by Joy Dettman
He’d found a base in Cara. She’d always been there. He’d leave her for ten months at a time, and when he returned she’d be waiting for him. Maybe he’d been testing her, proving to himself that she’d be around forever.
And maybe he was lonely enough to reach for that Bible, or desolate enough.
He’d read bits of it as a kid, old Lorna towering over him. She’d been into the Bible in a big way. He’d copied passages from it on Sundays, practising his handwriting, and she was never satisfied with what he’d produced.
‘Again, boy. Write it again!’
He hadn’t liked that book.
During Vern’s final year of life, he’d taken it up on Sundays, though not to read from it. He’d close his eyes, let the Bible fall open where it would, then place a finger on the page and allow it to slide down, blindly seeking God’s message for the week.
Morrie did as his grandfather had done.
Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.
Flipped that page and glanced again at Bernard, who had rolled to his back, a snoring, whistling little hump tucked in by his cage of blankets.
Again Morrie allowed the Bible to fall open. This time his finger landed on sister and he read.
Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices! . . . A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
God’s message for the week blurred before his eyes. He massaged them with two fingers, then opened the bedside table where he found two sheets of hotel paper. No biro. Found one in the pocket of his jacket, and on a sheet of paper he copied the paragraph.
‘How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse. How much better is thy love than wine,’ he said aloud, and wished he’d ordered a bottle of wine – something red, bottled in South Australia.
Took up his biro again.
Dear sister/spouse,
I have taken into my hand a book I haven’t looked at in fifteen years, and been given a message from God. I love you . . .
His pen stilled. It was too bloody sad; and whether he liked it or not, she was right. They’d made a mistake and it had to be erased.
‘Don’t come back, Morrie,’ she’d said when he’d phoned her. ‘We’ll get over it.’
Maybe they would. He’d grown accustomed to losing those he’d learnt to rely on. But he had to let her know the situation with the estate and Lorna. Give Lorna the ammunition of an eight-hour marriage and she’d do her worst. She’d promised him that much after the funeral, when he’d called a taxi and paid the driver in advance to take her home – and threatened to toss her into it headfirst if she didn’t get in under her own steam.
He’d seen the worst of Lorna that day. He didn’t need more.
FLESH AND BLOOD
Amber Morrison, carried unconscious from the scene of a car accident ten years ago, had all but erased her previous existence. Her second and finer life as Elizabeth Duckworth began in a hospital bed three days after the accident. She’d sustained serious head injuries, had undergone brain surgery at a time when brain surgery had been a hit-and-miss procedure. The surgeon had not damaged Amber Morrison’s unique mind. She’d inherited Archie Foote’s lack of empathy for his fellow man, his lack of shame, of guilt, of love and his cat-like nine lives.
Possessions had been important to Archie, though not vital. He’d shed them easily enough when forced to lighten his load so he might move faster.
When, after those three days she’d regained consciousness in that hospital bed, she’d smelt the scent of clean. The first movement she’d seen when she’d opened her eyes was that of a white-clad nursing sister. The first touch she’d felt was that of a gentle hand stroking her cheek, the first sound, a gentle voice.
‘Wake up, dear. Time to wake up now.’
That’s all Amber knew of her first day back from the dead. Clean. Gentle. Dear.
Perhaps it was the second day, perhaps a second white-clad nursing sister. The dear hadn’t changed.
‘Can you tell me your name, dear?’
Her mind had been working well enough to wonder what had happened to her possessions, and to know that her well-documented name would make that gentle hand flinch from her.
For the murder of her husband Norman, Amber had rotted for sixteen years in a state asylum for the criminally insane. Two years prior to the accident, she’d been reclassified, pronounced sane enough – or too old and frail to be a threat to society. They’d given her a pension and a selection of pills. They’d found her a room in a derelict boarding house where the scum of the city had settled, and for months they’d kept an eye on her. She’d swallowed her pills, controlled her anger – for a time. Then they’d gone away and left her to her own devices.
