The Fine Color of Rust (16 page)

I warn Tony to stay twenty minutes only, and to come and see me before he leaves, then I call Melissa and Jake out to the lounge room. Melissa runs mewing like a kitten to her father and wraps her arms around him as he drops the bag of expensive presents by the wall.

A better man, ha. While I'm waiting for him to come out I perfect my yoga breathing in the dark on the veranda—breathe in through the nose, gnash the teeth, breathe out through the mouth. I should visit Leanne and find out what she's got in her bag of spells.

“WHAT THE HELL
am I supposed to do?” Norm says straightaway when I answer the phone.

“Pardon me, Norm?” I use my poshest voice, trying to indicate that elegant ladies like myself prefer a conversation to be opened with a courteous greeting and an inquiry after our health.

“Justin's out on parole. He's coming to stay.”

“Who?”

“My son.”

The shock is too much. I sit down. Norm's son? Somewhere deep down I knew Norm and Marg had a son. Somewhere deep down I knew their son had gone to prison for armed robbery. Somewhere deep down I had decided to forget that information.

“Oh.” My heart is beating a little too fast. I can hear my own breath. “Norm, can I ask you something?”

“No.”

“OK then,” I say in a sprightly voice.

“He was a stupid kid when he did it.”

“Norm, if you're Norm Senior, isn't your son called Norm Junior?”

“He never liked it. Justin's his second name. Made us start calling him Justin when he was in high school.”

“Ah.”

“It was his bloody high-school mates who got him into it. No one got hurt in that stunt they pulled. But he wouldn't dob on his mates so they gave him fifteen years. Then while he was inside he got caught up in some fight and they gave him another five.”

“Twenty years. Hmm.” I don't know what I'm supposed to say.

“He's out in fourteen, though. Good behavior.”

“Well, that's got to be a good thing.” Five years on top of your sentence? Doesn't sound like good behavior to me.

“He never wanted me to visit. I went when he was first in, but he wouldn't come out to the visitors' room. Ten times I turned up at visiting time. I sat on my own for an hour every time, hoping he'd at least come and say hello.”

I've never heard Norm string this many sentences together. It's as if we're having a conversation in reverse. Usually I'm the one banging on and Norm's going “Hmm” and “Yep” and “Is that right?” while he tinkers with a piece of scrap.

“Is that right?” I say.

“Marg neither. He never let her see him. She goes every year at Christmas and waits, but he's never shown his face.”

“Is it that he . . .”

“I thought he hated us. We both thought he hated us.”

Jake's tugging on my sleeve and making faces. He's been told so many times not to talk at me while I'm on the phone that now he mimes messages at me. He wrinkles up his face into a bad-smell kind of expression, then makes a big face of surprise with an O mouth and points at the sky. It could
mean anything. OK, I mouth back at him, pushing him away. He's not screaming, so it can't be that bad.

“So, Norm, your son is—”

“Loretta, you don't get it. He sent a letter. He wants to come here. He wants to stay with me.”

“And that's . . . I mean, is he . . . Gee.”

“Marg's pretty upset. But what does it mean? What am I going to do? After all this time he's a stranger.”

“Gosh, Norm.”

“Jeez, Loretta, let me get a word in here. I don't know what to do, all right? What am I supposed to say to him?”

“Hello?”

“Hello, are you there, Loretta?”

“No, I mean, say ‘Hello.' Start with hello. Let him do the talking.”

He heaves a big sigh at the other end of the line.

“When he's coming, Norm? You'll have to get stuff in. Set up a room for him. Buy some food. You can't expect him to eat takeaway hamburgers every meal the way you do.”

“Three o'clock.”

After I put down the phone I understand what Jake was trying to tell me. The tomato soup I was heating for lunch has thickened up, burned onto the bottom of the saucepan—that would have been the bad-smell face—then sent small semiliquid missiles flying around the kitchen, which have stained the walls and floor in a gory red spatter pattern like a TV massacre scene. And—here's the surprise O—one dark brown gob of it is stuck to the ceiling in the shape of a map of Tasmania. At least Jake managed to turn off the gas before the saucepan burst into flames.

