‘You can fuck off,’ Tony mumbles, slurring, and he’s looking past all of them, to Mandy. The smell of the rum, his voice sticky with it.
Stephen’s voice goes lower still, he whispers, ‘Stay calm, mate,’ he is praying it, ‘please mate, please mate,’ but the shotgun stays up and they are all suspended in the silent exploding of their heartbeats and breath. The only sound is their father breathing aloud in the unconscious air, and now of Tony beginning to cry, in liquid, nasal sobs. Then he starts to mutter, staring at Mandy, and the open mouth of the gun moves through the white air, a weathervane slowing to stop at her, and his voice is crackled with its own disbelief, sobbing out to her, ‘I . . . am not . . . vermin.’
Mandy hears her own cool clear voice.
‘Tony.’
She is surprised at how easily she has slipped from Chris’s grip and propelled herself past the others. They are making noises but she cannot hear them, she has straightened her arms behind her to shed them and now the weathervane follows her as she steps out of her family and into the open centre of the room, into the last seconds of her life.
She says, ‘I know why we’re the same.’ She has never felt so calm. ‘I know what you meant. I understand now.’
And as she speaks the crisp, dark openings of the shotgun barrels are opening up to her, and she stares into the blooming shadows and thinks, okay. She has left her life behind, and she and Tony are together again in the suspended dark space, the fire burning towards them. She stares into it. I’m ready.
And Tony starts to move, a violent shaking takes his body and he’s sobbing out incomprehensible things, the snot running down into his mouth, and the rhythm of his shouted words is the rhythm of his body as he lifts his other hand to steady the shotgun’s aim at her. All she can see is that dark approaching centre, and she hears her sister inhaling great breaths, hears running and shouting coming from far away down the corridor but it is like listening to the soft beat of bird wings. Tony steps towards her with one swoop and sound, and then she shouts out ‘NO!’ and there is a single unstoppable crack.
He has shot his own throat and face away.
The screaming breaks open the sealed moment then, as the bright bloody mess of him falls to the floor. One nurse stands screaming and screaming with her two hands clamped over her mouth, and another hurls herself to Tony on the floor, pulling sheets with her, and Chris is holding Mandy rigid by the arms and Stephen is open-mouthed and crying with a hacking sound, and Cathy and Margaret are cleaved to each other heaving, and everywhere there are people running in their rubber shoes and shouting.
But Mandy pulls free once again to kneel with the nurses at the side of Tony there on the floor in the blood and the flailing, as they tear his clothes away and shout and hold the drenched sheets to his shattered head.
She kneels, all sound gone quiet in her head, paying attention to the petals of his flesh torn open, the black and red and charcoal mess of him, and in the mess she finds an eye, entire and watchful, and people are screaming and shoving and someone is vomiting and it is only Mandy who can be still, who can stay with him, watching him through the clear brown iris of his eye, and as it solidifies and goes pale she sees all the years, all the miserable story of Tony’s life falling away from him and he is only a man, naked and stained and mistaken, and with his last few paltry breaths he sheds his life.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT IS a Sunday afternoon. Mandy and Stephen slouch on the back steps in the sun. Next to each of them, on the counterpointed stairs, is a half-drunk glass of wine. Lunch is long over; they all sat at the outdoor table, picking over the dishes of reheated lasagne and curry and the plates of slumped cheeses left over from the funeral.
Margaret potters around the garden, dazed from the wine, stepping across the beds to inspect a leaf or nip off the dead head of a flower with her fingertips. Cathy and Chris are washing up in the kitchen, and the sounds of dishes and running water and their talking waft out through the window above Stephen and Mandy on the steps. From far off, across the town, come the lost chimes of a church bell. Mandy and Stephen stare at nothing, across the space of the garden. They are both thinking of Tony.
THREE DAYS ago Stephen sat on a cushioned chair in one of the town’s three funeral homes. The rest of the family waited in a row outside, each sitting on the reproduction antique chairs in the plush red-carpeted waiting room. On the smoked-glass table were some brochures for a video production service, a bowl of promotional chocolates, and a vase of nylon flowers on vivid green stalks.
The room in which Stephen sat was set up to suggest a chapel, with thick velvet curtains, a subdued wooden cross and low lighting. It was cocooned in quiet. The coffin was shiny and black atop its folding metal trolley.
They had chosen the coffin from a catalogue, sitting dumbly around the dining room table. The photographs floated in nothingness on the page, set in soft blurs of manipulated mist or rainforest frond. Margaret’s finger had hovered over something elaborate and deep mahogany, murmuring, ‘That one’s lovely.’ The others had looked at one another over her head, shrugged.
Mandy had smoothed her mother’s back with her hand in long, firm strokes, and then Margaret had lifted her face, eyes full of tears, confusion. She’d said, her fingertip pressing on the same picture, ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ And they had all begun to cry then, nodding, blowing their noses. The plain black, it was decided, with silver handles.
A little later, as the man from the funeral directors’ sat with Margaret and Chris on the couch, filling out forms, Stephen flipped through the catalogue on the table. He stopped on a page near the back full of short, stumpy coffins. Bow side style, Tulip. Kids. How terrible. The White Pearl, in Polished White, Decorative Floral Handles. Stephen felt the tears coming again. Then another line at the bottom of the page caught his eye. The Bow-sided Pet Coffin is an elegant variation on the toe-pincher style. Small, medium and large sizes. He let out a gasp, and at the same instant Mandy had seen it, and they seized each other’s arms in silent, tearful chortling.
At the funeral home the next day Stephen sat beside the coffin for long minutes, not lifting his head to see over its lip. After a while he heaved himself up and stepped across the carpet. His father lay there, perfectly straight, dressed in the old black dinner suit he wore to Mandy’s wedding so long ago. There was some white silky fabric wispy over his lower half. Stephen moved the fabric to find his hands; they were there, a strange, pale yellow, crossed at his stomach. His face was yellowish too, smooth and hard and faintly gleaming. Waxen the only possible word, Stephen thought.
