Ripples on a Pond (4 page)

‘We know who we are, Morrie.'

‘I know who I am. I'm Morrison Langdon, and I'm freezing.'

She opened her coat then, wanting to share its warmth with him. She put her arms and the coat around him and his arms crept willingly beneath it. Close then, so close, she holding the coat, he holding her beneath it. For minutes they clung together, his hands warming against the wool of her sweater. Loved his hands on her, loved the way his eyes looked at her. Loved his mouth too. And, cold faces close, where else were aching mouths expected to find peace?

Wind moaning between naked branches at the sight of them, but the wind tells no tales. For half an hour they stood in the meagre shelter of that old tree, growing there since Ballarat streets had been paved with gold. That tree had seen heartbreak before; it had seen too many goodbyes. It had seen it all before. It looked the other way.

W
ATER
U
NDER
T
HE
B
RIDGE

J
im Hooper, last of the Woody Creek Hoopers, still a bookworm, was the town historian. What there was to know about Woody Creek, Jim Hooper knew. For six months, he had been compiling a brief history of the town for the proposed centenary celebrations.

An artificial leg places restrictions on how a man might fill his days. Jim had lost half of one leg in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He had a daughter, Trudy, he adored, a wife, Jenny, he'd loved since boyhood, he lived in his mother's house and had inherited the money left to her by her first husband. From the Hooper line he'd inherited little other than their steel-grey hair, their excessive height and a suggestion of the long, dominant jaw. The Hoopers' desire to dominate, to possess, had been bred out of him.

‘A nice bloke,' folk said of Jim Hooper.

‘He's too good for her,' a few said.

Memories were long in Woody Creek, though there were plenty who chose to forget, if not to forgive, Jenny's colourful past. Since Miss Blunt had retired her sewing machine Jenny was the only dressmaker in town. Self-taught in the main, she was an artist at her trade. As a girl, she'd dreamt grander dreams. As a girl, she'd believed that one day she'd become a famous singer, live in Paris, marry Clark Gable. A lot of water had flowed under Woody Creek's bridge since Jenny's girlhood.

She was having a break from her sewing machine when John McPherson, Woody Creek's photographer for near on fifty years, came by with a carton of photographs. Until today, Jim had believed his work on the centenary history was done. Then John started spreading out old photographs of a once thriving and self-sufficient little town. He had photographs of Moe Kelly's funeral from when Jen and Jim were schoolkids. Moe had been Woody Creek's undertaker. John had photographs of an old bullocky and his team, hauling a massive log into town.

He had a photograph of Juliana Conti.

‘I came across the old negative,' he said, offering Jenny the six-by-eight-inch enlargement.

As a seventeen year old, John had gone with his mother to Moe Kelly's cellar where he'd photographed the foreign woman who had died after giving birth to Jenny. J.C. they'd named her, for the initials embroidered in the corner of her handkerchief. Twenty-two years after her death she'd been identified as Juliana Conti, the wife of an Italian banker. John had photographed her dead face in semi-profile and she looked as if she was sleeping.

Jim reached for it. ‘It's you, Jen,' he said. ‘You with dark hair.'

She'd never seen herself sleeping, but could see what he meant. The men continued their search through history while Jenny sat staring at the face of that stranger, wanting to cry for who she might have been had that stranger lived.

She'd grown to adulthood never doubting she was the daughter of Amber and Norman Morrison. They'd raised her. She'd known of Archie Foote, known she'd inherited his hair, but had believed him to be her grandfather – until she'd turned twenty-two and learnt he'd fathered her. A confusion, Jenny's early life; a confusion she preferred not to think about.

She glanced at her watch when Jim plugged in his tape recorder and offered John a series of labelled tapes. During the past six months, Jim had spent hours recording the ramblings of Woody Creek's elderly citizens, driving backwards and forwards to the Willama old folks' home, trapping history before it was lost to time, he claimed. Those tapes held a lot of complaints about kids who never visited, inedible meals and arthritis along with the history, and Jenny had heard it all before.

‘Boys with their toys,' she said, and left them there to play.

Technology had gone mad since the war. She'd been a three year old when she first set eyes on Vern Hooper's wireless; it had been taller than her. These days, modern cars came off the assembly line with radios built into their dashboards.

