The Tying of Threads

by Joy Dettman

  ‘For God’s sake, drop it, Jen.’

  ‘Admit it and I’ll drop it. Admit that every time you look at me you see Amber bludgeoning your sister. She isn’t my mother, Jim, and it’s not my fault that your sister was such an old bitch that no one noticed she was missing. It’s not my fault that you cut yourself off from them. I would have kowtowed to her, I would have licked the soles of Margaret’s shoes if it would have bought me one hour with Jimmy.’

  ‘Stop it now,’ he moaned.

  ‘They’re haunting you,’ she said. ‘They’re haunting this house and that rat-mouthed old coot out there is their medium.’

  He rose and attempted to get by her. She caught his arm. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘What do you want from me?!’

  ‘Start with why you prefer to spend your night with dead Hoopers than with me, why you haven’t touched me since they arrested Amber.’

  ‘Put yourself in my place,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been putting myself in your place for years. I’ve been pussyfooting around your place, your space, since that day in Ringwood when I found out that you’d let Margaret adopt Jimmy. Every time you get into one of your sitting, staring at walls moods, I pussyfoot around you. And I’m done with it, Jim, and I’m done with that evil-eyed old coot hanging up there too, and to tell you the unblemished truth, had it been anyone other than Amber who’d murdered Lorna, my sympathy would be with the murderer.’

  He shook off her hand and went to the bathroom. It had a lock on its door.

  *

  Jenny didn’t sleep, and when there was light enough to see, she rose and went out to the shed to fetch the stepladder. John, early to bed, early to rise, caught her manhandling the ladder in through the front door. He helped her position it and steadied it when she climbed to remove the portrait’s chain from its hook. Not an easy task. The frame was heavy, but with him supporting it, the chain came off – and he had to dodge it as it crashed to the floor.

  She climbed down, expecting the noise to have woken Jim, but Trudy’s room was a good distance from the hall and he didn’t come. She expected some damage to the frame, but the old ones had made their frames to last for a few lifetimes. She climbed again to hang Simon Jenner’s landscape, then together she and John returned the ladder to the shed. She dragged and carried the portrait out to the front veranda then along it to the east side where she leaned it against the wall.

  The dogs came to sniff, and if they did more than sniff, then the old coot deserved what he got. He’d married four young wives and at a time when he should have been too old to need a wife. All four had died in childbirth or soon after.

  Jim retrieved the portrait before she carried her case from the house. ‘If he’s hanging when I come back, I’ll cut him from the frame and burn him next time.’

  The case was small but heavy. Get enough sheets of foolscap together and they become weighty. The Molly Squire manuscript consisted of four hundred and fifty-two pages, his and hers.

  SENT IN CHAINS

  Georgie read Molly Squire in two days, Jenny watching her face all the while, watching her smile, rub her eyes, watching too as she flipped fast through bunches of pages, then hearing her chuckle.

  ‘Well?’ she asked when Georgie was done.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Georgie said. ‘Do you want the scrupulous truth or the toned-down version, Jen?’

  ‘Scrupulous?’

  ‘The major problem, as I see it, is you can pick where your chapters begin and Jim’s end. They need smoothing out, or you need to make it obvious that there are two separate viewpoints.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How would I know? You need to get it onto a computer.’

  ‘Amy would have been able to type it in. I’d die of old age before I’d typed fifty pages.’

  ‘Use a scanner,’ Georgie said, picking up and sifting through a few of the pages. ‘Paul’s college has got one. It should do most of it.’

  ‘What’s a scanner?’

  ‘A machine that reads text then copies it to disc,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be game to let anyone see it.’

  ‘Machines don’t see – and why write it if you don’t plan for anyone to see it?’

  ‘That old rhyme got into my head.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Number two problem,’ Georgie continued. ‘Molly and Wadimulla are gripping. There are bits in those chapters that are so you, it’s hilarious. Then you hit me with a slab of history and it’s like moving from fast forward into slow.’

  ‘It’s Jim’s book. Amy and I tried to leave as much of his work in it as we could.’

  ‘Get rid of him and you’d have a damn good read.’

