The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  ‘The bathroom is the second door on the left, dear,’ Alma directed.

  Amber opened the second door on the left and locked it behind her. She placed her handbag on a small vanity unit then wet her hands, soaped them, rinsed then soaped them again. Washed her face, her throat; for minutes she stood, the tap running, until she could look that staring mirror face in the eye.

  Elizabeth Duckworth’s face. The frock she wore, the small hat that matched it so well, were Elizabeth’s. The handbag over her shoulder was Elizabeth’s.

  Sissy had murdered Elizabeth.

  All ten of the eaters’ eyes had followed Amber’s hasty exit. Only Reginald’s watched for her return. The minister studied his watch. Alma and Valda cleared the table. Sissy, who’d claimed Amber’s untouched meal, was tucking into the meat and potato salad when Valda served a cream-filled sponge.

  The minister forgot his watch long enough to eat a slice, to drink a small cup of tea, to compliment the cook before claiming a pressing engagement. Valda saw him to the door.

  No similar escape for Reginald. He ate his sponge and remembered his Aunt Cecelia’s funeral, the slow train trip to Woody Creek with his parents, cousins, aunts and uncles. He remembered Norman’s railway house, and the dead infant born to Cousin Amber. He remembered the grunting stray Amber had put to a milk-swollen breast, and at nineteen he’d become obsessed by where that tiny mouth had sucked.

  Thou must not covet thy neighbour’s wife – or your cousins. He’d coveted pretty Amber and for months after that trip had spent his nights with his Bible, attempting to wipe the vision of that pale beauty and the sucking infant from his head.

  Repent ye sinner.

  Then came that night when he’d walked pale sad Amber in the Fitzroy Gardens and she’d asked him to hold her. He’d done more than hold her. A rambling rose, pretty Amber, as vital when supported against the woodshed wall as in his narrow bed.

  They’d sent him off to an outpost in hell where he’d spent his days attempting to speak of God to fuzzy-haired blacks who’d had as much interest in God as he. He’d discovered gin and tonic in the tropics. Later, he’d discovered compliant native girls and their black breasts. They’d faded the image of Amber’s white.

  The Japanese ruined his party. He was no fighter. They’d evacuated him from Port Moresby with the women and children, and he would have preferred to take his chances with the Japs than with his widowed father, but in true Duckworth spirit, Charles had forgiven his erring son – and emptied his gin bottles down the sink.

  Charles had offered a fatherly hand to Sissy when she’d been orphaned by Norman’s murder and Amber’s subsequent incarceration. Two men living alone had required a housekeeper and for years the church paid Sissy’s small stipend. She’d learnt to sniff out gin bottles.

  Until ’57, Reg had laboured in a back office at David Jones, snatching time to moisten his throat at lunchtime and after work; Sissy’s kitchen skills had not encouraged him home.

  Charles eventually succumbed to Sissy’s brand of housekeeping. The church buried him.

  The dead require no church-supplied house or housekeeper; ‘the family’ took Reg and Sissy in. ‘The family’ found Sissy employment at a child care centre – and God save the children – but only for a day or two. A variety of other positions had been found for her before the Duckworths gave up and she’d returned to her preferred position of permanent house guest. Guests sat while others laboured.

  Reginald recalled a few glorious years at David Jones where he’d spent most of his days in an alcoholic haze, but those glorious years ended in a hospital ward where he’d been diagnosed with advanced liver disease. The family stepped in to save one who had no desire to be saved. They’d packed him off to a teetotaller Duckworth who owned a farm, fifteen miles from the nearest town. House guests are only tolerable for a month or two. The Duckworth clan shuttled him and Sissy between relatives for years – until an elderly Duckworth recalled an earlier problematic duo. By the securing and furnishing of a flat, earlier relatives had rid themselves of the ongoing problem of the young Norman Morrison and his mother, Cecelia – née Duckworth.

  The proposal had first been put to Sissy, not in Reginald’s presence, though his newly acquired invalid pension was mentioned.

