Wind in the Wires (27 page)

H
AUNTING THE
L
ETTERBOX

M
ichelle had been transferred to a country school – not home, but closer to home. Marion was now teaching at Doncaster. Engaged to her childhood boyfriend for three years, attempting to get pregnant to him for twelve months, she was planning a big, white Christmas wedding, Cathy, Michelle and Cara her bridesmaids. They’d chosen the fabric for their gowns, the reception rooms were booked.

She came to Cara’s dog-box flat late one night, her eyes swollen by tears. Like Margot, she’d been dumped for a younger model.

‘I should have known when he wanted me to go on the pill. Why didn’t I smell a rat?’

There were multiple contraceptive pills on pharmacy shelves, multiple opinions on their likely side effects too. The major effect was, eighteen-year-old kids with no more fear of unwanted pregnancies were out there test-driving the available merchandise. Men had never had it so good.

Cathy was on the pill, and everyone who knew her knew it.

No pills for Cara. Her romance with Morrie was all on paper. He knew she’d posted her three hundred and forty-nine page manuscript to a Sydney publisher, posted it registered mail, with a money order to pay for its return post, just in case they didn’t accept it. Cathy, who had now read the novel in its entirety, said it was brilliant, that they’d come beating down her door to get it.

They hadn’t yet. She’d posted it weeks ago. She’d found a flat she could afford, a tiny, beige dog-box but almost new. She had her own mailbox. Rarely anything in Number Ten, but she checked it each morning when she left for work, just in case the postie had come late, and hurried home from work to check it again, and every day kicked herself for not including the school’s phone number in her letter to the publisher.

Morrie had said he’d be back in April. He wrote to tell her he’d be delaying his trip. His mother had a serious operation. He’d said he’d try to get over in June. Like Marion’s fiancé, he’d probably found a younger model – or one not half a world away.

August now, a blustery month, and cold, and Cara’s second- or fifth-hand fridge empty. Marion had spent the weekend with her, on a narrow fold-up bed. Two can’t live as cheaply as one.

There was little space in her flat; she owned little furniture, would have owned less if not for Myrtle and Robert. They’d driven down the weekend she’d moved in, the station wagon loaded to the hilt with ex-boarding-house items, from linen to crockery; the fold-up bed was ex-Amberley and the old easy chair had once lived in the lodgers’ sitting room.

Cara had bought a miniature kitchen table and a double bed, secondhand – and Myrtle had almost had a fit when she’d seen the double bed, and had checked the bathroom for evidence of a man.

On the Monday after the weekend with Marion, she was walking with her shopping towards her block of flats when she saw red. There were hundreds of red cars in Melbourne. It wouldn’t be him.

It was an MG. And there were probably hundreds of them in Melbourne too. She walked by it, and down the drive tonight, ignoring the letterbox.

And found him sitting out of the wind on the concrete stairs, and maybe her smile was too pleased but she didn’t care if it was.

‘We don’t allow immigrants to camp here. Move on, mate,’ she said.

His smiled was as wide. ‘You’re late.’ No kiss. They sent their kisses airmail. Willed him to kiss her, but he reached for one of her bags and she led the way upstairs.

‘Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?’

‘I wasn’t sure I was until I got a cancellation. My folks are booked on a tour.’

She filled the jug, plugged it in and unpacked her shopping. She told him to sit down, that he made her flat look small.

‘It is small,’ he said. ‘Mum is in hospital.’

‘Over here?’

‘She found another lump the day before we left.’

‘Lump?’

He patted his left breast. ‘They said they’d got the lot in April. It’s probably nothing, but with her history it has to be checked out.’

‘Where’s your dad?’

‘At the hotel, with the tour group. They’re supposed to get on the train to Perth tomorrow night.’

‘And you?’

‘They’ll be touring for a month. You’re stuck with me.’

‘What terrible sin did I commit to deserve that?’ she said.

She showered, washed her ultra-short hair. He wanted to buy her dinner, and when she emerged, he kissed her and asked what shampoo she used.

‘Sunsilk. Why?’

‘It smells like Australia,’ he said.

He bought her a glass of bubbly wine, bought himself a pot of beer, emptied his glass too fast and ordered another.

‘You’ve got a car out there,’ she warned, and he took his car keys from his pocket and passed them across the table. ‘I can only drive real cars, not toys,’ she said.

‘It drives itself,’ he said.

She wouldn’t take his keys, so he took her hand and slipped the key ring onto her finger. ‘Consider yourself engaged.’

