After

by Nikki Gemmell

  Sadness, above all. At piles of accumulations. Files and papers and boxes stacked in the lounge room, eating it up with neglect. At the ugly, fusty, patterned carpet that had been there for decades and even thirty-odd years ago had seemed burdened by too much dust. At three crowded bedrooms of endless, useless clothes; a lot never worn. At gaps where furniture had once been; the only sign of its absence indented markings on the carpet. What had Elayn been doing? Selling it?

  Stains on the bathroom roof. Mould in a neglected ceiling corner. Faded furniture that had seen better days, imitation antiques that would never be anything but imitation antiques. It felt desolate, like an old lady hoarder’s house. In an instant my thinking about my mother shifted, lifted. Into understanding. The knot of anger towards her softened into something else. Pity. It all felt so . . . lonely. Elayn wasn’t being selfish or imperious or snobby by not allowing the rabble of my family near her world – she was being protective. Of herself.

  *

  On this gruelling morning of sifting and searching, Elayn’s sewing room is a time capsule. Next to the old machine perches the wicker sewing box of mysterious entanglements and its companion, the tall button jar, packed to the rim with alluring samples of tweed and silk, velvet and ivory. I can see so clearly the curve of Elayn’s concentrated back over the machine, making her creations. Can hear the pulse of its whirr, stopping and starting, an aural rhythm of absorbing work that my daughter will never know.

  Elayn was always trying to change me with that machine. Designing a different girl’s primary school uniform because she didn’t like the fit of the official one. Copying kids’ clothes in velvet and lace from the variety music show Young Talent Time. Organising tiny, plastic, serrated wheel-like attachments for my school shoe heels that forced my feet outwards and stopped me from being pigeon-toed. Forever tampering, moulding, bettering.

  *

  At seventeen, Elayn bought me a school formal dress. It was expensive, frilly, wrong. I couldn’t tell her at the time it just wasn’t me, I didn’t want to crush her enthusiasm in the shop. Eventually, I made one myself. Sequins and chiffon, on her machine. I offered to pay for the one she bought me with my own pocket money. Looking back, my handmade effort was awful. But as always with Mum I had to do it my way. I wouldn’t listen. Throughout her life Elayn had never experienced such thorough, consistent, rejection as from me, her daughter.

  *

  The fridge on this bleak morning is a snapshot of a life well preserved, crammed with monotonous health. Prunes and soy milk, cooked rice, fish ready for steaming, green vegetables, a carton of skinny milk I’d bought Elayn a week previously still tipped on its side, just as I’d left it, barely touched. She ate little in her final weeks, didn’t get much enjoyment out of it. All appetite for living lost.

  *

  Some parents believe that if you want a child to do well you ignore them. Never give them praise or love, never throw them the juicy bone of attention. All my achievements feel like a scream to be noticed. Yet my mother would barb with cruelty. Quote back paragraphs to me of bad reviews for my books, word perfect; she had memorised the most cutting of phrases. Or talk about similar writers to myself with extravagant praise while pointedly saying nothing about a book of my own just out. Or say that she was going to write a book herself, it was easy, just wait. Beyond the sting of the hurt I assumed Elayn was a product of her generation. An Australia that didn’t big-note or boast; that gleefully cut down its tall poppies. With pursed lips, she was making sure her daughter was kept in her place.

  As we’re going through the flat Paul and I find a box of clippings. My press. Twenty years’ worth. Interviews and articles, many I’ve never seen before. I could never bear to look closely at any of it; it never felt really me; I usually hated the photos and was frustrated when misquoted or quoted out of context so hadn’t been too bothered about collecting it all. Yet Elayn carefully cut out and catalogued a boxful of articles. She gave me a life’s stretch of tut; when talking with me about my writing she was often suspicious, censorious, wary.

  But then secretly, this.

  Is there love here? Love is the gift of attention. This is attention. I take the box home for what it says about Elayn rather than me. She actually, deeply, cared. Oh.

