by Joy Dettman
She had a grandson.
Had she not been looking so closely at the boy, she may have noticed the tall chap holding his hand.
The shot was brief.
Had Jim been sitting at her side, he may have guessed that Cara was more to her than a thirty-second cousin. He was on the phone to Trudy, telling her to stay where she was, that they would see her at Frankston after Christmas.
Jenny hadn’t wept one tear for Margot, but for the grandson she didn’t know, that she could never claim, she caught a few tears with her index fingers then mopped up the rest with her petticoat.
The newsman rehashed the escape of Georgina Morrison from the burning building while the screen flashed a close-up of Georgie, framed by Charlie’s green doors. Her swollen eye and eyebrow stitches camouflaged by dark glasses, clad in Jenny’s black slacks, rolled up to the knee, in Trudy’s faded orange T-shirt and worn sandals, and she was still a raving beauty.
*
Morrie saw his sister that night, and like Lorna, he rose from his chair so he might see more, but the fire and the deaths now old news, Georgie was gone too fast. It was Christmas Eve, and Santa was on his way down from the North Pole.
Channel Seven repeated that news broadcast at ten thirty. Jenny watched it again, Jim now at her side. No tears, but that little boy was the living image of Jimmy.
Morrie watched the repeat, and this time he saw Georgie glance at him before turning her head. And the sun on her hair turned it to molten copper – or a spill of new-minted pennies.
Then gone. He stood on, staring at the screen, not seeing the commercial.
His sister.
Jimmy’s half-sister.
Nothing matters. Only the children, only keeping them safe.
Tracy was safe. They were collecting her from the hospital at ten tomorrow and by midday they’d be in Ballarat, celebrating Christmas with Cathy and Gerry and their tribe.
Nothing matters any more, Morrie. We are who we’ve become.
Closed his eyes and the image of Georgie remained, burned into his retina, the grown Georgie – and as he watched it, the years slid from her face, and the Georgie he’d known in Armadale filled his vision. A big girl, Georgie, she’d stood between him and the raging giant of Armadale.
She’d held his hand when they’d crossed over the road. She’d brushed the dust from his back the day Margot pushed him and his red trike off the veranda.
Children are adaptable. They have the resilience of rubber bands. In adulthood, the rubber loses its elasticity, he thought.
He’d seen his father twice on the nightly news. He’d heard the voice of Jim Hooper, spokesman for the bereaved family.
Caught a glimpse of Jenny too, a distant glimpse, just for an instant until a car door had closed. Closed her away.
Those images may never be quite enough, but few men have it all, and tonight he had more than most. Cara and Robin were in his hotel bed, both sleeping soundly for the first time in days.
They were enough. He’d make them be enough.
Turned off the television then. Searched for the unfamiliar light switch, found it and turned it off.
Then he went to his crowded bed.
*
Jenny turned off the television. She wanted to talk about Trudy. ‘Sooner or later, she has to be told, Jim.’
‘We’ve discussed this before.’ Not a soul in town doubted that Trudy was their natural daughter. Jim chose to forget that she wasn’t.
‘I wish I had your ability to forget what I don’t want to remember,’ Jenny said.
‘She doesn’t need to become caught up in this, Jen.’
‘Her birth mother is dead! We have to bury her.’
‘You’re Trudy’s mother.’
‘I’m her grandmother!’ And the grandmother of that little Jimmy boy, and because he could never know her, she needed Trudy to know that she was her blood.
A selfish need. But it was more than that. It was . . . it was fear.
‘I was in my twenties when I found out that Norman and Amber weren’t related to me. It threw me off kilter for months. I don’t want Trudy finding out like that then blaming us because she could have gone to her birth mother’s funeral.’
‘She’s too young to go to funerals,’ he said.
‘Let her decide whether she’s too young or not, Jim, not hate us when someone lets it slip out one day that Margot gave birth to her.’
‘Who is going to let it slip, Jen?’
‘One of the Halls. Or their kids. Or their kids’ kids. Someone – be it this year or in twenty years.’
