Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  About Wind in the Wires

  The wind is whispering in Woody Creek . . . Change is in the air.

  It’s 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged – kicking and screaming – into the swinging sixties.

  Jenny’s daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother’s hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met.

  A mistake from Cara’s teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.

  But life for the Morrison girls has never been easy, and once the sisters are in each other’s lives, long-buried secrets are bound to be unearthed, the dramatic consequences of which no-one could have predicted . . .

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Previously in Woody Creek

  Part One

  The Old House

  Miles Away

  A Different Christmas

  Tenants

  Margot’s Indigestion

  Jim Hooper

  Margot’s Little Mistake

  A Convoluted Life

  The Water-Pistol Bandit

  Born on a Kitchen Floor

  The Young War Widow

  Like Riding a Bike

  Woody Creek Gossip

  Charlie’s Accident

  Secrets

  Letting Go

  Nineteen Sixty-One

  Conditional Release

  College

  Coke and Aspirin

  A Train through the Night

  The Red Dress

  A Different City

  A Shrinking World

  Parenthood

  Good Behaviour

  Part Two

  A Roast Dinner

  Collision Course

  Amberley

  Ballarat

  The Master Plan

  Sea Sick

  Genetically Programmed

  Precipice

  Haunting the Letterbox

  Lost and Found

  Dinner for Three

  Stale Cigarettes

  The Connection

  Wills and Things

  Engagement Rings

  The Letter

  The Mouse Nest

  The Visitor

  Laundering Money

  Having a Sister

  Jockeys Wearing Red

  Swimming at Portsea

  That Final Inch

  Repercussions

  The Wedding

  About Joy Dettman

  Also by Joy Dettman

  Copyright page

  My heartfelt thankyou to Emma who tolerates my idiosyncrasies and to my readers who supply the fuel which keeps my nose to the grindstone

  PREVIOUSLY IN

  WOODY CREEK

  Gertrude Foote (Granny), town midwife and small property owner, was once wed to Archie Foote. She is the mother of Amber and grandmother of Sissy and Jenny Morrison.

  Vern Hooper, farmer, sawmill boss and leading Woody Creek citizen, is Gertrude’s half-cousin and her long-term lover. He has three offspring, Lorna, Margaret and Jim, a childhood friend of Jenny.

  George Macdonald, mill owner and farmer, and his wife, Maisy, are the parents of eight daughters and identical hell-raising twin sons, Bernie and Macka. When a drunken prank goes badly awry, Jenny, a schoolgirl, is found to be with child. For her good name’s sake, a hurried wedding is arranged by Amber and Norman Morrison together with the parents of the twins.

  Jenny has other ideas. Fifteen, alone, afraid, her childhood dream of becoming a famous singer ripped from her by the twins and Margot’s birth, Jenny escapes to Melbourne, where she meets Laurie Morgan, a redhead who looks like Clark Gable. He is kind. He takes care of her, buys her pretty thing – and takes advantage of her confused innocence. Georgie is conceived.

  Jenny returns to the ever dependable Gertrude, her life in tatters. The town has lost respect for her, as she has for herself. When she learns that Sissy is engaged to Jim Hooper, it may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Jim is Jenny’s friend and one of the few in town who still looks on her as the girl she had once been.

  By accident or design, their friendship develops into much more. Then Jim breaks his engagement and joins the army. Seven months later, Jimmy is born. Jenny is eighteen and the mother of three illegitimate children, Margot, Georgie and Jimmy. She vows to never again become pregnant.

  Vern learns of his grandson and is determined to claim the infant. Jim hasn’t been back to Woody Creek. Jenny won’t reply to his letters. His family tell him he has a son and he wants to see him before he is sent overseas. To escape Vern’s threats of court, Jenny flees to Sydney and to Jim with their ten-month-old son, her tiny Georgie left in Gertrude’s care.

  Elsie, a light-skinned aboriginal who calls Gertrude ‘Mum’, lives with her husband Harry Hall on Gertrude’s land. They have the care of several children: their own, Elsie’s niece and nephew, and Margot, who Jenny has had little to do with.

