She may as well have leaned forward and rapped me over the knuckles with a school cane.
‘Hold the wheel a bit firmer, Skeet,’ Dad suggests. ‘And remember ten and two. Always have your hands at ten and two on the wheel, it gives you more control over the car.’
I slide both hands about one inch upward.
‘Oh yeah, you’re right!’ I say. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Next time you come for a cuppa, would you mind pulling out the mint bush for me? It’s too hard for me or Dad.’
It would appear today’s list of job requests is far from over.
‘No problem,’ I say, because it really isn’t a problem, and I’d been the one to plant the stupid weed for her in the first place, and I can’t help feeling that she remembers this.
‘Darl, you’ve gotta stop giving the boys all your jobs. Every time they come you ask them to do something. They’re gonna stop coming if you keep it up. They’ll think you only want to see them so they can be your handymen.’
‘Darl . . .’ Mum warns, the word hanging ominously in the car.
‘Skeet,’ Dad says, ‘I have a little favour to ask. Can you change the light globe in the garage while you’re there? I can’t get it with my Arthur Itis.’
‘Sure thing, Dad.’ I cast a glance in my mirror Mum’s way and her eyes speak volumes.
‘You didn’t get up a ladder and try to change that globe, did you? I don’t want you climbing up ladders anymore. Or chairs or anything like that. If it’s high, wait for me. If it’s urgent, let me know and I’ll come right away.’
‘Ladder? No, mate. I just stepped onto a milk crate.’
Mum and I exchange another glance. I groan involuntarily. ‘Dad, no more climbing.’
‘What about if there’s a snake?’ Mum asks.
Mum recently found a baby brown snake in her kitchen, ran out to the garage, grabbed a shovel then ran back into the kitchen where she climbed atop the bench and proceeded to chop the thing in half, apparently.
‘First of all, it’s illegal to kill a brown snake,’ I say to them both. ‘And secondly, you know my friend Erin could’ve rescued it for you.’
‘What? And I’m meant to let a lethal snake go behind the fridge waiting for your friend to come? No fear!’
Mum has a point. For the record, I’m still doubting it was actually a brown snake. Or that Mum ran.
‘I had to finish it off for her,’ Dad says triumphantly. ‘She hadn’t quite killed it. And then it was me who had to throw the thing in the bin. Wasn’t it, darl?’
‘Yep.’
‘Eh? Wasn’t it, darl?’
‘YES!’
‘That’s better.’
Since retirement, Dad’s determination to be the full stop has morphed into him being a kind of Grand Master, whose input is required on everything. Mum is utterly useless without Dad. Just ask him. After Mum spends three hours painting a bookshelf on her own, it will be Dad who completes the task by ‘just touching up’ where she wasn’t able to reach. After she’s been vacuuming for forty minutes and her back has seized up so badly she can barely walk, he’ll make sure you’ve heard (more than once) that he ‘did the rest for her’. Inevitably, it’ll be Dad who pressed in the last staple, hammered the nail in the wall so she could hang the artwork that took her six weeks to complete, or added the last eighth of a teaspoon of salt to make her latest meal taste so much better.
‘That’s all it needed,’ he’ll say self-assuredly. ‘Just a little bit more salt. Didn’t it, darl?’
‘Yep.’
‘Eh, darl?’
‘See, Mum,’ I’ll interject, ‘I just don’t know why you can’t use a bit more salt in your cooking. Just a shake or two.’
Dad will nod his head vehemently.
Since they moved closer to us, I honestly cannot recall a visit to their house that has not included the words ‘a quick favour’. Between Jeff and me, we must have completed a thousand and one little jobs. Sometimes I think I should show up wearing a tool belt.
It’s Jeff I feel most sorry for. I’ve made no secret of my lack of building skills, sometimes exaggerating the point to deter Jeff from even vaguely looking in my direction when a tool is required for a task. Jeff’s abilities, on the other hand, are unrivalled in the family, unless James is out from Canada and then Jeff gets a fairly good run for his money.
