The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  ‘He buried his wife in a suit I made for her twenty years ago. That’s how he got his money—’

  ‘Some women don’t know how to handle men,’ Lila said. ‘Are you going to invite me in, or make me stand out here with everyone gawping?’

  ‘Go home to your groom.’

  ‘I can’t. His sons are there. I’ll toss my fag,’ Lila said, and so saying she tossed it onto the lawn, a long butt, a good half of a cigarette, and every muscle in Jenny’s body wanting to run and snatch it, she turned her back on it and opened the front door, Lila on her heels.

  ‘I told you the last time you were here that you’re not welcome, Lila.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Lila said.

  ‘You’ve lost your marbles – and so has he.’

  ‘All the better to roll ’em, my dear,’ Lila said. She followed Jenny in through the front door where she veered right into the sitting room to turn on the television.

  Jenny stood in the hall, watching her flick the channel selector around the dial. It was Murphy’s law that, no matter when you turned on that box, you’d catch it in the middle of a commercial, but by her third circle of available channels, she found a movie, an old black and white tear-jerker from the thirties. She sat then, and Jenny walked to the doorway.

  ‘I was halfway through watching it when they turned up,’ Lila said. ‘Remember Forever Amber?’

  Jenny remembered it. It had been a ‘must see’ movie in its day. Like a woman’s breasts, few old movies stand the test of time.

  ‘Why?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘You wouldn’t give me a bed,’ Lila repeated. ‘He was advertising for a live-in housekeeper when I went back to the dole mob after I lost my job. They gave me his number so I phoned him. He got a bit more than he expected.’

  ‘You’re no better than a prostitute, Lila.’

  ‘And you’ve got a filthy mind. I was talking about my cooking.’ Lila turned to the screen, then back to the doorway. ‘It was like doing it with a sex-starved chimp – if you’re interested. He’s covered in hair from the neck down.’

  Unable to take any more, Jenny closed the door and went out to the kitchen to vomit, but Jim was in there stoking the stove.

  ‘His sons will have him committed,’ he said.

  ‘She doesn’t know what she’s in for – and I can’t live in this town if she’s in it, Jim. If you want me to stay off the smokes, for God’s sake, sell up and get me out of here.’

  For ten years, she’d been urging him to sell. The year they’d sent Trudy to boarding school, she’d almost talked him around.

  ‘Going by her past record, she won’t stay long,’ Jim said.

  ‘Today is too long,’ Jenny moaned.

  The movie ended at four. Lila found them in the kitchen. ‘Your sitting room is like a tomb,’ she accused.

  ‘You weren’t invited to sit in it,’ Jenny said.

  They rarely used the sitting room during the worst of winter when a two-log fire did little to remove the chill. The room was too big. The house was too big, and the garden – and this town was too small.

  ‘Where do your guests sit?’ Lila asked.

  ‘We don’t have guests. Go home.’

  During winter, two easy chairs lived in their cosy kitchen where they ate, read, worked beneath powerful fluorescent lighting. Jim’s typewriter spent most of its winters on the south side of the kitchen table.

  Lila moved a kitchen chair close to the stove; she took out her cigarettes.

  ‘No.’ A chorus of two.

  ‘The smoke will go up the chimney,’ Lila argued.

  ‘No,’ they chorused. ‘If you want to smoke, you smoke outside.’ Watched her, willing her out that back door so they could lock her out, but she put her cigarettes away.

  ‘I told him not to tell his sons what he’d done, but the silly old bugger phoned them.’

  ‘You’ll learn,’ Jenny said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What most gave up attempting to do fifty years ago.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trying to tell old Joe Flanagan what to do.’

  Jim turned on the television, a small portable which used up too much space on the kitchen bench but offered a clear picture of footballers rolling around in the mud. He followed Collingwood. They were playing someone. Jenny had no interest in a mob of men rolling around in the mud, but the mass of males held Lila’s interest until the game ended and the news came on.

  Someone had shot a judge at his own front door. A while ago, there’d been a shooting outside a family court. Australia was catching America’s disease. Australia’s first test tube baby had been born intact and healthy. Jenny sat forward to listen to that.

