Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  Didn’t know what to do with his spike. Knew he’d bought those shares with ill-gotten gains, that if she took them over to the bank manager, it might somehow get Charlie into strife with the taxman.

  Didn’t want the responsibility of knowing about them. Thought about ringing Jack. Considered hanging them back where she’d found them. Thought about Jim Hooper. Jenny had said that some of his money was in shares. He should know something about them.

  He knew a lot. He told her they needed to be in the bank vault. She told him about Charlie’s filching from the cash drawer, about the tax accountant going through him not too long ago.

  ‘Your name is on a few of them,’ Jenny said. ‘He could get you into trouble.’

  ‘Get a safety-deposit box,’ Jim said. ‘In your joint names.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At any bank.’

  Not Woody Creek’s. Everyone would know about it.

  ‘We’re going down to Willama on Friday,’ Jenny said. ‘Come with us and we’ll do it there.’

  She rode in the back seat, Margot’s baby crowing in her car basket beside her, and growing too big to fit that basket. She didn’t look like Donny, or sound like him.

  Jim went with her to the bank. He knew what he was doing. She stood back, allowing him to do it. She signed papers, then got rid of the shares, now sorted by Jenny into his and hers and placed in separate envelopes. His were worth a fortune, according to Jim. Hers were worth big money.

  They saw Charlie that afternoon and he’d got his trousers, washed-out and baggy pyjama trousers. He had four fingertips sticking out of his plaster cast, and with them shook Jim’s hand. He wasn’t interested in his safety-deposit box. He wanted to go home.

  ‘We’ll talk about it when your plaster is off and you can walk, Charlie,’ Georgie said.

  *

  On Gertrude’s land it was generally agreed that Teddy and Margot had the sex instincts of rabbits, and smaller brains. Small or not, Teddy’s had been wired directly into motors. Georgie hadn’t spoken to him since Margot’s miscarriage. She had to when her old ute went ‘Bang!’ And stopped dead. Roy, the garage bloke, was in Melbourne visiting his kids.

  ‘Rear axle,’ Teddy said.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘We’ll have one somewhere.’ In the shed, or behind the shed, or maybe under Roy’s house.

  ‘How long.’

  ‘Tomorrow or the day after – if I can find one. One side of the diff has to come out.’

  ‘Ta,’ she said.

  *

  By December, Charlie was escaping again from gaga land, with the aid of two walking sticks. A determined old coot; if they’d given him a pair of trousers and boots, he might have made it home. In pyjamas and slippers, he was an easy target. They kept picking him up, taking him back. His daughter wanted him assessed for mental incompetency. He assessed the assessors, asked them if they knew their thirteen times tables, then showed them that he did. That was the day Georgie decided to kidnap him again.

  They made an appointment for ten o’clock on Sunday morning, around the corner from the old fogies’ annex.

  He needed help to get into the ute, and more help to get out, but there was no happier man in Woody Creek that day.

  ‘Did I ever tell you your blood is worth bottling, Rusty?’

  ‘You’re repeating yourself, Charlie White. I’ll tell the gaga assessors on you.’

  He ate Christmas dinner with the Fulton family, always had since Jeany died. He gave the many Fulton grandkids ten bob each, always had.

  Georgie ate with Jenny, Jim, John and Amy McPherson, and Trudy seated in a high chair, chewing on a chicken bone, her Father Christmas hat fallen over one eye. Eight months old now, old enough to enjoy being the centre of attention and playing for it.

  It was a good Christmas, normal. It brought back memories of Georgie’s last Christmas.

  Wondered if Jack was eating dinner in Molliston.

  *

  Not a good Christmas at Elsie’s table. Margot and Teddy ate there, though not side by side. They didn’t speak, didn’t look at each other.

  ‘What the hell do you two think you’re playing at?’ Josie said. ‘It’s no secret that you sleep together.’

  ‘Shut your trap,’ Teddy said.

