by Joy Dettman
The shell of Elsie’s house was still standing, and the old shed holding together. No barn owl snoozed in its rafters. A smell in there, not of mice, but of long abandonment.
The front fence to the west of Elsie’s house was down, saplings encroaching. Nothing now to warn the forest that this was Gertrude Foote’s land. Lives had been lived here, good lives with no handouts. Days had begun with hard labour and ended the same way.
Jenny sighed and walked back to where the old lean-to had once leaned, where Margot had been born, and Georgie. Not Jimmy, though she’d tried for hours to scream him out.
She walked north to where Granny’s front door had been, the door Granny and Maisy had carried her through that day. They’d carried her out to the car where she’d screamed all the way to Willama, while Granny, who’d spent hours telling her to push, now begged her not to push. God, how she’d sucked on that chloroform mask, sucked it in and died, and come back from the dead vomiting her heart out, and howling because her belly hadn’t been cut, because she knew they’d pulled Jim’s baby out of her in pieces.
They hadn’t. They’d got him out alive. Battered and bruised, scratched and bung-eyed, but a week later he’d been her most beautiful baby.
Three kids, born to her before she’d been old enough to have kids, each one an accidental seed, pollinated by accident. Georgie, her tall strong sapling; Margot, too long in Georgie’s shade, had grown stunted; little sapling Jimmy, his roots transplanted early to grow in strange soil.
According to Lorna, he now called himself James Langdon. Jenny had written twice to James Langdon at his Thames Ditton box number but received no reply. Perhaps Lorna had lied. Jim said not. Jim said she never bothered to lie. The logical side of Jenny’s head knew that Jimmy had received her letters and chosen not to reply. The other side didn’t, nor did her bones, nor her womb where he’d grown. Down there, she knew that one day, somewhere, sometime, she’d see him again, and she’d recognise him too.
She wandered the land for an hour, finding flowers in hidden places, wandered until a bunch of dark-complexioned males with a flagon came from behind Elsie’s house. No Wadimulla amongst them. They looked dangerous and, the hairs on the back of her neck rising, she walked fast towards the rear fence where she climbed between the wires and into Joe Flanagan’s land, the safer option today.
He’d always owned a pair or two of red kelpies, which for forty years had appeared to be the same red kelpies. For as long as Jenny and her kids had used Joe’s land as a short cut to town, those red kelpies had come on their bellies to warn them off the property. She was midway through the heavily timbered wood paddock before one came from behind a tree to show his teeth, and not in a neighbourly smile.
Back up, lady.
Jenny didn’t back up. She got her back to a tree then looked for his red mate – or for old Joe, or even Lila.
He barked half-heartedly, glanced over his shoulder. No keeper, no companion watching to dob on him, so he sat and offered Jenny a conspiratorial wink before scratching his fleas.
‘Where’s your mate today?’ Jenny asked.
She’s got eight new kids to feed, lady. Where do you think she be? he said in that conversational voice of all dogs.
‘Tell her – and your pups – that I’m going to build down here one day.’
Joe’s bitch’ll’ave that fence down in a week, lady.
THE DOG AFFAIR
Amber was usually out and about before the roar of traffic claimed Melbourne, before the stink of car and truck fumes killed that barely perceivable perfume of a lost city.
She dressed carefully for her early morning jaunts, camouflaging her pretty frocks beneath a black overcoat, concealing her white curls beneath the black headscarf worn by many elderly European immigrants. No one spoke to her. Tram drivers on the Kew line were familiar with that old dame in black who once a week rode the early morning tram to that same stop in Kew.
A conveniently placed stop, and on an October morning, Amber used her walking stick as she stepped down to the road then made the turn into Lorna’s street. A newspaper boy on his cycle passed her. She watched him stop before the tall metal gates where he jammed two rolled newspapers between its rails before riding on.
Lorna must have been watching for him. She came to retrieve her papers, and Amber crossed over to the far side of the road, slowly, a stooped old European lady leaning heavily on her stick. She watched Lorna from behind the trunk of a tree, smiled as taloned hands felt the gate rails for her newspapers. Watched her locate the newspapers, snatch them – as a black rat might snatch a lump of mouldy cheese from a trap.
