by Lette, Kathy
I felt as though I’d been dropped through a wormhole into a crack in time. My unaware sisters were living above it. On their timeline, our mother was not dead. After sobbing bitterly for a five full minutes, I turned on my phone and texted my sisters through my tears.
SOS. Come to Mum’s immediately. Emergency. This is not a drill. Repeat: This is not a drill.
31
‘What are you doing here?’ were Emerald’s first words to Amber when they met on the porch as I opened the door. ‘You should be languishing in the outer ring of the seventh circle of hell.’
‘You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do.’ Amber closed her eyes and smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. ‘Clearly it’s the most vile, thoughtless, stupid thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.’
‘Stop calling yourself stupid. You’re going to ruin it for everyone else.’
A hungover Emerald had come straight from bed and was still wearing her brand-new silk pyjamas, bought in the ship boutique to replace her regular moth-eaten cotton nightie. Amber was still wearing the clothes she’d worn on Christmas Day, an uncharacteristically simple cotton shift and flat sandals.
‘Why haven’t you changed since yesterday?’ Emerald asked.
‘I’ve been driving around all night with a boot full of prawns, trying to work out what to do with the rest of my life.’
Emerald rolled her eyes so far back in her head she could probably see her synapses zinging. ‘Not lying face-down on either of your brothers-in-law would be a start. So, Ruby, what the hell is so urgent that you dragged us both over here at sparrow’s fart?’
I was standing numbly in the doorway. Neither sister had taken into account my ghostly complexion.
Emerald pushed past me and stomped down the hall towards the kitchen, with Amber trailing after her. Emerald then grabbed the nearest utensil from the countertop and swivelled to face us. ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m all out of oestrogen and I have a fondue fork,’ she said, only half-joking. ‘So?’ she asked me. ‘What’s up?’
Blood beat in my ears. ‘Mum’s dead,’ I said tonelessly.
Everything suddenly seemed slow, as though we were all moving through deep water in dive suits. My sisters looked at me for a silent eternity, though the clock on the wall behind them recorded it as eighteen seconds.
‘No!’ Amber choked.
‘Are you sure?’ Emerald demanded. ‘Where is she?’
I led my sisters to the grim scene on the backyard banana lounge. We made a semi-circle around our mother, all of us stupefied by the power of death.
Amber and I instinctively looked to our elder sister for guidance. Emerald was the practical and level-headed sibling; she would know exactly what to do. Emerald’s superior maturity became immediately apparent when she gasped, hysterically, ‘What the fuck do we do now?!’
‘I don’t know!’ Amber’s voice seemed pitched an octave higher than usual. ‘You’re the medical one. Shouldn’t you do CPR or something?’
This galvanised Emerald into professional mode. She immediately felt our mother’s bejewelled wrist.
‘So, is she . . . you know?’ Amber asked, in an annihilated voice.
‘Dead?’ Emerald said. ‘As a dodo. Deader than a weekend in Dapto,’ Emerald said, lapsing, in her woe, into inappropriate black humour.
Shock has a terrible texture to it. The world around you, normally solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin and translucent.
‘Oh, god,’ Amber exclaimed. She was pointing at an orange vial of pills poking out of the pocket of our mother’s dress. She picked them up and read the label. ‘Fentanyl.’
‘Opioids,’ Emerald said. ‘And look.’ She indicated a vodka bottle amid the debris and detritus of yesterday’s uneaten lunch that I didn’t remember being there.
‘She’s Catholic. Mum would rather die than kill herself,’ I said.
‘Unless she was helped,’ Emerald stated.
The idea that it may not be a natural death hit all three of us at the same time with cyclonic impact. Despite the fact that the soporific heat of a scorcher was already declaring itself, the morning air thick with abundant insects and birds, the menthol coldness of winter suddenly descended onto our garden. Mistrust banked up around us like a slow drift of snow, making everything icy and treacherous.
‘So, what were you doing here so early in the morning?’ Emerald asked me.
‘I came to give Mum a piece of my mind.’
