Ripples on a Pond (46 page)

‘Looks like you end up as a part of the sum total of my life, Laurence George,' she told his battered photo as she returned him to the drawer and placed her bankbooks on top of him.

She flipped through a few pages of one of Itchy-foot's diaries, before settling them back into the drawer.

Held her nautilus shell in her hand. It was as big as her palm, delicate, pure white and perfect. She'd had no tissue paper to wrap it with in '59. Jen would have some tucked away somewhere. Waste not, want not, Granny used to say. Jenny could afford to waste but didn't. She wasted money on tissues, and had placed a packet on the small table beside the bed. Georgie wasted six in wrapping the shell before settling it in a corner of the drawer.

And that was it, other than a dead biro, a dead silverfish and two mothballs. Not a lot to show for her thirty-seven years on earth – and the sheet of newspaper she'd used to line the drawer, back in 1952.

She was reading, one-eyed, about the world's worst air disaster, when Jenny came to her door.

‘The midday news is on, Georgie – if you feel up to watching it,' she said.

‘Ta,' Georgie said.

She followed Jenny out to their sitting room, to a television screen in full unnatural colour, the reds too red, the greens too green. Or maybe that's how the world looked to others; or maybe it looked more red and green through one eye than two.

She'd owned no television to burn. Had almost bought one, but by the time the signal had been strong enough to be picked up clearly in Woody Creek, she'd outgrown her desire to own one. Should have bought one for Margot . . .

Shook that thought away and flinched.

‘Your head still aching?' Jenny asked.

‘It's pretty much like my eye, Jen – somewhat red and puffy.'

Dark in their sitting room, the heavy curtains drawn to keep the heat outside. The dark was good.

Four-year-old Tracy Lee King, kidnapped from her bed in the early hours of yesterday morning, was found by a farmer and his wife, sealed into a cardboard carton . . .

Old news in Woody Creek. Big news in the city. Headline stuff. The cameras cut from the newsreader to a shot of Joe Flanagan's back, two dogs guarding his back. Accidental heroes, old Joe, the missus and his red kelpies. Then the newsreader told Georgie something she hadn't known. Joe's missus had a name:
Joseph and Rose Flanagan
. . .

He told her too that tiny Tracy's condition was listed as critical. The camera cut to a photograph of a pigtailed infant, hair like Raelene's but nothing like her. A wide-eyed smiling little kid. She hadn't looked like that last night. She'd looked dead last night.

Georgie must have dodged old Joe as often as she'd dodged his bull. She'd served his missus at the shop, but until last night hadn't set foot in their backyard or house. She had last night. Had followed Jack, who had followed Cara through an immaculate kitchen to the bathroom. Joe or his wife must have carried that little kid inside and put her on a blanket in their bathtub. She was in no condition to be put down anywhere else. Georgie had smelt her before sighting her. She'd stood back. Cara hadn't. Before the ambulance arrived, its siren wailing, Cara had got those defiled pyjamas off with her one good hand. That was a mother. That's what they did. What Jenny had done on the last day of Jimmy – taken off his messed pyjama pants. Not a good last memory of Jimmy.

When the ambulance men cleared the bathroom of onlookers, Georgie had changed her mind about having her eyebrow stitched. She'd asked Jack to drive her down to the hospital. Thought she'd have time, after the stitches, after the pills, to sit with Cara. But by the time she'd been stitched, the air ambulance had been halfway to Melbourne, Tracy and Cara on board.

Newspapers, put to bed before the news of Tracy's finding reached Melbourne, had gone to print with unconfirmed reports of the arrest of one of the suspected kidnappers. They'd cobbled together their own version of the unmarried mother, her daughter removed from her care; a report slanted towards the distraught young mother driven to kidnap her own child. Television reporters, given time to dig deeper, showed a mug shot of the distraught young mother. It wasn't flattering.

If sighted, contact the police. King should not be approached.

Good idea, Georgie thought, fingering her spiky eyebrow. She'd have a scar. A lucky scar. Raelene's weapon could have knocked her eye out. She could see out of it if she lifted the puffed lid.

‘I spent years worrying that she'd come home pregnant,' Jenny said.

They hadn't known Raelene had been pregnant, hadn't been told she'd had that little girl. How Cara had become involved, Georgie didn't know. She'd lost touch with her around the Easter of '64. She'd written two or three times before she'd called the school and been told that Miss Norris was no longer teaching there. Maybe she now knew why.

The television cut to a commercial.

‘If yesterday had been as hot as today, that little girl would have died,' Jenny said.

She'd probably die anyway. Critical, they'd said, dehydrated, possible brain damage. Far better she died without waking than survived with brain damage to live out her life like poor little Donny, Georgie thought.

The news was back, with a shot of the air ambulance, Cara walking beside a stretcher, still nursing her elbow.

