Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  Too much on her mind that week to worry about the future. Margot to worry about, her baby. Raelene too. She was full up with her pretty bedroom in Box Hill and ice-cream in Florence’s fridge and even ice-cream cones in a packet. No ice-cream in Jenny’s elderly fridge. It melted.

  Then Wednesday evening and another one of Vroni’s specials moved in, and Jenny and Raelene had to walk over to the main building to use Vroni’s bathroom and toilet, just for two nights, but for those two nights Jenny was on call, and the patient in isolation was a sixteen-year-old girl who enjoyed hitting her buzzer and disturbing Raelene, who was reaching an age where she resented the sick lady who wouldn’t let them use their own bathroom.

  Had to get a flat, or a house, or another job.

  On Friday, Florence rang. She and Clarrie would be willing to pick Raelene up on Friday night and return her on Sunday.

  ‘Do you want to sleep at Florence’s house again, love?’

  ‘They do things,’ Raelene said.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Shops and everything.’

  The Keatings picked her up at seven. Jim came in a taxi on Saturday morning. She took him down to the beach and walking on sand wasn’t easy for him, so they sat on sand and when he tried to get up he lost his balance and fell. She could panic or make light of it. She did the latter, laughed, and offered him her hands.

  ‘I’m useless,’ he said.

  ‘Not entirely,’ she said. ‘Though beach walks might be out.’

  They booked a room at a hotel and it was like being in Number Five in Sydney. They kissed and lay, his arm beneath her shoulder, her arm over him, holding him close to her, and talking, talking about everything under the sun and beyond the sun.

  He told her how he’d attempted to drive Nobby’s car two nights ago. ‘I can’t judge pressure on the clutch with a dead shoe,’ he said.

  He’d been driving since his legs had grown long enough to reach the pedals. When she’d been nine or ten, he’d driven halfway to Sydney with his father and sisters and Sissy.

  ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Then I will. I drove from Melbourne to Geelong once.’

  They spoke of Sissy. Maisy still kept in touch with her. He asked about Jenny’s mother.

  ‘My natural mother died in childbirth.’

  He knew nothing about Juliana Conti and Archie Foote. There was so much to talk about. She told him she’d sung at a city jazz club, then told him about Amber and Norman.

  ‘You would have been back in Australia when she killed him. The newspapers were full of it,’ she said. ‘He was in bed asleep, and she bashed and stabbed him to death – then cleaned the house.’

  ‘Insane?’ he said.

  ‘She always was. When it happened, she was judged unfit to go to trial and locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane. There was supposed to be some sort of hearing about her a while back. For all I know, they could have let her out.’

  She told him that she’d spoken to his cousin, Ian Hooper, on the phone, that he’d told her Lorna had lost track of Jimmy and Margaret.

  ‘He’d told me that after Margaret and her husband adopted Jimmy, they bought a house at Cheltenham and bought one for Lorna in Kew, but she refused to live alone in it. He said that Margaret and her husband had moved house several times in an attempt to lose her, and they finally succeeded last December. Jimmy was here when I came down to Frankston. He was here when I met you. He went to school at Kew until December. I rang up the school. They couldn’t tell me anything.

  ‘Ian said he writes to Margaret, posts his letters to her accountant and he passes them on. I wrote to her. She didn’t reply. She would to you – if she didn’t know you were with me, she would.’

  He didn’t want to write. She didn’t push him.

  Saw Margot on Sunday. Learned from one of the sisters that she was to be moved down to Melbourne for psychiatric assessment. And maybe she needed assessing – she still denied having that baby.

  The Keatings brought Raelene home. She’d seen Jim at the station the night of the grand final. Hadn’t approved then. Didn’t want him getting into Florence and Clarrie’s car. Florence and Clarrie belonged to her, and their car belonged to her.

  *

  The Keatings had offered him a lift back to the city. Taxis cost money. He’d accepted. And wished he hadn’t once they were on the road.

  ‘Have you known Jenny long?’ Florence asked.

  ‘Since we were kids,’ he said.

