by Joy Dettman
‘Who . . . employs you?’
‘Charles White and company. We are representing Jim Hooper and his wife.’
A moment spent in consideration. A decision made.
‘You might inform him that I have spent a veritable fortune in attempting to trace the whereabouts of his son. The boy attended Carey Grammar. My representative has spoken to the masters and students who knew the boy. They have had no contact with James since 1958.’
Narrow lips, fighting to release words and not her false teeth, spitting sardine saliva. Georgie stepped back, just a little.
‘You might also inform him that since the thirteenth day of December 1958, when the family home was sold over my head – for the second time – I have neither seen nor heard from my sister or nephew. Nor do I expect to. Now remove yourself.’
Georgie removed herself, and Lorna opened the gate.
‘However, should your company be successful, I would expect to be informed. You have a card?’
‘We have your address, Miss Hooper,’ Georgie said.
Lorna humphed, then strode into her yard and latched the gate. Georgie returned to the car where Jenny remained low until they were out of the street.
‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did she look like when she was young, Jen?’
‘The same.’
‘The family home was sold over her head – twice,’ Georgie said.
*
They bought petrol in Kilmore, ate a late lunch there, then Jenny took the wheel for the final leg home, and for the first time they spoke of Jim.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘I like his car. I’m reserving my opinion on him.’
‘You’ve been reserving it for two years.’
‘He was in a nuthouse, Jen. Don’t take this personally, but your record for picking blokes hasn’t been exemplary, so I’m reserving my judgement.’
‘That evil bitch – and her father – is the reason he was in a nuthouse. What do you weigh, Georgie?’
‘Around nine stone.’
‘He was under six when the war ended, too sick to bring home. He was in hospital over there for months. He told me a while back that he survived that camp for me and Jimmy. I sent him a poem when I was waiting for him in Sydney. He said that every morning he was in that Jap camp, he’d hold the tatters of it in his hand and promise me and Jimmy he’d make it through that day. And he did. And he came home to us and I’d gone and married Ray. There was nothing left of him but determination to get home to us, and his bloody father and sister told him I hadn’t waited for him.’
‘You can’t cry and drive at the same time, mate. Pull over.’
‘I’m not crying. I hate that evil bitch and hate the Hooper name. And I wear it. Do you think I’d wear it if I didn’t love him? Do you think anything else could make me live in that house?’
‘I like his house.’
‘I want you to like him.’
‘You’ve got to admit the family doesn’t have a lot going for it. What was the other sister like?’
‘I used to think she was harmless. She looked like Beatrice Potter’s mother mouse, wearing a bustle. She couldn’t keep her hands off Jimmy. And she got him, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s as bad as that hawk-faced lamppost.’
‘She told me Jimmy went to Carey Grammar.’
‘Ian Hooper told me that ages ago. I rang them. It’s a dead end.’
A maniac in an old car was itching to pass, and on a curving road; Jenny wasn’t driving fast enough for him. He stuck to her bumper bar and she stuck to fifty, and the fool pulled out and passed.
‘If someone had been coming around that bend, they would have ended up dead.’
‘Want me to drive?’
‘I’m fine – just as mad as hell at you for dragging me around there.’
They drove on in silence and the speedo crept up to sixty.
‘Is he enough for you, Jen?’
‘I’ve already told you I love him.’
‘What’s love?’
‘Something you know you’ve found when you find it. I knew I’d found it when I was eighteen.’
‘Is it sex, or desire to breed?’
‘I had no desire to breed when I had Jimmy.’
‘Just sex then?’
‘I explained the birds and bees to you when you were twelve years old,’ Jenny said. ‘And I’m not in the mood to do it again.’ She slowed to make a left-hand turn, then drove slowly through a town. They were back on the open road before she spoke again.
‘Animals have sex. Loving someone is what differentiates us from the rutting animal. Sex lecture over.’
‘Define love?’
