Grace's Table

by Sally Piper

  Grace felt like an alien visiting her life, the way Susan was telling it. ‘I think I must have had some kind of breakdown.’ Grace’s voice sounded old and feeble to her ears. ‘Much of that time’s a dark blot on my memory.’

  Susan looked at her in a way that reminded Grace trust was a hard-won thing.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Well, what I remember is how you’d pile Dad’s plate up high with food and watch him empty it, and then you’d add more. I don’t think he knew how to tell you he was full, like he didn’t feel he could. He put it all down to you needing to keep yourself busy, so he went along with it, ate everything you gave him. I think he believed he was keeping you happy that way.’

  ‘I was just doing my job,’ Grace said.

  ‘In spades.’

  Grace looked away from Susan’s gaze. She put the plate she was drying down on the bench carefully and took up another from the draining board.

  ‘And the lock on Claire’s wardrobe door – do you remember that?’ Susan asked.

  Grace nodded. That, she remembered.

  ‘I’d stare at it and imagine you’d put her body in there and that one night the door would fall open and she’d come tumbling out. I’d lie awake for hours some nights thinking about what she’d look like.’

  Grace had started to tremble a little. She put the plate on top of the last, barely dried, fearful she’d drop it.

  ‘Part of me was desperate to steal the key to see what you were hiding. If you hadn’t kept the damn thing round your neck the whole time I probably would have.’

  Susan rested her gloved hands on the edge of the sink, looked right at Grace. ‘You let her death ruin your marriage. How could you do that? He never understood it.’

  ‘It was already on its way to ruin. He never understood that.’

  ‘It was not.’

  ‘How would you know? It wasn’t your marriage.’

  ‘You should have patched it up. Other women lose children and don’t let their lives fall apart.’

  ‘Maybe their children didn’t die the way Claire died. And nor did their husbands handle it the way mine did.’

  ‘He had to do something. You weren’t capable.’

  Capable and grief – did they go together?

  ‘You remember her sheets?’ Susan asked.

  ‘Yes – I remember her sheets.’ Grace spoke quietly. She took yet another plate from the draining board with care, barely trusting herself to hold it but needing her hands to be busy.

  ‘It wasn’t fair. I could still smell her in the room.’

  ‘So could I.’

  She’d wanted to keep every skerrick that smelt of Claire. With Des, she scrubbed the place from top to bottom after he died, several times over, just to get rid of the smell of him – his stale tobacco, his old sweat, the California Poppy he used to oil his hair that left a grimy halo on his pillow. She washed curtains, blankets, quilts, and those things that refused to give up his scent – his pillow, his chair cushion, the clothes she couldn’t give away – she burnt in the incinerator down the back. It seemed a just act.

  ‘And I knew you slept in her bed during the day, even though you tried to hide it by straightening the covers again. I put threads across the bedspread because I had to know for sure. They were nearly always disturbed when I got in from school.’

  Grace looked at the blue concentric rings that patterned the plate she was drying. Through moist eyes the colour blurred like a spinning roulette wheel.

  She’d run a finger round and round the small blood spots on Claire’s bottom sheet, from a scab she’d have picked. Most days they’d blurred too. Some were the shape of Tasmania, others were more like Britain. She’d loved the indelibility of those spots, even as they faded to a dirty brown, tracing their permanence while she breathed deeply of Claire’s breath on the pillow.

  ‘I needed something of her.’

  ‘But what about us? Did you care what we needed? It was like sleeping in the same room as a ghost. If it wasn’t for Dad letting me fall asleep on the sofa each night and carrying me to bed later, I’d have gone mad with my fear of that room.’

  ‘Why fear? She was your sister – a child.’

  ‘Mum, I was eleven. Ghosts aren’t fond memories at that age. They’re things with fangs and claws that jump out from dark places or suck the breath from your lungs while you sleep.’

  ‘But I couldn’t just give her up – not that quickly.’

  ‘It’d been more than a year.’

