by Joy Dettman
Cara missed the punchline. People everywhere, coming and going, and not him. A dero, sitting on the steps three feet from her, was forcing commuters to walk around him. He had a bottle, disguised in a brown paper bag. He didn’t look old enough to be a dero, but he wasn’t Dino Collins. Probably a cop.
‘There’s Dave,’ Cathy whispered. She’d found him clad in a business suit, reading a newspaper.
‘It’s almost ten past –’
‘Your watch is fast. Tell us another one, Marion.’
‘Have you heard Fred’s goodbye to his father as he was heading off to war?’
It was a long and detailed tale, and Cara determined not to miss the punchline. Missed it anyway – if it had one. She’d been watching the steps, the street, expecting a motorbike, certain he’d come that way. He came with a crowd from the rear, from the platforms, came well dressed for his date, in sports slacks and shirt, his hair blond, cut in an Elvis style, fashionable sunglasses to hide his eyes, four bandaids to hide the tattoo she’d watched him cut into his left knuckles with a razorblade when she was fourteen.
‘Waiting for me, moll?’ he said.
Marion was the actress, Cathy the organiser. Cara was a runner. She ran.
*
The lights must have been green at the Flinders and Elizabeth streets intersection. She didn’t notice if they were or not but was on the far side when Cathy called her name. She waited, her hand on her heart, holding it in behind her ribs.
‘They got him,’ Cathy panted. ‘They dived on him from every direction, and you should have seen his face. I was expecting a big bruiser in bikie gear. He’s fabulous looking! I could go for him in a big way – if I didn’t know.’
Cara walked on. Cathy kept up, panting as she told her story. ‘I sort of stood in front of him when you took off. He shoved me out of the way. I could have fallen down those steps and broken my neck. I spilt all my lollies, then cops came at him from everywhere and you should have seen his face.’
She was a bored college student, playing at cops and robbers, but obligated to keep her eye on Cara, she’d missed out on the final scene.
‘Slow down, will you. These shoes are killing me. You shouldn’t have taken off like that. No one was going to let him hurt you.’
He’ll find a way, Cara thought and crossed over Little Bourke, Cathy at her elbow.
‘We have to go up to the police station now so they can do the official bit or something. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of Russell Street.’
‘I’ve done my bit and I don’t want to see the inside of Russell Street. I’m going home.’
‘You can’t yet.’
‘I can. Leave me alone now, Cathy.’
‘If you want them to lock him up, then we have to finish what we started.’
Cara swung around to face the girl who had got her into this mess, the girl who never shut up, who kept her awake half the night with her snoring, who forced her to write in the lavatory – who had killed her writing stone dead these last months.
‘I’m crawling with him, Cathy. He’s crawling through my head.’
‘It’s crawling because you’re an ostrich who has got her head in the sand thinking that the dingo pack can’t see you, then you wonder why you get bitten on the backside – and your parents are as bad as you are. If he’d been scaring the tripe out of me since I was fifteen, Gramps would have belted him up and Gran would have been beside him, putting the boot in.’
‘They didn’t know! And you know nothing about me or my parents, so don’t start making your uninformed judgements –’
‘Me make judgements? Me? You’re the one who spends her life making judgements, and none of us come up to scratch, do we?’
‘Go to hell, Cathy! I’m sick of you trying to run my life. I’m sick of your snoring too.’
‘Me snore? You’re the one who snores. You tick. Every morning when I wake up, you sound like a ticking time bomb.’
‘You snore every bloody night –’
‘Yeah, well you tick every bloody morning! I stood over you watching for an hour the morning after you came back from your gran’s funeral, trying to work out how you did it – and I never said one word to you about it, did I? And I still haven’t got a clue what makes you tick – and if you think you can pick a fight with me, then you haven’t got a clue what makes me tick either, so stop trying.’
Cara gave up and walked faster. Cathy kept pace, taking three steps to Cara’s two.
‘Have you ever trusted anyone in your life?’
She’d trusted Rosie, and look where that had got her. She’d trusted her parents and found out they weren’t her parents.
