The Tying of Threads (44 page)

‘Years, but those legs aren’t Sissy’s.’

The reporters got it right on Thursday when their cameras caught Sissy opening her front door to pitch a saucepan of water at a cameraman. Jenny recognised her through a dripping lens.

Given time, the Duckworths rallied as Duckworths ever had. They removed the useless duo from Doveton to a farm fifteen miles from Bendigo, and with nothing more to aim at, the cameramen moved on to greener pastures. The neighbour’s dog stopped barking and the kids got on with their cricket match.

N
obby owned a large trailer. He, Rosemary and Jim emptied Lorna’s house while Jenny remained at Greensborough, locked in, the television playing from morning to night. On the Friday following Amber’s arrest, Jim arrived home, the car boot loaded with old files, moth-eaten albums, his great-grandfather’s Bible and four statuettes.

‘They were Mum’s,’ he said. ‘There were six of them when I was a kid.’

Jenny didn’t want them, or the files that had transferred their odour to her car boot. She changed her mind about the ornaments when Jim unwrapped the first twelve inch tall lady, clad in a maroon and green gown and carrying a basket of delicate china flowers. Beneath its layers of grime it was beautiful. She helped remove the newspaper from the others.

‘They’re old,’ she said.

‘Older than me. I was allowed to look at them but not touch,’ Jim said, and they carried them into the laundry where Jenny ran them a bath in the sink then bathed them with dishwashing detergent and a toothbrush.

They were air drying on the family room table when Georgie came in. Like Granny, like Jenny, she saved used tissue paper. They wrapped each lady well before placing it into the case, well protected on all sides by clothing. Jim wanted to go home in the morning, as did Jenny – until they watched that evening’s current affairs program.

Reporters had tracked the woman they’d named the Grinning Granny to Woody Creek where, in 1946, she’d been arrested in connection with the murder of her husband. They’d found Maisy, neighbour and childhood friend of the Grinning Granny, and there she was, on the box in full living colour – and knowing Maisy, the tape editor must have worked overtime to patch together three minutes of usable interview. For Jenny, even those three minutes were too much.

‘I’m not going back there, Jim.’

‘We’re packed,’ he said.

‘I went through it when she killed Dad, and again when Raelene and Margot died. I can’t do it a third time. I can’t. And I won’t.’

Jim phoned John, who suggested they stay where they were. ‘The dogs have been worth their weight in gold,’ he said.

‘We’ll move over to Nobby’s in the morning,’ Jenny said.

‘Stay where you are,’ Georgie said. ‘I was hoping to get a look inside Lorna’s house.’

‘Paul is sick of the sight of us,’ Jenny argued.

‘I’ve been thinking about offering you a job as cook,’ Paul said.

‘Live in, ute supplied? I’ll take it.’

He’d bought a new battery for the ute. Twice Jenny had driven to the local shops. The roads around Greensborough were viable in the late morning or early afternoon.

Georgie, who battled peak-hour traffic daily, should have been content to stay home on Saturday, but she drove Jim to Kew in the ute. There was an old oil painting he hadn’t been able to fit into his boot, and with room for only two in the ute’s cabin, Paul stayed home, Jenny barely aware that he was there. Like Jim, he typed, but his computer keyboard was near silent.

At one, she heated a can of tomato soup and made two toasted cheese sandwiches. She called him, and when he didn’t come out to eat, she took a mug of soup and a sandwich to his study.

‘It’s getting cold,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m inclined to become involved when I get in here.’

He cleared a space between his computer and half a dozen flat squares of what appeared to be cardboard. One fell to the floor at Jenny’s feet. She placed the mug and plate down then picked up the cardboard square.

‘What is it?’

‘A floppy disc,’ he replied.

Discs were round flat things, not square. She placed it with the others, turned to go, then changed her mind.

‘They’re the things Georgie said she’d put her grandfather’s diaries on?’

‘Her Itchy-foot? He’s here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see what she did?’

‘You’re working,’ she said, but he opened a drawer to riffle through a dozen more of the same-sized squares of cardboard until finding the one he sought. He slid a square disc out of a slot in the computer, slid the other one in, hit a few keys and, half a minute later, up popped THE DIARIES OF ARCHIBALD FOOTE FILE ONE.

