The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Anything is doable,’ he said.

  She left one earring with him. Maybe he’d lose it. Maybe he’d make a mess of the pendant. Maybe she’d never wear it if he didn’t make a mess of it, but having got rid of the watch and Lila, she wandered down to a big fabric store to smell the new scents of bulk fabric, to handle silks and brocades and dream up a fairytale wedding gown for Trudy, who hadn’t even brought a boyfriend to her party. She’d meet someone one day, and when she did, Jenny would bring her to this shop to choose the most beautiful fabric and from it she’d make her a magical wedding gown.

  MORE THAN SHE

  CAN CHEW

  The phone rang at seven on Saturday morning, and Jenny flew from her bed, certain that one of the girls had been in an accident.

  ‘Hooper residence,’ she said.

  ‘Get your husband,’ a male said. No STD beeps. It was a local call, and that voice was remotely familiar.

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Flanagan. Get your husband.’

  ‘He’s in bed. Call back at a reasonable time,’ Jenny said, then wondered if he’d murdered his new wife who he expected to milk cows. Lila? She didn’t even know what the milk she used in her tea came out of.

  Jim, also concerned, had followed her out on one leg and the crutch he used if he had to get out of bed at night.

  ‘Flanagan,’ Jenny said, giving up the phone. Jim listened, Jenny shivering beside him until she heard Lila’s laugh. She wasn’t dead. Jenny had been seeing her dead and, relieved that she wasn’t, ran to the bedroom for shoes and dressing gown then returned to listen secondhand to old Joe’s ranting.

  ‘It was an advance,’ Jim repeated. ‘She agreed to sit for some photographs.’

  A long silence followed, or Jim was silent. Jenny could hear the tinny overtones of old Joe’s ranting escaping from the phone to warm the frosty entrance hall air.

  ‘No,’ Jim said. ‘No. No. No. They are to be used in a children’s book . . . Yes . . . Yes. We produce books for children . . . Children’s fairytales . . . Yes . . . No . . . Yes. The character requires her hair to be black . . . Yes . . . She will receive further payment after the photographs have been taken . . . That will depend on the . . . on the publisher. Of course . . . Certainly.’

  Then Joe hung up but Jim was unable to put the handset down. He stood on his one leg and a crutch in the hall, laughing like a madman, laughing so hard that Jenny had to hang up the phone then lend him support.

  ‘She told him . . .’ And he erupted again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She told him she’d agreed to star in John and Amy McPherson’s pornographic movie,’ he said. The crutch fell and he grabbed at the wall. Jenny moved a chair closer then ran to fetch his other leg.

  They laughed through breakfast, and when it was late enough, they called John and Amy, and there was laughter at both ends of the line.

  ‘He’s bitten off more than he can chew with that lady,’ Amy said.

  ‘She’s bitten off more than she can chew,’ Jenny said, and she told them how Joe expected her to milk cows.

  There was too much laughter that day, that week too. Oh to be a fly on the wall in Joe’s kitchen. Jenny had sighted him often during the years she’d lived with Granny. They’d shared a back fence. She’d considered him old then, old and bad tempered. He was older now, but no doubt still capable of putting his boot into a dog or cow, and maybe Lila, who had been around for so long, she’d almost become family – not favourite family, but a member she did care about.

  The following Thursday, the kitchen warm and their bedroom freezing; they sat watching the late news and Jenny saw Ayers Rock. A dingo had somehow got into one of the campers’ tents and taken a small baby from her crib.

  ‘Georgie climbed that rock,’ she said. Jenny wanted to see it. She wanted to sell up and move, wanted a briquette heater installed in the sitting room, wanted a smoke too, and when did that wanting stop?

  Over the next days the Chamberlain couple were big news in the newspapers and on television, as was the red land and that rock. It looked hot there. Jenny craved heat.

  Lila just wanted her money. They clad her in her witch’s outfits, designed by Amy, stitched by Jenny. They stuck hairy warts on her chin, her nose. They teased and pinned her hair into a high bird’s nest and sat two goblins in it, then, with Jenny carrying the props and Amy directing the shots, John’s camera snapped and, say what you like about Lila, she played the role well – and talked nonstop.

  ‘They reckon that woman sacrificed her baby,’ she said between shots.

  ‘It’s rumour, Mrs Flanagan,’ Amy said.

