Wind in the Wires Read online

  The offer of a cold beer at the Farmer’s Arms Hotel had got him out. That’s where he’d learnt how he’d signed his boy over to his mother, who in turn had signed him over to Vern.

  ‘Your sister and her husband adopted him a few months back,’ the accountant had said.

  ‘Pass the parcel,’ Jim had said.

  ‘A prize worth winning, Jim.’

  He remembered that. And the cold beer.

  They’d delivered him back to his locked ward where previously there had been no world, no time. He couldn’t lose time after the funeral. It had got a grip on him.

  Six weeks later they’d moved him to a place with a bush garden and trees and hills outside that garden. He’d found an onion bulb in a pile of garden refuse, found a broken terracotta pot, and planted it.

  It had become his clock of seasons. He’d given it sun and water by day and carried it to his room at night. Watched it shoot up a tiny green spear that grew into many spears; watched it bud, watched the bud become a stalk of purple-blue flowers. A nursing sister named it Hyacinth.

  In ’53 he’d watched that cycle again.

  No lock on his door in that place. No crown of thorns there. A tall fence, a locked gate, though not always locked.

  In ’54 two green shoots had pushed free of the dirt, before he’d seen Lorna walk through the gate, briefcase in her hand. Hadn’t wanted the calm of that garden place defiled by his sister. He’d left his pot in the garden and walked out that gate, no aim in mind other than to stay outside until she went away, without her signed papers.

  He’d limped downhill and had been leaning against a white post, looking up that hill, aware he couldn’t make it back, when a car had pulled up beside him.

  ‘How far are you going, mate?’

  ‘How far are you going?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Richmond,’ the chap had said.

  That was where he’d dropped him, in a busy street, the wind biting through to the bone. It had felt good. For a time it had.

  His age, his limp, must have marked him as a serviceman. A Salvo had fed him breakfast. He’d washed dishes for the Salvos, wiped down their trestle tables. They’d got him a job plucking chickens behind a Chinese restaurant.

  He’d plucked a lot of chickens. They’d called him Chicken Man. Looked a bit like the Japs. Hadn’t smelt like them.

  Anzac Day of ’55 he’d stopped plucking chickens and walked down to watch the parade and count the dead. Paddy blown to smithereens; Bull, head on him like a bull, and the little yellow bastards had aimed for his head. Basil, Martie, Tomo –

  All gone.

  Then one of the dead called his name. ‘Hoop!’ They’d all called him Hoop. Chicken Man had wanted to march with the dead.

  ‘Hoop? That’s not you, mate?’ A chunky little bloke had broken ranks to push his way through the crowd. ‘Stone the bloody crows,’ he’d said. ‘We thought you were dead, Hoop.’

  Too tall, Chicken Man, head always above the crowd. Too easily seen.

  Nobby had seen him, Nobby who’d been bought an early ticket home by a bullet through the leg. ‘Artie’s marching, Dave, Kracka. We were only talking about you an hour ago, and there you go, rising from the dead.’

  He’d arisen that night. Drank a lot of beer. Woke up in a bed, his leg off. Woke to the noise of squabbling boys – and Nobby, offering him his leg.

  He’d tried to go.

  ‘You can’t go without a bit of breakfast, mate,’ Nobby had said.

  ‘Have a bite of lunch with us, Jim,’ Rosemary had said.

  He’d told them he had chickens to pluck. They’d showed him an old caravan down the bottom end of a naked backyard.

  ‘It’s yours, mate. You can give us a hand to do something about the mud.’

  A brand-new house sitting in the middle of a moonscape of clay and mud, but something clean and unsullied about it.

  Something healing about earth, the feel of a clod breaking up in the hand. He had two legs from the knees up. He’d spent a lot of time on his knees, his hands in the earth.

  There’s magic in a seed. A shrivelled speck, smaller than a grain of sand, given earth, sun and water, will get its head out of the dirt and a few months later reward you with a blossom. A rose cutting, snipped in June from a neighbour’s garden, will bud up and bloom by November.

  He’d been content on his knees, until they’d found Ian Hooper’s number in the phone book.

