This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  She took her grandmother’s ancient slow cooker from under the bench and plugged it in. When Simon appeared with the next boxes, she chopped and threw in an onion, celery, carrots, garlic and parsley, then topped up the cooker with water. How does she know how to do things like that? Molly wondered. She didn’t have a recipe out. Simon headed back out to the car for the last load.

  ‘What are you making?’ Molly asked her sister.

  ‘Some vegetable soup for Ray.’

  ‘Right-of-Way Ray?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s not well.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Patrick told me.’

  ‘Oh. Very not well?’

  Naomi stopped grinding pepper into the soup and looked at her. ‘Why are you asking so many questions?’

  ‘Why do you care how many questions I ask?’

  Naomi didn’t answer, but turned back to the soup. Molly hated the way her sister had always refused to argue with her. It almost made the last word seem not worth having.

  Chapter 15

  From her bedroom window, Annie watched Molly leave for work, walking haltingly down the street towards the bus stop. She was really at that lumbering stage now. The baby wasn’t going to stay in for much longer. Annie remembered well the purgatory of late pregnancy and she didn’t envy Molly.

  The heat was rising, the closer they got to Christmas. Still, there was meant to be a cool change that afternoon, and the forecast for the next week or so was mild, with rain. Sometimes Sydney did that at Christmas. It was as if the city looked at people’s expectations of it — at their carefully planned seafood menus and ornate Ottolenghi salads, at their halter-neck dresses and fake-tanned legs — and decided to take them down a peg. Goose bumps and cardigans, too wet to send the kids outside — these were not out of the question for Christmas Day in Sydney, and it looked like it might happen again this year. Better than a heatwave and bushfires, though.

  Annie felt some sympathy for the weather. She too would like to rebel against the festivities. Today was set aside in her calendar for a bus trip into the city, to battle the crowds in the department stores for gifts and festive bits. She would inevitably end up buying her children books they would probably never read, or shirts that didn’t fit. At least the grandchildren had made long and specific wish-lists.

  It was pure sentimentality that took her the hour’s bus ride to the city, anyway. There were plenty of local shops, both big centres and the small businesses she knew she should support, but the memories of catching the bus with her own mother, drinking a milkshake on the ramp beside Wynyard Station and admiring the decorated windows of David Jones were strong. They seemed to grow stronger every year.

  But she liked going into the city less and less. She’d have the memories regardless of whether she took on the hordes in Pitt Street Mall or not. Today, she decided, she’d stay at home, and get the last presents from the local shops. After all, everyone was trekking into town that night anyway to see Carols in the Domain. This way she wouldn’t have to carry her shopping around all evening too.

  Simon was in the kitchen when she went down to make a cup of tea, leaning against the counter, looking at his phone and frowning. Something was bubbling gently in Jean’s old wood-veneer slow cooker. She lifted the lid and peered in: vegetable stock. Naomi’s work, she imagined.

  ‘Good morning, love,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘What? Yep. All good. Coffee?’

  She flicked on the kettle. ‘No, I’ll make a tea. Who’s up?’

  ‘Everyone,’ he said. ‘It’s eight thirty. The mums took the kids to the beach. Naomi’s already been to the fruit and veg market. Molly’s gone to work. Dad and Brian are out the back, doing something garden-related. You off shopping?’

  ‘In a bit.’ She took her tea into the living room and sat at the piano.

  She went through the songs she’d accumulated over the week. They were good. They were still good. And there was another one coming now. The melody had been in her mind when she woke up. This was extraordinary.

  She played the parts of the song she had, but before she could lose herself in it again, Brian and Paul came in from the garden. Brian was carrying a red plastic bucket and stood at the door, tilting it at her so she could see it was filled with passionfruit.

  ‘Fancy making an absolutely massive pavlova?’

  ‘Not even remotely,’ she told him. ‘But you can. Knock yourself out.’ She turned back to the piano and put her hands on the keys.

  Paul’s voice interrupted her as soon as she played the first notes. ‘Where’s the recipe?’

  Annie scrunched her eyes closed for a few seconds. ‘What?’

  ‘Your mum’s pav recipe. Have you got it handy?’

  She took two slow deep breaths, but there was lava inside her. In a quiet voice, she said, ‘Where have you looked so far?’

  Paul was confused. ‘Nowhere. I thought you’d know where it is.’

  ‘I do know where it is. It’s where my mother’s recipes have always been. Since you first met her, more than forty years ago. Do you know where that might be?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Paul was delighted. ‘I do know. The wooden box in the cupboard beside the stove. I knew that.’

  ‘Then why did you ask me?’ That Annie was shouting came as a surprise to them all, including her.

  There was an awkward silence. ‘Sorry,’ said Paul. ‘I didn’t realise that was the wrong thing to do.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Is it a bit much, having us all staying with you?’ he asked. ‘Would it be easier if Brian and I cleared out?’

  Annie sighed. ‘Paul, no. You’re fine. Individually, everyone is fine. On a case-by-case basis, each of you is a perfectly good houseguest and I love you all. It’s just that if everyone asks me one unnecessary thing every day — just one thing they could have figured out for themselves — then that’s nine times I get interrupted.’

