by Joy Dettman
Woody Creek woke slowly to news of the tragedy, those in the know passing on what they knew to those who had slept through the fire siren. By nine thirty, the two main streets were buzzing with the news: in the butcher’s shop, where women ordered a leg of pork for Christmas; in the newsagency, where more papers were sold that morning. Not in Charlie’s. His green doors remained padlocked.
By midday, clad in a pair of Jenny’s black slacks that stopped four inches short of her ankles, and in her own green top with the lurex pattern woven around the neckline, Georgie sat on her borrowed bed, sorting through the contents of the dressing table’s top drawer. The green top had been in it, a twenty-seventh birthday present from Cara, used long ago to wrap Jack Thompson’s nautilus shell. Itchy-foot’s thirteen small leatherbound diaries had been in that drawer, and the heart-shaped pendant Jack had given her for her nineteenth birthday. She gave it and its chain a polish with the corner of a bedsheet, then, fingers working blind at its fiddly hook and clip, she got it clipped at her throat. Hadn’t worn it in years. Hadn’t worn it more than two or three times in her life. When everything else is gone, we cling to junk we discarded yesterday, she thought.
She was wearing borrowed knickers, a borrowed bra – Jenny’s knickers, Trudy’s bra. Still barefoot. Jenny’s shoes were too small, Trudy’s too big. No matter. She wasn’t going anywhere, not right now. Hadn’t wandered around barefoot since she’d been a kid in Armadale. Too much chook dung, too many prickles, on Granny’s land. Jen and Jim’s floors were carpeted. Carpet feels good underfoot.
She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t tune her mind into sleep. Kept shaking her head every time she thought of Margot, denying the reality of it. She allowed her mind to think of her lost books, her rubbish-tip set of encyclopaedias, a little out of date, but old information never goes out of date. She’d miss them. They’d taught her a lot.
All gone. Everything.
Not her city bankbooks. Seven of them, rubber-banded together in the drawer. Gina Morgan’s on top.
The Christmas of ’58 Jack had introduced her to his parents as Georgie. ‘Georgina,’ his mother had said. ‘You look like a Gina.’ That’s what had started Jack on it.
She opened Gina Morgan’s book, then the others. She’d opened those accounts during a long weekend she’d spent in Melbourne with Cara, and for twelve months Cara had done the rounds of the banks each week, paying ten pounds of Charlie’s mouse money into each account. They’d rarely been touched since.
When was the last time she’d handled those books? The date was written there. She’d made small withdrawals from each account the last time she’d driven Jenny and Raelene down to an appointment with the court-appointed social worker. Wasted effort.
The framed mug shot of Laurence George Morgan, Jenny’s water-pistol bandit, had somehow ended up beneath the lining paper of that top drawer. Couldn’t remember placing him in there. Hadn’t thought about him in years; hadn’t looked at his mug shot in more years.
She looked at him now, remembered the morning Jenny had presented her with that framed newspaper mug shot, with her porridge. Four years old at the time and she’d wanted a father. Everyone else had a father. Margot had two. Jimmy’s father had also lived in a picture frame, but she’d liked hers best. Thought he’d been a famous movie star. Lots of movie stars had their photographs in newspapers. Laurie Morgan had been famous for robbing banks. She found that out in Armadale, when she’d removed the back from the frame and read all about him.
‘Looks like you end up as a part of the sum total of my life, Laurence George,’ she told his battered photo as she returned him to the drawer and placed her bankbooks on top of him.
She flipped through a few pages of one of Itchy-foot’s diaries, before settling them back into the drawer.
Held her nautilus shell in her hand. It was as big as her palm, delicate, pure white and perfect. She’d had no tissue paper to wrap it with in ’59. Jen would have some tucked away somewhere. Waste not, want not, Granny used to say. Jenny could afford to waste but didn’t. She wasted money on tissues, and had placed a packet on the small table beside the bed. Georgie wasted six in wrapping the shell before settling it in a corner of the drawer.
And that was it, other than a dead biro, a dead silverfish and two mothballs. Not a lot to show for her thirty-seven years on earth – and the sheet of newspaper she’d used to line the drawer, back in 1952.
