Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  It was the accountant, with the news that Rick Thompson, Vern’s farm manager for thirty years, had dropped dead in the paddock. Where were they going to find a man to replace him? And the funeral — the Hooper family must be represented there.

  FASTER YEARS

  Rick Thompson’s funeral was big news in Woody Creek, or Margaret Hooper turning up for it with a husband instead of her sister was big news. The Hooper women had been inseparable for forty years.

  The service wasn’t as well attended as it ought to be. With Christmas only days away, people had other things on their minds, and the day was a scorcher.

  Charlie White had other things on his mind. Born on 21 December 1873, he’d celebrated his eightieth birthday the day before the funeral, celebrated it alone. Hilda, his one offspring, hadn’t remembered it — or not until Glenda, her daughter, called from Sydney mid-afternoon and reversed the charges.

  ‘Happy birthday, Grandfather,’ she’d said. ‘Can you put Mother on please?’

  Three words for him and she’d spoken to her mother for half an hour, and every penny being sucked down that telephone line by their blabbering would come out of Charlie’s cheque account. And when Hilda finally put that phone down, she’d started on him again to sell the shop and buy a business in Sydney. He’d told her the telephone company would go broke if she moved. She called him a miserable old coot, begrudging her a five-minute talk to his only granddaughter. He told her it was closer to twenty-five minutes, that he’d had his stopwatch on her.

  ‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ she’d said and walked out.

  He paid her a man’s wage, paid her for a forty-hour week, and was lucky if she worked twenty-five. He’d educated his granddaughter at one of the better Melbourne ladies’ colleges, which had made her so much better than every other bugger in town, she wouldn’t set foot in it. Which he’d told her mother last night.

  ‘I bought your husband a brand new car,’ he’d said.

  ‘You bought it for yourself,’ she’d said.

  ‘It’s in his name, isn’t it.’

  ‘Only because the constable won’t give you a licence.’

  She could argue like her mother had, didn’t do it as nicely though, liked rubbing it in that he couldn’t get a licence and she’d got one. Not that it stopped him from driving the car — or not since the new copper had been in town. He didn’t drive it far: picked up a few goods from the station; delivered a few orders on Friday mornings.

  ‘You’ll get the lot when I’m dead,’ he’d said.

  ‘You’ll be standing behind that counter for the next twenty years and I’ll be standing beside you.’

  ‘Go to Sydney if you want to go to Sydney. I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘What are we supposed to live on!’

  ‘Not me for a bloody change,’ he’d said and walked out, ridden around to the pub for his dinner and a few beers to calm him — a few too many beers. He hadn’t gone home either; he’d spent the night on an old easy chair in the shop’s storeroom.

  She hadn’t come into work today and he’d been run off his feet. A man of eighty with a serious hangover should have been sitting on his backside nursing his hangover, having folk run around after him. He was dead on his feet by two o’clock. He didn’t go to Rick Thompson’s funeral, didn’t get to see Margaret Hooper and her husband. He heard about them. For the rest of the afternoon he heard about them.

  He didn’t get away from the store until six, and when he leaned his bike against the veranda post, his car wasn’t where it ought to have been, nor was his trailer.

  No one in his kitchen. And their room was bare.

  Ate a tin of preserved peaches for dinner, forked them from the can while walking his house looking for what was missing. A lot was missing. The crystal cabinet, along with its contents. Jean’s jewellery.

  His bed was still there.

  He walked out to the yard, still forking up peach halves. He needed that car. Couldn’t report it missing. He needed Jean’s jewellery too. He liked looking at it at night, her ghost at his side, discussing where they’d bought each piece.

  They’d taken her ghost with them — or she’d hitched a ride to keep an eye on her treasures.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing you in the flesh soon, Jeany.’

  That night Charlie fell into a bed to die in comfort, and was disappointed he was still alive when he woke the following morning.

  He was still alive come January. He didn’t look as neat, nor did the shop. The customers missed Hilda. She’d kept them abreast of the news.

  ‘Have you heard from Hilda and Arthur?’ they asked.

  ‘Who?’ Charlie replied to one and all.

