The Tying of Threads (16 page)

A mill hooter let the town know it was midday. Maisy stood. ‘I’ve got to go, love, but to cut a long story short, Alma found out that Lorna skittled her Miss Duckworth around the same time as Amber went missing from that Brunswick place, which wasn’t far from where Lorna skittled her – and I’ll have to go. That pretty little blonde one is pregnant and they’re going to tell us today who she’s pregnant to.’

*

Days of Our Lives
followers knew who the little blonde was pregnant to before Amber ascended those fifty-three steps back up to hell. She let herself in with the loaned key, smelling tinned fish before sighting Reginald, who was seated before the television, forking tuna out of the can. No sign of Sissy.

She carried her shopping bags through to the kitchen table, cleared when she’d left this morning, now filling but not full. She cleared it again, delved into one of her shopping bags for a packet of her favourite kitchen sponges. She removed one, wet it and wiped the table before unpacking her shopping bags.

She’d bought fresh milk, butter, cheese, bread, a writing pad, biro, envelopes, a scrubbing brush, rubber gloves, a bottle of Handy Andy and a bottle of bleach. Large bottles were more economical but heavy. The small bottle had grown heavy before she’d climbed a dozen of those steps, but she’d done it.

With no sign or sound of Sissy, she assumed she’d gone out, and set about boiling the kettle and making tea. She was eating a cheese sandwich, her writing pad open beside her plate, when a sneeze penetrated a wall and closed doors. Amber closed her pad and looked towards the doors as the first sneeze was followed by half a dozen more. Then the cistern flushed and water began burping down the pipes behind the wall. The pad again opened, the sandwich placed down, Amber returned to the letter she’d been composing in her mind since riding the Kew tram back to the city. During the years she’d spent with Lorna, Amber had become adept at . . . at covering her tracks.

My dear Miss Hooper,

How can I ever repay you for your kindness to a stranger in her time of great need? I fully understand your response on Sunday. Your shock was no doubt as great as my own. Had the deception been a conscious ploy for your sympathy, I would not beg your forgiveness now, but until yesterday I was unaware of my cruel deception.

Never a writer, nor a reader, or not until Lorna had required her sight, practice over her twelve-year close association with an over-intelligent tyrant had polished Amber’s seventh-grade skills.

I learned yesterday that my daughter’s married name is Duckworth and that her father-in-law was a minister of the church.

Those of a devious nature, when obliged to bend to a tyrant’s will, will become more devious.

Then Sissy emerged, wet hair hanging. Amber closed her pad.

‘You told Reg that you were coming back to get your case.’

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Duckworth,’ Amber said.

‘Don’t you “Mrs Duckworth” me. You know who I am,’ Sissy snarled and stomped out.

Amber returned to her letter.

When roused from my stupor at the hospital, no doubt I grasped at the few pleasant memories I had retained . . .

Not so pleasant memories. Sissy was back and two slices of fresh bread hit the table opposite the pad. Amber closed it to watch a knife spread butter – as a bricklayer might spread mortar on a brick – to watch her block of cheese attacked, thick slices gouged from it to be buried in butter. Watched the second slice of bread slapped on the first, flattened with a palm then, uncut, the sandwich lifted and a massive jaw clamped while with one hand Sissy tested the weight of the teapot. Judging it full enough, she found a mug, judged it clean enough, poured tea, then the dressing-gown-clad humps and lumps of Sissy flopped down onto a chair to add milk and sugar.

Reginald came to place his empty can of tuna on the table. The smell of dead fish overpowering, Amber picked up the can with finger and thumb, placed it into one of the empty supermarket bags, sealed it, then again sat.

They were watching her, he blinking, Sissy staring. Unable to write her letter, Amber opened her handbag and removed the borrowed key. She’d had four duplicate keys cut this morning, one each of Lorna’s three and one of the borrowed unit key. An expensive exercise, but necessary to her plan, which she’d altered since counting those fifty-three steps down, since the tram she’d caught this morning at a very conveniently positioned tram stop, which she’d catch again when her letter was done.

Reginald returned to the sitting room to eat his cheese sandwich and to flick channels. Sissy set about the construction of a second sandwich, and Amber, pressed for time, returned to her letter.

