by Joy Dettman
*
‘A beautiful model,’ Morrie said. ‘Have you ridden in one before?’
‘No. Have you driven one before?’
‘A few times,’ he said.
Wind in her face, tangling her hair. She’d never ridden in an open car, had twice clung onto the back of a motorbike. Similar.
He turned left at an intersection, then a hundred yards on, turned right. She believed he was taking her home via the scenic route until she saw the sign pointing to Melbourne, where he put his foot down.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I’ve never driven it on an open road.’
She wasn’t afraid of him. He was Gerry’s friend, driving Gerry’s car – and there wasn’t enough room in the car to rip her clothes off and no back seat, and the doors were low enough to climb over anyway. She was more scared of having nothing beneath her, nothing over her, and of his speed.
‘Have you got a death wish?’
‘You don’t like speed?’
‘I have this crazy desire to begin my teaching career.’
‘They’re made for speed,’ he said, but he slowed, then swung the car in a wide circle and headed back to town.
She’d lost any bearings she may have thought she had. Minutes later, when he swung the car into a driveway then drove deep down the side of a house, she didn’t have a clue where she was. Apprehensive now and angry at Cathy’s desertion, she sat, her arms folded.
And the swine tried to kiss her.
‘You offered to drive me home,’ she said, taking a handkerchief from beneath her bra strap and making a point of wiping where he’d connected.
‘I thought you were waiting for the obligatory kiss. You’re home – or walk over the road and you will be.’ He’d pulled into Gerry’s drive, which, in Cara’s mind, had managed to transpose itself from one side of the street to the other.
Embarrassed, blood rushing her face, feeling like an idiot, she fumbled for the door handle, and when he reached across her to open it, believing he was making another move on her, she whacked him across the ear.
‘Out,’ he said, the door pushed wide.
‘You drive like a maniac, drive me in circles, pull into a strange yard – you could have told me where we were.’
‘You could have asked where we were.’
‘You had no right to touch me.’
‘Wave a red rag at a bull and he’ll chase it. Wear a neck-to-knees fur next time. We can rub noses, Eskimo fashion – exchange frosty nasal drips.’ She was out. Her heel forgotten, she ran across the road, but not done yet, he followed her to Cathy’s gate. ‘More acceptable to chip icicles from the nostrils and less insulting to the other participant.’
‘Participant suggests I was participating.’ She flung the words over her shoulder as she swung the gate hard at him, then ran to the dark semi-enclosed porch.
No lights on at Cathy’s house. No key in the door either. She tried it, and of course it was locked, Cathy’s parents were out at the Hill-Jones party and, like their daughter, would probably stay out until dawn. Should have thought about the house key. Cathy should have thought about it. She was too busy trying to get off with Gerry.
Cara turned around and, in the dark of the porch, bumped into him.
‘Locked out?’
Hadn’t known he’d followed her onto the porch. She pushed by him and headed down a path leading to the back door. Darker down there. Had to feel her way. He, less familiar with this house than she, tracked her every step.
‘I’ll drive you out there – if you know where to go.’
‘I don’t.’ And as if she’d get back into that car with him. She found the back door. Didn’t expect it to open. It didn’t.
Barked her shin on an outdoor stool as she turned too fast to the east side – the bathroom was on the east side. Its window had been open earlier, a high window and small.
He tailed her, two paces behind. ‘Got a hidden key?’
‘A drainpipe, and with luck, an open window, and I don’t need an audience.’
‘As if I’d miss seeing you scale a drainpipe in that skirt.’
She swung around to murder him, and a garden hose left where it had been trickling water onto rosebushes lay across the path. She trod on it. The hose rolled beneath her shoe, and her reflexes screaming snake, she threw her weight onto her left foot; with no reliable heel to drive deep and regain her equilibrium, she was going down.
We’ll save ourselves on anything. Rosebushes are prickly. The wall was too far away. Flailing arms reaching for what they could, found him.
