The Tying of Threads (20 page)

He drank but didn’t sit, so she sat.

‘What’s going on in your head, love?’

‘It’s too short for lice.’

‘You had beautiful hair.’

‘You didn’t have a bad crop yourself.’

‘At least you remember what I used to have.’

‘I remember everything,’ she said. ‘I see everything. Raelene opened up a third eye in my eyebrow that night and through it I can see ants crawling around the moon’s craters. Someone should have hit me with a shifting spanner twenty years ago.’

‘I considered clubbing you and dragging you off to my cave.’

‘How many kids did you end up with?’

‘Just the two boys. The youngest is still in school, the oldest is still trying to do what his mother wants him to do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Become a businessman instead of a copper. He wants to be a copper.’

‘You’re still living in Melbourne?’

‘We built a new house a few years back. Where have you been?’

‘Like the old song says,
I’ve been everywhere, man
.’

‘How long are you here for?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘As long as it takes to do what?’

‘I’ll let you know when I find out,’ Georgie said.

‘If you don’t want to stay with your mum, get a cabin out at the caravan park.’

‘Been there, done that. This house mightn’t be home but the land is. I’ve got a stove, an unlimited wood yard.’

‘And you’re sitting on an oil drum, freezing your arse off.’

‘While confronting my past, reviewing it with my third eye. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do after a catastrophe?’ she said.

‘Your sister has been dead for near on two years. It’s time to start getting on with your life.’

‘That, my friend, is a supremely ridiculous statement. While one lives and breathes, one is getting on with one’s life. I had a birthday in March, and the March before that, and next year I’ll have another one. Drink your beer and go. You’re disturbing my third eye.’

‘You’re disturbing me, or this place is, and that bloody haircut is.’

Again she ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Cutting it off was a part of the great erasure of self, the rubbing out of she who had been me. Whoever she was should have died in that fire, and would have if Raelene hadn’t knocked down the chicken wire fence. Had it been standing, there’s no way Harry and those two cops could have got close enough to my bedroom window to break it. I’ll guarantee that she was heading for my bedroom to toss another one of her petrol bombs when she tripped and bombed herself. She didn’t give a damn one way or the other about Margot. It was me she wanted dead, me and Cara, but Cara was gone, and Raelene inadvertently saved me by knocking down that fence. Try to work that one out, Jack, because I can’t.’

‘Some might say God was watching over you?’

‘Good one. Why me and not Margot?’

‘I’ve got no answers for you, love,’ he said.

‘And some paid professional does? A priest, maybe? Can he tell me why Raelene’s body was found four metres from my bed and I didn’t even hear her screams?’

‘You were zonked out on painkillers when I left at two.’

‘Do you dream much?’

‘If I do, I forget them,’ Jack said.

Georgie stood to look out of the lone kitchen window, to wipe with her hand at its dust and cobweb curtain. ‘I used to forget them. Now I dream in technicolour and they stay, every one of them stays. I was dreaming about Raelene the night of the fire. I was chasing her through a maze of tunnels beneath Charlie’s shop. She’d pinched my handbag,’ she said, then wiped the window again. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘There’s a pea souper of a fog coming down out there. You’d better go while you can still see to go.’

Jack remembered Woody Creek’s pea soup fogs. He emptied his mug, kissed her cheek, told her to look after herself, and he left.

T
he fog-shrouded land kept morning at bay; no sunrise for the rooster to crow about so he didn’t crow. Georgie had set her inflatable mattress close to the stove’s hearth, a cosy enough bed last night. Only cold ash in the firebox this morning. She’d stockpiled wood in the rear sleep-out, had found newspapers aplenty, and within minutes twigs were crackling and flames offering the suggestion of heat to her blackened billy.

She wanted a coffee, wanted a smoke but refused to light a cigarette until the steaming mug was in her hand. Wished she had an electric jug. Wished she was someplace warm. Fed the fire larger pieces of wood and thought of warmer places, a few she’d wished cooler – but whichever direction she’d driven, she’d ended up in towns that were much the same, had ended up dealing with people who were much the same.

