by Joy Dettman
‘That wouldn’t stand up in court.’
‘Her birth certificate would. As far as the world is concerned, she’s my granddaughter.’
‘They can do tests on blood these days that will prove she isn’t.’
‘They’ll prove some connection to Amber.’
‘Knowing what you know, or reckon you know —’
‘I know. She’s got Archie’s voice, his hair, his eye colour. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.’
‘He would have been in his late fifties when she was born.’
‘He never aged. When he was up here that time when Amber was going on thirteen, he didn’t look his age — and I didn’t notice you slowing down in your late fifties.’
‘How can you stand looking at her, if you reckon she’s his?’
‘I could ask how Jim turned into the pleasant boy he did with you and Joanne Nicholas as his parents.’
‘You’d stick up for anyone against me, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ll stick up for her against you. That little girl had the world on a string at fourteen and those raping little bastards came along and cut it.’
‘So she goes after some redhead in Melbourne, goes after Jim to nark her sister, goes up to Sydney to get another one and nark me by marrying him.’
Gertrude stood and walked down to the lean-to, opening and closing drawers until she found what she was after. She brought an envelope back to the table, set her reading glasses on her nose and read aloud.
You, dirt beneath my feet? Moon dust maybe, sprinkled down from a moon far too high above my head for me to ever reach. Think back for a minute, Jen. While you were winning talent quests, having your photograph in newspapers, I was the town drongo, tagging around behind Margaret and Sissy and pleased to have someone to tag around behind. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what happened to you, but it put the moon within my reach.
I’ve been giving a bit of thought to how I might have felt about that photograph of your other kids, and all I can say with any honesty is that they are half you, they’re Jimmy’s half-sisters, and they’d probably grow on me — and even if they didn’t, I promise I’d always do the right thing by them. There’s one sure way to put a stop to Pop’s plans, so stop putting up your barbed-wire fences, and say you’ll marry me.
You told me that you’d loved me since you were four years old, since the day I’d taught you the right way to eat an icecream. Just try for a second to imagine what that must have been like for me, Jimmy Hooper, town drongo, hearing that, and being able to write that on paper today. It makes me a bigger and better man . . .
‘There’s love there, Vern — or they believe there is.’
Vern reached for the page, but she folded it, placed it back into its envelope and returned it to the lean-to.
‘How do I know that’s what’s in it?’
‘Because I’m not that good at making up words on the spot — and because I told you so.’
‘Let me read it for myself.’
‘It’s my evidence for court. I can’t have you damaging it,’ she said.
She didn’t sit with him again. She emptied her mug and rinsed it with a dash of water from her kettle, then turned, waiting for his mug. He had no intention of leaving. He asked her if she had a biscuit.
‘You’re as fat as a pig already. You need to cut back on cakes and biscuits. Your father probably died of the sugar disease.’
‘What else has a man got left?’
‘Life,’ she said. ‘Which a lot we grew up with haven’t got. Get out of the house and live it. Get back to your council meetings, out to your farm. You’re bored. That’s your trouble. That’s why you keep hounding me with your solicitors.’
‘I keep hounding you because that boy is a Hooper, and I’ll see him raised as a Hooper — and for the umpteenth time, I sent those letters to her, not you.’
‘You’ll find out how much Hooper I’ve got left in me if you keep sending them. I’ll spend Archie’s money on my own solicitor and have you and that streak of misery you call a daughter up on charges of verbal abuse, mental anguish, blackmail and anything else I can think of. Now go home. I’ve got work to do.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Then go home and get a pair of boots on your feet. I can’t stand looking at you in bedroom slippers.’
POLICY
The la-di-da landlady had made it clear on day one that she had a ‘no children’ policy. On Jenny’s fourth morning in Sydney, she was at the clothes line, Jimmy playing with pegs at her feet, not quiet, but not making too much noise, when the landlady approached them.
‘Good morning, Mrs Hooper.’
