They married quite late for country folk. They’d been busy in their own ways. He was thirty, she was twenty-five.
He’d been run over by a road grader and had both legs crushed, and even though he was completely healed and healthy as a bull he couldn’t wear the boots the army issued. So he didn’t go to war and he didn’t die like so many of the young men in the small town, like his brother and two of hers.
Times were tough. There was a depression and she came from a big family. Nine left, plus Mum and Dad, and none of them with work except the boys on the farm, and the farm wasn’t paying. She was the only one with an income. She played the piano and she gave lessons to the richer families and was paid to play for church events, socials and dances.
He came to a dance and you’d never know he’d nearly died after his legs were crushed. Never know he’d spent six months in hospital flat on his back with his legs suspended in traction by steel pins in his hips, ankles and knees, and nearly died again from pneumonia. She soon learned he’d been bitten by a brown snake and they could definitely kill you, so she knew he was a man to be reckoned with.
He was the best dancer in the hall. And that wasn’t just her opinion. He won the competition. He was the last man left whose eggs hadn’t broken. It was all the rage and eggs were cheap. The men would tape them to the heels of their boots and whoever didn’t break them was the winner.
There was nothing to win except a free drink and applause, but he won her heart. He was big and gentle. She fitted under his arm and he could lift her like she was made of fairy floss. She knew that because they danced together. He didn’t say much except that he thought she was his prize.
They met again a month or so later. He was selling farm equipment and her father wanted to see it. She was the only one other than Dad allowed to drive the car. She drove him to Ginty’s farm. But he was strange with her. He wouldn’t look at her, stood very awkwardly and it was obvious she made him uncomfortable. Her father made her go sit in the car and she was disappointed.
He came to the next dance she played at. He came straight up to her in her tea break and told her he was sorry for how he’d been when she’d come to his farm. You see, he was embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. He had a hole in his overalls – the whole bum ripped right out of them and no underwear so it made him act silly like a galah.
They talked that night and she learned more about him. He was a drinker, but then all the men were. A hard worker, she could tell. He owned his small plot of land outright, no mortgage. He had two sisters and he looked out for them. He was clean-cut and handsome. He was shy but he had a nice smile.
She wasn’t the prettiest of her sisters, but she had style. She made her own clothes from patterns she drafted and she wore them well. They looked good together and it didn’t take long before people started assuming they’d marry. His parents were dead. Hers approved.
When they married, their friends gave them a tin kettling. The night of their wedding party, they went to Ginty’s small house. All their friends arrived with kettles and pots and pans and pieces of metal, anything that would make a noise when you banged on it. And make a noise they did, all night. It was supposed to stop the couple settling down for bed; supposed to disturb their peace. And other things. But Ginty and Kel found a peace together no amount of empty noise could disturb.
Ginty put his land up for sale but there were no buyers. They moved to the city. They had no money, but their town was going backwards so they had to try to make a go of it in Sydney. They lived in a small flat in Kings Cross, just one room and a kitchenette. They shared a bathroom with others on the same floor.
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.
Everyone got older. The son came home for good. Ginty retired and sold the crane. He got diabetes and wasn’t happy about it. He had to cut down on the drink. Kel got cataracts. She had surgery then threw her glasses away.
They moved to a different house, smaller, sunnier, and their life was good except all Ginty’s injuries came to revisit. He got painful osteoarthritis and a rare form of Parkinson’s disease. His knees seized up. He lost weight. He never got the shakes, but he dropped things and he fell over when his brain signal shut his legs down. When he fell in the house, tiny Kel found the strength to get him back on his feet again. When he fell in the street, people would walk past him muttering, “Silly old drunk”. One time he fell in the bath and found a reason to be very grateful for his son-in-law. Because he was still a big man, he broke a lot of furniture this way, but no bones. That, he’d tell anyone anyway.
They managed together. Ginty had to stop driving. Kel hadn’t driven a car since they moved to the city. He gave her lessons. She took the test and passed first time. She drove everywhere until she broke her arm and some too busy doctor set it badly, crookedly. She’d told them it looked strange and they ignored her. When the plaster came off they told her it would have to be re-broken. She said no thanks and decided to live with it, but it made driving and playing the piano difficult. Ginty got her a small organ instead; it was easier to play and she loved it.
Time passed. Then the son got wet in a sudden rain storm and contracted meningitis. He died. He was too young and it was too sad and his lover blamed Kel and Kel blamed Ginty even though it was no one’s fault.
It was inevitable: Ginty became increasingly crippled. Then he got pneumonia. He was very sick. It was the night a famous golfer walked into the propeller of a plane and severed his arm and half his face off. They couldn’t get an ambulance to come. Ginty almost died while they waited for help. When they carried him out of the house on a stretcher, he waved to Kel, just his fingertips, the hand with the finger he set wonky and its closest stiff friends.
