Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  *

  Margot watched the dust and feathers fly as Georgie drove up the track to the open boundary gate, then she walked through the house to continue her search for her comb.

  The best part of the renovation was the east side. The working bee men had moved half of a farmhouse to the site, a sitting room, a tiny passage, bedroom and a veranda. Those two rooms were furnished like other houses, the sitting room with a couch and matching chairs, stored for years in the Macdonalds’ shed. Ray’s bedroom suite was in Margot’s bedroom. It was supposed to be Jenny’s room – if she ever came back. She wasn’t getting it. Its door had a key.

  Margot loved looking at the house from the east side. It looked like a proper house; it even had a cane chair on the veranda.

  No one approached from the east side, or entered via the east side door – not by day. Teddy Hall crept in that way by night then locked the bedroom door behind him. He and Margot did what they liked in that bedroom. And tonight they’d have all night to do what they liked in it.

  The first time Teddy had done it Margot hadn’t thought he’d be game enough to do it again, but only two days later she’d gone out to the shed to get wheat for the chooks and Teddy had walked in. There was no lock on the shed, no door on it, and it had been about half past five and still light.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing over here?’ she’d said.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he’d said, then he’d taken the basin from her hands and they’d done it on the bag of wheat and all the time he’d been doing it he’d tormented her.

  ‘Mum’s milking the goats. Why aren’t you yelling out for her, dobber?’

  She hadn’t wanted to, that’s why. Nothing exciting had ever happened to her. Never in her life had she done one single thing that everyone hadn’t known about. No one knew about her and Teddy, and they never would either.

  ‘You’re like opening up one of those crates of donated junk Bernie Macdonald dumped down here,’ he’d said last Saturday night. ‘It looks like there’s nothing worth having in you, but dig down deep enough and you’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’

  People who were addicted to drugs hated those drugs. Teddy said he was addicted to sex. She was too. She still hated him, but she took him anyway.

  Perhaps in the dead of night Granny’s ghost stood at a window shaking her head at the goings-on in Ray’s double bed. Perhaps on the darkest nights when Margot heard a tap-tap-tap at the window, it was Granny, tapping out a ghostly warning. Margot had heeded few of her warnings.

  *

  Georgie had. She still missed Granny and knew that she continued to walk her land at night. Every time the light globe in the old kitchen had to be replaced, she knew Granny had been about. ‘Who needs their electric lights when we’ve got that old moon,’ she used to say.

  Granny had never trusted electricity. Had never trusted cars either. She’d named anything faster than twenty miles an hour speeding. Georgie was behind the wheel of Jack’s car and touching fifty on straight sections of the road.

  Until ten minutes ago she’d never driven further than the outskirts of Willama. Tonight Jack had let her drive through that town. They were out the other side now, and heading into territory unfamiliar to Georgie.

  ‘Did you go to the Willama high school, Jack?’

  ‘I was thirteen when the war ended,’ Jack Thompson said.

  That war supplied timing for many things. Everyone said it – before the war, since the war. Georgie couldn’t remember it, other than the day it ended. She knew they’d still been fighting when Jenny had come home from Sydney with Jimmy. He’d been three at the time, so it must have been in 1944. She remembered staring at the big girl, who Granny had said was Georgie and Margot’s mother. She hadn’t looked like a mother.

  Later she’d learnt that Jimmy had a father and he’d been killed in the war, which could have been the first time Georgie had asked about her own father. ‘He’s in Sydney,’ Jenny had said. He’d been in jail at the time. She hadn’t told her that.

  ‘Why did you join the cops, Jack?’

  ‘Dad was a cop,’ he said.

  Probably locked up mine, Georgie thought, wondered what he’d think if he knew Jack was taking the daughter of Laurie Morgan, the redheaded water-pistol bandit, home to eat Christmas dinner.

  For weeks she’d done her best to wriggle out of meeting his parents, and was beginning to wish she’d wriggled harder. But he’d taught her to drive, and they were mates – and her hanging around with him could have been saving him from a life sentence of Woody Creek. A few of the town girls gave him the eye – not that he was anything special to look at, he was single, that’s all, and single blokes were thin on the ground in Woody Creek. Most of them left school and left town.

