Jacaranda Blue (6 page)

He didn't know what they were doing, it looked like they were playing rudy trampolines on the bed, but one night he'd wanted to play and his mother had kicked him out to a bed down the other end of the passage.

She was the boss at the shop, and at home, but it was his father who made him work at filling shelves. ‘Teach him responsibility,' he said. ‘I worked with Dad from when I was fourteen, and it didn't do me any harm.'

Didn't do him much good either, Thomas thought. Weak bastard.

His parents couldn't stand the sight of each other, but they spent every day together. They went to church together, crapped on at parties together, saving up all their hate until they got home. Then they screamed all night.

He didn't listen any more. The same shit got said, year after year. It got boring after a while.

His old man slept in the sleep-out now, and his old lady tossed down pills and whinged about him sleeping in the sleep-out. She looked about sixty. If he'd been his old man, he would have been sleeping out in the sleep-out too, or sleeping some place else. His old man was only forty-seven, but he looked fifty.

Saint Stell wasn't too fat, or too grey. ‘Wow!' he said. ‘Radical.' She hadn't screamed, or put up much of a fight. She'd sort of flaked, accepted his visit as she might have the coming of the holy ghost.

He giggled.

With her head under the Packard, he'd been able to watch himself in the paintwork. It was something else, like doing it in front of a mirror. He hadn't wanted it to end, and he'd lasted longer than he ever had with Kelly.

‘What are you laughing about, Tommy?'

‘Just thinking of scones,' he said. ‘How long it takes them to cook.'

‘You can cook something for dinner tonight, if you like. Go home early and get it started.'

‘Hire yourself a maid.'

‘You used to like cooking. You used to make biscuits with Aunty Stell.'

‘I used to like a lot of shit,' he muttered, then added, ‘I might just knock you up a big batch of scones and surprise you.' Again he laughed, and Marilyn laughed with him.

Mrs Wilson put the magazine down, paid for her purchases and left as two more customers came in. With the supermarket and the liquor store, his parents had the town wrapped up. If you looked at the average hick in Maidenville, most of their money went on food, drink and smokes, he thought, as he filled two more shelves, waiting, waiting, until his mother got busy checking out an old dame with a trolley full of pet food, and his father was tied up selling grog, then he walked to the telephone and dialled Templeton's number without even looking at the numbers he'd written on his wrist.

‘Hello,' Martin Templeton said.

Thomas stood blowing into the phone until the image of the fat old fool, standing there, going red in the face, got to him. He had to cover the mouthpiece while he giggled.

‘Hello. Who is this? Who is there?'

Thomas knew old Templeton wouldn't recognise his voice, he was past recognising much of anything. He wanted to heckle him. Say something. No fun in it, unless you did something. He blew a raspberry.

‘Templeton here. Who is this?'

‘Templeton?' Thomas said, keeping his voice low and using his American accent. ‘Ah yes. Are you the Templeton on the main road, sir?'

‘Yes – '

‘Then you'd better get off because there's a road train coming through fast,' Thomas said.

The old bastard slammed the phone down.

‘Got you, fat stuff. Got you a beauty – and I'll get you sooner or later, Aunty Stell.'

Stella had been aware of the red light on the dashboard for minutes, but had not realised its significance. The windows were down, allowing the wind to whip her long hair, knot it, cleanse it. And she had felt cleansed because she had found a focus. Escape.

The car was different to the Ford. Things were in different places. ‘Fuel gauge?' she said, and her foot sought the brake. As her father said, it was dynamite. A touch and the tyres grabbed, but they were on the narrow bitumen – if not, she may have lost control, rolled the car, ended it all on the Dorby Highway. Carefully now, she pulled off to the side and turned off the motor.

The hum, the noise of the wind, the grey blur of passing land had lulled her, allowing her mind to move away to a future somewhere, far, far away from Maidenville. Perhaps she would have flown as far as Sydney, driven east until stopped by the ocean, but flight had been stopped by a red light.

Her father had mentioned filling the tank. She'd forgotten. Jennison's service station must have been closed last night when he returned from the funeral, otherwise the tank would have been filled then.

The problem of fuel forced her mind back to grapple with the moment. There was probably enough in the tank to get her to Dorby. Her father said the car went on the smell of an oily rag – but she had no money to buy more if she made it that far. She never carried money, hadn't for years. Her father carried the money. He paid the bills. She had accounts at the department store, and at the butchers, and at the supermarket. If she went to a fete, her father handed her money to spend, as he had since she was five years old.

Long ago she had suggested to him that she might have a credit card. Everyone used them. Marilyn had bought an expensive red racing bike for Thomas before Christmas, ordering it from Sydney; she'd paid for it with her credit card, just gave the number over the telephone. Bonny always bought the boys' clothing on hers, but the minister didn't believe in credit cards.

‘It encourages living beyond one's means, Daughter. In my situation, I see the harm this can create. Too often young lives have been ruined by their greed for more. I have seen families split asunder by credit cards. If you require money, you may come to me. When have I denied you your heart's desire, Daughter?'

Not since the day she asked for money for a pair of jeans.

