by Joy Dettman
The Toyota was parked in her drive when she returned, Lila terrorising Jim on the veranda. John stood between two rabid dogs, safe from her attack.
‘You have to bring those mongrels back,’ Lila said.
‘They’re staying where they are,’ Jenny said, silencing the dogs with the matching leg bones of a cow. They would have preferred to sink their teeth into Lila’s more meaty legs, but accepted the bribe and lay down to gnaw.
‘I just got off the phone from Joe’s solicitor and he said you have to bring them back.’
‘Go away and spend your money. You worked hard enough to get it,’ Jenny said.
‘I won’t get a red cent unless I’ve got those mongrels.’
‘Which didn’t worry you when you left them on their chains to die. If Harry hadn’t found them, they would have been dead a week ago.’
‘I didn’t know what was in the mean old bugger’s will then, did I? Anyway, I’m here now and you have to bring them back.’
‘You’re two weeks too late. They’re mine.’
‘Well I’m telling you that you can’t have them. He signed most of his money over to his sons before he married me and he tied up the rest in a trust fund for his dogs. Unless I stay in the house and feed his mongrels I don’t get a red penny.’
‘Get a job like everyone else. You look young enough.’
‘You finally admit it?’ Lila said. ‘Anyway, his solicitor said I could sue you for pinching them. They’ve got pedigrees a mile long.’
‘They’ve got fleas too, and worms, and I’ve got witnesses to prove you left them for two weeks to starve on their chains, so charge me.’
‘You wouldn’t care if I starved.’
‘I’ll guarantee that when the last cow on earth is slaughtered, you’ll end up with one of its hind legs,’ Jenny said. ‘Go, Lila, or I’ll let my dogs off and you’ll need plastic surgery on your sagging backside.’
‘You’re blind jealous, that’s what’s wrong with you, and you never got over me marrying Macka.’
‘I pity him,’ Jenny said. ‘Want to know something else? I couldn’t stand old Joe Flanagan when he was alive, but by God, he’s gone up in my estimation since they buried him.’
‘Yeah? Well you should have heard what he used to say about you,’ Lila said.
‘He called you the winter boomerang,’ Jenny said. ‘It didn’t matter how far he pitched the thing, it kept on coming back – and I know exactly how he felt.’
*
Jim didn’t want the dogs. Had Amy not been so frail, had John owned dog-proof fences, he would have taken then. He’d recently lost his well-behaved dog who’d understood unfenced boundaries.
Maisy’s sheep farmer son-in-law said he’d take them, until he came around to get them and they told him in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going anywhere. They liked Jenny. They loved John. Gave Jim dirty looks when he ventured out to the veranda but no longer snarled at him. They used one of his old sweaters as bedding – John’s idea.
There had once been a gate to that driveway. They’d closed it when Trudy was small. Stopped closing it once she’d learnt not to wander from the yard. The years had buried it beneath a creeper, but it was still there. Two days of Jenny and John’s labour with saw and secateurs released a galvanised gate, still intact. They didn’t expect it to swing, but with a little oil applied to rusting hinges, it swung and latched.
‘Vern Hooper only ever bought the best,’ John said.
They were smart dogs and, of the two, Vern the more obedient to Jenny. She released him first from his chain. He had a sniff around, watered a couple of trees then returned to his chained mate where he remained until Amy approached Lorna and ended up scratching behind her ears. Jim, embarrassed by Amy’s lack of fear, came out to watch her release Lorna. She approached Amy, wanting more scratching. She sniffed Jim’s artificial leg. He froze, his hands raised, but she lost interest and sniffed her way to the closed gate where she barked her warning.
‘Bad dog,’ John said, and led her by the collar to the veranda. Three times she barked at that gate, and three times John led her back. She’d learn town manners or she’d know no freedom. She lay then to watch that gate but kept her distance from it.
Lila didn’t return for her meal tickets, but a letter arrived from her solicitor. It led to two nights of searching for old receipts. Jenny’s handbag was a gold mine, as were the pockets of John’s tweed jacket. A typed, itemised account for dog food, flea powder, chains, collars, worm pills, butcher’s bills, plus kennelling fees and petrol used while feeding the dogs twice a day at Joe’s property was posted to old Joe’s solicitor. A cheque for the total amount arrived by return mail.
