Authors: Joy Dettman
‘Are you happy?’
‘Happy enough.’ She pitched another clod, watched the ripples fade, die.
‘I wake up missing you. I go to bed missing you, love.’
She stood, brushed grass from the seat of her shorts. ‘I’m too young to jump into something I don’t understand and have never understood and, to tell the truth, don’t want to understand.’ She slipped off her rubber thongs and walked into the creek, stepping carefully through slimy mud, clinging waterweed, and over submerged and slippery timber.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I don’t want to breed, Jack, not now, not ever. Don’t call me any more. You mess up my head,’ she said and walked deeper.
‘Get out of there.’
Waist deep now in water, she tucked her thongs beneath her bra straps, then dived, not re-emerging until she was well downstream.
‘Georgie!’
Swam faster, her arms cutting the water, swimming hard until she rounded the curve.
‘Georgie!’
Heard him. The creek altered sound. Just a bird, calling to its lost mate. Couldn’t get back to him if she’d wanted to. You can’t swim far against the current, so she swam with it.
She knew that creek, knew it twisted and turned like a snake with a bellyache. She knew every inch of the forest on the far side of the creek. Had roamed there with Teddy, set rabbit traps there. Knew if she swam down to the next bend, she wouldn’t be far from home, as the crow flew.
*
Brian, Josie and Ronnie Hall left home that night. Only Teddy now, and Lenny, a big blue-eyed blond-headed football hero, engaged to a Willama girl for eighteen months and planning to live at home for eighteen months more.
They’d bought a block of land out on Cemetery Road, and with both of them working and socking every penny away, they’d build a house before they wed. A steady man, Lenny Hall, steadied perhaps by seeing Ray King die at Davies’s sawmill.
He sorted Teddy out. He tossed him a packet of condoms and told him if he didn’t use them he’d end up in the creek with one of his motors chained to his ankles.
He got Margot’s signature on Trudy’s release papers too. ‘You don’t eat until you put your name on them,’ he said.
‘Pith off,’ she said.
‘Let her eat,’ Elsie said.
‘Stay out of it, Else,’ Harry said.
Margot put her name on the papers. She liked her food.
S
ECRETS
D
ino Collins was out there again, marking his turf with the stink of hot rubber. ‘Don’t think you can make a fool of me, you moll, and get off scot-free,’ he’d said when she’d told them she wasn’t going up to Sydney. ‘Watch your back,’ he’d said.
Myrtle was big on turning the other cheek. Robert told her to ignore him. He said he’d grow bored with his game.
They’d been so wrong about so many things. If they’d told her the truth the first time she’d asked them, in Sydney, they’d still be living in Sydney.
‘No more secrets,’ Robert had said the night they’d told her about Jenny.
She was full of secrets, overflowing with secrets and no one to tell them to.
She’d told Rosie about everything, where she’d been born, how she’d been born, Rosie her best friend, her only close friend – back then. If Cara had learnt one worthwhile lesson from these past months, it was just how fast a best friend can turn into a worst enemy – or second worst. Dino Collins was her worst enemy.
And she didn’t understand why. Just by crooking his little finger he could get almost any girl he wanted. He was good-looking, he owned a motorbike, always had money to spend. He’d probably only gone after her to get back at Robert, who had been the main instigator in having him expelled from school – which, had Robert not been new to the town, he may not have done. People pitied Dino and she now knew why. His parents had run off the side of a bridge and drowned in their car and he’d spent an hour diving for them when he was only eleven years old. Then he’d ended up living with his mother’s seventy-year-old aunty. Everyone pitied him, which was why he got away with the things he did.
Cara pitied his aunty. He’d taped her cat into a box while she was in hospital. It hadn’t died, but it should have. His aunty was in hospital for two weeks.
He had Cara boxed in now. She never left the house unless she was with Robert or Myrtle, and he wasn’t even scared of them.
Over Christmas she’d got out. They’d driven up to Sydney and it had been like being in heaven, or like life was supposed to be. Aunty Beth and Uncle John had a new television, which Gran spent all day watching, which Uncle John and Aunty Beth spent half the night watching. Robert had refused to look at it. He blamed television for everything. He said the mass viewing of mindless drivel was brainwashing the younger generation, that television was responsible for the fall in moral values. He said that the drivel on those boxes was aimed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, and that a society geared towards the lowest denominator would end up ruled by the lowest.
He could have been right too. Gran loved that box.
‘Keep your noise down out there. I can’t hear a word they’re saying.’
They’d gone to Amberley to look over the manager’s books, and Cara had felt like a sinner locked out of paradise. She loved that tall house, loved its front window that used to paint magic patterns on the parlour wall. And she hadn’t even been allowed to go into the parlour, or into her own room.
