by Joy Dettman
‘What did they say, Jen?’
‘That as it is, they don’t want it!’
‘Concentrate on the road,’ he said.
‘I know where I’m going.’ She wanted a smoke. He didn’t like her smoke, didn’t allow it in his car. A smoke might have shut her mouth.
‘It could be the perfect family saga. You’ve got the dominant James Richard, then his two sons, one determined to live his own life, the other remaining with the old man so he might one day inherit the property, then dying before he did.’
He sat, his eyes closed, and whether he was listening or not, she said more.
‘Then Granny and Vern, the next generation. Gertrude and Vern, cousins? They were much more than cousins, and you know it. If you were prepared to write the truth about their relationship, you’d have the longest love story ever written.’
‘You’re the love story expert,’ he said.
‘There are a lot of readers who enjoy a love interest and I’m not ashamed to admit I’m one of them.’
‘I write historical fact, as Molly was historical fact.’
‘She was too much fact and not enough humanity – like your Hoopers are all fact and no humanity.’
‘No doubt it too needs a Wadimulla,’ he said.
‘No. It needs your old shepherd. His one-page letter told me who he was and he’d be a brilliant character – as would each of the four wives of old James Richard. That’s a story in itself, how the old coot kept marrying these young women, dragging them out to the middle of nowhere then letting them scream themselves to death in childbirth.’
‘I don’t recall mentioning the screaming.’
‘You didn’t. You silenced their screams, Jim, and that’s your main problem.’
‘Melodrama is your field,’ he said.
‘Every birth is a drama. Dying with a baby stuck inside you is very dramatic. Old James’ wives screamed for days. They exhausted themselves with their pushing and their screaming. Then they died – like I would have died if Jimmy had been my first baby, if Granny hadn’t got me down to the hospital.’
He’d put Jimmy away. He hadn’t mentioned his name in years. He usually walked away when she mentioned his name. He couldn’t walk away that day – and Jenny couldn’t put Jimmy away. Still saw that little six year old boy, still felt his sweaty little hand in her own, and she’d never put him away – and today she wouldn’t let go of the Hooper tome because it did have the makings of a brilliant family saga. She’d read every solid page of the thing and the story was in there, just lost in a mass of names and dates.
‘Who buys books, Jim?’
‘Those who read, Jen.’
‘Why are publishers in business?’
‘To print books?’
‘To print books, Jim, but business is the operative word. A business is in business in order to make money. Writers produce the raw product the publishing business turns into money. They’re not patrons of the arts.’
‘As the writer says to the novice.’
‘As the reader says to the pig-headed writer who has got himself so wrapped up in his power over words, he’s forgotten about me, the reader. You used to be a reader. Get your book scanned onto a computer disc then read it, as a reader. Your words coming off the screen might alter your perspective.’
‘My perspective is fine, Jen.’
‘Your perspective stinks. Your tome is a wallow of facts and dates that mean nothing to anyone other than you.’
‘I write history and history is full of facts and dates.’
‘Old rat mouth wasn’t Captain Cook or Australia’s first prime minister. He was a no one, and who gives a damn when he was born, when he sailed away from old England. If you’d shown him saying goodbye before he sailed, I might have given a damn. Your book needs truth.’
‘Look up truth in your computer’s dictionary. Unless your screen alters its perspective, it will define the word as a conformity to fact: reality: veracity.’
‘The truth of man and woman goes a damn sight deeper than their birth, marriage and death certificates.’
‘Watch the road.’
‘Unlike some, I always watch the road when I drive.’
She watched it while she wound down the window, while she found her cigarettes in her jacket pocket, found a lighter and, one handed, got it lit. It silenced her for a kilometre or two. It silenced her until she drove into rain and had to pitch her butt to close the window. Locked in then by heavy rain, the wipers doing what they could to clear her windscreen, she dropped her speed down to sixty, slowing other drivers on the two-lane road.
‘Your father’s chapter tells the reader that he was a successful farmer, a mill owner, town councillor and a respected man who in midlife married a forty year old widow who gave him a son, ten months after the wedding. I knew Vern Hooper. He might be in there somewhere, but if he is, he’s as flat and lifeless as a cardboard cut-out. Whatever your father was, no one could call him a cardboard man.’
