Pearl in a Cage (73 page)

 

Bernie won her.

Cecil, the losing twin, won a drive out to his brother-in-law's property, where he was told to remain until he cooled down. He left for home when they left, and by sundown Bernie couldn't sit still. At seven that night he set off to meet his twin.

At the same time, Jenny, the third point of this ill-shaped triangle, left on her evening walk. She went the same way each night, through the bush, up to where the road forked, then back again. That road, always her demon, had kept her from Granny's house. All of those wasted years of fearing strangers hiding behind trees. Danger didn't come from trees and strangers. It came from mothers and boys you'd known all your life.

Loved the bush now, loved the sound of the bush by night, the night things, the whispering of the trees. Loved the walking too, and feeling the strength returning to her legs.

She'd let herself get sick because of them. Every day now she ate like a horse and every bite she ate made her stronger. She'd be strong enough when the time came.

 

Gertrude had timed her walk last night. She was back in twenty-three minutes. Tonight she watched her to the gate, looked at her clock, then went to the lean-to where she reached for the old shoebox placed on top of that wardrobe the night Ernie Ogden had given the stranger's few belongings into her keeping.

Back in the kitchen, the purse emptied to her table, she looked again at the handkerchief and the brooch pinned to it. It was a beautiful thing and valuable. She turned it this way and that, watching those stones flare. But that wasn't what she'd gone looking for; nor the old luggage label, that bleeding ink no clearer tonight than it had been fifteen years ago. Less clear. She set her reading glasses on her nose, got the light at the best angle. The T and the V were clear — clearer now that she knew what had been written there.

The sheet of paper Ernie Ogden had placed into the purse resented giving up its folds, but she flattened it and held it close to the light. And it was there.
Albert Forester
, Ernie Ogden's handwriting still black and clear.
Albert Forester. No fixed address. Inquired after identifying jewellery
.

It was no real surprise. Gertrude had known it since she'd cut Jenny's hair, had known it when she'd seen her silhouetted against the window, when she'd seen her smile as she'd watched the Macdonalds walking back across the goat paddock.
She had his eye colouring, and, like his, Jenny's could change in an instant from the clearest, purest of blue to the chill of the ocean floor. He'd been in her from the beginning. She should have seen it earlier.

And she had his voice.

The first time Gertrude had set eyes on Archie Foote, he'd been at Monk's piano, looking at her and singing ‘Greensleeves'. She'd been wearing green that day. She'd known he was singing it to her. He'd charmed her with his voice.

‘He looks like the angel Gabriel but they say he's a prize mongrel,' Vern had said. He'd known. As an eighteen-year-old boy, he'd known.

Always something biblical about Archie Foote's looks. The angel Gabriel had aged into old Noah or maybe Moses.

Man's mind is a mystery, she thought, how it works, what disturbs it, how it sorts and sifts information until the dross is shaken off and only a pure hard lump of knowledge sits waiting to be viewed beneath a magnifying glass — which was the way she'd come to realise what had once been written on that old luggage label. The V had once been attached to Via, the T was attached to Three. Whoever had used that label had been travelling to
Three Pines Via Woody Creek
.

Max Monk's city guests had used that siding, as had others living out that way. Monk had last seen his mad cousin at Three Pines, a few months before Archie's father passed away. Gertrude knew the date of her father-in-law's death. He'd passed on in early March of '24. Jenny would have been a bare two months old.

Had Archie taken his lady love up there in December of 1923 — or deserted her and she'd followed him, carrying that old label so she'd know where to get off the train? Got off at that old mill siding maybe, and found nothing there but acres of wheat stubble. Had she tried to follow the train lines back into town? Had she fallen — or been pushed? Had Archie drugged her, tried to take the baby, and she'd got away?

A fiction writer would have found an answer. Gertrude was just a woman with an enquiring mind.

