by Unknown
And then there was the strange encounter in his bedroom to be negotiated. Joel had said that Francie didn’t know things had changed. How had they changed? Francie took another sip of her drink and considered where to begin.
Joel sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He reached for his beer.
‘I’ve been to Dad’s house in Albert Park, you know. Three storeys. Cathedral ceilings. Swanky neighbourhood. All old Victorian buildings,’ he said. His voice was flat, matter of fact, but it was clearly a statement delivered with intent.
‘They’ve got a great place—if you can find your way through all the wind chimes and Tibetan prayer flag junk. Denise paints. All sorts of New Age crap—goddesses, fairies, dragons—shit like that, but she’s not too bad actually. She’s even got Dad picking up a paintbrush. Hah! They’d piss themselves at the bank if they knew.’
Francie put down her glass and stared at her brother.
‘Yeah. Thought you’d be surprised. You should come with me. The next time Dad calls and says he wants to take you to some expensive joint for your birthday, why don’t you say you’ll go to his place? He’d like it and I’ll bet you’d get on with Denise.’
At the mention of this name Francie’s mouth fell open and it was a moment before she could form a sentence.
‘You think I’d like . . . Denise?’ Even saying her name felt like treason.
‘Yeah, you would. She’s great. I know Mum doesn’t get it, but Dad’s happy. And Stella’s cool. She’s a violinist with some orchestra in Sweden.’
Stella? The surly seven year old with the buckteeth? Cool? Francie tried to reconcile this pronouncement with the image of the hostile stepsister in a bridal wear shop from twenty years ago. And Denise? Every time Francie thought of her she was hosting a sex-aids party. Picking up edible g-strings with orange nails.
‘Why haven’t you told me any of this?’
Joel sighed and pushed the hair from his forehead. He was trying to be patient. Alright then, we’ll take it slowly. How many fingers am I holding up?
‘Look, Frank, that’s the way you and Mum have wanted to play it, and that’s fine. It’s just that at the beginning of this year I decided that it was all bullshit. What was the point? I just thought that even if you and Mum couldn’t move on, it wasn’t what I wanted. I thought, what if I ever get married and have kids? What if they want to go to Christmas at Grandpa’s or Grandma’s? What am I gunna say? So I just picked up the phone and . . . well, I’m glad I did, that’s all.’
Joel was comfortably seated in a sunny clearing on the moral high-ground. Francie was still groping along a dark tunnel, trying to adjust her eyes to the light.
‘You’ve been going all this year? You should have told me. I would have come too!’
Francie’s tears were instantaneous. They took her by surprise.
‘Aaargh! Jesus, fuck, Jesus, JOEL!’
She grabbed a table napkin, scraped her face. Her voice took on a childish tone of not fair. Baby talk you could only get away with in front of your family.
‘Do you really think that Mum and I are the same? Do you think I’ve enjoyed creeping around this whole thing for my entire life? I saw you standing in the yard waiting for Dad to come and take you to the footy. I know how hard it has been on you. I just figured that maybe Mum was right, that if we all just got on with—’
Joel raised his voice, just slightly, enough to stop his sister in her well-worn tracks: ‘Got on with WHAT, exactly? The dumb fairytale where the handsome prince is put under a spell by the evil witch and the good princess waits her whole life for him to come back to the palace? And then . . . guess what, boys and girls? HE NEVER FUCKING COMES BACK!’
Francie adopted an attitude that was familiar to her brother—not looking at him, not wanting to hear.
Joel’s voice took on a desperate tone. He gripped the edge of the table. ‘GROW UP, FRANCIE! Is it any wonder you’re seeing a shrink? Is it any wonder you’re all over the newspapers and the TV—let’s not forget that—for being some sort of mad psycho bitch?’
Francie hid her face in her napkin.
‘And you can STOP CRYING! I’m sick of you crying. Everyone is.’
He reached out and tore the fabric from her hands.
