The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street Page 3

  ‘How?’ Helen wanted to lay her head on the cool formica table and sleep.

  ‘Hendel insisted that a group of us women go to the casino to speak with the gamblers. Sinners, he called them. We had to go and embrace them, make them see the error of their ways.’ Astrid halted, and took a deep breath before going on. ‘I argued with Hendel. I told him — Never! Then a funny thing happened, it crept up on me. I wanted to meet the sinners. And thank God I did, because … I like the error of their ways. They turned me inside out, and taught me how to play blackjack, and all the other games. I discovered I loved gambling. And you know I’m good at sums. I take a little out of my housekeeping money each week. Hendel never sees a difference. He doesn’t notice if he eats mince or steak.’

  Helen knew her friend was an excellent mathematician. Astrid had been an accountant before her marriage at the age of thirty-four. Helen also knew that trying to beat the casino at blackjack was almost impossible. The casino set the rules. Astrid must know that. What a curious refuge for a former accountant.

  Then, like an icebreaker, Astrid crashed through the silence again. ‘You know another place Hendel never goes? It’s fantastic when you think of all the hidey-holes us women have in the house. Places men never, ever go! They send man to the moon but never to the kitchen. Come with me Helen.’

  The journey was short, three steps to the cupboard beneath the sink where the cleaning agents and dusting cloths were kept. Astrid pulled out an old biscuit tin. She lifted the lid and extracted something wrapped in a brown paper bag, looking at Helen as she kept unfolding.

  ‘You know, my kitchen is full of money. It’s the richest kitchen in the world,’ Astrid laughed, holding a bankcard in front of Helen’s face.

  ‘In this little piece of plastic there is three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Helen! I won it.’

  ‘You won three hundred and eighty thousand at the casino! How?’

  ‘Keno. I won the jackpot. Jackpot! Three weeks ago. And straight away I banked it all. Although … I’ve lost a little of it already.’

  Helen felt she was in a fog of Keno, jackpots and casinos. For one tiny second she panicked. Had she slipped into one of her nightmares?

  ‘Please Astrid, can we just sit down, and start from the beginning.’

  They settled back at the kitchen table with the bankcard in front of them. Astrid’s words at first were hesitant. ‘I love blackjack but I usually lose. Well, three weeks ago, I got tired of losing. And decided to play Keno. Then suddenly for ten dollars I won over three hundred thousand. Not a bad investment, hey?’

  ‘More like a miracle,’ said Helen, staggered at this news. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘When I won I could hardly believe it. I was so excited but then I thought, who could I tell? Not Hendel. And you were … away Helen, you were here, but not here. Pha. It was very easy to keep it a secret. Sad, hey?’

  Sad indeed, thought Helen.

  ‘I’m a sinner,’ chuckled Astrid. ‘Fancy that. A sinner. It’s so much fun being a sinner. Especially a rich one. Our little secret though?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Our little secret,’ Helen said sleepily, but seeing Astrid anew, like a precious object. Not a mothball-scented weary old lady, but a gambler, a winner. A gambler who did her sums meticulously, even if her opponent, the casino, was bent.

  Astrid’s face became serious as she held the bankcard in front of Helen. ‘This is for you.’

  ‘No. No! You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I am serious. You know, I tell you something I am ashamed of. I won three hundred and eighty-eight thousand. But since then in the casino I have already lost eight thousand. Best I give it away, otherwise I’ll lose it.’

  But Helen couldn’t take Astrid’s money, even if she was losing it.

  ‘You don’t like my confessions?’

  Helen smiled. ‘They’re great confessions. It’s been a bad week. I’m sorry.’

  *

  Still in her pyjamas, Helen returned at nine to an empty house to get her things. She knew Arnold would be out mowing. She deliberated over the note and wrote several drafts, agonising over what to say. Then realised everything had been said. All that was needed now was an ending.

  So she wrote on a clean sheet of paper:

  I HAVE GONE FOR GOOD.

  LIVING WITH ASTRID.

