Amy's Children (5 page)

No one spoke so Amy did. “I know it will be hard.”

“The girl next door got a job in labels,” Daphne said. “She was four months waitin'.”

“What's labels?” Amy asked.

“Don't youse have them down there in the bush?” Daphne asked, only slightly playing down the scorn.

John with his round shiny face gone red reached out and touched the handle of a jug, fawn coloured with a deep brown glaze near the top threatening to outshine John's eyes.

“The people bring the tops of the tea packets to her and she counts them,” said Peter, taking the responsibility for explanation. “She got us the jug for all Mum saved.”

“She's a great counter,” John said.

Peter dug him with an elbow.

“She's got a bloke.”

John beamed around them all, as if this added to the thrill of conquest.

“Mum saves the labels of our tea too,” Amy said. “But she has to post them away.” The silence following might have said here was another reason to escape the backwardness of Diggers Greek.

I will get it over now, Amy thought. “I was wondering, Aunty Daph, if you could put me up for a few days.”

“Yes, sir!” John cried raising an arm. Having failed throughout his schooldays to raise a hand to answer a question in class, he took every opportunity of doing so now to make up for the humiliation of having to remain still and silent in a sea of waving limbs and vibrant, confident voices.

Daphne reached across and slapped his ear. “How many times have you been told to stop that silly habit?” she shouted.

Dudley got up from the table.

Men always walk away, Amy thought. Ted did, Gus does and here is Dudley going. She watched his back pass through the door for he was going into one of the rooms off the hall, the one furnished as a sitting room. Amy glimpsed it on the way in, overfull of pieces, the edge of a piano nearly touching a table of photographs, window curtains not able to hang freely since they were not clear of the table and brushing an upholstered chair jutting well towards the centre of the room, and a lounge and two matching chairs fitted around the remaining walls, and a cabinet wireless as well. There might have been an illusion of space if the centre of the carpet square had been free of clutter, but there was another table there with a green fringed cloth reaching to the floor and on it a silver vase of artificial poppies, and there was a picture of the same flowers burning a square of colour into the dun coloured wall.

Dudley went there to listen to the wireless, for almost at once there was the sound of crackling and squeaking as if someone had let fireworks off in a box of mice.

Disregarding the slap and with a big smile John shook his head and looked at Amy. “He's never learned to tune it in.”

Daphne gathered up the pudding plates. “Then go and tune it in for him!”

“As per usual,” said Peter.

Daphne rattled the plates and Amy thought she might be pretending not to hear to avoid rebuking Peter, who was most likely his mother's favourite.

Amy helped with the washing up. There was hardly any conversation between the two women, and when Daphne had wiped down the linoleum on the tub covers, she went into a room off the hall opposite the sitting room and switched a light on there. Amy followed and when she saw the single iron bed made up with a thin quilt on top and starched pillowslips she felt a beautiful ache to her limbs, an ache to the side of her head, a creeping of the flesh of her body, loosening it against her clothes. It will be heaven lying there, she thought.

“I'll put a table for Peter to work at in here when he goes to college, and something for his clothes if I don't get any setbacks between now and then,” Daphne said, turning back the quilt.

She is telling me I can't stay permanently, Amy thought, not discouraged. She removed her shoes and tucked them under the chair in the corner, one with a leg bent right under, unsafe for sitting on but handy for her clothes when she took them off. Daphne flicked the light off then on, to indicate where the switch was and the necessity to use only a minimum of electricity.

When Amy's head was on the pillow she whispered to herself. “Thank you God. Please don't punish me too much for leaving my little girls.”

Finding work at Amy's age with no skills apart from domestic ones proved very difficult.

Daphne was up early to get John off to work and she brought the newspaper from the front veranda to Amy in bed. Amy had to scan the employment columns and note any suitable vacancies, write down the addresses and have the paper refolded to leave by Dudley's porridge plate.

“He's that fussy,” Daphne said.

Dudley did not want Amy in the house, but everyone else did.

