Left Luggage

by Andrew Christie

  Betty set off at a slow hobble, past a a small woman in a sari guarding a trolley carrying an unstable-looking mountain of suitcases. John was glad they didn’t have to go far.

  Forest Court Retirement Village was in a wide, tree-lined street within strolling distance of Glebe Point Road. It was a genteel place, made up of two-storey apartment buildings, tastefully arranged around shady courtyards, hidden from the street behind a high brick wall.

  John unlocked the gate and held it open for his mother. Inside the gate were tidy gardens and little lawns cut by pathways. They moved slowly, Betty hobbling along with her stick, John following with her bags, pointing out the sights. The administration building, where the manager’s office and the mailboxes were, the common room and laundry over on the right. They passed a pair of old women chatting in a courtyard. One of them was leaning on a four-wheeled pusher, the other was sitting on a bench with a newspaper folded in her lap. John smiled and nodded to them. They smiled and nodded in return, conversation suspended, their eyes following Betty, who hadn’t stopped, hadn’t smiled.

  Betty’s new home was apartment number 12, on the ground floor of a block towards the rear of the village. John opened the door and stood back to let Betty in. When she didn’t make a move to enter, he slipped past her and carried the bags through into the sitting room.

  “Tu es très occupé,” said his mother following him inside.

  John looked around at his mother’s old furniture in this new room, at her photographs on the wall. “Just trying to make it look a bit like home.”

  “It has not worked. Ce n’est pas du tout comme chez moi.” She crossed the room to her lumpy old armchair, leaning her stick against the over-stuffed arm and easing herself down. “Vas-tu m’offrir une tasse de thé?”

  “Of course. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  When John came back with a tea pot and two cups, his mother was staring at the dresser, at the objets he had arranged there, souvenirs she had brought back to Paris from the various battlefields and hell holes she had worked in: a little ceramic tea pot from Vietnam, a carved cedar tree from Lebanon, and a beaded elephant from somewhere in Africa.

  She is never going to forgive me for bringing her here, he realised, as he passed her the tea.

  Later, after they had shared an early lunch, Betty put herself to bed and slept for most of the afternoon. John stood in the doorway watching his mother sleep. She had always been a bundle of energy, but now she was old. Her skin was thin and almost translucent, wisps of grey hair curling across her cheek. There were photographs of her from Vietnam, all blonde hair and cheeky grin, usually surrounded by soldiers. She had been beautiful then, but now she looked frailer than he’d ever seen her.

  John wasn’t sure what to do now. He couldn’t go home and leave her alone. Not yet, not on her first day. He turned on the television with the sound down low and watched a show about antique fairs. The point seemed to be for people to buy things and try to resell them for a profit. Mostly they didn’t. The host was a bizarrely dressed Englishman with a bow tie and bulging eyes. John turned the television off again.

  In the kitchen he took the chicken he had bought the day before out of the fridge and looked at it. He had meant to roast it: a welcome home dinner, roast chicken with all the trimmings. But now he thought chicken soup might be a better bet.

  Betty never cooked much when he was a kid. When he was home from school they would always go out to eat, sometimes at friends’ houses, but mostly cafés and restaurants. She knew all the people who ran the local cafés, greeting them by their first names, asking about their families, gossiping about the other regulars. She would miss all that here.

  It was after five when Betty woke up. Making her way to the living room via the bathroom, she sat herself back down in the lumpy armchair.

  “How are you feeling?” John asked.

  “Je me sens mieux maintenant. Better for being in my own bed, even if it is in a strange room. What is that smell? Have you been cooking?”

  “Chicken soup. Thought we’d have some for dinner.”

  “You’re making soup?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you lived out of cans.”

  “Yeah, well, I still love canned tomato soup, but I can cook a bit. Have done for years. I was going to do you a roast chicken but thought soup would be better.”

  “Do I seem sick?”

  John shrugged. “Out of sorts, jet lag. It’s only natural.”

