by Ian Wedde
Lit from behind by the grey, metallic light, my stocky sister still looks like the kid who might have stood just there with her back to the lawn where our father was subjecting the natural world to his system of rectangles and stripes, meanwhile acting the goat for Mick’s benefit, or later for the cleaner’s weird kid, whose thrilled shrieks used to make Vero put her hands over her ears and come inside through the French doors, screwing her face up.
She’s screwing her face up now, ostensibly because she doesn’t like the taste of the beer but also to make the shape of her question.
‘Why do you think that was?’
‘Why do I think what was?’ I know what she’s asking, but I want her to say it and without making a face.
‘You know—why did Martin love Micky? I mean, so much?’
‘Why did Agnes love you?’ I say.
‘Here we go again,’ says Vero, and begins to laugh. ‘Jesus Christ, Sandy, just listen to us. Here we are, a couple of grandparents—actually in my case about to be a great-grandparent, probably—and we’re still doing the favourites thing.’
But that isn’t what I mean.
Now, after all this time, and after the lives we’ve lived away from the house, and away from its framing devices and memory-opening gadgets, and now that its last concentrated dreg of life has been emptied out of it, the question of why Martin and Agnes loved any of us seems to have moved out of range of answers, like the cat with its casual disregard for what’s just happened—and now it suddenly bolts out of sight around the corner, and I hear its claws ripping an excited ascent of the trunk of the elder whose delicate blossom Agnes used to make into a fragrant, volatile ‘champagne’, and which my father used to greet mockingly by lifting his baseball cap when its first clusters of white cloudy flowers appeared—some kind of Cherman tradition. Sometimes, when Agnes used to open one of the elder champagnes out on the deck, her scream and the explosion were all that was left of it—the contents vaporising across the orderly nap of the lawn, just a finger’s depth left humming in the bottom of the bottle.
Used to.
The pressure of all that bottled-up time.
‘We’d better get over to the hospital,’ I say. There’s a kind of high-pressure zone between my sister and me, and it’s pushing everything we need to say to each other out to the margins of what’s happening.
‘You mean, identify Mick?’ That practical, no-nonsense manner again.
‘Some time before twelve,’ I say, but really it’s before he too just disappears entirely, the way time has from the inside of the house—the way the house’s purpose as a container has, all at once, become redundant. ‘Then we have to see the lawyer,’ I say.
Vero is looking around the almost empty room. ‘We’ll have to come back,’ she says. ‘I’ll leave my bag.’
She takes our bottles of beer to the sink and tips them out. There’s a washed glass and several empties next to the sink. Mick was drinking by himself, but somebody’s tidied up. I see my shrewd sister take note of this, and pause, but she doesn’t say anything.
As we’re getting into the taxi, though, she does come out with one of those blunt, coded remarks.
‘Know what this feels like?’ she says. ‘It’s as though Mick was the plug, and now that he’s gone . . .’
‘Been pulled,’ I say.
‘. . . it’s as though everything’s just drained away.’
‘Down the gurgler.’
‘Down the bloody gurgler,’ says Vero, with a kind of relish. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘Same,’ I say, hearing us slip into the speech of our childhood.
A little way along Brougham Street there’s a minor traffic jam where some of the day patients at the halfway house are being dropped off.
‘Christ,’ says Vero. ‘Imagine having to deal with one of them on a daily basis.’
I’m tempted to point out that Mick pretty much was one but that neither of us knows who did. It wasn’t us, anyway.
‘Remember Sampan?’ she says.
I’d have said I didn’t, but I do now, watching the variously disarticulated people struggle into or out of their backpacks. ‘I wonder what happened to them?’ I say, but in fact I don’t wonder, and nor does Vero, apparently, because she doesn’t pursue the matter—though she’s looking out the window at the little jostling crowd, and I can tell she’s thinking about something, but whatever it is she’s not sharing.
