The Fine Color of Rust (30 page)

By eight thirty, the main meals—which ended up being a weight-loss version of a pub meal: two slices of beef or chicken, a carrot, a potato, and a teaspoon of gravy—have been served and thirty pizzas delivered and divided among the crowd. Mario's daughter was thrilled to get a vegetarian pizza to herself. The desserts are OK because the cook made the pavlovas and cheesecakes yesterday using a very reliable brand of packet mix. His kids are in the kitchen whipping cream and chopping strawberries and passion fruit as if they are getting paid for it.

With the beer and wine and whisky flowing, the auction is about to start. Or so I thought. I'm waiting for the auctioneer to come out from behind the bar when the lights go out and everyone looks up at the screen that normally shows the footy or the racing channel.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice issues from the speakers around the ceiling of the pub. I think that voice belongs to Vaughan.

Sure enough, he appears on the screen dressed in his rather tight-fitting scarlet robes and chain. In the real world he's sitting at the table next to ours, staring up at the screen.
I can hear his wife murmuring, “See, you've lost some of that chub around the tummy already.” She's very much the proud wife now Vaughan is the honest mayor who exposed Samantha Patterson and John Ponty's schemes. She even nodded hello to me the other day.

“Norm Stevens Senior was a pillar of our community. He took part in many of our town-building activities, was a member of the Save Our School Committee—”

“That's my mum on that committee!” Jake screams. He's had three glasses of lemonade, it's past his bedtime, and if he has one more sip from that glass I think his head will start spinning like the girl in
The Exorcist.

“Sssh.” I quickly switch his lemonade for water while he stares up at the screen. Melissa's on the other side of Jake. She's gazing in the opposite direction to the screen. It's still school holidays and Kyleen's sister's kids are staying with her. One of them is a boy of fifteen, which is where Melissa's adoring gaze is directed. I think Helen's influence is starting to show. I notice Mersiha's girl is looking in the same direction. A couple of weeks ago we got Mersiha's children and my children together and they apologized to each other. If they'd done it with any less grace, baseball bats and chains would have been involved, but once it was done I did think I felt the tension in the air ease a little. Mersiha and I have been working together on a plan for the revitalization of the Neighbourhood House and a few days ago I finally got up the courage to ask about her husband. She thanked me, and she cried as she told me about his work during the war, transporting artworks and religious relics under cover of darkness out of their besieged town. One day he risked a run in the heavy fog of a winter morning. He was driving a truck loaded with illustrated manuscripts when the mist cleared long enough for a sniper to take him.
I thought then about how we don't have much here in Gunapan, but at least we are safe.

“—donated countless hours of labor as well as goods to community projects, was always around when a man needed an ear, offered excellent racing tips, and could be relied upon, with adequate notice, to source almost any spare part for any kind of mechanical device you could imagine. If he couldn't find it he'd make it. Given time, that is. Plenty of time.”

The screen mayor pauses and the real-life mayor claps, looking around the room. Everyone joins in. I wish they'd hurry up. I hate these things. I hope they don't start with the soppy music and misty pictures of Norm as a baby through to old age. As much as I hate that sort of stuff, if they put it on the big screen now I'm sure it would undo me.

Across the room, Kyleen's on her feet with her two little fingers to her mouth. She lets out a piercing whistle and calls out, “We love Norm!” and the crowd cheers.

“Now,” our on-screen mayor says, “on with Norm's auction. But keep your eye on the screen because you'll find out something about Norm during the night that probably very few of you knew. In fact, it was a secret held by a government department that even I only found out about last week. Enjoy!”

The barman edges out from behind the bar and pulls off his apron, leaving the owner serving drinks. Under the apron he's in tails. He leaps onto the stage and bows deeply. Beside him, the headmaster, Justin, and Mario Morelli pull the red velvet covering off the table with the goods to be auctioned. We stand up and peer at the table, but it's hard to see what's what because everything is piled up higgledy-piggledy.

A picture of a multicolored flower is on the screen. I wonder what that's got to do with Norm, or if it's a test pattern. I can't read the tiny text at the bottom of the screen.

