Pearl in a Cage

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Elsie.’

  That girl’s approach to problem-solving differed from Gertrude’s. She’d put off what she didn’t want to do today in the hope that it might be forgotten by tomorrow. And if it wasn’t forgotten tomorrow, then maybe she could put it off again. She knew too that Vern didn’t like driving after dark. Two minutes after Gertrude lit the lamp, she crept inside, head down, crept to the bottom end of the kitchen, to her mattress, where she sat cross-legged, looking at the floor.

  ‘You have to go, darlin’. My house isn’t big enough for you and me and a baby.’

  ‘Baby only a little feller, missus.’

  ‘Babies grow into big fellers. The mission has got plenty of room for babies.’

  Elsie measured the kitchen with her eyes, stood and moved her mattress closer to the corner, hard in against the wall. She glanced at Gertrude, wanting her to see how easily the space problem could be overcome.

  ‘I’ll go out there with you and tell the lady all about your baby. There’ll be lots of girls out there for you to talk to, lots of babies to play with,’ Gertrude said, unwrapping half a dozen sausages she’d bought in town.

  Elsie liked sausages. Gertrude watched her watch them, knowing she’d come to see them placed into the hot fat. She loved watching sausages squirm as they fried.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  ‘They like alive ones, missus,’ Elsie said, creeping to her side.

  ‘The butcher makes them in his sausage machine,’ Gertrude said, stabbing one with a fork, turning it.

  ‘They like fat worm. Wriggle-wriggle, missus. How’s him make them sausages?’

  ‘With a bit of meat, a bit of this and a bit more of that.’ She turned two then caught that girl’s eye. ‘How did you make that baby, Elsie?’

  Elsie looked left, right, anywhere but at her inquisitor. ‘You fryin’ some ’taters too, missus?’

  ‘A man hurt you when he made that baby. Where did that man come from, Elsie?’

  No reply.

  ‘You tell me who hurt you and I’ll fry you some potatoes.’

  So it was blackmail. She’d tried all else — and it didn’t work anyway.

  Elsie stood head down, studying her narrow feet. Her hands were as narrow. She was a tiny girl, five foot nothing and fine. Gertrude had cut her lice-riddled hair near to the scalp on the day she’d brought her in from the camp. It was a mass of black curls now — a pretty, sad-eyed kid with the sweetest nature. And what hope did she have? The mission folk would take that baby and try to turn Elsie back into a twelve year old. Time couldn’t be turned back. What had happened to her had happened and she liked babies.

  They’d teach her to read and write. She was young enough to learn, capable of learning — capable of learning a lot of things if she could see the sense in the learning. Milk she could drink. She’d learnt to milk a goat. Bread she could eat. She could get that bread started in the mornings. She could sew on a button. Buttons kept her frocks done up, but what use was reading and writing to a kid who’d spent most of her life barely surviving? It had taken Gertrude a month to get a pencil into her hand, another to teach her that E made the sound for Elsie. A teacher might have done better — would maybe do better at the mission.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Elsie, and a big help to me. I’m going to miss you so very, very much.’

  ‘I stay in shed, missus. Plenty room in shed.’

  ‘God save me from your eyes, darlin’,’ she said, then to save herself she turned to her sack of potatoes, selected a big one, gave it a brush off, a quick wash, a wipe, then sliced it into the pan. She wasn’t a fussy cook and never had been. Her meals weren’t fancy. The potato sizzling, fat spitting, her fork busy turning sausages and potatoes while Elsie took knives and forks from the dresser drawer, placed plates on the hob.

  ‘Grab me a couple of eggs, love.’ No sooner said and they were in her hand.

  Potatoes and sausages moved to the side of the pan, two eggs broken into the fat and she stood flipping fat over the yolks, turning them blue.

  No wasted effort in Gertrude’s house, nor extra washing up. Two meals served from a frying pan, hot fat poured into the dripping bowl, the pan wiped out with newspaper, the paper burned, the pan hung on its bent nail beside her stove, ready to cook the next meal, and Gertrude sat and picked up her knife and fork.

  Elsie stood opposite, looking down at her piled plate. ‘Wadi,’ she said.

