Amy's Children Read online

  Gus decided to stop for a smoke now that work was in progress without him. He took his tobacco from a rail of the fence, and with his legs apart and his head down he stuck a paper to his bottom lip and rubbed the tobacco in the palm of his hand. He was pleased with his digging, getting a good look at it for the first time. His face took on a contented look as if everything else had been placed on a closed shelf of his mind, and the new garden was all that mattered.

  May began to stroke the ground clean of the weeds left behind in the first rake. The short grass was like hair being combed, the ground seemed to purr under the strokes, fine strands clinging to the teeth of the rake as hair does to a comb.

  “Roll yourself one,” Gus said, handing May his tobacco. He sniffed with a cocked nose towards the house. “You’d need something calmin’ after that rort.”

  May sat on the ground, lifting her knees, her dress over them in tent fashion.

  She watched the shreds of yellow-green tobacco turn into a little golden-brown mould, tipping it then onto the paper. Everything connected with rolling a smoke was a joy—pinching out the stray ends of tobacco from the tight little roll, wetting the one end, then lighting the other just on the tip, a perfect light, not blazing halfway down the paper, not even scorching it, a sensuous feeling holding it between two fingers, then taking the first draught of smoke, all but peace leaving her mind as the smoke left her mouth, moving sensuously too, putting a frail screen between her and Gus.

  Ted crossed the veranda, jumping to the ground without using the steps, and walked jauntily up to them. “Hullo, Mum and Dad!”

  “Pass me back that tobacco, May,” Gus said.

  2

  Amy and the children moved in with Gus and May when Ted left.

  There was hardly any furniture for Amy to worry about. Food and rent for their small grey house next to the Diggers Creek Post Office accounted for the little Ted earned when he got a few months’ work with a road gang after Kathleen was born. Patricia came next and then the baby Lesley.

  May said it might have been different, Ted might have stayed if the child had been a boy, and Amy, blaming herself, did the best she could and gave her the male-sounding name of Lesley.

  Amy sat a lot of the time on the edge of the veranda, nursing the restless whimpering infant and looking out for Ted to return.

  One day she went inside, trailed by Kathleen and Patricia, and still with the baby in her arms, pushed the furniture together for Norman or Fred to come and collect it in the farm truck and return it to the Scriveners, for the stretcher beds, food safe, table and two chairs had been roped for a dozen years to the rafters of the corn shed. They were discarded from the farmhouse to make room for furniture inherited when May’s parents died and their possessions were divided between May and her sister Daphne.

  Amy put the yelling baby on one of the stretchers while she rolled up the mattress on the other, the blankets and sheets inside. She then told Kathleen to sit on the floor with her legs stretched out, and laid the baby across them while she did the same with the other bed. The baby yelled on while she packed her one tablecloth and few face and tea-towels among the groceries in the food safe, and bound a piece of rope around the safe to stop the door flying open.

  She put the kettle, two saucepans, a frying pan and a tea caddy in an old butter box. The box was one Kathleen and Patricia pushed around the floor pretending it was a dolls’ pram. Sometimes it was a car or train carriage pulled by a rope bound to two nails Amy hammered in the corners where the wood joined.

  Kathleen’s eyes widened and her face paled at this misuse of her plaything. But any protest would have been drowned by the screams of the baby. So she pressed her lips together and relieved her feelings with a wild rocking of her body, hoping this might quieten the child as well. But Lesley screamed on, with a vein throbbing alarmingly in her thin little neck.

  Amy hoisted the two old suitcases that held their clothing onto the table and packed a billycan with wrung-out wet napkins for Kathleen to carry. After she’d put some clean napkins in an old leather bag she flung over her shoulder, she took the baby and they were ready to go.

  She had no free hand so she closed the front door with her foot. Kathleen gave her free hand to Patricia and turned her sturdy little body around when they were on the road to look back on the house, pretty sure she was not going to live there any more.

  The legs of the little girls miraculously held out until the last half mile, when Kathleen had to take both basket and billycan and Amy had to take Patricia on her hip.