“Without further ado,” the auctioneer calls, “let the auction begin. Lot One. A stationary engine, part-repaired by the magic hands of the good man himself, wanting only a flattop piston, gudgeon pin, and ring set. Do I have one hundred dollars?”

Silence. I knew this wouldn't work. Across the room I can see Brenda leaning across her table, probably saying to her kids, “I knew this wouldn't work.”

Justin stands behind the stationary engine, his arm resting on it.

“Do I hear fifty dollars?” the auctioneer calls.

Nothing.

“One hundred dollars!” a voice calls out. It's a very familiar voice. It's Melissa's voice. I almost fall out of my seat.

“One hundred and twenty,” a voice calls from the back.

Everyone turns. It's Bowden with his new girlfriend, a hairdresser from Halstead. She's given him a haircut that, together with his ultrathin pencil moustache, makes him look as though he's come to sell you the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

“One hundred and fifty,” Melissa responds.

“One hundred and fifty from the little lady at the front table, and we'll have to get your mother's OK on the bidding, darling. How about it, Mum?”

How about it? I'm wondering why I didn't drop those children off at the orphanage when I had the chance. As if I can say no when it's an auction to raise money for SOS and it's the engine Norm was fixing for us. I nod at the auctioneer even as I rack my brain for a punishment large and long enough to make up for this.

“One thousand dollars!” Jake screams.

“No!” I call out quick smart, and everyone in the pub lounge laughs, including the auctioneer.

“OK, we're at one hundred and fifty from the lovely Melissa. Any more bids?”

The heat of Melissa's blush almost sets fire to the tablecloth.

“One sixty.”

“One eighty.”

“Two hundred.”

“This is more like it. Come on, ladies and gents, let's have some more bids for Norm Stevens's very own stationary engine. Remember, it's for a good cause—the education of our kids.”

In a few seconds the bidding shoots up to four hundred and twenty dollars.

“Sold! To number twenty-six. Thank you, Gabrielle and Geoffrey. I'm sure you'll have many hours of pleasure from the putt-putting of this fine engine.”

Amazingly, it's Gabrielle from the Neighbourhood House Committee who has bought the engine. I wave to her and she nods.

The auction continues while more images flash up on the screen: what could be a model of the Gunapan town square fountain, although it's missing the bunch of schoolkids who usually sit there from four till five daring each other to shoplift something, anything, from the milk bar; an outline of a pig that looks like it's done in mosaic. In fact, all the pictures look like mosaic.

“Did Norm do mosaic?” I ask Helen.

“How would I know? Mosaic doesn't sound very Norm.”

When the donations for the auction first came in, it seemed as if everyone in Gunapan thought that bikes with broken chains, Scrabble sets with missing letters, one-armed action figures, and dolls with their hair cut off that their own
kids wouldn't play with would be a real treat for someone else's kids. Ditto for adults with broken tools and electrical appliances, clothes covered in stains, three-legged chairs, books that had been dropped in the bath, dented bumper bars, cracked plastic containers of every shape and size. I could imagine Norm telling me to take them and dump them back in the yards of the idiots who'd dropped them off.

Instead I filled the Gunapan tip—luckily, tip fees were waived for the special occasion. They'll have to dig a new hole in the ground for the rest of Gunapan's rubbish. It's incredible how this town can generate so much landfill from so little income.

We're up to Lot 24. The auctioneer has knocked down two of the big-ticket items: Norm's engine and a side of beef from Mario. The mayor won the donation from Leonora, our entrepreneurial witch.

“What's it to be, Vaughan?” the auctioneer asked. “Hex or charm?”

“If I say it's for a certain ex-councillor, can you guess?” Vaughan called back, and the crowd cheered and whistled.

Helen, with the grade-three teacher egging her on, won the weekend for two at the alpaca homestay farm—I wonder if a demonstration of the rutting alpacas is part of the package. I paid ten dollars for a newish white dinner set that the charity shop couldn't sell. A picture of Kung Fu Jesus donated by a member of the Church of Goodwill has been bought by another member of the Church of Goodwill. A motor mower and brush cutter set from the local hardware shop got knocked down to Brianna, whose yard does a fair imitation of a Peruvian jungle. And dinner for two at the pub has been passed in unsold.

