Pearl in a Cage

by Joy Dettman

  There was little entertainment in Woody Creek. He took his family to the school concert where his daughters sat in silence through two hours of boredom while Noah built his ark and filled it. Ogden’s nine year old played Noah, in a long black coat and cottonwool beard. Cecelia was one of the giraffes, and tall enough. The highlight of the night was the Macdonald twins who played front and backside of a donkey.

  Norman was there with Jennifer. Life had been easier before he’d brought her home. Cecelia resented competing for his time. His arm still ached if he lay on it, but it was strong again. He no longer expected Amber to step down from each Melbourne train, though the sight of a slim pale stranger alighting could still set his heart lurching like a frog in a pool of sludge.

  Each Friday, Gertrude delivered her jams and eggs, her fruit and vegetables to Norman’s kitchen and stayed on to iron a few things, cook a meal and bake a batch of oatmeal biscuits. From time to time, the church ladies brought around some offerings; occasionally Maisy delivered a cake. They managed. They ate a lot of sausages and potatoes. The house grew in untidiness — the kitchen floor was more often than not sticky with spills, book covers and newspapers frequently stuck to the kitchen table, pencils were occasionally washed up with the knives and forks, but they managed.

  Sissy made slow progress with her reading, her mind at times a locked door to Norman, her uncomprehending stare defeating. He blamed himself, blamed his lack of early involvement with that daughter.

  There had been no such lack of involvement with Jenny. At times he feared he may be straining her young mind, but she enquired so he replied.

  During the evening meal, and in the hour following it, his kitchen became a schoolroom. This had been his habit prior to Jenny’s return home and Norman was a creature of habit. As the months passed, he’d become aware that his instruction, prepared for his nine year old, was being more readily absorbed by his four year old, who could, in the blink of an eye, reduce his convoluted information down to the central core and occasionally slip it in some back door to her sister’s mind.

  To those who have no use for it, learning to read is a trial. To the seekers of answers, reading is only a code waiting to be broken and the keys to that code all around.

  Jenny was such a seeker.

  Maisy was a mother to Norman’s girls. She had ten of her own and barely noticed the two extras. They played in the park beside her house, in her backyard. She fed them if they were there at mealtimes, kept her eye on them when they ran back across the road to the station, or told her older girls to keep an eye on them.

  Jessie, her youngest daughter, was Sissy’s age and an average scholar. Her twin sons were fourteen months Jessie’s junior. There was little more than a year between any two of Maisy’s brood.

  They were playing school in the backyard on a hot January morning midway through the long school holidays, when each child, admit it or not, was beginning to look forward to the daily routine of school.

  The twins were eager to return to the battleground of the schoolyard; they had no use for books — they couldn’t read — which didn’t mean that their sisters could make fools of them by getting a four year old to read their Christmas book.

  ‘Show-off,’ they chanted. ‘Show-off.’

  ‘If you won’t play properly, then you can’t play,’ Maureen, the senior Macdonald daughter said.

  Sissy didn’t like playing school, or Jenny. She added her voice to the chant. ‘Evil show-off. Evil show-off.’

  The Macdonald girls walked away when the twins started picking plums and throwing them. Sissy, once the girls were out of sight, picked up fallen lemons and threw them. Lemons hurt when they connected. Jenny would have run to Norman if the twins had let her out the gate. They held it shut. She knew another way, between two broken fence palings. She scuttled through, but they saw her in the park and chased her with sticks, so she went the other way, ran all the way up the road and down the lane behind the police station, then down the road towards Charlie’s railway crossing. From there she could run down the railway lines to Norman. Except they were waiting at Charlie’s crossing and they had more lemons.

  She ran out towards the slaughteryards, then across someone’s paddock to the railway lines, aware that she wasn’t allowed to be down here by herself, but Sissy and the twins weren’t allowed to be chasing her and throwing things at her either.

  ‘I’m telling Daddy on you,’ Sissy yelled.

