The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  And she couldn’t spend a penny of that blood money account. Knew that updating that account each June hadn’t been to keep the account up to date, but to keep it alive – and to keep Jimmy alive. If she closed it, he’d be gone.

  She had no problem spending her own and Ray’s insurance money and as a young male moved away, she took his place at the head of queue, tucked her bankbook away and offered a plastic card to the teller.

  ‘Five thousand, please,’ she said.

  *

  John was in bed before Jenny placed the rubber-banded notes beside Jim’s typewriter – still in the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t need your money,’ he said.

  ‘You will,’ she said. ‘An electrician is coming in next week to rewire the house and install fluorescent lights in the small sitting room.’

  He looked at her, then rose from his chair. ‘You go too far,’ he said, and left the room, left his typewriter and her money on the table.

  Five minutes later she followed him to bed. And he wasn’t there. She found him in Trudy’s unused room.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ No reply, and he didn’t go to sleep that fast. ‘Talk to me, Jim.’

  Still no reply.

  Maybe she’d gone too far. She went to her sewing room where Maisy’s evening gown waited for its hem. Chiffon frocks in stores had machine-stitched hems. Miss Blunt had hand stitched them. She’d taught Jenny how to roll a chiffon hem. She’d rolled a few since, though none of her own. She’d never worn chiffon. She’d never owned a long ballgown.

  Picked up Maisy’s blue. Picked up a reel of blue thread and her pincushion and returned to the kitchen to stitch, and to think.

  At fourteen, she’d worn a long gown and felt like Cinderella. It had ended its life in shreds. As a ten year old she’d worn a magical ankle-length froth of crepe paper frills, designed by Amy for a school concert. It ended its life in a lavatory pan. Sissy’s daffodil-yellow dress, altered by Maisy for another of Amy’s school concerts, had ended its life in Norman’s kitchen stove. She’d almost owned a brand new blue dress to wear to the talent quest. She’d tried it on in Miss Blunt’s fitting room. Amber hadn’t approved. She’d brought home a gruesome brown.

  Jenny’s hands, requiring no direction, worked on while she smiled at the memory of her attempt to dye that gruesome brown blue – and created a dirty grey. That same dye-bath had turned Amber’s moth-eaten creamy beige ballgown to the prettiest shade of blue – and it had ruined her life.

  Shook that thought away, made three fast stitches then rolled another inch or two of hem.

  Not often did she allow her mind to roam back to the night of that blue gown with its sheen of green when the light caught its folds. If she hadn’t dyed it, if she hadn’t worn it to the ball, if she hadn’t argued with Norman, if she hadn’t climbed out of her bedroom window, there would have been no Margot. Too many ifs, and if there’d been no Margot there would have been no Georgie. Couldn’t have survived her life without her beautiful Georgie. And Jimmy. And if not for Margot there would have been no Trudy and no beautiful books with Jennifer Hooper’s name on them.

  Jennifer Hooper. Would I have been a Hooper if not for the ball and Margot? Would I have married Jim anyway? Probably not. If not for that blue gown, my entire life would have been different. I would have sung in other talent quests, and might have won the next one. I might have sung with the Willama band. I would have gone to that Bendigo boarding school, would have got an education and done something, been something.

  What?

  Something.

  Might-have-beens don’t count for much. She shrugged her shoulders, stretched her neck, adjusted her glasses, knew she should have stitched the hem by day but stitched on, determined not to think of Jim, who hadn’t been her Jim since he’d heard about Lorna – and had been even less like him since Amber’s arrest. Thought of him before the war. Thought of him in Sydney. Loved him. That week in Sydney had been the best week of her life. Loved watching him with Jimmy.

  Bloody Sydney.

  She’d hand stitched a blueish/green taffeta frock in the boarding house kitchen, the first frock she’d made without Granny watching her every cut, her every stitch. She’d worn it to Barbara’s twenty-first birthday party and Lila wouldn’t believe Jenny had sewn it. Wore it a second time, to the Sydney club on New Year’s Eve, on her twentieth birthday, and those bastards had ripped it from her on a beach, five of them.

