Ripples on a Pond (32 page)

Out then to the night, to light a cigarette and to stamp life back into her legs. They had stairs to climb, cases to carry, but one look at those cases decided her that they could wait until morning. A late moon up there, playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. Wondered if Myrtle was up there, watching her daughter suck strength from a butt. She'd been strong enough to get them here; now she needed strength enough to get them inside.

The cessation of movement had woken Robert. He was watching her. The cigarette in her mouth, she opened the rear door. Robin was still dead to the world. She slid her handbag over her shoulder, spat the cigarette and replaced it with her keys, then lifted him and carried him sleeping up the stairs, juggling him against her shoulder one-armed while she opened her door. He didn't wake. He didn't wake when she placed him down in her bed, in the clothes he wore.

A week ago, Robert would have been behind her, carrying a case or two. She found him in the foyer, empty-handed.

‘This is home,' she said.

A week ago he would have set up her folding bed while Myrtle found his pyjamas, toothbrush, a towel. Cara set up the bed, showed him the door to the bathroom, then left him to use it or not while she ran downstairs to get Myrtle's jewellery box, his spectacles and the hand-painted bowl. The rest she locked in the car until morning.

Found him staring at a bag of sliced bread left on her bench to turn green, at a fur of multicoloured mould growing in her unwashed coffee mug. The milk had gone sour in the fridge. No Weet-Bix, no cereal for Robin's breakfast. Should have thought to pack Myrtle's Weet-Bix. Tomorrow's worry for tomorrow.

She showed Robert to his narrow bed set up between her desk and her cartons of books, still unopened, and left him to get into it or not. Slid in gladly beside her vanilla-flavoured boy. No time to wonder if he was a sound sleeper or not. She slept soundly.

And woke too soon to a dirty-faced, sticky-haired cherub.

‘Did we came here by magic, Mummy?'

‘By Papa's car. And guess what?'

‘What?'

‘We have to go shopping before breakfast. Mummy hasn't got any bread, any Weet-Bix, any milk, any anything.'

‘'Cause you haven't got a proper house?'

‘It's a very un-proper house. I've only got two kitchen chairs and my office chair and a tiny baby table, and no couch.'

‘And no television?'

‘I've got a big television.'

‘Can I see my kinder on it?'

‘You can see all sorts of things on it, but very soon we'll find you a proper kinder with real ladies and real children to play with.'

A D
RIPPING
T
AP

B
usy days, no time to think. No school. Cara called the headmaster, explaining her situation. He told her to take what time she needed. She took three more days and it took all of them to find a crèche close enough to the school with a vacancy for a three-year-old boy.

Those three days were long enough to know it would take more than a change of scenery to lift Robert's mood, and long enough, too, to teach her the constancy, the weariness of motherhood, the demands of it, and the impossibility of sharing her bed with a wriggling, sweating little boy.

From time to time she'd looked at pretty lounge suites. Two months ago she'd almost ordered a two-seater couch with matching chairs. She took Robin to a secondhand shop on Saturday morning to look for a couch that would fold down into a bed. They had one: vinyl, olive green. She didn't buy it for its colour but for its price, and because Robert may spend less time in bed if his bed was also her lounge-room couch, and if there was no door to close between his bed and her kitchen.

It cost damn near as much again to have the thing delivered, and the men delivering it weren't happy about the stairs. They got it in, and it looked bigger in her unit than it had in the shop. Couldn't push it back against a wall because the back folded down to make the bed.

That night, Robert slept on it, and Robin moved into the fold-up bed in the room she'd previously named her study. Robin liked his bed. He was a big boy now. Only babies slept in cots with sides.

He was a big boy at breakfast time, too, and when he and Mummy got dressed for their day at work. He helped make a sandwich to leave for Papa's lunch. He was big when they held hands on the way downstairs, when they talked about Mummy getting some money from work so they could buy things at the shops. He was big until they reached the crèche's door where he was confronted by an accumulation of small children and ladies he didn't know. Then he changed his mind about being a big boy.

Too much time spent in attempting to reason with him, Cara ran out of time, pushed him into the arms of a carer and ran from his screams.

A bad day, a long, bad day. At a quarter to four, when she returned to that place, she found a silent little boy standing alone in a corner. She ran to him, or he ran to her. Gathered him into her arms, and he clung and sobbed on her neck.

The following morning, Robert left in his bed, no sandwich cut for his lunch, she carried her screaming boy from the unit.

‘I want to stay with Papa. I want to stay with Papa.'

‘Papa is sick. Be a big boy for me.'

‘I'm not big. You're big. I want you to stay wiff Papa.'

She wanted to stay with Papa, too, wanted to give up and go on the dole, but Gough's handout would barely pay her rent.

Robin fought against the straps that held him prisoner in the rear seat of the wagon, fought her when she unbuckled them, when she carried him from the car to the arms of a carer. Cara hoped she cared, but whether she did or not, had to drive on to work, where she no longer cared.