‘Come on, think about it! You go off and try to recreate some stupid domestic “happy ever after” with Nick, pretend it’s real, and you’re surprised at the way he left you? And the way you’ve fallen apart? It was always going to happen, Francie. He was always going to dump you like Dad dumped Mum. Your relationship with Nick wasn’t real! Anyone with half a brain could see that! Oh sure, he visited on weekends, but he wasn’t really here. He was just going through the motions.’ Joel leaned forward and muttered, ‘I’ve hated him for it for years. And if he was here now, I’d punch his fucking lights out!’
Francie, stupidly, took Nick’s side. ‘You can’t say that—’ she began.
Joel shook his head in exasperation. ‘No! You can’t go on being so hurt. Some innocent victim of circumstance. At some point you are going to have to actually get over it.’
Francie wiped her eyes again. Get over what? Who she was? Her life? If everything was going to be laid on the table, there were things she wanted to say too, and since Joel was saying exactly what was on his mind . . .
‘Well, I could say the same thing about you!’ she charged. ‘You’re almost thirty, still living at home with Mum.’
Joel took up his beer and drained the glass. He set it on the table. ‘Not for long, I’m not. I’ve met this girl on the net and we’ve been together for four months. She’s from Sydney and she’s coming down here.’
So this must have been what he had hinted at the other night. Francie said what most people she knew would say under the circumstances: ‘What? On the internet? Are you kidding?’
Joel was calm, defiant. He was expecting a fight. ‘We talk every night, sometimes three, four hours. Like last Sunday we were together for the whole day and I think she knows me better than anyone I’ve ever met.’
‘But you haven’t met—’ Francie began.
‘If you haven’t ever done it before, Francie, you wouldn’t know! You can get to know someone properly, without all the superficial shit. Anyway, her name’s Vanessa and we’re engaged.’
Engaged? To be married? Francie tried to make sense of it all. She clutched at her familiar persona of Big Sister/Agony Aunt.
‘Joel, this is mental! Can’t you see what living with Mum, the emotional vacuum cleaner, has done to you?’
‘No, I can’t. Why don’t you tell me? Seeing your personal life is going so well.’
It was another sardonic remark which hit its mark. Francie had always feared Joel’s psychoanalysis—one of the other reasons she didn’t visit as often as she should have. She scrambled to defend herself.
‘Look, I know my life is shit at the moment! OK, everyone knows, but this is bizarre! The reason you’re in love with someone you’ve never even met is that it’s a fantasy! You spent five years being in love with Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings—and you say my relationship wasn’t real?’
Silence. Like the silence in the aftermath of a terrible crash, when all you can hear is the dying hiss of a punctured radiator or the echo of a hub cap spinning on bitumen. Francie and Joel lay in the wreckage and were still for a moment. They then tentatively checked for injuries. Wiggled toes, shifted limbs and put their hands on their faces to feel for blood. They were brother and sister still strapped in the back seat of a car out of control. Still being punished by a failed love affair from two decades ago. Divided and conquered by an argument that was never theirs to have or understand.
Eventually Francie became aware of the sounds of the outside world. Conversations of people walking past in the laneway next to the restaurant. The clatter of plates being carried to the kitchen. The clink of glassware.
She looked at her little brother. She remembered him sitting in front of the television. Eating cornflakes.
Watching cartoons. Unaware of the carnage just around the corner . . .
‘God, Joel,’ she whispered, ‘how fucked-up are we?’
Twenty-One
It was about 11 pm when Francie walked through the front door of Elysium. She checked all the rooms in the house and there was no-one home. She was glad for the emptiness. There was so much to think about. Then again, she reflected, none of it bore thinking about at all.
She was standing in the kitchen boiling the kettle on the stove top and idly thinking about killing herself. How did you do it with an oven anyway? Stick your head inside? Then what? Did you light a match in the hope it would explode? Or did you sit at the table and wait until the whole room filled with gas and you were asphyxiated? That wouldn’t work. The ceiling was too high.
