Wind in the Wires (2 page)

‘How long has your family lived in Molliston, Jack?’

‘I was born there. My parents have been there since the twenties – not together. Mum lost her husband, Dad lost his wife – and then there was me.’

‘I can’t work out why anyone who managed to get away from one tin-pot little town would move back to another one,’ she said.

‘I get to see more of my folks. They’re no spring chickens.’

‘If not for Charlie’s broken arm, I’d be in Frankston now.’

‘He’s not your responsibility, Georgie.’

‘I know that.’

‘Is your mother planning to stay down there?’

‘She’s got a job. She won’t get one if she comes back here.’

‘I thought she got her husband’s insurance from the mill accident.’

‘She says it’s for Raelene and Donny, not for her.’

‘She’s his widow,’ Jack said.

‘She didn’t live with him, not since ’47. He lived with us and we looked after his kids.’

‘Does she pay much for Donny’s care?’

‘I don’t think she pays anything.’ She didn’t pay rent either. She worked for a friend at Frankston, and lived in two rooms behind her health resort, a three-minute walk from a beach – and she wanted Georgie to move down there with her.

She might too – if she could talk Charlie into trusting someone else in his shop. In March she’d be nineteen, and since a few weeks before her fourteenth birthday she’d been standing behind Charlie’s counter. She’d managed the shop single-handed for the three weeks he’d been in hospital and the old folks’ home.

He wasn’t her responsibility, but he was more grandfather than employer. He called her Rusty; she called him Charlie; and since his broken arm, he’d been paying her a full adult male’s wage – which could have been another reason why she wasn’t in Frankston. She was stuffing money into the bank, and if she continued stuffing it in, she’d be able to buy her own ute soon. In Frankston, she’d be lucky to get a job that paid half of what Charlie paid.

He was a problem. If he’d ever had any fear of authority, old age had discarded it. Since she’d started working for him, he’d been helping himself to any large note that landed in his cash drawer – taking back some of the money he’d lost during the depression, he said. It hadn’t concerned her until she’d started doing his bookwork. She did what she could. His ute’d had phantom brake linings last month.

If Jack knew how she balanced those books he wouldn’t be taking her home to meet his parents – who would read more into her agreeing to have Christmas dinner with them than she meant for them to read. Didn’t know why she had agreed, except this Christmas would be only the second of her life without Granny, and without Jenny, too, she couldn’t face the bedlam of Christmas with Elsie and Harry and their horde. They were like family, but had been more Granny’s family. She had raised Elsie.

Shouldn’t have agreed to go. She liked Jack, liked the way he’d adopted Charlie since he’d broken his arm. He’d tracked down Hilda, Charlie’s daughter, had found her widowed and living in Sydney with her daughter and son-in-law. The son-in-law told Jack that they’d try to get down to Willama. They hadn’t, but one of them had spoken to the hospital and asked them to find a place for Charlie in the old folks’ annex.

He might have been old enough – he was pushing ninety – but he didn’t consider himself old enough and had spent his days absconding, so Georgie kidnapped him and brought him home to his corner in the storeroom. Until the plaster was removed from his arm, Jack had taken him over to the police station to help him shower.

A good bloke, Jack Thompson. Had she been older, she might have liked him a lot more than she did.

‘That’s Dad’s old station,’ he said, pointing left as they broached the top of a hill and were too suddenly in the centre of a town.

MOLLISTON, POPULATION 450.

Just a tiny town, perched on top of a hill. Woody Creek had a larger population. Woody Creek land was flat. The town had space to sprawl. No sprawl in Molliston. Shops and houses clustered around a massive old gum tree growing on top of the hill. Georgie slowed to stare, then to circle the tree. No hotel.

‘Where to?’

‘Down the hill,’ he directed. ‘We’re a good mile out.’

‘The drunks sober up on their way home?’

‘That’s the idea,’ he said.

M
ILES
A
WAY

A
time of family, Christmas. Finding staff willing to work through the holidays wasn’t easy. Jenny had nothing better to do, and was so grateful to Veronica Andrews and her doctor partner she would have worked seven days a week for them without pay.

