by Joy Dettman
‘Why didn’t you tell me when I asked?’
‘Tell you what?’
Head down in that near empty trunk and Gertrude couldn’t find what she knew was in there. A fancy vase, another wedding present came out. Her father’s family Bible. A shoe with a turned-up toe.
‘That I’m the image of Itchy-foot.’
Gertrude pounced on a grey leather pouch. ‘I knew it was in here.’
Stepping over old frocks, old shawls, tablecloth, her fingers working hard to untie a leather thong stiffened by age. She lifted back her bedroom curtain and saw Jenny holding that photograph, but staring at her.
‘That’s why she hates me. Because I’m the image of her father.’
‘You’re nothing like him. You couldn’t—’
The gathering of the pouch neck demanded Gertrude’s full attention; it didn’t want to release its prize, but she got it open and poured a string of amber beads to her palm.
‘I am like him,’ Jenny said, uninterested in beads. ‘And why couldn’t I be like him?’
‘Because you’re a beautiful young girl and all you’re looking at is his hair, and the only reason it looks the same is because I used to cut his in the same style. Now turn around.’
The amber beads filled the space nicely, and matched the beadwork of the dress, as she knew they would. Those school shoes and socks didn’t match anything. The stranger’s shoes were somewhere, and she may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. She looked in the bottom of her wardrobe, found them in the lean-to wardrobe, and Jenny more than willing to swap the photograph for the shoes.
Things like this didn’t happen to her. The shoes had high heels. She craved heels. They were a size too large, though.
‘Elsie’s sandals will fit you. Get them off,’ Gertrude said, again glancing at her clock.
‘Who did they belong to?’
‘Someone left them here, with the dress.’
They were a light tan, more sandal than shoe, the leather straps stiffened by fourteen years, the toes a mote misshapen by the newspaper Gertrude had stuffed into them.
‘They’re not that much too big.’ She tried walking in them. They made her tall, made her walk tall. ‘We could cut something up and put it in them. Miss Rose is always doing that with shoes at the concerts.’
Gertrude looked at what she’d done, at the shape of her granddaughter’s legs. Everything about that girl was class. She was long in the calf, her ankles were slim. She’d done the wrong thing in putting that dress on her, had got more than she expected. Elsie had lent it little shape; it had been longer on her. Jenny was doing something else to it—as her mother may have done something else to it.
‘Can I cut this up?’
There was a cardboard carton down the bottom end of the kitchen, overloaded with newspapers. Jenny had the scissors. They cut and trimmed cardboard innersoles and the shoes were back on.
‘Can you walk in them? And it’s no use saying you can if you can’t.’
‘I can fly in them, Granny.’
‘You’ll need to. Joey will take you in on Harry’s bike.’
The skirt rose up to her thighs when she straddled the rear seat of Harry’s bike, one of her shoes fell off. Harry picked it up, ran it up to them while Jenny removed the second shoe. She carried them the rest of the way, carried them to the King Street corner, where she decided she wasn’t going home to wait for the Hoopers and probably get murdered while she waited. She wasn’t riding by Hooper’s with her shoes off either. She’d walk the rest of the way like a lady.
They stopped at King’s corner. She leaned on Joey while she brushed her feet and got those shoes on. She straightened her skirt, then, because the world was a different place tonight and she a different person, she kissed her finger and touched it to his cheek.
‘Ta very muchly, Joey.’
‘I’ll be listening, so you’d better win,’ he said.
‘Cross your fingers for me.’
Jenny walked the block to Hooper’s corner, taking care where she put her feet. Heels were all very well, but not if you wanted to walk. And the cardboard innersoles were slippery. Her toes had to cling on like fingers.
But the car was in the side street, Jim cleaning dead insects from its windscreen.
‘Gord’s struth,’ he said. ‘What have you done to yourself, Jen?’
‘Haircut.’
Margaret joined them, clad in floral frills. ‘Oh, my, but don’t you look the smart one tonight,’ she said, her fishbowl eyes wide.
