by Joy Dettman
‘The woman next door has gone mad,’ he said.
‘Oh my God,’ Jean moaned and ran into the store with the baby. ‘Charlie! Charlie. For God’s sake, get Norman.’ She laid Jenny on the counter where she looked at the mutilated hair, the bleeding mouth, the nose pouring blood. ‘Get Norman. Get the constable, Charlie. I think she’s killed her.’
She hadn’t killed her. Jenny stirred when Norman came to gather her into his arms, to weep on her; then Jenny cried because he was crying. Jean White was wiping her own tears when Ernie Ogden and his wife came at a run. Jenny clung to Norman, hiding her face against his shirt, wiping blood to his shirt. Wouldn’t let them look at her face until Charlie tried bribery. He offered two fat humbugs from the large jar on his counter, and when she wouldn’t take them, he opened her hand and placed the humbugs into it.
Three is the age when the fog of infancy begins to lift, when the world starts filtering through, when images imprint the blank pages of the mind so vividly they remain forever. Amber’s attack may be overprinted in the coming years, but Jenny would never forget her first haircut. Eighty years from that day, seated in a Melbourne salon, her hair attacked by a megalomaniac wielding scissors, Jenny would lift her left palm to her nose, certain a trace of aniseed remained. Forever more she’d associate those black and white striped sweets with a bad haircut.
AMBER’S ESCAPE
They hid Jenny and her injuries at Gertrude’s house, two miles from town, surrounded by forest. Few visitors ventured down there and most who did only came to buy her produce. Maisy took Cecelia.
A decision had to be made on what to do about Amber. Mr Foster had diagnosed madness; Jean White agreed with him.
For some time, Norman had known his wife was not herself, but surely she should be given time — time for the infant to be born. Once it was in her arms, she would miraculously revert to the pretty, happy girl he had wed.
‘She must be very close to term,’ Gertrude said. She didn’t want her daughter committed and that’s what Ernie Ogden was suggesting. ‘If Norman is agreeable, as long as we keep the children out of the house . . .’
No one was sure when that babe might come. Amber had been in the city through May, June, July and most of August.
Ogden tried to speak to her. She locked herself in her room. His wife had more luck. Amber showed her a fine tea set, showed her a vase, reputedly a gift from Queen Victoria. Mary Ogden asked when the baby was due. Amber told her she had a growth in the womb.
There are varying degrees of madness, which make its diagnosis difficult for layman and expert alike. How do you draw the line between common run-of-the-mill child abuse and a murderous mania? How can you state for a fact that what looks like paranoia isn’t green-eyed jealousy? How can you pick a blatant bare-faced liar from some poor demented soul who has lost her grasp on reality? You can’t.
‘She’s as mad as a rabbit,’ Mary said. ‘And whether she is or not, any woman who’d do what she did to that little girl deserves putting away, Ernie.’
‘Yeah, but try putting yourself in her shoes for a tick, love,’ Ogden said. ‘She’s lost three and she’s having another one that’s not her husband’s. She’s got nowhere to go. She’s got to stay in that house and face him every day knowing that he knows. Do you reckon you’d be feeling as sane as you ought to be?’
‘I wouldn’t have got myself into her state in the first place, and I wouldn’t go taking it out on a three-year-old baby if I had.’
‘I’m not justifying what she did to that little girl. All I’m saying is that any woman, given her situation, can’t be blamed for going a bit funny.’
Madness wasn’t a bit funny, nor were some of the places they put those diagnosed as mad. He’d sent two Woody Creek residents to asylums in the fifteen years he’d been in town. He’d put one of the Duffy boys away after he’d tried every other means of stopping him from climbing over the back fence of the convent and exposing himself to the holy sisters. He’d put George Macdonald’s retarded mother away after the third time she’d lit a fire on her bedroom floor — to keep the wild animals out of her room. The curtain had caught on fire on the last occasion; she might have burnt the family in their beds if her grandsons — maybe the animals she’d sought to keep out — hadn’t smelt smoke.
‘She seems calm enough now, Norm,’ he said. ‘That doctor chap said he’d get up here to take a look at her as soon as the garage gets his car back on the road.’
