Jacaranda Blue

by Joy Dettman

  Old Cut-n-Slash, to the last, had managed to read blood pressures without more than a bruise or two, and to prescribe high blood-pressure pills and aspirin for arthritis. His waiting room provided a meeting place for aged busybodies. When Parsons took over the practice, the oldies looked down at him with a jaundiced eye, but they didn’t vacate their chairs.

  Parsons had never found an assistant prepared to remain for more than twelve months, so he’d never found time to look for a wife – no-one over the age of ten was short enough anyhow. He’d never found a car which enabled him to both reach the brake and look over the steering wheel at the same time, but a five-minute peddle took him from one end of town to the other, so he told himself he didn’t need a car.

  Back at the surgery that Sunday, he wheeled his bike into the hall, and walked into his waiting room. Cool. He’d left the airconditioner on. He flung his straw hat to its peg, and looked around. He’d never updated the furnishings in his consulting rooms, nor had he altered his summer-winter uniform, but there was a pastry shop next door to his surgery, and he liked his food. His waistline had thickened, and the size of his baggy shorts grew with the passing seasons, but not so his legs. They remained cordy, twin pegs, carved from local mallee roots.

  He wore a full beard now. It protected his face from sun and wind burn, and his beard helped to hold his hat on. It also saved him shaving time. His hair, trimmed when necessary with scalpel or surgery scissors, was sparse on top, and the silver blond of his youth had slowly turned to white. He wore it long enough to tuck it into his collars. His shirt sleeves were always buttoned at the wrist, and his long socks always sagged around the ankles of his brown leather sandals. In the winter, he added a plastic bag to his hat, and a plastic raincoat to his uniform.

  When Medicare was introduced, with a solo practice such as his, it had turned an old timer’s clubroom into a goldmine. Given licence to bulk-bill the old and the young, the rich and poor alike, charity was out the window and billing the government was in. No-one sued him for over-servicing. Maidenville was an old town, full of arthritis and high blood pressure. As more of Maidenville’s population reached pensionable age, and came to fill the waiting room, profits increased which enabled Parsons to install bigger and better airconditioners.

  His refrigerated, dimly lit retreat was a fine place for unshielded eyes to scrutinise their neighbours for signs of decay. Catholic and Anglicans sat side by side, shivering, while placing silent bets on who would be the next pin to fall. And if there appeared to be no death imminent, perhaps there was a life, or even an emergency, to brighten up an otherwise long and dreary country day.

  Parsons’ receptionist, a local widow who answered to the name of Sister, came with the practice. She refused to make appointments, but used the old ‘first in best dressed’ appointment system. Seventy-five if she was a day, near crippled by arthritis, she rode to work each morning on a motorised three-wheeler, then hobbled into her office with the aid of a walking frame; but once seated behind glass, only the brave dared question Sister’s authority.

  ‘Life happens,’ Parsons said, if people complained about the long wait on hard chairs. ‘So catch the bus to Dorby and pay for the privilege.’

  Many did. There were umpteen doctors in Dorby, and the hospital was modern.

  Martin Templeton telephoned Parsons the following morning.

  ‘I have the Martin funeral this afternoon, so I’d like to make an appointment at ten for an influenza shot.’

  ‘See Sister,’ Parsons replied. He was younger than Martin by a decade or two, but they were drawn together by a love of chess and by the church. Parsons, raised Anglican, was now one of the church elders. He liked going to church on Sundays, and even if he didn’t get a lot out of Templeton’s sermons, he got a kick out of heckling him, also the Sunday services supplied the doctor with most of his invitations for home-cooked meals.

  ‘I am a busy man, and I have neither the time nor the desire to freeze in your waiting room all morning. If you refuse to make an appointment, is it within your capabilities to make a house call?’

  ‘I could. Are you sick?’

  ‘Of course I’m not sick. I merely require an influenza injection.’

  ‘House calls to the healthy are termed over-servicing. Is Mousy Two sick?’

  ‘You obviously consider yourself a humorist. My daughter is well enough, and when did you last service myself or my daughter?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of rape or buggery, Templeton?’