  ‘Are you thinking of marriage?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Our solicitor says that, given her situation, there’s little chance of a judge awarding her custody of Raelene,’ Clarrie said.

  ‘That’s Jen’s business, not mine,’ Jim said.

  ‘We’d never cut Raelene out of her life,’ Florence said.

  ‘Her living conditions would go against her in court. Raelene has got her own room at our place, and Flo doesn’t work,’ Clarrie said.

  ‘A bit of traffic on the road,’ Jim said. Maybe they got the message.

  *

  The one constant in life is change. The following Friday Jenny came late to his caravan door. She’d received a letter from the Keatings’ solicitor.

  ‘They’ve picked their time,’ she said. ‘Margot is in a ward for disturbed patients. I’m thirty-four and a grandmother, and my only claim on Raelene is being married to her father and raising her for seven years.’ She lit a cigarette and drew hard on it.

  ‘Want to know why I raised her, Jim? Want to know why I changed Donny’s backside until he was almost as big as me?’

  He wanted to know. He’d been gone too long. Maybe he didn’t want to know when she told him.

  ‘I aborted two of Ray’s babies – or Vroni aborted them. And the last one of them will still be on record somewhere. It went wrong and I woke up in hospital with a cop leaning over me in bed.’

  ‘Why would you, Jen?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t stand him touching me. He never did again – or not in that way. Because I knew I was going to leave him.’ She inhaled smoke and flicked ash. ‘Flora, the woman who shared Ray’s house, knew about the last abortion. Florence Keating lived with him in that house. She was bosom buddies with Flora Parker, and still is. Their solicitor has got a statement from her.’

  ‘About the abortion?’

  ‘Not yet. Just about Florence being a good mother and about Ray’s abuse. If I fight them for Raelene, Flora will give them more.

  ‘And you may as well know the lot while I’m about it. Vroni’s partner does abortions three rooms away from mine. Want to run for the hills?’

  ‘I wouldn’t get far, Jen.’

  They saw the baby the following Saturday. Elsie and Harry met them in the city and they went to the hospital together. It was still a poor wee mite of a thing, but it looked less monkey and a little more human, and they were allowed to touch it. Elsie, who planned to raise it, couldn’t keep her hands off her grandbaby. She had a baby complex.

  Jenny touched a fragile foot, a minute hand – which didn’t look like a Macdonald hand, not that there was enough of it to tell. An old-man wrinkled thing with grabbing fingers, it grabbed for her.

  They saw Margot, or the women and Harry saw her. Jim, who had seen the insides of too many psychiatric wards, remained outside. Harry was out in minutes.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Christ, but I don’t know what went wrong with that girl.’

  He rolled a slim smoke, got it lit before offering his tobacco. Jim shook his head. He’d got out of the habit of smoking.

  ‘Just between you, me and the gatepost, mate, I’m inclined to think they’ve got her in the right place,’ Harry said. ‘Christ Almighty.’

  For the best part of an hour Harry rolled his skinny smokes while they waited for the women, who waited almost as long to speak to a doctor. And achieved nothing. Elsie attempted to explain how Margot had denied her pr
egnancy from day one, how she’d refused to marry her baby’s father; Jenny told him Margot believed she’d let the air out of her stomach with the vegetable knife, and by the look on the doctor’s face, if they hadn’t got out of that place fast, he might have locked them in too.

  Harry had left his car in Bendigo and come the rest of the way by train. With time to fill, the two couples ended up in a city car yard, where the men discussed the merits of V8s, and Jim’s attempt to drive Nobby’s Holden.

  ‘Young Ted is a genius with cars. He’d work out a way for you to get around the clutch,’ Harry said. ‘You used to drive too, didn’t you, Jen?’

  ‘When I was fifteen. I didn’t know what I was doing then and I’d know less now.’

  ‘Get yourself a few lessons. Young Georgie has taken to it like a duck to water.’

  ‘She seems fond of Jack,’ Elsie said. ‘We don’t see a lot of her lately.’

  The Halls boarded their train to Bendigo. Jen and Jim booked into a hotel for the night and on hotel paper, he wrote to Margaret.

