The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  The white-headed coot recognised his receipt, so she’d opened Papillon to display its missing pages.

  ‘Were they missing when you bought it?’

  ‘Had I required loo paper, I would have used one of the others,’ she’d said, then emptied the bag onto his counter.

  ‘I don’t give refunds,’ he’d said, pointing to a sign on the wall behind his register stating NO REFUNDS in large black print.

  ‘Which doesn’t apply to faulty merchandise,’ Georgie said.

  It took time. It took a second customer waiting for service before he’d refunded her one dollar eighty, and she’d left – left the books and bag on his counter.

  ‘I’m not responsible for my customers’ poor taste, sweetheart,’ he’d called after her.

  She’d spent her Mondays, her days off from the supermarket, on trains to Melbourne where she’d applied for a copy of her birth certificate, aware she’d need identification when she attempted to access her seven bank accounts opened back in ’67, a few days after Charlie’s funeral – opened with the black money he’d secreted away in an antique biscuit tin beneath his storeroom bed.

  Had his daughter deserved it, Georgie may have given it up, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to her father, though the poor old bloke had hung around for a week, waiting for her and his granddaughter to come.

  A few generations of mice had nested in that money, which Georgie had laundered, literally laundered it, in the kitchen sink, with Rinso and Dettol – then ironed those notes dry, ironed them flat.

  With Australia in the process of changing over to decimal currency, she’d had to get rid of the old notes fast, which had led to the best weekend of her life. She’d caught the bus to Melbourne and stayed the weekend with Cara. Bought her red ute off the showroom floor and paid cash for it. She’d taken Cara and a handbag full of ‘mouse money’ to the racetrack, where they’d cashed big notes to place fifty-cent bets then, on the Monday, with Cara back in the schoolroom, Georgie had done the rounds of city banks, opening accounts in a variety of versions of her name. For twelve months Cara had added leftover ‘mouse money’ to each account. They’d got rid of it.

  Half-sisters and best friends for a time. The rot had set in when Raelene and Dino Collins broke into Cara’s unit and stripped it. Georgie’s fault. They’d found Cara’s address on a letter in her handbag. Georgie’s concern had been for Cara’s possessions. She hadn’t known of her history with Dino Collins. Not until she’d read the reports on Collins’ first trial had she known of Collins’ youthful threat made to a schoolgirl.

  The night of the kidnap Cara had hinted at a history. ‘This is his payback, Georgie,’ she’d said. ‘He bided his time until I had something to lose, then he took it.’

  Should have questioned her that night. Hadn’t. Had believed there’d be time, that there’d be phone calls and chubby letters.

  Nothing. Not a note.

  Each Monday for weeks, Georgie had caught the train from Geelong to Melbourne and with her driver’s licence, birth certificate and chequebook for identification, she’d accessed her bank accounts. Gina Morgan’s and Georgina Morrison King’s balances had been transferred into Georgina Morgan Morrison’s account. She’d filled in forms to apply for a credit card. John the disciple’s card had given him access to money, until he’d accessed it too often. She thought about the trio in Melbourne, about their bank bill. Interest rates on credit were high. She could have helped them out with her ‘mouse money’, which had never been quite real to her anyway. Didn’t know where they lived. Didn’t have a clue what their family names were, other than one of them being a Dunn, which had reminded her of the chook dung she’d dodged for most of her life.

  One Monday she’d found the correspondence college she’d posted her assignments to. She’d gone in and spoken to a woman about her lost certificates. It would be possible to obtain replacement certificates if she filled in a form and lodged it along with a statutory declaration, the woman had said. Maybe she’d do it. The ‘statutory declaration’ suggested those certificates might have been worth more than the paper they’d been printed on. She’d sat her first exams with a bunch of schoolkids. Had sat her accountancy exams with a bunch of the mixed and matched. Should have kept them in her safety deposit box with her share certificates. Could have put them in her top drawer instead of Itchy-foot’s diaries.

  The quintessential survivor, Archie Foote, he’d wriggled his way in, as had her seven bankbooks. What did that make her? The quintessential money-making machine?

  She had a ton of money. The money from the sale of Charlie’s would need to be invested. The rent she received from Charlie’s old house would have ballooned while she’d been away. She’d get her finances organised while she was home and maybe buy a new ute. Her red ute had taken a battering and had half of Australia clinging to it. A good old ute though, it had carried her safely around Australia and brought her home.

  Home?

  Woody Creek was her only address. The bank had it. The correspondence college knew her Woody Creek address.

  Amy McPherson was a Justice of the Peace. She’d witness a statutory declaration.

  See what tomorrow brings, Georgie thought.

  FOG

  When two days of nagging didn’t convince Georgie to move into town, Harry, Teddy and Lenny came to pull down and carry away the front veranda. They exposed the meter box. It looked intact. Teddy crawled into the roof cavity to look at the wires. He reported them intact.

  Harry had taken charge of Georgie’s chainsaw. He and his sons felled three saplings, grown round enough in Georgie’s absence to qualify as trees. They used them as props beneath the kitchen floor, which did nothing to alter its lean but might prevent the lean from becoming more acute. The junk beneath Elsie’s house supplied a slab of solid timber. They used it to prop up the rear legs of Elsie’s old refrigerator.

