Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  Flora admired her rooms, admired the chest of drawers, asked if Jenny had found it in the sleep-out.

  ‘I’ve got the receipt, Flora.’

  Geoff came to stand at the door and do his own admiring — of the curtains, and his neighbour’s industry.

  ‘Why don’t you make curtains?’ he asked Flora.

  ‘Buy me an electric sewing machine and I might be able to,’ she said, and where did she get the nerve to speak to him like that?

  ‘Get a job and buy your own,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got money to waste on gas converters.’

  He slammed the door. Flora returned to her side to slam a few of her own.

  They’d been arguing on their side of the house since Jenny moved in. They argued on her side now, and in the backyard — and still went out to dances on Saturday nights, still went to the pictures while she babysat Lois. She didn’t argue with Ray and he never took her out. She hadn’t been for a ride on his bike since she’d married him, hadn’t been to a dance. Went to the pictures with Jimmy.

  ‘How did you cook your meals before you had this kitchen, Ray?’

  ‘U-u-used theirs.’

  ‘How come the old girl’s fridge is on your side?’

  ‘W-w-will,’ he said.

  It was the first Jenny had heard about a will. She knew Ray had worked for Flora’s aunty but until that moment had been unaware he’d been named in her will.

  Flora wanted curtains for her parlour exactly like Jenny’s. They made them together. Flora bought the smoke-damaged sheets, Jenny mixed the dye bath. Flora rinsed them, pegged them on the clothes line. Jenny stitched, Flora ironed, Geoff hung them. They didn’t offer to pay. Jenny didn’t ask for payment.

  Making those curtains started a habit, not a bad habit. With tea still rationed, the women began sharing their pots at lunchtime, in Flora’s side of the house until Ray’s month of night shift ended, then in Jenny’s. The passage door spent most of its days open thereafter, or during the day it was open. The bathroom became more accessible. They weren’t friends — Flora was very churchy, her life dictated to by the Pope — but they were housemates, and as long as they stayed away from religion, they found enough to talk about.

  Flora watched a square of grey fabric become a pair of shorts for Jimmy. She was there one afternoon when a friend of Mrs Andrews, the bank manager’s wife, came to pick up a lilac frock. Flora knew her. She saw money change hands.

  ‘You get your money’s worth out of that old machine,’ she said when the woman left.

  ‘I spent a month pulling it apart and cleaning it. It owes me.’

  She was there the day Jenny found Laurie’s framed mug shot tucked deep beneath Amber’s embroidered tablecloths, beautiful things, rarely used. Not so beautiful that battered frame, nor the newspaper cutting it kept safe, which, a month ago, had disappeared from the kids’ windowsill. Georgie must have hidden it in the drawer. Had she taken it out of its frame and read the tale of the water-pistol bandit, the details of Laurie’s sentence — three years’ hard labour for car theft and robbery? That kid was too old for her years, and far too smart. She had the intelligence to know that robbery and car theft were not things to be proud of.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Flora said.

  ‘He looked like a young Clark Gable,’ Jenny said, sliding the photograph deeper beneath the cloths. ‘He was my favourite movie star when I was a kid.’

  ‘I meant the tablecloth.’

  ‘Oh. My . . . my stepmother worked it,’ Jenny said.

  Stepmother — half-sister. Wondered if she was embroidering sackcloth in the asylum. The only time she’d sat still was when she’d had a piece of embroidery in her hands.

  She removed the cloth with the pink and maroon roses, shook and spread it over the table.

  ‘It looks like one of Aunty Phoebe’s,’ Flora said.

  There was a grab-all lurking in Flora.

  ‘There was nothing here when I moved in. Every sheet we’ve got, every tablecloth, I brought from home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that it was hers! Most of her stuff was worn out anyway. I meant it’s like the stuff she had here when I was young. We used to visit her a bit when she was married to her third husband. She’d put on fancy tea parties for us, spread one of her fancy cloths, and were we for it if we spilt anything on it.’

  ‘How long have you known Ray?’

  Squeezing information out of him was like trying to squeeze milk out of Granny’s billy goat. Why not get what information she could where she could?

