The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  Jenny thought of the black leather hot pants and platform-soled boots, immortalised in the second Witch book.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll leave her to you then, Mrs Hooper,’ the constable said.

  ‘No. I’ll do what I can with her hair then you can have her back.’

  She led her visitors through to the only warm room in the house and, in better lighting, saw why the constable was eager to be rid of Lila. She was naked, or nearly so, beneath Joe Flanagan’s gabardine overcoat. Jenny took her arm.

  ‘Bedroom,’ she said.

  ‘He ripped my dress off me and burned it too. It set me back fifty-five dollars—’

  Jenny tossed underwear at her, slacks, a sweater, and while Joe’s coat came off and the clothing went on, she fetched her scissors. There isn’t a lot you can do to level up the wool of a badly shorn sheep other than to cut the rest of it off. The finished cut was shorter than Georgie’s crew-cut, and there was nothing to be done about the gaps where Joe had cut a mite too close to the scalp. It would grow. Jenny offered the Collingwood beanie. Lila pulled it on before the constable drove her home. Old Joe was in hospital.

  ‘That got rid of a night,’ Jim said, then relayed what the constable had told him. Lila had split Joe’s head open with the back end of a broom.

  The Wednesday edition of the Willama Gazette featured Lila on page two. She’d removed her beanie for the cameraman: LOCAL DAIRY FARMER ARRESTED.

  Maybe he’d been arrested, but by Wednesday he was back in his milking shed, limping, one eye closed, one side of his head as naked as Lila’s, apart from the black stitches crawling across his scalp. He wasn’t sighted in town for three weeks. Had he been himself, he might have noticed sooner that two bank cards, which accessed accounts he’d opened in joint names, for taxation purposes, which he’d believed to be safely hidden, hadn’t been safe, a fact he remained unaware of until his bank statements arrived in the mail.

  He closed both accounts but, as most know, it’s of little use locking the stable door after the mare has bolted. This time she’d bolted with a haystack.

  PART TWO

  GREENSBOROUGH

  Trudy had a trade she worked at so she might travel. Georgie had travelled, then acquired a trade.

  In 1980, she’d become aware that universities had opened their doors to mature-age students and had applied to do law, driven by a burning desire to equip herself with the necessary tools to hang Dino Collins – and she hadn’t heard a word about him since. He may have been dead, but had he passed on, that would have made headline news: JAMES COLLINS FINALLY AT REST WITH HIS BELOVED PARENTS.

  During her last year at university, she’d become convinced she’d wasted five more years of her life, that she’d have little chance of beating any one of the bright young sparks in her lectures to a job. Spent a fortune on a black suit for the interviews – with pantihose. Wore that same suit and pantihose to five interviews, made up her face five times, pinned up her hair.

  She bought a black frock when called back for a second interview at Marino and Associates – and she’d walked away with a job.

  The money was unbelievable. She had her own cubbyhole office. The one drawback was its location. Marino and Associates’ office was in the city, in Queen Street. She lived at Greensborough, miles away – and she couldn’t move. Her tomato plants were loaded. She’d been picking tomatoes since mid-January. Tonight she’d picked a dozen and tomorrow she’d pick more.

  Every year since arriving in Melbourne she’d grown a couple of tomato plants with varying degrees of success. On two occasions moving house had meant she’d had to leave plants loaded with green marbles for someone else to either let die or maybe enjoy. The day she’d moved to Greensborough she’d taken her six immature plants in pots.

  On a Friday night in early August, she’d picked up those seedlings at a Doncaster supermarket and when she’d returned to her ute with her loaded trolley, there was Paul propped against its bonnet – the Paul disciple she’d met on her travels who she hadn’t sighted since. He’d looked so clean she’d barely recognised him.

  ‘I thought you might have traded the old girl in, and some big bruiser would walk out and claim it,’ he’d said.

  She’d bought the ute in ’67, given it a bashing around Australia. Five years more of waiting all day in a university car park hadn’t done its paintwork or tarp canopy a lot of good – and marked her as a country hick to a few of the brighter young sparks. That night it had marked her as a long lost mate.