  You can’t fight five. She’d thought she was dead that night, had given in to death and been pleased to give in. Woke stark naked in the sand, an old dog licking her face. He’d guided her eyes to that frock, caught up on a tussock of beach grass, and she’d crawled to it, crawled through sand, every inch of her hurting. It had covered her nakedness – later she’d burnt it in Myrtle’s incinerator.

  Blue frocks had always been her downfall. Even the blue linen dress-length bought for her twenty-first birthday by Granny. She’d loved that dress. Wore it the night Ray King took her to a New Year’s Eve dance. Wore it the day she married him. Had been buttoning it up the day Lorna had driven away with Jimmy.

  Black was safer. The red dress Laurie Morgan had bought in Melbourne ended its life black. A frock of many personalities, that one. She’d dyed it in Sydney and stitched a strip of lace to its neckline to offer it respectability. In Armadale she’d removed the lace, respectability not required when she sang at the jazz club with Itchy-foot.

  She’d stitched herself a smart black suit in Armadale and worn it for years. After the fire, when she’d been looking for clothing that might fit Georgie, she’d dug that suit out from the back of her wardrobe, and its light wool blend fabric had pressed up as good as new.

  And the hem was done. Jenny frowned, checking her work, doubting that it was done. It was. She’d done too much sewing; her hands now worked on automatic pilot. She anchored the thread before snipping it. She checked the seams for dangling threads. Found a few she tied off well before snipping – as Granny had taught her to tie off all threads before snipping.

  It was Granny who’d taught her to use the old treadle sewing machine, who’d taught her to measure three times and cut once. An urge to create was her only guide until Miss Blunt, a fabric artist, had taken her in hand and taught her how to draft a pattern, and to roll chiffon hems – and how to charge like a wounded bull. She never charged Maisy, but Maisy always found a way to pay.

  Brides paid, or their fathers paid. She’d stitched a lot of fairytale wedding gowns. As a twelve year old, she’d dreamt of marrying Clark Gable. Gave up early on that dream and started dreaming for Georgie. Gave up on her and started dreaming for Trudy. And might as well give up on her too. If she ever married, she’d do it on holiday, in a t-shirt and jeans.

  She gave the frock a shake. It needed pressing, but that was for tomorrow. She thought about crawling into Trudy’s bed with him. Knew she should. Knew she’d gone too far today – or hadn’t gone far enough before. He’d had the money. She’d allowed him to make the decisions on how to spend it.

  Maisy’s frock returned to the sewing room, she fed her new god another gift, adjusted his air supply for night burning, told him he was the one true god, then returned to the kitchen to stoke and close down the stove.

  Didn’t want to go to her lonely bed so stood reading Jim’s half-completed page. He always left an incomplete page in his typewriter. He’d written two paragraphs beneath LORNA 1908–1987 and before Jenny was done with her reading she wanted to rip that page from his typewriter and pitch it into the stove. No matter how bad a death might be, it doesn’t wash away the deceased’s past sins.

  She turned to the pile of completed pages he’d placed face down on the table, and she picked up a bunch of eight or ten, hoping to see what he’d written about his father. He wrote well. He wrote too well. Molly Squire had been written well. He wrote in solid blocks of words, dialogue free, a documentation of bland facts. She stood, scanning more pages – and found old James Richard’s four wives. They�
�d warranted a paragraph each; their birth dates, marriage dates, death dates, and the names of the infants who’d killed them.

  She hadn’t considered Jim to be super intelligent as a kid, though he’d always been a reader, or he had been until his obsession with Molly Squire. She sighed and placed his pages down as she’d found them, made a cup of tea, lit a cigarette and thought of Georgie, of Laurie Morgan, found in a secondhand bookshop – and of all of the occupations Jenny might have imagined for him, bookshop proprietor hadn’t been one of them.

