Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  Never this sick with any of those kids. Not sick at all with Margot. Hadn’t known she’d been having her, that’s why.

  Veronica was away for six weeks, cruising the tropics with her sister, the trip booked and paid for by her doctor chap. The newspapers and police were running a witch-hunt on abortionists. Veronica’s chap had taken his wife to England.

  The card players knew she needed Veronica, who wouldn’t be back until late September. They needed Jenny. With Veronica missing, they didn’t have a sixth for Five Hundred. Friday night was club night. Jenny couldn’t make up the six.

  Had to keep going. That was all she could do: keep doing what she’d been doing, hide it from him until September.

  She became devious in late August and slept with him again. You can’t get pregnant when you’re already pregnant. It made him happy until Friday, until she dressed for the club, painted her face, until Mrs Firth, her babysitter, arrived, a tough old bird in her sixties. Maybe Ray had respect for her age. He stayed out of her way, took off on his bike when he saw her at the door.

  Wrapped in her overcoat, scarf around her head, the wind attempting to blow her back the way she’d come, Jenny boarded a crowded tram on that last Friday in August. There must have been something good on in the city.

  Archie Foote bought her a coffee. Tonight she couldn’t stand the smell of it. She ordered a glass of wine. Sipped it, with a cigarette, while Archie spoke about nothing in particular and she nodded. Ralph and Monique were late. No audience other than she, he found a persona between doctor and grandfather. Her tolerance levels low, she lit a second cigarette. He was a man of vices, Granny had said. Smoking wasn’t one of them. She found out why that night.

  ‘The smoking habit is harmful to a singer’s throat,’ he said.

  She had bigger problems than her throat. She nodded, politely. Didn’t put her smoke out.

  They arrived, Monique windblown. Her hair was long. She went to the ladies’ room to do something about it. Archie transformed; interesting watching it happen, the altered vocabulary. He was old and he wanted to be as young as Ralph. Jenny was young and she wanted to be fifty and menopausal.

  She sang. Ralph played the accompaniment. He was probably a musical genius. He probably knew it.

  His wife was back, and probably as fake as Archie. There was a Monica Fulton in Woody Creek. Had Monique been baptised Monique or just plain Monica?

  The whole world seemed fake tonight and Jenny didn’t belong in it. Like with Laurie, when nothing had been real. Pregnancy did something to her brain.

  Her old snakeskin handbag looked real, worn real. Why was it still with her? She’d looked at other bags, never liked them enough to waste money on them. Why? It was a part of her past, that’s why.

  She emptied her wine glass and looked out at the tables between the leaves of the sick palm tree, sick for need of the sun. Sun and soil and room to grow wasn’t much to ask for, was it? She couldn’t have any either. Never had.

  Not a full crowd in tonight. Some nights the place was packed, the ceiling blue with smoke. Too cold to leave warm houses, warm wives in warm beds?

  She sang two ratbag songs, and tonight she wanted to sing the old, sad songs. Wondered if Ralph would notice if she broke into ‘Blue Moon’, if he’d follow her as the organist had at Norman’s funeral when she’d started singing the Twenty-Third Psalm. Or maybe she’d sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ for Jim, let him hear how it sounded in a cellar.

  No Jim here to hear. Wished he was here. He wouldn’t have got her pregnant to stop her singing. Closed her eyes and saw him as he’d been that night in Sydney, so proud of her; maybe the only person in the world who had ever been proud of her. She saw the Sydney crowd, yelling out for their favourite songs, clapping, whistling. Just a well-mannered patter of applause from this lot. Maybe they wanted the old songs but were too, too modern to admit it.

  Archie ordered a second glass of wine for her, which seemed happy enough to share her stomach with whatever was in there. She lit another cigarette. Ralph playing, Archie discussing a singing teacher he knew, his eyes on Jenny. He’d offered to pay for a few months’ training with a singing teacher. She needed money, not lessons.

  ‘I had eight years of lessons,’ Monique said.

  I had five years of pregnancy, Jenny told her wine glass. ‘It shows,’ she told Monique, and wondered if her years of pregnancies showed.