Cleaning the kitchen can wait. I bundle Melissa and Jake into the car and we run around the supermarket loading up
with the basics that people keep in their houses—bread, butter, milk, eggs, cheese, fruit, a few vegetables, lollies, chocolates, more lollies.

“Take them back to the shelves,” I tell Jake. “And bring me a jar of peanut butter. And, Liss, you go to the deli section and get some bacon.”

“What if he's vegetarian?” Melissa says.

“He can eat the eggs. Hurry up, Lissie. It's twelve o'clock and we've got to get to the yard and make up a bed and clean the house and be out by two.”

“Why can't we meet him?”

“We will, later.”

Norm's house is quite difficult to distinguish from the surrounding junk in the yard. He shifted here when Marg threw him out eight years ago, worn down by his irredeemable passion for scrap. He couldn't stop bringing stuff home. After Marg woke up one day to find half a boat in the dining room, she sold their brick-veneer house and moved to Warrnambool. Norm lived in the junkyard shed for a while, then the house began to assemble itself around the shed. He had to knock up another shed as an office. “What's the point in having a scrap yard if I can't make use of it?” he always says.

The
Closed
sign is hanging on the gate. This is the first time I've seen the yard closed in the daytime when Norm's here. Norm is sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Jake climbs onto his lap the way he used to when he was a toddler.

“Hey, mate,” Norm says.

Jake leans his head against Norm's chest. I don't know how he knows something is wrong. Norm gives him a hug.

“My dad came to visit,” Jake tells Norm.

“I heard. Did you enjoy that?”

“He brought me a car and a machine gun and a truck and a T-shirt.”

“Oh, bloody hell. I didn't buy Justin a present! I should have bought him a present.”

“Don't be silly, Norm. He's a grown man. You and Jake put the groceries away and start cleaning the kitchen,” I say. “Liss and I'll get started on the rest of the house.”

Melissa steps into the bathroom and steps right back out again quick smart.

“I'm not going in there,” she says.

It's years since I've been into this bathroom. Norm gave me a tour when he first built it. I remember nodding politely and admiring the claw-foot bath with bricks instead of claw feet, and the real estate agent's sign as flooring. I did wonder about the lack of windows and fans, but Norm said he liked his bathroom steamy. He said Marg had always complained about his steaming up the house, and now he could do it to his heart's content.

Today Melissa has glimpsed the terrifying results of that steaming process. I send her off to make up the bed in the lean-to room off the lounge where Norm's mates sometimes stay if they've had a few and don't want to drive, while I arm myself with gloves, cleaners, scrapers, brushes, disinfectants, and a head scarf before venturing in to do battle with the green velvet wallpaper.

By two o'clock, I can't lift my arms above my head anymore. Crippled by mold. I don't know how I'll explain that to Beemer Man when he has to help me into a cardigan after our armless lovemaking session. Melissa runs gratefully to the car, dragging Jake behind her, and we leave Norm standing in his doorway, his tall stooped frame bent over a little more
than usual. He's given me a letter to drop into the postbox on our way home. I'm very curious. It's addressed to the editor of the
Shire Herald
, the local rag.

“What's Norm scared of?” Melissa asks as we pull away from the yard and Norm gives us a halfhearted wave. It's a good question.

“That's a good question. What do you think he's scared of?”

Melissa tips her head back and stares at the roof of the car.

“Intimacy,” she finally pronounces.

“When's your birthday?”

“You're my mother! You're supposed to know that.”

“If you were really Melissa Boskovic, you'd be turning twelve in August, but I seem to have a forty-year-old sitting next to me in the car. Intimacy indeed. And what kind of intimacy do you think Norm might be afraid of?”

“He's afraid of having to connect with the son he hasn't seen for a long time and he's worried they won't have anything to say to each other.”