  ‘What are we interrupting?’ he asked. ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve written some songs. They’re the first I’ve done in years and years, and I’ve done them all by myself and I’m a tiny bit excited. I’m also terrified, because obviously I’m a hundred and what am I going to do with a bunch of songs? But I’ve found . . . a flow, and so when people come and ask me things like where is my mother’s pavlova recipe, I sort of want to kill them. Even lovely people like you.’

  ‘Songs for the band?’ Paul’s face lit up. ‘For us?’

  She stared at him. ‘No. Not for the band. For me.’

  * * *

  Molly’s bus ride into the city was uncomfortable, and surprisingly full for so late in the month. Why hadn’t all these people gone on holidays yet? Today her back had started aching more when she stood, but her pelvis hurt when she sat and, although a man had given up his seat for her, there was an old woman on the other side leaving nowhere to put her handbag except wedged between the front of her stomach and the back of the seat in front. She had at least two more weeks of feeling like this to get through and maybe more, although thank Christ definitely no more work and probably no more bus rides.

  When Simon called she hung up immediately and texted: On the bus.

  What about next door? he replied. Should I go introduce myself to Patrick?

  Typical, that was. Simon asked for more time to figure things out about Patrick, but he had no actual plan of how he was going to go about it.

  What could be gained from talking to Patrick? They might figure out whether he knew he was Pa’s child. They might discover if he was planning to contest Pa’s will. But if he didn’t know, Simon was exactly the right person to blunder in and accidentally tell him. She would do some subtle investigation, maybe by introducing herself to Patrick. Simon needed to stick to online research about estate law.

  She messaged, Wait until I get home. Do some googling re wills like you’re meant to, and returned to gazing out the window of the slow-moving bus at p
eople in their cars leaving the city for the holidays. Every vehicle had Christmas presents jammed up against the back windscreen, and pillows, toys, bikes, cases of beer. Missing from her childhood memories of that situation were the little faces staring out of the windows, bored already. Today she saw those faces in profile, staring at screens attached to the headrests of the front seats. Jack said they wouldn’t do that when they had kids, and she agreed, in principle, but she was starting to see the appeal now she was looking down the barrel of eighteen years of road trips with a kid.

  Being a child these days looked excellent. They had exactly the sort of technology she and her siblings had longed for. She remembered the conversations they used to have: ‘Imagine if you could watch TV in the bath.’ ‘Imagine if you could see where people were on a screen, and, like, track them.’ ‘Imagine you had every single album in the world, and you could listen to them whenever you wanted.’ ‘Imagine if you missed your show, and you forgot to set the video, imagine if you could just watch it again any time you liked.’

  It had all come true. The world was very cool now. Apart from climate collapse and the incipient fall of democracy, obviously.

  Things were better for women now too. No one was expecting Molly to give up her career to have this baby. Which was annoying actually: it would be very convenient to be told to quit her job right now. But still, women started new and better careers when they had babies these days, what with workplaces being so much more flexible. A niggling voice whispered a quiet hope inside her, though, that didn’t fit at all with her assessment of the brave new world she would be entering as a mother. Be a boy, she thought.

  She sent the telepathic message to the baby, and it squirmed. What did that mean? Was it an affirmative wriggle? It was so stupid to wonder that. It would take one phone call to her GP to learn if the baby was a boy or a girl. The test results from early pregnancy gave that information as a matter of course, but she and Jack had chosen to wait for a surprise. And yet every day she found herself unwittingly sending the same thought to the baby. Please be a boy. Every day she noticed more and more how easy things were for boys, and how hard things were for girls.

  It was there at work all the time: the men who hired her to sort out their domestic settings did so with pride. Such work was beneath them, they had the funds to outsource it, so what was there for them to worry about? It was a straightforward transaction. But the women? They also hired her but they apologised endlessly for it, and they flitted about the places where she was trying to work trailing clouds of guilt and shame for needing her services. It was ridiculous.

  Today’s job would be an easy one, and her last ever, with any luck. She was more and more certain she wasn’t going back after the baby was born. She would take a few months off for maternity leave, and then she’d start something new.

  Mum would help with the baby. Molly wouldn’t actually mind if the work on the flat took longer and they had to stay in Baskerville Road for a while. Things were a bit overcrowded just now, but once Christmas was over and Simon and Naomi and their families and Brian and Dad had all gone home, it would be spacious and peaceful. Her mother would probably actually like them to stay. Maybe they’d rent out their flat and move in for a year, to give her some company.

  Back when she first found out she was pregnant, Molly had looked into the daycare situation in her area, but all the centres had been so expensive. If she was going to be starting a new business, they wouldn’t have hundreds of dollars a day to spare. Besides, all the good places were full, and had huge wait-lists. Apparently if you hadn’t enrolled before the wee on your pregnancy test was dry, you were likely to end up with your only option being two days a week in a family daycare run by crack-addicted murderers with an unfenced pool and a dangerous dog. And they probably wouldn’t even be the days you worked. So she hadn’t bothered putting the baby on any wait-lists at all.