‘Good morning,’ Jenny said. They’d been keeping Jimmy out of her way — wearing him out by day in parks, on the streets, bringing him home late so he’d be eager to hit that cot and sleep. Jim usually kept him quiet while she did the washing, but this morning he’d gone off alone to the post office to place a call to his father.
‘What age is he?’ the la-di-da dame said.
‘Not ten months yet.’ Certain the woman was about to complain of Jimmy’s squealing, or his scattering of boarding house pegs, Jenny’s reply was defensive. She picked up a handful of the scattered pegs, used them on three more napkins, two pairs of his rompers.
‘He keeps you busy,’ the woman said.
‘He certainly does.’ Jenny shook a few creases from her navy print, hung it.
‘You’ve been lucky with the weather.’
‘Thankfully.’ She collected more scattered pegs. Jimmy had lost interest in them. He was kneeling, studying the landlady. Then he took off across the lawn to get a closer look and Jenny left her pegging to retrieve him. But before she could, the landlady with the ‘no children’ policy offered him her hands. Jimmy wasn’t shy; he accepted her hand and pulled himself up to his feet.
‘What a fine strong boy you are,’ the landlady said. ‘Would you come up to Myrtie, darling?’
Myrtie? Darling?
He didn’t protest when she lifted him; he allowed her to wipe his hands with her coverall apron.
‘We have a few cats wandering across the lawn, Mrs Hooper,’ the landlady said. ‘You never know what diseases they might carry.’
‘Oh,’ Jenny said, and she hung three of Jim’s handkerchiefs.
‘My husband returned to his unit this morning,’ the landlady said. And maybe it was her captain husband who had the no-kids policy; she didn’t seem over eager to hand Jimmy back when the bucket and peg basket had been returned to the washhouse. She asked how he’d enjoyed the long trip up from Melbourne, asked how Jenny was enjoying her time in Sydney.
Then Jim came back and the la-di-da landlady returned to the house.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Nothing — I don’t think. Stray cats that walk across her back lawn mainly, and the diseases cats carry. What did your father say?’
‘The lines south were busy. I gave up.’
‘Everyone is on the phone saying goodbye. Mrs Norris said her husband, Robert, has gone back to his unit — that thousands of servicemen are on the move this week.’
This week, their week. They’d been squeezing every minute from every day, leaving the house early, staying out until nightfall. And when Jimmy was down for the night, they squeezed that night. Drank tea in the kitchen, listened to the wireless in the lodgers’ sitting room, sat like kids on the front fence, watching the cars go by, talking, forever talking about nothing and everything, and knowing that when they were finally ready to bid that day goodbye, there was their room and their closed door.
They saw little of Nobby and Rosemary, who were only just thinking about getting out of bed while Jenny and Jim were deciding where they’d eat lunch. They saw little of the other lodgers, except at breakfast time.
Their own labelled milk was in the refrigerator now, their own labelled butter, their block of lard. Jenny borrowed the landlady’s iron one evening and it was such a pleasu
re ironing again with electricity, she ironed every frock she’d brought with her.
She shouldn’t have bothered ironing the red dress. She’d never wear it again. But it was such a waste. The fabric was classy, heavy, with a sheen to it that might have told Granny it was a heavy silk.
Jenny could recognise wool, cotton. The lime green frock Laurie had bought for her in Melbourne was cotton. She loathed the shade but liked its style and the way it fit. She wore it on their fifth day in Sydney. There was always a crowd in the city’s centre, in the park, too, where they ate lunch, where Jimmy was free to crawl and crow as much as he liked, and where they could laugh at his antics. There was the telephone box on the far side of the park. Sooner or later, Jim would have to call his father.
A busy telephone box. A dozen Yank soldiers were queuing to use it.
‘Charlie White reckons that the Japs did Australia a favour when they bombed Pearl Harbor and got the Yanks into the war,’ she said.
‘We would have been in trouble without them,’ Jim said. ‘So would England.’
