This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  ‘That’s what people say when they’ve been sacked. Simon, have you been sacked? Diana, have you?’

  ‘Who needs another beer?’ asked Simon, rising and marching back into the house as though his youngest sister hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Maybe let it go?’ Jack put his hand on Molly’s leg.

  The unmistakable sound of a Champagne bottle being opened echoed across the fence from Ray’s house and as one the family looked up in time to see a cork fly over the fence and land in the middle of the lawn. Sunny and Felix downed cutlery and dashed over to it, fighting for possession.

  ‘That was unexpected,’ said Brian. ‘Do you think Ray’s having a party?’

  ‘Ray doesn’t have parties. He never even has visitors,’ Annie said. ‘Honestly, since I’ve been staying, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else’s voice from that house.’

  The sound of a man’s laughter drifted over: too young to be Ray.

  ‘He has a very cheerful home invader then,’ said Paul. ‘I want to go look.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Annie said. She put her plate down and padded across the lawn in her bare feet. Paul followed her around the garage.

  The side fence was still half-rotten there. Over the years the nails had rusted away, leaving the wooden palings leaning against each other like disaffected teenagers smoking around the back of a toilet block.

  Quietly, Paul and Annie peered through. Ray stood on his verandah with another man, both holding glasses of Champagne and looking out at the garden. Annie hadn’t had a good look at the old bloke for years. He was thin, but still tall. He hadn’t curved into a question mark like some thin old men do. His hair was white but thick. How old would he be? She tried to figure it out. He was about ten years younger than her dad. Somewhere in his late seventies, early eighties?

  The evening sun glowed through the trees at the back of Ray’s garden, and the other man on the verandah, the one holding the Champagne bottle, raised his glass in salute to Ray, his back to Annie and Paul.

  ‘Who do you reckon that is?’ Paul asked quietly.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Didn’t Ray have a kid?’

  ‘He did, but I don’t think they had a relationship. Heather left when he was a baby.’

  They watched for a few moments longer, both pressed up against the fence, their arms touching. His arms felt strong and firm. Hers had grown thinner and softer, although the Zumba was making a difference. She remembered being behind this garage with him before, his whole body pushing hers up against the fence as they kissed each other with the desperation that only virginity brings.

  They’d met at sixteen in a ballroom dancing class, she and Paul and Brian. They were the only students under fifty. Paul had caught her watching him during the first lesson, and pursed his lips into a funny little half smile. He’d made a beeline for her when Miss Laurel said it was time to choose a partner but Brian beat him to it.

  Brian was definitely the better dancer. He had filled out the template of a man earlier than Paul, who still looked like all his joints belonged to his father. Paul’s extreme handsomeness didn’t become apparent for another year or two: back then any potential was masked by pimples and awkwardness. Brian was tall and strong already, with shoulder-length dark hair that Paul used to say made him look like Richard III. Annie thought it made him look like David Cassidy.

  They’d bonded over their affection for uncool music. Their city was exploding with underground sounds of the burgeoning pub rock and punk scene, so finding two other teens also prepared to admit they loved ABBA and The Seekers was an unexpected relief and a delight.

  As children of middle-class parents who, while not musical themselves, knew playing an instrument competently to be a life skill akin to possessing a decent game of tennis, between them they could more or less manage the piano, guitar and bass. After three dance lessons they’d stopped going, and instead began meeting in the enclosed verandah at Annie’s parents’ house each weekend.

  That was where they wrote their first song, ‘I See You Every Day’, and where they decided one afternoon, while tipsy on Chateau Tanunda brandy Paul had stolen from his mum’s drinks cabinet, that although it was tempting to call the group Brian, Paul and Annie, times were changing and the name Love Triangle might help them go further.

  Annie had realised she had a knack with a lyrical melody and catchy hooks. Brian and Paul could add guitar and bass to whatever she came up with. All their songs had a minimum of two upward key changes and a bridge that could double as the opening theme to a sitcom. Once they pooled their pocket money savings, the funds from the sales of their three bikes and a not insignificant investment from Annie’s dad, their compositions were transformed by the otherworldly sounds of a synthesiser.

