by Joy Dettman
‘Why?’ Jenny asked.
‘That’s what he said. God is kind. I think I heard him say it before I swung.’ They looked at her. She sighed, again licked her lips then tried to explain the finer details. ‘I wanted to hang him, not murder him,’ she said. ‘It replays when I close my eyes. It’s like watching an action movie on fast forward.’
‘You’re supposed to be resting,’ Paul said.
‘Tell them he’s not What’s-his-namesky.’
‘Go to sleep,’ Paul said.
‘I’ll go,’ Jenny said.
‘Did you charter a plane or something?’ Georgie asked.
‘I’ll probably go home to ten speeding tickets,’ Jenny said.
‘I’ll represent you in court,’ Georgie said.
She was drunk on painkillers or the anaesthetic, a different-sounding, sleepy Georgie, her eyes closing between utterances. This time she closed them for so long, Paul attempted to release her hand.
‘Just remembered. I mightn’t be able to represent you,’ she said. ‘Did Marino call?’
‘I haven’t been home,’ Paul said.
‘I was taking a sickie. You’d better tell him when he calls that I was digging a hole to vomit into.’
‘Stop talking,’ Jenny said.
‘He’ll probably sack me, not represent me,’ Georgie said.
Jenny stood, brushed the hair back from Georgie’s brow, kissed her scarred eyebrow and knew she’d have more scars after today. But she was alive, and now she needed rest.
‘I’ll see you in the morning, darlin’.’
Georgie reached out a hand to prevent her leaving. ‘Didn’t you tell me once that Amber tried to cut your father’s head off with a shovel?’
‘She broke his collarbone,’ Jenny said.
‘That would make it . . . make it premeditated,’ she said.
‘You’ve got forty-odd stitches in your arm and shoulder,’ Paul said.
‘They only put five in my eyebrow. He had one of those carpet layer’s knives.’ She swallowed. ‘I need a beer.’
‘You need to stop talking and we need to go,’ Paul said.
‘I was on the phone to the cops and I looked out the window to see if he was coming in and saw a trail of blood heading for the door. I thought he was coming in. It was me . . . my blood. Did they give me a blood transfusion?’
‘You told them not to,’ Paul repeated.
‘There’s probably some by-law . . . some council by-law . . . about how sharp a shovel is allowed to be before . . . before it’s reclassified as a lethal weapon.’
‘Go to sleep,’ Jenny said.
‘You’re easier to look at than what I see when I close my eyes.’
Jenny sat again. There was nowhere else she wanted to be.
‘I only meant to flatten him,’ Georgie said. ‘I hit a kangaroo in Queensland and killed it and felt like a murderer. I hit him and I don’t. What’s the time?’
‘Ten past five,’ Paul said.
‘You’ll get someone at the office. Have they got a phone in this place?’
‘I’ll call him tomorrow,’ Paul said.
‘He defended a bloke . . .’ She swallowed, licked her lips then continued, ‘. . . who brained a druggie with a cricket bat and the cops charged him . . . not the druggie. You can’t go around hitting druggie thieves with hard luck stories.’
At five thirty, a nursing sister hunted Jenny and Paul from the ward.
‘Where did you park, Jen?’
‘Off Sydney Road somewhere. In Brunswick – or close to it.’
‘I’ll see if I can get word to Georgie’s boss, then we’ll get going,’ he said.
Chris Marino wasn’t in the office, but the woman who took the call said she’d see that the message reached him tonight.
There are a lot of side streets off Sydney Road around Brunswick, a lot of tram stops, but they found the Holden, and Jenny followed Paul down back road and highway, aware that if she lost sight of his car, she herself would be lost. Tonight, drunk with relief, she stayed on his tail, barely aware of the traffic. He caught the end of a green light. She caught the beginning of the red, but didn’t lose him.
He served leftover spaghetti bolognaise that night, and while he spoke to his mother, Jenny stood outside blowing smoke into the night and looking at the trail of Georgie’s bloodstains on the paving.
Paul’s brother called, Jim called. Then Chris Marino called and Jenny and Paul learned that that Novak Wazinosky had died at the scene.
