by Joy Dettman
Cara had opened the kitchen window. Jenny came with the ashtray to stand beside her and blow her smoke out of doors. Two in the small area of the kitchenette was a crowd. Cara gave up her space to check on the pastie. Not hot enough yet to kill the bacteria Myrtle swore lurked in all frozen foods. She felt the potatoes. Still hard.
‘Policemen look so young these days,’ Jenny said. ‘They were lovely boys, both of them.’
‘Teachers fresh out of college look like kids to me.’
‘Which direction do you face here?’
‘East – more or less,’ Cara said.
‘I usually know now when I’m in Melbourne, but my head feels so twisted tonight I wouldn’t have hazarded a guess.’ She drew on the cigarette and held the smoke. ‘For the best part of twelve months we drove Raelene down here every six weeks to appointments with a psychologist. We always popped into Coles to have a cup of tea and use their toilets before we started for home. She knows my habits too well – she must have followed me.’
Eyebrows raised in question, Cara wondered if she’d missed a key word.
‘Who?’
‘Raelene. I was standing at the washbasin, soaping my hands, then the lights went out.’
‘I’m not following you.’
‘Raelene. She hit me over the head with a bottle of Coke – or so they said. I didn’t see a thing. It was so embarrassing. I woke up flat out on the washroom floor with half a dozen people fussing around me – and two of them men, in the ladies’ room.’
‘Sit down, Jenny.’
‘I’m good now. She had a Coke bottle in a plastic bag. She swung it at a woman who was coming in as she was going out, and the woman’s daughter grabbed it. They identified her – or described what Raelene had worn in the court.’ She sucked in more smoke, then shook ash into the ashtray she held in her hand. ‘She got my handbag.’
Cara stood listening, her back to the stove. Interesting how this visitor was telling a similar tale to that of her last visitor. Why did she believe this one?
Because a policeman had delivered her? Maybe.
Because she was a gullible fool? Maybe.
Watched the way she held that cigarette, watched her mouth, the turn of her head to the window when she exhaled.
‘My money, licence, car keys, our joint chequebook – all in my handbag. Jim made me bring the chequebook. Our car’s twelve years old and he’s always worried that something will go wrong with it. He would have come with me, but we’ve got Trudy home sick with that hepatitis thing. Both of us couldn’t leave her.’
She spoke in bursts, sucking words from the cigarette.
‘Sit down before you fall down,’ Cara said.
‘I’m good here. The worst part of it, the part that hurts most of all – other than my head – is my little pendant. I’ve owned it since I was ten years old. Its clasp came undone while I was being raked over the coals by her swine of a lawyer – I felt it slide and thought how lucky that I’d felt it. I put it in my handbag. I wish I hadn’t felt it slide now. If I’d lost it in the witness box, I’d have some chance of getting it back.’ One final draw on her cigarette, one last glance at the butt, then she stubbed out the ember. ‘My cigarettes, Granny’s little embroidery scissors I’ve been carrying around for years, my new lighter, headache pills, everything. Jim says that if we ever got washed up on a desert island and I’d managed to hang on to my handbag, we’d have everything we needed to survive.’
Cara took the ashtray from her hand and placed it on the table. Jenny followed it.
‘As a tiny kid, she loved fiddling with that pendant. She took it once, when she first came back to live with me and Jim and Trudy. I searched the house for it for days; begged her to tell me what she’d done with it. It wasn’t until she started accusing Trudy that we found it beneath the cot mattress. She was three at the time – Trudy – she couldn’t have reached my dressing table. And even if she’d climbed up there, she wouldn’t have known how to unlock my jewellery box. She’s never liked Trudy. She’s the reason we sent Trudy down to that damn school to catch their hepatitis. It can do permanent damage to the liver, they say.’
Cara killed her own butt beneath the running tap and tossed it into the bin. She opened the oven again, checked the pastie, just for something to do. Couldn’t think of anything to say. Watched her visitor’s fingers delve beneath her curls, seeking a place she couldn’t immediately locate.
