The Sparkle Pages

by Meg Bignell

  Neither did Eloise cry when I told her Ria had died. Dad had to fetch the children back from the park and he brought them all in, breathless and waiting to hear why they’d been summoned home. Mary-Lou said, ‘I can beat Pa at running and he said we can have blackcurrant cordial.’ So Mum got them blackcurrant cordial, extra sweet, while Dad hid in the living room. Raffy stared hard at my puffed, smudged face so I said, ‘Ria died, darlings. She died yesterday, I’m so very sorry to say.’

  Rafferty wailed an infant cry that fractured the pieces of my heart and sent splinters into my throat. Beside him, Mary-Lou shrieked in fright and Dad came back in to take her. Mum took Raffy in her arms and Jimmy pushed his face into the small of my back.

  ‘How did she die, Mummy?’ Jimmy asked, tears spilling from his eyes.

  ‘She was very, very sick,’ I said. ‘Only we didn’t know.’

  And Eloise? Eloise stood absolutely and completely still. Then she vomited blackcurrant into the sink, washed the sink and loaded up the dishwasher …

  So we’re all back home again. A bonus holiday day. We might sort out the pantry. Hugh is at work. Spring has turned cold and windy and blown a lot of blossom away.

  WEDNESDAY 1st NOVEMBER

  This morning Raffy gave Eloise a (sharper than friendly) pinch and a punch for the first day of the month and set off a full-blown war. So I screamed at them. Screeched and screamed and screeched again. In front of Hugh.

  I even got the wooden spoon out and told them to pull down their pants so I could spank them. Raffy cowered but Jim screwed up his eyes and bravely bared his bottom. I threw down the spoon and cried and stomped away and did a lot of picking up random mess and thumping about like a grumpy hair-shirted martyr who has mercifully spared bottoms and is not about to spare stray Lego bits or worn-down pencils.

  Hugh pulled a ‘settle-down’ face and sent it my way like a slingshot. It stung. I screeched at him too. ‘Maybe you could turn off the telly and support me by being the bad person for once. You’re always the goddamn goodie.’ His settle-down face turned surprised and then thunderous. He turned up the telly. I turned it off and faced him.

  He looked at me. ‘Do you want an argument?’

  ‘No. I want someone to pick up their own SHIT for once, and maybe do the dishes or offer to take me away somewhere or drive me to a lake with a clinker rowboat on it.’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘And don’t ROLL YOUR UNROMANTIC EYES AT ME!’

  ‘You do want an argument, so come on, let’s do this. Tell me what your problem is.’ His exasperated hands were palms-up in front of him. I felt the world tilt.

  ‘I don’t have a problem, you have a problem,’ I said, and started to stomp away because I could feel myself sliding, along with any hope for rational and measured responses.

  ‘Okay. Well, what’s my problem, Zannah?’

  ‘Exactly. What is your problem?’

  ‘Don’t walk away. You started this.’

  ‘I did not. You started it with your eye-rolly, settle-down face.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Want me to get a mirror? You should see yourself. You look like Jimmy when he spent all his money on that remote-control car and then realised it wasn’t the one he wanted. Terrible shame when you get a Mazda but you could have had a Maserati.’

  ‘That’s it. I can’t talk to you,’ Hugh said. ‘You can walk away now. No. Actually, I’m walking away.’ He got up.

  ‘No! I’m walking away. You stay and gaze at your precious telly that you’re in love with.’

  I’m not good with words when I’m angry.

  The only thing I could do, amid the prickling shame, was hitch up the tatters of my pride and stomp off on my warpath, picking up mess along the way. If nothing else, temper tantrums can be very productive. Although I think I threw away Jimmy’s maths improvement certificate.

  When my stomping took me into the laundry, the washing machine said shoosh shoosh shoosh and made me lie down on the floor to rest my racing, roaring heart. There I realised how terribly tired I was, and that perhaps those cool slate tiles with a pillow of odd socks would be a good place to stay, possibly forever. I wondered from the middle distance whether that moment might mark the proper start of the unravelling.

  I seem to have been unravelling for years. It’s a wonder there’s any ravel left. Must almost be down to the hard, blank spool.

