Mallawindy

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t lock them in your car?’

  ‘I might have, but I haven’t done that for months. Have you got a screwdriver or a knife?’

  ‘What are you going to do with a screwdriver, hot wire it, take the door off?’ His anger was sudden, and for no He wanted to be gone, wished fervently he’d opened a can of beans and not obeyed the call of his stomach.

  ‘I’ve got a spare key behind the number plate. If you haven’t got a knife, I’ll borrow one from the shop.’

  ‘I’ll have something in the boot.’

  She waited while he opened the boot and found his tool-box, but instead of a screwdriver or knife, he handed her a plastic bag, dusty, sticky, full of bits and pieces. ‘Yours,’ he said. ‘I cleaned out the glove box before I traded the old car in. For the small amount of time you spent with me, it is amazing how much of your life you managed to leave behind you.’

  ‘I shed things. You ought to see my car,’ she said, her hand delving into the plastic bag in search of better days. She found a woollen glove, three combs, a photograph, a cancelled bankbook, a nest of hairpins, a reel of white thread and the blue velvet box. ‘That’s not mine, you nut.’

  ‘I gave it to you and you tossed it in the glove box with your bobby pins.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Throw it in the rubbish if you don’t want it. Sell it, pawn it, stick it on your key ring if you ever find it. It’s yours. I’d forgotten about it until a minute ago.’

  She flipped the box open. The ring sat in a blue satin pillow. One diamond.

  ‘Old fashioned now,’ he said.

  ‘I prefer a single rose bud to a vase of gladioli. I thought you’d given it to Melissa.’ She locked it away from the light, handed it to him as she took the screwdriver from his hand. He aimed the tiny box at the rubbish-bin.

  ‘Bullseye,’ he said, and he was back in the car, the motor running.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ she moaned. ‘David! You can’t do that. What’s happened to you? You can’t throw away something precious.’

  ‘No? You’re a great one to talk, aren’t you? You invented the bloody game. Why didn’t you phone me that night, or ride to Warran, to me?’

  Head down, she ransacked the bin until she found the velvet box sitting on a half-eaten pie. Her eyes accusing him, she took a handkerchief from her purse, wiped the velvet clean, and walked to his window. ‘Please take it. Where is the banker I used to know, the cash coach, guardian of ten thousand postponed dreams? Take it, David.’

  ‘Try it on,’ he said. ‘Put it on. Take it out of the box and try it on your finger – just once. Prove or disprove a point for me. Let me see if I knew you, knew your hand as well as I thought I did back then.’

  ‘Stop it. Stop that. The world has moved on.’

  ‘Not for me. Try it on. Prove me wrong. I want to be proven wrong tonight.’

  Slowly she did as he asked. She tried the ring on her right ring finger, twisting the small band, attempting to force it over the knuckle, because he wanted her to. But the ring wouldn’t fit. She shook her hair back from her face, her eyes huge, hurting in the near dark street, and she handed him the ring. He took it, and the hand that extended it. He slipped it easily onto her engagement finger.

  ‘I chose it for your left hand,’ he said. ‘Right hands are always larger than the left.’ His grip on her hand was strong. She stood dumbly there, her head down until the pressure relaxed. Then she turned and ran for her car, his ring on her finger, his screwdriver grasped in her hand.

  She found her keys taunting her from the ignition. By the time she started the motor and swung around the corner, David was gone.

  There were six roads leading out of Warran, but directly opposite the signposts, she sighted a licensed hotel-motel, its light blinking vacancy. She drove in, booked a room, then walked next door to the hotel where she purchased a bottle of cherry brandy.

  A fast glass, a faster shower to wash the dust away, then a second glass of cherry brandy and she was brave enough to dare all. The exchange gave her his telephone number.

  ‘David Taylor speaking,’ he said.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Taylor,’ she said. ‘You are one of the lucky Warran residents to be offered a night at your local motel, with the – ’

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘ – with the Mermaid girl. This is an obligation free, once in a lifetime offer, and not likely to be repeated – ’

  ‘I love you. I have loved you from the day I first saw you and I’ll die loving you. Where are you, Ann?’