*
They were back at the hospital at ten thirty the following morning and found Georgie in a different ward, a private ward, found her propped on pillows, two uniformed men on her left, a chubby, balding chap on her right. Paul introduced him to Jenny as Chris Marino.
‘Have we met?’ he asked, studying her face intently while shaking her hand.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Jenny said.
‘All good, I hope,’ he said, then turned back to the business at hand.
The room being too small for six and the uniforms and the notebooks speaking of repercussions for Georgie, Jenny left and walked downstairs. She ordered a cup of tea, picked up a newspaper, its headlines screaming: PREGNANT WOMAN ATTACKED IN HER HOME.
That’s Melbourne for you, she thought. She’d known it as a safe city where the bad had been locked away, the mad hidden away in asylums, when governments had spent their money where it had needed spending. It went on renovating Bob Hawke’s lodge now, on ex-prime ministers’ overseas trips, on communal junkets, while the mad and the bad walked the streets.
She paid for her tea and newspaper then, in need of a place where she could smoke, found her way to an outdoor table, complete with ashtray. Sugared her tea, got her smoke burning then spread out the newspaper.
Georgina Dunn, a solicitor with Marino and Associates, was attacked in her Greensborough home yesterday by a knife-wielding intruder . . .
Dunn? Georgina?
Jenny looked back at the headlines. PREGNANT WOMAN ATTACKED IN HER HOME. She looked again at the name. Georgina Dunn?
Georgie? She was too old to be pregnant.
Dunn?
If she was pregnant, she would have married him – and, knowing Georgie, she wouldn’t have bothered to tell anyone. And Jenny was on her feet, her cigarette mashed into the ashtray. She gulped a mouthful of tea, another, then left the remainder to grow cold as she returned to that private ward at a near run, her newspaper gripped as evidence.
The uniformed men had gone but Chris Marino was still there. Jenny waited until he’d left then closed the door and, her evidence held high, approached the defendant.
‘Is it true?’
Georgie’s one available hand reached for the paper. ‘The buggers,’ she said. ‘How did they get onto that?’
‘It would be Marino’s doing,’ Paul said. ‘He makes every post a winner.’
‘Is it true?’ Jenny repeated.
‘Yeah, but don’t count your chickens before they hatch, mate. I’ve already lost two and I’ll probably lose this one now – and not another word about it or I’ll have you evicted.’
‘How far along are you?’
‘It’s due in December,’ Paul said.
‘On Jimmy’s birthday. Now, the subject is closed, Jen,’ Georgie said, and she read aloud from the newspaper: ‘The intruder, Novak Wazinosky, a Polish immigrant, had been with the taxi company since the mid-eighties, a spokesman told reporters yesterday. He said that Novak was a reliable driver.
‘I told the cops before they loaded me into the ambulance that it was Dino Collins. What’s wrong with them?’
They got it right by nightfall. It was in the morning newspapers, and when Jenny and Paul arrived at the hospital at eleven, Georgie had her own copy of the Melbourne Sun.
Police yesterday officially identified the Greensborough intruder as James Robert Collins, who was involved in the Grenville kidnapping in 1977. Collins’ de facto wife, Raelene King, the natural mother of the kidnapp
ed infant, died when she was trapped in the Woody Creek house fire that killed her stepsister, Margot Morrison. Margot Morrison was the granddaughter of Amber Morrison.
There was more, a lot more, but Georgie had read enough. ‘They’ll join their dots,’ she said. ‘They’ll have me connected to the Grinning Granny by morning and have found me a motive for murder.’
‘You defended yourself in your own backyard and if you hadn’t, you’d be dead,’ Jenny said.
‘You’re thinking with your head, Jen, as an individual. The new world is reverting back to a pack mentality. They don’t think. They sniff each other’s backsides then bay for blood. Cast your mind back to Lindy.’
‘That sort of thing wouldn’t happen these days,’ Jenny said.
