by Joy Dettman
In closing, I bless you for your kindness to me when we met as strangers and I hope that one day you can find it within your heart to forgive my accidental deception. Should you need me, you need only to call.
My very best regards to you always,
Elizabeth
‘I told you that your name is Amber Morrison!’
‘Yes, dear, you did.’
‘Then why sign that letter Elizabeth?’
‘It is who I have been for some time.’
‘And My dear Miss Hooper. No one writes “my dear” anyone these days, and crawling to her after what she did to you yesterday – you make me sick.’
Sissy, never a reader, could now apparently do it quite well upside down. Amber looked into those sunken mud eyes for a moment, then back to her pad to carefully remove her page and fold it. She’d bought a packet of twenty envelopes, and on one she wrote the familiar Kew address. She’d bought no stamps.
‘You’re not staying here tonight.’
‘I have nowhere to go, Mrs—’
‘Don’t you dare.’
‘—Cecelia,’ Amber said, her lips grimacing on that name. She slipped her letter into the envelope, adding Lorna’s keys then, with a lick, sealed it.
‘You can’t put something like that in a letterbox. And if you think for one second that she’ll take you back, then you’re stark raving mad. If she’d had any spit left in her, she would have spat in your face outside that church – and if you think it wasn’t her who tossed your clothes everywhere, then you’re dumb along with being a stark raving mad crawler,’ Sissy said, snatching more bread from the packet.
Amber, unwilling to watch the last of her cheese disappear, placed the envelope into her handbag and left the kitchen, left the unit to again descend those fifty-three steps to heaven, where she still had much to do.
*
In each life there are highs, lows and the flat spaces in between. Amber had survived the ultra lows, had lived the highs in Kew. This was neither a high nor a low. This was her one day. She now had sufficient funds in her handbag for Maryanne to escape to Perth – or to Tasmania – to rent a small flat, furnish it. Or should she stay a while in this place, well camouflaged by the mixed and matched mass of humanity she’d passed on those fifty-three steps?
Since childhood, when stressed by a life she could not control, her feet had been unable to remain still. In adulthood, when life in Norman’s house had returned more punishment than reward, she’d walked from dusk to dawn. This morning the circling descent had been mind-cleansing and therapeutic – as had been her freedom to ride the tram with the city’s masses. She rode with them again, rode the familiar tram to Kew where she deposited her letter in the familiar letterbox. No sign of Lorna.
By three thirty Amber was in Richmond, at her favourite opportunity shop. She’d found her vases there, but this morning she ignored the folderols and made a beeline for the frock racks. The dusty pink worn since Sunday morning was no longer fresh, nor was the clothing picked up from Lorna’s gutter. She found two frocks, not as smart as Elizabeth’s pink, but quite suitable for Mrs Maryanne Brown. Later she chose new underwear, two new towels. Her plans had altered since this morning. Elizabeth was not required to die, but to go into hiding.
*
It was six o’clock before she commenced her slow circling ascent, a new key pinned to the lining of her handbag: Elizabeth Duckworth’s. Having decided not to kill herself, she’d rented a private mailbox at Richmond, which would require another letter to be written, though not tonight. Amber was near dead on her feet when almost knocked from them by a herd of running louts – who might have intentionally knocked her down had they been aware of the contents of her handbag. She’d emptied both Amber’s and Elizabeth’s accounts. Amber’s bankbook had joined Elizabeth’s in the drains below Melbourne.
Television blaring when she unlocked the door, Reginald sleeping on his chair and no sign of Sissy, she crept across the chaos to the sitting room to turn the volume low before continuing through to the kitchen, where she armed herself with a beige-toned floral frock, new underwear, towel, a scrubbing brush, sponge, her bottles of Handy Andy and bleach, the rubber gloves, a sealed cake of perfumed soap and her handbag. She required a bath.
And found Sissy standing before the toothpaste-splattered, soap-greased mirror, grimacing as she unwound plastic rollers from her hair.
