by Joy Dettman
There was no direction. On the dot of nine Lorna’s war of attrition would begin. She had unwittingly become a party to the defrauding of the Social Security Department. She’d obtained the forms, filled in the boxes, lodged Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s application for the old age pension – as a means of obtaining a housekeeper at no cost to herself – and at nine tomorrow morning, her housekeeper would receive her just punishment.
Always pay back the sum you borrowed, Amber thought. Little Amber Foote had never liked that concept and had difficulty learning it. If the ten you borrowed was only a phantom ten, then why bother giving that phantom ten back? Had to, or the answer to her sum had been incorrect.
Elizabeth Duckworth couldn’t pay back her borrowed thousands. She’d spent most of them on her back.
Amber Morrison had spent nothing of her pension, or not since moving to Kew. Each month she’d squirrelled her portions away in a city bank. The world may have forgotten her but since the asylum doors had swung open, the pension department had never forgotten to post her fortnightly cheque. For a time after Amber’s disappearance, she’d unlocked her GPO mailbox with trepidation, fearing the hand of the law on her shoulder, fearing the mailbox’s contents – or its emptiness. Not once had she received a Please Explain letter, nor had it ever been empty.
A near full moon had found its way to the patch of sky outside the window. As a child, she’d loved moonlit nights. She’d walked for miles with her mother when the moon had been full. As a wife she’d walked alone on moonlit nights. At the asylum she’d walked in circles.
She’d walked by day at Kew. Each morning, summer, winter, autumn and spring, Lorna’s hand gripping her arm, they’d walked their measured mile, and by nightfall Amber’s eighty year old feet had been content to rest on their footstool while her fingers had done the walking. Lorna had been sufficiently impressed by one piece of Miss Duckworth’s embroidery to fetch her magnifying glass so she might study it more closely for the imperfections she’d surely find there. A woman of few feminine skills, Lorna, but an efficient businesswoman, a keeper of papers and of telephone numbers, and tomorrow, at nine o’clock precisely, in some government department, a telephone would ring and Lorna would link Elizabeth Duckworth’s name to Amber Morrison’s. Then the police would come. Though perhaps not in the morning. It might take a day, maybe two, for the information to be passed on to the relevant department.
For the twelve years Elizabeth Duckworth had sat at Lorna’s side in church, mouthing prayers, hymns, she’d never thought to ask God’s forgiveness of her sins. Elizabeth, the kindly spinster daughter of a clergyman had been born sinless – and in hindsight, born too swiftly, in a hospital bed, with a broken leg and a fractured skull.
Maryanne Brown could be born as fast. She’d known a Maryanne Brown a long time ago. She’d died young. Tomorrow morning she’d go early to the GPO, collect Amber’s last cheque and her bankbook, empty her account, and then Maryanne Brown would catch a train, then another, then another. Plenty of Browns in the telephone book.
Amber stood and her aging joints, unmoving for hours, complained. She leaned, palms on the table, her eyes watching the moon moving away from the window, until her legs were strong enough to hold her, when she stepped to the right, so she might keep the moon in view a while longer. Envied its freedom. She’d known too little freedom.
Elizabeth had her own bank account. That saintly lady had squirrelled away a small pile of nuts for the winter, and if Lorna was on the phone at nine, she wouldn’t be at the Kew bank. Perhaps Kew first to empty Elizabeth’s account, then into the city, empty Amber’s, then the train.
She lifted her case, a far too heavy case to haul around on trams. She’d need to call a taxi – or leave it here and return for it in a taxi.
And ride that lift down, then up, then down again?
She was walking now, walking the small area around the table, around the metal and vinyl chairs, listening to the tap-tap rhythm of her heels on vinyl. They’d tapped in the asylum, in Norman’s house, in her mother’s house – had stopped tapping in Lorna’s house. All she’d required to achieve content had been given there.
As she reached down to remove her shoes so she might walk silently, she heard muffled snoring from behind a wall. Lifted her head to listen, to remember.
She murdered my father—
Murdered? Norman had been dead for years before Amber had silenced his snore on a night when the moon had been full and that red mist of anger had come down to engulf her mind. And like the fool she’d been in Woody Creek, she’d returned to her bed to sleep in blissful silence.
