The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  Amber Morrison’s eightieth birthday well behind her, she’d believed the fifty-three step climb up to Sissy’s unit would kill her. It hadn’t, and as the old saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. By spring, her ascensions were faster.

  The letter she’d hand delivered to Lorna’s box on the morning after her unveiling had been returned to Elizabeth Duckworth’s private mailbox, in an envelope addressed by Lorna’s hand. Every letter since had returned in its original envelope, Return to sender, written in red, front and rear, and seemingly unopened.

  The minister had responded to Elizabeth’s letter which had expressed her deep concern for her poor dear Miss Hooper: . . . She has relied on my sight for many years, during which time, I have pleaded with her on many occasions not to drive her vehicle. For her own sake and the sake of those who share the roads, I beg you to do what you can to have her licence revoked. He’d responded – but done nothing. Each week Amber rode an early tram to Kew where she walked by her old address, taking note of the vehicle’s position, and condition. There was a new dent in the passenger side fender, a new scrape along the driver’s side rear door.

  Mrs Maryanne Brown, the woman Amber might yet become, had written a letter to the transport department, suggesting that her daughter had been forced to brake suddenly to avoid an accident with near blind Miss Lorna Hooper. Mrs Maryanne Brown’s letter had been acknowledged, but government departments move slowly – and God bless them for that.

  The pension department had moved slowly, but it had moved. Amber Morrison’s pension cheques were now delivered fortnightly to Sissy’s mailbox. Two of Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s pension cheques had gone astray, or been shredded by Lorna, but the third had found its way to Box 122, Richmond Post Office.

  Last week, Maryanne Brown’s birth certificate had been delivered to Box 122. Amber hadn’t been certain of her date of birth and had sweated for three weeks before the certificate arrived. And a vast relief it was. Coexisting with Sissy and Reginald was proving expensive. Roast a leg of lamb on Sunday night and it was gone by Monday. Expecting to boil a lump of corned beef on Monday and have it supply cold meat for the week was foolhardy. A loaf of bread disappeared in a day; a pound of butter in two.

  She’d had other expenses. A week of Sissy’s couch had sent her to a furniture store. For a fee, they’d delivered a single bed, a lightweight easy chair and a standard reading lamp. With Sissy’s double bed pushed in hard against the wall and her dressing table moved to stand beside it, Amber had made space enough for her bed at Sissy’s feet. Supermarkets sold deodorant spray; pharmacies sold earplugs, which in recent weeks Amber had taken to wearing for much of the day. They didn’t cancel the noise of the blaring television, but muffled it. Sissy’s explosions penetrated, though they were not as frequent, nor were her demands for Amber to move on. She’d realised during the early weeks of Amber’s occupancy that three could live more cheaply than two. The rent, electricity and phone bills had not increased with one extra in residence, but those bills, when divided by three, became much less.

  The car registration, insurance and telephone bill arriving in the same batch of mail had shaken the multilevel building to its foundations, or shaken Sissy into a screaming, door-slamming tantrum, until Amber had gone to the bathroom, removed sufficient notes from one of the long narrow pockets she’d stitched inside her elasticised corselets and placed it on the table. It bought Sissy’s silence and Reginald’s fealty for life. Amber’s pocket accounts earned no interest but should the need arise, they’d offer Maryanne Brown a ready means of escape, though preferably not before Maryanne was in receipt of her own pension.

  Amber had found a life of absolute freedom once she’d descended those fifty-three steps and on pension days and Sundays she had her freedom in the unit.

  Chaos bows to your hands, Mrs Morrison, Norman had once said. Chaos, though not yet bowing, had backed away. The bathroom, small, was modern, and now smelled of bleach and disinfectant. The kitchen was immaculate and very functional. She cooked there. She served. Reginald still snacked on tuna, but she’d trained him to wash his empty cans before disposing of them into a lidded kitchen bin she’d carried up those stairs.

  She did her heavy-duty cleaning on pension day when the duo left the unit sometime after ten thirty, rarely returning until four. On Sundays Reginald shaved, a major production, as was the styling of Sissy’s hair, then the stiffening of her style with hairspray, but once out that door they were gone for the day.

