Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  ‘He was only sixty-three,’ she said. ‘His father died young.’

  ‘How old was your grandfather when he died?’

  ‘Ninety-two and still ruling the roost. He died with his boots on, and after a good meal,’ Gertrude said. ‘That’s the way I’d like to go.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere — ever.’

  Howard Hooper was survived by his wife, one son and two grandsons. Gertrude got out her pen and ink to write them a line of condolence. She wrote no letter to the family of Victoria Foote. She had no husband to write to, no family to mourn her. Loved cousin of . . . so the newspaper said.

  ‘Was she the one Itchy-foot was supposed to have raped?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘There was no supposed about it,’ Gertrude said. ‘It says that she passed away peacefully in her Hawthorn home. I doubt she’d known much peace in the past fifty years, the poor soul.’

  ‘Did you see much of her?’

  ‘We left her father’s house six weeks after we wed. According to one of your grandfather’s cousins, the only time she left that house was when they took her off to a mental hospital.’

  PEACE

  Bobby Vevers had died in a Japanese prison camp. When photographs of those who had survived similar conditions started finding their way into the newspapers, no one wondered why Bobby Vevers had died. Joss Palmer, an army medic, was one of the first to see the men they carried out of Burma, or to see the skin and bones of what were once men. Joss’s letters to Jessie arrived uncensored now. Those at home were finally hearing the truth.

  I saw Billy Roberts and didn’t recognise him. He was near on six foot, must have weighed around twelve stone when he joined up. He’s a walking skeleton now — and barely walking. He recognised me, and his smile looked like a death mask. Most of the chaps we’re getting in will need months of rehabilitation before they’re repatriated to Australia.

  Joss wouldn’t be home for a while but a few of the boys stationed around Australia started arriving home.

  WHERE WILL THEY LIVE? the headlines shouted. With no war to write about, journalists were already attempting to take the shine off peace.

  It was a question which would have to be answered. In the next twelve months tens of thousands of men would be unloaded from the armed forces, many returning to wives, to fiancées, and expecting to set up homes. There was a serious housing shortage in Australia. Even in Woody Creek there was a housing shortage.

  ‘It’s one thing to take in your daughter and grandkids, another to take in their husbands. He’s not the boy she married, I can tell you that. The kids don’t even know him.’

  ‘What they seem to forget is that we’ve been keeping this country going while they’ve been away. Now we’re supposed to go back to the way it was five years ago.’

  ‘He’s forgotten how to live as a family man.’

  Joey Hall had been in a hospital in Brisbane. He came home in November. He’d forgotten how to share a sleep-out with a bunch of rambunctious kids. On his second night in Woody Creek, he carried his mattress across to Gertrude’s shed and tossed it onto the floor in the partitioned-off back corner he and Harry had once called a bedroom, the corner that housed Gertrude’s preserves, Jenny’s bathtub.

  ‘You can have it back in a day or two,’ he said. ‘I won’t be staying.’

  ‘That’s what I said a year ago,’ Jenny said. ‘Elsie and Granny won’t let you go. They’ve been counting the days.’ As had she.

  ‘There’s nothing here for me, Jen,’ he said. Jim had always called her Jen; Joey had picked up the habit back when they’d played penny poker.

  ‘George Macdonald said you could have your job back.’

  ‘That’s what I mean by nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m going back up north, up to the sugar country. I met a nurse who came from Bundaberg.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are you going to marry her?’

  ‘Maybe. She thinks I get my colouring from my grandfather, the Spanish pirate.’

  ‘You looked more like a pirate when you had your moustache.’

  ‘I’ll grow it again.’

  ‘Would she care who your grandfather was?’

  ‘Her folk would.’

  ‘You can’t . . .’ Can’t hide from who you are? Yes you can. She’d hidden in Sydney and it was a fine thing to do . . . or it was for a time. ‘You can’t go until we give them a good thrashing at five hundred,’ she said.

