Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  ‘And we’re supposed to drive around in a car with a burning furnace and a tank of boiling water behind us?’ Flora said.

  ‘Precautionary measures must be borne in mind at all times. I bear them in mind.’ His voice was rising.

  As was Flora’s. ‘That chap in Brunswick no doubt bore them in mind too.’

  There’d been an item in the newspaper a week or ten days ago about a father of five who had burnt his shed down and burnt himself with one of those contraptions. Jenny had read it out to Ray and hadn’t known what she’d been reading about. Now she knew. Flora’s mother lived in Brunswick and knew the family.

  Jenny eyed the overflowing ashtray as Geoff lit another cigarette. Wished he’d offer his packet. He didn’t, nor did Ray. Married men smoked. Their wives emptied the ashtrays. Married men talked motors. Their wives’ minds wandered. Ray smoked too much. Geoff was never seen without a cigarette in his hand, held between his stump and second finger.

  She stood, replaced the full tray with an empty, washed her hands at the sink, got grease on her hand from the tap. Washed it off with a soapy rag, washed the tap with the soapy rag, then strained to turn the tap tighter. It dripped. Having a sink and water on tap was a miracle. She could stand the drips, which was just as well because she couldn’t stop them. Having access to unlimited water, having a bathroom for two hours four nights a week, with a proper bath and a gas bath heater, was a miracle. Most of Melbourne was.

  ‘He parks a hot car in a shed,’ Geoff said. ‘And he’s got a drum full of black-market petrol in there, the bastard —’

  ‘Geoff!’

  ‘Well, he is.’

  Jenny slept in a room with three jerry cans of black-market petrol, and Ray smoked in bed. No precautionary measures for him.

  She wondered if Geoff took his precautionary measures in the bedroom. Flora wasn’t pregnant.

  He parked his car in the open, out front, where a lawn might have grown if someone had watered it. No one did. Ray raked up the leaves that fell to it. Plenty of land for things to grow, but nothing growing, only weeds. Miss Flowers, from across the road, had a running war against weeds. She had a beautiful garden. With a name like that, she was more or less obligated to have a beautiful garden.

  Jenny looked at Ray’s hand, a ham of a hand, maybe born to swing an axe. He worked at a textile factory, kept the machines going. It wasn’t a confident hand. It held his cigarette back to front, the burning end protected by his palm, his knuckles lifted to his mouth. She remembered those big hands from school, the way they’d gripped a pencil — always back to front. Should have remembered he couldn’t read. It wasn’t the sort of thing a little kid remembered. Images stick in a kid’s mind. Giant boy with lost lamb’s eyes. Miss Rose, pretty auburn-haired pixie. And the smells of the school room, the chalk smell, the smell of old books. And Sissy, on stage that night, stripped to her white bloomers. Ray, his tall top hat lopsided, his eyes afraid as he’d offered Sissy her tattered green onion tunic.

  Sleeping in his bed brought back memories of sleeping with Sissy: the heat of another body, the smell of human sweat. She dreamt of Sissy some nights and was pleased to wake up and find Ray beside her — sometimes. Most of the time she woke up homesick for her sagging solitary bed in Granny’s lean-to.

  His nose had been broken since school. She’d asked him how it happened. Fight, he’d said and that was all he’d tell her.

  ‘She’s got a system of filters to remove any impurities before the gas gets to the motor,’ Geoff said. ‘That’s where most of the trouble starts. There . . .’ Again that stump of finger tapped the page. ‘Filters must be cleaned regularly.’

  Flora stifled a yawn. ‘Why don’t you say he’s got a system of filters that need cleaning regularly, Geoff?’

  ‘Cars demand a lot of attention,’ he said and winked at Jenny.

  He was a married man, a neighbour, a good Catholic; he was in her kitchen, and Jenny didn’t like that wink. Trust of mankind hadn’t been written into her master plan — and she had reason not to trust him. During her early weeks here, when she’d slept on the floor with her kids, she’d heard the creak of floorboards, the scrape of wood on wood in the locked sleep-out, a built-in section of the eastern veranda. The kids’ bedroom door opened into it, though it hadn’t opened back then.

  She’d asked Ray if he had a key. He’d said the door had always been locked.

