Wind in the Wires (4 page)

T
ENANTS

T
here are good tenants, then there are the other type. For sixty years, Charlie White had been collecting rent from half-a-dozen properties; he’d known a few of both types. These days he considered himself an expert, swore he could pick a good tenant from a bad by the way they kept the inside of their cars.

The Hoopers had been lucky. Every Sunday, instead of going to church, their tenants were out washing and vacuuming their car or mowing lawns. Vern’s garden looked like something out of a magazine. Joe Dolan had kept the garden, to the east of Charlie’s house, looking nice – until he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-four and his wife moved in with one of their city sons.

Mrs Fulton rented the house to the west of Charlie’s. Charlie didn’t like many, and trusted less. He liked and trusted Mrs Fulton, and when she complained about the new tenants he’d put into the house to the east side of his, he listened, not that there was much he could do about it. He’d given them a twelve-month lease.

He bathed and shaved at home, but rarely slept there. Always woke up there feeling lonely for Jeany. He didn’t wake up feeling lonely in his storeroom bed.

He’d ridden home to clean up for Christmas, to spend Christmas Eve in Jeany’s bed, and found out what Mrs Fulton had been complaining about.

The rowdy buggers had started arriving around nine and they’d kept on coming, loud Melbourne louts, in cars, on motorbikes, and they’d brought their dogs with them. A man with poor hearing can tolerate a barking dog – if it doesn’t spend all night doing it. A man with poor hearing can tolerate a wild party next door – if the revellers go to bed at midnight. The party had continued until morning, when it moved out to the street, where two maniacs roared motorbikes and the rest of the party yelled encouragement while their dogs howled.

Someone had rung Jack Thompson. He’d been out of town. The party continued into Boxing Day when someone called Jack again. He’d moved a few of them on.

Charlie had waited until a few more left, then he’d gone next door to give the noisy coots their marching orders. The male tenant waved his lease in Charlie’s face and told him to piss off.

Which he’d done, though not quietly.

He’d returned to his storeroom and hadn’t gone home again until New Year’s Eve, which was a repeat of Christmas Eve, with fireworks. Not a soul in the street got a wink of sleep. Then the following morning, all hell broke loose, or the tenants’ guests’ dogs had. Three big ugly buggers attacked Bobby, Mrs Fulton’s fox terrier, and the mongrels ripped him to shreds.

Mrs Fulton, her son Robert, plus Charlie and half-a-dozen more, spoke to Jack Thompson.

‘You said they’re paying their rent, Charlie. I can do something about the dogs and the noise, but as far as I see it, you’ve got no legal cause to evict them.’

‘Their dogs killed Bobby,’ Mrs Fulton said.

‘There was a girl running around the yard last night, stark naked,’ Charlie said.

‘A landlord can’t dictate how his tenant chooses to live, Charlie.’

‘A bloody tenant can’t dictate how I live either, but that’s what they’re doing,’ a neighbour said.

‘There were a few parties in town last night,’ Jack said.

‘Half of Melbourne was at theirs, Jack,’ Robert Fulton said.

‘We had cars from one end of the street to the other. We couldn’t get out our own bloody drives,’ the neighbour said.

‘I can’t charge a man for having a party,’ Jack said. ‘You need just cause.’

‘They’re wrecking my bloody house!’ Charlie said. ‘That’s just cause enough for me.’

When he’d signed that lease, that house had manicured lawns, front and rear, flowers, shrubs. The lawns were bum-high grass, empty bottles and rubbish. He’d paid a fortune for new floor coverings before moving the tenants in, bought three new roller blinds. No blind at all now at the kitchen window or on the broken front window.

A quiet week followed; the new tenants kept their heads low until the long weekend in January when the cars, bikes and dogs arrived again.

Charlie waited until they went to bed, sometime after dawn, when he walked next door, armed with a tape measure. He was there to measure up the broken window – not that he had any intention of repairing it, he wanted to get a look in through it. He measured – and while so occupied, a dirty great mastiff’s head came through the hole, its face in his face, and that ugly bastard looked big enough, hungry enough to eat him.

There wasn’t much left of Charlie White, but what there was backed off fast to the front door where he knocked until he raised his bleary-eyed, towel-clad tenant.

‘No dogs inside the premises,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s in the lease.’

‘Piss off, you geriatric old bastard, or I’ll let the bloody dogs out,’ the tenant said.

It was the ‘geriatric’ that did it. It hurt. That ‘geriatric’ decided Charlie.

