by Joy Dettman
‘Bugger that for a joke,’ he said, chips flying everywhere. ‘That’s you.’
Her photograph, taken after the talent quest, had been used to wrap the fish and chips. In her mind, the talent quest part of her life had stayed clean. Greasy now, stained like the rest of her.
‘You’re fifteen years old,’ he said.
She looked at the date on the paper. It was months old. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘It matters to me, sweetheart. You told me you were nineteen.’
‘You tell lies all the time.’
‘You’re jail bait.’
Jail bait. A beautiful thing. A play thing he liked to dress up in bright colours. A play thing he’d got into trouble.
He told her that night she had to go home. She told him she could never go home now, and why she couldn’t go home.
‘There are doctors about,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, sweetheart.’
He came home with the handbag a few nights later, and she’d never seen anything like it in her life — except in Sissy’s magazines. He told her it was made from the skins of snakes.
He wasn’t like other people. He never worried about money, about eating normal meals at normal times. At times he was a boy of sixteen. At times he was older than Granny.
He’d found a doctor at Richmond. ‘We’ll get you fixed up,’ he said. But they moved again, and he hadn’t taken her to Richmond.
Her eyes had started seeing too much, watching him too much. He was looking through a newspaper one day, when he laughed.
‘I’m sending in your accounts, Dad,’ he told the ceiling. ‘The bastards are finally paying up.’
He was strange that day, quiet, he’d sat, watching her for an hour, then he’d said, ‘What say we have a clutch of them, sweetheart? George the first, George the second, George the third.’
Then September. She felt sick in the mornings, sick at night, and he went away and left her in a room with a winged mirror like Amber’s. She could see all of herself in it, but she no longer saw herself in who she was looking at. Without Granny to cut her hair, it had grown long, grown frizzy. The clothes she wore were not her clothes. He bought what he liked.
She killed the balloon that day. Squeezed it until one end of it popped — hardly a pop at all. Then she picked up her handbag and went out to find a hairdresser.
A middle-aged woman standing behind her, snipping off curls, the hairdresser’s wireless playing a melody Jenny had never heard, when the announcer cut into the music with a news bulletin, and Bob Menzies said, We are at war.
The scissors stopped snipping, and in the mirror, as clear as day, Jenny saw Charlie White shaking his finger at her, saying I told you so.
Of course it wasn’t Charlie. It was the woman’s husband, but she knew Charlie would be standing behind his counter, shaking his finger and saying,I told you so.
He was real.
That snakeskin handbag she clutched to her stomach wasn’t.
What was behind the handbag was growing more real every day.
Laurie wasn’t. Nothing about him was real.
The snipping scissors were, and she forgot to watch them. They snipped too much. Still no Jenny in the mirror, only a wide-eyed spaceman staring back at her, a Martian who had lost his spaceship, who wanted to go home to his own planet but had no way of getting there.
The following day she ripped the front page from a discarded newspaper, bought an envelope and addressed it to Charlie — just to prove to herself that her planet was still out there.
You told them so, Mr White.
That night, or near dawn, Laurie came home limping. ‘Up you get, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting.’
The taxi was waiting. Its driver wasn’t.
‘Where’s the driver?’ she said.
‘You’re it tonight. I’ve buggered my foot.’
If she lived for a million years she’d never forget that dawn. He told her to drive, so she drove, followed suburban streets to roads. One road ended in Geelong, or that’s where the taxi ended its journey. It ran out of petrol. He tried to walk away from it. He couldn’t.
‘Go home, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘When it’s over, it’s over.’ He pushed her handbag at her. ‘Find the station and get yourself back to where you came from.’
‘I can’t,’ she said.
She sat with him until the man from the café on the corner came out to sweep his section of footpath. He sold her a packet of APC powders and a bottle of lemonade. He raised his eyebrows when she ordered two double-header ice-creams.
She did more than raise her eyebrows when she opened her handbag to pay him. She dropped the bag on the shop floor and a roll of banknotes bounced free.