  *

  Elayn is the embodiment of Proust’s mother, who addled her son so potently by continually failing to climb the stairs to kiss him good night. And so I left, to pursue a writing life. Somewhere else, always somewhere else. Wanting anywhere but home.

  Patrick White said, ‘I knew more or less before I arrived that my mother and I could not live in the same hemisphere.’ He said he always found that something positive, either creative or moral, came out of anything he experienced in the way of affliction. And so he wrote.

  Being removed from Elayn’s world was my fuel.

  *

  Paul and I retreat. A last sweep of the flat, checking that power switches are off and windows secured. The world of Elayn’s home – her centre, her nest – is now lifeless. Waiting with breath held for the next person or people, whoever that may be. This is one of the last times my brother and I shall see all the familiar possessions we’ve known our entire lives; waiting forlornly now for dispersal, and forgetting. The shock of white secateurs from toddler days, even though Elayn hasn’t had a garden for decades. A biscuit tin from the very first house we lived in, a modest white weatherboard barely altered even now. A desk with a map of the world on it that we both studied on. A Noritake tea set Elayn was so proud of, for so long, then just wanted to offload but never got around to it. Plastic biros from decades ago, no longer in shops. The flat reflects nothing of the dazzling public image so carefully cultivated. In this lair that is Elayn’s real world, her life was closing over her. All around Paul and I are the humble accruals of a little, elderly, exhausted life. That no one else would want. Including us.

  *

  Taken, Elayn’s scarves. Fifty or so. She had many, in a blare of brightness, to cover the surgical scar on her throat. The scarves smell thickly of her as do her clothes, smell of her washing powder and White Linen perfume. I open her cupboard and breathe deep. Oh to bottle that smell.

  A while ago, at a funeral, I’d seen each church pew draped with a woman’s lifetime of scarves, and all the congregation was invited to take one home as a memory at the service’s end. I’d spoken to Elayn of this at the time and she thought it a grand idea. We had no idea that the gesture would be used at her own funeral just a few, fragile months later.

  *

  The secret loneliness of Elayn’s flat. Her motto through life: ‘If I rest, I rust.’ She knew that with rupture we’re always learning something new, if we’re open to it, and she was courageously unafraid of change. Except when it came to this, her flat. The disconnect between public and private is almost violent. Many acquaintances knew only the vivacious woman who seized life; who loved her theatre and film and writers’ festivals and travel. Few knew the other woman, prone to depression, alone in her stale flat. And in the end this world won. It swallowed her up.

  *

  Paul and I need repairing threads of gold to put us right, here, now. With our mother’s presence filling out these rooms there had been a transformation of the ordinary; everything had a story, a preciousness. With Elayn gone her possessions hold no allure. They languish unwanted, unclaimed. Everything feels abandoned now.

  What to do with all the photos of strangers – at functions, on South Pacific cruises, cradling unrecognised babies. It feels like sacrilege to ditch them. All those lives, treasured by someone; yet Paul and I leave them for someone else and walk away from this desolate place with heavy, inadequate hearts.

  We’re no good at this.

  13

  Officialdom is not asking for access to Elayn’s body – it’s declaring it.

  Paul and I do not fight the autopsy ruling; we have no fight left in us, over anything. We need closure too, need our uncertainties erased. The procedure w
ill be invasive. Our mother will be dramatically cut open. To soften the blow, perhaps, we’re told that the doctor wants to check if our mother’s cancer had come back. If this, possibly, was a cause of her anguish.

  In the world of inconclusive death and police procedurals, things move fast; the autopsy is to be performed the day after the coroner’s request. T, our familiar counsellor from the morgue, is sympathetic but clear on the phone: this may provide answers but it may not, that is the way of these things. We have to be prepared. She the protector, shadowing our grief.

  *

  One question hovering above all: Elayn robbed us of a mother – or did she? Paul and I still hope, somehow, that it was an accident. A deliberate choice is just too rejecting.

  *

  The funeral. Have to get on to it. People pressing us, time pressing us; she can’t stay refrigerated in that crammed morgue forever. Paul suggests a firm staffed by women. ‘So Elayn.’ One that promises the Australian way of death, with a woman’s touch. Attendants wear white jackets and smart hats at the service. It’s exactly how Mum would have wanted it; a panoply of strong, efficient, organised, appreciative women to send her off.

