Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  He wasn’t drunk enough to attempt a second drive down Gertrude’s track. He parked out front of Hall’s house.

  Saw Lila Roberts’ car parked there, and what the hell was she doing down there, and how the bloody hell had she got down there on bald tyres? Not game to go home, maybe. The widow the only woman in town who might give her a bed? Lila Roberts liked beer better than tea; liked men better than women. Men liked her. Women didn’t. She knew the widow, had stood with her at the grave side. She’d known her in Sydney, so she’d said. Most of the blokes reckoned anyone could have Lila. Maybe they could. He hadn’t had her. Macka would have liked to have her.

  He loaded his arms with wood and walked down Hall’s drive, fought two gates open, dropped a lump of wood, and, as he stooped to retrieve the first, dropped two more. ‘Daddy bloody stuttering Ray.’ Guilt and jealousy in a man unaccustomed to feeling either emotion are hard to handle. Bernie wasn’t handling it drunk any better than he had sober.

  With no hand to knock, he used his boot on the door. Lila opened it. The widow now ironing with those flatirons, the dago kid staring at him, the lump of a boy eating the wireless, redhead packing a red case. No sign of Margot.

  ‘I brought you down a bit of dry wood,’ he said. It was pretty obvious what he’d brought down. ‘Where do you want it?’

  ‘I could think of a few places,’ Lila said. ‘They could be splintery.’

  ‘Drop it on the hearth,’ Georgie said. ‘Thanks.’

  He dropped his load and stood dusting his hands ‘The creek’s broken her banks this side of the bridge. There’s a torrent running through the culvert.’

  ‘It went down the last time,’ Georgie said.

  Jenny placed one iron on the stove and chose another, spat on it to test its heat, or maybe the spit was meant for his eye. He stepped back, expecting her to grind the iron into his ear. She took it to the table and continued her ironing.

  ‘They’ve got bad flooding upstream,’ he said.

  ‘It was on the news. Thanks for the wood,’ Georgie said, again dismissing him.

  ‘I’ve got another armful in the ute.’

  The second armful dropped beside the first, he stood on, waiting for his kid — or Macka’s — to materialise. She didn’t, and they wanted to shut the door.

  ‘If there’s anything you need down here, just give someone a yell.’

  As he backed from the room, Georgie, looking at his shoulders, looking at Donny, thought, another night of Donny, more stinking napkins. She’d stuffed him with chocolate drops at the funeral.

  She glanced at Jenny, knowing she wouldn’t give anyone a yell, not if she was drowning beneath napkins, sinking in a quicksand of stinking napkins. Knowing she’d pay the garage man ten pounds to drive Donny down to the hospital in the morning. Georgie had great respect for money. And what difference would one night make — other than two less dirty napkins and ten pounds?

  Bernie Macdonald was closing the door.

  ‘Just a tick, Bernie. I don’t suppose you could give us a lift down to the hospital with Donny?’

  ‘No worries,’ he said, stepping fast back indoors.

  And the blood-sucking bat let go its hold on his throat.

  THE LEAVING

  Margot’s world was black or white. The various shades of grey confused her; she chose not to see them. She loved and she hated, and in the blink of an eye one could become the other. She’d loved Ray. He’d loved Donny, so she’d loved Donny, from a distance.

  Georgie belonged to her. They’d shared a cot before they’d shared a bed. They’d spent their days together until Jenny came home from Sydney and brought Jimmy with her. After that, Georgie had played with Jimmy. Once he was gone, Margot had got Georgie back, or she had until she’d started working for Charlie and grown too big for her boots.

  A mess of twelve-year-old’s emotions and nineteen-year-old’s desires Margot Macdonald Morrison, bewildered by a world she’d never quite found her place in; a world where nothing was ever the way she wanted it to be, where no one stayed the same.

  Like Brian Hall. He’d always been her best friend, always taken her side, played cards on her team. He swapped sides the night of Ray’s funeral.

  Along with the Halls, she’d seen Bernie Macdonald carrying wood across the paddock. Had seen him haul Donny over to his ute, watched Georgie toss the red case into the loading area, then Donny’s wheelchair. Jenny, Georgie, Donny and Raelene had squeezed into the ute’s cabin. Margot hadn’t asked why; hadn’t asked where they were going. Everyone knew the floods were going to be bad, that Granny’s house could be flooded if the creek kept rising. Maybe Jenny was moving into town to stay with Maisy or Lila.

