by Joy Dettman
There was little of the original left, so Georgie spent another four-hour shift altering names. Squire became Flanagan, so Molliston had to go. Flanagan Hill grew in its place. The giant gum tree turned into an elm; Molly’s daughters became Myrna and Laura. The hotel moved into the middle of town and the police station slid halfway down the hill. She came up with a new title during Katie’s six to ten o’clock sleeping shift, and typed a new title page: SENT IN CHAINS by Jennifer Hooper.
Still sullying the Hooper name. She deleted it and typed in Morrison.
‘Add daughter of the notorious Grinning Granny and it will make the bestseller list,’ Paul said.
‘Yeah,’ Georgie said. She deleted Jennifer Morrison and tried Juliana Conti.
‘That looks good,’ Paul said. ‘Who was she?’
‘Jenny’s mother. She had Jenny beside a railway line and died a few hours later.’
During another morning shift Georgie wrote a thumbnail synopsis and a brief letter, which included the titles of the McPherson/Hooper children’s books, published by their company. She put her own address on it, her own phone number. Didn’t want them contacting Jenny, who she had no intention of telling what she’d done, but it was a damn good read and, as Granny had always said, waste not, want not.
She enclosed a cheque for its return postage, sent it on its way to Sydney and forgot about it.
A WRONG YEAR
Nobby’s son phoned on the evening of the twenty-ninth of December. ‘Mrs Hooper,’ he said. ‘It’s Steve, Nobby’s son. It’s bad news,’ he said. ‘Dad had a heart attack this afternoon. He was gone before the ambulance got here.’
It was the wrong time. It was so wrong. Georgie and Katie and Paul had spent two days in Woody Creek over Christmas. Trudy had called from Venice. Jim was still on a high from that call, as was she. With old James Richard’s cockroach eyes gone from the entrance hall, all had been well with their world. Jim was back in his own bed, and certain his Hooper tome would be accepted for publication.
He was watching a television comedy. Jenny turned it off. ‘It’s Nobby,’ she said, and it was the wrong thing to say. He stood, believing Nobby was on the phone. ‘His son, Jim,’ she added quickly. Maybe her face said what she couldn’t say. Jim stood waiting. So she said it. ‘He had a heart attack this afternoon.’
Then she bawled.
*
They drove to Ringwood via Lilydale. They sat through the funeral, saw Rosemary collapse, saw her son carry her from the church.
A dozen of Nobby’s RSL mates were there. Two remembered Jim. Hoop, they called him, and they wanted him to go to the pub and have a final drink for Nobby. He looked to Jenny to get him out of it, but she didn’t know how.
Four wives went with their men and Jenny didn’t know the RSL wives. She did her best. She counted the glasses of beer Jim emptied, listened to too many conversations that included ‘Rosemary won’t survive this.’
Most do, Jenny thought, and lit a cigarette, but one of the wives was allergic to smoke, so she stood and walked out to the pavement to smoke with the lepers.
Jim was no drinker. Three beers were too many. She stopped counting after three. When he was done her shoulder supplied a crutch out to the car park. He had the keys. She refused to get into the passenger seat. He argued that he was fine to drive. She argued that he wasn’t, but he wanted to go home so gave up the keys. Somehow she got the car back to Greensborough, through peak-hour traffic, Jim asleep beside her. To her dying day she’d never know which roads she’d driven. Jim was in bed before Paul served dinner.
Jenny wanted to stay a few days in Greensborough, to allow the new life of her Katie to wash away Nobby’s death. Jim wanted to go home. They left early, Jenny behind the wheel. She drove out via Whittlesea, Jim sorry and sober beside her. Home to a dusty, dirty new year, to forty-degree temperatures, blistering north winds that dried the first sheet before the last was pegged, sheets which smelled of burning forest when she brought them in. Back in the old days when five mills had screamed their victory over logs, when the loggers had kept old timber truck tracks open, when farmers had cleared wide firebreaks around their properties, bushfires and grass fires hadn’t been as common.