  ‘Only a year.’

  ‘Dad did the right thing – getting rid of it all. It was time.’

  It’s time, Grace. She could still hear his words along with the splintering of the wardrobe. She’d clutched at the key on its chain round her neck, refusing, still, to give it up even as the crowbar did its work. And she watched as the clothes and shoes and drawings and books clattered to the floor when it sprang open.

  ‘No, he did not do the right thing.’ Grace slammed the blue plate on the bench. It broke in two. ‘It was too soon. Much too soon.’

  Nick was on the back patio when the plate broke. He came to the back door, stood with the flyscreen between him and the kitchen. Susan had her back to him; only Grace could see his troubled face.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Mum,’ Susan’s voice gentled, ‘it was always going to be too soon for you, but it needed to be done.’

  Grace closed her eyes to Susan and shook her head.

  17

  When Grace opened her eyes again she saw Peter had come into the room and that Nick now stood on the kitchen side of the screen door. Peter leant up against a wall, legs crossed at the ankles, hands dug deep in his pockets. He looked at the floor in a state of rare quietness. Grace was reminded of the insecure boy he could be. Nick seemed young, uncertain, caught in the crossfire of adult discontent.

  ‘What’s going on?’ He looked from Grace to Susan and Peter. ‘Gran?’

  Grace reached out and gripped the back of a chair. She pulled it out and sat heavily. Years of fatigue weighted her bones.

  ‘What have you been saying to her?’ Nick came up to Grace, placed a hand on her shoulder. The weight of it was comforting.

  ‘You’re too young to understand what this is about, Nick. I suggest you go back outside to the others.’

  ‘Do as your aunt says. Go.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m leaving Gran alone in here with you two.’ Nick pulled out the chair beside Grace and sat down. ‘What you say to her, you say to me.’ He stabbed a finger in his father’s direction then brought it back to touch his own chest. But all the while one leg bounced nervously under the table. Grace reached out and steadied it. She took strength from the action.

  She looked from Susan to Peter. ‘Your father had no right to do what he did. It wasn’t for him to decide when it was time. It was for me to decide. What he did was wrong.’

  Peter and Susan pulled themselves up tall, ready to disagree, Grace supposed, but she wouldn’t be put off.

  ‘And the only reason he did what he did was because he wanted to clear his conscience. By getting rid of everything that belonged to Claire he could pretend she never existed.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Susan snapped off her dishwashing gloves and threw them on the bench. ‘He got rid of everything to give us all a fresh start.’

  ‘You can’t just strike a line under a child’s death, Susan – write a new kind of beginning to suit yourself.’

  ‘Granddad got rid of everything of Aunty Claire’s?’

  Grace nodded at Nick. ‘Burnt it.’

  Nick winced. ‘Harsh.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘Harsh.’

  ‘It’s not exactly as your grandmother says. Mum was a wreck, wasn’t she?’ Peter looked to Susan, who nodded. ‘We were suf
fering. Dad made a tough call to help everyone get back on track.’

  Susan added her pitch. ‘And he thought the best way to do that was to clear the house of painful reminders.’

  ‘Rubbish! It had nothing to do with helping either of you, or me. It was about helping himself.’

  ‘Do you seriously think it was a decision he made lightly?’ Susan asked. ‘And he didn’t get rid of everything. He left all the photographs. You still had those.’

  But they weren’t enough. They only showed Claire as a little girl in shades of grey, and she was every colour other than grey. They’d had no fragrance.

  Des had wiped out Claire’s scent.

  ‘It was time for all of us to move on, Mum.’

  ‘Yes. Time,’ Peter agreed.

  Nick looked confused. ‘Excuse me if I sound a bit thick, but are there rules about this sort of thing or something? Did somebody write a book telling everybody how they’re supposed to act when someone dies?’

  ‘You’re too young to understand,’ Peter said.

  ‘You had to be there,’ Susan added.

