by Joy Dettman
Pops used to tell me that everything, the good, the bad and the indifferent, all happened for a reason. I do a lot of thinking about the past lately, and for once, he could be right.
If you hadn’t had Margot forced on you, you wouldn’t have had Georgie, Bobby Vevers wouldn’t have been trying to pick you up the night you went to see Gone with the Wind, I wouldn’t have decided to see you home, and if all of that had never happened, Jimmy would never have been born. Apart from you, he’s the best thing that ever happened to me — which I told Pops when I wrote to him, which might be another reason why he hasn’t written back.
I’m running out of light. It gets dark early. I’ve got our photos out and your poem, and just now I crossed out ‘beggar’ and wrote in ‘goddess’ because that’s what you are, my singing goddess. I only wish I was there to hear you.
Love you both.
Yours,
Jim XXXXX
She folded the letter, slid it into its envelope and walked to the window to look north to where he was — somewhere north, up where the weather was always hot. No sun on her window yet, not much sun anywhere today. She’d have to go to the bank and find out how to make a withdrawal, or go home — unless the Yanks came back to town and the tips picked up.
It must have been close to noon. She had bread and a little milk left, some cheese, plenty of lard. Fried cheese sandwiches for lunch, she thought. They always reminded her of Norman. He’d loved fried cheese sandwiches. He wouldn’t be missing Amber. He’d be making a mess in her kitchen.
Jimmy had one of her sandals on and was attempting to stand. He’d grown tall. He’d probably end up as tall as Jim.
She heard footsteps whispering up the passage. Jimmy heard them too. He tossed the sandal and headed for the door. Myrtie at his door could mean macaroni cheese, or tomato soup.
There was no invitation to lunch today. Myrtle Norris, who lived in mortal fear of telegrams, had one in her hand — and fear in her big brown eyes. To Jenny, telegrams were a swift means to an end. Maybe Jim had got leave. Maybe he was already back in Australia.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and she opened it.
She should have feared this one. Shouldn’t have opened this one. She threw the thing from her and backed away from it.
Myrtle picked it up. She read it.
SAD NEWS STOP JIM HOOPER MISSING IN ACTION STOP LETTER FOLLOWING STOP COME HOME GRAN
‘My dear, dear girl.’
Jimmy sitting on the floor, using a sandal as a hammer. Bang. Bang. Bang. He knew it wasn’t true. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Granny just wanted her to go home, that’s all. Every time she wrote she nagged her about going home. It was a trick. Vern had probably told her to do it.
Bang. Bang. Bang. The sandal or her heart hammering. But Myrtle had the sandal, had Jimmy in her arms.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
And Jimmy chuckling, wanting to rip up that lying telegram, knowing full well it was a lie. Two hours ago, Daddy had sent him a proxy kiss.
She clasped Jim’s letter to her breast, using it to hold her lurching heart inside. He was alive and well in that letter and Granny’s bloody telegram wasn’t going to kill him.
Couldn’t breathe, because Granny would never do such a thing.
And her fool’s paradise came crashing down on her, crushing the breath from her lungs.
She was a jinx. Everything she touched, she ruined. If not for her, Jim would have been married now to Sissy and living in Monk’s house. She was a disease, a contagious disease. If she hadn’t climbed out the window the night of the ball, she wouldn’t have been raped. If she hadn’t got on the train . . .
Jimmy’s arms reaching out to her.
Had to stay away from him. She’d jinx him, too.
Myrtle’s eyes leaking, her mouth full up with la-di-da words, opening, closing, making empty talk bubbles.
Blood rushing in Jenny’s ears, thumping in her head. Shook her head. Missing. Missing.
‘Can I call someone for you, pet?’
No one. Only Jim.
And Jimmy.
And she hadn’t wanted Jimmy anyway, not when he’d first got started. She’d willed him out of her. Climbed up on the roof of the shed and jumped, trying to shake him out of her.
Hadn’t asked to start loving him.
Hadn’t asked to start loving goblin-eared Jimmy Hooper who had taught her how to keep pushing that ice-cream down with her tongue while crunching on the cone so that you had ice-cream left right down to that last bite.
