by Joy Dettman
Her handbag hung over the bedroom doorknob. She fetched it and brought it to the table, opened it, counted pound notes, money she’d withdrawn from her bank account to pay for fares, money saved from her endowment and her sewing.
‘W-w-where d-did you get it?’
‘Where do you think I got it?’
‘Wh-ooo knows w-w-what you g-get up to?’
‘Right. I’m at it every day,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my own corner in Fitzroy. Threepence a ride and a discount for twins.’
She had excellent reflexes. His backhand missed her ear.
She stood on the opposite side of the table and swept up her notes, stuffed them into her handbag, then took her bankbook from a worn side pocket, Archie Foote’s card still in it. Stuffed the card back into her bag — not that he’d be able to read it. He could understand figures.
‘That’s where I got it,’ she said, pointing to a fifteen-pound withdrawal. ‘I earned it in Sydney with my voice. People used to pay me to sing, Ray. People used to treat me as a person, not a live-in prostitute-cum-cook-cum-laundry woman.’
Angry, fiery-eyed angry, and vocal tonight. He couldn’t fight her with words. Maybe he knew he was in the wrong. He walked away from her bankbook, went to his bedroom and slammed the door.
She stood leafing through the book, looking at the pitiful little figures. The first page was all withdrawals, then the pay-ins commenced: 7/6; 5/0; 15/0. Pages of money squirrelled away, the sums growing in size as she progressed through the book. Then the last page, after those Yankee bastards had raped her, when the storing of money had been her only security: 3/0/0 ; 2/10/0 ; 2/7/6. Followed by Melbourne withdrawals. Going down, down, down. And what for? For the pleasure of living with him?
She opened his bedroom door. ‘I drew that money out so I could take the kids home, and I’m not disappointing them. You come or don’t come, but we’ll be on the train in the morning.’
‘D-d-don’t bother coming b-back if you g-go.’
‘You made the mistake of marrying me, Ray. We’ll come back.’
‘You w-w-won’t get in,’ he said, and he kicked the door and damn near took the tip of her finger off.
She walked outside, sucking the pain from her finger, stood on the veranda sucking and staring at her garden beds, the bankbook still in her hand, handbag over her shoulder, breathing fast and fighting back tears.
Tomato plants grown tall, plenty of fruit on them, though not pinking up yet. Onions aplenty, carrots standing in rows, lettuces sunburnt, full of slugs and snails, but they washed off. The rhubarb had gone mad. She’d made rhubarb pies, they’d eaten rhubarb with macaroni puddings, with their Weet-Bix for breakfast — all thanks to his bloody livers.
She’d created that garden, she and her kids. They’d brought a little of Granny, a little of home, to this place that wasn’t home, that would never be a home. The kids had dug holes all along the fence line and planted his withered potatoes, grown now into a long row of dark healthy greenery. Below the earth they were making babies. She’d tunnelled beneath one of the plants just to prove it to the kids.
Am I prepared to leave my garden? Can I leave my dresser, my electric iron, his fridge? I’d leave him a damn sight easer. I’d leave him tonight without a backwards glance.
The pain gone from her finger, she placed her bankbook into her bag and considered returning to Woody Creek as a failure, married for less than twelve months. And after what she’d written to Granny, she couldn’t.
He turned the kitchen light off. He was going to bed.
Walk up to the phone box and call a taxi. Get the kids up and take them to a hotel. One way or the other, she was going home tomorrow. She walked out to the gate and stood leaning on it, knowing she couldn’t disappoint those kids.
And knowing too that she couldn’t stand being the subject of Woody Creek gossip again, couldn’t stand having half of Woody Creek whispering behind their hands every time she walked into town, couldn’t stand to walk by the raping-eyed blokes who congregated on the hotel corner, who had probably placed their bets on how soon she’d come running back pregnant.
Worse than that: Vern Hooper would be on the phone to his solicitor five minutes after he learned she was home. Jimmy had a father now, a returned soldier, heroic survivor of a Japanese prison camp. Every newspaper in Australia had published photographs of the walking skeletons they’d brought out of those places, every newsreel in the theatres had shown those men and the conditions they’d survived in. That hard old swine would use Jim’s war record in court, and how many judges would deny a serviceman’s claim on a son he hadn’t seen in five years? None — not if she took that son back to live in two rooms and a lean-to.
