Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  RUNNING FROM THE HOUNDS

  On a Sunday morning, while his neighbours drove off to church, Archie Foote cut a half-pound block of butter into careful squares, made neat holes in their centres, measured in a little arsenic, then sealed the holes. When the neighbours went to bed, he crept around his garden placing bone-china saucers loaded with small golden treats for the umpteen wandering cats who used his front lawn as a public lavatory and bordello. He had never been fond of cats, and not because they killed birds. He wasn’t fond of birds either.

  No doubt the greediest of family pets died in agony on Sun day night. He was called in to assist with grey and white Tom on Monday morning. It wasn’t pretty. He diagnosed a bait, offered his condolences to two pretty girls, and returned home delighted that one less feline would be peeing and pooping on his lawn.

  The following week, he mixed up a few similar, if smaller, treats, which he offered to a family of cawing crows. They’d taken a particular liking to his oak tree, where they spent their days bick ering and splattering his new car, a cream Holden. He would have liked something a mote more sporty. Economics had dictated his choice of vehicle.

  Given the life he’d led, he should not have owned a lawn for cats to yowl on, a new car for crows to poop upon, nor butter to waste. Disowned in his twenties, declared dead in his sixties, and happy enough to stay dead for a decade, Archie had, like Jesus, arisen. It had taken Jesus a bare three days to do it. Paper hadn’t been invented then. It had taken Archie a damn sight longer, and a veritable mountain of paper, but he’d done it. His father’s house, willed to his cousin, was Archie’s, if only for his lifetime. A pity. It was worth a fortune. He’d got his father’s money too, never a fortune, but enough, or it had been. It was damn near gone now.

  He would have gone easier on it had he expected to live past eighty. There had been times when he hadn’t expected to see thirty, but he was hanging together better than he ought to have been — apart from his eyes. Always an avid reader, a reliable keeper of journals, he’d taken his good sight as God-given. To read these days required good light, which he found on a sunny corner of his father’s front porch, if the sun was shining.

  He enjoyed his newspapers: they told him of a world he could no longer travel. He’d seen most of it. Had few regrets. Would have appreciated a longer relationship with Jennifer; still, their brief acquaintance had been enough to recognise Gertrude’s distrust in her every nuance.

  He’d brought that fighting bitch of a woman to this house as a bride, and known within days what he’d let himself in for. The house had been surrounded by an acre of garden back then; she’d spent more time with the gardener than with her in-laws. She wouldn’t recognise the street today: the busy road, vehicles spewing exhaust fumes. She wouldn’t recognise the kindly old gentleman who raised his hat to neighbourhood women when he took his daily constitutional around the block. She was more familiar with the old bastard who had prepared the arsenic and butter baits. Archie chuckled and flattened his copy of the Melbourne Truth. If he had one ambition left in life it was to sing at Tru’s funeral.

  August almost over, spring sunshine seeping into his sheltered corner, two buttered biscuits set on one of his mother’s hand-painted plates, teacup close at hand, Archie settled down to read a witness’s report on a double murder. The Melbourne Truth could be relied upon to give a few gory details on the front page, then force the reader to flip through seeking the tale’s continuation. He licked a finger and flipped to page five, where the photograph of a tombstone caught his eye, its details too clear not to have been enhanced by an artist’s hand. clarence, simon, leonora april reginald.

  A sorry tale, two columns of it beneath the photograph. Archie sipped his tea, scanning down the column to the brutish husband who had kept his wife pregnant since her wedding night.

  He threw me to the floor and had his way with me while my daughter screamed from behind the locked door, Amber Morrison . . .

  Archie placed his cup down, seeking more information.

  The reporter claimed to have spoken to a third party, one of a group of Samaritans intent on gaining Amber Morrison her freedom.

  ‘Some chance — a fine piece of fiction.’ He smiled attempting to visualise Norman Morrison throwing any woman to the floor and having his way with her, or having his way with any woman. For a few years, during his blue period, Archie had made a study of Woody Creek’s stationmaster, a worm of a man if ever a man was a worm.