  Gus and May were in amiable conversation over the dinner table when they walked in. It was clear to them what had happened, and Kathleen made it clearer by hooking the handle of the billycan over the tap, as had been the practice at their place.

  “Take those dirty things to the wash house,” May said quite sharply. “They’ll bring flies just when I got the place clear of them.”

  She rose and began to clear the table, taking a pile of plates to dump in the washing-up dish, then dumping the dish on a corner of the table. She saw Amy looking hardly older than Kathleen, with Patricia crushed to her side on the couch and the baby on its stomach, sleeping across her lap as if it had undertaken the long walk and was more worn out than the others. Patricia’s eyes were round and scared, and looking from them to Amy’s, May saw hardly any difference at all.

  She slapped crumbs from the breadboard, slapped the blade of the knife on the tablecloth to clean it, and seizing a loaf began to saw slices off.

  Kathleen put her chin on the table. “Oh, good!” she said.

  “Look out or you’ll get cut!” said May.

  Gus left his chair and went out.

  Amy gave May her only income, the Child Endowment paid by the Government for children other than the eldest. The Government’s theory was that parents, however feckless, should be able to provide for an only offspring, the offer of payments for more being an incentive to have them, despite the hard times.

  She would dream of having a job, buying a new dress and silk stockings and a blue band for her hair to go to the Tilba Tilba dances.

  She sometimes dreamed aloud on the front veranda, sitting between Kathleen and Patricia, with her feet among the arum lilies growing thickly on either side of the front steps.

  “Mummy might get a job one day, you never know,” she said once, her eyes on a car racing along the road, going south. It might stop, she said silently, a man might get out and come up to me and say, I’ve got a job for you in my big shop. There will be clothes for you very cheap, and clothes for the girls. Come on, I’ll give you half an hour to get ready. All she needed to do was to wipe their faces and go.

  She looked from one to the other and buttoned the back of Patricia’s dress and pinched it straight on the shoulders, the child’s eyes asking questions. Kathleen brushed some dirt from her legs and pulled her skirt down. They had no shoes on, but there would not be a long wait for new ones.

  The car had gone but there was another coming. Perhaps this time, Amy thought. The baby cried and Kathleen took a sharp breath and watched Amy’s face.

  “Lebby’s crying,” she said gently as if Amy were sleepwalking and she didn’t want to shock her into waking. In a moment there were footsteps inside and the crying stopped. “Granma’s got her,” Kathleen said.

  Inside herself Amy said, I won’t be taking her.

  3

  She didn’t either. Or for that matter the other two.

  When Lesley was a few months old Amy got work in Moruya at one of the hotels. It took days of grumbling from May to agree to her going, for she could not take the children and could see them only on her days off. The visits would be infrequent since Amy would have to get a lift with someone travelling Diggers Creek way. There would be problems getting back to the hotel. And taking the mail car on its way through Moruya to Diggers Creek meant arriving at Scriveners late in the afternoon and an overnight stay to catch the car early the next morning. Only one full day at
a time was given staff so Amy would need to make arrangements with the management (a weak little man and his overpowering wife) to take the mail car, and the cost would take nearly all her weekly wage.

  Only once did Amy come home this way. Mrs Turner was away in Melbourne on a week’s holiday, and Mr Turner, who admired Amy’s round little bottom and the way her smile went right back to the last of her teeth, told her to go off and see her children, and gave her five shillings from the bar till, slamming it shut straight away, as if he was afraid of changing his mind, or Mrs Turner was able to hear although she was several hundred miles away.

  Amy sat on the couch for the first hour of her visit and nursed Patricia with Kathleen pressed to her side. May walked about getting things done in the kitchen with Lebby on one hip. Amy didn’t see much of the baby’s face for she had her forehead pressed to May’s shoulder, a few curls parted to show a tender, creamy neck.

  Amy called out “Lesley!” and stretched out an arm. “Here’s Mum!” she said, only feebly pleading.

  The baby pressed harder into May.