  Six months later, at the cinema one night, the group’s dynamic had changed. Poor Brian, Annie thought. He’d turned away from The Pink Panther Strikes Again to find Paul tongue-deep in Annie’s face, with one hand firmly up her jumper. Annie could still remember the shock in his eyes when they’d come up for air.

  The next morning Brian had called a band meeting and they’d decided Annie could become Paul’s girlfriend as long as it didn’t threaten the existence of Love Triangle. It was big of Brian. They were not children, they all agreed, and could be trusted to put the future of the band first. ABBA would be their model: sensible, strong relationships, but always putting the focus on the work. They would be having no Fleetwood Mac nonsense.

  Annie’s mum and dad weren’t thrilled at the romantic development, but they still let the band use their enclosed verandah to practise. Probably, Annie now realised, so they could keep an eye on proceedings. She didn’t think they had ever known how frequently she and Paul climbed out of the window and scurried along the right of way so they could pash behind the garage.

  Love Triangle knew how lucky they were to have the Thornes’ house to practise in. Jean baked them biscuits and always had cordial made up in a tall yellow plastic jug in the fridge, and Robert never seemed to mind their noise.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Thorne,’ Paul would say when he spotted Robert through the open windows, often spraying poison from a backpack onto the weeds springing up between the Besser bricks that lined the drive. ‘We’ll try to keep it down.’

  Robert would smile back, and say, ‘Don’t give it another thought, young man. You just keep on making your music. It’s not bothering anyone.’

  It must have bothered Ray, Annie always thought. His house was just on the other side of the driveway, about six feet away.

  Annie moved her arm a fraction away from Paul’s. He didn’t appear to notice. He had wanted her, back in those days. For sure. They’d had several years of perfectly fine sex before the kids gradually leached them of desire. After that it was Brian who Paul wanted, not Annie.

  Annie straightened up and gestured with her head that they should go back to the patio. Paul caught her eye and looked away. She knew he remembered too, but it wasn’t something they talked about. They hadn’t then and they wouldn’t now. It was easier that way.

  ‘Well? What’s happening over there?’ asked Simon when they sat back down.

  ‘Nothing very exciting,’ said Paul, picking up his plate and refocussing his attention on his goulash. ‘Ray’s having a drink with someone.’

  ‘Maybe he’s celebrating Pa’s death,’ said Molly. ‘He hated Pa as much as Pa hated him, right?’

  ‘I don’t think they hated each other,’ Annie said. ‘Hate’s a very strong word. They just weren’t friends.’ She picked up her plate and held it in her lap. She couldn’t face another mouthful.

  Molly frowned, scraped the last forkful of food up and burped. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This food isn’t really agreeing with me. It’s a bit rich.’

  * * *

  ‘I’ll do the washing up,’ Annie said to Diana as they stacked the dinner plates on the kitchen counter. ‘You cooked.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Diana. ‘Let me help.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’d rather do it on my own,’ said Annie, realising too late her voice was too bright.

  Diana looked up in patent alarm. Annie’s eyes felt dry, but she knew she was grimacing the set smile of a woman who needed to be alone. Her daughter-in-law stepped back out into the garden and Annie blessed her unfussy kindness.

  Methodically, she scraped the plates, rinsed them in a sink of hot water, and stacked them in the dishwasher. She decanted leftovers into the new glass containers Naomi had made her buy after declaring the ancient Tupperware both a health and an environmental hazard. She picked pieces of parsley out of the sink strainer and wondered if Paul had ever truly loved her, or if she’d merely been a placeholder until he was brave enough to love Brian.

  Chapter 9

  The slam of a car door woke Molly on Saturday morning. In her confused somnolent state, she couldn’t immediately place where she was. She opened her eyes and looked up. Mattress-ticking wallpaper. On the ceiling. Pa’s house.

  Swinging her legs out of bed, she pushed herself into an upright position. Her body felt like it had been filled with custard. Bracing her lower back with one hand, she shuffled out of the sunroom and down the hall.

  The bathroom door was closed and she could hear the shower running. She banged loudly. ‘I need to pee.’

