Jacaranda Blue by Joy Dettman Page A

and down, up and down, then he withdrew it, smelt it. Squatting there, he looked long at the bloody finger before licking it clean.
    His mother was working the checkout and, between customers, she sat around knitting the legs of Stell’s stupid clown dolls. Thirty stitches, sixty rows of garter stitch. She could do it blindfolded. He could do it blindfolded! Stell had taught him to knit when he was six or seven, before he knew any better.
    He used to watch her stuffing all the bits before she stitched them into clowns. She made him one when he was a kid. For years it had sat on his window ledge and laughed at him – until one day he’d cut its head off.
    â€˜That stopped its laughing,’ he said.
    She used to let him play in the stuffing, pass her handfuls of it. He could remember the feel of his hands, deep in the white fluffy fake wool stuff that she stored in bales in her shed.
    That’s why he went there yesterday. Stuffing.
    It was his father’s fault. He’d sent him around to tell Stell that the new bales of stuffing had arrived, and that he’d drop them around when they closed the shop on Saturday. But he didn’t tell her his father was coming for a visit. He did his own stuffing instead. More fun than stuffing clowns.
    He chuckled, and again slipped his finger into the mouth of the bottle, feeling the smooth silk of glass, the sucking, the pressure of fluid. Again he licked his finger.
    â€˜Tommy?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜What are you doing down there?’
    â€˜Nothing.’
    â€˜I asked you ages ago to get some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson. She’s still waiting.’
    â€˜And getting a free read of your magazines while she’s waiting,’ he said, replacing the bottle top, sliding the sauce to the front of the shelf. A bead of red oozed from beneath the lid. He wiped it away with a finger, licked the finger clean.
    â€˜Who were you trying to call earlier?’
    â€˜No-one,’ he said.
    â€˜I heard that Thomas has got himself a little girlfriend,’ Mrs Wilson said.
    â€˜Have you, Tommy?’
    â€˜That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ he replied, adding quietly, ‘Stupid old cow.’
    â€˜Who is she?’
    â€˜No-one. Leave me alone, why can’t you?’
    â€˜Get me some self-raising flour for Mrs Wilson, then I will.’
    Nagging old bitch, he thought but he stood and walked again to the storeroom, returning with a box of self-raising flour packets. He ripped it open, walked to the checkout, tossed one to the bench, then returned to study the packets. They had pictures of scones on the back.
    â€˜Scones in the oven,’ he whispered, ‘Maybe I gave the old Stell some self-raising power – got my scones baking in her old oven. I wonder if she’s too old.’
    His mother was too old, old and fat as a pig. She’d had her bits cut out by old Parsons. Now she had to swallow hormone pills to stop her shrivelling up. He sometimes thought of doing it to her, like his old man used to. He used to watch them doing it when he was a little kid. His old man was so scared he was going to die, like his other five kids had died, that he couldn’t sleep unless the cot was in their room. Thomas had slept beside their bed until he was nearly five. And he’d watched them when they thought he was asleep.
    He didn’t know what they were doing, it looked like they were playing rudy trampolines on the bed, but one night he’d wanted to play and his mother had kicked him out to a bed down the other end of the passage.
    She was the boss at the shop, and at home, but it was his father who made him work at filling shelves. ‘Teach him responsibility,’ he said. ‘I worked with Dad from when I was fourteen, and it didn’t do me any harm.’
    Didn’t do him much good either, Thomas thought. Weak bastard.
    His parents couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but