Jacaranda Blue

by Joy Dettman

  As with the kitchen, the bathroom window presented a major problem. Replacing windows required considerable structural work, the knocking out of old bricks. Still, it was possible. Steve had said it was. He said it was easier to do in a solid brick house than in a brick veneer. Both rooms needed more light. The bathroom by today’s standards, was large, and its window, a small cell-like thing. With more light, she could have a pot plant or two in there which would give the room life. They’d thrive in the steamy atmosphere. Still, it would cost a lot of money. She’d wait until the minister came back and try to talk him into it.

  ‘Some chance,’ she said.

  Another small clown head completed, she placed it in the plastic bag, and felt for a blank face. Most were done.

  ‘Thank God,’ she murmured.

  The jacaranda limb knocked at the spouting. It definitely sounded like Miss Moreland’s high heels tripping away – dragging her luggage behind her. In truth, Stella did not want the branch to die and fall now. It had become a comforting sound. The one she had respected above all others, had lived her life without learning fear, had died in her sleep, in her own bed, never recognising fear. It was a good way to die. The best possible way, just as everyone in town said. No warning. No weeks tied to a hospital bed. Just taken from her dream to . . . to wherever.

  Still, she shouldn’t have died. She had years of life to live, and certainly on that final Saturday, she had not appeared to be ready for death.

  Why had Sergeant Johnson been involved, and what had he been looking for? Stop that. I am doing too much writing. My imagination is beginning to rule me. She had a massive heart attack, as Doctor Parsons said.

  How old is he now? she thought. He must have been, at the very least, twenty-three when he arrived here, which would make him sixty-seven. He’s already past retirement age. Will Maidenville find another such as he when it is time for him to go? He had been attempting to obtain an assistant for the past three years, but Maidenville had little to offer.

  With no doctor the hospital would die, and without a hospital, the school would eventually die. Parents would not want to send their children to board in a town fifty-eight kilometres from the closest doctor.

  The country was dying. The best of Maidenville’s youth left for the cities, or at least the larger centres. With little work to be had, there was nothing to keep school leavers in town.

  Twenty years ago, Maidenville had boasted four banks, and each one had given employment to several men. The old picture theatre had employed one full-time girl and several part-timers. In those days there was work to be found on the surrounding farms, for both farmhands and domestics. And there had been so many more shops, each one requiring assistants. Today most of the older shops in Crane Street were empty. Even in Main Street, a few businesses had closed their doors, and now the ANZ Bank – that beautiful old building – would become vacant in June.

  Sad. And frightening. Age is frightening, she thought. When we are young, we think the world will go on unchanged forever. The people who died back then were strangers, but we reach this stage in our lives when the ones we love begin to die, and suddenly, death is no longer for others. One day it will be Father’s turn. How will I handle his death?

  But it is odd, too, how we learn to accept. We walk by the empty shops without a second glance. And death. It is as if they go away – as Father has gone away. It’s as if Miss Moreland took the morning bus to some place. I still think of her, but as I think of Father. I can no more see where he is at this time than I can see where she has gone. They are both away, but living on in my memory.

  I do not fear death – not since that dear lady blazed the trail for me. I don’t. I really don’t. And I no longer fear that . . . that youth either. It’s over. It was a momentary aberration, some madness he now regrets, and must live with. At the funeral, he looked as if guilt were eating him alive.

  She turned her head to her closed window, still locked – as all of her windows and doors were locked. Perhaps she knew her words were false bravado. It would be a long, long time before Stella was brave enough to sleep again with her window wide.

  Remember all our yesterdays. And the laughter and the tears. Tomorrow and tomorrow, will –

  Another clown eye completed, she was snipping the thread as the old town clock struck eleven.

  ‘Good grief,’ she said. ‘I am supposed to be having an early night. Where has my mind been wandering?’

  Tomorrow was Tuesday. Her favourite day. No meeting. Not one thing that she must do, except to keep a breakfast appointment with her typewriter.

