This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  ‘Oh well, I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said. ‘Now, we must let you get back to your night. Thanks for letting us know about the repairs. Email us through the quotes?’ She shifted her weight and took a deep breath — a movement she hoped would look like she was about to get up to show Suzanne and her out-of-proportion drama to the door.

  Jack took the hint. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he said and, putting his arm around Suzanne’s still shuddering shoulders, he led her to the front door.

  * * *

  Molly and Jack sat down in front of the TV with plates of grilled salmon and sweet potato with broccoli. Again. At least four nights a week they ate the same thing. It had been Jack’s idea when she got pregnant, to choose an optimally healthy meal and eat it often, to save themselves time planning meals each week, but it was getting both boring and expensive. Molly wasn’t even sure it was as healthy as he thought. She’d seen a headline on an article in her newsfeed saying farmed salmon was inferior to wild, but she hadn’t clicked on it because it had annoyed her so much. And she knew there was something about mercury and large fish that was bad but she couldn’t decide if salmon counted as large. Why were the rules so unclear and ever-changing? It was too hard to keep up.

  And, god, how much more would wild salmon cost? If they switched to that, they’d be living under a bridge by the time the baby came.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Jack, looking at his phone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Suzanne’s just forwarded me those quotes for the repairs. It’s going to be eighty grand per unit.’

  ‘What? Show me.’ She snatched his phone and scanned the email. Eighty thousand dollars. He hadn’t read it wrong. Three quotes, all in the same ballpark. A fluttering began in her chest. And the six months she’d heard Suzanne mention: that wasn’t when the work was going to start, it was how long the repairs would take.

  How could they live with a newborn baby in the noise and dust of a construction site for six months? It was out of the question. Plus the money, the special levy — there was no way they could afford that on just Jack’s income, not on top of their mortgage payments.

  Molly put her hands on her belly for reassurance, but the baby didn’t kick. It was probably paralysed with fear. Anyway, it wasn’t the baby’s job to reassure her. She was the grownup here.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said brightly, as though the baby could only hear her words, and wasn’t in fact connected to the current of pure stress hormones that was coursing through her bloodstream, infusing its nervous system, laying down pathways of panic that would light up for the rest of its life. ‘It’s only money.’

  Jack was still frowning at his phone. He’d opened up their online banking app. ‘Where are we going to get another eighty thousand dollars? You’re about to go on maternity leave.’

  ‘We can borrow it. From the bank. Banks love lending money. We’ll tack it onto the mortgage.’

  ‘How will we pay it back?’ He opened a loan calculator and started stabbing in figures.

  ‘We’re going to be fine, Jacko. Hey, maybe Pa left us some money. That might be why Mum wants me to come to the solicitor’s office tomorrow. It might be eighty grand. This might all be fate.’

  ‘Even if we do get some money we can’t stay here. We can’t live in a building site. Our baby will never sleep. It will breathe in asbestos and get lung cancer.’ He was sounding panicky.

  Molly put her hand on his cheek. ‘There isn’t any asbestos. That’s not what’s wrong with the building.’

  ‘That’s not what they know is wrong with the building. Once they start looking of course they’ll find more things, and they will be worse than the concrete cancer. Why’s it called concrete cancer anyway?’

  ‘I don’t even know what it is,’ admitted Molly.

  ‘It’s where the metal that reinforces the concrete gets rusty and starts causing the concrete around it to crack. Which is more like osteoporosis than cancer.’

  ‘That’s not a very catchy name though is it: “concrete osteoporosis”? Not as alliterative.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’ Jack paused for a moment, before his eyes widened in fear again. ‘Is it even safe for us to be in here now? What if the building cracks and the roof falls on us? While we’re asleep?’

  ‘We’ll be entombed like Pompeiians,’ replied Molly, but Jack didn’t even smile. He looked around the room and his gaze lit on the spiderweb of cracks radiating from one corner of the living room ceiling. ‘Is that new?’

