Page 68 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

Drive-By (continued from preceding page)
wicker thingy. And I know I’m interrupting. Rita gives Thomas this meaningful clap on the leg, and stands. She walks right up close to me.
—That used to be your job back home, I say —the weeding, weren’t you scourged with it?
—I Do, I feel like saying to her —I Do.
—Transplanting mum’s geraniums come winter, says Thomas.
She takes my face in her hands and pins this long and encouraging look on me.
—Saving them from the frost, I say.
—Thomas needs to tell you something, she says.
I stroll around by the picket fence, lift my nose to peer across it. Thomas then is standing beside me. The compost tumbler is between us on the sand, like a stoic Buddha.
She leaves me this slow nod, turning away. I’m be- ing entrusted with something of value.
—What do you make of this composting business that your mother is gone mad on.
I watch her walk down the hallway, past the door to the living room and the three doors that lead
to our bedrooms. She takes a seat at the kitchen table, hands spare in her lap, waiting for whatever to transpire between Thomas and me. I’ve heard it said by younger men that I’m punching above my weight. And I can’t always see that, but right now, maybe I can, the way she’s framed at the end of the hallway, in that repose of hers
“The silence, momentarily,
I must say, between Thomas and me, it has no presence.”
—How was your mother today, I ask Thomas? —Pretty good, today.
—Talking to home?
—Yeah.
—What do you mean?
—I mean, she was never like that, before. —She could do worse, says Thomas.
—I don’t like it, I say.
I sigh to fill the space between us.
Through the window and sliced by the venetian blinds, inside, there’s Anika, in the room we call the living room. She’s lying on her stomach in the beanbag, reading a book with Rosie.
Across the road in the flat-blocks, the music is starting up. There is a group moving from the- Franklin Tavern. Slabs of beer, the lit flare of a face in the draw of a cigarette.
—Isn’t that the one good thing about Australia, I say, jabbing with a toe at a weed in a flower bed —damn all weeding to be done.
—There’ll be ructions later, I say.
—It’s just another type of stability, says Thomas.
The front courtyard of the rental is hemmed by sandy strips that we call flower beds, for want of a better term. The beds have damn-all in them, a handful of succulents that require no water. The few weeds there is, would uproot, if you were to look sidewards at them. Low maintenance, the place was advertised.
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The headlights of a car nib across the hill then, brushing the underside of the jacaranda tree. They move on past us, slowly, downhill, and I pic- ture telling Thomas about the previous night, the fake gun and the mobile phone.