Missing. Not dead. Had to get away, find space to think. Missing meant missing. Lots of soldiers went missing.
That’s what they wrote when there was not enough left of the soldier to find.
And she pushed past Myrtle and Jimmy and she ran. Ran back the way she’d walked the first day with Jim, ran fast, attempting to turn back time, ran with his letter in her hand until her lungs started whooping in great breaths, until she knew that no one could turn back time. Walked then, walked anywhere, up hills and down hills, walked while the day grew cooler. Walked north, south, anywhere, the wheels of her mind grinding in circles that all came back to blown to bits — like she’d been willing Maisy’s twins to be blown to bits.
The knowledge that Jim had already been blown to bits when she’d read his letter came to her in a street she didn’t know. Walked on, searching her mind for a day when he wasn’t dead.
She had to leave time for Vern to get the news from the army, time for Granny to hear the news, time for Granny to saddle her horse, ride into town, send off that telegram, time for those words to fly from Woody Creek to Melbourne, from Melbourne to Sydney, time for the telegram to be written on paper, for the boy to ride up the hill and knock on Myrtle’s front door.
On Friday night when she’d sung, when she’d danced with two boys in her once-red dress and high-heeled sandals, he’d been . . . missing. On Thursday when she’d sat in the library looking up places in the atlas. Last Wednesday maybe. What had she done last Wednesday? Couldn’t remember last Wednesday.
Time wasn’t real. It began to lean, to wobble. And the pavement beneath her feet wobbled. And the street ahead grew misty.
Give it up. Just give up. You can’t control what you can’t control. Just let go and give in. It’s no use.
She’d let go the night Margot had come out. She’d let go the night she’d found out what Laurie wanted. Just let go and let whatever happened happen.
Amber let go and ended up in a madhouse.
Jolt in her heart and in her mind. She wasn’t Amber. Grasped hold of a picket fence. She wasn’t Amber. Never would be Amber. Grasped the point of one splintery picket too hard, drove a splinter into the pad of her palm. And crushed Jim’s envelope. Blood on her palm. If she’d got blood on that envelope it would mean he was dead. No blood on it. Slid it in safe beneath her bra strap and stood looking at the hole in her hand. Hurting. But the pain was good. It was something she could take hold of, concentrate on.
A woman at her gate watching her howl. Jenny wiped her eyes and walked on, got around the corner where no one was watching. Walked and howled until the long creeping tendrils of an overgrown rosebush caught her frock with its thorns.
Like Granny’s climbing rosebush, always ready to grab. She eased her frock free, wiped her eyes and looked at the bush. It had covered a side fence. Now it wanted the front fence.
One rose, a red rose, still blooming, too high to reach.
’Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone.
He’d brought her here. That rose was his final goodbye.
All her lovely companions are faded and gone.
And she wanted that rose. He’d meant her to have it.
Lone one, I’ll not leave thee to pine on the stem. All the lovely are sleeping, so sleep thee now with them . . .
If she walked away from that rose, he was dead. She had to reach it, keep it alive in water, then he’d be alive. Just . . . just missing . . . just lying in some jungle
somewhere, just shot in the leg like Nobby. If she could get that rose home, they’d find him and take him to a hospital.
She wiped her eyes on her petticoat, wiped her nose on it, and reached into the mass of thorny growth until she found the branch the rose was growing on. Didn’t care whose rose it was or who may have been watching her. And she got it, snapped it from its stem.
It smelled of Woody Creek, at sundown, in spring. It steadied her world. They’d find him now. They’d find him and send him home.
And she had to find her own way home.
She turned right at the corner and walked on, smelling the rose. She stood a while beside a larger road, seeking a landmark, a direction. She’d walked one too many roads today and not taken a scrap of notice where she was going. She was lost, didn’t know if she should walk right or left. She looked for the sun. It had been lost beneath low clouds all day and the day was almost done. No east, no west, like the day she’d arrived in Sydney.
She had to ask someone, that was all.
