The Fine Color of Rust (13 page)

I nod again.

Melissa's clinging to Tony as if he's a life buoy. Tony reaches out a hand to Jake. “Hey, Jake, how's my boy?”

“Very well, thank you.”

Talee crouches down beside Jake. “Aren't you a cutie. How old are you?”

“Seven,” Jake whispers. “In four months.”

Talee looks up at me. She's got the clear skin of a twenty-year-old. No makeup except for a swipe of pink lipstick. She's the opposite of scrag.

“Could we take them to buy an ice cream? We'll bring them back in time for tea,” she says.

I'm speechless. This can't be happening. She's acting as if this is a regular visit. Norm's gasping like he's run the Stawell Gift. Tony detaches Melissa from his side and reaches for Jake, but Jake steps behind me.

“Let's go, Dad.” Melissa grasps Tony's hand and pulls him in the direction of the shops. “Come on.”

“You've got more nerve—” Norm's wheezing now. I take hold of his arm and try to shush him.

“Listen, mate. This is none of your fucking business,” Tony says through tight lips.

“Tony!” Talee squeaks out a protest.

This is more like the Tony I know. For the first time in two years I'm desperate for a smoke. The old Loretta's taken over my body again. I want to go home and have a glass of wine and wash some dishes. I want to wash every dish in the house. I'll sit in the dark for a while, smoking Winnies. Then I'll take a few clean dishes out the back and smash them on the rusted old truck carcass that squats in my yard and reminds me every day that this bastard left me nothing but crap.

My hand's still on Norm's arm and I can feel his bicep tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing with each breath. With time creeping glacially through this moment I find myself drifting up and floating above the impossible happenings at the school gate. I'm dissociating, I think dreamily, the way psycho killers do in horror movies. It feels oddly pleasant. What will I do with the money Mum's going to send me? Mmm. A list of pleasing things to do when I have a few thousand dollars. Look at Melissa's hair, I admonish myself. Flyaway tangles and uneven lengths. That girl needs a professional haircut. And maybe I'll dye my hair. We could have a girls' day at the salon. Melissa's never been to a proper salon.
Come to think of it, I haven't had a haircut from anyone except Helen for years. And cricket lessons for Jake so he can stop smashing the laundry window. My heart's slowing down at last. They're talking around me, but I can't make out the words. I might buy Helen lunch at the golf course restaurant as thanks for all those haircuts. I'll check out the BMWs in the car park. See if . . .

“Loretta!”

“Huh?”

“We've got to head off. But we'll drop around to the house later, after tea, OK?”

“Drop around to the house?”

“Just like the old Loretta,” Tony says. “Off with the pixies.”

Damn, my heart's starting to ramp up again. I used to think I'd have a heart attack when we were together. He'd be shouting at me and my heart would be hammering so hard my teeth would start to chatter.

“Honey, maybe Loretta's busy tonight. You should ask what suits her.” Talee smiles at me.

A single mother busy on a week night? Who is this woman? She makes Kyleen seem intelligent. Norm wrenches his arm out of my grip and stands clenching and unclenching his fist.

“Dad, I want to go with you and the lady,” Melissa says firmly.

Tony harrumphs uncomfortably. “No, you go with your mum. I'll see you tonight, Liss. Be a good girl.”

“OK, Daddy. What time?”

I haven't seen this kind of obedient acceptance since she was eight.

“Later, all right?”

My body feels like it's been slammed back to earth. My
knees are bending fine now. They're bending so well I think I'm going to sit down right here in the dust at the school gate. Norm grabs me as I buckle. We watch Tony and Talee stroll back to the CRX. Talee slips her hand into Tony's and leans her head on his shoulder, then turns and waves goodbye. Melissa waves back.

“She's pretty,” Melissa says accusingly.

“What are you doing up there, mate?” Norm helps Jake down from the tree behind us.