  He turned the page and settled to read about a different breed of man, one driven to murder by his nagging wife. They’d given that poor sod life.

  Maisy Macdonald sat at her table reading a copy of that same newspaper. Amber’s best friend since kindergarten, she’d introduced her to Norman — and never forgiven herself for doing it.

  ‘Poor Norman,’ she muttered.

  An inveterate, though never vicious, gossip, Maisy enjoyed a good talk — and at times knew she did too much of it, but when someone popped in for a cup of tea, someone had to do the talking, didn’t they.

  It was the following Tuesday, the lunch dishes washed and packed away, a lemon meringue pie cooling on the bench, when someone knocked on her front door. Most of her visitors yelled out at the back door. She ran a comb through her hair, removed her apron. It was a stranger, a young chap, city-dressed, his car parked out front.

  ‘Mrs Maisy Macdonald?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what they call me.’

  ‘I was given your name by Amber Morrison. I’d like to have a chat to you, if I may.’ Then he introduced himself. He was a city newspaper man.

  ‘What’s she done — I mean, what else?’

  ‘May I?’

  He wanted to come inside. She let him in and led him down to the kitchen.

  ‘I believe you have known Amber for some time, Mrs Macdonald?’

  ‘All of my life. We started school the same day,’ she said, and he took out a fountain pen and a pad to write in. ‘I would have been her bridesmaid if I hadn’t been pregnant at the time.’

  He’d driven all the way up from Melbourne. Of course she made him a cup of tea. She told him she had a daughter and four grandchildren living in Melbourne, out at Box Hill. She cut two slices of her lemon meringue pie, which never cut well when it was hot, asked him if he’d like a dollop of cream with it.

  He ate her pie, told her it was the best lemon meringue he’d ever tasted. She told him the trick was in only using fresh eggs; that Amber’s mother supplied those eggs, that she had a little farm two miles from town.

  He stayed for two hours and for those two hours Maisy talked. Before he left, she brought out her old photograph albums. There were a few shots of Amber, a few of Jenny and Sissy, and the most God-awful shot of Norman.

  ‘He didn’t look that bad in real life,’ she said. ‘Or not to me, he didn’t. I got used to seeing him, I suppose. He wasn’t a bit like they said in that newspaper. He was like . . .’

  What was Norman Morrison like? Like that photograph: fat and faceless; nothing around him, a brick wall behind him, always there, but never quite . . . quite present.

  The chap was more interested in Amber and her girls. He asked if he might borrow three photographs.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ Maisy said. ‘Or not that one. It’s the only shot I’ve got of me as a girl. I was raised by my aunty who was as mean as a meat axe. She didn’t waste money on photographs.’

  He worked for a big newspaper. He gave her his card with his business address and a phone number, and if you can’t trust newspapers, what can you trust? He wrote her a receipt for the three photographs and promised to post them back, registered mail, within the week.

  She asked him what his interest was in Amber, and he told her that three specialists had pronounced her sane, that he and a few more were interested in obtaining her release.

  ‘She was never charged with the murder of her husband, Mrs Macdonald,’ he said.

  ‘They didn’t need to charge her, did
they? Everyone knew she did it. She hid him in the house for two or three days and told everyone he was missing. And she stayed in there with him. Anyone who did that had to be stark raving mad. I mean . . . I helped clean the place, after they’d taken him away, and with every window in the house open, you could still . . . It was terrible.’

  ‘You believed she was out of her mind at the time, Mrs Macdonald?’

  ‘Of course she was — and had been on and off for half her life. She cleared out and left Norman when the girls were about three and eight. No one knew where she was for six years. Her mother paid doctors a fortune to cure her, but she never was cured — which is the only reason she wasn’t charged for Norman — and for little Nelly Abbot and Barbie . . .’

  He closed his book with a snap and rose, thanked her again for the splendid pie and the photographs.

  ‘Pass on my regards to her,’ Maisy said. ‘Not that I mean my regards, but you know what I mean. Tell her I’m in touch with Sissy.’

