“A Mrs Sullivan. Says she felt called to come.”
“My mum?” queried Charis. She looked shocked.
“Says her daughter’s here too.”
To my surprise both Mum and Vicki said she could come in. She bustled in, more untidy than usual; a stray roller dangling like a dag from her messy hair; a slash of lipstick; feet crammed into her good shoes, spilling out over the edges in protest. She went straight to Mum and out-mummed her, hugging her to her bosom. Vicki leaned back ready for the onslaught. It never came. Whatever supernatural insight Charis had to human nature, her Mum had it too. Maybe she’d passed it on to Charis.
“And you must be Rob’s father?”
Dad nodded awkwardly, shuffling from foot to foot. She did the hug thing with him too. I could already hear her muttering away. Charis looked at me and I smiled through watery eyes. Chris was asleep in a chair in the corner. Stuart sitting next to him nodding on and off after his flight. He’d wake every couple of minutes or so with a startle, look around to gathering his bearing, then settle back into the chair, before falling asleep again. He had started to snore once, competing with Bevan for the loudest throat noise.
“Wake him up,” said Mum, irritated. How could he sleep? How could any of them sleep. Mum had a betrayed look on her face. Could you not watch one hour with me in my time of testing, oh ye of little faith?
As the night wore on Vicki had leaned in over Bevan closer and closer, until right she almost had her head on his chest. She seemed unaware of the rest of us.
“Don’t die babe,” she whispered over and over again, “Don’t die babe, don’t die babe, don’t die.” It became a sing-songy mantra, going up and down with his laboured breathing. She was probably making it even harder for him to breathe, but what did it matter now? “Don’t die babe, don’t die.” But for once Bevan wasn’t listening, or if he was listening he wasn’t going to do what she said this time.
“May I?” Charis’s Mum asked dragging over a chair. “Charis, come here love.” By the look on her face, intense and strong, Charis knew where it was going. “Can we pray with him?” It was directed towards Mum, not Vicki, who was too distracted by her own grief to notice anyway. Mum looked uncertain, flickering a glance at me.
“They’ve prayed with me before Mum, it’ll be ok.” I don’t know what Mum was expecting them to do, but she nodded. Charis sat on the bed next to her mum. Perhaps Mum was thinking The Lord is My Shepherd maybe, or even Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild.
The whispering started: “Shadda-berrica-mananna-shallapuna, shadda-berrica-mananna-shallapuna, shadda-berrica-mananna-shallapuna.” First Charis’s mum.
Then: “Be-andracanna-shamanalla-kee-apana, be-andracanna-shamanalla-kee-apana. Charis. It was Charis as well. The two voices joined forces, low and urgent, like tributaries meeting and swelling towards the sea. Water flowing from a rock, spreading over the desert. Mum looked at Dad, who looked at Mum. Even Vicki raised her head from Bevan’s chest, but dropped it down again, lulled by the pacifying strangeness of the throaty lilt, an urgent, vibrant contrast to Bevan’s rattle. Circular breathing. Didgeridoos in harmony. Mrs Sullivan rocking slightly in her chair, her hair roller bouncing from side to side. Charis stock still and upright; a prophetess seated under a tree with a word of knowledge on her lips, not daring to open her eyes lest the muse vanish and the profane intrude on her ecstasy. Mum gazed at them in a mix of astonishment, fear, and uncertainty; a Bernadette at her very own Lourdes.
I looked around. Dad was watching transfixed. Stuart was lying there pretending to be asleep, but I could see his half-closed eye watching the scene before him.
“Shadda-berrica-mananna-shallapuna.”
“Be-andracanna-shamanalla-kee-apana.”
Vicki had let herself be enveloped by the sound and had gone silent, almost asleep with grief, draped over Bevan. Any other situation it would have looked melodramatic. Chris cried out in his sleep, turning violently in his chair. Charis and her Mum responded in unison, raising their voices as if trying to wash them over Chris as well. He settled and they followed suit, back to their low tongues hum that each of us was interpreting in our own way.