  He stayed five days. They played cards on Saturday night, played until midnight on Sunday, Lenny, Joey and Jenny against Harry, Elsie and Gertrude. Like a party, that night, like a goingaway party, and when Gertrude went home, when Elsie and Harry went to bed, Jenny, Joey and Lenny sat on, playing three-handed canasta until dawn.

  She walked with Joey to the station the night he left, waited with him, smoking his cigarettes, uncaring who stared. Norman stared. He probably heard Joey tell her to get out of this place any way she could.

  ‘You were going to be a famous singer, Jen,’ he said.

  ‘I was going to be a lot of things. I gave up daydreaming when Jim died.’

  ‘You’re only twenty-one.’

  ‘Almost twenty-two. I’m working on developing a ten-year plan, Joey. By the time I’m thirty, the kids will be in their teens. I’ll still be young enough to . . .’

  The train was coming. She kissed his cheek, stood waving his train away, wanting him to go off and be whoever he wanted to be. As Granny had said this morning, he’d never be more than Darkie Hall in Woody Creek.

  And the boys kept on coming home. Like Joey, a few didn’t stay long. A few wives left with them, a few left without their wives.

  Billy Roberts came home, and Jenny, who had sat in a classroom with him for years, barely recognised him.

  He recognised her. ‘It’s a tonic seeing you, Jenny,’ he said. He still looked as if he needed a tonic.

  ‘You too, Billy.’

  ‘I hear you’ve got three nippers now.’

  ‘I hear you were a bit of a hero in that Jap camp,’ she said, understanding his meaning, hoping he understood her own.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of you sometime,’ he said.

  ‘You’re seeing about as much of me as you’re likely to, Billy. The kids keep me busy.’

  They kept on coming, and Billy Roberts was not the only one who looked at her with anticipation. Johnny Lewis, brother of Weasel, damn near propositioned her when she was walking the kids home from school one afternoon.

  Then, on a Saturday in late November, when summer was flexing her muscles, eager to give spring the old heave-o, one of those Saturdays when Charlie White looked at his bike and wanted to ride, one of those days when Jenny craved ice-cream, she dressed the girls in matching floral, clad Jimmy in shorts and sandals and walked them into town.

  Georgie and Jimmy had legs bred to walk. Margot’s were short, but she walked now, and with less complaints. They were near King’s corner when Jenny saw the two too familiar khaki-clad shapes walking elbow to elbow half a block ahead.

  These past years her skin had grown thick enough to handle Billy Roberts and Johnny Lewis, but not them. She couldn’t face them. She turned tail and fled.

  The kids had walked for ice-cream and they wanted ice-cream. They grizzled for ice-cream. And why should they miss out because of a pair of stumpy-legged, no-necked, raping bastards?

  She turned down King Street towards the school end of town, turned right into Blunt’s Road, then headed back to the café.

  Mrs Crone, busy doing nothing, had always enjoyed the power she wielded over kids. Jenny’s bunch were waiting expectantly in a line at the counter when the wire door opened.

  ‘G’day,’ they chorused. ‘We heard you’d been a busy girl.’

  Not a flinch from Jenny; not the slightest turn of her head, until Georgie pulled on her arm, wanting her to see what she could see. All three kids had lost interest in ice-cream. They were staring at identical stran
gers who looked like George Macdonald in uniform.

  ‘They’re Maisy’s twins,’ Georgie accused.

  ‘Remember that swear word I said you weren’t ever allowed to say? That’s who they are. Four ice-creams when you’re ready, Mrs Crone.’

  ‘Make them double-headers,’ one twin said.

  ‘Make them what I ordered — when you’re ready Mrs Crone.’

  ‘Make up your minds,’ Mrs Crone snarled.

  ‘Double-headers,’ one twin said. The other one was offering Margot a two-shilling coin and she was reaching for it. Jenny dragged her back by her skirt, held her skirt and turned to watch the ice-cream scoop dig deep into the freezer.

  A double-header, and Jimmy’s hand reaching to take it. Jenny’s arm was longer. She took it from Mrs Crone’s hand, and mashed it into the nearest twin’s ear, ground it into his ear — and Mrs Crone stopped sneering to stand open mouthed.

