by Joy Dettman
Steve had come around to discuss the plans yesterday, and to collect some old photographs. He dabbled in photography, and was intent on creating a video of the old lady’s life. For hours they had sat, selecting, rejecting. There were photographs too of the old town when it was young, photographs of the old school. The album was a historical documentation of Maidenville, Steve said.
He had stayed so late that Stella asked him to join her for dinner, cooked on her wonderful new stove. And afterwards –
She smiled, and her hand holding the long embroidery needle stilled as she sat a moment, staring at a small clown eye. Then she shrugged, slid the needle beneath the round nose and commenced working the second eye. Her mind free to roam, returned to Sunday night.
After dinner, Steve had washed the dishes while she dried, and there was something about washing dishes with a companion, a task she’d always done alone in that kitchen. There was a closeness about it.
He had started the remembering games. ‘Remember the old van? Remember the night the tyre blew and we were stuck thirty kilometres out without a spare?’
Remember. Remember. So fine to remember the good times.
And they had sung again, right there at the sink to the clatter of crockery, the jacarandas their only audience, and when the dishes were done, Stella had hunted out her own old photographs.
They’d laughed then at Steve’s hair; he had allowed it to hang free back in those days, and they’d laughed at baby-faced Chris Scott. So much laughter. What a night, and what on earth would the neighbours have thought of her?
It was well after midnight when he rose to leave, the selected photographs in a large envelope. She had walked him to the front door, flooding the drive with light, flooding her garden with light, which got them started again.
Then he’d spoken of a booking he’d taken for his aging band.
‘It’s in three weeks, Stell. Come with us. We still sound good together,’ he said.
‘What a lark, Steve.’
‘Do it.’
‘I’m too old. I’d look ridiculous.’
‘You’d look far from ridiculous. Age is all in the head of hair.’
‘Father will be back in Australia next Saturday. He’ll come through on the Sunday bus.’
‘So it’s back into the cage, eh?’
‘Back to normal, I suppose, Steve.’
‘I always reckoned our band could have made it big if you’d stayed with us back then. We might have been a second Seekers.’
He’d kissed her cheek when he was leaving. Just a brother’s kiss. He’d always been like a younger brother, always there – at the same children’s parties, always around, but in the background. He’d helped carry home the small jacarandas and suggested she plant them between the house and shed. A born planter of seeds, his hands more at ease in the soil than at the dinner table. His blond hair was greying at the temples, but he still wore it long – as he had back then. Now he tied it back with rubber bands. A strange boy, and they did sound so well together.
‘What am I thinking of?’ she said. ‘Father will return and bring reality back with his case full of washing, and I will pin up my hair again and Miss Moreland’s colourful shirts will be packed away in the cases.’
But it had been a good night. One of the best. Laughter so readily raised, and eager to rise. He was so darn easy to be with.
‘Lord. What would Father think of me? “Entertaining a man in my kitchen, singing love songs until midnight with that long-haired lout. Wandering the garden at 1 a.m. You must ask yourself, Daughter, is it seemly, with Miss Moreland barely cold in her grave?”’
Probably not, but that dear lady would have been delighted. Stella smiled as she turned the radio volume a little higher. They were playing the song she had sung at Miss Moreland’s funeral. It was one of the old favourites from the seventies.
Leave my worries far away in another time and place.
She hummed along with it now, thinking of her old friend who had always turned the volume up when they played that song.
It was odd. Several times since the funeral, the Dorby radio station had played that song – as if they knew, even though they couldn’t possibly have known. Each time it played, Stella’s thoughts went to Miss Moreland. And what better way to be remembered, she thought?
She stitched the round eye on the face of a clown, then peered closely at it, before changing her thread. Writing had taken over her days; the clowns were a chore she resented.
Let someone else do them, girl.
‘Would that I could, my dear,’ she said. The song had ended, but Miss Moreland was still close. There were moments when Stella could almost hear the comments spoken in her mind, as if Miss Moreland had not truly left yet, but taken up residence in Stella’s right ear, determined to change her, to have her will.
