by Joy Dettman
‘Why didn’t Paris impress you?’
‘It’s supposed to be a beautiful city. I suppose it is, but for me its soul was missing. A language thing maybe, or my expectations were too high. London gave me the magic I was looking for.’
‘I received an invitation to a wedding today. It’s not far from London.’
‘It’s a long way to go to a wedding.’
Plates empty, Cara took them to the sink and made more coffee, aware of why the Jessica of her novel had been so wrong until she’d stopped attempting to base her on Jenny. Jenny was too complex to trap on paper – or maybe not complex enough.
Only four cigarettes remaining, and as Cara reached for one of them, Jenny took her hand, like Georgie had that day at the shop.
‘I knew the day you were born that I’d given you my hands and terrible fingernails.’
Strange, her touch. It raised feelings in Cara she’d managed to kill these last few years. Long seconds passed, a half-minute of seconds, both women looking at the linked hands, one a little older than the other, but the skin tones near identical.
Cara withdrew her hand, lit the cigarette and asked the question she’d been wanting to asked since she’d turned fifteen.
‘Why give me away but keep the other three, Jenny?’
Jenny was lighting her own. ‘I did them no favours, love.’
‘They grew up knowing who they were. I doubt I know yet.’
‘When I saw you that night in Woody Creek, I saw my success story, the girl I might have grown into.’
‘A teacher who loathes her job? Twenty-seven and still living alone? I don’t see that as success.’
She walked to the window, thinking to close it. The night had cooled.
‘My lease is up in December. I’m thinking about going home and getting a job in an office.’
‘Because of Raelene?’
‘In the main. I’ve got so many locks on that door, but still don’t feel safe in bed. And Dad needs me. Mum doesn’t drive, and his knee makes it impossible for him to drive far.’
‘Georgie told me you were engaged to a solicitor at one time.’
‘He’s still around.’ She drew again on the cigarette, then released the words with the smoke. ‘Why raise three and give the fourth away?’
‘There were reasons, love.’
‘What reasons?’
‘You don’t need to know that.’
‘I’m probably old enough to be the judge of what I need to know.’
It had started. Now it couldn’t end until it ended.
‘Did Myrt tell you that you were born on her kitchen floor?’
‘I know where I was born. I know you handed me to Mum when I was minutes old. What I need to know is why a woman who already had three children could carry a baby for nine months then walk away from it.’
‘We do what we have to do,’ Jenny said.
‘If you’d loved my father, why wouldn’t you love his child?’
‘I didn’t love him.’
Cold air coming through that open window, and its chill crept into Cara’s voice. ‘So, I’m the result of a one-night stand?’
‘You might call it that,’ Jenny said.
The window closed, but Cara remained at it, looking out.
Jenny stood. ‘I wrote you a letter before I left for England – a pretty story about how I fell in love with your father and how his boat had been sunk by the Japs. I thought the plane would crash before we got there, so a pretty lie wouldn’t matter. We didn’t crash. I read it when we came home. It might have appealed to some of those magazines that print romantic drivel. I don’t know who your father was.’
‘You told Mum his name was Billy-Bob,’ Cara accused.
‘You’re too tall,’ Jenny said. ‘He was a stocky little sod.’ She stood a while in silence, and when she spoke again her voice had lost its warmth. Just the relaying of a tale from long ago. ‘I sang at a servicemen’s club with Wilfred Whiteford, a sixty-odd-year-old pianist. He drove me there, drove me home. It was New Year’s Eve. My birthday. We were in Wilfred’s car, in a lane behind the club, when a mob of drunken Yankee sailors opened the door, tossed him out to the gutter, then drove me down to a beach and raped me. I passed out before they were done and woke up naked on the sand.
‘I was twenty. I’d made myself a beautiful taffeta frock. It was blue, shot with green and purple, the first new frock I’d had in years. I found it six or eight yards away, its sleeve ripped halfway out of the armhole. I found a gold watch with Billy-Bob’s name on it – that’s how I knew he was one of them. He was five foot six if he was lucky, a baby-faced, snub-nosed kid of eighteen who’d had his eye on me all night at the club, and got upset when I wouldn’t go on to a party with him.’
