The maskeys, p.27
The Maskeys, page 27
‘I couldn’t say,’ Rodney said.
‘We’re gonna go for a Chinese at the club. When it’s dark, we’ll leave.’ She felt herself touched by the sight of him. His shyness. His disappointment. And some other quality that she couldn’t put her finger on. ‘Don’t ever get your teeth fixed, Rodney,’ she said, sitting next to him.
The weasel thought that was a strange thing to say. His teeth were so bad. So unattractive. ‘Why not?’ he asked, their knees touching.
‘If you had good teeth – you’d be perfect.’
Rodney wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Leanne leant in and kissed him. His first kiss, lasting several moments.
When their lips parted, he knew his mouth would never be the same. He shaded it with a hand and then suddenly was in a hurry. ‘I got to go somewhere,’ he said, standing and rushing to the doorway in a blush. ‘I put a letter in your bag,’ he said, hesitating.
Leanne smiled. ‘I know.’
He bolted down the stairs, and at the counter he helped himself to a pair of Gayle’s servo sunnies.
‘They’re seven dollars,’ she said.
‘Can I fix yup later, Mrs Reynolds? I gotta go somewhere.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ she said with a frown.
‘Please don’t stop me. I gotta see Serenade.’
At the mere mention of Serenade, Gayle flinched. She impatiently waved Rodney away.
He threw on the sunglasses and hurried out.
Meanwhile – up at the Lodge, the most pulchritudinous and (largely) venerated seer in the entire caldera, Serenade, stood at the window in her parlour, causing the trees to tremble in their twilight glow of magic time. And as wayward locks of golden satin stratus cloud glowed, back-lit, like the curls of a siren of the silver screen – reminding Serenade of when she briefly wore her hair blonde, like Jean Harlow – the fabulous mesmerist awaited Rodney’s imminent arrival …
With Leanne’s kiss still on his lips, Rodney pushed in the gate and bounded up the steep stairs at the front, surprising Dimity aka Ratshit, who was smoking a durrie with a thesaurus handy. ‘You missed Hilda, Rodney,’ the author advised, blowing smoke. ‘She left hours ago.’
He paused. ‘I’m not here for Hilda,’ he panted, dismissing the old user. He entered the darkened hallway. ‘I’m here for me.’
‘And, for me,’ Serenade said, clutching her kimono about her breasts.
She released the garment and yanked him into her room. ‘I’ve been expecting you, Rodney.’
He began to burble on about Leanne.
‘I know, Rodney,’ Serenade said, ‘you are preoccupied with the pretty girl. But what are you going to do about the slut, Celeste?’
He was confused.
Serenade produced a laboratory document that showed Eric Lunarzewski’s paternity to the baby, Damon Maskey. (For Serenade was nothing if not thorough, and since DNA matching had become a thing, her job of fortune-telling had become much easier. She took DNA samples from all her clients: fingernail ends, eyelashes, hair, saliva, and sometimes much more intimate evidences when she got lucky in room three.)
She quickly caught Rodney up with the extent of the toxic-berry’s betrayal of the Maskeys, placing a particular emphasis on what was unfolding, as they spoke, in Hilda Maskey’s studio.
‘The universe is about to set you a brand-new place at its table, dearest boy – the one you always wanted. Don’t let the viper ruin everything!’
A minute later, the weasel was running up Main Street. As he ran – past the hospital, past the Potter’s Gallery, past the pub – a few fleeting inconsequential greetings ensued from townsfolk who have no role to play in this story. He turned the corner into Judith Street, and soon he was back at Gayle’s garage.
‘I need a truck.’ Rodney puffed.
‘No.’
‘It’s really important, Mrs Reynolds.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t have my truck, Mrs Reynolds. Please. I’m not doin nothin criminal in it.’
‘You better not be,’ she said, handing him keys reluctantly.
Rodney drove from the servo. Minutes later he was at Longwhile, fairly flying across the knee-high grasses of the farm.
While, back at Naples Lodge, in the company of her rescues, Serenade reclined on her seven-poster bed.
