The House That Was Eureka (7 page)

That was what Lizzie was talking about now. For Nobby’s mother had gone to Court today and obtained an order from the magistrate giving Lizzie’s father a week to pay the back-rent. If he didn’t pay it by next Friday, a warrant would be issued on Monday, 25 May, ordering the bailiffs to evict the Cruises.

‘Pay the back-rent!’ Lizzie said. ‘She’s off her head. It’s twenty-five quid.’

It was five months since the Cruises had paid rent: for it was five months ago that Lizzie lost her job, and for two years Lizzie’s earnings had been the only cash coming regularly into the Cruise household. Paddy and Mick had only had the odd day’s work since 1929.

‘No!’ said Nobby. The old girl had done this secretly, without a word to him. ‘I’ll stop her,’ Nobby said.

He was the light of the old girl’s life, her darling treasure. She was tough as they come, but she’d never denied Nobby anything. ‘She’ll only be threatening, just to get at your pa.’

‘To get at me, you mean.’ Everyone in Liberty Street knew that Mrs Weston couldn’t stand a bar of Lizzie. Mrs Weston, who played piano, the widow of a bank teller . . .

Sucks to you, Ma Weston, Lizzie thought. I don’t want your sweet Sunshine anyway. Not in that way.

‘The stuck-up cow,’ Lizzie said.

‘You’re not wrong there,’ Nobby agreed. Then felt dirty inside because he’d said it. There were still things about his mother he couldn’t help liking.

One day when he was little, Nobby had seen her on the roof, fighting a southerly buster to pull a tarp over while the slates flew off around her head. She was shouting down into the street to stop the neighbourhood men from coming up to help her.

‘I don’t take charity!’ She didn’t give it either.

And she could be funny too sometimes. Like when she played the piano and made up songs about all the neighbours. But she only ever showed her wit to Nobby.

‘I’ll get round her, no risk,’ Nobby said.

‘And if you can’t?’

‘I will.’

‘But just if you can’t?’

‘Then I’ll stick with your side. Our side.’

Nobby looked down over the houses. One day he and Lizzie would live out there in a house, he said.

‘You know I hate it when you go like this,’ Lizzie cut him short.

I’m a pure red flame, burning only for the struggle
.

The thought of a husband, and love, and kids, and doing the mopping to keep it all clean, made Lizzie feel as if someone had locked her up inside somewhere tiny and airless.

Evie flunked the job interview she went to that next Monday. It was for a sandwich hand, in a place in the city, and they had other girls with letters saying they’d worked in other sandwich places, so they didn’t even try Evie out. Evie didn’t mind, except for the money. Slap-slop, putting curried egg onto buttered squares, it wasn’t thrilling. Not that anything was.

As she was all dressed up it was a pity to waste it, so she walked around Centrepoint a bit, then dropped into the local CYSS place on the way to pick up Sammy.

‘G’day, I’m Roger,’ said the friendly guy who was good-looking. He still had a video portapak on his shoulder, and the solid girl with glasses was still trailing after him on the end of the sound-lead. There was macrame in one room, and tap-dancing in another, and in the kitchen a whole lot of guys were eating rice and cooking more rice and talking a foreign language and laughing.

‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ Roger said.

(
He doesn’t remember me
.)

Evie couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked exactly like someone she’d love to go out with. Really clean hair, thick and the right length and the right colour; a suntan (despite winter!) and blue eyes and clean faded jeans that fitted well and a yellow sweatshirt that said ‘Make The Ruling Class Crumble’. Evie read it and couldn’t understand it. It sounded like apple crumble, that they used to make in Home Science. The girl was obviously his girlfriend. She had on a black T-shirt with the same sort of writing. It said ‘Eat The Rich’. Cannibalism made Evie feel sick.

‘Were you looking for something in particular?’ Roger had a really warm voice.

‘No.’ Evie felt silly in her best respectable dress and tights and Mum’s shoes.

‘There’s things on the noticeboards,’ Roger said. ‘Or come again. Or Di’s probably in the kitchen, go in and meet her. We’ve got to get down and film the demo.’ He smiled again on his way out the door.

‘Or come along,’ the girl said, hurrying to keep up with him or the cord might break. ‘We need numbers.’

‘What?’ Evie trailed out after them.

‘Down at the CES headquarters. The unemployed demo.’

