Pearl in a Cage

by Joy Dettman

  He shook her shoulder. ‘Your meal is ready, Cecelia.’

  ‘You woke me up!’

  ‘You are in the wrong bed. Up, my dear.’

  ‘I hate you! Get away!’

  ‘One wet bed is more than sufficient.’

  ‘I’m sleeping in here, I said.’

  ‘You did, and very definitely.’

  He took her upper arm, then, dodging the worst of her blows, manually removed her and most of the blankets from the bed, deposited her in her own room, found the key to the nursery door, fought her away from the door, then locked it against her.

  She was weary, as was he. He stepped over her on his way to the front door, which he closed behind him. There was a bench seat down the eastern end of his verandah and a packet of cigarettes on the parlour windowsill. Two left in it. He slipped one out, got it into his mouth and, with practice, learned the best means of striking a match without setting fire to his sling. He sucked the first cigarette down to a butt, then lit the second from the first, hoping to borrow energy enough to continue the battle.

  She grabbed his leg as he stepped over her on his way back to the kitchen, almost overbalancing him, but he saved himself, freed his leg and continued.

  His stew was drying out, his potatoes required heating. He breathed deeply, left both pots on the hob, and prepared a second bucket of soapy water, added a dash of phenol, found the soggy cloth, plopped it into the bucket.

  ‘Shall we work together on this, Cecelia? My one good hand is at your disposal.’

  ‘You go to hell.’ Her mother’s words.

  Epic battles are recorded in history books. Men who achieve great feats are hailed worldwide as heroes. Norman was nobody’s hero, but he fought the epic battle of the wet bed and at ten forty-five that night he won. They washed the mattress protector together, they dried it, got clean sheets roughly spread; and at eleven ten, they sat down to a sloppy mush of potatoes— he’d added too much boiling water — and a very tasty stew. They ate bread later, neat enough slices. She held the loaf while he sawed.

  The following morning, she tied his shoelaces, or knotted them.

  ‘Train a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it,’ the Bible advised. The reverse also applied: ‘Raise a child in the manner of a wild animal and God help the trainer when the child grows large enough to bite.’ His sin, his most grievous sin. From her birth, he had taken the easy road with Cecelia. He could blame none other than himself now that the road had turned rocky.

  He was a man of books, accustomed to written instructions, but with no instruction booklet to guide him in the taming of his child, he turned to the past, to his own boyhood — not to his mother’s child-training methods, but to his months spent with his aunts Lizzie and Bertha and their many dogs. They’d owned five, all near human, and each one knowing its place in the pack hierarchy; puppies trained to know their place, good behaviour rewarded, poor behaviour receiving the aunts’ turned backs. During the weeks of Norman’s incapacitation, he applied his aunts’ rules of puppy-training to his daughter, and though she may never heel nor sit, beg or roll over on command, her snapping and howling decreased significantly. Her bed-wetting persisted, until he found the dusty commode in the washhouse, placed there when his mother had outgrown its narrow confines.

  Sissy’s rewards were great when for a week her sheets were dry, her chamber-pot emptied. His arm grown stronger, he pumped up his bicycle tyres and away they went, west, out to mushroom country where they collected a billy full, which they fried in butter and ate on toast. They rode east to where the city men were stringing their electricity wires so Woody Creek might shine more brightly at night. In May, they rode south out along Cemetery Road and spread their blanket on damp grass, picnicking on hot chocolate from a flask, on ham and cheese sandwiches.

  The frosts of winter, the wet or foggy days, interrupted Norman’s training. They couldn’t ride through a pea soup fog and she punished him for it. He purchased a dozen unbleached calico sheets. Urine and frost bleached them white before the daffodils started opening their trumpets to a weak sun.

  They found a field of daffodils out near the Three Pines siding, where together they explored the old mill workings. He attempted to make their Sunday rambles instructive. She was a child who required, demanded, instant gratification, but that day he discovered her interest.

  ‘Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’ Norman quoted as they surveyed the daffodils.

  ‘Miss Rose knows that one,’ Sissy offered.

  Encouraged, he recited more. ‘Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretch’d in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay . . .’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Given time, man can move mountains, or tunnel through them, or fly over them. Given time, a bad haircut grows out, bruises fade clean away and some memories fade with them, or go deep underground. Given time, those city workmen erected enough poles, strung enough wires, and electricity came to Woody Creek.

  There was a celebration at the town hall for the turning on of the lights and Vern Hooper was ready for it. He was the first in town to buy an electric refrigerator, though not the first to buy a wireless.

  ‘So, what do you say, Trude?’

  He had a fine house and he wanted someone to share it. She chose to misunderstand his proposal.

  ‘It’s all very fine. If our folk could see all this, they wouldn’t believe it.’

  Jenny couldn’t believe it. She was attempting to see inside that wireless. There was a man inside it singing.

  ‘How did . . . how did he get inside?’ she asked.

  ‘Electricity,’ Vern said.

  ‘Where did it get from?’

  ‘It comes in those wires, girlie. Comes all the way from the city.’

  ‘Can I see it come?’

  ‘No one can. It’s just there. All around us, they say.’

