An Inch of Love, an Inch of Ashes: Survival Through Insight and Courage After a Life of Betrayal

By Leone Mary Britt

An Inch of Love, An Inch of Ashes is the story of an anguished search by a woman for a meaningful and productive life.

But how can Calinda Carruthers truly love anyone when all she knows is betrayal and abuse of trust? As a child, she longs for her father, Frankie. He deserted her mother, Hazel, when he ran off with a dancer from Bobby Le Bruns travelling tent show. Calinda's great ambition in life is to find him.

By taking her to a dodgy screen test when the girl is only thirteen, Hazel sets Calinda up for a sad life. As a grownup her troubles intensify when she is referred to psychiatrist, Dr Hal Hatter, who compounds her problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479799145

Leone Mary Britt

Leone Mary Britt was born in Orange, central western New South Wales, Australia, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University even though she left school aged 14. She has had two marriages, four beautiful and talented sons (one now deceased) and worked at various jobs including six years at Australian Associated Press. Leone trained as a broadcast officer at 2CR, the ABC radio station in Orange when she was known as Leone Marten. She has had short stories published in the literary magazines Meanjin and Quadrant and had poetry published in The Australian and both the Newcastle and Sydney Morning Heralds and won two national poetry prizes. An earlier manuscript of The Telling Wall was chosen in the long shortlist of 30 in the Varuna Award for Manuscript Development circa 2001.

Book preview

An Inch of Love,

An Inch of Ashes

SURVIVAL THROUGH INSIGHT AND COURAGE AFTER A LIFE OF BETRAYAL

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

LEONE MARY BRITT

Copyright © 2013 by Leone Mary Britt.

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4797-9913-8

Ebook 978-1-4797-9914-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 03/25/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-800-618-969

www.xlibris.com.au

503164

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Notes

‘This story is a long journey for Leone. The manuscript is richly textured. There are places where the writing is breathtakingly brilliant . . .’

‘Although this is harrowing material, the central message is about courage and the decision to confront a legacy of pain. The result is a moving and original book. I think this manuscript shows she has a great talent . . .’

‘I remember nearly weeping when one part was read aloud to me for the first time . . .’

Margaret Simons, award-winning Australian freelance

journalist, author and academic, writing about the

manuscript of this book during her time as Leone Britt’s

mentor.

. . . and in she fell, face first, deep into that black hole in space called love.

For those who believed in me despite everything

Chapter One

On her troubled little sojourn through time, Calinda Carruthers remembered the night she almost became a star, shining bright on the silver screen like Gina Lollobrigida. Back then she hoped that if her father, Frankie, saw her in the movies he’d be so sorry he left that he’d dump the dancing redhead he pissed off with and come back home to Cherry Glen where he belonged.

Calinda’s life changed that Saturday night the moment her mother, Hazel, who had been drinking, ordered her to put on her new pale pink cotton bikini to parade before the two men she had invited home for a beer.

Earlier that afternoon, Hazel had permed her own dark auburn hair and was in the process of setting Calinda’s long brown locks in rollers, ready for a night out at the movies. Sitting on a kitchen chair in the lounge room with a striped towel draped over her shoulders, Calinda squealed when Hazel pulled a strand of hair that had caught in a roller.

‘Ouch,’ Calinda yelled. ‘That hurts, Mum. Why do you always have to pull it?’ She moaned and rubbed the top of her head. ‘I hate you doing my hair; you’re too rough.’ She looked over at her school friend Gracie Rye who sat obediently on the settee with her carrot-coloured hair wound in pink rollers. ‘You didn’t pull Gracie’s, and I’ll bet you cut my fringe too short again, did she Gracie?’

‘Just keep still,’ Hazel said, taking a puff of a cigarette and blowing the smoke away from the girls. ‘And stop your whingeing or I’ll cut it all off.’ She squashed the cigarette into a green glass ashtray.

‘It’s just like mine, truly,’ Gracie said softly.

‘There,’ Hazel said, popping the plastic ball into the end of the last roller. ‘Don’t say I never did anything for you.’ She started picking up red and brown hair from the brown linoleum. ‘Someone get me the broom,’ she said. ‘Then go and iron your clothes and get dressed while your hair sets.’