  Jenny pretended she couldn’t hear her, as Norman had advised; she continued walking down the centre of the lines.

  ‘I’m telling Daddy you went over Charlie’s road. I’m going back to tell him right now, you evil show-off.’

  Jenny walked until Sissy stopped yelling, and when she turned around to see if she was coming, she couldn’t see her, but she saw something else, something she’d never seen before. Those train lines looked exactly like a giant had ruled them on the ground with his grey lead pencil, like he’d marked Woody Creek exactly in half!

  They’d been placed down when the town was little more than hotel and general store. Desperate to get from A to B, railway surveyors gave no thought to the settlement’s possible expansion, but laid the lines parallel to the only street, then, for convenience, placed the station a stone’s throw from the hotel. No one had expected the town to grow as it had. This was farming country, wheat and wool country. But the railways had offered ready transport to the city and there was a forest surrounding the settlement, a forest begging to be harvested.

  Old man Monk had owned a hundred acres of forest. He’d set up the first pit mill. Others had followed. Timber-getting required many labourers, labourers required wives, wives had kids, required or not, and kids required education.

  The town fathers ran out of space in the main street, north of the line, and when the more substantial structures came, they set them south of the line. The two banks were in South Street, the town hall, post office, police station, Norman’s house, George Macdonald’s house. The hotel, café, butcher, newsagent, boot shop and bakery were in North Street, Blunt’s drapery on the eastern corner of North Street, Fulton’s feed and grain store on the corner of South Street, Blunt’s crossing between them. Charlie and Jean White’s grocery store sat on the western corner of South Street, and on the other side of his crossing the Methodist church claimed the North Street corner.

  And Jenny could see the lot. She could see the hotel roof, the station roof, the tall bank’s roof, Blunt’s red roof, and those lines running straight down between them.

  If she looked the other way, she could see five dusty sheep and two cows staring at her from behind the slaughteryard fence. Knew why they were waiting there too, and it made her feel very sad for them, so she looked north towards the creek and the trees because Granny lived down in those trees. That made her sad too, because living at Granny’s house was good. No one threw lemons there.

  You had to think of something happy if you felt sad, Elsie said, so she thought of Vern’s valve fairies and, like magic, she saw a stone, which was very interesting indeed because it was brown with black stripes.

  Something blue twinkled at her eye and it was just a little way ahead. She looked behind at the roofs then ran to find the blue. It was only broken glass. From a distance though, it had looked like magic.

  She didn’t mean to walk further, except there were flowers growing down beside the lines, like purple paper flowers. She picked a stem, but there were more of them, just a little way ahead.

  Saw a blue-tongue lizard sunning himself, too sleepy to move until she tickled him with a flower. Then he moved and, chuckling, she followed. Followed butterflies that danced in the sky like fairies. Saw an eagle, way up high, gliding like an aeroplane. She ran a while with him, her arms outstretched, ‘Vroom. Vroom. Vroom.’

  Chased a grasshopper, tracked a family of ants that must have lived underneath the lines. Squatted for a long time waiting, watching two ants carrying a caterpillar home for their dinner.

 
; It might have been her dinnertime. She stood and looked back to see the roofs. And they were gone. They weren’t the other way either, and she could see where the train lines stopped, or disappeared through a ripply wet window. Whichever way she looked they’d disappeared. Then across a paddock she saw something that was truly magical. The trees were flying in the sky, and there was water, lots and lots of water, which must have been magic water because even the creek didn’t have much water in it. She ran towards that ripply window, determined to find out where those train lines had gone to.

  Jenny’s story may have ended on that Saturday in January of 1928, and ended barely a mile from where it had begun, if Vern Hooper hadn’t decided to take his boy out to the farm that day. If he hadn’t given up attempting to interest him in the land, he might have stayed out there until sundown. Instead, they’d eaten a bite of lunch with the manager and his wife then left for home.

  Jimmy was staring out the car window at dry farmland when he saw her. He pointed a finger.