  She studied the note, fingering it, unable to believe she had actually written it. She gazed around the kitchen, and then slowly walked towards the lounge. The quiet felt like an accusation. Isn’t this what you want?

  She recollected a daydream she had when her sons were young and felt guilty. What was wrong, she cried to herself. Isn’t this what she had secretly wished for — the day she would have the house to herself. But there was the rub. She would never have the house to herself. Never.

  When the boys were young with their Lego blocks on loan from the toy library, she dreamed as she collected the colourful chunks of plastic, about a life in Legoland where children were silent and fathers went to work and never returned with anything — not even a tired expression. In Legoland, she saw herself in a four bedroom, two bathroom house with a guest room for guests who never arrived, thank God. She did not want her pristine life disturbed. Her Lego children and husband could be packed away each evening: carefully placed in their box, remembering which body was what colour, size, and how many blocks they consisted of, so they could be reassembled in the morning.

  *

  Two hours later Helen was living in Astrid’s house. She had managed it, even though demented with exhaustion. With Astrid’s help, she had packed her car with clothes and books, driven to the next driveway, unpacked and carried her belongings into the guest room where she now lay drowsily between the sheets of a freshly made bed. Falling into a deep sleep the last thought that occurred to her was that she’d married for worse. For better had been left behind at the altar.

  5

  Arnold was pushing his lawn mower aimlessly around the oval. Looking back at his work, he realised the God-awful mess he was making and switched off the mower. He didn’t want to believe that Helen had burnt her bed. But the smouldering pile of ashes in his back yard was hard evidence. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ muttered Arnold.

  The pain was too much to bear, and it was all he could do to steer the mower towards his ute with the intention of going home. What was happening to his life? His family?

  His two sons Gabriel and Vivian were not a bit like him. Like Helen they had shown no appreciation of the things he had amassed over the years, the wealth of bits and pieces he’d collected like a magpie. They had stopped inviting their friends over, and finally, ashamed of him, or so he surmised, they had turned away from him.

  The boys were as different from each other as they were from him. Gabriel was loud where Vivian was quiet. Gabriel insulted and jibed his parents in a good-natured fashion where Vivian spoke little. In one respect only were the boys similar — their disgust with their father’s junk and sympathy for their mother.

  Gabriel had joined the army, a career move Arnold was entirely unable to comprehend. Vivian, his younger son, had held a succession of jobs, as though he was on a freight train jumping from car to car, not staying in any one place for longer than a month. In the emails he sent home he spoke of travel, of wanting to see the country and meet its people, yet he never mentioned friends or spoke of the places he’d seen. Finally he had found work in underground mining in a far-flung part of the state. He’d been there ten months now, a record.

  On a rare visit home, Vivian had set up an Internet connection on the only one of Arnold’s thirty-eight computers that worked. At the sight of a keyboard Arnold panicked. For him, writing and sending off an email was akin to dealing with the supernatural. But Helen loved to tap out long emails; she wrote them with ease and dispatched a multitude. She badgered Gabriel and Vivian about their jobs, people they’d met, and whatever else she could think of but which ironically, only served to push the
m away. However being loving sons they emailed her back, once a week.

  Communications with their father were infrequent, and brief.

  6

  Having turned the footy oval into a crazy patchwork, Arnold knew it was time to quit. With Helen’s departure, what once seemed utterly pointless had now become utterly unbearable as well. He simply couldn’t mow lawns any more.

  Now it was midday and he was slotting old fence pickets under the kitchen table, a task he might have enjoyed but for his current troubles.

  The pickets, packed in tightly, lifted the table from the floor and jutted out either end. Arnold liked wood. If Helen had been here she’d have shouted at him to get the fence pickets out or gone into a smouldering silence. But she wasn’t here, and he missed her, even missed her blade-like tongue. He’d found the note, and stared at it for a good ten minutes before putting it away. She could have said a little more, he thought, or was that asking for too much.

  He put the last of the pickets neatly into place before settling the kettle on top of the stove. Feeling restless he moved around the kitchen: a kitchen made tiny by the pressing in of stuff.