  ‘Then I did two years at the Conservatorium.’

  I did two years in Sydney free of pregnancy — between Jimmy and Cara Jeanette, Jenny explained to her wine glass.

  She liked what that wine was doing, liked how it felt in her stomach, so she sipped more, drew on her cigarette and wished she was at Wilma’s playing cards. The card players weren’t fake. They were who they were. Wilma had been five months pregnant with Micky when Joe Fogarty married her and she didn’t mind who knew it. She was a Catholic, and she’d had one of Veronica’s abortions. Now she wouldn’t let Joe come near her unless he used a rubber.

  ‘I’ve warned him that if he gets me up the duff, I’ll get rid of it again,’ she’d said.

  Up the duff. A bun in the oven. In Woody Creek, women had ‘fallen in’, or were ‘in the family way’. Same women; different words for different worlds. None of them got pregnant. Cows got in calf, goats got in kid, dogs got in pup . . .

  Women didn’t drink wine in Woody Creek. Jenny ordered another and reached into her bag for a cigarette. Monique eyed her bag, eyebrows raised — at its age, or its worn shoulder strap? The strap, replaced in Sydney, had never matched; now, worn ragged, it was a better match for the bag. So what? It looked how she felt: a little worn on the outside, tattered on the inside, soiled by too much handling.

  Like Granny’s house too, that handbag. She could put her hand on anything. To prove it, she put her hand on a lipstick, on her endowment book . . . what the hell was that? She withdrew a new packet of sewing machine needles bought months ago. Thought she’d left them on the shop’s counter. She needed machine needles. Hoped tomorrow she’d remember they were in there. Found her smokes, and a choice of two boxes of matches.

  Monique didn’t smoke. She had respect for her trained vocal cords. Her husband smoked. He didn’t need vocal cords, only his fingers. Jenny had no respect for her fingers or vocal cords or her head tonight. She drank half of her wine in a gulp.

  That’s what she’d do. Spent the next three weeks drunk. Laurie had given her wine. It numbed the brain. She’d get drunk and sleep with Ray, keep him happy for three more weeks.

  Laurie had always been happy. He’d been happy when she’d unwrapped that handbag. He’d been happy when she’d noticed he’d filled it with stolen money.

  Hadn’t known much at fifteen. Hadn’t known they made handbags out of snake’s skin either. It must have had a tough hide. You needed a tough hide to be a dirt slider in this world — though it hadn’t done the snake a lot of good, had it. The hunters had still got it, skinned it, hung its skin out to dry.

  Her hand, still searching, withdrew a crumpled shopping list. Vinegar, Baking powder, Cornflour. Which just went to show how often she cleaned out that bag. She’d bought baking powder months ago, months and months ago.

  The men were discussing America. Itchy-foot had lived there for a time. Itchy-foot had lived everywhere.

  ‘I spent some time at an asylum,’ he said.

  Inmate? Jenny thought, and peered again between the palm fronds, allowing her mind to wander far away.

  What a ridiculous life I’ve led. What the hell is Jenny Morrison doing in this place?

  Who is Jenny Morrison?

  And what the hell are they talking about?

  ‘He went in behind the eyes,’ Archie said. ‘The skull is quite thin at that point.’

  Did any of his convoluted stories have a point?

  ‘The eyeball was pushed to the side, a few taps of the hammer and it was over in minutes. I was lucky enough to watch a few of his operations.’

&
nbsp; She frowned and met his eyes, her eyes, though her own would look numb tonight. She felt numb, and numb was good.

  ‘The asylums were full of shell-shocked boys and there was little anyone was doing for them. He offered a solution.’

  ‘What was his success rate?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘A third showed improvement. There were deaths, of course.’

  ‘As one would expect,’ Jenny said, very carefully. She put her hand on a stub of pencil. Wrote Lobotomy beside Vinegar, Baking powder, Cornflour. She needed one of those badly. I am lost, she wrote.

  A half-page, ripped from an exercise book, crumpled, soiled by months in the bottom of a handbag, forces a pencil stub to be brief.

