flux
Foreword: This was written in 2001 for a zine (the same for which I wrote to fall so far), submitted under yet another pseudonym (I can't now remember what it was - I've used so many) *eyeroll*
She'd lost her job. She couldn't tell the others, though, so for a few weeks she left in the morning like usual. She couldn't apply for welfare. That would give too much away. Her situation was precarious enough already.
She'd wander, walking two or three suburbs over, taking a packed lunch, citing a diet so the others wouldn't get suspicious. She'd walk all day some days, window shopping, or exploring a park, or browsing in a bookshop, but never staying in one place too long. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and kept her head down. She didn't want her face seen by security cameras.
If it rained she might go to the museum or the library, but always a different one. She didn't want to get known, be recognised. She didn't want to strike up friendships, associations. Even being on a nodding acquaintance with the paperboy caused acute anxiety.
One time she came home and there was a message on the machine from her mother: Tried you at work, Christa dear, and they said you weren't there. Do call me. It was pretty much over then. She kept her joblessness hidden from the others for a few more days before her mother tried to get her at home and Mariel found out she wasn't working.
Sometimes people get fired, she reasoned to herself, and it doesn't have to be your fault. It wouldn't have been so bad if Mariel had known about the job in the first place. Mariel thought she was studying. Devon didn't care what Christa did during the day as long as she produced the rent on time. Now her secret was out and Devon was refusing to take sides. Mariel huffed and ranted and said he should care because they'd been deceived. Devon just shrugged, drank his coffee, watched the news. Mariel always got what she wanted and it made no difference whether he took sides or not.
Mariel wanted her to move out. She didn't want to but Mariel gave her two weeks' notice and she spent the first of those finding somewhere else to live, a bedsit on the cheap side of the railway, in a boarding house that used to be a factory, a smash repairs shop on one side and a sleazy takeaway on the other. The second week she spent trying to persuade Mariel to release her bond. "You can't have it," Mariel spat, "You lied to us. Liars don't get their money back."
The money didn't matter that much because she had ample savings. Her pride mattered. Her principles mattered. She took her case to the Rental Tribunal.
Her mother came to visit. The bedsit was damp and smelly and poorly insulated so she'd been burning incense constantly for ten days and keeping the window open to try to overcome the mouldy walls with fresh air. It was the middle of summer and even with the window open and the fan on the room was always in the high twenties, being at the front and top of the house and bearing the full brunt of the sun eight hours a day. Her mother sniffed a little, pursed her lips, clenched her hands in front of her, but refrained from saying what she was surely thinking.
Her mother had brought a few house-warming gifts: a terracotta pot housing thick clumps of parsley and chives, a small oval mirror in a bronze frame, four packets of good leaf tea and a tin of shortbread biscuits. Not having a teapot Christa made bag tea in her favourite blue mugs and promised her mother she'd acquire a teapot before the next visit.
"I don't think your father will like this."
"I thought he wasn't well enough to go visiting?"
"He's not, but, you know, he likes to make the effort for you children."
The talk was idle chit-chat, nothing deep or serious. Christa nibbled at the biscuits, only wanting the visit to be over. Her mother consumed several with obvious relish, not worried about her weight now she was past fifty.
The conversation would falter every few minutes. The trains which passed by only twenty feet from the front gate were more than a match for even her mother's loud voice. The planes came by every five minutes and were sometimes so loud as to drown out the trains.
"Couldn't you have afforded something better, darling? Is money a problem?"
"I don't expect to be here too long. I'll go somewhere else when I have another job."
"There's that nice new place on the other side of the railway. They have double glazing."
Her mother nodded and gave her a meaningful look. Christa suppressed the urge to sigh, shrug, or look at the floor, and managed to smile a little and only cock her head.
"You're a strange one, Christa."
After walking her mother to the car she crossed the narrow street to lean on the railing that bordered the tracks. She watched the trains go back and forth, watched the people milling about on the station platform to her right, sometimes looked up at the modern townhouse complex opposite, weighing in her mind the chances of obtaining a studio there. She didn't think it likely. The rent would probably be monstrous (given the double glazing).
