Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tallow Cemetery boasted ample parking for the living and, in another small-town efficiency, was a convenient four-minute drive from the main street. Underfoot, the earth was dry and hard. Overhead, the sun was the sole occupant of a blue, endless sky. Between the two ancient friends, a handful of stooped mourners looped their arms around nieces or nephews in an attempt to steady themselves on the uneven, patchy trails through the ordered rows of tombstones. Catholics to the east and the rest to the west. Every now and then, a wind swung by; warm and tired and beaten by the summer heat, it took its time to move past the front gate, across the mourners, through the two gums in the back corner giving shade to a couple of dead people and out towards the horizon, where the ancient friends met again with nothing standing between them.

  ‘Too sad, too sad,’ a cigarette-soaked voice said, its owner turning around and looking back at the pile of fresh earth and the newest grave in a cemetery the size of a football field.

  Everything had been baked: the earth, the figures walking through it, the names on the graves, the patches of grass that still survived, the birds too hot to fly.

  On the other side of the fence, cows occasionally looked up at the trail of black-clad people and returned unimpressed to their interminable grazing. The fence didn’t bother the kangaroos, and their hard, black balls of shit dotted the graveyard ground like cracked pepper on a used plate. Stubby, comical shadows started to appear on the ground– a reminder that the hottest part of the day was on its way – and mourners began to whisper. Making arrangements. They returned to cars parked in slashes and dots up on the grass footpath outside the cemetery. Doors slammed and the bumpers of cars could be heard crunching on the bitumen as they bunny-hopped off the footpaths.

  Sarah and Eve stood still beside the fresh pile of earth, their feet sprinkled with red dust. Sarah had cried at the church service, wiping the tears from her cheeks efficiently and quickly. Head down, she had rubbed the rich, polished grain on her pew near her bottom, her hand moving carefully backwards and forwards, something to fixate on instead of the coffin. She had thought about Andrew not worrying enough about the neighbours’ pool and where Sebastian was every minute of the day. She had clutched the pew with both hands and tried to remember the ingredients for her special marinated prawn and scallop lime salad. Prawns, scallops and lime, naturally. Then there’s coriander, rocket, lemongrass, Spanish onion. What’s the best dressing? Lemon or …

  She had contained her tears and was doing really well until they had left the church. When she had arrived at the cemetery, she’d watched the other faces fanning out in a semicircle around her. Old faces mostly. They were veterans and knew what to do, their heads bowed, hands clutched in front, and behind them that blue sky wrapped around their shoulders somehow changing Sarah’s depth of view and making everything – the people, the grass, the sky, the cows – look two-dimensional, like a drawing. The priest had said one, maybe two lines. Sarah had cried, her face red and shining. She hadn’t been listening. She had pretended to look at the coffin but had been counting feet. There were fourteen pairs of shoes including those of the priest, who was wearing a pair of black R. M. Williams boots with a shine you could see up a girl’s skirt in.

  The last engine grew faint, and Eve spoke to its hum. They were her first words since she arrived at the church, a staccato conversation with Meg’s cousin Penny and Penny’s husband, Jeff. During the service, Eve had sat up straight, not crossing her legs, not fiddling with her handbag or perusing the funeral service sheet she clutched in her hand.

  ‘I should have worn a hat,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I forgot. I’m so careful about the sun, this sun. It burns so quickly.’ She put a hand up to her cheek and smoothed the skin down on her cheekbones in small, firm motions as though her flesh was boiling and trying to jump off her face. ‘I can feel my skin frying. It’s the worst, the worst thing for your skin. You may as well go out and get a bloody knife and start cutting lines into your face. How do they stand it? They’ve got lines on the back of their necks. The back of their necks.’

  Eve made her handbag into a visor and started for the car, her feet crunching through the grass, and then, as if she had just walked past a hat, she turned abruptly and started walking back towards Sarah, her face obscured by the slack pouch of her green leather handbag on her head, her words clear. ‘“Megan Patterson, 1976 to 2010. Death is not a foe but an inevitable adventure.”’

