The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  A week or two passed. Christabel ran into Pippa and Hank on their way to the park. Hank clasped Christabel lovingly about the knees and grinned—he had just consumed a pavement turd. Greetings, my stinky darling, said Christabel silently, massaging his ears. A small girl going past told her mother, ‘That dog looks zactly like a tiger.’ She snarled and bared her teeth, making a tiger face.

  Pippa tugged Hank down and asked, without inflection, ‘So did you like that tagine I left you?’

  ‘It was delicious,’ said Christabel, wondering why Pippa’s eyes seemed darker than a moment ago. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘No need to thank me again,’ said Pippa in the same flat tone. ‘Just checking that you liked it.’

  ‘We loved it. We got at least a couple of meals out of it. I keep forgetting to bring your dish round. I’m sorry—’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of dishes. But when you cook for someone, it’s good to know if they liked it.’

  ‘Oh, we loved it! I’m sorry—’

  ‘Listen, I’ve really got to get going. Hank doesn’t walk himself, you know.’

  It was like their first meeting: Christabel relived the sensation that she had failed a test. Earlier, rain had exploded, and now every scraggy callistemon in the street was wrapped in brilliant, watery light. The light turned up the gory in geraniums but did nothing at all for the unfortunate trees. Christabel heaved her shopping bags past them, biting her lips. The power lines across the street were noteless staves interrupted only by the crotchet rest of a decomposing bat.

  Confusingly, there was a reassuring memory to counter that one. When Christabel saw Pippa near St Peters Station one afternoon, Pippa paused to explain that she had been flat out of late. The wind, swimming past, shoved her hair to one side. ‘Let’s catch up soon,’ she called, walking backwards over the railway bridge and waving. Christabel went on her way, straight-backed, springy with hope.

  The year stumbled on, the winter softened: it had been a fierce one that frosted the streets. Spring brightened and strengthened—suddenly it was the bolshie Sydney spring. The phone rang. ‘Hellooo!’ yodelled Pippa. ‘I’ve got amazing news. Can you come round?’

  She had baked a poppy seed cake, and there was a new cushion with a cover made from a vintage tea towel on the cherry-red chair. The tea towel, a souvenir of the Great Barrier Reef, featured tropical fish. On the couch, with her feet tucked up, just as Christabel always pictured her, Pippa announced that she had been awarded a six-month residency in Paris for the following year. She felt really honoured and humbled because competition for the residency was keen. Beyond her shoulder, yellow roses were assertive in a jug. Matt would join her near the end of her time in Paris, went on Pippa, brushing crumbs from her T-shirt. ‘I’ll miss him like anything, of course. And Hank. I’ll be counting on you to keep an eye on them for me, Christabel.’

  Christabel looked away. If only Pippa could see into the mirror across the room: it held part of a bookcase, half a painting of a ferry passing a headland, and the crumpled light from the roses. Who could want to abandon that view? Pippa confided that her new novel was called French Lessons. The long middle section would be set in Paris; she had already begun reading guidebooks in preparation. ‘It’s important to do your research in advance and then bury it while you write.’ That was the kind of window onto the creative mind for which Christabel believed she came. She didn’t notice it, because she was thinking of an afternoon when Pippa had said, ‘Whenever I try a new hairdresser, I secretly hope my whole life will be different.’ Christabel thought, Who will she tell her secrets to in Paris? What she meant was, What will my life be like without her? There were things she longed to hear Pippa say that she couldn’t precisely name.

  It was not until the next day, or perhaps the one after—in any case, after the wedge of poppy seed cake Christabel carried home had been eaten—that she realised, I was right. She was avoiding me. The reason was plain: Pippa had been trying to prepare her for the parting to come. At this proof of Pippa’s sensitivity and consideration, Christabel was so overcome that she laid out the whole story for Bunty that night.

  There was a long silence. A bedspring protested as Bunty shifted her weight. She said, ‘That hillside on Santorini where I thought I’d sprained my ankle—do you remember? It was flowery and stony. Pippa reminds me of that.’

