The Tying of Threads (35 page)

He’d had no kids with his absconding wife. He had two brothers. They had six kids between them. Paul had known his father for twelve years, he’d known both sets of grandparents. Georgie’s blood line began and ended with Jenny. As a kid she’d believed Granny to be her great-grandmother by blood. She’d been Jimmy’s blood, via the Hoopers’ line – Granny and Vern Hooper were half-cousins. Margot had been connected by blood to Maisy, via her rapist fathers. Georgie’s father was a framed newspaper mug shot of a redheaded water-pistol bandit.

She’d borrowed Itchy-foot’s diaries at Christmas time, and since had keyed his pages of minute script onto a computer disc. She’d never met him, but he’d been her great-grandfather and Granny’s husband. She’d married him at nineteen, left him eight years later and never referred to him by name. To Granny, Archibald Gerald Foote had been
that philandering, conscienceless sod
. He’d lived off women. It was in his diaries, as was his shipboard romance with Juliana Conti, the supposedly barren wife of a wealthy old banker. By the end of the cruise, she’d been pregnant with Jenny. Itchy-foot’s diaries mentioned her
sow belly
– his only reference to the infant Jenny, though he had mentioned her as a ten year old, and later. There wasn’t a lot of pleasant reading in those diaries, and they’d done little to fill in the jigsaw puzzle of Georgie’s life.

*

Paul wanted to buy the house. The owners were moving back to England and had given him first option and a month in which to raise the money before they put it on the market.

Georgie had the money. During the last years of high interest her balances had ballooned. She’d invested what she’d got from the sale of Charlie’s shop, and she still had much of her mouse money. She could sell the old Woody Creek house Charlie had willed to her. It needed money spent on it. She had shares bought for her by Charlie for Christmas bonuses or whenever she’d mentioned being overdue for a holiday.

Hang on to them, Rusty. They’ll be worth something one day.

They were worth something. A canny old chap, Charlie White – he’d warn her not to put her money into a joint investment, but the De-Facto Relationships Act had come into being last year, giving unmarried couples similar rights and responsibilities to those who were married. She’d spent today sifting through pages of a joint property settlement. The unmarried couple, who had produced two kids and built a house during their nine-year relationship, were now at each other’s throats over who had paid for what, and who would get the kids, and if they didn’t stop arguing soon, Boss God Marino would get the lot.

She could see Paul moving around the kitchen. A long, long time ago she’d told Jenny that one of her prerequisites in a husband would be an ability to cook. He was cooking spaghetti bolognaise. She could smell it wafting out the back door.

His family believed her to be a fixture in his life. His mother, Irene, in her early sixties, was still working. The Dunns were a working family, a house-buying, mortgage-paying family. Paul had been paying off a house when his wife absconded. He’d spoken to the bank about getting a loan.

And he caught her staring at him. ‘Are you going to stand out there all night?’ he called.

‘I’m considering my options,’ she replied and went inside.

She’d liked his face. She’d liked his eyes when his face had been covered by a bush of beard. He was taller than her, though not by much, a few years younger, though not many.

The television news was on, showing Arabs at war. They’d been at war with someone for a thousand years and would still be killing someone – or each other – a thousand years from now. War was a genetic thing with them.

‘Who was it who said that all religion should be strongly discouraged?’ Georgie asked.

‘The pope,’ Paul said.

*

By April of ’86, Georgie knew she was Marino and Associates’ token female, that her age and lack of encumbrances might have swayed the Boss God’s judgement. She’d replaced the former token female who’d retired pregnant. By April, Georgie knew she’d spend the rest of her days chained to her desk while the top dogs played God in courtrooms a bare block and a half from her fourth-floor cubbyhole. Chris Marino was a big name barrister – and currently playing God in Sydney – and while the boss was away, the atmosphere in the office relaxed.

He didn’t approve of smoking. His office was smoke free. Georgie stole a smoke at lunch, lit up when she walked back to her car at night, had a couple with Paul at home but was considering calling it quits. She’d only started it because she’d liked watching Ronnie Hall blow smoke rings.