And then at three am exactly they stopped, and the secular beeps, hums, and ticks of the Age of Reason flooded back in. Charis’s mum opened her eyes wide and intense, and Mum leaned in as if she was about to hear some mystery revealed. Dad got up from the chair he’d been swapping on and off with me for the last two hours, and walked in next to Mum. He hadn’t even gone out for coffee during the whole time. Maybe he was afraid that he’d be breaking some sort of incantation, or frighten something away. I had never seen Dad look so strong. Or so tender. He stood there next to Mum for a while, then slowly, but with confidence, put his hand on her shoulder. She responded without looking, putting her hand up to his. If only Gracie could seem them now. Charis’s mum didn’t say anything. Maybe there was no mystery, or maybe this was it; a divorced man and woman united for one last time by those parts of their vows they’d never thought about on their wedding day - sickness, sorrow, poverty. By now Bevan was real quiet. Straining to see through lidded eyes.
I woke Stuart and Chris up. “It’s time,” I whispered.
“Is this it?” asked Stuart too loudly, trying to be more awake than he was.
“Eh?” Chris tried to wipe the booze from his eyes, his face lined and crinkly from where he’d fallen asleep on his jacket. We walked over to the bed, and Charis got up and put her arm around me. We all stood that way for fifteen minutes of hot tears and hush. The clock. Machine noise. Night-time cars below made even more distant by the double-glazing. The faint hum of giant air-conditioning systems on the roof. Bevan’s rattle getting softer and softer. Vicki lying over him, stroking his hand. And then the clock ticked over to 3:16.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was two days after the funeral and Charis was driving me somewhere in my car.
“Come with me,” she’d said, switching on the lights walking into the darkened house. The sun was going down quicker these days and Charis’s knock on the door had woken me up. I’d been packing boxes, but the emotion of the past week had tired me out and I’d fallen asleep on the floor. I felt pasty and drooly.
“Give me a minute.” I went into the bathroom. “Where’re we going?” I called out.
“It’s a surprise.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Mum dropped me off.”
“Should I dress up?”
“Come as you are.”
“As you were, as I want you to be,” I sang under my breath. I felt and smelt like Kurt might have felt and smelt just before he did himself in. The cold water over my face woke me up a little and I looked into the mirror. Actually the mirror did the looking for me because I wasn’t up to it.
“Nearly finished packing?” asked Charis looking in the door, “Sorry,” she said, as she walked in on me having a piss.
“Getting there. It’s just temporary you know.”
“I know. And even if it wasn’t, that wouldn’t matter either. Your mum needs you at the moment.”
That’s the line I’d fed Benny too to fend off his questions.
“Back home? To your mum’s?” Benny had quizzed when I told him I was moving out. He made it sound like the regression that I felt it was.
“Mum needs a bit of support at the moment.” Lame answer.
“Suit yourself. The offer’s there to come back if you need it.”
It sounded just like what Pongo had said and it felt just like it too. All that was left was to get in the car and get the hell out of there.
* * *
What can I say about the funeral? Benny hadn’t been there for a start. He had to be “somewhere.” A client thing apparently. I was just as glad. I had come to the point where I didn’t want anything from him, not even his grief. Besides the funeral had been a bit embarrassing. The same celebrant who’d done the wedding did the funeral and I could have sworn that she’d used the sam
e transcript and just exchanged the word “life” for “death”. It was all pretty and lovely, as if there was no difference between two people making vows to each other and a wasted body in a box.
Vicki read some poem about Bevan only being in the room next door that made everyone sniffle. Actually she did grief well. She’d worn her blue wedding dress, only this time with a black shawl instead of the white she’d worn at the wedding. All her private school girlfriends were there, dressed to the nines, the odd one or two with a bored looking broker type suited up and standing next to them. Waiting for the coffee and cake in the room out the back, I’d thought at the time.
Chris had drugged himself up with something he’d got from some of the roofies he worked with. He’d looked more dead than Bevan had. He didn’t say anything that made sense between the night Bevan died to the morning of the funeral. Maybe it was my imagination, but Stuart had looked smug, like he was central to all this or something. True, he’d helped Mum organize the whole thing, from ringing the funeral directors to getting her friends to do the catering.