He bought a long garden hose that week, and a cigarette lighter. He didn’t smoke and never had. He rode his bike around to the garage and asked Roy, the garage chap, to fill up his can with sump oil.

‘The best thing I know for eradicating noxious weeds,’ he said.

In the pre-dawn hours of a Sunday morning, after what might be termed a tame Saturday night party by his tenants’ standard, Charlie crept next door, turned the electricity off at the mains, connected his new garden hose to their tap, checked the backyard for dogs and, when he didn’t see any, got down to business.

A man who had lived as long as Charlie White had learnt how to make a lot of smoke with very little fire. He’d gathered together a ragged pair of longjohns, an old shirt with a collar that cut off his circulation, a couple of worn-out singlets, and newspapers, which he’d rolled tight, screwed into wicks, then wrapped in the singlets, shirt and longjohns.

The kitchen window hadn’t been closed since the new tenants had moved in. He dipped a singlet into his bucket of sump oil, lit the wick and, once it was burning well, pitched his first smoke bomb through the window. Working fast then, as fast as a bloke with one gammy arm could work, he lit two more. One went in through the rear door, one through the broken front window. The last of his smoke bombs, his longjohns, he pitched in through the front door, then he closed the door and stepped back to the garden tap to await the desired results.

Their dog must have smelt the smoke. It started barking. Charlie gave it time to wake the house. It woke its mates. Charlie wasn’t here to do murder and with no sight or sound of the tenants, the hose turned on full bore, he dragged it up to the front door and opened it. Acrid smoke gushed out.

‘Fire,’ Charlie yelled.

Given the guidance of his voice one dog exited, sneezing, shaking its head. Two of its mates followed it out.

‘Fire,’ Charlie bellowed, dragging his hose indoors, spraying in the direction he’d tossed his wicks.

They came, one by one, two by two; he counted five, and washed a sixth from his mattress.

A hose in a house, in the hands of a determined old coot, could spread a lot of water in the time it took for Jack Thompson to get there and turn off the garden tap. Most of the neighbours were out on the street, smelling smoke but seeing no fire. The rest emerged when the fire truck arrived, its bell ringing.

Jack found a partially burnt singlet on the kitchen floor. He sniffed it before pitching it out the window. ‘Don’t think you’re fooling anyone, Charlie. What you’ve done here is illegal and dangerous.’

‘But bloody effective,’ Charlie said, armed now with a dipper of water, which he brandished as a bare-bummed bodgie came in looking for his trousers, his
HATE
tattooed hand occupied in covering up his genitals; he wasn’t looking for a fight.

‘They’ve got a lease,’ Jack argued.

‘If it was in here, it’s water damaged,’ Charlie said, tossing his dipperful into a food cupboard, then pitching what he’d saturated out the window.

The ceilings were dripping, the floors awash, the sink overflowing. Jack turned off the tap. Charlie found another one in the bathroom.

You can’t wrestle a dipper from a near ninety-year-old bloke when he’s only got one good arm. Jack gave up and went out to the street to offer the homeless, half-clad mob a pair of dripping jeans and a bed for the rest of the night in his cell. They wanted their car keys. Charlie had them.

‘Give them up, Charlie.’

‘They’re too drunk to drive –’

‘Give them their keys, Charlie, or you’ll spend the night in my cells.’

A soggy lease went into the lavatory pan before the tenants and their guests got their car keys, minus Charlie’s house keys. Two cars and a bike took off to someplace, hopefully to a far place.

*

On Granny’s land, they knew nothing of Charlie’s war. Civil war had broken out down there.

All Georgie’s fault. She’d spent too many of her formative years with Charlie, and the rest of them with Granny – other than the two she’d spent in Armadale in Ray’s house, which had taught her that few men could be trusted.

For weeks she’d been tossing her prowler theory around in her mind. The night of Charlie’s war, she decided to prove or disprove her theory. Hooked a couple of lengths of fine wire, at ankle and calf level, across the east-side front door. As a second front, she set pots, pans and jam tins in a row on the veranda, she sat on Norman Morrison’s old cane chair to await results.

Four o’clock when Teddy attempted to creep out. Tripped on the wires; fell headlong into the pots and pans and the noise of his landing might have woken Granny from the dead.

It woke Harry, and Harry, barefoot, clad in sagging jockey briefs, a gangle of bony limbs topped by rusty hair in need of a cut, wasn’t a sight to be tangled with. Nor was Lenny, Teddy’s cousin-brother, a big, blond-headed bloke with a punch on him like the kick of a mule.

