by Joy Dettman
There were days when she felt like lining both of them up against a wall and borrowing Granny’s rifle back from Harry. He still had it. There were days when she missed John so much she sat on his bed, in his room, and invited the pups in for company. Missed his clever hands every time Lila opened her sewing room door. He would have worked out how to fit a lock that would keep her out.
‘Why do you need two of those things for?’
‘I run a retirement home for Paul’s old computers.’
‘What do you do on them?’
‘Play games.’
‘Show me.’
Not bloody likely. Jenny saved, shut the computer down and went for a walk that ended at Fulton’s hardware store.
Robert Fulton sold her two solid slide bolts and, as always, asked after Jim. He’d stopped visiting him around the same time Jim had stopped wearing his leg.
‘As usual,’ she said. ‘Would you know if old Shaky Lewis is still capable of screwing in a screw?’
‘They took him down to the old-folks’ home, but there’s a chap living out Cemetery Road who does a bit of handyman work.’ He gave her the phone number.
Jenny looked at the phone when she walked in. Jim would take to his bed to hide from him. She studied the fittings. All they needed was a couple of screws and a few holes drilled. She’d once been capable of using tools. In Armadale, she’d drilled holes to repair an old cabinet, to hang curtains, to attach a form of lock to Ray’s back door. When she’d lived with Granny, she’d sawed and hammered and worked like a labourer. Only since she’d been with Jim had she become useless. John’s toolbox was still in the shed. He’d owned two electric drills and a huge set of multi-sized drill bits.
And maybe Jim wasn’t quite as usual. She roused him from his chair when she started drilling a hole through the carpeted floor, which took a few attempts and a larger drill bit before the hole was big enough for one of the slide bolts to fit into. He watched while she positioned the bolt plate on the bottom of the left hand side door and marked its four holes with a pencil.
‘Hold the door still for me,’ she said.
He held it still. He held it when she got down on her knees to drill. She’d used Norman’s hand drill in Armadale and wished for it now. John’s electric model was too powerful, but fast.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Building myself a barricade,’ she said, and selected a screwdriver. She got the screws in and, when the slide bolt was driven down through the floor, she had the left hand side door locked.
‘In or out?’ she said. ‘I need to close the other one.’
He came in, no doubt wanting to protest against the ruination of another of his possessions. His mouth slapped open and shut a few times but she closed the door, then, closer to him than she’d been in months, she started measuring up for her second slide bolt, which, if attached in the right place then anchored into the locked door, should give her privacy.
He held the bolt plate above the doorknob while she marked its holes, and again while she got the screws started. He watched her mark the keeper’s holes, and when the screws held it firm, when the second slide bolt was in its keeper, they were barricaded in. It wasn’t a pretty job. A couple of the screws had gone in on an angle and their corners were sharp, but she hadn’t been looking for pretty, only effective. And he wanted out.
‘Thanks for your help,’ she said, then locked him out and turned on Paul’s second retired computer. He’d bought a faster model with a larger built-in brain, or hard drive, as he called it. Jenny’s second computer had a small hard drive which she didn’t quite trust yet.
It took one night for her to trust her handyman skills, because shove as she might, Lila couldn’t get in. She knocked, she yelled, but not until Jenny took pity and slid that bolt did Lila get her cigarette.
Jim knocked on Monday afternoon, his knock a foot higher than Lila’s. Jenny slid her bolt for him.
‘Seeking me or my sanctuary?’ she said.
‘She took Trudy’s car,’ he said.
‘I told her to take it for a run.’ Jenny had given her ten dollars to wash the sheets and hang them on the clothes line. Lila had gone to Willama to spend it.
‘She won’t bring it back,’ he said.
‘If she doesn’t, it’s celebration time,’ Jenny said. ‘In or out?’
He came in, leaned his crutch against the table. It fell. She picked it up, took it to his bedroom and returned with his leg. Didn’t say a word, just placed it down beside her older computer.
