by Joy Dettman
At the funeral, they watched her speak to the father of the dead girl, before approaching the man who had called his mother to kill cockroaches, watched her speak to him. And saw him step away, turn away. She gave up on him and spoke to Gertrude, then reached out her arms to her. They kissed. Perhaps Gertrude held her too long. They saw Norman’s concern, watched him step from foot to foot, a man walking on burning embers.
After days in this town, they were getting the hang of things. Like tram tracks in Melbourne, each resident was connected up to the other.
They knew Maisy Macdonald and watched her leave her group and approach the stationmaster’s wife. Maisy was a talker who had a voice that carried. The city police moved in near enough to eavesdrop.
‘What a terrible funeral,’ she said, filling the gap between Norman and Amber.
‘A child’s funeral is always unbearable,’ Gertrude said.
‘I’m pleased to see you here, Amber.’
‘I had nothing dark to wear,’ Amber said. She was wearing her beige suit and a brown felt hat, a wide-brimmed hat.
‘I’d like to see me try to get into a ten-year-old suit. You look good too, Mrs Foote.’ Gertrude was dressed for a funeral, in her black suit. ‘I notice the Abbots aren’t here,’ Maisy said.
‘It would have been too hard on the pour souls,’ Gertrude said.
‘Did you see the pictures in the Willama Gazette? I said to George that they had no right to go dredging up little Nelly’s photograph. It must be like reliving it all over again for the Abbots.’
‘She used to remind me of Nelly,’ Jenny said.
‘They were related, love. Mrs Abbot is an aunty to Barbie’s mother.’
‘Is it someone in the family who’s doing it?’ Amber said.
‘God, no! They thought they had him yesterday. They brought this bloke in from one of the farms out past Three Pines, but it wasn’t him.’
They walked off as a group, but split into pairs once outside the cemetery gates, Joey and Jenny, Norman and Gertrude, Maisy and Amber, mourners before them, mourners behind, strung out in twos and threes along the crown of the road like a herd of cows at milking time. The rain had stopped for little Barbie, but step off the crown of that road and you’d sink into foot-deep mud.
Maisy turned right at the town hall corner, Amber crossed over the road. The city police turned left into Denham’s yard. Gertrude’s horse and cart was parked up near the church. Jenny turned to walk with them, but Norman held her back.
‘Your mother spoke to you?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘There is relief in forgiveness, Jennifer.’
‘She’s being nice because she wants something, like Sissy’s nice when she wants something.’
‘Cynicism is for the old and jaded, and not attractive in a child,’ he said.
She shrugged and ran to catch up to Gertrude.
UNIFICATION
In the Sun News–Pictorial on 14 March, they printed a large photograph of Herr Hitler and another one of his goose-stepping troops as they crossed the frontier into Austria.
That was the day Charlie White started forecasting a war. ‘You mark my words. Twelve months, two years at the most and there’ll be war.’
‘Old warmonger,’ they said. ‘As if things aren’t bad enough, he’s got to make them worse.’
‘Germany doesn’t want another war any more than we do,’ they said.
Then, on 17 March, Norman did his own goose-stepping through his side gate; and though Jenny watched for him to come out, he didn’t.
Samson had lost his strength when Delilah gave him a haircut. Jenny had lost her blindfold since Gertrude had cut her hair. She saw the world much more clearly now. Or maybe it had nothing to do with haircuts. Maybe it was due to the month she’d spent in Maisy’s house where few subjects were taboo. She’d learnt to see Norman much more clearly in Maisy’s house. Always the giant-killer of her infancy, he’d grown smaller as she’d grown taller. She loved him, but even that love had undergone a change. He’d left her alone in that house, left that key in the door—or where Amber could get it. Trust in her father had taken a blow on the day after the quest. During the four weeks since, she’d come to see him as less the giant and more the goose—or perhaps a great pelican, hatched and raised in a parrot’s cage. There was nothing wrong with his wings, but no matter how hard she might try to teach him to fly, all he’d ever do was flap around in the same circles.
