The Tying of Threads (55 page)

‘Where did you first learn to touch-type, Jim?’

‘Somewhere,’ he said.

‘At one of the hospitals?’ There would be no more topics which were out of bounds, not for her. He didn’t reply. She turned back to her computer and for half an hour their keyboards chattered companionably.

Nobby believed Jim had lost his leg before he’d been captured, that he’d received the wound in battle. From what Jenny had read of the Japs, if he’d been injured in battle, they wouldn’t have wasted medical supplies on him. Through the years she’d asked him a hundred times how he’d lost his leg. He claimed to have no memory of it, or of the war. Only once had he mentioned the prison camp, to John.
I saw the worst of mankind and the best of it
, he’d said. Jenny knew when he’d gone missing. She knew when he’d been returned to a Melbourne hospital, but that’s all she knew.

‘Did they have doctors in the Jap camp?’

He looked at the blank screen, his hands still.

‘Talk to me,’ she said.

‘It’s the past,’ he said. Like a parrot. For thirty years he’d been parroting those words. Thirty years? It was too long, and today his words failed to silence her.

‘The past isn’t ever gone, Jim. Scars from the past don’t heal. I’ve got one on my calf from a pair of scissors Amber threw at me one day. I’ll wear it to my grave. You’ll wear that stump of a leg to your grave. How did you lose your leg?’

He’d stood then, and let himself out; she returned to her
Boomerang
file. She had a hundred and twenty-two pages now, and was having a no holds barred ball with Lila. She’d celebrate her absence when she was gone, but while she was here, she looked on her presence as less of an irritant and more a subject to be studied, and recorded.

And he was back. She unlocked the door.

Until the moment his batteries had run down, he’d filled his every day at his typewriter. At times she’d wanted to drag him away from the thing, to dig a pit in the garden and bury it. Today she wanted to watch his hands fly. Knew those hands so well. Knew the scar on his middle left finger, the scar on his wrist.

‘You’re getting your old speed back,’ she said.

‘It’s flat,’ he said. ‘The keyboard.’

‘It doesn’t demand paper,’ she said.

‘Where does it go?’

‘It stays inside until you save it to a disc,’ she said. ‘If you don’t save it before you turn the computer off, it’s lost.’ She watched him type another line. ‘You can tell a computer your worst secrets. Its blank expression never alters, and when you’ve finished baring your soul to it, you can hit the delete key and erase the lot. Do you want me to erase it?’

He nodded, so she turned on the monitor and up came the
The quick brown fox
and
the crow.
She held down the
shift
key, selected the pages on the screen, hit
delete
and the screen’s blank face looked back at them.

‘Look, no white-out,’ she said. ‘Rubbed out as if it never was.’

She’d done a lot of her own deleting when she’d filled her
Jenny
file. Had almost wiped out the night of the five American sailors and the beach and the taxi driver and the factory and her belly growing with Cara and the ripped taffeta dress. Hadn’t. Hadn’t deleted Laurie Morgan, or the Macdonald twins either. Knew deleting it would do no good. It had happened, all of it.

Every Tuesday, rain, hail or shine, at one o’clock Bernie Macdonald drove into her yard. Every Tuesday at three thirty, he returned to collect Maisy. Jenny never spoke to him, but constant subjection to the sight of him may have been a form of therapy. And she loved his mother.

She loved that fool of a man sitting, typing his fox and crow epic. Should have tried harder to make him talk about his war when he’d been well, and he had been, for years and more years. They’d created eight kids’ books. Then they’d lost Amy. If he hadn’t insulted her version of
Molly Squire
, if he’d put his name on it beside her own, if he’d taken one scrap of notice of her when she’d told him to turn the car around that day, she wouldn’t have attacked his Hooper tome.

He’d burned half of it. He’d stood feeding a few pages at a time into the stove and when that had proved too slow, he’d opened the briquette heater’s door and pitched in half of his tome before the smoke choked him. She’d retrieved some of it, and burnt her hand in doing it, and before she’d done it, he’d driven off to the tip with his typewriter. Should have kept her mouth shut. Should have burnt
Sent in Chains—

And if she had, the house would have been falling down around them by now. Her advance had paid to restump Vern Hooper’s house – and her floors felt better for it.

