After

by Nikki Gemmell

  EPIGRAPH

  Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.

  Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

  Anne Carson

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Pictures

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Nikki Gemmell

  Copyright

  1

  Have you ever done what you dread to do, identify someone close to you in a morgue, on that thin steel table? I did. Just now. And I have to write this out, to piece together what has happened into some kind of coherence. And because writing is my ballast through life’s toss.

  Carry me in on a stretcher from this experience, carry me in.

  *

  Air from another world. In this concrete box of another world, an other-world, that is hushed and windowless. It is a morgue. It is too close to death. ‘The mouth is always a shock,’ T, the coronial assistant, is warning us.

  Eh? What?

  Bird-like, half our age, a face marinated in kindness, T is doing her best to prepare my brother Paul and myself before we step into the viewing room where a body awaits us. A body that the police need identified urgently on this sunny weekend of too much life everywhere else. ‘No one’s ever prepared for, er, how the lips look,’ T adds.

  Here, now, stopped of talk. My mouth a fistful of feathers. In this public service waiting room that is too public service for its task. Glarily new, foreign. Neither Paul nor myself have ever stepped inside such a place. Morgue. The very word a moan, a sullenness. And this building has seen too much life, in all its variety; has seen what it means to be deeply, vulnerably human, too much. You can feel it. The too many tears in this sparsely furnished room of strategically placed tissue boxes. That’s a lot of weeping. These walls, the collectors of tears.

  Paul and I are bound together within the fresh shock of this world. It feels like us against everything else. It is all too new. Every conversation feels mined. Full of barbing surprises we do not want to know about. So we prefer not speaking, if at all possible. Can’t. Much. Stopped. T seems to understand.

  *

  But so much. To ask here. In this public place of too much death. Unpicking the knot of whatever has gone on. Head burning. Yet my brother and I are treading carefully where we do not want to tread at all. And amid the weight of the un-knowing there are formalities to be carried out, fast. Like this. Identification of Body. Which we have seen in countless television police procedurals that are nothing like this. This pedestrian world, and our mouths, stopped.

  A rupturing. As I wait for The Identification. So that matters can proceed. I feel like a child who has done something wrong. Called to the headmistress’s office and not sure why. Something is peeling away. Within. It is monumental. It feels akin to great splinters of ice falling from an iceberg, it feels like a slipping into vulnerability I have never known. Huge walls of defence are crumbling here. I am forty-nine for God’s sake. Have never been this. Have never felt this.

  So. Right. Not as strong as I’ve assumed. Cannot contain the vulnerability flooding out yet no one knows it is there. A vulnerability I’ve managed to contain my entire life and now, and now, cannot. I am hurtling into the unknown.

  *

  I look across at Paul. Just as stricken as myself. Does he, like me, know too much yet not enough with all this? Everything is too complex, messy, muddy. A longing right now for simplicity, that great medicine of life. For the fatness of normality. The restful quiet; all those nibbling little challenges of an everyday life, which are no challenges at all I now know.

  Brain, flooded. With too much. With this death too close and branded suspicious. Which means police involvement. A likely autopsy. Endless questions beyond it. And I’m the person who walks through Customs at an Australian airport blushing over the box of chocolates I do not have in my suitcase but am thinking about. Here we go on the shipless ocean, here we go.

  2

  ‘The mouth is always a shock,’ T has said.

  Paul and I do not understand. Need help here. Need help actually in more ways than one. A sympathetic smile warms her eyes; T is the coronial assistant to have. Can she speak for us too, talk to the cops, hold our hands?

  ‘It’s slightly open,’ T adds.

  Open. Oh. Right. A smile back at her. A nod. Crazed. This can be dealt with. Am I unhinged here? Great cleavings of ice, splitting from their iceberg. Need something to hold, to steady myself. No. This can be done. Yes of course Paul and I can handle it. ‘I’ve seen her mouth open before,’ too breezy, guilty as sin but not. ‘It’s how she sleeps sometimes.’

  T frowns. Perhaps I am coping too well, perhaps she can see right through me. ‘No, this is different. It’s the . . . set . . . of it.’ Oh. The thought of whatever that means hovers in the air. Paul and I are the amateurs at death and doesn’t T know it. This woman with her background in counselling who is so gentle before us both. With the nest of hands at her stomach, with the expectant and compassionate face. She is here on this sunny Saturday for the countless reeling families before us and after us, here for the sudden, unhinging Friday and weekend deaths, for the bodies that have to be identified because the police demand it so they can begin their investigations and move the corpses on swiftly in this city morgue not built to purpose, and packed.

  *

  Head, work. Shaking it as if shaking a listening into it. Everything has to be concentrated upon, everything said from now on has to be carefully thought out. Words, filtered. Watchfulness, full alert. And T is giving Paul and myself the feeling that this is the first time she has ever spoken about the stubbornness of a dead person’s mouth; as if this is the first time she has ever forewarned visitors who want to be anywhere but here, who are lost and scrabbling and dissolving in front of her just like us. Clever that. And we are like two small animals in headlights stopped before her. Holding each other. All we have right now, as broken as each other in this place.