  Around a month ago, when she’d heard the noise again, she’d told Flora and asked her if she had the key to the padlock on the sleep-out door.

  ‘It’ll be cats,’ Flora said. ‘I’ll ask Dad if he’s seen the key.’

  No more was said about it, but that sleep-out was on the east side, on Ray’s side. It was his, and her inability to get into it annoyed Jenny. There were gaps in the tattered flywire. A cat could have climbed in through the hole, a kid could have climbed through it.

  Then, two weeks ago, near midnight, she’d been smoking a stolen cigarette on the veranda when she’d heard definite footsteps in there. Swagman? Murderer? Her kids sleeping a door away!

  She’d done her own creeping and damn near bumped into Geoff when she’d rounded the back corner. He’d been doing something to that padlock.

  ‘I . . . found a key,’ he said. ‘Thought it might fit.’

  Dark in the backyard. The Parkers had a light on their section of back veranda. They turned it on when they went out to the lav. It hadn’t been turned on that night. He hadn’t hung around to talk either. Maybe he’d found a key. If he had, he hadn’t given it to her. Maybe he’d been what she’d heard in that room. She’d made up her mind to get the door open.

  Locksmiths cost money. She’d already been into her bank account twice. Norman’s toolbox had travelled down with her. As a kid, she’d watched him cut through a metal bolt with his hacksaw. She’d found his hacksaw and two spare blades wrapped in oilpaper. On Wednesday, Geoff at work, Flora visiting her mother, it took less than an hour to hack through the end of a slide bolt held into its slot by that heavy padlock.

  Like a step back in time, entering that room: there must have been ten years of dust in there, and bird droppings, and a cat’s leavings, feathers too — and areas of no dust. Something triangular had been moved recently. She’d found shoe prints, drag marks — and the key to the kids’ bedroom door, in the lock. It took some turning, but a few squirts from Norman’s oil can and it turned.

  She’d found an old camp stretcher, dusty but still strong, old picture frames, a disintegrating cabinet that may have been expensive a hundred years ago. She’d found what might prove to be a treasure hidden beneath a dusty calico shroud: an old treadle sewing machine. Singer sewing machines never die, Granny used to say. Hoped she was right. It needed a needle, needed a good clean and oil, but if she could get it sewing, it would be coming out to live in the kitchen. Six times a week and twice on Sundays she found reason to miss Granny’s sewing machine. And she badly needed curtains. All she had were sheets tacked up at the bedroom windows.

  She glanced at the kitchen’s wall of windows, seeing the group at the table reflected there. Dark out there tonight, but by day those windows would offer perfect light for sewing. There had never been enough light in Granny’s kitchen.

  She’d been so lucky. For all she’d known or cared the night they’d left Woody Creek, Ray could have taken her to a tent on the banks of the Yarra. And he’d brought her to this. No more wood to fetch in from the wood heap. Blue flames at the flick of a match. A flushing lavatory the kids had spent too much time flushing during the first days; asking too many questions about where everything went to, and what happened to it when it got there.

  Certain subjects were taboo around Ray. She was learning. Her kids would learn. Given time, he’d relax. She wasn’t looking for a fairytale marriage, just a good life, with a stepfather for her kids, enrolled at school as Margot and Georgina King.

  ‘It’s written on the back of the front cover for any fool to see,’ Geoff Parker said. ‘
Carbon gas must be allowed to dissipate before vehicle is garaged.’

  Go home, Jenny thought and glanced at her watch — BillyBob’s watch. Almost ten thirty.

  Ray didn’t like her wearing that watch. She’d put it away for a week or two, but with the girls at school, she needed the right time on her wrist and that watch never lost a minute. It brought back bad memories, but life had a way of overwriting the old with the new, and Cara Jeanette could have belonged to any one of five Yankee sailors. And even if she had kept her, every time she’d looked at her she would have seen Yankee in her face — as she saw Macdonald in Margot’s face. She had to forget Sydney, forget Amberley and that baby.

  ‘And what does the fool do?’ Geoff said. Too loud. He’d have the kids awake in a minute. ‘He parks a hot car in his shed and closes the door —’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Flora said. ‘And he’s still in the hospital, and he’s got five little kids and his wife is due to have another one.’

