Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  Always ‘that girl’ to Gran. Had she ever said her name? Myrtle rarely said her name; she called her ‘pet’. Robert called her ‘pop pet’. Sarah called her Caro, as did a few of the girls at school. Most of her teachers called her Cara. The headmistress had called her Miss Norris today and told her that such bad behaviour in a young lady was not acceptable.

  Cara sighed and turned to look at the house her parents wanted to sell. She loved Amberley. She’d learnt her numbers from the boarding-house doors, had learnt to read Myrtle’s many signs before she’d started school. Since she was six years old she’d been running upstairs to deliver phone messages written on Myrtle’s special message paper — and reading them before doing her deliveries.

  ‘What would I do without you to save my legs?’ Myrtle used to say.

  ‘You’d have to pin notes on Bowser’s collar.’

  Poor old Bowser had lost most of his fluff. He no longer barked and wagged his tail, but still spent his nights guarding her bed. Robert still brought him to life on days when the sun was shining in through the parlour window at just the right angle and painting its coloured patterns on the wall. He made the best shadow puppets, and Cara’s favourite was Bowser. When she looked at her father’s hands, of course they looked like hands, fingers raised or bent, but when she looked at the wall, she saw Bowser chasing dragons through a green, blue, pink and gold jungle.

  The boarding house had been full up with people when she was small, the lodgers’ kitchen like a cage full of hens, all clucking and cackling for their dinner. They had six lodgers now, all upstairs: Miss Robertson, Mrs Collins, the two Miss Keatings, Miss Jones and Mrs Gladstone, all too old to cluck and cackle in the lodgers’ kitchen. They were the reason Cara couldn’t have a real dog. Pups were boisterous, Robert said, and with so many old ladies coming in and out of the gate, one would surely let him out onto the busy road.

  Sarah North, from over the road, had been given a puppy one Christmas. It got out the gate and was run over. Her mother had got her another one, which they kept prisoner on a chain. He’d grown into a crazy dog. Cara wouldn’t go anywhere near Sarah’s backyard — not that she’d ever be likely to go anywhere near Sarah North ever again, not after today.

  She turned to her father, wanting to ask him something. He was searching the sky with his binoculars. She watched him for minutes, uncertain of how to start, or even if she should start.

  Until today, she and Sarah had been best friends; until lunchtime, when Sarah had whispered something to Elaine. You always know when people are whispering about you. Cara had known, even before Elaine told Lena and Lena told Cara at afternoon recess.

  She’d gone up to Sarah as they were going back into class. ‘If you want to tell lies about me, then say them to my face instead of whispering behind my back,’ she’d said.

  Sarah said it to her face, right in her face, so Cara pushed her — not hard, but Sarah wasn’t expecting it and she’d tripped on the step and skinned her elbow against the brick wall, really skinned it, which was why Cara had to go to the headmistress, which was worse than embarrassing because Robert taught English to the senior kids at the same school.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Daddy?’

  ‘That sounds ominous, poppet.’

  ‘It’s just about why I pushed Sarah.’

  ‘I thought she was your best friend.’

  ‘Well, she’s not any more. She told Elaine that you weren’t my proper father.’

  Stars in the night sky blurring. Silence in the street, or in Robert’s ears. For years Myrtle had feared this night. The silence continued too long. He had to find the right words and find them fast.

  ‘Don’t tell me they got you and Sarah mixed up at the hospital? I always thought she looked a bit like me.’

  ‘It’s not something to joke about. Why would she say that?’

  ‘Because she’s a silly goose and she was angry about something else. Tomorrow she’ll be whispering to you about Elaine. Here, you have a look for a while. My eyes are too old.’

  He passed the binoculars to her. She took them, but didn’t look at the sky.

  ‘Why are you and Mummy so old?’

  ‘Old? Us? We’re still spring chickens.’

  ‘You’re nearly sixty. Sarah North’s father is thirty-six.’

  She’d asked that question before. He’d never answered it, and didn’t answer tonight. She placed the binoculars to her eyes and looked up.

