Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  Deidre is my cousin—not a first cousin, but some distant cousin on my father’s side, and probably not a real cousin, even though for years it had been a matter of recourse to refer to her simply as Cousin Deidre. Cousin Deidre is coming for Christmas, or Cousin Deidre has sent a postcard . She was too young to be of my father’s generation, but too old to be of mine, so she inhabited a generational space that was uniquely hers. For this reason, I never thought it odd that she wore childish overalls, or spoke in an affected voice that made her seem like she was born in Oxford rather than Clapham, South Australia. The only thing that jarred was her formalised use of the word ‘mother’ and not the friendlier moniker ‘mum’ that my friends and I had grown up with.

  I was shocked at the state of her house, even though I had expected it. The last time I’d visited Adelaide was when Deidre’s mother had died eight years ago, and I was summoned from the other side of the country to help sort out Aunt Gladys’s small cottage—not because I was some organisational wizard, but because there was this assumption that I had the sort of life that is easily left.

  Back then, Deidre’s house was a bit of a shambles, though in a genteel, civilised way. There were books spilling out from the study alcove, and glass cabinets jam-packed with trinkets. Nonetheless, there was still a comfortable space for guests to sit on the sofas and place their teacups on side tables. But ever since Walter and his collections moved in, not long after Gladys’s funeral, that all changed.

  ‘We need a system,’ I said, probably for the tenth time, as I knew from experience it was far easier to make plans than to execute them. ‘Things to keep, things to give away and things to throw out.’

  ‘I don’t want to throw out too much,’ said Deidre, with a frown.

  ‘We can start with the obvious stuff. Like the newspapers.’

  ‘There might be interesting articles. I would need to go through them first.’

  I was stunned. It hadn’t occurred to me that Cousin Deidre would be acting in this manner. When she had called my mum, who then called me, it was assumed that Walter’s stuff had spiralled out of control and Deidre needed help with the clean-up. Was this a kind of Stockholm syndrome by proxy? Instead of falling in love with the captor, Deidre had fallen in love with his stuff.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, modulating my voice to make it sound less threatening. ‘Let’s at least sort out things for the Good Sammys. His clothes for starters.’

  ‘I thought his friends might like those.’

  ‘Okay—well, what’s in the boxes over there?’

  ‘His books. He had an excellent collection of fantasy and sci-fi.’

  ‘You don’t want to keep those?’ I suggested hopefully.

  ‘I thought of taking them to the funeral service. With the CDs, too. Setting up a trestle table in the church for his friends and family—as mementoes.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I said, even though I thought it sounded odd. ‘So why don’t we put these boxes straight into the car. That will clear more space in here, so you can use this room again.’

  ‘But I need to go through them first. I thought about creating a bookshelf of his favourite books and CDs. Over there in the corner, as a memorial.’

  Before I could even begin to think of an answer, the lamp behind me began to flicker weakly. Suddenly we were sitting in inky darkness, and I realised the rest of the lights in the place must have failed too. With all the concentration of the task at hand, I had simply blocked out the raging storm that had been battering the small house for the past few hours.

  ‘The powerlines must be down. I’ve got some candles in the kitchen.’

  ‘Use my phone,’ I said, turning on its light and handing it over to Cousin Deidre.

  I watched her weave her way slowly through the boxes and stacks of newspapers, like a mole wending its way through tunnels of its own making. When the electronic glow of the phone light finally disappeared, the darkness returned like a shroud. It felt weird sitting in a space that I didn’t know, without the ability to make sense of it in my mind. Logic told me that the sensation of someone breathing down my neck was really the stack of newspapers towering behind me. It didn’t help that Walter had died in this same house only three weeks earlier.

  I could hear clattering and rattling noises, as Deidre searched the kitchen drawers for candles. Great sheets of rain pelted the windows and the wind whistled through the gaps in their frames. I remembered the suitcase I’d left out on the front doorstep because there’d been too many boxes in the entry hall to wheel it in. I had my university readings in there, plus my notebooks, and I hoped to God that the rain wasn’t angling under the eaves and drenching my precious belongings. Whenever I pack to go somewhere, I take great delight in folding the best of everything in my life and seeing it arranged in neat squares in my suitcase: the newest underwear, the favourite jeans, the most expensive tops. All the crappy, regular stuff gets left behind.

