by Joy Dettman
He leaned against the kitchen’s doorframe while telling her the roof wouldn’t stand up to the next wind. She asked him if his old fridge had still been working when they’d cut off the power. He told her it had. He told her that the rafters and wall supports in his old bedroom were paper thin, told her that every movement in the rafters put an added strain on old power wires.
‘If she burns, she burns, Harry.’
‘I pulled you out of one fire, Georgie.’
‘Which sort of proved to me that I wasn’t written down to die young, Harry.’
THE HAIR
With the stove burning, the kitchen was warmer than the back of her ute. Georgie had paid to have a canvas canopy fitted to it in Townsville and had spent a few nights beneath that tarp, comfortable enough on her inflatable mattress. She’d seen a lot of country, crossed a lot of mountains, walked a lot of beaches, watched the burning of a crop of sugarcane somewhere north of Brisbane, hoping its controlled burning might wipe out the uncontrolled burning of her dreams.
It hadn’t, and so what? She’d eaten ripe pineapples in Queensland, slurped mangoes by the dozen, tried a custard apple too. Had always wanted to try one. One had been enough.
She’d worked for a time in Townsville before taking off for Mount Isa. Had worked in a few places, slept in a few caravans and cabins, then driven on, turning when she’d felt like turning, stopping when she’d felt like stopping, working when she’d needed the company and writing a cheque when she hadn’t.
She’d spent three months in Darwin working as a pub waitress, interested in a city blown away in the cyclone of ’74 but thriving by ’78. She’d seen an eight-foot crocodile outside of Darwin, its jaws open, ready to eat her.
For six weeks she’d worked at a roadhouse up near Karratha while her ute had been out of action. Without her wheels, she’d had to do something to fill her time. Waited ten days for her ute’s reconditioned motor to arrive, waited another week for it to be fitted then waited a month more because the roadhouse bloke had begged her to stay on until he could replace her. She’d liked him, so she’d stayed.
Met a lot of people. A few she’d liked, a lot she hadn’t. Sold petrol at a service station on the outskirts of Perth. Cooked and sold hamburgers and chips in Albany. Hadn’t liked that owner. Had slapped him in the eye with a lump of hamburger meat one night and walked out without her pay.
She’d been selling ice-creams and mixing milkshakes in Coolgardie, sleeping at night in a crumbling caravan, when she’d read that a date had been fixed for Dino Collins’ second trial. This time, she’d be there to convict that mongrel and, desperate to get there, she’d driven from Norseman to Ceduna – across the Nullarbor in a day, a very long day, but the road was straight and the traffic minimal, so she’d kept on driving.
She’d been driving since before her nineteenth birthday. Jack Thompson had given her a licence in October of ’58. He’d kissed her around the same time. Maybe everyone remembers the bloke who first kissed them. A few had kissed her since, though not in recent years. Women were few and far between in some of the places she’d been. She’d talked a few blokes out of pursuing her, had belted one with a lump of firewood. The crew-cut had helped, as had the scar through her eyebrow, her rag bag clothes and ute, unwashed since she’d left Woody Creek.
She loved driving. Always had. It released her mind to roam, and to wonder what her life might have been had she married Jack Thompson at nineteen and had a kid or two. He’d spent a year nagging her. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t married him. Old Charlie maybe – or Granny. ‘I’m footloose and fancy free, me darlin’,’ she used to say. At fourteen, fifteen, Ray King a constant in her life, footloose and man-free had seemed like a good way to live. And it had been during her eighteen months on the road. She’d woken when she’d felt like waking, no clocks to watch, or not since she’d left her watch in a washroom in Queensland after trying to remove two frogs from a toilet she’d needed to use. Could have replaced it but had got to enjoy her timeless state.
She had no fear for the life she should have lost in the fire that killed Margot. Being dragged from that smoke-filled bedroom to gasp in life’s air had been like a second birth, as had losing everything she’d spent her life working to gain. Or almost everything – she’d saved the contents of her top drawer, a small drawer. She glanced now at a battered cardboard carton, her only travelling companion. Jack’s nautilus shell was in it, her reason for grabbing that drawer. They’d picked it up on a Frankston beach.
