by Joy Dettman
He’d read Jenny’s first letters to Mary Jolly. They had been handed to him to fold, to slide into envelopes. He’d supplied the writing paper, the stamps. Through the years, he’d watched a child’s handwriting evolve into a young lady’s. He knew it well, knew her curled Js, her fancy Ms, as he did Mary Jolly’s perfect copperplate script. He’d kept her every reply in a shoebox in his post office cupboard. He saw that script in late February, on a letter addressed to The Governess, c/o Mrs Foote, Forest Road, Woody Creek. He took his spectacles off, polished them, placed the envelope on his counter, then reached for the box of her old letters. A random selection set beside the new and he studied both envelopes closely. There was no question. It was Mary Jolly’s handwriting.
He’d been told by the stationmaster that Jennifer was studying music in the city, and he’d celebrated for her. When the last letter addressed to Cara Paris had arrived, he’d held it for weeks while weighing up the breaking of a confidence against the getting of that item of mail to its owner. In the end he’d returned it to Mary with a brief note, stating that Cara was in the city studying music.
Now he knew that Jennifer was not in the city. Jennifer was with her grandmother. They had hidden her down there once before. He’d heard the scuffle on his neighbour’s verandah on the night of the ball. He’d heard Jennifer’s voice. Then silence.
‘What has been done to that child?’
He worried about her, and the letter, thinking to confront Norman Morrison. Did he have the right? He had no rights.
Perhaps he should speak to Mrs Foote when she came next to collect her mail — or offer her the letter and ask if Jennifer was well. No harm in that. But Friday passed, and if she came to town, she did not come by for her mail.
Mid-week, Harry Hall came to the post office. ‘Anything for Mrs Foote?’ he said.
And what else could he do but pass that letter across the counter?
Gone.
But his concern grew. He sat at his bedroom window on Saturday afternoon, sat for most of that Sunday, watching the comings and goings from his neighbour’s house. All seemed well enough.
Then on the Tuesday, he recognised the Js, the Ms, on an outgoing envelope, a stamp already attached. All was not well next door. Something was very wrong next door.
He spied more often on his neighbours, his eye to a knothole in his fence, an eye to a convenient rip in the sitting room blind. He watched the wife walk by the post office window on her way to the grocer, watched her hang washing in her backyard.
‘Any news of young Jennifer?’ he asked on the Friday when Norman came for his mail.
‘Doing well,’ the stationmaster lied, his eyes fastened on two envelopes. ‘Very well,’ he said, and he left.
Old images began to haunt Mr Foster’s lonely nights. Midway through reading a newspaper, halfway through a meal, in the dark of his bedroom, in the grey light of pre-dawn, he saw that battered, bruised little face . . . hidden from the town at her grandmother’s house.
Pretty little blue-eyed blonde. Battered. Smashed. Broken.
Pretty little blue-eyed blonde, face smashed, slashed —
Imagination is an evil thing when you live alone, but he had seen his neighbour’s wife wandering at dusk. And had he not personally witnessed her brutality?
‘You carry this thing too far,’ he warned himself.
Then in late March another letter arrived for The Governess, c/o Mrs Foote; and on the first day of April, the fool’s day, he sat down and penned his own letter to Mary Jolly, uncaring if he were fool or not.
My dear Miss Jolly,
I am penning this line in the hope that you are still in touch with our mutual young friend, Cara. (The first time he’d written that line he’d written ‘Jennifer’. He would not break that child’s confidence.) I have not seen nor had word of Cara in several months, and am concerned for her wellbeing.
Please find enclosed stamped, self-addressed envelope for your swift reply.
Yours faithfully, Bob Foster
He did not wait long for his envelope’s return. It arrived on 7 April, the day Joe Lyons, prime minister of Australia, died. Prime ministers didn’t die, they were voted out; and Joe, a popular man, would not have been voted out. The nation in shock, Mr Foster ripped that envelope open.