  ‘Only since the funeral. We knew about him before,’ Flora said. ‘After she divorced her third, we stopped coming around. Dad used to get on well with him. I was about twelve or thirteen at the time.’

  Flora was three years older than Ray. When she’d been twelve or thirteen, Ray would have been going to school in Woody Creek.

  ‘I’ve often wanted to ask you why Ray doesn’t pay rent,’ Jenny said.

  ‘It was in the will,’ Flora said, and Jenny baited her hook with a white lie.

  ‘He told me once that your aunty was like a mother to him.’

  It sounded logical, but it raised Flora’s eyebrows and silenced her for a time.

  ‘She didn’t like kids. She was on stage until she was too old to have them, so Mum says. I dare say they would have interfered with her lifestyle. I want more kids but I can’t get pregnant again. I got pregnant fast enough with Lois.’

  ‘I do it too easily,’ Jenny said.

  ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘No, thank God.’ She turned her back. Mentions of God, in that context, equalled blasphemy.

  ‘I thought Ray was Catholic.’

  ‘He is. I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, it’s like that, is it.’

  ‘Three is enough to handle at the moment.’

  ‘Mum says that Phoebe’s first wanted kids. He was twice her age. Seven years of her killed him, and less than twelve months later she married some dago bloke. He cleared out when she was in her late forties and she married a normal Australian bloke — the only one of them who was normal, according to Mum.’

  The heavy knocker on the front door reverberated down the passage. That door was in Flora territory. She rose to answer it, Jenny listening while pouring a mug and a cup of tea. Flora didn’t like drinking out of mugs. Cups didn’t hold enough for Jenny, and she’d gone past the stage of putting on a show for her neighbour.

  A woman’s voice. ‘The girls are wondering if you might make up a sixth tonight.’ She sounded like Maisy, or one of her daughters.

  ‘I can’t stand the woman,’ Flora said.

  ‘She won’t be there. That’s why we need a sixth. Be a sport and sit in for her.’

  ‘Geoff doesn’t like me going out without him.’

  ‘It’s not out! It’s around the flaming corner.’

  Whoever she was, she hadn’t been invited in, but she was in and staring openly into Jenny’s half of the house.

  ‘Look what they grow in the bush these days,’ she said.

  Flora introduced them as Jenny, Ray’s wife, and Wilma Fogarty from down at the corner. ‘We go to the same church,’ she said.

  ‘I smell floor polish. It’s banned at my place,’ Wilma said. ‘You can’t squeeze another cuppa out of the pot, can you?’

  ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘The same way I take my men, love: strong, white and sweet.’

  She looked older than Flora, her frock was a washed-out floral, and within minutes, Jenny knew why. She had seven kids, the oldest fourteen, the youngest three.

  ‘You’ve got three, so they tell me,’ Wilma said. ‘You don’t look old enough. Where did he find you anyway?’

  ‘Do you know Willama?’ Jenny said. She never mentioned Woody Creek. Amber had put that town on the map.

  ‘I’ve been as far as Frankston. Joe took me down there on my honeymoon and I’ve been pregnant since,’ Wilma said, and she sat down at Ray’s table and ch
anged Jenny’s life.

  Wilma and Flora had worked together at Foy & Gibson during the depression. She lived around the bottom corner with Joe, who worked at a brewery and at weekends kept them in business, Wilma said. She was a talking machine, a city version of Maisy, not as weighty yet, but, like Maisy, could jump from one subject to the next with no breath between. She jumped from telling Flora how young Micky, the little bugger, had had enough of school, and how Joe was trying to get him an apprenticeship at that big garage in Toorak Road. She jumped from the big garage to Veronica, mad Bill’s absconding wife, then, mid-sentence: ‘I don’t suppose you play, Jen?’

  ‘Play what?’

  ‘Cards. A bunch of us get together on Friday nights, and Veronica will end up with her throat cut if she sticks her nose anywhere near this street. We’ll be one short tonight.’

  ‘I do,’ Jenny said, more willingly than she’d said it on her wedding day and with more conviction.

  ‘Five Hundred?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Once the kids are in bed.’