She was back in her box now. She couldn’t even go shopping with Myrtle and Robert. Dino tracked them when she did. And he phoned, phoned a dozen times some nights.
She never answered the phone. She was too scared to play tennis. The last time she’d played, he’d sat beside the court, not taking his eyes off her. She’d conceded the match and telephoned Robert to come and pick her up.
School was double, triple hell. She’d scraped through last year, or Robert had managed to get her a scrape-through. She was going to fail this year because she couldn’t stand being there.
Rosie clucked like a hen, flapped her elbows every time Cara walked into the classroom. She flapped her elbows if they met in the corridor, or at the lockers, and she was probably the one who had broken into Cara’s locker and smashed eggs over everything. Robert had to buy a heap of new books and she’d spent a week of nights copying work from one messed-up book into another.
She had no friends. Rosie had plenty. There were always kids eager to take sides in a school war. Hated going to school. Couldn’t concentrate on anything the teachers said. She tried to study at home, but that bike-riding mongrel wouldn’t let her. He spent his nights racing his bike up and down the street, doing screaming turns in front of the house.
‘What’s wrong with that boy?’ Myrtle said.
‘Ring the police, Mummy.’
‘Ignore him, pet. He’ll find someone else to annoy.’
Myrtle didn’t know what she was talking about. The day of the eggs in her locker, she’d told her mother that Rosie had done it. ‘There are more suitable girls in town for you to mix with, pet,’ was all she’d said.
Such as Sarah Potter, a farmer’s daughter, who had come around to the house one night, asking if Cara would like to go to the pictures with her. She was one of Rosie’s new pack who had bailed her up in the school toilets a week after school had gone back and four of them had pushed her head into a bowl and flushed it. Had to wash her hair in cold water, with school soap, and was too scared now to go to the toilet even if she was busting.
Head up, Cara listened. Silence. She sighed and opened her Maths book to stare again at Robert’s figures. He’d gone over her homework with her three times. All of his workings were there, and when he’d been explaining it, she’d thought she understood how he’d got from A to B. That screaming bike had washed it from her head.
And he hadn’t gone. He’d never give up.
His aunty had kicked him out after the cat business, which was why the going to Sydney business had started, why all of the bad stuff had started.
Like the cat, Cara might not starve or die of thirst, but she couldn’t get out of that box until Robert retired in 1964. When she was twenty. She’d pleaded with him to get a transfer back to home; he’d said that if he retired as a principal he’d get more pension money. She’d begged him again to be allowed to live with Uncle John and to repeat last year with Pete. Not on your life. He didn’t trust her – probably never would.
She’d tried to delay coming home from Sydney by asking him to take her to Woody Creek.
‘It’s a good place to stay away from, poppet.’
As was the Traralgon high school, but he drove her there five days a week.
If she’d told Myrtle what Dino had done the day she’d got home late from the library, they might have allowed her to live with Uncle John. She should have. Though people like Myrtle didn’t quite believe in the bad that existed outside their God-safe little world. ‘Give your problems into God’s hands, pet,’ Myrtle said.
Her parents expected her to stay at that school and matriculate, then go on to university and become a high-school teacher. Robert was a great one to talk about television brainwashing the younger generation. He’d started brainwashing Cara about teaching when she was six or seven years old, and Myrtle had been as bad. The way she was going this year, she’d end up working in a sewing factory like Jennifer Hooper/Morrison, except she couldn’t sew on a button.
She’d only need a reasonable pass in form five to do primary teaching. Last year a girl in form five had got a scholarship to a Melbourne teachers’ college. It was an option. Not much of an option, because if she happened to get in, and if she happened to finish the two-year course, she’d be bonded to the Education Department for three years, which might mean one less year in Traralgon but extra years before she could go home to Sydney.
The book before her, pencil in hand, nothing in her head bar escaping from him and his roaring bike, she jumped two feet from her chair when something hard landed on the roof.
Wished he’d broken a window. Robert might do something about that.
Before Christmas Dino had been in trouble for smashing windows in a vacant house. His aunty wrote a cheque for the damage.
Wished the police had put him in jail, and he was pacing backward and forward behind metal bars like tigers at the zoo. And Rosie too. Wished she was in a cage, flapping her elbows and clucking to get out.
Every good part of life in this town had been spent with Rosie. Now being in the same classroom made Cara want to vomit. Then yesterday the history teacher, Mrs Hunter, had asked them to stay back at lunchtime so they could sort out their problem. Cara had played noughts and crosses with herself while Rosie put on such an act of howling innocence, Mrs Hunter had started comforting her.
‘Have you anything at all to say, Cara?’ she’d asked.
‘Only, why doesn’t she get a job acting on television?’ That was all she’d said. It had felt good too, because Mrs Hunter had looked as if she might have believed her.
