by Tracy Farr
‘You can borrow it. If you want. I’m trying not to look back at it while I work. I want to leave myself room to move away from the stories, to really retell them my own way. They’re really vivid in my head.’ He rubs his hand over his hair, musses it behind his head on the right, behind his ear, jabs his finger at his glasses.
Luce doesn’t answer him. She’s settled into the corner of the sofa, her legs pulled up by her side. She has turned to the first page of the first story in the book.
All my girls, in the kitchen!
Iris, passing the doorway to the big room, sees Kurt and Luce there together. She stops, leans against the door frame, pretends to sort through the collected tat on the sideboard in the hallway – old keys, bits of paper and notepads, feathers and stones, unmatched hose connector pieces – but really, she’s listening, watching. She watches the two of them sitting there, their heads together over an open book, the shapes of their heads – the shape they form together – so familiar. Their hunches match each other, their rounded shoulders containing self; cousins, but they could be siblings. She sees only the crowns of their heads, sees only similarity. The book – landscape, black cover – is open on the low table in front of them. Kurt’s finger points to the page, jabs it three times, then flicks up in the air, fingers pinched in to thumb, then pause – beat – then his hand sweeps to the side, palm down, fingers spread in a gesture of no way!, then he jabs his finger twice at the next page. He opens both hands outwards, palms up, arms moving outwards, shoulders lifting in a gesture of showmanship. Luce peers in at the page, then looks up at him, smiling, nodding. She says something. Iris can’t quite hear her, just sees the shape her mouth makes.
Kurt sits back on the sofa, pulls his legs up, crosses them. He’s still talking, but quietly, so Iris can’t even hear the murmur she heard before. Luce picks up the book, is leafing through it. She looks up at him, asks a question, makes a comment, nods at what he says. Kurt gets another book from his bag, opens it, points to something, and they lean in even closer, heads together over the page. Luce takes the book from him, runs her fingers over the cover. She lifts the book to her face. Iris watches Kurt watch Luce. Luce smiles, says something. Kurt smiles at her. Luce settles in to read the book. When she lifts it, to read it, Iris sees that it is her mother’s book, Miss Fortune’s Faery Tales.
Iris smiles, but she knows to keep her pleasure to herself, at least as far as Luce is concerned. They used to be so close, the two of them. Luce used to call Iris my fairy godmother. Luce, the daughter of her best friend; Luce’s mum, Marti, her twin-sister-in-law. Her ex-twin-sister-in-law. But for a year, maybe more, Iris hasn’t been able to get close to Luce, and she’s pretty sure Marti can’t, either. I was like this, she reminds herself. She knows she was a difficult teenager, closed off. Poor Rosa.
But the kids are still close. They’ve virtually grown up together, even though Kurt is six years older than Luce. They were in and out of each other’s houses all the time; then when their parents split up within three months of each other, that brought them even closer. And Luce will still let Kurt close. He can lean into her, without her flinching away.
Iris moves, now, down the hallway to the kitchen. She sits at the kitchen table, smoothes the list in front of her, her attempt to bring some order to the task ahead this weekend. Now that the house has been sold – sooner than they expected – they’re here to sort and pack up their belongings, their long-stored junk and treasures. There’s nothing like making a list to postpone action, and Iris’s list is random, loose, pointless, little nervous thoughts written down in shorthand, out of list-making habit:
Start in sleep-out – what to keep?
Furniture – need anything?? Kurt?
Rosa’s stuff …
CHINA = kitchen = KEEP!!
Photos etc (scanning – Luce? Kurt? $$)
Plants – cuttings? Dig up => transplant? (Rain!!)
Blanket – unpick? Restart? Finish!!
She starts doodling at bottom right of the page, under the list. She draws an egg; or perhaps it’s a stone. She draws a curve around the egg-stone’s equator, another below to twin it, then lines that radiate out and down, then another curve, until the egg-stone wears a stiff, sticking-out skirt, a ballerina’s tutu – a doodle from her childhood, one she hasn’t drawn for years. Down from the egg-stone skirt she draws thin legs, one straight, one bent up to rest foot on knee, each leg ending in a ballet slipper, with ribbons crisscrossing up the spindle-thin legs. Thin arms attach at the top third of the egg-stone, and loop up to arch above it, framing it in the fifth position, en haut.