  Georgie had been disappointed in who she’d found. She had a face Jenny could read like an open book. The night she’d driven in late with Jack Thompson’s manila envelope, her eyes had been flashing green sparks. Father and daughter, meeting across a counter after forty-six years. That would make a book Jenny would want to read. As would the tale of Lila’s many husbands. As would Granny’s life story. As would my own, Jenny thought. The world was full of stories people would want to read – and Jim was wasting his time and talent again in documenting a cleaned-up history of a family of pig-headed, bigoted swine.

  She glanced again at the half-filled page in the typewriter, LORNA 1908–1987. He’d mentioned her mother, Lorna Langdon. She’d died in childbirth. Granny had known her. She’d described her once as a slim-hipped Englishwoman, nine years Vern’s senior, approved of by old James because of her connections to the English gentry and her five hundred pounds a year. She’d died with Lorna stuck inside her. A Willama doctor had cut her out of her mother’s dead body. Did Jim know that? It was a detail Jenny would have been interested in reading.

  She looked at the wall clock. Its small hand had crept past the two. Had to go to bed. Didn’t want to, so lit another cigarette and sat down at the typewriter to write what she knew of Lorna Langdon who, according to Granny, Vern hadn’t been able to get close enough to, to impregnate.

  She completed the page, wound in another and wrote of the totem pole Lorna, of her childhood, and poor dithering Margaret too.

  More pages rolled in and out. She wrote of the morning Jimmy had been taken.

  Then her rhyming gremlins came out to play.

  RHYME FOR LORNA

  Morning has broken, a fine day for hunting

  Carrion bitch is eager to feast

  Lives to extinguish while daylight comes creeping,

  Blown out to appease the greed of a beast . . .

  GOD IS KIND

  It was after ten when she woke and she would have slept later had John’s elderly Morris not complained for ten minutes before it roared into life.

  ‘Where’s he off to?’ she asked.

  ‘Willama,’ Jim said. His typewriter had gone and his pages. He was stacking his notes.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Film.’

  His one-word replies told her he hadn’t appreciated her addition to his Lorna chapter.

  ‘To see one or to buy one?’

  ‘Buy,’ he said as he walked from the room, her money and her Lorna pages left on the table.

  She picked up both and followed him to the dining room. ‘The small sitting room is warm.’

  ‘Go away, Jen.’

  She tossed the rubber-banded wad down beside his typewriter. ‘My sewing money has paid for half of the food on your table. What’s the difference?’

  ‘I’m attempting to work,’ he said. ‘Close the door on your way out.’

  ‘You’re into factual material. My chapter is all fact.’ There was only his tappity-tap staccato in reply. ‘Every word is fact. The bit about your father marrying Lorna’s mother for her five hundred pounds a year is fact,’ she said.

  ‘If you are attempting to annoy me, you are succeeding,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘You’ve been annoying me since she died.’

  ‘Have you any idea of the amount of work involved in rewiring a house?’

  ‘No more than five thousand’s worth.’

  ‘You didn’t discuss it.’

  ‘I didn’t have another twenty years to waste discussing it, like I wasted on discussing a heater for the sitting room – and I didn’t hear you discussing how you planned to turn what’s supposed to be my home into a bloody Hooper museum.’

  ‘I grew up with that furniture.’

  ‘I grew up with Norman’s. Can you see any of it about?’

  ‘Go away, Jen.’

  ‘I might take my photograph of Norman out to Simon Jenner and get him to paint me a life-sized portrait – and a matching one of the Grinning Granny.’

  She’d got him to his feet.

  ‘Did you ask me before you brought those dogs home to defile every lawn I walk on?’

  ‘Do you prefer tripping over Lila? She hasn’t been inside that gate since the dogs started defiling your lawns – and John picks up most of their leavings anyway. And how often have you been outside this winter? You sit all day writing pages of muck that a reader would need a bulldozer to work his way through. You’re doing exactly what you did with Molly, mixing up an acre of wet, waist-high mud then pitching a few handfuls of diamonds into it. It’s not worth the digging through mud, Jim, and you need to be told before you waste the rest of my life in your puddle.’

  ‘You want to see me angry, Jen?’

