by Joy Dettman
Then how did she have me?
*
A busy week, that first week in Sydney, an uncomfortable week for Cara who spent it balancing, not quite her parents’ daughter, nor quite Cathy’s sharp-tongued mate, but someone walking a tightrope midway between the two. It was a filling-in of time sort of week, Cathy counting off the days until Gerry came home from the sea, Cara watching for the postman and for the letter that would dictate where she’d spend the next twelve months of her life.
Night-time for Cathy meant one more day over. For Cara it was writing time in a stilled house. She’d started a new exercise book with a chapter she named ‘The Telegram’. It began with the arrival of the telegram informing Jessica that her soldier, William, was dead, and when she read it later, it brought tears to her eyes.
One day, one glorious day, a book with her name on its cover would draw a tear from a reader’s eye. One fine day.
*
‘How come you only had the one baby, Mrs Norris?’ Cathy asked.
‘We weren’t blessed with more, dear.’
‘Mum either. I always envied kids who had heaps of brothers and sisters. I want six kids. Three boys and three girls.’ They were shelling peas, Cathy eating as many as she dropped into the basin. ‘Our street was full of kids when I was growing up.’ One tooth wore a green pea skin. Myrtle pointed. Cara laughed.
‘What’s wrong?’
Myrtle told her. Cathy cleaned the tooth with a fingernail and continued. ‘I walked to school with the same mob through primary and high school. One family had nine kids.’
‘I used to envy my six cousins until Gran moved in with them,’ Cara said, and Myrtle walked to the sink, not pleased by the turn of conversation.
‘What do you really think of Gerry?’
‘I’ve told you fifty times, he seems nice enough.’
‘What’s nice enough?’
‘Nothing spectacular,’ Cara said.
‘Why not spectacular?’
‘He’ll be bald by the time he’s thirty.’
‘I don’t care if he is. Do you expect her to ever get married, Mrs Norris?’ Cathy asked.
‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ Myrtle said.
‘Morrie, a Pom, is very interested in her.’
‘Shut up, Cathy.’
‘Well he is. You should have seen the way he was looking at her the night he and Gerry left – as if he wouldn’t have minded kissing her goodbye.’
‘When did they say you’d hear where you’ll be teaching?’ Myrtle asked.
‘They didn’t,’ Cara said. She shelled three more peas. ‘They’ll probably send me to Traralgon, then you and Daddy will have to mortgage this place to buy me out of my bond.’ Which might put an end to talk of splitting it into flats. Myrtle was even thinking about it now, though not to sell off in bits, but to borrow the money and let the rent from the units pay off the loan – which sounded better, in theory.
‘The last time I heard, they were going to send you to Woody Creek,’ Cathy said, and Myrtle’s hands stilled.
‘We found it on the map on the way up,’ Cara explained quickly. ‘It’s a tiny dot out the back of Willama. Cathy’s great-grandparents had a farm there.’
Cathy left off shelling peas to watch The Flintstones. Cara could live without Fred and Dino. She holed up in her bedroom to rewrite two pages, which meant ripping out the original and sticky-taping in the new. Her hands occupied with tape, she couldn’t close the book when Cathy came in. She snatched it.
‘Why aren’t you using Mum and Dad’s diary?’
‘Give it to me, Cathy.’
‘Have you been recording my habits for the TV cop?’ Cathy said, dancing back with the book. Robert’s attitude to television was quite clear. Since her second night in Sydney Cathy had referred to him as the TV cop.
‘It’s private. Give it back, Cathy!’
They fought over it. Cara ended up with the front cover, which she spun at Cathy’s head before walking out and slamming the door. She had a shower, washed her hair, vowing not to speak one word to her at dinner. She was still in the bathroom when Myrtle called them to the table.
Cathy exited the room with the book. ‘You secretive bugger. Where’s the rest of it?’
‘I’m not talking to you.’
‘What’s that I hear? Was it your ears flapping?’
‘I wouldn’t consider looking at your private things.’
‘I haven’t got any. Who is Jessica?’
