The Fine Color of Rust (25 page)

“Your mother marrying a geriatric and retiring to the Gold Coast is not thrilling or mysterious.”

“Here's a real secret. I got the check from Mum from the sale of her flat. Five thousand dollars!”

Helen whoops as Justin walks in the door. He's alone.

“Norm not coming?”

Justin shakes his head. “Next meeting, he says. He's sent me to represent the Stevenses.”

“And don't forget you're the treasurer.”

For the next ten minutes I sit on the edge of my vinyl chair, biting my nails, while Helen reads and Justin wanders around the room, hands clasped behind his back, looking at
Vaccination Works!
and
Literacy Week
posters. The hall is the original building that the community center has been constructed around. It's paneled in oak and the ceiling is painted the original toilet-block green. On one wall is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, who never made it to Gunapan on her coronation tour but sent a framed picture instead. The back wall has the names of all the mayors listed in gold lettering.

I can't wait any longer so I pass them copies of the
Shire Herald
article. “Did you read this?”

“Typical.” Helen goes back to reading her book.

“I saw a copy on Dad's door,” Justin says. “And I don't think he's finished with them yet.”

Now Helen looks up. “Norm's the source? He is full of surprises, that man.”

At seven fifteen, Leanne appears at the door. She looks around the empty room.

“Is this . . .?”

“The Save Our School and Sod Off Development Committee.”
I gesture around the empty room. “Maybe someone's meeting in the room next door, but I haven't heard anything.”

“That's right, I'm here to save the school.” Leanne sweeps into the room. Ever since she reappeared as Leonora, she's been wearing clothes that sweep and swish and pretty much walk around with a life of their own, while little Leanne gets carried inside. And she loves the heavy jewelry. Tonight she's wearing a necklace and bracelet of ruby-red glass baubles the size of knucklebones.

“Did your mum send you?” I ask.

“I'm not your babysitter anymore, Mrs. Boskovic. I'm a grown woman and a practicing Wiccan.”

“Sorry, Lea—Leonora. And you'd better call me Loretta.”

“So why are you here?” Helen asks Leanne. “No offense.”

Justin meanders back to the chair circle and sits beside Leanne.

“That's OK. I want to have kids one day. And I want a proper town for them to grow up in. Everyone thinks I'm weird coming back here, but I like Gunapan.”

Justin and Helen and I nod as we ponder this.

“Why?” I ask finally.

“That's what everyone says! I dunno. It's home.”

“The vision splendid,” Justin murmurs.

“Pardon me?”

“I mean, is it the countryside? Fresh air, all that. You ‘see the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended and at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.'”

“I'm guessing you didn't make that up,” Helen says. At least she's showing enough interest now to drop her book into her bag.

“Can you do the whole thing?” Even as the words come
out of my mouth I wonder if I've gone too far by asking shy Justin to recite a poem to three women. But he leans back and closes his eyes and starts to intone.

“‘I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan years ago.

“‘He was shearing when I knew him so I sent the letter to him just on spec, addressed as follows, Clancy of the Overflow.'”

He continues with the poem. I'm stunned at his memory. I'm lucky if I can remember the three things I went to the supermarket to buy. Quite often I arrive home with seven completely different items, none of which we need. That is why we have a whole cupboard for toilet paper storage. If there is ever a major oil spill in Gunapan, my household will have enough absorbent paper to effect a full cleanup.

“‘But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of the Overflow,'” Justin finishes, and opens his eyes. Which are blue, washed-denim blue.

Leanne and Helen clap wildly.

I can take a joke. “I see, Justin. You're telling us that Gunapan is ‘the vision splendid.' Obviously it would be from the west with the glowing mountain of Norm's junkyard on the horizon. Or at night, the wondrous glory of the abattoir's all-night shift lighting up the sky. And that must be why you came back, Leanne—sorry, Leonora.”

“Don't worry, everyone still calls me Leanne. I'm not sure about a vision splendid, but it is nice here. And I can rent a house for a quarter of what I'd pay in the city.”

