The phone rang at five o’clock. I was inside with Brigid, putting off going back to my grandma’s. Video clips rocked us into a daze as we laughed about which male rock singer we wanted to go out with, and which girls needed to change their hairstyles. We’d come in wet from the pool and been banned from the furniture, and our bottoms made marks the shape of enormous peaches on the floor. We shuffled aside and laughed about those, too.
A wall had been removed as part of the recent renovations, and a new kitchen installed. The cook could now talk to the rest of the family. Rebecca stood there, chopping and grinding. Dinner. She began to mix something in a bowl and looked at us.
“You really do need to help more next week, Bridge. I bet Madeleine helps her grandmother sometimes, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” I hedged. Brigid probably hated cooking as much as I did. She didn’t need to get stuck peeling onions or slicing raw meat just because I sometimes used Grandma’s can opener.
Meanwhile, Brigid gave her mother a funny look. “Where’s Dad?”
Rebecca turned and frowned at the clock. I remember exactly how she stood, sharp knife poised over an onion, her face raised, when the phone began to ring. It was incredible timing, as if someone was calling to answer Brigid’s question.
Instead of saying, Bridge, get that will you? Rebecca wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and reached for the receiver herself. Her fingers were damp and pink.
“Hello?” she said.
Brigid and I sat quietly, watching. It was as if we knew something was happening, although I don’t know how. The house was silent for a few moments while the blood drained from Rebecca’s face as if the caller was sucking it out through her ear.
“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Yes, I will. Right away.”
She hung up without saying goodbye. Her eyes were dark and dull, as if they had gone into mourning before the rest of her.
“There’s been an accident,” she told us, although we knew already. I seemed to see it played out on the back of my eyelids when I blinked. When I looked at Brigid, it seemed she could see it as clearly as me.
“Daniel and Andrew are at the hospital,” Rebecca said. “They say we should come in as soon as possible. I’m going to call a taxi now. Madeleine — would you mind?”
“Mind?” I repeated, shocked and confused. “Do you want me to call the taxi?”
“No. I mean, will you go home now, please? Brigid, get dressed …” Rebecca’s voice faded as she opened the phone book and looked for the number of a taxi company.
I had no place with them now, of course. But I couldn’t help casting Brigid a desperate look as I tiptoed out the back.
They were in hospital. Daniel, Andrew.
My grandma heard me come in through the front door.
“Maddy!” she called from the sleep-out. “Maddy! I can hear you there. It’s about time you came home. Or do you want to live with the Colemans?”
I walked through the hall towards her. The television was on, volume as loud as usual. I wondered if the car crash had been on the news. If so, then my grandma might have some idea of how bad it had been.
“Mr Coleman had a car accident,” I told her, partly to find out an answer, and partly to ward off any further attack.
My grandma’s eyes widened in her pale face. “No!”
“While he was picking Andrew up from swimming practice,” I continued. “Mrs Coleman and Brigid have gone to the hospital.”
“The hospital?” said my grandma. “Is it bad?”
“I don’t know.”
Her television continued to show the soft-focused features of daytime-soap actresses. But Grandma was staring into space. Once, my father reversed out of a car space and straight into a telegraph pole. I had laughed at his rueful expression but I’d been a bit shaken. A crumpling car sounded a lot like crushing a lemonade can. They were pretty flimsy sorts of things to trust your life with. Even a BMW.
“Swimming practice,” Grandma said, her voice sounding faint and far away. “I don’t understand why they bother so much with that. There are millions of people in this country. Even if he went to the Olympics, only one man can win. Daniel should spend more time trying to teach that boy more of what he needs to have a good life.”
To Grandma, having a good life meant studying boring things that would get you a safe job, preferably at a bank. That was what she’d wanted for my mother, too, the reason art had been discouraged in favour of maths. Irritated, I temporarily forgot the bad news.
“At least he spends time with his kids,” I said. “Not like my dad.”
