Ripples on a Pond

by Joy Dettman

  ‘I know they were there, Daddy. I know they were watching from somewhere when we left the office. I know.’

  Be it paranoia or instinct, Robert, having now met the natural mother, placed Amberley on the market. That house was just money, gathering dust in the bank. Cara and the children needed money.

  Tracy’s next visit with her mother was terminated after ten minutes. Raelene didn’t like the supervisor. The supervisor found Raelene’s behaviour towards her screaming daughter unacceptable.

  Tracy screamed all the way home. Commuters eyed her, eyed her useless mother who couldn’t shut her screaming kid up.

  That was the day the war began; a war of letters and phone calls.

  Dear Madam,

  I refuse to subject Tracy to the ongoing abuse of her natural mother. I have accrued documentation from several sources, which I am prepared to present to the courts.

  Chris had located Miss Elizabeth Duckworth with one phone call. Only one Duckworth listed at a Kew address, and Mrs Alma Duckworth knew a Miss Elizabeth. She gave Chris Lorna’s address. He wrote a fine letter to Amber, praising her heroic actions and asking if she’d be prepared to stand beside the young mother she’d assisted by telling her story to a judge.

  Amber had no desire to go anywhere near a courtroom, a judge or policemen. She replied to his letter, claiming age as her reason for refusing.

  Chris wrote again, asking if she’d be prepared tell him and his secretary her story, then to sign the document so it might be read in a court of law. He offered to send a taxi to collect and deliver her home.

  A trip into the city meant a day of freedom. Amber had pension cheques to collect. She replied by return mail; told him she’d take the tram into town and make her own way to his office at two. It would be appreciated if I could be met on the ground floor.

  They met her. They gave her tea and fancy biscuits, treated her like royalty. When the tale was told and typed up, she read and signed two pages, Elizabeth Duckworth, then watched, smiling, while two witnesses signed beneath her name. Pleasant people. They thought they knew who she was.

  The solicitor walked her down the stairs and out to the street. He waited with her until the ordered taxi pulled in. He gave the driver Lorna’s address, gave Amber a ten-pound note to pay the fare, then shook her hand.

  Once out of the city, Amber offered the driver a new destination. She paid him in coins, then caught the tram home.

  *

  Amberley was sold to a cashed-up retired Queensland businessman who made no attempt to beat them down on price. Pete had advised them to set it high. ‘You can always drop your price if you need to,’ he’d said. They could have built a mansion with the money from the sale. Cara wanted a house that didn’t stand out, on a quiet street well away from the city, with a high front fence and a gate. They found what she wanted in Ferntree Gully.

  Chris did the paperwork. He put Cara’s married name on the title. Few knew she had a married name; only Chris, only Cathy and Gerry. And Morrie.

  His MG refused to move with them. Cara’s fault. She hadn’t driven it in months; hadn’t started its motor since April.

  It needed a new battery, Robert said. They bought a battery, and when the motor refused to catch, they called in the local mechanic, who spent two hours fiddling beneath the bonnet, achieving nothing. He’d brought a small compressor in his van. He put air into the tyres, told them the car needed four new tyres, then offered his bill for free air and his opinion on old relics.

  ‘They’re a specialist’s job,’ he said.

  Cara knew an MG specialist, but there’d been no contact with Barry in years, and he’d been an old man when she’d met him. She’d had no contact with Morrie since that day in Sydney, but one way or another they needed to move that car. She dialled Barry’s number, afraid that the man with the magic hands might have moved on to poke around the big wrecking yard in the sky.

  Mary picked up the phone. ‘Is that Cara? Well, fancy hearing from you,’ she said. ‘We were only talking about you last night. I’ll swear that Barry has got a telepathic link to that car. Hang on for a minute, dear, and I’ll fetch him in for you.’

  An RACV truck carried the MG to Ashburton, Cara and Robin driving behind it. Robin was more concerned for his unknown daddy’s car than she.

  ‘Can the magic man make it go again, Mummy?’

  ‘If anyone can, Barry can,’ she said.

