One Long Thread

by Belinda Jeffrey

  ‘We’re really sorry for what’s happened,’ Cassie said, leaning forward awkwardly.

  ‘Thanks. I’m sorry to interrupt your evening. It’s just. I don’t know anyone else in Darwin and I couldn’t take being at home much longer. Bit selfish, really.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Boof said. ‘Just you’ll have to excuse our gawking. Sally worked for us, you know.’

  I nodded again. Barry was quiet but he felt like an anchor beside me. I felt the same fluttering in my neck being beside him.

  ‘Barry was kind enough to keep us company,’ Cassie says. ‘Thought for a minute it was time.’ She glanced at Boof and they shared a warm smile. You can tell some people love each other just by looking at them. They share an invisible glue that separates them from the rest of the world. Cassie and Boof were like that.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling even more uncomfortable, forcing myself on people who thought they were about to have their baby.

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ Boof said, standing up. ‘Hasn’t been any action for more than an hour and a half.’

  ‘Do you play cards at all?’ Boof asked me.

  ‘Um,’ I said trying to remember the last time I played cards. Names of games were passing through my head, canasta, euchre, bridge. None of them I had ever played. It wasn’t ever something our family did. Sally and I went through a Monopoly phase, intense, but short-lived. I named the only card game I could actually play with any confidence and that I might remember the rules.

  ‘Fish,’ I said a little too confidently. Boof laughed from the kitchen and Cassie held her stomach as she laughed, too. Barry’s laugh was quiet and restrained, but no less enthusiastic.

  I blushed, thinking they were laughing because Fish is a kid’s game. Not serious cards. ‘Bit childish,’ I said.

  ‘Na, it’s not that,’ said Boof, returning with a plate of milk coffee biscuits. ‘Do you know Barry’s full name?’

  I looked at Barry.

  ‘Barry Mundy,’ said Boof.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Barry said, trying to downplay it all.

  I smiled.

  ‘Not that he’s been a fish out of water for a long time,’ Cassie said.

  Boof placed his hands on Barry’s shoulders and shook them affectionately. ‘So Fish it is.’

  Somewhere over the next few hours, we stopped playing cards and turned on the television. I must have felt so comfortable being with them all because my eyes became heavy and I drifted off. You can never tell how long you’ve been asleep, but the sound of a glass being placed on the coffee table woke me.

  Before I opened my eyes, I heard Boof say, ‘Bit weird if you ask me. Freaky how much they look the same.’ Boof lowered his voice. ‘I can tell you like her, mate. Better be careful you’re not wishing for the past.’

  I pretended sleep for a few minutes so there was no chance they’d worry I heard what was said. I was genuinely alarmed when I ‘woke’ and apologised for sleeping on the couch.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ Barry said, standing up.

  ‘Thanks so much,’ I said to Boof.

  ‘You’re welcome, love.’

  ‘I guess the baby’s not coming tonight, then,’ I said.

  ‘Na, false alarm.’

  All the way home Boof’s words echoed in my mind. The possibility thrilled me and I was completely irrational, imagining moments we might share together. Holding hands, kissing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it even though I felt like a traitor. And then I realised it was Sally he loved and I was just an impossible reminder of what he once had and could never have again. I would never be me, I would always be the girl who could have been Sally.

  ‘How do you stop it hurting?’ I said, then felt stupid for saying it.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ Barry said. ‘But it must be worse for you.’

  ‘Really?’ His concern ripped through my defences and I melted. Tears pooled in my eyes. ‘You wouldn’t believe this if you read about it, would you? I mean. It all sounds so absurd.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘I feel like I don’t belong anywhere. I just want to stitch everything back together just the way it was.’

  We pulled up outside Mum’s house and I closed my eyes and opened them slowly. I wanted it all to disappear. I was leaning on the window, looking outside, away from Barry. ‘Do you ever feel like you just want to drive forever, away from everything?’

  Barry was quiet. I had this moment of clarity, of understanding something of Sally. I could see her inside that house, trying to reconcile herself within the world our parents had created for us. I could understand how she must have felt. I was no longer the same girl that lived with Dad and the thought of going back felt hard, even though I longed for it at the same time.

  ‘I’ve spent my whole life feeling like that,’ Barry said.

  I wiped the last of my tears from my face. I felt a little calmer. ‘That’s a lot of loneliness.’

  ‘I’m not the father of her baby, Ruby. Even if I wanted to be, I’m not.’

  A sickening feeling crept up inside and I thought of Bob. I didn’t want that to be true. ‘But you could have been,’ I said and it sounded hopeless and weak.

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference.’

  ‘It’s only a few weeks. That’s what they said. A few more weeks and the baby might have survived.’ I felt a glimmer of hope, a light of possibility. ‘But no one would know you weren’t the father. You could plead with them, tell them you couldn’t live without your child. You have rights, too.’ Even after I said this I heard the stupidity of it. I didn’t want to be practical. I didn’t want to think through the details of anything that would happen next. I didn’t want implications, I wanted a possibility, to give her a chance.