  ‘Cousin Reginald is in desperate need of your care, Cecelia. You alone managed to keep him sober during your years of housekeeping at the manse. As the wife and carer of an invalid pensioner you would secure, for your own personal use, your own pension.’

  ‘You’re stark raving mad,’ Sissy said.

  She’d lived off her broken heart since ’41. Her unworn wedding dress, still packed into its box, had travelled with her since her father’s demise, its life spent beneath a variety of beds. The Duckworths moved that box again – moved it and Sissy to Bendigo, to a house filled with children. Sissy’s patience with ‘brats’ known to be nonexistent, the Duckworths left her there for three months, and when they finally came to move her to her new lodging, they’d started again.

  ‘As a married couple, you and Reginald would be eligible for government housing, dear. Your carer’s pension would be paid to you each fortnight.’

  ‘How much?’

  They had the figure at their fingertips, and it wasn’t enough.

  They moved her and her wedding dress into Aunt Bessy’s spare room in Hawthorn. Bessy, in her dotage, had lost a few of her marbles and control of her bladder. After a month of this, Reg, government housing and a carer’s pension became a carrot dangled before a donkey.

  ‘All right then!’ the donkey brayed.

  And thus it was arranged. Sissy, a Duckworth in all but name, took that name at a small service in Hawthorn.

  Reginald took Sissy as an exit light in the impenetrable tunnel of Duckworth watchdogs. He made no attempt to consummate the union, nor had he been given the opportunity. After the service, he was returned to his Portsea cousin. Sissy spent her wedding night in Hawthorn.

  It took a month or two more for the necessary departmental strings to be pulled, but if a string required pulling there was a Duckworth available to pull it. A unit on the fourth floor of one of the multilevel Housing Commission red brick monoliths, built in sight of the city, was allocated to the bride and groom, a two-bedroom unit the family furnished with their collective discards. A five year old Falcon sedan was provided for Reginald, its registration and insurance paid for twelve months, and he was threatened with the loss of that vehicle should one sip of alcohol pass his lips. Then the family drove away to collectively wash their hands of the matter.

  Sissy had washed little since.

  *

  Alma and Valda washed the dishes that day. Amber, who had found a chair beside the parlour window, hadn’t moved from it all afternoon. Sissy sat in the kitchen. Reginald paced between parlour and kitchen doorways.

  ‘I’ve told you a dozen times that I’m not having anything to do with her,’ Sissy said.

  ‘We’ll make other arrangements for her tomorrow, Cecelia. Nothing can be done on a Sunday.’

  ‘I told you to let her minister look after her, and you brought her here, so you can keep her.’

  ‘She’s your mother, dear.’

  ‘Don’t you blame me for that. And you two wanted to prove who she was as much as me anyway.’

  ‘She’s an elderly woman, tossed out of house and home—’

  ‘Serve her right for lying to everyone.’

  THE BALCONY

  During the afternoon more Duckworths, summoned via phone, arrived to lend weight to the argument, and come evening, Alma and Valda again working their wizardry, the multitudes were fed.

  Amber didn’t join them at the table. From time to time one or another of the Duckworth entourage attempted to speak to her, but Amber, empty of words, remained mute.

  Come nightfall, Reginald removed himself from the scene of battle to await the outcome in his car, leaving Sissy to fight alone until nine, when, manipulated by Duckworths, exper
t in the art of manipulation, she capitulated. Amber was assisted out to the car by Alma and her daughter.

  ‘It’s just for tonight, dear. I’ll phone Miss Hooper first thing in the morning. I’m sure it can all be sorted out.’

  They seated Amber in the rear of the vehicle, which ten minutes later tilted dramatically to the left when Sissy took her place in the front passenger seat. The door closed after two worthy slams, the motor fired, and the flock of Duckworths was left quacking on the footpath.

  A drive then through night streets. Amber, who had been Lorna’s eyes, who had spent the past twelve years watching the road when in a vehicle, sat head down, eyes closed, unaware as to where she was being carried.

  She made no attempt to open the door when the motor died. Sissy’s door opened, the vehicle shuddering upright as she stepped out and stomped towards the brick monolith. Reginald walked around to the boot, opened it and removed the case. He opened the rear door and Amber stepped out of the car to stare at her case, then follow it and Reg into the Housing Commission block – as a sheep being led to its slaughter.