‘Go over and queue with them, Jim.’
‘It doesn’t seem like good sense — paying out money to be yelled at.’
‘You’ll be sorry if you don’t.’
‘I’ll be sorrier if I give him another stroke.’
They sat watching one group of Yanks replaced by another in the phone box. They were like kids, like fourteen-year-old boys when their mothers weren’t watching, Jenny thought. A lot looked like baby-faced boys. The group who had been in the phone box had a tennis ball. They were using it as a hand grenade, pitching it hard at each other, with sound effects. She watched their play for a time then turned to Jim, now lying on his back, Jimmy sitting on him, wearing the army hat.
He was still the same Jim Hooper she’d always known; his ears were still big, his teeth at times looked like china cups, but he wasn’t the same. She loved looking at him, watching his big hands holding Jimmy, loved sitting in the park at his side and knowing that they were joined forever in Jimmy.
How did such things happen? How can someone know a mouth forever then suddenly start wanting to kiss it? How can you suddenly love a pair of hands, crave the touch of those hands?
She’d always had a thing about hands. Loved Granny’s big work-worn hands, feared Amber’s ladylike hands, envied Sissy’s fingernails, loved watching the way Norman’s hands had turned the pages of a book, the way they’d held a pen. If not for Georgie’s hands, the little girl might have become a Cecelia Smith, a Martha Jones . . .
She still couldn’t stand to look at Margot’s hands. She’d known them as a four-year-old, had seen them pulling the wings off a beautiful butterfly. It wasn’t Margot’s fault. For the past year she’d been telling herself that six times a week and twice on Sundays. And it wasn’t her fault — which didn’t change how she felt every time she washed Margot’s fathers’ stubby hands.
‘Margaret told me your sister had a breakdown after I left,’ Jim said.
‘Amber had the breakdown. Sissy probably drove her to it.’
‘Pops said once that your grandmother spent a fortune on doctors when they found your mother that first time.’
‘She never mentions it, but she probably did. She still loves her — or loves who she used to be — I don’t, and I don’t waste one second of my day in thinking about her either.’
‘There used to be talk around years ago that you weren’t born a Morrison.’
‘The twins started it at school. Old J.C., she went off to have a pee, squatted down behind a tree, dropped her pants and found Jenny. Old J.C. now stinks up the cemetery, since many long years ago,’ she sang.
‘How do you remember that?’
‘Ray King is lousy, his mother is a frowsy. He smells like a dog, ’cause his father likes the grog.’
‘Do you remember the one they used to sing about me?’
‘I remember all of them.’
‘Sing it.’
‘I will not.’
‘I often wonder what happened to Ray King.’
‘Granny says he was probably murdered like Nelly Abbot and Barbie Dobson except they never found his body,’ Jenny said. ‘Remember the night he saved me from Sissy?’
‘The lonely little petunia in the onion patch,’ he said.
Jimmy was on his feet, looking as if he was thinking about taking off alone. He changed his mind and took off on all fours. She retrieved him.
‘The day I drove you and the kids home from the bridge, Sissy told me you weren’t her sister.’
‘She’s been calling me a stray since I was four years old. Did you ever read Silas Marner?’ she asked.
He’d read too many books; he didn’t remember titles.
‘It’s about an old weaver who finds little Eppie sitting in his cottage one night and he ends up raising her. When I was ten or eleven, I copied it, and called myself Cara Jeanette. I was left on the doorstep of the post office, wrapped up in brown paper, and Mr Brown, a crippled postmaster decided to raise me.
‘I spent half of my life pretending Amber wasn’t my real mother — but the twins killed that, too. When Dad was trying to marry me off to one of those mongrels, he brought my birth certificate down. His name and Amber’s are on it. And I look a bit like Amber. I’ve got her build, or the build she used to have before she turned into a rake handle — and I’m the image of my grandfather.’
‘How did they . . . the twins . . . that night? You were up on the stage, singing with the band, then you disappeared.’