She left the yard to walk, uncaring of where she walked, turning when she felt like turning, as she had the day she’d heard Jim was missing in action. She’d lost herself that day. Wanted to lose herself tonight, but, unlike Sydney’s roads, Melbourne’s went to where you expected them to go. She kept finding herself.
Ray was jealous of Joey, jealous of Jim, jealous of Georgie, probably jealous of Granny . . .
If he didn’t care about me he wouldn’t be jealous.
Jealous or possessive?
Wanting to possess someone isn’t loving them. It’s owning them. Telling her not to come back wasn’t loving her. It was proving to himself that he owned her.
And he didn’t. And she was going.
And what if he’d meant what he’d said?
Georgie loved her school and was doing so well there. Jimmy was eager to go to school next year, and over-ready to be there. She had a growing business with her sewing. She had her garden, her card-playing friends, Miss Flowers over the road, Carol next door. She saw all of the new movies. Delete Ray from the equation, delete fear of pregnancy, and she had a good life down here, a better life than she’d ever expected to have.
Not the life she’d wanted.
A damn sight better than the one she’d have if she went home.
Tyrants are created by those who give in to unreasonable demands.
She had to give in. She had no choice.
She took a road leading back to High Street and to a telephone box, where she looked at her watch. Not nine thirty yet. Maisy wouldn’t be in bed.
If I haven’t got the right coins, I’ll call a taxi and to hell with the consequences.
Of course she had the right coins.
Maisy must have been sitting next to the telephone waiting for it to ring. Jenny said what she had to say. She lied about Ray’s factory, said it had been involved in the strike, that he was still catching up with the bills and could Maisy please let Granny know that they wouldn’t be coming up. Maisy filled the three minutes. She’d had a card from Sissy. Patricia was having another baby. Rachel’s oldest had been rushed to hospital with . . . then the money dropped and Jenny was alone, holding on to a dead phone line.
Wanted Maisy’s voice back, wanted to hear news of anyone, wanted the normalcy of . . . of home.
Not enough coins to call her back. Plenty of pennies.
Empty streets out there. Didn’t want to leave that phone box for emptiness.
She had a number she could reach with pennies. Had it in her handbag.
Couldn’t.
He wouldn’t be home — so it wouldn’t matter if she tried his number.
And what if he was home?
Was he any worse than Ray?
Tonight no one was worse than Ray.
Ringing. Ringing somewhere. Where?
Five. Six. Seven rings. He wasn’t at home. Then the pennies dropped.
‘Good evening.’ A bored voice, maybe a sleepy voice. ‘Good evening.’ Repeated. An educated voice, distant, but in that phone box with her.
Hang up.
‘Are you there?’
She was there. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.
‘Jennifer?’ How could he possibly recognise her voice? ‘Where are you?’
‘I flew down,’ she said
. ‘Just for the night.’
‘My Christmas was looking very bleak. What a delightful surprise.’
He spoke of his recent trip to Woody Creek. She told him she was on her way there, on the morning train. She told him she was staying at a hotel in the city. Just a fairytale, spun in a phone box, on a street corner, just fiction travelling down a line. It didn’t matter. He replied, and not in monosyllables.
He asked if she’d seen Jim Hooper recently, then told her he’d lost track of him, that the family had moved him to a clinic specialising in the care of shell-shocked servicemen. She didn’t want to talk about Jim. Didn’t want to think about Jim. She wanted to ask him about Juliana Conti, but couldn’t raise the nerve, so she wove more stories about the club she sang at in Sydney — had, once upon a time.
‘Granny always told me I got my voice from you. She said once you could charm the natives from the jungles with your voice.’
‘Dear Tru,’ he said, then he asked after her fine friendly son. She told him he’d be going to school next year. He knew about the girls. She didn’t want him to know about the girls or ask after them. She spoke about Wilfred Whiteford and his band, no doubt disbanded by now, but so very fine to speak about as if it were today. He spoke of the jazz club, of his concert group.
‘If I could get work down here, I’d consider moving closer to home,’ she said.
