Miss Rose had forty-seven children in her classroom that year, forty-seven children seated in four rows — her kindergarten group, her largest group, on her left; grades one and two in the centre rows. Then there was her upper second grade, created this year and situated on her right. These were her problem children, old enough to have moved down the verandah to Mr Curry’s room, but not sufficiently advanced to manage there. So Mr Curry said. He didn’t want them.
Then, a week after school went back, Vern Hooper delivered his son to her classroom, a great gangling boy, all legs, arms, head and ears. He was the height of a twelve year old.
‘Mr Curry?’ she said, her eyebrows disappearing beneath her auburn fringe.
‘We saw him. He suggested he might do better with you for a time,’ Vern said, and he left, closing the door behind him.
Her upper second grade consisted of three desks capable of seating six children. Ray King and Cecelia Morrison sat alone, not by choice but by choice of their mutual victims. Ray was a giant for his age, a docile, stuttering, barefoot boy, his hair clipped to the scalp and with a smell about him that suggested an unfamiliarity with soap and water. His father, district wood-chopping champion, also known for his ability to drink any man under the table, and his mother, an evil-mouthed, long-haired and lousy hag, survived in a shack opposite Macdonald’s mill. Miss Rose pitied Ray. She kept her distance, but did what she could for him, which was little enough.
Vern Hooper’s son was decked out in his private school uniform and toting an armful of his old school’s books. She couldn’t inflict Ray on him.
She glanced at Cecelia, still prone to occasional hair-pulling, which wouldn’t present a problem. The Hooper boy had little more hair than Ray. Cecelia was clean.
‘Do you know Cecelia, Jim?’ she said.
He flinched. A few children flinched for him, but Cecelia lifted her elbow and moved to the right of the two-seater desk. Jim placed his books down then sat on the edge.
The Macdonald twins were seated in the front row of upper second grade. The first day school went back, Miss Rose had attempted to separate them, had placed one alone in the front desk, one at the rear with Ray, but they’d made her own and Ray’s life a misery by mimicking his stutter in unison. How they did it, she did not know, but two voices speaking in unison was less unnerving when they came from the same desk. They were small for their years and of unfortunate appearance, toad-like, their most commanding features their violet-grey eyes — cruel eyes, if a child’s eyes could be cruel. Both boys were capable of learning when they wished to learn, which wasn’t often enough to learn much of anything. They enjoyed singing and had a natural ability with rhyme. They chased Ray home from school four nights out of five, chanting their cruel rhymes.
‘R-r-ray King is l-lousy,
His m-m-other is a f-frowsy.
He smells like a dog,
’Cause his f-f-father likes the grog.’
Could she blame them? Ray’s hands and neck had years of dirt ingrained into them, and no doubt as much where she couldn’t see. He was old enough to keep himself clean. Certainly he brought much of the tormenting down upon himself.
He gained some relief from the twins’ torments that day. They turned their joint attack on Jim Hooper.
‘Lanky poofter, drongo Jim,
Dropped his brain in the rubbish bin,
Scared to get dirty getting it out,
Or his sister will give him a punch in the snout.’
No one, other than their sisters, was safe from those wicked little boys, not the Catholic sisters or the few children who attended their school behind a tall green corrugated-iron fence. The twins walked by that fence twice a day, dragging sticks along it. They went cat-hunting on moonlit nights, bagging their catch then dropping them yowling over the convent fence.
The second Morrison child, delivered to the classroom this year, came in for her own share of verbal abuse. Miss Rose had kept her distance from Jennifer, fearing a second Morrison screamer. As yet, the scream had not come. A dainty child, she sat in the kindergarten row, her long hair pulled back tight in man-made, lopsided plaits, her frock, man-bought, too dark, too large, too long, her shoes too heavy for tiny legs.
Until Jim Hooper joined her group, Miss Rose had watched Jennifer standing on the verandah waiting to walk home with the Macdonald girls. She walked home with Jim now, the twins behind them, chanting.
‘Old J.C. she went off to have a pee,
Squatted down behind a tree,
Dropped her pants and found Jenny . . .’