  Barry and Mary kissed her; Barry shook Robin’s hand. Cara drank a cup of tea in Mary’s kitchen while discussing the car’s recent years with Barry. Robin turned the pages of a picture book.

  ‘Mummy, it’s like our Lady’s Garden book,’ he said.

  She glanced at the book. The Lost Letter House. It was like The Lady’s Garden. Same names on the cover: J.C. Hooper and J. McPherson. She knew the author; didn’t mention the fact.

  ‘I saw it out the front of a bookshop one day and it brought back memories of a little penfriend I used to write to,’ Mary said, ‘way back before the war. She was a Cara too.’

  Two inches of tea in the cup. Cara emptied it, her throat suddenly dry.

  ‘I’ve never written to an author in my life,’ Mary said. ‘But I was so sure it was my Cara Jeanette that I wrote to her care of the publisher. And would you believe it, after near on forty years I found my little penfriend. Her name was Paris back then, Cara Jeanette Paris. She’s married now, of course, and has got three daughters. One of them goes to school down here. She said that the next time she and her husband come down to see their daughter, they’ll pop in for a cup of tea. Isn’t it a wonderful world?’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Cara said. Too small.

  She looked at the picture on the cover. Someone had spent a lot of time building a tiny house of stamped, addressed envelopes, then had somehow managed to photograph a little man with long white hair and beard sitting on a mushroom in its open doorway.

  ‘A clever photographer,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t he just. My friend told me that the gnome on the mushroom was her grandfather. The illustrator had been looking for his perfect gnome everywhere, then he came across a photograph he’d taken back during the depression.’

  Cara left soon after, aware that she had to get rid of Morrie’s car. How could it be possible that his car could lead her to a penfriend of the Jenny child? That elderly couple she almost loved had attached themselves to Woody Creek, and anything to do with that town was now a threat. Had to call Chris when she got home, ask him to write to Morrie and tell him his car could be collected from Barry’s address.

  Thank God it had died in Doncaster and not Ferntree Gully. Next Thursday week, Cara Norris would disappear off the planet and Mrs Cara Grenville would land with her father and two children in that quiet court in Ferntree Gully. So quiet that the three times she’d driven out there, she’d got lost.

  She’d lost Georgie when they’d moved to Doncaster. No more late-night conversations. No more wads of pages from Charlie’s docket books. Cara missed the sister she’d got to know so well, but couldn’t chance further contact with her. Georgie had exposed her once to Raelene and Collins. It wouldn’t happen a second time.

  Forewarned is forearmed,Georgie had once said.

  Cara would be armed in Ferntree Gully – with a gate she could lock at night, with security doors front and rear. She’d get a watchdog too. Had plenty of garden for a dog.

  *

  Tracy’s case worker was given the Ferntree Gully address. Two weeks after they’d moved in, a letter arrived introducing Anna. Cara called her. For half an hour she attempted to instruct Anna in the hard facts of life, but gentle Anna, another Linda, had been handed a folder containing many sheets of paper, and on paper a relationship between the natural mother and her child was considered to be vital to the said child’s psychological development. Little things like broken and bruised arms, like little girls terrified of trains and lifts, didn’t count for much in the greater scheme of paper.

  She hadn�
�t expected to fall in love with that tiny girl; hadn’t expected Robin and Robert to fall in love with her. Brainless fool.

  Wanting to scream her frustration, but unable to scream at Anna, unable to refuse to present Tracy at a certain office on a certain day at a certain hour, whether Raelene decided to present herself or not, Cara turned to her typewriter.

  She wrote The Addict’s Child in anger. It poured from her fingers, page after page of it, fact barely blurred by fiction. It gathered in her head by day while she went about the tasks of motherhood, then once her two were in bed, the pages began rolling again from that rattling typewriter. Night after night of it, page after page, each page leading irrevocably to only one conclusion.

  Robert went to bed each night to the song of that pile of pages growing. Like others before him, he asked how much longer that infernal racket might continue.

  ‘You can read it when it’s done,’ she said.

  It was done in six weeks, or a first draft was done, and when she wrote that final overdose scene, she felt cleansed.

