There were many other things Sylvie’s family did that his did not. Guiseppa was always popping by with food, delicious casseroles and lasagnes that kept them from living off takeaways after they got home late after work. Her parents vocalised their joy, often at DB’s accomplishments: success in the courtroom, affixing a new number to the letterbox, completing all his meal. Sometimes they spoke to him in Italian and he would dazzle them with a clumsily executed ‘Molto bene!’ and they would applaud him as if he’d just delivered a poignant and stirring oration, while Sylvie, who understood the language but rarely spoke it, would roll her eyes at the praise.
‘It’s like they think you’re a simpleton,’ Sylvie would marvel.
‘It’s like they think I’m a god!’ he would crow.
Money was another area where their families differed, specifically in the giving of it. Having worked their way eventually onto the bottom rungs of the lower middle class, Sylvie’s parents had contributed to the purchase of the house, writing a cheque to cover the last few thousand to secure DB and Sylvie’s deposit in a loan it was understood they would never pay back. His had gifted them a potted lemon tree that had died not long after they’d put it in the ground. While Guiseppa and Nino did not expect the loan to be repaid, they maintained an unwavering determined insistence that one grandchild – while much revered – was not nearly enough to meet their quota. Despite her absolute adoration for her son, Guiseppa had long ago come to peace with the fact that if Tony had indeed fathered children, the likelihood was that she – and probably he – might never meet them. DB knew she lived with a secret hope that one day they would appear unannounced at the door, teenaged and longing for a nonna, like the storylines in her favourite Italian soap operas. But until this time came, she and Nino took solace in applying a constant malingering pressure on Sylvie, as if she was the heir to a royal lineage under strain to ensure its very existence. The heir and the spare, that’s what they wanted, because you never knew – and Christ forbid it – when a wolf might snatch Rudy from their clutches. And it wasn’t that he and Sylvie didn’t want more children, but they really should have done it a year or so ago before they’d upgraded the family car and landscaped the yard. All was not lost, though, because they’d be in a sound financial position when the promotion came through. With careful planning we can have it all, he liked to tell Sylvie, and he’d watched a great many TED Talks on this very subject. Financial security was a frame of mind, after all. Sylvie had rolled her eyes at this, but she was not by nature a planner. So it was up to DB to do the planning for both of them, and he’d managed it down to a fine, somewhat precarious line. And as long as nothing interfered with that line, everything would be just fine.
There was a tap at his toes and DB realised he had dropped his pace again. He pulled himself forward, returning to the email for Jonesy he’d been composing in his head. His mentee Nell had spent half the previous Friday with cappuccino froth caked across her top lip, which had been somewhat amusing, so maybe he’d include a line about that. Of all the grads Williams & Williams employed, he seemed to have been lumped with the crusading one, and she seemed to spend a considerable amount of time questioning the very foundations upon which the legal system was built, which for a lawyer was not an ideal position to take. It wasn’t that they were bad questions – insufferable yes, unintelligent no – but that they forced DB to think of answers to things he had never really thought about before. And she somehow found ways to make the legal system – which was seemingly a straightforward and transparent beast – into a windy labyrinthine being waiting about to trip up people like himself. A minotaur! That was it. She’d somehow made a minotaur of the law. This was how he would put it to Jonesy, who would no doubt be prompted to remember the handful of Classics classes they’d taken together in first year. But minotaur or no, the promotion would clear him of this because none of the department heads had to have mentees, and he made a mental note to put this in the email too. Then an update on Rudy – fascinated by nature . . . And Sylvie . . . well, they were sleeping separately now, nothing weird, just that he’d been snoring a bit more at night, muttering and whatnot from the stress, and, occasionally, apparently, shrieking from his financial night terrors, and it made sense because they both needed a good night’s sleep and god knew they had enough rooms . . . Sylvie is doing well. And as for him, the best part of the week had been not having bowel cancer. He’d been worried – worried about how long it took to take a shit these days – but the doctor had told him this was just how things were now, so that too was a victory of sorts. Do you think about fibre as much as I do these days, Jonesy? Life, eh!
DB dragged himself from the pool, towelled off and headed towards the change room. He would grab a coffee, jump on the tram, shoot off the email to Jonesy on the way into work, and get on with the business of starting his day.
3
Evangelia
My mother Xanthoula Georgiou (nee Anastasiades) was born in the port city of Lemosos, Cyprus, in 1941 to a Rhodian mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. Her father was a fabric merchant who owned a textiles store in central Lemosos. Like many women at the time, her mother did not work but stayed home to raise my mother and her two brothers Athanasios and Niko. As the eldest, my mother went to school so that she would be able to watch over her two young brothers and make sure they behaved. My grandfather’s store did very well until the war with the British when it was destroyed by fire. They stayed on for another year, trying to rebuild their lives, but things became very difficult with the fighting so they were sponsored by my mother’s uncle to come to Australia. My mother was sixteen at the time. They stayed with her uncle in Northcote, before they eventually bought a house of their own. My grandfather worked in the Pelaco factory because of his knowledge of textiles, and once more my grandmother stayed home to continue raising the family.