  ‘Like fairies?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Some sort of magic.’

  ‘Is that man inside that thing like . . . like a fairy man?’

  ‘From what I can tell, it’s a box full of valves, girlie.’

  Jenny knew about gnomes and dwarves and elves. Now she knew valves, which were wireless men that sang, who she couldn’t see because they were magic. Lots of things were magic. Granny was. She could make things on her sewing machine and make jumpers with wool.

  Vern’s Margaret was making a jumper for her brother. She’d said so when Granny asked. She talked funny because she went to school on the train, not to Sissy’s school. Jenny liked listening to Margaret talk. She liked Vern’s house too. It was a magic house with thousands of flowers and short grass she could play on, and pictures of lots and lots of people hanging on his walls. She liked photographs of people.

  ‘Why did you have just one, Granny?’

  ‘One what, darlin’?’

  ‘Picture.’

  ‘Have I got one?’

  ‘Your big boy and girl — with the fly-hitter thing.’

  ‘Where have I got it, my darlin’ girl?’

  ‘You know. Wiff your thing for hitting flies.’

  Gertrude’s wedding photograph hung on a hook near her bedroom doorway, in the place it had been so proudly hung by her parents thirty-odd years ago. It shared its bent nail with her fly swatter.

  ‘That’s Archie Foote. That’s your grandpa,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Why is Itchy-foot my grandpa and not Vern?’

  ‘Damn good question, girlie,’ Vern said. ‘I’m thinking to fix that, though.’

  ‘Itchy-foot was your mummy’s daddy, like I’m your mummy’s mummy.’

  ‘And Margaret’s daddy too?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past the weasel-faced cur —’

  ‘Shush with that in front of her, Vern,’ Gertrude warned.

  They left soon after. Vern’s daughters were on the verandah, dressed in thei
r Sunday best even though it wasn’t Sunday. Jenny waved to them. Gertrude gave Margaret a second glance, then a third, as she walked by.

  Lorna, Vern’s firstborn, had inherited the Hooper height and more of it than Gertrude, which, when combined with her mother’s looks, was not good. Margaret was a plump and fluffy girl who might have stretched to five foot three. There was no saying who had fathered her — other than it hadn’t been Vern. She had her mother’s platinum blonde hair, but with more curl. There was a lot of her mother in her, and more so since she’d grown into her woman’s shape, but there’d always been someone else lurking behind Margaret’s face. Out of the mouths of babes, Gertrude thought. Strange how even a child’s eye sought out similarities, made its own comparisons — a leftover perhaps from when we swung in the trees, when the ancestors needed to judge fast who was family and who was foe.

  ‘Will Mummy’s daddy come home sometime, Granny?’

  ‘No, darlin’.’

  ‘Will Mummy come home when I come home?’

  ‘I don’t know, darlin’.’

  Would she turn up at that station one day? Would Norman take her back if she came home?

  ‘Do I have to live in . . . in her house . . . when she comes, Granny?’

  What did babies know? How much did they remember? Gertrude didn’t want to send her home, but Norman wanted her home and he was her father — for all intents and purposes.

  ‘You’ve got a good daddy and a big sister in there, and you’ve got me down here. And you remember, darlin’, that no matter what else changes in your little life, I’m going to be right here for you.’

  ‘Even when I’m very, very big?’

  ‘My word I will. Even when you’re as big as me.’

  ‘Even when I’m big as Vern’s Lorna.’

  ‘Don’t go wishing that on yourself, me darlin’.’

  Poor Lorna, she had the dimensions of a totem pole.

  LOST AND FOUND

  Jenny returned home in the spring of 1927 and Elsie missed her. Two small children played more contentedly than one. Joey was three years old, his birth registered in some city office. Gertrude said Elsie’s birth may have been recorded at the mission, but Elsie didn’t want to go there to find it. She had a sister, Lucy, who was older, who may have known her birthday but like their daddy, she’d gone.

  Elsie now shared Joey’s birthday, on 17 July. She may have been sixteen. She was no more. A pretty, dark-eyed girl with a mop of tight black ringlets hugging her head like an astrakhan cap, her hands fine and birdlike, but unafraid of work.

  She’d taken Joey with her to the shed while she got the copper burning.

  He missed his playmate and wanted Elsie to play. He liked hiding underneath the big old wooden wash trough. She called into many odd places before pouncing on him. He came out laughing, something grasped in his hand.

  ‘What you got there, Joey?’

  His hand hidden behind his back, he wanted to continue the game. She tickled him until he gave up his find. Then no more laughter.

  ‘Where’d you find that?’ She could see gold through the crust of red dirt. She cleared a little soil from it between her hands. ‘Where’d that come from, Joey boy?’

  ‘Dat mine,’ he said.

  ‘That’s Mum’s, more like it.’

  Gertrude was down at her boundary with wire and pliers, attempting to encourage another year or two from her gate. She stopped twisting wire, dropped her pliers.

  ‘It’s that brooch!’ she said, taking it, rubbing it with her thumb. ‘It’s that woman’s brooch. Where did you find it?’

