The Other Madonna (13 page)

I
had elves. They're kind of like worms only happier. They were having a serious rave party in my stomach when I caught up with Evie. Why would I be nervous about going shopping with my sister? New clothes. New look. New job. They were the elves of change.

Evie looked like she hadn't slept. Her eyes stared into nothingness like she'd been dining on instant coffee straight from the jar. We hugged.

‘Hey. You okay?' I asked.

‘Yeah. Fine.'

‘You look like shit.'

She ran her hand through her hair. ‘Thanks.'

‘What is it?'

‘Nothing . . . just not waking up very well. Mornings . . . they suck. Why can't the day begin at a respectable hour like three in the afternoon?'

The idea of uniform at Sapphires was a little more relaxed than at Pepe's. No official T-shirt, just dress classy and in black. The first pair of pants that I tried on were
a score. Bum-hugging shiny black flares. And only seventy dollars. Evie picked out a heap of shirts, none of which I liked. They looked like
her
shirts and flashed too much cleavage. I bought the pants and apologised to Evie for wasting her time.

She blew a raspberry. ‘I don't care, Madds. It's fine. I've got nowhere to go . . . be . . . until eleven-thirty.'

I found a blouse in a spooky shop that ponged of incense. Angel's Bazaar. Quite bizarre. It had a V-neck but not plunging, and loose-fitting three-quarter sleeves. I opened the curtain of the change room and Evie wolf-whistled. Fifty-four dollars.

‘Do you want to work lunch today? It'll be quiet. You'll get a feel for it before the storm.'

‘Serious?'

‘Yeah. You can jump in the deep end tomorrow night if you like.'

‘Lunch sounds good. I'm in.'

‘Shoes,' she said.

‘I've got some at home. Newies. I probably won't have time to go back and get them. What about the ones I borrowed from you? If I can dance in them until I drop they'll be fine to work in.'

‘Yeah, but they're . . . they're at Bianca's.'

‘So? I've got to change. I'm not going to work looking like this.'

‘Can't you change here? In the toilets or something? Change room?'

It was a fifteen-minute tram ride to Bianca's. We'd be back in the city by half-past ten. Evie was biting her lip.

‘What
is
it, Evie?'

‘Nothing. Let's get a coffee. Have you had any breakfast?'

Evie picked at an egg and bacon McMuffin then tortured a sugar packet – bending it and twisting it, shaking it and eventually tearing it in half and spreading sugar across the table and onto her seat.

‘Good on you,' I said.

She sniffed and frowned at the remains of her breakfast.

‘Evie? What's happening?'

She shrugged. ‘Philippe's home.'

‘Oh.'

‘Bianca's going to tell him.'

‘Tell him what?'

‘That she doesn't want to be married to him anymore.'

‘Oh. That's good, isn't it?'

‘Yeah. I
think
so. I dunno. I love her, I know that. I just dunno if I want to spend the rest of my life with her.'

I put my hand on her arm. ‘She's good,' I said. ‘She'll look out for you. It'll all work out.'

She nodded but I think we both heard how hollow my words had sounded. The shit was about to hit the fan.

Sapphires was on the ninth floor of a hotel. Maybe ‘hotel' wasn't the right word for it. They call pubs hotels. This place wasn't a pub. It was one of those places where guys with too much cologne carry your bags up to your room for you and there are real plants in the foyer. We travelled in the lift with an American couple. They were raving at
the top of their voices about the aquarium. They'd seen more of that part of Melbourne than I had.

I changed in the toilets and stood in the middle of the empty restaurant with my mouth open like a flytrap. Cloud-white tablecloths. The cutlery looked as though it had just been taken from its velvet case by a white-gloved hand. Each table had a vase. Each vase held water and a real rose.

Evie introduced me to Dale the chef and Lonnie the Asian kitchenhand. Dale wore a permanent frown but Lonnie wiped his mitts on the tea towel over his shoulder before shaking my hand.

‘Can't half tell that you guys are sisters,' he said with a smile.

Evie put on a smooth classical CD and I actually felt my spine straighten. No crackly tapes of Dean Martin singing ‘Volare'. Sapphires was another planet.

