Goodbye Sweetheart

by Marion Halligan

  Ah, William. The life we were going to lead. The travel. The six months in the French countryside. The Greek islands. The boat around the coast of Turkey. Over dinner together they had talked of the voyages they would embark on, next year, why not.

  Ah, William. You have left me. You have abandoned me. I am bereft. I am betrayed. Her anger mounted in her chest, tasted like metal in her mouth.

  People say that a death like this, a quick death, sudden, no warning or portent, really no pain to herald it, such a death is a good death, lucky. There is even sometimes a suggestion that it is a reward, for a life well lived, for goodness, and noble behaviour. She’d said it herself in the past. And yet, to have your death, that is, you might say, what life has been lived for, the culmination and the end of it, this death that everybody knows and nobody understands, the experience that everybody ever born must have, has had or will have, to have this happen so that its protagonist hardly notices, since by the time it has begun to happen it is already over, is a kind of waste. Shouldn’t death be prepared for? Not in lingering pain, not that, nor in terror, but with enough awareness to allow the dying person to put his mind in order. Last rites, not to stop you going to hell, but to show you that you are prepared for this next step in life’s way. The great adventure, Peter Pan called it, to die will be a great adventure, and people remember that, even though if you look at it in context you can see that Peter was not keen.

  That’s for the person dying. And for the people left? The quick death, the sudden death, is the worst kind for them. Their life is changed utterly, in a moment; everything has to go on as it was before, work, eating, keeping house, bringing up children, yet nothing can be the same. If you have nursed a beloved person you can say, perhaps devoutly and with gratitude, It is finished. You have a chance to put your joined existences in order, to remember with care the past, to recall joys. The beloved says, I will never see Paris again, but you can remind him how many times he has already, and with what pleasure, visiting it again in this new conversation. The past can live in your recollecting of it, become more vivid than the present that is about to stop existing. He can say, You are the love of my life, and it is true, at this moment.

  Lynette was suddenly angry at this suddenness. No goodbye. No farewells. Just this terrible guillotine-quick not-being whose events kept crashing on to her like huge waves that dumped her, knocking her off her feet, rolling her over in scouring sand, slapping the breath out of her, and when she fought her way to her feet again and tried to catch her breath, another wave crashing down on her and the same thing happening over. Maybe in a while she wouldn’t make it to her feet again. Maybe she’d drown.

  Like dying of a broken heart, she knew it wouldn’t happen.

  And so much to do. The identifying. The car. The address book. The telephoning. The lists multiplied in her head like bacteria. They’d make her sick.

  She turned over. The doona was too hot, the sheet was rucked. The pillow seemed to have bricks in it. She began thinking of the calls she’d have to make. She hadn’t ever thought much about William’s wife, the one he’d been married to when they kept having to make urgent love on the kitchen floor, with its black rubbery covering printed in a pattern of raised coin-sized dots. You’ve got spots on your bottom, the man she was living with remarked. What? she shrieked, imagining red pustules, but when she peered over her shoulder in the mirror she realised it was the indentations from the kitchen floor. Where’s that bottom been? the man had laughed. Sitting on something dotty, I suppose, she said. Dotty, that’d be right, he laughed again. She was pleased and hardly at all guilty that he didn’t suspect. Later she sometimes thought of him, with pain for her bad behaviour. Passion, and damage. But William’s wife, well, she was William’s wife. People said a woman couldn’t come between a happily married couple. For Linnet and William there was the overwhelming need, irresistible, ungainsayable (the William word), they had to do this, this fucking on the kitchen floor, they had to do it now and keep on doing it, all their lives they would need this. There was this beautiful necessity to it. Love asks all, and demands that all be forgiven. She didn’t think about the wife, she only thought of herself, and William. Though she knew the wife had been devastated. How had she known? Lynette had side-long glanced at a tall still figure, composed, heartbroken, like a ghost seen only from the corner of the eye. Or like a statue, a still pale figure, carved as a monument to grief, in the graveyard of another life, left further and further behind and disregarded, as the helpless ardent lovers galloped harder and more headlong on the joy and gaiety of their own passion.