Most can tolerate a well-mannered snore. Few light sleepers could tolerate that rabid dog, choking snarl of a drunk who slept seven nights a week a thin wall away from their bed. Night after night, month after month, Amber had lain in her bed cursing the snore and the snorer.
He’d brought back bad memories. He’d raised that red fog of anger that at times misted her mind and wiped out all thought of consequence.
She had inadvertently silenced that snore on the night of the accident. Hadn’t meant to. Had risen from her bed only to find something with which to plug her ears, but when the red mist had cleared, he’d stopped snoring and she’d been standing over him, holding a pillow down.
Made him comfortable on that pillow. Tucked him in tight, then escaped the building, aware she’d need to escape the city.
That’s what she’d been doing, escaping across a minor road, when the lights had gone out for Amber Morrison. They’d been turned on in a place where white-clad angels washed her face, where gentle hands cared, where she’d been dear, and sweetie too.
‘Can you remember your name, sweetie?’
Say her name and kill that sweetie? Or choose another? No choice to be made.
‘Duckworth,’ she’d said. Norman’s mother, Cecelia, had been a Duckworth before she’d become a Morrison, and in Amber’s concussed state, her mother-in-law had epitomised respectability.
Had Amber been capable of forethought, she would have chosen Jones, Smith, or Brown. Had she recognised the woman in the second bed as Lorna Hooper, she would have risen, and, concussed or not, broken leg or not, would have run for her life.
For three weeks, she’d failed to recognise the toothless, bandaged Lorna, and by the time she had, it had been too late to run.
The devil looks after his own. Lorna’s sight, severely damaged in the accident, had made her reliant on little Miss Duckworth long before the two had been moved to a convalescent hospital; and when evicted from her convalescent bed, Lorna had offered Miss Duckworth her guest room in exchange for housekeeping services.
Unsociable was too mild a word to describe Lorna Hooper. She discouraged visitors and salesmen with a padlocked gate. She confiscated balls that bounced over her fence, punctured them, stamped the air from them, before relegating them to the rubbish bin. An evil, uncharitable woman, Lorna Hooper; but after the places Amber had been, after the dregs of humanity she’d cohabited with, Lorna and her staid red-brick house in Kew were next door to paradise.
Or had been, until a Duckworth female and her maiden daughter moved to Kew, their house barely a block away from Lorna’s. Amber had risen and almost run from the church the morning the two Duckworth women were introduced to the congregation.
Duckworths had always stuck together. They’d come in force to old Cecelia Morrison’s funeral, had travelled miles to get there. And they’d killed Amber’s second son while they’d been there, or caused his premature birth. It was Charles Duckworth who’d brought the stray into Amber’s life and Sissy’s. Those two Duckworth women, Alma and Valda, ruined Amber’s Sunday mornings. They’d
bailed her up after church one morning, determined to find a common thread that would weave Miss Elizabeth Duckworth into their clan. Amber already had a place there. She was their cousin Norman’s crazy wife. She’d met Alma Duckworth’s sister forty years ago.
Knew she’d have to move on. Didn’t want to move on. She was comfortable, even happy, in her role as Lorna’s companion/guide dog, reader/housekeeper and general factotum.
In late July, three weeks after Margaret’s death, Amber at Lorna’s elbow, waiting to shake the hand of the parson, her mind away with a leg of lamb she’d left roasting in the oven, a third Duckworth female, a massive draughthorse of a woman, jumped the queue, her bulk forcing Amber to step aside or to be run down. Her resemblance to Norman’s mother was uncanny.
‘Lorna Hooper,’ the woman said. ‘Well, fancy running into you here.’
Not quite the height of Lorna, four times her width, heavy jaw, carping codfish mouth. That was all Amber saw before she dodged between the queuing congregation and away from that woman.
The organist was packing up his music. Choir members glanced at little Miss Duckworth who, keeping her head down, searched the front pew Lorna claimed as her own each Sunday. Whatever she was searching for remained lost, until the supersized woman and Lorna had shaken the hand of God’s earthly representative and were gone from the doorway. Amber didn’t rejoin the queue, but made her hasty exit through the side door, behind the organist.