  Jenny had been following that story in the papers. The Sun had printed a photograph of his kids, little blonds, the oldest of them Georgie’s age.

  ‘Fools have been killing themselves off for thousands of years. That’s how we swung down from the trees,’ Geoff said.

  ‘Survival of the fittest,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Too bloody right — and the way it ought to be. And the bloody government is paying them now to breed.’

  ‘They’re investing in an army for their next war,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Yeah, and they’ll be doing what their bloody fathers did in the last one, breeding more morons while the rest of us are over there keeping the bloody world safe for them to breed in.’

  Ray might talk cars, listen to talk of cars, all night, but the conversation having swung away to an area where he didn’t want to go, he rose and walked to the window.

  ‘You only need to look at the animals to know how man got to where he is today,’ Geoff went on. ‘The strongest ape breeds with his pick of the females, and the race grows stronger. The farmer knows it. He doesn’t breed his cows to some mixed-breed mongrel bull. Man is no different. If you want a strong race, you breed the strong and sterilise the weak.’

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ Flora said.

  ‘That man did a lot of good until he went power crazy.’

  ‘There’s no rhyme nor reason to any of it,’ Jenny said. ‘We’re all numbers in God’s big game of chance: the university professor and the night man. If our number is drawn out of the hat, we get whatever he feels like handing out as the prize.’

  Ray had opened the glass door.

  Flora’s God didn’t wear a hat, or play games of chance. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I think Ray wants to go to bed.’

  With Flora and Ray on their feet, Geoff rose reluctantly. ‘The conversation was just getting interesting,’ he said, and again he winked at Jenny.

  A neighbourly wink? Or was he an ape, out for what he could steal from his neighbour’s tree — or from his sleep-out?

  She didn’t rise to see the visitors out. The door was open. They closed it behind them, locked it. Ray went outside. She sat on at the table, looking down at her clasped hands, at the two bands of gold, one on each ring finger. Difficult to tell which one was which when her fingers were linked. Shouldn’t have been wearing Jim’s. She’d taken it from her wedding finger the morning they’d gone into the registry office, had meant to put it away with her earrings and pendant, but the engraving on its inner circle had looked so new.

  Jen and Jim, 1942.

  Why should one man be chosen to come home from the war with a couple of lost knuckles, and another be blown to bits too small to find — if God wasn’t up there, running his daily lottery?

  EMPTY -HANDED

  Norman’s estate — his possessions and seven hundred and fifty pounds — was to be divided equally between his daughters. He’d named Gertrude and Maisy executors in his will, which was as well. Gertrude knew where Jenny might be found, and Maisy, who had a married daughter living in Melbourne, kept in touch with Sissy.

  There were legal papers to sign, and in June, Maisy was coming down to Melbourne to spend a few days with her daughter and to get Sissy’s signature on her share of the papers. Gertrude suggested Jenny meet them in the city, rather than entrust important documents to the post.

  A month ago, Jenny would have told her to post them. By June she wanted to see someone from home, even Sissy.

  She’d started off on the wrong foot in Melbourne, with Ray and with Margot. There was too much Macdonald in that kid. The twins had been running amok since they’d learnt to run. Margot was doing the same, and something had to be done about her. Finding the incentive to do that something was Jenny’s problem. Easier to give in; and, for the sake of a quiet life, the other two kids were learning to do the same.

  Something had to be done about Ray’s eating habits. Every Saturday morning he rode off on his bike and came home loaded down with dead cow. He expected to eat meat for breakfast. If she didn’t have a bit of leftover stew to put on his toast, he wanted sausages; if they were out of sausages, he expected her to fry him a piece of steak — and facing a raw slab of steak before breakfast wasn’t her idea of a good way to start the day. And some of the steak he brought home looked as if it had been slaughtered on the road.

  She’d never had a lot to do with meat, had spent too little time cooking it to work out one cut from the other. She’d never looked a liver in the eye before Armadale. Their first disagreement was over a liver, be it sheep’s, cow’s or dead dog’s, she didn’t know. She’d tried to slice it and damn near vomited. She’d asked him to slice it. He hadn’t got around to it. Three days wrapped in newspaper and the thing started turning green. She’d dug a hole beside the fence and buried it deep, still in its newspaper.

  ‘I don’t know how to handle innards, Ray. Don’t buy any more.’