‘It’s too big –’

‘I’ll have it adjusted,’ he said.

For three hours they sat. She ate her meal, he, full up with words, allowed his meal to grow cold. He didn’t allow his beer to get hot. She didn’t comment, aware that if it was her mother in hospital with a lump in her breast, she might have been attempting to dull the pain too. Listened to him, sympathised, and felt very old, very responsible when she drove his silly little car to his city hotel at ten. Got it there without incident, parked it without mishap. And he refused to take the keys.

‘I’m not driving it home, Morrie.’

‘How will you get home?’

‘Tram.’

‘I’ve got a double bed,’ he said.

‘I don’t sleep with drunk Poms I find on my doorstep. Take your keys.’

The lift doors opened and he stepped in. ‘If I can’t sleep, I’ll drive.’ And the doors closed.

She considered leaving his keys at the reception desk. People waiting there for service, she stood a moment, then turned and walked back to the car.

It looked like a forgotten toy left on the street by a kid called in to bed. She’d never left her toys in the yard. Didn’t want the responsibility of that car. Didn’t want him to lie alone in the dark, worrying about his mother either.

I should have got into the lift with him. Would it matter if I slept with him?

Yes. When I sleep with him, I want him to remember it. And if his mother needs another operation, he’ll be on the first flight home.

She looked back at the hotel while checking the car doors. They were locked, though with that canvas hood it would be the easiest car in the world to break into. Cars were stolen every night in Melbourne, and this one would be a temptation to joy-riders.

She drove it home. There was little traffic about, and after manipulating her father’s station wagon into her parking space at the rear of the flats, getting Morrie’s toy into it was easy.

She’d eaten prawns for dinner, drunk one glass of wine. Maybe it was the combination that brought on her night of dreams. Or him, or his car keys on her bench, his car in her bay.

She was driving it, his mother beside her, or a woman who was probably his mother. She had to get her to the hospital and it was on the far side of Sydney Harbour, and she was driving the car across it, across glassy water.

She must have got her there because the dream changed, and she was in a huge hospital ward, and couldn’t remember where she’d left his mother. There was barely enough light to see. Thousands of beds in a ward that was miles long and she’d done the wrong thing in bringing her to this place. Should have taken her to Gran Norris’s hospital.

And how was she supposed to recognise her if she found her. She didn’t know her face.

Then it wasn’t his mother she was searching for, but Jenny. And suddenly Myrtle was there, and she didn’t want her to find Jenny. She was walking ahead, covering the beds with ex-boarding-house sheets, and she had piles of them, covering the patients’ heads too, and they only covered the heads if the patient was dead.

On leaden legs, Cara tracked Myrtle, lifting sheets to look at faces. All the same blurred, featureless face, and she didn’t know Jenny’s face, only her hands. And Myrtle knew it. She’d placed pink rubber gloves on their hands and Cara couldn’t pull them off.

She was fighting to pull off a pair when she woke, her heart racing.

Only five-thirty, the ghostly hands of her alarm clock told her. Too early, too cold to rise. Her electricity bill had been mammoth last quarter. For half an hour she willed herself back to sleep. Couldn’t get Morrie and his mother off her mind – or Jenny. At six she gave in, got up, turned on the heater and made a mug of coffee.

Was Jenny Morrison/Hooper still alive? People died every day, in car crashes, from cancer, from a million different diseases. What if I go up to Woody Creek in ten years’ time and find out she died a week before I got there?

What if I go this weekend and find out she died when I was fifteen?

At least she’d be out of my head.

I need to know who is behind me. It’s not Myrtle and Robert and Gran Norris. Her son might still be up there, or one of her girls, or someone who knew them.

It took two cups of coffee to shake that dream, but by seven-forty she was driving in heavy morning traffic, planning to park Morrie’s car and leave his keys at the reception desk. No place to park out front of the hotel, and on her second turn around the block, she saw him standing at the kerb.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to work,’ she said. ‘And I’ll be late.’

He drove her to work and was waiting for her when the school day ended. He told her the lump was small, that the surgeon had removed it. Tests would prove it cancer or not. He told her his father had left Melbourne with the tour group after his mother promised to join him when she could, which, to Cara, said more about his parents than he may have meant to say. If Robert or Myrtle had been in hospital, the other one would have stuck to them like glue.

Morrie spent two nights on Cara’s fold-up bed. She didn’t expect him to remain in that narrow bed, but he did. On the second night, she all but offered him half of her own. Good sense stopped her. She’d need to find a lady doctor and get a script for the pill before she slept with him.

