by Kim Scott
She told me that when I grew up I should work in a bank.
He Restoreth My Soul
One time I offered to sit for her.
‘I can’t paint you,’ my Aunty Alien says to me all exasperated, ‘you have no soul.’ She would tell me that hell was like the inside of a very hot oven. We would sit by her electric heater sipping on shandies, leafing through her gigantic books of the paintings of Goya and Bosch.
‘You were an accident,’ my Great Aunty Alien would say when she was drunk enough to say whatever came to mind. ‘Your parents never even wanted you to be born. That is why you were never baptised.’
My Great Aunty Alien would tell me that I would go to hell because I had not been baptised. ‘Just think about that,’ she would say and I did think about it. I still think about it sometimes. She just had this power over people – she would tell them an Unpleasant Truth when they were at their most vulnerable and delight at the reaction she had provoked. She liked to find that sweet spot in your soul, if you had a soul.
Sometimes I would look into a mirror just to make sure I could be seen.
A Praying Mantis
When I was very young I would think about hell all the time and I would pray silently before meals. I really do believe it helped me back then, the praying.
I would burn insects with my magnifying glass in the garden. I would stick out my tongue and concentrate the entire energy of the sun into one little white-hot dot.
It was okay because insects did not have souls.
Shandy
Every three months I would mow my Great Aunty Alien’s garden and she would pay me ten dollars. She would open her purse and say, ‘Now watch the moths fly out of here.’
I would have been about twelve. I would drink a shandy with her in the full sun of the afternoon and she would swallow some tablets from the doctor and tell me how she was special and how I was special because we shared the same artistic bloodline. She might have said autistic – it was hard to hear anything under the drone of the mosquitoes, like tiny fighter jets, honing in on any weakness or exposed skin.
She liked to call me a one-pot screamer but then always made sure I drank more than one.
We would sit on her back verandah as the sun went down and she would talk about all the changes in the town. She would do all the talking, slapping at mosquitoes. Clapping with both hands suddenly right in front of her face as she was talking, sometimes clapping in front of my face at an imaginary mosquito when my attention waned.
All of the Headless Bodies Lined Up in a Row
I remember my teacher in primary school being concerned because my drawings of people did not have heads and my teacher spoke to my father about this. I heard them talking about it in another room.
‘Well, I just don’t see the problem,’ said my father. ‘If he doesn’t want to draw heads he doesn’t have to.’
My father was a busy man back then – he had my real mother and my first stepmother and my second stepmother to think about. He just didn’t have time for this kind of bullshit even if they were well-meaning nincompoops.
The Eulogy
When my Great Aunty Alien was a teenager she lived with the nuns from time to time but it was always time to leave. She loved bawdy jokes and bawdy talk and double meanings. She had a way of bringing the conversation back to sex and nudity. She tried to be a nun, she gave it a pretty good go but they did not want her. They said that she did not have the right sort of brain to be a nun.
‘She may have been a lesbian,’ says my Great Uncle Oren.
She got into trouble often as an adult. She was a troubled little girl and then a troubled woman and then a troubled old lady. She lived with about a million stray cats and a bunch of mouldy paintings. I only knew her when she was an old lady and trouble was her middle name by then. She would be stunned at the way people shunned her. She was often wounded, often in need of assistance. She was her own worst enemy. She was good at making trouble for herself and other people. Even after she was dead she made trouble for people. It was all spelled out in her will.
Her lawyer organised the funeral and he made sure her will was enforced to the letter of the law. Her will was absolute. It was iron-clad. Even if you were related to my Great Aunty Alien and meant her well, it was no good. It was like the inside of her Sunbeam Mixmaster. You would be lifted up by the whirlwind, churned up within the maelstrom, so committed she was to destroying all those that meant her harm.
Family Feud
She liked me well enough when I was a troubled moody child but turned on me when I began my first sculpture series in my late teens. She did not like my girlfriend, who was a single mother. My Great Aunty Alien called her a prostitute to her face, called her son a bastard. We were all traumatised by it. We never spoke to her again.
I shouldn’t have been so hard on her. She called everybody a prostitute, she called everybody a bastard. Everybody she had ever met was either a homosexual or a prostitute or a lesbian or a bastard.
My sculptures did not have heads and she lampooned me so viciously that I refused to participate in Christmas and Easter celebrations in order to avoid her. I did not see my family for many years.
Hypocrites
And so the mourners are pretty thin on the grounds of the church, most of them wondering why they have come at all. Some of us had just never managed to forget what she had said and what she had done.
A few relatives had sent messages – mostly they thought it would be hypocritical to attend. Some of these people had donated money to the cat shelter elected by the lawyer and a few people had just sent flowers instead of donating money to the cat shelter, just to deviate from her will in any way they still could.
