This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  Walking through the house, she was struck by how much lighter and more modern it felt than their place. It was a similar layout, and it hadn’t been renovated either, but it was more sparsely furnished. She hadn’t quite realised how crowded and cluttered it had been feeling next door, with so many of them living together, their possessions layered over the remnants of her parents’ lives. It was like living in a compost heap.

  Naomi led the way to the kitchen, where Patrick was sitting at the table, eating a bowl of porridge. He put his spoon down when Annie appeared, and stood up.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’ Annie didn’t know what to do or say next. Hug him? Shake hands? What was the protocol for surprise brothers?

  Naomi couldn’t stand the tension. ‘Oh, for god’s sake, give him a hug, Mum. He’s your brother.’

  Annie launched herself at Patrick and hugged him tightly. He even felt like her father. Warmth spread through her body and her eyes stung with tears. Letting him go, she rubbed them away.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re so like him.’

  ‘Just to look at,’ said Patrick, tensing up. ‘Otherwise I’m more like Ray.’

  ‘Of course, of course you are.’ Annie was thrown. Of course he didn’t want to be compared to Robert. ‘When did you know about my dad?’

  ‘When I was eighteen,’ said Patrick. ‘You know I was a baby when Heather dragged me off around the world. She wouldn’t tell me who my father was. It was like she thought it was some exciting mystery. She never mentioned Ray, or this house, or even Sydney. I knew I was Australian, because I’d seen my passport. And your passport says where you were born, so as soon as I turned eighteen I applied for a copy of my birth certificate. It listed Ray as my dad. So I just looked him up in the phone book and came home to him as soon as I could afford a plane ticket.’

  Naomi placed two cups of tea down on the table and pulled out a chair for Annie. ‘Sit,’ she ordered. ‘You’ve got a lot to catch up on.’

  Annie tried to put the years together in her head. ‘So, you were eighteen, which means that was what, twenty-two years ago, is that right?’ Where had she been? Had it been summer when he’d come back? Had she and the kids been there? Could they have met and uncovered all this twenty-two years ago? What would have happened to her parents if it had come out then?

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t stay long. A few weeks that first time. My dad was honest with me, straight away. He told me he wasn’t my biological father. Robert was. He told me my mum and Robert had an affair.’

  ‘I like that he was honest with you.’

  ‘I liked that too,’ said Patrick. ‘I was very angry, though. Not at Ray, but at Heather and Robert. I wanted to go and confront your father. Ray convinced me not to. What would have been the point? Besides, he was so happy to have me back. I couldn’t do it to him. He was my father. He’d been looking for us ever since Heather took me away. Biology doesn’t mean anything to Ray. It’s about who you love, that’s what he says. And he loved me for the first two years of my life. “You were mine.” That’s what he said to me. “You were my little boy.” He told me I would always be his boy, if that’s what I wanted. It was the first time I ever felt loved. Because I can’t imagine Heather was a particularly caring mother when I was a baby. She wasn’t for the years I can remember her, so it stands to reason she wasn’t much better when I was really little.’

  Sadness and rage battled for supremacy inside Annie’s head. Her heart broke for poor Ray, who loved his boy so much, and who’d missed out on his whole childhood because Heather was bored by suburban life.

  ‘So when Ray told me the truth, he also told me that as far as he was concerned I had one father and that was him. I said we should at least tell Robert so he could choose to have me in his life or not, but Dad told me Robert already knew. He’d always known. Heather told him when she was pregnant and he didn’t care. She asked him to leave his wife — your mum — but he wouldn’t. I can see his reasoning, to be honest. Ray’s always said your mum was nice, and Heather’s a nightmare. Heather hung around for a couple more years, hoping he’d change his mind.’

  ‘But he’d broken it off, dumped her, once she was pregnant?’ Annie tried to reconcile this with her own memories of her father.

  ‘More or less. Ray says he sort of strung Heather along. Kept seeing her, on and off. He played with people, your dad. He wasn’t kind.’