Arriving where he had to be, at Hilda’s mosaicking studio, Rodney crouched low – not difficult, he was not tall – and commenced his stalk. He reached a window – the studio had two – and pressed his face against the dusty glass. George was seated on a chair, and as Rodney peered in, he thought he could see a naked Celeste on her knees, fellating him.
George’s head was thrown back, and his belted Levi’s had fallen heavily about his slippered feet; he seemed to be experiencing no pain in his soon-to-be removed legs.
Having coaxed an erection out of the man she liked to call Dad, Celeste sought out his mouth with hers.
And, in her parlour, Serenade beamed. ‘Think you can call me an old boong, you little cunt!’
Celeste pulled George down to the floor with her. Ecstatic to be feeling his stowaway so ready and able for mutiny but plagued by his disabled joints, he struggled to accommodate her urgings.
The scene was becoming worse than Rodney could ever have imagined; he lifted the dusty aluminium-framed window an inch. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Mr Maskey?’
George thought it was a voice in his own head. His conscience. He dismissed it. It only interfered.
On his knees, he gave his son’s ex-fiancée a slobbery wet growl between her legs and moved awkwardly to enter her.
‘Don’t dare stick your dick in her —’
Celeste saw Rodney peering through the window. ‘Piss off, you pervert,’ she cried.
‘She wants ya dead, Mr Maskey. But before that, she wants your kid. Coz the one she has with Caleb ain’t a Maskey. It’s white-teeth’s. Caleb has been unable to give her a kid – and that’s why she wants that ugly old dick of yours inside her.’
George turned to see the weasel and, with his hand shielding his ugly old dick, instantly felt ashamed.
‘She’s making a fool of you.’
‘I knew that,’ George said. ‘But I didn’t care.’
‘No, Mr M,’ Celeste protested.
George felt his mutiny collapse in his hands. He retreated from the girl. With difficulty, he struggled back into the chair. Getting his jeans up over his knees, he turned on Celeste. ‘I’ve known some bitches in my day.’
She began to cry.
‘Maybe if you’d managed to bar-b-cue the prick, I could have forgiven you,’ George said gloomily, of the arson that he had come to realise was her doing.
‘I did it for you, I did,’ she said, increasingly desperate. ‘I had to do something. Mrs Maskey was making such a fool of you with him.’ She blubbered into her forearm.
Unbeknownst to them all, from the studio’s second window, Hilda watched on.
‘Stupid bitch,’ George said. He got onto his feet and belted his jeans.
Celeste threw herself at his ankles and begged for forgiveness. ‘Don’t do this, Mr M, please don’t do this. I fucked up – that’s all.’
He kicked her loose from the hemline of his jeans and, after warning her off the property, stumbled outside.
Face to face with his son, he felt ridiculous. ‘I suppose you want me to thank you.’
‘No.’
‘It’s good to have you back, son.’ George reached out a hand for Rodney’s shoulder. ‘I don’t have any excuse for what you saw in there.’
‘I don’t need an excuse.’
‘Hilda’s left me. My legs are going to be amputated.’
Rodney frowned. ‘I don’t need an excuse, Mr Maskey.’
They walked across the grass.
‘Anyway,’ George went on, trying to lighten his tone, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you!’ Not keeping pace with his son. ‘Growing a crop for Hilda, without telling me!’
‘What of it, Mr Maskey?’ Rodney said, with a laugh.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rodney, call me Dad.’
‘Why?’
His son’s question stung. ‘I’ve missed you, son.’
Rodney halted. ‘I’ve never understood why Serenade makes excuses for ya, like she does. It’s only her that gives a fuck about you, really.’
‘Rodney.’
‘You’re nothing to me. You’ve always been nothing to me.’
Shocked, and hurt by his son’s contempt, George stumbled and fell in the grass.
Rodney shook his head in disgust but ran on, impatient to get to Gayle’s for one last glimpse of Leanne.
While unseen by both father and son, Hilda Maskey entered her studio.
Rodney’s mother was not gone for hours and hours, as Rodney had hoped. In fact, barely had the boy reunited himself with his tomato-sauce sandwich on the back steps, when the loud rumbling of a motorcycle out front preceded Lucy’s screaming re-entry into the house.
