Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  Archie has been up here looking for you. I told him you were singing at a club in Sydney. He’s living in his father’s house in Hawthorn. I don’t know how that came about, his father wrote him off years ago. He seems to be in the money too. He’s driving a little sports car, yellow, so no one would miss seeing him. That man always was an exhibitionist. I don’t know how far Hawthorn is from Armadale. I hope it’s a long way, but if you see that car, run. He might look the part of a harmless old grandfather, but I wouldn’t trust him within a mile of those little girls.

  Tell the kids I loved getting their letters. Tell Margot I was very proud of her beautiful writing, tell Georgie that reading her letter was like reading a book about all of my beautiful grandchildren, and tell Jimmy I’m sending him six dozen eggs so he can have two for breakfast.

  I don’t know how well they’ll travel. We’ve marked the carton fragile and Harry is going to drop it off at the station for me tomorrow. All things being well, by the time you get my letter, the eggs and things should be at Spencer Street. I dare say I could send it to the Armadale station, but this town is full of bloodhounds, always sniffing around after information. Margaret Hooper has been doing her own sniffing around. She asked Maisy only this week where you’re living, and like the fool that woman can be, she told her she’d had lunch with you and Jimmy.

  That’s about all I can find to say today. Give the kids a big kiss and a hug from their granny and tell them I miss their noise.

  Love you all, Gertrude

  The carton was waiting at the station, labelled MRS J.C. KING. And it was as heavy as lead. Jenny propped it on a bench seat and counted her coins before asking a taxi driver how much he’d charge to take her to Armadale. She couldn’t carry that carton to the tram stop, then home from her tram stop.

  Jimmy enjoyed the taxi ride. He’d had an ongoing love affair with cars since Myrtle had bought him his first wooden car in Sydney. Jenny resented emptying her purse into the driver’s hand, but Granny’s food parcel made up for it. Six dozen eggs, well packed in newspaper, cushioned by carrots, big fat Granny carrots, fat onions, lemons, oranges, a huge cabbage cut in half to fit, and the eternal silverbeet filling in every gap. For once in its life, Ray’s fridge was full up with Jenny’s type of food.

  Dear Granny,

  I was in a filthy mood last time I wrote. I’m over it now. Sorry. The kids thought it was Christmas time when we opened the carton. They’re starved for your greens and eggs. Not one was broken and only three were cracked. We turned them into a bread pudding.

  Georgie is writing to ask you if you could send us down a few seeds so we can make our own Granny Garden. Any sort of seeds will do. We’ve got a ton of dirt down here doing nothing bar growing weeds, which it seems to do well . . .

  The seeds arrived a week later, multiple twists of paper containing enough seeds to start a market garden. She’d sent tomato seeds, onion, lettuce, squash, bean, silverbeet, pea, carrot, and on each twist of paper, she’d printed instructions on when and how to plant them. The kids hammered nail holes through the bottoms of rusting tins to make pots for the tomato seeds. Georgie read the instructions. Set pots in sheltered spot safe from frost. Keep moist. Plant out to garden when frosts are over.

  Happy days those, waiting for winter to end, a six-by-four-foot plot of land already planted with Granny’s onion and carrot seeds, the kids running out each morning to see if a seed had popped up its head — Margot always first out the door.

  Jenny was better. The weather was better. There was warmth to be found on the veranda in the mornings, the rhubarb was growing curly baby leaves. Then, in early August, Granny’s onion seeds popped their heads out to feel the sun, and, not to be outdone, up came the carrots, and the tomatoes.

  They had a thousand seeds unplanted, and on a false spring day in mid-August, Ray ridden off to buy his dead cow, Jenny clad herself in her Woody Creek shorts and shirt and worked with her kids, turning over more earth. They had a strip of earth, seven foot in width and thirty foot in length, bordered by a paling fence and a bricked path, and every one of Granny’s seeds would be in that strip of earth before this weekend was over.

  They worked all morning, Jenny and her kids, she tossing weeds over her shoulder, the kids carrying them to her compost bin — a large and rusting garbage can she’d found behind the lavatory, its bottom near rusted away. Norman’s chisel and hammer had made short work of what was left of it. By noon, it was overflowing with weeds. Georgie climbed in to stomp them down, and it fell over, and they laughed in the sun, while time went on holiday.