Eleven out of twenty-seven tables had been used by the end of lunch. I'd taken orders and served meals, polished cutlery and managed to flood the kitchen with one of the dishwashers. I didn't pull the lid down properly and the flood reminded me that there
was
a real world beyond the infectiously graceful walls of Sapphires.

‘Back tomorrow night then? Colin will be working. You'll have a ball. You did a great job, Madds. You'll fit in for sure.'

Evie gave me some employment declaration forms and it all felt too easy. Get a job – a great job – working with people I love, just like that. The world outside looked shinier.

Coming home cured me.

Someone had spewed in the lift. The doors rattled open on the ground floor and the smell made me dry retch before I had time to step inside. I recovered in the stairwell and jogged the first few flights of stairs until the concrete-cool air whistled in my throat. The door on the eighth floor burst open just as I'd passed it. Its handle slammed against the wall and sent a gunshot retort echoing through the stairwell. The man with pasty tattooed skin and the ponytail crashed shoulder first into the metal balustrade. I heard his teeth clatter and I ran to the next landing and looked back, unable to breathe. Another man stepped onto the landing and grabbed the tattoo man by his hair, dragging him away from the handrail and onto his knees. The tattoo man cried out and the other bloke threw his head at the floor and turned as if to leave. The tattoo man's hands shot out. He was on all fours and moaning when the other guy turned back from the door, took two strides and kicked him in the guts. The force of it lifted the tattoo bloke off the ground and filled the stairwell with a base drum thud. Flesh slapping on concrete. The moaning, hacking and retching of a wounded man.

The man standing over the body in the stairwell looked up. I knew his eyes. I ran. For a moment I could hear hurried footfalls on the concrete behind me. I raced across the stair landings on the ninth floor, tenth floor, eleventh floor. I pulled the door open on the twelfth floor and looked back down the stairwell. Nothing. I stepped up to the balustrade and held my breath. An arm hung limply
through the rails a few floors down and the stairwell roared with obscenities, challenging the tattoo bloke to get up and fight. I closed the door and leaned against it, panting like a greyhound. I walked to the door of the flat with the horror of what I'd just seen tingling in my fingers.

From behind the door I could hear shouting. Rosie shouting at Dad. Dad shouting at Rosie. I listened to them rant and I felt weak. Weak so my knees only just held my weight. And sick in the guts. In one minute all my dreams for the future, all my hopes of happiness lay ragged at my feet. Again. I couldn't escape. I couldn't get out without going down the spewed-in lift or past the broken body in the stairwell. And where would I go?

The door flung open and Rosie barged into me. I sprawled on my back and my head clunked on the concrete. Rosie fell on top of me then struggled to her knees.

‘Maddie! Sorry, lov. Are you okay?'

I nodded and held the back of my head. I'd hit the concrete but no real damage was done. Lucky it was only my head!

Dad appeared in the doorway.

‘God, are you all right? What happened?'

Rosie and I looked at each other and exploded with laughter. Dad helped us both to our feet and made coffee while Rosie and I sat at the table, rubbed our wounds and giggled the hope back into our hearts. I told them what I'd seen in the stairwell. When I'd finished the story, we felt sad for the fighting men.

‘Life's like that sometimes,' Dad said. ‘We all try to avoid it but some folk get stuck in believing that the hard way is the only way.'

He looked at Rosie. She smiled.

They weren't finished arguing, though. Far from it. Dad had smashed up Rosie's van and Rosie wouldn't let him pay to have it fixed. Rosie wanted to buy a new van. A better van. Dad said that would mean borrowing money and he didn't like the idea.

‘Why not, Tricky?' Rosie asked. ‘The van would pay for itself.'

Dad pushed his chair back from the table and screwed his nose up. ‘Lived hand to mouth for so long that the idea of going into debt makes me feel exposed.'

Rosie scoffed. ‘Let's see what happens with the insurance. We have more pressing issues at the moment like how we are going to do deliveries without a van.'

I crept into my room and left them to it.

