by Cate Kennedy
Mum’s other half, Bob, is at the back door taking off his boots. He has been mowing the lawn before the barbecue. Mum says it drives her mad that he leaves it till the last minute. He pokes his head around the doorway and chuckles.
‘What’s going on here? Secret women’s business?’
‘You betcha,’ Mum says, winking at Reen.
Bob is wearing khaki shorts and a black singlet stretched to breaking point over his huge stomach, which looms larger due to his lack of height. He has a grey moustache and is wearing his favourite hat, which rarely leaves his head.
‘I’ll clean myself up and then I’ll fire up the barbie,’ he says as he heads towards the bathroom.
My phone beeps. Craig again. The text reads, All sorted. Shit.
‘Mum, you know I mentioned a bush?’ I try again.
The screen door at the front of the house bangs and we can hear voices in the hallway.
I finger the silver cross hanging around my neck. It was Rachael’s and I’m hoping Mum notices I am wearing it.
Roy and Cliffy appear in the doorway. Roy is huffing and puffing. He leans his small body against the wall, overcome with the exertion of walking from next door. Cliffy is his polar opposite, tall and twitching with nervous energy.
‘OK,’ Mum announces. ‘Officially too many people in the kitchen.’
She squeezes past everyone, carrying two bowls of salad, and we follow, emerging on the small porch. It is a concrete slab with a green shadecloth awning that offers some respite from the Queensland sun. A sea breeze teases us with bursts of cool air. Mum places the bowls on the table, its lace covering flirting with the wind. The esky holds the Fourex on ice, minus the one Bob’s nursing in a Gold Coast Titans stubby-holder. He is provoking the sausages on a large home-made brick barbecue over by the paling fence.
I try calling Craig to warn him. It goes straight to voicemail and I swear under my breath.
‘Craig, it’s me. Call me when you get this.’
‘Where is Craig?’ Mum asks with her back to me.
‘Not sure. He’s not picking up.’
Cliffy is sitting on an old wrought-iron chair he has placed on the lawn. His foot taps the ground in quick, insistent beats as if he is primed and ready to run when given the signal. He pulls off his T-shirt and tosses it over the back of the chair. He has strong shoulders and a surprisingly taut stomach. A tat on his left pec announces, I am God. I wonder if he has stopped taking his medication.
‘Want a beer, Cliffy? One won’t hurt,’ Mum says, handing over the small brown bottle.
‘Cheers, Mrs D.’
Roy and Reen sit side by side in the shade. He rattles with the effort of breathing and she is vigilant, ready to take over if needed. Mum disappears inside and re-emerges carrying the white box. She sets it carefully on a small bench below the laundry window, retrieves her beer from the table and makes a toast.
‘To Rachael.’
‘Hear, hear. To Rachael.’
Everyone sips their beer, including me. Then I take a couple of gulps but it doesn’t help. I text Craig, Abort! Abort!
The gate creaks open at the side of the house and my brother’s face pokes around the corner. He is wide-eyed, his curly brown hair matted with salt and sea. He shuffles forward, dragging a skinny bush, its disappointing foliage wilting in the heat.
‘Ta da!’
Everyone is silent. The barbecue crackles as another sausage pops its skin.
‘What?’ he says.
Mum edges forward on her seat, ready for a fight.
I walk over and try to put an arm around her shoulder. She shrugs me off.
Craig glares at me. ‘I thought you had cleared it with her.’
‘I said I would talk to her.’
‘For God’s sake, Mum, it’s been ten years.’
‘Your point?’ Mum folds her arms and leans back in her chair.
‘Look, I’ll dig a hole right here, we’ll scatter the ashes and you’ll have beautiful roses all year round.’
‘I’m not ready.’
Mum jumps up and grabs the white box.
Craig walks towards her and begs, ‘Please, Mum, give me the ashes.’
‘Back off.’ Mum is sidling towards the door.
Reen is on her feet, covering some of the ground between Mum and Craig.