  ‘Keep your eyes skinned for roos along this stretch,’ Jack warned. ‘They’re in plague proportions out here.’

  She shouldn’t have been driving his cop car. He’d probably get into strife if someone dobbed on him, though he didn’t seem too worried about it.

  Since he’d given her a licence in October, she’d been driving Charlie’s ’47 Ford ute around the town. He’d bought it cheap after his daughter left home with his sedan and a trailer load of his best furniture. No one would bother to steal his ute. About the best anyone could say for it was it had four wheels and a motor that usually went. The cop car was almost new; she loved driving it.

  Jenny had said in one of her letters that she’d driven a car from Melbourne to Geelong when Georgie had been a peanut in her belly, that the sniff of petrol must have got into her bloodstream. It probably got into it before that. Laurie Morgan had stolen cars along with pretty much anything else.

  Didn’t want to think about her water-pistol bandit tonight. Didn’t know why she was – except for Jack’s father being an ex-cop. If he’d been a cop in 1939 he could have helped in the arrest. Jenny had said that there’d been six or more police at the Geelong station when they’d caught Laurie.

  ‘How long has your family lived in Molliston, Jack?’

  ‘I was born there. My parents have been there since the twenties – not together. Mum lost her husband, Dad lost his wife – and then there was me.’

  ‘I can’t work out why anyone who managed to get away from one tin-pot little town would move back to another one,’ she said.

  ‘I get to see more of my folks. They’re no spring chickens.’

  ‘If not for Charlie’s broken arm, I’d be in Frankston now.’

  ‘He’s not your responsibility, Georgie.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Is your mother planning to stay down there?’

  ‘She’s got a job. She won’t get one if she comes back here.’

  ‘I thought she got her husband’s insurance from the mill accident.’

  ‘She says it’s for Raelene and Donny, not for her.’

  ‘She’s his widow,’ Jack said.

  ‘She didn’t live with him, not since ’47. He lived with us and we looked after his kids.’

  ‘Does she pay much for Donny’s care?’

  ‘I don’t think she pays anything.’ She didn’t pay rent either. She worked for a friend at Frankston, and lived in two rooms behind her health resort, a three-minute walk from a beach – and she wanted Georgie to move down there with her.

  She might too – if she could talk Charlie into trusting someone else in his shop. In March she’d be nineteen, and since a few weeks before her fourteenth birthday she’d been standing behind Charlie’s counter. She’d managed the shop single-handed for the three weeks he’d been in hospital and the old folks’ home.

  He wasn’t her responsibility, but he was more grandfather than employer. He called her Rusty; she called him Charlie; and since his broken arm, he’d been paying her a full adult male’s wage – which could have been another reason why she wasn’t in Frankston. She was stuffing money into the bank, and if she continued stuffing it in, she’d be able to buy her own ute soon. In
Frankston, she’d be lucky to get a job that paid half of what Charlie paid.

  He was a problem. If he’d ever had any fear of authority, old age had discarded it. Since she’d started working for him, he’d been helping himself to any large note that landed in his cash drawer – taking back some of the money he’d lost during the depression, he said. It hadn’t concerned her until she’d started doing his bookwork. She did what she could. His ute’d had phantom brake linings last month.

  If Jack knew how she balanced those books he wouldn’t be taking her home to meet his parents – who would read more into her agreeing to have Christmas dinner with them than she meant for them to read. Didn’t know why she had agreed, except this Christmas would be only the second of her life without Granny, and without Jenny, too, she couldn’t face the bedlam of Christmas with Elsie and Harry and their horde. They were like family, but had been more Granny’s family. She had raised Elsie.

  Shouldn’t have agreed to go. She liked Jack, liked the way he’d adopted Charlie since he’d broken his arm. He’d tracked down Hilda, Charlie’s daughter, had found her widowed and living in Sydney with her daughter and son-in-law. The son-in-law told Jack that they’d try to get down to Willama. They hadn’t, but one of them had spoken to the hospital and asked them to find a place for Charlie in the old folks’ annex.