  Amber wrote her letters on Sundays, and on a very pleasant Sunday in late September, all signs of Sissy and Reginald removed from both sitting room and kitchen, Amber poured a long glass of lemon cordial and began her letter.

  My dear Miss Hooper,

  I hope this letter finds you as it leaves me . . .

  And she heard a key turn in the lock. It takes time to stand, to empty a long glass – to almost identify a forgotten taste which didn’t belong in cordial. Then Sissy entered the kitchen to accuse. ‘Who were you writing to?’

  Big, loud, emerald green-clad this morning, sweating emerald green-clad, petticoat hanging below her skirt but not a hair out of place. Too big to tangle with, Amber didn’t fight for possession of her pad.

  ‘You’re still writing to her, you old idiot!’

  Still writing, and Lorna still returning those seemingly unopened envelopes, though Amber knew better. For twelve months she’d watched her benefactor steam open and read her sister Margaret’s letters, then carefully reseal them, write, in red, Return to sender on both the front and rear of the envelope then drop them, with a smirk, into the post box.

  ‘When are you going to get it through your senile old head that she wants nothing to do with you?’ Sissy bellowed.

  ‘The Bible tells us to pity those not as fortunate as us, Cecelia.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me about the Bible! I’m the one who just sat for an hour in the same church as that miserable old hag, and you should have seen the way she sneered at me when I spoke to her.’

  ‘Was she alone?’ Amber asked, her hand out, waiting for her pad. Sissy tossed it. It flapped its pages as it fell.

  ‘You’d go running back to her if she as much as crooked her little finger,’ Sissy accused, which perhaps told Amber that her presence in the unit was appreciated, that Sissy had no desire to lose her housekeeper cum cook cum hairdresser, that those who live in squalor, who sleep between filthy sheets, usually prefer not to.

  The pad retrieved, Amber took it to her shared bedroom, drew her case from beneath her bed and placed her pad and writing equipment into it before sliding the case back into the dark.

  Would she return to Kew if Lorna called? Perhaps she would. She missed the serenity, missed the planning of meals a week ahead, missed her Royal Doulton vases. There was nothing of beauty the eyes might rest upon in Sissy’s unit.

  She served a salad lunch and, while they ate, Amber learned why the duo was not eating lunch with Alma and Valda Duckworth.

  ‘Alma has been . . . hospitalised . . .’ Reginald began.

  ‘Valda took her to the hospital early this morning and couldn’t even be bothered picking up a phone to let us know,’ Sissy added.

  ‘Gallstone . . .’ Reginald said.

  ‘They’re operating in the morning,’ Sissy said, spooning mayonnaise over her meal. She enjoyed a little salad with her mayonnaise.

  *

  An anomalous household, three aliens coexisting within a too small membrane, surrounded by rampaging natives who passed them without acknowledgment in the corridors. Their young ruled those fifty-three steps, and on many occasions, Amber evaded packs of them. There were nights when Sissy turned the television off so she might better hear the natives’ tribal wars, but the three lived safe enough within their oxygenated membrane – three until October, when Reginald’s lemon cordial soaked system gave up the struggle. Amber dialled triple zero. Sissy told him to die and be done with it.

  Two uniformed men ca
rried Reginald from the unit. Sissy spent the remainder of her day and evening on the telephone, informing a variety of Duckworths. Amber spent her day and evening cleaning Reginald’s room, turning his mattress and remaking his bed with clean sheets, not in preparation for his return but for his demise. When the ambulance men had carried him away, his shuddering eyeballs had been canary yellow.

  He didn’t die, not that day, nor on Saturday, and come evening, Sissy found the key to the balcony door and unlocked it.

  ‘He tried to jump,’ she said when Amber followed her outside. ‘He got halfway over the rail and I dragged the useless sod back. You can’t manage on a single pension and if you’re single, they move you into a one-bedroom place.’

  Amber listened. Sissy rarely spoke to her. She never instigated conversation.

  ‘The Duckworths will have to pay for his funeral,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got any money.’

  The phone rang early on Sunday morning, not to inform them of Reginald’s demise as Sissy had surmised, but a Duckworth, offering her lunch, then a lift to the hospital.

  ‘If you pick me up,’ Sissy said. They picked her up at the door.

