by Lily Malone
His mum had a blanket over her knees, sitting in her chair in front of the windows looking out to the garden. A book lay open in her lap.
‘Hey, Mum.’
‘Braxton!’ She put the book face down on the coffee table and she would have got up if he hadn’t got to her first and told her not to bother.
Had Jake and Abe felt the same way when they’d seen her? His mum’s hair had lost most of its grey and was almost white. She’d always been a solid, strong woman, but her tummy was swollen now, stretching her clothes in a way he’d never seen before. It was an all-over swelling too, not like when a lady was pregnant. A puffiness under too-thin skin.
‘Do I look that bad?’ she said, trying to smile.
It took him back. ‘No, Mum. Not really. You’re just a bit of a shock is all.’
‘You were never any good at lying, Brix,’ his mum said. ‘Abel was always hard to read, but you and Jake, I can read you like I can read that book.’
‘You’re a bit of a shock, Mum,’ he said again, leaning low to hug his mother close. The tickle of her hair hid the prickle of tears high behind the bridge of his nose.
* * *
Dad asked him to stay for lunch, but they didn’t have much in the fridge, which embarrassed his mother, so Brix offered to buy them something from the bakery. When he stood up to go into town his dad stopped him with a, ‘You stay here and talk to your mother.’
So Brix sat.
He’d discovered that even though her brain was under attack by something hideous, she was still sharp, except every now and then she’d drift somewhere in her head before she came back.
She was drifting now, in fact. He’d been telling her about the weekend when he’d helped Jake at the farm, and how he’d forgotten how stupid sheep could be. The story about the sheep tripping him arse-up in the yards should have made her laugh, but her eyes were fixed on the wall and the photographs of their family displayed in a nook there, and he’d lost her.
Brix’s gaze moved to the photos too. He’d seen them all before, many times, although on the wall of the farmhouse, not here. They were family photos. Years of school photos with his brothers in Chalk Hill Primary School white and blue. There was the picture of him with the basketball trophy for Albany association b-grade fairest and best; Jake with a premiership medal for football.
No medals for Abe, though. They didn’t strike a medal for junior muffin champ, although Abe won prizes for baking at the Mount Barker show.
A wedding picture of his parents caught his eye. His folks cutting the cake. Dad’s big hand over Mum’s on the knife.
Jaydah didn’t want a special cake. Jaydah didn’t want anything special. She didn’t want any fuss. Much of that was to do with her need to keep it secret, and he got that. But in years ahead he didn’t want her to think she’d missed out.
‘Do you still have your wedding dress, Mum?’ he asked.
‘Hmm?’ she said, vacant eyes coming back to focus on him, as if she’d lost him in the room somewhere and only found him now. ‘Pardon?’
‘Did you keep your wedding dress?’
‘Of course I did. What else did you think I’d do with it?’
He had no idea whether his mum’s wedding dress would have been normal for a country wedding in the late eighties, or not. His television memories of the eighties were of big hair, rock ballads, leg-warmers and, in terms of a wedding, footage he’d seen of Lady Di and Prince Charles.
He couldn’t picture Jaydah in anything as elaborate as Lady Di’s dress, but something like his mum’s? He could see Jaydah in that.
‘Is it here?’
‘Yes. In a vacuum-sealed bag with Dad’s suit.’
The inkling of an idea sparked in his mind. ‘Can I see it?’
‘What for?’
He listened for the return of his father’s car, or the hiss and catch of the screen door at the front of the house. He couldn’t hear anything except the gentle creak of his mum’s chair. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘Of course I can. I’ve got all sorts of things you don’t know about sitting up here.’ She tapped her temple.
‘Okay then but you can’t breathe a word to anyone.’
‘I promise.’ Mum leaned in closer.
‘I’m getting married.’
Now she rocked back. ‘Married!’
‘Shhh, Mum.’ Bloody hell she’d tell the world. ‘No one knows.’
‘Not even Dad?’
‘Nope. No one. Not Jake or Abe either.’
Her eyes twinkled as she sat forward again. ‘Does the lady in question know?’