  *

  T tells us we can touch the body. ‘Kiss it?’ I blurt, not even sure I want to.

  It? It? What’s this it? T nods. She’s seen everything, her face tells us that. We can stroke it, hug it, hold it or none of that. T tells us there will be a folded blanket under the head. Another drawn across the chest. She tells us the hands have been carefully placed across the blanket and the feet will be bare. As if by giving us as much detail as possible she can get us through this, can lessen the shock. No. She cannot.

  *

  Another family – a huddle of eight – emerges from the viewing room. Red eyed, clutching hands, leaning in on tender arms. Another family at the morgue on this infinitely lonely, infinitely wild Saturday, going through what we are going through. As Paul and myself reel in silence within the baldness of the waiting room, unanchored. The past feels already antique. For that was the mother time, with a mother in it.

  A well-dressed woman crosses over to us. I steel myself as does Paul. Can feel his subtle retreat because small talk is beyond either of us right now, connection unwanted. As we sit, bereft, on the stained plastic seats of grimy utilitarianis
m that seem like an insult in this place.

  ‘I’m sorry for keeping you waiting.’ Oh. The woman is speaking. To us. Paul and I look up. We shake heads in quick denial. Find a smile. Connect. For we recognise the bewilderment in her face, the vulnerability in her eyes, the leaking nostrils beyond her control that her hand flutters to contain with a tissue. Oh yes. The body ahead of ours was someone extremely close to this woman and the death is a felling shock just like our mother’s is to us; she is still processing her new existence just as we are. Paul and I both blurt out empathy, ‘Please, no.’ ‘It’s fine, really.’ ‘Take all the time you need.’ ‘We understand.’

  In that moment, two huddles of grieving family look at each other. Nod. Smile. Beyond words. Beyond talk. All of us recognising that every person in this room has entered a strange new existence glary with fragility, all of us united by tenderness and shock. And even though we will never come across these people again the connection feels deep because of how we’ve all seen each other on this effulgent Saturday of a world outside at full shout, except for us. This dingy waiting room is sanctified in that moment by a something faint, a flutter of connecting humanity. It is affirming and good and then they are gone.

  *

  T indicates that it is our turn for whatever is next. The people behind the scenes are powering through this body-viewing morning. Hey there’s sun outside. Paul and I steady each other and walk across to the viewing room, vulnerability helmeting us both. And there she is. In a tiny space barely as long as a coffin, on the other side of a curtain that runs the length of the room at table height. Our mother is very much on the other side. A police officer, Constable B, is quiet in the corner. She came to my house yesterday with her grim news, she is shadowing me on this journey, watching. This is the reality now. Being observed.

  *

  So. We were not prepared for the beautiful model’s mouth slightly open, askew, the mouth that had already set itself awry through rigor mortis even then, so soon. Not prepared for the cold in the flesh, the refrigerated chill that had already penetrated the bones; the body that felt triumphantly cold through every firm inch of its flesh. Not prepared for clawed hands curled as if in agony at some final, sudden resistance we will never know of, or perhaps it was merely post mortem’s creeping clutch drawing the skin tight. Not prepared for the slight smell of death, even in this building of officious signage and standard, plastic, waiting room seat; they couldn’t scrub that, oh no. Not prepared for this to be Mum.

  *

  It is not sleep. My mother’s wilfully youthful body is stiff and unworldly and gone, utterly gone. To an other-world or no world at all. Her haunting hands in agony’s clench. I am alone now. Paul is alone. And so is she.

  Wanting to hold her. My mother, Elayn. Lift her. Press her into me as she would ram me close whenever I was ill, even as an adult. She’d hold me tight and soothe that she wished she could take the sickness from me, as if she wanted to leech it from my bones; she couldn’t bear to see a child of hers suffering; needed their equilibrium and nothing else. It is the most vivid memory of her love – a mother’s unbound love – and now it is lost. The enveloping of it. Gone.

  As are the conversations. The personal history, family history. It was all to come, all, until of course it wasn’t. I’ve lost the calm of the cushionings when we were both at our best, for nothing was more wanted in life: to be loved unconditionally by a parent, to be cherished for exactly who we are.

  *

  The sense of abandonment. Here. In this place. The obscenity of that. The shell of our mother, the skin on her face already sinking into the hollows of her skull. Giving her that distinct, distancing, mask of death. It is not Elayn but an eviscerating absence more skull than life. It is our mother. It is not. And as I weep over her – I love you, I love you so much – I think, for a trick of a moment, I catch her mouth move in its familiar acknowledgment, a movement of infinitely small regret. At what she’d done. To herself. To us. I’m going mad here. Splintering. Will not be put right. Never, no, broken for the rest of my life. Because I know too much.

  *

  Stroking and stroking the softness of the silvery blonde hair, adult now to the child. Harangued by the guilt, at the words never said before to her. In her living, brittle, waiting life, with such conviction or force. I love you so much.