  Then the washing machine reached the end of its cycle and there was quiet, with no music. And I thought about how I’m another year older and that ‘I, Susannah Parks, have lost the spark in my marriage. And I need to find it.’ And I lay there for a little bit longer before getting up and going to find my Martha Wainwright CD so I could play ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ and dance to a different beat.

  And then Hugh announced that he was taking the children to Bouncy World so that I could have some breathing space and I stopped feeling sorry and thought, Great. Mr Goodie is also Mr Fun. And they left. Now I’ve done ironing and sighing a lot, as well as the usual tears, because God forbid I use my breathing space to just breathe.

  If it were me who had died, Ria would never do all this crying. ‘Don’t blubber,’ she’d say when I got a bit shiny in the eyes over something.

  ‘I’m not,’ I’d say with a sniff.

  ‘Bullshit. I can read you like a sook.’

  When her mum died she cried once, then taught herself to bake. She made a spectacular vanilla and custard cake called a tractor cake. It was big enough to feed everyone, including my family and all her ravenous brothers. For three years she baked everything from cake and caramel slice to lemon delicious and cream puffs. Then one day when I rattled her cake tins and found them empty, she said, ‘No more baking.’ After that, she composed her first award-winning piece of music, a sorrowful sonata for flute and viola that won us first place and fifty dollars at the Hobart Eisteddfods. I wanted to spend it on lunch at Sizzler but she used it to buy a microphone. We rigged it up to the Christmas tree base and drove our families mad with silly, teasing jigs and impromptus. ‘She drove us so mad we started calling her Mozzie,’ Bax said during his eulogy, ‘but I’d do anything to hear her playing piano in the next room again. Anything.’ They did call her Mozzie, or Mozz, but just as often they’d call her Glory. She variously called them cockshiners, douche-nozzles, negatons and smells. Glorious little Gloria Mirrin, biting everyone’s heads off, touching them up and putting them back on more squarely.

  Perhaps I’ll go and write a sonata make a tractor cake.

  PS Ria loved Martha Wainwright. She gave me that CD. I love how Martha’s music seems to be full of secrets. Listening to it is like wandering through attics. All our attics are full of secrets, I suppose.

  SATURDAY 4th NOVEMBER

  Today we had Jimmy’s birthday party. It was not my most triumphant mothering moment. Jimmy wanted to invite his whole class to come along to the cinema complex, kill one another with laser guns and eat hot dogs, sweets and cake. I said yes. Then I paid an extortionate amount of money to watch Jimmy shoot everyone (including his siblings, his father and me), claim the prize, brag about his new 240-dollar sneakers (I said yes to those too) and not thank Mary-Lou for her present (a finger-knitted wristband in his footy colours with a card that said I am very glad your not ded).

  He did thank his friends for their gifts, so that’s something, but as I watched him swagger about, I found myself worrying that at this rate he could turn into a complete cockhead a slightly arrogant teen. Hugh must have been thinking the same thing because he said, ‘That boy’s going to need a face full of acne before he trips over his ego.’

  Yes, a little puncture to the self-esteem wouldn’t go astray. Nothing too scarring – perhaps not acne – just an unfortunate trouser split or something. A little tumble down a peg or two. Giving him exactly what he wants is not going to help. I even paid extra to have the birthday cake supplied, so he wasn’t even subjected to the usual humbling experience of my cake decorating. (Onc
e Eloise got a Dolly Varden with a chocolate–zucchini cake skirt. I was trying to sneak in some nutrients. The zucchini possibly wasn’t grated finely enough.)

  Anyway, between laser traumas, parental shames and a few too many Smarties, I find myself back in the wardrobe. Should I put some work into the Sparkle Project? It’s November already. Jimmy is eight. ‘Tick tock, motherfuckers,’ Ria would say, if she wasn’t so gone. Perhaps I should delve back into Hugh’s and my archives again. It seems pertinent to record the parenting bit of our history, anyway. The bit where the happy couple have done the sunset thing and awake to find the sun has of course risen again, and there is a terrible lot to do.

  Hobart, 2003–2004

  Our busy careers whipped up again soon after our wedding (we had a three-day honeymoon in a beautiful Swansea guesthouse where the pipes resonated a rich baritone throughout the night and the seaweed brought a nasty smell in on the morning breeze). S Mackay became S Parks (eventually; there were a lot of forms to fill in) but everything else stayed much the same. We still worked hard and played hard and let our sundries pile up in the spare room. I still talked to Ria most days about Life off the Island, still dreamed intermittently about flying away.

