Authors: Joy Dettman
‘Is she all right, Mummy?’
‘She’s fine, pet.’
‘You have to stop running up there every time she decides to die.’
‘I know, pet. I just wanted to let you know we’re back.’
‘Dino Collins has got the college number, Mummy. Who told him where I was?’
‘Who?’
‘James Collins. He’s got this number.’
‘Robert.’ Myrtle’s hand must have been covering the mouthpiece, though not quite covering it. ‘The phone pad,’ Cara heard, and she heard Robert curse. He never cursed.
‘Don’t take his calls, poppet.’ Robert was on the line.
‘What’s going on down there, Daddy?’ She could hear another male voice, hear Myrtle speaking to someone. ‘Have you got visitors?’
‘The police are here. We’ve had a break-in through one of the rear windows.’
‘It was him. That’s how he got this number. Tell them it was Dino Collins, Daddy.’
‘You are probably right, poppet. Your mum had your name and number on her telephone pad. We can’t see it around.’
‘Tell them he phoned here on Sunday night and kept it up for an hour.’
‘I’ll tell them. We’ll call you tomorrow night.’
*
Robert had been aware the attack on his house was personal. He’d smelt it when he’d opened Cara’s bedroom door. A dog marks his territory with urine. He’d left his scent in her room. The phone calls to the college killed any doubt as to the culprit’s identity.
Robert joined Myrtle and the two constables in the kitchen, where for the first time he spoke of Collins’s ongoing harassment of his daughter. Making unwanted phone calls was not a capital offence. Myrtle’s jewellery box was still in the drawer. Nothing of value appeared to have been taken.
Vandalism
the police constable wrote on his report.
A departmental house, it was insured, as were the contents. For a month Robert and Myrtle became nomads, living out of the large case they’d taken with them to Sydney, spending their weekdays at a Traralgon motel, their weekends at a city hotel, where Cara joined them.
She’d had time to learn Melbourne, its markets, its trams, its beaches. They rode trams with her at weekends, playing tourists, Cara their guide. Away from their natural element, she had time to know them, and to accept that though she had little in common with either, she loved them. She had time to decide, too, that God had known best when he’d allowed no issue to come from their marriage. They had each other and needed no one else. Like two halves of the same bowl, each side was useless without its other half.
She watched them at dinner one evening, selecting their meal, the waiter waiting.
‘The last time you ate asparagus you were covered in hives for three days, Robert,’ Myrtle said.
‘Are you sure it was asparagus?’
‘Yes I am. I haven’t bought it since, and you haven’t had hives since.’
He couldn’t make a cup of tea; had, to Cara’s knowledge, never washed a dish; but at the hotel, he ordered the meals. He carried the cash or chequebook when they shopped, then carried the shopping bags.
The hotel had staff to make up the beds. Myrtle’s bed was made up to hotel standards before she left the room, and if Cara walked away from her own unmade bed, Myrtle hurried in, just to tidy things up a little.
Robert paid the bill. He carried the heavy case to the car park.
He’d always driven a car but never considered teaching Myrtle to drive it, and she would have been aghast had he made the suggestion. The eternal passenger, Myrtle, and happy to be the passenger. Cara wasn’t. She sat in the rear seat, her head between them, seeing street names before them, directing them where and when to turn. One day she’d drive a car. Cathy could, Marion too.
The lines between male and female may have been clearly defined back before the war. The sixties were erasing them, though not for Robert and Myrtle. For them the line between male and female had become a deep groove they couldn’t step across.
C
OKE AND
A
SPIRIN
O
ne of Myrtle’s designated responsibilities was to remember family birthdays, to place early phone calls, and on the morning of 3 October 1963, Cara’s nineteenth birthday, she wasn’t disappointed. The call came at eight-fifteen, but it was Robert’s voice on the line.
‘I’m in Sydney, poppet. I flew up last night.’ He wasn’t calling to wish her happy birthday. ‘Gran passed away three hours ago.’
‘Mummy flew!’
Shouldn’t have said that. Should have said, I’m so sorry to hear that, Daddy – or something. Couldn’t take it back.
‘Mummy is in Traralgon. I’ve booked a twin sleeper on tonight’s train. You’ll need to pick up and pay for the tickets at Spencer Street, poppet.’
Belatedly she asked what had happened, how, if he’d got up there in time to say goodbye.
‘John and I were with her. We’ll talk later, poppet.’ Always that promise to talk later. It never happened. ‘I’ll ring Mummy now and let her know that you’re on your way up there.’
‘Not up there!’
‘She needs you today.’
