This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  Very gently, Annie lifted the corner of the box in her mind marked Songs. What if there was nothing there?

  She wouldn’t write jingles. Not any more. They weren’t even fashionable in advertising nowadays. And they didn’t interest her anyway. If she was going to do this again, it was going to be proper songs, for her to perform. She had been talented, in the beginning: she knew that now. For so long she had thought she needed Paul and Brian to be involved, for them to write together, but she felt now that that might not be true. There was only one way to find out. And for the first time in decades it felt like they were still there, the songs, bubbling away, breeding in her like a viral load. It was only a matter of time before she began to show symptoms.

  The house could be rented out. That money, along with the income from her flat, and the interest from her father’s small superannuation fund, would mean she could literally stick a pin in a map and go anywhere she wanted. If the interviewers ever came after all, they could say, ‘Annie, who lives in a shack in Nashville’ or ‘Annie, who writes in an apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris’ or ‘Annie, whose music reflects her new home on Mykonos’.

  After Christmas, she would go. She’d stay for the birth of Molly and Jack’s baby, but then she’d sell most of her belongings, rent out the house and head off into the wide blue yonder. She played with the phrase: why were yonders only ever wide and blue? It was such a positive expression. Finally it felt true. For the first time since becoming a mother Annie felt like there really might be a wide blue yonder and that she might be in a position to explore it. For so long her yonder had been, if anything, biscuit-coloured and too small to swing a cat.

  Sunny and Felix were just visible through the sticky mauve flowers of the plumbago. Annie loved kids at this age. They were independent and curious, past the rather dull point of wanting to show you every single leaf and stone they came across. Annie hadn’t been displeased that her first two grandchildren were born in Germany and Byron Bay. She’d visited them every so often, and now they were six, and more like actual people with ideas and jokes and opinions, she enjoyed seeing them. She liked being an occasional presence in their life, rather than a default extra parent, the kind so many of her friends were finding themselves to be.

  All these wonderful women, who had worked and raised families, supported husbands and each other and their own parents, now they were being asked to go back to work as unpaid nannies. And if they said no, they were made to feel like they didn’t care about their kids. The unfairness made Annie’s blood boil.

  Her friend Elizabeth had been talking about it after Zumba only the week before. She had asked her son if he could start to look for a daycare place for his two-year-old twins, whom Elizabeth had been looking after three days a week since they were nine months old. Just for one day a week, she’d said. She was still prepared to do two days, but she thought that maybe now that they were walking and talking, daycare might be fun for them. Her son had said no. He wouldn’t consider that until the twins were three.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him to go jump in the fucking lake?’ Jane had responded. That’s what Jane would have done. Jane was brilliant like that. She could say no for Australia. If it was up to Jane, pretty much everyone would be in a fucking lake.

  It was Jane who’d warned Annie to be careful about Molly’s expectations of free childcare. Apparently that was what happened nowadays: girls expected their mothers to look after their kids so they could go back to work more easily. ‘Nip it in the bud,’ was Jane’s advice.

  But Molly hadn’t even hinted at Annie looking after the baby, thank god. Annie hoped that it was indicative of her having quietly made other arrangements, but she worried that it was in fact lack of forethought. From the sounds of it, by this stage of pregnancy, Annie’s friends’ daughters had done an assortment of birth courses, installed car seats, set up baby monitors, painted the nursery, and booked daycare places and private schools. Molly was living in the moment, admiring her growing bump and revelling in her now ultra-thick hair.

  Annie’s relief was tempered with guilt, having had so much help from her own mother when her kids were small. For in addition to the summer holidays, Jean had always been prepared to drive down to Glebe at a moment’s notice to mind the children for an hour or two, to give Annie a breather. The idea of being trapped at home again with a baby for a whole day was horrifying.

