The Tying of Threads (12 page)

There were two women with her, shorter, one not a lot slimmer, and a male who looked like death warmed up – and not warmed up enough. He was skin stretched over bone, and hairless; his oversized skull appeared to be contracting around his eye sockets, attempting to force his eyeballs out.

The introductions were made while Maisy stood gaping, the names going in one ear and out the other as she followed the trio to the cemented area close to the church door. Maisy, stunned silent, stood at Sissy’s side. She wasn’t silent, or not until the organist stopped playing and a chubby, middle-aged parson emerged, his shrinking congregation behind him.

‘That’s them,’ Sissy said.

As if she needed to point out Lorna Hooper’s elongated black-clad bones, or her man-sized lace-up shoes. She was gripping the arm of a fluffy-headed little woman clad in dusty pink.

‘Oh my God,’ Maisy breathed.

‘Is it her?’ Sissy hissed.

‘Oh my God.’ Maisy hadn’t set eyes on Amber Morrison in forty years the day she’d seen her in Woolworths, but she’d known her. She knew her today. ‘Oh my God.’

‘Is it her?’ Sissy demanded, louder.

Maisy nodded and stepped back.

Sissy wanted her to step forward. ‘Get up close and listen,’ she hissed.

There was no need to listen. She knew that stretched-lip smile, which someone had once described as a chimp’s grimace, the smile Amber was offering to the minister as she shook his hand, the smile Maisy had known since the classroom. They’d started school on the same day. Had been girls together, young wives, mothers, close neighbours. She’d seen that smile the day Amber had turned up late at little Barbie Dobson’s funeral, had seen it the day the police took her away from Woody Creek, poor Norman rotting in his bed, his face caved in by a cast iron frying pan, a carving knife jammed between his ribs.

A forgiving soul, Maisy, she’d forgiven Amber a thousand unforgivable sins, and as many stings, but poor, pompous Norman hadn’t deserved to end his life like he had.

Memories are long in Woody Creek
, she’d written to Amber when the Salvation Army people contacted her to let her know Amber was being released from the asylum. Maisy’s memory was as long. She wouldn’t have been game to turn her back if she’d given Amber a bed.

She stepped back again as the emaciated Duckworth male began to offer his opinion.

‘She appears . . . to . . . to have made a . . . a new . . .’ His sentence commenced with no expectation of completion, or of anyone listening even if he had bothered to complete it. Maisy didn’t. She turned tail and hotfooted it back to the taxi.

‘Get me out of here,’ she said.

‘Wait,’ Maureen said.

Sissy and the Duckworth women had approached Amber.

‘Who do you think you’re fooling, Mum?’ Sissy said.

Rarely in her sixty years of life had she considered the likely repercussions of any action. She’d given no thought as to what might come after Amber’s unveiling.

The minister stopped shaking hands. His congregation stood staring. Lorna Hooper froze, the blood draining from her chin and brow to what the accident had left of her battle-scarred nose.

Sissy hadn’t expected Lorna’s response. The pink-clad arm she’d been clutching might have been a striking snake. She flung it from her, and the little woman attached to it teetered, then, blind as a bat or not, Lorna made a beeline for home.

Sissy should have expected Alma Duckworth’s response. For the greater part of her life, Sissy had lived comfortably enough on Duckworth charity. Alma, well positioned to catch Amber, caught her, then she and Valda, her daughter, supported her back into the church. Sissy followed them. She’d been invited to lunch today at Alma’s, and it was almost lunchtime.

She stood in that quiet place staring at her mother, who hadn’t said a word, who sat on a rear pew, her mouth open, panting like Alma’s white poodle.

And she shouldn’t have been in that church. She’d committed murder and Alma knew it, yet there she was fanning a murderess’s face with her hat – and calling her dear. And Valda knew it too, and there she was patting her shoulder. The minister didn’t know who his church was sheltering. He fetched her a sip of communion wine.

Sissy stood well back, her arms folded across her breasts, the thinnest part of her. She was considering enlightening the parson as to whom he was offering his communion wine to – except a church didn’t seem like the right place to talk about murders and insane asylums.

She watched her mother sip that wine, listened to the minister suggest they drive Miss Duckworth home, where any misunderstanding between the elderly companions could surely be sorted out over a cup of tea. Valda agreed with him. She wasn’t married and nor was he. She’d had her eye on him for six months.

