave to a couple of his friends’ kids at home, on his days with Rosie while she was sleeping.
‘Eeni maru, goodbye to you, crochets and quavers, tickle your tum, have a nice day and be good to your mum,’ he sang with a marching beat to a giggling Rosie as he lowered her to the ground and headed out to the Red Devil, a twenty plus year old Volvo stationwagon. As he drove towards North Hobart, where he and his muso accomplices were renting a first floor warren of gloomy rooms, ideal for their experimentation and recording, clear blue exhaust smoke puffed up into a clear blue sky.
Melinda gave Rosie a bath in a large plastic tub she placed on the kitchen table, more for fun than the wash. The old claw foot bath they’d picked up at a salvage place looked as if it might need a few more goes with some strong bleach and scourer before use. Mrs Gorski, punctual to a tee, was due to arrive in ten minutes.
Melinda was wrapping Rosie in a towel when she became aware of someone approaching the front door. She’d left the door open so the house could breathe the morning’s fresh warm air. She recognised the visitor’s looming form as their neighbour who had moved next door a week before, an AC/DC fan, as they’d found out the first night she’d moved in, a raspy nicotine voiced single mother of three young boys.
Standing in the open front door, the woman’s silhouette sucked the light out of the day. After a quick rap, and before Melinda could reply, she stepped into the passage. Her eyes wandering around as if she was a prospective house buyer and she had come to inspect the premises.
‘Can I help you?’ Melinda said guardedly.
But then, seeing that the woman was carrying a three or four year old on her hips quickly dispelled any fear of threat. The woman looked as if she wasn’t quite ready for the day. Her lank black hair was dishevelled and her blotchy mascara had been trying to remove itself for some time. She took a last drag from her cigarette and flicked it expertly backwards along the corridor and accurately through the front door into the garden. Faded black jeans hung from bony hips, and her bra less flaccid breasts were squashed shapelessly beneath a blue sleeveless truckie’s wife beater.
Melinda thought that in a gust of wind her ears would surely jangle with the lineup of piercings. One protruded from the side of her lower lip, and another in her eyebrow looked inflamed. Her shoulders and upper arms were a battlefield of clumsy, smudged tattoos.
Her child, already with crudely shaved head, tufted mullet in the making and shifty eyes, was attempting to reach a comfort breast through the side of her shirt with a grubby hand. Wearing spent Ugg boots the woman scuffed casually towards Melinda as if they were old friends meeting up for a morning joint.
‘From next door, darl. Lippy, to me friends.’
‘Yes, we saw you move in a while back. Hi, I’m Melinda. And this is Rosie. How are you settling in?’
‘Yeah, all right for shit ’ousing.’ Lippy peered into the kitchenette giving it the once over, ‘Looks noice ’ere.’
‘Thanks. We had to do a bit of renovating. My husband’s just gone to work, I’m afraid.’
Mungo and Melinda had agreed that referring to each other as husband and wife sounded too much like ownership. ‘It’s the dissolution of self,’ Mungo had argued, more protectively of himself when they’d first decided to live together. It was as much to do with the idea of Melinda earning money as a teacher whilst he struggled with his musical creativity, and knowing how her father thought of him as not contributing financially. It used to bother him each time he drove off to the studio.
Melinda and Mungo had devised their own union ritual, inviting family and close friends, and had made promises to try harder to understand the other person when things inevitably got bogged down. In the meantime they wanted to show the people they cared about how much they loved each other at this particular point in time. How long it would last was not the issue but getting pleasure from the moment. To begin with, Barry had thought the whole thing nebulous and hippy, but to his surprise it seemed to be working.
This morning Melinda thought the concept of having a husband gave her a bit more clout. This woman looks as if she could hold her own in any bar fight, she thought as her neighbour approached. For now the term husband would be adopted as a protective mechanism.
‘Yeah, I seen ’im. Is ’e a poof or summit? Never seen a bloke wearing red trousers