The Tying of Threads (6 page)

No one wants to watch a man, dog or kangaroo burn, but had he or Macka given ten seconds’ thought that night to the fact that it was their own flesh and blood that was burning?

Not ten seconds of thought, nor one second. It might have meant no more to them if the redhead had been trapped in that inferno. They’d been buying their smokes from her for twenty years, during which time Bernie had set eyes on her sister just once, on the night of Teddy Hall’s engagement to Vonnie Boyle. He’d seen a bit of her when she’d been eight or ten, when for months she’d stayed in town with Maisy – a lisping, whingeing bitch of a girl he’d dodged when he could.

She should have worn his name – or Macka’s. At eighteen, they’d both been willing to do the right thing, or maybe just willing to help themselves to legal rights to Jenny Morrison. She’d done a runner the night before the wedding day, had left Bernie standing at the altar, choking in his wedding suit.

For a lot of years, he’d convinced himself that he’d been the one made a fool of. It had worked well enough until he’d got out of the army. During the years since, he’d blamed being young, being drunk, which had worked well enough too when there’d been the two of them, when they’d been drunk. There were no longer two of them and a man couldn’t stay drunk twenty-four hours a day – unless he was old Shaky Lewis.

Bernie stopped going to the pub, stopped going to work, lay on his bed dozing, scratching his skin cancers and thinking. Thinking hurts those not accustomed to doing too much of it. He was lying on his back scratching and thinking when Maisy came to the bedroom door to nag him about driving her down to Willama to choose a tombstone for Dawny.

‘Drive yourself,’ he said.

‘If I felt up to driving myself I wouldn’t have asked you to drive me, would I?’

Her admission got him out of bed. Until Dawn’s death, Maisy had spent more time on the roads than she had at home. She sat watching television and swallowing aspros these days, and she held on to walls when she walked up the passage.

He drove her to Willama. He was tailing her back to the stonemason’s office when she went down.

An inflated ball will bounce. Maisy bounced. She lost a bit of skin off her hands and maybe off her backside, but he and the stonemason got her back onto her feet with Maisy still fighting to pay for Dawny’s tombstone.

‘You’re going to see a doctor,’ Bernie said.

‘I haven’t got an appointment.’

‘Then you’re going to the hospital. You’re not dropping dead on me, you old bugger.’

‘I’m not going near a hospital. Dawny was all right until they operated on her.’

The stonemason phoned. An Indian doctor fitted her in. Bernie walked her to his office and stayed on to dob about how she bounced off walls and swallowed aspro by the packetful.

The Indian took her blood pressure and told her it was sky high.

‘I buried my granddaughter, my daughter and I lost my son to a Sydney trollop. What do you expect my blood pressure to be doing?’ Maisy asked.

‘On the scales, if you please, Mrs Macdonald.’

‘I didn’t come in here for you to have a go at my weight.’

‘That is your choice, but hiding your face from the figure will not make it less,’ he said in the singsong voice of Indian immigrants. ‘If you persist in carrying that weight around, your husband will be losing you,’ he said, and he started writing scripts.

‘Her son,’ Bernie corrected, and attempted to suck in his gut.

The doctor eyed him, then asked him to sit down so he might check his blood pressure.

‘Be buggered,’ Bernie said.

‘A man of your height cannot carry the weight you are carrying and expect to live a long life, Mr Macdonald,’ the Indian said.

‘It’s all muscle,’ Bernie said, and he returned to the waiting room until Maisy came out with her prescriptions, a diet sheet and a leaflet advertising Weight Watchers.

They had lunch with Rachael. She always put on a good spread. Midway through eating it, he mentioned the Weight Watchers leaflet and Rachael agreed with the Indian that Maisy could afford to lose a few kilos.

Maisy, who ignored kilos, walked away from the conversation to turn on the television. She never missed
Days of Our Lives.

Bernie left the women watching their soap opera and drove back to give the stonemason a cheque and the words the women had decided they wanted put on Dawny’s tombstone. He had his mother’s scripts filled at the pharmacy then drove home.

*

There were rich families and poor in Woody Creek. There were families edging their way up to being comfortably off, and others who had once been comfortable sliding closer to the breadline with each generation. The Hoopers had always been rich. The Macdonalds had become rich after the first war.