Does your cheese grow mouldy without your Duckworth? Amber thought. Do you sit where the light comes in through the window with your magnifying glass, struggling to read of Lindy and her pastor? They’d been judged guilty of the murder of baby Azaria, though he not as guilty as she. Men never were. Eve had tempted pure-hearted Adam, and for that, all women would eternally pay. The pastor had been allowed to go home to his children; Lindy was sentenced to life, a pregnant Lindy.
Amber had once sacrificed a baby. She’d tried to bury it. Dug a grave in the moonlight beneath the oleander tree, and he’d come huffing and blowing in his nightshirt to ruin everything. Some are born to ruin.
Lorna stood a while in her driveway, reading the headlines, no magnifying glass necessary, proof enough to Amber that she could still see, though no proof was necessary. Months ago, she’d included a wisp of her hair inside one of her letters to Lorna, then a sliver of newsprint. The letters returned, seemingly unopened – but there was no wisp of white curl or sliver of newsprint in those envelopes.
She watched Lorna walk back to her house, watched until she was inside, then retraced her footsteps to the tram stop.
The minister replied to Elizabeth Duckworth’s letters. The Housing Department acknowledged receipt of Mrs Cecelia L. Duckworth’s frequent letters. Amber opened them, unless Sissy got to them first. She had last month. She’d read it, tossed it at Reginald and again accused his family of interference.
‘They’re only doing it because she’s stuck here.’
She, her, even it on Sundays when Maisy phoned, when Sissy spent an hour speaking in code. Never Mum, never Amber. Never told her to leave, not now. Sissy enjoyed the meals served up to her each night.
Never a thank you offered, neither for the meals nor the nut-brown dye Amber combed through Sissy’s weight of hair each month. She offered a snarl during the plucking of new growth from between and around her now well-shaped eyebrows. A mother’s care had always improved that mud-eyed ox of a girl, though not enough.
Since the loss of Reginald’s car, each Sunday morning a Duckworth came to the unit door to sniff for alcohol before collecting the duo for church and lunch. They found no alcohol. A few of the drivers ignored Amber, a few offered a nod, others asked if she wished to accompany Sissy and Reginald to church. Amber declined all invitations. Sundays were her days.
Dear Sir or Madam,
Three years ago I was advised by your department that I was on the waiting list to be moved into a three-bedroom house. We are still waiting and our situation has now reached the hopeless stage.
My mother is eighty-three, and senile. My husband, in his seventies, has liver damage. As mentioned in my previous letters, there are fifty-three steps leading down to the ground floor. No doubt I am not the only resident who has complained about the deplorable condition of the lifts.
Please find enclosed letters from my husband’s, my own and my mother’s doctors, stating that in our poor physical condition it is imperative that we be moved to more appropriate accommodation without delay.
Yours sincerely
Cecelia L. Duckworth
Amber didn’t have a doctor. Archibald G. Foote, Physician signed his name on the bottom of a brief note, mentioning his patient’s weakened state and her growing senility. Sissy and Reginald shared their doctor, an Asian chap who was unaware he’d written two very fin
e letters.
Amber now owned a selection of writing pads, small and large, cheap and expensive. She owned a blue biro, a black and a red, also a bottle of black ink and a pen. Archibald G. Foote, Physician had used pen and ink on unlined heavy cream paper, his script closely resembling Lorna’s cursive copperplate. Sissy and Reginald’s doctor, a Dr Nguyen, had used a small white pad and blue biro. Lorna’s letters were penned on the common, larger pad. More expansive when she wrote to Lorna, Amber could fill two pages and still have more to say.
Like Lorna, Amber now had her own labelled files, not in a cabinet’s drawers but a concertina file.
It was a Tuesday in January ’83 when Amber received a letter from the Housing Department informing Mrs Cecelia L. Duckworth that she, her husband and mother had been allocated a three-bedroom house in Doveton. Amber, who’d been hoping for a house close to the Camberwell tramline, kept the news to herself, and in the early morning of Wednesday, she caught a tram to the city, a train to Dandenong, a bus to Doveton, then walked past two and a half blocks of third-rate houses, each one much the same as its neighbour, many attached to its neighbour, and she wanted no part of them.
