Free The House That Was Eureka by Nadia Wheatley

By ‘the girls’ meaning his girls; or meaning him to think she meant his girls. For really, the trampoline was for Evie.
    Evie had been looking pale since they’d moved here . . . she must be lonely without Roseanne…the trampoline would give her something to do when she was home alone all day…That was how Evie’s mum’s mind was working.
    Evie’s mum didn’t know that Evie really had no urge any more to jump up and down on a trampoline.
    Plus, Evie’s mum thought, it would keep those other two out of Evie’s hair…
    Ted hit the roof. How much and take it back and where’d she get the money from, and so on.
    ‘Three hundred and fifty,’ Evie’s mum admitted. ‘But it’ll last forever, darl. And it’s okay, I got it on Bankcard.’
    ‘Bankcard! But you can’t use Bankcard!’
    Evie’s mum laughed. ‘We’ve never used it since the day they issued it, darl. There’s a thousand dollars, just sitting there.’
    ‘Hardly sitting there,’ Ted muttered. ‘It’s going back tomorrow.’
    ‘No, darl.’
    Rows, Noel thought next door. Family rows. They never had them in his family: at least, not yelling ones. Mum didn’t yell, she was as quiet as a little lizard, and the despot didn’t yell, she wrote angry notes, and then made them disappear.
10
    On the night of Monday 25 May, Nobby packed a few clothes in a sugar-bag and went in next door.
    ‘Emigrating is it, son?’ Paddy Cruise smirked at him.
    ‘I thought I’d move here.’
    ‘Well have another think.’
    ‘And a mug of tea while you’re doing it.’ Mrs Cruise pushed the pot to him. This boy was the second son she’d never had. She’d patched him up dozens of times when he’d been in a scrap and was too scared to get some iodine from that mother of his.
    ‘And when you’ve finished, you’ll kindly take your little swag and go back in to your mam,’ Paddy said.
    ‘She’s no mother of mine.’
    Paddy gave it to him then. Full and strong. How his mother had given her life to bringing him up and how the poor woman could trip maybe, fall upon the stairs, and her be lying moaning in her blood and no son to hear her.
    ‘I hate her,’ Nobby said.
    ‘That’s as may be,’ said Paddy. ‘I do too, m’self. But things aren’t desperate yet. They never execute the warrant straight away. There’s still time for her to change her mind. With perhaps a little gentle persuasion. And till things get desperate, you’ll kindly stay and protect her. Life might soon be a bit of a strain for your good lady mother.’
    So Nobby took his sugar-bag home, and then began to lead a split life as the gentle persuasion that Paddy had referred to was exerted upon Nobby’s mother.
    For the UWM began to picket.
    Every day that week, from morning till sundown, Nobby and Lizzie and Mick and Paddy and twenty or thirty more stood outside in the street with banners and placards.
    NO EVICTIONS
UNITE, FELLOW-WORKERS
DON’T LET THE BAILIFFS SHIFT THE CRUISES!
    The little Cruise girls and the other kids from the street ran and played around the picket line, cheering the pickets, yelling things up at the heavily curtained windows of Nobby’s mother’s place. And they skipped to the rhythm of the new skipping songs that had grown out of the occasion.
    One two three four
    Mrs Scab come out your door
    Five six seven eight
    Pa is waiting at your gate
    Nine ten start again
    Lock her up in a dingo’s den
    One two three four...
    At tea-time Nobby would eat with the rest of the pickets at the Cruises. And then go in next door to sleep in his own bed in a dark house completely silent. Nobby wasn’t talking to his mother.
    ‘Well, is she coming round d’you reckon, son?’ Mrs Cruise said on the Friday night.
    ‘She won’t ever,’ Nobby said, drying and drying a tin plate.
    ‘Here, give me that, you’ll wipe off the enamel.’
    It was wearing the boy out. His face was pale and strained. It was like the Civil War all over again, Mrs Cruise thought. And this lad split