Couldn’t remember how or with what she’d paid him, just took the change and ran back to the taxi, handed Laurie an icecream, then showed him the contents of her handbag.
‘Elves have been at it,’ he said. ‘Pesky little buggers.’
‘Why did you put it in my bag?’
‘I won’t need it where I’m going, sweetheart.’
‘Did you take the taxi driver’s money as well as his car?’
‘They don’t make enough to bother with,’ he said, licking in a circle around the ice-cream cone before handing it to her to hold while he poured three APC powders into his palm, then he licked them up, washed them down with ice-cream and lemonade.
She smoked two cigarettes with him, shared that bottle of lemonade, and when the APC powders had done their work, she asked a dog walker where she’d find the station.
They were halfway there, she walking ahead carrying both cases, when a newsagent on the far side of the road placed his large wire-caged posters out front of his shop.
REDHEADED GUNMAN FLEES WTTH JEWELLER’S TAKINGS.
Maybe there is a switch in the mind that can cancel out logic, cancel fear of consequences. Her switch flicked back to the full-alert position on that street in Geelong. She dropped the cases as the double-header ice-cream and lemonade rose up to her throat and spilled to the gutter, then, the cases left lying on the pavement, she ran across the road.
No war, not even Bob Menzies could compete for the front page of the Sun that morning. She grabbed a copy, paid over her pennies and walked out to the street to read all about the injured redheaded gunman.
Mr Quinn, a St Kilda jeweller, was on his way to the bank yesterday when a black vehicle pulled into the kerb and the well-dressed gunman stepped out and demanded Mr Quinn hand over the two hundred pounds he was carrying in a canvas bag. When the bag was denied him, the gunman brandished his firearm and wrenched the bag from Mr Quinn’s hand. His clean getaway was foiled by quick-thinking carrier Mr Colin Matheson who, having witnessed the incident, drove his horse into the path of the gunman’s car. In swerving to avoid a collision, the car mounted the footpath and hit a brick fence. The gunman was last seen escaping over the fence. Mr Matheson told police the gunman was limping.
Mr Quinn and Mr Matheson, though shaken, were able to give police a good description of the bandit who has been eluding police for months. The wanted man is approximately six foot in height, aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, and has dark red hair worn in a brushed back style. He is clean-shaven, and when last seen was wearing a grey pinstriped suit and a dark tie. The grey hat found in the vehicle, size six and seven-eighths, is believed to belong to the thief . . .
The injured gunman was sitting on her case on the far side of the road, no grey hat on his head this morning. Sun glinting on his hair, turning it to melted pennies.
She couldn’t remember dodging the cars on the way back. All she remembered was throwing her handbag and Mr Quinn’s money at his injured foot.
‘Jewellers make enough money.’
‘They wear nice suits too,’ he said.
Sun shining on that handbag, making it squirm like poisonous vipers, but his hand reached for it.
‘Where’s your gun?’
‘Not e
nough in there. Want to stick up the newsagent, sweetheart?’
‘You’re as bad as . . . as Squizzy Taylor.’
‘Better looking though.’
‘You pointed a gun at a man and stole his money!’
‘You’re not yelling it loud enough, sweetheart. They can’t hear you over the road yet,’ he said, and with the handbag beneath his arm, he limped on towards the station.
She should have turned around and run the other way, but her talent quest prize money was in that bag and it had become more than just a five-pound note. It was the only piece of herself that hadn’t been lost, the only clean piece of the before time, the songbird time, before the world had gone mad. She picked up the cases and caught up with him. He swapped his case for the handbag.
‘Walk away from me, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘We’re out of options. Get lost now.’
She walked eight or ten yards towards the station, but turned back when a car blasted its horn. No more good or bad to balance. No more guardian angel or red devil either, just Laurie, who had swallowed so many APC powders he was going to get himself run over. And she knew why. Two policemen were waiting out front of the station.
A truck braked hard, but he got to the other side of the road. She stood watching him until he limped into a hotel.
