Fake ID

by Hazel Edwards

  ‘Am I supposed to get up?’ I whispered, shoving the wet tissue in my pocket.

  Mrs Donna shook her head, and her chins wobbled.

  Suddenly, Luke stood up, and said in a loud voice, ‘Madga Kovacs was a cool lady. She even surfed the net, as she called it. ’ Then he sat down and the noise of his feet echoed around the chapel. Everybody swivelled around to look at him. Luke’s neck was going bright red. I could see a few zits standing out.

  Luke never volunteered at school for anything, unless it beeped. But Gran used to feed him goulash whenever we stopped by. And he helped her recently when she deleted files by accident.

  After that, the service didn’t take long. I was concentrating on not crying or sniffing loudly, but my tissues were still a soggy, stringy ball by the end. I was OK until the coffin jerked a little and then started to roll behind the dark velvet curtains on rollers and I realised I’d never be able to ask Gran all those questions: Who was that man in the photo? Why had she used more than one name? Who was Mr or Mrs Tuna? She had gone and I was left behind to make sense of the mystery of my family history.

  The end of the polished wood coffin vanished. That was so final.

  I gulped and it came out sounding like a snort. In that quiet chapel it sounded so loud. My last tissue dissolved as I tried to wipe away my tears.

  ‘Here.’ Mrs Donna passed me a few more dry ones. ‘You have to go outside first because you’re the main relative. Others will follow you.’

  So we walked to the front door behind the White Ladies. My gran was a tall woman, so how could she fit in such a short coffin? I guess it was her in there, behind the curtains. Who checked? I guess the undertaker did and that’s why they were called that. But if someone dead thought they were going up to heaven, maybe the funeral director should be called the above-taker. Going up to heaven, above. Stop it, Zoe, I told myself. You’re just playing word games to stop thinking about the real Gran who didn’t believe in heaven anyway, so she wouldn’t be bothering about a fake ID to get in there.

  How did I find out my gran had fake ID? Well, something serious happened last month when Gran leased the computer and started surfing. I made the mistake of asking her questions about our family, which came from Hungary years ago. My cyber hockey mate, Luke, started hacking at our family tree when he found the site of the Dead Persons’ Society, and told my gran about the links to the Hungarian sites. That’s when Gran started surfing the net, seriously.

  Now, nothing was certain any more. I felt shaky and a bit scared of the unknown. I was the only one left.

  Chapter 3: Dead Persons’ Society

  ‘Woof. Woof. Woof.’

  Bark was digging up the vegie patch. Chasing cats was his other hobby. At this moment, he seemed so alive and ordinary and noisy. I felt grateful for that.

  ‘I’m off now. Sure you’re OK, Zoe? I’ll feed Bark until it’s decided where he’s to live. And you’re certain your gran would have liked me to have this back? Magda found it so useful, I know.’ Mrs Donna was fussing as usual.

  That gross black vase had been Gran’s pet hate. Since she didn’t want to hurt her neighbour’s feelings, Gran kept it near the front door, with umbrellas, spare keys and things to be returned.

  ‘I’m sure Gran would want you to keep it as a … memory.’ I couldn’t think of the proper word.

  ‘Memento? Magda did say she was leaving something for you too, Zoe. I couldn’t understand which file she was talking about. Have a look for that, too.’

  Mrs Donna obviously wanted to go home to put her feet up. Ankle fat rolled over the edges of her best shoes and she walked with difficulty, hauling her bulk around.

  ‘I’ll carry that next door for you,’ Luke hoisted up the black vase. His shoulders and thighs were strong from training. He just looked a geek in between.

  ‘Are you sure that’s all right? Just you two young ones?’ Mrs Donna had been a brilliant neighbour to Gran, but I wished she’d go home. We couldn’t even take Bark to Luke’s place because he’d eat their cat. This is when I really missed my mum.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll just look around here for a few things first, er, Nell. And then we’ll walk back to Luke’s parents’ place. Thanks for all your help.’

  ‘Make sure you lock up. If you find a will, give it the to Trustee who’ll call soon. Here are all the keys from the black vase.’ Mrs Donna handed over a jingly bundle with a name tag.

  ‘Is your mother coming back soon, Zoe? It’s not right that a young girl has to make all the arrangements.’

