by Cowley, Joy
The truth was, he wouldn’t be sorry to leave the place. He liked the view of the harbour, but the house itself was lonely and had always been that way. Maybe because it was too big, like a shopping mall or business centre; lots of glass, marble floors, and spaces too open to be comfortable.
The loneliness had increased these past weeks. There was no one to talk to. Mr Sorensen was not like Eddie, who was always interested in people. The new gardener was a silent worker who preferred plants. As for Winston, he spent a lot of time in the office or outside, looking over the harbour with his own thoughts. All the fiery rage about the Sydney fraud, about Helen and Andrea and Beckett, seemed to have died down to cold ash. He looked burnt out.
That Sunday, Jeff kept thinking about Maisie. He wondered if she was still breathing, and how he could find out. Would it be possible to go to her funeral? Because he’d never been to a funeral, all he knew was what he had seen in films. Would he have to prove that he was related to Maisie? It bothered him that he had allowed the people at Aurora hospital to think he was her great-grandson.
He thought about the way Maisie had laughed when she said there was no such thing as death. At the time, he thought she meant she would go on breathing day after day and not stop. Of course that wasn’t it. It was about someone getting out of an old car that wouldn’t go any more. What did she call it? Rent-a-wreck.
It was raining again, traffic hissing on wet streets and umbrellas poking people at the bus stop. He didn’t have a waterproof jacket and by the time he’d walked up the hill, he was soaked to the skin and his hair was dripping in his eyes. He felt cold. He fumbled in a wet pocket for the electronic gate opener. He stopped by the gum tree and said out loud, “Maisie, I still don’t know how you got in here.”
Then he saw Andrea’s car. The little Toyota was parked in the middle of the yard, glistening with rain.
10
A FALLING OBJECT REACHES TERMINAL VELOCITY when the sum of the drag force and buoyancy equals the downward force of gravity acting on the object. Since the net force on the object is then zero, the object has zero acceleration. Drag depends on the projected area and that is why objects with a large area relative to mass, such as parachutes, have a lower terminal velocity than objects with a small area relative to mass, such as bullets.
Andrea had come home. She sat at the table, her hands around a cup, her eyes dull from weeping. Winston was standing beside her, angry, but not with his daughter. “If I get my hands on him, he’ll wish he’d never been born.”
Neither seemed to notice Jeff, who went to the fridge for a chocolate milk. Andrea put her head down in a fresh bout of crying and said, “It wasn’t him, Dad. It was me.”
Mark had gone back to his wife. Jeff knew something dramatic had happened when he saw the suitcases on the back seat of her car.
He wanted to feel sorry, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t the least bit sorry. He took his chocolate milk to the table and sat opposite her. “Hi, Andy.”
She didn’t look at him. Her long hair was loose around her face and she was wearing her blue T-shirt with the words Don’t tell me to have a nice day, which would have been be funny if she weren’t so unhappy. Winston stood near, hands in pockets, his mouth twitching as though it wanted to say something but he couldn’t allow it.
“Are you hungry?” Jeff said. “There are pizzas in the freezer.”
Andrea looked at him and her eyes filled up again. “He missed his children. That’s the only reason.”
He wanted to hug her but couldn’t reach that far, so he grabbed her wrists. “We missed you, Andy. It’s cool you’re back. What do you want? Hawaiian, Pepperoni or Seafood? They’re the thin-crust pizzas you like.”
“Oh, shut up, Squidge,” she said, and she put her head back down on her arms.
Winston turned to Jeff. “Call your mother, there’s a good lad.”
He wanted to tell his father that it wouldn’t work. Helen was not returning. The marks on her face had faded, but they were still inside her like deep cuts with ugly scar tissue. Even her voice was different, hard and determined and there was no way you could argue past it.
But there was pleading in his father’s eyes, so he made the call.
It was as he suspected. Helen was interested only in being proved right where Andrea was concerned. “This is not my problem,” she said. “If she’s old enough to create a mess in her life, she’s old enough to clean it up.”
