This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  ‘Darling,’ her mother said, ‘I know you’re very good. You’ve a lovely voice and you play the piano beautifully, and the boys with their guitars and everything . . . but you don’t know anyone in London. You don’t have a manager or a . . . what is it called, a recording thing.’

  ‘A record contract,’ said Annie. ‘I know. But we won’t get one hanging around here playing at the Police Boys’ Club.’

  ‘I think it’s a great idea,’ said Robert.

  ‘Robert, you do not think it’s a great idea. She’s far too young.’

  ‘When you’re young is when you have to do these things,’ he said.

  ‘How will you afford it?’ demanded Jean. ‘You all spent all your money on that synthesiser.’

  Annie gave her father a grateful smile. ‘Dad said he’d help. With another investment.’

  Robert reached out and took his daughter’s hand and squeezed it. ‘My money is safe as houses invested with Love Triangle. I am one hundred per cent confident of a tenfold return.’

  Her mother had pleaded. ‘Will you please at least defer your university place? Rather than rejecting it? Who knows, maybe you’ll be famous enough in a year that you might want to come back and have a break from all the screaming fans by doing your arts degree, or a Dip. Ed.’

  But in her head, Annie was already gone.

  * * *

  By the time Heather and Ray did have a baby, a couple of years later, Annie, Paul and Brian were happily ensconced in their new London life. Jean wrote to say she had offered to mind the baby, a long thin child they named Patrick, but Heather never took her up on it. They didn’t seem happy together, Heather and Ray. She was too young for him, Jean said. Fifteen years was far too great an age gap.

  There came more hints in the letters that all was not well next door. Sometimes there were loud arguments. Jean tried not to listen, she said, but even with the kitchen radio on she couldn’t help hearing Heather shouting. Ray didn’t seem to shout back, but who could say what was going on. And it was none of her business. Children could put a strain on relationships, and poor little Patrick was a particularly unsettled baby. Jean often heard him crying, lying in his pram out in the back garden.

  Then one day Annie got a letter from her mother that said Heather was gone. Jean had realised, while unpacking the shopping, that she hadn’t heard shouting for a while. She couldn’t remember when it had stopped. She hadn’t heard Patrick crying either. She popped round with a plate of Anzac biscuits, but no one answered her knock.

  Later, she told Annie, she’d asked Robert to stop in when Ray was home from work, to see what was going on. Robert had initially refused, saying it was none of their business: a marriage was between two people only.

  She’d insisted, though, and eventually he’d dragged on his tennis shoes and gone. Two minutes later he was back to report that Ray was drunk, had shouted at him to go away, and that, as suspected, Heather had shot through with the baby.

  Jean had wondered if she should try to phone Heather. She asked Annie if she knew where Heather’s mother lived, for surely that’s where she had taken Patrick. But Annie didn’t know. She wrote back to say she thought Heather had grown up on the south coast somewhere. Or maybe it was the north coast. They hadn’t really talked about that sort of thing. Heather had written to her sometimes, and Annie promised to let Jean know if she heard from her again, but she never did.

  Thinking back now, Annie had been too busy in London to miss Heather. Occasionally she’d thought of her, and hoped she was well, and felt a pang of guilt for not missing her more, or trying harder to find her. After all, they’d been such great friends for the year or so at home. A few times in recent years she’d googled Heather or looked for her on Facebook, but she hadn’t found her. Maybe she’d changed her name.

  Now Annie looked at the fence and wondered what would have happened if she had never gone to London. Would Heather have stayed? Annie probably would have ended up exactly where she was now: there really wasn’t much to show for the promising start she’d had.

  * * *

  At first, things had gone better over in England than Annie could have dreamed. Unlike in Sydney, where if you didn’t have a drummer no one thought you were a real band, in London there seemed to be room for everyone. If you looked hard enough and went to enough clubs, you could find your tribe, and Love Triangle’s particular brand of songwriting was gaining popularity. It even had a name in London: they played synth-pop, albeit at the poppier end of the synth-pop spectrum.

