The Tying of Threads (39 page)

Amber picked up her handbag and walked out. She stood on the footpath for a moment, staring at the house she’d schemed to possess, the house she’d spent Amber’s and Elizabeth’s savings on making more than it had been. She’d chosen the carpet – and stained it with her blood. She’d chosen the drapes, the lounge suite, the washing machine, and that homeless stray had walked in and taken the lot – and Sissy.

Five babies Amber had carried. She walked away from the last of them that day to become Maryanne Brown. Rode the bus, the train, then rode a tram to Richmond where she used her private mailbox key to retrieve six envelopes and two bankbooks, Maryanne’s and Margaret’s. It was a long trip from Doveton. Once a month she emptied that box. She cashed Elizabeth’s cheques at the post office. They knew her there. They thought they knew her. A middle-aged woman asked after her health.

No chatter in Elizabeth Duckworth today. Amber zipped her notes into her handbag’s inner pocket and she went on her way. Such a grand game she’d played, but too old to play any more. Such a grand life she’d led as Elizabeth. Lost her. Lost her Royal Doulton vases. Lost her Waterford crystal bowl. Lost Number 12.

She had her pocket accounts, but in a world that had long outpaced her, how could she start again? Caught a tram into the city. Margaret Hooper’s bank was in Swanston Street. She made her way there, joined the queue. She was reaching for the correct envelopes when she stabbed her finger on one of the stray bitch’s skewers, in her handbag since the day of the roasted onions. She’d had plans for those skewers. Another plan that wouldn’t come to fruition. Dripping blood onto one of Margaret’s envelopes, she stood staring at it, and at her middle finger where blood oozed up rich and red. Aged skin rips like paper. A woman queuing behind her offered her a tissue. Amber took it, wrapped her finger and moved forward to pay in Margaret’s cheques then to withdraw what she’d paid in last month. She didn’t need the money, her pocket accounts were bulging, but Maryanne and Margaret had never allowed their balances to grow large.

Walked on then towards Maryanne’s bank, a red flower blooming on white tissue. Red for Christmas. She crossed over Bourke Street, wondering if Myers were ready to display their Christmas windows. How many days left until Christmas? Didn’t know. Didn’t care. Sissy’s stray would cook the Christmas chicken. Amber Morrison was redundant. And those magical windows had been unveiled for Amber to see one final time, and there was space to see them today. She pressed in between a woman with a fat brat of a child and an elderly male and his woman.

Alone between them. Always alone, though never alone in Kew. She’d lived a companionable life there, had walked with Lorna, read with her, sat with her in theatres and restaurants, sat at her side in church each Sunday. Led a good and useful life until mud-eyed Sissy had ruined it. Born to ruin. Her birth had ruined Amber’s dreams of beautiful Ruby Rose. For years she’d tried to make her be Ruby Rose. She’d bought her pretty frocks, spent hours on her hair, Sissy’s one saving grace, that mass of heavy hair.

There was a little girl and she had a little curl,

right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good she was very, very good

and when she was bad she was horrid.

Amber was unaware she’d mouthed that old rhyme aloud until the brat pulled on her mother’s arm.

‘That lady said I was horrid, Mummy.’

The woman looked at the well-dressed lady, then took her daughter’s hand and they walked on, Amber watching fat little thighs rub together.

She sniffed. Smelled whining brat on the city air, smelled age on the old man at her side; his wife’s perfume brought back memories of Maisy.

The smells of life, she thought. She’d never forget the scent of her father’s hair. How many years had she waited for him to come back and take her away to his fine house with his maids to iron her pretty gowns and polish her fancy shoes?

A bud near ripe for the plucking.

Loved the scent of his hair. Loved him. Hated him when he hadn’t returned. Always confusing, the love, the hate. Confusing, too, how the eye recognised beauty while the heart rejected it.

Amber swayed but steadied herself against the plate glass while shaking the past from her mind. Old age too often sent the mind reeling back to yesterday.

Every year since ’61, she’d stood here. Next year’s display would be different and the year after that, and the year after that and soon she wouldn’t be here to see them. She placed her bleeding hand flat on the glass to bid those clockwork creatures goodbye, then walked on, her tissue lost, her injured finger leaving blood on her frock as she felt her breast, still bruised from her fall, painful, swollen and leaking red milk, fit only for the devil’s child. Felt the other breast, sucked flat and dry by Sissy.