  ‘More emus?’ Vern asked. Jimmy liked emus.

  ‘A little girl, sir.’

  ‘I’m not one of your flaming schoolmasters. Call me Dad or Pop.’

  Jimmy didn’t know his father well enough to be on such familiar terms. He’d been sent away to school because his mother was sick. She’d died, and his sisters said he was sickly, which meant he was going to die soon, which meant he had to spend school holidays at a guesthouse near the ocean. His sisters liked that guesthouse. He didn’t care where he was as long as it wasn’t at school.

  Vern stopped the car and looked to where his boy pointed. There was no mistaking who it was. That hair stood out like gold in sun-dried clay.

  ‘Run over to the fence and ask where she thinks she’s going.’

  Jimmy, a shy, gangling, lop-eared boy, was obedient. ‘Dad says, where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Magic land,’ she said.

  She didn’t know Jimmy but she knew Vern. She let him lift her over the fence.

  ‘You’re as red as a beetroot,’ he said. ‘Were you looking for your granny’s house?’

  ‘I can’t live there any more,’ she said.

  He removed his hessian waterbag from a bull-wire hook fixed to his car’s grille and let her drink her fill, then trickled a good dose over her curls, over her sunburned shoulders.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Sissy said.’ She wiped trickling water with her forearm. ‘About the prince’s pills, Sissy said.’

  ‘What prince’s pills?’ Vern had no qualms when it came to digging information out of kids.

  ‘Granny got the prince’s pills off the trollops,’ she said with a shrug. ‘So I can’t live there now.’

  It took a second or two to decipher her words, then Vern laughed, he roared, wiped tears from his eyes, held his stomach and groaned with laughter, and for a time was incapable of driving. He was still chuckling when he pulled the car into the shade of a peppercorn tree out the front of Crone’s café and sent Jimmy in to buy three big ice-cream cones.

  He’d expected to find a search party out looking for that girl, or at least to bump into Norman searching the streets for her. Just a normal Saturday afternoon in Woody Creek — or not so normal. His boy was talking.

  Vern demolished his ice-cream in three bites, while the kids leaned against the horse trough, licking and discussing magic, his boy having more to say in three minutes than Vern had heard out of him in three weeks.

  ‘Did you come through that place with all the trees flying up in the sky?’

  ‘That’s a mirage,’ Jimmy said.

  They licked.

  ‘My daddy has got a big mirror in his bedroom and . . . and when you turn the sides you see a hundred, hundred faces — forever faces.’

  ‘Mirage, I said. Not a mirror. It’s sort of a reflection,’ he said, tonguing the last of his ice-cream down, flattening it, crunching on his cone.

  She watched him crunch, tried pushing with her tongue as he had, but found her finger more efficient. She licked it clean, then took a bite of cone.

  ‘I saw a emu running very, very fast. I bet he could get in the mirror . . . mirages.’

  ‘Nothing can,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re not there. They disappear before you get there.’

  ‘Like fairies disappear.’

  Fairies to little kids were like Santa Claus. Jimmy knew all about him and them, but he wasn’t the boy to go opening the eyes of kids half his size. ‘A bit,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know everything?’

  ‘From school.’

  ‘When I’m five, I can go to school, Daddy said.’ She bit, crunched. ‘Can you read yet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Do you go to school with Sissy?’

  ‘There’s no girls,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  He waved a hand, wanting the subject away from school. ‘My mother died,’ he said.

  ‘My mother got sick and went a long, long way away, Daddy said.’

  ‘Did she die?’

  ‘Just gone.’ Little hands lifted, empty hands.

  ‘My mother went to the hospital to get operated on and she . . . she stayed there.’

  ‘Didn’t she get a grave with angels?’

  ‘She’s got a grave with a stone and my name on it, and . . . and my father’s.’

  ‘My grandma has got three angels and only her name. Cecelia Louise Morrison and Duckworth too.’

  ‘Duckworth?’

