by Joy Dettman
‘You wouldn’t be related to a Laurence George Morgan, would you?’ She didn’t mention the water-pistol bandit. ‘I believe he worked in the menswear department at Myers during the fifties.’
‘Dad,’ he said. ‘He worked at Myers when I was a kid. Did you know him?’
‘Not personally,’ Georgie said.
‘Some long lost uncle has left him a fortune, I hope?’ he said. ‘Ali and I could use a bit of it right now.’
‘Is your father still living?’
‘He was last Sunday. They’re down at Geelong – if you happen to come across the family’s missing millions.’
She got them out the door, got it closed then sat down hard. Her legs were shaking. She had a smoke out of her packet before she realised where she was. Put it away fast, picked up her handbag and rode with her clients to the ground floor. Beat them out the door to the street where she had a smoke burning before her feet hit the pavement. It was unbelievable. She’d found him. Things like that don’t happen in real life.
But they did. If Paul hadn’t found a park two car spaces down from her ute that night, he wouldn’t have recognised it, and she wouldn’t have been living in Greensborough. If a tourist hadn’t fallen to his death from Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain would still be in jail.
Ayers Rock was an easy enough climb. Georgie had climbed it. How had he fallen? Why had he landed near a dingo’s lair? The retrieval of his body had led to the finding of the jacket worn by the Chamberlain baby the night she’d been taken from the tent and Lindy had been released – and there’d been talk in the office for days, of how many millions she might sue for, for false imprisonment.
Is your father still living?
Your father. My father.
He was last Sunday. They’re down at Geelong.
If she’d read that in a book, she would have tossed it. If she’d read about the tumbling tourist, she would have tossed it. And the manila envelope Jack’s father had placed in his desk drawer in ’59, still there twenty years later. Was it fate? Was it God? Until she’d opened that envelope, Georgie had seen Laurie Morgan as an old lag in Long Bay jail. Thereafter she’d seen him in Essendon with his wife and three kids.
Her mind wandering, Georgie damn near ran up the backside of a truck. Braked in time, then barely saw the road or the traffic until she turned into her own street.
Paul worked closer to home so was usually there before her. She parked behind his Holden then gave her tomatoes a drink. She still had a few ripening, smaller but as sweet. She picked two then let herself in via the back door.
The shower was running. The two pieces of Scotch fillet removed from the freezer this morning were bleeding onto the plate on the sink. All day she’d been craving it – or at least until the last hour of her day. Her stomach feeling jumpy, she placed the steak back in the fridge then went in search of the envelope and the mug shot Jenny had presented to her forty years ago, with her porridge.
Many times through the years it had disappeared, and for those years she’d forgotten Laurie Morgan. Like a bad penny, he’d always turned up again, in a carton, in a drawer, and each time she’d found him and dusted him off, his face had grown younger. She’d found him covered in dust on the floor behind her dressing table the day she’d moved out of the Surrey Hills granny flat. Hadn’t bothered to dust him that day. Tossed him into the garbage. But removed him later and washed his face with a damp cloth. He’d lived in the manila envelope since, with the rest of his history. Wherever he was, he’d be dust free.
‘What did you do with the steak?’ Paul yelled from the kitchen.
‘Tossed it out to a passing crow,’ Georgie yelled back.
He opened a bottle of wine, so she fried the steak and served it with tomatoes and eggs, not as fresh as Granny’s, but eggs. They ate while the news played. There was old footage of the exploding Challenger space shuttle, or of its smoke trail, and a Yank discussing why it had failed. Another elderly walker had been run over. Another level crossing crash. One dead. A woman at Doveton had her two minutes of fame. Someone had baited another of her dogs. She’d only had him for three weeks.
Paul packed the dishwasher then returned to his computer. Georgie went to a spare room, the room she’d called her own when she moved in. She continued her search for the manila envelope and found it, secreted away beneath the lining paper of the top dressing table drawer, as she’d secreted the framed mug shot away beneath the lining paper of Granny’s top dressing table drawer. A survivor, Laurence George Morgan, accidently saved from the fire while she’d been saving Jack Thompson’s nautilus shell.
