‘Mum taught me everything I know,’ Melinda replied wist fully. She was eight years old when she’d baked her first loaf of bread. Now, with memories of her mother, the practice for Melinda was more than just making loaves.
Barry stretched his legs out on the well heeled patch work ottoman, complementing the blue family suite, more a bleached grey now. He and Sarah had given the ensemble to Melinda when she’d partnered up with Mungo four years ago. The sofa, having borne the weight of the family at the cottage since she was a youngster, was permeated with rich memories from her country upbringing, so it didn’t matter to Melinda that it wasn’t really their style. Not that they could afford one yet. Mungo’s musical pursuits were still being developed and they had agreed to give it a couple more years with her earning sufficient bread winning money as a teacher as long as he put aside two days a week to be with Rosie.
Each time Barry drove past the green belted Domain and into the shabby surrounds of Lutana to visit his daughter he felt disappointed in their decision to live there. The sixties’ government housing was still cheap when they paid the deposit in 2007 on the wholly unremarkable hip roofed, grey Besser block box, saved only from total blandness by a stubborn walnut tree in the otherwise bare backyard. Creativity was loose but money was tight, end of story. It was close to the city by Tasmanian standards, and Mungo’s DIY skills were definitely improving, the brass number four screwed to the fence out the front was testament to that. He had even managed to put the screws in without drilling first into the gate post. Skilled with an assort ment of tools, a hammer proved useful for the final fastening.
Melinda had found stubborn feet to dig in against her father’s resolve for them to move south of the city, to ‘a more reputable suburb where the word culture has some meaning’.
It didn’t help that Mungo loved the sport of ‘taunting the father in law’. Six months after they’d moved in, and the battle of wills was at its peak, he gleefully mentioned that Lutana alongside the infamous Chigwell had found itself in the list of top ten bogan suburbs in Australia, alongside Albion Park in New South Wales and Dandenong in the smog soaked sprawling outer reaches of Melbourne.
‘Don’t tell me there’s actually somebody who sits at a desk and compiles those statistics as a job?’ Barry had countered.
‘Must be. And, until recently, Frankston, that other Victorian piece of work, was up there too. But then Franga embarked on a marketing push to show the city was perking up. I LOVE FRANKSTON stubby holders and T shirts made those die hard bogans real proud for a while, until of course they realised there were a few too many lattes being served up in cafés around the joint. It’s amazing how prejudice can be formed by a simple cup of coffee.’
‘I don’t know how you can be so proud to be part of it with your musical sensibilities,’ Barry had answered, appealing with another tack. But he knew he was clutching at straws, besides, and this was the crux of his dilemma, his own father still lived not three minutes’ walk away.
‘Does it really matter which side of the tracks you live?’ Mungo pursued. ‘The chiggas, and virtually anyone who lives in the northern suburbs, that you seem to want to disassociate with, albeit with their moccasins, mullets, and flannies, aren’t so much removed from your average 4x4 driver for steep drive ways to nouveau riche brick monstrosities in ‘poash’ Sandy Bay. And you can be sure they’ll all be rubbing shoulders at the footy screaming the same obscenities at the umpire.’
An article on page four of the paper about the homeless eighteen year old girl, Minnie Donovan, had caught Barry’s eye. Editorials recently had given much ink time to homelessness in Hobart, describing the phenomenon as a complex issue, more than not having a job to support renting, owning or indeed feeling part of a family unit.
Mackelroy had intended to get the girl on BKS but before they could make her an offer she had drugged herself silly before cutting her wrists with a serrated bread knife, concluding her short life in a tepid, crimson bath .
The constant line up of wretched people itching to get on the show had started to weigh on Barry’s stamina. This latest holiday break hadn’t come too soon. But now, Vince already on the phone with the next contestant and his holiday almost over, it was all starting again. He had become uncertain about whether he still wanted to keep hosting, feeling dismay at society’s insatiable need to bask in other people’s misery.
Rosie was stirring. Barry could hear Melinda in her bedroom, talking gently to her. ‘Yes, Grandpa’s here. No, he’s not going. Yes, you can have some raisins. I know you do, sweetheart. I love Grandpa too.’
Barry rubbed at his eyes. Do I really want to keep breaching old wounds? Am I really making a difference, or am I just caught up in an endless cycle of popularising human suffering as if it’s a damn commodity? It was people’s casual apathy that really troubled him. He had seen it so often in the responses by the studio audience. He lay awake with it at night. Am I just as guilty?
Barry narrowed his eyes to focus on the article again, unable to put it down.
From the hillbilly back sticks of New Norfolk, “ … Ms Dono van had won a massive sum of money in a lottery … ” But it seemed that over a frenzied three years of buying, gambling, drug use and a naive generosity towards an endless stream of new ‘friends’, sprouting around her like malignant mush rooms, she had squandered the lot, leaving herself drowning in debt, homeless, and still illiterate.
She’d hooked up with her first cousin, Shaun Donovan, become pregnant and chosen to abort the pregnancy when she was told the baby had Down syndrome. Her second pregnancy to Shaun produced another Down syndrome child, which she insisted on keeping. It being too much for her cousin, he took his own life shortly after the birth. Shaun’s drinking binge had put him five times over the alcohol limit but he’d still managed to drive his Cortina to the top of a quarry cliff halfway up Mount Dromedary, the place of his daughter’s conception, stop twenty metres from the edge before speeding off into oblivion.
Minnie had been dossing at a friend’s squat and had caught hepatitis through sharing needles and sex with anyone whom she happened to find lying next to her.
‘Jesus. Who needs enemies with friends like that?’ Kant murmured, eying one of Rosie’s soft toys on the floor, and looking up to see if she was in the room.
“The baby girl, who had not been given a name by her mother, had been placed into State care. Her mother, after an incident with a group of drug users and subsequent violent altercation with police, had been placed under State psychiatric supervision where she had committed suicide a week later, the details of her death have not been released yet”, the article stated.
Barry felt little hands tugging at his trousers.
‘Gampa, Gampa, move the paper, I can’t do cuggling. Gampa!’
Barry looked down. ‘Hello little one. There, how’s that?’
He dropped the paper, a dark omen, onto the floor and rear ranged himself, opening his arms to receive his granddaughter, still sleepy and warm from her nap. She had a piece of peeled apple gripped tightly between chubby fingers. Rosie clambered up onto her grandfather’s expansive chest and began fidgeting as a cat does, nestling for perfect comfort. She was proudly two years old, ‘and a three corters’, as she reminded anyone who enquired. She lay her head down under her grandfather’s chin, her wispy fair hair so delicate next to his holiday stubble.
Barry breathed with contentment. To him, Rosie, still untainted by a grimy humanity, counterbalanced the maelstrom of anguish in a world that seemed hell bent on destroying itself. But he feared for her, and prayed that her spirit would never become corrupted.
He kissed her cheek.
‘Gampa.’
‘Mm.’
Rosie began to giggle and wriggle.
‘What are you chuckling at young lady?’ he asked, tickling her on the back of her neck.
Rosie