False Advertising (18 page)

‘What are you doing?'

‘Umm . . .' Gemma hoped something slightly more intelligent would come out of her mouth soon.

Helen was glaring at her, her expression grim. She slowly, deliberately folded her arms in front of her, waiting for an explanation.

‘I just wanted to see what was behind the door,' Gemma offered lamely.

‘Well, now that you have, would you please close it up and leave it as you found it,' Helen ordered as she turned to walk away.

‘Hold on,' Gemma stopped her, dragging the table out of the way.

Helen turned back again to look at her.

‘Why is it all closed up? What's the point?' asked Gemma. ‘There's a whole room you could be using, instead of filling it with junk.'

‘Who said it was junk?'

‘Oh, sorry, I didn't mean –'

‘It's a storage area,' Helen said curtly.

‘But it's a good-size room. Surely it could be put to better use?'

‘I have all the rooms I need. I even had one spare to rent out to you, remember?'

‘Well, I could always use another.'

Helen frowned at her.

‘For the baby,' Gemma added.

Helen looked horrified. ‘Why would you want to put a baby in there? You can't do that, you just can't.'

‘Why not?'

Helen looked flummoxed. ‘It's just, well, it's dark and dingy . . .'

Gemma walked back inside the room. ‘It's not so bad with some light in it. And if you stripped the black paint off that window . . . Why on earth was the window painted black anyway?'

Helen had come to lean against the doorjamb. ‘It was used as a darkroom.'

‘Oh, right,' Gemma nodded. ‘Who was the photographer?'

‘My father,' said Helen. ‘He wasn't a professional or anything, it was just a hobby.'

‘Well that explains the chemical smell,' said Gemma. ‘It certainly lingers.'

Helen took a couple of tentative steps further into the room,
breathing in deeply. ‘I'd forgotten that,' she said. ‘Smells are so . . . nostalgic, aren't they?'

Gemma smiled. ‘The last unconquered territory of advertising. They just can't get smell-o-vision right, but the theory is, if you could package a smell, you could sell just about anything.'

Helen sighed. ‘It's nice to know some things can't be packaged for sale.' She looked around the room. ‘I haven't stepped foot in here for years.' It had always given her the creeps, though it seemed pretty innocuous now. ‘David used to store things away in here when we were finished with them, but I never came in here.'

‘Mm, I noticed the cot,' said Gemma.

‘Oh, that's right,' Helen said, stirring. ‘You're welcome to it if you want. There's quite a bit of baby gear in the cupboards too, I think . . . What am I saying? You probably want to buy new things for your baby.'

‘Are you kidding me?' Gemma scoffed. ‘Beggars can't be choosers.'

Helen blinked at her.

‘Not that I'm saying your stuff's only good for beggars . . . or that beggars don't deserve decent stuff . . . Oh, I don't really know what I'm saying, but you know what I mean,' Gemma dismissed, opening up one of the wardrobes. ‘Wow,' she murmured.

The hanging rack was crammed with mostly women's clothes, as far as Gemma could make out. There were lots of shiny, lustrous fabrics in royal blue, purple, green, red; she even glimpsed some silver and gold, and bright florals, polka dots, stripes. Gemma carefully moved aside the hangers. ‘This stuff's all vintage.'

‘It used to be called old or second-hand,' Helen remarked.

‘Call it whatever you like, there's some gorgeous stuff in here.' Gemma drew out one hanger, and then another, holding the frocks up for inspection. Because ‘frock' was the only word for them. One was elegant and striking in black and cream trim, very Audrey Hepburn, while the other was a rich flowered pattern on cotton voile.

‘Were these your mother's?' Gemma asked, not waiting for an answer. ‘You should be wearing some of these, not leaving them
locked away in storage.' She held the floral dress up in front of Helen. ‘Look at that, like it was made for you. Are you very like your mother?'

Helen was staring at her, unresponsive.

‘I guess you could always sell it all off,' Gemma rattled on. ‘Stuff like this would get snapped up on eBay.'

