by Joy Dettman
‘They suit you,’ she’d said, and they did, they made him look like a professor. He’d never been the best-looking man in Woody Creek. Too tall, and not enough flesh to cover his bones. His cheekbones looked sharp, his long jaw as sharp. Didn’t know why she loved his face, but she did. And maybe he did still love her.
He’d walked out with her, walked to the corner, and would have walked further if she hadn’t told him to go back. He’d lost half of one leg in the war and his limp was bad.
She’d asked no questions about his missing leg, had tried not to look at his shoes, tried not to see Vern in his limp, in his face. His father had that same long jaw. Not Jim’s eyes though or his mouth, not his gentle ways.
She’d see him again tomorrow. Today she was playing carol singer cum waitress; Vroni playing hostess, not nursing sister; her doctor partner playing pianist instead of abortionist; and the guests all legitimate and over forty, other than a fourteen-year-old girl down here with her parents and wanting pudding and custard, not fruit salad, for sweets.
‘I don’t know why you wanted to come to this place,’ she said as Jenny continued on with her tray, leaving the family to argue about Christmas pudding.
Jenny watched her from a distance, her mind flitting to another fourteen-year-old girl eating Christmas dinner with her parents at Amberley.
*
Cara Jeanette, born to Jenny in ’44, handed at birth to Myrtle Norris, had turned fourteen on 3 October. She was eating roast chicken with all of the trimmings at a trestle table, in a Traralgon backyard, barely a hundred miles from Frankston as the crow flew.
She’d never heard of Jenny King or Jenny Morrison. She didn’t know she could blame her for her frizzy yellow-gold hair and atrocious fingernails, though this year she had become aware of how little she resembled her parents and cousins.
Her best friend, Rosie, was adopted. For a time, Cara had been convinced Myrtle and Robert had adopted her, which would explain why she looked different, but she’d asked and they’d said no, and whether she was or not, it wasn’t her biggest problem. A mother who looked and thought like her grandmother, and who refused to let her grow up, was her biggest problem.
Rosie, who was barely five months older than her, was allowed to wear makeup. And her mother had bought her a pair of boys’ black jeans. Cara had asked for a pair for Christmas and she’d got a new tennis racquet – a good one, but still boring. Uncle John and Aunty Beth gave her a gold necklet, which she might wear when she was about thirty. And Gran Norris! She’d knitted her a purple and blue striped sweater, the most despicable thing anyone had ever set eyes on, which Pete, Cara’s youngest cousin, named the Purple People Eater.
Since she’d unwrapped it after breakfast, Pete had been singing ‘Purple People Eater’, and by the time the table was set for dinner, he only had to look at Cara and threaten to open his mouth and she got the giggles.
He was thirteen, and not even one of those thirteen-year-old boys who suddenly take it into their heads to start growing. He looked about twelve, if he was lucky, and he was far too young for her to be giggling with. They’d always done it, though. Way, way back before Robert had got his job in Traralgon, way back when they’d eaten Christmas dinner around Amberley’s huge parlour table, when there had been a million reasons to giggle, or no reason at all except it was Christmas and there were presents. Myrtle and Aunty Beth had always separated them at the table. They’d been separated today, and poor Pete given the chair on Gran Norris’s left.
‘You’ve got a purple bruise on your arm, Gran,’ he said.
‘She’s got that cupboard too close to her bed,’ Gran accused. Cara bed, Cara’s cupboard. She’d been evicted from her room for Gran.
Uncle John and his entire family had driven down from Sydney yesterday. He and Beth had six kids, the two eldest already married. Paul, who had two little kids, had towed Uncle John’s caravan down. It was parked on the front lawn. The rest of the cousins were in tents on the back lawn. Uncle John and Aunty Beth were in the spare room.
It was fun, like being away on one of their family camping holidays, except for Gran, who didn’t approve of camping holidays, or Christmas dinners eaten in backyards.
She’d turned ninety this year and had been dying for as long as Cara had been alive, and no one was allowed to forget it. She’d brought along a shoe box full of pills to prove how close she was to death.
