Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  October came after September. She was twenty-one. Myrtle and Robert sent her a card and a watch, dainty, expensive, more decorative than functional. She received half-a-dozen cards, then the night of her birthday, Cathy and Michelle arrived with a bottle of champagne, caviar and dry biscuits, and caviar tasted worse than smoked salmon. They ate the biscuits, drank the champagne.

  And the next day a card came from England, a pen-and-ink sketch of a Chinese junk, and inside: Happy twenty-first. Cathy told me. Got anything to wear to a wedding on the first Saturday in November? M.

  His address was on it. She wrote back.

  I paid off my catsuit. Will it be suitable?

  And he wrote back.

  It’s a black-tie affair. Can you afford a tie?

  He picked Cara up at her boarding house in Gerry’s MG at five on that Saturday in November and he told her he was buying the car.

  ‘It’s not the right look for a doctor,’ he said.

  It wasn’t the right look for a couple dressed up for a black-tie affair either. Weddings are a bore, the reception wasn’t, and seated with Cathy and Gerry, Cara barely sipped her wine.

  Morrie didn’t drive her directly home after the reception, but down to the St Kilda pier, where he parked so they might watch the moonlight playing on beach and ocean.

  He spoke of plane flights, of London. He told her of his aunt’s five-hundred-year-old house and she told him the sorry tale of Amberley’s renovations. He asked if she’d finished her novel. She told him it was still a mess, and asked how he planned to take his new toy home.

  ‘Gerry will garage it for me until I decide what I want to do.’

  ‘What’s the use of owning a toy when you can’t play with it?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll have two reasons to come back,’ he said.

  Did some growth hormone kick in when you turned twenty-one? Was there such a disease as falling in love? Did a switch flick on a light in your head? She hadn’t seen him for eight months, might not see him in another eight, but for the month he was here, she allowed herself to be in love.

  He spent a long weekend at a city hotel and she saw him every day, every evening. They went to a movie, drove out to the hills, had dinner at a hotel. Then he went back to Ballarat and she missed him. But he returned the following weekend, and the one after that.

  She saw him off at the airport and her chest ached with missing him before his plane was in the air.

  He wrote the day he arrived home, on an aerogram, blue paper as fine as tissue folded into an envelope, and when she ripped two of his words in the opening of it, she mourned their loss.

  Marion had been in love at sixteen. Banished to Seymour, she’d sworn she’d be pregnant in a month and married in two. She made it through the year, and was the first to learn where she’d be teaching in ’66.

  ‘Burwood,’ she said. ‘We ought to get a flat together, or a house if Michelle is being kept on at Doncaster.’

  Cara didn’t want to move in with them. She wanted a single-bedroom unit with soundproofed walls and floor. She wanted freedom to write, and privacy – and somewhere to take Morrie when he came back in April.

  PRECIPICE

  Australia, the lucky country, the safe country, virtually untouched by war, had in the late forties thrown her doors open to the displaced, the dispossessed. They’d worked hard to make new lives, intermarried with locals and raised their kids to vote for Robert Menzies. An entire generation had grown to maturity believing Big Bob was next door to royalty and, like the Queen, a permanent fixture.

  In January ’66 the rot set in. After eighteen years at the helm, Menzies retired from Australia’s top job.

  A generation had grown to maturity knowing the six o’clock closing of hotels was the way it ought to be, that twelve pennies would always equal one shilling, that twenty shillings would always equal one pound – until Harold Holt, Menzies’ deputy, stepped into the top job, when a new generation of kids began to learn that nothing was permanent.

  In February of ’66 a law was passed allowing hotels to remain open until ten, which ended the great Australian six o’clock swill. Sawdust got in the eyes, up the nose, it stuck in the throat. For generations, Woody Creek’s mill workers had hit the bar after work and swilled down pots until Freddy Bowen called, ‘Time, boys.’ Then they’d gone home to their wives and kids for dinner. Now, with no call of time, the diehards stayed on at the bar. There was more money in the publican’s pockets, more tax for the government, less pounds, shilling and pence for the wives and kids – or less dollars.