Dodged a bike rider who failed to give way to her, walked by snarling dogs, but found the house she’d been allocated. Number 12, not attached to its neighbour. She wasn’t fond of the number twelve, and was less fond of the house. Stood for minutes eyeing the lopsided mailbox with its upside down two. She’d visualised a tall front fence of bricks and steel and received a low timber fence overgrown by a creeping weed. She’d been expecting bricks and mortar, long wide windows, a tall roof. She’d received small windows and the flat roof of a prefabricated structure an estate agent might have described as compact and she described as basic shelter. But it had only two steps up to a porch and it had three bedrooms. With a sigh, she opened the low gate and entered the yard.
A very small porch sheltered the front door and a small window, one of those wretched metal-framed things. She cupped her hands to its glass so she might see inside. Nothing inside to see other than a garish linoleum floor covering. Floors could be recovered, windows could be draped. She sighed again, then left the porch and followed a rutted driveway to the rear of the house. A rotary clothes line. She missed Lorna’s line. A large expanse of newly mown lawn, no tree, no flower, grass growing halfway up the surrounding paling fences. Amber had not considered grass. At sixteen she’d made a pact with the earth to never disturb it if it kept its distance from her.
On the train back to the city, she composed Cecelia L. Duckworth’s rejection of the offered house, editing it while crossing chaotic streets with the hordes, while fighting her way onto a tram, then off it, weary as she hadn’t been in a while, weary with disappointment, and annoyance at what her years of scheming had delivered.
She entered the unit block behind a woman and her three daughters. They continued on towards the lift. She’d seen them before on the fourth floor, and the fifty-three steps being too many that afternoon, she hurried weary feet towards the lift.
On Sunday evening Cecelia L. Duckworth retrieved the good news, sealed in a new envelope, carefully readdressed, stamped with a used stamp and posted in her mailbox, and she read Duckworth interference into its every line. Reginald read it. He knew that Doveton was somewhere out beyond Dandenong. He’d spent most of his life in the city and knew its roads well.
‘The inconvenience of . . . of position may well be . . . be balanced by the . . .’
‘They’re not moving me again,’ Sissy said.
‘. . . by the space,’ Reginald finished as Sissy picked up the phone.
For two hours she dialled a variety of Duckworths, explaining to each in her own inimitable way how they were not moving her again, that they’d spent their whole rotten lives moving her around.
One-sided conversations are difficult to decipher, but it became obvious that no Duckworth was admitting his guilt. One had the audacity to ask for Reginald to be put on the line. His conversation was disjointed at its best. It was cryptic that day. ‘Melway coordinates? Yes . . . Map 90. K 10 . . . Yes . . . that is so . . . The distance . . . Yes . . . Transport would certainly . . . certainly be a consideration . . . Yes. I would deem it impossible . . .’
It became clearer to Amber when the discussion turned to a vehicle. Reginald wanted a car. In Doveton, he’d require a car, and during the following days, when the phone rang, Reginald rose eagerly to take the call. A Ford Falcon could become available. Sissy, who had missed the car, began to see the fringe benefits of Doveton. And thus, while two states burned, the trio moved into the hot box of Number 12. A sweat box for Sissy. Amber shuddered as she passed – the floors shuddered. Reginald and a Duckworth fiddled with the television, unable to pick up a clear picture until a younger Duckworth climbed onto the flat roof to adjust the antenna.
Two days after the move, on the sixteenth day of February, fires swept through South Australia and Victoria, taking seventy lives and incinerating two thousand homes. It was a day most would remember as Ash Wednesday, the day dust storms, combined with smoke from the fires, blanketed Melbourne and blocked out the afternoon sun. Amber would remember that day for the gritty red dust that infiltrated every window and door. She’d remember it for the east-side neighbour’s dog, barking nonstop from early morning to mid-afternoon – until the world darkened and the sun became an alien red glow in the western sky, when the dog’s bark became a wolf’s elongated howl. Sissy’s howl continued longer. Reginald failed to hear her. His hearing was not good, a result of malaria caught during his years in the tropics. He stood to turn the television volume higher.