‘Show a little self-restraint, woman,’ he said. And he kissed her, held her up and kissed her until she saw stars, or until her blush went internal and the backs of her eyelids turned red. She would have whacked him again, had she had a hand free to whack with, but her feet were spread, one shoe sinking deeper into a garden bed, one heel useless, and if she released her hold to whack him, she’d go down properly.
He took his time, and when he was done, he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, brushed it across her lips, spat on it theatrically, then wiped his own mouth thoroughly.
Nothing she could say. Nothing she could do but remove her sandals. Sure-footed then, she found the drainpipe Cathy had spoken of utilising once when she’d lost her key and come home too late to wake her parents. She found a foothold, a new handhold, heard something split as she got a knee onto the windowsill, but the upper sash was open and the lower slid up easily. Everything slid easy in Cathy’s house. It wouldn’t be easy to slide in through the narrow opening, and he wasn’t seeing what she’d have to do to get in.
‘Goodnight,’ she said.
‘It was until half an hour ago.’
‘Go.’
‘Never let it be said that I slept soundly in my bed knowing there was a Sydney cat burglar on the loose.’
And to hell with him. She hitched her skirt up to her thighs, got her backside onto the sill and slid one leg through. So he’d get a good view, but a dim view. Starlight tonight, but no moon. Blessing the lack of moon, clinging to the drainpipe, she flattened and wriggled her other leg in through the gap, then slowly, hands clinging, she went in backward, lowering herself until one muddy foot found the washbasin. Her head and shoulders still on the far side, she reached down. ‘Could you pass up my sandals, please.’
‘What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet the sun,’ he quoted.
‘My shoes, you halfwit.’
‘The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, as daylight doth a lamp.’
‘Will you please pass me my shoes!’
‘Pull your head in,’ he said, and he was gone, a sandal in each hand.
THE MASTER PLAN
Cara had been raised in the knowledge that God had a master plan for each of his children. She’d been raised in the certain knowledge that for each girl child born there was a boy child, and that one day they’d meet, fall in love and live happily ever after. She’d been raised to believe that if she placed her life into God’s safe hands, he’d guide her in the direction she was destined to go.
Maybe it worked for some of his children. Gerry had come home to his old street after two years of London, Dublin, Madrid, and there was pretty kid Cathy, all grown up and overeager to welcome him home. He treated her like his kid sister but didn’t appear to find her hero worship unwelcome.
God was wearing a blindfold when he glanced Cara’s way. She’d spent years imagining her return to Amberley and been greeted by cockroaches. Cast adrift at birth, Cara not-quite-Norris was destined to float between half-worlds forever, her blueprint mislaid when two women pulled a swiftie.
The girl child she’d been born to be may have liked Morrie. He’d fixed her sandal’s wobbly heel and brought them across the road the morning after New Year, the mud all cleaned away. She should have gushed, told him how brilliant he was. Cathy had. Cara had asked him if he’d booby-trapped the heel.
‘Stop freezing him off,’ Cathy ordered when he walked back across the road. ‘He’s interested in you.’
For two years she’d been accusing Cara of freezing boys off. She didn’t freeze them, just let them know early that she wasn’t interested – and maybe had been doing it for so long, she’d forgotten, or never learnt to treat them any other way.
Cathy’s original plan had been to leave for Sydney on 3 January, but on the third, she delayed their departure date until the fifth, then invited Gerry and Morrie and two dozen more around for a barbecue. Her parents had a built-in barbecue in their backyard, and according to Cathy’s gran, the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.
They bought four pound of sausages, half-a-dozen loaves of bread and two dozen eggs. Gerry loved pavlova and Cathy’s gran had an infallible recipe for it, which in the girls’ hands proved almost infallible. Fruit and cream covered their failings. Gerry praised their effort and came back with his paper plate for more.
‘When are they going back?’ Cara asked that night.
‘Gerry’s not, or not for a while. He said tonight that his father is supposed to take things easy and that he’s going to take over the practice for three months while his parents have a holiday. Did you see him kiss me?’