Jenny moved closer as the screen filled with words then, elbow to elbow with this quiet man who had somehow managed to run Georgie down, she watched as page after page slid by, until she glimpsed what appeared to be a poem.

‘Can you make it go back to the italics bit?’

He could, and did, and she read words she recognised, astonished that a skinny piece of cardboard could contain so many words.

‘How?’ she asked. ‘How can so much fit onto that thing?’

He attempted to explain between sips of soup. He spoke of bits and bytes – meaningless jargon to Jenny. She was mesmerised by the screen.

Then he vacated his chair and gestured to her to sit.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I need to shower,’ he said. ‘Hit the
page down
key when you’re ready to move on.’ And he left her with the humming beast that would probably explode if she touched anything.

It didn’t.

There were passages of Archie Foote’s diary he’d recorded in mirror writing, which, like the poems, Georgie had typed in italics. She was reading one when Paul returned to stand behind her. Hit the
page down
key twice before springing up from his chair.

‘Playing games is the best way to lose your fear of the beast,’ he said, reaching to turn on the second computer. He set it up to play a game of solitaire.

‘I’ll wreck something,’ she said.

‘It’s a mindless tool, Jen. You’re the controller. How did you learn to control a car?’ he asked.

‘When you’re young you have no fear.’

‘I bet you didn’t take off at a hundred k’s an hour?’

‘I remember kangaroo-hopping down a country lane while my teacher killed himself laughing,’ Jenny said.

‘Playing solitaire is kangaroo-hopping. If you run into trouble, you hit the brake – the
quit
key.’

She’d been playing solitaire since she’d discovered the game. He showed her how to move the cards and she sat down to play. That’s how she got to know Paul Dunn, after almost a week of sleeping beneath his roof, a week of well-mannered monosyllables.

She’d liked the way he hadn’t turned a hair when the news broke of Amber Morrison’s arrest, or when Georgie had explained Jenny’s connection to the Grinning Granny. She liked watching him and Georgie seated side by side on the couch. They looked right together. He was almost four years her junior, but Georgie had never looked her age. What a pity they hadn’t found each other years ago – or recognised what they’d found years ago.

The computer beat her. It beat her three times before she gave up.

Stood a while in the passage, listening to his keyboard’s chuckle, and thought of Jim’s rattling, zipping, bell ringing, clanking relic. Before Amy went to hospital, Jim had taken on a typing job for the Forestry Commission. He was a whiz at typing facts and figures.

The ute returned at three thirty. Jenny went outside to tell Jim she’d used a computer and that he had to buy one. He was more interested in removing a life-sized portrait from the rear of the ute – no wonder he hadn’t been able to fit it into the boot.

‘I thought you were talking about a landscape,’ she said.

‘It’s Pop’s grandfather,’ he said, propping a mean-faced old coot against the wheel of the ute, then stepping back to admire him.

‘His frame might be worth keeping. He isn’t,’ Jenny said.

‘He’ll clean up,’ he said. ‘What would you use on oil paint?’

‘A splash of petrol and my cigarette lighter on that one,’ Jenny said. ‘And just for the record, I’m not giving him house room, Jim.’

In all, they stayed for twelve nights in Greensborough, and when they left for home on Wednesday, James Richard Hooper rode on the floor behind them, and he blocked the view, and he stank of Lorna, so Jenny lit a cigarette.

‘Not in the car,’ he said.

‘It’s a sweeter smell than his, and I’m not having him in the house, Jim.’

‘Trudy wanted to keep him.’

‘There are places down here she could pay to store him,’ Jenny said.

‘We’ve got the space,’ Jim said.

‘He’s going in the shed.’

They were halfway home before he told her there were a few pieces of furniture Trudy also wanted to keep. ‘The removalist will deliver them on Thursday.’

‘What?’

‘Only the best of it,’ he said.

‘Not “what” as in “what’s coming?”, but “what” as in how dare you agree to store it, and how dare you leave it until now to tell me.’

‘I knew what your reaction would be.’

‘If you knew my reaction, then why agree to store it?’

‘I grew up with it, and most of it was Mum’s before it was Pop’s.’

‘That thing wasn’t your mother’s,’ she said, gesturing to the rear seat. ‘And I’ll bet she didn’t give it house room.’

‘It was in the farmhouse until I was six or seven. We found out that one of Monk’s English relatives had painted it—’

‘The one who shot himself,’ Jenny said.

