by Joy Dettman
‘I’ll make it quick. I’ve done something stupid.’
‘Got married?’ Cara said and eased a shoe off. She’d been wearing those same shoes since morning and her feet had finally had enough of them.
‘Not that stupid,’ Georgie said. ‘My handbag went missing from the storeroom and it had a letter in it addressed to you.’
‘Write me another one,’ Cara said.
‘You already owe me one. Anyway, I’m ninety-nine point nine per cent certain that Raelene’s got it. I left the back door open for a delivery bloke–’ She told her tale of the bikie and Duffy and Raelene as Cara eased off her second shoe.
‘Her bikie drove her out towards the Duffy place this morning, and I think I was set up – they kept me busy in the shop while Raelene waited out the back for the delivery truck to leave.’
‘Was there much in it?’
‘A day and a half’s takings. I’m more worried about her having your address.’
‘I’ve just paid my electricity and phone bills, Georgie. There’s not much more than coins left in my handbag.’
‘It’s not your handbag I’m worried about. She’d knock you over and steel the gold fillings out of your teeth. Anyway, forewarned is forearmed and you’ve been warned. Did you get my card and letter?’
‘I came home to a bundle of mail, an empty fridge and overdue bills. So far I’ve only opened the bills.’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘A pick-up club in the city. My friend is between blokes and on the prowl.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ve sworn off them,’ Cara said, and her mind returned to Sydney to that perfect little two-toothed boy who should never have been born.
‘Have fun,’ Georgie said. And the phone was down.
Cara walked over to her desk where she stood looking down at Georgie and Morrie’s sealed envelopes. Didn’t want to open them. Didn’t want to put her shoes back on and go out to a pick-up club to sit smoking while Marion eyed the available merchandise either.
Glanced at her watch, then walked back to the phone to dial Marion’s Richmond number. Maybe she’d catch her. Marion was rarely on time.
‘I’m leaving now,’ she said.
‘My shoes are off,’ Cara said. ‘Can we make it another time?’
She made coffee when Marion stopped talking. She opened a packet of nuts, stale, but ate a handful while looking at Morrie’s business-sized envelope, chubby with its contents. Knew it contained something about the divorce.
They had a son.
Lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling, then ripped the envelope open.
And after all of that, it wasn’t about the divorce. She removed three photocopied pages of a book. The first two contained a poem. The last contained brief biographies of the poets. He’d underlined one. Jennifer Hooper (1923) resides with her husband and two daughters in a small logging village in Victoria, Australia.
Cara turned to the poem.
OLD DAME POVERTY
By Jennifer Hooper
She’d waited overlong for me, that aged one
Old relative, too distanced to recall the bond of blood I’d
travelled far to claim.
She approached and called my name.
I saw a crone, decayed, unclean,
her hands begrimed, her bare and calloused feet,
her hair a grizzled matted grey.
I tried to run away,
to weep in privacy for dreams now lost to me.
And loud I screamed, ‘Old harridan, old slut.
Soap is cheap and water free.
Go clean yourself.
Don’t force your filth on me.’
With disapproval in my eyes,
more closely then I scrutinised that aged one,
who, proud as any dame on Toorak Road,
walked up to me, her chin held high.
‘You came,’ she scoffed.
No smile upon her face, but tolerance,
acknowledgment.
My distant blood claim she did not deny.
Her unclean hand was offered me
with no implied apology.
And I, from habit long or manners learned,
took that hand in mine.
And felt its strength. Her grasp was strong,
her fingers warm in welcoming one with
a real need to belong.
My eyes, confusion filled, were slowly drawn
to meet her own.
All that I had hoped to find
I found then in her faded eyes,
as, wordlessly, they spoke to me.
I’ve burned my bridges, girl, but I’ve rebuilt.
I’ve seen my tallest sons reduced to dust.
I’ve beat my breast and wept with all the rest.
Emotions fade. Hope grows stale.
I live. I am.
