The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  How did I get to sixty-four? How did little Jenny Morrison grow a solicitor, a schoolteacher, and Margot, who in turn had grown a nursing sister – one with a charitable heart. Trudy was determined to sell Lorna’s house and give away half of what she received for it.

  No sign of Georgie. She’d said she could become tied up and not get away on time. She wasn’t smoking, or only smoking at parties. Keeping her eye on the corner, Jenny lit a cigarette, intending to smoke it before Georgie turned that corner. Her mind was far away when solicitor Georgie tapped her on the shoulder.

  ‘I was expecting you to come from the other direction.’

  ‘You’re twisted,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I was born that way,’ Jenny said, crushing the butt beneath her shoe.

  ‘You don’t need to waste it. I smoke if I feel like smoking.’

  ‘I know what I was like when I stopped,’ Jenny said.

  ‘You look as if you’ve been buying out Melbourne.’

  ‘Most of it’s working clothes for Jim.’

  They lifted the loaded buggy into the boot, then they were in and away, and nothing more was said until a traffic light stopped them.

  ‘Do you like your job?’

  ‘I didn’t have to pay to get the legal work done on the house.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I’ve got the wrong attitude for it, Jen. I can’t yet see as innocent those who are guilty as sin. I want to hang the mongrel Boss God Marino is defending at the moment but he’ll probably get him off.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Your fault.’ Georgie braked, ten or so cars back from another red light. ‘You spent half your life telling me I had brains enough to do anything. I decided to prove you right – or wrong.’

  ‘Why law?’

  ‘I had a dream,’ Georgie said with feeling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me standing in a courtroom convicting Dino Collins.’

  ‘I could have sworn he was driving my taxi yesterday,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I used to see him on every motorbike that roared by.’

  The traffic crawling at a snail’s pace, they made it through the next lights as they changed to red. Two other cars made it through behind them.

  ‘I don’t know how you stand this day every day.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Georgie said. ‘If you want to smoke, smoke.’

  ‘I’ll smoke when we get home. When I lived down here before the war, no one could have conceived of this many cars in the entire world,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Your water-pistol bandit managed to get his hands on a few.’ They’d done most of one block before she spoke again. ‘I found him a while back.’

  ‘You found Laurie Morgan?’

  ‘The one and only,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where you lost him.’

  ‘In Geelong?’

  ‘He owns a secondhand bookshop.’

  ‘My God. How did you track him down?’ Jenny asked and she lit a cigarette and wound her window down.

  ‘I didn’t.’ Georgie braked. ‘His son walked into my office one night and he was the spitting image of him. Red hair, green eyes, same face, tall. Light me one, Jen.’

  She drew on her cigarette and, as the traffic moved, slipped into the central lane, which appeared to be moving. ‘I asked him if he was a relative of Laurence George Morgan, and he was his dear old dad.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I drove down to Geelong and bought two books from him.’

  ‘What did he say when you told him?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he would have thought it was a bloody good joke – and at the time, I didn’t feel like laughing.’

  They drove on in silence until a solid block of traffic in front and behind slowed them to a first gear crawl.

  ‘There must have been an accident,’ Jenny said.

  ‘It’s normal here for this time of day. We’ll be right once we get off this road.’

  ‘Why buy so far out of town?’

  ‘House, trees, price, and dirt that will grow anything.’ She ashed her cigarette. ‘Your bandit told me I looked like his mother. I’ve got a feeling that he had his suspicions.’

  ‘He was worldly wise when I knew him, world weary too,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Hardly a fifteen year old’s type.’

  ‘I wasn’t old enough to know what type he was. He was better than the alternative.’

  ‘Namely?’

  ‘Margot. Her fathers.’

  ‘How do you have a kid you don’t care about, Jen?’

