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About The Christmas Cafe
About Amanda Prowse
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About No Greater Love
About No Greater Courage
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For this I am truly indebted to my teams at Head of Zeus, Midas and PFD.
My colleagues, my friends.
I really, really, love you all.
Prologue
Bea stood in the early-evening light and let the warm New South Wales wind lift her long, layered grey hair and kiss her face. It was seasonably clement and the city had an air of expectation about it. As far as Sydney-siders were concerned, the warmer the better, allowing them to enjoy all that the outdoor life had to offer. She stared at the bronze boar in front of her; Il Porcellino stared back as her fingers twitched in the pocket of her funky grass-green linen smock. Commuters keen to get home and make the most of the evening sunshine, either with a trip to the beach or supper in the garden, rushed along Macquarie Street behind her, shedding jackets and rolling up sleeves. Groups of colleagues making an early start on the Christmas party season walked with arms across each other’s shoulders, the booze-fuelled banter bringing them closer than any teambuilding around a boardroom table. Bea envied them the ordinariness of their preoccupations. Looking to the left and right, swallowing her shyness, she stepped forward and gingerly rubbed the shiny nose of the tusked creature.
‘Please.’ She mouthed the one word and closed her eyes briefly before tossing the little round coin with the square hole into the water at its feet. Throwing her head back, she took a deep breath and looked up at the grand arches and pretty green ironwork panels with terraces behind. It was a beautiful building in the city that they loved; that in itself was a comfort. There were far, far worse places for her husband to die.
‘Ah, you’re back. Did you have a little wander?’ The kindly nurse flicked off the overhead strip-light, leaving the room dulled, with only a subdued glow coming from the side light above the sink. It was most fitting; cosy and calming.
‘Not really, just went outside for a breather. It’s warm tonight.’ Bea pinched and pumped the front of her smock.
The nurse nodded. Her shift didn’t finish until the morning; the weather outside was of little consequence. She placed her hooked fingers against Peter’s wrist and swept her palm over his brow, smiling into his milky eyes. ‘I’ll be back in a wee while, Peter,’ she said.
Bea greatly appreciated how civil the nurses were to her husband. He might or might not have been able to hear or comprehend them, but she was glad they assumed that he could.
She resumed her position in the vinyl chair by Peter’s bedside, still in the clothes she had worn for the last seventy-two hours, crumpled and dappled with splashes of coffee and streaks of mascara that her tired arm had blotted from her tear-stained face.
‘If you need anything, Mrs Greenstock, then you only have to buzz,’ the nurse said as she made her way towards the door.
Bea nodded. ‘Thank you, yes. Do you think he needs anything right now? Should we give him more medicine?’
The nurse smiled and spoke slowly as if addressing a child. ‘No. No more medicine. Really, it’s best we just let nature take its course.’
‘How long, would you say, if you had to guess?’ She spoke quietly, averting her eyes, guilty for asking.
The nurse shook her head, her voice equally soft. ‘It’s really hard to say. Sometimes, when the final decline starts, it can be quite quick; but other people hang on, literally for days. There’s no way for us to know, but I would say that with Peter it will be sooner rather than later. It’s good that you are here.’ She crinkled her eyes in a smile as she shut the door behind her.
Bea was grateful for her honesty and her kindness. She sat forward in the chair with her elbows resting on her bony knees. ‘Did you hear that, darling? It’s good that I’m here. But actually, I’d rather neither of us was here. I’d rather we were on a little sailing boat in the Whitsundays catching fresh fish for lunch, washed down with a cold glass of wine. Then we could nap on the deck in the sunshine and when we woke up, we’d swim in that glorious sea, go ashore to walk on that fine, white sand and sit and watch the day pass overhead.’ She smiled. ‘Do you remember that wonderful Christmas? Just the two of us. It was paradise, wasn’t it? The best ever.’
Bea held her husband’s hand and leant over his face. His eyes seemed to have fogged, but his head moved slightly from side to side, as if seeking the face that he could no longer see.
‘It’s okay, my love, I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.’
There was the slightest flicker around his mouth. She wanted to believe, in the half-light of this hospital side ward, that it was a final smile for her, but it could have been wishful thinking. He was preoccupied with his battle, bathed in a sickly sweet sweat as his body fought the inevitable. It was a cloying, unpleasant scent that she would smell in the future on certain flowers and on the breath of the ill and elderly and find herself immediately transported back to this room at this moment.
Bea thought of the many deathbed scenes that she had witnessed in movies and plays. The laborious last messages of love or confession as violins built to a crescendo. It was of course all utter, utter rubbish. She had seen one man die before, happening across a traffic accident one morning on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Park Street, and he had barely twitched an eyelid before passing. Peter fought for every last second, steely and determined till the end. She wished the movie scenes weren’t rubbish, she wished he would sit up straight, look her in the eye, with his palm against her face and a bloom to his cheek, tell her that it was all going to be okay, that he had no regrets, that he had always loved her. This last fact she knew, but the thought of not hearing it again made her unbelievably sad.