  He seized upon his tambourine collection. Picking one up and drumming the grey-skinned surface, making the cymbals jingle, he smiled in remembrance of Leif, who, as a toddler, would laugh and clap at the sound of a tambourine. Leif’s name meant ‘love’ in Dutch. Helen had singled it out of a book of ten thousand names for babies. Out of all those names she had picked Leif. Arnold’s smile began to weaken. He lowered the tambourine.

  Leif had died. His lungs, tired of fighting for air, had surrendered to the inevitable. He had lived a mere eight years.

  In the city hospital Helen and Arnold had sat by Leif’s bed bewildered at the sight of their son’s motionless body. Helen wept inconsolably while Arnold held her tight, vice-like, as if squeezing the grief out of her.

  Had she blamed him for Leif’s death? After all, he could pinpoint the time, the day when he had felt her first turn away from him. It was the day Leif died.

  It was unfair. He had gone through the same nightmare as she had — the constant rounds of doctors, treatments, and sleepless tormented nights. The winter that brought a common cold to their son’s respiratory system and took him from them.

  Arnold tapped again at the tambourine, begging the image of his son to reappear. He was rewarded. Grateful, and with all the strength he could muster, he held the memory of Leif laughing,

  He sat by the stove holding the tambourine, looking at its grey surface, searching for answers. And he knew there never was any reply, only an unbearable pain which stretched back for twenty years. With Leif’s death it was like he’d swallowed cement. It had made its way to his chest and set into concrete so hard that no sledgehammer could ever break it. Not the sledgehammer of time, or of work, or of trying to think it out.

  7

  Gabriel stood on the pavement under a streetlight, suitcases by his side. He inspected the family home from across the road. Despite the icy night air his cheeks burned with shame. Why the hell had he thought for even a nanosecond that it would somehow be different? It was still a dump — that’s why he’d left in the first place. But now, after three years in the army, he’d swung homeward to live. His feelings were in a right mess; a weird alchemy of love and hate brewing in his gut.

  He scrunched up his eyes to study the five-foot high front wall Arnold had built from old telephone directories. It didn’t appear too bad at night, blanketed in nasturtium foliage, but in summer, in broad daylight, the wall was grotesque. Turning to look at the other houses that lined the broad street, he saw clear-edged dark structures, quiet and uncomplaining, with subdued light shining from a small number. He found it baffling. How could the occupants of these houses not object to the Great Wall of Telephone Directories?

  It was time to fix things up, or rather, fix his old man up.

  *

  Arnold heard sounds. The front door opening, footsteps going towards the dining room. Helen had returned! He quickly made his way to join her, or so he thought, but on reaching the dining room he saw that it was Gabriel. For a spilt second he was disappointed, but then he felt elated. Too surprised to speak, he shook his head in amazement; his son had come home. He gave him a great hug before standing back to admire him.

  Gabriel was wearing jeans, T-shirt and a faded windcheater, but his close-cropped head and erect posture were from another lifestyle. The army had gotten its claws into his son.

  Gabriel did a quick reconnaissance of the dining room, finishing on Arnold’s collection of crumbling garden gnomes and early twentieth century gardening implements. There were even a number of lawnmowers, which Arnold had once used, now put out to pasture within the house.

  Gabriel stiffened his already unyielding shoulders. He looked ready for combat, as if at any moment he’d throw a grenade. And he did. ‘Why the hell did you name me Gabriel, Dad?’

  These were the first words Gabriel had said to his father in six months. He had no idea why he was carping on about his name, when in all honesty he liked it, loved it in fact. But it was a starting point, a vent for his frustration.

  Arnold decided to play along with the stranger; let him spend his rage. ‘Because.’

  ‘Because bullshit. I’ve left the army because of my name.’

  Arnold struggled to think. Words came skidding out of his mouth, colliding against one another. ‘Hey, you left the army? That’s good.’

  ‘Listen up old man. I’m telling you I left the army because of my name!’