Patient writer of life’s journal, caretaker of time,
Lady Pride and Madam History,
Countess of Pomp, and old Dame Poverty,
I am London.
Stay a while with me.
Morrie had added five lines to the rear of the biography page:
No doubt she’s not the only Jennifer Hooper living in a small logging village in Victoria, Australia, but she used to make up poems when we were kids. Do you know if she writes, if she’s been to London?
Love, Morrie
Cara knew. A few months after she’d gone to Woody Creek, Jenny and her husband had flown to England with the McPhersons. She knew she was a poet too. Four poems by Jennifer Hooper had been included in the centenary book.
She lifted the heavy book to the table, turning pages until she found Sunset, her favourite amongst the four in that book. There was something about it that sounded like Old Dame Poverty.
Wondered if the book was still in print, if she could order a copy. It had more of Morrie’s history in it than it had of her own. The Hooper name was on every second page. There was a portrait of the first James Hooper, or the first to land in Australia.
A bookshop could find out. Georgie would know.
And who do I say I want the book for?
Lies and secrets made life too hard. Life was too damn hard.
I’m one big mistake, she thought. My conception, my profession, my marriage – and my two-toothed son, my greatest mistake.
And such a beautiful mistake.
LITTLE STAR
Myrtle sent a postcard-sized studio photograph of Robin shortly before his first birthday. She and Robert were into their psychological blackmail in a big way now. Robin had four front teeth, more hair and chubby little legs, but his first birthday passed and Cara stayed away from Sydney.
Myrtle upped the ante. Every Sunday night when she phoned, she wasted her money attempting to encourage him to say one of the dozen words she swore he spoke. ‘Tell Mummy about the car. Where’s Papa’s car? Say car for Mummy.’
Like his mother before him, he refused to perform as required – then protested loudly when Myrtle reclaimed his new toy.
‘Sing him a nursery rhyme, pet,’ Myrtle suggested.
Stuck there, a mutter of moist sounds coming down the line, Cara tried ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, then for an encore did ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’. She heard his voice joining in with the ‘baa, baa’, so she sang it again, and when she hung up the phone her eyes were leaking.
Happy Myrtle with her baby to play with; happy with her fluffy white towelling napkins, happy changing his messy backside. As she changed mine, Cara thought. She’d sat for studio photographs each year until they’d left Sydney, had blown out the candles on the cake Myrtle had made every year. The last, the year Cara had turned fifteen, had been a lady in a crinoline, her skirt a cake baked in a steam-pudding bowl. Myrtle must have spent hours, days, mixing icing sugar in secret. That was the year of Cara the prize bitch, and that bitch had cut a great gash out of the skirt before the fifteen candles circling it had been lit.
Why
didn’t they give up on me? Why didn’t they throw me out the door and tell me never to come back? They should have.
And she should have flown up to Sydney to see the cake Myrtle would have made for Robin’s birthday.
*
Definitely should have flown up there the weekend of Helen’s thirtieth birthday party, and may have had she known Chris Marino had been invited. Of course he’d received an invitation: he and Helen’s husband worked for the same firm of solicitors. Cara had first met Chris at one of Helen’s parties, when she’d been matchmaking – and she was probably attempting to do it again.
‘He’s still unattached,’ Helen – still childless, unchanged, same dark bobbed hair, different caftan – whispered when she hung Cara’s coat. ‘He told Michael a while back that he’s never got over you. Be kind to him.’
She’d probably whispered the same to Chris.
They shook hands and were very kind to each other; and, as the night wore on, may have been pleased to find chairs side by side amid the fifty-odd unknown family members and neighbours, plus the teachers Cara saw enough of at school. Alcohol always helped. Older now, she needed more of it before she felt its buzz.
She’d put away enough before Chris asked if there was a man in her life.
‘Barry,’ she said. ‘The man with the magic hands.’
‘Illusionist? Musician?’ he asked.
‘Mechanic,’ she said.
