Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  He’d trimmed the branch later. She’d pitched what he trimmed over her neighbour’s fence; and when there was no light left to trim, to pitch, her decrepit old housekeeper had come out with a plateload of mashed potatoes and hunks of meat swimming in gravy.

  He’d eaten in the yard. They’d stood, two crazy old dames, on the veranda, choking with laughter while he shovelled in that pile of potatoes.

  ‘Raised in a pig pen were you, boy?’

  Maybe he’d nodded.

  ‘Dumb are you?’

  Maybe he’d nodded again.

  They’d laughed at Big Henry’s boots. He’d wired a bit of car tyre to the soles. It stopped his feet from wearing out.

  Boy, they’d called him. ‘I’d change my boot repairer if I were you, boy.’

  They’d tossed him a pair of fancy shoes and a blanket later, and told him to be on his way by sun-up. The shoes were too small for his feet but he’d cut the toes out of them with his pocket knife.

  The sun hadn’t come up the next morning. A fine rain drizzling down, he’d started cutting the solid section of that limb into foot blocks, stacking them down behind her wood heap. The old dame had watched him from her veranda, sucking on cigarettes she poked into an eight-inch holder. They’d fed him breakfast: two eggs, toast with butter and three sausages. He hadn’t known there was so much food left in the world.

  She hadn’t liked trees. Her neighbours had been too fond of them — every leaf in Armadale fell in her yard, she said. That afternoon he’d climbed a ladder and cut more limbs. They’d kept feeding him.

  He must have been going on for fourteen. His birthday was in July. It could have been July the night she came out to the washhouse and told him to get inside. Freezing cold, half asleep, he’d followed her into a house the likes of which he’d never seen. It had a bathroom and a tub full of steaming water, big pink towels hanging on a rail, and a brand new bar of pink soap sitting in a china dish shaped like a swan.

  ‘Get yourself clean, boy. You stink,’ she’d said.

  He hadn’t known folk had rooms used for nothing but getting yourself clean in. He’d never sat in a bathtub of hot water. He’d used her pink soap that smelled like Miss Rose and he’d watched the water turn brown. She’d come in while he was sitting there and placed a bundle of clothing on a stool, then she’d washed his hair. No one had ever washed his hair. At home, his mother’s clippers had never left him any to wash.

  The night of his first bath he’d told old Phoebe his name and she’d stopped calling him Boy. She’d had a different way of saying Raymond: Ramón, she’d said. After a time he’d got to feel like he was playing Prince Charming in one of Miss Rose’s concerts. Old Phoebe had dressed him in fancy costumes, bought him soft shoes that fitted his feet like a second skin. He’d got to like playing Prince Charming, winding up her gramophone in the dead of night and dancing with her in her parlour.

  He must have been sixteen when she sent for a tailor. He’d made Ray a three-piece suit. When she was happy with it, she’d clad herself in scarlet satin and scented furs, and, like the nobs, they’d travelled in a taxi cab to a dance hall.

  Travelled to many more in the years thereafter. Rode in taxis to theatres, to balls, old Phoebe clinging to Prince Ramón’s arm.

  He’d been old enough for the army when war broke out. Couldn’t get a word out the day the army doctor checked his heart and lungs. Maybe the forms the doctor filled in said stuttering, brainless oaf. The army hadn’t wanted him.

  Factories weren’t so particular. He’d worked at a few through the war years, working six days a week and raked up the old girl’s leaves, lopped intruding branches on Sundays. They’d fed him, clothed him.

  He’d squired old Phoebe to theatres and dance halls through most of the war years, then one day she’d stopped dancing. She hadn’t stopped thumbing her nose at her neighbours; thumbed it every time she’d dragged herself out to the letterbox; hadn’t stopped hosing the neighbours’ kids when they’d thumbed their noses back.

  She’d sent for her solicitor a few months before she died. They’d all come when old Phoebe called: butcher, baker, hairdresser, doctor, tailor. She’d been someone once. Miss Fisher, they’d called her. The parson came one day, with the solicitor and his clerk. They witnessed the marriage of Phoebe May Fisher and Raymond Henry King, then the parson witnessed the signing of Phoebe’s last will and testament.