She’d seen him peck her on the cheek. Could girls fall in love at twelve? Maybe he’d looked better when she was twelve. He had a pleasant enough face, was six years Cathy’s senior – and his curly hair appeared to be receding. His father’s dome was billiard-ball smooth.
After the barbecue, Cathy delayed their trip until the eighth. Gerry and Morrie were going on a yacht to Tasmania on the eighth, and until they were safe in the middle of the ocean she was not about to leave Gerry unguarded.
‘If we leave before they leave, he’ll think I’m not interested.’
‘I can’t say you leave a lot of room for doubt, Cath.’
‘You’re just copying what Mum says.’
‘No. I’m saying that you’re hurling yourself at his head.’
‘I don’t care if I am. See that posh car parked out front of his place? It’s Roger’s, one of his university mates from Melbourne. Gerry went out with his sister for about six months and I think the girl Roger brought with him is her.’
‘Keep looking through the curtains and he’ll see you spying on him.’
‘I’m trying to get a good look at the girl.’
It was a side to Cathy Cara hadn’t realised was there. She’d flirted her way through college, had half of the boys in love with her. Up here she was like a wife with a philandering husband. While the maroon Rover was parked in front of Gerry’s house, she sat at the window, peering through filmy white terylene curtains.
‘So we leave on the eighth, definitely.’
‘Whatever.’ Cara was in no hurry to return to bedlam, which was wrong but didn’t feel wrong. There was freedom in this house.
She’d grown up with lodgers, elderly lodgers who said good morning or good afternoon, who had occasionally knocked at the rent hatch to hand over money, but Amberley hadn’t seemed like a boarding house, not back then.
It was now. And it wasn’t home. But if it wasn’t, then where was home? Her room at the college had been, though not any more. Another student would sleep in her bed, hang her clothing in Cara’s wardrobe.
The boys left for Melbourne on the evening of the seventh, and that night Cara printed in huge block letters, GERRY KISSED CATHY, on page seven of her new diary, a gift from Gwen and Len Bryant’s car yard. Gwen had caught her writing in an exercise book.
‘Diary,’ Cara had said.
In the early morning of the eighth, the little blue car crept out of a sleeping street, then from Ballarat to Bendigo, Cara suffering a blow-by-blow replay of Cathy’s previous night. It didn’t end in Bendigo, or in Albury where they found the motel, booked for them by Len Bryant who had ordered that they break their trip halfway, and to give him a call from the motel.
He’d supplied them with a strip map and a large map of eastern Australia. They opened it that night in their twin room, discussing towns.
And maybe God hadn’t lost Cara’s master plan, just mislaid it.
‘My great-grandparents on Dad’s side were farmers up that way,’ Cathy said, prodding a finger at Willama.
‘Cow farmers?’
‘Crops – or I seem to remember paddocks full of crops.’
‘You’ve been up there?’
‘Once.’ Cathy searched the map with her finger until she found what she was looking for and prodded an insignificant dot. ‘There it is,’ she said. ‘Their farm was a few miles out of Woody Creek. Pa was raised up there. He used to ride a horse to school with two of his sisters clinging on behind him.’
‘Woody Creek,’ Cara read, and the ghost of Jenny trailed its fingers down her spine. ‘What’s it like, Cath?’
‘I was about ten at the time. I remember Pa telling me not to blink as we drove through the town or I’d miss it. Why?’
‘I’ll probably end up teaching there,’ Cara said.
‘You won’t. We’re both going to get placements in Melbourne. I dreamed we did. Did I tell you Gerry is going to stay in Ballarat for at least three months?’
‘Only a few dozen times, but go ahead.’
‘You have to admit now, though, don’t you – it pays to listen to your dreams.’
*
Robert and Myrtle drove the new station wagon out to meet them and to guide Cathy in through the chaos of Sydney. They looked better. Myrtle looked as if she’d just come from the hairdresser.
