The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  That night Christabel was woken by a voice at the door. She flung off her coverings and rose with the liquid movements of a girl: Pippa called out like that, ignoring the bell. She hugged Christabel and explained that it had all been a mistake or a test of character or a baffling game: she had never really intended to move away. Christabel drew back the bolt and opened the door wide. The wind rushed into the house like someone bringing news.

  Christabel arrived at Waratah Lodge with a foil container of macaroni cheese. She was filling out the Food Book kept at reception when Sister Reena appeared. ‘We’re trying to keep Bunty’s weight down, you know,’ said Sister Reena.

  ‘Just this once,’ said Christabel.

  ‘I don’t like to think what Dr Metaxas will say.’

  An old woman in a knife-pleated flannel skirt approached, trailing a shitty sheet like a bridal veil. She kissed Christabel’s hand and said, ‘I want to go home with you.’

  ‘Watch out for that one,’ said Sister Reena. ‘She’s a biter.’

  An aide came around the corner, pushing a wheeled rack of clean laundry in shades of pink. ‘I’m doing Oz Lotto tonight, if you’re interested,’ Sister Reena told her. ‘And Powerball on Thursday.’

  ‘I really don’t know how you keep track of all the things you do,’ said the aide. ‘You’re a wonder.’ She was new, Christabel saw: the tag still dangled at the back of her logoed shirt.

  ‘Live while you can, that’s what I say,’ said Sister Reena. Her hair was bronze and fabulous. She thumped her chest: ‘I never forget I’ve got a heart.’

  Christabel said, ‘Macaroni cheese is Bunty’s favourite. A treat.’

  ‘We get the blame, you know.’

  The old woman shouted, ‘Be quiet, you fool!’ Her breath tasered; no one had brushed her teeth in days.

  Heat was seeping from the container, condensing on Christabel’s fingers. She told Sister Reena, ‘Oh, but you do such wonderful, caring work.’

  Pleading and flattery were her tokens in this game. When there were enough tokens on the board, Sister Reena would relent. Sister Reena’s bright brown gaze diminished everything on which it rested. She had a small head, muscled calves, feet that pointed outwards: once a ballerina, always a duck. Christabel told Bunty, ‘I would like to kill her. Just once.’

  On the wall near Bunty’s bed was a picture of a vaulted room with a chequerboard floor. Its painted walls went up and up, dwarfing the people in their heavy, draped clothes. The cold interior light that filled the picture had seeped out into Waratah Lodge. Ceiling fans turned in empty rooms. Televisions talked to no one. Disturbingly credible flowers stood in transparent vases of fake water. For a dreadful week, the day room contained a clear-sided brooding pen in which chickens hatched out from eggs. An overhead lamp, shining into the pen, provided heat and lit the activities of the chicks. These were few. Newly hatched, they fluffed up their damp feathers, then stood dull-eyed. What they knew of the planet was sawdust; their sun was a lamp. Soon they would be taken away and killed. Christabel read the publicity brochure: ‘A hassle-free and cost-effective way to provide residents with hours of fascinated enjoyment.’ She read it twice before realising that what counted was ‘cost-effective’. All the old people, including those whose minds were furthest eroded, instinctively turned away from the birds.

  Bunty was concentrating on macaroni cheese. She hadn’t spilled much on her bib. When she had eaten it all, she nodded off. Christabel picked a dried fleck of pumpkin from the mobile tray-table with her nail. Bunty woke with a long, shuddering breath. She stared—she was developing a stare. The stare wasn’t directed at Christabel’s eyes but at her chin, which made Christabel feel uneasy. It had been a long time since Bunty laughed. Christabel was glad about that; she feared that Bunty’s laughter, once a joyous weapon, would have unravelled into something baleful.

  She told Bunty, ‘Pippa’s freesias are out. I still think of them as hers.’

  ‘I couldn’t say what he was doing there.’

  ‘There are new people at number 17—you know, the house with the lions at the gate. They have a small girl. She has one of those stern, humourless faces you sometimes see on young children.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Bunty’s mouth was hanging open. A glob of macaroni cheese could be seen inside it. New nurses marvelled that she still had her own teeth.

  Across the passage, an ancient man shouted, ‘Mum! Mum!’

