by Joy Dettman
‘The camera broke when the man was trying to take one,’ Jenny said.
‘Jennifer!’ Gertrude warned.
‘That’s the same like my name,’ Georgie said. There was enough print exposed above the frame to see Laurence George Morgan.
Georgie wanted to take it to school to show all the kids who said she didn’t have a father. Jenny told her the glass would get broken, that her father was so special that there was no other picture of him in the whole world. It remained safe on Monday beneath Georgie’s pillow.
She showed it to Charlie when he rode down on Saturday with his offerings for the chooks. He showed great interest, so when Vern arrived to see what Charlie was up to, Georgie showed her Daddy to him.
He showed more interest than Charlie. The sticky-nosed old bugger took the picture from its frame.
Jenny, her back to him, her foot busy on the sewing machine treadle, didn’t see what he’d done until Georgie pulled at her elbow. She turned as Gertrude reached for it.
Vern didn’t give it up. ‘No wonder you wouldn’t tell me,’ he said.
‘Put it back in the frame, Vern,’ Gertrude said.
‘Letting a kid flash something like that around,’ Vern said, and Charlie rose to take his leave.
Georgie didn’t understand what the fuss was about. ‘He was like a fil-um star,’ she said.
The fabric left beneath the foot of the machine, the scissors on the bench, Jenny walked to the table. ‘Seen enough?’ she said.
‘You give something like that to a kid to flash around and you expect me to leave that boy down here —’
‘Most would have the manners not to take it out of its frame. And don’t bother trying to turn this to your own advantage,’ she said.
‘It will go down well in court,’ he said.
‘If you want Jim’s letters read out in court, go for it, Mr Hooper. You’ll come out of it looking like the old bully you are.’
They should have seen it coming. They didn’t. Jenny shouldn’t have left those scissors where Georgie could reach them. They were small but had vicious little points. Vern got them driven into his backside.
He dropped the water pistol bandit’s mug shot. It skidded beneath the table, Georgie dived after it, and was out the door, her daddy safe in her hands.
There was an uproar then. Vern bleeding through his trousers, Jenny on the attack, Gertrude backing her up, Charlie clearing the doorway as Jenny pursued Vern out to the yard.
‘I’ll get that boy if it’s the last thing I do,’ he swore.
‘You take me to court, you mean-hearted old coot, and I’ll go after Jim’s money. Jimmy is his rightful heir, not you.’
The car roared up the track and Jenny came in breathing hard and wanting a cigarette. She went to the lean-to to get her hidden packet.
‘Get Georgie home,’ Gertrude said. ‘She has to learn that she can’t do things like that.’
‘The stickybeaking old bugger deserved it,’ Jenny said, removing a cigarette and lighting it. ‘She showed him her prize possession and he pulled it apart and sneered.’
‘Stickybeak old bugger Vern,’ Georgie said at the window.
DESTINY
Everyone in town knew Jimmy was Vern’s grandson, that he was the reason Sissy’s wedding had been called off, and if a few didn’t know, then a passing glance was enough to tell them he was a Hooper. He had the Hooper jaw, the mouth. He had their long limbs, their large feet and hands. He turned four in December and would have passed for a six-year-old.
He and his Aunty Sissy were destined to meet sooner or later. It happened on a Thursday morning, at Blunt’s. The girls needed new socks and Sissy needed a new frock to wear to one of the Duckworth cousins’ weddings.
‘You shouldn’t be allowed to bring your bastards into respectable shops,’ Sissy snarled.
‘If you’d stood in the doorway we wouldn’t have been able to get in,’ Jenny said, which was true enough. Holidaying with Duckworths was never good for the waistline. Sissy, who holidayed nine or ten months of the year, took up space enough for two at the drapery counter.
Broad browed, heavy jawed, flat in the face — other than her small parrot-beak nose, legacy of her paternal grandmother — she was taller than old Cecelia, almost as tall as Gertrude, and at twenty-six a formidable presence.
If not for a motorbike pulling into the gutter out the front of Blunt’s, and Jimmy running out to have a closer look at it, there might have been a slanging match in Blunt’s shop that day.
