The Tying of Threads (54 page)

Didn’t set the table. Dumped the parcel onto it along with a bottle of vinegar, salt and pepper, then sat down to eat off the paper, with her fingers. Hoopers didn’t eat off paper. Jim looked at it, then actually looked at her, expecting her to fetch him a plate, knife and fork, to serve him his fish and chips. She ate scalding chips, and he reached for his crutch and got his own plate, his own knife and fork, served himself the last piece of fish and a dozen chips. There was nothing wrong with his appetite.

There was nothing wrong with his stump either, or his artificial leg. Six months ago he’d stopped wearing it. Every night since, his crutch had been a third presence at the table – now a fourth. He leaned it on the chair to his right, beside Jenny’s chair, and every time she saw it, heard it, she wanted to take to it with an axe. For months and months and more months, she’d pleaded with him to put his leg on. He suffered terrible pain, he claimed. She no longer believed in his terrible pain. He refused her aspros, her Panadol, refused to see a doctor, refused to set foot or crutch outside the door. He sat, staring at windows, at walls or sleeping – sat and rotted and she rotted at his side.

Lila ate her meal from paper, with her fingers. She’d never been skin and bone before. Wouldn’t be for long. She cleaned up the last of the chips then ate both pieces of toast. She dropped three teabags into three mugs, poured the boiling water over them, then left Jim to fish for his teabag – and look at it as if he’d retrieved a dead mouse from his cup when he finally got it out.

Jenny escaped, with her smokes, to her sewing room, where she no longer sewed but gave her problems to her gods, the computers, preloved, though never loved more than she loved them. Tonight she emptied her anger into the original god, already stained yellow by her smoke. It didn’t accuse when she lit another.

She created a new file she named
Boomerang
, and closed it down fast when the chair jamming the twin doors gave way to Lila. She wanted a smoke. Jenny went to bed and took her cigarettes with her.

On Tuesday, Maisy’s visiting day, Lila hunted Jim from the sitting room. He holed up in the bathroom. On Friday, Lila begging for a loan, Jenny offered her ten dollars to cook dinner, clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor.

‘That’s bloody slave rates.’

‘It’s bludger’s rates, Lila, and more than you deserve.’

She cooked, she cleaned, she got her ten dollars. Spent it on hair dye, but the supermarket didn’t have a good range of colours in stock. The faded red and silver turned dark brown. She looked semi normal.

L
ila’s battered handbag was hanging over the back doorknob as usual. Jenny removed it each night when she locked that door. Tonight she dropped it, scattering its general chaos of makeup and used tissues, purse and perfume. She picked up each item, tossed it back in, then tried to close it. Its zip no longer zipped.

Her plastic card would be amongst that mess. She’d collect her pension in the morning and recycle it at the pokies – or maybe not. Last night she’d diagnosed Jim’s illness as ‘mad as a rabbit’. She might catch the bus on Friday.

Georgie’s diagnosis was kinder than Lila’s though much the same. She’d suggested a psychiatrist. Maisy had suggested the doctor who set up shop in the old bank building every Wednesday. She’d made an appointment for Jim. Jenny had kept it. She’d spoken to a young doctor about Jim’s breakdown after the war, about his years in psychiatric clinics. He’d told her he couldn’t fix her husband by remote control and to bring him in. As if.

She emptied her cup and went to the bathroom. Clean. She hadn’t cleaned it. Maybe the Muslims had got something right with their many wives. Every wife needs a junior wife. Jenny hadn’t asked Lila to stay but no longer told her to leave. The
Boomerang
file was growing. Lila shed gems daily, gems Jenny swept up and fed to her computer. She’d made a superb Molly.

The publisher wants to know if you’re working on a follow-up novel
. . . She was now.

She brushed her teeth, creamed her face, then crept back to the kitchen to open Lila’s purse. Her bank card was in it, and not much else. She stole it. She hid it in her sewing machine drawer, then went to bed.

Lila missed it when she went to the post office to pick up her government pay and was back in ten minutes. ‘I have to phone the bank. I’ve lost my money card.’

‘You’ll get it back when you’re on the bus out of town, Lila.’

‘You’ll give it back to me now or I’ll bloody report you to the copper.’

