by Joy Dettman
The book before her, pencil in hand, nothing in her head bar escaping from him and his roaring bike, she jumped two feet from her chair when something hard landed on the roof.
Wished he’d broken a window. Robert might do something about that.
Before Christmas Dino had been in trouble for smashing windows in a vacant house. His aunty wrote a cheque for the damage.
Wished the police had put him in jail, and he was pacing backward and forward behind metal bars like tigers at the zoo. And Rosie too. Wished she was in a cage, flapping her elbows and clucking to get out.
Every good part of life in this town had been spent with Rosie. Now being in the same classroom made Cara want to vomit. Then yesterday the history teacher, Mrs Hunter, had asked them to stay back at lunchtime so they could sort out their problem. Cara had played noughts and crosses with herself while Rosie put on such an act of howling innocence, Mrs Hunter had started comforting her.
‘Have you anything at all to say, Cara?’ she’d asked.
‘Only, why doesn’t she get a job acting on television?’ That was all she’d said. It had felt good too, because Mrs Hunter had looked as if she might have believed her.
Should have said more. Should have told her what she’d done, just opened her mouth and let it out. Should have climbed up onto the roof of the school and screamed it out. Hadn’t. She’d looked down at her noughts and crosses game and tried to beat herself.
She was supposed to hand in her Maths homework and a fiction essay tomorrow. She was usually good at fiction. Not tonight. Life was too real to think up fiction.
Closed her Maths book and opened her English book, wrote her name. Cara Norris. It looked lonely – and wrong. She added Hooper-Morrison-Billy-Bob Someone to it and wondered what her English teacher might make of that.
Ripped the page out and the corresponding page at the rear of the book. The blank paper invited her pen back.
Jennifer Hooper or Morrison, twenty-year-old mother of two daughters and a son, fell in love with Billy-Bob Someone and had a baby to him. Jenny Hooper or Morrison must have had her first baby at fifteen or sixteen and liked it so much she kept on doing it. Fancy having four kids by the time you’re twenty.
Jenny Hooper or Morrison was a slut like Rosie.
Cara Jeanette Hooper-Morrison-Billy-Bob Someone, Norris by default, was not born to be an only child. If she’d had a big brother, he’d go out there now and fix that bike-riding mongrel.
How does a woman who has already got three kids have another one, hand it over to a stranger, then get on a train and forget it was ever born? Wouldn’t she want to know how it grew up, if it grew up? Was she such a slut, she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough so she could go out and have another one?
Jenny Hooper-Morrison had me on the kitchen floor at Amberley, without a doctor or a nurse, then she got dressed and went upstairs to get Mrs Collins and Miss Robertson to witness the birth of her landlady’s baby.
Cara could almost visualise that scene. What had Myrtle done with the round velvet cushion? Had she taken it out before Mrs Collins and Miss Robertson came down? Maybe she’d been sitting on it.
She wrote again, filled one page and started on the other, writing the tale of her birth from an all-seeing, all-knowing point of view. She turned the full page over and wrote on the back, then around the edges when the back of those two pages were full. And when she stopped, the street was silent.
She stood, stiff with sitting, and walked out to the kitchen for a glass of milk – and found out why the street was silent. It was ten past one and she hadn’t started her homework.
Crept into the lounge room and lifted the phone from the receiver, as she did every night once her parents were in bed. When Dino had no petrol for his bike, he phoned. He’d phoned one night at two o’clock and kept it up until four. And with Gran Norris threatening to die at all hours, Myrtle and Robert refused to leave the phone off the receiver.
Brushed her teeth, dressed for bed, then sat reading her night’s work. It wasn’t fiction but it sure sounded like it. If she changed the names and dates and places and cut out the personal bits, it would do for her fiction assignment. She had to hand something in tomorrow.
Altered Sydney to Melbourne, Woody Creek to Lakes Entrance, Myrtle to Martha, Jenny to Jessica, Robert to Captain John Amberley, fitted it into three pages and ended it at Spencer Street Station, where Jessica held her baby one last time, then handed it to Martha and boarded the train.