Looking closely at the oven Francie figured that, because it was just a domestic appliance, it could probably only blow your hair off and burn your face. That would be a great look—a bald, burnt, heartbroken stalker. That had to be the definition of a complete loser—someone who couldn’t even pull off their own suicide.
And that’s what Francie figured she was, just an everyday common or garden variety loser. She knew she wouldn’t kill herself. That would require even more drama and theatrics. If there was one thing Francie knew after her well-publicised Night of the Scissors, it was that dramatic and theatrical acts often inspired anger, laughter or worse: indifference. Unless the audience really cared. And no-one cared about Francie. Why would they? She didn’t even care about herself.
She would leave suicide to the professionals. Francie picked up her cup of tea and plodded to her bedroom.
She was propped up in bed against her embroidered red pillows with the ‘Journey’ pack of cards Faith had given her. Everyone she had talked to in the past few days had told her she did not understand, that she was missing something. Didn’t get it. That she had to keep thinking.
She drew a card at random and turned it over.
The card was ‘Mind’. The text read: Your mind does not exist, except in your imagination. Poonjaji.
So, here was a concept to think about. Your mind does not exist, except in your imagination? Doesn’t your imagination exist in your mind? Francie was puzzled. Or is your imagination in your . . . er . . . big toe? What do you think with if your mind doesn’t exist? What can your imagination imagine, if not your mind? And who was this Poonjaji anyway?
The nature of the thinking mind is fear, doubt and judgement—a stream of imagined words, sounds and pictures passing through Consciousness. The only meaning it has is the meaning we invest in it. It is not real.
Francie knew what this meant. She’d read enough of the aphorisms on Faith’s walls to know this was a gold standard of the self-help industry. It meant that the events in her life could only affect her negatively if she let them. That she had to, as she herself had observed, be more detached. Let go. Well, this had been the mantra of every guru since time began and surely only gurus could achieve a thought process without fear, doubt and judgement? If she lost those three thoughtful companions, Francie’s mind would be a blank. Then it wouldn’t exist. Then she would have nothing. Except her imagination. Damn! She was going around in a circle.
She read on: Have you been entertaining thoughts recently? Have you been analysing, interpreting, dissecting, revisiting them until you’re tired of them?
Oh yes! Francie had been doing that alright! But she hadn’t been ‘entertaining’ thoughts. Her thoughts were gatecrashers who kicked down the doors of her mind and imagination at all times of the night and day. And was she tired? Yes! She glanced at her bedside clock—she was utterly exhausted.
The card went on to suggest that Francie should stop trying to barricade her mind against negative thoughts, but just let them all in and attach no meaning to them. Let them be none of your business. Let them come and let them go, and then discover what remains untouched by any thoughts.
Attach no meaning to anything and see what’s left?
The brief moments of clarity she had experienced while sitting with Faith suggested that there was hope. And just as suddenly they had clouded over and these Elysian fields had gone from view.
Elysian . . . now there was a thought. She realised she had been thinking lately that Elysium was hell. A place of eternal torment. But it was supposed to mean—Francie leafed through the dictionary she kept on her bedside table—‘a blessed abode’. Paradise at the end of the world.
So was she, even now, in paradise?
That night in her dreams Francie died and went to heaven.
She was walking across Swanston Street mall on a sunny afternoon to meet her mother and didn’t hear the tram. She didn’t see it either, until it was only an arm’s length away. This was surprising because it was an old green and gold rattler. It bore down on her with all the bells clanging.
She saw the big round light on the front and estimated that it would smash her right in the solar plexus, crush her ribcage and flatten her heart and internal organs. They would end up like a stack of pancakes on a serving platter.
At this point, it was like every near-death experience she had ever read about. Time stood still. She called to her mother standing on the footpath. ‘Bye, Mum, bye,’ and waved. Her mother waved back. ‘Goodbye, darling. It was lovely to see you. Take care of yourself. Have you got a warm cardigan?’
