by Joy Dettman
‘Then the time to think about that was before you went with the boy.’
‘He wasn’t a boy — he was a third option,’ she said. ‘And he was better than the worst.’
‘God help me.’
‘God helps those who help themselves,’ Jenny said, and she walked on.
‘Come back and talk it out with me.’
‘There’s nothing to talk out, Granny. Can’t you see . . . can’t you understand? My life stopped. It stopped when I was fourteen. They even had to make my fourteen-year-old talent quest photograph dirty. They wrapped it around greasy fish and chips.’ And, too close to tears, she ran.
‘Don’t make me follow you all the way to town. You know I will.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me there were such doctors when I was fourteen?’ she yelled over her shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you take me down there when I was fourteen?’
‘A dear little baby would have been dead!’
Jenny threw the case down as her eyes gave up their battle to stay dry. ‘That Macdonald thing took every dream out of my head and I can’t get them back! It took me — and I can’t get me back, so stop trying to treat me like me.’ She walked on then without her case, walked fast, blind. Gertrude had longer legs, longer strides. They walked side by side until a truck moved them from the road to the gravelled edge. Gertrude raised her hand to the driver, Jenny turned her back and wiped her eyes on her petticoat.
‘You can’t go without your case. Come back and talk, and if you still want to go tomorrow, I’ll go with you to your doctor. ’
‘You’re just saying that to make me go back. You’ll say different tomorrow.’
‘It’s a promise — if you come back with me now.’
Jenny’s nose was running. She couldn’t wipe it on her petticoat, didn’t have a handkerchief. Her eyes would be red. She looked towards the town, wanting to go there and get it over and done with. She didn’t want Norman to see her with red eyes. Never again would he see her with red eyes.
Gertrude had turned back. Jenny was free to go. She’d made a start. She could come back for her case when it was over.
Or go tomorrow, with Granny? If something went wrong at the doctor’s, Granny would know what to do.
She wouldn’t go with her. Saying that she would was just a trick to make her go back to the house.
Not if she’d promised. She had promised.
Gertrude picked up the case, brushed it clean of gravel, then continued on. She didn’t look back.
Jenny turned around. She followed her home — or as far as the door.
Inside, Gertrude was stirring, tasting the soup. ‘It’s nice. What did you put in it?’
Jenny sighed, ‘I didn’t come back to talk about soup.’
‘It’s still nice.’ She left her soup and came to the door. ‘I told you once a long time ago that no matter what else changed in your life, I’d be here for you. I’m upset by what’s happened — I’m more than upset — but that doesn’t change what I said. I love you and I’m here for you. That’s unchangeable.’
Tears weren’t any use but they wouldn’t stop trickling. Jenny stood, her back to the wall, staring at Elsie’s house through the blur of tears. The kids had all gone inside to eat. No screaming now. Goats still moving around, white goats.
Behind her, bowls and cutlery rattled, soup was ladled from the pot, bread sawed, tea brewed while Jenny stood staring at the land, at the distant trees.
The fading light was washing the colours away. Elsie’s house looked like a carton, too tall, too narrow — a house on stilts, just a splash of colour clinging here and there.
‘What are you looking at, darlin’?’
‘A mirage,’ she said. ‘This place isn’t real.’
‘What about me?’
‘I don’t know anymore. I thought I was looking out on fairy land when I got to Melbourne.’ She shook her head, shook tears, licked at the few trickling to her lips. ‘It wasn’t real. Nothing is.’
‘Life isn’t always what we want it to be. We learn to make the best of it.’
‘How?’
‘By walking ahead, by taking one step at a time and never looking back at the bad times.’
‘How can you keep going when everything you are is back there? I don’t know who I am, who I’m supposed to be. I can’t feel anything that’s real. I can’t . . . I can’t feel me inside. It’s like I’m lost, and every day I get more lost.’