  Annie wanted to throw up. This had to be bullshit. None of it could be right. Not her father. But a horrible recognition was creeping over her, like mould blooming on her memories. It fit. This was true. She hadn’t known this particular fact, but she had known her father. What she’d characterised to herself as his casual carelessness with people’s feelings hadn’t been casual. ‘You missed a spot,’ he’d always said to her mother. It had been deliberate cruelty. She’d just not wanted to see it because he’d always been good to her.

  ‘Ray said he’d understand if I wanted to confront Robert. But he was right. What would have been the point?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Annie, for want of anything better to say.

  ‘You don’t need to say that. You had no idea.’

  Through the window they heard shouts. Paul was ordering people around in the back garden. Fragments drifted in: ‘Right, that’s the crease. There. No — there, where the chalk is. You’re out if it gets caught on the full or you hit the cat.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Naomi. ‘They’re not doing the Boxing Day Test, are they?’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ said Annie. ‘Why’s he resurrecting that? It’s been two decades.’

  ‘He’ll be doing it because of Pa.’

  ‘I know,’ said Annie. ‘But he could choose not to. Quite apart from the fact that my dad was a complete arsehole to Paul for nearly twenty years, I mean, read the room: Dad hasn’t come out of this week smelling of roses, has he? Perhaps a memorial cricket match in his honour is not the most appropriate choice.’

  ‘Maybe he thinks you want something nice to commemorate him. It was always fun the way we did the Boxing Day Test when we were kids.’

  ‘It wasn’t, but I’m glad you remember it fondly. It was only ever fun for about ten minutes and then Pa would half-accuse someone of cheating or something and it would all end in tears.’

  Patrick stood and drained his tea. He put his porridge bowl in the sink. ‘I’m going back in to sit with Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Do you need anything?’ Annie asked. ‘Is he in pain?’

  ‘No, he’s got enough morphine,’ said Patrick. ‘The palliative care nurse said he could go any time. It seems a bit vague, doesn’t it?’

  ‘They told me that too,’ said Annie. ‘My dad only had a couple of days after they said that. But I know it varies enormously. Is the nurse coming back today?’

  ‘If we need them,’ he said. ‘At the moment we don’t.’

  * * *

  Annie walked back to the house and went straight to the piano. Outside, the Boxing Day Test raged on, but she ignored it. Once her fingertips were resting on the keys, she felt she could breathe again. How had she gone for so long without writing songs? Now she felt she couldn’t stop. The words and the music were flowing like they had never done before. Truly, it was as if she’d picked off a scab and was bleeding songs.

  Everything in her life suddenly felt like material, and memories she had closed the door on came drifting back like smoke. She remembered her mother, ten years earlier, beginning to lose herself to dementia, sitting in tears on the sofa one morning, her head in her hands, saying, ‘It’s like you never knew me’ — repeating those words over and over again. Now Annie wrote it down, and sang the line to herself, repeating it like her mother had, until she found a melody to hold its hand, and phrases to put their arms around it.

  In an hour the song was fully roughed out, and she moved on to working on ‘Not the Girl Next Door’. When she’d started it a few days back, she’d been thinking about Heather,
and who she might have become. Now, in the light of what she knew, the song shifted. She altered the perspective: now it was her mother looking at Heather next door. It became a jealous song, with undercurrents of dissatisfaction and rage, and it swept Annie away even as she created it. She didn’t know how her mother had seen Heather, whether she had ever known about the affair, but Heather and Robert were such narcissistic, thoughtless people that Annie couldn’t imagine they’d been very subtle. Her poor mother. Trapped there, her whole life devoted to her husband and her daughter, and her only creative outlet drawing secret pictures of the houses that made up her suburban prison. Annie felt like smashing something. Instead she kept playing.

  Chapter 30

  ‘Mum’s having some sort of crisis all over the piano,’ whispered Simon, sticking his head into the sunroom where Molly was changing Petula’s nappy. ‘I need to hide from her and the cricketing maniacs out the back.’

  ‘Get a warrant,’ she told him.

  He came in anyway, and sat on her bed. ‘Phew, open a window.’

  ‘You open a window,’ she replied, irritated. ‘And leave Mum alone. She’s had a pretty shit Christmas.’

