The Fine Color of Rust (27 page)

“Are you OK?” I asked after I had dropped off the three frozen soups at the door of the shed. We turned toward the warming sun and both crossed our arms as we squinted out over the yard.

Justin nodded. “Thanks, Loretta,” he said.

“Marg's gone home?”

He nodded again.

I hesitated before I said, “You know, Justin, I'd never seen Norm as happy as when you came to live here.” I wasn't sure whether that would please Justin or make him even sadder, but it was worth saying.

At home, we are in shock, unable to believe Norm isn't going to appear at the back door with a bag of lemons and all the news of the town. It's as if no one has any news to tell anyway. Gunapan has gone quiet. We're all in mourning.

It seems important to go back to routines. For a week Melissa and Jake, distraught as they were, got away with doing no chores, eating whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and watching endless hours of television. Today we
stop that. Today we go back to life and try to find a way back in without Norm.

“I don't want to go to school,” Jake says in the car. “The holidays were good. Let's put more pictures of Norm in the book.”

When I pull up at the gate, Melissa and Jake stay sitting in the car.

“What's up?” I ask.

“What if they ask us about Norm?” Melissa puts her hand up to her mouth and begins to nibble at a nail. Another bad habit she's got from me.

“Sweetie, everyone knows Norm died. Don't worry, they'll try to make you comfortable.”

They climb reluctantly out of the car and shuffle toward the school steps. Around them, kids stare silently. I was wrong. No one knows how to behave when someone close to you has died. My poor kids will probably sit alone all day while the other children gawk at them as if they're zoo animals.

At the Neighbourhood House, the reaction is quite different.

“Welcome back,” Gabrielle says at the front door. She holds the wire screen open while I unlock the front door, then follows me into the office.

“How come you're here today? The committee meeting's not for another two weeks.”

“Oh, darling, I wanted to see that you were OK. I heard your friend Mr. Stevens died. That's so awful. I am sorry, Loretta.”

“Thanks, Gabrielle.” I am more than surprised. I was certain she didn't know my name.

Gabrielle sits in the office armchair with the foam spilling out of the holes in the fabric and leafs through some old committee
minutes while I walk around turning off the alarm, unlocking the rooms of the House, switching on lights. The House seems even shabbier than usual today. We can't get money to paint the rooms, so the walls are scuffed and the paint on the woodwork is chipped. The colors they chose originally were jolly lemons and greens, supposed to cheer people up. Now they look like prison colors. The furniture is all mismatched. The polished floorboards have lost their polish where everyone walks and dirt is being ground into the boards. I trudge back to the office, making a note to apply for funding to repair the floors.

“So how are you coping, darling?” Gabrielle asks once I've dropped into the office chair.

My email opens as she speaks. I have three hundred and forty-four unread messages after two weeks of being away. I don't want to talk about how I'm coping. For the first time in my life I want to work slowly through a huge number of outstanding emails and think about nothing else.

“We're OK. Thanks for asking, Gabrielle,” I answer in a crisp, businesslike voice. I move a pile of papers from the left side of the desk to the right. “Look at all this. I'd better get on with it.”

Gabrielle doesn't look as if she's about to move, so I open my emails one by one. The first twenty or so are course and child-care inquiries. Why these people can write an email but not look at a web page is beyond me. I reply with a link to the web page. At least thirty emails are from the funding bodies who think the main purpose of the Neighborhood House is to fill in forms about funding. If you fill in enough forms and are lucky enough to get some funding, you'll spend the rest of the year filling in forms about how you intend to spend the funding, how you are spending the funding, and then how
you did spend the funding. And then they'll want a report on the success of the funded project. Which you haven't had time to do because you've been flat out filling out forms about funding and they only gave you a quarter of what you needed to do the project anyway.