Something moved within Amber’s exhausted breast, the merest flicker of something. The protest of a weary heart perhaps? Something. In another lifetime, she had loved that plain as mud ox of a girl. Always she’d done her best for Sissy. She’d bought her pretty frocks, spent hours styling her heavy hair. For a moment, Amber stood with her load in the doorway, watching her daughter struggle.
She sighed and turned towards the kitchen. She yawned, sighed again, then: ‘Bring your comb and pins out to the light, Cecelia. I will do what I can for you.’
THE PARTY
Elsie Hall couldn’t tell you with any certainty the day or the year of her birth. She had vague recollections of a father who had dropped her and her sister Lucy off at the Aboriginal mission but had retained no image of him. She had no similar memory of a mother.
She remembered horses, barking dogs, a canvas-covered wagon and Lucy, who told her Daddy was coming back. He hadn’t come.
There was little doubt that he’d been a white man. Elsie’s skin tones had never been quite white but her features were European. She’d been raised white by Gertrude Foote, or, rather, from the age of eleven or twelve she’d been raised white.
Harry Hall, a lanky, freckle-faced redhead, might have been seventeen when Gertrude took him under her wing. At eighteen he’d married Elsie, who was four or five years his senior, and already the mother of ten year old Joseph Richard Foote, or Joey.
Joey, also not quite white, raised as Gertrude’s grandson, had celebrated his eighteenth birthday then left home to fight a war. He’d met Annette, a nurse and the daughter of a Queensland cane farmer, who he married when the war was over when he became Joe Foote, a Bundaberg cane farmer of Spanish descent. In Woody Creek he’d been Darkie Hall, son of Elsie and Dingo Wadi. His visits home were brief.
Lenny Hall had been raised as the son of Elsie and Harry, but by birth was Elsie’s nephew, a big blond-headed, blue-eyed chap, a top footballer in his day, now wed to a Willama girl and living in a modern brick house out Cemetery Road. His full sister, Joany, and Tony, her Italian immigrant husband, grew tomatoes on a property fifteen kilometres west of Woody Creek.
Harry and Elsie had produced five of their own: Ronnie, a redhead and a dead ringer for his father; Maudie, born with Elsie’s dark hair, Harry’s freckles and blue eyes; sandy-headed and blue-eyed Brian, an accountant at a city bank; redheaded Josie, a theatre nurse at the Alfred Hospital; and Teddy, the middle man. Born with Elsie’s dark hair and eyes, her darker than average skin tones, Teddy had always known he was the odd man out. He’d started leaving home as a three year old, started stealing his father’s tobacco as a ten year old. Man sized by the age of fourteen, he’d discovered that a bottle of beer could make his dark complexion go away.
He’d left home at twenty. He might have gone further than Willama had he not been arrested and charged with the purchasing of known stolen property, two cartons of Charlie White’s cigarettes. Harry and Lenny bailed him out and took him home to do the right thing by Margot, who had been five months pregnant at the time. She’d refused to marry a ‘blackfeller’, though after Trudy’s birth, the odd relationship had continued for seven more years. Teddy’s one saving grace during those years had been his skill with motors. Show him a piston and, hungover or not, he’d name the car or truck it had come out of. Take a dying motor to him and, drunk or not, an hour or two later he’d have it purring.
He was twenty-eight the year Roy, the garage owner, retired, which, had Roy been able to find a buyer for his rundown house and tin shed garage, his umpteen years of accumulated greasy bits of vehicles l
ong dead, might have been the end of Teddy. Few prospective buyers bothered to get out of their cars, so Roy had made Teddy an offer too good to refuse. He’d had money in the bank. Harry had put it there. For years he’d been confiscating Teddy’s wages, his only means of keeping his son off the grog. He gave up that bankbook. Teddy put down a deposit on Roy’s house and business and the bank gave him a loan for the rest.
That’s when Vonnie Boyle, a not quite eighteen year old kid, had wormed her way into Teddy’s life. She’d sorted out his bookwork first, then his tin shed, and later his life, and in doing so had ruined Margot’s. Young Vonnie knew almost as much about motors and gearboxes as her husband. That girl could do anything other than carry a baby beyond five months.