  Harold Holt gave the country two years in which to accept that ten cents now equalled a shilling, to accept the fact that a two-bob coin would now be called twenty cents, that a pound note, the familiar green quid, would become a two-dollar note, and its blue mate, ten dollars.

  Antique cash registers bit the dust in their thousands. Prewar permanent fixtures on shop counters all over Australia made way for the new. The makers of dollar and cent registers did a roaring trade.

  There was a shift in the sixties, a movement that shook Australia’s foundations, only an earth tremor but to some it gave warning of the massive earthquake to come – or it warned Charlie White.

  Not a thing he could do to stop it coming other than ignore it. Back when he and Jeany had opened up that shop, after the first war, they’d managed with a cash drawer and handwritten dockets. That cash drawer and his docket books would see him out.

  Bloody fool things, he named the new cent coins. His arthritic fingers couldn’t handle them, his eyes could barely distinguish a two-cent coin from a one-cent, and both of the damn fool things jammed beneath the wooden partitions of his cash drawer.

  Fulton’s hardware invested in a new cash register. It totalled up a customer’s order then spat out small printed dockets, though two dollars spent there didn’t buy as much as the old quid had once bought.

  *

  Teddy Hall, a fixture in Margot’s life – bed – for seven years, had his twenty-eighth birthday in 1966. His mother’s son in colouring, his father’s in height, he was himself in appearance, though rarely seen out of his grease-stained navy-blue combination overalls, his head beneath the bonnet of a car.

  Teddy’s boss, Roy, the garage chap, twenty years Charlie’s junior, allowed dollars and cents to push him faster towards retirement, or maybe it was his wife who pushed him. She had half-a-dozen grandkids in Melbourne and was lucky to see them twice a year. And it wasn’t enough.

  ‘I’m putting the house and business on the market, Ted. We’ll be moving down to the kids,’ he said.

  He was going the wrong way. By ’66, two dozen or so Melbourne retirees had moved to Woody Creek – maybe to put space between them and their kids.

  If there was one man in town who knew Teddy Hall, it was his boss. If there was a man in town Teddy respected, it was his boss.

  ‘You’ll get a job anywhere, Ted. I’ll have a yarn to that big Holden place in Willama for you if you like. They’re always on the lookout for good mechanics.’

  Teddy knew more about cars than he did about people, though he had no papers to prove it. He was a darkie with a knack, that was all, the darkest of Elsie and Harry’s brood and resentful since childhood of his nonwhite complexion. His brothers were white.

  He’d never considered his future, never believed he had one. He went to work, went home. When he felt like it, he walked across the goat paddock. When he didn’t he watched television. Every year or so, he realised that he had nothing and he went on a bender, but never in town. He took off somewhere in his ute, drank until he ran out of money, fought if he felt like it, then came back. His boss always took him back.

  A loner, Teddy Hall, an outsider amongst the seven Elsie and Harry had raised, and little hope of ever being more – until Harold Holt’s dollars and cents, until Teddy’s boss’s wife started having a go at would-be buyers who ran down her house and sneered at the figure she’d put on it. Roy got rid of her to the city, then came
back to deal personally with prospective buyers. No one wanted his house. Very few considered his tin shed garage.

  There was competition now in town. A new service station, with clean petrol pumps and uniformed lads to check tyres and clean windscreens, had sprung up out on the corner of Stock Route and Blunt’s Street. They sold a lot of petrol, though most in town would tell you their mechanic didn’t know his arse from his elbow.

  ‘What price have you got on the place, boss?’

  ‘Half of what I had.’

  Teddy’s brain, hotwired early into motors, had been trained since the age of fifteen by a man who had grown up with cars. They never pitched a used part away, could walk into the chaos of that tin shed and unearth a greasy axle off an old Ford, then name the owner of the Ford it had come from. They could crawl beneath Roy’s house and pull out a 1939 Chevy truck motor and a wheel rim from the same truck. If you wanted your car fixed, you took it to that tin shed. They kept Charlie White’s old ute on the road.

