by Joy Dettman
There were plenty in town who refused to work at much other than the begetting of a kid every year or two. Breeding had always been a favourite pastime in Woody Creek. Invalid pensioners with crook backs may have done it sitting down, but they did it, as did dole bludgers and their girlfriends. By the late seventies, big families made good economic sense to those who didn’t go in for labour, and if the government didn’t place a limit soon on the number of bludgers’ kids the taxpayer was prepared to feed, in twenty years’ time there’d be insufficient taxpayers’ kids to keep the bludgers’ kids in the style they’d become accustomed to.
Maisy’s capital, cut by a third since she’d bought Macka’s share of the mill, was, by Woody Creek standards, still enough to make her a rich woman. Few would believe it these days if they’d looked in her fridge, in her cake tins. Bernie couldn’t raise a rattle from her biscuit tins, and if he did, all it offered were the slices of fossilised cardboard Maisy had the gall to call biscuits. The freezer, which had once contained a selection of ice-cream and frozen cakes, now froze bread, and not even white bread.
‘Just because you’re on a bloody diet doesn’t mean that I’m supposed to starve,’ Bernie complained.
‘If it’s in the house I’ll eat it,’ Maisy said. ‘And the doctor said you needed to lose weight as much as me.’
She’d always cooked, which may have been why Bernie had never considered leaving home. She sliced lettuce now, grated carrots, served them with tomatoes and onions and paper-thin slices of corned beef. She thawed two lousy slices of frozen bread before each meal, one for her, one for him.
‘Stop freezing the bloody stuff.’
‘If I don’t, I’ll eat more than my three slices a day,’ Maisy said.
He escaped her on Tuesdays, after dropping her off at her Weight Watchers meeting. The big restaurant in the middle of town served meals all day. He was seated, trying to catch the eye of a waitress, when Jenny and her lanky coot walked in.
Guilt multiplies in an empty gut, and who was looking after the shop while they were eating down here?
He waited until they were seated, then sidled out and bought himself a chocolate-coated ice-cream at a milk bar, which he scoffed in three bites on his way back to the meeting to collect Maisy, who smelled that ice-cream, or saw the melted chocolate on the belly of his shirt.
He didn’t mention seeing the Hoopers, but asked a question which had been haunting him for weeks. ‘Have they done anything yet about getting that girl a tombstone?’
‘I haven’t asked them,’ Maisy said.
‘What’s happening with the redhead?’
‘They hadn’t heard from her the last time I spoke to Jenny.’
*
Maisy never walked if she could drive. Every Sunday since Dawn’s funeral, she’d driven around to the cemetery with a bunch of flowers. Weight Watchers suggested their members walk, and that Sunday she set off on foot.
Bernie watched her slow progress through the park, watched her lean on a white post to catch her breath before crossing Park Road, where she was lost to his view. Convinced she’d fallen again, he took off after her.
She was still going, slow but steady. He caught her halfway across the sports oval.
‘What’s got into you?’ she asked.
‘Save me sending out a search party for you when you drop dead,’ he said.
Maisy, who knew every man, woman and child in town, who went to every Protestant funeral and to a few of the Catholics’, knew that cemetery like the back of her hand. He followed her to the raw wound of Dawn’s grave where he watched her kiss her flowers before placing half of them on the mound. Assuming the rest were for his father, he hung back to light a smoke. George Macdonald had been gone for a lot of years but Bernie still had bad memories of the day he’d died. He knew where that grave was too, but Maisy was walking the wrong way, so he followed her. Followed her to a not so raw wound in the earth, where she kissed the rest of her flowers then placed them down – and knowing who was under that dirt gave Bernie goose bumps.
‘What’s wrong with them, leaving it looking like that?’
‘They’ve got the shop to worry about.’
‘Not so worried that they can’t piss off to Willama.’
‘Where did you see them?’
‘Going into the restaurant.’
‘You went in there eating,’ she accused.
‘I had a bloody chocolate-coated ice-cream. Lay off me, will you,’ he said, and looked towards the Catholic section, and at a second unmarked grave, knowing who was in that hole too, and knowing that his mother wouldn’t go within spitting distance of Raelene King’s grave.