‘Go for your life. When he comes around to arrest me, I’ll ask him to evict you.’

‘I can’t live without money!’

‘Bernie Macdonald has got plenty. Try your luck with him on Tuesday.’

Their exchange became louder when Jenny suggested Shaky Lewis, who still had a room at the hotel. ‘Two pensioners can live more cheaply than one,’ she said. They became loud enough to raise Jim. He stopped the argument – or his clunk-clunk across the hall stopped it. Jenny left via the back door.

He was in the kitchen, close to the open back door, when she returned. His crutch was leaning beside his chair. Lila was vacuuming.

On Tuesday, Lila claimed his sitting room where she terrorised him with afternoon television. He clunk-clunked to the bathroom to take refuge, and that night he spoke to Jenny – or moaned.

‘When is she going?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jenny said, looking at his eyes, which, for the first time in months, appeared to be seeing her.

There were days when she felt like lining both of them up against a wall and borrowing Granny’s rifle back from Harry. He still had it. There were days when she missed John so much she sat on his bed, in his room, and invited the pups in for company. Missed his clever hands every time Lila opened her sewing room door. He would have worked out how to fit a lock that would keep her out.

‘Why do you need two of those things for?’

‘I run a retirement home for Paul’s old computers.’

‘What do you do on them?’

‘Play games.’

‘Show me.’

Not bloody likely. Jenny saved, shut the computer down and went for a walk that ended at Fulton’s hardware store.

Robert Fulton sold her two solid slide bolts and, as always, asked after Jim. He’d stopped visiting him around the same time Jim had stopped wearing his leg.

‘As usual,’ she said. ‘Would you know if old Shaky Lewis is still capable of screwing in a screw?’

‘They took him down to the old-folks’ home, but there’s a chap living out Cemetery Road who does a bit of handyman work.’ He gave her the phone number.

Jenny looked at the phone when she walked in. Jim would take to his bed to hide from him. She studied the fittings. All they needed was a couple of screws and a few holes drilled. She’d once been capable of using tools. In Armadale, she’d drilled holes to repair an old cabinet, to hang curtains, to attach a form of lock to Ray’s back door. When she’d lived with Granny, she’d sawed and hammered and worked like a labourer. Only since she’d been with Jim had she become useless. John’s toolbox was still in the shed. He’d owned two electric drills and a huge set of multi-sized drill bits.

And maybe Jim wasn’t quite as usual. She roused him from his chair when she started drilling a hole through the carpeted floor, which took a few attempts and a larger drill bit before the hole was big enough for one of the slide bolts to fit into. He watched while she positioned the bolt plate on the bottom of the left hand side door and marked its four holes with a pencil.

‘Hold the door still for me,’ she said.

He held it still. He held it when she got down on her knees to drill. She’d used Norman’s hand drill in Armadale and wished for it now. John’s electric model was too powerful, but fast.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Building myself a barricade,’ she said, and selected a screwdriver. She got the screws in and, when the slide bolt was driven down through the floor, she had the left hand side door locked.

‘In or out?’ she said. ‘I need to close the other one.’

He came in, no doubt wanting to protest against the ruination of another of his possessions. His mouth slapped open and shut a few times but she closed the door, then, closer to him than she’d been in months, she started measuring up for her second slide bolt, which, if attached in the right place then anchored into the locked door, should give her privacy.

He held the bolt plate above the doorknob while she marked its holes, and again while she got the screws started. He watched her mark the keeper’s holes, and when the screws held it firm, when the second slide bolt was in its keeper, they were barricaded in. It wasn’t a pretty job. A couple of the screws had gone in on an angle and their corners were sharp, but she hadn’t been looking for pretty, only effective. And he wanted out.

‘Thanks for your help,’ she said, then locked him out and turned on Paul’s second retired computer. He’d bought a faster model with a larger built-in brain, or hard drive, as he called it. Jenny’s second computer had a small hard drive which she didn’t quite trust yet.

It took one night for her to trust her handyman skills, because shove as she might, Lila couldn’t get in. She knocked, she yelled, but not until Jenny took pity and slid that bolt did Lila get her cigarette.

