by Joy Dettman
Parsons let himself out. The front door had a modern lock, but he checked it before walking to the shed where he peered through a crack in the side door. He could see the shape of the Packard against the light from a small window. Everything looked in order. He straddled his bike and rode away.
Her tears wouldn’t, couldn’t dry. She walked the house while they rolled down her cheeks and she wiped at them, swiped at them, denied them.
‘How am I going to survive this town without her? Why should she die? It’s too fast.’ She wandered the kitchen, picking up, putting down, hoping the workmen did not return and find her weeping uncontrollably.
Her head ached with it. Her nose was blocked and her sinuses heavy with weeping. She caught a glimpse of her swollen eyes in the bathroom mirror as she washed her face for the umpteenth time. She looked terrible. Terrible. Her face was shiny, her nose red. What if they were to come back? What had they said? They’d called out that they were leaving, but she had been too absorbed. What if someone were to come?
She splashed cold water on her eyes, held the cold facecloth there, then wept into it until it was cold no longer.
‘Stop this. You must stop this,’ she ordered, but her tears would not listen. ‘How can I stop? I need you, my dear friend. I need you. I am not weeping for you, but for myself, for my loss.’ She lay on her bed, muffling her grief in the pillow.
It was near five when she walked downstairs, took two Aspros and made a cup of tea. Her head aching, but still denying, her tears still leaking, she let them leak, bored with the futile attempt to wipe them away.
The telephone rang, it caused her to jump, again splashing tea to the table. She shook her head, but the phone continued to ring. There was only one way to stop it.
‘Marilyn?’
Her friend wanted to talk about the news and to seek out more information to pass on with her change. In a voice, not quite her own, Stella cut the conversation short.
Five times in the next hour the phone rang as the news swept through the town, scattering yesterday’s news before it. Five times she spoke a few words then hung the phone on the cradle. It was after six when John Parker, solicitor and husband of Lyn, got through.
He was accustomed to having people listen, so a murmured yes or no was all he required. He spoke until the sun began to go down, go down on Miss Moreland’s final day. Go down. Stay down.
‘Oh, God, John,’ she said, and she blew her nose. ‘Why now?’
‘Bad timing,’ John Parker said, and Stella leaned and listened. Her tears slowly dried.
Perhaps she had known she would be named in Miss Moreland’s will. There was no-one else. Perhaps she had known, but there was nothing she wished to say to him about it. That was for another day, if there was another day.
‘Can I come around, Stell?’
‘No. Not now.’
‘You’re one of the executors.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know, but there is nothing I can do. Not now. Not yet. It is too soon to think of her as gone. I don’t want to do anything. Not yet. Please – ’
‘Are you also aware she left some pretty weird instructions as to –?’
‘I know. You have her instructions in writing, John – and we will follow them to the letter, otherwise she will return to haunt me. She made me promise. Spit my death and hope to die.’ Again the tears welled. She shook her head, shook them away.
‘It’s all here, Stell, but Christ – has she got any family? How are they going to take it? Won’t they have some say in it?’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow. It can all wait until tomorrow. Thank you for calling.’
‘Okay. I’ll be there around ten.’
‘Yes. If you must.’
‘Before I go, can you tell me where I can contact the family?’
‘She said I was her family. She has two nieces somewhere in Sydney. She hasn’t seen them since Cara, her sister, died in . . . in the sixties.’
‘I’ll have to try to contact them.’
‘Surely they will receive something.’
‘There’s not a lot left to receive. The flat, a few thousand in the bank. I’m afraid you’re it, Stell. The only mention of family is – ’ She heard the shuffling of papers, then he added. ‘To my nieces, Marie Connor and Raelene Mackenzie, I leave the bill for my funeral, and my insincere condolences.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Stella laughed and the tears rained down. ‘Oh, my dear, dear, wicked lady.’
The solicitor remained silent until he heard her blow her nose. ‘She had a good life, Stell. The best any one of us can wish for is a fast death. Better for her than dying like Mum did, an inch at a time for two years. Try to look on the bright side.’