  Nine o’clock when the ute came back, no Jenny, Donny or Raelene in it. Georgie told Margot that Doctor Frazer was sending Donny down to a home for retarded kids in Melbourne; that Jenny and Raelene were staying the night at a Willama hotel and going down with him in the morning.

  ‘The’th putting him away?’ Margot accused.

  ‘Where were you when his pants needed changing?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘I’m not hith mother.’

  ‘Neither is Jenny, and stop sounding like a silly bitch, Marsie,’ Brian said.

  ‘Don’t you dare call me that!’

  ‘Well, you are if you think Jenny can handle him without Ray.’

  Margot ran to Elsie’s bedroom to howl. The bedroom was cold and no one cared that she was howling in there, so she came out to the kitchen to do it. And found them playing Canasta: Georgie, Lenny and Brian against Josie, Elsie and Harry.

  ‘No one athked me if I wanted to play,’ Margot accused.

  Elsie rose from her chair. ‘Take my place, lovey.’

  Georgie went home when the game ended; Margot tailed her across the paddock, stepping where she stepped. She followed her to the lean-to bed. Georgie got out and got into Jenny’s. The night was cold; Margot didn’t want to sleep in a freezing bed by herself. She followed her, and Georgie moved back to the lean-to bed. They played musical beds until midnight, until Georgie took blankets and pillow to the cane couch. A hard bed, but barely room for one on it.

  *

  Dark clouds kept daylight at bay on the morning after Ray’s funeral. The rooster forgot to wake his hens, and when he stepped down from his perch to crow, he got his feet wet. Blaming Georgie for Rooster Lake, he flew at her when she opened his pen door.

  ‘If you weren’t so old, I’d fry you, you mad mongrel,’ she said backing off.

  He had her on the run and danced at her again, high-stepping, his wings spread, and he lost his footing and took a dive. It shocked the fight out of him. He emerged from brown water squawking like a hen. And well he may. She’d already opened the cockerels’ pen, releasing fifteen youthful rivals.

  A sly, creeping flood, sneaking in via Flanagan’s. His wood paddock was a lake. Unable to take the short cut to work, Georgie went via the forest road, and was confronted by a stream fifty or so feet back from where the road joined up with Three Pines Road. The culvert must have been blocked, or unable to cope with the glut of water. She took her shoes off, rolled up the legs of her slacks and paddled through freezing water.

  All her life, Georgie had heard tales of flood, only tales, told at night around the stove. She was experiencing the reality now, and finding it interesting how the water showed up the levels of Woody Creek. Three Pines Road was high and dry, or high and dry to the bridge, as was the stock-route road. They’d built it up before they’d sealed it. By the look of the water backed up against it, not much of Joe Flanagan’s land would be above the water line by nightfall. A few of his fences already stood in brown lakes. Someone with a good eye for levels had chosen high ground for the town centre.

  ‘I had to paddle out,’ she explained, perched on Charlie’s counter, brushing her feet before pulling on socks and boots, before rolling down the legs of her slacks.

  ‘She’s broken her banks down behind Dobson’s,’ he said.

&
nbsp; ‘Has the town ever gone under, Charlie?’

  ‘Not in my lifetime.’

  Rain, rain and more rain that day, and the news all bad.

  ‘Three Pines Road is cut a mile this side of Bryant’s old place. I drove in through a foot of water.’

  Paul Jenner now owned Bryant’s land. He’d built a new brick house on it three months ago. Maybe he’d built it high enough.

  ‘Monk’s old place is surrounded.’

  Hooper’s new manager, from Cobram, lived in the old mansion. They’d put the share-cropper chap and his five kids out. No one in town knew the new manager, or cared if he got his feet wet. His wife was a stuck-up bitch.

  Crops were drowning. Nothing to be done about that. Those with stock had time to do something. All day, cattle and sheep were on the move through town, all heading out along Cemetery Road to land well distanced from the creek. A busy morning that one.