Denim jeans. Everyone was wearing them. The new jean shop had just opened in Main Street and –

 

She was twenty-eight. They had buried precious Angel on the Monday, and it was Bonny's birthday barbecue on the Saturday. Martin had said it was too soon to go out, but she was going anyway, and Bonny said that everyone would be wearing jeans.

Her mother had never allowed Stella to wear trousers, but she was dead, and her rigid reign was over. Stella wanted a pair of blue denim jeans.

Her father had shaken his head, so she'd bought two metres of denim and a pattern from the department store and she put it on his account. The jeans were baggy, and they looked homemade. She had wanted them to be tight, like Bonny's, but she wore them to the barbecue and she drank two fast glasses of wine.

Steve Smith and his band had been playing there that night, and somehow, blame the wine, blame the blue jeans, or the freedom, Stella began singing with Steve. Everyone said she sounded terrific, that she had lifted the band. ‘You ought to cut a record,' they'd said.

‘How about it? I mean, joining us. We could use a female lead,' Steve said when the night was over, but she'd shaken her head. He was so much younger, and his guitarist and his drummer were only boys – barely twenty. Then she'd accepted another glass of wine and Bonny had said, ‘Do it,' so Stella said ‘Yes. Okay then, Steve. I mean, why not?' And she had another glass of wine to seal the agreement.

A dark door had closed behind her, and now a very fine portal was swinging wide open; Stella, feeling wildly wonderful, ran through it, just to find out what was on the other side.

‘It is not fitting, Daughter, this caterwauling all night with that long-haired lout. This driving all over the country with three males, and unchaperoned. It's not fitting at all for one in your particular situation, and so soon after your dear mother's death.'

‘But, Father, I am paid to sing. It's wonderful to be paid for doing what I enjoy, and to be able to buy what I want. I have few enough talents, and I want to sing. I want to live my own life, earn my own money.'

‘Do I not pay for your needs? You smite me to the heart with this late desire for independence – and will you take those damnable trousers off and turn that damnable recording off? Must it play night and day? Since your dear mother died, I have grown accustomed to a silent house.'

‘I have to learn the song before Saturday,' she'd said to him, but the borrowed tape-recorder moved into her room and she kept the volume low. It was her first rebellion, and too long placed on hold.

Three months passed before she stopped gallivanting around with the band to concentrate her energy on the church choir – a small enough sacrifice if it might buy her the rest of the week.

Through the long years of precious Angel's illness, Stella had, in the privacy of her own room, penned tales of love, spilling the self that sheltered within to paper, freeing that self from Angel, God and Martin Templeton. She'd begun typing her tales on the minister's ancient Royal, and posting her compositions away to the women's magazines. For several years, her writing had kept her both busy and happy, until one magazine had posted a cheque instead of the usual rejection.

Ron Spencer cashed that cheque at his supermarket, and with her ill-gotten gains, Stella had gone shopping. She bought six copies of the magazine and two pairs of fashionably tight jeans from the jean shop.

But keeping a secret in Maidenville was like trying to hide a pumpkin in a bowl of undergrown apricots. Martin Templeton, the omniscient, bore down on Stella, a copy of the magazine in his hand. ‘Daughter! Daughter! What is this I see?' Stella cringed from his disapproval. She bowed her head and clenched her hands and she waited. ‘What you must ask yourself, Daughter, is what would God think of time wasted on this . . . this . . . this puerile trash . . . this . . . '

She had not been expecting praise. Praise had always been a stranger in the minister's house, but she had seen no wrong in her writing, and if she'd captured rotund little Doctor Parsons in his summer-winter uniform of baggy check shorts and wide-brimmed gardening hat, wouldn't he have been amused by her description . . . even delighted? Wouldn't he have shaken her hand and said, ‘Keep that chin high, Mousy Two'?

‘I . . . I didn't use your name, Father. I didn't for a moment consider using your name. See.'

‘Does that not, in itself, tell you, Daughter, that inside your heart of hearts, you were ashamed of what you had written? You cannot hide shame from God. Destroy it. Shred it, and swear that you will pen no more of this . . . this . . . ' Words deserted him.

Stella took the magazine he had crushed in his huge hand; she smoothed it, looked at the illustration. It was just an innocent love story, the tale of a boy and a girl and an odd little detective. Of ‘Silver Sand', by Lea S. Temple.

Lea S. Temple. Weeks had been spent in choosing the name. She'd practised it, over, and over, had finally printed it on the cover of a short novel packed ready to post away to Mills and Boon. They paid well for romance. Perhaps enough – this magazine had symbolised her true beginning. It was the promise that there could be a future for her. Publication. Fame. Fortune. Eventual flight from Maidenville.

‘Destroy it, Daughter. No good will come of it.'

Her hands were no longer driven by her will, but by his. She felt them grow hot, burn as they had that day . . . that other day. As from a great distance, she watched the scorched things slowly tear two pages from the magazine. Twin craven cowards, they shredded the pages, handed him the pieces.

‘Do you have more of this?'

Head down, she nodded. ‘Then let us be rid of it now, Daughter,' he said, tossing her dreams into the open fire.