She hadn’t lost her money in the fire. She couldn’t have done what she’d done without money, which she couldn’t have accessed as readily if not for fate. The day she’d unlocked the shop for an irate retiree, she’d found half a dozen letters on the floor. The postie, accustomed to tossing shop mail onto Charlie’s long counter, must have shoved it beneath the green doors. She hadn’t opened the envelopes, not then. Tossed the lot into the ute’s glove box then drove back to Jen’s to empty the contents of that top drawer into her carton, to toss in a handful of borrowed clothing. Left then, no plan in her mind other than to put a few miles between her and this town before they buried Margot.
She’d opened her mail in Willama while waiting for her eyebrow stitches to be removed and she’d found a new chequebook. She’d found two accounts from suppliers too. Her first purchases, a biro and a packet of envelopes, she’d paid for from the shop’s canvas change bag. Had always left coins and a few notes in that bag at night when she’d emptied the cash drawer. Written two cheques, posted them, then walked down to the bank. The bloke there knew her, and so he ought to. She’d seen a movie with him once, had supper with him. He’d cashed her cheque. She’d cashed all bar one since. Had saved it for an emergency. No more emergencies. She was home.
She would have been here months ago if not for her need of a shower. She’d slept in the ute in Ceduna, then pushed on to Adelaide where, in need of a shower, she’d booked into a caravan park. Five minutes after parking her ute beside an onsite van, the trio of males she’d named the ‘three disciples’ had come belting on her door.
‘Stop following us around,’ the John of the group had greeted her.
‘You again,’ she’d said.
They’d given her a long beep when their F100 half-truck had passed her somewhere between Alice Springs and Darwin, her Victorian number plate and their own the only two on that road. Then three or so weeks later, they’d walked into the Darwin hotel where she’d been waitressing. Simon, the youngest of the trio, tried to pick her up. She’d told him she was old enough to be his mother – might have been, had she started breeding at twelve. He’d called her Mum thereafter so she’d called them the disciples. The third member of their group was a Paul.
The next time she’d seen them she’d called them saviours. She’d been stuck out in the middle of nowhere, up near the top of Western Australia, her ute dead on the side of an unmade road, a hole through its sump, and she almost ready to get down on her knees in the dust and start praying for salvation. Then out of the haze, like knights in rusty armour, they came to tow her to Karratha where they’d offered floor space in their tent for her sleeping bag. She’d camped with them until they’d moved on and she’d taken that job at the roadhouse, for its accommodation, a crumbling caravan out back.
That night in Adelaide she’d eaten with them, she supplying the bread, baked beans and beetroot, they, the sausages and beer. At midnight, after one too many beers, she’d decided to go grape picking. John’s credit card had reached its limit, the F100’s gearbox was buggered and they were broke.
She’d shared their tent for two weeks, had picked a lot of grapes by day and drunk a lot of beer by night, and maybe had the best weeks of her life. Someone wrote a song about people who needed people being the luckiest people in the world. Maybe they were when they had the right people around them.
With the disciples’ truck back on the road, they’d gone their separate ways, the boys heading home across country to Melbourn
e, she heading for the same place, but via the scenic route. A swine of a road, the coastal road, narrow, winding, too much traffic on it, and most of the number plates Victorian. A pretty drive, had she been able to take her eyes off the road to look at the scenery. She’d seen little of it.
She’d seen a sign pointing to Geelong, a city she’d visited as a peanut in fifteen year old Jenny’s belly, the city where the cops had finally arrested the redheaded water-pistol bandit who’d created the peanut.
How had a fifteen year old kid survived that? How had she got herself home? Made of tough stuff, Jenny, or having three kids before her eighteenth birthday had toughened her up. She’d handled Margot’s death. She’d handled the police, the reporters, and no doubt the funeral. The thought of putting what the fire had left of Margot into a coffin was what had given Georgie the impetus to run. Desire to see the mongrel responsible for Margot’s death hanged had turned her nose towards home.
Dino Collins hadn’t lit that fire. He’d had the best alibi in the world for that one. It had taken the cops an hour to cut him out of the car wreck and for the next two weeks he’d been more dead than alive. Raelene lit that fire, but it was Collins who had turned a fifteen year old brat of a kid into someone capable of setting fire to a house while its occupants were sleeping, and whether he’d denied it or not at his first trial, he’d been the one who had broken into Cara’s house and kidnapped Tracy, and if they ever got him back into court, Georgie would do her damnedest to convict him.
