by Joy Dettman
A noisy occupation, the scraping and stacking of dishes, the splashing of water, amplified tonight by her anger. Baked-on chop juice gone black in the roasting pan. That brainless old battleaxe hadn’t possessed sense enough to leave the pan out once she’d helped herself. Jenny filled the pan with water while at the table, Jim flipped pages, searching for motels.
And she came, into Jenny’s new kitchen, brandishing her papers.
‘Get out of my kitchen,’ Jenny said.
A scoff, a toss of her head, and Lorna pulled out a chair, sat, her back to the skivvy at the sink.
That was when Jenny knew why Margaret had taken Jimmy and disappeared off the face of the planet, and at that moment, for the briefest second, she was grateful to that dithering Beatrice Potter rat for saving Jimmy from a life with this evil hag.
A shake of detergent added to the roasting pan, and she stood, noisily scraping the pan while staring at Lorna’s narrow back, reflected in the window, at Jim writing on a sheet of paper.
‘It’s a thirty-minute drive. There’ll be little traffic on the road.’ He was too soft. She loved him because he was, but tonight wished he wasn’t. Watched him take a five-pound note from his wallet and placed it with the notepaper.
Lorna ignored both.
‘Leave under your own steam or I’ll call the constable,’ Jenny said.
Not even a scoff in reply, not the turn of that grey wiry head. Jenny picked up the baking pan, which would need to spend the night in the oven to soften up what that scoffing witch of a woman had baked onto it.
A sixteen-by-twelve-inch metal roasting pan half-filled with water is heavy. She stood between stove and table, the pan between her hands. Difficult to balance a full pan. Easy to spill.
‘The will states clearly, The Woody Creek properties will not be sold . . .’
Spilt it. Spilt the lot, and every skerrick of it in Lorna’s direction, most of it down her back, on her hair. A pleasurable experience, perhaps one of the most pleasurable of Jenny’s lifetime, as was watching that dripping totem pole head turn, watching a pinched-nostril sneer alter to one of mute shock as talon claws reached for hair and came away with a segment of soggy potato.
Later, it was a loud experience, and slippery. Lorna dripping, screeching, stepping high and carefully to the rear door, to avoid a little of the flood.
‘That’s the servants’ entrance,’ Jenny yelled after her, then turned again to the sink to refill the baking pan.
COLLISION COURSE
Amber Morrison’s night vision was good enough. She didn’t need to look far ahead. Nothing there she wanted to see.
The boarding house had been a hotel in some long-forgotten era. Its rooms once boasted locks, keys. The keys long lost, a few latches failed to latch. Amber’s door failed.
An inquisitive lodger peering into her room would have seen an old bed made up hospital tight; a battered chest of drawers, bare; no item of clothing hanging in the doorless wardrobe. What little Amber owned she wore on her back or carried in her hessian shopping bag. In recent months she’d procured a string bag, her weapon, once loaded with a water-filled lemonade bottle. She swung it at tormenting youths, used it to slash at overhanging shrubbery, to swipe drunks from her pathway when she entered or left her lodgings.
She slept there, slept badly, slept little. Didn’t eat there. Couldn’t stomach the company in the kitchen, the filth and confusion of it, the odours of boiled cabbage, cheap wine, rancid fat and the stink of unwashed humanity. Left her bed in the early morning, splashed bleach around the bathroom before she washed or bathed, then left the house. Bought a yeast bun from the bakery for breakfast. Bought a piece of fruit for lunch, a pie, or a few slices of cooked meat for her dinner. Carried bread and cheese, lived on bread and cheese when her purse was empty.
An angry woman, Amber Morrison. Insane? In 1946 she’d been judged insane by the courts. In the early sixties, a variety of doctors had decreed her sane enough. She was sane enough when necessary. Sanity was unnecessary at a lodging house she shared with sluts and drunks and a few who had a lesser claim on sanity than she.
