by Joy Dettman
The last time he’d spoken to Georgie, he’d claimed that he suffered constant pain in his missing leg. Maybe he did. Jenny blamed Sent in Chains, which hadn’t made it to the top of the bestseller list but had been on it for weeks and had got up to number three. He should have been celebrating with her, not hiding his pain in a locked bathroom.
Paul hadn’t known him during the kids’ books era. He’d had little to do with him until the Lorna business. On the second night Jen and Jim had stayed with them during the clearing out of Lorna’s house, he’d asked how Jenny had become involved with a bloke like Jim.
She’d got pregnant to him too young, but should have been old enough to know what she was doing by ’59 when she’d married him.
Georgie filed the royalty statement, slid the attached cheque, made out to J.C. Hooper, into an envelope and addressed it. Jenny wanted no part of that book, or the fame that might have gone with it, but she didn’t refuse the money it made.
She missed John. He’d been her rock until a few months before Christmas when he’d gone to bed one night and hadn’t woken up the next morning. Harry was her leaning post now, when he wasn’t with Ronnie and his wife and grandkids in Mildura.
Wished Trudy would come home. She knew her father wasn’t well, though knowing Jen, she probably didn’t know how unwell he was. She was currently in Norway. She’d spent last Christmas in Spain with Nicky, who wasn’t a Nicole or a Nicola as Jenny had believed when they’d flown away. He was a Nicholas.
Dear Jen,
More money for the coffers. Your publisher also wants to know if you’re working on a follow-up book. They’re still nagging about photographs too, and a literary lunch somewhere. You could be out there having fun with this. How many times did you nag me about wasting my life? You’ve done something big, and if you were prepared to do it, you could turn your Granny file into something publishable instead of sitting up there playing nursemaid and dog lady.
Enough nagging, now for the interesting bit. Cara wrote, not to me, or to you, but to Juliana, a sort of one writer congratulating another letter. She mentioned her link to a former Juliana Conti and how some Aussie friend had sent her your book for Christmas. You haven’t happened across anything written by a Cara Grenville, or a C.J. Grenville, have you? . . .
‘Come to bed. It’s almost midnight,’ Paul called.
‘Five minutes,’ Georgie said.
THE SEWING ROOM
In July of ’92, Harry brought his chainsaw around to prune the rose hedge. Its noise roused Jim, who came to stand in the doorway, on one leg and a crutch, wanting to protest at the desecration of those rosesbushes but unable to find the words.
‘You can’t kill a rosebush,’ Jenny told him. ‘They’ll bloom better than ever come spring – if it ever comes.’
Unpruned last year, the roses had grown tall and rangy – like the thorny brambles imprisoning Briar Rose. Harry, Elsie’s Prince Charming, freed Jenny not with a kiss but his chainsaw. Before the day was done two trailer loads of brambles had been offloaded at the tip.
In August, he suggested he prune a bit off Vern. The dogs were at it again, and both Lorna and Jenny were too old to cope with another batch of pups.
‘At what age does a female dog become menopausal, Harry?’
‘I think they die of old age first, Jen,’ Harry said.
*
Georgie and Paul spent Christmas Day setting up Paul’s second retired computer in Jenny’s sewing room and copying her large floppy discs onto the smaller plastic ones the new computer read. Jim sat nodding off in the sitting room while Katie, a beautiful being with hair as red as her mother’s and as curly as Nanny’s, assisted Nanny in the kitchen. She dropped an egg Jenny had given her to hold, poked a finger into the spilled yolk to taste it and considered it a grand joke when Jenny invited Vern inside to clean up the mess.
Dinner was late that day. Jim ate at six, and at six he came out to the kitchen to sit and wait. He wasn’t fed until seven.
Vern lost his male privileges to a Willama vet in January, a mild case of locking the door after the horse had bolted. In late February, Lorna popped another batch of the blind-eyed little coots while Jenny stood by counting and willing her to stop. They kept coming and coming, ten of the little blighters, and one of them dead. She buried it. By March, they were trying to trip her over each time she stepped out the door, or get in before she could close it. The other litters had run to John to learn good doggie manners. No John to train this lot. Lorna taught them bad manners while Vern slept his life away in the shade of the elm tree and Jim slept his life away in the sitting room.