  ‘No,’ said Molly. ‘It was there when we bought the place. I remember painting over it.’

  ‘I don’t think it was that big. We have to go. We have to get out of here.’

  As a person to whom things tended to come easily, Molly wasn’t prone to panic, and she’d never really settled on a way to deal with Jack’s moments of complete flap. Sometimes a joke did the trick. Sometimes she rolled with it, indulging his fears. Telling him to calm down had never once worked, and yet it was still the first thing she said each time he began to build up to a panic attack.

  ‘Calm down. If you really don’t want to be here with the building work going on, I understand that. We’ll find somewhere else to go for a bit.’

  He took a few deep breaths and squeezed her hand gratefully. ‘We can go to my parents’ place.’

  ‘Well, no, we can’t, because we haven’t met the hell-freezing-over threshold for that yet. And they live two hours away. You can’t commute that far.’

  ‘They’re not that bad,’ said Jack. ‘And I don’t mind the drive.’

  Molly said nothing.

  ‘The dogs,’ Jack said. ‘I know you don’t like the dogs.’

  ‘It’s not the dogs that are the problem. It’s the way your mum and dad treat them like they are human.’

  ‘They don’t treat them like humans.’

  ‘Jack, do you know which universities those dogs would go to if they weren’t dogs?’

  ‘Molly —’

  ‘Do you?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Toggle would go to Wollongong Uni and do International Relations and Law, because it’s the closest to them and she gets homesick, and Fifi would go to ANU.’

  ‘Yes. And that is insane. They are dogs. We aren’t staying with your parents. A baby would not be safe in a house where the concept that dogs are inherently wild animals is just not an accepted fact. They won’t care if their dogs eat our baby.’

  ‘That’s a bit rough.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel like that’s an option. It’s not out of the question that their dogs will bite our baby and we’ll have to call the police and they’ll refuse to get the dogs put down and we’ll all end up in the Daily Mail, and all the commenters will be like, “Why on earth did those people move in with those crazy dog owners? Of course their baby got eaten.” If we can’t live here it would make more sense to move in with my mum. Especially if she’s going to stay at Baskerville Road.’

  ‘You really think your mum is going to want us and a crying newborn living there with her?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she?’ Molly was indignant. ‘We’re lovely and our baby isn’t going to cry all the time. People just say they do to freak you out. And the house is massive.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘Besides, we don’t know what the will says about the house. It might not even be in the family any more.’

  ‘Do you reckon Pa has gone and left it to the RSPCA or something? Of course it will be left to Mum,’ she said firmly. ‘And she will love having us. It takes a village, you know? It’ll be like forming a little village.’

  Jack gave her a look, and she could tell he was wondering if that really qualified as building a village — or if it wasn’t more like an invasion.

  The ceiling didn’t fall in on them that night. Molly felt Jack lie awake beside her for a long time, no doubt flipping through the catastrophe Rolodex in h
is head, while Molly heaved herself over every twenty minutes like a shoulder of pork trying to brown itself evenly in a pan.

  Chapter 6

  Walking through Darlinghurst the next morning, trying to remember where they’d managed to find a parking space the night before, Molly wondered why her grandfather, a suburban accountant whose own office had been above the fruit shop on the main street of the suburb he lived in his whole life, had bothered to use a firm of solicitors on the twenty-first floor of a tower in the city. His affairs weren’t exactly complex. The man had owned one house. He might also have had cash savings and some other investments, maybe some super, Molly surmised, because he never received the pension, and hadn’t seemed to want for money. It was most likely his will was straightforward.

  It was probably just to make himself feel more important. Unless things weren’t what she thought. She briefly entertained the idea that Pa had somehow amassed a fortune and invested it in a complicated series of trusts that meant a fleet of lawyers had been working away behind the scenes so after his death all could be revealed to his family and none of them would ever have to work again. That would be handy.