  ‘I’ve found them, Melanie!’ I heard Deidre call out, and then her slow, torturous shuffle back to the lounge room. No doubt my cousin would be a whizz at solving those mazes in puzzle books.

  She handed me my mobile, and I held our only source of illumination so she could strike the match and light the two candles.

  ‘I think we should retire now and get up early,’ Deidre said. ‘I still need to sort out things for the service.’

  ‘Good idea. The lights won’t be going back on in a hurry.’ I gripped my candle and followed her to the corridor. Even though there was enough light to see, I still rammed my knee into a sharp object that looked like a baby’s pram from the Middle Ages.

  Cousin Deidre stopped in front of an open doorway.

  ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping. I’ve cleared some space in the cupboard for your things. And I’ve made up the bed. It’s Walter’s room.’

  Before I could protest, she disappeared through the opposite doorway. I inched my way into the room, placing my candle on the side table next to the bed. As I had nothing to get changed into, I stripped down to my knickers and crawled under the covers.

  I thought about Walter. The fact that he had his own room intrigued me. I had assumed they were a couple. An odd one, mind you, both eccentric in their own way, and living seemingly disparate lives: Walter an introvert, who liked to stay close to the house, and Cousin Deidre always travelling on her own, using the money she had inherited from the sale of Gladys’s cottage to fund her sojourns abroad. That’s where she happened to be when Walter suddenly died of a heart attack, and why no-one had found him for ten days, until a concerned neighbour heard the dog howling and came over to investigate. How awful for Cousin Deidre to be told over the phone that her partner was dead, even worse to know that his body was left in this state for all that time. And then I had the terrible realisation that Walter could have died in this very bed, decomposing over those ten days, his bodily fluids seeping into the mattress as he evacuated faeces and urine in that final, mortifying dump. I felt the hysteria rising and hurriedly grabbed my mobile.

  ‘Rache, it’s me,’ I said, when I heard her reluctant hello.

  ‘Melanie. What’s up?’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sleeping in Walter’s bed. Where he probably decomposed...’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I’m sleeping in Walter’s room. He wasn’t found for ten days. This place is a hovel—there’s a storm outside and the lights are fucked and it’s freakin’ me out. I’ve got this creepy candle.’

  All I could hear was Rachel’s laughter swirling into my ear. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak.

  ‘I want to come home.’

  ‘I thought you were staying for a week.’

  ‘Why the hell did I agree to that? I’ve got too much to do—I’m so behind on everything.’

  ‘Can you change your flight?’

  ‘It’s school holidays.’

  ‘Any rats’ nests, this time?’

  That made me smi
le. Rachel had remembered that when I flew over to help with Gladys’s cottage eight years ago, I had discovered a rats’ nest in the laundry cupboard. And not just any ordinary rats’ nest. One that had been lined with the shredded pages of The Mill on the Floss.

  ‘Mel, I can’t talk. I’m at work.’

  ‘Oh... Okay. See ya.’

  I tucked the phone under the edge of my pillow, and contemplated my choices. There was no other place to sleep, not even a usable sofa. So I decided to curl up, using the least amount of surface area on the bed I could. It was hard to relax. The wind whipped and shook the house, and there was a shattering noise as if someone was showering stones in the gutters.

  I thought of Rachel. Even though we weren’t together any more, she was my default person: the one to call whenever I was happy or sad. I pictured her brown, trusting eyes and the way she pushed her spiky fringe off her forehead with her signature yellow sweatband, making her look more like a tennis pro than a chef. Thinking of this made me forget about the condition of the mattress, and the wild, woolly storm battering the house, and the snuffling, scratching noises coming from beneath the bedroom door, and soon I drifted off into a deep sleep.

  In the morning, it took me a few seconds to register where I was. And then I was leaping out of bed and pulling back the bottom sheet to check the state of the mattress. It looked brand spanking new. How weird. There was still the plastic protective cover on it, and the clinical smell of the furniture showroom. And that’s when I realised that Walter’s body must have been removed, bedding and all, straight to the morgue.

