Free The House That Was Eureka by Nadia Wheatley Page A

like Ireland and her Lizzie going on like a great stupid and not helping at all.
    For Lizzie was all for trouble. Jumping around on the picket line till her skirt near fell off, skipping and singing up at the windows like young Maudie and Fee, pushing Nobby further and further.
    ‘Come on, Nobby, get me a paint brush. It’s one side or the other. If you reckon you’re on our side, you will.’
    So Nobby had taken out his latch-key and gone into his mother’s house, had got his mother’s paint brush and taken it back so Lizzie could write in whitewash on the footpath outside his mother’s gate:
    DOWN WITH SCABS AND CLASS-TRAITORS.
NO EVICTIONS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED.
    It’d be funny if it wasn’t desperate, Mrs Cruise thought. That poor woman all alone in there, acting like stone to her own son, and all because she fears my larrikin of a Lizzie who’s too young in the head to care. For Lizzie might be sixteen, she might have done grown women’s work for two years, but her mother always reckoned she was a very young sixteen. Whereas Nobby was betwixt and between.
    Mrs Cruise put a stop on her sympathy. That poor woman was to be the cause of her own children sleeping God-knows-where.
    ‘Leave that. Go and give Lizzie a hand out the back if you’re so restless you must do something.’ Mrs Cruise often wished Nobby had taken the other side and stayed with his mother. It got on her nerves when he mooned around beneath her feet. As if she didn’t have enough worries. She was edgy with her backache for she was pregnant again. It’d be another girl, with her luck that’s for sure.
    Nobby crossed the breezeway, looked cautiously into the scullery. Lizzie had been scratchy lately, jumping down his throat at the slightest. She was mopping up the floor now after bathing Fee and Maudie. Making as many puddles as she mopped, for there was something about the way Lizzie mopped that was completely hopeless.
    ‘The dear knows, you’re a lousy mopper,’ her mother was always saying.
    ‘And proud of it!’ Lizzie would reply.
    ‘Proud of it!’
    ‘It’s far from being my aim in this life to be a dab hand with a mop!’
    ‘Well, what is it that you aim to be?’
    ‘A flame.’
    ‘Really, child, when do you intend to grow up!’
    Lizzie slopped a puddle sideways as Nobby stepped in.
    ‘Sit down and pull your feet up,’ she threatened, ‘or I’ll mop you.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Stop saying sorry!’
    ‘I’m sorry.’ Nobby knew she thought he was weak.
    Lizzie dumped the mop and sat down with Nobby on the green wash-stand. Said nothing for a while, then she said it. ‘I keep thinking you’re going to run out on us.’
    Nobby stared down at the puddles.
    ‘Lay off me, girl. It’s hard enough.’
    ‘Stop calling me
girl!
’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘
Stop
saying you’re
sorry!
’
    Lizzie swung her legs as she sat on the green wash stand. You get a feeling of power, having someone in love with you. This is the first time it’s happened to Lizzie.
    (If he didn’t love me, then I might love him.)
    (If he wasn’t like this, I’d be nice and not horrible.)
    It’s just that it can make you feel that you’re locked up, when someone gives you love.
    But it’s wonderful too, having someone think your hair isn’t messy and your words aren’t stupid.
    But if
they
think
you’re
not stupid, then
they
must be stupid.
    If Nobby didn’t love me, then he’d be strong enough for me to love.
    Lizzie’s legs swung and her eyes saw all the water on the floor that her mop had missed. But it was up in her eyes that the puddles were. I have to stop this.
    ‘I keep thinking of the trouble coming,’ Lizzie Cruise said. ‘What’s going to happen, what it’s going to be like.’
    Nobby couldn’t understand the tension in her voice. ‘What trouble?’ Wasn’t this enough for her? ‘We’ll just keep picketing, day after day, and after a while she’ll get fed up, and give in.’ God knows, there was enough reason for her