by Joy Dettman
Not so the disappearance of the Chamberlain baby. If there was a man or woman in Australia who didn’t follow the inquest into the death of that tiny baby, then he owned no television set, couldn’t read a paper and chose not to speak to his neighbour. Everyone had an opinion.
The inquest claimed the end of one year and the beginning of the next, when because of public interest, the coroner’s findings were televised.
And it was official. A dingo had taken the baby from the couple’s tent. Person or persons unknown had taken the remains from the dingo and disposed of it.
A long hot summer the summer of ’81. The airconditioner, fitted into a sitting room window, battled on as Jenny sweated that summer to a close. Leaves were changing colour before the last of the heat left town. It had taken its toll on the old Hooper house. The constant vibration of the air conditioner had opened up a crack where the ornate cornice met the wall above that window.
There was seventy years of dust trapped above the ceiling. Daily it fell. Cobwebs did what they could to catch it. Last year, Jenny would have climbed a ladder to chase those cobwebs, but Jim, a foot taller, a foot closer to those ridiculously high ceilings, didn’t notice crack or cobweb, so Jenny closed the sitting room doors and allowed the spiders privacy in which to spin. It wasn’t the only crack. There was too much house, too many rooms never used. It needed a plasterer, a painter, and most of its floors complained when she walked on them. Harry said the house needed restumping.
In April, The Witch Queen left Woody Creek to commence the second part of the process, and Jim agreed to Jenny booking seats on a bus tour to Ayers Rock, but before she could book them, he became obsessed by Molly Squire.
He and John had put a book together for Jack Thompson’s mother’s hundredth birthday and they’d come upon a handwritten rhyme, titled Squire Molly, used as a bookmark in an old hotel guest book, one of several in the carton of photographs, letters and miscellaneous junk that Jack had delivered to Jenny’s dining room. The town of Molliston was named for Molly Squire, its first settler.
By June, Jim, deep into his research, wouldn’t take time off for a trip to Melbourne, or to Willama. By June, his new project had moved from the dining room to Jenny’s warm kitchen. And she’d had her fill of Molly – and of Jim’s rattletrap typewriter – and Jim. Left him sitting one bitter day and drove alone to Willama.
If he’d been with her he would have been driving and she wouldn’t have seen the green disposable lighter when she stepped from the car in Coles’ car park. If that lighter hadn’t flicked into a flame, she would have tossed it into a bin. Maybe if it had been red, she would have tossed it anyway. Had it been amber, she may have stopped long enough to consider her actions, but green meant go, so she walked into Coles and bought a packet of cigarettes. Smoked one before she unlocked the boot to load her supermarket bags. Smoked another before she left for home. Washed her hands well. Bought a bag of mints which she sucked all the way home.
Jim didn’t notice the smell. If she’d smoked the entire packet he wouldn’t have noticed. He probably hadn’t noticed she’d been missing for four hours – and wouldn’t miss her in bed either. She rugged herself up in her overcoat and beanie and went outside to the veranda for a smoke and to write a rhyme about a witch with an itch, and oil of a bat, and tail of a rat. Freezing cold out there but she lit a third cigarette and started a second rhyme, this one titled ‘Confession to Jim’.
If this paper holds a sniff of ashtray – a minor whiff
do not call me weak. It’s brain retrieval
The conditions cause the stink – just be pleased that I don’t drink
and see my weakness as the lesser of two evils.
Smoking smites a man stone dead, but it’s damn good for his head
Future doctors will prescribe smokes for all ills
With instruction, Don’t exceed more than twenty of the weed
per day. And do remember please that smoking kills
Two o’clock when she placed both rhymes with Jim’s notes on the kitchen table. He was working when she opened the kitchen door at eleven. He actually looked up from his documents.
‘Why, Jen?’
‘Too much Molly and no Alice Springs,’ she said. ‘And Woody Creek, and this bloody cold mausoleum and that mouldy old junk all over my kitchen table.’
*
Trudy phoned on Sunday night. Jim had typed up both rhymes, the witch for Amy, the confession he’d posted to Trudy.
