Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  ‘Mrs Maine. How are we today?’ He adopts the same manner as in the surgery but it doesn’t look right in those leisurewear slacks. The ones the colour of shark fin.

  ‘I’m fighting fit,’ she answers, just like a good girl. ‘I even have my appetite back. I just ate an enormous lunch.’ Her smile is skeletal and glassy. An intimation of the corpse-to-be. The doctor smiles dumbly in return.

  ‘Is that your family over there?’ Mum points to the two small boys standing nearby, watching them. The doctor is hesitant. He knows damn well who she is pointing at, but squints his eyes as if to make out their outlines.

  ‘Ah… The boys. Yes.’ Before Mum has a chance to call them over, he pats her hands briskly. ‘I must be off now.’

  He leaves so quickly—pulls the small boys along, kite-tail trailing, so fast—that he doesn’t hear or smell the retching stench of vomit. There on the white sand lies a pile of char kway teow that looks remarkably like the original meal.

  Theorem

  The minister arrives. I dislike him immediately. He is smarmy and religious. Tall. He stoops his head over like a biblical crook, not knowing what to do with the extra top inches. An affected humility. He is probably the first generation of his family to have such height.

  He wears thick metal-framed glasses, and the watery green of his eyes swells in the distortion.

  My sister has warned me already about ministers. Something about slurping their tea and hairy ears. Yvonne has many theories. Never see a local band with a name ending in a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’. Only members of the Royal Family can wear white shoes. Cats and spurned lovers can look after themselves.

  Surely five minutes in the company of a minister with cake crumbs adhered to his chin is no worse than ten minutes listening to Boyz Night Out at the local tavern? For a man of the cloth, he certainly is in need of a napkin. I pour him another cup of tea. I notice that where the sock’s elastic ripples his leg, the skin is cadaverous.

  Mum is arranging her own funeral. She is famous for being sensible. She has chosen ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ as her hymns. She loves to sing but I guess in this case it really doesn’t matter. Today she looks tired, and arranges her arms and legs on the sofa as if they are pieces of kindling. Death slowly bruises the area beneath her eyes.

  Yvonne thinks funerals are just like weddings. Another theory involving rites of passage or something. The last wedding was for Maisie’s eldest, my cousin Peter. That day there were lots of hymns, and white doilies pressed around slabs of loam-coloured fruit cake. I wore a long black crimplene dress and painted my face white. Only my eyebrows had stood out, drawn as crazy bolts of lightning. Mum was furious with me. I didn’t care. I had matters of identity to sort out. I was yet to learn that being Gothic didn’t work in bright, clean, sunny Darwin. And I never knew that a cancer inched along my mother’s spine like a live, singing wire.

  The minister gets up to leave, and for one brief moment my mother looks frightened.

  ‘Can we say a prayer?’ she says quietly.

  He looks surprised. He adjusts his glasses and prisms of rainbow light stream through the room. I have this feeling that beneath the magnified glass, his eyes are straining hard into a tiny mole crumple. He doesn’t see my mother at all.

  Colours

  My mother is dying. She lies on the bed she has shared with Dad for thirty years. Death isn’t black, I seem to notice. It’s a mulberry blue. I show Mum’s feet to Yvonne. I think I’m trying to shock her or something. Maybe to prove to her that Mum is dying after all. Her feet are blue. Together we watch the ghostly stains appear on the entire body. Veins collapsing and the body flooded with the cool wash of indigo. Return to earth.

  Earlier we had tried to lift Mum onto the commode. Her thin nightie stuck like a second skin to her small frame. Yvonne tried to peel the fabric from beneath Mum’s wishbone pelvis so she could pee into the ceramic bowl. A few drops of pale yellow issued. I handed Yvonne the toilet paper and she wiped underneath, the mysterious cleft a dark wink of folded skin. We laid Mum back on the bed, the nightie pulled down to restore her modesty. I stroked her head and felt the solid strength contained within the skull. Her mind’s ark. The rest of her was disappearing fast, but the head’s dimensions were secured in bone. What was left of her hair was plastered over the skull, like a child still moist from the afterbirth.

  And every ten minutes she changes colour. A multi- speckled, bruised canvas. She is a giant lily one moment, large arterial branches running across the silent pad, life’s ink moving slowly along the plant-like pathways. Next, a yellow stone on a riverbed. Death closes her petal by petal. She begins to shrink back, small, within her paper skin.

  Endings

  Mum is now a piece of driftwood. I’m scared to touch her in case she breaks into pieces and slips through my hands. Yvonne is organising the clothes to give to the undertaker. She chooses the dress that Mum wore to Peter’s wedding. A lovely soft, pleated silk. There is a matching handbag, but the shoes no longer fit. Mum’s feet are swollen like fat tribal canoes.

  I become frantic. ‘Mum can’t go barefoot,’ I yell at my sister.

  Yvonne calms me down. She finds some beige nylon stockings to cover Mum’s legs and two artificial daisies to thread between the fat toes. Mum is to be the Princess Bride. A dancer with red shoes that finally split and burst open like ripened fruits. Figs—not mangoes, though. The smell of rotting mango is too familiar now, too cloying.

  Downstairs I can hear Nana doing the dishes. Her sleeves are rolled back to reveal her strong, bare arms. I can hear the dip dip of dish into water and suds, and the final sluice as she rinses things clean. I imagine her lifting her arms, and the cotton sleeves rustling. The smell of lavender briefly escapes from her skin. A lightly dusted, female sadness. Always, the smell of grandmothers.