On 15 April, the twins arrived home on their motorbike. Maisy told them to get back on it, to get back to where they’d come from if they valued their lives.
‘The old man didn’t send our money,’ they chorused.
You couldn’t drink in Melbourne without money. You could drink without it in Woody Creek, or some could.
The mill hooters were playing their off-key notes when the twins walked into the hotel. Horrie Bull served them. He’d filled their glasses a second time before Denham walked in.
‘It’s still ten minutes off six!’ Horrie said.
Denham wasn’t interested in the time. He approached the laughing duo. They didn’t laugh long. ‘Bernard and Cecil Macdonald, I’m arresting you for the carnal knowledge of a minor,’ he said.
One tossed his beer in Denham’s face and went south. The other tossed his beer and went north, over the counter and out through the rear of the bar. They’d perfected the art of escape before they’d learnt to walk, having realised early that their mother was one and they were two.
Denham followed the one who’d gone over the bar, followed him through the rabbit warren of dining room and passage. His legs were a good foot longer than the twins’, his reach was longer. He caught his quarry in the lane at the back of the hotel, brought him down with a tackle, and once he had him down, he sat on him and rammed his bullet head into hard-packed clay, which did the clay more harm than the head, but he did it anyway because he’d been wanting to do it for years.
Fifteen or twenty men watched him get the cuffs on, watched him drag that twin up the lane by the cuffs, drag his trousers off his bum, then drag that bum another twenty feet before the twin yelled ‘barley’. He stood and walked across the railway yards, walked like a tame lamb, eight or ten kids now following behind. They saw Denham leave his boot print on that gravel-rashed bum, saw the twin sprawl into the cell.
Maybe they expected Denham to go after the other one. He didn’t. He went inside to have his tea, aware that getting one of those little bastards was as good as getting two. There was something missing in their heads, something they needed to get from the other for their survival. He’d have both by sundown. He ate with his family, listened to the six o’clock news, and was standing on his verandah by seven, waiting for the second twin to show up. They’d been separated for over an hour. They’d be starting to feel the pinch right about . . .
‘Now,’ he said, sighting a trio walking up past the town hall: the missing twin, his father, and a taller man, a suit-clad stranger, who turned out to be a solicitor from Willama.
The Church of England ball and that escapade long forgotten, Bernie, the twin who’d got away, had gone home to his father swearing that he was innocent of carnal knowledge of any minor, that neither he nor his brother had ever put as much as a finger on any under-aged girl — unless they’d paid for it in Melbourne, and they wouldn’t have paid for it anyway if they’d known she was under-age.
April in Woody Creek was usually a pleasant month; that evening’s warmth brought many out to rake up the autumn leaves and put a match to them. Smoke in the air that night. Raised voices carry on warm still nights, and a front verandah, built eight or ten feet from the main street, is not the best place to raise your voice, not when your neighbours are keen gardeners, not when there’s a council meeting at the town hall. Several councillors saw the group on Denham’s verandah. A few heard the Morrison name mentioned.
Let a cat get one whisker out from a bag and you’ll never get it back in. A snarling, fighting, biting tiger was released that night in Woody Creek, and come morning, the bag was in shreds, bits of it blowing all over town.
The hotel bar had been full when Denham had charged the Macdonald boys, drinkers had gone home with news of the what, but not of the who. Come morning, those who knew the who got together with those who knew the what and the few who also knew the when, and before the sun set on that day, only the few in town who were hard of hearing and the kids too young to understand remained in the dark about what had happened to Woody Creek’s songbird. She wasn’t taking singing lessons in Melbourne.
George Macdonald had more men in his employ than Vern Hooper. He was a respected man. All right, his boys were drunken little bastards, and there was no doubting that they’d done what they’d done, but they were eighteen-year-old drunken little bastards who could spend the next twenty years in jail — if they escaped the noose — and he had to do something.
Maisy, substitute mother to Jenny for most of her life, told him that his mongrel-bred sons deserved to hang. George and Maisy who never argued now tongue-lashed each other in bed and kept it up at the breakfast table.
On the second morning, the solicitor spoke to the twins, separately and together, and, true or false, they told the same story.