‘How could you, Mum, after all of this time?’
‘Easy.’
‘You admitted to me on Christmas Day that your breathing was better. Why would you do that to yourself?’ Trudy said.
‘It’s not much use having a good set of lungs if you’re suffering from brain rot, Tru – and your father is doing enough nagging so I can do without yours.’
*
In late June, Jim took time off to drive to Molliston. John and Amy went with them. The car was warm. The old-folks’ home they visited was warm. Jim had arranged to go there to interview the elderly, hopeful of unearthing a few factual details on the life and times of Molly Squire. Amy ended up playing the piano while Jenny sang the old songs, and the old folk applauded and wanted more.
John aimed his lens at Molly’s monastery later, which according to the locals was haunted, not by Molly, but by the ghost of her murdered great-granddaughter. Jenny and Amy liked the idea of a ghostly theme. They tossed ideas at Jim on the drive home.
In July, Lady Di married her Prince Charming, to the accompaniment of the rattle and zing of Jim’s typewriter. Jenny watched the spectacle while hemming a wedding gown and a half-acre of train. Di’s gown was more spectacular, her train longer, but the maker should have chosen a non-crushable fabric.
‘Can you stop that noise for five minutes? I can’t hear a word, Jim.’
‘It’s been going for hours,’ he said. As had he – and both would continue a few hours more.
‘Who taught you to touch-type?’
‘I picked it up somewhere,’ he said without glancing up from his copy.
In one of the rehabilitation hospitals he’d spent years in, or from his sisters? Both taboo subjects. Jenny had never ‘picked it up’, though long and close association with his rattling relic had taught her the basics. She used it to type out her accounts – used the old hunt-and-peck method. Each of his fingers had its own eye. He could look at his handwritten notes while his fingers flew those worn keys.
She turned the television volume higher and stitched on. She had another wedding gown and three bridesmaids’ frocks coming in next week. Shouldn’t have agreed to do that wedding, not in winter. Her sewing room was a tomb in winter.
*
Through August she spent her days in that tomb where a small electric heater did little to mitigate the chill while Jim rattled in her warm kitchen.
Then September, and the Chamberlains back on the front page of newspapers. Forensic experts in England had found evidence of a small bloody handprint, a woman’s handprint, on the back of the baby’s jumpsuit.
In September, Jenny’s latest wedding gown made the society page of the Willama Gazette.
The bride’s fairytale gown, created by Mrs Jennifer Hooper . . .
Fame at last for old mother Hooper, Jenny thought, a clever lady with a needle and thread. She’d never wanted that fame. She’d wanted to be a famous singer. She could still do it, still did it – at funerals and old-folks’ homes.
She’d never wanted to live in Vern Hooper’s house. That had been Jim’s decision. Most decisions were.
‘You have a lovely home,’ the mother of the society bride had said.
Was it lovely? The sitting room may have looked lovely to one who didn’t have to freeze in it, look up at the cracks and at the globe in the fancy light fitting that had blown. Last year, Jenny would have carried the stepladder in from the shed and replaced the globe. Jim was no good on ladders.
He was good at pruning, but
hadn’t touched a pair of secateurs this winter. She did what she could once the sun came back, a smoke in one hand, secateurs in the other. She was pruning when Jim emerged from hibernation.
‘Done,’ he said.
‘Thank God,’ she said.
‘I’m going around to John’s. He said he’d have the photographs ready today. I’ve left the manuscript on the table. Give it a glance if you get time.’
She tossed her smoke, washed her hands and went inside to read. She liked the anonymous rhyme, had read it many times, but read it again.
She’d led a life of ill repute had pretty Moll, the prostitute.
Sent in chains from her homeland. Cast upon a foreign sand . . .
Where she met young Wal, a common thief, who brought her little more than grief.
And o’r two states they were pursued until the night Wal’s past he rued.
The trappers close upon their trail, when from the dark they heard a wail
And on that cold and frosty dawn they found them in a den forlorn,
An infant on Wal’s lap, at rest, another held to Molly’s breast.