  Then I got pregnant. It was planned. Ish. I just went off the pill and put it out of my mind. ‘It’ll happen if it’s meant to, then we’ll cross that bridge,’ I said, like a twit. No one tells you that the baby bridge is like something constructed by Dr Seuss. Even Hugh, my structural engineer, didn’t anticipate such willy-nilly-ness; his coping strategy included patting my head and taking on extra work. From the moment of conception my body did an abrupt about-turn; I was nauseous most of the time. The thought of coffee made me ill, I couldn’t look at salad, everything about me became feeble – my voice, my gait, my work. My fingers swelled up, my head felt heavy on the chin rest and in the orchestra I moved from first to second viola.

  In my spare time I ruthlessly threw everything away from the spare room (including Caroline Smedley-Warren, the poor love; she looked disapproving but resigned) and worried about whether fresh paint could hurt tiny lungs. I rearranged the kitchen so that for years Hugh would open the plate cupboard and find the cups. Barky wouldn’t leave my side because he thought I was packing up to go away, when in reality I’d stopped daydreaming about packing up and going away; instead I was thinking about nesting and putting down roots and how to stay. Also about breast pumps, prams and whether Vegemite was a legitimate form of vitamin B.

  And still I was telling everyone that there was no way I would be changed by motherhood. Mum looked worried and Alison sniggered. Because of course I was utterly and irreversibly changed forever.

  I went into labour two weeks before my due date, while shopping at Baby World. Mum had offered to buy us a pram and instructed me to meet her there. She was late. Late enough for me to feel a bit woozy among the nursery linens. All the shelves filled with shoulds loomed over me. You should have a car seat with luxury velveteen, you should hang black-and-white mobiles above the cot, you should dress your baby in stripes, should, should, should. My palms felt damp. I tried to distract myself by using a meditation technique recommended by the scary prenatal nurse (scary not because she was fierce or bossy but because she sometimes wore fairy wings and barely spoke over a whisper). The idea was to visualise flowers opening. I closed my eyes and had managed to open three daisies and a violet when Mum’s voice, very close and unnaturally quiet (much like the nurse), said, ‘Boo.’ I did a small scream, a large jump and a little bit of wee.

  ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry,’ said Mum. ‘I was trying not to scare you.’

  ‘But you said boo!’

  ‘Just a tiny little boo, to alert you to my presence.’

  ‘I’ve done wees on the carpet,’ I hissed.

  ‘Don’t panic. I’ll say it was me. Or we could just …’ She glanced furtively about, took a bib from a nearby rack, popped it over the wee and stood on it. After a moment she picked up the bib. The wet spots were gone. ‘Golly, they’re very absorbent bibs. You should get some. Not this one, though.’ She put the damp bib back on the rack.

  ‘Mum!’ I clutched at her arm.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a square, Susannah. They’ve had worse than that in Baby World, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said again, looking at another small dribble at my feet. ‘I don’t think it’s wee.’

  And that’s how Mum frightened Eloise into the world, then told everyone forevermore about her granddaughter, the baby very nearly born at Baby World. (It wasn’t ‘very nearly’ at all. Eloise was born via normal delivery eleven hours later. She didn’t appear the slightest bit startled. I was, though. Very.)

  That was Boxing Day 2004, the same day that 230 000 people were killed by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. And that was the day, once I got over my outrage at what women and their vaginas are subjected to in childbirth, I was walloped by a love so intense that it swept me up and took my breath and sent things clattering down around me. Is motherhood a natural disaster?

  MONDAY 6th NOVEMBER

  I got a message from Hannah. On my phone yesterday afternoon. She said how sad she was to hear about Ria and wondered whether she could pay us a visit. Oh, God.

  What I don’t want is someone crying on my shoulders. Lord knows I do enough of that. Also house chaos and terrible yellow bathroom. I bet Hannah doesn’t have piles of crap on the end of her kitchen bench.