‘He raped you too, didn’t he?’
‘He didn’t rape me, now shut up about him.’
‘It’s plain obvious that he did something pretty horrible to you.’
Cara crossed over Bourke Street, turned towards Swanston and walked fast towards Myer, Cathy now limping at her side, limping until they were directly out the front of Myer’s entrance, when she gave up keeping up and flopped down to the step to take her shoes off.
Black stiletto sandals, though very smart, were not great to walk in. Cara wore flatties, chosen by Myrtle, paid for by Robert, probably expensive, and very comfortable. She walked on in them, merging with the crowd, walked six or eight yards with the crowd, then stopped, forcing the crowd to fork around her. Easier to keep on moving with them, to be swallowed up by them, a separate part of nothing, one grain of sand on a lonely beach, a solitary bean in a bean bag.
Cathy was a part of the whole, sitting unconcerned, attempting to unclip her stocking suspenders without lifting her skirt.
Cara walked back. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘They’re brand-new stockings and I’m not walking in them, that’s what.’
Cara shielded her from the disinterested crowd until the stockings were off, rolled in a bunch and stuffed into her handbag. Cathy, the organiser, the fixer, the problem solver, Cathy sitting there, wriggling her toes and purring with ecstasy – and she looked like a twelve-year-old kid wearing her mother’s lipstick, too small to run her own life, let alone the world.
‘I’m sorry.’ Cara sat at her side. ‘My insides are shaking. I’ve had a headache for six months and I want to vomit.’
‘Me too – or while we were waiting for him I wanted to vomit – except I wanted Dave to get him more. Marion would have seen them handcuff him, and I had to chase you, you twit.’ She wriggled her toes. ‘My little ones feel dead. The bottom straps cut off their blood supply. What if they turn black and drop off?’
‘Then your strap won’t cut into them,’ Cara said. Plump little feet, stubby little Cathy toes, a kid’s hands but nice fingernails, painted an unacceptable red for her city date. ‘Buy yourself a pair of flat shoes.’
‘I look like a midget in flatties.’
‘Feet were given that we may walk,’ Cara said, studying her nondecorative shoes and at the step below them. Saw the shape of a telephone in the wear pattern. No telephones in jail cells. No more phone calls. Lots of metal bars. He’d be locked in by now, a prowling tiger in the zoo. They’d give him prison clothes, cut off his hair, and when the roots grew through dark, he’d look piebald – and forever more he’d blame her for it. And be more vicious when they let him out. And they would. His aunty would pay for the best solicitor and he’d pull out the old sob story.
Dave had said ten to fifteen years. Michelle Hunter was fifteen. He might get ten years.
Even if he only got five years. She had one more year of college then three years working wherever the Education Department sent her. Then after that, she’d go to England with Pete.
‘Girls never broke up with him,’ she said. ‘He was the one who broke it off. The girl he raped must have broken up with him.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘Her mother taught History at high school. She’s got four daughters. Cynthia is my age. The youngest is Michelle
.’
‘Michelle?’ Cathy’s appetite whetted, she wanted more, so on the steps out front of Myer’s, Cara gave her more.
‘He started coming after me when I was fourteen. Having him after me made me popular for a while. We’d just moved to Traralgon. I didn’t know anyone.’
‘You went out with him?’
‘Not really. He was a part of the group. I let him give me a ride home a couple of times, danced with him, smoked his cigarettes. Then his aunty kicked him out and he and Rosie, my girlfriend, and her boyfriend, Henry Cooper, decided that we were all going up to Sydney. I backed out, and a week later was walking home from the library and they pulled up beside me, Tony Bell, Henry Cooper, Rosie, Leanne and Dino. They asked me if I wanted a lift home. I said no thanks, then Rosie and Leanne got out of the car to walk with me and the boys drove along beside us. It was normal for them, just a normal Saturday afternoon.
‘We were about a block from my place when Dino and Tony Bell got out and Leanne and Rosie got into the front seat. I was standing beside the car, telling Rosie I’d see her at school on Monday, and Dino and Tony Bell pushed me into the back seat, got in and the car took off.’