  And now she would have to look at her, turn and discern where she stood. The passion had stopped galloping some time ago. Now Lynette had lost William too, and the other wife—she did not ever say her name to herself, though she knew William kept in touch, and there was the boy, whom she loved more than a stepmother might, for his own sake and his father’s—that other wife would now have to be told that William was lost again, but maybe she would be glad in a vindictive fashion, thinking that now Lynette would not have him either, though she told herself she had no reason to believe that the woman was mean-spirited. But she would have to ring her and tell her, the woman she saw in her mind as a slender statuesque figure, its stone pitted from years of standing in a seaside graveyard, and blotched a little with intricate small growths of yellow lichen. And the stone hands would grind together in the wringing motion of sorrow, and the carved tears would slide down the worn cheeks.

  She hadn’t thought to pull the curtains. The sky began to lighten. The birds began their chortling, soon to sound like a distant schoolyard of children playing. She drifted into a fitful sleep. She was still in the seaside graveyard; the statue stood with its back to her, but she could see that it was beginning to turn with a stone slowness. She walked away down to the shore, on to a jetty, out to the end and stepped off. Her sleeping self stepped too, and woke up with a violent start, her whole body recoiling as it saved itself from the fall. The light was bright now, it was the next day and so much to do. She was still exhausted but that couldn’t matter.

  She went into Erin’s room. The girl was asleep, the salt of tears like snail trails on her cheeks. The child was half an orphan, and Lynette was a single parent. The man she’d been living with when she fell in love with William wanted them to have a baby but he wasn’t keen to get married and she thought he wasn’t committed; to a child maybe but not to her. When it was she who went away and broke his heart, he said, and she knew he believed it to be true. Whyever would anyone think marriage would save you from single parenthood? And Erin in the early days of her teens, the traditional difficult time. She’d been funny about food lately. Not hungry. Lynette knew she had to pay attention. Not that she was thinking of anorexia or anything like that.

  Janice was in the kitchen making coffee. It didn’t occur to Lynette how uncharacteristically early it was for her to be up.

  Look at you, Janice said. Did you sleep a wink all night?

  Not many, said Lynette.

  We’ll get you some Normies. You need to sleep.

  Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, said Lynette. Astounded. Her mouth gaped. She didn’t know she even knew such a quotation. It was William who came in with the neat classy words from his vast lexicon of useful quotes for all occasions. Was this him, still here, speaking through her? Maybe she was channelling him. Perhaps he was still nearby. People said the souls of the dead didn’t depart instantly, they hung around their old haunts for a while.

  Ravelled, said Janice. I thought it was unravelled.

  Maybe Lynette is unravelling. There was a thread got loose, and someone is pulling it. And all the stitches, so firm when the thread is fastened, so tightly locked, just slip apart, faster and faster, whole rows and chunks coming undone. Until in the end there is a tangled mess of threads and no sign that once they had been knitted up into a person.

  I’m pretty sure it’s ravelled, she said. Though I don’t
know . . .

  Erin came stumbling out, her eyes half closed. Janice poured juice and made her some toast, buttering it and spreading it with Vegemite. She cut it into thin strips. Soldiers, she said. Erin picked one up and sat with it between her fingers.

  Erin, said Lynette. The girl turned her head and lifted her face, but her eyes didn’t meet her mother’s, they looked emptily to one side, as though Lynette was not to be seen. The mother saw a little thin snake of hunger peering from her daughter’s eye, playful and deadly, ready to feed on her from within, eating her insides out into a cave of rib bones, held together by cracked and desiccating skin, her rosy flesh consumed, her head a skull. Erin, she said, almost shouting. Your father would want you to eat. Be strong for him.

