Lola in the Mirror, page 8
‘Bit like us,’ I said.
‘A lot like us,’ Mum said.
Then I asked Mum how much longer I had to be invisible for.
‘Three more years,’ she said.
‘What happens in three more years?’ I asked.
‘That’s when you’ll be an adult,’ she said. ‘That’s when they can’t take you to them places you don’t want to go.’
‘No more runnin’,’ I said.
‘No more runnin’.’
‘I wish I was eighteen tomorrow,’ I said.
‘I wish it would take an eternity for you to reach eighteen.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this all has to end then.’
I looked around the van. I didn’t see much but a hole in the roof and a slice of the moon.
‘What is this, anyway?’ I asked.
‘This is you and me,’ Mum said. ‘This is paradise.’
‘Why does it have to end?’ I asked.
‘Because one day I’m gonna have to go away,’ Mum said.
‘Why do you have to go away?’ I asked.
‘You know why,’ Mum replied. ‘Because I did something very, very bad. Because one day you’ll want me to go away.’
I nestled my head into her breast. ‘I don’t care what you did,’ I said. ‘I’ll never want you to go away. I love you, Mum. More than all the bicycles in Beijing.’
‘I love you more than all the tacos in Mexico,’ she shot back.
‘Don’t make me think of tacos,’ I cried.
‘Taaaacoooos!’ she sighed.
One day you’ll want me to go away. I always wondered what she meant by that. I thought she meant that one day I’d grow tired of running. One day I’d want to live a normal life. One day I’d want something more than a van with four flat tyres. But maybe what she really meant was One day you will know the truth. Or perhaps: One day you will hate me for what I have done.
*
After a year in the orange van, Trev let Mum and me stay during the daylight on weekends. After two years, Trev let Mum and me cut the overgrown grass and build a vegetable patch by the van. Not long after that, he gave Mum a key to the padlock that opened the gate to the rear yard. Not long after that, he let a homeless friend I knew from The Well set up a swag beside our van because I told Trev what a good kid Charlie Mould was and how great he would be at doing odd jobs around the lawn and the shed. Then one night Charlie turned up to find that Trev had given him a whole new home to sleep in: a 1989 white Ford panel van, gutted and rusted from the inside but fitted with a foam mattress and brand-new bedsheets that Trev had bought from the Arana Hills Kmart. ‘You don’t ever have to find no heart, Tinman,’ Mum said. ‘You got the biggest heart in Australia. You’re the kindest man in Oz.’ And that’s why we called the place what we call it. That’s why we live in Oz.
*
‘I think one day the guilt got too much for your mum,’ Ros says. ‘I remember you and Charlie were down at the cement factory getting into mischief. Your mum comes to me all distressed. Like she’d been thinkin’ so much she’d turned her brain into a big ball of silly string. Talkin’ all quick like God had tapped fast-forward on her TV remote. Said she couldn’t live with herself no more. Couldn’t live with what she’d done.’
‘You mean, what she done to my father?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, maybe it was that. But I think it was something else. I think it was something she’d done to you. She said she was going away. And that’s when she reached into her pocket and handed me the world.’
*
Roslyn’s 2002 Honda Jazz was also donated by the Tinman. I keep telling her she needs a bigger car with more leg room to sleep in – something like a Subaru Outback or a seven-seat Toyota Kluger – but she always says I’m talking smack because I’m jealous that her car is newer than my van and has tyres that are actually inflated.
Roslyn was a forty-three-year-old wife and mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter when she had an anxiety attack inside St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta. She’d been working as an accountant for three family-run community supermarkets across Western Sydney. The anxiety attack occurred at the very moment she looked into an open coffin and saw the face of her dead father, an exceedingly strict and pious man who viewed suburban corner-store confectionery in much the same way as most parents view city-corner narcotics. He flogged Roslyn with the leather razor strop that hung in the family kitchen if he ever found his daughter indulging in those notorious gateway temptations manufactured by the devil: jelly babies and Jaffas. ‘You got the prettiest smile in your class,’ her father yelled. ‘You want your smile to rot away, Ros? Is that what you want?’
