by Minnie Darke
‘Get up in the morning, breathe all day, go to bed, repeat,’ she sometimes said. She listened to his most self-defeating drivel without rolling her eyes, occasionally forced him into a game of tennis, and if on a Wednesday night he inadvertently poured himself a third glass of wine, she’d drive him home.
Home. Where Arie had installed a television in his room so he could go to sleep each night with ancient episodes of Doctor Who mutely flickering at the foot of the bed. Home, where Arie now parked his car out the front. Indoors, he stacked the jam in the almost-empty pantry, and went upstairs to change. What did one wear to a New Year’s Eve party? More specifically, what did one wear to a New Year’s Eve party that one didn’t especially want to attend?
Before reaching for the handle of the wardrobe door, Arie took a short, sharp breath. But brace himself as he might, it never saved him from the stab of pain that came each time he swung the door open and found himself face-to-face with Diana’s clothes hanging beside his, just as she’d left them – a selection of her famous red dresses, some black dresses, winter coats, drifty summer shirts and long, tiered maxi dresses. All these garments, Arie often thought, had once held her body.
The trouble with parties at Richard and Lenka’s place, these days, was that they were full of people just like Richard and Lenka themselves – couples in their thirties, deep in the earnest years of childrearing. By arriving just after nine, Arie successfully avoided the part of the night when the backyard patio was full of dads with babies on hips and mums blowing on pieces of barbecued sausage to cool them down. He hadn’t been forced to try to talk with Lenka while she simultaneously supervised little Marek, who at eighteen months old was given to striking out on kamikaze adventures around the garden furniture whenever his mother’s attention strayed for a nanosecond, nor had he been called on to admire someone’s toddler’s new-found ability to ‘wave night-night’.
When he got to the party, the children had already been taken indoors by the babysitters. Now the light beer and mineral water was flowing in earnest as inoffensive lounge music pulsed through the warm, summer air. In the flickering light of some high-tech garden torches, and with a full-strength beer in hand, Arie searched around for someone to talk to, preferably somebody who wouldn’t talk his ear off about childcare policy or infant neuroscience, or excuse themselves from the conversation every few minutes to duck inside and check on their kids.
‘Arie?’ a female voice said.
He turned to find himself looking into the face of a woman, a little shorter than him, with feathery light brown hair, overbright lipstick and a nervous smile. Somewhere in the softness of her face were the bones of a woman he hadn’t seen for years. Arie remembered Diana commenting, uncharitably, that this friend of Lenka’s had a charm so understated that it was easy to miss it. What was her name? Sally or Sophie or something.
‘It’s Sylvie,’ she said, bailing him out.
‘Of course, yes, hello.’
‘It’s so good to see you again.’
It is?
‘Look,’ she went on, ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am, to hear about Diana. I saw you on the television. You were . . . oh my God. You know, I’ve never liked flying. It always makes me imagine what it would be like . . . Anyway, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you. But on television, the way you spoke about her? I couldn’t stop crying.’
On the first anniversary of the crash, Arie had given an interview to a current affairs program, and it sometimes seemed to him that half the country had watched him cry on live, national television.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Sylvie said.
Arie never quite knew what to say when people said they were sorry about Diana. In the past two years, however, he’d learned that diversion was usually a safe strategy. He asked, ‘So . . . what about you?’
‘Well, I was married,’ Sylvie said, confidingly, ‘but it didn’t work out. I’ve got a three-year-old son. He’s gorgeous, of course. Being a single mum, it makes working really difficult. Anyway, my parents are great. They help me a lot. You and Diana didn’t have kids, did you?’
Arie shook his head.
‘Look, Arie, if you ever want to have a coffee, and maybe, I don’t know, if you ever need anybody to talk to?’ she offered, gesturing awkwardly with her wine glass.
Arie was stunned. If he were to make a prioritised list of the people he was likely to choose to talk to about Diana, then Sylvie wouldn’t have rated in the Top 500. He was relieved to sense Richard’s presence at his side.
‘Sylvie, hi,’ Richard said. ‘Look, sorry, but can I just steal Arie from you for a minute?’
‘Of course,’ she said.
When they were out of earshot, Richard whispered, ‘So, rule number one of being the most eligible bachelor at a party is that you don’t commit to anything until you’ve had a good look at your options. All your options.’
Eligible bachelor? What the actual fuck?
‘Do you remember Grace McLean?’ Richard went on.
‘Grace McLean? As in, from school?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘As in, the head girl from our school?’
‘The very same.’
‘Didn’t she laugh every time you got your head flushed down the toilet?’ Arie asked, bewildered.
Richard waved a hand in the air to indicate the insignificance of this. ‘She’s in the same yoga group as Lenka. They’ve struck up a bit of a friendship. And she’s . . . here on her own.’
Arie felt himself being lightly steered across the patio, Richard’s hand on his upper arm.
‘Here he is,’ Richard announced. Grace, turning to greet them, smiled more warmly than Arie remembered her ever doing at school. As a girl she’d been pretty, but as a woman she was beautiful, with freckled olive skin and serious, dark eyes. Her bronze dress suited her well and it had a plunging neckline that played to the rather obvious asset of her cleavage.
