from the Armenian community. She was wearing short skirts and smoking in the street. Ready-snap Peas had closed their doors and she had lost her job as well, but it still seemed, to Sarkis, that she was having a good time. She had come all the way to Franklin because she had convinced herself that there were no Armenians here. But the first people they met were Tahleen and Raffi who ran the corner store in Campbell Street. The first thing they did was offer to drive Sarkis and his mother to the Armenian Church on Sundays. Sarkis thought it wouldn’t hurt – if only from the employment point of view. But he could not budge his mother. She said: thank you. She thought: no way, Jose. From there on she walked an extra mile to buy her ciggies from another shop.
His mother’s feeling about the Armenian community made her judgement bad. She might have hated them, but she was one of them. When she met someone who was not Armenian, she got herself into a drama. No way she was going to serve
For a while Sarkis sat at the kitchen table and cut out more fabric for ties. The fabric he was cutting was 100 per cent French silk. It was dark green with hard-edge motifs in silver and black. He concentrated hard on the cutting because the fabric was beautiful, because it had been expensive, and because he was angry and did not want to see what was happening on the other side of the servery door where the taxi-driver was adjusting his pants. It made him ill to think of that thing being put inside his mother.
The taxi-driver smelled of unwashed sweat. His mother did not know shit about men. She took the taxi-driver to show him her wedding pictures. They were in the bedroom. He could hear her light young voice – she was still only thirty-six – as it named the members of the wedding party. The names were of Armenians who had once lived in the suburbs of Teheran. She talked about them as if they were certainly alive.
Tomorrow she would tell Sarkis all the good things she had found out about the taxi-driver – he was kind, he supported his sick father or he was a bad dancer but had read her palm ‘sensitively’. She would not learn that the taxi-driver cruised the Franklin streets which were named after jewels putting his dick wherever there was isolation and desperation. He could have AIDS. His mother did not even think of this possibility. Instead she opened up her miniatures. She showed him wedding pictures. She pointed out Sarkis’s father to the taxi-driver. She said how handsome he was, like Paul McCartney.
Earlier, in the living-room, she told the taxi-driver he looked like George Harrison. This made the taxi-driver smile. It was extraordinary to see. It was impossible to know why he smiled, whether from pleasure or because he could see how ridiculous it was.
Sarkis put down his scissors and folded the fabric. Then he went out to sit on the back steps which were farthest from the bedroom and where the noise of the trucks on the Sydney road drowned out the various noises of the night. Sarkis was normally optimistic. He could lose three jobs and not be beaten. He could be angry and irritable, but he always had a way forward. He was a member of a race which could not be destroyed. He had energy, intelligence, resilience, enthusiasm.
But tonight he was oppressed by his circumstances: he could not get a job, a girl friend or even a sewing machine. He could not even telephone his friends in Chatswood.
It was in this mental state that he saw Mrs Catchprice standing at the bottom of the yard. He thought it might be someone from the Commonwealth Employment Service come to take his dole away because they were already paying benefits to his mother.
‘Hey,’ he said.
The figure waved, a tinkly little wave from the wrist. Did not look like the C.E.S.
‘Who’s that?’ He picked up a Sidchrome spanner for protection.
‘I’m a ghost.’
Sarkis felt prickly on the neck. Then a match flared and he saw an old woman with a cigarette stuck to her pouting lower lip. She had a big black leather handbag in the crook of her arm, a pink floral dress and a transparent plastic raincoat. ‘We had a poultry farm for twenty years,’ she said. He could smell the meat-fat smell then, from that far away, the Aussie smell, as distinctive as their back yard clothes-lines with their frivolous flags of T-shirts, board shorts and frilly underwear, so different from Armenian washing which was big and practical – sheets, rugs, blankets, grey work trousers and cotton twill shirts.
‘You’re not a very good ghost,’ he told her. He stood, and stepped down into the yard.
‘I’m damned near old enough,’ said Mrs Catchprice, dropping the lit match on to the sodden ground where it sizzled and went out. ‘I’ll be eighty-six in March. You might find it hard to imagine, but we had two thousand birds and this was just the bottom of the property. There was a little natural pond here and a stand of Gymea lilies. I was going to have a flower farm, but there was better money in poultry then, so it ended up being poultry. You had some here yourself, I think … last week?’
‘The Health Department made us kill them.’
‘You’re better off without them. There is nothing nice about poultry. The smell of plucked feathers makes me nauseous now. Who washed the chook-poo off the eggs? Your mother I suppose. I always washed the eggs. I sat at the kitchen table with a bucket and a bowl. You never forget the smell of it on your fingers.’
‘I’ve found your cigarettes here,’ said Sarkis. ‘You smoke Salem. You just take a few drags and throw them away. Do you come from the nursing home?’
‘I’m Mrs Catchprice.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Are you local?’ asked Mrs Catchprice, coming forward to peer at the good-looking young man by the light of the kitchen window. ‘You must know Catchprice Motors.’
He did. He had bought a fuel pump there once from a woman in a cowgirl suit. ‘And that’s where you live?’
‘And where needs be I must wearily return,’ said Mrs Catchprice, throwing her Salem in among the Hydrangeas. ‘Don’t you find the nights are sad?’
‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ said Sarkis.
‘Car!’ said Mrs Catchprice, straightening her back and tilting her chin. ‘Car. I have no car. I walk.’
Walk? Sarkis was young and strong, but he would never walk at night alone in Franklin. There were homeless kids wandering around with beer cans full of petrol. They saw fiery worms and faces spewing blood. They did not know what they were doing.
‘I think I’ll walk with you a bit of the way,’ Sarkis said.
‘How lovely,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Sarkis Alaverdian.’ He was scared. He slipped the Sidchrome spanner into his back pocket. He thought: her family should be ashamed.
17
Mrs Catchprice did not stand in Sarkis’s back yard in order to employ him. Yet if she had set out that night with no other purpose than to rescue a life from the asbestos sheet houses in the real estate development she had once planned, this would have been consistent with her character.
In the days when Catchprice Motors had sold combine harvesters and baling twine, she had taken boys from the Armvale Homes, girls in trouble with the police. She had given them positions of trust, placed a shoplifter in charge of petty cash, for instance. She was erratic – loud in her trust on the one hand but vigilant and even suspicious on the other. She was ready to ascribe to her proteges schemes and deceptions too complex and Machiavellian for anyone but her to conceive of, and yet she could manage, in the same breath, to think of them as ‘good kids’. She was sentimental and often patronizing (she spoke loudly of her beneficiaries in their presence) and what is amazing is not that a few of them never forgave her for it, but that most of them were so grateful for her
