Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  The weather warmed. Pleasant days, pleasant evenings of sitting beneath the stars, the night birds calling, the frogs’ chorus from the creek carrying.

  And Vern turning up every Friday, and Jimmy happy to go with him now—which hurt like hell.

  Gertrude’s happiness hurt, too.

  ‘Why don’t you marry him and be done with it, Granny?’

  ‘It would be the sensible thing to do.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘He hasn’t asked me lately. He’s found himself a new focus in Jimmy.’

  ‘You love him, don’t you?’

  ‘I was probably born loving him, darlin’.’

  ‘Then why marry Itchy-foot? How could anyone force themselves to do the bed bit if they weren’t in love?’

  ‘That’s not the sort of question you ask your grandmother and you watch your mouth around those girls. They’re growing up.’

  ‘It’s better for them to learn about it from us than on a tombstone.’

  ‘That’s enough of that talk!’

  ‘It happened, Granny. I can’t hide from it, so why should you? And you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘Marrying Vern was out of the question by the time I wed Archie.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re as bad as Georgie with your questions.’

  ‘I told you once your life was like a storybook to me.’

  ‘I’ve told you before. If Vern had married me back then he would have lost that land to his half-brother, and a boy of nineteen is too young to be thinking of marriage anyway.’

  ‘So getting that farm was more important to him than getting you. Jim would have given up everything for me. I should have given up everything for him. I should have gone to Queensland with him.’

  ‘And I should have waited until the old chap died and married Vern, but I didn’t. We could spend our lives kicking ourselves for the things we did or didn’t do. All that does is leave bruises.’

  ‘Vern would know if the Japs had taken Jim prisoner, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Tom Vevers’s boy was in a prison camp. They knew. I think the Red Cross gets lists of the boys’ names and contacts the families.’

  ‘Bastard war.’

  ‘Don’t use that language in front of those girls!’

  Jenny spied on Vern and his lunch guests when he drove them home the following Friday, spied through the bedroom hatch, and saw more than she wanted to see, saw Jimmy kiss his grandfather, saw Gertrude kiss Vern’s cheek.

  They came in smiling, Gertrude with a load of shopping, Jimmy with another toy in a box.

  Vern never came into the house. He’d sent no solicitor’s letters. He’d decided to woo Jimmy to his side with drives in cars, with presents. He was wooing Gertrude to his side, too. He could no longer haul a wheat bag, but he sent one of his farm labourers down with half a dozen bags of wheat for her chooks. He sent down a giant load of mill-ends, too green to burn yet, but they’d dry out over summer. That little black stove ate a lot of wood in winter.

  And what am I doing thinking about next winter? Jenny thought. I can’t be here next winter.

  There were pages of advertisements for work in the back of Saturday’s newspapers. Country girl, for light cleaning. Must be good with children.

  ‘If she’s got kids, she might take a widow with a kid.’

  ‘You’re not the type to be doing the bidding of society dames.’

  ‘I’ve cleaned. I’m a good cleaner.’

  ‘You’d need references.’

  ‘I’ll clean up this place for you and you can write me one.’

  ‘You’ll leave this place alone, my girl. I’m having trouble finding anything as it is.’

  Jenny borrowed Lenny’s bike and rode into town to place a call to a woman from Camberwell, who wasn’t interested in employing a widow with two kids. She wrote in reply to an advertisement for an experienced housekeeper to live in on a property in Gippsland, some cooking required.

  A widower replied, asking for a photograph.

  ‘He’s got more than cooking and cleaning and childcare on his mind,’ Gertrude said.

  He made it pretty obvious. He wrote again, suggesting Jenny meet him in Melbourne for an interview.

  The Friday lunches continued, the kisses for Grandpa, the toys, the lollies. You could set your clock by Vern on Fridays. Jimmy watching for him now, running to him, Gertrude not far behind him.

  ‘Traitors,’ Jenny said.

  ‘What’s traitors?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I said so,’ Jenny said.

  Too much time to think on Friday afternoons, to wonder if Myrtle had killed that baby with kindness, to wonder what she’d do if she and Jimmy, plus an extra, turned up again on her doorstep, wondering and watching the clock’s hands creep around, past two thirty, close to three thirty.