She turned into a lane. Only rear gates and back fences there, but it led her to a street of factories. Signs hung beside doors, on doors, over doors, all screaming VACANCY. APPLY WITHIN.
The sound of hammer on metal. Making more guns to kill more boys.
She walked by fast and stood a moment before a boot factory. Everyone busy in there making boots for soldiers to march in — die in.
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead.
Walked by an old green door in need of paint, a cardboard sign pinned to it with drawing pins. VACANCY MACHINISTS. APPLY WITHIN.
What were they making in there for that bloody war? Uniforms so the boys might die well dressed?
He wasn’t dead. Another telegram would come tomorrow saying that they’d found him.
It had been near noon when she’d left the boarding house, was four, four thirty now and the day darkening. She had to find her way back to Jimmy.
She was crossing the road when a crowd of laughing girls came pouring out through a factory door. She watched them light cigarettes, watched them walk in bunches in the opposite direction. They’d lead her to somewhere. She followed them.
They led her to a station, not to her station but it was on her line. She had no money to buy a ticket but she could follow the railway lines back to Myrtle’s station, or follow the road that followed the lines.
Night had settled over Sydney before she reached the boarding house. Exhausted, legs more weary than they’d ever been, head still heavy with tears, and Myrtle Norris standing on the porch watching for her.
‘Come through, pet.’ Jenny walked into warmth. ‘Did you speak to your family?’
Myrtle Norris lived in a magical world where telephones rang, where milk was delivered to her door in bottles, where onions were bought by the bunch from the greengrocer. She had no concept of a hut two miles from town, of goats in the front paddock, chooks in the yard, row upon row of vegetables growing between shed and house. Jenny didn’t attempt to explain. She just wanted Jimmy. She needed to hold him, have his little hands holding her. She needed to put that rose in water, keep it alive so Jim would live too.
WINDOWS AND DOORS
Bobby Vevers had been missing for weeks before his family learned he’d been taken prisoner by the Japs — and just when they’d got their hopes up about that, the Red Cross got word through that he’d died in the Jap prison camp. One of the Murphy boys had died in Africa, died a hero’s death so they said. One of the Dobsons’ older boys had been on a boat torpedoed by those killing bastards. Vern Hooper wasn’t the first in Woody Creek to lose a son. A boy turned eighteen now and unless he was crosseyed and had a gammy leg, the army took him. Woody Creek had bred a lot of boys. Vern had bred only one, and one who never would have been called up to fight, being an only son with a sick father and a farm to run.
A man doesn’t cry. Vern spent his days walking, cursing the girl responsible.
‘Hot-blooded little half-dago bitch. She never would have looked at my boy if he hadn’t been engaged to her sister. Bloody little goldie-headed prostitute bitch.’
For two days Gertrude stayed with him in town and ignored his cursing. If blaming Jenny gave him a focus right now, she’d allow it. He wasn’t well enough to take the stress of this waiting to hear if Jim was alive or dead. Strip control away from a man accustomed to control and what was left to him? Not much.
He watched her addressing an envelope to Jenny, watched her enclose a money order to cover her fare home.
‘Bloody Amberley,’ he said. ‘She’s got that boy up there living in a brothel.’
‘It’s a respectable boarding house and he’s being well cared for,’ Gertrude said.
‘How do you know he’s well cared for? How do you know what the hell she’s getting up to? You didn’t know what she was getting up to in Melbourne. Selling herself for two bob a time, and that’s what she’s doing up there now — like her bloody mother . . .’
‘She’s singing in a club, Vern, and you know it.’
‘I don’t know it and neither do you.’
‘I know it.’
His railing continued too long. Gertrude found herself biting back replies — and not biting back replies to Lorna.
That girl had been carved from granite. If the telegram from the war department had shaken her, she’d absorbed the blow. More male than female, Lorna, born with Vern’s desire for control. Some man had been saved a mess of pain by her spinsterhood.
Gertrude remained in town until Saturday morning, when she told Vern it was time she went home, that she had two little girls to see to.
