Mallawindy

by Joy Dettman

  ‘No, but you’re the only one here who isn’t. You know me. I’m not into dry affairs, lovely.’

  ‘I’m ready to go. Let’s quietly disappear?’

  ‘If you put it like that.’

  It was after midnight before they reached the city and stopped off at a bar.

  ‘Can’t you love me a little, as a mermaid might love a sardine?’

  ‘Your mother loves you.’

  ‘Sam doesn’t.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘It wasn’t what he said, but how he said it.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘Old money. A superior bastard, but he comes across as a fake. May is a fine lady. What you see is what you get.’

  ‘I’m a fake, Roger. What you see with me isn’t what you’d end up with. Underneath this facade of up-country gentility, lurks a heap of bullshit, and if you had fifty years to spend shovelling it out, the facade could collapse in on you like a deflated balloon.’

  ‘I’ll take the fifty years shovelling bullshit.’

  They sat on until two, drinking a little, talking a lot.

  ‘Say yes.’

  ‘I rode a lift up to the top floor a while back, did I tell you? It didn’t kill me.’

  ‘Are you drawing a parallel?’ They laughed. ‘A baby a year for two years, then if you decide you want out, a quickie divorce, a good pay-out, and no recriminations. I’ll put it in writing.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’ll marry me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Monday?’

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘I’ll tell Michael to give you the day off.’

  ‘January. If you haven’t come to your senses by January, then we’ll do it. At Narrawee.’

  going home

  November 1985

  Summer almost come. In Narrawee, May was supervising the installation of three new bathrooms. Sam would be there for the wedding, and stand in for his brother, give Ann away. That was what May wanted, so that was the way it would be done.

  Ann went with the flow. It would happen. She’d started thinking of the first Saturday in January as a TV commercial for wedding dresses, and she’d be the star. She’d learn the part in time, or get the giggles and run at the altar.

  Roger’s parents were ecstatic. They had flown over, and were spending a week with May – God help her. Roger’s mother never stopped talking, and his father never stopped walking. Ann was on her way there to lend some moral support, just as soon as she picked up the ring.

  Go home.

  ‘Shut up, Annie,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Narrawee.’

  The voice had been screaming at her for days – so much for the new identity. Little Annie refused to move on.

  Annie Burton has bare board floors, and sticking doors, she has willow trees and dogs with fleas. Shake your head Annie Blue Dress. Shake it hard. Get away from him. Go home. Home. Home.

  ‘Shut up,’ Ann repeated and a passer-by gave her a look reserved for people you don’t want as neighbours.

  January – too close for comfort. The honeymoon in Europe booked. The Anglican church in Narrawee, booked. The wedding rings, chosen. Cake on order. Her bouquet would be rosebuds from Narrawee.

  Ann was sleeping badly, dreaming again. Perhaps she needed a bedmate to wake her up, as Branny had. She hadn’t slept with Roger yet. In this day and age, no-one took on a partner for life without some sort of trial marriage. But they spent so little time together, and most of that with a table and a bottle of wine between them. She couldn’t imagine sleeping with him. The mental vision of the two of them in their marriage bed reduced her to near hysteria. He never touched her as David had, just made jokes about saving himself for his wedding night.

  It would be all right. She’d get drunk and tune out.

  A bride wasn’t supposed to feel this way. A bride was supposed to be wandering around on cloud nine, not wandering the early city streets working out how much she’d need to drink before she might consummate her marriage.

  The fabric she’d chosen for her gown was cream satin to match the heavy hand-made lace May had dug out of an old trunk. Three months ago, Ann had intended sprinkling the panels with seed pearls, but she was running out of time. Each time she spread the fabric, considering the first cut, she held back ... couldn’t decide on a style. Didn’t feel like sewing. Didn’t want to marry Roger, or sleep with him.

  Maybe she’d buy a dress, or hire one. Maybe she’d get married in jeans and T-shirt.

  She stopped in front of a bridalwear shop in Bourke Street, taking mental notes of a dress displayed there. She liked the bodice, but not the skirt. With a shrug, she turned away and walked towards the jewellers. The shops weren’t open yet, nor would they be open for another half an hour or more but when little Annie was nagging it was safer to be out of the flat and amongst people.