‘She rarely sees any of the Halls, and will see less of them when she starts her training,’ Jim said.
‘She’ll see Teddy every time she comes home!’
She liked the man she called Uncle Ted. And Teddy showed more interest in her than an uncle should.
If Vonnie could give him a few babies, he might lose interest in Trudy. For years Jenny had been willing Vonnie to carry a baby to term.
‘Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall,’ she said.
‘Then change the subject.’
Maybe her own guilt was driving her, or the tears she’d shed for that little Jimmy boy that she hadn’t shed for Margot. Didn’t know what was driving her. Only knew that there was a raw aching hole in her heart, a throbbing loss of something she’d never owned.
Jim went to the bathroom. Jenny went out to the kitchen to light a cigarette and to see what she had in the freezer that she might turn into Christmas Dinner for three tomorrow. Half a dozen leg chops. She’d season and roast them.
Checked her pantry for the makings of some sort of fast pudding. Plenty of mixed fruit. Plenty of butter in her fridge.
Fruit pies, she thought. Georgie loved her Christmas pies. She wouldn’t be doing any sleeping tonight so may as well do something productive.
Not a good night for baking; the kitchen was hot enough without the stove adding its heat, but she set about making Amber’s flaky pastry.
Jim came in to kiss her goodnight. ‘It’s after half past eleven,’ he said.
‘I won’t be long.’
He went to bed and the old house stilled but for the rhythm of her rolling pin. She took time with her pastry, as had Amber. Had watched her often enough to know how it was done.
Have to organise Margot’s funeral after Christmas, she thought as she folded the pastry to roll again.
Loathed funerals, loathed that cemetery. That’s where Margot’s awful life had begun, in the cemetery, on Cecelia Morrison’s tombstone, the Macdonald mongrels holding down a fourteen-year-old kid while taking turns at spilling their poison into her. Sacrificed her every dream while three marble angels smiled down on the scene.
She glanced up, feeling rather than seeing movement at the door. Georgie, clad for bed in one of Jim’s oversized T-shirts, no sunglasses to hide her eye, now a purple and yellow bruise.
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘Is that clock telling you something, Jen?’
‘I’m determined to catch Santa in the act this year.’
‘He won’t come if you’re not asleep.’
Granny used to say that.
THE LEAVING
Margot’s remains were released to the family on Boxing Day. Two days later, the second victim was officially identified as Raelene Florence King. It was on the news at midday.
The newsreader gave an update on Dino Collins’s condition – and who cared.
The phone rang when the news ended, and when Jenny heard the beep, beep, beep of long distance, she knew it would be something to do with Raelene. She wasn’t wrong.
‘Is that you, Jenny?’
Hadn’t heard that voice in eight years, but recognised its apologetic tone.
‘Florence,’ Jenny said, that one word exhausting her, or knowledge of what was to come, that old litany of guilt, exhausting her. She had enough of her own.
Leaned against the wall of Vern Hooper’s entran
ce hall, closed her eyes and allowed Florence’s nasal tones to play out.
‘. . . the terrible things they’re saying about her up here on the television . . . that Raelene did it, that she lit that fire. I feel so terrible.’
‘Me too,’ Jenny said. ‘We’re on our way to Willama to organise Margot’s funeral, Florence.’
Leaned there, phone to her ear, wondering who Raelene had been trying to burn and how she’d got by the police to do it.
Three explosions Harry had heard, one after the other, and by that time he’d already been halfway across the goat paddock, the two cops stationed down there running behind him.
The front rooms already an inferno, he’d known it was too late for Margot, but he’d got into the old kitchen, got a few feet into it before being driven back by flames. Raelene must have been lying there then. How she’d trapped herself no one would ever know. Tripped on the laundry step? Stubbed her toe on uneven cement, on the splaying legs of Granny’s old sewing machine? God alone knew.
There’d been no official decision yet on the cause of the fire. It would come out at the inquest. No date yet set for that.
