Nine Days (20 page)

‘I can’t decide right away,’ she says. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘If it’s to be done, it’s best done now.’

‘Done away with, you mean.’

‘By the time you get to my age you’ll know some rules belong to Jesus and other rules belong to men who want to keep others in their place,’ I say.

She looks at me. ‘I won’t.’

In our family we’re not ones for big speeches, but standing there under that tree while the morning ticks away I talk as much as I ever have in one stretch. I tell her about shame and the way it’s always the women who wear it. I spare her nothing. I say
loose woman
and
no morals
and I say
bastard
and I say
slut.
It pains me to hear these words in my own voice and I tell her to imagine how much worse they’ll sound when filthy urchins are yelling them at her on street corners. I grit my teeth. When the children were little and there was TB around I made them take cod liver oil off a spoon even when they begged me not to. Medicine leaves a bad taste but it makes you better.

She never weeps. Not one tear. She won’t relent.

But I’m not done yet. I know how to make her see sense. The boys. It’s not enough that the world knows the state their father was in when he died, what about their own sister?
Does she want Kip to be ashamed of her too? Is that the burden she wants that boy to bear? I tell her how her father did everything to pull us halfway up the hill for the sake of his children and that she’ll be the one dragging us down to the bottom of it.

When I talk about the boys she raises her head and I know I’ve reached her. It’s Kip, especially. She’d do anything for him. She twists and turns her skirt between her fingers. Then she nods and I sag with relief.

I was twenty hours in labour with Connie. She was so still when she came out, like wax. But I knew she was a girl. And when the midwife handed me Francis, so tiny, almost purple, coated in grease—then she said there was one more coming and I thought she was having a lend of me when out popped Kip, squirming and mewing. A husband and three littlies. The best days of my life. The reason women are put on earth. There’s still hope for her, to have a husband and children the right way, keeping them and not giving them up.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Get inside. Neither one of us will be going to work today.’

Mothers need to know that butter goes on a burn and spider webs on a cut, clove oil for a toothache, cakes and tea for bereavement. And for things like this, for girls like Connie and saving her future, there is a respectable woman who runs a business in Victoria Street.

‘Aren’t you going to work, Ma?’ says Francis.

They’re still sitting at the kitchen table like two Lord Mucks. I’ve changed out of my uniform. Connie is in our room sitting on her bed, looking like even getting into clean clothes is too much for her.

‘Kip. Did you ever notice your sister stepping out with a boy?’

He looks up like I’ve dropped something. ‘Stepping out? A boy?’

‘Got fairy floss in your ears? Yes. A boy.’

‘A man’s sister,’ says Francis. ‘I’d fix anyone who tried.’

‘Wasn’t asking you. Well?’

‘No,’ he says, slow and careful.

‘You’d tell me if you knew anything.’

‘Course I would.’ He blinks more times than is normal.

‘Is Connie all right?’ says Francis.

‘She’s crook. I’m going to stay home and look after her.’

‘It’s not fair,’ says Francis. ‘Kip gets to stay home, you and Connie get to stay home. Why do I have to go to school? It’s holidays.’

‘You’re the one that asked for extra. Good of the brothers to let you.’

‘When I’m a rich lawyer I’ll have buns for breakfast every day. I won’t ever eat bread again.’

Kip jumps up from the table. ‘I’m getting dressed,’ he says. ‘I’m going to feed Charlie.’ He just about runs to the bedroom.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ says Francis.

‘Your brother has a soft heart.’

I open the second drawer and take out a notepad and
pencil, write a shopping list and two notes, thinking about every word, in my neatest hand. I call Kip back and give him instructions after he’s seen to the horse: first, go to the big house and drop off the note explaining. There’s a good chance I’ll keep that job. With more and more women going to the factories good housemaids are hard to find.

Then, the second note to Mr Ward at the
Argus.
Connie’s got the flu. Bad. It’s best she stays home for the week.

Then I tell him to drop by his father’s grave and give it a clean up and then as he’s in the city he can go to the Vic Market and get some necks and giblets so I can make soup for Connie. And Francis: he can take his cricket boots so he can go to practice straight after school. I tell them Connie will need her peace and quiet.

‘That’ll take all day,’ Kip says. ‘Maybe if Connie’s sick Mr Ward’ll let me go with the photographers today. He’s always saying to come in. He says they’d be glad to have the help.’

I think of Connie sitting under that tree. The shame that comes from behaving in ways you oughtn’t. Kip gave up his chance. I shake my head.

When I’ve got rid of the boys I go upstairs. Connie is curled in a ball under the covers, in this heat. I get her up, get her dressed. She does as she’s told for a change, doesn’t ask any questions. Before we leave, I take the bundle of notes from under my mattress. For a moment, as I hold it in my hand, I almost change my mind. It’s all we have.

On a normal day we’d walk down the Vaucluse to Church Street but today we take three trams: down Swan, up Church and back up Victoria. On the last tram, the lady conductor takes one look and barks at a working man to give up his seat. Connie doesn’t argue, sinks into it like a puppet with its strings cut. In Victoria Street, I have one arm around her waist. She’s leaning on me, making no effort. Reluctant, but without the strength to walk away.

I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking it’s all too hard, that it’d be easier for all concerned if she took the tram the other way up to the Church Street bridge and did a swan dive into the Yarra. It seems every other week they drag that filthy drain and find some poor soul stuck on the bottom, snagged on some piece of rubbish. Maybe they’re better off without their troubles and maybe they aren’t, but one thing’s for sure: it’s a coward’s way out, else I’d have done it myself by now. Three children and working like a slave to feed them. Not what I would have chosen either.