  ‘I dare say you’re missing her.’

  He was missing Jean’s ghost. She’d always been flitting around that house somewhere. Just an empty house now, and Charlie didn’t want to be in it.

  Mick Boyle the younger, who now delivered the orders, moved Charlie’s bed and kitchen table down to the storeroom. At night, Charlie locked his doors and fell into his bed. He woke wearing his apron some mornings, then worked all day in it.

  He was still alive come February. His diet of tinned peaches had eroded the little fat he’d had and started working on muscle. He looked shrunken, strained, stained, unshaven, but was too damn tired to give a bugger what he looked like, too damn tired to ride home for a bath and a change of clothes, too damn tired to climb ladders, stack shelves, set mouse traps.

  ‘Have you heard from Hilda and Arthur, Mr White?’

  ‘Who?’

  Mice chewed holes in his cornflakes packets, held race meetings on his long counter, left their calling cards on every shelf; and when irate customers returned damaged goods and threatened to go elsewhere, Charlie was too damn tired to be polite.

  ‘It’s a long bloody walk to Willama,’ he said.

  He may have given up and died; he may have locked his doors and remained in that bed until he rotted. One thought kept him going. His will. To Hilda Jean Timms, my only daughter and sole beneficiary, I leave my all. If he’d had muscle enough left, he might have ridden his bike to Willama and changed that will. He didn’t have muscle enough to push that bike out to the cemetery to visit Jean’s tombstone.

  He was asleep on his feet the day Georgie Morrison and her limpet sister walked in, both clad in high-school uniform.

  ‘Sleeping on the job, Charlie?’ Georgie greeted him.

  ‘Just resting my eyes, Rusty,’ he said, allowing his eyes to rest on that mane of copper hair tied back in a heavy ponytail. He’d had a soft spot for Georgie since the day he’d seen her drive a pair of embroidery scissors into Vern Hooper’s thigh.

  She took a list and a pound note from her pocket. ‘Are you growing a beard?’

  ‘Saves wasting razor blades,’ he said, fingering a ten-day growth of stubble.

  He filled her order, wrote down each item, totalled it. She didn’t hand over her pound note but pointed to his figures.

  ‘It’s eighteen and ninepence, not seventeen and ninepence.’

  He eyed her. ‘You’re adding it up upside down, and what are you complaining about? It’s your way.’

  She shrugged and Charlie checked his figures. Upside down or not, she’d got it right.

  ‘Time to get myself new glasses,’ he said, or to clean the ones he was wearing.

  ‘Are you older than Granny or younger, Charlie?’

  ‘I’m a hundred and ten, and it’s none of your business,’ he said.

  She dropped the change into her pocket, loaded her string bags and walked out, her sister at her elbow.

  ‘Hey,’ he called. Margot kept walking. Georgie turned. ‘You’re not looking for a job, are you?’

  ‘I would be if I was old enough.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen in March.’

  ‘Too young for me,’ he said.

  ‘Are you looking for a shop assistant or a wife, Charlie?’

 
She stood there smiling at him, the weight of her shopping pulling on her right arm. Her mother had been a beauty. This one was something more than beautiful — and one of the few who ever smiled at him.

  ‘I could work on Saturdays and after school,’ she added.

  ‘I need someone full-time, Rusty.’

  Her shopping placed down, her hand went to her pocket to finger coins as her eyes took inventory of the shop, its chaos, of Charlie in his soiled collarless shirt, his formerly white apron now a fair match for his greasy white hair.

  ‘The school is taking us down to see the Queen on Monday. I could start next Tuesday.’

  ‘It’s not March on Tuesday,’ he said.

  ‘It’s near enough though. Can I?’

  *

  In February of ’54, schoolkids from all over the country were transported to large centres so they might catch a glimpse of royalty. Margot, going on fifteen and measuring a bare four foot ten inches, stood in the front row out front of a fancy civic centre, put up in a hurry to impress Queen Lizzie. Georgie, five foot eight, stood in the back row with the boys. She’d remember that day for the rest of her life, not because of the new civic centre, the Queen or Philip, but because of the long bus ride to get there and the brief glimpse of a world outside of school and Woody Creek. And because that day would forever be marked in her memory as her final day of childhood.

