Tin Kettling

She got a job before he did, making dresses in a factory.  It wasn’t long before he had a job too.  And a new name to go with it.  He was christened Gregory, but everyone called him Ginty.  He’d gone to line up for piecework at the wharves.  They wanted five strong men for a job.  Over a hundred showed up.  He put his name down and never thought it would be called out.  He wrote G McPhillips.  The foreman called out George McPhillips.  He didn’t hesitate.  He needed the job.  He was George from that day on, except to her he was always Ginty.  And she was always Kelly, Kel to him.

She was christened Marjory Irene Clarke, but because she had red brown hair and because everyone in her family had a nickname she was known as Tom, which was short for Red Rusty Tom.  It didn’t make much sense, but then neither did the name he gave her, although it was much more romantic.  He named her after Ned Kelly and said it was because, like the bushranger, she was a thief who’d stolen his heart.

He worked long hours, hard physical labour.  He’d never had much schooling but he wasn’t stupid.  He got a union ticket for the wharves which meant he was guaranteed work.  They saved.  He bought a crane and could earn more by contracting it out.  His land sold.  They bought a house in the suburbs, small and rundown.  The toilet was in the backyard, but they didn’t have to share it.  They had a baby girl, and then three years later a baby boy.

They built a good life.  He swam every morning at the beach.  She paddled in the bogie hole with the kids and made hundreds of sandcastles.  He worked and went to the pub.  She sewed, worked in her garden and read every magazine she could get her hands on.  They bought a better house.  She wanted to be a florist and since she could bring dead sticks in a pot back to life she’d have been a good one, but it wasn’t the done thing then in the city for a married woman with kids to have a paying job so she never got the chance.  Later she envied her granddaughter for the opportunity she had to have a career.

They were city people now.  Though Kel wouldn’t eat in restaurants that used candlelight; that’s all they’d had growing up, and she wanted to see the food she was eating, and the people she was with.  And Ginty wouldn’t go to the pictures.  He tried once.  It was The Sound of Music.  He thought it was silly, all these people dancing around on the screen, singing.  He walked out before it was finished and went to the pub.  They both had skin cancers cut out.  Great swathes of skin on his back and her arm; the surgery used then was brutal and left ugly scars, but was efficient.  She never wore short sleeves again.  

The kids grew up.  Ginty drank too much, but he never got mean until their daughter started dating.  One time he nearly tipped the car of her date over just to scare him.  But that boy didn’t scare easy.  He married their daughter though he still wasn’t good enough, so Ginty resorted to less dramatic tactics like turning off the lights and the TV if his son-in-law was in the room.  He stopped doing things like that four years later when his granddaughter was born, and later still, when his grandson was born, he finally accepted his son-in-law for the good and kind man he was.

Their son went to America and then Canada to avoid the draft. He stayed for a long time.  Partly because it was exciting and partly because being a hairdresser and a gay man wasn’t something Ginty accepted.  It was hard to be the son of a man who fixed his own broken bones and pulled his own teeth, so hard the son married a woman friend for a green card so he could stay in the US.  But the son missed Kel; they were best friends, so he encouraged her to travel, to meet him in New York.

Ginty wouldn’t go.  He wasn’t getting on a plane.  He did everything he could to stop Kel going, but she held firm.  She booked a Woman’s Weekly World Discovery Tour and she didn’t care what he thought about it.  She was going.  He drove her to the airport, but he was in such a panicked state when he left her, thinking she would die in a fiery plane crash and never come back to him, he lost his mind for a while and couldn’t find his way home even though they only lived a short distance away and he knew the roads like the sunspots and veins on the backs of his hands.