  ‘Please present yourself at the Motor Inn, near the Dorby highway, opposite the signpost. Unit six – ’ But the connection was broken.

  She greeted him at the door, a glass in hand, and it was so easy to slip into his arms where she belonged, and so good. So good to feel the strength of his arms crushing her to him, and his mouth on her own, to taste his breath again, and smell the scent of him. So easy and so right.

  ‘Oh God,’ he breathed against her lips. ‘What have we done to each other?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she said, and he kissed each word away while the drink in her hand tilted, releasing the pink stuff to trickle down his shirt. ‘Now we’re both stained,’ she said, reaching for a tissue. ‘Perhaps it’s fitting,’ and they were kissing again, her mouth as hungry as his.

  Later, so much later, when the world was back in focus, he kissed her and tucked the twisted pillow beneath both heads and he pulled a blanket over their cooling flesh. She hadn’t spoken, nor had he.

  He wanted to cry. His throat ached with tears, and love, and guilt, and questions he wanted to ask, but he didn’t want the answers, so he held her and kept his silence.

  Caught up in a marriage that was no marriage, he had built his memories of Ann into a shrine. And now she was here with him, in this bed, but getting married in January.

  Why? Brides might still dress in white, but only one in a thousand made it to the altar with virginity intact. She’d almost been that one in a thousand. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand. Why? Why had she called him? ‘Why?’ he finally said. ‘Why in God’s name did you do it?’

  ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘I thought ... I thought you’d be experienced.’

  ‘You sound like a character from a Jane Austen novel.’

  ‘I feel like one. Some rakish cad. Why did you call me, Ann?’

  ‘Your number came up on the computer.’ He didn’t reply. ‘I think the man I’m marrying is gay, and I know I’m going to run at the altar – or if I don’t, I’ll damage him for life when he tries it,’ she said.

  ‘You think he’s gay and you’re still going to marry him!’

  ‘His mother had a heart attack two years ago. He wants to give her a grandchild. Two actually.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s a good friend.’ She breathed deeply, and turned to face this beautiful man. ‘Everything I ever do is wrong, David. Every plan I ever make is wrong. I came home today to see Mum. That was a very bad move. I don’t know why I drove up to Warran. Probably because I wanted to be close to where you were. I don’t know. Was it so wrong?’

  ‘What do I say? What can I say?’

  She slid from the bed. ‘It didn’t feel wrong. It felt like the least wrong thing I have ever done in my life,’ she said, and she walked to the shower.

  He heard the shower’s hiss, and waited, unsure of her next move. Would she steal away while he was sleeping? His limbs spread in the tumbled bed while he waited for the water to be turned off. His eyes closed.

  It was just before dawn when he woke and knew the bed he was in was not his own. Memory filtered back. He felt for her beside him, but he was alone. He sprang up, found the light switch, stared into white light. Her case was on the bench. He looked through the window, saw her car was there.

  He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the floor, scribbling on the
back of a motel breakfast menu, the bottle of cherry brandy at her side.

  ‘So you’re still here,’ he said.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Making a shopping list.’

  She was wearing a towel, and he reached out a hand, exploring the painfully thin shoulder, the child-like curve of neck. He wanted to gather her back into his arms, but he stood, turned to the mirror. She was making the rules. ‘It’s almost dawn,’ he said. ‘Warran still has a small town mentality. Our reputations will be in shreds.’

  ‘I didn’t like mine much anyhow.’ She stood then, holding her towel close and brushing the damp strands of hair from her face. He watched her fold the menu and place it in a briefcase, lock the briefcase. ‘You go if you want to, David. What do you want to do?’

  ‘What a silly, silly question.’ And he reached for her, gathered her to him, and he kissed a mouth, fresh with toothpaste. ‘What a silly, silly question, you idiot girl.’

  lost innocence

  December 1986

  It was with some cynicism that Malcolm Fletcher watched the building of a new brick school. For twenty years he’d pleaded for improvements, but his plea had been ignored. Still, he goaded his students, he drove them with sarcasm, and he whipped them with his tongue, his voice overriding the hammer and the drill. He taught the unteachable, and he sipped his brandy from a teacup until the final bell.