  Her social life improved during the weeks of Reginald’s illness. There were many charitable Duckworths prepared to take their turn waiting at Cousin Reg’s bedside for his torment to be eased by God. Amber, who now slept in Reginald’s bed, free of earplugs, expected him to die. She tossed half a dozen small cans of his tuna into the kitchen tidy. She drank his lemon cordial, though not too much of it in a day. She’d identified its odd flavour.

  Then Reginald’s condition began to improve. A liver will regenerate if given half a chance. Twenty-two days after he was carried out of the unit, a male-dominated bunch of Duckworth farmers collected him from the hospital and took him home to their farm to recuperate. Then the following Sunday, three Duckworths knocked on Sissy’s door. An improved version of Sissy opened it. Her greying hair had been transformed to raven brown, her eyebrows no longer associated and she was clad in a loose-fitting black frock, purchased by Amber, prematurely, in anticipation of a funeral. It was a vast improvement on the emerald green, the puce, the vibrant floral which, one by one, had made the trip down to the laundromat but not returned.

  Amber offered tea. The Duckworths were not interested in tea. They made it clear that they were there only to sniff out Reginald’s supply of alcohol and to explain to Sissy how one more sniff of alcohol would kill her husband.

  ‘If I’ve told you all once I’ve told you a dozen times, he wasn’t drinking at home,’ Sissy said.

  They questioned Amber, who chose not to mention Reginald’s lemon cordial, which she missed. She opened cupboards for the Duckworths, opened wardrobes so they might satisfy themselves that there was no hidden alcohol in the unit, and not one bottle did they find, not one empty bottle.

  They confiscated Reginald’s car keys before they left, convinced he’d been drinking outside of the unit, and thus could no longer be trusted to drive.

  ‘We need that car,’ Sissy’s voice pursued them down to the lifts. ‘He can’t walk a hundred yards.’ Nor could she.

  Two weeks later, Amber lost her bedroom to an improved version of Reginald – well dressed, shaven, a hat covering his oversized bald dome.

  *

  In October, Bob Hawke, president of the ACTU, won pre-selection in the safe Labor seat of Wills. There was little doubt he’d get into parliament, and when he did, God save Malcolm Fraser and his Liberal Party. Bob was well known, and a man of the people.

  Georgie saw the writing on the wall. Two nights later, she heard Elsie’s bedroom wall buckle. She was out of her sleeping bag in time to watch it fall. It took a portion of the roof down with it, raising a cloud of dust before putting out her light.

  By torchlight she turned the power off at the main. She didn’t crawl back into her sleeping bag. Fate had told her it was time to leave.

  She’d completed her planting weeks ago, had settled two dozen punnets of seedlings in rows she’d drawn in the ash-laden soil where Granny’s house had stood, then for good measure, she’d scattered three packets of assorted flower seeds between the rows. She’d guided those first tendrils of Granny’s climbing rose towards the chicken wire fence, had dug up three wisteria suckers from beside the shed and transplanted them at intervals alongside the chicken wire. Perhaps they and her seedlings would fight the weeds for their space in life, as she was now ready to fight for her own space.

  Jenny’s sewing machine had been busy this past month, not for paying customers but for Georgie, who by torchlight packed her case, brand new, shiny and large. The replacement copies of the correspondence college’s certificates were already in it, along with the manila envelope containing Laurie Morgan’s mug shot in its battered frame.

  Her worn-out working boots she tossed down the hole in Elsie’s parlour floor, with Trudy’s well-worn shoes, the washed-out windcheater and baggy jeans. She packed her khaki shorts, tossed her oilskin coat into a new cardboard carton with her electric jug and toaster, her saucepan, billy and Granny’s cast iron frying pan. Jack’s nautilus shell, wrapped again in Cara’s green top, went into a corner of her case.

  She drove away an hour before sunrise, her bare arms feeling the morning chill, but the forecast was for heat today, and she hadn’t wanted to pack a pretty black and white top Jenny had stitched for her. It crushed. Her new sandals weren’t as comfortable as her old working boots. They’d wear into shape, as would she.

