One Long Thread by Belinda Jeffrey Page B

We’d hired a skip and thrown everything we’d wanted to get rid of into it. Mostly these were Dad’s things: old baseball bats, a few balls and mouldy gloves. Straw hats and disintegrating picnic rugs, rusty tools and moth-eaten blankets and coats. Dad had reduced the entire garage to a neat wall of plastic boxes. He’d laughed as he surveyed his work, telling me how good it felt to clear things out. Mum’s two boxes were left inside the house beside the front door, ready to either send to Darwin or add to the skip when we heard back from her.
    We had just sat down on the couch, our cups of tea on the coffee table, when the phone rang. I answered it.
    â€˜Hello,’ said a male voice. ‘My name is Barry. Barry Mundy and I’m a friend of Sally’s.’
    â€˜I’m Sally’s sister, Ruby.’ I was so surprised and stupidly excited. I didn’t know why I over-explained who I was.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you.’
    I couldn’t speak. Or swallow.
    â€˜Where is my mum?’
    â€˜There’s been an accident.’ A pause. ‘Is your father there? I was told to talk to him.’

13.
    â€˜Do you sense things?’ Becky once asked me. ‘Do you and Sally feel the same thing at the same time? Do you go cold when something is happening to her?’ All our friends had asked the same questions at some stage. The truth is I wish I did. I wish we shared that kind of bond because I might have known or understood earlier. I might have been able to help.
    While Dad talked to Barry and I waited to find out exactly what had happened, I closed my eyes and willed myself out of my body and into Sally’s, but I was as trapped inside myself as she was in hers. I felt Dad go cold beside me. He lowered his head, picked up the TV remote and hit the mute button. Images and colours flashed from the screen through the darkened lounge room and the absence of sound exaggerated everything. Dad put his arm around me and pulled me close. I could hear the mumbled sing-song of a voice on the other end of the phone, but I had no words to dispel the images of every awful thing in my mind. My heart hammered inside me, but my body was heavy and frozen. Each breath hurt as I imagined the worst. The very worst.
    Dad made noises of acknowledgement. ‘Does Jan know?’ he said at one point, asking about my mother. ‘I see. Oh my god. I don’t know what to say. Thank you for letting us know.’
    I’m her twin, I should have known something had been wrong, she should have called me. We look the same, but we are nothing alike. Not in any way that matters. Peel back the surface, unravel the fabric of our fragile cocoon and we are strangers.
    Over the next few minutes after that phone call, I pieced together what had happened from the snatches of phrases and words that came from Dad’s mouth. He finished, and I felt his arm slide from my shoulders as he stood up and walked to his room. I heard the door close and looked down at the coffee table where our cups of tea sat, still steaming.
    What a shock it must have been for that fourteen-year-old Empress, unravelling that golden thread for the first time. That cocoon getting smaller and smaller, the strand of thread sticky around her hands, until all that remained was the half-transformed worm. Dead.

14.
    Dad didn’t come out of his room all night, not even when I knocked, so I lay down in the hall outside his door. It was as though my brain couldn’t register what had happened yet my body curled up around the truth and held it still.
    You have thoughts of running away when you’re a kid. Something makes you so angry, you convince yourself you have to run away. You pack a bag – probably with nothing suitable for anything beyond an hour stuck underneath the tree in the front yard – and you tell your parents you’re leaving. You actually manage to