Free The Tying of Threads by Joy Dettman

you tonight – and I thought that you’d given up the drink.’
    ‘Ring her up then?’
    ‘You did it, you ring her up. I’ve told you before that I’m not interfering in their private business.’
    Bernie had known better days. The pie and mashed potato lunch still swimming nicely in whisky, he chose to leave it unpolluted by macaroni and slimy greens and he walked outside to his ute. Drove by Hooper’s corner, turned right at King Street, right into Blunt’s Road and right again into Hooper Street, this time slowing as he passed their driveway. He didn’t turn in, or stop. Drove by, then turned right onto Three Pines Road where he braked directly opposite their house and sat staring at it, scratching his skin cancers.
    There was no sign of movement in the garden, so he got out and crossed over the road to hide behind their rosebush hedge. By summer’s end it was tall enough to hide a man of his height. He didn’t have much of it. He was peering between the thorns and the few remaining blooms when a door slammed. He ducked low, knowing they must have seen him, or his ute. Half a dozen of their windows looked west, and everyone and their dog knew his ute.
    Lanky Jim came limping around the corner to the west-side veranda, looking for him, probably thinking that Maisy had dropped dead, so Bernie showed himself, or showed his head between the roses, then without preamble, let rip.
    ‘Me and Mum thought we’d like to take care of young Margot’s tombstone – that’s if Jenny’s got no objections.’ And too bloody late if she had. He’d already written the cheque.
    ‘I’ll speak to her,’ Jim said, turning, limping back indoors, leaving his rose hedge thorns to punish the rapist.
    Bernie didn’t go home. He drove on down Three Pines Road to where it forked. He took the right fork, out Forest Road.
    Gertrude Foote’s boundary gate was closed. If he hadn’t been drunk, he might not have opened it, but he was, so he did, and drove on down to the walnut tree.
    ‘Shit,’ he said.
    He hadn’t been near the place since the night of the fire and nor had anyone else as far as he could see. Blackened stumps, blackened piles of junk and silver-white ash were all that remained of the house he and his working bee had built around Gertrude Foote’s two-roomed hut, back in ’58. Maybe he’d been thinking of his kid at the time – his or Macka’s. He hoped he had. He no longer knew why he’d done it, and the whys and wherefores didn’t matter much now. That girl was dead and the house was rubble, all bar the sitting room chimney and fireplace that old Jorge, the Albanian, had built.
    Is there anything more lonely than a chimney left standing amid a pile of blackened junk? Maybe there is. Beer was Bernie’s choice of drink. Beer gave him a lift. Whisky made him lonely.
    He sat in his ute, staring at the site for a while, then he got out to walk, and later to lean against the chimney, commiserating with it while attempting to identify items.
    He could make out the blackened, twisted frame of a bed’s springs, set up like a piece of modern art to be photographed by a city cameraman. He’d seen it in one of the newspapers at the time. That was where they’d found the girl’s body, or what had been left of it – in her bed – or on what had been left of her bed.
    He stared for minutes at the bedsprings, then walked across ash and twisted corrugated iron, dragged the bedsprings free and loaded them onto his ute. He’d have a new ute next week. May as well get some use out of the old one.
    A heavy man full of whisky doesn’t move fast, not on a pair of bandy legs never designed to support his mass of weight, but they kept him going. He transferred eight or ten sheets of corrugated iron to the ute’s tray while his mind travelled back to the war. Join the navy and see the world, they used to say. He and Macka had joined the army to escape rape charges. They’d seen a bit of the world, a bombed, burnt out