  Josie, the last of Elsie and Harry’s brood, was a freckle-faced redhead. Brian, the second youngest, was fair and not as tall as his brothers. Teddy and Maudy had inherited Elsie’s darker than average hair and complexion, which had never worried Maudy. It worried Teddy. Since childhood, he’d resented Brian’s fair skin and Ronnie and Josie’s red hair. They’d spent their childhoods arguing, and the older they grew, the more they argued.

  ‘Stop!’ Harry demanded. ‘You give a man indigestion.’

  ‘As long as Margot doesn’t end up with it again,’ Josie said.

  The table erupted into laughter, initially, but Margot hadn’t inherited Jenny’s fingernails. Unworn by labour, hers were long, strong. Josie, who sat on Margot’s left, wore the proof of their strength in three long raking gouges down her cheek.

  Josie had less weight than Margot but a lot more height. Raised amid brothers, she’d learnt early how to hit back. She hit back, her open palm connecting with Margot’s jaw, the full weight of her arm behind it. The last they heard from Margot that Christmas Day was her ahzeeing wail across the goat paddock.

  ‘She’s been a sister to you,’ Elsie said. ‘To all of you.’

  ‘Try explaining that to Ted, Mum,’ Brian said.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut, you whitey bastard, or I’ll shut it for you,’ Teddy said.

  ‘Keep your fly shut and we might, you black bastard,’ Brian said.

  No more eating was done. Brian and Josie took off towards Flanagan’s, the short cut to town.

  Ronnie, who shared a room with Teddy and threatened regularly to leave home, started tossing his belongings into his car.

  ‘Stop being silly, Ronnie,’ Elsie said.

  ‘I’m going this time, Mum. Move her in with him. What you can’t change, you accept.’

  He drove into town to phone up his girl in Mildura. Brian and Josie saw his car parked beside the phone box.

  ‘We’re going with you,’ they said.

  All three drove home to pack. Elsie’s bawling may have worked on one, it didn’t work on three. Harry, white-faced and chain-smoking, gave up and walked over to the creek. Margot spent the afternoon upending Georgie’s room, looking for the key to her bedroom door confiscated by Georgie months ago.

  She was still looking when Georgie came home. ‘What do you think you’re doing in here?’

  ‘You’ve thtill got that thtupid photo.’ Margot had the framed newspaper mug shot of Laurie Morgan in her hand.

  ‘Put it back where you found it, Margot.’

  ‘Ath if he careth about you.’

  Georgie manually retrieved the photograph, and was manually removing Margot from her room when Jack Thompson drove in. She released Margot and walked out to his car.

  He drove her out to a lane behind the old slaughteryards and they walked down to a bend in the creek where she sat on the bank, pitching twigs into the water, watching them float downstream, while he spoke of Melbourne, about Charlie, asked about the new cop. She had little to say.

  ‘Mum said to invite you over for dinner.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I need you with me, Georgie. I love you. The flat has got two rooms. You can have your own room and I promise I won’t pressure you into doing anything you’re not ready to do.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m only six months older than I was in June, Jack, and Charlie is about ten years older.’

  ‘You should have left him where he was.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound like his daughter.’

  ‘Has she been to see him?’

  ‘Ha.’ She pitched a clod of earth, watched it plop, watched the ripples circling. ‘She rang me and blasted a hole through from my left ear to my ri
ght, threatened to have the law onto me if I didn’t take him back to where I’d got him.’

  ‘He can’t look after himself, love.’

  ‘Joss Palmer helps out with him. Mrs Fulton brings him down a meal at night. A few of the old blokes wander around to talk to him. He’s happy, and I’m not going to be the one to take what little he’s got left away from him. And that is the end of the story.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Happy enough.’ She pitched another clod, watched the ripples fade, die.

  ‘I wake up missing you. I go to bed missing you, love.’

  She stood, brushed grass from the seat of her shorts. ‘I’m too young to jump into something I don’t understand and have never understood and, to tell the truth, don’t want to understand.’ She slipped off her rubber thongs and walked into the creek, stepping carefully through slimy mud, clinging waterweed, and over submerged and slippery timber.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t want to breed, Jack, not now, not ever. Don’t call me any more. You mess up my head,’ she said and walked deeper.

