Not now, I kept thinking. Not. Now. Everything couldn’t come exploding out of me now. Not in that room. Not while surrounded by the people who had lost the dearest member of their family. I would not want to obligate them to comfort me at a time like this. This was about them. Hold it the fuck together, Rosie.
Assunta and I finally reached the front of the line. We stepped forward, and I looked down at my soulmate, lying in his coffin.
Tony was dressed in a chequered suit, his hands folded neatly on his chest, holding a rosary. But it didn’t look like Tony. It just looked like a version of him. Like a wax figure. I reached down to touch his hand. The hand that had held mine since the day he met me. The hand that had kept me safe and made me brave. The hand that I wasn’t ready to let go.
It was hard. Like plastic. My fingers recoiled and I took a sharp breath in. I had expected the man lying in this coffin to just be Tony, but asleep. I thought he’d look like the man I woke up next to after we fell asleep watching movies, usually a pizza box between us. This wasn’t sleeping Tony. This was something else. That wasn’t the hand I remembered.
I thought maybe his face would be different, so I reached over and stroked his cheek. Again, my hand jerked back. His face felt the same as his hand. Cold. Hard. Like a doll. Just like a plastic doll.
My brain was reeling. Every nerve ending in my body was on fire. This wasn’t my best friend. This wasn’t my soulmate. This was a plastic doll in a chequered suit.
The lid was finally about to burst off my glass jar. I wasn’t sure I could do anything to stop it. But before it could happen, Assunta reached into the coffin and placed the bracelet next to Tony’s hands. It immediately slipped off and down the side of his body, and we both looked at each other, eyes wide, as it rattled against the side of the coffin as it slid all . . . the way down . . . to the bottom. It was a quiet room, and that bracelet slipping off Tony’s lap and into the coffin abyss might as well have been as loud as a marching band. I pursed my lips together, trying not to laugh. So did Assunta. Then, before I realised we had been moved on, we were walking towards the back of the room. Assunta asked if I wanted to stay and pray. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I really need to leave.’
I turned around, took one last look at Tony lying there in his chequered suit, and I walked out the door.
‘Oh my god, the bracelet!’ Assunta said, once we were in the car. We laughed and laughed, and talked about how much Tony would love that her gift to him was probably now wedged under his bum for eternity. I didn’t tell her that I was grateful it had happened when it did, because I was certain that just a moment before, my legs had been about to give out.
Everybody was going back to Tony’s house for dinner after the viewing, but I asked Assunta just to drop me back at the hotel with my sisters. I felt like I hadn’t taken a breath since the moment I had looked at Tony’s face, and laughing about the bracelet was only a temporary fix. Something big was coming. I could feel it.
Jacob, who had driven up from Melbourne, arrived while I was at the viewing, so we all decided to go to dinner together. We found some Italian restaurant down the road, and set ourselves up at a table big enough to fit other friends from drama school who were on their way. I still felt like I hadn’t taken a breath. I still felt tingles all over my body. I started just nodding or shaking my head when Jacob or one of my sisters tried to talk to me, like just pushing words out was going to be the thing that would make me explode. I sat at the table, listening to Rhiannon try and order something that Mohammed would eat, watching the families around me laugh and chat and enjoy each other’s company. I sat while Jacob tried to explain to an Italian waiter that he didn’t eat gluten or dairy or sugar or meat or onion or garlic. I sat there, in that crowded restaurant, and all I could see was a plastic doll in a chequered suit.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said, jumping out of my chair.
‘Are you okay, Rosie?’ Jacob asked.
‘I just need the bathroom,’ I snapped. ‘I’m just . . . The bathroom!’
I practically sprinted away from the table. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air.
The bathroom was three levels up, in the dark, closed mini-mall that the restaurant was connected to. I stood on each escalator, trembling, knowing that whatever had been bubbling under the surface was coming out now. Right now. The bathroom was locked, so I walked through the dark mall and found a bench outside an empty store. I sat down, clung to the wooden slats beneath my fingers and stared at the ground.
It was here.
