by Joy Dettman
‘It was all over the news at the time.’
‘In the fire,’ he said. ‘That’s right. I haven’t thought about her in years, but I can see her tonight. We’re in the backyard at Armadale and she’s stamping her feet because I won’t give her my trike. I can see them all in Armadale, almost smell Ray’s leather jacket. He rode a motorbike. It’s too much,’ he said, then walked through to the bedroom.
She brushed her teeth, rinsed her face, creamed it then followed him.
‘Did you know that Itchy-foot came from a long line of doctors?’ he asked.
‘I told you he used to be a ship’s doctor – back when Robin decided he was going to study medicine. He was a writer too. After he died, someone posted a pile of his diaries to Jenny. Georgie read them. She said they put Lady Chatterley’s Lover to shame.’
‘Jenny told Robin that his grandfather used his doctoring on boats only to get from A to B. She said he had little interest in medicine but came alive on stage.’
‘I’d never heard her voice before today,’ Cara said.
‘I’ve known it forever. It hit a raw nerve-ending,’ he said. ‘Robin is over the moon.’
‘I noticed,’ Cara said. ‘And so it begins. I forget, Morrie. For months at a time I actually do forget who we are. Then one way or another, back it comes to haunt me.’
‘You’re Myrtle and Robert’s daughter,’ he said.
‘You and I, Jenny and Georgie know different. Did she say anything to you about . . . our marriage?’
‘Nothing.’
Cara didn’t hang her frock. She tossed it over the back of a chair, pulled on the long t-shirt she’d hung over that chair when she’d dressed this morning, then joined him in their old four-poster bed. Its mattress and bedding were twenty-first century, as were the two lights on either side of the bed. She touched her own and the room darkened, though not enough. Mid-summer evenings were long.
They could have bought blackout drapes for the windows, but only passing birds could see in, and that long room needed all the light it could get by day. She lay on her back looking up at the shape of a heavy beam, her favourite beam, the original builder’s rough axe cuts carved into time. It was high enough above the bed, but slanting down fast, was too low where it met the external wall. Morrie claimed to have suffered concussion for a month before he’d learnt when and where to duck his head in these upper rooms.
They had rooms with easier access. They had rooms Tracy advertised as palatial, but this one was their own. They’d slept beneath that beam when newly divorced. Cara had spent months here, editing Rusty by day, and by night, making sinful love beneath that rough-cut beam. A memory place this room. They’d keep climbing those convoluted stairs until . . . until the day they couldn’t.
‘She kept calling me Jimmy,’ he said. ‘No one has used that name since my grandfather died. It began to sound right.’
‘Georgie always spoke of you as Jimmy. I never related my Morrie Grenville to her Jimmy Morrison. There’s a part of me still that can’t.’
‘She told me that you knew the facts of my alleged “kidnap”.’
‘I told you what I knew years ago, and you didn’t believe me.’
‘During my denial period,’ he said. ‘Tell me again.’
Cara adjusted her pillow then lay back to stare at that beam again. ‘You were burning up with some killer flu. A neighbour’s son rode into town to get someone to drive you and Jenny down to the hospital. Lorna Hooper arrived. She took you but not Jenny. The Hoopers hated her. The next day Jenny was in hospital with pneumonia. She was sick for weeks, for years, Georgie once said. They never saw you again.’
‘She told me tonight that my grandfather found out she’d aborted Ray’s baby, that he’d blackmailed her into signing me over to my father. Incidentally, she ripped up my bill of sale.’
‘I’ve been tempted to do that for years.’
‘It’s been a part of me,’ he said.
‘Not one of your better parts. That abortion is a fact,’ Cara said. ‘She had a nursing sister friend in Armadale who “fixed” unwanted pregnancies for the neighbours. She “fixed” two for Jenny. The second one put her into hospital and when she was released her husband beat her to pulp. That’s when she left him.’
‘I can remember the day we left, coming home from school to a pile of cases and rolled-up bedding on the veranda. She’d forgotten my trike. We had to write a ticket to tie onto its handlebars.’
‘What else do you remember?’