In some future year there might be a syndrome to explain her lack of feeling for humanity, her need for constant movement. In the sixties, by those who shared her residence, she was labelled that crazy old walking bitch. Had they been aware of how close they were to being right, aware she’d spent sixteen years in an asylum for the criminally insane, they may not have slept so soundly in their own beds. The raving wino in the room beside her own shouldn’t have –
While Jenny giggled and mopped greasy water from the kitchen floor, while Jim boiled the jug for a cup of tea, while Raelene stood on the hotel corner with three gangling youths and Lorna drove dark roads, smelling of mutton fat, Amber Morrison walked the inner suburban streets of Melbourne.
A full moon had always drawn the youth of Woody Creek from their homes. It drew them from high-rise commission flats, the older of them to huddle in the shadows, the younger to run, laughing, screaming beneath that orange ball in the sky. Everything had changed while Amber was away, but not the sound of children at play. Like a vibration from the past, that running, that screaming, that laughter of moon-mad children.
She’d been a part of it once. Once, long, long ago, she, Maisy, Julia and Sylvia. She was a part of nothing now.
Swiped with her loaded string bag at shrubbery and walked on by, lost in the past where she lived her life.
Always loved moonlit nights. As a child, as a girl, a woman, she’d walked. The girl was close tonight, washed in on waves of the past, with the scents of the past. It was the perfumes and stinks of life that sustained. The stink of urine and unwashed humanity was the place where they’d left her to rot for sixteen years. The smell of an orange was home, when home had been Nan and Pa and happy days, and her pretty-boy Daddy only a photograph on the wall.
Almost thirteen when his doctor hands had shown her how a man could raise that aching need in her. She’d let him take her in the dirt for his promise of a life with her handsome doctor father, and pretty gowns and maids to keep them clean, and pretty shoes and a fine house and a carriage to ride in. He’d promised he’d come back. She’d spent ten years waiting for him to keep his promise.
Smelt his scent on that stray bitch. Right from day one when she’d placed the newborn to her breast, she’d smelt him. Hadn’t put a name to the odour, not then. Had allowed that stray to suck the life from her. The knowing had come later. The knowing had come with her crown of golden hair – his hair. Smelt him in it.
He’d come back for his stray, not for Amber. She’d seen him, hiding his face behind a beard, disguising the doctor beneath a long black coat. Saw him standing beneath Charlie White’s veranda, watching half-a-dozen ten year olds at play. He’d walked by Sissy, hadn’t known her, or Amber. She’d known him – smelt him. Stood at his side one day at Charlie’s counter and he hadn’t turned his head to look at her.
‘Evil bastard.’
Two walkers on that same moonlit path walked faster. Amber didn’t see them. She wasn’t there. She was young and wandering the streets of Woody Creek.
She’d approached him one afternoon in the park. ‘I know who you are,’ she’d said.
‘I believe you are mistaken, madam.’
He’d taken her in the dirt beneath the bridge and now he denied her? She’d wanted to kill him for that denial. He was her pretty-boy Daddy, and all he’d ever given to her was a heat in her loins no man could cool. He’d deserved to die. She’d taken hours of pleasure in honing her carving knife.
Found him one evening, down by the creek, watching two dozen laughing, screaming kids at the swimming bend. He’d been standing out in the open. She’d stood amid the trees, waiting for him to walk her way.
Things happen when blood is pounding red in the head, when the aching heat is in the loins and only fat, grunting Norman in your bed. Golden curls lose their colour at night, lose their curl when wet. Watched her run in behind a clu
mp of blackberry bushes, pull her bathers down, squat.
Like a dream, the stillness of the bush at twilight. Things happen in dreams and there’s no guilt until you wake up – and only for an instant, then dreams dissipate, float away like thistledown on the wind.
Norman had missed the carving knife. He’d bought another she’d later used to silence his snore.
Used a pillow tonight. Less mess. She’d probably done him a favour – but she couldn’t go back to the boarding house, so she walked on.
By eleven-thirty, Amber was in the central city, heading for the GPO. Pension day tomorrow. She’d go . . . go somewhere.
*
Eleven-thirty, Lorna again negotiating the city, following landmarks unfamiliar by moonlight, sitting forward on her seat, squinting left, squinting right. She’d spoken the truth when she’d claimed her eyesight was not good for night driving, nor were her tinted outdoor spectacles.