  He might have been old enough – he was pushing ninety – but he didn’t consider himself old enough and had spent his days absconding, so Georgie kidnapped him and brought him home to his corner in the storeroom. Until the plaster was removed from his arm, Jack had taken him over to the police station to help him shower.

  A good bloke, Jack Thompson. Had she been older, she might have liked him a lot more than she did.

  ‘That’s Dad’s old station,’ he said, pointing left as they broached the top of a hill and were too suddenly in the centre of a town.

  MOLLISTON, POPULATION 450.

  Just a tiny town, perched on top of a hill. Woody Creek had a larger population. Woody Creek land was flat. The town had space to sprawl. No sprawl in Molliston. Shops and houses clustered around a massive old gum tree growing on top of the hill. Georgie slowed to stare, then to circle the tree. No hotel.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Down the hill,’ he directed. ‘We’re a good mile out.’

  ‘The drunks sober up on their way home?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ he said.

  MILES AWAY

  A time of family, Christmas. Finding staff willing to work through the holidays wasn’t easy. Jenny had nothing better to do, and was so grateful to Veronica Andrews and her doctor partner she would have worked seven days a week for them without pay.

  She’d known Vroni in Armadale, as a card-playing friend, and later as her saviour when she’d aborted two of Ray’s babies. She’d already had a daily battle to feed the ones she’d had – and she’d had no intention of tying herself to Ray with babies. Vroni had saved her life again by offering her a job and accommodation in the servants’ quarters behind the guesthouse – or saved her from Woody Creek.

  In a bygone era, there had been five servants’ rooms built alongside a big old kitchen. Vroni’s doctor had turned two of them into one and set up a modern surgery there. He’d turned two more into comfortable bedrooms, and one into a modern bathroom. A few of his city colleagues recommended a week of sea air to a frantic female patient, or to the frantic mother of a patient. Every week or two a guest arrived in a taxi, feeling so unwell she was placed in isolation, out the back, where within a day or two she was feeling much better.

  Jenny and Raelene, Ray’s seven-year-old daughter, lived in the western bedroom, beside the old kitchen. They used the bathroom when there was no guest in isolation, used Vroni’s when there was. Jenny delivered meals to those special guests, made their beds, and was compensated well for her tight mouth.

  She’d thought nothing of living beside an abortion clinic until she’d run into Jim Hooper at Flinders Street Station. She thought about it now – but if not for Vroni, she wouldn’t have been at the station to run into Jim. It was Vroni who had talked her into allowing Raelene to meet Florence Keating, her natural mother.

  Natural? Mothers nursed their kids through chickenpox, measles, sore throats, multiple colds. Mothers tucked their kids into bed at night, kissed them, changed the sheets when they wet the beds. They didn’t turn up seven years later and start calling themselves the natural mother.

  ‘Like it or not, kiddo, you need to pacify her or you’ll end up in court,’ Vroni had said. ‘Raelene knows you’re her real mother.’

  Maybe she did, but she liked being treated like baby Jesus at the Keatings’. Jenny had left her with them for two hours in October. The Box Hill station was on the same train line as Ringwood, where Jim had told her he was living in a caravan behind Nobby’s house, an old army mate Jenny had met in Sydney the week she’d spent there with Jim and ten-month-old Jimmy. Nobby and his wife, Rosemary, had greeted her like a long-lost friend that first afternoon. Jim had kissed her hello; the visit had started out so well. It hadn’t continued well.

  The night, at Flinders Street Station, when she’d sighted Jim’s head above the crowd, she’d thought Jimmy might be with him. He’d told her then that Jimmy was with his sister Margaret. She’d told him in Ringwood that she wanted to see their son.

  ‘I’m not in touch with them, Jen,’ he’d said.

  ‘But you see Jimmy?’

  He hadn’t seen Jimmy since 1947. Margaret and her husband had adopted him a few months before Vern Hooper’s death. She’d done the wrong thing, then, she’d opened her mouth and let her tongue loose, but it had been like losing Jimmy a second time.

  ‘How could you let her adopt him? He’s our son. I gave him to you. I thought he was safe with you.’

