The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  In the bookshop, a draughty, makeshift affair at one end of the pier, a long, long line of readers was waiting for Ryan. Waves of merriment rolled from his signing table. Christabel joined the much shorter queue that had formed in front of George.

  A very tall redhead was moving down this line. When she reached Christabel she snapped, ‘Please have your book open at the title page.’

  ‘My book?’

  ‘Well—George’s book, obviously. All of them, if you’d like him to sign more than one.’

  ‘Can I just speak to him?’

  The redhead looked at her. It was the kind of look an ocean liner casts at a paper boat.

  Christabel left the queue. ‘Her scarves were so aggressive!’ she heard, as she passed Marta and her fan club of one. ‘Hostile interruption…psychological assault…’

  ‘Make representations…embassy,’ soothed the goatee man. ‘Magnificent reading in the face of…such reserves of strength…’

  George Meshaw’s book cost thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars! Returning with it, Christabel saw Marta and her courtier leaving together. ‘Private reading’ and ‘diplomatic channels’ hovered in their wake. Ryan’s fans were departing too, clutching their books, half dead from laughing. His queue still reached to the door.

  Christabel found herself standing in front of George.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, looking her in the stomach. His cushiony fingers turned a pen that had leaked on to some of them.

  ‘You won’t remember me,’ began Christabel. ‘But Pippa Reynolds used to be my neighbour in St Peters.’

  George looked up. His outsized glasses made it seem as if dark circles had been stamped around his eyes. ‘Oh, hi,’ he said. ‘Hi.’

  Christabel took The Kitchen Diaries from her bag. ‘I wanted to ask you—’ But it was easier to hand Pippa’s book to George. ‘Where the bookmark is. I’ve underlined it.’

  George Meshaw scanned the page. ‘A closet lesbian with a mannish face,’ he murmured.

  ‘I didn’t take it in when I first read it. Then it upset me so much.’

  ‘Yes. A gross stereotype.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ said Christabel.

  George looked up again. ‘I see,’ he said. He closed the novel and placed it on the table.

  ‘If it were true, we wouldn’t have been ashamed of it. But we shared a house, and now Bunty’s gone. I mean she’s no longer alive. Why would Pippa write something like that?’

  ‘You must ask her.’

  ‘She said I was confusing life with fiction. She said, “I know you’re not a lesbian. Right there’s the proof that Eileen isn’t you.” But there are all kinds of things later on about this Eileen, silly things she says, even the “dirt-brown splashback” in her kitchen…Pippa’s describing me.’ Christabel stopped. She tried again. ‘How could someone reading this book know what is and isn’t true? It’s Pippa who’s mixing up fiction and life.’

  After a moment, George Meshaw said, ‘How can I help you?’

  Christabel had no idea. She couldn’t remember why she had come, only what it had cost. She thought about saying something like, Tell me how to live without illusions. Pippa’s book stared up from the table. As plainly as if it had spoken, it told Christabel why she had sought out George: it was to punish Pippa by exposing her betrayal. Look at me lying here, said The Kitchen Diaries. I am the exact measure of the dimensions of your soul.

  It was appalling information. Christabel glanced left and right but couldn’t avoid the charge. Her eyes returned to Pippa’s novel, and she saw Eileen genie up from its pages. Eileen wafted about the room and spiralled out of the window. She was only a minor character on the margin of the lives that mattered, and it was impossible to feel sympathy for her: Pippa had seen to that. From the top of the harbour bridge, Eileen’s whining voice called to Christabel, ‘I am your other life. You are immortal!’

  George Meshaw was waiting for an answer. Christabel managed to say, ‘You called it “an unforgettable novel”.’ Her voice seemed to have to push past her teeth.

  ‘It is. In a way.’

  ‘I’m not hurrying you, George,’ said the redhead. ‘But that student journalist’s waiting to interview you in the green room. And I’ve got to collect Josh Kapoor and take him over to Channel Nine.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said George to Christabel.