  Paul took the manuscript to work on Friday and returned it that night along with three discs, more of modern man’s magic to Jenny. She didn’t understand it, and didn’t try. Georgie flipped the first disc into her computer, hit a few keys and up came Molly’s poem.

  ‘My God.’

  Thereafter the days flew by too fast, the red and the fading gold heads side by side at the computer, Georgie instructing, at times commanding, Jenny selecting paragraphs confidently, Georgie reaching across occasionally to hit the delete key Jenny couldn’t make herself hit. But the text moved up to fill the gap and left no scar behind.

  Within three days they’d deducted thirty-two pages from file one. Jim’s pages. He hadn’t phoned. Jenny had phoned once. He was well mannered. He asked after Georgie’s health, and when she put the phone down, Jenny felt guilty. He’d spent years researching and writing Molly and she’d just wiped out fifty per cent of his research.

  They were nearing the end of disc three when Georgie came up with the idea of an addition – Molly’s half-white son.

  ‘They were at it like rabbits on disc one. Molly probably had half a dozen kids to Wadimulla. What happened to them, Jen?’

  ‘There was no Wadimulla. I cooked him up,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Then cook him up a son,’ Georgie said. ‘And while you’re about it, cook up a few of Molly’s starving siblings in Ireland. There’s too much telling in your first chapter. Open the book with a death scene for one of them and the rest dying of starvation before Molly goes out and sells herself for a loaf of bread.’

  ‘How could I cook that up?’

  ‘Think back to Armadale, Jen, and making us pancake sandwiches for school lunches – and minced vegie pancakes and fried dough-balls for dinner. Send a few of her siblings out to the paddocks to pick nettles.’

  Jenny wiped out five hours that night remembering her fight to feed three kids back in Armadale when Ray had taken her purse and bankbook. Before she shut down the computer she’d written Ray into the story. Molly had traded her virgin body for a loaf of the stuttering baker’s bread, and Jenny knew exactly how young Molly had felt, like a beached starfish attached by a ravenous beak. She’d sold herself to Ray so she could give her trio his name.

  That chapter became the opening chapter, hopeless, sad, but moving, and when Georgie read it on the screen, she shook Jenny’s hand.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about, mate,’ she said. Amy had said much the same when she’d read a similar chapter. That, Jennifer Morrison, is what I’ve always known you were capable of.

  *

  Chris Marino phoned to let them know that the hearing into Dino Collins’ death had been delayed again. Georgie wanted it done. She wanted to go back to work. Chris wanted her to look pregnant.

  He stage-managed Georgie’s day in court. He told her he’d need her to present herself in a feminine maternity frock, her hair worn in a soft style. By the end of September she was living in stretch slacks and oversized sweaters. She didn’t own a maternity frock. Chris Marino’s wife, who had spent most of her married life pregnant, owned plenty. He arrived the evening before the hearing with a choice of two – a pink, ultra feminine frilly thing and a spring green with box pleats but no frills –
and a two-inch hem Jenny could let down.

  The show went according to Chris Marino’s plan. The magistrate, a white-headed grandfather, came back with the right decision, the only decision. Justifiable homicide. Georgina Dunn, who had already lost two infants, had defended herself and her unborn baby with the only weapon at hand. There had been no intent to kill the intruder. She’d raised the shovel only to parry her attacker’s knife.

  They drank champagne that night at a hotel, and Jenny ate a meal she hadn’t cooked. Too relieved, too wound up to sleep, they sat talking until twelve, and when Paul and Georgie went to bed, Jenny started up the computer. She found Molly’s half-black son standing at the tall gates to his mother’s mansion. He’d walked for miles, led by some ancient awareness that the mother he’d known for six years was dying. Near dawn, he crept up to the house and in through a rear door. And Molly had known him, had reached out a hand to him, and with her final breath, spoke his name.

  ‘Joeyboy? My Joeyboy,’ she whispered.

  And having found him old, Jenny wanted to find him young. She knew how Molly had lost him. He’d been stolen away by the tribe after the white settlers shot Wadimulla.