  ‘You need to get in touch with your family, Jim.’

  They didn’t know his family.

  ‘What happened about Jenny and your boy, Jim?’

  ‘Collateral damage,’ he’d said.

  By ’56 he’d been driving down to the timber yard with Nobby to load trucks, stack timber, learning to tell one length of wood from the next. In ’57 the chap who ran the office smashed his car into a tree. Nobby was no office man. Jim might have been. He might have been a lot of things.

  It was the office chap’s injuries that made him aware that strapping on an artificial leg each morning wouldn’t have sounded too bad to the office chap who came out of hospital with his two legs, but unable to make either of them move. He didn’t return to work. Jim had stayed on in the office.

  A good year, 1958, a good year for the Collingwood Football Club too. A smashing good year for Nobby and his oldest boy, one-eyed Magpie supporters. Enthusiasm rubs off. All winter Jim had gone with them to the Saturday matches. When their team got into the grand final, there was no way they were going to miss that game.

  And they’d won.

  Waiting for the train that night and she’d come running through the crowd calling his name.

  It had been like being sucked back to that other time. Like the missing years, like every year between their saying goodbye at the Sydney station had been wiped out. He’d been twenty-two again, and whole for a time – until she’d come out to Ringwood.

  In the light of day, those years had come rushing back – and they hadn’t stood still. He wasn’t twenty-two. She wasn’t eighteen. You can’t wind back time to where you lost it. And she hadn’t come out there looking for him, but for Jimmy.

  Told her where he was. Told her he’d lost him. Hadn’t expected her to come back.

  She had, in November. Not the same though. His Jenny had opened her mouth and let it rip. The new Jenny measured, then filtered each word before she let it out.

  Still beautiful. Older, but still beautiful.

  She’d come on Boxing Day, then again halfway through January.

  And he hadn’t seen her since. And he knew why. Rosemary had told him why. She’d given Jenny Ian Hooper’s phone number.

  He and Maggie had always been as thick as thieves.

  MARGOT’S LITTLE MISTAKE

  April. Saturday, 11 April. Jenny never came out to Ringwood on a Saturday, but a woman had rung, asking if she’d arrived there yet.

  And at three she did. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting your day,’ she said.

  Rosemary told her she’d taken a call from a Veronica Andrews, that Veronica had said she’d call back.

  ‘Did she say what she wanted me for?’

  ‘All she said was that you were dropping Raelene off to spend the night with her mother, then coming out here.’ There was a question in that statement, and Jenny answered it.

  ‘Her mother lives in Box Hill. I split up with Ray in ’47 and he got together with a seventeen-year-old kid. She had Raelene and Donny to him, then in ’51 he turned up at Granny’s with both kids. I’ve raised Raelene since she was three weeks old and now her mother wants her back.’

  Wound up tight that day, chain-smoking, watching the phone. ‘I shouldn’t have let them put Ray’s death notice in the papers. That’s how she found me.’ Unfiltered Jenny that day, unabridged Jenny, impatient for the phone to ring, lighting a new cigarette from the last.

  ‘They’re threatening to take me to court over her. People have been threatening to take me to court since I turned eighteen.’ Looked at Jim
when she said it, accused him for his family, sucked in smoke and blew it out. ‘Sorry, but I’ve just about had enough. I’ve got my oldest –’

  And the phone rang and Jenny sprang up to take the call.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Margot? . . . Jesus, Vroni.’

  Jim had known Margot and the other one as toddlers. One redhead, one white.

  The phone was an open door away. He heard, ‘Ambulance.’ He heard, ‘What the hell did she think she was doing?’ He heard, ‘I’ll get a taxi now, Vroni. I’ll come straight to the hospital.’

  The phone down, she returned to the doorway. ‘Would you have a taxi number handy, Rosemary?’

  ‘We’ll drive you down,’ Rosemary said.

  ‘I’ll grab a taxi. Thanks though.’

  They found a number. Rosemary rang it, and Jenny picked up her bag and walked out to the gate to wait. Jim followed her, stood with her, wishing he had two legs and a car, watching her count the coins in her purse, finger a ten-shilling note, find another, crumpled.