Cara had turned from the window to stare at her.
‘He was with a big thick-necked coot who stank of BO. Rank Hank the Yank. I’d danced with him too. Link was another one. He was tall enough to be your father.’
‘You told Mum you were in love with Billy-Bob.’
‘Your mum knows the truth. Whether she believed it not, it’s not the sort of thing she’d tell you,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m pretty sure that until the night you came she still believed that storks delivered babies – or would have preferred to.’
Myrtle in a nutshell.
‘I almost aborted you,’ Jenny said. ‘My friends from the factory took me to a house in the inner city, but when I saw the doctor I ran, then spent the next months cursing myself for running. I didn’t, not for one split second of the months I carried you, consider taking you home. That’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – which I’ve already sworn once to tell today.’ She shrugged, glanced at her interrogator. ‘If I’d gone home with another fatherless baby, Vern Hooper would have got Jimmy sooner than he did. I loved that little boy. I would have laid down my life for him. I knew that Myrt would spoil you rotten, give you the fairytale life I used to dream up for myself–’
But Cara had left the kitchen.
COMMON GROUND
Should have kept my big mouth shut, Jenny thought, wishing now that she’d lied.
She washed the two plates, rinsed the saucepan, willing Cara to return. When she didn’t, she walked to the open bedroom door, expecting to see her face down across the bed – or on her knees beside it, as Myrtle had fallen to her knees to offer her problems to God.
Cara was standing before her wardrobe, both doors flung wide, checking the pockets of a beige jacket. Jenny watched until it was hung.
‘Are you all right, love?’
‘Fine,’ Cara said, and continued her occupation, systematically checking pockets.
Jenny, who always took off somewhere to hide her own tears, knew why Cara was hiding behind the wardrobe door, and knew too that approaching her would be a mistake.
‘I remembered your every birthday,’ she said. ‘I used to buy cute little birthday cards to send. I almost posted a couple of them.’
Cara continued her search.
‘I knew Myrt would raise you the way a little girl should be raised, educate you.’
‘I had nothing but the best, Jenny,’ Cara said, no tears in her voice.
*
She was searching for cigarettes. She’d remembered buying a large packet at a hotel when she’d gone there to meet Marion, who had turned up over half an hour late. Knew they’d be in the pocket of whatever she’d been wearing that night, but couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d worn.
‘Are you all right . . . with what I told you?’ Jenny asked.
‘Goodbye, Billy-Bob and hello, Rank Hank the Yank or Lanky Link. That’s all it means to me, Jenny. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life asking that question and could find no answer that rang true.’
She found the cigarettes, in her black suit jacket pocket, then remembered wearing it that night as a blazer with jeans and sweater. She closed the wardrobe doors and tossed the packet to Jenny, who didn’t allow one sm
oke to spill, that near-full pack like gold to a smoker.
‘I thought I’d upset you,’ Jenny said.
‘I think I feel liberated,’ Cara said. ‘Link-Lincoln is a vast improvement on Billy-Bob. He always sounded like a firewater distiller.’
She returned to the kitchen to boil the jug for coffee and a fresh pot of tea, while Jenny used her bathroom, no doubt relieved that the inquisition was over. It had only just begun.
‘How did Jimmy’s grandfather gain custody of him?’ Cara asked when Jenny was seated again.
‘He was the only grandson Vern Hooper was likely to have, and no grandson of his would be raised a bastard in his town. He was the main reason I married Ray. I thought if I gave my kids a name, Vern would stop hounding me. And he did too, until I left Ray and we went home and we all caught the flu. Jimmy was so sick with it he started taking convulsions. I sent our neighbour’s boy into town to get someone with a car, and Lorna Hooper turned up. She carried Jimmy out while I was getting dressed, then drove off with him. A day or so later, I ended up in hospital with pneumonia. I don’t remember much after that. I know I signed Vern Hooper’s papers, though at the time I thought they were the devil’s papers, that I was selling him my soul. I remember two devils leaning over my bed, making bids for it. I think I signed so they’d go away and let me die in peace.’