‘No one.’
‘She’s someone you know. Come clean.’
‘It’s a novel, and you keep your hands off it!’
‘Are you going to yell that at the people who buy it? It’s brilliant, you secretive bugger. Where’s the rest of it?’
‘There’s no rest.’ There was. She’d filled three exercise books with the rest of it.
‘I didn’t know you wrote stuff like that. You told Mum and Dad it was your diary. I tell you everything and you tell me nothing.’
‘You tell everyone everything.’
She did. Cara knew Cathy’s mother had to get married straight out of school, that she’d tried to have more kids once Cathy was at school but hadn’t been able to get pregnant. She knew Cathy had kissed a boy named Mike when she was twelve, that she’d lost count of how many she’d kissed since, that Frank was the only one she’d gone any further with than kissing, though not much further. The night Gerry kissed her, she’d woken her parents to relay the news.
Amberley was full of secrets. Cara would never have known that Myrtle’s father had committed suicide if Pete hadn’t told her. She’d never met Myrtle’s brother, Richard. And it cut both ways. Myrtle and Robert wouldn’t have known what Dino Collins had done if Robert hadn’t been forced to give evidence at the trial.
It’s brilliant. Where’s the rest of it? Praise to a writer is food for the soul. Those words played through dinner, and continued to play long after Cathy’s mouth was closed by sleep. It’s brilliant. Where’s the rest of it?
Cara wanted the rest of it. That chapter would lead into Jessica having her fourth baby, Carolyn. The early chapters, written when she was fifteen, had never been believable. She knew more about the world now. She’d had Jessica producing twins at sixteen, then falling in love with her soldier, and how, with twins, would she find time to fall in love with her soldier and have Jimmy, who had been almost three years older than Cara, which meant he’d been born before Jenny was eighteen?
If Jessica had been a stripper instead of a singer, it might have been easier to get her pregnant four times by the age of twenty. But if she’d been so in love with her soldier that she’d left her two girls at home to follow him to Sydney, how was a reader supposed to believe she’d fallen in love so fast with Billy-Bob . . . Bobby-Lee.
She’d trapped a real Jessica in that ‘Telegram’ chapter and knew it. Hadn’t ever been able to make her a real person before; depending on her mood when she’d picked up her pencil, Jessica was slut on one page and victim on the next.
Contrary to what Mrs Collins had said, there would have been heaps of strippers and prostitutes in Sydney during the war, though they wouldn’t have lodged at Amberley. If she turned Jessica into a stripper, she’d need to find her another rooming house.
It came to her, near midnight. Michelle Hunter would have had a baby at sixteen if they hadn’t terminated the pregnancy.
Jessica had been raped at fifteen and her rapist’s name jumped out of the dark, with the opening sentence to her novel.
Dean James was a purebred cur who ran with a pack of mixed breeds. Smarter than the average cur, he was more vicious –
Oh, yes! Yes! And she had to write it down or she’d lose it before morning.
She rose, found her dressing-gown and crept out to the kitchen with her exercise book and pencil.
It came so fast, her pencil couldn’t keep up with it. Jessica was walking home from the library. They came in a car . . . what sort of a car? Dodge. Uncle John’s f
irst car had been a Dodge . . .
She wrote of a bush track, of a cow farmer and his wife. Had to alter a few details – the library book, her escape from Henry Cooper’s car. She allowed the farmer to find Jessica cowering naked in his milking shed.
And it worked. It really worked. And the mixture of Cara and Michelle Hunter worked too, and making Jessica a Catholic. In those days, even if doctors had done abortions, a Catholic family would never have agreed to their daughter having one.
Dean James was a pure unadulterated Dino Collins, evil. Readers loved to hate evil characters. She’d used Lakes Entrance as the town, which was restricting. Where was the library? Where was the lane where the rapist and his friends had pushed Jessica into the car?
‘Woodsville,’ she whispered. ‘Riverwood,’ she decided, then flipped through the pages, erasing Lakes Entrance and replacing it with Riverwood.