‘Not up there, Daddy. Tell her I’ll meet her down here at the station.’
‘I need you to put your own feelings aside, Poppet, and to think of Mummy,’ he said. And he hung up – and he hadn’t wished her happy birthday – and it was no longer her birthday anyway, Gran had commandeered it for her death day.
Cathy said happy birthday. Cara told her she had to go up to Sydney, that her grandmother had died. Cathy’s eyes filled, then she hugged her, and Cara felt like a fraud.
She considered asking Cathy to go with her to Traralgon, then decided against it and asked her to check train times to Traralgon, to double-check the departure time of the night train to Sydney. She made the calls while Cara showered, tamed her hair, packed a small case, and nothing she owned was suitable to wear to a funeral.
Marion owned a straight black skirt. She was a smidgen taller than Cara. Cathy, the organiser, found suitable clothing. Michelle owned a nice black sweater. Not much she could do about shoes. They packed Myrtle-supplied black court shoes with inch-and-a half heels – old ladies’ shoes, Cathy named them.
Cathy went with her to the bank, and that day Cara appreciated her company. She and Marion saw her onto the Traralgon train.
*
Myrtle was waiting at the gate when the taxi pulled into the kerb. A kiss but no birthday greeting. Only Gran.
‘She hadn’t been well all day. John rang around noon, and I was convinced she was crying wolf again, pet. I’ll never forgive myself.’
‘Are you ready to go?’
‘I should have driven up with your father yesterday when John rang.’
‘If Daddy had driven, he wouldn’t have got there in time to say goodbye. It’s lucky you thought she was crying wolf, so stop the guilt bit, Mummy.’
‘You sounded like Jenny then,’ Myrtle said.
‘Are you ready?’
Cara had no intention of paying the taxi driver until she was back at the station. He waited, meter running, while Myrtle checked the wireless, toaster, jug, bedlamps, the back door and windows. She’d probably been ready since ten o’clock, had probably checked everything a dozen times already, but for five minutes Cara waited at the open front door, sniffing the scent of new paint, looking at new carpet.
‘Why the new carpet?’
‘It was very worn when we moved in,’ Myrtle said.
Had Cara gone further than the doorway, she would have noticed the new bed in her room, the brand-new easy chairs in the lounge room. She went no further. Two years ago she’d promised herself she’d never enter that house again.
Twenty minutes later they were on a train back to the city.
Cara wanted to book the luggage through then hop on a tram up to Myer’s. She could fill hours in that store and they had four hours to kill. Myrtle wanted to keep her case with her. Her jewellery box was in it, her night attire. Left her guarding it while she picked up the tickets, and not even a queue at the ticket office to kill five minutes of those four hours.
An hour on, and their cases weights around their necks, Cara booked them through. Freed, then, they sat in the cafeteria drinking tea, eating flavourless cake, just to fill a little time.
A dragging day. By five, Myrtle was sitting, turning the pages of a magazine; Cara was walking, attempting to shake off a Traralgon headache. When exercise wouldn’t move it, she bought a packet of aspros and a bottle of Coke.
Stood off at a distance, washing two pills down and watching Myrtle, wondering how she’d become who she’d become. She had no close women friends. She socialised with the wives of Robert’s friends, spoke to her neighbours, had at one time babysat for one of them, but never visited their houses. She went to church every Sunday, had joined some women’s money-raising church group – paid for her magazine with her emergency five-pound note she’d been carrying around so long the moths had probably been at it.
And she owned Amberley, which these days had to be worth big money. She and Robert had a joint bank account most of the lodgers’ rent was paid into. Myrtle could have walked down to the bank this morning and withdrawn enough to pay for tickets to Sydney and a taxi all the way to Melbourne, but she’d waited for Cara to travel home, collect her and bring her down here.
How had she managed to run a boarding house during the war years? She must have written cheques, paid bills, made bank withdrawals, caught taxies. With the men away, women had kept the county running, and when the war was won and the men came home, many women had refused to give up their new-won independence. Not Myrtle.
Maybe dependency was healthy. She never had a headache. She was overweight, but as fit as a Mallee bull. Didn’t drive, wouldn’t fly, dressed as she might have twenty years ago. Her body looked its age, her unlined face didn’t. No worries to make worry lines – maybe a few when Cara had been fourteen, fifteen. Round face, curling not quite grey hair, big brown innocent eyes – currently searching the crowd for her daughter.
Cara washed a third aspro down, and the bubbling Coke attempted to flush it out through her nose. Myrtle didn’t approve of girls drinking from bottles. Maybe Coke trickling from her nose was why.