Back in the kitchen, she emptied the envelope onto the table, imagining Paul’s mother’s response should she walk in. She was Jenny’s age, had been born and raised in Collingwood, and might have remembered the redheaded water-pistol bandit who for months had terrorised businesses around Melbourne.
Paul came out at ten to boil the jug for coffee. ‘What are you working on?’
‘A lost parent,’ she said, sliding the papers back into the envelope. ‘A young couple came in late today. They’re borrowing a fortune to buy a house. He’s a car salesman, and his wife looks about twelve months pregnant.’
‘When we’re young we believe we’re indestructible,’ Paul said.
‘How much did you borrow when you bought your first house?’
‘Too much,’ he said.
‘You still want to buy this place?’
‘The repayments will be no more than what we pay in rent.’
‘I’ve got an investment maturing in May.’
‘Much?’
‘The money I got for my shop.’
‘What shop?’
‘I told you I owned a shop.’
‘You told me you managed a shop.’
‘I did, then I inherited it.’
‘From your father?’
‘From my adopted grandfather.’
‘You haven’t got a husband and six kids out there somewhere, have you?’
She emptied the contents of the manila envelope again to the table, then riffled through the papers for the copy of a newsprint page headlined REDHEADED WATER-PISTOL BANDIT CAPTURED, then offered it to Paul.
‘I’ve got a father,’ she said. ‘Or I had one last Sunday. I was born while he was serving a three-year jail sentence. He’s got three kids – or he had three in ’57. His son is the one buying the house.’
He looked at her, not comprehending. She lit a cigarette then told him a much condensed story of Jenny’s brief Melbourne love affair. ‘The police locked him up before he could marry her. I’ve never met him.’
She picked up the battered old frame. Silverfish had managed to get into it and have a nibble at the brushed-back hair, but she handed it to Paul. ‘Jenny framed him for me when I was four and demanding my father. My brother and sister had fathers.’
‘You’ve never mentioned a brother.’
‘His grandfather claimed him. I haven’t seen him since he was six years old.’ She shrugged. ‘My sister had two fathers.’
‘Two?’ he asked.
‘Two – and to a four year old kid it seemed damned unfair.’
‘Two?’ he questioned again.
‘Do you believe there’s a higher power than man, Paul?’
‘I don’t believe in two fathers.’
‘Identical twins.’
‘Your mother couldn’t choose between them?’ he said.
‘She wasn’t given a choice,’ Georgie said. ‘She was fourteen; they were eighteen and drunk.’ She drew on her cigarette. ‘Do you believe in a higher power?’
‘Something sent me into the Doncaster car park that day.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why should Laurie Morgan’s son walk into my cubbyhole today? Why pick Marino and Associates, and if he had to, then why me?’ She looked at her cigarette and, knowing she didn’t want it, mashed it into the ashtray.
‘Jenny used to swear that there was a malevolent old God sitting up
there, flipping through his account book, and when it fell open at her dog-eared page, he dished out whatever was written on it. Was solicitor written on my page at birth? Was I predestined to do law late in life so that I’d still be the junior dogsbody when Laurie’s son was old enough to buy a house?’
‘Lucky you didn’t do psychology or the mean old coot might have had him develop a psychosis.’
‘He’ll develop one anyway. He’s taken on the package deal, mortgage, missus, midget and in debt to his mother-in-law.’
‘I’ll take that deal,’ he said.
‘Quit while you’re ahead, mate,’ she said and started packing away the papers.
THE MELTDOWN
It was a Wednesday, bingo day, when news of an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Russia leaked out along with the radiation. A secretive race, the Russians, they’d covered up the catastrophe until that deadly cloud spread across Scandinavia. MELTDOWN the headlines screamed. THOUSANDS EVACUATED. A city was evacuated, and while the world awaited the repercussions of yet another nuclear accident, Lacy Hopkins, who should have been celebrating her birthday, was dealing with her mother’s little accident.