‘Yeah, Mum. She knows.’
She put a hand to her mouth. ‘It’s Jaydah, isn’t it?’
‘It only ever could be, Mum.’
‘I knew it.’ Tears appeared in her eyes, welling, welling. ‘Oh, I knew it!’ Spilling as the emotion poured with them. ‘Oh, you don’t know how happy that makes me. At least one of my boys. At least one. I’m here long enough to know one of you is getting married. When?’
‘Christmas Day, Mum.’
Her hand bumped from her mouth to her lap. ‘This Christmas?’
‘This Christmas.’
‘But that’s ... that’s not even a month. I’ll be here. I’ll see it.’
‘We’re not having a big ceremony or a reception or anything like that. It’s very simple. Very small.’ He didn’t want her to get her hopes up about a church, a hundred guests, a band.
‘But you’ll be here. You’re not going away to Las Vegas or Bali or anywhere like that?’
‘Nah. It’ll be here, but Jaydah wants it all under wraps.’ He put a hand over his mother’s. ‘You can’t say anything, Mum. Mr Tully doesn’t know. We want to keep it that way.’
Her lips thinned and she shook her head once, twice, as the creases deepened in her cheeks. ‘There’s always been something not right going on at that Tully farm. That poor girl. Her poor mum.’
‘Did you know something about it, Mum?’
‘Your dad went out there once, that time you came home and told us you almost crashed the old ute.’
‘Dad went out there?’ He’d never forget Keith Tully’s face that day he’d got his driver’s licence and gone out to the farm to see JT. Keith flushed so red Brix thought he might have a heart attack and drop dead right there on the porch: top lip pulled all tight and cruel and his fingers making shapes like they wanted to wrap around Brix’s throat. He’d never been so scared in his life.
‘Of course your dad went out there. You came home white as a sheet.’
‘Dad never said anything.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t. But Stan went out there to give Keith a piece of his mind. It was just after that thing happened at the club.’
‘What thing?’
‘Well, your dad was the new president of the Bowling Club that year, and Keith had run up a pretty big tab behind the bar. Dad cut his credit off and Keith didn’t like that—he accused your dad of only wanting locals at the club, not blow-ins, which was silly, you know. Your dad’s never been like that. Some people are around here, but not your dad—’
‘What happened out at the Tully farm, Mum?’ he interrupted gently.
‘The where, dear?’
Don’t go away now, Mum. ‘The Tully farm, when Dad went out there.’
‘He said he’d seen Jaydah shovelling those river rocks from a trailer, but she disappeared inside when she saw his car come up the drive. He said a dog barked at the back the entire time he was there, and he never saw Rosalie. Keith came out on the porch and when Dad explained why he was there, Keith told him to keep you away. Keep your kid’s grubby mitts off my girl or I’ll break his grubby fingers for him, that’s what he said.’
‘So what did Dad do?’
‘He told Keith if he ever touched you, he’d kick him into next week, and that was that.’
‘I never knew.’
‘Well, we didn’t tell you boys everything. Some things are between adults. You�
��ll understand that when you’re a father.’
‘Jaydah’s told me a bit about it. He’s a mean bastard, her dad.’
‘I never liked his eyes. They looked right through you, and he always stank of cigarettes.’
‘I’m going to get Jaydah and Rosalie out of there, Mum, when we’re married. But you can’t say anything till it’s done. Promise me.’
‘Okay already, keep your hair on. I told you I wouldn’t say anything and I won’t.’
She had the hump with him nagging at her, he could tell. Or maybe more like she wished she could keep the hump on, but her smile kept breaking through it.
‘It’s such lovely news, Brix. I needed some good news, and your father,’ she broke off, ‘oh, he’ll be so proud. It’ll help him when I’m … well, when I’m gone. It’ll give him something else to think about. And then there’ll be grandkids to keep him busy.’
‘Steady on, Mum.’
‘Well, there will be.’
He’d never even asked JT about kids. Did she want them? He wasn’t sure.
‘So can we take a look at your wedding dress?’