‘Stop the car until the rain eases.’
‘There’s nowhere to stop.’
‘Stop the car. I can’t see the road.’
‘There are a lot of things you can’t see lately. Did you see Katie?’
‘She’s very visible.’
‘You used to know how to talk to babies. You dodged Katie.’
‘Enough!’
‘It’s not enough, and you’re not either lately. Tell me what’s going on in your head.’
He turned his face to the window and a kilometre or two on, she drove out of the rain, and one by one the tail of vehicles following her whizzed by, and when the road had cleared behind her, she wound her window down again and reached for another cigarette. Got one out, then dropped the packet. He picked it up, crumpled it and aimed it towards the open window. It hit her, landed on her lap.
‘That, at least, was an uncensored response,’ she said. ‘Remember the censors’ blackout during the war? One of your letters was more blackout than words.’ No reply. ‘You’ve become your own censor. Every word you say is censored, as is every sentence you put on paper.’ No reply. ‘Your head is so involved in blocking out whatever it is that you don’t want to remember, you’re turning into a cardboard man. The Jim Hooper who made Jimmy censored nothing.’
‘Goddamn you,’ he said.
‘He did, at birth – and you too. Your father married your mother for her sawmill and her first husband’s house and his money – and to nark Granny, who wouldn’t marry him because she had brains enough to know what she’d be getting herself into if she did. That’s what you need to tell your reader, how he was a dominating, cold-hearted bastard of a man who for three years allowed me and Jimmy to believe that you were dead.’
He slapped both palms on the dashboard. ‘Stop.’
‘I’ll stop when you talk to me.’
He didn’t talk so she didn’t shut up.
‘Tell them too how that mean-hearted old bastard believed it was his God given right to take my son away from me and raise him to think his mother was the town trollop – which is how you’ve been treating me lately – like some worn-out old bugger you keep around because she can cook. Well, she can write too.’
‘It’s shit!’ he said.
‘Excellent uncensored response. Your tome isn’t shit, Jim. It’s too dry to be shit. Any highlights in it are so buried in your four-syllable intellect, your reader becomes breathless attempting to get to the end of each line.’
‘What do you want from me?’ he yelled.
‘A book I can read, not an obese attack of words, written by a hung-up English professor with a guilty conscience. You’ve taken a pair of cowyard boots and plastered them with boot polish in the hope it will hide where they’ve been.’
‘Tell me where they’ve been, Jen.’
‘Wallowing in wet cow dung and my blood and guts, that’s where. Telling it as it was won’t make me like those boots, but I might respect their bloody honesty – and yours too.’
In November of that year, his Hooper tome was rejected again. In February of 1990, Jenny drove to Willama to post Sent in Chains up to Sydney. She’d taken too long to return it. The publisher had probably forgotten it. They’d suggested the novel could stand ten thousand words more. She’d given them an extra twenty thousand. She was on her way home, her mind still with the manuscript, when she heard a siren on her tail. It was a first. Woody Creek’s brand new constable wrote her a speeding ticket before she knew his name was Quick.
Constable Quick wrote more speeding tickets that week. The road to Willama was straight, flat and newly bitumined. Then he confiscated Maisy’s driving licence. Few blamed him for that. She’d developed a bad habit of backing out first and looking over her shoulder later. A cop car is the wrong car to back into, and it’s never a good idea to accuse a man in blue of coming too fast around the corner.
Bernie bought her a four-wheeled, top of the range electric runabout, known locally as a gopher – they’d go far enough for most on a charged battery. Maisy drove it into Jenny’s yard on a Tuesday in early March. A more silent beast than her Chrysler, she crept up on the chained dogs and frightened six months of sex out of them – hopefully.
Jenny and John admired her new set of wheels. They test-drove her gopher around the garden.
‘The salesman said they’ll do twenty-five kilometres on a fully charged battery,’ Maisy said. ‘I’ve ordered a spare.’