  ‘I have told you before, Parsons, I do not like your particular brand of humour. And it does not suit one of your position in the community.’

  ‘You don’t say? Did I ever tell you I’m not too fond of your bloody sermons either? Speaking of sermons, I saw our Mousy Two at church yesterday. She didn’t look well enough to me. Invite me around to dinner and I’ll give her the once over, and you, your injection. I won’t even bill Medicare for it.’

  ‘I do not mix social and business intercourse. My daughter and I are not seeking charity, nor do I respond well to blackmail.’

  ‘Then come down to the surgery like everyone else, you cantankerous old coot.’

  The phone was slammed down. Parsons chuckled, placing his own phone gently in its cradle while he probed his ear with an index finger.

  ‘Poor little Mousy Two,’ he said.

  Parsons would have been the first to admit that Stella Templeton didn’t fit the description of mousy. A sweet-natured, vivacious kid, she was sliding too fast into colourless middle age – fading into the crowd. By mixing often with the elderly, she had become one of them, old before her time.

  ‘Pity,’ he said. He’d liked the look of her the day she was born, and he’d watched her grow. Her little pointed chin held high, her eyes constantly scanning – like him, she appeared to be looking for a way out.

  He’d set her broken arm when she was three years old. That was the day he’d named her Mousy Two.

  Blame it on his adored grandmother. She used to tell him a rhyme about two little mice who fell into a vat of cream.

  Mousy One and Mousy Two, in search of cream once strolled into the farmer’s dairy, where Tom the cat patrolled.

  Poor Mousy One and Mousy Two, in fear jumped in a vat, full up with cream. ‘Far better we were eaten by a cat.

  ‘We’re going to drown. We’re going to drown,’ cried timid Mousy One.

  ‘Oh goodness gracious dearie me, our little lives are done.’

  But Mousy Two, her chin held high, was circling round and round.

  ‘Please don’t despair, keep swimming, a way out may be found.’

  With cream upon her whiskers and cream upon her chin, she swam around in circles, allowing no cream in.

  And come the morrow, Mousy One lay dead there in the vat,

  But Mousy Two upon a raft of golden butter sat.

  Poor little mite. She’d been looking for birds’ nests in the oak tree. Martin had found her on the lawn. He’d wrapped her in a towel and driven her to the hospital. It was when the doctor tried to remove the towel that he began to ask his silent questions.

  He had never seen a three-year-old child so afraid of her little naked body, nor had he met a father who dared not look on the beauty of his own naked child. Something was smelling bad. He asked no questions, but pinned the tiny mite into a toga while her huge tears dripped, and her tiny jaw remained clenched.

  His size usually helped him with kids. He could get around most, but it wasn’t until he told her his grandmother’s rhyme that her wide blue eyes had looked at him. She allowed him to wash her cuts then and check out the break in her arm. He’d said the rhyme again as he and Matron Firth set the small arm in plaster, and when it was dry, he’d drawn a picture of two long-nosed mice on it, one with its chin held high.

  Little Stella had raised a giggle. ‘That one is Mousy Two,’ she’d whispered. ‘I like that Mousy Two, cause her has put her chin up high so she can get out.’

  Until last S
unday it had been a long dry time between sweet Mousy Two’s giggles.

  He’d watched her and the grand old lady attempting to control their mutual hysteria in church, and he’d understood it. He and his grandmother had known that same lack of control. Just a glance, the twitch of a lip and they’d be off. That morning, Parsons felt that old twitching call to join the giggling duo, then he recognised the desperation in Mousy Two’s laughter. It was a frantic straw-clutching giggle. She looked bad, pale, nervous as a mouse. She wasn’t well enough. She wasn’t well at all.

  Surgery hours were from nine to twelve Monday and Wednesday, and from two to four on Fridays. The queue was always orderly. Those who came by car, first took their place in line, seemingly marking it with their spore before returning to the comfort of their cars. There was no argument. And when Sister unlocked the door at a quarter to nine, the queue filed in, to queue again in front of her window while she wrote their names on her written queue.

