The minister made his grudging way back to the shed, his mind with his new car. Unmarked yet, it still smelt of the showroom – and he liked it that way. The church supplied his vehicles, and so they should, he thought. Much of his work was out of town. He had given his life to the church, but, had he not chosen to follow his father’s vocation, Martin Templeton would have made an admirable motor mechanic. He had a shelf in his study specifically for mechanical books. Each year at the church fete he sorted through the second-hand books for old magazines he could not justify purchasing at the local newsagents. Wallowing in the intricacies of motors was his secret vice.
The Packard, like the house, came to him with his wife, and he had grown to know the old car more intimately than he’d ever known dear Angel. ‘A strange woman,’ he muttered, dusting her father’s car, loving it, wiping finger marks from its wheel-arch with one of his own outgrown singlets. He kept a bag of rags beneath his workbench, discarded garments he used as polishing cloths and to wipe the grease and oil from his fingers when he delved beneath the bonnet.
On his knees, he was peering beneath the old vehicle when the telephone again paged him.
‘Confound that thing,’ he said. ‘Confound its ill-mannered interruptions.’ Head up, he counted the rings. Most callers gave up if the phone wasn’t answered after twelve rings. He always followed this rule. With effort he stood, listening, counting. The phone continued to ring. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen –
His oily rag in hand, he crossed the garden to the back door, flinging the flywire wide, picking up the phone and bellowing his frustration into the mouthpiece. ‘Hello. Who is this?’
‘Old age pinching this afternoon, Martin Templeton?’ an equally peevish voice replied.
‘Miss Moreland. Do forgive my ire. I have been the recipient of innumerable nuisance calls today. Any work I have attempted this morning has been interrupted by some young hooligan with a penchant for telephones. Is Stella there? She has taken the new car. Not familiar with it, I’m afraid.’
‘She’s a better driver than you ever were, Martin Templeton.’
‘Has she arrived, madam?’
‘Not yet. Where is she?’
Martin’s mind began charting the car’s course to Miss Moreland’s unit, seeing his small white vehicle smashed on each corner. ‘She left a few minutes before two-thirty. She was . . . is not . . . not herself.’
‘Speak English. Is she sick?’
‘No. No. Luckily she inherited my constitution rather than her poor mother’s. She may have stopped off at the centre. I noticed that we were out of milk,’ he added, attempting to convince himself, more than the caller. He looked at his clock. Almost fifteen minutes had passed since his daughter had driven away. It didn’t take that long to buy milk in Maidenville. He should have put his foot down, refused her the keys. It was six months since the army reunion in Sydney. That was the last time she had driven, and that had been in the six-year-old Ford. Why he had allowed her to drive away today he didn’t know. ‘Remind her about the milk. Better still, tell her to give me a call when she arrives.’
‘If she’s not here by three, I’ll call back.’
‘Thank you. Don’t forget to remind her we need milk.’ Martin placed the phone down then, his rag tossed to the table, he made his slow way upstairs to his study where he sat scanning through his bible, looking for inspiration. He had barely taken up his pen when the phone jangled again from the hall. ‘That will be Stella,’ he said, ‘or the police.’ He sprang to his feet and hurried downstairs. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
There was no reply.
‘Who is this? What do you want? Have you got the right number?’
The caller replied with heavy breathing, and Martin slammed the phone into the receiver.
Thomas Spencer was stifling his laughter as he returned to the storeroom of his parents’ supermarket. He was supposed to be filling shelves. He did it every Saturday, and he hated it.
For minutes he stood on the cool cement floor, imagining the face of old Templeton. It was almost as good as Stell answering, he thought, visualising the old bull-moose slobbering into the phone. He’d do more than slobber if old Stell ever told him what’d happened. But he knew she’d kept her mouth shut like he told her to because he’d seen the cop car driving down Main Street only half an hour ago. It went straight by.
He reached for a carton of tomato-sauce bottles, and hefted it onto his shoulder as his father walked through.
‘Nice to see a smiling face for a change, Tommy.’
‘You’ve got a better view than me.’
‘Why don’t you use a trolley? You’ll drop the lot one day.’
‘She’s cool man. She’s cool.’
Ronald Spencer continued on through the storeroom, his brow permanently creased in a frown.
‘Nagging old shit,’ Thomas muttered. His father was always nagging him to use a trolley. Thomas ignored him. He liked the look of his shoulders beneath the carton, and he stopped now in front of a mirror over the main freezer, shifting the carton to his other shoulder. He stood there, viewing his still new manly physique. Twelve months ago, he’d been one of the smallest in the junior football team. This year he’d be one of the biggest. He looked good too. Girls liked him now. They more than liked him! He hoped Kelly Murphy would walk in and see him flexing his muscles, see what she was missing out on. He was giving her a rest for a while, letting her learn that she wasn’t making the rules any more. He was making the rules these days.
Nobody came in.
He walked to the sauce shelves, placed the carton on the floor, then with his Stanley knife, slashed the cardboard carton, waiting for the wound to gape open like a slit throat, to expose the glass veins of clotted red blood. ‘Die,’ he hissed, slashing again. ‘Die.’