  ‘Tomorrow is her last day.’ I felt like a tornado of opposite feelings. I wanted to hate someone, to make it someone’s fault, all because I didn’t want to lose her. And my feeling for Barry flooded up in a rush. I leapt across my seat to him. I kissed him, hard and clumsy and god knows what I expected from him. There was nothing passionate or warm, there was no space, no response. Shame was quick and instant. I pulled back and fumbled for the door handle, muttering apologies as I made an undignified exit from the car. I heard him call my name as I ran across the grass around the back and up the stairs. But there was no way I was going back to him. In fact, there was no way I wanted to see him again. Ever. I wanted to get as far away from here as I could.

  The Aberdeen were gone. The door to Mum’s room was slightly open and I saw her lying on the bed.

  ‘I’m home,’ I muttered.

  ‘Will you lie next to me?’

  I lay down on the bed beside her, but there was a turmoil inside my body. Grief and shame were thundering inside me.

  ‘My baby,’ Mum kept saying over and over again.

  I wanted to say it was all right. That she still had me. But I didn’t. I wasn’t Sally.

  Sometime in the early hours of that next morning my mother’s breath was even and steady and I slipped off the bed and out of the room. I had brought two suitcases with me. One containing my own belongings, but the other was full of the contents we had pulled from the boxes in our garage. Mum’s patterns, some of her fabric and Pearl’s red coat, her History of Silk and her scrapbook. That suitcase was still beside the front door. I laid it down on the floor and opened the zipper. The red coat was on top and I took it out and shook it.

  It was worn and faded, something you would find in a jumble sale at St Vincent de Paul’s. I slipped my arms inside and fastened it, threading the large buttons through the buttonholes. I had rarely seen buttons this large. They were covered in the same fabric as the coat. One was missing in the middle of the jacket.

  I began to sweat soon after putting the coat on. I tiptoed up the passage to the bathro
om and examined my reflection in the full-length mirror. I tried to imagine my grandmother inside this coat, but I couldn’t. And why, when there were so many possible things, had she held onto this coat for so many years.

  I let myself sweat, forcing myself to suffer with the discomfort. It was nothing compared to what Sally would have felt at so many times in her life. I thought about what it would feel like to die from overheating. Shame was like heat. I kept thinking of my ridiculous attempt at kissing Barry and wished I could take it back. ‘Please,’ I begged the moon. ‘Please make it all go away.’

  It seemed so long ago that my mother had been that woman I remembered at the kitchen window looking at the moon. It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity, her laughter and freedom had vanished. I knew then that I didn’t ever want to be like that. Whatever happened, life was something too precious to give up on so easily. Sally may have had too much of it, but she lived life like a flame might, always burning bright. Fearing nothingness more than regret.

  I heard somewhere that the reason why makeovers never last is because people secretly prefer familiarity over change. They might profess to wanting to look beautiful, but if you cut and colour their hair, apply the right makeup and clothes and reveal their stunning potential, it scares them witless. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t think happiness ever felt right to Mum.

  Ruby, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. I decided that red was my favourite colour.

  I heard my phone, muffled somewhere inside my bag, beeping to let me know there was a voice message. It was almost dawn.

  Call me when you wake up. Please call. It was from Barry.

  I fell asleep on the couch, waking to find Mum standing in the passage looking at me. I was still wearing the coat. She blinked and blinked again. I don’t know if she was seeing me or not.

  ‘Take it off,’ she said and I lowered my head feeling stupid. I undid the buttons and slipped my arms out and folded it slowly, not knowing what to say.

  ‘This is all a punishment,’ she said. ‘Sins of the father.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I should have been a better mother. If I had been a better mother she would never have left. After everything I did for her . . .’ she trailed off. ‘Sit with me,’ she said and I sat down, placing the coat on top of the suitcase. ‘I won’t make the same mistake with you, though.’ She stiffened, sucked in a deep breath, sitting up straighter on the couch. ‘You’ll have to go back to Melbourne to get your things but I won’t make the same mistake. We’ll have to get you baptised,’ she turned to me and smiled and my skin crawled. ‘We’ll find you a nice Aberdeen boy and you’ll be my bride in white and everything will be fine. I didn’t keep a close enough eye on her. I won’t let that happen again.’

  I tried to tell myself that grief was twisting her in knots and I shouldn’t read too much into what she was saying. I tried telling myself that she needed me just to be there, to listen. That what I felt and needed didn’t matter right now, but I felt a vice tightening around my throat and panic rising in my guts. My head began to spin as though my whole world had been whisked away from me. A thousand thoughts thundered in my brain and I wondered whether Dad was in on this, whether he had planned to give me to Mum all along. I felt like I had no one I could trust, that the ground underneath my feet had turned to sand and I was slipping and falling.

  Mum was looking at me, wanting me to say something but I was mute. Nothing would get past the lump in my throat. The only words I had were tears that came rushing, hot and sticky, rolling down my face.

  Mum stood up and pouted, stepped sideways to where I was sitting and squashed herself to me, tapping me forcibly on the back and blocking my nose and mouth with her chest. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m here and I’ll never leave you. We have each other and God and that’s all we need.’

