Ripples on a Pond

by Joy Dettman

  Georgie’s protégé, Shane Murphy, now studying in Melbourne, Georgie had offered his part-time job to his younger brother: He told me he was happy enough working for Gough, but thanks for the offer . . .

  Gough Whitlam’s spendthrift habits were creating big problems for the country – as Myrtle’s had created problems for Robert. His living expenses now subsidised by Cara, he had no trouble making February’s loan payment; had more trouble concentrating long enough to sign the cheque. He was worse, not better. He wasn’t sick, wasn’t limping, but he wasn’t Robert either.

  No doubt Gough and his party are working on the principle that if they can breed up enough of those dependent on handouts, they’ll never be able to vote him out, Georgie wrote.

  As I see it, Australia the lucky country is racing full steam ahead towards a rocky landing; and the taxpayer, exhausted by the load he’s carrying, is too damn tired to see the rocks ahead.

  Cara saw nothing but rocks ahead. Every morning she crawled over them as she climbed from her bed. At night, when she couldn’t sleep, when she sat on her balcony chain-smoking, she saw more rocks piling up for her to climb over come morning.

  She didn’t reply to Georgie’s letter. That would have required energy she didn’t possess.

  She didn’t miss a day at work; work was a relief in a life of no relief, a safe hiatus between Robin’s tears when she left him and the sobbing and clinging when she collected him.

  ‘As soon as you’re out of sight, he’s fine,’ the carer said.

  He was a happy boy on Saturdays, when he rode in the supermarket trolley. He knew Saturdays and Sundays. He knew Mondays too and didn’t like them.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ he told Cara.

  ‘I don’t like naughty boys. And if you don’t let me put your shoes on, you can go to work in bare feet.’

  The floor needed vacuuming. Little boys shed crumbs, they shredded paper. But what use vacuuming? There’d be more to do tomorrow. What use in stripping sheets and blankets from the couch only to spread them again? What use flipping that couch up then down again? Just wearing out its mechanism. Left it down.

  Grey mouse Robert was on it if he wasn’t in it – grey mouse or Gran Norris, though more silent than she had been.

  Cara had hoped Robert would run out of pills, but John phoned him one day while she was at school and a new script was delivered to her letterbox. She refused to get it filled for a day or two – until his old familiar hands could no longer hold a teacup, a knife and fork. She went to a pharmacy then and got him a new bottle, and he snatched it from her as a kid might snatch a bag of lollies – or a druggie his daily fix.

  He ate little. He’d lost any fat he may have carried a month ago. She didn’t serve fillet steak. Served frozen pasties, fish fingers, canned spaghetti on toast. Robin liked her meals; Robert didn’t. He needed professional help, and she was too tired to get him what he needed – and he didn’t agree that he needed it anyway.

  Exhausted by day, wound up too tight by night to sleep, she sat on her balcony and exhausted her mind with additions, subtractions, multiplications. Robert’s pension, plus the rent from Amberley’s upstairs units, multiplied by twelve, when deducted from the amount still owning on the loan, interest added, equalled . . . equalled . . .

  That loan, if she paid only the required amount each month, had over four years to run, but if she paid his pension plus rent from the two units on it . . . And rented out his unit . . .

  Myrtle’s furniture would need to be stored. John had offered to store it. He knew Robert would never live in the unit alone. If Cara rented out the unit, and found someone to rent Mrs Collins’s room, she could get that loan paid off by the time Robin started school.

  Cathy rang often, at night when her babies were in bed. She and Gerry had a loan. She and Cara discussed mortgages and interest rates. Cathy spoke of a lovely new nursing home in Ballarat. Cara listened, subtracted Robert’s pension money from her equation. The nursing home would swallow up his Education Department pension, but the rent from three units and Mrs Collins’s room would still eat that loan.

  What sort of woman have I raised? Myrtle whispered in her mind.

  A fiction-writing realist, Mummy, and they don’t live happily side by side. And he wants to die anyway and I can’t stop him. Robin can’t stop him.