She sighed, glanced at the clock, removed her glasses and slid them into their case. She folded the paper, tucked it with the handkerchief and brooch into the purse, placed the purse into the shoebox, the shoebox back on top of the lean-to's wardrobe. Some things were better off left buried. Someone would find that brooch when she was gone. She wouldn't be looking at it again.

Sissy was the older daughter. She was supposed to be getting married first. The fact that Jim hadn't asked her, the fact that she hadn't seen him in ten days, didn't enter into the argument. She was five years older than Jenny and it was ridiculous, and ridiculous that they were letting her have a white wedding. Not that Amber's wedding gown was worth wearing, not that it was even white, but they shouldn't have been letting her wear it anyway. Jenny wanted photographs too, and they were giving her anything she asked for. And it was ridiculous her wanting it. Anyone else would be hiding their head in shame, and a lot of people were saying the same thing too, not just Sissy. It was worse than ridiculous. It was disgusting, and if anyone thought that she'd be showing her face at that church, then they had another think coming to them.

She prayed for a cloudburst, timed to drop its load on Woody Creek at eleven thirty on Saturday morning. Perhaps that was being too specific, so she prayed for it to arrive any time between Friday midnight and Saturday at eleven thirty. Jim was coming in on Friday to take her and Margaret to a dance. She didn't want rain on Friday. Didn't want a pea soup fog either, but she'd raised one by Friday morning and it hung around all day.

By four thirty, Woody Creek was a white-out. Jim telephoned his father asking him to pass on to Sissy that he wouldn't be attempting to drive in through this fog. Vern rang Norman at the station, who forgot to tell Sissy until Amber had started on her hair at six thirty.

‘He can go to hell,' she said. ‘And so can she. She's a slut, and if you think I'm embarrassing myself by going within a mile of her wedding, then you've got another think coming.'

By six thirty, visibility was down to nil. Gertrude told Jenny that she wasn't going out in that fog, told her it would be like feeling her way through a bag of cottonwool. Jenny walked every night. She knew that road. Tonight, she didn't turn back when she reached the fork but continued on into town.

Vern was peering out his living-room window when he saw a dark-clad shape walk by. He couldn't tell if it was man or woman.

She was wearing the black overcoat Gertrude had taken from the stranger. It reached her ankles, near wrapped her twice, but it kept her warm. She'd crocheted a beret from wool leftover from a pale green sweater she and Gertrude had spent a week in knitting. She wore it pulled low, her hair tucked beneath it — though not so low it hid her pearl in a cage earrings. She was wearing her pendant too.

Her walking shoes were new and comfortable, though she resented the seventeen and sixpence Gertrude had paid for them. Norman had given her ten pounds for shoes and the necessary. Nothing else was necessary, or not as necessary as the eight pounds of change she'd tied into the corner of a handkerchief and pinned to her bra. Touched it for luck as she walked by the hotel and crossed over the road to the big old peppercorn tree leaning low over the railway yard fence. The night was clammy cold, the fog clinging to her face like damp sheeting, but it was hiding her, as was that black coat.

She wasn't scared. Not one bit. Nothing could hurt her now, not the monsters and murderers hiding in Granny's forest, not the cold, not the fog, not Amber. Nothing and no one would ever hurt her again.

Sometimes the train was late. She'd thought it could be late tonight because of the fog, thought she might have to stand around shivering for an hour, but right on time, she heard it hoot-hooting up beyond Charlie's crossing. With a glance behind her, she ran through the cottonwool fog to the western end of the
station platform where she flattened herself against the wall, her eyes seeking Norman. Couldn't see him; and if she couldn't see him, he couldn't see her.

On a clear night if she looked west down those lines, she would have seen the train light coming long before it got to Charlie's crossing. Only the foggy dark up there tonight. Nothing to see in any direction. Norman's house had been wiped from the earth by that fog. There was no fence, no road, only the station, which seemed right somehow. So much of her life had been spent at that station, watching the trains come in, watching them go out. Her first memories were all joined to Norman's station. So many years she'd spent watching all of those people travelling on by to a better place.