  Then Jimmy running inside with a brown paper bag.

  Kids are easily bought. Sitting on Grandpa’s lap driving a real car was beyond price. Four chocolate frogs in a brown paper bag is like gold to a three-year-old.

  ‘Share them with your sisters.’

  ‘Poppy sayed dey is for me.’

  ‘And I say share them with your sisters.’

  He shared them, one each for the girls and two for him, until Jenny stole his extra frog and made a point of sharing it with Gertrude.

  ‘He wouldn’t miss me if I took off and left you with the three of them.’

  ‘Vern and his daughters would have no argument with it,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘I’m existing, surviving around the perimeters of everyone’s lives like a stray dog. I’m fed, but I don’t belong. Sissy used to call me a stray bitch.’

  ‘Those girls will learn bad language soon enough without you teaching it to them.’

  Jimmy learned to call Elsie ‘Mummy’, and hearing that word on his lips ripped a hole in Jenny’s bowel. Go to Mummy, Jim used to say. Where’s Mummy?

  She’d never been Mummy to those girls — she didn’t want to be Mummy to anyone, but there was no way she’d let Jimmy start using that name for Elsie.

  Georgie fixed it while Jenny was still wondering how.

  ‘Elsie is Teddy and Brian and all of them other kids’ Mummy, not yours,’she said.

  It was sickening how she loved that kid; it was that aching form of love, that wanting to grab her, hold her, kiss her cheeky face. She couldn’t yet. Too scared of frightening her away. Jenny stood listening, tears blurring her eyes.

  ‘You have to say Elsie for her, like I say Elsie,’ Georgie instructed.

  ‘Margot sayed Mummy.’

  ‘That’s ’cause Elsie gived her milk, is why, ’cause Margot didn’t like goat’s milk.’ Then that so familiar finger pointed in Jenny’s direction. ‘She’s our muvver.’

  ‘Dat’s Jenny,’ Jimmy argued.

  ‘And our muvver, too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause . . .’cause I said so is why, and we live here and not at Elsie’s, and ’cause she cooks good puddings and everything for us.’

  And there you go, Jenny-muvver Morrison, pudding maker, egg collector, water carrier, washerwoman. Poor Jenny-muvver Morrison, not twenty-one yet. Accept your lot, Jenny-muvver Morrison. You’re worn out with running away. Accept your lot in life. Give in to it.

  But what about your dreams, Jenny-muvver Morrison? What about Cara Jeanette, that famous singer who married a handsome film star and went to live in Paris?

  You left her behind, Jenny-muvver Morrison, left her up in Sydney to live out those dreams in the house of the fairy godmother.

  MOTHERHOOD

  Jimmy turned three on the third of December. Jenny gave him three kisses and two pairs of homemade shorts. Granny gave him three tiny pullet’s eggs and told him he could have all three for breakfast. He didn’t want to eat them. He wanted to get tiny chickens out of them. One had leaked into the pocket of his brand-new shorts before Ve
rn and Margaret arrived with a bright red tricycle. And it was no common tricycle either; it had mudguards and a bell on the shiny handlebars. They presented him with a cake, fancy iced, Jimmy written on it in blue and underlined by three blue candles. For the first time since October, Gertrude invited them inside for a cup of tea.

  The cake looked too fine to cut, but they lit the candles and Jenny lifted Jimmy up so he might blow them out. Margaret, who had baked and iced the artwork, was offered a knife to cut it. She served fat, cream-filled wedges onto an assortment of plates and they ate cake, drank tea. It was a more civil gathering with the third Hooper missing.

  Then it was Christmas, and the Hoopers came again, all three of them this time, toting a green pedal car, two shirts and a pair of leather sandals.

  Jenny couldn’t stand Lorna’s ever-present sneer. Couldn’t stand seeing Jimmy sitting on Vern’s lap, couldn’t stand hearing him call Margaret ‘Aunty Maggie’. Couldn’t and didn’t have to.