‘Now, now, she’s your mum. What she says goes!’
For a minute, I think my brother is considering a reluctant retreat.
Instead he says, ‘Reen, stay out of it,’ and walks over to Mum.
He tries to take the box from Mum carefully, gently loosening her grip, but she jerks it back and it falls from her hands. The lid bounces away, the ashes spill out. A sudden gust takes the silver tailings and throws them in the air, lifts them in a shimmering dance and showers them over everything.
The remains of Rachael are in our eyes and up our nostrils and coating our hair. Roy struggles with the new hazard, wheezing and rocking. Reen flaps her hands dangerously close to his face as she tries to clear the air. Cliffy jumps onto the seat of his rickety chair, all elbows and knees, like a giant praying mantis. Bob eases back to the barbecue, tongs in hand, retreating from the menacing grey mist.
Craig and I scream and jump around, flailing our arms as if spiders have fallen from the sky and are running through our hair and across our skin. He leaps from foot to foot, rushing his fingers across his scalp and shaking his head. I frantically wipe my face and arms.
‘Fuck. This is freaking me out!’ Craig calls from beneath his upside-down hair.
‘Jesus, I don’t want her on me!’ Cliffy sprints to the back fence.
Reen shows superhuman strength by lifting Roy off his chair with one hand and turning it 180 degrees before dropping him back onto it. Convinced his fragile airways are safe, she turns her attention to everyone else and, sliding her sleeves up her arms, she lurches towards the swirling debris.
A noise emerges from beneath the cries and the curses. It’s Mum. Laughter trickles out of her as she kneels before the little white box, trying to scoop up what’s left of the pile. She is scraping and laughing and looking at me and I hold my breath, partly because I don’t want to suck my sister into my lungs and partly because I want to remember the sound.
The Life You Chose and That Chose You
Strawberry Jam
Penny O’Hara
Frank looks at his watch. Eight o’clock. He’s been here an hour, no more.
At the next stall, David’s already unloading his second batch. Out they come, from the ordinary cardboard cartons underneath the table and into those baskets he’s got, in arty, rabbit-dropping piles. The women are the usual free-range crowd, shouldering their way to the front like punters on race day.
Frank eyes the stallholders, with their smiling and nodding, their passing of bags. All he’s getting are backs and arses. He feels the cat’s-bum tightness in his mouth and knows it’s his own fault.
He hears Ellen’s voice in his ear. You’re scaring them off.
She’s right, as usual. And David – despite the ponytail, the silver eyebrow ring – is a canny bloke. The way he spreads his palms, nods towards the laminated photos. ‘Happiest chooks in the world,’ he grins. All a bloody show, but it gets the customers.
‘They’re not buying an egg,’ David said once. ‘They’re buying a story.’
Holy shit, he thinks. A story.
In the last hour, as David’s baskets have emptied and been refilled, Frank’s sold one lousy jar.
‘Cheers, mate.’ David raised the jam like a schooner. A pity sale.
There’s a noise at his elbow. He looks down to see a kid tugging at the tablecloth, eyeing the wobbling jars.
‘Hey, kid.’
The boy looks up,
gives him the look: the watchya gonna do look.
Jesus. He’s in no mood. He looks around for the mother. Three bloody guesses. There, in the purple pants. She’s lifting an egg, holding David’s eye.
‘Oi,’ Frank says. ‘Leave it.’
He sees the woman pass David a note and cock her head, asking something. David gestures his way.
She’s coming over.
Come on, Frank, says Ellen, straight into his eardrum.
He pulls his face into a smile. The woman stops at the table, picks up a jar, examines the label. He gathers the words in his throat.
‘Home-made.’
Her eyes do a quick dart, taking him in.
‘My wife.’
‘Ah.’ She turns the jar in her hand.
A story, he thinks. A story. He should’ve brought the photos. ‘Stop bellyaching,’ Ellen had said as she’d snapped him unloading the crates of seedlings. Later, she’d tied on her apron, stood before the big saucepan and told him to get her good side.
