Authors: Joy Dettman
‘I like his house.’
‘I want you to like him.’
‘You’ve got to admit the family doesn’t have a lot going for it. What was the other sister like?’
‘I used to think she was harmless. She looked like Beatrice Potter’s mother mouse, wearing a bustle. She couldn’t keep her hands off Jimmy. And she got him, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s as bad as that hawk-faced lamppost.’
‘She told me Jimmy went to Carey Grammar.’
‘Ian Hooper told me that ages ago. I rang them. It’s a dead end.’
A maniac in an old car was itching to pass, and on a curving road; Jenny wasn’t driving fast enough for him. He stuck to her bumper bar and she stuck to fifty, and the fool pulled out and passed.
‘If someone had been coming around that bend, they would have ended up dead.’
‘Want me to drive?’
‘I’m fine – just as mad as hell at you for dragging me around there.’
They drove on in silence and the speedo crept up to sixty.
‘Is he enough for you, Jen?’
‘I’ve already told you I love him.’
‘What’s love?’
‘Something you know you’ve found when you find it. I knew I’d found it when I was eighteen.’
‘Is it sex, or desire to breed?’
‘I had no desire to breed when I had Jimmy.’
‘Just sex then?’
‘I explained the birds and bees to you when you were twelve years old,’ Jenny said. ‘And I’m not in the mood to do it again.’ She slowed to make a left-hand turn, then drove slowly through a town. They were back on the open road before she spoke again.
‘Animals have sex. Loving someone is what differentiates us from the rutting animal. Sex lecture over.’
‘Define love?’
‘Total trust, with fringe benefits. It’s knowing that the world could end, but if you were holding his hand it wouldn’t matter. It’s wanting to remake him too, so a new generation will know him – which I can’t seem to do these days.’
‘You actually want another kid? Haven’t you done enough of it?’
‘I want to do it right this time.’
‘That’s all you want from life, Jen? Him and six kids?’
‘One. A brother for Trudy,’ Jenny said. ‘When you reach the stage where there is nothing more that you want, it’s probably time to curl up and die. What do you want?’
‘You’ll be the first to know when I work that out. I wouldn’t mind this car for starters.’
‘Do you still hear from Jack?’
‘He got married two weeks ago.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘He wrote to me.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘I plan to find out who I am before I give up who I might have been, Jen.’
C
ONDITIONAL
R
ELEASE
F
ive-thirty, one of those days when spike-heeled shoes leave indentations in Melbourne’s bitumen roads, when Swanston Street is thick with sweating humanity, all hurrying towards tram stop and station. They ignore the shop windows at five-thirty. A few will steal a glance at bulbous twenty-three-inch television sets playing cartoons in one window. Poor old Roadrunner, still attempting to outrun Wile E. Coyote.
Beep-beep.
By the end of 1962 a large percentage of the walkers owned their own television sets, and with luck, they’d be home in time to watch the six o’clock news, or to catch the tail end of it.
Cara wouldn’t be home by six; she’d be lucky to make it by seven, and only the radio news when she got there. Robert had fought in two world wars, had lived through the Great Depression; he took English, History and Maths classes if one of the teachers was away – and he denied progress.
Not much good denying it. It was coming to get him – and proving him wrong too. Before the advent of television, ask most Australian schoolkids the name of the top man in America and they’d say Elvis Presley. Ask them today and they’d come back fast with John F. Kennedy, wife Jackie, two kids, John Junior and Carolyn. Five-year-old kids could tell you the names of Russian cosmonauts, of American astronauts. Three year olds could recognise their sports heroes. The percentage of the population buying newspapers might have diminished, but who needed to read all about it in the daily paper when television newsreaders read and condensed it for you, and fed it to you while you sprawled on the couch with a beer?
A fast year for Cara, this one, and a better year. Rosie had left school halfway through first term to marry Henry Cooper – and had a baby four months later – and lived with Rosie’s parents and two brothers in a three-bedroom house.
Dino Collins had spent two months on a prison farm, and would spend another month there. It might teach him that his actions had a consequence. Probably should have started teaching him sooner.