She was reading, one-eyed, about the world’s worst air disaster, when Jenny came to her door.
‘The midday news is on, Georgie – if you feel up to watching it,’ she said.
‘Ta,’ Georgie said.
She followed Jenny out to their sitting room, to a television screen in full unnatural colour, the reds too red, the greens too green. Or maybe that’s how the world looked to others; or maybe it looked more red and green through one eye than two.
She’d owned no television to burn. Had almost bought one, but by the time the signal had been strong enough to be picked up clearly in Woody Creek, she’d outgrown her desire to own one. Should have bought one for Margot . . .
Shook that thought away and flinched.
‘Your head still aching?’ Jenny asked.
‘It’s pretty much like my eye, Jen – somewhat red and puffy.’
Dark in their sitting room, the heavy curtains drawn to keep the heat outside. The dark was good.
Four-year-old Tracy Lee King, kidnapped from her bed in the early hours of yesterday morning, was found by a farmer and his wife, sealed into a cardboard carton . . .
Old news in Woody Creek. Big news in the city. Headline stuff. The cameras cut from the newsreader to a shot of Joe Flanagan’s back, two dogs guarding his back. Accidental heroes, old Joe, the missus and his red kelpies. Then the newsreader told Georgie something she hadn’t known. Joe’s missus had a name: Joseph and Rose Flanagan . . .
He told her too that tiny Tracy’s condition was listed as critical. The camera cut to a photograph of a pigtailed infant, hair like Raelene’s but nothing like her. A wide-eyed smiling little kid. She hadn’t looked like that last night. She’d looked dead last night.
Georgie must have dodged old Joe as often as she’d dodged his bull. She’d served his missus at the shop, but until last night hadn’t set foot in their backyard or house. She had last night. Had followed Jack, who had followed Cara through an immaculate kitchen to the bathroom. Joe or his wife must have carried that little kid inside and put her on a blanket in their bathtub. She was in no condition to be put down anywhere else. Georgie had smelt her before sighting her. She’d stood back. Cara hadn’t. Before the ambulance arrived, its siren wailing, Cara had got those defiled pyjamas off with her one good hand. That was a mother. That’s what they did. What Jenny had done on the last day of Jimmy – taken off his messed pyjama pants. Not a good last memory of Jimmy.
When the ambulance men cleared the bathroom of onlookers, Georgie had changed her mind about having her eyebrow stitched. She’d asked Jack to drive her down to the hospital. Thought she’d have time, after the stitches, after the pills, to sit with Cara. But by the time she’d been stitched, the air ambulance had been halfway to Melbourne, Tracy and Cara on board.
Newspapers, put to bed before the news of Tracy’s finding reached Melbourne, had gone to print with unconfirmed reports of the arrest of one of the suspected kidnappers. They’d cobbled together their own version of the unmarried mother, her daughter removed from her care; a report slanted towards the distraught young mother driven to kidnap her own child. Television reporters, given time to dig deeper, showed a mug shot of the distraught young mother. It wasn’t flattering.
If sighted, contact the police. King should not be approached.
Good idea, Georgie thought, fingering her spiky eyebrow. She’d have a scar. A lucky scar. Raelene’s weapon could have knocked her eye out. She could see out of it if she lifted the puffed lid.
‘I spent years worrying that she’d come home pregnant,’ Jenny said.
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They hadn’t known Raelene had been pregnant, hadn’t been told she’d had that little girl. How Cara had become involved, Georgie didn’t know. She’d lost touch with her around the Easter of ’64. She’d written two or three times before she’d called the school and been told that Miss Norris was no longer teaching there. Maybe she now knew why.
The television cut to a commercial.
‘If yesterday had been as hot as today, that little girl would have died,’ Jenny said.
She’d probably die anyway. Critical, they’d said, dehydrated, possible brain damage. Far better she died without waking than survived with brain damage to live out her life like poor little Donny, Georgie thought.
The news was back, with a shot of the air ambulance, Cara walking beside a stretcher, still nursing her elbow.