The cheap paper burned to ash before she walked upstairs to her room.

Her manuscript was in the top drawer of her desk. She picked it up knowing her hands would give it to him, let him place it on the coals. Palms would join and she'd mouth the words of a prayer while her future burned. Then she thought of Doctor Parsons and her chin lifted. High. Higher. The heavy bottom drawer of her dressing-table was eased silently to the floor and into the cavity she dropped the novel, safe with the six magazines and many exercise books, safe with the postcard Ron had sent her from Bondi, and his friendship ring with the blue stones. The drawer slid back on its runners, she closed it with her foot and stood dusting guilty hands. Cool hands. Even cold. From her desk she took a writing pad and, after scanning it briefly, she walked downstairs and handed it to the minister.

Several years passed before she discovered Angel's fine metal knitting needles and a bag of knitting wool.

 

While others of her age lost their waists and energy in breeding the new generation of bored Maidenville youth, Stella remained slim and active. Perhaps there was something to be said for virginity after all.

Her garden had become her child, and a wilful ward too. It began when a teacher sent her home one day with a handful of bean seeds to grow in a jar. She had placed hers in the garden, and daily watched the miracle of birth, and later of death. Thereafter she carried seeds home from other gardens, and she learned early to nip cuttings from overhanging shrubs. Each birthday, Doctor Parsons had bought her a bulb to plant, and in later years he had become adventurous, ordering exotic bulbs for her from Sydney. The little doctor loved her garden.

Then Steve Smith, who now owned Gardening Supplies down the bottom of Crane Street, started bringing her his sickly discards, and Stella's friends offered their dying plants when, after a meagre blooming, they curled up their leaves in suicidal pact. Stella nursed them all back to health, and found space for them in her garden. Forty years of undisciplined planting had created a wilderness, where narrow gravelled paths wended their way through the masses of blooms to tiny hidden lawns, and to bird baths. Large and hardy shrubs protected their tender relatives. Rare bulbs sent up their stalks to bloom, and the common geraniums, massed behind them, raised their own expectations higher.

Martin, who had a penchant for order in all things, could find no reason to disapprove of the disorderly garden, for each Sunday – summer, winter, autumn or spring – Stella filled his church with blooms. She picked bouquets for each new mother, and she knitted her colourful clown dolls for their offspring.

Every babe her father baptised received such a toy. Soft cuddly things, with contoured faces, each one was unique; they were coveted by those outside the Anglican congregation, and the few Stella knitted for the church fete sold as soon as they hit the stall.

It was the January of her thirty-sixth birthday and she'd been seated in the garden, watching the birds while adding the finishing touches to a large clown – a gift for Bonny's fifth son. Because of their friendship, this doll was receiving special attention – the eyes were wide and innocent, the smile wry, the hair a carrot red. It was almost done when the minister had come to stand before her. ‘For the Davis child,' he'd said.

‘Yes, Father – and I believe it looks a little like him.' She'd held the clown up for inspection, smiling at its cheeky face.

This morning her father was not in a smiling mood.

‘Your thirty-sixth birthday today, Daughter,' he said.

‘Don't remind me.'

His ‘Yes' was long and thoughtful. He stood on, studying her attire until she looked up from her sewing.

‘Is there something you wish to discuss with me?'

‘Your dear mother has been dead eight years. It seems less.'

‘The years are flying,' she replied. A long silence grew, an uncomfortable silence she had to fill. ‘My jacarandas have grown so tall. It seems like only yesterday I planted them and worried that the frost would kill them.'

‘Yes. Yes. I have been meaning to speak to you about your mother.' He coughed, looked over his shoulder to the house and to his bedroom window, then he took two paces back. ‘Your mother's wardrobe.'

‘Perhaps I should pack her things up for the opportunity shop. I've been wanting to for some time.'

‘No!' His head was shaking adamantly. ‘Indeed, you should not!' He stepped from foot to foot, seeking the correct approach. A bumbling great ox of a man, Martin had measured six foot five before age bowed his shoulders. Thankfully, Stella had not inherited his excessive height, nor his heavy bones, but his hair was as thick as her own, it curled as her own hair curled. Perhaps his too had once been the same shade of gold. She couldn't remember him other than grey.

‘What you must begin to ask yourself, Daughter, is – ' He coughed again, uncomfortable with personal issues, and he looked towards heaven for inspiration to continue. ‘Having now reached middle age, perhaps the time has come to ask yourself, would God deem that . . . that outfit suitable for a woman of your years, and your position in the community?'

She'd been wearing jeans that day, and a light T-shirt, through which she could see the shape of her small breasts – and worse. Her nipples were large. A bra did little to camouflage them. When she went out, she used two tissues, placed strategically, but at home, in her garden, she had seen no need for tissues. She blushed, folded her arms across her breasts. ‘I'm comfortable in jeans, Father.'

‘Around the yard. Convenient for some of the more strenuous tasks you take upon yourself around the garden perhaps; however, I know your dear mother felt that trousers on a female encouraged unladylike posture. She could never have been accused of unladylike posture – in her early years.'