  ‘When you think of the trouble we went to to dodge getting pregnant and now the buggers have found a way to inject them into us with syringes,’ Lila said.

  ‘You’re well past worrying about it and we’re trying to listen,’ Jenny said.

  Jim gave up and left the room. Lila changed the channel and Jenny rose to serve two bowls of soup which she carried into the sitting room, where Jim had lit the open fire. They pulled chairs close to it and sat to watch the ABC news, then the show that followed the news.

  They sat until ten, when Jenny stoked the kitchen stove, closed it down for the night and told Lila to go home.

  ‘His sons are staying until tomorrow. Toss me a blanket, will you?’

  Jenny tossed her an elderly quilt and a pillow, aware she’d find her in one of the spare beds come morning. Lila had spent enough time in this house to familiarise herself with every room, though the chill might confine her to the kitchen.

  She was there come morning, sound asleep on the two easy chairs she’d moved seat to seat. She’d no doubt slept on worst.

  *

  News had travelled fast in Woody Creek before the telephone. It travelled faster via phone. Joe Flanagan’s Jap car parked overnight in Jim Hooper’s driveway started a trail of early morning walkers. Women who didn’t require bread for breakfast chose to walk by Hooper’s corner on their way to Blunt’s drapery cum tea room cum Sunday morning bakery. Pauline and John Taylor had found their niche in Woody Creek. There’d been no hot crusty bread sold in town since a few years after the war ended.

  One of his sons dropped Joe Flanagan off at ten, and he didn’t look much like old Joe. He was a clean-shaven ferret, his hair clipped to the scalp, a scalp glowing flame red beneath the winter sun. Jenny watched him through a front window. He had spare keys to his Toyota and was in it before Lila joined her, still wrapped in her borrowed quilt.

  ‘The silly old bugger,’ she said. ‘I gave him a red rinse before the wedding and he looked ten years younger.’ She tossed the quilt at Jenny, let herself out via the front door and walked down to her groom, or his car.

  Gone then. Gone, but for how long?

  ‘I’m phoning the estate agent,’ Jenny said.

  *

  On Monday night money changed hands at the hotel where a pool had been running as to how long Lila would remain a widow. Freddy Bowen opened a new page to take down names and their guess at the number of days it might take Joe’s sons to have him declared insane, or for Lila to wear the old coot out in bed.

  There wasn’t a lot of wear and tear going on at weekends, though Joe’s committal to an asylum looked hopeful. Through July Joe’s sons arrived on Friday nights and didn’t leave until Sunday morning. Jenny and Jim passed them on the road to Melbourne. They saw a lot of the girls through July.

  On the last Saturday in July Lila, having tried Jenny’s door, walked down to the bend to see if her car was at the McPhersons’. It wasn’t. Lila didn’t knock on their door. The McPhersons spied on her, Amy through her birdwatching binoculars and John through his camera’s zoom lens.

  A vibrant auburn-headed girl of nineteen when she’d moved to Woody Creek after the First World War, Amy had become birdlike and near crippled by arthritis. John, eight years her junior, had altered less. His hair, always sno
wy, was now white. He’d never been a muscular man, but he was a walker who, during his seventy-three years, had never been without a dog. The couple had walked the dogs night and morning. John walked them alone now.

  He owned a car, an old green Morris Oxford. It made a weekly trip to Willama but sat idle for six days out of seven. He owned three cameras and a darkroom where he developed his own film. He was tinkering with the internals of a camera when Jen and Jim called in on Monday afternoon. Amy had phoned. She had something she wanted them to see. She offered twenty colour photographs of her evil-faced goblins – and Lila, one goblin clinging to her windblown hair.

  ‘She’s our witch,’ Amy said. She’d been at Jenny for two years to come up with a witch and goblin rhyme. Those photographs, shot in a hurry though a window, trimmed by Amy’s hands then photographed again, were superb, and sad.

  ‘When did you see her?’

  ‘Saturday afternoon,’ Amy said. ‘She walked down the drive, stood looking at the house for a while, then left.’