‘Somehow a good death doesn’t seem to hold a lot of meaning for me at the moment, John. Maybe tomorrow. I have to go. Please excuse me now.’
‘Are you all right? Do you want Lyn to come around for a while?’
‘No. Of course I am all right. It’s just the shock. Totally unexpected. Do forgive me. I’ll see you in the morning. At ten.’
See you at ten. Get down to the business of burying. Off with the old and on with the new, but Miss Moreland hadn’t belonged to him. She was just another high school teacher, just another client. He hadn’t known her friendship. He didn’t know that she had filled the place of mother, of friend and confidante. He didn’t understand that a raw gash had opened up in Stella’s life, a gaping space which now threatened to swallow her. He didn’t know that.
She shouldn’t have died in her bed in the middle of the night. She shouldn’t have died alone. No-one should die alone. Had she tried to call Stella? Had she tried to climb from her bed, reach for the telephone?
‘God! How dare you do the things you do?’
Night had drifted into the rooms while she’d been speaking to John Parker. Now she turned the lights on, flooding the house as she wandered, breathing in the scent of its age and old memories. She had wept herself dry. Perhaps the Aspro had helped, but she didn’t want to sleep. Perhaps she was afraid of sleep tonight. Somewhere that dear lady was laying cold and dead. How could she sleep and forget that? She took up her knitting, but couldn’t settle to it. She picked up the plastic bag, half filled with clown heads, and she took it with her to the lounge room where she turned on the television, let it flash its nonsense before her eyes as she stitched.
These small clown faces she stitched by rote. A mindless task, but that was what she needed tonight. She felt mindless, empty of emotion now, empty as the old house. Empty head. Empty heart, just empty. For two hours she sat stitching empty faces on her clown head while some inane show played its faces on the screen. She didn’t know which of the males was villain, and which the hero. They were taking turns sleeping with the same naked woman. Or were there two naked women? She didn’t know.
Her clown faces all looked the same when she was done. She picked them up, one by one. Bland, staring things. She’d hate them in the morning. Yawning now, she turned the television off, leaving the villain/hero and the blonde rocking their bed, then she tossed the clown heads into their plastic bag and walked to the twin glass doors.
It was black outside, sullen black, waiting to pounce on her, wrestle her down. She drew the drapes. Faded, musty. No sun to fade them – not in the past forty years. When had they become faded? Why are they still hanging there? God. How time has stood still in this house, she thought.
But it was catching up now, spinning, ticking, gobbling up all the years of unchange. Like the vampires in – what was that film? A stake through the heart and the vampire began his aging, flesh decaying, his skull turning to dust to be blown away by a puff of wind. She stood staring at the brown velvet curtains, expecting them to begin their rot before her eyes. Small holes would melt into the larger, join. Slowly the metal rings would shed the fabric, and it would fall to the floor. A small heap of dust to be sucked up by the vacuum cleaner. Gone.
‘But who will vacuum up the dust?’ she sa
id, ‘My own small pile of dust may be beside it in the morning.’
She turned away then, stiff with sitting, drained by spent emotion, and she walked slowly upstairs, forcing blood to flow.
The typewriter was on her father’s desk, her stack of completed pages at its side. She sat, seeking words, words to fill the blank paper and the blank space inside her.
Time remained motionless, trapped in the darkrooms. He stood in the doorway, holding time back with his will, and with his massive frame.
‘She was not the mother I had hoped she’d be,’ he said –
Stella’s fingers stilled. They hung over the keys, like birds, frozen in flight.
These had been her father’s words.
‘She is not the mother I had hoped she’d be.’
Her father’s words.
She sat back, her heart beating like the motor-mower engine as she looked at the words that had come from some too full page buried deep within herself. She could remember hearing those words. They had been spoken once in this very room. Long, long, long ago.