  He returned to weeds and earth strewn where he parked his bike and saw the mess, not the laughter or the industry. His eyes didn’t like the mess.

  ‘W-what d-do you think you’re d-doing?’

  ‘Making a garden. I’ll sweep it up when we’re done,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Ins-s-side.’

  ‘In a minute. I’ll finish planting this one.’

  ‘Y-you w-want him l-looking at your l-l-legs.’

  Jimmy was the only ‘him’ around. Seeing her legs didn’t worry him. Passers-by might look over the fence, and who cared.

  He meant Geoff Parker.

  She glanced towards the backyard. ‘He never comes around this side of the house, Ray.’

  He took her arm. Big hands, strong. She dropped her shovel, kicked her soil-covered shoes off and allowed him to lead her inside. Didn’t stay inside to sort out his dead cow; pulled a skirt over her shorts and went out to finish off what she’d started, visualising a long row of raised-up garden beds growing everything under the sun, loving the earth that gave back so willingly, loving the sunshine on her limbs, and wondering if he’d bought another liver. The rhubarb would appreciate it.

  At eight thirty, he nodded towards the bedroom.

  ‘In a minute,’ she said. Stole a cigarette and smoked it on the veranda, delaying the inevitable.

  Hated the bed part of marriage. Hated it even more now she knew Jim was alive. It was like . . . like she was cheating on him. Or cheating herself.

  Big moon up there tonight, and cold enough for a frost. Not many frosts in Armadale. At home, morning after morning the grass was white with frost. Much was different down here. The kids had covered their tomato seedlings. Jenny stood with the rusting jam tins, looking out at moonlit humps of earth. You could imagine anything on such a night, almost see fairies dancing between the spindly onions.

  Imagine the expression on Jim’s face when he saw how big Jimmy had grown; those big china teeth flashing white, his smile growing so wide it would almost cut his face in half.

  Shouldn’t think about him.

  Why not? He had a right to see Jimmy, and Jimmy had a right to know his father was alive.

  She drew on the cigarette and allowed her mind to wander back to the cellar at Monk’s old house, to where Jimmy had been conceived. She hadn’t known anything until that night. She’d thought human sex was no different to a pack of dogs taking turns on a yelping female dog in the street. Loving someone changed animal sex into something else.

  Had to stop thinking about that too. She was married. Her kids had a stepfather.

  And she, and they, had more connection to those tomato seedlings than they had to Ray.

  For richer, for poorer, for better for worse . . .

  Jim was the husband of her mind and always had been. His ring meant more to her than Ray’s. And he’d never been dead, not to her soul. Loved him, and he was out there somewhere tonight, looking at that same moon, maybe thinking about her.

  Had they told him how Jimmy had grown?

  They would have told him she’d married Ray King — which might alter his attitude to her but not to Jimmy. He’d loved him.

  Should have put my age up and married him in Sydney.

  Which would have achieved nothing. Vern knew how old she was. He would have had the marriage annulled.

  And whether she was married or not, Jim would be interested to know what she’d learn
t of Juliana Conti. In Sydney, he’d tried to tell her she hadn’t been born a Morrison.

  ‘Juliana Conti,’ she whispered. It sounded like a pseudonym. She’d been real though. She’d lived. She’d died. She’d been buried.

  If Granny had saved J.C.’s life that night, she would have taken me back to where she came from. I would never have known Jim, would never have had Jimmy and Georgie.

  Who was Juliana Conti? Had she planted a garden? Did I get my love of the earth from her or catch it from Granny? Most of who I am came from Granny. Most of what I know I learned from her.

  My singing came from Itchy-foot. Archibald Gerald Foote; old Noah of the long white beard and black coat; Doctor Gerald Archibald, abortionist — now driving a little yellow sports car — and older than Granny.

  How had a thirty-odd-year-old woman become involved with a sixty-year-old man? In the photograph of Juliana wearing the hat, she looked about thirty — had looked about sixteen as a bride. She’d been married at some time. Widowed maybe. Have I got a batch of half-sisters and brothers somewhere? Where had she left her kids while she was chasing Archie Foote up to Monk’s. Had he been worth chasing at sixty?