  ‘You left because of your name? You’re kidding me.’

  ‘You’re an ignorant old bastard, who was once an ignorant young bastard,’ Gabriel spluttered.

  Arnold felt wounded by these words. On top of Helen leaving him, this was too much. The Gabriel he knew was an easygoing fellow; the army had sent back an angry young man. Arnold looked to the gnomes for help. They offered none.

  ‘It was your mum’s idea to call you Gabriel.’

  ‘Yeah, go on, blame her.’

  But it had been Helen’s idea, and when she had explained its meaning, Arnold had marvelled at her inspiration. Gabriel was Hebrew for ‘messenger of God’, in honour of the archangel who had told Mary of the conception of Jesus.

  Arnold thought his son’s name was beautiful and said so.

  ‘Caltex would have been a fuckin’ better name.’ Gabriel’s words echoed in the chasm between father and son. ‘No one called Gabriel survives the army. It’s a queer’s name.’

  Gabriel knew he was being a right bastard in giving his father grief. No one in the army had given a bugger about his name.

  Arnold began to pace the floor. ‘What were the other guys in the army called then?’

  ‘Keith, Brian, Len, Ken, Phil, Rod, Mark.’

  ‘Geez, I wouldn’t call a dog any of those names.’ Arnold paused, and then asked out of genuine interest, ‘So what were the queers called?’

  ‘Keith, Brian, Len, Ken, Phil, Rod and Mark.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ grunted Arnold. ‘So stop talking shit. What are you really angry about?’

  ‘Everything,’ snapped Gabriel.

  ‘Well, that narrows it down a bit.’

  Gabriel snorted. ‘This dump stinks! You know, I could smell it before I could see it.’ This was what Gabriel had been longing to say.

  Homesickness, disguised as an honourable discharge after three years in the service of his country, had driven him home. To a house he hated. And a father who disgusted him.

  In truth, Gabriel had been homesick for what he’d never had — an orderly house and normal parents.

  ‘I’m not hanging around here, Dad. This is just a quick visit. I’ll see if I can stay at Astrid’s.’

  ‘We can fix it up.’ The words tumbled out of Arnold’s mouth.

  ‘Your idea of a fix-up is to just move stuff around.’

  Arnold felt as though he was on a high diving board. Should he jump? He had to do something
to keep his son here.

  ‘We can move it out,’ he said, immediately regretting it for he knew he couldn’t. But how else to placate Gabriel?

  ‘As in out of the door, out of the house and for good?’ Gabriel asked mockingly. He waited for his father to take back the words he’d just uttered.

  Arnold had lost his bearings; there was a whine now to his voice. ‘Out means out …’

  Gabriel was not naive when it came to his father’s ‘out means out’. He’d heard it a million times before. He looked around the room, feeling as though he was in the trenches and surrounded by the enemy. He swung his head around to stare at his father, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I guess. I would need a little more time to think about it.’

  ‘Ugh!’ cried Gabriel, as he threw up his arms in exasperation. ‘I knew it. I’m off.’

  Arnold panicked. Two family members leaving him in one day was too much. But what to do, or say?

  ‘It’s interesting what you learn in the army, Dad. You should sign up.’

  Arnold laughed uncomfortably. ‘They wouldn’t want an old fart like me … so what did you learn?’

  ‘How to make a bed. How to march in a straight line. How to shoot.’

  Arnold froze as Gabriel in three giant steps closed in on him. Nose to nose. Eye to eye. Son to baffled father. ‘And, most importantly,’ Gabriel took a deep breath and in a loud voice enunciated carefully, ‘how to keep a room free of fuckin’ crap.’

  ‘Didn’t teach you much then,’ replied Arnold. ‘All this is worth a fortune. Gnome collection, big bucks there. The garden collection …’ his voice dropped, he knew he was whistling in the wind. Saddened at the hardening in his son he sulked, and put his hands in his pockets, wriggling his fingers through the holes he found there.

  ‘Why did you really leave the army son?’