They’d see his red hair. They’d know who he was. She looked towards the station. He’d told her to get lost. She crossed the road and followed him into the hotel.
Stood back until he’d signed in, until the key to number eight was in his hand, until he limped towards the stairs, then she booked a single room. Cara Paris, she wrote. Surrey Hills. The man at the desk handed her the key to number eleven.
She thought Laurie’s door would be locked. It wasn’t. He was lying face down across his bed, asleep or feigning sleep, when she crept in. She opened her handbag, opened his case, and stuffed Mr Quinn’s money into the toes of his dancing shoes, all but three five-pound notes — enough to pay for the Richmond doctor, enough to buy a roll of bandage, a tin of antiseptic salve, a bottle of strong painkillers and a pair of size ten canvas boots.
She bought a dark brown cap to cover his hair, bread, cheese, bananas, cigarettes, two bottles of lemonade and a string bag to carry her shopping in. She’d get lost soon, but he’d looked after her when she’d sprained her ankle and she couldn’t leave him to starve in a hotel room.
He was like a little boy, sitting with his eyes scrunched shut when she took his shoe off, soaked the blood-caked sock from his foot. He kept his eyes shut until she’d plastered his foot with salve, bandaged it, until she’d tried to get the oversized canvas boot over the bandage.
‘I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It’s over. Go now or you’ll get caught up in it.’
‘I will when you put that shoe on. If you don’t put it on now, you won’t get it on,’ she said, and she felt like Granny, giving advice.
‘You’d make a good nurse,’ he said.
‘I could have been.’
‘What did they do to you?’ he asked.
‘What’s the Richmond doctor’s name?’
‘Poor little Georgie,’ he said, but he told her the doctor’s name and she wrote it on hotel paper.
She didn’t leave that day. For three nights she stayed at the Geelong hotel. His foot was no better. He needed to go to a hospital — and he couldn’t go to a hospital. She brought food to him, cigarettes, told him he looked like Clark Gable.
‘Why, thank you, sweetheart.’
‘Did you think that you could keep robbing people forever, Laurie?’
‘I hoped so,’ he said.
‘You could have shot someone, then you would have been hanged for murder.’
‘It leaks when I load it,’ he said, and he told her his father had bought him a fine water pistol for his thirteenth birthday, told her he’d loaded it once too often. The rubber butt had perished.
She asked him about his sister, who had lived in the house on the side of the hill. He told her the house belonged to a man who had worn nice suits and taken his wife on a grand tour of Europe.
‘I read about them in the social pages, sweetheart, and thought what a damned pity to leave a nice house like that sitting empty for six months.’
Maybe he was like Itchy-foot. Maybe he had no conscience. Maybe she was like Itchy-foot, too. She knew who Laurie was, but she didn’t hate him. Like a snatch of disconnected time, those three days in Geelong, like Mr No one and Miss Nobody smoking cigarettes in some halfway place between yesterday and tomorrow, where consequences and conscience didn’t apply. She got to know him in that room. Maybe he got to know her.
When she opened his door on the fourth morning, he was sitting on his bed, dressed for travelling, his canvas boots and too large cap looking silly. He told her he’d take the train back to Melbourne, then try to get up to Sydney.
‘Don’t budge from here for a day or two,’ he said, then he picked up his case and limped away — hadn’t even said goodbye.
She watched from the hotel balcony, watched him disappear into the station, and she felt more for the redheaded gunman than she had for the well-dressed businessman.
She was standing, willing a train to leave for Melbourne, when two police cars drove up and stopped in front of the station. Six policemen got out.
She left the balcony and ran downstairs where she joined a group of onlookers beneath the hotel verandah.
They saw the gunman limp to a police car, his hands locked behind his back, his too-large cap falling forward over his eyes and no hand to push it back.
He didn’t look for her. He didn’t turn towards the hotel. She looked at him but hers was just one of many staring faces.
A Salvation Army couple stared, their rattling tins silent. Had Laurie put a penny in their tin? He’d always had a coin for the Salvos. Were they the ones who’d recognised him? Or was it the man at the hotel? Or the stationmaster?
