The Tying of Threads by Joy Dettman

stop picking at it – and stop picking at your head too – and start wearing that hat I bought you.’
    ‘Offer to buy her one.’
    ‘Go home and let me visit in peace.’
    He waited for her, walked home with her, or followed her home, a dozen or so paces behind – followed her home to skinned chicken and zucchini soup. He wanted his Sunday roast, his meat with all the trimmings, swimming in gravy. He wanted butter on thick slices of fresh white bread. She tossed him a slice of chilled brown bread and no butter.
    ‘Use some of that creamed cheese on it,’ she suggested.
    ‘It tastes like sh—’
    ‘Stop your swearing at my dinner table.’
    ‘Bloody dinner table? If that was dinner, don’t bother feeding me tea.’
    Then it happened, on Thursday night. He woke with a pain in his chest and knew he wasn’t going to live long enough to die of skin cancer or starvation. He was having a heart attack.
    His father’s heart had given out on him, though not when he’d been fifty-eight years old. Old George’s hadn’t missed a beat in ninety years. Bernie’s wasn’t missing beats, just beating hard and fast. He could hear it pounding in his earhole, thumping against pillow.
    He lay on his narrow bed, scratching his hairy chest instead of his head and staring at Macka’s empty bed, lit tonight by a full moon, and he blamed his twin for their heart attack too. They’d shared the flu every year or so, shared the measles, mumps, chicken pox and a few attacks of the clap. That bastard didn’t have the stamina to satisfy a woman with that Sydney slut’s appetites. Wherever Macka was, he was dying – and not doing it alone.
    He missed that ugly bastard. He missed his voice from the other bed, missed his snore, and knowing that he was dying on top of his slut – or she on top of him while Bernie died alone, was enough to kill any man.
    For an hour he lay there, wondering if he ought to wake his mother, then at around one o’clock his heart attack moved southward to where hard-boiled eggs, a tin of salmon, raw onion and cucumber attempted to unite.
    He lay on his back, his gut bubbling, the moonlight tormenting him. He missed Macka more on moonlit nights and, near two, he rolled from his bed determined to cover that window.
    As he moved, gas exploded from his rear end, then again while fighting on a pair of trousers, and with no one to blame other than himself, he got out of that room fast, closed his door and went out the back door to blast in the moonlight.
    As kids, that moon had called him and Macka out to play and, blasting every eight or ten yards, he followed the pathway they’d used on many a moonlit night, through the park where the bandstand was lit up as bright as day, across Park Street, and across the football oval to the cemetery’s six foot high cyclone wire fence, where he stood getting rid of gas beside a peppercorn tree he remembered as being much smaller.
    They’d cut a hole in the wire behind that tree, he and Macka, cut it one moonlit night with their father’s wire cutters, then used that hole to climb through to the cemetery where they’d decorated tombstones. Denham, the local copper back then, had been hiding behind old Cecelia Morrison’s stone one night. They’d scrambled out through that hole and he couldn’t.
    And not much use looking for it tonight. If he found it he wouldn’t be able to squeeze through. Walked on then and in through the small cemetery gate to follow the gravelled paths he’d walked with Maisy until he found the raw wound where the bones of his – or Macka’s – only offspring lay.
    His sisters had kids, grown-up kids who had kids of their own. He was Uncle Bernie to the multitudes, old Uncle Bernie who owned a sawmill and a black ute and not much else. He should have had a ton more money in the bank. Blown it on new utes, the gee-gees, grog and smokes. Easy come, easy go.
    He stood a while beside Margot’s grave, blasting rotten egg gas – and maybe it was