by Joy Dettman
He walked on and she swung, backwards and forwards, the rhythmic motion, the whoosh of air, and nothingness of being nowhere, so peaceful. She let her mind roam where it would on that swing, dreamed of pretty frocks and Melbourne and aeroplanes, while the sun disappeared down behind Charlie’s shop to set over the slaughteryards.
She wrote mind letters to Mary Jolly on that swing, and sometimes poems, which were easy with the squeaking song of metal on metal to make the rhyme.
Pretty frock hanging, that hands worked hard to make,
Dead cow hanging for tomorrow’s steak,
Old swaggie hanging in the showground shed,
Knowing that in Woody Creek he may as well be dead.
Old Woe-is-me, an ancient swaggie who had wandered the area for months, had been found swinging from a rafter in the showgrounds shed. No one knew his name. No one knew if he’d hanged himself or if someone else had hanged him. Moe Kelly buried him, and Joss Palmer, one of the boys who found him, made a cross for his grave and painted his initials and the date of his death on the crossbeam: W.I.M. R.I.P. 27-8-37.
He’d become Wim Rip now. Poor old Wim Rip, just another part of Woody Creek folklore, like J.C. LEFT THIS LIFE 31-12-23. Just nameless strangers who came to Woody Creek and stayed.
Summer has come now, the creek is very low, Spring birds have gone to wherever they may go, The tomorrow I dream of, flies so far, so high, Like it knows that in Woody Creek, it’s pie in the sky.
She swung higher, repeating the words of her poem, memorising it. Backwards and forwards, higher and higher, her eyes closed, and when she whooshed down, it didn’t feel like coming down, but going higher still, higher and higher until she was flying.
The old swaggie looked like Noah, but his thoughts weren’t biblical. He was watching her from behind the shrubbery at the southernmost section of the park. He’d recognised her. Had recognised that hair. He stood, hands cupped to his mouth, taking the evening air from between the cage of his fingers, taking it in and releasing it in time to the squeak of that swing, his eyes following her arc, watching the push of air meld the light cotton shirt to her breasts.
‘Baby breasts,’ he said, his words little more than a purr in his throat, then he turned towards the showground. Last night he’d slept in a farm shed. The night before he’d camped down by the creek. Tonight . . . tonight was still a few hours away.
Shadows lengthening though, corellas screeching, a cloud of white flying overhead, protesting the loss of their day and too dumb to know there was always another one, that the sun would rise again tomorrow. He knew. He was like the sun, up and down, but even at his lowest ebb knowing he’d rise again.
He followed the arc of her swing, his head turning from side to side, his tongue creeping from between his lips, almost tasting the scent of pre-woman. She was perfection in rags, her skirt billowing high as her legs flexed and straightened. Backwards and forwards. Heavy chains couldn’t hold her to those complaining posts.
‘Kick,’ he purred. ‘Kick yourself free, my beauty.’
A glance over his shoulder. Not a soul moving about. No one to hear him. He glanced left to the town hall, tall and silent tonight. The house to his right was a blaze of lighted windows, and he sighed for watching eyes at windows and for sweet temptations that should have been locked safe indoors at twilight.
A step to his left took him deeper into the shrubbery, then, carefully, he worked his way through half-grown trees, and dense shrubs until he had closed the space between him and his lovely. And when he lifted a branch, just a little, he had his reward. On her downward arc that rag of skirt lifted and he glimpsed the full length of colt-slim legs. It took his breath away.
He moved a little to his right, his breath short, taken in sips of air between his teeth, a whistle of air, but enough. He ought not to be here. Self-control was necessary in this place — but control was so . . . so controlling.
Eyes alert, he stepped around the shrubs. Barely three yards between them now, but his vision blocked by some flowering thing, with thorns, which he discovered when he made a viewing space with his hand. But so close, close enough to see her pretty face. Her cloud of hair swept back by the push of air.
‘Flawless.’ The word breathed into his hand. ‘A bud, waiting to burst open.’
‘Jennifer!’
