Read The House That Was Eureka for Free Online Page B

as she got one in one side, a nail would drop out of the other side and her board would still be swinging down.
    Evie was in foul temper.
    Bang.
    Ted was there, but in the dream he was her father.
    Bang.
    Noel was there, but he wasn’t quite Noel.
    Bang.
    Evie flamed with hatred.
    Bang bang.)
    Evie looked at Ted. That look on his red face as he took a swig from his can of KB. Yet she didn’t hate him. She bucked against him a lot, out of habit more than anything else, for when he’d first married Mum he’d tried to be nice to Evie and she’d been jealous of him, and started to fight. Yet in real life she didn’t hate him like she had in that dream. It was as if real life was more like dreaming.
    ‘And then Friday I went back to the CES, to look at the noticeboards.’ To get ideas for what to write on her form when the time came to lodge it on Monday. Evie had been on the dole well over a year now, and had been knocked back so often that she no longer bothered applying for jobs much, but she had to show ambition to work on her form.
    ‘Okay, okay,’ said Ted, walking out. Something more interesting than Evie had just come on TV.
    ‘And then the next Monday,’ Evie muttered on regardless, just feeling like a gripe, ‘I went down to lodge my form and they hadn’t got the stuff transferred and said my cheque would be late, I’d do better to lodge it back in Campbelltown, so on Tuesday I went out there and lodged it a day late so the cheque’ll be late anyway and Thursday I went up to the CES and asked about a job and they got me an interview for next Monday, so I spent all day today getting my clothes ready for that.’ (Leaving out Wednesday when Evie had slept. She really needed to sleep in the daytime now, after dreams and footsteps running through the night.)
    ‘Did you go and see Roseanne, love, while you were out there?’ Mum just asked that to keep the conversation flowing. Her mouth was full of pins.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘How was she?’
    ‘Good.’ Roseanne had spent the whole time talking about some guy Evie didn’t know, and she hadn’t wanted to know anything about Evie. Evie never had any guy to rave about, whenever Roseanne raved.
    ‘That’s good, love.’
    ‘By the way, love,’ mum added. ‘What’s the job you’re going for Monday, that you’re fixing some clothes for?’
    ‘Nude bar-work,’ Evie said, making a casual exit.
    ‘Smart alec!’ From outside, Evie heard Mum laughing at her.
    Evie laughed back. Mum was all right.
    Evie went into her room, shut the door, hurled herself on her bed, lay there a while in the quiet and privacy. She might go to sleep. It was still too early for bed even for Jodie and Maria, but Evie felt kind of sleepy and there was nothing else to do. Watching TV meant sitting with Ted and Maria and Jodie, and the alternative was going out, which she couldn’t do. Firstly because she knew nowhere to go and no one to go with, and secondly because she had no money, her dole cheque hadn’t come.
    Evie dozed off, woke a couple of hours later. Shook her head to try to remember, but no, there didn’t seem to have been anything this time. Not anything in her sleep that made her wake up, stuck tight to the bed, wanting to cough, desperate for something cold to ease her throat. Not anything like the terrible loneliness as his white face disappeared.
    Evie got up and went around to the old outside toilet, behind the scullery. She could hear Noel and his mouth-organ in the toilet next door. The now-familiar whining melancholy of his Dylan songs. Evie sometimes faintly heard him in the daytime, playing in his kitchen.
    Evie climbed up on the paling fence and leaned over.
    ‘What do people do around here, Friday nights?’ she asked when finally he came out.
    ‘I dunno. Go into town and play Space Invaders. Go to some place if they’ve got money and listen to music. Stay home.’ Noel never asked anyone at school what they did because, whatever it was, he wouldn’t be