  ‘Get out of there.’

  Waist deep now in water, she tucked her thongs beneath her bra straps, then dived, not re-emerging until she was well downstream.

  ‘Georgie!’

  Swam faster, her arms cutting the water, swimming hard until she rounded the curve.

  ‘Georgie!’

  Heard him. The creek altered sound. Just a bird, calling to its lost mate. Couldn’t get back to him if she’d wanted to. You can’t swim far against the current, so she swam with it.

  She knew that creek, knew it twisted and turned like a snake with a bellyache. She knew every inch of the forest on the far side of the creek. Had roamed there with Teddy, set rabbit traps there. Knew if she swam down to the next bend, she wouldn’t be far from home, as the crow flew.

  *

  Brian, Josie and Ronnie Hall left home that night. Only Teddy now, and Lenny, a big blue-eyed blond-headed football hero, engaged to a Willama girl for eighteen months and planning to live at home for eighteen months more.

  They’d bought a block of land out on Cemetery Road, and with both of them working and socking every penny away, they’d build a house before they wed. A steady man, Lenny Hall, steadied perhaps by seeing Ray King die at Davies’s sawmill.

  He sorted Teddy out. He tossed him a packet of condoms and told him if he didn’t use them he’d end up in the creek with one of his motors chained to his ankles.

  He got Margot’s signature on Trudy’s release papers too. ‘You don’t eat until you put your name on them,’ he said.

  ‘Pith off,’ she said.

  ‘Let her eat,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Stay out of it, Else,’ Harry said.

  Margot put her name on the papers. She liked her food.

  SECRETS

  Dino Collins was out there again, marking his turf with the stink of hot rubber. ‘Don’t think you can make a fool of me, you moll, and get off scot-free,’ he’d said when she’d told them she wasn’t going up to Sydney. ‘Watch your back,’ he’d said.

  Myrtle was big on turning the other cheek. Robert told her to ignore him. He said he’d grow bored with his game.

  They’d been so wrong about so many things. If they’d told her the truth the first time she’d asked them, in Sydney, they’d still be living in Sydney.

  ‘No more secrets,’ Robert had said the night they’d told her about Jenny.

  She was full of secrets, overflowing with secrets and no one to tell them to.

  She’d told Rosie about everything, where she’d been born, how she’d been born, Rosie her best friend, her only close friend – back then. If Cara had learnt one worthwhile lesson from these past months, it was just how fast a best friend can turn into a worst enemy – or second worst. Dino Collins was her worst enemy.

  And she didn’t understand why. Just by crooking his little finger he could get almost any girl he wanted. He was good-looking, he owned a motorbike, always had money to spend. He’d probably only gone after her to get back at Robert, who had been the main instigator in having him expelled from school – which, had Robert not been new to the town, he may not have done. People pitied Dino and she now knew why. His parents had run off the side of a bridge and drowned in their car and he’d spent an hour diving for them when he was only eleven years old. Then he’d ended up living with his mother’s seventy-year-old aunty. Everyone pitied him, which was why he got away with the things he did.

  Cara pitied his aunty. He’d taped her cat into a box while she was in hospital. It hadn’t died, but it should have. His aunty was in hospital for two weeks.

  He had Cara boxed in now. She never left the house unless she was with Robert or Myrtle, and he wasn’t even scared of them.

  Over Christmas she’d got out. They’d driven up to Sydney and it had been like being in heaven, or like life was supposed to be. Aunty Beth and Uncle John had a new television, which Gran spent all day watching, which Uncle John and Aunty Beth spent half the night watching. Robert had refused to look at it. He blamed television for everything. He said the mass viewing of mindless drivel was brainwashing the younger generation, that television was responsible for the fall in moral values. He said that the drivel on those boxes was aimed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, and that a society geared towards the lowest denominator would end up ruled by the lowest.

  He could have been right too. Gran loved that box.

  ‘Keep your noise down out there. I can’t hear a word they’re saying.’