A male voice broke the spell. It jarred him. He had been watching his back, his sides. She was before him, the road before her. He had not been watching the road. A reflex step back almost undid him. Should have gone to the side. Caught his foot on a root and grasped a branch to save his fall. No thorns on that one, but the shrubbery moved, exposing him, and at the top of her arc she saw him.
He had come too close. Her pretty mouth opened.
But what had she seen? An old, old man, old as time, a weary old chap looking for a place to sleep.
At full extension of her swing, she jumped, landed on her feet and ran from him. And he felt her loss.
He stood in the shrubbery watching the swing’s disturbed momentum. With no child to guide it, it twisted, barely missing its supporting posts. It would right itself. That was the nature of swings, the nature of all things — just a matter of time and they righted themselves. He watched it slow, watched it steady, watched her join her father on the road, and when they were gone, he walked to the swing to place his palm on the wooden seat where she had sat, seeking the warmth of her left on wood.
‘What a pretty thing,’ he said. ‘What a pretty, pretty thing.’
LIKE WHITE SILK
If not for old Noah, Jenny would never have gone down to Granny’s place that Saturday. Since Nelly had been killed, she saw every big tree as a threat, but she’d been down to the bridge to look at the birds, and as she was walking back, she saw Noah limping towards her. One of the Duffy kids had told someone at school that he was her grandmother’s old boyfriend, that he stayed out there sometimes. To Jenny he didn’t look the type of friend the Duffys might have. He looked too clean.
She knew she shouldn’t stare at him, but he intrigued her, or his beard did. It wasn’t like most old men’s beards. It looked biblical, or elfin, like combed white silk. His hair was as white and silky, and almost as long as his beard. He never took his coat off. It was too big for him, it brushed his boot tops, and today he must have been hot wearing it, but he didn’t look as if he felt the heat. Most swaggies looked as if they hadn’t washed in years. He looked as if he had a hot bath every morning. Maybe that was where he was going, down to the creek for a wash. Maybe he carried a bar of soap in his coat pocket.
She nicked in behind a tree, determined to watch where he went and to maybe see him take that coat off. She was opposite McPherson’s gate, near to where Granny’s road forked off from Three Pines. The trees were tall down here, tall and wide. He wouldn’t see her. Except he must have seen her nick in behind the tree, because when she popped her head out to see if he’d gone down to the creek, he was standing there spying on her, and only about four yards away.
‘Hiding from me, Jennifer?’ he said.
Didn’t like him knowing her name. It made cold knives run up and down her spine.
‘I’m going down to visit my grandmother,’ she said.
‘Didn’t Goldilocks visit with the three bears?’ he said.
She took off like a startled cat, cutting a diagonal course through the trees to Granny’s road, and when she got to it, she kept on running, straight down its centre, running as fast as her legs would carry her — until a stitch in her side slowed her pace. She didn’t stop though, didn’t glance back either, just in case he was running behind.
And of course he wasn’t; he was as old as Methuselah. He couldn’t run if he tried, and now she’d got herself locked onto this road by trees with murderers hiding behind every one of them.
‘Stupid.’
Hated this place, hated those trees lined up like prison bars on both sides of the road. Hadn’t hated them when she was small. She’d loved them when she’d ridden down h
ere behind Norman. Hadn’t hated walking down this road on Christmas mornings either, Sissy lagging behind, complaining that her shoes hurt. Just hated them now, because of Nelly.
Dora knew everything — almost everything. She’d heard her father telling her mother that the murderer had done terrible things to Nelly with a knife, and that she’d been placed in her coffin with a cloth covering her face because if Mrs Abbot had seen what was done to her, she would have lost her mind. She’d lost it anyway, or she had for a little while, so Dora said. Which wasn’t a good thing to be thinking about down here. Jenny walked faster, holding her side, hearing her own footsteps on the gravel and hoping they were her own, her eyes darting from one side of the road to the other, seeing movement where there was none.