The traffic lights green, she crossed over and walked on towards Maryanne’s bank, glancing in windows at beautiful things, stopping to admire a tray of diamond rings. She’d once owned a diamond ring. Looked at her left hand, old, the knuckles swollen. As a girl she’d had beautiful hands. Maisy had said so. Buy Maryanne Brown an engagement ring.

Far better she buy gloves to hide her hands than a diamond to laugh at them.

Gloves no longer in vogue, the shop doors were closing before an assistant found her a pair of lacy things, white. Amber paid, and while waiting for her change she pulled them on. Blood still seeping. Nothing she could do to stop its seeping.

Norman’s blood had seeped into the pillow, into the mattress—

But she’d saved him from old age. He would have thanked her for that. She’d never wanted it, never expected to grow old. Age crept up while the back was turned.

She was close to Maryanne’s bank when her feet came to a halt before a restaurant where only the finest meals, the best wines were served. She’d sat in that restaurant with Lorna, had eaten lobster there and craved a glass of wine. Lorna had ordered water. Tonight she’d drink her wine.

A black-clad waiter eyed her as she entered, but it was still early and he had empty tables. He led her to a table for two in a corner where she got her back to a wall, and when he asked if she’d be dining alone, she told him her companion would be joining her.

‘A glass of water?’ he asked.

‘Champagne – and a bandaid, if you please,’ she said.

*

An unforgettable two hours for that black-clad waiter. He’d speak of it and of Maryanne Brown many times in the coming year, how she’d been the size of a sparrow, but over a two-hour period had managed to put away two-thirds of a bottle of champagne and two serves of lobster when her companion hadn’t arrived. He’d speak of how, when he’d presented her with the bill, she’d placed the uncorked bottle into her shopping bag and asked to borrow his biro. He’d given it to her, believing she meant to check his addition, but she’d taken an envelope from her handbag, removed a pension cheque, signed it and offered it to him with the bill. He’d gone to get his manager, who’d explained to the old dear that they couldn’t accept her cheque as payment.

‘When we can’t trust our own government’s cheques we’re in a bad way, aren’t we?’ she said, and reached again into her handbag – not for cash, but for a second envelope.

They watched her sign a second cheque, watched her stand, watched her walk away, the uncorked bottle in her shopping bag.

I
n January ’88, Australia celebrated two hundred years of European settlement. Prince Charlie and Lady Di arrived in Sydney to add their royal presence to the occasion. The six o’clock news that night was full of them and the re-enactment of the First Fleet’s landing. There was barely time to slot in half a dozen words about an elderly woman found dead in her bed.

At ten thirty they broadcast more Charlie and Di, and again mentioned the elderly woman believed to have been dead for some weeks. They interviewed the neighbour who’d raised the alarm after junk mail from her neighbour’s overflowing letterbox had been blowing across the road onto her front lawn for days.

When I saw one of the junk mail deliverers piling in more, I went over to tell him that the owner was on holiday. Then the woman who lived next door came out and said that maybe we ought to call the police, that she hadn’t seen the old lady since about a week before Christmas, and that when her son had climbed over the fence to get his ball yesterday, he’d said there was a bad smell coming from the bathroom window. That’s when we contacted the authorities.

‘What a world,’ Jim said. ‘Someone must have missed her.’

‘People don’t know their neighbours down there,’ Jenny said.

It was getting to be that way in Woody Creek, or so it seemed to her. Maisy knew everyone. She still called in for a cuppa on her way home from Willama on Tuesdays, still kept Jenny abreast of the town news. She came the following day. The dogs were tied up on Tuesdays and the gate left open so Maisy could drive in.

‘Guess who I just ran into in Willama?’ Maisy greeted her.

‘Who?’

‘The unmentionable. She came straight at me in that big new roundabout they’ve put in down the bottom end of Main Street.’

‘Lila?’

‘Who else? She got out of her car and started snarling at my window, so I backed up and drove around her,’ Maisy said.

Most agreed that Maisy shouldn’t have been driving. She’d hit one or two of the town cars. Bernie had stopped having her dents straightened. Most also agreed that if Maisy’s wheels and freedom were taken away from her, she’d curl up and die.

