Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Man’s magic,’ she said. ‘It’s like I know that little girl. What was her name again?’

  ‘Elizabeth Taylor,’ Jenny said. ‘You would have loved Scarlett in Gone With The Wind.’

  ‘I always thought it was a good title,’ Gertrude said. ‘Everything gets blown away with the wind; everyone I ever knew, the world I knew, got blown away. My mum and dad wouldn’t know what they’d struck if they came back to earth today. Human nature and the weather are the only things that don’t ever change. We had these same howling winds the week my dad died. I swore it was his land mourning for him.’

  Almost one o’clock. They should have been in bed, but so little of their time was spent together, just the two, so they sat on, listening to the wind, speaking of many things.

  ‘The older you get the less sleep you need,’ Gertrude said. ‘There was a time when I was ready for my bed when the sun went down.’ Then out of the blue, she added, ‘Don’t you go mourning for me when I go, will you?’

  ‘Talk like that and I’m going to bed.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re going to sit there and listen to me. All I want to hear in that church is your beautiful voice singing me off to my rest. You remember that.’

  ‘You still look sixty-five — on a foggy morning. You’ll outlive me, Granny.’

  ‘That would have sounded nicer if you’d left out the foggy morning bit, and I want your promise that you’ll sing that one you sang at your father’s funeral.’

  ‘What do you want with hymns? You’ve never been to church in your life — apart from funerals.’

  ‘Some of the old hymns are the best part of religion — and you can finish off with Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye. And no tears. You shed one tear over me and I’ll come back and haunt you.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘You’ll believe in me. I’ll walk my land all night and make terrible noises at the window hatch.’

  ‘I’ll blame it on the screeching owls — and I’m going to bed.’

  *

  In June of ’58, Georgie found a Duckworth in the newspaper’s death columns. ‘Charles Duckworth,’ she read aloud. ‘Loved father of Reginald, brother of . . .’

  ‘It’s your great-uncle Charles,’ Gertrude said, and with the aid of her magnifying glass she read the names of his siblings, most followed by deceased. Only three Duckworths still with the living: Millicent, Wilber and Olive.

  ‘Your sister’s name is there,’ she told Jenny. ‘Loved uncle of Cecelia.’

  ‘Sissy, who needed two chairs to sit on?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘My only blood granddaughter,’ Gertrude said. ‘It says here that he died at home.’

  ‘Sugar diabetes,’ Jenny said.

  ‘It doesn’t say that.’

  ‘If Sissy’s been housekeeping for him, he’s been living on toffee and jam sandwiches.’

  ‘You wicked girl. He was your uncle. You should send a card.’

  ‘He was Norman’s uncle, not mine, Granny.’

  ‘She still sends Maisy a Christmas card, you know,’ Gertrude said. ‘She’s never sent me one.’

  ‘That would be like sending one to the town slut,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’ve told you not to use that expression.’

  ‘She said it first.’

  ‘You were raised as sisters. You share the same memories if nothing else.’

  ‘She’s welcome to them. She’s nothing to me, and never was — or not since I turned eleven.’

  ‘If you look at it like that, then I’m not your grandmother.’

  ‘I hate to tell you, but you’ve left it a bit too late to wriggle out of that one.’

  ‘It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?’ Gertrude said. ‘How some families breed like rabbits and others die out. The only blood I’ll leave behind is Sissy — and Jimmy, in a roundabout way.’

  ‘How will it be in Jimmy if it’th not in me and Georgie?’ Margot asked.

  ‘Vern was my half-cousin, darlin’. I was born a Hooper.’

  Charles Duckworth had been born in the same year as Gertrude. Maybe his death was to blame, maybe National Velvet. In early July, Jenny caught Gertrude attempting to saddle her horse.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing? The old coot has forgotten what a saddle is.’

  ‘You’re not getting on his back, Granny.’

  ‘I look sixty-five on a foggy morning. It’s foggy. Now give me a hand and stop treating me like an old woman.’

  ‘He’s old and he’s fat and lazy. Leave him alone.’

  ‘He needs the exercise and so do I.’

  ‘And I’m exercising my right to stop you from killing yourself.’

