Pearl in a Cage (59 page)

‘Your mother will be alone,' he said.

‘That's not my fault, is it? I don't know what you think you're doing. Everyone is talking about you.'

He had not seen Amber. He had fed her pills to the fish, had dreamt terrible dreams of befuddled fish, had swum with them, awakened gasping for air.

‘The Hoopers are going down?'

‘Margaret is. Her father passed out in Willama. He was supposed to stay in hospital, but he came home and passed out again, so he can't go, so Lorna won't go.'

‘His heart?' Norman said.

‘How would I know? Margaret just said he passed out. Twice. I'll need at least ten pounds.'

He wrote her a cheque for ten pounds, sent her to the post office to cash it, then walked across to speak to Vern. He found him sitting in the shade of a large oak, sitting looking into space.

‘Bad news,' Norman said, offering his hand.

Vern took it, shook it. ‘I've got to think he's in the best hands, Norm. I'm pleased they took him down there. It's too far away, but they've got all the knowledge down there.'

‘He's a fine boy, Vern. God will not take him so soon.'

Vern didn't reply for a second. ‘We've got tough heads,' he said. ‘I've got a lot of faith in the Hooper skull. That's what I'm clinging to right now, Norm, and to the doctors. He's with the best. He's in the best hands.'

‘He's a fine boy,' Norman repeated for lack of anything better to say.

‘I could have done a lot worse,' Vern said. ‘I could have done a whole lot worse.'

‘Your own health?'

‘I'm all right. They're panicking about nothing. It was just the shock of seeing him like that, that's all. It took us an hour to drag him out of it. That bloody car fell apart. We couldn't see what was up and what was down. I'm glad your girl can go along with Margaret. She'll need company down there.

‘I've never seen anything like it. Never in my born days did I expect to see anything like it. We wouldn't have got him out if not for the garage chap and Denham. Say what they like about that pig of a man, but he's the chap to have around when you're in a tight hole. He got him out. And the garage chap—'

Telephone ringing. Vern up and running.

‘Don't run, Father. It's not the hospital.'

Norman left them and returned to his station. Once, twice, he glanced towards his house.

She'd be alone.

Amber had searched the floors, had moved his chest of drawers, moved his wardrobe, knowing there was just one more pill. Found one yesterday, or the day before, in one of his shoes. She'd stripped the bed, shaken his pillows, crawled the floor beneath his bed, certain there would be just one more pill. No more. And her every scar offering pain; every one of life's bruises a throbbing open sore.

She rose from her crouch and stood before the dressing table, seeing her bruises in the mirrors. Black and blue with bruises. Slid her dressing gown from her shoulders, watched it collapse like a purple and blue floral bruise at her feet. Naked beneath that gown, naked and bruised and scarred by them. Finger tracing the wide white scar down her belly where they'd tried to cut them out of her.

Take you in the dirt, fill you with their filth, then leave you. One after the other after the other.

Skin scrubbed raw and still she crawled with them. Needed her pills to kill that crawling, aching, twisting pain.

She'd kept her bargain. She'd kept her bargain. She'd cleaned his house.

You needed to see the dirt when it fell. Hard to see, those first fine grains, but if you missed those, let them settle for a day, there were more. She ran her hand over the wood of his mother's dressing table, traced her scar on the winged dressing table mirror. Three mirrors. Traced all sides of the scars of Amber Rose.

And those mirrors showed too much, showed the filth pulsing through her veins.

‘It's in your blood,' he'd said. He was a doctor. He knew everything. ‘Amber is dug from the dirt,' he'd said. ‘Petrified sap. Insects crawling the earth millions of years ago became trapped in it. What is trapped within your core, pretty Amber?'

Stared at the winged mirrors, and three pale ghosts stared back, angry ghosts, wild-eyed, wild-haired.

Afraid of them. Too old, they knew too much. She reached to move the wings, to kill the ghosts of Amber Rose, but born of that move was a long corridor of ghosts, marching back, and back, and back, whispering about her, hissing at her. A chorus of hisses.