She felt a rush of love and also gratitude for this man who had met the love of his life and been content to walk by her side, knowing that in her affections he came third, after her son and the memory of one she had loved long ago. Even now, in his final moments, he was self-contained, as if considering her needs until the last, making her experience as comfortable as he possibly could. She didn’t need violins.
‘I was so blessed to find you, Peter. You are a wonderful man, a wonderful friend, and I love you – you know that, don’t you?’ She sighed. ‘What do I do now, my love? Where do I go from here?’ She heard his words loud and clear, the mantra by which he had lived. ‘Always remember, life is for the brave. This is our one time around the block!’
‘I know...’ She nodded. Her many silver bangles jangled together, cracking open the silence with their noise. She squeezed his hand, hard, hoping for reciprocation.
‘Oh, my love, your hand has gone cold.’ She bent forward and kissed his nose, which was also cool against her lips, but his body was still hot, as though a furnace burning centrally was losing its ability to ignite anything out of immediate reach.
Peter turned his head a fraction and with every ounce of strength left in his body he reached up and past her, seeming to focus on the space to the right of her head. His thin legs twisted in the same direction, as if he was trying to leave his deathbed.
‘Where are you off to?’ She cried then, knowing where he was going and that she could not follow. ‘You go, my darling; you go wherever you want to. It’s okay. Just go to sleep and know that you are loved.’
Peter sank back against the shallow pillow and his breath faltered. He opened and closed his mouth as if trying to speak. She bent low and wit
h her ear against his mouth, she heard the faintest whisper of his final words. ‘It’s been lovely.’
‘Oh, it has, Peter! It really has!’
The gaps between each breath grew longer and longer, until there were no more.
Bea waited and watched, fixated on the waxy skin at the base of his throat, hoping for one more fluttering tremor that would mean he was still with her and she didn’t have to start grieving. But there was none.
She’d been told to press the call button when the inevitable happened, or if she needed anything, but instead she sat holding his hand, with her other pressed in the nook of his elbow where warmth lingered. She wanted to stay just like that until the warmth disappeared, like singing a baby off to sleep, waiting for the right moment to shuffle backwards out of the room, leaving the door ajar.
It was way past midnight before she finally left her love and quietly closed the door behind her on nearly thirty years of marriage.
The hospital canteen was quiet, the silence shattered only by the occasional weary medic, wearing creased scrubs and with dark shadows beneath their eyes. They gave small nods in her direction, knowing it could not be happy circumstances that saw her lingering over a cup of scalding, weak, machine-issued coffee all alone at that ungodly hour. She was grateful for their lack of intervention, wanting to be alone with the images that were crystallising inside her mind. His last minutes, engraving themselves on her brain, there for perfect recall whenever she might need them in the future.
She looked around the walls of the canteen that had been her refuge for the last ten days, the place she’d crept to hourly, when nurses invaded the room to ‘make him comfortable’. She always gave them ten minutes to complete the chores that she didn’t want to witness; not for her sake, but for Peter’s. It was strange to think that it would now be someone else’s turn to sit on that plastic chair in the dead of night and figure out how to stop feeling numb. Women just like her, going through the same thing, would be scanning the panini menus, scooping chocolate bars from the shallow baskets and searching pockets for small change. She felt a wave of pity for them, because they didn’t know what was coming and it was horrid.
‘There you are!’ Wyatt’s voice jolted her from her musings. His short-sleeved white shirt was undone to reveal a little too much chest and his khaki board shorts had wisps of grass hanging off them; he looked like he had just come in from the garden. He sounded slightly cross, as if she had been hiding, his stance and tone indicating he had been mightily inconvenienced by the whole carry-on.
‘I couldn’t park the bloody car, even at this time of night. It’s 2013, we can send shuttles up into space and we can fit more information than is held in the Canberra National Library on a digital postage stamp, but we can’t work out how to allow entry to a locked car park after hours. It’s a bloody ridiculous system.’ He flipped the bunch of car keys back and forth until they nestled inside his clenched palm.
Bea nodded. It was. Bloody ridiculous.
‘So, how’s he doing?’ Wyatt placed his knuckles on his hips; again, as if angry with her about something.
She stared at her son and twisted the bangles on her wrist. ‘He died, Wyatt. He died a few hours ago.’ It was the first time she had said it out loud. ‘It was actually very peaceful. He just went to sleep. I was holding his hand. He seemed to reach across me, as though trying to head off somewhere. I told him it was okay to go; like giving him permission, I suppose. Permission to leave me. And he went.’ She gave a brief smile.
‘Oh, Mum,’ he offered, neutrally.
She wondered what that meant. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry,’ or ‘I wish I’d got here sooner,’ or ‘Please, Mother, less of the dramatics.’ It was hard to tell. Wyatt was a man who coped better with the practical than the emotional. He no doubt wanted her to start talking about funeral arrangements and finances, things to which he could relate, rather than how she was feeling. But that was simply tough shit.
‘I didn’t know what to do, so I called you.’ She felt, awkwardly, that she had to justify the inconvenience.
‘Of course.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll take you home, when you’re ready.’ He placed his hand briefly on her shoulder, pulling away quickly.