  I’d chase Jim up there if he was blind and on crutches. I wouldn’t chase Ray down to the end of the veranda.

  Enough!

  I’ll stop — after I see Jim, I’ll stop. I have to explain why I married Ray — and tell him his father is a lying old bastard and his sisters are lying bitches.

  They might have believed for a month, two, maybe even for six months, that he was dead, she thought, but they would have known he wasn’t before I brought Jimmy home from Sydney, yet all three of them had sat around Granny’s table and lied when I asked if they’d heard any news of Jim.

  ‘Bastards.’

  They’d heard by then.

  ‘Do the right thing by Jim’s boy,’ Vern had said. ‘Do the right thing by Jim’s name.’

  ‘Old bastard.’

  He’d been trying to get Jimmy since he was a baby. ‘I’ll have him raised by decent folk,’ he’d said when Jimmy was five months old.

  Marrying Ray had put a stop to that, and that’s what she had to think about. And the house, and the garden.

  A cold garden now. She was freezing. It would be an orange-picking night at Granny’s. How many times had she and Joey run down to the orchard on frosty moonlit nights to pick oranges then sit close to the stove, peeling, eating, cold oranges?

  ‘Don’t waste that peel,’ Granny used to say. Nothing was wasted up there. She’d used dried orange peel as a fire starter.

  That’s what I have to do. Plant an orange tree. Plant an apricot tree. Plenty of room.

  A week ago, she’d looked at plum trees in a shop in High Street. They cost money.

  Wished . . . wished she was rich and could buy what she wanted to buy. Wished she could get a job singing somewhere at night. She’d made good money in Sydney with her voice. Never any advertisements for singers in the newspapers. Plenty for nurses, shop assistants, house cleaners. She could get a job cleaning while the kids were at school, or she could next year when Jimmy started school.

  Or plant seeds. Fruit trees grew from seed — didn’t always grow true to the parent tree though. It all depended on the whim of a bee, Granny used to say. A blossom opened, it was pollinated, fruit formed and each one that ripened had its own unique seed.

  My seed pollinated by Jim produced Jimmy, and look at him. He’s not me, and he’s not Jim, but the best of both of us. And look what I made from Laurie’s seed — perfection. Margot? I had nothing to do with the making of her. I didn’t know they were making her, didn’t know I was having her until she was two-thirds done, so nothing of me went into her.

  Cara Jeanette? God alone knew which one of those drunken mongrels made her. Was she big-boned like Hank the Yank; thick from the ears down, dark like him? Or blond like Billy-Bob? Hadn’t recognised the other ones. Five of them. No room for me in Cara Jeanette — except for her hands. My hands fought that night. For a time they fought.

  A shiver travelled down her spine. Just the cold. And she had to go in before she froze solid.

  Didn’t want to go to his bed.

  The way he was about sex, she couldn’t work out why he and his first wife hadn’t had kids. Maybe she’d used something. Or had she died in childbirth? Not many did these days, and less down here where the hospitals were close and there were plenty of doctors. He wasn’t good with kids, didn’t mind her taking precautions. Wouldn’t take any of his own.

  She was managing.

  She looked up at Melbourne’s stars, not as bright as Woody Creek’s, not as many, but up there, shining. She’d sat on Myrtle’s front fence with Jim, searching the sky for the brightest star, sat holding hands, and hand-holding had been almost too sweet to bear.

  Craved the touch of his hand, craved his beautiful mouth, craved that throbbing expectation.

  And craved another cigarette. Crept inside and stole another, listened to Ray’s breathing. Maybe he was asleep.

  Had to get her own packet, hide it in the washhouse.

  NIGHT SHIFT

  Monday morning, Jimmy sat on the post office steps with a book and an ice-cream, while Jenny placed a call to Maisy.

  ‘It’s me, Maisy. Granny said that you still cut Margaret Hooper’s hair.’

  ‘You rang me up to talk about Margaret Hooper’s hair?’