  I called out for Sally in the silent space of my mind. I shouted and called and begged her to listen. My need was crazy and desperate and no matter how much I shouted inside the shell of my own being, she was not there. She was gone forever and I had never felt so small. We were a pair, there were always two of us. There was never a moment in the memory of our bodies or minds that we had been without the other though this knowledge had no words. I closed my eyes and waited for my mother to let me go. And when she did, I leapt off the couch. I looked at her and realised something of what must have happened.

  ‘You wanted Sally to get married, didn’t you?’

  ‘He would have looked after her, he was willing to marry her and accept her into the Aberdeen family.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. No wonder Sally ran away.

  ‘Where is her present?’

  My mother stared blankly towards me.

  ‘I sent it for her birthday.’

  I saw her shoulders rise slightly, the tilt of her head before she raised her chin. ‘We don’t believe in birthdays,’ she said, folding her hands over each other, clasping them firmly on her lap.

  ‘What did you do with it?’ I was shouting.

  Calmly, my mother replied, ‘I got rid of it.’

  Something about that admission gutted me and my voice faltered. ‘Did you even open it? Did you look inside?’

  She turned her head away from me towards the kitchen without answering.

  I left her, running downstairs, taking the red coat with me. I opened the outside door to my room and locked it behind me. I threw everything into my suitcase, expecting my mother to follow me, to hear her banging on the door. But she was too caught up in herself. Perhaps she thought I would come around if she left me alone. Perhaps she was praying for me, asking God to make me see sense. I called a taxi.

  While I waited I heard Mum’s footsteps upstairs. I heard a few cars pull up and looked through the window. It wasn’t the taxi but people from the Aberdeen. I heard their doors open and close, their footsteps climbing the front stairs. I felt trapped and abandoned all at once. I scribbled a note and left it on the sewing machine. I’m going home.

  When the taxi arrived I raced outside pulling my suitcase behind me. We were driving away before faces appeared at the window upstairs and I saw Brother Daniel step out onto the front landing and run quickly down the stairs. I turned away from the window reducing my options and future down to the bare essentials. I had money, I had a passport, a phone and clothes. I had everything I needed to get out.

  Strange how little things come back into your mind. Far off things, inconsequential things that have almost nothing to do with what’s happening in the moment. I thought of Becky and the musical and how Dad laughed so loud I could hear him from the stage. I thought of Mr Grandy and the phone conversations with his mother. I thought of Amona sitting on the couch with Dad and wondered which video they had chosen to watch. I thought of Mum, when I had loved her, pretty and free, framed in the sunlight of our window when we were kids. And I thought of Sally and the last night we had spent together, our hands touching and how she had been gone for so long. I felt the breath go right out of me as I let her go. And I thought of Pearl and the last card that had come from her last year.

  Hello!

  Birthday greetings to you, my heart. How is life, how is it all? Would love to see you sometime. Come for a holiday, Tonga would love you.

  Grandma Pearl xxxx

  When I arrived at the airport I was propelled by one thought only, I had to get home, back to Dad, back to where I felt safe. But when I went to buy the ticket I couldn’t do it. I panicked with a sudden thought that Dad might send me back.

  ‘If we were rational creatures we would never get out of bed or live or love,’ Mr Grandy once said to me. Nothing I felt seemed rational or fair or right.

  A voice message came through just before I boarded the plane but I turned the phone off. I might have stayed if I’d
got that message earlier. I thought about that Empress discovering silk for the first time, pulling that thread, further and further, more and more, wanting to see what was wrapped inside. I could not see a way forward. Every door seemed closed and the walls were caving in. I was blind to everything, save that flimsy thread of an idea that could take me away from it all. So, just like Sally, I ran. Far away.

  What Pearl must have thought, seeing me on her doorstep, drenched from the rain, like that. No warning, no announcement. She could have put me on the next plane back home, that’s what my own mother would have done. But not Pearl. She took me inside, put that red coat across my knees and told me something of herself. And that first night, far away, I dreamt of the moon turning to confetti over me; a bride in white.

  16.

  I woke badly. My body had been curled around the pillow, my left arm was numb and all I wanted was food. The red coat was on the floor as I swivelled my legs over the side of the couch and I remembered arriving the night before, Pearl crushing me to her, the pulse of rain and the tang of dye as she told her story.

  The air was sweet and breathing it in reminded me I was so far from home, tempting me to get straight back under the covers and forget. Instead I smoothed my hair down, looking vaguely for a mirror, but then I’d never much cared for how I looked. Standing in the corner of one large room, the house appeared to be an all-in-one kind of room. A sink and bench top on the far side, small table and two chairs, the couch I had slept on. A few bookshelves against the walls. The sweet-smelling air, blowing through the open window. The faint sound of the ocean. I thought about tucking my shirt into my jeans, but left it out.

  At the door I found my purple Converse Sneaker and noticed the flooring for the first time. Squares of rattan fibre woven or plaited together. It was an odd sensation walking barefoot across it, the uneven corrugations pressing into the soles of my feet as if I were paper pressed to a lino print. But, then, I was in Tonga; a small island in the archipelago, a girl from Melbourne. I was Fanny or Betsy, waking to the world at the top of the Faraway Tree in the Enchanted Wood.