Dear Bob,
Like you, I am feeling more than a little concern for Cara. Her father died late last year, and it seems that she has tutoring work with the grandchildren of a local property owner, a Mrs Foote, which, she says, is well out of town.
As you may or may not be aware, her letters are often fanciful tales of incredible happenings or odd little poems about her town. One I received recently concerns me deeply.
I am forwarding a copy to you. Your kindness to a stranger in her hour of need tells me you have a good and kind heart, and that your concern for Cara is as great as mine.
My best regards, Mary Jolly
Mr Foster was still reading when he limped from the post office and crossed over the road to the Denham residence.
The two men stood together at the police station counter, Denham a good six foot and solid, Mr Foster a bare inch over five foot and thin. His spine was twisted, Denham’s was straight, but they shared a common bond; a deep-seated loathing of the Macdonald twins; and there was no doubt in either mind they were reading about them.
Foolish green spider, non-venomous thing from a web of imperfect creation,
Was seen by two hornets, out seeking fun and with appetites above their station.
Untutored in living, the spider spun on, threading her web with moonbeams,
While the hornets, they buzzed and flitted around, uncaring of green spider dreams.
They trap prey with laughter, with strong nets of lies, hook prey with their ugly deceit,
For hornets must feed their repulsive greed, and green spiders the rarest of treat.
They flit ever nearer, their need growing large as they settle for closer inspection.
A gossamer web of inferior style, it offers so little protection.
Silly green spider, stung once and again, then sealed in a nest of cold clay,
Paralysed by their venom, unable to run, so slowly she rots clean away.
And so dies the spider, not born to combat, just a spinner of imperfect thread,
While maggots once hatched from the cruel hornet eggs suck the last dreams from her head.
Denham rode a BSA motorbike. It was well known around town but had never negotiated Gertrude’s track. He came in the late afternoon. She stood at her wire gate, determined to keep him out. He didn’t attempt to force entrance.
‘I have information leading me to believe that your granddaughter is staying out here with you, Mrs Foote.’
‘You need to speak to her father,’ Gertrude said.
‘I’ll speak to him when I know I’ve got my facts straight. Your granddaughter has a penfriend who writes to her at your address. I’ve got a few ideas about what might be going on, but what I’m down here for today is the facts.’
‘Her father will tell you she’s having singing lessons in the city.’
‘I’m asking you, Mrs Foote. I know we started off on the wrong . . . that we got off to a bad start, but you’ve got the reputation of being a straight-talking woman.’ He leaned against her fence, took out a cigarette and lit it, telling her by his actions that he wasn’t planning to leave. ‘What if I tell you what I know, and you put me right if I’ve got it wrong? She’s in the family way.’
Her reaction told him he and Foster had hit the nail on the head.
‘You’ve been talking to Vern,’ she said.
‘The girl more or less told her city penfriend.’
She glanced towards the house, then opened the gate, stepped out to the yard and walked him back to his bike, where, head down, she told him all she knew, told him she’d wanted to go to him the night she’d found out, but Norman had decided to keep it quiet, which was what Jenny wanted them to do.
‘I need to talk to her.’
‘She’s barely holding on as it is.’
‘This can’t be covered up.’
She looked up from his bike to his face. He was no Ernie Ogden. He didn’t have the soul of that man. She could have spoken to Ernie, explained how that little girl spent her life hiding behind that green curtain, existing in some form of dreamworld. She would have spoken to Ernie at the start, had his support these past months. She’d never liked Denham. Had he demanded to go inside, she might have given him a taste of the back of her hand.
‘The Macdonald twins,’ he said.
‘Bastards,’ she said.
‘There’s a topic we agree on, Mrs Foote. It’s a start.’
And he patted her shoulder and got on his bike.
Jenny heard the bike arrive. She heard it leave. She was waiting, just inside the door. Gertrude couldn’t tell a lie.