Luce walks into the kitchen. Iris puts her arm over the stone ballerina, puts her head up, smiles at Luce. Luce ignores her, opens the fridge, stands staring into it. She closes it again, walks to the pantry, opens it, closes it, opens it again, then goes back to the fridge.
‘Hungry?’
‘No.’
‘There’s plenty of fruit. Crackers? Cheese? We’ll do dinner soon.’
‘It’s fine.’
Luce pours water into a glass, leans against the sink drinking it. In between mouthfuls, she bites the pad of her left thumb.
‘What’ve you been looking at? With Kurt?’
‘Nothing. You know. Stuff.’ Luce puts the glass down on the sink. ‘Mum’s not coming. She texted.’
‘She texted me, too, maybe an hour ago. Said she’ d be here tomorrow.’
‘Yeah. Same.’
‘She’s so busy, poor old Mart. Do you need anything? That Marti was going to bring down for you?’
‘Nah. I’m okay.’ She bites her thumb. ‘Just –’
The baby cries. They hear it start with a whinge and a whimper, rising quickly to a full-on wail.
‘Poor love, waking up in a strange room.’ As Iris starts to get up, they hear a door open, hear Kristin’s voice oh bubba, Mama’s coming, it’s alright bubba. They hear the baby’s cry gurgle to a stop, hear Kristin’s shhh, shhh, Mama’s here, hear her walking up the hallway towards them. She appears in the doorway holding the googy-faced baby on her hip, both of them with bed hair, neither of them caring. Kristin is wearing yoga pants and a t-shirt. Her feet are bare.
‘She’s had a good sleep,’ Iris says.
‘Not too good though, eh bubba? Hopefully she’ll still sleep tonight.’
Kristin goes to put the kettle on, and Iris stops her, takes the kettle, fills it, flicks it on.
Paul appears behind Kristin, slips his arm around her waist, and kisses the top of the baby’s head. The baby reaches her hand out and presses his nose, as if to push him away. Paul’s days of bed hair are, like his hair, a thing of the past, but he’s grinning a sated grin.
‘Look at you, all my girls, in the kitchen! My har-eem. I’m a lucky man.’
‘Euwgh!’ Luce covers her ears with her hands.
Kristin belts Paul on the bum with her free hand. ‘You’re so lucky you can cook us dinner, then.’
‘With pleasure. What is there?’
Paul starts poking around in the boxes of food they’ve brought, and the fridge, and Kristin starts bossing him around, telling him what he’ll do, in that way she does, that Iris has become used to. It’s been ten years since Iris and Paul’s marriage fell apart, a year longer than that since Paul fell in love with Kristin. The messy years were over quickly, at the beginning, and – truth be told – they weren’t even very messy. They all adjusted. They all got on with it. And they’re all just family now. All together, all just family.
And here they are, to get this job done now, all of them in the house, all ready to clean it up, to pack it up, to split it up and sort it out, and to say goodbye to this place.
Time to move on
While Paul is cooking dinner, Iris makes a start on the sorting and packing. She takes the key she’s always kept – never handing it over to tenants or agent – and goes out the back door, around to the side door that leads to the old sleep-out. She unlocks the door, the key stiff in the
lock, and opens it onto a room stacked high with boxes and furniture, much of it belonging to her mother, Rosa.
It was supposed to be a short-term solution, moving Rosa’s things here ten years ago, after she’ d sold her house and moved into the retirement village. They’ d always planned to spend time sorting through it, working out what to keep, what to get rid of. Until then, they had heaps of storage room in the Cassetown house, their sometime holiday home, where they always planned to move for good (one day; not yet, but one day), tree-change and sea-change combined. Iris thought she could sort through Rosa’s things a box at a time at weekends and school holidays, each time they came down to the house; maybe it’ d take six months, maybe a year, but she’ d get through it. She would check things with Rosa as she went; they could make decisions together.