Harry required no official explanation. He’d had three full drums of petrol stored in Granny’s shed. One had been emptied, and not by Georgie. Four gallons of petrol will soak a lot of books, newspapers and tinder-dry timber. A bottle of metho and a bottle of kerosene stored in the shed were no longer in the shed. Exploding bottles might account for the explosions.
‘Like Dante’s inferno,’ Harry had said. ‘If we hadn’t known where Georgie slept, we wouldn’t have got her out. If that fence hadn’t been down, we wouldn’t have got her out.’
God, or fate, had wanted Georgie alive. Jenny thanked God, or fate.
And that fool of a woman on the phone expected sympathy? Jenny wanted to accuse her.
‘I need to go, Florence. Jim is waiting out at the car.’
‘I blame Ray for the way she became, Jenny–’
‘If blaming him helps, then blame him, Florence, but as far as I see it, we each make ourselves out of whatever we’ve got to work with. We sweep up what’s left over after each holocaust and glue the bits of us back into something that resembles what we might have been. And we go on, doing the best that we can – or most of us do.’
Georgie would too – when she was ready.
She’d turned the television off, and was offering Jenny a cigarette. They could say what they liked about nicotine, it made the intolerable slightly more tolerable.
*
Georgie was going to Willama with them, to have her stitches removed. Jenny had pressed her old black suit skirt, polished a pair of Trudy’s black flatties and fitted two inner soles into each. They’d do the job. The skirt was barely knee-length on Georgie, but, given the fashions of the day, and her legs, it looked fine. She’d washed her hair, and altered her usual style to cover some of the bruising. Jenny’s owl-eyed sunnies would cover the rest.
‘I dare say that you and Clarrie will handle Raelene’s funeral arrangements,’ Jenny said to Florence.
‘We’re up in Brisbane, Jenny. Clarrie will have to fly down. I can’t leave the children.’
‘It might be easier to fly her up there,’ Jenny suggested.
‘If you and Jim could arrange things from down there, we’d pay for it.’
Paying for it wasn’t the problem. Organising it would be; putting in an appearance at it. Which she was not going to do. Couldn’t and wouldn’t.
‘Ray’s insurance money will pay for it. Now I’ve got to go.’
‘I’ll give you our phone number–’
‘Write me a letter, Florence.’
And I’ll burn the bloody thing unread.
‘I will. It’s been so good talking to someone who understands.’
Understands? Jenny would never understand, but she got that phone down and walked out to the veranda, where the air smelled of burning forest. By the look of the sky, that fire was closer than it had been an hour ago.
Jim was studying the Ford’s raked paintwork, its sprung boot lid. The car was old in car years and, according to the insurance company, would cost more than it was worth to put back the way it was. It didn’t have a lot of miles on the clock, didn’t have a thing wrong with its motor, or its interior – other than Georgie’s blood staining the rear carpet and upholstery.
‘It might be time to let it go,’ he said.
‘It fits your legs.’
‘Ted was saying that Holden’s automatic models are decent cars. One foot handles the accelerator and the brake – which sounds good to a one-footed man.’
Loved his smile. Loved him, hang-ups and all.
‘It’s your money,’ she said.
‘Will you feel up to looking at cars after we . . . ?’
‘If Georgie is,’ she said.
They were about to lock the front door when Georgie changed her mind about going.
‘I’d like you with me today, love . . . you’d know better than me what would be right for her.’
‘I can’t bury her, Jen,’ Georgie said, and she returned inside.
*
Jenny and Jim had done what they’d had to do. Then they’d test-driven and ordered a new car. It was late when they left Willama to drive home, to drive west into a setting sun. Those who didn’t know this land and what the sun could do to a smoke-filled sky would swear that the earth was burning. And it may well have been. With every mile, the smell of smoke grew stronger.
Woody Creek was as they’d left it, sprawled out beneath a pall of smoke.
The red ute wasn’t where they’d left it.
