Nine Months Of Summer

1.2

1.2

A red-gum log burned gently in the wood heater. Leah was watching Days of Our Lives, her weekdays cleaved by frothy melodrama. Yvette gazed out the window. She had no tolerance for her mother’s habit. To her, the soaps were shallow, over-acted, lip-quivering drivel. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she had enough going on inside her to fill an entire series.

Outside, a fierce southerly buffeted the grevilleas and bottlebrushes. Leah said she lost a shrub every year. Snaps off right at the base and rolls about like spinifex. Yvette watched the shrubs cower. She felt adrift, her own roots shallow, their grasp in the soil of a stable life tenuous. Her mother’s soap addiction reinforcing feelings of tremendous isolation. Leah was an impossible anchor. She had an astonishing capacity to get on with the practical day-to-day that alienated Yvette at every turn. She’d rather her mother thrashed and flailed like a shrub decapitated by that uncompromising wind. At least now and then. If only she would let down her reserve.

In an effort to relieve her listless mood, Yvette flicked through the local paper that her mother had brought back from her bi-weekly run into the village. When she came to the last pages she scanned the small ads. The Cobargo hotel needed a cleaner. She felt a swirl of contempt; her life had come to this. Yet it was the only listing. In deference to her mother, she waited for the adverts then dialled the number, hoping the job would be cash-in-hand.

A woman answered.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Yvette Grimm. I’m calling about the cleaning job.’

‘Are you new in town?’

Straight away she knew she was too well-spoken to be a local, and too well-spoken to be a cleaner, but she kept those thoughts to herself. ‘I’m Debbie Smith’s sister,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the claim was an appeal for acceptance.

‘Ah.’

The woman warmed to her.

Maybe there was some advantage in being known as Debbie’s sister.

She started work the following Thursday.

It was a cool and sunny day. Heading for the hotel, Yvette walked down to the village, glancing up the road at the Catholic church as she crossed the bridge over the creek. Debbie’s farm was a short walk further on. Since her return, Debbie had been away visiting her sister-in-law. She’d returned yesterday. And she’d be at home now. Her boys at school. Alan in the paddocks with the cows. The sisterly thing would be to call in after the shift.

She pulled open the heavy wooden door of the hotel and went through to the bar, long and dark with too much tacky chrome. A sickly odour of yesterday’s beer perfumed the air. She nodded at the old man seated on a stool over by the cigarette machine, who gave her a languid smile. Otherwise, the bar was empty.

Before long, a middle-aged woman appeared. She was in her thirties, dressed as if ready for the beach in T-shirt, shorts and thongs, her blonde hair pinned back in a ponytail. ‘G’day,’ she said. ‘You must be Yvette. I’m Brenda.’ She grinned as she gave Yvette a single appraising sweep of her eye. ‘Come with me.’

She followed Brenda across the car park to the cleaner’s storeroom, located in the centre of a row of motel rooms. Brenda talked her through the cleaning procedures, detailed and exacting, and handed her a bunch of keys. ‘Cash all right?’

‘That’s fine.’ Thank God, but already she was sinking at the prospect of the work ahead. The view of the rolling hills and the mountains did nothing to loosen the tightening knot of resistance in her guts.

She wheeled the cleaning trolley from one stuffy, pastel-coloured room to another. She stripped and re-made beds, emptied bins, polished, mopped and vacuumed. She did it all with no enthusiasm whatsoever. She earned ten dollars per room, slave wages, and only by cleaning three rooms per hour did she feel the work remotely close to worthwhile. She hated it. Her back hated it. Her self-esteem sloshed with the grime at the bottom of the mop bucket.

She walked back to her mother’s house without glancing at the road to her sister’s farm.