by Joy Dettman
‘I love the colour of your hair,’ Cathy said. ‘What do you use on it?’
‘Shampoo,’ Cara said.
‘I mean its colour.’
‘Still shampoo.’ By the fourth week, Cara had given up on well-mannered silence. Her replies were brief. She spent a lot of time perched on the seat of a toilet, behind a locked cubicle door, escaping into her fictional life.
‘I thought it must have been a rinse. You can’t trust them, can you. Mum put mine in for me then spent the rest of the weekend trying to wash it out. What’s it look like now?’
‘Pink.’
‘I almost put in a black. Black curly hair looks better than blonde. The Hill-Jones sisters are blondes but they’ve got straight hair. I love blonde straight hair – if it’s long. They’ve got long hair they all wear in a pageboy style. You’d swear they were triplets if you saw them from the back. They’re different in the face though. Leonie, the youngest, is the best looking. I wish mine was straight. Have you ever tried to straighten your hair?’
‘How?’
‘When mine was long, I could straighten it a bit with large rollers, except you can’t sleep in them. Mum ironed it for me one day. It looked really good too, except it didn’t last. A bit of wind, a bit of rain and I looked like a floor mop. I might get it cut short like yours, except, from past experience, I know that as soon as I hear that first snip of the scissors I’ll wish I could take it back. It’s almost long enough to put up in a French roll now.’
‘Short is easy,’ Cara said.
‘It’s boring though. You can’t do anything with it except comb it. I promised myself I’d grow mine long this year then get it permed straight.’
‘Permed straight?’
‘They can do it. I read it somewhere. The Hill-Jones trio got their photos in the local paper last year with their hair up in French rolls – when they went to the Melbourne Cup. Their father has got shares in a horse that was running in it. I forget its name. It didn’t win. Have you ever been to the Cup?’
‘No.’
‘Me either. I can’t stand horseracing, car racing or any racing. Have you been anywhere?’
‘Sydney.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Home,’ Cara said.
‘How come you’re at a Melbourne college then?’
Five foot two, round-faced, round where the boys liked girls to be round. Every male at the college flirted with Cathy Bryant, and whether she was in love with Gerry Jasper or not, she flirted back.
‘Why don’t you wear makeup, Cara? Is it your religion or something?’
‘Something.’
‘Why did you freeze Paul off this afternoon? He’s nice.’
Been there, done that and lived to regret it.
‘Does your mother buy your clothes?’
‘Why.’
‘That skirt looks like a Fletcher Jones.’
And probably was. Robert wore Fletcher Jones trousers. Myrtle wore Fletcher Jones skirts. They’d brought down two new pleated skirts and a twin set, pink, three new blouses too, one blue, one pink, one white. She wore them. For the past few years she’d worn whatever Myrtle bought, saving her arguments for the battles she’d needed to win.
‘Their stuff is so expensive,’ Cathy said. ‘My grandmother on Dad’s side buys Fletcher Jones skirts and pays a fortune for them. When you’re old you don’t worry about stuff going out of fashion I suppose, so it doesn’t seem like such a waste to spend a fortune on a skirt. Do you dance?’
‘I’m not down here to dance.’
‘It’s just that I’ve got a cousin down here, a cop. Actually he’s Dad’s cousin, but he’s a lot younger and not married yet. He said he’d take me and a friend down to St Kilda on Saturday night. Want to come with me?’
‘I thought you were going home to put in a black rinse.’ Cara lived for Cathy’s weekends at home.
‘Gran would kill me if I did. They’re coming down on Sunday – Gran and Pa, not the other ones. Want to come out to lunch with us?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Does your family ever come down at weekends?’
‘Not out here.’ They came down on the train. She met them in the city.
‘You never go home. Don’t you get on with them or something?’
‘Is that any of your business, Cathy?’
‘Probably not. To get back to the dance, St Kilda’s is supposed to be the best dance in Melbourne. Michelle said she’d come.’
‘No thanks.’
