The Tying of Threads (22 page)

‘See you next time, darlin’,’ Elsie said.

‘Love you, Nan and Pa.’

Maybe you grow up not caring too much about where you came from when you live with two parents in the biggest house in town. Georgie copped another Trudy kiss before she moved her Torana, freeing Georgie to drive home to her draughty squat.

*

The removal of that bedroom door had caused its wall to buckle, and by mid-August the house was creaking and groaning like an old bloke with arthritis, but with every inch of that blackened earth turned, Georgie had started on the removal of the concrete slab. She was making a lot of noise but little impression when Jack Thompson crept up on her one Sunday morning.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about breaking up concrete?’

‘Have you got a sledgehammer?’ he asked.

‘I’ve tried that.’

‘A crowbar?’

She’d tried that too, but she fetched the tools he’d ask for from the shed and he gave her a practical demonstration on how to break up a slab of concrete. It was a two-man job. While one shoved the crowbar beneath a corner and heaved, the other one gave the cement a decent whack with the sledgehammer. Their first whack broke away a good-sized chunk which required four hands to move it.

‘You’re not just a pretty face,’ she said.

‘I’ve got a lot of hidden qualities,’ he said.

They worked side by side then, taking turns on hammer and crowbar. Always good mates, Georgie and Jack – becoming more than best mates had ruined a good friendship. They worked all morning and when backs and hands complained, they stacked the broken-off lumps of concrete along the fenceline as an added deterrent to the hens.

They worked together until the sun disappeared behind the treetops, and like an old and weary married couple crossed over the goat paddock, he to open the beer and pour it into glasses while she stoked up the stove and set Granny’s frying pan on to heat.

They ate eggs and toast for dinner, emptied the bottle of beer then drank coffee, he seated on the south side of the table on an upturned packing crate, she seated on the north side, on her oil drum chair.

He turned the conversation to Collins. ‘I saw him a week ago. He was like a zombie.’

‘Still in his wheelchair?’

‘Yeah. He’s got the use of his arms, and I’ll almost swear I saw his knee twitch. He didn’t open his mouth while I was there, just sat picking at that tattoo he’s got on his knuckles.’

‘A Willama bloke broke his neck diving into the creek a few years ago. His foot doesn’t twitch – or his hands. He’ll lull everyone into a false sense of security then do a runner.’

‘Not the bloke I saw last week.’

‘Will he go to trial again?’

‘And have every bleeding-heart in the country up in arms?’

‘So he gets away with it?’

‘He’s not going anywhere, love.’

She made more coffee, and lit a smoke. He lit his own and was counting what he had left in his packet when she asked how to go about finding someone she’d lost track of.

‘Electoral rolls,’ he said.

‘Been there, done that. Can a cop track them down through their rego numbers?’

‘Who do you want to track down?’

‘Cara Norris – Grenville.’

‘I thought you said she was your cousin. Oh,’ he said. ‘I almost forgot why I came up here. Are you still interested in locating your water-pistol bandit?’

‘You arrested him?’

His hair might have receded, he might have added a few stone, but his smile hadn’t altered.

‘I put Dad onto tracking him down – after our trip to Frankston,’ he said.

She’d told him about Laurie Morgan the night they’d driven Margot home, Trudy unnamed, unwanted, in the city in a humidicrib. He’d suggested asking his retired policeman father to see what he could do about locating Laurence Morgan, and she’d told him very definitely not to tell his father.

‘What did he find out?’

‘Plenty, by the feel of the envelope.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me back then?’

‘It wasn’t through lack of trying. I must have phoned you a dozen times and had the phone slammed down in my ear as many,’ he said.

She played with her packet of cigarettes. ‘You disturbed my equilibrium.’

‘You did your own disturbing of mine. Still do for that matter. Anyway, Mum found it a few weeks back when she was clearing out Dad’s desk.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘It’s sealed and it’s got your name on it, but from what I recall, there were photographs, newspaper cuttings and pages of Dad’s notes.’

‘Mug shot photographs?’

‘I seem to recall him in uniform in one of them.’

‘Prison uniform?’

‘Army. He was standing with two other chaps. They were wearing slouch hats.’

