Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Ten lodgers. He told me there were ten. When you lost Mrs . . . the woman from Number Six . . . back in July.’

  ‘We’ve had nineteen for the past month – since the Smiths arrived,’ Mrs Collins said, joining the tour. ‘And no washing machine since Sunday, Mr Norris. What a homecoming for you.’

  Cara left the four lamenting in the laundry and walked out to stand and stare at the street, or at the traffic on it. Since the day they’d left, she’d protected her image of life at Amberley, of that road, of the shops up the hill and around the corner. Shook her head and walked up the hill.

  Not the same. No Mr Hodge at the café. A new Australian woman sold her a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, butter, ham, a small jar of coffee. The greengrocer hadn’t moved. The girl working with him might have been one of his daughters, infants when Cara had been thirteen. She sold her three tomatoes, three bananas.

  She walked downhill on the far side of the road, stood in front of Sarah North’s house for minutes, waiting for a break in the traffic so she might cross over. There’d always been cars, but insufficient to prevent her running across the road to Sarah’s house. A constant stream of traffic on it this morning and no more Sarah North. They’d moved on. Wondered if they’d taken their chain-crazy barking dog with them.

  From the far side of the street, Amberley looked as it always had, a mite superior to its neighbours. Not so superior inside.

  Robert was struggling to open a window when she entered; Myrtle was walking in circles. Their tour guide had gone.

  ‘Have you called the police?’ Cara asked, dumping her load on the kitchen bench.

  ‘Don’t put it down there. Take it into the lodgers’ kitchen where it’s clean.’

  ‘By the look of a pair I ran into out there, it won’t last ten seconds,’ Robert said.

  Cara stood, her shopping in her arms. ‘Ring the police or I will, Daddy.’

  ‘If we bring them out here, we’ll get nothing done today, poppet.’

  ‘We’ve been robbed!’

  ‘What we need to do is to get these rooms habitable before the removalists get here. See if you can find a broom somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘And a mop,’ Myrtle added. ‘And a bucket.’

  ‘It’s not just what’s missing, Daddy. He’s been getting rent from nineteen lodgers and paying us for ten.’

  ‘Find a broom.’

  ‘He’s a thief and you are both ostriches,’ Cara said, then, her shopping given into Myrtle’s arms, she went off to look for mop and broom.

  *

  The manager, who for years had been Mr O’Conner, became the unmentionable he, him, as they swept, as Cara pitched rubbish out the front door and Myrtle complained about her pitching it out there for the neighbours to see.

  ‘Concentrate on your kitchen!’ Robert said.

  The ragged mop from the laundry might have housed the cockroach, two cockroaches, who appeared to be halfway through making baby cockroaches, which slowed their getaway sufficiently for Myrtle to scream and for Cara to stomp on them.

  There is always a final straw. The third cockroach running into her cupboard was Myrtle’s.

  ‘Call the police, Robert.’

  ‘They don’t arrest cockroaches, Mummy.’

  Robert called a taxi. He and Myrtle rode it to a hardware store where they paid the driver to wait while they shopped for new mops, plastic buckets, brooms, washing powder, detergents, bleach and two varieties of bug sprays. By three-thirty the removalists hadn’t arrived, but no self-respecting cockroach would consider those rooms a healthy home.

  The beds had been stripped, their wire mattresses doused with bug killer, Myrtle convinced that if he could live with cockroaches he would have slept with bedbugs, would have shed fleas to the floor rugs too. The rugs had been sprayed then hauled down to the clothes line. Mr Bertram moved his truck to give them space, then helped hang the rugs and offered his boys to beat them with the old brooms.

  The room Cara had named her own since infancy had fared worse than the main bedroom. The paintwork was scuffed, the floor scorched by cigarette butts, the windowsill, convenient ashtray, seared. She’d ripped the curtains from their rod, adding them to the pile of junk out front. The mattresses had been dragged outside to where the sun might fry any flea or bedbugs eluding Myrtle’s spray.

  Four-thirty and still no furniture van. Five, and every truck that drove by had to be it – and wasn’t. At five-thirty Robert dragged the mattresses indoors.