*
Georgie had been standing on the western veranda, still dressed up in her borrowed skirt and her green top, when a city retiree had driven by. Not yet familiar with who was who in town, or how the redhead who ran the grocery shop was connected to the house fire, she pulled her car off to the side of the road and walked across to the fence.
‘If you’re not going to run that shop, then sell it to someone who will,’ she said.
‘Want to buy it?’ Georgie asked.
‘There’s plenty in town saying the same thing I’m saying, and don’t you think that they’re not.’
‘I’d be the last person in town to doubt you,’ Georgie said.
She knew the woman’s face; she owned a bull terrier that looked like her. Today, that face was out of patience with the unrelenting heat, out of love with country living, maybe out of tea, and needing a focus for her disillusionment.
Georgie turned to watch two modern fire trucks go by, their sirens drowning out the woman’s yapping complaints. When they’d gone from sight, she went inside for her keys.
She hadn’t driven the ute since she’d brought it home from Teddy’s garage, but now, all dressed up and no place to go, she backed it out and drove around to Charlie’s.
The old key was eager to slide into the padlock, to turn. Green doors were delighted to open, the cowbell clanging its pleasure that she was back.
The yapping retiree had followed Georgie’s ute to South Street. Two locals followed the retiree to the counter. Georgie turned the lights on for them, but, instead of stepping in behind the counter, she walked out to the veranda.
‘Well?’ the determined retiree yapped, pursuing her heels.
‘Self-service is all the rage in the city. Go for your life,’ Georgie said.
Then, turning her back on the city terrier, she stepped away – kept on stepping, over the gutter. She was on the road before she turned to face the place where she’d wasted her life. Had to take a few more steps backwards to get a full overview of Charlie’s.
Just a low-slung barn with a sagging veranda, cringing on the corner like a whipped cur, its roof warped, veranda posts leaning, weatherboards cracked and grey. And, like all cringing things, its teeth were exposed, ready to crunch her bones if she took one step towards it.
She covered her bruised eye and the stitches in her eyebrow, won
dering if Raelene had opened up a third eye in her head, if the shifting spanner had made some permanent maladjustment to her brain, or maybe shocked a buried optic nerve into life. Something had dramatically altered her perspective.
‘What do you think you’re doing out there?’ the disgruntled retiree barked, backed up now by three women and a youth.
‘Seeing,’ Georgie told her.
‘Get off that road or you’ll get run over.’
A car was coming. It dodged Georgie, or she dodged it as she walked back to her ute. About to get in, she changed her mind. Walked around the women, the youth, two kids who’d joined them, and back into the shop. They all followed her. They watched her walk down to the storeroom, then back to the green doors, an empty carton in her hand.
‘Are you going to serve us or not?’
‘Not,’ Georgie said. And she left them there to help themselves, or not.
It took five minutes to toss the contents of her drawer into the carton. She didn’t include Itchy-foot’s diaries. They belonged to Jenny. She took Jenny’s old suit jacket, used it to wrap Jack’s nautilus shell. Her collection of bankbooks went in. Laurie Morgan’s mug shot went in, along with two pairs of Jenny’s knickers and a T-shirt of Jim’s that she’d been wearing as a nightgown.
She glanced at the first letter she’d received from Cara, placed for safety between the pages of one of her bankbooks. Hadn’t heard a word from her since that night. Not that she blamed her, though she wished it otherwise. She read the letter again, looked at the date, 1967, then folded it and placed it back between the pages of the bankbook.
Not the envelope. She used its rear for notepaper.
Dear Jen,
Ta for the bed, etc. I’m off to get my stitches out. The shop is open. Leave it open if you like. I don’t want it.
We sweep up what’s left over after each holocaust and glue it back into something that resembles what we might have been, then we go on. You said it, mate. I’ve done my sweeping up. Now I’m off to do the gluing bit.
Love ya, Georgie
Left the envelope on the kitchen table, weighted down by Jenny’s sugar bowl. Locked up Vern Hooper’s house, then drove away from Woody Creek.