Between the two great wars, Paul Jenner had started his married life scratching a bare living from dry land. Twenty years ago, he’d scratched up enough money to buy Lonny Bryant’s riverfront property, where his labour, along with that of his three sons, had started paying off. Paul Jenner was living proof that if a man is prepared to work his guts out, he’ll get to where he wants to be. He now owned the old Hooper farm, and if his bid was successful, he’d own Monk’s acres, which would make him the biggest landowner in the district.

There were plenty in town who refused to work at much other than the begetting of a kid every year or two. Breeding had always been a favourite pastime in Woody Creek. Invalid pensioners with crook backs may have done it sitting down, but they did it, as did dole bludgers and their girlfriends. By the late seventies, big families made good economic sense to those who didn’t go in for labour, and if the government didn’t place a limit soon on the number of bludgers’ kids the taxpayer was prepared to feed, in twenty years’ time there’d be insufficient taxpayers’ kids to keep the bludgers’ kids in the style they’d become accustomed to.

Maisy’s capital, cut by a third since she’d bought Macka’s share of the mill, was, by Woody Creek standards, still enough to make her a rich woman. Few would believe it these days if they’d looked in her fridge, in her cake tins. Bernie couldn’t raise a rattle from her biscuit tins, and if he did, all it offered were the slices of fossilised cardboard Maisy had the gall to call biscuits. The freezer, which had once contained a selection of ice-cream and frozen cakes, now froze bread, and not even white bread.

‘Just because you’re on a bloody diet doesn’t mean that I’m supposed to starve,’ Bernie complained.

‘If it’s in the house I’ll eat it,’ Maisy said. ‘And the doctor said you needed to lose weight as much as me.’

She’d always cooked, which may have been why Bernie had never considered leaving home. She sliced lettuce now, grated carrots, served them with tomatoes and onions and paper-thin slices of corned beef. She thawed two lousy slices of frozen bread before each meal, one for her, one for him.

‘Stop freezing the bloody stuff.’

‘If I don’t, I’ll eat more than my three slices a day,’ Maisy said.

He escaped her on Tuesdays, after dropping her off at her Weight Watchers meeting. The big restaurant in the middle of town served meals all day. He was seated, trying to catch the eye of a waitress, when Jenny and her lanky coot walked in.

Guilt multiplies in an empty gut, and who was looking after the shop while they were eating down here?

He waited until they were seated, then sidled out and bought himself a chocolate-coated ice-cream at a milk bar, which he scoffed in three bites on his way back to the meeting to collect Maisy, who smelled that ice-cream, or saw the melted chocolate on the belly of his shirt.

He didn’t mention seeing the Hoopers, but asked a question which had been haunting him for weeks. ‘Have they done anything yet about getting that girl a tombstone?’

‘I haven’t asked them,’ Maisy said.

‘What’s happening with the redhead?’

‘They hadn’t heard from her the last time I spoke to Jenny.’

*

Maisy never walked if she could drive. Every Sunday since Dawn’s funeral, she’d driven around to the cemetery with a bunch of flowers. Weight Watchers suggested their members walk, and that Sunday she set off on foot.

Bernie watched her slow progress through the park, watched her lean on a white post to catch her breath before crossing Park Road, where she was lost to his view. Convinced she’d fallen again, he took off after her.

She was still going, slow but steady. He caught her halfway across the sports oval.

‘What’s got into you?’ she asked.

‘Save me sending out a search party for you when you drop dead,’ he said.

Maisy, who knew every man, woman and child in town, who went to every Protestant funeral and to a few of the Catholics’, knew that cemetery like the back of her hand. He followed her to the raw wound of Dawn’s grave where he watched her kiss her flowers before placing half of them on the mound. Assuming the rest were for his father, he hung back to light a smoke. George Macdonald had been gone for a lot of years but Bernie still had bad memories of the day he’d died. He knew where that grave was too, but Maisy was walking the wrong way, so he followed her. Followed her to a not so raw wound in the earth, where she kissed the rest of her flowers then placed them down – and knowing who was under that dirt gave Bernie goose bumps.

‘What’s wrong with them, leaving it looking like that?’

‘They’ve got the shop to worry about.’

‘Not so worried that they can’t piss off to Willama.’

‘Where did you see them?’

‘Going into the restaurant.’

‘You went in there eating,’ she accused.