Then two days later, Harry came to their door on a day when the smell of smoke was on the air and the heat so intense the dogs could barely raise a bark of protest. Jenny knew when she saw his freckles, like blotches of mud on grey clay that day.
‘Else,’ he said. That’s all he said. He didn’t need to say more.
Jenny didn’t speak. Was there one word worth saying, one question worth asking? She stepped out into the heat to hold him on Vern Hooper’s veranda, to hold him tight, then tighter, and to howl. A howling month that January. The calendar hanging on the hook behind the kitchen door was too gay with its beachgoers and its boats on cool water, and its 1989. All wrong. This was the year Jenny would turn sixty-six, and if she looked at 1989 upside down, there were those two sixes taunting her: 6861. She was old. Her friends were dying.
Harry asked her to sing at the funeral. She tried. She opened her mouth to sing for Elsie. The organist played the introduction a second time, then Jenny ran out into the burning heat, hot enough, dry enough, to turn her tears to salt. Walked home through the railway yard, walked fast to the shade of the veranda and elm tree where she sat and howled with her arms around her dogs. They kissed her. They calmed her before Jim and John came home with the key.
A blank of days. A black pit where Elsie had always been. She’d been there before Margot, before Georgie. She’d been there the day they’d carried Jenny out to Maisy’s car, Jimmy stuck inside her. Always there. And she’d been so well at Christmas time when she’d held Katie. All good things come to those who wait, lovey. Dead of a brain haemorrhage. She’d had a bit of a headache. Dead in minutes, Harry said. Gone.
And lanky, raw-boned Harry, smoking faster than he could roll them, his freckled hands never still, and looking so wrong without little Elsie at his side.
Trickling eyes eventually run dry. Harry came with his watery blue eyes that never cried. Jenny and the dogs knew he was full up with tears. They greeted him at the gate and tried to make him better. He ate at Jenny’s table. He pottered around the garden with John, in the shed with John, who owned every tool known to modern man. He made toys for the hospital auxiliary. Harry could paint. They worked together while Jim sat on the veranda watching for the postman.
John and Harry were fitting new hinges to the small gate when the postie delivered Jim’s manuscript. Jenny watched him open it, praying for him, pleading to God – or to the publishers – to give him what he needed. They had enclosed a brief letter. ‘Rejected,’ he said. Jenny put her arm around him but he didn’t want to be held. He took his pages into the dining room. She took the dogs for a walk. The gate repairers downed tools to walk with her.
They walked to where Hooper Street dead-ended on Blunt’s Road, then turned left and headed to Joe Flanagan’s land – no longer old Joe’s, though whoever had bought it hadn’t yet moved in, so they took the short cut through to Granny’s land. The fig tree, always loaded, had been stripped by the birds. They’d beat Jenny to the apricots this year – or someone had. Harry picked a pocket full of plums.
‘Else always wanted to move back here,’ he said. ‘Three days before she died we spoke about buying a caravan.’ He ate a plum and pitched the stone, and the dogs, freed from their leads, chased it, thinking food.
‘We look on the old days as utopian,’ John said. ‘We forget the disease, the death.’
‘And no water on tap,’ Jenny said. ‘I must have spent half of my life carrying water before we put the big tank in.’
Harry took another plum from his pocket and Jenny held her hand out for one. John shook his head, and he’d made the better decision. Those plums had always been sour. She took one bite then pitched it. The dogs gave chase.
‘The chap who bought Flanagan’s made me an offer before Christmas. I was thinking a
bout selling,’ Jenny said.
‘They say he beat Joe’s sons down in price,’ Harry said.
‘He offered me a fair price. It’s just the land. Every fence needs replacing,’ Jenny said.
‘Maybe it’s time for it to live another life,’ Harry said. ‘Young Ronnie says it’s time I did. He reckons he could use my help over there.’
Ronnie lived in Mildura, miles away. Jenny didn’t comment. John whistled the dogs to his side and they crossed back over old Joe’s land, perhaps for the last time.
Jim was typing when they returned. He told her Georgie had phoned. ‘She said she’d call back tonight,’ he said.
