Pearl in a Cage

by Joy Dettman

  He’d left three pills in her medicine glass, but by Monday morning they were gone and he’d brought no more. She knew where he was. There were few in town unaware that Norman Morrison had taken a room at the hotel, that Jennifer was staying with Maisy Macdonald. Amber went to Charlie’s to buy a pound of butter and four of sugar, and all eyes stared at her.

  Tuesday was hell. She’d walked most of Tuesday night, fell into bed near dawn and was awakened a few hours later by the stink of ammonia and damp, clinging sheets. Rose from that bed and left Cecelia snoring in her pool of urine.

  Swallowed the last of the aspirin tablets, burned newspapers enough to heat her bathwater, was attempting to wash the shaking aching crawl from her scalp when Maisy called to her at the front door. Rinsed out the soap, determined not to answer that call. And where did she get the nerve to come here anyway? She’d caused that wet bed. She’d taken those boys down there knowing what they’d had in mind.

  ‘Amber. I know you’re home. I need to talk to you.’

  Amber stepped from the bath, towelled herself, slid her arms into a washed-out purple and blue floral dressing gown, opened the front door.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve.’ Mouth aching, mouth shaking around those words.

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You knew what they’d do.’

  ‘I did not! We told them they weren’t coming, but the idiots jumped on the running boards—’

  ‘She’s distraught!’ A word used to excess loses its meaning. This morning, the meaning of life was lost. ‘She’s distraught.’ It had less impact the second time, or her mouth couldn’t give it impact.

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘I heard you laugh.’

  ‘I did not laugh. Jessie sounds just like me.’ Amber tried to close the door but Maisy was halfway in. She was little taller than her neighbour, but weightier. ‘And she wasn’t laughing at Sissy anyway. She was laughing at the way they were dressed—and my new basin too. They chipped it. I promise you, Amber, none of us knew what they had in mind. I’ll swear that on my life.’

  ‘You’re not fit to raise dogs.’

  Maisy gave up attempting to keep the peace. ‘I don’t know about dogs, but by the smell of this house, you haven’t made much of a show of raising kids.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘Who stood by you when everyone else in town kept their distance, Amb?’

  Always a fighter, Amber was wiry and stronger than she looked. Not as strong as Maisy, who pushed the door wide and stepped into the passage.

  ‘Who gave you a bed when your husband wouldn’t take you in?’

  Amber was looking for a weapon. Only the vase, the Queen Victoria vase. She’d wed him for that vase.

  ‘Get out of my house, you no-name bitch.’

  ‘People who live in glass houses can’t afford to throw stones, Amber. What were you getting up to the day I spent trying to calm Sissy when she woke up thinking she was bleeding to death? You weren’t home fussing with her then, were you?’

  Amber went for Maisy’s hair. It was too short to offer a grip. They were unequal opponents. Maisy had quelled a thousand arguments and, with the finesse of a wrestler, she got her opponent in a half-nelson and walked her out to the kitchen, where she sat her down and held her down.

  Dry skin, yellowing complexion, straw-grey hair dripping water—as pretty as a picture at thirteen, the best-looking girl in town at twenty, Amber Morrison was ugly this morning, and ten years older than her years, a snarling straw shrew held against her will. Maisy hadn’t come here to fight with her, but to sort things out. She was attempting to reason with the unreasonable when the stink of urine announced Sissy’s presence. And her whine.

  ‘You leave her alone, Maisy.’

  ‘Clean yourself. You stink of wee, you selfish, whining bitch of a girl. Between you and your mother, you’ve driven your father out of his house and half out of his mind. What did he ever do but his best for both of you?’

  What did he ever do, Amber thought, eyeing her daughter. What he’d done was standing in the doorway and it smelled of the asylum, of the stale urine stink of madness.

  They’d bound her to a chair in the asylum. They’d let her wet herself, let her sit in it all day. They’d strapped her to her bed where she’d swum in pools of urine, paralysed by their pills.

  ‘You’ve got no right even coming into our house after what you let those twins do to me.’