She hadn’t returned to her bed the next time she’d done it. Had no access to money in Brunswick. Lived a hand to mouth existence there. She’d been on her way to no place that night, with nothing other than her hessian shopping bag.
The devil looks after his own, her mother used to say. That night he’d sent his handmaiden to look after Amber.
She had no recollection of the accident that gave birth to Elizabeth. She’d been escaping through dark streets, her few possessions in her shopping bag, then no more, nothing, until she’d opened her eyes three days later in a hospital bed.
Hadn’t given her wardmate a second thought. Had been concerned about the contents of that shopping bag, her photograph, Maisy’s letter.
Memories are long in Woody Creek, Amb.
They hadn’t found her hessian bag, no doubt strewn to the four winds along with its contents.
Amber cleared a space at one end of the table, then in two stages, lifted her case to the space. With its clean surface to work on, she opened her handbag. There was little in it. Elizabeth Duckworth’s bankbook; the keys to Lorna’s house and gate; the gold mesh purse she’d found at an opportunity shop, used but not worn out. She’d always wanted such a purse. Born with a craving for pretty things, expensive things, and no way to get them – until Lorna.
Pretty is as pretty does, her mother used to say. A penny saved is a penny earned. Old bitch, overflowing with her isms. Gone now, long gone, along with her penny-pinching poverty.
Maryanne Brown would bring poverty back.
Amber sighed and opened Elizabeth’s bankbook. Its total was worth collecting. Amber had accrued thousands. She’d empty both in the morning, then get a taxi and ask the driver to ride up with her in the lift to fetch her case. Tip him in advance if necessary.
It was a plan, and good enough for now. Her handbag repacked, she zipped and hung it by its shoulder strap over the back of a chair while she opened her case. A jumble of pinks, maroons, lilac and blue, like a box of dried rose petals. White underwear, a black cardigan, a flattened blue hat. She reshaped the hat, brushed grit from it, then placed it on a chair.
Removed each frock, each item, shook, brushed and draped it over the back of a chair, her hand searching deeper for her pair of Royal Doulton vases, for her Waterford crystal bowl. The case had felt heavy enough to contain them. They weren’t in it. And one shoe was missing, not her best shoes, but comfortable for walking. And grass stains on her undergarments, and her lilac floral frock.
No blue overcoat. Perhaps it was in the car. Lorna would have rid her house of that familiar coat, left hanging beside the black coat on hooks behind the front door. How many miles had those blue and black overcoats walked side by side?
Her maroon jacket was in the case, and it had filth on its sleeve – which it had transferred to the grey and maroon floral print. Dog’s filth. She could smell it. Anger rose, but she killed it. Tonight was no time for concern over filth. She was surrounded by it. Had to think ‘tomorrow’, think ‘nine o’clock tomorrow’ and the birth of Maryanne Brown. She had to keep her focus on tomorrow morning. It was all she had.
She squinted at the too small face of her watch, a pretty thing but not easy to read at night. It told her that her tomorrow morning had already begun. It told her that she had eight and a half hours left before Lorna dialled the pension department’s number.
&nbs
p; Did the Kew bank open its door at nine or nine thirty? Perhaps the latter. Elizabeth would be waiting at its door at nine to take her final curtain call.
She looked at the sink, at the tap. Her mouth dry for hours, wanting what that tap contained. She walked around the table to stand before a sink loaded with plates, mugs, bowls and saucepan lids all swimming together in greasy grey water. Turned on a bare heel to a stove, fitted in between the far door and the kitchen bench. A lidless saucepan on one hotplate, a small kettle on another. The kettle suggested that tea might be found in this hell in the sky. She wanted tea and reached to test the kettle’s weight of water. Empty, and the sink full, and it was too much, the stink, the filth they lived in. It nauseated her, exhausted her. But two modern taps over the sink suggested that one would deliver hot water. In her mother’s hut, she’d boiled the kettle for hot water. No tap in her kitchen, no sink. She’d washed-up in a tin dish on the kitchen table. Since leaving her mother’s hut, Amber had measured all labour by her labour there. When you have known worse, the bad is never as bad.
