The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  The traffic lights green, she crossed over and walked on towards Maryanne’s bank, glancing in windows at beautiful things, stopping to admire a tray of diamond rings. She’d once owned a diamond ring. Looked at her left hand, old, the knuckles swollen. As a girl she’d had beautiful hands. Maisy had said so. Buy Maryanne Brown an engagement ring.

  Far better she buy gloves to hide her hands than a diamond to laugh at them.

  Gloves no longer in vogue, the shop doors were closing before an assistant found her a pair of lacy things, white. Amber paid, and while waiting for her change she pulled them on. Blood still seeping. Nothing she could do to stop its seeping.

  Norman’s blood had seeped into the pillow, into the mattress—

  But she’d saved him from old age. He would have thanked her for that. She’d never wanted it, never expected to grow old. Age crept up while the back was turned.

  She was close to Maryanne’s bank when her feet came to a halt before a restaurant where only the finest meals, the best wines were served. She’d sat in that restaurant with Lorna, had eaten lobster there and craved a glass of wine. Lorna had ordered water. Tonight she’d drink her wine.

  A black-clad waiter eyed her as she entered, but it was still early and he had empty tables. He led her to a table for two in a corner where she got her back to a wall, and when he asked if she’d be dining alone, she told him her companion would be joining her.

  ‘A glass of water?’ he asked.

  ‘Champagne – and a bandaid, if you please,’ she said.

  *

  An unforgettable two hours for that black-clad waiter. He’d speak of it and of Maryanne Brown many times in the coming year, how she’d been the size of a sparrow, but over a two-hour period had managed to put away two-thirds of a bottle of champagne and two serves of lobster when her companion hadn’t arrived. He’d speak of how, when he’d presented her with the bill, she’d placed the uncorked bottle into her shopping bag and asked to borrow his biro. He’d given it to her, believing she meant to check his addition, but she’d taken an envelope from her handbag, removed a pension cheque, signed it and offered it to him with the bill. He’d gone to get his manager, who’d explained to the old dear that they couldn’t accept her cheque as payment.

  ‘When we can’t trust our own government’s cheques we’re in a bad way, aren’t we?’ she said, and reached again into her handbag – not for cash, but for a second envelope.

  They watched her sign a second cheque, watched her stand, watched her walk away, the uncorked bottle in her shopping bag.

  FUNERALS

  In January ’88, Australia celebrated two hundred years of European settlement. Prince Charlie and Lady Di arrived in Sydney to add their royal presence to the occasion. The six o’clock news that night was full of them and the re-enactment of the First Fleet’s landing. There was barely time to slot in half a dozen words about an elderly woman found dead in her bed.

  At ten thirty they broadcast more Charlie and Di, and again mentioned the elderly woman believed to have been dead for some weeks. They interviewed the neighbour who’d raised the alarm after junk mail from her neighbour’s overflowing letterbox had been blowing across the road onto her front lawn for days.

  When I saw one of the junk mail deliverers piling in more, I went over to tell him that the owner was on holiday. Then the woman who lived next door came out and said that maybe we ought to call the police, that she hadn’t seen the old lady since about a week before Christmas, and that when her son had climbed over the fence to get his ball yesterday, he’d said there was a bad smell coming from the bathroom window. That’s when we contacted the authorities.

  ‘What a world,’ Jim said. ‘Someone must have missed her.’

  ‘People don’t know their neighbours down there,’ Jenny said.

  It was getting to be that way in Woody Creek, or so it seemed to her. Maisy knew everyone. She still called in for a cuppa on her way home from Willama on Tuesdays, still kept Jenny abreast of the town news. She came the following day. The dogs were tied up on Tuesdays and the gate left open so Maisy could drive in.

  ‘Guess who I just ran into in Willama?’ Maisy greeted her.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The unmentionable. She came straight at me in that big new roundabout they’ve put in down the bottom end of Main Street.’

  ‘Lila?’

  ‘Who else? She got out of her car and started snarling at my window, so I backed up and drove around her,’ Maisy said.