He didn’t want to be treated. His body had given up on him and there was no cure for that. He wanted to take his chances, see what happened. He drank smuggled cocktail bottles of brandy and charmed the nurses into letting him have his way. One day his granddaughter visited. She was nervous, because she knew he was dying. She asked him a stupid question. She said, “What did you do today?” He opened one eye and looked at her. He said, “I went fishing.”
A nurse told the granddaughter not to worry, that her grandfather was delirious. But she knew he wasn’t because he was always going to see a man about a dog, and there never was any dog, or going fishing when he’d never owned a rod.
Ginty died.
There was a wake. People got fall down drunk and told incredible stories about the things Ginty had done because he was one of those larger than life people. It was assumed Kel would spend time with her daughter, starting from that night. She refused. The granddaughter was sent to persuade her.
Kel said, “All my life I’ve lived in the house of my father or the house of my husband. If I don’t sleep in the house on my own tonight I might never be able to,” and she pushed the granddaughter out the door.
The granddaughter was amazed at her strength. She’d always thought Ginty was the strong one even though his body was weak, but she came to learn it was little Kel who had the heart of giant.
You see, they had a pact. They knew each other so well. Ginty knew he couldn’t live without Kel, but that Kel was strong enough to live without him. And Kel agreed. So they planned for him to die first. Kel was grateful that was the way things turned out. It was what they both wanted.
Kel got older and frailer but she never stopped reading her magazines. She was an expert on the royal family and Hollywood movie stars. She gave up playing the organ but she was the first person in the family to have a CD player. The day her granddaughter set it up for her she made a strange comment.
They were talking about loneliness. The granddaughter said listening to the CD player might help when Kel felt lonely. Kel told her she never got lonely. “What, never?”
No, you see, she wasn’t alone. The granddaughter asked Kel to repeat what she’d said, because her grandmother had lived alone for years, but Kel clammed up. The granddaughter prodded and finally Kel said she wasn’t lonely because she wasn’t alone because Ginty was still with her.
The granddaughter was shocked speechless.
Kel made her promise not to tell anyone what she’d said, especially her daughter, because everyone would think she’d lost her marbles, but she was perfectly sane. She knew it sounded odd, and Father Francis would think she’d blown a gasket, but Ginty was with her in the house, keeping her company. She knew he was, she could feel him there. He didn’t re-arrange furniture or rattle the blinds, and she didn’t go around making him cups of tea or talking to him out loud. It wasn’t like that.
The granddaughter wanted to know what it was like and Kel said it was comfortable. Not like some silly ghost movie, not like that, no. It was just comfortable. Ginty could hear her thoughts and she could hear his, and no one needed to worry about her being lonely or afraid.
The granddaughter, who was the reason Ginty stopped being horrible to his son-in-law, never told anyone about this, but she understood why Kel rarely wanted to spend a night away from the house in a way her mother never did. Kel was married to Ginty for more than fifty years and in all that time, he’d never been fond of travel.
Kel lived by herself for eight years after Ginty died. And she was never lonely. When she died it was suddenly and without warning. She’d spent the night with her daughter and she didn’t wake in the morning.
Everyone was upset, but the granddaughter was also worried. What if Ginty didn’t know?
The granddaughter had often walked around her grandparent’s house and tried to feel the spirit of her grandfather. It never worked; it made her laugh to think it might. The day Kel died, the granddaughter went to her grandparent’s house and sat quietly by herself.
She thought about the piano, the eggs taped to shoes, Ginty’s ripped pants and the tin kettling. She thought about how her grandfather could barely read or write but told the most wonderful stories; there was always a fire engine, chocolate biscuits and ham and pickle sandwiches in them. She thought about how her grandmother never seemed old at all and was the easiest person in the world to get along with. And the strongest person she’d ever met. She thought about her father’s car being rocked onto two wheels. She thought about her uncle dying and the four kegs at her grandfather’s wake. She opened the wardrobe and looked at her grandmother’s clothes, so stylish, and her shoes; she still wore heels. She cried a little in the house on her own.
And nothing spooky happened.
Because it already had.
Ginty found Kel. Kel found Ginty and they’d lived and loved a long time together, and even when he wasn’t physically around, she believed he was with her.
A love that strong, that deep, that undisturbed didn’t mind a little awkwardness, a little noise, a little pain, sadness, and separation, and it certainly didn’t need the granddaughter’s help to go on.
Quietly, comfortably, endlessly, despite all the racket in the world, it just would.