  ‘O come, Olly Faithful,’ sang Christabel, ‘Joyful and triumphant.’ She persisted for a bar or two but got only the stare.

  After Bunty died, days slid into one another like the colours in a sunset. Whole afternoons passed as Christabel drank tea in the kitchen under the saint’s glassy gaze. If there was a book in front of her, she would look away frequently and forget to turn its pages—she no longer read in the old, urgent way. The taste for reading had started to withdraw from her; she felt it pulling gently away, like a tide. Books contained hard truths, waiting like splinters in their pages. Over the years, many had lodged in her unnoticed. Little anticipations of life’s awfulness, they might have served as a defence against it but pierced instead with knowledge of damage, error, waste.

  As each afternoon wore on, and the blue of the saint’s robe intensified, the book in his hand would come to look like a reproof. ‘Little man,’ said Christabel. ‘What do you know?’ Her hairdresser, hearing the news about Bunty, had said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Studying Christabel’s face, she proposed a new hairspray: ‘It creates a lighter, fuller effect.’ Christabel’s GP suggested Vegemite: ‘Packed with vitamin B—excellent for the nerves.’ Christabel erected her own shaky ramparts. Every morning she cleaned the house. She washed windows, scrubbed spotless benchtops; every surface knew her unforgiving hands. Spraying the mould in the shower, she recited names: scribbly gum, crepe myrtle, magnolia, all the ordinary, lovely trees. The courage of birds was exemplary: small hearts pulsing, small wings working in the endless, transparent air. All the while, she understood that nothing could save her from the emptiness of the years that still had to be lived. Days passed, and weeks, and no one said her name.

  Long after the kitchen had grown dark, there was still light outside; it was after sunset but before the stars. It was the hour, remembered from childhood, when clocks ticked loudest: a long moment of suspension when boundaries blurred. That was when Christabel expected Bunty to appear—each time, she was sure she would come. She might take the form of an out-of-season cockroach or a shudder in a pipe. Christabel would accept anything. What was unthinkable was that Bunty, clasped so close in memory, might have wandered unreachably far.

  Christabel had got into the habit of keeping the door to the soft room closed, even though it darkened the passage and necessitated a light in the middle of the day. On a sunless afternoon, she realised that Bunty was trapped in the soft room. The unheated passage was a river of cold air. She went quickly along it and opened the door. The room looked all wrong, zigzag and black. Christabel returned to the kitchen and waited. She sat there for so long that when she got up, an abacus clicked in her hip. She thought, I’m closed to ghosts. When Kiki Mack’s husband died, Kiki had commanded him to appear in her dreams. He continued to obey her as he had done in life, advising her on business matters and whether to replace the car or keep it going for another year. But Christabel’s nightly entreaties vanished into her pillow. Nonsensical dreams came. She climbed out of a bus and crossed a deserted parking lot on a snowy evening. A low building appeared, with icicles hanging from the eaves like bluish-white combs. She was carrying a bag with a shoulder strap and tried to walk quickly in fur-topped boots. There were also the nights when she had to sit an exam in a subject she had never studied—chemistry, or was it Dutch?

  The telephone mounted on the kitchen wall rang. A man said, ‘Madam, there is an urgent problem with your computer.’ Christabel let him go on talking: it was lovely to hear a human voice. The oven was on, with the door open for warmth. But these days there was alwa
ys a long, draughty corridor at her back.

  Pippa came back once to show Christabel her baby: a wobbly infant who left a long strand of spit on Christabel. Christabel had bought a woolly blue bear for little Ben. At the sight of it, he screamed and turned his face to his mother’s breast. When Christabel brought out the expensive kind of Nescafé that made cappuccino, Pippa said, ‘My naturopath has me on a caffeine-free protocol.’ She asked for herbal tea. There wasn’t any, so Pippa said a slice of lemon in a cup of hot water would be fine. Christabel had to admit that she had no lemons either. Pippa resettled the baby. She said, ‘Just some water, then.’ Her hair had been dyed as black as a piano—it turned her face grey. Another upsetting thing was that Christabel had forgotten to bring in the washing. From the kitchen table, Pippa had an unimpeded view of a towel and a bathmat that had faded and dried hard. Kindly ignoring them, she told Christabel that she had another novel coming out very soon. It was called The Kitchen Diaries, and Pippa had written it in barely three months. ‘It was amazing, Christabel, I set self-criticism aside and just experienced flow.’ The novel was a really honest description of an adulterous affair set against a backdrop of corruption in the restaurant business. The early reviews were so good they were humbling. Pippa had brought Christabel a printout of the cover: a headless woman in a mauve dress faced away from the reader, holding a cleaver behind her back. Christabel read, ‘Brutal and brilliant, this fearless account of forbidden…’ She put her hand to the side of her head—was the ache there or in her teeth?