  Teddy lived at home. Elsie removed his wages from the pocket of his combination overalls before she boiled them semi-clean. She handed the money to Harry, who banked it. Teddy had never drawn on the account, or not since he’d bought his ute in ’58.

  ‘Have you still got my bankbook, Dad?’

  ‘What do you want with it?’

  ‘To see how much I’ve got in it.’

  ‘What do you want to buy?’

  ‘The garage,’ Teddy said.

  One gear moves another. Somewhere a wheel turns. Those turning gears dragged Teddy in a direction he’d never considered going. Blame Harold Holt and his Yankee dollars. In a roundabout way, he was responsible for turning Teddy Hall into a business owner.

  Blame the piles of mechanical junk stored beneath Roy’s house for turning him into a house owner.

  ‘How much have you got on your house, Boss?’

  An old house, child-abused, grandchild-abused, it hadn’t sighted a lick of paint since before the war. Most prospective buyers went no nearer than the front gate – or where the front gate had once been. One sod had made him an offer for the land. He’d intended ripping the place down and rebuilding on the site. Roy took a leaf from his wife’s book and told him where he could put his puny offer.

  ‘Match what the last bastard offered me and it’s yours, Ted. Save me clearing out what’s under the bloody thing.’

  And thus Teddy was impelled forward again. Two weeks later Roy followed his wife, and Teddy gave young Michael Boyle a job.

  Wheels within wheels within wheels.

  Michael had a sister, Vonnie, not a lot older than her brother, a plump and pretty blonde who had a slow leak in her bike tyre. Every morning she wheeled her bike around the garage to pump up her tyre. She hung around one morning to give her brother a hand taking the radiator out of an FX Holden, then stayed on to have a cup of tea with them. Didn’t turn up her nose at the grease-stained enamel mug either and, while emptying it, reeled off every Holden model to come off the assembly line since the FX in ’48. Teddy had never met a girl like Vonnie Boyle.

  Come May and Teddy, damn near desperate enough to ask his father for help, was standing, sealing greasy cheques into greasy envelopes, and when he got to the last of the greasy buggers, he ended up with a bill for twenty-two dollars and a cheque for twelve dollars fifty, and Christ only knew which of his five envelopes he’d sealed the wrong bloody cheque into, and he’d already wasted an hour in writing the bastards. The air was blue when Vonnie came to pump up her tyre.

  ‘Give them here, Ted,’ she said.

  He gave them, then stood back, rolling a skinny smoke, watching her wipe his greasy biro on the rounded seat of her jeans, then to do in two minutes what he’d been sweating over for an hour.

  ‘Still looking for a job?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  He started off paying her for Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, selling petrol, inflating tyres, checking oil and washing windscreens, and looking after his bookwork.

  She came in on her days off too, and by June had cleaned up an area around his telephone, scrubbed down a filthy table and moved it to form a barrier between telephone and hoist. She brought a chair from home to sit on when she did his bookwork and answered his telephone.

  ‘Good morning. Hall’s garage. What can we do for you?’

  He liked her being there, liked listening to the way she said, ‘Hall’s garage.’

  ‘How old is your sister, Mick?’

  ‘Eighteen in July.’

  Before June ended, Teddy had moved into his house, or he’d transferred his mattress and bedding from Elsie’s sleep-out up there.

  *

  Giving up sex is much like giving up cigarettes. Those who decide to quit cold turkey can be hard to live with. Margot, always hard to live with, suffered severe withdrawal symptoms. She was twenty-seven. Harry had lost patience with her in ’59, and by ’66 he’d had enough.

  Most smokers who quit the habit notice a weight increase. The same goes for those who quit sex, which is one of the more enjoyable forms of exercise – and for some years, Margot’s only exercise. Her girth increased in pace with her anger.

  Then another molar started aching every time she ate. That was when hell broke loose on Gertrude’s land.

  Jenny made another dental appointment. She arrived to pick up her firstborn, told her to take her socks off, and Margot attacked her with Elsie’s broom.

  Jenny drove home and cancelled the appointment.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was going the same way your mother went,’ Maisy said. She’d known how to handle Amber when she’d gone off her head, or Doctor Frazer had known how. Jenny called Frazer’s office, but like everyone else he’d grown old, and was no longer making out-of-town house calls. A Polish chap with an unspellable, unpronounceable name arrived. By ’66 many such names were creeping into telephone books.

