Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories (14 page)

It growls.

‘Is she related to the Wakool Lambs?' the hat says.

‘Who? What?'

The dog's snarlin'. His head is bigger than mine. He's a white and brindle bastard and I'm not feelin' lucky.

‘Ya sheila?'

‘I dunno.'

I'm tryin' to find the end of the seatbelt. Not for safety, but attemptin' to take some stress off the door that I'm sort of half sittin' on, but the dog's sittin' on the seatbelt and its teeth are six inches long. It's shovin' 'em in me face.

I give up. I sit on the door handle.

‘Hope she's not related to the Wakool Lambs. Never heard a good word said about that nest of wowsers.'

‘War? Coal?' Supplyin' coal for wars might mean cash. I'm interested.

The hat waves an arm. ‘I been piggin' out there. Do any piggin', mate?'

‘Yeah. Around West Melbourne.'

‘Bloody Melbourne. I knew a bloke who got took to Melbourne fer a operation once. He never come back.'

‘Yeah. I know a poor bastard who tried to get to Balranald one day. Nobody ever heard from him again neither,' I say, but I'm still thinkin' coal and war and wowsers, which, if you put 'em all together, could add up to big money. ‘Those Lambs,' I say nonchalantly, ‘I s'pose they made a bit of dough out of the war – with their coal?'

‘Dunno nuthin' about coal. Knew a bloke what was gunna marry one of 'em once, though. Grab us some fags out of that toolbox, will ya.'

I open the toolbox, which is devoid of tools. There's a shirt, old socks, dog collars, a dead loaf of bread, bullets and, down the bottom, an unopened carton of fags.

I rip it open, my fingers remembering how. I pass him the pack.

He pushes a smoke under his hat, lights it. ‘Help yourself,' he offers.

‘Gave 'em up three months back, didn't I?'

‘I gotta give 'em up. Coughin' me guts out.'

For five minutes the cabin shakes with his coughin' and his hawkin' and his dog barkin' while he rides the centre of the bitumen. The land is flat. The crate is wound up and we're flyin'.

‘Ah, bugger that cough,' he says. ‘Lift the lid on a stubby for us, will ya, mate. There's a sixpack at your feet somewhere. Help yaself.'

I help him and myself to a stubby, still thinkin' about the bloke who was gunna marry one of the Lambs, and I'm sinkin' me stubby like it's the last one I'm ever gunna sink, which mightn't be too far from wrong neither, after tonight. But I gotta find out about that poor insane bastard who was hitching up with a Lamb, so I say, ‘So what happened to him?'

He hawks one more time while I'm tryin' to look for his eyes under his hat. He's jugglin' a beer in one hand, a smoke in the other and the dog must've seen somethin' on the road, 'cause he makes a dive across the hat an' knocks the wheel.

We hit the side of the bitumen and the wheels sink down in the mud. The hat belts the dog in the jaw with his stubby, heaves on the steerin' wheel, and the bloody car rolls, don't it? I wake up lyin' face down in the mud, me rucksack on me head. I think me neck's broke, so I try to roll to the side and take me last breath of air, and me rucksack slides off me head. I lift up me chin and in the last of the daylight I see this heap of rust, sort of like wrapped round a lone tree. And I see his ugly bloody dog hangin' by its collar from a low branch. It's dead and I don't care.

I crawl then. I'm too scared to stand in case I can't, too scared to wipe the mud from my eyes in case it's blood, so I crawl on me hands and knees. I'm half blind in one eye and can't see outa the other and I'm turnin' the clean country air blue with female genitalia sexist curse words. I'm just crawlin' and I'm spittin' mud and curses.

Then the pile of rust starts talkin' my language. I crawl up to where I recognise broken glass twinklin' like diamonds in the mud, and I'm thinkin' there can't be nothin' alive in there, but what's in there is lettin' go with some language that I never heard put better, so I pull meself up and I see the hat jammed between the steerin' wheel and the tree, sort of wrapped around with rust.

‘Are you hurt bad?' I ask.

‘How's me dog?'

‘Dead.'

‘Shit. Haven't paid for him yet. Find me a fag, mate.'

Where? There's no front, no back anymore. It's all one and the same. He's a rust beetle, pupatin' in his rust cocoon. We're buggered. We're up shit creek in a barbwire canoe and he wants a fag. But I know that wantin' feelin'. Christ how I know it.

I look round me feet, recognise a wheel, kick it. I kick it again, then recognise the corner of his toolbox. I kick it too and it falls free.

‘I got you a fag, mate,' I say, sort of proud of meself.