Norman wasn’t good at it either. He heard that bike coming. He watched it raise more than the usual dust as those wheels spun to a halt in the station yard, and he knew what Denham wanted. His burning gut knew, his aching shoulder knew, and he willed a train to come thundering down the tracks so he might throw himself beneath its wheels; willed God to send a bolt of lightning down to wipe him from this earth. No train, no lightning, and the constable walking up the platform. Norman scuttled for his ticket office.
Little room in there for two men, and no back door. Norman shuffled papers.
‘Covering up a crime is as bad as doing that crime, Mr Morrison.’
‘We had hoped . . . only to protect . . .’
‘Your daughter, or your neighbour’s sons?’
‘My daughter. The shame —’
‘The shame is yours, Mr Morrison.’
‘In May she can return —’
‘Your girl was pack-raped, Mr Morrison. Those two bastards held her down and took turns.’
Norman cringed, turned his face to the wall.
‘And I’m going to see to it personally that those no-necked little bastards will have necks before they die.’
Gertrude, tired for weeks, worried sick for months, had spent the night in Jenny’s bed promising she wouldn’t let Amber bury her in one of Sissy’s hand-me-downs, promising she’d cut that seething mass out of her belly before they buried her, promising anything that might give that little girl sleep. It was no use telling her that she wasn’t going to die of it, no use telling her she’d delivered hundreds of babies. Jenny didn’t believe in that baby. She knew what they’d left inside her.
She also knew Mr Denham; he’d been her neighbour for most of her life. She knew his daughters; and if he knew about her swollen belly, his daughters knew too. She wanted to die.
Gertrude could no longer handle what was going on in Jenny’s head. She was afraid for her. They had to get her down to the hospital, whether she wanted to go or not.
CHOICES
On 15 April, the twins arrived home on their motorbike. Maisy told them to get back on it, to get back to where they’d come from if they valued their lives.
‘The old man didn’t send our money,’ they chorused.
You couldn’t drink in Melbourne without money. You could drink without it in Woody Creek, or some could.
The mill hooters were playing their off-key notes when the twins walked into the hotel. Horrie Bull served them. He’d filled their glasses a second time before Denham walked in.
‘It’s still ten minutes off six!’ Horrie said.
Denham wasn’t interested in the time. He approached the laughing duo. They didn’t laugh long. ‘Bernard and Cecil Macdonald, I’m arresting you for the carnal knowledge of a minor,’ he said.
One tossed his beer in Denham’s face and went south. The other tossed his beer and went north, over the counter and out through the rear of the bar. They’d perfected the art of escape before they’d learnt to walk, having realised early that their mother was one and they were two.
Denham followed the one who’d gone over the bar, followed him through the rabbit warren of dining room and passage. His legs were a good foot longer than the twins’, his reach was longer. He caught his quarry in the lane at the back of the hotel, brought him down with a tackle, and once he had him down, he sat on him and rammed his bullet head into hard-packed clay, which did the clay more harm than the head, but he did it anyway because he’d been wanting to do it for years.
Fifteen or twenty men watched him get the cuffs on, watched him drag that twin up the lane by the cuffs, drag his trousers off his bum, then drag that bum another twenty feet before the twin yelled ‘barley’. He stood and walked across the railway yards, walked like a tame lamb, eight or ten kids now following behind. They saw Denham leave his boot print on that gravel-rashed bum, saw the twin sprawl into the cell.
Maybe they expected Denham to go after the other one. He didn’t. He went inside to have his tea, aware that getting one of those little bastards was as good as getting two. There was something missing in their heads, something they needed to get from the other for their survival. He’d have both by sundown. He ate with his family, listened to the six o’clock news, and was standing on his verandah by seven, waiting for the second twin to show up. They’d been separated for over an hour. They’d be starting to feel the pinch right about . . .