An elderly woman who’d been in this morning to make a will had been a heavy smoker. The smell of tobacco had exuded from her pores. A dear old bird, desperate to see that each of her seven kids received an equal share of next to nothing. Last week she’d made a will for a quarrelsome old bugger who had been determined to teach neglectful grandchildren a damn good lesson once he was dead. She’d made a study of humankind during her years behind Charlie’s counter. Nothing had changed. Loved watching people, reading about people and attempting to work out what made them tick.

She’d spent the afternoon sifting through a stack of files for one of the top dogs who was currently attempting to get a big payout for a bloke with a bad back injured in a work-related accident, and at four twenty, she looked at her watch and decided she’d sifted sufficient dung for the day. She was packing up when the office girl knocked, then opened the door, with two customers in tow – clients. Bugger, Georgina Morgan Morrison, BA, LLB thought. She wanted to let down her hair and scratch, wanted to go home and fry the steak she’d removed from the freezer this morning.

‘Michael Morgan and his wife Alison,’ the office girl said, handing over a file.

A pretty, very pregnant Alison looked about fifteen, and Georgie glanced at the male accusingly. He was removing his baseball cap and beneath it, his hair was as red as her own. And his face – she was looking at the flesh and blood face of the redheaded water-pistol bandit who’d got another kid pregnant at fifteen.

Looked down fast at his file, at the
Morgan
, her heart slamming into her ribcage like a sledgehammer into concrete. She barely heard the office assistant explaining that Rowan, one of the senior associates, was Alison’s mother’s neighbour and that she’d made the appointment with him. Sadly, Rowan was in conference. Conveniently so. Georgie was the token female, the office dogsbody.

She got her clients seated then excused herself to escape to the passage where she poured a glass of water and told herself she’d gone stir crazy. It worked to a degree – as long as she didn’t look at that male Morgan’s face. She looked at Alison, looked at her notepad as they told the story of the house they wanted, and how Alison’s mother was going to give them the deposit but she wanted all of the checks done before she allowed them to sign anything. Georgie took notes and wondered how two kids – kids compared to her – could consider tying themselves into a twenty-five year mortgage they’d still be paying when she turned seventy, but she was no longer watching the clock.

She shook their hands as they were leaving, told them to call her any time, then dared a close-up look at his face, at his eyes – as green as her own – and she wasn’t fooling herself. He was the living, breathing personification of the mug shot she’d been carrying around for forty years. He had the height too. He had the same shape to his face, the forehead, the eyebrows. Less hair, but give him an inch or two more and an old-fashioned brush-back style and he could have been Laurie Morgan – and she had to ask him.

‘You wouldn’t be related to a Laurence George Morgan, would you?’ She didn’t mention the water-pistol bandit. ‘I believe he worked in the menswear department at Myers during the fifties.’

‘Dad,’ he said. ‘He worked at Myers when I was a kid. Did you know him?’

‘Not personally,’ Georgie said.

‘Some long lost uncle has left him a fortune, I hope?’ he said. ‘Ali and I could use a bit of it right now.’

‘Is your father still living?’

‘He was last Sunday. They’re down at Geelong – if you happen to come across the family’s missing millions.’

She got them out the door, got it closed then sat down hard. Her legs were shaking. She had a smoke out of her packet before she realised where she was. Put it away fast, picked up her handbag and rode with her clients to the ground floor. Beat them out the door to the street where she had a smoke burning before her feet hit the pavement. It was unbelievable. She’d found him. Things like that don’t happen in real life.

But they did. If Paul hadn’t found a park two car spaces down from her ute that night, he wouldn’t have recognised it, and she wouldn’t have been living in Greensborough. If a tourist hadn’t fallen to his death from Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain would still be in jail.

Ayers Rock was an easy enough climb. Georgie had climbed it. How had he fallen? Why had he landed near a dingo’s lair? The retrieval of his body had led to the finding of the jacket worn by the Chamberlain baby the night she’d been taken from the tent and Lindy had been released – and there’d been talk in the office for days, of how many millions she might sue for, for false imprisonment.

Is your father still living?

Your father. My father.

He was last Sunday. They’re down at Geelong
.

