The Tying of Threads (21 page)

She’d delayed coming over here, expecting . . . expecting to feel more. There was nothing left to feel much about, apart from the stove, the slab of concrete—

And the prongs of a fork reaching up through ash and ice, twisted prongs, like the clawed fingers of her dream—

She stepped back from it, then stepped forward, reaching down to give it a hand out of the dirt. It was blackened, but intact. With her thumb she rubbed soil from its handle and saw that old familiar pattern Granny’s cutlery had worn, like someone fanning a bare bottom, the Hall kids used to say. She placed it on the stove then squatted to see if the oven door still opened.

It opened. And Granny’s cast iron frying pan was on its bottom shelf! She snatched its handle, disbelieving what her eyes were seeing, what her hand was holding. How did it get into that oven? Who would have put it in there? Harry, maybe. Someone had cleaned up the site. Shook her head then, knowing that if Harry had found that frying pan he would have taken it home to Elsie.

Had it been in the oven the night of the fire? Margot had done that with saucepans she’d used when she’d heated up a tin of something and couldn’t be bothered washing the saucepan. She’d melted a plastic bowl she couldn’t be bothered washing one day.

For minutes Georgie stood feeling the familiar weight of that pan in her hand and, for the first time since the fire, forced her mind back, back beyond the fire, back to when she’d returned from Monk’s with Cara and found Jenny, Jim, Harry, Elsie and Margot in the kitchen. That was the last time she’d spoken to Margot. An hour later, with the search for Raelene called off for the night, Teddy and Lenny had turned up, and Margot had swallowed her sleeping pills and gone to bed. Georgie could still see her standing in the bathroom doorway washing those pills down and accusing Georgie with her pale purple/grey eyes.

Shook that image away and forced her mind further back, back to breakfast that morning. She’d fried eggs. Most mornings she’d fried eggs. Like Granny, she’d wiped the pan clean with newspaper and hung it on its nail. Had Margot cooked an egg for breakfast? Had she put her teeth in and eaten eggs on toast that final morning?

Georgie looked at the handle, cast iron like the pan, wanting to believe Margot had hidden the pan and its congealed grease in the oven, needing to believe her hand had been the last to touch that handle, that her desire for the eggs on toast she’d loved had inadvertently saved that pan. Eighteen months of rust had done what it could, which wasn’t a lot. Being sealed in the oven, its layer of fat and baked-on grease had protected it.

‘Steak and eggs for dinner,’ she told it, then, clutching her pan and fork, she walked to the shed to find a hammer to straighten the fork’s clawed prongs, and an axe. She’d need to restock her woodpile today.

The hens returned to peck and scratch at forbidden ground. Georgie drove into town to buy a slab of steak and a newspaper, and to use Jenny’s shower. Slowly the frost backed away to where only the shadows lurked.

It was after one before she walked back across the goat paddock to study the fallen section of fence. One post had been snapped off at the base, one midway up and a third had been scorched sufficiently to release its grip on the wire. A good six or eight metres of chicken wire lay on the earth, weeds growing over and through it as old mother-nature attempted to heal what Raelene had destroyed. Weeds can’t compete with determination, Granny used to say. They had no hope that day. Georgie found an edge to the wire netting then heaved on it until wire and weed lifted.

It took the afternoon, but a sunny afternoon. It took the axe and sweat enough for her to remove her windcheater, but the trunks of a few more well-grown saplings turned into fenceposts, and once the clean red dirt was tamped down firmly around them, a roll of thin wire from the shed bound that bulging chicken wire to each sapling post. Rusting chicken wire, a twisted fence when she was done, but strong enough to hold back hens. It took the last hour of daylight and more wheat to bribe the hens back to their own yard.

An icy chill was creeping up from the earth before she had hammered in the final garden stake, hoping it would assist that sagging wire to stand tall. The stake hit something hard and would go no further. She moved it a little to the right and hammered again. Same result. Moved it to the left, where her hammering lifted a circular lump of earth. And when the earth was scraped away, out came the plaque which for most of Georgie’s life had hung on a nail over Granny’s front door:
Ejected 2. 8. 1869
, the letters and figures formed by small nail holes patiently hammered into one of Granny’s aluminium dinner plates by Jenny. Gertrude Maria Foote had been born on the second day of August in 1869.