  Pushed, pulled, dragged three open-mouthed kids out to the street, two looking back to their lost ice-cream, all three wanting to know why.

  ‘Walk, I said!’

  ‘You said we’d get an ice-cream.’

  ‘We’ll get it later.’

  ‘Why did they give Margot money for?’

  ‘They didn’t give her money, now stop your whying and walk.’

  ‘Maisy’s twins means Margot’s fathers, that’s why,’ Georgie accused.

  ‘I want ice-cream,’ Jimmy wailed.

  ‘I wan’ ithe-cweam,’ Margot grizzled.

  And those mongrels were out on the street and Jenny wanted to run away and leave those little buggers howling.

  ‘Walk. We’ll go and see your grandpa.’ Bribery can work with kids at times.

  ‘Why did Margot get two fathers and a nanna and Jimmy get one father and two grandpas and aunties and everything, and I didn’t get anything?’

  ‘Stop it, Georgie.’

  ‘I want my father and a double ice-cream.’

  ‘Your father gave you something a damn sight better than icecream, you brat of a kid. He gave you his beautiful hair and his eyes —’

  That did it. Georgie flopped to her backside and bawled. She didn’t do it often but when she did she could make more noise than the other two combined.

  The men hanging around the hotel were staring, and Jimmy was clearly planning to join the protest. Jenny dragged him up by his collar. Tried to lift Georgie. Try lifting a well-grown five-year-old kid when that five-year-old kid doesn’t want to be lifted. And that pair of khaki-clad mongrels smirking at her, one still digging ice-cream out of his ear.

  ‘He can’t see me . . . with no eyes,’ Georgie bawled.

  ‘Oh, Jesus! Of course he’s got eyes. I meant his eyes are exactly the same as your eyes.’

  ‘And hair.’

  ‘Lots of hair, exactly the colour of your hair. Now get up.’

  ‘I want you to get him.’

  ‘Stop your bawling and I’ll find you a picture of him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the newspaper.’

  It was a mistake, but it got that kid on her feet. Jenny walked them across the road, climbed between fence wires and led them through long grass to the station.

  Norman was surprised, probably embarrassed, but he offered his biscuits, and like locusts the kids ate until Jenny told them to stop. The twins stood out front of the hotel for a time, then went inside, and finally the kids got their ice-creams, double-headers.

  Most kids nag. Georgie could keep it up longer than most. She was still nagging about her father’s photograph when she went to bed.

  At eight, when Gertrude headed off across the goat paddock with her towel and nightwear, Jenny lifted the old shoe box down from the wardrobe and retrieved the newsprint mugshot of the water pistol bandit.

  She’d need a frame. Jimmy’s sailor suit photograph donated its frame. She found an empty Weeties packet, cut and trimmed Willy Weeties to fit the frame, then trimmed the newspaper to fit the cardboard. She didn’t trim off his name; Georgie would need to see that. She didn’t trim off the bit below his name, stating that he’d been charged with numerous offences, but it would be folded over the edge of the cardboard.

  She made flour and water glue in a cup, and while it was cooling Gertrude came in and caught her.

  ‘You could have found something better than that,’ she said. ‘Get her a nice picture out of one of Elsie’s magazines.’

  ‘He’s her father, Granny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s her father.’

  ‘What’s he doing in the newspaper?’ Gertrude reached for the newspaper.

  She wasn’t often speechless. She snatched up her reading glasses and couldn’t get them on with her hair wrapped in a towel, so she pitched the towel. Her hair was never left hanging. It hung and dripped that night.

  ‘That’s that boy . . .’

  ‘Who held up a jeweller with a leaking water pistol and stole cars to make his getaway in — Laurence George Morgan.’

  ‘I’m burning the thing.’

  ‘You’re not, Granny.’

  ‘You don’t want that little girl seeing something like that!’

  ‘She wants her father.’

  ‘He’s a jailbird!’

  ‘They only gave him three years. He’d be out by now. Give it to me.’

  ‘Where have you been keeping that thing all this time?’

  ‘Put away in case I needed it. I learned that from you.’