It wasn’t official yet but everyone knew she’d petrol-bombed that house. They’d found Harry Hall’s empty petrol can. How she’d got herself caught up in it, no one knew nor ever would. For two days they hadn’t known her bones were there. Half of the cops in Melbourne had been up here with their dog squads searching the forest for Raelene King.
‘Ask her,’ Bernie said.
Maisy’s mind far away, she looked at him quizzically. ‘Ask who what?’
‘Ask Jenny what she’s done about marking that girl’s grave.’
‘Raelene’s?’
‘Margot’s.’
‘I will not ask her, and I didn’t come over here to have you following me around nagging me about tombstones. It’s like an open wound knowing the way Margot must have died, so stop picking at it – and stop picking at your head too – and start wearing that hat I bought you.’
‘Offer to buy her one.’
‘Go home and let me visit in peace.’
He waited for her, walked home with her, or followed her home, a dozen or so paces behind – followed her home to skinned chicken and zucchini soup. He wanted his Sunday roast, his meat with all the trimmings, swimming in gravy. He wanted butter on thick slices of fresh white bread. She tossed him a slice of chilled brown bread and no butter.
‘Use some of that creamed cheese on it,’ she suggested.
‘It tastes like sh—’
‘Stop your swearing at my dinner table.’
‘Bloody dinner table? If that was dinner, don’t bother feeding me tea.’
Then it happened, on Thursday night. He woke with a pain in his chest and knew he wasn’t going to live long enough to die of skin cancer or starvation. He was having a heart attack.
His father’s heart had given out on him, though not when he’d been fifty-eight years old. Old George’s hadn’t missed a beat in ninety years. Bernie’s wasn’t missing beats, just beating hard and fast. He could hear it pounding in his earhole, thumping against pillow.
He lay on his narrow bed, scratching his hairy chest instead of his head and staring at Macka’s empty bed, lit tonight by a full moon, and he blamed his twin for their heart attack too. They’d shared the flu every year or so, shared the measles, mumps, chicken pox and a few attacks of the clap. That bastard didn’t have the stamina to satisfy a woman with that Sydney slut’s appetites. Wherever Macka was, he was dying – and not doing it alone.
He missed that ugly bastard. He missed his voice from the other bed, missed his snore, and knowing that he was dying on top of his slut – or she on top of him while Bernie died alone, was enough to kill any man.
For an hour he lay there, wondering if he ought to wake his mother, then at around one o’clock his heart attack moved southward to where hard-boiled eggs, a tin of salmon, raw onion and cucumber attempted to unite.
He lay on his back, his gut bubbling, the moonlight tormenting him. He missed Macka more on moonlit nights and, near two, he rolled from his bed determined to cover that window.
As he moved, gas exploded from his rear end, then again while fighting on a pair of trousers, and with no one to blame other than himself, he got out of that room fast, closed his door and went out the back door to blast in the moonlight.
As kids, that moon had called him and Macka out to play and, blasting every eight or ten yar
ds, he followed the pathway they’d used on many a moonlit night, through the park where the bandstand was lit up as bright as day, across Park Street, and across the football oval to the cemetery’s six foot high cyclone wire fence, where he stood getting rid of gas beside a peppercorn tree he remembered as being much smaller.
They’d cut a hole in the wire behind that tree, he and Macka, cut it one moonlit night with their father’s wire cutters, then used that hole to climb through to the cemetery where they’d decorated tombstones. Denham, the local copper back then, had been hiding behind old Cecelia Morrison’s stone one night. They’d scrambled out through that hole and he couldn’t.
And not much use looking for it tonight. If he found it he wouldn’t be able to squeeze through. Walked on then and in through the small cemetery gate to follow the gravelled paths he’d walked with Maisy until he found the raw wound where the bones of his – or Macka’s – only offspring lay.
His sisters had kids, grown-up kids who had kids of their own. He was Uncle Bernie to the multitudes, old Uncle Bernie who owned a sawmill and a black ute and not much else. He should have had a ton more money in the bank. Blown it on new utes, the gee-gees, grog and smokes. Easy come, easy go.