  And he’d withdrawn from her, had folded in on himself. She’d watched it happening, had seen his eyes grow distant, seen his big Hooper hands begin to tremble.

  She’d seen Nobby’s reaction too, Rosemary’s.

  He wasn’t well. At the station she’d thought he was. She’d got out of there fast, left without a word to anyone, afraid of what she’d done and hating him for his weakness and for allowing his dithering bitch of a sister to get her hands on Jimmy. Hated the Hooper name that day.

  In the taxi Nobby’s house had been minutes from the station. It might have been a ten-minute walk if she’d known where she was going. She’d got hopelessly lost, had been late picking up Raelene and for two weeks after Ringwood she’d felt . . . adrift.

  Then Nobby turned up at Frankston. He’d done most of the talking. He’d told her how he’d found Jim, where he’d found him, told her of Jim’s years of shock treatment, how his memory had been shot to hell by their electricity.

  ‘I thought he was well,’ she said. ‘He’d seemed well at the station.’

  ‘Our team had just won the premiership, Jen. He’s coming good. Most of the time he’s good. He runs my timber-yard office.’

  ‘How could he not have even seen his son since ’47?’

  ‘We thought the same thing a few years back. We tried to put him in touch with his family. He won’t have a bar of them.’

  ‘Is he all right now?’

  ‘As right as rain. The day you took off I got him on the booze. He likes a drink and it’s better for him than pills, or me and Rosemary reckon it is. He told me he wrote his last will and testament in ’47, leaving Jimmy and his money to you, then he tried to hang himself with his dressing-gown cord. He said his sisters and old man let him think his boy was with you – until his old man kicked the bucket. The sister had adopted Jimmy by then.’

  ‘How long has he been with you, Nobby?’

  ‘Anzac Day ’55.’

  ‘I saw him at a Melbourne hospital a year after the war ended. He didn’t know me. Where was he between then and when you found him?’

  ‘Hospitals. He doesn’t remember much about any of them. He was living behind a Chinese restaurant
when we found him.’

  ‘His father would have left him money.’

  ‘He wouldn’t touch it if he had. He told us once he had his own money. If he has, he’s got no interest in it. It’s like he’s doing a bit of a balancing act on a tightrope right now, Jen. He still crashes off it from time to time, but these days we’ve worked out how to get him back up.’

  ‘Bless you, Nobby,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay away.’

  ‘Don’t you even go thinking about doing that. For a week after he saw you at the station, he was damn near doing cartwheels on his tightrope. He knew it was you when the taxi pulled up out front that day, and he lit up like a beacon.’

  ‘I can’t . . . I never could walk on eggshells, and not about Jimmy.’

  ‘He blames himself for losing your boy. Back during the war he used to say that you and Jimmy were the best things that ever happened to him. I was with him over there until I took a bullet in my leg. Most of us when we got letters from home would rip them open where we stood. He’d take off with his. He kept them on him too. We’d be sitting in a hole, no light, no moon, and he’d have his photos out, looking at them on a pitch black night, reading your letters in the dark. He loved you, Jen, and still does.’

  ‘I’ve never taken his ring off. Even when I was married to Ray, I never took it off. I would have waited the rest of my life for him, and his family knew it. They let me think that he was dead.’

  Nobby had offered to drive her to Ringwood that day, to drive her home. She’d shaken her head. He’d kissed her cheek when he was leaving and told her to come around for dinner on Sunday.

  She hadn’t planned to go back, not that day. But she’d lost Jimmy first, and she’d known Vern Hooper and his daughters. Margaret hadn’t been able to keep her hands off Jimmy when he’d been five months old, and the Jim she’d seen at that city hospital wouldn’t have had a chance against them.

  She’d gone back on a Sunday in late November. Florence had wanted to give Raelene a little birthday party. She’d left her with them and found her way to Nobby’s house. It had been a good day. She hadn’t mentioned Jimmy or Woody Creek, not that day. Jim remembered the ring. She’d removed it, and he’d taken it from her hand to look at the engraving, Jen and Jim, 1942. He’d reached for a pair of glasses so he might see it more clearly.