Wind in the Wires (7 page)

B
ORN ON A
K
ITCHEN
F
LOOR

C
ara should have been home by half past ten. She tried to creep in at one-thirty, but the back door was locked and Robert and Myrtle were waiting for her. They caught her with her face painted and wearing Rosie’s old jeans. Myrtle looked as if she’d been howling for hours. Robert, dressing-gown clad, thinning hair standing on end, looked furious.

‘Where have you been until this hour?’

‘It’s none of your business, is it? You’re not my father, so you’ve got no right to tell me what I can do.’ She dodged around them, went to her room and slammed the door.

Robert opened it. ‘You’ll see how much right I’ve got,’ he said. Then he told her she wouldn’t be leaving the house for a month, other than to go to school.

Since Christmas Cara had known he wasn’t her father. Until they’d driven up to Sydney at Easter time, she’d believed she was a stray pup they’d taken in and given a good home. She knew now that Myrtle was her mother and that she’d played around with someone while Robert was overseas during the war.

They’d gone to Amberley to check the fat manager’s rent books and to have a new gas stove installed in the lodgers’ kitchen. Left to her own devices for most of one day, Cara had checked out a few things with Mrs Collins, one of two long-term lodgers. She’d been a teacher, so Cara had woven a story about how she had to write an essay about being born during wartime. It wasn’t a complete lie, except they’d written that essay two months ago. Anyway, she’d said that one of her New Australian friends was going to write about being born while her mother and grandmother hid from the Germans in a muddy gutter.

‘Do you know anything interesting about when I was born?’ she’d said. Mrs Collins had told her she’d been born at Amberley, in the kitchen.

‘Your mother looked after the little boy of a young war widow, a singer who was working out of town. She arrived very late one night and found your mother in the kitchen, you in her arms.’

Which may have been almost as interesting as being born in a muddy gutter if it hadn’t proved that her mother had cheated on her father while he’d been fighting the Germans – which was more or less what Sarah North, her first best friend, had originally said. Sarah hadn’t said Myrtle wasn’t Cara’s mother, just that Robert wasn’t her proper father.

And it was sickening seeing Myrtle pretending that butter wouldn’t melt in her plummy mouth, and seeing Robert with his arm around her, when he knew she’d cheated on him. Cara hated her for it, and hated Robert for letting Myrtle make a fool of him.

She shouldn’t have done what she’d done, shouldn’t have done it on the way back to Traralgon, definitely shouldn’t have done it in heavy traffic. She’d done it anyway. They’d been about ten miles from Amberley when the boiling inside her had bubbled up and spouted out of her mouth.

‘So, who was it you were you playing around with during the war, Mum?’ That’s what she’d said.

Myrtle had swung around as if there were a rattlesnake in the back seat. Robert had sideswiped the car beside him and almost lost control of the wheel. They’d had to pull over to the side of the road and swap names with the other driver, who had been as mad as a hornet. His new car was scraped all the way down one side.

She could have caused a serious accident and killed everyone. The shock had kept her quiet for the next hundred miles, until they were out of the car in front of public toilets, which stank, so it was the perfect place to attack both of them.

‘Mrs Collins told me, so you may as well admit it.’

They hadn’t. They hadn’t spoken to her or to each other. It was the worst trip of her life. They’d planned to stop in Albury for the night but Robert had just kept on driving and driving. They’d got to Traralgon after midnight.

And she’d nicked off the next morning while they were sleeping, had breakfast at Rosie’s and stayed there all day. Then Dino Collins, who Robert couldn’t stand, had come around. He was still after her – not that that stopped him going with other girls. It stopped Cara from going with anyone. He’d belted up Graham Jones from school, just for walking home with her one afternoon.

She hadn’t let Dino kiss her until after the Sydney trip, after he’d given her a ride home from Rosie’s on the back of his motorbike, which she only did to nark Robert, who hated motorbikes worse than he hated Dino Collins. He saw her kiss him too. That was the night they’d stopped giving her pocket money.