She called at nine. She said she had some good news and a confession. ‘Which one do you want first, Jen?’
‘I need a dose of good news,’ Jenny said.
‘The publisher likes Molly.’
‘How?’
‘That’s the confession bit, Jen. I posted it to them.’
‘No, Georgie. They sent Jim’s book back today,’ Jenny said.
‘They sent Molly back too, but they want to see it again,’ Georgie said, then read aloud: ‘We feel that the novel could stand an extra ten thousand words . . . a chapter on the birth of Joeyboy . . . a scene where the six year old boy witnesses his father’s death and perhaps scenes showing the relationship between father and son. They like Wadimulla. I changed most of the other names – oh, and Juliana Conti now wrote it.’
‘It’s the last thing Jim needs to hear right now. He’s been down since Nobby’s funeral.’
‘What do you need, mate?’
‘For people to stop dying and life to get back to normal.’
‘There’s no such thing, Jen, so live what you’ve got while you’ve got it because it’s all that you’ve got – unless you believe in reincarnation – and stop attempting to live it through Jim.’
She read out the letter in its entirety, then the two-page reader’s report, and it was like . . . like hearing someone else’s mail read, not Jenny’s.
‘I’ll come down and we’ll talk about it. I was thinking of coming down—’
‘I made copies of the letters. Molly is in the mail.’
‘No! It will kill him!’
‘You’ve done something, Jen. Pull your head out of the kitchen and your flea-riddled mutts and finish what you started.’
They spoke for half an hour. Jim had gone to bed. John had been in bed for two hours. Jenny, a night owl, went to bed when they’d hung up.
‘Are you awake, Jim?’
‘I am now.’
And she told him what Georgie had done. His breathing altered but he didn’t comment.
‘How much of it did you read?’
‘Go to sleep, Jen,’ he said and he turned his back.
She rolled onto her side and placed her arm over him but, feeling his tension, removed it and rolled to the other side. Didn’t sleep well.
The parcel came the following afternoon. Jenny was cutting her way into the envelope with her dressmaking scissors when the dogs started their killer bark. John was out there.
He came in as she removed the stacked pages. ‘It’s the Wild Witch of the East,’ he said, his name for Lila since their last couple of kids’ books. Jenny went out to deal with her.
‘You look well heeled,’ she greeted her.
‘They paid me out,’ Lila said.
‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘I didn’t want the bloody solicitor to take half of it,’ Lila said.
‘They usually do. Where have you been?’
‘Wherever. I’m going up to Sydney. Barbara is still up there.’
‘Have a good time,’ Jenny said, taking a better grip of the dogs’ collars.
‘After all these years, that’s all you’ve got to say to me? Ask me how much I got.’
‘How much did you get?’
‘Twenty-two lousy thousand. He was worth millions.’
‘Put it in the bank and spend it wisely,’ Jenny said.
‘Like hell I will. I’ve been living on a pittance these last years, but you wouldn’t know what that’s like.’
‘I spent a lot of years living on a pittance, Lila.’
‘Bullshit you did. You caught yourself a rich bloke and have been on easy street since.’
‘If you say so,’ Jenny said.
‘Are you going to tie those mongrels up and give me a cup of tea?’
‘Not today.’
‘I used to be your best friend.’
Jenny sighed. She’d lost her two best friends. She sighed again. ‘I just gave you a best friend’s advice, Lila. Put your money in the bank and make it last.’
‘Stuff your friendship and your advice,’ Lila said and walked back to her car.
*
Planes crashed that year. An oil tanker spilled thirty-eight million litres of oil off the coast of Alaska, wiping out seals and birds by the thousands. Ninety-odd sports fans were crushed to death in a people stampede at a football match in England. In June, the Chinese government sent in troops to open fire on students in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, China’s capital city. Thousands, there only to protest for democracy, were mown down by rifle fire, crushed beneath the army’s tanks.
And Jim had the nightmare to end all nightmares. Jenny, deeply asleep, wore the bruises of his battle with the Japs.
