Pearl in a Cage (12 page)

‘I goin' tamorra, missus. You stop cryin' now. Plenty room at mission, missus. Wadi won' get me. I goin' tamorra, missus, aw'right.'

‘You're not going anywhere,' Gertrude said, kissing that worried face. ‘We've got room enough. Baby's only a little feller.'

‘You stoppin' cry now, missus.'

‘You say Mrs Foote and I'll stop,' she said, kissing her again.

‘Foot sound like walkin' on it, missus.'

‘You're right,' she said. ‘And I'm tired of being walked all over. You call me anything you want to call me, darlin'.'

‘Mum sound good, missus.'

‘Mum sounds beautiful to me.'

Jennifer was five months old the day Amber left her sitting in her highchair while she got the sheets on to boil. That was the day Cecelia discovered that if she placed her shiny new shoes against the seat of the chair and applied enough pressure, the chair tilted, and if she applied a little more pressure . . .

Amber heard the crash and, seconds later, the scream. She ran to the house where she found Cecelia looking down at the chair and the bellowing baby.

‘She fallded.'

‘How?'

‘She fallded, I said!'

The chair, chosen for Cecelia, was sturdy and stable. Amber had strapped Jennifer into it so she couldn't fall. The straps released, she looked at a growing bump on the baby brow. She looked at her arms, her legs, while Jennifer screamed. Nothing appeared to be broken. Amber sat and put her to the breast, and in time Jennifer sucked.

‘I want some titty too,' Sissy demanded, slapping her mother.

‘In bed,' Amber said. ‘Now be good, or Mummy will sleep in Daddy's bed.'

Babies bounce. They bruise easily. She told Norman Jenny had rolled from the bed while she was changing her napkin. She repeated those words to Maisy. Gertrude didn't see the bump. She was no longer welcome in her daughter's house.

Jenny was almost seven months old and still bald the day Elsie gave birth to a son with black hair two inches long. The
new mother laughed at him and set Gertrude laughing. During the following months there was much laughter in those two cluttered rooms.

No laughter in Norman's house and no love. He slept alone while his wife slept in his daughter's bed, the door closed against him. He was a man of forty years, a man with carnal desires he could not admit to, or not consciously. At night, his subconscious shocked him. He feared he was possessed by demons. Wicked, sinful dreams invaded his sleep, dreams of one of the Duffy girls. And he awakening in such a state of arousal he ran from the house to the chill of the backyard.

His dreams began infiltrating his waking hours. He saw that Duffy girl walk by his house, pursued by three dogs, and Lord, God almighty, what was happening to him?

‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .'

He found himself aroused by the sound of Amber's bathwater running down the pipe and into the garden. He was aroused by the sight of her forearm reaching for a loaf of bread, by the breast she bared occasionally to the infant.

‘Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil.'

He found himself walking the station platform by day, planning his night ahead, arguing his case mentally, rehearsing his arguments over and over until he was word perfect, but come nightfall he lacked the inner fortitude to put his case before his wife. He was afraid of her. Only in the dead of night did he dare to creep into Cecelia's bedroom, to stand beside that bed breathing in the scent of his wife's pale hair, gazing on an arm bared in sleep — and to fantasise the lifting up of her, the carrying of her to his own bed, the locking of his door, and the taking . . .

Then the most incredible of all dreams awakened him one cold and frosty dawn. Half-asleep, he flew from his demon bed to walk the passage on chilled bare feet, to stand outside Cecelia's bedroom door long enough for his feet to turn to ice, then to slowly, quietly, turn the knob and ease that door open. And his eyes could not believe what they saw. The sight of that flattened nipple as it popped from his daughter's mouth shocked his heart from its natural rhythm. Like a trapped vulture,
it lurched in his breast while his arousal grew to that of a crazed bull.

Certain his heart was about to explode, as had his father's, he lost all reason, and while Cecelia watched in milk-drooling, open-mouthed silence, he dragged Amber from the blankets, carried her out one door, in through another. And he turned the key.

She fought him, but in silence. She slid from his bed, but he caught her gown and tumbled her to the floor rug where he finally subdued her.

