‘I’m happy for Mungy to be doing that. We don’t need tons of money at the moment anyway.’
‘I suppose I’m a bit old fashioned about responsibility for family.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a fuddy duddy, Dad.’
‘Fuddy faddy, fuddy faddy,’ the little sponge in the high chair chortled to herself.
Melinda turned the last bread tin out onto a metal cooling tray.
‘For someone who heads a cutting edge show on the box you can sound so … yesterday. Mungy puts in his share.’
‘Okay, I’m hearing you.’
Barry tickled Rosie under the chin, but she pulled away, sensing her mother’s annoyance. Besides she was concentrating on placing eyes into a circle of raisins.
‘Well, young Rosie Posie, Grandpa has to go now and get ready for work tomorrow. You got a kiss for me?’
‘Mummy, Gampa’s got spiders in his nose … and they’re very big!’
Melinda smiled warmly at her father, giving him a hug. ‘I know. And I’m glad I didn’t inherit that conk! Go on, you silly old thing, off you go. Go and give some money to some poor down trodden wretch. We’re fine here.’
Barry leaned over and blew a raspberry into Rosie’s neck. ‘Old spiders love dark places,’ he whispered.
‘Gampa!’
‘Here, Dad, take a loaf, and these rolls. But eat them soon while they’re fresh.’
‘Thanks. You look after me too well.’
‘Gampa, I like apicot jam.’
‘Me too.’
Barry put his nose inside the packet and breathed in. ‘Mmm. I’ll see you in a week or so; it’s going to be hectic for a while.’
As Melinda walked her father to the front door, three hoodied teenagers on skateboards rattled by on the pavement bouncing affable expletives between each other.
‘Don’t let the show get you down, Dad,’ Melinda said.
‘I’m fine, really. Remember, I’m just the Front Man. It seems it’s what ninety five percent of the population needs to see and hear.’
‘Maybe it puts their own lives into perspective.’
‘Who knows? I’ve always hoped the show might be able to turn some of their lives around. You know, give some hope. But I’m really not sure how long I can keep on doing it. I wouldn’t mind doing something a little less stressful. You know, like baby sitting Rosie. I could even join Mungo’s band and play the triangle! How stressful could that be?’
‘I’d love to see that.’
Melinda had watched the last series. Her father was highly skilled at interviewing vulnerable people revealing their internal scars and bruises, not gratuitously but enough to expose the crucial aspects of their hapless lives, the bottom line being to give them all an equal chance to come away with a hefty wad of money. Melinda recognised it was the stuff of commercial television viewing. Tabloid trash Mungo called it. She even found herself being sucked into the vortex of intrigue. Her students seemed to talk about nothing else these days. And she knew that money alone wouldn’t solve the problems. On the contrary, she believed it even exacerbated them, Minnie Donovan being a testament to that.
Barry kissed his daughter.
‘Oh, I forgot to ask, how’s school?’
‘Started back last week. Pretty good generally. Some of the same old. I lost my mobile on Tuesday only to find it entombed in a slab of wet clay on Wednesday. Didn’t lose anything inside luckily. Hey ho!’
Barry settled in his car. The Audi’s engine fired up, the electric window came down.
‘When are you going to move back south of the city?’ he called out.
‘When you stop asking!’
Melinda came to the car window.
Kant took hold of his daughter’s hand. ‘I don’t like the idea of my granddaughter being brought up in this godforsaken suburb forever. And that’s not a question.’
‘When we can afford it we probably will move to the southern gardens of Eden, but believe it or not we are very happy here, Dad.’
Rosie had wandered out chewing at a bread roll, and wiping at a blob of apricot jam on her front that was seeping south wards. She waved, licked the back of her hand and blew her sticky sentiments towards the car.
The house Melinda and Mungo bought, originally built by the Zinc factory for their workers, was at the end of a nondescript cul de sac. The plan was to do it up gradually over a few years, double their money in five to seven and move nearer to the sea. Melinda even had thoughts of returning to her birth place in the Huon Valley.
She and Mungo were oddities in their street. They were the only family who owned a piano, novels filling the bookshelves and artwork on the walls, albeit dominated by Rosie’s colourful masterpieces. They knew this because over time they had visited all the other houses, making a point of attending as many street parties as they could. There was the Grand Final day sausage sizzle at number ten imperative to find out for whom the hosts barracked. And the infamous Boxing Day fully padded cricket friendly, played on the road, which ended with several broken windows, drunken threats and a punch up between Merv from Number One and Dirk, his enormous Dutch mate. A keg was shared sometime during Easter. Australia Day barbecues were held across the road for some of the Harley Club members, where Southern Cross flags flew proud ly and were draped around anyone who could remain standing. The Queen’s birthday barbecue at the covertly royalist Sanderson’s place three doors up was an easy excuse to crack a slab.
Cranky old Todd Mullins from number six, an ex workmate of Melinda’s grandfather and retired boiler maker from the smelter, who had lived in the area all his working life, had advised them to keep up this practice if they could, so that their house would be taken off the unspoken list for burglaries. On the whole it worked perfectly well, except they did lose a large garden gnome playing a banjo that Ziggy, one of Mungo’s muso friends, had given him for his twenty sixth last year. It was sort of fair enough because the kiddies from number sixteen really needed something for air rifle target practice. Small shards of the happy chappy were found at the base of a fence post near the rivulet where Mel and Mungo would sometimes walk in the evenings.
Later that afternoon Melinda fetched some logs for the wood stove to heat the evening’s water.
‘So much for summer. Come on, sweetheart, come and help mummy get some food ready for dinner. Daddy will be home soon.’
‘Is Gampa coming for dinner?’
‘No, he has to go back to work tomorrow and needs to prepare, and then go to bed early.’
‘Gampas don’t go to bed early!’
*
On the day of the house purchase Mungo had said, ‘We’ve got to be patient, do it up, bit at a time, gradually,’ wondering when they would find it. Not the time, the inclination. Music was his world and the thought of scraping, sanding, painting and hammering sent shivers through his body.
‘A lick of colour will transform it. That’s all it needs in the short term.’ Melinda had inherited her mother’s patience in lean times. ‘And we can dig a pond, surround it with nestling ground covers, plant some pockets of bird attracting natives, you know, grevilleas and callistemons. It can’t be that difficult.’
The place had been vacant for some time so the real estate agent had given them the keys before final settlement. Vandal ism was minimal: a couple of broken windows only, a car’s skid ruts on the front lawn, nothing they couldn’t fill or repair.
‘Natives’ll cope