The Tying of Threads (31 page)

‘Done,’ he said.

‘Thank God,’ she said.

‘I’m going around to John’s. He said he’d have the photographs ready today. I’ve left the manuscript on the table. Give it a glance if you get time.’

She tossed her smoke, washed her hands and went inside to read. She liked the anonymous rhyme, had read it many times, but read it again.

She’d led a life of ill repute had pretty Moll, the prostitute.

Sent in chains from her homeland. Cast upon a foreign sand . . .

Where she met young Wal, a common thief, who brought her little more than grief.

And o’r two states they were pursued until the night Wal’s past he rued.

The trappers close upon their trail, when from the dark they heard a wail

And on that cold and frosty dawn they found them in a den forlorn,

An infant on Wal’s lap, at rest, another held to Molly’s breast.

They left her there to take her chance while young Wal did the scaffold dance.

And many a tale was told of Moll, but never a sight was seen

And many a rumour spoken, of the beauty Moll had been,

And many a year gone by before she was sighted with her daughters,

Clad in naught but the skin they wore, a-frolicking in the waters.

She’d led a life of disrepute, had Moll, the aging prostitute.

And all of ye who’ve heard folk say that a life of crime will never pay,

I’m here to tell you it’s a folly. Just take a look at Squire Molly.

Jenny turned to page two.
No record exists of Molly or Walter Squire’s transportation to Australia.

‘What?’ Jenny asked. He may as well have written
The end
. She knew no record existed. He’d searched for months. He’d found a few Squires, a few Walters and many Mollys transported for prostitution, but without the year of her transportation or her family name, she could have been any one of those Mollys, or none of them. They’d found no record of a marriage, nor of the birth of her two daughters. All they knew of Molly Squire was that she and her adult daughters had been found by Molliston’s first settlers, squatting on two thousand acres of prime river land and ready to spear anyone who attempted to move them off their land.

Jenny persevered through page two, through page three, which was more than enough for her to decide she didn’t want to read Jim’s book – and that few would. It was well written. He could string big words together – blocks of big words.

Page four had space for a photograph, and beneath that space was a paragraph about James Murphy. Who was he? She scanned the next page, and the next, looking for Molly and her daughters but finding more names, a glut of names and dates she had no interest in reading. She turned back to the anonymous rhyme.

If there was no record of Molly Squire’s existence, if there were no relatives to upset, why stick to known facts? That rhyme set the scene for a fabulous story, the baby on Wal’s lap, the baby at Molly’s breast, then the husband hanged and a young woman left alone, miles from civilisation. How had she managed to raise two infant daughters? How had she come by money enough to build her mansion?

Blame that unknown poet, blame Jim for staying out all afternoon, blame his opening sentence, or too much overgrown garden. Blame what you will, but she sat down at Jim’s typewriter to find the youthful Molly, a girl who’d had nothing to sell but herself.

Mid-page, she gave her an excuse for becoming a prostitute. She set her up with six orphaned siblings, starving to death in a wretched hut in Ireland – and if it resembled Granny’s hut, too bad. Then, because a woman with two babies wouldn’t have survived alone in the bush, and because Molly and her daughters had defended their land with spears, Jenny allowed them to meet up and live with a tribe of blacks – at a camp which looked much like Elsie’s description of old Wadi’s.

More pages rolled in, rolled out, very messy pages, words cancelled with x’s; entire lines cancelled with x’s, but somewhere between the x’s and the blacks’ camp, Molly developed a voice much like Lila’s. And too bad about that too. Molly was telling Jenny’s seeking fingers where to go.

He could put his boots under my bed – if I had one . . . if he owned a pair of boots, Molly thought.

Molly and a handsome young black that Jenny named Wadimulla were just about to get down to business when Jim came home expecting to eat. She’d been cooking up fiction instead of the stew she’d planned for tonight.

‘I forgot the time,’ she said.

He counted her butts. ‘What have you been doing – other than smoking?’

‘Typing,’ she said.

‘The rattle as I came in the door was self-explanatory, Jen,’ he said. ‘Did you get time to look at the book?’

