The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

People called them the Trashtown Gypsies, which Andrea knew was supposed to be derogatory but she couldn’t help but think it sounded poetic and romantic. It certainly sounded a lot better than the Jones-Smith-Corbin-and-Wilson families.

Andrea and her extended family of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents, and people who’d just wandered in one day and decided to stay, lived on a patch of land just close enough to the centre of town to be classed as urban. Rural probably summed it up better, given the amount of dusty yellow grass stretching out in all directions around the mishmash of cobbled-together dwellings and old caravans jacked up on blocks, and Andrea was willing to bet that the members of the town council often wished for a reclassification. Redefining the area as rural would certainly let those council busybodies off the hook although if they didn’t have Trashtown to bother themselves with, what would they do with all their time?

She swung herself off the bus to follow her brother, ignoring the catcalls of the kids still sitting in the seats behind her. The bus would laboriously turn at the end of the road before taking its remaining passengers to the new housing estate a few kilometres away. Andrea had no idea why the kids thought they were better than the inhabitants of Trashtown, considering their swanky new subdivision didn’t boast a single shop and they too had to catch the bus to the nearest school.

Luke raised his middle finger to the back of the bus as it trundled away in a cloud of grey dust but Andrea didn’t care enough to turn around. She set off up the track, already looking forward to a cool drink of water and kicking her shoes off.

“Hey, Andrea! Wait up. I’ve got something to show you.”

Andrea carried on walking. She couldn’t imagine that Luke, with his passion for old Spiderman comics and cheap plastic spinning tops would have anything that she’d be interested in seeing. She’d fill a bucket with water when she got home, she decided, and she’d dunk her bare feet in it. Nana Ginty did that sometimes, sitting in the weathered lawn chair with the splintered seat and groaning in ecstasy as she dipped her swollen old ankles into the cool water. Andrea’s ankles were neither old nor swollen, but the cool water still seemed like a good idea.

“Andrea.” He grabbed roughly at her arm, his gleeful, freckled face held only inches from her own. “You’ve got to see this. Rashid let me have a $5 scratch lottery card as a swap for some of my comics.”

Andrea shook off his arm and stared at her brother, not impressed with this news. “He gave you a scratch card? That’s not allowed. You’re not old enough and he could get in lots of trouble.” Rashid was the spotty faced young man who worked behind the counter at the R&B Convenience Store down the road from the school, and Andrea had seen his envious expression whenever Luke showed him one of his Spiderman comics. The comics used to belong to their uncle and were Luke’s by default now. Uncle Brett left Trashtown ten months ago in search of something better. Word was it that he was now whiling away his hours in the county prison after a failed robbery attempt on a pharmacy, and Andrea sometimes wondered if he thought his life now was any better than what he’d left behind.

Luke shrugged. ”He wanted the comics real bad and I told him I’d only give them to him if he gave me a scratch card. He paid for it and slipped it across the counter. I had to promise not to tell anyone.” Luke gasped and stopped, the guilt at what he’d just said seeping across his face like a stain, and again he grabbed urgently for her arm. “You can’t tell anyone.”

A tiny seed of an idea nudged against Andrea’s brain and began to grow into something bigger. She allowed a sly smile to tug at the corner of her mouth. “I won’t tell anyone, but only if you promise to share your winnings with me.”

“What? Get off. If I win anything it’s mine.”

“Suit yourself. You won’t win anything anyway and even if you did, you couldn’t collect it. You have to be over 18. You’re not as smart as you think you are, Lucas Jones.” She whirled away from him, swinging her bag carelessly, to continue her march up the track. Uncle Don had said they might have a BBQ tonight, with sausages wrapped in white bread and a big squirt of that artificial green-coloured tomato sauce out of a carton he said fell off the back of a truck. Uncle Don seemed to find a lot of stuff that had fallen off the back of a truck.

Luke hurried to catch up, struggling to extend his shorter strides to match her step. “Don’t you want to see?” he wheedled. “Three of the same means you can win up to $250,000.”

“Yeah, right. No one ever wins on those things. You’ll be lucky to win $2, which isn’t even as much as the ticket cost.” Andrea considered herself an expert on gambling, mostly due to earwigging in on conversations between Auntie Jodie and her mother about what went on down at the club. The two women were enormous fans of the pokie machines and the chocolate wheel, although they never seemed to have much luck with either. However, after their monthly visit to the local casino they’d always arrive home pink-cheeked and flushed, boasting about their fried chicken supper and the half price glasses of wine, so Andrea supposed their lack of luck didn’t put too much of a downer on their night.

They’d nearly reached the bend in the track and Andrea could see the small, colourful settlement spread out in front of them. The land belonged to Grandpa Jack, the result of a debt owed by some long dead friend and as far as Andrea was concerned, it was the perfect place to live. Their oldest brother Ken had set up a generator to supply electricity before moving to Perth to work in the mines, and there was running cold water in each of the houses. If you needed hot water you had to boil it, but Andrea thought that was all part of the fun.

“I’m scratching it now,” Luke crowed. “I’ve already got two crowns. If I get one more I’m a winnnerrrrr.”

“You’ll always be a loser to me,” Andrea muttered. She idly scratched at a fresh mosquito bite on her elbow. If she had to list one thing that she didn’t like about Trashtown, it would have to be the bugs. Bugs and Andrea Jones just did not get along.

“Andrea!” Luke’s voice was a strange combination of a squeal and a gasp. “Oh Jesus Christ God Bollocks.”

“What? Have you won $2?” Despite herself, Andrea stopped walking and peered over her brother’s shoulder to look at the ticket in his hand. It looked like any other scratch lotto ticket to her, this one a rectangle of vomited-coloured green decorated with cartoon kings wearing too-large crowns on their flat heads. She squinted her eyes in the glare of the sun, unsure of what she was supposed to be looking at. “What is it? What are you squawking about?”