Everything had gone from bad to worse since. Robert drove her to school each morning, and as soon as he walked into the building, she’d walked out the gate. She’d gone riding once with Dino, only once. He’d ridden out to the bush and started kissing her, like shoving his tongue halfway down her throat while trying to shove his hand up her school uniform. She’d had to kick him to get away, and lucky she’d been wearing her school shoes. He’d roared off on his bike and left her to walk three miles home.

He was crazy. All of the kids knew it. They said it was because his parents had drowned or something when he was a kid and he’d had to live with an old bat of an aunty who had only taken him in because his parents had left him pots of money and she got some of it for looking after him. He’d told them that getting money out of her was like squeezing out her blood – a spoonful at a time – though it would have taken more than a spoonful to pay for his motorbike and his riding gear.

Cara spent a lot of time thinking about money, now that she had none to think about. On the days she wagged school she wandered around the shops dreaming about what she’d spend her money on – if she’d had any.

They’d still fed her at home, though she’d stopped eating with them. She ate in her bedroom, so Myrtle stopped tidying her bedroom.

Their cold war had turned into a hot war after the midyear exams. She’d failed Maths and Geography and she’d never failed a subject in her life, and it hurt enough without Robert getting stuck into her.

Then a few days ago Dino’s aunty had kicked him out for trying to starve her ancient old cat to death while she was in hospital.

He came around to Rosie’s on the Sunday and said he was going up to Sydney. And like a fool, Cara said she wished she could go up to Sydney, and all of a sudden they were all going up to Sydney.

‘We’ll need money,’ Dino said.

‘Cara has got piles of it in the bank,’ Rosie said.

She had a huge bank account, and every week there was more in it, because part of the money from the lodgers’ rent got paid into it – for when she went to university, Robert said. As if.

‘I can’t get it out without Mum or Dad’s signature,’ she said.

‘You can copy it,’ Rosie said.

Which she could. Myrtle’s was easy. She’d forged it on absent notes for school, though doing it at a bank was more illegal than a note for a teacher. If she was going to do something illegal, it would be easier to take Robert’s wallet and Myrtle’s emergency five-pound note. Her handbag lived behind the sitting-room door and Robert’s wallet, when it wasn’t in his pocket, lived on the fridge with his car keys.

Except she wasn’t a thief, and she might want to go to Sydney, but not if Dino Collins was a part of the deal.

He didn’t even feel pain like normal people. She’d been at Rosie’s the day he’d cut
HATE
into the knuckles of his left hand with a razor blade, then rubbed black biro into the cuts, which he’d said was how the crims in jail did it.

Rosie had wanted him to do Coop’s name on her shoulder, in a heart. She felt pain. One cut, one bead of blood, and she’d changed her mind.

Cara went to school that week, except on Friday, after lunch. They were supposed to be leaving for Sydney on Saturday night and everything she owned needed washing. Since she’d stopped speaking to her parents, Myrtle had stopped washing her clothes.

‘At least sort the lights from the darks, pet.’ Myrtle stood at the laundry door offering instruction.

‘You can do it if you like,’ Cara snapped.

She didn’t like, so Cara tossed the lot in, turned on the machine, then walked down to the bank with the best of half-a-dozen forged withdrawal forms.

And when she got there, she couldn’t pass it over the counter. Ripped it into tiny bits and scattered the bits as she walked home.

She was ironing in the kitchen when Robert came in. He kissed Myrtle, put his car keys and wallet on the fridge and went to the bathroom to shower. Cara didn’t speak to him. She hadn’t spoken to him for a week.

And as if he’d care if she was there or not. A week after she was gone they’d both forget she’d ever been born. She was going to Sydney and when she got there, she’d go out to Uncle John’s place and live with them.

The cases were stored in the garage. She found her own and carried it through the house.

‘What do you need with that, pet?’ Myrtle asked.

‘I’m going to Sydney.’

‘Don’t start that foolishness again.’

‘He’s the fool,’ Cara said. She fetched her ironing from the kitchen and tossed it into her case, shoved in the bits that hung over the edges and attempted to close it.

‘Robert!’

He came from the bathroom, clad in trousers and singlet, his hair still wet from the shower. He didn’t stand in the doorway with Myrtle. He walked into the bedroom, picked up the case, emptied what was in it to floor and bed, then returned to the bathroom to finish shaving, and he took the case with him.

