Book of Lost Threads (2 page)

Finn’s alarm had returned when he heard the name Linsey. ‘You said before that your mother knows me,’ he said. ‘What’s her name? Where do I know her from?’

Moss licked honey from her fingers and stole a look at his face. Now the moment had come, panic constricted her throat. The bravado with which she had set out had been washed away with the rain. She swallowed painfully. ‘Amy,’ she mumbled. ‘Her name is Amy Sinclair. You knew her from before I was born.’

Finn slopped his tea as he set down the mug. ‘Amy Sinclair . . . Amy and Linsey.’ He stood up abruptly and fussed with the kettle. It was so long ago. The person he was then no longer existed. What was he supposed to say to this . . . this
interloper
who had materialised on his doorstep? Crouching down on his haunches, he poked at the fire and looked at her covertly from under his eyebrows. She was obviously waiting for him to say something. He frowned. There was something not quite right . . . What was it? It came to him suddenly.

‘Obviously you didn’t turn out according to plan,’ he observed in what he hoped was a normal voice. ‘What did Linsey have to say about that?’

Moss flinched. Despite Linsey’s assurances to the contrary, she had always believed she was a disappointment and here at last was confirmation. She’d been right all along. Her resentment was justified. Her pain was real. She looked straight at Finn, her tone carefully neutral.

‘She left just before my fifteenth birthday. Mum says it was for the best.’

‘Possibly . . . Possibly . . .’

Finn lapsed again into silence. What more could he say? He saw that the fire was burning low, and with some relief escaped out the back door, muttering that he needed to get more wood. He grabbed his tobacco pouch on the way out and stood on the back verandah, rolling a cigarette. Shielding the flame he lit up and drew deeply, his mind a kaleidoscope of shifting images—a tall blonde woman, a small dark woman, a rose garden. Gilt chairs. A glass jar . . .

Moss was grateful for time in which to compose herself and looked curiously around the room. Considering the outside of the house with its sagging verandah and peeling paint, inside it was, well—
cosy
. The kitchen was warmed by the wood-fired stove where the large black kettle bubbled and steamed on the hob. On the mantelpiece above, a sturdy little clock measured the minutes with an uncompromising tick. The table, piled at one end with newspapers, was old and heavy, with a slight depression in the middle from years of scrubbing. None of the chairs matched. Two were padded dining chairs, one with worn green velvet upholstery, the other with a brocade of doubtful pattern and hue. The sideboard, probably quite handsome in its day, retained some of its former dignity if little of its original surface. It had what antique dealers call
patina
—years of patina, she guessed. On every inch of its shelves, glasses jostled with plates, bowls and mugs, and books teetered in ziggurat formation among cooking utensils, pens, pencils, notebooks and a self-important orange ashtray. A steel spike speared an alarming amount of what were probably bills, and a brave little jar of wild violets sat precariously but hopefully on the edge of it all. The walls, roughly plastered, were a cheerful if streaky yellow, and several tattered art posters were affixed with what must have been whole rolls of sticky tape. They were bold and colourful. Matisse? It didn’t matter; she felt comfortable here. Living with Amy, Moss was used to clutter. She closed her eyes for a moment, starting guiltily when she heard Finn stamp his feet on the backdoor mat as he returned with an armload of wood.

‘Still raining,’ he said. Perhaps if he ignored those wounded eyes, she would go away and leave him be. She had breached his first line of defence and he felt besieged. Rightly aggrieved. At all costs, they mustn’t continue where they’d left off. Change the topic of conversation—to what? Anything. Anything but Amy and Linsey.

He sat down, not sure what to do with his hands. ‘I understand what you were saying about being called Moss. I like people to call me Finn—for Finbar, you know. Your mother, and my mother too, for that matter, called me Michael, but he was an archangel, you see—not me at all.’ His tone became judicial. ‘Now, you might well point out that Saint Finbar was a bishop. And that’s certainly true. From Cork, he was. But most of his life was spent in a monastery. Did you know he was even a hermit at one time? You can see that’s more me than an archangel. I just shortened Finbar to Finn. It’s easier.’ Having completed his story Finn sat back, hoping his diversion had been successful.