Expected trouble rarely came. The weeks passed and Miss Rose was barely aware the Hooper boy was in her classroom. And he should not have been there. His handwriting would put a sixth grader’s to shame, he was reading in advance of a sixth grader, and his spelling put her own to shame. The little Morrison girl was another surprise — a pleasant surprise in a very small package.
A tangle of days, that school year, an interweaving of heat and rain, fire and frost, schoolyard fights, skinned knees and tears. There were bad, bad days when she planned to get out of town, and good days when everything went right and she decided to stay a while longer.
Then there was spring, that perfect time between the frost and heat, between fog and dust, when Woody Creek became green and the scent of Vern Hooper’s hedge of roses fought down the stink of sawdust. She planned the school concert in spring, chose the songs, sketched the costumes, met with Mrs Fulton and Miss Blunt to see what could and could not be done.
Jimmy refused to be measured for a costume. Sissy didn’t want to wear an onion costume, but Miss Rose had learnt how to deal with Cecelia Morrison.
‘That’s your choice, Cecelia. You may sit in the audience this year.’
‘I want to be something else.’ The twins, Sissy’s only friends, had major roles in the concert. Jenny had a major role, and Sissy wanted one. ‘I just said I don’t want to wear a stupid onion costume.’
‘We need one more onion, but if you don’t want to be on stage this year, then you may leave. Good afternoon, Cecelia.’
‘I want to be in the twins’ song, I said.’
‘As you are aware, the princess has already been chosen. Good afternoon, Cecelia.’
Her replies sounded somewhat bored, starting high, ending low. There was a definite rhythm to her Cecelia Morrison voice. It never altered. Always cool, calm, slow and controlled. At times, she believed she was making progress with her. At other times, she walked out to the verandah to breathe a while and to count the days to December. Thereafter, Cecelia would be Mr Curry’s responsibility. Only fifty-three more school days.
‘I’ll be a stupid onion then!’
‘Wonderful. Line up with the other onions. Flower fairies, over here, please, in a row.’
Australia went to the polls in October and Scullin was voted into the top job, then, before the month ended, the New York Stock Exchange experienced record declines in stock prices. It was reported in the Melbourne newspapers, but the running of the Melbourne Cup made bigger headlines. Australians liked their race meetings.
When Joanne was alive, Vern had taken her down to Melbourne every year for Cup week. He tried to talk Gertrude into going with him. She wouldn’t go and there was no joy to be had in going down to the Cup alone. He had a flutter. He put a fiver on Nightmarch’s nose, and won a wad — all thanks to Jimmy’s night-marching.
Two nights out of three, that kid walked. Vern listened for him, woke to find him opening the front door, or standing outside Vern’s door, and, on a few occasions, attempting to get into Vern’s double bed. Another man might have invited him in. Vern wasn’t that man. He marched him back to his own bed.
He wasn’t the man to sit enthralled through school concerts either, watching group after group of kids in fancy clothes singing off-key. Gertrude wanted to go this year. Jenny was singing.
‘You wouldn’t come down to the Cup with me,’ he said.
‘You pig-headed two year old,’ she said. ‘Jimmy wants you to go.’
‘You take him then — and stay in town overnight.’
He had his housekeeper make up one of the back rooms for her — he planned on doing his own marching in the night. He was shaving when he heard the train pull in. He was sluicing his face when he heard it pull out. And five minutes later, Margaret and Lorna walked in, unannounced, unexpected, Margaret’s hair looking a mite singed.
‘And there goes my night,’ he said.
They’d taken rooms at a guesthouse in Brighton, which had gone up in smoke while they were sleeping. Margaret escaped in her nightdress. Lorna escaped through a window, fully clad, case in hand. They’d had two choices: Vern’s half-brother out at Balwyn, who Lorna considered a halfwit and his sixteen-year-old son a congenital moron; or Woody Creek. Margaret quite liked her uncle and cousin, but her need for clothing had weighted the scales in favour of home. She’d arrived wearing Lorna’s severe grey suit, the skirt pulling across her buttocks, dragging in the dust, the jacket barely covering her breasts.