Rodney jumped off the steps and hid in the outside dunny. Peering through a split in the plank door, he slowly dropped the little wire latch into the eyelet, locking it. And watched.
A man had given chase to his mother. A tall man. In motorbike boots and leather vest. Leaping into the house behind her and tripping her up. She dropped to the kitchen floor, like a felled beast.
Rodney recognised the man, who began to abuse her. Calling her a thief. A slut. ‘You’ve been diddling me since day one – ya filthy junkie bitch!’
Rodney had heard his mother called names like this before. But this was different.
Pleading for mercy, she scrambled on her elbows through the back door and down the steps. Knowing that her son would be in his usual hideout, she caught Rodney’s eye as he peeped through the split in the door.
George Maskey pulled her back indoors by the ankles, and much in the way she had been terrorising her son, he began to strike her and launch into her with his heavy boots; all the while, Lucy’s single unwounded eye locked on to those of her son.
‘That’s my father,’ the boy whispered to the spiders in the timbers of the dunny.
From all the darkened corners of the falling-down shit-house, the spiders, large and small, emerged and gathered at the crack in the timber door, to better see the violence. ‘How do you know?’ they asked.
‘I just do,’ Rodney said, feeling terrible.
‘He doesn’t look like a very nice man.’
‘No,’ Rodney agreed, sitting on the scungy old toilet seat. ‘What am I going to do about it?’
His friends, the spiders, went into a huddle and conferred. ‘Why don’t you do what we do?’ they suggested.
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, we cast a web,’ they squeaked, in their sticky spider voices. ‘And wait.’
3
Everything was falling into place for Rodney now. And by the time he arrived back at Gayle’s he felt that Serenade’s prediction, that the Universe was setting a new place for him at the table, could be believed.
His legs scaled the steps into Gayle’s upstairs flat. He surprised her, leaning on her upright vacuum cleaner, at the framed school portrait of her son. She didn’t flinch, appearing to be captivated by the image.
Rodney stood back, so as not to disturb the mother-and-son moment. Finally he said, soft-voiced, ‘You’ve been very good to me, Mrs Reynolds. I’ve been comfortable here. I’ve never slept in a bed like that in my whole life.’
A black cloud loomed over Gayle. ‘A croc …’ she whispered, in heavy sarcasm.
‘If I could make things better for you, I would,’ he said, not registering her tone and moving to stand by her side.
Viewing the weasel in distaste, Gayle released the vacuum cleaner and grabbed him angrily by the front of his shirt; once her son’s. ‘I know my boy became rotten, as Serenade says. I know he was no good. A bully. And much worse than that even.’
Rodney went red.
‘But you should know,’ she went on, pulling the weasel in very close, ‘that while I still have breath in these lungs to blow a butterfly off course, I will not rest until I find out what happened to him.’ She released Rodney like you might release waste into a kitchen tidy.
He swallowed down hard. ‘I know Duncan would like it if you did that,’ he said, straightening the dead man’s oversized tee about his neck.
‘I want you out of here tonight.’ She turned away from him to look, once more, at her son’s photo.
‘Sure, Mrs Reynolds.’
When Rodney’s door was closed, Gayle reunited her hand with her upright. And looking at her hand upon it, she wondered if what she had just said to him was true. Because how far would she go, really, to learn the truth of her son’s fate?
She frowned. As yet, she did not know.
Rodney took some moments in the ensuite to recover from Gayle’s confrontation. Then he went to the window, to see the campervan still parked below.
He hoped for a final glimpse of Leanne and managed a thin smile when he remembered what she had said about his teeth. He wished he could have been fully honest with her too. He had a father. He belonged to a family. Not a good one. But one all the same.
Casting his mind back, he remembered the day George had awkwardly acknowledged paternity to him. Father and son had been working together at the grow site. ‘I refused to believe it at first,’ George said.
‘Me too, Mr Maskey,’ Rodney mumbled, feeling some response was called for.
‘What do you … I mean, do you expect anything from me?’
Rodney frowned. ‘No.’
George burbled. ‘I mean you’re eighteen years old, and you’ve done so well without a father. Or a mother, really.’
