Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  The girls are doing well, and your gran is thrilled that you’re using that God-given voice, as is Amy McPherson. We always have a good talk when I cut her hair.

  Amy McPherson now, no more Miss Rose, but always Miss Rose to Jenny. She was still teaching at the school. Maisy said she’d wed too late to have her own children — or maybe she’d had enough of other people’s children when she locked the door of her schoolroom each afternoon.

  Still putting on her Christmas concerts, still wearing that same sharp-cut bob, trimmed by Maisy every month or two.

  . . . that’s what happens I suppose when you’ve spent your life practising your hair-cutting skills on ten kids. I seem to have become the local hairdresser. I don’t know how old she is but she was teaching there when Maureen started school. Her hair still looks auburn from a distance but up close you can see that she’s going grey.

  I was telling Amy that Margot has inherited your voice, how she sings with the radio when she’s in here. Amy said she’d be a welcome addition to her concerts when she gets to school. She’s not much of a talker, Margot, but she can definitely hold a tune . . .

  Jenny dreamed of Woody Creek that night, a near pleasant dream until it moved her to Norman’s parlour. Too real then. She was sitting across from Amber, working with her on a huge piece of embroidery, acres of it, and scared stiff because she was working her corner with blue thread when she should have been working it with maroon. Still scared of Amber in her dreams. Still woke up with her heart thumping from Amber dreams. Scared too of Amber’s blood running in her veins. She’d left her kids in Woody Creek, as Amber had left her and Sissy . . . It wasn’t the same though. Every week, when she could afford it, she enclosed a ten-shilling note in her letters to Gertrude. Amber had never written, not in the six years she’d gone missing. Anyway, knowing what Amber was, was being forearmed against ever being like her — like standing with your gun aimed and your pockets full of hand grenades, ready to fight off the enemy as soon as you sighted her peeping over the horizon.

  20 November 1942

  Dear Jennifer,

  Running away from a life that’s been less than you might have wanted it to be isn’t going to change what went before. I knew a man once who thought he could keep starting over, but each time he got started he ended up making the same mess he’d left behind in the last place. You can’t keep re-creating yourself and leaving the threads of who you are behind. You’ll turn around one day and find yourself tangled up in them.

  Whoever you are calling yourself, whatever tales you might be telling to your new friends, you are who you are, and trying to pretend that you’re someone else will only lead to trouble. And I don’t care how well the landlady and your teacher friend look after Jimmy — you can’t raise a little boy in a boarding house room. He’s at an age where he’s forming his attachments to people, and he should be forming them with his sisters and family . . .

  25 November 1942

  Dear Granny,

  Myrtle isn’t just a landlady. She’s my fairy godmother and she’s a damn sight better mother to me than the one I had. I had dinner with her the other night and we sat in her parlour knitting, and not once did she suddenly turn around and stab me with her knitting needle.

  And as for Jimmy forming attachments to his family, that’s a lot of hoo-ha. I spent fourteen years attempting to form an attachment to my sister and it didn’t work. I spent years sleeping in her bed and the best we ever managed was not to kill each other.

  Some people are born outcasts, and I’ve been an outcast of that family all of my life, and an outcast of the town, too, for the last few years. Apart from you and Elsie’s mob, and Maisy, all that’s waiting for me back there are sneers and Vern Hooper . . .

  November 1942

  Dearest Jen and Jimmy,

  By the time this gets to you, Jimmy could have had his birthday. Give him a birthday kiss from me.

  I wish I was there to hear you singing. I’ll never forget the first time I heard you. You were knee-high to a grasshopper and wearing a hat almost as big as you were . . .

  She had the dream of her life that night. She was out at the clothes line, maybe Amber’s clothes line, and the sky was full of miniature soldiers, swarming like a plague of grasshoppers wearing parachutes. She was pegging out talent quest envelopes, piles of them, Granny’s laundry basket was overflowing with them, and those tiny soldiers were landing in it and putting their dirty feet on her white washing. And she was not going to stand for that. She started stepping on the soldiers, crushing their parachutes that weren’t parachutes at all, but those tiny umbrella mushrooms that grew in clumps in the bush. Saw the face of one miniature soldier as she was about to crush it beneath her shoe, and it wasn’t a Jap’s face. It was the twins’ face. They all wore the twins’ face and there she was, stomping on them, grinding them into the lawn, she squashed an entire battalion of those twins.