Helen suddenly roused, snatching the dresses from Gemma. ‘Look, could you just leave it all alone, please?' she said tightly. ‘I'll go through and find the baby clothes for you later. I think it's best if you just shut up the room again, if you don't mind.'

And with that she marched out and up the hall to her bedroom. She flung the dresses onto the bed and sat down heavily, feeling sad, and exposed, and confused. She should never have gone inside the room, it was easier not to have to think about it, to dredge it all up again.

She stared down at the dresses. Her mother had worn the black and cream dress at Tony's christening. Helen remembered it from photographs. She had looked so beautiful, her dark hair swept up under a cream hat, and wearing cream gloves. But mostly Helen remembered her beaming face, her eyes brimming with happiness.

And the flowered print – Helen remembered burying her face into the folds of the skirt, just as Noah liked to do. She could feel her mother's hand touching her head, comforting, reassuring.

Helen picked up the dress and stood up, holding it in front of herself as she crossed to the mirror. A slight lump rose in her throat. She couldn't imagine ever wearing it, but it was a beautiful dress – it was a shame for it to be hidden away out there. She opened her wardrobe. It was packed tight, all of David's clothes were still hanging there, her nursing uniforms . . .

Her life suddenly felt overcrowded, suffocating, buried under the weight of too much sadness and grief.

She tossed the dress onto her bed and hurried out of the room, down the hall to the back room. The table was back in place in front of the door, which was sealed tight again.

‘Gemma!' Helen called as she dragged the table out of the way. She banged on the door. ‘Gemma!'

‘I'm just about to lock up, okay?' came her muffled reply.

‘No, don't,' Helen cried.

‘What did you say?'

‘Could you open this door again?'

There was a pause. ‘Are you serious?'

‘Yes, please Gemma, just open the door.'

Gemma sighed and went back to the door, leaning against it as before and sliding the barrel bolt open. She wrenched the door back again as it scraped across the carpet.

Helen was standing on the other side, her expression contrite. ‘My father died when I was a teenager,' she said. ‘Suddenly . . . unexpectedly. This is where my mother found him. Here, in this room.'

Gemma didn't know what to say. ‘Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know.'

‘Of course you didn't, how could you? It's all right,' said Helen quietly. ‘We didn't use the room at all after he died. All his things were left as they were. It's probably why the chemical smell is in everything.' She paused. ‘After a while, my mother, well, she started wandering in here, and it used to upset her so much, she even got hysterical a few times. So I had to seal it off. Try to make it look like the room wasn't even here.'

Gemma was confused. How could her mother forget a room in her own house?

‘She has Alzheimer's,' said Helen, anticipating the unspoken question.

Now Gemma was plain dumbfounded. This family was some kind of case study in tragedy. ‘That's so . . . sad,' she said lamely.

Helen nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it is. She's in an aged-care facility now. It's a good one.'

‘That's where you go to visit her?'

‘That's right, though sometimes I wonder why; she hardly knows me any more.'

Gemma wished she could think of something else to say except, ‘That's so sad.'

‘But she is better off there,' said Helen, as though she still needed to convince herself. ‘She had a few minor accidents while she was still here at home, she could have hurt herself, or someone else. I had to keep everything the same around
the house. If I moved even one little ornament, she got upset, disorientated.'

That explained a lot. ‘When did she go to the home?' Gemma asked.

‘The facility?' Helen corrected. ‘About five years ago.'

‘And you still haven't moved anything?'

‘I guess I thought . . . or hoped she might be able to come back . . .'

Gemma was watching her. Helen had never opened up this much to her before. She seemed to have a habit of going so far and then suddenly snapping shut again. Gemma knew she had to tread carefully.

‘She's not coming back, though, is she?'

Helen looked across at her with glassy eyes, and slowly shook her head.

‘Do you think that maybe it might be time for a change?' Gemma continued in a quiet, careful tone. ‘Clear some of the clutter away?' She winced. That might have come across a bit bluntly. Subtlety was not her strong suit. ‘Not that I'm saying it's clutter,' she added quickly. ‘If this is how you like things . . .'

Helen managed a faint smile. ‘I know it's cluttered. I often think about clearing it all out, but look at this place. Where would I start, and where would it end? It's such a huge job.'

