by Joy Dettman
Georgie, who sat on Teddy until they came, gave him up to Harry and Lenny then went into Margot’s room to haul her out of bed and frogmarch her out to the kitchen.
Elsie came, dressing-gown clad, carrying Harry’s trousers. Teddy sat, nursing one arm, Margot stood ahzeeing while Georgie gave leash to a tongue, which until that moment she hadn’t known she possessed.
MARGOT’S INDIGESTION
A ninety-year-old man grows weary when he misses out on a night’s sleep. At eight in the morning, Charlie crawled into Jeany’s bed. If he moved in the next twenty-five hours, he didn’t know about it.
On Granny’s land, civil war raged for most of Sunday. Georgie got to bed late and couldn’t sleep when she got there, or not until the early birds started dancing on the low tin roof.
The rooster didn’t wake her. Couldn’t believe her watch when she finally opened her eyes. No time for breakfast; she dressed, grabbed her keys and ran, and found two customers champing at the bit when she got to the shop.
Charlie usually unlocked if she was held up. No time to think about him: Denis Dobson, on her heels, was gasping for a fag.
She saw light coming in through from the storeroom’s rear door, which meant Charlie had risen. Flicked on the light switches, then reached for the cigarette shelves for a packet of Turf.
Nothing on those shelves. Nothing on the tobacco shelves.
‘Looks like you’ve been done over,’ Denis Dobson said.
‘Charlie!’ Georgie ran for the storeroom. Back door hanging open on one hinge. ‘Charlie!’ She damn near tripped on a carton that shouldn’t have been there. ‘Charlie! Where are you?’
He wasn’t in his bed. Not in the lav either. No Charlie tossing crates around in his backyard.
Her customers lived in town; they knew about the fire and Charlie’s war with his tenants. Jack knew. He roused Charlie from slumber and drove him to the shop. Unshaven, uncombed, his fly undone, Charlie didn’t give his empty shelves a glance as he scuttled by Georgie, Jack and four customers, who tailed him to his storeroom, where he got to his knees beside his bed, not to pray but to reach beneath it.
‘Checking on your chamber pot?’ Maisy Macdonald asked.
‘Thieving, wrecking bastards,’ Charlie panted as he rose from bony knees with difficulty. ‘It’s them.’ He sat on the bed, a hand on his heart, panting for breath. ‘What did they get, Rusty?’
‘Cigarettes, tobacco, the bag of change. Lollies, biscuits. It’s hard to say what else yet.’
They hadn’t got Charlie’s biscuit tin. That was all he cared about. Insurance would cover the rest. He had fire insurance on the ruined house too, though it could be safer not to put in a claim for damage he’d done.
*
A bad end to January. February was worse. The leftovers of a cyclone that hit Queensland cut across country to Woody Creek. It had done untold damage up north. In Woody Creek, it blew trees over, blew down powerlines.
Things got worse for Charlie. Georgie told him she was going down to Frankston, that she’d spoken to Emma Fulton who had worked at the shop when Charlie’s wife had been alive.
‘She said she’ll give you a hand until you can get someone else. There’s a dozen kids in town who’d kill for the job, Charlie.’
He tried bribery, spent a handful of his ill-gotten gains on a bunch of brewery shares in Georgie’s name. He’d stopped her from leaving him once before with shares, or guilt.
‘I don’t give in to blackmail,’ she said, then she picked up the phone and rang Jenny.
‘Have you got room for me, Jen?’
‘I’ll set up a bed in the kitchen,’ she said.
And it sounded like home, and she wanted to go home to Jenny and Raelene.
She might have gone, too, if her war and Charlie’s hadn’t met head-on in Willama. The tenants, living in a caravan at the Willama caravan park, were arrested, along with two Willama locals and Teddy Hall. They were charged with being in possession of stolen goods.
Teddy hadn’t been in on the robbery, Georgie could vouch for that. He hadn’t left the house until Monday morning when Harry, who had confiscated his car keys, had given them up so Teddy could go to work. They hadn’t seen him since. They hadn’t known where he was until Jack drove down and told them.
The cops altered the charge against Teddy to the purchasing of known stolen goods. Harry and Lenny bailed him out.