  ‘Old Mrs Thomson is waiting in her car. She was after me, Sister, at number five, and young Barbara Bennet is vomiting. She had to run over the road to the public loo. She’s after Mrs Murphy, at number seven.’

  It worked well. Only an emergency could throw the list into chaos.

  On the final Wednesday in February, Doctor Parsons had such an emergency. Bert Holden was brought in, a bloody towel wound around his hand. The waiting room buzzed as a patient was evicted and Bert hurried into the doctor’s room.

  ‘How did he do it, dear?’ Mrs Morris asked, her small brown eyes, dug in between low eyebrows and high cheeks, like hungry cockroaches in a pudding bowl of stale rice custard.

  ‘Well, he took the day off for the funeral, of course, and he was helping me cut up the pumpkin for the Meals on Wheels. He’s bloody useless with a sharp knife. I’m always telling him to be careful. I’ve left it roasting in the oven. Hope old Parsons isn’t too long, or it’s going to burn.’ Liz Holden was loud. Heads lifted, turned to the new arrival.

  ‘Sit down, dear. Here, have this seat by me. You look all of a bother. So long as your oven isn’t turned up too high, pumpkin will be all right for an hour.’

  ‘Cut his hand cutting up the pumpkin for Meals on Wheels.’ The news was passed in the half-circle that made up the left of the room. Slowly it was gathered in by those who waited in the hall with Parsons’ bike.

  ‘Hope you washed that pumpkin well, Liz,’ Mr Bryant, the ancient and half-blind wit, said from his corner.

  ‘Didn’t think you took Meals on Wheels, Mr Bryant,’ she yelled back.

  ‘Only when our Stella’s cooking,’ he replied. ‘She drops me off a freebie on Wednesdays.’

  ‘As you were telling me, about the way she came into church yesterday. You were saying, Mrs Morris – ’ Mrs Murphy prompted her friend of the bosom.

  ‘I was saying I don’t know if I would have been game to show my face in town again. That’s what I was saying. But she was almost brazen about it. Behaving like a giggling teenager. Laughing about it, my dear, and in front of the whole congregation,’ Mrs Morris said.

  ‘I wonder if there’s any truth in it.’

  ‘I always say that where there’s smoke, there’s usually a fire. And at her age too. Lace always gives me a rash. I prefer comfort, myself.’

  ‘I used to make all mine, but I don’t seem to find the time since Dave and I tied the knot.’

  ‘I buy those Cotton-tails myself. A hundred per cent cotton they are. You can buy a packet of three for eleven dollars at the department store at the moment. They’re made in China but they seem quite good quality,’ Mrs Morris admitted.

  ‘Have they got a good wide crutch in them? I like a good wide crutch.’

  ‘Crutch? Whose crutch? Who’s got a rash? Did I miss something?’ Liz bellowed.

  Soon those who were not in the know learned what had been written on the church hall door. For minutes the room hummed, melding the ones waiting there.

  Slowly, lace led back to Cotton-tails, which led to corsets, and corsets led to stomach ailments, until the clusters segmented again, and Bert exited, his hand stitched and held high in a sling.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ Liz yelled, jingling the car keys as she followed her husband from the room, unaware that all eyes were following the line of her knickers beneath her skirt.

  Everyone now knew that she made all her own knickers since she did that stretch-sewing course at the high school. She found they stayed up better than the bought ones, and the crutches, that she reinforced with calico, lasted years longer. As the door closed behind her heavy buttocks, other patients came under scrutiny.

  ‘Young Barbara Bennet. Look at her. She might have done well to keep her knickers on, my dear.’ Mrs Morris’s words were spoken behind a hand.

  ‘Do you think she is?’ Mrs Murphy leaned forward, staring blatantly at Barbara.

  ‘Pregnant. Plain as mud on your face.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Look at her eyes. If she’s not pregnant, I’ll eat old Parsons’ straw hat and have his sandals for seconds.’

  ‘She’s only my second grandson’s age.’ Mrs Murphy’s bottle-top glasses were lifted and held forward, gaining her a closer inspection.

  ‘Can’t be more than fifteen – sixteen. Terrible isn’t it? The youth of today. My word, but I do not know what our old world is coming to, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘I wonder who’s the father, Mrs Morris?’

