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( Chapter Six: ❛ WILLIAM ON THE DOTTED LINE ❜ )
OCTOBER, 1943
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VIRGINIA GLOYNE WAS HOME ALONE ONE SATURDAY, prancing shamelessly around the kitchen and washing the dishes in her cozy dressing gown, listening to When a Girl Marries, an American daytime radio drama that aired on enough local stations for the blonde to be able to listen to it on their wireless. The rough-around-the-edges accents like that of Dr John Wayne reminded her of the Marines.
After a short-winded debate, her mother had won her father over and they had both approved her decision to join the AWAS. She'd already given her two week notice at the switchboard centre, and only had the following week to complete before her time there was officially over and she was free to enlist as a working woman of the army. Even the mere thought of it made her quiver with excitement.
To celebrate, she was due to be going out with Jackie later that afternoon, back to the Railway Motel. Therefore, she was yet to dress and make herself look presentable, her platinum-blonde hair in lazy blonde waves that rolled over her shoulders and down her back, slightly frizzy like bubbling champagne and yet to be set in rollers and sprayed. Though, she knew the whole celebration of her leaving her job would somehow morph into Jackie spending the evening with her Marine boyfriend and Ginny sitting with his unpleasant friends.
She'd been scrubbing the Friday evening dishes, wearing her mother'a duck yellow washing up gloves when Otto began barking at the window, before racing around the armchair and scampering towards the front door, "Otto, what is it, boy?" she asked the sheltie as she turned off the taps. "It's not the telegram boy, is it? He must have got the wrong house again," she sighed and hurried towards the dog, ushering him back before unlocking and opening the door.
The caller was far from whom she'd been expecting, and she instantly shut the door in his face again. Through the door, she called, "You better get outta here, Mr Hoosier, my dad doesn't much like you Marines," a hearty blush blooming on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose and the thought of her unruly appearance that he'd caught a momentary glimpse of when she'd opened the door.
He turned around and sat down on her front doorstep, his knees high and his arms propped up on them. On the other side of the door, she could hear him humming an old song with the low, grousing cadence of his southern American voice. Ginny knew, that if her father found her in kahoots with some Marine man, he'd disregard her arguments for her desire to join the AWAS and pit it down to wanting to impress a man, or worse, he'd call her a liar for speaking about not wanting to court any Yanks.
"You've gotta sweet garden going on out here," he called through the door. They had a rather pristine front lawn, with a carpet of pruned red roses that her mother took a major amount of pride in, especially after the media coverage of the Garden Armies. They had a vegetable garden in the back and a chook shed, too, all dedicated to her mother's hobby. At the time of Hoosier's calling, actually, she was helping dig up portions of the local public park to be used for vegetable gardens. Luckily, her father was working, so there was a low chance that either of them would see this man on their doorstep, but either way, Ginny could feel her heart in her mouth.
"Hey! Don't you touch those," she snapped at him, instinctively ripping open the door and praying he wasn't fondling the petals or snapping the stems of her mother's prized rose garden. He wasn't, thank heavens. She admitted. "They've my mother's pride and joy. She'll just about die if you trample them. Why are you here? How did you get my address?"
"Jackie told me you had a dog," he responded simply, just as Otto rushed out past Ginny's ankles to greet the man, barking and running in circles and jumping up to try to lick his face.
Ginny rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. "I don't wanna talk about Jackie," she claimed, before crouching down and whistling to bring the shetland sheepdog back into her care. "Otto!" she called. "Bed!" and the energetic little sheltie rushed past her and towards the pile of cushions they had for him to sleep on in the corner of her kitchen.
"Good, cos neither do I," he agreed, and then added, I love dogs," thinking of the pup he'd cradled in his arms one night after the Japs set the whole world on fire.
"His name is Otto. He's an ex-police dog. We've had him for about three years now, I'd say," Ginny claimed, remembering the time they'd been told Otto's days as a police dog were numbered and her father couldn't help but bring him home at the end of it all. She said. "Anyways — have you been let off the leash? I thought you Yanks got busted for going AWOL."
"Oh, yeah," he huffed a sort of half-laugh at the expense of exhaling his dense plume of smoke. "It wasn't that deep. A talking to, slap on the wrist, it's all the same. They've put us on extra training now. All that bayonet swinging shit. It ain't so bad, though, as long as we've still got weekend passes."
She looked at him quizzically for a moment. There was something different: he didn't look as tired as usual, and his tow hair seemed to be parted more neatly, in pretty light brown waves. Everything seemed so much more clean — there was no longer dirt beneath his fingernails when he lifted his hand to his mouth to smoke. He was wearing his dress greens too, but not a garrison cap. She sighed in defeat, stepping back to open her front door fully and allowing him to pass, "Come on in," she said, giving in eventually and gesturing inside with her hand. "But don't even think about it until you stump that cigarette out."
Though somewhat of an addict herself due to her social smoking habit, her parents prohibited such vices to be satisfied under their roof, and they would just about die if they found their golden child's stash of smokes in her jewellery box. The smell, apparently, gave her mother a headache and her father couldn't help but agree. They ought not to have been surprised though, if they did find out, as Ginny could be ever the rebellious young girl when she wanted.
