The Fine Color of Rust (28 page)

“My friend Norm died. He was a good man.”

“I'm sure he was.” Samantha relaxes her shoulders, rolling the left, then the right, and brings her hands to rest in her lap. “I'm very sorry. I am really very sorry.”

As soon as she says this everyone in the room starts to breathe again. Relief ripples through the salon. I start to see the funny side of this. Samantha's face is covered in cream. It's like talking to a pavlova.

“Should I call the council and make an appointment for you? Tran, could you please bring my handbag here?”

“No.” I will not be put off. Norm is dead and I owe him.

Tran hurries past me with her head down and passes Samantha a red leather bag.

“You're obviously grieving. I'm very sorry about your friend. Go home and rest and we can organize an appointment with the council for you.” She pulls a gold notebook and matching pencil from her handbag. “Now, what's your name and phone number? I'll get my assistant onto it first thing tomorrow.”

I can hear murmurs of approval from the front of the salon. So her friends think she is doing the right thing. Perhaps I
am
blowing things out of proportion. Samantha has her pencil poised over the open notebook.

But no. Grief, stubbornness, anger, whatever it is, she's not getting rid of me this easily. “I want you to tell me about the development and your connection with it.”

From her small pink mouth I hear a tiny
tsk.
She turns to
the woman at the next table and rolls her eyes. “For heaven's sake,” she mutters.

I am not sure exactly why this sets me off the way it does. It's not only about Norm, or the development, or the council. It's everything about who Samantha Patterson is and who I am and who Norm was. It's Samantha Patterson rolling her eyes as if I'm some annoying bug that got inside her big air-conditioned house. It's the way she said, “For heaven's sake,” as if my life and Norm's life and the lives of most of the people I know in this town are a waste of time. It's enough to make me take a step forward and do something I've never done in my life.

I slap her face.

Even as my hand connects, I realize what a stupid thing I'm doing. Not because it won't give me satisfaction—it will—but because her face is covered in cream. What should have been a resounding smack that leaves her with a stinging cheek and a good dose of humiliation becomes a slithering swipe that unbalances me and leaves my hand greasy and Samantha with the look of a half-eaten cream bun. A giggle rises in me.

“Tran, lock the door,” the cream bun says through gritted teeth. “Call the police. I've been assaulted.”

•  •  •

“GEEZ, LORETTA, WHAT
do you think you're playing at?” Bill asks when I'm sitting in the passenger seat of the police car heading for the station.

I shrug.

“Samantha Patterson is not a person to get offside.”

I shrug again. I don't care.

It's only a ten-minute drive from the salon to the police station, a small brick office at the front of Bill's house. We
should drive past the CWA Hall and the school on the way, but Bill swings the car around the corner at the supermarket and heads along Grevillea Street. He says he doesn't want my children to look out of the window of their schoolroom and see me in a police car. I tell him I would probably go up ten points in Jake's estimation if he did see me in a police car. We drop by the doctor's surgery, where I run inside to ask Helen to pick up the kids after school and take them to her house. When she asks why and I explain I'm under arrest for assaulting Samantha Patterson, I think I go up ten points in her estimation too. An old lady I know from the Neighbourhood House hauls herself out of her chair in the waiting room and asks to shake my hand. Unfortunately my hand is still greasy from Samantha's face cream.

At the station, Bill sits across the desk and gazes at me with the sorrowful expression of a disappointed father. He shakes his head as he reaches into the drawer and pulls out a form with several colored copies attached.

“Full name?”

“Loretta Judith Boskovic.”

“Address?”

“You know that perfectly well, Bill.”

“Answer please, Loretta. This is serious. Mrs. Patterson has insisted I charge you with assault.”

“Fine. I'm glad I slapped her. Do you have a tissue?”

“You know you could lose your job if you get a conviction?”

That shuts me up.

“You'll be charged on summons. You'll come up in front of a magistrate. You'll be a criminal if you're convicted, Loretta. It's not a joke.”