  Not so for the timber men. Like the forest that fed them, the mill workers enjoyed a decent flood. A batch of flood babies would be born in nine months’ time.

  Bernie and Macka had no good reason to remain in their beds, no woman to share them. They paid for the little they got in Melbourne, when they could get down there. No good reason to get out of their twin beds either. The pub didn’t open its doors until ten thirty. Nowhere else to go.

  Plenty of empty rooms in Maisy’s house; two grown men had no good reason to share. Maisy had tried hard to separate them at fourteen. They’d half-killed each other in attempting to settle the matter of which one should move out. Neither one had.

  They’d half-killed each other at eighteen over which one should be the groom and which the best man. A pack of cards had given Bernie the right to be left standing at the altar. Jenny dealt those cards, and hadn’t spoken to either twin since — until last night.

  Bernie had hauled that kid into the hospital, then stood around waiting for the doctor to turn up, hoping he didn’t turn up, so he could offer to drive her to Melbourne and go to the football while he was down there. The doctor turned up.

  ‘Anything you need, just give me a yell,’ he’d said as he was leaving.

  And she’d spoken to him. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she’d said.

  They had a history. Righto, so it wasn’t a good history. He wasn’t much in the looks department. There was no denying that — not when you had a mirror image looking back at you from the second bed — but after stuttering bloody Ray King, he mightn’t look such a bad prospect.

  That ugly bastard in the next bed could still read his mind.

  ‘Davies and the old girl were talking about starting up a fund for her while you were pissing around after her last night,’ Macka said.

  ‘You ought to see the house they’re living in,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s like taking a step back in time.’

  ‘It’ll be floating downstream in a day or two.’

  The house was there when Georgie paddled home that night. By Saturday, there was water beneath the new rooms. On Sunday morning, she rolled her feet out of bed and into water. Only at the back end of the lean-to. The kitchen was still dry — or it was until four, when Harry and Teddy came over to move the furniture out to the back rooms, to carry the refrigerator across the paddock. The sewing machine went with it. Metal rusted.

  Georgie had gathered the family treasures, which were few. Only Jenny’s shoe box of letters and the old purse and brooch, only the framed mug shot of the water-pistol bandit, which she should have pitched out years ago. Hadn’t then, couldn’t now. She placed it into the shoe box, the shoe box into Itchy-foot’s carton of notebooks, which had come six months after his death, and which Granny hadn’t allowed her to read. She was old enough now — not that she’d get a chance to read anything at Elsie’s. Uncontrolled bedlam over there, and Maudy was getting married in three weeks’ time.

  The water kept coming, working its way across the goat paddock. John McPherson came in his rubber boots, with his camera, to photograph Granny’s house standing in a lake. The goats were moved into the top paddock with the horse. White chooks covered Gertrude’s old cart; a few, seeking higher ground, had found perches in the walnut tree.

  A hundred yards of water to paddle through on Monday morning, fast-flowing water. She wouldn’t be paddling back. Bought a sleeping bag and inflatable mattress from Fultons.

  ‘You’ve got a lodger for the duration, Charlie,’ she said.

  He shouted her dinner at the pub, then walked her home to his empty house. Not so empty with Georgie in it.

  GOING TO THE MOVIES

  Lorna Hooper well remembered Woody Creek’s last major flood, or recalled the delight of spending the school holidays at school rather than on a waterlogged farm. Always an avid reader, Lorna, she read The Age from cover to cover. Ray King’s death had gained a small mention on page five, only in connection with the flood. Tragedy dogs family of mill worker.

  Lorna cut the item from the paper; not to keep, but to destroy before her nephew saw it. The boy should have been moved from that den of iniquity before his memories had set in stone.

  On a Saturday morning in August, Lorna was in Bourke Street, Melbourne, walking towards Swanston, her nephew at her side, when she sighted the Morrison tramp holding the hand of a black-headed child. Lorna threw her spindly ankles into reverse and made a sharp right-hand turn. With a tongue that rarely missed an opportunity to spit insults, this was out of character, as was her entering the premises of G.J. Coles, where she was forced to take refuge — driven to slumming by that tramp. She might not have recognised the boy alone; however, if she sighted him at Lorna’s side, she would surely recognise him.

