by Joy Dettman
‘Can you make it go back to the italics bit?’
He could, and did, and she read words she recognised, astonished that a skinny piece of cardboard could contain so many words.
‘How?’ she asked. ‘How can so much fit onto that thing?’
He attempted to explain between sips of soup. He spoke of bits and bytes – meaningless jargon to Jenny. She was mesmerised by the screen.
Then he vacated his chair and gestured to her to sit.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I need to shower,’ he said. ‘Hit the page down key when you’re ready to move on.’ And he left her with the humming beast that would probably explode if she touched anything.
It didn’t.
There were passages of Archie Foote’s diary he’d recorded in mirror writing, which, like the poems, Georgie had typed in italics. She was reading one when Paul returned to stand behind her. Hit the page down key twice before springing up from his chair.
‘Playing games is the best way to lose your fear of the beast,’ he said, reaching to turn on the second computer. He set it up to play a game of solitaire.
‘I’ll wreck something,’ she said.
‘It’s a mindless tool, Jen. You’re the controller. How did you learn to control a car?’ he asked.
‘When you’re young you have no fear.’
‘I bet you didn’t take off at a hundred k’s an hour?’
‘I remember kangaroo-hopping down a country lane while my teacher killed himself laughing,’ Jenny said.
‘Playing solitaire is kangaroo-hopping. If you run into trouble, you hit the brake – the quit key.’
She’d been playing solitaire since she’d discovered the game. He showed her how to move the cards and she sat down to play. That’s how she got to know Paul Dunn, after almost a week of sleeping beneath his roof, a week of well-mannered monosyllables.
She’d liked the way he hadn’t turned a hair when the news broke of Amber Morrison’s arrest, or when Georgie had explained Jenny’s connection to the Grinning Granny. She liked watching him and Georgie seated side by side on the couch. They looked right together. He was almost four years her junior, but Georgie had never looked her age. What a pity they hadn’t found each other years ago – or recognised what they’d found years ago.
The computer beat her. It beat her three times before she gave up.
Stood a while in the passage, listening to his keyboard’s chuckle, and thought of Jim’s rattling, zipping, bell ringing, clanking relic. Before Amy went to hospital, Jim had taken on a typing job for the Forestry Commission. He was a whiz at typing facts and figures.
The ute returned at three thirty. Jenny went outside to tell Jim she’d used a computer and that he had to buy one. He was more interested in removing a life-sized portrait from the rear of the ute – no wonder he hadn’t been able to fit it into the boot.
‘I thought you were talking about a landscape,’ she said.
‘It’s Pop’s grandfather,’ he said, propping a mean-faced old coot against the wheel of the ute, then stepping back to admire him.
‘His frame might be worth keeping. He isn’t,’ Jenny said.
‘He’ll clean up,’ he said. ‘What would you use on oil paint?’
‘A splash of petrol and my cigarette lighter on that one,’ Jenny said. ‘And just for the record, I’m not giving him house room, Jim.’
In all, they stayed for twelve nights in Greensborough, and when they left for home on Wednesday, James Richard Hooper rode on the floor behind them, and he blocked the view, and he stank of Lorna, so Jenny lit a cigarette.
‘Not in the car,’ he said.
‘It’s a sweeter smell than his, and I’m not having him in the house, Jim.’
‘Trudy wanted to keep him.’
‘There are places down here she could pay to store him,’ Jenny said.
‘We’ve got the space,’ Jim said.
‘He’s going in the shed.’
They were halfway home before he told her there were a few pieces of furniture Trudy also wanted to keep. ‘The removalist will deliver them on Thursday.’
‘What?’
‘Only the best of it,’ he said.
‘Not “what” as in “what’s coming?”, but “what” as in how dare you agree to store it, and how dare you leave it until now to tell me.’
‘I knew what your reaction would be.’
‘If you knew my reaction, then why agree to store it?’
‘I grew up with it, and most of it was Mum’s before it was Pop’s.’
‘That thing wasn’t your mother’s,’ she said, gesturing to the rear seat. ‘And I’ll bet she didn’t give it house room.’