‘I’ll go in what I’m wearing then,’ Cara yelled.

‘I wouldn’t place my last ten bob on that,’ Robert yelled back.

‘You’re not my father and you can’t tell me what to do!’

‘I wouldn’t place my last ten bob on that either.’

She didn’t have ten bob to bet with. She didn’t have five bob. Hated Myrtle for cheating on him, hated him more for being fool enough to let her get away with it. Wanted to get Dino to cut
HATE
into her knuckles – and
THEM
into her other hand.

‘Hang up those clothes,’ he said as he walked by with her case, walked outside to the garage with it.

She picked up a handful of clothing and chased him, pitching pants and shirts at him. Myrtle collected the scattered garments. She was howling. Robert looked angry – and silly. She didn’t often see his skinny old white arms sticking out of a baggy singlet. He was over sixty and he looked every year of it when he wasn’t wearing a shirt and tie.

‘Hang up your clothing then come out to the kitchen and help you mother with dinner.’

‘I want my case!’

‘Tell her, Robert.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘That we’ve got this crazy idea that you’ll start coming to your senses in another year or two, and that we plan to be around to see it,’ Robert said.

‘What do you care what I do? She had an affair while you were in the war, and you took me in like you’d take in a stray cat –’

‘A stray cat might have been easier to live with.’

‘I’ve got a right to know who my father was.’

‘You’ve just about cancelled any rights you ever had in this house.’

‘This house stinks and so do both of you.’

‘Your room stinks, as does your behaviour. Pick up your clothing and hang it up.’

‘Who did you do it with, Mum? Or did you have so many boyfriends you don’t remember which one he was?’

Myrtle’s handkerchief was out, and like the fool he was, Robert put his arm around her so she could cry on him.

‘I hate the way you crawl around her all the time. How can you crawl around her when she cheated on you?’

‘Wash that muck off your face,’ he said. ‘You look like a racoon with conjunctivitis.’

He didn’t care why her makeup was running. She returned to her bedroom to bawl on her pillow, then changed her mind, stripped the pillow slip from it and began stuffing clothing into it. Stuffed it full then pitched it at the closed door, because she had no intention of going up to Sydney with someone who thought he was a cross between Jimmy Dean and a skull and crossbones bikie, who ten miles out of Traralgon would be trying to shove his tongue down her throat. The only thing she liked about him was his cigarettes.

She had a packet in her school case. She dug it out, found a box of matches in the pocket of her school uniform, then stood before her dressing table, watching her reflection light up and blow smoke – and saw what Robert had meant about her eyeliner. Wiped it off on her school uniform, then replaced it with wider lines of black, added lipstick, one of Rosie’s used-up lipsticks. She drew a beauty spot on her left cheekbone with an eyebrow pencil stub, also one of Rosie’s.

They had noses like bloodhounds. Robert came to her door and slapped the cigarette from her hand. It flew, landed on the dressing table. He snatched it, mashed it into a pot of pancake face powder.

‘Wash your hands.’

‘They’re not dirty.’

‘If you plan to eat tonight, you will wash your hands. It’s your choice.’

Braised chicken and mashed potatoes wasn’t a choice. Braised chicken and mashed potatoes was blackmail. She washed her hands and slouched into the kitchen.

‘Was my father one of the lodgers or someone from your church?’

‘He was an eighteen-year-old American boy,’ Myrtle said.

T
HE
Y
OUNG
W
AR
W
INDOW

‘I
’m sick and tired of you both lying to me. As if an eighteen-year-old boy would be interested in a fat forty year old. As if an eighteen-year-old boy would even look at you without laughing.’

‘I didn’t give birth to you, Cara,’ Myrtle said.

‘It’s too late to pull that. Mrs Collins already told me I was born on the kitchen floor at Amberley.’

That made them sit up and shut up. For ten or fifteen seconds the only sound in the kitchen was the peas hissing because the saucepan had run out of water. Myrtle lifted it from the stove, added a knob of butter, pepper.

‘God sent an angel to my door –’

‘Oh, yeah, and I’m baby Jesus – and now I’m really going to Sydney.’

