Ripples on a Pond (45 page)

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ONE

B
arely a hint of dawn outside the window, the sky washed of colour, the city, unready yet to go about its new day, clinging to its blanketing mist.

Doves singing their monotonous coo-cooing song. Early risers, they owned Melbourne at dawn – shared it with the milkman, the paper boy – and that first tram, its aging bones groaning as it trundled by. Noisy old tram. It would wake this southern city to a new day Cara was not yet ready to face.

Still that same old night in Tracy's ward, the night sisters busy adjusting the tubes and bottles connecting that tiny motionless body to tenuous life. Soon the day sisters would come and this long night would fade into yesterday. But not yet. Tracy wasn't ready yet to become a part of yesterday. Nor was Cara ready for what the new day might bring.

Unmoving for hours, her bones mimicked those of the tram as she turned away from the window to again take her place on the chair beside the bed, to touch the tangle of dark curls, to brush a tiny hand with her index finger, backwards and forwards from fragile wrist to curled fingers, backwards and forwards.

Barely a shape of her beneath that sheet. Not enough of her. All of this long day Tracy had fought alone. A constant bustle of movement around her bed now, doctors fighting for her, nursing sisters.

And useless Mummy, with her useless arm and her useless tears.

Someone had given her a wad of tissues. Who? Where? She didn't know. Tissues always reminded her of Myrtle and her eternal handkerchiefs.

Watch over her, Mummy–

‘Mummy?'

Thought she'd heard that word. Looked at the still form in the bed.

Then he was beside her, holding on tight to Bunny Long-ears and to the nursing sister who had brought him to this room.

‘Be careful of Mummy's arm,' she warned him.

A mother needs two arms to hold. Cara would be X-rayed tomorrow, but for now, in this hiatus of time, one arm was enough to hold her boy.

And later, when more tears had been mopped by soggy tissues, when raggedy old Bunny Long Ears lay beside his sister, Robin asked that honest question which only a child dared to ask.

‘Will Tracy die like Nanny?'

‘She stayed alive all day for us, and all by herself, Robbie. Now she's got so many people helping her to stay alive. And she's got us too, and Bunny Long-ears.'

‘Why has she got those things on her for?'

A nursing sister told him what all of those things were for. She told him that they were giving his little sister some special strong air to breath and a big drink of water because she hadn't had a drink all day and was very thirsty.

And later. ‘Did your arm get broken?'

‘It's just sore, Robbie. Did Papa come with you?'

‘Uncle John made him go to bed,' Robin said.

‘Why didn't he make you go to bed?'

‘I did . . . but . . . but I woke up all the time.'

‘Did Uncle John drive you in?'

‘He can't drive our toy car. He said for me to just come.'

‘Who drove the car?'

‘The man that you said . . . that you said it was his car.'

She rose from her chair. ‘Where is he?'

‘He said he would wait for me . . . in . . . where the nurse's telephone is.'

‘Sit here, Robbie. Hold her hand very, very gently and tell her that you're waiting for her to wake up so she can play with you.'

‘She can't hear me when she's asleep.'

‘Tell her that Bunny Long-ears is waiting too,' Cara said. ‘I'll only be a minute.'

*

He was where Robin had said he'd be. She saw his back, his long, jean-clad legs, his hair, greying. He turned to her footsteps, and she spoke his name. He spoke her name.

They stood separately, but face to face.

‘He needed to see that his sister had been found,' Morrie said.

‘Thank you.'

‘Your arm,' he said.

‘It doesn't matter,' she said.

Standing in the long corridor, the night staff leaving, the day staff arriving, Cara's eyes followed one arrival to Tracy's door.

She had to go back, but there were words that needed to be said, words that must come from her.

The wrong time. The wrong place, but when would there be a right time and place?

‘Nothing matters, Morrie. Only they matter. Only keeping them safe.'

‘Is she safe?'

‘They don't know. There's nothing of her and those murdering bastards drugged her.' She looked at the door. ‘I have to go to her.'

‘I'll wait,' he said.

She took two steps towards that door, then turned and offered him her one functioning hand, and he took it and held it between his own. No hand now to mop the sudden rush of tears, she lifted her chin so gravity might stem their flow.