The doctor didn’t come for a week, and on Thursday night, or the early hours of Friday morning, Norman heard Amber walk through the house and out the back door. He waited for her to return, and when she didn’t, he went looking for her.
The moon was full and, with not a cloud in the sky, he saw her clearly. She was down near the oleander tree. He approached on slippered feet, saw she was using a shovel and appeared to be digging a hole. He believed she was sleepwalking, acting out a nightmare. He spoke her name gently as he reached to take the shovel.
And she turned it on him.
The blade was not dull. Had he not ducked, raised his shoulder at the last moment, he may have lost his head. The blow disabled his arm; he heard the grinding of bone as he fought her for the shovel, saw the blood painting his nightshirt black. Only when he gained the shovel did he feel the pain of his injury, only then did his good hand rise to explore. The blade had cut deep. He backed away — and felt something soft, something giving, beneath the sole of his slipper.
Then he heard the grunt. The weak protest of life.
‘What have you done?’ he howled, falling to his knees in the dirt, finding the warmth of flesh there. ‘Woman, what have you done?’
One arm useless, he slid his right hand beneath the curve of a tiny spine, the round fruit of its head, lifted it awkwardly to his lap, its birth membrane trailing in the dirt. ‘We will raise it. We will raise it.’
She was gone. The back door slammed. He tried to rise, but required a hand to push himself up from his knees. No hand to push with; one arm hung useless in the dirt, the other held the newborn. Unable to rise, he lifted his face to the moon and howled like an injured beast.
The town awoke to a different morning; to Vern Hooper’s car parked in front of Norman’s house, to Vern and the constable standing out there with him. Vern’s car lights were unreliable, they were waiting for daylight before they hit the road.
The birds knew better than to warble their song that morning. They sat silently in the trees, peering down at the scene as Mr Foster peered silently through his bedroom window. Three men blowing smoke at the dark eastern sky, willing it to begin its change, while the grass growing alongside Norman’s front fence lapped faster of the evening’s little dew. The sun was coming to steal it away.
First that glint of gold over the trees. Then that flush of palest pink.
‘Righto,’ Vern said. ‘Hop in the front, Norm. You’ll get an easier ride.’
Norman’s shoulder had been beyond Gertrude. They’d roused her from her bed; she’d padded and bound it tightly, had told them it needed more stitching than she could do, told them his collarbone seemed to be broken.
More was broken than his collarbone. Norman was broken.
The baby was dead, its nose, its mouth, full of dirt. Whether it had choked on dirt or was born dead, Gertrude couldn’t — or wouldn’t — say. In her heart she knew it had fought for life. Norman knew he had heard that life.
Nothing to be done now. They’d given it into Moe Kelly’s hands.
‘No good for you or your wife will be achieved by opening up that can of worms, Mr Morrison,’ Ogden said. ‘No one can say for certain what happened out there.’
Amber was ready to go. She wanted to go. She’d packed her case, bathed and clothed herself in her city suit, found her city hat, set it on wet hair. She put on her jacket, its pocket heavy with coins and she held that pocket so the coins would make no noise when she walked out to the car.
Ernie carried her case. He sat her in
the rear seat and sat beside her. Norman and Vern sat up front. And so they drove off into the sunrise, Willama thirty-nine long and silent miles away.
The grave diggers opened up the grave of the babe’s siblings, and at sun-up on the following day, another tiny coffin was added to the hole. Moe Kelly and the grave diggers covered up Amber’s adultery.
Earth once disturbed can’t be disguised; and how do you explain a missing stationmaster?
‘They say he’s at the hospital. I know his oldest girl is staying with Maisy.’
‘As if she hasn’t got enough of her own.’
‘That’s what I said to her.’
‘Someone told me a while back that his wife had a growth in the womb.’
‘That was Vern Hooper’s wife, but it wasn’t in her womb. She didn’t have one. They say her innards were riddled with it.’
Norman came home and it was learnt that he’d broken his collarbone, that he had fourteen stitches in his left shoulder.