I ask Norm to come for tea and we eat our scrambled eggs on toast and watch TV without saying much. At nine o'clock Jake's asleep in my lap and I put him to bed. Melissa's wide-eyed and keyed up. She can't stop talking. She makes a list of things she wants to tell her dad and she writes them down in an exercise book so she won't forget. How she won first prize in English last year. Getting the best and fairest in netball the year before last. How they got a pet sheep at the school and everyone voted for the name she suggested.

“What else, Mum?” she keeps nagging me.

When the phone rings at nine thirty I hold my nose, trying not to cry. Melissa picks up the receiver, but she's too anxious to say hello. She listens for a minute, then hands the phone to me.

“Hello, Loretta? It's Talee here, we met today? Tony's called. He's stuck out on the highway with a flat so we won't be able to make it tonight. I'm very sorry to inconvenience you. Tony says he'll call you tomorrow.”

“Fine,” I say, and hang up without a goodbye. Melissa looks at me and I shake my head.

“I'm so sorry, sweetie. Maybe tomorrow.”

I follow her to her room.

“Leave me alone,” she says from the darkness.

In the lounge room Norm turns off the TV. He pats me on the back as he leaves.

I pick up Melissa's exercise book from the couch and read her long list, printed and numbered with scratchings out and arrows moving things to more important positions and asterisks with notes like
The only girl!

Melissa's list of pleasing things.

THE NEXT NIGHT,
Norm arrives on my doorstep and tells me I'm going out.

“You're not going to mooch around here feeling sorry for yourself. I want to see the Gunna Panther in action tonight, because it's the shire meeting. No one's getting away with calling my yard unsightly.”

I sigh. “I can't, Norm. I haven't got a babysitter.” I want to sit at home mooching around and feeling sorry for myself. Tony's postponed his visit for another night and Melissa is so furious with me, convinced it's all my fault, that she's on the internet looking up how to divorce your mother.

“It's all arranged,” Norm says. “They set up child care a while ago because some mothers who had a petition in front of council made a hoo-ha about equal opportunity. For the older kids they've got that computer whiz, Joey, you know, Al's kid, giving some demo in the computer room. Helen's coming. No excuses, Loretta.”

I remember being taught in school that local government is the face of democracy. If that's the case, then our democracy is an angry little ferret face pushed up against the glass of the complaints department, telling people no. Normally the
monthly meeting about town issues would have two people trying to get out of paying their parking fines, someone objecting to a neighbor's building permit, and the usual Hotel Association rep pushing for a bigger car park outside the pub's poker machine annex. Tonight is different. Norm wants his Unsightly Property Notice withdrawn. Plus there's special entertainment. A witch has come to Gunapan, and she's been entered as an item on the agenda.

When we arrive, the room is packed with the biggest crowd the shire meeting has ever seen. The councillors are seated around a table at the front of the hall. They have jugs of water and bowls of mints and huge piles of paper beside them. A couple of council staff are making notes at a table behind.

Kyleen's brought two packets of chips and a can of lemonade, as if she's at the pictures, and the cadet reporter from the
Shire Herald
is snapping candid shots of the gallery. The council gallery is rows of seats divided into two blocks by an aisle. On the right of the aisle, the entire congregation of the Church of Goodwill is squashed uncomfortably next to the ten remaining aged Catholics and a few pious types who don't go to church but who you often hear boasting about God the way you would a close friend who's won a quiz show on the TV. To the left sits everyone else. The kids are in the computer room learning how to hack into NASA. Melissa's probably already found herself an internet foster family.

Two rows behind, I see Brianna. She's wearing a lot of makeup. Not enough to cover the bruise. I wander back. When I touch her arm she jumps.

“Are you OK, Brianna?” Everyone knows her boyfriend loses it after a drink or two, but we can't persuade her to leave him.

She leans into me and murmurs at my shoulder, “I'm sorry the kids saw us arguing the other week, Loretta. It was nothing, honestly. He's a good man with a hot temper, that's all. He's getting so much better.”

I don't know what to say.

“Honestly, Loretta. It's OK.”