  The following morning, instead of catching the bus, she rode Norman’s bike into town and sat on Charlie’s doorstep until he opened his doors. Jenny and Granny had told her to go to school. Maybe she would tomorrow.

  Didn’t know if she wanted to work or not. She wanted . . . things. She wanted . . . separation from Margot. Wanted money that wasn’t Ray’s. Wanted her own bed. Wanted to go to Sydney and find her father, to see if he did look like Clark Gable. She wanted everything, and working for Charlie might start a bit of that everything happening.

  That was the year the town got to know Georgie Morrison, the year the good ladies grew accustomed to her knocking on their back doors to take their orders. And if a few of the old brigade didn’t like the idea of dealing with one of Jenny Morrison’s illegitimate brats, they missed out on having their cartons of groceries delivered by Mick Boyle on Fridays.

  A fast year, 1954: athletes ran faster, planes flew faster, Christmas came around faster.

  In ’55, New South Wales abolished the six o’clock closing of hotels. Their doors could now remain open until ten. Border town hotels along the Murray did well; old bridges, built in the slower days of the horse and gig, rocked with the traffic, all going the same way at six and the other way after ten. Road deaths increased. Most were alcohol related.

  In March 1956, tax was increased on cars, smokes, grog and petrol. In July, poker machines were legalised in New South Wales. Someone had to pay for the Olympic Games, and who better to hit than the working man. It had been learnt long ago that he couldn’t survive without his car, smokes, grog and petrol, that he liked to gamble. And why not try his luck on the pokies if he had a few bob left over at the weekend? The working man became the government’s goat that year; poker machine clubs their milking sheds, where the government milked them dry.

  The news wasn’t all bad. Salk vaccine was introduced in July and immunisation programs were underway to wipe out polio, a disease feared for decades. Television came to Melbourne that year, just in time for the Olympic Games.

  Georgie read about the November extravaganza. She read about television, about Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose, John Landy’s record-breaking run. Charlie read about the share market — or didn’t read it. His eyes were bad. She read it to him between customers. She’d known nothing about stocks and shares. He had piles of them. She stripped his bed each Saturday, rode home with a bundle of sheets and shirts, pillow slips and aprons to boil up in the copper and in exchange Charlie bought her small packets of shares so she could watch how money grew.

  They got on well, Georgie and old Charlie. He’d always been somewhere in the background of her life. Maybe she’d found her father figure. He’d found a granddaughter who smiled at him and invited him home for meals. He sat with Gertrude, speaking to her about Jean and the old days, of epidemics they’d lived through, of those who had been lost in childhood, those of their age group who hadn’t made old bones.

  *

  Gertrude still laced on her boots in the mornings and unlaced them at night. Elsie still searched out those white give-away hair roots, still painted them away with a toothbrush dipped in dye. Chooks still had to be fed, eggs had to be sorted, apricots had to be made into jam, but when it was done, Gertrude was content to sit longer.

  Raelene commenced school in January of ’57. Georgie transported her in, on the child’s seat Jenny had once ridden in, fitted again to Norman’s bike. At three each school day, Jenny collected her from the school gates and Raelene rode home more comfortably seated behind Jenny’s new bike.

  Donny? At seven, he had the advancement of a fourteenmonth-old baby and was the size of a ten year old — an overweight ten year old — and had started taking fits. They’d bought him a single bed. He rolled out of it. Gertrude suggested a mattress on the floor. No use talking to Ray about it. He kept on tucking him into the cot at night, hauling him out of it the next morning. A solid cot, its bars made of iron, big enough in another lifetime for two little girls. Donny filled it.

  Jenny read books on retardation, became an expert on the degrees of feeble-mindedness. Some kids never learned to feed themselves. Some managed simple tasks with supervision. Donny knew where his mouth was, had learnt to hold his feeding bottle. He could hold a biscuit, find his mouth with it, stuff the lot into his mouth and gag on it too. He recognised his colourful Donald Duck bowl and related it to food. His hands wanted that food, but add the third element of spoon and the relationship between bowl and mouth was too distant for him to grasp.