  They’d gone to Amberley to look over the manager’s books, and Cara had felt like a sinner locked out of paradise. She loved that tall house, loved its front window that used to paint magic patterns on the parlour wall. And she hadn’t even been allowed to go into the parlour, or into her own room.

  She was back in her box now. She couldn’t even go shopping with Myrtle and Robert. Dino tracked them when she did. And he phoned, phoned a dozen times some nights.

  She never answered the phone. She was too scared to play tennis. The last time she’d played, he’d sat beside the court, not taking his eyes off her. She’d conceded the match and telephoned Robert to come and pick her up.

  School was double, triple hell. She’d scraped through last year, or Robert had managed to get her a scrape-through. She was going to fail this year because she couldn’t stand being there.

  Rosie clucked like a hen, flapped her elbows every time Cara walked into the classroom. She flapped her elbows if they met in the corridor, or at the lockers, and she was probably the one who had broken into Cara’s locker and smashed eggs over everything. Robert had to buy a heap of new books and she’d spent a week of nights copying work from one messed-up book into another.

  She had no friends. Rosie had plenty. There were always kids eager to take sides in a school war. Hated going to school. Couldn’t concentrate on anything the teachers said. She tried to study at home, but that bike-riding mongrel wouldn’t let her. He spent his nights racing his bike up and down the street, doing screaming turns in front of the house.

  ‘What’s wrong with that boy?’ Myrtle said.

  ‘Ring the police, Mummy.’

  ‘Ignore him, pet. He’ll find someone else to annoy.’

  Myrtle didn’t know what she was talking about. The day of the eggs in her locker, she’d told her mother that Rosie had done it. ‘There are more suitable girls in town for you to mix with, pet,’ was all she’d said.

  Such as Sarah Potter, a farmer’s daughter, who had come around to the house one night, asking if Cara would like to go to the pictures with her. She was one of Rosie’s new pack who had bailed her up in the school toilets a week after school had gone back and four of them had pushed her head into a bowl and flushed it. Had to wash her hair in cold water, with school soap, and was too scared now to go to the toilet even if she was busting.

  Head up, Cara listened. Silence. She sighed and opened her Mat
hs book to stare again at Robert’s figures. He’d gone over her homework with her three times. All of his workings were there, and when he’d been explaining it, she’d thought she understood how he’d got from A to B. That screaming bike had washed it from her head.

  And he hadn’t gone. He’d never give up.

  His aunty had kicked him out after the cat business, which was why the going to Sydney business had started, why all of the bad stuff had started.

  Like the cat, Cara might not starve or die of thirst, but she couldn’t get out of that box until Robert retired in 1964. When she was twenty. She’d pleaded with him to get a transfer back to home; he’d said that if he retired as a principal he’d get more pension money. She’d begged him again to be allowed to live with Uncle John and to repeat last year with Pete. Not on your life. He didn’t trust her – probably never would.

  She’d tried to delay coming home from Sydney by asking him to take her to Woody Creek.

  ‘It’s a good place to stay away from, poppet.’

  As was the Traralgon high school, but he drove her there five days a week.

  If she’d told Myrtle what Dino had done the day she’d got home late from the library, they might have allowed her to live with Uncle John. She should have. Though people like Myrtle didn’t quite believe in the bad that existed outside their God-safe little world. ‘Give your problems into God’s hands, pet,’ Myrtle said.

  Her parents expected her to stay at that school and matriculate, then go on to university and become a high-school teacher. Robert was a great one to talk about television brainwashing the younger generation. He’d started brainwashing Cara about teaching when she was six or seven years old, and Myrtle had been as bad. The way she was going this year, she’d end up working in a sewing factory like Jennifer Hooper/Morrison, except she couldn’t sew on a button.

  She’d only need a reasonable pass in form five to do primary teaching. Last year a girl in form five had got a scholarship to a Melbourne teachers’ college. It was an option. Not much of an option, because if she happened to get in, and if she happened to finish the two-year course, she’d be bonded to the Education Department for three years, which might mean one less year in Traralgon but extra years before she could go home to Sydney.