  Christabel took the long way back to Circular Quay, past the water, carrying her face like a mask. Ferries glided meekly as if pulled on a string. The sun came out: what a dreadful old hack it was, routinely switching on that blinding charm. The harbour fizzed a slavish blue. Towers flashed their eyes, their logos blazed. The wasted day turned headachey and aureatic, the outlines of buildings, trees, lampposts flickering into a yellowish smudge. There were blooms of sweat in Christabel’s armpits. She struggled out of her jacket—it seemed to weigh more than she did. Folding it into her bag, she avoided the cairngorm’s accusatory eye. The bag dragged at her arm as she went up the stairs at the station. Her good black shoes preceded her, obedient, snub-nosed little animals.

  On the platform, tourists were photographing the view. The view was designed to drop you to your knees. That! thought Christabel and turned her back. She sat down between two people who were reading their phones and opened George Meshaw’s book. But she stared at the print blindly: she was writing to Pippa.

  ‘People say approvingly of someone, “He never pretends.” But pretence can be deliberate and life-giving. A long time ago I had a friend with whom I spent several evenings over the length of a winter and a spring. He had a wife, a daughter and two sons; the younger boy was ill, his father’s accent sharpened when he spoke of him. We told each other about the countries we had come from. He described a town by a lake, an old resort. I saw boulevards lined with palms, a yellow clock tower, an avenue of catalpas leading to a bandstand. The biggest hotel had a glassed-in veranda. That was where we would stay, he told me, we would eat ice cream on the veranda. Ice cream! It was a child’s vision of happiness. He had left when he was a boy and never returned. There had been a war. The town no longer existed—it had been destroyed or transformed. It was plain from the outset that we would never go there or anywhere else together. But he made me a gift of that town. In winter, there is snow on the palm trees. I can still find my way to the square by the station where the old men played dice.

  ‘I have a talent for pretence and, since our strengths easily grow unbalanced and tip over into faults, I fall readily into illusion. Have you ever noticed that we’re the same height? We’re straight up and down, both of us, and our faces are the same shape. These are only trivial resemblances, of course. But one day I saw Matt in the supermarket. I went up to him and touched his arm. He looked confused. I thought, He took me for Pippa! What madness—the truth was that for a moment, in an unfamiliar context, he couldn’t remember who I was. But there was no limit to my fusing of our lives. At best I might have conceded, He took me for her sister. You see how it was? Once when you were cutting up a chocolate babka you had baked, I willed the knife to slip. The cut wouldn’t be deep but it would bleed profusely. You would have to lie on the couch, and I would wrap my hanky around your finger; blood would seep through the cloth. I fetched a blanket and tucked it around you. One of your feet slipped out, and I sat with it on my lap, warming it in my hands. Oh yes, I treasured you and damaged you without hesitation. That’s how it was.’

  When her train came in, Christabel chose an upstairs seat and settled down to George’s novel. Stations passed slowly: Redfern, Erskineville. The train was crooning to itself as it eased out of Sydenham when Christabel looked out of the window. For a moment, the graffitied Victorian walls and billboards advertising mobile phone plans had escaped from a film; then she realised that she had missed her stop. It didn’t matter, she could double back at the next station. But when she got off at Marrickville, instead of going around to the other platform, she went out into Illawarra Road. She hadn’t been back there since Bunty died
.

  In the last months of her life, Bunty had stopped speaking English. She had discovered a language of her own: strings of sounds like water running over pebbles, like elusive, archaic songs, like an unmusical bird. This language welled up fluently in Bunty. Now and then, something that resembled an English word might stand out: ‘Murr-mmm-mmm-nnnnn-mlk-luhluh-luh…’

  ‘Milk?’ asked Christabel, although it seemed unlikely.

  ‘Glah-glah-umm-umm-mmm. Flaaay,’ said Bunty on a beseeching note. Her forehead glared with the effort. Christabel went to the kitchen and returned with a plastic beaker. She put it into Bunty’s hand. Bunty ignored it and went on talking. The sounds that came were lilting and tormented. They held stubs of meaning, trailed ghosts. Christabel thought, She’s trying to make words say things there aren’t any words for. Bunty stared at Christabel’s chin. The look in her eyes was both intense and inert, as if she were following an argument through invisible headphones. When Christabel took the beaker away, Bunty’s fingers still made the shape of it on the table. There was puréed apple on her sleeve—she wiped it on her mouth. She poured out more words that no one could understand.