  She left them to it, took the girls down to the creek and tried to teach Margot to swim. Georgie had been swimming since she’d learnt to walk. Margot screamed if a splash of water wet her face. Left Margot sitting on the bank while she and Georgie played. Not five years old yet, but that little girl was a sponge eager to soak up the world. They stayed at the creek until they heard the Hoopers’ car drive away, when they returned to find Jimmy playing log buggies, his pedal car loaded with firewood and roped to the rear of his tricycle.

  ‘Vroom, vroom, vroom.’ Around and around the yard he drove in wide circles.

  ‘I want a grandpa too that buys fings.’

  ‘Things,’ Jenny corrected. ‘Poke your tongue out and blow.’

  Jimmy’s new shirts and sandals still on the table, Jenny tossed them onto the cane couch. Jimmy didn’t need shop-bought shirts; she made his shirts. He didn’t need new sandals either; he had shoes.

  Santa’s present to Georgie, a large rag doll with hair redder than Georgie’s own, was tossed with the shorts but fell to the floor. ‘Not fair,’ Georgie said.

  ‘No it’s not,’ Jenny agreed, picking up the thrown doll.

  ‘Stop encouraging her bad behaviour,’ Gertrude scolded.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with bad behaviour. It’s pure unadulterated envy, and I understand it,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Where’s my grandpa and aunties to buy fings?’ Georgie pushed her advantage.

  ‘Your grandpa spent all of his money on your aunty.’

  ‘Stop that, Jennifer!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You’re acting like one of the kids.’

  ‘Why did he spend all his money for?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Because your aunty Sissy is so big she needs six buckets of food every night for her dinner and two miles of material to make one dress, and even two chairs to sit on at the table because her bottom is so wide it falls over the sides of one chair.’

  ‘How big?’

  Jenny stretched her arms to their full extent. ‘Bigger even.’

  ‘Stop that now,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Can I see . . . how big? Can her and my grandpa come here one day?’

  ‘She’s in Melbourne,’ Gertrude said. ‘Now go outside and play with your brother.’

  Full of questions, little Georgie, and like a dog with a bone too big to chew, she worried it for days. Give her one answer, and she found ten more questions, and trying to sidetrack her was like trying to sidetrack ants from a jar of jam. They kept finding their way back to it.

  ‘Where does my grandpa and Aunty Sissy live?’

  ‘Near the trains.’

  ‘Can we go there and see them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s no room in their house for us.’

  ‘’Cause Aunty Sissy is too big. And her muvver is too?’

  Jenny had no intention of discussing Aunty Sissy’s mother. She changed the subject. ‘Mother. If you can’t say your ths you won’t be able to go to school with Teddy next year.’

  ‘I done wan’ thcool,’ Margot said. She had no difficulty saying th, just couldn’t say an s to save her life.

  ‘Father,’ Jenny said. ‘Sss-chool,’ she said.

  ‘Jimmy’s farver got dead. Did my farver and Margot’s get dead too?’

  ‘Father.’

  Maybe they practised saying father once too often during the days between Christmas and New Year. Maybe words take wing, become caught up on some air current — maybe those air currents infiltrate dreams.

  On the night before her birthday, Jenny dreamed of Laurie. He was at Norman’s station unloading Granny’s trunks, dozens of them. She knew she’d been home for months. Where had those trunks been? She knew she’d packed that Sydney baby into one of those trunks, and she had to find it, feed it. Laurie was standing there, laughing while she threw clothes everywhere, searching for that baby, knowing it was in one of those trunks, knowing she had to feed it.

  She woke gasping for air, her arms reaching out to hold Jimmy. He no longer shared her bed. He’d deserted her for the girls’ bed in Granny’s room.

  Little traitor.

  She sat up and stared at faded rosebuds, sat for long minutes, not wanting to rise and face this day. She’d told Jim she’d marry him when she was twenty-one. She was twenty-one and he was dead and she wanted a cigarette, needed one.