Looking down she saw she had made a slight miscalculation because it was the tram’s front bumper which hit her first, breaking both her legs and then pitching her body slightly forward so that her face took the next blow. The light did crash into her chest after that and shards of glass sliced through her clothes and skin. And then Francie was dead.
She found herself floating and watching the scene in the street below in the same way a snorkeller observes the activity in a coral reef. The sounds down there were muffled, but she could clearly see the human drama unfolding.
Her mother ran to the scene and was restrained by the tram driver. The passengers peered from the windows.
Francie smiled to see everyone she had ever known in her whole life on board. There was her third-grade teacher, Mrs Bevan. The Carmichael twins who had lived next door when she was seven. Joel was sitting up the back in between her father and Denise. Denise gripped the handrail in front of her with orange fingernails. Amanda, Olga and Johnno queued patiently in the aisle behind Auntie Kath and Kevin Jenkins. Gabby Di Martino was checking tickets.
They were all keen to view her body, which was lying on the tram tracks. Her old Mohair cat, Wellington, pushed through the legs of the crowd to lick her lifeless hand. She spied Nick and Poppy in the throng. They had just come from the market and still held a basket full of fruit and vegetables, one handle each.
‘I’m fine,’ Francie called. ‘I’m up here. I love you.’ But no-one on earth heard her.
She just hovered above it all and watched as the emergency vehicles arrived and her body was covered with a blanket and then loaded into the back of an ambulance. Her mother was helped into a police car.
She wasn’t sad to see her body taken away. It was of no use to her anymore, but she did think it had been an attractive body and she was glad to have had the loan of it for more than thirty years.
Her death really was an inconvenience. She was sorry for that. She looked back down Swanston Street and saw the trams backed up and blocking traffic in all directions through the city. It wasn’t until the firemen had hosed her blood off the road that Francie felt she could finally take her leave.
She rolled onto her back and looked up. There it was, the bright light everyone talked about. A cloud of luminous intensity. Francie could feel herself being drawn towards it. She spread her palms as if to warm herself by a fire. The light shone through her flesh, turning it translucent pink and illuminating the bones in her fingers. I’m touching heaven. I’m taking handfuls of heaven.
Francie’s eyes opened to a dense blackness. She knew she was dead. She felt something she had not e
xperienced in a long time. Maybe even in her whole life. Absolute peace. She didn’t think anything at all. All was calm and merciful peace. She lay in the dark like this for a while, just enjoying being dead, until she observed the first thought creep across the horizon. If I am really dead and in heaven, why is it so black? Shouldn’t it be . . . white . . . and fluffy?
She looked around her and saw a sliver of pale light appear through the . . . They must be curtains. This must be her room.
Then she saw the numbers on her alarm clock glowing green and could make out her bedside lamp. She wasn’t dead and gone after all. She held out her hands and stretched her fingers. She was still alive.
At first Francie was disappointed. Especially if being dead was going to be as comforting as the feeling she had just experienced. But then, she reasoned, it was good to be alive and to have had a little visit to the afterlife.
So she had only dreamed she had been killed. Why had she dreamed that? Could it be a real near-death experience if it was just a dream? Maybe that card was right. Maybe life and death were all in your imagination.
Twenty-Two
Francie got into the Sunday Press office after lunch on Friday. She had calculated that this would give her enough time to finish her very last Seriously Single column. It was also calculated to be the very least amount of time she would have to spend in the presence of Gabby Di Martino.
From where Francie was sitting she could see Gabby behind the glass wall of her office. She was wearing a short black skirt and matching fitted jacket and was rattling around like a blowfly in a bottle. Francie saw that Gabby was trying to look important and busy so she wouldn’t have to come and talk. She guessed that Gabby was still royally pissed off.
For her own part, Francie felt oddly detached, as anyone would be if they had just died and gone to heaven. Why was she still here? She could only imagine it was like everyone who has died says: I was sent back because I had unfinished business on earth. Francie was doing that now. Finishing her business.