‘It was in the farmhouse until I was six or seven. We found out that one of Monk’s English relatives had painted it—’
‘The one who shot himself,’ Jenny said.
‘Did he?’
‘He would have if he’d had a conscience,’ she said.
‘It’s old, Jen. It’s got historical value.’
‘Hysterical value,’ she corrected. ‘His moustache looks like a white rat perched on his top lip – and your mother’s furniture or not, you had no right to agree to storing it without talking to me about it, and then not telling me until we’re on the road and there’s not a thing I can do about it.’
‘The dining room setting could be over a hundred years old—’
‘I’ve got my own dining room suite.’
‘Trudy brought an antique dealer in to give us a valuation on it and the sideboard. He offered twelve hundred, and if he was prepared to pay twelve, it’s worth twice that or maybe more.’
‘Every stick of furniture, every floor covering and drape, we’ve chosen together—’
‘All things pass,’ he sighed and said no more.
All things pass? She smoked in silence for a kilometre or two, each revolution of the wheels drawing her back to that town, to no Amy, to hours of Maisy and her rehashing of the Amber, the poor Sissy, the Granny rolling over in her grave story. And she didn’t want any of it.
‘Nothing passes,’ she said. ‘Our arguments don’t pass. They congeal and grow scabs until you go and do something like this that rubs my scabs off and I bleed again – and I’m sick of bleeding, Jim. Stop the car and let me out. I’m going back to Greensborough.’
‘We’ll talk about it at home,’ he said.
‘Woody Creek isn’t home. Your father’s house has never been home—’
‘You’re being unreasonable.’
‘Being reasonable hasn’t got me far, has it? How did you lose your leg, Jim?’
‘I’m driving, Jen.’
‘Then stop the bloody car and let me out.’
He didn’t stop. He didn’t make the usual halfway stop for toilets and petrol, and when he turned into the drive, the motor was running on empty and Jenny’s bladder wasn’t.
The dogs were pleased to see her. John looked well and he had news.
‘Lorna is in pup,’ he said.
An unfortunate choice of name that Jenny had considered changing. Not today. Today it sounded fine as she ran for the bathroom.
GOOD DOG
John went home. Jim wanted the dogs to go with him and, if not for the portrait leaning against the entrance hall wall, Jenny might have let them go. But it was there, eyeing her as she walked by, and the removalist was coming with more junk, so the dogs stayed.
She threatened to leave them free to hunt the removalists. Jim wouldn’t go near them. He threatened to phone John, or the Willama dog catcher. There was a stand-off until Maisy beeped her horn at the gate. Jenny chained the dogs for Maisy, and two minutes after she drove in she had to give up her space to a huge van.
Two burly males carried Vern Hooper back into his house – or carried in his tapestry-upholstered dining room chairs, ten of them. Jenny had sat on those chairs way back when her feet couldn’t reach the floor. She’d traced their carved backs with a tiny finger. As each chair
was carried inside, she promised it that it would never feel her weight again.
Jenny’s dining room suite made way for a heavy oval table and matching sideboard. That suite may well have been worth twelve hundred dollars – or thirty-six hundred. Jenny could see its value, which didn’t alter its stink of Lorna.
Her convenient phone table and chair made way for a grand hallstand. As a kid she’d admired it. She hadn’t previously sighted the large camphorwood chest with five deep drawers. Plenty of space for it in Trudy’s bedroom, and who can ever have too much drawer space? Its drawers were magnificent but, camphorwood or not, it smelled of Lorna, and Jenny escaped with her dogs, went for a walk down to John’s and found him, sitting alone in the garden, looking into space.
‘Will I leave the dogs with you?’
‘I’ve paid a deposit on a room at the retirement home in Willama, Jen. The house is on the market.’
‘A deposit on a room?’
‘It has its own bathroom,’ he said. ‘All meals are provided by the hospital.’
She went home late – went home, and when she flicked on the entrance hall light she saw him glaring down at her with his cockroach eyes and his white rat moustache. They’d hung him high where Simon Jenner’s landscape had hung that morning. Jim couldn’t climb ladders. The removalists must have hung him.