Lorna saw the dark shape as it was upon her. Neither her reflexes nor the brakes of her old Ford at their best, and little she could have done had they been. She felt the impact.
I have killed, she thought. Then nothing.
*
An ambulance transported two unconscious women to St Vincent’s Hospital. In the main, Lorna’s injuries were to her face. It had had a head-on with the steering wheel. The windscreen had shattered; her spectacles had shattered into her eyes; her eagle-beak nose was pulp. The heavy bumper bar had broken Amber’s leg. She’d flown thirty feet and landed on her head, on concrete. Her injuries were life-threatening.
Through the night two teams of doctors worked on the accident victims. They did their best.
The Melbourne Sun reported the accident, a bare line or two beneath a report on a three-fatality head-on with a transport on the Hume Highway.
Lorna regained consciousness thirty-six hours after the impact and she was blind – bandaged blind, but unaware of the bandage. Lorna, never known to panic, panicked. They sedated her and when she next awoke, she’d gained sufficient of her senses to listen. And to remember that dark shape on the road.
‘Have I killed?’
She hadn’t, or not yet, though the pedestrian had not regained consciousness.
‘My vehicle?’
They couldn’t say what had become of her vehicle. ‘We need to let your family know where you are, Miss Hooper.’
‘I have no family to inform,’ she said.
*
On the third day, Amber opened her eyes to a white-clad sister with gentle hands.
‘You’re in hospital, dear. You had an accident but you’re going to be fine.’
Dear? For too many years she’d been dear to no one. Too many years of stink and filth and no touch of kindness. Smell of clean on that hand, on the air.
‘Can you tell me your name, dear?’
Knew her name. Didn’t want that clean-smelling sister to know it. Knew why she’d been out on the roads. Wondered what day it was. If they’d found him. If she’d been asleep for long enough for them to smell him.
Closed her eyes again, safe a while in sterile heaven.
They moved her to a different bed, surrounded her with curtain screens, spoonfed her broth, wiped her chin when she dribbled. And they asked their questions.
‘We need to know your name, sweetie. Your family will be worrying about you. Can you remember your name? Do you have a husband, children?’
Only Sissy. He’d turned her into a Duckworth.
‘Where is home, sweetie?’
Memories are long in Woody Creek, Amb.
‘Where do you live, dear?’
‘Here.’
‘This is a hospital. No one lives here, sweetie.’
Norman’s mother had called her dear, served her tea in a fine china cup, shown her a vase presented to a Duckworth by Queen Victoria – had until she’d been in town long enough to learn that dear’s mother lived in a two-room hut and was on with Vern Hooper. No more dear then, but too late. Norman had wanted dear, and she’d wanted his mother’s bone-china tea set, her Queen Victoria vase and superior furniture – superior to anything Amber had known in her mother’s hut.
They kept asking her name – the tall sister and the pretty little nurse. They called her dear and sweetie and washed her face, cared for her, ‘We need to know your name, dear,’ so she gave them a name. ‘Duckworth.’
‘Mrs Duckworth?’
No ring on her finger. Had never wanted it there, so removed the scar of it.
‘Miss. Elizabeth,’ she said. Elizabeth was the Queen of England.
Her right leg and foot were encased in plaster. She learned why her head hurt. No hair on it, long rows of spiky stitches and raw flesh. Sighed, happy with the pain of it, and safe, and at peace, she slept.
*
‘Miss Duckworth. Sweetie. You can’t sleep all day.’
Lorna recognised the name but was unable to see its owner. She’d spoken to the eye specialist. He’d assured her that she’d have some sight. The plastic surgeon, brought in to reattach her nose, told her she’d require a second operation once the swelling subsided.
He’d packed her nostrils with gauze. She’d never been a mouth breather and panicked when she awoke and could not draw breath. She’d panicked when the eye surgeon removed her bandage and she’d seen little more than light. He’d replaced them, and she’d calmed.
Each morning she was assisted from bed, led by an arm to the bathroom where her backside was guided to the toilet seat. She suffered the stripping off of some form of nightgown, suffered the showering, the chatter of a garrulous staff member, and her laughter when Lorna informed her that the great Roman Empire had fallen due to too frequent bathing.
