This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

  And now her mum was going to stay and help. She’d told Molly she wasn’t going to go overseas any more. Not that she’d even really had much of a plan for where she was going or what she was going to do. It had been a sort of nebulous theoretical idea about resurrecting her singing career, which hadn’t even been that big a deal in the first place. Really, what was there to resurrect? This was good. Good for Molly, good for Petula, and probably good for Annie. So why didn’t she feel as relieved as she’d thought she would? Why did she have a nagging sense that she was doing something wrong?

  She tried to dismiss the uncomfortable tickle that felt too much like guilt for her liking. No one was forcing her mother to stick around and help. Molly hadn’t chained her up in the attic. This was Annie’s choice. As the baby drank, Molly picked up her phone and went to the place she knew would inspire enough envy to drown out the guilt: Instagram. She uploaded another picture of Petula and sat back to see how many likes it got.

  * * *

  Annie’s phone was lying out in the garden, deep in the plumbago, when it buzzed with an incoming call. Sunny and Felix had been using it to take photos of the desiccated corpse of a rat they had found in the garage, so old and dried that it didn’t even smell. At the sound of the phone, Sunny put down the flower crown she had been making for the dead rat and swiped to answer.

  ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously. ‘This is Annie’s phone but she said we could use it.’

  A woman’s voice laughed. ‘Hello, Annie’s phone. I’m looking for Thorne. Have I got the right number?’

  ‘No,’ said Sunny. ‘This is Annie’s phone.’

  ‘What’s Annie’s last name?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Jones,’ said Sunny. ‘Same as me and Felix.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘I must have the number wrong. I’m sorry to bother you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Sunny. ‘I like answering phones.’

  The woman hung up, and Sunny opened up the camera app. ‘Felix,’ she instructed, ‘prop him up against that bush so he looks like he’s dancing, and put this on his head.’ She looked critically at the scene. ‘That’s good. Next, let’s get the face paint and we’ll make him be in Kiss.’

  Chapter 36

  By the time Jane returned from sea, Annie was almost dreading seeing her. So much had happened in the short time she’d been away. Her text came the morning of New Year’s Eve, announcing that she had mutinied, murdered the captain and sunk the boat. She would be over at midday. Hope you had a good Christmas, she signed off.

  Annie wasn’t sure where she would start. Should she prepare a short digest of events? A briefing paper for her friend. The key points would be: a) Annie’s father was a fraud and also the father of the man next door; b) Annie’s youngest child had almost immediately developed postnatal depression and attempted to abandon her baby; c) Annie’s son was a gambling addict and a thief; and d) which stood for Difficult and Don’t Want To Tell Jane This, Annie wasn’t going to throw herself body and soul into her music any more, to the exclusion of her family. She knew that was what Jane wanted her to do: sack off everyone, run away after a dream and live for herself. But it wasn’t possible. Annie hoped Jane would be mollified by her discovery that maybe writing songs and spending time with her grandchildren needn’t be mutually exclusive, but she suspected that wouldn’t wash. There would be an addendum explaining that Annie was throwing a wedding for Brian and Paul that night, at her father’s house, and that her children had learned she was sleeping with someone they went to school with, and they were horrified.

  Jane arrived five minutes before she said she would. The front door was open and she marched straight down the hall to the kitchen. She started talking as soon as she entered the room. ‘Thorne, my friend, I have missed you.’ Her arms went around Annie and she kept talking. ‘Hello, Di, what’s all this food for? You lot having a New Year’s Eve party? Where’s my invitation? If anyone deserves a party it’s me. I have been stuck at sea with the worst people you can imagine for eighty days. Well, it felt like eighty days. Christ on a bike, they were the pits. Alan’s horrible friends were horrible. Beyond horrible. They were the distilled essence of horrible. If you wanted a horrible-flavoured cake you’d only need a couple of drops of them. And they wore popped-up collars and boat shoes. I’ve got nothing but hate in me now. Cut me and I bleed hate for those horrible people. Honestly, I kept hoping Billy Zane would show up and Dead Calm us all to just make it stop.’