‘He was jailed for three years in ’39. The army wouldn’t take crims.’

‘It will be in the envelope,’ he said. ‘And once the Japs came into the war I think they were taking every able-bodied man they could get.’ He reached out a hand to ruffle her elongated crew-cut. ‘It’s growing,’ he said. ‘You’re starting to look a bit more like yourself.’

‘Jenny threatened to murder me if I shear it,’ she said.

‘How come you never married, love?’

‘I’m queer,’ she said.

‘That outfit will do it for you, though I reckon I know better,’ he said. She drew smoke and blew three perfect smoke rings at him, and he smiled. ‘How do you do that?’

‘Practice.’

‘You didn’t smoke when I knew you.’

‘I was nineteen in ’59, Jacko. A lot can happen in twenty years.’

‘Mum told me once that you never get over your first love. There’s a part of me that won’t let go of you,’ he said. She directed three more perfect rings at him. ‘If that’s your usual response when a bloke declares his lifelong love, it could be what’s holding you back.’

‘Back from what?’

‘Getting married. Having a few kids.’

‘I’m footloose and fancy free, and that’s the way I like it.’

‘There’s no future in it, no eternity.’

‘I thought eternity was what came later – if you don’t end up in hell.’

‘It comes with your kids,’ he said. ‘I look at Johnny and Ronny and I see my dad and myself in them, and I know that if I live long enough, I’ll see my dad and myself in their sons. That’s my eternity – and I’d better get back. I told Mum I’d be a couple of hours.’

‘Idiot. She’ll be worrying about you.’

‘She knew where I was going,’ he said.

‘Can you post that envelope up to me?’

‘I can do better than that. It’s in my glove box.’

She was out the door before him. She was trying his door handle when he came with his keys, and when he handed her a large manila envelope, she held it to her breast, her arms crossed over it. She expected him to get into the car. Not yet ready to go, he kissed her and she didn’t have a hand, or the heart, or maybe the desire, to belt him. Should have belted him. He drew her close and kissed her again.

‘I’ve been wanting to do that for twenty years,’ he said, his mouth close to her own, then he went back for more, and maybe she wasn’t queer. She remembered his kiss. Didn’t fight him until he came up for air, when she held him off with a palm on his chest.

‘We look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, Jack, and see some utopian place where kids played. It was never what we thought it was.’

‘It was for me,’ he said, reaching again to hold her. She gave him a light tap on the cheek with the envelope then stepped back.

‘Thanks for this. Tell your mum thanks for not tossing it out.’

‘I loved you back then and I love you now. I think I get it under control, then I see you and I know that nothing has changed for me, nor ever will.’

‘Your marital status has,’ she said. ‘The past was crap, Jack. Ta for the cement, but don’t come back.’

‘I’ll come back,’ he said.

‘Then I won’t be here.’

She watched his tail-lights disappear into the bush, knowing she could have had a different life with him, that she could have shared his eternity – or messed it up. His kids would have been redheads, would have looked like the water-pistol bandit and not like their father.

Back in the kitchen, she ripped her way into the envelope and emptied its contents on the table. There must have been twenty-odd pages of Laurence George Morgan, copies of old newspaper reports, handwritten pages. Afraid to look closer, to discover that Tom Thompson had found the wrong Laurie Morgan, she lit a cigarette and made another coffee before sitting down on the upturned crate.

In 1959, when Tom had done his search, Laurence George Morgan had been living in Essendon, Melbourne, with his wife, two small sons and infant daughter. He’d been employed in the menswear department of Myers. And of course it wasn’t Georgie’s Laurence Morgan. He’d been a bank robber. He’d held up a jeweller with his water pistol. He’d stolen cars.

Her fingers delving deeper found a photograph, in sepia tones. Three men wearing slouch hats and army trousers, one wearing a singlet, one a shirt and one’s chest bare. They were standing over an unexploded bomb, and the bloke baring his chest looked like a young Clark Gable wearing his slouch hat at a cocky angle.

And she breathed. She breathed and touched her father’s face with an index finger. It was him.

‘My God.’

Fingers delving deeper still until she found a pristine newspaper photograph, identical to the mug shot she’d been carrying around since she was four years old.

‘My God.’