*
Amber Morrison had been released back into society in late winter of ’62, a conditional release, a supervised release. For sixteen years she’d been fed, clothed and medicated; she wasn’t handling freedom, or not their supervised freedom.
They’d supplied her with a few items of clothing, a room, pills and a pension – the old-age pension. Forty-nine when they’d locked her in. Forty-nine plus sixteen made her old enough to get the pension. And she didn’t believe it.
She hadn’t believed how much pension they’d given her when she’d held those first banknotes in her hand. During the depression it would have been riches. In ’46, she could have lived well on it. Now it paid the rent on a room in a crumbling rooming house she shared with eighteen more of Melbourne’s rejects who dropped their filth for her to step over. She slept there. Had to sleep somewhere. She made a point of being there when
they
came to talk their bullshit at her –
they
, the all-powerful.
They
knew she had two daughters, or they spoke of her two daughters. She didn’t tell them she had one daughter and the stray.
They’d
found Sissy, living with the Duckworths, and she wanted nothing to do with her mother. The stray was in Woody Creek. Amber wanted nothing to do with her.
Five babies she’d carried, four of them were in the cemetery. Had they lived, Norman would have turned them into Duckworths as he’d turned Sissy into one. ‘Nothing, no one,’ Amber muttered. ‘Nothing. No one.’
She had a hessian shopping bag, half a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese in it, a tin mug, a photograph of her and Maisy, pills, a few items of underwear. That’s all she had, all she owned, all she was.
Prettiest girl in Woody Creek once. Could have had her pick of the boys. Hadn’t wanted the dirt scratchers, the mill workers. Always wanted better.
Bitter better.
Walked along Swanston Street with the crowd, locked in by them, but separate. Businessmen in white shirts, ties off or loosened, women in light dresses, women with children holding tight to their hands, or held tight by their mother’s hand, children who hadn’t yet learnt not to stare at those who were different.
Amber was different. Haircuts cost money. Overcoats were easier to wear on the back than to carry.
‘No sense, no feeling,’ a passer-by said.
Anger prickled beneath her coat, but conditional release meant no anger. Conditional release meant controlling the desire to swipe at that female with her bag, it meant slowing her feet, allowing the female to become lost in the crowd.
She stood a while before a shop window, watching the cartoon bird kicking up dust as it raced towards a dark tunnel. And a truck came through it and ran it down.
Beep-beep.
A world she no longer understood was attempting to run her down. She’d taken her eye off it for sixteen years and now nothing was as it had been. Boxes that played cartoons in shop windows. Trucks spewing stinking fumes into the street. Cars, cars and more cars, and a world moving too fast for her to catch up.
Walked on.
The smell of oranges was still the same. A Mediterranean man locked inside a small street kiosk was eating his profits. She stood before his counter, eyeing three oranges, measuring them, wanting the best of them. She’d never had the best.
Pointed to it, then dug into her coat pocket for pennies she counted into his palm. Hers then. Held it like a jewel in her hand. Smelled the scent of home on it.
Home?
Memories have always been long in this town, Amb. It wouldn’t do you any good coming up here. I get down to Melbourne two or three times a year to see Maureen and the kids. I’ll let you know when I’ll be down next and we can have lunch somewhere . . .
Maisy’s letter was in the hessian shopping bag, with their photograph – two boot and pinafore clad kids. The man from the newspaper had given her that photograph.
The golden jewel held to her nose, she walked on with the crowd, smelling orange and remembering so clearly the girl in the pinafore, remembering the miles she’d walked when she’d grown too old – or too embarrassed – to sit behind her mother on the horse. Ten, maybe. Walked to and from school thereafter. Walked for miles as a bride, determined to stay out of Norman’s bed.
A brutal husband,
they
’d said. An abused wife, four dead babies, three illegitimate grandchildren she’d never been allowed to hold,
they
’d said. She hadn’t said a word, not this time. She’d learnt control. Kept her head down, her mouth shut this time.
Then no more barred doors.
How many miles had she walked in their rooms with their barred doors? How many miles down corridors that led to barred doors?