And Doctor Parsons had been here. The tiny man, smaller still because he stood beside her father. And her hands. Her hands were . . . were blistered. Her small finger like a parchment balloon. Water-filled. And her palms. Seared. Raw.
‘No. No.’ She shook her head, shook the words away. This was fiction, only fiction.
‘Put it away. I am becoming caught up in fiction. And perhaps it is not the sort of tale to become involved in at this time. She pushed her chair back and walked across the hall to her own room where she sat on the edge of her bed, wishing her father home. Her hands came together, as in prayer, then they separated, and she stared at her palms. They had always been scarred. Ever since –
Again she shook her head. ‘Put it away.’
Don’t put it away. Look at it. Look at truth. Learn from truth.
‘No. I will crack,’ she said. ‘The shell I have built around me is already fracturing. My tears have weakened it and I am breaking up. I must get my mind onto something else. The computer. Lyn Parker. Yes. I will speak to Lyn. She is a wizard on John’s computer.’
Poor hands. Again she stared at her palms. They were scarred, ridged, toughened unnaturally, as she had been toughened unnaturally. For minutes she sat staring at her hands, the sound of her own breath loud in the room.
I’m going to crack. I must sleep. Turn my mind off.
Tired now, tired beyond tiredness. She rested it on the pillow, still damp from her afternoon of tears. Perhaps she slept.
‘I want to get up, Mummy.’
‘You want a lot of things, don’t you? Do you want to feel the fires of hell?’
‘No, Mummy. Please, I just want to get up now.’
‘Sit there and don’t you move.’
‘The clock made four. Daddy might come home soon. Please can I open the gates for him.’
‘You haven’t said the magic word.’
‘I said, please, Mummy.’
‘Please what?’
‘Please, my dearest darling good Mummy. Please may I leave the room now?’
‘You didn’t say the magic word. You’ll sit there until you do.’
‘I don’t know the today magic word, Mummy. You say it first, then I will say it, and we’ll be very happy, Mummy.’
‘You listen to God. He will tell you the magic word. Listen to him. Let him save you from the burning fires of hell – if it is his will.’
Her own scream woke her, but she’d bought part of her dream back with her. She could see her. She could see her clearly. For the first time in years, she could see her mother. A screaming, foot-stamping virago, her hair uncombed, her body unwashed, her face mad. Her mother had been mad. No precious Angel, hanging on the wall, with her fine eyes and her arms full of flowers. Not that fake portrait kept in Martin’s room, a vase of flowers always there, beneath it.
Mad. She had been stark raving mad.
‘But dead,’ Stella said, breathing out the dream. ‘Dead now. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.’
A Flighty Old Bird
There was no way to escape the morning and responsibility. The workmen arrived before nine to complete the installation of the stove, and by ten John Parker had wandered in with his papers. Then Steve Smith arrived, and minutes later Chris Scott turned up to measure old doorframes for new security doors. And the kitchen and laundry floors – finally they would have new coverings. Never had the old house seen such activity.
She had risen early that morning, dressing carefully in beige. Pantihose, sensible shoes. She had tamed the too short hair with pins above her ears, and appeared composed as she sat with John and Steve in the study, all doors closed between them and the workmen.
John had given her much to do today. Steve, the second executor, would be tied up at his one-man business until five. Near eleven when they left, she handed the back-door key to the electrician and asked him to lock up, and to drop the key into Miss Moreland’s flat.
‘Do what must be done,’ she said. ‘Go. Life goes on. Go.’ Thus she steeled herself to leave the house and drive alone to Miss Moreland’s unit where she must set about packing up a long and wonderful life.
Johnson and the new constable were there when she arrived. The older man left soon after, but his colleague remained in the bedroom, behind closed doors. Stella was given leave to sort through the drawers and personal files in the lounge-dining room. She did not ask her questions aloud, but her mind kept asking, why?
A death no doubt had to be investigated – even the death of an elderly woman who had gone to sleep one night and never awoke. A massive heart attack was the probable cause of death. So Johnson said.
‘Instantaneous,’ he said.