  She had three inches of hair to comb. Long hair she could cope with, or short. She couldn’t handle that in-between stage, but she was between lives, so maybe an in-between hairstyle was right for this day. Maybe she’d let it grow. Maybe she’d have it shorn when she got to where she was going. South to Melbourne, north-east to Sydney. Somewhere.

  She didn’t say goodbye to Jenny but gave her an elongated blast of the horn as she turned the corner into Hooper Street. It fed out onto Blunt’s Road, which fed into Stock Route Road. She’d make up her mind which way to go once she reached Willama.

  *

  On Melbourne Cup Day, the day the city stood still for a horse race, Valda Duckworth had the day off, and at two o’clock, she and Alma popped into Sissy’s unit for a cup of tea. Amber served them on one of her embroidered cloths, served the tea in her new bone china cups, very old new, picked up at the opportunity shop in Richmond when she’d collected Elizabeth and Maryanne’s pension cheques. The television was on, but quietly. Valda had turned the volume down. Hyperno won the Melbourne Cup that year.

  Amber was drying her cups lovingly when Alma came into the kitchen to thank her for afternoon tea and to praise her light hand with scones.

  ‘Bless you for what you’ve done for them, my dear,’ she said. ‘You will join us for dinner on Christmas Day?’

  ‘She’s not coming with us,’ Sissy said.

  ‘She’s your mother, Cecelia. Have a little Christian charity,’ Valda said, then made a point of kissing Amber’s cheek.

  Pleasant people. Each time Amber had dealings with them they raised in her the desire to be Maryanne Brown, who might be surrounded by pleasant people. When Reginald had reclaimed his room, she’d spoken again to an estate agent. He’d driven her around to see a small unit. She had a bed, a chair, a lamp. The Salvation Army would provide a kitchen table and chairs. She’d wanted that unit with its built-in wardrobe where her garments would be safe from the stink of sweat-soaked fabric. She’d told the agent she’d think about it, then arrived home to find a neighbour, from the unit opposite Sissy’s, moving out.

  ‘They’re giving us a three-bedroom house,’ one of the children told a friend. ‘It’s got a backyard,’ she said. ‘We can get a puppy, Mummy said.’

  A house with three bedrooms. No stairs, on a tramline. Perhaps a clothes line, a shop on the corner. To Amber it sounded utopian. That night she changed her mind about a small second-floor unit in a box of similar units.

  Sissy’s script was appalli
ng, but not difficult to copy. Amber stole her shopping lists. She found her signature one Sunday and spent the day perfecting it. The following Sunday, she penned her first brief letter to the Housing Department.

  Dear Sir, or Madam,

  I am currently renting a two-bedroom fourth-floor unit, where I care for my elderly mother and my husband, who was recently hospitalised with severe liver damage. I am in desperate need of a three bedroomed house, preferably on the Camberwell line.

  Yours sincerely,

  Cecelia L. Duckworth

  Ten days it took them to acknowledge receipt of her letter, and their acknowledgment came not on a Tuesday, while Sissy was at bingo, or on pension day, but on a Monday. Reginald retrieved it. It was addressed to Cecelia L. Duckworth so Sissy opened the letter, glanced at it, put its contents down to more Duckworth interference and tossed it at Reginald, still sober. Amber later claimed the letter and filed it.

  In December she wrote a longer and more desperate page.

  Dear Sir, or Madam, Further to my previous letter, re the rehousing issue. My mother and husband are incapable of using the stairs when the lifts are out of order, which happened twice this week. I have my own health issues, of my own making, I admit. I am severely overweight, which makes the fifty-three step climb while loaded like a pack mule, physical abuse of the elderly.

  Please find the name and phone number of my husband’s doctor below.

  Yours faithfully,

  Cecelia L. Duckworth

  She included a Christmas card, wishing the department season’s greetings and a more comfortable Christmas than she was likely to enjoy. Elizabeth signed a second Christmas card, purchased specifically for Lorna, a Christmas tree with a jolly Santa placing his gifts beneath it. It included a cheery seasonal greeting, to which Amber added a few words.

  My dear Lorna,

  I will be dining on Christmas Day with Alma Duckworth, who has kindly offered to collect the last of my belongings. Aware as I am of your attitude to dust-collecting ornaments, I feel certain that you will be pleased to see the last of my vases and crystal bowl. My very best Christmas wishes,