  Rache would have a field day with this, I thought, as I got dressed and headed out to the living room. Cousin Deidre’s golden labrador was whining at the back door, so I sidestepped all the junk to let it out. The backyard was a sea of weeds. There was still a sense of the formal English garden beds—arched rose trellises and flashes of colour where an iris or daffodil raised its delicate throat—but it wouldn’t be too long before all sense of the borders would be lost.

  I left the dog to plough heavily through the weeds and went into the kitchen to make a cuppa. This room was worse than I’d realised. The benches weren’t just cluttered and overrun with crockery—the crockery was unwashed and all the surfaces were filthy. I rinsed out a cup and rummaged through the pantry for a box of tea. When I saw the stained, ancient Tetley Tea box, I decided against it and made my way back to the lounge room. I looked around at the task at hand and it seemed even more hopeless than the night before.

  There was the sound of footsteps in the corridor and then Cousin Deidre poked her head over the top of the boxes. ‘Good morning, Melanie. How did you sleep?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Did Tuppence wake you? She used to sleep with Walter.’

  ‘I think the storm woke me.’

  ‘She’s missing him terribly.’ Deidre’s face looked lopsided, squashed from her pillow.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘No, I’m okay,’ I said a bit too quickly. ‘I thought I’d get started on all the sorting.’

  ‘Good idea. I was thinking last night about a display board for the service—a snapshot of all Walter’s achievements.’

  ‘Would we have time for that?’ I asked doubtfully.

  ‘It would be a shame for people not to see it.’

  ‘So we should add another category then? Display board.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll call it the Wall of Achievement.’

  So that’s what I did. I spent the entire day shifting the piles of Walter’s life around the limited space in the living room while Deidre gave a running commentary. I would pick up a photo, or a lanyard, or a pamphlet and she would be off, filling me in on Walter’s teaching days at the Catholic boys’ school, his sudden retirement from the education system, and her serendipitous reconnection with him at the university reunion, weeks after her mother’s death. It reminded me of when she and Aunt Gladys would come to visit us in Perth and set up their slide show in the outside storeroom, and Mum’s and Dad’s eyelids would grow heavy, seeing National Trust homes and ruined abbeys in places they had never heard of and would never visit, given their gruelling schedule at the newsagency. I wasn’t interested in their travels either; instead, I marvelled at how Gladys’s huge fleshy arms melted over the armrests of her chair as she barked out orders for Cousin Deidre to fix the height of the projector or switch the lights on and off.

  And now it’s Cousin Deidre, forearms swinging back and forth, telling me to keep this photo, and put that book aside , or pin this to the Wall of Achievement.

  * * *

  At four o’clock, when all I had achieved were five burgeoning piles and no clearer floor space, Deidre announced that it was time to start working on the photos for the powerpoint presentation.

  ‘Powerpoint,’ I said incredulously. ‘So that makes another category?’

  ‘Yes, powerpoint. I thought it would be nice to have a selection of photos during the service—whilst they are playing the final hymn.’

  ‘I’m not that great at powerpoint,’ I muttered.

  ‘Surely you do presentations at university?’ she asked me, with a critical widening of one eye.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So, how is your dissertation going?’

  And I answered as I did whenever my parents called me to ask. ‘It’s coming along nicely, thank you.’

  It wasn’t. I didn’t have the courage to say that I was way behind schedule and my scholarship money had run out six months ago.

  ‘What’s it about, again?’

  ‘Um, I’m arguing that David Malouf translates Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space into an Australian experience of house and home. How your childhood home corresponds to your psyche... The attic is the higher level, the basement the more primordial desires. Malouf uses this idea and flattens it into verandas and porches and the wide, open spaces of the Queenslander...’ My voice dropped at the end, making me think I wasn’t convinced either. What did I know about Queenslanders? I was brought up in a red-brick bungalow in Perth.

  ‘That sounds interesting.’

  ‘Have you got a computer I can use, Deidre?’

  ‘Yes, but the power is still off. Hopefully there’s enough battery life left in the old girl.’