  Maisy released Amber’s wrists to face the girl. ‘You couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer without putting Jesus Christ himself to sleep, Sissy, and it’s time someone told you. All those boys did was get the audience laughing with you instead of at you. And that’s the truth. You ought to be thanking them for saving you face. Now get into the bathroom and clean yourself up.’

  Amber’s back was to the stove, unlit this morning.

  ‘Something has to be done, Amber,’ Maisy said. ‘Norman’s not at work, and young Danny Lewis doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.’

  The kitchen was full of ammunition. The frying pan on a triangular pot stand beside the stove, a heavy pan. It flew. Dented a dresser drawer. The hearth brush hit the door. A chair flew.

  There is a commonly told tale of the man who could lift a full-grown bull above his head. It’s said that one day he picked up a newborn bull calf and lifted it high, then every morning thereafter he repeated the exercise until the bull was fully grown. Maisy had been hauling her sons out of mischief for years, daily manhandling them. She could still throw them out of her kitchen. With little effort, she took control of Amber, half-dragging, half-walking her to Norman’s room where she flung her down to the bed then slammed the door.

  Amber turned to fight on—and stepped on a pill, crushed it beneath her shoe. Sacrilege.

  She stooped, pinched up what she could and licked the powder from her finger, then with that moistened finger got the rest of it, and some dust.

  Found three more caught up in the folds of his coverlet. Found two more when she moved his pillow, another on the floor, two beneath his bed. Forgot about Sissy and her wet bed; crawled around the floor on a pill hunt, dropping each find into the pocket of her gown.

  Maisy changed Sissy’s bed linen, heated water for her bath, opened windows to air the house, opened doors, then carried the soiled sheets down to the washhouse and got them soaking. An hour or two later when she looked into Norman’s room, Amber was sleeping.

  ‘You should be looking after her, not the other way around,’ Maisy said. ‘She’s my age, Sissy, and she looks sixty.’

  ‘So do you,’ Sissy said. ‘And you’ve got no right—’

  ‘Jesus, you’re a bitch of a girl,’ Maisy said and she left her to it, walked over the railway lines to the hotel to see if she might get some sense out of Norman.

  Found him sitting on his sleep-out bed crying over the Willama Gazette. It had a photograph of the quest’s prize-winner on the front page, but Norman’s paper was open at page two, at a head-and-shoulders study of a beautiful woman—with an inset of her in her Alice Blue Gown costume.

  Woody Creek songbird’s early promise was realised on Saturday evening when Jennifer Morrison, fourteen-year-old daughter of Woody Creek stationmaster, brought the audience to their feet . . .

  Maisy sat with him on the bed, reading around his teardrops. She read of the stationmaster’s second daughter: ‘a hilarious comedy sketch, which caught the audience off guard . . .’

  The Duffy family rarely wasted money on newspapers, and when they did, they liked weight for money. The Willama Gazette didn’t offer weight for money, but nine-year-old Maryanne Duffy paid over her coins for a copy then started the long walk home.

  In 1938 there was a veritable colony of Duffys living on a barren acre a mile out past the cemetery. Theirs was a matriarchal society, ruled by old Betty, now old enough to get the old-age pension. It was the first regular money she’d seen since she’d worked as a kitchen maid out at old man Monk’s back when she was fourtee
n. She’d had her first at fifteen, a son she’d raised to eighteen months then lost to the measles. Male offspring didn’t do as well as the females on Duffy land. Her father had owned a house of sorts, built close to the road. The huts had come later. Lots of huts. Her house was near ringed by crumbling sheds and huts.

  Young Maryanne ran with the newspaper into a lean-to tacked onto the side of her mother’s hut, and well off to the left of Nan Betty’s house. She offered the paper to old Noah who, from time to time, lodged in that lean-to. Maryanne’s mother liked him lodging there. He bought things sometimes, and he bought a lot of newspapers. Maryanne’s mother used them to paper the walls.

  ‘Thank you, Maryanne,’ he said, his hand held out for his change. Sometimes he forgot to ask for it.

  Hoping to sidetrack him Maryanne pointed to the front page. ‘That girl goes to our school.’

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t have to. Say what the words say.’