She’d known Vroni in Armadale, as a card-playing friend, and later as her saviour when she’d aborted two of Ray’s babies. She’d already had a daily battle to feed the ones she’d had – and she’d had no intention of tying herself to Ray with babies. Vroni had saved her life again by offering her a job and accommodation in the servants’ quarters behind the guesthouse – or saved her from Woody Creek.

In a bygone era, there had been five servants’ rooms built alongside a big old kitchen. Vroni’s doctor had turned two of them into one and set up a modern surgery there. He’d turned two more into comfortable bedrooms, and one into a modern bathroom. A few of his city colleagues recommended a week of sea air to a frantic female patient, or to the frantic mother of a patient. Every week or two a guest arrived in a taxi, feeling so unwell she was placed in isolation, out the back, where within a day or two she was feeling much better.

Jenny and Raelene, Ray’s seven-year-old daughter, lived in the western bedroom, beside the old kitchen. They used the bathroom when there was no guest in isolation, used Vroni’s when there was. Jenny delivered meals to those special guests, made their beds, and was compensated well for her tight mouth.

She’d thought nothing of living beside an abortion clinic until she’d run into Jim Hooper at Flinders Street Station. She thought about it now – but if not for Vroni, she wouldn’t have been at the station to run into Jim. It was Vroni who had talked her into allowing Raelene to meet Florence Keating, her natural mother.

Natural? Mothers nursed their kids through chickenpox, measles, sore throats, multiple colds. Mothers tucked their kids into bed at night, kissed them, changed the sheets when they wet the beds. They didn’t turn up seven years later and start calling themselves the natural mother.

‘Like it or not, kiddo, you need to pacify her or you’ll end up in court,’ Vroni had said. ‘Raelene knows you’re her real mother.’

Maybe she did, but she liked being treated like baby Jesus at the Keatings’. Jenny had left her with them for two hours in October. The Box Hill station was on the same train line as Ringwood, where Jim had told her he was living in a caravan behind Nobby’s house, an old army mate Jenny had met in Sydney the week she’d spent there with Jim and ten-month-old Jimmy. Nobby and his wife, Rosemary, had greeted her like a long-lost friend that first afternoon. Jim had kissed her hello; the visit had started out so well. It hadn’t continued well.

The night, at Flinders Street Station, when she’d sighted Jim’s head above the crowd, she’d thought Jimmy might be with him. He’d told her then that Jimmy was with his sister Margaret. She’d told him in Ringwood that she wanted to see their son.

‘I’m not in touch with them, Jen,’ he’d said.

‘But you see Jimmy?’

He hadn’t seen Jimmy since 1947. Margaret and her husband had adopted him a few months before Vern Hooper’s death. She’d done the wrong thing, then, she’d opened her mouth and let her tongue loose, but it had been like losing Jimmy a second time.

‘How could you let her adopt him? He’s our son. I gave him to you. I thought he was safe with you.’

And he’d withdrawn from her, had folded in on himself. She’d watched it happening, had seen his eyes grow distant, seen his big Hooper hands begin to tremble.

She’d seen Nobby’s reaction too, Rosemary’s.

He wasn’t well. At the station she’d thought he was. She’d got out of there fast, left without a word to anyone, afraid of what she’d done and hating him for his weakness and for allowing his dithering bitch of a sister to get her hands on Jimmy. Hated the Hooper name that day.

In the taxi Nobby’s house had been minutes from the station. It might have been a ten-minute walk if she’d known where she was going. She’d got hopelessly lost, had been late picking up Raelene and for two weeks after Ringwood she’d felt . . . adrift.

Then Nobby turned up at Frankston. He’d done most of the talking. He’d told her how he’d found Jim, where he’d found him, told her of Jim’s years of shock treatment, how his memory had been shot to hell by their electricity.

‘I thought he was well,’ she said. ‘He’d seemed well at the station.’

‘Our team had just won the premiership, Jen. He’s coming good. Most of the time he’s good. He runs my timber-yard office.’

‘How could he not have even seen his son since ’47?’

‘We thought the same thing a few years back. We tried to put him in touch with his family. He won’t have a bar of them.’

‘Is he all right now?’