When we stop in front of the shop, Connie looks up. She’s surprised. I know what she was expecting: a stinking back alley littered with rotten vegetables and horse manure. A Chinaman with filthy nails and sour breath. As if I’d do that to my little girl. We’re out the front of an elegant dressmaker’s set demurely between a tea shop and a gentlemen’s outfitters. Sparkling window, gold lettering on the glass, the inside clean and crisp, mannequins in the latest fashions and bolts of silk along one wall. I think how nice it’d be to have silk in one of those shades for Connie’s glory box, but you can only spend money once.

I push the door and the little bell tinkles. The shop is divided in half by a velvet curtain and there’s a girl sitting at an elegant desk. The desk has skinny curved legs that look highfaluting in a place like this but back where I grew up would remind everyone of rickets. The girl is wearing a suit in a minted tweed. She nods her head in a serious way and looks down her long nose. She asks if she can help us.

‘We’re here to see Mrs Ottley.’

Her mouth says, ‘Certainly madam,’ while her eyes say
shouldn’t you be using the servants’ entrance
? ‘In the meantime, would madam like to see some pattern books? Is it for a special occasion? For you, or the young lady?’

‘My daughter, Constance. And it’s a personal matter.’

She gives me a look and I know she understands. ‘This way then,’ she says, with a flick of her head and a voice sliding away from Hawthorn and closer to Richmond. I sit Connie down in one of the flimsy French chairs against the wall. She doesn’t ask how I knew where to bring her. She hardly seems to know or care where we are or what it is I’m doing to save her. The girl lifts the curtain and I follow her through to the back of the shop.

‘Wait here,’ the girl says, and there’s no madam anymore, and the space where that madam used to be is like a kick in the guts. It strikes me that this is why I’m doing this. It’s so Connie has a chance of being a madam, for the rest of her life and the lives of her daughters and her daughters’ daughters.

I stand in the back of the shop and wait. Nobody offers me a chair. Along one wall is a low bench with a row of working women all bent over sewing machines, feeding
dresses and blouses and skirts through the wee feet, peering at the tiny stitches. Their broad legs pump the pedals, their quick hands change the direction of the fabric, loop the thread over and under to start a new seam. Every so often one stands, picks up a tiny pair of scissors and snips off the thread, then chooses a new reel of cotton from a vast rainbow on the other wall, walks back to her place and runs the end of the cotton between her lips and rethreads the machine. It’d be a good job, this, better than mine. Sitting down all the blessed day, easier on the joints. Though I probably wouldn’t have the eyes for it these days. The women don’t talk or even look up. It’s as if I’m not here.

In a corner of the room, an old woman wearing a floral apron sits hunched on a stool darning something heavy, perhaps denim. In the broad shaft of light that comes through the windows high on the back wall I can see the needle flashing as she works. Sometimes the cloth is too thick and the needle doesn’t want to go all the way through so she pushes the eye end against the pad of her thumb and forces the point of it through the fabric like a lance. All the while the expression on her face does not change. She doesn’t feel a thing. Her thumb must be one solid lump of callous.

‘Mrs Westaway,’ says Mrs Ottley. She’s come up behind me unnoticed and when I turn, her arms are crossed over her bosom like she’s the Queen deigning to walk among us. Her hair is in a French bun to match the severe tailoring. She has wee spectacles on the tip of her nose and a belt around her waist holding a pincushion filled with shiny silver pins all clustered together.

Mrs Ottley is the picture of good deportment and her own best advertisement: she has a discreet pocket sewn into the waistband of her skirts to hold her business cards. Her hands, though, are rough and flakey with great knobby knuckles that stand out a good half inch. I’d reckon she hasn’t always been such a lady.

‘Mrs Westaway.’ Her gaze goes straight to my belly. ‘It’s been some years since you’ve needed our assistance.’

‘And as my husband hasn’t miraculously come back to life, I have no need for it now.’ I pull back my shoulders. As if she has the right to condescend to me. ‘Mrs Ottley’ indeed. I’ve lived in Richmond my whole life and I’ve never heard of a Mr Ottley. ‘My daughter, however, is waiting in your front room.’

‘How far?’ The genteel dressmaker is gone now; the eyes are sharp as one of her needles.

‘A few weeks, maybe. Can’t be long. She’s sick as can be.’

‘Bring her through to the last fitting room on the right. And it’s twenty-five pounds these days, Mrs Westaway.’ She gives me a smile. ‘War-time expenses.’

I close my eyes for a moment. That’s all of it. Nothing in reserve for if I get sick or to pay for Connie’s wedding or if something happens to Kip and we don’t get his wages from the Hustings. Some days I feel disaster lurking around this family the way the soot floats down from the factories over all of Richmond, respectable or not.

‘Or seeing as you’ve been a good customer in the past, I could do two for forty-five,’ she says. ‘Fix up your daughter now, keep one up your sleeve for yourself. Whenever you might need it.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’ I put out my hand to give her the roll of notes but she pulls back her palms as if touching it would affront her delicacy.

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Give it to Katie, at the desk.’

I do as she says and go to fetch Connie. It takes all my strength to get her on her feet. We walk through the curtain, past the sewing women. They do not give us the slightest glance. The last fitting room is bigger than the others, with a door instead of a curtain. Inside is a long bench and some metal instruments in a tray. In the corner is a bucket with a lid. There is a strong smell of carbolic, and something else. Camphor? There is one window high up, glazed with dirty louvres.