  I had forgotten about the power crisis. The storm had wiped out all the main power stations in South Australia and we were following the latest events via the small radio that Cousin Deidre had propped on her lap.

  ‘It’s somewhere in the study.’ Deidre handed me the radio and did her two-step shuffle around boxes and disappeared.

  All I wanted to do was go back to bed. Actually, on second thoughts, that would be the worse place to be. I surveyed the chaos around me. If Deidre cleaned up the place properly, the room would be quite liveable, even pretty. There were huge bay windows, floral chintz curtains (though in need of a good wash) and wooden floorboards that would polish beautifully to reveal their original oaken hues. In the same way Cousin Deidre would scrub up, too, if she had her hair trimmed, wore new clothes and lost a bit of weight.

  I had thought the same about Walter the only time I’d met him, when they both flew over to Perth for Dad’s sixtieth birthday. On first impression, he was a slovenly wreck, with an unironed shirt, shoulder-length greying hair, and a wobbling chin. He shyly stood back from the rest of the family, his hands hanging over his crotch as if hiding a secret, while Cousin Deidre spoke of their flight from Adelaide and made a big fuss over Dad. Walter only came alive when he confessed his love of the new Doctor Who episodes to me at dinner, and we had a momentary bonding over that, playfully arguing the merits of each Doctor. I could see in his face traces of the man Deidre had known and liked from university days.

  When Deidre came back, I knew something was up. She had the same look Aunt Gladys always did when she inveigled someone into doing something for her.

  ‘I forgot to tell you. My dear friend’s husband is turning seventy tomorrow. I thought since you are a
brilliant baker you could make the birthday cake.’

  I felt my heart freeze over. Deidre continued, oblivious to my discomfort, ‘I thought you could use Mother’s famous fruit cake recipe and then decorate it in a golfing theme. Frank is an avid golfer.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m the best person for the job,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you are! Remember your father’s sixtieth birthday cake? It was splendid.’

  I remembered that cake all right. It wasn’t my cake at all. I had begged Rachel to make me a cake in the shape of Garfield, and I passed it off as my own, as Rachel was the little secret I was keeping from my family.

  ‘Let me see if I can find Mother’s recipe. The oven should work—it’s gas.’

  My mind was a blank and at the same time a crazy scribble of activity. I spent one moment staring at photos for the powerpoint, the next frantically trying to remember all the steps from when Rachel used to bake in our flat—cutting perfect strips of baking paper to line the tops of tins, scraping the sides of the bowl with a deft flip of the spatula. By the time the hands of the kitchen clock had inched around to 10pm, I had a basic powerpoint ready (though no decorative borders, no fade-in tricks) and a black-bottomed fruit cake cooling on the bench.

  Luckily, Deidre was easily pleased. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, eyeing the wonky, singed cake on the wire rack. ‘Now to bed! We have a busy morning tomorrow. We need to set up the church and finish icing the cake.’

  I panicked all night about the damn cake. How the hell could I pull off a golfing theme? In the morning, the first thing I did was rummage in the pantry for anything that could be used for grass, for tees, for balls. I found green food colouring, a half-deflated bag of desiccated coconut and a single macadamia nut that must have rolled out of its bag some time ago and was stuck in the corner of the shelving. I smeared the cake with cup-loads of icing sugar mixed with the green food colouring, sprinkled on the green-drenched coconut for grass, made a ‘Happy 70th Birthday’ flag with a toothpick and coloured paper, and plonked the nut on top. It didn’t look that bad. Quite good, in fact. I pulled out my phone, took a photo and sent it to Rachel, then raced to get all the boxes out the front door, ready for my lift to the church. The power was still off, and Cousin Deidre’s car was stuck in the garage behind the electric roller door, so she had organised another distant relative, Cousin Gordon, to pick me up. When he stood at the front door and saw the mess, I thought his eyes were going to detach themselves from their sockets. We struggled back and forth, carrying all the boxes to his Toyota, and loading them into the boot and over the seats. Then we took off, leaving Cousin Deidre behind in her flannelette nightie to start work on the eulogy.