Glorie - The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street

First published 2009 by

FREMANTLE PRESS

25 Quarry Street, Fremantle

(PO Box 158, North Fremantle 6159)

Western Australia.

www.fremantlepress.com.au

Copyright Marlish Glorie, 2009.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Consultant Editor Janet Blagg.

Cover Designer Tracey Gibbs.

Cover image Tracey Gibbs.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-publication data

Glorie, Marlish, 1955

The bookshop on Jacaranda Street / Marlish Glorie.

1st ed.

ISBN: 9781921361449 (pbk).

A823.4

Ebook ISBNs:

9781925816839 (epub)

9781925816846 (mobi)

9781925816853 (pdf)

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

For Lindsay, Heather and Tom

Shortly after five in the morning Helen Budd-Doyle chopped her bed to smithereens, manufacturing a million toothpicks, sufficient kindling for a week, pulp enough to make sixty rolls of toilet paper, and a thick layer of mulch for a garden bed how ironic was that, she thought. Her bed could be all these things, yet could not provide her with one decent night of sleep.

She knew the time because the alarm clock had just sounded. It was set for five a.m. It had been set that way for the last twenty years of her twenty-nine year marriage.

What do you want an alarm clock for? Arnold argued. Get up with the sun. But as Helen had barely spoken to her husband for five years, the call to argue back was firmly in control, lashed up and bound for all eternity.

Helens attempt to sleep had been futile. It always was. She tossed, turned and thrashed about like a whale harpooned until, exhausted and furious, she would relent and get up out of her single bed to roam around the darkened house by torchlight, make a cup of tea, sit at the kitchen table and ruminate over the nightmares obstructing safe passage through the hours of sleep. But on this particularly bitterly cold morning shed had enough.

*

Helen Budd-Doyle took her industrial strength torch one of the few of Arnolds collection of torches that worked and marched out of the house. She assumed that her husband, in the master bedroom on the other side of the house, was sleeping like a newborn. That he could sleep made her even angrier, and her legs moved like pistons at full speed. She stormed down to the garden shed, skirting around the piles of junk, muttering wild obscenities at each useless item that had occupied their yard and life for as long as she could remember.

She fixed her torchlight on a vast array of axes before putting a firm grip on one particular handle. Weapon in hand she marched back to her bedroom and lifting the axe above her head with both hands began chopping. The cheap pine gave way easily.

Sweating after the initial flurry of blows, Helen paused briefly. Calmly taking off her dressing gown, she rolled up the sleeves of her winter flannelette pyjamas and resumed the attack until her bed was no more than a mess of splintered wood. In four trips, she carried the wood down the stairs and outside, dumping it all onto the brick paving. Then she hauled out the bed linen, blankets, and pillow and chucked them on top of the wood.

She hunted for matches, finding a slim box amongst Arnolds collection from Pubs n Bars around the world. Arnold had never travelled beyond the outer city limits, yet had junk from all around the globe. Helen raged. Why did it all trickle down to him? Why?

Hugging a pile of newspapers to her chest with one hand, the knuckles of the other white from gripping the handle of a full five-litre container of kerosene, she set out with enough fuel to launch her bed into space. Frantically she built up the wood, blankets and newspaper into a cockeyed creation, then drenched the bedraggled sculpture with the entire contents of the kerosene tin. A single match courtesy of the JOY JOY CLUB Laos set it roaring, an angry beast whose mighty red flame leaped high, the heat smacking the cold air of dawn fair in the face. Helen was sent reeling.

It warmed her immensely to see the fire. She was not so naive as to think she could burn away all the sadness, anger, disappointment and everything else that nagged a person into grey hair and madness, but the bonfire was a good start. Incinerate her nightmares of the past twenty years. Scorched Earth Policy.

As the first leap of flames was starting to settle, her neighbour Astrid appeared in her nightie and dressing gown, her face filled with concern and inquisitiveness. Whats happening now? Its a terrible stink. And what a fire! I saw it from my kitchen window, Astrid cried out in her German accent.

I couldnt sleep, Helen replied, gazing at the fire, its red-hot flames leaping and dancing. She was mesmerised by how swiftly her rubber pillow had melted into a black pancake. Thats my bed, she stated proudly. And its the rubber pillow ponging the place up.

You burn your bed when you cant sleep? I cannot drive, but I dont burn Hendels car!

Sleeps different, Helen answered wearily, staring at the flames.

The flames began to die, the first embers were forming, and soon ashes were all that remained of Helens bed. Astrid suggested they go to her house for some cocoa. Helen followed her along the track that wound through the busted up, rusted up fridges, stoves, washing machines and general white goods that Arnold had amassed over the years.

White goods? Pha! More like ghost goods, thought Helen. She shivered as puffs of frosty breath lingered around her, hesitated for a moment. No, she decided. Go forward.

She surveyed the street. It was quiet, the streetlights still glowing in the break of day. The neighbourhood had developed over the years from a blue-collar suburb into a not unpleasant mix of styles. Modern edifices sat amongst the old renovated weatherboard and asbestos homes, and the gardens mirrored the various dwellings: native trees and bushes were neighbours to roll-on lawn and concrete. The place had been gentrified and her home had been left behind.

Apart from a select few, most of her neighbours kept their distance from the House of Junk. And who could blame them? Theyd paid good money to live in a decent house in a decent area. They didnt deserve Arnolds mess.

The beat-up ute that he used for gardening jobs straddled the curb, spilling with mowers, whippersnippers, rakes and other equipment. The verge itself was taken up with garden pots, mounds of mulch, old watering hoses and broken reticulation piping, and then there was the fence made of telephone directories.

Helen looked up. The sky was a vast fading darkness dotted with stars that blinked at her. Thank God for the sky. It always invigorated and comforted her, maybe because it was one place she could look and not see rubbish.

They passed from the junkyard that was her yard into what Helen considered to be pristine bliss. Astrids disciplined stretch of well-groomed lawn was devoid of any object except flowers placed in neat rows and separated by precise borders. This was Hendels work. Helens chilled feet sank into the spongy, damp grass. Never had neatness felt so good, so seductive.