  ‘I don’t know, love. I’m sorry now that I couldn’t care about her. Before she was born, Granny used to tell me that I was making her from my flesh and blood. I never believed her – and still don’t. She was their flesh. I used to . . . used to hope she’d grow more like Maisy, that one day we’d find a common meeting ground. It wasn’t fated.’ They got through the next traffic lights. ‘Are you going to see Laurie again?’

  ‘I considered it for a time – considered taking you down there with me to see if he recognised you.’

  ‘When did you find him?’

  ‘April of ’86.’

  ‘And you left it until now to tell me?’

  ‘He was something I had to come to terms with. I saw his son again, as a client, in my office. He’s not my type.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Georgie said. ‘And he’s not much older than Trudy.’

  They were stuck again in solid traffic before she spoke once more. ‘I never wanted to know your water-pistol bandit, just to know that he was real. He was a bit like Santa Claus and Jesus to me when I was a kid, unseen, unknown but supposedly there.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve seen him. He exists, and I don’t need him in my life.’

  ‘His kids are your blood.’

  Georgie pointed to a couple in the lane beside them. ‘Do you want to know them?’

  ‘They’re not my blood.’

  ‘How do you know? From what I’ve read of Itchy-foot’s diaries, he could have seeded the earth with relatives.’

  And probably had, Jenny thought as she looked at the couple. The woman had curly blonde hair.

  ‘I used to envy Jimmy’s Grandpa and Margot’s Nana, and all of their aunties when I was a kid,’ Georgie admitted. ‘I remember the night Granny got us out of bed to meet our grandfather, Norman, and I remember thinking, oh boy, I’m catching up with them. I had an aunty too, who needed two chairs to sit on, then the next thing I knew, Grandpa Norman was dead and Aunty Sissy had disappeared. My tongue was probably hanging out for a blood relative when Cara turned up. I welcomed her into my pack like a thirsting man sinking his head into a water trough.’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘She didn’t hang around long.’

  They were creeping towards a green light, but the red beat them. ‘Blood is overrated,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I’m no expert on it.’

  ‘Want to know the weirdest bit about the whole water-pistol bandit deal? Back when I was working in Geelong, I bought half a dozen books from the flirty-eyed old coot, and I didn’t have a clue who he was. So much for the old genetic fireworks display.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Like every other old coot who still thinks that women from fifteen to fifty are after his body. He’s nothing like his mug shot. I wasn’t certain he was who he was until he took his glasses off and I saw my own eyes looking back at me.’

  ‘He probably saw his looking back at him.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘He’d be in his seventies now,’ Jenny said.

  ‘He doesn’t look it. He’s carrying too much weight, still got a good head of hair. Did you ever see a photograph of his mother?’

  ‘He never mentioned her. He spoke about his sister once or twice. At the time I didn’t know she was dead. He’s still married?’

  ‘I spoke to his wife on the phone. She sounded normal. The
re were kids in the background. The papers Jack’s father dug up on him in ’59 said he had two sons and an infant daughter. He could be breeding up a second family with a second or third wife. He looks capable of it.’

  ‘They’d be his grandkids,’ Jenny said and they drove on. ‘I’m pleased you found him. I’m more pleased that you found him in a bookshop and not a jail. I’ve thought of him from time to time through the years.’

  ‘He took advantage of a fifteen year old kid. You’re supposed to hate him.’

  ‘He thought I was nineteen, and he gave me you,’ Jenny said. ‘I know he cared about me, and if not for me, he probably would have been long gone from Melbourne.’

  ‘He cared enough about me to find an abortionist.’

  ‘It’s what I wanted. Don’t think of him as the bad guy. He was kind, and he did what he could to protect me at the end. “When it’s over, it’s over, sweetheart,” he said. “Walk away from me. We’re out of options.”’

  ‘Did he know where you were from?’

  ‘Granny reported me missing in the papers.’

