Wind in the Wires (18 page)

G
OOD
B
EHAVIOUR

C
ara spent Christmas and New Year in Ballarat, then the first three weeks of January at Portsea. She bought a bikini, and one of Marion’s brothers told her he was in love with her. Like their sister, they were merciless tormentors. There was only one way to treat them, like she treated Pete, which turned those weeks at Portsea into the best weeks of Cara’s life. Freed of Myrtle chasing her with a hat and protective clothing, she perfected a tan for the first time in her life.

And thank God for that unforgettable January, because the February that followed it was the worst month of Cara’s life. She had to give evidence in court, had to sit in a courtroom with Dino Collins and the other two Traralgon mongrels.

The trial had been going for a day before she had to give her evidence, which was worse than her worst imaginings.

Someone had supplied the trio with suits, white shirts, quiet ties; they looked like three up-and-coming young businessmen, off to work in the city. Collins’s left hand was bandaged, his tattooed
HATE
hidden. No sunglasses in court. He couldn’t disguise the hatred in his eyes when he looked at her.

And Rosie was there, wearing a maternity frock. Cara hadn’t expected her to be in court – and sitting beside Henry Cooper’s deadbeat mother and two of his deadbeat sisters. No sign of Dino Collins’s aunty.

Mr and Mrs Hunter were there. No Cathy, no Marion, who had to wait their turn in the witness box. With no one she dared look at, Cara looked at her hands.

She wasn’t a good witness. Replied easily enough to the prosecutor’s questions. Knew what he was going to ask her, that’s why, and she’d practised her answers. He’d told her to look at the jury when she replied, or at the judge. Couldn’t. If she looked up, she saw the three deadbeat Cooper women murdering her, saw Rosie’s eyes doing likewise.

Tony Bell’s father owned half-a-dozen electrical shops. He had money. Dino Collins would have inherited his parents’ money by now. Between them they’d hired three white-wigged, black-gowned barristers. One would have been fifty, two might have been thirty. It was one of the younger men who attacked Cara.

‘I put it to you that you got into the car of your own free will,’ he said.

‘I’ve already said that Tony Bell and James Collins pushed me into the back seat.’

‘You had been in the car previously, as part of a group,’ he accused. She had, and couldn’t deny it. ‘Were you raped that day, Miss Norris, harmed in any way?’

‘No.’

‘Is it not true that it was James Collins who came away from that particular encounter with the injuries?’

‘Yes.’

He kept her in the witness box for an hour, going over and over the same ground. He knew she’d agreed to go up to Sydney with Rosie, Cooper and Collins. She couldn’t deny that either. Couldn’t deny she’d kissed Collins a couple of times, that she’d ridden on the back of his motorbike a couple of times. There was too much she couldn’t deny, and by two-thirty she was shaking and having difficulty forcing her mouth into more than monosyllabic replies, and mentally cursing herself for not sticking to her guns and staying clear of the whole putrid mess. And cursing Cathy and Marion, too, for dragging her into it, because the truth didn’t matter in this place, because the truth in the hands of clever men was malleable, because Collins would get off again and this time he’d rape and murder her. He knew now that she was a student. He’d work out where pretty quickly.

She glanced at the jury. Their faces told her that they didn’t like her. She turned to find Mrs Hunter, and saw Rosie, smiling, triumph written all over her face.

For two years they’d been inseparable friends. She knew about Jenny, about Woody Creek. Knew everything. Cara wanted to vomit. Closed her eyes, wiped sweating hands on her skirt. And the judge told her to answer the question. What question? She hadn’t heard it. As she turned to look at him, Collins showed her his closed fist, his concealed hate, like a promise, like, You wait, moll. I’ll get you.

Wanted him hanged. Wanted him hanged, drawn and quartered, and his bits dragged to the four, eight, ten corners of Australia.

The question was asked again, or a different question, about the car’s missing door handles.

Again she wiped her hands on her skirt. ‘They called the back seat of Henry Cooper’s car the bird coop. Once they got a bird – a girl – into the back seat she couldn’t get out.’

‘You had been in the rear seat on previous occasions?’

‘Yes.’

‘How had you managed to open the back doors on previous occasions, Miss Norris?’

‘I opened a window and reached out.’