Jenny was reading in the kitchen when she heard Lorna’s killer bark at the gate. Hadn’t heard it for a long time. Didn’t want to hear it. ‘Please God, let it be one of your salesman,’ she moaned and, placing her book face down on the table, she went to the front door to peer out through the security mesh.
The pups were yipping at the small gate Lorna was attempting to climb over in order to de-sex Lila. All greying red hide, dangling teats, sinew and bone, Lorna – and Lila – who was wearing most of a red sweater that clung to sagging marble breasts, which looked lopsided. She had an inch of grey roots showing beneath her fading red dye job, and she looked hungry enough to eat Lorna.
Jenny walked down to get a grip on Lorna’s collar and haul her back from the gate.
‘Sit!’ Lorna didn’t want to sit.
‘I need a bed. I’m stony motherless broke,’ Lila said.
‘What happened to your payout?’
‘Try paying board and living on a few measly thousand and see how far you get. I’ve been on a single pension since my last one croaked, and the pittance they expect a single person to live on wouldn’t be half enough to live decent on even if they gave you twice as much,’ Lila said.
‘Your idea of living decent has never corresponded with most,’ Jenny said, surrounded by six week old pups whose mother was now teaching them how to show their teeth. Then Vern, roused by the ruckus, came to add his sexless ‘woof’ to the chorus.
‘Sit,’ Jenny ordered, and eleven dogs disobeyed her command.
‘I’ll only be here for a day or two.’
‘Jim’s sick.’
‘You’ve got your photographer living with you.’
‘He died before Christmas.’
Lila shrugged. ‘He was always an up-himself old bugger anyway.’
‘Far better to be up oneself than to have half of Australia up you,’ Jenny said.
‘Bitch. Have you got a spare fag on you?’
‘No.’
‘I can see a packet in your pocket.’
Jenny retrieved her smokes, offered one, not the packet. Lila didn’t have a light, and again Jenny patted her pockets. She found a lighter.
‘I haven’t slept in a decent bed for two weeks.’
‘No,’ Jenny said.
‘I’ll be out on the Friday morning bus. My pension gets paid in on Thursday.’
‘Try the hotel,’ Jenny said, then, releasing Lorna’s collar, she turned to walk back to the house and her book. Hearing the gate squeal open, she turned to see Lorna riding it while the pups fell like ninepins before it.
‘Eat me, you mongrels, and see if I care,’ Lila said, and she came through, dragging a case with only three of its four wheels intact.
An embarrassed Lorna, her four feet again beneath her, snarled her challenge, as did her pups, but the unwanted visitor and her case continued up the bricked path towards the house. It’s one thing to snarl and bark when there is a barrier between antagonist and defender. Actually ripping out a wrinkled throat is another matter entirely. Lorna retreated with her troops to make a second stand at the veranda where Jenny stood, watching her nemesis coming to get her.
Some are haunted for life by their yesterdays. Jim was, and there was not a thing Jenny could do or say to change that. Some wake each morning to a brand new day, their every yesterday washed clean. Lila had only ever believed in t
omorrow. Jenny sighed and opened the wire door. At Christmas time, Georgie had suggested a dose of shock therapy might jolt some sense into Jim. Maybe a few days of Lila might do the trick, or at least get his leg on. He’d spent a lot of years dodging Lila’s scarlet kisses.
‘Let those pups inside and you’ll be rounding them up,’ Jenny warned, and returned to her book.
Georgie, on the hunt for Cara since she’d written to congratulate Juliana, had posted up Balancing Act, by C.J. Langhall, because of the photograph of the author inside the rear cover. The initials were right. The photograph could have been Cara. Georgie swore it was, but if it was, she was wearing a shoulder-length wig and glasses. Her biography was of no help. Ms Langhall lives on a rural property outside of London with her partner and their three children.