The city streets were endless. Turn a corner and there was another block to walk. Turn right. Turn left. The decision her own to make. Only the traffic lights dictated to her on the city streets. They forced her feet to still.
*
Amber Morrison and Cara Norris met at the lights on the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets. It was after five-thirty. A crowd waited for the green light to cross over, workers and shoppers packed tight together, all wanting to be first across the road, first onto the tram, onto the train.
Cara carried a canvas bag with little in it, other than pen, pad, purse and her return ticket to Traralgon. She’d come alone to the city, had gone alone to the Burwood teachers college – and had to argue for her right to travel alone. Until this morning, Robert and Myrtle had been determined to drive her to Melbourne. Next year she’d be free. Next year she’d wash the smell of Traralgon from her.
They weren’t happy with her decision to do primary teaching. They wanted her to do one more year at school, to get her matriculation certificate then go on to university. She’d argued about that too, and when she couldn’t win the argument, she’d dug her heels in and applied for the teaching scholarship anyway. They were beginning to realise she wasn’t . . . wasn’t who they were.
She glanced at the straggle-haired dame standing beside her, or noticed her worn overcoat, its astrakhan collar, her orange. Kept a space between them, or did until two boisterous boys bumped her, she bumped the dame’s arm and her orange fell and rolled to the pavement.
‘Sorry.’ Cara stopped its roll with her foot, picked it up and offered it.
The old dame’s hand was reaching, then her eyes looked higher. ‘Stray slut,’ she snarled and swiped the orange from Cara’s hand and it bounced to the gutter.
Shocked by the response, Cara attempted to step back. The crowd held her captive, then the crazy old dame, still cursing, stepped forward, into the path of a truck.
You can’t allow people to kill themselves, not right in front of your eyes, you can’t. Your reflexes won’t allow it. Cara grabbed a handful of the dame’s black coat and yanked her back.
‘Get your filthy hands off me, you hotpants slut.’
The truck rattled by, lights changed and the crowd jostled forward, that crazy dame gone with the initial rush. Not Cara. She wanted the black overcoat swallowed up by the crowd. That crazy old dame had made her sweat, made her hands sticky with sweat.
She felt for a handkerchief. Myrtle had asked if she had one before she’d left the house this morning. Yes, she’d said, as she’d said every day of her life when she’d left the house for school.
No more school. No handkerchief either. She wiped her palms on her hips as she crossed Flinders Street with the tailenders.
*
Amber walked on, cursing that stray slut to hell. She’d ruined her life, ruined Sissy’s life. Cursed her for the lost orange too, and walked faster. Heads turning to stare at the muttering, straggle-haired one pushing her way between them. Kids still too young to know that fingers shouldn’t be pointed at crazy old dames pointed, and their mothers grasped small wrists and urged them forward.
Jim Hooper and Jenny got married a few years ago. They’ve got a little girl they named for your mother. She doesn’t take after Jenny.
You wouldn’t recognise the inside of Vern’s house, Amb. They’ve stripped off all of his dark wallpaper and lightened the whole place up. His sitting room looks like something out of one of those women’s magazines. Jenny calls it their blue room.
‘Wriggled her arse at him and he went sniffing after her like the scrawny mongrel he always was,’ Amber muttered.
Sissy had been meant to live in that house, or in Monk’s old mansion. For a time, Amber had believed she’d live out at Monk’s with her girl.
‘Stray slut.’
Another corner. Another decision. Turn left, turn right, continue forward or turn back. Her choice to make.
She looked back. She’d chosen that orange. She’d paid for it and she wanted it. She turned back.
And found it too, found it squashed, run over, as her life had been run over by Norman and his stray. Walked on, against the current, back to the shop window to watch the television cartoons.
They’d turned it off. Gone home. She had no home.
And Amber walked on to the next corner.
C
OLLEGE
C
athy Bryant was from Ballarat, and secretly in love with Gerry Jasper, the local doctor’s son who had lived all his life in a house diagonally opposite, who was six years older than her and looked on her as a kid. He’d finished university and gone to England to practise his doctoring skills on the Pommies before he started on the neighbours, or that’s what he’d told her father before he’d left for London – on a boat, and he’d been sick for a week. He’d sent her a postcard from the boat and told her. He’d sent her a second postcard for her eighteenth birthday. She’d written to him a dozen times. Her mother told her to stop writing to him, that she was making an ass of herself, but he was fabulous and she was going to marry him when she was a few years older.