  ‘I’m not sleeping on them,’ Cara said.

  ‘If the removalists don’t arrive, we’ll need to sleep on something,’ Robert said.

  The sheets stripped from the beds had been boiled clean. They’d dried. You can’t boil blankets.

  ‘I’m not sleeping here,’ Cara repeated at seven while they ate sandwiches, drank more coffee in a now clean parlour, and listened for the furniture van, all three weary, Myrtle yawning, worn out, worn silent by labour, staring out through coloured glass as night came down on Sydney.

  They’d been living, breathing, dreaming of Christmas dinner eaten around that table. Not enough chairs. They’d found two, one in the lodgers’ kitchen, stained, one in Miss Robertson’s room, cleaner than the ones in the parlour. Six still missing. According to Myrtle, there had been fourteen chairs, not twelve.

  ‘Father ordered them from America when the house was being built. We should have put them into storage, Robert.’

  ‘We’ve got bigger problems than a few missing chairs,’ Robert said. He was in pain. He’d been limping for the past three hours, and Myrtle couldn’t remember in which bag she’d packed his pills. Cases everywhere. Cara hadn’t opened her own but she found Robert’s pills, and her mother’s jewellery box, in the grey case. The pills eased Robert’s pain, the pearls didn’t ease Myrtle’s.

  Nine o’clock when they gave up on the removalists and took a taxi out to Beth and John, where Myrtle bathed then fell into the guest’s bed and died for eight hours, where Robert and John sat late and Cara smoked cigarettes with Pete behind the shrubbery in the backyard; they washed the stink of bug spray from her nostrils, and a little of the disappointment.

  A warm night, a different warmth from Melbourne’s. The sounds were different.

  ‘Still going to England?’

  ‘When I save a bit,’ Pete said.

  ‘What does it cost?’

  ‘Depends on how you go.’

  ‘If I owned a bike I’d give you a dink over there tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to coming home since the day I left. Now I’m here and I’d rather be just about anywhere else.’

  *

  John owned a trailer. They hooked it up to his car the following morning and he, Beth and Pete drove them back to Amberley. Still no sign of the removalists. They’d expected to see the van waiting out the front. The men took two loads of junk to the tip; the women washed walls, cleaned windows; the lodgers complained about the missing washing machine; and ten- and twelve-year-old boys ran up and down the overhead passage, had races up the stairs.

  ‘Something will have to be done about the Bertrams,’ Myrtle said.

  That day was lost, along with their Traralgon furniture, which Cara had never appreciated, which now grew more precious every hour they waited for it.

  ‘I just ran into that female from the storeroom,’ Myrtle said. ‘She is . . .’ There was no fitting way to describe her other than as an unclean, foul-mouthed middle-aged slut.

  Was Jenny an unclean, foul-mouthed middle-aged slut?

  There was no fitting way to describe the middle-aged creep in Number Nine, other than as a bug-eyed cockroach looking for spoil. Cara felt soiled when she carried another of the dining-room chairs from his room. Five to go. Locating those chairs had become her focus. She found one in the laundry, a rag of towel hung over its ornate back, a carton of clothing on its mutilated upholstered seat. She claimed it.

  Four to go – and probably gone with them.

  Nigh
tfall, Beth, John and Pete gone home to sanity, Myrtle and Robert, too weary to do more, sat at the dining-room table, attempting to sort out the rent book. Mr Bertram and his two boys had been renting Number Five since early October, and could show no record of having ever paid rent, though the father swore he’d paid a fortnight in advance last Friday. Miss Robertson had already informed them that he, the unmentionable, had demanded rent to be paid two weeks in advance.

  The couple in Number Ten, a single downstairs room, who also had no rent book, told the same story, and Miss Robertson backed them up. She’d queued at the rent hatch behind them and seen them pay.

  ‘The Bertrams will need to be given notice, Robert.’

  Robert yawned. ‘There’s little harm in his boys other than youthful exuberance.’

  Slept that night at Amberley, between twice-boiled sheets. The old copper in the laundry, unused in years, had got them back to white, or Myrtle’s bleach had. No blankets necessary that night. Had they been necessary, Cara would have chosen to shiver.