‘Jenny squeezing milk out of a goat. Jenny frying a whole pan full of eggs. The taste of those eggs. She served them on pancakes.’
‘Can you remember Lorna taking you?’
‘Nothing. There’s blank space. I was at Granny’s then I woke up in a room with a light shade swinging overhead and Mum leaning over the bed.’
‘You knew her before you went to live with her?’
‘The Hoopers had always been around. They used to buy me presents. When we lived in Armadale, they sent me a train set that blew smoke. They bought me a bike with training wheels when I lived with them in Balwyn. I remember that house, those years. We lived in Balwyn until my grandfather died.’
‘Was your father there?’
‘Never. I can remember all hell breaking loose a few days after my grandfather died. He’d given Mum and Bernard control of his estate. Lorna went crazy and for some reason blamed her uncle, Henry. We put her on a boat to visit him.’
Silence, then he sighed and spoke again. ‘Remember how the crowd used to throw streamers to boats leaving port?’
‘No one I knew ever left port,’ Cara said.
‘They used to toss rolls of coloured streamers and someone on board or on the dock would catch them. Mum and Bernard kept throwing the streamers as if they were pitching rocks at Lorna. Then when the last streamer broke, they grabbed each other and started dancing. I thought they’d gone mad or thought the crowd down there would think they’d gone mad.’
‘I would have danced too,’ Cara said. She’d met Lorna.
‘Everything changed then. They bought Lorna her own house in Kew and we moved down to a little place in Cheltenham. Mum loved the beach. Then Lorna came home and moved herself in with us, so we moved again, and again – until we came over here.’
‘Why didn’t she follow you to England?’
‘Old Henry died while Lorna was over here, and to her last day, Aunt Letty swore that Lorna had put a curse on him. She used to call her that black witch. Had she come within a mile of the Hall, Aunt Letty would have had her burnt at the stake.’
‘How old was your mother when she married Bernard?’ Cara asked.
‘Early forties, I think.’
‘Life might have been very different for you if they’d had their own children.’
‘Letty liked me – and life is what it is,’ he said.
‘Did Jenny mention me at all?’
‘Robin asked her if she remembered your mother. She said she’d rented a room at her boarding house, that her landlady had a baby shortly before she left Sydney.’
‘See,’ Cara said. ‘I was born three weeks before she left Sydney. She never lies, Morrie. I wished to God she had the night she told me that any one of five American sailors could have been my father.’
‘I’ve known who she was forever but spent most of my life attempting to know who they told me she was. Mum used to call her an unfortunate girl. My grandfather told me I was better off not remembering her. Lorna told me she was the town trollop, shunned by every decent person in town.’ He breathed in for a long moment while overhead the old timbers groaned. ‘After Mum died and I found my bill of sale, I came up with my own description of a slut capable of selling her six-year-old son for two thousand pounds.’
‘Mum loved her, and you. She told me once that God had sent one of his angels to her door so she might have her own baby to love.’
‘Angel at My Door?’
‘Yep. The first real image I had o
f Jenny was of a faceless girl who gave birth on Mum’s kitchen floor, no doctor, no midwife. A girl who tied my cord with a length of used string, cut me free with blunt scissors, handed me to Mum, then put on her makeup and high heels and went upstairs to pull off her scam.’
‘How did they do it?’
‘We had an elderly spinster lodger who’d never been closer to a birth than the columns in her daily newspaper. She came down, saw Mum sitting in the mess of birth with me in her arms and that was as much as she wanted to see – Miss Matilda Robertson. I used to think that Mum had the backbone of a worm, until she told me the story of my birth. She had guts, just not of a type I recognised.’
‘There’s not much left of Jenny, but she’s got a backbone of steel. You saw the mood I was in when the kids dragged me down there today. I wasn’t pleasant. She told me I was like my grandfather, that being likened to him was an insult.’
‘She loathed him,’ Cara said. ‘Georgie loathed him. She told me once that she stabbed him in the backside with a pair of embroidery scissors – when she was five or six years old.’