‘Did he?’

‘He would have if he’d had a conscience,’ she said.

‘It’s old, Jen. It’s got historical value.’

‘Hysterical value,’ she corrected. ‘His moustache looks like a white rat perched on his top lip – and your mother’s furniture or not, you had no right to agree to storing it without talking to me about it, and then not telling me until we’re on the road and there’s not a thing I can do about it.’

‘The dining room setting could be over a hundred years old—’

‘I’ve got my own dining room suite.’

‘Trudy brought an antique dealer in to give us a valuation on it and the sideboard. He offered twelve hundred, and if he was prepared to pay twelve, it’s worth twice that or maybe more.’

‘Every stick of furniture, every floor covering and drape, we’ve chosen together—’

‘All things pass,’ he sighed and said no more.

All things pass?
She smoked in silence for a kilometre or two, each revolution of the wheels drawing her back to that town, to no Amy, to hours of Maisy and her rehashing of the Amber, the poor Sissy, the Granny rolling over in her grave story. And she didn’t want any of it.

‘Nothing passes,’ she said. ‘Our arguments don’t pass. They congeal and grow scabs until you go and do something like this that rubs my scabs off and I bleed again – and I’m sick of bleeding, Jim. Stop the car and let me out. I’m going back to Greensborough.’

‘We’ll talk about it at home,’ he said.

‘Woody Creek isn’t home. Your father’s house has never been home—’

‘You’re being unreasonable.’

‘Being reasonable hasn’t got me far, has it? How did you lose your leg, Jim?’

‘I’m driving, Jen.’

‘Then stop the bloody car and let me out.’

He didn’t stop. He didn’t make the usual halfway stop for toilets and petrol, and when he turned into the drive, the motor was running on empty and Jenny’s bladder wasn’t.

The dogs were pleased to see her. John looked well and he had news.

‘Lorna is in pup,’ he said.

An unfortunate choice of name that Jenny had considered changing. Not today. Today it sounded fine as she ran for the bathroom.

J
ohn went home. Jim wanted the dogs to go with him and, if not for the portrait leaning against the entrance hall wall, Jenny might have let them go. But it was there, eyeing her as she walked by, and the removalist was coming with more junk, so the dogs stayed.

She threatened to leave them free to hunt the removalists. Jim wouldn’t go near them. He threatened to phone John, or the Willama dog catcher. There was a stand-off until Maisy beeped her horn at the gate. Jenny chained the dogs for Maisy, and two minutes after she drove in she had to give up her space to a huge van.

Two burly males carried Vern Hooper back into his house – or carried in his tapestry-upholstered dining room chairs, ten of them. Jenny had sat on those chairs way back when her feet couldn’t reach the floor. She’d traced their carved backs with a tiny finger. As each chair was carried inside, she promised it that it would never feel her weight again.

Jenny’s dining room suite made way for a heavy oval table and matching sideboard. That suite may well have been worth twelve hundred dollars – or thirty-six hundred. Jenny could see its value, which didn’t alter its stink of Lorna.

Her convenient phone table and chair made way for a grand hallstand. As a kid she’d admired it. She hadn’t previously sighted the large camphorwood chest with five deep drawers. Plenty of space for it in Trudy’s bedroom, and who can ever have too much drawer space? Its drawers were magnificent but, camphorwood or not, it smelled of Lorna, and Jenny escaped with her dogs, went for a walk down to John’s and found him, sitting alone in the garden, looking into space.

‘Will I leave the dogs with you?’

‘I’ve paid a deposit on a room at the retirement home in Willama, Jen. The house is on the market.’

‘A deposit on a room?’

‘It has its own bathroom,’ he said. ‘All meals are provided by the hospital.’

She went home late – went home, and when she flicked on the entrance hall light she saw him glaring down at her with his cockroach eyes and his white rat moustache. They’d hung him high where Simon Jenner’s landscape had hung that morning. Jim couldn’t climb ladders. The removalists must have hung him.

All things pass, or weeks pass. The Grinning Granny didn’t. The newspapers loved her. Ninety year old women didn’t wander around at night bludgeoning other old women to death with champagne bottles. She had a young solicitor, who might not win the case but his face would become as well known as Grinning Granny’s before the trial began, if it ever got to court.