  ‘The stars keep wriggling,’ she said, and the binoculars were on her lap. ‘Sarah said she heard Mrs Rowe talking to her mother about how you were away at the war when I was born, so you couldn’t be my proper father. And she said that Mummy must have had a boyfriend, and that he must have been one of the lodgers or the minister or something because she never went anywhere except to church.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re the milkman’s daughter?’

  ‘You always do that.’

  ‘What do I always do?’

  ‘Make a joke of everything. You always do it. Are you my proper father?’

  ‘There has never been a more proper father than I. I’m very, very proper. I’m probably the properest father I know.’

  ‘There is no such word as “properest”. Were you away at the war when I was born?’

  ‘You know I was. You were ten months old when I first saw you, and you were the most beautiful baby ever born. You’re just looking for compliments.’

  ‘I mean, how long were you away before I was born? I know how long a baby takes . . .’

  ‘Are you that old? I don’t even know that. How long do they take?’

  ‘Stop being silly. I’m not laughing at you.’

  Robert took the binoculars and again placed them to his eyes. ‘If we went through life trying to work out what silly people meant when they whispered about us, then we’d be as silly as they, wouldn’t we? You are my very own, my one and only, beautiful daughter. Mummy and I are older than most of the other parents because by the time you were born we’d given up hope of having our own baby, then God blessed us by sending his most beautiful star down from heaven and it landed right in Mummy’s arms.’

  ‘Time has a way of concealing details, of blurring memories,’ he’d said to Myrtle six weeks ago when she’d spoken again of selling Amberley. Time blurred, but didn’t erase.

  Through the years they’d had a few moments of fear. In ’47 they’d come close to selling and moving to New Zealand when a chap knocked twice on their door asking about a Jennifer Morrison. Had Robert’s mother been a well woman, they may have made the move, but the chap hadn’t returned and they’d forgotten about selling.

  Until Myrtle had given in and allowed Cara to have her hair cut short, like Sarah. Curls released from their weight had become a crinkled cap. Several times they’d caught Miss Robertson staring at the cap of gold. She’d made no comment.

  Myrtle had. ‘She’s the image of Jenny with her hair like that.’

  ‘It will grow,’ he’d said. ‘Miss Robertson is retiring at the end of the year and going home to England.’

  Miss Robertson had retired and gone to England for ten weeks. Not finding the land she’d left thirty years ago, she’d returned to their door. Amberley had been her home. What could they do but take her in?

  Done with stargazing, Cara safe in the bathroom, Robert relayed the earlier conversation to Myrtle.

  ‘If Mrs Rowe has been gossiping to Sarah’s mother, she’s been gossiping to others,’ he said.

  ‘New Zealand, Robert. We’ll stay with my brother until we find a house.’

  ‘I don’t want to place an ocean between me and Mum. Melbourne perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘It’s too close.’

  Not so close. A good five hundred miles south. And on a school oval five hundred miles south, a mob of raucous schoolboys and one of their young masters were doing more skylarking than stargazing.

  One of those boys stood head and shoulders above his schoolmaster and most of his mates
— not as tall as Jim and Vern, but tall enough to be nicknamed Lofty. His mother called him ‘darling’. Aunt Lorna called him James. No one called him Jimmy — not that it worried him much what anyone called him. Viewing life from his lofty perspective allowed him to distance himself from much of it.

  He went home some weekends. His mother and Aunt Lorna were civil. Mrs Muir was like a gentle old granny in the kitchen. He didn’t see a lot of Bernard who spent his life in a tin shed he named the studio. Pops, he called him; could never force his tongue to call him Dad. Jimmy had a real father, who, as a kid he’d believed to be dead — until they’d visited him at a hospital one Christmas. The war had damaged him, they said. There’d been more to what was wrong with his father than war damage. He wasn’t in the hospital now. No one knew where he was — and they didn’t look for him either.

  Jimmy could remember Australia being at war, and when it ended. He could remember the words of war: Enemy lines, counterattacks. As a little kid, he’d thought it was some sort of team game, with two captains who drew lines, put up long counters, then across those long counters the goodies fought the baddies with bayonets.