  In Miss Rose’s fairytales, witches were all wicked. They died badly. The old girl had died by the inch. He’d looked after her. He’d looked after her for so long he’d started wishing she’d ask him to bring her a razor. She’d never done that to him.

  He’d wound that gramophone and cared for the old girl to the end, believing he and her antique housekeeper were the only souls on earth she had to care for her. Not until she died did he find out just how many had cared. They’d come out of the woodwork at her funeral: her brother and his wife, her niece, cousins, a lover or two, a couple of discarded husbands.

  A smart old dame, she left her money to her housekeeper, her jewellery to her antique hairdresser, with her furs. Most of her furniture went to the Salvation Army. She left the house to her brother. Left Ray her bedroom suite, her small dining-room suite, her refrigerator — and free tenancy of that house for his lifetime. Twenty-six at the time, he might expect to live rent-free for another forty or fifty years.

  Her brother wasn’t happy about that. Phoebe hadn’t expected him to be happy. Smart as a whip, that crazy old girl, she’d invested a thousand pounds with her solicitor in Ray’s name. He’d get it on his thirtieth birthday, if it hadn’t been swallowed up in court costs.

  She hadn’t been cold in her grave when her brother’s solicitor sent the first letter. Sending a solicitor’s letter to Ray was as much use as handing a small-toothed comb to a bald man; he could just about work out the headlines in a newspaper. He’d found Phoebe May Fisher-King in the funeral column, and filled in a few nights working out passed away at home after a long illness. He didn’t waste five minutes on a letter couched in language designed to confuse a university professor. Pitched it out with the rubbish. Pitched the next one too.

  Phoebe’s brother knocked on the front door on a Saturday morning six or eight weeks after the funeral. Ray didn’t invite him inside. The brother told Ray, and most of the neighbours, that the will of his crazy bitch of a sister wouldn’t stand up in court. Ray locked his front door, went out through the back door and caught a tram into the city where he spent a portion of his hoarded wages on a motorbike. The following week, he spent a bit more on a leather helmet, goggles, leather jacket and riding boots.

  Someone turned off the electricity, but he wasn’t home often enough for lack of light to bother him. That bike introduced him to another world. Girls liked it. Turning off the gas was of no great concern either. Pubs served up what he ordered, and with a glass of beer.

  They came to his door in force three weeks after the gas was turned off, Phoebe’s brother and his solicitor. They suggested that given the drastic housing situation, empty rooms were sacrilege. They suggested that the house, if split into flats, could house three families. They suggested too that unless he agreed to their terms, the electricity and gas would remain disconnected until after the court case. Then they suggested that for a nominal fee to cover electricity, gas and rates, Ray might retain his bedroom in the eastern section of the house.

  Ray told them he liked living alone, thanks, though not always sleeping alone.

  They came again, the brother, the solicitor and Geoff Parker, and told him there was nothing in the will stating that anyone other than he had free tenancy, and if he brought a woman into the bloody house again he’d be tossed out on his ear.

  Then his sister died. No one told him. No one knew where he was to tell him. He’d taken to reading the funeral columns in the rear pages of the Sun. They were repetitive; work out one and you could work out a lot of the next one. He learned that Molly Martin had died after a long illness
, at her home, in Woody Creek.

  Molly was his sister. He could probably thank her for his survival, or curse her for it. He didn’t know why he’d got onto his bike that morning, but once he’d been on it, he’d kept on riding.

  Being back in that town, seeing Big Henry’s shack, had made him sweat. He’d gone to the draper’s to buy a clean shirt for the funeral and chanced upon pretty little Jenny Morrison, the singing petunia from that last night of Miss Rose’s concert fairytales. Couldn’t believe she remembered him. Fifteen years since he’d walked away from that town. She couldn’t have been much more than six or seven years old at the time.

  ‘Ray King,’ she’d said. ‘I went to school with you.’

  She’d gone with him to Molly’s funeral, maybe only to ride on his bike, but he’d seen how his brother looked at her, how his cousins looked at her. He’d never owned anything that every other bastard in the world had wanted. He’d decided that day to have Jenny; and when next Phoebe’s brother, solicitor and son-in-law turned up, Ray told them he’d think about giving up the west side of the house, the hottest side of the house, that he’d pay half of the bills, as long as he could have a wife living there with him, as long as they fixed up a bit of a kitchen for her on the east side.