Moss was defeated. She was warm now, and tired. So tired that her head was sinking under its own weight. Fearing that Finn would continue to babble about bishops and angels, she decided to take the initiative.

‘Look, I know it’s a bit of a cheek, but can I doss down in front of the fire? It’s too late to find somewhere else to stay and I brought a sleeping bag and a blow-up mattress. I won’t be any trouble. You can send me away in the morning, if you want. I guess we both need time to think before we, you know, talk properly.’ Did he understand her meaning? she wondered, both hoping and fearing that he did.

Despite the abruptness of her request, Finn was relieved, on two counts. There was no accommodation to be had in town now that it was past closing time at the pub, and he couldn’t simply send a young woman away into the night. Regardless of why she had come, he was now responsible for her safety, at least in the short term. There was also his realisation that his Finbar story had seriously depleted his fund of small talk. The only things left to say were too big to approach tonight.

‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it a night. Bathroom’s through there.’ He put the covers on the stove top and ensured that the back door was secure. Picking up the orange ashtray, he headed off down the short corridor, but hesitated at his bedroom door. ‘Um . . . goodnight, then, Moss.’

‘Goodnight, Finn.’

Finn sat on the edge of his bed and rolled another cigarette. He was trying to give up yet again and was down to four a day. His routine had always included a cigarette before bedtime and he often smoked in bed even though he knew it was dangerous. But tonight he sat upright while he drew in the acrid smoke. With someone else in the house, his carelessness could have serious consequences. Abstracted, he smoked his second and then third cigarette before climbing into bed. His sleep was fitful and he struggled to keep at bay the dreams that drew him back to the house with the rose garden, back to the house where Amy and Linsey had greeted him with so much hope, all those years ago.

2
Michael, Amy and Linsey

W
HEN
F
INN WAS STILL
M
ICHAEL, his stork-features were not at all evident. At twenty-two, he was tall and supple in the way of an athlete or dancer, or even an archangel, and his thick blond hair bore no trace of corrosive yellow. It was whiteblond, a Viking blond that matched his deep blue seafaring eyes. Further blessed, he was one of the brightest in his year at university, where he was majoring in pure maths.

Women found him variously handsome, gorgeous, scrumptious, sexy, funny, clever, attentive, charming: infinitely attractive, in fact. They loved his hard, lean body, the silver-gilt halo of his hair, his kind, vulnerable blue eyes. But despite his undoubted good looks and charm, he had an air of innocence that turned the minds of his female acquaintances to dark thoughts of passion, seduction, and, in some extreme cases, corruption. Every one of them wanted to see lust in those dark blue depths and Michael, who was nowhere near as innocent as he seemed, was happy to oblige. Strangely enough, as he moved easily from one conquest to the next, he left behind very little resentment. Disappointment, yes. But very little resentment.

As none of them actually fell in love with him (or he with them), it seemed only fair to share him around. Most of his women eventually went on to marry lesser but more accessible men. Of the remainder, two never married: one entered a convent, and the other disappeared into the black hole of the Murdoch newspaper empire from whence she later emerged as a waspish commentator on other people’s sex lives.

The problem with all this female attention was a lack of ready cash to fund his exploits. Michael had a bursary that paid for his books, his scientific calculator and some of his rent, and to supplement this, four nights a week he stacked supermarket shelves for twelve dollars an hour, earning just enough cash to cover the rest of his living expenses. As a consequence, he often had to leave his paramours alone in their beds as he dived into his clothes and hurried to rendezvous with laundry detergent, baked beans, tomato sauce, Tim Tam biscuits and bonus-sized bottles of Coke. There was no doubt that money was short, but somehow he always found a way.

‘Hey, Phil, can you lend us a couple of dollars?’ he asked his housemate one day.

Phil looked up from his newspaper. ‘Pushing your luck, mate. I only have six dollars fifty till I’m paid and you still owe me twenty bucks from last week.’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’ Michael had a happy knack of ignoring what he didn’t want to hear. Getting no reply, he began to compile a shortlist of those he hadn’t borrowed from recently. The list was very short indeed. He was close to despair when Phil came over with his newspaper. It was the official student publication,
Vox Discipuli
.

