Home Fires     by Susan McCreery

The bedroom door was locked so she went into the yard and looked up at the window. The blind was lowered. Next door, dry pellets rattled into a bowl and Mrs Layton called for her dog. She was hungry. She went back inside and turned on the kitchen light, opened a box of old Jatz and took a handful.

            At the bedroom door she knocked again. ‘Mum?’ Silence. ‘Mum?’

            How long would it be this time? she wondered.

            With the onset of winter, the house was chilly in the evenings. She went to her room for a jumper. She took off her skirt and pulled on some track pants, then she placed a clean school shirt under the mattress to flatten it.

            Back in the kitchen she searched the pantry until she found a can of spaghetti.

Jeremy must have supplied it. Not much of a contribution when he spent every day here. No job. Taking long showers. Keeping the heater on. And now he’d gone without a word.

            She was glad because when Jeremy was here she felt uncomfortable in her own home. And her mum put on a display, laughing too loud and swinging her hips around. Everything he said was funny according to her mum. Her own skin crawled when he was here.

            When Jeremy left, her mum went into hibernation, the way she did when any of them left. After a day or two she would emerge, like a pale night-creature, inching forward with an abject face and pleading hands. A child to her own child.

            Warm cups of tea would gradually return her to life. She’d sit alongside, brushing her mum’s lank hair and stroking her cheek, saying little – murmurs were enough. She understood the pain only through her own. The pain of being forgotten.

            She tipped the spaghetti into a saucepan. The cat mewed around her ankles.      ‘Sorry, puss. No milk.’

            Before Jeremy was Harry. Harry smelled of turf and bourbon. Turf because he mowed council lawns. Bourbon because he drank it with her mum. She’d come home from school to find them passed out on the couch. Her mum’s top slipping off her shoulders and skirt rucked up. Harry’s chest flaccid, with its sparse hairs. Man-boobs, she thought with disgust. She’d fling open the doors and windows to let out the stench.

            ‘Whaa-the?’ they’d mutter, drooling, waking up.

            Then there was the pale, strange David with his Basset-hound eyes and bony hands. Her mum had taken care of David, who seemed new to the world, and grateful, as if receiving the last bowl of gruel on the planet.

            In the pan the spaghetti was bubbling. She turned it with a spoon to unstick it, then took the pan to the couch, where she sat eating, staring at her reflection in the darkened window.

The phone woke her. She looked down. The cat had licked the saucepan clean. She couldn’t remember pulling the rug over herself, but there it was. The answering machine clicked on. Babe, can you pick up? Babe. I need some money. Can yez do a transfer? Two hundred. I’m stranded.

            Jeremy. The phone rang four more times. Each time the message was nastier. Louder and cruder. She took the phone off the hook, and there were no more calls.

            She drew the curtains on the night and went to the bedroom door.

            ‘Mum, I’m going to bed. Can I get you anything?’

            The sound of the bed creaking, but that was all. No light under the door.

            She picked up the cat. ‘Our secret, you can sleep with me tonight.’       

            At the sound of the doorbell she jumped, scared it was pissed-off Jeremy coming for money. Through the chink in the curtain she could just make out a bearded man. It wasn’t him. She called through the closed door, ‘Who is it?’

            ‘Mrs Layton from next door, I’m her son. Up from Canberra. Mum can’t find her dog. Wonder if you’ve seen it?’

            ‘No,’ she called. ‘Sorry.’

            The bedroom door opened. ‘Wait a minute, hon.’ Her mum tied the sash round her robe, smoothed back her hair. ‘Open the door, invite the man in. We must be hospitable.’