‘I didn’t know they were old Charlie’s, did I,’ Teddy argued. ‘And all I got was a dozen lousy packets of the things.’
‘Get in that car.’ Harry, white-faced beneath his freckles, watery blue eyes shooting sparks and Teddy knowing those sparks hadn’t been caused by a few lousy packets of cigarettes. Knowing, too, that he’d been safer in the cell, he stopped arguing and folded himself into the back seat.
‘She wouldn’t leave me alone, Dad.’
‘You keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you,’ Lenny said.
‘My ute’s down here somewhere. We have to get it.’
‘Ronnie is driving it home – and it’s his ute,’ Harry said. Teddy had been gone for less than a week. A lot can happen in a week.
Chunky, dumpy, snarly bitch Margot, clad in her frumpy skirts, her baggy shirts and cardigans, her sandals and ankle socks, ate like a horse. Weight ran in the Macdonald family. She’d been complaining of indigestion since Christmas. Elsie had been dosing her with liver salts.
No one looks for the unexpected, but give them the whisper of a hint, and their minds will leap to the obvious conclusion.
Ronnie beat them home. A redhead like his father, and as tall, he was in the sleep-out bedroom he shared with Teddy, packing his clothes. He was off to Mildura to his girlfriend before Harry changed his mind about the ute.
‘He’s not taking my bloody ute,’ Teddy said.
‘He’ll take it if I tell him he can take it,’ Harry roared. ‘You’ve broken your mother’s heart.’
Elsie had been bawling off and on since the night of the civil war. She was still doing it. Georgie was to blame. Teddy had been in love with her since she was twelve years old and they’d rafted down the creek on an inflated truck tyre, determined to ride it down to the ocean. They’d ridden it out to Monk’s place.
And she’d done this to him.
‘She’s having a dear little baby, Teddy,’ Elsie bawled.
If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have stopped in Willama.
‘It’s mine and your daddy’s grandbaby, Teddy.’
‘It’s not all my fault, Mum. I’d stop going over there and she’d threaten to dob on me.’
*
A man doesn’t sell his soul easily. It took two days. He wouldn’t sell it to silence his mother’s bawling, or for her dear little grandbaby; but he’d do it for his hotted-up ute.
‘You make him give me back my keys and you can do what you want.’
A wedding was what they wanted, and wanted it done fast. By the look of Margot’s belly when it was stripped down, she could have been five months pregnant. Lenny drove into town to ring up a Willama parson, who said he could do it after church on Sunday.
Elsie stopped crying to unpack Ronnie’s case. They’d need his suit. Teddy didn’t own one. She wanted Harry to drive in and ask Maisy to ring up her girls and see if one of them had something nice they could lend Margot for the wedding.
It was Margot who saved Teddy’s neck – or his soul.
‘Ath if I’m marrying a blackfeller,’ she said.
That was the day Margot became indigestible to Harry and Lenny. That was the day Georgie received a phone call from Jenny, a call that delayed her retirement from the shop. If Margot was going down to Frankston, then as sure as hell Georgie wasn’t.
When you can’t go, and you can’t stay, you look for sanctuary. Only Jack. She spilt the whole sorry story to him that night – except the bit about the doctor Jenny knew who might be able to do something about Margot’s indigestion, and about Elsie, howling again because Jenny was
plotting against her dear little innocent grandbaby.
‘I’m living in bedlam, Jack, then I go to work to more of it. We made a loss last week – and we didn’t. He helps himself from the cash drawer and I can’t stop him.’
‘That’s not your responsibility, love.’
‘It is. I do his books.’
Jack got rid of one of Georgie’s problems. He drove Margot to Frankston, wedged between Harry and Lenny in the rear seat, ahzeeing. Georgie sat at Jack’s side, pleased to be at his side.
She walked on the beach with him that day, after Veronica Andrews and her doctor partner had shot Margot in the backside with a horse needle to shut her up.
They walked for miles, Georgie picking up shells and lacy seaweed, crawling over rocks.
