Happy as Larry (5 page)

‘Woops,' Clinton said again. He picked Jemma up and patted her clean. ‘She loved that, didn't you, Jemma?'

Jemma's whole body was shaking. Larry took her from Clinton and lowered her into the box. ‘I think she might be hungry now.'

But she still refused to eat.

‘I know!' Clinton offered. ‘We can give her a rollercoaster ride.'

Larry looked at the assortment of play equipment. ‘How?'

‘Well . . .' was all Clinton said. He lifted her from the box and weighed her in one hand. He tossed the bundle into the air and caught it with both hands. He tossed her again, only this time his catch was not complete. She bounced off his fingers and sprawled on the grass. He picked her up by the ears and cast her skyward again, this time with all his might. The throw was crooked, and she spun and hit the slide.

Larry put her in the box. The boys squatted on either side and watched, but she didn't eat; didn't move. Her nose no longer twitched when touched with the carrot.

Denise arrived. ‘How's Jemma?' she asked.

‘Still not hungry,' Larry said.

And the following morning, when Denise ventured into the laundry, she found her son crouched with his chubby finger pressed to the rabbit's unlidded eye.

‘Yep. She's dead. Jemma's dead.'

STOP

O
N
S
ATURDAY 10
D
ECEMBER 1994
– the day before the Russians sank their boots into the breakaway republic of Chechnya – Mary Holland arrived at the park with her brood but they didn't stop to play. Tim, her eldest, was booked to work on the dunking machine at his school fête.

Denise read between the lines. ‘Would you mind if Larry and I tagged along?'

‘Please do,' Mary said, and blushed.

‘Yay!' Jemma yelped. She grabbed Larry and danced in a circle.

Denise knew for a fact that Larry had no idea what a fête was or what he was dancing about.

He would soon find out.

They could hear the music and see a large orange jumping castle wobbling in the carpark. The school-crossing signs were up and the crossing lady – dressed in the white-and-orange uniform of an attendant – was waiting for customers. Her stop sign gleamed as though it had recently been polished. It reflected colours, a burnished rainbow like fish skin and abalone shell. Around her neck hung a silver whistle.

Denise heard Tim whisper, ‘Oh no, not the lollipop lady,' and saw him stiffen.

‘Form a line, please,' the lollipop lady commanded.

It was the voice that gave her away: the brassy military tone of a woman who gave orders but seldom took them. It was Muriel Hammersmith.

Denise felt her own spine straighten as her neighbour stepped into the traffic, stop-sign first. Muriel halted a mini-van going in one direction, then hesitated. A salt-chafed brown Escort with P-plates was bearing down on the crossing, and the driver was chatting with her passengers.

Mrs Hammersmith raised her hand imperiously. The driver looked up just in time. She braked hard. The tyres yelped. Her passengers lurched forward in unison and the car stalled.

Muriel Hammersmith held her pose for several deliberate seconds before straightening. She rolled her shoulders and adjusted her uniform before bringing the whistle to her lips. Her cheeks bulged as she let off an ear-piercing military double-peep. Adults and children flooded across the road from both directions, backs straight, elbows locked. They gave Muriel Hammersmith a wide berth. Larry let out his breath in a great rush when they reached the other side.

Mary Holland pointed out some of the teachers and other parents as they strolled through the fête. Denise realised – with a quiver of something in the pit of her stomach – that it wouldn't be long before she'd be buying a uniform for Larry. She wondered if he'd be going to Villea Primary School with Jemma and Tim – and Clinton, no doubt – or if she and Mal could afford to send him to St Patrick's.

When they'd seen everything the fête had to offer and the air had gone from the jumping castle, Mary invited Denise and Larry to her place for a coffee. The invitation was a big thing coming from Mary the church mouse, and Denise knew that it was her solemn duty, as a Christian and a friend, to accept. The notion had crossed her mind that Mary would be the perfect babysitter for Larry, but the thought of looking after Mary's screaming horde in return made her baulk. She still wanted to check out Mary's home, though, and properly meet her husband.