  Lost in the chill depths of his eyes,

  Captivated by his eloquence,

  I listen.

  Monologue

  of self-appreciation,

  Monotonous hum

  of words

  unheard.

  I nod.

  My gaze, it hovers somewhere

  north of eye but south of brow.

  Unmoving now,

  I nod, politely.

  Attentive puppet, his voice controls my strings

  while my own thoughts compete

  in chaos of race-meet

  around the circuit of my mind

  where streams of lost and wandering dreams

  ride dodgem cars that grind and grate,

  while I nod, and nod,

  and I self-negate.

  And he fills the still receptacle he sees,

  as empty shells long left behind he’s filled

  throughout his years.

  Vibration in his throat,

  old cat in silken coat,

  soft fur,

  gentle purr,

  a hidden claw?

  His face in profile, darkening

  against the lesser dark

  of open door.

  Hovering now, a floating thing.

  The room, retreating.

  Table where . . .

  . . . where the chair.

  As I regulate my breathing to that deep, that droning hum,

  and I grow numb,

  become,

  not yet begun.

  Regression to the place before the being,

  retreat into a greedy sack,

  unwilling to expel

  and to set free

  the me

  I yet may be.

  Refused exit,

  I watch myself decay,

  while the walls of a womb shed wasted cells

  and cleansed again, its tissues wait

  to yet create . . .

  ‘Jennifer?’ His hand was on her arm.

  She was here to sing, though not quite here. She crumpled the paper, stuffed it into her handbag, dropped the pencil in and stood, or didn’t quite stand, or not on her initial attempt.

  ‘Are you quite well?’

  ‘You’re the doctor,’ she said.

  She sang two more songs then left while Itchy-foot was up there singing; left without her money.

  Always next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. The calendar was full of weeks, and she was drunk.

  THEN THE SKY FELL IN

  September near gone. The kids back at school today. Springtime — or the blossom trees thought it was spring. This morning, the path Jenny walked was strewn with wet petal confetti, and before she reached Veronica’s street a fine rain was falling again. Cold rain, blown in from the South Pole. The map, hurriedly drawn with pen and ink on the rear of an envelope addressed to Mrs Fogarty, was wet, its ink bleeding.

  Veronica had been home for two weeks. Wilma had put Jenny’s case to her over a hand of cards, then told her about the pantomime, showed her a flyer, a photograph of the cast on it, and Jenny’s stage name: Jennifer Morrison.

  Jenny’s kids had been given free seats at every matinee. Wilma and her troop sat with them at two sessions. Carol and her husband drove Miss Flowers to the Saturday night performance, the hall crowded that night. Like one of Miss Rose’s school concerts.

  She could have had it done before the pantomime. Maybe she should have. Scared something might go wrong, that she’d be denied her days of magic, denied her line in the newspaper: Jennifer Morrison’s voice carried an otherwise unspectacular performance . . .

  Wondered if Granny would see it, if someone up there would see it. Barely a line, near the rear of the paper. Probably not. Probably a hundred Jennifer Morrisons in Melbourne, and she was Jennifer King now.

  She found Veronica’s house, one in a row of small narrow houses; found Veronica standing on the veranda watching for her. No time to waste this morning. She had to be at work by ten thirty.

  ‘How far along are you, kiddo?’ she asked, taking Jenny’s coat, scarf, both damp.

  ‘I missed in late July.’

  ‘You can’t keep doing this, you know.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to leave but I need enough money behind me when I do.’

  Narrow staircase; Jenny followed her saviour up to what must have been her doctor chap’s surgery. Was it murder like the newspapers said; like Granny said? At what stage did it become murder? It was no longer an overdue period. She felt bloated with it this time, her breasts felt sore with it. She was vomiting her heart out morning, noon and night with it, had lost a ton of weight.

  Getting rid of this one had nothing to do with babies. This time it was all about Ray. He’d put on such a shy, pleasant face in Woody Creek when he’d been the visitor. He’d worn that face for a month or two after she’d married him. You can’t wear a visitor’s face when you live with a person, sleep with a person. She didn’t like the man behind the mask.

