The Tying of Threads Read online

  They fought each other at times, and to circumvent a twin brawl as to who would be driving a sedate sedan to Melbourne, Dawn tossed a coin. Bernie called heads. He won the right to a night in Fitzroy. No matter what he called, or whether the decision was made with a coin or a deck of cards, he usually won. At eighteen he’d won the right to marry Jenny Morrison – or to be left standing at the bloody altar by her.

  ‘Eat something and you mightn’t need to go to bloody city doctors,’ Macka said.

  ‘Stop eating and you mightn’t need an undertaker for a year or two more,’ Dawn said.

  The specialist put Dawn into hospital to do his tests, and a day after he let her out she was back in, a surgeon cutting into her. Instead of a few hours in Fitzroy, Bernie spent those hours with Maisy and Maureen, his eldest sister, sitting in a hospital waiting room.

  They read bad news on the surgeon’s face before he opened his mouth, and when he opened it, they got worse than they’d read. He told them that Dawny was riddled with cancer, and that there wasn’t a bloody thing he could do about it – these weren’t his actual words, but what his mess of jargon translated into. Maisy didn’t believe him, not until they were allowed in to see Dawny. That’s when they knew the quack hadn’t been exaggerating.

  ‘Bugger the mill,’ he said. Maisy and Maureen left howling at Box Hill, Bernie drove home to get Macka and to tell the rest of them to get down there.

  It was after midnight before he hit home. Macka’s ute wasn’t parked in the drive, and Macka wasn’t in his bed. Bernie got rid of Maisy’s sedan and in his ute drove the night streets, looking for its twin, which he found parked out the front of the pub. And what the hell was it doing parked out there at that time of night?

  It took five minutes of belting on the bar room door to raise a pyjama-clad Freddy Bowen. He told him where he’d find his brother.

  The hotel’s sleep-out doors would have had some form of locks. Lila’s hadn’t been utilised. Bernie swung the door wide and flicked on the light switch.

  ‘Get your trousers on, you dim-witted bastard. Dawny’s dying,’ Bernie said.

  Back in the fifties when Billy Roberts had brought his bride to town, the twins had argued Lila’s merits. She slept in the raw and as long as you didn’t look at her face, she still had merits enough, which she made no attempt to cover up while Macka put his trousers on.

  They woke Jess and Joss. Jess rode back to Box Hill with Macka, her two daughters rode with Bernie. By mid-morning the others started arriving and the walls of Maureen’s weatherboard sweated with Macdonalds, ex-Macdonalds, offshoots of Macdonald. Maureen had four, Patricia had brought one of her three, Glenys and Joanne arrived in separate cars, Rachael and Rebecca drove down together with Rebecca’s twins. No Dawny there to keep the mob under semi control. She lay drugged to the eyeballs in a hospital bed.

  Macka spent ten minutes beside it, then drove home to look after the mill, or so he said. Bernie stayed on with the women, taxiing them to and from the hospital, to tram stop or train, taking his turn at sitting with Dawny who, full of morphine, was unaware anyone was there.

  ‘She’s never had a day’s sickness in her life,’ the women said.

  ‘Why didn’t she go to the doctor sooner?’ they said.

  ‘It would have meant missing work. She never missed a day in her life.’

  Daily they expected her to improve, but she got a lung infection, and on the fifth night after the operation her condition was listed as critical. On the sixth night, a call came through to Box Hill before dawn. Maureen phoned home. Macka wasn’t answering, so Bernie woke Freddy Bowen again. He raised Macka; Bernie told him to get his arse back down here, then the Macdonalds drove in convoy through the empty streets to sit with Dawny and hold her hand while she died.

  Gone by six. They were back at Box Hill before Macka turned up with Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman in tow. Maisy, who hadn’t stopped bawling for a week, stopped bawling to stare at what followed Macka into Maureen’s sitting room. Lila had dressed for the occasion, in the only black she owned – a pair of skin-tight leather hot pants, long matching boots and a skimpy black singlet top, stretched to fit her uplifted boobs.

  ‘This is a house of mourning,’ Maisy said. ‘Take her out, Macka.’