‘Arm's stuck. Light her up fer us, mate.'

I've got me chewin' matches in my pocket. I dig one out and, shelterin' a fag with me hands, I light it, tryin' hard not to suck on the weed.

Smells good. Tastes even better, but I pass it grudgingly through the metal pulp to him. ‘Here y' are, mate,' I say.

He's not movin' and he's stopped swearin'. I look at his hat. It looks sort of different. I lift it up.

He's got eyes, all right, but they're starin' at me cross-eyed. I lift it a bit further and half his head starts comin' off with his hat, and I sort of see why the hat's changin' colour.

I jump back. The cigarette is in me mouth, and I'm suckin' on it, suckin' and suckin' on it. I'm standin' there in the rain, shelterin' the fag like it's the only thing that's alive in a dyin' world and I'm suckin' on it. Nothin' comin' from neither direction. Must be almost halfway to Balranald – or halfway to Tooleybuc?

I pick up his carton of fags, shove 'em down the front of me jacket and start runnin' back to Tooleybuc. I'm suckin' on me fag and I'm running, and I'm not looking back over me shoulder neither. I'm runnin' and suckin', I'm suckin' and I'm runnin', oh Christ, how I'm suckin' on the glorious weed.

‘Unmarried? The poor old thing . . . ' Molly Murphy wheezed with genuine feeling while scanning up from the naked fingers to the face of her current victim. ‘Seventy-five, or eighty,' her eyes calculated. ‘Oh! What an awful mole, that is!'

Overflowing with compassion for a population she studied like microbes under glass, Molly stared blatantly, safe behind her sunglasses and smoke screen. Then the focus of her attention, seated at the next table, looked up from her magazine and their eyes locked.

Molly's mouth, pursed in concentration around a cigarette, fell open, releasing the cigarette to slide into the inviting gully between two bulging breasts. A desperate grab for it sent her half-filled coffee cup flying across the table to land upside down on her neighbour's lap.

‘Oh, I am so sorry!'

Molly floundered to her feet. The saved cigarette secured between her teeth, she swiped at the spilled coffee with a paper serviette, her eyes now studying at close range a mole that had no equal.

It was a purple/puce thing, crisscrossed by craters. Long bristles bristling, it crouched over the woman's eyebrow like a blood gorged tick on a white rat. Her head shaking in mute sympathy, Molly stared.

‘You like me badge, lady, me badge of membership to a flawed old human race? We all wear our badges. Some of us flaunt 'em, some of us try to hide 'em behind clouds of stinking smoke.' And she was gone, lost in the crowd.

Molly shrugged, dismissing the old woman's words as she lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. Content in her den of delusions, she had long ago convinced herself that her life was without flaw – or it would be when her marriage was blessed with a child.

Still, as Stan said, there was plenty of time for children. He felt he wasn't ready for the responsibility of fatherhood. Not that he was selfish. Her Stan was an angel when compared to some. In almost ten years of marriage, Molly had never said a harsh word to her husband. They had a good relationship. She nodded, giving emphasis to her thought. Very, very good indeed. I'm lucky to have such a good husband.

Convinced then, she collected her supermarket bags, made her way to the bus depot, then home to another lonely evening. Stan was working late again.

That night Molly ate dinner with the cat then went to bed early with a romance novel, and only after its hero had declared his undying love for the heroine did she turn out the lights. It was twelve forty-five and Stan was still not home.

‘He works too hard,' she muttered to her pillow. Spreading her limbs in the lonely double bed, she attempted to compose her mind for sleep – difficult to do with that old woman's face and its disfiguring mole playing before her eyes.

‘Poor old love. What a terrible burden to carry through life. My word, some people don't know how lucky they are,' she said aloud and rolled onto her back.

The walls of her home were breathing tonight, aged ceilings groaning and creaking, windows rattling and worn door hinges squeaking. She loved her house, loved the area, had never considered moving. She knew why they had to sell. Stan had explained it in detail. But she didn't want to sell. She'd grown to adulthood in this house. Still, Stan knew best. She allowed him to make the decisions as her father had once made the decisions for his family. A plain and solitary child, Molly had evolved into a plain and solitary woman who by the age of thirty had been employed in her father's electrical goods business. Then her father died, and Stanley Murphy had walked into her life. He'd recognised her need.

Courting sleep, Molly rolled onto her stomach, but the debris of long-buried doubt and disappointment oozed and bubbled out from their sealed tombs, rising like poisonous vapours through the thin crust of her subconscious to her conscious mind.

Where will we live? What will I do without my garden?

