At five o’clock Emma climbed the back stairs and let herself in. Melvyn’s flat was crowded with lavish Parisienne-style furniture – or at least what Emma thought was Parisienne style furniture, based on the glossy French magazines downstairs. High pelmets, rich red drapes that pooled on the parquetry floor and an oversize gilt mirror. Cubist lamps, bronze figures of naked women and an art deco copper-and-glass chandelier. Fabulous art on the walls: prints by Matisse and Picasso. Emma liked each piece separately, but together they were too much, too fussy. Too try-hard.
She wandered around the overblown rooms, including the bedroom with its lacy scrap of cream silk lying on the gold damask counterpane. Was that what Melvyn expected her to wear? What was the point? She may as well be naked. Yet the thought of losing her job and Elsie was enough to persuade her.
Emma took off her dress, hung it up carefully, put on the lace teddy and looked in the mirror. She shuddered to think of Melvyn seeing her like that. A memory flashed by, of another day when she was standing in her underwear. A day with Tom looking on, making her blush. Tom, with his brilliant brown eyes, blazing with an overwhelming, irresistible vitality. Why couldn’t she be waiting for him instead?
Time dragged on. This must be how Marie Antoinette felt before her execution. Then, the sound of the front door opening. Emma froze. Before she had time to think, Melvyn was upon her. He tore off the teddy without a word and shoved her back on the bed. She closed her eyes, trying to block out his hot, clammy hands kneading her breasts and the ragged sound of his panting breath.
Every instinct screamed to fight him off. To gouge her fingers into his eye sockets, knee him in the groin and escape. But she couldn’t. She was paralysed, just like her mother. So instead Emma lay, still as death, going deeper and deeper into shock. He flopped his fat belly on top, forced Emma’s legs apart with his knee, and tried to shove himself into her. Grunting and sweating. Harder and harder, and harder still until he forced his way inside. She felt a distant pain, as if through a thick fog. A pain that didn’t belong to her. And as she lay suffocating under Melvyn Spriggs flabby, bucking body, she thought of Tom and began to cry.
Chapter 16
Tom filed into the paymaster’s office behind the other men, excited to receive his first pay packet. He’d begun the new year working at the Hobart Aero Club as a trainee civil aviation mechanic, living at Cambridge Aerodrome, sleeping in a humble dorm with five other apprentices. Lumpy bunks, thin blankets and stodgy, tasteless food, but Tom didn’t mind. It had been like his birthday every day, investigating the innermost workings of a dizzying array of aircraft, learning the secrets of flight in a satisfying nuts-and-bolts way.
The problem was that Tom didn’t only want to know how planes worked. He wanted to fly them himself, guide them through the heavens, leave his earthbound existence behind. It would be next year at least before he could transfer to a pilot training course, and even then, entry wasn’t guaranteed.
So he’d applied for a Royal Australian Air Force flying cadetship. Technically he was a year too young, but he’d talked to Harry and, hey presto, he had a shiny new birth certificate proclaiming him to be eighteen years old. Applying for the RAAF was the first thing Tom had ever done that seemed to impress his brother.
‘An air force pilot?’ Harry whistled through his teeth. ‘Papa would have been proud.’
Tom bit his tongue at the mention of their father. There was so much that Harry didn’t know about their heritage, about the past. A privilege to think Nana had chosen him as secret keeper, but also a burden.
The panel interview had been exhaustive but maddeningly vague. We mark candidates on general promise and fitness for service, they’d said. How could you quantify general promise? He had no idea how he’d done. The entrance exam on physics, physical science and mathematics was more to his liking, and he’d achieved a high score.
* * *
‘A letter for you, Tom,’ said the paymaster as he distributed the wages. The man toyed with it, taking an agonising amount of time to hand it over, piquing the interest of the others. ‘Not planning on leaving us so soon, are you, son?’
Tom snatched the letter, taking a deep breath as he spotted the Air Board insignia in the corner. Unwilling to open it in front of an audience, he retreated to his empty dorm room, extracted the note from the envelope with shaky fingers, then whooped aloud with joy. He’d been selected for the RAAF’s No. 1 Flying Training School at Point Cook in Melbourne, and was to report there on the 20th of January, barely a week away.