She had no idea of the time. It could have been seven or eleven when she walked out to the back steps to look towards Joe Flanagan’s land. There was nothing there. No fence, no trees, even the goat paddock had gone – and the blackened square of earth behind it. Knew it was still there – she could smell the dank ash stink of it riding the swirling fog banks. Turned her back on it and returned to stand before the stove, to dip a finger into the billy. The water hadn’t warmed – and whether she was staying or going, a small electric Birko wouldn’t take up much space. The three disciples had carried one to heat soup, beans, boil eggs and water – when they’d had power to plug into. She didn’t have much but she had power.

Robert Fulton always opened his doors at nine. He might have a Birko in stock. She glanced at her wrist, missing her watch this morning, then dipped a finger in again. There was barely warmth enough in the stove to heat its own metal. She glanced out at her ute. It would be warmer, or would warm up faster.

The decision made, she added more water to her billy, fitted its dented lid, then closed up the flue and walked out to her ute.

The motor started. It always started. It stalled too as she backed out to the road. Knowing it well, she gave it a bit more choke, got it going again, then drove off into the fog, the only proof she was on the road being the occasional passing white post.

Stock Route Road had gone missing, but it was wider and had a broken white line painted down its centre. Keeping to the left of the line, she drove on, seeing little other than a truck or two rising out of the fog ahead then disappearing back into it. Mission Bridge was still there, looking eerie as it rose out of a fog bank, but she crossed over and continued on towards Willama.

Too many houses in that town for the fog to cancel their presence, the roads wide, well kept and tree lined. A clean town, she knew it well.

The emptiness of Coles supermarket’s car park told her that the hour was early; she parked close to the entrance and walked in. Its wide aisles were warm and she wandered them, tossing items into a trolley – a bag of potatoes to bake on her oven tray, two apples, two bananas, a loaf of crusty bread still hot from the baker’s oven, two tins of preserved peaches, on special this week – and they reminded her of Charlie.

No Birko to be found on Coles’ shelves, but a choice of three electric jugs. She chose the smallest of them, and a toaster. Picked up a pack of three glasses, just in case Jack came back again to share her beer. Looked at a set of screwdrivers then, with a shrug, tossed them into her trolley, aware they were too cheap to be much good but that they might well do what she had in mind for them to do. No one queuing at the checkout, she emptied her trolley and, just for the hell of it, offered her brand new credit card to the assistant, and was surprised when it worked.

It paid for a watch later, then a pair of shoes, a pair of stretch jeans that looked as if they’d fit. It paid for two sweaters, woollen and warm. The bank charged no interest if the bill was paid on time.

By eleven thirty the sun was out in Willama. Woody Creek fogs had a bad habit of hanging around all day, so she drove around to the Holden showroom to look at the new ute, a beauty and she wanted it, then, feeling guilty for wanting it, she shouted her old ute two new rear tyres, or her card shouted. It could prove itself the best invention since the wheel should she decide to hit the roads again. Maybe she would. Maybe she’d buy that new ute and a small caravan and keep on driving around Australia until she ran out of money.

By one, the sun was strong enough to follow her home, strong enough to shine heat on Elsie’s west-facing window. The kitchen felt warm.

Her shopping dumped on the table, she ripped her way into her screwdriver set, determined that the kitchen remain warm. An hour later, a door removed from the east-side bedroom now swung in the kitchen doorway. It didn’t swing well, but it closed.

For dinner that night she ate two baked potatoes swimming in butter, with cheese and black pepper – and, thanks to the door, she slept warm, though became aware that her new door might well have been the only support for that bedroom wall when she heard new creaks in the house, but not a breath of wind. She slept like a log and dreamed of Jimmy. They were playing hidey beneath Elsie’s house.

Woody Creek’s fogs had a habit of coming down day after day once they started. She expected to wake to fog, but instead woke to blue sky. Her old habit when waking had been to look first at her watch. She slid back into old habits that morning. The time was eight fifteen.