‘Life is a one-lane track, darlin’. It has to be, or there’d be a stampede of folk running back to fix up their old mistakes,’ Gertrude said. ‘A long time ago, I put up big signposts warning me not to go looking over my shoulder. I looked over it this afternoon. That’s what upset me so much. I saw a tiny baby boy lying in a basin and your grandfather standing over it smiling.’
Jenny turned her eyes away from the land, and for an instant looked into Gertrude’s face then away to stare again at Elsie’s house.
‘All I can think about that doesn’t hurt, that doesn’t make me feel dirty, is over my shoulder. There’s nothing in front of me, except black — like there’s a giant black pit there and I can’t get around it.’
‘If we’re walking side by side, my darlin’ girl, we’ll get around it.’ Gertrude took the smaller, softer hand in her own, held it between her hands. ‘If we’re holding on tight to each other’s hands, we’ll find the way.’
‘I’ve loved you for every season of my life, Granny, but I can’t think like you. I can’t want the same things you want.’
‘You can make a tastier chicken soup. Come in and eat it while it’s hot.’
WALL BUILDING
Busy hands make busy minds. Many hands make light work. Idle hands are the devil’s tools. Gertrude had a thousand such adages. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today was another of them. She’d woken at dawn with that one playing in her mind.
For ten years she’d put off lining the walls of the lean-to. Today she’d make a start on it. The roll of hessian that would form the lining’s backbone was still in her shed somewhere.
It took a while to unearth it. It was dusty, it smelled of mice, but she draped it over the clothes line, gave it a good belting with her broom, then let the sun and the morning breeze do the rest while she fed her chooks, milked her goats, saddled her horse.
Young Robert Fulton opened his shop doors at eight thirty. For twenty-odd years, the sign painted across the verandah had been advertising Fulton’s Feed and Grain. Robert Senior had closed his doors in the early days of the depression and was dead a year or two later. Robert, his firstborn, a boy of twenty-five or so, had reopened it twelve months back.
From the outside, it looked like the same store. Inside, it was not. Young Robert had diversified, adding hardware, furniture and household appliances, and the last time Gertrude had been in there she’d seen a display of wallpaper samples. That’s what she was after this morning, something pretty and not too expensive.
Fulton’s carried little wallpaper stock but Robert had a good range of samples and a telephone. If a call was made to Melbourne before four o’clock, he assured her, he could have her order on tomorrow’s train. Australia needed more like him, Gertrude thought — as would the army. The shop, Robert now being the family breadwinner, might keep him out of the war, but God help his younger brothers. Gertrude had delivered nine Fulton offspring, five girls and four boys.
She ordered five rolls of wallpaper, a cream with green stripes and panels of pink roses. Four may have been plenty but a spare roll wouldn’t go astray. She ordered three rolls of heavy-duty lining paper, half a pound of tacks with large heads and a wide glue brush. Gertrude carried little cash. She wrote a cheque.
She shouldn’t have gone to the post office; Mr Foster always asked after Jenny. She had to lie to him.
‘She’s well,’ she said.
As she walked by Norman’s house, she glanced in. No sign of life there. She could be seeing Norman tonight. She’d made a promise and she’d keep it if
she had to, though this morning she hoped she wouldn’t have to. Jenny had been born with a pair of capable hands. She’d get those hands busy and keep them busy, then see what tonight brought.
Her horse tied in the shade out front of Fulton’s, she mounted and started for home.
Vern’s car was missing from his yard. He’d be at his mill or out at the farm. Not that she wanted to see him. She’d end up spilling what she knew to the first friendly pair of ears. Time enough for him to know when she’d come to terms with it — or not come to terms with it.
The hessian still smelled a mite mousy. She spread it out in her front yard where she took to it with a tape measure and scissors, and by ten thirty she and Jenny had moved the dressing table and wardrobe out to the kitchen, and moved the bed to the centre of the room so they could work around it.
‘You think you’re going to sidetrack me, Granny.’
‘I think it’s time to make this room look less like my shed,’ Gertrude replied.
