The Newspaper of Claremont Street (2 page)

She used the sky as a blackboard, and in her mind wrote the figures on the clouds of the morning. The total sum came out somewhere halfway down her window. And then she rested on this total sum with the warm glow which had seemed to start somewhere in her chest, spreading and spreading over her body until, at last, she felt able to get off her bed.

Every morning it was the same and she groaned with every garment she put on. And, as she started to sweep, she was afraid she would not manage the work in the houses where she would be going. Slowly she swept, trying to force the ache out of her body.

‘Hi Newspaper! Are you once weekly or twice weekly?' some boys hailed her from the street. She ignored them, forcing herself to sweep.

‘Hi Newspaper!' they tried again. ‘Did your nose get born first and then the rest of you grow all around it?' Weekly sent the leaves and dust swirling off the edge of the boards.

‘Nope!' she said. ‘I chose me own nose.' And they went on their way because there was no answer they could give to this.

Years ago a policeman had called at the front door, frightening her mother. Together she and her mother had hidden under the table. They had seen the shadow of the helmet on the frosted glass. When no one opened the door, the officer had come to the back door and, letting himself in, called out, ‘Missis Morris, Missis Morris you can come out from under there.' As Weekly and her mother scrambled from under the edges of the tablecloth he removed his helmet in front of the staring neighbours and stepped inside the small scullery.

‘I'm here on duty Missis Morris,' he said, ‘but you can boil up your kettle. I'll take a cup of tea at your table since I have taken this off.' Carefully he placed the helmet on the draining board and sat down.

The boys in the street reminded Weekly of other boys in other streets. The policeman had called that day, long ago, to warn her mother about Victor who, with other
boys, was, as he put it, harassing the tram drivers on the number seven route. Weekly tried to dismiss the memory. Her mother had been terrified.

There was something special about sweeping. While she swept, all the time while her broom was moving, sweeping and sweeping, her mind found a freedom that might be quite unknown in any other kind of work.

Weekly felt the fresh air of the morning touch her cheeks, it brought with the forgetfulness of sweeping, green meadows and willow trees along the flat, grassy banks of a river. This river was known as the Factory River.

‘It's called ground baiting,' Victor, hurrying on the grass, told her. Half her size, he knew everything. She was older and protected him, but he was the one who ordered her about. ‘Ground baiting,' he said, ‘you get the fish to come to your part of the stream, away from them. See?' All along the river bank men were sitting huddled in the drizzle, hour after hour, hoping to catch fish. Together Weekly and her brother scattered meal on the slow moving water. The other fishermen—some had their wives silently beside them—took possession of their stretches of the river in humped up immovable shapes. Some of the wives had sour expressions.

In their enthusiasm Victor and Margie, as she was then, used up all their ground bait. They threw in all the ordinary bait and then their jam sandwiches and, without
fish and without lunch, they set off hungry and wet and miserable for home. Victor consoled himself by throwing clods of grass and earth at his sister.

‘Here! Take the bloody World! Here's another bloody World!' The muddy lumps flew towards her. Feeling sorry for this—she later liked to think that it was the reason—when they reached the main road, that he stepped hopefully into a dilapidated shop. As Weekly thought about the shop, she felt again some of the reverence she had had for her brother. This reverence was mixed with love, but more with shame when she recollected, all too often now, her betrayal of the one person in the world she had loved.

In the shop that day Victor, with his refined accent and his knowledge of flattering words and gestures and movements, describing the plight of himself and his dear sister, lost and far from home, moneyless too because of a cruel uncle, and on their way to their sick mother, had extracted from a shopkeeper, so hardened by lack of business that her eyes had turned to little sharp stones, two stale doughnuts from under a glass jar on the counter.

‘Where's the fish then?' their mother was waiting for them at the end of the dingy street where they lived. Victor was ready for her with a neat little story about a poor old lady, with no home and no money, who had begged from them.