  So that forever after, the idea of Pippa would come to Christabel accompanied by creamy spires of asphodel.

  Bunty was saying, ‘But who dislikes someone just for their faults? That girl smiles at you as if she’s chosen you out of all the world.’

  Christabel avoided missing Pippa too acutely by conducting long, silent talks with her while she was in France. They were peaceful conversations, very detailed in some respects and hazy in others. Sometimes Pippa said, ‘You’re like a sister to me, you know,’ and sometimes she asked Christabel for help with her writing. Christabel had noticed all kinds of small wrinkles in Pippa’s work, and she smoothed these out with great tact, waving away thanks. They told each other about books they had read and anecdotes from their lives. Christabel was reluctant to talk about herself at first, but gradually the person she was describing gripped her, and she spoke eagerly about a Christabel who was at once very well known to her and not quite real—someone who belonged to ‘a brilliant company’.

  No matter how they began or expanded, these conversations were characterised by warmth and friendliness and the delicate pleasure of feeling understood. One part of Christabel’s mind knew very well that all this was the work of her imagination. That part of her mind was of little account. But it existed, and that gave her permission to imagine anything. There could be no harm in it; it was like watching a film and being in a film at the same time. The film seemed truer and more compelling than life while it was going on, and cast a cinematic glow on her relations with Pippa when it was not.

  Pippa came back from France at last. The phone rang one evening while Christabel was defrosting peas. Matt had spotted Bunty walking along the highway dressed in her knickers and vest—as he braked, she was stepping into the road. Rushing up the passage, Christabel discovered the TV on, Bunty’s clothes on the floor and the front door standing open. A few minutes later, Pippa came out onto her porch; Matt had called her, too. She was carrying a doona and looked very pretty in a green shirt with a hood. When Matt pulled up, Pippa opened the car door and handed Bunty the doona—it had an embroidered white cover. Bunty climbed out with it draped about her like a swansdown cloak. Pippa tucked in a trailing edge. Her hand, with its short nails painted red, rested on Bunty’s arm.

  ‘The thing is, this…thing,’ said Bunty, as they came up the path together. There was no colour in her face. She said, ‘Am I making myself plain? Your age is against you.’

  Pippa gave a little cry. ‘Oh, lovey, you sound just like my nan. She used to say life turns against you when you grow old.’

  ‘I am talking about your age. What can you know?’

  The next day, the phone rang. ‘Only me,’ said Pippa. ‘Lovey, this can’t go on.’ Pippa knew about everything: assessments, social workers, waiting lists, forms. ‘It all takes ages, so you’ve got to start right away.’ Everything she said was wise and clear and depressing. There was a really helpful website; Pippa would bring her laptop around. She asked, ‘Do you have Bunty’s power of attorney?’

  Christabel wanted to say, You’re talking about Bunty. She is she. She has favourite colours and weather and game show hosts. But what came out was, ‘I see that she takes her pills.’

  ‘Pills! Lovey, I didn’t like to say anything, but I was shocked by the change when I came back from Paris. You’ve been amazing but you can’t look after Bunty now. She needs professional care. It’ll be best for you, too: you’re so thin, Christabel, when’s the last time you got a proper night’s sleep?’

  It was a fatal question. Christabel had been about to say, ‘I can’t imagine my life without Bunty.’ But that was a lie: she could. There wou
ld be no toaster stuffed into the rubbish. The electricity bill wouldn’t disappear, along with their toothbrushes. Christabel wouldn’t find a library book soaking in the sink. Best of all, there would be uninterrupted sleep. The prospect floated in front of Christabel, as dangerous and irresistible as a gift from the gods. Her mind circled it. The word ‘sleep’ entered and took possession of her, clouding her thoughts.

  Just the night before, a sixth sense had woken her. She found Bunty in the kitchen, in front of the open fridge. With midnight clarity, Christabel thought, The light in the city is like that, white and cold, like the light from a fridge. Bunty was taking things out and dropping them onto the floor. Christabel saw that a pack of butter had been unwrapped and placed in the sink.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she cried.

  ‘I’m looking for the queen.’