‘I had a bloody chocolate-coated ice-cream. Lay off me, will you,’ he said, and looked towards the Catholic section, and at a second unmarked grave, knowing who was in that hole too, and knowing that his mother wouldn’t go within spitting distance of Raelene King’s grave.

It wasn’t official yet but everyone knew she’d petrol-bombed that house. They’d found Harry Hall’s empty petrol can. How she’d got herself caught up in it, no one knew nor ever would. For two days they hadn’t known her bones were there. Half of the cops in Melbourne had been up here with their dog squads searching the forest for Raelene King.

‘Ask her,’ Bernie said.

Maisy’s mind far away, she looked at him quizzically. ‘Ask who what?’

‘Ask Jenny what she’s done about marking that girl’s grave.’

‘Raelene’s?’

‘Margot’s.’

‘I will not ask her, and I didn’t come over here to have you following me around nagging me about tombstones. It’s like an open wound knowing the way Margot must have died, so stop picking at it – and stop picking at your head too – and start wearing that hat I bought you.’

‘Offer to buy her one.’

‘Go home and let me visit in peace.’

He waited for her, walked home with her, or followed her home, a dozen or so paces behind – followed her home to skinned chicken and zucchini soup. He wanted his Sunday roast, his meat with all the trimmings, swimming in gravy. He wanted butter on thick slices of fresh white bread. She tossed him a slice of chilled brown bread and no butter.

‘Use some of that creamed cheese on it,’ she suggested.

‘It tastes like sh—’

‘Stop your swearing at my dinner table.’

‘Bloody dinner table? If that was dinner, don’t bother feeding me tea.’

Then it happened, on Thursday night. He woke with a pain in his chest and knew he wasn’t going to live long enough to die of skin cancer or starvation. He was having a heart attack.

His father’s heart had given out on him, though not when he’d been fifty-eight years old. Old George’s hadn’t missed a beat in ninety years. Bernie’s wasn’t missing beats, just beating hard and fast. He could hear it pounding in his earhole, thumping against pillow.

He lay on his narrow bed, scratching his hairy chest instead of his head and staring at Macka’s empty bed, lit tonight by a full moon, and he blamed his twin for their heart attack too. They’d shared the flu every year or so, shared the measles, mumps, chicken pox and a few attacks of the clap. That bastard didn’t have the stamina to satisfy a woman with that Sydney slut’s appetites. Wherever Macka was, he was dying – and not doing it alone.

He missed that ugly bastard. He missed his voice from the other bed, missed his snore, and knowing that he was dying on top of his slut – or she on top of him while Bernie died alone, was enough to kill any man.

For an hour he lay there, wondering if he ought to wake his mother, then at around one o’clock his heart attack moved southward to where hard-boiled eggs, a tin of salmon, raw onion and cucumber attempted to unite.

He lay on his back, his gut bubbling, the moonlight tormenting him. He missed Macka more on moonlit nights and, near two, he rolled from his bed determined to cover that window.

As he moved, gas exploded from his rear end, then again while fighting on a pair of trousers, and with no one to blame other than himself, he got out of that room fast, closed his door and went out the back door to blast in the moonlight.

As kids, that moon had called him and Macka out to play and, blasting every eight or ten yards, he followed the pathway they’d used on many a moonlit night, through the park where the bandstand was lit up as bright as day, across Park Street, and across the football oval to the cemetery’s six foot high cyclone wire fence, where he stood getting rid of gas beside a peppercorn tree he remembered as being much smaller.

They’d cut a hole in the wire behind that tree, he and Macka, cut it one moonlit night with their father’s wire cutters, then used that hole to climb through to the cemetery where they’d decorated tombstones. Denham, the local copper back then, had been hiding behind old Cecelia Morrison’s stone one night. They’d scrambled out through that hole and he couldn’t.

And not much use looking for it tonight. If he found it he wouldn’t be able to squeeze through. Walked on then and in through the small cemetery gate to follow the gravelled paths he’d walked with Maisy until he found the raw wound where the bones of his – or Macka’s – only offspring lay.

His sisters had kids, grown-up kids who had kids of their own. He was Uncle Bernie to the multitudes, old Uncle Bernie who owned a sawmill and a black ute and not much else. He should have had a ton more money in the bank. Blown it on new utes, the gee-gees, grog and smokes. Easy come, easy go.