‘We can look at it, but I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything. It’s so old-fashioned compared to what they wear these days.’ Her hands flew to the arms of her chair, already pushing straight but struggling with her weight. ‘Hold on! You think Jaydah might want to wear my dress?’
Both of them looked at her wedding picture. The photo was black and white and the cake and cake table covered the skirt of the dress, but the top was pretty as his mum leaned forward, hair dark and shining. It had puffed sleeves that made his mum’s shoulders look huge, a scooped neckline, lace detail and flowers stitched into the bodice part.
His mum put her hand out towards the wall and Brix got to his feet to help steady her.
‘If she needs to alter it, I wouldn’t mind. Can Jaydah sew?’
Could she? ‘I don’t think so, Mum.’
‘Oh I wish I could do it for her, but I can’t. I know I can’t. Not well enough to do it justice. Irene Loveday is the best seamstress around. She used to make all the wedding dresses and her mum before that. Her mum made mine.’
She set off for the spare bedroom which served as a reading room and a junk room, and a spare room if they ever had guests, which wasn’t often. Sometimes his Aunt Kay, Mum’s sister, used to stay over, but not so much now. She was on her own and didn’t like the long drive from Perth to Chalk Hill.
Brix followed, staying out of the way, and his mum went unerringly to the wardrobe and opened its doors before she stopped.
‘It’s on that shelf up there. You’re taller than me. In that clear bag.’
Brix raised his arms and pulled at the vinyl strap. With a slip and slide, the bag came loose and he braced himself so it didn’t fall.
‘Let’s get it out,’ Mum said eagerly.
‘I don’t want Dad to see it. I should put it straight in the car.’
She bit her lip.
With a jolt, Brix realised this might be the last time his mum saw the dress. The very last time.
‘Of course you can look at it.’ How selfish was he not to realise? It was so hard to think of life without his mum. She’d always been there.
He unzipped the bag, pulling back at the stiff plastic and his mum dove in, bringing the material up and out in her hands.
She raised the white froth to her face, taking a deep sniff.
‘It needs a good wash.’ Her voice choked and she was lost, her eyes going far away. ‘Take it, love. Take it for Jaydah. Go on.’
‘Let me help you back to the kitchen.’ He took her arm, holding gently because it felt like the least pressure would bruise.
‘I hate being so doddery. I hate it.’
He zipped the bag and the dress and took that under one arm and his mum under the other, and as he helped her back to the chair by the window, he wasn’t sure which felt more fragile: the dress or his mum.
* * *
Later that afternoon Jake dropped around, and after the café shut Abe called in too, and it was the first time in years that the family had been in the same place at the same time.
Like Nanna Irma’s funeral, this reunion also felt bittersweet.
Abe sat closest to their mum, and he didn’t say much. The news of her illness had hit them all hard but Brix thought it was Abe who’d been affected the most. It made a strange sense, now he thought about it. If you had to have a Mummy’s boy, then Abe would be that kid. He and Mum used to cook together, bake together. While he and Jake were shifting sheep with the old man, Abe would be sifting flour and salt in the kitchen, leaving floury fingerprints on their mum’s cooking diary.
He and Jake used to tease him that cooking was a sissy thing for a boy, like kids do, but they’d always been happy to come back in from the farm and find treats warm out of the oven, waiting.
‘You’ll have to meet Ella, Mum,’ Jake said, stretching his legs beneath the table.
‘Your swimmer lady?’
A proud smile broke across Jake’s face. ‘That’s the one. And there’s Charlotte, too.’
‘I thought you said Ella had a young boy?’
Brix and Abe chuckled.
‘She does, Mum. Sam is Ella’s boy. Charlotte is my daughter, remember? I told you about her. She’s twelve.’
When their mum’s face stayed blank, Jake looked at their dad.
‘I told her. But she might have forgotten,’ Dad said. ‘You remember, Val? Jake told us he has a little girl. We’re grandparents now.’
‘I think I would have remembered news like that, Stan,’ their mum said, lifting her chin at him. ‘I think you just plain forgot to tell me.’