Like a clockwork clown, battery- or cigarette-driven; her feet kept on dancing, her arms continued their same movements day after day after day. She paid her rent, tried to smile when she picked Robin up at four, when she ran a bath to wash the scent of the crèche from him. She forced a clown smile when she buttoned his pyjamas.

‘I don't want 'jamas. It's not dark time.'

‘Papa has got his pyjamas on, and I bet you've never watched television in your pyjamas before.'

He watched too much television, Robert watching with him, his bed flipped back to a couch for the hours between four and eight. By the Friday, his bedding was no longer folded ready for its next use but piled in an untidy heap in the corner. For a mother, carer, wage-earner, there are only so many hours in a day. Corners get cut.

Robin had been raised with the expectation that his every need, his every demand, would be instantly satisfied. If he wanted to wear his shirt with the train on it, that shirt would be supplied.

‘I told you, it's in the wash.'

‘I want you to wash it.'

‘I want you to walk down the stairs instead of making me carry you. Mummy is tired.'

She had to shop, supply meals. Supplied pancakes one night. Robin liked pancakes, Robert didn't. He returned to his couch to stare at the television until he nodded off.

Pills shielded the mind from pain. They didn't take the pain of loss away. It needed to be felt, to be dealt with. Cara had no time to deal with her loss. She'd been too busy choosing a coffin, talking to the minister, the undertaker, cigarette in hand. Was too busy shielding Robin from his loss, worrying about Robert. Too exhausted to sleep at night, she sat on a kitchen chair on her balcony, chain-smoking while her eyes stared off into the dark.

Cathy phoned on the Friday night to ask where Cara had been, and to tell her that Dino Collins wasn't due for release until October.

October? Cara couldn't see as far as March.

‘Thanks, Cath.'

‘I tried to call you a dozen times.'

‘I've been in Sydney. Mum died.'

‘You poor thing,' Cathy said. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I've got Dad and Robin down here with me.'

And I'm all wrong, so all wrong.

*

The price of petrol went up. Supermarket prices went up. Land prices never stopped going up. Back in the early sixties, Helen and Michael had bought their block of land in outer Melbourne for under two thousand pounds. At the weekend, the block beside them sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. Every year, housing estates ate deeper into productive farmland. There were several teachers who travelled further to work than Helen and who discussed land prices in the staffroom.

‘Forest Hill was considered to be the sticks when we bought,' Helen said. ‘But the way the estates are moving out, we'll be part of the inner circle soon.'

Cara told Helen about Robin. Chris hadn't told her Cara had a son. Trustworthy Chris. Helen, assuming Robin was Chris's son, asked why they hadn't married.

‘His father lives in England.'

A silence, then a shrug. ‘I envy you. We're still waiting to adopt. Not that I would have wanted to have a baby outside of marriage – or I wouldn't have wanted to back then.'

‘Did Chris get married?'

‘Yeah. She's a nice kid – or she seems a kid to me. The granddaughter of someone his father used to know in Italy.'

‘He wanted a big family,' Cara said.

‘So did we,' Helen said. ‘Neither one of us has brothers or sisters. We wanted at least three and will be lucky to get one. Unmarried girls are keeping their babies now – as you know.'

‘As I know.'

One of Cara's first students was pushing a stroller. She might have been seventeen. Cara had seen her at the local supermarket with her mother – a so young grandmother. Since time began, babies had been born out of wedlock, born in secret, signed away in secret, dumped in public lavatories, in garbage cans – expendable items. Not any more. The young grandmother had shown no embarrassment that the taxpayer's bottomless pockets would pay for her grandson's raising.

Plenty of unmarried mothers in Woody Creek. Georgie had filled the blank sides of twelve docket book pages on the subject of Woody Creek's dole bludgers and unwed mothers.

An unmarried mother, if shacked up in her subsidised housing with her dole-bludging boyfriend, is on easy street these days. With no restrictions on how many kids the taxpayer is prepared to subsidise, the more frequently the unmarried mother breeds, the better off she is. The boyfriend, of course, isn't allowed to live with her, and he doesn't – or not on paper. I know of five who do . . .

Georgie's protégé, Shane Murphy, now studying in Melbourne, Georgie had offered his part-time job to his younger brother:
He told me he was happy enough working for Gough, but thanks for the offer . . .

Gough Whitlam's spendthrift habits were creating big problems for the country – as Myrtle's had created problems for Robert. His living expenses now subsidised by Cara, he had no trouble making February's loan payment; had more trouble concentrating long enough to sign the cheque. He was worse, not better. He wasn't sick, wasn't limping, but he wasn't Robert either.

No doubt Gough and his party are working on the principle that if they can breed up enough of those dependent on handouts, they'll never be able to vote him out, Georgie wrote.

