Mum hangs up the phone and puts it back in her bag.
‘What did she want?’ Dad asks, oblivious to what Mum just screamed into her phone. The ringing in my ears is beginning to go down a little.
‘She can’t make it to —’
‘WHAT?’ he yells, bursting my eardrums anew.
‘HOUSIE!’ Mum bellows.
‘Well, you’ll have to —’
‘YES!’
‘— CALL THE NUMBERS BACK!’ he says, referring to Pauline’s usual task of reading back a player’s bingo card to make sure all of their numbers have been drawn.
Mum nods.
‘DARL?’ he hollers.
‘OH, FOR CHRISSAKES!’ I yell, forgetting my carefully placed ten-and-two hands to slap the wheel for added emphasis. I take my eyes off the road briefly to turn to Dad so he can’t miss the words on my lips. ‘We get it!’ I say into the stunned silence. ‘Pauline can’t come to housie so Mum has to do the call back. We all get it! Now please, for the love of god, please can we all just stop yelling?’
I’m looking forward to self-driving cars so I can be free to crumple into a useless heap.
‘WHAT?’ Jeff screams. We exchange glances in the mirror and get the giggles.
After a couple of seconds Dad begins humming the Beatles’ classic hit, ‘Twist And Shout’.
Attention Twilight Waters Residents:
Today’s extra special guest entertainers, appearing in the Beverley Whitstock Memorial Hall at 1pm sharp, are the Royal Philatelic Society’s Baritone Quartet. Light refreshments will be served from 1.25pm.
Only flat shoes are permitted.
Thank You,
Management
THREE
International Playboys
As we drive through the main street of Greta, I flick on the windscreen wipers to clear off some of the dust that persistently puffs from every country road here. (The town’s name is pronounced greeta, not to be confused with another local town, Heddon-Greta, where it is pronounced gretta.) I consider a bout of self-flagellation, leaving them swishing across the dry glass to see how long it will take any of my passengers to notice. I thought it was just my parents who did it but now Jeff has decided to also tune out of the constant scrape of rubber, leaving me as the only sane person in the family who reliably turns the wipers off after they’ve done their job. My bet is it will be twelve minutes of awkward squeaking, so, to save my sanity, I decide against it and twist the wiper handle to off.
Mum’s mobile begins ringing again from somewhere deep in her handbag and I brace myself for another booming conversation. She pulls her bag wide open and begins pulling things out at random like she’s Mary Poppins. Oh look, a hat stand!
‘Get the phone, Nina!’ Dad says helpfully.
Mum has spent a good fifteen per cent of her life rummaging through her handbags. Why do so many women opt for the same fate when surely over centuries they’ve designed bags that make it possible to keep the contents well organised, and easy to find? The time Mum takes to retrieve her phone or a set of keys or a pen has increased exponentially over the years thanks to arthritic fingers and the enormous wads of ‘important’ receipts, lists and driving instructions (she can’t use GPS) that she insists on stuffing in there . . . just in case.
Buried in Jude’s bag are about fifteen facemasks, three pens that no longer work, five bingo markers, four Keno tickets that need to be checked, keys from their old house and a Scratchie that won her ten bucks back in 2003 that she still hasn’t claimed. But ask Mum for a hankie and she will always know where it is: safely tucked up under her bra strap. Whenever we needed a bit of dirt removed when we were kids, she’d whip out the hankie, suck a corner and wipe our faces clean – one small step up from a bird that regurgitates food into its baby’s mouth.
‘Need a hand, Jude?’ Jeff offers to find the phone, after thirty-seven more hairs on my head have turned grey.
‘Got him!’ Mum says finally, and pulls the phone out of her bag, but it’s taken so long she’s missed the call. ‘Nigeria,’ she says flatly. ‘Again. Why do they keep harassing me?’
‘Bosnia-Herzegovina!’ she’s been known to announce excitedly, as though Eddie Maguire has just asked her a million-dollar question: What country is located between Croatia and Serbia? If not that, then we might be having a nice sit-down dinner when she will suddenly shout, ‘Uzbekistan!’ How is it that society’s elders seem to field a disproportionate number of spam callers? Do they just have the unfortunate disposition of actually answering phone calls from unknown numbers so as not to appear impolite? Perhaps, despite fears over their information privacy, they are simply more likely to give their numbers to organisations that trick them into it.
For my parents, it started out of the blue when Mum received her first ever case of bill shock. With regularity, Mum is wont to rattle off the precise amount she pays for any single utility. I’m sure many adult children in a similar situation know, by heart, their parents’ power or ‘light’ bill ($180 a quarter), water bill ($200 a quarter), rates ($300 a quarter) and phone bill ($85 a month).
‘Got the light bill in the mail this week . . .’ she told me one day, as I was attempting one of her crosswords. Whenever I visit, I take great delight in sitting at the table and inserting a few answers of my own. Jude pretends she doesn’t mind, but you can feel her body tense up when she sees me walking towards her sacred crossword seat. Her eye twitches with supressed rage when I very politely point out a few of the obvious ones she’s missed.
‘Oh, did you?’ I say.
Fifteen down. Dispassionate. Twelve letters.
_ N _ _ T _ R _ S T _ D.
‘Of course, I knew it was coming because I saw the guy come in the backyard to read the meter. Your father still hasn’t fitted a lock to that gate so the guy just lets himself in now. Nice fella. I was expecting it to be a bit more than $180 because we’ve been using the bar heater a fair bit lately, but it wasn’t . . .’
‘Oh, that’s good.’
‘Yes, it came in at $173.48.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ I say.
Thirty-eight across. Absent-minded. Eight letters. _ A R _ L _ _ S.
