by Joy Dettman
Cara remembered those months, the pain Robert had claimed long after his knee had healed. She’d spent as little time as possible with him; had gone to work, slept in Mrs Collins’s room, left him to Myrtle, his brother, his doctor.
No more Myrtle.
‘When are you thinking about going back, love?’
‘I’m hiding from the decision, Aunty Beth.’
‘We’ll look after your dad. You know that.’
‘You look after everyone. How do you do it?’
Beth kissed her cheek then returned to the house. Cara lit another cigarette and stood on alone, watching the road from behind her smokescreen and wondering how she’d manage a three-year-old boy in an upstairs flat – with a balcony – and work five days a week so she could pay the rent, the loan.
Have to find a crèche. Pay for it too.
Or stay here.
Didn’t want to think that far ahead. Maybe tomorrow she’d be ready to think.
Tomorrows turned into days much the same as yesterdays. Not quite the same.
Pete turned up in the rattletrap Holden he’d driven before he’d gone to England. Guess What I Ate, Cara had named it, its registration numbers GES 188 – and it was still wearing its old plates. John had paid the rego while Pete was away.
She was sitting in his car when Miss Robertson wandered out to eye the multicoloured ’53 model Holden, with its red bonnet, green driver’s side door, the rest cream and rust. Miss Robertson wasn’t rusting, but was out of milk and bread. Last week she would have told Myrtle. Today she told Cara. Pete offered her a lift to the shops. The old dame’s expression suggested she may have preferred to mount the pillion of a Harley, but, desperate enough, she got into his car. And Cara got out. Watched the old lady clinging on to what she could as they rattled away.
She went inside, picked up Robert’s pill bottle and read the label: Take one tablet daily or as directed by your doctor. Placed it back in the medicine cupboard. Cuts heal if given time, bruises fade, pain eases.
She waited until the Sunday, until John started packing Robert’s clothing, until Robert started digging in his heels.
‘I’ve asked you to leave me be!’ he said, and he sounded like Gran Norris.
‘Cara has to go back to work, and you can’t stay here alone,’ John said.
‘Just leave me be!’
‘We’ve left you, Bob. Now it’s time to move on.’
‘I’m taking Robin back to Melbourne,’ Cara said.
Robert went back to bed and Cara walked out to the hedge to light a cigarette.
Robin followed her. ‘Why did you put that fing in your mouf for, Mummy?’
She tossed it and took his hand, walked with him up the hill.
‘Where will we go?’ he asked.
‘Just for a walk, pet.’
‘Nanny sayed “pet”.’
‘Nanny said “pet” to me too when I was a little girl.’
And when I was a big girl, and when I was a woman. No more Myrtle. And I can’t stand it.
Walked on, too fast for small legs to keep up. His step faltered, but she was holding his hand. She stopped his fall.
‘We’re going to get into a big aeroplane and fly down to where Mummy lives.’
‘And Papa?’
‘Papa is going to have a holiday with Uncle John and Aunty Beth.’
‘I want Papa to come in the airplane wiff us.’
That’s what Myrtle would want, would expect. Morrie’s mother had extracted a deathbed promise from him, and if Myrtle had seen death heading her way, she would have extracted that same promise from Cara. No one had seen her death coming. Cara had seen Myrtle left behind, as helpless as Miss Robertson without Robert to drive the car.
Does anyone see what is coming? Had the twelve who had lost their lives in the Brisbane floods? The sixty trampled to death at a soccer match in Glasgow? The honeymooners dead in a car crash? Had the hundred dead when their plane fell from the sky seen it coming? Just a part of God’s big master plan, and never revealed to his children.
She carried Robin home. He belonged to her now. She could fly to England with him. Robert had his pills.
*
Beth was at the parlour table, sorting through a variety of spectacle cases, eleven of them, some obviously Myrtle’s. Cara stood a while watching the opening of cases, watching Beth peer through a lens then place the glasses to the left or to the right. Robert’s keys were on the table, his wallet, chequebook, bankbook. Cara picked up his bankbook, opened it. Not a lot in it. Funerals cost big money. Opened his chequebook. Not much in it either.