  Had Georgie not returned to work, Molly Squire might have grown to a thousand pages, but Chris Marino wanted her at work. He told her she’d be joining him in Sydney in October.

  ‘I get to stick my nose inside a courtroom, Jen.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘He said a week to ten days. He’s not often wrong.’

  ‘You’ll be seven months pregnant,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Wrong choice of subject matter, mate.’

  ‘Why, Georgie?’

  ‘Donny,’ Georgie said.

  Donny, Ray’s retarded son, Jenny had babied for seven years. She glanced at Georgie’s growing bulge. Thought of her age, of the O’Briens’ youngest girl, thirty-odd and still a child in her mind. It could happen – but wouldn’t happen, not to Georgie’s baby.

  The printer churned out three hundred and ninety-eight numbered pages, including the title page, MOLLY SQUIRE, in large print, J. AND J. HOOPER beneath it, and on the final Sunday in September, those pages travelled home in Jenny’s case, though not on the bus. Paul and Georgie drove her home.

  Paul Jenner’s landscape still hung in the hall. She glanced into the sitting room, expecting to find old rat mouth had taken up residence over the mantelpiece. He wasn’t there. The bathroom was a pig pen, the kitchen a mess. She walked by the mess to the laundry to fetch bleach and mirror cleaner. Gave the main bathroom a wipe, splashed bleach into the toilet, dusted the floor with a soiled towel, hung clean towels and was sweeping the kitchen floor when she heard Georgie mention power points in the sewing room. Jenny stopped sweeping to see why she needed power points.

  She knew Paul had ordered a new computer, a bigger, faster model. She hadn’t been aware that his old model had made the trip up with them. Paul was setting it up on the cutting table, close to a power source.

  ‘You can’t just give it away,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Done,’ Paul said.

  Dust was thick on her sewing machines and cutting table. She gave the table a wipe with a scrap of fabric while Jim and John stood back watching the bits and pieces of that magical machine being connected, cables with weird fittings plugged into weird sockets. And Paul had brought his printer. Jenny watched him fit its plugs, her mind darting to what was in her case. She looked at John, who stepped in closer to watch, looked at Jim, and their eyes met. She’d told him a dozen times that he ought to buy a computer.

  ‘It’s Paul’s,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I need its space for my new model,’ Paul explained and plugged in his own power board.

  And the magical beast awakened and Georgie slid the first Molly disc into it. Up came the title page.

  ‘What have you been up to down there?’ Jim asked.

  ‘I’ll show you later,’ Jenny said, demonstrating how to close that file fast, flip it out and flip in another, the safer, solitaire game.

  She played it, on her feet before the computer, and for the first time the cards fell in exactly the right way. She won.

  Georgie and Paul didn’t stay for lunch. Jenny fed the men an omelette, and two hours later, when the kitchen looked and smelled like her kitchen again, she fetched the manuscript and dumped it on the dining room table beside Jim’s typewriter.

  ‘That’s what we’ve been up to,’ she said.

  He was interested and, feeling sick with the knowledge of what they’d done to it, she left him to read and took the dogs for a walk down to Granny’s land.

  The manuscript was on her cutting table beside her computer when she returned, a red line through one of the J’s and the and. He was in the dining room. She placed the title page down near him. ‘I take it that you don’t want your name on it.’

  ‘It’s all yours, Jen.’

  ‘How much of it did you read?’

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Can we leave it at that?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, her stomach aflutter. Amy had liked what she’d done. Georgie had been impressed. She trusted their opinions.

  Had trusted his once.

  Walked away from him. Walked around the veranda, then returned to her sewing room and closed the twin doors. For half an hour she sat turning the pages of the manuscript, attempting to see, to feel how much of it he’d read. Shrugged her shoulders and turned on the computer, then riffled through the discs Georgie had copied for her until she found Itchy-foot’s diary. Barely thirty pages into it, she found the young Gertrude . . . a feisty young beauty who resides in a pig pen and has opinions above her station. He hadn’t mentioned her name, but there was no doubt in Jenny’s mind that his feisty young beauty was Granny. She read on, absorbing every word, read of a grand garden party at Monk’s, and less than four months later, according to Itchy-foot’s dates, she found Gertrude again, this time in verse.