She’d been proud of him when he’d taken a room at the hotel. She cringed with embarrassment on the Saturday when she saw him carrying his case back home; almost died of embarrassment, for him, when he walked into church on Sunday, Amber at his side. Dodged him after church, knowing he’d expect her to go home. She looked for him to walk over the road on Sunday afternoon to take her home. And she wasn’t going home. He didn’t come.
Then, three days before Sissy’s birthday, Vern Hooper arrived home in a brand new car, Margaret sitting beside him in the front seat, Jim sitting in the rear, with Sissy. Never had Jenny seen Jim sitting in the back seat, nor had anyone else in town. Stories were passed around during the next days about Jim Hooper—as if there wasn’t enough drama in broken ribs and bruised lungs, people seemed to need the more dramatic impact of injuries to the brain.
The Macdonald girls heard all of the town gossip. Only Jessie and Dawn were living at home. Four were married, two were nurses in Willama. Jessie had a boyfriend, but Dawn, one of the middle girls, wasn’t interested in men. She told anyone who asked that living with her brothers was enough to put her off the opposite sex for life. Maisy’s girls came in a variety of shapes and sizes, all with similar pale blonde hair and varying shades of George’s purplish eyes, apart from Dawn. She had Maisy’s hazel eyes. Most of the girls were lucky to make five foot in height. Dawn was five foot two. She couldn’t handle those twins like Maisy, but she managed quite well with a broom. Jenny didn’t manage.
Fate was attempting to force her home.
She spent a lot of time at Blunt’s shop, unpacking crates of goods from Melbourne. Loved burying her nose in the pure essence of the city. The post office was too close to Norman’s front gate, but she always helped Mr Foster sort the mail when it came from the train on Saturday mornings, and Norman being home wasn’t going to change that.
That Saturday, Sissy was standing out the front of the post office talking to Peggy Fulton. Like the Macdonalds, the Fulton girls enjoyed a gossip, and Sissy, having spent the best part of a month in Melbourne, was a fount of information.
‘Happy birthday,’ Jenny said.
‘Thanks,’ Sissy said.
And that was all they said, but maybe, just maybe, that month away from Amber hadn’t done her any harm. And maybe she hadn’t eaten as well during that month. She’d lost weight, had four inches cut from her hair. She looked better.
The fates kept conspiring. Near midday when Mr Foster locked his door, Jenny saw Norman and Danny struggling to heave a loaded trolley up the front step to the verandah, a large crate balanced on it. She stood at the gate watching until they got it up to the verandah, then Norman saw her, or saw her red print dress, one of Dawn’s old dresses too short and fitting too well.
‘It is past time that you were home,’ he said. ‘The door please.’
She opened it, held it wide, and the smell of home hit her like a punch in the pit of her stomach. The shine of it, and the parlour, not a cushion, not a curtain, out of place, no book on the table, no newspaper tossed down on a chair. Maisy’s house was where people lived. No one lived in this place.
But they did today. The trolley wheels left gritty lines across the polished floor and on the parlour carpet, and Danny’s boots left their own marks. She looked down at her shoes. She hadn’t wiped them. And Amber wasn’t dancing, wasn’t snarling, going for her hair—not that she had much left to go for.
‘Close the door, please, Jennifer. It’s cool out today,’ she said.
Didn’t want to close th
at door, be closed in by it, but wanted to see what Norman had in his crate. She stepped inside. Danny closed the door on his way out.
The crate took some ripping open. She watched bits of it fall, watched packing paper spread over floor and couch. Then she saw it. It was a wireless and its wood matched the crystal cabinet.
Norman had the leaflet of directions. He liked instructions.
‘Did you know it was going to match the cabinet, Norman?’ Amber said.
‘I ordered the mahogany,’ he said.
‘It’s nicer than Hoopers’,’ Sissy said.
They moved it in against the couch, its back to the window, and Norman connected the aerial wire, which he fed up beneath the curtain and out through the top of the upper window sash to dangle down to the verandah.
‘Stand back,’ he said, pushing the power plug into a socket. Jenny hadn’t known was there—or maybe it wasn’t there before.
The thing made a loud pop, then screamed: ‘British leaders believe there is little likelihood that the British Empire will be dragged into . . .’