John came out of Robert’s room with a large case, and Cara took his place, though not by Robert’s bed. She stood before the dressing table, staring at Myrtle’s jewellery box, at the tiny key attached to the case by a faded blue ribbon. Myrtle had misplaced that key for a week when Cara had been eight or ten years old. When they’d found it, Cara had looped that blue ribbon around the hinge so Mummy wouldn’t lose the key to her magic box again.
She placed the key into the tiny lock and turned it, lifted the lid. String of pearls in their grey case. Cara’s pearls now. Not made by man but by oysters swimming free in the ocean.
They’ll be yours when I’m gone, pet.
I’m not a pearl person, Mummy.
She took them from their satin-lined box, allowed them to run a while through her fingers. Given to Myrtle on her wedding day; immortalised in her wedding photograph and unworn in years. She opened a heart-shaped gold locket and found a minute photograph of Robert’s face inside the heart. Turned to the bed to stare at the aged reality of him, and wonder how the fresh-faced boy of the locket could have become that white-headed old man.
This is the moment, this is the page in my book of life where the child becomes the parent of her parent, she thought.
Robin came in. ‘Papa. Get up now, Papa.’
No comment from the bed.
Cara locked the jewellery box and took it out to the table to place beside the spectacle cases. ‘I’ll take him home with us, Uncle John,’ she said, and went to her room to pack her few items, to empty Robin’s drawers into Myrtle’s old grey case, pack his books, his bedtime friend, Bunny Long-ears.
She heard Gran Norris’s whine. Robin had climbed onto Robert’s bed and sat astraddle him.
‘Take him,’ Gran Norris whined.
‘He’s missing you, Daddy.’
‘All I’ve asked of all of you is to leave me be.’
‘If you want to die, the place to do it is in a hospital. You’ve got until I pack our cases to make up your mind.’
She took Robin out to Beth. ‘He’s got until midday to decide between the living and the dead, and if he hasn’t by then, I’m calling the ambulance.’
Shouldn’t have said that word. An ambulance had taken Nanny away.
Robin started crying. ‘I want Papa to stay wiff me, not bird’s wings. I want Papa. I don’t like birds.’
‘You go in and tell that to Papa, Robbie. And you’re allowed to jump on his bed as much as you like.’
The little boy got Robert out of bed.
It took two hours, but they got him out to the wagon, with three cases, five of the eleven pairs of spectacles, the jewellery box and Myrtle’s prized hand-painted bowl. They got away, left John and Beth to lock up the unit. Left Miss Robertson wandering around like an aging sheep that had lost its shepherd.
The HG Holden with the 186 motor had been born to fly. On good sections of the Hume Highway, Cara gave the car its head and when the speedo crept high, she didn’t rein it in. Only one thought in mind: to get them home. After that, she’d worry about what to do.
Hour after hour of near-blinding truck lights on a road that chopped and changed from potholed dual highway to the bliss of a four-lane freeway where she could fly past road-hogging, road-clogging trucks. Two toilet breaks, more petrol, a bucket of hot chips and two ice-creams at one stop.
She was on the outskirts of Melbourne bef
ore one, Robin sprawled full-length across the rear seat, Robert sleeping where he sat. They were still sleeping when she parked the wagon in the visitors’ parking bays.
Out then to the night, to light a cigarette and to stamp life back into her legs. They had stairs to climb, cases to carry, but one look at those cases decided her that they could wait until morning. A late moon up there, playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. Wondered if Myrtle was up there, watching her daughter suck strength from a butt. She’d been strong enough to get them here; now she needed strength enough to get them inside.
The cessation of movement had woken Robert. He was watching her. The cigarette in her mouth, she opened the rear door. Robin was still dead to the world. She slid her handbag over her shoulder, spat the cigarette and replaced it with her keys, then lifted him and carried him sleeping up the stairs, juggling him against her shoulder one-armed while she opened her door. He didn’t wake. He didn’t wake when she placed him down in her bed, in the clothes he wore.
A week ago, Robert would have been behind her, carrying a case or two. She found him in the foyer, empty-handed.
‘This is home,’ she said.
