Cars and Scars
The day Marjorie summoned Ava to the office, calling her from the steps that separated the sunken kitchen annexe from the formal living area, she’d wagged a finger and Ava had naturally thought the worst. With her mouth suddenly dry, she stopped to gulp a glass of water before she followed her employer, treading across the wooden floorboards and through the maze of wing-backed armchairs and sofas in the living room. She found Marjorie behind the desk in the adjacent office, pen poised.
‘We’re delighted with your commitment, Ava. You do so much around the place. More than expected. You spend your days off working in the garden and helping with other odd jobs and we appreciate your efforts, particularly over what turned out to be a busy Christmas holiday period.’
‘Oh, ah, thanks.’ She’d had little choice but to stay close by. There was no local bus, no train service, no way of getting anywhere from Ivy-May unless she borrowed a car, and only one vehicle on the property was registered as roadworthy. The rest had an assortment of faults and flaws, all acceptable for bashing around the paddocks: bald tyres, missing doors, dodgy brakes. ‘There’s really nothing I need to do and nowhere for me to go.’
‘Nonsense. Candlebark Creek and Basmorra region offer an array of amusements, all accessible by car.’
Ava remained puzzled. Marjorie had already told her the good car was off limits and must remain onsite during the day in case of an emergency.
‘You’ve settled into the position well and it’s been months. Time to get out and start making friends of your own age.’ Ah, the fog of confusion was lifting. Marjorie had noticed the amount of time John was spending in her company. ‘Consider this a bonus payment.’ She scribbled a cheque. ‘You’ll take this and buy yourself a car.’
‘A car?’ Ava hardly knew what to say. She didn’t need one, but she would gladly accept a cheque of any amount and have the money banked next time someone went into town. She was about to pocket the slip of paper when she noticed the name of the payee. ‘Who is Rick Kingston? I don’t understand.’
‘The publican, dear,’ Marjorie explained. ‘You remember? He was good enough to drive you out here for your interview. Lovely man, although a terrible negotiator. He has a car for sale.’ Her self-congratulatory tone and the speed with which she scooped the cheque book out of sight into the desk drawer as she stood had Ava reeling and needing the door frame for support. ‘Ask John to drive you into town to collect it soon, before Rick changes his mind on the price. That’ll be all.’
Ava was dismissed.
*
‘Wow, you must’ve really made an impression,’ John said, when Ava shared her news.
‘But I don’t want a car.’
‘Why not? Don’t look a Marjorie gift horse in the mouth. I’ll go grab the ute keys and we’ll head into town straight away. I wouldn’t trust Rick as far as I can throw him.’
Ava fell onto the bed to wait. What a waste of money. A car was not going to help her bank balance or get her to Europe. She’d spoken openly to John about her deadline, the promise she’d made herself to celebrate her thirtieth birthday, come hell or high water, on the other side of the world. She’d told him all manner of things about herself, her father, her mother’s impact on how she lived her life. She’d told him everything, including why she wore her hair tied back and the need to protect her heart and the money she’d worked so hard for. Money was security and independence, and that meant everything to Ava if she was to avoid turning out like her mother – the woman who’d felt trapped by the constraints of family and financial hardship.
Their marriage had been shotgun style while Lenore was in her first trimester with Ava, hardly an auspicious start, but Marco the mad Italian had been crazy in love and so excited about becoming a father. When he was struck down with an illness and lost his job, and a blood clot had meant amputating his left leg, the evil Marco claimed lurked in Lenore’s side of the family reared its head. He had understood, to protect his daughter and break the curse, he had to send Ava away.
Lenore had lavished punishment rather than praise on them both, always telling Ava she had to grow a thick skin. It was the only way to get through life. This life, she would say, as though there was another or their family’s existence was different from everyone else’s. And it was, only it took Ava a decade to figure that out, a decade to toughen up. The sad thing was, by the time she’d grown old enough and big enough to stand up for herself her father had grown frail. He was no longer the breadwinner, so Lenore’s abuse switched between her husband and her daughter. To feed her mother’s constant clamour for money, which she promptly lost on the club’s poker machines, a fifteen-year-old Ava had been pulled from high school, forced to say goodbye to friends and her beloved cooking class with Mrs Ramsey, and put to work in the public service. As a filing clerk at the transport office, she did menial tasks for other miserable public servants, whose goals were usually based around not working much at all. Between the blank faces and beige folders that had become her nine-to-five, and the two-hour commute by bus and train, Ava itched to create. A clerical job was not what she wanted and she was going to tell her mother.