  It wasn’t completely out of the question. Maybe he’d been given a tip by a client fifty years back, and invested in McDonald’s or Tampax. A private security firm. Something he would have been embarrassed to admit to but which made him a massive amount of money. Maybe that’s what they were all being brought together to hear about.

  Finding the car, she got in and sat for a moment, reminding herself of the route to the airport. Her father and Brian’s flight from London, which was supposed to have arrived at six am, had been delayed, meaning Annie wouldn’t have time to collect them. Now Molly had to get them and they’d need to tag along to the will reading.

  Was it appropriate for them to come? Pa hadn’t been what you would call supportive of their relationship. Perhaps she could leave them in a coffee shop.

  She pulled off the expressway at the entrance to the international terminal, and as she approached the pick-up zone she could see them from fifty metres away. Both wore extremely loud Hawaiian shirts: Brian had teamed his with a pair of three-quarter length cargo pants, all pockets bulging, while her father’s was tucked neatly into a pair of pleated cream linen trousers. They looked like an ageing Bart Simpson had taken James Bond to Barbados.

  She never knew how to feel when she saw her dad. It was like knowing someone and not knowing them all at once. Was this how everyone felt around their father? Or just those whose dads had nicked off? He always acted like they had this normal strong father–child relationship, like he had with Naomi and Simon, but it felt fake to Molly. She didn’t know him like she knew her mum. Sometimes she even felt closer to Brian. When she’d gone to stay with them in London as a child, Brian had been the one who made sure they did things that were fun for Molly, not just for the bigger two. Brian had taken her to see Buckingham Palace and Madame Tussauds when Naomi and Simon had said such things were too babyish. All they’d wanted to do was try to get into pubs and wander around Portobello Road market.

  When she got out of the car, Paul started towards her and stopped short. He put his hand to his chest. ‘Oh, my Molly-dolly,’ he said, and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Look at you.’

  She looked down. ‘Oh. Yes, this. You haven’t seen me. Well, ta-da! Baby on board!’ She gestured at her swollen front like a regional television spokesmodel trying to drum up interest in a diesel hedge-trimmer.

  ‘I’ve been trying and trying to picture what you’d look like and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t see you pregnant. But now —’ he waved both hands at her ‘— this. I just . . . So much like your mum.’ He wrapped her in his arms.

  Molly felt her chest tighten and her eyes sting. She smiled over her father’s shoulder at Brian, and reached out her hand.

  ‘Hi, Brian.’

  ‘Hi, Molly. We’re so glad to see you.’ He squeezed her hand firmly and smiled at her.

  Paul let her go. ‘Now, Mum texted to say we’re not to dilly-dally. Is your mother the only one who still says “dilly-dally”? Apparently you have to be in the city in half an hour for The Reading of the Will.’ He said it like it would be taking place in the panelled study of a country house in an Agatha Christie book and might involve fainting, or murder with an antique pistol during a blackout.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, I won’t have time to take you to Pa’s first. That’s where you’re staying, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, but that’s totally fine. We’re at your disposal. We just want to be with you.’

  Brian loaded their suitcases into the boot and climbed into the back seat. Paul sat beside Molly, and they set off.

  Molly inserted the parking ticket into the machine at the exit and the boom gate lifted without asking for payment.

  ‘Winning at life, as the young people say!’ Paul crowed. ‘Getting out of this airport for free is a rare and great achievement.’

  She smiled. ‘Pa thought that too.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say,’ said Paul. ‘Women go for men like their fathers.’

  ‘What about men?’ Molly replied. ‘Do men go for men like their fathers? Is Brian like your dad? Brian, is Dad like your father?’

  ‘That’s an excellent question,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t remember my father — I was so little when he died — but my mum always liked Brian, so maybe he was a bit like him.’

  Brian grinned at Molly in the mirror. ‘Your dad is nothing like my dad was. My dad was a kind, thoughtful, lovely fellow. Never had a bad word for anyone. Only thought of others.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Paul said happily.

