The Tying of Threads (50 page)

‘Why, Georgie?’

‘Donny,’ Georgie said.

Donny, Ray’s retarded son, Jenny had babied for seven years. She glanced at Georgie’s growing bulge. Thought of her age, of the O’Briens’ youngest girl, thirty-odd and still a child in her mind. It could happen – but wouldn’t happen, not to Georgie’s baby.

The printer churned out three hundred and ninety-eight numbered pages, including the title page,
MOLLY SQUIRE
, in large print,
J. AND J. HOOPER
beneath it, and on the final Sunday in September, those pages travelled home in Jenny’s case, though not on the bus. Paul and Georgie drove her home.

Paul Jenner’s landscape still hung in the hall. She glanced into the sitting room, expecting to find old rat mouth had taken up residence over the mantelpiece. He wasn’t there. The bathroom was a pig pen, the kitchen a mess. She walked by the mess to the laundry to fetch bleach and mirror cleaner. Gave the main bathroom a wipe, splashed bleach into the toilet, dusted the floor with a soiled towel, hung clean towels and was sweeping the kitchen floor when she heard Georgie mention power points in the sewing room. Jenny stopped sweeping to see why she needed power points.

She knew Paul had ordered a new computer, a bigger, faster model. She hadn’t been aware that his old model had made the trip up with them. Paul was setting it up on the cutting table, close to a power source.

‘You can’t just give it away,’ Jenny said.

‘Done,’ Paul said.

Dust was thick on her sewing machines and cutting table. She gave the table a wipe with a scrap of fabric while Jim and John stood back watching the bits and pieces of that magical machine being connected, cables with weird fittings plugged into weird sockets. And Paul had brought his printer. Jenny watched him fit its plugs, her mind darting to what was in her case. She looked at John, who stepped in closer to watch, looked at Jim, and their eyes met. She’d told him a dozen times that he ought to buy a computer.

‘It’s Paul’s,’ Jenny said.

‘I need its space for my new model,’ Paul explained and plugged in his own power board.

And the magical beast awakened and Georgie slid the first
Molly
disc into it. Up came the title page.

‘What have you been up to down there?’ Jim asked.

‘I’ll show you later,’ Jenny said, demonstrating how to close that file fast, flip it out and flip in another, the safer, solitaire game.

She played it, on her feet before the computer, and for the first time the cards fell in exactly the right way. She won.

Georgie and Paul didn’t stay for lunch. Jenny fed the men an omelette, and two hours later, when the kitchen looked and smelled like her kitchen again, she fetched the manuscript and dumped it on the dining room table beside Jim’s typewriter.

‘That’s what we’ve been up to,’ she said.

He was interested and, feeling sick with the knowledge of what they’d done to it, she left him to read and took the dogs for a walk down to Granny’s land.

The manuscript was on her cutting table beside her computer when she returned, a red line through one of the
J
’s and the
and
. He was in the dining room. She placed the title page down near him. ‘I take it that you don’t want your name on it.’

‘It’s all yours, Jen.’

‘How much of it did you read?’

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Can we leave it at that?’

‘Fine,’ she said, her stomach aflutter. Amy had liked what she’d done. Georgie had been impressed. She trusted their opinions.

Had trusted his once.

Walked away from him. Walked around the veranda, then returned to her sewing room and closed the twin doors. For half an hour she sat turning the pages of the manuscript, attempting to see, to feel how much of it he’d read. Shrugged her shoulders and turned on the computer, then riffled through the discs Georgie had copied for her until she found Itchy-foot’s diary. Barely thirty pages into it, she found the young Gertrude . . .
a feisty young beauty who resides in a pig pen and has opinions above her station.
He hadn’t mentioned her name, but there was no doubt in Jenny’s mind that his feisty young beauty was Granny. She read on, absorbing every word, read of a grand garden party at Monk’s, and less than four months later, according to Itchy-foot’s dates, she found Gertrude again, this time in verse.

The feisty new missus, though she has tasty kisses,

Of late begins dodging her lover.

Much prefers yarning out in the garden,

than sliding beneath the bed cover.