In November of ’78, the original loan paid off, Vonnie spoke to the bank about a new loan to build a new garage, and while the site was being cleared, she booked a two-week holiday at Veronica Andrews’ Frankston guesthouse, where she’d be waited on and could lie around all day. She was pregnant again.
She started bleeding in Frankston.
Since the late forties, Veronica and her retired doctor partner had done a few hundred abortions in the rooms behind their guesthouse. That night they did what they could to prevent one. Vonnie was moved by ambulance to the Royal Women’s Hospital where she got by the five-month marker before Teddy drove home alone. He spent his weekends on the road through January and February, hope growing in his eyes, and in Elsie’s.
And in Jenny’s. Her reasons were selfish. Teddy showed too much interest in Trudy. If they were in the same room, his eyes rarely left her. He’d never mentioned her birth, and probably never would, which didn’t alter the fact that he was her blood father. Since his wedding day, Jenny had been willing Vonnie pregnant, preferably with triplets.
She was only having one, and on a Sunday night in late March, Teddy popped his head inside the bungalow to relay the latest news. Jim and Jen were there, playing cards.
‘The quack said today that if Vonnie can hang on until the week after next, he’ll operate. She’s a determined little bugger. She’ll hang on.’
Hope made his eyes glisten that night, made him smile, and it was Trudy’s smile, and Jenny’s heart lurched.
‘I heard its ticker this morning. It’s beating away in there like a steady little motor,’ he said, and he sniffed and left them to their game.
On the morning of the tenth of April 1979, Michael John Hall was delivered, all five pound eight ounces of him, and within an hour of his birth, the news that he was alive and well, that Vonnie and Teddy were over the moon, had travelled from Bundaberg to Mildura, to Melbourne and back to Molliston. Vonnie’s parents made their own few phone calls. Their son, Michael John, had died at twenty-one in a car accident. Vonnie was their only daughter, and her son their only grandchild.
Harry had lost count of his. Elsie could tell you the birth dates of every one, including Trudy, but this one’s arrival deserved celebrating. They baptised Michael John in early June, and Halls and Boyles came from every direction to be a part of that miracle. Jen and Jim offered their house for the party. Harry booked half a dozen onsite caravans and cabins, but no Hall went to bed that night, not the adults, the teenagers or the kids – nor did Jenny.
Joey had flown down from Bundaberg for the day and would return tomorrow. He’d flown alone. His children believed they’d inherited their dark eyes and hair from their Grandmother Foote’s Spanish pirate ancestor. Jenny’s fault. When Joey had grown a moustache at fifteen, she’d told him he looked like a Spanish pirate. Or maybe it was the town’s fault. The five year old boy in Joey had never forgotten, or forgiven, the constable who’d pointed out the fact that he had the wrong-coloured skin.
Near daylight, Joey and a minor herd of yawning Halls drove down to have a look at the house they’d been raised in, the land they’d played on. The light, though poor, was just sufficient to see the colour of a utility parked in their old driveway.
‘That’s Georgie’s ute,’ Teddy said, and he and Josie crept inside.
Found her dead to the world, on the kitchen floor, zipped into a sleeping bag.
Josie wanted to wake her.
‘Let her sleep,’ Teddy said.
Before the Halls went their separate ways, they told Jenny. She crept in at nine and found Georgie still curled up in her sleeping bag, so crept out to walk around Elsie’s crumbling house, to peer beneath the termite-riddled structure, then walk across the goat paddock to stare at the blackened site and to shake her head again. The shed was still standing. She had a poke around inside it, picked up a little spade she could use at home. She carried it back to the car, had a smoke then, with still no sound of movement from within, she decided she’d waited long enough.
Cocooned in the green sleeping bag, Georgie looked like a giant caterpillar, and how anyone could sleep so heavily on a hard board floor, Jenny didn’t know. She reached out a hand to the small portion of her that was visible, that dark copper hair – or what was left of it.
‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’ she said. Hadn’t meant to wake her like that. She’d planned to do it gently.
Georgie opened her eyes and rolled onto her back. ‘What the hell are you nagging about at this time of day?’
‘It’s after ten, and your hair’s gone.’
More of Georgie emerged. A hand appeared and ran fingers through her inch-long crew-cut. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Damn those termites.’