  ‘It’s ch-cheap,’ he’d said.

  ‘Mince and sausages are cheap. I can handle them.’

  Sausages were for breakfast, as was mince on toast. He wanted slabs of meat at night, and potatoes.

  He bought potatoes cheap, wheat bags full of them, and if she didn’t serve him a Mount Everest of mashed potato, he thought his throat had been cut. He didn’t eat greens. Never bought greens. Didn’t own a pot to cook them in. He owned a good frying pan and a large and battered saucepan for his potatoes. He owned three plates, enamel, two stained enamel mugs, three sharp knives, one fork and two dessertspoons. If she’d come to him empty-handed, she would have been in strife. And if not for Gertrude and Elsie, she would have come to him empty-handed. They’d packed Amber’s pots, her kitchen crockery, her cutlery. They’d packed Gertrude’s old tin trunk with sheets, towels and blankets from Norman’s house. Sissy’s mattress had been tossed onto the pile as an afterthought, and Amber’s preserving pan, still full of her pantry items. They’d packed a cardboard carton with jam, chutney, tomato sauce, onions, eggs.

  She’d packed Norman’s toolbox, only because it had been left overnight in the yard, and while he’d been alive that toolbox had never spent a night out of doors. She hadn’t been thinking straight that day, hadn’t wanted to be weighed down with trunks and cartons, had just wanted to get away. She’d packed her bankbook, the account transferred to a Melbourne branch back in ’44, before she’d left Sydney. She’d had visions of emptying that account, taking a train to . . . to somewhere, Queensland, anywhere. Her first withdrawal paid for a bed for the kids, a battered chest of drawers, a secondhand electric iron.

  She didn’t know how much Ray earned each week. From day one, she’d cooked what he brought home, grateful for what he brought home — or had been during those first months. Maybe she’d been too grateful. She’d never been a wife, didn’t know how to be a wife. Flora was her only example of a suburban wife and mother, and she spent half her life yelling at Geoff, who spent half his life snarling orders back.

  So much Jenny didn’t know, like how often she was obliga
ted to sleep with Ray. Someone in Woody Creek had once said it was a wife’s duty to welcome her husband’s attention. Someone had once said that the honeymoon only lasted for twelve months. Maybe they’d meant the sex. Most brides were pregnant within the first twelve months, which might have put an end to sex.

  A long time ago, with Laurie, she’d learnt that you could let a man take your body without taking your mind. Lovemaking was a thing of the mind, not of the bits below it. It was an inconvenience in an otherwise good life. She took more than the recommended precautionary measures: rubber cap and gel, and a douche when he was done. With access to the bathroom restricted, she associated sex with the lavatory, where she prepared herself for his onslaught then washed him off, but she wasn’t pregnant, and as long as she wasn’t, she could stand whatever it took to stay that way.

  She couldn’t stand his livers. They looked and felt like monstrous lumps of congealed blood. They shivered when she picked up a knife, and her own liver shivered in sympathy. And tripe too. He’d brought that home twice. It resembled something between grey fungus and a cancerous growth.

  ‘B-b-boil it w-with milk,’ he’d instructed.

  ‘You won’t look at fish. I feel the same about cow’s innards.’

  She’d bought fish in celebration the day the government had started handing her a few bob a month in child endowment. She’d bought macaroni, pumpkin, cabbages, apples. Geoff Parker may not have appreciated the government paying women to populate; Jenny did. They may have paid her sooner had she felt like advertising to governmental departments that she’d had three illegitimate kids. She hadn’t. Mrs Jennifer King filled in those forms. Mrs Jennifer King queued up for her monthly handout.

  Jennifer Morrison Hooper’s bank account supplied her kitchen dresser. The only cupboard in Ray’s kitchen was the one beneath the sink, and by May the cartons containing Amber’s pots and plates had started disintegrating. She’d seen the dresser in a cluttered little secondhand shop in High Street, the day she’d gone shopping for the kids’ bed and drawers. Every week thereafter she’d visited it, smoothed its timbers with her hand. It had three deep drawers, three cupboards, wide shelves and a slide-out marble workbench. Then one morning she went in and the secondhand man had brought the price down by five bob, so she and Jimmy caught the tram into the city and went to the bank.