Free Ripples on a Pond by Joy Dettman Page A

through the side door, behind the organist.
    He cut through the shrubbery separating church from church car park, and she pushed through behind him. The car was parked there, locked. Lorna had a locking complex. Amber hid between two vehicles, pressed in close to the shrubbery, peering between the branches at the groups clustering outside the church. There was not a lot of Amber to hide. Thin as a rake, five foot four, white and silky curling hair peeping out from beneath her blue hat, bought to match her overcoat. Sighted Lorna, surrounded by Duckworths. Lorna’s spectacles glinted as she turned, searching for her guide dog.
    The mother and daughter Duckworth were broad, but their relative – for surely she was a relative – made them small. An immense, puce-clad woman with heavy shoulder-length hair . . . Quickly, Amber glanced at Alma Duckworth’s hair – like old Cecelia Morrison’s, sparse and silver grey. Her daughter’s was as sparse, though not yet as grey. Darting eyes returned to that abundant dark hair, as heavy, as dark, as . . .
    â€˜No,’ she breathed to the bottlebrush as she eased a branch lower so she might gain a better view of that hair. ‘It can’t be.’
    Knew it was. She could see the heavy face in profile and she knew that flat profile. Amber hadn’t seen her daughter in twenty-odd years. Cecelia, they’d named her, for her paternal grandmother – Sissy.
    â€˜No.’
    Hair like Gertrude’s. From infancy it had been obvious that Sissy had inherited her maternal grandmother’s hair – as it had been obvious she’d inherited the Duckworth build and features.
    It was her.
    Five babies Amber had carried. Only Sissy had survived to be put to the breast. She’d loved her plain daughter, had loved her purely for living. And that bastard had brought his golden stray into their lives, his dainty-faced, fine-limbed songbird stray and Amber had hated her for her beauty. She’d tried to make Sissy beautiful. Hours she’d spent curling, combing, styling that hair, choosing frocks to flatter, plucking her eyebrows, painting her face.
    And she’d come to this, a monstrous thing with black bushes of eyebrow, clad in puce polyester stretched to fit the rear end of a city tram.
    My flesh. My blood.
    Norman’s flesh and blood. Sissy had denied her blood link to Amber back in ’62.
    The Salvation Army captain had contacted her. Your daughter has made a new life for herself, Mrs Morrison. That was all. Not a word. Not a letter. Just a new life with no space in it for a mad, murdering mother.
    Anger rising in her breast, Amber’s feet began tapping. They needed to walk, but she couldn’t walk. Lorna wouldn’t get that car home without her guide dog. Lorna drove, but it was Amber’s eyes that watched for bike riders, red lights, braking cars.
    Your daughter has made a new life for herself, Mrs Morrison.
    Looked down at her tapping shoes. Good leather shoes. Had to concentrate on her good leather shoes, which she could afford to buy because of Lorna. Had to concentrate on the roast lamb dinner she’d eat at a polished table in a fine house that she ran the way a house should be run. Had to think of her bankbooks. Until Lorna, she’d owned no bankbook. She now had two and a small pool of accumulated wealth. Every fortnight Amber Morrison’s cheques were delivered to a private mailbox at the Melbourne GPO, where they remained safe until Miss Elizabeth Duckworth retrieved then squirrelled them away in Amber’s bank account.
    Lorna had been instrumental in securing a pension for Miss Elizabeth Duckworth; her cheques were delivered fortnightly to Lorna’s locked letterbox. With no rent to pay, little food to purchase, Amber always had money left in her purse when the new cheque arrived, when her leftovers were paid into Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s bank account.
    Lorna having broken