  They’d turned up the following evening with papers for him to sign. It had taken four months for old Phoebe to die and she hadn’t done it silently. Ray told the brother’s solicitor to give his papers to Phoebe’s solicitor, that he’d sign them where and when Phoebe’s solicitor told him to sign.

  They’d worked it out between them while Ray continued his pursuit of Jenny. And he’d got her.

  And now he’d gone and done something stupid and lost her.

  He’d done a few stupid things. Maybe he had hit his mother like she’d said he had. He knew he’d hit Jenny. Had seen it written in those kids’ eyes. He’d seen her face.

  Hated himself for what he’d done to her face. He loved her beauty. If someone had asked him to describe his wife, if he’d had the words, he might have said, She’s a petunia, fighting for space to grow in a bed of onions. He didn’t have the words.

  A MILLION EGGS

  Gertrude didn’t hear them coming. Her goats did. Six or eight of them stood at the fence, big and small. The chooks cackled their welcome, the rooster high-stepped towards them, wings spread wide to scare off rivals. The kids remembered mad roosters and dodged behind Jenny as she opened the chicken-wire gate.

  ‘Granny?’

  The door was shut. Jenny opened it.

  ‘Granny? Are you in there?’

  She must have gone to Maisy’s to wait for Harry’s call.

  One foot inside and Jenny knew. Smell of sickness in a cold kitchen. No stove burning. No kettle singing.

  And from the bedroom, a death-rattle cough, and a voice that didn’t sound like Granny’s. ‘I told you kids to stay out of here.’

  Jenny’s kids stayed outside. She didn’t. Nor did Ray. At the station she hadn’t spoken to him. She spoke to him when he came to stand at the curtained doorway.

  ‘We have to get the ambulance.’

  And Granny, choking for air, trying to rise up and fight for her right to die alone, vomited on her bed, and not for the first time.

  Gertrude Foote had cared for the sick for fifty years. She wasn’t going to be seen by ambulance men lying in her own vomit.

  ‘I’ll get you clean, Granny.’

  Hated the howl in her voice. Howling would do no good.

  The bed she’d expected her kids to sleep in tonight was down the northern end of Gertrude’s room, piled high with cartons of God only knew what. Jenny pitched them to the floor, pitched a pile of newspapers, a box of empty jars, not seeing what she was pitching or where she was pitching it, just working her way down to the bedcover. When she stripped it back, there were no sheets on it. Sheets behind the middle door of Granny’s wardrobe. She snatched two, found pillow slips, and felt him behind her.

  ‘I have to get her clean.’

  Hated howling in front of him, hated herself for speaking to him. Would have spoken to old Wadi had he been here; would have spoken to Lorna Hooper — or to the Devil.

  ‘I’ll f-f-fix it,’ he said, taking the sheets from her hands.

  She filled the washbasin at the tap, found soap, a piece of towelling and old towels, and, when he left the room, she rolled the soiled blanket back and saw an old woman in a fouled bed.

  Ripped the nightgown from buttoned bodice to hem, got it off the only way she could. No fight left in Gertrude. She lay like the burning dead, offering no resistance while Jenny soaped her with her hands, washed her as she might wash a baby, with water cold from the tank. Gertrude’s heat would turn it to steam. Hated seeing the age of her, cried for her age, welcomed her tears for their blurring of the evidence of age.

  Had to leave her to fetch clean water. He was in the kitchen. He took the basin from her hands.

  ‘More,’ she said.

  He brought more.

  She washed the end of Gertrude’s plait, then released it and washed her hair. Perhaps soothed by the touch of cool hands, Gertrude went away, her only protest from lungs bubbling like a pot of porridge, groaning like a wind storm.

  Clean gowns in the bottom drawer, where they’d ever been. Getting that gown on was like dressing the dead, but she fought old arms into the sleeves, pulled the gown down to cover her.

  ‘Ray. Can you help me?’

  He came, carried Gertrude to the clean bed, supported her while Jenny propped her high on pillows and spoke again of the ambulance.