“Three crowns. Andrea, I’ve got three crowns.” She could feel his body shaking as she leaned over his shoulder and she saw now that the colour had drained from his face, leaving his freckles standing out in stark relief against his white skin.

“Let me see.” She snatched the ticket out of his hand and scanned her eyes across the just-revealed symbols. “Where does it say you need three crowns to win?”

He stabbed a trembling finger at the gold text on the top of the ticket. “There. $250,000 for three crowns. Andrea, we’ve won the big one.”

***

They still had their BBQ that night but no one was in the mood for eating. The Trashtown Gypsies, everyone except Brett who was in jail, Ken who was in Perth, and Grandpa Jack who was dead, huddled around the bonfire and debated what they should do with their good fortune. There was never any doubt that the money would be shared, despite Luke’s earlier comment about keeping the money all to himself. The Trashtown Gypsies lived by the motto All For One and One For All, except when jail, Perth, or death was involved.

“They call dollar bills greenbacks in the States. We could ask for the money in greenbacks and move to the US of A.” Uncle Don was still shaking his head in disbelief. He hadn’t stopped shaking it since Luke and Andrea ran screaming up to the camp to tell everyone and for some reason he was fixated on this America idea, although most of the others had stopped listening to him now.

“I can’t believe my little brother won a quarter of a mill. $250,000 smack-a-roonies.” Debbie, Andrea and Luke’s oldest sister, playfully attempted to kiss him but he scowled and ducked out of the way. “What are we going to do with it?”

“A Gold Coast apartment,” Cousin Julie said bossily, as if it was she who’d won the ticket and she had first dibs on what the money went on.

“Don’t be a dick, Julie. $250,000 is nowhere near enough to buy an apartment on the GC, even if there is a glut.” Uncle Dave rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We could buy a couple of new cars, not new ones exactly, but second-hand ones that look new.”

“Computers,” said Andrea and Luke’s second sister Mandy-Ann. “Laptops. And a Wi-Fi connection. I’m getting through a shit ton of data since we moved out here to the boondocks.” Mandy-Ann spent a lot of her time on her phone, swiping right and waiting for her dates to come out to Trashtown to pick her up for a night on the town.

“We could do up some of the houses. Add hot water plumbing and an inside loo for the ones that don’t have it.” Aunt Jodie gazed across to her own ramshackle dwelling, which was half of shipping container tacked onto the end of a retired relocatable office building. “I’d feel like I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“No one forced you to move out here, Jodie,” Sarah said tartly. “You had a perfectly good council house in Greenfern before you came here.” Sarah wasn’t exactly related to anyone, she’d just arrived one day when the car she’d hitched a ride in dropped her at the end of the track. She’d wandered in, said hi to everyone as she passed some beers around, and set up her tent. By the time the next month rolled around, Uncle Gazza had dismantled the tent and moved her into his caravan and it’d stayed that way ever since.

“What would you know, Sarah?” Jodie threw dagger-eyes at Sarah, while Andrea quietly watched and wondered if they’d have another one of their girl fights. They’d had one once before, throwing ineffectual punches at one another and pulling each other’s hair while the men hooted and whistled and yelled out “Someone bring a wading pool filled with jelly!” Uncle Gazza and Uncle Dave tried to place bets on who would be the winner until Uncle Don hauled the two women apart and told the other men to grow up.

“Enough.” Uncle Gazza’s roar stopped everyone in their tracks. “Someone has to go and collect the money before anyone can do anything, and a ten-year-old kid certainly can’t be the one to hand a scratchie ticket across.”

“You should do it, Maureen,” Nana Ginty’s voice was firm and authorative, silencing her kin as she spoke. Andrea supposed that everyone shut up in surprise because Nana Ginty hardly ever said anything, not even when she found a brown snake curled in the bottom of the dunny. “You’re the boy’s mother. Tell them you bought it. The owner will be so happy to hear that a winning ticket was sold at his shop that he won’t even question you.”

Andrea and Luke’s mother looked doubtful, tugging self-consciously at her hair and biting her lip. “There might be TV cameras there. I don’t want to be on the TV.”

“There won’t be TV cameras,” Uncle Don scoffed, lighting up yet another of his foul-smelling durries. “They won’t even know you’re planning on going in.”

“I’ll do it.” Auntie Jodie reverently took the ticket from Luke, holding it in her hand as if it were a tiny baby bird just fallen from the nest. “Don can drive me into town tomorrow to hand it in.”

***

In the end, all the discussions and arguments meant nothing. It turned out that Rashid, in the hopes of getting the money for himself, confessed to his boss that he’d bought the scratchie for Luke shortly after Auntie Jodie presented herself at the counter with the winning ticket. CCTV footage was duly examined, Rashid got the boot, and the Lottery Commission quietly re-absorbed the prize money into its coffers with a minimum of fuss.

Uncle Don took it the hardest. He moped around for weeks, aware that all his hopes of traveling to America were now dust in the wind. In the end, Nana Ginty wrapped him on the knuckles with her walking stick and told him she was tired of his bleating and if he wanted to go the States, he should think about getting himself a job.

Uncle Gazza agreed with Nana Ginty and took Uncle Don aside for a ‘man-to-man talk’ about how ‘the grass isn’t always greener’.

Aunt Jodie, along with Andrea and Luke’s mother, started going to the casino twice a week, hoping to catch some of the luck while it was still in the air. However, they stopped that after a month as they said it was getting too expensive and the luck had probably moved on by now anyway.

Andrea was sorry they didn’t get the money, but mainly on Luke’s behalf as she knew how much it’d meant to him. As for her, she was just happy that life at the Trashtown Gypsy camp was back to normal.

The End