‘I suggest the reason why you didn’t open the window and reach out that day was because you wanted to be there, because you had chosen to be there.’

‘I didn’t open the window that day because he was on top of me trying to get my . . . my underclothes off. And Henry Cooper’s wife didn’t open it because she and the others were having a smoke and laughing, as if it was the best joke in the world, and if I hadn’t smashed him in the face with my library book, they would have stood there smoking and laughing while he raped me, like those other two had when he raped Mi– another fifteen-year-old schoolgirl.’

She wasn’t allowed to mention Michelle Hunter’s name. She was in hospital. Two days before Christmas she had tried to stab herself with her mother’s hairdressing scissors because that bastard had got her pregnant. Dave knew, so Cathy knew. Robert and Myrtle probably knew – not that they’d tell Cara.

An hour later she walked head down from that place, and collided with one of Henry Cooper’s sisters, who was standing out front, smoking.

‘Lying, stuck-up bitch,’ she snarled and spat in Cara’s face.

Ran then, ran wiping spittle with her handkerchief, threw the handkerchief into the gutter and ran to the tram stop, holding her tears at bay until she was back at the college and in the shower where she could bawl if she wanted to.

Cathy and Marion had to go back to court the following day. They didn’t mind. They expected Cara to go with them. Like hell she’d go back to that place. If the judge wanted her again, he could come and get her.

She spent the day in her room, writing out that court scene. She wrote until the girls came home, full up with their big day in court and eager to relay it. Robert and the Traralgon farmer had given evidence.

‘Your father was good,’ Cathy said. ‘He backed us up about Collins’s phone harassment, and said how Collins had been expelled from school at sixteen for sexually molesting one of the young female teachers.’

He’d spoken of the defilement of Cara’s room while the family was in Sydney, of the missing telephone pad and the college phone number. A returned soldier, a school principal, he would have looked at the jury, looked the judge in the eye.

The farmer said that he and his wife hadn’t known the identity of the girl who had run to them weeping one Saturday afternoon. He couldn’t remember the exact Saturday the incident had occurred, but he had learnt later that the girl was the daughter of one of the high-school teachers. He said that he had not seen the girl’s attackers, that he and his wife had suggested she report the attack to the police. She’d asked to be driven home, and no, at no time had he or his wife doubted the girl’s story. The three accused were known troublemakers in the area.

A middle-aged doctor stated that he had known the victim’s family for twenty years, that he had seen the girl after her first suicide attempt, and yes, he had done a genital examination, and yes, the victim had been a virgin before the vicious rape. He spoke of the second suicide attempt in December, when, the girl’s mental health being of paramount importance, a pregnancy had been terminated, and yes, blood tests had been carried out on the foetus and it was possible that the accused had been the perpetrator.

Statements given by the two schoolboys who had seen their classmate bundled into the back seat of the car were read to the jury. The statement named all three of the accused and identified the car. Everyone in town knew Henry Cooper’s hotted-up Holden.

The newspapers followed the case. Collins didn’t take the witness stand, which to many was an admission of guilt. Henry Cooper took the stand. He had a cute two-year-old son, a pretty wife almost ready to pop their second child. Cooper admitted to driving the car but said the girl had been sneaking out to meet Collins for two months, that she’d asked Collins to pick her up after school. He hadn’t seen what had taken place in the car. He and Bell had gone for a walk to give Dino and his girl a chance to work things out. Bell told the same story, word for word. The Hunters’ second daughter was forced by the defence to take the stand to answer one question. Yes, her youngest sister had sneaked out at night to meet the accused. Under cross-examination she was able to say more, but the damage had been done.

Expensive lawyers, multiple character witnesses, a jury wanting to get back to their jobs or home to their kids – all three were sentenced, but on a variety of charges. Henry Cooper received a twelve-month, fully suspended sentence; Tony Bell would serve a minimum of six months, and James Collins was given a lousy five years.

Twenty years wouldn’t have been enough for Cara, but Robert was retiring in December, and by the time Collins was released, she’d be free of her commitment to the Education Department, and home at Amberley.