By midday, the hessian, wet down in the old tin tub, was being stretched and tacked over bare timber walls. It would shrink as it dried. Gertrude had done it all before: Thirty years ago she and Amber had given the bedroom walls the same treatment.
They spoke of tacks and hammers that day; there was no talk of Richmond doctors, and at train time, worn out by labour, they spooned up Jenny’s chicken soup and ate it with stale bread fried in bacon grease.
‘I love your food,’ Jenny said.
‘You cooked it.’
They boiled up a large pot of glue before they went to bed, and the following morning started in early, pasting newspaper, page after page of it, covering the hessian. Jenny continued the pasting while Gertrude fed her chooks, milked her goats, packed eggs into cardboard cartons for Charlie and Mrs Crone.
At six, Harry came over with more newspaper and a pound of sausages. He stayed a while to paste and he didn’t need to stand on a chair to reach the top of the wall.
It took another day to use up the last of the newspaper. It took three days for the many layers to dry out. Then the bad old news disappeared beneath strips of lining paper and the walls of the lean-to turned white.
Harry helped them with the hanging of rosebuds. They finished the papering by lamplight, determined to be done that day with glue.
It was an amazing transformation. Elsie and the kids thought so. Once the furniture was back where it belonged, once the green curtain had been washed, when a scrap of lace had been found to hang on elastic over the flywired window hatch, it looked like a bedroom.
Vern, the realist, saw it for what it was, but he had other things on his mind.
‘I see where they’re planning to bring back compulsory military training for boys over twenty-one.’
‘That’s no surprise, is it?’ Gertrude said.
‘Jim will be twenty-one come April. That’s why they did their registration of manpower. They were counting up their cannon fodder.’
‘Nothing much seems to be happening; it could all come to nothing,’ Gertrude said. ‘And a few months in camp won’t do Jim any harm.’ It might even do him some good, she thought. He’d spent his life with his sisters — who were no role models.
‘I worked too hard at getting him, in raising him, to have him caught up in a bloody war.’
Gertrude had heard it all before. ‘I’m thinking of getting Harry to hammer a few batons along the rafters. The kitchen ceiling is only batons and paper.’
‘Stop wasting your money on it.’
‘You’re a tactless man, Vern — and you’re worrying needlessly about Jim. Even if the worst comes to the worst, they’re not going to take a farmer’s only son away from the land. Someone will have to feed their armies. Move out to the farm with him.’
‘Move out with me and I will. You can spend your days papering Monk’s old place and have something to show for it when you’re done.’
‘You insulting coot of a man! We’re proud of what we’ve achieved.’
‘I’m a truthful man, Trude,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Down at the creek with Joey. They promised me a feed of yabbies for tea.’
‘Are you stuck with her for the duration?’
‘She’s here for as long as she’ll stay and I don’t know how long that will be.’
‘Has she told you yet where they found her?’
‘Leave it alone, Vern. And don’t you start giving her the third degree as soon as she comes in either.’
‘She’s been with someone down there. I don’t care if she was cleaning houses from daylight to dark seven days a week and telling her boss she was twenty-one, she didn’t earn the sort of money she’s spent, then save fifteen quid to bring home with her. I’ve been paying maids for years — Oh, Christ,’ he said, hearing a bike land against the chicken wire fence.
Charlie came to the door, and when asked to sit, he sat on Vern’s chair.
‘I see when I rode past that they’ve started clearing the block for the new telephone exchange,’ he said.
‘Which block?’ Gertrude asked, and Vern walked outside for a smoke.
‘Old man Lewis’s, near the Presbyterian church. His son hadn’t paid the rates on it in ten years. The council sold it to them.’
Charlie could talk town gossip for hours and had come prepared to do just that. He asked after Jenny, he praised Gertrude’s paper hanging when she got him to his feet, and while he was on his feet, praising it, Vern reclaimed his chair. He saw enough of Charlie White at council meetings, heard enough out of him, too.
