Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘You have no idea of the life he led before he met me –’

  ‘What? A poverty-stricken pretty boy gigolo, flogging his wares to old ladies?’

  ‘You’ve got an evil mouth, Mum.’

  ‘And butter wouldn’t melt in yours, would it? Oh, except when you’re spooning drugs into three-year-old boys so you can go to work to pay for your parasitic pimp’s Greek holiday.’

  Heat rising from that table, a drinks waiter came to cool it with his fake smile.

  ‘A glass of sparkling wine,’ Jenny said, pushing her empty glass towards him.

  ‘She’s had enough,’ Trudy said, and waved him away.

  ‘Make that a bottle,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m not driving.’

  ‘One glass,’ Georgie said, and he went away.

  ‘You were probably drunk the night Margot went into labour –’ Trudy accused.

  ‘It was afternoon and she didn’t go into labour,’ Jenny snapped. ‘She relieved her indigestion with a vegetable knife, stabbed herself in the belly to let the air out, and if the blade of that knife had been half an inch longer, you wouldn’t be sitting here tonight accusing me of Christ knows what.’

  The legs of Trudy’s chair squealed back from the table. ‘Why bring me here to tell me that? What did you gain by telling me that, Mum?’

  ‘I’m only here for the wine,’ Jenny said. ‘As for gain. It’s you who gained. You found out that you’re my blood and Georgie’s, Katie’s and Harry’s, that you’ve got aunties and uncles and cousins coming out of your ears. And I’ll guarantee that the least of them cares more about you and your boys than that poncing pimp you allow to knock you around. Incidentally, is he on drugs?’

  ‘How dare you –’

  ‘You’ve got an audience, ladies,’ Georgie warned.

  Jenny glanced over her shoulder. With umpteen chairs to fill, a foursome was being seated at the table behind her chair. She lowered her voice when she turned back to Trudy. ‘I’ll bet you ten cents to ten dollars that he’s on something. He’s got Raelene’s dead-snake eyes.’

  Georgie changed the subject. ‘There’re millions of people living in London, Jen. How do you plan on finding Jimmy in three days?’

  Jenny didn’t want the subject changed but she turned to Georgie. ‘I know where he lives.’

  ‘Because of what Lorna Hooper told you forty years ago?’ Trudy asked.

  ‘He’s still there. Her mother was a Langdon. Margaret Hooper’s husband was connected to them. Lorna told Jim that they would have inherited that estate and that Jimmy would after them.’

  ‘You didn’t find him when you flew over there when I was six years old – and left me home alone for weeks.’

  ‘I left you with your grandparents –’

  ‘We didn’t find him when we were over there – because he’s not over there to find,’ Trudy said.

  ‘He’s probably dead, Jen. He would have come back to find us if he’d still been alive.’

  ‘He’s not dead, and I’ll find him.’

  ‘Let’s say you do. Let’s say you knock on his door and a second Vern Hooper opens it. They raised him, Jen. God knows who they turned him into.’

  ‘I dreamt he was a drug lord,’ Jenny said. ‘I don’t care if he is. It’s not about him. I need him to hear the truth from my mouth before I die.’

  ‘He won’t want your truth any more than I do,’ Trudy said, disinterested in that shadow child Jimmy, long gone before she’d been born, but there, always there. He was an out-of-focus photograph hung on the wall in the entrance hall, a tiny boy in a sailor suit, a wide-eyed toddler seated on a young Jenny’s lap.

  Georgie had known that shadow boy. She’d run from Ray with him, had ridden the train home to Granny with him, then a few days later, he’d gone.

  ‘What if you find out that he’s been dead for forty years and you’re stuck over there, thousands of miles from home, Jen?’

  ‘What home, Georgie? Until March I had a home, then with one God-almighty stroke of his pen, that old sod in the clouds wiped out the lot. I’ve got Lila, but she’s ten years old. If I make it back, if I hand over my keys, in a year or two I’ll have to face losing her. So what home?’