A few years after arriving, my mother was introduced to my father and they were married in the Holy Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady in East Melbourne. After a time, they moved to their own house in Northcote. My father worked for many years in the brickworks while my mother volunteered at the church and looked after the home. It was some time before they were able to have children, but my mother prayed every week and eventually my sister Lydia was born in 1968. I was born in 1971. My mother continued her duties raising our family and when we had children of our own, she helped Lydia and me to care for them. She continued to live in the same house in Northcote even after my father passed away of a heart attack at the very young age of sixty. Unfortunately my family were not so lucky and my mother died young too, at seventy-five.
Evangelia read back over what she had written. Shit. It was utter shit. It sounded like a eulogy which was exactly what she didn’t want it to sound like, and what was worse, it sounded like the most lifeless eulogy on earth. She saved the file, naming it MumsStoryVersion1_ShitVersion, then pushed her chair back from the desk. The wheels squeaked as they rolled and she spun it gently in a full rotation. Her head hurt – had been hurting since the bloody traffic jam dropping the kids off at school that morning – which was another headache on top of the existing headache still hanging about from the school holidays. She needed sugar. Maybe there was some of the baklava left that Peter or the kids hadn’t eaten yet. Unlikely, though. It had been the first sweet she’d allowed in the house since the funeral and they’d gone at it like feral animals, elbowing each other out of the way and getting the sticky syrup all over their uniforms. Even Peter, who was meant to be partaking in Lent, had tried half-heartedly to convince her it was allowed.
‘Nistisima my arse,’ she’d scoffed, rolling her eyes. ‘Your sister may as well throw in the cow for all the butter she uses.’
But he had ignored her, shovelling the wedges into his mouth as though he’d crossed the great desert himself, buttery syrup dripping down his chin and into his dark whiskers which he’d kept long, even after the forty days were through. It was one
of the many moments in her life that Evangelia was glad not to have company.
That had been one of the pluses since the funeral. That beautiful period when people weren’t supposed to visit, and they were expected not to socialise, and she’d been able to sit around at home in her tracksuit pants without fielding a thousand calls from Lydia or the other school mums about why she wasn’t at whatever fundraiser the school was currently holding. That school. It was like the Sydney Opera House. Once they finished one expensive renovation they started on another. The new music centre, the Olympic-sized swimming pool, the state-of-the-art theatre. And it wasn’t like she could refuse to help out on the basis that her children declined to participate in anything extracurricular. If it were a user pays system, Lydia would be bankrolling the whole thing with her overachieving children. If there was a stage, Lydia’s kids would be on it. They’d even made a performance out of the funeral, keeping quiet the secret that they’d brought along cuttings from her mother’s garden so that Yiayia could ‘take some of her garden with her to heaven’. And there were her own children, forgetting to bring the expensive roses she’d organised from the florist and having to make do with an ugly bouquet of daffodils that Peter had managed to find in the back of the little cemetery shop. This had set the tone for the rest of the mnimósina, with Nick and Xanthe squabbling in the car on the way to the nine days service, which graduated to actual physical fighting at the forty days while the priest was reciting the prayers. It had started like all their fights, over something trivial, which never seemed trivial when you were eight and ten years old and everything that happened to you seemed entirely important and unfair. Nick had turned to his sister, whispering in a too-loud-for-church voice, ‘Why is it forty days?’ and Xanthe had rolled her eyes at her little brother and replied, ‘Because of Jesus. Don’t you even listen to anyone, you idiot?’ and for some reason it had made sense to Nick to elbow her in response, which Xanthe had taken as an invitation to hurl her koliva at him, and then they’d both started clawing at each other because, embarrassingly, her children were scratchers.
The only blessing – which wasn’t really a blessing but an embarrassment – was that there hadn’t been many people there, but then there hadn’t been many people at the funeral either. Not like her father’s, because he had lived his life outside the home – the Greek Club, the brickworks, the market – while their mother’s world had revolved largely around the kitchen. And, to make matters worse, each time they seemed to get the Italian, a man who had converted to Orthodoxy after many years as a Catholic priest, and it unsettled Evangelia to have this man pronouncing her mother’s eternal blessings with his harsh y’s and ridiculous rolling r’s.
The embarrassment of the tiny attendance at the funeral had nothing on the embarrassment of a few weeks earlier, though. They’d gone to church for her mother’s three-month mnimósino, she and Lydia, and realised too late that neither of them had remembered to hand over the slip of paper with their mother’s name and the money to the Italian, so they’d sat through the whole service for a bunch of strangers.