Georgie, who sat on Teddy until they came, gave him up to Harry and Lenny then went into Margot’s room to haul her out of bed and frogmarch her out to the kitchen.

Elsie came, dressing-gown clad, carrying Harry’s trousers. Teddy sat, nursing one arm, Margot stood
ahzeeing
while Georgie gave leash to a tongue, which until that moment she hadn’t known she possessed.

M
ARGOT
’
S
I
NDIGESTION

A
ninety-year-old man grows weary when he misses out on a night’s sleep. At eight in the morning, Charlie crawled into Jeany’s bed. If he moved in the next twenty-five hours, he didn’t know about it.

On Granny’s land, civil war raged for most of Sunday. Georgie got to bed late and couldn’t sleep when she got there, or not until the early birds started dancing on the low tin roof.

The rooster didn’t wake her. Couldn’t believe her watch when she finally opened her eyes. No time for breakfast; she dressed, grabbed her keys and ran, and found two customers champing at the bit when she got to the shop.

Charlie usually unlocked if she was held up. No time to think about him: Denis Dobson, on her heels, was gasping for a fag.

She saw light coming in through from the storeroom’s rear door, which meant Charlie had risen. Flicked on the light switches, then reached for the cigarette shelves for a packet of Turf.

Nothing on those shelves. Nothing on the tobacco shelves.

‘Looks like you’ve been done over,’ Denis Dobson said.

‘Charlie!’ Georgie ran for the storeroom. Back door hanging open on one hinge. ‘Charlie!’ She damn near tripped on a carton that shouldn’t have been there. ‘Charlie! Where are you?’

He wasn’t in his bed. Not in the lav either. No Charlie tossing crates around in his backyard.

Her customers lived in town; they knew about the fire and Charlie’s war with his tenants. Jack knew. He roused Charlie from slumber and drove him to the shop. Unshaven, uncombed, his fly undone, Charlie didn’t give his empty shelves a glance as he scuttled by Georgie, Jack and four customers, who tailed him to his storeroom, where he got to his knees beside his bed, not to pray but to reach beneath it.

‘Checking on your chamber pot?’ Maisy Macdonald asked.

‘Thieving, wrecking bastards,’ Charlie panted as he rose from bony knees with difficulty. ‘It’s them.’ He sat on the bed, a hand on his heart, panting for breath. ‘What did they get, Rusty?’

‘Cigarettes, tobacco, the bag of change. Lollies, biscuits. It’s hard to say what else yet.’

They hadn’t got Charlie’s biscuit tin. That was all he cared about. Insurance would cover the rest. He had fire insurance on the ruined house too, though it could be safer not to put in a claim for damage he’d done.

*

A bad end to January. February was worse. The leftovers of a cyclone that hit Queensland cut across country to Woody Creek. It had done untold damage up north. In Woody Creek, it blew trees over, blew down powerlines.

Things got worse for Charlie. Georgie told him she was going down to Frankston, that she’d spoken to Emma Fulton who had worked at the shop when Charlie’s wife had been alive.

‘She said she’ll give you a hand until you can get someone else. There’s a dozen kids in town who’d kill for the job, Charlie.’

He tried bribery, spent a handful of his ill-gotten gains on a bunch of brewery shares in Georgie’s name. He’d stopped her from leaving him once before with shares, or guilt.

‘I don’t give in to blackmail,’ she said, then she picked up the phone and rang Jenny.

‘Have you got room for me, Jen?’

‘I’ll set up a bed in the kitchen,’ she said.

And it sounded like home, and she wanted to go home to Jenny and Raelene.

She might have gone, too, if her war and Charlie’s hadn’t met head-on in Willama. The tenants, living in a caravan at the Willama caravan park, were arrested, along with two Willama locals and Teddy Hall. They were charged with being in possession of stolen goods.

Teddy hadn’t been in on the robbery, Georgie could vouch for that. He hadn’t left the house until Monday morning when Harry, who had confiscated his car keys, had given them up so Teddy could go to work. They hadn’t seen him since. They hadn’t known where he was until Jack drove down and told them.

The cops altered the charge against Teddy to the purchasing of known stolen goods. Harry and Lenny bailed him out.

‘I didn’t know they were old Charlie’s, did I,’ Teddy argued. ‘And all I got was a dozen lousy packets of the things.’