He was a shipwrecked, salt-caked sailor washed by a wave into safe harbour. His landing was rocky, but he clung there while the crashing waves rocked him. Not until the tide went out did he look down at where he'd landed. In the struggle, her gown, a low-necked cotton thing, had been ripped from neck to hem and her breasts, twin mounds of naked perfection, stared up at him.

Norman's lovemaking had ever been a thing of the dark, of the bed, silent, due to his mother's presence in the house, and well blanketed. It was an animal need he was not proud of, which he had only requested on Saturday nights — pleaded for some Saturday nights, bribed for — but bribe or plea, he had always treated Amber with the greatest of respect, completing his task with alacrity, following it with a brief apology then turning his back.

This morning, though relief had come fast, he did not apologise or withdraw. He was out of breath, on the floor, and a man of his size did not rise from the floor as gracefully as a dolphin from the ocean. And he was stark naked and uncertain of how he'd got that way. His heartbeat, however, had regulated, and now beat in his breast like a victory drum.

‘Let me up, you brutal swine,' Amber hissed.

‘I am not done,' he said, staring down at the peaked nipple so recently in that girl's mouth. He felt moved to suck there, but resisted temptation, easing himself up so he might better view his naked woman. Supporting himself on one hand, he allowed his other to explore those twin breasts, to brush the nipples.
Certainly he had fondled her breasts in the night, but to watch his hand's exploration —

‘She's having a seizure. Let me go to her.'

She? He turned his head to the noise on the other side of the door, of which, to that moment, he had been unaware.

‘Let you go to her and have a repetition of your deviant behaviour, Mrs Morrison? I think not.'

His fingers brushed an erect nipple and within her he stirred, but he quelled the urge and allowed his hand to play.

‘The girl will be sent to a boarding school.' Kissed one breast, then the other. ‘Where her conduct will be curbed — and your own, my dear Mrs Morrison.'

‘I'll take her and leave you.'

She fought him, and he watched her fight, her breasts finding a life of their own, falling to the side, rising towards him, arousing him wildly. He moved within her as she strove to get a grip on his hair. He had little enough left, and what he had was shorn regularly. She attempted to remove his ear and may have succeeded. No matter. He had two. She raked his face with her nails, and he moved deeper, determined to reach the girl within, the laughing girl he had seen at church and loved.

‘Boarding school. I will see to it . . . today.' Like the recitation of a joyous poem. ‘Your place is . . . beside me . . . my dear, my beautiful Amber . . . to love . . . to honour . . . to obey.'

‘I loathe the sight of you.'

‘Then I suggest . . . you close your eyes . . . my so precious . . . my very dear Mrs Morrison.'

She cursed him, his mother, his family, but Norman was beyond hearing. The kicking, the screaming outside his locked door, slid far away. He took his time with her, took his fill of her, and when the last of his need drained from him, he rose like a dugong from the ocean floor and fell to his bed, sucking air.

The key scratching in the lock opened his eyes. He turned to view her one final time but she'd clad herself in his morning gown.

‘You're not sending her away, Norman. She's all I've got.'

You have me, he thought, but with little energy for other than thought, he did not reply.

‘I'll send her to school here,' she said. ‘I'll go down and speak to Miss Rose today.'

 

She spoke to her. Cecelia spent one morning in the junior classroom. A senior girl walked her home at noon, with a note from the infants' mistress suggesting Cecelia was not yet ready to take her place at school, that perhaps they should try her again after the Christmas holidays.

The following week was difficult, but remarkable in many respects for Norman. Over that period of seven days, he made love to his wife on nine occasions, and on three of those occasions during daylight hours.

Cecelia was rabid. Jennifer was miserable. The breast denied to one was denied to the other. Jennifer turned to her thumb for sucking comfort. Cecelia slapped and pinched, taking comfort where she could.

She hadn't appreciated her morning at school. All she'd learnt there, and from the Macdonald girls, was that the headmaster had a strap and that naughty children who couldn't behave themselves got whacked around their legs with that strap.

