by Joy Dettman
She needed music or conversation when she ironed, but Jack was still sleeping, so the kitchen was silent. Her gaze wandered from the shirt to the back verandah where Annie was smashing mud nests, releasing the paralysed spiders placed there as host for the big hornet’s egg. She was always at it, always getting stung.
Ellie shuddered. She couldn’t do a thing with that girl, nor could the nuns at the deaf school. They’d sent her home after only three weeks. What was she supposed to do with her now? God can be cruel sometimes, she thought. It was as if Johnny had thwarted his plans on the night of the fire, but he was a determined God. It was obvious that Annie had not been meant to live out a normal life.
They’d saved all bar the kitchen that night. The boys’ bedroom wall was scorched, but the lounge and third bedroom at the front of the house were saved by the passage. Paint and wallpaper had covered the smoke damage. It was a comfortable house, with wide verandahs, front and back. The kitchen’s rough replacement spoiled it. The lining had never been put in, its cupboards were makeshift, but the little stove had survived, and the brick chimney. Ellie turned to the stove now, plied it with wood. Jack would be wanting his breakfast soon.
She was taller than average. Hard work kept her slim. Her eyes were green. Emeralds, Jack used to call them. Green fire. She was proud of her eyes, and her rich gold hair, worn plaited this morning and pinned high. At thirty-four, Ellie was still a beauty, but her complexion was fair. Mallawindy’s harsh sun had already pencilled in its sad little roads around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.
She had known too much heartache in the past three years. Liza lost at seven – not knowing if she were dead or alive. And Johnny. He was on her mind this morning. He’d be seventeen today. It was fourteen months since he’d left home, and he’d never written, even though he’d promised to, care of Bessy. Seventeen was too young to be out in the world alone, she thought. Dear Johnny. She’d been seventeen when he was born. Just a baby, with a baby.
Her gaze turned to the pram, to her last born, tiny Linda, sleeping beneath mosquito net, tied down with elastic. It was the only way to keep the insects away from her. No matter what she did, no matter how often she sprayed, flies and mosquitoes used her kitchen as a thoroughfare.
Ellie’s breasts were milk-full. Milk leaked, and perspiration trickled. Her blouse was ringing wet. She rested the iron on its heel and walked to the pram, peering beneath the net. ‘Wake up, Linda Alice,’ she said. ‘Daddy will be wanting his breakfast soon, so you’d better wake up and have yours.’ Linda was going to be fair, like Liza. Ellie hoped she might take Liza’s place in Jack’s heart. He’d never got over losing her. Nor had she. Still, Ellie had little time to dwell on yesterdays – except when she was ironing and her mind free to roam.
It was the not knowing where she was that was bad, Ellie thought. At least with the death of a child, there is a grave, and a service, the mourning, then the putting away of sadness, but to have a child stolen – . She shuddered, drew her mind away from Liza.
Ben was her mainstay. Busy packing eggs, he was wiping the stained ones with a damp cloth – more particular than she. ‘How many did we get today, love?’
‘Forty-three,’ the youth replied, not looking up from his task. He had the build of a twelve-year-old, but he’d turn fourteen in March.
‘Hardly enough for the orders. It’s this heat,’ Ellie sighed.
‘They said on the news last night that we might get a change Tuesday.’
‘I hope they’re right.’ Ellie picked up another garment. Ironing was a mindless, thankless task. She’d bought Jack some casual shirts that didn’t need ironing, but he’d cut them up and used them to clean his gun. ‘One more to go. Pass it up to Mummy, then you go and see if you can get Annie to hang them up for me.’
Three-year-old Bronwyn walked out to the verandah where she squatted beside her sister, more interested in the collection of spiders in the pickle jar than in hanging shirts. Ben stamped his foot on the wooden floor and both girls looked towards the kitchen.
‘Mum wants you to put Dad’s shirts away, Annie,’ he said, pulling at the collar of his own shirt.
Ellie didn’t attempt to communicate with her oldest daughter. She’d given up on Annie a long time ago. Jack was hard on her. It was almost as if he blamed her for being here, as if he wished it was Annie instead of Liza who had been taken.