  ‘I rest my case,’ Brian replied.

  * * *

  In the parking station nearest to the solicitor’s office, Annie’s ancient Volvo station wagon was blocking the entrance. Molly could see Simon gesticulating in the driver’s seat. Five minutes passed as they sat quietly waiting. Simon stabbed the button on the ticket machine several times, and leaned out of the car to speak into the intercom.

  Eventually Molly gave an exasperated growl, jerked on the handbrake and unclipped her seat belt.

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ said Paul, putting his hand on her arm. ‘Stay here. I’ll go see what the problem is. Maybe the machine isn’t working.’ He got out and walked over. She rolled down her window to listen.

  Paul rested one hand on the roof of his ex-wife’s car.

  ‘Hello, Simon,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ The sliver of Simon’s face that Molly could see from her vantage point was red. ‘Good flight?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. What’s the hold-up?’

  ‘This,’ said Simon with a snort. ‘This is the hold-up. This is an actual hold-up. They want thirty-six dollars for half an hour.’

  ‘That’s a lot,’ agreed Paul. ‘But it is the CBD. On a weekday.’

  ‘That’s outrageous,’ said Simon. ‘I’m not paying it.’

  Molly stuck her head out her window, with difficulty, and shouted, ‘Simon, just take a ticket. What’s the big deal? You’ve used car parks before.’

  ‘But it will cost us at least eighty bucks. To park the car.’ Simon wouldn’t be placated.

  ‘Yes, it will,’ Molly said.

  ‘Well, I think that’s —’

  ‘No one cares what you think. You don’t have a lot of choices here, Simon. Unless you can put the car in your pocket.’ She settled back into her seat. ‘Or stick it up your arse,’ she muttered. Paul dashed back and got in.

  Grudgingly Simon took the ticket and drove in. They spiralled around and around, down and down, through a double helix of no spaces. Molly could practically see the steam coming out of Simon’s ears in the car ahead.

  ‘Why does he get so upset about everything?’ she remarked. ‘And why’s he such a skinflint?’

  They all breathed a sigh of relief as Simon pulled into a space, and Molly found another three spots along.

  ‘Simon was always frugal,’ said Pau
l. ‘He never used to buy anything with his pocket money. There were always things you and Naomi wanted — toys and stuff — so you’d save up and buy them. Just little things. But Simon never did. He just kept on putting it in his Dollarmites account. Maybe that’s how he’s ended up doing so well. They seem to have quite a nice life in Berlin. Their house is in a very smart part of town.’

  ‘Well, hooray for Simon,’ said Molly. ‘It doesn’t seem to have made him very happy. Or Diana. They’re the grumpiest stressheads ever. Honestly, you’ll see when we get back to Pa’s. Maybe he’s tormented by guilt for all the people pushed out of their homes by the developments he works on.’ The narrative of her brother as a Big Bad Property Developer was one of Molly’s favourites. It probably wasn’t accurate — she didn’t really understand his job — but she knew he was involved in gentrifying residential areas of Berlin and gentrification always meant lower-income city dwellers suffered, didn’t it?

  * * *

  No one else thought Paul and Brian should wait in a coffee shop while the will was read. They were coming along to the meeting. The lift up to the solicitor’s office went so fast it made Molly’s ears pop. Her parents had greeted each other when they got out of the cars in the same way they always did after being apart for a year or two: as if they’d last seen each other the previous day. Paul hugged Annie, Annie hugged Brian, and they started chatting about a movie Brian and Paul had seen on the plane. There wasn’t a hint of awkwardness.

  Molly was perplexed by them. Sure, it was almost twenty years since they had split up, but how could it not be strange to see your husband and your oldest friend as a couple? Sometimes she wondered if perhaps her mother had never loved her dad. That was the only way she could see how someone might be okay with their husband leaving them for their friend.