  Erin’s eyes focused, the skinny snake blinked away. She said, My father wanted me to be happy. But she put the Vegemite soldier into her mouth and took a small bite.

  They made lists. Things to do. People to ring. Lynette remembered days when she’d happily made lists and added things she’d already done, so straightaway she could tick them off, as if a list was not a reminder of things to be done but a pattern to be completed.

  By evening she’d rewritten it several times, ticking things off, crossing them out, but always adding more. The pattern was far from complete. It never would be. However much was crossed off there would always be more to add. She could get one of those rolls of paper from the till and still the things to do would spool out, never ending.

  When she got into bed she decided to imagine that William lay there beside her, asleep as he sometimes was by the time she came. But she could not see his face. She had forgotten him. Barely a day dead, and she had forgotten him. Even though she had looked at him just that morning, said, Yes, that’s my husband, because it was certainly him, though he was cold now and waxy. A friend who’d lived among Buddhists said that they kept a body in the house for three days and no corruption happened, and then after the three days the spirit left, and the body was taken away. Less than one day, and William wasn’t there any more. When she finally got to sleep, the endless spool of lists wound through her dreams, and though she woke up often it didn’t ever go away, it turned and rolled out in its endless spiral, trapping her in its stiff papery folds. It wasn’t lists at all, it was William’s spirit, twisting away, away.

  Janice had gone into the shop and discovered that she’d forgotten to take in the tubs of cumquat trees on either side of the door. They stood on wheeled metal stands so they could be pushed inside the door at night, for fear of vandals. Or strong robbers. Yesterday they’d been covered with shining globes of fruit. In the night all the fruit had been ripped off and squashed under feet wearing shoes with treads like a truck’s tyres. A crushed mess of muddied orange skin and pulp carpeted the pavement. Janice felt sad, that what was beautiful had been destroyed, that people could look at something beautiful and see only something that could be destroyed, turned into an ugly mess.

  Lynette had often wondered if it would be safe to leave the cumquats outside. Several years ago, she said, she’d stayed in a flat in London, just off Jermyn Street, and walking around at night she’d noticed that all the shops had wonderful flowers outside, iron stands with terracotta pots of cyclamen, tubs of polyanthus, of azaleas, all sorts of elegant flowers, just sitting there, not fastened down or anything, and nobody touched them.

  Jermyn Street’s very posh, said Janice.

  Yes, but that’s the point. It’s pretty quiet at night, not a lot of people about, certainly no guards or anything. You’d think it would be a good place for disaffected people to come and destroy things. Or steal them. I couldn’t see what was stopping them. But night after night, the same marvellous displays of flowers, unharmed.

  Well, here was Lynette’s answer. Manuka was quite posh, even if it wasn’t Jermyn Street. And it wasn’t safe. One night, and the pretty cumquat trees had been violated.

  Janice got a bucket of water and a broom and washed the smashed fruit into the gutter. She trimmed the broken and bent branches of the little trees, sprayed their glossy green leaves with water. They were still quite handsome, if you didn’t know how they’d looked, yesterday.

  JACK GOES FISHING

  When they drove down to the house at Eden on a Friday afternoon they took sandwiches and a thermos of tea. Rosamund always carried the milk and sugar separately, in little jars she kept for that purpose. This meant that the tea tasted fresher, not stored and stale.

  Later Jack dropped the jar for the milk, it broke and he was bereft. You should not be bereft by the loss of a small useful but otherwise valueless article, but he was.

  They left Cooma on Friday during the afternoon and always stopped just past Bombala, where the high country starts to shift down to the coast, leaving behind the yellow grasslands rubbed and dusty like the skin of a mangy old lion in the zoo. Leaving behind that hard clear light, without softness or distraction or movement, the light that burns in summer and freezes in winter. Entering the forest, almost rainforest, turning off on a dirt road threading its way through the tall slender-trunked trees, where the light falls in shafts and shadows, and trembles and shivers as the leaves move. In the distance there are smooth layers of mountains blue in the oiled air. It is not the coast, which has different light and trees, glittering with prickly sunlight in the morning, shrouded in luminous watery mist in the afternoon. Nor is it the high country. It’s the space between and they always stop there, eat their sandwiches and drink their tea, and go on refreshed.

