The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  Bunty said, ‘Sizzle’s dead.’ Her knife screamed against her plate. Chewing, she said something that might have been, ‘Stroke.’

  The Hills Hoist had assumed prominent, solid lines as the light withdrew. It was the pendant to a stunted lemon tree—ancient, untended and burdened with thick-skinned fruit—that persisted in a diamond of earth. Three eskies, respectively coloured red, green and blue with white undertones, provided the only other decorative touch. Bunty had salvaged them from a skip, planted them with succulents and set them on half-bricks stacked to different heights.

  ‘Oh, Bunty,’ began Christabel and couldn’t remember what to say next. Once, as she was leaving a hotel with a man, he had caressed her cheek, grazing it lightly with his broad golden ring. ‘I don’t think much of your face,’ he said. Then, as now, Christabel felt the blood recede from her fingers. She summoned up the paper Sizzle Bunty kept in a frame in the soft room: he looked waxy and bland, like a murderer on TV.

  Bunty said, ‘I had a dog when I was growing up.’ She was probing her potatoes with her fork as if they might conceal a foreign object. ‘Oliver used to follow me around and breathe on me. One morning, Sizzle came into my room and told me he’d had a nightmare. He said, “I dreamed there was something awful inside Oliver.” We looked at Olly, stretched at the foot of my bed. He thumped his tail. His black fur was as shiny as paint. A week later he was dead. He had a kind of cancer that only became apparent right at the end.’

  Christabel wanted to put her arms around Bunty; she could see herself doing it, but someone had shackled her to her chair. She tried and failed to meet the appalled, purple faces of succulents. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she told Bunty at last, locking her hands—life seemed to end at her wrists.

  From the depths of her chilly cowl, Bunty said, ‘My father hanged himself.’ She went on talking, but another plane blasting across the sky blanked out the rest. Christabel’s eyes were on the shapes made by Bunty’s mouth, but the yard had given way to a Javanese room as final as a grave. When the roar overhead faded, Christabel heard, ‘…all dead now. Pombo, Raven, Sizzle. And Dad, of course.’

  Pombo!

  ‘All my brothers were useless. But Sizzle tried to help.’

  ‘I had a cat,’ said Christabel, ‘when I lived in Kiki Mack’s garage.’

  The traffic along the highway was as murmurous as the sea. They were having lunch in the graveyard again. These days they lowered themselves cautiously onto the grass. Getting up could also be tricky. Bunty, being fat and strong, had devised a method that involved clambering onto all fours. Christabel preferred to grasp one of the iron railings in the fence and heave.

  A succession of pips sounded. Children rushed out of low buildings as if shooed with a broom. They were of all nations, a human assortment. A few drew near the fence and stared.

  ‘I dream of him,’ said Christabel. ‘In the dream, I’m at the cinema watching a film. Ann-Margret is in the film, feeding Napoleon strips of roast beef. He scratches her arm. Only I know it’s an accident, that he doesn’t mean to hurt.’

  ‘Ann-Margret!’ said Bunty. ‘I’d completely forgotten Ann-Margret. How about that!’

  ‘When I was leaving, Kiki wouldn’t have Napoleon—she was very firm. She’d never liked me keeping a cat in her garage. I asked everyone. I put notices in the papers, even the Sinhalese and Tamil ones. In the end, I sold my mother’s ring that I’d been saving to pay for my funeral and gave the money to the man who picked Kiki’s coconuts. He promised me Napoleon would be happy and well looked after in his village.’

  Bunty was transfixed by a cloud.

  ‘I’d been in Sydney five months when Kiki wrote to tell me Napoleon had been run over. She said there was no mistaking his corpse in the gutter. She wrote, “At least its suffering is over now. An animal who has been petted and spoiled cannot survive as a stray. I simply cannot understand your cruelty.”

  ‘Oh, Bunty!’ cried Christabel. ‘From the time you sent me my ticket, Kiki told me I should have Napoleon put down. But he was only four years old! And I thought, Life is long.’

  Bunty ate the last corned beef sandwich. She began the manoeuvres that would bring her to her feet. Halfway up, she resembled a great cow.