The taxi driver’s a middle-aged or older Indian or Bangladeshi man with nicely groomed hair. His cab is fresh, with a smell of recent upholstery cleaner, something a bit sweet and flowery. There are real flowers, some miniature pinkish chrysanthemums, in a small long-necked vase attached to the dashboard by a clever home-made bracket. The sleeves of his shirt have crisply ironed creases. He’s driving with a kind of languid pleasure, as if there’s no hurry to get to the next fare, and sneaking looks at us in his rear-view mirror. As we wait more patiently than usual for a gap in the traffic by the Basin Reserve, he half-turns to us and says, over his shoulder, ‘That’s your house?’
Neither Vero nor I answers. We look at each other—her face has a blank expression that I imagine mirrors mine. Probably the driver takes us for a couple.
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘don’t mean to be rude. But it’s interesting.’
‘What is?’ says Vero in her abrupt way.
‘Your house,’ says the driver, making that assumption. ‘It’s very modern, isn’t it? Up-to-date.’
‘Actually, it was built in 1947,’ I say. ‘By an architect called Martin Klepka.’
Vero gives me an ‘Oh, please’ look and mouths ‘actually’.
‘He’s probably well known?’ says the driver, as if apologising.
‘Not anymore,’ I say.
‘But still nice place to live in?’
I sense the man’s giving up hope, so I say, ‘It’s been a wonderful house to live in,’ hearing how my carefully provisional grammar winds itself around the truth.
‘Yes, wonderful,’ Vero says, and when I look at her she’s grinning, and her eyes are shining with mirth or tears, I can’t tell which.
‘You know,’ says the driver, emboldened by the good news, ‘you got to have a house you can be happy in. Otherwise.’
We both wait for whatever doom is going to follow ‘otherwise’, but nothing’s forthcoming.
‘Otherwise you can’t be happy?’ offers Vero, as if the tautology needs to be bolted together.
‘Exactly!’ says the driver. ‘I got all my kids houses,’ he adds in an offhand way.
I’m daring Vero to say, ‘And they’re all happy?’ But she just murmurs, ‘Good for you, my friend.’ And then, ‘So I guess you’ll be driving taxis for a few more years yet?’
The driver laughs. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Part time now. Pocket money. They got to look after themselves. Pay the mortgage, all that. Be looking after us soon enough, won’t they.’
‘Lucky for you,’ says Vero. ‘Can’t see that happening with our lot.’ She winks at me. ‘Too busy ruining their own lives to worry about ours.’ She clears her throat in a self-admonishing, apologetic kind of way, and then, as if she’s been holding it in, lets go with an extended rattle of laughter, throwing her head back and slapping her thigh. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, wiping her eyes. ‘But, you know, happy in spite of that, the silly buggers. Wouldn’t you say, Sandy?’
‘Last I heard, Joe’d just bankrupted himself again, this time on a super-yacht contract for some Russian oligarch, and was leaving Mandy for a young woman he’d met at the Boat Show.’
‘And my seventeen-year-old granddaughter’s pregnant,’ shouts Vero, beginning to laugh again, and I can’t help myself, the laughter comes out in a great efflorescent fountain, like the elder champagne from one of Agnes’s explosive bottles, and Vero and I fall together and hang on to each other, her face has gone all blotchy again, and the snot starts to run out of my nose.
‘Here,’ says Vero, pushing a tissue against my face,
‘clean yourself up, you fool.’
The taxi driver’s shoulders are shaking. ‘My son,’ he says, and pauses. ‘Excuse me.’
‘No, go on, please, don’t mind us,’ says Vero, who’s calming down.
‘Very rebellious boy, too clever also. He’s in love with this girl, going to marry her, doesn’t matter what we say, we are old-fashioned monsters. But then he goes to visit his cousins back over in Puri, seaside holiday and all that, and boom! Arranged marriage, old school.’
‘And they’re happy?’ says Vero. ‘It worked out, contra-romance-wise?’
‘No way!’ says the driver, laughing heartily now. ‘She just left him! Said he’s too serious!’
He toots his horn as we go up the steps to the hospital.
‘Goodness me,’ says my sister. ‘That was refreshing.’ She’s holding my arm, and all at once we both seem to notice this. ‘We’re okay, aren’t we?’ she says, stopping in front of the main entrance. ‘I mean, you and me?’ She reaches up and pats my cheek. ‘Too serious, Sandy. I mean, one can be, can’t one?’