  Macka, who had warned Lila to wear something black, thought she looked fine, but he took her out to the kitchen to the food. Like their mother’s, Maureen’s refrigerator was a gold mine. Lila was eating cake when Bernie picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder and carried her, kicking and scratching, through the house and out to the street where he dumped her into the gutter beside Macka’s ute. He’d turned to go back to the house when Macka sucker-punched him in the jaw.

  And what was a sucker-punched man expected to do but retaliate, which he did. It wasn’t a fair fight with Lila straddling him. She had fingernails an inch long. Sammy, Maureen’s copper son, broke them up, and Macka and his Sydney tart took off.

  Two o’clock before the convoy of Macdonalds left Box Hill, Bernie, with Maisy at his side, leading the way home, a slow-moving convoy across the city, but once on Sydney Road, Bernie put his foot to the floor.

  He thought Macka had come to his senses when he saw his ute parked in the drive. Bernie got his mother out and led her indoors. She was a broken woman, until she saw that well-travelled case in her hall.

  Her kitchen was at the rear of the house; she found Macka and his well-worn trollop seated at the table, eating take-away chicken and chips. Maisy, who had never had a bad word to say about anyone, who had never made an enemy in her life, who’d stuck by Amber Morrison through thick and thin – until she’d murdered Norman – picked up the flat iron she used to prop open her kitchen door.

  ‘Get her off my property now, Macka, or by God I’ll iron out a few of her wrinkles,’ she said.

  When a woman like Maisy Macdonald declares war, a man is forced to choose which side he’s on. Bernie carried Lila out to a second gutter; there was water in this one and what followed wasn’t pretty. The twins had the fighting technique of a pair of rabid gorillas; they drew an audience. Maisy’s house was in South Street, right in the centre of town, a stone’s throw from most of Woody Creek’s scattering of shops. There was a narrow park to the left of the house, then the town hall. The railway paddock was across the road and on the far side of the railway paddock there were a few more shops and the hotel.

  They came from all points of the compass – kids came on bikes, over back fences or running through the park, adults came to drag their kids home then changed their minds, passing cars stopped passing and pulled over.

  If Dawny hadn’t been dead, she would have been out on the street with the hose or the hair broom, breaking them up. If Dawny hadn’t been dead, Bernie might have realised that Macka’s brains had moved temporally south to his trousers and might have allowed him the last hit. But Dawny was dead, and he’d stood beside her bed watching the life seep out of her, and that useless bastard hadn’t been at his side, so today he refused Macka the last hit.

  Two overweight males pushing sixty don’t have the stamina of youth. They were dead on their feet. They were bruised and bleeding before the local copper and Joss Palmer pulled them apart long enough for Maisy to get between them. Joss and a neighbour tumbled Macka into his ute. His trollop got in with him, and as they were backing out, Bernie pitched the well-travelled case into the tray.

  *

  A bastard of a week. A bastard of a funeral. Maisy, still not over the last one, was determined that Dawn’s would be about Dawn. She told the girls and Bernie that they were going to get up in the pulpit and say something meaningful about what their sister had been to them.

  The girls did as they’d been told. Jess and Rachael’s elbows got Bernie to his feet to stand like a fool in his skin-tight suit beside the fancy coffin. In the end, all he could do was put his hand on it.

  ‘I got used to seeing you around, Dawny,’ he said. ‘I got used to dodging your bloody broom too. You could
swing it like a champ, mate. I keep closing the door of your bedroom and the old girl keeps opening the bloody thing up again,’ he said, then he took off out the side door and made a beeline for the pub.

  They came in later, Macka and his trollop. She was wearing a dress, or wearing most of it. Bernie tried to make his peace. He bought Macka a beer.

  ‘It was a bloody dare, you half-witted bastard,’ he said.

  ‘You’re jealous, you ugly bastard,’ Macka said.

  And it was on again.

  They broke a few glasses, did a bit of damage before a trio of cops from Willama arrived to assist the local constable. They frogmarched Bernie out to the street and warned him not to return. Macka and Lila were now paying for a refurbished room inside the hotel – and the cook’s wrist was still in plaster.