As a kid, she’d seen Laurie Morgan as a man. He was a boy, and a nice-looking boy in 1939. If he was still alive, he’d be an old man now. Jenny would turn fifty-six in December, and her water pistol-bandit had been years her senior – not as old as John McPherson. Younger than Amy.

She read of his parents’ and sister’s death, read of his every escapade, then found the date of his release from prison – not from Long Bay but from a prison farm. For twenty years she’d seen him as an old lag, locked up in Long Bay.

He’d been honourably discharged from the army in 1945.

‘My God.’

She’d slept with the framed image of her father beneath her pillow until Jenny had moved them to Ray King’s rooms in Armadale, where he’d spent a few months on the windowsill, beside Jimmy’s photograph of his father.

The day she’d removed him from his frame, she’d considered a burial, in the garden where Jenny had buried Ray’s sheep livers. She’d dug the hole, had found an empty custard powder packet for a coffin. Couldn’t put him in the dirt, so she’d buried him in one of Jenny’s kitchen dresser drawers, beneath the fancy tablecloths she’d never used.

The contents of that manila envelope again altered Georgie’s image of Laurence George Morgan. The old lag with the flattened nose and cauliflower ears was gone and in his place had risen the Myers salesman, the married man, the father of three.

Then it hit her. His kids were as much her siblings as had been Margot and Jimmy and Cara – though closer in age to Trudy. And she had to tell Jenny, had to show her what Jack’s father had found. She didn’t look at her watch. Knew it was late but also knew that Jenny never went to bed early.

The papers shovelled back into their envelope, she picked up her keys and handbag and drove into town.

A
rchie Foote, a sprightly eighty-odd, may have made his century if not for old man kangaroo’s decision to cross over the road as Archie had driven by too fast to swerve. Archibald Gerald Foote had died as he’d lived, in a hurry to get to somewhere else fast.

The date of Gertrude Foote’s birth, hidden behind her crazy tombstone, was considered by many to be a joke in very poor taste. It would have made her twelve months away from ninety when she’d waved her final goodbye from the goat paddock. Gertrude Foote had ridden her horse into town not six weeks before she’d died and hadn’t looked a day over seventy.

Amber Morrison’s eightieth birthday well behind her, she’d believed the fifty-three step climb up to Sissy’s unit would kill her. It hadn’t, and as the old saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. By spring, her ascensions were faster.

The letter she’d hand delivered to Lorna’s box on the morning after her unveiling had been returned to Elizabeth Duckworth’s private mailbox, in an envelope addressed by Lorna’s hand. Every letter since had returned in its original envelope,
Return to sender
, written in red, front and rear, and seemingly unopened.

The minister had responded to Elizabeth’s letter which had expressed her deep concern for her poor dear Miss Hooper:
. . . She has relied on my sight for many years, during which time, I have pleaded with her on many occasions not to drive her vehicle. For her own sake and the sake of those who share the roads, I beg you to do what you can to have her licence revoked
. He’d responded – but done nothing. Each week Amber rode an early tram to Kew where she walked by her old address, taking note of the vehicle’s position, and condition. There was a new dent in the passenger side fender, a new scrape along the driver’s side rear door.

Mrs Maryanne Brown, the woman Amber might yet become, had written a letter to the transport department, suggesting that her daughter had been forced to brake suddenly to avoid an accident with near blind Miss Lorna Hooper. Mrs Maryanne Brown’s letter had been acknowledged, but government departments move slowly – and God bless them for that.

The pension department had moved slowly, but it had moved. Amber Morrison’s pension cheques were now delivered fortnightly to Sissy’s mailbox. Two of Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s pension cheques had gone astray, or been shredded by Lorna, but the third had found its way to Box 122, Richmond Post Office.

Last week, Maryanne Brown’s birth certificate had been delivered to Box 122. Amber hadn’t been certain of her date of birth and had sweated for three weeks before the certificate arrived. And a vast relief it was. Coexisting with Sissy and Reginald was proving expensive. Roast a leg of lamb on Sunday night and it was gone by Monday. Expecting to boil a lump of corned beef on Monday and have it supply cold meat for the week was foolhardy. A loaf of bread disappeared in a day; a pound of butter in two.