  After only a few months they had found a manager, a slight, bug-eyed Welshman called Dai, who never seemed to blink. Annie had found him an alarming presence, but he was good at his job, and Love Triangle started travelling the country playing in little clubs. They released an EP, and then an album, and joined other bands each summer for the festival season, touring Europe in a bus, playing in towns that would have really preferred ABBA but were grateful to have anyone.

  The relief at escaping the surf-rock scene they’d grown up in made them giddy. ‘We were oppressed and repressed back home,’ Brian explained one night as they sat on the sofa in the one-bedroom flat they shared in Brixton, drinking cider and watching Wham on Top of the Pops. ‘All good music comes from cultural oppression, and our middle-class suburban upbringing was oppressing us. And Sydney was oppressing us, just because we weren’t Cold Chisel.’

  Annie wasn’t sure about that, but she suspected, a while before Brian reached the same conclusion, that he was actually talking about something else. She and Paul hadn’t felt terribly hard done by back in Sydney, musically, so it made sense that Brian might actually have been talking about his preference for blokes rather than his taste in lightweight instrumentation and parallel thirds.

  The triangle remained strong through those years in London. And their success helped. They weren’t massive — they never made it onto Top of the Pops themselves — but they sold enough albums to still feel like they were a proper group. The real money was coming from the songs they were selling to other people. It was a truth none of them liked to talk about, but the material they wrote did a lot better when other people recorded it. One or two became actual bona fide chart-toppers. That was a slightly bitter pill to swallow, but they were able to wash it down with a bottle of vintage Champagne.

  It was their fourth year in London when they almost made it really big. ‘Home Is Where Your Heart Is’ was on the shortlist for Britain’s Eurovision song that year. They weren’t famous yet, but they could see it from where they were sitting.

  The only slight hitch in their plan for world domination was the boisterous child Annie was accidentally gestating. Simon, still four months from his birth, roiled and kicked so violently that even when disguised under a red crushed-velvet square-shaped dress, he caused the fabric to shake like a stagehand was ham-fistedly changing sets behind theatre curtains. Whenever Annie sang, her baby writhed. It was distracting to watch.

  A band meeting was called, and after briefly considering the stipulation (made, naturally, by the middle-aged record company executives who ran things) that they replace only Annie for the Eurovision heat, the triangle stood strong and handed the song over entirely to an unknown English singer called Lorraine Darmody. Lorraine had a voice like golden syrup, hair so fluffy you could read the telephone book through it and a body that didn’t bring to mind a scene from Alien.

  It was then that Annie had suggested maybe it was time to go home. She had run out of puff. Paul, in no real position to argue, agreed, and they got married in the Chelsea and Kensington Register Office on a rainy January morning in 1983, with Brian and his latest squeeze Trevor as witnesses. The newlyweds flew back to Sydney the next day.

  Brian, seeing no future for the triangle, stayed in London, where he tried to get work as a producer but ended up writing for a music magazine.

  Lorraine Darmody had acquitted herself well in A Song for Europe. ‘Home Is Where Your Heart Is’ was selected to represent Britain,
and in Munich in April she earned a respectable seventh place at Eurovision. She’d gone on to act a bit, playing the landlady in a long-running Yorkshire drama about a rural pub, and ended up marrying a chinless minor aristocrat — Annie had gleaned all this from various magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms over the years.

  Annie watched the broadcast of Eurovision that year with Paul in the living room of their rented flat in Sydney, a newborn Simon asleep in a crochet bouncinette, which Paul nudged with his foot to the beat of someone else making a hit of their song. When Paul had grabbed her hand and squeezed it, she’d looked away so he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.

  * * *

  Paul had taken on guitar students, and studied for his Diploma of Education at night. Once he had that, a private school employed him full-time as a music teacher.

  Annie had thrown herself into her new life the way someone who has run out of other options might throw themselves into a cold dark lake. But as with a cold lake, once she got used to it and stopped feeling anything, she found motherhood was survivable. She met other mothers at the park, and the local playgroup. One or two old school friends lived nearby and they would gather to drink tea at one of their homes while their babies lay on rugs on the linoleum floors and yanked each other’s hair.