  ‘Young – yes. Ignorant – probably. But let’s look at things the way I see it.’ Nick wrapped his arms around salt and pepper containers, empty dip packets and a half-finished packet of Starburst sweets left on the table. He drew them in towards him. ‘We’ve got Granddad here …’ he set the pepper mill out on its own, ‘telling everybody It’s time.’ He added italics to the words with a matching pair of rabbit-eared fingers. ‘Then we’ve got two kids siding with their dad …’ he shifted the salt pot and the empty baba ganoush dip container alongside the pepper, ‘because, understandably, they’re upset and want the whole thing to go aw—’

  ‘This isn’t some bloody game, Nick.’

  ‘Leave him,’ Grace snapped at Peter.

  Nick looked at Grace. She nodded, and he continued. ‘Then right over here …’ he moved the empty cream cheese container to the other side of the table, ‘we’ve got somebody whose child has died …’ he laid the packet of Starburst sweets between the divided groups, ‘being told to get over it.’ Nick looked at the scene he’d created and shook his head.

  For the first time Claire’s death brought a faint smile to Grace’s lips. Claire would love it that she’d been depicted by a packet of Starbursts. She’d always had an insatiably sweet tooth.

  ‘You’re interfering in adult business. Just leave, will you.’

  ‘Excuse me, but I am an adult, Dad. And I’m not budging.’

  ‘Why are you always threatened by people who don’t do things your way – your father’s way?’ Grace fixed her gaze on Peter. When he didn’t answer, she turned to Susan. ‘And if it had been you and not Claire, I would have kept your sheets on the bed, your wardrobe locked and full of your precious things.’

  Peter and Susan looked anywhere but at Grace.

  ‘Nick’s right. There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, just as there’s no decent amount of time for it to go on.’ Grace copied her grandson’s rabbit-eared fingers.

  ‘Just as it’s not decent to keep blaming us,’ Susan said.

  ‘I’ve never blamed either of you. You were children.’

  ‘Dad then.’ Peter said. ‘You’ve got to stop blaming him.’

  ‘Because that hurts us,’ Susan added, ‘given he was the only one trying to protect us afterwards.’

  Grace didn’t know that she could stop blaming Des. In a strange way she’d taken comfort from knowing who was responsible for Claire’s death.

  ‘Why’s anybody blaming anybody?’ Nick asked. ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, an accident,’ Peter said.

  ‘A terrible accident.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It should never have happened.’

  ‘But it did, Mum,’ Susan said. ‘And we can’t change that, only how we live with it.’

  Nick looked from Susan to Grace to Peter. He seemed confused by this mixture of gravity and anger, and sensed, perhaps, there was more to it than his nineteen years allowed him to grasp, so remained quiet.

  ‘It was such a long time ago now,’ Susan continued, softly. ‘You’ve got to let it go.’ Her words hung in the kitchen.

  But if she let Des off, declared Claire’s death a tragedy of circumstance, it would reduce it to just another senseless loss. To be able to pinpoint the moment, the events, which led to it had kept Grace grounded all these years. The alternative would be to have spent a lifetime asking the air around her How? Why? which would likely have sent her mad permanently.

  Nick spoke now, having thought his way to a new understanding. ‘Maybe they’ve got a point, Gran. Anger’s like a poison if you don’t get rid of it.’

  She studied her grandson’s stubbled and studded face. Such a rough exterior, but inside so gentle. What if Des had still had something of this softness inside him behind his coarse, indifferent exterior? What if it really was a gentler man who’d got rid of Claire’s things, genuinely believing he was doing everybody a favour?

  Grace thought back to when each of her children was born. When Des first saw Peter, he’d looked at her, still exhausted and sore from delivering him, and said, ‘You’ve done well, doll. He’s a little beauty.’ He then laid a gentle hand on her cheek, kissed her, allowed his face to linger against hers a while. She remembered how his chin was smooth and smelt of Sunlight soap; his palm soft, careful. He did the same thing three times over and each time that tender act offered a sweet release from the war of her labour.