  Christabel dusted her skirt free of little pieces of leaf. A child was watching her from the other side of the fence. In his peaked cap with its long neck flap he looked like a small colonial soldier. His lips moved. Christabel waved in return. She put her face close to the railings and smiled. The child’s voice reached her, bold as a bell: ‘Bitch!’ he shouted. ‘Bitch!’

  The old women took a gummy sort of smell with them into the street. With a powerful hand, Bunty snapped off a branch flowering over a wall. She presented the clotted pink blossoms to Christabel.

  Weeks passed.

  ‘My mother smelled like pencil shavings,’ said Bunty. ‘Dad used to say that it was cruel of her to abandon her children. Especially me.’

  ‘Did you hate her for it?’

  ‘When I think of her, even now, what I remember is feeling loved.’

  New people moved into the adjoining semi. Christabel saw the young woman in the street and stopped to admire her dog. The dog was stumpy and smiley, with a back as broad as a shelf. The woman said that he was called Hank, adding, ‘And I’m Pippa Reynolds.’

  Christabel gave her name in return. Bricks quivered in the midday haze. Further along the street, a man from the council was mowing a nature strip. The young woman’s smile didn’t change. An odd little silence fell. Christabel had the impression—ridiculous, glancing, unshakeable—that she had made a mistake.

  ‘I have to get going now,’ said Pippa at last. ‘I like to be back at my desk by half-past one.’

  ‘Oh, do you work from home?’

  ‘Only two days a week. The rest of the time, there’s the day job. Because, frankly, it’s impossible to make a living writing novels.’

  The council worker carried on mowing as if the afternoon hadn’t just executed a pirouette.

  When Christabel told Bunty that their new neighbour was a writer, Bunty said, ‘Ah.’ It sounded like a stone dropping into a well.

  Pippa and her husband were to attend the wedding of an old friend. ‘It’s a Wiccan ceremony in a rainforest up north,’ Pippa told Christabel—they had come out to collect their mail at the same time. ‘My friend’s never really recovered from being raised by hippies. She’s being married by a white witch.’ But what was to be done with Hank? He was such a people dog—Pippa hated to board him. At once, Christabel offered to mind him for the weekend.

  When she got back from the wedding, Pippa invited Christabel to afternoon tea. Matt was always late home on a Thursday, she said, he played tennis after work. Christabel sat in Pippa’s red leather armchair. The floorboards had a watery sheen: a skylight had been let into the ceiling. Christabel’s soul expanded, pulled upwards by the light. She asked questions, ardent and clumsy, about writing books. Pippa said that she thought of each book as a problem that required solving. ‘It’s the way an engineer might think about a technical drawing or a mathematician might approach a proof. It’s strict, not dreamy.’

  A routine formed: Hank came to stay whenever Pippa and Matt went away, and every few weeks the phone would ring on a Thursday. ‘Only me,’ said Pippa. ‘I’m done for the day and I’ve just taken a cake out of the oven. Would you like to come around?’

  Matt and Pippa’s semi had an upstairs extension that served as their bedroom. Their spare room, which corresponded to Christabel and Bunty’s bedroom, doubled as Pippa’s study. ‘This is where the magic happens,’ said Pippa, holding her study door open with her arm. Christabel admired the messy desk with its ergonomic chair, the photos and postcards pinned to a corkboard, the day bed covered with a slatey-blue throw. There was a jug of lilies by the window—they made sharp shadows in an oblong of light on the floor. The books from which Pippa was currently drawing inspiration were grouped between two bookends. ‘My touchstones,’ s
aid Pippa, running a finger along their spines like someone checking for dust.

  At home, walking down the passage, Christabel ran an imitative hand along the wall. She felt tender towards it: it was the wall that attached her to Pippa. On the other side of those bricks and plaster lay a different world: one where there was nothing remarkable about polished wood, little tangy lemon tarts, and flowers making a sunset in a vase. She had made the tarts herself, said Pippa. ‘Pastry isn’t difficult really but it’s an art. You have a cool, quick hand or you haven’t. It can’t be taught.’

  Whenever she thought of her afternoons with Pippa, Christabel saw a scene in a paperweight: something perfect, sealed-off, round.