  It would be so much nicer to share the care with her mum. She hadn’t actually got round to confirming that with Annie. She couldn’t say why. It wasn’t as if her mum would say no. She’d be desperate for some purpose now that Pa had died. She really should just ask her and get it sorted.

  The apartment she was working in that day was on the twenty-third floor of a luxury building — the five-bedroom home of a man called Pierre Reed and his family. Pierre worked for Google in some high-up capacity, and he spent a lot of time travelling. His wife, Bridget, worked there too, and Molly had only ever seen them wear a uniform of leather trousers and silk shirts, with trainers that looked like box-fresh all-terrain vehicles. They were an exceedingly cool couple. They worked almost all the time, though the contents of their home suggested they did nothing but buy toys for their two kids. If it weren’t for the merciless culls Molly and Tien carried out, the family would have long since disappeared, sucked into a quicksand pit of Shopkins and Pokemon merchandise and Lego.

  Neither Bridget, Pierre nor the children were home today. They were in France, on a skiing holiday, and their doorman let Molly into the apartment. Her task was to sort through the children’s clothes, culling anything that was too small and making a list she would then use to order replacements from an approved selection of websites.

  Work like this was better when the client wasn’t around. Bridget wasn’t one of the clients who constantly apologised for having hired her, but when she was home she did tend to hang about making loud business calls, as if to make sure Molly knew she was working.

  The task was methodical. Without the children there to try on the clothes, she was probably discarding things that still fit, seeing as the sizing varied brand to brand, but she had to follow the brief. It seemed very wasteful. She thought about taking some of the nicer pieces home for her own baby, but it would be years before they fit, she’d have to put them in a box and label them and store them and it seemed too much like more work.

  She considered what it would be like to do this for her own child. Her mind whispered a word she pretended not to hear. Boring. Shut up. It will be so boring. And you will be so tired. Stop it, she told herself. Then she spoke out loud to the baby: ‘I can’t wait to meet you.’ She wondered how much of what she felt was transferring to it. Could ambivalence flow through the umbilical cord? Was her uncertainty sending negative energy waves through the amniotic fluid?

  ‘How about a kick?’ She waited but there was nothing. The baby was quiet today.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just text your grandmother,’ she told her tummy. ‘I’m obviously not doing so well at the in-person conversation, so maybe it’s better if I put it to her in writing. She’s going to be over the moon to spend time with you. She’s probably been dying for me to ask.’

  She left the older child’s room, where she was shifting his wardrobe from size eight to size nine, and headed back to the open-plan living area where her phone was.

  Hi Mum, she typed. Hope you’re having a good day. Are you still (might as well give the impression she’d already asked) keen to do a few days a week with the baby when I start working again? (No need to be specific about what work she would be doing, or when.) Just trying to get our ducks in a row. Xx M. She added a line of six duck emojis, sent it, and went back to work.

  Chapter 16

  Once Annie had explained to Paul and Brian what she was doing at the piano so much, they tried very hard to leave her alone. They managed it for almost half an hour, during which time they bumbled around in the kitchen, separating eggs and whisking the whites, weighing sugar using Annie’s mother’s old Imperial balance scales, and fiddling with the oven. They were like pantomime actors pretending to be quiet, but their stage-whispered conversations carried through to the living room just as much as their normal voices had.

  As if in protest, the song she had been working on lay down like a toddler refusing to walk in a supermarket, and no matter what she did it felt heavy or wriggled away from her.

  After an hour she gave up and went into the kitchen. Her phone lay on the table and she picked it up
. There was a message from Molly. Opening it, she held her breath. There it was. Exactly like Jane had warned her: a request for a childcare commitment. Shit. She closed the message without replying.

  Paul and Brian were reading cookbooks and drinking tea, so she took a mug from the cupboard and joined them, hoping the movements of pouring and sipping would help dissolve the sudden panicked rage she was feeling.

  Holding the warm cup with both hands, she considered that a few weeks ago she wouldn’t have reacted like this: her whole body flooding with adrenaline, as if she needed to kick her way out of this situation. But that was before the songs had come back. Calm down, she told herself. You are not a hostage. You have options. Money. Rationally she realised it probably wasn’t specifically her mother’s time Molly wanted here: it was free childcare. And the money from the house, if she chose to sell it, could provide that. She didn’t want to respond to Molly now. She needed to think.

  Paul and Brian were discussing the relative merits of a chewy versus a foamy pavlova base, when Simon came in, his hair still damp from his post-run shower. He stopped in surprise at the sight of her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, grabbing a glass and gulping down water.

  ‘I think you’ll find I live here at the moment.’

  ‘No, I mean, I thought you were going to the city.’

  ‘I was, but I changed my mind.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Is that a problem? Did you need me out of the house for some reason?’

  ‘Of course not. Not at all. Why would I want you out of the house?’

  ‘Great, then,’ she said, and turned back to the cookbook she was leafing through.

  Simon was still standing at the sink looking at her. ‘It’s only that I’ve got a friend popping in. I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘It won’t disturb me if you have a friend over. Is it someone I know?’