Chapter Three
Home for Lucy is on Raglan Street, which is pretty much the longest street in Mosman apart from Military Road, the main artery.
It stretches from the city side of the harbour to Balmoral Beach, transecting the suburb.
The beach side winds downhill; the city side is the high side, which is where Lucy’s family’s house is.
Her parents’ shop is on Avenue Road, about fifteen minutes’ walk away but mere steps from Lucy’s high school.
Less than a minute of commuting, on foot.
Each weekday Lucy’s routine is the same, with slight variations: she finishes school, she goes to the shop – it’s a dry-cleaning business, but calling it ‘the dry cleaners’ makes it sound like it belongs to someone else – she works for a couple of hours, then she walks home while one or both of her parents closes up for the day.
Home is rundown because her parents spend all their time and money on the business, even though her mother would love to do some renovations on the house. Her father has ‘been through it all before’, though, and says that renovations are a waste of time.
He’s been through it all before because he’s been married before.
Lucy’s mother was nineteen when she gave birth to Lucy, but her father is twenty years older and already had another family.
A wife, a son, Russell, who is ten years older than Lucy, and a daughter, Gail, who died at ten.
It was losing Gail, her father has said, that ended the marriage.
Although Lucy tends to think – because of what her mother has told her – that it was him meeting her mother and having an affair.
Lucy is the result of the affair. She’s the reason her father left his first wife, even though he’s never married her mother.
‘Lucy!’
She turns to see her friend Angelica running up, struggling to keep her backpack on both shoulders.
‘God, I’m so unfit.’ Angelica rolls her eyes. ‘Are you leaving already?’
‘Yeah.’ Lucy shrugs and smiles like she doesn’t mind the fact that she doesn’t get to hang out with her friends instead of going to work at her parents’ business. Like every teenage girl would rather be dry-cleaning than doing anything else.
Angelica screws up her face. ‘What about our English project?’
‘Hey! Hi!’ Their friend Poppy appears, her own backpack hanging off one shoulder. Poppy’s too cool to wear it on both shoulders. Not that she’s said that. Poppy’s coolness is just a fact that Lucy and Angelica have to live with.
‘Lu can’t stay to work on the project,’ Angelica says as she chews a fingernail.
‘Huh?’ Poppy says distractedly, her gaze drifting to the teenage boys who hang around the school gates, wolf-whistling at the girls they like and slagging off the ones they don’t.
It’s a brutal ritual, and even though Lucy is usually on the receiving end of wolf-whistles she hates it. The teachers won’t do anything about it – ‘boys will be boys’, they keep saying.
Lucy wants to know what that means, what exactly the boys are meant to be. Won’t these same boys grow into men she’ll be told she has to respect when they’re running banks and the government and making decisions for her life? These boys who don’t respect her now and aren’t likely to then?
She’s sick of boys – of men – who just want to be boys.
That’s one of the reasons why she likes Madonna so much.
To the casual observer it might look as though Madonna’s doing things for men, but she’s not.
She does things for herself, on her own terms. Lucy wants to live like that one day.
But for now she, Angelica – even Poppy – seem to end up doing things on other people’s terms.
‘Hey, Poppy!’ calls Tony, one of the boys who regularly whistles at both her and Lucy.
Poppy ignores him and turns her gaze to Lucy. ‘Could we come to the shop and work on it?’
Lucy wishes she could say yes. It would be so much easier if her friends could come to the shop and they could finish their project – due at the end of the week – together.
‘Russell,’ Angelica says simply and Poppy sighs.
‘Oh yeah,’ she replies.
Even though he’s twenty-seven, Russell still lives in the family home and works in the family business.
Whenever Lucy and her friends have tried to do their homework at the shop before, he’s always interrupted them – usually to say something mean, although once they all went to get a drink and came back to find glue tipped over their diorama.
Russell has been mean to Lucy for as long as she can remember.
Never in front of her parents, although he’s left his marks.
Pinches that turned into bruises. Cuts that were put down to Lucy being clumsy when she’s nothing of the sort.
She can’t avoid him as much as she’d like because they’re on top of each other most of the time, apart from when she’s at school.
When she was a kid, Lucy tried hard to get Russell to love her. She adored him, in defiance of all logic. All she wanted was his approval. And she’s never had it. Never will – she knows that now.
‘How about I come over once we close?’ Lucy says to Angelica. ‘Mama never minds if I don’t go straight home.’ In fact, her mother always likes there to be at least an hour between the shop closing and them all sitting down to dinner.
Angelica looks from Poppy to Lucy and back again, while raising of eyebrows and nods are exchanged.
‘See you at – what, six?’ Angelica says.
‘Yup.’ Lucy smiles. ‘Thanks.’
The friends wave farewell and Lucy continues to the shop. She walks behind the counter and drops her school bag beneath it, glancing around to try to locate her mum, who’ll be here somewhere. She’s always here.
