Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  It’s hard talking to a distant cousin when you have no idea how you are related. Cousin Deidre had previously tried explaining it to me, but my eyes glazed over and my brain switched off when she showed me the family tree on a tablecloth-sized ream of paper. More branches than the varicose veins in Gladys’s calves.

  The superstorm was a good out. That took up a lot of car time, as I let him talk about the failed Labor policy and how closing down all the coal-fired power stations was too short-sighted. ‘The Libs would never have let this happen,’ he sighed. What could I say to that? I had no interest in politics. Rachel was always saying that I should spend more time reading about the news and less with my nose in a novel.

  Gordon must have sensed my lack of interest, for he changed tack. ‘Terrible about Walter,’ he said. ‘Ironic though. How he died in bed reading the paper.’

  Normally irony is something that would excite me, but I couldn’t get beyond the words ‘in bed’.

  ‘I think Deidre’s feeling a little guilty, for not being there when it happened,’ he continued. ‘But when your time’s up, your time’s up.’

  ‘He wasn’t that old, was he?’ I asked.

  ‘Same age as Deidre. He really hit the jackpot when he moved in with her.’ I detected a faint note of disapproval and wondered if this critical tendency was an inherited trait. I hoped the turkey neck wasn’t.

  We pulled up at the church, a beautiful building, just like all the other churches we had passed in Adelaide, with golden, hallowed stonework and an iron steeple. We unloaded the car and I followed Gordon, with the first of my many boxes, to set up. Gordon stopped at a marble plaque in the entrance and in a reverent, hushed tone said, ‘This is William’s memorial stone—our ancestor. He helped build this church.’ I murmured recognition and made a note to myself to locate a William on the family tree—that was obviously the nexus point of all these distant cousins.

  Inside, there were three elderly ladies setting up the trestle tables for the afternoon tea.

  ‘Did you bring the flowers?’ one of them asked.

  ‘No. What flowers?’

  ‘Deidre was bringing flowers for the tables. Didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘She must have forgotten. She mentioned something about display boards?’

  ‘Yes, they’re in the Sunday school room. And you can also use those spare trestle tables.’

  So Gordon and I set to work rolling in the boards from the other room, and getting the books and CDs out of their boxes and arranging them methodically. A table for sci-fi, a table for non-fiction, a table for CDs from the eighties and one for the nineties. Then we moved onto the display boards, dividing these into his uni years, teaching years, sci-fi conferences and his casual job at the cricket ground. I stood back from the boards and noticed there were big, unaccounted gaps in Walter’s life.

  ‘Are we missing a box?’ I said to Gordon, a bit worried.

  ‘That looks about right. Unless it’s still in storage.’

  ‘Storage?’

  ‘Didn’t you know? Walter had a storage unit he kept his stuff in. Of course, Deidre was paying for that, too.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  It was too late to try and find the relevant boxes. Anyway, Walter was dead and people would be too grief-stricken to notice a dodgy timeline. I glanced at the clock on the wall and panicked. I had only thirty minutes to get back to Cousin Deidre’s place, get changed and then come back in time for the service. As we were leaving for the car, one of the kitchen ladies called out, ‘Don’t forget the flowers!’

  * * *

  As soon as I walked into the house I knew that same sense of urgency wasn’t present. There was classical music playing, the sound of the stovetop kettle whistling in the kitchen and Cousin Deidre still noodling around in her slippers and nightie.

  ‘Deidre. It’s time to leave. We only have five minutes.’

  ‘Oh, but I haven’t had a shower yet.’

  ‘Jump in now!’ I couldn’t believe how assertive I was being.

  I ran to my suitcase and flung it open to find the only dress I had packed. I’m not usually a dress person, but this one I had bought at the Fremantle Markets with Rachel. It was a retro black and green dress with a huge collar and a tightly fitted belt that Rachel said made me look like that actress from the show Mad Men.

  I remembered the flowers. ‘Deidre,’ I called through the bathroom door. ‘Are we supposed to be picking up flowers?’

  ‘You need to pick them from the garden.’

  Gordon was standing in the hallway ready to go. I handed him my handbag and ran outside into the backyard and through the mud and dog shit. I aimed for the heads of bobbing colour amongst the weeds. A blue iris, a yellow daffodil. Soon I had a decent armful of flowers and brought them inside.

  I was brutal. ‘DEIDRE, INTO THE CAR NOW!’

  When we arrived at the church, we could hear the piped sounds of the organ playing. I told Deidre to go ahead while Gordon and I took the flowers into the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ I said to the three ladies, who were busy cutting the crusts off sandwiches and checking the water level in the urn. ‘Do you have any vases I can use?’

  ‘Leave that with us, luv. You’d better get to the service.’

  ‘Aren’t these ladies lovely,’ I whispered to Gordon on the way out.

  ‘They should be, at thirty dollars an hour.’