  She knew those buildings. They reminded her of Lorna’s eight-drawer filing cabinet which stored a conglomeration of papers in individually labelled files, just as those buildings stored a conglomerate of humanity. She followed her case to a lift where Sissy waited for the doors to open, and when they did, Reg, the case and Sissy stepped into it. Amber remained in the passage.

  ‘Get in!’ Sissy demanded.

  Memories of hell in that voice. Amber stepped into the lift, the doors interlocked, closing her in. She stood unbreathing until they opened, when the voice from hell commanded: ‘Get out!’

  Down a long corridor of many doors to one which opened to Sissy’s key. And the air wafting out of that hole in the wall, flavoured with burned grease, stinking shoes and sweating humanity, sucked the marrow from Amber’s bones. Her life, her world upended, she had ascended up to hell. But her case was carried in through that hole in the wall and tonight all she was was her case and the handbag she’d been gripping since the confrontation out the front of the church. Elizabeth Duckworth’s bankbook was in her handbag, the key to Amber Morrison’s private mailbox was in that handbag, and their gold mesh purse.

  ‘If you’re coming in, then get in and shut that rotten door!’

  So bidden, Amber entered, mouth dry, throat parched, soul desiccated, eyes attempting not to see – but seeing a glass door which no doubt led out to one of the balconies – and a faster solution to her predicament than becoming Mrs Brown, or Smith, or Jones. High-stepping over an unwashed plate, around a loaded chair, between the chaos of two undisciplined lives, she walked towards salvation.

  ‘Locked,’ Reginald said sadly as he turned on the television. It bellowed. Sissy bellowed, and in the confined area of a small sitting room, the noise reverberated against Amber’s eardrums. She’d become accustomed to the silence of Kew.

  Kew gone. Elizabeth Duckworth gone and Amber Morrison too old to rise again from the ashes.

  Watched Sissy flop down onto a cleared area of the couch. It flinched. Two magazines on it flinched. A packet of toffee flinched and shed its colourfully wrapped sweets.

  ‘It’s ridiculous, and so are your brainless relatives,’ Sissy said, scooping up spilled sweets, unwrapping one and popping it into her mouth. ‘It’s straight out rotten, stinking ridiculous,’ she said, her massive jaw working that toffee.

  Amber stared past her to the case, placed down in a clearing where the passage fed into the sitting room, weighing it in her mind as a tool for the breakage of glass. Again she turned to the balcony door to peer through glass to a railing, a high railing. If she could break the glass, the case’s inches might provide a step of sufficient height for her to climb over it, or to lean far enough over it.

  She glanced at Reginald, his gaze fixed on the screen where actors cavorted in an immaculate mansion, and Amber, who hadn’t shed a tear since four day old Leonora April had died, shed one for Lorna’s near-silent television, for her house, her bathroom, which Amber needed desperately. When the world ends and all else seizes, bladders don’t. Amber’s, unrelieved in hours, was threatening to release its load.

  Her nose following the scent of burnt grease she found a small walk-through kitchen. The odour of public urinal directed her to a bathroom where she emptied her bladder while keeping her backside well clear of a facility uncleaned since first installed. Rinsed her hands beneath a tap trickling into a filthy basin. Didn’t touch the tap, basin or the slime of bewhiskered soap swimming in a pool of filth.

  A second door led out of the bathroom. She opened it. The stench of body odour and cheap shoes suggested she close it, but she pushed on, high-stepping across scattered clothing, to another door. It led her back to the passage, back to her case.

  ‘Stop wandering around and sit down!’

  Amber remained standing, with her case, while surveying the immense pair of spread thighs utilising the greater percentage of a three-seater couch. No space to sit down. She turned to the closed front door. Only a lift out there. She didn’t like lifts. Didn’t like enclosed spaces. Had spent too much time locked into enclosed spaces. There’d be stairs. She reached for her case but it was heavy and with no strength to carry it and her legs threatening to let her down, she dragged it out to the kitchen. She’d be stronger in the morning. She’d get through this night and tomorrow . . . tomorrow, perhaps Mrs Brown would ride a train to . . .

