Wind in the Wires (40 page)

T
HE
W
EDDING

E
ach day Morrie commuted, east at night to Cara, and west each morning to be with his mother, the sun always behind him.

Cara drove west with him on Saturday morning. No Myrtle and Robert waiting to greet her. She hadn’t expected them to be there.

She’d met Morrie’s mother at the hospital, briefly, after the lump had been cut from her breast. The woman in that hired hospital bed didn’t look like the one she’d met. His father she met for the first time, a frowning little man who told her she had pretty hair, told her five times in as many minutes.

Morrie’s retired army nurse chose the mother of the groom’s outfit, a pink shawl to drape over her nightgown, a hat to cover her sparse white hair. She propped her up with pillows for the ten minutes it took for the words to be said, the rings exchanged, the papers signed.

Then no more Cara half-Morrison, half-Billy-Bob Someone, Norris by default. Cara Langdon walked out of the bedroom, Cara Langdon-Grenville. And C.J. Langdon-Grenville sounded like an author’s name.

There would be no honeymoon. The bride had to work on Monday, but Gerry and Cathy’s wedding gift was dinner at a posh Melbourne hotel and one night in the honeymoon suite.

A uniformed porter carried their small cases. Two waiters served them in their suite. All paid for. Champagne paid for. They drank it at the window while looking down on the lights of Melbourne.

When the meal was cleared away, Morrie tested the ridiculously wide bed, bounced on it.

‘Who else have you invited?’ he asked.

‘I thought I’d call down and take what’s available,’ she said.

‘Male or female?’

‘Couldn’t we fit in one of each?’ She sat with him then, and later they lay, with room for two more between them, her hand lifted so the light caught her diamonds.

‘I could only see my earrings when I looked in the mirror. It’s sort of narcissistic, isn’t it, admiring engagement earrings. I prefer them on my finger.’

‘I feel branded,’ he said.

‘You branded me. I branded you.’

‘I think it’s cutting off the blood supply.’

‘It will turn black before it falls off.’

He moved across to share her pillow, and they lay together then, his arm over her, her arm over him.

She asked about England. ‘It rains,’ he said.

‘What are English winters like?’

‘Wet.’

‘People who have long engagements know every detail of their partner’s life by the time they get to the bed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know if you were Catholic or Protestant. And how come you’re so long and your father is so short?’

‘Rain,’ he said. ‘He shrank.’

‘It didn’t affect you.’

‘Mum chased me with raincoats.’

‘We’ve had a hit-and-run relationship, haven’t we?’

‘I hit that first night and you ran – climbed a drainpipe.’

‘I bought a black lace nightgown, planning to seduce you if you’d flown over that February.’

‘I like your baggy pyjamas.’

He won the toss for first use of the bathroom. She took her black lace nightgown from her case and changed into it after showering, and he laughed when she emerged, and told her it was a bit too late to seduce him, and she loved his laughter, and one thing led to another and he won the fight for the nightgown.

‘It prickled anyway,’ she said.

Lovemaking, still so new, was a breathtaking treasure she’d almost passed up for security. To hell with security. He was a rare and beautiful thing, though not the pretty boy Chris named him. He was beautiful in a manly way. Loved the shape of his mouth, his eyes, hands, his long legs. Her sons would grow tall. Her daughters would be beautiful.

‘I should go on the pill for a few months, I suppose,’ she said. ‘If it’s not already too late.’

‘Aunt Letty has got ten bedrooms. She’ll feed them – if we live in England.’

‘Two is my limit. Teaching has put me off large families.’

‘I was one of three at one time,’ he said.

‘Truly? What happened?’

‘A flu epidemic. I had two sisters. According to Mum, I almost died of it. I remember the nightmares – rats with giant teeth eating my feet.’ And he played the rat with giant snarling teeth, and she laughed at his game.

‘I didn’t catch anything until I started school. Mum kept me in a glass case, and when she had to let me out, I brought home every disease known to common man.’

‘In Sydney?’

‘Yep. We lived there until I was thirteen, then Dad transferred to Traralgon.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a long story. That first book I was writing in Ballarat,
Angel At My Door
, is sort of my search for identity. This is for your ears only, but I’m sort of adopted.’

‘How can you be sort of adopted?’