‘I’m ninety years old and expected to sit all day in a car for the pleasure of sharing my dinner with swarms of flies.’
‘And us, Gran,’ Pete said. He’d driven down with her and had had his fill of complaints before they’d got to Goulburn, so he said. There were a lot of miles between Goulburn and Traralgon.
Gran spent her life complaining or demanding, often doing both at the same time. Cara should have been the one complaining. She was the one who had lost her bed. Not that she minded sleeping in the tent with Pete, though the fun of queuing up to go to the toilet was wearing thin, with Gran on it for half an hour at each sitting. Two or three times a day one of the cars had to make a trip to the public toilets.
There were nineteen chairs around the trestle tables – kitchen chairs, outdoor chairs, fold-up camp chairs, and a high chair borrowed from next door for the baby, who was wearing a half-decent white cardigan that Gran had knitted. She’d knitted Pete half-decent socks, and the Purple People Eater for Cara. It was a statement, like saying, That will nark you, girl.
Gran liked Cara’s dad better than Uncle John. He didn’t see as much of her so didn’t talk back like Uncle John. She liked John’s kids better than Cara, who didn’t talk back, but didn’t kiss her every time she saw her either. She had whiskers on her chin, and smelled of camphor – and so did the Purple People Eater.
‘When are you bringing your family home where they belong, Robert?’ Gran carped.
Home, Amberley, where the dining-room table would have seated nineteen at a pinch. Traralgon’s table was hard-pressed to seat six, and no room to move around it when it did.
They’d never go home now. The school principal was retiring sometime next year and Robert, the vice principal, might get his job. If he did, they’d be stuck here forever.
Cara eyed her father, mentally betting every penny of pocket money for a month that he hadn’t brought them down here so he could be a vice principal, which he’d said was the reason.
She’d asked Monica, her second oldest cousin, if she knew anything about Robert and Myrtle adopting her. Monica was plenty old enough to know the family history. If she knew, she was in on the conspiracy. Pete would have told her if he’d known. All he’d said when she’d asked him was that he wished someone would adopt him. Since Monica had married and moved out, Gran Norris had sold her house and moved into Monica’s room.
‘Be thankful for small mercies,’ Pete said.
In a way she was. Had they still been living at Amberley, they would have copped Gran. John was too much like his father for Gran’s liking.
He must have been. He looked nothing like Gran, or Robert. John was taller, broader, bald, which made him look older. Robert’s hair was thinning on top, though not obviously – unless you were looking down on him. He had a male version of Gran’s features, back when she’d had features. John’s features were heavier. Everything about him was heavier – except his wife. Aunty Beth was skinny. Having all of those kids, running around after two grandkids, and now Gran Norris, had worn her down to skin and bone.
‘Dragging your family miles away from home to this,’ Gran said, back on her hobbyhorse and determined to ride it to death.
‘You’re in a purple old mood today, Gran,’ Pete said, and Cara, her mouth full, slid from her chair and ran for the house, where she spat meat and potato into the bathroom washbasin, then stood attempting to gain control of her giggle. Her giggling reflection didn’t help.
Rosie said she was good-looking. Dino Collins said she was the best looking sort in town. She looked heaps better when she sneak
ed on a bit of Rosie’s lipstick and eyeliner. Since Rosie, life down here had been okay. And Dino wanted to be her boyfriend. ‘Hands off. She’s mine,’ he said if any of the other boys started mucking around with her.
His name was James, but they all called him Dino because he looked a bit like James Dean. Most of the boys had nicknames. They called Tony Bell ‘Ding-dong’.
‘Cara!’ Myrtle called from the kitchen.
‘Coming.’ She was supposed to be the hostess – or waitress. She washed her hands, raked a comb through her curls, then went outside with a tray of Christmas pudding, Myrtle behind her, carrying a second tray.
Pete got the largest serve, and Steve, four years Pete’s senior, complained.
‘He needs it to grow on,’ Uncle John said.