  The funeral director, G, is older, motherly. Over a cup of tea the grief cannot be contained, she pushes a tissue box towards me. She understands, has seen it all, will get me through this. Paul is back in Newcastle but on speakerphone. I select the wood of the coffin like we’re selecting kitchen cupboards. There’ll be speeches and poems, the vibe will be vibrant, the colours of the flowers youthful and bright. All, so very, Elayn.

  *

  I shy away from volunteering to dress my mother. I cannot imagine seeing her without clothes. Her body has revolted me ever since I saw it naked, often as a teenager, as she’d wander around the flat with no clothes on, doing her hair and makeup, organising herself. I do not want to see the ravages of the autopsy, nor revisit the unearthly coldness of her flesh all over again. I selected Elayn’s funeral clothes as if she was going to a wedding. The good clothes from her cupboard door, the bra among her satiny best, underpants pristine, shoes polished. Am glad it will be G doing this intimate women’s business, that I know her.

  Elayn will travel from the church service to the crematorium without us. We’ll farewell her at the church. A collective decision. Not sure if it’s right. G assures me it happens a lot now; that the crematorium is very far away, through heavy traffic, it’s an anticlimax after the service, the cars lose their tight processional order as others cut in. I worry that Elayn will be alone for her final hour on this earth. Without us. Still, she chose lonely, at the end.

  *

  Ticky’s high school rings in the thick of the funeral arranging. It’s his house tutor, who oversees his pastoral care. My eldest has come into her office and broken down. ‘What happened to my nonna,’ he has cried. ‘Why were the police involved? Was she murdered?’ The school has umbrellaed us with their concern since I told his house tutor of the death after the police had left my house on the Friday, while the boys were still at school. Ticky’s housemaster had rung me at home on the Saturday morning and again on the Sunday night, to see how both sons were travelling, how we all were travelling. The moving kindness. And now this.

  The school tells me that Ticky needs help. As soon as possible. They have a counsellor on tap; I had no idea. They want my poor, bewildered, broken boy to see her as soon as possible, today, this lunchtime if possible. It’s that urgent. But she wants to speak to me first.

  *

  Breaking, afresh. Cannot hold the pieces of all my family together. Explaining through new tears to C, the school counsellor, that we haven’t yet told the boys their beloved Nonna may have killed herself. Only that Nonna died in her sleep. We don’t know the cause yet. I tell C I’m not sure how long I can keep the story up. Until this point our house has been a leaden mix of lowered voices when children enter the room; of clamming up and shutting down, lowered eyes and evasion. But Nonna Chose to Leave Us? It’s too momentous right now. Too blunt.

  *

  ‘You have to tell Ticky the truth,’ C counsels. ‘And your thirteen year old. If you don’t, they’ll find out eventually. And they’ll be so angry at you for lying to them, for not treating them as adults. They’ll hate you for it. Grieve all over again, which means they’ll be grieving twice.’

  Yet what, exactly, is the truth here? Everyone seems to be assuming something my brother and I are not, just yet. Or can’t face. Head cram, too much. I explain to C that our family isn’t into therapists, have never had a need of one; we aren’t against them in any way, just aren’t used to them. She says Ticky needs to see her. The school wants him to. It needs my permission.

  I give it. C won’t tell him anything specific, she’ll leave this to me. ‘But I’m worried – and it’s ridiculous, I know – that their lives will somehow be stained by knowing that there’s a suicide in the family. That in some awful moment of anger, some silly, mindless fit of teenage angst, they might run outside and do something stupid like throw themselves off a cliff.’

  C tells me teenagers are affected by the suicide of their peers, but it’s a different story with older people around them. They’re not a trigger in the way the copycat suicides of teens can be. G, the funeral director, concurs. My boys have to be told. She’s been in enough situations to know they’re old enough and can take it. They’ll deal with it in their own way.