  ‘You little bottler,’ Wilma said. ‘You probably heard how Veronica walked out on her old man last week?’

  Jenny heard what Flora told her, what the kids told her, and occasionally what the twelve o’clock news told her. She’d never heard of mad Bill or his wife.

  ‘They’re in that cream weatherboard two doors up from Miss Flowers and her brother,’ Flora said.

  ‘You can’t miss her. Tall, dark, good-looking — her, not him,’ Wilma said. ‘He looks like a mad-eyed German. Do you smoke?’

  Wilma took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her house dress, flipped one into her mouth and tossed the packet to the tablecloth, spilling tobacco on Amber’s embroidery. Amber would have murdered Norman for less — and had.

  ‘I do,’ Jenny said, helping herself to one.

  She reached for Ray’s ashtray and placed it, too, on Amber’s tablecloth while Wilma continued her convoluted tale of Veronica, and Jenny realised she was talking about Mrs Andrews, the bank manager’s wife, her second customer.

  ‘Flora was saying a while back that your first hubby got killed in the war. I lost my youngest brother three weeks before it ended. I wish they’d dropped that bomb sooner. He was the pick of the lot. I’ve got six. One girl among six brothers — if you can imagine that.’

  Time took wing that day. Jenny forgot to pick the girls up from school. She was on a high when Ray came home, until she told him Wilma Fogarty had invited her down for a game of cards.

  He knew Wilma Fogarty. ‘You d-don’t w-want to m-m-mix with her,’ he said.

  ‘I miss playing cards.’

  ‘Sh-sh-she’s a b-b-b—’

  His stutter was worse when he argued. The kids sat watching his mouth, Jimmy’s mouth working for him.

  ‘She talks too much, but she’s very friendly.’

  ‘Her h-h-husband’s a s-s-soak.’

  ‘He won’t be there, and I haven’t had a game of Five Hundred since I left home.’

  ‘W-we’ll p-play with the k-kids tonight.’

  ‘It’s an adults’ game.’ Shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have. He could only play Switch. ‘I won’t stay late.’

  But he was gone, out to play with his bike, to sweep his path, rake up leaves. She followed him out to the veranda.

  ‘Come down at ten and walk me home, Ray.’ Hold my hand, she thought, kiss me in the moonlight, make me feel something for you.

  ‘W-w-walk yourself home,’ he said.

  She put on a clean frock, tied her hair back, got two of the kids into bed by seven thirty. Margot refused to go.

  ‘I want you in bed before I leave, Margot. It’s late enough.’

  ‘I’m not thleepy yet, I thaid.’

  ‘And I’m not in the mood for your argument,’ Jenny said. ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘J-just because y-y-you want to g-go out, you’re s-sending them to b-bed.’

  ‘Just because you’re not pleased that I’m going out doesn’t mean that you have to take her part against me. Go to bed, Margot.’

  ‘I want uth to play cardth with Daddy Ray.’

  Gave up, or gave in. Got the cards out and a sheet of paper, a pencil. Watched Ray write the kids’ initials laboriously, the J for Jimmy reversed. Didn’t correct him. Georgie didn’t correct him. She liked playing cards.

  At eight, Jenny retrieved her cigarettes from the washhouse, from behind her packet of Persil, lit one and walked down to the corner where women’s laughter drew her to an open front door.

  ‘Get in here. You’re late,’ Wilma yelled in reply to her knock.

  Jenny entered and followed the voices to a battered kitchen, where five women were already seated around a wreck of a kitchen table.

  ‘Patsy, Moira, Doreen, Carol, and the lanky little bugger at my cake tin is Micky, my eldest. And I told you to get out of that cake tin and get to bed, Micky. Now!’

  Jenny knew Carol from over her side fence. She nodded to the rest then took her rickety chair. Five minutes later, she was immersed in the battle of the cards.

  Ray didn’t come at ten to walk her home. At ten thirty she heard a bike. Hoped it was him. Hoped he’d come to take her riding through the night streets. It went by.

  ‘I should go,’ she said.

  The women didn’t want to break up their card game. She stayed until eleven thirty then walked home with Carol.