Woody Creek was changing. The world was changing. Ten years ago, girls of good family had stayed at home until they wed, while the girls of poor families were paid a few bob a week to clean up after them. Before the depression, the Fultons might have paid a maid to do the dirty work. Now three of the Fulton girls held down jobs. Charlie employed one, another one worked at the post office and the third did the typewriting for the council.
‘The dark-eyed Macdonald girl has applied for one of the jobs at the exchange,’ Charlie reported.
‘Dawn,’ Gertrude said.
‘They say the middle Palmer girl has got work there.’
‘Dora?’
Charlie knew everyone in town, Gertrude knew their names. They spoke of the town and the folk of the town while Vern sat, barely getting a word in edgewise. His Saturday nights had been ruined, now Charlie White seemed determined to take his Saturday afternoons.
He hung around until Jenny came in with a bucket half full of yabbies — and Charlie obviously pleased to see her. He wasn’t known for his smile, but he smiled at Jenny as he took his wallet from his back pocket and withdrew the page of newspaper.
‘I was in a hairdresser’s shop when I heard about the war and I looked up and you were in the mirror, saying, I told you so, Mr White,’ Jenny said — which was more information than she’d given Gertrude.
Charlie stayed ten minutes more, until Gertrude picked up the bucket of yabbies, preparing to execute them in boiling water. He couldn’t stand the stink or the squeaks of boiling yabbies.
Vern stayed on to eat his fair share; he stayed on until nine. Gertrude walked him out to the car. Jenny was seated at the table when she returned.
‘Does he know?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him when Itchy-foot died? Everyone thought you would.’
She’d been full of questions once. These days, she rarely spoke unless she was spoken to. Maybe Charlie’s visit had been good for her.
‘The time for us to wed was when we were young, darlin’,’ Gertrude said. She’d been looking forward to her bed, but she pulled out a chair and sat. ‘We were too old to bother with wedding rings by the time your grandfather was declared dead.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him when you were young?’
‘Our grandfather. His sister had wed a cousin and they’d ended up having three idiot babies. Rightly or wrongly he blamed the close blood ties. Vern was t
he apple of his eye, his only grandson until he was fourteen — until his father took a second wife.’
‘Did you ever love Itchy-foot?’
‘Queen Victoria was on the throne when I wed Archie. They were different times. He was a doctor, an educated man from a good family. I fed chooks, milked goats, slept at night down the bottom end of this kitchen in a homemade bed. My mum and dad thought I’d made the match of the century when he came courting me.’
‘Did they make you marry him?’
‘I was encouraged to, maybe expected to, but no one pressured me into doing it.’
‘What was Vern doing while Itchy-foot was courting?’
‘Never having a good word to say for him — but not prepared to stop me from marrying him. Our grandfather had told him he could have the land or me. Vern wanted that land — and I don’t blame him for it.’
‘What was he like when he was young — Itchy-foot?’
‘What was he like?’ Gertrude repeated. ‘He had no fear in him. He’d go anywhere, do anything. I saw the world at his side —’she started, then knew she’d spoken those same words before, and she closed her mouth on them. She’d filled Amber’s head with pretty tales of travelling in strange lands, of rich maharajas and grand ships of the line. A mistake, and one she wouldn’t make a second time.
‘His people were very decent, very good to me. I lived with them in Melbourne for six weeks. Then they booked us on a boat to Africa to work with a group of missionaries. I was given no reason why, though in hindsight I’d say it was probably the worst place the family could come up with on the spur of the moment to send Archie.’
‘Why?’
‘He’d broken an unwritten family law, darlin’.’
‘What?’
Only once in her life had Gertrude spoken of what that man had done. She’d told Vern. It wasn’t the sort of thing to tell a fifteen-year-old girl, but Jenny wasn’t the average fifteen-year-old girl and Archie wasn’t dead. She knew it. Vern knew it. Back during the depression, Archie had hung around Woody Creek for two or three years — and she had a fair idea why he’d hung around.
Forewarned was forearmed against vipers.