  It took four days more for the electricity company to reconnect the power, but by the sixth day of Georgie’s occupation, while Harry held the hose, Georgie flicked the light switch and a globe lit up in Elsie’s kitchen. Once satisfied the house wasn’t going to burn, Harry reconnected his hose to the pipe feeding into the kitchen tap. They had little faith when Georgie pushed the refrigerator plug into its socket and turned it on but, like Frankenstein, the antique shuddered into life.

  Georgie hadn’t been into town. A traveller accrues survival supplies and Jenny had been coming by daily with fresh bread, soups, stew and smokes. Georgie had been home for eight days before she ran out of coffee.

  She parked her ute where she’d always parked it, at the kerb out front of Charlie’s – of what had once been Charlie’s. An alien now stood on that windy corner, a long white characterless barn.

  Without its verandas, its roof looked taller, or maybe it was the green paint on that previously rusty roof that made it appear taller. She walked down its western side, then back, walked by its glass door then on to the post office where she collected her mail. A share dividend and an envelope containing her bank card. She slid both into her handbag then walked back to the barn, to the glass door that blasted her eardrums when it rumbled open. Glanced up to where Charlie’s cow bell had hung. Gone, as was his long counter. A row of white cabinet fridges stood where it had been, self-service fridges, self-service aisles too, narrow by necessity.

  No sign of a shop assistant, but half a dozen trolleys. She helped herself to one then served herself a pound of butter, a block of tasty cheese, a large jar of coffee. Stood staring at Charlie’s storeroom door for minutes. It was open, so she peered in, expecting cartons but seeing saucepans, garden hoses, crockery – and grog!

  Elsie’s tank water wasn’t drinkable. She loaded a carton of Victoria Bitter into her trolley then picked up a small saucepan. She’d been boiling eggs in her travelling billy, heating beans and soups and stew in it then boiling water for coffee. She tossed the saucepan in.

  The new owner, now waiting behind a small g
lass counter to take her money, looked to be somewhere between fifty and sixty, and didn’t look happy to see her. She knew how to use a modern register, as did Georgie these days.

  ‘How’s business?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Slow,’ the woman said. ‘You’re not a local.’

  ‘No. I’ll have a carton of Marlboro too, thanks.’

  Smokes and beer swelled the register’s total, though not enough to lift the corners of the woman’s mouth.

  ‘Have a good day,’ Georgie said.

  ‘They’re few and far between up here,’ the woman said.

  That afternoon, she was seated on the back steps, smoking and staring beyond the space where the house had stood to old Joe Flanagan’s wood paddock, when she heard a car motor die out the front, heard a car door close. Not Jenny’s car door. Not Jenny’s quick footsteps on the gravel either.

  She turned as Jack Thompson walked around the corner, then smiled and raised her hands high.

  ‘Don’t shoot, officer. I’m unarmed,’ she said.

  ‘I come in peace.’ He smiled. Then, ‘What happened to your hair?’

  ‘I blame the white ants,’ she said. ‘What do you blame?’

  ‘Genes,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’

  ‘We’re at Mum’s for the night. Mick Murphy told me you were back.’ Mick Murphy, married to Maudy Hall and raising a second family with her.

  ‘My question still stands,’ she said.

  ‘Mick said that your mother is worried about you.’

  ‘Maudy always liked a bit of drama in her day.’

  ‘You don’t look like you should.’

  ‘I don’t need a comb,’ she said, running her fingers through her crew-cut. ‘Have you heard anything recently about the little girl?’

  He’d been the first cop on the scene at Flanagan’s that night, but for Jack a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since, a lot of little girls had been lost, abused, murdered. He waited for more information.

  ‘Tracy King.’

  ‘Oh. I saw her foster mother at Collins’ trial. I saw your mother too, and you’d swear they were sisters.’

  ‘Cousins,’ Georgie said. ‘The papers at the time said Tracy could have suffered permanent brain damage.’

  ‘Like your Maudy, the media like a bit of drama in their day. She was kept in hospital for four or five days – which doesn’t suggest brain damage to me. They’ve moved interstate, I think. I know Mrs Grenville had to fly in for Collins’ trial.’

  ‘Did the police ever speak to Tracy?’

  Jack nodded. ‘They got nothing. She was four years old. All she’d been interested in was who had driven her to the hospital and when she was going home. The mother refused to allow those doing the interview to wake up memories of bad men and boxes.’

  ‘She looked dead that night.’

  ‘Had there been more heat in the day she would have been.’

  ‘Is Collins playing possum, Jack?’

  ‘They say not. He’s in a wheelchair and having trouble coming to terms with the fact. The psych treating him says he’s having flashbacks. His parents drowned when he was a kid. He’s supposed to have dived for an hour attempting to drag them out of their submerged car.’

  ‘Collins is a man to be pitied, not punished,’ Georgie quoted. ‘I’ve read it all. There’s not a word been printed about the mongrel I haven’t read.’ She drew on her cigarette then pitched the butt. ‘And I still guarantee that he’s playing possum.’

