Wind in the Wires by Joy Dettman

the purchasing of known stolen goods. Harry and Lenny bailed him out.
    ‘I didn’t know they were old Charlie’s, did I,’ Teddy argued. ‘And all I got was a dozen lousy packets of the things.’
    ‘Get in that car.’ Harry, white-faced beneath his freckles, watery blue eyes shooting sparks and Teddy knowing those sparks hadn’t been caused by a few lousy packets of cigarettes. Knowing, too, that he’d been safer in the cell, he stopped arguing and folded himself into the back seat.
    ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone, Dad.’
    ‘You keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you,’ Lenny said.
    ‘My ute’s down here somewhere. We have to get it.’
    ‘Ronnie is driving it home – and it’s his ute,’ Harry said. Teddy had been gone for less than a week. A lot can happen in a week.
    Chunky, dumpy, snarly bitch Margot, clad in her frumpy skirts, her baggy shirts and cardigans, her sandals and ankle socks, ate like a horse. Weight ran in the Macdonald family. She’d been complaining of indigestion since Christmas. Elsie had been dosing her with liver salts.
    No one looks for the unexpected, but give them the whisper of a hint, and their minds will leap to the obvious conclusion.
    Ronnie beat them home. A redhead like his father, and as tall, he was in the sleep-out bedroom he shared with Teddy, packing his clothes. He was off to Mildura to his girlfriend before Harry changed his mind about the ute.
    ‘He’s not taking my bloody ute,’ Teddy said.
    ‘He’ll take it if I tell him he can take it,’ Harry roared. ‘You’ve broken your mother’s heart.’
    Elsie had been bawling off and on since the night of the civil war. She was still doing it. Georgie was to blame. Teddy had been in love with her since she was twelve years old and they’d rafted down the creek on an inflated truck tyre, determined to ride it down to the ocean. They’d ridden it out to Monk’s place.
    And she’d done this to him.
    ‘She’s having a dear little baby, Teddy,’ Elsie bawled.
    If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have stopped in Willama.
    ‘It’s mine and your daddy’s grandbaby, Teddy.’
    ‘It’s not all my fault, Mum. I’d stop going over there and she’d threaten to dob on me.’
    *
    A man doesn’t sell his soul easily. It took two days. He wouldn’t sell it to silence his mother’s bawling, or for her dear little grandbaby; but he’d do it for his hotted-up ute.
    ‘You make him give me back my keys and you can do what you want.’
    A wedding was what they wanted, and wanted it done fast. By the look of Margot’s belly when it was stripped down, she could have been five months pregnant. Lenny drove into town to ring up a Willama parson, who said he could do it after church on Sunday.
    Elsie stopped crying to unpack Ronnie’s case. They’d need his suit. Teddy didn’t own one. She wanted Harry to drive in and ask Maisy to ring up her girls and see if one of them had something nice they could lend Margot for the wedding.
    It was Margot who saved Teddy’s neck – or his soul.
    ‘Ath if I’m marrying a blackfeller,’ she said.
    That was the day Margot became indigestible to Harry and Lenny. That was the day Georgie received a phone call from Jenny, a call that delayed her retirement from the shop. If Margot was going down to Frankston, then as sure as hell Georgie wasn’t.
    When you can’t go, and you can’t stay, you look for sanctuary. Only Jack. She spilt the whole sorry story to him that night – except the bit about the doctor Jenny knew who might be able to do something about Margot’s indigestion, and about Elsie, howling again because Jenny was plotting against her dear little innocent grandbaby.
    ‘I’m living in bedlam, Jack, then I go to work to more of it. We made a loss last week – and we didn’t. He helps himself from the cash drawer and I can’t stop him.’
    ‘That’s not your responsibility, love.’
    ‘It is. I do his books.’
    Jack got rid of one of Georgie’s