  *

  And then like some ridiculous farce of too-muchness, in the midst of all this the coroner’s assistant, T, calls.

  It is done. The model’s body dissected. Would Elayn have known this invasive autopsy would be happening to her, as a consequence of how she died? Results, I am told, are ‘pending’. Won’t be known for a month or months. G had told me this is the case in ninety per cent of autopsies. So, still no definitive answer. ‘Can you tell me anything?’ I plead to T.

  ‘The doctor did say that your mother had the most unbelievably healthy internal organs.’ I think of Elayn’s fridge crammed with all its fashionable health; its rice and fish and quinoa and prunes. ‘He had never seen such splendid ones in someone her age. They were incredibly well preserved.’ So. Several more decades left in her. Right. Her mother had lived to one hundred and Elayn could have done that too.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you this,’ T adds, ‘but the doctor did remark that she had the most beautiful aorta he’d ever seen.’ Of course. Even internally Elayn was physically dazzling. All this well-intentioned detail is all the more heartbreaking. The waste. Of a good, healthy, vibrant life. ‘There was no cancer,’ T adds. ‘But the doctor did say that he could tell from your mother’s feet that she had been in a lot of pain. There was also scoliosis of the spine.’

  Oh Mum. That her final months were so weighted with all that. Scoliosis, the twisted spine, the crippling disease that teenagers get and none of us knew. But it was in her walk in her final weeks. In her body twisted in agony around a walking stick. In my memory of a mother who seemed suddenly shrunk to almost half her height.

  *

  C, the counsellor, rings after lunch. It’s been a good session. ‘He’s such a beautiful boy.’ I know, oh I know, and I’m fighting my hardest to keep him that way.

  *

  The teenage boys arrive home from school earlier than the little ones. We tumble into our extravagantly oversized armchair that can accommodate all three of us. I hold them, stroke them, breathe them in deep, just like I used to when they were toddlers. They do not resist, rare at this age. Deep breath. Time for the truth. That Nonna may have overdosed accidently on her painkillers. That she had spoken of the agony to them, remember, had been hobbling and twisted in this very room. But it’s more likely that she possibly, perhaps, took her own life.

  A pause. The boys absorb it. Many questions. They sense a narrative taking shape. Clarity trickles into their thinking. It feels like something has lifted between us. The air has cleared. As we talk, adult to adult. For what feels like the first time in ou
r lives. Adult concepts, adult ways. Our relationship has shifted into a different plane. The counsellor was right.

  *

  That night, in Ticky’s eyes, a knowledge that he has entered some grown-up world of limitless complication. A world of pain and sadness, failure and despair that he has never, deeply, known. But he can take it. The resilience of the young. Something within him is repairing, moving on. He wants to see the school counsellor again tomorrow. Threads of repairing gold.

  *

  But Elayn. All the complexity she has left us with. What bleakly adult world have the children been plunged into with their grandmother’s flinty choice?

  14

  Yet at the same time as the loss, there is a freeing. From silences. From attack. From the exhaustion of never knowing what would be coming at you – fulsome love or its withery opposite. From the extravagance of Elayn’s emotions, whatever they were. As after the eviscerating words would come the wounded coiling into silence when it felt like something fundamental in life had been severed. It is a bitter truth: you hurt those you love the most, because you know them too well. You hurt them with vicious effectiveness.

  *

  Elayn wanted the perfect daughter. Beautiful, quiet, talented, successful, pliant. The daughter wanted the perfect mother. Loving, generous, nurturing, understanding, forgiving. Perfection undid us, the expectation of it, the pursuit. We both had to be taught how to love with acceptance, looseness, forgiveness. The tragedy is, we were getting there.

  *

  When I was young Elayn would fling, ‘No one likes you.’ When I craved prettiness, ‘You’re so ugly.’ When I didn’t measure up in terms of a daughter, ‘Why can’t you be like M and O? I wish they were my daughters.’ I was nine. She was referring to the prettiest and most popular girls in the class. It was like a tic of envy in her head. She wanted them but she had me, vined to her. Her swotty clod of a thing. That could write.