  Thinking again about the day he’d gathered together all the traces of Claire and carried them out of the house in a hessian sack like unwanted kittens … there’d been wet streaks on his cheeks; she’d never seen that before. And they were still there when he came back in, some time later, smelling of smoke and looking older.

  Grace sighed with the weight of such thoughts. Had she allowed herself to be poisoned by her anger, as Nick suggested? If so, then her children had allowed themselves to be also …

  ‘Have the pair of you been able to put your father’s death aside, as you expect me to do with Claire’s?’ she asked. ‘A fresh start is the ticket to recovery you say, but I wonder, does that apply to all of us?’

  Susan and Peter didn’t answer. But Grace knew her point wasn’t lost: each of them shifted their gaze around the room.

  She answered for them. ‘No. I thought as much. There are two sets of rules – one for you and one for me.’

  ‘But this is where we come to remember him,’ Susan said. ‘This was his home …’

  Peter went ahead: ‘And it’s not right his place being taken by somebody else.’

  ‘Who’s taken whose place?’

  Grace reckoned she could answer Nick’s question in a word. ‘Jack.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’

  ‘A friend,’ Grace said.

  ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘I suppose you could call him that.’

  Jorja came in and filled a glass with water from a jug in the fridge. She downed it in one. ‘You coming back out, Nick? I’m getting slaughtered by those midgets.’

  Nick was too distracted to answer. ‘I never knew you had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Who’s got a boyfriend?’ Jorja asked.

  ‘Gran has.’

  ‘Cool. What’s his name?’

  ‘Jack, apparently.’

  ‘Is he handsome?’ Jorja rested her elbows on the island bench, eyes bright with the prospect of gossipy girl-talk as she looked at Grace.

  ‘Jorja,’ Susan snapped, ‘I don’t think that’s really relev—’

  ‘At my age?’ Grace cut in.

  Peter tried to take charge. ‘I think it’s high time all children left the room. Now.’

  ‘Oh, I get it.’ Nick looked from stern-faced father to sullen aunt. ‘You two don’t like it.’

/>   ‘Why wouldn’t they like it?’ Jorja asked. ‘Granddad’s been dead for years, hasn’t he?’

  ‘No bloody respect,’ Peter blustered.

  ‘Dad, when are you going to learn bullying us is a waste of time? Sooner or later we all end up ignoring you and you just sound like some old bleating sheep lost down the back of a paddock.’

  Grace liked the analogy. So would Pa.

  ‘Why isn’t he here today, Grandma?’

  Grace didn’t speak, but Nick saw the answer.

  ‘Because there are two sets of rules, Jorja.’

  18

  Neither of her children could look at her; Grace saw it in the brisk way they undertook tasks, and how they’d defaulted to over-politeness.

  Nick and Jorja had gone back outside, though Grace wished they hadn’t: their straightforward way of interpreting the past was refreshing.

  ‘Paper plates would have been the ticket.’ Peter slung a tea towel over one shoulder then stacked the last of the dried plates together. He looked as ungainly as Des would have on the end of a feather duster. ‘Though I expect Nick and Jorja would’ve had something to say about that, now they’ve gone completely green on us. Which cupboard?’ he asked Grace, lifting the weighty pile from the bench.

  ‘They’re from the china cabinet in the dining room. Leave them there. I can put them away later.’

  ‘It’s okay. Dining room it is.’ He left the room with the crockery, tea towel still in place, escape perfectly executed.

  Susan carefully put some of Kath’s biscuits on a plate, then poured the boiling water into the plunger. The ground coffee released its fragrant aroma like a freshly opened box of chocolates. Grace had drunk so many cups after Claire’s death, giving her hands and mouth a distraction, when her fingers ached to curl into fists and her tongue to spit mean words. Perhaps she should have allowed these hands their freedom, let them punch the walls, scratch, claw; opened her mouth to scream at the moon. It might have given Susan and Peter permission to do the same.