While Hazel swept the floor, the girls ironed their new clothes, excited about going to the movies at night on their own for the first time, both in their new clothes and shoes, and what’s more, Hazel said they could wear her lipstick, and the same dresses. Hazel had agreed to allow them to see Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, so, the Saturday before, they had made identical cornflower blue floral dresses with gathered skirts on Hazel’s treadle sewing machine with the rain falling so heavily they could hardly hear the click-clack of the machine for the drumming on the corrugated iron roof of the Carruthers’ old rented shack on Union Street.

Calinda had a reputation in the family for rescuing animals. Stray puppies, kittens, and injured birds and once she even picked up a blue-tongued lizard with a hole in its tail after her dog bit it. A neighbour whose bitch had a large litter, gave her the fox terrier cross so she called him Billy, dressed him in her oldest sister Queenie’s cast-off baby clothes and wheeled him around in an old cane pram. Someone else gave her two white rabbits. She tried to save the lives of the last two of seven babies born in the cage to what she had been assured were two females. She cried when the two defective kittens died, even after she ran home from school every day to feed them warm milk with an eyedropper and nurse them in her lap, singing lullabies.

‘You great big sook, fancy crying over dead rabbits,’ Hazel said. ‘You’ve got plenty more. If you shut up I’ll let you go to the movies one night with Gracie, by yourselves.’

After parading before Hazel in their dresses, the pretend twins went further than lipstick. They became so carried away they plastered pan stick makeup on their faces. Calinda’s sunburnt cheeks stung a little. She combed mascara onto her long eyelashes with a tiny black brush, accentuating her large dark brown eyes. Then she smoothed rouge on her cheeks. Calinda held her mouth open the way she saw her mother apply lipstick. She ran the lipstick over her lips, and then smacked them together. After Gracie copied Calinda, they put on their white ankle socks and shoes. Calinda had new black court shoes and Gracie’s were white. Then they combed out their curls and with their tender lips the colour of pomegranates, they walked up Icely Rd hill hand-in-hand towards the town.

When they passed the blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary outside the Catholic Church next to their old primary school, the girls made a sign of the cross and genuflected. When they came to the shoe repairer’s shop they sang a ditty the boot maker painted every year on his shop window, complete with flowers and bees: Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, I wonder how your golf shoes iz? They laughed and ran across the railway line, over Piesley Street to the big old Strand Theatre.

Calinda sat on the edge of her seat, enthralled, watching as Eliza’s father drank too much alcohol, just like the stories she had heard about her own father, Frankie. In the film, Eliza’s family struggled with poverty, like Calinda’s did, but Eliza learned proper pronunciation, the way the nuns had told Calinda how to speak. Sister Gabriel would say: ‘just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you can’t speak proper English’. Calinda and Gracie tapped their feet to the songs and when Eliza returned to Henry Higgins at the end, they cried with joy and love into their popcorn. They caught a taxi home, sat in the back and sang Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, and Just You Wait, clapping their hands on wait.

If only Calinda had used the toilet before she left The Strand that night. If only she had gone straight to bed, things might have been different. But she disliked public toilets after warnings from her mother’s sister, Mona, a woman with an aquiline nose and black, frizzy hair, who told her strange men lurked there waiting to snatch little girls, so she held on. She also held her breath after she paid the cab driver and slipped through the white picket gate. She breathed again when no bogeymen leapt from behind the privet hedge. The moon shone full and bright and her mother had left the front light on; thank heavens, so she skipped up the cracked concrete path. Turning the key in the door, she felt happier than she could remember. When Calinda opened the front door she heard laughter and when she peeked through the lounge room door her stomach fizzed again when she smelled beer.

Hazel sat perched on the edge of the settee wearing her new grey velvet straight skirt with a pink organdie top, which made Calinda think her mother looked like a galah. A man drank a whole glass of beer in one guzzle sitting on the lounge chair and another man leaned on the mantelpiece above the Warmray wood heater. Calinda guessed her mother met the men at the pub. She often brought men home. The man who guzzled his beer had a thick neck and reminded Calinda of the bull up in Patrick Crow’s paddock. The other man, shorter than the bull man, wore beige trousers, like the insurance man who came to collect Hazel’s payments every month. As the trio laughed and talked, Elvis Presley sobbed Are You Lonesome Tonight in the background. Calinda’s older sister Therese would be angry if she knew they were playing her new 45 record she had saved for weeks to buy with her pay from her job at Glover’s Milk Bar.