  The first thing I observed when we walked down the aisle was how empty the chapel appeared. There was a family group sitting in the front pew, Deidre directly behind them, and a small smattering of people spaced out like single pegs through the rest of the church. I sat next to Deidre, and I could see straightaway that she was nervous, and focusing on re-reading the eulogy silently to herself. I patted her hand. She looked really nice, with her black slacks and a fuchsia silk top that I had never seen before. And I could see that she was also wearing Gladys’s old screw-on earrings, little diamanté flowers clamped like small vices to her fleshy lobes.

  The first person to speak was Walter’s aunt and it didn’t augur well, for she started with the words, ‘Walter was an odd child.’

  The next speaker wasn’t any better. An old school friend who finished with the line, ‘And now when the phone doesn’t ring bang on dinner time, my wife and I will strangely miss Walt.’

  And then a former teaching colleague saying, ‘Walter was the most brilliant man I knew. With an eidetic memory, who could move from the fall of the Roman Empire to string theory in a single breath. Until his nervous breakdown. Such a waste.’

  People looked uncomfortable; some stared at their programs. I studied my hands, which still had a hue of turf green. And then it was Deidre’s turn, and she made her way slowly to the lectern, eyes trained on her feet as if she was worried about stumbling. She took out a pair of spectacles, cleared her throat and began.

  She spoke of how she had first met Walter at university, where they connected as shy teenagers sharing a love of history and reading. And how they had lost touch since graduation, only reconnecting years later at the reunion, where she was shocked to see that he had holes in his shoes and that he had been living on the streets. They were peas in a pod. Both only children, brought up in poverty by strong single mothers who instilled in them a thirst to better themselves through education. Yes, life had been a struggle for Walter, but the last eight years had been good to him. He had thrived with her. Had a home, the means to buy clothes, books, and go to concerts and sci-fi conferences. He was excited about his quest to finally write his life’s opus; hence, all the research articles and newspapers he couldn’t bear to part with. She finished with the words, ‘He was my soul mate and I was the happiest I have ever been in my life.’ The tears flowed down her face. Then the powerpoint started, and there were the photos of a baby on a sheepskin rug, the boy on a bike, smiles at graduation, and a picture of Walter holding court under the shade of a eucalyptus tree, with a circle of earnest-looking boys in unifor
m. The final shot was the same photo printed on the funeral service booklet: Walter in front of Deidre’s house, collecting the newspaper from the front lawn with a goofy smile illuminating his entire face.

  There was a minute’s silence after it finished, as people studied the photo in their programs as if discovering for the first time the pixelated meanings in that smile, that newspaper.

  After the service, everyone trickled into the kitchen area for the afternoon tea and to view the trestle tables. It took on the feel of a garage sale: people rummaging through for a bargain, picking up five items and hugging them under their armpits. I noticed a few men gathered around the Wall of Achievement, and I was pleased—until I realised they were only scanning the boards for things relating to themselves. When I saw the kitchen ladies walk across and begin to rifle through the CDs I wanted to explode. But then my eyes caught sight of Deidre standing at the periphery, and she was looking at everything with a serene, beatific smile.

  ‘It was a lovely service,’ I said to her gently.

  ‘I wish he could have seen all of this.’

  ‘Deidre,’ I began slowly. ‘I have to go back to Perth on Sunday to sort out my own life, but I’ll be back later to help you with the storage unit. And I thought I’d bring a friend. She’s kind of my soul mate... I think you would like her.’

  ‘That would be perfect,’ Deidre said, smiling not at me, but at Walter’s towering wall.

  GODDESS OF FIRE AND WIND

  It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. The honeymoon they never had—seeing parts of the world Margaret had only ever dreamed of. But it was nothing like she had imagined, for her husband would not stop at the market stalls on the side of the road or veer off to leisurely follow the signs advertising farmhouse devonshire teas. Like the true engineer he was, everything was scheduled and broken down into ratios of time versus money versus maximum satisfaction. And now at their final destination of Hawaii before they returned home to Australia, when all she wanted was to feel the warm sands of Waikiki Beach between her toes and drink sunset-coloured Mai Tais, they were stuck in budget accommodation on the Big Island just so Des could see an active volcano and tick that off his spreadsheet.

  The trek over the fields of lava was to begin at 5pm, a private tour run by a local guy named John, which Des had found on a travel forum and was touted as an experience like no other. Des entered the destination into the GPS, and they set off thinking they had plenty of time to get there, but they hadn’t factored in the winding roads, the extra caution in driving on the right-hand side of the road or the long queue of cars at a standstill on Kaimu-Chain of Craters Road.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Des muttered. ‘John specifically said not to be late.’

  ‘Are you sure this is the right road? It looks like people are being stopped.’

  ‘Of course it’s the right road. I’m following the map exactly.’

  ‘But are we allowed to be here? Look! They’re turning everyone away.’

  Margaret could see men dressed in security uniforms walk alongside each car and bend their heads into the windows to have a word with the drivers, and then the vehicle would pull out of the queue and do a U-turn at the roadblock set up at the end of the street. It must have been going on for some time, for a bored-looking woman, dressed in sweatpants with a long grey ponytail and cap set backwards, sat at a home-made booth selling water bottles and flashlights.

