Read The House That Was Eureka for Free Online

when the despot was in charge of Noel, instead of vice versa. Right from when he was a baby Mum had had to work because Noel’s father was dead, and so Mum had been out all day and hadn’t known what went on. Sometimes the despot was okay and played games with him, but on her bad days she used to lock him in his room for just about anything. And Noel could still taste the glug of her cold porridge.
    Noel got the bowl out of the fridge. A cold crusty skin had formed on the top. Lovely. Noel pushed aside the rhubarb pie that was meant to be the despot’s sweets.
    ‘Mummy, I’m hungry…’
    Noel used to tittletat to Mum when she got home; but the despot always told Mum that the boy was a can’t-help-himself-liar.
    ‘Oh dear, Noel. Nanna says you wouldn’t eat your tea.…Maybe a jam sandwich wouldn’t hurt.’
    ‘Eating between meals,’ the despot warned. ‘That’s what makes him sleepwalk, you know.’
    ‘I suppose you’re right, Mummy.’
    As Mum always seemed to believe the despot, Noel just gave up. Mum was totally under the despot’s thumb. She was a small woman, always tense, ready to flee, like a little lizard.
    Noel could still taste the porridge. And hear the speech that always accompanied it.
    ‘...If you’d been here, boy, when one in three was out of work, you’d know what it is to tighten your belt. Cruel it was then. Four days I once went, with nothing to sustain me save a little black tea.’
    ...The taste of that speech over the porridge. The stories of joining up slivers of soap, of boiling up the one lamb shank all week, of thinking it Christmas to get a choko. Noel had been brought up on Depression tales the same way other kids have Cinderella.
    ‘Well, my lady.’ Noel put the porridge on the tray. ‘You may just find the Depression days returning.’ There was macaroni cheese in the oven to be warmed up, but bugger her. ‘
Cruel it was then…
’ Noel chanted.
    Noel knew he was vicious, the way he was acting to an eighty-seven-year-old woman. But what about the way
she’d
acted when it was
him
that was weak?
    Noel heard voices from the kitchen next door, was distracted, lost some of his anger.
    ‘Oh bugger it.’ He relented, and warmed up the macaroni. But she could still have the porridge for her sweets.
    A scream came through the kitchen wall.
    It was that girl, yelling full blast at the other kids. Noel had quite liked her. She looked ordinary, and listened to him. Noel decided to skip school that afternoon and go in there; then changed his mind and decided to go up the music shop instead. Plenty of time.
5
    There was plenty of time. By that Friday fortnight Evie still hadn’t got around to fixing her room properly. She had her bed and stuff from Campbelltown now, but she hadn’t painted the walls or made any curtains. She’d just stuck an old blanket of Sammy’s up over the window.
    ‘What you find to do all day beats me,’ Ted always said. ‘But whatever it is, it must keep you flat out. Christ knows, it’s not as if you’re much help to your mother with the housework.’
    Ted was wrong about the housework: Evie thought she did lots. But he was right, in a way, about the rest. Whatever it was that Evie did with her days, Evie didn’t know either.
    Evie should have had lots of spare time, but she didn’t. She’d walk Sammy to the play centre. Then she’d go home and clean up for an hour or so. But then she should be free from about half-past ten till she had to pick Sammy up at two-thirty. Four hours each day to do something in. To fix up her room, or maybe do something proper about looking for a job. But the days just wandered past Evie, the time in them disappearing on things she had to do before she could do anything.
    ‘I do so do things,’ Evie told Ted that third Friday night, after tea.
    ‘Like for example what!’ Ted had been worse than usual, this last week. Really moody. Even snapping at the girls.
    ‘Like the Monday after we moved in, for instance, I