  In the movies, the goodies and the baddies remained a constant. In real life, there was no constant. In real life, alliances altered every day. Until Bernard came along, Lorna and Margaret had fought on the same side. After Bernard, Lorna had become public enemy number one. As had the Russians, who had been allies during the war, lost millions of their people to the war. They were the bad guys now, the reds, the communists, while the Germans, responsible for the war, were immigrating to Australia. The Japs, such bad guys America had dropped two atomic bombs on them, were no longer considered the bad guys — or not by some.

  Yanks were the perennial good guys, big on God, freedom and equality, though still lynching a few Negroes in the southern states — and pouring millions of dollars into perfecting better bombs to drop on the Russians, which would probably mean the end of the world, because Russia also had the bomb, and if America dropped one on them, they’d drop one on America. Like kids in the schoolyard: you hit me and I’ll get you back double.

  And what was so bad about communism? He’d asked his mother once and all she’d said was that they were godless people.

  Until Jenny and everyone had died, he’d probably been a communist. He’d never been inside a church, never been baptised. His grandfather might have been a communist. He hadn’t gone to church, though towards the end of his life he’d liked to sit and look at the family names written in the big Bible — Hooper family names, not Morrison. Some days his grandfather would allow the book to fall open, then run his finger down a page looking for a message from God. Once, long ago, Jimmy had asked him where God lived. He’d pointed up to a cloudy sky.

  No clouds up there tonight. Jimmy smiled, imagining a Russian rocket ship ramming into heaven, imagining the newspaper headlines: GOD ASSASSINATED BY THE REDS.

  He’d pretty much given up believing God was up there since his grandfather had died. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine a pair of feathered wings big enough to hold up his grandfather’s weight.

  He’d pretty much given up believing that smoking would stunt his growth too. He’d smoked all he could get during his fourteenth and fifteenth years. It had been too late by then to stunt him but he’d hoped it might halt his growth. It hadn’t.

  He’d lost faith in the government. Only last week one of the teachers read an article to the class about radioactive fallout from atomic bombs, and the danger it presented to mankind, yet Menzies was still allowing Britain to tests bombs in Australia.

  All traces of radioactivity are expected to pass from Australian territory a day or two after the tests, the newspapers said. What territory was it going to pass into after it passed out of Australia? Did anyone think about that? It had to go somewhere; or did it just float off into space and poison the Martians?

  He looked up, searching the sky for falling Martians. And he saw Sputnik! It had to be Sputnik. Just a tiny star moving across the sky too slowly to be the light from a plane.

  ‘There it is, sir,’ he said, his finger pointing.

  ‘Trust Lofty,’ Alan said. ‘He’s got an unfair advantage.’

  Schoolmates, schoolmasters, were the only constant in Jimmy’s life; they’d remain a constant for another year — then what? So many people he’d already known and lost; so many houses he’d lived in. He could remember each one: Myrtie’s in Sydney, Granny’s little dark house, Balwyn, Cheltenham. For a time, change had been the one true constant in his life.

  They’d stopped moving since he’d been away at school. Some sort of truce had been signed. Lorna had become a constant at her desk in the sitting room, telephone at her elbow, snarling instructions to solicitor and accountant. No more lunches with the accountant for Margaret and Bernard; they took long holidays instead, little Mrs Muir left at home to feed and water Lorna.

  ‘Georgie thhould be home,’ Margot said.

  ‘It’s not nine yet.’

  ‘The’th alwayth going out thomewhere.’

  ‘She said you could go with her.’

  ‘Ath if,’ Margot said.

  ‘Walk in with me to meet her. We might see Sputnik once we’re out of the trees.’

  ‘How can you thee one tiny little thtar in that thky?’

  ‘It’s like a rust-riddled tin dish placed over the world tonight, the sun peeking through a million holes,’ Jenny said. ‘Fancy the Russians beating the Americans up there.’

  ‘Who careth.’

  Margot had more important things on her mind than Sputnik. She’d heard something today that she was busting to tell Georgie, who should have been home by now. Georgie was always going out somewhere. She played table tennis at the town hall. She went square dancing there. Getting too big for her boots, that’s what she was doing.

