The Tying of Threads (17 page)

He’d left home at twenty. He might have gone further than Willama had he not been arrested and charged with the purchasing of known stolen property, two cartons of Charlie White’s cigarettes. Harry and Lenny bailed him out and took him home to do the right thing by Margot, who had been five months pregnant at the time. She’d refused to marry a ‘blackfeller’, though after Trudy’s birth, the odd relationship had continued for seven more years. Teddy’s one saving grace during those years had been his skill with motors. Show him a piston and, hungover or not, he’d name the car or truck it had come out of. Take a dying motor to him and, drunk or not, an hour or two later he’d have it purring.

He was twenty-eight the year Roy, the garage owner, retired, which, had Roy been able to find a buyer for his rundown house and tin shed garage, his umpteen years of accumulated greasy bits of vehicles long dead, might have been the end of Teddy. Few prospective buyers bothered to get out of their cars, so Roy had made Teddy an offer too good to refuse. He’d had money in the bank. Harry had put it there. For years he’d been confiscating Teddy’s wages, his only means of keeping his son off the grog. He gave up that bankbook. Teddy put down a deposit on Roy’s house and business and the bank gave him a loan for the rest.

That’s when Vonnie Boyle, a not quite eighteen year old kid, had wormed her way into Teddy’s life. She’d sorted out his bookwork first, then his tin shed, and later his life, and in doing so had ruined Margot’s. Young Vonnie knew almost as much about motors and gearboxes as her husband. That girl could do anything other than carry a baby beyond five months.

In November of ’78, the original loan paid off, Vonnie spoke to the bank about a new loan to build a new garage, and while the site was being cleared, she booked a two-week holiday at Veronica Andrews’ Frankston guesthouse, where she’d be waited on and could lie around all day. She was pregnant again.

She started bleeding in Frankston.

Since the late forties, Veronica and her retired doctor partner had done a few hundred abortions in the rooms behind their guesthouse. That night they did what they could to prevent one. Vonnie was moved by ambulance to the Royal Women’s Hospital where she got by the five-month marker before Teddy drove home alone. He spent his weekends on the road through January and February, hope growing in his eyes, and in Elsie’s.

And in Jenny’s. Her reasons were selfish. Teddy showed too much interest in Trudy. If they were in the same room, his eyes rarely left her. He’d never mentioned her birth, and probably never would, which didn’t alter the fact that he was her blood father. Since his wedding day, Jenny had been willing Vonnie pregnant, preferably with triplets.

She was only having one, and on a Sunday night in late March, Teddy popped his head inside the bungalow to relay the latest news. Jim and Jen were there, playing cards.

‘The quack said today that if Vonnie can hang on until the week after next, he’ll operate. She’s a determined little bugger. She’ll hang on.’

Hope made his eyes glisten that night, made him smile, and it was Trudy’s smile, and Jenny’s heart lurched.

‘I heard its ticker this morning. It’s beating away in there like a steady little motor,’ he said, and he sniffed and left them to their game.

On the morning of the tenth of April 1979, Michael John Hall was delivered, all five pound eight ounces of him, and within an hour of his birth, the news that he was alive and well, that Vonnie and Teddy were over the moon, had travelled from Bundaberg to Mildura, to Melbourne and back to Molliston. Vonnie’s parents made their own few phone calls. Their son, Michael John, had died at twenty-one in a car accident. Vonnie was their only daughter, and her son their only grandchild.

Harry had lost count of his. Elsie could tell you the birth dates of every one, including Trudy, but this one’s arrival deserved celebrating. They baptised Michael John in early June, and Halls and Boyles came from every direction to be a part of that miracle. Jen and Jim offered their house for the party. Harry booked half a dozen onsite caravans and cabins, but no Hall went to bed that night, not the adults, the teenagers or the kids – nor did Jenny.

Joey had flown down from Bundaberg for the day and would return tomorrow. He’d flown alone. His children believed they’d inherited their dark eyes and hair from their Grandmother Foote’s Spanish pirate ancestor. Jenny’s fault. When Joey had grown a moustache at fifteen, she’d told him he looked like a Spanish pirate. Or maybe it was the town’s fault. The five year old boy in Joey had never forgotten, or forgiven, the constable who’d pointed out the fact that he had the wrong-coloured skin.