THE KIDS SIT
quietly in the back on the way home from Helen's place. It's likely they can see the steam pouring from my head and they're worried it's about them. I keep thinking about Samantha Patterson calling Norm a filthy old junk man, and each time that phrase goes through my head another surge of steam builds up. Sure, Norm was the local junk man, and I do admit that on occasion he was filthy, but that's not for her to say. And now I might lose my job.

“If you're looking down—or up—from somewhere, Norm Stevens, I'll show you what a battler I am. Nothing is going to stop me bringing that woman down.”

“Mum!” Melissa says crossly. “You're talking to yourself again. And you missed our street.”

“All right, all right, no need to blow your top.”

“Not like some people,” she says, pursing her lips in that special Gunapan way.

I swing the car into the next street, then do a blockie, heading for our road. With the silence broken, Jake can't help himself.

“Our class got a mouse today and the teacher said if anyone screamed she'd send them home and Jamie wet his pants
and he had to wear the spare ones and they were blue and I got—”

He's stopped midstream for the same reason I'm applying the brakes. Sitting outside our house on a trailer behind an old Bedford truck is a massive yellow machine with a bucket at the front. It has caterpillar treads and a square cabin on the top with a seat in the shape of an upturned hand perched above the engine and levers sticking up from the floor. From this angle it looks like it could scoop up the whole house.

I'm expecting Justin to jump out of the truck, but when we pull up in the driveway, it's Merv Bull who ambles up beside the car. He leans in, shading his eyes against the sun.

“G'day, Loretta.” He taps on the glass of the back window. “G'day, mate,” he says to Jake.

Jake scrambles to get out of the car so fast he nearly knocks Merv over with the car door. I try to emerge in a more seemly manner. Melissa gets out of the car on her side and looks hard at Merv, then shouts across the car roof to me.

“I'll check the letter box and see if Dad's sent a card. Remember Dad? Your husband?”

I smile brightly at Merv Bull. “I used to be married. Kids can't let things go, can they?”

He laughs. Jake is welded to his left leg, gazing up adoringly. I think about how strange it is that he didn't react this way with his own father.

“Mr. Bull, can I pleeeeeeeese look at the yellow machine?”

“Sure, mate.”

Melissa pushes the mail at me and storms inside. I watch as Merv lifts Jake onto the seat of the bulldozer and lets him try to move the gear levers. Jake's so excited he's laughing like a hyena. I hope he didn't get that laugh from me.

When we all get inside and sit down at the table for tea and lemonade and biscuits, Merv tells Jake about the different types of bulldozer he's worked on. He turns to Melissa, who has been sipping her lemonade and nibbling her biscuits with her face turned aside, as though even the sight of Merv Bull could ruin her appetite.

“I met your dad. Worked on his car. He seemed like a great bloke,” Merv says.

It's as if he has turned on the sun.

“Yeah, my dad's great.” Melissa nods vigorously. “Even though some people don't think so.” She glares at me. I glare back. I know she's putting this on for Merv. She's as disappointed in her father as I am. The other night she took the postcard off her bedroom wall and put it in her secret box in the wardrobe. It made me sad when I found it.

“Anyway, I did want to have a word with your mum about some stuff,” Merv says pointedly.

Now she's been appeased, Melissa gets up and herds her brother off to his room before settling into her room to do her homework.

“So,” Merv says when the kitchen is quiet. “I wanted to say I'm sorry about Norm. He was a champion. I know I haven't been in town that long, but it was clear from the get-go that Norm was a bloke you could rely on.”

I have to wrinkle up my face to keep the tears from coming.

“He did a couple of favors for me and I won't forget that,” Merv goes on. “Which is why I'm here.”

“Oh?”

“That Unsightly Property Notice business was out of line. Everyone knew it was dodgy.”

“It was Samantha Patterson. I heard this morning. I don't
know how she's involved with that development, but I'm going to find out.”

“I might be able to help. I'm not allowed to talk about the development, because I signed that confidentiality agreement. But I can talk about some other things I've noticed.”

This is so exciting I feel a hyena laugh coming on. “Such as?”