  Most agreed that Maisy shouldn’t have been driving. She’d hit one or two of the town cars. Bernie had stopped having her dents straightened. Most also agreed that if Maisy’s wheels and freedom were taken away from her, she’d curl up and die.

  ‘You should have heard what she called me, and it wasn’t my fault anyway. They’ve got no signs telling you that you have to take the long way around it to make a right-hand turn so I took the short way, and she slammed straight into me. Is Jim home?’

  ‘He’s in Willama with John.’ Everyone knew that Amy was dying.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s been in a coma since Sunday night.’

  Jenny had sat with her on Sunday. John sat with her every day. Her kidneys had shut down. It was only a matter of time.

  ‘John won’t handle it. Remember Nancy Bryant, how she was dead a month or two after she lost Lonny? Maureen O’Brien was the same. She was dead in six weeks. How old would John be?’

  ‘Gone eighty,’ Jenny said.

  ‘He was just a kid when Amy started teaching up here. He didn’t have a word to say for himself, but he set his sights on her and never looked at another girl. She must be close to my age.’

  ‘Eighty-eight. She goes with the century,’ Jenny said. ‘What did you want with Jim?’

  ‘I was just wondering where his car was,’ Maisy said. ‘They say Melbourne will get forty degrees tomorrow. It’s lucky they found that dead woman when they did.’

  ‘She must have had relatives somewhere who’d missed her,’ Jenny said.

  ‘She was a spinster,’ Maisy said. ‘Sammy told Maureen that they had to cut a padlock off her gate and break into the house.’

  ‘Heart attack?’

  ‘Murdered, Sammy said, but you can’t breathe a word of what I’m telling you. He wasn’t even supposed to tell his mother. They reckon that it was someone she knew, someone she let in. No windows were broken.’

  ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘Bludgeoned,’ Maisy said.

  The beeping of a car horn ended their conversation. Jim was home and Maisy’s aging Chrysler was blocking the drive. He never beeped at Maisy. He’d park in the street for Maisy and walk in. Jenny knew why he hadn’t today.

  ‘I think Amy’s gone,’ she said, standing, picking up Maisy’s handbag and car keys. If Jim had John with him, the last person he’d need to see would be Maisy.

  *

  An appalling night. They’d been four for so many years. Now they were three – or two and one broken man. John didn’t want to return to his empty house and he wouldn’t go to bed, so they sat half the night with him, pouring wine and speaking of better nights. He hadn’t slept for weeks and at two fell asleep on the couch. Jenny was asleep when the phone rang at eight the following morning. She rose to silence it, wanting John and Jim to sleep, but the caller, a male, asked to speak to Jim.

  He came on one leg and his crutch and Jenny watched the blood drain from his face.

  ‘It’s Lorna,’ he said. ‘The woman on the news. It’s Lorna.’

  Jenny moved the chair she kept in the hall so he might sit, then stood, her hand on his shoulder, her own ear close to the phone, listening secondhand to the distant voice. As Lorna’s next of kin, Jim was expected to make the official identification.

  ‘My sister and I were estranged,’ Jim said. ‘I haven’t seen her for many years. Our cousin, Ian Hooper, will have seen her more recently than I.’

  He spoke for five minutes more, but
Jenny walked away to dress for a day like no other.

  ‘Murdered,’ Jim said when he put down the phone. ‘Blunt force trauma to her head and face, then they . . . mutilated her eyes . . . with kitchen skewers.’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Jenny said as he tried to rise. ‘I’ll get your leg.’

  She had two silent men, two dogs and a telephone to deal with, had gone to bed too late and been woken too early. She had no time to mourn Amy – didn’t give Lorna a second of thought.

  She drove with John to the undertaker where she learned that Amy would be forced to queue up for burial, that they’d have to wait through a weekend before they could put her death away. It was too long.

  John surprised her. He had a strength she hadn’t expected. He didn’t want to be alone in his empty house so they gave him the big bedroom on the north-eastern corner; it had twin glass doors opening onto the veranda where the dogs spent their nights. They had a telepathic understanding of his loss, and each time he opened those doors, they were at his side, to offer their silent sympathy, to walk the garden with him.