‘I could help,' Gemma offered.

Helen frowned. ‘Why would you want to do that?'

‘I promise you, I've got nothing else better to do.'

‘But I couldn't ask you –'

‘You didn't,' Gemma interrupted her. ‘By the way, where's Noah?'

‘Oh, he's with his grandparents for the rest of the day. I had an appointment with my mother's doctor, thought I'd ask them to mind him for a couple of hours, get them off my back, and next thing I knew they've organised to take him out for the whole day.'

‘They really rub you the wrong way, don't they?'

‘You met them – can you blame me?'

‘Maybe they're just having trouble dealing with the loss of
their son . . .' That was particularly empathetic of her. Gemma hadn't known she had it in her.

But Helen was shaking her head. ‘They never liked me, right from the start. I don't know why exactly. Maybe it was just the standard “No one's good enough for our son”.'

‘Well, I don't know what else it could be,' said Gemma. ‘How could anyone not like you?'

Helen looked a little self-conscious.

‘I'm not pissing in your pocket,' Gemma said quickly. ‘I just mean, what's not to like? You're the most inoffensive person I've ever met.'

Helen was not sure if that was a compliment.

‘So when will Noah be home?' Gemma was asking.

‘By dinnertime, they promised. They wanted to keep him overnight, but I managed to put my foot down about that at least.'

‘Well, let's take your mind off it,' Gemma decided. ‘We've got a few hours; why don't we get a start on cleaning this place out now?'

They had got a start on it, right there and then, and they had barely stopped since. What a lot of stuff had been packed into the place, jammed, rammed and crammed fit to bust. Gemma found the whole process quite exhilarating, rewarding even. Helen needed her, she realised, or at least someone like her. Someone who was not overly attached to stuff, not sentimental in the least – a real ‘out with the old and in with the new' kind of person. Gemma was that kind of person. Helen, on the other hand, was the kind of person her grandmother would have called a ‘hoarder'.

Gemma's own parents were incorrigible hoarders; they had no choice. They had so much stuff, and there was no end in sight to their accumulating more and more, so they had to hoard it. When there was no more even remotely useful stuff for them to buy,
they started buying stuff for no reason at all, and thus was the beginning of their obsessive collecting. Her dad collected fishing flies, though he didn't fish; wine that he dared not open; and guns that could not be fired. Her mother's collecting energies were focused on the Art Deco and Art Nouveau eras – lipstick cases, compacts and perfume bottles, anything Bakelite, and her most recent obsession: antique toast racks, of all the useless things.

Trish Atkinson couldn't throw out a thing, especially if it had the slightest sentimental value whatsoever. Their baby shoes had been mounted, first teeth and hair clippings saved; every finger painting or shoddy collage or toilet-roll sculpture they'd made as children had been labelled, dated and stored away in a system to rival the archives at the National Gallery. And that was not to mention every birthday card, school report, certificate, award, ribbon, medal. It went without saying that Gemma's siblings had much more substantial collections than she did, but it was nonetheless not surprising that her mother was horrified when Gemma celebrated finally ditching school by building a bonfire out of all of her school memorabilia and setting it alight. The fact that she nearly burned down the gazebo in the back garden at the same time paled in comparison with her act of destroying her memories, as far as her mother was concerned. Gemma had tried to insist that memories could not be destroyed by fire, only stuff could. Memories were in her head. Her mother thought that same head likely needed examining.

So Gemma had made it a personal credo never to get so attached to anything that she couldn't give it up, making her the ideal person to help Helen unclutter her house. She had suggested they start with the makeshift darkroom and toss out what was actually rubbish – and there was plenty of that. The old photography equipment was largely defunct, particularly the bottles and containers of various developing and setting solutions. Helen nearly had a stroke when Gemma went to toss it all in the bin. That could not possibly be environmentally sound, she argued. Consequently, she rang the council and inquired about appropriate disposal of toxic substances, boxed it all up and delivered it to a designated depot.

And on they ploughed. Gemma was a little bemused to find
what must have been all of Helen's father's clothes in one of the wardrobes, right down to socks and underwear.