‘Is that all you gave her? Remember what you said on the boat – that if you killed Mum you’d be out of the mental hospital in two to three years and then there’d be a fat book contract waiting?’ Emerald’s sharp accusation went into me like a blade. My skin became overly sensitised to every molecule of air, and my bare arms were definitely registering a threat.
‘I was being facetious!’ I pinned my older sister with a reproachful glare. ‘Besides, you’re the one who said you wanted to smother mother.’
Emerald snorted in disdain. ‘Oh, come on. You know I was joking. Besides, why are you letting Amber off the hook?’ she added. ‘The person you go to bed with says a lot about you; sleeping with your sister’s husband says that you are clearly a two-faced psycho.’
We were suddenly circling each other like Cold War spies. Newly orphaned, we three strong, capable, working mothers quickly reverted to little girls, bickering like spoilt brats.
‘Yes, I’ve done something vile and unforgivable, but I am not a psychopath. I’m sorry, but if anyone’s a psychopath, it’s Ruby,’ Amber shot back. ‘Or have you forgotten introducing us to “Kev”? Although, Emerald, you did say you have enough morphine to put a rhino to sleep. Ram sedative, that’s what you recommended. With a plastic bag full of gas and helium, to make it seem as though she’d killed herself.’
‘What?! You’re the one who knows how to induce multiple organ failure from poisonous flowers, Amber. Devil’s helmet, you called it. No antidote,’ Emerald counter-claimed.
‘Oh, and what’s my motive? I’m not the one with money troubles,’ Amber parried. ‘Alessandro told us how much debt your practice is in, Emerald. And what about Ruby’s baby? A new baby costs a fortune. Being cut out of Mum’s will is clearly the last thing you wanted, either,’ she said, turning to face me.
‘The will,’ I said, snapping us back to reality. ‘Mum’s solicitor is still on holidays. She told me she was going to deal with it after Christmas. Do you think she got around to signing the new version?’
It didn’t take us long to find it. The sealed envelope addressed to the solicitor was sitting on her writing desk, beneath the watchful eye of a framed image of the Virgin Mary. It was stamped, ready for posting.
‘Look away, Mary,’ Emerald said, as she tore open the letter.
We fumbled around in our respective bags for our reading glasses, then pored over the pages, heads banging. Our mother had made handwritten amendments to the document, scratching out our names and citing the Catholic Church as her sole beneficiary. She had carefully initialled each of the amendments. The document was signed, dated, and witnessed by two of her hairdressers. Emerald took the will into the kitchen, rummaged through the drawers and found a box of matches. She stood over the sink, match poised to strike.
‘We mustn’t. It’s illegal,’ Amber stated, but I could hear the touch of a plea behind the assurance in her voice.
‘No, we mustn’t,’ I agreed, gnawing my nails all the way up to my wrists.
‘Although . . . nobody will ever know,’ Amber added. ‘Except for the three of us.’
I had now chewed my nails nearly all the way up to my elbows. We caught each other’s eyes over our reading glasses. And then as one, we signalled a covert middle finger by pretending to adjust the frames on our noses. It had been our secret code since we were kids, giving a subversive middle finger without being caught by our parents.
‘A pact.’ Emerald laid her hand out flat in front of her. Amber placed her hand on top – then I add
ed my own quivering palm to the fleshy tower. ‘In sisterly solidarity.’
‘In sisterly solidarity,’ Amber and I chorused.
We nodded our agreement and Emerald lit the match. We watched in silence as our mother’s new will and testament flamed into black curls and disappeared in a fug of smoke.
Emerald scooped up the ashes and deposited them in the compost bin, then called the police to report Mum’s death. As we waited for an officer, she poured herself a large whisky and sat nursing the bottle with her legs dangling into the pool, pristine silk pyjama pants rolled up. I resorted to comfort eating, grazing straight from the fridge with a spoon. Amber started frantically cleaning, binning spoilt food, putting on the dishwasher and polishing surfaces, using a flannel to manically wipe down anything that didn’t talk back.
