Ripples on a Pond (40 page)

Yesterday, everything had been so right. A doll from Santa waited in the rear of the wardrobe for Tracy, a soft doll, dressed in pink, to replace chewed-up Bunny Long-ears – or maybe not. Cara had tried to replace him before with another bunny, with a soft teddy too. Tracy refused to go to bed without Bunny Long-ears. An electronic keyboard waited beneath Cara's bed for Robin. He was a whiz on his school recorder, could play any tune he heard.

Knew where he'd be right now: at Mrs Macy's front window, looking across the road, waiting for the police to drive in with his little sister. Knew she should go to him. Knew she'd howl if she did. Instead, she slid the cards from their string, then removed the thumbtacks holding the string. Pitched the cards into the kitchen tidy with the string; placed the thumbtacks into a colourful lopsided bowl, made by Robin for Mother's Day.

She returned to the lounge room then to strip the Christmas tree. She and Robin had chosen it. They'd carried it home in the station wagon; even with the back seats down, it was still too long. Had to leave the rear window down, leave two feet of tree blowing in the wind. A laughing drive that one, making jokes about a policeman giving them a ticket for driving with tree-bigger-than-car.

Robert came to help. They worked together, silently wrapping glass baubles, placing them into their carton, wrapping the golden angel, winding pretty lights into their box, picking off the tinsel piece by piece. When the tree was bare, they eased it from its stand and together carried it outside.

No Bowser to greet them. No more laughing-mouthed dog to yap,
Good morning, my lady. Is it walk time?
She howled for him again, because he'd been taken away to become evidence.

One o'clock. No sign of Collins or King in Woody Creek. Where else would that foxy bitch and her mongrel mate go to ground when the hounds were baying at their heels?

She always comes back . . .

They hadn't been sighted in Traralgon, another of Collins's hangouts.

Could have gone anywhere. Could be on the road to Sydney, another one of their hangouts. Cara knew Tracy was screaming wherever she was.

Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.

Two o'clock before John and Beth arrived in a taxi. It was a long trip across town from Tullamarine. They wanted to kiss, to offer comfort. There was no comfort, not today.

Cara got away when the phone rang.

‘A Roland Atkinson,' the policewoman said.

Morrie's accountant. Cara had spoken to him a month ago and couldn't do it today. John spoke to him. He explained the situation.

Cara walked out to the backyard, seeking the policeman with the cigarettes. No policeman there.

John spoke to her as she walked through to the front door. ‘Morrie's flying in this morning. They've arranged to ship the MG.'

Cara's world had ended, but for Morrie it still turned. Blamed him. Blamed his bloody car. It stuck out like a sore toe. Should never have driven Robin to school in it. Should never have struggled to put its hood down. That feral bitch had seen them, or her mongrel mate had seen them. Somehow they'd found them.

No smoking policeman in the front yard. Watched the postman circle the court on his motor scooter, still delivering his Christmas cards. Just a normal day outside Number Seven. A family of magpies in the front yard, warbling to be fed. Yesterday Tracy had stood amongst them, tossing steak worms. They'd had no fear of a tiny girl.

The policewoman frightened them away when she emptied the letterbox. Four envelopes. A male looked them over – not the smoking male. Seeking a ransom note?

If they found one, Cara would pay it, no matter how much the demand. On her instruction, Raelene had been offered money to release Tracy. One of Chris Marino's associates had got the papers signed. Two thousand pounds had bought little Jimmy Morrison back in 1947. Robert had obtained a bank cheque for ten thousand dollars and they'd considered it money well spent. The pressure had been off since July. Just a matter of time, they'd said, and had spoken of Perth, of Tasmania, New Zealand too. Safe fools, celebrating Christmas in a fool's paradise. As if signed papers would mean one bloody thing to that foxy slut. She'd partied on Robert's ten thousand, shot the lot up her arms, and now needed more.

Envelopes on the dining table. Cara stared at them. Three shaped to hold Christmas cards, one business-sized. Stared long at that one, at its typewritten address, then turned and walked away from it and out again to the backyard, still searching for that smoking policeman.

Found two searching an overgrown garden for the knife used on Bowser, neither one with a smoke in his mouth.

Robert found her out there. He offered a typewritten page. She turned away, uninterested.

‘Read it, poppet.'

One glance was enough to see the letterhead of the Sydney publisher, to see
Rusty
, to see
meet with you . . .
Slapped the page from his hand and stepped back from it, back, back, back.

‘Not now,' she howled. ‘Don't let it be now, Daddy. The price is too high.'

He tried to hold her, but she ran to the kitchen, picked up her handbag and the keys to the new station wagon.