  One afternoon, Christabel arrived at Waratah Lodge and encountered a tiny old man crossing the lobby. She was about to pass him when he put out his hand: it was copper-coloured with a bluish undertone. His eyes gave the game away: they had kept the sheen of raw liver.

  ‘How terrible!’ cried Mr Valente. ‘I see her—how terrible!’ He couldn’t keep from smiling. He made Christabel sit on one of the comfy chairs grouped next to a fire blanket and a framed photo of Princess Mary. He sat down, too, on the far side of a vase of synthetic anemones, his knees out wide. He had acquired a Padre Pio amulet and five grandchildren. Christabel was to examine a folder of photographs. ‘I bring them show her. But no good.’

  I bet you asked her questions, thought Christabel. I bet you said, ‘Do you remember?’ and felt smug when she didn’t. He was as transparent as the plastic pages he had dumped in her lap. ‘How terrible!’ he cried again, and she understood that he was wild with joy. The idiot really believed that in picking God over Bunty he had made the right choice. He placed his hand on his jubilant heart and announced that he hoped to grow old with humility: ‘I thanking God for many blessings.’

  I see that all your grandchildren are fat, said Christabel silently, turning the pages of his album. They’re as ugly as your wife and as stupid as you. On your way home, you will crash your car into a sewage works. Your descendants will fall out over your will—the quarrels will last longer than you have lived. A week after the funeral, no one will remember your face.

  Her words vanished into the red and blue swagger of the anemones. Another senseless smile cracked his cheeks. His bald patch shone like an unlucky coin. Increasingly he saw himself this way, at one remove, like a man in a mirror. Events had slowed and lost their edges. But throughout the years he had retained a clear impression of the woman in front of him: a skinny, fast-moving creature. He wanted a glass of thick red wine. He wanted to make a phone call. The other one’s laugh had always been the right shape. Not ten minutes earlier, he had knelt beside a sagging envelope of flesh, kissed the inside of her wrist and put her finger in his mouth. Her face was a collapsed meringue. A long time ago, she had pulled him down beside a box of tiles he kept hidden under the counter. They were old, handmade tiles from Naples, individually fired, with red flowers and green leaves, and he had never been able to part with them. His mouth was full of gold. All the notes in his wallet faced the same way. He was frightened all the time.

  In Bunty’s room, everything seemed as usual. Bunty was in her chair, talking, the words all muddle and slur. The visiting hairdresser had dyed her hair that week. It was cut to within an inch of her shoulders for easy maintenance and looked like tarred twine.

  Christabel kissed Bunty’s cheek, laid her jacket on the bed and looked around. She was checking for sinister traces of Mr Valente: holy medals, cakes that no one wanted to eat. The only flowers were the yellowing gardenias that she had stood in a glass on the weekend—he hadn’t brought Bunty so much as a wilting 7-Eleven gerbera, the cheapskate. Christabel opened the bedside drawers to check if he had stolen anything. The middle one yielded a tartan slipper. ‘I wonder who this belongs to,’ she said, looking inside it for a name.

  ‘Ger-ger-ger-ger…’

  ‘I’ve brought new batteries for your radio.’

  Bunty went on and on. Her noises could sound angry or imperious but today were merely heartbreaking. Christabel opened the back of the radio. She was easing out the old batteries when Bunty cried, ‘Olly Faithful!’ She beat her big fists on the arms of her chair.

  Christabel clutched the radio. She asked, ‘Do you want to sing?’ Then she saw what Bunty was staring at. In the dowdy tree outside the window sat a black-and-white bird. ‘Olly Faithful!’ shouted Bunty. The magpie flew away, and Bunty threw herself about in her chair.

  The phone call came while Christabel was getting out of bed the next morning. Sister Reena’s voice turned quavery towards the end. She said, ‘Bunty always smelled of orange blossom.’ What a ridiculous thing to say—Bunty had never worn perfume! The entire conversation filled Christabel with something like rage. She was the one who suffered from chronic ailments: a wavering heartbeat, undiagnosable, stabbing pains in her eyes, an arthritic hip. Every year, she coughed through spring. Bunty once said, ‘That’s a wolf’s cough.’ After that Christabel heard it every time, the howl in her chest. It was understood, at least by Christabel, that she would go first. Even at Waratah Lodge, Bunty had remained fit and strong. Her blood pressure baffled every doctor she had ever seen. Just a few months earlier, ‘She’s the type who goes on for years,’ Sister Reena had said, in the tone of one offering commiserations. So why talk now of a major cardiac event? Christabel went up the passage, then back to the kitchen where she walked twice around the table. The incompetent blue saint offered her his book: it was all he had to give. She saw that she had forgotten to hang up the phone.