  ‘Us,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I’ve asked you to stay with me and the boys –’

  ‘I heard you. I also heard myself begging you to leave the boys with me when you went back to that bastard. I heard your father begging you, pleading with you not to go back to him. Twice in my life I’ve heard Jim beg, that day and the day you told him you wanted to become a nurse.’ She stood then, close to tears, but determined not to cry in a restaurant. Walked away, her chin high, walked again to the toilets.

  A group of five was being seated when she returned. She sat and kept her mouth closed while the girls discussed solicitors, bad backs, insurance claims and wives who earned too much money for their husbands to qualify for Centrelink handouts. She kept her mouth closed until the waiter came with one glass of wine. Georgie got to it first. She drank an inch before passing it to Jenny’s reaching hand.

  ‘Let’s say the search turns belly up, Jen,’ Georgie said, harking back to her former subject.

  ‘I catch my plane home, drink wine all the way and watch movies – and it’s not going to turn belly up. For six years he was my little shadow, and for some reason he kept my na–’ She caught her tongue, altered name to memory, but her halting alteration raised Georgie’s eyebrows, so Jenny downed an inch of wine. ‘How much have you forgotten about Ray and Armadale?’

  ‘He scarred me for life,’ she said.

  He hadn’t, or not physically. His daughter and her boyfriend had, though few saw Georgie’s scars, the internal or external. Clever feathering with a pencil concealed her missing centimetre of eyebrow, missing since the night Raelene died. She’d fought Georgie earlier with a shifting spanner. She’d opened up a deep gash in her eyebrow.

  Dino Collins had scarred Georgie from throat to shoulder with a box cutter. She’d been in her back garden, turning over the earth with a shovel, when he crept up behind her. He’d started that fight. Georgie and her shovel finished it.

  She looked beautiful tonight; she’d dressed in her usual black, a high-necked sweater and a scarf of muted greens, oranges and blues, and her mass of hair pinned lose and high. Her eyes, freed of their reading and driving glasses, were magnificent.

  Poor Margot, Jenny thought. Poor Trudy. She wore more colour than Georgie but looked colourless beside her in a gloomy green shirt, a bulky grey cardigan and baggy jeans.

  ‘He’ll remember the rhubarb,’ Georgie said. ‘He used to love your rhubarb pies.’

  ‘I’ve never grown it as well before or since Armadale,’ Jenny said. ‘It was Ray’s livers.’

  ‘What are you talking about now?’ Trudy asked.

  Georgie explained. ‘Meat was rationed during and after the war. Ray used to bring home hessian bags full of roadkill and empty the lot onto the kitchen table, sheep heads, livers, tripe. We buried half of what he brought home in the garden, then had to hammer in stakes so we’d remember where not to dig.’

  ‘Jimmy will remember those stakes,’ Jenny said. ‘You and he used to use two of them as your goalposts – when you played football.’

  ‘What’s wrong with lambs fry and bacon?’ Trudy asked.

  ‘Ray didn’t bring home the bacon,’ Jenny said.

  Georgie laughed. She had an infectious laugh, as had Granny.

  It eased the tension at their table.

  EXPORTING LIVE SHEEP

  ‘Keep your passport zipped into that inside pocket at all times. At all times, Jen. Never allow it out of your sight,’ Georgie instructed.

  Katie had nagged her into buying a new camera, a small digital thing she could carry in her handbag. She’d done her best to talk her into a new mobile. Jenny knew her old phone well and learning to use one new piece of technology was enough for a stressed-out mind to process. She’d bought a new wallet, red and instantly visible w
hen she unzipped the top compartment of her handbag. Her new bank card was red. She’d tested it. It worked in Australia and had been doubly guaranteed by bank staff to access ATMs in any country on her itinerary. She had cash in her wallet, Australian and a handful of alien notes procured for her by Georgie.

  Behind the front side zipper, she’d packed Panadol and aspros, lipstick, a comb, a new tube of sunscreen, face cream and a tiny green nylon pouch that unzipped into a shopping bag – just in case she needed it. Her aqua case was bloated. An hour ago, she’d squeezed her laptop into it. So involved now with her Parasite file, she hadn’t been able to walk away from it.

