by Joy Dettman
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Ask her. She inherited the hotel from her second husband. He used to make apple cider out there. She was married twice before Dad, and she didn’t marry him until two months before I was born – when he threatened to arrest her if she didn’t – or that’s their story.’
They were home by nine, when, exhausted by her day, Elsie doled out another pill to Margot, a different pill, then sat beside her bed until she slept again. Georgie drank coffee in the kitchen with Jack, sat close to him and when he was leaving she walked out to the yard and kissed him goodnight.
The night before he left Woody Creek, she almost did more than kiss him. Stopped herself though. She had no intention of adding to the world’s population.
*
It was close to midnight, five days after Jack left, Georgie had been reading in bed, attempting to read herself to sleep, when she heard thumping. A rhythmic thump, thump, thump, which sounded like Donny when he’d taken a fit. Margot was taking pills for something. Afraid she’d started taking fits, Georgie ran, as Jenny and Granny had run when Donny had started fitting.
She hit Margot’s light switch running. And caught them red-handed, or red-faced, in bed, or on it, or Teddy on it and Margot on him.
‘You pair of mindless rabbits,’ she said.
‘Piss off,’ Teddy said.
‘Pith off,’ Margot echoed.
BORN ON A KITCHEN FLOOR
Cara should have been home by half past ten. She tried to creep in at one-thirty, but the back door was locked and Robert and Myrtle were waiting for her. They caught her with her face painted and wearing Rosie’s old jeans. Myrtle looked as if she’d been howling for hours. Robert, dressing-gown clad, thinning hair standing on end, looked furious.
‘Where have you been until this hour?’
‘It’s none of your business, is it? You’re not my father, so you’ve got no right to tell me what I can do.’ She dodged around them, went to her room and slammed the door.
Robert opened it. ‘You’ll see how much right I’ve got,’ he said. Then he told her she wouldn’t be leaving the house for a month, other than to go to school.
Since Christmas Cara had known he wasn’t her father. Until they’d driven up to Sydney at Easter time, she’d believed she was a stray pup they’d taken in and given a good home. She knew now that Myrtle was her mother and that she’d played around with someone while Robert was overseas during the war.
They’d gone to Amberley to check the fat manager’s rent books and to have a new gas stove installed in the lodgers’ kitchen. Left to her own devices for most of one day, Cara had checked out a few things with Mrs Collins, one of two long-term lodgers. She’d been a teacher, so Cara had woven a story about how she had to write an essay about being born during wartime. It wasn’t a complete lie, except they’d written that essay two months ago. Anyway, she’d said that one of her New Australian friends was going to write about being born while her mother and grandmother hid from the Germans in a muddy gutter.
‘Do you know anything interesting about when I was born?’ she’d said. Mrs Collins had told her she’d been born at Amberley, in the kitchen.
‘Your mother looked after the little boy of a young war widow, a singer who was working out of town. She arrived very late one night and found your mother in the kitchen, you in her arms.’
Which may have been almost as interesting as being born in a muddy gutter if it hadn’t proved that her mother had cheated on her father while he’d been fighting the Germans – which was more or less what Sarah North, her first best friend, had originally said. Sarah hadn’t said Myrtle wasn’t Cara’s mother, just that Robert wasn’t her proper father.
And it was sickening seeing Myrtle pretending that butter wouldn’t melt in her plummy mouth, and seeing Robert with his arm around her, when he knew she’d cheated on him. Cara hated her for it, and hated Robert for letting Myrtle make a fool of him.
She shouldn’t have done what she’d done, shouldn’t have done it on the way back to Traralgon, definitely shouldn’t have done it in heavy traffic. She’d done it anyway. They’d been about ten miles from Amberley when the boiling inside her had bubbled up and spouted out of her mouth.
‘So, who was it you were you playing around with during the war, Mum?’ That’s what she’d said.
Myrtle had swung around as if there were a rattlesnake in the back seat. Robert had sideswiped the car beside him and almost lost control of the wheel. They’d had to pull over to the side of the road and swap names with the other driver, who had been as mad as a hornet. His new car was scraped all the way down one side.