  Sarah didn’t know if it was a question, a statement or a test. She searched for the right reply and came up with a fail: ‘Mmm.’ With the certainty of death at her feet, it was amazing how much Sarah didn’t know out here.

  ‘We should go,’ Eve said.

  Sarah nodded. Her face was losing some of its redness now.

  The two figures followed the worn path between the graves the mourners had taken moments before. Every now and then, they passed a bunch of fake flowers on top of a stone slab; most graves were decorated only with petrified bird poo.

  ‘Imagine being buried by strangers,’ Sarah said, a step behind Eve. ‘How can that happen? I hope she wasn’t lonely. Whenever I called, she seemed happy, involved in her work. I should have gone to visit her, taken the boys, they would have liked it, all that space, seen for myself …’

  ‘Stop, Sarah. We grew up. We’ve all been living our lives. That’s what happens.’ Eve repeated, ‘Megan Patterson. What shouldn’t happen is having your own name spelt incorrectly on some pathetic little temporary wooden cross.’

  Eve kept moving on the path, her pouchy leather bag still held, by long arms like some kind of worker ant, on top of her head. Streaks of brown ran down her calf muscles where sweat and dirt had mingled and were now sliding back to the earth to rest. Every time she moved on the grass, a crunching sound was made like she was eating a packet of corn chips. She was surrounded by kangaroo shit, bugs that were bigger than her fists and dry grass that scratched at her ankles. ‘Megan. That’s not her name. It’s Meg or Meghan. “Death is not a foe?”’ Eve’s laugh sounded like pebbles being scraped together in a tin can. She stopped at the foot of the grave of Edward Ward, husband, father, grandfather, brother, 1932–1984. ‘“He is not far away.” I mean, is there someone here with a camera, filming us to post it on YouTube?’ Eve asked, turning around on the spot in a complete circle, seemingly hunting a camera. ‘“Death is not a foe.” She was thirty-four. Of course it’s a fucking foe. She would hate it. Hate it.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Sarah went to hug Eve but felt the long, tight body in a soft dress recoil instantly at her touch. Sarah whipped her arms and body away. ‘Sorry,’ she said, taking a step back onto Edward Ward.

  ‘I’m okay, Sarah.’ Eve gave Sarah’s bicep a quick, awkward squeeze. They stood for a moment between Edward’s grave and the car, the earth and sky, silence and an oversized galah screaming bloody murder above.

  ‘Christ. What is that?’ Sarah jumped, turned her entire body around and looked up in one surprisingly athletic movement to find the source. ‘What an awful sound.’

  Sarah watched a flock of galahs weave and dive through nothing and finally, en masse, land on the branches of a blue gum, their baby pink chests out of place here. Eve, she thought, with her vowels and her pale skin that couldn’t stand to be touched by anything, was out of place here. ‘We should have been the ones to organise this,’ Sarah said.

  ‘But we didn’t,’ Eve said. ‘We couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re right. We couldn’t.’ Sarah’s voice was quicker now. ‘It all happened so fast.’

  ‘We’re here now, Sarah. That’s the important thing, to be here.’

  ‘Eve?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That was kind of them today. Those people. To come out and bury a stranger. They’ve probably never had to bury a stranger.’

  ‘I know.’ Eve continued to the car. It was the last one left up on the footpath outside the cemetery gates, and both women slid onto the car seats, pushing
some of the hot air out with their bodies.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Sarah screamed and jumped out of the car, clutching the back of her thigh and turning around like a dog chasing its tail. ‘I think something just bit me. Something bit me. What is it? What is it?’

  The windows had been left open in the optimistic hope of keeping the car from reaching boiling point.

  ‘Oww, oww, oww,’ Sarah said, jumping up and down on the spot and making a hissing sound as though she was deflating.

  Eve looked at the squashed bee on the seat next to her. ‘It’s a bee, Sarah. You’ll have to get the stinger out or it will keep on stinging,’ she yelled through the open window.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t see it. It’s on the back of my thigh. Is that it? Shit, shit, shit.’