  ‘Elsie still does as she’s told. I’ll call her over to help me.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘To choose some new wallpaper, if you must know.’

  ‘I’ll choose your wallpaper.’

  ‘I’m not letting you choose it again. I want something with colour in it not prison bars. Now are you going to help me or do I yell out for Elsie?’

  Gertrude hadn’t been on that horse’s back in two years, but she got up, and without too much effort, and old Nugget was too fat and tired to bother shaking her off. Jenny walked ahead of them to the boundary gate, opened it and left it open. She watched them up to the road, watched until they disappeared around the bend.

  They returned two hours later, Gertrude looking pleased with herself and old Nugget looking more alive than usual.

  Three days later, Harry picked up her wallpaper: brilliant blue cornflowers for the bedroom; a cream paper, embossed with self stripes and flowers, guaranteed by Robert Fulton to be washable, for the kitchen; and pale green paper with a large bamboo pattern for the lean-to, which turned that room into a jungle, but offered the delusion that the walls might hold up for a year or two more.

  Gertrude’s cornflower walls were concussive when the eyes opened to them each morning, but the kitchen looked lighter, cleaner, and led Gertrude’s eyes towards the ceilings. Hardly ceiling, just strips of lightweight timber and kalsomined newspaper, layer upon layer of newspaper, eighty years of sagging newspaper.

  ‘I should have got Harry and the boys to put up decent ceilings in here while they were lining the new rooms,’ Gertrude said. ‘I might get them onto it.’

  ‘There’s eighty years of dust underneath that paper. We’d have to move everything outside.’

  ‘Not eighty. I helped my dad put it up when Amber was two months old.’

  ‘Sixty then.’

  ‘She can’t be sixty.’

  ‘She’s over sixty. I’m thirty-four. She was twenty-eight when I was born.’

  ‘How did you get to be thirty-four? It seems like yesterday.’

  Ray bought a tin of white paint. Jenny and Georgie painted the kitchen ceiling. It showed up the sags, but it looked clean.

  It was the following day, the empty paint tin still outside the door, beside the wood trunk. Jenny didn’t know the date. She was sitting on the trunk, stealing a smoke, one eye watching Gertrude, who only last night had totalled up the amount of money Jenny and Ray wasted on cigarettes each year. It was well after four o’clock. She’d been into town to pick up Raelene. It was a Wednesday, a dull day, more rain on the way, Gertrude’s maroon cardigan the only patch of colour in a wintry landscape.

  She’d never altered her way of dressing, never wore a coat. Always and forever, she’d milked her goats in that corner with no more than a woollen cardigan to keep out the cold. The day Jenny learned where milk came from, Gertrude had been sitting in the corner of the goat paddock on a packing-case stool, the same or an identical bucket between her knees.

  A splash of white where there ought not to have been a splash of white that Wednesday. She’d spilt the milk.

  Then she fell, slowly, easily, to the side, one arm raised, a wave to those she was leaving, or to those she was greeting.
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  Running. Pitching the burning cigarette. Screaming for Elsie, and Elsie running from her back door. And nothing they could do when they got there. Nothing bar sit in the cold dirt of that goat paddock, cradling Gertrude between them and screaming, screaming for someone, screaming for anyone.

  Only Elsie to cling to when they carried Gertrude from her land. Just clinging and bawling, clinging until Harry came, when Elsie turned to cling to him, to bawl on him. Only Georgie then for Jenny. Margot bawling for attention at Elsie’s house, Raelene bawling at Jenny’s heels until Ray came home, came home hungry to a dark house. He lit the lamp. He filled the bowl with kerosene. He stoked the firebox.

  ‘She had a g-good i-i-i-nnings, Jenny,’ he said. ‘Eighty-n-nnine’s a good age.’

  Didn’t want to hear about good innings, good ages. Walked away from him, blindly, to Granny’s empty bed, to bawl into her pillow. Georgie came to lie with her. Ray fed the kids, noisy kids. Raelene wanted Mummy, wanted to go to bed with Mummy. No more room in that bed. At nine, Ray took her to his bed.

  He went to work the next morning, and if Daddy could go to work, Raelene could go to school. No one would take her to school. She punished them for that.