One sleeve pushed high, she reached a hand into greasy water to feel for and remove the plug. Filth burped and gurgled through the pipes to the dirt far below. The tap to the right supplied hot water. She filled the kettle, found the correct switch for a rear hotplate, then while it boiled, she filled the sink with near scalding water to which she added a dash of Rinso, found amid the chaos of the bench.
The plates, mugs, cutlery and miscellaneous items left to soak clean, she searched that bench for tea, for a teapot. Not there. She extended her search to unexpected places. Found an open packet of tea in the refrigerator, beside four cans of condensed milk. Found the door shelves and the lower shelf of the refrigerator loaded with large bottles of lemon cordial. Found tiers of canned tuna. Small cans. Amber counted thirteen.
Found a large tub of ice-cream in the freezer section, iced into the freezer section, meat pies clinging to the ice-cream tub’s side. No teapot, or not until she closed the refrigerator door and looked higher. Teapot on top of the refrigerator, beside a bowl containing two mouldy lemons, a long dead banana and a cockroach, not dead. She mashed it with a mouldy lemon.
No bin in Sissy’s kitchen, no rear door where she might empty tea leaves, or toss out mouldy fruit. She considered the window, then emptied the teapot into the bowl where the mashed cockroach, his insides seeping, attempted to swim for his life.
Amber worked hard for her cup of tea. She opened a can of condensed milk with a pair of scissors and the heel of her shoe when her search of drawers failed to locate a can opener. She washed the dishes, washed the sink with a fossil of sponge found in a drawer she’d searched for a can opener. She washed filth from the tiles behind the sink, then began on the benchtop, moving massed items to random cupboards.
She cleared the table of salt and pepper, sauce and scissors, bills and pills, and placed them neatly on the benchtop, then used the fossil and more Rinso to wash the laminated table top clean, and when it was done to her satisfaction she made tea and sat down at a clean table to sip – and a cup of tea had never tasted so good.
One step at a time. That’s all it had ever taken. When she’d cleaned up after Norman, when she’d cleaned at Kew, just one step at a time, one small corner, then the next and the next until there were no more corners to clean.
By dawn Amber had found a modern stove she’d scrubbed white with Rinso and a nail brush, found on her second trip to the bathroom. She’d found a very modern refrigerator, which by seven was as clean inside as it was out. Found a can opener when she dried the dishes, found a nice set of cutlery, which justified her lining of a cutlery drawer with pages ripped from a magazine. Each knife, fork, spoon and the miscellaneous placed into its own pigeonhole. She’d lined two wall cupboards with more pages from that same magazine and in one she’d placed the plates and bowls; in the other, the mugs and glasses.
An organised kitchen leads to an organised mind. Her mind was functioning well when Reginald emerged before eight, clad in a moth-eaten dressing gown. He caught her drinking tea. If he noticed the cleared table, the empty sink, the white stove as he brushed by it, it was not obvious.
Amber sipped until she heard a cistern flush, at which point she rose, washed and dried her cup, slid her feet into her shoes, tidied her short curls and set her hat on them.
He didn’t return. Water was gurgling again down the pipes. She carried her case back to the door, placed her handbag strap over her shoulder, then stood with her case, waiting for him.
He came but only as far as the kitchen. From the sitting room, she watched him take a bottle of lemon cordial from the refrigerator then seek a receptacle. He settled for her cup, half-filled it, added water, then sighting her watching, he emptied the cup and placed it down.
‘Are there stairs, Reginald?’ His chin lifted, or the place where his chin should have been, and in a family where heavy chins dominated, how he’d been born chinless, Amber didn’t know. ‘Stairs,’ she repeated.
‘A lift,’ he said, his eyes shuddering in a last ditch attempt to escape their bony confines. Red and scaly lids reined them in. He blinked, twice, three times, cleared his throat again, and tried once more. ‘We are . . . on the . . . on the fourth . . .’
He’d had little to say as a youth. Charles had done the sermonising, leaving few spaces for the other occupants of his house to find their voices. Amber had once allowed Cousin Reg time to express his dreams. This morning she had no time to waste. ‘There must be a staircase?’