  Sunday, and Myrtle so looking forward to returning to her old church.

  ‘Next week,’ Robert said and got down on his bad knee, not to pray, but to fix the kitchen cupboard’s snib. Uncombed, clad in singlet and trousers, his thinning grey hair in need of a wash, he didn’t look like a high-school principal. He closed the cupboard door, but when he attempted to rise, his war-damaged knee decided otherwise. He paled and sat on the kitchen floor, the leg stretched out before him.

  They brought his pills. They helped him into the parlour, where he couldn’t bend his knee to sit. They walked him to the bedroom.

  And someone knocked at the rent hatch.

  ‘See what they want, pet.’ The lodgers had now been parcelled into a convenient they, them, those people.

  Only Mrs Collins. She still had a name. ‘I’m sorry to add to your problems, dear, but the upstairs toilet isn’t flushing.’

  Robert tried to rise, but his knee screamed and he stayed down. He had half-a-dozen pieces of shrapnel floating around in it. Myrtle looked as if she’d been run over by a truck.

  In five weeks’ time Cara would be Miss Norris, schoolteacher. Miss Norris took charge. She locked the upstairs toilet door and stuck an Out of Order sign on it. There was a toilet downstairs and one outside behind the laundry.

  For thirty years, with barely a shudder, Amberley had absorbed selectively chosen lodgers. O’Conner hadn’t chosen selectively. The floors rocked with nineteen, and when Cara went upstairs to demand the Bertram boys turn their noise down, she found another dining-room chair. The Bertrams were using it as a stand for a small portable television set. She won the chair, and before she left with it, the volume had been turned down a notch. Not enough. The parlour was directly beneath Number Five, and they could still hear every whiz, bang, screech.

  ‘It’s intolerable, Robert.’

  ‘We’re not putting children out on the street at Christmas time. Now that’s enough about it.’

  He was swallowing more pills, and he looked like Gran Norris – looked as old as her too.

  The phone rang at seven-thirty. Cara answered it, expecting it to be the removalist. Cathy’s gabble greeted her, and tonight it was the warble of a messiah magpie.

  ‘So, how are the bright lights of Sydney?’

  ‘I’m considering jumping off the Bridge.’

  ‘That good, eh? I was hoping so – not really, but it will make my proposition that much more attractive. I just got a brand-new Mini Minor for Christmas. It’s powder blue and it needs a good long drive to run its motor in, so I thought –’

  ‘It’s chaos up here, Cathy. We’ll need to change our plans.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do if you’ll listen. Guess who I’ve just been talking to for the last half-hour?’ She didn’t wait for Cara’s guess. ‘Gerry is home and he’s brought a Pommy mate back with him, and I asked them if they’d be here for the New Year dance, and Gerry said he wouldn’t miss it for quids, and to save him the first dance. So you have to come down here and keep his mate occupied.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can. Then after New Year, I’ll drive you back up there and stay until we find out where they’ve posted us.’

  ‘You can’t come here. Will you listen for a minute –’

  ‘You listen first. Remember that dream I had about me and the black dress and you wearing that red dress, and Gerry being home for a funeral. Well, there’s no funeral, but his father has been in hospital with something wrong with his heart, which is what brought Gerry home. He’s not going to die or anything – or not yet. So it’s all sort of preordained. I’m buying a black dress and you’re going to wear your red.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere – and you said it was claret, not red.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re out of the convent now, so it’s allowed to be red. You’d only be away for maybe four days. As soon as I get him interested, I’ll drive you back and he’ll realise how much he misses me . . .’

  ‘The house is stuffed to the rafters with lodgers. Dad is crippled, Mum is ripping her hair out, and on top of that our furniture has gone missing.’

  ‘Leaving them for a couple of days will give them less grief than jumping off the Harbour Bridge,’ Cathy said.

  ‘You could save a lot of depressed people with your kind of logic.’

  ‘I know. Dad reckons I should hire myself out to the government – like a secret weapon. Anyway, you have to come. Two blokes and one girl never works, and Marion and Michelle have got blokes, and Gerry’s mate is fabulous-looking.’