One police car drove away, three policemen and Laurie in it. Jenny hoped they’d drive him to the hospital. The second car remained. There was no sign of the other police.
Were they looking for the gunman’s companion, looking for a girl wearing a long black coat who had bought a bandage and antiseptic salve, who had bought that brown cap? She shouldn’t have bought that. How many dark brown caps, size seven and a quarter, had been sold in Geelong that week?
Scared then, blind panicking scared then.
And the hotel maid had seen her going into his room once. She’d end up in jail. She’d end up having a baby in jail. He’d end up hanged for the rape of a minor. She was fifteen. She was jail bait.
One policeman crossing the road to get her.
The Salvation Army couple walking on, tin rattling.
‘There’s always the Salvos,’ Laurie used to say. ‘They don’t ask the hard questions.’
If he knew what she’d done that morning, he would have laughed like a boy. She caught up to the tin rattlers and told them her name, her real name, told them she’d run away from home in May and was too scared to go back.
Laurie was right; they didn’t ask the hard questions.
A few days later they returned her to the loving arms of her parents.
*
She’d learnt Laurie’s real name from the newspapers, learnt that Laurence George Morgan had been arrested at the Geelong station following information given to police by an observant stationmaster. A later newspaper told her that twenty-six-year-old Laurence Morgan was the son of a Sydney tailor who, in ‘31, had lost his business and maybe his mind. He’d shot his wife and daughter and wounded his eighteen-year-old son before shooting himself.
For a few days journalists attempted to turn Laurence George Morgan into the new Ned Kelly, WATER PISTOL BANDIT, they dubbed him.
Water pistol bandit sentenced to three years’ hard labour.
MOTHERHOOD
Breastfeeding was nature’s own form of family planning, Gertrude said. It was Elsie’s only form o
f family planning. She’d weaned Ronny and Maudy at six and eight months. Teddy had arrived before Ronny’s third birthday. She’d nursed Teddy for eleven months, then Margot had taken his place at the breast. At ten months, Margot hadn’t had a tooth in her head. A month later they’d erupted, front, back and sides. She had a bad habit of clenching her jaw, which had necessitated her weaning.
Elsie was pregnant again. They had no room for more, but it would be welcomed, and all thanks to Margot, Elsie’s insides had had a rest from carrying.
On a morning in late May, Margot still miserable with her teething, a pile of washing waiting to be started, Elsie heaved Margot’s dead weight up to her hip, picked up a bucket of napkins and tripped over Teddy as he came running up the back steps.
Teddy made a reflex grab for the stair rail. He saved himself, but with no free hand Elsie went down, down five steps, Margot cradled against her. She may have saved the baby growing within, but not herself. Elsie’s bones were always too fine. Her right arm snapped.
Harry and Joey were at work. Lenny was at school. Gertrude couldn’t leave Elsie alone. Jenny had to run into town to fetch the garage chap to take Elsie to hospital.
‘George Macdonald will know where to find Harry,’ Gertrude said. ‘Go to his office. It’s on the left side as you walk into the mill yard.’
It was the first time Jenny had set foot in town since arriving home — and she couldn’t force herself to walk into that mill. She walked fast past it, walked fast to the garage in North Street, midway between Blunt’s corner and the Catholic church. The mechanic drove a modern car, Woody Creek’s unofficial taxi cum ambulance. She passed on Gertrude’s message then continued over Blunt’s crossing to Maisy’s door.
‘Well, look who’s knocking on my front door. And when have you ever needed to knock?’ Maisy greeted her. ‘Come in, love. Jessica’s just making a cup of tea.’
Maisy knew about Georgie, so Jessica knew. Jenny didn’t want to see her. She’d shared a bedroom with her, back when the world had been an almost sane place. Jessica was married to Joss Palmer, brother to Dora, who had been Jenny’s best friend. She’d know about Georgie. Everybody would know. Granny had warned her that she couldn’t hide her. She couldn’t, but she could hide herself.