  Her nail scissors had to stay in Greensborough, as did Norman’s pearl-handled pocket knife, which she loathed giving up. Since finding it the day she’d helped pack up the railway house, she’d carried his pocket knife in her every handbag.

  ‘How will I peel an apple?’

  ‘With your teeth,’ Georgie said. ‘Sharp objects are not allowed, Jen. They’ll X-ray your handbag, find your father’s knife and confiscate it. Do you want to lose it?’

  She didn’t. She gave it up.

  Seven hours, then six. Five hours, four, then three.

  ‘Ready?’

  She wasn’t ready. She was a danger magnet and shouldn’t have been doing this to the three hundred-odd other passengers. Lightning would strike an engine, or they’d run into a flock of birds, or hijackers would pull out guns and shoot the pilots –

  ‘Where did you put my sunglasses?’

  ‘The sun’s gone down, Nanny.’

  ‘I don’t want to see anything,’ Jenny said. ‘Which pocket did I put them in?’

  Katie found them, in the rear zip pocket.

  ‘You can still pull the plug, mate,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I’m going. I’ll see the Sistine Chapel.’

  They became a pair of dictators during that evening drive to Tullamarine.

  ‘Don’t allow your handbag off your shoulder when you’re out of your hotel rooms,’ Georgie warned.

  ‘Don’t leave your chargers plugged in when you pack up your rooms,’ Katie said.

  ‘Check every bathroom before you leave it, Jen.’

  ‘And under your bed, Nanny, and keep your mobile charged! I don’t know why you won’t buy a new one.’

  ‘It works if I charge it every night. Where do I keep the copy of my new will, Georgie?’

  ‘You’re not taking the shuttle to the hereafter. You’re having a holiday.’

  ‘Tell me where it is.’

  ‘In your black concertina file, in the bottom drawer of Amy’s desk, in the slot marked Will.’

  ‘Keep in touch with Harry and Lila – and Trudy.’

  ‘We’ve said a dozen times that we will. Text us the second you land,’ Katie said. ‘And don’t worry about the time difference.’

  ‘What did Google say the time difference would be?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘That we’re about half a day ahead of you wherever you are, and don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Where did I put that list of emergency numbers?’

  ‘It’s in with your passport,’ Georgie said.

  ‘The first day you don’t text us, I’ll open your will and see if I’m getting Amy’s desk, so every day, Nanny. Cross your heart and hope to die.’

  Then all of her time was gone, or her time with her girls. From here on she’d have to do it alone. She hugged them. They offered final instructions she was no longer processing, but she found her camera, and as she backed away from her pair of redheads, she focused it on their worried faces.

  Click. Her first holiday photograph – or three. It clicked twice more, accidentally.

  ‘We want pictures of where you’ve been, not of us,’ Katie said. ‘Text us the second you land, Nanny, and every single day after. Love you heaps.’

  ‘Love you more,’ Jenny said.

  At the security gate, a woman in uniform told Jenny to take her shoes off, and when she didn’t jump to do it, the woman pulled rank.

  ‘There’s nothing in them but my feet,’ she said, but took them off. They were X-rayed with her handbag and aqua-blue case, then given back. She had to lean on her case handle to put her shoes back on, and the case fell over.

  Panic, blind, out of her mind, heart-racing panic. She was in a world outside of her own solar system and half of the world appeared to be there. She didn’t know where to go, until a nicer woman in uniform pointed the way. She followed Jews wearing black hats, was tailed by a bearded suicide bomber, and she wanted to go home.

  All so different from when she’d flown with Jim and the McPhersons. Excitement, laughter that day; she’d been off to find Jimmy. Now her legs felt weak, her top-heavy case kept threatening to tip over, but she found the right gate number, found a seat and damn near fell into it. Sat then, sat clutching the handle of her case until the other travellers, as if at some given signal, started forming a queue. She stood and joined their queue.