She’d told Cathy she wasn’t accustomed to sharing a room, that she was an only child. Just one more thing they had in common. Cathy, too, was an only child, an only grandchild for one set of grandparents.
College had been in for eight weeks before Myrtle and Robert came to see where she spent her life and who she spent it with. She had to introduce them to Cathy, who tagged along to get a look.
‘Were they your parents or you grandparents?’ she asked later.
‘I was a change-of-life baby.’
‘I was a change-of-lifestyle baby. Mum was seventeen, Dad was eighteen and my Nan was thirty-six. What’s your father do?’
‘He’s a high-school principal.’
‘He looks like one. I bet he pushed you into teaching.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t seem to want to be here.’
Didn’t.
Had they pushed her? More or less, though not into primary-school teaching. She’d done that all by herself. For years this college had been a light dancing at the end of a dark tunnel. Not much of a light, and a shared room hadn’t been a part of that light. She’d seen herself in a single room with a locked door, had imagined sitting at night, writing ten novels, making enough money to buy herself out of her bond before Robert retired. The only place she could get away from Cathy was locked into a toilet cubicle.
‘Gerry reckons that’s why he’s a doctor, because his father pushed him into it. He reckons that a kid following in his parent’s footsteps justifies a parent’s own choice of profession. Mine are sort of exceptions to the rule. Dad sells cars. Actually he owns the garage that sells the cars – or Gramps does, except he’s semi-retired now. I told him to give me a car for my birthday, but they all ganged up and said I wasn’t driving in Melbourne yet.’
Cathy was ceaseless – even when she slept. She snored. One of Cara’s first purchases had been a roll of cottonwool. Jam enough into the ear canals and it will muffle a snore.
During her fourth month at college Cara admitted to herself that there could be advantages to sharing a room with a girl who never shut up. She left few spaces to fill, and hanging around on the fringes of her growing group was preferable to hanging around alone.
Cathy was a born organiser. Couldn’t play tennis to save her life but could organise the tennis matches, then elect herself Cara’s partner. Cara played well enough to carry her. She’d had years of tennis lessons, had won kids’ tournaments, junior, even one senior tournament. The Traralgon mantelpiece was full of trophies. She could dance too. During her last two years at Traralgon, just to get her out of the house, Myrtle and Robert had driven her miles out of town to ballroom dancing classes.
Child of Jessica was almost finished, or one exercise book of it was, in her locked toilet cubicle. She’d need to type it. These days publishers wouldn’t accept handwritten submissions. She’d written to one in Sydney and received a reply – or a page they probably posted out to anyone who sent them a stamped self-addressed envelope. Cara treasured it. It had been touched by someone in a publisher’s office.
Child of Jessica, by Cara Norris. One day she’d see it in a bookshop. She liked the title, though Cara Norris didn’t sound like an author’s name, more like an old maid schoolteacher’s.
Wished Billy-Bob’s family name had been Steinbeck. C.J. Steinbeck sounded good. C.J. Morrison. C.J. Hooper. Either one of them looked better on paper, sounded better then Norris.
Cathy Bryant didn’t sound
like an old maid schoolteacher. She should have stayed in Ballarat and sold cars.
*
Robert called the college on a bleak Wednesday in late winter. Gran Norris had been taken to hospital with a suspected bowel blockage. She was too old to withstand an operation, he said. They were leaving now to drive up to Sydney, and would pick Cara up on the way through.
‘We should be at the college around one, poppet.’
Didn’t want to join them in their death watch. Been there, done that – last winter. Gran usually decided to die in winter.
Cara didn’t refuse, not immediately. She’d see Pete, her cousin, see Amberley. Didn’t want to do the deathbed bit, the concerned granddaughter bit. She felt nothing for Gran, and less since she’d found out why she’d always been ‘that girl’ to her.
‘She’s got John and Beth’s kids up there, Daddy. I’ll come up on the bus if . . . if anything happens.’
‘She’s ninety-four, poppet.’