* * *
The next morning, Andrea was reluctant to talk about the break-up. She was more or less back to normal, but she seemed older, quieter. At breakfast, she told Jeff there was no point in unpacking her suitcases.
He felt alarm. “You’re not going again!”
“We’re all going! Well, aren’t we? Don’t we have to move out of here in two weeks?”
He nodded.
“No one would think it. You and Dad have turned the place it into a pigsty. What happened to the cleaning? Everything’s filthy! Nothing’s packed! The place looks like a bombsite. Does Dad think he’ll wave a magic wand and it’ll all happen?”
“Something like that,” Jeff said. “He’ll get movers to put everything in storage and then the commercial cleaners will come.”
“What?” Her eyebrows came together. “Let’s get this straight. Everything goes into storage? So what’s put into the house we’re renting?”
“We’re not renting a house. Not yet.” He saw her frown deepen and he felt uncomfortable. “Dad says he doesn’t know what kind of house Mum wants. So we’re going to go to a motel for a few weeks.”
“Which one?”
Jeff looked at the floor. “The Market Motel.”
“The same as Mum?” She gave an explosive laugh. “The cunning old fox! You have to admit it – he’s a trier. Does Mum know?”
He shook his head.
“I’ll bet she doesn’t. As soon we move in, she’ll move out. What’s he thinking of?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeff. “He’s a bit lost without her.”
“He’s hitting the bottle,” Andrea said. “I could smell it as soon as I walked in, and he looks awful.”
“He’ll be better now you’re home, Andy. He’s missed you.”
His sister gave him a hard look. “Don’t you start!”
“Start what?”
“Emotional blackmail. Right now, you can pull the plug on your computer, little brother, and do some real work. You and I are going to clean up this disgusting place.”
The thought gave him a good feeling, working together, Andy and Squidge like before. But there was something he had to do first. “You said you’d give me Beck’s address,” he told her.
* * *
Winston had left the newspaper on the concrete by his wooden chair. It was close to the low wall that overlooked the harbour, but the breeze was still catching it, flapping a triangle of pages. A good gust would take it apart and spread it over the garden. Jeff went out to get it. He had been cleaning windows and was wearing purple gloves that were too big. He had to take them off to open up the paper on the table. This time, she was in the obituary column. He put his finger on the notice, Eleanor May Caldwell, age 89 years, funeral Aurora chapel. His finger stopped. This afternoon. The funeral was at three o’clock today!
He took the newspaper through to Andrea, who was dragging a mop over the white marble floor. “Look! It’s the old lady, Andy. She died.”
At first she didn’t understand and he needed to fill in details. She took the paper from him and read the notice. “Eighty-nine. No wonder she was a sandwich short of a picnic.”
“Her funeral’s this afternoon,” he said. “I want to go.”
“Why?” She looked puzzled.
It was too difficult to explain, not here and in the middle of house cleaning. “I just want to. I have to, and I need you to come with me. Please, Andy.”
“Why on earth would I go to the funeral of someone I don’t know?”
“But I know her. Andy, I’ve never been
to a funeral. I don’t want to do it on my own. Please! We owe it to her.”
“Because she came here in the storm? Oh Squidge! We don’t owe her anything. I hate funerals.”
He took the paper from her. “All right,” he said, “I’ll go on the bus.”
She snatched the paper back. “Where is it? Aurora chapel?”
“It’s in Newtown.”
“All right, all right.” She smiled in defeat. “You know why I came back here instead of staying with Mum? Of course you know. Because you are here! My squidgy little brother! So yes, bow down and thank me. I’ll take you to the funeral, but we’ll make it quick – there, in, out and back. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Cool! Thanks a million, Andy.” He stepped forward to hug her, but she had already turned away to mop the floor.