First she had to tell her father.
‘Ava, Ava, be a good girl,’ Marco Marchette had said. ‘A few years and you’ll have gained skills and be in a position to—’
‘Skills? Papa, if I stay working there the only skill I’ll have is how to fudge my timesheet. I’ve run out of creative ways to tie that stupid pink ribbon around files.’
‘A bit longer and I’ll be well again. The treatment seems to be working. I look stronger, yes? See what love can do, my Ava?’
‘Yes, Papa,’ she lied. ‘Yes, you do look strong.’ She sat gingerly on his lap and wrapped both arms around his neck. ‘I’ll stay, Papa, and I’ll save up. When you’re better I’ll take you to Italy.’
Her father’s eyes had lit up. ‘To the Amalfi coast?’
‘Why not? Isn’t going back to Positano what you want to do?’
‘That will take a lot of money and your mother—’
‘Mum doesn’t know I keep some of my wage each fortnight.’ Access to the stationery cupboard at work meant she could rewrite the wages information on a new pay envelope before she handed it to Lenore. ‘I’ve saved a heap already. I want to go to Paris. Have you heard of Le Cordon Bleu? It’s a cooking school.’
‘Positano? Paris? Oh, Ava.’ His hug and happy laugh warmed her heart, but soon her mother would come home from the bowling club, having gambled a good portion of Ava’s last pay packet, and the laughter would end. Ava and Marco would fall silent and the house would be still, but only until after dinner when booze and her mother’s misery monologue and drunken demands livened the joint up again. ‘Such dreams, my little dragonfly, such big dreams.’
‘Not dreams. Dreaming is what my girlfriends do, waiting for a Prince Charming to sweep them off their feet.’
‘My Ava does not want a Prince Charming to rescue her?’
‘Persone forti si salvano, Papa. The strong save themselves. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? Besides, there’s only one prince for me, ever.’ She kissed her father’s cheek. ‘My dream is Paris so I can learn about pastries, but then I thought…’ She shrugged. ‘In Positano I can learn about pasta and sweet pastries, and we can hunt down the perfect panna cotta together. You love your panna cotta, Papa.’
The front door slamming against the hallway wall forced Ava to her feet. Marco grabbed her hand, and she was certain he could feel the mad beating of her heart had reached her fingers because he squeezed them tight. ‘Listen to me, my tiny dragonfly,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t let you waste your money. You need it to take yourself away from here as soon as you can.’
‘But—’
‘Ssh! Your mother and I will be fine.’
‘No, Papa.’
‘I promise you and I will be together again one day, Ava, but for now you need to do this for me. Dream big, travel far, find your place, love deeply and be loved in return. You deserve all this and it is what I ask of you.’
‘Where is everyone? Ava?’ Her mother’s voice reverberated along the high ceilings of the semi-detached cottage that had been Ava’s grandparents’ home. Lenore had never lived anywhere else, tied to the place with a child she had never wanted. Maybe that accounted for her misery and the sense of ownership in the house, as though Ava and her papa were unwelcome squatters. ‘There you are.’ She stared at her daughter, sparks of anger in the sharp movements as her hand came within inches of Ava’s face. ‘Do you want to explain this?’
Lenore held out the small yellow envelope. One of the fortnightly pay packets she’d brought home.
‘Don’t look at me with that innocent face. Bruce Halverson,’ her mother spat the name, ‘the man who got you that job, says this is not an official wages envelope and the information is wrong.’
‘I, um…’
‘Well, do you want to explain?’
‘The money’s mine,’ Ava blurted. She looked at her father in his wheelchair and drew strength. ‘I earned it.’
‘How dare you?’
Whack. Ava’s cheek burned.
‘You sneaky little cow. Where are you hiding the rest? Where?’
Before Ava could answer, her mother had grabbed the hair that hung loose, dragging her along the narrow hallway to the bedroom. Lenore thrust open the door so hard it knocked down the lamp with the red scarf and tassels Ava draped over the shade to dim the light. One by one Lenore ripped open the dresser drawers. ‘Where is it all? Tell me before I find it, because I will find it, Ava.’