When I step into the aisle to go back to my seat I almost crash into a portly figure, resplendent in red and gold, sailing toward the front of the room. Our mayor, Vaughan, loves the robes. He doesn't have to wear them—after all, this is Gunapan. We think dressing up is for weddings, funerals, and visits from the pension assessor. But he slips on the big scarlet cloak and the gold chain whenever he gets the chance, and he makes sure the chain jingles a little when he walks, his stomach pushed out in front and his head thrown back with the pride of leading this great community.

Tonight he walks down between the forces of good on the right and the forces of nothing-better-to-do-on-a-Thursday-night on the left without glancing either way. I heard him discussing the witch issue with Sandra, the checkout girl, at the supermarket the other day. In the background, the supermarket sound system was vibrating with the rage of a radio talkback caller from Halstead who was working his way through a long list of grievances, from the laziness of young people today to that appalling pantsuit the foreign minister was wearing at the OPEC conference and did she think orange was a suitable color to represent hardworking Australians in front of other world leaders who wore perfectly dignified suits and never dyed their hair either except that French bloke who was a ponce anyway.

“This witch business is the biggest thing ever to hit this town,” Vaughan started saying to Sandra, like he was narrating
the plot of a blockbuster movie. “I have to be very careful, very careful indeed, to be bipartisan.”

Sandra reeled back. “You're bipartisan?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“I try,” the mayor said. “It's not always easy. Sometimes one side looks a lot better than the other.”

“Does everyone know?” Sandra said, hurrying to swipe his groceries and pack them. She glanced past him at me. I pretended not to be listening and kept flipping through the magazine from the rack next to me, which happened to have George Michael on the cover.

“Oh, I think it's pretty clear that I spend plenty of time with both sides. They all have different wants and needs. You have to satisfy everyone—I tell you, what with the shop in the daytime and my mayoral duties at night and weekends, it's exhausting. The wife's not happy. She wants me to give it up, spend more time at home.”

“I bet she does,” Sandra muttered. She thrust his change at him, holding the coins between the tips of her fingers and dropping them into his hand.

“I've been trying to get on top of this witch business. Haven't heard back from her yet, but I might get lucky before the meeting. Cheerio then, Sandra,” he said.

“Hmmph,” she said.

I pushed my carton of milk up to the register and put George Michael back on the stand.

“Did you hear that?” Sandra asked.

“Nope,” I said.

She rang up my milk and handed me the bag. On the speakers above, the radio talkback caller was winding down to a shuddering finale on refugees taking our jobs and how apples don't taste the same anymore. He seemed to have been
given an excessive amount of time to talk. The DJ must have been out making a cup of tea.

“This town's changing,” she said, shaking her head. “First the witch, then a bipartisan mayor. What next?”

The witch moved to town a month ago and began advertising on a board outside her newly rented house. The hand-painted board, strung by chains from the lacework on her veranda, offered spells, charms, curses and the lifting of curses, amulets, and an invitation to a monthly new-moon coven. The Witchery would open for business in July, and would start taking appointments from early June.

Helen said she was heading down the day the Witchery opened. She was going to get the town curse lifted.

“What town curse?” I asked.

“The one where men suddenly get the urge to bugger off back to the city as soon as they've fathered enough children. I used to think it was something in the water, but maybe it's a curse.”

None of us is sure who the witch is. She's been out of town during most of the month the house has been rented. No one's seen her enter or leave. A stranger was spotted around town, a tall woman with black hair who had her roots dyed at Hair Today Gone Tomorrow in the main street and bought Chinese takeaway three nights in a row. Brianna saw her driving up and down the streets looking at the houses and we wondered if she was casting some kind of spell on the town. Next, she turned up at Norm's junkyard.

“She walked straight up to the door of the shed and the dogs never barked once. I look up and there she is in the doorway with this big black hairdo and a wand in her left hand that she's pointing at me. I nearly shit myself thinking I'm about to be hexed. Turns out the wand's a bit of pipe
from the yard and she's come to try to sell me KwikKerb. ‘Darl,' I said to her, ‘if you can find anywhere to put a curb in this yard, good luck to you.'”

So it wasn't her. Now we're all looking around to see the witch, but she doesn't seem to be here.