His head had been sized for a larger man, as had his limbs. His appearance when silhouetted against the undraped window was like one of the hairless, large-eyed, stick-limbed aliens portrayed in comic strips and on television. Sissy silhouetted against the same sun was The Blob – and it oozed vicious moisture from every pore – and the floor plan of that basic shelter forced the trio into closer, not more distant, proximity. It was a common enough layout – three small bedrooms, small kitchen, front door opening into the sitting room, with the kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom and laundry feeding off a narrow passage. It reminded Amber of Norman’s house, though his rooms had been larger, cooler, his ceilings higher. The kitchen with its west-facing window could have been Norman’s – apart from the gas stove that stood where his wood stove had burnt – and had she possessed energy enough that Wednesday, she might have got down on her knees and stuck her head into the gas oven.
During that first week at Number 12, misery became a fourth presence. It sat at the kitchen table and sprawled in the sitting room while a motorbike roared in a tin shed behind the rear fence and Number 10’s dog barked from seven thirty in the morning until six o’clock at night five days a week. It was silent on Saturday when the Duckworths came – two males, Ron and Charles. They delivered a six year old blue Falcon, now registered to Reginald and comprehensively insured for twelve months. Reginald patted its panels. He smiled. He sat in the driver’s seat and roared the motor until a Duckworth claimed the keys so he could open the boot and remove an elderly lawnmower.
It roared on command and the dog, no longer silent, attacked the paling fence, determined to break through so he might kill that disturbing machine. The working neighbours, celebrating the cool change with barbecued sausages and beer, came to the dog’s side to abuse the mower for disturbing the dog, so Sissy emerged to abuse the owner of the dog. Charles and Ron left the mower roaring to approach the fence where they attempted to offer a little Duckworth rationality to the discussion. Have mower, will mow. Reginald cut a swath through yellowing grass.
An elderly mower is a dangerous beast when driven by an inept fool wearing bedroom slippers. Reginald brought peace to that street in Doveton. Perhaps his big toe flew over the fence. Something silenced the dog. Charles Duckworth silenced the mower.
Many faint at the sight of blood. Reginald was a fainter. The men carried his min
imal weight into the sitting room so he might bleed on the floor and couch. The dog owner, who also owned a telephone, called an ambulance. Amber fetched a towel to wrap the foot, and a mop and bucket to wipe up the blood. Two toes were missing, a third hung by a thread. Reg regained consciousness long enough to look at the stumps, then passed out again. They took him away. Amber and a street full of viewers watched the ambulance until it was out of sight. The Duckworths followed it.
So many of Amber’s hopes had been centred on the possession of a house, and what had she received? Dead lawns, dogs, neighbours with motorbikes. The day was done before Sissy remembered what day it was. She’d forgotten to vote. Amber Morrison hadn’t cast her vote in years. Elizabeth Duckworth had been on no electoral role.
Lorna, born the year Victorian women were given the vote, would have queued early at her polling booth but would not have been pleased with the outcome of the ’83 election. Malcolm Fraser and his Liberal Party were given the boot by Australian voters. Bob Hawke, Labor man, ex-union man, would be sworn in as Australia’s new prime minister. That raucous larrikin, Lorna had once named him.
On Monday Reginald was returned to Number 12 by a Duckworth husband and wife. His foot well bandaged, a mild heart condition had been diagnosed along with anxiety. The Duckworths lined up a variety of pills on the kitchen bench – vitamins, painkillers, pills to increase the strength of his heart, pills to relieve his anxiety, antibiotics – the dosage to be taken printed on each label.
Reginald sat, his foot propped on a pillow on the coffee table. Sissy slumped beside her new telephone, waiting for it to ring. The television belted out its advertisements, the dog barked and Amber tested an anxiety pill, which worked so well she caught the bus into Dandenong where she bought a pair of workmen’s earmuffs, as red as Sissy’s new telephone. That night she wore them while sitting at her embroidery.