  Hugh thinks it’s a great idea. ‘Didn’t we say we’d invite them over for lunch anyway?’ We did. This means finding all the parts of me and putting them back together. At least temporarily. And food preparation. I’ll work up to calling her back.

  Hugh bought me a bag of Clinkers. Remember those? Sort of like chocolate-covered chalk? For a minute I looked confused but then he said, ‘Just until I can get you to a lake,’ and I remembered about the dinghy thing. I suppose it’s his way of smoothing things over again. I should make a smoothing gesture too, but that would probably lead to sex and, frankly, I’m not in the mood. And I’m all distracted about Hannah and lunch. So I just looked pleased with the Clinkers, leaned into Hugh and said, ‘Thank you.’ That’ll do.

  WEDNESDAY 8th NOVEMBER

  Halloween-themed disco at school. I didn’t know about it until last night (Jimmy said he gave me the letter but I don’t remember) so they had to go as ghosts. Then two of the sheets I’d grabbed turned out to be fitted ones. So there was a fight over the flat sheet, which ended in Raffy and Jim having to be puffy ghosts, as if they were wearing those bubble skirts from the eighties. Or jellyfish. Also there was a slight stain on Raffy’s back. For God’s sake, Susannah. It’s one thing to embarrass yourself but it’s quite another to humiliate your children. Jimmy hid behind a black cat and a skeleton and refused to dance. Broke my heart.

  Also Hannah and family are confirmed for lunch on Saturday. I will be calm, make a simple but classy meal and wear a classic shirt dress. None of Hannah’s children would ever be sent to a school disco dressed as a puffy, wee-stained ghost.

  God, I hope it wasn’t a sex stain.

  FRIDAY 10th NOVEMBER

  Can’t write because no time. It’s almost midnight and I’ve just finished straining the sourcrout seurcraut sourkruat dammit, pickled cabbage. Honestly. I should get a job so I can buy in food. But then I’d worry about additives.

  SUNDAY 12th NOVEMBER

  Where to begin about yesterday? From the beginning, I suppose.

  The de Montagus arrived exactly on time. Hannah’s husband, Charlie, is not the mannered gentleman I imagined. He’s a proper pommy larrikin, extremely tall, with a round face that’s flushed with good nature. And he shouts everything. ‘CAN I USE YOUR LAV, PLEASE?’ he said shortly after arriving. The children slunk about, looking at our guests with bewildered expressions until he made them all tell him their names and swiftly gave them new ones. ‘RIGHT, WHO HAVE WE HERE? ELOISIANA, JIMMY SWAGGART, RAFFERTY RULES AND MARY-WHERE’S-THE-LOO. VERY PLEASED TO MEET YOU. THESE AR
E MY CHILDREN, WALLY-WIZZER AND THNEE.’

  Gazelle Emily and her smaller sister Gazelle Nell rolled their eyes but laughed. We all laughed. Mary-Lou dutifully showed him to the LAV. Everyone else tried saying ‘Thnee’.

  His shirt was crisp and clean and cut beautifully, the only hint of gentility about him. I wanted to hug him for so expertly putting paid to any ill-ease. ‘I’m really, really sorry about your nose,’ said Eloise to Emily, and Emily said, ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘She met a boy because of it,’ Charlie said. ‘He asked her whether she’d walked into a door and if the door might need sorting out.’

  ‘Daaaaad!’ Emily blushed deeply until I wanted to hug her too. I have an affinity with blushers. One day I’ll give Emily some green face primer. And April, she’s a blusher too.

  Hannah and Hugh shared a warm greeting, with hug, which I tried not to watch but then did because the act of looking away was obvious. So I looked away and then looked back, which was even more obvious. But I got to see some clear shyness on both sides, which is something I didn’t think either of them were capable of.

  Hannah didn’t blubber on about Ria, nor did she get all awkward with my tears. She just gave me a bowl of homemade guacamole and a card saying:

  Dear Susannah, this comes with my deepest sympathy for your loss. Ria was a rare force of nature and I know that you will be missing her terribly. I have vivid memories of your friendship, like when the two of you came to a party dressed as a horse, and when you played the footy club song at the end-of-season dinner.

  And when Ria’s mum died and you made her guacamole and made sure everyone left her alone with the piano.

  Not many of us experience friendships like that. I’m so very sorry. Hannah.