He flew with his mother to Perth on the Thursday, his toy car parked behind the flats, and the afternoon of his flight, when she came in from school, she damn near tripped over her manuscript, propped by the postie against the bottom step.

Snatched it, her dream of publication not ending, not on those concrete steps. It didn’t end until she was inside, until she slid the bulk of pages from the oversized envelope, until she searched the envelope, shook it for a letter, for some proof that her words had been read.

Only an impersonal printed card, paper-clipped to her well-worked synopsis. Not a handwritten word on it, no signature.

That card made up her mind. Her years of labour tossed by the postie onto an unclean stairway like so much rubbish made up her mind. She could relate to that envelope, to being left behind like rubbish, and while the hurt was still sharp, she walked down to the phone box on the corner, called the Pioneer bus depot and booked a seat to Woody Creek on tomorrow’s bus.

L
OST AND
F
OUND

A
brutal day in Melbourne, worse in Woody Creek, one of those evil country days when howling winds blow straight in from the South Pole, attempting to sweep walkers from their feet, when small electric radiators heat an inch at a time.

Five twenty-five, Charlie warming his scrawny shins before such a radiator, Georgie eager to lock up and go home to warmth, watched the Melbourne bus pull in, watched two passengers step down to the wind. One was Gracie Dobson, the other was a stranger clad in a blue overcoat and tartan scarf, which she removed from her neck and used to tie her hair down while waiting for her luggage. She looked remotely familiar, probably one of the Dobson girls who had got away.

Not a Dobson. Gracie took her case and walked to her son’s car. The one in the blue overcoat and tartan scarf disappeared into the post office.

Charlie, hunched in his overcoat of unrecorded vintage, in a tweed cap of similar ilk, wanted to know who she was looking at.

‘Grace Dobson is back. The other one is a stranger,’ Georgie said.

‘Granger? She died two years ago?’

‘Sssss for snake, Charlie. Stranger.’

*

Cara closed the post-office door, shutting the worst of the gale outside while the youth behind the counter eyed her.

‘The
Closed
sign’s up,’ he said.

‘I was wondering if you could direct me to a motel, please. I came in on the bus.’

‘Should have got off thirty miles back if you’re after a motel – or gone on another fifty.’

‘A hotel then?’

‘Over the lines.’ His ink-stained thumb pointing vaguely north-east as he came from behind the counter and walked to the door. She followed, believing he intended offering more concise directions. He turned off the light.

‘We’re closed,’ he said. ‘I’m going home.’

‘Would you know if there is a family here by the name of Hooper?’

‘Down the same way as the pub,’ the youth said. ‘There’s a few more in the cemetery.’ There is nothing worse than a joke that doesn’t come off. The youth shrugged, eyed her again, then reached for the door to close it.

Cara clung to shelter. ‘Do you know of a Morrison family?’

‘Are you doing a survey or something?’ He jiggled the keys.

‘Something,’ she said.

‘Georgie Morrison works for Charlie.’

‘More information please?’

His thumb pointed again. ‘On the corner, the grocer.’

She stepped outside. He locked up and walked to his bike, parked against a leaning veranda post. Her case in hand, she watched him mount and ride east into the growing gloom, then she turned west, or in the direction he’d pointed, the wind attempting to blow the small case from her hand.

Fought that wind past a bare-faced brick building to the suggested shelter of a crumbling corner veranda, its posts painted green in another lifetime, to match twin front doors. They were closed, but light showed through what had obviously been a grocer’s window in another lifetime. She tried the door. The wind did the rest. It flung one wide, and while she fought to close it, a cow bell fixed overhead jangled.

Not a lot of light within, bare boards, boxes, a long battered counter running the length of a deep and narrow store. She placed her case beside a crate of tomato-sauce bottles, sighted an ancient old bloke clad for outdoors but seated over a tiny heater.

‘I was told George Morrison worked here.’

‘Speak up,’ he said.

‘George Morrison,’ Cara repeated, a tone louder.

‘Who’s looking?’ a voice from the deep asked. Cara searched for the owner and sighted red hair at the far end of the counter.

‘Good afternoon,’ Cara said and walked deeper into the barn of a store. Should have said evening, shouldn’t have said
good
anything. This was bad. This was as bad as it got and she was stark raving mad. She cleared her throat and walked to the counter. ‘I’m attempting to locate a Jennifer Hooper. I believe her maiden name was Morrison.’

‘You’re here about Donny?’

Cara tried her schoolmarm voice, which these days worked with nine year olds. ‘I was told I might find a George Morrison here. Would he be about, please?’