She could have caused a serious accident and killed everyone. The shock had kept her quiet for the next hundred miles, until they were out of the car in front of public toilets, which stank, so it was the perfect place to attack both of them.
‘Mrs Collins told me, so you may as well admit it.’
They hadn’t. They hadn’t spoken to her or to each other. It was the worst trip of her life. They’d planned to stop in Albury for the night but Robert had just kept on driving and driving. They’d got to Traralgon after midnight.
And she’d nicked off the next morning while they were sleeping, had breakfast at Rosie’s and stayed there all day. Then Dino Collins, who Robert couldn’t stand, had come around. He was still after her – not that that stopped him going with other girls. It stopped Cara from going with anyone. He’d belted up Graham Jones from school, just for walking home with her one afternoon.
She hadn’t let Dino kiss her until after the Sydney trip, after he’d given her a ride home from Rosie’s on the back of his motorbike, which she only did to nark Robert, who hated motorbikes worse than he hated Dino Collins. He saw her kiss him too. That was the night they’d stopped giving her pocket money.
Everything had gone from bad to worse since. Robert drove her to school each morning, and as soon as he walked into the building, she’d walked out the gate. She’d gone riding once with Dino, only once. He’d ridden out to the bush and started kissing her, like shoving his tongue halfway down her throat while trying to shove his hand up her school uniform. She’d had to kick him to get away, and lucky she’d been wearing her school shoes. He’d roared off on his bike and left her to walk three miles home.
He was crazy. All of the kids knew it. They said it was because his parents had drowned or something when he was a kid and he’d had to live with an old bat of an aunty who had only taken him in because his parents had left him pots of money and she got some of it for looking after him. He’d told them that getting money out of her was like squeezing out her blood – a spoonful at a time – though it would have taken more than a spoonful to pay for his motorbike and his riding gear.
Cara spent a lot of time thinking about money, now that she had none to think about. On the days she wagged school she wandered around the shops dreaming about what she’d spend her money on – if she’d had any.
They’d still fed her at home, though she’d stopped eating with them. She ate in her bedroom, so Myrtle stopped tidying her bedroom.
Their cold war had turned into a hot war after the midyear exams. She’d failed Maths and Geography and she’d never failed a subject in her life, and it hurt enough without Robert getting stuck into her.
Then a few days ago Dino’s aunty had kicked him out for trying to starve her ancient old cat to death while she was in hospital.
He came around to Rosie’s on the Sunday and said he was going up to Sydney. And like a fool, Cara said she wished she could go up to Sydney, and all of a sudden they were all going up to Sydney.
‘We’ll need money,’ Dino said.
‘Cara has got piles of it in the bank,’ Rosie said.
She had a huge bank account, and every week there was more in it, because part of the money from the lodgers’ rent got paid into it – for when she went to university, Robert said. As if.
‘I can’t get it out without Mum or Dad’s s
ignature,’ she said.
‘You can copy it,’ Rosie said.
Which she could. Myrtle’s was easy. She’d forged it on absent notes for school, though doing it at a bank was more illegal than a note for a teacher. If she was going to do something illegal, it would be easier to take Robert’s wallet and Myrtle’s emergency five-pound note. Her handbag lived behind the sitting-room door and Robert’s wallet, when it wasn’t in his pocket, lived on the fridge with his car keys.
Except she wasn’t a thief, and she might want to go to Sydney, but not if Dino Collins was a part of the deal.
He didn’t even feel pain like normal people. She’d been at Rosie’s the day he’d cut HATE into the knuckles of his left hand with a razor blade, then rubbed black biro into the cuts, which he’d said was how the crims in jail did it.
Rosie had wanted him to do Coop’s name on her shoulder, in a heart. She felt pain. One cut, one bead of blood, and she’d changed her mind.
Cara went to school that week, except on Friday, after lunch. They were supposed to be leaving for Sydney on Saturday night and everything she owned needed washing. Since she’d stopped speaking to her parents, Myrtle had stopped washing her clothes.