  3 December 1942

  Dear Jenny,

  Give Jimmy a kiss from me and his sisters for his birthday. Vern took another bad turn on Tuesday and I ended up taking my life into my hands and driving with him to Willama. Lorna drove, and that girl couldn’t drive a goat to a field of clover. The doctors think he might have a touch of sugar diabetes. They are keeping him in for a few days, to starve him back to health, as his doctor said. He won’t listen to a thing I tell him.

  Margaret showed me a photograph of the three of you taken in Sydney. It’s a lovely photograph of you, of all three of you. I hope you’ve got some feeling for that boy and that you’re not just leading him a dance . . .

  10 December 1942

  Dear Granny,

  I’ve booked my seat for the week before Christmas. I’ll be travelling as far as Melbourne with Mrs Collins. I’m glad for your sake that you’re on good terms with Vern, but if I were you I’d make a lot of hay while the sun is shining because it won’t be shining when I get home. As soon as I step down from that train, he’ll get over his diabetes and start sending his solicitor’s letters . . .

  She didn’t want to go home, but Mrs Collins was travelling down to Melbourne to spend the Christmas holidays with her son and his family, and the opportunity to travel those miles with a companion convinced Jenny to book her seat. She’d told Wilfred she was going home, she’d told Myrtle.

  Then, on her last Friday night at the club, Wilfred told her the band had two big paying jobs over Christmas and New Year.

  It was excuse enough. She cashed in her ticket.

  Dear Granny,

  I’ll say sorry first, sorry repeated twenty times, but Mr White-ford has got two big jobs over Christmas so I won’t be coming home.

  Please try to imagine what it must be like for me up here, to be respectable Mrs Jennifer Hooper, the singer, instead of Jenny Morrison, with TOWN SLUT tattooed on my forehead . . .

  She sang with her elderly gentlemen friends on Christmas Eve. Wilfred had to be in his late sixties and the other two band members looked no younger. It was like going out to a party with three Normans — but happy Normans. Basil, tall, grey and courtly, who worked for a solicitor; Peter, round, bald and shy, who owned a music shop; and Wilfred, a leprechaun with magic fingers. They knew who she was, and it wasn’t Jenny Morrison, town slut. She’d gone, and she was staying gone, and Jenny Hooper was staying in Sydney — and if she was staying in Sydney, she needed clothes.

  She spent her Christmas Eve earnings on a bottle of black fabric dye and one of leather dye. She bought a secondhand preserving pan, a long-handled metal spoon and a pound of salt, and when Jimmy was down for the night, and the lodgers’ kitchen was empty, she half filled the preserving pan with hot water and set it on the largest gas ring to boil.

  Amberley was deserted, apart from Miss Robertson, one of the men, and the two middle-aged sisters who shared a room. They came down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea at nine, and stayed on to watch Jenny change the personality of her red sandals with black leather dye. The red dress and the gruesome lime gr
een hung over the back of a chair, waiting for their own dose of respectability. She knew the red might not take the dye, but it was useless to her as it was. The lime green would dye; it was a heavy cotton. By nine thirty the water in the pan was boiling. Jenny added the contents of the dye bottle, added salt, gave her brew a good stir then eased in the red frock. It turned black in an instant, so she dropped in the lime green and stirred. The instructions on the bottle said to keep the fabric moving for half an hour. She stirred her brew for an extra ten minutes, desperate for those dresses.

  Her fingernails were black, her hands grey when she crawled late into bed. They’d wear clean. The frocks had looked black when she’d hung them dripping on the line — by night they’d looked black. If they dried streaked and useless, she’d know she was meant to go home. She slept, her stained fingers crossed.