A photograph of Liza hung on the long eastern wall of the kitchen. It was a fourteen-by-ten, head and shoulders. Ellie looked at it now. She’d been a beautiful little girl. Everyone called her the pretty one. Like dark and dawn, those two girls, they used to say in town. No-one picked the girls as sisters, Annie so long and skinny, Liza all pink and plump and gold.
Liza Jane. Born February 2nd, 1960. Stolen from Narrawee February, 1967. My golden treasure, may she bloom forever, Jack had written in the Bible. Ellie had written beneath it. God keeps her safe.
She hoped he was keeping her safe somewhere. She made the sign of the cross now, asking forgiveness for her doubt as Ben stamped his foot again.
‘Annie! Hang up Dad’s shirts.’ The older girl stood. She reclaimed her pickle jar, scooped the last of her spiders into it and walked into the kitchen. ‘And get rid of those spiders, too,’ Ben said.
Too reliable for his years, Ellie thought. Ben worked like a man around the farm, fixing fences, milking cows. Her father had been dead for eight years now, but he lived on in his grandson. They’d named Johnny for Jack’s father, and Ben for her own. Johnny was pure Burton, as tall as his father when he’d left home. Ben was all Vevers, in looks, build and ways. At five, he’d known what he wanted to be. ‘I’m going to be a farmer, like Grandpa,’ he used to say.
Ellie’s father had built the house when she and Jack married. A footbridge joined the land on either side of the river in those days, but Jack doused it with petrol one night and burnt it, determined to keep Ellie on his side. Ben was only three at the time, but he remembered that little bridge they had used to run across to Grandpa. Two years ago, he’d planted a row of tiny saplings where the river narrowed between high clay banks. Two of his trees were doing well, and already reaching high. One day he’d build his new footbridge; Ellie knew it as surely as she knew that God was in heaven. Whether the bridge would work or not was another question, but she never expressed her doubts.
She hung the final shirt over the chairback, and took her best dress from the laundry basket. Again the iron worked hard, striving to press some life into fading cotton.
Church tomorrow. She always went to church with Bessy. When their father died, Bessy inherited the land just five minutes from town. But without the little footbridge, Ellie had a mile walk through the forest to the main bridge, then a mile back east to town. Jack refused to drive her to church.
Annie had made it as far as the sink. She stood there, washing her hands and blowing soap bubbles through cupped palms. Ben tossed a ball of newspaper at her, and Ellie watched the girl’s hands make a cutting motion in the air. God only knew what she was saying – God and Ben.
‘Then do as you’re asked the first time,’ Ben said. ‘Get a move on, Annie, or Mum won’t let you go to the school break-up party with me.’ His wrists tapped his hips and he shook his head. ‘No party,’ he signed.
‘Are you sure you want to take her, Benjie?’ Ellie asked.
‘Mr Fletcher said we could bring sisters and brothers if they’re five or over. She wants to go. She never goes anywhere, Mum.’
‘What’s she going to do all day?’
‘She’ll be all right. She can sit with me.’
Ann turned to Ellie. Her uncombed cloud of dark curls pushed back from her eye with the swing of a shoulder, she thumped her breast with a fist, then made a waving motion away.
‘You’re going, but only if you do as Mum tells you, and if you let her comb your hair,’ Ben said.
‘I suppose I’ll have to let down the hem of her red floral. She’s growing like a weed lately.’
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br /> Watching her mother’s lips, Ann nodded, and continued nodding as she picked up a shirt and backed across the passage to the lounge room door.
The lounge room looked like her father; it smelt like him too. Clean, unused, all the nice saved to show visitors. It had an open fireplace and a polished table, it had books and stuffed chairs, and beautiful Liza. Ann wasn’t allowed in the lounge room, except when she had to go through it to hang her father’s shirts.
She didn’t like the smell of his wardrobe when she opened the doors. It reminded her of another wardrobe. With a shake of her head, she dismissed that memory, pushing it away into the dark place, where it got mixed up in the big black of nothing.