‘You should have heard what she called me, and it wasn’t my fault anyway. They’ve got no signs telling you that you have to take the long way around it to make a right-hand turn so I took the short way, and she slammed straight into me. Is Jim home?’

‘He’s in Willama with John.’ Everyone knew that Amy was dying.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s been in a coma since Sunday night.’

Jenny had sat with her on Sunday. John sat with her every day. Her kidneys had shut down. It was only a matter of time.

‘John won’t handle it. Remember Nancy Bryant, how she was dead a month or two after she lost Lonny? Maureen O’Brien was the same. She was dead in six weeks. How old would John be?’

‘Gone eighty,’ Jenny said.

‘He was just a kid when Amy started teaching up here. He didn’t have a word to say for himself, but he set his sights on her and never looked at another girl. She must be close to my age.’

‘Eighty-eight. She goes with the century,’ Jenny said. ‘What did you want with Jim?’

‘I was just wondering where his car was,’ Maisy said. ‘They say Melbourne will get forty degrees tomorrow. It’s lucky they found that dead woman when they did.’

‘She must have had relatives somewhere who’d missed her,’ Jenny said.

‘She was a spinster,’ Maisy said. ‘Sammy told Maureen that they had to cut a padlock off her gate and break into the house.’

‘Heart attack?’

‘Murdered, Sammy said, but you can’t breathe a word of what I’m telling you. He wasn’t even supposed to tell his mother. They reckon that it was someone she knew, someone she let in. No windows were broken.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘Bludgeoned,’ Maisy said.

The beeping of a car horn ended their conversation. Jim was home and Maisy’s aging Chrysler was blocking the drive. He never beeped at Maisy. He’d park in the street for Maisy and walk in. Jenny knew why he hadn’t today.

‘I think Amy’s gone,’ she said, standing, picking up Maisy’s handbag and car keys. If Jim had John with him, the last person he’d need to see would be Maisy.

*

An appalling night. They’d been four for so many years. Now they were three – or two and one broken man. John didn’t want to return to his empty house and he wouldn’t go to bed, so they sat half the night with him, pouring wine and speaking of better nights. He hadn’t slept for weeks and at two fell asleep on the couch. Jenny was asleep when the phone rang at eight the following morning. She rose to silence it, wanting John and Jim to sleep, but the caller, a male, asked to speak to Jim.

He came on one leg and his crutch and Jenny watched the blood drain from his face.

‘It’s Lorna,’ he said. ‘The woman on the news. It’s Lorna.’

Jenny moved the chair she kept in the hall so he might sit, then stood, her hand on his shoulder, her own ear close to the phone, listening secondhand to the distant voice. As Lorna’s next of kin, Jim was expected to make the official identification.

‘My sister and I were estranged,’ Jim said. ‘I haven’t seen her for many years. Our cousin, Ian Hooper, will have seen her more recently than I.’

He spoke for five minutes more, but Jenny walked away to dress for a day like no other.

‘Murdered,’ Jim said when he put down the phone. ‘Blunt force trauma to her head and face, then they . . . mutilated her eyes . . . with kitchen skewers.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Jenny said as he tried to rise. ‘I’ll get your leg.’

She had two silent men, two dogs and a telephone to deal with, had gone to bed too late and been woken too early. She had no time to mourn Amy – didn’t give Lorna a second of thought.

She drove with John to the undertaker where she learned that Amy would be forced to queue up for burial, that they’d have to wait through a weekend before they could put her death away. It was too long.

John surprised her. He had a strength she hadn’t expected. He didn’t want to be alone in his empty house so they gave him the big bedroom on the north-eastern corner; it had twin glass doors opening onto the veranda where the dogs spent their nights. They had a telepathic understanding of his loss, and each time he opened those doors, they were at his side, to offer their silent sympathy, to walk the garden with him.

Ian Hooper phoned, eager to rehash the details of Lorna’s death. Mrs Watson called to offer her condolences, Jenny believing her condolence was for John and realising late it was for Jim. Lorna’s notorious death was more newsworthy than the slow fading away of gentle Amy. Missed her. Sat alone at night turning the pages of the books they’d created together, free to mourn her in the dead of night. Not by day. She was strong by day, and she’d said her goodbyes on Sunday.