Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (26 page)
I said I love her, I love her crown, thank you. Aunty Jacinta leaned over and gave me a hug and she smelled so nice, not like perfume but just cups of tea and shampoo, and she said softly she doesn't have to be Cinderella, Tyler, you can give her a new name if you like. Then my mum jumped up and said are we allowed to have a glass of wine or do we have to say grace first round here.
After lunch when we got into the car to come home Zac said just drop me off at the station and Mum said I thought you were staying for a few days and he just shrugged and shook his head. Mum said there probably won't even be a train on Christmas Day and he said I checked and there is.
After we dropped him, Mum said he always was an ungrateful little shit wasn't he Ellie? Do you remember Ellie, how he always took his father's side? Ellie said no she couldn't remember. I wished she had just said yes because then Mum wouldn't have kept going. I knew she would and she did. All the Christmas lunch in my stomach turned into a hard cold stone as she started talking on and on about how Aunty Jacinta and Uncle Matt thought they were so great and they didn't even have a plasma and they'd always been like that, always judging her, and Jacinta had always been the favourite with Grandma and how neither of them had given her any support when she'd got pregnant with Tegan and she'd had to move out of home too young and that's what had started all the problems. Mum said they both denied it but she was sure either Jacinta or Grandma had been the one to dob her in to the Department and that was how she'd lost Tegan and she couldn't trust anyone, they were all shits to her even her family.
I looked at my doll's wool hair which Aunty Jacinta had sewed on and made into two little plaits, they were so neat and perfect, tied with thin red ribbon.
When I look at my doll now I remember all this exactly like it happened.
I wrote a card to Aunty Jacinta last year and she wrote a card back to me, here is what she said:
Dearest Tyler we missed you this year and we're sorry you couldn't make it back here again for Christmas. Remember Ty, we think you're wonderful and would love to see you again any time.
On the bottom of the card was a little arrow pointing to the back where she'd written her phone number and small writing saying
: if you ever need to ring me for anything at all, here's the number.
Mum already had that number in the phone book, but Aunty Jacinta must have forgotten. I put the card in my box. I called my doll Calypso. It's just a nice word.
If I had a bike I would of written about that instead.
On Saturday mornings early my mum says I'm allowed to watch cartoons then she goes back into her room. When I peek in as I go past I see an orange shawl over the lamp and a bare foot sticking out of the bed from under the doona. It is Shane's foot, he has a snake tattoo on his ankle. Do you like my tattoo? he said once, lifting up his foot to show me. I said, didn't it hurt? and he said, yep it sure did. He made me read out the words under the snake and said and don't you forget it, that's the truth babe.
If you get something written on your skin it's like you imagine yourself blank like a piece of paper, ready for words, but the bones in Shane's ankle bumped up underneath so the letters were crooked. The snake had fangs that were much too big, like a cartoon snake, when they open their mouths their jaw goes right back and the fangs fill the screen and that's impossible. The person they're attacking starts running in midair without going anywhere and first you hear bongo drums and then the noise they're supposed to make when they run really fast.
One thing about the early Saturday cartoons is that sometimes they show the old ones about the cat chasing the mouse. He makes up all these plans to get the mouse but never gets him, then they wreck the house again, running over and over again past the same lamp and the same chair. Sometimes the cat or the coyote gets big red sticks of dynamite and it always happens that they get it wrong and the dynamite blows up their head. Anyone knows you wouldn't survive that, but they do. They just shake their heads, which have gone black like someone's dropped a packet of black powder onto the floor and it's split open, then suddenly they're back to normal. They can still run so fast they're a blur.
Live fast die young leave a pretty corpse
is what Shane's tattoo says. A corpse is a body like on NCI. I don't know how you'd stay pretty if you were dead. I watch the cartoons listening for when Shane gets up so I can run and get dressed because I don't like being just in my pyjamas when he's here. It just feels funny.
My birthday today. I got my present from my grandma. As soon as I saw it I knew it wasn't the tin. It was a long plastic packet of coloured pencils all different colours but when I coloured with them it wasn't the same. With Georgia's Derwents it feels soft when you colour, and it goes on dark and strong. These pencils feel gritty, like there was sand in them, and no matter how hard you press the colour isn't very good. Say thank you to your grandma, said my mum, for your lovely pencils. Grandma said they're just what she wanted aren't they Tyler?