Tablets from the Doctor
I make jokes about my Great Aunty Alien but I loved her.
‘I am just like her,’ I tell my father and my cousin and her sister that is still alive. ‘The only difference between me and her is four gin and tonics and some prescription medicine from the doctor.’
I often feel like I am floating in space and disconnected from every living soul on earth. I can hardly breathe sometimes I have created such a vacuum.
Thy Rod and Thy Staff They Comfort Me
All of the facts I know about God and hell I learnt from my Aunty Alien when I was a small troubled child.
A couple of my older relatives had been altar boys in the Catholic Church. Something terrible had happened but they won’t talk about it now. They still mouth the words though not very loud and when the priest asks us to jump these old people jump up or get down on their knees or murmur back very quietly. There are only three members of my family that actually know what to do and say in response to all of these voodoo incantations and mumbo-jumbo.
‘Come on,’ says my father, ‘say it with me. I feel like an idiot saying it by myself. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’
‘No no no,’ I say, ‘the Lord is not my shepherd.’ I might have said it too loud. ‘I am the shepherd.’ It just comes out – I am just bedazzled by the architecture and the music from the organ and the overpowering stench of the frankincense.
Everybody turns around and looks at us.
‘Jesus,’ says my father.
And a Hole Opened Up in the Earth
We are standing around my Great Aunty Alien’s grave and the priest is saying something about how she may have irritated people sometimes but that it was all part of God’s plan and I am smiling at that horseshit.
I cannot believe that God’s plan included her daily rollercoaster ride of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. She didn’t even know what she was saying half the time. Even God would have had a lot of trouble reading her thoughts with any clarity because they were always so addled and scrambled and discombobulated. I would like to know the details of God’s plan. It is a ridiculous notion. I don’t know what to thi
nk so I don’t think anything. I am only aware of a creeping numbness and the air around me being so crisp and clean. There is silence because the priest has lost his place. He is staring down intensely with a furrowed brow. The priest has the ruddy cheeks of somebody that grew up on a farm. He is not a people person. He is uncomfortable in his clothes – they do not fit him.
There is a gentle rain falling, with occasional rays from the sun shining through the clouds. It is spectacular, like a landscape painting my Great Aunty Alien could have painted. And then I see a tiny flying saucer slowly descending through a hole that has opened in the clouds, humming like a giant mosquito, hovering above this hole in the AstroTurf and emitting a ray – silently teleporting my Great Aunty Alien’s soul to that little planet she was born on all those years ago. Then I think of all of her millions of cats and their souls and teleport them to the same planet so that they can all sleep in the same bed.
I continue to ignore everything the priest is saying. I imagine that her electric blanket is turned up very high.
‘She wasn’t good with people but she was kind to animals,’ I am saying to myself with my eyes closed. ‘She found all of those cats and rescued them from their pathetic situations. Um,’ I say, ‘she was a friend to the birds, she fed the birds a lot of food.’ I try to think of other nice things but cannot think of anything.
‘She was good at painting pictures,’ I think. ‘She was good at painting pictures of eyes.’
When I open my eyes everybody is walking towards the cars in the parking lot.
The Wake
She would write people into her will and then write them out almost as quickly. She used her will as a weapon to get people to do things they did not want to do. She always overestimated the value of her paintings. One of her best paintings, I think, is a portrait of John Howard wearing a wifebeater and a big, floppy lady’s hat. She told me that she went out on a date with John Howard, that he sat for her for two weeks and it was his idea to take his shirt off and put on one of the hats she had worn to the Melbourne Cup in the late 1970s. ‘It just happened,’ my Great Aunty Alien said to me, suggesting that much more might have happened. I like to imagine my Great Aunty Alien and John Howard in her front room drinking wine and sharing prescription medicine in the nude.
My relatives agree that there is very little truth in her association with John Howard. She might have met John Howard once at a public function and painted the portrait from photos that she cut out of the newspaper.
She would promise The John Howard to me when she was drunk but would then deny any knowledge of promising me The John Howard when she was sober again. I was never sure if she was really drunk or really clever. I would always mention The John Howard that belonged to me when I saw her and when I stopped seeing her I would tell people to tell her on my behalf.
‘Tell her The John Howard is mine,’ I would say.
At last I had the power to upset her, at last I had found that sweet spot in her soul.
A Squabble
Now she is dead I do not even want that stupid portrait of John Howard. It has no value now. And anyway, she had already promised The John Howard to a gallery and a library and a town hall. She knew it was her best painting and she never actually intended to give it to anybody.
She wanted us to fight over it.
Still Laughing
‘She made sure her will was executed by her lawyer to the letter,’ says my Great Uncle Oren. ‘Why did she make it so hard for people to say anything at her funeral? Because she was afraid of what people might say, that’s why. She was afraid people would tell the truth about her. She didn’t want a wake for herself but we had to endure all of the God-awful wakes she organised for everybody else. She wasn’t even Irish, not really. She was Cornish and Swiss-Italian as much as she was Irish.’