P
ART
T
WO

A R
OAST
D
INNER

L
orna Hooper still drove Vern’s ’49 black Ford, which she might with near honesty claim to have only driven to church on Sundays, wet Sundays at that. On fine days, she walked to church. She didn’t lunch with friends, was a member of no women’s guild, had no contact with her sister, nephew, brother or neighbour.

She could claim one long-term, ongoing relationship. During the late forties Lorna had first written
Jenison
on a cheque. Vern had signed that cheque; she’d been signing her own since ’52, when the Balwyn house had been sold and the cretins had absconded with her nephew.

Jenison, a retired sergeant of police, had celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday in July ’64 – and been given an ultimatum by his arthritic wife. She’d had enough of Melbourne’s winters and was retiring to Queensland. He could go with her or move in with Miss Hooper for all she cared. He chose the former, and when Lorna received his resignation along with his final monthly report and bill, she was not pleased.

In a good mood, Lorna had the appearance of a termite-riddled totem pole. In a bad mood, the termites turned into African fire ants. Jenison’s report stated that two more of her father’s properties were on the market.

‘Thieves, cretins.’

‘As you say, Miss Hooper.’

She wrote a final cheque, no bonus for long service. She didn’t see him out. He closed the door behind him while she stalked the rooms, angered by his desertion, and by the female Jenison’s. She’d written her a monthly cheque for two mornings of cleaning, two afternoons of baking.

A three-bedroom house, one resident, mounds of books and newspapers accumulated since she’d moved to Kew in December ’58 left little space in which to stalk. No veranda on that hard-faced, clinker-brick house. She missed Woody Creek’s verandas, its garden. She missed Margaret, younger sister and family maid, who since she’d wed, Lorna had referred to as
the cretin.

For weeks prior to her sister’s escape, Lorna had smelt infamy on the wind, but her nephew in his final year at school, she’d not expected them to jump the gun. They had. They’d taken off in the night, ten days before the school term ended.

She’d risen that morning, as usual, at six-thirty. The cretins and Muir, their skivvy, had rarely moved from their beds before eight. Lorna had taken her morning constitutional, done a little bookwork then at eight, and still no call to break her fast, she’d rung her bell for the skivvy, and later pounded on, before opening, her bedroom door. Her bed and the cretins’ double bed had been empty. Their car was in the garage, blocked in by her own vehicle. Each evening she’d made a point of blocking them in. At nine she’d placed a phone call to her nephew’s school and been told he’d left the grounds on the previous evening, in a taxi, which Jenison had traced to a city theatre, where he’d lost the scent.

Few, if any, items had been missing. Until the Saturday afternoon, she had not been overly concerned – until a male and his son knocked on the door and stated that they were there to take possession of the cretins’ vehicle. She’d told them quite succinctly where they might go. They’d gone, but returned with two constables and a receipt.

On the fourth day, she’d received a phone call from Vern’s accountant, who had informed her that the house and contents had been sold and that she had ten days in which to vacate the property.

Jenison spent those days attempting to pick up the cretins’ trail. Lorna had spent the tenth day defending her family home from a second-hand dealer, his offsiders, the accountant and the same two constables who had forced her to release the cretins’ sedan. The house was emptied around her, the floor rugs ripped from beneath her feet.

And thus she had vacated another family home, the two constables seeing her to her car.

The Kew house was her own, for her lifetime. Her father’s estate paid the rates, insurance, electricity and gas, and paid her a quarterly stipend, which, since the eviction, she’d been forced to draw on.

In the years since, she’d hired a constant stream of cleaning women and cooks. Few had remained for any length of time. By the time Jenison offered his wife’s services, there had been little for her to do, or little space in which to do it. Fortnightly she’d cooked a roast, filled the biscuit and cake tins, swept the passageways, washed the dishes, and for a day or two Lorna had been able to find a kitchen bench and table – and little else.

Windows were never opened in Lorna’s house. They were, for the most part, inaccessible. A clutter of heavy furniture, a muddle of dust-collecting ornaments, Margaret’s idea of decoration. The female Jenison packed them away, cleared what she could, stepped over what she couldn’t.

As with many of those who survived in chaos, there was method to Lorna’s. Jenison’s reports lived on Vern’s long dining-room table. A solitary eater only requires a small area in which to eat.