A week ago he would have set up her folding bed while Myrtle found his pyjamas, toothbrush, a towel. Cara set up the bed, showed him the door to the bathroom, then left him to use it or not while she ran downstairs to get Myrtle’s jewellery box, his spectacles and the hand-painted bowl. The rest she locked in the car until morning.
Found him staring at a bag of sliced bread left on her bench to turn green, at a fur of multicoloured mould growing in her unwashed coffee mug. The milk had gone sour in the fridge. No Weet-Bix, no cereal for Robin’s breakfast. Should have thought to pack Myrtle’s Weet-Bix. Tomorrow’s worry for tomorrow.
She showed Robert to his narrow bed set up between her desk and her cartons of books, still unopened, and left him to get into it or not. Slid in gladly beside her vanilla-flavoured boy. No time to wonder if he was a sound sleeper or not. She slept soundly.
And woke too soon to a dirty-faced, sticky-haired cherub.
‘Did we came here by magic, Mummy?’
‘By Papa’s car. And guess what?’
‘What?’
‘We have to go shopping before breakfast. Mummy hasn’t got any bread, any Weet-Bix, any milk, any anything.’
‘’Cause you haven’t got a proper house?’
‘It’s a very un-proper house. I’ve only got two kitchen chairs and my office chair and a tiny baby table, and no couch.’
‘And no television?’
‘I’ve got a big television.’
‘Can I see my kinder on it?’
‘You can see all sorts of things on it, but very soon we’ll find you a proper kinder with real ladies and real children to play with.’
A DRIPPING TAP
Busy days, no time to think. No school. Cara called the headmaster, explaining her situation. He told her to take what time she needed. She took three more days and it took all of them to find a crèche close enough to the school with a vacancy for a three-year-old boy.
Those three days were long enough to know it would take more than a change of scenery to lift Robert’s mood, and long enough, too, to teach her the constancy, the weariness of motherhood, the demands of it, and the impossibility of sharing her bed with a wriggling, sweating little boy.
From time to time she’d looked at pretty lounge suites. Two months ago she’d almost ordered a two-seater couch with matching chairs. She took Robin to a secondhand shop on Saturday morning to look for a couch that would fold down into a bed. They had one: vinyl, olive green. She didn’t buy it for its colour but for its price, and because Robert may spend less time in bed if his bed was also her lounge-room couch, and if there was no door to close between his bed and her kitchen.
It cost damn near as much again to have the thing delivered, and the men delivering it weren’t happy about the stairs. They got it in, and it looked bigger in her unit than it had in the shop. Couldn’t push it back against a wall because the back folded down to make the bed.
That night, Robert slept on it, and Robin moved into the fold-up bed in the room she’d previously named her study. Robin liked his bed. He was a big boy now. Only babies slept in cots with sides.
He was a big boy at breakfast time, too, and when he and Mummy got dressed for their day at work. He helped make a sandwich to leave for Papa’s lunch. He was big when they held hands on the way downstairs, when they talked about Mummy getting some money from work so they could buy things at the shops. He was big until they reached the crèche’s door where he was confronted by an accumulation of small children and ladies he didn’t know. Then he changed his mind about being a big boy.
Too much time spent in attempting to reason with him, Cara ran out of time, pushed him into the arms of a carer and ran from his screams.
A bad day, a long, bad day. At a quarter to four, when she returned to that place, she found a silent little boy standing alone in a corner. She ran to him, or he ran to her. Gathered him into her arms, and he clung and sobbed on her neck.
The following morning, Robert left in his bed, no sandwich cut for his lunch, she carried her screaming boy from the unit.
‘I want to stay with Papa. I want to stay with Papa.’
‘Papa is sick. Be a big boy for me.’
‘I’m not big. You’re big. I want you to stay wiff Papa.’
She wanted to stay with Papa, too, wanted to give up and go on the dole, but Gough’s handout would barely pay her rent.
Robin fought against the straps that held him prisoner in the rear seat of the wagon, fought her when she unbuckled them, when she carried him from the car to the arms of a carer. Cara hoped she cared, but whether she did or not, had to drive on to work, where she no longer cared.
