Listening to Mondrian (11 page)

Mum jabbed at the switch and Janis died in the middle of asking the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz. ‘Pardon me for breathing,’ Mum said, as Callie always said when Mum yelled at
her
. And she flounced out of the room before Callie could ask her the difference between concrete and cement.

Concrete
(said the dictionary in the library the next afternoon),
adj. 1. constituting an actual thing or instance; real;
a concrete example
. 2. concerned with realities or actual
instances rather than abstractions:
concrete ideas . . .

(But ideas were what Callie was trying to avoid.)

4. made of concrete:
a concrete pavement . . .

(Yes, I knew that . . .)

n. 8. an artificial stone-like material used for foundations
etc., made by mixing cement, sand, and broken stones etc.,
with water . . .

(OK, OK, but what’s cement?)

Cement
, n. 1. a material used for making concrete for
foundations . . .

. . . v.t. 8. to unite by, or as by, cement:
a friendship cemented by time . . .

(Not if I can help it . . .)

Eventually Callie worked out that concrete and cement were like one of those horrible philosophical things that the kids’ dad used to bamboozle her with. ‘All As are B but not all Bs are A’, or however it went. (Soph and Damien’s father taught philosophy at university.) Concrete was cement but cement wasn’t necessarily concrete . . .

Concrete poetry
, the dictionary suggested. That sounded better. She imagined a big concrete (cement?) mixer whirling out poems.
My luv is like a red red
. . . no.

Or what was that thing you read about the Mafia doing – giving someone a concrete overcoat. She imagined Roger in one, lying at the bottom of the harbour.

And so before Callie had actually found anything, it was time for the library to close. ‘Here are some books that may be useful,’ said the librarian Callie had asked for help when she’d come in. ‘Just time to stamp them. Have a nice weekend.’

When Callie got home, Kaye had arrived with a bundle of tops, and she and Mum were in the front bedroom, playing dress-ups.

‘What do you think, Cal?’ Kaye yanked a T-shirt a bit further down over Mum’s hips. ‘Don’t you think it suits Jan?’ The T-shirt was black, with lacey bits around the edges.

‘Very slimming,’ Callie said in her sarcastic voice.

Mum took her seriously. ‘Do you think so?’ But she whipped the T-shirt off. It was like when Callie asked Mum about something, and Mum told her she looked nice, and Callie immediately knew that whatever-it-was was exactly what she didn’t want to wear. ‘I think it’s a bit young for me,’ Mum said. ‘Could you check the roast on your way through, love?’

After tea, Callie lay on her bed in the room she shared with Soph, and put her headphones on, so she couldn’t hear the murmur of the girls next door. Despite her diet, Mum had had a couple of beers. ‘You’ll be sorry tomorrow,’ Callie thought at her.

And she was, Callie could tell. Black coffee and a poached egg for breakfast, and not even an attempt at the crossword. Sunglasses to go to the supermarket, and as soon as lunch was over she gave Soph and Damien money to go to the pool.

‘That’ll tire them out nicely for you and Voula,’ she said virtuously, and in case Callie sneered she whipped out her purse again and sent Callie to the video shop. ‘Get a movie for yourselves, and one for the kids,’ she said. ‘But no watching them till I go.’

The local video place was just a back shelf of the sports store. Hopeless. Callie finally settled on
The Blues Brothers
and
Casablanca
. Hard to keep a couple of old favourites down. On the way home she watched a cement (concrete?) mixer for a while, pouring poetry out onto the driveway of the new bottle shop. A bit up near the footpath had been smoothed and was nearly dry, so she delicately drew a heart with her finger and wrote
Mum L Roger 4 Ever TRUE
.

‘Hey, whaddaya think you’re doing!’ The concrete-smoother swung round and shook his trowel at her, and she ran all the way home like a little kid.

Mum was in a bubblebath with a cup of tea and the review pages. The radio was tuned to Classic FM. ‘You know,’ Mum said when Callie came in to use the toilet, ‘I don’t really care if tonight doesn’t work out. It’s just been so much fun to get ready . . .’

But Callie just pushed the flush button and didn’t believe her.

Five o’clock: countdown.

Mum got out of the bath and couldn’t find the hairdryer. Her hair was long and fine and it looked dreadful unless she blow-dried it immediately. She and Callie tore the house apart till they found the dryer under Soph’s pillow.

‘I’ll kill her I’ll kill her, this time I swear to God I’ll kill her!’ Mum muttered. Already the straggles had set in.