‘Amber bailed me up in the lav and ripped that blue dress half off me. I said a few things Dad didn’t like and he locked me in my room. I climbed out the window and was sitting on the oval fence, listening to the band, when they crept up and dragged me over to the cemetery. Anything else you’d like to know? How they held me down on my grandmother’s tombstone and took turns?’
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘You’d think it was if I married you.’
‘Don’t get spiky, Jen.’
‘Go and make your phone call then. I want to walk over the bridge.’
He took Jimmy with him, perhaps as a buffer between himself and his father, and she sat staring at the phone box and wondering how she might explain how she’d got entangled with Laurie. He hadn’t dragged her off and raped her. She didn’t hate him either. He wouldn’t have touched her if she hadn’t lied about being nineteen.
She shook her head, shook Laurie away, and stared at the phone box, knowing Jim’s call must have gone through; he’d been in the phone box for several minutes.
Left sitting alone with the stroller, perhaps she looked like fair game. The tennis ball came flying towards her. She caught it, and pitched it back. The Yanks applauded her catch, or her throw, a few called out to her. They didn’t speak English, or not Australian English, and she didn’t want them talking to her. She stood, tossed her string bag and Jimmy’s rubber elephant into the stroller and pushed it across the grass to the phone box, where Jimmy, bored with phone calls, saw her and wanted to get out. She took him from Jim’s arms and a minute later Jim ended his call.
‘Righto, Pops. Righto. Take care of yourself,’ he said, and he hung up. ‘He’s made up with your grandmother, or that’s what it sounded like to me.’
That might have been good news to Jim; it wasn’t to Jenny.
They had an appointment at a photographic studio at two. Jim wanted a family photograph and made certain Jenny’s ring was well displayed. She signed papers at a bank later, signed them Jennifer Morrison Hooper, because Jim was determined that she was marrying him first thing in the morning, and because she was seriously considering doing it.
And why shouldn’t she? Jimmy deserved it, even if she didn’t.
They took a ferry to the zoo. She stood a long time watching an elderly tiger pacing backwards and forwards behind the bars of his cage, the tiger’s eyes telling her that if he ever got out of that cage, he’d eat her and his keep
er before he’d climb back in.
She was out of her cage. She could stay out if she was married. All she’d have to do was lie about her age.
He had the papers. He knew where they had to go.
They walked home across the bridge, Jimmy propped in the stroller, sound asleep. Halfway across, Jenny got down on her knees to kiss the pavement, and when Jim asked what she was doing, she told him she’d sworn to one day kiss the ground that had given Sissy giant blisters. And he got down on his knees and they kissed the pavement together, and for a time they couldn’t get up for laughing.
‘I was green-eyed jealous when you brought her up here to see this bridge’s opening.’
‘You wouldn’t have wanted to be here the day she got those blisters,’Jim said.
Loved him for kissing that bridge, wanted to tell him she’d marry him tomorrow. Wished she was twenty-one and in control of her own life, wished they could bring a minister out here right now and get married in the middle of that bridge.
They couldn’t. His father would get his solicitor to undo it.
‘We’ll get married on my twenty-first birthday.’
‘That’s years away. What if you change your mind before then?’
‘You might, but I won’t.’
They walked again, walked that mile across the bridge and not a blister to show for it, while Jimmy slept on.
He woke up to share their meals at a restaurant. They introduced him to Sydney’s moon on the walk home from the station. It was late when they got there — and there was nothing hanging on the clothes line.
‘No!’ Ten napkins, plus half of the clothes she’d brought for Jimmy, her spare bra — and most of those missing napkins were the new ones Jim had bought. And not a thing they could do about the missing washing but lament its loss.
Jenny was still lamenting, but quietly, as she carried Jimmy upstairs while Jim carried the stroller and their shopping.
‘Oh, Mrs Hooper.’ The landlady’s private door, the one that never opened, was open. She’d brought the washing in.