  ‘You didn’t learn to keep things like this,’ Gertrude said, evading Jenny’s hand and walking to the stove.

  ‘Don’t you dare burn it!’ Gertrude had opened the firebox. ‘Don’t you dare, Granny.’ She couldn’t make a grab for that paper. It was old, never meant to stand the test of time. ‘Please give it to me.’

  ‘There are things kids are better off not knowing, and this is one of them.’

  ‘If a kid doesn’t know the truth, she makes up her own.’

  ‘Tell her he died in the war.’

  ‘Lie to her?’

  ‘You’d be doing her a service.’

  ‘Like you and Dad did me a service when I was her age.’

  ‘We never lied to you.’

  ‘You did so. You told me my mummy was very sick so the doctors had sent her away to get better. Maisy told me that my mummy was up in heaven with God, that she was one of his angels. My mother damn near killed me when I was three years old, then she tried to cut Dad’s head off and they put her in a madhouse, Granny. And I would have been better off growing up knowing that instead of making a fool of myself by trying to love her when she came home.’

  ‘She was only in that place for a few months. She disappeared from the Willama hospital and for years we didn’t know if she was dead or alive. The constable we used to have up here found her six years after she disappeared. How were we supposed to explain that to a little girl?’

  ‘You should have tried — or you should have warned me to run like hell if I ever set eyes on her again.’

  ‘We thought she was well when she came home.’

  ‘She’s never been well. I saw her today. I took the kids to the station and she was standing at the fence down behind the lavatory, murdering me with her eyes — or murdering my kids — like she probably murdered Nelly Abbot because she looked like me.’

  ‘Stop that!’

  ‘And so did little Barbie.’

  ‘Stop that now!’

  ‘She hated me enough at the hospital to try — probably tried to burn all of us in our beds. I hate her, Granny, and I’m scared of her.’

  ‘She’s on her pills again, according to Maisy.’

  ‘Then they’re not doing her much good. Norman has got his ticket office set up like a kitchen — icebox, double burner primus. By the smell of the place, he fried steak and onions for his dinner last night.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘He asked after your health, though I doubt he heard my reply. He mentioned the weather, the
Nazi trials in Nuremberg — please give me that paper, Granny.’

  ‘You can’t show something like this to a little girl.’

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed you used to say, and there’s more of me in that kid than my hands. She needs the truth. And so do I. Did having me in a paddock traumatise my mother? Did I look too much like her father? Did he rape her like he raped his sister?’

  ‘I don’t know what he did to her — other than pass on his own weakness of the mind. He was incapable of loving anyone. I doubt that your mother is capable of feeling love.’

  ‘Don’t give me that garbage! She crawled all over Sissy. All my life she crawled all over her.’

  ‘She left her for those same six years she left you. No mother leaves her kids if she loves them.’

  ‘I left Georgie for two years. I love her.’

  ‘You weren’t much more than a child yourself, and she knew where you were.’

  Jenny’s hand was still out for the paper. Gertrude closed the firebox. ‘What were you doing with a boy like that . . . with a common thief?’

  ‘He wasn’t common, and I didn’t know he was a thief.’

  ‘Parasites,’ Gertrude said. ‘Anyone who will live off the labour of others is no more than a parasite.’

  The old newspaper was back in Jenny’s hand. She continued her project. ‘Remember me telling you once that Amber was a parasite, living off Sissy, a flea on a fly?’

  ‘You were probably closer to the truth than you knew,’ Gertrude said as she drew a part in her hair.

  ‘The flea is feeding: Sissy’s washing was on the clothes line,’ Jenny said.

  Laurie’s mug shot looked like newspaper pasted over cardboard when she was done, but a frame will improve any picture. Maybe Gertrude was right. Maybe she’d live to regret it.

  And maybe she wouldn’t. She gave it to Georgie at the breakfast table the following morning, and that little kid’s eyes turned into glistening emeralds.

  ‘He’s in the newspaper, like a fil-um star?’ she said.

  ‘He was very famous when you were born,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Is he a fil-um star?’

  ‘A bit like a film star.’

  ‘Margot hasn’t got a picture.’