Shook her head and her fingers returned to her keyboard where she sat Lila down at a Sydney poker machine and had her feed it her last ten cents. She was working her way towards allowing her to win the jackpot, when he spoke.

‘Tell me again how I erase it, Jen?’

‘You have to . . .’ She stood and turned on his monitor. Saw no crows and foxes. Saw . . .
prisoners dying like flies from disease and dysentery and starvation
. . .
little bastards were starving
. . .
waste no food on us
. . .

He sat watching her select the eight pages he’d typed. She didn’t
delete
the pages but removed them and, her heart racing, she lied, ‘All gone.’

The screen was blank. He stood and let himself out. She locked the door behind him, opened a new file, dumped what she’d removed from the
Jim
file into it, saved it as
Memory
then shut down the computer. Opened it late that night and read of Jim’s war, or his final years of it. She learned how he’d lost his leg. A Jap did it – and he’d been lucky not to lose his head. He was a blocked conduit, finally releasing his load of debris, and with the minimum of punctuation and words of four syllables.

A man can’t survive on a cup of water and a handful of filthy rice.

I watched them give up and their eyes looked relieved to give up.

My leg wouldn’t heal. I knew I was dying and I found out why their eyes looked relieved. Something happens inside your head. One of the blokes there called it the God centre of the brain. If there’s a God he lives somewhere in man. He wasn’t in that bloody camp.

She couldn’t read for howling, but she read, swiping her tears away with wet fingers, sobbing in breaths before she reached the end of his pages, when she wiped her eyes on her dressing gown and closed his
Memory
file. Knew now why he’d erected his neon-lit
Don’t Look Back
signs. Wanted to go to Trudy’s room and climb into his bed and hold him, howl in his arms. Knew it wasn’t the right time, not yet.

Each day thereafter she dumped more of his pages into his
Memory
file. Each night she read what he’d poured into that old computer. She forgot to put the ad in the paper to get rid of the pups – or she didn’t forget, just knew what would happen when that ad went in. The phone would start ringing, the buyers would start coming and, right now, Jim didn’t need the disturbance.

She knew she couldn’t get rid of Lila when her next pension payment was paid in. Lila therapy had driven him to the sanctuary of her locked sewing room. Lila was due for another payment the night Jenny read about Jim’s final days in the camp.

‘It’s over, Hoop,’ one of the chaps said. ‘They dropped a bloody big bomb on the bastards and blew them all to hell.’

He had a sheet of paper they’d dropped from a plane that circled the camp that day. I remember one of the chaps was spoon-feeding me something sweet. Those little yellow bastards had cleared out, and our boys had cleaned out what they’d left behind. Jap jam maybe, or what had come from the sky in crates.

They dropped down warning leaflets, telling us not to eat too much, to allow our stomachs to get used to dealing with food slowly. We were skeletal men clad in loincloths. I was too weak to feed myself, a dead man breathing. Someone, maybe the chap feeding me, must have found the ribbons of Jen’s poem. Someone copied it onto the back of one of the warning leaflets. It was days before our blokes got in to get us out. We were in a jungle camp. They carried me out on a stretcher. I was in the first hospital when I found the poem.

I wanted to live then, but damn near died. It was months before they brought me home. I still had it with me. Then I lost it. I lost everything . . .

T
uesday afternoon, Jenny was swinging the big gate open when the postie came. He handed her three envelopes, two addressed to Jim, the third addressed in Georgie’s handwriting to
Jennifer Hooper
.

The dogs, defeated by Lila’s ongoing presence, had lost their killer instinct and might not have bothered getting to their feet to eat Bernie Macdonald, but Jenny had chained them, just in case. She’d given up penning the pups. Too well grown now, they climbed on the backs of their siblings and scrambled over the sagging fence as fast as she could lift them into their pen. They’d learnt that the gate was out of bounds and that’s about all they’d learnt, and not from Jenny, but from Lorna.

She opened Jim’s mail. He had no interest yet in opening a bill or in paying it. She was opening Georgie’s envelope when she heard Bernie’s ute drive in. She removed two pages, a handwritten page from Georgie and one typewritten and addressed to Juliana Conti. Juliana Conti was dead. Folded the two together fast and slid them beneath her bra strap as Lila came from the kitchen.

‘He’s out there,’ Jenny said. ‘Skitch him, Lila.’