An eerie night; the sound of the approaching train wheels down that line was eerie, like a ghost train that wasn't really there, a ghost train come to get one ghostly passenger. She felt like the ghost of Jenny, or the dust of Jenny, all of her juices sucked away by that thing feeding on her, only Granny's coat was holding her together.

It came then, out of the dark, came with the strangest light she'd ever seen. A white light, not penetrating, but flattening against the fog, turning it into a glowing swirling wall.

Or a window, a misty, ripply window like the one she'd seen on the day of the mirage.

She'd run so far that day, trying to get through that window to where the trees and the fences could fly, but no matter how far she'd run, she couldn't get there, not then. Tonight, that window had come to get her and take her away to a land where she could fly.

And she would. One day, when she felt clean again, she would fly.

No passengers boarding. None stepping down. Who'd be crazy enough to end his journey in Woody Creek? This town had nothing to offer, other than its timber. Loaded flatbed trucks waiting for that train.

She sighted Norman, an indistinct figure going about his business down the eastern end of the platform. He wasn't always
so indistinct. He'd been big enough to kill giants when she was small. He'd just . . . he'd just shrunk, just grown ragged in the wash of life, that's all.

Loved him still, just didn't like him any more.

She watched him, her back to the wall, watched him until the door of the goods van opened, until the guard walked down to speak to him.

Then she ran across the platform and stepped on board.

 

 

Liz Byrski

Bad Behaviour

 

One mistake can change a life forever.

 

Zoë is living a conventional suburban life in Fremantle. She works, she gardens and she loves her supportive husband Archie and their three children. But the arrival of a new woman into her son Daniel's life unsettles Zoë. Suddenly she is feeling angry and hurt, and is lashing out at those closest to her.

 

In Sussex, England, Julia is feeling nostalgic as she nurses her best friend through the last painful stages of cancer. Her enthusiastic but dithering husband Tom is trying to convince Julia to slow down. Although she knows Tom means well, Julia cannot help but feel frustrated that he is pushing her into old age before she is ready. But she knows she is lucky to have him. She so nearly didn't …

 

These two women's lives have been shaped by the decisions they made back in 1968 – when they were young, idealistic and naïve. In a world that was a whirl of politics and protest, consciousness raising and sexual liberation, Zoë and Julia were looking for love, truth and their own happy endings. They soon discover that life is rarely that simple, as their bad behaviour leads them down paths that they can never turn back from.

 

Liane Moriarty

What Alice Forgot

 

When Alice Love surfaces from a strange, beautiful dream to find she's been injured in a gym, she knows that something is very wrong – she
hates
exercise. Alice's first concern is for her unborn baby, and she's desperate to see her husband, Nick, who she knows will be worried about her.

 

But Alice isn't pregnant. And Nick isn't worried – he is in the process of divorcing her. Alice has lost ten years of her life.

 

When Alice returns ‘home', it is totally unrecognisable, as is the rest of her life. Why is her sister, Elisabeth, being so cold? Who is this ‘Gina' that everyone is carefully trying not to mention? And what's all this talk about a giant lemon meringue pie?

 

Over the days that follow, small bubbles of the past slowly rise to the surface, and Alice is forced to confront uncomfortable truths. It turns out forgetting might be the most memorable thing that's ever happened to her.

 

Shireen Lolesi

Wives and Girlfriends

 

Angel Blakely leads the perfect life. With a handsome husband in the form of a famous rugby league star, a million-dollar apartment in Sydney's sought-after Eastern Suburbs, and a gorgeous baby son, she seems to have it all.

 

But her glamorous life is not what it seems. Beneath the money and the status that go with football at its highest level lies a dark world of alcohol and drug abuse and sexual misbehaviour. As Angel begins to understand the man and the life she's married into, her world starts to unravel around her. And soon she finds herself on the verge of breaking the ultimate football taboo – an affair with one of her husband's teammates.