‘Who turned it on?’
It howled until Norman found the knob to reduce the volume. The static was bad. Jenny knew all about static from Maisy’s house. She went out to the verandah to hold the aerial wire high.
‘You’ll get electrocuted!’ Norman yelled.
‘It’s much better, though,’ Amber said. ‘What are you doing to it?’
‘Just holding it up,’ Jenny called back.
And she’d gone and done it. She’d spoken to Amber . . . just by accident, though.
‘Perhaps we could take turns holding it up,’ Norman said.
He didn’t make jokes. He used to once, a long, long time ago.
He brought out a chair and Jenny stood on it; they looped the aerial up and over a verandah rafter, then across another and another to the side of the house, where they allowed it to drop down to a water tap. A few twists around the galvanised pipe and—
‘That’s perfect, Norman,’ Amber yelled.
She sounded so human. Jenny went back inside to investigate her mother, while Norman investigated the wireless knobs until he found the station they played at the hotel. Music in a house unaccustomed to music, mess in a parlour unaccustomed to mess, unaccustomed beep-beep-beeping and an announcer who told them the time.
‘Good Lord,’ Amber said, just like Mrs Palmer might have said it, ‘is that the time? What happened to the morning?’
She made sandwiches for lunch and set four places at the table. So Jenny sat, and hoped her sandwich wasn’t poisoned. It was so weird. Amber was weird—or so un-weird she was scary. And Norman calling her ‘my dear’ instead of ‘Mrs Morrison’. Something had changed radically in Norman’s house. Sissy was even human, or so full up with what she’d done in Melbourne, she had to let it out.
‘We stayed in Jim’s uncle’s house in Balwyn, and Ian, Margaret’s cousin, drove us everywhere. There’s thousands of cars down there, thousands of people. Everywhere you go there’s a crowd of people and cars. They have to have stoplights on some streets to stop cars and trams from running into each other. We went down to the beach three times, and every beach we went to there were thousands of people swimming. And the theatres. They’re huge. We went to the pictures three times. He took us out to visit Uncle Charles and Aunty Jane . . .’
The doctors had taken out Jim’s tonsils, which they said had been causing his septic throats. Vern had bought a Ford V8.
‘Coming home in it was so much more convenient than the train,’ Sissy said, and she almost sounded like Margaret. ‘We could stop whenever we wanted to. We had lunch at a restaurant in a little town . . .’
Strange, eating in this kitchen. It was home. It had always been home. Good being able to go down to the lav after lunch where no one would dare to throw broken bricks at the roof. Even good walking up the passage and not having to dodge one or both of Maisy’s twins—and how could you dodge two? It would be easier just dodging Amber.
And maybe Amber had turned into a mind-reader.
‘Your room is made up for you, Jenny,’ she said.
Had she ever called her Jenny before that day? Had she ever spoken to her in a normal voice? Maybe she was finally well. Gertrude said she was well. Maisy said she was well.
It would be nice to have her own wireless, to be able to turn it on and listen to what she liked, instead of what the twins or George liked.
They moved things around after lunch, moved the wireless into the corner beside the fireplace. They took the crate out to the woodheap—it would make good kindling. They cleaned up the packing paper, Amber swept her floor and still Jenny didn’t leave. She stood in the doorway watching her place a figurine on the wireless. It looked too small. Amber must have thought so. She put it back in its place on the crystal cabinet, and Jenny dodged out of her way as she came for the doily and the vase of flowers from the hall table.
That looked right on the wireless, but Norman had the leaflet of instructions in his hand. ‘It says here . . . water and electricity do not mix.’
‘It needs something big,’ Jenny said.
And she knew exactly what it needed. She ran down to the washhouse where she’d last seen those peacock feathers wrapped in an old sheet. Still there, and dusty. She unwrapped the parcel, gave the feathers a shake, gave them a good whack against the verandah post on the way back in, a final whack or two against the relief bag in her room. Her room, her bed, her whatnot and wardrobe and her pillow. Loved that pillow. It fitted her neck. She drew in a breath of it, held it for a moment, then turned to the wardrobe and reached for the blue-green vase. She gave the feathers a last whack on the relief bag, then stuffed them into the vase and carried it into the parlour.