The place was as neat as a display home, and Christopher was nowhere in sight. Mary explained that he'd gone prospecting in the headwaters of the Cradle River and wouldn't be home until after dark. In fact, at her own kitchen table, with a steaming cup in her hand, Mary explained a great many things. Denise couldn't get a word in. Mary told tales of the gold rush of 1862, when the mountains behind Villea were home to five thousand people, of the townships of Sentine and Florence that sprang up then disappeared in the two frenetic years that followed, and the fires of 1875 that burned the hills clean. Except for the myriad mine shafts and the occasional lump of rusted metal or shard of glass or china, the bush had erased most of the evidence of human existence from those times. The cemetery was now part of the national park, and the concrete slab that was once the footings of the bank had been converted into a picnic area off the Cradle River Road.

Denise nodded, though she'd visited very few of the places Mary talked about. Without a car, much of the country around their home remained a mystery to her. For the first time in her life she thought her existence hidebound. The wild adventures she'd had at the heels of her missionary father seemed distant enough to be from another life.

The children had been amusing themselves in the other rooms. Larry and Jemma ran down the hallway and into the kitchen, arm in arm.

Larry was wearing a fine straw hat with a purple ribbon and a short floral summer dress that brushed the floor as he clomped along in black shiny women's boots. He had a black handbag looped on his elbow. His lips were closed, but they were bent in a wry smile.

Jemma wore fawn suit pants and a pink shirt, with the trouser cuffs and sleeves roughly rolled to fit.

‘Oh my,' Mary offered. ‘Don't you two look beautiful?'

Denise could only laugh and clap her hands.

The other children came in from the lounge. The little ones laughed, but Tim scowled.

‘Don't they look gorgeous?' Mary asked.

‘No,' Tim said. ‘Larry's a poof. A poofy poof poof.'

‘Timothy!' Mary squeaked. ‘That's enough.'

Her kitchen chair scraped as she stood, and Tim hightailed it out the back door.

Larry wanted to take his dress-ups home but Denise helped him back into his shorts and sandals and packed the old suitcase under Jemma's bed before they left.

Larry broke the silence as they rounded the corner into Condon Street.

‘Mum?'

‘Yes, darling?'

‘What's a poof?'

Denise's face flooded with blood. ‘It's nothing. It's not a nice word. It's nothing, okay?'

She looked straight ahead and didn't see her son's brow furrow.

That night, when Larry was tucked up tight in bed, Denise told Mal what Tim had said. Mal laughed and Denise chastised him.

‘Where does a boy . . . he's probably only seven or eight . . . learn that kind of language? How can a child already be so loaded with stereotypes and prejudices?'

‘Probably straight from his parents.'

‘But Mary is so . . . I don't know. Mousy.'

‘You've got to watch the quiet ones. What's the husband like?'

Denise shrugged. ‘He drives a truck for the council.'

Mal nodded knowingly, but said, ‘School is where I learned to swear.'

Denise looked at him, puzzled. She'd never heard him swear, not even when the Fishburn Street house burned to the ground. She wasn't so naïve that she thought the Sundays at the jetty and the times drinking in his shed with his friends were without swearing; now she wondered if her boy was being damaged by the less-than-elegant company her husband kept. There were only two ways of dealing with that worry – she could either keep Larry with her at all times, or trust her man.

And trust her man she would. She sat on the arm of his chair and kissed his forehead.

‘I missed you today,' he said.

‘Oh? Why was that?'

Mal shrugged. ‘Everywhere I went to make a delivery, people were playing happy families.'

She kissed him again, and saw an opportunity. ‘Poor love. Would you ever consider taking us with you?'

‘Would you do that?'

She nodded. ‘I was thinking today how much fun that might be.'

Mal scoffed. ‘Fun?'

It was Denise's turn to shrug. ‘You never know.'

There's a whole world out there, she thought, waiting for us.

EARTHQUAKE

V
ILLEA LOST THE
last of its postal foot soldiers when Mal Rainbow became a bicycle postman early in 1995. Nettie Firmin still pushed a cart through the commercial centre of town, but bikes now ruled the suburbs. When postman Ben Heany officially retired on the seventh of January, he wasn't replaced, and Dominic Evans, Stan Ward and Mal took up the slack on their bikes. Mal and his body ached and complained about the changes.