Georgie squatted there, smiling while scraping dirt from it, rich dirt veined by charcoal. She didn’t see what the plaque had been sheltering, not immediately. About to continue her hammering, her stake disturbed a pale white/green sprout. It didn’t look like a weed. A sucker from Granny’s climbing rose maybe? Or the wisteria, or even that nameless yellow flowering thing with the overpowering perfume? Georgie didn’t care which one of the three it might be, only that something else had survived the fire. The stake and fence forgotten, she squatted to clear weeds from around the shoot to keep it safe until longer, stronger sunshine told it to grow.

Her days passed more easily then. She’d found a focus. There must have been two dozen garden stakes leaning in the eastern corner of the shed with Granny’s variety of shovels and spades, crowbar, rakes and the old three-pronged weeder, Granny’s favourite tool. Its handle had grown splintery. Every year she’d sharpened her tools and oiled the handles. The tin of linseed oil she’d used was still on the shelf in the shed beside her oilstone.

Why the tools hadn’t been stolen along with a good fifty per cent of the hens Georgie didn’t know. Thieves preferred to eat than to labour, she decided. An elderly pick, a crowbar, may have been worth a bob or two as scrap metal, but dead hens were easier to carry away.

She found Granny’s earth-turning shovel and, after sharpening it and giving the handle a good soaking of oil, she started turning the blackened earth, burying it, and leaving in its place a patch of clean brown soil.

J
enny used to say the town stood to attention and saluted when Trudy stepped down from the bus in her ladies’ college uniform, her lisle stockings and school hat. Most of the old brigade had been familiar with Vern Hooper’s daughters who’d stepped down from the train clad in similar garb. That uniform wasn’t all that marked Trudy as a Hooper. She had the dark eyes, the dark hair and height enough to be the granddaughter of the great Vern Hooper. She wasn’t, but there were few who knew it. She’d inherited her colouring and height from Teddy Hall.

She didn’t arrive on the bus that Saturday in August. She drove a white Torana sedan into the yard and parked it behind Georgie’s ute. No ladies’ college uniform that day. Georgie recognised the Torana but raised her eyebrows as a sneaker and jeans-clad Trudy stepped out. Jen and Jim waited to greet her. Georgie suffered her kiss on the veranda. She suffered a replay of the hair thing, and was pleased she’d wriggled into her new jeans, that she’d worn her new sweater, patched in her missing segment of eyebrow and decided to tolerate the pinch of new shoes.

Later, at dinner, she watched Jim’s eyes adore his daughter, watched Jenny fuss over her, and felt a minor twinge of envy. Trudy had it all – two parents, a beautiful old home, an education, and she’d have a career in a year or two.

‘Remember when Margot used to say she wanted to be a nurse?’ Georgie said. Jim stopped eating. Jenny stood to move the kettle over the central hotplate. Just a memory, a kinder memory of Margot as a fifteen year old, just an innocent remark. Georgie said no more.

By seven thirty, her duty visit done, Georgie was urging Trudy to move her car when Elsie, Harry, Teddy, Vonnie and their baby arrived, further blocking the ute in. She gave up – parried the hair thing again then, for Teddy’s benefit, relayed the tale of the rock through the sump thing, the three guys driving an F100 who had given her a tow to the nearest town, a hundred-odd kilometres away.

The grunter was in Teddy’s arms, which to Georgie looked highly ridiculous. Trudy did the required amount of worshipping of Michael John Hall, which enabled Georgie to keep her distance – watched her coo at its smiling face, listened to her speak of assisting at a few deliveries – and how in God’s name anyone could stand around watching that, Georgie didn’t know.

Granny had. She’d delivered a few generations of this town. She’d delivered Georgie, and Elsie’s six.

‘I’d like two or three more,’ Vonnie said, which turned the conversation to pregnancies and caesareans – time for Georgie to excuse herself, to walk outside for a smoke and wonder if there was something queer about her. Dino Collins and Raelene had called her the red dyke. In one of the places she’d been where women were thin on the ground, she’d told a stockman she was queer.

Cigarettes don’t burn long and a smoker gets rid of one faster when the air outside is frosty. The conversation had turned to Trudy’s ten-day holiday in America when the smoker returned, and the new Hall god was in Elsie’s arms.

‘Of all the places you could go, why America?’ Jenny asked.