  ‘You want to go back to Wadi?’ Hot potato in her mouth.

  ‘Wadi hurted me. He put baby, missus.’

  Had to spit that potato or swallow it. She swallowed and it burned all the way down. She rose, her chair legs squealing, as Elsie shrank back, back to the washstand.

  They were a different race, folk said, they had different attitudes. You can’t put a white head on a pair of black shoulders, folk said. And Gertrude knew it. She knew it. But it didn’t make the way they lived right, and that little girl wasn’t black anyway, and whether she was black or white, it didn’t give that jabbering bastard of a man the right to rape a twelve-year-old girl.

  She walked to the door to suck some night air down her burning throat. Had to say something. Had to find something to say.

  ‘Thank you for telling me.’ Too stilted, too cold. ‘You’re a good girl for telling me, darlin’.’

  ‘Lucy runned, missus. She say we not go to mission, missus. He get us from mission. We going our daddy. Wadi comed and getted me. He don’t like runnin’. He done . . .’

  She showed her leg, her broken leg, and Gertrude’s stomach, shaking since she’d left town, decided to reject that hot potato, and Sissy’s birthday cake too. She ran into the yard and vomited. She wasn’t the vomiting type, but she held on to her fence tonight and vomited her heart out.

  Washed her face, washed her hands at the tank, stood leaning there, staring through her fence at the dark hump of her walnut tree, her mind circling from Amber to Elsie, from Wadi to Archie, from India to Argentina.

  Didn’t hear those bare feet behind her, didn’t know Elsie was there until she felt her breath on her arm.

  ‘No use both of our meals getting cold, love. Go inside and eat.’

  ‘Them in oven, missus.’

  Gertrude lifted her eyes to the sky, pleading with them not to let her down. She was a healer, not a howler.

  That timid bird-like hand barely touching, that was what did it. Touch is what the human spirit craves and no one ever touched her. She wailed like a punished child, turned and grasped that girl to her, holding her hard against her and howling, for her, for Amber, for the doll she’d spent so much love in sewing, and for tiny Jenny too, who might have been better off placed in a children’s home, or raised down here, fed on goat’s milk, this little girl loving her. She’d made a mistake. She’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. She’d signed her name as witness to the birth of that little girl, registered as the child of Norman and Amber Morrison. She’d done the wrong thing by that poor dead woman and by her baby.

  ‘I goin’ tamorra, missus. You stop cryin’ now. Plenty room at mission, missus. Wadi won’ get me. I goin’ tamorra, missus, aw’right.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Gertrude said, kissing that worried face. ‘We’ve got room enough. Baby’s only a little feller.’

  ‘You stoppin’ cry now, missus.’

  ‘You say Mrs Foote and I’ll stop,’ she said, kissing her again.

  ‘Foot sound like walkin’ on it, missus.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And I’m tired of being walked all over. You call me anything you want to call me, darlin’.’

  ‘Mum sound good, missus.’

  ‘Mum sounds beautiful to me.’

  GROWING FAMILIES

  Jennifer was five months old the day Amber left her sitting in her highchair while she got the sheets on to boil. That was the day Cecelia discovered that if she placed her shiny new shoes against the seat of the chair and applied enough pressure, the chair tilted, and if she appli
ed a little more pressure . . .

  Amber heard the crash and, seconds later, the scream. She ran to the house where she found Cecelia looking down at the chair and the bellowing baby.

  ‘She fallded.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She fallded, I said!’

  The chair, chosen for Cecelia, was sturdy and stable. Amber had strapped Jennifer into it so she couldn’t fall. The straps released, she looked at a growing bump on the baby brow. She looked at her arms, her legs, while Jennifer screamed. Nothing appeared to be broken. Amber sat and put her to the breast, and in time Jennifer sucked.

  ‘I want some titty too,’ Sissy demanded, slapping her mother.

  ‘In bed,’ Amber said. ‘Now be good, or Mummy will sleep in Daddy’s bed.’

  Babies bounce. They bruise easily. She told Norman Jenny had rolled from the bed while she was changing her napkin. She repeated those words to Maisy. Gertrude didn’t see the bump. She was no longer welcome in her daughter’s house.

