The Tying of Threads (49 page)

It was eight o’clock when he said goodnight; Jenny was weary enough to go to bed. She’d showered, was clad for sleep, but instead began searching her wardrobe for garments Georgie might wear. Although she refused to discuss what she was growing, she’d grown out of her jeans. Jenny found a black pinafore dress she’d worn in the seventies. Plenty of room in it. It wasn’t long enough but she could cut it shorter and turn it into a smock. She found a pair of elastic-waisted stretch slacks which, with an inch or two off, would make serviceable pedal pushers. She folded them and placed them into an open case.

‘What are you doing, Jen?’

‘They’ll fit Georgie.’ She stripped a seventies caftan from its hanger.

‘You’re going back?’

‘On the Sunday bus.’ She added a long shirt to the case. ‘She needs someone with her.’

‘You said she was well.’

‘She is well, but her arm isn’t, and you can’t go around decapitating people with a shovel. She’ll be charged with something.’

‘It was self-defence,’ he said.

‘I know that, you know it, but he’s dead and she’s alive, and the last thing she needs right now is to be stuck in that house by herself all day, thinking about what might happen.’

He left her to her packing and she heard him at his typewriter in the dining room. The electrician had been and gone, the new fluorescents were hanging in the small sitting room, but he’d chosen not to move there.

She looked at a muted floral shift frock, a late sixties style, and what the hell was it still doing in her wardrobe? She’d never learnt to throw anything away – Granny’s doing, her ‘waste not, want not’ having been drummed into Jenny’s head for too many years. She added the shift to the case then walked across the hall to the dining room doorway.

‘The little sitting room is warm. Amy’s desk is in there. It would make a perfect study.’

‘I’m comfortable,’ he said.

‘You’ve done a lot while I’ve been away.’ His stack of completed pages had grown, and grew one page higher while she stood.

‘I thought I was going to lose Georgie.’

‘What do you do down there all day?’

‘She’s been teaching me how to work her computer. You need to get one, Jim. It would save you a ton of rewriting.’

‘I’m too old to learn new tricks, Jen,’ he said and, the conversation over, he wound a new page into his typewriter.

‘I’ve been away for a week, John’s in bed. Can’t you stop that for a minute and talk to me?’

‘I’ve been attempting to finish this chapter all day.’

‘And tomorrow there’ll be another chapter, then another one, then another one.’

‘I’m trying to finish a book, Jen.’

‘I’m trying to work out what’s going on in your mind. You wanted your car, I brought it home for you. I cooked your dinner, washed your dishes. What else should I have done to be worthy of your attention?’

He typed another line, his ten fingers working as a team, flying across those keys.

‘When we got back together you made me believe that I was the most important person in your life. I’m less important to you now than your car.’

‘Stop,’ he said.

‘You stop. You couldn’t even kiss me hello.’

Zing! Bang!

‘You refused to have anything to do with your family before we got back together. Nobby told me how he’d found your cousin and you refused to speak to him. I had to plead with you to write to Margaret – and when you did you wrote her a business letter.’

Zing. Bang.

‘She wasn’t the black-hearted bitch Lorna was. If you’d begged her, if you’d pleaded with her, I might have got to watch Jimmy grow,’ she said.

Zing. Bang.

‘And now that they’re all dead and safely buried, you surround yourself with them. This house is supposed to be my home too, and the whole bloody place stinks of Lorna.’

‘It was my mother’s furniture!’

‘You’re not writing about your mother. You’re turning every Hooper who ever walked into a hero. They weren’t heroes. They were a kidnapping, self-serving mob of pig-headed swine, and the reason why you didn’t kiss me hello was because you’re now seeing me through bloody old James Hooper’s cockroach eyes.’

‘You’re talking arrant nonsense,’ he said, his hands hovering over the keyboard like wounded birds who’d lost their way.

She’d said too much. She stepped back to the hall, but that old swine was looking at her, and tonight he knew he’d won. It was in his eyes, in the angle of his rat moustache, so she turned back.

‘I told you when we were in Sydney that there’d come a day when you’d start seeing me through your family’s eyes and that you wouldn’t like what you saw.’

‘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.

G
eorgie 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.’