‘Your mother mustn't have thrown out a thing after he died,' Gemma remarked.

‘I don't think she was up to it,' Helen said lamely, aware that she hadn't done any better, though she consoled herself that it was still only months, not years, since David's death.

Gemma was relieved that Helen didn't seem especially attached to anything in her father's wardrobe, and it was all swiftly bundled into garbage bags and deposited into a charity collection bin. Boxes of ancient photographic journals and manuals were relegated to the recycling bin, under Helen's watchful eye, but she finally relented that the last few bits of flotsam really belonged nowhere else but in the garbage. When they got to the furniture and heavier items, Gemma called on Charlie for help.

‘Why do you need my help?' he asked, though not unkindly, when she went to find him at work one Friday afternoon.

‘Because there's a council clean-up next week, so if we get the stuff out on the footpath, we won't have to –'

‘Council clean-up,' Charlie said wistfully, leaning back in his chair. ‘I used to love that time of the year.'

Gemma nodded. ‘I furnished my first flat from a council clean-up. Mum went off her head when she found out, wanted to get the place fumigated.'

‘My mum finally put a ban on me,' said Charlie. ‘I used to drag all this junk home, not that it was junk to me, of course. But then there was the incident with the rat's nest in an old armchair, and my scavenging career was over.'

‘Well, this is your chance to revisit those halcyon days,' said Gemma, jotting their address down on a notepad. ‘So we'll see you tomorrow? I won't expect you before midday, I know how you like your beauty sleep.'

‘Explain to me again why you need me?' asked Charlie, looking more than a tad sceptical.

‘You're a man,' said Gemma plainly, ‘and men are good at lifting heavy stuff.'

‘Aah, this is where feminism falls right on its pretty face, hey?' he said smugly.

‘Charlie, I'm pregnant. Feminism comes to a screeching, grinding halt right at my swollen ankles.' She tore the page off the pad and slapped it into his hand. ‘Tomorrow, midday, and bring your muscles with you.'

‘You do realise any muscles I may have had once upon a time have atrophied from sitting at a desk all my working life?'

But Gemma had already left the room and was on the other side of the glass wall, out of earshot.

Charlie had showed up the next day, on time, chirpy and motivated, which made Gemma suspicious. She expected him to come and help, but he didn't have to act as though he enjoyed it. Helen liked him at once, and Noah stuck to him like glue. Funny, Gemma had never thought of Charlie as the fatherly type, but watching him with Noah was more than a little disarming.

‘So how's Project Get On Boss's Good Side coming along?' Charlie asked when they were out front stacking boxes and broken bits of furniture into a neat pile. It seemed that every time they went back into the house, the pile was picked over, rearranged, and significantly thinned out. Even the wonky lamp had been snapped up, Gemma hoped by some poor struggling uni student, not just a hoarder with questionable taste.

‘The project is going very slowly. Tortuously, you might even say.'

‘He hasn't promoted you to assistant managing director then?'

‘Don't be a smart-arse,' Gemma returned. ‘I get to go to meetings in his office, some of the time, but he hasn't asked me to anything else. I really want to sit in on some production meetings – it's the only way I can show him I have something to offer.'

‘I don't think he's interested in what you have to offer, Gem. He just wants an assistant. You're going to have to come to terms with that sooner or later.'

Gemma pulled a face. ‘Well, for your information, I am actually coming to terms with that. Being PA to the managing director might be quite stimulating if I was actually allowed to assist occasionally.' She stood up from a crouching position, arching to stretch her back.

‘Wow, look at you,' said Charlie, with what could only be described as a silly big grin on his face.

Gemma frowned at him. ‘What?'

‘Check out that baby bump.'

‘
What?
' she virtually shrieked, looking frantically down at herself. ‘Am I showing? Is it obvious?' She stretched her T-shirt down over her unmistakeable, if still relatively petite, pregnant belly. ‘Shit. Where did that come from?'

‘Well, Gem, when a man loves a woman . . .'

‘Charlie!' Gemma cried. ‘What am I going to do?'

‘You still haven't worked that out?'

She shook her head.