“Where is she?” John would ask when he got in, taking his old felt hat from his sweaty head.

Peter was studying for his Leaving Certificate and talked shyly to her about the poetry.

“I don't understand what it all means, but I love the sounds. Like music,” Amy said.

“Me too,” Peter said.

Daphne to her surprise loved having another woman in the house. As if her conscience demanded an explanation, she told it she supposed she had missed having a daughter of her own.

“I been wanting to move that couch to under the window for ages,” Daphne said one day when she was mopping the kitchen floor and Amy was scrubbing down the pine dresser.

“Come on then,” Amy said, and with a couple of swoops of her young body had a small cane octagonal table astride the window sill and had hold of one end of the couch.

When it was in place she took the cane table under her arm and looked about for a new place for it.

“There!” she cried, setting it down in a corner of the hall near the door into the kitchen. “As soon as you open the front door you see it, and we could put a vase of flowers there. Looks real welcoming!”

“Look at that!” Peter cried when he saw the table. “Just the place to put the books I have to take to school next day!”

“We'll leave it bare then, Aunty Daph,” Amy said.

Peter flopped full length on the couch. The sun gave the brown leather the richness of blood, and the brass studs fastening the beautiful little pleats on the headrest shone bright as gold. Peter's thick fair hair shone too. The girls will like him, Amy thought.

The woman next door, the mother of the girl in labels, asked about Amy's children.

“I could never go off and leave mine, young like that.” She drew down her eyebrows and the corners of her thin mouth.

Daphne tossed her head and splashed some water onto a starched pillowslip, rolling it up so tightly it looked no bigger than a handkerchief.

“It would be too cruel to take the little things from May.”

Mrs Cousins's eyes swept the top of Daphne's head and rested on the top shelf of the dresser where the brown jug sat, the one exchanged for the tea labels, for which she felt part ownership. The eyes neither agreed nor disagreed with this sentiment.

“She misses them, she cries herself to sleep some nights.” Daphne's eyes were steel arrows piercing those of Mrs Cousins, who began nervously to pleat her skirt across a thigh.

Daphne hoisted a basket of clothes to one end of the table to leave space for the ironing blanket. She had the pleasant prospect of Amy sharing the job. Amy liked doing Dudley's shirts and those Peter wore to school. Starched collars were a novelty to her since at home in Diggers Creek there were only rough farm clothes to iron. Dudley was a tailor who went to work dressed as an advertisement for his trade.

“I suppose no job don't help much either,” Mrs Cousins said, mournful on the outside, but cheered within thinking of her Helen. Mrs Cousins had just laundered her uniforms, orange coloured with dark blue trimmings matching the tea labels. Her ironing was all done so she could sit in comfort and watch Daphne.

“There she is now,” Daphne said, speeding up the iron in time with the hurry of Amy's feet coming down the hall. That speed might mean good luck at last.

But her face said otherwise. There was strain, even fright in her eyes, very large, a shine on her pale skin for the day was unusually warm for early spring. Her pert little nose shone too and perspiration had darkened her hair.

“Sit down there on the couch,” Daphne said. She badly wanted to offer Amy a cup of tea but it would mean including Mrs Cousins and if her ten-year-old wandered in, as school was out, between them they were capable of emptying her biscuit tin.

“I'll get you a glass of water,” Daphne said.

Mrs Cousins looked at Amy's seated body, marvelling at its youthfulness. You'd never know, she thought.

“Don't say your age,” Mrs Cousins said.

 

“How old?” asked the man at Amy's next interview.

It was a knitwear factory in Newtown and the advertisement sought a young girl for general duties, mainly typing labels describing packaged goods for retail outlets.

The man was short with a skin that looked lightly smeared with grease. You could see hairs sprouting from little pockets of oil. There were some holes without hairs, and Amy thought of a cheese coloured a yellowish grey marked with the feet of mice.

The man's hair was lightly greased too and he had what was called a cowlick in front and yellowy green eyes, a colour Amy had not seen before. I am always finding new things on faces, Amy thought. What will I see next?