‘Arie,’ she said, kissing his cheek. ‘Happy New Year.’
At school, Grace McLean would no more have kissed his cheek than eaten a frog sandwich.
‘So, what are you up to these days?’ he asked.
‘I have a little importing company, and a couple of gift shops, although the biggest business is online, of course. Richard was telling me that I really ought to get the two of you to take a look at my website.’
‘She should, shouldn’t she?’ Richard added.
‘Of course. We’d love to take a look.’
Now that he had introduced them and seen them safely through a few exchanges, Richard made his exit, excusing himself to go and see to people’s drinks.
‘Do smile,’ Grace said, as Richard – walking away – glanced back over his shoulder. ‘The dear little Cupid. He’s so excited to throw us together.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Leukaemia widow,’ Grace said, as if this was how she introduced herself. ‘Two and a half years.’
It took Arie a few seconds, but then he caught on.
‘Right,’ he said, with a droll laugh. ‘So, ah . . . plane crash widower. Coming up for two years.’
‘Yes, I knew all that. I mean, Richard told me, but even before that, I saw you on the television.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, you were really good. Great. Very moving.’
‘Thanks. I think.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said. He recognised this brittleness of hers; it reminded him of the way Belinda conducted herself in the world, with a kind of forced good humour that was always threatening to crack. Perhaps, he thought, this was how public grief was supposed to be done.
‘So,’ he said, deciding to have a go at it himself, ‘those extra six months . . . do they make any difference?’
‘Oh, you’d like a report from down the track?’ she asked, and sipped her wine. ‘Hm, what can I tell you? Well, to state the obvious, at any social event you’re almost guaranteed to be shepherded into the company of somebody else who’s si
ngle. Your friends start inviting you to dinners with other random, single souls. You can expect an increase in those sorts of events. But then they dwindle again when your friends all get shitty that you haven’t jumped at their first offerings.’
‘Right, thanks, good,’ he said, trying to match her bantering tone. ‘That’s all good information.’
‘What else? Let’s see. Oh, I know. About a month ago, there was this day when I realised that I’d got through an entire twenty-four-hour period without crying. That was a big one.’
He could feel her pain. It was like his own, just in a different colour scheme, maybe.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, affecting a gesture in the vicinity of a curtsey. ‘How are you doing, on the crying front?’
‘Crying’s not really my thing. That’s just something I do on television, apparently. No, for me it’s the way I lose time. I’ll be in the middle of something, and time just seems to slow. Like watching a movie one frame at a time. But then I look at the clock, and I find that an hour’s gone by, and I can’t for the life of me remember what I’ve done with it.’
Grace nodded. ‘I’m afraid that doesn’t stop. At least, it hasn’t for me.’
‘Righto then. Better get used to it. Anything else I should know?’
‘At your next birthday, if you haven’t managed to get yourself hooked up with someone, not one but several of your girlfriends will buy you a sex toy.’
‘Excellent,’ Arie said, trying to remain nonchalant, although in truth he was feeling slightly dizzy.
‘Well, maybe that won’t happen for you,’ Grace said. ‘In a nutshell, I’d say . . . there are still good days and bad days, but the overall trend is generally upwards. I’m a walking stock-market report.’
They talked for a time, then, about what they remembered of each other from their school days, and from there found their way into a conversation about what it was like to be childless at a party full of parents. After a while, Lenka and another of their yoga friends came to join them, and – in the way that so often happens at parties – their conversation came to an end by circumstance rather than intent.
By the time Richard called out for everyone to charge their drinks to see in the New Year, a cool breeze was blowing through the garden, stirring the leaves in the young trees that had been artfully planted around the fence-line. Arie watched as the approach of midnight reshuffled the party, groups dispersing and re-forming as partners moved quietly to each other’s sides, as if by some kind of magnetism. As he looked around for a shadowy spot to disappear into, Grace arrived at his side, a light scarf draped around her shoulders for warmth. She was not drunk, but it was evident that she’d had a few glasses of wine. He imagined he would have appeared much the same to her.
She stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, so that they looked out over the rest of the gathering as if from the sidelines – a pair of spectators.
‘In two and a half minutes,’ she said, gesturing with her wine glass, ‘everybody here will be kissing.’
‘I know,’ Arie said, and took a deep gulp of his beer.
‘Shall we give them a thrill?’ she asked, without looking at him.
Arie took a moment to be sure he understood. She was offering to rescue him from his situation, but also asking to be rescued. It was a fair enough proposition. Except for the fact that the idea of kissing somebody new filled Arie with anxiety. For so many years he had kissed Diana, and only Diana. What if he no longer knew how to do it with anyone else? What if the way he and Diana kissed was entirely specific to them? What if he did something wrong? And as for making love . . .
‘I haven’t . . .’ he began.
‘Kissed anybody yet?’ she asked.
‘Not since Diana,’ he confirmed. ‘Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it like?’
‘A bit like trying to tune in to a radio signal from Mars. It might be that I’ve lost all my receivers.’