  There were fringe benefits to sharing a life with a pill-befuddled parent. He drank coffee now, which saved her time in emptying the teapot. If he tasted the difference, he made no comment. His fogged eyes commented on the mug – Myrtle had served tea in a fine china cup on a saucer – but he drank what was in the mug. He drank water when he swallowed his pills, probably the only water he drank – and thus a fringe benefit to his pill-popping.

  ‘Papa’s asleep again, Mummy.’

  ‘He must have worked very hard today, Robbie.’

  She’d tried to interest him in fixing the dripping shower. A plumbing supplies shop had sold her a selection of suitable washers for the shower taps. Robert had once known how to stop a dripping tap, but his tools were locked up in a shed behind Amberley and his brain was locked up in some shed midway between life and death. The shower’s splat-splat became a trickle. A fringe benefit to that too. A constant is easier to live with than an intermittent splat.

  *

  On a Friday at the beginning of March the office woman knocked on Cara’s classroom door.

  ‘Phone call, Miss Norris.’

  ‘Did she give her name?’

  ‘A Linda Watson.’

  ‘Tell her I’m not in,’ Cara said.

  The social worker left her phone number and a message. ‘She said it was urgent that she speak to you and that she’d be in her office all day on Monday.’

  Monday, the morning threatening excessive heat, Robin trying to undo the buckles that held him prisoner, and Robert’s wagon refused to start. It had been running on empty for days and Cara had known it. Big blue eyes looked at her.

  ‘Out,’ she said, releasing him.

  In an instant, his sulky morning face was wiped clean. He ran ahead up the drive, up the stairs, into the flat, where she tossed Robert’s keys to the bench and picked up Morrie’s. The MG hadn’t been out of its bay in a month and probably wouldn’t start.

  Robin, who had learnt how to turn on the television, turned it on, preparing for a crèche-free day. She turned it off, picked him up, slammed the door behind her and reversed her footsteps, Robin protesting – until he saw the red car. He hadn’t ridden in it since she’d driven it up to Sydney. He sat beside her that morning while she attempted to make it go. It did, eventually, and made a lot of noise and smoke about it.

  ‘Is this my daddy’s car?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She’d mentioned his daddy in Sydney, a year ago. Hadn’t since. Wondered how he’d remembered.

  They drove around the block a few times, just to shake out the MG’s cobwebs, Robin happy to ride at her side. Not so happy when he recognised the crèche’s street.

  ‘Little boys don’t ride in the front seats of red MGs, so put your big boy’s face on for me or we won’t ride in it again.’

  ‘I don’t like work.’

  ‘I don’t either, but I like ice-cream, and shops won’t give me ice-cream unless I give them money.’

  ‘Will we get ice-cream?’

  ‘We’ll buy a giant container and cones too at four o’clock.’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘At four o’clock,’ she said, and she took a biro from her satchel and drew a blue watch on his wrist, its hands pointing to four o’clock.

  ‘When the crèche clock’s little hand gets to the four and the big hand gets to the twelve, we’ll drive to a giant supermarket and buy ice-cream, cones, bananas and everything you like.’

  ‘Nanny’s ’roni too?’

  ‘And macaroni too. Now we have to go to work so we can pay the lady at the supermarket, or she won’t give us anything.’

  He went, not willingly, b
ut with minimal protest.

  She was late to her classroom, and fifteen minutes after settling her rabble, the office woman knocked on the door.

  ‘Phone call, Miss Norris. It’s not the Watson woman. She said she was your cousin and that it was urgent.’

  Natalie.

  Knew that Amberley had burnt to the ground, that Miss Robertson had left her hotplate turned on again. She’d left it on twice during the week Cara had been up there.

  It wasn’t Natalie.

  ‘That Watson dame left you two messages and you couldn’t even call her back.’ Raelene.

  Cara’s reply was reflex. ‘My mother died.’ How many times since the funeral had she said those words?

  ‘Half your fucking luck,’ Raelene said.

  Cara didn’t hang up. It was a good line; she’d use it one day.

  ‘The bastards are putting my kid into foster care and you don’t give a shit.’