‘Now,’ he said, sighting a trio walking up past the town hall: the missing twin, his father, and a taller man, a suit-clad stranger, who turned out to be a solicitor from Willama.
The Church of England ball and that escapade long forgotten, Bernie, the twin who’d got away, had gone home to his father swearing that he was innocent of carnal knowledge of any minor, that neither he nor his brother had ever put as much as a finger on any under-aged girl — unless they’d paid for it in Melbourne, and they wouldn’t have paid for it anyway if they’d known she was under-age.
April in Woody Creek was usually a pleasant month; that evening’s warmth brought many out to rake up the autumn leaves and put a match to them. Smoke in the air that night. Raised voices carry on warm still nights, and a front verandah, built eight or ten feet from the main street, is not the best place to raise your voice, not when your neighbours are keen gardeners, not when there’s a council meeting at the town hall. Several councillors saw the group on Denham’s verandah. A few heard the Morrison name mentioned.
Let a cat get one whisker out from a bag and you’ll never get it back in. A snarling, fighting, biting tiger was released that night in Woody Creek, and come morning, the bag was in shreds, bits of it blowing all over town.
The hotel bar had been full when Denham had charged the Macdonald boys, drinkers had gone home with news of the what, but not of the who. Come morning, those who knew the who got together with those who knew the what and the few who also knew the when, and before the sun set on that day, only the few in town who were hard of hearing and the kids too young to understand remained in the dark about what had happened to Woody Creek’s songbird. She wasn’t taking singing lessons in Melbourne.
George Macdonald had more men in his employ than Vern Hooper. He was a respected man. All right, his boys were drunken little bastards, and there was no doubting that they’d done what they’d done, but they were eighteen-year-old drunken little bastards who could spend the next twenty years in jail — if they escaped the noose — and he had to do something.
Maisy, substitute mother to Jenny for most of her life, told him that his mongrel-bred sons deserved to hang. George and Maisy who never argued now tongue-lashed each other in bed and kept it up at the breakfast table.
On the second morning, the solicitor spoke to the twins, separately and together, and, true or false, they told the same story.
‘She came after us,’ one said. ‘She was having a fight with her mother and she came to us looking for a bit of sympathy,’ the other added. ‘One thing led to another.’ ‘And it wasn’t the first time either.’ ‘No, it wasn’t either,’ the other agreed. ‘While she was living with Mu
m and Dad, every time we come home, it was on,’ one said. ‘We thought she was older,’ they chorused. ‘We thought she was sixteen or so.’
The solicitor believed them, or didn’t believe them; it didn’t matter one way or the other to him.
It mattered to Denham. He wanted to stretch their necks.
Once again, that bike roared down Gertrude’s track. Once again, she barred that gate with her body.
‘I need to hear the girl’s side, Mrs Foote.’
‘I just got her to sleep. That cursed bike will have woken her up again.’
‘Her mother’s telling the same story as those Macdonalds. If I’m charging those boys with a capital crime, I need the facts, from your granddaughter’s mouth.’
‘Leave her be.’
‘What’s going on between her and her mother?’
Gertrude turned to walk inside.
‘The postmaster is in contact with that city woman. Your granddaughter is an imaginative girl, Mrs Foote. She told that woman her mother had been arrested for murder. Does she know what’s real from what’s not?’
Gertrude felt a jolt in her heart and she closed her eyes, remembering Amber’s kiss at Barbie’s funeral, remembering the cups of tea, those pleasant chats with her daughter. Turned off like a tap. Cut off like power to the light globe. On the Friday after she’d stitched up that scalp wound. After they’d arrested Albert Forester for murder . . .
She’d seen Amber’s eyes that day. Seen the smile of the victor. No cup of tea for Gertrude that day. No pleasant chat in Norman’s kitchen. That’s when Gertrude had stopped ignoring her gut feeling that Barbie Dobson’s and Nelly Abbot’s resemblance to Jenny hadn’t been coincidental.