I have spent this morning attempting to sort out the confusion my loss of memory has created. As you, my dear, are aware, I have no personal income, and although I know you have been hurt deeply by my unconscious deception, it would be greatly appreciated if you could hold my mail at Kew until I find alternative accommodation.

The gentleman I spoke to this morning at the Social Security Department told me it could take some weeks before the confusion is sorted out and his office can issue me with a pension in my own name . . .

Sissy’s stomach bulges moulding themselves around the table, she leaned forward to better see what was being written, and again Amber closed the pad.

‘As if I’m interested, and what’s the use of writing to her? She’s supposed to be blind.’

‘Miss Hooper’s loss of sight is severe but not complete, Mrs Duckworth.’

‘I told you my name. I told you yesterday. I told you last night. I’m not telling you again.’

Her raised voice brought Reginald back to the door, and Sissy turned to face him. ‘I lived with her acts for twenty years – except when she was selling herself on the streets down here, and if she thinks I don’t remember that, I do, and everything else she ever did too.’

Amber lowered her head and again took up her pen. She had today and half of today was already gone. She now had money in her handbag, and Elizabeth Duckworth had none – or little. It would have taken more time to close the account. She left two dollars ten in the book which was now swimming in the pipes that ran beneath the city. Dropped it onto a street grating, edged it through with a shoe and – goodbye, Elizabeth.

Though not quite goodbye. The twin vases, found at an opportunity shop, paid for and carried home to Kew by Elizabeth, decorated Lorna’s sitting room mantelpiece, and Elizabeth’s delightful crystal bowl lived on Lorna’s blackwood sideboard.

As you are aware, my Royal Doulton vases have great sentimental value to me. I thank you for not placing them at risk with my other belongings. I can only assume that one of the young street louts vandalised my case’s contents. As to my Waterford crystal bowl, I am sure it and my vases will be safe in your care until I can arrange to collect the last of my belongings.

This morning when I awakened, back again in the bosom of my family, my first thoughts were for you and of how you will manage alone, my dear. I beg you not to drive your vehicle without me at your side, and feel sure that Mrs Duckworth and her daughter would be more than willing to take you shopping.

In closing, I bless you for your kindness to me when we met as strangers and I hope that one day you can find it within your heart to forgive my accidental deception. Should you need me, you need only to call.

My very best regards to you always,

Elizabeth

‘I told you that your name is Amber Morrison!’

‘Yes, dear, you did.’

‘Then why sign that letter
Elizabeth
?’

‘It is who I have been for some time.’

‘And
My dear Miss Hooper.
No one writes “my dear” anyone these days, and crawling to her after what she did to you yesterday – you make me sick.’

Sissy, never a reader, could now apparently do it quite well upside down. Amber looked into those sunken mud eyes for a moment, then back to her pad to carefully remove her page and fold it. She’d bought a packet of twenty envelopes, and on one she wrote the familiar Kew address. She’d bought no stamps.

‘You’re not staying here tonight.’

‘I have nowhere to go, Mrs—’

‘Don’t you dare.’

‘—Cecelia,’ Amber said, her lips grimacing on that name. She slipped her letter into the envelope, adding Lorna’s keys then, with a lick, sealed it.

‘You can’t put something like that in a letterbox. And if you think for one second that she’ll take you back, then you’re stark raving mad. If she’d had any spit left in her, she would have spat in your face outside that church – and if you think it wasn’t her who tossed your clothes everywhere, then you’re dumb along with being a stark raving mad crawler,’ Sissy said, snatching more bread from the packet.

Amber, unwilling to watch the last of her cheese disappear, placed the envelope into her handbag and left the kitchen, left the unit to again descend those fifty-three steps to heaven, where she still had much to do.

*

In each life there are highs, lows and the flat spaces in between. Amber had survived the ultra lows, had lived the highs in Kew. This was neither a high nor a low. This was her one day. She now had sufficient funds in her handbag for Maryanne to escape to Perth – or to Tasmania – to rent a small flat, furnish it. Or should she stay a while in this place, well camouflaged by the mixed and matched mass of humanity she’d passed on those fifty-three steps?

Since childhood, when stressed by a life she could not control, her feet had been unable to remain still. In adulthood, when life in Norman’s house had returned more punishment than reward, she’d walked from dusk to dawn. This morning the circling descent had been mind-cleansing and therapeutic – as had been her freedom to ride the tram with the city’s masses. She rode with them again, rode the familiar tram to Kew where she deposited her letter in the familiar letterbox. No sign of Lorna.