‘I think you’re a bit of a wag, Miss Hooper.’
Lorna was no wag. For the past fifty years, she’d bathed once a week, which was more than adequate for one who never raised a sweat. Trapped within the hospital system, dependent on others for her every need, her lack of sight, her fear of its permanent loss, led to a modicum of humility, a smidgen of civility.
Bruises become less painful, wounds heal. Two elderly women, bedded side by side in a two-bed ward, one denied sight, the other denied movement, listened in to the other’s conversations.
Miss Duckworth, of Launceston, had recently buried her father. She had come across to the mainland to take care of dear old Aunt Lizzie, who incidentally she’d been named for, but Aunt Lizzie had not long outlived her brother. Miss Duckworth had found accommodation at a house in . . . and for the life of her she couldn’t recall the name of the suburb.
Existing without sight sharpened the other senses. Lorna’s ears pricked up at the mention of Tasmania, and for an hour she lay sifting memories. She’d written the invitations to her brother’s aborted marriage to Sissy Morrison. A dozen or more envelopes had been addressed to Duckworths and surely one to Tasmania. Had it been to Launceston?
It was not until the morning Miss Duckworth was moved from her bed to a cane chair where she might take a little sun that the two communicated. Lorna heard the turning of newspaper pages and sighed at a future with insufficient sight to read the morning papers.
Amber wasn’t reading, but studying her bandaged neighbour. She’d known two Miss Hoopers in another lifetime. Her ward mate resembled neither of them. Had Lorna’s hair been the black of her youth, worn in a tight coiled bun on the nape of her neck, she might have recognised her, but her ward mate’s hair was grey wire, each strand standing on end. She’d known Lorna Hooper’s acidic tone. Gauze-packed nostrils neutralise acid. Her ward mate’s eyes were bandaged, her nose held together with lengths of plaster, false teeth smashed, gums cut by her dentures – had she not been toothless, Amber would have recognised those biting teeth, or her clothing, had she been clad in her permanent uniform of black. She wasn’t. Amber saw a tall, thin woman, her bare sparrow ankles jutting from hospital-loaned male slippers; she saw a hospital-issue washed-out dressing-gown. Lorna Hooper had as little resemblance to her
self as did a featherless cockatoo.
Then the featherless cockatoo spoke. ‘My bandages will be removed in the morning. I was an avid reader.’
Amber nodded, realised a nod was insufficient. ‘Oh,’ she said.
Conversation needs to be practised. Amber, never good at it, had done none of it in recent years. The newspaper was open. One of the sisters had offered her a selection of reading glasses when she had initially refused the offered paper. She’d tried on two pairs before settling for a pair of blue-rimmed bifocals.
‘Dawn Fraser made history in the most desperate swim of her career when she won the women’s one hundred metres for the third time,’ she read.
‘I saw her swim in ’56,’ Lorna offered. ‘A fine sportswoman.’
A forcing ground, a hospital ward. When Lorna’s bandages were removed and replaced with a single patch and darkened spectacles, she regained a little independence but not her ability to read. Prior to the accident she’d required reading spectacles.
Amber learned to move around on wooden crutches and to make her own way to those chairs in the sun where Lorna waited for her to read aloud of the great human horde, and for the first time since 1946 Amber began to again count herself amongst them.
The women were of similar age, Lorna younger by ten years than Amber Morrison, though barely three years junior to Miss Elizabeth Duckworth. When one is weaving fiction, then why not allow fiction to deduct a few of those lost years? Strong women both, strong hearts and lungs, good healers who would have been released into the care of their families had they possessed families who cared. Instead, they were found beds at a convalescent home, in a four-bed ward, two of the beds occupied by a pair of the lower order.
Lorna had never doubted her rightful position in society. In her youth, Amber had possessed aspirations to rise above dirt scratcher. She’d lived with Cecelia Morrison for five years, a dame who had considered herself to be one of the upper, upper class. Miss Hooper and Miss Duckworth were given the beds on the eastern side, and the east and the west sides did not mix or converse until one of the lower order learned that Miss Duckworth’s dear departed father had been a parson.