Then young Patty Kelly, Moe’s daughter, let it slip that her father had buried another Morrison baby. Rumour-mongers don’t need to be good at arithmetic. They have eight fingers and only require one thumb when counting nine months in reverse.
‘Late May or June. She was in Melbourne most of May and all of June.’
‘How can you remember that?’
‘She had that last baby, the girl that died, in the April, had a breakdown and they took her down to some city doctor in early May. I remember clearly. It was the week of Barbara’s wedding.’
‘I heard she went mad and hit him with the wood axe.’
‘Some men deserve operating on with a wood axe. That’s the third one she’s lost.’
‘The fourth one.’
‘Third or fourth, he must be some sort of animal in the bedroom.’
‘You’d never think so to look at him, would you?’
The young Willama doctor was having similar thoughts. He’d had several dealings with Norman Morrison and he did not appear to be an unsympathetic man.
‘Your oldest girl is not yet eight, you have a three year old, Mrs Morrison, and you’ve lost four infants?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you carry them full term?’
‘Yes.’
She felt cleansed by the antiseptic smell of the hospital. She could breathe deeply of air filled with new possibilities. She made no complaints, made no demands, said not a bad word against her husband, who had said more than a few about her, as had the constable who’d brought her in.
She had little to say, perhaps too little. She ate little, but was she deranged? Not in the young doctor’s opinion. He was impressed by her loyalty to a husband who had seemingly kept her pregnant since her wedding night. He didn’t know of the three year old with two black eyes, a mouth split by baby teeth and wallboards, a face, an arm, a tiny body black and blue. He didn’t know the dead infant was not her husband’s, or that she’d attempted to bury it alive beneath the oleander tree, or that she’d chosen that site in advance. The earth was always damp beneath the oleander tree, kept that way by the run-off from the washhouse troughs.
The young doctor didn’t know much.
One of the women sharing Amber’s eight-bed ward knew a little more. She didn’t sleep well and, aware her ward mate crept around in the night, she placed her new red purse under her pillow.
On the sixth morning of Amber’s stay in hospital, a nursing sister noted that Amber was not in her bed at six. At eight thirty, another checked the women’s bathrooms. At nine forty-five, the young doctor was searching the verandahs and grounds for his patient.
That’s when the owner of the red purse noticed it wasn’t where she’d left it.
‘She’s pinched it,’ she wailed. ‘I knew I couldn’t trust her as far as I could kick her.’
Then an elderly woman limped down to ask one of the nurses if she’d removed a tobacco tin from the pocket of her dressing gown. There was no tobacco in it. Her husband had given it to her with five shillings in it, just in case she needed to buy something.
A girl down the bottom end of the eight-bed ward started searching for the gold crucifix she’d hung over her bed. A woman in a two-bed ward across the passage was missing a ten-shilling note and her wedding ring the sisters had told her to remove in case her fingers swelled up. Someone had lost money from the pocket of her jacket.
The sisters were buried beneath an avalanche of losses — a lot of it was snow but there was solid rock in there too.
And no sign of Amber Morrison.
A train passed through Willama between seven thirty and eight o’clock each weekday morning. By the time the search for her had begun, Amber was well on her way to freedom.
SIMILARITIES
Sissy knew her mother had gone mad and gone missing. The Macdonald kids told her so. They were supposed to be kind to her. That’s what Maisy said, but Macdonald kids didn’t play fair. Sissy gave Jessie one little slap and the rest of them ganged up on her, the big ones holding her down while Jessie paid her back ten times over. They cut her fingernails back to nothing just because she’d accidentally scratched Dawn. They locked her in a spider-infested shed. Eight against one wasn’t fair. And if the twins tried to help her, the girls locked them in separate rooms until the two boys almost went mad.
‘I want to go home,’ she told Maisy.
‘Your father is sick,’ Maisy said.
Everyone was sick, her mother, her father and Jenny. Sissy was sick too, sick of Maisy’s house and Maisy’s kids and Maisy’s kids’ father. She escaped one night while they were eating dinner. She said she was going to the lav and instead went home.