Evie watched them dump the gear in an old Volkswagen. There were banners on top, and boxes of pamphlets on the back seat.

‘There’s room,’ the girl yelled to her. ‘You can sit on my lap.’

‘Oh no thanks.’ Evie went to the play centre and picked up Sammy, then went home. Maria and Jodie were already there, because the school holidays had just started.

‘You two can look after Sammy today.’

‘I can’t,’ Maria said. ‘I’ve got to go somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a secret.’

‘
Tell
me!’ Jodie demanded.

‘It’s a
secret
!’

Maria liked secrets for their own sake. Secret friends, secret places, secret money, secret food. Morning secrets and afternoon secrets and dark night secrets. Out at Campbelltown, she’d had lots of secrets, but now they’d moved here she’d have to start all over again.

A few days ago, she’d found her first one. It was an afternoon secret, a food secret, a friend secret, a money secret, a place secret, but mainly a food secret. Like most secrets, it’d started by itself.

One afternoon around the middle of last week, Maria had been mooching around the street thinking about getting a secret pile of money and secretly buying a BMX bike:
that’d
show Dad. For all she had now was Evie’s crumby old hand-me-down ancient-history dinosaur, and Dad reckoned she didn’t need a new one.

So she was wandering along the far end of the street when she spotted a fat foreign lady dressed all in black, sweeping and hosing her neat concrete front yard.

‘Would you like me to do that for you?’ Maria asked.

The lady looked up, smiling a wide smile, but with a blank look in her eyes. ‘Excuse me?’ she said.

‘Would you like me to do that? I could do it for you, and you could pay me, and then you wouldn’t have to get your slippers wet.’

The lady didn’t seem to get the point. She looked back to an old man sitting on the porch.

‘Bob-a-job is it, love?’ He smiled too.

‘No,’ said Maria. ‘I just want lots of money, that’s all.’

‘Ah,’ the old man grinned. ‘Sheer capitalist free enterprise, is it?’

Maria didn’t know what his big words meant. She didn’t say anything. The lady wasn’t there now anyway, she’d disappeared inside her door.

But was back again a second later, with little white crescent-shaped biscuits on a plate.

‘Eat, eat,’ she urged. Then fast words in a foreign language. ‘
Einai orea, i koritzei!
’ With one hand she stroked Maria’s white-blonde hair, while with the other she held the plate right up to Maria’s nose. She smiled, and there were teeth missing, and some of the teeth that were there were gold. It was like a witch story, Maria thought. The biscuits were poison; the lady was doing a spell on her head; propped up against the fence was her
broom
. Maria looked around for a cat, but could only see a bird in a cage.

Maria wasn’t scared. She’d always longed to meet a witch. She took a biscuit, and it was covered in white icing-sugar that powdered down all over Maria’s jumper. Arsenic, she thought, biting in. Quite delicious.

‘
Einai orea ta mallia tou koritzei!
’ The lady was gushing fast in foreign as she gently pulled and stroked at Maria’s hair.

Maria looked towards the old man, whose eyes were on her, curious, amused.

‘It seems she thinks your hair’s pretty,’ the old man said drily.

‘Yes, pretty, very pretty hair,’ the lady knew the words now. ‘Very pretty girl.’

That was nice. The biscuits were nice (Maria took another one) and the lady was nice, and it was so nice to hear you were pretty. The lady was so nice, she couldn’t be a witch, that was a pity, but the compliments and biscuits made up for it. I’ll find a witch somewhere else, Maria thought.

Then the man explained to the lady about the money, and the lady let Maria sweep and gave her twenty cents.

‘You come back, eh?’ grinned the lady when Maria finished. ‘Tomorrow. Next day. We have cake. You come back to Mrs Maria.’

‘Maria,’ said Maria. ‘That’s
my
name.’

‘Is my name too,’ said the lady. ‘So we friends, eh?’

That was how the afternoon secret started. The next day and the next day and on Saturday and Sunday too, Maria slipped off away from Jodie and Sammy and Evie and sat in the kitchen with Mrs Maria and the old man, and ate strange Greek honey cakes and nut pastries and preserved fruit, and the old man talked a bit about the olden days when he was a boy, and Mrs Maria beamed and told Maria she was pretty and let her sweep for twenty cents, and the parrot chattered in its cage and picked up the crumbs that Maria dropped in to it. It beat afternoon tea at home with Evie hands down. At Evie’s afternoon tea you got a choice between peanut butter on bread and peanut butter on toast, and Jodie or Sammy was always grabbing the jar away.