  A long day, Thursday, long day of the empty kitchen, which wasn’t empty. Full up with Donny’s whining; and the napkin Ray had pinned on him before he’d left for work was unlined. Smell of Donny’s napkin filling that kitchen. Someone had to clean him. Jenny bawled while she cleaned up his mess. Georgie ran from the odour to the garden to pull weeds and howl in the rain. Hell in that kitchen. Margot yelling at Raelene. Raelene yelling at Margot. Donny singing his dirge. Couldn’t run anywhere. Rain pouring down to the yard, dancing in muddy puddles.

  You can’t pull weeds in a downpour. Georgie came inside. She lit the lamp at four. Donny slid around to watch the flame’s flickering dance. It altered the pitch of his dirge. She walked to the wireless and turned the volume higher, to drown the sound.

  Margot seated at the table, flipping through True Romance magazines. Raelene wanting a jam sandwich, stamping her feet for a sandwich, until Georgie took bread from the tin and cut two slices. She was spreading them when that song came on the wireless, a beautiful song until yesterday.

  I wake up in the morning and I wonder why everything still seems the same . . .

  Georgie left the bread on the table and ran to pull more weeds.

  Don’t they know it’s the end of the world . . .?

  Raelene yelling for her sandwich. Margot yelling at Raelene to shut up her yelling. Jenny’s back to them, her two hands gripping Gertrude’s mantelpiece, that song digging its fingernails into raw nerves.

  She couldn’t sing tomorrow. She couldn’t go to that church tomorrow. She couldn’t see Granny go into a wet hole in the ground tomorrow.

  Couldn’t.

  Her eyes swollen with weeping, her back to the table, she didn’t see it happen. Heard the squealing complaint of old wood, the thunk! Saw the light in the room alter. Turned to see Raelene dancing back, True Romance magazine in her hand, Margot half-risen from the chair, Granny’s old table tilting, lamp on its side, rolling.

  Saw it all in a split second, a split second stretched long. Saw the lamp crash to the floor, its glass chimney shatter, kerosene spill. Then too fast, longer shadows playing on cream-papered walls as blue flames tasted aged floorboards, found them good, and raced headlong to taste the cane couch.

  For the first time in twenty-four hours Jenny stopped bawling to react. Picked up the lamp and pitched it out the door. Tried to stamp out blue flames while Margot and Raelene stood together beside the lean-to curtain, screaming in unison for a change.

  Granny’s black coat hanging where it had always hung, behind the door. Ripped it from its nail, swiped at the flames with it, flung it over the flames, stamped on it. All done without conscious thought. Just done; and as fast as they’d been born, the blue flames died.

  Time then to notice her hand, burnt by the lamp. She walked to the refrigerator, opened its door to placed her palm on ice.

  Georgie entered. ‘What’s going on in here?’

  Jenny turned, expecting Granny. It was her voice, her tone, her question.

  ‘Margot did it,’ Raelene said.

  ‘You did it, you little liar.’

  Old table, as old as Gertrude, one of its legs known to be unreliable. Georgie kicked it back to its rightful position. Jenny picked up the overcoat, looked for scorching. Wool didn’t burn easily. Shook it, brushed it, hung it back on its bent nail.

  ‘You’re three times her age. Act it, Margot,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Well, thee’th a liar. The wath the one that knocked the table leg.’

  ‘Because you pushed me into it,’ Raelene yelled.

  Georgie swept up the shattered glass. Jenny went around to the back rooms for the Coleman lantern. No wick in that light; its mantle offered a stronger, whiter light. Gertrude wouldn’t have it in her kitchen. It didn’t drink familiar kerosene, but shellite, a form of petrol, pumped to the mantle under pressure. She shook it, testing the depth of fluid in the bowl. As ever, it needed filling.

  Across to the shed then, tears all gone now. The light would be gone soon. She was pouring shellite from the bottle when she heard movement in the rafters.

  Big-eyed barn owl looking down at her. It had been years since they’d had a barn owl. Granny had encouraged owls. They’d kept the shed’s mouse population under control.

  The human mind is a crazy thing. It can choose to believe what it wants to believe, or needs to believe at the time. Jenny knew who was perched up there. She knew who had knocked that table leg, had started that fire. Knew why she’d done it too. Never once in her life had Granny broken a promise.