‘Get a look at this, Mike. A job made just for you. Listen:
Part-time position
.
Earn up to
$
10,000
.
Applications are invited
from males between the ages of twenty-two and thirty. They must
be tall and fair, in good health and with an exceptionally high IQ. Special skill in science or maths preferred. Please send CV, academic
transcript and two recent photographs (full-length and head shot) to
PO Box OIV, GPO, Melbourne. Applications close 24 June.
There! What do you reckon? Up to ten thousand dollars, it says.
Ten
thousand dollars
, mate.’

Michael looked at the advertisement. ‘What do you reckon you’d have to do? It doesn’t say here.’

‘Model?’

‘Why would they need an academic transcript?’

‘Call boy? For super-intelligent females?’

‘I could be their man.’

‘It might be ASIO, wanting you to seduce enemy scientists.’

‘Dangerous blonde Russian babes. Just my type.’

‘Go for it, brother.’

So it was that a few days later, Michael found himself knocking on the door of a very nice house in a very nice suburb. He had received a letter inviting him for an interview and he presented himself punctually.

The door was answered by a serious-looking young woman in jeans and a neat T-shirt. She was petite, but her voice was that of a much bigger woman: the sort of voice that usually issues from a broad chest; the sort of voice that suggests confidence and authority. He was startled to hear it coming from such a small frame.

‘Michael Clancy? I’m Linsey Brookes. Come in.’

Linsey led him into a small sitting room and he lowered himself gingerly into one of the elegant little chairs as she dashed away down the hall, telling him she wouldn’t be long. He tried to lean back in the chair, but it was impossible to sit any way but straight. He looked around, trying to ignore the gilt curlicues abrading his spine. What struck him most about the room was its order—its uncompromising symmetry, its matching fabrics, its clear preference for right angles. It was a room that strove to keep you in your place and it rigidly resisted Michael’s sudden desire to move the coffee table to a forty-five-degree angle—or, better still, seventeen degrees. Squirming like a schoolboy in the frost of its disapproval, he wished he had worn a subversive red shirt just for the joy of alarming its smug colour scheme and prim furniture. By the time Linsey returned, he was feeling resentful and sullen.

‘Follow me,’ she said, and led him to a dining room where another woman sat with her head bent over some papers she was reading. Linsey indicated a chair, and Michael found himself sitting opposite the two women. It didn’t quite feel like a job interview—but then he didn’t have much experience to go by.

Linsey introduced the other woman as Amy Sinclair. He realised now she was somewhat older than him—
Around thirty
, he estimated.
But what an incredible . . .

Amy stood to greet him, taking his hand in cool fingers. Like Michael, she was tall and blonde with blue eyes fringed by impossibly dark lashes. Her face was heart-shaped and her mouth generous. He stole a glance at her breasts. Two perfect curves rose from her soft V-necked sweater.
Things are looking up
, Michael reflected, reluctantly adjusting his gaze to the table and what he realised was his résumé.

‘I see you’re an Aquarian,’ Amy noted, glancing at the résumé. ‘That’s a good start.’

Linsey frowned. ‘But hardly a clincher, Amy.’ She turned to Michael. ‘You seem to meet most of our requirements, but can you be discreet?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And reliable? Are you reliable?’

‘Discreet and reliable. That’s me. Anyone will tell you.’

‘Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of being able to ask anyone. Your academic and work records seem to speak for your reliability, and you were on time today. Discretion, now. That’s another thing altogether.’ Her dark brows, winged at the outer tips, swooped together. ‘Can you give us an example of your ability to be discreet?’

Michael was unsettled by Linsey’s keen stare. He gained some time by moving his chair closer to the table and folding his arms thoughtfully. Then he brightened. ‘I never discuss the girls I sleep with.’ This was true. He felt a strange delicacy about discussing his conquests, a courtesy not returned to him by the conquests themselves, who never tired of discussing him.

Linsey smiled grimly. ‘Unusually discreet, for a man,’ she said. ‘Tell me, are your parents and grandparents still alive?’

‘My parents are, but I only have one grandparent.’

‘And how did the others, er, die?’

‘You want to know how my grandparents died? What sort of job is this?’