‘I had a lump the size of a goose egg when I came around,’ she said. ‘It’s shrinking. I should be grateful she didn’t get me on a thinner part of my skull. I mightn’t have been here to tell the tale.’
‘You should have gone to the hospital,’ Cara said.
‘I don’t like hospitals. Granny always used to say that there wasn’t much a cup of tea and an aspro wouldn’t cure. I’d add a cigarette to that.’
‘I’m sorry. I should have offered tea,’ Cara said, and given occupation she filled the jug.
She had tea in a coffee jar, kept for those who drank it – Cathy in the main, though not recently. She unearthed her two-cup green enamel teapot. It was ex-Amberley, as most of her kitchen equipment was. She’d cleaned it to within an inch of its life after Raelene’s visit, and was pleased tonight that she had.
‘She’ll have to serve that twelve-month jail sentence when they find her,’ Jenny said.
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Cara said, measuring tea, then a little more.
The new jug, smaller than the old, boiled faster. Poured water over the leaves, then placed pot and a mug on the table.
‘I’ll let you pour. I’m not a tea drinker.’
She placed the sugar bowl, milk, beside the pot, found a spoon, then opened her refrigerator, searching the freezer for something to extend dinner for one into dinner for two. She found frozen beans. The fridge’s crisper offered up a large carrot, attempting to grow in the dark. The cupboard beneath her sink gave up an onion and two more small potatoes.
‘I would have taken the bus down, but they told me I had to be at the court by ten and the bus doesn’t get in until almost twelve,’ Jenny said. ‘I rang my friend out at Frankston and found out that her husband’s son was killed in a car accident yesterday.’
Her back to her visitor, Cara busied herself at the sink, peeling the onion, cutting it small before tossing it into a saucepan with a knob of butter. While it sizzled, she peeled the carrot and potatoes, diced them, then tossed them in to sizzle. A shake of frozen beans, salt, pepper, a dribble of water, then the lid on and the heat turned low, she made a strong coffee. Seated then across the small table from Jenny, she lit another cigarette.
‘I’m making you break your rules,’ Jenny said.
‘Someone once said that rules were made to be broken.’
And there they were, finally, alone together, cigarettes burning, tea and coffee mugs full, and Cara could think of nothing to say.
Jenny appeared to be afraid of silence. ‘Jim taped a spare key beneath the bumper bar. I asked the young constable to drive me up to the car park, but my car wasn’t there.’ She ashed her cigarette as the phone rang. ‘That will be Georgie now.’
‘I changed my number – after the robbery,’ Cara said. ‘I’ve been lax in letting people know.’
Marion had her number. ‘Did you collect your winnings?’ she asked.
‘What winnings?’
‘Your Tatts ticket. I told you I took a copy of the numbers.’
‘I never look at the numbers.’
‘We got five and the supplementary,’ Marion said.
‘You’re having me on.’
‘I’m not. We’ll get something worth collecting – if you haven’t lost your ticket.’
Cara didn’t lose things. ‘It’ll be here somewhere. You’re not kidding me, Marion?’
‘I’m kidding you not – but I’m sweating on my half.’
Found the ticket under the telephone, with Phyllis bloody Willis’s wedding invitation. ‘Tell me the numbers.’
She called these numbers and Cara circled them, and unless Marion had got them wrong, they’d won something.
‘I’ll meet you under the clocks after school. We’ll go to the place where I bought it,’ Marion said.
And the phone was down, and Jenny watching her.
‘We won a prize in TattsLotto,’ Cara said, looking at the small printout, stunned. She never won anything. Placed that scrap of paper safe into her purse.
‘I never buy tickets,’ Jenny said.
‘Me either. Marion bought it for my birthday. I didn’t even look at the numbers.’
Silence then, though it was never silent in that flat, not with the window open. The road was close, and at six o’clock there was a constant stream of traffic heading north, south.
‘It must be noisy for sleeping,’ Jenny said.
‘My bedroom is sheltered a little from the noise – and the cars eventually get to where they’re going.’
Blowfly flinging itself against the flyscreen, desperate to get in for a share of what was cooking.
