Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  He was a good man, shy, strange. He said he loved her. He told her she was beautiful. He told her he’d take care of her kids.

  He wanted to have sex with her, that’s why. Men had been wanting to have sex with her since she was fourteen — and had taken what they’d wanted too.

  Not him. Not once had he tried to force himself on her.

  Mrs Jennifer King. It sounded like someone, not her, but maybe a character in that mutilated book.

  Couldn’t do it — not after being with Jim, not after being Mrs Hooper.

  She’d done it with Laurie, just closed her eyes and recited ‘Daffodils’. He’d usually been done with her before she’d reached the third verse.

  Until death do us part. That was the trouble: the forever of marriage. Didn’t want that forever.

  And he’d get her pregnant.

  Plenty of tall buildings in Melbourne —

  Everyone gets married. Not many actually die of marriage.

  Norman had.

  He survived twenty-odd years of it.

  Question: Who else but Ray was likely to marry a woman with three illegitimate kids?

  Question: What else was she planning to do with the next twenty years?

  Nothing. Nothing ahead but empty space; nothing but ruin behind her — and she was never, never, never going back to face that ruin.

  Ray was a Catholic. Until death do us part meant what it said if you were Catholic.

  Question: Does forever have any meaning to an unnamed life form drowning in a stagnant pool?

  Question: If an unnamed life form is attempting to escape the mud slide behind it, does it stop to read signposts to see if it’s swimming the right way?

  On Friday, 9 February, Jennifer Carolyn Morrison married Raymond Henry King at the Melbourne Registry Office. He’d wanted to buy her a white dress. He’d wanted to be married in church by a priest. He’d settled for what he could get. He’d wanted a wedding photograph to hang like a trophy on the wall. She was no trophy, but she went with him to the photographer and forced a smile for the camera.

  Didn’t share his bed, not that night, not until the following Tuesday.

  February was gone before he picked up the photographs, one 10 x 12, coloured, framed, and two of postcard size. It was a good photograph of him. He was a nice-looking man. Her mouth may have been smiling. Her eyes weren’t.

  In mid-March she posted one of the smaller photographs to Gertrude. Her accompanying letter was brief. There was nothing she wanted to write. Wouldn’t have bothered buying the envelope, the stamp, had she thought to bring Margot’s birth certificate with her — if she had one. Jenny had never seen it. The other kids’ certificates she’d found in her snakeskin handbag.

  Dear Granny,

  You’ll probably be pleased to hear that he married me. I’m enclosing one of our wedding photographs as proof. We’re all well. The girls are in school, which is very handy to Ray’s house. It’s a big old brick house. The kids have got a huge backyard to play in. I’ve met a few of the neighbours.

  For obvious reasons, I’ll ask you not to give my address to Vern and Maisy. If anyone asks where I am, tell them I’m in Sydney, singing with the band.

  I don’t know if you ever received Margot’s birth certificate, but if you’ve got it somewhere, could you send it down, please. Love, Jenny

  THE HIGHWAYMAN

  Ray’s house wasn’t his house. For a time Jenny had believed he rented the west side to the Parkers, who she’d done her best to dodge during her first weeks in Armadale. Since February, the Parkers had been making it very clear who owned the house. Like Myrtle at Amberley, they marked their territory with signs.

  East-side residents’ bathroom access: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday evening between 6 and 8 p.m. G&F Parker.

  The bathroom was on the west side of the house, the Parkers’ side, approached via a long central passage, also Parker territory, as was the front door.

  Please use side door entrance. G&F Parker.

  Jenny had done the washing whenever she’d raised the incentive to do it during the early weeks. The washhouse was in the backyard, on Ray’s side, very conveniently placed to what might have been a back door for the east-side residents had anyone possessed the key to a heavy padlock locking the sleep-out door.

  East-side access to laundry: all day Wednesday and Sunday. G&F Parker.

  Motorbike not to be garaged in laundry. G&F Parker.

  Jenny and her kids obeyed all instructions. Ray had continued to park his bike in the washhouse until Georgie asked at the dinner table what garaged meant.