She learned much more at home. She pushed Jenny off the verandah and Amber told Norman she'd fallen off. Cecelia tried something new. She whacked Jenny around the legs with the string shopping bag and kept on whacking until Amber took the string bag away and hung it high, then told Norman it must have been some sort of rash, that she must have had a reaction to something in the garden.

‘I can't watch her every minute, Norman.'

Cecelia raked Jenny's cheek with her fingernails.

‘She scratched herself on the rose bush,' Amber lied.

Cecelia, now approaching her sixth birthday, though not overly burdened by intellect, was bright enough to realise she was a protected species and thus could upgrade her attacks with impunity — as long as Norman wasn't around. Norman had keys. He could lock her out of his bedroom and lock her mother
in, and on the one occasion when he'd caught Cecelia slapping Jenny, he'd locked her in her own room.

The key to her door went missing on her birthday. She'd given herself a secret birthday present — tossed the key into the lavatory pan then belted Jenny across the face and dared her father to find that key. He had another one. It didn't fit her door but he carried her kicking into the nursery and locked her in there. And when he let her out, he'd taken the key out of the lock and put it up high so she couldn't get it.

She had to watch out for him. She became expert on Norman's comings and goings. She learned to tell the time, knew when the clock hands said twelve o'clock and it was lunchtime. She learned to smile at him, just like Amber smiled when visitors came, learned to play nicely with Jenny, drew pictures for her, built castles from wooden ABC blocks . . . until the clock's hands said one o'clock and he walked out that side gate and back to his station. Then she could throw those blocks, jab Jenny in the leg with the point of the pencil and watch that baby mouth opening in shocked surprise, even before the scream came out.

She swung an empty lemonade bottle at that bald head one windy afternoon, and was surprised at the results. Jenny fell over. She didn't bawl and didn't get up.

At twenty-two months, Jennifer had less meat on her bones than a day-old lamb and less hair on her head than a newborn mouse, which made the inch-long split in her scalp look worse than it was. Amber picked her up and ran with her to Norman. He didn't see the scalp wound, only the left eye socket filled with blood. He carried her over the road to the constable's house, while Amber comforted Cecelia, who hadn't realised that a little hit with a lemonade bottle would cause so much fuss.

Ernie Ogden's wife had seven boys. She'd seen her share of blood. She mopped out the eye socket, looked at the gash, told Norman it would need a few stitches, told him to press the pad to the wound, then she yelled for her oldest boy to ride down and fetch Gertrude.

Norman carried Jenny home, her tiny arms clinging to his neck. Perhaps the seed of love had lain dormant in his heart since her baby mouth had first turned to his touch. He realised how deeply its roots had become entrenched that day when he held her down on the kitchen table. He could feel the pain in his own bowel as Gertrude placed each stitch into baby flesh. His spectacles fogged for her, and when it was done he scooped her back into his arms.

‘Forgive me,' he said. ‘Forgive your daddy.'

He had not asked the question of Amber, the how, the where, and thus had not received the lie. She attempted to take Jenny from his arms; he didn't release her, but walked with her up and down the passage while she sobbed the last of her pain into his shoulder.

Gertrude asked the question. She was packing her equipment into her cane basket. Norman came to the door to hear Amber's reply.

‘She fell over. She never walks if she can run,' Amber said.

Jenny heard that lie. She lifted her head from her father's shoulder and, her big teary eyes looking into his, she removed her sucking thumb from her mouth and pointed it at Cecelia. ‘Sissywidabotta, Duddy,' she said.

‘I did not do noffink to you.' Jenny's speech, still unintelligible to an adult, was crystal clear to Cecelia, who had watched the entire bloody operation with morbid interest. ‘You're telling big fat liars.'

‘What did she say, love?' Gertrude asked.

‘Noffink.' Cecelia backed away to her mother.

‘Can you show Daddy what happened to your sore head?' Gertrude encouraged.

Eyeing the stranger who had hurt her, Jenny slid the long way down to the floor, took Norman's hand and led him out to the back verandah where, with two hands, she picked up the lemonade bottle.