  ‘Probably that cousin of the Watsons who spent Christmas in town. I saw them riding off to the river on their bikes,’ Mrs Morris nodded knowingly.

  ‘You don’t say.’

  The diagnosis made without need of Doctor Parsons, the likely father named without need for blood tests, they turned their faces to a young woman and her twelve-month-old baby.

  ‘He always looks such a sickly little pet, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He certainly does, Mrs Morris.’

  ‘I wonder – is that a bruise on his dear little arm?’

  ‘I do believe it is,’ Mrs Murphy whispered as again her glasses were used as dual magnifying lens. ‘Yes. He’s bruised from wrist to elbow.’

  ‘As they say, like mother, like daughter. Her mother nearly killed her youngest one time. I saw her take to him with a broom handle, and if I hadn’t wrestled it away from her, he mightn’t have been alive today. Did I tell you about – ?’

  And when their own names were called by Sister, and their own backs unshielded from neighbours’ knives, vacated chairs were not vacant long. There were new fish to fry, new reputations to singe.

  ‘Mrs Morris doesn’t look at all well. Did she say what was ailing her?’

  ‘Her hubby is going for the invalid pension. He’s ten years younger than her. She’s here to prime old Parsons before she sends her hubby to him.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘A bad back, or so she says. Not that you’d guess. He was helping his son fell that big gum tree over her fence. They cut it into foot blocks and stacked it up against my side fence. It’s got a terrible lean on it, and I can’t afford a new fence, not now that Dave has retired.’

  ‘He could be going for the carer’s pension, dear. She’s been on the pension for years. I’ve often wondered why he isn’t on the carer’s.’

  ‘She doesn’t look at all well lately – that terrible complexion.’

  ‘She’s five years older than I am, you know.’

  ‘She looks it too, dyed hair or no dyed hair. Not that I’d say that to her. Of course, her mother died young. A growth in the breast if you remember.’

  ‘Yes. It’s in her family. She’s very pasty-faced lately. Oh, look. Here comes Reverend Templeton. I wonder what’s up with him?’

  At fifteen minutes to twelve, Martin Templeton bumbled his way through Parson’s entrance hall to the waiting room, hoping it had cleared. The room was still full. His expression, not pleased, he hid it with his white handkerchief. He hadn’t been inside Doctor Parsons’ rooms since he sprained
his ankle fourteen years ago. Looking around him now at the staring faces, he pondered their possible diseases. It would be just his luck to go down with some virus after posting off the cheque, but the tour organiser suggested he have a flu injection. He hated injections. Didn’t want to be here.

  ‘Good morning.’ Many voices muttered, and many eyes measured him for a box. He was more than old enough, but God help his pallbearers.

  He nodded, and spoke his communal, ‘Good morning.’

  ‘There’s still seven before you. Do you want to wait?’ Sister, safe behind the glass window that sealed her into her tower of power, asked.

  ‘No. No. I certainly do not want to wait. Thank you. Thank you. If you could tell Parsons that not everyone has the time to sit and await his pleasure, and that if he is prepared to run his business in a businesslike manner, to make an appointment for me, then, and only then will I return.’ He turned his back on the room and departed, relieved to be away. Shooting slightly disabled germs into one’s arm had always sounded like an admirable way to catch disease, rather than a prevention. He’d do well enough without it.

  Delayed Rebellion

  Martin had learned long ago to wait for the last day of the month before making withdrawals from Stella’s bank accounts. By doing this, he neither missed out on interest for the month past, nor for the following.

  From the stove, where she was cooking his breakfast of lamb’s fry and bacon, Stella watched him place two slips of paper on the table, tucking them beneath her bread and butter plate – as he always did – as he had with her mother. Without a word, he walked out the back door.

  ‘Father. Don’t go away now. It’s almost ready.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ he called.

  ‘You’ll get sidetracked in the shed like you always do,’ she warned, but Martin was back within less than a minute, a huge and dusty leather case in hand. She frowned as he took up the clean dishcloth and began wiping the dust to her newly polished floor.