‘Don't drive, love,' Beth said. ‘You're in no fit state.'

‘I'll drive you,' John said.

She was out the door.

They followed the car out to the street, Beth, John and Robert. They watched her drive away.

*

Three o'clock, sitting in the car out the front of the corner milk bar, a cigarette burning. The nicotine rush made her head spin. Had to go back home.

That house had been home yesterday. They'd stolen home. Didn't want to be there. Didn't want to be anywhere.

A car pulled in beside her and she recognised the driver from Robin's school. Perhaps the woman knew about Tracy. She stared.

Cara backed out, drove and howled and smoked. Didn't go home, just drove to nowhere, turning at will down unknown streets, through estates, up other roads, until she lost all sense of direction. One street fed her out to Burwood Highway. Caught up in heavy traffic, she went with the flow to Springvale Road. Knew that road well. It led to Doncaster. Made the right turn at the lights, then drove on towards Nunawading, where the railway crossing's flashing lights halted her progress.

Lit another cigarette there while the train Tracy had feared went by. Trains had taken her to that place where they took her from Mummy's arms to see the stranger who had wanted her to say Mummy. Tracy had known who was Mummy.

Boxed in by metal, Cara drove on. Should have turned right onto Whitehorse Road, gone back. Couldn't get across to the right lane, so continued towards Doncaster.

Had to find a place to turn back.

Back to what?

Back to the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, she'd made a bargain with the devil. Tracy for publication. She couldn't have both.

Or him. Couldn't have him.

He was coming tomorrow to get his bloody car.

It was all pre-scripted somewhere. It was all written down in the big book of life.

P
LAYING
C
ARDS

N
oses become more particular as we grow older, Jenny thought as she stepped from her car. The descendants of Granny's chooks roamed more freely than their forebears, squirting their droppings freely. Tonight, the smell of chook dung was strong.

Had she smelt it during the years she'd named this place home? Maybe not. Constant subjection to odours disarms the senses. If a BO sufferer could smell himself, he wouldn't be able to live with himself. She smiled then, and for the first time in years thought of Sissy and the double bed she'd once shared with her and her BO.

Difficult now to recall Sissy's face. With no effort at all she could raise an image of Norman's chubby old face; and Amber's and her anger, though could barely recall the child who had feared that anger. Difficult, too, to recall the too-young mother Jenny who had worked like a navvy on this piece of land.

Granny was imprinted on her soul. Always here to run back to when the world outside had become too hard; always. And she was still here. Every time Jenny set foot on this land, she saw Gertrude from the corner of an eye, still going about her day in another dimension of time.

Since Jim, since the night she'd found him at Flinders Street Station, Jenny's life had taken a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Anywhere with Jim was safety, in the air or lost in England; just hold his hand and she was home. His hand not available tonight, and with Raelene and her bikie in town, there had been only one place she'd wanted to be.

She glanced at her watch. It was going on for six thirty. Georgie should have been home, but no red ute parked in the yard meant no Georgie. And without the buffer of her, Jenny preferred to keep her distance from Margot – a snarl of a woman, and every year more of her to snarl.

If there was a day in Jenny's life she could take back and live differently, it would be the day of Margot's conception. She'd known other bad days, but that was the day that had caused the others. And she could have changed it so easily. If she hadn't climbed out the bedroom window, the twins wouldn't have found her sitting on the oval fence; or if she'd climbed out and walked straight down to Granny's. You can't take back one day of the past, only relive it; and tonight was not the night to start reliving it.

She turned on her heel, towards Elsie's house. Realised Margot would be over there, eating dinner, and Jenny wasn't going there to watch her eat. Turned again, towards Flanagan's land. The lights from Joe Flanagan's house were no longer visible. Too many trees between his house and Granny's, saplings grown tall along the boundary fence.

Georgie fought a constant war against saplings, as had Granny, as had Jenny, but the forest had all the time in the world. It would win the war. Clumps of them growing tall behind the crumbling chook pen; a few reaching high to become trees. Nourished too well by dung, Jenny thought.

The chicken-wire gate was still standing; the fence along the western side of the house rusty, but still holding on to its posts, still strong enough to keep the chooks in their own backyard. Jenny opened the gate and walked the few steps to the house.

Front door hanging open. The tin plaque she'd made for one of Granny's birthdays was still nailed above the door:
Ejected 2.8.1869.
Remembered the day she'd stolen Granny's tin – or maybe aluminium – plate and spent hours engraving the words and numbers into it with a hammer and nail. Georgie had added the painted board, its paint flaking now but still readable: The Abortion.