They left her there to take her chance while young Wal did the scaffold dance.
And many a tale was told of Moll, but never a sight was seen
And many a rumour spoken, of the beauty Moll had been,
And many a year gone by before she was sighted with her daughters,
Clad in naught but the skin they wore, a-frolicking in the waters.
She’d led a life of disrepute, had Moll, the aging prostitute.
And all of ye who’ve heard folk say that a life of crime will never pay,
I’m here to tell you it’s a folly. Just take a look at Squire Molly.
Jenny turned to page two. No record exists of Molly or Walter Squire’s transportation to Australia.
‘What?’ Jenny asked. He may as well have written The end. She knew no record existed. He’d searched for months. He’d found a few Squires, a few Walters and many Mollys transported for prostitution, but without the year of her transportation or her family name, she could have been any one of those Mollys, or none of them. They’d found no record of a marriage, nor of the birth of her two daughters. All they knew of Molly Squire was that she and her adult daughters had been found by Molliston’s first settlers, squatting on two thousand acres of prime river land and ready to spear anyone who attempted to move them off their land.
Jenny persevered through page two, through page three, which was more than enough for her to decide she didn’t want to read Jim’s book – and that few would. It was well written. He could string big words together – blocks of big words.
Page four had space for a photograph, and beneath that space was a paragraph about James Murphy. Who was he? She scanned the next page, and the next, looking for Molly and her daughters but finding more names, a glut of names and dates she had no interest in reading. She turned back to the anonymous rhyme.
If there was no record of Molly Squire’s existence, if there were no relatives to upset, why stick to known facts? That rhyme set the scene for a fabulous story, the baby on Wal’s lap, the baby at Molly’s breast, then the husband hanged and a young woman left alone, miles from civilisation. How had she managed to raise two infant daughters? How had she come by money enough to build her mansion?
Blame that unknown poet, blame Jim for staying out all afternoon, blame his opening sentence, or too much overgrown garden. Blame what you will, but she sat down at Jim’s typewriter to find the youthful Molly, a girl who’d had nothing to sell but herself.
Mid-page, she gave her an excuse for becoming a prostitute. She set her up with six orphaned siblings, starving to death in a wretched hut in Ireland – and if it resembled Granny’s hut, too bad. Then, because a woman with two babies wouldn’t have survived alone in the bush, and because Molly and her daughters had defended their land with spears, Jenny allowed them to meet up and live with a tribe of blacks – at a camp which looked much like Elsie’s description of old Wadi’s.
More pages rolled in, rolled out, very messy pages, words cancelled with x’s; entire lines cancelled with x’s, but somewhere between the x’s and the blacks’ camp, Molly developed a voice much like Lila’s. And too bad about that too. Molly was telling Jenny’s seeking fingers where to go.
He could put his boots under my bed – if I had one . . . if he owned a pair of boots, Molly thought.
Molly and a handsome young black that Jenny named Wadimulla were just about to get down to business when Jim came home expecting to eat. She’d been cooking up fiction instead of the stew she’d planned for tonight.
‘I forgot the time,’ she said.
He counted her butts. ‘What have you been doing – other than smoking?’
‘Typing,’ she said.
‘The rattle as I came in the door was self-explanatory, Jen,’ he said. ‘Did you get time to look at the book?’
‘You lost me on page two,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Lack of Molly. The poem told me what the book was going to be about, then Molly disappeared and you introduced umpteen people I don’t give a damn about.’
‘She’s in it later,’ he defended.
‘I want her youth! Who’s interested in an elderly squatter?’ She wound a half-finished page from the typewriter and handed it to him, then eight messy pages more.
He glanced at them and followed her out to the kitchen where the wood in the firebox had turned to ash. She added newspaper and a few sticks of kindling. She opened the flue. He sat down to be served, and to glance at her pages while waiting.