  ‘No, and I’ve got no more coins to extend. Next time you see her, can you find some way to ask her where they’ve got Jim?’

  ‘He’s still in Melbourne. They’re down there now. Nelly Dobson told me Vern has got sugar diabetes, and Lorna has gone to England for six months.’

  ‘Is there any England left?’

  ‘She’s got an uncle over there — her mother’s brother, I think he is. He’s in for a shock when he sees her, though her mother didn’t look much better . . .’

  Once Maisy got started it was hard to cut her off. The telephone company cut her off, Jenny’s precious coins wasted on three minutes of Lorna Hooper’s uncle and Vern Hooper’s diabetes, Margaret’s bloke and Nelly Dobson’s new washing machine.

  Miss Flowers was out in her garden, planting pansies. Jenny leaned a while against her fence to chat, and left half an hour later with roots of mint, thyme and a clump of parsley.

  The garden was looking like a garden when Ray went on night shift. It meant more money, he said, didn’t say how much more money. He was a machinery supervisor and would have been paid more than the basic wage. For some reason, he didn’t pay rent to the Parkers. He hadn’t told her; Flora had. He paid a half-share of electricity, gas and water rates, spent a fortune on his bike and meat, had stopped buying butter. He could have been struggling with money, but it was a waste of time asking, or asking why he paid no rent. Ray didn’t talk, and he’d been talking less than usual lately.

  Her fault. She’d been . . . been less available to him. Couldn’t get Jim off her mind. Sat up late reading library books until Ray started snoring.

  She cooked early on the Monday night he commenced his month of night shift. He ate and rode away. She got the kids bathed and into bed, then managed to squeeze in a bath and shampoo before eight. Time to read that night, the gas oven burning on low, the oven door open. It was her only form of heating and no doubt a waste of gas, but the bills weren’t high. She finished her book at ten and slid into the luxury of a wide empty bed where she slept like the proverbial log, undisturbed until she heard his bike putter by the window. Out of that bed like a scalded cat; out to the kitchen, placing sausages into the frying pan before he opened the door. He ate, then, unwashed, crawled into bed.

  ‘Shush,’ she warned when she woke the kids. ‘Ray’s asleep.’

  ‘Shush,’ while they were eating, and when they crept down the veranda on their way out. ‘Shush,’ until they were out the gate and free. Ray slept a good eight or ten hours at night. Jenny, expecting him to sleep all day, continued from the school to the tram st
op. She and Jimmy were going exploring.

  They found St Kilda beach that day and shared a banana there, paddled in the waves. They caught a tram back to the city where they shared a milkshake. With hours still to fill, they went to the pictures. Their tram got them back to Armadale in perfect time to pick up the girls.

  He wasn’t sleeping. He was watching for them on the veranda, six butts at his feet.

  ‘W-what have you b-b-been doing all d-d-day?’

  ‘We went out so we wouldn’t disturb you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the pictures,’ Jimmy said. ‘And the beach. And we paddled. And it’s all salty. Trams go everywhere, Ray.’

  He’d had the best day of his life. As had Jenny. Now she was home.

  She found a slab of cow, tossed six potatoes into the sink, ran water on them to soften the dirt, then went to the bedroom to take off her city frock. She heard him tell the kids to go outside and play. Didn’t know why — or not until he came into the bedroom.

  Froze, half-clad, knowing what was on his mind.

  ‘I’m halfway through getting dinner.’ And she wasn’t prepared for sex. ‘I can’t, Ray. I’m not ready for that.’

  Ready or not, he was on her. Dinner could wait.

  ‘Let me at least go down to the lav —’

  ‘W-won’t m-matter once.’

  ‘It will! Just give me a minute —’

  Didn’t recite ‘The Highwayman’. She prayed. Please God. Please God. Please God, just this once let it not matter. Please God. Please God.

  Kids no longer quiet. Jimmy vrooming his trike up the bricked path, one of them running along the veranda.

  Please God. Please God.

  She knew it mattered when she filled a basin at the sink, the potatoes still waiting there. Knew it mattered while she washed him out of her in the bedroom; knew her seeds spent their lives standing in line, gasping for sperm. Knew by the calendar that it mattered.