One of the cousins tells a story about another wake at a distant-relative’s house in Glen Waverley and my Great Aunty Alien was much drunker than normal, tearing her paintings from the walls and dragging them out to her car. They grabbed her keys so she could not drive and she lay down on the ground and kicked and screamed and cried like a little baby. She was already an old lady then and that was over thirty years ago now. I cannot imagine how old she was when she died.
Nobody knows how old she really was. She may have been a vampire. She may still come back as a zombie or a poltergeist. She did not have a birth certificate – she didn’t need one. Everyone around here knew her name and who she was.
It was a different world back then.
The Chemist
She had a succession of gardeners and home carers and health workers visiting her and she favoured the ones that would home-deliver alcohol and takeaway food and pick up her bulk prescription medicine from the chemist. She rewarded the ones that respected her painting time. Painting pictures was the only thing she really cared about.
The Gardener, I am told, had a sexual arrangement with her and managed to embezzle a good deal of her savings before relatives and the police finally descended. She painted pictures of The Gardener. She gave The Gardener one of the paintings called The Gardener and kept talking about how good this painting was and how much it would be worth.
Later, when she was dying, she tried to get The Gardener to visit her again. She had some money tucked away but The Gardener was too frightened of the police and my other relatives. The Gardener was probably also a little frightened of my Great Aunty Alien.
Money meant nothing to her as she still hoarded all her paintings she had painted worth millions of dollars and she could easily just paint more paintings and sell them for many more millions if she really had to.
And all the while, well-meaning relatives paid her bills and delivered food to her. It was crazy. It was total fucking lunacy.
An Unscheduled Eulogy
‘If you didn’t know her already you wouldn’t go out of your way to meet her,’ I hear one of my cousins say. I don’t even know his name but I pretend that I do.
‘Good to see you again,’ I say to him, shaking his hand and pulling him towards me, turning it into a hug.
‘Colin,’ he says.
‘I remember,’ I say. I don’t remember anyone’s name.
‘She did it to herself,’ says a nephew that I have met once or twice.
‘She was a cow,’ says my Great Uncle Oren. ‘She tried to be a nun but the nuns did not want her because she wanted to fuck them.’
‘She called my son a bastard,’ says my other cousin.
‘She called me a bastard and a poofta,’ says an uncle, on my mother’s side I think.
‘I was molested by my teacher when I was fifteen and she called me a slut,’ says my Aunt Peg.
‘She was nothing if not consistent,’ says my mother’s second husband. And everybody looks at him because he is not a blood relation and has no right to say anything. I do not even think that she would have even remembered him. She would have called him a homosexual or a paedophile or an alcoholic – or she would have cooked up some special tailor-made insult for him right there on the spot.
I keep my thoughts to myself. I try not to think anything at all.
‘She had mosquitoes on her back verandah as big as Black Orpingtons,’ says my Great Uncle Oren. ‘She always told me how proud she was of you,’ he says, ‘she always said that you were a great artist. That you and her were like two peas in a pod.’
‘She was never boring,’ I say.
‘She always had the last laugh,’ says my Aunt Peg.
‘At least she was consistent,’ I say to everybody when I am drunk.
Orange Sorbet
Now I hear somebody has broken into her house and vandalised all of her beautiful paintings. All of the eyes are crossed out. Crude and violent red slashes with red house paint.
‘It’s more of an orange sorbet,’ observes my third s
tepmother, who had gone there with my father to inspect the damage. They do not go into her bedroom. The bedroom is padlocked and off limits to everyone except the lawyer and The Gardener.
‘There must be about a million dead cats and about a million dollars worth of portraits and landscapes locked up in her house,’ I say.
More Gossip
My Great Uncle Oren says that he heard it was The Gardener who had crossed out the eyes on her paintings on her instructions. The lawyer is protecting him. Nobody can get at him.
‘She must have had something on The Gardener,’ he says. ‘Why else would he have risked his life to complete these tasks for her?’
‘Somebody needs to ask that lawyer about it,’ says my Aunt Peg. I don’t know how old my Aunt Peg is but she still looks good. I would totally fuck her if I was not related to her.
The Right Stuff
There had been an open-casket viewing of my Great Aunty Alien’s body a few days before. The work was already paid for and done by some sort of artist. The lawyer really shopped around. She had been crafted to look like a human again. There was enough money to make her look like Kate Bush. I don’t think anyone except The Gardener went to see her body after it had all been fixed up. I heard he went to see her quite a few times. Not even the lawyer went to see her all laid out in her finery and he was being paid to do things like that.