The Fine Color of Rust (23 page)

It must be the champagne. My throat is tightening at the memory of the notes. I would sit at my desk wondering all day who had written them and why they hated me so much.

“Are you going all soppy on me, Loretta?”

I shake my head. Take another sip of champagne with a water chaser. The tiramisu arrives and we both scoop our spoons into the soft creamy center. That school episode never had a proper end. One day there was no note. After that I never had another one. Once I realized it was over I cried with relief.

“This tiramisu is almost as good as Caramellos.”

“Hey, look.” Helen points with her spoon.

Vaughan, the mayor, is walking arm in arm with his wife past the window of the restaurant.

“Back in a sec.” I drop my spoon on the table and fling my napkin on the chair as I get up. Even as I stand I can see the mayor glimpse the movement from the corner of his eye. His eyes widen when I wave at him, and he waves back quickly,
then grips his wife's arm and starts walking fast, away from the restaurant. He can't beat me, though. I've been chasing goats around the backyard and I have legs like pistons.

“Vaughan!” My voice echoes against the shop windows in the empty mall.

“Hi, Loretta. Great job on the school. We must have a meeting about what to do next,” he calls back over his shoulder, still scurrying along at a surprisingly speedy pace and dragging his wife behind him.

“I need a signature from you for the next letter to the minister,” I shout, even though I've nearly caught up. They stop, panting, and I lean over to catch my breath.

“How dare you,” the mayor's wife, whose name I have forgotten, says to me. In the neon light of the mall, the fine spray from her mouth looks like a tiny rainbow-sheened fountain. She is dressed in black trousers and an orange silky top as if she's been out to a fancy dinner. Rings glint on her fingers. She has a gravelly voice like a transvestite, but I'm fairly sure she's not.

“Pardon?”

“Why are you making trouble like this? You should be looking after your children, not running around like a nutcase. Everyone knows you're only trying to get attention. You're probably trying to get onto council yourself, is that it? You're going to stand for election?”

“What?” I'm gobsmacked.

“Leave us alone. Don't you think you've done enough this week?”

“Vaughan? What's this about?”

The mayor looks at his feet. Or, if he could see his feet he would be looking at them. “Loretta, I think you went a bit far with the newspaper.”

“What?” My vocabulary has shrunk to one word thanks to all the champagne.

When the wife leans in close to me I stumble backward. I don't want to be standing in the shower when she speaks.

She points at my chest. Her finger isn't exactly poking me, but I can almost feel the pressure on my breastbone. “Who do you think you are?”

“Darling, don't get upset.” Vaughan takes his wife's arm, the one not pointing at me, and tugs her away. “We don't know for sure it was Loretta.”

“What?” I say one more time.

“Of course it was her. She's the one who keeps sending out those endless letters about the school. She's the one who's always putting up signs and calling meetings. And she hangs around with that old junk man. I told you, Vaughan, she did it for him, to get that Unsightly Property Notice lifted.”

“Stop calling me HER!” I shout.

“What?” Vaughan and his wife say together.

“I don't know what you're talking about. Why can't we discuss this like . . .” My words peter out as I wonder what I'm trying to say. “What
are
you talking about?”

“Don't get me started.” The wife's lips are all tight and wrinkly. “Vaughan, let's go.” She swings around, her shiny silk top rippling in shades of orange and ochre in the mall light.

“I'll call you, Loretta,” he mutters as he turns to follow her, but she finishes the conversation for him. “You certainly will not. Goodbye.”

“Whoa.” I flop back in my seat at the table. “Have you read the newspaper lately?”

“The
Shire Herald
? Of course not. That's five minutes of my day I don't want to waste.”

“I'll have to go to the library.”

Helen pours more champers into my glass while I spoon up another velvety mouthful of the tiramisu.

“I've got news. I had a date too,” Helen says.

I stare, open-mouthed, which must be disgusting considering what I'm eating.