The last time they’d seen Cara she’d had a seven year old boy, and she’d been fostering Tracy. They’d be adults now. She could have had another baby. They knew from Chris Marino that Cara had married her Englishman, so why write partner and not husband? Partner could mean anything from husband to lesbian lover.
Jenny did no more reading that day. She led her visitor to the room beside Trudy’s, threw sheets and pillow slips at her, an extra blanket, then returned to the kitchen to round up something for dinner. If Jim’s meal wasn’t on the table at six he became agitated. He’d be agitated anyway when he woke up and saw Lila.
*
Her pension was paid into an account she accessed with a plastic card, and on Thursday morning Lila disappeared early. Had she taken her case, Jenny might have believed she’d left town. She hadn’t. She returned before six, her demeanour suggesting she hadn’t had a good day.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Nice to know you missed me,’ Lila said.
Never an early riser, Jenny woke her in time to catch the Friday bus.
‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ Lila said, rolling over. She slept until midday when she showered, put on her makeup and disappeared again. She returned at five.
‘When are you leaving, Lila?’
‘That bloody bowling club took every penny I had.’
Anyone with a brain in their head knew that poker machines were the government’s recycling agency for pensions.
‘You mindless halfwit.’
‘It wouldn’t have kept me for a day in Melbourne. If I’d doubled it I would have gone.’
‘You’re going.’
Jenny packed her case, stripped her bed and, when Lila refused to leave, she carried her case down to the gate and dumped it on the footpath. Lila dragged it back. She retrieved her sheets from the laundry and made up her bed.
‘I won six hundred dollars up in Sydney one night. Sooner or later I’ll win again.’
‘And until you do you expect to bludge on me.’
‘I don’t eat much.’
‘You’re not staying here, Lila. Jim isn’t well.’
‘Put him away and come up to Sydney with me. We’d have a ball.’
Couldn’t take another day of her – or Jim. Wanted . . . wanted life, wanted Georgie, wanted Katie, wanted to howl with frustration, and what good had howling ever done? She lit a cigarette instead, and made the mistake of leaving her cigarettes on the refrigerator while she hid in her sewing room, the twin doors closed, a chair jammed beneath its doorknobs. It remained in place until five to six, and when she went out to the kitchen to find something for dinner, her empty cigarette packet was on the table, Lila smoking the last one.
Couldn’t get the car out, not unless she rounded up and penned nine pups. She opened a tin of tomato soup, slotted bread in the toaster, and with the hands of the clock now pointing to six, Jim came to the kitchen on one leg and his crutch. Couldn’t stand the sight of his crutch. Ran from it, from him, from Lila to the take-away shop. They sold cigarettes – at a premium price – and disposable lighters for twice the price she’d pay for one at the supermarket. She bought one, then ordered two dollars’ worth of chips and three slabs of flake and went outside to smoke while she waited for the fish to fry.
Didn’t set the table. Dumped the parcel onto it along with a bottle of vinegar, salt and pepper, then sat down to eat off the paper, with her fingers. Hoopers didn’t eat off paper. Jim looked at it, then actually looked at her, expecting her to fetch him a plate, knife and fork, to serve him his fish and chips. She ate scalding chips, and he reached for his crutch and got his own plate, his own knife and fork, served himself the last piece of fish and a dozen chips. There was nothing wrong with his appetite.
There was nothing wrong with his stump either, or his artificial leg. Six months ago he’d stopped wearing it. Every night since, his crutch had been a third presence at the table – now a fourth. He leaned it on the chair to his right, beside Jenny’s chair, and every time she saw it, heard it, she wanted to take to it with an axe. For months and months and more months, she’d pleaded with him to put his leg on. He suffered terrible pain, he claimed. She no longer believed in his terrible pain. He refused her aspros, her Panadol, refused to see a doctor, refused to set foot or crutch outside the door. He sat, staring at windows, at walls or sleeping – sat and rotted and she rotted at his side.