Jenny should have asked why she needed a spare battery. She found out why on Friday. Val, Lenny Hall’s wife, sighted her seven kilometres short of Mission Bridge. Maisy had managed to disconnect the flattened battery and connect up the new, but her gopher refused to go. Val Hall waited with her until two of the Watson boys came along in their farm truck. They transported her gopher home. Val drove Maisy. Then, the following Tuesday, Bernie Macdonald’s ute drove into the yard.
Jenny stood inside her screen door and watched him get out from behind the wheel, watched him walk around the ute and take his mother’s arm while she stepped out, and the dogs, so attuned to Jenny’s emotions, strained to get off their chains and eat meat. Through the security mesh she watched him approach the steps, then climb up the steps to the veranda. She was closer to him than she’d been in thirty years, close enough to see the age of him. Too close. She stepped back.
‘I’ll give you a beep at half past three,’ he said, and returned to his ute. Jenny opened her security door.
‘He hid my battery charger. I can’t find it anywhere,’ Maisy said.
‘I would have tossed it in the bin. I heard what you got up to,’ Jenny said.
‘I was all right, and I paid enough for that spare battery. You’d think that they could have charged it up for me.’
‘How did you plan on getting home?’
‘Bernie would have picked me up.’
‘I would have driven you down there too if you’d asked me.’
‘I hate being dependent on people,’ Maisy said, settling herself in her usual chair so she could look out both the window and the door. ‘Are we doing your taping thing today?’
‘If you feel like it.’
‘I thought of something this morning that you might be interested in. I was talking to Hilda O’Brien about poor old Dottie Martin. She’s fading away to a shadow. Anyway, we got onto how Dottie damn near died in a diphtheria epidemic when we were kids and how your gran saved her life and half a dozen more with a spoon handle.’
Jenny set up Jim’s tape recorder with her Maisy tape, turned it on and went about making a pot of tea. Maisy didn’t like teabags. They were the lazy way of making tea, she claimed. Jenny had become one of the lazy – except on Tuesdays.
‘Hilda remembers watching your gran wrap a bit of flannel around a spoon handle, dip it in kerosene, or a mixture of kerosene and something else, then poke it down Dottie’s throat to break the membrane that used to grow over the windpipe or something. She’d be interesting to get on your tapes. I’ll bring her around with me sometime if you like.’
Jenny didn’t like. ‘No thanks, Maisy.’
‘What are you going to do with what we talk about?’
‘Lock it away in a time capsule,’ Jenny said. Since Paul had given her his old computer she’d been filling a file she’d named Granny – with Elsie gone, it somehow seemed more important to trap Gertrude Foote in something more substantial than her memory.
‘Bernie told me that you sold your gran’s land,’ Maisy said.
‘It seemed like the right thing to do at the time,’ Jenny said.
‘Because of Elsie?’
‘Because of a lot of things, Maisy.’ Because Ray’s insurance account was empty. Because Jim had lost interest in chasing high interest, because inflation was eating into his capital, because she wanted that land to have another life.
‘That new owner has got twice as many cows as old Joe had,’ Maisy said.
‘That’s the way of the new world. Get bigger or get out of the game.’
‘Bernie is thinking about getting out of the sawmill game. Those new people who built on John’s land spend their lives complaining to the council about the noise.’
Never a silence in that kitchen when Maisy came. She knew everyone, knew the ins and outs of the local news the Willama Gazette didn’t mention. She was still talking when the ute horn beeped at three thirty on the dot, and by the time Jenny walked her visitor to the front door, he was waiting on the veranda to take charge.
Georgie phoned that night. The publisher had made an offer for Sent in Chains.
And God save her – not that he’d ever listened.
PART THREE
COMMUNICATION
May, 1991
Dear Juliana,
My great, great-grandmother’s name was Molly Flanagan and she was sent in chains to Australia in the early eighteen hundreds. My sisters and I are wondering if your Molly Flanagan was a real person . . .
July, 1991
Dear Juliana,
It’s two o’clock in the morning and I just finished your book. I bought it this morning to take with me on holiday, then made the mistake of opening it. I couldn’t put it down . . .
