Moth to the Flame

by Joy Dettman

  He remembered her singing on stage in a Snow White costume; remembered the doctor who they’d met that time at the hospital had been in that play. At school, they tried to get him to sing. He could, but felt a fool doing it. Wondered at times if that old doctor had been some sort of relative. He’d sung a duet with Snow White.

  Colours could jog the memory. A certain green, and he was back in that dark old kitchen, and Granny was there, with her weird hairpins holding her long plait high. A certain shade of red hair, even a brand new penny and Georgie was pushing him around the Armadale backyard on his trike.

  Trees were memory shakers; rainbows too. They took him to a house with a magic window, just for a brief, non-graspable instant.

  Dreams he could grasp. He dreamed often of walking down a Melbourne street and seeing Jenny walking too fast ahead, or turning into a dark theatre. In his dream he’d run after her on leaden legs, run down the aisles, knowing she was in there, smelling the scent of Jenny’s hair, like lemons. In the dreams, he never found her, but when he first awakened, he could, for the briefest of split seconds, remember her face.

  She was dead. They were all dead, had died of some terrible flu epidemic he’d almost died of. And what was the use of straining to remember the dead?

  He loved his mother; felt older than her, had for years. He never felt older than Lorna. She was a family antique, like his greatgrandmother’s chair in the sitting room, which he wasn’t allowed to sit on. It was totally useless but too old to throw out.

  THE LICENCE

  What goes up must come down. When water stops rising it starts to recede. It took weeks for the land to dry. Scummy green water still lay in low corners when Maudy married her Molliston man and left town to live happily ever after. With Maudy’s bed now empty, Georgie was obligated to return home.

  Gertrude’s floors were mud-covered. Her wallpaper had disinte grated to the high-water line, buckled and gone mouldy to shoulder height. There was a stench of rotting grass and dead fish about her house, but it was shovelled out, hosed out, scrubbed out, and when it dried, the furniture was moved back where it belonged.

  For a time, stranded carp fought for air in stagnant Rooster Lake. They gave up the fight and the chooks picked their bones clean. The mad old rooster had gone west, and no doubt a few of his harem. The young survived; the cockerels, previously penned for the Christmas trade, had learnt to fly. They were birds; their ancestors had flown. Harry and his boys penned them. They crowed their protest for days before settling down to grow fat on forgotten golden grain. The goats were back in their paddock. Pliable beasts, goats, accepting of change.

  The week after Maudy’s wedding Georgie moved back across the paddock. Margot remained with Elsie. Maudy had left her a two-foot-tall pile of True Romance magazines.

  Jenny and Raelene didn’t come home, and in early August, Georgie found out why.

  Dear Georgie,

  You might remember Veronica, Mrs Andrews, a neighbour I used to sew for when we first moved to Armadale. She’s a nursing sister, and now runs a health farm in Frankston. I’m working for her, as a receptionist, or trainee receptionist, so I doubt I’ll be home for a while.

  We see Donny every Sunday. Maybe he knows us. I still feel guilty about leaving him there, but he’s clean and cared for and I know I had to do it.

  Now, some motherly advice. You’re young enough, have brains enough, to do anything you want to do with your life, and no chance to do anything up there other than waste your god-given brain standing behind Charlie’s counter. He’s not your responsibility any more than Donny was mine.

  Margot has always been happier with Elsie, and she’s got her grandmother up there. You’ve got no reason to stay, as I’ve got no reason to go back. You said once that you wanted everything that wasn’t to be possible. It could be down here. You’re young enough to go back to school. There are night schools down here. Give Charlie notice and come down. I miss you . . .

  Maybe she would, in a week or two. She had things to do on her first Sunday at home. She boiled up a saucepan of glue and set to work pasting newspaper around the lower sections of the kitchen walls. A hotchpotch of old news, upside down and right side up news. She’d begun the second layer when two cars drove into the yard: Bernie Macdonald’s ute and the cop car. Georgie met her visitors at the gate, as Gertrude had always met her visitors. There was a stranger with them.