Dino Collins, though not expected to survive his injuries, had been transferred to a city hospital. They’d try to save him whether he deserved it or not. Joe and Rose Flanagan said a few words, old Joe telling how his dogs had found the carton near his front fence. Then more commercials to wash tragedy from the minds of the viewers. Shampoo to make your hair shine. Coffee to give you a start to the day. Cars too, furniture, then tomorrow’s forecast.
Temperatures expected to reach the high thirties today.
Hot hadn’t seemed as hot when temperatures had reached the high nineties. Granny’s old temperature gauge still measured Fahrenheit – used to. Used to hang on the old kitchen wall. No old kitchen wall. No Margot . . .
Georgie left the cool of the sitting room to return to her borrowed bedroom, where she lay on her borrowed bed and stared one-eyed at the ornate ceiling, thinking of Raelene and her bikie. For years he’d ridden a Harley around Woody Creek, Raelene clinging on behind him. He’d ridden it like a madman. Should have broken his neck and hers a hundred times.
When your time is up, it’s up. Whether you’re riding a Harley or driving a five-year-old Holden, death will come for you when it wants you. Death had collected Granny from her goat paddock, and less than a week later it had called for Ray in the shape of a rolling log pile. It had come for George Macdonald while he’d been doing the pay envelopes in his mill office; had come for Margot while she’d been sleeping. For some reason, it hadn’t been ready for Georgie.
Why not?
*
The local constable came to the door at four thirty. They’d found Margot, or, to use his words, ‘had found the remains of a woman in the area of the eastern bedroom’. Dental records would be used to make the official identification.
They watched the news at six, when cameras showed Georgie what was left of the house. How could so much become nothing so fast?
The remains of a middle-aged woman were found this morning in the burnt-out shell . . .
Middle-aged? Am I middle-aged? Georgie wondered. Margot had never become a woman. She’d been Margot, that was all, her sister; a pain in the arse at times, but a blood sister. And no longer there. No longer anywhere, which was somehow beyond Georgie’s comprehension right now – as was that expanse of black stumps and ash.
The heritage house, built by one of the town’s founding fathers in 1869 . . .
Georgie went back to bed. All day her head had been aching. All day she’d been refusing Jenny’s painkillers. Blamed the hospital’s painkillers for Margot’s burning. Blamed the double adaptor in the kitchen, the long power cord snaking across the floor to the electric hotplate. Blamed the hotplate. And Teddy Hall. If he hadn’t turned up, Margot wouldn’t have locked her doors. Or maybe, with Raelene roaming around, she would have anyway. Blame Raelene, the cause of Georgie’s stitches, the reason why she’d swallowed those pills.
Whirlpools in the mind make you giddy with their circling. That was all her mind had been doing since dawn, circling and getting to no place.
That’s what she’d been doing all her life, circling around Woody Creek – a fish trapped in a puddle. Hadn’t possessed brain enough to follow the other fish to deeper water when she’d noticed her pool shrinking.
It had shrunk on her now. No oxygen left. Wanted this day gone and the dark, then tomorrow and better news.
Cara might call tomorrow.
RUMOURS
Days before it became official, there had been rumours around town of a second body found in the ashes. Amber Morrison’s name was whispered again on street corners. She’d been missing for ten years or more.
‘She’s come home here and someone has done her in and buried her under the floorboards,’ the gossips whispered behind their hands.
‘Or she’s done someone in and buried them.’
The town’s only known murderess, Amber, and she’d lived in that house with her mother for twenty-two years.
‘Do you remember that boy she went out with before Norman, how he suddenly up and disappeared?’
Memories were long in Woody Creek.
‘He didn’t disappear. He was one of the Willama Watsons. I remember the father of a girl he’d got into trouble coming up here looking for him with a shotgun.’
*
The second victim’s remains, found face down on the cement floor of Gertrude’s old kitchen and buried beneath buckled roofing iron, brought the local constable and a city man to Jenny’s door. She owned that land.
They returned the following day to show her the remains of a small leather purse, found beneath the second body, and a coin, a gold bauble welded to it.
‘You’ve found Raelene,’ Jenny said. One glance at that misshapen bauble was enough to recognise her pearl in a cage pendant, stolen with her handbag the day Raelene had knocked her senseless in the Coles restroom.