Mum said that next year I can have a party and we can go to Lollypops Fun Centre. Ellie said that place is for pre- schoolers and Mum said well Maccas then. We had a birthday afternoon tea because Ellie couldn't stay home for dinner, she had a shift at Subway till 9.30. She whispered to me in the kitchen sorry Tyler we'll do something good next year, just you and me, don't worry. I said I didn't care because I had cupcakes at school today. Shane wasn't there tonight because Grandma doesn't know about him yet, Mum says she'll introduce them when the time's right. She says Grandma always interferes and wrecks her chances when it's none of her business so don't tell her yet. Ellie asked her why not and she said first Shane has to get his parole period out of the way and get his gold star for staying clean. Maybe that's why Shane comes over to our place to have a shower and get changed, to stay clean. Otherwise I don't get it. Much later when I was in bed Ellie came in and woke me up and said come into my room. We lay in her bed and she opened a bag from the mall and inside were two little mirror disco balls and two torches. We put batteries in and shone the lights on the mirror balls and sparkling dots went everywhere, all around the corners of the room, spinning. It was like we were floating in the solar system. It was lovely and warm in Ellie's bed.
Thank you for making the cupcakes today Mrs Carlyle. It was great when everyone sang.
My mum says she is going to have a new job. Centrelink is running it and it is sewing. She is good at sewing and she already has the overlocker Aunty Jacinta gave her to make tracksuit pants and tops two years ago.
It is very heavy and she has to lift it up onto the kitchen table. Ellie asks her what she's sewing and Mum says designer things. She says it is support to start her own small business.
She shows me a pattern and it is not clothes, it is a doll. Sort of like a doll, anyway; like a prep kid's drawing, just a round soft shape with big eyes and two useless little arms sticking out the side. Mum has rolls of felt and soft velvet, and stretchy fur material for the clothes. The dolls are called Glamour Plushies.
Designer plush toys, Mum says, reading from her pattern page. They're just for fun. I'm going to sell them in that shop with the cushions and teak furniture in the mall, that Asian one.
Are they the scissors? is all Ellie says. The ones that cost 45 bucks?
Mum says I told you I would pay you back so lose the attitude. She lines up material on the table and Ellie just turns away rolling her eyes.
Mum tells me the scissors are just for special sewing, not for my school stuff or craft things. She says that will wreck them. There is a special tag that gets sewn on to the dolls when they're finished, with a card tied on it that says:
Glamour Plushies are soft, loveable critters that teach us that beauty is only skin-deep. When you adopt one of these adorable soft monsters you are showing your warm-hearted side, a valuable lesson presented by cutely irresistible toys designed and created with great care.
Mum says you will have to help me round the house more Tyler so I can get my first order finished for the assessment. I have to make twelve.
So I cook the chicken with the simmer sauce while she cuts out the pieces and says we will eat dinner on our laps tonight so I can leave the overlocker and all my work on the table OK? And I say OK even though we always eat dinner on our laps anyway because Mum is hooked on
Survivor.
The stuff for the Glamour Plushies takes up all the room on the table so I have to do my project on the glories of Ancient Greece on my bed after dinner. It's hard to write neatly.
Mum hears me snipping and rustling when she comes down the hall to her room and calls out they better not be the good scissors.
They're not. They're the plastic ones that don't cut. Pic- tures stuck down with the glue that doesn't stick, coloured in with the pencils that don't colour. Sorry, Mrs Carlyle.
Mum had nearly finished two whole dolls today when I got home from school. She said the overlocker doesn't really work properly on the felt so she's worked out how to do the blanket stitch by hand. The dolls have big round eyes and little mouths like cats or big open mouths with teeth and they stick their arms straight out the side like they're running towards you afraid. Out of like a fire or away from a scary thing. They are not dolls, they are more like cartoon monsters. Ellie was doing her homework in her room and I went in there. Her room is nice and she bought some curtains for herself at Spotlight and a hot-pink mosquito net. I looked at Ellie's homework which is so hard because she is in Year 10. It was science and she had written
red blood cells plus white blood cells plus platelets plus water equals blood.
There was a picture of platelets and they looked like biscuits. When I get to high school I want to do art in the art room where they have easels. I saw them when we went to Ellie's school for parentâteacher. You stand up and paint and they have huge pieces of paper you're allowed to use, as many as you like. And also a pottery wheel. It's those things that make me want to go to the secondary school even though there's hundreds and hundreds of kids there. I get worried I might forget where my locker is in all those corridors. You get a locker with a combination so that only you can open it. Maybe the other kids want to steal your stuff. You would never know who because there are so many kids there is no way a teacher would notice that or even remember everyone's names. Ellie says she just does the subjects that are going to get her good marks, not art, so that she can do something at TAFE or uni. That is why she works part- time too, to save all her money. When she and Mum fight Mum says set your sister a good example, and Ellie says I'm setting her the best example I can, which is how to get the fuck out of here.