  ‘Arthur Hogan,’ he said. ‘Maisy is my mother-in-law. She asked me to have a look at the house — if it’s all right with you.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Mum and a few are thinking about doing some improvements,’ Bernie said.

  ‘Go for your life.’

  Georgie resumed her pasting, and fifteen minutes later Margot came across the paddock to see what they were doing.

  ‘When is your mum due back?’ the cop asked her.

  Margot shrugged and walked by him.

  ‘I dare say you’re missing her,’ he said.

  ‘Ath if,’ she replied as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  He stood in the doorway, watching Georgie paste sheets of newspaper until she glanced up from her work and caught him staring. Arthur Hogan was walking around the roof.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t come through.’

  ‘He’s checking for leaks. Bernie was saying you’ve got a few.’

  ‘It’s the chimney, or the bricks it’s sitting on. Harry fixed it — until the next time.’

  A heavy iron chimney, rusty, but solidly built, put together with large rivets, spent its life attempting to drag itself free from the roof. Harry had put wooden props against it this time, had poked a bit of concrete between its brick foundations. Hogan suggested there could be heat enough in that chimney to burn the props, then he came inside to hammer on walls, study upside-down news.

  ‘They’ve used decent enough timber in the frame of these front rooms. That little lean-to has been chucked together.’ He pointed to Jenny’s tin-plate plaque still hanging on a nail over Gertrude’s door. Ejected 2.8.1869. ‘Is that fair dinkum?’

  ‘It’s a private joke,’ Georgie said.

  ‘When’s your mother due back?’ Bernie asked.

  ‘When Donny settles in,’ Georgie said.

  The cop carried in a carton of groceries before he left. Davies had sent them down.

  ‘Tell him thanks,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Your little sister doing all right without your mum?’

  ‘She’s older than she looks.’

  Chubby Margot, not much more than a child’s height. She’d always been chubby, her chest measurement not much more than her waist. Elsie’s cooking was adding to her weight.

  The men left, Georgie continued pasting, Margot sorted through the carton of groceries. Butter, two packets of cereal, a packet of tea, a tin of apricot jam.

  ‘Ath if we need that,’ she said.

  ‘How would he know what we need?’

  ‘They juth came down here to have a good thtickybeak.’

  ‘They came down to fix the chimney.’

  ‘Harry already fixthed it.’

  ‘Until next time.’

  Georgie sighed and thought of Frankston, visualised Armadale, visualised St Kilda beach. Apart from Ray, she’d loved living in Melbourne. Missed Jenny.

  ‘Brian hateth me now.’

  ‘Tell him you’re devastated.’

  Wanted to go to Frankston. Couldn’t, or not until she found someone to take her place at Charlie’s.

  He’d enjoyed the flood, or enjoyed living in his house with her. He’d told her she could stay on there. She’d never lived in a house where hot water came out of pipes, where she could have a hot shower every morning. Wanted . . . wanted more than Granny’s house.

  Margot was always happier with Elsie.

  Margot wouldn’t be happy anywhere.

  ‘He hateth you too. He thaid you’re too big for your bootth.’

  Sighed. Wanted to pitch that glue and run.

 
‘Tell him I’m devastated, Margot.’

  They were sisters and they didn’t speak the same language and thank god Margot didn’t like baked beans. She went back to Elsie’s when Georgie opened a can. Georgie sat, spooning them out, like Charlie, spilling drips onto the pages of one of Archie Foote’s diaries.

  His handwriting was small, and in places he’d added a paragraph of mirror writing — the hot stuff more honest though. She read the afternoon away.

  As did Margot. She read a story that changed her life. It was about an English girl, Penelope Wood, an orphan who had come to live with her aunt and uncle on a cattle station in Australia, where Tommy, a black boy, worked for her uncle. They fell in love, but the uncle and aunty were too stuck up to let them get married. Then, one night, Tommy climbed in through Penelope’s bedroom window to tell her he’d won a scholarship to an English university.