“Yes, Norm's yard.” I'm on a roll. “The vision splendid. You can see it from the moon—all those bits and pieces of broken machinery glinting in the sunshine. Well, the parts of
them that aren't half rusted away. And it is smack bang in the middle of the, what did you call it, ‘sunny plains extended'?”

“Settle down, Loretta,” Helen says. “Norm's yard is so far from splendid it needs a new word. It's a blight on the landscape. So, Justin, do you know any other poems?”

“A few. Had a bit of time for reading. I read a book of poems and they kind of went in without me even trying. I can recite them all.”

“What were you doing?” Leanne leans forward in her chair.

“Time.”

Leanne opens her mouth to ask the next question, but I jump in. “Do another one.”

“What kind?” He doesn't look very enthusiastic.

“Anything, honestly, anything. Love poem, hate poem. Whatever.” I'm stalling. If we sit through the time it takes Justin to recite another poem, fifty excited Gunapan citizens might storm the room, pitchforks raised, ready to make kebabs out of the Minister for Education, Social Inclusion and the Service Economy if she won't save our school. Because if someone doesn't arrive soon, I'll break into the wailing country music song of self-pity my mother always hoped would issue in glorious twang from at least one of her daughters. Except without any kind of tune because we've all inherited her tone deafness.

“Another day, maybe.” Justin keeps his head lowered.

We sit in silence for a few more moments.

“All right then, we might as well go home. The Save Our School and Stupid Obnoxious Development Committee is obviously finished.”

No one charges in to protest. At least if Kyleen was here she'd be telling me not to let the carburetors grind me down,
but she's in Halstead working her new job at the cinema's candy bar.

I turn to Leanne. “I'm sorry you came along for nothing.”

“No, it was good.” She's still staring at Justin.

I think she's in love. A strange bubble forms in my gut. “I'm sorry, everyone. You go, I'll pack up the chairs.”

Against their protests and offers to help tidy up, I herd the three of them out the door and shut it behind them. After I've dragged the chairs back to their spots lining the walls and rubbed the agenda off the whiteboard, I lock the door and head for the car, thinking about the Freedom of Information application I put into the council yesterday to find out about the development. It took me two hours to fill in the forms and, what's worse, it cost twenty-six dollars. I wonder if I can get that money back.

IT'S DARK IN
the Community Centre car park. We've asked the shire a million times to put some lighting in here. It would serve them right if I got raped and murdered right here on the concrete. Then they'd be sorry. Or I could trip on this poorly maintained surface and crack my head open. I find tears springing to my eyes at the satisfying image of how right I'd be and how sorry they'd feel when they visited me in hospital and found me hovering at the edge of death, pale and delicate, the trauma surgeon—who has fallen in love with my quiet courage—at my bedside wringing his hands and praying for steady nerves to perform the surgery that could save my life.

A rap on the driver's-side window makes me jump so high I nearly do end up with head trauma. My heart is still battering the wall of my chest as I wind down the window.

“Didn't mean to startle you. Are you OK?” Justin leans in close.

“Apart from this heart attack?”

“Wondered if you were all right. You sounded a bit wobbly before.”

“Thanks, but I'm fine.” I wait until he's ambled off and the
rumble of his motorcycle engine has faded into the distance before I slump into the seat.

This is the freedom I used to dream about. The kids off at their auntie's house and me with a tank full of petrol and an empty evening ahead. I only wish I could think of something to do. Now that mine is the only car left, the gloom in the car park seems to be even darker. In fact, over near the community hall, a patch of darkness is moving as though it's caught on a breeze. Must be the shadow of a tree, I think, until it emerges from the bushes and starts moving toward me.

I know I'm screaming because my ears are hurting, but I don't have any control over it. The darkness slips closer to me as I suck in another lungful of breath and scream again so loudly that the steering wheel thrums. My keys, which were in my lap, have jiggled loose and I know they're on the floor, but I can't lean down in case the black specter flows into the car and smothers me while I've got my head between my knees. The darkness is pressing in on me and I can't help turning my head and seeing . . . a smiling woman in dark clothes standing outside the car door. I wind down the driver's-side window. That's two terrifying moments I've had tonight. I don't think my heart can take it. I must stop reading those books from the Neighbourhood House donations shelf.