‘No,’ Georgie said. ‘It would happen a damn sight faster. The human pack thrives on its daily dose of soap opera, celebrities and drama, and Dino Collins was the whole damn deal. Born of the Virgin Mary, beloved only son of Joseph, Dino was orphaned at the age of eleven in a horrendous accident, when the boy hero turned to drugs to mask his pain. He was tempted by forbidden fruit, and for love of his temptress, was crippled in a car accident. He descended into clinical depression, but after years in hell, he rose and ascended into heaven, or into the arms of his loving wife and nurse, who with her love and compassion cured him of depression and miraculously repaired his damaged spine. And they lived happily ever after. But no, enter the devil, in the guise of the evil redheaded solicitor, stepsister of the temptress, granddaughter of well-known killer, Amber Morrison, who with one blow from her razor-sharp shovel, stole poor long-suffering Dino Collins’ life. Get me out of here, Paul. Shave my head and carry me if you have to,’ Georgie said.
They took her home that evening.
THE MANUSCRIPT
Chris Marino came, and when Jenny opened the door to him, he stared a moment, forced a smile, then got down to business. It was a busy week in Greensborough. She opened the door to Irene Dunn, to her sons. She hung up the phone on newspaper reporters, who had not connected the dots yet between Georgie Morrison, grocery shop proprietor, and Georgina Dunn, solicitor.
Jim rang twice, each time asking when she’d be home.
‘Georgie needs me down here,’ Jenny said.
He needed his car, though he didn’t say so, not straight out. He spoke of driving with John to Willama and leaving a trail of blue smoke behind. He spoke of the severe knock in the old Morris motor, and how that day he hadn’t expected the car to get them home.
‘Use Trudy’s car. It needs a run,’ Jenny said.
‘It’s a manual,’ Jim said.
‘John drives a manual.’
‘John sits on thirty miles an hour,’ Jim said.
Jenny had been a passenger in John’s car once, and if he’d got his old heap up to thirty miles an hour, she’d have been surprised.
‘I’ll bring the car home at the weekend,’ she said.
The worst of Georgie’s injuries was to her upper arm. The knife had cut deep there. Muscle takes a long time to heal. There was little she could do. She read. She talked and Jenny talked. On the Thursday, Jenny was at the letterbox when Chris Marino drove in. She walked him around the house to the rear door, and once more he gave her his piercing stare, and this time didn’t look away.
‘I had a call yesterday from a girl I knew many years ago, a Cara Grenville, previously Norris. Your resemblance to her is quite striking,’ he said.
‘Where is she?’ It was a reflex question and, aware that an explanation was necessary, Jenny added, ‘She’s a distant relative.’
‘I noticed the similarity at our first meeting,’ he said. ‘She’s in London. She married an Englishman and moved over there with her children in ’78.’
Georgie was in the family room. ‘Chris had a call from Cara,’ Jenny said.
‘She called to verify an Australian friend’s information. The friend had mentioned that Collins had attacked one of my solicitors.’
‘He kidnapped her foster daughter the Christmas of ’77,’ Jenny said.
‘I was her solicitor at the time, Mrs Hooper,’ Chris said.
‘You don’t know her phone number?’ Georgie asked.
‘No. She had little to say other than how she and her children could now sleep safe in their beds – and to enquire after your injuries and wish you a speedy recovery.’
Jenny had intended leaving at daybreak on Saturday morning but altered her plans when Irene Dunn arrived at ten on Friday morning. Jenny left at ten thirty, following Georgie and Paul’s route out to the Hume Freeway, through Whittlesea. It was an easy drive. She was home before two and Jim pleased to see his car.
‘A good trip?’
‘Fast,’ she said. He didn’t kiss her hello, so she turned to the dogs, who didn’t give a damn about the car; they loved her, and told her so.
She’d shopped in Willama. The men unloaded the car while she ran for the toilet – it smelled like a public loo, and the main bathroom looked as if it had been hit by a cyclone. Her bed hadn’t been made for a week and the kitchen looked like a squat for the homeless. She cleaned while she cooked. She swept, turned a kilo of steak into a stew, then vacuumed while a lump of corned beef boiled. Cut up half a loaf of stale bread and turned it into a pudding, mopped floors, lit the briquette heater, served dinner, then Jim went into the sitting room to watch the news in comfort, and she washed the dishes. John dried them, then went to the bathroom.
