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    Operation Trash Bandit: Operation Tomcat, #5
    Operation Trash Bandit: Operation Tomcat, #5
    Operation Trash Bandit: Operation Tomcat, #5
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    Operation Trash Bandit: Operation Tomcat, #5

    By Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

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    About this ebook

    Tammy wants new furniture. Ben wants to be allowed to share the household expenses. And Jason just wants his parents to stop fighting all the time. Can Tom make it all happen?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTabitha Ormiston-Smith
    Release dateNov 14, 2024
    ISBN9798227148148
    Operation Trash Bandit: Operation Tomcat, #5
    Author

    Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

    Tabitha Ormiston-Smith was born and continues to age. Dividing her time between her houses in Melbourne and the country, she is ably assisted in her editing business and her other endeavours by Ferret, the three-legged bandit.

    Read more from Tabitha Ormiston Smith

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      Book preview

      Operation Trash Bandit - Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My grateful thanks to the member of the Victoria Police, who was so very helpful with all manner of police details, but modestly requested anonymity.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Jason sighed, and turned up the volume on his phone, sneakily so as not to attract Mum’s notice. She was well away this morning, yelling and banging stuff around in the sink. His earbuds were more of a symbolic protection than a real defence; their tinny little speakers couldn’t compete with Mum in a rage.

      If only Dad would talk to her, really talk, he thought. Instead of hunching down behind the paper with his shoulders round his ears like that. Nothing was more guaranteed to send Mum into orbit; she thought he was ignoring her, she felt disrespected. They were the helpless victims of their acquired gender roles, he thought, with all the superiority of his nineteen years.

      The theme of Mum’s rant was the same as every day: the creeping tide of Dad’s stuff, which had filled up the garage so that they had to park on the street, and which had recently made incursions into the house. Today’s rant was particularly fierce, because Mum had discovered the secret stash of motor parts under the bed in the spare bedroom. Dad, Jason thought, was like Steve Kerrigan in The Castle; he was forever buying this and that piece of what he described as a great bargain which would come in handy/be worth its weight in gold when he did X, X being one of various imagined projects, none of which had the faintest likelihood of coming to fruition. Unfortunately, however, Dad was nothing like Steve’s father, Darryl Kerrigan, who was resourceful and actually used all of the stuff he brought home to enhance his house. Jason wished his own family was more like the Kerrigans. Darryl Kerrigan would never have sat there, all silent, when his wife was upset. In fact, she wouldn’t have been upset anyway, because if there was one thing about the Kerrigans, it was that they all adored each other, and could do no wrong in each other’s eyes. And if Darryl Kerrigan had brought home a pile of old junk, Sal Kerrigan would have beamed and said how clever he was, and probably decorated it with some poster paints from her art class.

      Mum was now approaching critical mass. In a minute she’d be snatching the paper off the old man, and Dad would either lose it completely and start yelling back, or slink off to work. Jason sneaked a look at his phone under the table. Eight twelve; soon it would be over, Dad would be off to work and Mum would be looking for either sympathy or a secondary target. Best to slide out now, if he could manage not to draw attention.

      He grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl and started to ease out from behind the table, but the sudden movement caught his mother’s eye and she rounded on him.

      ‘And where do you think you’re going,’ she shouted. ‘I want you to cut the front lawn this morning, and bloody don’t forget the nature strip this time.’

      ‘Aw, Kylie, leave the boy alone, I’ll do it when I get home tonight,’ said Dad. He sounded exhausted already. Poor Dad; off to another day as an accountant in a bank, which to Jason seemed like the seventh circle of hell, and then he wouldn’t even be able to relax when he got home because he’d be dragging out the lawnmower to shave an eighth of an inch off grass that was already immaculate. And it would be hotter than hell by then.

      In that moment Jason looked at his parents, really looked, stepped out from his adolescent self-absorption and saw them as individuals, as human beings, beings like himself, with hopes and dreams, or the remnants of hopes and dreams, anyway, because surely when they’d been his age, they hadn’t been dreaming of a dreary middle management job in a bank, with numbers, and a sour, bitter life in the suburbs, screaming with rage all the time. Tears pricked at his eyes for the first time since he’d been seven, and had fallen off his skateboard and skinned both knees. And after all the havering and uncertainty, after the months of drifting since the end of school, Jason Mulligan knew, beyond any doubt, what he wanted to do in his life. He would become a counsellor, that was what, and he would help people like his parents to learn a better way to connect and a way forward to deal with their issues. That was his mission in life, for sure. To help people.

      And then, Jason had his Brilliant Idea.

      =^..^=

      Tammy drifted through her house, enjoying the quiet. She circled around – kitchen, empty room, empty room, bedroom, sitting room. She paused to smile at the bedroom – all white, all freshly painted, although it was true the furniture, or rather the lack of furniture, let it down a bit. She really should get a proper bed; the mattress on the floor just lacked dignity, she felt, if you were older than about nineteen. A mattress and a few cardboard boxes were all very well when you were a student, but she was a grown woman, with an honours degree in Fine Arts and a completed novel, which was even now winging its way to the first publisher on her list. She should have a big, comfortable bed, and bedside tables with lamps, and some nice, gauzy curtains blowing in the breeze.

      It was all too hard. She drifted on, to the sitting room, where the rich splendour of the oriental rug drew the eye away from the shabby furniture. Tom was sprawled in the middle of it, his black and white elegance in sharp relief to the intricate carpet.

      Here again, the room was basically renovated: all beautifully painted, and the floor stripped and varnished to a high shine. But the bare windows and broken-down old sofa and armchair, complete with wine stains, were weirdly dissonant. She threw herself into her armchair and rubbed her bare toes along Tom’s white stomach. Those windows, now. It wouldn’t take a lot: even some plain white sheer ones would do, as long as there was enough of them to have plenty of fullness. Nothing worse than skimpy curtains. But she wasn’t really worried about privacy; the house was built on a slope, so there was a short flight of steps up to the balcony that ran outside the French windows in front, and the window at the back was effectively on the first floor. It was just the bare look of it, especially at night. She didn’t like the look of the black night staring in.

      ‘Whatta you reckon, Tom? Will I buy a lot of material and make them myself? Probably can borrow a sewing machine from somewhere.’

      She’d need a lot of the stuff. ‘Shitloads of material we’ll have to buy,’ she told Tom, happy in the knowledge that this was something she could actually afford. That sheer white stuff didn’t cost much. She didn’t know exactly how much, but surely it wouldn’t be as much as five dollars a metre. All the same, she’d need a lot. Just those French windows, they ran along the whole front wall. She’d do something to match on the door, it could be gathered at the top and bottom, her Gran had had something like that, she remembered. Some kind of stretchy wire arrangement, and you gathered it on, and you could pull it away at the side if you wanted to see through.

      The French windows, then, and the ones along the back wall too. The same fabric would also work well in the all-white bedroom. There were two big windows, right along most of the front and side walls. There was so much light in this house. It was going to be beautiful, once she got it all fixed up. There were still the kitchen and two bedrooms not touched, but they didn’t matter. If she was going to do one of those rooms up, she’d have to face up to the piles of still-packed boxes. And the kitchen was perfectly functional, really; it was just that it felt sort of sad, having dinner at the beat-up old laminex table when right there in the very next room was that beautiful carpet.

      The back end of the sitting room opened onto the kitchen; it was a big, long room, stretching the entire depth of the house, so there would be plenty of space to have a little dining area at one end. She imagined serving dinner to Ben on a proper dining table, with a beautiful linen tablecloth. She didn’t actually have a beautiful linen tablecloth, but perhaps Mum would have some of Gran’s old ones stashed away.

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