‘I can what?’
‘Call me Charley.’
And Lisa had smiled. ‘OK, Charley.’
Charley was well aware of his less-than-average economic status and he knew he reflected a much sadder social one, but it didn’t usually bother him. Because of the shit life he’d led up to this point, he was OK with getting by. But if made to show a woman his home – his small and lonely ex-con home with his two-seater couch and a stained-to-buggery coffee table and all those books on the shelves he’d built, with the single bed in the room with nothing but a reading lamp and a single three-drawer dresser and piles of books, with the mouldy shower, the dank dunny, the wonky-springed recliner under the awning in the backyard – if made to show a woman his home, Charley stiffened till it hurt. ‘You should be proud of yourself,’ his parole officer had said, hands on her hips, surveying his lounge room. ‘You’re doing really well.’ Charley had felt small then, just as he’d felt the master of losers when a mate’s wife looked around nervously, with pity, as if to say, ‘How do you live like this, you sad and awkward man?’ A woman he’d been wooing at the local pub in a very self-conscious way came over one night drunk and horny and said his house was depressing, ‘needs some bloody curtains’, and she would be the one to make them. He felt hopeful and hopeless all at once and she, of course, never came back. Now, here was Lisa. Here she was in Charley’s new cell, a space within the vast open prison that was his world, and it said, This is me; what do you think? And he hated himself.
‘Look at all of these books. Camus. Robert Dessaix. Cormac McCarthy. You’re certainly diverse.’
‘Not really,’ he said, his shoulders loosening. ‘Takes me ages to get through one, eh.’
‘You like poetry?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I do too.’ Lisa looked back at Charley. The room felt warm. ‘Funny we never brought it up in our letters.’
‘Mmm,’ he said, not sure what to say.
‘I love the Romantics. Shakespeare’s sonnets. When my mum died I went into an Emily Dickinson phase.’
‘I like Dickinson.’
Lisa laughed quickly through her nose, said, ‘I wonder if it’s because you’ve lost your mum too,’ and returned to his books.
‘I didn’t read poetry when she died. Only been reading it the last few years.’
‘What made you start?’
And here they were, having a conversation about poetry and life in his somehow ample home. They talked about Alice Springs, how much she liked it, how much he’d like to go, though she didn’t invite him to visit. They talked about her family, about how he was sure he’d never be a father. They talked on the car ride to her hotel about how driving was for him, since the accident. Later, at the hotel’s restaurant, Lisa asked Charley how he was feeling about the funeral. He took his time answering, at first trying to escape it by swirling his whisky in his glass and letting the words golden amber, bronze urine roll around his mind. Though he read poetry, he never wrote it. Sometimes, though, he silently composed it.
‘I guess it’s pretty hard naming your emotions right now.’
Charley took a swig. Fire ants’ piss and splendidness.
‘I feel nervous for you. I’m sorry, but I do.’ Lisa picked at the calamari in the basket in front of them but didn’t take a bite. ‘You know, I can’t believe you can write these confident letters, so insightful too, but you can’t speak out loud without second-guessing yourself. I mean, in your letters you ramble on, and it seems like you’ve got it all worked out because you really have no idea. Does that make sense? Like not understanding gives you clarity and comfort.’ Lisa looked up from the food to see Charley once again swirling his whisky. ‘They’re amazing letters.’
‘Clarity? No. Comfort? Don’t know. Maybe.’
They arrived at the funeral late, as Charley had wanted. It meant he wouldn’t have to shake hands with the family if the funeral was to be traditional. His plan was to get in and out without having to talk to anyone other than Lisa. True, he wanted to apologise to Jean Harley’s son, but there was no way to do it without imploding. Lisa agreed. Talking to the boy would be hard.
Although late he had plenty of time to look for the people he’d seen in the ICU waiting room. He couldn’t help wondering how each of them might handle their anguish now that she was gone. There was Stan. There was the boy he now knew to be Orion. There was the woman with her two children. She was holding her baby close to her chest, as if she might grieve too loudly if she and the baby were to separate. Her older daughter seemed to be singing.