‘You’re so kind to me,’ the old lady said.
‘I’m your daughter, and I love you,’ Lacy said.
The old lady chuckled. ‘Lucy is my daughter, dear.’
‘I’m Lucy, Mum.’
‘You’re too old. Where’s my Lucy?’
Sissy had bought a box of chocolates. They shared them while watching television, Lacy unloading during the commercials.
‘My brother and his wife came around at the weekend and both of them got stuck into me about putting Mum away.’
‘I’d put mine away if I could,’ Sissy said.
‘How has she been?’
‘She burns my underwear. I can’t put a magazine down or she burns it, and the neighbour reckons she poisoned her new dog with weedkiller, and she probably did.’
‘Talk to Dr Kemp about her,’ Lacy said.
‘It won’t do any good.’
‘If I was your age, I’d do it,’ Lacy said, then quickly added, ‘Don’t take that the wrong way, Sissy. I didn’t mean that you’re too old to look after her, just that once Mum goes into the nursing home I’ll not only lose her pension, but my carer’s pension and probably this flat. With my nursing experience, if I try to sign up for the dole, they’ll make me look for a job.’
‘The Duckworths used to make me get jobs,’ Sissy said.
*
Georgie couldn’t get Laurie Morgan or his son out of her head, and on a Saturday in May she decided to stop thinking about looking him up and just do it. Not even as a kid had she imagined him being in her life; she’d wanted to know he existed, and to Georgie, adult or child, seeing had been believing.
Paul had left early to meet up with both brothers at the MCG. Their football team was doing well and win, lose or draw, they wouldn’t leave until the last ball was kicked. She had all day, and at nine o’clock it promised to be a nice day.
She’d called the telephone exchange a week ago and been given numbers for two Geelong L. Morgans, addresses unknown. One was an L.G. That’s the one she dialled, and somewhere a phone rang, Georgie’s heart rate increasing the longer it rang. Visualised an old bloke with arthritis, cursing the phone, standing, knocking over his walking stick, finding it, limping to the phone.
A woman’s voice came on the line: ‘Hello.’ She sounded as breathless as Georgie felt, and there were kids’ voices in the background.
Georgie swallowed, convinced she’d dialled the wrong number. ‘I’m attempting to locate a Laurence George Morgan. He was employed—’
‘He’s not here at the moment,’ the woman said. ‘Can I take a message for him? I’m his wife.’
‘I’ll call back later,’ Georgie said.
‘He should be home by six, or you could get him at the shop,’ the woman said.
Georgie’s quarry was seventy-two. A minute ago, he’d been crippled with arthritis. What was he doing at a shop?
‘Could you give me the number?’
People are too trusting. For all that woman knew, Georgie could have been an axe murderer, or one of the jewellers her redheaded water-pistol bandit had robbed, but before the phone was placed down, she had the phone number and the shop’s address scribbled on her phone pad. She ripped out the page and for a moment stood watching the paper shake in her hand. Jenny had once accused her of not having a nerve in her body. In recent years, she’d found a few nerves – or maybe it was old age tremors.
She changed her top twice before settling for Cara’s old green top. Hadn’t worn it since Darwin. Wore it today to remind her of how Cara had found the guts to track down her missing links.
What she’d say to him, she didn’t know. Nor had Cara the day she’d caught a bus to Woody Creek – and been sorry ten minutes after she’d arrived. Georgie might well be as sorry, but one way or another, today she’d write the end to something she’d begun as a four year old.
By eleven thirty she was approaching Geelong for the third time in her life. In ’79, she’d spent two months there, working as a checkout chick, and was relatively familiar with the city though had never learnt more than a couple of street names. She parked then walked, looking at street names until a woman waiting at the traffic lights gave her directions. Walked on then, not recognising a lot until she saw the side street that had housed a fish and chip shop and the secondhand bookshop in ’79. She’d paid top dollar for faulty merchandise at that bookshop and, smiling at the memory, she turned left and walked on. The PRE LOVED BOOKS sign was still there, if a little faded. The fish and chip shop, now a motor mower repair shop, was still greasy but its odour not as inviting.