  Dear Maggie,

  I ran into Harry Hall today . . .

  In his youth he’d got on well with the younger of his two sisters, and seeing Harry had taken him back to those years of poker nights in Gertrude’s kitchen, of dances, and balls with Maggie and Sissy. On Jenny’s advice, he didn’t mention her name.

  Since ’56 I’ve been working in the office of a timber yard . . . You’ve no doubt twigged as to why I’m writing to you. I want to see Jimmy . . .

  They sealed his page into two envelopes, wrote Margaret Hooper on the inner envelope, addressed the outer envelope to Vern’s accountant and posted it that night.

  Then waited.

  *

  Margot spent six weeks in the psychiatric ward before those trained to deal with problems of the mind tossed their hands in the air and released her into her mother’s care.

  Jenny hadn’t wanted her as a baby and didn’t want her now. Vroni picked her up and installed her in the isolation room, and with her in there, Jenny needed Jim. He came on Friday night after work and slept in the kitchen on Margot’s bed. Raelene shared Jenny’s, but the Keatings picked her up on Saturday morning.

  On Sunday, at noon, when Jack Thompson, Georgie and Elsie arrived to take Margot home, Elsie said that dirty word. ‘We popped in to see your baby on the way through, love. The nurses say she’s doing really good.’

  If Margot was sane, Jenny would eat her hat. She threw a screamer. Elsie pandered, petted. Jenny walked away.

  ‘Walk away from her, Elsie,’ Georgie said, taking Elsie’s arm. ‘Start treating her like an adult and she might start acting like one.’

  She sounded like Gertrude, so much like her, a ghost walked over Jim’s grave. He followed Jenny outside, and Jack followed him.

  ‘Your father’s house is becoming the louts’ hangout,’ Jack said. ‘There was a For Sale sign up until a week or so back. Do you know if it’s been sold, Jim?’

  ‘I’m not in touch with my family,’ Jim said.

  He knew his mother had left the bulk of her money to him, and the house. He knew too that he’d signed Lorna’s papers blindly. Maybe it was time to find out what they’d done with his money – and house.

  When they got rid of that lisping, bawling lump of a girl, he spoke to Jenny about Vern’s house.

  ‘It wasn’t a part of Pop’s estate. Mum’s first husband built it, back before the first war. She left it to Pop for his lifetime, then to me. Margaret has received my letter. That will be why the house was taken off the market. They probably thought I was dead.’

  THE WATER-PISTOL BANDIT

  Mid-June and cold. They were halfway home and Georgie driving when a sleety drizzle set in. They’d stopped for a fast coffee at six and Margot had wanted fish and chips. Elsie gave in to her. They’d lost half an hour waiting for the meal to come, then waiting for Margot to eat it.

  Elsie had been given three bottles of pills with Margot’s name on them. She’d fed her two with her dinner. Georgie didn’t know what they were for. Some sort of sleeping pill maybe. She was asleep now, her head on Elsie’s shoulder, Jack’s travelling blanket over her.

  They spoke of the greasy roads, of Raelene, Florence Keating and her solicitor. Jack knew the law. He knew the court system. Given the facts, he believed that most judges would award Raelene to her natural mother. Florence and her husband were childless. Florence claimed that Ray had thrown his mother-in-law from the house and broken her wrist, that she’d gone with her mother in the ambulance, and when they’d returned the following day, Ray and the babies were gone.

  The solicitor had obtained the hospital records of Florence’s mother’s broken wrist. Flora and Geoff Parker, who’d owned the Armadale house, had both sworn statements backing up Florence’s story. They’d gone with Florence to report her kids missing.

  Georgie didn’t doubt that what they claimed was true. She had total recall of Christmas Day, 1951, of Ray pulling Donny out from beneath his riding jacket, then digging Raelene out of a saddlebag. He’d looked half-crazy, had been shaking so hard Granny had sent her across the paddock to get the bottle of medicinal brandy. At the time Georgie had been convinced that he’d murdered his kids’ mother and buried her in Jenny’s garden. He’d half-killed Jenny one night.