  He saw Margot, not a pretty sight in her white uniform gaping wide between the buttonholes. Since Teddy had moved into town, she’d refused to wear her partial denture.

  ‘She says that’s what’s making her teeth ache, doctor,’ Elsie said.

  He looked at Margot’s teeth. ‘They all need to come out,’ he said. ‘They’re poisoning her system.’ He checked her blood pressure, told Elsie to cut her meals in half, asked if she received the invalid pension, told them he’d sign the necessary papers, then he left.

  Margot wasn’t going to the dentist again. They fed her painkillers. Maisy got her onto the invalid pension, and thus labelled, Margot became an invalid.

  ‘The doctor said your teeth are poisoning your system, lovey,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Your breath smells like a dead cow,’ Maisy said.

  ‘Thut up and leave me alone!’

  They left her alone until late July when Harry and Elsie drove to Mildura for Ronnie’s wedding, where Elsie, dressed like the Queen Mother in one of Jenny’s creations, met Ronnie’s in-laws. They left Margot again in October, drove down to Molliston to help Maudy with her first baby. They drove out to Joany’s place on Sundays, five grandchildren out there, dark-headed dark-eyed little dagoes. Brian and Josie were working in Melbourne. They never saw them.

  Harry knew why. He started spending his weekends slapping paint on Teddy’s house, planning to move in with him, to place distance between Elsie and Margot.

  And the grass grew long in Gertrude Foote’s paddocks and gum saplings hidden in the grass grew tall. The old apricot tree, dying by degrees for years, split and fell that winter, but neglect had allowed a few dozen of its offspring to grow. One might produce comparable fruit.

  The climbing rose, cut back to the earth when the working bee had constructed the abomination, determined to hide what had been done to Gertrude’s little hut, had done what it could. The old climber again covered the west wall and was attempting to creep across the roof of Georgie’s bedroom.

  Jenny’s tin plaque still hung on its nail over the front door –
Ejected 2.8.69 – as did Georgie’s painted wooden board – The Abortion.

  Owls still flew at night, their soft wings whispering secrets.

  Not the same though. By 1966 nothing was or would be again.

  HAUNTING THE LETTERBOX

  Michelle had been transferred to a country school – not home, but closer to home. Marion was now teaching at Doncaster. Engaged to her childhood boyfriend for three years, attempting to get pregnant to him for twelve months, she was planning a big, white Christmas wedding, Cathy, Michelle and Cara her bridesmaids. They’d chosen the fabric for their gowns, the reception rooms were booked.

  She came to Cara’s dog-box flat late one night, her eyes swollen by tears. Like Margot, she’d been dumped for a younger model.

  ‘I should have known when he wanted me to go on the pill. Why didn’t I smell a rat?’

  There were multiple contraceptive pills on pharmacy shelves, multiple opinions on their likely side effects too. The major effect was, eighteen-year-old kids with no more fear of unwanted pregnancies were out there test-driving the available merchandise. Men had never had it so good.

  Cathy was on the pill, and everyone who knew her knew it.

  No pills for Cara. Her romance with Morrie was all on paper. He knew she’d posted her three hundred and forty-nine page manuscript to a Sydney publisher, posted it registered mail, with a money order to pay for its return post, just in case they didn’t accept it. Cathy, who had now read the novel in its entirety, said it was brilliant, that they’d come beating down her door to get it.

  They hadn’t yet. She’d posted it weeks ago. She’d found a flat she could afford, a tiny, beige dog-box but almost new. She had her own mailbox. Rarely anything in Number Ten, but she checked it each morning when she left for work, just in case the postie had come late, and hurried home from work to check it again, and every day kicked herself for not including the school’s phone number in her letter to the publisher.

  Morrie had said he’d be back in April. He wrote to tell her he’d be delaying his trip. His mother had a serious operation. He’d said he’d try to get over in June. Like Marion’s fiancé, he’d probably found a younger model – or one not half a world away.