  On that last day, the bell rang non-stop for six hours, and when townspeople complained, and the rope was removed, Robby West’s youngest son shimmied up the pole and the bell continued to peal.

  Malcolm now at retirement age, was given six weeks to get out of the schoolhouse. No-one cared that he had no place to go. They bought him a cheap gold watch, allowed him to declare the new school open, then the solid citizens hurried away, eager to indulge the new man who was promising to inject some enthusiasm into the dust.

  Malcolm bought a new Falcon stationwagon, suitable to his stature. He bought a caravan and a five-hectare paddock from Bluey Fraser. He chose it because it faced the Burton property, gave him a perfect view of Jack Burton’s bedroom window.

  It took two days to load his caravan, and one more and a bottle to raise nerve enough to tow it away. His new car aimed in the direction of the river road, Malcolm hoped his caravan would follow. It jibbed at the bridge, so he stopped, halting a truckload of beef one side and the town clerk’s new Toyota on the other. While they cursed him, he walked around his van and edged sideways through its door, exiting with the gold watch. He studied it a moment, nodded to the town clerk, and the farmer, then he flung the watch high, watching the sunlight catch it and glide with it into deep water. It shimmered as it sank. He stood at the railing until the watch disappeared from view. Chubby cheeks trembling with suppressed amusement, Malcolm drove on to commence the next phase of his life.

  The year came in wild, intent on leaving its mark on Mallawindy. Bert Norris died two hours into New Year’s Day. He left his house, business, and bank accounts to Ben Burton and Deadeye Dooley. Then on the 4th of January, Ethel Dooley, long-term cook at the Central, dropped dead at the stove, throwing the counter meals into chaos, and leaving a husband, fifteen children and umpteen grandchildren to welfare.

  ‘Two down, one to go,’ the old ones whispered, eyeing each other for signs of imminent demise. Death always came in threes.

  Deadeye, still in a daze over his good fortune, couldn’t wipe the dollar signs from his glass eye. It dazzled as his mother’s coffin was lowered, it tallied when his father over-balanced and almost followed his wife to her rest. It subtracted as he dragged his father back to the brand new car he’d bought on account of he was going to be able to afford it as soon as probate went through.

  Unchanged by the years, untouched by the sun of Mallawindy, protected in the cool dark cavern of his bar room, Mick Bourke, owner/barman of the Central Hotel poured beer into glasses while drinkers poured cash into his pocket. He was stressed out. He needed a new cook. His wife was giving everyone indigestion, and Jack Burton was giving him indigestion by asking for credit again.

  The heat of that last January day was threatening everyone’s sanity.

  ‘You’ve got a few bob on it from before Christmas, Jack,’ Mick said.

  ‘You’ll get your money. You always get your money.’ The price of whisky was high. Inflation had reduced Jack’s annual income to a pittance. There was money to be had at Narrawee, but he had to crawl to get it and May was turning the screws. There had been no cheque for three months, and he was stony motherless broke.

  ‘It’s your liver,’ Mick said. He reached for his top shelf and passed a full bottle across the bar. He took his red account book from beneath the bar, licked his pencil, coughed, grabbed his heart, and that was the last move he made.

  Jack walked away with a free bottle and the old ones in town breathed deep sighs of relief and gossiped on, safe again now the third pin had fallen.

  For years now, Ellie Burton had been hearing rumours about women’s liberation, but she’d learned early to close her ears to gossip. She ironed Jack’s shirts and cooked his meals. She didn’t miss him when he wasn’t around, and she dodged his bad moods when he was. She collected her eggs for the egg board, she milked her cows and fed her pigs, while her golden hair paled to white at the temples.