He stood a while beside Margot’s grave, blasting rotten egg gas – and maybe it was the wrong place to be doing it, so he backed off and found his way to old Cecelia Morrison née Duckworth’s stone, feeling no guilt about blasting there. He could just about remember that super superior old bugger.
Poor old Norman was in with his mother now, poor harmless old Norman dead in his bed for three days before they found him – and found crazy Amber, his wife, standing on a chair, cleaning out her bathroom cupboard.
The moon lit the three angels guarding Cecelia’s tombstone, as it had on other nights when Bernie and Macka had added a few missing appendages. No chalk in his pockets tonight but a lot of bad memories rolling in his gut.
They’d told Jenny they were going to sacrifice her on that cement slab for a bit of good weather.
You stink like a pair of pole cats. Let me up.
A swarm of goose bumps rising thick on Bernie’s soul, he stepped back, remembering the night they’d deflowered little Jenny Morrison on that slab, he and Macka – which most of the time he remembered like something he’d been told that they’d done, or maybe like one of the roles he’d played in the school concerts.
Still real to Jenny. She hated his guts.
They hadn’t meant to do it. They hadn’t. She’d been like one of their sisters, her and Sissy both. They’d been mucking around, that’s all. They’d found her sitting on the oval fence, listening to the band music, and decided to have a bit of fun with her, that’s all. Dragged her through the hole in the fence and held her down on that stone.
I forgot to bring me sacrificial dagger.
Have you got something that would do the job, because by the Jesus, I have.
I dare you.
Don’t you dare me, you ugly bastard.
If Macka hadn’t done it first, Bernie wouldn’t have – or maybe he would have. Didn’t know now if he would have or he wouldn’t have. Didn’t know if he was coming or going, what he thought or didn’t think, or if what he thought he thought was what he thought or what he thought he ought to think, if what he felt was what he thought he ought to feel or if he felt it.
Still erupting from time to time he walked the moonlit paths to the fence and the peppercorn tree, and he found the hole, or found where it had been. Someone had repaired it with twists of wire.
Nothing stayed the same. This place wasn’t the playground it had once been – not since they’d carried his father out here. Bernie had found him dead in the mill office, halfway through filling the pay envelopes. No one had been paid that Friday and not one bugger had complained about not being paid. There wasn’t a man in town who hadn’t respected George Macdonald.
Or Dawny.
She haunted his dreams. Still nagged the hell out of him at times. Eight sisters he had, all older. Seven now. One by one they’d die and be brought out to this bloody place. Maisy would go next – if she was lucky. Then Maureen. She was pushing seventy.
‘A man would be better off having a fast heart attack and going first,’ he muttered, and he went home to drape a blanket over his curtain rod.
It kept the moon outside where it belonged.
ODD COUPLES
Someone may have once told Amber Morrison that cleanliness was next to godliness. She may have taken those words to heart. Experts who studied the workings of the human mind might have diagnosed her obsessive desire to eradicate every speck of dust, every smear of grime from her world as a desire for inner cleanliness, which, to those who knew her history, could suggest she possessed a conscience.
They’d be wrong. Had Amber bothered to self-diagnose she’d have blamed the twenty-two years spent on her mother’s fifteen acres, shovelling chook dung from the floors of fowl pens, raking up goat and horse dung, sweeping up the muck her mother tracked into their two-roomed hut on her working boots. Gertrude Foote’s idea of cleanliness had differed from that of her daughter.
The hut of Amber’s childhood had burnt to the ground five days before Christmas. She’d read every report on the tragedy with relish, had read every news item aloud to Lorna, who had also shown interest.
In April of 1978 Amber read a brief report on the inquest into the death of Margot Macdonald Morrison, disinterested in the one who had died in the fire or in how she’d died. It was the details, the accompanying photograph, that caught her interest. She knew exactly where the cameraman had been standing when he’d taken the photograph, and at what time of day.
She stared at the walnut tree a mite too long, long enough for Lorna to reach out talon-tipped fingers to tap the newspaper. ‘Are we reading or dreaming this morning, Duckworth?’