  ‘The queen!’

  ‘They’ve lost her,’ said Bunty, tossing out a packet of cheese slices. A patch of skin on her hand was bubbly from the time she had trailed it in a flame on the stove. ‘She’s not to be found.’

  Inspiration arrived. Christabel said, ‘The queen is in the parlour, eating bread and honey.’

  Bunty took her head out of the fridge. ‘Is she really?’

  It was a period Christabel survived by lying on her bed in the afternoon, while Bunty snored on the couch. Christabel was usually too tired to sleep, but she wore her high-necked blue dressing-gown over her clothes and lay there thinking how she would like to give Bunty a good kicking. She liked to picture it: Kick! Kick!

  On the phone, Pippa was asking about Bunty’s next of kin. Pombo and Raven. Sizzle. Trim. Dead men with dogs’ names, Christabel said, or intended to. But Bunty was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Why are you whispering?’ she asked. She looked cheerful and well. Her blouse was an old one from the Mr Valente days. The buttons were done up wrong.

  Curtains hung between the three beds in Bunty’s room at Waratah Lodge, but Christabel usually found them pulled back and Bunty there alone. In the day room, where the TV was always on, old people sat with their backs to the wall. If she was led there, Bunty would get up and walk away. In her bedroom she sat by the window, listening to her radio. She talked to Christabel. She talked a great deal, as if making up for a lifetime of reticence. ‘I’m very well, thank you,’ she might say. ‘But I wish they’d do something about the sun. It’s broken down.’

  ‘You’re right—it’s been raining since dawn. Did you hear it on the roof?’

  ‘Yes, he’ll be back soon. That’s right.’

  ‘Would you like me to brush your hair, Bunty?’

  ‘I was under the impression it was a ladder. All the boats went this-way, that-way, this-way, that-way. Why does she…?’

  ‘A huge new block of flats is going up in Illawarra Road.’

  ‘When does the train leave?’

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with this invoice.’

  ‘I wish they’d wash the curtains in this room.’

  Bunty said, ‘I’m older than you now.’

  ‘You’ve always been older.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Bunty with astonishment.

  Every afternoon for eight days in a row, she sat at a table in the dining room, colouring in flowers—she pushed away pictures of animals or fruit. All around her, old women murmured and twisted their hands. Bunty chose lively colours—emerald, magenta, electric blue—and took great care, her crayon hardly ever straying over one of the thick black lines. ‘Look!’ she cried. She sounded eager and amazed.

  The music video came on. An aide joined in with ‘You Are My Sunshine’, dancing slowly past with a human husk in her arms. That was Jian—sweet Jian, who kissed pleated old cheeks, and offered words that were immediately grasped by those who now understood only two things: kindness and its absence.

  Bunty raised her voice: ‘O come, Olly Faithful.’

  ‘Joyful and triumphant,’ went on Christabel encouragingly.

  Bunty insisted, ‘O come, Olly Faithful.’

  A kitchen hand arrived with fruit. Bunty fell silent and eyeballed the trolley. She scooped cubes of watermelon into her mouth with the panicky greed of old age, as if time would run out before everything could be eaten up.

  The removalists were due at Pippa’s at seven. Christabel left her house at twenty to. All night, a figure with an electric head had stood grinning outside her window. Now the day stretched before her: a tightrope. It was a matter of getting to the other end.

  The sky was still dark, inset here and there with a low-wattage star. It was the third week of winter. The first drops came as Christabel reached the station. By the time the train was crossing Tom Ugly’s Bridge, the rain was vengeful. When the Pacific slid into view, it was a colourless smudge. Christabel had seen herself on the shore at Thirroul, eating her sandwiches against a backdrop of pines; when she rose to leave, she whacked sand from her skirt.

  This vision had the propulsive force of reality, so when the express pulled in to Thirroul, she got off and made her way to the beach. The rain had turned gentle and unrelenting. Christabel’s mouth had tasted muddy all morning; now her jaw began to ache. She peered out from the severe canopy of her umbrella at a sea of grey wool. Silent reproaches flew up around her like moths. Today, for the first time since Bunty had gone into care, Christabel wouldn’t visit her. Not that Bunty would notice—her wheels went around independently. One afternoon, when Christabel told her, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ Bunty had said, ‘Why?’