‘As right as rain. The day you took off I got him on the booze. He likes a drink and it’s better for him than pills, or me and Rosemary reckon it is. He told me he wrote his last will and testament in ’47, leaving Jimmy and his money to you, then he tried to hang himself with his dressing-gown cord. He said his sisters and old man let him think his boy was with you – until his old man kicked the bucket. The sister had adopted Jimmy by then.’

‘How long has he been with you, Nobby?’

‘Anzac Day ’55.’

‘I saw him at a Melbourne hospital a year after the war ended. He didn’t know me. Where was he between then and when you found him?’

‘Hospitals. He doesn’t remember much about any of them. He was living behind a Chinese restaurant when we found him.’

‘His father would have left him money.’

‘He wouldn’t touch it if he had. He told us once he had his own money. If he has, he’s got no interest in it. It’s like he’s doing a bit of a balancing act on a tightrope right now, Jen. He still crashes off it from time to time, but these days we’ve worked out how to get him back up.’

‘Bless you, Nobby,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay away.’

‘Don’t you even go thinking about doing that. For a week after he saw you at the station, he was damn near doing cartwheels on his tightrope. He knew it was you when the taxi pulled up out front that day, and he lit up like a beacon.’

‘I can’t . . . I never could walk on eggshells, and not about Jimmy.’

‘He blames himself for losing your boy. Back during the war he used to say that you and Jimmy were the best things that ever happened to him. I was with him over there until I took a bullet in my leg. Most of us when we got letters from home would rip them open where we stood. He’d take off with his. He kept them on him too. We’d be sitting in a hole, no light, no moon, and he’d have his photos out, looking at them on a pitch black night, reading your letters in the dark. He loved you, Jen, and still does.’

‘I’ve never taken his ring off. Even when I was married to Ray, I never took it off. I would have waited the rest of my life for him, and his family knew it. They let me think that he was dead.’

Nobby had offered to drive her to Ringwood that day, to drive her home. She’d shaken her head. He’d kissed her cheek when he was leaving and told her to come around for dinner on Sunday.

She hadn’t planned to go back, not that day. But she’d lost Jimmy first, and she’d known Vern Hooper and his daughters. Margaret hadn’t been able to keep her hands off Jimmy when he’d been five months old, and the Jim she’d seen at that city hospital wouldn’t have had a chance against them.

She’d gone back on a Sunday in late November. Florence had wanted to give Raelene a little birthday party. She’d left her with them and found her way to Nobby’s house. It had been a good day. She hadn’t mentioned Jimmy or Woody Creek, not that day. Jim remembered the ring. She’d removed it, and he’d taken it from her hand to look at the engraving,
Jen and Jim
, 1942. He’d reached for a pair of glasses so he might see it more clearly.

‘They suit you,’ she’d said, and they did, they made him look like a professor. He’d never been the best-looking man in Woody Creek. Too tall, and not enough flesh to cover his bones. His cheekbones looked sharp, his long jaw as sharp. Didn’t know why she loved his face, but she did. And maybe he did still love her.

He’d walked out with her, walked to the corner, and would have walked further if she hadn’t told him to go back. He’d lost half of one leg in the war and his limp was bad.

She’d asked no questions about his missing leg, had tried not to look at his shoes, tried not to see Vern in his limp, in his face. His father had that same long jaw. Not Jim’s eyes though or his mouth, not his gentle ways.

She’d see him again tomorrow. Today she was playing carol singer cum waitress; Vroni playing hostess, not nursing sister; her doctor partner playing pianist instead of abortionist; and the guests all legitimate and over forty, other than a fourteen-year-old girl down here with her parents and wanting pudding and custard, not fruit salad, for sweets.

‘I don’t know why you wanted to come to this place,’ she said as Jenny continued on with her tray, leaving the family to argue about Christmas pudding.

Jenny watched her from a distance, her mind flitting to another fourteen-year-old girl eating Christmas dinner with her parents at Amberley.

*

Cara Jeanette, born to Jenny in ’44, handed at birth to Myrtle Norris, had turned fourteen on 3 October. She was eating roast chicken with all of the trimmings at a trestle table, in a Traralgon backyard, barely a hundred miles from Frankston as the crow flew.