The redhead rose up from behind a large cardboard carton, an absolute stunner of a redhead, tall, clad in a zip-up navy windcheater, her long hair pulled back hard from her face in a long and bushy ponytail. ‘Could be,’ she said.

The bus had travelled north, or north-west. Logic suggested the weather would be warmer here than in Melbourne. This place was hell without the heat, but that stunner of a girl standing there, taking her measure, made Cara remove her headscarf and shake her curls free.

‘You’re from Raelene’s welfare place?’

‘The matter is personal,’ Miss Norris said.

The redhead nodded and took a packet of cigarettes from her windcheater pocket, flipped one into her mouth and struck a match, all the while eyeing her visitor.

Cara turned back to the door, wanting out of this place. If she’d learn one thing from this, it would be not to make rash decisions.

The decrepit old coot had left his heater. He was blocking her way out, polishing his glasses. And he smelled of mould and mothballs.

‘She’s here to see Jenny,’ the redhead yelled.

The glasses back where they belonged, he had a good look. ‘I’ll bet you a Yankee dime to a dollar that you’re one of Gertrude’s quack’s mob,’ he said.

‘Archie Foote,’ the redhead translated.

They were speaking in code. Cara looked from one to the other, then capitulated. ‘My mother knew Jenny during the war.’

‘She’s got your mother’s hair,’ Charlie said.

The redhead blew three perfect smoke rings towards the ceiling, perfect until they contacted the polar air currents up there and dissipated.

‘I’m Georgie Morrison,’ she said. ‘Jenny is my mother.’

And Cara’s heart rose up from her breast like a dying frog then flopped down dead to the swamp of her stomach.

She was looking at her half-sister. She was standing across the counter from a half-sister, and her half-sister was offering her a cigarette.

Struck dumb. Staring at the redhead, then aware she was staring, she reached for the packet of cigarettes.

And the redhead caught her wrist.

This was
Psycho
country. She’d seen the movie. She swung around to face the old bloke, expecting that music, the long-bladed knife. He was staring at her, but three foot away.

Wrenched her wrist free and stepped back from the counter. Had she been in her right mind she would have run out to the street, thrown herself in front of a truck, if there’d been a truck. She hadn’t been in her right mind since Monday. She was in love, and he was in Perth with his mother. If she’d been in her right mind she would have been in a city doctor’s office, getting a script for the pill, but the pill took a month to screw the female system into its unnatural cycle anyway, and by that time he’d be back in England.

And Cathy had said her novel was brilliant. And it was trash, and treated like trash by the postie. Anyone could have picked it up. And who cared if they had.

‘How did she know Jenny?’ the redhead asked.

‘Sydney.’ And I want to go back there, be thirteen again and know nothing about this place. I want to do it again, and do it the right way – and put Amberley back the way it was.

‘How did she know her?’

‘Jenny was one of my mother’s lodgers –’

‘Not the Myrtle who used to look after Jimmy?’

Cara nodded.

*

‘Righto.’ Georgie nodded and continued nodding.

What looks like a fish, smells like a fish and feels fishy is usually related to a fish. Jenny’s hand had reached for that packet of cigarettes, and Charlie was dead right about her hair, so Georgie nodded, having a fair idea of why this stranger was here.

Years ago, back when Lila Roberts had moved to town, Margot had become obsessed about a fourth baby Jenny had produced while she’d been in Sydney. It had never taken much to get Margot started on one of her obsessions and most of them Georgie ignored. She may have got that one right.

I knew you when you were a bulge in your mother’s belly
, Lila Roberts had said to her when Jenny had introduced Margot as her daughter.

And Georgie knew she was looking at that bulge in Jenny’s belly. She was dead certain of it.

When you’re fishing, first bait your hook. Georgie was searching for that bait when a gale blew in the door with Maisy Macdonald.

‘I thought you might have closed up early. I forgot to get tea when I was in Willama.’

‘Shut that door or I’ll start flying before they give me wings,’ Charlie yelled.

She closed it, speaking as she approached the counter. ‘Bushells, thanks love. It’s got less dust in it.’

She saw Georgie’s visitor – and saw the resemblance. A blind man would have seen the resemblance, and the longer Georgie looked at her visitor, the more resemblance she saw.

‘That the lot?’

‘Give me a couple of pound of sugar while I’m here, love.’ Then never backward in coming forward, her next comment was to the visitor. ‘You picked a bad day for your trip. The news just said there’ll be gale-force winds tonight – which reminds me, love, I’d better have a bottle of kero just in case the wires go down again.’