It was a large flock of mourners. He guessed two hundred. There were blown-up pictures of a smiling Jean on her bike, a smiling Jean with Stan, with Orion, with her friends, as a child with her brother, as a baby with her parents. There was an open casket, the body in it soon to be ash. Charley and Lisa found two seats near the back.
The preacher wasn’t like Charley would’ve imagined, having seen only males, for starters. She didn’t wear the right clothes. No black pants and shirt or robes. No collar. Charley then realised she wasn’t a preacher, this wasn’t a church and God hadn’t been invited.
She spoke about the meaning of life, the meaning we make of our own lives. Charley’s gut was heavy with regret, almost touching the ground with shame. Here was a man who’d made so many wrong turns the only thing he knew to do now was go straight, and even that wasn’t working for him. His mother must have been cursed to have a child like him, and yet she’d loved him and he hadn’t even been there to bury her. Now there was Jean, who’d done good in this life, whose death was giving the people in this room reason to cry. Charley suddenly became aware of his arms and legs touching Lisa’s. He couldn’t give her any more room; his body wouldn’t allow it.
Who would speak at his funeral? One woman said that Jean’s life was an adventure and she’d known how to be a damn good hero. Her brother spoke as if she’d been a star, shooting through two hemispheres. Her husband said it was love. ‘With Jean, it had always been about love.’ Charley’s insides were tight and twisted. He felt the only way to loosen them was to let out a howl. What had he done to this poor woman’s life? To her son? At least he has a dad, he thought. At least he has a dad. And then he missed his mum. And then the pain made its way to the back of his throat and he made a sound like hissing gas inside a moan, the inverse of a howl.
‘For those who are able, Stan has provided envelopes in each of the memorial cards so that you may write to Orion about his mother. It is no minor tragedy when a young child loses his mother and this is a way to ensure we keep her alive in his memory.’
Lisa took hold of Charley’s hand and whispered, ‘You can write him a letter.’ And without having thought about it first, Charley squeezed Lisa’s hand in reply.
There was a space between the funeral home and the parking lot that Charlie thought of as a holding pen, and if the decor of the holding pen could talk, the green vase in the centre by the ficus tree might complain of its colour, bemoaning that it wasn’t black or white, something less vibrant in such a solemn place. The ficus tree itself might scream that it wasn’t fair being in here, away from the other trees that had roots in the earth. The eyes that skimmed past his own might say, Who the fuck are you? Charley stood next to the ficus, looking down into the vase, wondering why there was nothing in it, all the time avoiding as many eyes as he could. But he could feel them on him, staring at his stiff shoulders boxed in his navy shirt, the sorrowful slant of his eyebrows, the dead weight of his belly. His hand flew up to shield his guilt, so sure he’d been giving something away: I do not belong here; I wasn’t her friend; I caused her death. In each corner of the room stood the guards of the holding pen, waiting for their moment to tell the people it was time to leave.
There were too many whispers and he couldn’t make out any particular phrases or words. A series of esses, some chopped consonants, a few ohs. Outs
ide the sound of cars moving forward as a light turned green, someone yelling abuse. Charley wished Lisa would hurry the fuck up. It was getting noisy and he was cramped. He thought he might need to shit. She was talking to the woman from the hospital, the one with the two children, the one who’d held the baby tight during the funeral. They smiled and hugged and chatted like two long-lost friends, which Charley would later learn is exactly what they were. He wondered how Lisa might explain to the woman what she was doing at Jean Harley’s funeral.
A girl with black hair to match all the swarming black in the holding pen bumped into him. He prayed she’d keep to herself.
‘Lot of people here.’ Small talk much like ‘nice weather we’re having’, but more suited to a funeral.
Charley nodded.
‘My aunt must’ve had a lot of friends.’
Charley nodded again.
The girl looked absently at all the others in the room. ‘How did you know Aunt Jean?’
The whispering seemed to have risen to a roar and he hoped she wouldn’t hear him when he said, ‘I knew of her, eh.’