It went on and on. Five minutes after setting foot in the room she and Cara were supposed to share, Cathy Bryant had spilled her life story, not prepared to waste time in finding a new bosom buddy to replace the dozens left behind in Ballarat.
Cara had left no bosom buddy behind and wanted no bosom buddy replacement. Two minutes after meeting her roommate, she felt breathless. Two days of it and she went down to the office and asked to be moved. And the woman she spoke to didn’t appreciate it – and didn’t move her either.
She was at that college to escape Traralgon, to escape Myrtle’s ‘pet’, Robert’s ‘poppet’, and to write her novel without both of them looking over her shoulder and asking every five minutes what she was writing.
‘I love the colour of your hair,’ Cathy said. ‘What do you use on it?’
‘Shampoo,’ Cara said.
‘I mean its colour.’
‘Still shampoo.’ By the fourth week, Cara had given up on well-mannered silence. Her replies were brief. She spent a lot of time perched on the seat of a toilet, behind a locked cubicle door, escaping into her fictional life.
‘I thought it must have been a rinse. You can’t trust them, can you. Mum put mine in for me then spent the rest of the weekend trying to wash it out. What’s it look like now?’
‘Pink.’
‘I almost put in a black. Black curly hair looks better than blonde. The Hill-Jones sisters are blondes but they’ve got straight hair. I love blonde straight hair – if it’s long. They’ve got long hair they all wear in a pageboy style. You’d swear they were triplets if you saw them from the back. They’re different in the face though. Leonie, the youngest, is the best looking. I wish mine was straight. Have you ever tried to straighten your hair?’
‘How?’
‘When mine was long, I could straighten it a bit with large rollers, except you can’t sleep in them. Mum ironed it for me one day. It looked really good too, except it didn’t last. A bit of wind, a bit of rain and I looked like a floor mop. I might get it cut short like yours, except, from past experience, I know that as soon as I hear that first snip of the scissors I’ll wish I could take it back. It’s almost long enough to put up in a French roll now.’
‘Short is easy,’ Cara said.
‘It’s boring though. You can’t do anything with it except comb it. I promised myself I’d grow mine long this year then get it permed straight.’
‘Permed straight?’
‘They can do it. I read it somewhere. The Hill-Jones trio got their photos in the local paper last year with their hair up in French rolls – when they went to the Melbourne Cup. Their father has got shares in a horse that was running in it. I forget its name. It didn’t win. Have you ever been to the Cup?’
‘No.’
‘Me either. I can’t stand horseracing, car racing or any racing. Have you been anywhere?’
‘Sydney.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Home,’ Cara said.
‘How come you’re at a Melbourne college then?’
Five foot two, round-faced, round where the boys liked girls to be round. Every male at the college flirted with Cathy Bryant, and whether she was in love with Gerry Jasper or not, she flirted back.
‘Why don’t you wear makeup, Cara? Is it your religion or something?’
‘Something.’
‘Why did you freeze Paul off this afternoon? He’s nice.’
Been there, done that and lived to regret it.
‘Does your mother buy your clothes?’
‘Why.’
‘That skirt looks like a Fletcher Jones.’
And probably was. Robert wore Fletcher Jones trousers. Myrtle wore Fletcher Jones skirts. They’d brought down two new pleated skirts and a twin set, pink, three new blouses too, one blue, one pink, one white. She wore them. For the past few years she’d worn whatever Myrtle bought, saving her arguments for the battles she’d needed to win.
‘Their stuff is so expensive,’ Cathy said. ‘My grandmother on Dad’s side buys Fletcher Jones skirts and pays a fortune for them. When you’re old you don’t worry about stuff going out of fashion I suppose, so it doesn’t seem like such a waste to spend a fortune on a skirt. Do you dance?’
‘I’m not down here to dance.’