She was reliving it, seeing that afternoon as she’d seen it a thousand times, but today Cathy was at her side. And not a word out of her either.
‘I’d borrowed two books from the library, two of Jane Austen’s. I dropped one when they pushed me in. I had one in my hand, Mansfield Park. I wasn’t concerned. I’d been in Henry Cooper’s car a dozen times. I told them I’d dropped my library book and they drove around the block and Leanne got out and picked it up.
‘Rosie said they were still going to Sydney and were having a going-away party. They drove out to the bush at the back of town and they got out. I tried to, but Dino held on to me until they closed the door. Once the rear doors of Coop’s car were shut, you couldn’t get them open from the inside. He’d taken the handles off. It had been a joke. Coop’s bird coop, they’d called it. Catch them and they can’t fly away.
‘I thought Dino wanted to talk me into going up to Sydney.’ Cara shook her head and closed her mouth.
‘We got him,’ Cathy said. ‘Keep telling yourself that.’
‘We got him, Cath, and if you think he’ll forget that, in ten years, in twenty years, then you’re wrong. There’s something missing in his head.’
‘Tell me the rest.’
‘Mansfield Park,’ Cara said. ‘I don’t know how it happened. He was all over me, trying to get my . . . my clothes off. I was yelling out to Rosie, my best friend, and fighting him. Then the book was in my hand and somehow I must have smashed it into his face.
‘I could have stabbed him in the heart and he wouldn’t have stopped, but he was in love with his face. I didn’t wait to see why he stopped. I was over the front seat and out and running for my life. There was a farmer on the road, driving his cows home. He and his wife took me back to my house.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘The farmer wanted me to. You only had to say Dino Collins’s name and everyone knew him. They told me he had to be stopped. I said I’d tell Mum.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I’d been giving her and Dad the run-around for months, and Rosie had already been there to drop off my library books – and tell her I’d left them in Henry’s car. “You promised Daddy and me that you’d have nothing more to do with those boys,” Mum said. I didn’t tell her what they’d done.’
‘You twit.’
‘If I’d known what I’d done to his face, I would have. I snapped off one of his front teeth, broke his nose.’
‘Didn’t look so fabulous, eh?’
‘Not until the plaster was off his face and his aunty bought him a false tooth.’
‘Good for you.’
‘It wasn’t. Rosie took his side. She turned going to school into hell. And every time I left the house, he was there. Mum and Dad used to take me to Sale, to ballroom dancing classes. He must have followed us one night. I stopped going. He stopped everything.’
‘That’s why you never go home. You have to put all of that in your statement,’ Cathy said.
‘I’m not repeating it, and you’re going to swear not to tell anyone.’
‘I’m too trustworthy to swear to something like that! That Michelle kid will be too young to do much good at the trial, if she even goes to it. What happened to you is proof that she’s not lying. And it can all be backed up too. Dentists and doctors keep records, and the farmer and his wife will remember. What were their names?’
‘Stop, Cath.’
‘I won’t. We’re going down to Russell Street now and you’re going to tell Dave exactly what you told me – and if you won’t, I will,’ Cathy said, forcing her foot back into the stiletto sandal.
‘Stop crippling yourself with those things!’
‘I’m not going to a cop station barefoot!’
‘Stay there and I’ll buy you something.’
‘No. We’ll get a tram.’
‘Do as you’re told for once in your life!’ Left her, sitting, one sandal on, the other one in Cara’s hand.
And something had changed. Melbourne’s streets looked cleaner, wider, the shop windows brighter, the crowd in Myer’s basement happier – just something different.
Something different about Cathy too. So she talked too much, so she snored, so she thought she was the axis that moved the world, but she was too trustworthy to swear she’d keep a secret she didn’t plan to keep, which for some weird reason meant more to Cara than the keeping of that secret.
And when all was said and done, would it matter if Myrtle and Robert and the whole of Australia learned what had almost happened to her when she was fifteen? Kids of fifteen are brainless. They need to live a few more years before they learn to judge who they can and can’t trust.