Helen's sent me a joke. I'm scared to open it because it might have sound, and Gabrielle is still sitting beside me in the House's most uncomfortable chair, the one we put in the office to discourage people from sitting and complaining for hours. The last joke I opened from Helen was a jaunty song about penises that rang out across the office of the Neighbourhood House for what seemed like an hour while I withered at the desk, apologizing, because I didn't know how to turn it off. Helen doesn't realize that I'm a professional woman doing a professional job and I have an image to uphold. Plus we have a large sign over the office window saying
Offensive language will not be tolerated in this House
, which Tina put up after her son Damien heard one of the visitors shouting abuse at someone on the phone. I was the first to be graced with his new vocabulary when I arrived on a Tuesday morning and said, “Hi, Damien,” only to be answered with, “Hi, you fucking slag.” Tina was mortified.

“What's going to happen to Mr. Stevens's yard?” Gabrielle asks out of the blue.

“I don't know.” I keep clicking through my emails as we speak, hoping she'll get the hint.

“It is an eyesore. I don't think many people will be sorry to see it go.”

“An eyesore?” I repeat. I remember Norm's description of it—an abstract interpretation of the changing face of Gunapan—and smile. “I find it rather attractive. An unusual work of art.”

“But most people won't think that way, will they, darling. Most people will be glad when it's gone.”

“I'm not sure why we're talking about this, Gabrielle. The yard is none of my business. And I don't feel up to talking about Norm, I'm sorry.” I turn reluctantly away from the computer to face Gabrielle and find to my astonishment that she has tears on her cheeks. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“I didn't know he was ill,” she says, breathing in with a stutter between words.

“Nobody knew. It's OK.”

“It's just that we were at supper and talking about the yard and how ugly it made that road and how it wouldn't look good for people driving to the resort, and I don't know, suddenly I was the one who was going to make the complaint. I didn't want to. And if I'd known he wasn't well . . .”

“You mean to the council?”

“I only said to them that they should ask him to put up a fence! And then they sent him that notice and everything blew up.” She takes in a long, shaky breath. “And then he died.” She pulls a tissue from her bag and honks into it.

“Who was at supper?”

“No one special. Just our book group.” She does another honk and brings out her makeup mirror. “Oh, look at me. I'm a mess.”

“Who's in the book group?”

“It's no one you'd know, darling. A couple of ladies from Halstead, a councillor, members of the Lions Ladies Auxiliary. We have a glass of wine and a nibble once a month and sometimes we even talk about the book.” Gabrielle's perking up now. She smiles as she mentions the glass of wine.

“Samantha Patterson?”

“Yes, Samantha. And Ann-Maree, who makes the most
delicious tiny party pies. Or maybe she buys them from that Halstead patisserie. I try to put on a lovely supper too, but some of those Lions ladies can cook like chefs. It's rather intimidating, I have to say. I've been tempted to cater, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of things, would it.”

“Samantha Patterson,” I mutter again. “Samantha Patterson suggested you complain.”

“No. No, it wasn't Samantha. I can't remember who it was. It was everyone. We were all talking about it. It just came up.”

“He was a sick man.”

Gabrielle's eyes fill with tears again. “I didn't know.”

“It
was
Samantha Patterson, wasn't it?”

“I can't remember. We were chatting. It was only a harmless little message to get him to clean up.”

“But it wasn't harmless, was it? He was ill. It caused him terrible stress.” I feel a little ill myself, hearing these words coming out of my mouth. But I'm furious. Norm knew Samantha Patterson had something to do with it. How dare they do this to Norm, my Norm.

Gabrielle dabs at her eyes with a new tissue. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

“I have to get to work now, Gabrielle.” I feel unkind, but not as unkind as I'm going to feel when I get hold of Samantha Patterson.

The day flies past as I answer emails and fend off sympathetic calls, and when I knock off I only have two hours until I have to pick up the kids. Luckily, I know exactly where Samantha Patterson will be. She'll be where all the wealthy women of this area appear on the first Monday of the month. The mobile day spa.