And in a rock pool, Jack found a treasure, identified by another beachcomber as a nautilus shell. A delicate thing, perfect and white, which the identifier wanted to own. Jack gave it to Georgie and told her he had put in for a transfer back to the city.
‘I thought you’d be down here, love.’
He asked her to marry him on their walk back to Jenny’s rooms.
‘I wish I was ten years older,’ she said. That was all she said.
*
The chap renting Vern Hooper’s house received notice that his lease wouldn’t be renewed and that he’d be required to vacate the property by the end of March. Two more families received identical letters. The Hoopers were selling up in Woody Creek.
There were few rental properties in town. Most who owned a house lived in it; Charlie owned three and two of them were vacant. He hadn’t slept in Jeany’s bed since the robbery. When Hooper’s tenant approached him, though Charlie wanted him, he shook his head.
‘The last lot buggered it,’ he said. They had. Every door was dog-raked, one of the kitchen cupboards had been dog-chewed. The floor coverings needed replacing again. One of his smoke bombs had singed the floor. His hose had done its own damage.
‘Your insurance ought to cover it,’ Hooper’s tenant said.
Charlie scratched his head and eyed him. There was still a stink of sump oil in that house. He hadn’t put in an insurance claim. Maybe he ought to chance it. He wanted Hooper’s tenant.
‘Give me a day or two to think it over,’ he said. Or to think something over.
Until his last tenants had gone feral, he’d considered renting out Jeany’s house. He thought about it that day.
February ended no better than it began, and March came in, looking no better than February. Two days into the month and work began on building Sydney an opera house, which would likely cost the taxpayer countless millions. And what did the average taxpayer need with an opera house? Charlie couldn’t turn his radio off fast enough when one of those screeching opera-singing sopranos opened her mouth.
He received two letters that day. One made him happy – the insurance company had paid up for the robbery. The second letter killed his pleasant mood. It was from the taxation department.
2 March 1959
To whom it may concern,
Your thieving city bodgies have already done over my business this year. It might be to your advantage to put off your own raid until next year when, with a bit of luck, I might be in a better position to pay for your bloody opera house.
Yours bloody sincerely,
Charles W. White, Justice of the Peace
They didn’t reply, not by letter. One of their numbers men replied in person, a chap of thirty-odd, heavy dark-rimmed glasses, dark suit, couldn’t crack a smile to save his life. For two days he took over the bottom end of the counter, demanding invoices. Charlie gave him a few cardboard cartons full, half of which were prewar, a few of which may have been pre first war.
Before the tax accountant retired defeated, he learned of the hidden costs in running a country grocery store. Potatoes went rotten, mice got into bags of oatmeal, power wires blew down in storms and goods went off in freezers. He learned, too, that it was a dangerous game to make a move on the person of Georgie Morrison. He departed for home with one arm of his heavy-framed glasses held together by a bandaid, and none the wiser about Charlie’s habit of filching big notes from the cash drawer, or about his clutch of share certificates, impaled on a wire spike and hung behind the storeroom door beneath a vintage moth-eaten tweed overcoat.
‘You need to stop now, Charlie,’ Georgie warned.
‘It’s my hobby, Rusty,’ he said. ‘You can’t take an old chap’s only vice away from him.’
‘Take up chain-smoking instead. It helps,’ she said, and lit one to prove it.
‘You need to do something about that empty house, Mr White,’ Mrs Fulton said. ‘Another one of your windows got broken last night, and we heard kids running around in your own backyard.’
‘I’m getting around to it,’ he said.
‘You need to clean up behind your shop, Mr White,’ the bank manager said. ‘You’ve got a mouse plague out there and they’re getting into the bank.’
‘They won’t eat much,’ Charlie said.
‘I need to know what you’re planning to do about your vacant house today, Mr White,’ Hooper’s tenant said. ‘Bill Roberts just offered me his place for six months.’
Everyone knew why. Lila Roberts, a Sydney tart, wed to Billy Roberts, had taken off towards Sydney with a juvenile. Her husband was moving to the west, placing a continent between them. Their house was a dump. It didn’t deserve Hooper’s tenant. Charlie deserved him.
He offered him a ten-year lease on Jeany’s house, then gave it to him rent-free for six months, on the understanding that he’d do what he could next door with both house and garden.