  ‘People put their cars in garages. Cars and motorbikes are garaged in garages,’ Jenny said.

  Ray had left his meal to move his bike. That was the night Jenny learned how little he could read.

  By necessity, the lav was available at all hours, seven days a week, but in March the Parkers found room for a sign behind its door.

  Newspaper, cigarette butts and foreign items must not be flushed. G&F Parker.

  You can’t evade housemates when you share facilities. You run into them in their passage on your way to and from the bathroom. Meet at the front gate, the clothes line. Women with kids find a way to get along. Jenny knew that Geoff Parker was a returned soldier who had served in Australia and overseas through most of the war years; that Lois, their daughter, had been born nine months to the day after their wedding in 1940. Geoff had returned intact, other than his right index finger. It was a nicotine-stained stub. Thousands of men had come home from the war unscathed. The Macdonald twins had. Not that they’d come home. They were with a peace-keeping force in Japan, and God help Japan.

  Ray hadn’t been in the army. Jenny didn’t know why. He knew a lot about motors, held down a supervisor’s job at a factory, managed the money.

  There was an article in one of Harry Hall’s books about tests carried out in America on a group of soldiers. It claimed that the average soldier possessed the intelligence and will power of a youth of thirteen or fourteen. Such men, with training and drilling, and under supervision, learn to do automatically, as any child will . . . which, at the time, had explained to Jenny why the Macdonald twins had landed on their feet in the army. It didn’t explain why Ray hadn’t been given a gun. He was big, strong, healthy, never missed a day at work. Maybe they hadn’t made army boots in his size. His shoes looked like boats.

  Big-boned like his father, Granny had said that first day when Ray had drunk tea with them in Woody Creek. Jenny had dim memories of Ray’s wood-chopping champion father: huge head, neck thick enough to hold it up, broad as a tree. Ray wasn’t as broad in the shoulder and chest yet, but he was heading that way.

  She’d been seven years old when they’d buried Big Henry King. Ray had gone missing a week later. She’d known him at school, as a seven-year-old girl knows an eleven-year-old boy. Now, she slept with the man. ‘Daffodils’ didn’t work with him. By April, she was reciting ‘The Highwayman’. It had seventeen verses — and she knew the man she slept with no better than she’d known the giant schoolboy.

  It might have been easier to get to know him had the Parkers not been a wall away. People lived where they could in Melbourne, where finding a room to rent was like winning the lottery, and finding a house was impossible. Thousands of men had been away fighting. They were home now and all looking for somewhere to live.

  Ray had three rooms. The kids’ bedroom was small, but no smaller than Granny’s lean-to. The kitchen, a converted morning room, had a wall of windows and a glass door. Ray’s bedroom was a big, beautiful old room. The position of the house was perfect — school just around the top corner, tram in High Street, train station not much further away.

  She’d make a go of it. In India, marriages were arranged by the parents, so Granny had said, the bride and groom not meeting until their wedding day. Given the population of India, those marriages seemed to work well enough — not that Jenny would be adding to the population.

  On a Wedn
esday in early April, a beautiful sunny Wednesday, her washing flapping in the breeze, Jimmy vrooming his trike around the yard, the postman blew his whistle at the front gate. There is a little of the psychic in most of us. Jenny knew he’d blown his whistle for her. She pegged Ray’s working trousers and followed Jimmy out to the letterbox, where he removed a fat envelope addressed to Mrs Jennifer King in Gertrude’s unmistakable large print.

  She’d got full value from that stamp. Margot’s birth certificate, two photographs and a four-page letter had been crammed into the envelope; four pages, filled margin to margin. Not a sad letter, just a long chat with Granny, but Jenny’s eyes blurred as she devoured each word about the goats, the horse, the horse’s lost shoe, the cost of shoeing a horse. She fed on news of Harry and Elsie, news of their kids. Norman’s name was there: the estate was paying to have his name added beneath his mother’s on her tombstone; what Jenny had planned to do before the funeral, before everything.