Near daylight, Joey and a minor herd of yawning Halls drove down to have a look at the house they’d been raised in, the land they’d played on. The light, though poor, was just sufficient to see the colour of a utility parked in their old driveway.

‘That’s Georgie’s ute,’ Teddy said, and he and Josie crept inside.

Found her dead to the world, on the kitchen floor, zipped into a sleeping bag.

Josie wanted to wake her.

‘Let her sleep,’ Teddy said.

Before the Halls went their separate ways, they told Jenny. She crept in at nine and found Georgie still curled up in her sleeping bag, so crept out to walk around Elsie’s crumbling house, to peer beneath the termite-riddled structure, then walk across the goat paddock to stare at the blackened site and to shake her head again. The shed was still standing. She had a poke around inside it, picked up a little spade she could use at home. She carried it back to the car, had a smoke then, with still no sound of movement from within, she decided she’d waited long enough.

Cocooned in the green sleeping bag, Georgie looked like a giant caterpillar, and how anyone could sleep so heavily on a hard board floor, Jenny didn’t know. She reached out a hand to the small portion of her that was visible, that dark copper hair – or what was left of it.

‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’ she said. Hadn’t meant to wake her like that. She’d planned to do it gently.

Georgie opened her eyes and rolled onto her back. ‘What the hell are you nagging about at this time of day?’

‘It’s after ten, and your hair’s gone.’

More of Georgie emerged. A hand appeared and ran fingers through her inch-long crew-cut. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Damn those termites.’

‘Why would you go and do a thing like that?’

‘Bore water,’ Georgie said as more of her was revealed, clad in a sweater and baggy jeans, heavy socks.

‘There’s nothing of you.’

‘Nice to see you too, mate.’

‘That goes without saying – if there was enough of you to see. You’re skin and bone and why would you let anyone do
that
to your beautiful hair?’

‘Birdsville,’ Georgie said. ‘Their water is fifty per cent tar. What’s happening with Dino Collins?’

‘He was supposed to go to trial again two months ago but they carted him off to a psychiatric hospital. As far as I know, he’s still there.’

‘He’s playing possum,’ Georgie said.

‘That’s what I said. What time did you get here?’

‘Late – or early. I lost my watch.’

‘Why didn’t you come in?’

‘I wasn’t dressed for a party, Jen.’

‘You look like someone’s rag bag.’

‘Ta.’

Jenny considered Elsie’s old table as a chair. She tested it, wiped away a little dust and grime, then sat, swinging her legs. ‘I saw Collins at the first trial. There’s less of him than you – though he had more hair.’

‘I hoped you might have been celebrating his demise last night,’ Georgie said.

‘Vonnie and Teddy had a baby and Joey flew down. You should have come in. You haven’t seen him in years.’

‘I saw him at the Centenary, and I barely knew your Joey.’

‘I barely knew him this time. His hair is almost white and his face is as lined as Elsie’s.’ She studied Georgie’s face while watching her pull on a pair of working boots then reach into her sleeping bag for a navy windcheater jacket she pulled on over her sweater. ‘That looks as if it came out of a rag bag too.’

‘It was hanging behind the door of a cabin I spent a night in. Any more insults, or are you all done for this morning?’ Georgie said, then turned her attention to Elsie’s old wood stove, barely visible beneath its layer of dust and possum droppings.

‘You’ll catch a disease down here – if you don’t die of pneumonia first – if the roof doesn’t fall in on you before you have time to catch it.’

‘I’ve paid out good money to camp in worse, mate.’

Elsie had left her old fridge behind, her old kitchen table, no chair, no hearth brush, no wood on the hearth, a sink with a tap offering no water.

‘We disconnected the hose,’ Jenny said as Georgie tried the tap. ‘It dripped. Harry needs what’s in the tank for the chooks.’

‘Disconnected the power too,’ Georgie said. ‘I could have used a bit of light last night. Does the fridge still work?’

‘It was barely working when they moved,’ Jenny said, eyeing the antique standing at an acute angle in the corner. The kitchen floor had run downhill for years. ‘We’ve had three different mobs squatting down here in the past twelve months. I’m thinking of selling to Joe Flanagan. He wants my access to the creek for his cows.’

‘Over my dead body.’

‘If you stay down here, that won’t take long. Get your things and come home.’