I let out a guttural scream like nothing I had ever heard before. I didn’t know I could make a sound like that. I howled in anguish and struggled to breathe through my heaving sobs. Every spark of energy that had built up in my body since the day I found out Tony had died was now exploding out of me all at once. The lid had been blown off the glass jar, and the pain it released was hitting me like a freight train.
I screamed, I cried, I howled, I wailed. I sat alone on that bench in the dark, finally realising that Tony was gone. If I reached out my hand, he wouldn’t be there to hold it. Tony was dead. And I was alone.
Once I managed to get control over my body again, I started to make my way back down to the restaurant. The visceral and the emotional had finally clashed, and now I was supposed to go eat some garlic bread. I must have been gone a while, because by the time I got back to our table, the meals had arrived along with our other friends from drama school. I saw how I must have looked in their horrified expressions. Everyone at the table knew I must have just finally broken down. No one said a word about it. We had a nice dinner and went back to the hotel, ready for the funeral in the morning.
Rhiannon woke me up by asking what I wanted for breakfast. ‘Just a toasted sandwich or something,’ I replied, assuming she was going to one of the cafés downstairs. When she came back with McDonald’s for everyone else and a toasted sandwich for me, I lost it.
‘What the fuck? Why didn’t I get McDonald’s?’
‘Because you said you wanted a toasted sandwich!’
‘But that’s only because I didn’t know McDonald’s was an option! Have you ever known anyone to pick a shitty toasted sandwich over a fucking hashbrown? WHY WOULDN’T I WANT A HASHBROWN? And why wouldn’t you specify that you’re going to McDonald’s when you ask me what I want for breakfast? Why would you ask me what I want without using the word “McDonald’s” at any point? I’m not a fucking mind reader. How the fuck was I supposed to know that you were going to McDonald’s, and that I had the entire McDonald’s breakfast menu to choose from, which meant I never would have chosen a SHITTY FUCKING TOASTED SANDWICH?’
I may not have been in the healthiest of emotional states.
I also yelled at Tayla for how long she was taking in the shower and at Rhiannon again for not letting me use the GHD at the exact moment I required it. I was slightly on edge.
There had to have been over a thousand people at the funeral. Tony is the only person I know whose funeral needed bouncers. The church was standing room only, and a large hall next door with a live video stream was also full. Bouncers and a live video stream. Tony would have loved it. People who didn’t fit into the church or hall spilled out onto the front steps, then the footpath, then the road.
I took my seat next to Assunta, a few rows from the front. Jacob somehow hustled himself and my sisters into the back of the church. Just like the viewing, it went by in a blur for me. I do remember that it was a beautiful, traditional, Catholic service. Flowers from all over the world filled the church. Tony’s presence reached far and wide.
Assunta had been worried that she’d break down while reading her half of the eulogy, so I stood with my arm around her, ready to take over. But she nailed every word. As I stepped to the lectern to deliver my half, I saw Jacob, always a head above everybody else in the room, standing at the back of the church. We locked eyes. He smiled. I was so glad he had hustled his way in.
After the service, we made our way
over to the cemetery. Hundreds of people gathered around Tony’s sky blue coffin, before three doves were released into the air. One dove stayed firmly on the ground, and kind of waddled slowly around in a circle. We called that the ‘Can’t Be Fucked Dove’. That would have been Tony’s favourite dove.
Everybody was handed a colourful balloon, and we all released them into the air simultaneously. I’ve never seen hundreds of balloons float into the sky like that before. They flock together like birds, moving wildly, but as a unit. (I’d probably never seen it because it’s illegal. Later, when speaking to Tony’s brother-in-law Bruno, he told me that the guy at the balloon shop had said that no more than twenty balloons can be released at any one time. ‘Mate,’ Bruno said, looking him dead in the eye and clearly not messing around, ‘we’re going to need three hundred.’)
As Tony’s coffin was lowered into the ground, his family gathered around the grave. I stepped back, but his nonna pulled me in close to her, and whispered to me, ‘He was your family, too.’