“Last week. At the Thai restaurant down the road. I had green curry. We drank two bottles of wine. Then we had another date on Saturday. And spent a day together.”

“Don't make me ask.”

“Peter Rudnik.” She grins at me.

I think that, in my thirteen years here, I have met every living person within twenty minutes' drive of Gunapan. Who is Peter Rudnik? It's obvious Helen expects me to know. “And . . . it was good?”

“It was fun. He relaxes when he's out of that environment. He's got a good sense of humor. And we're exactly the same height.”

I'm starting to suspect. “So he's not gay, then?”

“Definitely not. And he's some kisser. Found that out at the end of the night on the first date.”

“At the end of the day, you mean.”

“Oh, ha ha. Everyone has things they say all the time. It's a habit.”

“You sly dog. You kissed the grade-three teacher!”

“Oh yeah.”

“I'm jealous.”

“I know,” she says triumphantly.

“Actually, I have a prospect of my own.”

“A biker?”

“No, this one drives an Audi. He's widowed, a tragic light plane crash that only he survived. His grown-up children put
in together to console him with a beach house at Sorrento and an annual trip to Tuscany.”

Helen is still grinning.

“Are you going out again?”

“Wednesday on a picnic. It's school holidays, so he's free for two weeks.”

“I'm very, very jealous.”

“I know.” If she was grinning any wider her face would split.

“If you get together with him, seriously, he has to join the Save Our School Committee Mark II.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

“In fact, he has to be an office-bearer.”

“I like him.” She shakes her head at me and I laugh before plunging my spoon deep into the tiramisu.

“Eat up,” I tell her. “You're going to need your strength.”

“For what?”

“For when you start the horizontal foxtrotting.”

Helen belts out a laugh and has to catch bits of tiramisu in her napkin. “Too late. We've already practiced the foxtrot, the waltz, and the barn dance.”

“LOOKING A BIT
the worse for wear,” Norm says when I lean in the doorway of the shed.

“Tired,” I mutter. Last night with Helen was fun, but I got home and cried about the kids and their bullying and how the mayor's wife told me I should be looking after them better and woke up ten times during the night and thought I heard a murderer coming in the back door and lay rigid for five minutes with my heart hammering until I realized it was Terror and Panic burping and butting each other on the outside stairs. Now that I'm up and about, the sparkly morning light has penetrated my exhausted hungover head and is making my brain wrinkle.

Norm stands up and pulls a seat from underneath a pile of newspapers, which cascade gracefully down to form a new pile on the ground. He empties the dregs of a cold cup of tea outside the shed door, wipes the rim of the cup on his shirt hem, and switches on the kettle.

“Hey, are any of those newspapers current?” I ask, remembering what the mayor's wife said last night.

“You saw it, then?” Norm's smiling.

“What?” I'm starting to hate myself for this word.

He points to a sheet of newspaper tacked to the cupboard door at the back of the shed. I get up and walk closer so I can read it. It's the front page of Saturday's edition of the
Shire Herald.
A perfect specimen of Norm's thumbprint in oil adorns the margin.

“‘Councillors Need Probe,'” I read aloud and laugh. “They shouldn't let that cadet write the headlines. Last night the mayor's wife nearly punched me out, I guess because of this.”

“Apparently,” Norm says with a feigned look of horror, “not all our councillors are as honest as they should be.”

It's hard to be shocked. Everyone knows local councils are about people making sure their friends' building projects are approved and traveling overseas on “research” missions and getting their names in the paper.

“But Vaughan? I can't believe Vaughan is corrupt.”

“It's not Vaughan. He's all right. But he's been letting the others get away with things. We all have. I'm not putting up with it anymore, Loretta. They've gone too far.”

“There's oil all over the newsprint on this, Norm. I'll read the article at the library. Where's Justin?”

“He's at work. Got two weeks at the abattoir. Hates it.” Norm glances at the dashboard clock attached to a car battery on the bench. “His shift will be over soon.”