‘Get in that car.’ Harry, white-faced beneath his freckles, watery blue eyes shooting sparks and Teddy knowing those sparks hadn’t been caused by a few lousy packets of cigarettes. Knowing, too, that he’d been safer in the cell, he stopped arguing and folded himself into the back seat.

‘She wouldn’t leave me alone, Dad.’

‘You keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you,’ Lenny said.

‘My ute’s down here somewhere. We have to get it.’

‘Ronnie is driving it home – and it’s his ute,’ Harry said. Teddy had been gone for less than a week. A lot can happen in a week.

Chunky, dumpy, snarly bitch Margot, clad in her frumpy skirts, her baggy shirts and cardigans, her sandals and ankle socks, ate like a horse. Weight ran in the Macdonald family. She’d been complaining of indigestion since Christmas. Elsie had been dosing her with liver salts.

No one looks for the unexpected, but give them the whisper of a hint, and their minds will leap to the obvious conclusion.

Ronnie beat them home. A redhead like his father, and as tall, he was in the sleep-out bedroom he shared with Teddy, packing his clothes. He was off to Mildura to his girlfriend before Harry changed his mind about the ute.

‘He’s not taking my bloody ute,’ Teddy said.

‘He’ll take it if I tell him he can take it,’ Harry roared. ‘You’ve broken your mother’s heart.’

Elsie had been bawling off and on since the night of the civil war. She was still doing it. Georgie was to blame. Teddy had been in love with her since she was twelve years old and they’d rafted down the creek on an inflated truck tyre, determined to ride it down to the ocean. They’d ridden it out to Monk’s place.

And she’d done this to him.

‘She’s having a dear little baby, Teddy,’ Elsie bawled.

If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have stopped in Willama.

‘It’s mine and your daddy’s grandbaby, Teddy.’

‘It’s not all my fault, Mum. I’d stop going over there and she’d threaten to dob on me.’

*

A man doesn’t sell his soul easily. It took two days. He wouldn’t sell it to silence his mother’s bawling, or for her dear little grandbaby; but he’d do it for his hotted-up ute.

‘You make him give me back my keys and you can do what you want.’

A wedding was what they wanted, and wanted it done fast. By the look of Margot’s belly when it was stripped down, she could have been five months pregnant. Lenny drove into town to ring up a Willama parson, who said he could do it after church on Sunday.

Elsie stopped crying to unpack Ronnie’s case. They’d need his suit. Teddy didn’t own one. She wanted Harry to drive in and ask Maisy to ring up her girls and see if one of them had something nice they could lend Margot for the wedding.

It was Margot who saved Teddy’s neck – or his soul.

‘Ath if I’m marrying a blackfeller,’ she said.

That was the day Margot became indigestible to Harry and Lenny. That was the day Georgie received a phone call from Jenny, a call that delayed her retirement from the shop. If Margot was going down to Frankston, then as sure as hell Georgie wasn’t.

When you can’t go, and you can’t stay, you look for sanctuary. Only Jack. She spilt the whole sorry story to him that night – except the bit about the doctor Jenny knew who might be able to do something about Margot’s indigestion, and about Elsie, howling again because Jenny was plotting against her dear little innocent grandbaby.

‘I’m living in bedlam, Jack, then I go to work to more of it. We made a loss last week – and we didn’t. He helps himself from the cash drawer and I can’t stop him.’

‘That’s not your responsibility, love.’

‘It is. I do his books.’

Jack got rid of one of Georgie’s problems. He drove Margot to Frankston, wedged between Harry and Lenny in the rear seat,
ahzeeing.
Georgie sat at Jack’s side, pleased to be at his side.

She walked on the beach with him that day, after Veronica Andrews and her doctor partner had shot Margot in the backside with a horse needle to shut her up.

They walked for miles, Georgie picking up shells and lacy seaweed, crawling over rocks.

And in a rock pool, Jack found a treasure, identified by another beachcomber as a nautilus shell. A delicate thing, perfect and white, which the identifier wanted to own. Jack gave it to Georgie and told her he had put in for a transfer back to the city.

‘I thought you’d be down here, love.’

He asked her to marry him on their walk back to Jenny’s rooms.

‘I wish I was ten years older,’ she said. That was all she said.

*

The chap renting Vern Hooper’s house received notice that his lease wouldn’t be renewed and that he’d be required to vacate the property by the end of March. Two more families received identical letters. The Hoopers were selling up in Woody Creek.