She knew that if she should turn her head, she would run back and snatch that tiny infant from the stranger’s arms. Jessica didn’t look back.
Child of Jessica, she’d named it. And her English teacher gave her a nine and a half out of ten.
Myrtle and Robert were delighted with her mark. They wouldn’t have been so delighted if they’d known what she’d got that nine and a half for. She hid the essay in her diary, hid her diary behind the bottom drawer of her dressing table.
It didn’t take much to delight Robert and Myrtle. An invitation to Sarah Potter’s birthday party delighted them.
It was a set-up. If Sarah and Rosie got her away from school, they’d do worse than flush her head down a toilet.
‘I’m not going, Mummy.’
‘Of course you’re going,’ Myrtle said. ‘You never go anywhere, pet.’
They bought her a new frock, a very nice pale green frock for a twelve year old. Cara didn’t bother telling them she wouldn’t be seen dead in it, just told them again she wasn’t going.
She didn’t tell them she’d started a novel about Jessica and Bobby-Lee. They wouldn’t have approved.
She didn’t tell them she wasn’t going to the end-of-year social until half an hour before they were ready to go. One big argument with them was preferable to umpteen little ones. The school principal was expected to put in an appearance, and where he went, Myrtle went. They had to give up arguing and leave. Myrtle was never late for anything.
Cara locked the doors behind then, turned the inside lights off but left both outdoor lights burning. She knew the windows were locked but checked them again, pulling blinds and drapes, and ending up in the bathroom. No blind on that window. It was high, small, its glass bubbled so no one could see in. The back veranda light had been fitted beside that window, and if it was turned on, there was light enough in the bathroom to write, though not sufficient to see what she’d written, which offered her a freedom she never found during the day. She could write anything at all, and couldn’t see to erase what she knew she shouldn’t have put on paper.
Carolyn’s father referred to Jessica’s town as Pandora’s box. ‘Don’t open it, my dear,’ he said.
In her head, Carolyn knew he was probably right, which didn’t stop her from wanting to meet Jessica, or at least to see her from a distance, or from behind one of those one-way mirrors maybe where you can see without being seen.
She’d seen a couple of photographs of her half-brother, taken when he was tiny. They were in Martha’s old photograph album. There were no photographs of his sisters. Did they look like her? Were they married? There were so many questions for which she had no answer . . .
The phone rang. A phone jangling in a silent house when your mind is a thousand miles away makes your heart jump. She walked to it, stood over it, counting the rings until it rang out. It could have been Myrtle or Robert checking on her, but they knew she never answered the phone. It could have been Uncle John. Gran Norris might have decided to have a deathbed scene. She hadn’t had one for six months. Cara waited, expecting the phone to ring again. And it did, and expected or not, each time it rang it sucked the marrow out of her bones. Three times she allowed it to ring out, then, when it gave up for the third time, she removed the receiver from its cradle and buried it.
She was in the bathroom, writing about the sound of telephones in the night, when a motorbike roared up the street. Her pencil stilled. Dozens of men rode motorbikes in this town. It wasn’t him.
But it
was. It slowed out front, putter-spluttered for a moment, then the putter-splutter died and her heart jumped up to her throat and stayed there. She should have let that phone keep ringing. He knew now that she was in the house, and alone. Robert’s car wasn’t parked in the drive.
‘Stupid fool!’ Stood frozen in the bathroom, listening.
Heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel, then the wire door opening.
She was a rat in a trap in that bathroom. Crept out to the passage as he knocked again; then, her shoes off, she continued to the entrance hall where she armed herself with a crystal vase. Stood, her back to the wall. She’d be hidden by the door if he got it open. And with only a cheap wooden door between them, when he knocked again it vibrated her lungs. She couldn’t breathe.
He gave up. His footsteps crunched away.
