This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  ‘Everyone’s so excited to have you both coming home,’ Jack ventured.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Moll? At home? Everyone can’t wait. It’s going to be wonderful to have you back.’

  She looked away from the view and focussed on Jack’s face. How could he be so blindly optimistic? Surely he didn’t actually think things were going to be easy when they got back to Pa’s house? His positivity was based on nothing but hope.

  ‘You have no way of knowing that,’ she said. ‘I’d say there’s a good chance it’s going to be an absolute nightmare. Sunny and Felix are going to be screaming around the place, Diana’s going to be in my face all the time, force-feeding us schnitzel, my brother’s trying to sell the house out from under my mum, you’re going to need to be working all the time, Dad and Brian will be lighting the place up like lunatic Christmas elves, then they’ll go back to London. And if Mum’s not at Zumba she’ll be playing the piano and being weird. It will be harder at home than in here.’

  He looked alarmed, but then he smiled. It was the most patronising thing Molly had ever seen. ‘That’s hormones,’ he said. ‘Day three is when your milk comes in properly and sometimes women cry a lot and feel like it’s all too much. I read up on it. It’s different with animals, I think, though maybe it’s not. Maybe they also feel shit on day three but no one notices because they don’t cry tears.’

  ‘I’m different from a dog, am I? Thanks for that.’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m not crying.’

  She hadn’t cried at all. She was oddly calm. All the feelings and thoughts that would make her cry ordinarily were there — all she had said about going home was true — but she felt strong, and on guard.

  Looking down she saw Petula had stopped drinking and fallen asleep. Her little face was smooth and peaceful. Molly felt a surge of love so strong she had to restrain herself from crushing her baby in her arms. She wanted to consume her back into her body where she was safe. She raised her daughter against her chest and whispered in her still-unfolding ear, ‘I won’t let them get you.’

  * * *

  As they drove home, Jack kept glancing over at Molly, checking she was all right. She hadn’t seemed very happy since the birth. He supposed that made sense: it had been pretty traumatic.

  But everything was going well now, wasn’t it? So why was she so serious all the time? He thought she’d be more relaxed. Molly was always relaxed — that was one of his favourite things about her. The pregnancy had made her a bit grumpier than normal, but generally Molly was cool about things that freaked him out. Too cool, sure, sometimes, like with not getting any baby stuff organised. But overall coolness was a good thing to have in a wife, he reckoned. And Petula was excellent. He couldn’t look at her little crumpled face, so much like Molly’s, without wanting to laugh. Why wasn’t Molly joining him?

  People didn’t always bond immediately, either with their babies or with the whole concept of motherhood, he knew that, but they usually came good. A midwife had told him so in the middle of the night and he clutched the information now like a lucky coin.

  * * *

  Molly opened Instagram on her phone. As she scrolled through her feed she was bombarded with images of her contemporaries’ carefree twenty-something lives. Few of her friends who lived in Sydney were still home for the summer but many of the expats were back. It was that special time of year, when all the public holidays meant people could cobble together their annual leave to go away for a few weeks, and they’d flown off overseas or piled into vans for road trips to music festivals or to go surfing.

  She twisted in her seat to check on Petula, who was now fast asleep in the capsule. A beach camping trip or a week in a hostel in Rome seemed suddenly like someone else’s dreams, and she felt like she’d gone from twenty to forty overnight.

  * * *

  They would be home any minute. Annie went out the front to check there was a car space ready for Molly and Jack. She needn’t have worried: the street was almost deserted. She sat down on the front step to wait.

  ‘Little drinky-poo?’ came a voice from the direction of Ray’s house.

  Annie looked up to see Heather on the verandah, waving a distinctive green-labelled bottle at her.

  ‘Green ginger wine? I can’t believe they still make that stuff,’ she called back, which Heather took as an invitation. She trotted down the steps and crossed the right of way to Annie, two glasses and bottle in hand. Annie must have been wrong about her apology to Ray stemming from recent sobriety.