  The mill became a war zone. No one got paid on the Friday following Dawn’s funeral.

  For fifty-eight years they’d been one. Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman chipped them apart. Dawny had been in her grave two weeks when Macka phoned the Willama mill owner who, six months back, had made an offer for their mill. The Willama bloke wanted all of it, not a half-share. Macka wanted his half-share, so he advertised it for sale.

  Maisy paid him out and, in Lila’s eyes, that payout made Macka a wealthy man. They left town together.

  MISSING

  Life wasn’t meant to be easy, according to Malcolm Fraser, the dour Liberal man currently occupying the prime minister’s lodge. He’d coined that line from a play written by George Bernard Shaw, except Shaw had removed the sting by adding his take courage; it can be delightful.

  Someone in Sydney hadn’t found life or Malcolm’s politics delightful. In February, a bomb was placed in a garbage can out the front of the Sydney Hilton Hotel where Fraser and other heads of state were at a meeting to discuss whatever heads of state wasted taxpayers’ money discussing. The bomb missed the heads of state but killed three taxpayers.

  By March Jenny was finding life a long way from delightful. She couldn’t believe that an Australian would make a bomb and place it where it could kill three innocent men. They made bombs in Ireland, not Australia. Australia was the safe country. The war hadn’t touched it – or barely touched it. And she couldn’t believe what Lila had done. Through the years she’d given that woman a bed, she’d fed her, given her money, bought her bus tickets, and confided in her long ago, had told her how one of the Macdonald twins had fathered Margot.

  Jim celebrated the fact that Lila was out of town, that with luck, she wouldn’t return. Jenny tried to. But how could someone who for years had claimed to be your friend, who’d made constant claims on that friendship, how could she marry one of her supposed friend’s rapists?

  She had married him. She’d sent a postcard from the Gold Coast and signed it Lila Macdonald. And how, after what she’d done, had she found the nerve to send that card?

  Weeding allowed Jenny to vent her anger, the ripping, the pitching, and the cursing of thistle, nettle and Lila. When that card arrived, she’d thought it was from Georgie – then she’d seen the signature and tossed the thing into the stove and watched it burn.

  Nothing was the same without Georgie. Jenny had been able to talk to her about anything. And Elsie, stuck in a bungalow that would have fitted inside Vern Hooper’s sitting room, wasn’t the same Elsie. She’d been accustomed to the freedom of Granny’s fifteen acres, to fruit for the picking, to chooks clucking and a paddock of vegie garden. Now a prisoner of Teddy’s bungalow, in the weeks since Margot’s death she’d aged ten years. Harry and his kids were worried about her, as was Jenny – when she found time to worry about her. She had no time for anything. She spent her days playing shopkeeper and didn’t have a clue how to play the game, and Emma Fulton, now Watson, knew little more.

  They had Georgie’s invoices. They had the names and phone numbers of the suppliers. There was money in the shop’s account to pay for new stock, but it was money Jenny couldn’t get at without Georgie’s signature, and last week they’d barely made enough to pay the electricity bill, plus Emma’s wage.

  Those twin green doors closed since Christmas, shoppers had altered their habits – and Willama’s two big supermarkets encouraged them by offering weekly specials – and how could Coles supermarket afford to sell large tins of canned fruit for what Jenny paid the supplier for those same cans? Jenny’d sent Jim down to Coles to buy a dozen cans, which saved her ordering them.

  She had no time to sew. The material for a bridal gown was still waiting on its roll on the cutting table, and she was running out of time to get that gown done. She had carrots going to seed, onions she couldn’t see for the weeds. There was light enough in the evenings to weed by, but by the time she locked those green doors, by the time she tossed something easy on the table for dinner, she was ready to sleep, and usually did, in front of the television – a sign of old age, or exhaustion. Went to bed exhausted. Woke too early, still exhausted.

  The inquest into Margot’s death was being held in April – not that she wanted to be there, but had she wanted to, who would mind that shop? Jim wouldn’t.