Heart beating too fast, thumping in her ears, attempting to listen for the gate over its thumping, listen for the bike’s motor. Then she heard him at her bedroom window, tapping on glass. It was locked, all of the windows were locked.
He knew how to break glass.
She ran to the telephone, waiting for the sound of breaking glass. A car approached spraying its light across the front of the house. Too early to be Robert and Myrtle. The car went by.
Stood, phone in her hand, panting air through her mouth like a caged cat as the rear wire door squealed on its hinges. No car lights to expose him out there. Trees to hide behind out there. Shadows.
And what use was a telephone? What good would it do? If he broke in it would take too long for that phone to bring the police or anyone else. She had to open the front door and run. Or find something better than a vase.
She was in the kitchen, feeling for Myrtle’s long carving knife, when the screen door slammed shut. No gravel at the rear of the house. No footsteps. Stood, listening, waiting, that long knife in her hand and heard the gate slam. Heard his bike cough. Cough-cough-cough, then roar its frustration to the night, then gone. Cara, her lungs screaming for air, her hand shaking, placed the knife on the table and sat down. Sat in the kitchen close to that knife until Myrtle and Robert drove in at eleven. She was in bed before their key turned in the lock.
She sat beside her parents in church on Sunday morning because she was afraid to stay alone in the house. Myrtle and Robert didn’t know they had Dino Collins to thank for her company. She prayed too, not that she expected her prayers to be answered. God wasn’t into causing his children to crash motorbikes into brick walls, to have head-on smashes with semitrailers. That’s what she prayed for.
*
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, according to the Bible and Myrtle. He didn’t manage the semitrailer or the brick wall, but he got Dino Collins. He and Tony Bell were seen climbing in through the back window of a shop and someone called the police. They got them as they were climbing out, and that night Cara wrote a chapter about Carolyn, who converted to the Catholic faith and became a nun . . . except, who had a clue how girls went about becoming nuns? She had to skip over that part, jump over a few years then send her off to work in an orphanage.
Tony’s father put up money to get him out of jail. Dino’s old aunty didn’t. The local newspaper ran a full-page story about him, a rehash of the boy hero story, and an old photograph of him and his parents. The judge would likely let him off with a warning but maybe he’d get a taste of how that cat felt in that box before the judge let him off.
She flipped pages to the editorial, which was sometimes interesting. Glanced at the first paragraph, about murderers released back into the community after they’d served their sentences, and about one woman locked in a Melbourne asylum for the criminally insane, and the group of people working to have her released. She’d been abused by her brutal husband since her wedding day, then one night she’d murdered him with a carving knife, in his bed. Cara was thinking about murdering Dino Collins with a carving knife when Woody Creek jumped up from the page.
And Morrison. Amber Morrison.
How many Morrison families lived in that town? She was probably one of Cara’s relatives.
She scanned the editorial for Jenny’s name, found out that Amber, who was fifty years old, had given birth to four dead babies in about four years, and no wonder she’d murdered her husband.
An unusual name, Amber. Cara glanced at Myrtle, wondering if she dared ask her if Jenny had ever mentioned an Aunty Amber, or a cousin Amber. Glanced at Robert. He’d read that editorial, see Woody Creek stationmaster and that newspaper would disappear.
She knew the story of Pandora’s box, how the lid once lifted could never be closed, and how the plagues of hell had come pouring out. Her father may well have been right about Woody Creek.
LETTING GO
Six times though 1960 the Keatings and the Hoopers met at Kilmore where Raelene and her luggage were moved from one car to the other. Her first visits with Jenny went well, Raelene pleased to see her and to go with Georgie to see what the men had done to Granny’s house. She liked Jim’s house, didn’t like him sleeping in Jenny’s bed, did her best to ignore Trudy but, all in all, she appeared to enjoy herself.
The fourth visit, in January of ’61, didn’t start well. Clarrie drove her alone to Kilmore. He looked stressed, and within minutes of making the transfer, Jenny knew why. Raelene didn’t want to be there. She was going to miss her friend’s birthday party.