Calinda had learned from the fights she witnessed as a child to be careful around drunks. Her mother’s old boyfriend Lester Lack once picked up a big armchair and threw it at Queenie. He also punched a hole in the stained glass door of the kitchen cabinet. After that, Calinda decided if she couldn’t be careful, she’d try to make the drunks laugh so they stayed in a good mood and didn’t swear loudly at her or punch walls and break windows, although at times fear froze her ability to speak.

An indelible scene stuck in her mind, even though she didn’t know where it came from since she had only just turned three when her father left, but maybe Aunt Mona had told her and she created a mind-picture about it: One very black night Frankie, who drove a green truck delivering lumber for builders, came home drunk in the black taxi he drove at weekends. She remembered how Aunt Mona had said Queenie and her older sister Therese hid Hazel in the big cedar wardrobe so Frankie wouldn’t punch her and leave her with awful black eyes and bruises. Calinda somehow remembered standing in Union Street that night, with Therese crying and begging her to go with her to their grandfather Groucho’s house across the road. Therese had won a golliwog at the local show and since she first set eyes on it, Calinda had wanted it, so Therese said if she’d go with her she could have the stupid bloody thing.

But now, with Elvis singing, Calinda couldn’t tell if these men were the laughing kind or the angry kind, and she had to get to the outside toilet unnoticed. The thought of going on her own around the scary, dark side of the house sparked more fear, even though Billy would surely bark from his bed in the shed if someone were there, but a burglar could have killed him, then he wouldn’t bark. Whatever she did would be scary, so she ventured into the room. When the men suddenly stopped talking, she held her breath, tried to be invisible, and crept through the room with her head down. On the way back, she whisked by like a mosquito, but Hazel saw her and shouted: ‘Calinda, go and get your pink bikini on.’

Calinda sucked in a quick breath. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t want to.’

Hazel spoke in the slurred manner she did after too much beer. ‘You do as you’re bloody well told and get your new bikini on, or else.’

Calinda sat on the double bed she shared with her mother. Therese, now out with her boyfriend Billy, slept in a single bed near the wall, even though her feet dangled over the end. Calinda wished Therese would come home. Queenie had moved to west Cherry Glen after she married Kevin.

‘Get it on, now,’ Hazel shrieked from the lounge room.

Calinda rummaged through the clothes in the bottom of Hazel’s wardrobe. Her clothes and Hazel’s were all jumbled together, but she found the bikini bottom, then the top with its curved plastic cups, which made her look as if she had breasts. Hazel bought the bikini and a peach coloured organdie dress for Calinda from Mrs Aboud, a Lebanese woman who always wore a black scarf and wheeled an old cane pram all over Cherry Glen selling clothes.

Calinda yanked the bikini bottom up, looped the bra strings around her waist and tied them in a bow, and then she tied the ones at the neck. She looked at herself in the dressing table mirror. Her new short fringe had kinked up but remained a bit curly from the rollers, the rest of her hair held some waves. Her sunburnt cheeks glowed after the makeup had washed off with the tears in the theatre. The mascara had run and given her dark circles under her eyes so she grabbed a handkerchief and tried to wipe it off. When Therese teased her, she called Calinda gawky and said she would never be as beautiful as her when she grew up. Too skinny, she often said, bandy-legged and bucktoothed. Calinda looked at her knobbled knees and worried the men would think the same and laugh at her. But she had to go, so she slowly walked into the room with her head lowered. When she looked up she saw both men watching.

Hazel pointed to the table. ‘Get up on there, and stand up.’

Calinda climbed onto the shiny mahogany table. She tried to fold her arms to cover her bare stomach.

‘She’s just what we want,’ the smaller man said. ‘A fresh, young face. And boy, is she gonna be a looker when she fills out.’