‘You were born to a twenty-year-old country girl who already had three children,’ Robert said. ‘A young war widow –’

Cara was halfway out the door. ‘War widow’ caught her attention. She turned.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

‘While you think up a few more lies.’

‘The boy’s name was Billy-Bob. He was an American sailor. Jenny was one of my lodgers. After her husband was killed, she took work at a clothing factory,’ Myrtle said.

‘Mrs Collins said that she and Miss Robertson were in the kitchen minutes after you had me on the floor. She said I was wrapped up in a tea towel.’

‘What she told you is the truth as she knew it, pet. Jenny and I deceived those dear women. You weren’t born to me, but you’ve been mine since the minute of your birth.’

Mrs Collins had said the lodger had been a singer, not a clothing-factory worker. Liars need good memories, and Cara was about to say so, when Myrtle added, ‘She had a little boy. I looked after him for her.’

Mrs Collins had said there was a little boy. It could have been true. And Cara didn’t want it to be true. Her every word, her every action since Easter had been aimed to punish her plummy-mouthed, too good to be true, cheating fraud of a mother – who, if she wasn’t her cheating mother, had no reason to put up with being punished.

‘You probably found out I was talking to Mrs Collins and you bribed her with free rent to lie for you.’

‘It’s the truth, pet.’

‘Then I’m nothing to you, to either of you?’

‘Only everything,’ Robert said. ‘Sit down, poppet.’

‘Stop calling me that – and you know what I mean. I’m not related to either of you.’

‘We’re related by love,’ Robert said, reaching out a hand. She flinched from his touch. ‘Had you been born to us, we couldn’t have loved you more, and you know it.’

Silence then, a heart-thumping, wobbly sort of silence. Her legs were shaking. It was too ridiculous. Having a father called Billy-Bob was totally ridiculous – probably too ridiculous not to be true.

Myrtle having a lover had been more ridiculous. Even in an essay she’d tried to write, the part where Captain Amberley came home from the war and found out his wife had a ten-month-old baby had never been believable. And as if a man would fall in love with a baby his wife had cheated on him to get – unless he was a complete fool, which Robert wasn’t.

If it was true, it changed everything. Even Amberley. That house had always belonged to her because it belonged to Myrtle, and before Myrtle, to Myrtle’s father. She had no claim on it now. She was a bag of rubbish left behind in a vacated room, rubbish Myrtle had picked up and found a use for.

Cara turned away, walked away from braised chicken and mashed potatoes.

Robert rose to follow her.

‘Leave her,’ Myrtle said, and moments later, Cara came back carrying the heavy family Bible.

‘Swear on it. Both of you.’

Myrtle took the book. ‘You were born to a twenty-year-old lodger. Her name was Jennifer Hooper. She had a small son, Jimmy, and two daughters living with their grandmother.’

‘I said swear.’

‘I swear by Almighty God that what I’ve told you is the truth, pet,’ Myrtle said and handed the Bible across the table to Robert, Cara’s eyes following it. She knew what that Bible meant to her parents.

‘Me too, poppet. I still have the telegram Mummy sent to me about her lodger. I swear,’ he added then placed the book on the table, and Cara sat.

‘If she already had three kids, why give me away?’

‘Her situation was complicated,’ Myrtle said.

‘How?’

How could she explain Jenny Hooper’s situation? Tell an already confused child she’d been born of rape. That was a truth which must never be told.

‘Jenny had a brief association with an American sailor. I know little else about him, pet.’

‘What was his other name?’

Myrtle shook her head. ‘She mentioned only his Christian name, Billy-Bob.’

‘She must have been a moll,’ Cara said and Myrtle’s serving spoon flinched at the word, spilling gravy.

‘Rules alter in wartime.’

‘What did she look like?’

Look in the mirror, Myrtle thought. Cara was Jenny around the eyes, the brow. She had her colouring, her hair. Taller than Jenny. At twelve she’d outgrown Myrtle, at fourteen she stood eye to eye with Robert, measured by the army doctors at five foot eight.

‘You’re very much like her,’ she said. And perhaps in more than appearance. ‘Eat your meal, pet, before it gets cold.’

Cara picked up her fork and used it, with her fingers, to break the meat away from the bone. Myrtle caught Robert’s eye, willing him not to demand acceptable table manners tonight.