  The local library didn’t stock Pippa’s novels but ordered them in for Christabel from a different branch. Christabel read both books straight through. She had no opinion about them as literature; they were miracles worked by someone she knew. Until then, her imagination had been stirred by words rather than by writers. Writers were dead or distant: haloed in unreality. A sense of this found its way into how she thought about Pippa. Anything might happen between them. It was unnerving and thrilling. Christabel recalled their first meeting, the moment of panicky suspension. She had misunderstood its nature, she decided: now she saw it as the necessarily precarious moment before a far-reaching change.

  Pippa needed a name for a character in the novel she was planning. ‘It has to be something ordinary,’ she explained. ‘Nothing fancy-schmancy but not too far the other way either. It’s just not possible to create sympathy for someone called Marlene—or any -een, really.’ Louise was perfect, and so was Cathy, but Pippa had already used both. She had friends called Mandy and Liz and Tina, so they were all out. ‘All I can think of is Carly, but that’s a bit close to Cathy.’

  ‘Helen?’ suggested Christabel after some thought.

  ‘Helen! That’s total genius!’

  It was one of those winter afternoons, lamplit at four, which encourage confessions, the windy cold kept at bay with an unflued gas heater that produced drowsiness and unbuttoned ease. The one drawback to tea at Pippa’s was the tea itself. Pippa drank only coffee, which caused Christabel’s heart to race, so the first time Christabel visited, Pippa had dug around in her pantry and found a packet of citrus-flavoured rooibos left by a house guest. It tasted of nothing, but Christabel had politely praised it, so now Pippa bought it just for her. Christabel was getting rid of it with quick, birdlike sips when Pippa, stroking a cushion, said, ‘It’s lovely having a friend who’s a reader. Matt isn’t, not really.’ Then she told a long story about a bookshop where the sales assistant had failed to recognise her. ‘I paid with Visa, so she saw my name, but she obviously didn’t know I’m a writer. I don’t expect to be mobbed in the street or anything, but this was someone who works in a bookshop. It’s a little wounding—you know?’ Her voice was charged; Hank, who had been making the noises that meant he was dreaming of barking, lifted his head. Christabel saw a Pippa stripped of the hard lacquer of glamour. Oddly, it was she, Christabel, who felt exposed.

  When Christabel was about to leave, Pippa said, ‘Hang on! I still haven’t paid you for Hank’s lead.’ Hank had been staying at Christabel’s when the clip on his lead broke and she had to buy him a new one. Pippa unzipped her wallet and produced a fifty-dollar note.

  ‘It only cost thirty.’

  ‘I don’t have anything smaller. You know ATMs. Don’t worry about it, lovey. You can give me the change whenever.’

  Christabel said that she would return with it at once; to her, twenty dollars was a significant sum. ‘OK, I’ll go with you then,’ said Pippa. ‘I don’t want you to have to come out again in this weather.’ At this proof of Pippa’s concern for her wellbeing, a lit candelabra branched in Christabel’s chest.

  An ad break was leaking under the door of the soft room when they entered the house. A buttery voice said, ‘At Planet Travel we specialise in unique tourism experiences.’ Instead of continuing down the passage to wait for Christabel in the kitchen, Pippa followed her into the bedroom. Ignoring the upright chair, she plonked down on Bunty’s bed. Beds are not for sitting on! Christabel couldn’t decide if the casual contravention of what she had taken for a universal and eternal law was exhilarating or upsetting or both.

  Pippa’s face was alive from the wind and something else uncontrollable. ‘Who has the wardrobe?’ she asked. ‘Bunty or you?’

  ‘Bunty has a couple of coats in the hanging part.’

  ‘So where does she keep the rest of her stuff?’

  ‘In the chest of drawers. And she has some things in the cupboards in the other room.’

  One of Bunty’s undergarments—vast, pig-coloured—lay on the chest. It whispered of old, stewy, female life. The candelabra had been extinguished as soon as Pippa entered the room. Now a lumpy object that grew larger with each question was making its presence known inside Christabel. On Pippa’s side of the wall, their conversation had unrolled in the intimate glimmer of strategically placed lamps. Here, the overhead light was sinister and flat. The unheated room smelled of used pillows. Reproach was a faint blue aura rising from the mismatched beds, the dressing-gowns hanging behind the door, the neglected chair. A thought—a realisation—came forward fast but swerved and faded. Christabel stood with her face and breasts in the wardrobe. She took notes from her purse and handed them over. Shouts of television laughter followed Pippa out of the house.