  ‘I know you,’ Jenny told the barn owl. ‘And you can haunt me as much as you like, I’ll cry if I want to.’

  THE FLOOD

  Gertrude Maria Foote was buried on a Friday. The world wept for her. By the following Tuesday her paddocks were water logged by the world’s tears, the forest road was a muddy bog. In town, the sides of the roads became lakes as street gutters over flowed. Her bike useless in the mud, on Tuesday morning, Georgie took the short cut across Flanagan’s paddocks, Raelene on her back, pleased to be going to school.

  Granny used to say she’d shared a back fence with old Joe Flan agan for sixty years and the only time he’d ever knocked on her door was the night young Joe had been born. Young Joe, no longer young, and as miserable as old Joe, had two young dogs who kept most from his land. Never Georgie. She tossed them scraps of sausage, and as their predecessors, they followed her along the track worn through Joe’s paddocks, hoping for more.

  Charlie was pleased to see her back. He didn’t mention Gertrude, didn’t ask after Jenny. He’d been at the funeral.

  There were few shoppers about. Georgie swept dusty corners, wiped dust from packets, wiped down the long counter, knew there’d be little gain in mopping floors. The few who came in brought half the street in with them.

  Maisy came in, wanting to talk, Georgie escaped to the storeroom, to cut bread, open cans — one of baked beans and one of beetroot. By the time she’d made two bean and beetroot sandwiches, Maisy had given up.

  Georgie took her sandwich and her mug of tea out to the veranda, where she sat on the doorstep watching the dance of the rain. Woody Creek was too flat. Its fine red soil would grow anything, but it didn’t know what to do with a glut of water given fast. There was little road visible in front of the police station.

  They’d had four policemen since Denham. The last one had barely unloaded his furniture before his wife loaded it again. The new bloke was young and unmarried: Constable Jack Thompson, a country boy, Maisy said, born and raised in Molliston. There was hope that one of the local girls might catch him and encourage him to stay. Plenty of unmarried girls to choose from in Woody Creek — not enough young men to go around, or not enough Australian men. Boys left high school and went to the city to work in banks; l
eft the technical school to take apprenticeships in Willama. They didn’t come back. Not a lot to come back for.

  Leanne Dobson had married a Latvian bloke. A Duffy girl had gone against family tradition to marry one of three Italian brothers who grew tomatoes out on Three Pines Road. A few said she was probably on with the lot of them. Lena Fulton, who had lost her husband in the war, had married Jorge, an Albanian, who may not have been as old as he looked, but still looked twice her age.

  Georgie knew this town. She knew who to give credit to and who to refuse; knew the Abbots looked like the Dobsons because their grandmothers had been sisters; that Joe Flanagan had a Chinaman great-grandfather on his grandmother’s side, which was why all Flanagans were born with chips on their shoulders. Charlie spent a lot of time passing on the town’s history; he had a willing student in Georgie.

  Most in town called him a mean old coot. Most swore he’d kicked his only daughter out of his house. Maybe he had. He never heard from her. Georgie never saw Charlie’s mean side. He paid her an adult male’s wage, bought her small lots of shares each Christmas, each birthday, or whenever she suggested she was due for annual holidays. She’d never had a holiday. Nowhere to go anyway.

  His eyes were bad. She read the papers to him, the share-market prices, celebrating with him when the price crept up, commiserating when the value dropped. They had much in common, Georgie and her employer.

  Her mind was far away when the new cop slammed his front door and ran through the rain to his car. He backed out too fast, the car slewing to the side, and Georgie stood, expecting him to end up in the water-concealed open gutter. He hadn’t been here long enough to become familiar with Woody Creek’s greasy mud. But he got two wheels onto bitumen, then, siren wailing, he drove towards Blunt’s crossing, spraying mud and water.

  ‘Someone’s had an accident,’ she reported to Charlie, who had wandered out to the call of the siren, a spoon in one hand, the half-full bean can in the other. Like Granny, he didn’t approve of waste — though a few customers might suffer for those beans. Old men’s muscles weren’t all they could be.