The bike rider was a stranger. Sissy vacated the premises. Jenny retrieved Jimmy and led him by the hand to the northern end of the shop, unchanged in twenty years, where she helped herself to four pairs of white socks from a box marked Girls’ white socks.
The stranger wanted a shirt with an attached collar, sixteen and a half inch neck. And there was something about him that looked familiar to Jenny. She placed the box back where it belonged and walked to a rack of frocks from where she could get a better look at the stranger’s face. Her fingers handled the fabrics, but her mind was not on frocks. She was thinking army, sorting through the names of the boys who had been away, attempting to visualise the Dobson boys older. They were all blonds. Maybe . . .
‘I’ll t-t-take the white,’ he said.
And she knew him — or knew that stutter. The boy at the school concert, the ringmaster on the night Sissy had tripped her onstage, the night she’d ripped the petals from her petunia costume. His name was on the tip of her tongue.
Ray King is lousy, his mother is a frowsy . . .
‘Ray King.’ It came out. She hadn’t meant it to. He turned when he heard his name, seeking the speaker; she had to come out from behind a rack of frocks.
‘I went to school with you. I’m Jenny Morrison.’
Big brown innocent lamb’s eyes taking in her face as he ran his fingers through thick butter-yellow hair. He’d had no hair at school, always clipped to the scalp. Always big boned — he’d been a giant to her at school.
‘The p-petunia,’ he said. ‘The petunia in the aaa-onion patch.’
‘That’s me. I thought you’d drowned or been murdered.’ He’d disappeared soon after his mother’s funeral. She remembered the town searching for him, remembered the twins telling everyone the fish had eaten him.
‘B-been in M-melbourne.’ He spoke in gusts, but he spoke. He’d made few attempts to speak as a kid.
‘What are you doing back here?’
He had a sister on a property out of town — or he’d had a sister. He was up here for her funeral.
Molly Martin was being buried today. His sister? She must have been closer to Amber’s age than his. He was Sissy’s age, Jim’s age. Not as tall as Jim but well over six foot. An image came to her then of his father, a giant woodcutter with huge arms and shoulders, swinging an axe and making the woodchips fly. Memories rushing her now. Henry King. Big Henry King, crippled by a falling tree.
And she had to stop smiling at him. He’d think she was interested when she wasn’t — not in that way. She was just interested to know he was alive, as was Miss Blunt, and her father, who had been nodding off in his invalid chair, his hearing aid turned off.
‘Raymond King,’ Miss Blunt yelled, fiddling the knobs to tune her father in. ‘Ray King. The boy who went missing back during the depression. Henry King’s boy. Big Henry King, the woodcutter. He won all of the woodchops at the gymkhanas, Father.’ Mr Blunt’s memory of today was not always clear, but he could remember his yesterdays.
Jenny counted out coins enough for the socks and left them to talk about Big Henry.
‘G-good to s-see you,’ Ray said.
‘You too,’ she said, and with Jimmy’s hand in her own, she walked off towards the butcher’s shop. There she bought a lump of corned beef. Granny and the kids liked it. She bought a pound of sausages, she bought two loaves of bread at the bakery, then followed her usual route home, down Blunt’s Road, over Hooper, left into King Street, which brought
her back to her road down near Macdonald’s mill — and meant she avoided the Hoopers’ house. She hadn’t seen Vern since the scissors episode — nor had Gertrude and Jimmy.
It would have been far better if she’d had another slanging match with him that day. King Street hadn’t been named for King George or any of his predecessors. It had been named for Big Henry’s crumbling shack, still standing on the corner opposite Macdonald’s mill. And that motorbike was parked out front of it. There was no sign of its rider.
She increased her pace down the far side of the street, keeping her head to the fore and hoping to hurry Jimmy past the bike. He didn’t want to be hurried. He wanted to stand and stare, and with two string bags of shopping and no hand to hold him back, he crossed over to get one last look at that shiny new bike.
At that moment the bike’s owner emerged from the far side of the shack. There was nothing Jenny could do but cross over and watch Ray lift Jimmy up to sit on the saddle.
‘Your b-b-b-boy reminds me of s-someone.’
‘Jim Hooper,’ Jenny said.
‘L-living with the family?’