  The once-lime green was as black as coal and not a streak on it. The once-red was black, but with a slight reddish sheen — and neither one had fallen apart in the dye bath.

  She pressed them that morning and tried them on — and the once-lime green looked so smart, so Sydney. She loved it. Dye hadn’t altered the neckline of the once-red, but she’d soon fix that. Maybe a white trim, white cuffs on the sleeves.

  She wore the ex-lime green on New Year’s Eve, with her ultra high-heeled ex-red sandals, and because it was her birthday she took her pearl-in-a-cage earrings and pendant from their box.

  Every time she wore them they brought back memories of the old swagman who had found that pendant in the park. He’d said he’d found it — had probably stolen it, because two years later he’d posted the matching earrings to her.

  He hadn’t looked like a thief. A few of the swaggies were. He hadn’t looked like a swaggie either. In his black overcoat, with his foot-long clean white beard, he’d looked like Noah from the Bible — hadn’t been as godly — Constable Denham had locked him up for molesting Maryanne Duffy. He’d been found guilty too, but he’d been the first person in the world to give Jenny something beautiful, and for that she’d never forget him.

  She’d never forget her nineteenth birthday, either, and driving out to a party with her three elderly gentlemen friends. God only knew how they found some of the halls of the dances, the houses of the revellers, but they did. Maybe New Year’s Eve parties in Sydney had always been frantic, or maybe it was the war, but Jenny was paid good money to be there and she sang her heart out.

  A hot sweaty night, that one, black dye from her sandals rubbed off on her stockings, dye from her dress turned her bra grey beneath the armpits, but she bought a black bra with her earnings, changed her mind about a white trim for the once-red dress and bought a quarter of a yard of black guipure lace instead. And when it was stitched in across the neckline, that frock screamed expensive, screamed respectability.

  She bought Jimmy a tiny sailor-boy suit, with navy shorts that buttoned to a white and navy shirt, and he looked so smart in his new outfit, Mr Fitzpatrick offered to take a photograph.

  Dear Jim,

  It seems strange writing 1943 but it’s going to be the best year. I know you’ll look at the photograph before you read this. Mr Fitzpatrick took it for me with three others. Jimmy was being at his most charming. He’s not always so charming. He’s saying a lot more now and he knows what he’s saying. He can say ‘car’ and ‘puppy’ and ‘bickie’ and a heap of things, and he thinks the photograph we had taken at the studio is called Daddy. Everyone talks to him, a few spoil him. He’s like a favourite boarding house pet . . .

  With Mrs Collins away through much of January, the landlady claimed babysitting rights. Jenny arrived home one Friday evening to find Jimmy asleep on the landlady’s bed. He’d woken so she’d taken him downstairs. Near January’s end, Mrs Collins returned, and brought a bundle of her grandson’s outgrown clothing back with her, and suddenly Jimmy had a ton of little boy clothes and a few to grow into — and Mrs Norris started inviting him and Jenny to Sunday dinners.

  She made an incredible macaroni cheese casserole, a delicious minced steak stew that didn’t even taste like meat. She made puddings and rich custards — no wonder she was overweight — but Jimmy loved her dinners. He loved Myrtie, too. If he saw her in the yard, he called her name, ran to her, and reached towards her with willing arms. He loved exploring her private quarters when they ate there on Sunday nights; he had an entire passage to play in, a parlour couch he could climb on, a kitchen table to crawl beneath. Perhaps he was beginning to resent the restriction of number five’s closed door.

  In February, Jenny wrote in a letter to Maisy that Mrs Norris wasn’t la-di-da at all, not in the true sense of the expression. She’d just been born with a plum in her mouth she couldn’t swallow when her posh family home had become a lodging house.

  Jim knew the Norris family history from Nobby, whose older sister was married to Robert Norris’s younger brother. He’d told Jim that Myrtle’s father was a paper millionaire who had played the share market and been burnt badly in the depression. He’d taken the long jump off the bridge, Nobby said.