  Jenny was almost seven months old and still bald the day Elsie gave birth to a son with black hair two inches long. The new mother laughed at him and set Gertrude laughing. During the following months there was much laughter in those two cluttered rooms.

  No laughter in Norman’s house and no love. He slept alone while his wife slept in his daughter’s bed, the door closed against him. He was a man of forty years, a man with carnal desires he could not admit to, or not consciously. At night, his subconscious shocked him. He feared he was possessed by demons. Wicked, sinful dreams invaded his sleep, dreams of one of the Duffy girls. And he awakening in such a state of arousal he ran from the house to the chill of the backyard.

  His dreams began infiltrating his waking hours. He saw that Duffy girl walk by his house, pursued by three dogs, and Lord, God almighty, what was happening to him?

  ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’

  He found himself aroused by the sound of Amber’s bathwater running down the pipe and into the garden. He was aroused by the sight of her forearm reaching for a loaf of bread, by the breast she bared occasionally to the infant.

  ‘Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil.’

  He found himself walking the station platform by day, planning his night ahead, arguing his case mentally, rehearsing his arguments over and over until he was word perfect, but come nightfall he lacked the inner fortitude to put his case before his wife. He was afraid of her. Only in the dead of night did he dare to creep into Cecelia’s bedroom, to stand beside that bed breathing in the scent of his wife’s pale hair, gazing on an arm bared in sleep — and to fantasise the lifting up of her, the carrying of her to his own bed, the locking of his door, and the taking . . .

  Then the most incredible of all dreams awakened him one cold and frosty dawn. Half-asleep, he flew from his demon bed to walk the passage on chilled bare feet, to stand outside Cecelia’s bedroom door long enough for his feet to turn to ice, then to slowly, quietly, turn the knob and ease that door open. And his eyes could not believe what they saw. The sight of that flattened nipple as it popped from his daughter’s mouth shocked his heart from its natural rhythm. Like a trapped vulture, it lurched in his breast while his arousal grew to that of a crazed bull.

  Certain his heart was about to explode, as had his father’s, he lost all reason, and while Cecelia watched in milk-drooling, open-mouthed silence, he dragged Amber from the blankets, carried her out one door, in through another. And he turned the key.

  She fought him, but in silence. She slid from his bed, but he caught her gown and tumbled her to the floor rug where he finally subdued her.

  He was a shipwrecked, salt-caked sailor washed by a wave into safe harbour. His landing was rocky, but he clung there while the crashing waves rocked him. Not until the tide went out did he look down at where he’d landed. In the struggle, her gown, a low-necked cotton thing, had been ripped from neck to hem and her breasts, twin mounds of naked perfection, stared up at him.

  Norman’s lovemaking had ever been a thing of the dark, of the bed, silent, due to his mother’s presence in the house, and well blanketed. It was an animal need he was not proud of, which he had only requested on Saturday nights — pleaded for some Saturday nights, bribed for — but bribe or plea, he had always treated Amber with the greatest of respect, completing his task with alacrity, following it with a brief apology then turning his back.

  This morning, though relief had come fast, he did not apologise or withdraw. He was out of breath, on the floor, and a man of his size did not rise from the floor as gracefully as a dolphin from the ocean. And he was stark naked and uncertain of how he’d got that way. His heartbeat, however, had regulated, and now beat in his breast like a victory drum.

  ‘Let me up, you brutal swine,’ Amber hissed.

  ‘I am not done,’ he said, staring down at the peaked nipple so recently in that girl’s mouth. He felt moved to suck there, but resisted temptation, easing himself up so he might better view his naked woman. Supporting himself on one hand, he allowed his other to explore those twin breasts, to brush the nipples. Certainly he had fondled her breasts in the night, but to watch his hand’s exploration —

  ‘She’s having a seizure. Let me go to her.’

  She? He turned his head to the noise on the other side of the door, of which, to that moment, he had been unaware.

  ‘Let you go to her and have a repetition of your deviant behaviour, Mrs Morrison? I think not.’