  It was one of those changeable autumn days, cutting and caressing by turns. Pippa was wearing a denim jacket over a dress splashed with flowery red—she always had beautiful clothes. Her new hair was angular and asymmetrical, slashed off above her ear on one side of her face and swooping down to a point beside her chin on the other. Pippa saw Christabel looking at it. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, in a way that made it clear only one answer was possible. ‘I got it done for my publicity photos. Matt’s not so keen, but I think it ups the cool factor, don’t you? Anyway, I’ve decided on my epitaph. Hang on, take Ben.’ Pippa passed him to Christabel as if transferring a package. She shrugged out of her jacket and placed one hand behind her head in an actressy pose, declaring, ‘Her hair was a talking point.’ Christabel, cradling the baby’s head, noticed that the tops of Pippa’s arms had spread. The baby curled his long fingers. His fixed, wide-open stare had been borrowed from a thinker or a corpse.

  Pippa explained that she couldn’t stay long because she was having a really social week. She reclaimed Ben and went on, ‘My agent took me out to lunch yesterday. We went to this amazing new Asian place at Darling Harbour. It’s been quite controversial because they do live sashimi. But Gloria and I talked about it, the cruelty aspect, and we decided that it was a Japanese cultural tradition, so it was OK.’ She stretched sideways to sip her water, holding the cup away from Ben. He had been grizzling placidly but chose that moment to turn rigid and roar.

  Pippa was on her way out when she said, ‘Where’s my head, Christabel? It’s called milk brain, apparently. I took this photo yesterday specially for you.’

  Hank’s moon face smiled from a screen. Christabel realised that what she wanted most in the world at that moment was a photograph of Hank—a real one, a paper one—but one of the useless commandments that had been drilled into her was never to ask for anything for herself. It was one of Moth’s rules. Her daughter owned a stiff, dark photo that showed Moth as a bride: she looked out flintily as if staring down an assassin. The weight of that photograph was immense.

  ‘Hank’s an outdoors dog these days,’ said Pippa, tucking her phone away. ‘Matt put his foot down. Because of Ben. We really miss having you next door, Christabel. We’re going up the coast next week, and poor old Hank’ll have to board at the vet’s.’

  ‘You could drop him off here. I’d love to have him.’

  ‘That’s so sweet of you. But it would mean going completely out of our way.’

  ‘Does he mind living outside?’

  ‘He made his noises at the start but he doesn’t do that so much now.’

  ‘But what about when there’s a storm? He’s afraid of thunder.’

  ‘He has a kennel,’ said Pippa in a patient, curved voice. ‘He’s fine, Christabel. I’ll bring him next time I come round.’

  Christabel saw a stack of The Kitchen Diaries in the window of a bookshop. She went in and looked at the price. She thought about waiting for the library to acquire a copy, but that would mean a delay before she could ring Pippa to tell her how much she had enjoyed her book. Also, if Christabel had her own copy, she could ask Pippa to sign it. Pippa would come over, bringing Hank and Ben, and this time Christabel would be prepared with peppermint tea.

  Pippa no longer had a landline, so when Christabel had read The Kitchen Diaries, she had to call Pippa’s mobile. While Christabel was still talking, Pippa said, ‘Oh, Christabel, you don’t get it—fiction isn’t real life. Eileen’s a character. She’s made up. No way is she you, just like Margot’s not me and Patrick isn’t Matt.’ She said a few more things. Christabel pictured her face: melting at first, then sharp. ‘Have to go, lovey,’ said Pippa. ‘I’m at the pool and Baby Swim’s about to start. Talk soon, OK?’ But whenever Christabel called, a stranger told her to leave a message, and Pippa didn’t ring back.

