by Joy Dettman
She’d killed the women’s laughter. Some explanation was necessary.
‘I’ve been pregnant for most of my life. The last thing I need right now is another baby.’
‘And so say all of us. My tongue is hanging out for menopause. Six clubs,’ Wilma said.
‘What is said at this table goes no further than this table,’ Veronica started.
‘I spoke out of turn. I’m sorry.’ Feeling the blood rush to her face, Jenny kept her chin down, positioning her cards according to value while the bidding continued.
‘Six diamonds.’
‘Seven spades,’ Veronica said, then added, ‘How far gone are you, kiddo?’
‘Hardly at all. Two weeks.’
‘Does Ray want it?’
‘He doesn’t know about it.’ Jenny’s heart upped its pace. It was going to burst out through her rib cage. Hope. Was there hope? ‘He can’t afford to feed the ones I’ve got.’
‘I thought she’d left him money,’ Veronica said.
Wilma held up a finger. The card players made a point of not speaking about Ray. They knew him, or Carol and Wilma knew him. They’d lived in the area for years. Veronica had lived opposite for a few years.
‘Did you know his first wife?’ Jenny asked.
‘In passing,’ Veronica said. ‘Passing fast. About the other — I’ve been known to help out a few of my friends.’
‘You need to have a good think about it, Jenny. It’s not something you decide to do over a game of cards,’ Carol said.
‘Eight hearts,’ Jenny said. ‘And I’ve thought about it.’
‘You don’t need to go eight. Seven will do,’ Wilma said.
‘I’ll go eight. If . . . if he could do it, how soon . . . could he?’
‘Have a think about it for a week, and if you’re sure, I’ll do it here next Friday — if it’s all right with Wilma.’
It wasn’t all right with Jenny. She shook her head. ‘I’ve got money in the bank. I can pay for your . . . the doctor.’
‘She’s a nursing sister, Jen. She’s done it for me. I lived to tell the tale,’ Wilma said.
‘I thought it was an operation?’
‘Not if you catch it in the early stages,’ Veronica said.
‘How much will it cost?’ Jenny asked.
‘I don’t charge crazy card players who go eight hearts when they don’t need to. I can’t go nine.’ Veronica lit a cigarette and counted her cards. ‘You need to get yourself fixed up with a Dutch cap. They’re pretty safe.’
‘I did.’
‘Say no more,’ Veronica said. ‘Nine spades.’
‘You’re both crazy,’ Carol said.
‘Nine hearts,’ Jenny said.
‘You kitty-happy little bugger! I can’t get ten!’ Veronica said. ‘Get them.’
Jenny scooped in the three-card kitty and added the ace of diamonds to her hand. Had she known it was in kitty she would have gone alone. She led the joker, followed it with the right bower, then, one by one, tossed her hearts down, watching the fall of the cards for the king of diamonds. Once he’d been played, she knew she had the lot. She took two tricks with her aces, then led the queen of diamonds, the best diamond in the pack. She got the lot, and her partners applauded her play.
‘Who are you?’ Veronica said.
‘I’ve never had enough time between babies to find out.’
‘You’re an interesting study, kiddo. You’ve got a forty-year-old seamstress’s hands, the looks of a Botticelli angel and you play cards like a mafia boss.’
‘One of my grandfathers looked a bit like Al Capone.’
The laughter was back, and Jenny loved that woman, loved every one of the card players, and stayed too late with them. They played until Joe Fogarty came home, came home drunk and happy and wanting supper, like Norman had wanted supper when he’d come home from his poker nights at the Macdonalds’.
‘That’s Jenny, Ray’s wife,’ Wilma introduced.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit of an improvement on his last one, love.’
‘Shut up, Joe,’ Wilma said.
The following Friday evening, Veronica did what had to be done, in Wilma’s bedroom. It was embarrassing, but no more so than having a baby. Jenny kept her eyes closed.
‘Is it gone?’
‘It will take an hour or two to come away, kiddo.’