  Eve jumped out of the car and ran around to Sarah, pushing her torso forwards and her dress up so she could get to her thigh swiftly and pull the stinger out of her fleshy leg. Sarah went to swat Eve’s hand away – she was in a fat phase again – but Eve was determined and grabbed the stinger. A big, red, throbbing mound sat on the crease just beneath Sarah’s bottom.

  Sarah and Eve faced the town below, their backs towards the cemetery, shaking their heads and trying not to laugh.

  ‘Sarah,’ Eve whispered without turning. ‘There is someone here with a camera.’

  The two figures looked out across the streets, perhaps eleven in total, maybe eighty houses, which backed onto wheat fields, which met a hill, which pushed into the horizon. Their shaking heads moved the still air just for a second.

  ‘This is turning out to be a fantastic day. Woke up crying, buried Meg, bitten by a bee on a car seat,’ Sarah snorted.

  ‘Yeah, all we need to do now is to hit a kangaroo on the way to the wake, become paraplegics and have to be looked after by our mothers for the rest of our lives,’ Eve said. They both laughed, for a second unchecked, and Sarah swore she saw Eve’s eyes turn red. ‘I need a drink,’ Eve said, driving off the footpath and hitting the road with a thump. ‘Here’s to the wake.’

  They knew the numbers would be small at Meg’s other send-off, but they didn’t count on there being only eight people in the back bar of The Crown. Eve nodded at Meg’s cousin Penny and her husband, who were a decade older but could pass as Eve’s parents. Who had the fifteen or so people been at the service and grave? Perhaps they were paying their respects, felt sorry for the new doctor in town who died before she worked one day, the doctor no family claimed, but a wake was just too intimate.

  Sarah and Eve grabbed a beer and stood at the counter.

  ‘I have not had a beer in years,’ Eve announced to no one. ‘I don’t know why. It’s so good.’

  ‘Here’s to Meg,’ Sarah said, raising her glass.

  ‘To Meg.’

  There was a long pause, broken by Sarah. ‘What do you drink, then?’

  ‘Richard loves his wine. It’s become a hobby. All very grown up. He disappears into the spare room sometimes, doing I don’t know what. Sorting cases? Making lists of wine he wants to buy next? Wanking?’

  ‘At least that gives you a break,’ Sarah said, immediately annoyed with herself. Even saying it as a joke was stupid. She was married. Andrew was a good husband. He never pressured her. He knew she was tired with the boys and would leave her alone if she pretended to be asleep. ‘So what wine should I be drinking?’ Sarah asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Expensive is in at the moment.’

  ‘Good to know. I’ll write it down so next time I’m entertaining some mothers at morning tea I can give them a bottle or two to go with perfectly iced cupcakes and half-chewed Cruskits.’

  A few raised voices at the back of the room made them turn. They were talking over each other and then a man’s voice cried, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Are they talking about Meg?’ Sarah asked, turning to the small group in the corner.

  ‘I think they are talking about the weather. Do we mingle?’ Eve said, swirling the silt of her beer in her near-empty glass. ‘Tell them what we really got up to with Meg?’

  They ordered two vodkas and said nothing to each other, waving away the young girl wandering around offering a tray of hot chips and blocks of cheese on toothpicks. They watched her disappearing through the double doors, and when the doors swung back the young girl was replaced by two bodies, a man and a woman, walking towards the bar. In this crowd, these two were babies.

  The tall stranger taking off his tie and tucking it into his inside jacket pocket was bending so far to the right to hear what his little companion was saying that Eve thought he might topple over. From a distance, there was the illusion of an invisible string between his ear and the top of her head, the words coming out of her mouth grabbing him and pulling him down without mercy.

  He broke the connection for a moment to order out of the side of his mouth a lemon, lime and bitters and a schooner of whatever full-strength beer was on tap. The short woman, in a chocolate-brown linen pantsuit, continued to talk to him over his right shoulder. Her tinny voice bounced off the back wall of the bar, where all the spirits, five in total – rum, Scotch, vodka, gin and bourbon – were lined up in a row, awaiting their fate.

  ‘At least you could make it to the wake. You’re just lucky you made it this far, by the sound of it. Tim at the garage will take a look,’ she said to him, her chestnut bob shaking with ‘why would you be driving such an old make of car’ admonishment.