Her feet slowed at the bookshop window. Two of Stephen King’s were on display. Paul liked his books. She’d read The Shining, but she wasn’t in Geelong to buy books, so continued down the street, searching for a street number and eventually finding one over a take-away cum café’s doorway. Found another over an accountant’s closed door and, realising she’d gone too far, she turned and walked back. This time he was standing out the front of his shop, that same white-headed flirty-eyed bloke who’d sold her faulty merchandise and hadn’t wanted to give her a refund. And the number over his head was the number she’d scribbled on her notepad.
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Still warm enough,’ he said.
Georgie eyed him as he made way for her to enter. He looked sixty, was weighty but well dressed. She was looking for a seventy-two year old bloke. He’d be tall, stooped maybe, bald maybe, may still resemble Clark Gable, an old Clark Gable.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ the white-headed bloke asked.
‘Leticia’s Wardrobe,’ she said. She’d picked up a copy of that book a couple of weeks ago and if there’d been a sales assistant available to take her money fast she would have bought it.
‘It’s a new release,’ he said. ‘I won’t be seeing a copy for a while.’ Secondhand bookshops have a smell of their own, a dusty scent of much-handled treasures, fused together with the defeated odour of the unloved. She sucked in a lungful, her eyes roving, seeking that tall seventy-two year old bloke. Jenny had always said that Georgie had inherited her height from Laurie Morgan along with his copper hair and green eyes. At seventy-two, if he had any hair, it wouldn’t be red. Harry Hall’s was no longer red. His eyes were still the same watery blue they’d always been, as Laurie Morgan’s eyes would still be pea green.
The white-headed bloke was back behind his counter.
‘Have you got anything by the author of Leticia’s Wardrobe?’ Georgie asked.
‘Langhall,’ he said. ‘Should do.’
He knew his shop and led the way to the K to O fiction shelves. His hand reached up and he withdrew a beige and brown paperback. Angel at My Door. Georgie had heard of it. Hadn’t read it. The title didn’t sound like something she might be interested in reading, but s
he’d asked for it so took it from a hand which didn’t appear to have done a day’s physical work in its life. He had long fingernails for a man.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and he returned to his door to relight his butt.
She looked at the cover, an anaemic sepia photograph of a girl standing against the backdrop of a blurred city street, and it did no more for her than the title. Georgie turned to the rear cover, to the blurb.
Australia is at war. Eighteen year old Jessica, pregnant and without family support, is befriended by her childless landlady . . . It sounded familiar – like Jenny’s life story. She opened it and flipped through to page one. Dean James, a purebred cur, ran with a pack of mixed breeds. Smarter than the average cur, he was more vicious . . . She read the page to its end and wanted to turn to the next. She could smell the leather jacket worn by Dino Collins the day he’d given Raelene a lift home from Moe on the back of his motorbike. Dean James was a similar bastard. Georgie wanted to find out if he’d get his comeuppance, which sometimes happened in fiction, if not in life.
The white-headed bloke had his back half-turned, and out of the corner of her eye, she studied him. Maybe he was tall enough. She was wearing heels. He didn’t look like Clark Gable, was heavier than he’d been when he’d sold her his faulty merchandise in ’79. Weight altered the structure of a jaw, as did the years, though it would take a better imagination than her own to superimpose that mug shot over his drooping jowls. She’d ask him – or ask him if he knew of a Laurence Morgan. And what would she say if—
He turned and caught her staring, so she flicked her hair from her face and approached the counter where he was now occupied in taping up a tattered paperback.
‘This one’s her debut novel,’ he said. ‘Rusty. Have you read it?’
She looked at the open book as he applied tape to the flyleaf. ‘I prefer them intact,’ she said.
‘No missing pages in this one, sweetheart,’ he said, and the way he said it, she knew he remembered the redhead who’d returned Papillon.
‘How much?’