Calinda didn’t think he was looking at her face.

Hazel said the men were making an underwater film up on Thursday Island and they were doing screen tests.

‘Okay,’ the smaller man said. ‘Bring her on Monday for a screen test.’

Calinda jammed her mouth shut with excitement when she heard ‘screen test’, even though she wasn’t quite sure what it was, or what they did.

She woke at seven the next morning and shook Therese’s shoulder. ‘I’m going to be a film star,’ she squealed. ‘And you’re not.’

Therese, four years older than Calinda, moaned, ‘Rack off hairy legs, it’s Sunday and you’re too ugly, you’ll break the camera.’

Calinda didn’t push it or else Therese might start calling her more names. She hated hearing her say Calinda’s feet were too big, her breath smelled like horse manure, that if anyone broke in to steal her they’d drop her at the first lamppost when they saw her ugly face. Calinda put on the skirt she had worn to see My Fair Lady, and then rode her blue Speedwell bicycle halfway across town to her big sister’s house and banged on the door until Queenie opened it.

Bobby pins held Queenie’s thick brown hair in curls and she still had her dressing gown on. ‘Oh, good, Calinda,’ she said. ‘You can mind Rachel while I run to the shop.’ Calinda followed her inside. The baby, standing up in her cot, smelled of poo, her nappy sagging wet. ‘I’m going to be a film star, Queenie,’ Calinda said. ‘I am truly. I’m going to a screen test on Monday.’ She bounced on the bed and made Rachel squeal with joy.

‘You’re making it up,’ Queenie said.

Calinda stopped bouncing. ‘I am not. Ask Mum if you don’t believe me.’

When Calinda got back home, she ran into the kitchen, out of breath. Hazel sat at the table reading the paper. Calinda sat on a kitchen chair. ‘Will I be famous Mum? When’s the film? Where’s Thursday Island? I can’t wait. Then I might be the Cherry Queen. Remember when Queenie got all dressed up for the Cherry Glen Queen Competition? She should have won. She looked so beautiful on that float in the parade with the cherry red and green tulle dress with those wings like cherry blossoms sewn on the back. Remember Mum?’

‘Yes,’ Hazel said, and kept on reading.

Calinda remembered how she used to crawl into her mother’s wardrobe and smell Queenie’s dress, dizzy with the scent of Tabu perfume, mixed with the sour stench of mothballs.

‘You haven’t even had the screen test,’ Hazel said, folding the newspaper.

Calinda whispered a prayer to the Virgin Mary: ‘When my father sees me swimming underwater and holding my breath for a long time, can you make sure he comes back home, because I can dance too, you know?’

‘Will my father see the film?’ she said softly.

Hazel’s thin top lip twisted into a snarl. ‘That drunken womanising gambling bastard can’t even be bothered showing up and paying for his kids,’ she said. ‘He’d be too busy in the pub or in bed with some whore getting crabs.’

Calinda had heard it all before and once asked her Aunt Mona what crabs were, so she shuddered on hearing it again. She left her mother to her paper and in her room she pulled a shoebox full of her precious things from under the bed. She flipped through some photographs until she found one of Frankie and Hazel as slim young parents on a trip to Sydney with baby Therese. In the photograph, her mother is wearing a 1940s dress with big shoulder pads and Frankie’s in a dark suit, a white shirt and a hat like Frank Sinatra’s, tilted to one side. Calinda sat at the window, leaned her elbows on the sill, and watched the wind bend the nectarine trees in the yard. She heard Therese put a record on her radiogram. Elvis sang, Love me Tender as rain fell and drops ran down the windowpane, Calinda remembered when she first heard the word ambition. She had asked Hazel what it meant. She whispered: ‘When I grow up my ambition is to find my father.’

Hazel clicked into the room on new snakeskin high heels. ‘Wake up to yourself, they might find someone else better looking.’

On Monday, when her mother arrived home from work, Calinda met her at the door. She had come straight home from school, had a bath and put on a new blue gingham dress with one of Hazel’s bras, complete with rubber falsies and Hazel’s old step-ins, even though she had no fat to hide and the elastic step-ins were loose. She loved the dress with the white tulips around the hem and sleeves.

