Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  She took the stroller’s handles and pushed on. They crossed the road together and walked by Coles, the woman with the gallstones discussing her cousin’s girl, Jenny breathing in that old essence of Melbourne wafting out through the store’s wide-open doors. Didn’t want to breathe it, didn’t want to think about Melbourne.

  ‘They’ve got a nice big ladies’ room, right down the far end,’ the women directed, holding the restaurant door open.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jenny said.

  Got away from her, pushed on down to the ladies’ room and changed Donny’s backside, stuffed the wet napkin into a rubber-lined drawstring bag, washed her face, combed her hair, and found a bottle of Bex tablets. Her hand a cup, she swallowed a tablet, then checked the time. Late enough for lunch. Donny might sleep for a while. She tucked him in tight then returned to the dining area.

  A row of cubicles had been built against the café wall. She slid into one that might hold six eaters. A clean ashtray on the table beside the salt, pepper, sugar — four necessities to most diners. She lit a cigarette and opened her bankbook. So much money. Two thousand, six hundred and seventy-five pounds, sixteen shillings and ninepence. So much.

  ‘It was always going to happen,’ Granny had said. ‘He’ll be safe with Jim.’

  Always going to happen.

  She could remember little of that first year of no Jimmy, just hating Vern Hooper, just wanting to smash him. She could remember chasing his car, smashing his windscreen because she couldn’t smash him, remembered making him run into a tree.

  He’d thrown something at her that day, spun something at her through the window. Cigarette packet?

  She looked at the interest paid into her account. June interest. Four lots of June interest. Three lots of forty-odd pounds and one lot of fifty-two. And there’d be more next month. Even the interest was riches.

  Blood money. Jimmy’s blood. She could never spend it.

  Beautiful boy, beautiful baby sitting on Jim’s chest in that park in Sydney, Jimmy wearing his daddy’s army hat. Like a coloured photograph she carried always in an inner album.

  A week, that’s all they’d had together. One week of playing daddies and mummies in the room over Myrtle’s parlour, Number Five, their home. A happy home. He’d said he’d loved her in that room, he’d made love to her. And she’d loved him, loved everything about him.

  And he’d paid her off.

  LEAF LITTER

  The bus trip home was faster than the trip down, or it seemed that way to Jenny. Georgie and the Hall kids took the short cut across the paddocks, but you can’t lift a loaded stroller over fences, or propel it along narrow tracks worn between trees.

  Half a dozen workmen were erecting new light poles out front of Macdonald’s mill. She walked around their heavy machinery, wishing they’d erect their poles out the forest road.

  Two new houses had been built in Henry King’s corner. His old shack gone now — and no older than Granny’s house. A new pumping station, built behind McPherson’s land, pumped water to the town. Joe Flanagan had town water and electricity. So near and yet so far from Granny’s land.

  Only last week Harry had spoken to Flanagan, about the laying of pipes and poles across his land. The miserable old coot didn’t want anyone or anything on his land. He’d set his half-starved dogs onto the kids — until they’d started carrying treats. Joe’s dogs waited for them each morning in the wood paddock, greeting the kids with wagging tails. Jenny smiled as she walked, thinking there was probably enough money in that bank account to make miser able old Joe wag his tail.

  She walked on, keeping the stroller’s wheels well clear of the gravel, knowing every grain of sand, every tree trunk and rotting log, every cawing crow and crawling ant, walking fast, wondering at Jim’s motive — other than the obvious, the pay-off. What good could be done now by knowing? It could change nothing. But it was like an infection, that money. She kept fighting it off and it kept coming back at her.

  She’d been fighting off the flu the day they’d taken Jimmy. Vern Hooper sitting in the police car. We know about that filthy abortion business. She could hear those words now, see his winner-takes-all face.

  Pick up your money. Use it to get some order into your life. He’d said that the day she’d broken his windscreen. What had he tossed at her? Not like him to throw an empty cigarette packet from a car window.