‘No!’ Ava tugged at her mother’s arm. ‘Stop.’
‘Get out of my way.’ The shove knocked Ava off her feet, her teeth cutting into her lip. With the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, Ava tried to stand, only to see more blood on her hands. She’d landed on top of the broken light bulb, sending glass splinters deep into her flesh.
Ava was afraid of yet another blow, but even more terrified that her mother would discover her savings and, like a police dog, Lenore Marchette was on the scent.
‘Lenore, stop! Stop immediately.’ Marco Marchette had positioned himself in the doorway looking bigger and tougher than he had in a long time.
‘Go away! This is between me and my daughter.’
‘She’s my daughter too, Lenore.’
‘Oh, really?’ her mother spat back. ‘Let me think about that. There’s you and there’s Donald McNally, a real ranga – a redhead all the way, if you know what I mean. Our Ava’s always had such a strong auburn streak in her hair.’ Her mother reached down and yanked Ava closer to her father. Her scalp hurt and Ava squealed. ‘You got any redheads in your family, Marco? No, I didn’t think so.’
Without warning he propelled his chair into Lenore’s legs, knocking her off her feet.
‘How dare you? You bastard!’ Back on her feet, Lenore scattered the contents of Ava’s dressing-table, latching onto the silver vanity mirror. ‘That’s the last time you’ll ever—’ Whack. She hadn’t even finished the sentence when her hand lashed out, the mirror flying from her grasp to carve a slice through the skin on Ava’s forehead, just above her left eyebrow.
Two nights later, with Lenore passed out on the bed, Marco had whispered his plan to his daughter.
*
At the beep-beep of a horn, Ava scrambled to collect her handbag, her sunhat, and the cheque she would have preferred to bank, and joined John in the car, sensing his curious stare.
‘You don’t look very happy,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I told you, John, it’s this ridiculous car business.’ Ava waved the cheque in frustration as they rattled over the cattle grid at the boundary gate to Ivy-May.
‘What’s so ridiculous?’
‘Buying a damn car! You do understand I won’t be cooking at Ivy-May for ever, right?’
‘Absolutely correct!’ he replied. ‘I will be. As soon as Mum and Dad agree I can handle the place I’ll be in charge of the kitchen and you’ll be in charge of our kids. Maybe we’ll try for a baker’s dozen.’
‘John, please, we—’
He poked the music cassette into the slot on the dashboard and raised the volume. ‘Come on, stop being so serious and sing with me.’
He began without her, forcing Ava to yell over the raucous rendition, ‘You sound like a strangled cat.’
John loved his jokes, and his teasing was the only thing about him that reminded Ava he was younger. But John was far from silly. A part of her knew the music was his way of avoiding the truth, while the rest of her mind was preoccupied with the notion that while she’d managed to run away from one intimidating mother she’d slammed into another in Marjorie Tate. The only difference between the two was that Lenore had slowly worn her family down, while Marjorie masked her manipulative ways behind motherly love.
As the car whizzed along the road, passing the most impressive of all twelve trachyte formations towering over the region, Ava tried to imagine how enormous the volcano must have been before; over millions of years, its shell was slowly stripped away by the weather until all that remained was its resilient heart of hardened lava. People had tried to wear Ava down over the years, too, but she’d protected her heart, built a wall, made it strong and kept it safe. Until John. Leaving him might break it.
The first sign of danger should have been that night when he had lain on the bed with her and whispered his ancient tale about monster volcanoes. She’d told him she thought the strange hemispherical mounds that littered the landscape around Ivy-May looked like giant truffles sticking out of the ground, but John had explained that a long time ago the earth’s core had seethed and writhed in anger, roaring to life and spewing molten rock. When she’d asked what had angered it he’d told her two star-crossed lovers had been running away together, but the monsters rising from the earth had frightened them back home to their families and kept them apart for ever.
As the car drove past another rock mass rising directly out of the plain, Ava thought of how her presence was unsettling the Tates. How long before another volcano, seething somewhere deep below the earth’s crust, rose up to frighten her and John apart? Ava Marchette might be just the irritant the monster needed. If Mount Marjorie was going to erupt at least Ava would have a getaway car to make good her escape.
She laughed, finally joining in with John, who was bawling John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’.