Amberley looked better than when Cara had left it. Mr Waters and Bill Bertram had been giving Robert a hand with a paintbrush. They’d painted the storeroom and bought bunk beds which they’d set up in the small room for the Bertram boys. The storeroom gave the boys direct access to the backyard. Bill Bertram had moved into a small room across the passage from the storeroom and Number Five was again locked. No more herd of boot-clad elephants over the parlour. No more wild horses galloping down the upper floor passage, or having races up and down the stairs; no more whiz, bang, screech of kids’ television shows.
The lodgers’ sitting room had lost its bed and was furnished now with Myrtle’s leather couch and two of the original easy chairs, found somewhere. The television sat on a small coffee table.
Robert and Myrtle had met Mrs Bertram and the three Bertram daughters. They lived with her parents in a two-bedroom unit fifteen minutes away.
‘Separated?’ Cara asked.
‘No. They’re building. The wife’s mother is crippled. They sold up in Melbourne and came up here to look after her,’ Myrtle said.
‘He’s a carpenter,’ Robert said. ‘His company is working on the conversion of one of these old places into self-contained flats. Given the price of inner-city properties these days, what the owners receive for one flat pays for the conversion,’ Robert said.
‘You’re not thinking about it?’
‘It’s a thought, poppet. We’ve become accustomed to having our own lives.’
The new Private Residence sign on the locked passage door gave mute evidence of that, and the new sign on the rent hatch: Business hours. 5 to 8 Fridays. 10 to 12 Saturdays.
The cigarette burns on Cara’s windowsill had been smoothed and painted away; her scuffed walls had disappeared beneath the two coats. Smell of fresh paint in the room, and a second bed, set up, made up for Cathy, who didn’t plan to spend a lot of time in that bed. She’d never been to Sydney and wanted to see what she could of it, preferably without elderly guides.
They partied with Pete and his mob on Saturday night, and didn’t get home until two, and found Robert and Myrtle pacing the floor when they came in.
Cathy giggled for half an hour.
‘Shut up, Cathy.’
‘I know now why you freeze blokes off. Your parents would have a fit if you ever brought one home.’
She wanted to drive into the city. Cara said she w
asn’t going unless they went on the train. They spent the day sightseeing, on bus and train, and came home before dark, Cathy with sore feet.
‘That’s why I wanted to drive,’ she said.
‘Wear shoes you can walk in, nitwit.’
She took delight in flirting with the middle-aged cockroach, then had the audacity to mention, at Myrtle’s dinner table, that he was ‘one of those’, translating her words with a flopping wrist. Even Myrtle understood the meaning of that sign; she damn near choked on a mouthful.
Twelve hours after Cathy arrived, it had become obvious to Cara that her mother didn’t approve of her. Robert formed his own opinion when Cara’s guest began sitting with the Bertram boys, watching The Flintstones each evening. Cara sat with them one evening and wondered if Dino Collins watched that show in jail. Fred Flintstone’s pet dinosaur’s name was Dino.
Mrs Collins enjoyed the boys’ television set. She knew what was showing and when it was showing. Cara and Cathy watched a war movie with her one night. It raised the subject of a Japanese submarine in the harbour and of the earlier war that had left her a widow.
‘A young lodger we had here during the war was widowed in ’43. She was left to raise her little boy alone – as was I. I hadn’t considered teaching until I lost William. It was an easier profession to get into in those days and my mother was alive then. We lived with her until her death. Jenny had no family, or none up here. Your mother and I kept an eye on little Jimmy at night. She entertained at a servicemen’s club,’ Mrs Collins said.
‘A stripper?’ Cathy asked.
‘In our era, such goings-on did not go on, dear – or not openly. She sang, with a band of elderly gentlemen.’
‘Did she have boyfriends – after her husband was killed?’ Cara asked.
‘Goodness me, no. She wasn’t that sort of girl, though there were a few around who were. She lived for her little boy.’
The ever-changing Jenny – not that sort of girl.