And as if Lorna Hooper would take Amber back. In what now seemed like another lifetime, Sissy had been overly familiar with Lorna.

Maisy had let Sissy down. If Sissy had given a split second of thought as to what might come later, Maisy had been heavily involved in that later, but she’d taken off like a scalded cat and left Sissy holding the bag – which having so recently claimed she was now eager to be rid of.

*

At Box Hill, Maisy was urging Bernie to take her home. She’d packed her case. It was waiting at the front door, but Bernie had seen a leg of lamb slid into the oven before Maureen called the taxi, and he wanted some of it.

Sissy’s need for lunch got her into Reg’s car. They followed Valda and her mother and the minister to Lorna’s street – and got there in time to see a suitcase follow a bundle of clothing onto the nature strip, to watch a hat escaping merrily down the road, to witness Lorna clip a padlock to the chain locking the tall black gates before her back disappeared into her hard-faced red clinker brick house.

Valda retrieved the hat. The minister and Alma collected the scattered clothing and a shoe. They forced what they could into the case then loaded the lot into Reg’s boot.

The Duckworth clan had always looked after their orphans, their widows and fallen women – and their alcoholic sons. Would Jesus have done less? Like Jesus, the Duckworth clan possessed a wizardry with food, and that Sunday, Alma and Valda stretched a midday luncheon for four to feed the six seated around their dining room table.

The sixth guest wasted her share. Amber stared at her plate of cold roast mutton, potato salad and greens, and she cursed her stupidity. How many times had she decided she must move on, then changed her mind? She’d been lucky on the night of the accident, and for too long had trusted her luck to hold. As any gambler knew, luck can swing in an instant.

She dared a glance at Sissy, revolted by what the years had done to her. A bulging hump of rounded shoulders, of ballooning belly, of mud-green eyes sunk deep into a tub of well-used lard. A black bush of mono eyebrows, a mastiff jaw, working on cold mutton and greens.

She dared a glance in Cousin Reginald’s direction. Wouldn’t have recognised him in a million years. Should have. She’d known him for a month or two – in the biblical sense.

In ’26 she’d been a young married woman, mourning the loss of four day old Leonora April. Cousin Reginald had been sympathetic. A pleasant-faced, overeducated but inexperienced youth, studying the word of God and preparing to follow Charles, his parson father, into the ministry, he’d driven Amber to doctors’ appointments in his little green roadster, had driven her later to theatres, and one night he hadn’t driven her directly back to the manse.

She’d initiated young Cousin Reg into the joys of sin. An eager student, too eager. Parson Charles had smelt a rat and put an end to their association. Packed Reginald off to the tropics to re-find his commitment to God, and sent Amber home to Norman, her sin growing in her belly.

Some months later, another name had been added to
CLARENCE
,
SIMON
and
LEONORA APRIL
’s tombstone. Norman had chosen the name.
REGINALD
, the letters cut larger, deeper. From that day to this, Amber had not given Cousin Reginald a second’s thought.

Her mind reassembling, rearranging, she sat staring at her plate, attempting to resurrect her old escape plans. Impossible to concentrate. A thousand memories buried beneath the dust of yesterday kept pushing through, mean memories, cheap memories, ugly – though not her memories of Reg. She’d dared to live a while, to feel, to laugh with him.

Dared a second glance in his direction – and caught him staring at her. His eyes shuddered and he looked down at his hands, shaking hands, spilling lettuce from his fork. Strong, inventive hands in his youth. A greedy youth’s mouth.

Tried to force her eyes up to the mound of female at his side. Remembered only the pain of her bones being ripped apart so she might birth that mound of female. Remembered the heavy months of carrying her weight. She’d carried it willingly, so certain her womb had been creating the most beautiful of babies. And why not, its mother had been the prettiest girl in town. For hours she’d pushed, screamed to free her beautiful Ruby Rose into life, and when she’d seen what she’d created, she’d been inconsolable. Her mother had handed her a swaddled, snuffling pig of an infant. A glutton at her breast. A glutton still.

Norman had named her, named her Cecelia Louise, for his mother, while somewhere out there in the stratosphere Amber’s beautiful Ruby Rose had remained forever unborn.