‘I have many contacts in the industry, Jennifer.’ Was it an offer? Did she dare? She was searching for a reply when he continued. ‘There are no limits as to how far your voice, your appearance, may take you.’
Who amongst us doesn’t want to hear such praise?
No praise in Ray’s house. No singing there — nothing to sing about there. And she had to go there. Her watch face told her over half an hour had passed since she’d placed her call to Maisy. That’s what happened when you spoke to someone who replied. Time disappeared.
‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘The train leaves early.’
‘Having broken the ice, do keep in touch, Jennifer.’
Goodbyes then, a promise to keep in touch. Promises don’t count when you’re spinning fairytales in a telephone box.
‘Oh, before you go, dear, should you find yourself back in town on the fourth, my concert group is putting on a performance at the Hawthorn Town Hall. I would be truly delighted to introduce your voice to our southern city.’
‘I don’t know where I’ll be on the fourth,’ she said.
‘Don’t lose my number.’
She had no intention of losing it, not now.
Life is a current. Get caught up in it and it can sweep you into dangerous waters, take you to where you don’t want to go. Fight it though and you’ll surely drown. Far better to float with it, hope that sooner or later it will wash you close enough into shore for you to get your feet on solid ground.
Jenny floated through Christmas, and it was like all of those Christmases with Amber, those silent Christmases of no laughter, no Granny, no love. It was a Christmas of children’s eyes watching her, watching him, of staying out of his way, and waiting for what came next.
Jenny didn’t know what came next. Her mind halfway between pretend-land and hell, she cooked a form of Christmas dinner: roasted chops and potatoes, pumpkin, carrots and onions; picked a bunch of silverbeet and made white sauce to pour over it. He liked gravy. She didn’t make gravy. He liked his potatoes and pumpkin mashed. He got what she cooked that Christmas Day.
She made a treacle pudding and poked a threepence into each serving. Hoped he choked on his. He didn’t, but he swallowed it. The kids found their threepences.
Slept on the camp stretcher she’d prepared for Joey — or didn’t sleep. Spent the night . . . floating . . . replaying the telephone conversation, replaying it word for word. Near dawn, the old Christmas tunes began playing in her mind, and she sang along with them, soundlessly, and thought of Granny, of Joey, of Christmases past and those ahead. A confusion, her mind on Christmas night, thoughts crisscrossing like the city train lines near Flinders Street, a confusion of tracks, leading out, leading in. She travelled to Sydney, then diverted to Norman’s funeral, stood again in the telephone box, hid behind a tree spying on old Noah the swaggie.
Itchy-foot. Always Itchy-foot. Always knew he could sing. Could old people still sing or did their throats become wrinkly?
She could hear him on the fourth — if she had the guts. Did she have that much guts left? She’d had guts once. Gone to Melbourne at fifteen, to Sydney at eighteen.
Was that concert a doorway?
What would be on the other side?
Don’t be taken in by him, darlin’.
More confusion on the far side, more trouble. She had to stay on the safe side — which wasn’t safe anyway.
A sleepless night, a bad Boxing Day, a day of dodging the blackmailer, and on Boxing night, sleeping again, or not sleeping, on the camp stretcher, letting him know that he may have been able to blackmail her into not going home but he didn’t own her.
Between Christmas and New Year, he tried to prove he owned her. She’d spent the day making jam from Wilma’s apricots, made eight jars of it, and went to bed early. He came into the sleep-out in the middle of the night and tried to take her on the camp bed, then the floor, her kids only a door away. She knew the layout of that room better than he did — climbed over the old cabinet and dived through the cats’ hole in the flywire. Rusting flywire scratches those without fur, but she showed him who she belonged to. Climbed over Carol’s fence and hid in her garden, in her nightgown.
Shades of yesteryear. How many times had she scaled Mr Foster’s fence when Amber had been the one chasing her?
Ray paid her back with a liver. She fertilised her rhubarb with it while it was still fresh, while 1947 was still shaking off its newness. He fought fire with fire. He stopped buying bread. She had money in her handbag. She bought her own bread, her own milk, cheese, fruit, loaded his fridge with her type of food and left no room for his.