‘I can't . . .' she said. ‘I can't . . . I don't want to wait alone, Morrie.'

*

Barely a breath of breeze disturbed the air in Woody Creek, barely a bird sang his early-morning song.

The hens had left their perches but the rooster, afraid to disturb the silence of Gertrude's acres, sought the house of yesterday, stalking there, high-stepping onto fallen chicken wire, high-stepping back.

The small water tank lay on its side, the last of its water leaked away in the night. The iron chimney lay flat on its back beside the big tank, still clinging precariously to its heavy load. Its stand was blackened and still smouldering. It might support the tank for another day.

Nothing remained of the house. Wisps of smoke, that was all, wisps rising from the blackened rubble to become lost in the mist of new morning.

A wasteland. Blackened corrugated iron lay where it had fallen. Gertrude's iron-framed bed, always black, was blanketed that morning by distorted roofing iron. Ash where her floor had been, where her walls had been, where her climbing rose had been. Grey-white ash.

The brick chimney, built by a master bricklayer from Albania, stood lonely, blackened too – other than its topmost bricks. As the sun crept up above that hump of trees to the east, those bricks glowed ember red.

Hot day on the horizon.

A long, hot day.

*

For an hour or two, Harry Hall had tried to sleep on Lenny's donated bed; its mattress felt padded with bricks.

Elsie was sleeping. She'd been a howling mess when they'd put her to bed. He lay beside her until seven, then rose to stretch the kinks from his lanky frame. He could place his palms flat on the ceiling of Teddy's bungalow – a solid-enough ceiling. Its floors didn't creak as he crept out to the kitchen-cum-sitting room.

They hadn't planned to move in until after Christmas, but no way could he have left Else down there last night.

He'd parked his ute out the front. Walked out to it. Not a soul moving on the street. Woody Creek never woke early, and half of the town had been down at Gertrude's a few hours ago. He drove through the sleeping town, listing in his mind what he had to fetch in from the old place. His mattress topped the list.

His wasn't the first car down there. He backed into his driveway, then stood a while looking across the paddock to where a bunch of strangers moved between the brick chimney and leaning tank, stringing cop tape.

He rolled a smoke, stuck it behind his ear, then went inside to retrieve the worn-out mattress he'd never had any trouble sleeping on. He gathered up an armful of clothing, a few items from the kitchen. There was still a lot to move. He unplugged the television and loaded it, then filled a carton with the contents of the cutlery drawers, packed half a dozen plates and mugs into it, and the contents of the old fridge. He'd never packed up a house before; hadn't had much to pack up before this house. The carton rattled, but he carried it intact to his ute, then lit his smoke and walked across the paddock. A stranger asked him his business.

Harry pointed with his fag back towards his house. ‘My chooks lay more eggs when they're fed, mate.'

The bloke looked as if he'd like to turn him back, but didn't, and Harry went about the business of feeding the chooks. Had to fetch fresh water for them from his own tank, couldn't get near Georgie's. Unless someone propped it up soon, it would topple on their cop-beribboned site.

Chooks had no respect for the strangers. The chicken-wire fence, which for years had kept them in their own backyard, was no barrier now. They walked and pecked where they would, while Harry raided their nests. Only fifteen eggs. Elsie would have found more. She knew their nesting places.

Eggs in the feed basin, he did a circuit of the blackened site, looking at the old iron chimney, the bane of his life for a lot of years. The stove had settled upright. The refrigerator hadn't. Buckled, blackened, it lay on its face.

He'd been racking his brains for the reason for that fire. Near dawn, he'd settled on faulty wiring. From day one there'd been a problem with the switch or ceiling fixture in Gertrude's old kitchen. Globes had never glowed long there.

He glanced at two blokes scraping ash in about the right place to have been Margot's bedroom, and the thought of how that girl had died raised goose bumps on his arms. He'd tried to get to her. His singed hair and eyebrows were testament to that. As was his singed forearm. Hadn't noticed that last night. Noticed the blisters in bed this morning, and they'd raised memories of his old dad's hand. He'd come home singed one night, way, way back when a neighbour's house had burnt, and two little kids Harry had played with had been burnt in it.