‘Raelene hates being locked in. A few years ago she spent twelve months in a girls’ home. She doesn’t like supervision.’
‘She needs to be made accountable for her actions,’ Cara said.
‘We had some control over her until he got her onto drugs.’
Cara had heard enough about Raelene. She was wondering how much money she might collect. Five hundred between them? Eight hundred, twelve? Knew nothing about the lotteries, only that very few won prizes, and for once, she’d won something.
Jenny drained her mug and reached for the pot to pour more. ‘I think your pills and tea are working.’
Pill packets still on the table. Bad memories in both of them. Cara rose, checked the contents of the saucepan, added a little water. Jenny stirred sugar into her tea, tasted it.
‘She’d told her lawyer that her stepfather raped her when she was eight years old. I thought he was talking about Jim when he said it in court. It’ll probably be in tomorrow’s papers, and no doubt I’ll be painted as the wicked stepmother. She wasn’t accusing Jim, but Clarrie, her mother’s husband, which is almost as bad. He’s a decent, hard-working bloke who did his best for her. It’s like Granny used to say to the kids when they were young: you can run from a murderer, hide your valuables from a thief, but a liar can steal your most precious possession from a thousand miles away.’ She sipped tea. ‘She meant your good name.’
‘If I had any say in the making of laws, I’d fence off a hundred square miles of desert with ten-foot-tall electrified fences, and I’d toss Raelene and her ilk behind that fence then let them fight it out like the feral things they are,’ Cara said.
‘The do-gooders wouldn’t allow it. That’s the problem with our world today – too many people having too much say in things they know nothing about. It was different when I was a kid. Like the Duffy family – Georgie might have spoken about them to you? They’re born thieves, and everyone in town knew it when I was a kid. Every so often, the state would move in, take away a few of their kids, and it was the right thing to do for them too. These days, they leave them there to be dragged up, and when the police pick them up for something, the courts let them off because of their terrible family life. It’s madness. Raelene and two of the Duffys bailed Trudy up in the railway yard in broad daylight – three full-grown girls against an eleven-year-old kid. They ripped her T-shirt off and she had to run home half-naked, just when she was starting to develop. And they weren’t even charged.’
‘Seriously?’
‘She wasn’t hurt, but so embarrassed we couldn’t get her out of the house for weeks. She missed a month of school, gave up playing netball.’
Jenny crushed her butt and pushed the ashtray and cigarettes to the far end of the table.
‘Georgie told me once that Raelene’s father was a violent man,’ Cara said.
‘He wanted to own my soul. No matter how much I gave of myself, he wanted more. He used to stutter badly, came across as a shy bloke – until I married him and discovered there was a side to him that didn’t stutter. It came out when he didn’t get all he wanted. Raelene’s the same. Even as a little kid, she could be the sweetest little girl, then without warning turn into a wild, biting, kicking little bugger. It’s in the blood.’
‘Smoking must be. Mum and Dad loathe the habit.’
‘You’d be twenty-seven now,’ Jenny said. ‘Myrtle would be sixty-eight. She turned forty-one not long before you were born. Does she keep well?’
‘She’s never aged. Dad is aging. Mum won’t cope if anything ever happens to him.’
‘We cope with what we have to,’ Jenny said. ‘I thought I’d die the day Granny died, but yesterdays have a terrible way of fading. You want the sun to never rise again, but it keeps on rising in the morning and going down at night, then one day you look at the calendar and realise you’ve lived without the one you’ve lost for a week, then for a month. The plum tree still blossoms in spring, the old nanny goat has another kid, and somewhere along the way you realise that life will go on until it’s done with you.’
‘You wrote something like that in one of your poems,’ Cara said.
‘Georgie told me you’d ordered another copy of the book for a friend.’
Friend, lover, brother. ‘He sent me a copy of “Old Dame Poverty”.’
‘Good Lord. Where did he find that?’
‘In a book of poetry about England.’
‘I’ve probably got the only copy of it in Australia. They paid me with a free copy.’