‘Lucy!’ Her name is called from deep inside the section where they keep the bedding – quilts and doonas.
‘Hi, Mama,’ Lucy calls back, then she heads for the kitchenette out the back for a glass of water before she returns to the counter.
Russell comes in the front door of the shop, glowering, milkshake in hand. He always has a milkshake in the afternoons. It’s probably why he’s a little overweight, although you can’t suggest that to him because he gets angry. Even their father has stopped saying anything about it.
‘What are you looking at?’ he almost spits at Lucy, and she looks away.
‘Nothing,’ she says meekly. She’s learnt to do everything meekly around him. It’s what he wants. He must. Why else would he be like this?
Their father doesn’t do anything about it. He feels guilty about the divorce. Lucy knows this because she’s heard her mother talk to him about Russell’s behaviour, ask him why he doesn’t stop his son being mean to his daughter.
‘Does that mean you feel guilty about us?’ her mother has said, more than once.
Her father always says no, but it’s hard to believe him.
‘Get on with it then,’ Russell growls, then stalks out the back.
Lucy doesn’t know what, exactly, she’s meant to get on with but she knows she may well be doing it alone this afternoon. When she’s working her parents will sometimes go out, separately or together, to do shopping or little jobs. They trust her, she guesses, to look after the customers.
Russell looks after the clothes, which is what Lucy really wants to do. Because what working here, being around this business for as long as she can remember, has given her is a love for clothes.
Kids at school have made fun of her for being ‘the drycleaner’s kid’, like there’s something wrong with it, but Lucy has always loved watching the dresses, skirts and blouses, scarves and coats, blazers and jackets and ties come in and out of this place.
Working here gives her the chance to observe the way they’re made, the fabrics they’re made out of, the different styles.
There’s one old lady who brings in all her clothes for washing or dry-cleaning, and she has frocks from the 1950s and the decades since.
Lucy wants to ask her about them – where she bought them, where she’s worn them, where she wears them still – but the lady, Mrs Rosen, tends not to talk.
They all know her name so she doesn’t need to speak to them when she drops off, and they send her a monthly account so she doesn’t need to do anything when she picks up either.
Whoever is at the counter just hands over the clothes.
Lucy gets most of her information about clothes from Daphne at the charity shop.
Daphne talks to her, doesn’t treat her like she’s an annoying kid.
She gives her good advice about items of clothing and Lucy pays attention, because Daphne is always so nicely dressed. She has interesting jewellery too.
Daphne’s who Lucy wants to be when she grows up.
That’s because Daphne told her that she used to design dresses, although she couldn’t get them made.
Lucy wants to design clothes too – and get them made.
She wants to be able to go back to the shop and show Daphne that she’s done it for both of them.
Because she knows girls – women – don’t always get what they want.
Her mother wanted to be a ballerina. She was dancing a lot – Lucy’s father saw her in a production, that’s how they met – but once she became pregnant she had to stop.
Then she had to look after Lucy. Then they started the dry-cleaning business.
Sometimes Lucy hears classical music playing in the house and wonders if her mother is thinking about ballet, but when she asks about the music her mother always says, ‘It was just the radio.’ Except the radio lives in the kitchen and the music comes from the sitting room.
‘I’m going out,’ her mother says now, pulling her handbag from under the counter. She kisses Lucy on the cheek. ‘Your dad’s out the back with Russell.’
Lucy nods and smiles. She glances at the clock: three twenty. They’ll get the after-school rush soon – mothers sending in their kids to pick up dry-cleaning, some of them kids Lucy has no wish to see. At least it’s her second-last year at school. She can’t wait for it all to be over.
The door closes behind her mother and Lucy puts her elbows on the counter, her long blonde-brown plait falling over one shoulder. She picks it up and starts chewing on the ends. It’s a bad habit and she should really stop it.
So she takes the hair out of her mouth and reaches under the counter for the basket she keeps there with clothes she likes to work on when there’s a quiet patch.
Russell is mostly confined to the back of the shop so she doesn’t worry about him finding her projects and ruining them.
Which he would if he knew how much they mean to her.
She pulls out a houndstooth jacket from a suit she bought at the op shop a few weeks ago. It’s a little too big for her but Daphne told her that if she adds some shoulder pads and nips it in at the waist, it could make for an interesting silhouette.
The skirt is too long for Lucy as well, so she’s going to take up the hem. ‘Don’t cut it off if you can avoid it,’ Daphne advised her. ‘Better to keep the material there in case you ever want to let it down again.’
Lucy’s hemming it by hand – it’s a good activity to do at the counter because she can quickly put it away if a customer comes in.
She could use the sewing machine out the back, but that almost feels like cheating. Plus she’d have to find a time when there’s no one else out there, and that’s not likely.
So she lays the skirt on the countertop, threads her needle and gets to work on making the houndstooth suit her own.