A woman about thirty came into the office and opened a steel cabinet and took some papers from it. Amusement, though very guarded, ran across the man's face. He threw a pencil about a desk pad. The redhaired woman left the room without looking at Amy. She saw me alright, Amy thought.

“I'm eighteen,” she said.

She was to start work the following Monday. The pay was twenty-five shillings a week and the hours were from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon. Amy saved her tram fare by walking home after the interview. She crossed the park adjoining Sydney University, passing some students with books and dragging feet. She smiled into their faces, she couldn't help it. A job, a job, I've got a job, she wanted to cry out. Twenty-five shillings a week! Only a pound at some of the other places. She dismissed the reason, her real age, for failing to get employment earlier. She started to run down the gravel footpath as if she really had shed the extra years and was only eighteen. A child whose mother sat with outstretched legs ran in front of her to scoop up a handful of little stones.

“Keep that away from your dress!” the mother called.

Amy saw the dress was pink organdie, a bit big on the thin little girl, it was handed down from an older sister, Amy guessed, seeing it stand out stiffly, making the thin little legs look even thinner.

About Lebby's age. Amy slowed her pace and concentrated on the trams shrieking along Broadway, dismissing the look the child had given her: the watery depths of her eyes asking what right she had to run like a happy boy. Amy walked with grown-up dignity until she turned into Wattle Street, then ran along the footpath past the houses crushed together, some semidetached, and two or three big old family homes of the past converted to flats and bed-sitting rooms. The verandas were turned into bedrooms, or sometimes a kitchenette with the main room opening into it. Canvas blinds were hung against the railings. The slightly sloping floor was usually covered with linoleum, a tattered edge often visible from the street below.

Amy looked up at these buildings with affection. She might get a little place like one of them if the rent was not too high. She knew from the newspapers that rents started at around twelve and sixpence a week. It might be possible to pay a little more for a better place and share it. She ran her mind over the faces of the girls looking her over while she waited to see Mr Yates. Perhaps one of them was looking for somewhere to live.

I will work hard, I'll be neat and particular and I won't daydream. I'll dress nicely and always clean my shoes. She looked down at them flying along the footpath and realized she was running hard now. I'll be the best worker in the place. I know I will.

She was as good as any. She had the small front office to herself, reached by a short flight of stairs from a door opening onto the footpath.

The job was a newly created one in the Lincoln Knitwear factory which was owned by Lance Yates and his brother Tom. They bought yarn, dyed it, and cutters and machinists turned it into clothing. The business had grown sufficiently in the past few months for Amy to be added to the staff of half a dozen clerks and typists. She would receive callers whom she would direct to a chair discarded from Lance Yates's office, while she went importantly through the main office to tell him who was there. A rack of clothing samples from the factory was against one wall and separated from this a rack of garments with small flaws sold to the public. A counter served as a desk with a heavy old typewriter at one end.

Amy had taught herself to type on a machine at the hotel. When Lance Yates got her to type a label describing the colour and size of a line of shirts, she rolled the paper into the machine, smoothed it out with a loving hand and poised her fingers over the keys with great confidence. Lance Yates admired her long supple hands, the loose joints of her fingers and deep narrow fingernails, clean and unpainted (he was dead against painted nails and would not allow them in the office). He did notice, but refrained from mentioning it, that Amy typed “grew-neck” instead of “crew-neck”, and when she realized the error a few days after she started work, she and Peter flung themselves back on the couch in mirth and Daphne indulged in a little smile cutting out biscuits at the kitchen table. She is like a sister to the boys, Daphne thought, glad that Dudley was listening to his silly old cricket and not sitting there at the table with a tight mean face.

Amy helped Daphne and Peter make a vegetable garden by the back fence. Remembering Gus digging on her wedding day Amy said: “Our yard at home is no bigger than this you know.” She tore at a massive growth of vines wrapped around a pile of discarded pine boxes.