Shush now. Stan loves me. He'll look after me. ‘Stan loves me . . . Stan loves me . . . ' She chanted until her litany of lies stilled doubt and Molly Murphy finally slept.

She hummed as she worked the following morning, dusting, sweeping, picking up pencils and bits and pieces left by a neighbour's child she sometimes babysat. She placed the items on her bench, checked the time, then efficiently cracked two eggs into the poaching pan, capped them with the lid, placed bread in the toaster, morning paper on the left hand side of Stan's placemat, tea in the pot – then sniffed. What was that smell?

Slowly she turned to the stove where a knob of plasticine had attached itself to the lid of the poaching pan and was melting there into a liver-pink blob.

‘Where did that come from?'

She scraped it away with a knife, recapped the eggs then stood a moment, holding the knife to her nose, breathing in the dear, safe odour of childhood when love and security had been her birthright.

‘Memories,' she said, and with a shrug that placed the past back where it belonged, she walked to the rubbish bin, peeling the liver-pink plasticine from the knife.

The knife came clean but the sticky ball refused to leave her fingers. Surprised by its tenacity, she shook it, flicked it, but still it stuck. It was the size of a large sparrow's egg – the size of the old woman's mole.

Molly frowned. It looked like that mole. Slowly her hand rose and pressed the ball onto her left eyebrow, where it stuck fast.

‘Stan. Stan, breakfast is ready.'

That plasticine was quivering with indignation by the time she handed Stan his second cup of tea. He hadn't seen it, hadn't commented, and when she tilted her brow for his kiss, amusement at her game turned to disbelief. His lips no more than an inch from the makeshift mole and he didn't say a word.

A hairline crack opened in her armour of fantasy.

‘Poor Molly Murphy,' the kitchen door hinge creaked as she passed.

‘He hasn't seen you in years, Big Moll,' a Holland blind flapped from the bay window.

‘We warned you he'd never qualify for husband of the year, Moll,' the kitchen chair offered as she sat on it, and the cigarettes squeezed together in a brand new packet wheezed in harmonic appreciation of their own snide humour. ‘Still, you never were a prize, Moll. He's thirty-four, you're nudging forty.'

‘I'm thirty-nine,' Molly snapped. ‘Anyhow, life begins at forty.'

Forty. Was it possible? Only yesterday she had walked down the aisle to her Stanley, her handsome new sales manager, almost six years her junior. Her own dear Stanley, who had encouraged her to step aside and allow him to manage her thriving little electrical store into near bankruptcy.

‘Stop it,' she hissed. ‘Stop it. Stan is a good man. He works so hard. It's not his fault that the business is failing. How can a small business expect to compete with the big department stores? Stop this sort of thinking right now.'

All day the plasticine mole tingled and burned over her eyebrow while the old house gave voice to Molly's thoughts. At four the bathroom mirror suggested improvements to her new facial adornment. Together they added contours and craters, colouring them with black mascara.

‘All it needs is a whisker or two, Big Moll.'

Stan's Burmese cat, a state champion, was a bad tempered little fiend Molly pampered because Stan loved him. As she backed him into a corner, threw a towel over him and snipped off three whiskers, she allowed herself to admit how very much he had grown to resemble Stan. Sleek, well brushed brown suit, pinched little features, cold blue, near-sighted eyes – and sharp teeth.

‘Ouch! Evil, bitching little stud, primping for strangers while biting the hand that feeds you. I wouldn't give you house room if it were up to me.' Her lips clamped and her fingers rose to close that disloyal mouth. What was happening to her? Still, she had the whiskers. Back to the mirror then, where she inserted them into the plasticine.

She fingered them that evening while serving Stan's meal. They soothed her. She sat in silence watching Stan's sharp little teeth, listening to his monotonous high pitched monologue of self congratulation, her mind far away, nodding, agreeing, while squeezing, shaping the mole, near hypnotised by its soft pliability. Like a barrier, it was blocking his words' access to her conscious mind. She said yes when she should have said no. Stan's angry response caused her hand to flinch, flatten the plasticine and entangle it in her eyebrow.

‘Another slice of cake, Stan?' Her words were followed by an involuntary, wickedly lecherous wink.

He caught its edge, shrank from it, closed his own near-sighted eyes before continuing the monologue. She nodded, played with her mole, winked beneath the weight of it from time to time.

Then, the following day, she took that phone call.

‘That travel agent from opposite our shop phoned today, Stan. She said your tickets were waiting for you to pick up, and when I asked her what tickets, she said to Disneyland. What did she mean, Stan?'