  Joey had pointed in under the wash trough when Elsie had asked the same question. She knew little of what had gone on the night of Jenny’s birth. She remembered waking to Gertrude’s house filled with strangers and movement and light when there should have been no light. Remembered the baby crying. If she’d heard talk of the brooch, she’d forgotten. She stood close, watched Gertrude tap and blow soil from it, rub it against the leg of her trousers.

  ‘It must have been on that coat. It must have fallen down behind the trough when I tossed everything in to soak that night. Or it’s been on the floor and I’ve kicked it under the trough.’

  Gertrude couldn’t believe it was found, couldn’t believe what she held in her hand either. Those diamonds looked real and some of them were big. And the ruby set dead centre was as big as a hen’s eye. It was a beautiful thing. She considered riding into the town with it there and then, but her boundary gate was falling apart, so Elsie took the brooch back to the house and placed it in a bowl on the mantelpiece where it remained until Friday.

  Ogden and his wife had never seen anything like it. The brooch was a good inch and a half in length, an elongated oval with fancy goldwork around the edges and rows of red and white stones circling out from a central ruby. No wonder at all that it had caught the eye of Norman’s relative.

  ‘She was on that train all right,’ Ogden said. ‘She was coming up here for some reason, though why she’d walked four miles from town, I don’t know.’

  ‘Folk fall from trains. I read of a case a while back where someone opened a train door thinking they were coming into a station. It’s easy enough to lose your balance when you’re carrying.’

  ‘No unclaimed luggage was ever turned in.’

  ‘If this had been found when we found her, someone would have recognised it,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘I’ve got the name — somewhere — of the chap who reckoned she could have been his absconding wife, back when that newspaper story came out.’

  Mary returned to her kitchen and Ogden and Gertrude walked down the verandah to his office. A half-grown boy was in there reading. Ogden evicted him, closed the door behind him.

  ‘A man doesn’t put a lot of thought into how he’s going to house and feed his kids when he has seven,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t consider the boots they’ll wear out, the space they’ll take up.’

  ‘They come in small packages, Ernie.’

  He opened drawers, rifled through them and slammed them shut. What he sought was somewhere, but near four years had passed since that night and a lot of junk could pile up in four years. Things changed. His oldest boy, fifteen then, was now going on nineteen and working in Melbourne. His youngest, three at the time and taking up little space, was seven and making his presence felt.

  He tried his desk drawers. ‘Hallelujah,’ he said, withdrawing a large manila envelope which he upended onto his counter. The embroidered purse was in there and six or eight sheets of paper. Gertrude reached for the purse to look again at the few items found on the woman, while Ogden scanned the papers until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘That’s him. Albert Forester. No fixed address. Enquired after identifying jewellery.’

  He offered the paper and she glanced at it, expecting more but only finding those few words.

  ‘He didn’t describe the brooch?’

  Ogden scratched at his neck. ‘From what I recall, he didn’t specify what jewellery. The chap who spoke to him reckoned he was out for what he could get. They tried to get an address out of him, some place where he might be contacted, but he told them he’d been travelling, attempting to find his wife, that he’d contact them again when he found accommodation.’

  ‘He knew there was a baby?’

  ‘It was in the newspaper at the time. That’s what convinced the chaps who spoke to him that he was a fraud. The fellow I spoke to said that Mr Albert Forester showed as much interest in the infant as a louse might show in vinegar. He was after jewellery. A man with a missing wife doesn’t ask about her jewellery first and the offspring later.’

  ‘Would it be worth getting John McPherson to photograph the brooch and get it in the papers?’

  Ernie was pinning the brooch to the stranger’s handkerchief. ‘Start advertising this,’ he said, ‘and you’ll have Albert Forester and every other louse in Melbourne up here claiming it — and claiming that little girl too.’

&
nbsp; Gertrude didn’t want anyone claiming that little girl. It had been hard enough losing her back to Norman. She watched brooch and handkerchief placed into the purse, watched Ogden fold the sheet of writing paper, fold it small enough and slide it in beside the handkerchief, place the purse into the manila envelope and the envelope into the drawer.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, Trude, the purse, and what it contains, belongs to that little girl and to no one else. Case closed,’ he said and he closed the drawer.

  A week after the brooch was found, Squizzy Taylor, a notorious Melbourne gangster, was gunned down in a Carlton house and Mrs Ogden’s firstborn son lodging in the same street — and the woman he lodged with knew the woman who had been caught up in the gangsters’ vendetta.

  ‘What if he’d been walking by when it happened, Ernie? What if he was dying in hospital and we couldn’t even get a train down to him until tomorrow? I tell you, I can’t stand having him all the way down there, never knowing where he is or what he’s doing.’

  In November they found out what he was doing. He was gambling. He won ten quid on Trivalve in the Melbourne Cup, and while his mother bewailed his gambling ways, he sent a telegram to his seventeen-year-old brother to be on Saturday’s train. He’d got him a job. And then there were five, and Ogden’s fifteen year old itching to go with his brothers.

  Vern’s offspring were at school and university in Melbourne. He saw them two or three times a year. In December of 1927, he travelled down by train and brought them home in his new car, his daughters in the rear seat, his son at his side. His daughters were not willing passengers. They preferred Melbourne. His son was carsick.