He cut through the shrubbery separating church from church car park, and she pushed through behind him. The car was parked there, locked. Lorna had a locking complex. Amber hid between two vehicles, pressed in close to the shrubbery, peering between the branches at the groups clustering outside the church. There was not a lot of Amber to hide. Thin as a rake, five foot four, white and silky curling hair peeping out from beneath her blue hat, bought to match her overcoat. Sighted Lorna, surrounded by Duckworths. Lorna’s spectacles glinted as she turned, searching for her guide dog.
The mother and daughter Duckworth were broad, but their relative – for surely she was a relative – made them small. An immense, puce-clad woman with heavy shoulder-length hair . . . Quickly, Amber glanced at Alma Duckworth’s hair – like old Cecelia Morrison’s, sparse and silver grey. Her daughter’s was as sparse, though not yet as grey. Darting eyes returned to that abundant dark hair, as heavy, as dark, as . . .
‘No,’ she breathed to the bottlebrush as she eased a branch lower so she might gain a better view of that hair. ‘It can’t be.’
Knew it was. She could see the heavy face in profile and she knew that flat profile. Amber hadn’t seen her daughter in twenty-odd years. Cecelia, they’d named her, for her paternal grandmother – Sissy.
‘No.’
Hair like Gertrude’s. From infancy it had been obvious that Sissy had inherited her maternal grandmother’s hair – as it had been obvious she’d inherited the Duckworth build and features.
It was her.
Five babies Amber had carried. Only Sissy had survived to be put to the breast. She’d loved her plain daughter, had loved her purely for living. And that bastard had brought his golden stray into their lives, his dainty-faced, fine-limbed songbird stray and Amber had hated her for her beauty. She’d tried to make Sissy beautiful. Hours she’d spent curling, combing, styling that hair, choosing frocks to flatter, plucking her eyebrows, painting her face.
And she’d come to this, a monstrous thing with black bushes of eyebrow, clad in puce polyester stretched to fit the rear end of a city tram.
My flesh. My blood.
Norman’s flesh and blood. Sissy had denied her blood link to Amber back in ’62.
The Salvation Army captain had contacted her. Your daughter has made a new life for herself, Mrs Morrison. That was all. Not a word. Not a letter. Just a new life with no space in it for a mad, murdering mother.
Anger rising in her breast, Amber’s feet began tapping. They needed to walk, but she couldn’t walk. Lorna wouldn’t get that car home without her guide dog. Lorna drove, but it was Amber’s eyes that watched for bike riders, red lights, braking cars.
Your daughter has made a new life for herself, Mrs Morrison.
Looked down at her tapping shoes. Good leather shoes. Had to concentrate on her good leather shoes, which she could afford to buy because of Lorna. Had to concentrate on the roast lamb dinner she’d eat at a polished table in a fine house that she ran the way a house should be run. Had to think of her bankbooks. Until Lorna, she’d owned no bankbook. She now had two and a small pool of accumulated wealth. Every fortnight Amber Morrison’s cheques were delivered to a private mailbox at the Melbourne GPO, where they remained safe until Miss Elizabeth Duckworth retrieved then squirrelled them away in Amber’s bank account.
Lorna had been instrumental in securing a pension for Miss Elizabeth Duckworth; her cheques were delivered fortnightly to Lorna’s locked letterbox. With no rent to pay, little food to purchase, Amber always had money left in her purse when the new cheque arrived, when her leftovers were paid into Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s bank account.
Lorna having broken free, Amber’s tapping feet given focus, she slid between the shrubbery and took her benefactor’s arm, her mind fashioning an excuse for her abrupt disappearance. No excuse necessary. Lorna’s expression suggested she was not pleased by the delay.
‘Obnoxious female,’ she muttered. ‘Always was.’
She offered her keys. Amber unlocked the driver’s side door, placed the keys into the ignition, then slid across to the passenger seat.
Thirty years ago, Lorna had not tolerated fools gladly. Age had done nothing to mellow her attitude. The motor roaring her annoyance, she rammed the gearstick into reverse.