‘If that girl keeps growing, she’ll be looking down on the lot of you before she’s much older,’ Gran said.
Always ‘that girl’ to Gran, never Cara – and in the real world, she wouldn’t even be considered tall. The Traralgon backyard wasn’t the real world. Myrtle and Beth might have measured five foot three. Uncle John’s two girls were no taller, unless they wore high heels. Gran might have stretched to five foot before she started shrinking. There was no more room for shrinkage. She’d become a hobbling, carping Egyptian mummy.
‘It must be this good healthy country air, Mum,’ Uncle John said.
‘Why don’t you stay down here for a month or two, Gran,’ Pete said. ‘You’ll probably grow six inches.’
‘Where’s my cup of tea,’ Gran carped.
Cara made a pot. She took it with cups to the table. Myrtle poured, then Cara had to carry Gran’s cup inside. She’d had enough of the filthy flies. There were no flies in Sydney – so she said.
‘Put it in me bedroom,’ Gran said. ‘And get me me pills and some water.’
Never a please, never a thank you polluted Gran Norris’s mouth. How she’d produced her father and Uncle John, Cara didn’t know.
Laughter growing in the backyard, Cara wanting to be a part of it, and here she was, fetching and carrying for Gran. She untied Gran’s shoelaces, placed her shoes against the wall. She opened her shoe box of pills, then stood waiting, just in case a bottle top required a stronger hand than Gran’s. It wouldn’t, or not until Cara tried to walk away.
A major production, Gran’s pill popping. Lids removed one at a time, a pill or two poured from each bottle to be placed in a row on the bedside table, then the lids replaced, the pills counted, the bottles returned to the shoe box.
Robert took pills when his war-injured knee played up. He went to the bathroom, tossed a couple into his mouth and washed them down with a mouthful of water – and was rarely seen doing it. Gran took hers one at a time, the glass placed down between sips. And she talked, about her various pills, her variety of ills, forcing Cara to wait, just in case she needed more water.
She’d lived in Sydney all her life, had wed a fool of a man, then taken in lodgers when he’d left her to raise his two sons alone – which was probably where Robert had got the idea to turn Amberley into a boarding house. Cara didn’t know how Robert’s father had died, if he’d died or just run for the hills. Knowing Gran, he’d probably run for the hills.
Today she asked, between the laxative and the tiny pill that was supposed to keep her tranquil and didn’t.
‘When did Dad’s father die, Gran?’
‘Your father was fourteen year old when I was left on me own.’ Two pills went down, and Cara still didn’t know if he’d died or run. ‘Another woman would have taken him out of school and put him to work, and for all the thanks I get for educating him, that’s what I should have done. I worked my fingers to the bone to keep that boy in school, and what does he do to me? He joins up before he’s old enough to be in that filthy war, that’s what he does.’
Probably saw it as the lesser of two evils, Cara thought. ‘What did he die of – my grandfather?’
Gran humphed before replying. ‘The Norrises were all weak in the chest. I told your father he wouldn’t last a week in the trenches, then his fool of a brother tries to go with him. Fifteen year old, John was. I put a stop to his games. I went down there and dragged him home by the ear.’
‘He was in the second war.’
‘In the home guard,’ Gran scoffed. ‘He never went further than Newcastle. Your father was overseas for years.’
‘How long was he overseas before I was born?’ Cara asked, just a fishing sort of question. She wasn’t expecting it to hook a soul-swallowing shark.
It was weird how you could question people until you were blue in the face and end up learning nothing, then, when you were least expecting it, out it came. The shoe box was in Cara’s hands. She’d been on her way out the door when Gran put her cup down.
‘They sent him over there in ’42 and he didn’t set foot back on Australian soil until 1945,’ she said. ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather the day she walked in with you. And she was too old to be taking you on, and I told her so. I said to your mother the day I first set eyes on you. What a damn fool thing to go and do with Robert thousands of miles away dodging bullets. Not that she ever listened to me.’
‘Where did she get me?’ Cara’s heartbeat thundering in her ears, muffled her own words.