The whole town must have lived on tomato sauce. Every Saturday of his life he had to fill the tomato sauce shelf. He even dreamed of filling it some nights – of spilling a pool of red to the tiled floor. If a Saturday ever came when he walked past the shelf and found it full, he’d know the world had come to an end and the whole town was dead, pulped, pulverised, blood running in pools down the street and into the drains and on into the river.
‘Blood,’ he said, then checked quickly over his shoulder. No-one heard him. His mother was serving a customer.
He didn’t know there would be blood with old Stell. From what his mother always said, he was sure she would have been like Kelly Murphy. Hot. Easy. When he’d done it to Kelly the first time there hadn’t been any blood, which wouldn’t be likely because she’d already had an abortion. Everyone in town knew about it. She and Sean Logan, who used to work after school in Smith’s Garden Supplies, had been at it since Kelly turned thirteen. Sean was seventeen. He’d wanted to marry her too and keep the kid, but Kelly’s old man was one of the mean Murphys. He wouldn’t let Sean get near her, warned him to get out of town or he’d end up under it.
Sean got out, and Kelly started doing it with anybody, just to nark her old man.
She was the first one Thomas had done it to, his second was one of the boarders from Dorby, Leonie someone-or-other. They did it on the night of the school social. Leonie lived in at the school all week, then went back to the farm at weekends.
‘Boring,’ the youth said as he carved two deep slits into the shelf. ‘How can they stand being locked in all week?’ It was bad enough going to school every day, without staying there at night.
All the out-of-town kids got a late pass on the night of the school social, and Leonie what’s-er-name made hay while the sun shone. She made a lot of hay that night; he hadn’t been the only one who got onto her. Half the football team had already done it before him, and the other half were lining up for their turn after him. It hadn’t been much good, like sharing your condom.
Old Stell was something else. ‘Radical, man,’ he said. ‘Animal.’
Animal. The way it was meant to be. None of this sensitive new-age guy bullshit the whole world was pushing down your throat these days. Just hit ’em over the head with a club and drag ’em home to your cave by their hair and give it to them in the dirt.
‘She liked it,’ he said to a sauce bottle. ‘She really liked it.’ He turned the bottle upside down and rammed its top into the now empty carton. It dented the cardboard, but didn’t go through. He looked over his shoulder again before slashing the carton with his knife – a horizontal, and a vertical – then with the bottle gripped before him, he hit the cross dead centre. The bottle penetrated. He ground it in, deeper and deeper, thrusting with his pelvis, grinding it in like he’d ground it into old Stell.
Then the carton collapsed and he almost went down on top of it.
‘Tommy?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Can you get some small packets of self-raising flour please? Mrs Wilson is waiting.’
‘Yeah,’ he replied, then muttered low. ‘Let the old bitch wait.’
I didn’t know there’d be blood though, he thought. He had thrown his under-daks out this morning, but his old man wouldn’t miss ’em in the wash. Plenty more where they come from – they got them wholesale from the supermarket.
He’d gone for a ride around town before he came to work this morning, and he’d dumped his daks in old lady Murphy’s garbage can, then ridden his bike on past the minister’s house. Nothing was moving there, no cop cars, no nothing. He rode by the cop station too. It was just as dead.
Bloody hick town. Nothing moved before eight. He hated it. Hated it like he hated this lousy supermarket. Hated hearing how lucky he was that his parents were putting money away for him to go to university in Sydney, money they saved by paying him a pittance to do the job they’d have to pay someone else ten dollars an hour to do.
As if they couldn’t afford to send him to university without him working, and who but they ever said he was going to go to university anyway? You needed good marks to go to university, and his marks weren’t worth shit – not since he’d discovered sex. It was a drug. The more you had, the more you wanted. If they hadn’t made him work, then he might have found time for sex and school work.
‘Their fault. Hardly any of the other kids at school are expected to work and study too, and they get a lot more than me for doing nothing.’
His old man and lady expected him to go down on his bended knee and thank them for letting him lug boxes around all Saturday morning and half his holidays, while they doled him out ten lousy bucks a week. Ten bucks? It was nothing. He could get the dole if he left home. He’d be rich. Have a fortune coming in every week.
Never mind, he thought. I take what I’m due.
He unscrewed the top from the small bottle of sauce and slid his finger inside, slid it up and down, up and down, then he withdrew it, smelt it. Squatting there, he looked long at the bloody finger before licking it clean.
His mother was working the checkout and, between customers, she sat around knitting the legs of Stell’s stupid clown dolls. Thirty stitches, sixty rows of garter stitch. She could do it blindfolded. He could do it blindfolded! Stell had taught him to knit when he was six or seven, before he knew any better.
He used to watch her stuffing all the bits before she stitched them into clowns. She made him one when he was a kid. For years it had sat on his window ledge and laughed at him – until one day he’d cut its head off.
‘That stopped its laughing,’ he said.
She used to let him play in the stuffing, pass her handfuls of it. He could remember the feel of his hands, deep in the white fluffy fake wool stuff that she stored in bales in her shed.