Two days later, on the disc containing the diary, she found Juliana Conti. There were mentions of Itchy-foot’s many love affairs scattered throughout, so many that Jenny hadn’t recognised his early description of her mother, the barren banker’s wife, until . . .
a scratching, biting, fighting lioness, protecting its lone cub. Why am I attracted to fighting bitches?
Until that moment, Juliana Conti had been John’s black and white photograph of a dead foreign woman; she’d been
J.C. LEFT THIS LIFE 31.12.23
cut into a small grey tombstone in the cemetery. That disc gave her life.

By November, Jim’s old rattler was silent. He’d completed his history and posted it up to Sydney.
Molly Squire
was gathering dust on Jenny’s cutting table where she might never cut again. She’d found a more absorbing occupation. With the help of Itchy-foot’s diaries and her Tuesday afternoon sessions with Maisy, she was creating the young Gertrude Hooper and her world of horse-drawn ploughs and long gowns and garden parties and lamplit balls, and to hell with
Molly Squire.

Deep into organising a grand wedding for young Gertrude, Granny’s own brocade wedding gown hung over a chair at her side, the phone rang. She sat, her hands hovering over the keyboard, hopeful that Jim would think it was the publisher and pick it up. He usually did. Not today. She hit
save
and caught the phone before it rang out.

‘We have a six and a half pound daughter, Jen,’ Paul said.

‘It’s too early!’ Jenny said.

‘Three weeks and three days, but that’s Georgie, always in a hurry.’ Silence then, and emotion in his voice when he continued. ‘They’re both well. She’s perfect, Jen, and as red and beautiful as her mother. Katie Morgan Dunn, Georgie said.’

‘Tell her we’re on our way,’ Jenny said.

‘We’re in Sydney. I flew up last night.’

*

Thanks to Chris Marino, Georgie had barely felt a ripple from the Dino Collins affair. He hadn’t billed her for his time, but she’d always known he’d claim his pound of flesh one day. She called him the Boss God. A few called him the Godfather, and some, the Little Dictator. He resembled Marlon Brando – not the aging Brando of
The Godfather
, more the balding, pot-bellied Brando of
Napoleon.
The courtroom was his theatre, and just as he’d stage-managed the James Dino Collins affair, he staged each production.

When he’d told her that she’d be with him in Sydney in October, she’d known why. The Collins affair had been newsworthy and he’d be defending a young mother of four charged with the murder of her brutal husband. The trial was delayed, then delayed again, and when you’re seven and a half months pregnant, a three and a half week delay takes you into your eighth month. She could have got out of it, but had wanted to watch him at work.

She’d watched him for four days. Watched him in fancy restaurants, too, where he’d taken her each night to eat. They’d been in court when the pains started.

Their client was acquitted five days later. Chris flew home, but the company paid for a hire car and, when Katie was a week old, they drove her home via Woody Creek.

Week-old babies don’t win beautiful baby contests and Katie was no exception. She looked like a tiny orang-utan, as had her mother forty-eight years ago, and as had that earlier orang-utan, she stole a large handful of Jenny’s heart.

‘What have you done with
Molly
?’ Georgie asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jenny said, the tiny orang-utan grunting in her arms.

‘Why not?’

‘Jim.’ Jenny shrugged.

‘What about Jim?’

‘It was his factual history of a town. To use his words, I’ve turned it into a penny dreadful.’ She shrugged again. ‘I can’t go sullying the Hooper name, can I – not even for money.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In my sewing room, on the table.’

‘I’ll get rid of it for him,’ Georgie said.

*

She was on maternity leave for six months. Katie slept in four-hour shifts – sometimes. Georgie had the original discs. It took one four-hour shift to cut the last of Jim’s long-winded chapters down to two vital paragraphs, then to dump those paragraphs into the following chapter.

There was little of the original left, so Georgie spent another four-hour shift altering names.
Squire
became
Flanagan
, so
Molliston
had to go.
Flanagan Hill
grew in its place. The giant gum tree turned into an elm; Molly’s daughters became
Myrna
and
Laura.
The hotel moved into the middle of town and the police station slid halfway down the hill. She came up with a new title during Katie’s six to ten o’clock sleeping shift, and typed a new title page:
SENT IN CHAINS by Jennifer Hooper.

Still sullying the Hooper name. She deleted it and typed in
Morrison
.

‘Add
daughter of the notorious Grinning Granny
and it will make the bestseller list,’ Paul said.

‘Yeah,’ Georgie said. She deleted
Jennifer Morrison
and tried
Juliana Conti.

‘That looks good,’ Paul said. ‘Who was she?’