Two weeks after receiving the final report, she cleared her eating area with her forearm, forcing back salt and pepper, sugar basin, an empty tin which had once contained red salmon. The new space, wiped clean of crumbs with her palm, she selected Jenison’s final report, plus a copy of Vern’s will – she had several. A fountain pen located, she sat, underlining a paragraph of the will pertaining to the Woody Creek property.

Will not be sold.

It was not to be tolerated, and would not be tolerated.

Again she returned to the pile of reports, delving until she located the one she sought. The three items folded together, she took her elderly handbag from its convenient doorknob and placed the papers into it.

She’d require her driving spectacles, which for a moment eluded her, until she retraced her movements of yesterday to the kitchen where she lifted a saucepan lid. Washed the spectacles at the sink tap, shook them dry enough, donned them then left the house.

God help any child running or riding along the footpath. God helped them, kept them indoors, in yards, until the big black ’49 Ford was out on the street and the iron gates closed, the padlock clicked.

In a good mood, Lorna was an atrocious driver. In a bad mood, she flung that old car around corners, stopped unwillingly at traffic lights, refused to give way to fools on her right where there were no lights to force the issue. She knew her way to the city, drove straight through it, drivers blasting, mouths screaming abuse, trams parting her hair, her eyes never leaving the road ahead.

She hadn’t seen her brother since the day of their father’s funeral. He’d been little more than a limping vegetable. He had not been mentioned in the will, other than as a drain on the estate, which for years had paid out hard cash on his so-called treatments. His son, her nephew, was to inherit his grandfather’s estate on his thirtieth birthday, or on his wedding day. Until then, the cretins, guided by Vern’s accountant, had total control – total control, given into the hands of two mindless fools, who had moved Jim from the secure sanatorium of her choice to a rest home in the hills, from which the fool had absconded. His disappearance had, however, alleviated one drain on the estate.

Since the redhead from White and Company had approached her that day with her claim that Jim had wed, she’d spoken to the halfwit cousin. He’d met Jim’s wife, and sighted an infant daughter.

Lorna had no desire to repair rents in her relationship with her brother. She was not expecting to be made welcome by him. Her interest was in his offspring, legitimate issue of Vern and therefore more entitled to inherit than the illegitimate get of the Morrison slut. One way or another, Lorna was determined to prevent the sale of her father’s properties.

The trip was long and wearying, the last of it done with the sun in her eyes. Five-ten when she drove into Woody Creek. Dogs have an ancestral memory. They cleared the road. A bike rider cleared the footpath as Lorna drove into Vern’s yard. A green car parked amid greenery gives too little warning of its presence to weary eyes. Before Lorna’s brakes got a grip, her Ford’s bumper bar communicated with the bumper bar of a younger relative.

*

Raelene watched the collision. Saw Jenny’s car shudder. She’d been looking at it, wishing she knew how to drive it.

Hated school, hated the baggy, daggy uniforms, hated the teachers, hated Woody Creek and hated Jenny, watch-dogging her all day long.

They must have heard that clang of metal on metal inside. Jenny came to the front door to see what was going on. She saw the old dame getting out of the black car. ‘No,’ she said, as she slammed the door and ran back to the kitchen.

‘It’s Lorna,’ she said. ‘She’s not coming in here, Jim.’

Raelene smiled. Payback time. She opened the door before the visitor knocked.

‘Jim Hooper,’ the dame said.

‘Someone wants you, Jim,’ Raelene called.

*

Lorna’s eyesight was good enough to recognise the Morrison tramp at fifty paces. There were only six or eight good paces between them in the entrance hall. Lorna spun on her heel to vacate the premises, and collided with an infant coming at a run from the opposite direction.

Children have good reflexes. The infant stumbled, then continued her run. Lorna’s reflexes, slowed by weariness, by speechless disgust, didn’t save her. She spun into the wall, one narrow ankle connecting with the leg of a Queen Anne table. Grasped for the table. It was too low. Grabbed at the wall. Photograph in the way, and unstable. Then her feet went from beneath her and she hit the floor, hard, and for the first time since her sixth birthday, exposed her knobbly knees.

The shock of a fall to those of average height is . . . shocking. Lorna had more height than most and no flesh to cushion scrawny hips. She stayed down.

