At least they still had plenty of private time where the pressure to be performative about their relationship fell away. They both breathed a sigh as they walked through the door of Fin’s mother’s house and shut out the eyes of the town, knowing they could just be Fin and Sweeney, childhood besties, again.
Not fake engaged. Not fake lovers. Just Fin and Sweeney. Pure bliss. Like the relief of removing a bra at the end of the day.
It was good to beoff. Good to just cook in the kitchen and chill in front of the television, talk about their lives and laugh about old times. Play that game Cold Chisel had sung about.Do you remember so-and-so. They hadn’t been in each other’s company for this long since they’d graduated high school and gone their own ways so this whole bizarre spectacle had been good for that.
But, when she went to bed every night, Sweeney couldn’t help but feel a kernel of anxiety deep in her belly that they’d irrevocably changed their relationship and it would never be the same again. Casual intimacies were still intimacies and she wasn’t sure if they’d ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
Thanks to their lying mothers!
Twenty-One
On Thursday, Sweeney got drafted into helping her mother at the charity shop. Someone had called in sick and her mother hadn’t been able to find a replacement at such short notice. She didn’t mind. Fin was taking his mother into Melbourne to drop off her latest batch of beanies to the Royal Children’s Hospital, and frankly it was nice to do something around town that didn’t involve her and Fin doing it together.
And to catch up with her mother.
Given she was living over the road in Ronnie’s house, they hadn’t really had any solo mum–daughter time, and although Sweeney had mostly felt like strangling her mother since she and Rhonda had thrown them in the middle of their lie, she knew soon enough she’d be gone again and she’d have wasted another opportunity to connect. Being forced to hang around Ballyshannon longer than she normally would, seeing familiar people and familiar sights, had softened the hard crust of her memories, and the hollow ache that it covered had been soothed by a deluge of nostalgia.
‘You can do the money,’ Connie announced as she unlocked the rear door to the shop. She was casually dressed in jeans and a light sweater, her spiky salt and pepper pixie cut stylishly zhuzhed with some gel. She walked through the back area, flicking on lights as she went, and they passed bags bulging with donated clothes and other sundry items of household goods and bric-a-brac.
‘It’s a simple system to learn. Mostly we get tap transactions. But people can also pay with cash. Come on, I’ll show you.’
They passed through a lurid, seventies beaded curtain that formed a partition between the back room and the shop. Her mother went through the cash register system, which seemed easy enough. ‘It’ll be busy for the first few hours,’ Connie said, ‘then it’ll settle. That’s when we go out the back and start sorting through the endless piles of donations. The shop only opens Mondays and Thursdays since Covid, so there’s always a backlog.’
Her mother hadn’t been kidding about busy. She opened the door at nine on the dot to admit a dozen people who were already standing outside, and the clock was ticking closer to midday the next time she looked. Surprisingly, though, Sweeney enjoyed it. She knew about eighty per cent of the people who came through and they were all up for a chat.
But it was her mother that was the revelation. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what and where everything was in the shop and she whizzed around like a whirling dervish helping people locate what they wanted, heading out the back to check on a requested item that wasn’t on shelf but might be in the non-sorted items. She chatted and recommended and sometimes even cajoled customers into buying something they might have otherwise left on the shelf had Connie not provided an entertaining discourse on the provenance of said item.
Sweeney couldn’t help but think she was wasted here. She should be at Doherty Motors selling dodgy second-hand cars.
The charity shop was run through their church, though, and Sweeney knew her mother took that very seriously. Connie firmly believed that people/organisations/governments were judged by how they treat their less fortunate and felt passionately about how the money raised supported myriad community programmes for the disadvantaged.
Most notably, though, Sweeney could hear her mother’s laughter all over the store. As a kid, she used to love lying in bed of a night-time, listening to the low murmur of her parents chatting in the room next door, the occasional burst of her mother’s laughter making her smile as she drifted off to sleep. It had been so happy and comforting, and Sweeney had felt safe and sound in the knowledge that all was right in her world.
Then the laugh disappeared for three long years, the house oppressively silent, and Sweeney had feared she’d never hear it again. Hearing it now helped soothe those teenage anxieties that still lurked somewhere deep inside and had been the reason why she’d only ever made brief, infrequent visits home.
‘Sweeney Bailey, it’s so good to see you in town.’
Coming out of her reverie, Sweeney focused on the birdlike woman in front of her. Elderly, a little hunched, wrinkles like ravines, but a wicked sparkle in that shrewd old gaze that had kept a keen eye on the goings-on at the primary school for decades as the volunteer lollipop lady.
‘Hello, Mrs Hitchin. Lovely to see you again.’
A papery-skinned hand slid over the top of Sweeney’s. ‘Always knew you and young Fin were destined for each other.’ A big smile showed off teeth still in remarkable shape—all her own, as she would be quick to point out. ‘Right from the moment you both walked across my crossing holding hands on your first day at school, I said to myself, those two are going to get married one day.’ She patted Sweeney’s hand. ‘I felt it in my water.’
Sweeney gave a nervous half laugh. Betty Hitchin’swaterwas famous around Ballyshannon. Or maybe infamous was a better word. It had predicted births, deaths, marriages, floods, fire, a pandemic, election results and a string of Melbourne Cup winners far more accurately than most pundits.
Few people messed with Betty’s water.
Except this time it waswayoff. Not that Sweeney was stupid enough to mention that. She just smiled and said, ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ Her mother was busy with another customer but Sweeney wasn’t going to wait around for her to be free. God alone knew what else Betty might predict if she wasn’t distracted.
‘Yes, dear.’ She lifted a ceramic bowl of some description onto the counter. It was a plain, mint-green colour, the porcelain a little crazed, a handle protruding from one side. It looked like a giant teacup but was, Sweeney suddenly realised, an old chamber pot. ‘Do you have one of these in canary yellow?’
Sweeney blinked. ‘Um, no, I don’t think so.’
Okay, she didn’t know every single item they had in the shop, but considering nobody had used a contraption like that in a hundred years, she was prepared to put money on the fact that Betty Hitchin was holding Ballyshannon’sonlychamber pot.
And wasn’t the more important question, why on earth did Mrs Hitchin want acanary yellowchamber pot? Surely whatever the colour, they all did the same thing?
Betty pursed her lips as though the answer displeased her and maybe she was going to push the point, but instead she just sighed, looking wistfully at the ugly, antiquated port-apotty. ‘Oh well… I guess I’ll keep looking.’