  Hours, hours and more hours Jenny spent with him the year Raelene started school. Achieved nothing. He could roll about on the floor. He could stand alone; once stood, even step if she held his hands. She needed him to walk. As a two year old he’d been too heavy to haul around. At four he’d grown out of the stroller. They’d replaced it with a wheelchair.

  Donny liked going for walks. Liked watching the chooks in the yard. Liked the wireless. Liked staring at the lamplight. He wasn’t toilet-trained. Would never be toilet-trained. She lined his morning napkins with heavy layers of toilet paper, which worked if she watched what he ate. Ray watched him at weekends, and fed him chocolate.

  He was a good father. There was no denying that. Gertrude, born to sweep up lost souls and nurse them back to health, had accepted Ray into her pack. Maybe all he’d ever needed was acceptance. They’d heard him laugh once or twice.

  Two tall rooms now sheltered Gertrude’s hut from southern winds. Ray and Donny slept in the western-facing room. The second room was Jenny’s laundry-cum-bathroom. Pipes from the large tank fed water to wash troughs, bath and chip heater. Pipes running beneath the floorboards carried waste water out to a gutter that ran down to the orchard. The old copper had been moved from the shed. It stood in the open, close to the washhouse door. A hose from the tank filled it. The girls shared the lean-to bed. Jenny shared Gertrude’s room; Raelene shared Jenny’s bed. A segmented house, a segmented family, but with Gertrude at the helm, it worked. And apart from Donny, life was . . . At times, life was good.

  Jenny didn’t wear Ray’s wedding ring but she was Mrs King, Raelene King’s mother. She wore Ray’s friendship ring beside Jim’s. She sang at the concerts. In Armadale, Ray hadn’t wanted her to sing. He didn’t go to the concerts. He’d be going to the school concert this year; Raelene would be in it. A born pixie, that one. A pretty, dark-eyed kid, head of dark curls — an easy baby, if not such an easy child.

  Ray loved her — and was ruining her — he came home from work every night with a bag of lollies in his pocket. Gertrude told him he’d rot her teeth, but if he didn’t have that ba
g of lollies in his pocket, Raelene didn’t love him. He needed that love. He carried her with him into town on Saturday mornings, on his bike; she never came home empty-handed.

  ‘Look what I got, Mummy.’

  Jenny had never been ‘Mummy’, other than for that week in Sydney . . .

  Shush, you’ll wake Mummy.

  Too young to be a mummy at eighteen, she was more than old enough now. She’d turn thirty-four this year. Wasn’t certain how she’d got there, but she had — against all odds, old Charlie might say.

  Age forced acceptance of many things. It forced understanding too. She found a bare smidgen of understanding for Amber while changing Donny’s napkins. There was no joy to be had in caring for a child you didn’t care about. She did her best. That was all anyone could do.

  Maybe she loved Raelene. She loved making her pretty clothes to wear; she tried to love her, tried to curb her wilfulness too.

  Wondered if Myrtle loved Cara. Wondered if a baby born to another forever belonged to that other.

  SPUTNIK

  On 3 October 1957, Cara Norris had her thirteenth birthday; one day before the Russians put their satellite into space. Sputnik, the newspapers named it, and tonight they’d said on the radio that it may be visible to the naked eye in the southern skies. Myrtle Norris, out stargazing with her husband and daughter, said her short neck had not been designed to look skyward. She gave up on Sputnik and went inside. Cara and her father didn’t give up.

  Myrtle wanted to sell the boarding house and buy a nice little house somewhere else. Robert and Cara didn’t. Gran Norris had a nice little house and she wanted them to live with her. Myrtle, Robert and Cara were in full agreement about not wanting that. Gran had a bad hip, a bad back, bad neighbours, bad sons and bad grandchildren who never visited her. There wasn’t much about Gran Norris that wasn’t bad. She said a boarding house was a bad environment in which to raise ‘that girl’.