That’s why he went there yesterday. Stuffing.
It was his father’s fault. He’d sent him around to tell Stell that the new bales of stuffing had arrived, and that he’d drop them around when they closed the shop on Saturday. But he didn’t tell her his father was coming for a visit. He did his own stuffing instead. More fun than stuffing clowns.
He chuckled, and again slipped his finger into the mouth of the bottle, feeling the smooth silk of glass, the sucking, the pressure of fluid. Again he licked his finger.
‘Tommy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are you doing down there?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I asked you ages ago to get some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson. She’s still waiting.’
‘And getting a free read of your magazines while she’s waiting,’ he said, replacing the bottle top, sliding the sauce to the front of the shelf. A bead of red oozed from beneath the lid. He wiped it away with a finger, licked the finger clean.
‘Who were you trying to call earlier?’
‘No-one,’ he said.
‘I heard that Thomas has got himself a little girlfriend,’ Mrs Wilson said.
‘Have you, Tommy?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ he replied, adding quietly, ‘Stupid old cow.’
‘Who is she?’
‘No-one. Leave me alone, why can’t you?’
‘Get me some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson, then I will.’
Nagging old bitch, he thought but he stood and walked again to the storeroom, returning with a box of self-raising flour packets. He ripped it open, walked to the checkout, tossed one to the bench, then returned to study the packets. They had pictures of scones on the back.
‘Scones in the oven,’ he whispered, ‘Maybe I gave the old Stell some self-raising power – got my scones baking in her old oven. I wonder if she’s too old.’
His mother was too old, old and fat as a pig. She’d had her bits cut out by old Parsons. Now she had to swallow hormone pills to stop her shrivelling up. He sometimes thought of doing it to her, like his old man used to. He used to watch them doing it when he was a little kid. His old man was so scared he was going to die, like his other five kids had died, that he couldn’t sleep unless the cot was in their room. Thomas had slept beside their bed until he was nearly five. And he’d watched them when they thought he was asleep.
He didn’t know what they were doing, it looked like they were playing rudy trampolines on the bed, but one night he’d wanted to play and his mother had kicked him out to a bed down the other end of the passage.
She was the boss at the shop, and at home, but it was his father who made him work at filling shelves. ‘Teach him responsibility,’ he said. ‘I worked with Dad from when I was fourteen, and it didn’t do me any harm.’
Didn’t do him much good either, Thomas thought. Weak bastard.
His parents couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but they spent every day together. They went to church together, crapped on at parties together, saving up all their hate until they got home. Then they screamed all night.
He didn’t listen any more. The same shit got said, year after year. It got boring after a while.
His old man slept in the sleep-out now, and his old lady tossed down pills and whinged about him sleeping in the sleep-out. She looked about sixty. If he’d been his old man, he would have been sleeping out in the sleep-out too, or sleeping some place else. His old man was only forty-seven, but he looked fifty.
Saint Stell wasn’t too fat, or too grey. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Radical.’ She hadn’t screamed, or put up much of a fight. She’d sort of flaked, accepted his visit as she might have the coming of the holy ghost.
He giggled.
With her head under the Packard, he’d been able to watch himself in the paintwork. It was something else, like doing it in front of a mirror. He hadn’t wanted it to end, and he’d lasted longer than he ever had with Kelly.
‘What are you laughing about, Tommy?’
‘Just thinking of scones,’ he said. ‘How long it takes them to cook.’
‘You can cook something for dinner tonight, if you like. Go home early and get it started.’
‘Hire yourself a maid.’
‘You used to like cooking. You used to make biscuits with Aunty Stell.’
‘I used to like a lot of shit,’ he muttered, then added, ‘I might just knock you up a big batch of scones and surprise you.’ Again he laughed, and Marilyn laughed with him.
Mrs Wilson put the magazine down, paid for her purchases and left as two more customers came in. With the supermarket and the liquor store, his parents had the town wrapped up. If you looked at the average hick in Maidenville, most of their money went on food, drink and smokes, he thought, as he filled two more shelves, waiting, waiting, until his mother got busy checking out an old dame with a trolley full of pet food, and his father was tied up selling grog, then he walked to the telephone and dialled Templeton’s number without even looking at the numbers he’d written on his wrist.
‘Hello,’ Martin Templeton said.
Thomas stood blowing into the phone until the image of the fat old fool, standing there, going red in the face, got to him. He had to cover the mouthpiece while he giggled.
‘Hello. Who is this? Who is there?’
Thomas knew old Templeton wouldn’t recognise his voice, he was past recognising much of anything. He wanted to heckle him. Say something. No fun in it, unless you did something. He blew a raspberry.
‘Templeton here. Who is this?’
‘Templeton?’ Thomas said, keeping his voice low and using his American accent. ‘Ah yes. Are you the Templeton on the main road, sir?’
‘Yes – ’
‘Then you’d better get off because there’s a road train coming through fast,’ Thomas said.
The old bastard slammed the phone down.
‘Got you, fat stuff. Got you a beauty – and I’ll get you sooner or later, Aunty Stell.’