  ‘He never bothered to look you up when they let him out,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Granny would have greeted him with her rifle.’ Jenny drew on the cigarette. ‘For three weeks he didn’t touch me, other than to bandage my sprained ankle, and as soon as I could walk on it, he gave me a five-pound note and told me to buy a ticket home. I told him I wanted to stay. Had I been old enough to see outside of my own problems, I might have realised that he was as mixed up as me. Fifteen year old kids don’t see far.’

  ‘How come you didn’t have an abortion?’

  ‘Granny – and maybe him. The last day I saw him, when I asked him for the abortionist’s address, he gave it to me and said, “Poor little Georgie.” He would have been a kind father to you.’

  ‘But wasn’t, isn’t, and such is life,’ Georgie said. ‘It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Why his son chose Marino and Associates. Why he was brought into my cubbyhole. Paul reckons there’s a big computer out there, a fat old controller sitting behind it, playing computer games and shaking with laughter as he looks down on the blood and guts and chaos he manages to create.’

  ‘Do you love him, Georgie?’

  ‘None of your business, Jen.’

  ‘Do you like your job?’

  ‘I’m making good money.’

  ‘Is it what you want to do for the rest of your life?’

  ‘Ask a plague of fleas if sucking on your smelly dogs’ backsides is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. That’s all we are, a plague of humanity, sucking the blood from some greater life form, each one climbing over the others to get to the juiciest spot.’

  ‘Are you a happy flea?’

  ‘I looked up happy in a dictionary once. Glad, it said. Content, fortunate, prosperous, successful. I fit the criteria. What about you?’

  ‘Jim is prosperous enough. We’ve had success with our kids’ books.’

  ‘What about you, I said?’

  ‘I miss Amy like I miss Granny. We worked on Molly Squire together until six weeks before she died. I miss that too.’

  ‘I thought it was Jim’s magnum opus.’

  ‘No one wanted to publish it. He spent years on the thing, changing bits of it, but not the bits that needed changing. I told him to self-publish. He told me to burn it, so I took it down to Amy. We’d tried for years to convince him to add in my Wadimulla bits. He wouldn’t so we did. Amy’s fingers were twisted with arthritis at the end, but she could still type faster than me. She owns – owned – a little portable typewriter, more modern than Jim’s – not as noisy.’

  Jenny looked at her hands, at her fingernails. Cook and laundry maid, chief gardener and seamstress, her hands were work worn and old. Were they happy hands? They had been. They were nicotine stained since Amy had died – then Lorna. Strong hands. They’d been afraid to hold Amy’s hand too tightly during her last days, scared they’d hurt her, but on that Sunday, Amy had gripped Jenny’s hand.

  ‘“Promise me that you’ll finish Molly,” she said to me the last time I saw her. “Write it in your own inimitable way, and dedicate it to me, Jennifer.”’

  ‘So do it,’ Georgie said.

  ‘She was the driver. I used to nick off down to her place with the dogs and stay for hours. We’d kill ourselves laughing over some of the things I made poor Molly do. I don’t think I can stand to look at it without her. I don’t think I can stand that town without her either.’

  ‘Get out of it.’

  ‘I’d move tomorrow. Jim won’t budge.’

  ‘What does he think of Trudy giving his sister’s money to charity?’

  ‘I doubt he’s even heard her. He’s wrapped himself up in guilt because everyone in town knows that Lorna lay dead for weeks and that her only brother didn’t miss her. Before we knew it was Lorna, he’d said that she must have had family – and she did – and I can’t raise a smidgen of sympathy for her. I can’t. I try to imagine her afraid of some young bloke with his bludgeon but keep seeing her carrying Jimmy out to the car, hearing her clashing the gears as she drove him away. I hated that woman and dead or alive, I can’t change what I feel about her. I’m lacking in human kindness.’

  ‘What do you think about Trudy giving the money away?’

  ‘It’s her money,’ Jenny said.

  ‘This is me, Jen.’