Gran flicked a bird-claw hand towards the heavens. ‘God sent you. All the churches had those homes for the unwed, and by God there were plenty of them around during the war.’ She lifted her cup, sipped and spoke over the rim. ‘We all knew they’d been talking about adopting before the war, but she never said one word about doing it while your father was away. Mind you, not that I saw her from one year’s end to the next. While Robert was over there, I saw your mother at Christmas and Easter if I was lucky. And she only lived half an hour away from my house. Too busy with her lodgers to worry about how an old lady was getting along.’
The cup was down again, and empty this time. Cara’s stomach threatening to get rid of Christmas dinner, she picked up the cup and walked fast to the kitchen where she stood over the sink, swallowing her need to vomit while staring through the window at the crowded table. Her mother – not her mother – laughing at something Uncle John had said – not her Uncle John. Not her cousins either, not even Pete.
And she was going to howl because Pete wasn’t her cousin, howl and vomit at the same time. She’d asked her parents. They’d looked her in the eye and said no, they hadn’t adopted her.
‘Liars.’
Every nerve in her body wanted to run out there and call them liars in front of everyone.
Knew she couldn’t. Knew she’d have to hold it inside her until those tents came down. And they wouldn’t be coming down until after New Year.
She poured a glass of water, drank it down. Washed her face, wiped it on a tea towel, remembering so clearly the day she’d asked them if she was adopted.
‘Liars.’
A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS
There was something about Molliston, something about its air. The more of it Georgie breathed, the more relaxed she became. By midafternoon she was calling Jack’s mother Katie and walking with her around the veranda, admiring her pot plants while Jack and his father sprawled on chair and couch, sleeping off Christmas dinner.
Their home was a hotel. It sold beer but didn’t smell of beer. If you walked within ten yards of Woody Creek’s hotel veranda, the smell of stale beer was enough to give you a hangover. Jack’s parents’ hotel smelled of wet soil and greenery. She’d never been here before, but she felt she’d known that veranda and those pot plants a hundred years ago.
And the bar room. In Woody Creek, women weren’t allowed in the bar and few would want to go in there. Georgie had tasted her first glass of wine in Jack’s parents’ bar room, at a rough-cut bar where a hundred years of people had leant and she’d known that she’d sat there in some past life, which was totally weird when she didn’t believe in past lives.
Granny had. Maybe she’d been here, or maybe the aged
smell of the rooms reminded her of Granny’s house – before the renovations. The west side of the hotel veranda was vine-covered like Granny’s hut’s west wall had been, and the dark hotel kitchen with its tiny high window smelled like Granny’s old kitchen.
The day a scorcher, they delayed their return trip until after nightfall. The sun long gone down had forgotten to take its heat with it. Every window of the car was open, but not a breath of breathable air entered.
‘What are you thinking?’ Jack asked.
‘That you must have had a normal life.’
‘What’s normal?’
‘Molliston is, and your parents. Everything is normal.’
‘Woody Creek isn’t?’
‘Is it?’
They sighted half-a-dozen kangaroos, missed one by inches. They smelled half-a-dozen who hadn’t been as lucky. Kangaroos were a rare sight around Woody Creek and, if sighted, usually ended up on a dinner plate or as dog’s meat. Woody Creek farmers didn’t tolerate the roos.
The town was sleeping when they drove in, the streetlights glowing over empty streets. As Jack pulled into the police station’s drive, Georgie opened the door and was out of the car before the motor died. She’d left Charlie’s ute parked in front of the shop, and while he locked the sedan, she walked over the road, smelling Woody Creek air and feeling lonely, or jealous, or something.
He followed her. And the ute’s driver-side door refused to open.
‘What’s wrong, Gina?’ he said. Jack had introduced her to his parents as Georgie. His father, a little deaf, had called her Georgina. This morning Katie had shortened it to Gina – but Georgie wasn’t tolerating it in Woody Creek.
‘This door is, and don’t call me Gina.’ She walked around to the passenger door. It opened. He followed her, but she slid in, slid across the bench seat and behind the wheel.