Three hours later when Gertrude rode into town, the concert seemed the lesser of two evils to Vern. The horse left to eat what he could find in Vern’s backyard, he walked with Gertrude and his son across the lines to the hall.
The punishment began with a maypole dance, the pole threatening to topple. It was followed by Victoria Bull’s tap dance. She did it well enough. The ringmaster was popular. Each time he doffed his hat between the opening and closing of the curtains, the audience applauded, so Vern applauded, though he had no idea whose kid he was applauding.
He recognised the big rubber ball rolling across the stage. He’d given Jimmy five bob from his Cup winnings and he’d spent half of it on a big colourful ball, more suitable for a girl than a boy. He heard Jimmy laugh as one of the Macdonald twins, clad in a green frog suit, hopped across the stage chasing the ball. The princess wandered on. It was one of the younger Macdonald girls. To Vern they all looked the same, undergrown and washed out. She spent some time searching for her ball, while off to the side three seniors sang the sorry tale of the prince turned into a frog by a wicked witch. The frog hopped around the stage holding the ball, hopped over to the princess to offer it. The princess thanked him profusely, gave him a mock kiss. The frog croaked, made a point of wiping his mouth, then fell theatrically to the floor, frog-kicking as the lights went out. It wasn’t a blackout, though they’d had a few in town. The stage lit up seconds later, the twin in the frog suit having swapped places with the other one, clad as a prince. It was well done and worth the watching and rightfully received a thunder of applause.
‘Who is he?’ Vern asked as the ringmaster doffed his hat.
‘Ray King.’
‘That stuttering lump of Big Henry’s?’
‘Shush,’ Gertrude said.
Few in the audience recognised Big Henry King’s son. Miss Rose had taken it upon herself to send him down to the creek with a bar of soap, a towel and strict instructions to soap himself all over, from head to toe, as he’d be wearing Richard Blunt’s trousers and waistcoat and Moe Kelly’s old top hat on his head. Cleaned up, he looked a different boy; dressed up, he was a class act. And he followed her directions to the letter, doffing his hat as he drew those curtains back to display twelve onions, clad in green crepe-paper tunics, brown bulbs on their heads.
‘Jenny’s in this one,’ Jimmy said.
‘Where?’
The onions were circling, jeering at something in their midst.
‘Shush.’
The onions stepped aside to reveal a large flower hat and, hiding beneath it, Jenny clad in purple and pink. Then the surprise of the night. That little girl opened her mouth.
‘I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch . . .’
Her voice was strong and sweet. Heads lifted, feet stilled their shuffling as the petunia wiped at mock tears.
‘Boo hoo, boo hoo, the air’s so strong it takes my breath away,’ she sang, the onions crowding her, leaning in, making a cage of their arms over her head.
Vern was almost enjoying himself, and Jimmy showing more enthusiasm than usual, sitting forward while the little petunia sang as she fought her way between the onions, weaving in and out, attempting to escape their patch.
‘I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, Oh won’t somebody transplant me.’
Sissy did her best. She stuck out a foot. Jenny, her hands clasped in plea, her little face lifted towards the heavens, didn’t see it. She tripped and went sprawling. Anyone with good eyesight had seen what happened. There was a communal gasp, a communal breath held, then a hum of indignation as Sissy Morrison smiled.
Norman, watching from the fifth row, had been expecting some form of retaliation. All week it had been threatening. He rose from his seat as the petunia scrambled to her feet and Miss Rose left the piano to brush pink and purple petals straight, to set the large flower hat straight, to reorganise her circle of onions. Back at the piano, she played the introduction to the final chorus, but Jenny didn’t sing. She stood looking down at a dragging petal, trying to tuck it back where it belonged. It wouldn’t stay there. It dangled down past her knee.
‘Children,’ Miss Rose urged. Again she played the introduction.
There was a hush of expectancy, a second of silence after the final note while Jenny wiped an honest tear from her eye. She opened her mouth, though not to sing.
‘You spoil everything, Sissy,’ she said.
‘You spoiled it. You made Mummy go away because you smell evil,’ Sissy said, and went in for the kill.
Like a mouse evading a predator, Jenny ran for cover. Ray King looked big enough.