  Heather lowered herself onto the front lawn with a groan. ‘God, my knees, Annie. They’ll be first against the wall, come the revolution. How are yours?’

  ‘They’re not bad,’ Annie admitted, not wanting to sound smug. She accepted the glass of amber-coloured liquid and brought it to her nose. The gingery hit was pure nostalgia. ‘So, things are okay with Ray?’

  ‘Oh, they’re about like you’d expect. He’s not my greatest fan, but things could be worse, actually. Ray’s mellowed in his old age.’

  ‘I always thought he was mellow. When you left and there were all these rumours he’d been abusive, I was surprised.’

  ‘Were there rumours?’ Heather raised an eyebrow. ‘That wasn’t right. He wasn’t abusive. Unless you count being terminally suburban and dull as abuse, which actually I do. I saw what was happening to the women around here. Not you — I could see you were going to get out. But people like your mum. No offence, but they were shrivelling up and turning in on themselves and slowly dying. There was no life. No culture. No art. No drama. No excitement. No joie de vivre. It was a big enough mistake getting married to Ray in the first place. I wasn’t going to compound it by staying married to him.’

  Annie opened her mouth to defend her home and her childhood, and her own mother, but the thought of the notebooks in the attic stopped her. ‘Did it work out? Did you get the life you wanted?’ she asked instead.

  Heather drained her glass and sloshed in more ginger wine. ‘On balance, yes. I mean, sure, now I’m in my sixties, and I don’t have a home or any money, but my god, the riches, the experiences I’ve had, Annie-Kate, they’ll sustain me forever, in here.’ She thumped her chest. ‘I followed every path I saw. I slept with every man I wanted to, and some of the women. I showed my kid that there’s more to life than going to the same school every day, living in the same house, eating the same old meat and two veg. Patrick got to see the world with me. We were partners in crime. It wasn’t the most settled childhood, but, trust me, he had the time of his life.’

  ‘That must have been exciting.’

  ‘You’ve no idea. God, the things I got up to. I never went to prison, but it wasn’t for want of trying. I got mixed up in all sorts of mischief. Here’s something I learned, Annie-Kate: the fun men, the sexy men, are the bad men.’

  Annie wondered why Heather hadn’t learned that the way everyone else had: from reading a Jane Austen book, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There was no need to drag your child around with you while you slept your way through and had your heart broken repeatedly by the ruffians of the world.

  Heather topped up Annie’s glass. ‘Why are you sitting out here, anyway? Has that lot in there got a bit much?’

  Annie felt defensive again. ‘No, I’m expecting my daughter back from the hospital with her new baby any minute.’ She didn’t want Molly’s homecoming interrupted by Heather. ‘You’ll have to come meet her when they get settled.’ It was the most low-key version of ‘This has been lovely’, but it did the trick.

  ‘Aren’t you gorgeous. The doting granny,’ said Heather as she clambered to her feet. ‘You have a merry Christmas, Annie-Kate.’ She went back into Ray’s house. Annie went back inside too: there was no point sitting out there like a devoted hound.

  * * *

  ‘Who is that gypsy person you were drinking with out the front?’ asked Simon when Annie entered the kitchen, where everyone seemed to be pr
eparing dinner by getting in each other’s way. ‘She looked like an RSL Bette Midler impersonator.’

  His sister and wife turned, frowning, from opposite sides of the room, reprimanding him like two feminist sphinxes for his casual ageist slandering of a woman he didn’t know.

  ‘What?’ He laughed. ‘She did.’

  ‘Paul,’ said Brian, his eyes twinkling. ‘She could call her show “Bette Midler: But Only From a Distance”.’

  ‘You beat me to it,’ said Paul, laughing.

  ‘She’s not a Bette Midler impersonator,’ Annie said. ‘She used to live next door.’

  Simon’s smile dropped away. ‘That was Heather? Next-door Heather?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annie. ‘How do you remember her name? She left before you were born.’

