Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  ‘She’s not Amber.’

  Never, never Amber.

  Recovery started with the blood plum tree. It looked like a snow of blossom in the spring of ’48. Then the peach trees joined the display, and the apricot. The climbing rose, not to be outdone, unfurled its insignificant buds and Gertrude’s west wall and half of her roof bloomed pink. A bunch of roses ventured in through the bedroom’s window hatch and Gertrude didn’t have the heart to cut them off or lock them out — or not until the petals fell.

  Jenny slept in the spare bed in Gertrude’s room. She liked that hatch closed, liked the dark. Bright as day when the moon rode high.

  Ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas . . .

  Given time, the petals fell. Jenny closed the hatch and brought the dark back, but bruised petals stuck to bare feet. She opened the hatch to see where they’d fallen.

  Someone had to sweep them up. She came to the hearth for the small shovel and brush, and those green eyes that darkened to black by lamplight watched her, followed her, and when she returned the shovel and brush.

  ‘Princess Elizabeth has got a baby boy, Jenny.’

  Baby boys and baby girls. Babies, babies, babies. That’s what life was, babies and war and more babies for more wars.

  Nature fought its own wars on Gertrude’s land that spring. The wisteria — a mass of perfumed lilac beauty for a month, and for the rest of the year a rampant weed — was doing its best to rip the boards from Gertrude’s shed. Harry took to its main trunk with the wood axe and cut it down, cut it below the earth, buried it. Within a week it sent up a hundred suckers to continue the war.

  Each year the forest sent in its young to reclaim the lost territory of Gertrude’s land. A clump of saplings had taken hold near the main gate; a veritable forest of saplings had claimed the eastern end of her rear boundary. The pumpkins, demanding more than their allocated patch, fought the silverbeet for space to extend their empire — and won. It was everywhere: the winners and the losers. That’s what life was about. The winners and the losers.

  Pumpkins dictated time passing. Each day their fruit doubled in size, feeding well on goat and fowl manure. And the tomato plants — their tiny golden star flowers fell away to expose green berries, and too soon the weight of tomatoes threatened the branches they grew on.

  Old garden stakes from last year, from ten years before, still leaned where they always leaned, in the eastern corner of Gertrude’s shed.

  Gertrude and Georgie heard the hammer, and together they walked to the window to watch Jenny hammering stakes into the earth.

  ‘She’s very good at growing things. We grew heaps of tomatoes in Armadale, Granny. We made your chutney, and when he wouldn’t buy anything, we had chutney pancakes.’

  Gertrude hadn’t lived for near on eighty years and not learnt to read between the lines. She asked few pointed questions but a good listener learns enough.

  In December, Jenny saw the first blush of pink amid the rich green of Gertrude’s tomato patch. That’s how she knew the first year of no Jimmy had passed. That’s how she knew he’d turned seven. She hadn’t been there.

  That’s how she knew she hadn’t been here for little Georgie. Not so little now. Big teeth growing, filling up the gaps. Worried eyes, as green as Laurie’s, watchful eyes.

  Mine. No one else ever for little Georgie.

  ‘My beautiful girl.’

  Little Georgie running from her words, running down to the orchard. Jenny thought she’d left it too late, but Georgie returned to her side with a handful of apricots.

  ‘They’re nearly ripe, Jenny. I like them best when they’re just nearly ripe. You do too, don’t you?’

  Little shadow stuck to Jenny’s elbow that day, eyes full up with hope, that day. You have to feed hope. You have to. All there ever is is hope.

  The heat came too fast. It ripened the apricots early; big apricots, tasting as none other.

  ‘Armadale apricots looked like marbles, Granny. They didn’t even taste like your apricots but they made good jam.’

  Christmas only days away and the jam jars found, boiled clean, paraffin wax seals melted down. Elsie and her girls came over to sit five around the table, cutting fruit, pitching the stones into a bucket. Little Georgie sat with them, using that sharp knife like a woman — not so little Georgie, grown out of the faded orange and green dress she’d chosen from Coles.

  ‘Why do yours grow so big and in Armadale they didn’t, Granny?’

  ‘It’s all of my good manure,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘We used Ray’s livers to grow good rhubarb down there.’