As I may have already mentioned, together, Jeff and I not only moved my parents into their new house, but took Mum shopping to furnish it, then spent weeks in the backyard turning a plain lawn into a plant haven. Clearly a glutton for punishment, Jeff decided years after the initial garden build, that Mum and Dad really needed a pergola to finish it off. It had been part of his original design and, to him, the garden felt empty without it. Over several days he erected a beautiful structure in the middle of the lawn, but then made the mistake of telling my parents it wasn’t finished yet and that he would soon install a Perspex roof on it so they could sit out there in all weather.
Now, the fact that we have seen them sit beneath that pergola a total of three times in over four hundred days since the structure was built should indicate the adding of a roof wasn’t an urgent necessity, its absence wasn’t exactly robbing my parents of a quality of life otherwise unobtainable. Or maybe they were just waiting for the roof before they used it every day? Admittedly, it’s been over a year since the pergola was built, but in that time we (and by ‘we’ I think we all know I mean mostly Jeff with just a bit of help from me) have prepared our own property for sale, sold it, bought an investment property, and Jeff alone has single-handedly rebuilt that decrepit cottage while I’ve written a couple of books and toured for them as well. So I guess my point being that putting a roof on a seldom-used pergola just keeps falling down the list of our priorities.
Globes changed, plants removed, other plants planted, pergolas built, wooden floors installed, things painted, furniture collected, furniture assembled, air-conditioning company sourced, electricians booked, forgotten ingredients requested . . . Listen to me complain about all the things any parent has to do for their children! Neither Jeff nor I mind that the requests never seem to end. We both knew that moving parents closer to us would mean they became dependent on us for certain tasks. Surely this was the point? More often than not, doing something for Mum and Dad results in us feeling a certain pride that we’ve been able to help.
Sometimes though – just on the odd occasion – that pleasure is undermined by one of two things. If something remains undone, or worse yet, we haven’t done it properly, it seems to overshadow the thousand well-done things that have come before it. With very little to do and oodles of time on their hands, my parents can obsess – and I mean borderline irrational preoccupation – over the smallest detail.
We had sliding screen doors professionally installed on my parents’ back porch, affording them year-round use of it without the harassment of summer’s flies and mozzies. Once fitted, however, it took my parents and other aged relatives some heavy-duty head-wrapping to figure out how they actually worked. If you didn’t twist the handle first before sliding the door (as the permanent sticker above the handle said to, with a diagram illustrating which direction to turn it in), you wouldn’t release the locking mechanism and, if you forced it, that would irreversibly knock the entire structure out of plumb. Once that had been achieved, the screens would rarely stay locked in the right place and even the slightest breeze would push them open. We had warned my parents about this quirk of the system . . . but sometimes a child will touch an oven just to see how hot it is.
‘Screens are broken again,’ became one of Dad’s favourite songs. Broken by person or persons unknown.
We (Jeff) asked the repair guy back three (or was it four?) times to inspect the mechanism and try to fix it. In the end, everyone was completely exasperated and, just before handle-forcing accusations were thrown about with wild abandon, it was agreed to just leave the screens as they were. Because Jeff had chosen the company and arranged the installation, it was hard for him to avoid feeling that it was all his fault. For months, we continued to get daily, fascinating updates on those bloody screens. Blew open in the wind. Blew closed in the wind. Can’t close. Can close. Seem to be all right now. Broken again. All with the underlying accusation: if only someone had chosen better screen doors. It was akin to us kids singing ‘Ten Thousand Green Bottles’ in the car on a very long, hot road trip.
Enter the hero, stage left. On an overnight visit, my eldest brother (this term is also interchangeable with ‘golden child’) Grant decided to screw in two very ugly hook-and-eye locks. Hey presto, the entire problem was solved. Grant is still being given credit for saving their lives, but nobody mentions the horrendous crime to aesthetics he committed.