The police officer, a middle-aged, no-nonsense woman with salt-and-pepper hair, arrived half an hour later. She offered perfunctory condolences then moved straight outside into the backyard. Watching through the window as the officer examined our mother’s body, I felt as though we were in a play. This impression was only heightened, half an hour later, by the arrival of a grizzled badge-flasher who introduced himself as Detective Tyson.
Sisters have an emotional patois only we can understand – we can speak fluently to each other only using eyes. What our eyes were saying right now was A detective? Why?
The detective summoned us into the backyard a few moments later. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he growled in a ten-pack-a-day voice. He peered at the world from beneath veined, saggy eyelids and his hair appeared to have been groomed with salad tongs. ‘When there’s an unexpected fatality, we usually rely in the first instance on good old-fashioned door-knocking and talking to friends and family. When suspicions are aroused, we tend to work backwards from the scene where the death occurred,’ he monotoned, utilising the brute vocabulary of his profession. ‘An officer has spoken to your mother’s neighbours. Apparently, some of them overheard a quarrel here yesterday.’
Our secret sisterly ocular semaphore resumed its bewildered broadcast.
‘Do any of you have any plans for the next few days?’
WTF? our eyes said to each other, more loudly this time.
‘I’ll probably just be sitting around tweezing my stray facial hairs,’ Emerald replied, before adding, curtly, ‘We have a funeral to organise, so obviously we’ll be here. Why do you ask?’
‘We’d just prefer it if you didn’t leave the area while we conduct our inquiries.’
Inquiries? The whole house was suddenly smudged with unspoken thoughts.
‘We’ll need to investigate and send our reports to the coroner, who will make a decision about whether to hold an inquest.’
‘An inquest?’ Emerald remarked, brusquely. ‘Why?’
‘Sleeping pills and alcohol have been located in the vicinity of the dead body. Toxicology reports take a while, so, in the meantime, it’s routine to determine the approximate time of death as well as any possible motives, alibis . . .’
‘Alibis?’ Amber repeated, wide-eyed with disbelief.
‘Yeah, well, usually the victim’s will is a dead giveaway. As in, who’s gonna benefit?’ The detective smiled without warmth. He now stood like a conquistador, with his scuffed black shoe on the pebblecrete lip of the pool.
Emerald put her lips through a series of gymnastic contortions. I thought she was going to cry, then realised she was merely trying to hold back from a giggling collapse.
‘How can you find this funny?’ Amber asked, agog.
‘How can you not?’ Emerald rebutted, emitting a raw, guttural bark. ‘Mum’s still making our lives a misery – even from beyond the bloody grave.’
I laughed then too, a bravura burst, bordering on mania. ‘You see, Detective, our mother was to parenthood what myxomatosis is to rabbits,’ I tried to explain between bouts of mirth.
This simile set Emerald off once more. Her explosion into a barrage of throaty howls caused Amber to also succumb, windmilling her arms to keep her balance as she rocked back and forth.
If any neighbour had glanced over the garden wall at this moment, they would have seen three sisters weeping with laughter over their mother’s corpse. It would warm the cockles, it really would. Although, perhaps not those of Detective Tyson, whose cockles remained decidedly, icily, cold.
‘So,’ he addressed Emerald, ‘just out of interest, where were you between the hours of four pm yesterday and one am this morning?’
‘I was on the beach for some of it,’ Emerald tittered. She sat down, suddenly winded from laughing. Amber collapsed onto one of the wrought-iron seats beside her.
‘Can any witnesses vouch for your whereabouts?’
Emerald let out another huge guffaw at the absurdity of it all. ‘Her husband.’ She hooked a thumb in Amber’s convulsing direction.
This comment caused Amber to instantly sober up. ‘Oh, really? Why?’
‘Scott came around. You hadn’t come home, apparently. And you weren’t answering your phone. He needed comforting. Alessandro was totally bladdered by then. So, Scott and I went for a walk on the beach.’
‘And just how much comfort did you provide?’ Amber asked, her perfect white teeth clenched. ‘Your usual full body pillow, I presume?’
Emerald shrugged, which prompted Amber to jump to her feet. ‘What happened? Answer me!’
‘Look, we snogged. That’s all. Don’t blame me. Ruby put the idea in my head.’