Jim and John were into technology. They'd stood breathing down her neck when she put her new sewing machine through its paces. It overlocked seams, made buttonholes with the twist of a knob. They might have pulled it apart to see how it did what it did, had she not told them she liked it as it was and to keep their hands off it.

Tape recorders had no doubt been around for years, but until Jim bought his portable model, she'd never heard her own voice. He'd filled a tape with her singing, Amy playing the accompaniment. A weird experience. People had been telling her for years that she should have been on the television – and the wireless before that. Too late now.

There was a feeling of guarded excitement about this final year of the sixties, as if the world was teetering on the brink of something wholly new while attempting to cling on to the old, the familiar.

Australia was shipping iron ore to Japan, and it meant nothing but money to those too young to remember the war. Those who did remember swore that the Japs were turning it into ammunition and another fleet of war ships. Jim never commented one way or the other; never mentioned the Japs, the prison camp, the war or his years in hospitals. Granny used to say she'd erected signs behind her warning her not to look back at the past. Jim had erected neon signs with warning sirens.

Millions had died in that war. How could anyone forget it? Lives had been changed, as had Australia. There were names in the telephone books now that Jenny wouldn't have attempted to pronounce. Woody Creek had become home to migrants from at least eight different countries. But had anyone learnt anything from all of that killing? Not on your life. There had been wars going on ever since, first in Korea, now Vietnam and pretty much everywhere else. You could look at the globe today and put your finger on a dozen spots where men were killing each other.

The pill might eventually put a stop to war. With women no longer popping out a baby a year, the armies of the world might run out of cannon fodder – or the Catholics would take over. The Pope didn't approve of the pill. Women approved. Offered freedom from pregnancy, they were filling the universities, taking over city offices. Women were a vital division of the labour force, some parliamentarian had recently said, and were finally to be recognised as such. The Arbitration Commission had adopted the principle of equal pay for equal labour regardless of gender.

Vern Hooper would have rolled over in his grave. Gertrude would have danced a highland jig. She'd been a liberated woman before liberation had become fashionable – and Georgie was her all over again. Jenny wished her daughter different, or wished her out of Woody Creek. She was wasting her youth, her brain and her beauty in this town.

She wished Jim out of it too. Not much chance of that. He'd found his niche in the world and he was sticking to it.

Wished herself out of it today, or out of her sewing room and a thousand miles away from Maisy's purple suit, which this morning she'd promised to get done before Trudy came in from school. She'd be pushing it.

An easy kid to raise, Trudy, right from day one. A sweet-natured kid, like her daddy; dark-eyed, dark-headed like most of the Hoopers, and not a skerrick of Hooper blood in her. Jenny's blood ran in her veins, via Margot – if a trickle had somehow managed to leak into Margot – the longer Jenny lived, the more difficulty she had believing she'd given birth to Margot.

The sewing room, once Vern Hooper's library, boasted two sewing machines: a big old industrial and her brand new portable model. It had embroidered the front of a blouse she'd made for Trudy. It wasn't Amber's perfect embroidery, but from a distance it looked as good, and it made better buttonholes.

Miss Blunt's long cutting table took up too much space. It was littered today with scraps of purple brocade. Three days ago, Maisy had turned up at Jenny's door with the fabric, instructed by her city-dwelling daughter to buy herself something new to wear to another of her granddaughter's weddings. Easier said than done for Maisy; these days she was almost as wide as she was tall. Had she been anyone other than Maisy, Jenny would have refused the job on such short notice. Always more aunt than neighbour, Maisy Macdonald, more mother than aunt when Jenny and Sissy were kids. They'd damn near lived at her house.

Jenny never went within a hundred yards of it now, never called her on the phone. Her raping sons still lived at home, and Jenny would dodge a truck on the road to get to the other side if she saw either one of them approaching, afraid she might breathe air they'd exhaled.

She slid purple brocade beneath the machine's foot and the motor hummed. Brocade was a curse to sew. It frayed. Wished Maisy had chosen a different fabric, a different shade. Close work on dark colours was hard on the eyes.

In good light, without the assistance of makeup, Jenny may have looked her age. Fine lines were creeping in. The light in her eastern-facing sewing room wasn't good in the afternoons. The deep gold of her hair had darkened a little, and amongst the short curls treacherous threads of grey could sometimes be found, though not for long. She pulled them out. She was forty-five. At times, those numbers sounded like a ridiculous joke. At other times, when she sat too long at her machines, her back didn't deny its age.

