A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  Now, she drank her tea, savouring its warmth as she stood by the kitchen table, until the beat of the music made her set down the cup to tap the bassline of the song with both her hands. Her wedding ring clinked a kind of percussion, and she jibed and swayed to its beat. There was a particular shape to this music, something low and funky that made her feel at least a decade younger.

  And then she was back there, in a dark room thick with people. She was wearing a long red dress that left her back bare and she was tracing shapes across the skin of her neck, her chest, her collarbones with an ice cube that dripped, delicious, down her skin. The room was hot and the audience pressed in closer. She was shouting this song back to a singer six feet away on a tiny stage.

  She was standing on her own. She’d never felt more completely alive.

  The music. The cool wetness. The dark room and the close air. It was summer and she was on her own for the first time in years. She had left Ferdi Klim and just about felt as if she could fly. Ferdi Klim. Their names hooked together for years on end, and then she’d walked off to find her own space. And felt invincible—even now, her body stretched higher, straighter with the memory of ice tracing her warm skin. That was who she wanted to be, the woman who reached out for more.

  It took a moment for her to realise that there was another noise nearby, and that slammed her back to the present. She grabbed at her loud ringing phone.

  Another thing she hadn’t understood all the years before Tom came along: motherhood’s terror—extremity, catastrophe, terror. The crazy swing from love to dread that could disrupt the most nondescript day. No mother she’d known had talked of it: not her sisters, nor her mother, nor the friends she’d left behind in every place they’d lived.

  There were so many things to worry about—Tom himself, and the spiders in the garden; the planet; and everything in between. She couldn’t bear to watch the news. Some twins, she’d heard the edge of a report just this morning, had been starved to death by their own mother in this very city. She’d broken a plate in her hurry to switch off the radio.

  Now, she scooped her phone off the counter. Ben was ringing to tell her something dreadful. Something had happened. By the river. Something had happened to Tom.

  And then the ringing stopped, just as suddenly as it had started, and Lucy stared at the silent screen. There was no number listed.

  All the smoothness, all the music’s joy fell away from her body.

  She hadn’t been like this before. Easy come, easy go; easy even with the randomness of life. Now, every hiccup, every unknown, was a crevasse into which she could fall.

  In other countries, she’d read once, there were spirits who travelled ahead of you in time, doing the things you’d do next. Alone in the house, she stood still to remember their name. Not a doppelgänger. Not an alter ego. Vardøger: that was it. It was Norwegian. She’d typed a paper for someone once—a professor in London, who specialised in Norse mythology—and she’d liked the sound of these creatures. ‘They never threaten, never frighten,’ he told her. ‘Some people hear the vardøger; some people see them. Perhaps you hear something busily going about its business and doing whatever it does. And then, a short while later, the person themselves arrives, and does all those things. It’s like a premonition, a future self.’

  The security, the comfort, of a version of yourself gone on ahead.

  The Vardøger of Lucy Kiss: Ben had joked about taking the phrase as the title for a novel. But what would her future self be doing? She’d loved this game when she was pregnant with Tom, holding onto an idea of herself somewhere ahead, with her baby safely delivered. She’d always be calm, always fabulous, the kind of mother who could take a toy, a snack, from an elegant tote bag at a moment’s notice. Instead of her current self, lugging Tom’s stuff jumbled together in an old conference bag of Ben’s, in the bowels of which she could rarely find a thing.

  From outside, she heard footsteps pounding along the bitumen: if that was her vardøger, it was running away.

  Then there were voices in the street, and laughter. Rinsing her cup at the sink, Lucy leaned forward to try to see the speakers. The cup clattered onto the draining board as her phone rang again, and she grabbed it, registering Ben’s name on its screen.

  ‘Hello?’ Her heart pounded; the line was completely silent. ‘Hello? Ben? Hello?’

  4

  The wedding

  Early in the morning of her daughter’s wedding, Elsie woke with a jolt in the darkness, holding tight to her husband’s left hand. It was the excitement, she told herself. She’d been married just ahead of her own twentieth birthday, in the spring of 1940, and now here was her daughter, twenty years old herself and taking the same big step as 1961 tipped into winter.