‘You can if your mother and one of her lodgers pulled a swiftie – thus the angel at my door. Mum couldn’t have kids. The lodger had too many. Her husband went missing in the war. She got pregnant to a Yankee sailor and couldn’t take a dead Yank’s baby home, so Mum took me.’

‘How about that,’ he said.

‘Want a divorce?’

‘I’m thinking about it. Is your other one –
Angel
– finished?’

‘Only about six times. I started it when I was fifteen, which is when I found out what they’d done. Parts of it still read like a fifteen-year-old kid’s view of life and I got everything wrong.’

‘How wrong?’

‘My other family. I created a whole family, a town.’

‘How do you know you got it wrong?’

‘I went up there one crazy day, walked into an ancient old grocery shop and found my half-sister working behind the counter.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Not quite, but almost. It killed my writing for a long time.’

‘What was wrong with her?’

‘Nothing. She’s gorgeous, tall, regal, with a mane of burnished copper hair.’

‘Your Rusty,’ he said.

‘Yep. She came down here for a long weekend and when she went home I started
Rusty
. It poured out of me like water through an unblocked tap. Incidentally, you did a good job of editing it. If you could type, you’d be perfect.’

‘How did you know where to find them? Your other family?’

‘Mum knew.’

‘Cathy doesn’t know you’re adopted?’

‘I don’t tell Cathy everything. She talks before she thinks.’

‘You think before you talk.’

‘I’ve learnt it’s safer to. That could be why I write. I can dive into the lives of others and let them do the thinking. Tell me something Cathy doesn’t know about you.’

‘Cathy demands. I obey,’ he said.

‘Not one skeleton in your family closet?’

‘Uncle Henry’s ghost lives in an upstairs wardrobe.’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘You’ll believe in Henry.’

‘Your father’s brother?’

‘Pops is Letty’s brother. She’s eighteen years his senior. Their own kids kept dying, so she and Henry took Pops in when his mother died. He was a Grenville but old Henry needed an heir, so Pops tacked on the Langdon.’

‘What did he do for a living?’

‘Not much,’ Morrie said. ‘An artist.’

‘A good one?’

‘He sold a few. He had a bit of success over here in the fifties.’

‘What was he doing over here in the fifties?’

‘Mum is an Aussie,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t admit it over there, but I think she knew she didn’t have long to live and she had unfinished business over here which is why she wanted to come back.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It never came up. I spent my first sixteen years here, went to school here. Here’s a skeleton for you. Pops came out from England to marry Mum’s sister, old Henry’s niece, and Mum stole him from under her nose – anything under Aunt Lorna’s nose was in shadow anyway.’

‘That almost tops mine. It would make a good story.’

‘Lorna wouldn’t raise a lot of empathy in your readers. Mum has been writing to her since before Christmas, wanting to make peace with her, and the hard old bugger sends the letters back unopened.’

‘Not devoted sisters.’

‘She’s why we moved to England.’

‘Will we live over there?’

He reached for the light switch, and the small light died. ‘We’ll take Pops home, then rethink our options.’

‘Tell me about your manor house.’

‘It’s overrun by Letty’s dogs.’

‘I like your Aunt Letty. I’ve wanted a border collie pup since I was old enough to say puppy.’

‘She breeds King Charles spaniels.’

‘Of course she would. She lives in a manor house.’

His arm was beneath her shoulder, her arm over him, holding him close, so . . . so safe. She was Cara Langdon-Grenville and she was going to fly to England, live in a manor house and write a hundred novels.

‘How tall are you, Morrie?’

‘Six-two and a bit.’

‘My favourite cousin is six foot two. He was a weed at sixteen. After we moved down to Traralgon, I only saw him once or twice a year, and I honestly didn’t recognise him one Christmas when we went up there. He must have grown a foot in twelve months. I haven’t grown since I was twelve or thirteen, haven’t changed much in shape either.’

‘Precocious brat.’

‘My real mother must have been. She had her first baby at fifteen, her second at sixteen, her third at eighteen and me at twenty. My half-sisters look nothing like her but I do. It’s as if God pointed his finger when she gave me away, and said, “Don’t think you’re getting away with it that easily.”’

‘Do you know who your father was?’

‘Billy-Bob Someone – a Yank sailor.’

