do men’s work, by which she meant work that entailed a denial of female feelings – killing people in war, working in slaughter houses, putting chooks in rows in cages. This was something men can do and it will have no harmful effects for them.
But it sends a woman’s chemicals into conflict. This was how she got breast cancer – that poultry farm. She never told anyone this, but shocked Cacka and the doctor on the eve of her mastectomy by saying, ‘Take them both off.’
She could see the idiots thought she was unnatural, that she had got so used to ordering Cacka around that she now wanted to be a man. Did they think she
Cacka could be weepy and sentimental about her breasts, but Frieda Catchprice was an animal caught in a trap, eating through its own limbs. She was poisoned and wanted to be free from the parts that would kill her. And sure enough, there was a second mastectomy – the one they so confidently told her she didn’t need to have – another five years later.
When Frieda Catchprice stood in Sarkis Alaverdian’s back yard, she ran over and over all these events, looking for a crack in the story, a place where she might have acted differently and have come to a different place. She worked up and down the events, like a fly trying to find its way through glass to air.
The trucks thundered over the Sydney Road overpass above the 60 ? 120-ft blocks which had been sold thirty years before as Catchprice Heights. The streets were named Albert, Frieda, Cathleen, Mortimer, Jack. It was the Catchprice Estate that Sarkis Alaverdian was now a prisoner of. And it was now Mrs Catchprice, walking with him back to Catchprice Motors, who determined to set him free.
‘Do you have a suit?’ she asked.
18
It was only after they had escaped from Vernon Street (where the twelve-year-olds were ripping the insignia off a Saab Turbo) that Mrs Catchprice offered Sarkis a job as a salesman. Sarkis had seen the twelve-year-olds too late to avoid them and he did not wish to turn round or even cross the street because it was like running, like blood in the water, and he had no choice but to continue walking. Three of them were sitting on a white-railed garden fence. Two were perched on the Saab’s hood. The space they left to walk through was bordered by the bright white stones of their naked kneecaps.
The Saab’s alarm started. Sarkis took Mrs Catchprice’s bird-wing arm, and Mrs Catchprice, who must have seen what was happening, just kept on talking. She was telling him stories about the disadvantaged people she had employed at Catchprice Motors.
‘But I am boring you,’ she said.
He was frightened, not bored. He guided the old woman under the dark umbrella of mould-sweet street trees, between the gauntlet of twelve-year-old knees – stolen commando boots, lighter-fluid breath. Even in the midst of it, he could not hurry her. He felt the bones through the wrapping of her plastic coat. Old women needed extra calcium. He had his own mother on 800 mg a day, and she was young. Without calcium they became hunch-backed and fragile. And although Mrs Catchprice was not hunch-backed, she had that dried, neglected feeling in his hand, like shoes no one has bothered to oil. She was someone’s grandmother, or mother – they should treasure her. She should eat with them, sleep in their house. They should listen to her papery breathing in the night and it should give them a sense of completeness they would never have without her. If not for her, they would not exist.
Sarkis could press 140 kg. He could split a shirt by flexing his deltoids, but the twelve-year-olds were like dogs in a pack. Their breath stank like service stations and their nails scratched. They were feral animals. He was scared of them, even now, twenty metres past the Saab. There was a dull thudding noise. They were running over the roof of the Saab and jumping on its hood and if the owners were smart they would stay in their house and wait for the cops to come. A breeze brought a flower scent he could not name. A rock bounced off a low paling fence and rolled along the footpath past his feet. The car alarm stopped for a moment and everything was suddenly very quiet.
He steered her off the street, and on to a rough clay path across the burnt-out Kmart lot. This was maybe dumb. How could he tell? He hoped that the buskers from Victoria had not come back to live in the concrete pipes. He could see the pipes glistening nastily in the centre of the site. He could smell them from here: piss like a subway tunnel. She stumbled and gripped his arm. It was then she asked: ‘Do you have a suit?’
Maybe she said other things and he missed it. He was worrying about her bones, the buskers.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well, you’d better come to the garage at eight-thirty tomorrow morning and we’ll see how we go.’ Sarkis was thinking how could he tell her to shut up, not to talk so loud. The piss-smelling pipes might hide Nasties, people without a human heart. They might beat you because they thought you had money, or a job, or a handsome face you did not deserve.
She held out her hand. He shook it. Just a little thing – a Chinese dish – bones and rice paper.
‘It’s a deal?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
They passed the concrete pipes and no one tried to hurt them, although Sarkis muddied his slip-ons and his socks.
They came out on to Loftus Street. Sarkis saw the Esso sign illuminated in the sky above Catchprice Motors.
‘Do you walk at night very often?’ he said, but his mind was trying to figure out a way to check on what had happened to him.
‘Always,’ said Mrs Catchprice.
‘Actually,’ said Sarkis, ‘it’s very dangerous.’ They had come to a bench which the Franklin Council had bolted to a concrete block beneath the collapsing veranda of an old store. Mrs Catchprice sat down on the seat and began looking for a cigarette in her handbag.
‘Really very dangerous,’ Sarkis said. He sat beside her, with his arms resting on his knees. He peered across the road, through the trees, at Catchprice Motors.
‘You don’t want your new employer bumped off, eh?’ said Mrs Catchprice, and flashed her big white teeth at him.
He could have kissed her wrinkled-up old face.
‘If these louts give me trouble,’ she said, ‘I’ll blow them up.’ She opened her handbag wide and held up what Sarkis thought at first was a piece of salami. He took it from her. It was about fifteen centimetres long and very sticky.
‘Gelignite. You know what that is? Smell your fingers.’
Sarkis sniffed. It was musty and aromatic, like amyl nitrate.
‘Nitroglycerine,’ she said.
The street lights were an orange-yellow and made everything look like a colour negative. You had to think about the most ordinary things to work out what they really were and even when they had been pigeon-holed and labelled, read and understood, they kept some of their spooky double-self. So when Mrs Catchprice said, ‘I’m a lot more dangerous than they are,’ she had orange lips and a yellow face and copper hair, and she was very scary looking.
‘You know how to let it off?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I know how to “let it off” just fine.’ Her teeth were huge and gold in her orange mouth. She was standing in Loftus Street, but she was walking through the grass, trees and wild roses while the Catchprice boys were standing with their hands on their hips and their great dusty legs were sticking out of their little blue shorts. She walked from stump to stump in her straw hat and summer dress with her crimping pliers and her gelly in an old Gladstone bag. She used a torch battery to do the detonators. She beefed up the gelly with some ‘Nitron’ fertilizer which sure did lift the stumps out of the soil and made Cacka wince and squinch up his face and push his great dusty hands across his battered ears.
Broken earth was like any fresh killed thing – a rabbit, a fish – alive with colour. When you fractured it, the