  There was a symmetry to it, thought Elsie as she watched the silver-mauve light before sunrise. Perhaps it would set something to rights—because there was no doubt that Elaine had never been as happy a child as Elsie had hoped she might have been. Not that Elsie usually voiced this, even to herself. But this marriage, to Gerald—the most equable of men, and already doing well for himself in something to do with the mines—this would be the making of her.

  Following in my footsteps and I’m very proud, Elsie practised, imagining the ladies who would offer their congratulations after the ceremony at the church beyond the ridge. It was a pretty place, with a spire on the roof and a small pipe organ inside. A young man would play the Mendelssohn wedding march, with its short, sharp, declarative beginning, and all would be as it should be.

  I’m very proud, Elsie practised again. She would stand with her husband, beside her daughter and her brand-new son-in-law. They would smile for the photographs. She squeezed Clem’s hand and he snorted a little in response.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said as he stirred, as he woke. ‘Might as well make a start on the day.’

  ‘Come here, Else.’ He reached for her but she was buttoning her dressing gown.

  ‘Things to do. Things to do.’

  The rest of the house was quiet. The door to her son’s room stood open, as always, while the door to her daughter’s was shut. On her own wedding morning, Elsie remembered, she’d been up before the birds with the excitement of it, nudging her sister, and getting in and out of her frock—a pale green one that she loved, overlaid with a new chiffon skirt embroidered with tiny pink roses—three times before breakfast.

  Her mum and her sister had come down from Bundaberg on the train and she remembered the laughter of their preparations ahead of the service on that bright spring day. They were neither of them with her today, her mother dead a dozen years, and her sister away on the other side of the country; she missed their chatting and their humour. She’d never found other confidantes quite like them, although she’d hoped Elaine might be one. It would have to be enough to sit and write a letter about it all in the quiet of this evening, while Elaine and Gerald spent the first night of their honeymoon at a smart hotel down on the Gold Coast.

  The start of a new life for them: what a thing.

  Elsie stood at the kitchen window, rocking the teapot as its leaves steeped and watching two lorikeets busy in a bottlebrush. There was a soft noise behind her and she turned to see her daughter turning away from the doorway and heading for the bathroom.

  ‘Good morning to you, Lainey—I was going to bring you a cup,’ she called, ahead of the bathroom door’s click.

  ‘I’ll fix one for myself,’ her daughter called, and then came the noise of running water.

  Rightio, thought Elsie. Nothing was going to rankle her—until she carried the tea through to Clem and caught sight of Elaine’s room, packed into suitcases and boxes as if ready for evacuation.

  ‘Did you know?’ she hissed to her husband. ‘It’s not just her holiday she’s packed for—she’s moving out.’

  Clem took a deep draught of the tea before he answered. ‘Of course she’s moving out, Else—she’s getting married. She probably thought she’d save herself the bo
ther of having to do it when she came home, or save you the bother while she was away. I told her I’d drive her things up to their new place tomorrow.’

  Elsie shook her head, her hand unsteady as she held the pretty cream and blue cup. ‘As long as she’s happy,’ she said. ‘What more could I want?’ But her voice sounded small and defeated.

  ‘He’s a good man, that Gerald,’ said Clem, setting down his empty cup. ‘We’ve got nothing to worry about there.’ A curse came from the bathroom on the other side of the wall. ‘And she won’t miss our tiny tank of hot water.’ Clem laughed, and Elsie did her best to smile.

  She didn’t mean to be standing by the bathroom door when her daughter came out, but she was.

  ‘Was I that long?’ said Elaine, reaching for the handle to close her bedroom door behind her.

  ‘Oh, love, no. Of course not.’ She was wrong-footed by whatever her daughter said, nine times out of ten. ‘I just thought you might like a hand—with your hair, or your dress?’

  But Elaine shook her head. ‘I can manage. You just look after yourself. Gerald said your car would come at ten.’