Like a clockwork clown, battery- or cigarette-driven; her feet kept on dancing, her arms continued their same movements day after day after day. She paid her rent, tried to smile when she picked Robin up at four, when she ran a bath to wash the scent of the crèche from him. She forced a clown smile when she buttoned his pyjamas.
‘I don’t want ’jamas. It’s not dark time.’
‘Papa has got his pyjamas on, and I bet you’ve never watched television in your pyjamas before.’
He watched too much television, Robert watching with him, his bed flipped back to a couch for the hours between four and eight. By the Friday, his bedding was no longer folded ready for its next use but piled in an untidy heap in the corner. For a mother, carer, wage-earner, there are only so many hours in a day. Corners get cut.
Robin had been raised with the expectation that his every need, his every demand, would be instantly satisfied. If he wanted to wear his shirt with the train on it, that shirt would be supplied.
‘I told you, it’s in the wash.’
‘I want you to wash it.’
‘I want you to walk down the stairs instead of making me carry you. Mummy is tired.’
She had to shop, supply meals. Supplied pancakes one night. Robin liked pancakes, Robert didn’t. He returned to his couch to stare at the television until he nodded off.
Pills shielded the mind from pain. They didn’t take the pain of loss away. It needed to be felt, to be dealt with. Cara had no time to deal with her loss. She’d been too busy choosing a coffin, talking to the minister, the undertaker, cigarette in hand. Was too busy shielding Robin from his loss, worrying about Robert. Too exhausted to sleep at night, she sat on a kitchen chair on her balcony, chain-smoking while her eyes stared off into the dark.
Cathy phoned on the Friday night to ask where Cara had been, and to tell her that Dino Collins wasn’t due for release until October.
October? Cara couldn’t see as far as March.
‘Thanks, Cath.’
‘I tried to call you a dozen times.’
‘I’ve been in Sydney. Mum died.’
‘You poor thing,’ Cathy said. ‘Are you all right?’
�
�I’ve got Dad and Robin down here with me.’
And I’m all wrong, so all wrong.
*
The price of petrol went up. Supermarket prices went up. Land prices never stopped going up. Back in the early sixties, Helen and Michael had bought their block of land in outer Melbourne for under two thousand pounds. At the weekend, the block beside them sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. Every year, housing estates ate deeper into productive farmland. There were several teachers who travelled further to work than Helen and who discussed land prices in the staffroom.
‘Forest Hill was considered to be the sticks when we bought,’ Helen said. ‘But the way the estates are moving out, we’ll be part of the inner circle soon.’
Cara told Helen about Robin. Chris hadn’t told her Cara had a son. Trustworthy Chris. Helen, assuming Robin was Chris’s son, asked why they hadn’t married.
‘His father lives in England.’
A silence, then a shrug. ‘I envy you. We’re still waiting to adopt. Not that I would have wanted to have a baby outside of marriage – or I wouldn’t have wanted to back then.’
‘Did Chris get married?’
‘Yeah. She’s a nice kid – or she seems a kid to me. The granddaughter of someone his father used to know in Italy.’
‘He wanted a big family,’ Cara said.
‘So did we,’ Helen said. ‘Neither one of us has brothers or sisters. We wanted at least three and will be lucky to get one. Unmarried girls are keeping their babies now – as you know.’
‘As I know.’
One of Cara’s first students was pushing a stroller. She might have been seventeen. Cara had seen her at the local supermarket with her mother – a so young grandmother. Since time began, babies had been born out of wedlock, born in secret, signed away in secret, dumped in public lavatories, in garbage cans – expendable items. Not any more. The young grandmother had shown no embarrassment that the taxpayer’s bottomless pockets would pay for her grandson’s raising.
Plenty of unmarried mothers in Woody Creek. Georgie had filled the blank sides of twelve docket book pages on the subject of Woody Creek’s dole bludgers and unwed mothers.
An unmarried mother, if shacked up in her subsidised housing with her dole-bludging boyfriend, is on easy street these days. With no restrictions on how many kids the taxpayer is prepared to subsidise, the more frequently the unmarried mother breeds, the better off she is. The boyfriend, of course, isn’t allowed to live with her, and he doesn’t – or not on paper. I know of five who do . . .