She filled fifteen pages with the new Jessica, and when her pencil required sharpening and her hand could barely grip it to sharpen it, she sat reading, dreaming.
It’s brilliant. Where’s the rest of it?
She’d give her the rest, once it was typed. As soon as she started making her own money, she’d buy a typewriter. And as soon as she sold her first novel, she’d pay off the Education Department’s bond and do nothing but write.
Didn’t want to teach. Wouldn’t admit it, even to Cathy. The thought of standing in front of a classroom full of kids, pretending she knew what she was doing, scared her stiff.
Cathy wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared of anything.
How do people grow up unafraid?
They grow up in Ballarat.
She was standing before the fridge when the kitchen door squeaked open and Robert, pyjama-clad, entered, his eyes squinting against the light.
‘Can’t sleep, poppet?’
‘I’m trying to see Amberley as flats,’ Cara lied, not quite a lie. She tried to imagine it often.
‘It’s not for you to worry your pretty head about.’
She removed a bottle of milk and reached for two glasses, poured milk into each and offered one.
‘How long have you been up?’
‘Not long.’
‘Every room needs money spent on it, and to be honest, both your mother and I have reached the stage where we don’t want to share what’s left of our lives with lodgers. Your mum doesn’t want to sell. Having our own separate unit here is looking like the answer.’
‘How many units are they talking about?’
‘We’d need to bring in an architect, but Bill believes we’d get four good-sized units.’
‘Architects cost big money.’
‘We’ve got our retirement fund behind us and a good pension, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve paid off a loan.’ He squinted at his watch, and without his glasses he couldn’t see the hands.
‘It’s a bit after three,’ Cara said.
‘Pop back into bed,’ he said and returned to his own.
Cara picked up her book, pencil and eraser and returned to her room to bury her new work with its older and battered mates in the bottom of her small case.
‘Put them in the cupboard,’ Cathy muttered.
‘Your wedding gifts, Cath?’ Cara asked. Occasionally Cathy replied from her dreams. Not tonight.
She’d end up married to Gerry. She’d have her six kids. It was all about knowing what you wanted, and going after it. Maybe knowing who you were allowed you to set your sights on an objective early and follow it. Cathy could look at her mother and know what she’d look like at thirty-nine, look at her gran and see herself at fifty-seven.
I’ll be twenty-one this year. Who will I look like when I’m fifty-seven?
No one. I’m a space child. I hitched a ride on a rocket ship, and landed at Amberley. I’m a shape, a shadow, not quite here. That’s why I freeze boys off, because I’m scared there’s nothing to find behind the shape of me.
The night Morrie kissed her, she could have asked him to give her a boost up to the windowsill. He would have. She could have thanked him for fixing her heel. At the barbecue she could have asked him where he’d met Gerry, what he did for a living, where he lived in England.
He was flying home in February.
Her mind wandering, wandered to Dino Collins, who could be back on the street by the time she’d worked off her bond – if he behaved himself.
When had he ever behaved himself?
She rose up on her pillow then, suddenly knowing that if Jessica had been raped at fifteen by Dean James she’d be scared off men for life. There was no way Cara could force her to produce Jimmy before Carolyn.
So give her triplets.
It’s brilliant. Where’s the rest of it?
Was Cathy any judge of brilliant literature? She loathed Jane Austen.
And the title was weak. The story was no longer about the child of Jessica, but about Jessica. Fallen Angel, she whispered, and it sounded too familiar. She’s No Angel, she tried on her tongue. Discarded it too. Angel At My Door. That was a possible. Myrtle had once said God had sent an angel to her door. It sounded like a title, and she had the Martha character saying it . . . somewhere.
‘Angel At My Door by C.J. Norris,’ she whispered.
SEA SICK
‘Get up,’ Cathy said. ‘We’re going home.’ She’d taken an early call from her mother. Gerry had flown home from Tasmania.
Cara pulled the blanket over her head and told her to go home if she wanted to go home.