  ‘If I leave Mum and Dad, they’ll jump off the Bridge.’

  ‘They’re old enough to make their own decisions –’

  Sound of a truck out front, barely worth a glance. She glanced, the phone cord at full stretch.

  ‘It’s them, Daddy!’ she yelled, then spoke into the phone. ‘I’ve got to go, Cath. Our furniture just turned up.’

  ‘I’ll call you back in ten minutes.’

  ‘Make it ten hours.’

  If someone had told Cara that one day she’d be pleased to see that green laminated kitchen table from Traralgon, she would have laughed in their face. She smoothed the door of the big clean refrigerator as two burly men hauled it indoors, explaining in bursts how they’d done a clutch outside of Wangaratta, how they’d been stuck there waiting for a new clutch to arrive from Melbourne, then waiting longer for it to be fitted, how the dame in the office had tried to call them but every time she called she got someone telling them it was the wrong number.

  The kitchen suite settled happily into Myrtle’s kitchen; the old couch gave way to the Traralgon easy chairs; the old refrigerator was moved by the men into the lodgers’ kitchen and Traralgon’s twin-tub washing machine installed in the laundry. Old beds were carried out to the front porch and Traralgon’s near-new beds carried in and made up with Traralgon bedding. Suddenly, home began to look possible, to smell possible.

  Robert tested an easy chair before the men were out the door, leather chairs with built-in footrests. He leaned back and, his knee at peace, or drugged to the eyeballs with painkillers, he nodded off.

  *

  John taxied Robert to the doctor’s office, to the hospital for X-rays, to a car showroom where Robert ordered a cream Holden station wagon. They bought paint for the bathroom. John climbed the ladder. He painted the ceiling and the high sections of wall, Robert below copped the drips, and Cara wanted a brother like Uncle John, and she had one and hadn’t been allowed to know him.

  John picked them up on Christmas morning and taxied them to dinner. His two daughters and four sons were there, five had partners. There were enough little kids and babies to start a new civilisation, and Cara felt like excess baggage, which by midafternoon was delivered back to Amberley by Pete while Robert nodded off in the back seat and Myrtle clung to what she could. Pete drove like a maniac.

  Six o’clock, Robert nodding off in his easy chair and an explosion shook the h
ouse. It was followed by an explosion of invective, the likes of which Amberley walls had never been subjected to. It got him to his feet. Cara beat him to the lodgers’ kitchen, as did a handful of lodgers. The objectionable Mrs Smith from the storeroom, a somewhat singed Mrs Smith, had blown up the gas oven. The kitchen smelled of singed hair and brimstone – the objectionable one’s hair was still smoking.

  Her husband was there, attempting to shut her mouth. She turned her abuse from the gas oven to him, then the war became physical. It was his fault that she’d turned that (language deleted) oven on. He wanted that (language deleted) bloody chicken.

  Had Amberley’s walls previously been subjected to gutter language? Had they witnessed physical violence? Myrtle hadn’t. She stood back with the gathering crowd while the singed dame got in a knee that almost floored her male.

  The Bertrams returned from where they’d been; the boys stood on the outskirts of the crowd, watching real-life whiz, bang, whack action while their father entered the fray. He dragged the male outside, but the dame wasn’t letting him off that easily. She followed them out the side door.

  ‘It’s got to be a nightmare,’ Robert said.

  ‘I wanted to sell up when you came home from the war, Robert,’ Myrtle said.

  ‘I was twenty years younger when I came home from the war.’

  Audience still grouped there. Waiting for the next bout?

  Miss Norris took charge. ‘The show appears to be over. The kitchen will be off limits until further notice.’

  ‘It’s only the oven –’ Myrtle began.

  ‘The kitchen will be off limits until we can get someone out here to check it.’ Cara’s voice rose, her hand held up, demanding stop, silence.

  It didn’t silence Myrtle. ‘We can’t do that to them. Get our electric frying pan –’

  Like hell she’d get the frying pan. She picked up the toaster, the electric jug and looked for hands to take them. ‘There are two power points in the laundry.’