New Animal

by Ella Baxter

  Forty minutes before the ceremony begins, we wheel her into the viewing room, which Carmen and Judy have set up beautifully. A cluster of mason jars have been filled with sprigs of golden wattle, and the large LCD screen steadily rotates through a series of photos. Bob and Cherie on a cruise at sunset, both sunburned and beaming at the camera; Cherie is wearing a turquoise sarong and a rattan cowboy hat. Bob and Cherie celebrating Christmas lunch on their deck. Cherie riding a mechanical bull in Vegas for her fiftieth, with her legs to the sky.

  Bob peers into her coffin. ‘She’s really left me, hasn’t she?’ He sniffs loudly.

  ‘We are born alone and die alone,’ Vincent announces. ‘Except for twins.’ He cocks his head to the side then wanders back into the foyer, where he grabs the arm of Hugh, who happens to be walking past.

  ‘My beautiful wife is gone,’ I hear him tell Hugh, who looks deeply uncomfortable.

  Vincent pulls out his phone. ‘Listen to my beautiful wife’s voice,’ he says. He starts scrolling through his phone, looking for a voicemail message that my mother left him weeks ago.

  I can sense he is working himself up into a full-blown histrionic display and I can’t stand it. His grief is dominating everyone else’s, taking up all the oxygen.

  ‘I don’t want to hear her voice right now,’ I say.

  He turns to me and Hugh makes his escape.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amelia. I’m sorry I messed up Cherie’s face. I’m sorry I’m not better at all this’—he looks around the room full of water decanters and tissues—‘this … this shit.’ He kicks the table leg.

  ‘When I met Josephine you were only three,’ he tells me, his eyes welling with tears. ‘You were such a spiky little thing! So stern. You would even sit with your legs crossed at the table while we were having dinner.’

  I put an arm around his shoulders, and together we sink onto the nearest sofa. I remember him sneaking me crackers and cheese whenever I did the special hand signal we’d devised, touching my pinkie to the tip of my nose. I remember him asking questions at parent–teacher evenings and writing down the answers diligently in his notebook, and I remember him sticking up for me when I was a hormonally deranged teenager, trying earnestly to understand my moods and triggers. He even bought a copy of How to Raise Girls and read it from cover to cover, underlining passages and dog-earing pages.

  ‘I wanted you and Simon to like me because I loved her so much. I was almost forty when we met; that’s a long time to be alone. And then within six months I had a life partner and two kids …’

  I can see Judy sitting behind the reception desk openly crying into her forearm as she listens. She gets up shakily and walks through to the back office, where Simon is sandwiched in a hug between Carmen and Hugh. Before the door shuts, I see Judy join onto the end of it, wrapping her arms around Carmen’s waist and resting an ear on her back.

  ‘Did you tell Jack she’s gone?’ Vincent asks. ‘He’ll be in pieces and I would feel sorry for him, but he never pulled his head out after I brought her up here. He was so unreasonable about it.’

  ‘I will call him later.’

  ‘He won’t cope with it, he’s too sensitive. But we should invite him to the funeral,’ says Vincent, as if any of us are coping with it.

  The throuple and Judy emerge from the back office, and Judy comes over to the couch carrying a glass of water. Bobbing down near Vincent, she holds it out to him. He takes it gratefully and then sculls it unselfconsciously. I watch as his Adam’s apple pulls up and down with each gulp.

  Judy clears her throat. ‘I really think that you two should go home.’

  Vincent shakes his head. ‘Everyone knows the captain goes down with the ship.’

  She shifts position slightly. ‘Vin, she died yesterday, you stink of booze—the captain needs to go home.’

  Vincent pulls himself up from the couch using Judy’s shoulders to steady himself.

  ‘Then I would like to form a final huddle before I leave for the day.’

  He stands with his hands extended out either side of his body, like a cormorant drying its wings, and we all converge into a tight circle. I hear somebody force a cough, and I turn to see Bob Reynal leaning against the doorframe, looking on.

  ‘Get in here,’ Vincent says, and Bob walks over and slinks in hip first between Carmen and Judy.

  ‘A prayer for our loved ones,’ Vincent states, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Do not be frightened. Be free, my earth angel. My darling, sweet amaretto. My rose. My wife. My life, my soul. Amen.’

  I sigh loudly, unable to grieve in a collective mound. She was not just his wife; she was my mother. I had a special relationship with her, and technically I shouldn’t even be upright now—I should be at home in bed, focused solely on gluing every single cell back together. I release my arms from the circle and start to back away as Bob pipes up, ‘And Cherie, if you can hear me, you were my everything. I didn’t love anyone except you. Nobody was significant anyway, and in my heart I’ve always been faithful.’

  I stand on the outside of the circle, widening my eyes at Judy, before Carmen concludes with a sincere, ‘Amen.’

  I maintain eye contact with Judy, trying to communicate my desperation to leave. As the circle disperses she reaches for my hand and I squeeze hers in a Morse code SOS, begging her to get me out of here and away from this nonsense. She acknowledges with a squeeze and release. Squeeze, squeeze, release. Our shorthand for Yes.