The last shirt she hooked over the foot of the double bed. Every morning her father had to have a clean shirt, and clean socks. He liked clean. When he stood, all clean and pressed, beside the dusty Mallawindy men, she liked him being her father.
His shirts all had one big pocket. She liked pockets, but if any of her dresses had pockets, her mother sewed them up with double stitches. Pockets were for holding treasures, and one day, before Johnny went away, she found a true treasure. If her mother didn’t sew up all her pockets then Johnny wouldn’t –
And then nothing. The memory slid off into black. She grinned at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror, pleased with herself. She didn’t have to remember anything except Johnny’s birthday. She liked to remember that.
In the mirror, she could see herself from the top of her head down past her dress to her knees. Her dress was brown, to match the dirt. It wasn’t a blue dress. There was no more Annie Blue Dress. Not anywhere. She was in that different mirror. Gone now. All gone now.
She tiptoed to her father’s side and stood looking down at him, her hands held behind her back. One fist had pushed his mouth into a funny little Bronwyn face. He looked beautiful and so safe when he was asleep, and she knew that beneath his eyelids, his eyes were soft, and brown, and velvet. She could love him when he was asleep, she could nearly reach out a hand to pat his black head, just like she patted Mickey her dog’s black head. But it might wake him, and most times she didn’t even nearly love him when he was awake because he didn’t love her. He only loved Liza.
A giant picture of Liza hung over the fireplace in the lounge room. Ann stole a swift glance at it. It was different to the one in the kitchen; it was a sitting down, all of Liza, picture. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin, her ankles crossed. Curls as gold as her mother’s were tied on top of her head with a yellow ribbon. It matched the dress.
Ann hated that picture because it always made a whole mess of words bubble up and spew out, just like sick had spewed from her belly on the day she tasted her father’s whisky.
He bought Liza’s dress of shiny yellow.
Took her to Daree in his motor car.
Got a picture from the photograph fellow.
And Liza was prettiest by far.
Poems were tricky, sticky things. They remembered themselves. If you found one word, then the rest found each other. She made a lot of poems in her head. That one always made her remember about Liza winning first prize in the competition. Liza won the little photograph in the kitchen and this giant one, and a hundred pounds, which was now called two hundred dollars, and she got her picture in a magazine, and the magazine was still in the bookshelves, even though it came from November 1963. It was worn out with looking, and showing off. Liza’s photograph wouldn’t ever get worn out, but it was trapped behind glass, where flies liked to sit on her and leave their black stuff in her eyes, and in the winter, smoke coiled up and stuck all over her Shirley Temple curls until Liza looked just as smudged and dirty as Ann.
A smile tickled at the corners of her lips. It was a bad smile. Father Fogarty would try to get God to strike her dead for smiling about that. Quickly she trapped the smile with her tongue. Her smiling lip caught, held between her teeth, and she glanced again at the photograph.
God keeps her safe. Or so it said in the Bible.
Lots of people in Mallawindy believed in the Bible, and in the priest. On Saturdays, if her father was away, her mother cut a chook’s head off with the wood-axe. She dipped it in a bucket of boiling water, ripped its feathers out and threw its heart away. On Sunday morning, she poked bread and onions inside it, put it in the oven, then she took everyone up to talk to God while the chook sizzled. The priest drove them home after church, and he stayed to help eat the poor cooked chook.
When her father was home, the priest didn’t come and Ann didn’t have to go to church – not since she’d learned to creep out while her mother had her head down praying.
There was a shop in the town with books in the window, and there were newspapers pasted on the blind windows of the old shoe shop, and there were packets of Weeties and tins in the grocer’s window to read, and picture-show signs outside the Shire Hall. There was the cafe too, and it had a glass case full of lollies, and the cafe lady was good. She swapped Ann’s church collection money, tied in the corner of a handkerchief, for a little white bag full of aniseed balls.
