Some mornings I’d wake up to the tack tack tack of my mother’s typewriter. I liked those mornings. I’d swing my skinny legs across my skinny mattress and flop barefoot onto the yellow carpet. Tack tack tack. I’d follow a trail of cigarette smoke down the set of stairs, the bottom landing of which, just the night before, housed monsters of all shapes and sizes. But in the mornings, when the sun was out, and my mother was awake, I was safe from last night’s creatures.
My mother looked like a fashion model. She was taller than most other mothers, especially in her high heels. Cigarettes and Elnett hairspray. The sense memory of my childhood. She’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror for hours, combing her hair just so. Teasing, curling. Spraying and then spraying again. Applying her lips. For hours. Too many hours. Abandoned tissues stamped with waxy red kisses littered the sink’s parameter. Rothmans filters with long crooked necks of grey ash stained the glass ashtrays.
But, tack tack tack. I liked those mornings. Sleepy eyed and pajama-fied, I’d visit her at her typewriter, offering her another cup of coffee. I am not sure if she really ever wanted one, but she’d tell me she did. So, back up the stairs I’d go, where I’d boil the water and measure in exactly a spoonful of instant coffee. I’d pour the boiled water into the cup, add milk, stir it up, and balance it on top of the white china saucer. Slowly and carefully I’d rattle down the hall from the kitchen, down the monster stairs, to the tack tack tack of my mother’s typewriter.
My mother was always on a diet. She’d eat boiled eggs with salt, and iceberg lettuce. At night she’d drink gin and low-calorie ginger-ale until she’d walk on her tiptoes and speak like the queen. She’d watch the evening news laying sideways on the chartreuse sofa. Her weight on her right forearm, her hip and thigh contoured into the foam cushions like a Renaissance sculpture.
Loraine was our nanny; before Vick, Miss June, and Janet. Loraine wore thick black rimmed glasses and gabardine dresses with belts cinched at the waist. Her eyes looked like cockroaches. There were five of us. Five in as many years. Our father had wanted thirteen. We went through a lot of nannies. Our parents were always on the lookout for the perfect “lady lion-tamer”. Their ads on the back pages of the newspaper read like that.
There was this couple who lived in the guest apartment below our house. The caretakers. She cleaned; he gardened and did handy work around the house. I don’t remember their names. He looked like Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island. That’s what my sister and I called him. His wife just looked old.
My mother was a writer. She was busy. My father was a drunk. He was busier. “It takes quite a bit of bloody effort to drink an entire six liters of wine in ten hours,” I’d overheard my mother say on the phone once. I think she hated my father. She yelled at him when he spilled wine on the carpet; or burned the steaks; or bumped into walls.
On school mornings the four of us older kids would sit on the vinyl benches of the sea-horse kitchen dinette. When Loraine wasn’t looking, our little sister, strapped into Grandma’s Victorian high-chair at the end of our table, dropped handfuls of cereal onto the floor for Poppins, our dog. In the summer our legs would make fart sounds when we lifted them off the benches. All of us except our oldest sister shot food out our noses at least once from our legs farting on the vinyl. She’s pretty serious. Dressed in our tartan school uniforms we’d eat the soggy banana cornflakes Loraine made for us earlier, then march out the front door to the bus stop at the end of the beach. Some mornings there was no time to follow the trail of cigarettes and hairspray. Some mornings, there was no tack tack tack from my mother’s typewriter at all. No cigarettes. No hairspray. No rattling of china cups on china saucers.
I’m not exactly sure what woke me that night. But I lay still, like a dead soldier, and tried to make out the source of a sour, soapy smell that hovered above me. I pictured giant grisly hands and poisonous fire breath. A black whip-like tail with humongous octopus suckers. Monsters. Usually they went away by the time I counted to ten and opened my eyes.
Nine.
Ten.
I cracked my lids just enough to spy Mr. Howell through my lashes. His hair was parted to the side, greased and combed off his face into a bump at his temple. His bare, hairy shoulders were hunched forward from his neck. The front of a white undershirt peeked through the open zipper of his trousers.
I maneuvered myself into some kind of crouching G.I. Joe combat position and punched him in the stomach.
“Go away,” I whispered.
I’d startled him. He jumped back from the bed and turned. His silhouette ambled towards the light of the hallway. He leaned against the door frame for a moment before he spoke. “Should I leave it open?”
“Yes please.”
The following morning, standing beside the dirty clothes basket, I mentioned my visitor to Loraine. Her cockroach eyes blinked. Tack tack tack. A cloud of cigarette smoke wafted from the landing at the top of stairs. She tugged me to her plastic belt buckle, held me by the side of my ears, and kissed me gently on the forehead.
My mother turned up at school that day. I was excited to see her. She never came to school. She wore high heels and a black coat with a light-brown fox stole. It must have been winter. She pulled me out of the classroom and we sat on the wooden benches that overlooked a concrete play area. I felt special. So important. I ate the Vegemite sandwich and orange jello slices she’d brought me. I pet the fox head and clawed feet that dangled from her neck. She smoked cigarettes. She asked me to explain what had happened the night before. I don’t recall what I told her.
I do remember that Mr. Howell and his wife were still there when I came home from school that day. They were still there months, even years later. I don’t remember if he ever visited me again. But I’ll always remember that special moment I had with my mother on the bench outside my class room.
Tack tack tack.