  ‘We’re just going to pop out for a nice, brisk walk,’ she addresses everyone over her shoulder as she propels me towards the door. ‘Won’t be too long.’

  I don’t look back to see who wants to come, or what might need doing. I don’t let myself think about my mother or Vincent. I just hold tight to Judy’s hand all the way out of Aurelia’s and across the gravel to her car. She opens the passenger door and feeds me through the gap, and I sit hunched unnaturally forward, unable to relax. Judy leans across and fumbles with my belt, finally clicking it into place, then eases my shoulders back until they touch the leather of the seat. I let my heavy, heavy skull lean back against the headrest. Here at last is a pocket of peace.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Judy is upright and alert, her hands positioned precisely at ten and two on the steering wheel. ‘You’re welcome,’ she sings to a passing cyclist travelling too slowly along the shoulder of the highway. ‘Slow down, please, Mr Toyota hatchback,’ she trills as a red car overtakes us. She flicks through the radio stations until classical music tinkles out from each dusty speaker. Lulled by the lilting piano, my focus shifts to a dead fly the colour of blue metal, upside down on the dashboard. It is iridescent in the afternoon light. As Judy alternates between the accelerator and the brake, I find myself wondering whether the fly knew its beautiful lapis lazuli mother. Does anyone ever truly know their mother? Did I?

  ‘Do you think she was happy?’

  ‘No thinking woman is,’ Judy says, while slowing the car down and then indicating. ‘Let me tell you, pet, life is either boring or shocking, there’s not much in between.’

  She tucks her long fringe behind her ear and I consider the clip I once saw of a panda springing back from a baby that had recently catapulted from her vagina with a sneeze. That clip was shocking for both the panda and me. Then there’s the amount of times I’ve left work early, only to walk back to the bungalow and stare at the phone or computer with nothing to do. Completely boring. Or how the aftermath of sex is so similar to death, with patches of fluids, excess hair and dry skin. Quite shocking.

  Judy clearly knows about life, and I regret not making the time to speak about these things sooner. I would have loved to know a little more about boredom and shock. I’m sure when humans were more communal beings we didn’t need to talk so candidly about things like this to gain common understandings. All that village living and communal space would have done wonders for group learning. Bonding over hide backpacks and so on. General kinship and whatnot. Everyone would have known how boring and shock
ing life is; it would not have been such a surprise back then.

  Judy accelerates erratically as we pass the billboard advertising Floyd’s Bananas. As we take a left on to the main road up the mountain, she points out colourful parrots that are scattered through the trees like handfuls of thrown jewels. I nod and have a go, pointing out the banana palms that have dropped their fronds in the wind and now show their fresh pink trunks underneath. She nods. Then I take another turn, pointing at the geranium flowers that have self-seeded by the side of the road, the fuzz of their leaves more magnificent than the fabric of the robes of the gods.

  ‘The leaves are so soft,’ I say.

  ‘Like ears,’ she says.

  It’s clear we both agree that everything on this mountain is important and beautiful.

  Judy pulls into the empty car park and swiftly undoes her seatbelt, getting straight out of the car and heading for the lookout. I watch as she leans further than I would expect over the side of the platform to look down into the ravine.

  ‘It’s not as far as I thought,’ she says.

  ‘It’s very steep, though, and there’re rocks,’ I point out.

  ‘I’m going down.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘It’s actually the best idea I’ve had in a while,’ she counters. ‘You’ve been coming here all the time lately, so you must be sensing something. Or maybe you feel the psychic imprint of Daniel. Anyway, it’s good to follow these impulses. Especially now, with your mum and everything.’

  I can see that she is willing herself not to cry as she moves towards the edge and takes a wobbly step, before lunging at a sapling and grasping its branches. As she lowers herself onto the rock below, her hand drags along the sapling, stripping its new leaves; they fly out from the edges of her clenched fists like confetti.

  ‘There’s a reason for everything,’ she yells up at me. ‘It’s all interconnected. We are part of a large cosmos churning and flowing and …’ She trails off to focus on her descent.

  I step off the platform and notice two wild strawberry plants. They have each shot out a few thin stems of berries, and although they are much smaller than normal, I’m reasonably sure they are edible, so I pick them.

  The berries are tart and crunchy, and I search for some to share with Judy. I find a few more, but they look as if they’ve collapsed in on themselves with the heat. I hold one up to inspect the wrinkled skin which, if you look hard enough, could represent the deflated stomach of my mother after she birthed me. Maybe Judy is right, and we are all bubbling together in this cauldron of life and living, death and suffering. That would explain why I see my mother in every living thing. But if that were the case, surely I would also be able to sense if she were happy or not. A daughter should know. I shove all the berries into one cheek and hold them there, because I’ve decided that I can’t share my mother with anyone else at the moment.

  I tread carefully down the escarpment after Judy, using tufts of grass and tree stumps to support me while I chew on my mother. Judy has got her momentum up, and pivots from one rocky foothold to another, each step triggering a tiny landslide of rocks and soil.