And had probably been a pain in the bum at twenty-four. She hadn’t caught herself a husband until she was over thirty, and when she had, she’d only run him down because he’d been consumptive. Pete, the family detective, had dug that information up. Blood cousin or not, she loved Pete, the rebel of John and Beth’s perfect family. He was working at a tyre place, fitting new tyres onto cars. The other boys had good jobs.
Robert must have checked on bus times and the availability of cabins on the overnight train. Myrtle rang back with the information.
‘Thanks,’ Cara said. She’d been on the phone to Ansett. If she had to go up there, she was going to fly. Her college fund would pay for it.
They phoned from Sydney the following day to let her know they’d arrived, then at eight-thirty on Sunday night when she was called again to the communal phone in the common room, she knew that this time Gran had gone and done it.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Look out the window, moll,’ he said.
She knew that voice. Dropped the phone and ran to look out the window, her hand burning with the touch of that phone. Green lawns outside that window. No bike, no sound of a bike.
She hadn’t heard Dino Collins’s voice in almost three years but her hand shook as she fumbled the phone back onto the receiver.
He called back.
After his third call, she stood beside the phone, disconnecting the instant she heard his voice. Everyone was watching her, amused or annoyed, until Marion, another of Cathy’s collection, called her boyfriend. That stopped him, but only for fifteen minutes.
At nine-thirty, he was still at it.
‘I’ve called the police,’ Cara said. ‘They’re currently tracing your call and have asked me to keep you on the line for as long as possible.’
He hung up and didn’t call again. She went to her room, Cathy and Marion behind her.
‘When you play hard to get, babe, you play hard,’ Marion, or Humphrey Bogart, said. The college comedian, Marion; long, lean, dark, wore glasses, and could do dozens of voices.
Cara picked up a pencil and exercise book and went to the bathroom to lock herself in, and that cubicle wasn’t so private tonight. Cathy’s head popped over the wall. She must have been standing on the toilet seat.
‘No foreign matter will be placed into the toilets,’ the head of the establishment said – or Marion, from a wall away. ‘That applies to pencils, exercise books, pads and cigarette butts.’
Then the two of them were standing on the toilet seat, tossing wads of toilet paper at her.
‘We made a rule about privacy,’ Cara said.
‘Which does not apply to the toilets,’ the head of the establishment said.
‘Who is he?’ Cathy asked.
‘Go and annoy someone else.’
‘You’re conveniently placed on a convenience, Norris.’
‘And you said you didn’t have a boyfriend. Who is he?’
Marion could do Queen Lizzie too, and was funny enough to make a cat laugh. Two minutes of Lizzie’s annual address to the constipated and Cara closed her book and opened the door.
‘Is he why you won’t go home?’ Cathy asked.
‘Get lost, both of you.’
‘What’s his name?’
They were eighteen-year-old kids, and making the most of their first year away from home. Marion’s parents lived down on the peninsula. She had four brothers who had made her childhood hell, so she said. The reverse may have applied.
There were days when Cara knew she couldn’t survive another hour of either one of them. There were other days when she envied them. Cathy’s mother looked like her big sister, and her grandparents looked younger and were more in tune with today than Robert and Myrtle. Marion’s mother was like one of the kids, and her youngest brother looked and even sounded like Pete. Wished she’d grown up with them. Wished she’d had four brothers to make her childhood hell.
She was called to the phone again on Tuesday night. Knew it was Dino Collins, and it wasn’t. Myrtle and Robert were home. They’d left Sydney at dawn and driven straight through. Myrtle sounded weary, or teary.
‘Is she all right, Mummy?’
‘She’s fine, pet.’
‘You have to stop running up there every time she decides to die.’
‘I know, pet. I just wanted to let you know we’re back.’
‘Dino Collins has got the college number, Mummy. Who told him where I was?’
‘Who?’
‘James Collins. He’s got this number.’
‘Robert.’ Myrtle’s hand must have been covering the mouthpiece, though not quite covering it. ‘The phone pad,’ Cara heard, and she heard Robert curse. He never cursed.