“I come to meeting,” says the mother of the children my kids were bullying. “Your friend Mr. Stevens, he tell me to come.”

I explain to her that the meeting is over without mentioning that it's because no one came. The night is chilling down. She is shivering and holding her arms close around her.

“Hop in, please.”

“Thank you. Mr. Stevens say you bring me home.”

Trust Norm to have worked it out so that we end up
together in a confined space. Heroic war widow and mother of four, beautifully dressed on a shoestring budget, well mannered, helpful, and toast of the town, clutching the dashboard and sliding around on the vinyl seat of the Holden beside me, the old scrag, deserted mother of two Gunapan-bred bush pig bullying children. I'm certain Norm only does these things to humiliate me. On the drive back to her house, I find out her name and the correct name of her country and repeat the names to myself twenty times so I won't get them wrong. Mersiha, Bosnia Herzegovina. Mersiha, Bosnia Herzegovina. Mersiha, Bosnia Herzebogova. Mersiha, Bosnia Herzeboggler . . . In between gear changes and mental exertions, I attempt chitchat about the weather, about the school, about the annual Kmart underwear sale in Halstead next week.

“It's a highlight of the Gunapan calendar. I'm heading over with Helen and Kyleen first thing Monday. Feel free to come along if you need undies.” The moment I've spoken, it dawns on me that I don't often have the opportunity to converse with people outside my normal circle. Perhaps underwear isn't the most appropriate conversation topic for a first meeting. It will have to do though, because I'm desperate to avoid the other topic, the real topic—my bullying children.

“I find that the elastic only lasts ten to eleven months, which makes these last few weeks before the sale pretty dicey. I try not to run or make too many vigorous movements and that usually—”

“I'm sorry,” Mersiha interrupts.

“Pardon?”

“My children. They say rude things to your children. I am very sorry. They had a hard time. Their father, the war, the camp. I speak to them. I tell them to be kind, to be good—”

I burst in and apologize to her for
my
horrible children.
They should have known better. It's my fault, I say. I'm a delinquent mother. I tell her that I'm sending them to the revenge camp for bullies and their bullied where they'll find out what it's like, and she gasps and I have to stop the car and explain that it was only a joke. How stupid am I to make a joke about revenge camp to a woman who has come from a war? Stopping the car also allows her a moment to unclamp her fingers from the edge of the dashboard. Perhaps Melissa is onto something about that refresher driving course.

While we're stopped on the side of the road near the turnoff to the old MacInerny place, the headlights of the car catching flitting night bugs and a few seedy grass heads in their beams, I make Mersiha promise she will tell me if my children ever bully her children again.

“My children too, please tell me if they say the bad things again. What is the word they say to your children? Bogan? I think it means bad thing.”

That's depressing. My children are being called bogans. I admit, I have occasionally called myself a bogan in jest, mainly when I was wearing sheepskin slippers or enjoying an AC/DC song on the radio. But I'm not a bogan. Bogans are proud wearers of checked flannelette shirts and trackie-daks as their costume of choice. Women bogans color their hair auburn and swear loudly, all the time, while swigging beer from long-necked bottles. Or there are the new bogans, the over-the-hill footballers who end up living in ridiculous houses and appearing on TV shows being rude to their fans, or the multimillionaire children of successful businessmen who swan about the world in tasteless expensive fashion and cockatoo hairstyles trying to be photographed. No, neither of those types are me, I'm certain. If my children are bogans, they must have got it from their father.

“Mrs. Loretta?” Mersiha presses her warm hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”

I nod glumly and put the car into gear. The tires spin on the gravel on the side of the road as we take off, sounding suitably boganish. As we turn into her road I start on the polite questions she must have heard a hundred times. How long she's been in Australia. Where she lived before. Her family.