  ‘Okay, then I think that charity begins at home, and that one day Trudy will appreciate the money – and that she must have got her charitable inclinations from Teddy’s side of the family because she didn’t get them from me or Margot.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem interested in getting married,’ Georgie said.

  ‘She’s got itchy feet and a trade like Itchy-foot’s that will get her a job anywhere – and I’m scared she’ll go somewhere one day and won’t come back, and I wish to God that Lorna had left her money to the church – and speaking of marriage, am I likely to be making a wedding dress for you?’

  ‘Marriage is out of vogue, Jen,’ Georgie said.

  ‘How did you get together with him?’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Nothing – as far as I can tell. I meant, how did he run you down?’

  They drove through a set of lights before Georgie replied. ‘I convinced myself the night of the fire that I’d been saved for a reason, and I drove all over Australia looking for that reason. When I put the rock through my sump, I started thinking I’d been saved to die alone beside a dusty road, fifty miles from Wittenoom, and along came Paul and his mates. We were Victorians and way over there any Victorian was home. I came back to stand in the witness box, convinced that I’d been saved to convict the swine, and the mongrel wriggled out of a second trial. I started the uni course so I could get him when they let him out of the psych ward, but he dropped off the face of the planet. I was planning to hit the road again when I finished the course, then I went to the Doncaster shopping centre one Friday night and when I came out to my ute, Paul was leaning against it.’

  ‘So you decided he was the reason you’d been saved?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I think,’ Jenny said, ‘I’ve just decided to stop nagging Jim to move down to Melbourne. I wouldn’t drive in this traffic if you paid me a million dollars to do it.’

  THE COMMISSION HOUSE

  While Georgie duelled with peak-hour traffic, Sissy and Lacy stood out the front of Number 12 waiting for a taxi. They ate out on Wednesday evenings then went to bingo. A car turned into their street. Lacy identified it as a police car and the two women watched it cruise by then stop opposite the house with the dogs.

  ‘Someone died,’ Lacy said.

  They watched a middle-aged male and the young female driver step from the car as a taxi made the turn. Sissy and Lacy were in it and away before the uniformed pair left their vehicle and crossed over to Number 12’s side of the stree
t.

  Jack Thompson had read what there was on file about Amber Morrison. He’d seen old photographs of her. Uncertain what to expect, he rapped on the front door, rapped several times before it was opened by the white-headed, apron-clad little woman.

  ‘Mrs Amber Morrison?’ he asked.

  ‘So they tell me,’ the old one replied.

  ‘We’d like a few words with you, if we may,’ he said.

  ‘It’s dinner time,’ she said.

  Old records stated that Amber Morrison was five foot four and a half, had greying/blonde hair, blue eyes, and weighed eight stone three ounces. The woman blocking his entrance might have weighed thirty-five kilograms, she’d shrunk in height, but her eyes were blue. She wasn’t what Jack had been hoping to find in that house, but he showed her his badge and, when it didn’t move her, he told her he had a warrant to search the house. Amber Morrison stepped to the side and removed her apron, and Jack and his colleague entered the kind of sitting room they hadn’t expected to find behind that door.

  Through the years they’d had reason to enter a few similarly constructed Commission homes. Some were well cared for, as many were not. Money had been spent in this room. Jack glanced at an old cabinet on his right, then he turned to the mantelpiece – and there they were, set on either side of an old marble clock, Miss Hooper’s missing vases. Her minister and his wife had mentioned that pair of vases.

  ‘You are alone, Mrs Morrison?’

  ‘My son-in-law is about,’ she said, then placing her folded apron down she stepped forward to reclaim a vase from his careless hand. He’d upended it to glance at the maker’s name, but returned it to Amber, who placed it back where it belonged.

  ‘An attractive pair,’ Jack said.

  ‘There was a grace to the old days,’ Amber said.

  ‘A few would agree with you there,’ he said. His colleague was interested in a pair of twelve-inch statuettes on the polished cabinet – also missing, according to the minister and his wife.