  ‘What happened to your hair?’ He’d known her when she’d worn her crew-cut, when her daily uniform had been khaki shorts and boots.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ she said. She’d known him during the year he’d stopped shaving, when his uniform had been a navy singlet and matching boxer shorts. Shared a tent with him and John and Simon for a week in Karratha, and again when they’d gone grape picking in South Australia. She’d sat at night in the dust around campfires, smoking, drinking beer out of bottles while insults and laughter had flown with the sparks. That night in the Doncaster car park, she couldn’t have kept the smile from her face had she tried – couldn’t have shaken him off had she wanted to, and she hadn’t.

  He asked where she was living while they unloaded her trolley, then he followed her back to the trolley bay, attempting to catch up on six years of news in ten minutes. She told him she shared a rented house, just around the corner. He told her he shared a rented house with the other two disciples.

  ‘John refused to let us get away until his credit card bill was paid,’ Paul said, then he looked at his watch and told her he had to go, that he taught computer studies at one of the colleges and ran night classes in Doncaster for office workers.

  The reunion could have ended in the car park, but his class only went for two hours, so she followed him to it, sat through it, then led the way to a hotel she knew where they talked nonstop until the lounge emptied while her frozen beans thawed and her tomato seedlings wilted in the ute.

  She signed up late for Paul’s computer class, and when she spoke of buying her own, he took her to a chap he knew, got her a good deal then set the machine up for her in her crowded bedroom. Leaned on her shoulder that night, instructing, kissed her cheek when he said goodnight.

  In September on the last night of the course, John and Simon met them at the hotel where Simon kissed her within an inch of her life, then John and his fiancée, who lived with them, shook her hand. They told her that night that Simon was transferring to Sydney and asked if she’d be interested in renting his room. It was larger than her current room and the house had fewer inmates and no cats, no tray of kitty litter in the bathroom. She wasted ten seconds in making her decision and moved that weekend, her computer riding in the passenger seat, her tomato seedlings riding beneath the tarp.

  There was plenty of dirt in their backyard and not a lot bar weeds growing in it. Her seedlings had got their roots into the earth and grown like weeds, like they knew they’d come home. For Georgie it had been a coming home. Since the night of the fire she’d lived in places, not in homes.

  Then came Christmas and John’s marriage to his long-term, long-suffering fiancée. It was a big wedding, heavy with relatives, sisters, brothers, mother, father, aunt, uncle and cousin of both bride or groom. Maybe it was the wedding that drew Georgie home to Woody Creek. She spent Christmas Day in Vern Hooper’s house with Trudy and two of her girlfriends, with Jim who, after twenty years, was still a stranger, and Jenny, who was ever Jenny, and all Georgie had of family.

  The day she returned to Greensborough, Paul had given her a Christmas paper wrapped gift he’d taken from the fridge . . . two slabs of Scotch fillet steak. She’d laughed, and fried it in Granny’s pan.

  Paul had always sat beside her on the couch when they watched television. She’d grown accustomed to him leaning on her, had grown accustomed to his hands on her shoulders when he demonstrated a new computer program. He started pus
hing the boundaries after New Year.

  She shoved him off a few times. She gave him an elbow in the ribs once or twice but the day she landed that job with Marino and Associates, needing to tell someone, she’d phoned Paul at work. He came home that night with a bottle of champagne, and two more slabs of Scotch fillet. Roses wouldn’t have got her into his bed. The steak, champagne and laughter did.

  When she’d met those boys in Darwin in ’78, Paul had worn a wedding ring. Of the three, she’d considered him the least threat to her footloose state. She’d found out since that he’d been their reason for travelling. According to Simon, Paul’s wife had caught the seven-year itch and absconded with a workmate. They’d set off from Melbourne to hunt them down, but got Paul blind drunk in Townsville and kidnapped him.