  The track leading off the forest road to Gertrude’s gate had always been steep. Jenny’s mind not centred on the stroller or its contents, it overbalanced, tilted to the side, almost tipped out its load. But she’d been pushing prams too long. Familiar with their idiosyncrasies, she righted it and continued on to the boundary gate, opened it and pushed the stroller through. About to close it when her inner album flashed up a photograph of Vern’s smashed windscreen, of something flying by her, a flash of blue.

  Pick up your money.

  Pick it up from where?

  She left the gate, walked back to where she’d stood that day, then stepped off the track to where a mulch of leaf litter, green twigs and dead wood covered the forest floor. She picked up a small branch and used it to scrape at the litter. Colonies of insects down there, all going about their business; webs of white fungus doing their best to return fallen timber to the earth. She exposed a rotting cigarette packet, predominantly red, one of Ray’s. Buried it for the insects and mould to work on.

  How much leaf litter fell each year? How long did it take for gum leaves to rot back to earth?

  She wandered deeper into the trees, scraping here and there with her shoe, searching for a needle in a haystack and not knowing if it was Granny’s darning needle or Amber’s fine needle for embroidery she was looking for.

  And what use anyway?

  Proof.

  Proof of what?

  Proof that the money hadn’t been paid for a week of prostitute services. Proof that that week had meant as much to Jim as it had to her.

  And what was she going to do if she found her proof?

  Nothing.

  Only Margot in the kitchen, and Raelene sleeping. Like an abused kitten, fallen on its feet into a good home, all she did was purr — or gurgle.

  ‘Where’s Granny?’

  ‘She went over to Mum’th. Joany got an engagement ring from that Tony dago.’

  Margot still called Elsie Mum. Easier for her to say than Elsie. The engagement ring wasn’t news, nor was the baby in Joany’s belly.

  Jenny hauled Donny up and out of the stroller and laid him on a blanket on the floor to change his messy backside, grateful he hadn’t soiled while she was out. When he was clean again, she propped him on pillows and turned on the wireless. Music soothed him.

  ‘Where’s Granny gone?’ she asked him. Never any response from Donny.

  Margot was riffling through the shopping. No one went to Willama and came home with empty bags. She found a parcel of bras and pants from Coles.

  ‘I told you to only buy me white panth.’

  ‘They didn’t have white in your size,’ Jenny said.

  ‘You were thupposed to be going to the doctor, not thopping. You’re not allowed to go on the buth to go thopping.’

  ‘There’s no law saying I can’t shop after I’ve seen the doctor,’ Jenny said. Heard, smelled, burnt milk, and swung around. ‘I’ve told you to stand and watch when you’re boiling milk.’

  ‘I wath watching it.’

  ‘You can’t watch milk from a distance.’

  ‘I wathn’t at a distanth before you came in with hith thtink.’

  Never worth the effort of arguing with Margot. She’d argue that black was white, wear the other party down with illogicality, have them gasping for air — or for a smoke. Jenny cleaned the mess from the stove while Margot scoffed at Georgie’s bras. Envied them maybe. She had the build of an undeveloped eleven year old — eleven going on fifty when she played cards. Recently, she’d become addicted to Joany’s and Maudy’s True Romance magazines. Granny told her they were rubbis
h, that she shouldn’t be reading them. Rubbish or not, they’d got Margot reading.

  And no sooner was the stove clean than she moved her saucepan of milk back over the central hotplate.

  ‘Get that off the stove, Margot!’

  ‘It hath to be boiling when you pour it.’

  She had a germ fetish. Blame Georgie for that; blame high school, and science, and invisible bugs, made visible by Itchy-foot’s microscope. It would pass. With Margot, all things passed in time. Her desire to feed Donny his bottle when Ray was around had passed, as had her obsession with yellow. She was going through her white period now. Germs were easier to see on white.

  ‘Where’s Georgie?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘How would I know?’

  Margot watched her milk, and caught it as it threatened a second eruption. She made cocoa in her personal mug and took it over to drink at Elsie’s. Harry didn’t buy cocoa for his lot. Like a swarm of locusts, Harry’s kids, they ate him out of house and home. Lenny and Ronnie were both working; Joany would be moving out of town in a week or two.