  ‘The last time I saw him he was drugged to the eyeballs and had one of those oxygen tube things under his nose.’

  ‘If it was to his benefit, he could play dead and you’d believe him,’ Georgie said. ‘Want a beer?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.’

  ‘A beer might be faster.’

  ‘When did you start drinking?’

  ‘Since I tasted some of the stuff they call water in the outback – and what’s in Elsie’s tank tastes worse,’ she said, leading the way through to the kitchen.

  He tested the floor as he entered and followed as far as the sitting room, where he stood looking down the hole to the junk below.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A modern innovation,’ Georgie said. ‘All houses will have them in a year or two. It saves picking up what you sweep. Do you want beer now or coffee later?’

  ‘You’re a mad woman,’ he said. ‘This place will fall on your head one night.’

  ‘So they keep telling me.’ She removed a bottle from the refrigerator, used the edge of the table to knock the top off, rinsed an enamel mug with beer then filled it while he tested the floorboards as he entered the kitchen. ‘Mug or bottle?’ she asked, offering both.

  ‘Have you spoken to anyone since that night?’ he asked.

  ‘You get to speak to a few in eighteen months, Jack.’

  He chose the mug. ‘I meant a professional.’

  ‘I had a few words with a professional road builder—’

  ‘You lost a sister. You were damn near burned in your bed. You’re living in conditions a vagrant wouldn’t call home – and drinking. You need to talk it out, Gina.’

  ‘I closed Gina’s account before I left Melbourne. I was going to close Georgina’s too but she’s now the proud new owner of a birth certificate and a bank card.’

  ‘Are you all right for money?’

  ‘Want a loan?’ She gestured to her upturned oil drum, her sleeping bag on it, folded as a cushion. ‘The guest gets the chair,’ she said.

  He drank but didn’t sit, so she sat.

  ‘What’s going on in your head, love?’

  ‘It’s too short for lice.’

  ‘You had beautiful hair.’

  ‘You didn’t have a bad crop yourself.’

  ‘At least you remember what I used to have.’

  ‘I remember everything,’ she said. ‘I see everything. Raelene opened up a third eye in my eyebrow that night and through it I can see ants crawling around the moon’s craters. Someone should have hit me with a shifting spanner twenty years ago.’

  ‘I considered clubbing you and dragging you off to my cave.’

  ‘How many kids did you end up with?’

  ‘Just the two boys. The youngest is still in school, the oldest is still trying to do what his mother wants him to do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Become a businessman instead of a copper. He wants to be a copper.’

  ‘You’re still living in Melbourne?’

  ‘We built a new house a few years back. Where have you been?’

  ‘Like the old song says, I’ve been everywhere, man.’

  ‘How long are you here for?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘As long as it takes to do what?’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I find out,’ Georgie said.

  ‘If you don’t want to stay with your mum, get a cabin out at the caravan park.’

  ‘Been there, done that. This house mightn’t be home but the land is. I’ve got a stove, an unlimited wood yard.’

  ‘And you’re sitting on an oil drum, freezing your arse off.’

  ‘While confronting my past, reviewing it with my third eye. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do after a catastrophe?’ she said.

  ‘Your sister has been dead for near on two years. It’s time to start getting on with your life.’

  ‘That, my friend, is a supremely ridiculous statement. While one lives and breathes, one is getting on with one’s life. I had a birthday in March, and the March before that, and next year I’ll have another one. Drink your beer and go. You’re disturbing my third eye.’

  ‘You’re disturbing me, or this place is, and that bloody haircut is.’

  Again she ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Cutting it off was a part of the great erasure of self, the rubbing out of she who had been me. Whoever she was should have died in that fire, and would have if Raelene hadn’t knocked dow
n the chicken wire fence. Had it been standing, there’s no way Harry and those two cops could have got close enough to my bedroom window to break it. I’ll guarantee that she was heading for my bedroom to toss another one of her petrol bombs when she tripped and bombed herself. She didn’t give a damn one way or the other about Margot. It was me she wanted dead, me and Cara, but Cara was gone, and Raelene inadvertently saved me by knocking down that fence. Try to work that one out, Jack, because I can’t.’

  ‘Some might say God was watching over you?’

  ‘Good one. Why me and not Margot?’

  ‘I’ve got no answers for you, love,’ he said.

  ‘And some paid professional does? A priest, maybe? Can he tell me why Raelene’s body was found four metres from my bed and I didn’t even hear her screams?’

  ‘You were zonked out on painkillers when I left at two.’

  ‘Do you dream much?’

  ‘If I do, I forget them,’ Jack said.

  Georgie stood to look out of the lone kitchen window, to wipe with her hand at its dust and cobweb curtain. ‘I used to forget them. Now I dream in technicolour and they stay, every one of them stays. I was dreaming about Raelene the night of the fire. I was chasing her through a maze of tunnels beneath Charlie’s shop. She’d pinched my handbag,’ she said, then wiped the window again. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘There’s a pea souper of a fog coming down out there. You’d better go while you can still see to go.’