The Fine Color of Rust (20 page)

“About Save Our School?”

“No.” She takes a deep breath. “About the bullying. Something has to be done.”

“I knew it. I knew it was bullying.” My face is tight with rage. “I'll do something all right.” I feel the breath blazing out of my nose, hotter and angrier than the snorts of a bull at a matador fight. “They'll find out no one messes with my kids. I'll call their father to come and sort it out if I have to. I'm going around to that woman's place right now.” I want to paw at the ground. The whole room is red.

Trudy stands up and squeezes out from behind the desk. She edges her way between me and the front door.

“Step away from the door, Loretta.”

I take a long, deep breath, swell to twice my size like an angry puffer fish. “I'm going now, Trudy. Get out of my way.”

Trudy presses her back against the door. “I can't let you.”

“This is not about you, Trudy. It's about my children. Get out of the way or I'll throw you through that door.”

“Loretta, listen to yourself. Think about where your children have learned their bad behavior. I had no idea you were this kind of person.”

“My children's bad behavior? What about that woman's children? Oh, it's a lovely welcome for them, even though they're making my children's life hell. I know, they're traumatized by war and everything, but that's no excuse for bringing their problems here and bullying my kids. I won't take it, Trudy. Out of the way, please.”

“Oh, dear,” Trudy says. She has slumped against the glass of the door. She reaches out and takes my hand. “Oh, Loretta. We'd better have a cup of tea.”

WHEN I ARRIVE
, bawling, at Norm's yard, Justin is by himself.

“Dad's gone out,” he says. He's sitting at the table in the shed, listening to the races and using an artist's paintbrush to paint fire-engine red enamel on an old toy car the size of a shoebox. “Thought your Jake might like this.”

I hiccup in reply. Justin gestures to the seat on the other side of the table, but I shake my head. It's two o'clock. I have one and a half hours till the kids get out of school and I need to do something, but I don't know what.

“Cup of tea?”

I shake my head, then nod, then sob, then sniff a long wet snotty sniff.

“When's Norm back?” I manage to ask.

“Not till later tonight. He's gone down to the city.”

I wonder what Norm would be doing in the city, but I can't allow myself to get off track. I have an urgent problem and I have to find a way to fix it.

“My daughter's a bully,” I blurt out to Justin. “My son's a follower. They've been tormenting the new kids in town.”

Justin nods slowly. I'm still standing in the doorway of
the shed, the sun burning the back of my neck in stinging fingers.

“I don't know what to do.”

Justin nods again. “Seen a few bullies in my time.”

“I'm going home.” I start to sob and hiccup again. “Can you tell Norm I came by?”

“I might follow to see you get home all right. You probably can't see too well right now. Drive slowly, OK?”

He's right. My eyes are stinging and smarting, my whole face is swollen. I must look like I'm the one who's being bullied.

I only bump the veranda lightly when I steer the Holden into the driveway. Justin pulls up in the truck and waves to me, but I don't want to go into my empty house and cry, so I call him in. He sits patiently at the kitchen table as I start the kettle, lay out the cups and a plate of biscuits, work my way through five tissues, then finally stop crying. I pour the tea and slump into a kitchen chair.

“I'm a terrible mother,” I tell him before I bite into a Chocolate Royal and suck the marshmallow. I've lined up the ten Chocolate Royals from the packet in two rows on the plate. Number one is still on its way down my throat when I pick up number two and start to peel the chocolate covering away from the marshmallow with my teeth. It's not easy to speak with my mouth full of chocolate, marshmallow, and biscuit base, but I do have experience.

“Melissa has been calling the Bosnian kids ‘bush pigs.' She passes the little girl notes during class with curly pigs' tails drawn on them. She whispers to them that they should go home to the stinky country they came from. She—” My voice cracks here. I can't believe this is my daughter. “She tells them they smell bad and that they're dirty foreigners.”

Justin blows on his cup of tea to cool it down before he takes a sip. “Does she hit them?”