  Jenny walked around the table to Donny. He was singing his dirge, which was easier on the ears than his whine. Ray interpreted dirge and whine as hunger. He liked feeding him, liked watching him do the one thing he could do. Fed him too much, and every Weet-Bix, every piece of chocolate, every bottle, turned to fat.

  ‘Joany got her ring,’ Georgie said as she entered. ‘It’s a diamond with fancy silver bits at the sides.’ She found and unwrapped sausages. ‘How rare,’ she said. ‘Sausages for dinner.’

  ‘Willama sausages,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Ah, Willama sausages — a world of difference — or twenty-nine miles.’

  A green kerosene refrigerator now stood where the sewing machine had lived for years, near the window. Gertrude didn’t trust it, didn’t like the idea of a tank of kerosene and a burning wick in her kitchen while she slept. The sewing machine had been moved into the lean-to, only until the new rooms were habitable.

  ‘Keep your eye on Donny for me for five minutes, love. I ought to pop over to Elsie’s.’

  Jenny’s intent when she stepped outside was to cross the paddock and offer her congratulations. But what for? For contracting to produce a baby every year until menopause? She looked across the paddock as she lit a cigarette, then turned on her heel and walked west, up the track, squawking chooks following her, expecting to be fed. They turned back. She continued on to the boundary gate, where she leaned a while, blowing smoke. Out that gate then to scrape again at leaf litter.

  With evening approaching, the smell of rotting leaves was pungent. She wandered, scraping with her shoe, blowing smoke until the heat of the butt burned her fingers and she was forced to drop it. Killed its spark with her heel, ground it in deep, then, with her shoe, scraped leaf litter to cover it. Granny’s law. She couldn’t stop Jenny and Ray from polluting their lungs, but she could stop them polluting her land.

  Granny’s law exposed a faded blue triangle.

  Jenny fell to her knees, wiping away leaves and compacted soil, and the triangle became a rectangle of blue, swollen by moisture, mouldy, insect-eaten. It was her old bankbook. Her proof.

  ‘You bastard! You pair of evil bastards!’

  Squatting there, she tried to open it. The years and the elements had sealed that account.

  ‘You bastards.’

  Stood then, wiped the cover carefully against the bark of a sapling, then, determined to separate the rotting pages, she did, and for her effort found a segment of mouldy page bleeding blue figures: 1/17/6; 15/-; 10/-; 2/10/0. Immobile as the trees surrounding her, she stared at blurred memories of Sydney. That one was money from overtime at the factory. That one was from the club.

  Tried to turn the page. Tried too hard and the rotting paper came apart in her hand. That’s all there was: half a page of bleeding figures and the smell of mushrooms. And proof that Jim hadn’t paid her off.

  Like a bruise on her soul that wouldn’t heal, Jim Hooper, and holding that bankbook made that bruising bleed anew, made her howl, because he knew there wasn’t enough money in the world to buy Jimmy, or to buy her. He’d loved her. Once upon a time, in a faraway land, he’d loved her.

  Tears running, shoulders heaving, she howled, her head against a tree, holding onto that tree. She was a crazy woman, and she didn’t care, because life was one crazy mixed-up nightmare and only crazy people could survive it.

  Davies’s mill truck stopped her tears. He dropped Ray and Lenny off out front of Elsie’s house. And she had to go home and start dinner.

  Wiped her face on her petticoat, sniffed tears, and told herself Vern Hooper was dead and buried, that his daughters were bitter old maids, that wherever Jimmy was he was with his daddy, that he had a good life because he had Jim.

  She had Ray. And she wasn’t going to Melbourne with him, staying at a hotel with him, taking Donny to a specialist who would only tell her what she already knew. And she wasn’t going to feel guilty about not sleeping with Ray either. He was a lodger. She looked after his kids, and he paid her to do it — like she’d paid old Mrs Firth to look after her kids when she’d sung at the jazz club.

  And the next time Amy and John McPherson nagged her to sing at one of their concerts, she would. And she’d make herself something beautiful to wear too, and she’d be who she was and stop trying to be who she wasn’t.

