Just a couple of points about this chapter. I'm not sure if "cold calling" or "cowboys" are general terms in Oz, but, in case they aren't and for any Aussie readers, in the UK "cold calling" means approaching would-be customers - instead of waiting for the customer to approach the firm - and "cowboys" is an expression used for anyone who isn't entirely honest with a customer eg charging much more than a job is worth; doing a botched job etc. "Safe as Houses" is a name I invented for the building firm so apologies if a real one does happen to exist out there - and, BTW, I doubt any building firm would still be in business if it carried on like this fictitious one does!
chapter 15
As the last note trickled away Steven wiped away the last of the tears and drew a shaky breath. Reluctantly, he placed the guitar back in its case and snapped it shut. Time to go home. Whatever, wherever that was.
It wasn't Mum and Dad and his friends Gazza, Andy and Jonno anymore - his parents had perished in the flames and his mates belonged to a rapidly fading past like some movie he thought, but wasn't sure, he vaguely recalled watching a long time ago. It wasn't the Fletchers: they had Frank, Carly, Lynn and Sally - and even Milko, he thought wryly - why did they need another person to worry about, another mouth to feed? It wasn't even the Home because nothing was the same when he'd insisted on going back...
"I could go back to the Home if you wanted me to. It'd save you heaps of money."
Tom and Pippa jumped. They hadn't known Steven was there. Believing all the kids to still be out, they were sitting on the couch, with bills, bank statements, insurance policies, and cups of coffee long gone cold laid out on the small oval table before them, their conversation going round and round in circles about how they could maybe, just maybe, save a dollar here or there.
"Mate, our finances aren't your problem," Tom replied, guiltily stuffing the paperwork he and Pippa had been worriedly discussing back into the alphabet-linked manilla folder and wondering just how much had Steven heard.
Enough to know that Tom and Pippa had agreed from now on they would forgo their only ever extravagance, a meal out with one bottle of red wine between them, in their favourite Chinese restaurant on the fourth Saturday of every month? That he and Pippa had decided they would start to buy the cheapest supermarket brand of coffee from the cheapest supermarket though it tasted disgusting? "We can get used to it. And we can drink more tea too. None of the kids drink coffee anyway so they'll never know."
Enough to know that the expensive leather suite which Pippa had so loved and which had been proudly displayed in the Fletcher home for only a few short months was destined to be sold back, at a massive discount, while they retrieved from the shed the faded and torn ten-year-old couch and matching faded and torn ten-year-old arm-chairs?
Pippa had sighed sadly as she ran a hand along the top of the couch when she came off the phone to Dream Homes Ltd and looked round at the badly scraped furniture and the four long scratches down the side of the wall unit (dating from the time when animal-lover Lynn, claiming it was harmless, had brought home a semi-feral cat, which had immediately run amok) and said, well, at least it would put some much-needed cash back in the coffers, if only for a little while.
Everyone knew that, having grown up with second-hand furniture and hand-me-downs, Pip dreamt of surrounding herself with luxury "when she won the Lotto". And everyone knew, with overwhelming certainty, that if Pip ever did win the Lotto every single cent would be spent on her kids and she'd still be saying things like "This dress will last me a bit longer yet" and still be making do with the old and worn out furniture for herself.
They'd all gathered round, on the day the suite was finally delivered, just to see Pippa's face and smile at her excitement, and Tom had popped open a couple of bottles of fizzy lemonade and poured everyone a glass. The two deliverymen, each gladly accepting a cold drink on what proved to be the hottest day of the year, had gulped back their lemmo and grinned politely, baffled by the fact that the whole family, for some strange reason, were all pretending to sip champagne and seemed to regard the arrival of the not-even-top-of-the-range soft leather three piece suite as a major celebration. Oh, but if they only knew, it was so much more than that!
Three times the Fletchers had almost saved enough to buy the leather suite and three times the money had gone on something else. Once it funded Frank's school trip skiing in Italy; the second time Pippa decided everybody should have complete new wardrobes, not just the usual clothes that the grant they were given for fostering barely covered, but fashionable stuff like their friends got to wear (and, though no one would have minded, Frank insisted it was only fair he opted out of that one); the third time it purchased the wide screen LCD TV that the Fletcher kids had been dropping hints about for ages. Funny, you know, but it never occurred to either Pippa or Tom, seeing as neither of them got much time to watch it, they could have returned the wide screen TV to Dream Homes Ltd instead. I never figured that one.
"Makes sense," Steven insisted, leaning on the back of the famous couch. "After all, I've only been here a few weeks." Somewhere between "here" and "a few" he was furious with himself when he heard an involuntary tremor in his voice. But he looked steadily at his foster parents as he leaned casually behind them, like it was no big deal, like he was just talking about how he might or might not go for a stroll along the beach later. "It's not like I've been here years or anything."
"Steven..." Pippa sounded emotional. She stood up slowly, walked over to the mantelshelf and picked up the silver-plated photo frame to hand to him.
"This photo," she said quietly. "Know why you're in it? You're in it because it's a family photo."
He shrugged, keeping his dark head down looking at the picture so she wouldn't see how close he was to tears.
"You're part of the family concept," Pippa said in the same quiet, choked voice. "We keep that photo on the mantlepiece because we're your family and this is your home."
"Home is where the hearth is." Tom made yet another of the nervous bad jokes that dogged him whenever he was anxious and he was real anxious right now, worried that his foster son was trying to take far too much responsibility on his young shoulders.
It wasn't Steven's fault that Tom had lost his job. It was entirely his own doing. The scene played out again in Tom's mind...
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"Actually, Miss Dixon," Tom suddenly interrupted his workmate Eddie Brookes' flow of words. "The roof is fine."