‘That’s right, Mr Maskey, I have done well. And I’m proud of everything I’ve achieved, how hard I’ve worked; the money that I’m helping you earn. I was gonna do all this with or without you, Mr Maskey. With or without anyone.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ George said. ‘I don’t mind saying, I refused to believe it at first.’ Beginning to repeat himself.
Rodney stood.
‘Didn’t want to believe it,’ George went on, with an awkward chuckle.
Rodney swallowed hard, looking down at his father.
‘Well,’ George said, tossing a smoke end into the scrub and standing to talk eye to eye, ‘maybe I’ll just call you son here and now. Son.’ He touched Rodney tentatively on the shoulder. ‘But not again. It’s our little secret, eh? You done well enough without a dad. You don’t need one now. Not one like me, at any rate. No need to go, you know, complicating everything, for everyone,’ he elaborated, walking back to his chopper. He looked around to give his son a parting smile.
But Rodney had disappeared into the marijuana bushes.
Interrupting the weasel’s memories, Leanne and Jay returned to their campervan. Leanne looked up to Rodney’s room to see him watching them. She smiled and waved. He touched the window with his hands.
After the campervan had driven away, he went to the kitchen. There, he found Gayle. ‘I’m off to the bins now, Mrs Reynolds,’ he said. ‘To dump all the stalks and stuff.’
‘Finally,’ was all she said.
He went outside, hitched Gayle’s truck up to the trailer and then drove through town toward Naples tip.
His destination: four big industrial waste bins situated by a stand of casuarinas, at the very edge of the tip-site.
He killed his lights and approached with caution.
Billy Maskey froze when he saw lights killed. He dropped down low. When the truck drew near, he thought he recognised it as being one of Gayle’s. Peering through the gap between two bins, he made out Rodney behind the wheel.
Biting a finger, Billy watched him park.
Rodney alighted the truck and untied the load of black garbage bags. He went to one of the bins, prised open its lid and began hurling them into it – only stopping when he thought he saw a Maskey truck parked behind the casuarinas.
Warily, he went over to investigate.
Seeing no one about, when he came upon Billy in a crouch behind a bin, Rodney jumped. ‘Billy?’ he said, sounding adenoidal in the damp night air. ‘You scared me.’
‘Hi, Rodney – you’re back?’ Billy said, standing up.
Rodney nodded. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Sure, Rodney.’
‘You look terrible – what are you doing here?’ Rodney glanced about apprehensively.
Billy sniffled. ‘Nothing.’ He awkwardly flashed a glance into a bin, and Rodney’s eyes followed.
‘You dumpin somethin?’
Billy’s eyes were fidgety in their sockets. ‘Yeah.’
‘What is that?’ Rodney said, taken aback at the sight of what he thought was a human foot.
Hilda stood.
‘Mrs Maskey,’ Rodney said. ‘You’re here too.’
She was cradling the baby, Damon. ‘Are you alone, Rodney?’
‘Yes, Mrs —’
‘I fucked up, Rodney.’
‘Did you?’ He stood on tiptoes to get a better view into the bin.
The body was wrapped in a blanket, just feet, hands, some hair visible.
Making out the sight in the darkness, Rodney recoiled. ‘Is that Celeste?’
Damon cried. Hilda soothed the infant. ‘You saw her with George. I couldn’t help it.’
‘What the fuck?’ Rodney said.
‘I know,’ Hilda agreed.
‘You saw her with Mr Maskey?’ Rodney confirmed.
Hilda nodded.
‘And you heard everything?’
‘Yes. I heard it all. I only meant to throttle her. But somehow, I couldn’t help myself,’ she said, looking at Celeste’s lifeless body. ‘I wanted her gone. She said she knew about Duncan too.’
‘How would she even know about that?’ Rodney asked, squeezing his temples.
‘Beats me, Rodney. I honestly don’t know.’
‘This is terrible. We can’t leave her here,’ he added gravely.
‘It’s where she belongs,’ Hilda said.
‘Fuck, Mum!’ Billy said.
‘No, Mrs Maskey,’ Rodney said.