‘Total trust, with fringe benefits. It’s knowing that the world could end, but if you were holding his hand it wouldn’t matter. It’s wanting to remake him too, so a new generation will know him – which I can’t seem to do these days.’
‘You actually want another kid? Haven’t you done enough of it?’
‘I want to do it right this time.’
‘That’s all you want from life, Jen? Him and six kids?’
‘One. A brother for Trudy,’ Jenny said. ‘When you reach the stage where there is nothing more that you want, it’s probably time to curl up and die. What do you want?’
‘You’ll be the first to know when I work that out. I wouldn’t mind this car for starters.’
‘Do you still hear from Jack?’
‘He got married two weeks ago.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘He wrote to me.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘I plan to find out who I am before I give up who I might have been, Jen.’
CONDITIONAL RELEASE
Five-thirty, one of those days when spike-heeled shoes leave indentations in Melbourne’s bitumen roads, when Swanston Street is thick with sweating humanity, all hurrying towards tram stop and station. They ignore the shop windows at five-thirty. A few will steal a glance at bulbous twenty-three-inch television sets playing cartoons in one window. Poor old Roadrunner, still attempting to outrun Wile E. Coyote.
Beep-beep.
By the end of 1962 a large percentage of the walkers owned their own television sets, and with luck, they’d be home in time to watch the six o’clock news, or to catch the tail end of it.
Cara wouldn’t be home by six; she’d be lucky to make it by seven, and only the radio news when she got there. Robert had fought in two world wars, had lived through the Great Depression; he took English, History and Maths classes if one of the teachers was away – and he denied progress.
Not much good denying it. It was coming to get him – and proving him wrong too. Before the advent of television, ask most Australian schoolkids the name of the top man in America and they’d say Elvis Presley. Ask them today and they’d come back fast with John F. Kennedy, wife Jackie, two kids, John Junior and Carolyn. Five-year-old kids could tell you the names of Russian cosmonauts, of American astronauts. Three year olds could recognise their sports heroes. The percentage of the population buying newspapers might have diminished, but who needed to read all about it in the daily paper when television newsreaders read and condensed it for you, and fed it to you while you sprawled on the couch with a beer?
A fast year for Cara, this one, and a better year. Rosie had left school halfway through first term to marry Henry Cooper – and had a baby four months later – and lived with Rosie’s parents and two brothers in a three-bedroom house.
Dino Collins had spent two months on a prison farm, and would spend another month there. It might teach him that his actions had a consequence. Probably should have started teaching him sooner.
*
Amber Morrison had been released back into society in late winter of ’62, a conditional release, a supervised release. For sixteen years she’d been fed, clothed and medicated; she wasn’t handling freedom, or not their supervised freedom.
They’d supplied her with a few items of clothing, a room, pills and a pension – the old-age pension. Forty-nine when they’d locked her in. Forty-nine plus sixteen made her old enough to get the pension. And she didn’t believe it.
She hadn’t believed how much pension they’d given her when she’d held those first banknotes in her hand. During the depression it would have been riches. In ’46, she could have lived well on it. Now it paid the rent on a room in a crumbling rooming house she shared with eighteen more of Melbourne’s rejects who dropped their filth for her to step over. She slept there. Had to sleep somewhere. She made a point of being there when they came to talk their bullshit at her – they, the all-powerful.
They knew she had two daughters, or they spoke of her two daughters. She didn’t tell them she had one daughter and the stray. They’d found Sissy, living with the Duckworths, and she wanted nothing to do with her mother. The stray was in Woody Creek. Amber wanted nothing to do with her.
Five babies she’d carried, four of them were in the cemetery. Had they lived, Norman would have turned them into Duckworths as he’d turned Sissy into one. ‘Nothing, no one,’ Amber muttered. ‘Nothing. No one.’
She had a hessian shopping bag, half a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese in it, a tin mug, a photograph of her and Maisy, pills, a few items of underwear. That’s all she had, all she owned, all she was.