That his family found it within themselves to be so generous to me in their time of gut-wrenching sorrow . . . Well, that’s probably why Tony was so brilliant. He came from the best.
Later that day, there was a wake at Tony’s house. Grief filled the air, but Tony had been so spectacular, so full of life, that the kind of people he connected with were the kind who wanted to celebrate him just as much as mourn him. His drama-school friends mixed with his Italian aunties. His high-school friends swapped stories with his Melbourne friends. His cousins laughed with my sisters. My nephew played with his nephew (and they hated each other, which Tony would have found hilarious).
In the evening, we all sat at long tables in the marquee set up next to the house and ate pasta together, which had been lovingly prepared by the brilliant people in his family.
The night ended with all of us linking arms in a giant circle as we sang Tony’s favourite song, one all of us had heard him belt out at the top of his lungs at one time or another: ‘Part of Your World’ from The Little Mermaid. Tony’s mum sent my sisters and me back to the hotel with about three weeks’ worth of food, just in case we needed it before the morning. The best of the best.
The next day, I was driving back to my apartment in Melbourne, so I needed to say goodbye to my sisters and go with Jacob. We stopped off at Tony’s parents’ place to say goodbye, then we were on our way. As we pulled out of Griffith there was a storm in the distance, and the sky in front of us filled with countless rainbows, spreading across the vineyards as far as we could see. Neither of us acknowledged it. In fact, we didn’t talk the entire trip home. We just sang along to five different musical soundtracks, as well as the best of Christina Aguilera. Maybe it was because we were too emotionally exhausted, but that was all we needed to debrief.
As we pulled into Melbourne, I tried to take stock of the last couple of weeks. Okay, I thought. You had it. You had your breakdown. You cried on that bench and saw his coffin go into the ground. Now you have closure: you smashed the glass jar and let the pain out. Everything is going to be better after today.
The IV hooked up to my arm in the emergency room would beg to differ.
It’s Jaaaaack’s Suuuuuubwaaaaaay Tuuuuuuuuush.
I’ve never hoped that my mum would die.
(I have. Recently.)
A lot of people asked me about Rosie’s Chicken Soup after I first wrote about it. First, they wanted to know if my mum really was ‘that bad’, if I really had been forced to start making it so young. Yes. I started making Rosie’s Chicken Soup when I was about eight years old. It came about by necessity really, when my mother, an alcoholic with a pretty severe mood disorder, started to treat being at home as . . . an optional part of her routine.
My father had died not long before, sitting in his favourite chair with an empty bottle of pills beside him, and although they had been separated for years, his death broke something in my mum. Any hope I had that she would ‘fix herself’ and take care of me – that she would fix herself and be one of the mums who coaches netball and picks me up on time and doesn’t drink lots of wine from a box in the fridge – disappeared into the ground with my dad. At eight years old, I knew better than to hope. Hope just meant anxious disappointment. You might get a warm, fuzzy feeling when your mum tucks you in at night, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be gone in the morning, leaving you and your older sister to decide who’ll go to school and who’ll stay home and look after the baby.
The times at home alone were unsettling, and often a little scary, but mostly they were just exasperating. A lot of work goes into pretending you have a stable parenting situation. There are teachers to fool and neighbours to keep in the dark. But there are also logistical things that need to be handled, things that aren’t often covered in modern Dickensian tales of childhood woe and neglect, where sad children with dirty faces stare at you in black and white charity ads on TV. Uniforms need to be cleaned. Lunches need to be packed. Nappies need to be purchased. And, of course, meals need to be cooked.
That is how Rosie’s Chicken Soup came to be.
The other thing people always ask me about Rosie’s Chicken Soup is what the recipe is, which I find a little perplexing, because I assumed I had made that pretty clear: boil water in saucepan. Put pasta into saucepan (any pasta will do; I like spirals, but sometimes I go with spaghetti). Put powdered chicken stock into water. Wait for pasta to go soft. Pour entire contents into bowl. Eat.
That is the recipe, people. That’s it. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was an acquired taste. Also, I was eight, so give me a break.