  The feisty new missus, though she has tasty kisses,

  Of late begins dodging her lover.

  Much prefers yarning out in the garden,

  than sliding beneath the bed cover.

  Two days later, on the disc containing the diary, she found Juliana Conti. There were mentions of Itchy-foot’s many love affairs scattered throughout, so many that Jenny hadn’t recognised his early description of her mother, the barren banker’s wife, until . . . a scratching, biting, fighting lioness, protecting its lone cub. Why am I attracted to fighting bitches? Until that moment, Juliana Conti had been John’s black and white photograph of a dead foreign woman; she’d been J.C. LEFT THIS LIFE 31.12.23 cut into a small grey tombstone in the cemetery. That disc gave her life.

  By November, Jim’s old rattler was silent. He’d completed his history and posted it up to Sydney. Molly Squire was gathering dust on Jenny’s cutting table where she might never cut again. She’d found a more absorbing occupation. With the help of Itchy-foot’s diaries and her Tuesday afternoon sessions with Maisy, she was creating the young Gertrude Hooper and her world of horse-drawn ploughs and long gowns and garden parties and lamplit balls, and to hell with Molly Squire.

  Deep into organising a grand wedding for young Gertrude, Granny’s own brocade wedding gown hung over a chair at her side, the phone rang. She sat, her hands hovering over the keyboard, hopeful that Jim would think it was the publisher and pick it up. He usually did. Not today. She hit save and caught the phone before it rang out.

  ‘We have a six and a half pound daughter, Jen,’ Paul said.

  ‘It’s too early!’ Jenny said.

  ‘Three weeks and three days, but that’s Georgie, always in a hurry.’ Silence then, and emotion in his voice when he continued. ‘They’re both well. She’s perfect, Jen, and as red and beautiful as her mother. Katie Morgan Dunn, Georgie said.’

  ‘Tell her we’re on our way,’ Jenny said.

  ‘We’re in Sydney. I flew up last night.’

  *

  Thanks to Chris Marino, Georgie had barely f
elt a ripple from the Dino Collins affair. He hadn’t billed her for his time, but she’d always known he’d claim his pound of flesh one day. She called him the Boss God. A few called him the Godfather, and some, the Little Dictator. He resembled Marlon Brando – not the aging Brando of The Godfather, more the balding, pot-bellied Brando of Napoleon. The courtroom was his theatre, and just as he’d stage-managed the James Dino Collins affair, he staged each production.

  When he’d told her that she’d be with him in Sydney in October, she’d known why. The Collins affair had been newsworthy and he’d be defending a young mother of four charged with the murder of her brutal husband. The trial was delayed, then delayed again, and when you’re seven and a half months pregnant, a three and a half week delay takes you into your eighth month. She could have got out of it, but had wanted to watch him at work.

  She’d watched him for four days. Watched him in fancy restaurants, too, where he’d taken her each night to eat. They’d been in court when the pains started.

  Their client was acquitted five days later. Chris flew home, but the company paid for a hire car and, when Katie was a week old, they drove her home via Woody Creek.

  Week-old babies don’t win beautiful baby contests and Katie was no exception. She looked like a tiny orang-utan, as had her mother forty-eight years ago, and as had that earlier orang-utan, she stole a large handful of Jenny’s heart.

  ‘What have you done with Molly?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jenny said, the tiny orang-utan grunting in her arms.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Jim.’ Jenny shrugged.

  ‘What about Jim?’

  ‘It was his factual history of a town. To use his words, I’ve turned it into a penny dreadful.’ She shrugged again. ‘I can’t go sullying the Hooper name, can I – not even for money.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In my sewing room, on the table.’

  ‘I’ll get rid of it for him,’ Georgie said.

  *

  She was on maternity leave for six months. Katie slept in four-hour shifts – sometimes. Georgie had the original discs. It took one four-hour shift to cut the last of Jim’s long-winded chapters down to two vital paragraphs, then to dump those paragraphs into the following chapter.