  Vern and his daughters refuse to contemplate a marriage between Jenny and Jim. He has bought her a wedding ring. She has taken his name at the Sydney boarding house, but at eighteen will require Norman’s permission to marry. Since Georgie’s birth, she has had no contact with Norman, Amber or Sissy.

  In Sydney, she is singing again at clubs and parties, and when Jim is reported missing in action, she takes on day work at a clothing factory where she meets Lila, also married and a mother. Jenny is living an exemplary life, waiting for news of Jim.

  Come New Year’s Eve, 1943, she is in the club pianist’s car, on her way home, when disaster strikes in the shape of five drunken American sailors.

  Ten months later, Jenny leaves Amberley, a comfortable boarding house, to return to a life of constant labour on Gertrude’s small property and to live in Gertrude’s two-and-a-half-room hut. She carries with her a guilty secret.

  Gertrude must never know a third daughter was born to Jenny – Cara Jeanette, given at birth to Amberley’s childless landlady, Myrtle Norris and her husband Robert, a high-school principal. Cara may well be Jenny’s secret for life, but to Myrtle and Robert she is a cherished only child.

  Vern Hooper and his daughters haven’t given up. They will not have their son and brother wed to a little trollop who can’t keep her pants on. They allow Jenny to believe that Jim is dead, and again threaten to take her son.

  Ray King wants to marry Jenny. She doesn’t love him, but he has a house in the city, and to have any chance at life, her children need to have a father.

  Then Amber Morrison, who has never been quite sane, murders her stationmaster husband Norman in his bed. For twenty-one years, Jenny has believed Norman to be her father. The night of his funeral, she learns the truth of her birth.

  Archie Foote, singer, poet, physician and Gertrude’s philandering husband, is her natural father. Juliana Conti, an Italian woman who died in childbirth, is her mother.

  She tells Ray King she will marry him but will never have another child. He wants her, not children. He doesn’t want her children. The marriage has little chance of success. She loved Jim Hooper. She promised him when they said goodbye never to remove his ring. When she marries Ray, she moves Jim’s ring to her right hand.

  The war has been over for months when she learns that Jim is alive and in a Melbourne hospital. She takes Jimmy there to meet his father, but Jim, a prisoner of the Japanese for two years, has lost a leg and some say his sight and his mind. He does not appear to recognise, or even see, her.

  After a violent episode, Jenny leaves Ray and once again
returns to Gertrude. Vern Hooper is growing old and infirm, and still has only the one grandson, who he will not allow to be raised as a bastard in Woody Creek.

  He gains custody of six-year-old Jimmy, and before Vern’s death, Jimmy is adopted by Margaret Hooper and her husband Bernard.

  Ray has formed an association with Florence, a young and inexperienced girl. She has two children to him, Raelene and the retarded Donny. In 1951, Ray comes to Woody Creek with his two motherless babies, where Jenny, still mourning the loss of her beloved son to the Hoopers, finds a focus in Ray’s babies. A relationship is forged, though never again as husband and wife. Jenny cares for Donny, and grows to love the doll-like Raelene.

  In 1958 Gertrude dies, then less than a week later, Ray is crushed beneath logs at a mill. Unable to manage the now seven-year-old Donny alone, Jenny delivers him to a Melbourne home for disabled children then finds employment in Frankston, with Vroni, an old friend.

  Charlie White, the elderly town grocer, has a daughter Hilda. He hasn’t seen or heard from her in many years. He is known as the meanest man in town, though not by Georgie, who has been working for him since she turned fourteen. The Fulton family are Charlie’s long-term tenants and good neighbours. Miss Blunt, the town draper and dressmaker, is another of Charlie’s tenants. He owns half-a-dozen rental properties in Woody Creek.

  Jack Thompson, the young constable, is falling in love with Georgie, who in 1958 is eighteen and a stunningly beautiful redhead.