‘One can,’ I say. Our old teasing game.
But then I just have to.
‘Why didn’t you respond to my emails, Vero? What took you so long? The voice-messages?’
The relief and lightness don’t drain from her face, as I expected they would, regretting what I’d just said the moment I said it. She pats my face again.
‘Come off it, Sandy,’ she says. ‘What are you claiming now—intuition? Mick just conked out. You didn’t know he would. Give yourself a break.’
‘The last thing I said to him, on the phone, was, Stop wasting my time, or something shitty like that.’
‘And now you feel bad?’ Suddenly, my sister’s face has her particularly intense expression of scorn on it. ‘So this is about you? Or you think saying that killed him?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not about me. And of course I didn’t kill him. But yes, I do feel bad.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ says Vero. ‘You can’t have it both ways. Make up your mind. Do you feel responsible, or did Mick just die?’
‘He just died,’ I say lamely, knowing I’ve surrendered something but I’m not sure what.
‘Okay, then,’ says Vero, ‘let’s do whatever’s required, shall we?’
I’ve seen dead people before—Martin and Agnes, of course, and a few friends and colleagues, and a few lying on marae. My father wasn’t my father by the time I saw him. I came down from Auckland and encountered this serene lookalike, with lipstick on his calm mouth and a sheen of clammy stillness on his high unwrinkled forehead, whose repose in my father’s case would have been the prelude to some prank or other, something inappropriate and wicked, so that I waited for a while for him to rise up out of the coffin at the undertakers and produce some kind of mocking effect, the sound of a toy trumpet, or a great fart, or a ‘Boo!’—but he didn’t. Agnes was different. She died twenty years after him. She was still alive when I came down from Auckland, but she’d gone past recognising anyone, although she said ‘Hello’ when I finally got there, but it should have been ‘Goodbye,’ and there’s no way she could have known who I was. There was almost nothing left of her, just a little bundle of sticks, and when she’d gone and the nurse asked Mick and me if we wanted to help clean her, I said no, because what was left there on the hospital bed wasn’t my mother anymore, and I didn’t want to look at what she wasn’t. But I saw the look Mick gave me, which was pretty much what it had always been, something like You coward dick-head fucking wanker.
I’ve never quite believed the toe-tag thing—it seems like a cliché out of crime fiction—but there it is, on Mick’s toe.
And it is Mick, all right, at the other end of the silly thing on his toe, only how can I say it? He looks great, his face not exactly calm, more a little smug and ironic, as if he’s had the last laugh, a bit weathered but handsome despite needing a shave, his long grey hair pushed back off that high forehead, the big eyes closed. It is Micky the way I’d hoped he could be when he was alive, and the way I knew he was for that matter, the most unusual of us three, the brightest without doubt, but . . .
My inventory is veering off towards ‘but most fucked up’, but the brother who’s half-smiling and asleep in front of me doesn’t look in the least fucked up. He looks as though he’s had a beer and called it a day. Knowing that he’s had some kind of last laugh or other.
But none of us can know that.
There’s a strange dry smell in the mortuary, though in effect everything in it seems to have been made out of a liquid substance, like viscous time, a metallic or porcelain emulsion of memory that has, just briefly, ceased to flow. Has desiccated itself irrespective of its conditions or contexts, and has just stopped, at once dry and frozen, at once motionless and about to be gone.
We sign the papers and agree to nominate a funeral director, and then walk together on what feels like a strangely veering, nauseating conveyor belt towards the hospital exit. Outside, the air is cool and damp, and Vero’s face, too, has a moist, chilly sheen on it, as if the surging emotional colours of the past couple of hours have drained away.
‘Well, that was him all right,’ she says. ‘That was our Micky.’ She’s studying my face—her eyes moving around and across it.
‘What?’ I say.
‘How do you feel?’ she says. And then, in that can’t-wait way of hers, ‘Who should we tell? Do we know who his friends were?’
‘I feel like having some lunch,’ I say, ‘if you want to know the truth. I want to sit down and eat something good, and have a nice bottle of wine and raise a glass to Mick, and not worry about the next bit.’