‘Oh. How was that?’
‘It wasn’t too good,’ he said, beginning to move away, but then the girl picked up the little boy Charley hadn’t seen standing there – the boy called Orion, Jean Harley’s son – and stopped Charley in his tracks.
Orion looked like Jean in the photos much more than the Jean he remembered lying on Diagonal Road. He had curly hair and a look that suggested he, too, would like tyre swings, as Jean’s brother had said in his eulogy, and he, too, was a deep thinker with a high-pitched laugh, as Jean’s friend had said, and he, too, had a very big heart, as Jean’s husband had said. The little boy rested his head on the girl’s shoulder and said, ‘Who are you?’ pointing to Charley. Both Orion and the girl stared at him, waiting for an answer.
‘I’m Charley.’ Then he made himself small and forged a path through the holding pen, past Lisa and the woman with the two children, all the way to his car where he was able to breathe. Then he howled.
Fifteen
Coraleen scanned the room and wondered who would die next. The woman who’d read the poem at the service while holding her baby the whole time? Her dad? She began playing a game with herself, making up stories for how each person would die. Lightning might strike dead one of the little kids running around the garden. The man with the large cheeks who seemed to be laughing too much for a wake would choke on his own vomit after the annual Big Night Out with the old gang. The baby sleeping in the pram under the tree would grow another year then get stung by a bee. The boy at the food table, who looked as if he were having a telepathic conversation with each individual platter, his heart would stop the first time he took drugs.
Coraleen approached the food table with trepidation. ‘My dad picked those out. They’re Oreos. We brought them from America.’ She could tell she’d startled him. He’d been checking out the food with such intensity, yet hadn’t put a thing on his plate.
‘I think you can get them here.’ His voice was deep. He wasn’t a boy. Coraleen guessed sixteen, though he could’ve been older. Eighteen. ‘I mean, you can …’ he continued, ‘get them here.’
‘My dad wanted to make sure we had Oreos. Jean loved them growing up.’ It surprised her how easily she’d said her aunt’s name. She found it harder to say ‘Jean’ when talking to her dad. As if she might upset him more than he could handle.
‘Are they brother and sister?’
‘Were they? Yeah. She was my aunt.’
The boy looked uncomfortable but he held Coraleen’s eyes. ‘She lived next door to me.’
Something in the way he said it made Coral think that he knew Jean well enough to feel sad about her death. She wanted to know how well he knew her. She wondered if he had any stories to tell. Any story. How she used to honk her horn when she backed out of the driveway so no one would get hurt. Or maybe how she’d once had a garage sale and he got some cool relic, and then he could describe it to her so she could see it in her mind’s eye. Any small story. Anything.
‘I play with Orion sometimes on Saturday mornings.’ He looked at his feet, perhaps fumbling with the present tense. ‘I guess I used to. They liked going for bike rides to the hills once a month. I don’t know if Stan will be wanting me to do that anymore.’
That was the story. That’s what Coraleen needed to hear so she could make the connection. Now she wouldn’t feel like such an outsider.
‘I’d like to, though. Keep doing it.’
‘Take one,’ she said, pointing to the Oreos. ‘For Jean.’
The boy seemed to endure a short-lived panic attack, looking at the biscuit. ‘I haven’t made it to the end of the table yet,’ he told her with pleading in his eyes.
Coral picked up the Oreo and put it on his plate. ‘It’s just a cookie.’
They followed each other to the bench along the fence, neither sure who was leading. When they sat down Coral said, ‘There are three types of people at this wake. First, there are the little kids. They’re pretty much untouched by it all. They don’t get death. They get now.’
‘Do you? Get death?’
Coral looked at him as if she could talk for hours. She was a Goth, didn’t he see that? A do-I-get-death! look sufficed. ‘Then there’s the grown-ups,’ she continued while eating some nuts. ‘This is heavy for them, but they don’t want to let other people know how heavy. So they keep telling jokes.’