  That wasn’t all that happened. The story didn’t say exactly what did happen, but it said enough for Margot’s imagination to fill in the gaps. His hand crept like a dark shadow over the cream silk of her gown’s bodice, as his lips found her mouth . . .

  Over and over again, Margot read those lines. How could words in a magazine make her ache for something she didn’t understand? She lay on Maudy’s bed, her own hand playing the dark shadow.

  Six days a week, the train came in at ten, or there about. The mail was sorted by eleven. Georgie picked up the shop mail and a letter for Jenny, an official letter in a long brown envelope. Jenny had told her to open all mail. Mill men were insured against accident. She opened it, expecting it to be about Ray. It was about Ray, but not about his insurance.

  ‘Hell,’ she said. ‘Hell.’

  Two pages, the first typewritten only, a few lines. The second page was handwritten.

  Dear Mrs King,

  My name is Florence Keating. My husband and I saw in the paper a while back that Ray was dead . . .

  Her reading was interrupted by the cop demanding the keys to Charlie’s old ute.

  Two years ago, Charlie bought a ’47 Ford ute from the garage man. He only drove it to the station to pick up a few goods, and on Fridays when he did the deliveries; rarely used more than one gear.

  He’d made the mistake of complaining about his eyesight to Emma Fulton, who had come in with a legal document requiring her signature to be witnessed by a Justice of the Peace. Charlie, an always accessible JP, complained to everyone about his eyes, had been for years. Constable Thompson overheard him that morning.

  ‘You shouldn’t be driving, Mr White,’ he said.

  ‘My long distance is all right.’

  ‘What’s your year of birth?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘I’ve just made it my business. Can I see your licence?’

  ‘Can’t help you with that,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Failing to produce a licence when requested to do so is a chargeable offence. Your licence, please, Mr White.’

  ‘You can’t see what I haven’t got to show, can you? The coot before the coot before you wouldn’t give me one.’

  Thompson demanded the ute keys.

  Georgie slid the letter back into its envelope and walked to Charlie’s side. ‘We’ll have a pile of stock at the station,’ she said.

  The cop turned to her. ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘I’ve moved it.’

  ‘I’ll take you for a run now if you’ve got time, kill two birds with the one stone. I need to talk to you.’

  *

  Georgie was the reason Jack Thompson had gone into the shop, or her grandmother was. He’d done more than his fair share of eyeing Georgie Morrison. Not a man in Woody Creek between sixteen and sixty didn’t eye her. She was tall and shaped the way a woman ought to be shaped, and on top of that she was gorgeous.

  The driving lesson took some time. There was more to handling a ’47 Ford ute than sitting behind the wheel and finding a gear that would move the thing back or forward. Jack Thompson took the wheel. They picked up Charlie’s goods from the station, he helped carry the cartons into the storeroom, then drove the ute over the road to his own yard and down behind his house, just in case Charlie had spare keys.

  Georgie and Charlie stood in the doorway watching him, Charlie cursing him — until he came back and made Georgie an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  ‘I could give you a lesson or two — that’s if you’re interested?’

  That was how it started, how everything started, on that final Monday in August. Like the cogs inside Granny’s old clock, still ticking on the mantelpiece, one turned and moved the others, and the old hands jerked forward, each action leading irreversibly to another.

  TIME’S SOVEREIGNTY

  Dear Jen,

  I will come down, but not for a week or two. Would you believe, the new cop offered to give me driving lessons — after he’d confiscated Charlie’s ute keys — which hasn’t put Charlie in a happy state of mind. Remember how Granny used to say that when trouble came to Woody Creek, it came in cycles? It’s been coming since the train got in this morning.

  I picked up a letter for you, which I’m enclosing. It’s from a solicitor and I don’t like the sound of it.