‘What happens?’
‘It won’t be much worse than a bad period.’
And it wasn’t. By ten thirty it was over. She took a Bex for the cramps and the game continued, Jenny only an onlooker tonight. The women had their original teams of players. She poured the cups of tea, emptied the ashtray, scored the game and watched the players.
They were all older than her, though they didn’t know how much older. Old enough to have a seven year old, she’d replied when Wilma asked her age.
Doreen admitted to forty, Wilma was thirty-three. Carol was almost forty-five, and Patsy over fifty. A mixed batch of neighbourhood wives and mothers, apart from Veronica, who looked to be in her late twenties but had been at school with Wilma. Well groomed, well dressed. Her doctor chap looked old. He’d dropped her off at eight, and Jenny saw him again when she walked out to the car with Veronica. He was balding, had to be fifty. What was she doing with him?
‘Take it easy tomorrow, kiddo. Stay off your feet.’
‘Thank you isn’t enough, Vroni.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said.
He held the car door open for her. She got in and he closed it. A gentleman. Jim had opened car doors.
Jenny walked home with Carol, and the air seemed lighter, her feet felt lighter, and her head. Free. Free. And she was going home for Christmas.
‘How did Ray’s first wife die, Carol?’
‘She had a growth in her female parts.’
‘Is that why she didn’t have kids?’
‘Talk to Ray about it, love,’ Carol said. ‘Goodnight then. And stay off your feet tomorrow.’
Jenny crept into the house and undressed in the dark. As she slid into bed, he rolled over and reached for her.
‘I’m unavailable,’ she said.
He understood what that meant and rolled to his side of the bed. Never touched her, never kissed her, when she was menstruating — one of the fringe benefits.
She lay on her back, feeling a far greater separation than the few inches between them, a floating separation from self.
Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but was it any worse than climbing up onto the shed’s roof and jumping, willing Jimmy out of her? It didn’t feel wrong. Her body was her own again. She felt . . . intoxicated by freedom, wanted to sing, dance in the moonlight. There was no sleep in her. Every nerve ending was rejoicing.
‘Were you living here before you got married the first time, Ray?’
On occasion, she could get replies out of him in the dark. Not tonight.
‘W-what have they b-been f-filling your h-head with d-down there?’
They emptied my womb, she thought. They freed my head.
‘They aren’t gossips. We just play cards, talk about cards. Did you live here with her?’
No reply to that.
If she had lived here, then what had happened to her linen, her kitchen things? A woman needed more than a frying pan and a dented saucepan. Had he got rid of everything? If she’d died of a growth in the female parts, he’d probably found it disgusting. Women only had female parts for his use.
He had a strange head, or strange ideas in his head. He had a switch in it too. One flick of the knob and lights out. He was asleep.
Jim used to talk to her all night, talk all morning, talk of everything under the sun and beyond the sun. She’d slept close to him that week they’d shared a bed in Sydney, had gone to sleep with his arm around her, her arm over him, and woken against him. Never anyone like Jim.
She’d waited for him in Sydney; had kept herself and Jimmy for two years with her voice and what she made at a sewin
g factory. She’d put money in the bank.
Had to stop thinking about . . . about Sydney. She was a married woman and she had to make her marriage work. And she had to be more careful; be like the scouts — always prepared — and learn to dodge again. And find a way to make more money.
Hands like a forty-year-old seamstress, Vroni had said. Sewing was hard on hands, as was gardening. Singing wasn’t. She knew she could sing. Knew Archie Foote would get her a job singing. He was like Eve dangling an apple before Adam’s eyes.
Ray would loathe it if she started going out at night, singing at a club, dozens of blokes around to stare at her.
So what? Would he cast her out of Eden?
Jim would have encouraged her to sing. He had, that night in Sydney. And when she’d written to him and told him Wilfred Whiteford offered her a job singing with his band, he’d been happy for her.
Granny hadn’t. You get yourself home, my girl.
Joey would tell her to do it. Do what you have to do, Jen, he’d said at the station.