  Teddy Hall, middle son of Elsie and Harry, is involved in an odd relationship with Margot, a plain and frumpish girl.

  Back in Melbourne, Florence, Raelene and Donny’s natural mother, sees Ray’s death notice in a newspaper. She contacts Jenny, stating that Ray stole her children and that she wants to see her daughter.

  Against her better judgement, Jenny takes Raelene to the city to meet Florence and her husband Clarrie. She chooses the wrong day. It is the Saturday of the football grand final. Flinders Street station is crowded. She sees a familiar head, well above the crowd. It can’t be Jim? She calls his name, and he turns, and Jenny runs to him.

  PART ONE

  THE OLD HOUSE

  Trees of the walnut family were once an important component of the vast temperate forests of Asia and North-eastern America. The walnut’s dense clusters of flowers are inconspicuous, the meat of its hard shelled nut highly nutritious, but it is for its timber the tree is valued and used extensively in cabinet making.

  Georgie Morrison found that piece of information while glancing through her new set of encyclopaedias – near new, she’d found them in a box at the tip while dropping off a load of shop rubbish. Georgie wasn’t proud – or not about her reading material; she owned shelves full of second-hand books. In their natural habitat walnut trees reach great heights and girths, the encyclopaedia said. Granny’s tree was no giant of its breed. Planted by her father, along with a dozen more, he may have dreamt fine dreams of furnishing his mansion with a walnut cabinet and table. Who knows what a dead man dreamt? One tree had survived to maturity. No mansion had ever risen on his acres.

  For most of Georgie’s life the midsummer sun had set each night behind that tree, its dense canopy of green doing what it could to protect the western wall of Granny’s house from the worst of summer’s ire. Its limbs were naked in July of 1958, when she’d packed her earthly bags – but if there was a place out there behind the walnut tree, behind the sunset, then as sure as that tree produced its annual bags of walnuts, Granny was up there milking her heavenly goats and thanking God she hadn’t lived long enough to see the abomination Bernie Macdonald and his working bee had made of her cosy little home.

  Her kitchen hadn’t survived the onslaught. Its small window, which for eighty-odd years had offered morning light to that long and narrow room, was gone. The timber floor had been replaced by cement – and not enough depth of cement. Already it was crazed by cracks. The green curtain, hung for Georgie’s lifetime in the lean-to doorway, was gone, as was the lean-to. A door had been hung in the green curtain’s space. It refused to close.

  That long room no longer served as a kitchen. It had donated its iron chimney and stove to the new kitchen. A dark place now, a connection now, forcing three groups of unrelated rooms into a marriage from hell.

  The door which refused to close gave entrance to a brand-new laundry and bathroom, their floors eighteen inches higher than the cement floor. Continue through and one more step up and you entered the old bathroom, which had made the transformation to third bedroom, a walk-through bedroom, and Georgie’s preferred entrance to Ray’s old bedroom, now a newly baptised kitchen. Split-level homes might become the latest fad in a year or two. That house, a hotchpotch of many levels, was before its time.

  Shakey Lewis had been more or less responsible for the design. A champion footballer in his heyday, a builder too, though a lot of water had passed under the old bridge since then. It was well known in town that he couldn’t name a hammer until the pub opened, that he shook too hard to hit a nail on the head before midday. By midafternoon Shakey was at his best; he’d designed the new kitchen in the afternoon, and given what he’d had to work with, he’d made a reasonable job of it – apart from his addition of a pair of large second-hand windows, set into its west wall, perfectly positioned to look December’s afternoon sun in the eye. Then he’d positioned a new stainless steel sink beneath those windows, perfectly positioned to reflect the sun’s glare.

  Today its dazzle was blinding and no curtain to draw against the glare. No Jenny to sew the curtain. The night of Ray’s funeral she’d delivered Donny to Melbourne and signed him into the care of strangers at a home for retarded children. He was Ray’s son, not Jenny’s. Ray had been able to handle him, Jenny couldn’t, not alone.