She flicked ash from her butt, and looked at her hand. It was shaking.
‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘It does that when I talk about Jimmy. I try not to these days. He’ll turn thirty this year and I still see him as a six year old.’
‘Did you attempt to get him back?’
‘Begged; smashed Vern Hooper’s windscreen one day when begging did no good.’ She sighed, shook her head and mashed the butt into the ashtray. ‘Then I sort of became one of the walking dead, wandering through a shadow world where the only light was from Georgie’s hair. Wherever I was, it was there. If I walked off to drown myself, she was at my side, stopping me. If I wouldn’t get out of bed, she’d climb in with me.’
Jenny rose and went to the bathroom.
Tell her, Cara thought. You have to. Tell her how you ran into him one night. It’s over, or will be over in December. Who do you owe? Him? He left you vomiting your heart out in a hotel bathroom. He’s marrying Phyllis Willis. You owe him nothing.
You owe Robin.
Jenny was back, her face washed clean.
‘Is Georgie likely to be at the shop tonight?’ Cara asked.
Jenny glanced at her watch. ‘She could be with Jim and Trudy. I should call Jim.’
‘What’s your number?’
Jenny called it out, Cara dialled. When a male voice replied, she offered the phone, then left Jenny to relay her day to him while the fold-up bed was dragged from its space. It had lived a long and varied life; ex-Amberley, as was her dressing table, her easy chair and coffee table. Old, but built as Myrtle’s generation had built their world – to last. They’d fitted it with wheels at its central fold, easy to move about. She wheeled it out to her sitting room to unfold where her television had once lived and she was spreading sheets over it when Jenny placed the phone down and picked up the plane ticket.
‘You’re going?’
‘They sent the ticket with the invitation.’
‘They must want you to be there.’
‘I don’t know the bride. Most of the guests will be from her side.’
She tucked the sheets beneath a mattress hardly worthy of the name. Too slim, too long folded, it was wearing out at its centre.
‘Go,’ Jenny said.
‘It’s a long way just to spend a day with a hundred strangers. And in the middle of their winter.’
‘I’d go tomorrow if I could talk Jim into it.’
They spread the blankets together, then sat again, speaking of England, of weddings and wedding gowns, and of Georgie. They smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much tea and coffee, then Jenny swallowed two more out-of-date pills and they went to their beds.
*
Ten fifty, the flat silent, two similar heads on identical pillows thinking similar thoughts.
The city wasn’t silent. An ambulance’s wail turned both minds to Raelene, and here their thoughts differed. Cara relished the image of that feral locked in a cage; Jenny, again, searched Raelene’s life, seeking the place where it had taken that wrong turn.
Cara’s mind travelled to the jail scene in Rusty; a scene, by necessity, she’d had to cut short. Didn’t know what the inside of a jail looked like, smelled like, felt like. What if the publishers accepted it this time? Maybe that’s where she was being led, her life pared down to basics, ready for a new beginning.
If she and Marion had got the first prize? Their payout would have been life changing. She could have paid off Robert’s bank loan . . .
Jenny’s mind travelled to Laurie Morgan, a grown man of twenty-six when she’d been fifteen. Was he out there somewhere still casing jewellery shops?
Cara thought of Georgie.
Jenny thought of Margot, and, as always when she thought of that girl, her mind flitted to Trudy, who, like Cara, may one day seek information about her natural parents. She’d written The Lady’s Garden for Trudy when she was a six year old, and old enough to start understanding how Mummy and Daddy couldn’t get any baby seeds to grow in Jenny’s womb garden. Jim hadn’t wanted to tell her anything. Only a handful knew, he’d argued. A large handful – Harry and Elsie and their kids, and no doubt their kids’ partners; Veronica from Frankston; Rosemary and Nobby and probably their kids. The Frankston solicitor knew; he’d done the paperwork for the adoption. There’d be records, too, at the Frankston hospital. Somewhere, sometime, someone would let it slip, and she wasn’t having what had happened to her happen to Trudy.