  The unfinished face placed with the others in the bag, she turned off the light, turned her radio volume to low, then rolled to her side to listen a while, perhaps fall asleep with the music playing. So soothing. Music is so soothing, she thought.

  The Blue Jeans

  The room was black. A male voice on the radio spoke of God. She reached out a hand to still the voice and was confronted by a narrow beam of light.

  ‘Who’s a lucky girl tonight? Ah-ah, Aunty Stell just won the lottery.’

  Then the light blazed overhead, flooding the room, framing the figure in jeans and sweatshirt.

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No.’ Only halfway back from sleep, she tried to rise up in her bed, but he was on her bed, on her, his weight pinning her legs beneath the quilt.

  ‘No.’ She hit out at him. She swiped at his face, and grasped at his hair, but he caught her hands and held them in one of his own strong hands and he laughed.

  ‘Come on. Don’t be coy. You like it. Admit it. Did I give you a taste for it, eh? I hear you’ve been getting a bit from old Steve lately.’

  She opened her mouth, screamed in his face, and quite casually, he backhanded her, connecting hard with her ear.

  No hand had been raised against her in too many years. She had forgotten the shock of the hard hand. For an instant she cowered from him and it gave him the advantage. A yellow, plastic-handled Stanley knife held at her throat, he stripped, tossing his shirt, his jeans to the floor. He dragged the quilt back, the radio fell to the floor, and the voice died.

  ‘No playing around tonight, Aunty Stell, or you get cut,’ he said, and he ripped her light cotton nightgown from neck to hem, he slashed her blue briefs at the hip, then he entered her, brutally, painfully, muffling her screams with a pillow held to her face.

  The chance, the time to scream was gone. Now she sucked air through the fibres, but not enough air – not enough to scream. Lungs bursting, mouth open, she sucked cloth, not air.

  Red mist beginning. Red mist, clouding her brain. The world was darkening, sliding away.

  No more time to live, to care, to grow, to write. No new bathroom window. No new curtains. No more dreams.

  The pain in her lungs and throat overrode all other pain. Soon that pain would die too, and she would die. This was how it was written down to happen. She was Maidenville’s number three.

  But I have just begun to live, she thought.

  The world was going far away. Dark now. Time became another time of sucking air through feathers. Another heavy hand, pressing down, down.

  Heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs.

  ‘Angel! Angel! What in God’s name –?’

  And the hand slid from the pillow, and the pillow slipped, and crushed lungs sucked in air . . . kept sucking in air, until air exploded in a hash dry sob. She coughed. She gagged, and she sucked air enough to scream it out at the figure looming large above her, large against the light.

  Spitting brown/grey shape with her vile accusations and her mad eyes, her kitchen knife in hand to cut out the bad.

  But it was the wrong shape. It was saying the wrong words.

  ‘Lick me,’ the new shape said, pushing his genitals at her face. ‘Go on. Lick me with your silky tongue and I might let you live for a while.’

  ‘Bow to her will, Daughter. Don’t argue with her when she is not rational.’

  ‘Better . . . that I . .
. am dead.’ A hoarse whisper. Uncertain to whom she was replying, she closed her eyes against this insanity, clinging to these last moments of her life, searching her mind for some sanity. Her lips pressed together, she moaned, moaned long, her head shaking, denying, until the moan became a hum and the hum became a melody, Miss Moreland’s song, perhaps seeking strength from the one who had been her strength.

  He hit her again. He sat back on his heels. Hit her. Again. And again. And each time it jolted her brain. Jolted her out of the now and into –

  ‘Say the magic word. Say it. Say it.’

  ‘Shut that up, or I’ll kill you now. Shut up with that bloody song. I hate it. It was stupid. It was a stupid bloody funeral, her sitting up there with her stupid dark glasses on, staring at me, accusing me. It was a bloody mad house, you crazy old bitch. And my bloody old man made me help carry her out. You need locking up. My mother said you needed locking up, and so does he.’

  She sobbed a breath, then a second. She blinked at the light, then closed her eyes against it, and she hummed. It was all she had, and she clung to it.