Back in those days, folk had buried their dead and moved on with what they'd managed to save. These days, there were experts to work out the hows and the whys of fire; how those who had died in it had died. Not that it altered one damn thing – other than maybe for the insurance companies. And when had insurance money brought back the dead?

Gertrude had never trusted electricity, had never wanted it. If she was out there somewhere, she'd be blaming those wires. Every light in the house had been switched on last night, inside and out. The wires must have overheated; they'd probably been smouldering when he and Elsie had gone home to bed. He should have smelt them smouldering.

Thank Christ we got Georgie out. Thank Christ for that much, he thought.

*

Georgie lay on her back in the room Lorna Hooper had for years named her own, an eastern room. Her face was turned to the window, her one good eye watching the shadow on the veranda grow as the sun rose higher.

She could hear Jen and Jim in the kitchen speaking in whispers, could smell toast toasting. They'd slept for two or three hours before Harry and Georgie had woken them with the news. They hadn't gone back to bed.

Woody Creek woke slowly to news of the tragedy, those in the know passing on what they knew to those who had slept through the fire siren. By nine thirty, the two main streets were buzzing with the news: in the butcher's shop, where women ordered a leg of pork for Christmas; in the newsagency, where more papers were sold that morning. Not in Charlie's. His green doors remained padlocked.

By midday, clad in a pair of Jenny's black slacks that stopped four inches short of her ankles, and in her own green top with the lurex pattern woven around the neckline, Georgie sat on her borrowed bed, sorting through the contents of the dressing table's top drawer. The green top had been in it, a twenty-seventh birthday present from Cara, used long ago to wrap Jack Thompson's nautilus shell. Itchy-foot's thirteen small leatherbound diaries had been in that drawer, and the heart-shaped pendant Jack had given her for her nineteenth birthday. She gave it and its chain a polish with the corner of a bedsheet, then, fingers working blind at its fiddly hook and clip, she got it clipped at her throat. Hadn't worn it in years. Hadn't worn it more than two or three times in her life. When everything else is gone, we cling to junk we discarded yesterday, she thought.

She was wearing borrowed knickers, a borrowed bra – Jenny's knickers, Trudy's bra. Still barefoot. Jenny's shoes were too small, Trudy's too big. No matter. She wasn't going anywhere, not right now. Hadn't wandered around barefoot since she'd been a kid in Armadale. Too much chook dung, too many prickles, on Granny's land. Jen and Jim's floors were carpeted. Carpet feels good underfoot.

She hadn't slept. Couldn't tune her mind into sleep. Kept shaking her head every time she thought of Margot, denying the reality of it. She allowed her mind to think of her lost books, her rubbish-tip set of encyclopaedias, a little out of date, but old information never goes out of date. She'd miss them. They'd taught her a lot.

All gone. Everything.

Not her city bankbooks. Seven of them, rubber-banded together in the drawer.
Gina Morgan
's on top.

The Christmas of '58 Jack had introduced her to his parents as Georgie. ‘Georgina,' his mother had said. ‘You look like a Gina.' That's what had started Jack on it.

She opened Gina Morgan's book, then the others. She'd opened those accounts during a long weekend she'd spent in Melbourne with Cara, and for twelve months Cara had done the rounds of the banks each week, paying ten pounds of Charlie's mouse money into each account. They'd rarely been touched since.

When was the last time she'd handled those books? The date was written there. She'd made small withdrawals from each account the last time she'd driven Jenny and Raelene down to an appointment with the court-appointed social worker. Wasted effort.

The framed mug shot of Laurence George Morgan, Jenny's water-pistol bandit, had somehow ended up beneath the lining paper of that top drawer. Couldn't remember placing him in there. Hadn't thought about him in years; hadn't looked at his mug shot in more years.

She looked at him now, remembered the morning Jenny had presented her with that framed newspaper mug shot, with her porridge. Four years old at the time and she'd wanted a father. Everyone else had a father. Margot had two. Jimmy's father had also lived in a picture frame, but she'd liked hers best. Thought he'd been a famous movie star. Lots of movie stars had their photographs in newspapers. Laurie Morgan had been famous for robbing banks. She found that out in Armadale, when she'd removed the back from the frame and read all about him.