She glanced towards Hooper’s corner. ‘Jim was . . . he died in the war. I live with my grandmother. You’d remember Mrs Foote.’
‘L-looked after my d-dad when they I-let him out of h-h —’
‘Hospital,’ she said. And of course she would have. Jimmy was gripping the handlebars, vroom-vrooming his brains out. She placed her shopping down and watched him ride.
‘W-would you t-trust me to give him a ride? I c-could take your bags d-down for you.’ He couldn’t hold her gaze, afraid of his offer — as was she. But how could she not trust a boy who had left Sissy standing on stage in her baggy white bloomers? She studied his face, and his shy eyes dared a glance back.
‘He’d love it. Just a little way though, just down to the bridge and back.’ She picked up her shopping and walked on ahead.
They passed her and a minute later were back, Jimmy sitting up front, hanging onto the handlebars. He didn’t want to get off.
‘G-give us your bags,’ Ray offered again, so Jenny gave up the heaviest of them and off they rode, backwards and forwards all the way to Gertrude’s gate.
She thanked him at the gate, but when she opened it he rode on through, rode on down to the walnut tree.
Granny was in the yard waiting to see who wanted her, or who wanted her eggs.
‘Look who I found in town,’ Jenny said. ‘Remember Ray King, the ringmaster I hid behind the night Sissy roughed me up at the school concert?’
‘Well, I never!’ Gertrude said. ‘Well, who would ever believe that? Of course. You’d be up for Molly’s funeral.’ She knew Molly Martin was his sister. She probably knew his mother’s maiden name along with his grandmother’s.
He was in no hurry to leave, and fifteen minutes later, when Gertrude offered him a cup of tea, he didn’t say no. He was Lazarus, risen from dead and sitting eating oatmeal biscuits in their kitchen. They wanted to know where he’d been, how he’d got there. He didn’t tell them much other than that he’d found his way to Melbourne, that he had a house there, that he’d been married but his wife had died the week before the war ended. And no, he didn’t have children, and no, he hadn’t been in the army.
‘F-f-flat feet,’ he said.
They didn’t ask where he worked. He had an office man’s hands, or maybe a shopkeeper’s — or a bank robber’s. Though it would be hard to hold up a bank if you stuttered.
He stayed for an hour. When he was leaving, Jimmy told him his head nearly hit the roof, like Grandpa’s head.
‘I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal,’ Ray chanted, with not a trace of a stutter.
He was no movie star. His nose looked to have been broken at some stage, but he had nice teeth, beautiful dark eyes, nice hair.
Jimmy ran ahead to the bike and again Ray lifted him up to the saddle.
‘You and your g-gran w-wouldn’t be g-going to the f-f —’
‘Funeral?’ Jenny said. ‘I barely knew her, Ray.’
‘M-m-me either,’ he said. ‘H-hoped I could h-hide behind you, this time.’
That shy smile again. Beautiful white teeth behind it. Maybe he’d always had those teeth, just hadn’t smiled often.
‘Your cousins will be there,’ she said.
‘H-haven’t seen any of them s-since I left.’
He needed someone to hide behind, and she knew that feeling. She lifted Jimmy down. ‘Which church, Ray?’
‘Catholic,’ Gertrude replied for him. Molly Martin had borne eleven babies and raised eight of them.
‘I’ll p-pick you up, d-drop you b-back.’
Riding on that bike must feel a bit like flying. Was craving a ride on it any reason to go to the funeral of a woman she’d barely known?
‘Would it upset anyone’s sensibilities if I went with him, Granny?’
‘I ought to go myself. I delivered most of Molly’s children.’
Jenny didn’t like hats, or they didn’t like her hair. She owned one Laurie had bought for her, a ratbag of a hat. Gertrude owned a black wide-brimmed felt hat. It looked just as ridiculous. She also owned a small black hat. Jenny tried it with her once-red dress, and it looked too dressed up for a Woody Creek funeral. They borrowed Elsie’s navy beret and Jenny swapped her once-red for her navy print. It was faded but more suitable.