‘When’s he coming?’ Callie yelled over the scream of the dryer.

‘What?’

‘Coming to get you!’

‘What? Oh . . . I said I’d meet him at that pub near work.’

‘Didn’t want him to see us, eh?’

Mum turned the dryer off for a second. She looked a bit apologetic. ‘Well . . . You know what Damien’s like.’

‘What?’ Damien asked as he came in the back door. ‘What’m I like?’ He hadn’t bothered to change after the pool, and was just in his togs, with a soaked towel clutched around him like a cape. His skin was goosey and withered.

‘Cold,’ Mum said. ‘Cal, run a bath for him would you? Yes I know you’re not dirty, but you’re –
just get in the
bath
!’ She turned the dryer on again to drown him out.

But Soph had already taken over the bathroom and locked the door. Bloody puberty, Callie complained to herself. Not long ago she’d been able to throw them both in the bath together, but now Soph always took ages.

Callie bundled Damien into his winter dressing gown and stood him to wait in front of the gas heater, then went back to yell through the door. The shower had stopped but that didn’t mean anything.

‘Stop checking to see if your tits are growing, Sophia!’

‘I am not!’

‘You are so!’

‘Listen, Cal, I’ve ordered the pizzas for seven o’clock,’ Mum yelled from the bedroom. ‘But make sure you’re there a bit before. You know how frazzled they get, Saturdays. If you’re not ready and waiting on the dot, they give your order away to someone else . . . Now what was I doing?’

All right for some, Callie thought, seeing her mother sitting on the bed in her sarong, with the nailclippers. ‘He’s not going to look at your toenails!’

‘Well, it has to be done some time . . .’ As if there was all the leisure in the world.

Get Soph out, run a bath, put Damien in, help dry Soph’s hair, hang the bathers and towels on the line, get Damien out, adjudicate the fight over whose turn it is to watch what . . .

‘
Cal!
’ cried Callie’s other child, helpless in front of the mirror, with one contact lens in place and the other quite disappeared. ‘What’ll I do!’

‘Just stand quite still! Don’t move! I’ll get the torch . . .’ Finally Callie spotted it, hanging from the end of Mum’s hair. She sat on the bed to watch Mum putting on eye make-up. This was an issue that Callie’s mother had never quite resolved. On the one hand, she always said that women shouldn’t feel obliged to change themselves. On the other hand, women should be free to express themselves in any way they liked. And how was make-up different from dyeing your hair, which Mum’s lesbian friends did? Despite which, Mum frowned disapprovingly at herself as she curled her eyelashes on the mascara brush; or maybe it was just concentration, for she was well and truly out of practice.

‘Bugger it!’ She spat on a tissue and scrubbed at the smudge.

‘You’re only making it worse.’ And Super-Cal flew to the rescue with a bit of Oil of Olay, then lay back on the bed as Mum searched for a clean bra and a pair of knickers with decent elastic.

‘This Roger . . .’ Callie said.

‘Mmmmmm?’ As if she weren’t quite sure which particular Roger it was that Callie had in mind.

‘That you met at work . . .’

‘Mmmmmm?’

‘How did you meet him exactly?’

‘Well . . . he came in, and we introduced ourselves, and got talking . . .’ Mum slammed the drawer shut. ‘D’you know that awful 1940s joke about knickers and the problem with wartime elastic?’

Callie shook her head.

‘One Yank and they’re down.’

Callie didn’t respond.

‘See, the Americans were here for R and R, like in the Vietnam days, and they had too much money, and the local blokes were jealous because the girls went out with them – oh forget it. It’s really sexist anyway . . .’

Callie smelled a rat. ‘You mean he came to the counter and you got talking . . .’

‘Well,
you
go out with blokes you meet for five minutes at some bloody party! I hardly see that this is any different.’

But Mum was too defensive, and Callie saw the shape of the rat now, big and brown and whiskery. ‘You mean he’s not some social-working bureaucrat jogger – he’s a
client
!’

‘Well . . .’ As if that were a question of definition.

The man in the blue pinstriped suit dissolved, and a series of rivals flashed into his place. A guy on sickness benefit, spinning in a wheelchair . . . A psych patient, with a shaved head . . . An aged pensioner, carrying a string bag . . .

‘If you must know, he’s currently registered for Jobsearch.’

‘You mean he’s on the dole!’ (Christ, imagine turning up at Speech Night with some twenty-year-old. ‘Miss Horsham, I’d like you to meet my new step-dad . . .’) ‘
On
the dole!