The boy pointed to a couple near the back screen door. ‘My mum and dad have lived next door to Jean and Stan for twelve years. Mum and Jean used to water their plants at the same time in the summer so they could catch up. Now look. Mum and Dad are laughing. It’s sort of quiet, though.’ He looked down at his plate, still untouched. ‘So what’s the third type?’
Coraleen turned her eyes to him, again as if the answer was obvious. ‘Us.’
The girl dove headfirst into the death of her aunt, whom she’d only met three times – four if you count when Coral could only crawl. She clung to the powerful mixture of sadness and confusion that accompanies an end and seemed to float with it easily, as if a ghost herself. She somehow blossomed in her grief, however dark the colour of her rose. No one was surprised or concerned about it; she was fifteen and dressed herself daily in black clothing and wore thick black eyeliner, a black-red lipstick. She’d been this way ever since her mum and dad’s first lengthy silence. Coraleen hadn’t known the fight lasted for five days; she’d only caught onto it after three. Given her outward appearance and the fact that her parents were going through a separation, it didn’t seem extreme that she took on her aunt’s death with such passionate gloom.
It was Jean, the exotic aunt from Australia, who’d walked her to school every day for what seemed like ages when her mum had gone through her first big bout of depression. Coraleen had been only eight and didn’t much understand the emotion in the house, but she did know that Jean was the best. They played dress-ups and dance school while her mother rested and cried.
Two years later Jean had come with Stan and their new baby. Coral had adored Orion, carrying him everywhere. She remembered Jean breastfeeding on the living room couch, as if her breast hadn’t been hanging out for all of the family to see, for her father to see, as if she hadn’t heard her mum say, ‘Would you like to go somewhere more private?’ She remembered Jean just smiling at Orion and saying, ‘We’re happy here,’ as if they were the only people who mattered.
Three years later it had been at Grandma Pearl’s home in Missouri. There had been talk of selling the old house when Grandpa Stompy passed on, but Grandma Pearl held strong, saying, ‘If I move from here, where will we have Christmas?’ It was Christmas then, and little had they known that two Christmases later Jean would be dead.
That last time, Jean and Stan had taken off with Coraleen and her dad on a two-day drive west to Colorado. Coral’s mum, being waist
-deep into avoidance with her dad, had stayed behind with Grandma Pearl and Orion. Jean had wanted to see the mountains again, wanted to return to the place where she’d first met Stan and take them all snow-shoeing and skiing, things Coraleen had never done before. And Coraleen was hopeless, but oh how she laughed with almost every gawky foot placement and disastrously slow fall. There was an unsullied elation about Coral during that trip, but then it ended. It had to end.
‘So were you close to Jean?’ the boy asked. They’d put their plastic plates beside them on the green bench: hers a mess of near emptiness, his neat with a single Oreo, untouched. They settled into watching the younger kids running in and out of small groups of grown-ups who laughed in place of crying. Coral thought his discomfort interesting and cute. ‘I got a question for you: why are you so afraid of the food here?’
‘I like to make plans first. It’s just something weird about me.’
Coral thought about him considering the platters of meat and antipasto, the devilled eggs, cold chicken, the chocolate and coconut sponges piled in a pyramid. She wondered if he’d been freaked out by the bowls of nuts sitting so near the bowls of chocolates. Did he ever consider mixing them or would he have spontaneously combusted? And weren’t dips something you needed to try before putting some on your plate? How did that work?
‘I’d made a mental note to take an Oreo before you came up to me.’
‘Then you’re OK to me. So was I close to Aunt Jean? Yeah. Totally.’
Though they shared a heinous loss that would eventually bring them closer, the rolling sound of the suitcase over the hardwood floor set the men apart: John was a stranger, Stan at home. And so he felt uncomfortable, claiming part of Stan’s space for the next few days. He felt uncomfortable without Jean in the room. He felt uncomfortable wanting to unpack his suitcase right after his sister’s wake. He’d planned on getting settled at the house days before the funeral, but things don’t always go to plan and death doesn’t afford a body time to wait.
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