That first anxiety attack led to several more anxiety attacks and Roslyn sought advice from a long-term work colleague she knew who had suffered similar attacks in the wake of her husband’s premature death from bowel cancer. Her colleague said Roslyn would benefit from finding hobbies that were calming, and she herself had found great relaxation in playing the pokies at her local Western Sydney leagues club. She invited Roslyn to join her at the pokies every Tuesday and Thursday night. Roslyn found an immediate name-based connection to a brightly coloured machine called Cracklin’ Rosie, which was adorned with the image of a vibrant red-haired cowgirl tipping her hat and winking at potential gamblers in a way that suggested they might just get a kick out of slipping a coin in her slot.
Roslyn was soon spending every Tuesday and Thursday night enveloped in Cracklin’ Rosie’s warm glow, with a cupful of coins in her left hand and, always, a three-hundred-gram bag of Pascall Clinkers between her legs. Soon enough, she was visiting Cracklin’ Rosie on Wednesdays at lunchtime too. And then Saturday afternoons while waiting to pick up her daughter, Zoey, from netball. And then Monday nights. And then Fridays at lunchtime.
After a while, Cracklin’ Rosie turned off the gentle cowgirl charm for Roslyn. She got needy. Got evil. She didn’t just want Roslyn’s time and calm and hope and desire. She wanted the family’s life savings and then she wanted the impossible. She wanted Roslyn to cook the accounting books at her work and transfer small amounts of supermarket money into a secret account established only for Cracklin’ Rosie. Five hundred dollars. One thousand. Then ten thousand and twenty thousand.
In the meantime, Roslyn had developed a most unexpected addiction to Pascall Clinkers and she laughs today when she thinks about how she met countless prisoners in the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre who’d spent their first week in prison cold-kicking heroin and methamphetamines. ‘I spent my first week kickin’ them fuckin’ Clinkers,’ she says.
*
Ros leans across my legs from the Honda’s driver’s seat. She pops open the glovebox. Two head torches there, along with McDonald’s napkins, Kleenex tissues and a small first-aid kit. There’s also lip gloss and an old worn tube of pink zinc cream for her nose, which is always being excavated for nasty carcinomas by Dr Jenyns, the GP who visits The Well every second Friday. Ros digs her left hand deep into the glovebox and grips the world in her hands, a plastic globe the size of a squash ball attached to a keychain, which, in turn, is attached to a silver car key. She holds the keychain in her open palm. Bright blue colours for the sea, the continents in vivid reds and greens and yellows. There’s Australia, coloured brown. Dirt brown. Sunburnt brown.
‘She gave me this,’ Ros says. ‘She told me to give it to you. She told me to tell you that she had to go away because she didn’t want to hurt you any more than she already had. And that’s when I grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and I don’t remember ever talkin’ more cross to her. I told her she was chicken shit if she ran like that, and I told her she could tell you about that running away stuff to your face because I wasn’t gonna be the one who broke a little girl’s heart, because that particular little girl didn’t have no more hearts left to be broke.’
‘She never would have left me like that,’ I say.
‘Well, I’m happy to say you’re right, kid,’ Ros says. ‘She never did. But she told me to keep this safe, all the same. Just in case something ever happened to her. Just in case them cops she was always fussin’ about closed in. Or in case somethin’ worse happened.’
Ros hangs the world above my lap from her fingertips. ‘Looks like somethin’ worse just happened,’ she says.
I hold my palm open and she places the globe on it.
‘Do you remember where you guys were livin’ before you landed here in Oz?’ Ros asks.
‘Yeah, I remember,’ I say. ‘Bedrock Wrecking Yard, Rocklea.’
‘Yabba dabba doo, kid,’ Ros says, nodding. ‘You remember the car you guys called home?’
‘Yeah, I think I remember. Yellow car. All bashed in at the front. ’Bout as big as a letterbox.’
‘What was the make of that car, kid?’
My mind runs through an automotive showreel of cramped rear-seat sleeps, awkward back seat scoops of Heinz tinned spaghetti, movie nights on portable DVD players: Finding Nemo in a Ford Laser, Frozen in a Ford Focus.
‘I can’t remember,’ I say.
‘What was your mum’s star sign?’
‘Gemini.’
Ros nods. ‘Yellow Gemini,’ she says. ‘Bedrock Wrecking Yard.’
‘What am I gonna find in that car, Ros?’ I ask, wrapping my fist around the keychain, around Mum’s world.