She felt the imprint of his fingers on her skin, like a burn. She considered reminding him that neither heart disease nor in fact heartache were contagious. He was safe on both counts. She felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Whilst it might have been nice to be swept up in an all-consuming hug, it would also have been acutely embarrassing; they were so out of practice.
Twenty minutes later, Wyatt’s big, shiny Holden Storm, with its warm leather interior and startling spaceship-like display on the dashboard, swept up Elizabeth Street and turned into Reservoir Street, at the heart of the affluent Surry Hills district. Both streets were almost deserted. The car’s headlights raked the walls and she winced, knowing they would wake several residents.
Pulling into the kerb, Wyatt turned to his mother. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come up?’ The way he left his seatbelt fastened and the engine running told her all she needed to know.
‘No, no, I’m fine. You get back to Sarah and Flora. Thank you for coming all this way, Wyatt, at this time of night.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Absolutely. It’s a good half-hour’s drive back to Manly. You get yourself off, love.’
She sensed the easing of his tension and realised that she too had dreaded the prospect of small talk and long silences over a cup of tea.
Bea climbed the stairs and twisted her key in the lock; the apartment was dark and quiet. Peter had been in hospital for ten days and she had popped back twice for showers and a change of clothes, yet tonight the rooms felt emptier than they had before, as if the bricks and mortar sensed that he was not coming home. She slumped down on the sofa and sat in the shadows, finding solace in the peace and particular hush that night-time brings.
Peter’s sandshoes sat side by side on the bathroom floor. His pyjamas were still in the laundry basket and his books were arranged in two small stacks on his bedside table. One pile waiting to be read and the other his favourites, which he liked to keep close. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he had loved since his teens, was among them. Bea’s mind jumped back in time, to another Kipling book, another man, another life. A tall man with a green scarf, who had kept time on her heart with his palm. Thirty-four years ago now, and yet she remembered it like it was yesterday.
She picked up a green silk cushion and hugged it to her while she surveyed Peter’s things, all now redundant, including the spectacles that sat on top of their case on the coffee table. She gingerly scooped them into her palm and held them against her chest. It was strange that these innocuous items now held such significance, vaulting the line from everyday thing to precious talisman. She wept, her loss and exhaustion sweeping over her like a wave that left her gulping for air. She was not just crying for the wonderful man she had lost but for the true, unconditional love that she had been unable to give him.
‘I’m sorry, Peter. I’m so sorry.’
One
Bea slowly opened one eye, peeking from her pillow at the new morning. The remnants of a dream lurked in her consciousness – she had been taken back in time, to the beat of a drum and the sound of a wide-decked, tall ship pushing through the waves. The wild torment of a younger body that yearned for the touch of her man, a memory of dancing under the stars on a swaying deck, the feel of his cotton shirt beneath her fingertips, his eyes, locked on hers, pulling her in. And his voice, deep and resolute, his words loud and clear, spoken on a still, hot, summer’s night as the cicadas chirped and the black flying-fox bats circled overhead. ‘I want to take you away. I want to make a home where you and I are free to love each other without judgement, without having to hide. I wish I could marry you, right here, right now. I won’t ever let you go. I’ll carry you with me, in here...’ His two fingers had patted his chest in the rhythm of a heartbea
t.
She sighed. The sun streamed in through the open window, casting spiky shadows of the full-bloomed Queensland lacebark against the wooden floor. She instinctively put a hand out to the other side of the bed. It was hard to believe that it had been a full year since she had said goodbye to Peter in that dimly lit hospital ward; but the pain was easing, a little. What surprised her were moments like these, when she reached out but failed to find him lying next to her in his stripy blue pyjamas, or when she wanted to call him with some titbit of information.
Bea glanced guiltily at Peter’s side of the bed. Even after all these years, an unsettling dream still had the power to do that to her: the flash of a memory, an image, a word. It could transport her back to a time before Peter, a time before her whole world had unravelled. And then, mercifully, he had swept in and saved her with his kindness.
She threw back the cool cotton bedspread and swung her legs onto the stripped wooden floor, letting her silk pyjamas unbunch themselves and slip crinkle-free down her legs, the sleeves falling in neat gaping triangles over her arms. She rather liked the contrast of the cream colour against the faint liver spots on the back of her hand. Deciding against her vintage silk kimono dressing gown, she left it on the bed and stood in front of the tall mirror, where she stretched her arms high above her head, turning sharply to the left as she waited for the familiar click of her neck. Next she bent forward with her hands clasped over her head and hung that way for a minute until her back, like her PJs, was kink-free. These were just a couple of the little rituals that she performed at the beginning of every day.
Bea held her breath and pulled the blind. She was, as ever, filled with joy and relief at the sight of Reservoir Street below, so very different from the dingy bedsit in Kings Cross she and Wyatt had shared for six years. Even after so many decades, the memory of that tiny hot room had the power to make her skin itch. She smiled as she took in the steep street with its pastel-coloured Victorian terraced properties and stunning wrought-iron balconies that sat proudly on either side of the thoroughfare. A runner laboured up the incline on the opposite side of the street, his headphones firmly in place. He raised his hand at the sight of her – funny how everyone knew her because of the business.
The Christmas Café Page 1