  Poor desperate Lila. There wasn’t a house in town where she’d be welcome. A beautiful girl when she’d worked at the Sydney factory, an attractive woman twenty years ago, but aging too fast now – and desperate enough to marry Joe Flanagan. That desperation had been trapped by John. The wicked little goblin clinging to her hair didn’t make Jenny smile but raised a wave of pity and sadness for the girl Lila had been.

  Jim wanted that book. ‘If we paid her, she’d agree to sit for the photographs.’

  ‘She has such perfect hair,’ Amy said.

  At sixteen, she’d had perfect hair, dark and wavy and long enough to sit on.

  ‘Clad her in a floating black gown,’ John said.

  ‘We’ve been sorting through the photographs left over from Butterfly Kingdom. There were so many delightful shots we couldn’t use. And our sparrows from My Bright-Eyed Friend. We need a rhyme, Jennifer.’

  ‘I don’t think I could do it to her,’ Jenny said.

  They took half a dozen of the better prints with them when they left, but there was no sign of Lila that weekend. With the weather unfit for man, beast or fowl, Joe’s sons must have stayed in Melbourne. Not until August was near done did Lila come again, on foot, clad in the first Mrs Flanagan’s tweed overcoat and her fur-lined boots.

  ‘Off to the snow?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I may as well as come here.’

  ‘I don’t recall posting an invitation.’

  ‘Any port in a storm,’ Lila said.

  And that was about it; that was the way she’d lived her life, why she’d married Macka, why she’d married old Joe – any port in a storm. There’d been no safe harbour for Lila, not since she’d deserted her husband and three sons in ’46 – and before that. Her parents had disowned her when she’d got herself pregnant at fifteen. Norma, her cousin, had kept an eye on her in Sydney. Norma was dead. Jenny was all she had now, and Barbara, another factory worker, in Sydney, and three adult sons she wouldn’t have recognised if she’d fallen over them on a city street.

  ‘The hotel is warmer,’ Jenny said.

  ‘So is the North Pole,’ Lila said. ‘Lend me the fare and I’ll go there.’ She was wearing a woollen beanie which she removed once indoors. ‘Look at my roots,’ she said. ‘They’re half an inch long and the mean old bastard won’t give me the money to have them done. I gave up the dole for him.’

  ‘Want to make a few bob?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Modelling. John and Amy McPherson want to know how much you’d charge to sit for some photographs.’

  ‘They’re into porno, the up-themselves old buggers!’ Lila squealed.

  ‘We need a witch for one of our kids’ books,’ Jenny said.

  ‘You bitch,’ Lila said. ‘I thought you were being serious.’ She moved the kettle over the central hotplate, removed her coat and turned on the television.

  Jim, currently up to his ears in a solo project, loaded his finished pages onto his typewriter, picked the lot up and left the warmth of the kitchen, Jenny following him to the bathroom. She opened the door for him, turned on the wall-mounted radiator. The vanity unit was long enough, though barely high enough, to double as a writing desk, but the room was warm. He’d always used the bathroom as a temporary winter study when Maisy visited.

  Jenny went to the small sitting room where she picked up copies of their kids’ books and took them back to the kitchen.

  ‘That’s what we do,’ she said. She offered John and Amy’s photographs. Lila glanced at them.

  ‘He ought to take another photograph then shoot himself,’ she said. ‘I don’t look like that.’

  ‘He took it through a window, with his zoom lens. It distorts things,’ Jenny said. ‘But we’d want to make you look worse, stick warts on your nose, turn your hair into a bird’s nest—’

  ‘If they shout me a dye job I’ll pose nude for the old buggers,’ Lila said, and Jenny shrugged.

  ‘Make your appointment,’ she said.

  ‘How am I going to get down there?’

  ‘If it’s not costing Joe, he’ll drive you.’

  ‘He told me he’d cut it for me.’

  ‘Make your appointment for next Friday and I’ll drive you down,’ Jenny said.

  Amy and Jim would be jubilant. John, a man of few words, showed few emotions. He communicated through a camera lens, but he had a smile that spoke volumes, or it did to Jenny, and he could usually find a word or two when she joined him on a dog walk.