Two-bob whore.

Sold herself for the price of a loaf of bread.

How many thought their two bob well spent?

‘Bastards,' she wailed. ‘Bastards.' Slammed the wings of the mirror, but they swung back to show a different angle.

Sold herself once for a pair of pretty shoes.

And a frock with buttons down the front.

And a promise.

Men and their broken promises.

Norman kept his promises.

Paid more than two bob for her too.

Didn't get his money's worth.

None of them did.

Daddy did.

‘Die, you bitches. Die and leave me alone!'

Look at her, still searching for a pill.

Wants to block out what we know.

Doesn't know the half of what we know.

Mad as a hatter, that one.

It's in her blood.

Slammed the wings against the central mirror, one and the other, again, again, slammed them until the central mirror cracked, then shattered, and the line of ghosts scattered. Only one then. One silent ghost left standing, staring at the scattered shards of her reflection.

Sky darkening, thunder rolling.

Now?

Then?

When?

Had to go home. She'd get wet. Had to get her pretty dress off. He'd bought it for her. She'd never had a white dress, never had pretty shoes, just boots. Boots were stronger, her mother said.

She'd met him under the bridge. That was where she'd always met him, because she wasn't allowed to meet him. She'd put that dress on under the bridge, taken her boots off.

‘My pretty bud,' he'd said that last day. ‘Almost ripe for the plucking,' and he'd kissed her, on the cheek but close to her mouth.

She'd told him she had to go home before the storm came, and he knew she couldn't wear that dress home or her mother would know.

It had tiny buttons right down the front of the bodice. He'd wanted to help undo them. He slid it down from her shoulders, then his hands measured her breasts. Maisy's breasts were much bigger, but she was fourteen. Amber's breasts were just baby breasts. He said so, and said he ought to look at them.

He was a doctor. He wouldn't do anything that was wrong.

‘So sweet,' he said. ‘A man's ultimate delight must be in the moulding of female perfection from a child of his own flesh, my pretty one.'

She didn't understand his fancy words, didn't know what to do except stand there while her beautiful dress slid down to the dirt. She didn't want it to get dirty.

Wanted to get dressed in her school dress, but he was holding her, his hands over her hips. She could get away if she wanted to. Half of her had wanted to, half of her wanted to stay.

Kissed her then on the mouth.

‘You're not . . . Why?'

‘You were panting for it, sweet thing.'

‘I have to go home now.'

But the rain didn't want her to go home. It came heavy, came down on an angle, reaching in to where they stood. They had to move away from it, crawl up the bank beneath the bridge supports where the rain couldn't reach. He took off his jacket and placed it on the clay, and she sat on it. The jacket wasn't very big so he had to sit close, place his arm around her, right around her and beneath her arm so it touched her breast.

Like being inside their own house. Like the sheets of rain were their walls. Sitting close and listening to him telling about his house and his maids who polished his silver—his fingers moving against her, kept on moving, making that achy sweetness down low.

‘Have you seen the city, my pretty Amber?'

She hadn't, but she couldn't talk. Didn't want to talk. Didn't want to move.

‘You're begging for it,' he said. ‘In a year or two, you'll be at the mercy of every lout in town.'

He lifted her chin and kissed her mouth. Laid her down, and his tongue was a cat's cleaning its kitten, cleaning her all over, sliding her petticoat up, off, cat tongue licking her baby breasts.

‘It should be a father's unquestionable right to spread the legs of his ripe little buds,' he said. ‘Want to go home to Mummy or stay with me, my pretty?'

‘She thinks I'm at school.'

‘I won't tell on you, if you don't on me.'

 

Left her pretty dress and shoes hidden behind one of the bridge pylons. Walked home in the late afternoon in her school dress and boots when the rain stopped. Told her mother she'd waited at Julia's house for the rain to stop.

Waited for him to come back and take her to his house in the city so she could always wear pretty dresses and fancy shoes and go to theatres and have maids and drive in his fine carriages with two white horses. He'd promised her.