  It wasn’t a fashionable attitude, but for Annie there was nothing more boring than babies. Even her own babies had been boring. Simon and Naomi were only eighteen months apart and while of course she’d loved them, felt pride and delight when they’d rolled over and smiled, those days back before they had started school had been truly a kind of purgatory. It was proper soul-crushing, brain-shrivelling boredom.

  When Molly was one, Annie went back to work, leaving her with a neighbour, Roz, who had a baby the same age. Moderate pop-stardom being the only thing on her resume, Annie had been grateful to secure a position in the office at the school where Paul worked. The work — basic admin and reception duties, with a sideline in playground injury first-aid and sick-bay triage — was not especially challenging or interesting, but she liked her colleagues, and it fit with the kids’ school hours and left the holidays free.

  Molly had somehow thrived as an almost entirely ignored third child. Although there was no baby book marking when she reached her milestones of infancy, she’d done everything she was supposed to with almost no help from her parents. She might have even done some things earlier than Naomi and Simon: it was hard to remember now. Annie couldn’t, to her shame, recall teaching Molly anything. She’d started school and seemed to have picked up her ABCs from somewhere. She could ride a bike. Who raised her? Roz, mostly, and Jean, in the summers, but then who? It was a bit of a mystery. Annie and Paul’s third child was much loved, but hardly noticed.

  It had been a surprise when Molly took her parents’ separation so badly. With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that they’d asked too much of her. Simon and Naomi, at sixteen and fourteen, had seemed able to process the split in a more adult way — they’d accepted that their father had fallen in love, that his sexual orientation was undeniable. As far as they were concerned, it was a no-fault divorce. They were upset that he was moving to England, but mostly because they missed him. Annie didn’t see much change in their behaviour.

  Molly wasn’t nearly as accepting. They’d all been in the firing line of her anger. She considered the three adults equally culpable in destroying the family. Annie remembered Molly’s face, tear-stained and wild with fury, in the days after the separation. ‘You let him go,’ she’d wailed. ‘You don’t even care.’

  Annie had tried to explain that it wasn’t up to her, that she wanted Paul and Brian to be happy because she loved them both, but that made Molly even angrier.

  ‘Why does he get to be happy and not us?’

  Annie didn’t have an answer for that back then, and she still found it a hard question. Maybe it was that Paul wanted it more. His feelings for Brian seemed to be stronger than her feelings for Paul. Also, life wasn’t fair: there was that to be taken into consideration.

  ‘He’s still your dad,’ she’d tried to tell Molly. ‘Nothing will change that. He’ll always be just a phone call away. You can ring him any time you want. I won’t even make you wait for off-peak.’

  Molly had refused to be placated. As far as she was concerned, Paul had not just left Annie, but all of them. She had predicted, quite accurately as it turned out, that the distance would matter: their relationship would change, for how could her father know or understand Molly or her life when it was reduced to what she would report in a phone call or write in an email? What she was doing, the netball games won and lost, the awards in assembly, the movies she had seen with her friends: they were just building blocks of her life. Paul knowing those facts didn’t mean he knew her. In her Year Seven art class Molly saw a portrait of van Gogh, done in tiny dabs of colour. She’d e
xplained to Annie that that’s what it was like: her dad only saw the portrait from afar. He didn’t see the dots.

  You couldn’t properly know someone, not without being there to hear them humming through the bathroom door, to see them laughing at Column 8 in the paper as they ate cereal in the morning, to make them a hot Milo to cheer them up when they lost their half-moon friendship necklace on the beach. Annie conceded that all those little things were what made Molly who she was, and that Paul couldn’t know them once he had gone.

  Truthfully, Annie wasn’t utterly devastated and broken by the end of her marriage. It might have ended anyway, one way or another, she thought. After all, she and Paul had got together when they were practically children and over twenty years later they had been no longer the same people. She felt oddly pragmatic about it all.

  Their love, she believed, had been the love of the very young. That sort of love wasn’t meant to last forever. It was naive to think it would. Saying that to Molly wouldn’t have helped, though. Molly had been eight and she’d wanted so much to believe her parents’ love was true and everlasting.