There were few rental properties in town. Most who owned a house lived in it; Charlie owned three and two of them were vacant. He hadn’t slept in Jeany’s bed since the robbery. When Hooper’s tenant approached him, though Charlie wanted him, he shook his head.

‘The last lot buggered it,’ he said. They had. Every door was dog-raked, one of the kitchen cupboards had been dog-chewed. The floor coverings needed replacing again. One of his smoke bombs had singed the floor. His hose had done its own damage.

‘Your insurance ought to cover it,’ Hooper’s tenant said.

Charlie scratched his head and eyed him. There was still a stink of sump oil in that house. He hadn’t put in an insurance claim. Maybe he ought to chance it. He wanted Hooper’s tenant.

‘Give me a day or two to think it over,’ he said. Or to think something over.

Until his last tenants had gone feral, he’d considered renting out Jeany’s house. He thought about it that day.

February ended no better than it began, and March came in, looking no better than February. Two days into the month and work began on building Sydney an opera house, which would likely cost the taxpayer countless millions. And what did the average taxpayer need with an opera house? Charlie couldn’t turn his radio off fast enough when one of those screeching opera-singing sopranos opened her mouth.

He received two letters that day. One made him happy – the insurance company had paid up for the robbery. The second letter killed his pleasant mood. It was from the taxation department.

2 March 1959

To whom it may concern,

Your thieving city bodgies have already done over my business this year. It might be to your advantage to put off your own raid until next year when, with a bit of luck, I might be in a better position to pay for your bloody opera house.

Yours bloody sincerely,

Charles W. White, Justice of the Peace

They didn’t reply, not by letter. One of their numbers men replied in person, a chap of thirty-odd, heavy dark-rimmed glasses, dark suit, couldn’t crack a smile to save his life. For two days he took over the bottom end of the counter, demanding invoices. Charlie gave him a few cardboard cartons full, half of which were prewar, a few of which may have been pre first war.

Before the tax accountant retired defeated, he learned of the hidden costs in running a country grocery store. Potatoes went rotten, mice got into bags of oatmeal, power wires blew down in storms and goods went off in freezers. He learned, too, that it was a dangerous game to make a move on the person of Georgie Morrison. He departed for home with one arm of his heavy-framed glasses held together by a bandaid, and none the wiser about Charlie’s habit of filching big notes from the cash drawer, or about his clutch of share certificates, impaled on a wire spike and hung behind the storeroom door beneath a vintage moth-eaten tweed overcoat.

‘You need to stop now, Charlie,’ Georgie warned.

‘It’s my hobby, Rusty,’ he said. ‘You can’t take an old chap’s only vice away from him.’

‘Take up chain-smoking instead. It helps,’ she said, and lit one to prove it.

‘You need to do something about that empty house, Mr White,’ Mrs Fulton said. ‘Another one of your windows got broken last night, and we heard kids running around in your own backyard.’

‘I’m getting around to it,’ he said.

‘You need to clean up behind your shop, Mr White,’ the bank manager said. ‘You’ve got a mouse plague out there and they’re getting into the bank.’

‘They won’t eat much,’ Charlie said.

‘I need to know what you’re planning to do about your vacant house today, Mr White,’ Hooper’s tenant said. ‘Bill Roberts just offered me his place for six months.’

Everyone knew why. Lila Roberts, a Sydney tart, wed to Billy Roberts, had taken off towards Sydney with a juvenile. Her husband was moving to the west, placing a continent between them. Their house was a dump. It didn’t deserve Hooper’s tenant. Charlie deserved him.

He offered him a ten-year lease on Jeany’s house, then gave it to him rent-free for six months, on the understanding that he’d do what he could next door with both house and garden.

Went home then for the last time, just to see what Jeany thought about what he’d done. At times he swore he heard her at night, saw her shadow in the passageway.

‘What do you reckon, Jeany love? Did I do the right thing? They’ll look after her for us.’

She wasn’t talking tonight.

He had a habit of nodding off when he sat still. He nodded off on Jeany’s couch, and woke to her singing, her voice as clear as it had been thirty years ago.

‘Charlie is my darlin’, me darlin’, me darling . . .’

She wouldn’t be calling him her darling if she hadn’t liked what he’d done. Wouldn’t call him darling if she ever found out what he’d done in Willama when her daughter had him locked up in the old fogies’ home. Some things wives need to know and some they don’t.

‘
I dream of Jeany with the light brown hair
,
floating like an angel on the hot summer air
,’ he sang.