Free One Long Thread by Belinda Jeffrey Page A

of the box was The Magic Faraway Tree.
    â€˜Happy to keep it if you want, Button. But no point holding onto stuff for the sake of it.’
    I pulled out a few things I didn’t really want. Things of no sentimental value. But most of it I really wanted to hang onto for no other reason than I wasn’t ready to let go.
    â€˜Think you can take a look through your mum’s things?’
    I looked over at the two boxes separated out.
    â€˜We can send her what you think she might like to keep,’ he said. ‘Or you could write and tell her what’s in it and what she wants us to do with it all. Not sure how it got left here.’
    I opened the lid of the first box and inhaled a dusty smell of age. I removed the books that sat on top, two photograph albums, to see what was at the bottom. I pulled out packets of fabric and patterns and placed them all around the box until I reached the bottom and there was nothing left. I glanced over to Dad, but he was busy with his own things.
    I left it all there, moving onto the next box. The first thing I pulled out was a large, woollen red coat. Underneath that was a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, pictures cut from magazines. Scribblings in a child’s writing, hand-drawn pictures. At the bottom of the box was an old hardback book. The History of Silk.
    â€˜What’s this?’ I asked Dad, showing him the red coat.
    â€˜Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know we had that. Belongs to your Grandmother Pearl, I think.’
    Becky has her grandparents come to dinner once a month on a Sunday evening and she was most surprised to find that our circle of friends didn’t observe the same habit relating to family.
    â€˜But don’t you have family get-togethers?’
    Rachel’s family got together over birthdays and Melissa lived with her grandparents so they were there all the time.
    â€˜Don’t you find it strange that your mother would leave you?’ Becky said. ‘I can’t imagine my mother leaving me.’
    I’d never thought of it like that before. ‘I don’t think she knew what else to do.’
    â€˜Well, my mother, if it ever came to that, would never let my father keep either of us. She just wouldn’t.’
    I didn’t know any other girl who only lived with her father. There were boys who lived with their single mothers, but that was relatively normal. Men were always leaving their families. Most men were, in our experience, most likely to be Casanovas. And Casanovas were always ready to move on to another woman. Perhaps there was something safe about honing our teenage senses towards identifying decent boys at fifty paces. If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome. It occurred to me, then, that I’d never heard my mother talk about her father. Only about Pearl. Mum talked of her mother in disappointing tones, and we knew she had done many things wrong or was the kind of woman we shouldn’t approve of. Though, on that day, I realised my mother had never told us anything tangible. There were no actual stories, or incidents, just her attitude and judgment.
    I remember taking a walk with Pearl through the Botanic Gardens, having high tea somewhere in the city, followed by a tram trip home. Mum had to take Sally to the bathroom to remove the markings of strawberry jam that had slid, like one complete mass, from the top of her scone onto her white blouse. My mother made audible ‘tut-tuts’ while she attempted to remove the jam with her handkerchief. When this failed she took Sally by the hand to the bathroom. All the while my grandmother laughed. She had large brown eyes and there were deep lines in her skin when she smiled.
    â€˜What do you know about Pearl,