Quite soon after this life became more difficult for the Morrises. Mr Morris was kicked in the jaw by a dray horse and gangrene set in. After he died Betsy, Weekly's elder sister, persuaded the family to emigrate. Betsy was in service with a family who were leaving for Australia, taking her with them.

Moving from one country to another had not suited Victor. Leaving his ambition for the grammar school behind him, he was not able to adapt easily to the change of scenery and climate, and particularly to the people and the different attitudes he had to face. He seemed to feel the heat badly and he was too sensitive to the loneliness and the crude remarks showing lack of welcome to the new arrivals. Weekly realised much later, for she had not understood his behaviour then, his great disappointment, which he had never spoken about, at not going to the longed for grammar school where he had managed, by a mixture of intelligence and trickery, to gain a place.

Weekly and her mother were in service in a large house. House cleaning was the only work they knew. Between them, on swollen feet, they waited on Victor, cherishing him, because they knew no other way. And Victor, as he grew older, made his own life which they were obliged to hold in reverence because they did not understand it.

‘But how has he harassed the tram driver?' Their
mother's cry, so long ago, was without answer. Was it the fireworks, the jumping-jacks or those bombs he'd made, she wanted to know.

The police officer tried to soothe her, telling her it was none of these things. He reminded her that he had made a friendly visit. He promised not to put his helmet back on till he was clear of their place and the neighbours could see he had just stopped for tea. The harassment he said had been of the intellectual kind. But Weekly's mother had not been able to understand what that meant.

It was as if her mother's sigh persisted through the years, sadly and quietly, in the noise of the leaves fluttering in front of the broom. Weekly added her own sigh and then shook off the thoughts. It was such a long time ago now.

It was the time for Weekly to hurry out to her first house. In cast-off clothes of good quality—for, watching each other, no one in Claremont Street would have given her a garment which was worse than something someone else had given her—she was an unusual figure. All her clothes were well washed and well mended and completely out of date. She was tall and elderly and leaned forward when she walked. The sweeping had made her feel better.

Somehow the mornings had not changed since she was a girl. The big houses in those far-off days were all along the river. The water shone peacefully and the road curved around by the river. Through the trees it was possible to see the town on the far side of the wide expanse of water;
clean and always looking as if asleep on the skyline. It was very different from the mean dirty streets they had come from. There, there had been blue brick yards and leaning fences. The tunnel-back houses were in long terraces, their entries echoing with boots and voice shouting.

Weekly, with her mother and Victor, ‘lived in', as it was called, in a large house on the river. The garden was bright with oleander and hibiscus and there were little orange and lemon trees in neat tubs bordering the swept paths. Weekly worked with her mother and Victor went to school. Betsy was far away in the wheatbelt, still with the same family.

The stillness of the river held a restrained power and the blue misty light made her mother feel rested. There was a great deal of work in the house, heavy china basins and pails to lift. There was ironing to do every day, starching and concentrating on little white frills, even their own uniforms and aprons took a lot of time and energy. Her mother was a strict teacher.

‘Margie! You'um not to go in the master's study, there's big cigars in there and drinks and books with titles. Out in the yard with you and hang out the washing!'

No one protected Weekly these days. Everyone tried to get as much work from her as possible and she was expected to go into every room in the houses where she worked. But after all these years there was nothing, not
even the
Seducer's Cook Book,
that could upset her.

She took no notice if there was a woman in bed, tranquil, with a red setter beside her, his head delicately on the pillow. Simply, she removed the remains of the breakfast tray from the hearthrug and later unfastened the door for the dog to go out into the garden. If she surprised people in their nakedness that was their affair. Clearly, in her opinion, showers should be taken before eight in the morning. If a bathroom was occupied she would say with a nod, sucking in her cheeks, clattering her pails and brushes, ‘Excuse me gentlemen, I'm about to do the floors.'