Jim knocked on Monday afternoon, his knock a foot higher than Lila’s. Jenny slid her bolt for him.

‘Seeking me or my sanctuary?’ she said.

‘She took Trudy’s car,’ he said.

‘I told her to take it for a run.’ Jenny had given her ten dollars to wash the sheets and hang them on the clothes line. Lila had gone to Willama to spend it.

‘She won’t bring it back,’ he said.

‘If she doesn’t, it’s celebration time,’ Jenny said. ‘In or out?’

He came in, leaned his crutch against the table. It fell. She picked it up, took it to his bedroom and returned with his leg. Didn’t say a word, just placed it down beside her older computer.

Only two chairs in that room, her discarded dining suite chairs. He sat to stare at the bulbous screen, so she turned it on to give him something to stare at. It took time in doing its warm-up exercises, and when it finished, she inserted the solitaire disc, and up it came, ready to play. He didn’t like it but, trapped there without his crutch, he sat while, from a standing position, she played the game, hearing herself echoing the words Paul had spoken to her the day she’d first sat in front of a computer.

‘Playing games is the easiest way to lose your fear of computers. Learning to control them is like learning to drive a car.’

He looked at her, helpless without his crutch. ‘Get it, Jen.’

‘Ah, he knows my name. I got your leg for you. Put it on – all the better to dodge her, my dear.’

She played a second game. The machine won, but her concentration hadn’t been in it, nor was his. He was looking at his leg.

There were new age antidepressant pills that might help him, if he’d take pills. He’d never taken pills. If he had the flu he wouldn’t swallow an aspro unless she disguised it in Granny’s flu brew, which she had many times. She did what she could for him. Lived the best way she could around him. He wasn’t interested in the computer, so she shut it down and returned to the faster model, still clean. Watched him. Watched his hands. One was hovering over the keyboard. She stopped typing to watch that hand. He didn’t touch the keys. How many years had he spent on
Molly Squire
? How many had he spent on his Hoopers? Then he’d stopped, stopped dead, like a battery toy out of power.

He stayed with her until he heard Trudy’s car at the gate. There was no mistaking its motor. Its exhaust pipe and muffler had rusted for lack of use.

‘If she opens that gate and lets those pups out, I’ll murder her,’ Jenny said, and ran out to stop her opening it. When she returned, Jim and his leg had gone.

He came back the next morning, on his crutch.

‘Bring that crutch in here and you know what I’ll do, Jim.’

‘The pain,’ he said.

‘Take an aspro.’

He went away and didn’t return to her door for two days. Came early the next morning on two legs. She locked him in her sewing room, ruffled his hair when he sat and turned on the computer, inserted the word processing program and created a file she named
Jim
. Then turned off the monitor.

‘Now it’s a typewriter without paper. You can pour your every thought into it then, with a few strokes of the keys, delete the lot,’ she said and sat again at her own computer.

He touched a key, and when the machine didn’t explode, his fingers started searching the keyboard.

Jenny married Lila off to Billy Roberts and moved her to Woody Creek, and so engrossed in what she was doing, she was unaware he was typing. He wasn’t as fast as he’d been on the old rattletrap typewriter, but his ten fingers had found a rhythm she’d never found with two fingers and a thumb.

He remained with her until lunchtime and when she turned his monitor on to read what he’d written, she’d expected more.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
, repeated. Repeated umpteen times. He’d filled two-thirds of a page with that one sentence, then progressed to
The crow flew over the river with a lump of red raw liver in his mouth
. In all he’d filled three pages, but better he fill a hundred pages with his fox and his crow than sit staring out the window. She deleted his morning’s work, closed down both machines and went out to make him a sandwich for lunch.

He beat her to the sewing room the next morning, on two legs. She turned on the two computers, turned his monitor off and, without comment, sat down to work.

And he spoke. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting Lila out of my head and onto disc. It’s therapeutic,’ she replied.

He typed a few more lines. Amy had timed him once on his typewriter. He’d done seventy words in a minute. Paul’s newer computer had come with a touch-type teaching program already installed. She’d wasted a day attempting to give her ten fingers eyes. The computer told her she could do twelve words a minute. Her two fingers and thumbs could do around forty.