  Bill and Jack were brothers, Jack the older by several years. They had idyllic childhoods in those days when parents didn’t work such long hours and rarely bought objects and loved their children with a certain amount of benign neglect. Those days before the phrase ‘stranger danger’ was invented, when children were almost never driven anywhere, even if their fathers owned cars, being expected to make their own ways, on buses or bicycles or their own two feet, and telling your mother you were bored during the school holidays wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind. So they played on abandoned railway lines and crawled through culverts spiky with lantana and the thrilling odours of dead things decaying. Once a goat, which was a bit too thrilling. They climbed crumbling sandstone cliffs in bare feet. They made cubbies in deserted huts, and in the intervals of swimming in the sea collected a certain kind of small pointed shell that a friend of someone’s mother could sell to a chinaman for a lot of money.

  They fell down ditches and off bikes, their legs were always scratched and scabbed, their clothes which were once-good garments wearing out and growing too small were dusty and their skin grubby, they had that hot dry feral smell of physically exerted boys which made lady teachers wrinkle their noses when they got too close.

  Strangers might still have been dangerous: Jack playing hide and seek had once been accosted by a man who pushed him against the concrete pylon of a bridge and pulled out his willy which was big and purple and waved around in the watery light. He never found out what the man intended to do with it. Jack’s mates caught up with him and the man ran off. You never told your mother things like that. They didn’t worry you but they’d worry her. In fact you had to protect her from the knowledge of a lot of things that happened. Mothers were innocent, it was wise to keep them that way.

  Jack is the dreamy one, grown-ups said. Jack is always dreaming. He stared at things in a kind of trance, the sea, a gravel path, the bark on a tree, looking at its blueness, or redness, the peeling roughness, but not making anything of this, simply gazing. Sometimes adults gazed at him too, because he was a beautiful child and an even more beautiful young man, as though one of those Greek marble statues had had life breathed into it and turned rosy and golden instead of stony white. But nobody talked about this because it wasn’t the sort of thing to discuss, really.

  It was a kind of paradise, our childhood, said Jack to Bill when they were both middle-aged, and Bill who was William now said, Do you think so? I suppose it was.

 
Jack was still much better looking than Bill, than William, but it hadn’t done much for him. When he was young Jack didn’t know he was not ambitious. It didn’t occur to him to think about it. He gazed at life and when things offered he took them, if they seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t until Bill began to make something of himself, their father’s phrase, that Jack saw he wasn’t doing that and didn’t know how to. By that time he was working in the county offices in Cooma, married to Rosamund. A good job, honest and worthwhile, finished with when he left the office and walked home to a good meal. Sometimes he went away for a weekend with a colleague; they walked high into the mountains and caught trout. They tied their own flies, painstaking in the long winter evenings; they camped by the rocky fast-flowing streams and went their own way, up and down the river banks with their tall rods, casting the flies dancing across the water. They constructed a device for smoking the fish, so they could preserve some of their catch. Do you ever think of moving on, Jack asked his companion, I mean, going somewhere else, getting a better job? Because everyone knew that the hierarchies in the council were set, there was unlikely to be any movement for years. And the colleague, whose name was Clarrie, replied, No. Why?

  Though he clearly continued to consider the question, because several times over the weekend he referred to it. Where would you go you could catch fish like this? At the time, they were frying two beauties in butter in the old iron frying pan. Cooma’s a bonza town, said Clarrie as they hiked out, laden with sleeping bags and fish and the smoke box. Joyce likes it here, her family’s all about. And the kids. Jack felt comforted by that. Less guilty with his own contentment.