  ‘Have you got any idea what it might cost to Frankston?’

  ‘I don’t use them,’ he said. Nobby drove him to work, drove him home. Always dependant on someone. Nothing to give anyone. He had money. He took his wallet from his hip pocket, removed a five-pound note and offered it.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll post it back.’ Looked up at him then. ‘Remember that other five-pound note?’

  ‘Your talent-quest money?’

  Shook her head. ‘That time when you wanted me to send you a photograph of Jimmy, when you were stationed up near Darwin. I kept posting the fiver back and you kept posting it back to me. Before Sydney.’

  He remembered.

  ‘It’s too late, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘To find Jimmy?’

  ‘That too,’ she said. ‘Lorna doesn’t even know where he is. I meant for us, to find us, Jen and Jim, 1942.’

  ‘I’m a screwed-up mess, Jen.’

  ‘Righto,’ she said, nodding, nodding for a while. ‘That’s that then – though I’d love to know what gives you the right to believe that you’re more screwed up than the rest of us.’ She slid his five-pound note into her purse. ‘Maybe it’s a money thing?’

  Filters definitely not working today. He had to swallow it, lumps and all – or spit it out and walk away.

  He swallowed it. ‘The old man bought me a special dispensation at birth, Jen.’

  ‘Margot’s got one too, though I don’t know who paid for hers. I didn’t.’ She breathed deeply as she looked towards the south, the direction a taxi would come from, then to her watch. Took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, struck a match. ‘I wish someone had bought one for me, or I could curl up in some dark hole and say, “Take this cup away from me”. No one else wants it, that’s the trouble.’ She got the cigarette lit before the flame died, and blew smoke towards the sky.

  ‘Margot has got a severe case of indigestion. She shoved my vegetable knife in to the hilt to let the air out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The little fool got herself pregnant to Teddy Hall, one of Harry and Elsie’s boys. She doesn’t want to be pregnant so she’s not. I’ve had her down with me since February and she’s driving me stark raving crazy – her and Raelene both. Vroni told me to shout myself a day off, let Raelene go to her mother for the night and she’d keep her eye on Margot.

  ‘Her doctor partner decided to make Margot listen to the baby’s heartbeat. When he finished with her, she picked up the vegetable knife and shoved it in.’

  Taxi coming. He opened the gate and she walked out to the kerb. ‘Thanks for the loan.’ That was all she said.

  Only one way out of Nobby’s street. Jim leaned on the gate, watching the driver start his three-point turn, knowing that he loved her, why he loved her – because she’d never curled up in a dark hole and given up, and never would. While he’d been hiding from life, she’d been out there living it. Knew he could survive anything if she was beside him.

  The taxi completed its turn. She glanced his way, raised a hand. He was raising his hand in a wave when the hand changed its mind and the wave became the universal sign for ‘stop’.

  Out the gate then. She wound down the window. He opened the door, and she moved over to make room for him at her side.

  *

  They saw the infant as it was being transferred to an ambulance for the ride to Melbourne. Just a glimpse of a squirming scrap with stick-thin limbs and a wrinkled old face – more monkey than human.

  ‘Margot is in recovery. She’ll be fine. The baby is struggling. Its best chance is in the city. It’s a girl,’ Veronica said. ‘Pleased to finally meet you, Jim. Now, I have to get back. Do you want to hang around here for a while, kiddo? They might let you see her.’

  ‘I’ll grab a lift back with you, Vroni.’

  The women walked to the car, side by side, Veronica filling in the hours Jenny had been away, Jim limping behind then. Had Jenny got into the front seat, he would have asked for a lift to the station. She’d got into the rear seat, with him.

  ‘Feel like joining us for dinner?’ Veronica asked.

  ‘Another time, thanks Vroni.’

  ‘Nice meeting you, Jim. I’ve heard a lot about you,’ she said. ‘Have a good night.’ Gone then, into the main building.

  Jenny led the way around the west side of the guesthouse to her rooms. No lock on her kitchen door, not much worth locking in. Plenty of space, though. She filled an electric jug, plugged it in, took half a bottle of milk from a vibrating refrigerator.