  “We call her Lebby all the time,” Kathleen said.

  “She’s not shy all the time,” Patricia said, gently cruel.

  Kathleen felt the stuff of Amy’s dress, blue with a diamond pattern of a deeper blue linked by narrow swirls.

  “Mumma’s dress has diamonds and ribbons on it,” Kathleen said.

  May moved Lebby to her other shoulder.

  “Not too many diamonds and ribbons around this place,” she said, laying a cooking spoon on a saucer.

  Amy loosened the arm around Patricia, and taking her handbag from behind her took out a ten shilling note. She had to stretch across the children to lay it on the end of the table. Kathleen expected May to reach down from her end and snatch it up, but it appeared she had no interest in it at all, which seemed strange, for May was always expressing a wish for more money, and she would look through the mail when Kathleen brought it from the box at the gate, anxious for something from Amy and wearing a closed dark face when there were only catalogues and bills.

  The money looked as if it might blow off the table, lying there by a fork at her grandfather’s place. Kathleen rushed forward and slid it under the fork. May, terrified her eyes might be forced to meet Amy’s, swooped on the fork, disturbing Lebby, and pushed the note off with the prongs. It fluttered to the floor and Kathleen turned scandalized eyes to her mother.

  “Leave it stay there,” May said. She dragged Lebby’s high chair to the table and sat her there, the child screwing herself around until her back was to Amy, again showing the little piece of neck. Kathleen went to her side and patted the hands gripping the chair arm. Amy went to the bedroom and came back in a black dress she wore to wait on tables at the hotel.

  Lebby screamed and flung herself on Kathleen with such force the chair tipped and Kathleen had to fling herself on Lebby to right it.

  “It’s that black dress,” May shouted, taking the warmed plates from the back of the stove. “She saw a nun once in Tilba and cried for a week afterwards.”

  She set down the roast of beef which looked like a small grey hut with a yellow roof, then took Lebby out of her chair and sat with her on a rocker. Kathleen went and sat by her mother. She always loved to see May rocking Lebby, but now she hated the grinding of the rockers on the hearth and imagined Amy winced, as if they were grinding into her flesh.

  Kathleen slipped a hand under Amy’s arm, soft like her own, and tried to gauge by the feel if Amy was terribly hurt by Lebby’s rejection of her.

  Gus came in for dinner and saw the note and picked it up. Bloody silly women, said the disgusted look he flicked from face to face. He pinned the money under a milk jug.

  “Take her,” May said to Gus and left the rocker. Gus sat and Lebby pressed herself against his rough old coat. He rubbed his bristly cheeks, first one and then the other, on the top of Lebby’s head. Lebby’s lips began to lift at the corners then stretch out. Mumma will see her new teeth, Kathleen thought, watching. Patricia left the couch and laid her body across Gus’s knees face downwards. Gus parted his legs so that she almost fell through, righting his legs in time to save her. She laughed and Lebby did too. Gus carried on the game of widening his legs when it was least expected he would, then clamping them together unexpectedly too. Above the beef she was slicing, May’s face softened with a quirking of her lips. Kathleen tried not to smile but couldn’t help herself.

  This is the last time I’ll come home, Amy thought.

  4

  She did come home again when Lebby was nearly two and as shy as ever.

  That’s good, Amy thought, looking briefly at the legs dangling from May’s hip, deceptively frail, she thought, wondering if she should carry the memory away with her.

  She had saved her fare on the mail car to Nowra and there was enough left for a rail ticket to Sydney and a few pounds in case she did not get work straight away. She would stay with her Aunt Daphne in Annandale. May and her sister corresponded fairly regularly. “You know the address if you feel like a look at the Big Smoke,” Daphne said in one of her letters. But Amy decided not to write and warn Daphne of her impending arrival. It might set up a conspiracy between her and May to prevent Amy getting away. It might be hard to convince Daphne from a distance of her intention of ultimately setting up house for herself and the children.

  She had made up her mind to have nothing stand in her way. People staying at the hotel said Sydney was the place to be.