If she’d read that in a book, she would have tossed it. If she’d read about the tumbling tourist, she would have tossed it. And the manila envelope Jack’s father had placed in his desk drawer in ’59, still there twenty years later. Was it fate? Was it God? Until she’d opened that envelope, Georgie had seen Laurie Morgan as an old lag in Long Bay jail. Thereafter she’d seen him in Essendon with his wife and three kids.

Her mind wandering, Georgie damn near ran up the backside of a truck. Braked in time, then barely saw the road or the traffic until she turned into her own street.

Paul worked closer to home so was usually there before her. She parked behind his Holden then gave her tomatoes a drink. She still had a few ripening, smaller but as sweet. She picked two then let herself in via the back door.

The shower was running. The two pieces of Scotch fillet removed from the freezer this morning were bleeding onto the plate on the sink. All day she’d been craving it – or at least until the last hour of her day. Her stomach feeling jumpy, she placed the steak back in the fridge then went in search of the envelope and the mug shot Jenny had presented to her forty years ago, with her porridge.

Many times through the years it had disappeared, and for those years she’d forgotten Laurie Morgan. Like a bad penny, he’d always turned up again, in a carton, in a drawer, and each time she’d found him and dusted him off, his face had grown younger. She’d found him covered in dust on the floor behind her dressing table the day she’d moved out of the Surrey Hills granny flat. Hadn’t bothered to dust him that day. Tossed him into the garbage. But removed him later and washed his face with a damp cloth. He’d lived in the manila envelope since, with the rest of his history. Wherever he was, he’d be dust free.

‘What did you do with the steak?’ Paul yelled from the kitchen.

‘Tossed it out to a passing crow,’ Georgie yelled back.

He opened a bottle of wine, so she fried the steak and served it with tomatoes and eggs, not as fresh as Granny’s, but eggs. They ate while the news played. There was old footage of the exploding Challenger space shuttle, or of its smoke trail, and a Yank discussing why it had failed. Another elderly walker had been run over. Another level crossing crash. One dead. A woman at Doveton had her two minutes of fame. Someone had baited another of her dogs. She’d only had him for three weeks.

Paul packed the dishwasher then returned to his computer. Georgie went to a spare room, the room she’d called her own when she moved in. She continued her search for the manila envelope and found it, secreted away beneath the lining paper of the top dressing table drawer, as she’d secreted the framed mug shot away beneath the lining paper of Granny’s top dressing table drawer. A survivor, Laurence George Morgan, accidently saved from the fire while she’d been saving Jack Thompson’s nautilus shell.

Back in the kitchen, she emptied the envelope onto the table, imagining Paul’s mother’s response should she walk in. She was Jenny’s age, had been born and raised in Collingwood, and might have remembered the redheaded water-pistol bandit who for months had terrorised businesses around Melbourne.

Paul came out at ten to boil the jug for coffee. ‘What are you working on?’

‘A lost parent,’ she said, sliding the papers back into the envelope. ‘A young couple came in late today. They’re borrowing a fortune to buy a house. He’s a car salesman, and his wife looks about twelve months pregnant.’

‘When we’re young we believe we’re indestructible,’ Paul said.

‘How much did you borrow when you bought your first house?’

‘Too much,’ he said.

‘You still want to buy this place?’

‘The repayments will be no more than what we pay in rent.’

‘I’ve got an investment maturing in May.’

‘Much?’

‘The money I got for my shop.’

‘What shop?’

‘I told you I owned a shop.’

‘You told me you managed a shop.’

‘I did, then I inherited it.’

‘From your father?’

‘From my adopted grandfather.’

‘You haven’t got a husband and six kids out there somewhere, have you?’

She emptied the contents of the manila envelope again to the table, then riffled through the papers for the copy of a newsprint page headlined
REDHEADED WATER-PISTOL BANDIT CAPTURED
, then offered it to Paul.

‘I’ve got a father,’ she said. ‘Or I had one last Sunday. I was born while he was serving a three-year jail sentence. He’s got three kids – or he had three in ’57. His son is the one buying the house.’

He looked at her, not comprehending. She lit a cigarette then told him a much condensed story of Jenny’s brief Melbourne love affair. ‘The police locked him up before he could marry her. I’ve never met him.’