  ‘Shut up.’ If he hit her, she felt no pain. ‘Are you listening to me? I said, shut that up.’

  ‘Are you listening? Are you listening to me?’

  Thump.

  ‘Look at me.’

  Thump.

  ‘Say the magic word.’

  Thump.

  ‘Look at me. Look at me, I said.’

  Thump.

  ‘I’m talking to you. Don’t you pass out on me. You look at me. I want you to look at me. Now.’

  Thump.

  ‘Don’t you pass out.’

  She opened her eyes, and her tongue tasted blood, and she saw his tongue sweep his lips, and she saw his feral eyes were afraid.

  ‘Yeah. That’s better. That’s better. I’ve got a bun in Kelly Murphy’s oven. Do you know that? Wouldn’t it be a laugh? Wouldn’t it just . . . if they did the autopsy on you and found out you were pregnant?’

  Cut. Cut out the bad.

  ‘Men with their love, and their lust, and their filthy needs. He wants to stick it in you. I know. They all want to make whores out of their little daughters, make their little bellies swell with seething crawling little parasites. You’ll find out.’

  ‘Old goody-goody two-shoes, didn’t tell a soul. I knew you wouldn’t. I bet if it had been someone else you would have told everyone.’ He kneeled between her legs, watching her, and she watched his thumb slide another centimetre of steel from the plastic handle of the knife. She made no response when he pressed the blade to her throat. He pressed harder. She swallowed, and her chin lifted.

  ‘I could cut your head off with this right now. It’d be easy. Just like nothin’. Just like cutting the head off a dead rabbit.’

  Nothing. No sting of pain. Heat. Only heat.

  He smiled, repeating the action an inch lower, wanting to see her cringe, wanting her little rabbit chin to tremble.

  ‘It could slit your throat open with one swipe, let your blood spout across the room. You’d be dead in ten minutes. I read somewhere that if you cut that artery, here, you can bleed to death in ten minutes. Your heart stops, but your brain doesn’t. You’d be lying there dead and your brain would still be asking, Why? Why? What did I do?’

  He’d given her a word, and she used it.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I felt like it, and because you’re it. You’re this fucking town, you are – with your holier than shit act, your little beige pleated skirts hiding your black knickers. Panting around after my father. You wanted it. Your tongue was hanging out for it. Fucking shit town, and you’re just fucking shit too. I know all about you and my old man. You think my mother is your friend, but she hates your guts.’

  Shivering uncontrollably, each breath of air a shallow sob, words were fought-for things, and she could not grasp one. She was in and out of time zones. She was in the past, and in this bed.

  ‘She thinks you did it with him. I hear her going on, and on, about you and him. Maybe I should tell her different, eh? Set her mind at rest. What do you think, Aunty Stell? Do you think I should tell her that the old man didn’t get into your frilly knickers?’ He slapped her face with his free hand. ‘I asked you, what do you think?’

  She lay limp beneath him, her eyes closed. His left hand pinched her nipple while he watched for her reaction. There was none, but Thomas craved response. ‘It’s your fault too about old lady Moreland. You can blame yourself for that one,’ he said, checking out the other nipple, wondering why Kelly had nothing to grip onto and why old Stell had no boobs but nipples worth sucking on. He licked the nipple, bit her, then laughed. ‘I did it to her too. You should have seen her crappy old face.’

  Now she reacted. Her eyes opened wide. Now he got what he wanted. She shook off yesterday, and his second-hand words, and she rose up from the pillow, screaming in his face. He wasn’t ready for it. Her breasts were bare, her briefs, caught on one ankle, he was kneeling between her legs, and she screamed as she should have screamed on that day in the shed. She screamed, and she hammered him with her fist, drew breath, and screamed at him.

  ‘Beast. Vile demonic little beast.’ She sucked in more air and screamed it out. ‘Evil, black-souled demon. May you burn in hell for all eternity.’