  John finally left when Betty was asleep for the night, snoring softly in her own bed. He had done the washing up and put the leftovers in the fridge while he waited for her to relax enough to go to sleep. As he locked her in, he thought, This is do-able, she’ll settle in. It might take time but she will get used to things.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  Rules

  Betty woke early to the sound of once familiar birdsong, sounds half-remembered from her childhood. Her new bedroom was strange, all her old things, but in a new place. It was disorienting, familiar and alien at the same time, like being in a dream. She remembered similar feelings of disorientation when travelling in new countries, especially in supermarkets, the spaces and colours familiar, even the brand names, but when you looked closely, things were different, unintelligible.

  The new apartment was small. Just a single bedroom, a sitting room and a tiny galley kitchen, making her feel big, like Alice after she had eaten the cake. The sitting room opened onto a little terrace that in turn opened onto other courtyards. The architecture was old-fashioned, minimalist, all pale bricks and dark timber – from the sixties, she guessed. It added to her feeling of disorientation. She was like an exile, but in a country that she had left a long time ago, when Kennedy was the president in the United States, young and good looking, and still alive.

  Paris had been her home all her adult life. It was her heart, it was in her. John didn’t understand that. She had nothing in Sydney anymore except old memories. There was John of course, but all her family were long gone. Her father Jack, and Emily, her stepmother, had died in 1998, three months apart. Her own mother had run off when Betty was five; just after the war, leaving Betty and her father behind in Kogarah. No, she had been away too long. Sydney would never be home again.

  She had left in 1962 to look for her mother, meaning to come home again, hoping to bring her mother back with her. But she didn’t find her mother, and once she got out, it was such a long way to come back. Well, it was then, in the sixties. And there was so much happening out in the world.

  It was not long after the Cuba crisis, Kennedy and Kruschev standing toe to toe. She read the reports and listened to the broadcasts, hoping one of them would blink before they managed to destroy the world. Betty was working in the classified advertising section of the Sydney Morning Herald then, having to listen to that fool Frank Thompson saying neither of them had the guts to do it. Talking as if he wanted them to launch the missiles, press the button, or whatever they did. Start a new war. The man was an idiot, swanning around the office like he owned the place. Supposed to be an account manager, but he still had pimples. Frank Thompson said even if they did do it, we’d be alright. Australia was too far away, the other side of the world. But Frank was talking out of his arse as usual. He didn’t know, no one did – that was the point.

  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh memories then. Her father had been to Hiroshima, had worked in the occupation force after the war. He said you wouldn’t believe anything could do that. A single bomb. There was nothing left of the place.

  When the Russians turned back their ship, it seemed that the whole city began breathing again. But then everyone just got on with things, as though nothing had happened, everything back to normal. But for Betty the world had changed: after Cuba, they were always going to be on the brink of disaster. It was too easy. Too easy for one side to misjudge the other, misread the signals, let things get to a point where there was nothing left to do but launch the missiles and
hope that someone would survive.

  After Cuba, time was no longer limitless. Betty had things she wanted to see, things she wanted to do before it was too late. She wanted to speak to her mother again for one thing. To find out why she had left Betty behind, why she hadn’t come back, hadn’t sent for her like she’d said she would.

  Mary Lawrence had followed an American sailor to San Francisco, leaving Betty behind with her grandparents in the weatherboard house in Kogarah. She had some memories of her mother in the last years of the war, beautiful and young, sometimes sad, sometimes full of life and laughter. There were hot days in the backyard, her mother happy, smiling, bending over Betty, blonde hair falling around her face, glowing in the sunlight like a halo. Blue eyes, white teeth, red lips. Smelling of soap. There were memories of a dark, powerful man too, who was so big he seemed to block out the sun. He might have been Mary’s sailor, Pete Connors, but Betty didn’t know for sure; she could be remembering a different American. She didn’t imagine her mother had gone out with just the one.