‘Look, just make Sammy and yourselves a sandwich,’ Evie said this Monday. ‘Then go and watch TV or something.’ She didn’t care what they did, as long as she could be alone.

‘
You
look after her, Jodie,’ Maria said. ‘I told you, I’ve got to do something.’

‘We’re coming too,’ said Jodie.

Evie went into her room.

‘No you’re not,’ Maria said.

‘Yes we are.’

‘Oh, okay, but don’t tell Evie but.’ The main point about secrets was to keep them secret from Evie.

As if
I
want to know, Evie thought in her room. She heard them traipse out the front door, one two three. Evie didn’t care what they did that day, as long as she could be alone. She felt tired, and miserable, and caught in a knot inside, so she locked herself in her room and had a sleep.

Scrabbling, Evie felt these days. Scrabbling inside the cupboard. But
she
was inside the cupboard. She was Evie, a girl scratching on the door with her fingernail. Too scared to go out. Too scared to go and see. Stuck in the dark. The door swung back and open. Then there was the white face of the despot. Looking at her fearful-eyed before it disappeared.

The row they’d had that Friday night had been a good’un. Hammer and tongs they’d gone, Nobby and his mother, till nearly dawn. Lizzie had heard them through the wall.

The next day there was a deputation by the Anti-Eviction Committee on behalf of the Cruises. They tried pleading, they tried reason. They presented a petition signed by a hundred residents of Liberty Street, and two hundred other locals. Mrs Weston threatened to call the police if the committee didn’t get off her doorstep.

‘And when you’ve finished wasting your time with your no-good friends,’ she added, pushing Nobby down the steps with her broom, ‘you might deign to come in like a civilized son and unblock the drain for me.’

Nobby fixed the drain, then cleaned the silver. That was his regular Saturday morning chore.

The smell of the silver polish, the feel of the clean white rag, the sight of all the cutlery and the vegetable dishes and the dish-covers and the eggcups and the vases and the roast-plate and the teapot and the sugar bowl and the milk jugs and the two serviette rings laid out there before him on newspaper on the kitchen table – all this had been going on for Saturday morning upon Saturday morning for as long as he could remember. This wasn’t man’s work, he thought viciously, finishing a vase, moving on to a serviette ring.

N
, he thought, idly running his finger over the engraving on the ring.
N
for his name,
N
for no one.

In the old days, Lizzie used to come in on Saturday mornings and help him, so he could get through it fast and they could go out and play. His mother hadn’t liked it, but hadn’t known how to object.

Lizzie’s wide green eyes would lift to her as she opened the door. ‘Good morning,’ Lizzie would say, all prim in her pinafore. ‘May I please help Nobby with the silver?’

‘We don’t need help.’

‘Oh, but I like to, we don’t have silver at home.’

Never sure if the child was mocking her, Nobby’s mother would let her in, and there she’d sit singing and chattering in the kitchen as if she had a right, making Nobby be noisy and laugh.

They used to play Crusaders.

‘This roast plate’s the king, and the teapot’s the queen, and the dishes and stuff are knights, and the vases are the squires, and all the cuttle-ry is the swords and lances . . . And these two rings,’ Lizzie would reckon, ‘they’re our crowns.’ Balancing Nobby’s mother’s serviette ring on her head as she polished, she’d giggle at Nobby whose head was too flat or something, and Nobby’s crown would fall off with a dull clunking sound.

Nobby smeared polish over the ring, turning the silver to dull white, obliterating the
N
.

Or they’d be invading armies sometimes, sitting at opposite ends with equal battalions, and as each soldier’s armour was cleaned he could advance on the enemy’s camp. The serviette rings were the cannon balls, and the trick was to flick them down the table when the other commissar wasn’t looking, and kill him dead.

One day, Lizzie had had this ring of Nobby’s, and she’d flicked too hard, and it’d gone spinning off in a helix of flashing silver and apparently disappeared into thin air. They’d searched and searched, and hadn’t found it, and Nobby’s mother had muttered about light fingers and said Lizzie couldn’t come and do the silver any more.

Six months later, Nobby had found it, in a dark corner beneath the dresser, but by then it was too late to get Lizzie back, for she’d turned fourteen and started work and she didn’t get off till after dinner-time on Saturdays.