  ‘Call me Lila. I change the married bit too often to keep up with it, and I’ll be changing it again soon. That crazy old cow threatened to cut my hair off last night.’ And she laughed, and John’s camera clicked.

  He used three rolls of film on her, trapped her in a variety of poses and floating gowns, and when she dressed to leave, Amy wanted him to take a few more shots of her in her black leather hot pants and long matching boots, so John used another roll of film. Classics of their era, those boots and leather pants, an era long past, but when John developed that final roll, Amy was determined to use them, so demanded another rhyme.

  ‘Her name was Lila, the blokes all feel her . . .’ Jenny sang.

  ‘You’re making my John blush,’ Amy said. ‘What we require is our witch, clad for the city – stocking up on oil of toad . . .’

  ‘The witch had an itch, in a city ditch,’ Jenny said.

  *

  By the eighties, grief had to be advertised if you expected it to sell. Sympathy for the Chamberlain couple, who refused to spill their grief on camera, had evaporated, but Jenny found herself relating to Lindy, found herself comparing the media vultures to the great and all-powerful Vern Hooper. He’d been sympathetic when she’d howled and hidden the swelling of Margot in Granny’s lean-to. His sympathy had fast turned to contempt when she’d come home from Melbourne pregnant with Georgie and found the nerve to look him in the eye.

  The media had been sympathetic to the Chamberlains for a day or two. Now they squeezed their story for blood. Experts on the native dog and its habits were interviewed. One so-called expert said he was doubtful that a native dog would creep into a tent, doubtful that a dingo would be capable of carrying away a ten week old infant.

  *

  September came with ice-cream days, those sweater off, arms bared to the sun days when the scent of the earth drew Jenny outside to dig, to plant. Lila, who neither reaped nor sowed, followed Jenny around the garden on those days.

  ‘I’ve had them all in this town,’ Lila said, blowing smoke.

  ‘You’ve had a good few of them,’ Jenny agreed.

  ‘Joe says that dingoes wouldn’t go anywhere near a tent that smelled of humans,’ Lila said.

  ‘He’s old enough to remember when there were dingoes up here. Granny’s generation shot them on sight.’

  ‘That mob killed anything that moved. They shot all of the Tasmanian devils.’

  ‘Tigers,’ Jenny corrected.

  ‘We don’t have tigers.’

  ‘Tasmanian tigers, not devils.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Lila said. ‘They reckon she used to dress that kid in black.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lindy Chamberlain.’

  ‘Bulldust.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Go home, Lila.’

  ‘I can’t. His sons brought their wives with them.’

  ‘They’re your daughters-in-law,’ Jenny said.

  ‘They’re up-themselves bitches. I told them I was going to be in a kids’ book, and they smirked at each other, like they knew what sort of a book I’d be in.’

  On and on it went, like the yark-yark-yark of an alien bird eating the blossom in the garden.

  ‘They’re jealous of me, that’s what’s wrong with them . . .’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Joe said a tame dog wouldn�
��t even go into a stranger’s tent.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘When you do that I know you’re not listening.’

  ‘It means I can’t be bothered arguing against irrational bulldust,’ Jenny said, settling a tomato seedling into the earth.

  ‘Dingoes are wild dogs. They might attack you in the bush but they wouldn’t creep into your tent.’

  ‘According to Joe,’ Jenny said.

  ‘And a bloke on the television. And as if one could drag a three month old baby out of its bed while that other kid was sleeping right beside it. You can’t tell me that he wouldn’t have woken up and yelled.’

  ‘Have you ever watched a kid sleep?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I had kids.’

  ‘Weren’t around much while they were sleeping.’ She planted another seedling.

  ‘Joe said that dingoes are no bigger than his dogs.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Jenny said. Jaws on them like a vice, unpredictable, Granny used to say of the wild dog. Untameable too. She’d told a story one night about her father’s attempt to turn one of their pups into a house dog. Granny had never owned another dog. Her generation had named the town’s untrustworthy ‘dingo’. Old Dingo Wadi. Old Dingo Duffy.