Only two chairs in that room, her discarded dining suite chairs. He sat to stare at the bulbous screen, so she turned it on to give him something to stare at. It took time in doing its warm-up exercises, and when it finished, she inserted the solitaire disc, and up it came, ready to play. He didn’t like it but, trapped there without his crutch, he sat while, from a standing position, she played the game, hearing herself echoing the words Paul had spoken to her the day she’d first sat in front of a computer.
‘Playing games is the easiest way to lose your fear of computers. Learning to control them is like learning to drive a car.’
He looked at her, helpless without his crutch. ‘Get it, Jen.’
‘Ah, he knows my name. I got your leg for you. Put it on – all the better to dodge her, my dear.’
She played a second game. The machine won, but her concentration hadn’t been in it, nor was his. He was looking at his leg.
There were new age antidepressant pills that might help him, if he’d take pills. He’d never taken pills. If he had the flu he wouldn’t swallow an aspro unless she disguised it in Granny’s flu brew, which she had many times. She did what she could for him. Lived the best way she could around him. He wasn’t interested in the computer, so she shut it down and returned to the faster model, still clean. Watched him. Watched his hands. One was hovering over the keyboard. She stopped typing to watch that hand. He didn’t touch the keys. How many years had he spent on Molly Squire? How many had he spent on his Hoopers? Then he’d stopped, stopped dead, like a battery toy out of power.
He stayed with her until he heard Trudy’s car at the gate. There was no mistaking its motor. Its exhaust pipe and muffler had rusted for lack of use.
‘If she opens that gate and lets those pups out, I’ll murder her,’ Jenny said, and ran out to stop her opening it. When she returned, Jim and his leg had gone.
He came back the next morning, on his crutch.
‘Bring that crutch in here and you know what I’ll do, Jim.’
‘The pain,’ he said.
‘Take an aspro.’
He went away and didn’t return to her door for two days. Came early the next morning on two legs. She locked him in her sewing room, ruffled his hair when he sat and turned on the computer, inserted the word processing program and created a file she named Jim. Then turned off the monitor.
‘Now it’s a typewriter without paper. You can pour your every thought into it then, with a few strokes of the keys, delete the lot,’ she said and sat again at her own computer.
He touched a key, and when the machine didn’t explode, his fingers started searching the keyboard.
Jenny married Lila off to Billy Roberts and moved her to Woody Creek, and so engrossed in what she was doing, she was unaware he was typing. He wasn’t as fast as he’d been on the old rattletrap typewriter, but his ten fingers had found a rhythm she’d never found with two fingers and a thumb.
He remained with her until lunchtime and when she turned his monitor on to read what he’d written, she’d expected more. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, repeated. Repeated umpteen times. He’d filled two-thirds of a page with that one sentence, then progressed to The crow flew over the river with a lump of red raw liver in his mouth. In all he’d filled three pages, but better he fill a hundred pages with his fox and his crow than sit staring out the window. She deleted his morning’s work, closed down both machines and went out to make him a sandwich for lunch.<
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He beat her to the sewing room the next morning, on two legs. She turned on the two computers, turned his monitor off and, without comment, sat down to work.
And he spoke. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting Lila out of my head and onto disc. It’s therapeutic,’ she replied.
He typed a few more lines. Amy had timed him once on his typewriter. He’d done seventy words in a minute. Paul’s newer computer had come with a touch-type teaching program already installed. She’d wasted a day attempting to give her ten fingers eyes. The computer told her she could do twelve words a minute. Her two fingers and thumbs could do around forty.
‘Where did you first learn to touch-type, Jim?’
‘Somewhere,’ he said.
‘At one of the hospitals?’ There would be no more topics which were out of bounds, not for her. He didn’t reply. She turned back to her computer and for half an hour their keyboards chattered companionably.
Nobby believed Jim had lost his leg before he’d been captured, that he’d received the wound in battle. From what Jenny had read of the Japs, if he’d been injured in battle, they wouldn’t have wasted medical supplies on him. Through the years she’d asked him a hundred times how he’d lost his leg. He claimed to have no memory of it, or of the war. Only once had he mentioned the prison camp, to John. I saw the worst of mankind and the best of it, he’d said. Jenny knew when he’d gone missing. She knew when he’d been returned to a Melbourne hospital, but that’s all she knew.