Dino Collins, though not expected to survive his injuries, had been transferred to a city hospital. They'd try to save him whether he deserved it or not. Joe and Rose Flanagan said a few words, old Joe telling how his dogs had found the carton near his front fence. Then more commercials to wash tragedy from the minds of the viewers. Shampoo to make your hair shine. Coffee to give you a start to the day. Cars too, furniture, then tomorrow's forecast.

Temperatures expected to reach the high thirties today.

Hot hadn't seemed as hot when temperatures had reached the high nineties. Granny's old temperature gauge still measured Fahrenheit – used to. Used to hang on the old kitchen wall. No old kitchen wall. No Margot . . .

Georgie left the cool of the sitting room to return to her borrowed bedroom, where she lay on her borrowed bed and stared one-eyed at the ornate ceiling, thinking of Raelene and her bikie. For years he'd ridden a Harley around Woody Creek, Raelene clinging on behind him. He'd ridden it like a madman. Should have broken his neck and hers a hundred times.

When your time is up, it's up. Whether you're riding a Harley or driving a five-year-old Holden, death will come for you when it wants you. Death had collected Granny from her goat paddock, and less than a week later it had called for Ray in the shape of a rolling log pile. It had come for George Macdonald while he'd been doing the pay envelopes in his mill office; had come for Margot while she'd been sleeping. For some reason, it hadn't been ready for Georgie.

Why not?

*

The local constable came to the door at four thirty. They'd found Margot, or, to use his words, ‘had found the remains of a woman in the area of the eastern bedroom'. Dental records would be used to make the official identification.

They watched the news at six, when cameras showed Georgie what was left of the house. How could so much become nothing so fast?

The remains of a middle-aged woman were found this morning in the burnt-out shell . . .

Middle-aged? Am I middle-aged? Georgie wondered. Margot had never become a woman. She'd been Margot, that was all, her sister; a pain in the arse at times, but a blood sister. And no longer there. No longer anywhere, which was somehow beyond Georgie's comprehension right now – as was that expanse of black stumps and ash.

The heritage house, built by one of the town's founding fathers in 1869 . . .

Georgie went back to bed. All day her head had been aching. All day she'd been refusing Jenny's painkillers. Blamed the hospital's painkillers for Margot's burning. Blamed the double adaptor in the kitchen, the long power cord snaking across the floor to the electric hotplate. Blamed the hotplate. And Teddy Hall. If he hadn't turned up, Margot wouldn't have locked her doors. Or maybe, with Raelene roaming around, she would have anyway. Blame Raelene, the cause of Georgie's stitches, the reason why she'd swallowed those pills.

Whirlpools in the mind make you giddy with their circling. That was all her mind had been doing since dawn, circling and getting to no place.

That's what she'd been doing all her life, circling around Woody Creek – a fish trapped in a puddle. Hadn't possessed brain enough to follow the other fish to deeper water when she'd noticed her pool shrinking.

It had shrunk on her now. No oxygen left. Wanted this day gone and the dark, then tomorrow and better news.

Cara might call tomorrow.

R
UMOURS

D
ays before it became official, there had been rumours around town of a second body found in the ashes. Amber Morrison's name was whispered again on street corners. She'd been missing for ten years or more.

‘She's come home here and someone has done her in and buried her under the floorboards,' the gossips whispered behind their hands.

‘Or
she's
done someone in and buried them.'

The town's only known murderess, Amber, and she'd lived in that house with her mother for twenty-two years.

‘Do you remember that boy she went out with before Norman, how he suddenly up and disappeared?'

Memories were long in Woody Creek.

‘He didn't disappear. He was one of the Willama Watsons. I remember the father of a girl he'd got into trouble coming up here looking for him with a shotgun.'

*

The second victim's remains, found face down on the cement floor of Gertrude's old kitchen and buried beneath buckled roofing iron, brought the local constable and a city man to Jenny's door. She owned that land.

They returned the following day to show her the remains of a small leather purse, found beneath the second body, and a coin, a gold bauble welded to it.

‘You've found Raelene,' Jenny said. One glance at that misshapen bauble was enough to recognise her pearl in a cage pendant, stolen with her handbag the day Raelene had knocked her senseless in the Coles restroom.

She fetched the matching earrings, then told the men how Raelene had come by that pendant. The local man nodded. The city man asked for the name of Raelene King's dentist.

‘I doubt she had a filling in her life,' Jenny said.

Her short life. Raelene had turned twenty-six in November.

The search for her was scaled down, the tracker dogs, brought up from Melbourne, were taken back to where they belonged. They hadn't found a sniff of Raelene outside of Granny's land and they wouldn't. She'd died while Georgie had dreamed.