Hazel put her cane basket on the table. ‘You’re keen. We’re not going until half past seven,’ she said.

Calinda followed Hazel like a foal after its dam while she watered the Daphne bush in the pot at her back door and then came in and filled the electric jug for a cup of tea. A blowfly flew in and Hazel whacked it with a rolled up newspaper. Afterwards, Hazel cooked lamb chops, pumpkin, peas and mashed potatoes and Calinda stuffed as much down as she could.

At 25 past seven the taxi driver tooted the car horn out the front. Calinda got in the back and Hazel sat in the front seat and they drove out along Cherry Glen Road. Calinda had no idea where they did screen tests. ‘Here?’ she whispered, disappointed as the cab pulled up. The neon sign beamed in electric blue, Cherry Glen Motel and a red sign read, Vacancies.

Hazel paid the fare, waited until the cab drove off, grabbed Calinda by the arm, walked to door number 26 and knocked. Smith, the smaller man, ushered them in, peeked to the left, then the right as if he didn’t want anyone to see them before he closed the door. Calinda had expected the other man to be there. Smith poured a drink from a bottle on the bench. ‘Do you want one, Hazel?’

‘Ta, thank you,’ her mother said in her most polite, put-on, posh voice.

‘Why don’t we give the kid one too? Help her relax,’ he said. ‘What’s her name again?’

‘Calinda,’ Hazel said.

‘Weird name,’ Smith said, gulping down his beer.

‘Her name is a cross between her father’s brother Calvin, killed in the war, and her great great Grandmother, Lucinda,’ Hazel said. ‘But don’t give her alcohol,’ she said. ‘Well a shandy maybe, she’s only thirteen.’

Smith had his back to Hazel, so Calinda guessed her mother didn’t see him open a small plastic bottle. She tasted strawberries in the drink, something gritty. After awhile, as Smith and Hazel talked, Calinda began to feel a bit giddy. She hadn’t been giddy since the time she drank a shandy Hazel had made too strong once when they had visitors. ‘Where’s the camera?’ she whispered to her mother’s back. ‘Oh, no. We forgot the bikini.’

Hazel pointed to a camera on a tripod in the corner. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘Sit on the bed,’ Smith said to Calinda as he fiddled with the camera. He looked around the room. ‘This is no good,’ he said and grabbed a pillow. He shoved it into Hazel’s chest. ‘I think she’d relax more if you went out to the car.’

Hazel hugged the pillow, gave Calinda a funny look, and left the room.

Smith stood by the bed, pulled at Calinda’s puffed sleeve and bared her brown shoulder. ‘Just slip it down, like this,’ he said quickly, and went behind the tripod. ‘Lie down and just lift your skirt, show us a bit of leg.’

Calinda lifted her dress up to her knee, whispered ‘God, Therese will cackle when I tell her he wants to see me bandy legs.’

‘What did you say?’ Smith said as he rubbed his chin, paced, then stopped and sat on the bed. ‘Lift the dress up higher,’ he said.

Calinda glanced at the door, yawned. Smith thumped a fist into the palm of his other hand, making Calinda startle. If her mother found out he wanted her to show Smith her legs, she’d kill her.

‘Ah, your mother’s okay, I won’t tell her if you don’t,’ Smith said and stroked her shoulder. She could smell his breath, sour tobacco. ‘Now, if you don’t, I’ll tell her you did, and then you’ll be in big trouble.’

Calinda stayed home from school the next day, complaining of a headache. Therese sat on the bed and laughed. ‘Did you go to the screen test? What happened? Did they chuck you out when they saw your ugly face?’

Calinda couldn’t tell her sister about it in case she got into trouble.

Sitting on a branch high up in a Granny Smith apple tree in her backyard with magpies carolling and a gentle wind blowing her hair, Calinda felt safer than anywhere else on earth. Safe from the taunts dished out by Therese, safe from her mother’s bad moods and drinking.

The gnarled old tree provided her with a place in which to dream of the day her father Frankie would come back home and make everything better. She had been fatherless and hungry for love since her third birthday, after Frankie Carruthers pissed