She was whipping up an omelette when he started laughing. She loved his laugh. He didn’t do it often and when he did, he cried and had to take his glasses off to wipe his eyes. He wiped them, then read on, but couldn’t read for laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘This is,’ he said.
‘I’ve never professed to be a writer. It’s just an idea of what I wanted to read on the first pages.’
‘You’ve turned her into Lila.’
‘From what we know of her she probably was a Lila. One of those old blokes said that she’d paid her builders in bed.’
‘Where did you find Wadimulla?’
‘He seemed logical.’
‘You can’t mix fact and fiction, Jen.’
‘Who says you can’t and who’s alive to argue?’ she said, claiming her pages.
She showed them to Amy, who also recognised Lila. She chuckled silently, as only Amy could, and when she was done with her reading, she circled three paragraphs and told Jim he had to include them – and told Jenny later to stay on Molly’s trail.
She tried, but pencil and paper failed to raise her. Something had happened in her head while her blind fingers had been busy searching out the right keys. The logical side of her brain being up to its ears in concentration had given the creative side freedom to run amok.
A week later she dreamed of Molly/Lila and her daughters. They were living in a dark hut on Granny’s land, and the dream was so real, she rose from her bed to write it down. And out they came to play, Molly and her nine and ten year old girls, the younger of them running wild in the bush with the Aboriginal kids, the older, a brat of a kid, refusing to eat a lump of blackened goanna.
‘It’th poithonous,’ Hilda whined.
‘Starve then,’ Molly replied.
Jenny wrote of the forest, the creek, the fish in the creek, of the naked Wadimulla, spearing dinner. She wrote of the bark canoe he cut from a large gum tree. There were canoe trees scattered throughout Woody Creek’s forest where it ran down to the creek. Molliston had forests and a river. She hadn’t seen a canoe tree there, but they’d be there.
She was clothing Molly and her girls in possum skins, cobbled together with animal sinews, when Jim wandered out to see what she was doing at that time of morning.
‘I had a dream,’ she said and handed him six more pages.<
br />
He accepted her description of the bush and a paragraph of Molly’s girls, who may have eaten goanna, but refused Wadimulla and his fish. Amy was in love with Wadimulla, she said he epitomised the tall and noble black savage.
Then the first inquest into the Chamberlain baby’s death was quashed and a new inquest announced. A Sydney forensic biologist had found baby blood beneath the dashboard of the couple’s car.
‘Why would they murder a tiny baby?’ Jenny asked.
‘Murderers rarely look like murderers,’ Jim said.
Lindy Chamberlain appeared to have the staying power of a champion racehorse, and by the look of things she’d need it.
The Witch Queen was released in time for Christmas sales. Six free copies arrived in Woody Creek. Jenny gave a copy to Lila.
‘What am I going to do with a kids’ book?’ she asked.
‘Sign it,’ Jenny said. ‘You’re all over it.’
‘I won’t be signing Flanagan much longer. How much money do you get for doing them?’
‘Not much, once it’s split four ways,’ Jenny said.
‘Do I get any more?’
‘Not unless we use more of the photos.’
‘Use them all,’ Lila said. ‘If I ever get my hands on enough money, you won’t see my heels for dust.’
Amy and John wanted to do a follow-up. They had photographs enough and the rhyme. Jim was playing again with Molly, as was Jenny – when Jim wasn’t around. He was no longer amused.
Then Trudy, now a qualified nursing sister, came home for a week before leaving for Africa, where she’d spend twelve months with a mob of volunteers who’d attempt to do what Granny and Itchy-foot had attempted to do ninety-odd years ago, what missionary groups and volunteers had been attempting to do forever. And what had they achieved? It was the black African’s culture to breed too many kids then watch half of them die of disease and starvation.
Jenny left her with her father and went for a walk down to the old place to rest her eyes.
Granny hands had been busy in the earth. Her climbing rose and the lilac wisteria had intertwined along the chicken wire fence, though there was not a chook left to appreciate the beautification of their yard. Harry had taken the last of them into town. Unguarded, the hens had made too easy meals for foxes, of both the four- and two-legged variety.