‘One of them was enough,’ Lila said. She went into the sitting room and closed the door.

Jenny stood behind the screen door, watching Bernie help his mother down from the ute then walk her to the veranda, one arm around her. Watched him support her up the steps. Maisy would celebrate her century in ’96, and her legs were beginning to let her down. Jenny pushed the door wide for her, held it wide. Half a dozen pups accepted the invitation to enter – and they hadn’t learnt that from Lorna.

‘Sorry,’ Bernie said.

Jenny ignored him and his apology, and once Maisy was in the hall, she closed the front door.

Pups skittered everywhere, sliding on the polished kitchen floor while she got Maisy seated on her favourite chair. She called to Lila to help round up the pups.

‘Boo,’ Lila said as she entered, a pup beneath her arm.

‘Your face is enough to scare the tripe out of me without your boo,’ Maisy said. And when she was gone: ‘What’s she still doing here?’

‘She’s incapable of surviving on a single pension,’ Jenny said.

‘Sissy’s been struggling since Reg died, and now the Housing Commission want to move her out of her two-bedroom flat. They’ve given her a choice of Richmond and some place way to blazes out past Lilydale.’

Jenny moved Maisy’s handbag and a small brown paper wrapped box she’d brought with her, then went about the making of afternoon tea, her Tuesday ritual, her mind with Georgie’s letter, not Maisy’s news of the week. Maisy didn’t require lengthy replies, a nod and an ‘Mmmm’ usually sufficing.

‘She’d be better off dead,’ Maisy said, and Jenny dragged her mind away from the folded pages pricking her collarbone.

‘Three years now she’s been in that home. I was warned not to visit her, but Bernie took me down to see Patricia’s new grandson, so I popped in to see poor old Dottie. I didn’t recognise her. She’s like a shrivelled-up little parcel of bones . . .’

Maisy’s monologue of the dead and the dying continuing, Jenny placed two mugs down, then sat.

‘He was two weeks early and weighed eight pound nine ounces. If he’d gone full term he could have been a ten pounder. That blonde-headed Duffy girl had a nine and a half pound son. How old would she be?’

‘I don’t keep track of them,’ Jenny said.

‘You know her. She rents the old Roberts’ place in King Street with her sister,’ Maisy said.

‘Her!’ Jenny said. ‘She’s already got umpteen – and a new two-door refrigerator. I saw it being wheeled in while I was walking the dogs.’

‘We paid for it – and her kids,’ Maisy said. ‘God help them.’

‘Granny used to say that Duffy babies did well in the womb but God help them when they hit the ground.’

‘Nothing much has changed,’ Maisy said. ‘God help this town too. They’re running wild.’

She spoke then of the bloke who owned the bush mill, spoke of log quotas and culls. Jenny was relieved when her monologue moved on to the new house going up on the last portion of John’s land.

‘That house is going to leave nothing over for a garden. It’s huge, Bernie was telling me.’

Ten long minutes of Bernie followed, Jenny silently smoking and sipping tea, hoping Maisy would move on from Bernie this and Bernie that. Like his father before him, Bernie had become a fixture on the town council. He kept Maisy up to date with council permits, council decisions. He was a good son to her. Even Jenny had to admit that. If not for him, she would have been shuttled around between her daughters, half of whom weren’t capable of looking after her. Maureen, her eldest, was eighty, and the rest weren’t far behind.

‘. . . he was saying last Sunday night when I phoned Sissy that I ought to tell her that Macka’s widow needs a place to live and, you know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. The Housing Commission isn’t going to put two widows out of their unit.’

‘I wouldn’t know which one to feel sorrier for, Maisy,’ Jenny said. ‘Did I tell you that Trudy got married?’

‘She didn’t! When?’

‘On Saturday, in Greece. She phoned us on Sunday morning.’

‘Who did she marry?’

‘That Nick she’s been travelling with.’ Nick, an Australian-born Greek with a name Jenny couldn’t spell. ‘They’re in Africa by now.’

‘I can think of better places to go for a honeymoon.’

‘They’re volunteering for twelve months with some medical group.’

‘She’s already done that,’ Maisy said. ‘For most of my life we’ve been pouring food and medicine into that country. Has it done any good?’

‘About as much as our handouts have done for our blacks – and the Duffys.’