Watched for him at the schoolyard fence.

Searched the streets for him.

Waited beneath the bridge for him, clad in her pretty dress, her shoes.

He didn't come.

The frock and shoes remained for a month beneath the bridge. Then Mr Blunt told her mother about a frock not yet paid for.

‘Did he do anything to you? Did he hurt you, Amber? You were told to stay away from him, darlin'.'

Knew all about what the billygoat did to the nanny goats. Knew how her mother hated that billygoat getting at the young female goats. Knew it was wrong, that she'd done wrong.

‘You ran away with another man and I hate you.'

Waited for her father to come back. Waited amid the chook dung and the goat dung and the dust of her mother's land, waited until its stink seeped into her skin, until it went in too deep to scrub out.

Knew things now that Maisy didn't know. Knew things Julia may never know. Stood at her mother's fence one day watching the billygoat going at one of the half-grown kids, and hated her mother anew when she whacked him with her garden rake, chained him up in the back paddock. Blamed her. She'd made him go away.

Waited for years for him. He'd never returned.

And there was fat, big-breasted Maisy living in George Macdonald's new house, having a baby every year; and there was Julia, an old maid in her twenties.

And there was Norman.

Gave up waiting for her father and sold herself to Norman for his railway house and his mother's furniture and her gold-rimmed tea set and Queen Victoria vase.

Then sold herself to Reginald to get away from Norman.

Sold herself for a lot less since.

Two babies were born the weekend of Jim Hooper's accident. Heat always brought the babies hurrying into life. Clarry Dobson's wife had a second daughter on Sunday morning, and at six that night, Sophie Duffy came down to get Gertrude. Milly was in labour, and a black storm brewing in the western sky. Gertrude didn't like the look of it, didn't want to take her horse out in it—and she was too weary to go. She went. She always went when she was called. And the shack she found that girl lying in was an insult to humanity.

‘Get those dogs out of here. Get this place cleaned up,' she demanded. Outside then for a breath of purer air while dogs yelped and scattered. ‘Get some lamps from somewhere. Beg them, borrow them, but get them.'

Seven o'clock when she arrived and by nine that baby was clinging in there, maybe knowing it was safer there. Gertrude took a break and went out to check on her horse. He didn't like the fireworks or the thunder.

In the thirty years she'd been delivering Duffy offspring, the accommodation had deteriorated. Old man Duffy had at least done a few running repairs and kept the dogs down to a minimum. There were more dogs than kids out here now, six or eight women and grown girls, and, as far as she could tell, two males: simple-minded Henry, a thirty-year-old child, and a bearded old bloke she'd sighted when she'd driven in.

‘Easy boy,' she soothed, missing old Nugget tonight. He'd stood between those shafts through many a thunderstorm and
never turned a hair. Time might teach his replacement patience, though she doubted it. She'd wanted a young horse, one who might see her out. He might, but the way he was behaving, he'd see her cart out tonight.

‘Easy boy. I'll get you out of it. We're going to have a long night. Easy now.'

Dark out here, feeling out each buckle, each clasp, but she released him and hoped he didn't find a gap in Duffy's fence.

‘Any rain in it?' the old bloke said. He was standing behind her.

‘We need a decent downpour.'

‘It's taking its time coming,' he said.

Maybe he meant the baby, maybe the storm, threatening now since late Saturday.

‘They'll probably get it three hundred miles south,' she said. ‘Like the last one.'

‘A nice-looking horse.'

‘He's got a soft mouth for riding. Doesn't like the cart much. You might tell those rampaging kids to give him space. He's inclined to kick first and ask questions later.'

‘A prerogative of youth,' he said.

‘True,' she replied, and someone walked over her grave.

The boy arrived an hour before midnight. He was a good size and healthy. Duffy infants did well in the womb, though not so well on dry land. She wondered who'd fathered him, wondered if he'd be alive twelve months from now, wondered who he might turn out to be if given half a chance. Some things you had to walk away from. Sometimes you had no choice but to walk away.