  ‘Sissy said she should have ducks on it, not angels. When I get dead, I want angels, with big flying wings.’

  THE PROPOSAL

  ‘It must have taken that kid an hour to get out to where she was,’ Vern said. ‘She was damn near to Bryants’.’

  ‘My God. What’s he thinking of?’

  ‘He thought she was with her sister at Macdonalds’. That woman has got too many of her own to take care of without taking care of his.’

  Gertrude was seated on a packing case stool, squirting milk into a bucket she held gripped between her knees. ‘He’s struggling.’

  ‘He’s like a tightrope walker balancing on red-hot wire,’ Vern said. ‘A man alone wasn’t meant to raise kids. It’s not the way nature intended.’

  ‘I told him I’d raise her but he wanted her home.’

  Flies swarmed around the goat and Gertrude, taking advantage of her busy hands. She flicked at them with her elbow, shook them from her face.

  ‘I heard something today I haven’t heard in a while. The little one told me she’s not allowed to live down here because Sissy said you got the prince’s pills off the trollops. Three guesses as to where that came from.’

  ‘I’ve heard it put worse.’ Milk squirted, flies buzzed and bit. She flicked at them. ‘Amber was a sweet-natured little girl until he came up here and filled her head with his lies. It’s like that man carried some infection around with him, Vern, some spoiling disease, and she caught it. She was never the same girl after that.’

  ‘Did you get back any word from the city?’

  ‘No. God know what she’s living on — if she’s living.’

  ‘Do you reckon he’s dead yet?’

  ‘Archie? He’ll never die. I’ve told you that before — or not while I’m alive.’ She moved to the next goat and her fingers worked again. ‘I’ve had the feeling lately that she could be with him.’

  He lit a smoke and puffed a while. He hadn’t come down here to talk about Amber or Archie Foote. He had a proposition to put to her, but wanted to get the right reply. He eyed her, sucked on his cigarette, watched her send one goat on its way and start on the next before he broached the subject.

  ‘You could have some say in the raising of those girls if you lived in town.’

  ‘Live in that hot box? With Norman?’

  ‘With me, you flamin’ idiot. I’ve been thinking about bringing Jimmy home, letting him go to school up here
for a few years. He was getting on well today with your granddaughter. It could be the making of him, having those girls close by.’

  ‘Where did you leave him?’

  ‘In the backyard, following ants, both of them. My housekeeper said she’d keep an eye out.’

  ‘You could have brought them down with you.’

  ‘Jimmy’s always pleased to get rid of me.’ He stood puffing smoke, listening to the rhythm of the milk squirting into the bucket. ‘We look to see ourselves grown better in our kids, hope to see ourselves somewhere in them. Every last one of mine ended up ninety-nine per cent their mother.’

  ‘They’ve got your height — or two of them have.’

  ‘That girl needs height like she needs a hole in her head. Where’s she going to find a husband?’

  ‘She’ll meet someone.’

  ‘I sent her to that university to meet someone and what did I get for my money? A know-all bugger of a girl with her mother’s superior outlook and a face you could crack eggs on.’

  ‘You’re a cruel man, Vern Hooper.’

  ‘I’m an honest man — and if you’re honest back, you’ll agree with me. She’s as ugly as sin.’

  ‘She’ll grow into herself.’

  ‘She’s already grown out of her flamin’ self.’ He dropped his smoke and ground it into the dirt. ‘So how about it? Moving in with me? We’ll take a trip to Willama, you come back with a ring on your finger and who’s going to ask if we’re wed or not?’

  ‘A few years back, I might have dropped my milk bucket and knocked you over running for the car. Things have changed in the last years, Vern. Your girls aren’t going to take kindly to having me move in.’

  ‘They know I’m not a man to live alone, and if they don’t by now they ought to. They won’t come home. I told them a while back they could toss a coin to see which one of them got to stay home and look after their brother and you’d think I’d suggested they earn their living on the street. How does a man like me end up with a pair of girls who think they’re above living with him?’