  Pippa and Matt were lunching with friends at the table set up under their grape vine. Determined red tentacles from the vine curled over the fence, and voices, too, found their way into Christabel and Bunty’s yard. Washing up, with the window open, Christabel heard Pippa say, ‘I can’t stand that kind of competitiveness.’

  Bunty came into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and took out a beer. ‘Have you seen the…thing?’ she asked, glancing around.

  ‘A glass?’ asked Christabel, wishing that Bunty would go away. ‘The thing,’ said Bunty, clattering drawers.

  A chair scraped on the pavers next door. At last, Bunty took her beer outside.

  A man said, ‘So is it true that George has come out? I heard he’s living with this guy called Tran.’

  People started laughing. ‘That one’s been doing the rounds for a while,’ said Pippa. ‘George used to have this housemate called Fran. She moved out ages ago, but I’m guessing that’s how the rumour got started. Half of Australia has him down as a rice queen now.’

  ‘It’s his own fault,’ said the man. ‘He won’t give personal interviews, he’s not on social media. People fill in the blanks.’

  ‘Oh, look, I agree,’ said Pippa. ‘He told me his agent said he should take control of his brand. She was trying to get him to sign up for Twitter. You know what he told her? “Twitter’s all about drawing attention to yourself while pretending to draw attention to something else.” Hey, Matt, we’re out of wine at this end.’

  Bunty came back into the kitchen. ‘The thing,’ she said, ‘like the thing we had at home.’ Her hands sketched a shape in the air.

  ‘Cushion?’

  Bunty went away up the passage, moving with weighty, serious grace. She returned almost at once: ‘Found it!’

  ‘Oh, your radio!’

  ‘We used to call it a wireless. It was much bigger. The lights inside were like a city at night. They were talking about those Aboriginal children this morning. The ones who were stolen from their mothers.’

  ‘Your beer’s outside,’ said Christabel, because Bunty had sat down. The table was scattered with gum leaves in muted, sensational colours: dim green and lilac, milky coffee splotched with chocolate, a faded red inlaid with grey.

  ‘My child was stolen,’ said Bunty. Her radio was on the table and she was holding it with both hands. ‘I signed a paper. But I was barely sixteen. It was stealing, really.’

  A woman cried, ‘Pippa, these quails are a-MA-zing!’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Christabel.

  Then she
did.

  ‘The nuns at my old school up-country arranged everything,’ went on Bunty. ‘They were very kind. It made me long to run away. Afterwards, it was decided that it would be best if I went abroad. The nuns took care of that, too. There was a branch of the order in Hong Kong.’

  Questions crashed around Christabel’s mind. Was it a girl or a boy? Who was the father? Did he know about the baby?

  ‘For a long time I used to tell myself stories about her. She was living with my mother in a house with nine windows. My mother was plaiting her hair.’

  Christabel heard herself say, ‘I’m sure a loving family was found.’ It came out sounding as if her mouth was stuffed with socks.

  ‘There are no secrets left now,’ said Bunty. ‘Only mysteries.’ A quick, frightening smile passed over her face. She lifted her arms, examined them as if they were foreign objects and lowered them, saying, ‘What are you talking about?’

  Christabel looked closely at her. ‘Did you really have a baby?’

  ‘There’s no time for that. The car’s too long.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The car needs cutting. It’s too long.’

  ‘Whose car? What do you mean?’

  Bunty said, ‘Why are you talking about a car?’

  A bewildering notion wriggled to the front of Christabel’s brain: the impression that her friendship with Pippa had cooled. It wasn’t a sustained conviction but a bleary sensation that came and went. Months had passed without an invitation to tea, and Pippa no longer got in touch about minding Hank but sent Matt around to make the arrangements instead. The feeling of unease was compounded by something that had happened earlier that year when Bunty was in bed with a cold, and Christabel, too, felt germy and weak. The phone rang. Pippa said, ‘Look on your porch, lovey.’ A note stuck to the lidded dish said that it contained lamb cooked with saffron and carrots and fennel. Christabel almost cried. She rang Pippa back at once and thanked her. ‘You didn’t have to call, lovey,’ said Pippa. ‘Just enjoy and get strong.’