All things pass, or weeks pass. The Grinning Granny didn’t. The newspapers loved her. Ninety year old women didn’t wander around at night bludgeoning other old women to death with champagne bottles. She had a young solicitor, who might not win the case but his face would become as well known as Grinning Granny’s before the trial began, if it ever got to court.
Jenny’s face was well known in Woody Creek. She couldn’t walk into the butcher’s shop to buy her dogs a bone, or into the newsagent’s to pick up her paper, without the stares, the whispers. Stopped shopping in Woody Creek. Stopped walking her dogs. Stopped.
She nagged John into a trip to Willama to have his hair cut, and that half-hour on the road with him was a relief. She drove him up to the hospital to look at a room similar to the one he’d be moving into.
‘You won’t survive in that,’ she said.
‘It’s enough,’ he said.
‘It’s not enough. And the dogs will miss you. You’re their alpha male, and we’ve got rooms rotting for lack of use, and you’re part of our pack.’
‘It’s done, Jen.’
‘It’s not done until it’s done. What am I supposed to do with a pregnant dog, and pups?’
‘Lorna has done it before. She’ll handle it,’ he said.
‘She won’t, and I won’t. I can’t handle what I’ve got now. Cancel your room and get your deposit back.’
He didn’t agree, not that day.
By February’s end Vern Hooper’s antique dining room table was buried beneath piles of antique Hooper documents, moth-eaten photograph albums, the typewriter and the familiar pile of Jim’s notes. He’d started compiling a book on the history of the Hoopers, and who did he think would be interested in reading about them?
Jenny read a letter written by the first James Hooper, a shepherd, or a letter he’d paid the town scribe to write to James Richard. It told him that his mother had died and that her final words had been of her son – interesting – but Jim wasn’t writing about the old shepherd. He had details of the boat James Richard had sailed on, and the date he’d set out for Australia, and the date he’d arrived, and his date of birth, and the date that he and Maximilian Monk were named as joint owners of the thousand-acre property they’d named Three Pines.
March, eight days of unrelenting heat. It broiled the musty scent of old documents and aged furniture, and the distilled essence of Lorna seeped from the dining room and hall into every room, and into Jim, who spent his days and nights sitting on Lorna’s chairs, his knees beneath her table, became steeped in that musty scent of dusty old age. John’s house was Jenny’s escape, and morning, noon or evening she walked her dogs to his door.
Found him packing up one morning. Found Amy’s typewriter on his kitchen table with Molly Squire, a bulk of pages, tied into a bundle with a blue ribbon. She undid the bow tied by Amy’s hands then sat down to read. They’d done a lot of work on poor Molly; they’d got rid of much of Jim’s work, his umpteen excess names had gone, his dates too. She found a pencil in Amy’s desk drawer and ran a cross through two pages of Mr Kennedy, who would later become Molly’s son-in-law. Then, after a late lunch, she erased her erasing and wound a sheet of typing paper into Amy’s typewriter and while the dogs roamed free in John’s garden, Jenny created a battleaxe mother for Mr Kennedy then, fifty pages deeper in the manuscript, after Molly’s daughters had wed – or bred – she allowed the one with the illegitimate son to bump off her sister’s mother-in-law with a spear.
Jim hadn’t appreciated Jenny’s suggestion that Molly had managed to raise her infant daughters because the blacks had taken her in. In Jenny and Amy’s version of Molly, she’d taken a black husband, Wadimulla, and her daughters had grown wild.
Jim missed out on lunch that day. She made him a sandwich at half past two. He ate it in the dining room while she set about cooking something for dinner. She’d left the dogs with John, had told him he could walk them home at around six and stay for dinner. Hoped he’d come. She cooked enough for three.
He was at Jenny’s side the day Lorna produced six pups, blind, rat-like and as red as their parents, and they looked underdone to Jenny. It was the pups who moved John back into the rear bedroom, and while he split his days between the pups and their parents, Jenny escaped alone to Amy’s house where she lived a happier life with Molly – and Amy’s chuckling ghost, who urged her labouring fingers on.