“Such as the 'dozer I'm towing into town today. Do you know where it's going?”

I shrug, still trying to keep the hyena laugh inside.

“It's going to the house of John Ponty,” Merv says triumphantly. “The heavy-equipment moving firm that does a lot of work for the place I'm not allowed to talk about was supposed to pick it up and deliver it, but they had a breakdown and I said I'd do it instead. Then I found out where it was going.”

“John Ponty? The name sounds familiar.”

“Council officer? Planning Department? Currently having major renovations done on his house?”

“Ah.”

“And commonly known to be bonking a certain married female councillor.”

“No!” How come I never know any of the real gossip in this town? “You mean Samantha Patterson?”

“Oh, yes. And here's the icing on the cake. I know my machines, right? I often work on them myself, don't only leave them to the apprentices. And I can tell you that someone has been swapping plates around on the 'dozers and the trenchers and the other machines. We note it all down, of course, for our records. Plate number and engine number on the repair sheet. And back when they started the shire swimming pool renos, I saw this very 'dozer on that site. Different plate, same 'dozer.”

“I don't get it. What's the swimming pool got to do with it?”

“I'm no wiser than you. I can only tell you what I've seen. But those machines belong to a big company with fingers in a lot of different pies, and I've seen them on jobs that shouldn't be connected.”

How can I start to figure this out? It's so complicated. No wonder they've been getting away with it, whatever it is.

“Thanks, Merv. I really didn't know anything much, so this is a great start.”

“Happy to help, Loretta.”

We teeter into a sudden, awkward silence. I can hear Jake singing to himself in his room, and the tapping and beeps of Melissa on the computer. Terror and Panic clatter up the steps of the back veranda and peer in the back window. They must be hungry.

“Liss,” I call. “Did you feed Terror and Panic?”

Merv raises his eyebrows when I say “Terror and Panic,” then looks behind him and jumps when he sees the two long bearded faces in the window.

“Lawn mowers from Norm,” I explain.

“Maaaaaaa, maaaaaa,” Terror calls. It works far better than my call and Melissa trots through the kitchen and out to the veranda in the automatic manner of a mother summoned by her baby's cry.

“Suppose I'd better deliver this 'dozer,” Merv says, standing and stretching.

I follow him out to the truck.

“Thanks again, Merv.” I'm getting that same feeling I had when I went to his garage ages ago. Something hanging in the air. His gaze resting a moment too long on the footpath, then the horizon.

He stands beside the door of the truck. Brushes his hand through his straight shiny brown hair. Turns to the truck and turns back again.

“I'm heading to Halstead for a drink and some dinner on Saturday. Don't suppose you'd like to come?”

He speaks so fast I want to ask him to say it again. Slowly. I think he asked me on a date.

“Halstead? Saturday?” I mumble. A thought occurs to me. “Aren't you . . .? Isn't . . .? Maxine . . .?”

“Maxine's great,” he says. “She's a good mate. Kind of turned out that way.”

I open my mouth and wait for the yes to come out, but it doesn't. The silence becomes uncomfortable. I should say yes. I'm being asked on a date. But as I keep failing to answer, the realization dawns on me. He's not what I want.

“If you're busy,” Merv says. He reaches for the truck handle.

“It's a bit hard to find babysitters. You know.”

“Yeah, sure. It must be a problem. Well, maybe another time.”

“Yep. Maybe another time,” I reply. My heart is beating fast. If I tell Helen about this she'll kill me.

He climbs into the truck and starts the engine, which shakes and grunts as it strains away from the curb, pulling the 'dozer on its trailer. His arm reaches out and waves from the cabin of the truck, and I feel a small twinge of regret.

But I could never go for a man who drives a Bedford.

THE MAIL MELISSA
brought in is fatter than usual. I sit back down at the kitchen table and open an envelope from the council. Inside is a letter and a wad of paper.

In response to your Freedom of Information Application No. 2/84/556, please find enclosed council documents relating to the Forest Springs Leisure Resort area rezoning and building application.