‘Sophie’s got an uncle and aunty over there and half a dozen cousins she’s never met.’

Georgie knew why Jenny didn’t like America. Trudy, Jim and the Halls didn’t know. Georgie knew that the miniature grunter in Elsie’s arms was Trudy’s half-brother. Trudy didn’t know. She didn’t know that the earth where her natural mother had died had been turned over this morning, that turning it had been Georgie’s private burial service for Margot.

Years ago, Jenny and Elsie wanted to tell Trudy the facts of her birth. Jim and Harry hadn’t, so she’d never been told.

The male and the female animal were two different species. Their brains functioned in a different way. How could a marriage between the two have any hope of working? Some did. Evidence of that was in this kitchen. A lot didn’t. The Paul disciple had been married until his wife caught the seven-year itch and took off for Queensland with a workmate.

‘Any boyfriends, Tru?’ Vonnie asked.

‘A few,’ Trudy said, and everyone laughed. Georgie wanted another smoke – or wanted to ask Teddy to move his car. What time did babies go to bed?

Harry, who must have been feeling the pinch, rolled a smoke while Trudy gave him a lecture on the hazards of smoking.

She was a nice kid, a totally together kid who’d decided early on her trade and never wavered – and she was no kid now. Still seemed like a kid to Georgie – a kid with Teddy’s eyes, big and brown and expressive, with Teddy’s dark hair, held back from her face tonight by a stretchy blue headband. Looked like
Alice in Wonderland
– after she’d eaten the grow tall biscuit. Harry and Teddy’s height had somehow been enough to cancel Margot’s and the Macdonalds’ lack of it.

On paper, she was Jenny and Jim’s daughter and Georgie’s half-sister. By blood she was Georgie’s niece. She called Elsie and Harry Nan and Pa. Always had. Had she ever questioned why? Would she ever question why? Knowing Trudy, probably not, and tonight, Georgie envied her disinterest in where she’d come from.

The Hall kids had been born knowing who they were. As a twelve year old, Teddy had known what he’d been born to do. At seventeen, Vonnie had known she’d wanted Teddy. She’d set her sights on him and chased him until he’d stopped running. And he looked happy to have stopped his running, looked content, his son back in his arms.

Did I ever want anything enough to go after it? Georgie asked herself. She’d gone after her bits of paper, had studied hard to pass the accountancy exams, though not because she had any desire to become an accountant. Her only reason for doing it had been to prove to herself that she could – and she had to do something about replacing that piece of paper, had to speak to Amy McPherson tomorrow.

She’d once envied kids their fathers. She’d envied the Hall kids, who’d called Harry Dad. As a four year old she’d envied Margot’s two fathers. She’d put on such a turn one day in town, Jenny had produced Laurie Morgan’s photograph, cut from a newspaper, glued around a bit of cardboard cut from a cereal packet. For a lot of years – or three years, which is a lot when you’re a kid – Georgie had believed her daddy to be a famous movie star.

She was seven years old that day in Armadale when she’d removed famous daddy from his frame and read the few available lines of print glued around his cardboard mounting.
Redheaded water-pistol bandit . . .
she’d read.
Arrested in Geelong . . .

Could still see those words. She’d almost tossed him that day. A few times since, she’d almost tossed him, but that newspaper cutting was half of who she was and, watching Trudy and Teddy, she knew how large that half might be, and how
do
you throw away the only contact you’ve ever had with half of yourself?

Harry went out the back door to light his smoke. Georgie went the other way, through the large and frosty entrance hall to the sitting room where a log fire smouldered in the grate, warming maybe a foot of air around it. A cold room, but pretty with its deep blue velvet drapes and fancy pelmets, its semi modern couch and chairs upholstered to match the drapes. She lit a smoke and stood smouldering with the fire, hoping her smoke would join the logs’ and go up the chimney.

This room had been well built in its day, with wide decorative cornices, a fancy mantelpiece and a beautiful old fireplace, a fancy light fitting which shed too little light hanging from the ridiculously high ceiling. She toed a smouldering log into a blaze then returned to the warmth of the kitchen.

The grunter ate at ten. The Halls went home so he might dine on breast and Georgie picked up her handbag to follow them out to the car. Watched Trudy give Elsie and Harry hugs, and again wondered if she’d ever questioned why she gave them hugs.