  In the evenings, when she sat alone doing the crosswords, the old house seemed to ache with silence, and the iron roof groaned, as if it too mourned her lost children. The blackened rafters in the kitchen trapped no more childish laughter, hid no more children’s tears. The beds were still made up in the empty rooms, though cobwebs hung grey in dark comers. Rusty hinges creaked, windows rattled, doors slammed on still evenings. And sometimes . . . sometimes on the darkest night when the air was still, Ellie swore she heard the plaintive cry of a child trembling on the air, and from the yard, bright eyes watched and seemed to follow her.

  Only an owl. Only a feral cat, or some wild thing of the forest.

  the baby

  June 1987

  Ann wasn’t in the private ward. David found her sitting alone in the sunroom.

  ‘Get me out of here,’ she said.

  ‘Doctor Williams wants you to stay in for a few days. Dad and Mum are flying over from New Zealand at the weekend. They said they’d stay as long as necessary.’

  ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’ Ann turned, walked to the door.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be walking around. Sit down, or better still, go back to your room and lie down.’

  ‘Heel, Mickey,’ she said. ‘Come to heel, boy. Sit. Roll over, and play dead.’

  ‘Do you want to lose the baby, Ann? Williams warned you that it wasn’t going to be an easy pregnancy, and yet you go racing up to your bloody old school teacher’s death-bed instead of looking after yourself. Is he more important to you than our baby?’

  ‘They told me he was going to die, and I sat with him for two days and I wouldn’t let him die. He lived because I made him live.’

  ‘And in the process you almost lost the baby.’

  ‘If it is determined not to survive, then no doubt it will succeed. Far better we lose it before we know it.’

  ‘You won’t lose it if you do as you are told.’

  ‘But I don’t. I never did. Don’t try to control me, David.’

  Control her? That was surely a witticism. She was still the girl he’d known and loved at sixteen, but so much more. She was a businesswoman, a supervisor of builders, and something else, some indefinable quantity he couldn’t fathom.

  He’d railroaded her to the altar. When his freedom papers were in his hand, she didn’t want marriage. They’d had a wonderful year. The best of his life. The best of her life, she said. ‘Don’t try to cage me, David. Leave me free to come and go at will. I’ll never leave you again, but sometimes I need to be by myself.’

  How many times had she repeated those words? But too afraid of losing her again, he’d force
d the issue and tried to tie her to him with a wedding ring. The pregnancy so soon had been a mistake. The house in Mahoneys Lane was barely finished, their plans placed on hold because of the baby, but for a while she’d seemed pleased. Then, for no apparent reason, she’d begun disappearing for the day. ‘Just felt like a trip to Melbourne. Just wanted to be by myself.’ She’d creep from his bed in the middle of the night, and he’d find her walking the yard, or seated at the table scribbling stuff she locked in her briefcase.

  The briefcase was kept beneath her side of the bed. She caught him as he was about to open it one night, and she snatched it from his hand, snatched the key. ‘Private. It’s clearly marked private, David. Can you read, or will I add. Keep Out Snoopers?’

  The key went missing from her key ring that day. Now she wore it like a charm on her watch band. For days after, she’d barely spoken to him. He couldn’t touch her. She slept in a spare room.

  ‘Hormones,’ Williams diagnosed, when David went to him seeking advice. ‘Hormones and the fear of miscarriage.’

  It was more than hormones, and David knew it. He wanted this baby, and he hated the fat old slug of a teacher Ann treated like some god.

  ‘Right from the first weeks, you made no concessions to the baby, Ann. Climbing up and down ladders like a monkey, sewing curtains at all hours of the night. You didn’t want to become pregnant, did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Not so soon – but I don’t want it to die, either, so don’t go trying to heap any more guilt at my door. There’s mullock-heap enough there already.’ She turned to face him, her eyes searching his face. ‘You were the one who wanted marriage. Not me. I told you it wouldn’t work. We’re together, day in, day out. I need space, and I don’t need someone trying to tell me how to live my life.’

  She walked from the room and he followed her to her private ward where he sat with her case on her bed. Her briefcase was beside it. She never moved without the thing – and he didn’t know what she kept in it. Two weeks of marriage to Melissa and there had been no more surprises left, but each week with Ann only made the puzzle more intricate. There was no working her out. The pieces didn’t fit into any recognisable pattern.