‘At least sort the lights from the darks, pet.’ Myrtle stood at the laundry door offering instruction.
‘You can do it if you like,’ Cara snapped.
She didn’t like, so Cara tossed the lot in, turned on the machine, then walked down to the bank with the best of half-a-dozen forged withdrawal forms.
And when she got there, she couldn’t pass it over the counter. Ripped it into tiny bits and scattered the bits as she walked home.
She was ironing in the kitchen when Robert came in. He kissed Myrtle, put his car keys and wallet on the fridge and went to the bathroom to shower. Cara didn’t speak to him. She hadn’t spoken to him for a week.
And as if he’d care if she was there or not. A week after she was gone they’d both forget she’d ever been born. She was going to Sydney and when she got there, she’d go out to Uncle John’s place and live with them.
The cases were stored in the garage. She found her own and carried it through the house.
‘What do you need with that, pet?’ Myrtle asked.
‘I’m going to Sydney.’
‘Don’t start that foolishness again.’
‘He’s the fool,’ Cara said. She fetched her ironing from the kitchen and tossed it into her case, shoved in the bits that hung over the edges and attempted to close it.
‘Robert!’
He came from the bathroom, clad in trousers and singlet, his hair still wet from the shower. He didn’t stand in the doorway with Myrtle. He walked into the bedroom, picked up the case, emptied what was in it to floor and bed, then returned to the bathroom to finish shaving, and he took the case with him.
‘I’ll go in what I’m wearing then,’ Cara yelled.
‘I wouldn’t place my last ten bob on that,’ Robert yelled back.
‘You’re not my father and you can’t tell me what to do!’
‘I wouldn’t place my last ten bob on that either.’
She didn’t have ten bob to bet with. She didn’t have five bob. Hated Myrtle for cheating on him, hated him more for being fool enough to let her get away with it. Wanted to get Dino to cut HATE into her knuckles – and THEM into her other hand.
‘Hang up those clothes,’ he said as he walked by with her case, walked outside to the garage with it.
She picked up a handful of clothing and chased him, pitching pants and shirts at him. Myrtle collected the scattered garments. She was howling. Robert looked angry – and silly. She didn’t often see his skinny old white arms sticking out of a baggy singlet. He was over sixty and he looked every year of it when he wasn’t wearing a shirt and tie.
‘Hang up your clothing then come out to the kitchen and help you mother with dinner.’
‘I want my case!’
‘Tell her, Robert.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘That we’ve got this crazy idea that you’ll start coming to your senses in another year or two, and that we plan to be around to see it,’ Robert said.
‘What do you care what I do? She had an affair while you were in the war, and you took me in like you’d take in a stray cat –’
‘A stray cat might have been easier to live with.’
‘I’ve got a right to know who my father was.’
‘You’ve just about cancelled any rights you ever had in this house.’
‘This house stinks and so do both of you.’
‘Your room stinks, as does your behaviour. Pick up your clothing and hang it up.’
‘Who did you do it with, Mum? Or did you have so many boyfriends you don’t remember which one he was?’
Myrtle’s handkerchief was out, and like the fool he was, Robert put his arm around her so she could cry on him.
‘I hate the way you crawl around her all the time. How can you crawl around her when she cheated on you?’
‘Wash that muck off your face,’ he said. ‘You look like a racoon with conjunctivitis.’
He didn’t care why her makeup was running. She returned to her bedroom to bawl on her pillow, then changed her mind, stripped the pillow slip from it and began stuffing clothing into it. Stuffed it full then pitched it at the closed door, because she had no intention of going up to Sydney with someone who thought he was a cross between Jimmy Dean and a skull and crossbones bikie, who ten miles out of Traralgon would be trying to shove his tongue down her throat. The only thing she liked about him was his cigarettes.