  At Christmas Christabel sent a card.

  In January she sent another one, for Ben’s first birthday.

  There were letters, elaborated over days, that couldn’t be sent: they weren’t written on paper but in Christabel’s head. They had replaced the old, silent conversations with Pippa, because Christabel had discovered that she could no longer imagine what Pippa would say.

  One letter offered, ‘It would be no trouble to me to take Hank off your hands. I would be glad to help, and glad of his company, to tell the truth.’ Another began, ‘When my mother died, I went into the dining room early one morning and found my father there, crying. At once I told myself that it was only a dream. Fa looked up and saw me, and there was a convulsion in his throat: he swallowed his tears like pills. He spoke to me, saying something about breakfast, and his voice was steady. There was no room in either of our minds for his tears—they were simply not possible. In the same way, it wasn’t possible for Fa to imagine leaving Ceylon. When I tried to, the pictures that came were as flimsy as ghosts. They were whitish and see-through, the way the souls of the dead are depicted in comic books. People said, “Australia” or “Canada”, and I saw ghost cars travelling past ghost buildings, ghost trees.

  ‘Bunty was different: she could imagine me in Sydney. When she offered to pay for my ticket and sponsor my application to immigrate, it was as if someone had knocked a hole in a brick wall that stretched forever: I watched a herd of antelope pass through.

  ‘The incredible thing was that Bunty and I hardly knew each other. As soon as I saw her again I asked why she had helped me. She said that when we were girls, I’d given her a sweet. A sweet! Why give it such weight? But I’m no longer sure that people’s motives can be understood and expressed.

  ‘When I arrived in Sydney, I hadn’t slept for thirty-eight hours. Suspension had taken hold of me, a belief in magic. It soothed fear. Everything familiar belonged to the past. I had stepped onto the plane and was suddenly modern.

  ‘On the way from the airport, I saw the strangest, most wonderful tree I had ever seen, a tree from another planet, with a smooth mauve trunk. It was summer; the sky pealed with blue. I walked down our street for the first time, and there were wavy lines in the air. The houses moved in front of my eyes. Much later, I learned that those small houses had been built for workers at the old St Peters brickfields and were considered little better than slums. They seemed perfect to me, people-size houses with good-tempered faces. Everything fitted, everything was in proportion. Another lovely thing was the path to Bunty’s door. The paint was fresh then, glossy and red. At the sight of it I felt something like a victoriou
s expansion. Although this is a dark, poky house, exactly as you describe it in your novel, standing at the front door for the first time I might have been about to enter a palace: a sequence of rooms awaited, gilded, mirror-hung. My father used to say that books opened doors to other worlds; but it was Bunty who did that for me, who opened up those bright rooms.

  ‘All my life I had been waiting for something wonderful to happen, and when I came to live with Bunty, I thought, Here it is. What I didn’t realise was that there would be no more big, unexpected changes like events in a book; at the back of my mind, I went on waiting for another transformation. By the time you arrived next door, it was your life that seemed brighter and fuller than reality, and I believed I could walk into it, as I had walked into Bunty’s house.’

  A month after Ben’s birthday, a postcard arrived: ‘Thanks for the beautiful cards and thoughtfulness. We’ve been in New York! Book out there now. It’s also been translated into Catalan, Hungarian and French. Must catch up soon. With love from us all.’ A PS written by an ant trailed around the edge of the card: ‘Benjamin means “child of my right hand”. My right hand might as well be tied to Ben. He still wakes up twice a night. I’ve written nothing since he was born.’

  Christabel turned the card over: hardy Australian flowers bristled on the front. She put it into an Arnott’s shortbread tin, where it joined the two postcards Pippa had sent her from France. Fa’s voice said, ‘Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.’ The tin also contained a copy of French Lessons, a gift from the author. Christabel knew the inscription by heart: ‘For dear Christabel, Thank you for being such a great neighbour! Big love from Pippa.’ There was a girl called Edie in French Lessons and another named Renée, but no one called Helen. The tin went into Christabel’s wardrobe, next to a blue bear discovered under the kitchen table after Pippa and Ben had driven away.