A bolt of excitement coursed down Tom’s spine as he looked out the dingy window to the sky of flawless blue. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t longed to fly. When he hadn’t been jealous of each bird, as it vanished into the sun; of each moth as it spiralled towards the moon. Not any more. He read the letter again and laughed aloud. This time it was his turn to defy gravity and soar to the stars.
Tom wished he could share the news with Emma, but without an address or phone number … He’d tried everything to find out, even sneaking into the student records office at Campbell College to look at the files. But he’d been sprung. ‘That’s confidential information, I’m afraid.’ Thereafter the door had remained firmly locked whenever the bursar or Principal’s secretary were away. The awful truth was that he might never see Emma again.
Tom closed his eyes, imagining her serious smile and sweet face. She’d be thrilled for him, he knew she would be. Wherever Emma was, he hoped she was happy.
* * *
Tom spent a few days at Binburra before his ship sailed for Melbourne. His excitement was somewhat tempered when he saw his grandmother. She looked thinner than he remembered, and her cough had worsened. But she insisted she was fine, and her eyes shone with pride and joy as he told her his news.
On the day he left she gave him a thylacine pendant on a silver chain. ‘Your grandfather gave this to me on our first wedding anniversary. He wore one too.’
Tom closed his hand over the small, shining figure. ‘I’ll call her Karma.’
‘What an excellent name. She’ll watch over you now, as she has always watched over me.’ Tears filled his eyes and he hugged her tight. ‘You’ve dreamed of this all your life,’ said Nana, ‘and it will be a glorious adventure. I just pray the world has learned its lesson, and there will not be another war.’
* * *
One fine morning a few days later, Tom lined up on the Point Cook parade ground with an assortment of other new cadets. Strangers, yes, but each knowing they shared something in common – a love of flight. There was already a certain camaraderie in the air.
That day passed in a whirl. Tom was shown his quarters and allocated a place in the mess hall. He was introduced to his instructors and, best of all, assigned a flight schedule. He couldn’t wait to take off.
However, it didn’t take long for the heady excitement of that first day to evaporate. The new cadets were initiated by the seniors that very night, while the officers turned a blind eye. Stripped, daubed with paint and tossed in the dam. Afterwards they were made to stand naked on a table and sing a song. A humiliating procedure apparently designed to ‘knock any airs and graces out of you sorry little sods’.
In the coming days Tom struggled to adapt to a life of strict discipline; no easy thing for a boy from the bush. Endless backbreaking drills. A thousand rules. Two hours of compulsory sport daily. Fourteen-hour days, six days a week.
‘At Point Cook we aim in one year to turn out officer pilots to the same standard as the RAF does in two,’ said Flight Lieutenant Jock Allen, Tom’s instructor. Working at the aerodrome had been easy compared to this, and a week passed with no sign of getting into a plane. There was plenty of theory though: twenty-three textbooks on subjects as wide-ranging as armaments, navigation, meteorology, navigation and the theory of flight.
In the hierarchy of the base, cadets were the lowest of the low, at everybody’s beck and call. Expected to run messages for their superiors, clean thei
r rooms, even shine their shoes. It didn’t take long for Tom and the rest of the cadets to get their backs up.
‘I swear, if that mangy corporal barks at me one more time, I’ll deck him,’ growled Stu Kennedy one day, after four hours of drill in the blazing sun. ‘When in God’s name will we get in the air?’
Stu was another country boy, from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains; a bit of a larrikin who in some ways reminded Tom of his brother. He and Tom were the two youngest cadets, and both shared a love of their mountain homes, swapping stories about the big skies and jutting peaks. The grand isolation. Talking to Stu helped ease Tom’s impatience and homesickness.
The boys weren’t long disappointed. Flying instruction began the following week. Tom was to train in a Tiger Moth. Hard to believe he’d be taking to the air in a plane made by de Havilland, the most innovative aviation manufacturer in the world.