By nine o'clock Jake's asleep on my lap and Melissa is
yawning. Justin, Mario, and the headmaster, who started the evening lifting the goods above their heads and parading them around the room as they were auctioned, are now pointing to the next item on the table like lazy game-show hosts. Only two things are left: Tina's hand-sewn quilt, and a packet of vacuum cleaner bags for an unknown brand and size of vacuum cleaner.

I love that quilt. I've seen the ones Tina made on commission for the Neighbourhood House Committee members. They're thick and soft and made with gorgeous materials in patterns that could send you into a state of meditation.

“Now you can bid,” I whisper to Melissa. “Up to two hundred and three dollars, then stop, OK?”

The bidding starts and, like a pro, Melissa waits till the bid reaches a hundred before she jumps in and tries to knock out the competition with a jump to one fifty.

I look at the screen again. The shots that were on before are repeating, but linking photographs have been inserted between them. It's like a stop-motion film where the pieces are moved around between takes to create movement. I watch with my mouth open as I begin to understand.

The quilt sells to another House Committee member for four hundred and ten dollars. I barely hear the applause for the end of the auction as the film speeds up and repeats one more time. The mayor hurries to the podium and waves his arm at the screen.

“Did anyone guess what it was?” he asks.

“We got it!” several tables call out.

The mayor points a remote control to freeze the screen. He thanks me, the auctioneer, the pub, Justin, and the headmaster, everyone who donated goods, the Save Our School Committee, and the audience. When he's finished his mayoral duties, he turns back to the screen.

“We always knew Norm was a bit crazy. Here's the proof, courtesy of the Department of Lands aerial surveying team and their shots taken over twelve years.”

The final cycle of the photos shows the outline of the flower morph into the outline of a car, a Christmas tree, the town fountain, an airplane, a head with a Roman nose, a star, a tree, an arrow, a cat, and, lastly, the three letters
SOS
. If I peer very hard at the screen I can make out the shape of the individual mosaic pieces. There are tractor bodies and harvester parts, old engines, pallets of bricks, corrugated iron, doors, and windows.

It's Norm's yard from the air, a new image made from junk for each year.

NORM STEVENS JUNIOR
(aka Justin) says I'll never sell my Holden. He says it's too old. Someone will come to test-drive the thing, and as they power down the highway at maximum speed, eighty clicks, bits of the car will fall away until the driver is sitting in a chassis with wheels and not a lot else.

“Leave it to me. I'll sell it for scrap. Send it to the compactor where it belongs.” He looks around the yard. “Half the junk in this place should be sent to the compactor.”

“It's more than junk, Justin. It's a memorial. It's an icon. It's the art of junk. And it's where people come to get things off their chest.”

“Too right they do. I have no idea how Dad made a living. No one ever buys anything. All they want to do is stare at broken machinery and talk for hours.”

“I don't think he did make a living here.” As executor of the will, I received the paperwork for Norm's telephone betting account yesterday. It's got sixty thousand dollars in it. And that's apart from the money in his bank accounts. “That's what I'm here to tell you, Justin. Norm made quite a bit of money on the track.”

Justin leans so far back in his chair I'm worried he's going
to topple over. When Norm's will was read we found out he had left the yard to Justin. Any cash was to be divided three ways between Justin, Marg, and me and the kids. We thought he might have a bit put away because he hardly spent anything. The man could build a working machine out of tinfoil, a ribbon, and lemon peel. So I guessed I might get a few thousand dollars.

The minute I heard that money was coming, I drove straight to Merv Bull's Motor and Machinery Maintenance and Repairs, and asked Merv to find me a car for five thousand dollars. Norm's money might not come through for some time, but I still have the money from Mum.

“What kind of car?” Merv asked.

“Small, but with four doors. Automatic. Yes, automatic. And with a little cup holder that flips out of the dashboard.”