I flopped on my bed with my Madonna scrapbook. The
real
Madonna. I flicked through the pictures and realised that I hadn't collected any of them. Not one. I'd stuck them in the book but Colin and Evie had scabbed all the articles and pictures from
Dolly
and
Cleo
and
Cosmopolitan
over the years. She'd had so many looks. They were all different and they'd all been cool at the time. She'd invented herself again and again. If she didn't like it then she'd just change. She never smiled. All of the photos were sexy and some were outrageous. She always looked happy but she never smiled with her mouth. I looked at the pictures and I realised that it was only the outside that was changing.
Her eyes were still the same. Her eyes always smiled. She was in control. She looked as though she was happy with what she saw in the mirror. She liked herself. And in one picture, when Lourdes was a baby, she looked like she
loved
herself.
And
her daughter.

How can you love yourself if you don't even like yourself? How can you like yourself if you don't even respect yourself? Sometimes, I thought, other people like me more than I like myself.

Dad shouted at my door that he was going out. Rosie had an after-hours appointment with the accountant, he said. Beer, I thought. He doesn't tell me he's going out except when it's for beer. I heard him – clinking bottles – as he came home about half an hour later. I smiled a crocodile smile to myself and felt sad for Dad. It's hard to change, I thought. It takes effort. It takes courage and strength. Everyone's allowed to have their off days.

Dad was hammered by eight o'clock. I got up to have a bath and he heard me from Rosie's lounge. He muted the TV.

‘Maddie? It's your turn to do the dishes.'

‘Yeah. Okay.' There was a pile on the sink that was a couple of meals old. ‘I'll do them after I have my bath.'

‘Do them
before
your bath.'

‘Okay,' I grumbled.

The sound of the TV burst through and I went to the bathroom. He wouldn't hear me. He'd be in the chair for the night, I thought. I wondered how Rosie would react when she found him snoring on her couch and stinking of
Guinness. Everyone's allowed to have their off days.

I ran a bath so hot it took five minutes to get into it, sucking air through my teeth and feeling my feet ache then tingle. Then glow. I bent my knees and sighed as I lowered my head. Water flooded my ears. I could hear my blood being swooshed around my body and my breath steaming in and out of my lungs. I could hear the TV mumbling and my mind wouldn't stop. There's no courage in hurting yourself when the bum falls out of your world, I thought. Mum had been sick. Getting up the next day is what takes guts. And the next day. And the next day. Shit things happen in your life all the time and the scratches and dents that they make in your heart get better eventually. If you let them. Sometimes you need help, like Mum needed help. I blamed Dad for Mum's death. He should have known. He should have taken better care of her.

I heard the springs of Rosie's armchair. Listen to my heart. Breathe. The water was so hot I could feel my body melting. I heard Dad cough. Nothing unusual in that. He coughed and coughed. I wanted him to shut up. Hurry up and cough out his lung. I knew the pattern. He'd had those sorts of fits before. He'd cough and cough until it was a breathless sort of yelp, the air whistling in his throat as he struggled to fill his lungs in the breaks. Then his throat would distort and the yelp became more of a loud honk. Honk, honk; hack, hack. Like he was about to spew, then spit. I heard . . . no . . . felt hurried footfalls and knew he was heading for the sink. Silence.

The flat exploded. The calamity made me jerk upright, sending a wave of bathwater sloshing across the room.
Glass breaking. Cutlery and plates bouncing against each other then the sickening thud of a body. My dad's body. Falling to the kitchen floor.

I leapt from the bath and almost tore the door from its frame. Dad lay face down in a shroud of broken dishes and glass, one hand cramped under his body, the other by his side. A jagged piece of his favourite blue and white plate had come to rest on his shoulder blade.

‘Dad?'

He didn't move. Not a breath. My own breath had frozen in my throat, my bare body dripped noisily on the kitchen lino. A bubble burst and I flew from disbelief into action. I brushed the fragment of broken plate from his shoulder and dragged him by the feet away from the mess and into the lounge. I grabbed at his clothes and heaved him onto his back. His hand clawed into the front of his shirt, the limb stiff and frozen. The skin around his lips and his closed eyes was blue.

‘Dad?'

The blueness filled his cheeks. His fingers felt like wax castings as I peeled them off his shirt. I put my ear to his chest like they do in the movies but all I could hear was my head ringing with panic. I grabbed for his wrist then screamed. Dad was dying.