  Ian Hooper phoned, eager to rehash the details of Lorna’s death. Mrs Watson called to offer her condolences, Jenny believing her condolence was for John and realising late it was for Jim. Lorna’s notorious death was more newsworthy than the slow fading away of gentle Amy. Missed her. Sat alone at night turning the pages of the books they’d created together, free to mourn her in the dead of night. Not by day. She was strong by day, and she’d said her goodbyes on Sunday.

  ‘Finish Molly,’ Amy had said. ‘Finish it in your own inimitable way, Jennifer.’

  It was Jim’s book. He’d spent years writing and rewriting it. Four publishers had rejected it and the last time it came back he had tossed it into the wood box.

  ‘Light the fire with it,’ he’d said.

  The manuscript spent one night with the chips and kindling. She’d attempted to crumple a page to use as a firelighter. Couldn’t crumple that anonymous poem, or any one of his pages. She knew the work, the hope that had gone into it, some of it her own, so she’d bundled it into a supermarket bag and taken it and the dogs for a walk down to the McPhersons’.

  Her first teacher, Amy, her singing teacher and accompanist, her best friend and a hard editor. They’d gone through those pages together, had burnt many and added many more. Their secret this last twelve months, their private game.

  Missed her, and on that gut-wrenching, soul-destroying morning when they carried her from the church, Jenny couldn’t follow the coffin out. She sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ while the church cleared, and when it cleared, she escaped out the side door and went home to her dogs, who comforted her while she cried her heart out.

  She fetched their leads when the men returned. John removed his suit jacket and tie and walked with her, the dogs wriggling with the pleasure of his company, and craving Amy’s they turned towards the bridge. Too many times Jenny had walked them that way to Amy. Not today. She turned them towards the school.

  ‘He’s such a shy boy,’ Amy used to say of John, but he spoke that day, to the dogs and to Jenny, he spoke of the retirement units being built down the bottom end of the school road, six single-bedroom brick units, built wall to wall on a block where Mrs Owen had lived and died. Two units were nearing completion. He spoke of buying into one, or into the Willama retirement units.

  To Jenny the units looked like prison cells. ‘Give yourself time,’ she said.

  A bad week followed before Lorna’s body was released for burial. Jim brought her home to the vacant plot beside Vern’s grave. It was the right thing to do. Had Lorna been born a male, she would have been the son Vern Hooper had wanted at his side.

  It was a better attended funeral than Amy’s. Many of the old brigade were there, not for Lorna, who in her lifetime had endeared herself to no one, but for the memory of Vern and the notoriety of her death. Jenny was there only for Jim, and for that wisp of hope that Jimmy would come home to bury his aunt. He didn’t.

  Jim’s hand was well shaken that day. Jenny’s remained firmly on her handbag. A few women who couldn’t get to Jim offered her their condolences. She could have used them in ’47. She was there only to make certain that the hole had been dug deep enough, and when Bill O’Brien told Jim that Vern would never be dead while Jim was alive, it was time to go. Jenny had spent the past thirty years denying that there was a skerrick of Hooper in Jim.

  There was. Age has a habit of bringing to the fore family resemblances. Jim’s steel-grey wire hair was his father’s, as was his long jaw, and he’d always had his father’s hands, though Vern’s had been broadened by the heavy labour of his youth and Jim’s refined by his years of typing. He walked with a limp, as had Vern, though only after he’d had his stroke.

  Two couples had driven up from Melbourne to pay their last respects to Lorna, Jim’s cousin Ian and his wife Lorris, and an elderly couple who introduced themselves as Martin and Mary Leeds; Martin was the former minister of the church Lorna had attended.

  ‘Your sister’s absence would have been noticed in our time there,’ he said. ‘She and her companion never missed a Sunday in their pew.’ He looked to be ninety and his wife looked as old. Jenny asked them back to the house for lunch. She’d already invited Jim’s cousin and his wife.