‘Why would you go and do a thing like that?’
‘Bore water,’ Georgie said as more of her was revealed, clad in a sweater and baggy jeans, heavy socks.
‘There’s nothing of you.’
‘Nice to see you too, mate.’
‘That goes without saying – if there was enough of you to see. You’re skin and bone and why would you let anyone do that to your beautiful hair?’
‘Birdsville,’ Georgie said. ‘Their water is fifty per cent tar. What’s happening with Dino Collins?’
‘He was supposed to go to trial again two months ago but they carted him off to a psychiatric hospital. As far as I know, he’s still there.’
‘He’s playing possum,’ Georgie said.
‘That’s what I said. What time did you get here?’
‘Late – or early. I lost my watch.’
‘Why didn’t you come in?’
‘I wasn’t dressed for a party, Jen.’
‘You look like someone’s rag bag.’
‘Ta.’
Jenny considered Elsie’s old table as a chair. She tested it, wiped away a little dust and grime, then sat, swinging her legs. ‘I saw Collins at the first trial. There’s less of him than you – though he had more hair.’
‘I hoped you might have been celebrating his demise last night,’ Georgie said.
‘Vonnie and Teddy had a baby and Joey flew down. You should have come in. You haven’t seen him in years.’
‘I saw him at the Centenary, and I barely knew your Joey.’
‘I barely knew him this time. His hair is almost white and his face is as lined as Elsie’s.’ She studied Georgie’s face while watching her pull on a pair of working boots then reach into her sleeping bag for a navy windcheater jacket she pulled on over her sweater. ‘That looks as if it came out of a rag bag too.’
‘It was hanging behind the door of a cabin I spent a night in. Any more insults, or are you all done for this morning?’ Georgie said, then turned her attention to Elsie’s old wood stove, barely visible beneath its layer of dust and possum droppings.
‘You’ll catch a disease down here – if you don’t die of pneumonia first – if the roof doesn’t fall in on you before you have time to catch it.’
‘I’ve paid out good money to camp in worse, mate.’
Elsie had left her old fridge behind, her old kitchen table, no chair, no hearth brush, no wood on the hearth, a sink with a tap offering no water.
‘We disconnected the hose,’ Jenny said as Georgie tr
ied the tap. ‘It dripped. Harry needs what’s in the tank for the chooks.’
‘Disconnected the power too,’ Georgie said. ‘I could have used a bit of light last night. Does the fridge still work?’
‘It was barely working when they moved,’ Jenny said, eyeing the antique standing at an acute angle in the corner. The kitchen floor had run downhill for years. ‘We’ve had three different mobs squatting down here in the past twelve months. I’m thinking of selling to Joe Flanagan. He wants my access to the creek for his cows.’
‘Over my dead body.’
‘If you stay down here, that won’t take long. Get your things and come home.’
‘I’m home, or as close as it gets, or I would be if I had some power.’
‘If electricity is put through white ant riddled wiring, this place will burn.’
‘White ants don’t eat wire,’ Georgie said, then walked through to Elsie’s parlour, through a sleep-out to the rear door. Jenny went as far as the parlour, its floor a clutter of bottles, strewn paper, unidentifiable clothing left behind by Elsie or the squatters. She looked at a hole in the floorboards where a squatter may have fallen through. Peered through it to the junk below. No sign of a body down there.
‘The whole place is being held together by white ant nests, Georgie.’
‘They’re doing an all right job,’ Georgie said, giving the doorframe a shake.
Termites had partied on the stumps supporting the front veranda. Its roof had fallen a month ago, blocking the front door – which hadn’t opened in years anyway. Jenny sighed and walked out to stand on the rear steps, watching Georgie searching Harry’s old wood heap for chips.
‘Come home, love.’
‘I’ll be forty next year, Jen. I reckon that might just about make me old enough to know where I need to be right now,’ Georgie said.
Harry drove down at five to feed the chooks. Georgie had found the remains of a broom beneath the house. She’d swept the kitchen and parlour floors. She’d found an empty oil drum to sit on. The stove was burning, her billy was boiling.