I’m thirty now, and Rosie’s Chicken Soup has been my goto meal since those childhood nights spent alone. In every one of the countless homes and towns I lived in. In every foster home or family member I was placed with. At every one of the twenty-plus schools I ended up attending. Through drama school and university, serious partners and my first job as a writer, Rosie’s Chicken Soup was there. And even now, as a grown woman (arguably), living the professional life I always dreamed about, certainly able to afford to eat better than powdered chicken stock with water and pasta, I still come back to Rosie’s Chicken Soup. It’s my comfort food. It reminds me of my childhood. It’s my version of homely nostalgia.
Then my mum saw me make it, and she was horrified.
‘What on EARTH is that?’ she screamed recently, looking into the gluggy, chicken flavoured abyss that was my saucepan on the stove.
My mum is sober. She is also judging my most prized (and only) culinary offering. But she is sober. And she has been since July 2016, which is by far the longest period in my life I’ve ever known her this way.
After years of rehabs and programs and promises and failures, my sisters and I had mostly given up. I was permanently removed from her care when I was fourteen, and I’ve had rules in place since then: don’t answer her calls after 5pm. Only visit her during the day. Don’t get your hopes up.
In early 2016, those rules were easy to follow. It was fairly certain she was going to die; she had been told if she kept going like she had been, it was inevitable. She hadn’t left the house for more than a few hours in years. As far as I could tell, her days involved waking up, drinking, sleeping a little, drinking, sleeping a little more, drinking, repeat. At what I was sure was the end, she couldn’t keep any food down. Her stomach and ankles were grotesquely swollen, while the rest of her body was freakishly thin. Her skin was grey and her eyes were . . . lifeless. I found her in bed one day, barely able to move, vomit on the floor next to her and urine through her sheets. She couldn’t walk on her own, so I showered her and helped her dress. To me, that day was it: my mother was gone. The sooner she actually died, I thought, the better. She would at least be at peace. As long as she was half-alive like this, we were all in purgatory. And I was done waiting.
And then, maybe because she was closer to the end than she’d ever been before, or maybe there was just a cliff-hanger on TV that she really wanted to see through,
she decided to turn around and come back.
Just like that, my mum came back.
She was hospitalised for six weeks, detoxing, recovering and slowly coming out of the fog she’s been in since I was a child. Then one day, like something out of every dream I’ve been having since I was five years old, she stepped out of that hospital in July last year and hasn’t had a drink since.
She moved in with me a few months later, and since then, I’ve been watching her rediscover the world. She’s gone from needing me to walk with her to the local shops, to catching the bus into the city by herself because she saw online that ‘Country Road is having a sale’. She has a Fitbit and an iPad. She loves podcasts and is obsessed with My Kitchen Rules.
And it’s all just been so . . . bizarre to me. I’m getting to know a person who I remember only fuzzy snippets of. I’m seeing where I get my humour, silliness and charisma. I want to kill her when I have to explain how to forward an email, eleven times, before she gets it. It infuriates me when she tells me just as I’m leaving the house that what I’m wearing doesn’t suit me. And I will actually lose it next time she comes and opens my curtains if I’m still asleep at 10am.
At thirty years old, I have finally found myself one half of a proper mother–daughter relationship.
And yet. And yet. There’s that ‘hope’ thing eating away at me. I want to let this newfound reality envelop me like the warm hugs I always craved. I want to lose myself in it so, so much. But I have been training myself since I was eight years old not to hope. Hope is dangerous. Hope just leads to anxious disappointment. A warm hug will always turn cold.
Won’t it?
When I explained to my mum that what she was seeing on the stovetop was Rosie’s Chicken Soup, she was horrified. Not because of the history that had gone into me teaching myself to make it, but because the actual soup itself does look kind of horrifying. She immediately decided to show me how it should be done. That night, while I watched TV in my room, I could hear her tinkering away in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, putting (to my complete shock) an entire chicken into a large pot that I didn’t even know I owned. She spent hours cooking it, seasoning it, letting it simmer, getting it just right. Then she called me to the kitchen.
Every Lie I've Ever Told Page 16