  She drove Lila home at five after telling a small lie, saying that Harry and Elsie were coming around for dinner and a game of cards. Lila liked them no more than they liked her, and they were coming to play cards, though not for dinner.

  Jenny watched Lila light up a smoke, stayed long enough to suck in a whiff of it, then drove home, attempting to find a rhyme for goblin, considered a cobbling goblin, considered a witch with an itch, then admitted that sucking on nicotine is what had greased her rhyming cogs.

  She’d smoked a packet a day at fifteen when she’d been with Laurie Morgan. She’d added her own smoke to the blue haze at the Sydney club when she’d sung with Wilfred Whitehead. Smoked at the jazz club in Melbourne. Smoked with Ray. Smoking had always been a part of who she was, and without it, a major part of her was missing. Cigarettes had turned off the switch to a barricaded doorway to her past, and without that nicotine hit, she spent too much time opening that door.

  She was looking for her new canasta cards when she found the watch an old dog had chewed on at a beach in Sydney the morning after five American sailors had pack raped her. She looked again at the inscription on the rear of the watch. Billy Bob from Mom and Dad, 7/18/43. It brought back memories of Myrtle Norris, memories of a swollen belly, of the night she’d shown Myrtle that watch as proof of the pack rape. It hadn’t proved a thing.

  What do you know about the father, Jenny? she’d asked a few weeks later.

  She’d died years ago, but Jenny could still hear her plum-in-the-mouth voice. Myrtle had never said that she’d doubted Jenny’s tale of the five sailors – not outright.

  Norma, Barbara and Lila had doubted the rape story. To them, her unwanted pregnancy had been like the passing of some initiation rite. Come clean, kiddo. Who was he?

  One of them had been Billy Bob. Who other than a Yank would inscribe a watch with that name? He and his pack had used her on that beach like dogs at a bitch in heat, and yet she’d worn that watch for years. She’d worn it until Jim had come back into her life, until Trudy had become their own, until Jim had bought her a new watch to measure the hours and days of their new life.

  Billy Bob from Mom and Dad, 7/18/43. Hoped the Japs had killed him and his friends. Should have pitched his watch away that morning. She’d kept it as evidence to show the police, then decided not to report them to the police. Should have pitched it in the incinerator with the taffeta dress. She’d thought about it, but it was gold, and how could anyone throw away gold?
<
br />   She should have sold it to the jeweller the day she sold him Ray’s wedding ring, but she’d needed the watch in Armadale. It had got the kids to school on time, had told her when to pick them up.

  For twenty years it had lived in a box in the kitchen drawer and when the melted remains of her pearl in a cage pendant had been returned to her, she’d placed it in the box with the watch, promising herself that one day she’d use the gold in that watch to remake the pendant. And why not? Why not spend the money she would have wasted on cigarettes on something she wanted?

  She stood a while juggling the watch and pendant remains on her palms while August’s wind moaned around Vern Hooper’s chimney and Jim’s typewriter zinged and clunked as he readied it to start a new line.

  ‘How much longer are you going to be rattling that thing?’

  ‘I told Jack I’d have it done by next weekend,’ he said, and rattled on.

  *

  She left him typing in the kitchen on Friday, tolerated half an hour of unrelenting Lila on the trip to Willama, and the more she talked the heavier Jenny’s foot became on the accelerator.

  And God save the hairdresser, but with an hour or more to fill, Jenny drove down to the big jeweller’s on the corner of Main and Carter streets where she placed Billy Bob’s watch and the melted pendant on the jeweller’s counter. The wife looked at both then fetched her husband from his back room.

  ‘We don’t see many of these around,’ he said of the watch.

  ‘I was wondering if you could melt it down and replicate my earrings in a pendant.’ She’d worn her pearl in a cage earrings this morning, and showed him an ear. ‘The pendant was about twice the size of the earring.’

  The jeweller wound the watch then took off its rear plate to peer into its internals, which hadn’t moved in over twenty years. They moved that morning.

  ‘It could be worth more to you intact than its gold content,’ he said, then asked to take a closer look at her earring. She removed one. He studied it through his eyeglass.

  ‘It’s old,’ he said.

  ‘I inherited them from my grandfather. Is it doable?’