She was used to people being in bath towels or in bed at all hours of the day. The intimate things which she could not help perceiving did not interest her much. If at the time of cleaning, various sexual or alcoholic activities of the householders were in the way, she simply cleaned round them. She was acquainted with, and quite unmoved by, their experiments with drugs and had tidied up on one occasion, quite calmly, after a murder. While she worked Weekly often thought of her mother and all the extra hours of work she had done because she wanted to buy things for Victor. Later Victor had drained all Weekly's earnings till she had made her escape from him in a way she could not bear to think of now.

In those early days, when Weekly was a girl working
with her mother, there was the freedom of the kitchens and the washhouse and the backyard and sometimes a vegetable garden and an orchard. It was like having quite a big house of your own, especially if the family went away on holiday, which was often the case.

Later there were changes and people did not keep servants with the same sense of responsibility. Cleaning women came daily and, as household equipment improved, they came weekly instead of daily.

‘Go through all the clothes Margie,' her mother said, busily chipping flakes of the washing-soap into the boiler. ‘Make sure there's no money in the pockets. Pound notes wash all right but there's no use in risking any.' The young men of the household were careless and Weekly's mother made a point of pinning any money she found in their clothes to the kitchen curtain.

‘I found these, what are they?' Weekly handed two screwed up pieces of paper to her mother who took them between two red wrinkled fingers. Her hands had been in the washing tub for hours.

‘Where was they?' her mother demanded, holding the papers, still between two fingers, up to the light to see them clearly.

Her face was as red as her hands and arms. Her eyes seemed full of excited tears. The tears burst out of her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks.

‘Go and brush out your hair and put on a clean frock,' her mother said. ‘We're goin' shopping.'

‘But what about the washing?'

‘We'll do it tomorrow. There's plenty of time. They're not coming home till the week after next.'

Weekly, or Margie as she was then, had never seen her mother so happy as she was that day choosing and buying good quality things for Victor. He had been given an invitation to join a Natural History camp and, because of not having the right clothes, he felt unable to go.

‘I'll need binoculars too,' he said that night. ‘All the others will have binoculars, you can't identify birds without them.' He stood, well dressed and indignant, in the middle of the warm kitchen. Without binoculars the new clothes seemed useless.

The next day Victor was still disappointed. There were notes of anger and tears in his voice. ‘I can't go with these,' he told his mother, ‘these are only field glasses, and cheap ones at that, they're not the same thing at all. The others won't have any like these. They're not the real thing.'

Weekly's mother wept with the disgrace of having to go to prison for theft. She tried to explain to Weekly, it was not so much being accused of theft.

‘I've thieved,' she said, ‘there's no use at all pretending I haven't. It's bad enough me taking them two five pound notes which wasn't mine. It's a lot of money but not
enough for what I needed to get and when I put the silver entrée dishes in pawn I fully meant to get them back before the family got home. But, as you know, they was home before I expected them and there's the washing not done and the ironing not done and the rooms not turned out as I was told to do. I've never thieved ever before in my life and I'm sorry.' She wept bitterly because she had not had the chance to explain. She couldn't bear, she said, to think of the family coming home to the terrible shock of the sideboard being empty of all those beautiful dishes.

‘I never had the chance to explain to Missis Malley,' she sobbed, and she plaited Weekly's hair into two tight plaits as if to make it keep neat for the twelve weeks they would be separated. ‘Be a good girl at the Remand,' she said, ‘the time will soon go and you'll get used to it. You can get used to anything if you try. There's one good thing,' she continued, ‘there's one good thing to come out of this and it's that gentleman who's taken a liking for Victor. That really is a blessing!' Weekly's mother stopped crying and seemed happier as she thought of Victor having the chance to be a boarder at the school because the Headmaster felt he was an able scholar and had recommended him to the board of the school.

‘That Headmaster really speaks nice,' Weekly's mother said. ‘Have you noticed, Margie, how Victor's getting a really nice way of speaking now?'