The summer wore on but she didn't look for another job. Job-hunting was for winter, or at least autumn. She rented a computer for a week and produced fifty copies of her updated resume, filling in the period from November to March as "holidaying interstate with family and learning to water-ski". She filed the resumes in an airtight camera case she'd bought second-hand at auction. The damp in the bedsit was terrible.
Her father came to visit, limping and dragging his feet, relying heavily on the walking stick and on her arm. She brewed proper tea in the new teapot and served up half the remaining shortbreads on her best porcelain dish.
"Is this the best you can afford? Did you not get a job already?"
Her father meant well but tended to the ascerbic. She bore up with outward good grace but inwardly gritted her teeth and cursed her mother for not preventing the visit.
Her siblings didn't visit, thankfully. Visiting was not in their repertoire. Either you went to them or they didn't have time for you. Suited her just fine.
The Rental Tribunal finally got around to giving her five minutes of their time. It was not, they said, the appropriate procedure. The Tribunal was for disputes between tenants and landlords or tenants and agents. She would have to work out the problem with her former flatmate by herself.
She rang the old house and got Devon. Could he give her the bond? It was his lease, not Mariel's. Did Mariel have to be so in control?
Mariel had spent her bond, he said quietly, so there was nothing to return.
She had nothing against Devon personally but did briefly hate him, yet said nothing. Having to use the boarding house's communal phone had a lot to do with it, not wanting everyone to hear her business. She was by far the youngest resident of the house and the others never failed to try to poke their noses into her affairs. The older women thought she was a prostitute, or at least a junkie. They couldn't understand why else a pretty young thing would choose to live in a damp-ridden dump that constantly stank of mould and machine oil and old grease. Why else would an able-bodied young woman subject herself to such poverty, if not for being on the lam or doing shady business?
Christa ignored the pryings as best she could and kept her most precious possessions in storage in another suburb, and the key to the storage locker in a safety deposit box at the bank. More likely the elderly residents of the house were junkies, if only addicted to prescription medication for pain and bowel problems. She didn't trust any of them and certainly did not cultivate friendships among them.
Summer drew to an end and Christa assessed her savings. Job-hunting could not realistically start for another six weeks. She looked up the number of the rental agents handling the studio apartments at The Grand View, the modern place across the tracks, and made an appointment. The months of living frugally had made her thin and she slipped easily into her old grey suit, a dated but still serviceable skirt-and-jacket ensemble made to look classy by being teamed with a cream silk blouse and seamed stockings. She thought she looked rather like Audrey Hepburn.
Her mother made another visit just before she moved.
"I'm so glad you're getting out of this horrible place, darling. It was making your father quite ill."
"You really think this place is horrible? You never said anything about it before."
"I didn't want to upset you, dear. And you seemed to like it here."
Devon was pleased to see her. The studio apartment had been lovely but it was barely bigger than her bedsit and at five times the price it simply wasn't worth it. She'd rung Devon on a pretext of collecting her large green serving bowl which had somehow been left behind. He'd found it at the back of the under-sink cupboard and said she could pick it up any time.
"Mariel went quite queer after you moved out. Acting erratic and not being here half the time when she was s'posed to. I'd've thought she'd be glad t'see the back of you... Were you actually close, like?"
"Oh, no! We hardly exchanged two words until she threw me out."
It was easy talking to Devon without Mariel there to direct the conversation. The bowl lay in her lap, forgotten, and when she finally stood up to leave it fell with a thud and rolled across the floorboards. They stared at it for a moment.
"You could move back in, if y'like. Zara's really quiet. I think you'd get on. I don't mind what y'do with y'time as long as you pay your way, y'know."
It was comforting to have things go according to plan and she moved back to the old house, to Mariel's old room, the second week of March. Her parents, assuming she was moving to the modern place, reacted with shock and concern. A psychiatrist, her mother suggested, might be of use.
Christa was used to her parents' machinations and ignored them. She hadn't relied on them financially since school so there was no point feeling guilty.
She was back where she belonged and that was all that mattered.