  She read the pages to Jimmy, or parts of the pages, and when they picked up the girls at three thirty, she read them again at Ray’s table. Hearing Granny’s words wasn’t enough for Georgie. She wanted to hold those pages, to breathe in the scent of Granny. She wanted to know who the bride in the photograph was, and why Jenny didn’t have a bride’s dress in her photo, and why Granny had sent those photos.

  Full of questions, little Georgie, always full of questions. Jenny picked up the head-and-shoulders study of a dark-headed woman wearing an old-fashioned hat, J.C.’s brooch pinned to it. Archie Foote had left the photo on the kitchen table the night of Norman’s funeral. The second photograph had been in an old trunk for years. Jenny had seen it as a twelve year old. It was of a bride, standing with a bald-headed man who must have been her father. Without doubt, the bride was a youthful version of the woman in the hat. She looked . . . maybe she looked a little like . . .

  ‘Get your daddy’s photo for me, Jimmy.’

  It lived on the windowsill in the kid’s bedroom, a framed photograph of her, Jim and ten-month-old Jimmy, taken in Sydney. He returned with it, and she studied the two photographs side by side. There was a similarity in the spacing of the eyes, the brow, the eyebrows and definitely the chin.

  ‘Her hand is exactly like your hand in that photo, Jenny,’ Georgie said.

  Did photographers have an instruction manual on how to pose hands? Exactly the same pose, same ring displayed. Perhaps the same fingers . . .

  That’s when it became real, or when Juliana Conti became real. She was there, as a bride, as a woman, on Ray’s kitchen table.

  That’s when Jenny No One realised that who she was was here, at and on this table. Those three little kids, who’d had no more say in their birth than she had, who were helpless with her, who had not much in common other than her; and those photographs. The pages of Granny’s letter too, every line on them about a world Jenny knew as well as she knew her own hand. And Margot’s birth certificate. Mother’s name: Jennifer Carolyn Morrison. Age 15 years. Father’s name: Bernard / Cecil Macdonald. Age 18 years. It was all there, the story of her life. And the photograph of Jim and eighteen-year-old, starry-eyed kid Jenny. And Granny’s envelope, MRS JENNIFER KING in large black print, spelling out very clearly who Jenny had contracted to be. It was all there, the scattered pages of her life story. Time to accept it. Time to start gluing that book together.

  ‘She was my real mother,’ she said. ‘Her name was Juliana Conti. She was your grandmother.’

  ‘Another one,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘What’s the man’s name, Jenny?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was probably her father, my grandfather and your great-grandfather.’

  ‘Are they all dead like Grandpa Norman?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘A long, long time ago, love.’

  ‘Why does everyone get dead for?’ Jimmy asked.

  Melbourne’s ratbag weather saved her the search for a reply. Rain had a bad habit of blowing in, seemingly from nowhere. Too many houses to hide the sky’s intent? Too close to the ocean? Or perhaps the house was at fault — too solid and well established to bother about what went on outside.

  She’d learn to read Melbourne’s skies, and, until she did, the veranda roof would give fair warning. She’d learn to read Ray too.

  MILK IN BOTTLES

  A haphazard month, April: sun and rain, summer and winter, hot enough for a hat, then cold enough for a cardigan. If Woody Creek was receiving its share of the rain, mushrooms would be bobbing up their button heads in grassy paddocks. No grassy paddocks down here, or maybe there were, though not where Jenny could see them. Shops and houses replaced paddocks in Melbourne; whole streets full of shops, all manner of shops, entire blocks of houses, and in every direction more blocks of houses then more shops.

  Ration coupons were a problem, tea coupons Jenny’s main problem. In Woody Creek a pot of tea could remain on the hob all morning, remain hot. No hob down here. Up there if she and Granny had run out of tea coupons, Elsie and Harry always had plenty. They had kids old enough to receive their fair share. Jenny’s kids weren’t considered old enough to drink tea. They did in Melbourne, where milk came in bottles instead of goats, where they ran out of milk daily unless Jenny rationed it. At home they’d lived on milk, on eggs and custards. In Melbourne they ate what Ray brought home.