Denise saw a movie that moved her to tears. Anita had brought a video of Yasujiro Ozu's
Tokyo Monogatari
(
Tokyo
Story
) to club night and nobody got through it dry-eyed. Denise borrowed it to try and work out why it made her sad. The plot was simple – ageing parents leave their coastal village to visit their married children in Tokyo, but the children's lives are busy and they have no time for their parents. There was no plain reason why the movie undid her, but its subliminal wrath haunted her dreams for days. On Tuesday 17 January, while buying shoes for her son to wear to kindergarten, Denise watched a news report on a wall of televisions at the back of the department store. Apparently, while she'd been sleeping that morning, another earthquake had rocked Japan. Measured at 7.2 on the Richter scale, the quake shook the city of Kobe and killed more than five thousand people, with whole families crushed by debris as they slept.

She couldn't take her eyes from the wall of screens.

‘Mum?' Larry shouted.

She blinked and became aware that he'd been tugging at her hand and calling her name. It took a few seconds for her to realise where she was. She apologised under her breath to nobody in particular, and marched Larry from the store, without the shoes.

That night, as Mal drank his beer in front of the graphic footage on the evening news, Larry pulled at his elbow.

‘What is it, Larry?'

He beckoned for his father to lower his head so he could whisper in his ear.

‘Mum's crying.'

Mal shot out of his seat.

Larry pointed a stubby finger at the kitchen.

When Mal wrapped his arms around his wife, she sobbed into his shoulder.

For some reason the visions of the earthquake had slipped past her defences and reminded her of the sad things in her life. There was her father, the seven miscarriages before Larry, and leaving her baby in the supermarket. There were the times she'd been short with Larry, times when she felt like the worst mother in the world, a mother so despised by God that it seemed they'd never be able to have another child.

The sadness came in a rush and left a few tissues later. It didn't register on seismographs, but the Rainbows all felt it.

Larry stood in front of the TV and watched rescue workers drag bloodied bodies from the wreckage of Kobe. He realised that what he was seeing was not a cartoon. They were real people. It was real blood. The boy he saw being lifted on the stretcher into the back of the ambulance might not be okay.

He eventually realised that like Hundred the goldfish, the toadies on the jetty and Jemma the rabbit, the boy was dead.

WET
BOTTOM

W
HILE
K
OBE TREATED
its wounded and shivered in the winter cold, Villea sweltered. For the three days that led to the weekend, the mercury burst through forty degrees Celsius. On Thursday night it clouded over before the air had a chance to cool and gave the town its hottest night since records began in 1863. The coolest it got was just over thirty degrees and everyone in the neighbourhood tossed and turned.

Muriel Hammersmith's ranting reached fever pitch that night. Maybe it was just that every window on both houses was open. Maybe she was shouting from the kitchen – the closest room to the Rainbows' house. Mal and Denise could hear her bellowing over the sound of their own television and, while there were pauses for breath, she didn't really stop for ten minutes. Most of it was indecipherable and Mal pretended not to be listening. One word cut through, though, again and again.

She.

Mal wondered if She was the dog but secretly hoped that She was Vince's lover. For one crazy breath, he wondered if his own wife was She. Sometimes he noticed the paired teacups in the dish rack when he got home from work. The thought came, and the thought went, burned to a crisp in the light of their innocence.

Mal shifted in his seat. ‘Is Muriel still going?'

As if on cue, Muriel's tirade shifted up an octave. Her voice distorted with unintelligible rage, and then something smashed. The silence that followed was immense. Then there was another smash, and another and finally, a single word uttered in Vince's powerful tone.

‘Enough!'

Mal and Denise looked at each other, eyebrows raised, but the sound of Muriel losing it had become part of the soundtrack of their lives. There was a fatal sort of familiarity about it. They'd agreed, months before, that there was nothing they could do to help.

The discussion in the Rainbow household for the rest of that long, hot night was about the things that
could
be changed.