  Melbourne, city of extremes, she thought. City of cities within a city, offspring of the rattling towering hub, each successive offshoot becoming braver, moving further away from the mother hub, creating the suburban sprawl. A strange conglomeration, a strange mixture of people. She was ready to leave Melbourne behind. Johnny wasn’t here. Maybe he was in America. London.

  She watched Lady X alight from a chauffeur-driven Rolls. She was wearing a leather and fur-trimmed coat. Three metres away an Aborigine, more grey man than black, looked cold. He, who should have been wearing animal skins, wore only a navy singlet and drill trousers. The bottle of wine at his side was as empty as his eyes. Bleeding fists were beating out some near forgotten rhythm on the concrete pavement. Old alien amid the jostling crowd who had come from all parts of the globe to blend here. Old alien in his own land.

  What was Melbourne before the European came, she thought. Where were this old one’s forefathers buried? Below the concrete that he is trying to smash with his fists. Or in Mallawindy? Or in the sand dunes of Dead Man’s Lane? Where do I belong? Ann thought. In Mallawindy, or New York?

  ‘In a looking-glass,’ she said.

  It only ever took one body to form the nucleus of a crowd. Around her, the cells were still splitting, multiplying, but she was not a part of the splitting cells. She turned again to the broken man, now clutching his broken wine bottle, threatening the onlookers. Just another play being played on the big stage of Melbourne. Just fodder for the printing press. Newspapers tomorrow might read

  ABORIGINE HOLDS CROWD AT BAY WITH BROKEN BOTTLE HEROIC SALVATION ARMY CAPTAIN DISARMS HIM

  I have to get out, or I’ll sit down on that pavement and smash my head into the concrete, and a Salvation Army captain will carry me off to an insane asylum and stick me in a straight-jacket. ‘Got her,’ they’ll say. ‘We’ve finally got her.’I’ve got to run. But where to? Not to Narrawee. Not today.

  She walked on, thinking of the ring she was in town to collect. Roger’s mother wanted to see it, and though Roger might not want to sleep with her, he wanted everyone to see his great lump of rock on her finger. His brand, if not stamped on her rump, would be on her finger.

  Ann thought of her mother’s wedding ring. It had been sized for a slim finger, and if it hadn’t totally cut off the blood supply like the rings they used to cut off lambs’ tails, it had kept her mother’s finger narrow at that point. All the growth had been in the knuckle, and around the knuckle.

  She looked at her own ring finger, unmarked yet. In the months since Roger bought the ring it had only spent a few days out of its box. It was too big, so she’d had it made smaller, then it was too small, so now it was being made bigger. It got in the way. Laddered her pantihose. Scratched her. She didn’t want it.

  She liked him, sure, but she didn’t miss him when he wasn’t around.

  ‘It’s a done deal,’ she said. ‘Go with me flow. Learn the part and say I do.’

  But she didn’t want to say I do, and she definitely didn’t want to do, because once upon another time she had known what love was. Once upon a time, she h
ad known what it felt like to want to be close to a man, sleep with a man. What she felt for Roger wasn’t love and never would be. He was just the dripping tap mat wore the rock away.

  The jeweller in Swanson Street hadn’t opened his door when she arrived. She tried it, then looked at her watch. Still twenty minutes to fill. ‘Damn it, and damn him,’ she said, turning to the window.

  The onyx ring glared at her. Its one great black eye on its heavy band of gold, its diamond shoulders glittering. She knew it, and she hated it, and she didn’t know why she hated it. Her hand went to me pocket of her jacket, surprised that the pocket was mere. She rubbed her fingers against the lining.

  ‘Home,’ little Annie said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  Seven hours of driving behind her and she was almost there. A signpost pointed to the last road. Mallawindy 22. She made a right-hand turn, and drove on, stiff with sitting. Those last kilometres were the longest.

  Mallawindy slunk out of the landscape. Undignified clusters of corrugated iron-roofed shacks waited beside the road to nowhere, their window eyes small, hooded, ashamed of their dust and their flies and their lethargy. Dusty trees, they sprinkled dusty shade to dusty walls.