‘What were you dreaming?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It wasn’t nothing. Talk to me.’
‘Go to sleep,’ he said.
‘I can’t. You punched me. I’ll have a bruise in the morning. What were you dreaming?’
He took his pillow and his crutch and he went to Trudy’s room, which Jenny would need to stop thinking of as Trudy’s room. She was currently sleeping in Ireland and working in one of their hospitals, as was Nicky. Sophie had come home.
Jim’s nightmares didn’t stop in Trudy’s room. Two nights out of seven she ran through the house, turning on the lights. She always heard him. He was vocal in his dreaming state and his voice was not the controlled Jim’s of daylight hours. He never swore by day, and when she did, he told her that her use of expletives displayed a lack of vocabulary.
He was certainly lacking in vocabulary when he fought the Japs. He screamed at crazy bastards to get their heads down, and too often when she turned on Trudy’s light, she expected to find him on the floor. The light woke him and, on his back, sitting, or halfway out of bed, well-mannered Jim said, ‘Sorry I woke you, Jen.’
His dreams had been rare during the years of the kids’ books. The loss of Amy, then Lorna, Trudy flying away, then Nobby’s death – then the rejection of his Hooper tome.
She brought home brochures for a bus tour to Alice Springs. He wasn’t interested. In July she talked him into a trip to Greensborough. A bad month to visit Melbourne. Unionists who refused to work prevented those who wanted to work from getting there. Bob Hawke didn’t call out his troops to mow the protesters down. These days, if a constable spoke harshly to a drunk he was accused of police brutality.
They spent the weekend in Greensborough, and even Katie’s antics couldn’t make Jim laugh. With Georgie now back at work, Katie spent her weekdays at a crèche, and Jenny wanted to stay longer, to give Katie a week’s holiday. Jim wanted to go home.
They left at seven thirty on Monday morning, Jim behind the wheel, and he missed the right-hand turn that led down to the Hume Freeway.
‘You’ll have to find somewhere to turn around,’ she said.
‘I’ll take the next turn,’ he said, and he did, but the road was unfamiliar and, judging by the amount of traffic on it, was heading into the city.
‘You need to turn back, Jim.’
He didn’t reply, or turn. There was no sun to tell her which way they were going, no landmark presenting itself, and he too was so occupied in looking for one, he damn near ran up the back of a truck at the traffic lights. Unfamiliar traffic lights.
‘Put your left blinker on a
nd get over to the left. We need to get off this road and find out where we are.’ The map book now open on her lap, she was searching its pages for the names of the streets they crossed over, but with no idea which road they were on or which suburb they were passing through, she gave up on the book to watch the road – and finally recognised an intersection she’d driven through with Paul, back when Georgie had been in hospital.
‘We’re heading into the city,’ she said. ‘Get off this road and stop.’
There was nothing wrong with his hearing. His problem was deeper. She reached across and turned on the left blinker. He turned it off and drove a curving road too fast. A red light stopped him and when it did, she opened the door and got out, dodging between trucks and cars to the nature strip. That got through to him. She saw it on the face she’d known since childhood, a face she could once read like an open book.
The lights changed to green. He continued forward with the traffic, but she saw his blinker signalling a left-hand turn, so crossed over and walked on. Found him down the next side street, a residential street where, frightened by his behaviour for the first time in her life, she attacked him with her tongue.
‘You pig-headed fool of a man. You’re not your bloody father so stop acting like him.’
‘Get in,’ he said.
‘Get out and let me drive, or I’ll hitchhike back to Greensborough and stay there.’
She polluted the residential gutter with two butts before he gave up the wheel.
THE SILENCING
OF SCREAMS
She drove back to Georgie’s house, then drove out through Whittlesea, and with Jim trapped in the passenger seat, she continued her attack.
‘It’s killing you what I did with Molly Squire, admit it.’
‘You wanted to drive, so drive.’
‘Amy and I told you what was wrong with it. You wouldn’t listen to us, and you need to listen to what the publishers said about your Hooper tome.’