  No response. She thumped the door again. ‘I need to pee!’ she shouted.

  ‘The whole neighbourhood will be pleased to hear that,’ said Diana, sticking her head out of the kitchen. She was holding a spatula.

  ‘Who’s in the bathroom?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Simon. I think the upstairs bathroom’s free.’

  Molly gave her a withering look. She would sooner wee in the gutter in front of the house than drag herself up all those stairs. ‘I’m busting.’ She opened the bathroom door and plunged into the cloud of steam.

  ‘Hey!’ Simon’s shouts reverberated around the tiled room and he clutched the shower curtain around himself dramatically. ‘Can’t you knock? Ever heard of privacy?’

  ‘I’m your sister. There is no one less interested in seeing you naked than me. I need to pee.’ She sat down on the toilet. ‘I thought Germans were meant to be relaxed about nudity. You’re a pretty shit German.’

  Simon turned off the shower and reached for his towel. He pulled it in behind the curtain and emerged, wrapped and furious. ‘At least I have lived somewhere else. You haven’t ever lived more than twenty kilometres from where you were born. You’ve got regional agoraphobia.’

  ‘That’s not a thing,’ she shouted as he slammed the door behind him. She heard him stomp up the stairs overhead.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. ‘Molly?’ called Annie. ‘Want to come to the gym?’

  Molly got up, flushed the toilet and opened the door. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you want to come to the gym? I’ve got advanced Zumba, but you can sit on an exercise bike, or potter along on the treadmill. Or there’s a yoga class on at the same time, and they can always modify the moves for pregnancy.’

  ‘Can they modify it into not being a yoga class?’

  Annie laughed. Molly wanted to go to yoga with her mother about as much as she wanted to see her brother naked, but still she dragged on leggings and a T-shirt of Jack’s advertising SKYY vodka and climbed into Annie’s car. How bad could one yoga class be?

  * * *

  Unspeakable. That’s how bad one yoga class could be. The other eight students were ancient, seemed to have a working knowledge of Sanskrit, and were as flexible as willow. It was their last class before the Christmas break, so they were all dressed in green and red, and one woman had brought felt Santa hats for everyone. The enforced jollity made Molly’s skin crawl. After fifteen minutes of Molly failing to get herself into any of the positions the instructor, Pascal, suggested, he took pity on her and told her to lie on her side in modified savasana. ‘Just be still and feel,’ he said, patting her shoulder gently.

  Molly was embarrassed, but she lay in the recovery position as if she were the plastic model in a lifesaving demonstration while Pascal fetched more and more props from the cupboard at the back of the room: a rolled-up blanket between her knees to align her hips, a wedge beneath her stomach and another behind her lower back, a foam brick under her head. Finally he draped a heavy blanket over her body and legs.

  Her stomach rumbled. The idea of a baguette pierced her consciousness like a crusty blunt javelin and lodged there. She tried to focus on her body, beginning at her toes, moving to her feet, ankles and up her legs. It worked as far as her knees. Then the baguette was back. A tiny bit sour, fresh and soft. A chewy crust, not the crumbly kind that shatters and leaves golden shrapnel in your lap. She would spread it with salted butter and sprinkle more salt onto the salted butter. There was a bakery in the same block as the yoga studio. How much longer was there to go?

  Her eyes felt heavy and Pascal’s voice droned softly. Beside her the other women moved through their poses, and she fell deeply asleep.

  Another hand on her shoulder awakened her. Her mother. The others were gone, their mats rolled up and put away. How long had she slept? She wiped her mouth with her T-shirt. God, she’d been drooling.

  ‘All right, darling?’ asked Annie. ‘How was the yoga? We’re going to get a coffee. Coming?’

  ‘Mmm, yes.’ Molly was groggy. She’d been dreaming about a dance class. She’d had no shoes and had to borrow some from her mother. They were too big. Her dreams were always so embarrassingly literal. She never told anyone about them, partly because there is nothing more boring than hearing about anyone’s dreams, but mostly because she felt there was nothing more boring than her own specific dreams. Not being able to fill her mother’s shoes. How pedestrian.