Who are you? Veronica had asked.
A singer, and a bloody fool who made a complete muck-up of her life — or who had added to the muck-up the twins made of it. Couldn’t blame anyone other than herself for her last muck-up. Thought she’d been running away from the mess and she’d landed headfirst in a messier mess. Mess followed her around, growing bigger every time she turned around. Sooner or later, she had to go back and start cleaning it up.
She rolled to her side, knowing there was no way to back out of this. For richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. There was nothing in the marriage vows that said she had to produce a baby every other year.
Yawned, and settled the pillow beneath her head. She wasn’t pregnant. She could put up with anything as long as she wasn’t pregnant.
So, backbone to backbone, we’ll face the world of sleep
in a bed crowded with secrets each must keep.
I’ll don my mask, allow you to wear your own,
and bless your roof and think my thoughts alone.
HENRY BLOODY KING’S SON
Through the years, Vern Hooper and Gertrude had argued more or less regularly. During their long lifetimes they’d had a few blazing rows. She’d never made the first move to heal the rift. He was the one who crawled back. He missed her, missed emptying his mind to her. In all but name she’d been his wife, on and off, for forty years. A man misses his wife, and the older Vern grew, the sooner he started missing Gertrude.
He found an excuse to crawl, or to limp, back in November.
She looked out the door to identify her caller, then walked out to her chicken-wire gate and told him to stay in his car, that he wasn’t welcome on her property.
He told her he was at death’s door, that she wouldn’t have to put up with him being on her property for much bloody longer, and to stop being so bloody antagonistic.
‘We’re too bloody old to hold grudges,’ he said.
‘Speak for yourself,’ she said and went inside.
At seventy-six, Vern moved like a man of ninety-six, and today he didn’t look a lot less. His once steel-grey hair had turned to silver — as had the handle of his walking stick. It was a fine stick, purchased for his last birthday by his daughters. His old stick had become a familiar friend, the new was still a visitor, but he leaned on it heavily as he made his way to her gate, and through her gate.
He had money for one daughter to waste on overseas trips, for the other one to waste on a fancy walking stick, fancy furniture that wasn’t fit to sit on; he had money to burn — and what use was it to a man if it couldn’t buy him his health, his son’s health, or buy his grandson out of purgatory? It made him sick to the soul to think of Hooper blood being raised by Henry bloody King’s stuttering, bike-riding lout of a son.
Everything made him sick to the soul these days. The thought of Henry and Leticia Langdon floating back to Australia with Lorna made him sick in his gut. They’d turned up in the thirties for months, had driven him out of house and home. The only bloody thing he had in common with them was food. And his city quack, a scrawny, mean-eyed bastard of a man, had taken that away. Food had been one of Vern’s lifelong pleasures. If he wanted to live long enough to get his grandson, he had to stay clear of anything with sugar in it. Take sugar out of a man’s life and what’s left that’s worth eating?
He’d lost a lot of his girth since they’d let him out of the hospital, and, as it decreased, so did the grease between his joints. His back ached, his knees, his ankles, ached. He was one elongated bloody ache, and with too much height in his bones, there was too much bone to ache. Pain wore a man down. He didn’t stand as tall as of old, didn’t bother ducking his head as he went through the doorway.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, Vern, other than you’re a lying bastard of a man.’
‘Then don’t say it,’ he said.
A determined race, the Hoopers, and neither age nor ache could erode that determination. Half-cousins, Vern and Gertrude, born six weeks apart, but try telling anyone Gertrude was seventy-six. Most would laugh in your face. She mounted her horse every Friday morning — or every Friday morning when Vern was in residence — and rode by his corner on her way into town, not because of her need to buy, but to rub in his face the fact that she was still capable of sitting a horse. Always cantered by his house, willing him to be sitting on his veranda watching her go by. Never looked to see if he was sitting there.