  After the split, Molly changed. Where some kids would have turned inwards, she became almost unnaturally confident. She got funnier and more outgoing. She aggressively collected friends, and each time she tried becoming a version of that friend: taking up the same pastimes and sports, listening to the music they were into and watching the same TV shows. She’d move on to a new friend just before her imitation became pathetic.

  At fourteen she took up Having A Boyfriend as a serious hobby. They were all different, but they had in common the fact that if you plotted their attributes on Venn diagrams none would have overlapped with her father.

  Each boyfriend she kept for three years, like a mobile phone, before upgrading to someone who was not yet worn out by her. Steve, Kyle and Tom came and went, before Molly met Jack when she was twenty-three. Jack had so far proven more durable than his predecessors.

  Annie hoped Molly would stick with Jack more than she stuck with other parts of her life. The way Molly picked up and put down careers like they were earrings she was browsing in an expensive shop terrified Annie. Nowadays it was normal to move around between jobs, she did understand that, but not like Molly did, not like an easily bored pinball.

  Naomi didn’t own anything more valuable than her van. Only Simon was doing okay, financially. Annie felt a pang of guilt. She’d always tried to focus on the kids doing what made them happy. She should have put more thought into what would make them a reliable living.

  Sunny popped out of the plumbago, brandishing a handful of dirty spoons. ‘Annie!’ she shouted. ‘We found them!’

  ‘Well done, Sunny. Do you want to come and wash them up?’

  ‘No! We want to swap them for knives. We want to throw knives at the tree.’

  Annie sat up and crossed her legs. ‘What if I give you knives to throw at the ground? You can stand there, on the edge of the paving, and see who can throw their knife the furthest along the lawn, while getting it to stick into the ground. If it doesn’t stab the ground, it doesn’t get a point. Minus a hundred points for killing a cousin.’

  Sunny ducked back out of sight, presumably conferring with Felix. They both emerged, Sunny’s T-shirt smeared with dirt and the tutu Felix wore over his shorts covered with sticky purple plumbago flowers.

  ‘Yes please, Annie,’ said Felix, in his sweet strong accent. Annie was impressed by his English. He was perfectly bilingual. Simon seemed to have picked up almost no German in eight years of living there. He spoke only English and Corporate Guff. Annie knew Simon would be pleased to see Felix throwing knives: he would think it offset his son’s tutu-wearing, which worried him.

  She went inside to find some knives.

  In the kitchen Naomi was cramming sliced cabbage into a jar. ‘You just got a text from Molly.’

  Annie picked up her phone and held it at arm’s length to read the message, because her glasses had been missing for several days. They’d work their way to the top of a pile eventually. ‘She says they’re coming after work.’ She put the phone down. ‘It’ll be a bit crowded.’ Annie considered the logistics of adding two more people — soon to be three — to the household.

  ‘A bit,’ agreed Naomi. ‘But you’ll be in your room, Dad and Brian are in Pa’s old room, I’m in the box room, Simon and Diana are in the guest room. So if we move Sunny and Felix out of the sunroom and put Sunny back with me and Felix back with his parents, Molly and Jack can have the sunroom.’

  ‘Ten is a lot of people in one house. There are only two bathrooms.’ Perhaps, Annie thought, I should go back to my flat and leave them all to it.

  She hummed six notes. They’d been floating around her all day, those six notes. That was how her songs used to begin life, as a few notes that tickled away at her subconscious like the beginning of a cold. It would take a few days to realise they were there. If she acknowledged them too soon, they sometimes evaporated. She’d learned it was best to ignore them for as long as she could, until they bedded down and wouldn’t leave her alone. But it was so many years since a decent song had done that. The notes were a tease, she knew. They’d be gone in the morning, and ‘Home Is Where Your Heart Is’ would have taken up its usual place, banging away on the piano in her mind, the obnoxious drunk friend who won’t be told that no one else is up for a singalong.