As I see it, Australia the lucky country is racing full steam ahead towards a rocky landing; and the taxpayer, exhausted by the load he's carrying, is too damn tired to see the rocks ahead.

Cara saw nothing but rocks ahead. Every morning she crawled over them as she climbed from her bed. At night, when she couldn't sleep, when she sat on her balcony chain-smoking, she saw more rocks piling up for her to climb over come morning.

She didn't reply to Georgie's letter. That would have required energy she didn't possess.

She didn't miss a day at work; work was a relief in a life of no relief, a safe hiatus between Robin's tears when she left him and the sobbing and clinging when she collected him.

‘As soon as you're out of sight, he's fine,' the carer said.

He was a happy boy on Saturdays, when he rode in the supermarket trolley. He knew Saturdays and Sundays. He knew Mondays too and didn't like them.

‘I don't like you,' he told Cara.

‘I don't like naughty boys. And if you don't let me put your shoes on, you can go to work in bare feet.'

The floor needed vacuuming. Little boys shed crumbs, they shredded paper. But what use vacuuming? There'd be more to do tomorrow. What use in stripping sheets and blankets from the couch only to spread them again? What use flipping that couch up then down again? Just wearing out its mechanism. Left it down.

Grey mouse Robert was on it if he wasn't in it – grey mouse or Gran Norris, though more silent than she had been.

Cara had hoped Robert would run out of pills, but John phoned him one day while she was at school and a new script was delivered to her letterbox. She refused to get it filled for a day or two – until his old familiar hands could no longer hold a teacup, a knife and fork. She went to a pharmacy then and got him a new bottle, and he snatched it from her as a kid might snatch a bag of lollies – or a druggie his daily fix.

He ate little. He'd lost any fat he may have carried a month ago. She didn't serve fillet steak. Served frozen pasties, fish fingers, canned spaghetti on toast. Robin liked her meals; Robert didn't. He needed professional help, and she was too tired to get him what he needed – and he didn't agree that he needed it anyway.

Exhausted by day, wound up too tight by night to sleep, she sat on her balcony and exhausted her mind with additions, subtractions, multiplications. Robert's pension, plus the rent from Amberley's upstairs units, multiplied by twelve, when deducted from the amount still owning on the loan, interest added, equalled . . . equalled . . .

That loan, if she paid only the required amount each month, had over four years to run, but if she paid his pension plus rent from the two units on it . . . And rented out his unit . . .

Myrtle's furniture would need to be stored. John had offered to store it. He knew Robert would never live in the unit alone. If Cara rented out the unit, and found someone to rent Mrs Collins's room, she could get that loan paid off by the time Robin started school.

Cathy rang often, at night when her babies were in bed. She and Gerry had a loan. She and Cara discussed mortgages and interest rates. Cathy spoke of a lovely new nursing home in Ballarat. Cara listened, subtracted Robert's pension money from her equation. The nursing home would swallow up his Education Department pension, but the rent from three units and Mrs Collins's room would still eat that loan.

What sort of woman have I raised?
Myrtle whispered in her mind.

A fiction-writing realist, Mummy, and they don't live happily side by side. And he wants to die anyway and I can't stop him. Robin can't stop him.

There were fringe benefits to sharing a life with a pill-befuddled parent. He drank coffee now, which saved her time in emptying the teapot. If he tasted the difference, he made no comment. His fogged eyes commented on the mug – Myrtle had served tea in a fine china cup on a saucer – but he drank what was in the mug. He drank water when he swallowed his pills, probably the only water he drank – and thus a fringe benefit to his pill-popping.

‘Papa's asleep again, Mummy.'

‘He must have worked very hard today, Robbie.'

She'd tried to interest him in fixing the dripping shower. A plumbing supplies shop had sold her a selection of suitable washers for the shower taps. Robert had once known how to stop a dripping tap, but his tools were locked up in a shed behind Amberley and his brain was locked up in some shed midway between life and death. The shower's splat-splat became a trickle. A fringe benefit to that too. A constant is easier to live with than an intermittent splat.

*

On a Friday at the beginning of March the office woman knocked on Cara's classroom door.

‘Phone call, Miss Norris.'

‘Did she give her name?'

‘A Linda Watson.'

‘Tell her I'm not in,' Cara said.

The social worker left her phone number and a message. ‘She said it was urgent that she speak to you and that she'd be in her office all day on Monday.'

Monday, the morning threatening excessive heat, Robin trying to undo the buckles that held him prisoner, and Robert's wagon refused to start. It had been running on empty for days and Cara had known it. Big blue eyes looked at her.

‘Out,' she said, releasing him.

In an instant, his sulky morning face was wiped clean. He ran ahead up the drive, up the stairs, into the flat, where she tossed Robert's keys to the bench and picked up Morrie's. The MG hadn't been out of its bay in a month and probably wouldn't start.