  They were leaving the cemetery. They were outside the gate when Lorna got in her last hit from the grave. Dust, flicked up by a breeze, landed in Jenny’s eye. A finger or handkerchief raised to remove it might suggest she’d shed a tear for Lorna and, a terrible death or not, let no one believe that Jenny had shed a tear for the woman. She drove home with dust in her eye.

  Trudy removed it. She’d come home because of Lorna’s will. To my niece, Gertrude Juliana Hooper, I leave my all.

  ‘Why me, Mum?’ Trudy asked again. ‘She didn’t even know me.’

  That will had set Jenny back on her heels. Lorna had seen Trudy once in her life. They’d collided in the entrance hall, back in the mid-sixties. Trudy, a three year old at the time, couldn’t remember the collision but had retained an image of a black-clad witch sitting on their floor, showing her knee-length bloomers. It was the first time she’d seen such bloomers. She remembered the haunted house where she’d been taken that night, and that’s all she remembered.

  ‘Why me, and not Dad?’

  ‘She didn’t approve of his choice of wife,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’m not even her blood.’

  ‘As far as she knew, you were her father’s granddaughter.’

  ‘Why not Jimmy? You said they’d adopted him.’

  ‘Lorna’s sister adopted him and gained control of the Hooper estate. That time you collided with Lorna, she’d come up here wanting your dad to go to court to stop the sale of the Monk portion of the land the haunted house was built on.’

  ‘Dad’s family owned Monk’s?’

  ‘They did for a lot of years.’

  ‘What’s Lorna’s house like?’

  ‘Brick, tiled roof, high fence and a tramline half a dozen houses away.’

  ‘Kew is a good area. It could be worth a lot of money. Georgie and Paul paid over a hundred thousand for a house way out at Greensborough,’ Trudy said. ‘When did you see her house?’

  ‘Back in the fifties.’

  Jenny sliced lettuce and tomatoes, Trudy worked at her side, efficient in the kitchen. She’d spent much of her early life at Jenny’s elbow.

  ‘I’d feel like such a fraud if I took her money, Mum.’

  ‘It’s yours, darlin’, to do with what you will.’

  They served their guests in the dining room, served a ham salad followed by trifle, Trudy’s specialty. Ian Hooper spoke of Lorna, whom he hadn’t seen in three years though he’d heard from her more recently. Martin Leeds, Lorna’s executor, who had last seen Lorna three months ago, told them that both he and his wife had suggested Miss Hooper sell her home and move into a church-run retirement home.

  ‘It was obvious to us that she wasn
’t managing alone,’ he said.

  ‘Your sister was a very determined woman,’ his wife said.

  ‘However, one had to respect her desire for independence,’ Martin said.

  The visitors left in convoy. John closed the gate and released the dogs, who chased the scent of strangers to the gate where they warned them not to return. John raised his voice and they came to his side, heads and tails down. They were more than half human, and if it was possible to fall in love with middle-aged dogs, Jenny had fallen hard. Vern Hooper’s garden belonged to them and for Jenny, they’d altered its character – and its scent.

  They spoke of Lorna’s house that night, Trudy wavering between signing it over to the church and selling it as it stood and donating the money to charity. It was not in a saleable condition, according to Sammy, Maisy’s grandson. He’d suggested Jim hire professional cleaners – with shovels and a truck. He’d offered the name and phone number of such a company. Jenny wanted to call them. Jim wanted the old Hooper documents he’d handled in his youth.

  ‘If any of them have survived, they’ll be in Lorna’s house,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere near that place, Jim.’

  Trudy went near it. She phoned on Friday. ‘Tell Dad I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off next week and that I’ll give him a hand to find what he wants before I get in the cleaners. It’s chaos, Mum. Sophie and I had a quick look through it, and you’ve never seen such a mess in your life.’

  Then Georgie rang. ‘Trude said that you don’t want to leave John on his own up there.’

  He’d moved home before Lorna’s funeral, his means of evading any obligation to attend, though he spent little time in that empty house. He ate at Jenny’s table, walked the dogs with her, and there was no way Jenny would leave him or her dogs to search Lorna’s house for Hooper history.