It had been obvious to all that Ron had forced his son to be one of the pallbearers. The teenager hadn’t looked well on that crazy day. His face had been pale, and his eyes had the look of a wild thing, trapped. A surly jaguar, pacing the bars of his too small cage, and wanting out.
He had strange green eyes – Marilyn’s eyes. There had always been talk in town about Marilyn’s mother. Marilyn and her brothers had grown up with many short-term uncles. Was it possible? Was that what Miss Moreland had been hinting at?
Stella had spoken to Steve of Cutter-Nash. They’d studied his photograph together, and she’d removed the shot of her grandfather. Perhaps she’d have that one enlarged. No photograph of old Randall De Vere hung in the house – even his wedding photograph had been cut in half, leaving only his ghostly hand on the shoulder of his bride.
‘I’m sadly lacking in relatives,’ she told the finished clown face, and she dropped it into the plastic bag beside her bed. ‘We were not a family of breeders. No uncle, no aunt, no cousin or niece, parents a generation removed from the parents of my friends.’
She took up a blank face, trying to see the personality hidden behind it. Sometimes they suggested themselves, or they had once. She was doing too many lately and they were all beginning to look much the same.
‘Green eyes,’ she said, ‘with a glint of yellow, and a golden collar.’ Again she began stitching, her mind once more free to roam.
Miss Moreland’s nieces had taken the jewellery. Some of it had antique value, as did the old china and ornaments. They had demanded a tapestry and a large painting from the lounge-dining room, the antique mirror in the hall. They had claimed an antique coffee table and the bedroom chair, but made no mention of the family album. Which was as well. Stella had no intention now of parting with it.
John Parker, a born diplomat, suggested Stella allow the nieces to go through the flat, and to take any of the older family items. They’d settled for that, but only after having shown a copy of the will to their own solicitor. ‘Don’t give them the key, Stell. Go with them, keep your eye on them,’ he’d said. ‘Lyn will go with you.’
The prunes had arrived with a small van and a large son on the Saturday, but Lyn was a match for any man. Bonny had come too. The friends followed the trio from room to room. By the time the van left, the flat looked a little bare, but Stella had a receipt in her hand, all items had been listed by Lyn on her laptop computer, then printed out on her tiny portable printer. And what a wonderful machine it was.
Until Sunday, no conversation had been complete without a mention of Miss Moreland, then old Joe Martin, a lost soul since the death of his wife, died peacefully, and the old-timers in town began looking at their neighbours for the one most likely to make up the third. In Maidenville, deaths always came in threes.
Funerals, weddings and births formed much of the news, but in recent months there had been more funerals than births, and even less weddings. The young ones were leaving the town in droves.
‘Sorrows shadow drapes no more, or cowers the dear heart,’ she sang. ‘Desist,’ she said. ‘You’ve become a singing fool. But you’ve left your run too late. Anyway, it wo
uld interfere with your writing time. You have enough on your plate without attempting to play middle-aged vocalist.’ Her needle slid into the featureless face and she began to create a character.
By running threads from side to side through the fabric, she lent shape to the clowns’ faces. She pinched up small noses, holding them high with invisible stitches. She fashioned ears, large and small, she stretched mouths into wide smiles or cheeky grins. The idea had come from the Cabbage-Patch dolls, fashionable many years ago, and many failures evolved before she perfected the art. Her hands were swift, and a small face once started, was quickly finished with a dimple in the cheek, and wide-set eyes. This would be the best face she’d worked tonight.
She had two dozen in the plastic bag beside her bed, but endeavoured not to count, allowing her hand to feel out the blank heads from the finished. Sooner or later, someone else would have to learn to work the faces. There were orders coming in from all over. Less than twelve months ago, she had sent out letters and photographs to craft shops all over New South Wales and Victoria, and for months had received no replies; then out of the blue they received an order from Echuca, and a second from Swan Hill. Since then it had snowballed.