December, 1991
Dear Juliana,
My name is Angela Luccetto. I bought your book because of your name but read it with great enjoyment. The sister of my grandmother, also a Juliana Conti, disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1923. According to family legend, her husband, a banker and a very rich man, took her on a world cruise and didn’t bring her home. He told the family she’d decided to stay on with friends in Australia. That was the last my grandmother heard of her sister.
I have enclosed a photograph . . .
January, 1992
Dear Juliana,
I was given your book as a slightly used Christmas present by my mother. She said she bought it because of Wadimulla on the cover. Her grandmother was an Aboriginal woman. My mother ended up reading it before she gave it to me and she said to tell you she loved every word, as I did. I found Molly’s relationship with Wadimulla and his family group, and the loss of Joeyboy, very moving . . .
February, 1992
Dear Juliana,
I was given your book by an Australian friend for Christmas. Your name is very familiar to me. It was my maternal grandmother’s name. I was adopted at birth and know little of my natural family’s history, other than, like you, my Juliana was of Italian origin, and that she separated from her husband, had a love affair with her doctor, and in 1923, died in giving birth to my biological mother. She was buried nameless in a country cemetery where for twenty years her identity remained a mystery.
I congratulate you on your novel. I too am a writer, and well recall the delight of holding that first copy of my novel to my heart. May you write many more.
My regards,
Cara
Juliana’s mail came via the publisher to Georgie, who filed each item. She replied to the fan mail with a half-page lett
er she had on file, only changing the name before it was printed and posted. When she deleted Joan and typed in Cara, she knew who would read that copy. During the weekend she’d spent with her in that tiny Armadale unit, Cara had picked Georgie’s brains for family information. She’d taken pages of notes on the Juliana Conti/Itchy-foot story.
I too am a writer . . .
What did she write? An avid reader, Georgie hadn’t come across a book by Cara Norris or Grenville.
Again she read the letter. Chris Marino had said she’d called from London. The return address on the letter was London, c/o Hillary Rowe. Did she write under a pseudonym, and why Hillary Rowe?
For ten seconds Georgie considered enclosing a personal note. For ten more she considered putting Cara in touch with Angela Luccetto. Knew what that would lead to. Cara would mention Jennifer Hooper and the Luccetto woman would turn up in Woody Creek. Cara’s letter had been written to Juliana Conti, the writer who, according to her biog, was the second daughter of Italian immigrants, born on 11 April 1939, midway between Australia and Italy. She was the mother of two daughters and resided with her husband on a property in Gippsland where they bred dogs – Georgie’s fiction.
She reached for the printed letter, signed it, the J dominant, the smaller C trailing into a squiggle, a circular dot over the tail of the squiggle.
‘Done?’ Paul asked. ‘It’s going on eleven.’
‘If not for him, she’d be doing this herself, and enjoying it too.’
‘Has he seen a doctor?’
‘She can’t get him near one.’
The filing cabinet was to the left of her computer. She filed Cara’s letter in the Juliana file, closed the drawer and thought of Christmas, pleased Katie wouldn’t remember it. She’d known Jim for twenty years but never known him, as in known who lived inside him. He was an intelligent, pleasant bloke, very well mannered. He hadn’t been at Christmas time. He’d eaten with them, then gone to the bathroom where he’d remained locked in for an hour. Paul diagnosed prostate problems. Georgie’s diagnosis placed the problem higher up, somewhere between his ears.
She knew he’d come home from the war screwed up in the head. She knew third or fourth hand that he’d spent six or so years in private clinics. Nobby had found that out from Ian Hooper, Jim’s cousin, who’d kept in touch with Margaret Hooper until she died. According to Ian Hooper, Jim had been given electric shock therapy at one of the clinics, which had apparently sorted out his head but wiped out his memory. According to Jenny, he had nightmares, he tried to sleepwalk – not easy to do on one leg and a stump. According to Jenny, he was back to what he’d been when she’d visited him in a Melbourne hospital, after they’d first brought him home from the Jap prison camp.