  ‘That’s excellent news, dear.’

  Midway through Raelene’s extended reply, Cara placed the phone down and returned to her classroom to manhandle an eleven-year-old girl out to the corridor.

  ‘Remain there until I tell you to come in.’

  When she went out to tell her, the girl had gone.

  At lunchtime Cara walked up to a corner milk bar, bought cigarettes, matches and a bottle of Coke. Washed down two aspros with the Coke, then lit a cigarette – and saw the absconding student dodge into a shop. Considered pursuing her, visualised dragging her back to school and into the headmaster’s office. Couldn’t be bothered. Wished she could abscond from school too. Couldn’t.

  The office woman waved to her as she walked in the door. ‘That Linda Watson woman is on the line again, Miss Norris. Will I tell her you’re unavailable?’

  Cara was in the right mood now to speak to Raelene’s social worker. She had two minutes before the bell. Two would be plenty to say what she had to say.

  Linda Watson said she was calling to arrange an appointment for Cara to be assessed as a foster carer for Raelene’s baby; that there was now some urgency.

  Cara couldn’t laugh at those too blind to see. She couldn’t explain how her visit to the jail had been a research trip either, so she stood listening. The bell rang and she didn’t care. Stood, shaking her head at the gullibility of the gentle souls who shared her world.

  ‘You’ll also be required to have a medical examination,’ soft-spoken Linda said.

  And enough was enough.

  ‘My mother died three weeks ago and my father is not handling his loss.’

  Nor is my three-year-old son, watching the clock’s hands tick their way around to four o’clock. She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Are you dealing with your loss, Cara?’ Linda asked.

  Had anyone else asked that question? Apparently not. She had no ready answer for it.

  ‘Someone has to,’ she said.

  Social workers are trained to be sympathetic. The gentle voice, the sympathy of a stranger, encouraged a tear to leak from Cara’s eye. She caught it with her index finger. Another leaked when Linda asked the age of her son. ‘Three,’ Cara said. Still a baby, and ripped from his perfect life to be carried off each morning to spend his day with strangers at a crèche.

  She spoke of Robin. Easy to talk to faceless Linda. She spoke of her father’s lack of interest in life. More fluid leaked. She wasn’t crying; had an allergy to gentle voices and sympathy, that’s all. Miss Norris didn’t cry.

  The headmaster caught her wiping the leakage away with her palm. Miss Norris ended the call and turned her back on him. His hand on her shoulder was the final straw. She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. She was too close to breaking point for speech.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said.

  Her hand spoke. She raised it. Shook her head again, then ran from him to Morrie’s car. The scent of its overheated interior, the scent of him, was too much. She howled. Howled because Myrtle was dead and she hadn’t even kissed her goodbye, and because Robert had abandoned her, and because she’d promised to take Robin shopping and was in no condition to take him anywhere, and it was too early to pick him up anyway. She’d said four o’clock, and kids needed to learn that four o’clock meant four o’clock – and if she didn’t open the car’s windows, she’d die of heat exhaustion.

  She opened them, got a cigarette out of her packet, lit it and drove home – to a unit near as hot as the car, and not smelling of Morrie but of stale old man.

  Walked by Robert’s bed to the balcony’s glass door. Opened it. Only hot air out there, but sweeter air. She stood at the railing, sucking that cigarette down to the butt. No neighbour to complain at this time of day.

  Robert, roused by the scent of smoke, arose from his blankets to watch her suck the last from the butt.

  ‘Have a shower,’ she said. ‘The flat stinks of you.’

  He watched her unscrew the lid from a jar, drop the butt into it, then replace the lid. And she couldn’t stand to look at his too-large pyjamas, his bare feet.

  ‘I’m not bringing Robin home to this again. Get dressed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Me, too – sorry that you look more like Gran Norris than her son. I couldn’t stand the sight of her, and I’m not living with her any more. Nor is Robin. There are nursing homes for people waiting to die. And I don’t care any more whether Mummy would approve or not. She abandoned me too.’

