by Joy Dettman
Without her, all he had to show for his years on this earth was a fool of a son who’d tossed away a fortune for thirty bob a week and a bloody uniform. All he had without that fool of a boy were two middle-aged old maid daughters who liked their comfort too much to leave home. That’s all he had.
And an illegitimate grandson with the thumbs.
‘Let the courts handle it, Father,’ Lorna called to him.
That’s what he’d do. He’d show that Goldilocks little bitch that she couldn’t get the better of him. And he’d show that independent, lying, door-closing, birthday-forgetting bugger of a woman while he was at it.
Lorna drove the car home. Vern was in no state to drive. Margaret made him a cup of tea. He drank it at Joanne’s writing desk while writing that fool of a boy out of his will.
To my brainless, book-reading bloody idiot son, I leave buggar all.
How did you spell ‘bugger’? He said it often enough, though had never attempted to spell it. The word didn’t look right on paper. He’d had little formal schooling — not that schooling would have taught him how to spell buggar . . . bugger. His handwriting had never been up to much. It was worse now.
Lorna did the writing these days. He forced his weak right hand to sign his name. It didn’t appreciate the sustained effort of writing his will. And who would he leave his all to if not to Jim? The girls? War or not, they’d blow the lot on a world tour.
To Betty Duffy’s dogs, I leave my —
He placed the pen down and read his words while emptying his teacup. Signed and witnessed, it would stand up in court — which made it a dangerous document to leave hanging around. He shredded it then sat a while, massaging his right hand. It had half the strength it used to have and did more than its fair share of aching, as did his ankle.
Again he took up his pen, dipped it, then sat staring at a blank page while the ink dried on the nib. Like his grandson’s infant mind, that page was waiting to be written on — and that hot-pants little bitch wouldn’t be writing a word on it.
He’d left too much of Jim’s early training to Joanne. She’d filled his mind with fairytales, bought him picture books of fairies perched on mushrooms. His boy was no fairy though. At least he’d proved that much. There’d been times these past years when Vern hadn’t been too certain. But to go and do that to a man, then not to tell him that he’d done it, to let him find out that he had a five-month-old grandson — and on his birthday. Those thumbs would have been a prized gift in different circumstances. It was a good-looking infant too, bright eyed, smiling, shaking hands with his finger. He had the Hooper chin. He looked to have the Hoopers’ long bones.
I did the wrong thing in taking those girls down there, he thought. I should have kept my mouth shut, sent them to church and gone down there alone.
He sighed, picked up his cup and drained it. Saw the ring it had left on Joanne’s writing desk. She would have had his hide for that.
‘Bloody women,’ he said, keeping a hold on his cup. ‘Independent, door-shutting, birthday-forgetting, lying bugger of a bloody woman I’ve loved since the cradle.’ He rose and walked out the front door.
His doctor told him at every appointment to exercise. Vern wasn’t a man to take advice, but unable to sit still, he walked that Sunday, walked down the eastern side of his verandah, around to the back door, in, through the passage, and back out to the front verandah. Around and around he went, his mind doing faster circles than his feet.
The house had been built with verandahs on all four sides. Lorna had been wearing their boards down for years with her early morning marching. Vern’s leg-throwing limp was no march, but he continued doing it, taking the short cut down the central passage just in case he fell over. That useless sitting pair wouldn’t come out looking for him. He started doing figure eights, turning left at the front door, or turning right, then back around to the rear.
Margaret, seated on the couch knitting, flinched each time the wire door slammed. She was using the leftover electric blue wool, knitting a tiny cardigan to match Vern’s, and his slamming of doors wasn’t the worst of his ire. He had an admirable vocabulary, learned from his mill men, perfected on sheep in the farmyard. He was exercising it, uncaring that it was Sunday, uncaring of his daughter’s finer feelings.
Lorna’s expression suggested she may have been mentally mimicking her father’s expletives. She slapped the newspaper with the rear of her hand.