  That was back in the sane old days when smoking had been a social habit not a death sentence, back in the days when the truth had been expected and, more often than not, spoken. These days, truth, sanity and chastity were out of vogue and every other day new age experts, given their moment on television, brainwashed the masses into believing the latest theory on breastfeeding, dog or child training – with frequent breaks for commercials singing their praise to birdseed paste, better than butter, and toothpaste which would keep your teeth sparkling clean and prevent cavities. Even the six o’clock news was interrupted for a commercial.

  Jenny had been brainwashed into giving up butter only because margarine was spreadable from the fridge. She’d been brainwashed into giving up cigarettes – to satisfy Trudy, who rarely came home to smell if the house was smoke free or not.

  ‘Well?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘If dingoes creep into tents to get a white’s baby, how come we don’t hear about them eating the blacks’?’ Lila asked.

  ‘Collateral damage,’ Jenny said, standing, stretching her back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their kids die like flies. Georgie and a dozen more saw a tiny black baby lying beside the coals of a campfire with half a dozen dogs fighting over and around it. Did that baby live out the day? Did it die? If it died, did anyone report its parents for child abuse?’

  ‘A few years ago, one of the whites would have picked it up and taken it, like your grandmother took Elsie Hall.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Joe says she did.’

  ‘It’s a great pity that ghosts can’t sue for slander,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Joe told me that Elsie’s father came over there trying to get her back one day and your grandmother fired off a rifle at him.’

  ‘Elsie’s rapist, not her father. She was around twelve at the time. Tell your groom to get his facts right.’

  ‘Whatever. She thinks she’s white, you know. We saw her at the butcher’s the other day with that kid of the mechanic’s in a pusher, and she was dressed up like the Queen Mother.’

  ‘When were you elected to head up Woody Creek’s dress-code bureau?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘You’re just jealous because my legs still look good in shorts, and because John wanted to photograph me in my hot pants.’

  ‘John and Amy have a fine sense of the ridiculous – incidentally, they worked out why Joe married you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He would have been paying enough tax to pay your dole and, on top of that, he had to pay someone to clean and cook. By marrying you, he got himself a housekeeper and a dependant to claim on his tax – and I’m going out.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘I’m walking.’

  ‘I already walked in here.’

  ‘Try your luck with Jim. He’s in the bathroom.’

  Light rain had begun to fall. Jenny stood looking at the car, wanting to get into it and drive, but Lila would be in the passenger seat before Jenny could lock the door, so she fetched her overcoat and Trudy’s Collingwood beanie, then walked out into the rain. It wasn’t heavy – maybe just a passing shower.

  John’s Morris wasn’t in the drive and the dog was, which meant that neither Amy nor John was at home. They had been Jenny’s sanctuary, her place to run since Granny went.

  The dog, a black and white gent, greeted her at the gate, and she stopped to talk to him for a while. Walked around the long bend then to the bridge, which was not a good place to dawdle these days. Back in the late sixties, half a dozen mission families had been moved into neat little houses on the far side of the creek. The best of those families had moved on; the worst had remained to turn those homes into a derelict enclave the town wits named Woody Creek West. Drunks, both male and female, took a short cut home from the hotel through Amy and John’s garden on pension night. They fought there, a few fell down and slept there, while their kids raised themselves.

  A few years ago, the whites would have stepped in and taken those kids, would have given them a chance at life. These days they didn’t dare, so they gave the parents money to spend on grog and they closed their eyes to what was happening to the kids.

  There was much spoken of racism and Australia’s colour bar. Acceptance of a race had nothing to do with colour. There was a dirt bar, a drunken violence bar, a neglected kids bar. Handouts and the right to vote won’t inject self-respect into black or white. Respect is purchased with sobriety, soap and water, a day’s work for a day’s pay.

  Norman had leant on that bridge railing watching the birds. He could name every one. No birds today. A few rag-tail kids wandering aimlessly, a few youths staring. They didn’t like sightseers, and she turned away and walked back to Forest Road.

  During the years she’d lived with Granny she’d grown accustomed to walking that road and had come to love the scent of the forest after a shower, a bouquet of eucalyptus and damp mulch and wild mint. The smell of exhaust fumes was added during holiday season when the caravan park filled. No holidaymakers today. The road and the forest were her own.

  She saw the colour before she opened the boundary gate. Georgie had turned and seeded the earth where Granny’s house had stood; there’d been a patch of colour amid the weeds last year, but the wind had been at work since, and the rains. Granny’s land was blooming. Her climbing rose had flourished. Last year it had produced a few stunted flowers but this year it was a hedge, grown along the chicken wire fence, a hedge of pink and green today.