‘Oh, my word,’ Norman said. ‘Mother’s feathers. I thought they had long gone to their rest.’
‘Peacock feathers inside the house are unlucky,’ Amber said.
‘We make our own luck in life, my dear.’
Amber wasn’t so sure. She stood back while Jenny placed the vase on the wireless. And they looked so right there. They matched the curtains, matched the cushions.
‘They fill that corner nicely,’ Amber admitted, moving in to take charge, to arrange them better to her liking, while Norman sat smiling his Cheshire cat smile, delighted his mother’s feathers were back where they belonged, delighted to see his wife and daughter standing side by side, so oddly similar in height and build, in calf and ankle.
Jenny stayed an hour with them in the parlour, listening to music and advertisements for pills that could cure every ill, listening to the beeping of the hour and to news from overseas.
‘Charlie White says Herr Hitler is going to start another war,’ she said. ‘If he did, would Australia have to fight in it again, Dad?’
‘The German people were so soundly defeated last time, you can rest assured their leaders will not subject them to another war, Jennifer.’
‘Why do they call them Nazis? It sounds . . . so sort of evil.’
‘The National Socialists is a political party,’ Norman said. ‘Their aim, I believe, is to unite the many small countries bordering Germany.’
Australia and America were huge countries. Germany wasn’t as big as Victoria, and Austria was even smaller. Uniting them sounded logical to Jenny. In 1938, it sounded logical to many.
Unification. It would be so easy to give in and come home. So . . . so logical.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ she said, fast, before she did something stupid.
‘Your sister is having a small gathering this evening,’ Norman said.
‘At eight,’ Sissy said.
‘I’ll come back.’
Jim was there, with Margaret, and for one terrible instant Jenny thought the rumours about his brain damage were fact.
‘No’ foo’ for me, fanks. Aw I gan ea is broff an yelly. Free momfs o’ ut.’
He looked brain damaged. His time at death’s door had stripped away the little
meat he’d had covering his bones, and Mr Cox had given him a Woody Creek haircut, near clipped to the scalp with a tuft on top. He looked like a startled cockatoo with big ears. Then Jenny saw his mouth. Like the burnt-out boot shop, a dark waste of ash, a hole where no hole should have been, his speech, a toothless slurry of words, a mush of hollow vowels and swallowed consonants.
He was . . . had been her big brother, but he was sitting at Sissy’s side now—as Robert Fulton’s fiancée sat at his side, as Jessie Macdonald sat at her boyfriend’s side. Jenny had eaten her first ice-cream at Jim’s side, had learnt about mirages from him and in turn had taught him the joys of watching bull ants. She’d gone to him on that Sunday after the talent quest and they’d found Norman blind, howling drunk at the hotel. He’d helped her tuck him into the hotel bed, then gone with her to the house to get him a change of clothes. For years, forever, he’d been her big brother.
Saw him too clearly tonight. Saw the folded skeletal length of him, his bony wrists supporting hands too large for those wrists to hold. They sagged to his knees, where his kneebones threatened to cut through the fabric of his trousers, like his jaw and cheekbones threatening to cut through the pale skin stretched tight over his face.
Saw his fate too. He’d end up married to Sissy. She always got what she wanted, had always coveted Vern Hooper’s house and indoor lavatory.
Wanted to warn him.
Wanted to warn Norman who seemed to be enjoying the party, sitting on the couch well fed and smiling—a grain-fed steer at the slaughteryards, unaware the butcher was sharpening his killing knife, waiting to turn him into next week’s steak.
No use. Some people got what they wanted. Maybe others got what they needed. Jenny wanted . . . wanted to go.
DUFFY’S DOGS
The city police had squeezed that town for information and come up with no answer as to who had murdered, mutilated, little Barbie, or why. A lot of strangers passed through Woody Creek, a lot of forest surrounded it, a lot of roads led into and out of it. Eight-year-old Barbara Jean Dobson had been murdered by person or persons unknown.
