After we’ve been in Nanna Pam’s car a while and she hasn’t stopped chatting, I decide to call my other grandma instead. I love Nanna Pam, but Granny’s still my favourite because she’s always ready to listen. I have to be careful, because Nanna Pam thinks my shoe-phone is weird. I’ve heard her ask Dad, ‘When will Jackson grow out of his shoe-phone thing?’ She doesn’t seem to realise that my shoe-phone gets bigger with my feet every year, so I won’t ever grow out of it.
Super slowly, so that Nanna Pam doesn’t notice, I wiggle my foot out of my soccer boot and hold the sole to my ear. It only rings once before Granny answers. Her shoe-phone is in her purple sparkly sandals that match her shimmery kaftan.
‘It’s still Mother’s Day,’ I whisper into the heel of my boot.
‘Don’t I know it, Jack-Jack!’ Granny yells back at me, then she’s laughing like a crazy hyena and that makes me laugh out loud too.
‘Happy Mother’s Day, Granny. I really miss you.’
Nanna Pam glances into the rear-vision mirror, so I drop my hands into my lap. She smiles at me and starts talking about when she was the Grand Poo-Bah of Brazil, doing important trade stuff for the government.
When I put my shoe-phone back up to my ear, it’s just me and Granny talking in a spacetime dimension that the scientists haven’t discovered yet, but one day they will. For now, only dogs and cats can hear our conversations, the same way they know a big storm’s coming before humans do.
Nanna Pam turns onto the road back to Queenscliff.
I can hear Grandpa through the shoe-phone now and he’s calling out my name, but it’s coming out all wrong like Saxon not Jackson. I laugh because I love this joke – ‘Saxon… Taxon… Staxon, ah, I remember – Jackson!’ Grandpa’s been doing that ever since I was a baby all snuggled up in my comfy blue elephant blankie.
Mum doesn’t believe I can remember that far back. She says I’ve got an ‘overactive imagination’ but actually, I’m a memory magnet.
Behind Grandpa’s jokey voice, I hear a hissing like a huge spitting snake and I know exactly what it is: the big dry-cleaning machine at Kaminski’s Dry Cleaners. I can even smell the solvents and spotters and deodorisers through the shoe-phone. All those clothes wrapped in plastic smell so good it makes me want to lick them. Once I did that when I was four, but Mum made me drink a litre of charcoal afterwards, so I never did it again.
My shoe-phone beeps because the videocall is activating now, and that means I’m actually going to see Granny and Grandpa. The screen stays foggy for a moment, then there’s a pale outline of Granny. Suddenly she’s right there, with her happy smile that’s bright enough to power a small toaster. It feels like if I reach out, I could actually touch her.
Granny’s wearing her big purple kaftan today with her dangly crystal beads. Her hair’s in pink rollers because Granny thinks her hair’s too straight, even though it’s the nicest hair I’ve ever seen on a grandma. I don’t know why she’s always trying to make it curly when it’s perfect already, like silvery ribbons streaming down her back.
Grandpa’s waving at me from behind Granny’s head, wearing a black singlet that’s stretched a bit too tight across his belly. His hair is all wavy and stiff from the sticky wax he puts in it every day, and his eyes are big and blue and glimmering. I’ve never seen the Polish sky in summer, but Granny says Grandpa’s eyes are exactly that colour.
Granny’s porcelain Feng Shui cat is sitting on the front counter, with its golden paw powered by invisible magic that makes money pour in through the front door. The Feng Shui cat sits next to the lolly jar, full of jellybeans and chewy toffees and those rancid spearmint leaves that taste like toothpaste. Granny and Grandpa give out handfuls of lollies to all the kids who visit their shop, even to the rude ones and sometimes to their parents too, so that makes everyone come back to Kaminski’s.
Behind the front counter, there’s a big white wall covered in spools of rainbow yarn. Further back, there’s Granny’s old sewing machine with the heavy foot pedal that creaks and groans whenever she pushes it. Granny’s mum carried that sewing machine in a hard leather suitcase all the way from Poland on a steamboat, right after the Nazis started wasting Europe with their butterfly bombs and prison camps and evil ways to torture you for being Jewish or too clever or just a bit unusual.
Everyone in Great-Granny’s family was all of that, so they had to leave their jobs and homes and friends in Warsaw and forget the best dumplings and sour soup and jelly pig’s trotters and come to the other side of the world and live in hot places where no one else wanted to live and eat boring stuff like Weet-Bix and Vegemite.
Grandpa tells me how many pieces he’s dry-cleaned this week and I say, ‘Wow, that’s a lot!’ They both work at Kaminski’s until after midnight most days because that’s what Granny’s parents did. Granny says she ‘inherited a migrant mentality’, which Grandpa says means they ‘just keep turning up’.
I can never exactly remember what a migrant is, so I have to ask again. Grandpa doesn’t get cranky, his eyes just crinkle up like jolly old Santa. He tells me again what a migrant is – ‘a person living in a foreign land’ – and I reckon I might be a migrant too.
I put down the shoe-phone and lean forward to ask Nanna Pam.
‘Nanna, am I a migrant?’
It takes a while for the words to slide out of my mouth. The last word gets stuck on the i sound, so it comes out like myyy-grant.
Nanna Pam snorts like there’s something stuck up her nose. Maybe there is, so I find the mini box of tissues in the seat pocket in front of me and throw them onto the front passenger seat where Nanna Pam can reach them.
‘Jackson!’ Nanna Pam sounds grouchy. ‘Don’t you throw things at me. Especially not when I’m driving.’
I wasn’t actually throwing the tissues at her, I was just trying to help her sniffy nose. I want to explain that to her, but the words don’t come.
I lift up the shoe-phone again to see what’s happening at Kaminski’s; Grandpa’s busy using the steam-iron presser and Granny’s just smiling, waiting for me to talk. Granny’s got a special way of doing that.
‘Something bad happened at Digby’s, Granny,’ I whisper, moving the shoe-phone closer to my mouth. ‘I watched a lady who wasn’t wearing any trousers getting chased by a pig-man who called her a slut.’
Granny sips loudly at something, probably the mug of warm ginger tea she’s always carrying around Kaminski’s as she sprays and steams and presses. Granny’s a miracle cleaner, even with super-difficult stains like wine or coffee or blood. Granny can make clothes so clean and bright again, it’s actually hard to look at them.
‘And how did that make you feel, Jackson?’ Granny asks.
Usually it’s Dr Louisa who asks those kinds of questions. Granny’s voice is like gentle music and she’s asking as if she wants to hug me and, suddenly, tears come into my eyes for no reason at all.
I want to wrap my arms around her middle and press my face into her softness.
‘I… really miss you,’ I whisper. I can’t hear myself properly, but Granny understands me anyway. Sometimes I don’t even have to use any words and she still hears me. ‘Please can you come visit, Granny?’