His gaze traversed the room, seeking a place to settle, other than on his wife's features. Mumbling a denial, he explained that they had no money to go on holidays.

‘I told her she'd made a mistake, told her she'd called the wrong Murphy. It's a common name, Murphy. You're right of course, Stan. We can't afford to go gallivanting around, although we do have to keep in mind my biological clock.'

She saw it then, felt his cold, cutting contempt like an icy dart aimed at her left eyebrow. The pain too intense, she froze as he pushed by her and disappeared into the bedroom.

Sitting on alone at the table, she ate slices of cake until only one remained on the plate. She stared at it for a full ten minutes until, unable to bear its lonely existence any longer, she dispatched it down to its brethren. Stan caught her scooping up the last of the cream with her finger. He sneered.

‘You're not going out again tonight, Stan,' she said, noticing his squash bag.

His back arching, he hissed at her and walked out the front door.

That night burning indigestion, or perhaps the conception of original rage, rumbled and rolled beneath Molly's gentle heart. For the first time in a lifetime of people-watching, she was actually seeing Stan. She had a third eye entangled in her left eyebrow and it was focused on Stan – and would sanction no more self deception.

Two days passed. The plasticine mole spent several hours each day perched over Molly's eyebrow, and if the cat ran for cover when he saw her approaching with towel and scissors, Stan neither saw nor ran from her, because he simply didn't see her, or the puce plasticine mole which had now grown eight long hairs. Lips that had once promised to love her until death did them part now soothed the donor of her mole's whiskers, and tut-tutted when he discovered the blunt bristles disfiguring his champion's features.

His high pitched complaining jarred against Molly's eardrums. She flinched, turned to stare at him and his cat.

‘I know he has to service two females next week. Are a few missing whiskers going to affect his performance? I don't notice your moustache inspiring you to dizzy new heights in the night, Stanley.'

Her un-Molly-like tone did not go unnoticed. With a sneering lip Stan, looking through his wife to a far, far better place, suggested she take the cat to the vet.

‘Take him yourself. I've got my own stud appointment. I hope the housekeeping will cover it.'

Newborn fury was alive and well; her head throbbed with it. Blood in her veins pounded, threatening to break free, but too long afraid of fury, she reached for her packet of prescribed serenity, popping two tranquillisers into her palm – not enough to kill such fury. She reached for her sleeping pills, thumbed two from their blister pack. Out of control now, trying to fill her glass at the tap, her hand shaking with fury, it was an inopportune moment for the cat to spring onto her shoulder, and with sharp claws demand his meal.

He received far more than he expected. Molly dropped the pill cocktail into his can of seafood delight. Her expression menacing, she added two more sleeping pills to his last supper, grinding them in with the back of a spoon.

‘Here kitty, kitty, kitty,' she called. ‘Nice kitty, kitty.'

The champion was too well bred to possess any intellect; his jaws didn't miss a beat – but his heart obviously did later that night.

‘Your cat's dead, Stanley,' Molly called the next morning, feeling a sense of achievement in a job well done. Scissors in hand, she crouched over the fresh corpse, considering the stockpiling of whiskers as Stan came at a run through the door.

He pushed her away from his fallen champion, dislodging her plasticine mole. It fell beside his slipper and he trod on it, flattened it, then walked it back into the passage. She trailed his murderous slipper and mumbled accusations, her mouth open, her hands outstretched. Each time his foot was placed on the floor, she felt a crushing weight on her fragile self image.

For half an hour Molly tracked him through the old house, her eyes searching the carpet for the mole. Without it, her tone was reverting to its familiar apologetic whine.

‘I'm sorry, Stan. I'll call the pet cemetery. I'll order a nice tombstone with his photograph on it. I'm sorry, Stan.'

Then, sighting the puce blob beside the nearly closed bedroom door, she pounced, attempting to scratch the plasticine from the worn carpet. Being close to the floor, her eyes were also close to the wide gap below an aging hinge. She had a clear view of the preening, primping little stud as he dragged his squash bag from the rear of the wardrobe. Hardly daring to breath, Molly watched cross-eyed as his hands delved deep into the chaos of his squash bag. Out came one shoe, followed by a racquet cover. From the shoe emerged a wad of tightly rolled notes, but the racquet cover was the treasure trove. A passport, a bank book, two Qantas air tickets he held to his new moustache and he kissed them.

She closed her eyes, praying for the sweet deception of cataracts, but her twenty–twenty vision had seen too much. Logic filled in any gaps. For ten years she had believed he was hers to have and to hold. True, he was flawed; he was also all she had. She knew then that she didn't have him at all; he was having someone else.