The Tying of Threads (34 page)

‘Off you go, love,’ Jenny said to Trudy. ‘Drive carefully.’ She didn’t want her and her friends to witness a Flanagan brawl.

Jenny had witnessed a few this past year. They weren’t pretty. The most recent of them had been caused by a final payment to Lila for permission to use the leftover photographs in a third witch book. She’d demanded five hundred, then taken off with it and Joe’s car, which he’d reported stolen. Some women don’t know how to handle men, Lila had once said. Some men refuse to be handled, and Lila had struck one.

Jenny watched him drag that well-travelled case from his boot. He didn’t carry it across the road. He pitched it. Too heavy to fly far, it landed hard on the concrete guttering. He pitched a handful of banknotes after it and when Lila stopped cursing him to chase his notes, he took off around the corner, his passenger side door hanging open. Lila chased one flying twenty halfway to Blunt Street before she caught it. Jenny picked up another from the gutter. She picked up a five.

‘Mean old bastard,’ Lila panted. ‘I’ll go him for every penny he’s got.’ She claimed the twenty and the five, retrieved a ten blown into the rose hedge, rolled her loot, tucked it beneath her bra strap, then asked: ‘Who were those blokes with Trudy?’

Jenny had forgotten the blokes and Trudy. ‘What?’

‘Trudy’s blokes?’

They’d broken the mould when they’d made Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman/Macdonald/Flanagan. Her case lay, half on, half off the road, spilling its load. She had two twenty-dollar notes, a ten and two fives to her name but could probably give a better description of Trudy’s male friends than Jenny, who had fed them. What can you do with a woman like that, a woman who laughs when she attempts to pick up her case and everything she owns lands on the road? One hinge had ripped free from the cheap cardboard. There’s nothing you can do with such a woman, other than make her a coffee, donate an old case as a replacement, give her a bed for the night, then buy her a one-way bus ticket to Melbourne.

‘See ya when I see you, eh?’ Lila said.

Jenny waved the bus on its way, praying that Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman/Macdonald/Flanagan wouldn’t come back, that she’d find herself a new bloke, or a job, or the Salvos.

Hope budded in Jenny’s breast that Christmas. No tree that year, no cooking. They ate barbecued chicken in Nobby and Rosemary’s backyard, with their sons and their grandkids and Trudy and Georgie, and on Boxing Day, in Myers, when Jenny saw the back view of a woman who might have been Lila, she grabbed Jim’s arm and walked him fast to the exit.

In January Trudy moved from the Box Hill hospital to Frankston, and Jen and Jim were afraid she’d come across old hospital files which might give up the details of her birth, but she wasn’t there long. In June she flew to India – and why, in God’s name, would anyone choose to go to India?

She was due to fly home the night the doorbell rang at ten, and Jenny feared her plane had crashed when she opened the front door and saw the constable. Then she saw Lila. Didn’t unlock the security door.

‘Look what he did to me!’ Lila wailed.

Jenny could see little through the security mesh. She unlocked it and looked at what he’d done. Old Joe was a dairyman. He’d been raised on a dairy farm. He’d never shorn a sheep in his life and he hadn’t done much of a job of shearing his wife. Lila still had her ears, she still had a few hanks of two foot long hair behind her ears, but the rest was gone.

‘He sat on me and cut it off then he pitched your case into the incinerator and poured petrol all over it. Everything I owned was in it, and he burned it.’

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.

T
rudy 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 pushing 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.