  ‘Woody Creek songbird’s early promise was realised on Saturday evening when Jennifer Morrison, fourteen-year-old daughter of Woody Creek stationmaster,’ he read aloud.

  ‘There’s more bits than that.’

  ‘Go to school and learn to read it for yourself,’ he said. ‘My change, please.’

  ‘Want to play ice-cream for a penny?’

  ‘Where is your mother?’ he said.

  ‘At Nan Betty’s.’

  The sun comes up each day, seen or not, and the sun goes down. Time passes; newspapers crisp with news on Monday grow stale by Friday. Time curls their corners, yellows their pages, turns them to dust. Time can alter history—or cleanse it of unacceptable fact. Time can turn myth into religion, turn saint to sinner, sinner to hero, while that sun keeps on coming up and keeps on going down and all men do what they must.

  Hot as hell, the sun of late February, blistering, burning. Sissy sweltered while her mother searched for more than those thirteen pills, and didn’t know if it was Monday or Sunday, didn’t know if it was March yet or still February, didn’t know it was her birthday, if she was forty-one or forty-three. No Norman, no newspapers to tell her the day, the month, the year.

  Maisy remembered her birthday. She came when that evil sun had gone down, came with a bottle of rosewater and a bar of perfumed soap.

  ‘Happy birthday, Amber.’

  ‘Get out, you fat bitch.’

  And Sissy bawled, bawled because she was hot and she’d forgotten what day it was, and because Maisy offering soap and perfume was as good as telling her mother that she stank, bawled too because Maisy was the only one who’d come to the house in days. The Hoopers hadn’t come. She bawled because her mother had probably done what Norman had said she had done—and because she’d stopped cooking meals.

  ‘What does he think he’s doing?’ Sissy bawled.

  ‘He’s suffering, love,’ Maisy said. The forest was suffering, the wood cutters said, and how can a forest suffer?

  ‘I’ve never seen so many leaves falling.’

  ‘We need a decent flood.’

  ‘The creek is down to a trickle. You can walk across it down behind the slaughteryards.’

  The swamp behind the slaughteryards had dried up long ago, leaving a new crazy-paved playground for the kids. They found the skeletons of fish and fox, and for a week carried around a skull they swore was Ray King’s.

  ‘Aboriginal,’ the old chaps said. ‘Used to be thousands of them around here. It’s washed out of the sandhills in the last flood.’

  ‘What’s a flood?’ the little children said.

  The sun comes up and the sun goes down. Clocks on mantelpiece and dresser, their hands jerking around and around in eternal circles, keep moving time along.

  ‘What’s going on with Morrison? Has he left her?’

  ‘Something happened the night that girlie sang on the wireless.’

  ‘She’s living with the Macdonalds, they say.’

  ‘The mother has gone off her head again.’

  ‘Then why the hell doesn’t he put her away?’

  Trains too hot to ride pulled into Norman’s station, trains too hot to touch. The railway lines buckled out past Monk’s siding. They could have caused a catastrophe but it was not meant to be that night.

  ‘Ask him what he did with her pills,’ Sissy wailed. ‘She walks around the house all night keeping me awake.’

  ‘She’s been on them for too long,’ Maisy said. ‘They weren’t curing her, love.’

  ‘I need her to sleep. I need her to cook something.’

  ‘It’s too hot to cook,’ Maisy said. She brought over a loaf of bread, a few slices of cold meat, two tomatoes.

  Too hot to eat. Too hot to sleep. Too hot to drive while that sun beat down.

  Jim Hooper had taken a liking to the farm—or to Monk’s old house. He’d spent three nights, sleeping cool in its root cellar. At sundown on the Friday night he left for home and was halfway there when a cow stepped out from behind a clump of scraggy scrub. He hit her, lost control of the car, ran off the road, hit a tree and lay trapped in the wreckage until the sun rose once more.

  Vern’s farm manager had watched him leave. Vern thought he must have decided to spend the night in the cellar. No one worried.

  There was little traffic on that road after dark. A drover found his injured cow at first light. He butchered her, skinned and dissected the carcass, tossed it into his wagon, then he saw the car and Jim, more dead than alive.