They would leave in an hour. He guessed it was wrong to feel excitement about a funeral, but there was no other word for it. He looked at the sky above the harbour, a blue that went on beyond seeing. He imagined Maisie, free as air, up there, waving her stick at him. Or perhaps there were two Maisies, both of them laughing. Or maybe none at all.
* * *
Andrea drove and Jeff directed her. She didn’t ask him how he knew where the Aurora retirement flats were, probably, he thought, because she wasn’t interested. Her concerns about Maisie were history. She had other things on her mind. He knew that. He also knew that she was doing this just for him, and that filled him with warmth. Usually, his sister made promises and then forgot about them. This wasn’t a promise. It was a sudden gift.
Her little car bumped over the rough driveway, past the green, box-like apartments, around the corner past the hospital, to a car park near a small building that had one word on a sign: CHAPEL. There was a black hearse in front of the building and two cars in the park.
“Not a big funeral,” Andrea said. “Hardly anyone.”
But she was wrong. The chapel was almost full, most of the people elderly, some in wheelchairs or with walking frames, and younger ones who would no doubt be the caregivers. He recognised the receptionist who had taken him to Maisie’s room.
Andrea was surprised. “How did they all get here?”
“They live here,” he whispered back.
Heads turned as they walked in. They sat in the back row near the aisle, and Jeff could see a wooden coffin on a stand, up front. It had a bunch of flowers on it. Some music was playing, the soft kind you heard in supermarkets, and there was a little pond with a fountain that trickled, though not in time to the music. He worked out the difference by tapping to the music with one hand, and the rhythm of the fountain with the other. He wondered if dead people could still hear things. Maybe spirits hung around to listen to what people said about them at their funerals. But that wouldn’t be so for Maisie, who had crossed over weeks ago. He guessed that the dream-keeper wouldn’t be hanging around, either.
After a while, his fingers stopped tapping the edge of his chair. The music had also stopped. In the room the air was so still it seemed that everyone was holding their breath, although they weren’t. He could hear them. Old people breathing. Louder than the splashing water.
A man in a dark suit came out from behind a curtain and started talking about Miss Eleanor May Caldwell, and then other people seated in the rows came forward and had turns talking about Maisie. The nurse who had been by the bed described her as a woman who celebrated life right to the end. “She knitted bonnets for newborn babies and taught us all to play poker. She wasn’t well, but she’d go out on her own and have all the staff looking for her. Once she got lost in a rainstorm and was taken to the public hospital. The next day she turned up at her unit, wearing a hospital gown and a towel. She’d simply walked out.”
People laughed. It seemed everyone knew the story.
“We had some explaining to do,” said the nurse. “But then that was Maisie. No one could give her orders. During World War Two she was in the air force in England, a bomber pilot who never got off the ground. She taxied those big aircraft around the airfields and ran up the engines for the pilots who’d fly them.”
A man pushed his walker forward and tapped the microphone, even though he knew it was working. “She could have a tongue sharp as a pick-axe, our Maisie. I took her some flowers once, and she told me to take a long walk off a short jetty.”
There was a roar of laughter and Jeff guessed the old people knew he wasn’t telling it all. The man grinned and pretended to look embarrassed. Then he said, “You had to hand it to her. She was a great storyteller.”
Jeff listened intently. Now he wondered if the dream-keeper was really Maisie making up a story. That could be. The things she’d told him had made a fantastically good story and parts of it slid over into his truth. He glanced at Andrea to see how she was reacting. She wasn’t. She had her head down, her phone out, and was texting someone. He hoped it wasn’t Mark.
Someone said that Maisie had pulled the flowers out of the unit gardens so she could plant vegetables. Someone else talked for a long time about Maisie’s involvement with the Labour Party. Finally, the man in the suit came back to the funeral speech. He had opened a book and was reading from it. “Once again Jesus addressed the people: ‘I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall wander in the dark; he will have the light of life …’”
Light, she had told him. Hold on to the Light.