  ‘Ray’s livers?’ Joany Hall asked.

  ‘He used to buy livers and we used to bury them near the rhubarb. Jenny used to say a poem over the grave. Remember, Jenny, about Mrs Cow’s liver?’

  Jimmy had bought a tin monkey the day Georgie bought that dress. Wind up its key and it played the drums. Someone had hidden it beneath the veranda and its cogs had rusted.

  Georgie and Gertrude had allowed Jenny to hide, but they’d wound her key daily. She found a sharp knife and joined them at the table, cutting apricots and tossing the stones into the bucket.

  SO MUCH FOR DREAMS

  Cars were big news in 1949. Few had been built during the war. Australia was now building her own: the Holden, ‘designed in Australia for Australian conditions’. A farmer from out on the Willama road was the first in town to buy one. He parked it out front of the post office one Friday where it spent most of the afternoon, bonnet up, men clustered around it, peering into its works.

  Two months later, the farmer’s seventeen-year-old boy decided to see if the car would go as fast as its speedo promised. Seventeen year-old boys are indestructible — though he’d turn eighteen before he was released from hospital.

  ‘The buggers roll too easily,’ the farmer said. ‘There’s some thing wrong with the design of those Holdens.’

  Vern Hooper’s car needed replacing. Lorna was hard on gear boxes and clutches. In May, he spent a few hours wandering around the Exhibition Building, his grandson holding onto his hand. Acres of cars with free-flowing lines and jewel-like paintwork, the newspaper advertisement had said. It hadn’t mentioned the acres of car enthusiasts. Vern’s legs weren’t up to negotiating their way through crowds. He stood a while, getting his breath, and admiring a black Daimler with a price tag big enough to choke an elephant.

  ‘Will we get that one, Grandpa?’

  So much taller than he’d been at six, the last of the baby gone from Jimmy’s face. His hair, always allowed to grow a little longer than fashion decreed by Jenny, was well trimmed now. It showed the shape of his head, showed his small neat ears, his skinny little-boy neck. He’d adapted. Life is what it is to a child.

  He wasn’t Jimmy any more. He’d been taken to the church and baptised with his proper name: James Morrison Hooper. Vern still called him Jimmy sometimes. Most times he called him lad. Lorna called him James. Margaret called him her darling boy.

  The Menzies government got into power in December of ’49. Few in Woody Creek voted for him. It was a labour town, full of labourers. They called Menzies ‘Pig Iron Bob’. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, though he pleased a lot of drivers when in February of 1950 he ended petrol rationing.

  Road traffic increased. Car accidents increased. Road deaths increased. The police blamed worn tyres, so the price of tyres increased.

  Georgie turned ten in March of 1950. Sissy turned thirty-one on the same day. In April, Margot had her eleventh birthday, and Norman’s money, invested so long ago, matured. A lot of dreams had been pinned to 19 April 1950. So much for dreams. Maisy took the cheque and Jenny’s unworn bankbook to Willama when she drove down to visit her daughters. She paid the money into Jenny’s bank account.

  In June, the rationing of butter was abolished. In July, coupons were no longer required for tea. The country was racing forward under Menzies. Work commenced on a bridge out near the Aboriginal mission,
a bridge promised back in the twenties. Men and machines were ripping up the old stock-route road. The work brought the first foreigners to town: blond-headed, blue-eyed blokes, ten or twelve of them, housed in hurriedly erected huts not far enough from Gertrude’s boundary gate.

  Vern missed Woody Creek, missed his roses, missed Gertrude. Melbourne wasn’t home and would never be home. Its winters played hell with his arthritis; his bed was as hard as the hobs of hell; the sounds outside his window weren’t the right sounds. He spent half of his nights listening to them and planning a train trip to Woody Creek. He put himself to sleep at times with his planning of that trip, but woke knowing he couldn’t go near Gertrude if he did make the effort to get on the train.

  His grandson was his comfort. He loved that boy, wanted ten more years of life in which to watch him grow — and doubted he had ten more months.