An odd smell is permeating the shed. Usually it smells of metal and oil with a hint of old hamburger. I sniff and try to figure it out, but my senses are out of whack today. It seems to be a clean smell. In this shed where every surface is marked with the liquid tools of Norm's trade—oil, petrol, grease, beer, and tea—it is a very odd smell indeed.

“Has he been cleaning up in here?”

“Justin? Not in here. He knows better than to mess with
my filing system. Mind you, he keeps that room of his tidy. Must be all those years in a cell.”

Norm turns off the whistling kettle and pours hot water into my cup, then drops a tea bag into it. He offers me milk, but I always think it's wise to stay away from dairy goods that have been sitting opened in Norm's shed for any length of time.

“It's quiet at my place, Norm. Terror's missing Melissa. She stands at the back door burping, then she chases Panic around the yard.”

“She's a goat. Goats burp and play. And the kids have only been away two days.”

We sit in the warm shed blowing on our tea and sipping it slowly. I move my feet closer to Norm's two-bar radiator under the table.

“Have you—”

Norm raises his hand for me to stop speaking. He nods toward the transistor, where the race caller is screaming like an assault victim. We wait until the caller has reached his highest pitch and sobbed out the result. Norm sighs.

“Bloody old nag. Knew it wouldn't win.”

“So why did you bet on it?”

“Justin did. He's done his tenner. I told him he should put five each way on that old crock, but he likes to put his money on the nose. So, Loretta, heard you had a word with the kids.”

How is it, I ask myself, that everyone knows these things about me? I talked to my children on Bald Hill out of sight and hearing of everyone except the fat black crow hopping around the rubbish bin, and somehow Norm has heard about it.

“I see,” I answer huffily. “And what did I tell them?”

“They'll be all right now. Things get out of hand, that's all. Kids don't know how to stop. Yep, I think it's going to be fine.”

He reaches under the table and pulls out an old tin.

“You deserve a biscuit.” It takes him a while to pry the lid off the tin, but when he does, a delicious aroma of orange-cream biscuits drifts out.

“How old are these?” I turn my biscuit over and examine it for signs of mold. It's worth asking, because I'm fairly sure that lid was rusted on.

“Those use-by dates are a con so we'll throw things out. Don't take any notice of them, Loretta.”

While Norm talks I can feel something happening in my head. Like a depth charge. A thought begins deep in my tired and fuzzy brain stem, working its way through the left and right hemispheres and out to the surface. I become convinced that the smell I caught before was antiseptic. Antiseptic is a smell I have never experienced in Norm's vicinity. And it smells like my mother. The connection sparks. Or it would do if I had any spark left in my brain. What happens is more like an underwater explosion. The smell is what I smelled back when we visited Mum in hospital.

“Heard you went into town last week,” I say casually before slurping some hot tea. It tastes good and bitter. I take another sip. The caffeine is definitely helping to wake me up.

“I think that's Justin now.” Norm inclines his head.

All I can hear is a faint whine somewhere down the road. Out in the yard the dogs start barking as if they know Justin's coming too. He's lengthened their chains and started feeding them more regularly. Norm told me he even walks them sometimes.

“By the way, has that dog near the gate changed color?”

“He washed them. He's turning them into bloody lapdogs.”

“Right. He's probably booked them in for a spa and massage too.”

The whine is becoming a throb. A rhythmic pulsing throb powering down the road toward us.

“What is that noise?” The throb sounds a little like what was happening in my head all night as I lay awake fretting.

“The boy bought himself a Honda 500cc on the never-never.”

Justin pulls up outside the shed with a spurt of gravel, swings his leg over the bike, and eases off his helmet. Norm's already poured him a cup of tea by the time he gets inside the shed. Justin nods at me as he pulls out a chair from behind a cupboard. Norm's shed is like a magician's trunk. Whenever you want something you reach under the table or behind a cupboard, and presto, there it is.

“Have you told her?” he says to Norm.

Norm shrugs and turns up the radio. Justin reaches over and turns it back down again.