  Myrtle Norris never mentioned her parents, never mentioned anything personal. She reminded Jenny of Norman — she said far too much without really saying anything. Jenny knew her husband was an army captain, stationed somewhere in England, but why he was way over there when the Japs were over here, she didn’t know.

  Their wedding photograph hung in the landlady’s parlour. Myrtle had been a plump but pretty bride. She had the shape to have borne more kids than Maisy, had breasts that might have fed a dozen babies, though if she’d had that dozen, they kept their distance — and she never mentioned them. She never mentioned Robert, apart from once mentioning that he’d taught English at a high school before the war.

  Like Norman, she never missed church. She and Miss Robertson walked off together on Sunday mornings at ten thirty on the dot; you could set the clock by them. They looked much of an age too. Jenny had put Miss Robertson’s age at mid-fifties, though the more she saw of Myrtle, the younger her face became. She had Norman’s big brown puppy dog eyes, expressive when she allowed them to have expression, which they had when she played with Jimmy. She had dark wavy hair and barely a streak of grey in it. Miss Robertson was all grey. Fat was aging. Maybe Myrtle Norris wasn’t as old as she dressed.

  The lodgers were all middle aged or older. Four were teachers. Miss Robertson taught arithmetic and Latin at a girls’ college. Mrs Collins taught English and art at the local high school where Mr Fitzpatrick taught history and geography. Miss Howell, a woman of forty-odd, taught at a local primary school. The two middle-aged Wilson sisters who shared number two worked as sales assistants in one of the big department stores in the city. They looked like sisters and acted like friends. The woman who lived in number six, the room opposite Jenny’s, worked in the office at a parachute factory, which may have been why Jenny had dreamt about parachutes.

  There were two single middle-aged men downstairs with Mr Fitzpatrick, segregated from the women. One was a salesman, the other worked in a bank. Jenny ran into them occasionally on her way to and from the lodgers’ sitting room. Their rooms were at the same end of the house, the back end.

  Jenny was out of time, out of place in this house, a child amongst adults. But on weekdays the other lodgers vacated Amberley between eight thirty and five, then the entire house belonged to her, the wireless in the sitting room belonged to her. She sat beside it, copying down the words of new songs, Jimmy climbing on chairs, crawling beneath them, yelling if he wanted to yell. The kitchen was their own between eighty thirty and five. They ate there, fried sausages there, fried cheese sandwiches.

  27 February 1943

  Dearest Jen and Jimmy,

  The weather up here is hard on photographs or maybe I wear them out with looking. He’s a real little man now, isn’t he? I’d love you to send one of those photos to Pops. Margaret says he’ not well. If you could bring yourself to do it, I’d appreciate it.

  It’s been a brutal wee
k. We kill them but they keep on coming. They’re a mad race. They’ll kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner.

  It’s hot up here, humid sticky heat. We’re driven mad by insects. We’re wet all the time, wet with sweat or rain or both and dropping like flies with malaria, and if we haven’t got that, we’ve got the runs or jungle rot. I oughtn’t to be writing this to you. They’ll probably black it out, but it gets into your head sometimes and you have to let it out or you’d start swinging from the trees . . .

  29 March 1943

  Dear Jim,

  I know what you mean about things getting into your head and having to let them out. I let this out last Saturday night. Wilfred and his friends have run out of jobs on Saturdays now that the party season is over. I wasn’t going to send it, but I read it again a minute ago and I thought why not, because it’s true.

  When fairy tales were written and dragons flew the skies,

  A gentle prince out riding heard strange and mournful cries,

  For a beggar she had fallen, and lay flat out in the dirt.

  The prince sprang from his gallant steed: ‘Dear lady, are you hurt?’

  ‘Kind sir,’ she said, ‘I am unclean, continue on your way

  For I’ll despoil your garments, if you long with me stay.’

  But he reached into the sticky mire and drew her to her feet.

  ‘Full many a year I’ve searched for you, and now finally we meet.’

  His tears were warm upon her face like raindrops falling down;

  They cleansed her face, her hands, her hair, they cleansed her linen gown.