But a month after she moved into the retirement village, Rosa stopped speaking, just like that: one day she was right as rain, the next, she just stopped. They didn’t think it was dementia – though the tests they’ d done only went so far (the cost-benefit ratio of invasive procedures on a ninety-year-old contraindicates further testing, they’ d told Iris). Rosa seemed to know what was happening, to an extent: she would open her mouth when food was brought close to it, she would chew, she would swallow; she learned to sip liquids from the soft silicon spout of a baby’s cup. It was unclear, at first, whether she knew who they all were. She had no voice – she whose voice had always been so strong – and she pushed the pencil away when they tried to encourage her to write, instead of speak. They were never sure how much she knew or understood. But at least she was cared for, kept well, bathed and dressed and fed.
They’ d visited Rosa that morning, early, before they headed south from the city, after she and Kurt’ d picked Luce up from her grandparents, Jacko and Alba. As Iris walked up the ramp to the High Care Facility of the Dorothy Hill Retirement Village, past the sad winter remnants of roses and lavender and agapanthus, she’ d felt the helplessness, borne of guilt, that always overcame her when she visited. Rosa – her own mother – no longer knew Iris (or anyone, as far as they could tell). Iris watched her open her mouth, as if to speak, but no words came. No sounds. Poor Rosa, like a tiny, soundless, ninety-nine-year-old bird.
The month that Rosa lost her voice – that unsettled December, ten years ago – was when Iris’s family fell apart. Iris came down to Cassetown with Kurt after that, but she had other things on her mind, and never got around to sorting her mother’s stuff. Then, after the split, when she and Paul first decided to let the house, they let it to some friends who were moving down south – fully furnished, leaving their paintings on the walls, their cups and saucers in the kitchen, the food in the pantry. That arrangement carried on for years, as it turned out; then, when those friends bought their own place, they found another local family to take the house over on the same terms. It’s been odd – they know that – to have people in their house with their things. But they’ve been happy to leave the house intact, somehow a reminder of them as a family. And neither Paul nor Iris, until now, has needed the money, so the house has sat here, increasing in value, bringing them a steady rental income. It’s a decent bit of land, an acre, the old farmhouse on the home paddock, and when Iris and Paul’ d bought the house (a canny purchase in the 1980s, when land here was still cheap) their nearest neighbours had been the horse stud across the road, the old school house on the other side of the bridge, then nothing much until town. And town wasn’t much, then. The town built up around their house, slowly through the eighties and nineties as the wineries grew in popularity, and more tourists came. The last ten years have seen the region grow like mad, the development of the New Town as a commuter hub for fly-in-fly-out workers in the mines up north. These days their house is on an acre of prime building land in the midst of suburbs. They’re sitting on a goldmine.
And now Kristin and Paul, with the focused energy of new parents nesting, are building their dream house in the hills above the city, and they need the capital. So Iris and Paul put their goldmine house on the market. It sold quickly. They don’t owe anything on the house. They’ve made a mint. They’re going to split it: half for Kristin and Paul, half for Iris, after they take out a chunk to invest for Kurt. The sale will settle at the end of the month – quicker than they’ d planned, but that suits them all. Now that it’s sold, they want to be rid of it. Move on. That’s what people have said to her: well, it’s about time that you all moved on. She finds herself repeating it, like a mantra – move on, move on, move on – a kind of beat you could march to, or breathe in time to.
Paul has left the bulk of the planning to Iris – It’s your thing, he’ d told her, come on, it’s what you do best. She’s booked the moving van and a rubbish skip to arrive on Tuesday morning – not great timing, but the best she could manage, with the long weekend – and she’ll stay to clean up, after that. She doesn’t mind. It’s your thing. She’s brought paper and packing tape, and as many boxes as she could fit in the boot of her car; Marti will bring a carload more when she drives down on Saturday.