*

Jim approached to within three feet of that length of wrinkled-lisle-stockinged leg. He didn’t offer his hand. Jenny had backed off to the kitchen doorway, Trudy now hiding behind her. Raelene leaned against the open front door, eyeing an aged black handbag. It had flown, landed at her feet like an offering from God. Wondered how much might be in it. Wondered if she dared. With her foot, she moved the bag behind her.

‘Can you get up?’ Jim asked.

Lorna’s driving spectacles, jarred from her hawk’s beak of a nose, had retained their grip on one ear. She had large ears. A talon-tipped hand felt for the spectacles, slid them back into place, then seeing her disarray, she drew her skirt down.

Raelene picked up the handbag.

Watch-dog Jenny saw her. ‘Jim.’

Jim stepped around his sister’s feet to claim the bag. He placed it on the hall table.

‘Can you give me a hand to get her up, Jen?’

‘She can rot where she is,’ Jenny said and disappeared from the scene, Trudy gripping her hand.

The rear door slammed. Raelene left via the front door.

*

Having satisfactorily cleared her father’s house of the unmentionable, Lorna got down to the business of why she’d come.

‘Your father’s properties are on the market,’ she accused, gathering her limbs, reaching for the Queen Anne table and gaining her feet.

On one leg or two, Jim was the taller. She rarely looked up to men, preferred to look down on them.

‘You need to leave, Lorna.’

‘Are you in touch with our cretin sister?’

He had not previously heard Margaret referred to as
the cretin
, but was familiar with earlier similar references. He offered her handbag. ‘You need to leave now, Lorna.’

‘Were you informed before our father’s land was placed on the market?’

Monk’s land had been on the market for months. They were asking a ridiculous price for it and, according to Paul Jenner, wouldn’t budge an inch. Jim answered her question with a question.

‘Are you in a fit condition to drive?’

‘I have driven,’ she said. ‘The will states that the land will not be sold. I ask again, are you in touch with the cretin?’

Raelene opened the front door. ‘Her car is blocking Jenny’s in.’

‘She’s leaving,’ Jim said.

*

Not soon enough for Jenny. She drove forward, ran over a rhododendron, over two azaleas, spun the wheel and backed up, nudged a large elm. Forward again, back, twice, three times before she had space enough to drive across the lawn, between two trees, around Lorna’s car and out to the road.

‘Wait,’ Jim called.

He had fifty years of John McPherson’s photographs and negatives on the dining-room table which he wasn’t prepared to leave at risk. Jenny waited, the motor running, until he emerged with a large carton. Carton in the boot, Raelene forced from the front passenger seat to the rear, they drove towards town, their meal left in the oven to burn. Roast chops and vegetables. Raelene liked chops.

*

As did Lorna. The smell of a roast drew her out to the kitchen, to the oven. She hadn’t eaten since leaving the city and hadn’t eaten a roast since Jenison, the female, had deserted her. She found a plate, helped herself from the roasting pan, found a teapot, a cup and saucer, found tea and brewed a pot. She found bread in the bread tin, cut two slices, buttered them liberally, then sat down and ate.

When they didn’t return, she walked the house. No heavy furniture, no Hooper photograph on the walls. Pale blue curtains in the sitting room, a lounge suite, tapestry upholstered in blues. She scoffed and walked on by to the rear of the house, to the bedroom she’d named her own for forty years.

The furnishings were new. They’d provided the occupier with a comfortable chair. She sat on it, perusing a large river scene hung over the fireplace, artist unknown. Never fond of gum trees, Lorna rose to test the bedsprings.

*

Jenny bought fish and chips for dinner. Mrs Crone now retired, a Greek couple had moved into the café and turned it upside down. They did a roaring trade with their fish and chips and hamburgers.

Six o’clock was not a good time to go looking for sanctuary. Margot would throw a screamer if they took Trudy and Raelene down to the old place. They couldn’t take a mess of fish and chips to the McPhersons’. Jenny drove by the park, considering a picnic, but Maisy lived over the park fence. She’d want to know what was going on. Jenny turned left at Charlie’s corner, considering his storeroom. He didn’t trust Raelene as far as he could kick her, which wasn’t far these days. Drove on over his railway crossing and back to Three Pines Road, which she followed over the bridge.