Raised eyebrows his only reply, she came clean and told him of the MG and the old tin-shed garage at the rear of a house in Ashburton where she’d found Barry Simpson, a wizened little bloke clad in oversized greasy overalls, and Mary, his wife, who walked with the aid of two half-crutches.
‘He got my car going.’
‘What do you drive?’
‘A ’54 MG.’
‘Didn’t he have–’
‘It’s Morrie’s,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t got around to shipping it over there yet. I’ve got a parking bay and no car so I’m babysitting it – and exercising it regularly.’
‘You’re still involved with him?’
‘I’m involved with Barry,’ she said, moving the subject to a more comfortable area. ‘I withdrew my life’s savings – which wasn’t a lot – but I expected him to charge like a wounded bull, and he didn’t. Now I’m head over heels in love with him – except he’s already got a wife – and I’m head over heels in love with her too.’
She must have been. She couldn’t stand the smell of tea, but drank two cups of Mary’s with two of her homemade biscuits. A bent little woman with a heavy iron on her leg, she’d gone to the trouble of making those biscuits and the pot of tea, and no way could Cara have refused it. Seeing her – or maybe the tea – had done a lot for Cara’s frame of mind. What the hell have I been moaning about, she’d thought.
Her mind was at Ashburton when Chris asked Morrie’s occupation.
‘Farmer,’ she said. He’d inherited a farm. It was near enough. And she, in no mood to be interrogated, went in search of Helen’s telephone to call a taxi. Never drove Morrie’s toy car to parties. It was like a red flag waved at police cars. Didn’t dare to drink and drive it.
Chris followed her. ‘I’m going your way,’ he said.
Helen lived in the suburbs, near the Forest Hill shopping centre, miles away from Cara’s dogbox. Chris had a flat in St Kilda and taxis cost money she didn’t have.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
Wasn’t fast enough in getting out of his swanky car. He caught her hand. ‘Would you consider dinner on Saturday?’
‘It would be a mistake, Chris.’
Her hand extricated, she got away.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
Why not? Everyone else did.
‘Goodnight.’
Went to bed, to sleep, and dreamed of him. He was driving Morrie’s car. Then it wasn’t him, it was Morrie, and he drove into Barry’s dark tin shed and made love to her. How they managed in the confines of the MG she didn’t know, but in the dream she didn’t concern herself with the mathematics. Woke alone, the doves cooing, her eye sockets filled with tears.
*
Chris called twice before she agreed to meet him for dinner. She ate with him twice before he asked her back to his flat for coffee. And she went there, stone cold sober, determined to wash Morrie from her dreams.
Didn’t want Chris’s kiss or his hands, or for him to see the scar of Robin’s birth, so drank his coffee then took a taxi home.
She tried to write. There was nothing inside her to write about. She started a letter to Georgie, and ended up spilling the whole damn mess of Morrie and Robin. And why not post it? Georgie wouldn’t blame, she’d celebrate the finding of her lost brother.
Would Morrie celebrate? Would Myrtle? Robert?
And what of the tiny boy accidentally caught up in the mess? It was bad enough to know you’d been discarded like so much rubbish when the lodger from room five had packed up in a hurry and gone home. How would it be growing up knowing you’d been born to a brother and sister?
A half-brother.
She ripped up the pages, then shredded the shreds. For Robin’s sake she had to keep her mouth shut and her pen still.
She considered Chris’s bed the following Saturday night, aware that it would be so easy to slip back into old habits. No fear of unwanted pregnancy, not with Chris. Not for him a hurried, hole-in-a-corner wedding. When he married it would be a full Catholic mass with every relative, every friend of the family – those who’d immigrated with his parents, families from their old village who had taken a later boat.’
In June, Chris asked her to partner him at his second cousin’s wedding. To attach another memory to the frock she’d worn to her own wedding, she agreed to go.
‘Perfection,’ he said when he picked her up at her door.
He held her hand during the long Catholic service of smoke and bells and priests in fancy dresses who joined a pretty dark-headed child bride clad in acres of white organza and lace to a baby-faced groom – for life. The bride was seventeen, the groom twenty-one.