  ‘I had a shit Christmas too,’ he protested. ‘Can you imagine how I felt when everyone found out?’

  ‘Like the thieving idiot you are, I imagine.’ Molly snapped Petula’s onesie back on and patted her tummy.

  ‘Can I . . . have a hold?’ Simon asked, tentatively.

  Molly paused for a second, then handed the baby to him. ‘As long as you support her head. And don’t pawn her.’ She flopped down on the bed beside them. ‘Seriously, though: gambling and stealing from work? What the hell, Simon?’

  ‘I fucked up. Big time. Mum’s just not talking about it, and Dad keeps trying to sit me down to have big chats. I think maybe she’s told him he has to deal with me because she has to deal with you.’

  ‘You’re worse than me. I don’t need them. I’ve got Jack.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got Di.’

  ‘I don’t like your wife, as a general rule, but she’s being way nicer to you about this than I would be.’

  ‘Yeah. Honestly, I thought she might leave me when she found out.’

  ‘I would have. For sure.’

  ‘You’re an arsehole, though.’

  Molly nodded in agreement.

  ‘Diana’s angrier than she comes across,’ he added. ‘We haven’t . . . you know . . . since it happened.’

  ‘Ew, Simon.’ Molly screwed up her face in disgust. ‘Priorities.’

  ‘It’s only because I found a support group to go to here, and have actually been to it a few times, that she even agreed to come to Sydney, and I haven’t been sure she won’t piss off back with Felix at any moment. It’s horrible, Molly. I’ve let them down so badly.’

  Molly didn’t say anything for a while. She pressed her finger into Petula’s palm and watched her daughter’s fingers instinctively curl over to grasp her.

  Finally she spoke. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Start again, I suppose. Here. Hopefully Mum will agree to sell up, and I can take my cash and buy a business or something.’

  ‘Jesus, you haven’t learned anything, have you? Get a normal job, Simon. Be a dogsbody for a while. Why would Mum give you a massive chunk of cash right now? That’s like asking an alcoholic to hold your beer while you go to the loo.’

  ‘But I’ve stopped. I’m not gambling any more.’

  ‘Might that be because you have no money?’

  ‘No, I’ve properly stopped. I promise.’ He nuzzled Petula’s cheek. ‘This is a seriously nice baby, Moll.’

  ‘She’s all right.’ Molly pulled her hand away and turned to fold a pile of her daughter’s tiny clothes. Petula was getting through an astonishing number of outfits every day. ‘We did the wrong thing, keeping the stuff about Pa and Heather a secret from Mum. That was the worst way she could have found out. And you shouldn’t have destroyed the letters.’

  Simon nodded. ‘I feel bad about that. Do you think it’s sent her off the deep end?’ With his foot he nudged open the door and a swirl of violent piano chords swept in. He closed it again.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t have that passionate artist thing she has. It doesn’t make sense to me. Naomi has it too, about her spiritual stuff and her aura-painting bullshit. Have you got something that makes you feel that, I don’t know, consumed?’

  ‘Poker makes me feel like that.’

  ‘Oh. You’re going to have to take up pottery or making sourdough or something instead now, aren’t you?’

  Suddenly the music stopped. They heard the piano lid slam shut, then their mother’s footsteps racing up the stairs.

  ‘Has she fully lost it?’ asked Simon.

  They listened again, but all was quiet. ‘Maybe. It’s got to have been a shock, finding out Pa was a filthy cheater.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not like she’s the first person in the world that’s happened to. Our father went off with a bloke and we didn’t all lose our tiny minds.’

  ‘Or did we?’ Molly replied ruefully.

  Footsteps came down the stairs again, and the door was pushed open. Annie stood there, a large cardboard box in her hands, her hair sweaty and dishevelled, her fringe sticking up.

  ‘You need to see these,’ she said, and dumped the box on the bed beside Simon.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Hopes and dreams. Dissatisfaction, repression, unfulfilled creative ambition.’

  A daddy-long-legs crawled out of the box and ambled across the sheet.