‘It’s just that I’ve got a cousin down here, a cop. Actually he’s Dad’s cousin, but he’s a lot younger and not married yet. He said he’d take me and a friend down to St Kilda on Saturday night. Want to come with me?’
‘I thought you were going home to put in a black rinse.’ Cara lived for Cathy’s weekends at home.
‘Gran would kill me if I did. They’re coming down on Sunday – Gran and Pa, not the other ones. Want to come out to lunch with us?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Does your family ever come down at weekends?’
‘Not out here.’ They came down on the train. She met them in the city.
‘You never go home. Don’t you get on with them or something?’
‘Is that any of your business, Cathy?’
‘Probably not. To get back to the dance, St Kilda’s is supposed to be the best dance in Melbourne. Michelle said she’d come.’
‘No thanks.’
She’d told Cathy she wasn’t accustomed to sharing a room, that she was an only child. Just one more thing they had in common. Cathy, too, was an only child, an only grandchild for one set of grandparents.
College had been in for eight weeks before Myrtle and Robert came to see where she spent her life and who she spent it with. She had to introduce them to Cathy, who tagged along to get a look.
‘Were they your parents or you grandparents?’ she asked later.
‘I was a change-of-life baby.’
‘I was a change-of-lifestyle baby. Mum was seventeen, Dad was eighteen and my Nan was thirty-six. What’s your father do?’
‘He’s a high-school principal.’
‘He looks like one. I bet he pushed you into teaching.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t seem to want to be here.’
Didn’t.
Had they pushed her? More or less, though not into primary-school teaching. She’d done that all by herself. For years this college had been a light dancing at the end of a dark tunnel. Not much of a light, and a shared room hadn’t been a part of that light. She’d seen herself in a single room with a locked door, had imagined sitting at night, writing ten novels, making enough money to buy herself out of her bond before Robert retired. The only place she could get away from Cathy was locked into a toilet cubicle.
‘Gerry reckons that’s why he’s a doctor, because his father pushed him into it. He reckons that a kid following in his parent’s footsteps justifies a parent’s own choice of profession. Mine are sort of exceptions to the rule. Dad sells cars. Actually he owns the garage that sells the cars – or Gramps does, except he’s semi-retired now. I told him to give me a car for my birthday, but they all ganged up and said I wasn’t driving in Melbourne yet.’
Cathy was ceaseless – even when she slept. She snored. One of Cara’s first purchases had been a roll of cottonwool. Jam enough into the ear canals and it will muffle a snore.
During her fourth month at college Cara admitted to herself that there could be advantages to sharing a room with a girl who never shut up. She left few spaces to fill, and hanging around on the fringes of her growing group was preferable to hanging around alone.
Cathy was a born organiser. Couldn’t play tennis to save her life but could organise the tennis matches, then elect herself Cara’s partner. Cara played well enough to carry her. She’d had years of tennis lessons, had won kids’ tournaments, junior, even one senior tournament. The Traralgon mantelpiece was full of trophies. She could dance too. During her last two years at Traralgon, just to get her out of the house, Myrtle and Robert had driven her miles out of town to ballroom dancing classes.
Child of Jessica
was almost finished, or one exercise book of it was, in her locked toilet cubicle. She’d need to type it. These days publishers wouldn’t accept handwritten submissions. She’d written to one in Sydney and received a reply – or a page they probably posted out to anyone who sent them a stamped self-addressed envelope. Cara treasured it. It had been touched by someone in a publisher’s office.
Child of Jessica
, by
Cara Norris.
One day she’d see it in a bookshop. She liked the title, though
Cara Norris
didn’t sound like an author’s name, more like an old maid schoolteacher’s.
Wished Billy-Bob’s family name had been Steinbeck.
C.J. Steinbeck
sounded good.
C.J. Morrison. C.J. Hooper.
Either one of them looked better on paper, sounded better then Norris.
Cathy Bryant
didn’t sound like an old maid schoolteacher. She should have stayed in Ballarat and sold cars.
*
Robert called the college on a bleak Wednesday in late winter. Gran Norris had been taken to hospital with a suspected bowel blockage. She was too old to withstand an operation, he said. They were leaving now to drive up to Sydney, and would pick Cara up on the way through.