‘You lost me on page two,’ she said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Lack of Molly. The poem told me what the book was going to be about, then Molly disappeared and you introduced umpteen people I don’t give a damn about.’

‘She’s in it later,’ he defended.

‘I want her youth! Who’s interested in an elderly squatter?’ She wound a half-finished page from the typewriter and handed it to him, then eight messy pages more.

He glanced at them and followed her out to the kitchen where the wood in the firebox had turned to ash. She added newspaper and a few sticks of kindling. She opened the flue. He sat down to be served, and to glance at her pages while waiting.

She was whipping up an omelette when he started laughing. She loved his laugh. He didn’t do it often and when he did, he cried and had to take his glasses off to wipe his eyes. He wiped them, then read on, but couldn’t read for laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘This is,’ he said.

‘I’ve never professed to be a writer. It’s just an idea of what I wanted to read on the first pages.’

‘You’ve turned her into Lila.’

‘From what we know of her she probably was a Lila. One of those old blokes said that she’d paid her builders in bed.’

‘Where did you find Wadimulla?’

‘He seemed logical.’

‘You can’t mix fact and fiction, Jen.’

‘Who says you can’t and who’s alive to argue?’ she said, claiming her pages.

She showed them to Amy, who also recognised Lila. She chuckled silently, as only Amy could, and when she was done with her reading, she circled three paragraphs and told Jim he had to include them – and told Jenny later to stay on Molly’s trail.

She tried, but pencil and paper failed to raise her. Something had happened in her head while her blind fingers had been busy searching out the right keys. The logical side of her brain being up to its ears in concentration had given the creative side freedom to run amok.

A week later she dreamed of Molly/Lila and her daughters. They were living in a dark hut on Granny’s land, and the dream was so real, she rose from her bed to write it down. And out they came to play, Molly and her nine and ten year old girls, the younger of them running wild in the bush with the Aboriginal kids, the older, a brat of a kid, refusing to eat a lump of blackened goanna.

‘It’th poithonous,’ Hilda whined.

‘Starve then,’ Molly replied.

Jenny wrote of the forest, the creek, the fish in the creek, of the naked Wadimulla, spearing dinner. She wrote of the bark canoe he cut from a large gum tree. There were canoe trees scattered throughout Woody Creek’s forest where it ran down to the creek. Molliston had forests and a river. She hadn’t seen a canoe tree there, but they’d be there.

She was clothing Molly and her girls in possum skins, cobbled together with animal sinews, when Jim wandered out to see what she was doing at that time of morning.

‘I had a dream,’ she said and handed him six more pages.

He accepted her description of the bush and a paragraph of Molly’s girls, who may have eaten goanna, but refused Wadimulla and his fish. Amy was in love with Wadimulla, she said he epitomised the tall and noble black savage.

Then the first inquest into the Chamberlain baby’s death was quashed and a new inquest announced. A Sydney forensic biologist had found baby blood beneath the dashboard of the couple’s car.

‘Why would they murder a tiny baby?’ Jenny asked.

‘Murderers rarely look like murderers,’ Jim said.

Lindy Chamberlain appeared to have the staying power of a champion racehorse, and by the look of things she’d need it.

The Witch Queen
was released in time for Christmas sales. Six free copies arrived in Woody Creek. Jenny gave a copy to Lila.

‘What am I going to do with a kids’ book?’ she asked.

‘Sign it,’ Jenny said. ‘You’re all over it.’

‘I won’t be signing Flanagan much longer. How much money do you get for doing them?’

‘Not much, once it’s split four ways,’ Jenny said.

‘Do I get any more?’

‘Not unless we use more of the photos.’

‘Use them all,’ Lila said. ‘If I ever get my hands on enough money, you won’t see my heels for dust.’

Amy and John wanted to do a follow-up. They had photographs enough and the rhyme. Jim was playing again with Molly, as was Jenny – when Jim wasn’t around. He was no longer amused.