Stella crept up on the drawers in the old writing desk, feeling like a thief, and too aware of the other presence that had been behind the closed door. Her sleep had been broken by the strangest dreams, fiction and fact intersecting in the night. This morning she could not shake the memory of wild grey hair, and those eyes. Ice blue, and wide. Wild. Angel had been a crazed thing near the end, locked in the small downstairs bedroom, hidden while the hedge grew ever taller. Why? Why had her father keep his wife at home?
Her fingers in her hair, she massaged her scalp and breathed deeply. This was no time for such thoughts. There was a task that must be done today. That is why she was here. No time to question insane decisions made on some lost yesterday.
‘His false pride,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she could have been helped.’ Then she shrugged. ‘Probably not. Not back then.’
Another drawer was opened. She took from it a box of old postcards, and stood scanning for names and the addresses of the missing nieces. There were many old letters, though none from a Marie or Raelene. She glanced at each one, but briefly, then she tossed them into a large plastic bag.
It was twelve before the young constable exited the bedroom with his own items in his own plastic bags, but Bob Johnson had returned. She made them tea, and the younger man asked her if she knew of any male friends Miss Moreland may have had.
‘She was on good terms with many – ’ She looked up from her teacup, caught his eye, and understood. ‘She was ninety-six!’
‘I’ve known a few who wouldn’t let that hold them back, Miss Templeton,’ he said.
‘She was a flighty old bird. I wouldn’t put it past her,’ Johnson added.
Stella flashed him a look and Johnson had the decency to blush.
She left them drinking tea while she emptied the refrigerator, but there was a feeling of unease about her now. She followed their backs with her eyes as they walked out the front door, then from a window she watched them knock on the doors of other flats, then return to walk around Miss Moreland’s unit. She sighted them in the shrubbery beside the lounge room window, and again at the bathroom window. Then they left, and she went about the business of searching.
At one, she called John Parker and gave him the names and addresses of Miss Morelan
d’s two nieces.
Empty, wrung out and squeezed dry, Stella worked on, functioning on a different level, as if lost in some never-never land where death is not yet complete, where life has gone but the presence remains, until church ritual and cemetery give release to the living. The wait until Thursday was too long.
‘Get me in the ground as fast as possible,’ Miss Moreland had said many times. ‘Don’t leave me languishing in a freezer like a side of old mutton.’ But Thursday was the earliest they could put her to rest. Thursday afternoon. They’d had to get a minister from out of town.
It was too long.
She washed the refrigerator shelves with water and a drop or two of vanilla essence then she propped the door wide. So empty, so lonely, its contents tossed to the bin, or placed on the bench. The flat offered no solace today, and Stella wept again for the empty refrigerator, the old supplier of countless luncheons, a thousand cool drinks. She had loved this place. So many wonderful afternoons spent here. So many meals eaten at this table.
Through the kitchen window, she saw the young constable poking at the soil beside the neighbouring flat. Her stomach grumbled. She had eaten little since breakfast yesterday. Stomachs make their own demands, lost energy must be replenished. She looked at a tomato she had given Miss Moreland on Saturday, picked fresh from her garden.
‘I must eat something,’ she said. ‘Life must go on, my dear lady, but only God knows how.’
The town clock struck two as Stella ate alone at the dining room table. She ate the tomato, she ate cheese and a small can of leg ham. She used the last of Miss Moreland’s milk in a cup of tea, then she washed the dishes and packed them away.
An apron, hung lonely, waited in vain on the kitchen doorknob for her old friend’s return. She picked it up and held it to her face a while, breathing in the odour of kitchen and luncheons, then like a thief, she folded it quickly and tucked it in her handbag. In the laundry, a basket sat patiently waiting on the ironing board, damped down and rolled up in the old-fashioned way. Stella found a task for her hands, something unfinished, something to be done, something that might keep her out of the bedroom. She didn’t want to go in there where the men had been. What had the young constable taken away? What tales might that bed have told?