Geoff’s hair was combed back, the dreadful wound cleaned and drained of colour, covered now with only a small white dressing.
Stephen reached out and gently, gently touched a smooth grey wave of hair. Then he stepped back and bent to a plastic shopping bag on the floor, pulled out the battered red paper kite. He held it for a moment and then flexed his fingers and bent it, snapping the remaining thin crossbar of the dowel in two. It was a gentle snapping, the final breaking of an old bone. He folded the kite carefully and then pushed the narrow triangle of it down into the space between the satiny pleats of the coffin and his father’s gauze-wrapped thigh.
He did not know what to do then, in that last long moment. He leaned over, patted his father’s chest. He said, in a whisper, ‘Bye-bye, Dad.’ It was not enough, but it was everything he had, and then he walked, tears streaming, from the room.
MANDY PICKS up the glass from the step next to her, twists its stem in her fingers. Across town Tony is being lowered into the ground, the same ground into which they let their father go. Into which, perhaps, they all will go. She wonders whose job it was, to patch poor Tony up, arrange his shattered remains back into human shape.
The hospital is organising a trauma counsellor from Sydney for the staff, for all of them. For her mother’s sake, Mandy has agreed to go.
She watches Margaret now in the garden where she reaches gingerly to g
rasp a thorny rose stem between two careful fingers, leaning to peer into the flower’s browning petals.
I know why we’re the same, Mandy had said to him in the raining terrible air of that moment. And she does know; too late, she knows. She and Tony are the ruined. They are each that trapped long-ago bird, wedged rotting between its river rocks, both stained with decay from too much death, from too much misery too closely watched.
Mandy notices, across the garden, how her mother’s aching hip has given her a lopsided lean as she walks. Then she brings her attention to Stephen’s calloused toes in his blue rubber thongs on the step beside her. She listens to the chink and dunk of the dishes in the kitchen sink behind them. Then Stephen’s feet disappear, she hears him pull himself upright and now he passes her, flip-flipping down the steps in his thongs, walking over the grass to their mother. The screen door bangs above her and she turns to see Cathy holding it open, calling out, ‘Anyone want tea?’ From behind Cathy in the gloom Chris meets Mandy’s eyes, his gaze tender. She tips back the glass to drink the last of her wine, listening to these murmuring voices, watching Stephen’s hand on his mother’s shoulder as they frown together at the spotted rose.
When everything is useless, when there is nothing to be done, all we can do is pay attention, keep watch. In his boy’s-own innocent’s fucked-up vigil, Tony knew this, and it was all he had. Her remorse will never leave her.
She leans forward, stands up, collecting the glass to go inside and help with the dishes. Because it is enough. And her purpose now, she knows more certainly than anything, is to keep watch over these small things, these ordinary decencies. To pay attention to her mother’s walk, to Chris’s voice. Her sister’s, brother’s eyes.
As she turns to go inside, there in the bright backyard something catches her eye. An Indian mynah is arcing up to the roof of the house, carrying in its beak one end of a white streamer of nylon packing tape. Mandy watches the bird as it settles for a few seconds on the crossbar of the television aerial, the long, long white strand trailing down over the guttering.
And then it’s gone, the aerial quivering, and the bird shoots up in a sharp swoop over all the roofs and yards, up and up, its white kite-tail streaming behind it, up into the wide blue sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MY GREATEST gratitude is to Kylie Morris—for reading, generous advice, and above all, her encouragement.
The book was partly written in Hobart, Tasmania, as part of the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s Island of Residencies program, which was supported by the City of Hobart and Arts Tasmania. The writing was also supported by a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and by Varuna, The Writers’ House.
Among a great many helpful books, the writings of Janine di Giovanni—especially Madness Visible: A Memoir of War, from which I adapted the incident on page 202—were essential, as was Denise Leith’s Bearing Witness: The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists.
For their generosity in myriad ways, my thanks to the Farey and McElvogue families; Jane Doepel; my colleagues, especially Graham Smith; the Clifford-Smiths; Russell Daylight; Caroline Baum and David Roach; Beck Hazel; Anna Funder; Jane Johnson and Brian Murphy; Henry Simmons; Jenny Darling; Siobhán Cantrill; Judith Lukin-Amundsen; and Jane Palfreyman. And enormous thanks to Tegan Bennett Daylight, Peter Bishop, Vicki Hastrich, Lucinda Holdforth and Eileen Naseby for early reading and insightful comments.
As always, I thank my brother and sisters and their families for their loving support. And to my husband Sean, always encouraging through the daily grind, my love and gratitude.
Greatest American Hero (Theme) ‘Believe It Or Not’
Words and music by Mike Post/Stephen Geyer
© 1981 Dar-Jen Music Inc, Darla Music
For Australia and New Zealand:
EMI Songs Australia Pty Limited
(ABN 85 000 063 267)
PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009, Australia
International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
© 1981 SJC Music administered by Universal
Music Publishing Pty Ltd
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Reprinted with permission.
‘I Am Australian’
Words and music by Bruce Woodley/Dobe Newton
© 1987 Pocketful of Tunes Pty Ltd
For Australia and New Zealand:
Alfred Publishing (Australia) Pty Ltd
(ABN 15 003 954 247)
PO Box 2355, Taren Point, NSW 2229, Australia
International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Unauthorised reproduction is illegal.
Reproduced with kind permission of Origin Music Group.
Charlotte Wood was born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1965. She is the author of Pieces of a Girl (1999), and The Submerged Cathedral (2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. She lives in Sydney.
www.charlottewood.com.au
The Children Page 21