‘I’m not driving all that way by myself. Get up. I’ve already told your mother we’re going and she looked relieved to be getting rid of me.’
‘It’s too late to start today.’
‘It will be if you don’t get out of that bed. Come on, on your feet.’
‘That’s not the way we work up here. We plan trips for a month, Cath.’
‘You won’t have a month to live unless you’re in that car in ten minutes.’
They left at nine, Myrtle and Robert waving, and not appearing too unhappy about their daughter’s sudden departure.
Two brief stops for eats and petrol, and twelve hours later they drove into Ballarat, the passenger more weary than the driver, who was halfway across the road before Cara’s feet were on the ground.
‘Nice to see you, Cathy,’ Gwen Bryant yelled after her.
‘Two minutes, Mum.’
Cara received Gwen’s welcoming kiss. Together they unloaded the car and hauled the luggage inside. Cathy, true to her word, was back in five minutes, Gerry in tow. He told them of a rough crossing, of his days spent, head over the side, seasick. He told them they’d refused to put up with him on the way back so he’d flown home from Hobart.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or perhaps separation from his mate had him seeking company. Cathy and her family were available.
He was nothing spectacular, but nice – and nicer still when he crossed the street one night toting an elderly typewriter. He’d been cleaning out a room behind his father’s surgery, and Cathy had told him Cara was writing a novel and that her handwriting stank.
Space was cleared on Cathy’s desk. Len donated a ream of typing paper, plus a dozen sheets of carbon. Cathy tested it, typed, Jessica, Chapter One, by Cara Norris.
‘You’ll need to marry someone with an interesting name before it’s published, though. Norris sounds like a book about growing brussels sprouts.’
Days disappeared thereafter as Cara’s best chapters were transferred from tattered exercise books to loose pages. She typed at night while the television played, her fingers growing faster at belting words out of the rattling keyboard. No one to look over her shoulder, Cathy had been warned not to, and she had better things to do. She was helping Gerry paint the back room he’d cleared. They were turning it into a second surgery.
‘He won’t go back,’ Cathy said. ‘He hasn’t said it, but he won’t.’
*
Morrie came home looking tanned and healthy, and h
e played tennis, and looked spectacular in his tennis gear. Cathy, in her rush to get away from Sydney, had given Cara no time to consider what she might require. She hadn’t packed her racquet or her tennis frock, but Cathy prised her away from her typewriter to play, with a borrowed racquet, in a too-short flyaway skirt, a pair of too-short shorts beneath it. She loved the competition of the game and knew she was good at it.
The early matches were played at night, under lights. Cathy spent more time shooing flying moths with her racquet than hitting balls. They were thrashed in the women’s doubles. Gerry lost his first singles match. Morrie and Cara got through, then walked in their mixed doubles match.
They got through their Saturday matches. The finals were played on Sunday. Gerry had a woman in labour at the hospital, so Cathy claimed sunburn.
‘Morrie will drive you,’ she said.
He did, in Gerry’s car. He told her to give her socks a party and invite her skirt down. She told him that one had been old when she’d been in second grade.
She told herself she wouldn’t need to see him, apart from in their mixed doubles final, but he stuck to her like glue, and if he hadn’t been watching her skirt fly, she might have won her singles final, but he was and she didn’t.
He was waiting with an icy bottle of Coke when she came off the courts. She accepted it gladly.
‘You know how to handle a racquet,’ he said.
‘My father’s fault. He played – before his knee was damaged in the war. I must have been about three when he decided I’d play for Australia.’
She watched Morrie’s singles match, a killer match, both winners, determined not to lose, and played in the worst heat of the day. He came off the court dripping sweat, but the winner – and he had to go back on in an hour or so for their mixed doubles match.
‘I’m out of running condition,’ he said.
‘Yachting around Tasmania will do that every time,’ she said.
‘As will sitting over a typewriter day and night. Cathy said you’re writing a novel.’
‘Cathy talks too much,’ she said – which was probably what Cathy meant by freezing blokes off. ‘I’m trying to write a novel,’ she added.