In Armadale, she'd sewn to feed her kids. Wasn't sure why she did it still. She didn't need the money. Liked to know she was still capable of earning her own living maybe; liked creating pretty things from pretty fabrics. Purple brocade didn't qualify.

She was humming along with her big machine, her mind far away, when the phone rang. It didn't ring often. She snipped a thread, hoping Jim would silence it; hoping that when he did, it wasn't Maisy. Didn't have time today to waste half an hour on the phone. Once Maisy started talking, you couldn't shut her up.

‘Jim! Will you get that thing?' she called.

No reply, so she rose and walked out to the hall.

The beep-beep-beep as she lifted the receiver told her it wasn't a local call. The unfamiliar female voice asking to speak to Mrs Jennifer King told her it was something to do with Raelene.

‘Jennifer Hooper speaking,' she said. ‘I'm Raelene King's stepmother.'

She was also Donald King's stepmother, and poor little Donny had taken a fit in his bed last night and died there.

‘Had he been sick?'

The woman had no details to offer. ‘We have been unable to contact Mrs Keating,' she said. ‘Would you have her current address or phone number?'

Jenny had lost contact with Florence Keating, Raelene and Donny's mother, since she and her husband had sold up in Moe and taken off somewhere with their five little kids. The woman, unable to get what she wanted, ended the conversation.

Until Ray's death in '58, Jenny had been the only mother Donny and Raelene had known. Poor little Donny, eight years old but with the mental age of a two year old, had been impossible to handle alone. She had given him into the care of people capable of handling him, then a few months later Florence Keating had come out of the woodwork. She and her husband, Clarrie, childless at the time, had wanted to raise Raelene.

Vern Hooper had spent years threatening to take Jenny to court to get custody of Jimmy, and when Florence and her husband started threatening the same, Jenny had given in. Since '59, Florence and Clarrie had been responsible for both of Ray's kids – and Raelene might have been a different girl had they stayed out of her life, or remained childless. Florence started popping babies and Raelene discovered boys. She'd gone off the rails as a twelve year old and by fifteen she'd been ripping them up.

She'd turn eighteen this year. Jenny had intended signing Ray's insurance money over to her when she turned eighteen, which, given her current situation, might be the worst thing she could do. Knew where to find Raelene, where she'd be able to find her until her birthday. At sixteen, her bikie boyfriend had got her hooked on drugs, and when he wasn't around to supply them, she did pretty much anything to get what she needed. She'd been picked up on a Melbourne street and charged with soliciting and Clarrie and Florence had signed her into a home for wayward girls. That home would have their current address. And Raelene needed to be told that her brother was dead.

Again, Jenny placed her sewing down and walked out to the telephone.

Jim found her there. She covered the mouthpiece. ‘Donny died. They're getting Raelene for me,' she said.

She waited on the line for minutes, wishing she'd thought to bring her cigarettes. Tried not to smoke in the house.

And Raelene was on the line. ‘What do you want?'

‘Donny died last night.'

‘So what?'

‘We need to locate Florence.'

‘As if I'd know.'

‘If we can't, then you're his next of kin, Raelie.'

‘He's nothing to me and neither are you,' she said and hung up.

Jenny placed the phone down, went out to the kitchen for her cigarettes and ashtray, then returned to dial a number given by the woman who had rounded up Raelene. It took time, but an office attached to the girls' home gave her Florence's address – in Dubbo, up in New South Wales. No phone number. The exchange supplied the number for the Dubbo police station, who got results. At four, Clarrie Keating phoned.

‘Flo and I were wondering if you could look after the funeral from down there, Jenny,' he said. ‘We'll pay for it.'

‘Ray's insurance will pay for it,' she said. ‘Would Florence have any objections to him being buried in with his father?'

‘It sounds right to me,' Clarrie said. ‘How's the girl?'

‘Not greatly improved by the sounds of it,' Jenny said.

It took until five thirty to get everything done, and when that phone was down for the final time, Jenny wondered how anything had ever got done before telephones.

‘They'll do the funeral up here on Monday, at one,' she said. ‘Someone will bring Raelene home–'