  The night they’d met up in the Doncaster car park Paul had told her that his wife and her solicitor had taken him to the cleaner’s. She’d since heard his repertoire of solicitor jokes, none of which were complimentary to her hard fought for trade, but she got him back, a few days after they’d started sharing a bed. When he told her they ought to get married, she told him she’d spent too much of her life dodging chook dung to change her name to Dunn.

  ‘The perfect name for a solicitor,’ he said. ‘You’re all dung beetles, sifting through the piled-up bullshit of life.’

  Loved his humour. Probably loved him. Didn’t love battling her way through traffic into the city five days a week. Through January she attempted to convince herself that, if not for her tomatoes, she’d look into renting a flat in the city. Each morning while driving to work in peak-hour traffic she decided that she – or they – had to move, but on the drive home, she knew she was driving home and had no desire to change it.

  Only two men had pursued her long enough to start talking marriage. She’d told Jack Thompson she was too young. Last week she’d told Paul she was too old. She’d turned forty-six in March. He never argued, but he cut an article from a newspaper about a fifty-three year old South American woman who’d given birth to her twenty-eighth baby. It was stuck on the fridge when she came home.

  ‘Lay off,’ she said.

  ‘I only want one,’ he said.

  She stuck a photocopied page from a magazine beside his cutting, hers stating the percentage of retarded kids born to women over the age of forty was three times as high as it was for a twenty year old.

  He’d had no kids with his absconding wife. He had two brothers. They had six kids between them. Paul had known his father for twelve years, he’d known both sets of grandparents. Georgie’s blood line began and ended with Jenny. As a kid she’d believed Granny to be her great-grandmother by blood. She’d been Jimmy’s blood, via the Hoopers’ line – Granny and Vern Hooper were half-cousins. Margot had been connected by blood to Maisy, via her rapist fathers. Georgie’s father was a framed newspaper mug shot of a redheaded water-pistol bandit.

  She’d borrowed Itchy-foot’s diaries at Christmas time, and since had keyed his pages of minute script onto a computer disc. She’d never met him, but he’d been her great-grandfather and Granny’s husband. She’d married him at nineteen, left him eight years later and never referred to him by name. To Granny, Archibald Gerald Foote had been that philandering, conscienceless sod. He’d lived off women. It was in his diaries, as was his shipboard romance with Juliana Conti, the supposedly barren wife of a wealthy old banker. By the end of the cruise, she’d been pregnant with Jenny. Itchy-foot’s diaries mentioned her sow belly – his only reference to the infant Jenny, though he had mentioned her as a ten year old, and later. There wasn’t a lot of pleasant reading in those diaries, and they’d done little to fill in the jigsaw puzzle of Georgie’s life.

  *

  Paul wanted to buy the house. The owners were moving back to England and had given him first option and a month in which to raise the money before they put it on the market.

  Georgie had the money. During the last years of high interest her balances had ballooned. She’d invested what she’d got from the sale of Charlie’s shop, and she still had much of her mouse money. She could sell the old Woody Creek house Charlie had willed to her. It needed money spent on it. She had shares bought for her by Charlie for Christmas bonuses or whenever she’d mentioned being overdue for a holiday.

  Hang on to them, Rusty. They’ll be worth something one day.

  They were worth something. A canny old chap, Charlie White – he’d warn her not to put her money into a joint investment, but the De-Facto Relationships Act had come into being last year, giving unmarried couples similar rights and responsibilities to those who were married. She’d spent today sifting through pages of a joint property settlement. The unmarried couple, who had produced two kids and built a house during their nine-year relationship, were now at each other’s throats over who had paid for what, and who would get the kids, and if they didn’t stop arguing soon, Boss God Marino would get the lot.

  She could see Paul moving around the kitchen. A long, long time ago she’d told Jenny that one of her prerequisites in a husband would be an ability to cook. He was cooking spaghetti bolognaise. She could smell it wafting out the back door.

  His family believed her to be a fixture in his life. His mother, Irene, in her early sixties, was still working. The Dunns were a working family, a house-buying, mortgage-paying family. Paul had been paying off a house when his wife absconded. He’d spoken to the bank about getting a loan.