Arie, who sometimes wondered if he’d lost the full spectrum of feelings in his heart, the way some people lose the range of motion in a limb after surgery, knew exactly what she meant.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not expecting the earth to move.’
As Richard began the countdown to midnight – ‘FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO!’ – Arie felt his pulse speed up.
‘ONE. Happy New Year, everybody!’ Richard shouted, Lenka under his arm, laughing and totally at ease with her own body and his, in a way that Arie remembered but didn’t know how to replicate. All around the garden it was the same; couples embracing, kissing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.
He turned to Grace, and she reached her brown freckled arms around his neck.
‘It really is okay,’ she said, and for a moment the banter was gone and he caught a flash of something deeply real in her dark brown eyes.
Arie put his arms around her waist, closed his eyes and kissed her. They managed something a little more substantial than a peck, although it wasn’t much more, in the end, than a pressing together of their lips. They drew apart.
‘Happy New Year,’ Grace said, with a sad smile.
‘Happy New Year,’ Arie said. He knew that while neither of them was in the place they really wanted to be, they had just shared a moment, and he was grateful.
Arie arrived home just after midnight to find a party going on noisily in the front yard of the conjoined house next door. As he made his way up the path through his own front yard, one of the revellers leaned on the fence, beer can in hand, and called, ‘G’day, neighbour! Give us a yell if we’re bothering you, all right? Or, you know, come over and join us, yeah? More the merrier, hey?’
Arie responded with a noncommittal thumbs up.
Once, the homeowners of this street had overwhelmingly been pensioners and middle-aged couples with empty nests. When Diana and Arie had moved in, they had been something of a novelty for the neighbours, but things had changed since then. Now, the owners were just as likely to live out of town, or in another state or country altogether. Arie didn’t know exactly how many of the street’s cottages and terraces had become Airbnbs, but these days hire cars were as common a sight on Tavistock Row as were people towing wheeled suitcases while looking out for street numbers.
Arie no longer knew the people who owned the house next door to his, but he’d checked out the listing online. The house rules included ‘No Parties’, but Arie knew from his experience as an Airbnb neighbour that lists of house rules weren’t worth the electricity needed to generate the pixels they were written in.
He wasn’t drunk, but even so it probably hadn’t been wise for him to drive home. There was no need for restraint now, though, so he fetched himself a beer from the fridge, the door of which was still covered with the souvenir magnets for which Diana had such a weakness – a windmill from Amsterdam, a rabbit in a kimono from Kyoto, a tango-dancing llama from Buenos Aires.
Stuck to the fridge with a plastic Eiffel Tower was a picture of Arie holding Marek in a christening robe. It had been taken eight months after the plane crash, and although Arie had thought he’d borne up pretty well that day, the evidence showed he’d gone to the happy event as the hollow-eyed godfather of the apocalypse. Below the picture, affixed with a blue police-box magnet, was an invitation – handwritten on handmade paper – for his youngest sister’s wedding.
Weddings, christenings, the world going on without him. Arie felt a wave of pain so strong that he returned the cold stubby to the fridge and reached for the half-empty bottle of Scotch on the kitchen bench. He searched out a tumbler and headed upstairs.
On the landing, Arie paused at the open glass doors of the piano room where Diana’s Steinway stood, framed by the bay window. For the first time in months, he went inside. Setting the whisky and tumbler on a corner of the instrument’s wide lid, he sat on the piano stool. Inside the room there was no sound, but through the window he coul
d hear a muted version of next door’s party.
Arie lifted the smaller of the piano’s lids to expose the keys. He placed his thumb on the A key just below middle C, and his fourth finger on the D just above. A for Arie, D for Diana. He couldn’t recall, though, how the chords were otherwise constituted, the ones that made up the plagal cadence, the ones that sang Amen. Nor could he remember anything at all about those other chords, the ones that made up the perfect cadence.
If only he could play, it might have been that the piano was a transmitter, a device by which he might talk to Diana, wherever she was. If he could talk to her, he could ask her, What now? Who am I, without you? What do I do, without you? How should I go on?
If only he could, as in a movie, enter an accelerated montage sequence and come out the other end with the power to work this machine and make it release its own memories to him. The night before Diana left, she had been playing a song, but its melody was lost to him now, like a word in a foreign language. He couldn’t play it on these keys, or sing it, or hum it. All that remained to him of that song was the feeling it expressed. Love, yes, but love of a shot-silk kind that changed colour when you looked at it from a different angle.
The room was stuffy in the summer heat. Arie got up from the piano to hinge open one of the angled panes of the bay window, allowing in the sugary smell of the flowering jasmine and a few extra decibels of the party. The late evening air was so mild that he couldn’t even feel it on his skin. From where he stood, Arie had a clear view over the neighbours’ nicely designed yard. Unlike his own front yard, which comprised some thirsty grass, an ugly path and a single eucalypt tree, next door’s was a circular courtyard of heritage bricks surrounded by tiered herb gardens and a border of bright green, well-tended lawn. The glowing bulbs of fairy lights peeped out from the passionfruit vines that grew thickly over the latticed fence on the far side.