Her hair was white at the roots. She and Elsie went looking for those white roots with a toothbrush dipped in dye and painted that give-away stripe a dark chestnut brown. There were things folk needed to know and a lot more they didn’t, and her age was one of the latter.
She had all of her teeth, barring two molars she could do well enough without. Every night of her life she brushed them with a finger dipped in salt. She had great belief in salt. Four times in her life she’d cured serious infections with salt and water, and one of those times it was Vern she’d cured. She’d saved his hand and maybe his arm twenty years ago. She hadn’t saved his teeth. He’d never been a man to willingly take a woman’s advice.
He sat with some effort at her table. She hadn’t invited him to sit, but for fifty years he’d required no invitation to sit in her kitchen. She could have walked out. She could have loaded Lenny’s pea rifle before he’d got out of the car. It had been leaning against her dresser this past month. She hadn’t. Habits of a lifetime won’t die easily. She made a pot of tea, took her tin of biscuits from the cupboard and watched him bite into one, wondering how a man with a mouth full of dentures could chew a biscuit. He could and reached for another.
‘You’re not supposed to be eating too many of them.’
‘Why put them on the table and tempt a man if you know he shouldn’t be eating them?’
‘I can eat them — and how would I know anything I didn’t hear third-hand, you lying bastard of a man?’
He reached for a third biscuit, maybe to change the subject. She snatched the tin.
‘Don’t want me to die yet, Trude?’
‘How could you do that to me of all people? I trusted you.’
‘I’m not down here to go into that.’
‘Then don’t come down here. How could you look me in the eye and lie to me for three years?’
‘The same way you lied to me. You knew he was on with her when I had my stroke. The Japs as good as killed him anyway. I can’t get through to him and neither can anyone else. He sits on his arse, staring at nothing, saying nothing, doing nothing . . .’
‘Shell shock?’
‘Bloody bastard Jap shock, having his brains belted out with a gun barrel shock, starved —’ He stopped for a breath, then changed his mind about breathing, and lit a cigarette. ‘And if you’d kept that hot pants bitch of a girl away from him, he never would have been over there.’
She filled the kettle, offering him her back and wondering why she offered him
that much. Blood, that’s why, and because they were the last Hoopers standing, or the last with the old man’s blood running through their veins. And because they’d been more than half-cousins for too damn long. She’d never married him, never lived with him — no doubt would have been dead by now had she married him. He’d gone through three wives.
Only two men in Gertrude’s life, and in the past two days she’d entertained both of them — though the other sod hadn’t got as far as her kitchen. When she’d heard Vern’s motor, she’d thought it was Archie come back for another attempt. Two obsessive old men, both in pursuit of Jenny. Vern wanted his grandson; Archie wanted to put Jenny on the world stage. So he said — not that she’d ever believe a word that sod of a man said, or not after the first twelve months of living with him.
He’d said yesterday that he’d run into Jenny at a city hospital, that she’d given him her Sydney address. Gertrude believed that. She hadn’t armed Amber against her father, but it seemed that she might have been more successful with Jenny, who’d had the good sense to give him a fake address.
‘Your bastard of a husband is staying up at the hotel,’ Vern said.
That’s the trouble with knowing someone for too long. They learn to read your mind.
‘I had him down here yesterday,’ she said.
‘He’s using his own name at the pub. Doctor Archibald bloody Foote.’
‘That’s not news either.’
Not news but an embarrassment. Foote wasn’t much of a name to wear, but she’d worn it since turning nineteen. Should have taken her maiden name fifty years ago. She hadn’t, for Amber’s sake — and that girl would have been better off if she’d never heard the Foote name, never met her sod of a father.
He’d always dressed like a toff, spoken like a toff. Too good-looking for his own good, saintly. He had the appearance of one of Jesus’ retired disciples now, a sprightly retired disciple. And he had to be eighty. He was four years Gertrude’s senior — and he drove a sporty little yellow car, drove it with the hood down so no one could miss seeing him behind the wheel. An exhibitionist, Archie Foote, never happier than when he had centre stage.