Rain May and Captain Daniel Read Free

paint,’ Jeff’s father said. ‘You’ll get it right, Mrs Carr. A lick of paint and you won’t know the place.’
    â€˜There’s only a slow combustion cooker,’ Mum said.
    â€˜With mouse poo in the oven,’ I said.
    â€˜A good clean out, that’s all that needs. There’s nothing like these cookers. And this one isn’t that old. I remember the old lady, sorry, I mean your mum, pulling the other one out. This one would be, let’s see — she got it a couple of years before she died. They last a lifetime. The old one would have, too. I told her that but she wanted a new one. A fancier one. Look, this one’s even got a wok burner. She was proud of that. A great one for cooking, your mum, not like some of these pensioners living on dog food. She’d cook up a nice little meal for herself every night, flowers on the table, the whole bit. People thought she was a bit queer, but I always say live and let live if you’re not hurting anyone else.’
    â€˜It is a good stove,’ Maggie said. ‘I remember her getting the brochures.’
    â€˜Heats all this part of the house, too,’ Jeff’s dad said. ‘And she could run her hot water from it.’
    â€˜So there’s no hot water until it’s lit?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
    â€˜Oh there should be. There’s gas — if there’s any in the bottles.’
    â€˜What! Gas in bottles?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ Maggie said, ‘you order them from the supermarket. I’d forgotten. They’re round the side. There’d be some. You can’t move house without needing a bath at the end.’
    â€˜There’s a bit,’ Jeff’s dad called through the kitchen window, ‘but you’ll have to go easy on it. When we’ve unloaded, Jeff’ll go down and order them for you — they’ll deliver ’em Monday — won’t do it on the weekend. You’ll have to be careful though. I wouldn’t run that gas heater if you want a couple of hot baths.’
    When they’d emptied the truck, I stood in the gloomy kitchen and looked around. I wanted Maggie to admit that it was all a big mistake, but she didn’t. She plugged in the fridge and turned it on. She unpacked a box marked ‘Electrical Appliances’ and brought out the kettle, the coffee grinder, the blender and the rice cooker. She set these up on the largest bench. She said, ‘I’m not going to unpack much, Rain. Not in here. I think we need to do some thinking next week.’
    I wondered what she was going to think about — moving back to Brunswick?
    â€˜Couldn’t we go on renting this house out?’ I asked. ‘And couldn’t we rent a house in the city with the money we got in rent? We wouldn’t have to unpack anything then. We’d just ring up Jeff’s dad and they could take it all back to the city.’
    â€˜Good heavens, darling — the rent we’d get for this wouldn’t cover a dog kennel in Melbourne. No, Rain — I meant thinking about what paint colours we want, whether we want to get rid of this lino, what we need to make this house into our special wonderful home.’
    â€˜A demolition team,’ I said, but very quietly.
    The next thing Maggie unpacked was our fridge poetry kit.
    â€˜Here we are, Rain — feels like home already! Do you want to put them on?’
    Fran had bought the poetry kit on her last overseas trip. It was just a plastic box containing a lot of magnetic words. You stuck these to the fridge and turned them into poetry. It was neat. You don’t always have the word you want, though — like our kit has no ‘love’ in it. And then it’s got words that you think you’d never want to use, like ‘kill’.
    Mum and I wrote poems to each other. Not soppy poems. We wrote about stuff that maybe we don’t want to actually