THE WOMEN WHO
go to the day spa would never have a haircut at Hair Today Gone Tomorrow in the main street of Gunapan. They have their hair done in Melbourne. But once a month a van arrives in Gunapan and spills young Asian women carrying manicure and pedicure kits and boxes of creams and lotions into Hair Today. The blinds go down in the windows. The pub delivers bottles of champagne. Four-wheel drives pull up and park along the street like some beauty-hunting club and the women disappear into Hair Today, which is closed to normal business for four hours in the afternoon. Helen tried to book in last year, but they told her it was full up. “Full up, my arse,” she said to me.

When I push open the door of the salon, the first person I see is Gabrielle in a bathrobe. She's sitting with her hands spread flat on a table. The girl on the other side of the table is shaking a bottle of nail polish. Farther inside are two women, lounging in reclining chairs with their feet in footbaths, chatting and laughing. Several more toward the back of the room are lying on massage tables, their faces covered in goop. Jazz music and a delicious smell of orange and cardamom fill the room. Candles are burning. A young woman comes toward
me carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres. Am I still in Gunapan?

“Do you have a booking?” the young woman asks, surprised, looking me up and down.

“No, I'm here to see someone.”

At the sound of my voice Gabrielle looks up. When I shake my head at her she looks away again, her face pink. I don't want to cause Gabrielle any harm. I have never wanted to cause anyone harm—until today.

“Sorry,” the young woman says quietly, “this is a private club.” She puts the tray on the shop counter and moves behind me to open the door and usher me out, but I'm headed for the back of the salon.

The elegant figure lying with its eyes closed and cream all over its face on the table near the basins is unmistakably Samantha Patterson. Her sleek hair is fanned across the pillow. Like the other women she's wearing a fluffy white robe and pink toweling scuffs. Her fine-boned hands, which have obviously never encountered a scourer, are crossed daintily over her flat stomach.

At this moment, the full extent of my scragness is very clear to me. My rage deserts me. I have a terrible feeling I'm going to open my mouth and a screech will come out.

Samantha opens her eyes, frowns at me for a moment, and closes them again.

“Tran, somebody's here,” she says, her eyes still closed. “Can you look after them, please.”

So much for my rage deserting me. It was only on a brief holiday. “I'm here to speak to you, Samantha.” I can hear a shade of screech in my voice, but there's nothing I can do about that.

She opens her eyes again and gives me the once-over. “I'm sorry. I don't think I know you.”

“I'm a friend of Norm Stevens. You know Norm, the one with the unsightly property. I'm also interested in the development on the Bolton Road. I think you might be the person to talk to about that.”

Samantha doesn't even blink. She lies on the massage table like Cleopatra waiting for her slaves and turns her face away from me before she says, “I am in the middle of a facial. Do you mind?”

“Yes, I do mind. I want to know what's going on.”

“I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.” She sits up and swings her legs over the side of the table so she's facing me. “I can't believe you've been so rude as to barge in here and interrupt our afternoon. If you've got some issue with the development, take it up with council.”

“No.” That screeching voice coming out of me is getting louder. “I want to take it up with you. Norm told me you were behind this. I'm going to finish what he started.”

Everyone's listening now. The girl doing the pedicures has her scalpel poised in the air and is staring at us.

“I hardly think the ravings of some filthy old junk man are anything to rely on.” She looks around at her friends, who half-nod and half-smile, not knowing what else to do. “And coming in here like this is completely inappropriate. Please take your concerns up with the council.” She waves an indolent hand at the girl near the counter. “Tran, can you show this person to the door.”

“No, Tran. Don't bother. I'm not leaving.”

The salon, usually full of chatter and the rush of water and the hum of hair dryers, is so still I can almost hear the guttering of the candles. Tran holds on to the counter.

Samantha looks around at her friends, but they're staring at the floor or the wall. I recognize one of them from
the creative-writing class at the Neighbourhood House. She seemed like a kind person. Her list of pleasing things included hugging her granddaughter and smelling the flowery scent of her flyaway hair. Why would she be friends with this nasty woman?