  Ann slowed the car to a crawl, her head turning from side to side to side, absorbing changes that were few. A fibro garage had been built where a tin shed once stood. A leaning verandah had disappeared from the grocer’s. A modern car was parked in front of the hotel. It would be her father’s. For a moment, she considered pulling into the kerb, sharing the shade, fronting up to the bar, and slamming her money down. ‘I’m as mad as you, Dad, so let’s drink to it.’ She said the words aloud, and the car crept onwards.

  A new roadhouse had been built in a paddock where cows once roamed. An unfenced lot across the road from her grandfather’s home now boasted a house. Bessy’s house looked as it always had – like Bessy, plain and down to earth. She turned down the road to the bridge. No bitumen crown for it. Dust and gravel were still heaped high on its sides, its corrugations deep, its potholes well known.

  Her heart beat quickened. ‘Strange to return,’ she said. ‘Somehow the years had altered my image of Mallawindy, dusted it, turned it into something it never was.’

  She was down to second gear by the time she crossed the bridge. It looked smaller, older than she remembered, its timber floor death-rattling beneath the weight of her car as she crossed over. The river was low, slow, but it turned its head and fish plopped up to spy, and write with ripples on the water, ‘Annie’s home, Annie’s home.’ The forest hummed, and the working bees stopped their labour a while to stare. Their scent of honey was strong in her nostrils.

  This forest track had known her well, known her bare feet. Now her feet were shod as her father’s feet were always shod, in only the best of leather. Money was in her matching handbag. The small case, packed for Narrawee, jiggled around in the trunk of the car. Was it fit for her mother’s property? Was she fit?

  She sighted the old canoe tree, slowed, turned right down the track that led to her mother’s land. ‘Oh my God, look at the willow. And Ben’s trees! We’ve been away too long, little Annie.’

  A new boundary fence, but no new gate between its posts. The old wooden thing still earned its keep. She swung it wide, drove through, then returned to it to ride it to a bone-crunching stop against the post, as she had since Johnny taught her how to ride it.

  Maybe he’d come home while she’d been away. Maybe they’d heard from him. Maybe he was married with six babies. Then again she was in the car, and creeping forward.

  Chickens squawked in ill humour, making way for her unfamiliar wheels. A brindle cow peering over a fence, eyed her, distrustful of a stranger. So tense. Her stomach was tied in knots. ‘I belong here too,’ she told the cow and the hens. ‘I knew your mothers.’ Then she saw the old straw hat in the middle of the pumpkin field, shielding the one playing bee, pollinating pumpkin flowers with a feather as she had every spring of every year. ‘Do I know my own mother?’

  No. She shook her head. She had learned more of May after one day spent at her side than all the years of her life had taught her of Ellie. A mist for a moment blurring her vision, she watched Ellie look up at the approaching car then down to her house dress, unfit for entertaining guests. The straw hat quickly removed, hands went to her fading golden topknot, straightening a pin.

  Ann pulled on the handbrake and swung the door wide, inviting in the scent of the fowl yard; the scent of home. Shy, nervous, she wanted to run to Ellie, say, look at me, see me, see what I have become. Love me like you loved Johnny and Ben. Kiss me like you used to kiss Branny. Hold me, Mum. Let me cry on your shoulder, while you pat my back and say, it will be all right, love. Make me whole, Mum. Make me into the one I should have been. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she called through the chicken-wire gate.

  Ellie’s hand shaded her eyes as Ann walked into the home paddock, covering the ground between them, her arms reaching tentatively towards the one still standing amid her vines.

  ‘Annie?’ One step away. One step back. ‘Well, my goodness. You look just like you do on the television, love.’ After eight years, this was to be her only greeting? No, not quite. ‘You’re looking well.’

  Slowly Ann’s arms fell to her sides. The script long writ was not open to editing. Ann smiled, held the smile long while her heart wept. But ... But, she thought, I have done the right thing in coming home, if only to discover there is nothing to come home to. As each option is cancelled, I’ll be more prepared to accept my last option. Right? Mrs Roger Wilkenson the Third. Not a bad last option.