‘A car is backing out behind you,’ Amber warned, but quietly. Experience had taught her to keep her tone level and low at all times.
The cars within a hair’s-breadth of colliding, Lorna’s size eleven mashed the brake. Collision avoided. The second car moved back into its space, giving Lorna right of way. Most who drove to church gave her right of way in the car park – and she took it as her due.
They gained the road, and, gearbox crunching, they went on their way, slowly.
‘The world is full of fools,’ Lorna commented. ‘That female in puce was at one time engaged to my fool of a brother.’
Amber nodded and watched the road ahead. She well recalled Sissy’s lost wedding to Vern Hooper’s gangling yard of pump-water son; recalled Monk’s mansion, which Vern had renovated for Sissy; recalled, too, her own dream of living in that mansion with her girl. The gawky swine had broken off the engagement, not only ruining Sissy’s life but killing Amber’s final hope of escape from Norman’s snores.
‘Her sister was the town trollop,’ Lorna added. ‘She had an illegitimate brat to my brother. A son.’
‘Goodness me,’ little Miss Duckworth tut-tutted, remembering the birth of the stray’s illegitimate son, and Amber’s consequent loss of Sissy to the Duckworth clan.
She knew Jim Hooper had married the stray. The Salvation Army captain, having failed with Sissy, had contacted Maisy Macdonald, Amber’s lifelong friend.
Dear Amb,
It would do you no good at all to come back up here. As you know, memories are long in Woody Creek . . .
. . . Jim Hooper and Jenny finally got married. They’re back here, living in Vern Hooper’s house . . .
‘Two boys on bicycles,’ Amber warned. ‘Our turn is just ahead of them.’
Lorna blasted her horn. The bike riders wobbled, then cleared the road. The turn negotiated, the abused gears having found a nominal peace, Amber asked if Lorna’s brother had children.
‘A daughter. My father claimed their bastard. You’ve met him.’ Lorna’s false teeth clacked. ‘That drunken lout you allowed in the door at midnight.’
‘Had I not opened the door, he would have had it off, Miss Hooper,’ Amber defended.
She’d been unaware that the young male who had pushed by her i
n the dead of night had been the stray’s illegitimate get. She’d believed him to be Margaret’s son. But no time now to ponder relationships: Lorna was swinging the car at her padlocked gates. Missed them. Relieved, Amber alighted to take the keys and unlock the gates.
The car driven through, Lorna continued towards the garage, while Amber reversed the process of the gates – the closing, the chaining, the fixing-on of a heavy padlock – her mind free to travel back to the night she’d met Lorna’s nephew.
He would have had that door down. He’d almost knocked her down as she’d opened it. He’d known Lorna’s house, had gone directly to her closed bedroom door, flung it wide and hauled the nightgown-clad Lorna from her bed.
Amber, who feared men in uniform, had been so afraid she’d picked up the phone to call the police. He’d ripped the cord from its wall socket and pitched the phone out the front door.
‘If I have to carry you out of this house in your nightgown, you’ll give Mum peace before she goes,’ he’d said to Lorna.
Lorna had gone with him, freeing Amber for two days. She’d caught trams, visited her mailbox, banked two pension cheques, then posted Amber Morrison’s bankbook back to the GPO. She’d spent hours poking around the depths of suburban opportunity shops. It was astonishing what one could find amongst the discards of others. She’d found a pair of vases, beautiful things, and paid next to nothing for them. Wonderful days. Amber knew too few such days of freedom. Some months she was lucky to steal an hour while Lorna attended an appointment with her eye specialist, or half an hour on the days of her own hair appointments.
Lorna had returned home from Ballarat in a taxi. A tyrant when disturbed, she’d been more voluble since.
‘Always a wilful swine of a boy. There was a place for my sister in the family plot, but he burned her.’ She spoke later between mouthfuls of roast lamb, rich gravy and vegetables.
‘That pernicious pile of pommy pig poop Margaret wed wanted to take her home. Take her home? She came home here to die with her family, to be buried with her mother. She wrote to me a dozen times or more begging me to see to it that she was buried beside her mother.’