She fetched the matching earrings, then told the men how Raelene had come by that pendant. The local man nodded. The city man asked for the name of Raelene King’s dentist.
‘I doubt she had a filling in her life,’ Jenny said.
Her short life. Raelene had turned twenty-six in November.
The search for her was scaled down, the tracker dogs, brought up from Melbourne, were taken back to where they belonged. They hadn’t found a sniff of Raelene outside of Granny’s land and they wouldn’t. She’d died while Georgie had dreamed.
Jenny and Georgie spoke of Raelene that night, spoke of Monk’s house. As a thirteen year old, Raelene and her friends had been suspected of setting that fire. Spoke of the matches Ray had burned to entertain Donny, didn’t speak of the day Raelene and Margot had set fire to the old kitchen with Granny’s kerosene lamp. Georgie was unready yet to speak about her sister.
*
There is always a bright side to tragedy – for someone. The hotel profited. Newspaper and television men had to make their base somewhere. The hotel’s back fence was a narrow street away from Vern Hooper’s hedge of roses, and every time Georgie stuck her nose outside the door a camera clicked or a television camera zoomed in on her.
She was newsworthy. Georgina Morrison, local shop proprietor, was dragged from the inferno minutes before the roof collapsed . . .
The cameras clicked and zoomed the day Teddy Hall came to Jim’s front door to ask what Georgie wanted to do about getting a new key for her singed ute. He’d got it started with jumper leads and a screwdriver, had checked it over, fitted a new radiator hose and two front tyres, and now needed it out of his tin-shed garage.
‘If I whip out the door lock, that big Holden place in Willama can get the keys code off it and fix you up with a new set,’ he said.
‘I’ve got spares at Charlie’s, Ted.’
‘That’s all right then,’ he said.
‘It’s not. They’re with the shop’s spare keys in the cash drawer.’
‘A bloody silly place to keep ’em, wasn’t it?’
‘In hindsight,’ she said.
‘How hard do you reckon it would be to break into the place?’
‘Charlie was only ever robbed once,’ Georgie said. She told Teddy about the four slide bolts fitted to the sheet metal – reinforced storeroom
door, about the bars he’d had fitted to the storeroom window. ‘The front doors are more vulnerable,’ she said.
A television cameraman caught Teddy applying bolt cutters to Charlie’s hardened steel padlock. They watched him exchange his bolt cutters for a hacksaw, and heard that antique padlock chuckle at the blade.
Georgie suggested an axe. Only green paint protected the aged timber of those twin doors.
They had an audience now, adults and a dozen kids wanting to get their faces on television. Someone in the audience suggested ripping a sheet of iron off the roof and going in through the ceiling. Then Shakey Lewis, standing on the outer fringes, suggested smashing the storeroom window.
‘Bars, Clive,’ Teddy said. ‘Big heavy buggers.’
‘I put ’em in for him,’ Shakey said. ‘Your hacksaw will eat ’em.’
Teddy broke the glass with his bolt cutters, and Shakey was proven right. The hacksaw went through those bars like a knife through butter. He removed two, enough for him to squeeze through. Like Harry there wasn’t a lot of fat on Teddy’s long bones.
Newsmen were not the only ones interested in that break-in. Tragedy is all very well; that house burning down, that woman burning to death in her bed was just terrible, and it happening at Christmastime somehow made it worse. But it was Christmas Day on Sunday and today was Friday, and women who’d thought they’d finished their Christmas shopping realised they hadn’t.
‘Is she going to keep those doors shut until after her sister’s funeral?’
*
A city television crew caught Cara as she exited the children’s hospital on Christmas Eve, a tall chap on her left, a little boy between them.
Amber and Lorna always watched the six o’clock news. Amber recognised the boy and the woman as the ones she’d assisted out the front of Myer’s on another Christmas Eve. Lorna’s sight was bad, but good enough to recognise the tall male as her nephew. She rose from her chair to take a closer look.
Jenny recognised Cara. Then she saw the little boy look back at the cameraman. And he was Jimmy. Not his hair. He had her hair, Itchy-foot’s hair, but his face, his little neck, his limbs were Jimmy.