“I don't think so. You'd better have one of these.” There are only four Chocolate Royals left on the plate. I'm starting to feel nauseated as I suck the marshmallow off the biscuit base of number six.

“That's got to be a good thing. She doesn't hit them.”

“Jake follows the younger ones around the schoolyard at recess making squealing noises. They escaped from a war, only to come out here and be bullied by my children! Is it because they're growing up without a father?”

“Dad said your kids have missed their dad.”

I want to blame Tony. When he was here he was a bad father and now he's gone he's still being a bad father. I wonder if I should try to contact him. He neglected to leave his new address. I suppose I could ring around the country towns near Mildura and ask about a man with unnaturally white front teeth and a child bride.

“He never taught them how to behave. He was always stomping around in a permanent rage.”

Justin nods, looks at his tea.

“How can I teach a little boy to be a good person? That's a man's job. Sure, it was fine to leave me, but did he have to abandon his kids?”

Justin keeps nodding, a quiet, calm motion.

“I thought everything got better after he left. We were happier. I thought I could bring them up on my own . . . I always joke about giving away the kids, but they're my life.”

For a moment we sit in silence as I come around to the truth.

“I've done a bad job. I'm the worst kind of mother. I've raised monsters.”

“So what do you reckon you'll do about it?” Justin asks.

“Here, you take this one,” I say, pushing the last Chocolate Royal toward Justin. He shakes his head. As I swallow the last gluey crumbs, I wonder whether I still have that old block of rum-and-raisin chocolate from Christmas in the back of the freezer.

“I think. I think, I think . . . I think I'll wait till Norm gets back. Yes, that's what I'll do.”

“Good idea.”

“They probably hate me. That's why they're doing this. They hate me and they want to punish me. Unconsciously. You hated your parents, didn't you? Norm said that.”

Justin sits back in his chair and stares at me. “Of course I didn't hate them. Did he mean because I wouldn't see them while I was inside?” He presses his lips tightly together for a moment, breathes in through his nose. “I was ashamed. I was a shitty, ungrateful kid who got caught, and then when they sent me to jail I realized what a fucking idiot I'd been. Sorry about the language.”

I shake my head. That kind of language slides off me after ten years with Tony, who thought “fucking” was the most descriptive word in the English language. For Tony, “fucking” meant good and it meant bad. It meant funny and it meant someone who needed a good kicking. It meant hello or goodbye. Thank you or I never want to see you again. Delicious, or red, or belonging to the human race, or not.

“I told Mum,” Justin mutters. “When I went up to Warrnambool. I explained why I couldn't come out when she visited.”

“Because you were ashamed?”

He shrugs and picks up his mug, peers into it, then holds
it up high so he can look at the base. “Cracked,” he says. “I'll get a new one for you.”

“Don't worry, it's been like that for years.”

Watching him at the table, I can't get over the resemblance. Justin hasn't seen his dad for fourteen years, and yet even the way he holds a cup is identical to Norm. His hands are the same plate shape. He looks off to the side when he's asking a question and he snorts softly when he doesn't believe something. And the ears. If he and Norm could learn to move those ears at will they could form a circus act—the Flying Stevenses.

“My friend Helen was going to come around tonight to watch a film after the kids have gone to bed. Maybe Norm and you could come too? To have a talk about this . . .”

He does his look-over-and-out-through-the-window thing while I gather the cups and switch the kettle on for another cup. He is so quiet and still that I feel like a punchy drunk, flailing around and rattling the whole kitchen with every move. I'm not helped by the wonky floor that bounces up and down every time I take a step and sets the kitchen dresser juddering and the plates chattering across the shelves.

So far poor quiet Justin has seen me blubbering, self-flagellating, moaning, complaining, and eating an entire packet of Chocolate Royals in eleven minutes. Prison and its standards of etiquette are probably looking pretty fancy right now.

“I'm not sure Dad'll be up for it tonight, but I'll ask him.”

The kettle boils and I pour water onto two more tea bags and settle back at the kitchen table.