When A Girl Marries was still buzzing in the background when she reentered the house behind him, immediately turning the wireless off and pushed the antennae down. Hoosier sat himself down in her father's plush armchair beside the window and pushed his head back, closing his eyes. He looked like Samuel Gloyne did when he fell asleep listening to the radio.
"Don't hesitate to make yourself comfortable," she snapped from where she was stood beside the sink, an open plan area that merged the kitchen and the living room into one big space. Taking off the garish yellow washing up gloves, she asked, "So, you want a coffee, or something?"
Anything she could give him would be better than WEET BIX in a cello pouch or those Steam Rollers Mints. He nodded, so she got to work. Granted, it was more of an American thing, to "have a cup of joe", but her father preferred coffee over tea, and had been using his stash sparingly since rationing came into force. Her mother was now an avid drinker too, especially after the Japanese captured many of the countries that grew the tea supplied to Australia, and there was no more tea to be consumed. Filling the kettle up with tap water and flicking on the switch to boil it, she said, "So, Lew and Jackie, then."
"Who? Oh," Hoosier huffed another laugh that didn't seem so much of an actual laugh as it did an exhale. She noticed, he did that when he was humouring himself or her, but she'd never actually heard him laugh, or even seen him smile, for that matter, "We call him Chuckler."
Ginny lofted a shapely eyebrow, "Why?"
"Cos he laughs like a schmuck."
"So why do they call you Hoosier?" she inquired as he stood up from her father's chair and strolled across the living room, nosily inspecting the framed family photographs littering the walls like a shrine to a young blonde girl with eyes the size of dinner plates, a father didn't seem to age, and a meagre mother with blonde hair that matched Ginny's.
"Because I'm from Indiana," Hoosier shrugged, "but it's William on the dotted line. Bill, actually."
Labels are for cans, she thought, not for people. It was something her mother always told her when she was in primary school, when she was labelled as a bossy boots by her peers. But Hoosier was just Hoosier, wasn't he? He wasn't just some can. Though, she thought for a fleeting moment, maybe they all were cans, in the Marine division. Hunks of scrap metal from all over America forged into something useful, an army of tin can men.
She handed him the steaming hot mug, and he cupped it with both hands. William, she thought as she watched him. It didn't quite seem to fit. It seemed too much like the name of a real man. She suspected that Hoosier was someone different from William; and she was right. William was American, a starry-eyed boy from Indiana. Hoosier was a rough-speaking cynic in khaki. Bill, though. Who was that?
There was a brief moment of silence between them, before Ginny took a glass of milk to match his coffee. As she fished around to find a teabag, she mentioned, "Jackie seems to like your friend very much."
"He's a likeable guy," the Marine responded, nonchalantly leaning back against the kitchen counter. "Some people just come off that way. Why're you askin'? There something he hasn't told us?"
"I dunno," Ginny responded with a shrug. "They might be going steady already but I haven't had the chance to ask. I'm seeing her tonight, so perhaps I'll find time to ask her about it then. Her track record ain't so clean. She's got the kind of moxie I'll never have in a thousand years — she absolutely drinks up GIs."
Bill huffed, "And you?"
"We move in different circles is all," the blonde claimed, dejectedly looking down into her teacup before turning back around to face him properly again. "I don't want to get all caught up in something that could end so abruptly. I mean, with all you Yanks going back to the US after all this is over."
"You say it like it's going to be over soon," the cynic responded. "Like we'll be packing up over the next couple of weeks and moving out."
"A girl can hope, can't she?" asked Ginny, her eyebrows lowering as they usually did when she was confused. "Why not?"
"Loose lips sink ships," he told her, tapping the side of his nose to indicate that it was a secret. "Might as well make the most of the time we have to spare. I mean, the time we lot have left before we're sweating our balls off and killing nothing but crabs and mosquitos in the jungle again."
Pensively, she teased back her bottom lip with her teeth. "Do you ever feel like you're going to die out there?"
"It come and goes," he responded, deadpan. He dipped his nose inside the coffee cup and drank, his sober eye contact with her not wavering for a second. The atmosphere was intense and Ginny could feel herself getting flustered, heat climbing up her neck, past her jaw and into her cheeks.
"Well," she said, turning back to the assortment of items she'd used to make both of their drinks and busying herself by packing them away. "I could do without the heartbreak."
"You can't just control everything."
"Maybe you just don't know me well enough."
"You've never let me try."
She nibbled on her lip again, and paused, staring down at the box of teabags she was holding. A pang of guilt in her chest swelled and she stopped for a second to think. After she put them back down on the counter, and spun around back to face him. "Fine," she declared.
"Fine?"
"Yes," she replied laughingly, the corners of her mouth hitching up into the apples of her satiny cheeks. "I'll go out with you," and then she quickly added, "If you still want to."
"'Bout time I got my answer," he said. "I heard you Aussie lot set up barbed wire all along the beaches to fend off the Japs. Would'a been my go-to. I like the sea, and that. But Chuckler told us this morning he's gonna bring Jackie to some cricket match next Sunday, when we're on weekend passes. I mean, I ain't playing or nothing. Most of us don't even know the rules, but we just hate the damn koalas and wanna crush them any way we can."
Ginny almost smirked. "Careful, Yank. I'll have your guts for garters. Our serving men don't have it so easy, especially with you boys around. Now you better get outta my kitchen before my father returns, or I change my mind and decide I want nothing to do with you."
"Yes, ma'am."