‘You could have come after the party, Raelie.’
‘Clarrie said I couldn’t because his mother got sick and he has to go down there, and Florence is sick too, and I’m sick of her always sick, and I’m sick of here too. It’s too hot.’
It was. They’d had three days with temperatures in the high nineties.
‘At home when it’s hot I’m allowed to go to the swimming pool.’
‘We’ve got a whole creek up here to swim in,’ Jenny said.
‘At home people swim in clean blue swimming pools.’
‘You used to swim in the creek with Georgie when you were little.’
‘It stinks of dead fish,’ Raelene said.
John and Amy McPherson popped in at four and caught Raelene in a foul mood and Jenny attempting to bribe her out of it with an ice-cream from the café. Amy had been Raelene’s teacher for two years. She’d known a happier child.
‘Do you like your new school?’ she asked.
‘No, and you said we’d go up and get an ice-cream.’
‘When the sun goes down.’
‘Before you didn’t say when the sun goes down. I want one now. Why haven’t you got ice-cream in your fridge anyway? At home we’ve always got ice-cream.’
‘Aren’t you a lucky girl,’ Amy said.
‘How long is she staying here for?’ the little bugger said.
‘Mrs McPherson is visiting with me, and if you can’t behave like a good girl, you can go to your room and there’ll be no ice-cream.’
Amy and John went home, and Jenny went about the preparation of dinner.
She had served the meal before she noticed Raelene was missing. They searched the house and garden, unaware that Jenny’s purse had also gone missing until they sighted Raelene returning with the purse, and a double-header ice-cream.
They met her at the gate where Jenny claimed both. She had a good lick of the ice-cream before tossing it into the gutter.
Raelene’s scream of disbelief might have raised the dead. Her kick to Jenny’s shin would raise a bruise. She didn’t hang around to see the results, but took off towards Blunt’s Road, bellowing like Flanagan’s bull.
‘Was that a bit harsh, Jen?’ Jim asked.
‘Not if it teaches her that there’s no gain in stealing,’ Jenny said.
A few years ago, she would have run her down. Tonight she tracked her, over Blunt’s crossing and into South Road, through the little park between Maisy’s house and the town hall. Raelene didn’t stop to play on the swing.
Jenny tailed her to the sports oval, where she kicked off her shoes and chased her
down. And Raelene threw herself down to kick. Jenny grabbed an ankle and got one shoe off, fought her for the other shoe, dodging blows.
‘I can hit back, Raelene,’ she warned.
‘You hit me I’ll tell Flo, and she won’t ever make me come back to this rotten hot place again.’
Do I want you to come back? Jenny thought.
She carried her from the oval, Raelene screaming and fighting all the way. She carried her into the park where she put her down and held her arms, dodged her barefoot kicks. The town must have heard her screams. Jenny was damn near ready to give up the fight when Joss Palmer, one of Maisy’s sons-in-law, came out to the veranda and asked her if she needed a bit of a hand.
He drove them home.
The papers signed in the Frankston solicitor’s office had given Jenny a week with Raelene in June and September, and two weeks in January. That night, Raelene still screaming, still kicking, but at her locked bedroom door, Jenny walked up to the phone box to call the Keating number.
Clarrie picked it up. ‘Flo is feeling a bit seedy,’ he said. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Raelene is miserable. She wants to go to her friend’s birthday party.’
‘She can be a bit of a handful,’ Clarrie admitted.
‘We’ll get her down to you tomorrow, Clarrie.’
‘I can’t take time off from work,’ he said.
‘We’ll get her out to Box Hill.’
They left before daylight and took the back road into Melbourne, through Seymour, Yea and Lilydale, where they parked the car and hoped it would be there when they returned. They caught a train to the Box Hill station, a taxi out to the Keating house, unloaded Raelene and her luggage, and minutes later the taxi delivered them back to the station for the return trip.