  His mind wandering his life, Vern Hooper wandered the Balwyn garden, killing colonies of aphids sucking the life from immature rosebuds. He’d planted two-dozen cuttings from his Woody Creek roses in the Balwyn garden. Half of them had taken.

  In Woody Creek, that hedge would be in full bloom. No one there to snip the best of them, to bring them indoors. A lonely house, its blinds drawn, no furniture on the verandas, no movement.

  Vern hadn’t married off any one of his three offspring. He’d educated the female out of Lorna — if she’d been born with any female in her. Margaret, all female, might have caught herself a man had she been able to break away from Lorna. Like a wolfhound and a yappy little chihuahua, those two; and let the chihuahua put one foot out of line and the wolfhound snapped. He’d done his best when Arthur Hogan had started hanging around Margaret, but Hogan hadn’t stuck. Blame Lorna for that. He’d packed her off to her Uncle Henry in England for six months when Ernie Dalton, a widower, had started showing an interest in Margaret, and Lorna had ended up bringing Henry and Leticia back to torment him for three bloody months. That got rid of Ernie Dalton.

  Jim? He’d never been able to work out. That boy had too much of his mother in him. A bookish bugger, he’d never had a girlfriend until he’d got himself engaged to Sissy Morrison — not Vern’s choice of daughter-in-law, but any port in a storm, he’d told himself at the time.

  ‘Bloody fool of a boy. He never should have been in the army.’ He squashed a mass of green aphids, and allowed his mind to return to the day he’d taken Jimmy out to meet his father, convinced that Jim would shake off whatever was shaking him up when he saw his son. They’d got a reaction out of him — not the expected reaction.

  Jim hadn’t noticed his boy was with them that day, or not for a minute or two. Jimmy had been hiding behind Margaret.

  ‘That’s your own dear daddy,’ Margaret had said. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your daddy?’

  If he closed his eyes, Vern could see that day now.

  There was no denying little Jimmy was the dead spit of that hot pants little bitch — and he’d looked like her that day, standing there, hands clasped behind his back, wide eyes watching everything, and silent, maybe awe-struck by the magic that had brought his father back from the dead — or halfway back.

  Then Jim must have sighted him. His eyes, fog shrouded since they’d brought him back to Australia, had changed. That fog had lifted — for a time it had lifted — then a rain storm set in.

  Vern never could stand to watch his son blubbering. Jim might have been three years old the first time Vern had told him to be a man. He said it that day and today he wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Be a man,’ he’d said. ‘Shake your son’s hand.’

  Jim’s hand had remained where it was, pleating the knee of his trouser leg, tears rolling, his eyes never leaving the face of that boy, seeing her in him, and Vern knowing what he was seeing, and knowing too that they’d made a mistake in taking Jimmy out to that place.

  ‘Why is he crying, Aunty Maggie?’

  ‘Because he’s so pleased to see you, darling. Go over to him and kiss him better.’

  Vern had never encouraged kissing between males, had never been guilty of doing it. ‘Shake his hand, lad,’ he’d said.

  Someone had trained that boy well. His hands had come out from behind his back and he’s stepped forward, and when Jim wouldn’t take that little hand, Jimmy had picked up his father’s trouser-pleating hand. He’d shaken it, then given Jim a quick kiss on the jaw.

  Fairytale princesses are woken with a kiss. They’d stood stunned, he, Lorna and Margaret, watching Jim wake from the half-dead and grasp that boy to him, watching Jimmy take it for a while, but when he wasn’t released, looking at Margaret for guidance.

  She’d walked over and kissed her brother, smoothed down his hair.

  ‘Jen?’ he’d said.

  ‘Jenny and everyone got very sick —’ Jimmy started.

  ‘Take him out to the garden, Margaret,’ Lorna commanded. They made a point of not mentioning his mother’s name in Jimmy’s presence.

  Jim’s eyes had found Lorna then. They visited him every month, but by the look on his face, he’d been seeing her for the first time since he’d handed her his car keys back in ’42.

  She hadn’t been looking at him. Had she been, she might have left those papers in her handbag. Always had more interest in papers than people. She’d wanted her brother’s signature on her papers that day, and while Margaret, the weepiest woman Vern had ever had dealings with, led Jimmy from the room, Lorna removed the cap from her fountain pen.