Ray knew he should have pulled the curtain, but the item wasn’t over and he’d been told only to pull the curtain after Miss Rose had played the last note. Then it was too late to think about pulling it.
Sissy had grabbed a handful of pink and purple petals, which reminded her of the pink petals in her first concert costume, before her mother went mad and ran away, before everything bad. Crepe paper is only paper. It can be shaped, stitched and gathered, but each row of machine-stitching leaves behind a series of tiny holes, which makes a fine ripping line. Sissy came away with a handful of petals.
The ringmaster was supposed to stand in the wings during each item. He wasn’t supposed to move until it was time to close the curtain. Miss Rose had said so. Ray loved Miss Rose and he wanted to please her. The ringmaster was definitely not supposed to defrock nasty bitches. But Ray King knew all about nasty bitches. His mother was one, and his father told her so six times a week and twice on Sunday, and next to his mother, Sissy Morrison was the nastiest bitch he’d ever come across.
Had he known that green onion tunic would peel off, like skin from a banana, he may not have done it, but she should have had the sense not to pull away. She knew what she was wearing underneath that tunic. He didn’t — or he hadn’t. Her rolls of green-tinged fat shocked him, as did her baggy white bloomers. He stood mouth open, big brown eyes afraid, stood frozen, clutching a handful of green crepe paper while Sissy screamed and released her bladder.
The headmaster ruined the climax. He drew the curtain. The audience heard the slap. Two sharp slaps.
Norman heard them, heard the familiar bellow. He’d left his seat and was approaching the stage door when he saw Cecelia’s white bloomers disappearing into the night. He took two steps to follow her, glanced at Miss Rose and her helpers mopping the stage, chasing drips; saw Jenny sobbing against the ringmaster, his arms protectively around her.
Until a few moments ago, Norman had been unaware of the role Jennifer was to play in the concert. Cecelia was the dominant presence in his house; Cecelia’s voice, her needs, were paramount. Until a few moments ago, Jenny had never argued with her sister. She, as he, had made allowances, had accepted.
He walked onto the stage, around the mopping women, to do his own mopping up. He wiped her teary eyes, wiped her nose.
‘You make me proud, Jenny-wren.’
Ernie Ogden was at the concert. His youngest boys were performing; his two eldest still lodging in Carlton, but his wife was on cloud nine. He’d put in for a transfer and they’d heard today that he’d got it.
‘The town won’t be the same without you,’ Vern said.
‘I doubt I’ll be the same without the town, but the wife is deadset on educating the younger boys. We’ll be going to a nice little place, a farming and orchard community, close enough into Melbourne for the other boys to live at home.’
‘Who’ll be replacing you, Ernie?’ Gertrude asked.
‘A younger bloke, they say. He should be up here between Christmas and New Year. If you can hang on for a tick, there’s something I’ll leave in your keeping, Trude.’
He was across the road and back in minutes and handing her a manila envelope. She remembered it, didn’t want the responsibility of it, tried to hand it back.
‘There’ll come a time when that little girl will want to own something that belonged to her mother. She’s got a better chance of getting it if it’s in your hands.’
‘If it’s up to Norman, she’ll never find out, Ernie.’
‘Time’s a strange thing. It alters what was into what is — and whether she ever finds out or not, it belongs to her. Give it to her for her twenty-first.’
Gertrude folded the top of the envelope down and forced it into her handbag. Vern was waiting, Jimmy was waiting.
‘I hope all goes well for you and Mary,’ she said.
‘It will go well enough. I’ll keep my ear to the ground on your daughter’s whereabouts. Sooner or later you run into every coot you’ve ever known in that city.’
‘Vern was saying it’s getting to the stage where you can’t see the forest for the trees down there these days — or the streets for the traffic.’
‘We’ll see a lot of changes, no doubt. Did you ever hear anything back from your father-in-law regarding your daughter?’
‘I got a note from his solicitor. The old chap died early in ’24. His daughter is still living at the house, but she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Amber — nor have any of Norman’s family, not that I would have expected her to go to them.’
‘The hardest part is the not knowing, I dare say.’
‘It gets easier. Others fill up the spaces,’ she admitted.