‘Did they have doctors in the Jap camp?’
He looked at the blank screen, his hands still.
‘Talk to me,’ she said.
‘It’s the past,’ he said. Like a parrot. For thirty years he’d been parroting those words. Thirty years? It was too long, and today his words failed to silence her.
‘The past isn’t ever gone, Jim. Scars from the past don’t heal. I’ve got one on my calf from a pair of scissors Amber threw at me one day. I’ll wear it to my grave. You’ll wear that stump of a leg to your grave. How did you lose your leg?’
He’d stood then, and let himself out; she returned to her Boomerang file. She had a hundred and twenty-two pages now, and was having a no holds barred ball with Lila. She’d celebrate her absence when she was gone, but while she was here, she looked on her presence as less of an irritant and more a subject to be studied, and recorded.
And he was back. She unlocked the door.
Until the moment his batteries had run down, he’d filled his every day at his typewriter. At times she’d wanted to drag him away from the thing, to dig a pit in the garden and bury it. Today she wanted to watch his hands fly. Knew those hands so well. Knew the scar on his middle left finger, the scar on his wrist.
‘You’re getting your old speed back,’ she said.
‘It’s flat,’ he said. ‘The keyboard.’
‘It doesn’t demand paper,’ she said.
‘Where does it go?’
‘It stays inside until you save it to a disc,’ she said. ‘If you don’t save it before you turn the computer off, it’s lost.’ She watched him type another line. ‘You can tell a computer your worst secrets. Its blank expression never alters, and when you’ve finished baring your soul to it, you can hit the delete key and erase the lot. Do you want me to erase it?’
He nodded, so she turned on the monitor and up came the The quick brown fox and the crow. She held down the shift key, selected the pages on the screen, hit delete and the screen’s blank face looked back at them.
‘Look, no white-out,’ she said. ‘Rubbed out as if it never was.’
She’d done a lot of her own deleting when she’d filled her Jenny file. Had almost wiped out the night of the five American sailors and the beach and the taxi driver and the factory and her belly growing with Cara and the ripped taffeta dress. Hadn’t. Hadn’t deleted Laurie Morgan, or the Macdonald twins either. Knew deleting it would do no good. It had happened, all of it.
Every Tuesday, rain, hail or shine, at one o’clock Bernie Macdonald drove into her yard. Every Tuesday at three thirty, he returned to collect Maisy. Jenny never spoke to him, but constant subjection to the sight of him may have been a form of therapy. And she loved his mother.
She loved that fool of a man sitting, typing his fox and crow epic. Should have tried harder to make him talk about his war when he’d been well, and he had been, for years and more years. They’d created eight kids’ books. Then they’d lost Amy. If he hadn’t insulted her version of Molly Squire, if he’d put his name on it beside her own, if he’d taken one scrap of notice of her when she’d told him to turn the car around that day, she wouldn’t have attacked his Hooper tome.
He’d burned half of it. He’d stood feeding a few pages at a time into the stove and when that had proved too slow, he’d opened the briquette heater’s door and pitched in half of his tome before the smoke choked him. She’d retrieved some of it, and burnt her hand in doing it, and before she’d done it, he’d driven off to the tip with his typewriter. Should have kept her mouth shut. Should have burnt Sent in Chains—
And if she had, the house would have been falling down around them by now. Her advance had paid to restump Vern Hooper’s house – and her floors felt better for it.
Shook her head and her fingers returned to her keyboard where she sat Lila down at a Sydney poker machine and had her feed it her last ten cents. She was working her way towards allowing her to win the jackpot, when he spoke.
‘Tell me again how I erase it, Jen?’
‘You have to . . .’ She stood and turned on his monitor. Saw no crows and foxes. Saw . . . prisoners dying like flies from disease and dysentery and starvation . . . little bastards were starving . . . waste no food on us . . .