Who had told Cara? Jenny hadn’t asked that. She’d been registered as the daughter of Myrtle and Robert Norris. Trudy had been registered as Gertrude Maria, born to Margot Macdonald Morrison and Edward Michael Hall. The certificate tucked away in some secret drawer after the adoption, but secrets refused to remain buried.
‘Cara Jeanette.’ Jenny breathed the name, and tonight it was a sigh of relief. For the first time in twenty-seven years, there was peace in her mind when she spoke her childhood pseudonym, given to that bald-headed infant she’d left with Myrtle to live the fairytale life of Cara Jeanette Paris, the Jenny child’s magic friend who had danced with fairies in Mr Foster’s garden. Jenny had grown old enough to know there was no magic, no miracles, no fairies at the bottom of the garden; to know that in the big lottery of life, there were few winners. But tonight, though her head hurt when she tried to lie on her left side, she knew she’d won first prize. There was peace in a part of her heart where there’d been no peace for twenty-seven years.
*
They walked side by side to the tram stop, two women clad in dark suits and high-heeled shoes, Jenny carrying a small handbag with money enough in it to pay for lunch and a bus ticket home, Cara carrying the small satchel she carried each morning to school. No passer-by would doubt they were mother and daughter.
Cara offered her hand at the tram stop. Jenny took it, and told her she’d post her a cheque for the money.
‘Go to your friend’s wedding, if only to see London,’ she added.
‘I’ll think about it.’
It was a long handshake, neither one ready yet to let go, then, hurriedly, Jenny kissed Cara’s cheek.
‘Georgie told me once that you’d turned the worst day of her life into the best. You’re good at doing that, love. Thank you so much for last night.’
City tram rattling in, and mother and daughter separated.
‘I’m pleased we finally got to know each other,’ Cara said.
‘It’s all written down in God’s big notebook in the sky, and the older I grow, the more I know that we’ve got no control over any of it. Be happy, love, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you about your Tatts win.’
Then she was gone, w
ithout a backward glance.
Cara watched the tram until it was lost to her view, knowing Jenny had boarded the train out of Sydney without a backward glance the day she’d walked away from Myrtle and three-week-old Cara.
She crossed over the road to catch her own tram. She’d miss Melbourne’s trams if she moved to Sydney. She wouldn’t miss Morrie’s car. Maybe she’d miss a few of the conversations she struck up in car parks with MG lovers or ex-owners. She’d miss Barry and Mary. She may miss Chris – not the bed part. She’d never wanted his bed. Needed his friendship, and paid for it in his bed.
If a couple aren’t friends first, they have little chance of forming a strong marriage, he’d once said.
Was that what she wanted?
Knew he wanted at least four kids. Knew she wouldn’t be having them. Had to tell him about Robin. Had to pick up her winnings this afternoon. Had to post Morrie’s ticket back – or, if she won enough, maybe use it and her winnings to see England.
A weird day, or maybe just a happy day – she wasn’t used to happy days – but weird in other ways too. Everything she touched screamed London. A crummy old photograph of the Bloody Tower in a battered history book; Roger Whittaker singing about London on a transistor radio at lunchtime; a temporary teacher with an English accent, obviously interested in her. Ate lunch with him, questioned him about England, and he asked her what she did at weekends.
‘I’m involved,’ she said.
Involved but not in love.
Then a tram to the city and the prize worth collecting. She and Marion walked away to celebrate with a bottle of champagne.
Home late, to a big brown envelope leaning against the door of Number Ten, and that old wash of hopeless disappointment sucking happiness from her bones. Wanted to sit down on the floor with it and howl. It had been away for so long she’d had real expectations.
Only one envelope, though. Her second manuscript was still out there.
She picked it up, unlocked her door and carried it in to the leftover stink of cigarettes. Scissors in the knife drawer; she needed them to cut her way into the giant envelope. It was Rusty, her favourite – and a letter, a brief but signed letter, suggesting the novel wasn’t what they were looking for, but to try another publisher.