Should have said more. Should have told her what she’d done, just opened her mouth and let it out. Should have climbed up onto the roof of the school and screamed it out. Hadn’t. She’d looked down at her noughts and crosses game and tried to beat herself.
She was supposed to hand in her Maths homework and a fiction essay tomorrow. She was usually good at fiction. Not tonight. Life was too real to think up fiction.
Closed her Maths book and opened her English book, wrote her name.
Cara Norris.
It looked lonely – and wrong. She added
Hooper
-
Morrison
-
Billy
-
Bob Someone
to it and wondered what her English teacher might make of that.
Ripped the page out and the corresponding page at the rear of the book. The blank paper invited her pen back.
Jennifer Hooper or Morrison, twenty-year-old mother of two daughters and a son, fell in love with Billy-Bob Someone and had a baby to him. Jenny Hooper or Morrison must have had her first baby at fifteen or sixteen and liked it so much she kept on doing it. Fancy having four kids by the time you’re twenty.
Jenny Hooper or Morrison was a slut like Rosie.
Cara Jeanette Hooper-Morrison-Billy-Bob Someone, Norris by default, was not born to be an only child. If she’d had a big brother, he’d go out there now and fix that bike-riding mongrel.
How does a woman who has already got three kids have another one, hand it over to a stranger, then get on a train and forget it was ever born? Wouldn’t she want to know how it grew up, if it grew up? Was she such a slut, she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough so she could go out and have another one?
Jenny Hooper-Morrison had me on the kitchen floor at Amberley, without a doctor or a nurse, then she got dressed and went upstairs to get Mrs Collins and Miss Robertson to witness the birth of her landlady’s baby.
Cara could almost visualise that scene. What had Myrtle done with the round velvet cushion? Had she taken it out before Mrs Collins and Miss Robertson came down? Maybe she’d been sitting on it.
She wrote again, filled one page and started on the other, writing the tale of her birth from an all-seeing, all-knowing point of view. She turned the full page over and wrote on the back, then around the edges when the back of those two pages were full. And when she stopped, the street was silent.
She stood, stiff with sitting, and walked out to the kitchen for a glass of milk – and found out why the street was silent. It was ten past one and she hadn’t started her homework.
Crept into the lounge room and lifted the phone from the receiver, as she did every night once her parents were in bed. When Dino had no petrol for his bike, he phoned. He’d phoned one night at two o’clock and kept it up until four. And with Gran Norris threatening to die at all hours, Myrtle and Robert refused to leave the phone off the receiver.
Brushed her teeth, dressed for bed, then sat reading her night’s work. It wasn’t fiction but it sure sounded like it. If she changed the names and dates and places and cut out the personal bits, it would do for her fiction assignment. She had to hand something in tomorrow.
Altered Sydney to Melbourne, Woody Creek to Lakes Entrance, Myrtle to Martha, Jenny to Jessica, Robert to Captain John Amberley, fitted it into three pages and ended it at Spencer Street Station, where Jessica held her baby one last time, then handed it to Martha and boarded the train.
She knew that if she should turn her head, she would run back and snatch that tiny infant from the stranger’s arms. Jessica didn’t look back.
Child of Jessica
, she’d named it. And her English teacher gave her a nine and a half out of ten.
Myrtle and Robert were delighted with her mark. They wouldn’t have been so delighted if they’d known what she’d got that nine and a half for. She hid the essay in her diary, hid her diary behind the bottom drawer of her dressing table.
It didn’t take much to delight Robert and Myrtle. An invitation to Sarah Potter’s birthday party delighted them.
It was a set-up. If Sarah and Rosie got her away from school, they’d do worse than flush her head down a toilet.
‘I’m not going, Mummy.’
‘Of course you’re going,’ Myrtle said. ‘You never go anywhere, pet.’
They bought her a new frock, a very nice pale green frock for a twelve year old. Cara didn’t bother telling them she wouldn’t be seen dead in it, just told them again she wasn’t going.
She didn’t tell them she’d started a novel about Jessica and Bobby-Lee. They wouldn’t have approved.
She didn’t tell them she wasn’t going to the end-of-year social until half an hour before they were ready to go. One big argument with them was preferable to umpteen little ones. The school principal was expected to put in an appearance, and where he went, Myrtle went. They had to give up arguing and leave. Myrtle was never late for anything.
Cara locked the doors behind then, turned the inside lights off but left both outdoor lights burning. She knew the windows were locked but checked them again, pulling blinds and drapes, and ending up in the bathroom. No blind on that window. It was high, small, its glass bubbled so no one could see in. The back veranda light had been fitted beside that window, and if it was turned on, there was light enough in the bathroom to write, though not sufficient to see what she’d written, which offered her a freedom she never found during the day. She could write anything at all, and couldn’t see to erase what she knew she shouldn’t have put on paper.