  ‘You said Jimmy was born early. Did he look . . .?’

  ‘He was a Hooper,’ she said, as if that said it all. She sawed two slices from a crusty loaf, uneven slices. She looked at one, then tossed it into the bin. ‘Granny used to say that Hoopers had a bad habit of killing their mothers. He got stuck coming out. Doctor Frazer had to drag him out with forceps.’

  She sniffed and sawed off another slice of bread, little better than the last, then with her shoulder swiped at a leaking tear.

  ‘I wasn’t allowed to see him for days, and when I did, his head still looked like a bruised egg. He was scratched, one of his eyes was swollen shut. And he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. And he’s mine, not your bloody sister’s.’ And she tossed the loaf from her, tossed the knife and opened the fridge.

  He stood watching her, the table between them, Jimmy between them. He’d always be between them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jen.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her fingers. ‘Granny knew. The minute she saw his hands she knew there’d be trouble with your father. I don’t think she believed he was yours until she saw his tiny double-jointed thumbs. The first things your father looked at were his hands. If Margot’s baby lives, the first things I’ll look at will be its hands. Margot’s inherited the twins’ stubby paws – and I still can’t stand to look at them, can still feel them all over me . . .’ She sniffed, wiped her nose with her forearm.

  ‘Will it live?’ he asked.

  ‘Ask Him,’ she said, pointing with a packet of cheese towards the ceiling. ‘He’s running this bloody show.’ She reached for her frying pan and dropped it. It bounced beneath the table. She picked it up and looked at its dented lip.

  ‘Old when I bought it,’ she said. ‘Cheap. Good enough for me. All my life, second best has been good enough for me. I didn’t wear a new dress until I nicked off to Melbourne and got run over by Georgie’s father.’

  ‘Sit down, Jen.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down. I want a fried cheese sandwich.’

  Turned on a small hotplate. Placed a knob of butter into the pan. ‘Jimmy wasn’t second best. You weren’t either. Do you think I give a damn about your wooden leg and your screwed-up head? I wouldn’t care if you had three wooden legs, a white cane, were cross-eyed, screwed-up, or otherwise buggered-up, you fool of a man, I love you, and . . . and I need you to hold me before I crack.’


  He held her whether he was second best or not. He kissed her hair, then her face and she wanted his mouth. He got lost there, and when she pulled away from him, he wanted to bawl.

  Men don’t cry. And only the butter burning in that dented pan. She turned off the heat, placed the pan on the sink, then returned to his arms.

  Narrow bed in the kitchen. Jimmy had been conceived on a narrow bed in Monk’s cellar. Jim hadn’t been with a woman before that cellar. Hadn’t been with one since Sydney. Didn’t know if he was man enough to be with a woman.

  An artificial leg can’t be removed without embarrassment, and when it was off, he couldn’t hide the puny stump of scarred calf attached to his knee. Didn’t want her to see his mutilation.

  Be a man, his father said.

  Fear of failure, desperate not to fail, Jimmy between them and Vern Hooper in his head –

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I need you, not that. It’s all right.’

  And it was. She hadn’t been with a man since Ray in 1947, and had sworn she’d never do it again. There was peace in the holding of Jim, in him holding her. They were Jen and Jim again. That was all that mattered.

  A CONVOLUTED LIFE

  He slept in her double bed that night, stayed with her on Sunday, held her hand when they caught the train back to the city and another to Box Hill, then he continued on to his caravan and she walked around to the Keatings’ to claim Raelene – hoping to walk in on a tantrum but meeting a happy Raelene at the door, a Raelene wearing new red shoes.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Jenny,’ Florence said.

  ‘They’re very pretty.’

  ‘We had a lovely time. We’d like to do it again next week.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it, Florence,’ Jenny said.

  She spoke to Vroni about renting a flat that week. She had no argument with what went on in the neighbouring rooms – and what would continue to go on in back rooms all over the world while women were expected to spend their lives pregnant. Jim could never know about what went on next door. Like Granny, he’d consider it murder.