Then Trudy, now a qualified nursing sister, came home for a week before leaving for Africa, where she’d spend twelve months with a mob of volunteers who’d attempt to do what Granny and Itchy-foot had attempted to do ninety-odd years ago, what missionary groups and volunteers had been attempting to do forever. And what had they achieved? It was the black African’s culture to breed too many kids then watch half of them die of disease and starvation.

Jenny left her with her father and went for a walk down to the old place to rest her eyes.

Granny hands had been busy in the earth. Her climbing rose and the lilac wisteria had intertwined along the chicken wire fence, though there was not a chook left to appreciate the beautification of their yard. Harry had taken the last of them into town. Unguarded, the hens had made too easy meals for foxes, of both the four- and two-legged variety.

The shell of Elsie’s house was still standing, and the old shed holding together. No barn owl snoozed in its rafters. A smell in there, not of mice, but of long abandonment.

The front fence to the west of Elsie’s house was down, saplings encroaching. Nothing now to warn the forest that this was Gertrude Foote’s land. Lives had been lived here, good lives with no handouts. Days had begun with hard labour and ended the same way.

Jenny sighed and walked back to where the old lean-to had once leaned, where Margot had been born, and Georgie. Not Jimmy, though she’d tried for hours to scream him out.

She walked north to where Granny’s front door had been, the door Granny and Maisy had carried her through that day. They’d carried her out to the car where she’d screamed all the way to Willama, while Granny, who’d spent hours telling her to push, now begged her not to push. God, how she’d sucked on that chloroform mask, sucked it in and died, and come back from the dead vomiting her heart out, and howling because her belly hadn’t been cut, because she knew they’d pulled Jim’s baby out of her in pieces.

They hadn’t. They’d got him out alive. Battered and bruised, scratched and bung-eyed, but a week later he’d been her most beautiful baby.

Three kids, born to her before she’d been old enough to have kids, each one an accidental seed, pollinated by accident. Georgie, her tall strong sapling; Margot, too long in Georgie’s shade, had grown stunted; little sapling Jimmy, his roots transplanted early to grow in strange soil.

According to Lorna, he now called himself James Langdon. Jenny had written twice to James Langdon at his Thames Ditton box number but received no reply. Perhaps Lorna had lied. Jim said not. Jim said she never bothered to lie. The logical side of Jenny’s head knew that Jimmy had received her letters and chosen not to reply. The other side didn’t, nor did her bones, nor her womb where he’d grown. Down there, she knew that one day, somewhere, sometime, she’d see him again, and she’d recognise him too.

She wandered the land for an hour, finding flowers in hidden places, wandered until a bunch of dark-complexioned males with a flagon came from behind Elsie’s house. No Wadimulla amongst them. They looked dangerous and, the hairs on the back of her neck rising, she walked fast towards the rear fence where she climbed between the wires and into Joe Flanagan’s land, the safer option today.

He’d always owned a pair or two of red kelpies, which for forty years had appeared to be the same red kelpies. For as long as Jenny and her kids had used Joe’s land as a short cut to town, those red kelpies had come on their bellies to warn them off the property. She was midway through the heavily timbered wood paddock before one came from behind a tree to show his teeth, and not in a neighbourly smile.

Back up, lady.

Jenny didn’t back up. She got her back to a tree then looked for his red mate – or for old Joe, or even Lila.

He barked half-heartedly, glanced over his shoulder. No keeper, no companion watching to dob on him, so he sat and offered Jenny a conspiratorial wink before scratching his fleas.

‘Where’s your mate today?’ Jenny asked.

She’s got eight new kids to feed, lady. Where do you think she be?
he said in that conversational voice of all dogs.

‘Tell her – and your pups – that I’m going to build down here one day.’

Joe’s bitch’ll’ave that fence down in a week, lady.

A
mber was usually out and about before the roar of traffic claimed Melbourne, before the stink of car and truck fumes killed that barely perceivable perfume of a lost city.

She dressed carefully for her early morning jaunts, camouflaging her pretty frocks beneath a black overcoat, concealing her white curls beneath the black headscarf worn by many elderly European immigrants. No one spoke to her. Tram drivers on the Kew line were familiar with that old dame in black who once a week rode the early morning tram to that same stop in Kew.