‘What? No, I didn’t!’ I protested.
‘You’re the one who said that Amber and I should swap husbands.’
‘Oh my god!’ screeched Amber. ‘You shame me for having a fling with Harry and then make out with my husband? Un-fucking-believable.’
‘It’s a very different scenario, Amber. You’re now into tits and clits, remember? With Leyla,’ Emerald replied. ‘Besides, nothing more happened. We were both off our trolleys by then.’
The detective was looking from one Ryan girl to another, as though at an unruly tennis match between McEnroe-type racquet-brats. With twitching fingers he cracked open the cellophane of a packet of cigarettes, which he was clearly trying to give up, then disappeared in a bloom of smoke. ‘Do you want to talk me through the details of this particular shit-show?’ he said.
I realised that I’d become strangely detached from my feelings of grief and shock – I felt no tears, no ache in my throat, no rage, just an odd calm. As the only trained reporter in the vicinity, I felt it incumbent upon me to summarise the situation for the confounded copper.
‘I’m sorry, Detective Tyson, but, you see, it’s been a rather stressful Christmas. Our mother entirely failed to grasp the concept of maternal love during her lifetime, which is why she chose Christmas Day to reveal that my husband Harry had a fling with my sister Amber, because he likes her cooking, apparently. Amber’s husband is the sexual equivalent of a binge-eater, while Emerald’s husband is a lapsed vagetarian – he now totally avoids vag,’ I elaborated. ‘Basically, we’re three menopausal women whose dreams have collapsed, just like our pelvic floors, which we seem to be trying to cure with some HRT – husband replacement therapy.’
The detective collapsed in a wheezing phlegm-fest. ‘Don’t worry. One of these days I’ll be out of therapy,’ he said, lighting up another cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘So, let’s unpack this more slowly, shall we, girls?’
But we were saved further humiliating interrogation by the shrill of the doorbell. Relieved at the reprieve, Emerald bounced off to open it. A few moments later, she called down the hall. ‘Ruby? Your HRT just arrived.’
I crossed to the kitchen doorway and looked towards the front door. A figure ambled out of the blinding sunshine into the darkness of the hall. I blinked against the brightness as my eyes adjusted. And there, backlit by the dazzling morning sun, stood Doctor Brody Quinn.
32
‘Ruby.’
As soon as I heard his voice a pang of longing corkscrewed throu
gh my body, which responded instantly, like Pavlov’s salivating dog. A lobotomised grin was the best I could manage.
‘Brody.’ I stumbled to a halt before him. Wide-eyed and wild haired, clothes dishevelled, I imagined I looked like a hair-care-magazine reject, or the ‘Before’ photo in a makeover feature.
‘Look,’ Brody began, with no preamble, raking his hands through his springy hair. ‘I’m sorry about the radio silence. Our ship got as far as Vanuatu, but then the winds picked up. There was rather a lot of offshore, which was presently onshore, and vice versa, and soon there were more trees resting on the upper decks than is desirable. The ship got blown into a reef, then laid low in port for a bit, before limping back to Sydney for propeller repairs. I got severance pay and joined some of my medical mates from Sydney who were off on a professional retreat at a wilderness lodge in Tassie. I was just drowning my sorrows in drink and wallowing in the general bollocks of being cross and hairy and living in squalor when one of the doctors started talking about a case she’d had recently, of a mother and daughter who shared the same initials . . . And how her practice had sent a letter revealing stage-four, terminal pancreatic cancer to the daughter instead of the mother. Well, needless to say, my ears pricked up. And I just want to say that I’m sorry I didn’t believe you . . . The lodge insists on digital detox, otherwise I would have contacted you straight away. Anyway, as soon as I got back to the mainland yesterday I tried to call you, but your phone’s been off. So, I got your address from a mate who works for the cruise company. But I didn’t want to go to your house, you know, to avoid the testicular trauma and compound fractures that might greet me upon my arrival. I mean, have you told your husband about us? Are you even still married?’
I was too stupefied to speak. I just kept looking up into his tanned, open face and remembering his lovely lips on mine while trying to fathom what the hell he was attempting to say to me.