  ‘We’re having a wedding. Paul and Brian are getting married.’

  Jane pulled back and raised an eyebrow. ‘Are they just? Tonight? Right. What can I do to help? Do these need washing, Di?’ She seized two lettuces from the table and held them up.

  ‘Sure,’ said Diana. ‘If you don’t mind. I’ll be back shortly. The grooms want the kids to do a little run-through.’

  ‘The grooms.’ Jane snorted. ‘Exactly why are you hosting your ex-husband’s wedding?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s what they wanted. To do it with all the family together, and that’s now, and we’re all here, so I thought why not? Dad would have hated it.’

  ‘When did they spring this on you?’

  ‘Christmas Day.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Jane, aggressively tearing leaves off the lettuce and dunking them in the sink of cold water.

  ‘Trust me, that barely made a ripple compared to everything else that happened at Christmas.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘This will take a while; are you in a rush to get back to anything?’

  ‘Thorne, I am all ears.’

  * * *

  The two lettuces were torn to tiny inedible shreds by the time Annie finished her outline of what had gone down while Jane was away.

  Jane was pink with fury. ‘Never,’ she said, her voice shaking, ‘ever again, for any reason, am I letting Alan talk me into going anywhere without mobile coverage at Christmas. I cannot believe I missed all this. It’s a fucking outrage.’

  ‘It’s all right. There wasn’t anything you could have done.’

  ‘I know. But I’m your friend. I would have tried to help anyway. I would have, I don’t know, kicked that Heather in the shins. I can’t believe she was sleeping with your father. My god. The nerve of some people.’

  ‘It was so shocking,’ Annie admitted. ‘I just never thought of Dad like that. I thought he was one of the good guys.’

  There was a pause. ‘I have to say, I’m not entirely surprised,’ said Jane at last.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I only knew him when he was ancient, but he still used to wink at me and pinch my bum.’

  ‘He pinched your bum?’

  ‘Is that so hard to believe?’ Jane was affronted. ‘I happen to have a very pinchable bum.’

  ‘Why would you tell me that?’ Annie demanded. ‘What use is it for me to know my father was a geriatric sex pest? Now I’m going to wonder forever if he was always at it. Before you said that, I was hopeful that Heather might have been a one-off.’

  Jane looked at her like she was a bit dim. ‘Thorne,’ she said, ‘there’s no such thing as a one-off. That’s a cover story invented by people who can’t stop having it off with people they’re not supposed to have it off with.’

  Annie got up from the table. She opened the dishwasher, but for once it was empty. A five-kilogram bag of brushed potatoes sat on the counter, so she ran more cold water into the sink, tore open the plastic and let them tumble in. She plunged in her hands and began rubbing the dirt off the potatoes, watching the water turn muddy.

  After a while Jane came over and filled the kettle, getting in Annie’s way, and set it back in its cradle to boil. She came and stood beside her friend, and reached into the sink for a potato.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t a helpful comment, about your dad.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Still —’ she nudged Annie with her elbow ‘— all good material f
or songs, eh?’

  Annie kept scrubbing away at a potato even though it was pretty clean.

  ‘Thorne?’

  Annie dropped the potato and stared at her brown hands. ‘I’m not Thorne. I’m just Annie.’ Her voice wobbled. ‘Jane, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to run away from home to be a pop star like we talked about. I don’t know what I was thinking. The kids need me here.’

  ‘They bloody don’t,’ said Jane. ‘Thorne, look at me. They are all perfectly able to look after themselves. You’re not divorcing them. You’ll still be their mother, but you need to pursue this. You need the freedom of knowing you don’t have to be home every Tuesday and Wednesday or whatever Molly wants from you. You need to not have to feel like you should be around after school to look after Felix, if his parents get jobs here. Mark my words. Your soul will never forgive you if you don’t. If you give up now, it will eat away at you forever. You will regret not taking this chance.’