  ‘And spiders,’ said Simon.

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ Annie told him. ‘I found these the other day. Look at them. Look.’ She wrenched open the box and tossed a sketchbook to each of them. ‘They were my mother’s. She taught herself to draw houses. They’re meticulous. Look, perfectly to scale. She had books on draughtsmanship, and grid paper, and for years — decades — she drew all these houses. Every house around here.’

  ‘They’re amazing,’ said Simon. ‘Really good.’

  ‘She never showed them to anyone, as far as I know. She just drew and drew and hid them away because no one gave a shit. That isn’t fair, and it isn’t good for people. All my mother did was care for everyone else. For Dad, and me, and Paul, Brian, you guys. Her whole life. She even tried to help Heather. And no one — myself included — ever saw her, or actually looked at her as a person, or wondered if she had more to offer the world than free childcare and really good scones.’

  Molly and Simon made sorrowful faces and too-bad sounds. Annie looked wildly at them.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Simon, uncertain what she wanted from him.

  ‘I do not want that to happen to me,’ she said quietly. ‘I deserve a chance to be heard and seen, and I’m going to let myself have that chance.’ She put the books back into the box, picked it up and walked out.

  ‘That was dramatic,’ said Simon, making his eyes wide and clutching at imaginary pearls around his neck. ‘Is it The Change, do you reckon?’

  ‘She went through menopause years ago, Simon.’

  ‘Oh. Well, how was I meant to know? And if it’s not that, then why’s she behaving like this now?’

  ‘You really don’t understand humans, do you? She literally just said: she doesn’t want to continue her role as a carer. She wants to do something more with her life.’

  ‘What, you don’t think she’s seriously going to do anything with her music, do you? She’s a hundred years old.’

  ‘At least she knows what she wants. It’s more than either of us can say.’

  * * *

  Ray’s room was dim, the curtains drawn against the bright summer sun. Patrick offered to open them, but Ray preferred the darkness. It made sense, Patrick thought. Animals went to quiet dark places to die. They sought peace too.

  ‘Howzat!’ A shout from next door’s cricket match broke the silence, and Ray’s eyes flicked open. He looked lost, until his gaze f
ound Patrick.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad. Are they being too loud? I can go ask them to keep it down.’

  ‘No, don’t leave me, Patty. Don’t go play cricket with them.’ He clutched Patrick’s hand in confusion.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Don’t play with Robert. He cheats.’

  ‘Robert’s gone, Dad. He died.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ray, closing his eyes. ‘He was awful.’

  Outside, a child squealed with delight.

  ‘I’ll just call out and ask them to be a little bit quieter.’ Patrick went to stand up.

  ‘No, don’t. I like to hear the kids. I missed you, Patrick,’ he said, and tears seeped out from under his closed eyelids. ‘I missed you all the time.’

  ‘I know, Dad. I missed you too. But I’m here now.’

  ‘Why did those kids next door behave so badly at Christmas?’ Ray said. Patrick recognised this was one of his father’s brief lucid periods and leaned closer. ‘When they realised about you?’

  ‘I think they’re worried I’m going to claim half of Robert’s house.’

  Ray gave a tiny smile. ‘Good heavens. What’s that house worth? Two million? If someone said it’d cost you a million dollars to not get mixed up with those people, I reckon that’d be a bargain at twice the price. You don’t need that house. You don’t need that money. This house is yours. Always has been.’

  ‘Thank you, Dad.’

  ‘I’ve given those people enough,’ Ray went on. ‘I’ve spent forty years hating that man. What a waste. Hate’s an expensive emotion. It takes more than you think. Don’t give them any more of our time, Pat. Don’t get mixed up in arguing about that place. Sell this house, take the money and walk away.’

  ‘What if I want to stay? The neighbours aren’t so shitty any more.’

  ‘Do what you like, boyo. Just don’t feel that you need to stay here on my account.’ He coughed, and struggled for breath for a moment. Patrick gave him a sip of water from a cup with a straw.

  ‘Heather,’ said Ray.

  ‘I know, she’ll try to get your house. I won’t let her, Dad.’