‘Coupons,’ she said. ‘They are to issue more rationing coupons. Tea is to be one ounce per week for those over the age of eight.’
Margaret made the tea. She poured the tea. What did Lorna know of the brewing of tea?
‘A child of eight does not require tea,’ Lorna said.
Vern’s expletives suggested he wasn’t interested in coupons. He silenced Lorna. He caused Margaret to drop a stitch, caused the girls to look at each other.
In appearance and personality, there had never been sisters less alike than the Hooper girls, seated on opposite sides of the sitting room. Lorna measured a six foot one in her lisle-stockinged feet, Margaret was five three in her nylons.
If Lorna had once developed breasts, they’d been tightly bound for so long her rib bones had reabsorbed them. She had the shape of a lamppost and a face which may have inspired primitive man to carve his first totem pole. Her black hair, prematurely greying, was pulled back to a small knob at the nape of her long neck, accentuating the Hoopers’ taxi-door ears. Her hawk nose was her mother’s but larger, her eyes were Vern’s, small and heavy lidded. She had her mother’s narrow hips, her father’s height, her father’s wiry hair, worn in her mother’s style.
A short cut, a permanent wave, available in Willama for only ten shillings and sixpence, would have disguised her ears and softened her features. Another woman, with her unfortunate shape, may have dressed to disguise it. Lorna wore straight grey or brown skirts, wore them ankle length. It’s possible the showing of a little leg could have lessened the impact of her great height, though as she was the only one familiar with those legs, perhaps she knew best.
Margaret had magnificent breasts, held high by an expensive undergarment. Her posterior was well cushioned, excellent for sitting, but created nightmares for her dressmaker, who made allowances for those twin humps of buttock, though whatever allowances she made, Margaret’s skirts always hung a little longer in front. Her hair, wildly curling, platinum blonde, was her best feature. For years she’d worn it short. Until Jim had left home, he’d driven her down to her Willama hairdresser every month or two. If allowed any length at all, her hair frizzed out of control. Two months ago it was out of control. Today it was feral.
She ran her fingers through it, entangling them, and considered Maisy Macdonald, known to be handy with a pair of scissors — also known to visit Gertrude’s shack. Where there was a will, there was a way. She would find a way to her nephew.
The wire door slammed and Vern came once more up the passage. Margaret’s overly large eyes circling — twin fish swimming in circular bowls — waited for the front wire door to slam.
It didn’t. She blinked once, twice, three times in rapid succession. Her eyelids, by necessity, bulged when she blinked.
‘The last letter that came from your brother. Have you got it somewhere?’ he said.
Margaret had it. She sprang up from the couch and scuttled to her room.
Jim’s letters were in her top drawer. She found his most recent and scuttled back to give it to her father.
BLUNT KNIVES
‘A harebrained rabbit doesn’t mate with an elephant and live to tell the tale, you fool of a girl,’ Granny had said. ‘If you’ve got any regard for your life, you’ll get yourself down to the doctor you were so fond of talking about a few months ago.’
The Richmond address, written on a scrap of paper, was long gone. Jenny hadn’t planned on needing it.
‘You did it to nark your sister,’ Granny had said. ‘And the only one it will nark is you. Jim was cut out o
f his mother six weeks early and he still weighed nine pounds.’
Angry Gertrude. Months of her anger. She couldn’t believe it. ‘You did it right under my nose,’ she’d said. ‘And I was fool enough to trust you, to think you’d learnt your lesson.’
Jenny had climbed up to the shed roof and jumped off, hoping to dislodge what had lodged inside her. She’d sprained the same ankle she’d sprained in Melbourne, though worse this time. For ten days she’d been a sitting duck for Gertrude’s anger.
The others growing inside her had been like cans of maggots. This one had been like the fluttering of a butterfly — for a time. By November it had turned into an elephant wearing football boots.
That’s when Gertrude had started talking about hospitals and doctors cutting. Then, on the third day of December, Jenny had woken before dawn knowing the baby had started vacating his crowded premises. She hadn’t said a word though. Had been determined to stay away from the hospital. Amber was down there.