  ‘Oh, Pa was always going on about how Right-of-Way Ray drove Heather away. The name must have just stuck in my head.’ Simon busied himself emptying clean plates from the dishwasher and stacking them in the cupboard.

  It was clear to Annie that he was lying. His ears had gone flaming red, just as they had since he first smeared nappy cream all over the walls of her bedroom at the age of eighteen months before alleging, ‘Teddy did it.’ She couldn’t imagine why he was lying about knowing Heather’s name.

  ‘Will she be joining us for Christmas lunch tomorrow?’ asked Diana.

  Bemused, Annie replied, ‘No, I don’t imagine so. Why would she?’

  ‘Naomi has invited the man next door, Ray, and his son to lunch. And if Heather is staying with them . . .’ Diana removed a huge dish of lasagne from the oven and put it on the stovetop more forcefully than she needed to. ‘There,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘Not the most traditional Christmas Eve meal I’ve ever cooked, but if it’s Molly’s favourite —’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Simon. ‘Naomi, you’ve asked Ray and Patrick for Christmas lunch?’

  ‘Yes. Is that a problem? We talked about this the other night.’

  ‘We didn’t decide to do it. We don’t even know them.’

  ‘I know them a little,’ said Annie. ‘And it’s a kind gesture.’

  ‘Ray isn’t well,’ said Naomi. ‘I thought it might make things easier.’

  ‘And will Heather come too, now that she’s back?’ Simon was like a dog with a bone.

  Annie turned to him. ‘Why is any of this a problem for you, Simon? You’re not the one cooking the meal.’

  ‘Well, because it’s Christmas. It’s a time for family.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said his mother. ‘It will make not the slightest difference if we feed three more people some lunch.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ agreed Diana. ‘We’ll have enough. I’ve done the stuffing, and the chickens are going to be beautiful. Naomi has made shells for the pavlovas.’

  ‘But in the morning we’re going to the beach, right? After the presents?’ Felix tugged frantically at his mother’s arm.

  ‘Yes, we will go to the beach in the morning.’ Shaking her head, she continued under her breath, though audibly, ‘We will eat lasagne tonight and go to the beach tomorrow. Like it’s not even Christmas.’

  Felix, apparently well aware of his mother’s rising internal pressure, grabbed Sunny’s hand and pulled her out into the garden.

  Chapter 25

  Late that night Annie lay in bed, watching the pattern of flickering coloured lights bounce around her room. It was almost midnight but Brian had begged her not to turn off the illuminated Santa, complete with sleigh and reindeer. He was more excited about Christmas than either of the children in the house. He said he’d switch off all the lights before he went to bed, but as she couldn’t hear anyone moving around in the house now she was sure he’d forgotten and turned in for the night, in the matching elf pyjamas he and Paul had bought themselves.

  Molly’s homecoming had been more subdued than Annie had expected. The family had met her at the door like a litter of puppies, all falling over each other to see the baby. But Molly was distant and quiet, and she hadn’t smiled much.

  Annie tried to think back to how she had felt coming home with Simon when he was a newborn. She’d been reeling with disappointment about Eurovision, certainly, but Simon had made her so happy. Every time she’d looked at him she’d smiled. She couldn’t help it. At least she thought that was what had happened. She’d felt incredibly alive: she remembered that very clearly. There’d been such a huge weight of responsibility on her, to look after Simon, and she remembered feeling like she didn’t really know how, but Molly was managing the practical stuff beautifully.

  She was so calm you’d have thought Petula was her fifth baby, so confident did she seem in handling, feeding, changing and dressing the baby and putting her to sleep.

  Annie had watched Molly at dinner. She’d held the sleeping Petula throughout, even managing to eat with her daughter cradled in the crook of her arm. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of people clamouring to hold the baby — everyone offered, at one point or another — but Molly had politely declined each time. The baby was settled, she’d kept saying, no point in waking her up by passing her around.

  Was it normal? Annie couldn’t tell. Maybe it was just unexpected, Molly apparently mothering with such placid ease. She hoped so.