  Twenty-one, finally in control of her own life and she had no life to control. She had money in the bank — well, Jenny Hooper had money in the bank that Jenny Morrison couldn’t get at, not in Woody Creek. She was twenty-one and sleeping alone in a sagging bed, beneath a corrugated-iron roof where birds congregated to jitterbug over head, she was gasping for a smoke and didn’t dare to light one — not inside.

  Mad Barbara’s parents had given her a huge party to celebrate her coming of age. They’d given her a silver key to the door. No key to the door for Jenny — no keyhole in Granny’s front door in which to place a key, and that door left hanging wide open now, day and night, a curtain of hessian hung across it, dampened down so a cooler breeze might blow through, and a few of the million flies and mozzies wouldn’t.

  Hot as hell already and not eight o’clock yet. God help this room by noon.

  She rose and pulled on homemade shorts, cut from Gertrude’s trouser pattern. They weren’t short shorts, but they offered a freedom she hadn’t previously known. She fastened her bra, slid her arms into a light cotton shirt, cut from the pattern Gertrude used for her own shirts, cut smaller. Like Gertrude, she dressed for comfort now, for convenience.

  Give me a year or two and I’ll be wearing trousers and work boots, she thought. Not yet though. She slid her feet into canvas shoes and went out to the kitchen.

  There was a present waiting for her on the kitchen table. Four kisses waiting for her, one given grudgingly. Margot liked Elthie betht — and didn’t mind saying it, didn’t mind showing it. And who could blame her for that? Jenny liked Georgie best. She tried not to show it though.

  She opened the parcel before breakfast and found a length of the prettiest deep blue linen, three yards of it. ‘It’s beautiful, Granny. Thank you.’

  ‘I saw it in Blunt’s and thought it would match your eyes,’ Gertrude said, serving out five bowls of porridge.

  Elsie came over with her kids and a cake at noon and the kids sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Jenny ate a slice of cake, then took off to the orchard with her packet of cigarettes.

  She’d thought she’d get a card from Myrtle, a card and a photograph of that baby. It would be almost three months old. But there’d been no birthday card, no Christmas card, not even a card for Jimmy’s birthday.

  Lila from the factory had known Jenny would be turning twenty-one on New Year’s Eve. The factory girls took up collections to buy presents. Jenny had put in her coins. They knew where she lived, or Lila and Norma knew. There was probably a heap of letters at the post office — addressed to Jenny Hooper — or they’d been given to Lorna Hooper and she
was standing at the stove, burning them.

  Mr Foster would know who they were meant for, dear Mr Foster who came from his back room whenever he heard her voice in the post office. Something could come on Monday. Lila’s mind was as disorganised as her boarding house room. Myrtle’s wasn’t. She would have posted that photograph a week early.

  There’d be no photograph, not for her twenty-first birthday, not ever. I have to forget about the baby, Jenny thought. She lit a second cigarette from the first, buried the butt deep into the earth, and leaned back against the trunk of the old apple tree, trying to smoke that baby out of her head. But some things become jammed in the deep recesses of the brain. Some things are unmovable.

  The chewing of a lemon leaf disguised the smell of smoke on her breath. Stolen mint rubbed between the hands washed them clean of cigarettes.

  She spent the afternoon of her twenty-first birthday in a spider-riddled shed and at the clothes line, labouring for three kids, while a paddock away they played with Elsie’s kids.

  ‘I’ve got to do something, Granny. I’ve got to go somewhere. People don’t live like this.’

  ‘A good few live a lot worse,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘And a hell of a lot live much better.’

  ‘Your father spent his life chasing after something better.’

  ‘I wish he had —’

  ‘You know who I mean. Amber’s father.’

  ‘Have you still got your wedding photograph?’

  ‘It’s somewhere.’ Washing, wringing, tossing worn-out sheets into a worn-out cane basket.

  ‘It used to hang on the wall when I was a kid.’

  ‘It hung there for your mother’s sake.’

  ‘Do you ever see her to talk to?’

  ‘She hasn’t spoken to me in years.’

  They rinsed and wrung, carried the used rinsing water to the garden in buckets, fetched clean water to the trough.

  ‘We’ll have to fill that tank tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s 1945 tomorrow and we’re still living in 1845.’