  Took another cigarette from her packet, lit it and blew smoke in his direction. ‘Come out here and slap it out of my hand, Daddy. That’s what my father would have done.’

  ‘She was my life,’ he said.

  ‘She was Robbie’s too.’

  That got him onto his feet. She watched him attempt to flip his bed into a couch. She’d shown him how it was done the day it arrived and a dozen times since. Before Myrtle’s death, he would have shown her how it was done. Watched him fail three times before she went inside to spill ash onto olive green vinyl as she clicked the seat into its lock.

  He sat on it and stared at the blank face of the television.

  His old-man smell, her helplessness against him opening her floodgates again, she ran to the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the tiled floor to trickle along with the shower, knowing that Myrtle’s death, Robert’s caving in, was her punishment for the sin of Robin’s birth. She’d had no say in that, had no say in anything; and her bathroom smelled like a public loo and she had no say in that either. Used to clean it once a week; now it needed cleaning every day and she didn’t have time to clean it every day. She bawled because it stank and because she’d meant to clean it last night. Had meant to do a load of washing too. The laundry hamper was overflowing.

  Robert knocked. He knocked three times before she unlocked the door and let him in – or let Gran Norris in. His hair was as white and damn near as long as hers had been. She’d had fewer whiskers, but hers had been longer.

  ‘I’m sorry, poppet.’

  ‘I’ve had it up to my ears with your sorry, and with your poppet too. I’m tired of feeling sorry for you, Daddy. What about me? What about Robin? He’s out there with strangers because I wouldn’t trust you to look after him for five minutes. Are you sorry about that too?’

  Maybe he was. He stood looking down at his now slipper-clad feet – slippers too big for him. Did feet shrink? The sight of them set her off again. She snatched a towel from the rail and bawled into it.

  ‘I don’t want you to cry over me,’ he said.

  ‘As if I’m crying over you!’ she yelled. ‘You’re not worth crying over. You’ve turned into your bloody mother, and she wasn’t worth shedding one bloody tear over.’

  Couldn’t stop bawling, or yelling at him, and that shower wouldn’t stop trickling.

  ‘Your mother won’t forgive me,’ he said.

  ‘She can’t forgive you or anyone else,’ she yelled. ‘She’s dead. We’re alive and she’s dead – and she did it so bloody easily
. Her whole life was so bloody easy, then she takes off while she’s dreaming and doesn’t even ring me up to say goodbye.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘All you’re sorry about is that you keep waking up in the morning. She’s not up there, holding heaven’s gate open for you. Heaven is a myth, a nursery rhyme for kids. Jesus was born on a bale of hay and forever more the people will pray – or pay. He’s Jack and Jill in the hands of clever priests.’

  Robert turned away to reach into the shower recess, to turn the taps.

  ‘It drips. It’s been dripping since you got here. It’s been dripping since I got here, and the fucking agent won’t fix it.’

  Shocked herself with that word. Raelene said it. Sometimes there was nowhere to go but to words, the worst words.

  It shocked him away from the tap; shocked him sufficiently to turn his lost eyes towards her.

  ‘What have I done?’ he said.

  She saw what he’d done when she turned to the mirror. Eyes near swollen shut, red nose, blotchy face. She ripped off a handful of toilet paper and blew her blocked nose, wiped her eyes.

  ‘She was our rudder, our mainstay, and I didn’t even know it, Daddy. We’re sinking without her.’

  LIKE GRAN NORRIS

  Robert came to the balcony door, perhaps to show Cara that he had dressed. He hadn’t shaved. She hadn’t packed his safety razor and blades. Had bought him a razor and blades at the supermarket, though perhaps not the right brand, the best brand.

  She’d never seen him unshaven. She’d rarely seen him without his glasses. He never bothered with them now. Nothing he wanted to see. Looked like, smelled like Gran Norris, and she waved her cigarette at him, as she may have waved a bunch of garlic to keep a blood-sucking vampire at bay.

  He remained in the doorway. He had something to tell her. It took time for him to formulate his sentences. It took patience to stand waiting for him to do it.