“I shouldn't keep you,” Justin says into his teacup.

The trouble with gentle, calm, quiet people I don't know
well is that I find myself babbling to fill the spaces between bits of conversation. Useless information wells up out of me and dribbles all over the silence.

“I'm starting up the Save Our School Committee Mark II. I want to make it about the development too, because of what they've done to Norm.”

“Dad said.”

“No one will join now. I'm the mother with the bully children. Everyone else is probably hoping the school will close so they can get their kids away from mine.”

Justin laughs. “Where I was, real bullies made a career out of it. Some other people did stupid bullying things because they were afraid. They thought it made them look strong. Once they found their place in the hierarchy, they settled down.”

I suppose I'm in shock. I think about Melissa passing nasty notes to the girl in her class and Melissa seems to have become someone new, not my smart-arse daughter who's full of bravado but loves to cuddle up on the couch with me and hug me from behind when I'm at the sink. How could she be doing this?

•  •  •

HALF AN HOUR
later, as I wait in the car outside the school, Melissa walks out of the school gate with Jake in tow. She has her father's narrow pointy features, I can see now. She looks behind her. The children she's been bullying are coming down the steps of the school in a tight group, not looking sideways or forward, only staring at their feet. Melissa pulls Jake aside and they stand hidden outside the gate.

Melissa could see me in the car if she turned around, but she doesn't. She's concentrating too hard on what's happening
at the gate. Her arm, stretched behind her, holds Jake protectively against the fence as if she's afraid someone is going to snatch him away. The other children step out through the gate in one movement, then hurry off down the street in the opposite direction to where Melissa is standing. I see her call something after them. The oldest one turns around and for a moment she and Melissa stare at each other like animals, each waiting for the other to make the first move. The girl, hissing something so loudly I can hear the hiss but not the words, turns, gathers her siblings around her, and starts off for home. Melissa's body goes limp and her head nods toward her chest as if she is exhausted. Jake steps around her and takes her hand. She might be crying.

I have no idea what's going on, but I want to take her in my arms and hug her. They say she's a bully. All I see is my little girl, frightened and alone.

NORM TURNS UP
at nine in the evening with a couple of stubbies of beer and a packet of beer nuts. He's got a Band-Aid on the inside of his arm.

“What happened?” I nod at the Band-Aid.

“Oh.” He seems startled. Puts down the beer and nuts and rolls down his sleeve to cover the Band-Aid. “Scratch. Piece of metal.”

“Make sure you get a tetanus shot,” I warn him. Norm snickers.

Helen greets Norm when he comes into the kitchen. The kids are in bed, but I've left the TV blaring in the lounge room so they can't hear what we're saying if they wake up.

“Come to help sort out the Children of the Corn?” Helen says to Norm.

“Bloody menaces to society.” He thumps into the same kitchen chair that Justin sat in this afternoon.

“Norm, tell Justin thanks for me, will you? I cried at him for a while, then forced him to drink about ten cups of tea and wouldn't let him have a single Chocolate Royal out of the whole packet.”

“So what's new?”

“It's not funny, Norm. My children are bullies. I raised two bullies!”

“Sometimes these things fade away,” Helen remarks. “Aren't the kids going to your sister's place next week? Maybe it'll blow over while they're gone.”

“It might blow over, but I don't think I'll ever get over it.”

“So they're calling kids names. So what? You didn't raise real bullies. Brenda Giles's boys, now they're real bullies,” Helen says.

“Yeah, settle down, Loretta,” Norm adds. “It's not like you're drunk every night or your kids are hacking babies into little pieces.”

“Norm, you've got to stop reading the newspapers.”

They may not have been hacking up babies, but last summer the Giles boys, Glenn and Gary, spent nights terrorizing anyone who dared to venture out on the streets. Brenda was having a bit of a bad patch with the stress of having all those children to feed, and she was passed out on the couch by nine every night. The younger kids stayed home eating rubbish and watching TV shopping shows till dawn, but the two older boys started to roam.