  Dumped three hundred pages beside Robert’s breakfast plate. ‘Edit it for me, then give it a mark, Daddy. But I warn you, you’ll need to forget I’m your daughter.’

  Robert had taught English to matriculation students. He was adept with a red pen. For a week, he sat reading while she walked around him, watching the pile to his left shrink as the pile to his right grew. At times she caught him staring at her, and knew he was asking what on earth he and his gentle Myrtle had managed to raise. There was little gentleness in that tale, but he’d met the protagonist Cara had trapped on paper, and he persevered to the end.

  ‘You write very well,’ he said.

  ‘Give it a mark, Daddy. How many out of ten?’

  ‘It’s very harsh.’

  ‘Life is harsh. Come on. I need your mark.’

  ‘I’d deduct a point for the language.’

  ‘You heard her language. Don’t blame the carpenter’s tools.’

  She stood over him, waiting for his mark, and he wrote a red nine. On the strength of that nine, she went shopping for a brand-new, whiz-bang electric typewriter, not as noisy as the jittery old portable.

  *

  The MG, again a going concern, was still cluttering Barry’s shed. She rang him from a public phone, told him she’d moved, that the phone hadn’t yet been connected, that the car’s owner had been contacted and no doubt would contact him shortly. Robin didn’t understand why the toy car was fixed but they couldn’t bring it home. They had room for two cars in their garage.

  Cathy had Cara’s number. She phoned. ‘Morrie’s up to his ears in builders, and his accountant is in hospital, but if you can get the car up to us, we’ll store it for him until he can work out what he wants to do about it. It wouldn’t have killed you to write to him instead of getting your old flame to write.’

  ‘Chris is my solicitor. He looks after my affairs.’

  ‘Morrie thinks you’re having an affair with him. Are you?’

  ‘He’s married.’

  ‘That doesn’t stop some of them.’

  ‘Speaking from experience, Cath?’

  ‘I’d kill him,’ she said. ‘And he knows it.’

  ‘Tell Morrie I’ll pick it up and store it, but I want it gone as soon as possible,’ Cara said.

  She and Robin took a taxi to Ashburton. They drove the MG home. Thereafter, because Robin loved that car, and because old cars need exercise, they exercised it regularly. They drove it to the post office when winter was almost done, where they posted chapter one of The Addict’s Child up to Sydney, with a copy of the reader’s report they’d sent to her when they’d returned Balancing Act.

  In September, the postman delivered a business-sized envelope addressed to Cara Grenville. The publisher wanted to read the manuscript in its entirety when it was complete.

  They drove to the post office again that afternoon and posted a giant envelope. Desperate to tell someone, Cara phoned Cathy, who way back in the mid-sixties had read a draft of Angel At My Door.

  ‘What happened to that Jessica story you wrote at college?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘It’s still around.’

  Her old desk was still around, and had deep drawers; the bottom drawer deep enough to hold all three of her rubber-banded novels and a rough draft of My Soldier Boy. One day, one fine day, they’d all see the light.

  In October, Tracy had her second birthday and Cara her thirty-first. Anna organised another supervised visit. Cara drove to Helen’s house, where she called a taxi. No Raelene that day. Definitely didn’t like supervision.

  ‘When will they learn?’ Cara asked the supervisor. Only a shake of the head in reply.

  Perhaps they didn’t want to learn. Raelene’s involvement in the prison’s experimental rehabilitation program may have coloured their judgement. Someone refused to give up on her.

  A wasted day, but on the way home, Cara bought a copy of The Lost Letter House and that night, she read her two a new bedtime story – a cute tale of gnomes and wicked witches, written in verse. They sat at her elbows, looking at the pictures of a magic garden on the far side of a tall fence:

  Where children roamed from dawn to dark, allowed to laugh and play,

  For the gnome had cast a magic spell to keep the witch away . . .

  She read the book again later, and asked again how, in a city of millions, a crippled woman who had never been outside of Melbourne had made contact with a Woody Creek child, and how a child’s fairytale book had given Mary her fairytale ending. And perhaps, too, for the Jenny child – Robin’s blood grandmother who he could never know.