  ‘L-l-let her g-go in her own b-bed, J-Jenny.’

  ‘She’s dying.’

  He didn’t deny it. She looked at him, wanting him to deny it; looked at Gertrude, resting on clean pillows, and knew that the last thing in the world she’d want would be to die old and helpless in a hospital bed. How many times had she said she’d die with her boots on, after a good meal?

  Howling hard, Jenny turned away. He reached out a hand to her, but she walked to the other bed, blindly bundled the soiled bedding, nightgown, the towels she’d used. Halfway to the shed and she changed her mind and carried her bundle down to the rubbish heap, pitched it. He came with Gertrude’s mattress; nothing else to be done with that bedding.

  The three kids behind him, wanted to know what they were doing.

  ‘What’s wrong with Granny?’

  ‘She’s sick,’ Jenny said. ‘And stay away from me. I’m covered in her germs.’

  Watched the mattress tossed to the pile, not knowing what to do, what Granny would want her to do. Birds warbling, chooks clucking, bees buzzing, Gertrude’s land speaking to her.

  She turned towards the orchard. ‘Lemons. Run down and find me a couple of lemons, Georgie.’

  Granny had sworn by her flu brew: the humble aspro, brandy, honey and lemon juice. They’d been her medicines the last time there had been flu on her land. All three kids ran. Ray reached for a cigarette.

  ‘Wash your hands,’ she said. ‘That mattress will be covered in germs.’

  Like one of her kids, he jumped to do her bidding, and sadness, pity for him, near overwhelming her, she followed him to the tank, couldn’t hold his big brown lost lamb eyes when he passed her the soap. He was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and she was married to both of them. And she couldn’t think about that now.

  ‘You might light the stove for me, please, Ray.’

  Wiped her hands on her hips and walked across to the shed. The worn-out mop was where she’d left it — Granny had never liked mops. A floor wasn’t clean unless you got down on your knees and scrubbed it clean. Jenny liked mops and boiling water. A cold-water wash today, but plenty of phenol on the shelf beside the old wooden wash trough. It got Gertrude’s room smelling clean. Later, the old brown curtain ripped down and pitched to the rubbish pile, the lean-to shutters open, kitchen window open, stove burning, Jenny reached for the packet of aspros on the top shelf of the dresser, for the brandy, always
kept up there, safe from the hands of kids. Honey in the Coolgardie, safe from ant attack, and that safe not cool like it should be. It required water. She filled a bucket at the tank and poured it into the metal-lined reservoir on top of the safe.

  This place needed people, that’s all. Everything was here, just needing hands to make it function. You could put your hands on anything in Granny’s house if you knew where to put them. Jenny knew. She found the lemon squeezer, the sharp knife to cut the lemons.

  ‘What’s the time, Jenny?’ Georgie said.

  ‘After twelve.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece told a different time. It didn’t wind down in a day. Fix it later.

  Two aspros crushed to powder, mixed with a dash of brandy, a good spoonful of honey, the juice of a lemon, a spurt of water from the kettle, already warm, and she entered the phenol-scented bedroom to feed the brew into Gertrude, a teaspoonful at a time. A new-born will reflex-swallow. Gertrude swallowed.

  The stink of burning feathers infiltrated the room before she was done. Ray had lit the stove; now he was attempting to burn Gertrude’s feather mattress — or send smoke signals to the cavalry. Hoped they’d come to the rescue.

  It brought the Hall kids running through Joe Flanagan’s wood paddock, thinking their house was on fire.

  ‘How long has Granny been sick?’

  ‘She got it when Brian got it, and told us to stay away from her — that Dad didn’t need to be worrying about us as well as Mum,’ Joany said. Just a kid of twelve or thirteen. ‘I came over this morning and she yelled at me to get out.’

  Lenny was fifteen; Ronnie, the youngest, the tallest of the three was the scrawniest — another elongated Harry in the making. He had Harry’s rusty hair, his blue eyes. None of them looked like Joey, were like Joey. He wouldn’t have left Granny to die in her own vomit.

  ‘How’s Mum?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘The doctors will be operating now. Your father said he’d phone Maisy tonight.’