She glanced at the glutton’s plate, scraped clean. Couldn’t look higher. Knew too well what she’d see. That glutton’s eyes would be on Amber’s untouched meal. Minutely, Amber’s chin lifted, minutely her lids lifted, only to prove herself right. No joy in that proof. Anger, that mind-blurring, red haze of anger she dared not breathe into her lungs. Held her breath against it until her need for air was overwhelming, squealed the legs of her chair back, and the chair, too abruptly vacated, crashed to the floor.

‘The bathroom is the second door on the left, dear,’ Alma directed.

Amber opened the second door on the left and locked it behind her. She placed her handbag on a small vanity unit then wet her hands, soaped them, rinsed then soaped them again. Washed her face, her throat; for minutes she stood, the tap running, until she could look that staring mirror face in the eye.

Elizabeth Duckworth’s face. The frock she wore, the small hat that matched it so well, were Elizabeth’s. The handbag over her shoulder was Elizabeth’s.

Sissy had murdered Elizabeth.

All ten of the eaters’ eyes had followed Amber’s hasty exit. Only Reginald’s watched for her return. The minister studied his watch. Alma and Valda cleared the table. Sissy, who’d claimed Amber’s untouched meal, was tucking into the meat and potato salad when Valda served a cream-filled sponge.

The minister forgot his watch long enough to eat a slice, to drink a small cup of tea, to compliment the cook before claiming a pressing engagement. Valda saw him to the door.

No similar escape for Reginald. He ate his sponge and remembered his Aunt Cecelia’s funeral, the slow train trip to Woody Creek with his parents, cousins, aunts and uncles. He remembered Norman’s railway house, and the dead infant born to Cousin Amber. He remembered the grunting stray Amber had put to a milk-swollen breast, and at nineteen he’d become obsessed by where that tiny mouth had sucked.

Thou must not covet thy neighbour’s wife –
or your cousins. He’d coveted pretty Amber and for months after that trip had spent his nights with his Bible, attempting to wipe the vision of that pale beauty and the sucking infant from his head.

Repent ye sinner
.

Then came that night when he’d walked pale sad Amber in the Fitzroy Gardens and she’d asked him to hold her. He’d done more than hold her. A rambling rose, pretty Amber, as vital when supported against the woodshed wall as in his narrow bed.

They’d sent him off to an outpost in hell where he’d spent his days attempting to speak of God to fuzzy-haired blacks who’d had as much interest in God as he. He’d discovered gin and tonic in the tropics. Later, he’d discovered compliant native girls and their black breasts. They’d faded the image of Amber’s white.

The Japanese ruined his party. He was no fighter. They’d evacuated him from Port Moresby with the women and children, and he would have preferred to take his chances with the Japs than with his widowed father, but in true Duckworth spirit, Charles had forgiven his erring son – and emptied his gin bottles down the sink.

Charles had offered a fatherly hand to Sissy when she’d been orphaned by Norman’s murder and Amber’s subsequent incarceration. Two men living alone had required a housekeeper and for years the church paid Sissy’s small stipend. She’d learnt to sniff out gin bottles.

Until ’57, Reg had laboured in a back office at David Jones, snatching time to moisten his throat at lunchtime and after work; Sissy’s kitchen skills had not encouraged him home.

Charles eventually succumbed to Sissy’s brand of housekeeping. The church buried him.

The dead require no church-supplied house or housekeeper; ‘the family’ took Reg and Sissy in. ‘The family’ found Sissy employment at a child care centre – and God save the children – but only for a day or two. A variety of other positions had been found for her before the Duckworths gave up and she’d returned to her preferred position of permanent house guest. Guests sat while others laboured.

Reginald recalled a few glorious years at David Jones where he’d spent most of his days in an alcoholic haze, but those glorious years ended in a hospital ward where he’d been diagnosed with advanced liver disease. The family stepped in to save one who had no desire to be saved. They’d packed him off to a teetotaller Duckworth who owned a farm, fifteen miles from the nearest town. House guests are only tolerable for a month or two. The Duckworth clan shuttled him and Sissy between relatives for years – until an elderly Duckworth recalled an earlier problematic duo. By the securing and furnishing of a flat, earlier relatives had rid themselves of the ongoing problem of the young Norman Morrison and his mother, Cecelia –
née
Duckworth.

The proposal had first been put to Sissy, not in Reginald’s presence, though his newly acquired invalid pension was mentioned.