  Smart cars, and a reception with chicken and champagne. What more could I want? Elsie nudged the water heater into action, waiting until the flow ran hot.

  But while Clem and Don ate breakfast and put on their suits and sat waiting on the back deck for the fuss—as Donny called it—to begin, Elsie sat in the quiet of her own bedroom, conscious only of the similar quiet in Elaine’s. I should take her something—I should do something—I should be there. Her own mother had brushed Elsie’s clean hair to a shine on her wedding day, then twisted it into an elegant chignon. Her sister had made pot after pot of tea. And there’d been laughter, so much laughter.

  Today, she didn’t know how to cross her own hallway.

  She watched the different angles of her reflection in the three-panelled mirror of her dressing table; there wasn’t a flicker of movement or emotion on her face in any of them. She looked neither happy nor sad, more stern. It usually calmed her, sitting here, still, the house quiet around her. Today, her stomach roiled and caught, a mess of unknown things.

  It was a funny idea, handing your daughter into marriage—did it make you less of a mother somehow? Who would she be now, her daughter grown up and gone away to a smart little flat up the hill? Would her own life change too?

  She didn’t want that. She didn’t want anything else. Was she supposed to?

  Well, she still had Donald—although he was getting earnest about that Carol. And perhaps there’d be grandchildren soon.

  More than enough to go on, she thought. And around the great loop we all go.

  She zipped up the new dress she’d chosen for this day. It was a deeper green than her own wedding dress had been, worn with a loose coat of rich green shantung. She patted a fine dust of powder across her face, lightly combed her set hair, its brown starting to fade and mottle, and glossed her lips with as bright a shade as she’d let herself choose in the chemist’s. When Gerald’s sister came—a pretty girl a year or so older than Elaine, and in a lilac version of Elaine’s wedding dress—Elsie was standing on the front steps to welcome her.

  ‘Mrs Gormley, you look so lovely,’ the girl said, her arms filled with flowers, a single pink rose for Elsie’s lapel, and a pale orb—creams, whites, the softest pinks and yellows—for the bride. Its stems were bound together to make a kind of floral lollipop. ‘Have you seen her? She won’t be nervous—I’ve never known anyone as self-assured as Elaine. It’s marvellous, isn’t it? I dream of having that kind of confidence.’

  Elsie smiled and held out her hands for the flowers. ‘And you look lovely too, dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll take those in for Lainey before I go on in the car.’ She’d never thought of Elaine’s stillness as confidence.

  As she pushed open the door to her daughter’s bedroom—registering it as the last time it would be her daughter’s bedroom—she swallowed the salt edge of tears and stepped forward. She held the flowers at her waist as if she was walking in a procession. Elaine stood, a straight slip of a thing in a white dress by a sunlit window, and her mother did cry then.

  ‘Did you want something else?’ Her daughter’s voice was flat and Elsie stumbled.

  ‘Just the flowers—here, your flowers.’ Pushing them forward.

  She wiped at the tears on her cheeks and stood, her hands working around each other like a machine.

  Elaine held the flowers in front of her body, turning them slowly like a great pastel-coloured wheel.

  ‘I thought there’d be more to it than this,’ she said at last.

  The way the pulse throbbed, fast, beneath her daughter’s skin; the way the tendons in her neck stood out, taut.

  ‘Oh, love—I think they’re gorgeous,’ Elsie said at last. ‘A bigger bouquet and you’d quite disappear.’

  5

  The call

  Lucy stared at the phone, at the timer ticking on: ten seconds, fifteen, but every time she raised it to her ear, there was only the same entire silence. She stabbed at the red hang-up button with her thumb, and the screen changed again.

  She pressed the phone against her belly and felt her stomach churn. Why was it so easy to be alarmed? Why assume it was bad news? Why assume anything?

  And she made herself take a deep breath.

  Perhaps, before, it was Elsie, trying to ring to introduce herself. That was a better fantasy than disaster. Perhaps it was another me, just ringing to tell me I’m fine. But where was Ben? Where was Tom? She dialled Ben’s number and it went straight through to voicemail.