LACY HOPKINS
In early November, a taxi arrived at Number 12, and Lacy Hopkins emerged from it, as did her many cases. She was followed soon after by a small removalist’s van. Powerless to prevent that homeless stray’s invasion of her house, Amber removed her earmuffs and left via the rear door. She walked. She rode a bus, a train, a tram. She stood for minutes at Lorna’s gates, remembering the clean calm comfort, the silence and serenity of that red-brick house.
Lost that day in wandering through a red haze of impotent anger. Couldn’t recall eating lunch. Weak and weary when she returned to Flinders Street Station, she sat a while to rest, and slept where she sat. Lost the hours between seven and ten, dreamed of Norman and awoke in fright, confused, alone and too far from home, and too hard to get home. Walked out to the taxi rank.
A young driver, a gentle boy, opened the door for her and helped her out. She tipped him well, and for that he walked with her to the door, found the right key and the keyhole. Then, his car lights gone, she stepped inside and into the dark, closed the door and, as she had many times before, made her way through the dark towards her bedroom with a hand on the wall.
And fell. Fell hard over boxes, bags. The noise of her fall might have woken a sleeper, but no one came. For minutes Amber lay as she’d fallen, shaken. Not until the shock eased did she feel the pain of her fall. Her left breast, her shoulder, hip, ear, and . . . moisture. Her first movement came from her right hand. It rose to wipe the left side of her face. Tears are salt water and she had no more to shed. Blood has a stickiness to it. She identified the moisture as blood, and got a knee beneath her.
She knew where she was. She could feel carpet beneath her knee. Her left hand held to her breast, her right hand felt for the familiar and found . . .
Wrong. Found Norman’s mother’s crystal cabinet. Knew its doors. Knew its curved central drawers. She’d polished them a thousand times. She knelt there, running both hands over carved timber. And she didn’t know where she was.
Using the crystal cabinet, she got her feet beneath her, then felt for the wall, then the light switch. Couldn’t find it – not where it should have been. She found one. And in that blinding white light everything was wrong. Her mother-in-law’s peacock feathers were there, in a brass urn, a long narrow urn with handles. The vase they belonged in was blue, blue/green, a china vase, and it should have been on Norman’s wireless.
The wireless was in the corner where it belonged, a walnut cabinet model chosen by him to match the crystal cabinet’s timber. She walked to it, her hand feeling for her glasses. Lost them in the fall, cut her nose with them. Looked for them on the floor beside the boxes. Ran her hand again over the crystal cabinet.
She’d married him for that cabinet, and for the dainty tea set with its gold-rimmed cups and delicate sugar basin. The cabinet was empty.
She turned in a half-circle towards the cardboard cartons where she’d fallen. The tea set would be in one of them. She’d forgotten something, that’s all. There was no need to panic. It would come to her. She turned to the feathers and the brass urn, certain she’d never seen that urn before. Walked to it, touched the feathers. Beautiful things, though dust gatherers, and they belonged on Norman’s wireless, which wasn’t his wireless but a television.
Gave up attemptin
g to work out where she was, whether she was old or young, dreaming or awake, but whoever had emptied that crystal cabinet was not getting away with it.
She opened the smaller carton. Didn’t find the gold-rimmed tea set, but as we do in dreams, she found previously unseen treasures. A crystal sweet set with a gold leaf pattern, a perfect cut glass vase. She found six crystal wine glasses. Found a lacquered bowl where Japanese ladies danced and, too weary to do more, she rested a moment on the couch to admire that bowl, to turn it in circles, watching the Japanese ladies dancing in an endless circle, and she thought of the six china sisters she’d found in the dark of Lorna’s cabinet, soiled sisters she’d bathed back to beautiful . . .
Amber slept where she sat, on the couch, the bowl on her lap, and woke to the voice from hell.
‘You had no right to touch Lacy’s things,’ Sissy yelled and Amber reached for the earmuffs she kept beside her bed. No earmuffs. No bed – then remembered why she had no bed.
‘She’s got blood everywhere,’ Lacy said. ‘She’s hurt herself, Sissy.’
