PLOTTING

Mother was plotting. She had spent a horrible amount of time sleeping, and lazing around, and being generally an embarrassment to me. I was glad she had got her energy back, but it was a feverish, unpredictable energy. She wasn’t a writer anymore, she said; she was an inventor of plots to foil publishers. ‘I’m going to write a sonnet,’ she said. ‘They want a sonnet? I’m going to give them a beautiful sonnet. A sonnet they’ll never forget!’ She was almost rubbing her hands in glee.

I was reading Asterix, with a plate of lamingtons balancing on the chair-arm next to me. ‘What’s a sonnet?’ I said idly, not really caring.

‘A sonnet, O-yo,’ she said, ‘A sonnet, my dear dear O-yo, is a fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, and ending in a rhyming couplet.’

I nodded and she drew her breath sharply inward and retreated to her writing desk. I did not see her again that evening.

When I got hungry, I whipped an egg with milk and grated cheese and scrambled it in the crepe-pan. There was no bread, so I buttered two Weetbix and added Vegemite. Sometimes I mixed the Vegemite and the butter so it was an indistinguishable paste: pale brown. Papa had beer in the fridge, and Carlito had already begun teaching me how to drink beer, so I had a glass of beer. No one minded me falling asleep on the couch anymore. So I fell asleep on the couch. It was as good as my bed, which was never made, and had a strange sour smell where I’d spilt a milkshake.

It was only at your house these days, Ornella, that I was actually ‘put to bed’ in the old-fashioned sense of being regulated and bossed around. No one else bothered with ‘lights out, school tomorrow’. In this sense, you had become the bane of my life. ‘A child your age needs eleven hours sleep a night. Do you hear me? Eleven hours!’ And then, in the morning, over breakfast, you punished me by making me recite the times tables. Then there was teeth-brushing. Shoe-polishing. Hair-combing. Where was my library book? Why hadn’t I eaten yesterday’s banana? What would you do with a kid who didn’t eat his bloody banana?

At Mother’s house, I sailed to school in the same clothes as yesterday, with money for the milk bar I’d got out of her milk-and-bread-jar. I could get a pie. I could get a piece of battered flake. I could get Redskins or Milkbottles or even Fags. I was scared, sometimes, by all the choice.

‘You’ve started to drink again, Veda,’ said Papa. ‘You need to get a grip on yourself. You don’t want to fall back into it. You’ve been doing so well.’