Lorna grunted a greeting and got into the car. Jenny thought to get in beside her, but Lorna had other ideas. She liked a window seat. ‘Other side,’ she said.
Safe then, jammed in the back seat between the Hooper sisters, not safe enough to stop her heart beating like a drum, to stop her throat from drying out, but pretty safe when they drove around to collect the rest of the party.
Norman had walked down to the station yard to look for her. Amber and Sissy were waiting on the verandah.
‘We’ve got Jen with us, Mr Morrison,’ Jim called.
Sissy saw her hair. She stared bug-eyed but made no comment. Amber didn’t look at her. The car would hold six in comfort. It didn’t like taking the seventh, but it did; Amber in the back seat beside Margaret, Norman and Sissy in front.
If Norman saw Jenny’s hair, her frock, he chose not to, and once in, there was no room for him to turn around. Like Cinderella, she was safe until midnight.
MEMORIES
The chooks were fed, the goats milked, the lamp lit, the stove stoked and a pot of tea made before Gertrude sat down. She ate bread, cheese and pickled cucumber. She drank two mugs of tea before reaching for her wedding photograph. Didn’t look at it, carried it to her bedroom to bury him once more.
Junk everywhere in there, still lying where she’d left it. She’d emptied that trunk before putting her hand on that necklace. Knew it was in there, though. It had to be. She hadn’t taken it out since she’d packed it in India. So proud of it once. She’d worn it often. He’d bought her forgiveness with those beads back when she’d been a buyable, pliable twenty. Remembered that night clearly, remembered his lovemaking. She’d been so sure a baby would come of it, she’d chosen her name: Amber Rose.
God alone knew why she’d stuck with that name. Everything else had gone by the time Amber was born. All of those years of waiting for her baby girl, all of those years of hoping, and when she’d come, she’d looked like Amber Rose.
‘Fool.’
Couldn’t shake him out of her head tonight. It was the trunks. It was the junk on her floor. It was his photograph.
And why in the name of hell she’d saved any of that junk, she didn’t know. She kicked a pile from her pathway. What use were old shoes, their toes curling up?
‘Fool,’ she repeated, reaching for a silk shawl, a pretty thing, or the embroidery on it had once been pretty. He’d bought that for her too. He’d bought her forgiveness a few times before she’d grown up enough to know that some sins were not forgivable.
She used the shawl to wrap the photograph, a burial shroud. He’d go down deep this time, down at the bottom of her trunk, so deep he couldn’t get out to haunt her. But the silk shawl split in two and she dropped him. He landed on his feet, still laughing at her. He’d always landed on his feet.
‘You’re dead and buried in some hellhole in Egypt, and I’ve got your money to prove it, you conscienceless sod,’ she said, finally looking him in the eye.
He’d had beautiful eyes, the clearest, the purest of blues. Chameleon eyes, altering to match his surroundings—or his moods. She’d learnt to read his eyes.
The photograph was black and white but tonight memory added colour. He looked like the angel Gabriel, complete with golden halo.
She’d thought he was the angel Gabriel the first time she’d set eyes on him.
It was at one of Monk’s parties. She’d gone out there with Vern, had worn her new apple-green frock. They’d put on some won
derful parties back in those days. Vern and his family, being neighbours, had always been invited, and where Vern had gone, she’d gone. Eighteen at the time. Just a pair of kids, alike in so many ways. A perfect match, her and Vern. Always were.
Archie had been older, twenty-two at a time when twenty-two had sounded old. He’d been so city, so sophisticated. He was sitting at Monk’s piano, singing, charming all of the girls, but she was the one who had caught his eye. A handsome man, a charming man, accustomed to getting what he wanted, he’d set his net for her, had ridden down here and charmed her mother. His occupation impressed her father.
And Gertrude had been flattered. There was no denying that. She hadn’t known then that she was courting the devil, that he collected lovers like another man might collect butterflies—crippled them, pinned them to his display board, then ran off to chase the next one.