Her teeth exposed in what served Amber as a smile, she turned the page.
Six days a week Elizabeth Duckworth read aloud to her benefactor. Between ten and twelve each morning they sat at the dining room table, the broadsheet newspaper spread between them, the items of interest to Lorna circled by Lorna in red. Given good light and the aid of a magnifying glass, she could read, though her sight, damaged in the accident that had given birth to her Duckworth guide-dog companion, Lorna’s sight had continued to deteriorate. Twice each day, Amber fetched eye-drops she dripped into Lorna’s eyes, which, when the beetle-brown iris disappeared beneath reptilian eyelids, looked like pickled onions.
Lorna’s injured nose produced its own drops. She’d always snorted. Now she sniffed and snorted. In her seventieth year, proud Miss Hooper was a sorry sight. She’d been likened to a totem pole in her youth – a black-draped pole now, short steel wire inserted into its head, its hawk nose mutilated.
Amber was several years her benefactor’s senior. Elizabeth Duckworth wasn’t. When she’d taken that name, she’d deducted seven years from her own birth date. And why not? If one was taking on a new identity, why not remove a few of the worst years from her past life?
There were days when she cursed her choice of name. Given her situation at the time of its choosing, ‘Duckworth’ had epitomised respectability and, above all else, Amber Morrison had required that undoubted respectability. Should have chosen Smith, Jones, Brown.
Had she recognised the bandage-swathed woman in the second hospital bed, she would have. She’d seen only the spikes of grey hair, the hospital-issue gown. Had she heard her wardmate’s natural voice she may have recognised her haughty tones, but for two weeks, Lorna’s mutilated nose had been packed with gauze; the tones she’d emitted were minimal and unfamiliar. Not until much later, until the bandages and gauze packing were removed, had Amber recognised Lorna Hooper’s snort of disdain, but by then, left with poor sight in one eye and less in the other, she’d become dependent on Miss Duckworth’s excellent vision.
Unsociable was not a word to describe Amber’s benefactor. Antisocial, uncharitable, demanding, ill-te
mpered, an unrelenting enemy may have sufficed. However, to one who had lived for sixteen years with the insane, then for a few years more with the dregs of humanity, cohabiting with a tyrannical, evil-minded hag was, to Amber, next door to paradise – or her staid brick house set in a quiet Kew street was.
Amber delighted in Lorna’s wall to wall carpets. She vacuumed them with love. She delighted in the large expanses of outdoor concrete she swept daily, and in her spacious bedroom with its crisp white lace curtains and matching bedcover. Here, in paradise, she was living the clean life she’d craved since childhood.
Joanne Hooper’s fine furniture filled Lorna’s rooms. Joanne Hooper’s delicate ornaments, locked away in a dark sideboard for years, had been removed from their tomb, washed and placed once again on display.
Lorna’s obsession with church was the one uncomfortable stone in Amber’s comfortable life. Church rubbed her up the wrong way, or the mother and daughter, Alma and Valda Duckworth, who attended Lorna’s church did. They’d moved into a house little more than a block and a half from Lorna’s locked gates. Since learning they were not the only Duckworths in the area, they’d become determined to link Miss Elizabeth into their clan.
Amber had a place there, on the periphery, through Norman’s mother Cecelia Morrison née Duckworth. Though considerably younger, Alma had been Norman’s first cousin. Amber had met her parents, Uncle Wilber and his wife. She’d met Alma’s oldest sister when the Duckworths came in force to Woody Creek to attend Norman’s mother’s funeral. It was their invasion that killed Amber’s second son, or forced him to make his entrance into the world prematurely.
Five times Amber had swollen with child. Only Sissy survived her birth. Amber had loved her girl, if only for living. A love not reciprocated. When Amber was released from the asylum with no place to go, Sissy had refused to see her. Your daughter has made a new life for herself—
A new life with the Duckworths. Amber had seen her with Alma and Valda Duckworth at Lorna’s church. On the first occasion, she hadn’t recognised the draughthorse of a woman who’d pushed ahead of her in the queue to get out of the church door. She’d recognised her later, as had Lorna.