And thus the two women in Sissy’s life met.
*
Twenty-two years Lacy had spent at her trade, before her marriage, after her marriage. She’d handled all types, the old and the young, the sweet natured and the foul. For years she’d cared for her mother, who’d progressed from fastidious to foul. Had she known Amber’s history, Lacy might have kept her distance. Sissy had mentioned that her father had died young, but withheld how he’d died. Lacy went to the bathroom to fetch a damp cloth. Amber went to her bedroom and closed her door.
Sissy had spoken for hours about her mother’s dementia. On that first day at Number 12, Lacy saw evidence of her dementia. Amber, earmuff clad, went about the house oblivious to its other occupants.
As she ever had with the elderly, Lacy smiled too much, she called Amber dear. She told her that she was a nurse and asked if she might have a look at Amber’s injured ear, her swollen nose. Amber left the house and returned in a taxi – late but in daylight – and she handed the driver a fifty-dollar note then walked away without her change.
‘That was a fifty-dollar note, dear, not a five. How far did he drive you?’ Lacy asked. Amber ignored her and walked to her room to fetch her earmuffs.
Lacy liked a tidy house. She was vacuuming the bedroom she shared with Sissy when Amber entered with a can of deodorant spray which she used liberally on Sissy’s frocks, her sheets, and in Lacy’s face when she dared to reach for the spray can. She dropped the vacuum cleaner and ran to the bathroom, and when she returned Amber had control of the vacuum.
Lacy bought two kilos of minced steak on pension day. She portioned it into four plastic bags which she flattened with a palm, sealed, then stored in the freezer. Amber opened the freezer, removed the minced steak and tossed it into the kitchen tidy. Lacy rescued it and returned it to the freezer. It went missing again that night.
She’d been patient but was becoming annoyed, and alone she took the bus to town where she bought two kilos more, then took over the kitchen for a day while turning that meat into a minced-steak stew, a meatloaf, bolognaise and a curry. She served the curry that evening. Amber scraped her meal into the kitchen tidy.
Reg in the front seat, the two women in the rear, the trio went to church on Sunday. Amber put a leg of lamb in the oven to roast. It was sizzling when the churchgoers returned, when Sissy’s stray peeled four onions, impaled them two by two on skewers, opened the oven and tossed them into the pan fat, her eyes daring Amber to remove them.
She didn’t. She stole Lacy’s skewers when she washed the dishes.
A cold war, it continued until one pension day in mid- December. The house was still Amber’s on pension days, but that day when the two returned, Sissy’s neglected hair had been cut short and bleached to the same shade as her homeless stray’s.
Amber stood, her back to the sink, until the shopping bags were heaved onto the table, a lump of minced steak removed from one and dumped determinedly on Amber’s sink where bacteria bred while they made tea, while they opened a packet of Tim Tams.
Then Lacy removed a large picture book from a plastic bag.
‘They wrote it,’ Sissy said to Amber.
Amber could see a family of sparrows stepping down to . . . to Norman’s railway station. She stepped closer to the table.
‘It’s them and the McPhersons,’ Sissy said.
Amber was staring at the station, at the family of sparrows, the Daddy Sparrow toting the family’s luggage, and beneath the sparrows the words J. and A. McPherson, J. and J. Hooper.
It was Norman’s stray, the motherless brat he’d decided to raise and the swine who’d ruined Sissy’s life. For a time Jim Hooper had been engaged to Sissy. Amber turned back to the sink and the mound of disease-riddled minced steak. It angered her. Sissy’s stray angered her. A world in which others were in control angered her.
There is a dark place where the damned dwell, where red mists rise to engulf and the fine threads of self-control unravel. Blame that meat, its blood seeping. Blame the television blaring in the parlour, and the barking dog, and Sissy’s stray blathering on about little Cathy, and little Sean and little Thomas. Get rid of her meat and she’d buy more. Get rid of her and there’d be another. Always another homeless stray to infiltrate the clean, the calm Amber required to survive, as there’d always be another stray dog to bark at that fence.