  Gough Whitlam believed in fairytales. In October, Malcolm Fraser and his party blocked supply. In November, the harsh reality of life crept up and king-hit Big Gough. He was dismissed as prime minister and Malcolm Fraser, a dour Liberal man, put in as caretaker prime minister.

  In November, The Addict’s Child returned, with a detailed reader’s report that suggested an alternative ending, where Frances gets her life back together and mother and daughter are happily reunited. The happily-ever-after fairytale is always prettier than the truth, and much more satisfying to a reader.

  *

  Santa ate his cake that year. He drank his milk, and left too many presents beneath the tree. On Christmas morning, too early, Robert and the children came to Cara’s room and placed a large carton on the bed. Its contents scrambled free – a bundle of black and white fluff with a big blue bow for a collar, and a card attached, printed by Robin: My name is Bowser.

  She’d had a Bowser on her bed as a four year old: a black and white puppy with a wind-up key in his tummy. He hadn’t licked her face and peed on her quilt.

  Laughter that Christmas morning, and puppy food to serve, and water bowls to fill, and in and out the back door all day, attempting to teach an eight-week-old pup that there was a time and place to make his puddles.

  Robin had his first professional haircut in January. He wanted his curls cut off – curls were for girls, not boys. The loss of his curls turned him into Morrie’s son. He was the image of him.

  Tracy’s curls had grown long. She wore them in bunches tied high with big pink bows. She liked pink best. Her hair was Raelene’s; her eyes weren’t. Her elfin chin may have been; her mouth was nothing like Raelene’s.

  And not one word about Raelene. No letter from Anna, no phone call.

  She always comes back, Georgie had once written. Maybe she wouldn’t this time.

  Border collie pups dig holes. Bowser became offended by the daphne bush; he dug it up twice before it died. He became offended by Robert’s tomato seedlings, but stayed well clear of a clump of self-sown pumpkin plants. They took over the back garden and in time produced multiple baby pumpkins, which the children kept tabs on. Each morning they ran outside to see how big their pumpkins had grown in the night.

  ‘The one near the incinerator is enormous, Papa.’

  ‘It ’normous, Papa. It diss big.’


  Happiness. How do you define it? It was no supervised visits; it was the day Robert transferred his ‘poppet’ to Tracy. Happiness was revisiting her own childhood as an onlooker; it was laughing at a half-grown pup that loved the earth she walked on; it was tucking two kids into their beds, kissing their noses, their ears, loving them, being loved by them.

  For two months, Cara attempted to alter the ending of The Addict’s Child, but couldn’t turn a sly fox into a lovable border collie and make the reader believe it. A fox is a fox is a fox, as The Addict’s Child was what it was.

  And who gave a damn anyway? She had what she wanted: two kids, a dog, and Robert well. She had a home that was her home, a safe home, set in a court of twelve houses where children played together and the neighbours watched over them.

  The Addict’s Child was packed away with the other manuscripts, a sheeting shroud was placed over her whiz-bang typewriter, and Cara lived happily.

  LORNA’S CIVIL COMPANION

  On a chilly morning in July of ’76, when most would have been content to sit by the gas heater, Lorna and her companion took a bracing walk down to the Commonwealth Bank, where Lorna withdrew a hundred dollars and learned that her account had been swelled, not by the usual quarterly payment, but by thirty thousand dollars.

  Her response was a satisfied humph. It was a satisfactory figure and one Lorna considered long overdue. Her mood was somewhat brighter on the brisk walk home.

  Amber checked the letterbox. They received little mail, but that day she removed a letter from Roland Atkinson. Once inside, with the aid of her magnifying glass, Lorna learned that the Kew house had been transferred to her name. She was a woman of property, until she offered the letter to her reader, who required no magnifying glass. There were two pages, stating that Lorna was to receive no more quarterly payments from her father’s estate; that from that measly thirty thousand dollars paid into her account she would now be expected to take responsibility for electricity, phone, water bills and land rates.