He nodded.
‘Where?’
‘To the . . .’ He raised his left hand.
‘Stairs to the left?’ He nodded. ‘Is there a tram nearby?’
Again he raised his left hand.
‘I’ll need to leave my case here for an hour or two. Do you have a spare key?’
He went to his room, returning moments later clad in an abominable rag of a tracksuit and bedroom slippers, but offering a key. She zipped it into her handbag as he led the way along the passage to a stairwell.
And Amber descended into heaven, counting the steps as she circled down.
Fifty-three.
NOSE JOB
‘Y ou should have seen Lorna Hooper’s face,’ Maisy said. She’d been talking since she’d sat down, and Jenny listening, wide eyed.
‘I don’t think either of them saw me. I hope they didn’t. I was standing well back with Reg. But, my God, you should have seen the way Lorna looked at Amber. She’d been hanging on to her arm, and when she realised who she was hanging on to, she gave Amber an almighty shove. She would have gone down if not for Alma Duckworth. She caught her, then Lorna gave her a look that should have smote her dead on the spot.’
They were sampling the morning tea menu at Woody Creek’s new tea room – three tables and twelve chairs set up beneath the veranda of Blunt’s drapery store. Two years ago, Miss Blunt had sold her business to John and Pauline Taylor, a city couple who, since N. and B. Wallis had moved into Charlie’s, had become disillusioned by drapery and were in the process of diversifying. Enough of the locals, loyal to Miss Blunt, had paid her exorbitant prices but didn’t feel the same loyalty towards the Taylors, not when they could buy similar items for a third of the price at Charlie’s. N. and B. Wallis now stocked pantihose, underwear and various items of cheap children’s clothing. They were go-getters, and that’s about all Jenny had to say for the pair who’d bought Georgie’s shop.
Maisy no longer entered that beeping door, not since she’d been called an old biddy, when all she’d attempted to do was explain to the B half of the Wallis duo how Woody Creek businesses had never attempted to cut the throats of the other businesses, that there was room for all in Woody Creek as long as everyone stuck to selling what they’d always sold. Her advice hadn’t gone down well, and since that day, Maisy had taken the Taylors under her wing.
‘They did well last Friday,’ she said. ‘Me and Patricia had one of their ham and cheese omelettes for lunch
and these chairs were full.’
The farmers and their wives still came to town on Fridays, or the few who chose not to make the longer drive to Willama came in to do their shopping, though the streets, once crowded on Fridays, were no longer crowded.
‘They’ll get no one sitting out here come winter,’ Jenny said.
‘If it takes off, Pauline said they’ll move things around inside and set their tables up in there.’
The male Taylor was a retired baker. He baked in the room Miss Blunt had used as a fitting room, and when he was working at his old trade the shop smelled of baking. On the days he didn’t bake, a whiff of the past still clung to the rear corners of Blunt’s drapery, but the days he didn’t bake were becoming rare. He supplied cakes and pies to the hotel. He’d made and decorated a beautiful wedding cake for the Jenner wedding. A couple like the Taylors would survive, though maybe not as drapers. In the time Jenny had been drinking tea out front of the shop, not one customer had walked in through the door.
‘How did she look?’ Jenny asked.
‘A damn sight happier before she saw Sissy—’
‘I meant Sissy,’ Jenny said.
‘The same,’ Maisy said. ‘Basically the same. Bigger, of course, older, her hair’s half-grey but still hanging around her shoulders, and she had so much hairspray on it, it almost cracked when she turned her head. She was wearing one of those stretchy material dresses that hug every bulge. She’s got a stomach on her as big as I had when I was nine months pregnant with the twins, but otherwise much the same.’ Maisy’s fork bit into a slice of lemon meringue pie. Her tongue tasted. ‘Their filling is more gluey than mine. The lemon isn’t supposed to be gluey.’
‘Did Lorna speak to her?’
‘Lorna didn’t say anything to anybody. Not a syllable. I thought she was going to have a stroke. She turned purple, or her nose did. Did she have a nose job or something?’