Read Online Ripples on a Pond by Joy Dettman - Free Book Online

horse-drawn dray. Remembered the horse lifting its tail to drop a load of manure on the tramlines. Remembered her laughter.
    And her songs.
    When I pretend I’m gay, I never feel that way, I’m only painting the clouds . . .
    He had to get some sleep. Tomorrow he’d get Bernard home, get the funeral organised, then fly back and . . .
    And what?
    He’d tried to talk to Cara before he’d flown. He’d phoned her three times.
    â€˜Just get it undone, Morrie. Then we’ll talk,’ she’d said.
    â€˜I love you.’
    â€˜We’ll get over it if you stay away.’
    Couldn’t deal with thinking about getting it undone, not right now, not with Lorna breathing down his neck, so forced his mind to the funeral. Get that done, then maybe go back, see the man who had been Daddy.
    Or write to him.
    He could remember a tall skinny man with crutches at a hospital, remembered big hands holding him, crushing him, until Margaret had eased him free.
    Daddy Jim was crying because he was so pleased to see his big boy , she’d explained later. Daddy Jim is unwell because of the war, but soon, when he’s well again, he’ll come home and live with us .
    He hadn’t come home to live with them. He’d married Jenny.
    There was no mention of Jim in Vern’s will, other than a paragraph stating that the cost of his upkeep in the sanatorium would be paid for by the estate.
    According to Lorna, he and the Morrison trollop had a legitimate daughter they’d named Gertrude. That name rang a bell in Morrie’s memory, and he didn’t know why.
    So many names. So many people had wandered through his life. Jenny and Ray, Georgie and Margot, Lois, Billy, Michael, Graham, Geoff, Ian. At every school he’d attended, in every neighbourhood, he’d tucked away another name or two. Steve, David, Alan, Matthew, Mark, several Johns, and all the while his own name had kept altering to suit the current situation. Moving, always moving, Lorna yapping at their heels.
    He’d left Jimmy Hooper Morrison in Woody Creek to become Jimmy King, for a little while. Then Balwyn, and because there were too many little boys named Jimmy, Margaret and Grandpa had changed his name to James Morrison Hooper. Then Cheltenham, where they’d tacked on the Grenville-Langdon.
    At the boarding school, when the teachers had called the roll, he’d replied to the call of Grenville-Langdon.
    â€˜Present, sir.’
    At fourteen or fifteen, his mates had named him Lofty Langdon, or Long-Don, or Stick Man. By then he hadn’t cared much what they called him, as long as the same faces did the calling. And they had, from the age of twelve to seventeen. Margaret and Bernard had allowed him to complete his final school year before making their great escape, which they’d managed with the assistance of Roland Atkinson and Mrs Muir, their housekeeper.
    The night after his final exam, he’d left the school in a taxi and for the next two hours had muddied his trail for Lorna. Bought a ticket to a movie he hadn’t watched. Caught a tram to Spencer Street Station, then walked up to the bus depot, where Thomas Martin had boarded an overnight bus to Sydney. The following afternoon, he’d flown alone to Perth, Margaret and Bernard waiting at the airport for him. They’d boarded a boat for England that afternoon and sailed merrily away.
    He’d loved that boat. Loved those weeks of being neither here nor there, and nothing but water around them – and no Lorna swimming behind the ship. Every night was a party, and Margaret, a giggling girl, dancing with Bernard. She’d forced Morrie up to the dance floor, had taught him to dance during those three weeks at sea.
    Then a cab to Thames Ditton. Alien names, alien countryside. His first sight of Bernard’s home had blown his seventeen-year-old mind. Big, rock solid, its roots embedded in that land for so long that its walls