And it was. Jenny loathed what Bernie Macdonald and his working bee had done to Granny's kitchen. It was a black hole, its little window gone, its stove and timber floor gone. She didn't go inside, but looked at her watch again. Georgie closed the shop at five thirty – unless she had a late customer. The police could have held her up. There had been half a dozen of them in town this morning, but by late afternoon there must have been a dozen. Since morning they'd known that Raelene and her bikie were believed to have information on the kidnapping of a four-year-old girl. No one knew the details.

The police had come for Jim five minutes after she'd put his dinner on the table – the local constable and a city man. John McPherson had told them that if anyone could find the entrance to Monk's old root cellar, Jim could. Jenny doubted it. Other than a partial chimney, which someone had turned into a barbeque, the old mansion was gone. But Jim had gone out there with them, or with John, after he'd eaten his dinner and locked the house up like Fort Knox – and seen Jenny on her way.

She walked around to the eastern section of
The Abortion.
Norman's cane chair stood on the veranda, grown ragged but still intact – as were his couch and the large chairs that had once furnished the railway house's parlour and now lived in Margot's front room.

She glanced at the brick chimney, which had known little smoke. If Margot's life had depended on lighting a fire, she may have got a sheet of newspaper to burn. Georgie never entered those front rooms. She lit Granny's old stove when she felt the cold.

Old shed still standing, built strong by Granny's father a hundred years ago. Always dark in there. The only light came in from the south side, and the shed was too deep to allow what little light was left in the night to penetrate far. Smell of dust and disuse within, with an overtone of petrol motors. Georgie's lawnmower lived in the shed, with her chainsaw.

Back in Granny's days, the shed had smelt of onions and garlic. Every year, they'd hung great bunches of onions from the rafters, bunches of herbs, too, and Granny's eternal garlic. She'd used more of it in plasters than in cooking. Hadn't been much of a cook.

They'd buried bags full of potatoes in the far corner, the darkest corner, then covered them with more bags to keep out the light. Had stacked pumpkins on a rusty wire mattress, stored apples in crates, preserves on rough-made shelves in that partially partitioned-off corner Jenny had once named bathroom. They'd lived off the land. Never had much money. Hadn't needed much.

Same row of dusty bottles on the same dusty wall stud shelf. Same wooden wash trough where for years she'd slaved over the washing. Only dust in it now, and a fallen bird's nest, feather-lined. Petrol drums beneath the trough where Granny's kerosene tin had once lived – and probably snakes behind the drums, getting high on petrol fumes. She looked down at her sandal-clad feet, feeling those petrol-sniffing snakes eyeing her bare toes and ankles, and stepped back, then turned and walked out to night.

Georgie was alone in that shop after five thirty. Raelene and her bikie liked her no better than they liked Jenny.

A voice from across the paddock lifted her head; Harry's voice. ‘I told him I'd give him a hand tonight with the bed.'

She waved a hand, but he wasn't looking her way. Didn't see her.

Harry and Elsie were moving into town after Christmas. Harry's pet termites had won his war. Six months ago, he'd told Jim they sang him lullabies at night with their nibbling at the rafters. When Jim offered him an advertisement of some company guaranteeing to rid a house of termites, Harry had laughed.

‘I wouldn't harm one hair on their nibbling little heads. Else will move when the roof falls in on her.'

He'd been trying to get Elsie into town for ten years. The roof hadn't fallen in, but a couple of weeks back another of the stilts supporting the front of the house had given up the battle. Their floors ran more dramatically downhill now, and their front door refused to open. They had a nice little place to go to: a two-roomed bungalow built in Teddy and Vonnie's backyard.

What then for Margot?

God alone knew. Maisy could take her in small doses, though these days the doses had become smaller. Elsie was the only one who'd put up with that lazy, snitchy bugger of a woman. A rustle in the dry grass near her exposed ankle moved Jenny towards that snitchy bugger of a woman. Harry greeted her at the back door, his arms loaded with drawers stacked one on top of the other.

‘Any word from town?'

‘The police are out at Monk's,' she told him. ‘Jim's gone out there to see if he can find the entrance to the old root cellar.'

‘There's been rumours about that cellar for years, from orgy to Eldorado,' Harry said. ‘Can you grab that one, Jen? It's ready to topple.'

She took the drawer and followed him with it to his ute, where he added his new load to the rest.