She’d sung at a couple of funerals years ago, the last time at Barbie Dobson’s. A different funeral this one. The church had been crowded for Barbie, but only a handful of mourners came to say goodbye to Molly Martin, and most of them were her kids and grandkids. Jenny recognised a few of the boys. A few recognised her. She recognised a middle-aged man as Ray’s brother by his build, his hair, though his was greying. Ray didn’t speak to him. Ray didn’t speak to anyone until his sister was in her grave, until his brother approached him.
‘Someone told me you were alive,’ he said.
‘Someone told me you were too,’ Ray said, his voice as cold as a tombstone on a frosty morning, and no stutter. Then he reached for Jenny’s hand and walked her fast to his bike.
‘Who?’ She sounded like Georgie.
‘The last of them. I’ll go to his f-funeral, too.’
The ride into town had been sedate. Now he went too fast out the Willama road, and that was flying, the wind in her face, tangling her hair. She had to cling to him. Then he turned the bike around and went even faster back to town; maybe he didn’t want that clinging to end. She clung to the seat when they put-putted through town, through the bush. This time he rode no further than the boundary gate.
‘W-would you c-c-come out w-with me sometime?’ he said, his eyes turned towards the bush.
‘I don’t go out much, Ray.’
‘S-signs around for a dance at the hall on New Year’s Eve.’
‘I haven’t danced since I lived in Sydney, but thanks anyway.’
He knew rejection when he met it head on, and his eyes were afraid of rejection.
And why shouldn’t she go to a dance with him if he wanted to take her to a dance? She’d be twenty-two on New Year’s Eve. She had a beautiful blue dress she’d never worn, and Norman’s necklace.
‘It’s a long way to come just for a country dance.’
‘Only a f-few hours on the b-bike,’ he said, the hope of the outcast in his lost lamb’s eyes.
Ray was always an outcast in the playground, as was Jim when she was small. Why did he keep reminding her of Jim?
Because like Jim, he’d been a part of that better time, the time before Amber had come home.
Why was she drawn to outcasts?
Blame Norman, the original outcast. She’d grown up loving him. She still did in her heart, she’d just learned not to let her heart rule her head.
‘If you decide to come up, I’ll go with you, Ray, but if you find that you can’t make it, then don’t worry. I won’t expect you until I hear your bike coming down the track.’
&
nbsp; ‘Y-y-you’ll hear it,’ he said.
Ray King was the talk of Woody Creek that week — as was Jenny Morrison.
‘I spoke to him in the café. He said he’d been living in Melbourne.’
‘She was in Melbourne for months. She must have known him down there.’
‘Can two yellow-haired people have a redheaded kid?’
‘One of Henry King’s wife’s sisters had red hair. The one that died young of the diphtheria.’
‘I seen him with that boy on his bike the morning of the funeral.’
‘I saw her clinging on to the back of his bike heading out towards Willama and going like the clappers.’
‘Wanting to get somewhere fast — I’d be doing the same if she was on the back of my bike.’
THE BEST NIGHT
‘His wife probably isn’t even dead. Someone probably told him about me and he’s decided to try his luck. Every time I go into town, the blokes on the pub corner expect me to start spruiking: “Sixpence a ride and discount for twins.’”
‘Watch your mouth around those girls!’ Gertrude said. Jenny was having a haircut, in the yard, in the sun, the cut curls glinting like gold in the dust.
‘He won’t come. I hope he doesn’t.’
‘Don’t bother lying to me. You’re dying to wear your father’s necklace.’
‘I’ll lose it when he rapes me halfway home.’
‘I told you to watch your mouth. You sound like a Sydney tart lately.’
Jenny had a bath at Elsie’s that afternoon. She washed her hair, added a little lemon juice to the rinsing water. At seven she put on her stockings, just in case. She hadn’t heard from him since he’d dropped her home after the funeral. She knew he wouldn’t turn up, and just to prove she wasn’t expecting him, she got the cards out and played switch with the kids.
They were in their bed before eight, just in case. No need for him to know she had three kids — if he didn’t know already — if he came.
She was trimming ragged fingernails when the kids peeped from the bedroom curtain. They’d heard the bike. Gertrude sent them back, told them to be as quiet as three little mice. Jenny ran for the lean-to to snatch her blue linen from its hanger.