Free The Tying of Threads by Joy Dettman Page A

world. They’d seen a lot of burnt houses and their burnt owners, seen so much death close up it had no longer meant much to either of them.
    They’d always wished themselves taller, had envied the kids who had outstripped them at fifteen, sixteen. They’d grown an inch or so taller than their old man, could look down on Maisy and the sisters, all runts. Not that lack of height had mattered much when there’d been the two of them. They’d fought as one, aware that no youth or man could do them much harm while they’d watched each other’s backs. It had worked during five years of war. They’d come home without a scratch. A lot hadn’t. Three they’d taunted in the schoolyard hadn’t come home. They’d taunted Jim Hooper. He’d come home with half of one leg and a decent section of his mind missing – or for a time his mind had gone missing, and maybe still was.
    He made kids’ fairy books, he and Jenny and the McPhersons. He refused to march on Anzac Day. Men who had lost two legs marched on Anzac Day. Bernie and Macka marched every year, side by side in their uniforms – until they’d grown out of their uniforms and had to march in suits, their medals pinned to their breast pockets.
    Bernie would march alone this year – or he wouldn’t.
    ‘You bastard of a year,’ he muttered.
    The light was gone before he got an old iron bedstead apart, the redhead’s bed. He tossed the bits of it onto his ute and called his load enough. Too late to unload it – the tip closed its gates at six – so he took it home to spend the night in the driveway, then went to the bathroom to shower off a bit of the dirt.
    Too much of him to wash, places he couldn’t reach easily – and too much of that dirt beneath his skin. He could feel it crawling there tonight. Whisky had always got him crawling with termites from the past.
    Maisy was making tea when he came out. She offered two slabs of her fossilised cardboard smeared with cottage cheese, a slice of tomato on each. He pushed them back to her side of the table. She offered him one of her blood pressure pills, with a glass of water.
    ‘Take it,’ she ordered. ‘You look ready to have a stroke.’
    ‘You take it,’ he said and pushed it back to her side.
    ‘Do as you’re told for once in your life, Bernie. I’m not losing another one of you. Did you tell Jenny about your tombstone?’
    ‘I told her lanky coot,’ he said.
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘That he’d bloody tell her.’
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘That we’d put up a bloody stone.’
    ‘You didn’t tell him you’d already ordered it.’
    ‘He didn’t tell me that they’d already ordered one either.’
    ‘What if she says no?’
    ‘You can use it as a garden ornament, now for Christ’s sake leave me alone. I’ve got a bastard of a headache.’
    ‘Strokes start with a headache. Take that pill!’
    He took it to shut her up. He tried a bit of her cardboard later. A man has to eat something.
    *
    Bernie was out of the house before eight the following morning, aware he had to get rid of the load on his ute before Maisy saw it and wanted to know what he’d been up to. He was embarrassed about what he’d been up to, and when the tip man arrived to open the gate at nine, Bernie was at the head of the queue.
    A potpourri of stinks greeted him – rotten fruit, dead cat, fish heads – a melding of odours that intoxicates the common house fly. They swarmed like bees, dive-bombing Bernie’s eyes, aiming for his nostrils as he added his load to a pile of the unnameable.
    As kids he and Macka had done a lot of poking around out here; they hadn’t noticed the stink or the flies. Not a lot of rotten food got tossed out when they’d been kids. Families had eaten it. Old Sam O’Brien was on about the bad years of the Great Depression yesterday. Get a bit of grog into a few of the older blokes and they’d talk for hours about the struggle to keep food in the mouths of their kids through those years.