‘Don’t take his calls, poppet.’ Robert was on the line.
‘What’s going on down there, Daddy?’ She could hear another male voice, hear Myrtle speaking to someone. ‘Have you got visitors?’
‘The police are here. We’ve had a break-in through one of the rear windows.’
‘It was him. That’s how he got this number. Tell them it was Dino Collins, Daddy.’
‘You are probably right, poppet. Your mum had your name and number on her telephone pad. We can’t see it around.’
‘Tell them he phoned here on Sunday night and kept it up for an hour.’
‘I’ll tell them. We’ll call you tomorrow night.’
*
Robert had been aware the attack on his house was personal. He’d smelt it when he’d opened Cara’s bedroom door. A dog marks his territory with urine. He’d left his scent in her room. The phone calls to the college killed any doubt as to the culprit’s identity.
Robert joined Myrtle and the two constables in the kitchen, where for the first time he spoke of Collins’s ongoing harassment of his daughter. Making unwanted phone calls was not a capital offence. Myrtle’s jewellery box was still in the drawer. Nothing of value appeared to have been taken.
Vandalism the police constable wrote on his report.
A departmental house, it was insured, as were the contents. For a month Robert and Myrtle became nomads, living out of the large case they’d taken with them to Sydney, spending their weekdays at a Traralgon motel, their weekends at a city hotel, where Cara joined them.
She’d had time to learn Melbourne, its markets, its trams, its beaches. They rode trams with her at weekends, playing tourists, Cara their guide. Away from their natural element, she had time to know them, and to accept that though she had little in common with either, she loved them. She had time to decide, too, that God had known best when he’d allowed no issue to come from their marriage. They had each other and needed no one else. Like two halves of the same bowl, each side was useless without its other half.
She watched them at dinner one evening, selecting their meal, the waiter waiting.
‘The last time you ate asparagus you were covered in hives for three days, Robert,’ Myrtle said.
‘Are you sure it was asparagus?’
‘Yes I am. I haven’t b
ought it since, and you haven’t had hives since.’
He couldn’t make a cup of tea; had, to Cara’s knowledge, never washed a dish; but at the hotel, he ordered the meals. He carried the cash or chequebook when they shopped, then carried the shopping bags.
The hotel had staff to make up the beds. Myrtle’s bed was made up to hotel standards before she left the room, and if Cara walked away from her own unmade bed, Myrtle hurried in, just to tidy things up a little.
Robert paid the bill. He carried the heavy case to the car park.
He’d always driven a car but never considered teaching Myrtle to drive it, and she would have been aghast had he made the suggestion. The eternal passenger, Myrtle, and happy to be the passenger. Cara wasn’t. She sat in the rear seat, her head between them, seeing street names before them, directing them where and when to turn. One day she’d drive a car. Cathy could, Marion too.
The lines between male and female may have been clearly defined back before the war. The sixties were erasing them, though not for Robert and Myrtle. For them the line between male and female had become a deep groove they couldn’t step across.
COKE AND ASPIRIN
One of Myrtle’s designated responsibilities was to remember family birthdays, to place early phone calls, and on the morning of 3 October 1963, Cara’s nineteenth birthday, she wasn’t disappointed. The call came at eight-fifteen, but it was Robert’s voice on the line.
‘I’m in Sydney, poppet. I flew up last night.’ He wasn’t calling to wish her happy birthday. ‘Gran passed away three hours ago.’
‘Mummy flew!’
Shouldn’t have said that. Should have said, I’m so sorry to hear that, Daddy – or something. Couldn’t take it back.
‘Mummy is in Traralgon. I’ve booked a twin sleeper on tonight’s train. You’ll need to pick up and pay for the tickets at Spencer Street, poppet.’
Belatedly she asked what had happened, how, if he’d got up there in time to say goodbye.
‘John and I were with her. We’ll talk later, poppet.’ Always that promise to talk later. It never happened. ‘I’ll ring Mummy now and let her know that you’re on your way up there.’
