Nine Days by Toni Jordan

Westaway’s job, as I hear when I express interest, is not only that a newspaper is not a respectable place to work, but that Connie does not keep decent hours. She is often home late, dropped off by her boss, who has a car. The dapper Mr Ward, a widower with two small boys, should take more care. He should have an eye to propriety with a young girl in his employ. In fact, the news is this: Mrs Westaway confided in Joyce Macree in Tanner Street who told Mrs Arnold the draper’s wife who told Mum in the strictest confidence that Mrs Westaway has hopes for Mr Ward. She’s almost sure there’ll be an engagement soon, in spite of the age gap. Then Connie won’t be able to work.
    And there’s no denying the difference it would make to that family. Mrs Arnold says Ward’s been in for tea and agrees that Francis is a serious boy and must go to the university and that takes money, even with a scholarship. The boys and their mother might even go live with them in his big house in Hawthorn. Although even then, Mum says, Kip will never make anything of himself, (‘that’s plain’), and if we have to send boys to fight overseas—here she gives me a nervous glance—’it’s layabout boys with no responsibilities, the Kip Westaways of the world, who ought to be going’.
    For afters my mother serves the remains of the apricot cake and tells me that people are happier if they stay wherethey belong and don’t try to become something they’re not. As indisputable evidence she tells me a story of the O’Riordan girl from Highett Street who Sid Lindsay got involved with and how badly that turned out for all concerned. If she was advising Connie Westaway, Mum would be telling her
don’t forget your place.
But if Connie’s set her cap at Ward, then it’s high time there was an engagement. Girls can’t be too careful. Far be it from Mum to suggest the girl’s done anything wrong, despite the absence of a father’s influence; sometimes when the man’s a drinker a family’s better off without him. And the mother. Mum purses her lips in that particular shape that means
common.
Still, there’s nothing to say that Connie’s let herself down. ‘It’s a shame,’ my mother concludes, ‘that the world is so full of gossips.’
    When I go up to my room after dinner, there’re curtains on the window. New, tight on the rail, difficult to pull open. Red and white checks.

    That night, instead of walking down to the Cremorne stretch of the river, I lean on the fence across the street from the Westaways’. The light in Connie’s window is still on. Now and then I can see a shape moving behind the curtain. If she opened her window she’d see me standing here. She’s reading or maybe sewing. Thinking about her photographs, about her future married to her newspaperman and raising his boys, being her family’s saviour. She is breathing the same air as me, on the same street.
    It’s good that Connie has found someone to look after her, someone with money in the bank and a good job and a house. Someone who might take her dancing, someone who plans to live in this city for good and won’t take her away from her family. Mum says they’ve lived next door since I was a toddler. Just a fence away. I think and I think, but I can’t remember one story, not one detail. What a fool I’ve been.
    After a while I move off from just staring at her room because it feels as if there’s something not quite right about that, something a man should be ashamed of. I keep walking until I reach the river. By moonlight it looks like beaten pewter, lumpy with rubbish. I think of Emily’s father and his shop.
He can do almost everything,
she said, but I can’t imagine him riding a horse, or fencing or shearing. I might be a coward but I’d rather be lost along with the arm than safe without it, regardless of the guaranteed employment as a lift operator. One day a soldier of the empire facing the Hun for King and country; the next a grown man