‘I found out Cassidy—that girl I travelled Nepal with years ago, Mum—she had a baby. Charlotte’s my daughter. I’ve seen her once, in October, and I’ve asked Cassidy if I could have Charlotte come for Christmas this year,’ Jake said.
‘Well this is the first I’ve heard about it. That’s lovely news. Wonderful.’ But it was all a bit stilted and short and sad, and their mum lapsed into silence.
‘She remembers things from longer ago okay, but the things that happened last week or in the last month, they’re a bit fuzzy.’
Fresh tears slipped down their mum’s cheek, and her eyes closed.
‘That’s the thing, isn’t it,’ she said, eyes snapping open.
‘What thing, Mum?’ Abe asked.
‘Just the thing. That thing.’
And that was all she said. None of them knew what thing she meant.
CHAPTER
8
‘Will you do something for me?’ Brix said to Jaydah the next day, a Saturday.
‘Probably,’ she said, and her eyes told him anything, not probably.
She was swinging her legs off the lowered rear tray of his Toyota, and he had one knee drawn up and the other nudging hers. Two empty Chalk ‘n’ Cheese re-use coffee cups sat at their hips.
He’d backed the ute into the parking area at their special spot on Cutters Creek. In winter, rapids fed into a green-brown hole deep enough to swim—nobody ever really knew how deep the hole in Cutters Creek was. They used to tease each other that an ancient giant catfish lived at the bottom and if you tried to find the bottom he’d eat you.
Downstream, the water level dropped away in summer to reveal a brace of rocks like a mob of turtles tumbling into the water, domed shells topped with dried black moss.
On the opposite side of the bank, the creek had hollowed out a grey cave where the low branches of those trees still living caught snarls of driftwood left for dead in past floods. Further downstream, that cave morphed into the slabbed grey face of Cutters Cliffs, and after that the creek dog-legged away.
Two rock climbers made laborious progress ever upward on the cliffs, and if one shouted a warning or an instruction to the other, the sound blew upstream on an echo. They must have hiked in, those two, or parked up top at the abseilers’ cliff because Brix’s veh
icle was the only one here.
They’d found this place years ago when Brix had finally got around to sneaking Jaydah out for a drive in his dad’s old ute without Keith Tully getting wind of it. They’d had to sneak out of school the afternoon of the senior cross-country run to do it and he’d driven the long way from Mount Barker to Chalk Hill, coming back along the forestry tracks to meet Chalk Hill Bridge Road so they didn’t see anyone they knew.
He’d planned for weeks to take JT for that drive. He’d had a picnic rug in the back, a thicker blanket to put underneath for a cushion, his dad’s esky carrying a beer he’d stolen from his dad’s stash for him and one of his mum’s apple ciders for her.
That day had been sunshine, just like this one. That was the day they lost their virginity together, over there, on a blanket under that tree—an hour in a lifetime of stolen hours and hijacked minutes.
This was another stolen hour. Jaydah had told her dad there was a bowls tournament today at the club and she had to start her shift early. They’d already spent a big chunk of that precious hour talking about his mum and her illness, and how she’d been when Brix saw her yesterday. That had been enough of a downer. He was in the mood to talk about something else.
‘I want to give you something, but I’m pretty sure you won’t want it. But I want to give it to you, and I want to do it for my mum,’ Brix said.
‘Ok-ay,’ she drew it out. ‘Now you’re making me nervous.’
‘I want to ask Irene Loveday to modify my mum’s wedding dress.’ His gaze met her eyes. ‘For you.’
‘What? No! I can’t do that. It’s too much, but anyway, we can’t tell Irene. We can’t tell anyone.’ She scrambled her feet up onto the tailgate and hugged her knees.
‘My mum would love it if you’d wear her dress. I told you she’s dying, JT. How can I say no?’
Jaydah tugged her hair through her hands. ‘If my father finds out …’ She left it unsaid.
The dress was in the back of the Toyota, still in its plastic bag. His plan had been to show it to her, but her reaction left him unsure.