At the end of the day Weekly was tired. She had been moderately fed in the houses where she worked. In spite of being watchful over each other's generosity, the people in Claremont Street, in moments of conscious economy, remembered thrift when leaving something for Weekly's midday meal. Mostly she had hard ends of cold meat, an ancient soup and cake which had lost its glamour. In all houses an effort of maintained strength was expected from her.

She stopped in the shop on her way home and sat down near the counter where boxes of long licorice lay, and buns in glass jars stood on top of cheap fashion magazines. She opened the fluttering book of lottery tickets with careful fingers and looked closely at all the numbers. Sucking in her cheeks, she mumbled the figures to herself, looking hastily all round the shop.

‘Go on Newspaper! Buy one, only a dollar! You might win thirty thousand. Just think what you might win. Go on! Choose a lucky ticket,' Valerie called across the shop. ‘Don't be shy! Just buy!'

‘Yo' need to get cleaned up and swept up in here,' Weekly told the girls sharply.

The book was tied to the counter with a string and so was the indelible pencil. A special hole had been made in the counter for these two strings to go through. She let the little book of paper fortune fall so that it was swinging to
and fro. The girls knew she would never buy a ticket. It was just a joke to urge her.

But in a sense Weekly had bought a ticket without paying for one. She remembered the number she had chosen and, as soon as she was safely in her room, she wrote the number down on a card. And then days later when the lottery was drawn she carefully read through the numbers to see if she had picked a winning one. It was exciting like watching a race in which she was the only competitor. Her chosen numbers never came up lucky and so, with real pleasure, she wrote on the card next to the chosen number what she had saved by not buying a ticket. She had several cards covered with small sums adding up to a total sum. As the lists of chosen unlucky numbers grew so did her totals and all this money of course was in her bank and not wasted on numbers which did not win.

So it was she saved in tiny amounts over the years, wearing cast-off clothes, working instead of paying rent, working morning, noon and night, spending very little on food, saving and saving for the one thing she wanted more than anything else.

Of course there were other ways of getting money she reflected as she walked on the pavement in Claremont Street. Her skirt had eleven rows of herringbone stitch worked in a heavy wool yarn. Mrs Chatham had unravelled a brown jumper to remake it and, losing
interest later, she gave the tangle to Weekly who, patiently at dusk, finished rewinding the curly worms of wool. The skirt looked quite interesting, as if from a foreign country, the folds of it swung when she walked. There were other ways of getting money; she could have scalded herself at the Kingstons' or broken her leg at the Chathams' or, screaming, she could fall from a step ladder and injure her back at the Laceys'. There were plenty of homes where she could have had an accident and then claimed compensation. But Weekly had a horror of doctors and hospitals. An examination or several examinations would be necessary, and to be told to take her clothes off, as would be the case as soon as she entered the consulting room, was the last thing she ever wanted. In any case, she always thought of money in small amounts totalling up, it is true, into a large amount at the end.

‘Two and two makes four, four and four makes eight,' she often muttered to herself. Small coins and her old purse she understood. Compensation, with all its vastness and medical and legal ramifications, was beyond her comprehension. She loved her battered little savings books, one after the other. She cherished them, her babies, and she could understand the entries as they were made, every one, because she saw the pages with her own eyes, stamped with the correct date and signed.

Right after the beginning, or shortly after the
beginning, she thought they had made a mistake in her book. Shyly she went all the way back up the Terrace to tell the girl in the bank quietly. She didn't want anyone to get into trouble for carelessness.

‘I think you've made a mistake,' she whispered through the bars, gently pushing her book across.

‘No Dear, that's your interest I've added on.'

‘Interest?'

And the girl explained it to Weekly who listened with serious attention. On the way home she couldn't help laughing a bit, a sort of subdued private cackle, talking to herself, as she hurried across the little green park. It seemed that, as well as what she added by her hard work to help the total grow for what she wanted, the money itself helped. Fancy money helping money, what an idea!