  He put a straw into her long glass and passed it to her while sipping the top off his schooner, his head tilting back towards an unstoppable mouth. ‘Thanks again for coming and getting me. It was bad timing. You missed the service and burial. It couldn’t get much worse,’ he said. ‘Just tell me when you want me to sort Meg’s stuff out.’

  ‘I know she has belongings at the house she rented. It’s a little way out of town. Wouldn’t have had time to unpack even, I suspect. In town two days. Two days. Hello, David.’ The chocolate-brown-linen woman nodded to a man walking past. ‘Her great-aunt, Vicky, has been a big help filling in the gaps. She’s over there, by the TV, the older lady in the charcoal top sitting down talking to Penny.’ Again, the pantsuit woman nodded to someone. ‘Thankfully, we found a relative quickly, so we could put the poor girl to rest. I couldn’t believe it. No close relatives, so to speak. Vicky didn’t even know Meg had left South Australia. I knew that was years ago from her CV. She knew the name of the family lawyer, thankfully. Sorry to sound so clinical.’

  Eve and Sarah raised their eyebrows at each other. As soon as the look was exchanged, the woman walked over in ten little steps and introduced herself. ‘Hi, you must be Eve and Sarah,’ she said. ‘I’m Georgia Thomas. What a sad way to meet. I am so sorry about Meg. It was terrible. I could tell in our brief time together she was a special person. Our community has lost someone very important to us. Or, should I say, was going to be very important to us.’

  Eve and Sarah were struck by her miniature authority, by the words straight out of a public-service announcement. Everything about her was correct and tiny. Tiny brushstrokes of perfectly subtle pink blush, carefully applied three-toned eyeshadow, a sweep of mascara, and coral-coloured lipstick – not a fly-by-night gloss – set surely into her little mouth. Her little hands went halfway around her drink, showing off watermelon-pink nail polish and an impressive wedding ring and princess-cut diamond engagement ring. Georgia was into pretty. She was also one of those people who seem in motion even when standing perfectly still. A pastel dash.

  The two old school friends stood up from their stools and finished the introductions – full names, how the day was so sad, how thankful they were to be found and told about the funeral, how grateful they were that Georgia had been so wonderful considering the brief time Meg had been in town – as though their mothers were standing behind them and keeping an eye on their manners.

  Georgia accepted their thanks and continued with her duties. ‘Eve, Sarah, this is Sam Chapman,’ she said, pointing at the rele
vant person at the relevant time. ‘It’s a terrible shame we missed the funeral. Sam’s car broke down and I had to pick him up down the highway. It all ended up taking much longer than expected.’

  ‘An absolute stuff-up,’ Sam said.

  There were awkward hugs and kisses. Eve missed his cheek completely, acknowledging the man they had heard about from Meg in telephone conversations and emails but never met. Sam, her flatmate when they started out as interns, the guy who caught an intruder on their balcony when they lived in a Sydney apartment near the hospital. The intruder had managed to climb up onto the balcony but couldn’t get out through the deadlocked front door or get back down. They remembered that one. Sam was so calm, Meg told them, so sensible. The intruder was massive, built like a public-toilet block, cornered on the balcony. Sam asked for their stuff back and then let the thief out the front door just as he would a dinner guest. Sam was a couple of amusing stories to them, not a person.

  Oblivious to the moment of discovery in front of her, Georgia asked a young woman with heavily plucked eyebrows to hang her and Sam’s jackets safely out the back. Soon, everyone was engaged in polite small talk about the service, Meg, the town – ‘Small but perfectly formed,’ Eve said, on her best behaviour. They learnt quickly that Georgia and her husband owned the town’s post office. Commerce central. The post office was a general store and the bank. For the rare tourist, it organised ‘authentic’ Australian-outback farmstays. They learnt that Sam would be coming back to Tallow two days a week as the area GP for a few months while Georgia searched for a replacement. That he had been working in a maternity hospital in Papua New Guinea when he got the news of Meg’s death. That he had been there for a year and was due home in three weeks. They learnt about the plans for Meg in Tallow. What they couldn’t help but learn was that Georgia knew more than God.