  Next: the new cop asked me to let you and your sister know that there’s going to be some sort of hearing soon in Melbourne about Amber. He says there’s a good chance that she’ll be let out this time. I’ve told Maisy to let Sissy know.

  Speaking of Maisy — not sure if this is a problem or not, but Maisy and a few others have got a fundraising committee going for you and Ray’s kids. They want to do something about Granny’s house. It needs it. Its wall linings were more or less washed away by the floods. Arthur Hogan has been down looking at the house. Maisy says he’d be in charge of things. Harry says Arthur built Elsie’s house and that he’s a qualified builder so he’d probably improve it. He’s got some sort of idea to move two rooms from someplace and attach them to the two back rooms. He seemed a bit impressed by the age of Granny’s front rooms, said that they were as solid as a rock — and the lean-to wasn’t. He’d have to wreck it. They need your say-so to go ahead, just a signed note giving them permission.

  Now, for the high note. I’ve been working my way through Itchy-foot’s diaries and, if you can wade through the crude stuff, and there’s a lot of it, they’re interesting reading. I’ve found a bit about Juliana, which you may not want to read in its entirety, but she was married to a rich old Italian banker when she was seventeen years old. Archie met her on a cruise ship and got her pregnant. Her old banker paid for her to stay in Australia to have you. She was supposed to leave you at an orphanage and go home.

  I know Granny always said he was an evil old coot, and no doubt he was!!! But he was a poet too. I’ve found dozens of poems scattered through his books, about all sorts of things. As I find them, I’m copying them in an exercise book for you. You’ll enjoy some of them. I’m enclosing two: one he wrote in February of ’51, only weeks before he died. It’s sort of sad. The other one I reckon it could be about you. It was written in ’34 when you were ten or eleven. Everything is dated. It’s like he’s documented his life, or the last thirty years of it.

  Okay, off the high note and back to the low.

  I’ll have to move in with Elsie while they’re building, or back into Charlie’s house, which would be preferable, but with Maudy gone, Elsie is trying to mother me. And it’s probably not a good idea to let Charlie get any more dependent on me than he is if I’m planning to desert him.

  Righto, I’m off to bed — while I’ve got my own bed to be off to.

  Love, Georgie

  Reading one of Georgie’s letters was like sitting with her by the stove late at night. Jenny almost reached for a biro to keep the conversation going. Just a glance at the solicitor’s . . . He was working for a Florence and Clarence Keating.

  ‘Keating?’ She turned to the next page, handwritten.

  Dear Mrs King,

  My name is Florence Keating. My husb
and and I saw in the paper a while back that Ray was dead, and that he still had the two children with him when he died. He might have told you about me. My name was Florence Dawson when I lived with him.

  This is very hard for me to write, knowing what most people think of a mother who leaves her children, but there were all sorts of reasons why I did.

  The doctors told me when Donald was born that he had a bit of brain damage. He was a big baby and he was born backwards with the cord twisted around his neck. I was told not to have another one for a few years, but Raelene got started right away. I wasn’t myself for the whole time I was carrying her, and after she was born I ended up having a total nervous breakdown. My mother had to come and look after me and the children. She never got on with Ray, not after she found out he was already married.

  He was drinking. You probably know how dangerous he got when he was drinking. Flora Parker told me you’d left him for the same reason. He broke Mum’s arm and we had to go to the hospital. I only left the children with Ray for two nights, but when we went back with the police, he’d gone with both of them. The police said they’d find him, but they never did. Mum said they weren’t interested because I wasn’t married to him.

  I’ve been married to Clarrie for three years now. We haven’t got any children. My doctor says that having had the two children so close and both of them big babies, it could have done something to my insides. I’ve never got Raelene out of my mind. I did try my best to look after both of them.

  I know you’ve been a mother to her and to Donald, and we wouldn’t ever try to cut you out of their lives, but Clarrie and I want to raise Raelene.