  To someplace.

  With the kitchen table buried beneath its load of the miscellaneous and no space to place her handbag down, she sat, her case at her knee, her handbag on her lap.

  Televised voices, ear-splitting music coming in waves through the open door, crashing, hammering Amber’s eardrums. Couldn’t think for noise, and she had to think, to plan, had to grasp hold of her mind and direct it.

  Nightmares have no direction. She was trapped in her worst nightmare, back with the filth, the stink, the noise, the lifts and locks – and that nightmare shape of mammoth female who was her daughter.

  Her daughter. And him?

  Couldn’t think, not beyond her, beyond him, beyond how, beyond why.

  Sat staring at the shape of a window that she didn’t recognise as a window until he came to turn on the kitchen light. Closed her eyes against its glare, against him, against the loaded sink beneath the window, the loaded benchtops. Sat, eyes closed, until roused by the voice from hell.

  ‘There’s a pillow and blanket on the couch.’ Amber looked at the table, at a space between an open envelope and the salt and pepper. A pattern in the table’s laminated surface, a cluster of what resembled clumps of folded grey umbrellas. Shelter from the storm.

  ‘Don’t think that you’re staying here after tonight.’

  Stay here? Had there been an iota of strength left in Amber’s body, she might have laughed at the suggestion. No strength, no hope, no reply, so she counted that clump of grey umbrellas. She’d got through many bad times by counting, through endless days and nights. She’d counted her steps, counted the cracks in the ceiling, the stars in the sky, the hairs on her arm when there’d been nothing else to count.

  ‘If you think you’re fooling anyone with your deaf and dumb act, you’re wrong,’ Sissy ranted.

  ‘Tomorrow . . . is . . . is perhaps time . . . time enough . . .’ Reginald began.

  ‘Don’t you take her side, you useless mongrel. You didn’t take my side against your brainless rotten relatives, did you? She murdered my father, and you know it, and so do they, and they expect me to spend the night with her in my house.’

  Reginald escaped towards the bathroom, Sissy in pursuit. ‘She’s putting on an act, that’s what’s she’s doing, and I’ve seen enough of her acts in my life to last until I’m a hundred.’

  He returned to the kitchen, to pick up and place down an item or two, until the slam of a door. It was as a signal to the disjointed skin and bones of Reginald. They regrouped as one to move towards th
e refrigerator, to fling it open, snatch a bottle of lemon cordial, half-fill a glass with it, add water then, at a tottering run, he was gone.

  The television silenced. The sitting room light died and a hush descended, a hush allowing alien sounds to seep through the walls, secret muted mutters.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

  There would be no tomorrow for Amber. Lorna would not allow it. Amber knew how her mind worked. For twelve years she’d made a close study of her benefactor, and during those years had watched her in action many times. An unrelenting enemy, Lorna Hooper would see Amber’s exposure only as it applied to herself: Miss Lorna Hooper had been duped. She’d been played for a fool. Proud Miss Hooper was nobody’s fool.

  She’d approved of the old minister and his wife, had invited them to take afternoon tea with her. She’d taken a dislike to their replacements, a modern-thinking young minister and his fashion-plate wife. Lorna had begun a year-long campaign to be rid of them – a hard-fought campaign. She’d won it.

  Her own sister, her own nephew, had felt the sting of Lorna’s ire. Elizabeth Duckworth had felt her scorn before she’d learnt to circumvent it.

  Tonight Lorna would be planning her new campaign. She’d be stalking the house, selecting her weapons, her papers, phone numbers, magnifying glass. Only when armed to the teeth would she sleep the sleep of the just.

  Amber glanced again at the kitchen window, which would surely open. Was a fourth-floor window high enough? Was there an afterlife where man was placed on trial for his every earthly sin? There was a hell. She was already in it.

  She glanced at the bench beneath the window. She’d need to clear space there, would need to stand on a chair to climb onto the bench – or find a direction which didn’t begin and end with her end.