  ‘Kat’s signed up for the season. She’s a winterer. She can’t get back because they’re iced in for the winter months. But she e-mails and we talk on the satellite phone and Skype. The Antarctic Division give us discount rates so families can keep in touch.’

  That was true, but I was still trying to sound OK and in charge. All afternoon, I felt as if I’d been playing ‘the granddaughter in grief’. I felt a bit of a fake, unlike Luke, who always said what he thought, even if it upset people. Gran had liked him. So did I, most of the time, as long as he wasn’t putting on an act and trying to impress Jessica. With Luke, I could stop pretending.

  Five minutes later, Luke was back. ‘Dropped the vase, when Bark barked and wanted to give me this.’ Luke held out a smelly bone.

  ‘You’re kidding about the vase?’ The bone smelled awful, as if it had been around for years.

  ‘Of course. Was your Gran starting a new vegie patch?’

  Bark had dug around all the shrubs, scattered soil over the path and made holes between the tomato plants. The kitchen herb garden was a holey mess, with scraps of green herbs dragged all over.

  ‘No, it’s just Bark. He digs when he’s bored. First he lost Pa, and now Gran’s gone.’ I dropped the bone in the biggest hole and swept soil over it. Then I swept the path clean. I picked up some of the scraggly herbs and tried to replant them. Some were too dry. I fixed a couple of the palings in the fence where Bark had tried to get through or dig under. If he was alone much longer, and especially if he didn’t get regular walks, Bark would wreck the yard.

  ‘Shouldn’t have showed your Gran the Dead Persons’ Society links. Bad timing.’ Luke pushed back his wire frames, and peered at the Bark holes. He’d taken off the ill-fitting jacket, which must have been his dad’s. He unbuttoned his good shirt, and stripped down to his usual t-shirt with Hot Stuff scrawled across it.

  ‘That’s gross,’ I pointed to his shirt. ‘Even for wearing to training.’

  Ignoring my comment about his clothes, Luke grabbed a spade and energetically started filling in the Bark holes. The dog sat and watched as if Luke was under his orders.

  ‘The site just linked to her Hungarian past. She’d been pretending to be Magda all the time she was in Australia. Before that, she was someone else, but I don’t know who. I was just going to ask her, and she was raced off to Intensive Care,’ I was thinking aloud to myself as much as talking to Luke. I was trying to work out how my gran thought, but there weren’t enough clues left behind. You think you know someone and then you find out things that make her seem like an entirely different person. So you feel a bit of an idiot that you didn’t realise earlier.

  ‘Yeah. Names are sick. Wish I could change mine.’ Luke leaned on the spade, panting.

  His family name of Warne wasn’t his fault, but his parents should have thought a bit longer before they named him. Luke was just a mate — with an unfortunate name, if you said his first and second name together really fast. I mean, how could you have a boyfriend who’s called Luke-Warm by other kids?

  Luke’s a cyber junkie. You know, one of those geeks who thinks if you can’t click on its screen, it doesn’t rate. In between he plays hockey, which is pretty rare for geeks, who only exercise their mouse-hand usually. Luke’s thighs and shoulders are as fit as his mouse-hand. But then Luke’s family is keen on the game of hockey.

  ‘That site’s for… gene-somethings,’ said Luke. ‘You know, those ones who track family trees
. They’re not dead… just the people they’re trying to find out about are dead. They’re tracking ancestor stuff, like famous people, or diseases.’

  ‘ “Genealogists.” ’I knew how to say it because Gran told me, but I need a spell-check to write it. There were other words nearby that sounded a bit like it, but you don’t want to make a mistake and say ‘gynaecologist’, which means a doctor for women‘s stuff. I can’t spell that without the spell-check either. Gran used to call the history detectives the ‘genis’. That’s shorter, and much easier to say and to remember.

  ‘What’s with the keys?’ Luke jingled the bunch. ‘You gunna be a locksmith or something for work experience?’

  Last week, our school told us to start organising a fortnight’s work experience at the end of term, so it’s something we were both thinking about. Luke wanted to work in a computer shop or for Hockey Galore, the sports gear shop, because he thought they might have a few free samples of sticks or hockey balls. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to work in Maccas or for the White Ladies Funeral services.