  ‘What chance?’ Annie replied, incredulous. ‘There is no chance. This isn’t a missed opportunity. This is me trying to pretend anyone gives a shit about an old lady singing her songs. No one called me after the gig. No one cares.’ She scratched furiously at a dirty potato eye with her thumbnail.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Jane, snatching the potato from her and a peeler from the second drawer down and violently deploying it. ‘You played one open mike night. Of course no one called. That’s not how it works. You can’t expect an immediate break. You’ll have to work at it. You’re not afraid of a bit of hard work, are you? These things don’t happen overnight.’

  ‘But I’m old, Jane, and I’m tired and I need things to happen quickly. Otherwise I’m taking myself from the people who actually need me and care about me, here.’

  ‘Which is it? Your family needs you or you aren’t up to the challenge? One of them at least is a piss-poor excuse for just not trying. Possibly both.’

  Annie sighed and sat down. ‘Please don’t be angry at me.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.’ Jane took another peeler from the drawer, handed it to Annie and dropped four soggy, streaky potatoes on the table in front of her.

  The pile of peeled potatoes grew. They worked in silence.

  Annie wanted to tell her about the previous afternoon, how for the first time ever she had managed to start creating something she thought had promise while in the company of small children, and how it had actually been fun, but Jane wouldn’t understand. She’d see it as half-hearted.

  Neither of them noticed when Sunny came in from the garden and stood for a moment, taking the measure of the room, then sidled up to the freezer.

  ‘Annie? Please may we have a Calippo?’

  Annie didn’t answer.

  Jane glanced over at Sunny, then at Annie, who seemed to be in another world. ‘Thorne? Can the kids have a Calippo?’

  ‘Who’s Thorne?’ asked Sunny.

  ‘It’s what I call your grandma,’ Jane said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was her maiden name. You can have a Calippo.’

  Sunny extracted two yellow ice blocks from a box and closed the freezer. ‘What’s a maiden name?’

  ‘It’s the last name you were given when you were born. Often it’s your father’s last name, not your mother’s.’

  Sunny looked confused. ‘But my last name’s the same as my mum’s. We are both called Jones. So is Annie.’

  ‘Yes, now she is, because your grandfather Paul’s name is Jones and when Annie married him she changed her name to his name.’

  ‘Annie’s name was Paul?’

  ‘No, just his last name.’

  Annie suddenly seemed to notice them. She smiled sadly at Sunny. ‘When I was your age my name was Annie Thorne.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Sunny, peeling the foil top from her Calippo with her teeth, the other ice block carefully tucked under her arm. ‘That’s who the woman wanted to talk to.’

  ‘What woman?’ Annie asked.

  ‘On your phone. A woman rang your phone when we were doing a photo shoot with Ray.’

  ‘Ray next door? When did you do a photo shoot with Ray?’

  ‘Yesterday. Not Ray next door. Ray the dead rat. We called him that because he was dead. Like Ray next door. We were using your phone to take the pictures. You said we could.’

  ‘All right,’ said Annie. ‘But who rang my phone?’

  Sunny carefully squeezed the base of her Calippo and sucked the top. ‘Don’t know. She kept asking for Thorne and I said I didn’t know anyone called Thorne. But she must have wanted you, Annie.’

  ‘She must have.’

  ‘Bye.’ Sunny gave Annie a sticky kiss on the shoulder as she passed, making her way back out to Felix in the sun.

  ‘She should have a hat on,’ murmured Annie.

  ‘Fuck hats,’ said Jane, almost bouncing in her seat. ‘Someone wanted to talk to Thorne.’

  ‘It might not mean anything.’ Annie was trying to ignore the flicker of excitement inside her.

  ‘It can’t mean nothing. Check your received calls and ring them back.’

  ‘I don’t know. I made a decision. It wasn’t easy, but I think it was the right thing. This might throw everything up in the air again. I can’t keep flip-flopping like this.’

  ‘Christ, Thorne, you don’t even know who it was or what they wanted. Just call them back. You can throw yourself off that bridge when you get to it.’

  ‘All right. I’ll ring back.’