‘How did you . . . do it?’
‘Write it? I get these urges to scribble things, and Jim types them up for me and sends them off all over the place. I’ve got one in a kids’ book, illustrated by the chap who worked on the centenary book with Jim.’
‘The Lady’s Garden,’ Cara said.
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘We’ve got it at school, and I bought my own copy. Is that garden real?’
‘It’s Amy’s – John and Amy McPherson’s, though the garden is mostly Amy’s doing. She’s a teacher, or was. She was my teacher when I started at school. I wanted to put her name in the book, but she didn’t want to be in it. We’re doing another one at the moment, using a poem I wrote as a kid about a little brown gnome who built his house out of letters that never reached their destination.’
‘You’re living my dream, Jenny.’
‘I don’t do anything. Jim and John do the work – and Amy. What do you write?’
‘Novels no one wants to publish.’
‘There you go again – it’s got to be in the blood. Your grandfather left me thirteen diaries crammed full of the world according to Archie Foote. A lot of their content is unfit for general exhibition, but there are other bits well worth reading.’
‘Georgie’s Itchy-foot, the ship’s doctor.’
‘He was a doctor, but from what I know of him, he only worked at it when he had to. He had a beautiful singing voice. When we lived down here with Ray, Itchy-foot sang at a jazz club in the city. I sang there for a while too. He would have been around eighty but didn’t look it, and his voice didn’t sound eighty. It had a richness you don’t hear often.’
‘Your grandmother separated from him, Georgie said.’
‘She was barely nineteen when she married him. He dragged her all over the world for eight years, then deserted her in India. She worked her passage home on a boat full of diphtheria, three months pregnant with Amber. Her story would make a book worth reading. I told her so once, and she told me that most of it would be banned reading.’
The pastie cut in two, one small baked potato on each plate, the mashed vegetables shared, and Cara carried two meals to the table.
‘Myrtle’s plates,’ Jenny said.
‘The week I moved in, Mum and Dad drove down with what they could fit into the station wagon.’
She took tomato sauce and butter f
rom her fridge, placed salt and pepper on the table, then sat to eat.
It was a little like sitting opposite Georgie. From time to time, Cara attempted to remind herself that this was the woman who had dumped her like so much garbage, but instead saw a woman who had been knocked unconscious with a Coke bottle, who’d willingly swallow out-of-date pills from dusty packets, who didn’t turn her nose up at a shared pastie, and, like Cara, shook plenty of tomato sauce onto her half-pastie.
‘Granny used to make cardboard pastry,’ Jenny said. ‘You needed a chisel to get into her pasties. Amber could cook – probably learned to in self-defence – as did I, and Elsie.’
‘Amber, the woman who raised you?’
‘Yep. I learned two things from her: how to dodge and how to make flaky pastry. She was a good cook.’ Jenny spoke of ordering a Cornish pastie when she was in Cornwall, and expecting it to be something special. ‘This one has got more flavour,’ she said.
‘I’ve always wanted to see Land’s End,’ Cara said. ‘And London, and Dublin. I planned to go there with my cousin, Pete, Dad’s brother’s youngest boy, but he gave up waiting for me and went with a mate.’
‘If that Tatts ticket pays enough, use it to fly there.’
Tell her about the invitation. Tell her that her son is marrying Phyllis Willis.
‘Charles Lindbergh took thirty-eight hours to fly from New York to Paris when I wasn’t much more than a baby, and I never forgot it,’ Jenny said. ‘I must have spent half of my life wanting to fly to Paris. We spent a few days there when we flew over. It should have impressed me more than it did.’
‘What about London?’
‘There are parts of that city that don’t look to have changed since Dickens wrote his novels. There’s this old cemetery, Brompton Cemetery, where they’ve been burying their dead for five hundred years. I could have spent a month wandering there, reading the tombstones.’
‘That was your highlight? A cemetery?’
‘There were too many highlights, but that cemetery was one of them. Until kids I knew started dying, I spent a lot of time wandering around Woody Creek’s cemetery reading tombstones.’