‘I don’t know, kid,’ Ros says. ‘She never told me. Maybe it’s something beautiful. But maybe it’s something terrible, too. I don’t know.’
Holding the world in my hand, I think about how the renowned art critic and curator E.P. Buckle might speak of this moment to a group of art lovers walking through the posthumous exhibition of my life and work at the New York Met. What would he say about this moment here and now, when the girl with no name chose danger? Chose daring.
I see a girl in Buckle’s gallery group, aged about twelve, wearing a three-quarter-length yellow peacoat. She turns from a painting of mine to her mother, who stands by her side. ‘She was sad, wasn’t she, Mum?’ she says.
‘She was very sad,’ her mother replies. ‘But never forget, she was also brave. She was a cartwheeler.’
Roslyn puts a gentle hand on my closed fist. ‘The world belongs to you now, kid,’ she says. ‘Time to decide what you’re gonna do with it.’
Holden Gemini Car Boot Filled with Planets, Stars and Interstellar Dust
February 2023
Pen and ink on paper
The artist was seventeen years old and heartbroken, though evidently moved by something she had seen inside the boot of an abandoned and worthless 1978 Holden Gemini automobile. The piece is seen by many as a tribute to discovery, or what the esteemed Metropolitan Museum of Art curator E.P. Buckle once called ‘the luminescence of truth’.
It’s 9 p.m. when I tap the metal handle of Roslyn’s old black Maglite torch against the curtained rear windows of Charlie Mould’s white Ford panel van. Walking shoes on my feet. Black Adidas backpack over my shoulders.
Charlie opens the left-side rear door of the van just enough for me to see he’s wearing his Paddle Pop lion pyjamas. The ones that say Cool Bananas amid a galaxy of floating banana Paddle Pop ice creams. He’s got a head torch strapped to his forehead. ‘Princess Diana,’ he says.
It was six years ago that Charlie decided to call me ‘Princess Di’ because that would mean he was my Prince Charles. But Charlie ain’t no prince. Charlie’s just one of those lovable scoundrels with a hidden heart of gold, like Han Solo, Keith Richards and the Artful Dodger. Charlie’s the Artful Dodgiest. Total artist, too. Born for it, like me. Burns for it, like me. We’re gonna start an art movement out of Brisbane together. Nouveau Brisbane. Neo Pineapple. Post Banana. We can’t decide.
‘You doin’ anything right now?’ I whisper.
‘Why you whisperin’?’ Charlie whispers back.
‘I don’t know,’ I whisper, then return to my normal voice. ‘You doin’ anything right now?’
‘I was doing my Sudoku over a glass of Golden Oak Fruity White.’
‘You wanna come help me discover who I am?’
‘Sure,’ Charlie says.
‘Meet me by the side gate in five minutes. Bring that head torch.’
I start to move away.
‘Hey, wait,’ Charlie says. ‘Come ’ere.’ He waves me in to him.
‘Why?’
‘Just come ’ere, will ya.’ He opens the rear door wider as I take two steps closer to him. And he pulls me in to his chest for a hug that lasts more than a minute. Then he sinks his head into my shoulder and whispers to me. ‘I counted them up. I got to six. There have been six people in this world who ever really gave a shit about me. You’re one of them, Princess. Your mum was one of ’em, too.’
He starts to cry. ‘I thought she was an angel,’ he says.
And now I sink my head into Charlie’s shoulder and cry as well. ‘I thought she was, too.’
*
Rocklea train station is eight stops from South Brisbane train station. The Bedrock Wrecking Yard is on Hutton Drive, a seven-minute walk from Rocklea station. Not a soul alive on Hutton Drive at 10 p.m.
‘Maybe it’s a bag full of gold bricks,’ Charlie suggests, tapping a stick on the footpath the way an ice-hockey player might tap a hockey stick on the ice. ‘Maybe she was a billionairess before she had to run away with you,’ he continues. ‘You’d have to keep gold bricks like that in the back of a Gemini. Hard to exchange that shit for cash without answering a bunch of questions.’
‘She wasn’t a billionairess, Charlie. If she was a billionairess I don’t think we would have spent the past six years sleeping in a van.’
‘Maybe it’s a dead body?’