  They ate his butter too. They’d rarely seen butter in Woody Creek. He liked to spread it thick on his morning toast. What kids saw, they wanted. Meat had formed a minor part of their diet at home. Ray lived on it. He did the shopping on Saturday mornings, and every Saturday came home loaded down with meat. And he didn’t need coupons to buy it. He had no coupons, he said, when Jenny asked him for his tea coupons.

  ‘Everyone gets coupons, Ray.’

  Not him.

  He came home from work the next night with a brown paper bag of tea; not the same quality as Bushells, but tea was tea. He knew how things worked in the city. She didn’t. In Sydney, Norma and Lila, girls from the factory, had known how that city worked. They’d known where to go to buy tea on the black market. They’d sold their clothing coupons to dress shops. Ray must have bought his meat on the black market — and his petrol. He had three jerry cans of it in the corner of his bedroom.

  Anyone with a driver’s licence received a petrol ration. Plenty of men had licences and no cars to drive. Where there is a will to make money, man will find a way. Jenny needed money but as yet had found no way to make it. Twice now she’d been into her bank account. Hated seeing that hard-worked for total going down.

  Petrol rationing was a problem to Geoff Parker. In April, he had a gas-converter contraption fitted onto the rear of his Dodge. The second time he took it out, the car had to be towed home from Lilydale. Flora wasn’t happy. Jenny was — because of Ray. He had no friends. That car got the two men talking.

  ‘They’re like kids with a new toy,’ Flora said.

  ‘Ray likes motors,’ Jenny said.

  He came in greasy when there was no more light to play in, washed his hands at the sink, sharing his black grease with sink, tap and floor. They ate late that night, the kids fed and in bed, Ray itching to go to his. He was happy, which meant ‘The Highwayman’.

  Then, at half past eight, Geoff Parker knocked on the passage door.

  ‘Thought Ray might like to have a look at this,’ he said when Jenny opened the door.

  He had the little yellow book the gas-converter company supplied with each system fitted. The men sat at the table, smoking and leafing through the book. Jenny kept her distance until Flora came to the open door wanting to know what was keeping Geoff. Jenny asked her in for a cup of tea.

  Ten o’clock, the cups long empty and the Parkers taken root at the table, Geoff dominating the conversation. An ex-army corporal, he had the voice for it.

  ‘The gas is drawn in here; it goes through the security filter, then it’s drawn along the gas line and into the mixer valve.’

  His stump of finger followed the diagram in the book,
Jenny’s eyes followed the finger stump. That furnace contraption burnt charcoal. Bags of the stuff were now stored in the washhouse where Ray used to park his bike. Apparently some form of gas could be made by the burning charcoal, which worked more or less like petrol.

  ‘I’m never riding in it again,’ Flora said. ‘I said it was dangerous all along.’

  ‘A table fork is dangerous in the hands of a fool,’ Geoff said. ‘It’s written in black and white for any fool to read. Precautionary measures must be borne in mind at all times. Follow the instructions and it’s no more dangerous than petrol.’

  Jenny took her precautionary measures at all times, and didn’t trust them yet. Ray had been married before; she’d thought he’d know what he had to do. He hadn’t. She’d gone to a pharmacy and bought him two packets of rubber sheaths, nearly died of embarrassment asking for them, and all for nothing. He’d gone red in the face and ridden off on his bike when she’d suggested he use them. He hadn’t come home that night. When he did, he refused to talk about using them so she’d refused to sleep with him. There were things a woman could use. She’d visited two doctors before finding one who would tell her. The first doctor had recommended abstinence.

  ‘The petrol ration they dole out is useless,’ Geoff said. He was a salesman. He went to work in a collar and tie. ‘They give you enough to do sixty, seventy miles a month, and what’s the good of that to me?’

  ‘You could have used it when you had your wife and daughter in the car,’ Flora said.

  ‘It will be no different to driving on petrol once I get the hang of it. All it is is charcoal fumes and water.’

  ‘Water?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Water turned to steam,’ Geoff said. ‘It gets drawn into the charcoal-heated zone where it hits the carbon gas, which goes along this pipe —’