Norman was more lost than sick. He was a constant itch, an ache, a throbbing anguish. He was trussed up like a turkey for roasting, the strapping around chest and shoulders creating the itch, aggravating the ache. With only one hand with which to grip, he couldn’t get a grip on himself. He couldn’t tie his shoelaces. Clothing himself was a struggle, bathing an impossibility. He was a mountain climber attempting to find a handhold on a glass mountain. By day, he gained an inch or two. At nightfall, he slid back down. Bed was an agony. He woke weary to begin again, to light the stove, feed it with oversized lumps of wood he couldn’t cut. Feeding himself was too much effort. He walked to the station unfed, his shoelaces dragging through the dust.
Didn’t want to deal with his wailing daughter. Couldn’t deal with her. Told her to go back to Maisy, then cringed from her when she ran bellowing into her bedroom.
One of the church ladies had brought him a bowl of soup and a slice of cake. He’d been fighting one-handed to heat the soup when Cecelia arrived. He spilled it into two bowls, halved the cake, called her to the kitchen.
She emptied her bowl, ate her cake and his, drank the little milk remaining in his jug. Now he had no milk for his tea. And he wanted a cup of tea. Wanted to place his head on the table and howl.
‘You must return to your Aunty Maisy. As you see, I cannot care for myself, Cecelia.’
‘I’m not going back there, I said.’
No energy to fight her. He went to bed without his cup of tea. She went to her own.
He had managed alone before — when he’d had two hands. He had spent three months in this house with Jennifer. A different time. A different child. He had been a younger man. His shoulder hadn’t throbbed, itched, ached, screamed when he rolled onto it in the night. The wound wasn’t healing. Vern was driving him to Willama in the morning, leaving early.
He smelled urine when he rose at seven. He couldn’t handle a wet bed this morning. He left her sleeping in urine, closed her door, fought with his clothing for half an hour then scuffed across to the station, tripping over his shoelaces. His station lad tied them, then made him a cup of tea. At nine, Norman left him in charge and drove off to Willama with Vern.
A long and painful day, and Cecelia waiting for him, surly because he’d gone missing for most of the day. He’d bought sliced ham in Willama and a loaf
of bread, a tin of powdered milk. He mixed a little and placed the rest up high. They ate the ham with chunks of fresh bread. Difficult to cut a fine slice with one hand. She demanded more ham. He had no more. He mixed more milk. She drank it.
‘I am going to my bed, Cecelia. Go back to your Aunt Maisy.’
He walked to his room. She followed him.
‘I’m not going there, I said.’
He propped against his bed, looked at his shoes, aware he must untie the laces but lacking the desire to begin. ‘Then go to your own bed.’
‘I’m not sleeping there either. It’s wet.’
‘Then you may sleep on the floor,’ he said, forcing one shoe off by applying pressure to the heel with his other.
She stood watching him struggle, then went to her bed. One side was almost dry, though not by morning. A whiff of ammonia can raise the senseless from a faint. The pervasive stink of stale urine roused Norman from his cave of itching, aching self-pity.
He found clean sheets, filled a bucket with warm soapy water, then offered Sissy instruction on how she might remove the saturated sheets, wash down the mattress protector, dry it thoroughly with an old towel, then remake her bed. She looked at him as if he were mad.
He went to work. She went to school, uncombed, unclean.
The church ladies delivered a pot of stew that afternoon. He poured it into a pot and placed it on the stove. He’d renewed his supply of fresh milk, and that night he fought her for it, one-handed, then stood guard in front of his ice chest while she stamped her feet and screamed.
‘I will pour you a glass of milk when your bed has been stripped and your mattress protector washed, Cecelia. As you can see, I have but one good arm.’
She went to her room, kicked the bucket of water, spilled it on her floor, went for a slide on slippery linoleum, landed hard and remained on her back to howl. He didn’t attempt to lift her. He closed the door on her noise and returned to the kitchen, closed that door also, then stood staring a large potato in the eye. It took some considerable time to peel it one-handed, but by nine his potato, well boiled, was mashed and keeping hot on the hob, the donated stew shrinking as it simmered. Cecelia was silent. He crept to her room and found it empty. She was in the nursery, in the narrow bed, fast asleep. It had no rubberised protector. He could not leave her there.