The Paul disciple had said his older brother lived at Ferntree Gully, not far from where the little girl had been kidnapped. He’d said that one of his brother’s sons had gone to school with Tracy’s brother. Georgie hadn’t mentioned her own involvement. She’d never been into gut spilling, which must have been a genetic trait. For years, she’d been in contact with Cara, from ’67 to ’74 they’d spoken for hours on the phone, written long letters, and not once had Cara mentioned that she was pregnant.
She’d been engaged for a time to a big name solicitor, Chris Marino. In ’69 she’d asked Georgie to be her bridesmaid, then the wedding had been called off. The boy Georgie had seen on television had looked to be around the right age to have been born in ’69 or ’70. He’d looked like Cara – like Jimmy too, other than his hair.
Georgie believed she could put a date to when Cara had become involved with Raelene and Tracy. It would have been around Easter of ’74. That’s when Cara had left her job at the school, moved out of her Windsor unit, stopped writing, stopped phoning. Not a word had Georgie heard from her in four years, then on the night of the kidnap, she’d turned up at the old place in a brand new Holden station wagon looking like an exhausted ghost, turned up as Cara Grenville, foster mother of Tracy King, according to the newspapers. When had she married? How had she become involved in the mess of Raelene’s life? Who had fathered her son? Georgie had no answers, so she poked a few sticks of wood into the open firebox which provided both light and warmth tonight.
She’d been over the road a few times today to fetch fallen wood. Plenty of it over there, though an axe would have been handy. She knew she’d find one in Granny’s shed, or would unless someone had helped himself to the tools. She’d check it out when she was ready. Wasn’t yet. Turning her eyes in the direction of the space where Granny’s house once stood gave her goose bumps and the urge to get back into her ute and go.
Granny’s husband, the man Jenny called Itchy-foot, had spent his life travelling – running away from himself, according to Granny. Georgie liked to believe she’d run away from the self she’d been before the fire and was between selves at the moment.
She’d accumulated little, a good pair of boots, a pair of jeans. They’d fitted when she’d bought them. Baggy now. She’d found the windcheater jacket. It was warm. She’d bought an Akubra hat and two pairs of khaki long shorts. She’d bought a couple of books from a secondhand bookshop in Geelong. Hadn’t been looking for a read at the time, just a feed. The smell of fish and chips frying had turned her into that side street. She’d been eating hot chips through a hole poked through the paper wrapping when she’d walked into one of the biggest secondhand bookshops she’d seen, and the well-dressed white-headed bloke behind the counter eyed her travelling outfit and hot chips as he might have a Neanderthal pulled fresh from the bogs. She’d lost a shelf full of books in the fire, lost thirty pairs of shoes, lost correspondence college certificates she’d wasted years of her life in chasing, lost her comfortable kitchen, and Granny’s stove and doors that closed.
No door on Elsie’s kitchen. Harry had removed it when his brood had outgrown the kitchen, his brood and Margot. She’d eaten most of her meals at that lopsided table – and tonight wasn’t the time to start thinking about her. Georgie lit a cigarette and moved her oil drum closer to the stove and, in the light from the fire, she looked at the hand holding the cigarette.
‘You’ve got big hands for a woman,’ the Paul disciple had said.
They were bigger than Jenny’s. As a twelve year old her hands had been bigger than Jenny’s, the same shape though – as were Cara’s, and hers closer in size and skin tone to Jenny’s. That’s how Georgie had recognised her that day in Charlie’s, by Jenny’s hands, Jenny’s hair, Jenny’s eyes. All Jenny – as Margot had been all Macdonald. The Macdonald twins may have stretched to five six or seven. Margot had stopped growing at five foot. Jimmy would have grown tall. As a six year old, though two and a half years younger than Margot, he’d been her height.
Georgie had got over losing him. She’d got over losing Granny. She’d get over Margot, though it wasn’t the loss of her so much as how she’d lost her. Couldn’t think of that night without flinching, so pushed her mind back from the fire to Cara.
They’d run together to Joe Flanagan’s back door, Georgie more familiar with the land, holding on to Cara’s hand, and Cara gripping it when they’d been led through to the bathroom where that tiny kid, who might have been Raelene at four, lay in the bathtub, on a blanket, old Joe’s missus on her knees beside the bath, washing what had appeared to Georgie to be a dead kid’s face.