She bought a pair of size-four cushioned flatties, then the girls continued on with the crowd, Cathy keeping her eye out for Marion, wanting from her a blow-by-blow account of the taking of Dino Collins.
Cara didn’t search for Marion. She looked at the street, at the sky, smelling the scents of Melbourne, seeing it for the first time as her city. She’d just spilled her worst secret to it, on the steps out front of Myer, and the city walls hadn’t crumbled, hadn’t come tumbling down on her.
The sun burned down from a too-blue sky, trams trundling by, cars and trucks jamming the street, newspaper men squatting on pavements, their wares spread. Nothing had changed since the last time she’d been into town, yet everything had. The vampire feeding on her since a month after her fifteenth birthday had been turned to dust, not with a silver bullet, or a wooden stake driven through the heart, but by a curly-headed kid who barely came up to her shoulder, and who couldn’t stand Jane Austen. Along with the size-four soft-soled flatties, Cara had bought a cheap paperback copy of Mansfield Park. She’d never read it.
‘We did one of her books in form four and I vowed never to read another one,’ Cathy said. ‘How much were my shoes?’
‘How much was my red dress?’
‘It’s not red, it’s claret, and it was a birthday present. How much?’
‘Merry Christmas,’ Cara said.
‘It’s not Christmas yet, and I like opening surprises. Are your parents going to let you come up to Ballarat with us?’
‘Yep,’ Cara said.
A SHRINKING WORLD
That same evening, Jenny and Jim were seated at the McPhersons’ dining-room table, sorting through dusty boxes of photographs, flipping through old school albums, pointing to near-forgotten faces, when someone knocked at the door.
John rose from the table and returned with the local constable at his side. He was looking for Jenny.
Police don’t go door-knocking the neighbourhood for you to let you know you’ve won the lottery. Jen and Jim stood up when he walked into the room.
‘I took a call earlier tonight from Melbourne. They’ve picked up a lass claiming to
be your daughter, Mrs Hooper.’
And a ghost walked over Jenny’s grave. Jim didn’t know about the baby she’d left with Myrtle in Sydney. No one knew about it. A shock of adrenalin hit her bloodstream, every pint of it racing to her eardrums. Barely heard Raelene’s name.
She heard Jim’s reply. ‘She’s Jen’s first husband’s daughter.’
‘She was taken into custody three days ago. Until this evening she’s refused to give her name.’
‘Into custody? She’s twelve years old!’ Jenny said.
‘Eighteen, I was told, Mrs Hooper.’
‘She’s not even twelve until next week!’
‘All I know is what I’ve been told,’ the constable said. ‘She was picked up for shoplifting in the city.’
‘She’s a little kid. She’s with her mother, in Moe.’ Jenny turned from the constable to Jim, then back to the constable. ‘Her mother’s name is Florence Keating. She and her husband moved down to Moe a few years ago.’
He took down the names of the Keatings, then questioned Raelene’s age.
‘She was born on 27 November 1951. Raelene Florence King. I married her father. He died in July ’58. Where have they got her?’
The constable couldn’t, or wouldn’t say. ‘I’ll make a few calls and get back to you, Mrs Hooper,’ he said.
‘We’ll be at home,’ Jim said.
The constable knocked on their door at ten-thirty. Florence and Clarrie Keating had not yet been located. Raelene had been moved to a juvenile detention centre.
‘We’ll go down there in the morning,’ Jenny said.
*
She didn’t sleep that night and at six drove down to the old place and woke Georgie. They left at seven and were at a Kilmore roadhouse by nine, placing their breakfast orders, a radio playing in the background.
‘Toasted raisin bread and coffee,’ Georgie ordered, and the radio announcer interrupted the song.
‘President John Kennedy, aged forty-six, was assassinated in Dallas Texas . . .’
For Georgie, John F. Kennedy’s assassination would forever more be associated with coffee, toasted raisin bread and the Beatles singing ‘Yesterday’.
‘His wife Jacqueline cradled his head in her arms as secret service agents raced towards the car . . .’
