The Home Girls (25 page)

“Bugger me. I haven't got the strength to get them,” she said.

“But I'm not laying here. You rot in bed.”

She got her feet out and swung them above a small bedside mat.

“Japanese rubbish,” she said looking down at it.

She stood up gingerly.

“Weak as a cat,” she whispered, staring at the door, willing it to come closer.

Pins and needles raced up her legs. But she trotted forward and opened the door onto the carpet in the hall. The carpet was an off-white colour put down from earnings at the delicatessen. The daughter-in-law treated it with reverence. Coming home each day her eyes fell on it for marks. Leaving each morning she sometimes took a brush and kneeling in her good clothes brushed the pile upright. Now the old woman wished she could avoid walking on it. She felt so heavy she was sure every footstep would flatten it. But she was so light she wafted across it like thistledown in her billowing flannelette nightgown.

In the living room she took hold of two chair arms, turned herself around and sat down.

“Ah,” she said, pleased at the achievement and putting her head back. It rested on one of the daughter-in-law's cushions and immediately she snapped her head forward. She had heard the daughter-in-law's boots pummelling the floor that morning as she went through the ritual of straightening mats, fixing cushions and pulling chairs to the angle she wanted them.

The old woman crossed her legs and began to rock a foot. The foot was a purplish brown colour like her leg covered with hundreds of little criss cross lines. She thought of the child's legs as she saw them that morning above her white school socks. Like fawn satin, she thought holding the memory under her shut eyes. She slept a little because she opened her eyes surprised at the sight of the living room furniture.

All those sharp edges, she thought, feeling as if they were cutting her. The daughter-in-law always rubbed fiercely at the edges of tables and chairs with her polishing cloth as if she wanted to turn them into weapons. The old woman remembered the furniture at the old place. There was the fat old sideboard crowded with sepia pictures, the cruet set, water jug and glasses.

“Damn rubbish,” Barry had said for his wife who looked sharp and ferret-like on that last day.

There was a little tapping noise and the old woman opened her eyes. The venetian blind had swung around in a small wind from the window and speared at the air with its slats.

“Those things,” the old woman said with scorn.

“Give me my old red curtains any day.”

She saw them burning in the back yard and Barry walking around throwing sticks and leaves on the fire to make them go faster. One of the tassels had blown away and burned out lying a little away from the fire. She remembered it shaped like a little bell in ashes on the green grass.

“Pretty,” she said, wondering why she hadn't shown it to the child.

Why hadn't she? Where was the child that day? Had she been born then? Agitated she rocked her foot harder, plucking through loose ends in her brain to get events in order.

“You went to Hilda straight after the old place was sold,” she said stern with her muddled brain.

She saw them together, two old bandy legged women struggling up a hill in the wind to buy cat food and indigestion powder (Hilda really had cancer and died and it was decided then that the old woman's two sons should have her turn about for six months).

She saw herself waiting with Barry for a train to take her to Corrimal where she was to spend the first six months with Percy, the other son.

“You'll like it there,” Barry said when a great hiss and puff from the engine had died away.

“You can go and sit on the beach whenever you want to.”

The old woman remembered the wind lifting the sand and flinging it against her face. She saw Percy's wife making ridges in it with her hands. The two boys blue like skinned rabbits in wet trunks were hunched over sniffing in the cold. All of them were set apart reminding the old woman of gnomes in a garden.

They all looked out to sea as if to find the answers there.

Five months and four days after going to Percy she came to Barry because Percy had been given his holidays (he said) and her time was nearly up anyway.

She saw herself waiting with Percy for the train to Sydney. His wife was already getting the room ready for the younger of the boys.

“You're only a spit from all the shops,” Percy said. “You'll like it there.”

She looked down remembering how she stood with only one case. When she went to Hilda she had three. What happened to the other two?

“Bugger me. They must have got lost somewhere,” the old woman said.

She rocked her foot and dozed. She must have dozed because she opened her eyes and Barry was there rolling a cigarette between his blue white fingers. In his job he started at dawn and came home at midday.

Licking the cigarette paper Barry saw a picture crooked and went and straightened it.

“Damn kids,” he said. “Jumpin' about the way they do. Wreck a place.”

He sat on a chair well forward to smoke.

The old woman with her head forward to avoid touching the cushion was so still she might have been a drawing.

“You still crook?” Barry said.

“Not too bad,” the old woman said.

She rocked her foot and Barry smoked. Then he screwed his rump around to put his tobacco in a back pocket.

“You ought to go into one of them places,” he said.

The old woman halted her rocking foot. She took hold of the two chair arms. She had a vision of a row of beds with grey haired women in them. The floor was a vast slippery sea. She was struggling from one of the beds, made tight like the daughter-in-law's beds, to look for a lavatory.

“I'd need more strength,” the old woman said.

“They take you sick,” Barry said. “Sick or well they take you. We've seen one. Clean. God, it's clean.”

Now? wondered the old woman and didn't know whether she spoke or not.

She thought of the child running home. Her shoes on the steps, tap, tap, tap. Her schoolcase banging the rails in her haste. She thought of all the child, her blocky little shape and those legs and arms and that fair, springy hair.

But not the eyes, bright blue inside all that white.

She dropped her head back on the daughter-in-law's cushion.

“Well, bugger me if I care,” the old woman said.

THE SEA ON A SUNDAY

All the summer the cars tore to the sea between milkings on a Sunday.

The Went children watched from the verandah of their house built close to the road.

It was rented to them by the Manns, quite well off property owners who built it originally for one of the families they employed. But they later built homes near the main homestead for sons who married. The sons did the work previously done by employed labour so the road house as they called it became obsolete.