‘She came after us,’ one said. ‘She was having a fight with her mother and she came to us looking for a bit of sympathy,’ the other added. ‘One thing led to another.’ ‘And it wasn’t the first time either.’ ‘No, it wasn’t either,’ the other agreed. ‘While she was living with Mum and Dad, every time we come home, it was on,’ one said. ‘We thought she was older,’ they chorused. ‘We thought she was sixteen or so.’
The solicitor believed them, or didn’t believe them; it didn’t matter one way or the other to him.
It mattered to Denham. He wanted to stretch their necks.
Once again, that bike roared down Gertrude’s track. Once again, she barred that gate with her body.
‘I need to hear the girl’s side, Mrs Foote.’
‘I just got her to sleep. That cursed bike will have woken her up again.’
‘Her mother’s telling the same story as those Macdonalds. If I’m charging those boys with a capital crime, I need the facts, from your granddaughter’s mouth.’
‘Leave her be.’
‘What’s going on between her and her mother?’
Gertrude turned to walk inside.
‘The postmaster is in contact with that city woman. Your granddaughter is an imaginative girl, Mrs Foote. She told that woman her mother had been arrested for murder. Does she know what’s real from what’s not?’
Gertrude felt a jolt in her heart and she closed her eyes, remembering Amber’s kiss at Barbie’s funeral, remembering the cups of tea, those pleasant chats with her daughter. Turned off like a tap. Cut off like power to the light globe. On the Friday after she’d stitched up that scalp wound. After they’d arrested Albert Forester for murder . . .
She’d seen Amber’s eyes that day. Seen the smile of the victor. No cup of tea for Gertrude that day. No pleasant chat in Norman’s kitchen. That’s when Gertrude had stopped ignoring her gut feeling that Barbie Dobson’s and Nelly Abbot’s resemblance to Jenny hadn’t been coincidental.
And how could any mother live with thinking something like that? How could she keep it down inside her? Her head spun with it, her heart ached with it, her bones howled with it. Her mouth opened now to let it out to Denham. Then closed, swallowed those words —
And found others.
‘Speak to Charlie White about what’s between that little girl and her mother. He saw what she was capable of doing to a three-year-old baby. Mr Foster saw it. Talk to him. And Vern. Ask Vern about the asylum. And the chap who used to be up here before you came — Ogden. He’s still in Mitcham. One of the Macdonald girls is married to his son. If he’s got a phone number, Maisy will know it. Talk to him.’
Maisy was bawling and moving her clothing into the back bedroom. George wasn’t accustomed to her tears. He wasn’t accustomed to having his dinner thrown at him either, or to having jailbird sons. He was paying his solicitor to fix this, and he wasn’t fixing it.
Norman no longer played poker with him on Friday nights, but the two men had a history of friendship. He had to talk to him, see if they could fix this man to man. At seven that night, he walked over the road and knocked on Norman’s door.
‘We’ve been friends for years, Norm,’ he opened the conversation. ‘Our wives have been friends for forty. There’s got to be a way we can work this out between us.’
Norman stood in the doorway, head down. He had nothing to say.
‘I’m not denying that they should have known Jenny was under-age, but they swear black and blue that they didn’t. I’m not saying that what they’re saying is fact either. Those little bastards will tell the same story blindfolded and twenty mile apart, but they are telling the same story and the solicitor says she won’t have a leg to stand on in court.’
Norman flinched.
‘Court’s not what you want for that girlie. It’s not what any of us want for her.’
Norman shook his head. He had no words left.
George, uncertain if the shake of the head meant Norm did or didn’t want to go to court, continued. ‘I’m not for ten seconds saying that this is fact, but they swear that Jenny came looking for them, hopping mad at her mother, and asked for their cigarettes. You know her mother told our solicitor chap what she saw — that she caught her with them earlier in the night.’
These days there was less of Norman to cringe, but he cringed more. His jowls hung like rags over his collar, his jacket hung from his rounded shoulders, his trousers sagged, bagged, around backside and knee. His hair, gone grey overnight, they said, looked more grey because there was more of it. He hadn’t sat in the barber’s chair since a week prior to Christmas. Tufts jutted above his ears. Too much of his life spent now in leaning head in hands.
‘The thought came from the boys when I spoke to them this afternoon. Maisy will back me up on this, but both of them have had eyes for Jenny since she was a twelve year old. They’re talking about a wedding, Norm, a fast wedding before the infant comes.’
Norman’s jowls lifted off his collar, the hairs on the back of his neck quivered. His wife the whore was behind him.