Prettiest girl in Woody Creek once. Could have had her pick of the boys. Hadn’t wanted the dirt scratchers, the mill workers. Always wanted better.
Bitter better.
Walked along Swanston Street with the crowd, locked in by them, but separate. Businessmen in white shirts, ties off or loosened, women in light dresses, women with children holding tight to their hands, or held tight by their mother’s hand, children who hadn’t yet learnt not to stare at those who were different.
Amber was different. Haircuts cost money. Overcoats were easier to wear on the back than to carry.
‘No sense, no feeling,’ a passer-by said.
Anger prickled beneath her coat, but conditional release meant no anger. Conditional release meant controlling the desire to swipe at that female with her bag, it meant slowing her feet, allowing the female to become lost in the crowd.
She stood a while before a shop window, watching the cartoon bird kicking up dust as it raced towards a dark tunnel. And a truck came through it and ran it down.
Beep-beep.
A world she no longer understood was attempting to run her down. She’d taken her eye off it for sixteen years and now nothing was as it had been. Boxes that played cartoons in shop windows. Trucks spewing stinking fumes into the street. Cars, cars and more cars, and a world moving too fast for her to catch up.
Walked on.
The smell of oranges was still the same. A Mediterranean man locked inside a small street kiosk was eating his profits. She stood before his counter, eyeing three oranges, measuring them, wanting the best of them. She’d never had the best.
Pointed to it, then dug into her coat pocket for pennies she counted into his palm. Hers then. Held it like a jewel in her hand. Smelled the scent of home on it.
Home?
Memories have always been long in this town, Amb. It wouldn’t do you any good coming up here. I get down to Melbourne two or three times a year to see Maureen and the kids. I’ll let you know when I’ll be down next and we can have lunch somewhere . . .
Maisy’s letter was in the hessian shopping bag, with their photograph – two boot and pinafore clad kids. The man from the newspaper had given her that photograph.
The golden jewel held to her nose, she walked on with the crowd, smelling orange and remembering so clearly the girl in the pinafore, remembering the miles she’d walked when she’d grown too old – or too embarrassed – to sit behind her mother on the horse. Ten, maybe. Walked to and from school thereafter. Walked for miles as a bride, determined to stay out of Norman’s bed.
A brutal husband, they’d said. An abused wife, four dead babies, three illegitimate grandchildren she’d never been allowed to hold, they’d said. She hadn’t said a word, not this time. She’d learnt control. Kept her head down, her mouth shut this time.
Then no more barred doors.
How many miles had she walked in their rooms with their barred doors? How many miles down corridors that led to barred doors?
The city streets were endless. Turn a corner and there was another block to walk. Turn right. Turn left. The decision her own to make. Only the traffic lights dictated to her on the city streets. They forced her feet to still.
*
Amber Morrison and Cara Norris met at the lights on the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets. It was after five-thirty. A crowd waited for the green light to cross over, workers and shoppers packed tight together, all wanting to be first across the road, first onto the tram, onto the train.
Cara carried a canvas bag with little in it, other than pen, pad, purse and her return ticket to Traralgon. She’d come alone to the city, had gone alone to the Burwood teachers college – and had to argue for her right to travel alone. Until this morning, Robert and Myrtle had been determined to drive her to Melbourne. Next year she’d be free. Next year she’d wash the smell of Traralgon from her.
They weren’t happy with her decision to do primary teaching. They wanted her to do one more year at school, to get her matriculation certificate then go on to university. She’d argued about that too, and when she couldn’t win the argument, she’d dug her heels in and applied for the teaching scholarship anyway. They were beginning to realise she wasn’t . . . wasn’t who they were.
She glanced at the straggle-haired dame standing beside her, or noticed her worn overcoat, its astrakhan collar, her orange. Kept a space between them, or did until two boisterous boys bumped her, she bumped the dame’s arm and her orange fell and rolled to the pavement.