‘What the fuck is in that Golden Oak? It’s not a dead body.’
‘Maybe it’s your old man, all curled up and bony? Did you ever find out what happened to his body? Did she ever tell you where he was buried?’
No, come to think of it, Charlie Mould, she never did tell me that.
‘It’s not a dead body and it’s not the bones of my ol’ man,’ I say. ‘And get rid of that stick. The yard’s just around this bend.’
The Bedrock Wrecking Yard is tucked into a row of Hutton Drive industrial sheds: a truck repair yard, custom car detailing sheds, a wholesale food and catering warehouse. There’s a high and rusting barbed-wire fence at the front. Inside is a small single-level box of a house with a flat roof that appears to be acting as the yard’s sales office. Resting upon the flat roof of this box house is a beat-up frog-green Volkswagen Beetle with a sign sticking out of its roof: Bedrock Wreckers. Behind the house is a dirt parking lot of wrecked and rusting cars. Old Holdens and Fords and newer Nissans and Hyundais and Kias and Hondas and Toyotas by the dozen. The gates to the yard are locked with a heavy chain.
‘So how do we get in?’ Charlie asks.
‘I don’t know. We used to just walk in. Mum used to know the guy who ran this place.’
We had hitchhiked to Brisbane from Bundaberg in 2017. Mum was looking for a car, and someone at the Emmanuel City Mission, where we’d been going for lunch, had put her onto this place because the guy here used to do up cars and donate them to people who needed wheels but couldn’t afford them. He didn’t have a car that worked for Mum but said that if it was a place to crash we needed then we were welcome to take our pick from the two hundred or so cars that were rusting out back.
‘He was a good man,’ I tell Charlie. ‘He let us sleep in the Gemini after the gates shut. I can’t even remember his name. Damn, what was his fucking name?’
What was it that Ros said? Yabba dabba doo.
‘Did you ever watch that show The Flintstones?’ I ask Charlie.
‘What the fuck is The Flintstones?’ he shoots back.
‘It’s an old cartoon people our parents’ age used to watch. It was all, like, modern life – parents dealing with spoilt kids and shit – but set in the Stone Age.’
‘How’d that work?’
‘I don’t know, but it works in cartoons. All the characters lived in a town called Bedrock. I think the guy who ran this place had the same name as one of the characters and that’s why he called this place Bedrock. But I can’t remember his name. I think it was Ernie or somethin’?’
‘Bert and Ernie?’
‘That’s Sesame Street,’ I say, as we scurry towards the industrial space to the right of the wrecking yard, a large warehouse for a company called Latitude Couriers. I clamber easily over the white concrete wall in front of it, and Charlie follows. We slip down the left side of the warehouse, adjacent to the barbed-wire fence of the wrecking yard. At the back of the warehouse are a scattering of pallet stacks and small shipping containers and a large cast-iron J.J. Richards industrial waste bin on wheels next to a row of empty parking spaces. I look across to the wrecking yard and spot a stack of four crushed cars close to the fence. Press my shoulder against the industrial bin and start pushing. When Charlie tucks his shoulder against the bin beside me, the thing starts moving. Once we have it against the fence, I stand, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and say, ‘Boost?’ It’s all I have to say because Charlie and me have spent the past six years of our lives boosting each other up over fences and up onto ledges and up into windows all over South East Queensland.
He props his legs and cups his hands, forming a platform for my right boot, which he raises up with one great heave of his noodle arms. I pull Charlie up onto the bin with me then unzip my backpack and pull out Mum’s fourteen-inch bolt cutters.
‘Will ya take a knee for me, Hercules?’
‘You just use me for my body, don’t ya?’ Charlie replies as he drops his left knee and props his right thigh up for me to stand on with both feet. Once balanced, I reach the bolt cutters up to the three lines of old barbed wire and press the long blue cutting arms together using every bit of power in my shoulder and chest muscles. The wires snap easily and I climb over the fence, pushing the loose barbed wires aside as I step onto the stack of four crushed cars. Behind it is a stack of three cars and then a stack of two cars. It’s like a staircase of cars running from the fence and Charlie and me bound down like monkeys descending the steps of an Aztec temple. Charlie lands hard on the final step and the bonnet of a red Commodore releases a loud boink that echoes across the yard.