Then the ambulance had arrived to take Cara and Tracy, and Jack Thompson had driven Georgie down to the hospital to have her eyebrow stitched. She’d expected Tracy to be taken there, had expected to find Cara there, but learnt after she’d been stitched that they’d been flown to Melbourne by air ambulance.
Georgie blew three smoke rings towards the firebox and forced her mind to the roads, to Simon, sitting beside her in the dust beside their campfire, she attempting to teach him how to blow smoke rings. Memories of laughter around that campfire.
No laughter that day in the secondhand bookshop. The white-headed owner had asked a fortune for half a dozen second or sixth-hand books.
‘I don’t want to buy your shop,’ she’d said.
‘Two are new releases.’
‘Two years ago,’ she’d said, handing over a ten-dollar note. He’d taken it then stood with his hand out for the coins. She’d counted them onto his palm.
‘Do you need a bag?’
‘And a receipt, thanks,’ she’d said.
‘My register is out of paper.’
‘If I’m spending the family fortune I’d like a record of what I’m spending it on,’ she’d said.
His expression telling her she was a pain in the arse, he’d reached beneath his counter for a receipt book, then taken his time writing an itemised account. Wasted more finding and inking a rubber stamp, then stamping his receipt. Pre Loved Books.
She’d planned to sleep in Melbourne that night, then spend a few days in closing her ‘mouse money’ accounts before heading home, but she’d gone to a supermarket for smokes and seen the newspaper headlines: SECOND TRIAL DELAYED. COLLINS ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL.
She’d found a caravan park where she’d rented a cabin, cheaper by the week than by the night. It had its own bathroom, its own fridge, a bed and a good light to read by. Booked it for a week and ended up staying
in Geelong for two months. She got a job at a supermarket, as a checkout chick.
The first book she’d opened, Papillon, hit the cabin wall an hour after she’d opened it. She’d read to page twenty, had started reading the next page – and it hadn’t made sense. Found out why. There were twenty-odd pages of it missing, and she’d been enjoying it, or had been interested in the character they’d just found guilty. Tossed it into the supplied kitchen waste bin, on top of most of the meat pie she’d bought for her dinner, and opened Kane and Abel. It filled three nights. She’d found space for it in her carton of possessions.
Number three book hit the rubbish bin. Number four’s first chapter was okay, but deteriorated into romantic bulldust. She binned it too. Not Marnie. She’d wanted to be that girl, robbing her employers then changing her name and appearance and moving on. Marnie epitomised footloose and fancy free – until she’d been caught.
As had Laurence George Morgan, Jenny’s water-pistol bandit, Georgie’s accidental father. He’d robbed banks, jewellers, stolen cars and spent his ill-gotten gains on classy hotels, guesthouses and Jenny – until the cops had run him down. His mug shot had travelled Australia in her carton. A survivor, Laurie Morgan, he’d somehow managed to worm his way into that top drawer, as had Itchy-foot’s diaries, and the green top Cara had given her for her twenty-seventh birthday, which she’d used to wrap Jack’s nautilus shell. Her seven ‘mouse money’ bankbooks had been in the drawer, and the pendant Jack had given her for her nineteenth birthday. Apart from Itchy-foot’s diaries, those few items made up the base layer in her carton. The diaries she’d left with Jenny – Itchy-foot’s will had stipulated that they be sent to her.
Marnie found a place in the carton before she’d started on book number six, which had been about to join its mates in the bin when she’d found the bookshop bloke’s receipt in the plastic bag she’d been using for her soiled laundry. He’d sold her faulty merchandise and charged top prices for it, so she’d emptied her overflowing kitchen bin. The cover of the first book was somewhat meat pie and sauce smeared, but a damp cloth wiped it clean enough. One book’s close association with an apple core had stained it for life, but even brand new it wouldn’t have been fit to read. She’d placed the discards into the bag and the following day returned to the bookshop, clad in her checkout chick uniform, her eyebrow scar camouflaged for work. Practice had taught her how to feather in the missing hairs, when she could be bothered. Most of the time she couldn’t. It could have been worse. Raelene could have knocked her eye out with that spanner.