“It’s the least I can do,” he’d said, every time Mum protested and said she should do something for a change.
“He got that right,” Charis’d muttered after he uttered it for the umpteenth time. It was typical Stuart. Breeze in after all the hard stuff had been done; take all the attention. I guess people can do that when they’re the star attraction in their uni department. They get the big grants. They get the best names to come to their college. A brother’s funeral should be a cinch to organize, especially if all the hard work, like dying and helping someone die, has been done by everyone else.
Mum was numb. Numbness muted her, or at least damped her down. Charis’s mum had come over and sat with her, but she didn’t do the prayer thing. Mum made cups of tea, answered the phone, crying like it was the first time whenever she spoke to someone new. She said “uh-huh” to the funeral director’s sales pitch, letting Stewart and me handle most of it. We’d nearly had an argument about the coffin.
“A plain one,” I’d said.
“Let’s not be cheap about this,” Stuart had countered, with a “shocked” look.
“I’m not being cheap. I know Bevan. I know what he’d like. A plain one.” The funeral director had sat back at this stage. He’d been in this place before and if missiles were about to be launched he wanted well out of the way.
“Think about what Mum wants. We don’t want some tacky cheap box,” Stuart had said, before turning to the funeral guy, “No disrespect mate.”
“None taken.” That had been his cue to start turning the pages of his brochure again. I could sense a deal closure coming on.
“Mum would want something nice.” Stuart had said it loud enough for Mum to hear and right on cue she’d looked up.
“What about everyone getting what everyone wants?” We’d both turned to him like hounds picking up a scent. He was a real professional. “How about this model?” We both nodded. “It’s actually an environmentally friendly model. The coffin is reusable, but Bevan would be placed inside a wooden sheath that sits inside it. Many people are environmentally conscious these days, so there is less desire to create unnecessary waste. The outer shell is returned to us, which makes it less expensive to provide something that has a touch more elegance than the base model.”
“If it comes in a V6 model, I’ll take it.” It was my best line for a while and it even made Stuart laugh. The funeral director had laughed too, but it looked polite and planned, just like his neat back and sides and sombre suit.
And Dad? Bevan’s father? Nowhere to be seen between Bevan’s death and the funeral. I wondered how it would be for him in those days. How much would Gracie allow him to grieve? Would Dad have to hold it back for “the sake of the children?” Sitting there in his chair, young Elvis giving him the eye from the wall? I wondered if he was even going to turn up at the funeral. Actually Mum had put that idea into my mind.
“He’s going to have to see people he wiped off years ago.”
“He’ll be there Mum.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“It’s twelve years Mum.” It had surprised me how much I’d used that line over the past year or so. It was the universal wrench in my conversation tool-box. All the same I suppressed the urged to ring Dad, instead quietly cursing Mum’s ability to plant fear into us, like she had when she’d refused to let us walk to school by ourselves when we were young. “You never know what might happen,” she’d said, before making sure we did know. By grade seven she’d relented, but only because she had to get to work earlier and would have missed the bus if she’d walked us to school. By then it was too late anyway. Grades five and six had been misery for the “mummy’s boy” who had been marched up to the school gate.
But Dad was there alright. I caught sight of him as we got out of the car in the cemetery, all suited and sunglassed, ready for the walk to the chapel. His head was bobbing up and down at the back of the entourage - Zacchaeus straining for a glimpse of Jesus in a hostile crowd.
“Dad,” I said walking up to him. We hugged. He sniffed.
A couple of people I sort of recognised looked at us, then, as if despite themselves, turned to look at Mum. She was gazing into the distance, tottering a little, while the funeral directors fussed around collecting the attendance cards.
“Some people don’t want me here, eh son?”
“They’re just rubbernecks Dad,” I gritted. I smiled over his shoulder at a stout middle-aged woman whose goitered neck did indeed look like rubber. She’d been giving me that melodramatic half-smile, half pity look we bring to funerals. It’s supposed to be in lieu of actually saying anything. Just stand there and look sad and dumb.