It was eight o’clock when he said goodnight; Jenny was weary enough to go to bed. She’d showered, was clad for sleep, but instead began searching her wardrobe for garments Georgie might wear. Although she refused to discuss what she was growing, she’d grown out of her jeans. Jenny found a black pinafore dress she’d worn in the seventies. Plenty of room in it. It wasn’t long enough but she could cut it shorter and turn it into a smock. She found a pair of elastic-waisted stretch slacks which, with an inch or two off, would make serviceable pedal pushers. She folded them and placed them into an open case.
‘What are you doing, Jen?’
‘They’ll fit Georgie.’ She stripped a seventies caftan from its hanger.
‘You’re going back?’
‘On the Sunday bus.’ She added a long shirt to the case. ‘She needs someone with her.’
‘You said she was well.’
‘She is well, but her arm isn’t, and you can’t go around decapitating people with a shovel. She’ll be charged with something.’
‘It was self-defence,’ he said.
‘I know that, you know it, but he’s dead and she’s alive, and the last thing she needs right now is to be stuck in that house by herself all day, thinking about what might happen.’
He left her to her packing and she heard him at his typewriter in the dining room. The electrician had been and gone, the new fluorescents were hanging in the small sitting room, but he’d chosen not to move there.
She looked at a muted floral shift frock, a late sixties style, and what the hell was it still doing in her wardrobe? She’d never learnt to throw anything away – Granny’s doing, her ‘waste not, want not’ having been drummed into Jenny’s head for too many years. She added the shift to the case then walked across the hall to the dining room doorway.
‘The little sitting room is warm. Amy’s desk is in there. It would make a perfect study.’
‘I’m comfortable,’ he said.
‘You’ve done a lot while I’ve been away.’ His stack of completed pages had grown, and grew one page higher while she stood.
‘I thought I was going to lose Georgie.’
‘What do you do down there all day?’
‘She’s been teaching me how to work her computer. You need to get one, Jim. It would save you a ton of rewriting.’
‘I’m too old to learn new tricks, Jen,’ he said and, the conversation over, he wound a new page into his typewriter.
‘I’ve been away for a week, John’s in bed. Can’t you stop that for a minute and tal
k to me?’
‘I’ve been attempting to finish this chapter all day.’
‘And tomorrow there’ll be another chapter, then another one, then another one.’
‘I’m trying to finish a book, Jen.’
‘I’m trying to work out what’s going on in your mind. You wanted your car, I brought it home for you. I cooked your dinner, washed your dishes. What else should I have done to be worthy of your attention?’
He typed another line, his ten fingers working as a team, flying across those keys.
‘When we got back together you made me believe that I was the most important person in your life. I’m less important to you now than your car.’
‘Stop,’ he said.
‘You stop. You couldn’t even kiss me hello.’
Zing! Bang!
‘You refused to have anything to do with your family before we got back together. Nobby told me how he’d found your cousin and you refused to speak to him. I had to plead with you to write to Margaret – and when you did you wrote her a business letter.’
Zing. Bang.
‘She wasn’t the black-hearted bitch Lorna was. If you’d begged her, if you’d pleaded with her, I might have got to watch Jimmy grow,’ she said.
Zing. Bang.
‘And now that they’re all dead and safely buried, you surround yourself with them. This house is supposed to be my home too, and the whole bloody place stinks of Lorna.’
‘It was my mother’s furniture!’
‘You’re not writing about your mother. You’re turning every Hooper who ever walked into a hero. They weren’t heroes. They were a kidnapping, self-serving mob of pig-headed swine, and the reason why you didn’t kiss me hello was because you’re now seeing me through bloody old James Hooper’s cockroach eyes.’
‘You’re talking arrant nonsense,’ he said, his hands hovering over the keyboard like wounded birds who’d lost their way.
She’d said too much. She stepped back to the hall, but that old swine was looking at her, and tonight he knew he’d won. It was in his eyes, in the angle of his rat moustache, so she turned back.
‘I told you when we were in Sydney that there’d come a day when you’d start seeing me through your family’s eyes and that you wouldn’t like what you saw.’