“Don’t talk like that.” Grandma stared at me. “Your father didn’t dump you. I wanted to look after you and he needs money. Your mother had the best care money could buy, Maddy. It cost your parents their house. Now your father has to go where the work is. You know all this.”
I turned to leave the room. I knew what I wanted to know.
“I’m glad you weren’t with them.” Grandma’s voice was faint. “Maddy, sleep tight, won’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
* * *
That night, I waited for the sound of a car next door, for Brigid and Rebecca, maybe Andrew and Daniel with them, to return home. Eventually I slept, dreaming of hospitals where a ghost-like version of myself wandered, anxious for medical advice about whether people know they are about to die. I’d wondered that about my mother. Had she been scared? Her situation had scared the hell out of me. In the end, my mother knew nothing. Hospital equipment did the knowing for her. The last time I saw her, the surrounding machines had formed an army of ridiculous proportions; she was completely unarmed. They beeped with the pitch and frequency that television programmers use to mask swear words. I learned that despite their high-tech, warlike appearance, the machines’ primary purpose was to hide the unacceptable: my mother was going to die. Before the cancer went to her brain, had she known?
“Time to get up,” my grandma said from the doorway. She was leaning forward like she wanted to come closer but didn’t know how.
I sat up. “Did you hear what happened to the Colemans?”
“No.” She raised her hand to the top button of her aged dressing-gown, breathing deeply. “There’s nothing on the news.”
“Do you think I should go in and ask?” Pushing my doona out of the way, I stood.
“Yes.” My grandma’s eyes opened wider, a list of possibilities reflected there. “I think perhaps you should.”
The front door was open when I went to the Colemans’. Timidly, I knocked on the adjacent glass panel, but no one came. A small noise from the back of the house sounded faintly like an invitation. I went inside.
The hall was bright as usual, its cheerful paint looking oddly tactless. Through open doors, a succession of bedrooms were empty and deserted. In the living room, Rebecca and Brigid still wore the clothes of yesterday’s picnic. Brigid was asleep. Rebecca turned tired eyes in my direction. A cask of wine was ripped open in a damp red puddle on the rug at her feet. The room smelled of onions; I saw the sliced vegetables still lying on the kitchen bench, untouched since yesterday’s phone call.
“Hello, Maddy,” Rebecca said. “Daniel died last night.”
She came out with it just like that. Like she was saying he went to work early, or took Andrew to the football.
“They say it was the alcohol. Impaired his reflexes. Would you like some coffee?” She didn’t move. “No, of course you wouldn’t …”
“I can get you some,” I offered.
Rebecca shook her head, stretching into a sitting position. “Don’t bother. I’m looking for things to do. Don’t wake Brigid, please. She needs sleep.”
And Andrew? What about Andrew? I didn’t know how to ask. Surely, I thought, if this woman has lost her son, this would upset her as much as losing her husband? Surely Rebecca would mention Andrew too, if he had died?
Then I remembered that Andrew wasn’t Rebecca’s son. Andrew was from Daniel’s first mar
riage, before he’d known Rebecca.
“And Andrew?” I didn’t know how to make my question more subtle. “What happened to Andrew?”
Rebecca didn’t give me a knowing smile this time. Instead, she blinked, and ran fingers through her hair. Her eyes were big, blank circles.
“I saw him last night,” she said. “He can’t remember much. They’ve kept him under observation. I think I’ll make myself some coffee now. And please let Brigid sleep.”
“I’ll go home,” I said, following her into the kitchen. “Mrs Coleman, I’m so sorry.”
One thing I knew was what to say when someone died. I’d heard the words often enough. But Rebecca paused, as if my words were profound. Perhaps I sounded surprisingly mature. Perhaps she didn’t know saying sorry about someone’s death was as meaningless as good morning or how are you? It was just something everyone said.
She’d learn, soon enough.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Maddy, thanks very much. I’ll send Brigid around to see you this afternoon, if you like. I don’t think she’ll be going to school.”