  Ellie made tea and spoke of the unseasonably warm weather, then she poured the tea and cut the cake and the conversation progressed to the heat’s effect on the hens. They had gone off the lay. She touched on who had died, and how they had died, but this was not what Ann had come home for. With half an ear she listened, while she thought of her father, and of his frequent returns. It had always been like this, the old ‘Come in, love. Nice to see you. The kettle is boiling. By the way the brindle cow had twin calves this morning, and old Mrs Crocker died in her bed.’ Cold Ellie. Would Jack have been different ... could he have been different if he’d married May? A villain, but controlled.

  Her head, a seething, burning ache of questions and disappointment, Ann sat until five, then she left Ellie peeling pumpkin, drove back to town and walked into the newsagent’s, slapping the counter for service.

  ‘Do you get the Melbourne Sun up in this neck of the woods, mate?’ she yelled.

  ‘Annie?’ Ben’s head emerged from behind a stand of magazines.

  ‘In the flesh.’

  ‘Annie?’

  He walked towards her, his smile too wide, his hands full. Then he dropped the magazines, reached out a hand, but changed his mind and pushed it into his pocket. ‘Well, you’re about the last person I expected to see today.’ He was behind the counter. He reached beneath it and picked up a women’s magazine. ‘I saw your photograph in it, Annie, and I wrote to them,’ he said. ‘Did they get in contact – ?’

  Ann took his hand away from the papers, and she squeezed his hand, then signed. ‘I miss you. Little Annie miss you too much. Think this morning, better go home, see Ben. Make him come my wedding.’

  He shook his head and his green eyes threatened to overflow. ‘Course I’ll come.’ He coughed, turned away, looking for something to do. ‘I’ll telephone Bron,’ he signed. Signs were safer than words right now. Ann watched him escape to the back room.

  She heard him blow his nose. She heard the dialling, and the, ‘I told you so. Guess who’s just walked in the door?’ He was smiling his gentle Ben smile when he came back to his counter. ‘She said, don’t go away. She’ll get one of her boyfriends to drive her up. Should be here in half an hour. She’s in Daree. Who are you marrying?’ He leaned there, smiling, shaking his head.

  ‘The red-headed Yank in the – ‘ Deadeye Dooley wandered in the side door, and she stopped. His ha
ir was the same carrot red.

  ‘Look who’s just turned up,’ Ben called, and Deadeye stared at Ann with his two matching pale blue eyes. The white blob had been replaced by glass. No thunderbolts, but a modern-day miracle. He was better looking than Roger. She laughed.

  ‘How a ya doing?’ he said. ‘I seen you on the television.’

  Then Jimmy Willis arrived, booked in for a late haircut – but it wouldn’t take long to cut what he had left on his head. ‘G’ day, Annie. Bloody famous now, Ah?’

  Did he really think that one lousy television commercial had nullified all her years as Dummy Burton? Didn’t they know that little Dummy was still cowering in the dark place, wanting someone to talk for her?

  ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she said, then she commented on the weather, offered them a topic to pursue. She’d have to get away. She wanted Ben, not them. She wanted – .

  ‘They say it’s going to be another hot one tomorrow.’

  ‘All the old blokes are forecasting a long hot summer.’

  ‘Is Mr Fletcher still here?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, the bloody old soak. Dunno how,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ve got my oldest starting school next year. I was hoping the stupid old fool would be dead.’

  ‘Tell Bron I’ll be at the school, Ben.’ Ann left them with their forecasts and their haircuts.

  The old schoolhouse looked smaller. Everything in Mallawindy looked smaller. Would he look smaller? She walked to his front door, a door she had never entered. Always the back door had been left open for her, but she knocked at his front door. Knocked twice. Waited.

  He flung it wide. Bigger, older, his face belligerent, then his features collapsed and he cried. He grasped her, held her to his bulk and he cried.

  She drew him inside his house, safe from prying eyes. She closed the front door and he disappeared into his bathroom. She walked to his kitchen, filled the jug, at peace here, finally at peace. He, who still smelt of brandy, he, of all the ones she had left behind, had given her what she needed this day. Peace in those old arms. God that he had been my father, what a life could have been mine, she thought.