Wished they’d all flown up last night. If Robert had asked her to fly, Cara would have gone, not to sit by Gran but to be a bird, to see what the world looked like from the clouds. One day she would. One day she’d drive a car too.
Myrtle now on her feet looking for her, Cara waved the empty bottle before placing it into a rubbish bin.
Cathy swore that Coke plus aspros made you drunk. Theory disproved. She walked a straight line back to Myrtle.
Or maybe not disproved. She asked a question she’d been wanting to ask for years.
‘How did you ever find the nerve to register me illegally, Mummy?’
Startled by her words, Myrtle looked over her shoulder. ‘People are listening, pet.’
‘They don’t know us from a bar of soap. You’re going to be stuck in a dog box with me all night, so you may as well tell me now.’
‘That college is changing you.’
‘A lot of things changed me. How did you do it?’
Again Myrtle glanced over her shoulder. ‘God meant you to be mine. He worked it out, He and Jenny.’
‘How?’
Myrtle frowned, and maybe wished she’d flown. She settled her hat on her curls and looked over her shoulder again.
‘You arrived in a hurry in the kitchen. I . . . slipped and fell. Jenny placed you into my arms and told me not to move from the floor. She . . . she dressed, she put her high heels on and walked up those stairs to fetch Miss Robertson, barely half an hour after giving birth to you. They didn’t doubt for one moment that you were mine, Miss Robertson and Mrs Collins.’
‘She must have been . . . tough.’
‘She was a strong girl, and quite wilful.’
‘What was she like, Mummy?’
‘Look in the mirror, pet.’
‘You’ve told me that. Was she a slut?’
‘What sort of girls are you mixing with down here?’
‘If she had four kids before she was twenty-one, she must have been a slut.’
‘She cared very deeply for her tall soldier. She was like a lost soul when he died.’
‘When did he die?’
‘In ’43. I believe it was May.’
‘And seven or eight months later, she was pregnant to Billy-Bob, which doesn’t say much for her, does it.’
They spoke then of Gran, of the funeral, of the borrowed black skirt and sweater. Myrtle suggested they buy something more suitable in Sydney.
‘What did you bring to wear?’
‘My black frock and coat.’
She’d clad herself for the trip in a brown frock and matching lightweight coat, a brown hat. Everything she owned looked fit for a funeral. Most of what Cara owned was pink or beige.
‘Did Jenny dress well?’
‘She did in the evenings when the band had an engagement.’
‘She sang with a band? What sort of a band?’
‘Three elderly gentlemen.’
‘Elderly?’
‘In their sixties. They picked her up from Amberley and drove her home. Now that’s enough about it, pet.’
‘It’s not, you know. Whatever I am, beneath my skin, is her and Billy-Bob Someone. I’ve got a brother somewhere, two sisters. How would you feel if you had sisters and a brother you didn’t know?’
‘I still think about Jimmy and wonder how he’s grown. He used to call me “my Myrtie”.’
‘If you got on so well with her, she’d probably like to see you. When this is over, could we go up there?’
‘She has no doubt made a new life for herself, pet. It would be wrong for us to disrupt it.’
‘Don’t I come into the equation? I’m going up to the funeral of an old lady who was no more to me than I was to her. John and Beth’s kids were her blood. She was fond of them. I was never more than “that girl”.’
‘Be kind, pet. She was an old lady who had lived a very hard life.’
‘So I heard – a few hundred times. Everyone at the college was saying, “I’m so sorry to hear about your grandmother’s passing,” and I felt like a fraud. All it means to me is movement forward for Daddy and Uncle John, like life is a big conveyer belt and Gran has been an immovable barrier keeping Daddy and John safe from old age. They’ve got no protection from it now, and that makes me scared.’
‘You come out with the oddest things, pet.’
Cara turned away to watch a family group to her left. They looked like a family, looked more like her than her cousins looked like her. They could have been her cousins.
‘Do you know if Jenny had brothers and sisters?’
‘She had a sister, Cecelia.’
‘How long did you know Jenny?’
‘Two years.’
‘How come you’ve got photographs of Jimmy but none of her?’
‘One of the lodgers owned a camera. He was fond of Jimmy.’
Old Mr Fitzpatrick had been fond of Jenny too. Until Cara’s fourth birthday, Myrtle had owned two photographs of her. She and Robert had decided it might save questions later if they destroyed them. They hadn’t foreseen a future where they might speak openly about the girl who had altered their lives.
A voice was calling their train, and gratefully Myrtle rose. ‘I’ve never known a day to go so slowly.’
‘Next time we have to catch a train, you’ll get here with five minutes to spare.’