Not knowing quite where to start, she’s decided on the sleep-out, where everything is, at least, already in boxes. Of the dozens of cartons in the sleep-out, Iris targets the one closest to her, stacked at belly height, ignoring the label, just needing to make a start, any start. She has brought scissors with her; she opens them full, grasps them like a knife – carefully, her hand over the blade – and slits the tape along the seam of the box lid, then across each opposite edge, in an H. She slips her hand under the flaps, opens them up and out, bends them back. There’s a piece of cardboard cut to fit the top of the box, lidding the contents. There’s an envelope (recycled – a label stuck over the old address, and IRIS written across it). She lifts the envelope out and opens it. It’s handwritten, her mother’s writing. She unclips her glasses from the neck of her shirt, puts them on, and the letters come into focus.
Books – Box 3 of 9
Photography
Photographic method
Some Frank’s books – any of value?
Iris breathes out. It’s just a list – not a letter, or even a note; there’s no word of kindness or love there – but it links to lives lived, lost, and past; to old memories. She drops the sheet of paper back into the top of the box, folds the box’s flaps over it, weaves them in, over and under each other, to close the box.
She sits on the windowsill. There are dozens of boxes, maybe a hundred: not just Rosa’s things, but Paul’s, and Kurt’s, and her own. How did she ever think she’ d get the job done this weekend? She’ d need fairytale helpers, like the birds that help Cinderella sort the lentils from the ashes.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She lifts it out, reads the message on the screen.
Come on Eye-Rice.
Tutti a tavola!
P x
She smiles, shakes her head, types K, hits send, and pockets the phone as it swooshes. She doesn’t bother locking the door behind her.
Iris joins all of them in the kitchen, all at the table together, at the same moment as her single letter of reply beeps Paul’s pocketed phone, and is ignored.
Tutti a tavola
‘Rice! Good of you to join us. Am I the only one drinking?’
‘Oh, Paul –’
‘Wine? You know you are.’
‘Go on then, I’ll have a glass.’
‘Good lad. Say when.’
‘Yep, that’s good.’
‘Cheers, son.’
‘Cheers, Dad.’
‘Now, food.’
‘No more!’
‘I’m stuffed.’
‘Well, pass it around, I don’t want any leftovers. Lulu? Come on. You’re a growing girl –’
‘Oh, Paul.’
‘– mangia! Mangiamo!’
‘I said no.’
‘No, thank you?’
‘No. Thank. You.’
‘Well, I’ll have some more.’
‘Excellent.’
&nb
sp; ‘Whoa whoa whoa! Plenty.’
‘Darl, you always cook too much pasta.’
‘Oh, does he, still? He always used to.’
‘My dears, it’s hard to judge quantities for this crowd. I’m used to cooking for two.’
‘Oh, look at her reaching her little hands out to you.’
‘Though I’ll be cooking for three soon enough. Once she’s off the tit –’
‘Euwgh.’
‘Oh, Luce.’
‘Breast is best, Lucinda-sky. It’s on-ly natch-ral –’
‘Now you’ve done it. Once he starts singing –’
‘It’s only the beginning –’
‘Oh for godsake.’
‘It’s going to be a very long weekend.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’
‘That rain is just getting heavier and heavier.’
‘At least the kitchen’s warm.’
‘But the big room’s freezing! I was wearing two beanies in there, before.’
‘I had socks on my hands.’
‘Is there enough wood for the stove?’
‘It’s supposed to last all weekend. The rain.’
‘I suppose the farmers need it.’
‘If there’s too much, though? What about flooding?’
‘Then the sheep will go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah –’
‘Was that thunder?’
‘Ah, no, sorry. That was me –’
‘Euwgh!’
‘Paul!’
‘Jesus, Dad!’
When they’ve finished the meal, Paul shoos them out of the kitchen, and starts to clean up, wash dishes, singing as he goes. Luce and Kurt huddle together in the hallway, then disappear to their rooms. Iris, and Kristin with the baby, move through to the big room, settle onto sofas but, even once they’ve rugged up with beanies and scarves and socks and ugg boots, it’s cold – too cold to stay – so they move back into the kitchen, the only room other than the baby’s room that’s warm.