  Lucy shook her head, hanging up the call and pulling up the browser on the phone. Distraction. She wanted distraction.

  This word, vardøger: she wished she could hold it in front of herself like a shield. She typed it into the search engine. A form of bilocation, she read. Déjà vu, but in reverse. Scrolling down, she focused on phrases that underscored what she remembered. A Norwegian word defined as the ‘premonitory sound or sight of a person before he arrives’.

  Or she, thought Lucy, fumbling the phone as it began to ring again.

  ‘Ben? Where are you? What’s happening?’

  She heard him this time, safe and sound and asking, simply, for a water bottle. He’d forgotten to take one for Tom. ‘Don’t know what happened last time—I was shouting at my end. You didn’t hear?’

  ‘I’ll come now.’ The sound of her heartbeat surged in her ears—fast, then dropping back. A drink of water: the most basic request. She could do that. Of course they were fine.

  ‘Take your time—take a break—there’s no—’

  ‘No. I’d like to come and find you now.’ On the brink of saying she hadn’t known what to do with herself; on the brink of saying she’d been scared.

  In the bathroom, she watched herself in the mirror as she ran the water hot to wash her face and melt away the last memory of that long-ago ice with one of Tom’s soft, fluffy washers. As if she needed to return to being a mother walking out to meet her husband and her son. Sometimes Ben left the cabinet’s mirrored door slightly open and when Lucy looked up, expecting to see herself, she found she’d been erased from the room by its angle. It surprised her every time.

  She dried her face, filled Tom’s drink bottle, and tapped at the screen of her phone, calling up the map of her new local streets. No matter how much she concentrated, she couldn’t get her bearings in this place—as if the city were always shifting; as if its landmarks were always in play. She plotted her course: left, right, left, right, right and then over the bridge. Really, how hard could it be?

  She set off, humming one of the songs from the CD. Her footsteps fell in time with the beat as she jogged along, and she stumbled once or twice—on a gutter, on the rough and rocky path of the cemetery beside the bridge.

  Crossing over, running on, she had the strangest sense of someone keeping pace beside her, until she turned and saw that it was her own reflection, tracking along in a bus shelter’s w
ide sheets of glass.

  •

  At the other end of the day, coming into the kitchen after settling Tom, Lucy leaned against the doorjamb with a sigh.

  ‘Did I ever tell you, before Tom was born, that I was scared I’d put him down in a room full of babies and not be able to recognise him when I had to pick him up? I didn’t know if I’d know who was mine.’

  Ben swirled two Moscow Mules, mixing their ingredients with the wrong end of a knife, and passed one across to her. He made an elaborate drink each evening, imbuing its choice and presentation with a kind of ceremony. ‘You really had no idea, did you, Lu?’

  ‘None at all.’ She sipped the drink, licking the spicy sweetness of the ginger beer’s bubbles from her lips as she reached around to the stereo and flicked its switch. Her songs were there, waiting, and Lucy clicked along. ‘Sometimes, later, I’d catch a glimpse of myself and Tom in a window as we walked along a street, and I’d look around for the lady with the baby before I remembered it was me. At least I knew what he looked like then.’

  ‘God.’ Ben laughed. ‘You can make yourself sound crazy.’ He nodded with the music, his fingers tapping to its tune. ‘I haven’t heard this song in years.’

  She took another sip. ‘The nineties. This is what I was playing today in my hour of solitude—don’t you love the beat? The way the rhythm folds into itself? The beat ticks away like those little pendulums they have in music class.’

  ‘Pendulums? Don’t you mean metronomes? It’s no wonder you’re terrible at crosswords.’ He tilted his drink at her—a fake toast.

  Lucy blushed. She hated it when Ben corrected her; he never got words wrong. ‘Pendulum, metronome, whatever. I remember hearing this song at a gig,’ she said, ‘years ago. I’m not even sure where it was—but it was summer, and it was great.’