Jenny and Georgie spoke of Raelene that night, spoke of Monk's house. As a thirteen year old, Raelene and her friends had been suspected of setting that fire. Spoke of the matches Ray had burned to entertain Donny, didn't speak of the day Raelene and Margot had set fire to the old kitchen with Granny's kerosene lamp. Georgie was unready yet to speak about her sister.

*

There is always a bright side to tragedy – for someone. The hotel profited. Newspaper and television men had to make their base somewhere. The hotel's back fence was a narrow street away from Vern Hooper's hedge of roses, and every time Georgie stuck her nose outside the door a camera clicked or a television camera zoomed in on her.

She was newsworthy.
Georgina Morrison, local shop proprietor, was dragged from the inferno minutes before the roof collapsed . . .

The cameras clicked and zoomed the day Teddy Hall came to Jim's front door to ask what Georgie wanted to do about getting a new key for her singed ute. He'd got it started with jumper leads and a screwdriver, had checked it over, fitted a new radiator hose and two front tyres, and now needed it out of his tin-shed garage.

‘If I whip out the door lock, that big Holden place in Willama can get the keys code off it and fix you up with a new set,' he said.

‘I've got spares at Charlie's, Ted.'

‘That's all right then,' he said.

‘It's not. They're with the shop's spare keys in the cash drawer.'

‘A bloody silly place to keep 'em, wasn't it?'

‘In hindsight,' she said.

‘How hard do you reckon it would be to break into the place?'

‘Charlie was only ever robbed once,' Georgie said. She told Teddy about the four slide bolts fitted to the sheet metal – reinforced storeroom door, about the bars he'd had fitted to the storeroom window. ‘The front doors are more vulnerable,' she said.

A television cameraman caught Teddy applying bolt cutters to Charlie's hardened steel padlock. They watched him exchange his bolt cutters for a hacksaw, and heard that antique padlock chuckle at the blade.

Georgie suggested an axe. Only green paint protected the aged timber of those twin doors.

They had an audience now, adults and a dozen kids wanting to get their faces on television. Someone in the audience suggested ripping a sheet of iron off the roof and going in through the ceiling. Then Shakey Lewis, standing on the outer fringes, suggested smashing the storeroom window.

‘Bars, Clive,' Teddy said. ‘Big heavy buggers.'

‘I put 'em in for him,' Shakey said. ‘Your hacksaw will eat 'em.'

Teddy broke the glass with his bolt cutters, and Shakey was proven right. The hacksaw went through those bars like a knife through butter. He removed two, enough for him to squeeze through. Like Harry there wasn't a lot of fat on Teddy's long bones.

Newsmen were not the only ones interested in that break-in. Tragedy is all very well; that house burning down, that woman burning to death in her bed was just terrible, and it happening at Christmastime somehow made it worse. But it was Christmas Day on Sunday and today was Friday, and women who'd thought they'd finished their Christmas shopping realised they hadn't.

‘Is she going to keep those doors shut until after her sister's funeral?'

*

A city television crew caught Cara as she exited the children's hospital on Christmas Eve, a tall chap on her left, a little boy between them.

Amber and Lorna always watched the six o'clock news. Amber recognised the boy and the woman as the ones she'd assisted out the front of Myer's on another Christmas Eve. Lorna's sight was bad, but good enough to recognise the tall male as her nephew. She rose from her chair to take a closer look.

Jenny recognised Cara. Then she saw the little boy look back at the cameraman. And he was Jimmy. Not his hair. He had her hair, Itchy-foot's hair, but his face, his little neck, his limbs were Jimmy.

She had a grandson.

Had she not been looking so closely at the boy, she may have noticed the tall chap holding his hand.

The shot was brief.

Had Jim been sitting at her side, he may have guessed that Cara was more to her than a thirty-second cousin. He was on the phone to Trudy, telling her to stay where she was, that they would see her at Frankston after Christmas.

Jenny hadn't wept one tear for Margot, but for the grandson she didn't know, that she could never claim, she caught a few tears with her index fingers then mopped up the rest with her petticoat.

The newsman rehashed the escape of Georgina Morrison from the burning building while the screen flashed a close-up of Georgie, framed by Charlie's green doors. Her swollen eye and eyebrow stitches camouflaged by dark glasses, clad in Jenny's black slacks, rolled up to the knee, in Trudy's faded orange T-shirt and worn sandals, and she was still a raving beauty.

*

Morrie saw his sister that night, and like Lorna, he rose from his chair so he might see more, but the fire and the deaths now old news, Georgie was gone too fast. It was Christmas Eve, and Santa was on his way down from the North Pole.

Channel Seven repeated that news broadcast at ten thirty. Jenny watched it again, Jim now at her side. No tears, but that little boy was the living image of Jimmy.

Morrie watched the repeat, and this time he saw Georgie glance at him before turning her head. And the sun on her hair turned it to molten copper – or a spill of new-minted pennies.