School. I hadn’t considered that. Now Brigid was going to get the please be nice to her, her father just died business.
I walked home with a lost, sick feeling in my stomach. Perhaps it was the smell of onions.
Daniel and Andrew had almost been home when their car veered off River Pocket Road, straight into a tree on the opposite side of the street. Their new shiny BMW. Grandma got the details chatting to people on the footpath and over back fences. Since Cameron Seymour disappeared, neighbours had been talking to each other again, the way they used to in the 1950s. No one was sure what caused the accident. Andrew’s memory of the drive was blurred, they said. In any case he couldn’t know what his father saw, or thought he saw, when they rounded the corner that day. It must have been something, that was the unanimous agreement. Daniel had rounded that corner hundreds of times before.
Parents at the pool where Andrew trained had seen Daniel. None of them thought he seemed drunk. He drank enough, often enough, to be able to act as if he didn’t. I couldn’t help recalling his pile of beer cans at the picnic and the way Rebecca asked him to be careful.
“It’s … dark, Madeleine, isn’t it?”
In Monday’s class, I’d attacked my painting with so much zeal that there was almost as much black paint on my hands as on the canvas. Mrs White paused behind me, her head cocked to one side.
“It’s night-time,” I told her.
“So I see.”
I made a few more dabs at the canvas before turning to her. My painting was a puddle of blacks and browns, a single splash of kingfisher-blue in one corner. Abstract, contemporary. “Do you want anything?” I demanded.
Her head jerked back, startled, while her gaze slid towards mine. Despite the grey in her floppy hair, for a moment she looked guilty, like a kid who’d been caught staring or copying someone else’s homework.
“I apologise, Madeleine. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.” And she began to move off.
I put my brush down, surprised. We were in art class, she was the teacher. So what did she mean by privacy?
After class, Mrs White asked me how it was all going, and I tried to forget my suspicion for long enough to say, “Fine, except that I’m sick of it.”
She was wiping her desk down with a damp cloth. “Sick of what?”
I left A Little Blue on a Lot of Black to dry on a desk at the side of the room, and turned, clutching a sketchbook in my hand. “Sick of death.”
I waited for an appalled expression to creep across Mrs White’s features. I’d meant this to be a shocking answer. And it was true that Mrs White’s eyes opened wider, one paint-tipped finger wiping a strand of hair behind her ear and leaving an orange streak on her cheek.
“You know, people say that death is part of life,” she began. “You’ve heard that?”
“Only about a hundred times.”
“And you don’t want to hear it again from me? You’d be disappointed if I tried to talk to you like that?”
I shrugged, gripping the sketchbook more tightly to my chest. “On the way home from school, sometimes I see Cameron Seymour’s mother standing at her front window,” I said. “I mean, I see her outline through the curtains. She’s just standing there, watching the street. Staring at us.”
“And that makes you uncomfortable?” The orange mark was still there. Instead of looking funny, it softened her somehow, making her seem vulnerable, someone who still did dumb things. It took the edge off her questions a bit.
“It’s like she still thinks he might climb down off the school bus and walk home,” I told her.
Mrs White nodded. She must have caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window, because she wiped the orange away with a careless finger, one that still left a smear behind. “That’s what you mean by being sick of death?” she guessed. “Madeleine, you know, sometimes it’s hard for a person to abandon hope, hard to work through.”
I felt anger flood my cheeks with a red to match her orange. Who did she think she was? “No one knows what I’ve been through!” I told her. “No one!”
If she hadn’t been standing between me and the door, I’d have stormed out. But saying excuse me seemed anticlimactic right then.
Mrs White was silent for a long moment, before moving aside. “Perhaps other people care more than you think,” she observed, as I left.
Sitting in the bus on the way home that afternoon, I watched the streets outside slide past like a documentary film, and thought, She’s actually quite nice. Maybe I should try to explain my painting.