Amber picked up her handbag and walked out. She stood on the footpath for a moment, staring at the house she’d schemed to possess, the house she’d spent Amber’s and Elizabeth’s savings on making more than it had been. She’d chosen the carpet – and stained it with her blood. She’d chosen the drapes, the lounge suite, the washing machine, and that homeless stray had walked in and taken the lot – and Sissy.
Five babies Amber had carried. She walked away from the last of them that day to become Maryanne Brown. Rode the bus, the train, then rode a tram to Richmond where she used her private mailbox key to retrieve six envelopes and two bankbooks, Maryanne’s and Margaret’s. It was a long trip from Doveton. Once a month she emptied that box. She cashed Elizabeth’s cheques at the post office. They knew her there. They thought they knew her. A middle-aged woman asked after her health.
No chatter in Elizabeth Duckworth today. Amber zipped her notes into her handbag’s inner pocket and she went on her way. Such a grand game she’d played, but too old to play any more. Such a grand life she’d led as Elizabeth. Lost her. Lost her Royal Doulton vases. Lost her Waterford crystal bowl. Lost Number 12.
She had her pocket accounts, but in a world that had long outpaced her, how could she start again? Caught a tram into the city. Margaret Hooper’s bank was in Swanston Street. She made her way there, joined the queue. She was reaching for the correct envelopes when she stabbed her finger on one of the stray bitch’s skewers, in her handbag since the day of the roasted onions. She’d had plans for those skewers. Another plan that wouldn’t come to fruition. Dripping blood onto one of Margaret’s envelopes, she stood staring at it, and at her middle finger where blood oozed up rich and red. Aged skin rips like paper. A woman queuing behind her offered her a tissue. Amber took it, wrapped her finger and moved forward to pay in Margaret’s cheques then to withdraw what she’d paid in last month. She didn’t need the money, her pocket accounts were bulging, but Maryanne and Margaret had never allowed their balances to grow large.
Walked on then towards Maryanne’s bank, a red flower blooming on white tissue. Red for Christmas. She crossed over Bourke Street, wondering if Myers were ready to display their Christmas windows. How many days left until Christmas? Didn’t know. Didn’t care. Sissy’s stray would cook the Christmas chicken. Amber Morrison was redundant. And those magical windows had been unveiled for Amber to see one final time, and there was space to see them today. She pressed in between a woman with a fat brat of a child and an elderly male and his woman.
Alone between them. Always alone, though never alone in Kew. She
’d lived a companionable life there, had walked with Lorna, read with her, sat with her in theatres and restaurants, sat at her side in church each Sunday. Led a good and useful life until mud-eyed Sissy had ruined it. Born to ruin. Her birth had ruined Amber’s dreams of beautiful Ruby Rose. For years she’d tried to make her be Ruby Rose. She’d bought her pretty frocks, spent hours on her hair, Sissy’s one saving grace, that mass of heavy hair.
There was a little girl and she had a little curl,
right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good she was very, very good
and when she was bad she was horrid.
Amber was unaware she’d mouthed that old rhyme aloud until the brat pulled on her mother’s arm.
‘That lady said I was horrid, Mummy.’
The woman looked at the well-dressed lady, then took her daughter’s hand and they walked on, Amber watching fat little thighs rub together.
She sniffed. Smelled whining brat on the city air, smelled age on the old man at her side; his wife’s perfume brought back memories of Maisy.
The smells of life, she thought. She’d never forget the scent of her father’s hair. How many years had she waited for him to come back and take her away to his fine house with his maids to iron her pretty gowns and polish her fancy shoes?
A bud near ripe for the plucking.
Loved the scent of his hair. Loved him. Hated him when he hadn’t returned. Always confusing, the love, the hate. Confusing, too, how the eye recognised beauty while the heart rejected it.
Amber swayed but steadied herself against the plate glass while shaking the past from her mind. Old age too often sent the mind reeling back to yesterday.
Every year since ’61, she’d stood here. Next year’s display would be different and the year after that, and the year after that and soon she wouldn’t be here to see them. She placed her bleeding hand flat on the glass to bid those clockwork creatures goodbye, then walked on, her tissue lost, her injured finger leaving blood on her frock as she felt her breast, still bruised from her fall, painful, swollen and leaking red milk, fit only for the devil’s child. Felt the other breast, sucked flat and dry by Sissy.