  ‘Put it on speaker. I’m your manager.’

  ‘You aren’t my manager.’

  ‘That’s not really up to you, is it? I’ll manage you if I want to.’

  Annie smiled at her. Why had she only found Jane now? What if she’d had a guardian bully like this when she was twenty-three? Everything might have been very different. They might have conquered the world. ‘You can manage me,’ she said. ‘If there’s anything to manage. Just let me make this call on my own first, okay? It’s probably nothing.’

  She left the room, and as she started up the stairs she heard Jane call after her, ‘I’ll bet you a hundred thousand bucks it’s not nothing.’

  Chapter 37

  There was only one number in her call log she didn’t recognise. They’d called three times the day before, the afternoon of the thirtieth. Sunny probably stopped answering after the first call.

  Annie sat down on her bed, holding the phone. Her dress for the wedding hung from the door of the wardrobe. She’d bought it that morning from the only boutique open in the suburb. It was too young for her — too sexy, cut too low in the back — but she’d bought it anyway.

  Just call, she told herself. The longer she waited, the more her imagination was going to run away from her, like a metal measuring tape pulled out to its limit. The further out those things were pulled, the more likely they were to slice your hand open when let go. If she called now, the disappointment would be less than if she daydreamed any more about the possibility inherent in this conversation.

  She pressed call.

  The phone rang twice, and a woman’s voice said, ‘Lizzie Gessle speaking.’

  Annie cleared her throat. ‘Oh, hello. My name is Annie Thorne. I believe someone on this number tried to call me yesterday?’

  The woman responded with a delighted, ‘Thorne! Are you Thorne?’

  ‘Yes, I am Thorne,’ said Annie, and she felt like someone else was speaking. ‘What’s this in regard to?’

  ‘I heard your songs. You gave a USB to a man called Philip recently. He said it was at an open mike night? Well, I’m a friend of his girlfriend, Emma, and she listened to your songs and passed the USB on to me and I — how can I say it? I’ve never heard anything like them.’

  Annie held her breath. That could mean anything. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing. ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘I loved them. I think you have a real gift.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Annie again, and her voice sounded remarkably calm. ‘T
hank you.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know anything about you — I’ve tried googling you and I found nothing.’ She laughed. ‘Unless you’re the Annie Thorne who wrote “Home Is Where Your Heart Is”, back in about eighteen fifty!’

  Annie paused.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lizzie. ‘That is you, isn’t it? I am so sorry. That’s a brilliant song. A classic. The girl who sang it was pretty annoying, though — what was her name?’

  ‘Lorraine Darmody,’ said Annie. ‘My band was going to record it, and play it at Eurovision, but I was pregnant and the label recommended we give it to someone else.’

  ‘Weren’t those the bad old days? Anyway, these new songs. They’re cracking. And my wife and I — we’re independent music producers — we’re looking for someone to work with a new artist we’ve signed.’

  ‘Work with them how?’ Annie was numb.

  ‘Collaborating on lyrics and music. Is that something you’re up for?’

  Annie caught her breath. Writing. For someone else. Not performing. For just a moment the disappointment stung like a slap.

  But just past the pain, not even very far past, she felt a tingle of something good. Someone liked her songs. Someone who mattered. She could still write. And who could say what an opportunity like this might lead to? It might not have been exactly what she wanted, but it was still an incredible chance and she had to take it.

  Gratitude washed over her and she laughed out loud. She couldn’t help it. ‘Yes!’ she wanted to scream down the phone to whoever this Lizzie person was. ‘That is everything I am up for. I am entirely up for that. I am up for that so much that you would have to scramble a fleet of fighter jets to shoot me down. Now and forever I am up for that.’

  Instead she took a breath and asked, calmly, ‘It might be. Can you tell me about the artist?’

  ‘Her name is Juniper Wrenn.’

  ‘Like the bird?’

  ‘Yes but with two ns at the end. She’s quite particular about that. She’s twenty, and her voice is just something else. Thorne, it’s not like anything we’ve heard before.’