  ‘Sissy?’

  ‘Cecelia — her daughter. Everyone called her Sissy.’

  ‘Would you have her address handy, Mrs Macdonald?’

  ‘No,’ Maisy said, aware she’d already said too much. ‘No. She moved recently.’

  She didn’t lie easily and, feeling the blush begin, walked ahead of him to her front door and got rid of him.

  Over dinner, she told George and Dawn about her visitor. They told her she shouldn’t have let him in, that she should have kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Don’t you go mentioning it to Mrs Foote,’ Dawn said.

  ‘As if I would.’

  On a Thursday in late February of 1951, Archie, seated on his front porch, was attempting to encourage his eyes to read. Blindness lay in wait for him; he knew it now. He had cataracts on both eyes, so an eye specialist had told him yesterday. His left eye was damn near useless, his right was going fast the same way. He didn’t need his magnifying glass to read the headlines.

  PLANE CRASH EIGHT DEAD.

  ‘A good way to go — up in the clouds, flying free, then gone,’ he said.

  A man needed his eyes. A man was up shit creek in a barb-wire canoe without his eyes. He’d gone into that surgery thinking he required stronger glasses and come out with blindness lying in wait for him.

  FREE MEDICAL TREATMENT PROPOSED FOR PENSIONERS.

  He’d be on the pension soon, a blind pensioner, tapping along with his white cane. No more books, no more newspapers, no more diaries. No more dreams.

  I flew in the clouds with the eagle, at one with supreme nobility. Time’s arrow stills man’s flight when cataracts steal his light . . .

  He flipped a page and found the report on the hanging of a prostitute and her two pimps. They’d tortured then murdered a seventy-three-year-old bookmaker. Archie used his magnifying glass to read all about that.

  SCHOOLGIRL RAPED.

  Again his magnifying glass was lifted. A man of his years takes his pleasure where he can. He took his time studying a photograph of two pinafore, boot-clad country girls. He hadn’t seen kids dressed like that in half a century.

  ‘I was twelve years old when my father bought me a pretty new dress and my first pair of pretty shoes, then took me for a walk down to the bridge and raped me in the dirt.’

  Amber Morrison is the daughter of . . .

  Cataracts or not, under double magnification Archie’s name was too large. He pitched his magnifying glass and that puerile rag. The glass landed on his front lawn, where February’s sun glinted on it, blinding him. A gusty north wind picked up the newspaper, separated its pages and sent them scuttling across the garden.

  Rape? He had never been guilty of rape.

  On his feet now, he attempted to recall the schoolgirl in pinafore and boots who he’d no more raped than he’d raped his own sister. He recalled buying her a pretty frock, recalled the rain storm and his ride home to his cousin’s house. Soaked to the skin, he’d taken a severe chest cold, which had kept him to his bed for much of the following week — not always alone. His recollection of a flighty little blonde-headed nursery maid who on several occasions had joined him in his bed was significantly more vivid than his brief dalliance beneath the bridge with his daughter — not acceptable in civilised society, but not rape either.

  Three times in his life he’d been accused of that heinous crime.

  Sixty years ago, his sister had screamed rape. A sociable couple, their parents, always out and about, his sister crawling into his bed at night to escape the shadows on her wall. For years he’d kept his hands off her, and when he hadn’t, she hadn’t stayed in her own room, had she? In many cultures, a girl of ten or twelve, untainted by womanhood, was considered to be at her best.

  His alter ego, poor old inoffensive Albert Forester, had been accused of rape and worse. He’d been in town when both of those Woody Creek girls were murdered. Amber had recognised old Albert Forester. She’d bailed him up down at the bridge one night and told him she’d get him. Women were better equipped for war than men. Get on the wrong side of one of them and they’ll get you any way they can. She damn near got him that first time.

  He’d been camping in a hut on McPherson’s land, sharing it with a lanky redheaded lad the night he’d found a slim-bladed knife beneath his bedroll. A good Sheffield steel carving knife. He’d washed the blood off it down at the creek, thinking it had been used on a bunny. Knew now what she’d used it on.