Is a child’s destiny set in stone at birth? she thought. John and Beth had daughters. They’d given their parents not one moment of trouble, had met boys who fitted so well into the family. Until puberty, until high school, Cara had been perfection.

Perhaps they should blame themselves for Cara’s rebellion. They’d disrupted her life when they’d moved to Traralgon, taken her away from a home she’d loved, from her friends.

‘Stop staring at me,’ Cara said.

‘I was thinking of the night Jenny placed you into my arms. I didn’t doubt that God had sent her to my door to bring me a priceless gift.’

‘Now you wish she’d had me in a public toilet and flushed it.’

Robert placed his fork down to butter a slice of bread. ‘Remember when you used to nag us daily for a black and white puppy? Imagine for a moment what it might have been like had you given up all hope of ever owning your own puppy, then along came a stranger and placed Bowser into your arms.’

‘You would have made me give it to a lost dogs’ home,’ Cara said, mouth full.

She had Myrtle’s voice, but Jenny’s tongue. She had Jenny’s hands – and perhaps her table manners.

‘Imagine we’d allowed you to raise that puppy,’ Robert said. ‘That you’d loved it, fed it, cared for it for fifteen years, then one day, instead of greeting you with a wagging tail, it snarled and bit your hand. Would you stop loving it, or decide that poor old Bowser had a pain, that his bite was the only way he could tell you about it?’

‘I asked both of you if I was adopted.’ Cara’s fork was down. Her plate was clean. ‘You said I wasn’t.’

‘We didn’t adopt you. Had we lied to you then, you would have asked more questions. We told Robert’s mother we’d adopted you and have spent our lives lying to her,’ Myrtle said.

‘You would have had to adopt me somehow to get my birth certificate.’

‘You were registered as our daughter. Mrs Collins and Miss Robertson believe I gave birth to you. To this day they believe they witnessed your birth.’

‘How?’

‘Your mother wandered around Amberley with a cushion tucked beneath her pinny,’ Robert said.

‘She did not!’

‘I did,’ Myrtle said.

‘That old maroon cushion she won’t give up,’ Robert said.

‘You didn’t.’

‘Did so,’ Robert said.

Like the old game Robert’s shadow puppets had played on Amberley’s parlour wall, back when Cara was four or five, the two old hens arguing over who had laid that egg.

‘That’s why your mum won’t throw the raggedy old thing away,’ Robert said.

‘It fits my back,’ Myrtle said.

‘How could you do that?’

‘I did,’ Myrtle said, then told the tale of Jenny, a prisoner for three months in their private rooms at Amberley, how the passage door was never opened, how Jenny had stitched long tapes to that old cushion one morning then chased Myrtle around the parlour table with it, singing her own words to
Greensleeves
.

‘She sang?’

‘She sang beautifully.’

That’s when Cara knew it was all true, and when Myrtle sang Jenny’s ditty, indelibly imprinted in her mind.

‘There was a landlady named Myrtle, who lived in a shell, like a turtle,

Until one fine day, she decided to play, and Myrtle the turtle proved fertile.

Oh, Myrtle the turtle was glowing, her stomach was definitely showing.

The lodgers aghast at her colourful past, each week watched it growing and growing.’

Myrtle couldn’t hold a tune to save her life. Her off-key song was more convincing than ten thousand words. She couldn’t make a rhyme to save her life either.

For an instant Cara saw beyond her mother’s butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth facade, saw a forty-year-old woman so desperate to have her own baby she’d been willing to look ridiculous for months, to do something more illegal than forging a signature at a bank – and just to get a baby.

‘Is that why you called me Cara Jeanette, because she was a Jeanette?’

‘She was a Jennifer, Jennifer Carolyn,’ Myrtle said. ‘She chose your name.’ Myrtle reached out a hand, not touching Cara’s but placing it fingertip to fingertip. ‘I suggested Cecelia, for your grandmother, and she said she had a sister Cecelia and that I wasn’t saddling you with that name for life. I have always believed that she chose Cara Jeanette so she might leave you her initials.’