It had a verandah along the front and four rooms, two front and two back. One was a kitchen and all the others bedrooms although one of the front rooms, the one you stepped into from the verandah doubled as a sitting room. Anyone calling during the day sat on one of the two stretchers against the wall and if it was night they were taken through to the kitchen where a stove burned all the year round.

There were also two stretchers on the verandah one either side of the front door which Mrs Went kept neatly made the moment they were vacated by little Wents. The pillows were plumped up and the quilts smoothed out without a crease. Sometimes the wind whipped the covers about showing the shabby stretcher legs and Mrs Went would hurry out and smooth them out again, treating the bed like brazen daughters with their skirts raised.

The reason for all the beds at the Wents was the seven children aged between twelve and two.

They had no car and it was very often hard to find the rent for Arthur Mann when he rode up for it at the end of each month and there was no way in the world the Wents could get to the sea on a Sunday.

Their house was three miles outside the town and the sea another twelve miles off.

Since most people were small farmers it was their cars the Wents watched tearing through the dust and rocking on the gravel as they rushed to the sea.

It was one of the complexities of life that in summer the cows gave more generously of their milk and in summer with the sun at its hottest the sweaty bodies of the farming families longed for the relief of the sea.

They mostly rose as soon as it was light and raced through the dairy work with a speed similar to that of their cars racing to the sea.

They went without a meal after the milking (second breakfast it was called) and if their strength permitted raced into the water as soon as they arrived (although the weather had a devilish habit of turning bleak as soon as the old Fords and Austins and Dodges pulled up on the grassy slope just above the beach). The wives and elder girls were left to get the food spread out and ready after the first swim.

The Wents had no cows to milk and plenty of time for the sea on a Sunday but no money for swimming costumes and no means of transport and one of the children looking around the room one day wondered privately what they would pack their food in if through some miracle they got there.

It seemed pretty certain that the best for them was to line up on the verandah, feet dangling into the geraniums and watch the cars go past.

The verandah beds would be made long before the first car rumbled in the distance and the verandah swept and the folded cornbag shaken and laid neatly at the front door which was open to show the front room tidy, sometimes with a jug of gum tips on the mantlepiece. Mrs Went let a corner of a small table be seen tantalizing the passersby into wondering what other furniture had crowded it out, while the fact was apart from the beds it was the only furniture in the room. You could not count the stack of old suitcases in one corner that held some Went clothing (the top ones) and clothes not presently in circulation (the large bottom one).

Mrs Went swept the path too and scolded the young Wents soundly if they left the old wooden gate swinging on its hinges instead of closed with the hoop of wire holding it to the post.

Around half past ten with the fowls chased from the sagging wire fence that ran down the side of the house because they tended to squeeze in and foul both the path and the roots of the lemon tree the Wents were ranged along the verandah edge waiting for the first car.

Mrs Went took herself to the kitchen to start getting midday dinner ready. Mr Went would be there sitting on the old couch not too far from the fire, a strange habit for the summertime and stranger still was his attire of a flannel the colour of dirty milk and thick socks with working boots.

In spite of the boots Mr Went did not often work. He was a very talkative man and when Mrs Went trotted out to see a car go by urged on by yells from the children he (with much effort) would slide along the couch to poke his head around the door and stare his disapproval at the interruption.

She would return apologetic to resume her potato peeling as soon as the road was quiet again.

“They wanted me to see the Bartons,” she would say. (Or the Boxalls, the Gillespies, the Skinners, the Percy Henrys or one of the Turner families.)

This being a typical Sunday morning (so far) Horrie Went then launched into a harangue about the family in the car on its way to the sea.

No matter who it was they had no right to be going there.

“The Bartons!” he cried standing up for better effect and putting a long piece of twisted paper in the stove to light his cigarette. For despite the terrible struggle for the Wents to exist from week to week Horrie still indulged his desire to smoke almost continuously. Mrs Went (Bertha) may privately disagree with him about the Bartons and some of the others but she would listen and use some soothing words when Horrie became overheated.

“Clyde Barton!” cried Horrie not sitting down immediately which showed how strongly he felt, “He got that farm because his father was a cattle thief!”

“A cattle thief!” he repeated and Bertha having heard the story every time the Bartons went past to the sea on a Sunday had to pretend she was hearing it all for the first time to build up enthusiastic responses.

She thought the fact that Clyde Barton's father long dead made some profit cattle duffing was not all that relevant to the present conditions for the Bartons who struggled as hard as any of the small farmers and restricted their time at the sea on a Sunday to less than three hours fearing any reckless treatment of the cows like milking them too late or too early and hastening the operation would affect their productivity.

Here was another point that called for scorn from Horrie.

In one way or another the Bartons, the Turners, the Skinners and others were putting pleasure before duty by indulging their fondness for the sea on a Sunday.

Particularly the Turners devout Catholics before the advent of the motor car and now almost every Sunday their old Rugby sailed past swarming with esctatic children waving from the spaces where side curtains should have been.

The Turners bypassed Mass all the year round being too ashamed to draw attention to a display of seasonal devotion by attending in the winter and all of this irked Horrie to boiling point although he himself was a Catholic. Winter or summer he did not step inside a church the excuse being lack of Sunday clothes and no car.

“Look at them! I don't want to look at them!” cried Horrie when the young Wents shouted that the Turners were coming and Mrs Went went trotting.

When she returned Horrie had worked himself into an emotional state.

“That Godless lot!” he cried making a fresh cigarette when the other was not completely smoked. He flung down his dead match and Bertha flinched as Horrie could have used a light from the stove and saved on the box.

“It's a wonder they're not struck down in the water! How could they be enjoyin' themselves? They couldn't enjoy themselves with that on their conscience!”