A crazy year 1936, a year of royal upheaval. On 20 January, old King George died, and it seemed to Jenny that no sooner had the new stamps and coins been issued displaying young King Edward’s profile than they were gone, the year was gone and King Edward was gone. For love of a divorced woman who couldn’t ever be a queen, he’d handed the throne of England down to his younger brother, George.
And how would a king feel about getting a hand-me-down throne? Jenny felt sorry for him. She lived in Sissy’s hand-me-down dresses, baggy, faded, loathed.
‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson stole our king,’ the Macdonald twins sang in church the week before Christmas. ‘Peace on earth and heavens bright, I’d like to be a fly on their wall at night . . .’
Heads turned, the aged scowling, the young grinning. Jenny didn’t need to turn her head to see. She sat in the back row of the choir box, to the right of the pulpit, like the minister, looking down on the congregation; on Margaret Hooper’s silver blonde hair and tiny hat perched on top of it, and Sissy’s hat and her tan suit, ordered from a city catalogue, with her tan and white striped shirt. The prices were in that catalogue. Jenny knew exactly how much they’d cost.
The second-worst part about growing up was seeing things you knew were wrong and not being able to change them. Sissy made a fool of Norman. Every time she wanted something she crawled around him, called him Daddy, kissed him goodnight, made him cups of tea, then as soon as he wrote his cheque, she ignored him. It was sickening, but more sickening because Norman looked so happy when Sissy was up to her tricks.
The depression had split Woody Creek down the middle, people said, cut it clean into the haves and have-nots. There had always been a rift between Jenny and Sissy, but Amber’s return, the needle and the Alice Blue Gown, had turned that rift into a yawning gulch. Jenny stood alone on the far side, in baggy hand-me-downs, Sissy on the other, in nice clothes and with Amber clinging to her back, while Norman attempted to balance one foot on either side of that gulch. And he was splitting himself in half trying.
Jenny glanced at her sister’s hair. Amber had done it this morning in an ear-to-ear roll copied from a photograph of a film star. They’d practised for days to get it right. It looked modern. She looked nice from the back. Jenny’s hair was tied back in a frizzy weighty bunch. It looked as if she didn’t care, and she didn’t. Maybe she wanted Norman to see that she didn’t care, but he didn’t see much of anything now. Maybe he never had. Maybe she’d just thought he had.
She’d shown him the sweat stains under the armpits of Sissy’s faded pink frock the first day he’d pulled it out of his carton, and all he’d said was that it had plenty of wear left in it. He’d bought it for Sissy in 1932 after the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened, after she’d gone up to Sydney with the Hoopers. Sissy was thirteen in 1932, just beginning her Margaret Hooper period. She’d stamped her feet for that pink. It had been the beginning of her sweating period too. Every dress she’d worn around that time was stained and faded under the armpits.
And it wasn’t just the stained armpits, which weren’t armpits on Jenny. The shoulder seams hung halfway to her elbows, the sleeves flapped around her arms like wings, the waist was a foot too wide and the hem on speaking terms with her socks. She’d never forgive her father for keeping that dress, and she’d never forgive Sissy for the shape she’d been at thirteen, nor for shrinking since Amber had come home, which meant she would never grow out of any of her decent frocks.
Dora had grown early and stopped early. Jenny had caught up to her. She was as tall as Amber, and starting to round out in places, which was the worst part of growing up because it meant that she had to be covered up. That pink dress did the job.
‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson stole our king . . .’ The twins were at it again. They didn’t come to church often and were only here today because their nephew was being baptised and there was a party afterwards. Jenny couldn’t tell them apart. No one, other than Maisy and their sisters, could, not unless they called one of them Cecil. If it was Bernie, he ignored them; if it was Cecil, he hit them so hard it wasn’t a worthwhile exercise finding out which was which. Their sisters used to torment hell out of Cecil, but he’d grown too big now so they called him Macka. George still couldn’t tell them apart. He called both of them wild little bastards.
Jenny’s mind always wandered in church. It wasn’t supposed to. She liked the singing, liked studying the people while they sat heads bowed, liked wondering if their minds wandered and where they wandered to. Sissy was going out to the farm with the Hoopers this afternoon. She didn’t like the farm but she liked Hooper picnics.
Once upon a time, Sundays had been Granny days. Norman never went down there now, and since Nelly had been murdered, Jenny didn’t want to go there. Even going for a swim gave her knives down her back.