Then Granny sent her a ten-pound note in the post, which wasn’t at all like Granny. She’d wrapped it well in three pages — one page from Joey, which Jenny couldn’t read for tears, couldn’t read aloud to the kids. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair in this bloody world.
‘Get your shoes on,’ she said.
Worn-out shoes, but they got them on.
‘Get your hats on.’
‘You don’t wear a hat.’
‘I don’t burn. Do as you’re told, Margot.’
They rode the tram into the city where Jenny paid back to the bank the fifteen pounds she’d withdrawn from her account, knowing she’d be desperate for it one day, maybe one day soon.
Later, loaded down with three pairs of new school shoes, after lunch at Coles cafeteria, she gave the kids five shillings each of Granny’s money and let them spend it in Coles. You could buy a lot for five bob in Coles. Watched them choosing how to spend their coins. Jimmy spent his on a wind-up monkey who played a drum when you wound his key. Georgie wanted a floral dress. Only one on the rack, one with leaves as green as her eyes, flowers the colour of her hair. Margot wanted one the same, but couldn’t have it. Didn’t want the yellow dress, or the one with blue flowers. Georgie got her dress. Margot bought a big bag of butterscotch, a packet of cards with Mickey Mouse on them, and two pretty pins to keep the hair out of her eyes.
As much as she, those kids had wanted to ride the train home to Granny. They knew who to blame for their lost Christmas. Even Margot knew who to blame.
She blamed Georgie for not buying the dress with the blue flowers. Coles had two of them.
‘We’re not twins,’ Georgie said.
She’d turn seven in March. Margot would turn eight in April. Jimmy had turned five in December. And look at them sitting there, little city slickers, holding on to their parcels, going home to a nice house in a nice street.
I did the right thing, Jenny thought. I’ve given them a chance at life. Now I have to give myself a chan
ce. I’m going to Itchy-foot’s concert.
She rang him from the post office, the kids sitting on the steps, licking ice-cream.
‘I’ll be here on the fourth. I’d like to sing at your concert,’ she said.
‘And you shall, my dear. And you shall.’
She told Ray she was going to a concert, that he could take her to it on his bike if he felt like it. He didn’t feel like it. He took off alone on his bike. Flora had already agreed to look after the kids. At seven, Jenny left them with her, Georgie in charge of Jenny’s old book of fairytales, her precious book from Sydney, only brought out on special occasions and treasured by all three of her kids.
She wore her blue linen, Norman’s blue necklet at her throat, its matching drop earrings swinging from her lobes. She caught two trams to the Hawthorn town hall and to the strangest, out-ofthis-world night of her life.
She heard Archie Foote’s voice, heard the age in it, heard him reach for the high notes and listened in awe to the pure rich tones of his lower register. He sang ‘Autumn Leaves’ and, to her, it would ever be his song. Since Christmas, anything could make her cry. She fought back tears that night, unsure if it was his voice, his age, or the words of the song that moved her — or maybe something deeper. He’d given her life. Him. He’d given her his voice. He was her sire, if not her father.
He claimed their connection, in part, when he introduced her. ‘My beautiful granddaughter, Jennifer Morrison,’ he said.
She didn’t embarrass herself on that city stage. She sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. And, when the night was near over, they sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’, father and daughter standing side by side. Their voices accepted their connection. They blended.
He wanted to drive her back to her city hotel. She got away from him, though not before he gave her the address of his jazz club.
‘I’m there every Friday night,’ he said. ‘If you find yourself back in town . . .’ It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t. She didn’t want . . . didn’t want to know him better. He was too . . . too easy to trust.
Jimmy was enrolled at school as James Morrison King. She got rid of the Hooper name. Hoped Jimmy would forget it but doubted he would. He had the memory of an elephant. Her days were long without him. She picked home-grown tomatoes, pulled home-grown onions, bought a pound of cooking apples and made eight jars of chutney to add to her pots of jam, stored now in the old cabinet in the sleep-out. Jenny wrote to Granny about her chutney, her jams. In February Miss Flowers’ tree had supplied plums. She didn’t mention Ray. Made no mention of singing with Archie Foote. She wrote about a wedding dress.