‘Too big, too fast, and the worst part about it is, I have lost interest. Lyn is good with a needle and thread. I’ll teach her to work the faces, and maybe Liz Holden.’
Writing. It was a demanding occupation. It stole time from her garden. There was much that needed to be done. Each day since the funeral she had promised herself a day in the garden, but somehow she didn’t get there.
She ate her breakfast with her typewriter, and her lunch. This unfolding tale was a force she could not hold back, so she was not holding back. She had written a sex scene that darn near made her blush!
Each evening she wrote, filling her blank paper with words, living her characters, speaking their words aloud. In her fictional world, she was in charge of who died, and how they died, and she killed at random, or her violent Seraphani did.
But inactivity had given her a neck-ache, so tonight she had closed her door on the typewriter, showered early, eaten a light dinner then climbed gratefully into bed. Propped high on pillows, she stitched clown faces, the small transistor radio beside her. It had earphones, which she would use when her father returned, but here in her own room, she allowed the radio freedom to sing.
Music was wonderful company. When the old radio in the lounge room had made way for a television set, she had missed it. Her father enjoyed his television shows, but she could always pick holes in their plots. Loose ends. She loathed loose ends, and she smiled now, her mind with the end of her novel, mentally tying up loose ends as she tied off the end of her green thread and chose one already threaded with gold. Her pincushion was filled with threaded needles.
A tuft of hair, a mouth of red given. Two questioning eyebrows, brown freckles on his nose and cheeks and he was done, dropped overboard into a plastic bag and a new face selected.
The last of fear had left her. Perhaps the tears she had cried that day had been inside her for too long, had filled her; the old lady’s death had released a plug, emptied the barrel. Now a part of that dear woman had crept into the hollow, filled it up with something more positive than tears. And Thursday night at the club in Dorby, the dancing, the singing all the way home, had been cathartic.
And she’d almost said no. Almost.
Why?
‘No fool like an old fool,’ she said.
She was feeling better tonight than she’d felt for years and years, and younger, so much younger, stronger. Free.
It was odd, really, this sense of freedom. Had it been bought by her money, Miss Moreland’s wardrobe, or by the haircut? She ran her fingers through her curls. Perhaps she’d have a little more cut off – and get a rinse. Bonny kept her hair vibrant with a rinse she bought at the supermarket. Stella had actually browsed in the hair-care aisle this morning, but she’d had no idea of what she might buy. There was such a choice.
She’d popped in for some cereal. Marilyn had had an X-ray appointment in Dorby, so Ron was alone. He always looked at her differently when Marilyn wasn’t around. Previously, this had pleased Stella. She had once lived for a week on those stolen glances, those stolen smiles.
‘I hope it’s nothing to worry about, Ron,’ she’d said to him this morning.
‘She’s always worrying about something,’ he said. ‘You look good today, Stell. I like your haircut.’
He never made personal comments when Marilyn was on the checkout, and the old pleasure had attempted to rear its head. Instead, Stella could only wonder how he had managed to spawn a rapist.
Not wanting to be long away from her writing, she’d walked quickly to the cereal department where she’d picked up a packet of toasted muesli. At the refrigerated section, she’d been studying the frozen meals, single serves; they were quite tasty and saved time in the kitchen. Then she’d looked up at Ron’s reflection in the long mirror. She hadn’t recognised him. He looked so old. For a split second, she’d believed she was looking at his father, dead these many years. He was the living image, and like his father, wed to a tyrant.
Ron had wanted to talk. He had taken his time at the cash register, but eager to get away, Stella cut the conversation short, took money from her handbag, surprising him with a fifty-dollar note, and she’d stood hand out, waiting for her change.
‘Tell Marilyn to give me a call tonight, Ron. Do let me know how she got on. I have to fly now.’
Something had changed. She knew it, as did Ron.