People stood up to sing Maisie’s favourite song, “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”. Jeff had not heard it before, but he stood up and so did Andrea. His sister gave him a strong nudge. “Let’s get out of here before they start asking questions about who we are.”
* * *
As they drove away from the chapel, Andrea said, “Now you know what a funeral is like. Satisfied?”
“Yes. Oh yes! I’m glad you took me, Andy.”
“The mourners usually go somewhere afterwards for refreshments. Sandwiches, cups of tea, heaps of talk. We couldn’t do that.”
“I know,” he said, glad she had steered him away.
“It’s nearly five. If you’re hungry we can stop for Chinese.”
“No. We’d better get back to the cleaning.” But really, he was thinking of Winston who would be sitting in the wooden chair, a bottle beside it, staring out over the harbour.
At the top of the hill, he pressed the release button, the bronze gates opened inwards, and Andrea drove to the front of the garage. He got out and ran into the house while she put her car away.
His father was not in his usual place, which didn’t surprise him because the sun had disappeared and the air was now cold. He would be in his office. “We’re home, Dad!” he called, unzipping his jacket.
There was no reply. He walked through to Winston’s office. The light was on, the computer humming, but his father wasn’t there either.
“Dad?” he called. “Dad, are you home?”
That’s when he heard the noise, a long grunt that sounded strained. He ran into his parent’s bedroom. Winston was lying on the floor, one eye almost closed, the other wide open and rolling. “Ugh! Ugh!” He was wearing shorts and a grey striped shirt. A clawed hand reached towards Jeff and then fell back on the floor. There was spit coming from his mouth as he struggled to talk. “Ugh!”
Jeff ran from the room, yelling, “Andy! Andy!”
* * *
Andrea was right. It was a stroke. The ambulance people wheeled in a stretcher, lifted Winston onto it, and cranked it up as high as a bed. They didn’t take him out immediately. They gave him an injection and unbuttoned his shirt to listen to his heart. They stuck patches on his chest and plugged in wires connected to a machine. They put an oxygen mask over his nose. He kept making grunting noises and the open eye, rolling from one person to another, was still wide with fear. Jeff moved forward and took his father’s hand between his, but he was in the way of the paramedic and he had to drop the hand and step back beside his sister.
Helen must have left immediately after Andrea’s phone call
because she arrived while Winston was still in the house. It was just as well, because she could answer the paramedic’s questions. Only she knew the details. Who was Winston’s GP? Was he on any medication? Did he have health insurance? Helen looked calm, but her voice shook when she gave them information.
Now the wide-open eye was on Helen and Winston was struggling to speak. With his good hand he tore off the oxygen mask and made a blubbering sound that oozed spit. Helen shook her head. “You stupid man!” she said, but she sounded more upset than angry.
The paramedics wheeled the stretcher out of the bedroom, down the white corridor and around the corner into the living room. Andrea and Jeff held the doors open. Helen followed behind.
It was dark outside. As they put Winston into the ambulance, Andrea said to one of them, “Can my brother go with him?”
The man looked at Jeff, but before he could say anything, Jeff turned to his mother. “Mum, you go in the ambulance.”
She shook her head.
“He needs you!” His voice was strong. “You have to go!”
The man now looked at Helen.
She was trembling. “I can’t leave the children.”
Jeff grabbed her by the arm and steered her. “Mum! Go with Dad!” He heard his voice, loud like a strong wind blowing. “Stay with him! Andy and I will be fine.”
“You can sit in the front with me,” the paramedic told her.
Helen climbed in. The other paramedic got in the back with Winston and the doors closed. As the ambulance went out through the gates, Andrea said what Jeff was thinking. “She’s more afraid than he is.”
“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Jeff asked.
She put her arm around his shoulders. “Of course he will. Strokes are nothing these days.”
But he knew they were both thinking about the funeral, and the people with wheelchairs and crutches. It had felt so right to go there for Maisie, but if they had stayed home, Winston would have got help sooner. How could something be right and wrong at the same time?