  ‘The keys should open most doors and drawers in the house. Mrs Donna said to check for a hidden will. My job to find it since Mum’s not here. And she said something about a file being left for me. It’s around the house somewhere, but Mrs Donna hasn‘t seen it yet.’

  ‘I’ll help you look for it. You did an OK job at the wake,’ Luke said. ‘Those olds ate more than me. All those sausage rolls and ham sandwiches went really fast.’

  I watched as he put the broom and the spade back in the tool shed next to the garage where Gran’s car was parked. Was Luke trying to be nice because I was Gran-less? Or did he mean it?

  The funeral people provided ‘light refreshments’ for what Mrs Donna called the wake. Weird! So quiet. The whispers guests made wouldn’t wake up any dead person. They thanked me for ‘the cuppa’ which I hadn’t organised. Offering curried egg or shaved ham (since when did pigs shave?) sandwiches saved me having to say important stuff like, ‘Did you know if my gran had another life?’

  Maybe someone there did know more about my gran, but I didn’t know who to ask or what to say. Besides, they treated me as the left-over grandkid, as if I were about six and feeling grown-up because I was allowed to hand around the sandwiches.

  ‘Are we looking for an envelope?’ Luke opened the back door, which then slammed behind us.

  ‘Probably.’ I had no idea. No labels on the keys. Not even colour tags or purple nail polish like I put on my second Hedge High locker key

  ‘Or a computer file?’ suggested Luke. ‘That’s what I’d look for.’

  Since Gran went hi-tech only a few weeks ago, the will was more likely to be in a drawer. Anyway, it had to be witnessed and you couldn’t do that on a computer. I held up the keys. ‘Try the locked drawers first. Let’s see which keys fit.’

  Checking for important documents and valuables is normal after a death, Mrs Donna says, but it’s creepy going into an empty house, which still has a feel of the owner. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there’s still a sense of Gran about the place that’s really hard to describe. It’s not a smell, just a flavour of her clinging to the rooms. Her furniture. Her colours. Her mess. And a sense of her personality. I don’t mean a ghost or anything spooky, just her.

  For a moment, I wondered what I’d leave behind if I died. Would there be a sense of Zoe anywhere? Mum and I never lived in the same place long enough for any house or flat to be ‘infected’ or even affected by us. Even on the farm where we house-sat for the owners, we were very temporary and the owners’ belongings were still around.

  ‘Sometimes old people hide jewellery under the mattress…or in the freezer,’ suggested Luke.

  ‘Uncomfortable to sleep on, or wear!’ I say. ‘Cool!’

  Gran was not the world’s best housekeeper. I’d always liked that. She didn’t fuss. But that’s also why I had to live with Luke’s super-organised mum. Since Luke trained for the same club, that made the pick-ups and drop-offs easier. Very different women. While Luke’s mum recycled everything, fast, Gran was a bit of a hoarder. There were newspapers in piles. Old envelopes. I checked them all. Empty. And stacks of canvases against the walls of the hall, with one painting hanging.

  ‘Hey, isn’t this the picture of you? The one where you had to sit still for hours?’ Luke called out.

  ‘Twenty hours.’ That’s when I used to dream of playing hockey for Australia’s top women’s team to fill the time. I’d get the only goal in the final minute of the second half and everyone in the international crowd would cheer. I’d be on the TV sports channel. But all I got was eye-ache from having to stare at a corner of the room and not move. You wouldn’t think it was so hard to do nothing. Being an artist’s model was not for me, either. So I wouldn’t try and get work experience with an artist, especially a portrait painter. Been there, done that.

  The picture was crooked. You know how some people can’t bear crooked pictures? Luke is one of them. So he tries to fix it.

  Trying to balance, one foot on the sofa arm, Luke reached up towards the portrait, wobbled and accidentally knocked ‘me’ off the wall. Crash! The painting fell on its corner frame, which splintered just as Luke wobbled back the other way.

  ‘Look out!’ Off balance, Luke put his foot heavily on my painted face. His sneaker heel went through my painted canvas mouth. The canvas broke and a hole appeared.

  ‘Idiot!’ I grabbed at him and he twisted his foot out, but the sneaker hole was still there. Realising what he’d done, Luke paled. ‘Can’t we use supa-glue or something? Or a band-aid on the back?’ He ran his fingers around the jagged hole in the canvas, and tried to make the splintered wood fit back.