  He was asleep when she crept in. She didn’t wake him. He was a reliable worker. He kept enough food on the table. He wasn’t a heavy drinker. He was young, strong. Doreen’s husband had a bad heart. He couldn’t work. Doreen and her two eldest daughters were the breadwinners in their house. Jenny went to sleep counting her blessings — and hoping that Veronica, the missing player, remained missing.

  Still missing the following Friday evening. Carol knocked on Jenny’s glass door and they walked together to Wilma’s house, all three kids in bed, Ray in no mood to play Switch, and not happy that Jenny was going out again. Friday nights were his sex nights, one of his sex nights. And Veronica was a slut. Any woman who walked out on her husband was a slut, and he didn’t want his wife associating with women that slut associated with, he said, though over a period of time and not in those words, or so many words.

  Veronica’s husband had broken her nose, blackened her eyes, and more than once, according to the card players. They discussed men around Wilma’s kitchen table, discussed childbirth and washing machines, the church and contraception, kids and apricot trees. Wilma’s apricot tree scraped against her spouting.

  ‘I’ve asked Joe a dozen times to cut it back. He’s too bloody lazy to get off his arse at weekends,’ Wilma said.

  ‘Does it have apricots on it?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘His arse? No,’ Wilma said straight-faced.

  There is little more raucous than the unrestricted laughter of women, and it was so good. Jenny laughed until her stomach hurt, and when the laughter died, she asked if the tree bore any apricots.

  ‘Yeah. I keep hoping the bugger of a thing will grow bananas, but it never does.’

  More laughter, the game won or lost, cigarettes lit, the scores totalled, while Jenny told the players how she and her grandmother used to make pots of apricot jam every year between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

  ‘My mother used to make her own jam,’ Doreen said.

  ‘Six spades,’ Wilma said. ‘It’s usually loaded. Pick what you like. The birds eat what the kids don’t.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about taking the kids home for Christmas,’ Jenny said.

  They played late that night. It was well after midnight when Jenny slid into bed. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t toss around until she got comfortable either. She’d wake him. She lay on her back, her mind doing the tossing and turning.

  She hadn’t spoken to Ray about going home for Christmas. Had been thinking about it for a while, and hoarding sugar in jam jars. It was still ration
ed. A lot of sugar was needed for jam-making. The war had been over for a year. Australia grew thousands of acres of sugar cane and, like most, she’d believed rationing would end when the war ended.

  Joey, Elsie’s son, was engaged to the daughter of a cane farmer. He was flying down for Christmas. And Jenny wanted to see him, speak to him. As kids, they’d spent hours together, sitting by the creek, tossing in fishing lines and talking about flying away to strange places. Jenny’s dream had been to fly to Paris, become a famous singer and marry Clark Gable. Joey had planned to fly to the sands of Egypt and dig up tombs filled with gold. And look where they’d ended up. He grew sugar cane and she spent her days leaning over an old sewing machine.

  She still had dreams about singing in Paris. She’d had an incredible dream two nights ago. She’d been on Woody Creek’s stage, but knew it was in Paris. She’d been wearing pink. She never wore pink, hated it about as much as she hated yellow. And he’d been in it — Itchy-foot. As a kid she’d named him Itchy-foot. Blame Granny for that: she’d told someone once she’d been married to a quack with itchy feet.

  He could probably get her a job. He’d know all about Melbourne’s night-life. She knew nothing. Clubs and bands didn’t advertise for singers. Singers had to be in the right place at the right time, like in Sydney.

  Occasionally when the Parkers were out, she sang.

  She knew she could do it. She’d learned a lot from Wilfred Whiteford, had learnt to read music in Sydney. Ought to do it, instead of ruining her eyesight unpicking seams, stitching invisible hems. Make some real money. Pay back to the bank what she’d withdrawn.

  Joey would tell her to do it. Maybe that’s why she wanted to go home for Christmas. Needed someone to give her leave to do what she wanted to do. Her fishing mate, Joey, almost brother, supreme yabby catcher.

  They’d never fitted into their families. Elsie had been a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid when she’d had Joey. Granny had raised him — and Elsie from the age of twelve.