She’d never heard of Jenny King or Jenny Morrison. She didn’t know she could blame her for her frizzy yellow-gold hair and atrocious fingernails, though this year she had become aware of how little she resembled her parents and cousins.

Her best friend, Rosie, was adopted. For a time, Cara had been convinced Myrtle and Robert had adopted her, which would explain why she looked different, but she’d asked and they’d said no, and whether she was or not, it wasn’t her biggest problem. A mother who looked and thought like her grandmother, and who refused to let her grow up, was her biggest problem.

Rosie, who was barely five months older than her, was allowed to wear makeup. And her mother had bought her a pair of boys’ black jeans. Cara had asked for a pair for Christmas and she’d got a new tennis racquet – a good one, but still boring. Uncle John and Aunty Beth gave her a gold necklet, which she might wear when she was about thirty. And Gran Norris! She’d knitted her a purple and blue striped sweater, the most despicable thing anyone had ever set eyes on, which Pete, Cara’s youngest cousin, named the Purple People Eater.

Since she’d unwrapped it after breakfast, Pete had been singing ‘Purple People Eater’, and by the time the table was set for dinner, he only had to look at Cara and threaten to open his mouth and she got the giggles.

He was thirteen, and not even one of those thirteen-year-old boys who suddenly take it into their heads to start growing. He looked about twelve, if he was lucky, and he was far too young for her to be giggling with. They’d always done it, though. Way, way back before Robert had got his job in Traralgon, way back when they’d eaten Christmas dinner around Amberley’s huge parlour table, when there had been a million reasons to giggle, or no reason at all except it was Christmas and there were presents. Myrtle and Aunty Beth had always separated them at the table. They’d been separated today, and poor Pete given the chair on Gran Norris’s left.

‘You’ve got a purple bruise on your arm, Gran,’ he said.

‘She’s got that cupboard too close to her bed,’ Gran accused. Cara bed, Cara’s cupboard. She’d been evicted from her room for Gran.

Uncle John and his entire family had driven down from Sydney yesterday. He and Beth had six kids, the two eldest already married. Paul, who had two little kids, had towed Uncle John’s caravan down. It was parked on the front lawn. The rest of the cousins were in tents on the back lawn. Uncle John and Aunty Beth were in the spare room.

It was fun, like being away on one of their family camping holidays, except for Gran, who didn’t approve of camping holidays, or Christmas dinners eaten in backyards.

She’d turned ninety this year and had been dying for as long as Cara had been alive, and no one was allowed to forget it. She’d brought along a shoe box full of pills to prove how close she was to death.

‘I’m ninety years old and expected to sit all day in a car for the pleasure of sharing my dinner with swarms of flies.’

‘And us, Gran,’ Pete said. He’d driven down with her and had had his fill of complaints before they’d got to Goulburn, so he said. There were a lot of miles between Goulburn and Traralgon.

Gran spent her life complaining or demanding, often doing both at the same time. Cara should have been the one complaining. She was the one who had lost her bed. Not that she minded sleeping in the tent with Pete, though the fun of queuing up to go to the toilet was wearing thin, with Gran on it for half an hour at each sitting. Two or three times a day one of the cars had to make a trip to the public toilets.

There were nineteen chairs around the trestle tables – kitchen chairs, outdoor chairs, fold-up camp chairs, and a high chair borrowed from next door for the baby, who was wearing a half-decent white cardigan that Gran had knitted. She’d knitted Pete half-decent socks, and the Purple People Eater for Cara. It was a statement, like saying, That will nark you, girl.

Gran liked Cara’s dad better than Uncle John. He didn’t see as much of her so didn’t talk back like Uncle John. She liked John’s kids better than Cara, who didn’t talk back, but didn’t kiss her every time she saw her either. She had whiskers on her chin, and smelled of camphor – and so did the Purple People Eater.

‘When are you bringing your family home where they belong, Robert?’ Gran carped.

Home, Amberley, where the dining-room table would have seated nineteen at a pinch. Traralgon’s table was hard-pressed to seat six, and no room to move around it when it did.

They’d never go home now. The school principal was retiring sometime next year and Robert, the vice principal, might get his job. If he did, they’d be stuck here forever.