  Granny had made the rules on her land. He’d obeyed them. There’d been a wildness in him, but most of it in his eyes when he’d looked at Jenny. He’d paid for the two back rooms to be built then had his bedroom furniture brought up on the train, expecting Jenny to share that new room. She hadn’t. She’d moved Donny’s cot out there.

  Her eyes left the road for an instant to glance at Jack. He wanted her to marry him. For the best part of a year she’d been telling herself he was a mate, maybe her best mate, but not her boyfriend. She was close to understanding why a man and woman might want to share a bed. Knew she probably could with him.

  He’d do anything for her. She hadn’t asked him to drive down to Frankston. He’d been in the shop when Jenny rang, and while she was on the line, he’d said to tell her they’d be down on Sunday, as if he was already a part of the family.

  Charlie liked him. Elsie and Harry liked him. Most did.

  ‘Want a break?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said.

  Elsie was asleep before they reached Willama, propped against the doorframe, her coat as a pillow, Margot still dead to the world, her head now on Elsie’s lap.

  ‘Unless someone does something, she’ll have Margot draped around her neck until the day she dies.’

  ‘How come she calls her “Mum”?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Easier to say than “Elsie”.’

  ‘She’s good with her.’

  ‘Her own kids don’t need mothering any more. Margot does.’

  ‘What’s going to happen when she brings the baby home?’

  ‘Elsie’s still imagining weddings and happy families. Did you hear what she wants to name the poor little coot?’

  ‘Gertrude, for your gran.’

  ‘Even Granny loathed the name.’

  ‘What’s your favourite name?’

  ‘Not Gertrude.’

  Just the road noise then, and the windscreen wipers’ flap-flap, flap-flap. They were through Willama and heading into familiar country before Jack spoke.

  ‘If you moved down to Frankston with your mum, I’d be able to see you.’ He was being transferred to the city at the end of June.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said.

  ‘Charlie is becoming a law unto himself. I should have charged him for what he did to his tenants.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘He’s not going to improve with age, love, and you’re too young to have the responsibility of him.’

  ‘So you keep telling me.’ Silence again and more rain blowing at the windscreen. She sat forward and eased off the accelerator.

  ‘I don’t want to leave town with us up in the air.’

/>   ‘I’m not cop’s wife material, Jack.’

  ‘I reckon you were made for the job, so do Mum and Dad.’

  ‘I know me better than they know me.’

  They were nearing the Mission Bridge when she asked if cops kept track of criminals after they’d served their time.

  ‘A good percentage of them end up back in,’ he said.

  ‘Would it be possible to find out if a bloke locked up in 1939 was in or out?’

  ‘It would be easy enough if he’s in. What did he do?’

  ‘Robbed banks, stole cars. You name it. Laurence George Morgan, the water-pistol bandit they called him. He got three years.’

  ‘What’s your interest?’

  ‘He’s a relative,’ she said.

  For three years she’d believed he was a movie star. Slept with his framed newspaper photograph beneath her pillow. Nagged Jenny to take her up to Sydney to see him. In Armadale she’d found out he was a thief, not a movie star, and she’d put him away. Since meeting Jack’s father, Laurie Morgan wouldn’t stay out of her head.

  ‘What sort of relative?’

  ‘Pretty close.’ She shrugged then, and added, ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Told you I wasn’t cop’s wife material. I fiddle Charlie’s books too. Do your parents want bank-robber grandkids?’

  ‘Your mother is a receptionist at a posh health resort.’

  ‘My mother had Margot at fifteen and two more by the time she was eighteen, and all to different fathers. Tell that to your parents.’

  ‘They wouldn’t care, and it’s got nothing to do with who you are.’

  ‘Your father probably arrested mine.’

  ‘I’ll ask him. Do you know where he was arrested?’

  ‘Geelong. I think Sydney had a prior claim on him. He was tried in Sydney and locked up there.’

  ‘Dad would enjoy tracking him down for you –’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Want to hear one of my family secrets?’

  ‘Your father took bribes?’

  ‘Mum probably tried it a few times. You know how Dad calls the sunken room out the back “Katie’s sly grog joint”? It was, back before the depression.’