  ‘What are we buying, Aunt?’

  A laughing, tormenting fool of a youth, altogether too much of the mother in him. The Hooper features had become lost — other than his mouth, height, hands. His adult voice was not his father’s nor his grandfather’s. He’d been influenced by his schoolmasters and that imported pile of pommy sh– poop he called Pops, which Lorna converted to P.O.P.S.

  Confronted by a counter of sweets, she propped. She was partial to aniseed rings; handed her nephew two shillings and tapped on the glass display case with a fingernail of iron to explain what he should spend her money on. Returned to the doorway, leaving him to deal with the painted-faced whore behind the counter.

  She didn’t exit the store, but peered out, as cagey as a black rat peering from its hole in a cat house — and sighted her again, standing before Coles’s window, no doubt admiring the wares. A back step into cover, until he came with the bag of sweets. The Morrison tramp and child disappeared, Lorna exited the store and turned towards Elizabeth Street.

  ‘You’re twisted, Aunt. You’re going the wrong way.’

  She ignored him. He followed until she stopped in a jeweller’s recessed doorway to snort at a display of rings, or their reminder that she had once considered donning a wedding ring.

  ‘Want to buy me a nose ring?’ he asked.

  Her lifted finger may have meant ‘sit’ or ‘heel’. He did neither, but looked at his watch.

  ‘We’ll miss the start.’

  ‘Step lively then,’ she said.

  They had three hours to fill while that pile of pommy sh— poop kept a doctor’s appointment, or so it had been said. Always a good walker, Lorna stepped lively to Elizabeth Street, followed it to Lonsdale, turned right, and by the longer route gained her objective. And was late. The movie had commenced.

  A fool of a movie, it did not engage her mind. She sat ramrod straight, convinced the Morrison tramp was seated directly behind her, until the screen’s action offered sufficient light to scan that row of seats.

  For two hours she sat, her mind not in the theatre but with P.O.P.S. and his bug-eyed cretin wife. They were hatching more infamy. She knew it, but as yet could not pinpoint it. She had won a major war; had gained control of the estate, more or less. She made the decisions, accounted for every penny spent, had proved she was more than a match for the th
ree morons she cohabited with.

  Jimmy was more than a match for his aunt. He allowed her her moves, when he was in the mood to play. His mother had asked him to keep her occupied today, which was no punishment in the city. He loved Melbourne, loved the old theatres. They brought back memories of Jenny.

  He could remember her hair. There was much about her he remembered, though not her face. He could remember her presence in the smell of sausages frying. His mother never bought sausages. At times, when he was in the mood, he bought his own. Mrs Muir fried them for him. He ate them as Jenny had in Armadale, rolled up in bread with tomato sauce or chutney. Shop-bought sauce didn’t hold the flavour of Jenny. Some brands of shop-bought chutney did.

  He loved his mother. She never did anything not to love. Still treated him like a six year old, but he could forgive that.

  He couldn’t categorise Lorna’s treatment. To her, he was neither child nor adult — perhaps a prize dog she believed she was training for the Royal Show. He tolerated his grooming, tolerated her. His mother had told him they had to tolerate her, because of his grandfather’s will. Mrs Muir had learnt to tolerate Lorna’s ‘Muir!’

  He’d sat through a lot of movies at Lorna’s side — romance, war, comedy. She’d watch anything, as would he. It was the theatres he loved, the smell of massed humanity in the dark, the not knowing who might be seated behind in the dark.

  He’d seen an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie on television a month or two back and had known he’d watched that movie with Jenny, that they hadn’t taken the tram home that day. He’d got a wipe-out wave of memory of riding on the back of a wooden dray, a giant horse lifting its tail and splattering manure.

  In Armadale, Jenny had swept up horse manure to put in her compost bin. She used to say that a horse had left her a present for her garden.

  He knew she’d had frizzy hair. It had tickled his face when she’d kissed him goodnight. There were no photographs of her, nor of anyone from the other side of his family. His mother had heaps of Hooper photographs, even one of his Hooper great-grandparents. After watching Fred and Ginger, he’d sat for half the night turning the pages of old albums, sifting through boxes of photographs. Without photographs, it’s the faces you lose.