Free Wind in the Wires by Joy Dettman Page B

were expected to spend their lives pregnant. Jim could never know about what went on next door. Like Granny, he’d consider it murder.
    Too much on her mind that week to worry about the future. Margot to worry about, her baby. Raelene too. She was full up with her pretty bedroom in Box Hill and ice-cream in Florence’s fridge and even ice-cream cones in a packet. No ice-cream in Jenny’s elderly fridge. It melted.
    Then Wednesday evening and another one of Vroni’s specials moved in, and Jenny and Raelene had to walk over to the main building to use Vroni’s bathroom and toilet, just for two nights, but for those two nights Jenny was on call, and the patient in isolation was a sixteen-year-old girl who enjoyed hitting her buzzer and disturbing Raelene, who was reaching an age where she resented the sick lady who wouldn’t let them use their own bathroom.
    Had to get a flat, or a house, or another job.
    On Friday, Florence rang. She and Clarrie would be willing to pick Raelene up on Friday night and return her on Sunday.
    ‘Do you want to sleep at Florence’s house again, love?’
    ‘They do things,’ Raelene said.
    ‘What things?’
    ‘Shops and everything.’
    The Keatings picked her up at seven. Jim came in a taxi on Saturday morning. She took him down to the beach and walking on sand wasn’t easy for him, so they sat on sand and when he tried to get up he lost his balance and fell. She could panic or make light of it. She did the latter, laughed, and offered him her hands.
    ‘I’m useless,’ he said.
    ‘Not entirely,’ she said. ‘Though beach walks might be out.’
    They booked a room at a hotel and it was like being in Number Five in Sydney. They kissed and lay, his arm beneath her shoulder, her arm over him, holding him close to her, and talking, talking about everything under the sun and beyond the sun.
    He told her how he’d attempted to drive Nobby’s car two nights ago. ‘I can’t judge pressure on the clutch with a dead shoe,’ he said.
    He’d been driving since his legs had grown long enough to reach the pedals. When she’d been nine or ten, he’d driven halfway to Sydney with his father and sisters and Sissy.
    ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’
    ‘I doubt it.’
    ‘Then I will. I drove from Melbourne to Geelong once.’
    They spoke of Sissy. Maisy still kept in touch with her. He asked about Jenny’s mother.
    ‘My natural mother died in childbirth.’
    He knew nothing about Juliana Conti and Archie Foote. There was so much to talk about. She told him she’d sung at a city jazz club, then told him about Amber and Norman.
    ‘You would have been back in Australia when she killed him. The newspapers were full of it,’ she said. ‘He was in bed asleep, and she bashed and stabbed him to death – then cleaned the house.’
    ‘Insane?’ he said.
    ‘She always was. When it happened, she was judged unfit to go to trial and locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane. There was supposed to be some sort of hearing about her a while back. For all I know, they could have let her out.’
    She told him that she’d spoken to his cousin, Ian Hooper, on the phone, that he’d told her Lorna had lost track of Jimmy and Margaret.
    ‘He’d told me that after Margaret and her husband adopted Jimmy, they bought a house at Cheltenham and bought one for Lorna in Kew, but she refused to live alone in it. He said that Margaret and her husband had moved house several times in an attempt to lose her, and they finally succeeded last December. Jimmy was here when I came down to Frankston. He was here when I met you. He went to school at Kew until December. I rang up the school. They couldn’t tell me anything.
    ‘Ian said he writes to Margaret, posts his letters to her accountant and he passes them on. I wrote to her. She didn’t reply. She would to you – if she didn’t know you were with me, she would.’
    He didn’t want to write. She didn’t push him.
    Saw Margot on Sunday. Learned from