  In a fish and chip shop, Christabel’s shoes were soaked. She burnt her tongue on a potato scallop while reading Keats. When she came to, And, little town, thy streets for evermore / will silent be, she had to close the book. It was her favourite ode because it mentioned Tempe, which was just down the highway from St Peters. But now Keats’s empty, silent town lay outside Christabel’s front door. Nothing was the same since Bunty had moved to Waratah Lodge, but at least Pippa had still been there. Sometimes, of an evening, Christabel would set a chair in the passage and lean her head on their shared wall. There were companionable noises: music, a toilet flushing, Hank racketing down the hallway. The waitress had gone into the room at the back of the shop, where Christabel could see her spooning egg into a toddler in a high chair; each time his mouth opened, so did hers.

  After a cup of tea, Christabel caught a train back to the city. She had her all-day senior’s travel card, so from Wolli Creek she went south again. There were muddy footprints on the floor of the carriage and puddles left by umbrellas. She ate her sandwiches. As the train passed through Coalcliff, the rain changed to crystal strings.

  Coalcliff! There had been a time when Christabel spent every Saturday and Sunday there. She came to be with a man: the last one, the one who turned up after she had thought sex was over. He had a shack tucked up against the escarpment at Coalcliff. What a place for a beach house—a child could have looked at the name and known that the sun set there at three! At first Christabel couldn’t understand how he was able to get away from his family every weekend. Then she realised that his marriage was a fiction. He didn’t want her to know where he lived in the city, that was all. It didn’t matter. On a flannelette sheet, in the inky afternoon under the escarpment, Christabel saw the world arch: the harbour bridge spanned a dusty sports-ground where girls in white uniforms were playing netball. She flew upside down over the coconut palms of childhood, her veined legs reckless, her dress slippery, a bride.

  One spectacularly sunny Saturday she arrived at the house and found all the blinds down as if someone had died. Christabel waited a while, pulling leaves off the lantana. She felt bright and unusual. She went around to the back and peered through the laundry window. A pair of rusty secateurs lay in the trough. What was really annoying was that she had lost the thin gold chain she used to wear at the time—she was sure it had come off in the man’s bed. One day soon a faceless woman would slip her hand under a pillow and fish out a broken cha
in. For now, someone using Christabel’s voice was speaking: ‘What is done is done,’ she declared. The voice was like the look in Len Raymond’s eyes when he had said goodbye: helpless and hard.

  Coalcliff belonged to the end of the old century. No one had wanted to touch Christabel since then. From time to time, she would engineer a momentary contact: her fingers brushing a cashier’s, her hip swaying against another on a crowded train.

  She travelled on in her lumpy, desiring body.

  Still the rain fell.

  She read ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in the waiting room at Wollongong Station.

  The rain stopped while Christabel was walking home, and the wind came up out of the west. The sky, carelessly wiped, showed a thumbprint of moon. When Christabel turned into her street, pellets of rain fell onto her shoulders out of a tree. She had been quite wrong, she realised: the tightrope stretched without an end, there was no other side. Life is long! How had she missed the warning in that? The empty parking space in front of Pippa’s gate was as conspicuous as a missing tooth. Her house looked back at Christabel with blind black eyes. A hydrangea still bloomed, rotting by the steps. Christabel went to her door and slipped her hand under the rubber doormat. It had been Pippa’s idea to thwart burglars by swapping keys. ‘The magic switcheroo,’ she said, taping Christabel’s key to the underside of her own windowsill.

  Christabel unlocked Pippa’s door and went inside. From the head of the passage, she looked into the naked house. The doors had been left a little open and let in panels of dusty light. They produced a ghostly kind of shimmer in the plaster flowers overhead. The first time Christabel stood in this passage, Pippa had said, ‘This place is so small, there’s nowhere to do a star jump.’ She spread her arms to show that her fingertips brushed the walls on either side.