  Chapter 8

  Diana was serving up goulash, potatoes and cabbage salad when Molly and Jack arrived. Jack carried bag after bag in from the car and dropped them in the sunroom, then came into the kitchen, sniffing the air like a bloodhound. Molly had sat down at the kitchen table, her legs spread wide to accommodate her belly.

  ‘It’s too hot for food like that,’ she said, half-heartedly attempting to irritate her brother, who was gathering plates and forks, but her stomach rumbled disloyally.

  ‘It’s very hot in the dining room,’ Annie said. ‘Why don’t we eat outside?’

  In the garden, Paul and Brian sat on the iron chairs, the kids on the grass, and the others improvised with kitchen and dining room chairs they’d carried out to the patio.

  ‘Isn’t this fabulous?’ said Paul, beaming around at them all. ‘Together again! We haven’t done this for ages.’

  Annie’s leg wouldn’t stop jiggling. How rude would it be to ask how long they were all planning on staying? ‘I hope you can all stay through Christmas,’ she ventured. Was it implicit enough that as soon as they had turned the TV off after the beginning of the Sydney to Hobart she would like them all to go home?

  ‘Are you “This has been absolutely lovely”-ing us already?’ Molly replied, indignantly.

  ‘What is “This has been absolutely lovely”-ing?’ asked Diana.

  ‘It’s something our grandmother used to do,’ said Naomi. ‘When guests had outstayed their welcome she used to get up and say, “This has been absolutely lovely,” and then just stand there until they got the hint.’

  ‘I’m not doing that. I’m just . . . forward planning,’ Annie said, trying to defend herself.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Paul, patting her on the shoulder. ‘Our flight back is on New Year’s Day. Brian’s ghostwriting a new book. He’s got two weeks of interviews lined up.’

  ‘Anyone we’d have heard of?’ asked Molly.

  Brian glanced sidelong at Paul, then at Annie. ‘Actually, it’s Lorraine Darmody.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Simon. ‘Massive awks.’

  ‘I don’t know who Lorraine Darmody is,’ said Diana. ‘Why is she massive awks?’

  No one spoke.

  Finally Annie said, ‘She’s a successful British performer. She got her big break when she performed a song at Eurovision. A song that we wrote — Brian and Paul and me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you perform it?’

  ‘Mum was pregnant, and that meant she wasn’t allowed to,’ said Naomi. She stabbed at her plate of coleslaw crossly. ‘The patriarchy at work.’

  ‘What’s
a patriarchy?’ asked Sunny.

  ‘It’s a situation where men are in charge of everything,’ Naomi told her.

  ‘What, all men? In charge of everything?’

  Felix glanced at his father, and then at his mother. ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘It’s how things were back then,’ said Annie. ‘I was about to have Simon and the powers that be decreed that seeing a pregnant woman on stage and on England’s television screens would not be conducive to winning Eurovision.’

  ‘It was a travesty,’ added Paul. ‘We should have fought harder. You were gorgeous.’

  Annie scoffed at him. ‘I wasn’t. And you didn’t fight for me at all. You both called me the Fairstar.’

  ‘Dad, you didn’t!’ Naomi was appalled.

  ‘What is a fairstar?’ Diana squinted in confusion.

  ‘It was a cruise ship,’ Annie explained. Poor Diana. Annie had never realised quite how much of what they talked about would require explanation to a foreigner.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Brian, ‘what goes around comes around, as they say, and I’m once again putting words in Lorraine’s mouth.’

  No one quite knew what to say after that. All conversational avenues seemed to lead down memory lanes littered with the used syringes of what might have been, and it seemed impolite to talk any more about the woman who had more or less stolen Annie’s future.

  Paul turned to his son. ‘Simon? When do the German schools go back after New Year?’

  Diana cleared her throat and looked at Simon.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we’re not sure how long we’re staying. We’re throwing around some ideas.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ demanded Molly.

  ‘We’re just exploring our options,’ Diana said.