  Betty had no memory of the day Mary left. She just wasn’t there anymore, replaced by a man who turned out to be Betty’s father. Jack Lawrence was a quiet, thin man. He must have been an angry man too, coming back from Japan to find his wife gone. But he kept all that inside himself, never talked about Mary, just got on with things. Went back to work at the Bank of New South Wales.

  There had been three letters from Mary in America. The first letter was long and rambling, full of excitement and descriptions of the new country she found herself in. Looking forward to settling down somewhere with Pete. Missing Betty. When Pete got a job they would send for her, and what a life they would have together in America. The other two letters weren’t so excited. They were sent from different places. Pete and Mary were moving around looking for work. The last was from Texas: Pete was trying to get work in the oil fields. Mary said she missed Betty. That letter was the last any of them heard from her.

  After Cuba, Betty went to America to find her mother. Or at least to find out what had happened to her. She was young then, she didn’t believe that people could just disappear. But they could – Mary Lawrence and Pete Connors had. After Texas there was no record of them anywhere that Betty could find. She had no money to hire an investigator, so she did what she could herself, talking to the Navy, following their trail to Texas, talking to the police. She put ads in newspapers and kept looking until what money she had ran out. Then she hitchhiked to the east coast and picked up some waitressing work. In New York she met some students who were starting a newspaper. When she said she had worked for a paper in Sydney, they didn’t ask what she had done there, just lent her a camera, said take some photos of a picket line for us. So she did. Turned out she was good at it.

  Betty had only been back to Sydney a few times. The last two trips had both been in 1998, for her father’s funeral in May and then Emily’s in August. So close together.

  In the tiny kitchen. Betty searched through the cupboards and drawers till she found her crockery and cutlery. There was food too, milk in a plastic bottle, Greek yoghurt, butter. No bread though. She found a brand new electric kettle on the bench and her old tea pot that John had left on the draining board. She made herself a cup of tea, and went into the sitting room, carrying the cup in her left hand and wielding her stick with the right. Just outside the living room window there was a little terrace and beyond it she could see gardens and lawns. There didn’t seem to be anybody else about yet.

  The door slid open easily and Betty hobbled outside, settling herself on one of the two new-looking chairs arranged either side of a small round table. It was a warm outside, a dry heat that prickled at her skin. It was going to be hot later. She remembered Sydney in February, hot days punctuated by dramatic storms. Southerly busters, Emily had called them. Dark clouds rolling up the coast, bringing relief at the end of long, stinking-hot days. She remembered standing out in the back garden under a sudden downpour, squealing with delight while her father yelled at her from the shelter of the veranda to get the hell inside.

  A tabby cat joined her on the terrace, yowling a greeting and rubbing against her ankles. Betty bent down and rubbed its ears, “Bonjour, kitty. Comment tu t’appelles?” The cat didn’t tell her its name, but it did purr and lean into her hand.

  The edge of the terrace was lined with pot plants that were old and struggling to compete with the flourishing weeds. They must have belonged to the previous occupant of the apartment. Who would that have been, she wondered, another old woman? Dead now, no doubt.

  Betty dragged the chair over to the nearest pots and began pulling out weeds, pausing every now and again to sip her tea and rub the cat’s head. Before long she had a little pile of weeds beside her chair.

  “Young Terry’s going to be annoyed with you.”

  A man was standing on the edge of the courtyard watching her.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The gardener, Terry. Calls himself a gardener anyway,” the man said, giving Betty a grin. “Wouldn’t know a rose bush from a coconut tree if you ask me, but he’s supposed to do all the gardening round here.” He stuck out a large-knuckled hand. It was a working man’s hand, strong fingers, the back covered in thick white hair and liver spots. “Ken,” he said, “Ken Mallard. You must be the new girl.”

  Betty looked at the hand for a moment then offered her own but quickly withdrew it when she saw the dirt caked on her fingers. “Sorry. I will have to get some gloves.” She looked up at the man. He was wearing a cloth cap, slacks and a light jacket. Very neat. Betty was wearing her old red dressing gown. “I am Betty Lawrence,” she said.