No-one made Ann eat the chook after church, not even when the priest was there – not since a long time. Not since she learned how to stick her finger down her throat and make the poor chook come straight back up again to her plate. And since she made the nuns send her home from the deaf school in Sydney, no-one chased her around trying to make her get in the bath either, or comb her hair. They just left her alone now – except Benjie, but sometimes Ann liked him not to leave her alone, because he talked to her, like Johnny used to, and he liked swimming too.
She was the best swimmer in the whole world. Better than Benjie. She could stay under the water until Benjie got scared and dived down to the deep hole to find her. But he only thought he found her. No-one could really find her, because she was hiding in the dark place, in the place where the words and poems lived.
She poked out her tongue at Liza’s photograph, then tiptoed to the dressing table where she stood looking at her father’s black briefcase. She liked it a lot. He kept things in it, locked tight and safe under its lid. She couldn’t have one, so she washed out a golden syrup tin for her briefcase, and she made holes in it with a nail, and put a string handle on it, and she kept things tight under its lid.
Her hand reached out to touch the shiny black leather. When her father was home, the case lived on the top of the wardrobe where she couldn’t reach, but he had come back late from Narrawee, the money tree, so today the briefcase was on the dressing table with his car keys. The point of her tongue moistening her lips, Ann picked up the car keys, careful not to let them jiggle. She found the smallest key and fitted it in the lock.
The briefcase opened easier than her syrup tin. Her eyeswatching her father, she slid one hand beneath the lid to touch his treasures. A box: papers, bankbooks. Then her fingers touched something furry, and she snatched her hand out fast. It felt like a mouse. Maybe a mouse from Narrawee had got inside to make a nest, and now it was locked up in Mallawindy with nothing to eat, not even any apples.
Her father rolled over. He pouted his lips and pop-popped out some air. Quickly she lifted the lid, and gave the trapped mouse her spiders for their dinner. She was scuttling from the room when she ran headlong into Benjie.
‘What you doing?’ He dispensed with surplus words when he signed – as Annie did. It took too long to sign grammatical English.
‘Hang shirt very good,’ she replied with her hands. Unable to meet his eye, she ran out the front door and down the east side of the house where she sat on the cool earth with the dog, her back to the lounge room wall, her heels moved backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards in the dust.
malcolm fletcher
Malcolm Fletcher leaned over his breakfast, devouring it with small, near-sighted eyes. Six of Mrs Burton’s eggs, fried in butter, were piled on four chunky slices of toast. Six rashers of bacon guarded the pile. With a shudder of anticipation that shook the man-mountain from his sagging j
owls to ballooning belly, he halved one golden yolk and carried it dripping to his mouth.
Carnal things he had long forgotten. Eyes that once feasted in libraries, had given up the fight with fine print, but his taste buds compensated. Age had not wearied them. His machine-jaws working in perpetual motion, orange yolk dribbled down his chin and bacon grease painted his chubby cheeks. Rinds were stripped of their meat by small greedy teeth, toast crusts used to wipe his plate squeaky clean.
He looked at the loaf of bread on his kitchen bench. He accused the clock on his mantlepiece. ‘Eight-thirty,’ he snarled, and he waddled down the hall to his bathroom.
A simple equation of mass versus container had nullified the one-time pleasure of bathing in a tub, but he stood beneath the shower for the regulation five minutes.
The water in the mains was already warm. Cold was a forgotten word in this land, where heat and dust and flies ruled his life. He’d come with his family from England, seeking a better life for his son. He’d found Mallawindy, little hell hole in central New South Wales, where he was dictated to by a school bell that now pealed out its call to the tardy and the disinterested.
Malcolm dressed, slowly. He picked up a small green Thermos, slammed his back door and ambled across the gravelled playing field to the school.
He could have bought his students’ approval on that final day of the school year, released them early to run from his classroom, but Malcolm chose not to. He stung with sarcasm, he whipped with his tongue, goading them, driving them.
Ben Burton returned to the classroom after lunch, his sister still in tow. An invitation for siblings to the Christmas break-up party did not extend to supplying baby-sitting services for mutes. Not in Malcolm’s room.
‘Will you take that child into Mrs Macy, Burton, and leave her there,’ Malcolm commanded.