  The next Christmas, when Simon was starting to drag himself around and occasionally slept through the night, Annie and Paul sublet the flat, packed their guitars, the playpen and the nappy bucket, and moved back in with Robert and Jean for the month of January. On arrival Simon was handed to Jean, and they saw very little of him for the next four weeks. Annie slept a lot, and Paul gave guitar lessons in the enclosed verandah where they used to write their own songs. Brian came home to see his mother for Christmas and in the evenings he came round to drink on the patio, but nothing was the same any more.

  When the summer was over, Brian returned to England, Paul went back to work at the school, and Annie took a deep breath and squared herself to face motherhood again.

  That pattern had continued for a decade and a half, and it was enough for Annie. When Simon was two, she had Naomi. Two children were plenty, Annie and Paul decided. But five years after Naomi was born, a gastro bug swept through the family, resulting in a permanently stained living room carpet and the failure of Annie’s contraceptive pill, and nine months later Molly was born.

  Having just reached the point of both her children being at school, and the possibility of thinking about what the future might hold, Annie found herself back in the newborn trenches.

  But still the summers at Baskerville Road continued, and in the evenings they played their old songs, and Annie composed new ditties infused with the scent of jasmine on the night breeze that made people feel good, which advertisers soon discovered would make people buy cars and shampoo and wet-wipes. Even after Paul and Annie bought a house of their own they kept going to Baskerville Road. They could leave the kids to Jean, Robert would come home at the end of each day from the office and pour them cold beers — and the enclosed verandah, with the piano, and the sliding windows, that was where they could pretend to be starting out again.

  Until the end of the seventeenth summer, and Annie and Paul’s fateful trip to buy milk.

  It hadn’t come as a complete shock to Annie to learn Paul was in love with Brian, but the sadness that coursed through her was more than she’d been expecting. She was thirty-nine and heading into a new millennium. She would have to navigate it on her own, with a sixteen-year-old, a fourteen-year-old and an eight-year-old.

  When they got back from the shop, Annie put the milk in the fridge and went out to the garden. Paul and Brian came and sat on either side of her on the bench under the jacaranda and they cried together.

  ‘Will you go back to London with Brian?’ Annie had asked the man who was suddenly no longer her husband.

  ‘I don’t know. What would be best for the kids?’

  None of this, she’d thought. What would be best for the kids is if you preferred me to Brian. ‘Can’t you both live here?’

  But by then Brian had moved from music journalism to ghostwriting memoirs for other, more successful musicians. The work wasn’t really something he could do in the Sydney suburbs, where world-famous rock stars were fairly thin on the ground. He needed to be London-based, with all-expenses-paid sojourns in New York and Los Angeles when required. They would visit as much as possible, they said, and fly the kids to London whenever there was enough money.

  The summers of writing together at the house had to end. Annie knew exactly what her father was going to make of the new development. Homosexuality was not on the list of things Robert approved of. He’d turned an aggressively blind eye to Brian’s orientation for almost twenty years, asking him every summer when he was going to settle down and put all the ladies of London out of their misery. Annie wondered if she could run the holiday music camps on her own. She supposed she’d have to. They’d need to be smaller.

  Love Triangle had faded away, like the end of one of their own songs. And tomorrow, thought Annie, we’ll be back together. Now that her father was dead and the coast was clear, her ex-husband and his boyfriend were coming to Baskerville Road for a family Christmas. Annie wished they weren’t. Jane was right as usual. Annie wanted her future to begin, and that would be hard with her entire past in the house, filling her pockets like stones.

  A bat flew overhead and landed in the fig tree in Ray’s back garden. Naomi would say that it was Pa. It probably was.

  Chapter 5

  Molly lay in the bath, watching her stomach, risen from the water like a Polynesian volcano. She loved baths, and had turned the air conditioning right up on her return home so she would actually feel like submerging herself in hot water on a warm December evening. The water was really very hot, which Jack would tut-tut about if he came in and saw the steam. He’d read that hot baths increased your risk of miscarriage, and he’d suggested Molly sit in a tub of lukewarm water when she needed to relax. She reasoned that the increase in blood pressure from how utterly annoying and non-relaxing that would be would outweigh any possible dangers from a bit of hot water.