‘Fearless Georgie,’ he said. ‘I remember one night in Armadale, being woken up by thumping and Ray yelling. Georgie opened our door. Jenny was on the floor, blood all over her face, Ray kicking her. I can see Georgie now, running at them, throwing herself on top of Jenny. She would have been seven,’ he said. ‘Jesus.’ He shuddered.
‘What?’
‘Memories,’ he said. ‘That one raises goose bumps on my soul.’
Only the sounds of night then, the creaking of old beams until Cara spoke. ‘It hurts,’ she said. ‘I know it shouldn’t, but it does – her coming here to find you, not me. She carried me for the same nine months. She gave birth to me.’
‘While I can convince myself that you’re Myrtle and Robert’s daughter, I can live happily ever after. She’s convinced herself that you’re Myrtle’s daughter, so she could have her one day. That’s all she wanted. One day. She flies home in the morning.’
‘Did you ask her about Georgie?’
‘I meant to tell you the second I saw you. She works for your Mafioso fiancé.’
‘For Chris?’
‘Yep. She’s got a fourteen-year-old daughter – with hair as red as her mother’s.’
‘Is she married?’
‘To a Paul someone.’
‘Works for Chris, doing what?’
‘Solicitor,’ he said. ‘She got into some university as a mature-age student, was forty-five when she graduated –’
‘Paul Dunn?’ Cara asked.
‘Could be. It was a short name. Did you know him?’
‘No, but it was a Georgina Dunn who got attacked by Dino Collins. I phoned Chris the morning after Cathy phoned to tell us that Collins was dead. He told me that an intruder had randomly attacked one of his solicitors in her garden, a Georgina Dunn. It wasn’t random, Morrie. Collins couldn’t get at me so he went after Georgie. My God. My God.’ Nothing more to say but ‘My God’, until they heard water running and old pipes knocking.
‘What time are they leaving?’ he asked.
‘After breakfast.’
‘Think we could give breakfast a miss?’
‘And have Cathy bailing us up in bed?’
‘No hint of how long they plan to stay in London?’
‘Until Tom and Gerry have to break up their first fight.’
‘Do you think you could possibly refer to them as Gerard and Thomas, or Gerry and Tom?’
‘It doesn’t flow,’ she said.
Once Henry’s ghost started his knocking, he refused to stop until the water downstairs was turned off. He was still knocking, Cara drifting in that place before sleep, when Morrie sprang upright.
‘What’s up now?’
‘Jenny gave me my father’s war medals and I don’t know what I did with them. Cover your eyes. I need light.’
‘They’ll be in your suit pocket.’
‘They were in an envelope. I had it in my hand when I went for a walk. I could have dropped it.’
He found it, in his suit jacket pocket, and he brought it to the bed. ‘It feels like aniseed balls. We used to buy aniseed balls when we went to the movies, used to see who could make one last the longest,’ he said as he poured the contents of the envelope onto the quilt.
There were medals, half a dozen of them, but no bag of aniseed balls. There was a worn grey leather drawstring pouch. He pounced on it.
‘Granny’s beads,’ he said unknotting the leather cord, then pouring the amber necklace into his palm. The bedside light insufficient, he took the necklace to the bathroom. She followed him with the envelope and caught him counting beads as a Catholic counted rosary beads.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Granny’s prehistoric mozzie.’
She needed her glasses to see it. She put them on, then beneath the strong mirror light saw the remains of an insect trapped in one of the larger beads.
‘I can remember Jenny showing it to us. Granny was emptying out the old trunk so we could take it with us to Armadale. It sucked the blood from dinosaurs and cave men,’ he said, then turned to her. ‘I don’t think I can let her go, love.’
‘She’s letting us go,’ Cara said. She found a note inside the envelope, a tiny note written on a page ripped from a notebook, the writing by necessity, was small.
Dear Cara,
If you’re reading this then it means that I’ve found my lost children and that I’m jubilantly happy. The amber beads belonged to Granny. They’re over a hundred years old and were her only treasure. She would have loved to know that they’d gone to the woman Jimmy married.