Everyone said that some wandering stranger had killed Nelly. Noah could have been wandering around Woody Creek back then, and even if he couldn’t run, couldn’t catch someone who did run, he could be waiting behind a tree to pounce out when she was walking home.
It was her fault. She’d tried to spy on him when she should have walked straight back to town, down the centre of the road, and if he’d said, ‘Good afternoon, Jennifer’, she should have said, ‘Good afternoon’. That was what she should have done. Too late now.
Things had a way of shrinking as people grew. She’d noticed it with the merry-go-round at the park, which had been huge the first time she’d spun on it. Now it wasn’t worth riding. Granny’s road must have shrunk because it wasn’t nearly as far as she remembered. She could already see the track leading down to the boundary gate. A minute later, she was scrambling over it, and safe.
Granny’s house looked shrunken, which may have been because there was a second house in her goat paddock, standing too tall, too high off the ground, which was because the creek had flooded in the olden days and floodwaters had covered all of Granny’s land. Years and years ago, Granny had told her that.
It was good to be down here now that she was down here, to see those clucking chooks pecking, to see the walnut tree. It was even better seeing Granny.
‘Well, my goodness. I knew it was going to be a good day when I woke up this morning,’ Gertrude said.
‘It’s not as far as I remember, Granny.’
A pint-sized boy popped his head from behind Granny. ‘Why’s her say Granny?’
‘That’s Jenny, and I’m her granny too,’ Gertrude said. ‘I was just about to pick a few sticks of rhubarb, darlin’. I won’t be a minute.’
They saw Lenny off across the paddock with a bunch of rhubarb larger than he, then they went inside, and it was a fine thing having Granny all to herself, crunching oatmeal biscuits, drinking tea that tasted of goat’s milk, which wasn’t good, but it was the way Granny’s tea had always tasted.
‘How is your mum?’ Gertrude said.
Jenny didn’t feel like answering that one so replied with a question. ‘How come you didn’t move into the new house and let them live over here?’
‘Six of them and one of me, darlin’, and if I moved anything, I’d never find it again.’
They laughed, but no doubt it was true. Nothing was ever moved in Gertrude’s house. Her frying pan still hung on the same nail, her clock had grown roots in the centre of her mantelpiece, her couch was still beside her washstand, her preserving pan still hanging over the Coolgardie safe, and when she opened that heavy old safe door, that same old stone bottle of water was inside.
The microscope on the table stuck out like a sore toe.
‘When did you get that, Granny?’
‘It came with your grandfather’s things,’ Gertrude said.
‘It doesn’t look that old.’
‘I doubt it is, darlin’. I doubt it had been out of its box until Joey started taking it out.’
Jenny stood and moved to the end of the table to place her eye to the glass. Just a blur.
‘You need to turn it around so the mirror gets the light.’
‘You were sort of divorced from Itchy-foot, weren’t you, so how come you still got all of his things?’
Gertrude smiled at Jenny’s use of her childish name for Archie Foote. ‘I was his legal wife when he died, darlin’.’
‘Did you get anything else interesting?’
‘Books in the main.’
‘She tells Sissy —’
Jenny closed her mouth and fiddled again with the contraption, fiddled until Gertrude took control and got it focused.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Feast your eye on that.’
There was something gruesome in it, something weirdly gruesome. ‘It’s moving,’ she said, springing back. ‘What is it?’
‘Joey said it was a fly’s flea.’
They took turns then, Gertrude adjusting the mirror just a little to bring it into clearer focus.
‘It’s like some sort of awful beast creeping through a forest.’
‘Flies have hairy legs.’
‘Are we all crawling with those things?’
‘The book that came with the microscope says we are. It’s got coloured drawings of all the germs we live with, all different shapes and sizes for different diseases.’
Jenny looked at her hands, expecting to see them crawling with beasts, but that microscope and its captive was addictive. She was drawn back for another look.
‘Did Itchy-foot have this to study germs?’
‘I suppose he did, darlin’.’
‘Did he work in other countries?’
‘He spent a lot of time in other countries.’