She’d gone for a walk at six, hoping to force it out. The other two had come fast. Not this one. Its head had jammed in her pelvis — so Gertrude said at ten, when she sent Lenny into town to get the garage man.
By the time Maisy arrived, Jenny, aware she’d been written down to die with Vern Hooper’s grandson stuck inside, stopped arguing about the hospital, didn’t care if the doctor sliced her in half with a crosscut saw just as long as he took that pain away.
They knocked her out with chloroform and dragged Jimmy out with forceps, dragged him out alive, but barely. She wasn’t allowed to see him. The sisters and the matron knew she wasn’t married. They told her it would be easier to give him up if she didn’t see him.
Late on the fifth night, she got out of bed and went looking for the baby nursery.
She knew Amber was there, though Maisy had assured her that the maternity wards were well away from where they’d put Amber. But they didn’t put unmarried mothers in the maternity wards.
If the hospital had supplied sharp knives, Jenny might have died in the corridor on the day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Two night sisters pulled Amber off, then they took Jenny to the nursery and let her hold Jimmy.
His head was elongated, his face was scratched and bruised, he was the ugliest, most misshapen scrap of Hooper humanity ever born. He looked more Martian than Hooper, but she fell in love with him anyway, almost drowned him in tears, wouldn’t give him back for an hour.
Babies’ heads find their true shape fast, scratches heal, bruises fade. He was beautiful now. He had the Hooper chin and Jenny’s ears, the Hooper hands and Jenny’s eyes, though not so blue. He had Jim’s mouth — before he’d been fitted with his false teeth. He didn’t have the Hooper hairline or Jenny’s, Gertrude said. He had Georgie’s nature — and he was worth every week of Gertrude’s anger, every hour of pain, every day of embarrassment at the hospital, even worth being almost stabbed to death with a blunt knife. He was worth everything.
She’d registered him at the hospital as James Hooper Morrison, but from the night she’d first held him, he’d been little Jimmy.
Gertrude, still convinced he’d been born of Jenny’s desire to break up Sissy’s wedding, didn’t hold it against him. She’d been born a Hooper. Here now was a grandchild of her own blood.
‘He’s got the Hoopers’ double-jointed thumbs,’ she said the first time she checked him over.
‘Lucky he hasn’t got their ears or they never would have pulled him out,’ Jenny said.
‘You’ve got no shame, my girl.’
No shame, no conscience, no husband, not much of a life, but a son she couldn’t get enough of.
And Gertrude was besotted by him. Her grandfather had those thumbs, she said. Her own father had them, Vern had them. She’d wanted to tell Vern about his grandson when Jimmy was two weeks old. Jenny put her foot down about that. Lenny had told her in detail how he’d knocked on Vern Hooper’s door the morning Jimmy was born.
‘You can’t keep secrets in this town,’ Gertrude said. ‘He’ll find out he’s Jim’s boy.’
‘He won’t get close enough to find out, Granny.’
Famous last words. Kids had to have injections and Granny refused to allow Elsie to take him into town.
‘You had him,’ she said to Jenny. ‘You take him in.’
Those damn injections . . . and calling into Blunt’s afterwards. That’s what had ruined everything.
COMMUNICATIONS
Dear Jim,
You bloody fool of a boy. I don’t know what the hell you were thinking of, but I’ve just now seen the proof of what you got up to with that wild little Morrison bugger. There is no denying that he’s a Hooper. I need a letter stating that you’re claiming that boy and that you want him raised by your family . . .
Dear Jen,
I know you don’t want to hear from me but I just opened a letter from Pops and I need to know if he’s lost his marbles or if what he told me is the reason you didn’t answer my letters. He said that you’ve got a son by me and he wants a letter from me saying that I want my family to raise him . . .