His Moth was a single-engine, two seater biplane; yellow and black like its namesake. Jock jumped into the open cockpit. ‘Hop in.’
Tom didn’t need to be told twice, but to his great disappointment, they didn’t leave the ground. He spent the next two hours taxiing around the runway, practising the controls.
‘That’s all for today, Abbott,’ said Jock at last. ‘Bring her back in.’
Tom gloomily headed for the hangar. At this rate he’d never take off, and he needed a certain number of dual flying hours before being allowed to go solo.
‘Cheer up.’ Jock smiled at his pupil’s long face. ‘You’ll take her up tomorrow.’
Tomorrow seemed to take forever coming, but when it did, flying was everything Tom had dreamed of. Taxiing down the runway, gaining speed, the thrill of lift-off. The buzz of adrenaline and sense of total freedom. The view of earth from sky. The magical, supporting power of thin air beneath him. It was indeed a miracle.
However, it wasn’t easy. Tom had blithely assumed he’d be a natural, and was surprised when he wasn’t. In those first few weeks he found his pretty Moth had a mind of her own. ‘I can’t fly straight and level let alone bring her in properly,’ he said to Stu one night over lamb shanks and mashed potato. ‘Today I overshot the landing point twice and almost hit a fence. I swung like mad when taking off, jerked at the controls and Old Jock called me rough and ham-fisted.’
‘You’ll be right,’ said Stu, who was flying an Avro Cadet, recently arrived from England; considered a superior training aircraft to the Tiger Moth and easier to fly. The pressure was on to go solo by ten hours of training, and it irked Tom that Stu had managed it after only seven.
But Tom wasn’t far behind, soloing right on the course average of nine hours and forty minutes. The euphoria of that first flight without Jock knocked him sideways. He could barely bring himself to land, and returned to earth whistling and singing and jumping for joy.
After that his confidence surged, and he made swift progress. Six weeks later he could loop the loop, scream through the sky at one hundred miles an hour, and perform daredevil dives. This was living.
However, not for everybody. Point Cook had its fair share of mishaps and tragedies. Four months into their course, the first fatal training accident happened. On a windy day in April, nineteen-year-old Norman Chaplin, with twenty-five hours’ flying time under his belt, was practising aerobatics when one wing crumpled coming out of a loop. The Gipsy Moth nosedived from a thousand feet. Norman had the courage and presence of mind to undo his belt, climb from the cockpit and jump. But his parachute became tangled in the plane.
Tom had liked Norman – a quiet, gentlemanly boy with whom he shared a bunkhouse – and the death hit him hard. Two days later Norman was buried with full ceremonial honours, and life at the base went on as before.
‘Better than crippled for life,’ said Stu. ‘Have you seen the burned flyboys that came down in the war? Faces melted away. Hands burned off. You’d be better off dead, I reckon.’
Tom shuddered. For the first time it hit home what he was doing. Playing at being a fighter pilot, shooting imaginary enemies from the sky. Pretending to drop bombs - making the noise as he flew low over buildings and imagined them exploding into flames beneath him. All the cadets did it. Flying was a thrilling game, but where would it lead them? Nana’s words rang in his ears. I pray the world has learned its lesson, and there will not be another war.
Chapter 17
Mum’s progress was agonisingly slow – three steps forward, two steps back. But she was improving, and that was the only solace in Emma’s grim existence. Going to work each day was a special kind of hell, especially on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But the other days were nearly as bad. Having to kowtow to Melvyn, call him Monsieur. Having to put up with his small familiarities, as if they shared something real between them.
Emma had tried her best to be discrete. Nothing could be more humiliating than her loathsome arrangement with Melvyn becoming public knowledge. However, rumours soon grew. She became an object of both contempt and envy among the other staff; a wicked combination that stripped her of friendships and ruined her reputation. Contempt for being an old man’s slut, and envy for receiving his largesse. Melvyn treated Emma generously and it raised eyebrows. Thankfully her neighbours in Sparrow Lane hadn’t caught wind of the scandal. They lived in the poorest quarter, moved in different circles, so the nightmare didn’t follow her home. But Launceston was a small town. It was merely a matter of time.