She stepped around him and out to the verandah. He stood staring at the dark green paint peeling from his front door. He picked off a flake, which jammed beneath his fingernail, and while his whore and neighbour spoke of weddings, he stared at that green flake. He’d kept this thing covered up. In a month or so it would have been over and Jennifer could have come home. His lower lids, drawn down by sagging cheeks, were red half-moons, his hangdog eyes constantly wet, his spectacles continually fogged. His shoulder ached, his gut burned . . .
Cecelia, her hair half up in rag curls, half hanging wet to her shoulder stood beside him.
‘Mum?’
‘Go back inside. And either come out or stay in, Norman.’
He came out. His whore closed the door.
‘It’s a terrible time for all concerned,’ George said. ‘Maisy is over there bawling her brains out. Your girl has been like one of her own.’
Sissy placed an ear to the door. She could hear the mumble of voices, hear their footsteps as they left the verandah, but little more.
The wireless was on in the parlour. She turned it off, then went to see where they’d gone. They were at the gate, George and Amber on the street side, Norman on the path leading out.
Until the twins were arrested, Sissy, like everyone else, had believed the singing lesson lie. And she’d resented the money Norman was spending on Jenny when he complained about every pair of stockings Sissy bought. She knew of a few girls who had got themselves in the family way and been rushed to the altar. She knew of one boy who had got out of town, and the bride’s father and brother had gone after him and dragged him back to do the right thing.
The window was open at the top where the wireless aerial had been fed through. She stood on the couch, placed one foot on the arm and got her ear close to the half-inch gap.
‘It’s a mess all round, but locking those boys up for twenty years won’t do your girl’s name a skerrick of good in the long term, Norm. A fast wedding will. That’s all I’m saying,’ George said, and clearly.
Wedding? Sissy wanted a wedding, her wedding.
She was a bottom-heavy girl, most of her weight in her backside and legs, which should have offered stability, but the arm of the leather couch was rounded and covered by one of Amber’s antimacassars. Her foot slipped; she grasped what she could, the curtain. The rod slid from its hooks, one end brushing the peacock feathers, which overbalanced the blue-green vase. It fell, then Sissy fell, landing hard on her well-padded backside and her not so well-padded funny bone — which is never funny. In other circumstances, she would have bellowed. Not tonight. She sprang to her feet and, through the now undraped window, saw the three walking out to the road.
Then she saw why. Maisy was coming. Still rubbing her elbow, Sissy opened the front door and crept out, crept down to the side fence, where she crouched low.
‘Get home now, George, or by God, I’ll get in that bloody car and go out to Patricia’s and I’ll stay there.’
‘They’re eighteen-year-old boys. I’m the first to admit that they’ve got some growing up to do, but they’re not going to do it with their necks stretched, are they?’
‘She’s fifteen years old, and she loathes your bloody sons and so do I,’ Maisy howled.
‘They’re not all bad. Look how they saved old Miller and his missus from the fire. One eggs the other one on, that’s all. You know as well as me that they’re different boys when we get them separated.’
‘Then shoot one of the little mongrels and separate them, George!’
‘Who’s going to marry her if not one of those boys?’
‘She’s a child,’ Norman wailed. ‘A child!’
‘Maisy wasn’t much more when we wed. It did her no harm.’
‘It didn’t do me much good either,’ Maisy yelled.
‘You’re the only bloody woman in town who drives around in her own car.’
‘And the only fool in town who walked around pregnant for ten years too.’
‘All I was going to say, before you put in your tuppence worth, was we have a fast wedding, pack both of those little bastards back to Melbourne and Jenny moves in with us. She liked living with us. You liked her living with us. You can help her look after the infant. It’s got a name, and there’s no court case. Do you want a nameless grandchild, Norm?’
Grandchild? Norman cringed. He’d given no thought to the infant, had spent the months since New Year almost believing his own singing lesson lie.
Maisy had thought about it, had thought about raising it. She had two grandchildren in Melbourne, but rarely saw them. She had three in Willama, saw them once a month, if she was lucky. She had one on a farm twenty miles out of town.
‘All I’m saying is that we need to talk to her — or you need to talk to her, Norm. For all any of us knows, she might be more than willing to get a ring on her finger before the infant comes.’
‘What choice has she got?’ Amber said.