‘We should be at the college around one, poppet.’
Didn’t want to join them in their death watch. Been there, done that – last winter. Gran usually decided to die in winter.
Cara didn’t refuse, not immediately. She’d see Pete, her cousin, see Amberley. Didn’t want to do the deathbed bit, the concerned granddaughter bit. She felt nothing for Gran, and less since she’d found out why she’d always been ‘that girl’ to her.
‘She’s got John and Beth’s kids up there, Daddy. I’ll come up on the bus if . . . if anything happens.’
‘She’s ninety-four, poppet.’
And had probably been a pain in the bum at twenty-four. She hadn’t caught herself a husband until she was over thirty, and when she had, she’d only run him down because he’d been consumptive. Pete, the family detective, had dug that information up. Blood cousin or not, she loved Pete, the rebel of John and Beth’s perfect family. He was working at a tyre place, fitting new tyres onto cars. The other boys had good jobs.
Robert must have checked on bus times and the availability of cabins on the overnight train. Myrtle rang back with the information.
‘Thanks,’ Cara said. She’d been on the phone to Ansett. If she had to go up there, she was going to fly. Her college fund would pay for it.
They phoned from Sydney the following day to let her know they’d arrived, then at eight-thirty on Sunday night when she was called again to the communal phone in the common room, she knew that this time Gran had gone and done it.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Look out the window, moll,’ he said.
She knew that voice. Dropped the phone and ran to look out the window, her hand burning with the touch of that phone. Green lawns outside that window. No bike, no sound of a bike.
She hadn’t heard Dino Collins’s voice in almost three years but her hand shook as she fumbled the phone back onto the receiver.
He called back.
After his third call, she stood beside the phone, disconnecting the instant she heard his voice. Everyone was watching her, amused or annoyed, until Marion, another of Cathy’s collection, called her boyfriend. That stopped him, but only for fifteen minutes.
At nine-thirty, he was still at it.
‘I’ve called the police,’ Cara said. ‘They’re currently tracing your call and have asked me to keep you on the line for as long as possible.’
He hung up and didn’t call again. She went to her room, Cathy and Marion behind her.
‘When you play hard to get, babe, you play hard,’ Marion, or Humphrey Bogart, said. The college comedian, Marion; long, lean, dark, wore glasses, and could do dozens of voices.
Cara picked up a pencil and exercise book and went to the bathroom to lock herself in, and that cubicle wasn’t so private tonight. Cathy’s head popped over the wall. She must have been standing on the toilet seat.
‘No foreign matter will be placed into the toilets,’ the head of the establishment said – or Marion, from a wall away. ‘That applies to pencils, exercise books, pads and cigarette butts.’
Then the two of them were standing on the toilet seat, tossing wads of toilet paper at her.
‘We made a rule about privacy,’ Cara said.
‘Which does not apply to the toilets,’ the head of the establishment said.
‘Who is he?’ Cathy asked.
‘Go and annoy someone else.’
‘You’re conveniently placed on a convenience, Norris.’
‘And you said you didn’t have a boyfriend. Who is he?’
Marion could do Queen Lizzie too, and was funny enough to make a cat laugh. Two minutes of Lizzie’s annual address to the constipated and Cara closed her book and opened the door.
‘Is he why you won’t go home?’ Cathy asked.
‘Get lost, both of you.’
‘What’s his name?’
They were eighteen-year-old kids, and making the most of their first year away from home. Marion’s parents lived down on the peninsula. She had four brothers who had made her childhood hell, so she said. The reverse may have applied.
There were days when Cara knew she couldn’t survive another hour of either one of them. There were other days when she envied them. Cathy’s mother looked like her big sister, and her grandparents looked younger and were more in tune with today than Robert and Myrtle. Marion’s mother was like one of the kids, and her youngest brother looked and even sounded like Pete. Wished she’d grown up with them. Wished she’d had four brothers to make her childhood hell.
She was called to the phone again on Tuesday night. Knew it was Dino Collins, and it wasn’t. Myrtle and Robert were home. They’d left Sydney at dawn and driven straight through. Myrtle sounded weary, or teary.