Emma didn’t blame her co-workers for despising her. She despised herself, and refused to think any more of Tom, or the fledgling love that she’d left behind in Hobart. That proud, innocent girl he’d known was dead. Risen in her place was a poor, sullied creature who allowed herself to be abused and manipulated; an unlovable wretch who deserved no respect. That other girl would never have got herself into this sort of trouble. Not the girl who won a scholarship to Campbell College and wanted to be a doctor. Not the girl who’d stolen Tom’s heart. That girl would have had a clever plan to turn the tables on Melvyn.
Emma did think of Karma though, and the other zoo animals. How she longed to see them again, make sure they were being cared for. Find out how Alison was getting on. Karma often came to her in dreams, whispering in a soft, sad voice, ‘Poor Emma, poor thing. As doomed and trapped as I am.’
A month passed, then two, then three, while each day Emma went through the motions. How she hated her life. If not for her mother, she may well have cast herself off the bridge at Cataract Gorge, as carelessly as one might cast away a scrap piece of paper. Commit her body to the cascade, where the wild South Esk river spilled into the Tamar. Let the current carry her to the river mouth, past the watchful eye of Low Head Lighthouse, and release her spirit into the vast, tumbling waters of Bass Strait.
Summer declined into autumn. Jack sent her letters almost every week, full of chatter about the places he’d been and the people he’d seen. Emma read them to her mother. ‘“I’m in Sydney. Hard to believe the size of the harbour here, and so blue you’d think it was painted. When Mum’s well, you’ll both have to come and see it for yourself.”’
He was a good boy, and it consoled her to know he was happy. A few shillings always fell out of the envelope - once even a pound note. She wanted to tell him not to bother; that she didn’t need his money, but she could never bring herself to write back.
One Friday at work a buyer arrived; an important one apparently, by the way Melvyn fawned over him. ‘Meet my top model,’ he said, calling her over. ‘Emma, this is Monsieur Angelo.’
Angelo was an attractive man. Mid-thirties. Tall and lean, with shiny blue-black hair and amused eyes. ‘Please.’ His gaze held hers. ‘Call me Tony.’ He reached for her hand, and drew it to his lips. ‘Charmed.’
Emma felt a certain frisson when he touched her, and something unfamiliar stirred inside.
‘Our friend here is considering an investment in Trés Chic, my dear.’ Melvyn licked his greedy lips and puffed out his chest. ‘It would mean opening new outlets in Hobart and Melbourne.’ He peer
ed at her triumphantly, hoping for some sign that she was impressed.
Emma turned her attention to the mannequins near the window.
* * *
When Emma let herself into the upstairs flat after work, Tony Angelo was waiting. A bottle of champagne stood in an ice bucket on the side table. He leaned back on the curved walnut sofa of cream leather, one long leg crossed over his knee, smoking a cigarette – the very picture of casual elegance.
Emma looked around for Melvyn.
‘Monsieur Dupont isn’t here.’ Tony offered her a cigarette and she shook her head. ‘He really is a revolting little man, Emma. How on earth do you put up with him?’
Emma wasn’t sure what to say, but Melvyn’s absence came as such a relief that she managed a shy smile. Tony stood, popped the champagne cork with a bang, poured two glasses and handed her one. ‘Sit, please.’
She took a sip of the icy bubbles, and perched herself on the edge of the sofa.
‘How old are you , Emma?’
‘Seventeen, sir.’
Tony looked thoughtful. ‘Do you know what your odious employer has promised me, Emma? A night with you in return for an investment in his business. What do you think of that?’
Emma weighed up the question. She wasn’t really surprised. She already knew that no wickedness was beyond Melvyn Spriggs. Whatever else, it meant she would not have to submit to him tonight.
‘What do I think?’ she said. ‘I think Melvyn is a monster – yes, that’s his real name – but not because of any promise he made to you. He is a monster because he has coerced me into becoming his whore against my will. Whether I become your whore as well, sir, is of no concern to me.’
Emma finished her champagne. She liked the way the bubbles tingled as they slipped down her throat.
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