With my love, Jenny. XXX
PART THREE
ROADS
Night came down early in June, and as Jenny started up her car in the supermarket car park, she turned on her headlights. She’d picked up a few basics, all she’d need for tonight and tomorrow. She could have slept at Georgie’s and done the trip in the morning, but so close to home and her car waiting for her on the lawn, she’d made the decision to drive and hadn’t stopped until Willama. She’d be home before dark. She wanted to see Lila, wanted to sleep in her own bed. If nothing more, that tour had put her off anonymous beds for life.
Given the optimum driving conditions, Willama was thirty-five minutes from Woody Creek. The conditions weren’t optimum at dusk, so she kept her speed down. A few truck drivers may have cursed her. She had a tail of trucks behind her when she crossed over the Mission Bridge. They passed her, one after the other when the road straightened out, but any kangaroos on the road that night may have thought twice before playing chicken with that convoy, so Jenny stayed on the tail of the last truck and got her speed up to the limit.
Harry knew she was coming. She’d phoned him before leaving Greensborough. He’d said he’d meet her at the house and have the kettle boiling. She needed her own mug, her own brand of tea, then her bed.
Five-twenty when she made the turn into Three Pines Road and drove that final kilometre to Hooper’s corner.
The trees had leaves when she’d left. They wore their ghostly grey tonight, and the rose hedge appeared to have been pruned by a chainsaw, which would do it no harm. There was a light showing in her kitchen, and to a weary traveller, tonight that light looked like home.
The gate open, she drove in, drove down to her usual place and Lila was there to meet her, to greet her, lick her hands and her face when Jenny reached down for a cuddle.
‘The conquering hero returned from the war,’ Harry said.
‘It was a war,’ Jenny said. She handed Harry a supermarket bag, picked up the other and her handbag and followed him indoors.
*
Twenty kilometres west of town, two brothers and their mate got into a silver–green Mazda to begin the trip to Willama, and not via the Mission Bridge. Back in the horse and buggy days, when the railway line was the main artery feeding life’s blood into Woody Creek, man and his beasts had forged a track that followed those l
ines as far as the Melbourne highway. They’d named that track Willama Road.
It was still there, dusty in the dry, impassable in the wet, but until the Mission Bridge and the sealed road leading to it were declared open, that track had been the only way for Woody Creek residents to access doctors and hospital.
The train lines crossed over the highway and continued on their way to the Big Smoke. Old Willama Road dead-ended when it hit bitumen. A left-hand turn and thirty kilometres would take a driver the back way into Willama.
Drovers and their herds still used that track, as did a few of the farmers who owned properties out that way. Enough used Old Willama Road to warrant a Stop sign where it T-intersected with the highway.
The driver of the silver–green Mazda had a girl waiting for him in Willama. Three times a week he drove that way, leaving a trail of dust behind him. He was too familiar with the Stop sign to heed its warning. Nine times out of ten when he turned left onto the highway, there wasn’t a car on the road.
There is always a tenth time.
Black vehicles are not easily seen at that time of night. Its driver, unfamiliar with the big SUV, found the wiper switch instead of the headlights. He was cursing the flapping wipers when the Mazda shot out of the scrub. He attempted to find the brake, but his right foot out of action, he was driving with his left foot – never a good idea in an automatic vehicle.
The impact spun the smaller vehicle into the path of a fuel tanker, approaching fast from the opposite direction. The truckie took evasive action. The noise of his action had roosting birds screeching from their trees, but as those tankers are apt to do, his jack-knifed, then rolled.
The guardian of fools and thieves allowed the SUV to remain on its wheels. Its nose was in the scrub, but the driver rammed the stick into reverse and backed up. There was a tangle of wreckage barring his way, so he took his only option, that dirt track that followed the railway lines. He turned the wipers off, noticed that his front wheels were not responding as they should, but found the switch that turned on the headlights, one of which lit the track ahead.
The truckie hadn’t been written down to die that night. He scrambled free of his over-turned cabin, saw a body wrapped in a tangle of metal, then looked for the third vehicle. He’d seen it coming. It had been big, dark. He’d seen the impact. He was thinking it must have ended up in the scrub when he smelt petrol. It shocked his legs into action. They ran him back in the direction he’d come from. They got him well clear of the accident before his load exploded.