  “Betty,” he said, trying the name out. “It’s good to meet you. We need a bit of new blood around here, new faces.” He looked around at the gardens. “Like I said, theoretically you’re doing young Terry out of a job,”

  “Theoretically?”

  “I don’t think Terry really believes in work.”

  “I can tell,” said Betty looking at the pile of weeds she had produced.

  The cat picked itself up off the bit of low wall it had been sleeping on and yowled lazily at them. “You’re blocking its sun,” said Betty.

  “Sorry, Tiger,” said Ken Mallard, stepping sideways to move his shadow away from the cat.

  “Who does it belong to?” Betty asked.

  “Oh, it’s just the village cat, doesn’t really belong to anyone. Just appeared one day, a skinny, beaten-up tabby, looking very sad and sorry for itself.” He gave the cat a rub behind the ears. “Weren’t you, mate? Can’t remember who came up with the name, but it stuck.”

  Betty thought it was an unlikely name. The cat may have been lean and hungry when it arrived, but now it was fat and happy.

  “Tiger’s daily routine involves dragging himself from one patch of sunshine to the next and visiting one old lady after another. He’s the luckiest cat in Sydney – a village full of cat ladies all to himself.”

  “There are worse fates for a stray cat.”

  “Sure. They all love him. And they all feed him, which is why he is so fat. But none of them will own up to it because we’re not allowed to have pets. Against the rules.”

  “Oh,” said Betty. “Rules.”

  “Oh yes,” said Ken. “There are rules.”

  Billy was leaning against the bonnet of the ute when John emerged from the house on Sunday morning. “I want to meet your French mum,” he said. “See what she’s like.”

  On the way to Forest Court they stopped in Glebe Point Road to buy some croissants for Betty. The smell in the little Vietnamese-run bakery was fantastic. John bought three pains au chocolat as well as the croissants.

  Betty was sitting with her cameras on the table in front of her, cleaning them with a soft cloth.

  “Morning, Mum.” John bent down and kissed her. “This is a friend of mine, Billy Sheehan. He’s been helping me, working on the house.”

  “Bonjour, Billy,” Betty said, looking at the boy
then back at John, before she went back to polishing the Leica.

  “Um, hello, Mrs Lawrence,” said Billy.

  “You found the cameras then?” said John.

  “Obviously,” said Betty. “Here they are.”

  John had told Billy about his mother, the broken leg, bringing her back to Sydney to live. Billy had helped John move Betty’s things into the apartment and had been fascinated by the cameras when they had unpacked them.

  “You were a photographer?” said Billy.

  “Photo-journalist,” said Betty.

  “What did you photograph?”

  “Wars mostly,” said John, looking at his mother.

  “I photographed all sorts of things,” Betty said to Billy.

  “But mostly wars. Vietnam, Lebanon, Rwanda,” said John, slipping into a familiar routine but unable to stop himself.

  “There were a lot of wars to cover,” said Betty.

  “Still are.”

  “You should know, you are the soldier.” She turned to Billy and smiled. “It was a long time ago. I’m retired now, but I like to keep my cameras in good condition. It is just a habit.”

  “Mum was famous for a while,” said John. He was aware of Billy watching them, mother and son, performing.

  “I should show you my portfolio some time, Billy. My photographs.”

  “Yeah. That’d be good,” said Billy

  The cameras didn’t need polishing. John had checked them before they were packed away. Not that she used them now she was retired anyway. “What would be the point?” she had said once when he asked her why she didn’t take photos any more. “It was never a hobby, always a job.”

  She had only kept two cameras when she retired, the Leica and her first Nikon. The favourites. They’d had a rough life but still shone through all the scratches and dents. John didn’t think she would ever own a digital camera. He assumed that she kept cleaning them because she liked the familiar feel. The tools of her trade. He had been the same in the army. The hands remembering what to do, without thinking, the familiar feel of the weapons. Reassuring. Comforting.