  Passport, boarding pass, then herded into a makeshift corridor that wobbled as she boarded that oversized jam tin, boarded it with the enthusiasm of a sheep being exported to have its throat cut.

  Found her seat number, a window seat. Katie’s choice, not Jenny’s. A businessman stowed her bloated case in an overhead locker. She’d lifted cartons of books, had carried computer monitors out to the veranda, had loaded and unloaded garbage bags by the score from her boot, but had no strength to lift that case. Had no strength in her hands to buckle herself in. She wasn’t thinking of Jim, Trudy, the boys or Lila. She was thinking about travel insurance, of making a run for the exit – until a woman sat beside her and blocked her in.

  Katie had flown to Queensland, she’d flown to Perth. She’d told Jenny how the lights of Melbourne had looked like fairy land from the plane’s window. Jenny saw no fairy land. She sat, eyes closed, until the frantic roar of that flying jam tin dragged her away from Mother Earth, and up, up, up – within striking distance of the vengeful old bugger in the clouds, who’d been out to get her since birth.

  The woman seated beside her ordered a drink, so Jenny followed suit. The woman swallowed two pills with hers, so Jenny swallowed two Panadol pills with sparkling wine. The woman was asleep before an attendant showed Jenny how to find movies on her private television. She watched three before Singapore.

  Her itinerary told her the flight went via Singapore. It hadn’t told her that all passengers would be herded off while the plane refuelled, that they’d have to take their cabin luggage with them, or that the luggage would pass through X-ray machines that were not Australian.

  Katie had picked up that case for three dollars at a neighbour’s garage sale. It was in good condition. Why had its previous owner decided to get rid of it? He’d been into drug smuggling, that’s why. Jenny was thinking drug smuggling when she queued to get out of Singapore. She wasn’t fated to take three hundred people down with her when a bolt of lightning hit. Instead, she was going to be shot at dawn for drug smuggling when the Singaporean X-ray machines picked up her case’s false bottom or its handle packed with cocaine. She took her shoes off, so they wouldn’t make the metal detector beep and draw the attention of officious officials – they looked officious, but the one who returned her shoes smiled.

  Never had a sheep under sentence of death pushed harder to get back into its truck.

  GONE

  Katie knew how many hours it took to fly to America. Her friend’s grandmother had been there recently. She knew that the flight from London took an entire day. Athens was closer than London. How much closer in flying hours, she didn’t know. She’d expected a text from Singapore while the plane was refuelling. Jenny hadn’t texted, but twenty-four hours after they’d driven home from the airport, Trudy texted to see if they’d heard anything.

  ‘Something’s happened, Mum,’ Katie said.

  ‘Her mobile is flat. She’ll charge it by morning.’

  No beeping from beneath her pillow that night, no text to read at
breakfast time. No planes hijacked either, or blown from the sky. The television played until ten when they had to take the Mazda to a body shop for an insurance assessor to look at its dent. Someone had rear-ended Georgie.

  They were backing out, in convoy, when Trudy drove in. The twins were with her. Nick wasn’t, and she looked as if she’d been howling. The twins unbuckled themselves and were out and running for the Toyota, parked on the front lawn.

  ‘Where’s Nanny?’ one asked.

  ‘She’s gone for a holiday,’ Katie said – or she was in hospital in Greece or Singapore with a blood clot on the brain.

  You can’t cancel appointments with insurance assessors. You can’t allow a woman who shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of a car to get back behind it either. Katie, elected babysitter/caretaker, unlocked the house and took the visitors inside while Georgie parked the Commodore in the street.

  Then her parents were gone and Katie was stuck with a depressed woman and wild twins. She herded them out of the lounge room. Pa’s china ladies lived in there. She closed the door then asked Trudy if she’d like a cup of tea.

  ‘Just water,’ Trudy said.

  The twins wanted tea. They got cordial and a biscuit.

  She’d known them since they were babies, had spent most of her school holidays with them. With their heads shorn, they didn’t look like the twins she’d known, or behave like them – and she couldn’t tell them apart. Jenny used to part their hair on different sides so she knew at a glance.