  Last Sunday, she’d told Margot to stop calling Ray ‘Daddy Ray’. ‘For God’s sake, Margot, you sound like mad Blanche with your Daddy Ray.’ They’d seen that Marlon Brando movie together. She hadn’t told Raelene not to call him Daddy Ray, had she?

  ‘Are you coming for a walk?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Ath if, I thaid.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Jenny said and she walked alone up the track.

  Georgie had started that ‘suit yourself’. Now everyone said it, even Raelene. More like they suited themselves.

  Like today. Maudy was getting married to a Molliston bloke, and Maisy had driven her and Elsie down to Willama to buy material for her wedding dress, and talked Granny into going with them to get herself something pretty to wear to the wedding. Margot had wanted to go too. She loved going to Willama. But she couldn’t go because someone had to stay home with Donny while Jenny rode in to get Raelene from school.

  Granny couldn’t even look after him. How was Margot expected to?

  ‘Just watch him,’ Jenny had said. ‘I’ll only be fifteen minutes.’

  ‘What am I thupposed to do if he taketh a fit? Anyway, what’th to thtop Raelene walking home? I had to.’

  ‘You didn’t have to until you were ten years old. You either keep your eye on Donny or you help me get him into his chair and push him into town,’ Jenny had said.

  Margot chose the second option.

  They were at Blunt’s, Donny’s chair parked out front while they picked out a zipper for Georgie’s bridesmaid’s dress — no one had asked Margot to be a bridesmaid — when a woman came into the shop and screamed, ‘If that isn’t Jenny Hooper, then I’ll go hopping to hell!’

  ‘Lila Jones?’ Jenny said. ‘What are you doing up here?’

  ‘Lila Roberts, I’ll have you know. My new hubby lives up here.’

  She’d married Billy Roberts, a truckie.

  ‘We worked together in Sydney during the war,’ Jenny explained to Miss Blunt. Then she introduced Margot.

  ‘I remember you as a bulge in your mother’s belly,’ Lila said.

  ‘Margot is eighteen,’ Jenny said, and blushed
. Miss Blunt might not have seen the blush but Margot did. ‘Jimmy was the baby I had with me in Sydney. He’s living with his father now,’ Jenny said too fast, then chose her zip fast, paid for it and got out of that shop. Lila followed her out.

  ‘He’s yours too? What’s wrong with him?’ Lila said when she saw Donny.

  ‘He’s my husband’s. He’s got a little girl too, I have to pick her up from school.’

  ‘I thought he got killed in the war — your boy’s, Jimmy’s, father?’

  ‘He was in a prison camp. I married Ray before Jim came home.’

  ‘My parents should have been shot for letting me marry my first.’ She’d walked with them to the school, filling in the years since the war. ‘Norma died, two years after the war. She got cancer. Barbara is married with two kids. So what happened to you?’

  ‘I was in Melbourne for a while after I remarried.’

  ‘I mean — you know.’ And she winked. ‘Sydney. After you left the factory.’

  ‘I came home.’

  Raelene was waiting at the gate and not happy about walking home.

  ‘I had to walk in and out becauth of you,’ Margot said.

  ‘You’re big. I’m little,’ Raelene said.

  Lila pushed Donny’s chair for a block or two; Jenny took over the handles at the forest road fork.

  ‘How far out are you?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Another mile or so.’

  ‘No wonder you’re skinny, pushing his weight around. I’ll drive down and see you tomorrow,’ Lila said.

  ‘I live with my grandmother, Lila. She’s elderly. I’ve got my hands full with Donny. I’ll ride in early tomorrow and we’ll catch up.’

  Something had gone on in Sydney: Jenny’s blush, Lila’s ‘bulge in the belly’ reference. Margot wasn’t dumb. You can learn a lot from True Romance magazines, and she was Maisy’s granddaughter, a born gossip.

  No friends to share her gossip with, apart from Brian and Josie Hall. She gossiped about Georgie to Brian and Josie, about her high heels and lipstick, which she only wore so the boys would look at her. Girls like Georgie got themselves into trouble all the time in the magazine stories; not that the magazines told the interesting bits, the how. They had a girl walking down a dark lane and coming home pregnant.