  Jenny walked there for half an hour, finding colour in the goat paddock, a cluster of marigolds, finding a lone snapdragon, not as tall as it may have grown in a cultivated garden, but adding colour to the green of the grass and looking fresh after the rain.

  White ants had done for Elsie’s house. She stood well back from it, looking at its sagging roof, its broken windows, its chimney. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in Woody Creek West.

  THE RING

  Television had murdered respect for politicians. If viewers took a dislike to a PM’s visage, they not only changed the channel, but their vote. Dour-faced Malcolm Fraser, who sounded more Pom than Australian, didn’t perform well on camera. Andrew Peacock had the looks and charm of a movie star, or so he believed. Bob Hawke, a down to earth Aussie to his booze-soaked bootlaces, was everyone’s mate, his face well known for years on the box as the ACTU trade union man. Bob bulldozed his way into parliament.

  There were dozens of elected politicians who sat around on the backbenches for years, faceless when they arrived and nameless when they were gone. Bob wasn’t the type to sit quietly on anyone’s backbench. Give him a year or two and he’d weasel his way up to the top of the pile, then God help well-heeled Malcolm – if Andrew Peacock didn
’t do him in first. He had his eye on the top job, and the in-fighting amongst the Liberals was destabilising the party – or softening them up for another Labor attack.

  There had been no television cameramen, no flashing box in the corner of sitting rooms during Bob Menzies’ long reign. Filmgoers had seen him on newsreels, the quintessential statesman, standing beside king or queen and appearing to be in his rightful place. While Menzies had been at the helm, Australia had known stability and, without thought, Jenny had cast her vote for him, but she had little respect for the current Liberal Party and not much less for the opposition. By November, she didn’t know if the problem was in Canberra, in Woody Creek or in her own head. There were days when, had a livestock train been passing through town, she might have stowed away with the sheep.

  She’d always loved trains, or maybe just their railway lines leading away from Woody Creek. She’d been born beside the railway lines, then lived beside them. For years, Norman had carried her to work with him, and all day she’d played at his station. Loved watching the trains pull in then pull out, taking their lucky passengers down those twin ruled lines to the east, or to the west.

  At fifteen she’d stowed away in a goods van, escaping from newborn Margot and marriage to one of her rapists. Four months later those lines and a Salvation Army couple had brought her back to town, pregnant with Georgie. At eighteen, Margot and Georgie left behind, she’d ridden trains for two days with ten month old Jimmy, running that time from Vern Hooper’s threats of court. She’d run to Sydney, to Jim, to a room in a classy boarding house where for the week of his leave, they’d played mummies and daddies and happily ever after.

  Jimmy had been a three year old when those lines brought her back, Cara, a three week old baby, left in Sydney with Myrtle, the childless landlady. In ’46, Jenny had caught the train with Ray King and all three of her kids, escaping that time from who she was – or wasn’t. Jimmy had been going on six when she’d come running home again. A week later he was gone, stolen from Granny’s kitchen by Lorna Hooper.

  The railway lines were still in reasonable repair. Goods trains used them during the wheat harvest, but Melbourne was no longer the city Jenny had known. There were streets down there today where you could play ‘spot the Aussie’, and have trouble spotting one. Migrants of every race and religious persuasion had swelled Melbourne’s population and the amount of traffic on the roads. Vietnamese had set up their own do-it-yourself migration policy in the late seventies, arriving at Australia’s northern boundaries in leaky boats. Migration wasn’t new to Australia. Whether they’d come on the First Fleet in chains, as free settlers like the first James Hooper, or with gold fever, they’d come on boats from other lands. In the years after the war, countless thousands of immigrants, displaced by that five-year massacre, had been shipped in, sent to camps for a few weeks, given a few words of English, then packed off in manageable batches to work in country towns where they’d been expected to fit into the community. Australia had absorbed them into her mix and match of humanity. They’d intermarried with the locals and thirty years on it was difficult to pick them from the old Aussie – and impossible to pick their kids. No doubt they’d had their own cultures, though back in Bob Menzies’ era, no one had mentioned the word – unless they were discussing the making of cheese. A cheesy word, culture.