Then gone. He stood on, staring at the screen, not seeing the commercial.

His sister.

Jimmy's half-sister.

Nothing matters
.
Only the children, only keeping
them safe.

Tracy was safe. They were collecting her from the hospital at ten tomorrow and by midday they'd be in Ballarat, celebrating Christmas with Cathy and Gerry and their tribe.

Nothing matters any more, Morrie. We are who we'
ve become.

Closed his eyes and the image of Georgie remained, burned into his retina, the grown Georgie – and as he watched it, the years slid from her face, and the Georgie he'd known in Armadale filled his vision. A big girl, Georgie, she'd stood between him and the raging giant of Armadale.

She'd held his hand when they'd crossed over the road. She'd brushed the dust from his back the day Margot pushed him and his red trike off the veranda.

Children are adaptable. They have the resilience of rubber bands. In adulthood, the rubber loses its elasticity, he thought.

He'd seen his father twice on the nightly news. He'd heard the voice of Jim Hooper, spokesman for the bereaved family.

Caught a glimpse of Jenny too, a distant glimpse, just for an instant until a car door had closed. Closed her away.

Those images may never be quite enough, but few men have it all, and tonight he had more than most. Cara and Robin were in his hotel bed, both sleeping soundly for the first time in days.

They were enough. He'd make them be enough.

Turned off the television then. Searched for the unfamiliar light switch, found it and turned it off.

Then he went to his crowded bed.

*

Jenny turned off the television. She wanted to talk about Trudy. ‘Sooner or later, she has to be told, Jim.'

‘We've discussed this before.' Not a soul in town doubted that Trudy was their natural daughter. Jim chose to forget that she wasn't.

‘I wish I had your ability to forget what I don't want to remember,' Jenny said.

‘She doesn't need to become caught up in this, Jen.'

‘Her birth mother is dead! We have to bury her.'

‘You're Trudy's mother.'

‘I'm her grandmother!' And the grandmother of that little Jimmy boy, and because he could never know her, she needed Trudy to know that she was her blood.

A selfish need. But it was more than that. It was . . . it was fear.

‘I was in my twenties when I found out that Norman and Amber weren't related to me. It threw me off kilter for months. I don't want Trudy finding out like that then blaming us because she could have gone to her birth mother's funeral.'

‘She's too young to go to funerals,' he said.

‘Let her decide whether she's too young or not, Jim, not hate us when someone lets it slip out one day that Margot gave birth to her.'

‘Who is going to let it slip, Jen?'

‘One of the Halls. Or their kids. Or their kids' kids. Someone – be it this year or in twenty years.'

‘She rarely sees any of the Halls, and will see less of them when she starts her training,' Jim said.

‘She'll see Teddy every time she comes home!'

She liked the man she called Uncle Ted. And Teddy showed more interest in her than an uncle should.

If Vonnie could give him a few babies, he might lose interest in Trudy. For years Jenny had been willing Vonnie to carry a baby to term.

‘Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall,' she said.

‘Then change the subject.'

Maybe her own guilt was driving her, or the tears she'd shed for that little Jimmy boy that she hadn't shed for Margot. Didn't know what was driving her. Only knew that there was a raw aching hole in her heart, a throbbing loss of something she'd never owned.

Jim went to the bathroom. Jenny went out to the kitchen to light a cigarette and to see what she had in the freezer that she might turn into Christmas Dinner for three tomorrow. Half a dozen leg chops. She'd season and roast them.

Checked her pantry for the makings of some sort of fast pudding. Plenty of mixed fruit. Plenty of butter in her fridge.

Fruit pies, she thought. Georgie loved her Christmas pies. She wouldn't be doing any sleeping tonight so may as well do something productive.

Not a good night for baking; the kitchen was hot enough without the stove adding its heat, but she set about making Amber's flaky pastry.

Jim came in to kiss her goodnight. ‘It's after half past eleven,' he said.

‘I won't be long.'

He went to bed and the old house stilled but for the rhythm of her rolling pin. She took time with her pastry, as had Amber. Had watched her often enough to know how it was done.

Have to organise Margot's funeral after Christmas, she thought as she folded the pastry to roll again.

Loathed funerals, loathed that cemetery. That's where Margot's awful life had begun, in the cemetery, on Cecelia Morrison's tombstone, the Macdonald mongrels holding down a fourteen-year-old kid while taking turns at spilling their poison into her. Sacrificed her every dream while three marble angels smiled down on the scene.

She glanced up, feeling rather than seeing movement at the door. Georgie, clad for bed in one of Jim's oversized T-shirts, no sunglasses to hide her eye, now a purple and yellow bruise.

‘I thought you were asleep.'

‘Is that clock telling you something, Jen?'

‘I'm determined to catch Santa in the act this year.'

‘He won't come if you're not asleep.'

Granny used to say that.