  * * *

  Molly lay in bed the next morning, listening to the raucous cackle of a kookaburra in the tree outside, and trying to decide if anything about Christmas mattered any more.

  No, she concluded. It didn’t. Christmas was nonsensical. Outside her door, she could hear her father and Brian giggling as they arranged presents under the tree. These presents, she assumed, were in addition to those she had heard them bringing downstairs at half past one and stuffing into the kids’ stockings, ostensibly from Santa Claus. She didn’t remember her dad being this into Christmas when she and Simon and Naomi were young. Had he become a born-again Christmasian when he moved in with Brian? Or was it the advent of grandchildren?

  It irritated her the way her father was treating grandparenthood like a second attempt at fatherhood. It was a different job. He couldn’t erase having given up on parenting when she was still only little by being the World’s Best Granddad.

  Did Sunny and Felix even still believe in Santa, anyway? Wasn’t six the sort of age where you figured out the ruse?

  Jack was still asleep, with one arm flung across his eyes to keep out the bright morning sunshine that was streaming in through the gap between the curtains. When the sounds from the living room had ceased, she eased herself out of bed, gathered up Petula from her bassinet and slipped out. Hearing voices in the kitchen, she padded quietly through the living room and along the hall to the front door.

  She walked down the right of way to the seat the boys had left there the night of Pa’s wake. That felt like months ago. Back when Pa was alive, he always put the chair back on the patio. He claimed Ray would go berserk if he didn’t, because it was technically his land and Pa was only allowed to use it for accessing his garage. Now she wondered if that was true. She’d never heard a peep out of Ray. He didn’t seem like a very berserk person.

  She settled onto the bench. Petula scrunched her face in her sleep, but didn’t wake. Ray’s kitchen window was open, and the net curtains were pulled to one side. Why had Pa been so rude to Ray all those years? Was it because Heather, having fallen pregnant, had gone back to Ray, after Pa spurned her? But what else could she have done?

  There had to be something missing from this story. It felt like playing Boggle with only fifteen pieces. No matter which way Molly moved things, the story did not make sense. Surely there was something she still didn’t know, that would explain why Pa, having slept with Ray’s wife and made her pregnant, had gone on to torment Ray, like a low-grade chronic illness, for the rest of his life. If there wasn’t, then she could only conclude that Pa had been, in this respect at least, actually a fairly shitty person.

  A shriek from inside told her Sunny and Felix were awake. It was followed by the jingling opening
strains of ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’, which she instantly recognised as the first track on the 1987 album A Very Special Christmas, the family’s festive soundtrack since before her birth. The sun was barely up. It couldn’t be much after six o’clock. This was a flagrant violation of the longstanding No Pointer Sisters Before Eight AM On Christmas rule. It was going to be a long day.

  * * *

  With cups of coffee and croissants, the family gathered in the living room to open their presents. Annie briefly considered suggesting they follow the one-at-a-time, youngest-to-oldest system that had been the tradition when she was a child, but the size of the pile of presents meant they’d be there all day. A free-for-all was the only way. She reached for the record player, flipped over the Christmas album and lowered the needle. Bono began begging his baby to please come home for Christmas, over a background of tortured-sounding backup singers.

  Sunny, possessing the unnerving talent of the young for opening the best present first, and thus making all subsequent gift-givers feel inferior, went straight for Paul and Brian’s offering: a laser tag set. Felix followed suit, tearing into a child-size metal detector and a rainbow taffeta tutu, also from his grandfathers.

  Simon frowned at the skirt, and went off grumbling to locate batteries for the metal detector. To Annie’s surprise, Naomi said nothing about the laser tag set: it seemed her ban on toy weapons was relaxed when her father was involved.

  Soon there were piles of paper everywhere (‘Try to keep it flat, not all scrumbled up,’ Naomi beseeched them. ‘It’s much easier to recycle.’) and everyone lost track of who had given what to whom. There had been talk earlier in the week of a Kris Kringle, where everyone just bought one gift, but no one had managed to organise it so there were six or seven presents apiece.