Elsie’s outdoor lavatory, built well away from the house, necessitated a walk through grass to reach it, icy crackling grass, every blade of it a spear of white that morning. The drip puddle beneath the tank’s tap wore a coating of ice; the ute’s windscreen wore a layer, the hose feeding the kitchen tap had frozen solid but the tank gave up its water, and it felt warm.

She stood, full billy in hand, looking at Granny’s land, its wintry green turned white. The rooster, no more impressed by frost than fog, crowed out his protest from the burnt-out site. She watched him stepping from foot to foot on something that had survived that fire. She hadn’t been across the goat paddock yet. Hadn’t walked that blackened area. Looked for it this morning but saw only white.

Her coffee made, strong coffee, she lit her first smoke of the day then returned to the back door to look again for the black. Not a sign of it, so with coffee mug in one hand and cigarette in the other, she walked the track across the goat paddock. Margot had kept it well worn. With no Margot to walk it, the grass was encroaching.

She went no further than the small wooden gate to Granny’s home paddock where she leaned, seeking the rooster who no longer crowed on his perch but pecked at the earth with his harem where Granny’s house had stood. With the chicken wire fence on the ground, the chooks had the run of Granny’s home paddock. She counted fifteen hens. There must have been forty in ’77. She could see only one rooster, a Red Orpington, who might have been a chick the last time she’d seen him. A big, bad-tempered White Leghorn had ruled the roost eighteen months ago.

She sucked the last from her butt, tossed it onto the icy grass, emptied her mug, set it down on a gatepost, then walked through the gate and across to the shed seeking wheat to bribe the chooks back to their own yard. They remembered her, or recognised the feed basin, and ran to her feet to curtsy for wheat. Bugs and grubs might go down well enough, a bit of grass might help with the digestion, but nothing settled so easily in the crop as familiar grain.

Glad-to-see-you-back
, the rooster crowed.
Hope-you-stay-a-while
.

She saw Granny’s stove standing where it had fallen, saw the big tank lying on its side. Walked by the site to the chicken wire gate and out to the fowl yard where she tossed wheat beneath the walnut tree. They came squawking behind her, through the gate, across the fallen fence, and when she’d rid the home yard of chooks, she walked across the fallen fence wire to stand staring at fresh dung on the stove’s hotplate.

There was a load of dung inside the big tank, evidence that many hens had found shelter there. If they wanted its shelter, they could have it, but in their own yard, not in Granny’s. She rolled it across new grass. It jibbed at the chicken wire but she repositioned it and rolled it again until its thunderous momentum was halted by the walnut tree where she propped it with chunks of wood and broken brick.

The weak sun creeping higher twinkled on icy fenceposts, those standing and their fallen mates. She looked at the fallen as she crossed back to the other side to stand a while staring at the rectangle of cement floor where Raelene had died. With the sun shining on its coating of ice it looked like a granite slab marking a grave. Crazed granite, the cement laid by Bernie Macdonald’s working bee, that had little depth to it. Its first crack had appeared two months after Georgie and Margot moved back home.

Someone had knocked down the brick chimney and carted the bricks away. She walked to where it had stood, then turned to look at the place where Margot died, a brief glance, then fast away to that slab of concrete. She could look at it without flinching.

It covered the area of what had once been Granny’s kitchen floor. She remembered that room as a roaring wind tunnel of fire. Could still hear it in her head but shook it away and walked back to the stove.

Its old iron chimney was gone. Granny had told her once that her father had bought that chimney from old man Monk, that it had replaced the original timber and mud chimney. Always a too massive thing for that little hut, Georgie had expected to see it lying where it had fallen. She hadn’t expected to see Granny’s stove.

How many times had she dreamt of walking here? The night after the disciples had given her a tow into Karratha, the first night she’d shared their tent, she’d had a nightmare about walking the burnt-out rooms where Margot’s hands had reached up through the ash to grasp her and drag her down. Never a sleepwalker, she’d attempted to take off in her sleeping bag and landed on top of Simon.

‘I’m ready, willing and able, Mum,’ he’d said and, having got a grip on her, he’d hung on. She’d almost loved those boys and sighed now for their loss, or maybe for the loss of their laughter.