  They’d charged him the second time: with murder and rape of a minor. He was no murderer, and, as it turned out, that Duffy girl hadn’t been raped. Put him away for corrupting a minor; like their grandmother before them, any one of those Duffy girls could have corrupted a saint.

  One of the flying pages was headed for the street. He retrieved it before it spread its news, then walked his lawn collecting the rest. He found the page with the photograph and studied it beneath full sun. Something of the woman she’d become was in her face, the eyes. Wished he’d discontinued his voluntary work at the asylum earlier — or never begun it.

  Later, his copy of the Melbourne Truth burned, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it was not the type of paper most in his street might read, and that the article had not been on the front page. All things pass.

  The Melbourne Sun, a family newspaper, was delivered six days a week to Archie’s door, and to fifty per cent of his neighbours’ doors. And there he was on the cover of Monday’s edition. Few might recognise the ancient old codger getting into his brand new Holden. Many would recognise his name, in bold print beneath the photograph: Archibald Foote, a retired Hawthorn doctor . . .

  Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. That’s what he used to say to Tru. He’d lived fast, but by the look of that photograph, his corpse wouldn’t look so good. He read of his ‘elderly’ wife that morning. Tru wouldn’t appreciate that. He read of his granddaughters, his great-granddaughters — an interesting enough tale, had he been able to disassociate himself from the old bastard that paper accused. He couldn’t; nor would his neighbours, his cousins, members of his concert group, neighbourhood women who popped in with pies and biscuits — and how many more?

  He saw how many more, also on the front page: 432,021 copies of the Melbourne Sun were sold each day.

  The gaining of his father’s house had given Archie immense personal satisfaction. Dining with young cousins he’d been introduced to as the family scallywag had filled some basic need for family. No more dinner invitations. No more concert group. No more chess on Monday mornings either. The retired chap, two doors down, who he’d enjoyed thrashing at the game, cut him dead at his front gate.

  No more tasty apple pies. At three thirty, a young neighbour who had brought a pie to his door only last Friday, hurried her clutch of schoolchildren by.

  The following morning, when he walked out to his letterbox to retrieve his latest collection of bills, two bastards sprang from behind the hedge, cameras clicking.

  Archie had ridden with the hou
nds once or twice. As he scuttled for cover that morning, he knew how a bailed-up fox felt just before its guts were ripped out.

  ‘Never darken this door again,’ his father’s ghost whispered.

  ‘Your sins will come home to roost one day, Archibald,’ his mother’s ghost wailed.

  ‘Some you win and some you lose,’ he told her nagging ghost, and he took up his car keys and drove down to the bank to clean out the account, apart from two and sixpence. Archie Foote had never been a loser, or not for long.

  That afternoon, he packed what he couldn’t live without, what he wouldn’t want to live without, and, in the dark of evening, loaded cases and cartons into his car.

  Failing eyes don’t appreciate being called on to drive at night. He didn’t force the issue. Went to bed early and slept well until just before dawn, when he dressed in suit and tie, locked the front door, closed his father’s gate and drove away, gleefully leaning on his car’s horn, blasting that street from one end to the next with an off-key and elongated beep, blasting until his two hands were required to make a right-hand turn.

  The streets were his own that morning, apart from milkmen and their patient nags, an early truck or two. He skirted around the city, leaning on his car horn again as he drove by bluestone prison walls. Then away, the open road before him, the city behind, the sun not yet risen over it.

  Or each continent and island, dawn leads another day.

  The voice of prayer is silent, the strain of praise away.

  Oh, the sun it is a wakening, in the eastern sky,

  and hour by hour it’s making, thy wonders seen on high.

  The Sun will always Rise in the morning . . .

  He’d sung that one in his youth for his parents’ guests. They’d been proud of his voice back then. Not so proud later, when he’d sung bawdy songs at his mother’s piano. He could remember them all, every word of every song he’d ever known, and he sang them all while his foot increased its pressure on the accelerator, one song following the next, words not thought about in years sliding easily to his tongue.