‘Jenny’s mother. She had Jenny beside a railway line and died a few hours later.’

During another morning shift Georgie wrote a thumbnail synopsis and a brief letter, which included the titles of the McPherson/Hooper children’s books, published by their company. She put her own address on it, her own phone number. Didn’t want them contacting Jenny, who she had no intention of telling what she’d done, but it was a damn good read and, as Granny had always said, waste not, want not.

She enclosed a cheque for its return postage, sent it on its way to Sydney and forgot about it.

N
obby’s son phoned on the evening of the twenty-ninth of December. ‘Mrs Hooper,’ he said. ‘It’s Steve, Nobby’s son. It’s bad news,’ he said. ‘Dad had a heart attack this afternoon. He was gone before the ambulance got here.’

It was the wrong time. It was so wrong. Georgie and Katie and Paul had spent two days in Woody Creek over Christmas. Trudy had called from Venice. Jim was still on a high from that call, as was she. With old James Richard’s cockroach eyes gone from the entrance hall, all had been well with their world. Jim was back in his own bed, and certain his Hooper tome would be accepted for publication.

He was watching a television comedy. Jenny turned it off. ‘It’s Nobby,’ she said, and it was the wrong thing to say. He stood, believing Nobby was on the phone. ‘His son, Jim,’ she added quickly. Maybe her face said what she couldn’t say. Jim stood waiting. So she said it. ‘He had a heart attack this afternoon.’

Then she bawled.

*

They drove to Ringwood via Lilydale. They sat through the funeral, saw Rosemary collapse, saw her son carry her from the church.

A dozen of Nobby’s RSL mates were there. Two remembered Jim. Hoop, they called him, and they wanted him to go to the pub and have a final drink for Nobby. He looked to Jenny to get him out of it, but she didn’t know how.

Four wives went with their men and Jenny didn’t know the RSL wives. She did her best. She counted the glasses of beer Jim emptied, listened to too many conversations that included ‘Rosemary won’t survive this.’

Most do, Jenny thought, and lit a cigarette, but one of the wives was allergic to smoke, so she stood and walked out to the pavement to smoke with the lepers.

Jim was no drinker. Three beers were too many. She stopped counting after three. When he was done her shoulder supplied a crutch out to the car park. He had the keys. She refused to get into the passenger seat. He argued that he was fine to drive. She argued that he wasn’t, but he wanted to go home so gave up the keys. Somehow she got the car back to Greensborough, through peak-hour traffic, Jim asleep beside her. To her dying day she’d never know which roads she’d driven. Jim was in bed before Paul served dinner.

Jenny wanted to stay a few days in Greensborough, to allow the new life of her Katie to wash away Nobby’s death. Jim wanted to go home. They left early, Jenny behind the wheel. She drove out via Whittlesea, Jim sorry and sober beside her. Home to a dusty, dirty new year, to forty-degree temperatures, blistering north winds that dried the first sheet before the last was pegged, sheets which smelled of burning forest when she brought them in. Back in the old days when five mills had screamed their victory over logs, when the loggers had kept old timber truck tracks open, when farmers had cleared wide firebreaks around their properties, bushfires and grass fires hadn’t been as common.

Then two days later, Harry came to their door on a day when the smell of smoke was on the air and the heat so intense the dogs could barely raise a bark of protest. Jenny knew when she saw his freckles, like blotches of mud on grey clay that day.

‘Else,’ he said. That’s all he said. He didn’t need to say more.

Jenny didn’t speak. Was there one word worth saying, one question worth asking? She stepped out into the heat to hold him on Vern Hooper’s veranda, to hold him tight, then tighter, and to howl. A howling month that January. The calendar hanging on the hook behind the kitchen door was too gay with its beachgoers and its boats on cool water, and its 1989. All wrong. This was the year Jenny would turn sixty-six, and if she looked at 1989 upside down, there were those two sixes taunting her: 6861. She was old. Her friends were dying.

Harry asked her to sing at the funeral. She tried. She opened her mouth to sing for Elsie. The organist played the introduction a second time, then Jenny ran out into the burning heat, hot enough, dry enough, to turn her tears to salt. Walked home through the railway yard, walked fast to the shade of the veranda and elm tree where she sat and howled with her arms around her dogs. They kissed her. They calmed her before Jim and John came home with the key.