Hmm, that's exactly what I was thinking. But I'm not letting an eleven-year-old outpsychologize me. Isn't this the child who still believes her father's promise that he's coming back to Gunapan to visit again any day now?

“Actually, I think Norm's got a number of issues.” I sound like Dr. Phil, but that's OK because Melissa's at school when his show's on TV.

“You sound like Dr. Phil,” Melissa says.

“What's an ‘issue'?” Jake asks.

“Have you done your homework?”

They both groan. “That's what you always say when you don't want to answer questions,” Melissa complains.

We're pulling into the driveway when Melissa asks the question I've been dreading. “Where has he been? How come Norm never talked about him?”

I try not to lie to the kids. I know that one day they'll find out stuff anyway. But this is a hard one.

“It was somewhere bad, wasn't it?” Melissa tilts her head as she asks.

“Why do you say that?”

“Duh. No one talking about him?”

“Sometimes people do things without thinking,” I start.

“Was he in jail?” She seems calm about it. I glance in the rearview mirror. Jake's eyes are wide.

“Yes, he was. But he's not a bad person. He made a stupid mistake when he was a boy, and he got locked up.”

Melissa looks out of the window. Jake's edged forward on the seat.

“Is he a murderer?” Jake whispers.

Melissa laughs. She leans over and tickles Jake under the arms. “And he's coming to get yoooooo,” she says in a spooky voice. Jake squeals and wriggles away from her tickling fingers.

“Of course he's not,” she says to him. “He's Norm's son.”

Once we're home I send them off to do their Saturday chores, and I turn on the computer. Information about Justin is impossible to find. I'd imagined that I would type in his name and find out everything from his favorite color to a blow-by-blow description of the crime he committed. But all that comes up is a world of worthless information. Norman Justin Stevens is the name of a young gynecologist in Maine, a jazz musician, an athlete, and some maniac who set his hair on fire and filmed it for the internet. I watch that video a few times before I wheel the computer back into
Melissa's room. I'm starting to think the internet is completely useless.

I want to ring and find out how Norm's going, but that would probably make Justin anxious. He might think people are ringing to check up on whether he's gone mad with the sudden freedom and chopped up his dad. Instead, a more productive task would be to start organizing, one more time, the Gunapan Save Our School Committee.

When the minister visited Gunapan and gave a speech about the value of education and his government's commitment to our rural communities, what he meant was he'd give funding to the school for two more years under a one-off assistance program for disadvantaged country towns. And that was probably only to stop me writing more letters.

At first, hearing that the school would stay open, the headmaster and teachers and parents thought I was some kind of hero. Not as good as Joshua Porter, the local footy player who was selected for the Australian Football League and now tells people he comes from Halstead instead of Gunapan. More like Hector from the abattoir, who did go on to win the Australia-wide championship and had
Speed Butcher
stenciled in silver Gothic lettering on the side of his black Falcon. For weeks afterward, blokes around town would raise their fists in a victory salute when the Speed Butcher drove by, similar to the way parents I'd never met would nod at me when I picked up the kids after school.

Now our fame has faded. The Speed Butcher's
S
has been scraped off his car, probably by Bowden, who doesn't like anyone else's car getting attention. At school, when I pull up in a cloud of Holden exhaust, the other mothers have gone back to coughing and spluttering in the exaggerated way they used to before I was a hero.

As I pull the file of the last Save Our School campaign out of the dresser drawer, I wonder again whether the Gunapan school is worth fighting for. The town's not growing. We've only got a population of a thousand, including the outlying farms. We have some local industry: the abattoir, a couple of organic farms, the alpacas.

The alpaca people set up five years ago on an old property out past the Wilson Dam. Last year I took Melissa and Jake out to see the animals. We left the car on the road and started walking down the driveway, hoping to see some cute fluffy alpacas. When we finally reached the end of the long farm road, we found a woman standing with her hands on her hips watching two alpacas in a pen near the house.

“I hope you don't mind,” I said, introducing myself and the kids. “We wanted to see the alpacas. My daughter loves animals.”