The woman’s thinking it over and the kid’s started jiggling again. Leave it, Frank. Forget the bloody kid. She’s interested. It’ll be three jars, maybe more.
If only he had the photos. That’d clinch it, no question. Only … those shots were a bit out-of-date now, weren’t they? Not the full story, the real story. And what would he put in their place?
The answer rushes in before he knows it’s coming.
Ellen. She’s standing at the stove, holding the spoon. Her face, without the wig, is like a peeled potato. Her mouth is open. She’s telling him she’s had enough. She’s chucking the bloody chemo and there’s no use trying to talk her out of it.
‘I’ll take three,’ says the woman, but he’s not listening. He’s seen what’s coming, knows it’s been coming, suddenly, since the day started, since he stood in the cool morning and slid the rattling boxes into the back seat of the car.
‘Kid!’
He lunges forward, but it is too late. The jars are rolling and toppling like skittles. They’re crunching onto the floor, one by one in quick succession, a rapid vomiting cascade of glass and strawberry jam. There’s a slow leak across the concrete floor.
Frank finds himself standing with his hands by his side, helpless as a child holding the pieces of his mother’s favourite teacup.
He feels the gentle pressure of Ellen’s hand on his arm.
*
He walks out of there four hours early, a schoolboy with an early mark. He leaves David and the others to smile smile smile until the crowds trickle away and the bottom of the boxes show.
He’ll drive home, he thinks as he walks across the car park, with the window open. Let it blow away, the whole bloody lot.
‘Fuckin’ ratbag,’ he’ll say. And Ellen, sitting in the passenger seat, will try to look disapproving.
Only he won’t, and she won’t.
The last of the jam has gone, one way or another. The last batch, just like he’d promised her.
And now it’s gone, she’s going too.
She used to do that, when she’d had something she wanted to say. Hold her thumb down on the remote, making the sound plummet. ‘Oi,’ he used to say. ‘I was watching that.’ Only now it’s her voice that’s fading.
He walks to the car, opens the door, slides into the driver’s seat. He rests his hands on the wheel. After a while – minutes, hours – he puts his key in the ignition. Going, going, gone. Nothing to hear but the sound of an engine starting in an empty car park.
Fifty Years
Stephanie Buckle
‘Pamela’s here,’ says my father, as if I am all the emergency services rolled into one. As if I will save the day. ‘She’s flown from Perth this morning.’
I put my arms round him, and as soon as I feel his familiar stubble on my cheek and breathe his tobacco smell, I start to cry. He was the one who was supposed to save the day.
He clings to me, his hug uncomfortably tight.
My mother lies on the hospital bed as if cast away. But she turns her head towards me, and her face changes. Her eyes fill with tears and she reaches out her still-good right arm to me. She does not say my name. She does not say how glad she is that I’ve come. But she still knows how to hug; she still knows how to hold hands. I sit on the bed and she lets her good hand rest in mine.
‘What a relief,’ says my father. ‘She knows you!’
My mother moves her mouth strangely, as if she has been asleep for a long time; but words are beyond her. Through the window, a hot air balloon drifts slowly across the rooftops beyond the hospital and she points to it, like a child who is seeing for the first time.
‘I knew you’d perk up,’ my father says to her, ‘once Pamela got here.’
For the moment, I’m spared from having to find words for either of them, because a nurse comes in to adjust the drip. She regards my mother’s innocent wonder at the drifting balloon as she might look at a wound and she tells us, ‘With a stroke, a person can be a bit emotional, you know, like cry for no reason, or be rude when they normally wouldn’t dream of it. They can lose their inhibitions.’
‘Oh, I can’t see Gwen doing that,’ says my father. He leans on the bed rail and knocks the medication chart onto the floor.
For goodness’ sake, Jim, why don’t you sit down? my mother would say, if she could talk.
‘She’s not the sort to start being rude just because she’s sick, are you Gwen?’