‘Turned-around initials,’ Cara said, then looked down at her mother’s hand. A small, plump hand with perfect almond-shaped fingernails. She looked at her own hand, longer and with flat, atrocious fingernails.

‘Did I get my rotten fingernails from her?’

Myrtle smiled and nodded. ‘When she saw your tiny hands for the first time, she said, “God help her, Myrt. She’s got my rotten fingernails.” She was intrigued by hands. Do you remember Mr Nightingale? He was our minister until you were six or seven years old?’

‘That tall one?’

‘Very tall. He had incredibly long, fine fingers,’ Myrtle said. ‘Spider-hands, Jenny named him. She told me one day that his hand dissolved into spider legs when she shook it. I recall a Sunday afternoon, shortly after I had begun wearing the cushion, which I dared not wear to church. He became –’

‘You gave up church to get me?’

‘I did. Mr Nightingale became concerned and he called on me one morning to see if I was well. An unmarried man, I had invited him to lunch on occasion, and had no choice but to invite him inside. His eyes fastened onto my cushion –’

‘Where was Jenny?’

‘In the bedroom. If we had someone at the door, or at the rent hatch, she hid in the bedroom. I can see Mr Nightingale’s hands now, his long fingers near dancing against the leg of his trousers, counting. He knew your father was overseas and how long he’d been over there. Then Jimmy began slapping at the bedroom door, calling Jenny.’

‘Jimmy. He’s my brother,’ Cara said.

‘He was a delightful little boy.’

‘Were his hands like mine?’

‘I don’t believe so. Jenny once said that had he not inherited his grandfather’s double-jointed thumbs, she would have been better off.’ Myrtle’s hand had crept forward to cover Cara’s.

‘You didn’t call a doctor or anything for her when I was being born?’

Myrtle shook her head. ‘She was foolishly brave. I recall standing at the kitchen door, too afraid to enter, the wireless playing at full volume – Joseph Schmidt singing “A Star Falls From Heaven”.’

‘What if she hadn’t kept her word, and you were wandering around with the cushion up your dress? How did you know she wouldn’t change her mind?’

‘I knew Jenny.’

‘What was her other name?’

‘Hooper – though, I doubt she was married to her tall soldier. When he was reported missing, she wasn’t informed through the official channels. Her grandmother sent a telegram, addressed to Jennifer Morrison.’

‘Where was she from?’

‘Woody Creek. It’s a small town in Victoria.’

‘Daddy should have told me when I asked the first time.’

‘How do parents tell a child they have taken her illegally, signed documents dishonestly?’ Robert asked.

‘You could have told me at Easter time when we were driving home.’

‘You were not being very pleasant when we were driving home,’ Robert said.

Cara took Myrtle’s hand and turned it palm up, placing her own beside it. ‘They don’t even look related. I’m an alien.’

Robert placed his own hand on the table. ‘We’re all from different planets, poppet, but we’ve done well enough together for a lot of years.’

‘We did before we came to this town. I hate it here, hate everyone here.’

‘You don’t know enough people to make that statement.’

‘I don’t want to know anyone else. I want to go home.’

‘We will when I retire.’

‘That’s years away.’

‘Not so long, not once you get to my age,’ he said.

‘What did Dino do to get expelled from school?’

‘Who?’

‘Dino Collins – James Collins.’

‘He’s trouble, poppet. That’s all you need to know.’

‘It isn’t. I’m almost fifteen. Tell me why he was expelled.’

‘It was to do with one of the young female teachers,’ Myrtle said.

‘Was it about sex?’

That word was never used in Myrtle’s house. She flinched from it, but replied. ‘He molested her, Cara, and if not for the school cleaner, it may have been worse than it was.’

‘And that goes no further than this room,’ Robert said.

‘Why protect him if he did something like that?’

‘I want your word on it.’

Cara shrugged. ‘Take me up to live with Uncle John and Aunty Beth until you retire.’

‘That’s not an option,’ he said.

‘I can’t go back to school here.’ She looked at the clock. Quarter to seven already. She’d told Rosie she’d see her at half past seven to finalise their arrangements for tomorrow. She’d told her she’d get the money from her bank account too. Rosie would hate her for not getting it, and hate her more when she told her she wasn’t going to Sydney. They’d all hate her.