  He hadn’t got what he’d thought he was getting either. He’d wanted her, not someone he had to share with three kids. Should have married a girl fresh from the schoolroom, who had no life apart from him, who might willingly spend her life feeling her way around whoever was inside him. She wasn’t that girl. She’d had a life, and, with luck, might yet carve out the life she’d dreamt of living as a kid.

  Couldn’t have done it without him. Would have still been in Woody Creek, old dames looking down their noses at her, the Hoopers still threatening to take Jimmy. Down here, there was hope. But not with him. He hated Georgie. She’d always kept her distance from him — a better judge of character than her mother. Jimmy used to follow him around at weekends; he’d loved the motorbike. Not any more. He and Georgie disappeared when they heard the bike coming.

  ‘What do you weigh, kiddo?’

  ‘Everything is loose on me except my bras. I haven’t stopped running since August.’

  He probably knew she was pregnant. He hadn’t asked. That was too personal for him.

  And it was done, and she felt worse for it, but she’d feel better soon. Vroni phoned for a taxi. She made a cup of tea while they were waiting, had a smoke, then wrote her phone number on Jenny’s palm.

  ‘Closed fist, kiddo. Memorise it, then wash it off. If you need me, call.’ Taxi tooting out front, coats on. ‘Don’t panic if the bleeding is heavier than last time. You were further gone with this one.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I’ll get the driver to drop me off at work, then he can take you home.’

  ‘Bless you, Vroni.’

  ‘You’re welcome, kiddo. Keep your feet up tomorrow.’

  Vroni paid her share of the taxi fare and then some. Jenny told the driver to drop her in the city, out the front of Coles. She went to the cafeteria, chose a table close to the ladies’ room. It had happened fast the last time. She expected the same this time; wanted it to happen before she went home.

  Always people about in the city. Wind and rain didn’t keep them indoors. It hadn’t kept her indoors. At any given time, enough Melbourne people had to be somewhere. She watched them come and go that day, mothers with daughters, sisters with sisters. She sat alone, sipping black tea and picking at a toasted cheese sandwich. Always loved
toasted cheese sandwiches. Sometimes they tasted like Norman’s fried sandwiches. Not today.

  She sat for two hours and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. She sat until people started staring, so she walked over to Myer’s and sat in their cafeteria until Billy-Bob’s watch told her it was close to three. Had to go home. Not home. She had to collect her kids from school. And it would probably happen on the tram.

  It didn’t. It didn’t happen when she walked to the school, when she stood with Gwyneth’s mother discussing the awful wind. She repeated identical words to Billy’s mother. Just a normal day.

  She wasn’t feeling normal. The pains were starting. She leaned against the school fence, willing those kids out and the bleeding to stay in.

  Jimmy too slow in coming today. Jimmy’s best friend was Billy, and they had a lot to say to each other.

  ‘Would you like to bring Jimmy around to play on Saturday?’ Billy’s mother said.

  ‘He’d love that.’

  Had to get away. And stop halfway up their street, grit her teeth, ride the pain and pray it didn’t come away. It didn’t.

  Peeled pumpkin between agonising pains, peeled potatoes, fried sausages for the kids and steak for him and watched the clock. Eight hours since it had been done. She took two Bex tablets when she heard his bike. Served the meal, didn’t serve herself. Went down to the lav.

  Just pains. Just agony. She sat until Geoff came out to knock on the door. Had to vacate her seat and go inside.

  Told the kids to get ready for bed at seven. Margot wasn’t sleepy.

  Couldn’t fight her tonight. She lit a cigarette and went outside.

  The tablets had done nothing to dull the pain. It was worse than having a baby. Fear that something had gone wrong multiplied each cramp. She walked the bricked path, walked out to the gate, wanting to call Veronica, just to talk to her, to have her say it was normal. She needed to know it was normal.

  Walked and smoked and thought of Granny. She’d encouraged her to walk when Georgie was coming. Walked back inside. Two kids in bed. Margot playing Patience at the table, Ray flipping the pages of a newspaper. Waiting for her to read it to him? Not tonight.