  His fingers brushed an erect nipple and within her he stirred, but he quelled the urge and allowed his hand to play.

  ‘The girl will be sent to a boarding school.’ Kissed one breast, then the other. ‘Where her conduct will be curbed — and your own, my dear Mrs Morrison.’

  ‘I’ll take her and leave you.’

  She fought him, and he watched her fight, her breasts finding a life of their own, falling to the side, rising towards him, arousing him wildly. He moved within her as she strove to get a grip on his hair. He had little enough left, and what he had was shorn regularly. She attempted to remove his ear and may have succeeded. No matter. He had two. She raked his face with her nails, and he moved deeper, determined to reach the girl within, the laughing girl he had seen at church and loved.

  ‘Boarding school. I will see to it . . . today.’ Like the recitation of a joyous poem. ‘Your place is . . . beside me . . . my dear, my beautiful Amber . . . to love . . . to honour . . . to obey.’

  ‘I loathe the sight of you.’

  ‘Then I suggest . . . you close your eyes . . . my so precious . . . my very dear Mrs Morrison.’

  She cursed him, his mother, his family, but Norman was beyond hearing. The kicking, the screaming outside his locked door, slid far away. He took his time with her, took his fill of her, and when the last of his need drained from him, he rose like a dugong from the ocean floor and fell to his bed, sucking air.

  The key scratching in the lock opened his eyes. He turned to view her one final time but she’d clad herself in his morning gown.

  ‘You’re not sending her away, Norman. She’s all I’ve got.’

  You have me, he thought, but with little energy for other than thought, he did not reply.

  ‘I’ll send her to school here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down and speak to Miss Rose today.’

  She spoke to her. Cecelia spent one morning in the junior classroom. A senior girl walked her home at noon, with a note from the infants’ mistress suggesting Cecelia was not yet ready to take her place at school, that perhaps they should try her again after the Christmas holidays.

  The following week was difficult, but remarkable in many respects for Norman. Over that period of seven days, he made love to his wife on nine occasions, and on three of those occasions during daylight hours.

  Cecelia was rabid. Jennifer was miserable. The breast denied to one was denied to the other. Jennifer turned to her thumb for sucking comfort. Cecelia slapped and pinched, taking comfort where she co
uld.

  She hadn’t appreciated her morning at school. All she’d learnt there, and from the Macdonald girls, was that the headmaster had a strap and that naughty children who couldn’t behave themselves got whacked around their legs with that strap.

  She learned much more at home. She pushed Jenny off the verandah and Amber told Norman she’d fallen off. Cecelia tried something new. She whacked Jenny around the legs with the string shopping bag and kept on whacking until Amber took the string bag away and hung it high, then told Norman it must have been some sort of rash, that she must have had a reaction to something in the garden.

  ‘I can’t watch her every minute, Norman.’

  Cecelia raked Jenny’s cheek with her fingernails.

  ‘She scratched herself on the rose bush,’ Amber lied.

  Cecelia, now approaching her sixth birthday, though not overly burdened by intellect, was bright enough to realise she was a protected species and thus could upgrade her attacks with impunity — as long as Norman wasn’t around. Norman had keys. He could lock her out of his bedroom and lock her mother in, and on the one occasion when he’d caught Cecelia slapping Jenny, he’d locked her in her own room.

  The key to her door went missing on her birthday. She’d given herself a secret birthday present — tossed the key into the lavatory pan then belted Jenny across the face and dared her father to find that key. He had another one. It didn’t fit her door but he carried her kicking into the nursery and locked her in there. And when he let her out, he’d taken the key out of the lock and put it up high so she couldn’t get it.

  She had to watch out for him. She became expert on Norman’s comings and goings. She learned to tell the time, knew when the clock hands said twelve o’clock and it was lunchtime. She learned to smile at him, just like Amber smiled when visitors came, learned to play nicely with Jenny, drew pictures for her, built castles from wooden ABC blocks . . . until the clock’s hands said one o’clock and he walked out that side gate and back to his station. Then she could throw those blocks, jab Jenny in the leg with the point of the pencil and watch that baby mouth opening in shocked surprise, even before the scream came out.