Harry was Jim's age, maybe a year or so older, but by evening light he looked little changed from the half-starved fifteen year old who had turned up that day in Woody Creek. He might have been eighteen when he'd married Elsie and taken on responsibility for her infant niece and nephew. She'd had Joey, too, who had been close to Jenny's age. A boy with a man's responsibilities, Granny used to say of Harry, and each year he'd added one more responsibility. They'd had five of their own – and Margot. That much responsibility should have aged him, and hadn't. If the years were creeping up on Harry, they were only obvious in the smattering of grey in his carrot-red hair.

Not quite a brother to Jenny, Elsie not quite a sister, but both much closer than friends. They were linked by blood through Trudy, though she was unaware of that blood link. Jenny had wanted to tell her that Margot and Teddy Hall had given her life, but Jim had put his foot down. He chose to forget that Trudy wasn't his own; chose to forget a lot of things.

*

Margot was sitting on her backside at the table, playing solitaire while Elsie washed the dishes. Jenny, keeping her distance, leaned against the open doorway, staring at Margot's back.

Hard to believe that pale bloat of a woman had grown out of runty, lisping little Margot. All body, with a pin head connected directly to her shoulders, and the lot supported on short bandy legs. All Macdonald. Necks didn't run in that family, and if Margot had ever had one, it had been swallowed by the rolls of fat that disappeared beneath the collar of her Maisy-supplied white uniform.

She'd developed her obsession with white as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid. Nothing Jenny could do about it. She'd tried. She'd sewn Margot floral frocks; had tried to do something about the white ankle socks she'd worn with sandals. One of the fringe benefits of her bulk now was her inability to reach her feet to put those socks on.

She had thick, stubby little Macdonald hands, hardly any difference between the length of any of her fingers. The twins' hands. Their father's hands, not Maisy's. Margot had Maisy's teeth – or lack of teeth. Old George Macdonald had hung on to his until the day he'd died, and the twins looked like they might hang on to their own – or most of them. Ray had knocked one of Macka's out.

Sharing those two rooms at Frankston with Margot, her belly swelling daily with Trudy, had seen the end of a mother–daughter relationship that never was. Jenny's audacity in bringing the evidence of Margot's severe indigestion back to Woody Creek had made her public enemy number one.

Maisy still believed in the wind theory. She had plenty of great-grandchildren without need for Trudy. That, too, had been Jim's decision. He'd missed out on knowing Jimmy. For him, Trudy had filled that space.

‘Georgie not home yet?' Elsie asked.

‘No, and I'm starting to worry about her,' Jenny said.

‘She stays late with her books some nights,' Elsie said. ‘Did Harry tell you we ordered our new fridge today?'

‘About time,' Jenny said.

Margot, who hadn't previously acknowledged her presence, gave her the evil eye.

‘It's got a big freezer up the top that goes all the way across,' Elsie said.

‘You won't know yourself, Else.'

‘Lenny and Val are giving us their old bed. Their new water bed was supposed to be delivered today,' she said.

Harry came from the bedroom, toting the body of a dressing table. ‘Their old bed is twenty years younger than ours,' he said, and placed his load down while he rolled a smoke. He got it lit, then, with it gripped between his teeth, he again picked up his load.

A happy man tonight, Jenny thought, new bed, new fridge, new residence and new life. He'd had enough of Margot fifteen years ago; and enough had gone well beyond far too much since his kids had stopped coming home. He'd lost his first family at thirteen and had no intention of losing his kids and grandkids.

Jenny was holding the back door wide for him when Georgie's ute drove in through the boundary gate. Relief washed from her ears to her toes. No matter how old your kids grew, you never stopped worrying about them – or some of them.

‘I'll leave you to it then, Else,' she called, and walked back across the paddock as Georgie pulled the ute into its space beside her own car, their noses to the chicken-wire fence.

Watched her slide from the ute, then lock its door. She looked sixteen from a distance: long jean-clad legs, hair tied high in a ponytail. Jenny loved that kid. Always had. She could have been anything, could have done anything, had the looks of a movie star, the brain of a banker. She'd been leg-roped to this town, first by old Charlie and now by his shop. And when Harry and Elsie moved into town, she'd be leg-roped down here by Margot. It wasn't right.

‘What are you doing skulking around on my property?' Georgie greeted her.

‘It's mine, and I'm seeking sanctuary,' Jenny said. ‘Any news in town?'

‘One of the Jenner brothers reckons he saw Raelene's car not long after dawn.'

They entered the house together, through Granny's old front door. Georgie flicked her bedroom light on as they passed and it lit enough of the black hole of Granny's old kitchen. Up high steps to the laundry, through the laundry to the room Harry and Ray had built as Jenny's bathroom-cum-laundry, now a book-lined junk room. Jenny followed Georgie through it to the kitchen, once Ray and Donny's bedroom.