‘I’m home, or as close as it gets, or I would be if I had some power.’

‘If electricity is put through white ant riddled wiring, this place will burn.’

‘White ants don’t eat wire,’ Georgie said, then walked through to Elsie’s parlour, through a sleep-out to the rear door. Jenny went as far as the parlour, its floor a clutter of bottles, strewn paper, unidentifiable clothing left behind by Elsie or the squatters. She looked at a hole in the floorboards where a squatter may have fallen through. Peered through it to the junk below. No sign of a body down there.

‘The whole place is being held together by white ant nests, Georgie.’

‘They’re doing an all right job,’ Georgie said, giving the doorframe a shake.

Termites had partied on the stumps supporting the front veranda. Its roof had fallen a month ago, blocking the front door – which hadn’t opened in years anyway. Jenny sighed and walked out to stand on the rear steps, watching Georgie searching Harry’s old wood heap for chips.

‘Come home, love.’

‘I’ll be forty next year, Jen. I reckon that might just about make me old enough to know where I need to be right now,’ Georgie said.

Harry drove down at five to feed the chooks. Georgie had found the remains of a broom beneath the house. She’d swept the kitchen and parlour floors. She’d found an empty oil drum to sit on. The stove was burning, her billy was boiling.

He leaned against the kitchen’s doorframe while telling her the roof wouldn’t stand up to the next wind. She asked him if his old fridge had still been working when they’d cut off the power. He told her it had. He told her that the rafters and wall supports in his old bedroom were paper thin, told her that every movement in the rafters put an added strain on old power wires.

‘If she burns, she burns, Harry.’

‘I pulled you out of one fire, Georgie.’

‘Which sort of proved to me that I wasn’t written down to die young, Harry.’

W
ith the stove burning, the kitchen was warmer than the back of her ute. Georgie had paid to have a canvas canopy fitted to it in Townsville and had spent a few nights beneath that tarp, comfortable enough on her inflatable mattress. She’d seen a lot of country, crossed a lot of mountains, walked a lot of beaches, watched the burning of a crop of sugarcane somewhere north of Brisbane, hoping its controlled burning might wipe out the uncontrolled burning of her dreams.

It hadn’t, and so what? She’d eaten ripe pineapples in Queensland, slurped mangoes by the dozen, tried a custard apple too. Had always wanted to try one. One had been enough.

She’d worked for a time in Townsville before taking off for Mount Isa. Had worked in a few places, slept in a few caravans and cabins, then driven on, turning when she’d felt like turning, stopping when she’d felt like stopping, working when she’d needed the company and writing a cheque when she hadn’t.

She’d spent three months in Darwin working as a pub waitress, interested in a city blown away in the cyclone of ’74 but thriving by ’78. She’d seen an eight-foot crocodile outside of Darwin, its jaws open, ready to eat her.

For six weeks she’d worked at a roadhouse up near Karratha while her ute had been out of action. Without her wheels, she’d had to do something to fill her time. Waited ten days for her ute’s reconditioned motor to arrive, waited another week for it to be fitted then waited a month more because the roadhouse bloke had begged her to stay on until he could replace her. She’d liked him, so she’d stayed.

Met a lot of people. A few she’d liked, a lot she hadn’t. Sold petrol at a service station on the outskirts of Perth. Cooked and sold hamburgers and chips in Albany. Hadn’t liked that owner. Had slapped him in the eye with a lump of hamburger meat one night and walked out without her pay.

She’d been selling ice-creams and mixing milkshakes in Coolgardie, sleeping at night in a crumbling caravan, when she’d read that a date had been fixed for Dino Collins’ second trial. This time, she’d be there to convict that mongrel and, desperate to get there, she’d driven from Norseman to Ceduna – across the Nullarbor in a day, a very long day, but the road was straight and the traffic minimal, so she’d kept on driving.

She’d been driving since before her nineteenth birthday. Jack Thompson had given her a licence in October of ’58. He’d kissed her around the same time. Maybe everyone remembers the bloke who first kissed them. A few had kissed her since, though not in recent years. Women were few and far between in some of the places she’d been. She’d talked a few blokes out of pursuing her, had belted one with a lump of firewood. The crew-cut had helped, as had the scar through her eyebrow, her rag bag clothes and ute, unwashed since she’d left Woody Creek.