I can’t believe I’ve said that, but I’m glad I did. It’s as though some kind of propriety, a sanguinity, has begun to give the day its appropriate shape.
Vero takes my arm again, only this time she hugs it close to her body.
‘The lamb rack with Nepalese spiced cheek at Logan Brown,’ she says. ‘Or the bistro monkfish, if you’re being careful.’ Of course she knows this stuff. It’s what she and Peter do.
We’re quite early, but the maître d’ knows Vero.
‘Veronica!’ he cries. ‘What brings you to town?’
‘I’m catching up with my brother,’ she says.
We lift the first glass and look each other in the eye, and clink, but neither of us says the words.
‘In case you’re wondering,’ says Vero, giving her glass a waggle, ‘I’m doing okay. I’m allowed two. Watch me.’ Then she pauses. ‘Can’t say the same for Pete, unfortunately. Permanent loop in the tracks, there.’ Her eyes are scanning across my face again. I know what’s coming. ‘You?’
‘What about me?’
‘Come off it, Sandy. How often do we get to do this?’
I’m having the lentil and ricotta cake bistro entrée—it’s tasty but a bit sticky, so you can’t talk around it. I finish my mouthful and take a good swallow of wine. Those whose company accounts can afford the business lunch at Logan Brown are beginning to barge boastfully into the restaurant. I find myself measuring my reply to Vero’s understated interrogation—of my private life, health and happiness, professional situation, and more than likely sexual status near the top of her interests—against the space between the noisy bonhomie of the business lunchers and the silence in the mortuary where my brother Michael Klepka seemed content to keep his mouth shut.
‘Good,’ I say.
My sister’s regarding me steadily, and I can’t tell whether she’s going to smile next, or get annoyed—whether she’s going to say something affectionately mocking like, Oh, Sandy, stop being so mysterious! or peevish, like, Oh, Sandy, lighten up for the love of god! But she just waits, and somewhere between the blather of the expense-account crowd and the stillness in my brother’s expression I find my cue. I’m not really telling Vero anything she doesn’t know already, but at least now she’s hearing it from me. Coming on eight years ago I met a young German woman who broke my heart through
no fault of her own, I lost the plot, Jilly divorced me and bought me out of our house, I gave the house money to Joe to save his boat-building business but he lost the lot, I couldn’t handle my work anymore and got a performance-review soft-sacking, these days I travel free on the bus with a superannuant card, my main extravagance is the gym because I don’t want to be old, and it’s been quite a while since I ate in a good restaurant.
I raise my glass to her. ‘But, Dum vivimus, vivamus!’ Her eyebrows go up. ‘While we live, let us live!’
She covers her glass with one hand when I go to top it up. I refill my own. Not much sleep last night, or the one before for that matter, and my third glass of wine has begun to make my cheeks feel numb, as if I’ve got a grin fixed on my face.
‘So,’ says Vero, with a mocking waggle of her head, ‘no more hanky-panky, eh?’
‘Not even one glass, so to speak,’ I say.
‘Now that I find hard to believe, you sexy beast.’ She’s tucking into her lamb-rack main, and is talking with one cheek full, like a busy squirrel or something. Then she puts her knife and fork down with a clatter. ‘I’ve never told you this, or anyone else for that matter,’ she says. Then she picks the fork up again, and refills her cheek, as if what she’s about to tell me can only be uttered with a full mouth—as if the message needs to be stoked up.
‘What?’ I’ve got the small bistro serving of monkfish in front of me but I can’t get started with it. The appetite I thought I had seems to be waiting for something to trigger it again—a desire, a lust, a curiosity.
‘I had an affair in Venice that time I went with Sophie,’ says Vero, looking me in the eye. Her throat gulps as though swallowing something whole.
‘When Agnes died? Then?’ My sister’s eyes have begun to shine and blink; she’s nodding her head, and one hand is clenching and unclenching around her napkin on the table. A tipsy surge of pity and love propels my hand across the table to grab hers. ‘Oh, Vero, that must have been awful,’ I say.
‘No,’ she says, and two identical tears run down into her grin. ‘It was great. It had nothing to do with Agnes, or anyone else. What was it you said, Dum something?’