‘Well, you'd better start thinking fast: you're not going to be able to hide that for much longer.'

‘It's not this obvious in my office clothes, I'm sure. Jackets hide a multitude of sins. I've still got time.'

‘Then what?'

Gemma looked at him helplessly. ‘I don't know. Embezzle company funds and run off to Brazil? Wanna come?'

He smiled. ‘You know, if you put as much energy into coming up with a solution about how to break it to the boss as you do trying to wangle your way into meetings, you might get yourself out of this mess.'

‘Nothing's going to get me out of this mess,' she said glumly, patting her stomach.

Charlie folded his arms, watching her. ‘Did I hear you say that you might be using that old darkroom for the baby?'

Gemma nodded. ‘Well, not as it is, I have to get that black paint off the window, paint the walls, something bright, happy. I was thinking yellow . . .' She looked over at Charlie and he had that big silly grin on his face again. ‘What?'

‘Well,' he said, ‘that sounds like you're thinking about keeping said baby, then?'

‘I guess.' Gemma straddled an old vinyl kitchen chair, leaning her elbows on the back. ‘Sometimes I can see myself with a baby; I catch myself making plans around it, thinking of the future . . . then other times, I'm terrified.' She paused. ‘I never pictured myself as a mother, Charlie. I don't know how I'm going to handle it.'

Charlie perched a little precariously on a broken chair, facing her. ‘I can totally picture you as a mother.'

Gemma looked at him. ‘You can?'

He nodded. ‘Sure. A bit of an unconventional one, a little loose around the edges, but I think the kid's going to be lucky to have you as his mum.'

Gemma felt a rush of something warm across her chest. ‘Thanks for that,' she said seriously. ‘No one's said anything that positive to me yet.'

Charlie shrugged it off. ‘Maybe that's because hardly anyone knows about it.'

No, that wasn't it. It wouldn't matter how many people knew; Charlie was one of the select few people in her life who truly ‘got' her, and that was a gift. She was really going to need him around when the baby came.

‘Hey, why don't you stay for dinner?' said Gemma. ‘Helen won't mind; she'll love it. She'll be cooking some vegie mush, but we can always order pizza as well.'

But Charlie was shaking his head. ‘Sorry, I have plans tonight.'

Charlie had plans? ‘Oh, heavy date?'

He took a breath. ‘Not so heavy.'

Charlie had a date? Gemma suddenly felt a wave of nausea. That was odd – was her morning sickness coming back?

‘First date?' she asked.

‘Nope.'

‘Well is it the second, the third?'

‘I'm not sure, I've lost count.'

‘What?' Gemma said, feeling flustered. ‘Well, that's not
a
date, that's dat
ing
. You're dating someone, Charlie.'

He nodded. ‘Yeah, sounds about right.'

‘Well, why didn't you tell me?'

Charlie shrugged. ‘It hasn't come up.'

‘Oh, come on. How many conversations have we had since I came back?'

‘We mostly talk about you, Gem.'

‘You could have interrupted me to tell me you had a girlfriend.' She was waiting for Charlie to interrupt her now and say he wouldn't exactly call her his girlfriend. But he didn't. ‘So what's her name?'

‘Brittany.'

‘Brittany? How old is she?'

‘Gemma,' he chided.

Was it Brittany, or Britney, as in Spears . . . as in skank? That wasn't fair. Any girl who appreciated Charlie's particular charms couldn't be all that bad. Was probably, in fact, pretty great.

Gemma took a deep breath. ‘I'm really happy for you, Charlie,' she said, trying as hard as she could to make that sound genuine. She was happy for him, of course she was happy. For Charlie. She was just feeling sorry for herself. She hated being single, it felt unnatural. Gemma liked having a man around – that was how she felt most comfortable. In fact, she almost didn't feel real unless she was in a relationship. Maybe that was why she kept picking such losers. Anyone was better than being alone. She looked across at Charlie and all of a sudden she felt a rush of jealousy for this Brittany. She obviously knew how to pick them.

‘Here they are, Mummy!' they heard Noah cry out from the front door.

‘Break's over,' said Charlie, standing up and putting a hand out to help Gemma up.