By three thirty Amber was in Richmond, at her favourite opportunity shop. She’d found her vases there, but this morning she ignored the folderols and made a beeline for the frock racks. The dusty pink worn since Sunday morning was no longer fresh, nor was the clothing picked up from Lorna’s gutter. She found two frocks, not as smart as Elizabeth’s pink, but quite suitable for Mrs Maryanne Brown. Later she chose new underwear, two new towels. Her plans had altered since this morning. Elizabeth was not required to die, but to go into hiding.

*

It was six o’clock before she commenced her slow circling ascent, a new key pinned to the lining of her handbag: Elizabeth Duckworth’s. Having decided not to kill herself, she’d rented a private mailbox at Richmond, which would require another letter to be written, though not tonight. Amber was near dead on her feet when almost knocked from them by a herd of running louts – who might have intentionally knocked her down had they been aware of the contents of her handbag. She’d emptied both Amber’s and Elizabeth’s accounts. Amber’s bankbook had joined Elizabeth’s in the drains below Melbourne.

Television blaring when she unlocked the door, Reginald sleeping on his chair and no sign of Sissy, she crept across the chaos to the sitting room to turn the volume low before continuing through to the kitchen, where she armed herself with a beige-toned floral frock, new underwear, towel, a scrubbing brush, sponge, her bottles of Handy Andy and bleach, the rubber gloves, a sealed cake of perfumed soap and her handbag. She required a bath.

And found Sissy standing before the toothpaste-splattered, soap-greased mirror, grimacing as she unwound plastic rollers from her hair.

Something moved within Amber’s exhausted breast, the merest flicker of something. The protest of a weary heart perhaps? Something. In another lifetime, she had loved that plain as mud ox of a girl. Always she’d done her best for Sissy. She’d bought her pretty frocks, spent hours styling her heavy hair. For a moment, Amber stood with her load in the doorway, watching her daughter struggle.

She sighed and turned towards the kitchen. She yawned, sighed again, then: ‘Bring your comb and pins out to the light, Cecelia. I will do what I can for you.’

E
lsie Hall couldn’t tell you with any certainty the day or the year of her birth. She had vague recollections of a father who had dropped her and her sister Lucy off at the Aboriginal mission but had retained no image of him. She had no similar memory of a mother.

She remembered horses, barking dogs, a canvas-covered wagon and Lucy, who told her Daddy was coming back. He hadn’t come.

There was little doubt that he’d been a white man. Elsie’s skin tones had never been quite white but her features were European. She’d been raised white by Gertrude Foote, or, rather, from the age of eleven or twelve she’d been raised white.

Harry Hall, a lanky, freckle-faced redhead, might have been seventeen when Gertrude took him under her wing. At eighteen he’d married Elsie, who was four or five years his senior, and already the mother of ten year old Joseph Richard Foote, or Joey.

Joey, also not quite white, raised as Gertrude’s grandson, had celebrated his eighteenth birthday then left home to fight a war. He’d met Annette, a nurse and the daughter of a Queensland cane farmer, who he married when the war was over when he became Joe Foote, a Bundaberg cane farmer of Spanish descent. In Woody Creek he’d been Darkie Hall, son of Elsie and Dingo Wadi. His visits home were brief.

Lenny Hall had been raised as the son of Elsie and Harry, but by birth was Elsie’s nephew, a big blond-headed, blue-eyed chap, a top footballer in his day, now wed to a Willama girl and living in a modern brick house out Cemetery Road. His full sister, Joany, and Tony, her Italian immigrant husband, grew tomatoes on a property fifteen kilometres west of Woody Creek.

Harry and Elsie had produced five of their own: Ronnie, a redhead and a dead ringer for his father; Maudie, born with Elsie’s dark hair, Harry’s freckles and blue eyes; sandy-headed and blue-eyed Brian, an accountant at a city bank; redheaded Josie, a theatre nurse at the Alfred Hospital; and Teddy, the middle man. Born with Elsie’s dark hair and eyes, her darker than average skin tones, Teddy had always known he was the odd man out. He’d started leaving home as a three year old, started stealing his father’s tobacco as a ten year old. Man sized by the age of fourteen, he’d discovered that a bottle of beer could make his dark complexion go away.