"But I thought you said..." The eccentric elderly woman with the air of refinement and falling fortunes, her black dress neat but worn, and the silver lizard brooch on the lapel of the matching short-sleeved linen jacket obviously paste, rested against her eagle's head walking stick, catching her breath and looking both puzzled and relieved. Then something else captured her attention for a moment. "Flossie! Flossie, come here! Bad girl!"
Tom grinned at the small black dog nosing in his work bag - no doubt having caught the scent of the now sadly gone ham sangers - and bent down to scratch her floppy ears. Flossie looked gratefully up at him through age-weakened brown eyes, her tail thumping. Much of her fur was peppered with white now. She and her elderly owner were everything to each other. All that they had. Both old ladies set in their ways and growing old together.
His colleague hid his fury and did his utmost best to retrieve the job.
"Bloody hell, Tom, you saw it for yourself! My friend means well, but his expertise isn't roofing - fortunately, eh, Tom?" Brookes smiled matily though neither man had ever liked the other. "Look, Miss Dixon, I don't want to frighten you but I'm going to give it to you straight here. I've been a roofer forty years and I've never seen a roof so badly storm-damaged. You're just lucky we happened to be passing. Okay, I'll admit, it's a major job, we'll need to replace every tile and check out the roof beams haven't rotted too, but if it isn't sorted and fast, come the next storm you won't even have a roof to complain about. And we offer good rates, unlike some - I'd hate to think of a nice lady like yourself getting ripped off by cowboys. Don't call ourselves Safe as Houses Conglomerate for nothing."
"Cold calling", the practice of knocking on doors and suggesting repairs to the householder, had started out innocuously enough. Safe as Houses Conglomerate (SHC had the monopoly on the building trade in the city, having bought up many small businesses) had suggested it when the Australian economy nosedived and, homeowners being hit particularly hard, work began drying up. No employee was pressurized into it, but it was actively encouraged and there was a huge incentive: the introduction of big fat bonuses for those who managed to secure the most contracts.
And then, while SHC deliberately turned a blind eye, some people, like Eddie Brookes, got greedy.
Tom wasn't a roof-tiler; his trade was carpentry, but, like many of the blokes, he had picked up a working knowledge of other skills through years on construction sites and it had been obvious to him that the roof needed nothing more than a few tiles replacing here and there. Basic renovation work really, hardly the "major job" Eddie was claiming it to be.
"No." the grey-haired old lady suddenly looked very determined. "No, I'm sorry, Mr Brookes, but I've changed my mind about the work. I get...an inkling...about people. Things. Woman's intuition, I suppose you might call it. And I think your friend is being the honest one here."
Fiona Dixon grasped her imitation pearl necklace and pressed her lips together and Flossie shook herself and licked Tom's hand, giving up the joy of having her ears scratched to stand beside her mistress, and Tom smiled to himself despite his problems. Clearly a united front.
"Ed was far too much of a coward to deck me - though he wanted to." Tom grinned, when he and Pippa were mulling over events some weeks later. Being small and slight, Tom had taken up Judo as a kid to protect himself from school bullies and, though he wasn't a violent man, he was still well able to take care of himself in a fight.
"I dunno though, Pip," he added, sighing wearily. "It's all very well taking a high moral stance, but this is the real world and we've got five kids to think about. Then to find out later that Miss Dixon secretly had a fortune to come from an inheritance and could well have afforded the work, even if it wasn't needed...Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut."
"You know you'd never have been able to live with yourself if you had, Tom Fletcher," his wife replied.
They sat on the soft leather couch, their arms around each other's shoulders, cheek to cheek, only half listening to the Bruce Springsteen CD playing quietly in the background, and Pippa turned and gently blew on his ear to make him smile again.
"Pity the kids are due home any minute..." Tom grinned.
Pippa laughed. "Wouldn't be without any of them though. Or you. No matter what."
"Me neither, Pip. And we're not in dire straits - yet. We've got a nice home. Nice furniture. Especially our much-longed-for leather suite."
They sat for a while without speaking, knowing that, whatever happened, they were in it together.
Tom's actions had had far reaching consequences that no one could have foreseen. Heiress Fiona Dixon hd not only contracted an out-of-town firm to repair the roof, she had signed them up to work on the new holiday chalets she'd decided to have built. And she had mentioned to a distant relative, who was, as it turned out, Terence Moorcroft-Dixon, owner of the world famous De Luxe Australian chain of hotels that, due to their malpractice, it would be advisable to cancel any proposed building work with SHC. But lastly, and most damaging of all, she had gone to the newspapers...
Safe as Houses Conglomerate's shining reputation was in shreds. Tom's moral high ground cost millions in lost revenue and, as SHC had already had to tell many of his colleagues, they "reluctantly had to let him go". Despite the high unemployment, a handful of men managed to get other jobs, but Tom was on the wrong side of forty and nobody was prepared to employ him. Ironically enough, not even Fiona Dixon.
Miss Dixon, though she was unaware of it as yet, was beginning to experience the early onset of dementia and there were sudden confusing gaps in her memory. The way she recalled and told the event, both Eddie and Tom had tried to persuade her to get the roof done unnecessarily. Only Flossie could have told the truth and she wasn't talking.
At last Pippa broke the silence that had been punctuated only by the steady ticking of the pendulum clock and Bruce Springsteen's gravelly voice.
"We could always sell our much-longed-for leather suite," she said.
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Steven glanced up fleetingly to acknowledge his foster Dad's weak joke before his face clouded over again.
"I've made up my mind. I want to go back to the Home. Let me try it for a week or two. See what suits us all." He smiled the Steven smile that years ago a neighbour had told his proud mother would always ensure Steven Matheson got his own way.
And he wasn't budging on this one.