  Once on her afternoon off she had put on her blue dress and sat on the veranda with a traveller in soft goods taking a seat beside her. He had a wife Elsie and two young children living at Bondi. He told Amy they had only to walk along the tram route past a few shops and there was the sea. Amy saw it rolling in blue as the last rinse on wash day, and the sand fawn coloured like the inside of a shell. Amy thought immediately of Lebby’s neck but dismissed it.

  She waited in the hope that the man would say to come and stay with them (if she was not welcomed at Daphne’s) until she found somewhere permanent to live. But he smiled at his joined hands in his lap and she suspected he was thinking of the cosiness of his little home. So he was. “You should visit us in Sydney if you come,” he said. “Elsie would make you very welcome.”

  In bed that night she imagined the sea washing onto the beach with a sleepy laziness, not crashing in cruelly as it had done once when Gus and May took her and the boys to the coast for a picnic when she was ten. She had whimpered in her wet cold state and Gus had been disgusted at her screams when he held her above a wave and let it slosh over her feet. He had all but thrown her back to May and the picnic basket, having made great sacrifices, working nearly all night to get their old truck going to get them there.

  But the sea at Bondi would be different. The big waves too far out to be a worry, so gentle when they rolled onto the beach she could lie and let them wash over her. She went on to dream of a bathing suit, red perhaps, cut low on her back, which would be tanned a deep honey colour.

  Gus left the kitchen when Amy announced her plans. “Gus!” May called, but he was gone.

  May was ironing and she put such urgency into her work all of sudden, Kathleen on the floor with her rag doll connected the ironing with the going away. She had a vision of Amy walking along the road with a great heap of ironed clothes balanced on her arm. She blushed at the foolishness of this when she saw there were many of Gus’s and the boys’ things in the pile, and changed the vision to all of them walking, spread out from one side of the road to the other. Tears came into her eyes at the thought that she might not be carried when her legs grew tired because Patricia and Lebby would be taken up first. She pressed herself against her mother to communicate this fear to her and seek reassurance through the warm flesh of Amy’s side.

  Amy, seeking reassurance herself, clung to Kathleen and Patricia, one on either side of her, and looked at her big case, dropped inside the kitchen door, to gain comfort from that. It was packed with
almost everything she owned and she planned not to unpack most of it since she would leave for Sydney in two days’ time.

  She watched May toss each ironed garment onto the pile. Lebby, in her chair at the corner of the table, bent towards May, eyes lowered. May murmured small soothing words every now and again.

  “I’ll get myself a better job there,” Amy pleaded, and loosened her hold on the girls to slide her hands over her knees and look at them, telling herself they were capable of better things than making beds and sweeping floors.

  Kathleen pressed harder against her, feeling the change in Amy’s body as if it had been a warm and friendly tree trunk until she spoke. Now it was cold, and she felt that she was out in the paddocks alone with a storm coming and that the tree, afraid for itself, was no longer concerned with sheltering her. She picked up her doll from the floor and wrapped her arms around it. Amy stood up and with a little frown inspected some wrinkles on her sleeves and concentrated for a moment on stroking them away.

  May gave her one brief, sharp look, ironing on with her free hand on Lebby’s shoulder. The look said Damn your dress! Is that all you care about? Amy picked up her case and all eyes, even Lebby’s, watched her as she carried it into the bedroom.

  May finished the ironing. Kathleen was surprised to see the basket empty. Nearly always there was something left in the bottom, some of the boys’ old shirts, too tattered to stand up to the rigours of May’s thrusting iron. Emptiness took hold of her too. Something is changing, she thought, seeing the late afternoon sun had moved to the edge of the veranda boards and was clinging there, growing paler as she watched. That chilled her too, and she didn’t know where to look for comfort.

  Then May called from the end of the table, where she was rolling the ironing blanket into a fat little log, with the scorched part of the sheet hanging some tattered tongues out one end.

  “Feed the fowls, Kathleen. Any minute they’ll start up a squawk to deafen us all!”