‘She says that you got five hundred pounds from his will. He must have made a lot of money.’
‘It was his father’s money.’
‘Was his father rich?’
‘He was a doctor, and comfortable enough.’
‘Was Itchy-foot comfortable?’
That wasn’t a word Gertrude might have used to describe him. She turned away, hoping to evade more or the same questions.
‘Dad does that,’ Jenny said. ‘When he thinks I shouldn’t ask, he walks off to do something important, which isn’t important at all. How come you didn’t live with . . . with our grandfather?’
Gertrude had never lied to her and didn’t want to start. She’d made the mistake of allowing Amber to grow up believing her father was a wonderful man — a big mistake. Maybe she could get away with a mild watering-down of the truth.
‘He wasn’t a healthy man, darlin’,’ she said.
‘What was wrong with him?’
You name it, Gertrude thought, brushing the soot from her stove and seeking a truth she might tell that was not too severe. Couldn’t find one in time.
‘He was sick in the head like her, wasn’t he?’ Jenny said, turning her eye again to the microscope. ‘And you’re not game to say it, like Dad’s not game to say it about her. He pretends to people that she’s normal, but she isn’t.’
‘She’s better than she was, darlin’.’
‘She must have been pretty bad then.’
‘Your dad seems to think —’
‘He . . . makes allowances. We must make allowances for those who are less fortunate than we,’ Jenny said, in near perfect mimicry of Norman. ‘The trouble is, Granny, if you keep on making allowances, one day there’s nothing left to allow. Like with sharing your bed. You allow the person you sleep with two-thirds, then sooner or later she wants three-quarters, and one night you roll over and fall out. She’s got the lot.’
Gertrude laughed, but learned something. She’d wondered at the sleeping arrangements in that house, had wondered if Norman put up with Amber because of the bed. Apparently not. More could be learned at times by not asking questions. She opened the firebox, poked in a few sticks of wood, then went to her bedroom to fetch the book that had come with the microscope.
‘Do germs make people stink of BO?’
‘The questions you ask!’
‘But do they?’
‘I don’t know.’
Gertrude was on her knees sorting throug
h Archie’s books and not finding the one she was looking for when she heard Jenny’s chuckle. Loved that sound. It had never changed.
‘What are you giggling about?’
‘Nothing. Just the flea on the fly.’
‘What’s it doing?’
‘Nothing.’ She giggled again. ‘It just . . . it just reminded me of Amber shaving Sissy’s hairy legs.’
‘That’s not nice.’
‘She’s like Sissy’s flea, Granny, always crawling over her, shaving her legs, or plucking her eyebrows, doing her hair — living off her, like a parasite. Sissy doesn’t mind most of the time, and when she does, she flicks her off and goes over to the Hoopers’.’
‘A beautiful girl deserves a beautiful mind, and those sorts of thoughts don’t do yours justice,’ Gertrude said, placing a slim book on the table.
‘They’ve got worse thoughts — worse words and actions too. Want to see the parasite’s last action?’ She didn’t wait to see if Gertrude would like it or not, but hitched up her skirt to display a fading blue and yellow inch-wide stripe across the back of her upper thigh. ‘She got me with the poker.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Mrs Morrison.’
‘She didn’t do that to you!’
‘She did so. I didn’t know she had the poker or I would have dodged.’
‘Did you show your dad?’
‘He doesn’t know I’ve got legs yet. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I just showed you so you’d know why my mind isn’t very beautiful.’
She opened the book. It changed the subject. They removed the fly and flea later and pulled hairs from their heads to stretch side by side on the glass. They shook pollen from a rose and studied that; they watched a smear of blood race like a river.
‘This is the only true magic,’ Jenny said. ‘This is the real fairies at the bottom of the garden, Granny. I think I might be a nurse or a scientist or something when I grow up. Girls can even be doctors now.’
‘You’d need a lot of schooling for that.’
‘In Melbourne. Which would be good. Gloria Bull goes to school in Melbourne.’