Stuart wandered over.
“Hi.”
“Hi son.”
“Turned up?”
“Of course son. How’s your mother?”
“Shitty.” Stuart was enjoying this. Only four words spoken and already he’d boxed Dad into a corner. It just needed a ref to put him out of his misery.
“We’re moving,” I said, watching the bustle at the front of the entourage slow down and assume an air of gravity. Sweet relief! I dragged Stuart away from his prized catch and we settled in next to Mum, Chris, Charis and Vicki. Dad melted back into the crowd.
The way I figured it, there were about fifty hard-core mourners at Bevan’s funeral. The rest were indeed rubbernecks. Tourists without cameras. Death is an interesting place to visit, but no-one wants to live there. So people turn up; walk behind the coffin to the funeral; and talk about everything except death. The weather. The latest renovation. The footy. But not death. Save that for when one of their own close relatives dies. Death has been kind enough to put on a dress rehearsal for them - a memento mori - and they treat it like a school trip to Disneyland. They go away with an experience, but really, where was the educational value?
Funerals are pretty short. It never feels that way, but it’s true. Once all of the trimmings have been removed; the long slow car ride; the getting out at the cemetery; the walking behind the hearse to the chapel; the settling into the tan fake leather seats – or standing with the crowd at the back if its someone young or well known – it’s pretty much over. All that’s left is a few thousand words to sum up someone’s entire life. Cut off some of the fancy marzipan and even that’s reduced to a few hundred words that really matter. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later the next tour group is hot on your heels, and everyone is ushered out of the chapel, free at last to plunge back into their busy lives. The closer friends and relatives will string it out at somebody’s house for a wake, but in the end they all go home and that’s when the real grief arrives. What you had before was only shock. Shock kicks in to give you the energy to get through the funeral. Shock is the lightning before the long low drawn-out rumble of grief.
Stewart had given the family eulogy. I’d wanted to do that, but he’d been pretty adamant.
“You’re good with
words,” Mum had said to me when we’d sat down round the table with mugs of tea, blank paper and a few pens lying around.
“I’d like to give it,” said Stuart, up front as usual.
“Robert’s got a good speaking voice.” Mum was actually defending me!
“Yeah but he’s more emotional. You’re more emotional than me, aren’t you Rob?
“It’s a funeral Stu, I’m gonna be emotional. We’re all gonna be emotional.”
“Yeah, but there’s emotional and there’s emotional isn’t there?”
“What do you mean: “There’s emotional and there’s emotional”? As soon as I said that I knew it was over. I’d strayed into his linguistic territory. He had me in his sights now. He moved in for the kill.
“You know what you’re like Rob. You’ll be a blubbering mess. You won’t be able to hold it together.”
“And you will?” Mum had a note of suspicion in her voice. Why wouldn’t Stuart be a blubbering mess? What was wrong with him? For a moment I sensed an unlikely victory.
“Bloody hell Mum, why not just get Chris to do it? If he can stand up straight on the day!”
Mum sat looking at her lap for a moment, her shoulders shaking a little. The first tear landed with an audible plop onto the apron stretched taut across her lap.
“Aww Mum, come here,” sighed Stuart, pulling her over to him. He sat there hugging her. “Don’t just sit there Rob, get the tissues.” I walked through to the bathroom and away from any chance of reading the eulogy. I could hear him “There-thereing” Mum, and I almost admired his tactics: go in brutal, then when the damage is done, bring out the bandages and ointment.
In the end I came up with most of the best lines, while Stuart read the eulogy, me standing next to him like a loyal handmaid.
“Lovely words,” they murmured, shaking his hand as we stood greeting a snaking line of people.
“Thank you,” Stuart repeated each time, false deference dripping from him. Everyone got hand shakes, hugs and kisses, depending on how well we knew them. Some wanted more than they got from me, but then again everyone wants to be your best friend at your brother’s funeral. As it happened the last guest left Mum’s house at eleven-thirty that night, and even she was someone Mum hadn’t seen for years, a real grief-junkie that cried real tears. She’d eaten the last of the real sandwiches as well.
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