She had a packet in her school case. She dug it out, found a box of matches in the pocket of her school uniform, then stood before her dressing table, watching her reflection light up and blow smoke – and saw what Robert had meant about her eyeliner. Wiped it off on her school uniform, then replaced it with wider lines of black, added lipstick, one of Rosie’s used-up lipsticks. She drew a beauty spot on her left cheekbone with an eyebrow pencil stub, also one of Rosie’s.
They had noses like bloodhounds. Robert came to her door and slapped the cigarette from her hand. It flew, landed on the dressing table. He snatched it, mashed it into a pot of pancake face powder.
‘Wash your hands.’
‘They’re not dirty.’
‘If you plan to eat tonight, you will wash your hands. It’s your choice.’
Braised chicken and mashed potatoes wasn’t a choice. Braised chicken and mashed potatoes was blackmail. She washed her hands and slouched into the kitchen.
‘Was my father one of the lodgers or someone from your church?’
‘He was an eighteen-year-old American boy,’ Myrtle said.
THE YOUNG WAR WINDOW
‘I’m sick and tired of you both lying to me. As if an eighteen-year-old boy would be interested in a fat forty year old. As if an eighteen-year-old boy would even look at you without laughing.’
‘I didn’t give birth to you, Cara,’ Myrtle said.
‘It’s too late to pull that. Mrs Collins already told me I was born on the kitchen floor at Amberley.’
That made them sit up and shut up. For ten or fifteen seconds the only sound in the kitchen was the peas hissing because the saucepan had run out of water. Myrtle lifted it from the stove, added a knob of butter, pepper.
‘God sent an angel to my door –’
‘Oh, yeah, and I’m baby Jesus – and now I’m really going to Sydney.’
‘You were born to a twenty-year-old country girl who already had three children,’ Robert said. ‘A young war widow –’
Cara was halfway out the door. ‘War widow’ caught her attention. She turned.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
‘While you think up a few more lies.’
‘The boy’s name was Billy-Bob. He was an American sailor. Jenny was one of my lodgers. After her husband was killed, she took work at a clothing factory,’ Myrtle said.
‘Mrs Collins said that she and Mi
ss Robertson were in the kitchen minutes after you had me on the floor. She said I was wrapped up in a tea towel.’
‘What she told you is the truth as she knew it, pet. Jenny and I deceived those dear women. You weren’t born to me, but you’ve been mine since the minute of your birth.’
Mrs Collins had said the lodger had been a singer, not a clothing-factory worker. Liars need good memories, and Cara was about to say so, when Myrtle added, ‘She had a little boy. I looked after him for her.’
Mrs Collins had said there was a little boy. It could have been true. And Cara didn’t want it to be true. Her every word, her every action since Easter had been aimed to punish her plummy-mouthed, too good to be true, cheating fraud of a mother – who, if she wasn’t her cheating mother, had no reason to put up with being punished.
‘You probably found out I was talking to Mrs Collins and you bribed her with free rent to lie for you.’
‘It’s the truth, pet.’
‘Then I’m nothing to you, to either of you?’
‘Only everything,’ Robert said. ‘Sit down, poppet.’
‘Stop calling me that – and you know what I mean. I’m not related to either of you.’
‘We’re related by love,’ Robert said, reaching out a hand. She flinched from his touch. ‘Had you been born to us, we couldn’t have loved you more, and you know it.’
Silence then, a heart-thumping, wobbly sort of silence. Her legs were shaking. It was too ridiculous. Having a father called Billy-Bob was totally ridiculous – probably too ridiculous not to be true.
Myrtle having a lover had been more ridiculous. Even in an essay she’d tried to write, the part where Captain Amberley came home from the war and found out his wife had a ten-month-old baby had never been believable. And as if a man would fall in love with a baby his wife had cheated on him to get – unless he was a complete fool, which Robert wasn’t.
If it was true, it changed everything. Even Amberley. That house had always belonged to her because it belonged to Myrtle, and before Myrtle, to Myrtle’s father. She had no claim on it now. She was a bag of rubbish left behind in a vacated room, rubbish Myrtle had picked up and found a use for.