She needs a reason to have gone back to the whites, Jennifer.
She did. The whites had hanged her husband. They’d left her and her babies to their fate, then along came Wadimulla and his tribe to save her. She’d had a life of freedom with the blacks and Jenny had never found a good reason for her to leave Wadimulla.
When in doubt kill them off had been Shakespeare’s method of problem solving, so she killed her noble savage, or allowed one of the new settlers to shoot him, then during the night the rest of the tribe had taken off, leaving Molly with no alternative but to return to the whites, which meant that Jenny had to lose half a dozen pages in order to slot the new pages in, but they strengthened the chapter where Molly’s daughter speared her sister’s mother-in-law. Jim would have a fit if he ever saw what she’d done to his manuscript.
Trudy came home in April. She took precedence over all else. Lorna’s house had sold.
‘Sophie and I have booked our tickets to Greece,’ Trudy said.
‘When?’
‘We fly out on the eighth.’
‘Where will you stay?’ Jim asked.
‘Sophie’s got scads of relatives. We’ll relative-hop until we wear out our welcome then backpack across country to England and see if we can get work there for a while.’
‘Two girls hitchhiking? You’re putting yourself in danger, Tru,’ Jim said.
‘Backpacking isn’t hitchhiking, and there’ll be three of us, Dad.’
‘To go over there without a plan is dangerous.’
‘I’ve been an adult for a while now, and India was more dangerous than Greece is likely to be.’
‘You travelled there with a group,’ Jenny said.
‘Three is a group, Mum.’
‘Who is the third?’
‘Sophie’s cousin, Nicky,’ Trudy said.
‘Are you shouting the trip?’
‘I’m paying Sophie’s fare – if the solicitor pays the money in when he said he would, otherwise our credit cards will be shouting.’
She was an adult. She had a profession, she spoke serviceable Greek and Sophie spoke the language like a native. They’d be safe together, with Nicky, who Jenny couldn’t place. Trudy had a lot of friends.
Jenny had Maisy, and if today was Tuesday
then she’d lost a day somewhere. She waved to her, couldn’t open the gate until the pups had been rounded up and placed into their pen, a chicken wire construction John had built behind the shed. He tied up Lorna and Vern, Jenny opened the gate and Maisy drove in – and got out of the car with a parcel, and its floppiness suggested fabric.
‘What have you been spending your money on?’ Jenny asked.
‘I know you said that you’ve retired, love, but young Glenda bought me a dress-length. She’s having an evening wedding and she wants me in an evening gown. It’s not until August,’ Maisy said.
Since Amy’s death, Jenny had refused half a dozen orders. She had enough to fill her days without her sewing machines, but how could she refuse Maisy? She led her down to the kitchen, hurriedly vacated by Trudy, who preferred the pups’ and John’s company to Maisy’s.
‘I wouldn’t ask you if she hadn’t gone and bought the material, and just look at it. It must have cost her a fortune.’
Jenny looked at it. Chiffon, but beautiful, a deep blue with metallic silver and blue/green thread woven through it, a fabric she might have chosen for her own gown had she been the mother of a bride. Not to be. Maybe never to be. She’d done something wrong with the raising of her girls.
Cara had married; Jenny had played no part in her raising. Jimmy had married. She hadn’t played a long role in his raising either. She’d raised Georgie and Trudy, one determined to rise to the top of her profession, the other destined to die a charitable pauper – and both of them childless. Maisy was grandmother to the multitudes and the multitudes were marrying and producing great-grandchildren.
‘In August?’
‘The second last Saturday, love. I just want something very simple.’
She stayed for two hours. Jenny learned that one of Patricia’s sons was in hospital with a broken leg and head injuries, that Sissy had suffered a nervous breakdown, that one of Amber’s breasts had been cut off.
‘Sissy said she had a lump in it as big as a golf ball,’ Maisy said.
‘When are they trying her?’ Jenny asked, feeling no sympathy for Amber’s breast.