  *

  My mother’s facial skin is radiantly smooth in death. We ask T if she is wearing makeup. If someone’s put it on her or if she did herself, before death. The flesh has the sheen of a creamy foundation. I tell T that makeup would be a signifier of intent, a sign that Elayn had prepared for the final dramatic moment, which would be very her. The beautiful woman, always so careful of appearances, presenting to the world her best self. Every day, for a good hour or so, the symphony of her preparation in her tiny bathroom. The rows of cosmetics plucked from their glass shelves, like a Michelin chef at her kitchen.

  T plucks out a tissue from yet another strategically placed box and lightly runs it across Elayn’s cheek – no, no makeup. The radiance is her beauty, luminous even in death. Of course. Yet already her features are shrinking into the bone, becoming skull-like. Uncannily just as my grandmother had looked in her final days in a nursing home, as death crept over her and pushed life out. Already something else is stealing Elayn from us. I can feel the greed of it in the smell; the mouth’s set.

  *

  A lonely death above all. ‘Hold her hand, Nikki, hold her hand,’ Paul beseeches for I’m closest to the fingers on the steel table. He’s standing back near her feet. I do hold Elayn’s hand. Clutch it tighter than it’s ever been held in its life. Need her to feel this.

  *

  In these reeling hours, an uncurling of something fresh within. I am becoming someone else and need a rescuing from it. A bringing in from this new world.

  Unhinged: To separate, to disconnect. Upset. Confused. Mentally unbalanced, deranged. A basket case. Unglued. Yes that is good, the best. That is it. As Alice said in her Wonderland, ‘I can’t explain myself . . . because I’m not myself.’

  3

  Who was she, this complicated woman now lying before her shattered son and daughter on this thin steel table on a Saturday morning of too much life everywhere else? Nothing has ever been as dramatic in our lives as our mother’s leaving of it. Elayn is more trouble in death than in life, and we were never expecting that.

  So I write, in an attempt to understand – now, too late – what shaped Elayn and specifically her final act that has aroused the suspicions of the police. I can do nothing else but question, query, probe right now. The mystery of my mother and her death is crowding out everything else. So. To write a woman into being. To write her back. Because I am wintering into bewilderment here.

  *

  Elayn, gone. And the ceramic lanterns that my children have made. In shardy slivers at my feet.

  *

  Lanterns carried across oceans from London to Sydney. Snugged in a tiny wooden crate constructed especially for them by a removalist with careful hands. As he held up several delicate cylinders to the light he made a promise that he would keep them safe, to trust him. And after six weeks of reeling and bracing in a steel shipping container the lanterns were returned to me in perfect condition in their bed of compacted straw.

  And now. Nothing of the lanterns left, irretrievably, at my feet.

  The wind did it. The lanterns didn’t stand a chance, poor buggers. The furious wind that an Aboriginal elder once told me comes into a community after death and sweeps the spirit away; sweeps the world clean of them. A snappy snarl of a wind lifted my painting that is the length of a man clean from its two hooks and crashed it down upon my row of lanterns that had survived a rolling sea journey. Take that, and that, everything that is cherished. Everything that is keeping you calm and quiet.

  *

  Nineteen of them. Different heights and widths, none higher than a pencil. Their brittle white glows with a honeyed luminosity when a tea light
is placed inside and lit. For the great exhalation. A ritual of solace, most evenings. Whatever country, whatever city I am living in.

  *

  Lumen is the consecrated light that enters sanctuaries and lumen is what these ceramic chronicles of collective memory created. I would loosen, every night, within the benediction of the light. Now they are in pieces. As am I.

  *

  Each porcelain cylinder had been stamped with geographical details from a specific pocket of the English countryside, from when we lived there. A world child-height and most likely hidden from adults. So, the prickling of blackberry thorns from Malmesbury. The rolling of conkers from Tetbury. The soldier line of twigs cloaked in moss from Edinburgh. The defensive swirl of an ammonite thousands of years old from Lyme Regis echoed in the spiral of a shell from Mawgan Porth. Also, the prick of a banksia cone from Sydney’s Tamarama. The triangulated tip of a eucalyptus seed from Wollongong. A gum leaf’s arresting slenderness from Awaba. Relics from spiky Australian holidays of a toughening up, when we would open our faces to the sun and walk through long grass barefoot, unlocked by the light.

  Embedded in ceramic is the natural history of my children growing up. The earth they’ve raced across, the trees they’ve climbed. The blackberries gobbled that have been lazing over forgotten dry-stone walls, rockpools hovered above in poky curiosity, pebbles picked through and pocketed and later transferred to secret boxes in far corners of small desks.

  Earthy treasures that were stamped into damp rectangles of porcelain which were then rolled into cylinders. Fired with held breath, for some didn’t survive this final reckoning. Our little coracles of balm would then be lined up in our living room in whatever country we were in, their golden light flickering in the close dark. Porcelain tubes representing everything held dear. Simplicity. The handmade. Care. Creativity. The natural world. Memory. Family. Love. Light.

  *

  Pieces on the floor. Lanterns cracked. A fistful of feathers in a mouth. A world stopped. How can I step back into the world again, how can I recover myself?