‘We look like those crazy old ladies who sit in on other people’s funerals,’ she’d later hissed at Lydia, though, if she was honest with herself, deep down she was partly pleased that Lydia had slipped up. Before, it was their mother who held this knowledge, the name days and twelve months and other important dates. She’d managed it all with military precision, all the cemetery visits and overseas phone calls and lighting of candles on her little shelf of icons and memorial cards. Lydia was the oldest so it was meant to be her job now. She knew Lydia didn’t see it like this, though. Lydia was – and it nauseated Evangelia to use the phrase – a self-described ‘cultural’ Greek, a phrase she brought out often in defence of her preference to pick and choose what suited her from their Hellenic heritage. From what Evangelia could see, it basically meant that anything Lydia wanted to do was ‘cultural’ and anything she didn’t was ‘a relic of a conservative and patriarchal tradition’. Lydia wanted to attend church for the mnimósino and afterwards invite people into her home to drink port and tell her how strong she was. Lydia didn’t want to wear black or refuse social events during the forty days of mourning because it was an imposition on her personal life. This had not been the case fifteen years ago when they’d buried their father, but according to Lydia, that was different. There had been more people watching, for one thing, and a proper Greek priest. So this time Evangelia alone had clothed herself in black, shuttered herself inside and ensured that no well-intentioned person made the mistake of bringing sweets to the house or calling them away. During those weeks she’d thought about her mother a lot, how her soul was meant to be wandering the earth, revisiting all the places she’d lived, but she’d only really lived in three places so it wouldn’t have been much of a trip. She’d probably skipped off to Heaven early, so the joke was on Evangelia sitting alone by herself dressed in black and not eating pastries. To Lydia, this was all an unnecessary act, a pointless show from a bygone time of village gossip and nonsensical superstitions. It was not, according to Lydia, how things were done anymore. Lydia liked to tell people how things should be done, and the person she liked to tell most was Evangelia. Only drink filtered water, Eva. Don’t let your children watch television on school nights, Eva. Your husband’s cholesterol is a symbol of the love you have for him and the state of your marriage, Eva.
Lydia and her husband, Darren, who was not an actual Greek but was, according to Lydia, culturally so, had raised two handsome blonde children who engaged in various cultural activities such as Greek dancing and bouzouki playing and language lessons, and were far better at these than their dual-Greek-parented cousins. Sometimes Evangelia would complain about this to her husband but, being the youngest child and only son, and therefore possessed of a hearty and secure sense of self, Peter brushed this off as he did much of Lydia’s behaviour.
‘We own a gyros shop and you’re constantly busting my balls – what’s more cultural than that?’
Then she would press him to list her older sister’s faults, and he would rummage around in his memory, offering vaguely satisfying barbs.
‘Her tiropita has hairs in it sometimes. This is a fault.’
Much of the problem lay in the fact that Nick and Xanthe were incredibly lazy, and this was exacerbated by the ready proximity they maintained to assorted technological items. Both had laptops, iPhones, iPads, iPods – which were apparently different – and the Xbox they’d pleaded for but rarely used because it meant sitting together in the living room as opposed to alone in their bedrooms. Sometimes, and far more recently of late because their yiayia’s passing had meant spending substantially longer periods in Lydia’s vicinity, Evangelia would bundle all the technology into a box and refuse to let them use it until they’d demonstrated some act of Greekness to her. They would whimper and plea, before eventually offering a sad little sirtaki as if they were at the end of a long and exhausting aerobics class, and Peter, who was meant to be the disciplinarian, would look at her like she was a monster.
Evangelia stopped spinning her office chair and glanced at her watch. She should probably put something onto the table soon or else Peter’s appetite would get the better of him and he’d end up eating a meal before their actual meal, and god knew where in the stratosphere his cholesterol was these days. One of the problems with owning a food service, he told her often, was that he spent the day in a constant state of hunger due to the meat juices circulating through the air. He maintained himself at work – there were customers there, after all – but, once home, became ravenous and tore apart the pantry, particularly on nights like tonight when he let one of the staff close up so he could join the family for dinner. He’d put on weight recently but instead of connecting this to his eating habits, he’d become convinced he was suffering some kind of debilitating ailment. He’d google things as he ate, and sift through the many possible illnesses that could be behind this baffling yet
steady weight gain. So far he’d considered hyperthyroidism, oedema and a range of unlikely cancers. Evangelia did her best, bringing him salads and healthy meals when she dropped by the store to pick up the takings or work on the books or the thousands of other things she did to keep the place afloat. She’d often find them on the next visit, untouched and mouldering. This was another thing that Lydia commented on, as if the fact Evangelia didn’t have a job title equated to her not having a job. As if running a small business – and a house – was not a job. Lydia had a job because she was cultural. She was a university lecturer and taught subjects on social identity and cultural anthropology. Darren had been one of her students and was noticeably younger than her. If you thought about it too much – which Evangelia sometimes did by accident – it was a little nauseating. Peter referred to her as Kyría Robinson, which Evangelia still found hilarious.
The Book of Ordinary People Page 4