The Tying of Threads Read Online Free PDF Page A

breaking them up. If Dawny hadn’t been dead, Bernie might have realised that Macka’s brains had moved temporally south to his trousers and might have allowed him the last hit. But Dawny was dead, and he’d stood beside her bed watching the life seep out of her, and that useless bastard hadn’t been at his side, so today he refused Macka the last hit.
    Two overweight males pushing sixty don’t have the stamina of youth. They were dead on their feet. They were bruised and bleeding before the local copper and Joss Palmer pulled them apart long enough for Maisy to get between them. Joss and a neighbour tumbled Macka into his ute. His trollop got in with him, and as they were backing out, Bernie pitched the well-travelled case into the tray.
    *
    A bastard of a week. A bastard of a funeral. Maisy, still not over the last one, was determined that Dawn’s would be about Dawn. She told the girls and Bernie that they were going to get up in the pulpit and say something meaningful about what their sister had been to them.
    The girls did as they’d been told. Jess and Rachael’s elbows got Bernie to his feet to stand like a fool in his skin-tight suit beside the fancy coffin. In the end, all he could do was put his hand on it.
    ‘I got used to seeing you around, Dawny,’ he said. ‘I got used to dodging your bloody broom too. You could swing it like a champ, mate. I keep closing the door of your bedroom and the old girl keeps opening the bloody thing up again,’ he said, then he took off out the side door and made a beeline for the pub.
    They came in later, Macka and his trollop. She was wearing a dress, or wearing most of it. Bernie tried to make his peace. He bought Macka a beer.
    ‘It was a bloody dare, you half-witted bastard,’ he said.
    ‘You’re jealous, you ugly bastard,’ Macka said.
    And it was on again.
    They broke a few glasses, did a bit of damage before a trio of cops from Willama arrived to assist the local constable. They frogmarched Bernie out to the street and warned him not to return. Macka and Lila were now paying for a refurbished room inside the hotel – and the cook’s wrist was still in plaster.
    The mill became a war zone. No one got paid on the Friday following Dawn’s funeral.
    For fifty-eight years they’d been one. Lila Jones/Roberts/Freeman chipped them apart. Dawny had been in her grave two weeks when Macka phoned the Willama mill owner who, six months back, had made an offer for their mill. The Willama bloke wanted all of it, not a half-share. Macka wanted his half-share, so he advertised it for sale.
    Maisy paid him out and, in Lila’s eyes, that payout made Macka a wealthy man. They left town together.

M ISSING
    L ife wasn’t meant to be easy, according to Malcolm Fraser, the dour Liberal man currently occupying the prime minister’s lodge. He’d coined that line from a play written by George Bernard Shaw, except Shaw had removed the sting by adding his take courage; it can be delightful.
    Someone in Sydney hadn’t found life or Malcolm’s politics delightful. In February, a bomb was placed in a garbage can out the front of the Sydney Hilton Hotel where Fraser and other heads of state were at a meeting to discuss whatever heads of state wasted taxpayers’ money discussing. The bomb missed the heads of state but killed three taxpayers.
    By March Jenny was finding life a long way from delightful. She couldn’t believe that an Australian would make a bomb and place it where it could kill three innocent men. They made bombs in Ireland, not Australia. Australia was the safe country. The war hadn’t touched it – or barely touched it. And she couldn’t believe what Lila had done. Through the years she’d given that woman a bed, she’d fed her, given her money, bought her bus tickets, and confided in her long ago, had told her how one of the Macdonald twins had fathered Margot.
    Jim celebrated the fact that Lila was out of town, that with luck, she wouldn’t return. Jenny