‘You’ve always had someone else to put before me, haven’t you?’ he said.
‘I’ve put no man before you, and there’s nothing to stop you from spending a few days out there with me.’
Nothing to stop him but two illegitimate kids and a lack of comfort, a lack of conveniences.
She went home, and on Tuesday learned from Maisy that Vern had been admitted to hospital. Maybe he needed to be there. Maybe his daughters needed him to be there.
Gertrude’s letter and the ten-pound money order arrived in Myrtle’s mailbox on Tuesday morning and Jenny wasn’t there to receive it.
She’d waited at the boarding house all day Thursday, at the gate through Friday, certain another telegram would come. By Sunday, when Myrtle and Miss Robertson walked off to church, the rose petals had started drooping, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t allow them to fall. She’d taken the flower from the glass of water and pressed it flat between the pages of Rebecca, had weighted those pages down with a brick she found behind the washhouse.
A busy day Sunday. The landlady had knocked on her door around midday to invite her down for lunch. She’d brought her minister home from church, a Reverend Nightingale, and he looked more underfed blue crane than nightingale.
‘God has a master plan for all of us,’ he’d said, shaking her hand with fingers that collapsed under her small pressure. And maybe that was the first real thing Jenny had noticed since Wednesday. She’d shaken a few hands, but never one that collapsed into spiders’ legs.
He’d prayed before they’d eaten. She felt embarrassed for him praying in Myrtle’s parlour. Hadn’t listened to his words, just wondered why all ministers used that same high-pitched singsong voice. Maybe God had a hearing loss. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hear most people’s prayers. Maybe she should have done her own praying in singsong tones.
She’d prayed for Jim every single night since he’d left. Please God, keep him away from the Japs. Please God, let him come home soon. Please God, make the war end. She’d believed in God when she was a kid, like she’d believed in Father Christmas. At five she’d woken up to the fat man with the fake beard. It had taken a few more years to work out that God was Father Christmas for grown-ups.
Myrtle had never worked it out. She stood with her head bowed while the minister prayed for Jim’s safety and for the safety of the other fighting boys — while at th
at same moment, thousands of boys were being shot, bombed, drowned, blown to pieces. Jenny stared at the parlour wall, praying that his praying would end soon. Jimmy wanted to eat.
He saw it first. He jabbered, pointed to the wall. The minister had called down a scrap of heaven; there was a rainbow behind him. Jenny turned to find its source. Only the sun, shining in through Myrtle’s leadlight window, reflecting its colours.
But the praying was done. ‘Has your son been baptised, Mrs Hooper?’ the minister said.
Jenny shook her head as she carried Jimmy closer to that pretty wall.
‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘Pretty rainbow.’
‘Pity,’ he mimicked.
‘Daddy painted a pretty rainbow for Jimmy,’ she said.
‘Dad-dada,’ he said.
Had the girls mimicked so many words at his age? She couldn’t remember. She could remember every detail of Jimmy’s growth. In some future year, she’d tell him that he’d said ‘dada’ before he was ten months old, that he’d said ‘pretty’ at seventeen months old, that he’d crawled at six months, walked at ten, cut his first tooth at eight months.
‘What a clever boy you are,’ Myrtle said.
‘Perhaps we could take care of that next Sunday, Mrs Hooper.’
She brushed the hair from Jimmy’s eyes. Too much hair, like his father. He needed a haircut. ‘I’m going home,’ she said. ‘But thank you very much for your thoughtfulness.’
She had to go home. Jim had created Mrs Jennifer Hooper. He’d created the club singer. She’d already gone. Myrtle had telephoned Wilfred at work on Friday morning.
That afternoon she started packing up number five, and every move she made reminded her of the first time she’d packed it up, and every move too sad. Wanted to howl when she tossed Jimmy’s outgrown clothes in a pile on that double bed, clothes he’d worn when Jim had been in this room.
Myrtle’s shoes whispering again in the passage at four. Jimmy headed for the door, eager to greet her.
‘Mr Whiteford is on the phone, pet. Will you speak with him?’