Dear Jen,
I just received five pages from Margaret. She said she’s seen the baby and that you named him for me. They can’t all be going mad so it must be me. I feel as if I am.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to have anything to do with me. I did the wrong thing by you and I know that you think I’m no better than the rest, but you’ve got to know what being with you meant to me. It’s the place where my mind goes when it’s got no place to go. I told you I loved you and I do, and nothing will ever change that. Please write to me and let me know what’s going on down there.
All my love,
Jim
Dear Jen,
I received an out-of-focus snapshot from Margaret today and I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life. You should have told me. You must have known I’d stand by you.
Thank God, I know now why you wouldn’t write to me. I must have said that fifty times since I opened Margaret’s letter. I nearly drove myself mad in trying to work out why you didn’t write back. All I could think of was that you’d met someone else.
I know how your head works. I’ve always known. For your own sake you have to stop thinking that way. Pops has got a beehive up his backside about Jimmy and when he gets like this, he doesn’t care how much he’s stung as long as he is stinging the one responsible.
I can’t see much of Jimmy in the shot. Margaret points that camera and if she sees something in the frame she calls it good enough. I want to see him, Jen. I don’t know how much John McPherson charges, but I’m enclosing five pounds in the hope that you’ll get him to take a good shot and send it to me . . .
Dear Jim,
Please find enclosed your five-pound note and stop writing to me.
Jenny
My dearest Jen,
I love you and I cherish your fourteen words. Please find enclosed five pounds. I still want a photo.
We’ve got a son together and even if we only do it for his sake, you have to marry me. I’ve put in for compassionate leave, though how I’ll get down there and back I don’t know.
Margaret told me what has been going on between you and Pops. He likes to get his own way and Lorna is as bad as him. He’s spent years telling me I’m too much like my mother, and Lorna has spent the same amount of time telling me not to be like my father. The best thing I ever did was join up and get away from them, and find out that I’m a bit like Mum and Pops.
I’m like him in knowing what I want, and I want to marry you . . . and Jimmy. I’m as determined as him, too. The day he had his stroke he accused me of getting engaged to Sissy so he’d put money into doing up Monk’s place. Maybe I did . . .
Dear Jim,
Please find the five-pound note, which is a pittance compared to what your father just offered me. He came down here this afternoon with his solicitor wanting to buy Jimmy for five hundred pounds. People come down here to buy eggs and goa
t’s milk, don’t they? Why not buy a baby? Anyway, to get to why I’m writing. I told him I was going to marry you as soon as you can get home, so just in case he says anything to you, you’ll know I only said it to nark him . . . like Granny thinks I only had Jimmy to nark Sissy.
Jenny
PS One hundred and six words.
‘I ought to marry him, Granny.’
‘You ought to get those napkins on the line, too.’
Wilma Roberts had married Ron Davies in June. Barbara Duffy broke from the family tradition to wed a Willama boy. Dora Palmer was engaged to be married. Love happened faster during wartime.
Attitudes changed, too. Mrs Bull, the publican’s wife, in her mid-fifties, caught the train to Melbourne in June, a pillow stuffed down her dress, so Maisy said. In July she came home with a new baby. She told Maisy he was a change of life baby, that she hadn’t known he was on the way. Maisy swore the baby was Gloria’s or Victoria’s, but no one really cared if it was or not. Horrie Bull, never seen on the wrong side of his hotel bar, was out every Sunday pushing a pram.
‘I could have trained to be a nurse.’
‘I could have been the Queen of England if I’d been born in a palace. I was born here, and this is where I am. And we’re going to have to do something about putting on another room.’
‘You could live with me out at Monk’s if I married Jim.’
‘My goats wouldn’t get on with his sheep. Now stop your pipedreaming. There’s a good wind out there today for drying.’
They were reliant on the elements at Granny’s house; on the rain to fill the tank, on the wind to dry the napkins, on the frost to sweeten the oranges.
Dear Jim,
You’ll wed that hot-pants little slut over my dead body . . .
Dear Pops,
They’d give me compassionate leave if there was a death in the family. They might even fly me down there. We could do the wedding before the funeral . . .