‘He sounds more like a firewater distiller.’

‘Mum says he probably died in the war. My half-brother’s father was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for two years. According to Georgie, had the war lasted for a few more days he wouldn’t have made it home.’

‘Georgie?’ he asked.

‘Rusty. The old grocer she worked for called her Rusty.’

He didn’t reply. She heard him swallow. Knew he was thinking of his mother, so she lay beside him, allowing him time to think.

He broke the silence. ‘Do you know your birth mother’s name?’

‘Jenny. Jennifer Morrison, now Jennifer Hooper.’

The arm beneath her shoulder stiffened, then he freed it and moved away. Too much space in that bed, she moved with him to place her arm again across his chest.

And his heart was racing.

‘What’s wrong, Morrie?’

He lay on his back, swallowing, attempting to swallow something he couldn’t get down. Then he stopped trying to get it down and rolled his feet from the bed.

‘What’s wrong?’ She reached again to draw him back to her side but he removed her hand. ‘I asked what was wrong?’

‘You talk too much,’ he said.

‘You were the one asking questions.’ But he was off the bed and at the window, looking down. ‘Are you thinking about your mother?’

‘My mother is a liar,’ he said.

‘You can stop this right now and tell me what’s wrong.’

‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m wrong. Everything is wrong. Get dressed.’

‘Talk sense, for God’s sake!’

‘You captured her in the first paragraph of
Rusty
,’ he said. ‘Captured her as an adult. Hair like flame, you wrote, sparking embers beneath the naked globe, a spill of molten copper. It’s Georgie,’ he said. ‘
They’ve all gone to live with the angels
, my mother said. She lied to me.’

‘Please stop this. You’re making me scared.’

And he turned from the window. ‘Jim Hooper is my father.’

She heard him. He was a great one for jokes, and that wasn’t a joke – and it wasn’t meant to be. She could hear it in his breathing, in his voice. Knew then why his voice wasn’t Morrie’s. He wasn’t Morrie. Jim Hooper was his father. He was . . .

Out of that wide bed then, dragging the sheets, the blanket with her, dragging them as far as the bathroom door, where she shed them and ran to vomit expensive champagne into the toilet bowl.

Couldn’t stop vomiting. Even when there was nothing left inside her, she couldn’t stop. Her hands gripping cold white porcelain, her stomach heaving, while in the bedroom he found the bedside light switch, not a lot of light, but enough to share a little with the bathroom, enough for him to see her naked form cowering over the toilet.

He came to the door, no further, breathing short, breathing fast until she turned to face him. No words. Two faces, similar in construction, disbelieving eyes staring wordlessly into similar eyes.

You’re a perfect match
, Cathy had said.

Too perfect.

And the bile rose again in Cara’s throat.

He came then to offer a wet cloth, a towel. He didn’t touch her.

‘I could write my name when I was four,’ he said. ‘They turned it around when I was six, put the Morrison in the middle, the Hooper on the end. I told them it should have been the other way around. I told them it was James Hooper Morrison, not James Morrison Hooper. She said my daddy’s name was Jim Hooper and my grandpa’s name was Vern Hooper and they’d like it so very much if my last name was the same as theirs, and wasn’t Morrison such a nice middle name.’

She cried then, for the loss of Morrie’s voice, for the loss of his big farmer’s hands, and the loss of him. Someone stood three feet from her, watching her heaving shoulders, staring at the shape of her crouching over the bowl. Someone picked up the sheet to drape over her nakedness. She dared not name that someone. Then he went away and she removed Morrie’s rings, placed them on the vanity unit, and vomited again for their loss.

He returned clothed to the doorway. She tried to stand, but as in any nightmare, her legs had no strength to raise her.

‘I used to dream about them,’ he said. ‘The lost-boy dreams I called them. Little Jimmy always trying to find his way home. Back when they started, I knew he was me. They never stopped, but home changed too often for my dreams to keep up, and after a while he wasn’t me but Peter Pan. He could run like the wind, ride his bike at a hundred miles an hour. He could fly. I loved my lost-boy dreams.’

His voice was ripping holes in her heart. Her head on the toilet bowl, she bawled for him, and for her. Wanted him to hold her, and was revolted by what she wanted.