  Her fingers delving into damp earth, she removed twin foot-high milk thistles and pitched them as far as she could. Why bother? She’d been at it for an hour and had barely made a dent in the carrot patch.

  Weeds would be growing on Margot’s grave. She had to do something about ordering a stone. Should have done it already. She’d meant to. Couldn’t make up her mind what to put on it. She had trouble sticking to any one thought long enough to make up her mind. She’d be thinking about a tombstone and remember what she’d forgotten to order yesterday. She’d be thinking about Georgie and start remembering that last game of cards they’d played with Margot the night she’d died.

  Wished she’d let her win that game. That kid had never won much from life, not in the looks department or personality. Georgie had won the lot, as a tiny kid, a teenager and a woman.

  When those girls were small, Jenny had tried not to lean towards Georgie. Every item of clothing she’d made for one, she’d made for the other, determined to do the right thing – as Amber had never done with her and Sissy. Shouldn’t have bothered. What had looked good on lanky, happy-faced little Georgie, hadn’t done a thing for pale, pudgy Margot. Was it any wonder she’d become what she had, growing up in Georgie’s shadow?

  Should have let her win that game of five hundred. Had Jenny known it was to be her last chance to do something for her, she would have let her win.

  You can’t know the future. It’s a blank page waiting to be written. And you can’t alter one day of what has already been written.

  She blamed herself – not for Margot’s death, but for how she’d grown. She and Jim had spent years attempting to sort out Raelene, but hadn’t spent one day trying to do the same for Margot. Back in the forties there’d been no one around to sort out kids’ heads. They either grew out of their hang-ups or they didn’t – anyway, all of those court-appointed psychologists and social workers hadn’t done one scrap of good for Raelene.

  Who sorted me out? she thought. Gertrude Foote, midwife, bush psychologist, font of all wisdom and Jenny’s beloved granny, that’s who – she’d stuck by her through thick and thin.

  Missed her. Still missed her so much.

  She pulled more weeds, pitching them onto the gravelled path behind her and remembering Armadale and Ray, who hadn’t appreciated her untidy style of weeding – or her kids or much else about her. She’d made many mistakes in her life, but marrying Ray had been her greatest.

  The only time she’d lived by clocks had been in Armadale, when the kids were at school – and now. Six days a week she opened that shop at nine though only for three hours on Saturday, and thank God today was Saturday. She’d make a start on the bridal gown this afternoon.

  She glanced at the new car they no longer parked in the shed. Too much trouble getting it in and out and Jim, celebrating its lack of a clutch, was on the road every day – while she was
stuck in the shop. She rarely got a chance to drive it – and when she did, she still looked for its clutch and missing gearstick.

  The day they’d ordered it, they’d made big plans. They were going to drive it up to Queensland and stop off in Sydney for a few days to see what thirty years had done to the place. And what had they done since picking that car up? Made one fast Sunday trip down to see Trudy, and by the time they got there, it was time to turn around and come home. Someone had to open that shop.

  Jim had written a cheque for the full price of that car. He’d written another to pay for Margot’s funeral. He would have written a third for a tombstone – had Jenny known what to put on it. He had no respect for money. Those who grow up with it don’t know what it’s like to have none.

  Vern Hooper, worth a fortune when he died, hadn’t left Jim a brass razoo. His mother had. She’d placed her first husband’s money into a trust account for him when he’d been a tiny kid.

  Jim knew little about his mother’s first husband’s family, other than that they hadn’t been breeders. Norm Nicholas was the only son of Oswald Nicholas, who must have been a gambling man. According to the few details Jim had been able to dig up on him, back in 1885, old Oswald had gambled ten thousand pounds on shares in Broken Hill Proprietary then, before the depression of the 1890s, he’d sold the lot for what must have been a fortune back in those days.

  His gamble had set Norm up for life. He’d built the house Jenny now called home – or sometimes called home but more often called Vern Hooper’s house. He’d built the sawmill Jenny had known as Hooper’s mill. That mill killed Norm, leaving Joanne a forty year old childless widow. She’d married Vern Hooper in 1918, and Jim arrived less than a year after the wedding.