’ ‘Stop being such a bloody snob, Callie! It’s where you’ll most likely be yourself in a year or so’s time.’

Yeah, but I’m not going out with me. I mean, if I were on the dole, and my dole officer asked me out, and if he were a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three . . . And besides – ‘Isn’t it like doctors screwing their patients or something?’

Mum blew like a surfacing whale. ‘
Get out of my room,
Cathleen!
Just get out and stay out! I don’t tell you how to run your life, just don’t fucking tell me what to do with mine!’

Callie lay on her bed, snivelling gently into a copy of
From Terrace To Townhouse: A History of the Urban Building
Industry 1880–1980
. It was the ingratitude that got her. The blank ingratitude. And also (maybe, just a tiny bit) the fact that Mum was going out while she was stuck home with the kids and Voula.

‘Callie! Phone!’ Soph stuck her head in the door. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘Shut up!’

‘Anyway, it’s not a boy,’ Soph added spitefully.

No, it was Voula. Mick Vasilopoulos had just come into the shop, and he’d waited to be served by Voula herself, and at the end when she’d given him his change he’d said ‘See ya at Ben’s place tonight,’ and Voula was wondering, he’d really smiled at her, if Callie would mind . . .

‘Of course I don’t,’ Callie lied. ‘Hope you have a good time.’ To make things even worse, Mick Vas was the only guy that Callie had fancied at all since she’d broken it off with Sean. Oh well, it seemed it was going to be a night alone in Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart.

‘Well, chickadees, I’m off now,’ Callie heard Mum telling the kids over the TV noise.

There was an outraged splutter from Damien. ‘Are you going
out
?’

Soph: ‘Whaddaya think she’s all dressed up for?’

Damien: ‘It’s not fair.’

Mum: ‘Cal’s hired a movie for you.’

Damien: ‘Bet it sucks!’

Mum: ‘Well anyway, I’ve ordered pizzas . . .’

Soph: ‘I just hope you remembered I’m allergic to anchovies.’

Mum: ‘I thought it was olives.’

Soph: ‘That was ages ago. It’s anchovies now. Nobody ever bothers to think about
me
. Talk about the classic middle child . . .’

Mum came into the hall, and even though Callie at the moment hated her mother, she felt her heart sink. Mum was wearing The Dress. And black tights, and her good shoes, and the little silver earrings that Kaye had brought back from Lesbos.

Doesn’t she know you scare them off if you look as if you’ve made an effort? Besides, if he was on the dole, it’d be noodles at the Saigon Palace, for sure.

‘Here’s some money,’ Mum said, ‘for the pizzas. I’ll give you a lift up to get them if you like.’ She was trying to make friends again, and her eyes were a bit red, though that could just be from the mascara.

‘It’s OK,’ Callie said with wounded dignity. The pizza place was just around the corner. But Callie walked out with Mum to the car, and said ‘You look nice’ as Mum got in.

‘Ta, love.’

When Callie got back and served up the pizzas, she found they’d given her two Sicilians instead of one Sicilian and an Australiana.

Damien: ‘There’s no pineapple!’

Soph: ‘Yuk, this is full of pepper! Trust Mum to get it wrong!’

‘It’s not her fault! Obviously some dickbrain at the shop mixed up the orders.’

‘Can’t you take it back?’

‘Not with your bloody great teeth marks in it.’

‘Well, can’t you buy another one?’

‘Got no money. Besides, it’s Saturday night. We’d have to wait for hours.’

So Callie made cheese on toast, and told Soph to get the movie ready.

‘What’d you get us?’ Damien hung around her in the kitchen as she kept an eye on the griller.

‘
The Blues Brothers
.’

‘I’ve seen that a hundred and fifty-seven times!’ He watched suspiciously as Callie scraped at a burnt crust. ‘That’s Soph’s piece.’

‘It is not!’ Soph was back. ‘And besides, I don’t see why Mum couldn’t have made us something to eat before she went.’

Callie dumped the plates in front of the kids. Despite the row earlier, the pattern of the family was such that she’d take Mum’s side, any time, when the other two ganged up. And this was the way of life that he threatened.

Oh, not necessarily Roger. Callie saw no future for Roger, the actual Roger. After all, some spunky young bloke Mum had met over the counter . . . Mum was sensible, in the long run. Even in the short run. She’d burst laughing into the hall tonight, with a great story about what a silly mistake she’d made and how she couldn’t wait to tell Kaye!