Brigid, quiet and still as a tombstone, was perched on an iron chair on their front balcony. Her hair, loosened from its usual ponytail, was red and frizzy and outraged around her face. She wasn’t very tall and she looked far younger than she was. Beneath a longish skirt, her ankles were crossed. I waved at her once I got off the bus. If she saw, she didn’t respond.
I remembered how numbing shock can be. As the bus pulled away in a dusty belch of smoke, I walked over to the letterbox at the end of their driveway.
“Hello, Brigid,” I called.
Her head turned slightly, and she looked at me through eyes that were swollen and pink. Their front door hung open, and the sound of sobbing floated out from somewhere inside. Brigid was silent, as though she didn’t know what to say.
I tried to smile. “All right if I come up?”
She nodded slightly, her hair moving more than her chin. “Mum, Maddy’s here,” she called, sounding half-choked.
The crying inside stopped, and Rebecca appeared at the doorway a moment later, quite dry-eyed. Who had been howling inside, then? Andrew? But he wouldn’t cry like that, he was almost a man. An athlete. He was cool.
“I’m very sorry,” I said again, this time to Brigid. The words tasted funny, as if I was regurgitating something someone else had eaten first. As though it was someone else’s mouth. Why should I be sorry for something that wasn’t my fault?
Brigid nodded. “Thank you.”
Rebecca turned and walked back into the house. I had, after all, apologised to her already.
“The funeral’s on Thursday,” Brigid said.
Thursday. Four days after the accident. My mother had been buried much quicker than that. But then, she’d been sick for a very long time. Daniel was different. He’d been drunk. I wondered for an ashamed moment if alcohol acted like a preservative.
“Will you be going?” I asked Brigid.
My grandma said funerals weren’t appropriate for children. She’d argued with my father about Mum’s. Dad said he didn’t care, I could go if I wanted to. Of course I wanted to. Not that I understood anything about closure or anything like that. My reason was much simpler. I’d never been to a funeral before.
It had turned out to be horrible. Dozens of grim-faced adults told me they understood, when of course they couldn’t. Grandma had tried to hold my hand and said she’d help
me through this terrible time. I’d walked away from her.
Brigid nodded. “I don’t have to wear black though,” she said. “Daddy says … Daddy didn’t like black on little girls.”
I walked up the stairs and sat down facing her, hoping she wouldn’t ask me to come with her. There was no way I was ever going to another funeral. Not until I was the corpse. But Brigid was silent, face white, fingers clenched. Over her shoulder, a shadow appeared and I swallowed. Andrew, in flannelette pyjama pants and no shirt headed from his bedroom to the bathroom. He kept his face carefully averted, head on an angle so that his thick hair fell forward over his jawline. Surely his eyes couldn’t be swollen? He couldn’t have been crying?
I looked at the rippled muscles of his swimmer’s back.
“Andrew’s home, then.”
“He got here at lunch-time,” Brigid said softly. And then, more softly still, “Mum had to take another taxi, because … we don’t have a car.”
She looked out over the garden, at the clusters of flowering annuals that Rebecca tended, and the lawn that still needed mowing. Near the end of the drive, a large jacaranda flourished, limbs smothered with purple flowers.
“Did they talk about it at school?” Brigid looked at me, jacaranda blossoms reflected in her eyes like a cloud. “Did they ask you?”
I shook my head. “Do you want me to tell them anything?”
“What can I say? Do I have any choice?” Brigid stared ahead again.
I considered telling her that she was crazy. She had plenty of choices. She could sound like an old lady and say, My father passed away. My father breathed his last. My father is deceased. My father has gone the way of all flesh, is departed, has succumbed, expired, perished, been killed, died.
Then there were other sorts of words. The ones that most people were too polite to say. My father carked it. My father croaked. My father kicked the bucket. My father kissed the dust. My father pegged out, was carried out feet first, conked out, bought it, gave up the ghost, turned up his toes, snuffed it. The things I said about my mother when I was angriest.
The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies Page 6