  Soon it was their turn. The security guy came over, and Des wound down his window.

  ‘Where you headed, folks?’

  Des bared his teeth—his attempt at a smile—and retrieved the printed-out email stashed in the middle console that gave John’s address. The uniformed man glanced at the paper, and for a moment Margaret thought they, too, would be turned away. But the man nodded and waved them on through a side gate onto a private road which wound up to the scattered homes built directly on the old fields of lava.

  ‘See. I told you so,’ Des said, smugly.

  It was a scene of devastation and hope. The ground— blackened, twisted runnels and furrows with a strange assortment of dwellings built on top, like defiant castles. Some had attempted to create gardens—raised vegetable beds and grown scarlet-flamed plants in pots—but it was the houses with nothing but black glistening yards that had the greatest visual impact.

  ‘This must be the place.’ Des stopped the car in front of the two-storey home on stilts with an expansive viewing deck.

  ‘This is incredible,’ Margaret said, imagining a life sitting on that deck.

  ‘Bloody stupid. It’s like living on the side of Mount Vesuvius.’

  At that moment another car pulled in behind them, and they glanced at each other, only now realising that their private, expensive tour included other people. They grabbed the camera and lightweight backpacks and made their way to the front door.

  Before they could knock, a rangy man stepped out to greet them. ‘John,’ he said, shaking their hands and staring at their footwear, not bothering to make eye contact.

  ‘Good. Everyone’s on time. We need to get started before sunset.’

  ‘Can I use the bathroom?’ Margaret asked, suddenly doubting the strength of her bladder.

  John appeared surprised by her request, as if no-one had asked this before. He took her inside and showed her the bathroom. Margaret tried to hurry, but her bladder wasn’t full. She needed to push out a few drops of urine so she wouldn’t be bothered by a feeling of incompleteness. It gave her time to take in all the details of the bathroom: the rustic wooden sink bench, a blue and yellow mosaic dolphin mirror, and a mural of a Hawaiian woman with heavy breasts and a flowering vagina—literally, a flower! A red, moist, petalled organ, which waved to her like a giant hand.

  Maybe this was what John didn’t want her to see. Or the curlicues of black hair stuck along the grouting at the edge of the wall, or the strong stink of male urine. Though, walking back to the front door, her eyes took in enough of the living room décor to determine that a woman had moved her hand over this place once.

  ‘Your house is amazing,’ Margaret said, as a way to reconnect with the quiet group waiting outside.

  ‘It’s a difficult life. Not many people can last.’

  ‘Because you’re so close to the lava flows?’ Des asked.

  ‘No, it’s the wind. Some people go crazy with the sound of the wind.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’d want to take the risk. Wasn’t this housing estate wiped out not long ago?’ Des said, stuck on his own line of thinking, and John nodded without much conviction. He looked like he had heard this all before.

  ‘The land is dirt cheap. Where else can you afford a view like this?’

  Margaret could see their eyes had only focused on the bleak fields of black, for there on the horizon was the bluest jewel of sea.

  ‘Awesome. We could definitely live here. Couldn’t we, Phoebes?’ The man who said this was in his twenties and had an American accent. He was diminutive and open faced; his female partner was on the short side too, with a clamped-up, surly expression.

  ‘I have walking sticks for those who need them. Remember the lava is like glass; if you fall you’ll be cut to pieces. And watch where you’re walking—I had a guy who got wedged in a crevice and snapped his ankle. Here are some head torches for when it gets dark.’ John passed out the torches to the group, and Margaret noticed that she was the only one who took up the offer of a stick. ‘We’ll be going through private land until we get to the stretch along the coast. Try and keep up with me. We’ve only got four hours.’

  That worried her. The idea of being on a tight schedule and the condition of her knees. The younger people would be fine, and her husband’s doggedness would see him through, but she worried that she would be the factor slowing them all down. John started at a cracking pace, but the rest of them were more tentative, trying to work out how to negotiate the uneven, unknown terrain, and not letting their eyes leave the ground. They passed a single banana chair left o
ut for sunbaking, and only when she heard the American guy say, ‘Awesome,’ did she turn to see that it had been trapped in a solidified previous flow.

  It troubled Margaret seeing it stuck like that. It reminded her of when she was a young woman, before she was married, and she went to see the touring Pompeii AD 79 exhibition in Perth. There were ancient artefacts, jewellery, pieces of broken pottery, cooking utensils, but the glass display that everyone was drawn to was the plaster casts of the lovers entwined on the ground, frozen in their death throes.

  ‘Try to keep up,’ shouted John, who was metres ahead. And Margaret realised that she was falling further behind the others, who had now stepped up their momentum. She levered her walking stick against the hard furrows to help herself move faster. She could see that the younger man, Tyler, had caught up to John by now and was easily matching the guide’s long-legged strides. Des was not far behind the two men, but she could imagine the strain of exertion for him just to keep up. Occasionally she would try and guess the distance covered, and allow herself to see something extraordinary, like a small sapling bowing in the breeze, its roots anchored in the crevices. The rest of the time, it was nose to the ground and desperately trying not to fall.