  ‘Like first aid for Gran’s painting?’ I started to laugh and then it changed into crying. ‘I don’t think that will mend anything. Gran’s gone. No one else will want my painting…or that one of Bark. Who would want to look at a dog and a bone on their wall forever? Only Gran really liked Bark.’

  I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I never liked that painting anyway. I pulled stringy, third-hand tissues from my pocket. Tears leaked through. My nose ran. My eyes dripped everywhere.

  ‘Sorry, Zoe,’ Luke stood up. He didn’t touch me. ‘Your gran probably thought it was special. Although, up close, the face doesn’t look much like you. Maybe we could stick it up in your bedroom at our place? Then no one else would see the hole. Or we could put a patch on it and then paint over the patch.’ Luke squinted at the painting. ‘No one would know the difference, would they?’

  ‘Forget it.’ I sniffed, and my nose was still all runny. I felt such a wet mess. Everything was going wrong. And I was the only one left to fix things.

  I tried to lift the portrait, but it was too big to balance. ‘Let’s leave it. I’ll tell the Trustee about this later. Or maybe he won’t notice?’ I leaned my portrait against the wall, but Luke flipped the canvas over. ‘Hey, there’s another painting on the other side.’ He stood back and half-closed his eyes the way he imagined experts did. Then he kneeled and squinted at a blob in the corner. ‘Looks like your family tree with faces on branches, and squiggly initials. Must have taken ages to paint. Easier and quicker to do family trees on a computer program. Are you on here?’

  ‘Dunno. First time I’ve seen it.’ I peered at the tree painting, which had a few brown branches. ‘Look.’ I pointed.‘Up the top, on a little branch. There’s my face and a Z.’ I looked further down, at the back of Luke’s sneaker hole. ‘Can’t read what’s here on the tree trunk.’

  I squinted at the bottom name. ‘It’s been signed Dagmar. Why would she sign it with a different name? Artists like to be known for their work, don’t they?’

  ‘Sure it’s not Magda and the writing’s hard to read?’ Luke said quickly.

  ‘Maybe Dagmar was her real name? Or one of them,’ I suggested. ‘Not Magda.’

  ‘Same letters, except for the r. Different order,’ said Luke.

  That wa
s true. Luke’s mind was different from some people’s. I felt a little curl of excitement. ‘Dead right.’

  ‘Gross,’ said Luke, just as I realised what I’d said. So many sayings had ‘life’ or ‘death’ in them. But you couldn’t stop using death words just because your gran died. But I could keep wearing my black gear after the funeral. No choice about that.

  Where should we start looking? In the sitting room, there was a tape still in the player. Kat bought it for Gran last Christmas to record her favourite docos. Gran’s docos, that is, not Mum’s. My mum only likes wildlife programs about birds or icebergs, but Gran was interested in people and history and all that old stuff. She’d watch anything about the past. ‘What you call history used to be current affairs for me,’ Gran said once.

  I hit EJECT. Out slid the black tape. Written down the side, in Luke’s writing, was Hungary 1956.

  ‘Did you write this label?’ I knew his writing by now, but what I really meant was why did he do it for Gran.

  Luke loped into the room.‘Yeah. She asked me to work the player to record some SBS foreign language television program. Lost her glasses, so she asked me to write a label in case it got mixed up with the other tapes.’

  ‘What’s the doco about?’ I turned the black cassette over as if it was a clue.

  ‘Some Hungarian Revolution in 1956. She kept using the freeze frame. I think she was looking for someone in the crowd.’

  ‘D’you think she was there?’ Maybe this was a clue to her past? I remembered the newspaper clipping date.

  ‘In Hungary? Showed her some Hungarian links from the Dead Person’s Society. She was pumped about that.’ Luke paused, thinking about my question. ‘Or do you mean was she in the video?’ He fiddled with the pile of old videos, checking the labels.

  ‘Both. Hey, this Missing Millions label here is in your writing. What’s that?’

  For a minute I wondered if she’d taped her will, but then I realised.

  ‘TV show about people who leave money and no wills. Finding who should get it. Your gran wanted the presenter’s phone number.’ Luke explained.