Sundays were bad. There were no trains, so no excuse to go to the station. Norman spent his Sundays trying to stay out of Amber’s way. She didn’t like newspapers leaving their print on her kitchen table, didn’t like newspapers left in her parlour. The verandahs were safe, unless she found him sitting out there with Jenny.
In January of 1937, the train began a daily train service to Melbourne. From Monday to Saturday it passed through Woody Creek at noon and returned at seven in the evening, which meant different working hours for Norman and for the men who connected the flat-bed trucks of timber. Jenny spent her evenings with Norman at the station. He was more himself there, more like he used to be.
Some nights when he came home from playing poker, he was unlike himself, brave — brave enough to cook a midnight supper for two while Amber and Sissy slept. He smelled different on those nights, smelled of bravery and cigarettes and beer. And he was full of words again. He told her about Germany’s funny little leader who was doing much for his people, and about a terrible war fought when he was a young man. He told her his eyes had not been strong enough for him to go to war, and had they been strong, he could not have fired a gun at another man.
He became too brave in August, the month of the adults’ concert. Last August Sissy had recited in her daffodil yellow frock with two paper daffodils pinned over her ear — she’d recited ‘Daffodils’. Amber prompting her from the wings.
And she wanted to recite that poem again this year!
‘No,’ Norman said.
‘Why not?’ Sissy said.
‘Learn another poem if you wish to take part.’ A safe suggestion. She still got stuck on the third verse of ‘Daffodils’.
‘I like doing “Daffodils”.’
‘You’ve had my last word on it, Cecelia.’
‘Old Mister Murphy sings the same song every year and no one ever tells him he can’t be in the concert.’
‘Mr Murphy is an old man who once could sing. The audience is tolerant of his age. Now enough about it.’
‘You don’t tell Jenny she’s not allowed to sing in the school concert, do you?’
‘Your sister has a beautiful voice,’ he said.
Shouldn’t have said that. He knew it, as Jenny knew it, as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He stood, walked away from his meal, Jenny behind him. They went to the station and made a cup of tea there, ate station biscuits.
But Sissy won. She always won.
Her daffodil dress was starched and pressed. Miss Blunt made a new bunch of paper daffodils. Amber stood for hours putting Sissy’s hair up in rags. They practised that poem for hours, Sissy came to bed to do her starfish.
‘Get over your own side of the bed.’
‘I’ll do what I like in my own bed.’
‘Get over, or I’m yelling out for Dad.’
‘Go to hell, you evil-smelling stray bitch!’
‘Daddy!’
Jenny walked across to the town hall with Norman. She sat with him. Mr Cox put off the inevitable as long as he could, but eventually Sissy came on stage in her yellow frock with her daffodils. Her hair looked nice. The overall picture was nice enough. Then the nice ended and Jenny and Norman, seated well back, looked at their shoes while Sissy wandered lonely as a cloud, and pranced like a cat on a hot tin roof when she sighted a host of golden daffodils.
And got no further.
The twins entered from the supper room side, waving bunches of gum leaves.
‘Beside the creek, beneath the trees,
Sissy is quivering at the knees.
Please, Jim, kiss my drooling mouth,
before you venture way down south . . .’
The audience erupted into giggles and tut-tutting, while Mr Cox, master of ceremonies, pulled the curtains, but the twins stepped through the gap and continued their recitation.
‘Struth, said Jimmy, give me more.
Open up your golden door . . .’
Constable Denham, sitting with his sourpuss wife and not so starched kids, took off for the stage. A twin went left, one went right, and ten minutes later old Dan Murphy came on stage to sing ‘Danny Boy’.
Norman sold the twins one-way tickets to Melbourne on Monday night, pleased to see the back of them. Most in town were pleased to see that pair gone. Most agreed they’d end up hanging before they were much older, but two weeks later they returned and they’d brought some city disease home with them. Maisy put them to bed, fearful of polio. She nursed them for a week, and a week after that wondered why she’d bothered. They got into a fight on the hotel corner and one of the windows was broken.
All mouth, teeth and jaw, the Macdonald twins, no-necked, heavy-shouldered, barrel-chested, no hips, short bandy legs. Built like bulls, some said, but with less between their close-set ears than a bull and a double quota between their legs — so some said. A lot was said about Maisy’s boys. One of the Duffy girls told Denham her baby belonged to them. Hard to tell. All babies were born with bandy legs. Maybe its eyes would turn purple, but until they did, there was no way of knowing if it was a Macdonald or not.