‘Sorry.’ Cara stopped its roll with her foot, picked it up and offered it.
The old dame’s hand was reaching, then her eyes looked higher. ‘Stray slut,’ she snarled and swiped the orange from Cara’s hand and it bounced to the gutter.
Shocked by the response, Cara attempted to step back. The crowd held her captive, then the crazy old dame, still cursing, stepped forward, into the path of a truck.
You can’t allow people to kill themselves, not right in front of your eyes, you can’t. Your reflexes won’t allow it. Cara grabbed a handful of the dame’s black coat and yanked her back.
‘Get your filthy hands off me, you hotpants slut.’
The truck rattled by, lights changed and the crowd jostled forward, that crazy dame gone with the initial rush. Not Cara. She wanted the black overcoat swallowed up by the crowd. That crazy old dame had made her sweat, made her hands sticky with sweat.
She felt for a handkerchief. Myrtle had asked if she had one before she’d left the house this morning. Yes, she’d said, as she’d said every day of her life when she’d left the house for school.
No more school. No handkerchief either. She wiped her palms on her hips as she crossed Flinders Street with the tailenders.
*
Amber walked on, cursing that stray slut to hell. She’d ruined her life, ruined Sissy’s life. Cursed her for the lost orange too, and walked faster. Heads turning to stare at the muttering, straggle-haired one pushing her way between them. Kids still too young to know that fingers shouldn’t be pointed at crazy old dames pointed, and their mothers grasped small wrists and urged them forward.
Jim Hooper and Jenny got married a few years ago. They’ve got a little girl they named for your mother. She doesn’t take after Jenny.
You wouldn’t recognise the inside of Vern’s house, Amb. They’ve stripped off all of his dark wallpaper and lightened the whole place up. His sitting room looks like something out of one of those women’s magazines. Jenny calls it their blue room.
‘Wriggled her arse at him and he went sniffing after her like the scrawny mongrel he alwa
ys was,’ Amber muttered.
Sissy had been meant to live in that house, or in Monk’s old mansion. For a time, Amber had believed she’d live out at Monk’s with her girl.
‘Stray slut.’
Another corner. Another decision. Turn left, turn right, continue forward or turn back. Her choice to make.
She looked back. She’d chosen that orange. She’d paid for it and she wanted it. She turned back.
And found it too, found it squashed, run over, as her life had been run over by Norman and his stray. Walked on, against the current, back to the shop window to watch the television cartoons.
They’d turned it off. Gone home. She had no home.
And Amber walked on to the next corner.
COLLEGE
Cathy Bryant was from Ballarat, and secretly in love with Gerry Jasper, the local doctor’s son who had lived all his life in a house diagonally opposite, who was six years older than her and looked on her as a kid. He’d finished university and gone to England to practise his doctoring skills on the Pommies before he started on the neighbours, or that’s what he’d told her father before he’d left for London – on a boat, and he’d been sick for a week. He’d sent her a postcard from the boat and told her. He’d sent her a second postcard for her eighteenth birthday. She’d written to him a dozen times. Her mother told her to stop writing to him, that she was making an ass of herself, but he was fabulous and she was going to marry him when she was a few years older.
It went on and on. Five minutes after setting foot in the room she and Cara were supposed to share, Cathy Bryant had spilled her life story, not prepared to waste time in finding a new bosom buddy to replace the dozens left behind in Ballarat.
Cara had left no bosom buddy behind and wanted no bosom buddy replacement. Two minutes after meeting her roommate, she felt breathless. Two days of it and she went down to the office and asked to be moved. And the woman she spoke to didn’t appreciate it – and didn’t move her either.
She was at that college to escape Traralgon, to escape Myrtle’s ‘pet’, Robert’s ‘poppet’, and to write her novel without both of them looking over her shoulder and asking every five minutes what she was writing.