‘I should have poisoned you with a cocktail of your own potions in Africa,’ she said. ‘I should have cut your throat in Argentina. I was too young,’ she said. ‘I was a stupid innocent fool . . .
‘And I shouldn’t have sent that little girl off dressed up like that tonight, not with her hair cut like that. She looked eighteen.’
She stood staring at the mess on her floor, her house so silent she could hear the clock ticking in the kitchen. Would have to get the right time from the wireless tonight. Vern always carried a watch. He used to set that clock for her. Never bothered now. Didn’t want to admit that his eyes struggled to see the hands on his watch. She’d driven him mad in the city asking him the time. Always a train to catch, a solicitor to see, a doctor’s office to get to, and no sun, no chooks and goats, to tell her the time.
She’d told the solicitor she had no use for Archie’s trunk, that she needed no more junk, but Archie’s sister hadn’t wanted it, and in the end Vern made the decision to bring the thing home. He’d been more interested in its contents than she—and annoyed when he’d found it locked and the key missing. He’d tried to pick the lock the night it was delivered to their hotel. He’d asked the chap on the reception desk if he had a key that might fit. They’d tried a dozen.
They’d forced it open three days after they’d got it home. And the first time they lifted that lid, Gertrude had expected a spitting cobra to spring out and strike at her throat, a poisonous dart to fly into her eye, certain that somehow, some way, Archie would get in the last hit from the grave.
No booby traps. Not much of anything other than his books. His poison had died with him . . . or migrated into Amber.
‘Change your thinking,’ she demanded. ‘Go over to Elsie’s.’
She’d come in here to bury him and bury him she would tonight. Thinking about him and the past never did her a scrap of good, and she knew it. Hard though to stop digging at the past once you allowed your mind to wander back there.
If Amber’s babies had lived, she would have been different. Maybe it took terrible pain, terrible disappointment, to activate Archie’s type of poison, though she’d never worked out what had activated his.
He’d been addicted to opium when she’d met him, not that she’d known that, or not then. Amber was now swallowing a derivative of that same drug, had been swallowing it since that operation which was supposed to cure her. She wasn’t cured and that little girl suffering for Gertrude’s interference.
I should have left her in that hellhole. I should have walked away like Vern warned me to walk away.
How does any mother walk away from her child?
Should have walked away from Archie long before she had. Some folk require a crutch in order to get through life, be it God, drug or bottle. She’d tried to be Archie’s prop, had believed she could save him from his drugs—had believed until he’d used his drugs on her one night and taken her baby boy before he was even showing in her belly.
That was the day she’d learnt to hate Archie Foote.
She could see him now, see him standing over her bed in his doctor’s coat, smiling down at her. ‘All fixed, Tru,’ he’d said. And that little boy lying in a basin, his minute mouth moving in an unborn scream. And that bastard had left him there so she could watch him die.
The photograph flew from her hand. It hit the curtained doorway, caught, landed easy, landed intact.
‘You’re unbreakable, you bastard.’
Almost heard him. Don’t fight me, Tru. You can’t beat me, Tru.
She’d tried to leave him after he took her son. She was twenty-three, had no money, couldn’t speak the language, was half-crazed with grief, hadn’t known a soul.
He’d spoken the language. He’d alerted the local authorities. They’d found her wandering in a daze. They’d taken her home to him. He was a doctor. He’d been working at the time in one of their hospitals. He told them she’d lost an infant, was crazed by grief; and when they were gone, he told her that the only way she’d ever leave him would be in a coffin.
Should have written to Vern. He would have come for her. Too proud to admit she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t written.
A smart boy Vern; at eighteen, he’d seen through handsome Doctor Archibald Foote. ‘Watch out for him, Trude,’ he’d said. ‘There’s something not quite right about the pretty-faced little mongrel.’
She hadn’t listened. She’d listened to her grandfather, her parents.
‘Archie is a good man, with an honourable profession,’ her father said. ‘You’ll want for nothing.’
‘You make such a handsome pair, Gertie,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll have a fine-looking bunch of children.’