  She ran through what she had to do the next day. She would get up at six. Prenatal yoga for an hour from the streaming subscription that had been aggressively marketed to her after she made the fatal error of buying a six-pack of maternity knickers online. She’d subscribed three months back but tomorrow was definitely the day she would begin her yoga practice. No more putting it off.

  Ha. As if. She’d switch off the alarm at some point in the night, before it had a chance to go off. Jack would wake her in a panic just in time for her to get in the car and head into the city for the reading of her grandfather’s will.

  She didn’t actually have to go to the solicitor’s, but she could take a half-day off work for it so why not? Maternity leave honestly couldn’t come soon enough. Home organisation had felt like a funny job for her to do at first: playing against type, going off-brand. Everyone knew her as impetuous, disorderly. What more unexpected line of work for her to take up than sorting other people’s possessions into overpriced storage solutions? But it had become utterly mind-numbing, if truth be told, and it was drawing to a natural end.

  The doorbell rang and she groaned. She called to Jack, ‘If that’s for me, tell them I’m dead.’

  She heard him open the door, then he stuck his head into the bathroom.

  ‘It’s Suzanne,’ he whispered.

  ‘Fuck,’ she muttered. Their neighbour and secretary of the building’s strata committee was an incorrigible popper-in. ‘What does she want?’

  ‘I don’t know. She looks like she’s been crying.’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake,’ Molly said, and put her hand out for Jack’s help. He pulled her up and water streamed off her body and onto the floor. ‘You’d better ask her in.’

  When Molly emerged into the living room Suzanne was hunched over on the sofa, nursing a cup of tea with both hands, like a witness to
an accident. Jack was sitting beside her. Her eyes were red and her face was mottled. Suzanne looked up at Molly, once more burst into sobs, and dropped her head again.

  ‘What’s wrong, what is it?’ asked Jack, putting his arm around her shaking shoulder.

  ‘C-c-c-cancer,’ she managed to get out in a high squeak before dissolving again.

  ‘Oh my god, that’s terrible,’ Molly said. ‘I’m so sorry. What sort? What treatment is there? You poor thing.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Suzanne. ‘Maralinga.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jack. ‘I’m not following.’

  Suzanne put her mug down on the coffee table and turned on the sofa to look straight at him. ‘Concrete cancer,’ she said. ‘Maralinga —’ she paused ‘— has concrete cancer.’

  ‘The block of flats has cancer? Not you?’ confirmed Jack.

  ‘It’s serious. It’s going to take a huge amount of work to cure it.’

  ‘Do we say cure, when it’s a building?’ asked Jack. ‘Not repair?’

  Suzanne glared at him. ‘To cure it.’

  ‘How bad is it?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Stage three,’ she said. ‘It’s spalling.’

  ‘That does sound appalling. Are there more than three stages?’

  ‘Not appalling. Spalling,’ said Suzanne, as if she was speaking to a particularly dense child.

  Molly looked at Jack, who shrugged. ‘Sorry, Suzanne,’ she said. ‘I’m not familiar with that term. Spalling, is it?’

  Suzanne took a deep breath and in a shaky voice explained that to treat the concrete cancer would be a huge undertaking and very expensive. ‘We need to have an extraordinary meeting and raise a special levy,’ she said. ‘There’s not enough in the sinking fund to even begin to cover it. It will be a long process to bring this building back to full health.’

  As Molly listened, her mind wandered to what might have happened in Suzanne’s life to make her care so much about a block of flats. She had heard a rumour — something the Irish schoolteacher downstairs claimed Suzanne had confided after about a bottle and a half of pinot grigio — that Suzanne had once lived on a houseboat that caught fire and sank, killing the man she lived with, but Molly wasn’t sure that story was true. The Irish teacher listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen, and the tale seemed to slightly resemble the lyrics of the song ‘Suzanne’. She tuned back in to Suzanne’s quavering voice only when she heard the words ‘six months’.