Poor Ron. Poor Marilyn too. Second choice for the leading lady in West Side Story. Second choice for Ron, when he couldn’t get Stella to ‘go all the way’. Circumstances force us all into the roles we learn to play, Stella thought. Circumstances had forced her into her role of dutiful daughter.
Circumstances alter.
She loved her new stove and her new floor-covering, and her security doors, but her father would disapprove – and soon too. She’d spent so much money.
‘He’ll have a stroke when he sees that!’ She glanced at the cordless telephone on her bedside table, beside her pincushion. It had been connected on . . . on Friday.
So much happening, it was difficult to keep track of the days. Her new phone followed her from room to room. It was so convenient, and to a degree gave her a sense of security. It had ten automatic dial buttons. This morning she had set them, following the instruction book to the letter. And it worked too. She had tested each one. Now she was one button away from Sergeant Johnson, one button away from Arnold Parsons – and from Steve Smith.
Steve was so nice. So plain, ordinary, straightforward, honest, nice. ‘And he was only two years behind me in school,’ she told a clown face.
And you started school a year early, Miss Moreland’s voice reminded her.
‘Yes, you wicked old matchmaker. You knew we’d be thrown together. Your two executors. Your big bon voyage party.’ Stella laughed as she heard the tap, tap, tap of Miss Moreland’s heels on concrete. ‘I know you are out there, keeping an eye on me, but for all your scheming, my dear, nothing will come of it. We are both too shy – too set in our bachelor ways to take it further than a kiss on the cheek, a meal or two, and a song.’
Stella had allocated one of the phone’s automatic buttons to old Mr Bryant, near blind, and too ill to live alone, but live alone he did. For some months now she had been concerned about him, but since Miss Moreland’s death, she phoned him each morning, not wanting him to die alone in his bed. He had kept an eye out for her when she was young, so she would make it her business to keep an eye on him now he was old.
Number five button had been allocated to Bonny. Five still remained blank. Stella told herself she was saving them for the minister’s use, but in truth there were no more phone numbers she wanted to add. Not Marilyn’s. Since the rape, she had not been able to dial Marilyn’s number, always afraid that her son, the rapist, may pick up the phone.
; Six weeks. Six weeks that had been like a lifetime.
She shook the thought away, forced her mind to her father. What will he think of my spending? ‘You’ll have us in the poor house, Daughter,’ she said in fair imitation of his tone, and she smiled again and stitched on.
He would return to a changed house. The new vinyl looked like tiles. So bright and clean, and so easy to clean. And the metal doors with their small keys that allowed her to lock herself in without locking away the breeze and birds and the perfumes of her garden. The old black stove, the evil beast of her childhood was gone. Ripped from the chimney and tossed to the dump, to rust, to rot. The workmen had cleaned the chimney of a hundred years of soot, sealed it with an exhaust fan, then placed white tiles over the smoke-blackened bricks before setting in the new electric range.
It looked so white and light, so clean and bright, she wanted to put in a new sink and get the men to tile behind it too. But maybe a new window first. A larger window. Or maybe a new kitchen. White laminated benches and cupboards –
Have I willed to you my spendthrift habits, girl?
‘Perhaps. But it may be genetic, my dear. We are all the sum pool of a long line of genes. Look at Ron. How did I fail to notice how like his father he has grown?’
At least he is his father’s son. In Maidenville, it is a lucky man who knows his own son.
‘Stop this, Stella Templeton. You are becoming quite wicked. Along with her spendthrift habits, Miss Moreland has bequeathed to you her delightfully wicked mind,’ Stella castigated herself.
Len Davis was coming in to paint the rooms next month. She’d already chosen the colours. Light. Bright. And she’d make new drapes too – dusty pink for the lounge and dining rooms, soft blue for her bedroom, and a green blind for the kitchen. The bathroom was overdue for a facelift. She wanted a new bath and shower recess built into the corner, and lots of tiles, bright tiles. Perhaps a dusty cream with a touch of maroon.