  From Marrickville Station, Christabel set off on a familiar route. But when she reached the street that led to Waratah Lodge, she ignored it and walked on. Eventually, she came to a sports field; parkland and the river lay just beyond. There was also a toilet block: as soon as she spotted it, Christabel needed to go. There was paper! There was liquid soap! Like drinkable water from taps, clean public lavatories were one of the blessings of Australia. A metal bin stood near the door—Christabel needed that, too. She had read enough of George Meshaw’s book to know that it concerned itself with the brutal and inadequate mechanism of the world. As if that were any kind of news! Why had she never told Bunty, You are everything: the lucky accident, the holy jacaranda, the luminous sauce? One morning, shortly before she went into Waratah Lodge, Bunty had sat up in bed saying, ‘I had such a round dream. It was full of hope.’ Christabel dropped George’s novel into the bin and followed it with Pippa’s. A lit fuse sparkled the length of her spine. She was a woman on a screen, renouncing love or claiming death with one stark, superb gesture. How wonderfully light her bag felt now!

  She strolled past a playground where a tiny boy was climbing a slide. A woman and a baby were marvelling at his earnest exertions. Christabel found herself wishing that she and Bunty had loved each other as Pippa believed: fully, giving love its whole importance. But what is not done is not done. She came to a bench and sat down. If her hair were long, she would have shaken it out. She scrunched her eyes at the sun bursting in the armpit of a tree.

  One day, it must have been not long after Bunty stopped working, she had a big win on a horse. She said, ‘I’ve decided we should go to Romania.’

  ‘Romania!’ Christabel thought of an objection at once. ‘We don’t speak Romanian.’

  ‘We didn’t speak Greek or Indonesian or Turkish either. Anyway, they speak French as well in Romania.’

  ‘But we don’t.’

  ‘I do. The nuns taught me when I was a little girl
. L’oiseau,’ said Bunty. ‘La plume.’

  And so they went. They visited fortresses and castles and monasteries, and a boat carried them down the Danube to a port. They caught trains. They looked at a modern pyramid, fronted by stiff trees, in which tyrants had lived—when they turned their backs on it, Christabel and Bunty were sure that someone was watching them from a window. They stayed in a converted palace, with seventeenth-century mosaics in their bathroom, and slept on straw mattresses in a dubious country inn. What was most astonishing of all was that the only clothes Bunty had brought with her were three dresses Christabel had never seen. There was a blue one, and a stripey pink cotton, and a sea-green gown with elbow-length sleeves—that one came out every evening. ‘It belonged to my mother,’ said Bunty. Open-mouthed, Christabel saw that in Romania Bunty was as resplendent as a ship: her rich décolletage, her crown of jet hair. She had a waist. She wore a red velvet ribbon around her neck like an aristocrat who had survived a revolution. Waiters looked through Christabel, dressed for sensible tourism, and led Bunty to the best table. They inclined their heads. They advised her to order river fish or smoky meatball soup, and everything that Bunty and Christabel ate on that holiday, even in the slab-built industrial town where a breakdown obliged them to linger, absolutely everything tasted delicious.

  A month passed in a brilliant blur. Here and there a picture stood out: impassioned students with banners, and a mountain with a snowy spine, and a pack of stray dogs in a dusty park. What remained jewel-clear from start to finish was a day near the end of their stay. At breakfast, over pancakes filled with jam, Bunty said, ‘Let’s go for a long walk in the country.’

  She had consulted a waiter, and knew which bus to take and where to get off. The bus driver had a zip-up jacket and black hair combed in a style that Hitler had made unfashionable. He drove as if slicing through enemy lines. First factories, then fields fell beside the windows. All the way he watched Bunty and Christabel in his mirror, but wouldn’t meet their eyes as they climbed off the bus.