Lila ate her meal from paper, with her fingers. She’d never been skin and bone before. Wouldn’t be for long. She cleaned up the last of the chips then ate both pieces of toast. She dropped three teabags into three mugs, poured the boiling water over them, then left Jim to fish for his teabag – and look at it as if he’d retrieved a dead mouse from his cup when he finally got it out.
Jenny escaped, with her smokes, to her sewing room, where she no longer sewed but gave her problems to her gods, the computers, preloved, though never loved more than she loved them. Tonight she emptied her anger into the original god, already stained yellow by her smoke. It didn’t accuse when she lit another.
She created a new file she named Boomerang, and closed it down fast when the chair jamming the twin doors gave way to Lila. She wanted a smoke. Jenny went to bed and took her cigarettes with her.
On Tuesday, Maisy’s visiting day, Lila hunted Jim from the sitting room. He holed up in the bathroom. On Friday, Lila begging for a loan, Jenny offered her ten dollars to cook dinner, clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor.
‘That’s bloody slave rates.’
‘It’s bludger’s rates, Lila, and more than you deserve.’
She cooked, she cleaned, she got her ten dollars. Spent it on hair dye, but the supermarket didn’t have a good range of colours in stock. The faded red and silver turned dark brown. She looked semi normal.
SANCTUARY
Lila’s battered handbag was hanging over the back doorknob as usual. Jenny removed it each night when she locked that door. Tonight she dropped it, scattering its general chaos of makeup and used tissues, purse and perfume. She picked up each item, tossed it back in, then tried to close it. Its zip no longer zipped.
Her plastic card would be amongst that mess. She’d collect her pension in the morning and recycle it at the pokies – or maybe not. Last night she’d diagnosed Jim’s illness as ‘mad as a rabbit’. She might catch the bus on Friday.
Georgie’s diagnosis was kinder than Lila’s though much the same. She’d suggested a psychiatrist. Maisy had suggested the doctor who set up shop in the old bank building every Wednesday. She’d made an appointment for Jim. Jenny had kept it. She’d spoken to a young doctor about Jim’s breakdown after the war, about his years in psychiatric clinics. He’d told her he couldn’t fix her husband by remote control and to bring him in. As if.
She emptied her cup and went to the bathroom. Clean. She hadn’t cleaned it. Maybe the Muslims had got something right with their many wives. Every wife needs a junior wife. Jenny hadn’t asked Lila to stay but no longer told her to leave. The Boomerang file was growing. Lila shed gems daily, gems Jenny swept up and fed to her computer. She’d made a superb Molly.
The publisher wants to know if you’re working on a follow-up novel . . . She was no
w.
She brushed her teeth, creamed her face, then crept back to the kitchen to open Lila’s purse. Her bank card was in it, and not much else. She stole it. She hid it in her sewing machine drawer, then went to bed.
Lila missed it when she went to the post office to pick up her government pay and was back in ten minutes. ‘I have to phone the bank. I’ve lost my money card.’
‘You’ll get it back when you’re on the bus out of town, Lila.’
‘You’ll give it back to me now or I’ll bloody report you to the copper.’
‘Go for your life. When he comes around to arrest me, I’ll ask him to evict you.’
‘I can’t live without money!’
‘Bernie Macdonald has got plenty. Try your luck with him on Tuesday.’
Their exchange became louder when Jenny suggested Shaky Lewis, who still had a room at the hotel. ‘Two pensioners can live more cheaply than one,’ she said. They became loud enough to raise Jim. He stopped the argument – or his clunk-clunk across the hall stopped it. Jenny left via the back door.
He was in the kitchen, close to the open back door, when she returned. His crutch was leaning beside his chair. Lila was vacuuming.
On Tuesday, Lila claimed his sitting room where she terrorised him with afternoon television. He clunk-clunked to the bathroom to take refuge, and that night he spoke to Jenny – or moaned.
‘When is she going?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jenny said, looking at his eyes, which, for the first time in months, appeared to be seeing her.