  Christmas Day tomorrow and that cloudless sky didn’t bode well for the roast chicken and steamed pudding dinner. The chooks who had donated their lives to Christmas could have been the lucky ones. Today, their sisters were panting in the shade. The bitumen newly crowning Forest Road was melting. A paddock away from it, Georgie could smell the tar.

  They’d done a lot of work on that road since the floods of July – or since a Melbourne blow-in had opened his caravan park for business. Charlie White, grocer and Georgie’s employer, swore the caravan park’s owner had bribed the council to bitumen that road and erect a sign where two roads forked.

  Forest Road, Caravan Park. 4 Miles, it read.

  Forest Road? It was a wending, winding bush track that had found a vocation, that’s all. It would never be marked on road maps. It didn’t go anywhere. Woody Creek was barely a flyspeck dot on Georgie’s new road map of Victoria – which she’d use when she could afford to buy her own ute.

  The old ones had named the town for the creek that twisted through a red gum forest like a snake with a belly ache. Forest Road twisted at its side – a busy track since the caravan park opened for business.

  City campers might like roughing it, but they liked their grog cold, liked to plug in their caravan’s refrigerator and flick a switch. More bribery, Charlie said. Light poles now ran alongside Granny’s front fence, and a month back the electricity company had fixed a meter box onto the wall beside the front door, beside Jenny’s tin plate plaque, beside the house name, painted by Georgie on a length of leftover floorboard: The Abortion.

  Flick a light switch and a globe lit up to highlight that painted board. Flick those switches indoors and naked light globes displayed every flaw.

  No globe necessary at six o’clock, or not today. Outside those twin kitchen windows, the sun clung to the sky like an aggressive kid clinging to his weary mother’s teat. The new kitchen was white hot – and white. Three four-gallon tins of paint donated to the fundraising committee, intent on rehousing the widow of Ray King, had been slapped onto that kitchen. Its walls were white, its ceiling, its cupboards, its doors were white.

  There was plenty of cupboard space, unmatched, donated units, forced by Shakey Lewis’
s screw and nail into one before being wed into a unit by white paint – and a red gum bench top. In some not too distant year, those boards would warp and crack, though not today. Today that bench gleamed red, offering some relief from white.

  As did Granny’s old black stove, set midway down the southern wall. During its many years of life that stove had rarely seen the light of day. Georgie had never noticed the pattern on its oven door. It was on display now, as was the battered kitchen table, and Granny’s old dresser, which in some future year may be classified a genuine antique. Today it only admitted its age.

  The kerosene refrigerator, purchased five years ago, didn’t flinch from the light. It stood opposite the stove, beside the bathroom door, a block of green, its burning wick adding heat and the odour of kerosene to the kitchen.

  Plenty of space in that room, space enough to seat a crowd, and only Georgie in it – until Margot entered in search of her comb.

  ‘Did you move my comb from the bathroom?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Margot would only use one comb, white, coarse toothed, purchased for her by Maisy Macdonald, her grandmother.

  Bloodless, squat, chunky, born of rape to fifteen-year-old Jenny, then deserted by her. For the first year of Margot’s life, Elsie and Harry had raised her. She still spent most of her time with them, on the far side of the goat paddock.

  Today her white hair hung limp, still damp from the shower. She’d turn twenty in April. She might have been fifteen or thirty. There was something lacking in Margot. Always the runt of Jenny’s litter of three, her growth spurt had begun late and ended prematurely. She had the Macdonalds’ height, though less of it. She had Bernie and Macka Macdonald’s stumpy hands, their broad jaws and pale purple eyes. Never pleasant eyes to look into, Margot’s were less so today. She was excited.

  Georgie wasn’t. She’d agreed to go to Molliston with Jack Thompson, to stay overnight at his parents’ hotel and have Christmas dinner with them tomorrow. Didn’t want to go. Couldn’t get out of it now.

  ‘Okay. I’m off then,’ she said and walked out to Charlie’s old ute.