He sat watching her select the eight pages he’d typed. She didn’t delete the pages but removed them and, her heart racing, she lied, ‘All gone.’
The screen was blank. He stood and let himself out. She locked the door behind him, opened a new file, dumped what she’d removed from the Jim file into it, saved it as Memory then shut down the computer. Opened it late that night and read of Jim’s war, or his final years of it. She learned how he’d lost his leg. A Jap did it – and he’d been lucky not to lose his head. He was a blocked conduit, finally releasing his load of debris, and with the minimum of punctuation and words of four syllables.
A man can’t survive on a cup of water and a handful of filthy rice.
I watched them give up and their eyes looked relieved to give up.
My leg wouldn’t heal. I knew I was dying and I found out why their eyes looked relieved. Something happens inside your head. One of the blokes there called it the God centre of the brain. If there’s a God he lives somewhere in man. He wasn’t in that bloody camp.
She couldn’t read for howling, but she read, swiping her tears away with wet fingers, sobbing in breaths before she reached the end of his pages, when she wiped her eyes on her dressing gown and closed his Memory file. Knew now why he’d erected his neon-lit Don’t Look Back signs. Wanted to go to Trudy’s room and climb into his bed and hold him, howl in his arms. Knew it wasn’t the right time, not yet.
Each day thereafter she dumped more of his pages into his Memory file. Each night she read what he’d poured into that old computer. She forgot to put the ad in the paper to get rid of the pups – or she didn’t forget, just knew what would happen when that ad went in. The phone would start ringing, the buyers would start coming and, right now, Jim didn’t need the disturbance.
She knew she couldn’t get rid of Lila when her next pension payment was paid in. Lila therapy had driven him to the sanctuary of her locked sewing room. Lila was due for another payment the night Jenny read about Jim’s final days in the camp.
‘It’s over, Hoop,’ one of the chaps said. ‘They dropped a bloody big bomb on the bastards and blew them all to hell.’
He had a sheet of paper they’d dropped from a plane that circled the camp that day. I remember one
of the chaps was spoon-feeding me something sweet. Those little yellow bastards had cleared out, and our boys had cleaned out what they’d left behind. Jap jam maybe, or what had come from the sky in crates.
They dropped down warning leaflets, telling us not to eat too much, to allow our stomachs to get used to dealing with food slowly. We were skeletal men clad in loincloths. I was too weak to feed myself, a dead man breathing. Someone, maybe the chap feeding me, must have found the ribbons of Jen’s poem. Someone copied it onto the back of one of the warning leaflets. It was days before our blokes got in to get us out. We were in a jungle camp. They carried me out on a stretcher. I was in the first hospital when I found the poem.
I wanted to live then, but damn near died. It was months before they brought me home. I still had it with me. Then I lost it. I lost everything . . .
THE UNFORGIVEN
Tuesday afternoon, Jenny was swinging the big gate open when the postie came. He handed her three envelopes, two addressed to Jim, the third addressed in Georgie’s handwriting to Jennifer Hooper.
The dogs, defeated by Lila’s ongoing presence, had lost their killer instinct and might not have bothered getting to their feet to eat Bernie Macdonald, but Jenny had chained them, just in case. She’d given up penning the pups. Too well grown now, they climbed on the backs of their siblings and scrambled over the sagging fence as fast as she could lift them into their pen. They’d learnt that the gate was out of bounds and that’s about all they’d learnt, and not from Jenny, but from Lorna.
She opened Jim’s mail. He had no interest yet in opening a bill or in paying it. She was opening Georgie’s envelope when she heard Bernie’s ute drive in. She removed two pages, a handwritten page from Georgie and one typewritten and addressed to Juliana Conti. Juliana Conti was dead. Folded the two together fast and slid them beneath her bra strap as Lila came from the kitchen.
‘He’s out there,’ Jenny said. ‘Skitch him, Lila.’
‘One of them was enough,’ Lila said. She went into the sitting room and closed the door.