  And he caught her staring at him. ‘Are you going to stand out there all night?’ he called.

  ‘I’m considering my options,’ she replied and went inside.

  She’d liked his face. She’d liked his eyes when his face had been covered by a bush of beard. He was taller than her, though not by much, a few years younger, though not many.

  The television news was on, showing Arabs at war. They’d been at war with someone for a thousand years and would still be killing someone – or each other – a thousand years from now. War was a genetic thing with them.

  ‘Who was it who said that all religion should be strongly discouraged?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘The pope,’ Paul said.

  *

  By April of ’86, Georgie knew she was Marino and Associates’ token female, that her age and lack of encumbrances might have swayed the Boss God’s judgement. She’d replaced the former token female who’d retired pregnant. By April, Georgie knew she’d spend the rest of her days chained to her desk while the top dogs played God in courtrooms a bare block and a half from her fourth-floor cubbyhole. Chris Marino was a big name barrister – and currently playing God in Sydney – and while the boss was away, the atmosphere in the office relaxed.

  He didn’t approve of smoking. His office was smoke free. Georgie stole a smoke at lunch, lit up when she walked back to her car at night, had a couple with Paul at home but was considering calling it quits. She’d only started it because she’d liked watching Ronnie Hall blow smoke rings.

  An elderly woman who’d been in this morning to make a will had been a heavy smoker. The smell of tobacco had exuded from her pores. A dear old bird, desperate to see that each of her seven kids received an equal share of next to nothing. Last week she’d made a will for a quarrelsome old bugger who had been determined to teach neglectful grandchildren a damn good lesson once he was dead. She’d made a study of humankind during her years behind Charlie’s counter. Nothing had changed. Loved watching people, reading about people and attempting to work out what made them tick.

  She’d spent the afternoon sifting through a stack of files for one of the top dogs who was currently attempting to get a big payout for a bloke with a bad back injured in a work-related accident, and at four twenty, she looked at her watch and decided she’d sifted sufficient dung for the day. She was packing up when the office girl knocked, then opened the door, with two customers in tow – clients. Bugger, Georgina Morgan Morrison, BA, LLB thought. She wanted to let down her hair and scratch, wanted to go home and fry the steak she’d removed
from the freezer this morning.

  ‘Michael Morgan and his wife Alison,’ the office girl said, handing over a file.

  A pretty, very pregnant Alison looked about fifteen, and Georgie glanced at the male accusingly. He was removing his baseball cap and beneath it, his hair was as red as her own. And his face – she was looking at the flesh and blood face of the redheaded water-pistol bandit who’d got another kid pregnant at fifteen.

  Looked down fast at his file, at the Morgan, her heart slamming into her ribcage like a sledgehammer into concrete. She barely heard the office assistant explaining that Rowan, one of the senior associates, was Alison’s mother’s neighbour and that she’d made the appointment with him. Sadly, Rowan was in conference. Conveniently so. Georgie was the token female, the office dogsbody.

  She got her clients seated then excused herself to escape to the passage where she poured a glass of water and told herself she’d gone stir crazy. It worked to a degree – as long as she didn’t look at that male Morgan’s face. She looked at Alison, looked at her notepad as they told the story of the house they wanted, and how Alison’s mother was going to give them the deposit but she wanted all of the checks done before she allowed them to sign anything. Georgie took notes and wondered how two kids – kids compared to her – could consider tying themselves into a twenty-five year mortgage they’d still be paying when she turned seventy, but she was no longer watching the clock.

  She shook their hands as they were leaving, told them to call her any time, then dared a close-up look at his face, at his eyes – as green as her own – and she wasn’t fooling herself. He was the living, breathing personification of the mug shot she’d been carrying around for forty years. He had the height too. He had the same shape to his face, the forehead, the eyebrows. Less hair, but give him an inch or two more and an old-fashioned brush-back style and he could have been Laurie Morgan – and she had to ask him.