  They got him out of the wreck. The garage mechanic drove him and Vern to the hospital, where Jim’s injuries were deemed too serious for Willama. They patched up what they could and sent him via ambulance to Melbourne.

  Norman heard about the accident. He liked that gangling Hooper youth, and though he could recall little of the Sunday he’d lost in a fog of alcohol and self-pity, he knew Jim had been there, knew it was Jim who had brought him a change of clothing.

  Norman hadn’t been back to the house, refused to look at it, turned his eyes to the earth when forced to look west. Maisy was caring for Jenny and keeping an eye on Cecelia, whom he saw at the station from time to time, always with some complaint.

  She came to the station on the Saturday. ‘I’m going down to Melbourne and I need money,’ she said.

  ‘Your mother will be alone,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not my fault, is it? I don’t know what you think you’re doing. Everyone is talking about you.’

  He had not seen Amber. He had fed her pills to the fish, had dreamt terrible dreams of befuddled fish, had swum with them, awakened gasping for air.

  ‘The Hoopers are going down?’

  ‘Margaret is. Her father passed out in Willama. He was supposed to stay in hospital, but he came home and passed out again, so he can’t go, so Lorna won’t go.’

  ‘His heart?’ Norman said.

  ‘How would I know? Margaret just said he passed out. Twice. I’ll need at least ten pounds.’

  He wrote her a cheque for ten pounds, sent her to the post office to cash it, then walked across to speak to Vern. He found him sitting in the shade of a large oak, sitting looking into space.

  ‘Bad news,’ Norman said, offering his hand.

  Vern took it, shook it. ‘I’ve got to think he’s in the best hands, Norm. I’m pleased they took him down there. It’s too far away, but they’ve got all the knowledge down there.’

  ‘He’s a fine boy, Vern. God will not take him so soon.’

  Vern didn’t reply for a second. ‘We’ve got tough heads,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot of faith in the Hooper skull. That’s what I’m clinging to right now, Norm, and to the doctors. He’s with the best. He’s in the best hands.’

  ‘He’s a fine boy,’ Norman repeated for lack of anything better to say.

  ‘I could have done a lot worse,’ Vern said. ‘I could have done a whole lot worse.’

  ‘Your own health?’

  ‘I’m all right. They’re panicking about nothing. It was just
the shock of seeing him like that, that’s all. It took us an hour to drag him out of it. That bloody car fell apart. We couldn’t see what was up and what was down. I’m glad your girl can go along with Margaret. She’ll need company down there.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Never in my born days did I expect to see anything like it. We wouldn’t have got him out if not for the garage chap and Denham. Say what they like about that pig of a man, but he’s the chap to have around when you’re in a tight hole. He got him out. And the garage chap—’

  Telephone ringing. Vern up and running.

  ‘Don’t run, Father. It’s not the hospital.’

  Norman left them and returned to his station. Once, twice, he glanced towards his house.

  She’d be alone.

  AMBER ROSE

  Amber had searched the floors, had moved his chest of drawers, moved his wardrobe, knowing there was just one more pill. Found one yesterday, or the day before, in one of his shoes. She’d stripped the bed, shaken his pillows, crawled the floor beneath his bed, certain there would be just one more pill. No more. And her every scar offering pain; every one of life’s bruises a throbbing open sore.

  She rose from her crouch and stood before the dressing table, seeing her bruises in the mirrors. Black and blue with bruises. Slid her dressing gown from her shoulders, watched it collapse like a purple and blue floral bruise at her feet. Naked beneath that gown, naked and bruised and scarred by them. Finger tracing the wide white scar down her belly where they’d tried to cut them out of her.

  Take you in the dirt, fill you with their filth, then leave you. One after the other after the other.

  Skin scrubbed raw and still she crawled with them. Needed her pills to kill that crawling, aching, twisting pain.

  She’d kept her bargain. She’d kept her bargain. She’d cleaned his house.

  You needed to see the dirt when it fell. Hard to see, those first fine grains, but if you missed those, let them settle for a day, there were more. She ran her hand over the wood of his mother’s dressing table, traced her scar on the winged dressing table mirror. Three mirrors. Traced all sides of the scars of Amber Rose.