‘They’re too young to know what life is about,’ Cara said.
‘They’ll grow together,’ he said.
‘She’ll have six kids before she’s twenty-five. They won’t leave her time to grow.’
‘A woman’s best child-bearing years are her twenties,’ he said.
‘There’s more to a woman than her capacity to breed.’
‘You don’t want children, Cara?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t. I’m not interested in marrying either, Chris.’
Wine flowed at the reception, a huge reception, and as the night wore on, less English was spoken. Cara was possibly the only natural blonde there. Plenty of pretty dark-eyed Italian girls giving Chris the eye; his mother and sisters giving Cara the eye and no doubt wondering why their son and brother was wasting his time again with that skinny Australian girl who drank too much wine, as she had the first time she’d slept in his bed.
As Marion frequently said, waking up beside any man was preferable to waking up alone.
She was comfortable with Chris. His lovemaking was familiar – as was his kitchen and his Sunday morning short shorts and running shoes.
He became her Saturday night habit. He’d changed one of his. He’d swapped his grapefruit and juice squeezer for a vitamiser. She watched him mix a gruesome green sludge in it, but said ‘No, thanks’ to the small glass of sludge he offered her. She said ‘No, thanks’ when he invited her to jog with him around Albert Park, but walked with him to the corner; watched him run off alone in his running shorts, and too-large shoes, before catching two trams home to make pancakes for breakfast. She made good pancakes; she’d had a lot of practice during her weeks of solitary confinement.
*
She was lazing in his shower in July when he returned too soon from his Sunday morning run. She unlocked the door and emerged, towel-wrapped, and he offered her a camera.
; ‘I was attacked by a rabid dog,’ he explained.
‘Are you okay?’
He nodded, and instructed her on the use of his ultra expensive Canon. Once satisfied that she knew what was required, he dropped his running shorts and she photographed his injury. Had expected blood and deep puncture wounds. Saw reddened skin and a scratch. No rabid fang wound.
She took three shots of his buttock, then photographed his short shorts. They’d been ripped a little. His pride had suffered the major bruising, but you can’t photograph injured pride.
‘What sort of dog was it?’ she asked.
‘A big white brute of a thing,’ he said.
She visualised a crazed albino Alsatian, or a Rottweiler, or a Great Dane–pig dog cross as she’d seen once on the back of a ute. She was sympathetic, but couldn’t stop imagining the reaction of the guy who’d develop the shots. Soon after, afraid of the giggle that kept rising to her throat, she took two trams home while he went in search of a tetanus injection.
The big white brute killed his Sunday morning runs, but he worked out one night a week at a gym, and it had a heated swimming pool and spa. Thereafter, on Sunday mornings, Cara drove with him to his gym, and while Chris did his multiple laps, Cara lazed in the spa.
They were at the gym in late July when he told her he’d be in Sydney for the next two weeks. Her mind darted to Amberley. Back when they’d been engaged, he’d been there often, had eaten many meals there, liked saying ‘Amberley, Vaucluse’. Her mind was searching for an acceptable reason why he shouldn’t go there this time when he asked her to fly with him to Italy in October.
‘My grandmother is still there, and elderly. I’d like her to know the woman I love,’ he said.
‘Don’t do this, Chris. I’ve told you, I need your company. I’m not looking for anything more.’
‘I’m looking for much more,’ he said.
Tell him about Robin and he’ll run screaming for the hills, she thought.
She hadn’t been back to Sydney. Sang nursery rhymes every Sunday night on the phone. Hadn’t wanted to know that little boy. Had been forced to know him.
By the time Robin was ten, Robert would be over eighty. Parents died. Three weeks ago Gerry’s father had died, and he’d been younger than Robert. Myrtle would never cope alone. She couldn’t drive a car. And even if they both lived for another twenty years, Robert’s knee would seize one day. If Cara didn’t take responsibility for all of them, then who would?