‘No bottle, no kero,’ Charlie said.

‘I’ll bring you up a dozen tomorrow, you mean old coot.’

The visitor had stepped away from the counter, turned her back to the three-way conversation. Maisy took her tea and sugar, and her beer bottle full of kero and, with nothing more to learn, left, Georgie walking her to the door, opening it, closing it behind her, glancing at her visitor’s case and deciding that fishing time was over.

‘You’d be the one she had when she was up in Sydney,’ she said. And she hooked her.

‘You know about me?’ the visitor said.

‘I do now,’ Georgie said.

*

Bloody fool, Cara’s mind screamed.
You know about me?
Bloody fool.

Get out. Now.

Nowhere to get out to until eight-thirty tomorrow morning.

‘What’s your moniker?’ the moth-eaten one asked.

‘Foote,’ Georgie yelled. ‘She’s Granny’s niece – on her quack’s side. Do you reckon we could have a bit of privacy, Charlie.’

‘Knew it,’ he said, then unplugged his heater and wandered with it swinging by its cord to the dark end of the store, where he disappeared behind a curtain.

Georgie returned to the counter and her cigarettes. She removed one, then again offered the packet. This time Cara took it and, with shaking hands, removed a cigarette and waited for a light.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘There’s a hotel –’

‘If the weather was better it would be packed out on a Friday night. You might get lucky. If not, the bloke out at the caravan park will have an on-site van.’ Georgie struck a match and shared the flame, her eyes never leaving Cara’s face. ‘You’re the dead spit of her.’ And she showed her hand. ‘Jenny’s only legacy to me. You’re taller than her. You’ve got the same haircut, or damn near. Decided to claim your heritage, eh?’

‘I . . . I’ve always wanted to meet her, and Jimmy.’

‘She’s here. Jimmy’s grandfather took him when he was six.’

‘She’s still in town?’

‘A decent stone’s throw away. If you stay at the pub she’ll be your nearest neighbour. How long are you here for?’

‘Tonight,’ Cara said.

‘What do I call you?’

‘Cara. Cara Norris.’

And the old man was back, but behind the counter, gathering notes from a drawer.

‘I’ll drop you off at the pub on my way if you like – after I fix Charlie a bit of dinner.’

They disappeared with their money, and Cara walked back to her case to stare out the window, rain blowing in clouds now before a howling wind.

This place wasn’t the place she’d packed for. She’d seen a different town, with motels in the main street. Every tiny town between Melbourne and Sydney had a motel. She’d seen herself unpacking that case in a comfortable room, with a telephone, had seen herself making anonymous phone calls to Hoopers, to Morrisons.

Her half-sister? A redhead? She’d thought her half-sisters might look like her. How could that redhead be her half-sister? What was a girl who looked like her doing behind the counter of a derelict grocery shop?

And she was back. ‘Were you planning to knock on Jenny’s door?’

‘No! No. I’m not up here to upset anyone.’

‘You’ve made my day – not that it would have taken a lot. Do you want me to give her a call for you?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are you here for?’

Cara shook her head. ‘I didn’t expect to find . . . anyone.’

‘You have, so what’s next?’

‘I thought there’d be a motel, a telephone.’

‘There’s a telephone on the wall. Go for your life.’ Cara shook her head. ‘She’s pretty shockproof,’ Georgie added.

Wished the sun was out. Wished she’d driven Morrie’s car up here. Wished she hadn’t come up here.

‘Is she married?’

‘Yep. And I doubt he knows that she had you.’

‘I shouldn’t have come.’

‘But you did, and I reckon that if I’d found the guts to come this far, I’d take the next step. Do you want to see her?’

She wanted to see her through a one-way mirror. No one-way mirrors in Woody Creek. But she was here where she’d been planning to be ever since she’d found out about her. Maybe she had to stop attempting to control what was beyond her control and allow this night to find its own ending, disaster or not.

‘Got any idea why she gave you up?’ the redhead asked.

Cara shook her head. ‘Mum told me she had three children, that she was young.’

‘She’s sixteen years older than me. I’ll give her a call and sound her out for you.’

Cara turned to the telephone, an ancient box fixed to a post behind the counter. ‘Would she see me?’

‘One way to find out.’

And Georgie made the call. Seconds later the ghost haunting the edge of Cara’s vision for years was on the other end of the line, and Cara’s heart hammering a hole through her lungs, pounding so hard in her ears it outdid the howl of wind in the wires, and Georgie’s conversation.