  Squatting then, she scraped a hole with a sharp stick, scraped it deep enough, wide enough, to bury that book, to bury Sydney and childish dreams. Not Jimmy. One day she’d see him again; five, ten, twenty years from now she’d see him and know him, and he’d know her. One day.

  THE ROOT OF EVIL

  Fire in January, floods in winter — a crazy land, Australia, but you name a mineral, a metal, and somewhere in this vast continent, man had found it. Gold in the colony’s early days. Convicts had dug and hauled coal a hundred and fifty years ago; and there was enough left to last another hundred and fifty years. Australia had hills of iron ore. Now at a site in South Australia — Radium Hill, they’d found deposits of uranium. Very valuable stuff in ’52, vital to those wanting to make better bombs. Britain wanted it. They made their own atomic bomb that year.

  No intention of testing it on home soil though. There were a few useless islands off the coast of Western Australia, and few inhabitants near enough to suffer any effects from the blast.

  Through June, July and August of ’52, Margaret and Bernard suffered Lorna’s blasts, cringed from her detonations. In that gentile, tree-lined Balwyn street, the walls trembled and Margaret trembled — until September, when Lorna again boarded a boat for England. God help her uncle Henry, who Lorna had entrusted to select her mail-order husband. With luck, her boat wouldn’t make it to port. On 3 October, the Brits blew up the Monte Bello Islands, and who knew what might happen when that atomic energy hit the immovable wall of Lorna.

  Perhaps radioactive fallout caused the madness in Balwyn. There was waltzing up and down the passages, hilarious laughter in bed. Happy days, gloriously happy days.

  The papers transferring the Balwyn house to its new owner had been signed some weeks ago. Margaret and Bernard had found their dream home in Cheltenham, by the seaside; a small house, with no spare room for Lorna. They’d purchased a house for her in Kew: middle-aged, tall-roofed, indestructible; its garden, in the main, grey cement, with a cactus or two to offer atmosphere.

  ‘For years she’s spoken of gaining her independence, Bernard. She’ll be delighted.’

  They did their best for her, once she was gone. They furnished her house with the heavier pieces from the Balwyn house, hung the Hooper relatives in her hall, parked Vern’s car in her garage.

  For themselves, they took delivery of a green Holden, also ordered some weeks earlier. Bernard was licensed to drive, but incapable of doing so with any degree of safety. He was an artist, more prone to searching for inspiration than watching road traffic. Margaret had gained her licence as a girl in Woody Creek, but w
ith Lorna always in the driver’s seat, she’d had little opportunity to practise the skill — until Bernard ran them onto a footpath one afternoon, dented the new car’s green fender and his head.

  While the fender was being straightened, Margaret took a few refresher lessons, and thereafter Bernard sat at her side, free to ponder the beauty of God’s great universe.

  The removalist’s van came in late October. Ian Hooper, Margaret’s faithful cousin, drove the Holden and its occupants to their new address, his wife following in their own car. They were no more fond of Lorna than most and swore never to divulge the new address.

  James was required to change schools before the final exams. He was a bright boy and at a stage of his life when making new friends came easily. Margaret bought him a brand new racing bike; the beach was a few streets away; Aunty Lorna thousands of miles away. He loved his happy new home.

  Bernard’s art thrived there. The smell of paint and turpentine permeated every room, but he painted an ocean scene, which, if one looked at it on an angle and squinted, almost resembled an ocean. Margaret planted a garden, determined to create her own Eden by the sea. Happy months, hopeful months.

  All mail was directed to their accountant’s office, collection of which necessitated a weekly train trip to the city, where the little couple lunched with their accountant and made decisions over a glass of wine. No letter or card arrived from Lorna, but in December they received an airmail letter addressed in a spidery hand.

  ‘Leticia,’ Bernard said, recognising his older sister’s script, and on the train home he read aloud of his brother-in-law’s death, of Lorna hiking in Scotland.

  ‘She didn’t attend his funeral,’ Bernard said.