  Her mother helped her to her feet. The baby seemed to have shifted during the class and now it felt like there was an aggressive cement bowling ball lodged in her pelvis.

  * * *

  Annie and her friends were well known in the tiny cafe they repaired to after the class. There were only three small tables and they took all of them, after the two men sitting with newspapers took flight at the sight of so much grandmotherly activewear blustering into their space. It was like a murder of crows had muscled in on a couple of pigeons. The barista asked if they wanted the usual. Molly prided herself on not having a usual coffee order. Why would you? Life was too short to have the same thing over and over again. She asked, today, for a decaf skim latte.

  ‘That’s what we call a “Why Bother?”,’ remarked Jane, who was small and wiry, with cropped grey hair and eyelids that drooped down and rested on her eyelashes.

  ‘I’m not supposed to have caffeine,’ Molly told her.

  ‘Are you excited? About the baby?’

  Molly arranged her face to resemble that of someone who didn’t feel like there was a chainsaw cutting through her undercarriage. ‘Very excited.’

  Jane looked her in the eyes. ‘It’s okay not to be. I felt like I was walking to the gallows before my first was born. It’s very frightening, the prospect of entering a room as you and walking out as a mother.’

  ‘I’m not frightened. I’ll still be me. It’ll be great. I’m doing a preparation program called Birth World. It teaches you to build an optimal environment of your own imagining around you while you give birth. That way whatever happens, you’re protected in your own bubble of safety, where you remain in choice and power.’

  There was general unsupportive tittering.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Jane. ‘Whatever floats your boat. I opted for an epidural followed by a Caesarean, which I highly recommend. All the women I know who had their babies vaginally ended up ripped from here till Tuesday. Mark my words, if anything looks iffy, you want to get a man —’

  ‘Or a woman,’ said the one in fluorescent leopard-print leggings, who Molly thought might be called Lynn.

  ‘Excuse me, or a woman, to chop that baby straight out with a scalpel.’

  ‘And try to relax,’ added probably-
Lynn. ‘When my Fiona had her first she was so stressed I thought the baby was going to come out her face.’

  Molly wasn’t planning a Caesarean, in as much as she wasn’t planning the birth at all. She wasn’t keen on injections, so voluntarily allowing someone to saw her in half like a magician’s assistant was absolutely off the table.

  But Jane’s question brought up the undeniable fact that although she was planning to follow the Birth World method, it was, like the prenatal yoga, still no more than a plan. A few times she had gone to the laptop to sign up for one of the workshops, which came with an online program of videos and podcasts and an app that was scientifically proven to reduce Caesareans by up to forty per cent. It was just that each time she was about to put in her credit card details, she slammed the machine shut and opened up Words With Friends on her phone instead.

  Chapter 10

  Wafts of cinnamon and pepper greeted Annie and Molly on their return to Baskerville Road. ‘What are they making now?’ Molly muttered.

  ‘It smells wonderful,’ said her mum. ‘Must be the pfeffernusse Diana was talking about. She said Simon makes them every year at Christmas.’

  ‘Simon? Simon isn’t even German. Other people have traditions too. They can’t keep making us all eat German food all the time. They’re so expansionist.’

  ‘It’s some seasonal bikkies, Moll, not a Reich. And you’re welcome to cook too.’

  ‘I would if the kitchen was ever free.’

  Molly went into the sunroom and shut the door. She needed to get on with the Birth World business. The baby wasn’t going to stay inside her forever, and she had very little idea about how to get it out. Having declined all the hospital-run birth classes, she was left with the online options or relying on her body’s intrinsic biological ability to know how to birth a baby. The laptop seemed a safer bet.

  She entered her credit card details into the website, pressed play on the introductory podcast, and lay on the bed.

  Outside in the right of way, Felix and Sunny had tennis racquets and were hitting a ball against the side of Ray’s house. The rhythmic thwack pierced Molly’s tenuous concentration. Her grandfather’s study would be quieter. Having not really registered a word of the podcast so far, she sat up again and pressed the space bar to stop it.