  ‘It would be a change from the well-mannered act you’ve been putting on lately.’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘I should have given you my “Rhyme for Lorna”: Morning has broken, a fine day for hunting, carrion bitch is eager to feast . . .’ she quoted. ‘And there you sit conferring sainthood on an evil bitch who took what she wanted from life and didn’t give a tuppenny ha’penny damn for the devastation she left behind.’

  ‘Go!’

  ‘If there was a goods train full of sheep passing through town right now I’d stow away in one of their trucks – and they’d be better company than you.’ The phone was ringing. She walked into the hall. ‘Incidentally,’ she yelled, ‘I’m bringing the ladder in here and pitching that rat-mouthed old coot. He’s polluting the atmosphere.’

  She silenced the phone with a sharp ‘Hello!’ And if it was someone wanting her to sew something, she’d hang up in their ear. But just when you think your world can’t get a whole lot worse, it up and proves you wrong again.

  ‘It’s Paul, Jen. Georgie has been taken by ambulance to St Vincent’s hospital. I’m leaving the college now. I’ll call you when I know more.’

  ‘Georgie! What?’

  ‘She was attacked at home. She was able to phone the police and tell them where I worked,’ he said. ‘I have to go, Jen. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Tell her I’m on my way,’ Jenny said.

  Jim was behind her when she placed the phone down. ‘Someone attacked Georgie. She’s in St Vincent’s hospital. I’m going down there.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll need to be here for the electrician,’ she said.

  Ten minutes later, she was away, two hundred of her five thousand in her handbag. She filled the tank at Teddy’s garage, then drove, drove too fast, not daring to pray for Georgie. Nothing she’d ever prayed for had been given. She’d got down on her knees and begged for Jimmy to be given back to her. She’d got down on her knees to plead to God for Jim to be found safe. She’d prayed for weeks for God to take the Macdonald twins’ leavings out of her belly. She wouldn’t dare a prayer for her Georgie, the only brightness in her world during the dark times. Beautiful Georgie, who’d howled with her when Granny died, who’d sat at her side through the hours of waiting to learn if Ray was alive or dead – her Georgie, who knew every mistake she’d ever made and who’d never blamed her.

  It was a three and a half hour trip to the western outskirts of Melbourne; Jenny did it that day in three. Sydney Road, a solid block of traffic, stopped her flight. Frustrated, jammed between trucks, choking on exhaust fumes, she wasted twenty minutes in that jam, then gave up and turned down a side street, parked the car, locked it and ran to catch a city-bound
tram. It was four forty before she found the hospital and was directed to the lifts.

  She saw Paul first, then Georgie, flat on her back. The tubes dripping into her proved she was alive, and Jenny bawled with relief and throat-choking love for that girl, that woman, her red hair spread on a white pillow, her face near as white as the pillow. Kissed her. Kissed her face and bawled.

  ‘Don’t go mushy on me, mate,’ Georgie said. ‘I look awful when I blush.’

  She looked awful already. They’d clad her in a hospital-issue gown, clad a part of her. One shoulder and her lower neck were gauze padded. Her left arm was immobilised, fluid dripping through a tube into it. Paul was holding her right hand, which he released so he might fetch a second chair. Jenny stole that hand awhile.

  ‘I need a pillow,’ Georgie said.

  ‘You need to lie flat. You’re held together by stitches,’ Paul said.

  ‘They didn’t give me any blood with AIDS in it, did they?’

  ‘You told them no blood transfusions before they knocked you out,’ Paul said.

  ‘A bloke is suing for . . .’

  ‘We’re only allowed to sit with you if you sleep,’ Jenny said.

  Georgie sighed, licked her lips and tried again. ‘He crept up on me,’ she said. ‘I swung the shovel. Or I heard him and swung, or swung then heard him. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Did they get him?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I did,’ Georgie said, and she closed her eyes.

  They thought she was asleep so spoke quietly across her bed. Paul knew little more than he’d known four hours ago, other than that the intruder had driven a taxi he’d parked in the drive, that the police had found the taxi licence of a Novak Wazinosky.

  ‘A taxi driver?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘It may have been stolen,’ Paul said.

  ‘God is kind,’ Georgie said.