  Her brain was functioning now. Telephone. The telephone. One button would bring Sergeant Johnson. Doctor Parsons. Steve. One button. Turn it on, and press one button. The right button. Get it in your hand. You’ll only have one chance. Don’t look at it. Look at him. Look at evil. Grab the telephone and hit the button then hit him with it. Aim for his eye with the aerial while you scream. She drew a breath. Held it. Then she grabbed wildly for the phone, but he saw her aim and he grasped the phone first, tossing it behind him at the wall, forcing her down.

  ‘You liked that, didn’t you? Want to hear some more? Want to hear what she said to me?’

  ‘May God strike you dead. May God strike you dead. May God strike you dead,’ she chanted over and over. ‘May you die in pain and agony, and rot, you demonic evil little beast. May you feed the dogs in hell.’

  ‘There isn’t any hell, and there isn’t any heaven, and you shut up about it, and listen to me. Do you know what she said, I asked you? She said my grandfather would be proud of me. I was halfway through doing it, and she started laughing. She’s sort of choking herself laughing, and I thought the old bat was getting to like it. Then she sort of stiffened, came up at me, and an electric shock went through her. And I thought, wow. Like, wow, lady, and here I’ve been wasting it on Kelly Murphy. Then she sort of sagged, gagged, and when I got off her, she didn’t move any more. First dead body I ever saw.’

  Stella lay shaking her head, backwards and forwards. Tears were coming now, tears to weaken her, but she must not weaken. She screamed again, killed her tears.

  ‘Shut up, or I’ll have to finish you now, and I’m not ready yet. Don’t you want to know what happened? I’ve been dying to tell someone. That’s the worse part about it, not being able to tell anyone. I was going to tell Kelly, but her old man won’t let her out. You want to know the grisly details?’

  ‘Kill me, Thomas. Kill me now or I will see you dead.’

  ‘What’s your hurry? Dead is for keeps. I can vouch for that. I stuck around for a while after she croaked, just to see if she was going to wake up, but she didn’t, so I put her in her bed and covered her over with a blanket, tucked her in, walked out and shut the door. Did you know that they didn’t find her for nearly two days? A neighbour found her. She was probably fly blown.’

  An involuntary sound, the pitiful cry of a trapped beast, growled in her throat as she lay there, denying the vision of the grand old lady violated on her own bed, but laughing in his face. She didn’t cry.

  ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘Because I felt like it at the time, and because I thought she’d be easy, and because you’re a stupid old bitch. You just took it, and then you kept your mouth shut. What did y
ou think I’d do? Forget it? It’s like something else, man. It’s like . . . like the power, and you’re not real anyway. You’re a fake, like this bloody town is a fake. I watched you walk into church that day in your little straight skirt and your little tight-arsed shoes as if nothing had happened. As if I’d done nothing. Was nothing. Nothing!

  ‘Do you reckon old lady Moreland wouldn’t of dobbed on me? Lucky for her she croaked, or I would of had to do it for her. Cut her with my knife. I was going to anyhow, going to practise on her. Go for the carotid artery. See what it felt like. I picked an easy one to start with, but she wasn’t so easy as I thought, the tough old cow.’

  ‘I wish you dead, Thomas Spencer.’

  ‘Wish in one hand, and spit in the other, and see which one fills up first.’ He hit her behind her ear with the handle of the knife gripped inside his fist, and the combination of fist and handle sent an agonising jolt of pain through her head. ‘You’ve got the guts of a rabbit and rabbits don’t deserve to live.’

  Willpower held onto consciousness, but it was minutes before she could hear his words.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bend to his will, give him what he wants.’

  Her head was throbbing. Next time, next time may be the last. ‘Yes. I am listening, Thomas.’

  ‘People used to reckon you did it with your old man too. Living here with him behind your fence, hiding your sin with your lacy knickers behind the hedge. Everyone thought so. Your mother told them he did it to you.’

  The kitchen knife. Sharp.

  Red on her stomach.

  ‘Cut it out. Cut all the bad out.’

  Footsteps pounding the stairs.

  And the man with the gnome face smoothing child Stella’s brow, threatening the minister, ‘Put her away, or I swear to God I’ll report it. She’ll kill this child one day.’