  ‘Is Jen with you?’ Jim had asked.

  Back when he’d been in that first hospital, Vern had told him what that hot pants little bitch had been up to. He’d forgotten, or hadn’t heard. He’d told him again about Henry King’s stuttering fool of a motorbike-riding son, while Lorna flattened her papers then offered the pen.

  Jim had signed before without question. He questioned today, or swiped at the hand offering the pen.

  ‘They are to do with me adopting the boy and legitimising his birth,’ Vern had explained.

  ‘You,’ Jim said. Just that. It wasn’t what he said. It was the way he said it that cut Vern to the bone. ‘You!’

  ‘You can play a role in your boy’s life if you get up off your arse and get yourself out of this bloody place.’

  ‘No,’ Jim said. ‘No!’

  ‘His mother signed him over to me a while back —’

  ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘Taken your son out of the purgatory you allowed him to be born into,’ Lorna snapped.

  And he’d got up on his feet, or on to his one foot and his peg. He’d gotten out of that chair unassisted. Damn near fell on his face while he was getting his crutch, but he got it under his arm, then stood leaning, breathing too fast, wanting to follow Margaret and his boy outside. Maybe the distance looked too great — until Lorna opened her mouth.

  ‘I need them signed today, boy.’

  He’d moved then, unassisted. They’d watched him to the door, where he’d lost his balance and come crashing down.

  Vern barely had strength enough to get himself on his feet. Lorna never touched anyone if she could walk around them. A chap on the staff got him up, and suggested they leave.

  ‘We require a minimum of sanity out of him today,’ Lorna said. ‘Settle him down.’ She’d chosen the sanatorium for its compliant staff. She said crap and her trained rats squatted down to obey.

  Jim hadn’t been as compliant. He’d lifted his crutch and sighted down it like he was sighting down the barrel of a rifle.

  ‘If this was loaded, I’d shut you up,’ he’d said.

  She’d got no papers signed. She’d told Vern and Margaret not to take the boy in there until she’d got them signed. She was always right, though he hated to admit it, and hadn’t that day. He’d sent Margaret back in with them. She wanted that boy safe as much as he. She was back in minutes, bawling her eyes out, and still no signatures.

  They had the mother’s. They’d be able to get something from Jim’s doctors,
stating he was unfit to make decisions on his son’s life.

  Lorna drove home. Margaret dripping, Jimmy asking why, Vern sitting, uncertain of how he ought to be feeling. He’d seen life where there had been no life in two years — and for a minute there, had seen the light of battle in Jim’s eyes. He’d felt hope, hope that the electric currents they’d been shooting into his head might bring him back from wherever his brain had gone to. He’d known too, that if he ever came back, things mightn’t go the way Vern had been planning for them to go.

  Not a good night that one, then the next morning, at seven-thirty, they were awakened by a call from the hospital. Jim had tried to hang himself from the shower pipes in the bathroom.

  He’d had too much height to get his foot off the floor. No real damage was done, other than by the note he’d left for the staff to find. A suicide note, they’d called it.

  It stated that he wanted his son to be raised by his mother, and that the money in his trust fund was to be transferred to them. He’d had his signature witnessed by a couple of inmates — patients — whatever.

  It was a well-put-together letter, which more or less proved he still had a brain in his head — if a man with a brain would attempt to hang himself. Vern hadn’t known what to think about that letter.

  It was Lorna who had seen the value of a signed, witnessed document, in which Jim had made no mention of hanging himself. It was Lorna who suggested that the addition of a date, prior to the date on the papers signed by the Morrison tramp, may be accepted by the courts, as proof that Jim had given up all claims on his son to the Morrison tramp, months before she had signed him over to Vern.

  Lorna had added in a date. She was good with a pen and ink.

  They hadn’t taken Jimmy back for a second visit. He believed his mother and sisters were dead and far better he continue to believe it.

  Vern and Lorna hadn’t been back. Margaret went out there once a month with Ian Hooper, her cousin. On two occasions, she’d come home jubilant. Jim had walked around the gardens with them. On more occasions, she’d come home weeping because they couldn’t move him from his chair.