And that’s when I see it, the first time. It’s the expression you make when you think no one’s looking. The one you make to yourself with your back turned. It’s the one that makes all the others look like masks, as if all the cups of tea and all the ironed shirts are just pretending. She turns from me and regards him quite steadily, but as if she sees him down the wrong end of a telescope, or as if he’s a fly buzzing still against the window, which she briefly thinks she might stir herself to deal with, but then can’t be bothered. Are you still here? it says.
But my father’s fond and anxious gaze does not waver. ‘Don’t worry; we’ll have you out of here in no time. We need the Christmas pudding making, don’t we, Pamela?’
She turns her eyes back to me. ‘You’re going to get better, Mum,’ I say to her, softly, wondering if she can hear me. ‘I’ll take care of you.’
‘I took her a cup of tea,’ says my father. ‘Seven o’clock, she never wanted it earlier. She reached her arm out, and I thought, that’s funny, she never does that. That’s when I realised, something’s not right.’
He’s told me this twice before, on the phone. It’s as if there’s a piece missing and if he keeps telling the story, he might find it.
While he’s telling me for the third time, I imagine her waking – only yesterday morning! – unable suddenly to make her body answer to her and praying that he would come sooner. She would have tried to call out to him and found that her words had gone too. She would have heard the kettle whistle and the cap blow off, and the back door creak, and then the silence while he had his first cigarette and let the tea brew, then the creak of the door again and he’d be back inside, stirring the pot, pouring the tea. Then she’d hear him coming down the hall, and the knock at the door – he always knocked, since they’d had separate rooms – and then, at last, he’d be there, the cup trembling in his hand as he put it down on the bedside table.
Now, he pauses his story, and leans over the hospital bed so that his face is close to her, and he smiles encouragingly.
‘“Wake up, Gwen, here’s your tea!” That’s what I said, isn’t it? Same as I do every morning.’
She’s not looking at him.
‘Did she say anything?’ I ask him. Even one word would be precious.
‘She was trying to,’ he says. ‘I didn’t catch on at first. She’s never been much of a one for
talking first thing in the morning, have you, Gwen?’ he jollies her. We wait, smiling, for her response, but of course there is none. Her face is stone. ‘Then I realised,’ my father continues, ‘something wasn’t right. She was making this strange noise and struggling, trying to move, but nothing was happening, like when you slam the accelerator and clutch together in a bogged car and the wheels spin.’
‘What did you do?’
‘She’d half fallen out of bed,’ he says, ‘so I lifted her back, propped a pillow behind her and tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, but she wouldn’t speak.’ His eyes fill with tears and I reach for his old man’s wrinkled, dry, tobacco-stained hand. ‘I said to her, “I’d better call an ambulance, Gwen, what do you think?” But of course, she couldn’t answer. In the end, I called the ambulance anyway, because I could see I wasn’t going to be able to get her into the car by myself.’
How long was it, I wonder, before he called the ambulance?
*
A neighbour, Margaret, has come with flowers, which lie in their vivid orange and purple cellophane, untouched and unlooked at. My mother’s eyes are closed, her body limp against the pillows. The nurses have dressed her in one of the nighties I brought in; the frilled neck of it cups her desolate, sunken face.
‘She’s not very well this morning,’ my father says.
‘I can’t believe it,’ says Margaret. ‘Gwen’s always been so fit and active.’
‘We’ve been married fifty years,’ says my father.
The shadow of a fresh concern passes over Margaret’s kind, plump face. ‘I know, Jim. Des and I were there for it, at the club, remember?’
‘She didn’t want a fuss,’ says my father. ‘She didn’t want anyone going to any trouble.’
‘It’s something to celebrate, though,’ says Margaret, ‘being together for fifty years.’
‘We’ve stuck together through thick and thin.’
‘It’s an achievement,’ says Margaret.
I want better words than these for my mother’s life. I want essential truths and real meanings; I don’t want to hear these platitudes.