Went home then for the last time, just to see what Jeany thought about what he’d done. At times he swore he heard her at night, saw her shadow in the passageway.
‘What do you reckon, Jeany love? Did I do the right thing? They’ll look after her for us.’
She wasn’t talking tonight.
He had a habit of nodding off when he sat still. He nodded off on Jeany’s couch, and woke to her singing, her voice as clear as it had been thirty years ago.
‘Charlie is my darlin’, me darlin’, me darling . . .’
She wouldn’t be calling him her darling if she hadn’t liked what he’d done. Wouldn’t call him darling if she ever found out what he’d done in Willama when her daughter had him locked up in the old fogies’ home. Some things wives need to know and some they don’t.
‘I dream of Jeany with the light brown hair, floating like an angel on the hot summer air,’ he sang.
JIM HOOPER
He’d lost her son and lost her again. Lost them both a long time ago.
He’d hung on over there for her and Jimmy. Every morning when he’d opened his eyes to another day, he would lie there gathering the threads of who he was, who he’d been, then weave them into some life form that might make it through to nightfall. He’d survived those little yellow bastards for Jenny and his boy.
They’d carried him out of that camp, the bones and ulcers of him. They’d brought him back. The first faces he’d known had been his father’s, Lorna’s and weeping Maggie’s. He’d wanted Jenny and Jimmy, had asked for them.
‘She didn’t wait for you, son. She wed Henry King’s stuttering lout,’ Vern’d said.
That was when he’d run out of threads to hang on to. That was the day he’d tossed in the towel.
He lay on his caravan bed on a Saturday morning in April, searching for guts enough to get up off his back, to get his leg strapped on. No work today. No reason to get off his back, so he lay there, turning the pages of his life, flipping by most of them since the war. They were blank anyway.
Forty-six had gone missing. In ’47 they’d brought Jimmy to his hospital ward and he’d shaken his son’s hand, and learnt that his father and sisters planned to raise him. Powerless, useless, but aware that he had to stop them getting their hands on his wide-eyed boy, he’d worked out how that night. He’d written his
last will and testament, stating that he wanted his son raised by Jenny, wanted his trust fund transferred to her and Jimmy. He’d woken two of his ward mates to sign as witnesses and make it into a legal document. Left it folded on his pillow and went to the bathroom where he’d made a noose from his dressing-gown cord.
He hadn’t done it right. He hadn’t done much in his life that had been right. The cord had stretched, or he’d been too long. Only had one foot to stand on, but he couldn’t stop it from reaching out for purchase to save his useless neck.
They’d moved him to a secure ward with a locked door and no dressing-gown cord. Plenty of supervision and good powerlines. They’d strapped him down, taken his dentures, fitted him up with a crown of thorns and crucified him.
For how many years? He’d lost track of ’48, ’49, ’50, ’51.
Woke up in ’52. Someone must have told him his father was dead, that he was going to his funeral. If they had, he hadn’t heard them. He’d stopped listening by then.
They crucified him again for the big day, made him pliable enough to walk out to a car, to get in. Someone’s. He’d noticed the suit he was wearing before he’d noticed Lorna, noticed Ian Hooper, his cousin behind the wheel – and Maggie – in that order. Maggie had always come last.
He’d noticed the city buildings on the way through town, and the road, and the road noise. Noticed a lot of things that day.
Heard the parson extolling the virtues of the great, the all-powerful Vern Hooper. Seen faces from the past coming at him at the cemetery. He’d expected to see his son there. Lorna would have demanded he be at his grandfather’s funeral.
He’d asked about him.
‘Bernard stayed home to look after him,’ Ian had said.
Jenny had married Raymond King. Jim remembered that much. No matter when he woke up, where he woke up, he always remembered that much.
‘Bernard?’
‘Maggie’s husband, Jim,’ Ian said.
That was the first he’d heard of Maggie catching herself a husband. Maybe he’d been pleased for her, but what were they doing with his boy?
Too hot at the cemetery, he’d walked out to the shade with the family accountant and when he’d opened his car, Jim had got in, into the front passenger seat. They’d tried to get him out.