Barely nineteen when she’d wed, and a fine wedding it was too, and a fine wedding party at Monk’s. Shy with Archie’s family, they were so city, but good people.
‘We’re delighted Archie found himself such a pretty country girl,’ his mother said.
They’d spent the night at Monk’s. Maybe she’d believed she was in love. They’d travelled by train to Melbourne, her first trip on a train. She’d been nowhere, had seen nothing. For a month they’d lived in his father’s house, Archie working with his doctor father and uncle, working long hours. She’d been homesick, had little to do. She’d tried to make a friend of Archie’s fourteen-year-old sister. Gertrude had always wanted a sister. Then his sister was sent away to a sanatorium, and a week later, passage was booked for the newlyweds on a boat bound for South Africa, where Archie was to redeem himself by working with a group of missionaries.
She’d heard the raised voices, had seen his mother weeping, watched the uncle and aunt arrive, heard the doors close, watched them leave. She was the outsider, as was Archie. He’d clung to her during those weeks. It was a wife’s place to support her husband, to not ask questions, to follow where he led. She’d been pleased to follow him from that house, relieved to board the boat bound for Africa.
They’d had a fine cabin on a ship of the line. There were parties every night. She wasn’t seasick, wasn’t afraid, loved those weeks, looked on them as the beginning of a huge adventure.
Archie, her handsome doctor, said he was feeling a little sick one night, that he needed to go to the cabin and lie down. She’d gone looking for him later, had opened the door and glimpsed a sight she hadn’t understood—hadn’t known then of the man’s perverted desire for one of his own gender; had seen the naked limbs and closed that door faster than she’d opened it.
They’d joined a group of missionaries in Africa intent on leading the black heathens to God with prayer and medicine. Accustomed to hard labour, she’d been pleased to labour at her clever husband’s side. Fell in love with the babies of Africa. Wanted one of her own.
She’d gone looking for Archie again one night, and found him at the little hospital hut, found his white body joined to black limbs. Knew what was happening this time. Reached for a bucket of water and tossed it. That broke them up.
She met her devil doctor that night. She was in bed when he came, had rolled herself into a sheet so he couldn’t touch her flesh. He straddled her and the shee
t became her straitjacket. A clever devil, Archie, he could punish without leaving a mark, or no visible mark when she was clothed. He told her many things while he abused her. Told her his sister didn’t have tuberculosis, that he hadn’t been sent to Africa to study the disease. Told her he’d been having his sister since she was nine years old, that she’d grown too old for their games and he’d got her with child. Told her that a female over twelve turned his stomach, that she turned his stomach, that her woman stink needed to be washed from his nostrils regularly by the clean sweat of man, that she could like it or lump it because that was the way it was.
‘I want to go home.’
‘Can’t do that, Tru. You’re my meal ticket.’
They’d left Africa soon after. He’d wanted to see Germany. A clever man, Archie Foote, he could make his needs known in the German tongue. She’d spent that year dependent on him. He spoke Spanish too. They were in Spain when she’d stitched up a gash in his head. He was appreciative. Her son was conceived in Spain and murdered in Argentina.
She hadn’t got away from him in Argentina, but she’d grown up, woken up. In New Guinea, she’d grown strong. In India, she’d grown smart—and no longer dependent on his language skills. Plenty of English in India. Watched him closely, watched his eyes. She could read those eyes as her father could read the skies for rain. Watched the ports too. Getting ready, waiting, knowing she’d need to snatch that chance when it came, that she’d need to move fast. Amber was growing inside her and he hadn’t known. She got herself home from India, worked her passage home on a boat full of diphtheria, and left him to rot.
His photograph was lying face up where it had fallen. She kicked it. It slid along the floor to rest against the leg of her table. She picked it up, held it close to her lamp and looked him in the eye.
‘You’re done with haunting me,’ she said, and she smashed the frame down on the edge of her table. He left a dent in the wood. A strong frame; her parents had paid good money for it. She took it to the stove where she slammed it hard on cast iron. And the glass shattered, tinkling as it fell into the metal hearth tray.