  ‘Those clogs have got to go,’ I call down to her.

  ‘No, they’re like hooves. I saw this documentary on mountain goats and they have feet like this—I feel very balanced,’ she says, careening from shrub to shrub. ‘Besides, exercise is brilliant for moving the trauma through our bodies. It’s just so good to sweat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I say.

  I survey the land below while eating the rest of the mother-berries. If I allowed myself, I could become untamed with grief. If it were socially acceptable and not frightening for everyone else, I would love to make a sacrifice, or burn an effigy of my mother. To carry her body on my back all the way down to the estuary, where I could send her away with the current. Sprint skin-naked through this ravine, screaming.

  If I had the ability, I would turn into a huge, malevolent demigod. A demonic goddess who would stand ten tree-lengths high, so tall that my head would reach the underside of the clouds. I would kneel in the sea as I clawed my fingers along the coastline, combing out all of the mothers from every family and sliding them in handfuls into the sea behind me, because if I can’t have a mother, no one can. That’s the law of my land.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Judy says.

  ‘Glad to be here,’ I say.

  Judy stands on a boulder below me. ‘Woman to woman,’ she says, ‘I’m going to tell you something I wish I had known when my mother died.’ She looks up at me, shielding her eyes against the sun. ‘You need to brace yourself for the next week or so.’

  ‘I am,’ I say.

  She turns and continues her descent. ‘And I’ll tell you why in a sec.’

  I follow her unsteadily until we reach the bottom of the ravine, where we stand resting our hands on top of our heads to open up our chests so that we can breathe more easily.

  ‘Is this the spot?’ she asks.

  We’re to the left of the viewing platform and out a few metres from the edge. I nod. He would have landed roughly here.

  Judy lies down on the dried eucalyptus leaves and twigs, and taps the ground next to her. I join her, resting on a flat knot of spinifex, and we both study the sky.

  I can sense that Judy has a growing amount of mysticism in her. She loves crystals and her big orange cat is named Hypatia after the first woman killed for being a witch. I’m sure lying here has something to do with witch alignment. I lie in a version of the position that Floyd’s son would have landed in, and feel nothing but the usual itchiness that comes with being too close to the ground. It would be great if lying in the spot where someone died connected you to them. It’s likely that he would have heard birdsong—either at the top or the bottom of the ravine, perhaps even both. Which would I prefer? Which would any of us choose for him? If I push myself to think about that a little more, I am devastated by his death—not more than my mother’s, but inside me they rest side by side.

  I turn my head towards Judy. ‘Tell me why I need to brace myself.’

  ‘It will be a shit show. People are going to expect so much from you, and it’s all going to feel like a lot of effort. I can look after Vincent, and Simon has Hugh and Carmen for support, but I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to do it,’ I say.

  ‘Which part?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t want to see her in a coffin.’

  Judy nods. ‘I had an open casket for my mother’s funeral and people kept leaning in and touching her, but she hated to be touched. Hated it. One of my uncles stroked her face and I almost took him down. I swear, Amelia, they were treating her body like it was for them. Like she was this touchstone of comfort—but she would have hated it. If she were alive, she would have wiped her sleeve across her face to get rid of their kisses.’

  I feel immediately in awe of Judy for going through that experience. Her strength is unfathomable.

  ‘What if I don’t go?’ I say.

  ‘That is an option, I guess,’ says Judy.

  If I want to be left alone, I could go to Jack’s house in Tasmania. He has always been a hands-off parent. He doesn’t require much of anything, and would be pleased to have me nearby. I could go and stay with him, and hide until it’s all over. Then I wouldn’t have to witness any of it. Yes. This is a solid idea. I will go to Tasmania and stay with Jack, and sit in the deckchair where my mother sat when she was pregnant with me, and stare at the water that laps at the embankment of his yard, and I will feel her in the landscape like a bass note through the earth. I will remember her in my own way—not in a casket, not with a fistful of lilies, and not being pawed at by distant relatives. I was made in the foundry under her lungs; she’s an engine, not a husk and that is how I will remember her.

  ‘I’ll go to Tasmania instead,’ I announce.

  ‘Good one.’

  We stand up and dust ourselves off and cl
amber back up the side of the ravine, and by the time we are at the top we are sweating profusely, but the trauma doesn’t feel like it has moved one inch. Before I get into the car, I pick the fly up off the dashboard by its legs and leave it on the wooden railing of the lookout as an offering to the mountain and to Floyd’s son. I turn to walk back to the car, but remember my mother’s earrings still held to my sides by my bra strap. I hold the underwire out from my body and they fall onto the platform. I pick the earrings up and then throw them as far as I can into the ravine. I am comforted by something of hers being on the mountain, along with everything else that is good.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Judy asks as I get into the car.

  ‘Her earrings.’

  ‘You might want them in the future, you know. I get that you’re in the ritualistic stage of the grieving process—we all are—but later you might wish you’d kept some things of your mum’s that seem completely and uniquely her.’

  ‘The mountain will keep them for me.’

  She looks at me. ‘You know that I love your wildness, you’re perfect to me, and Josie loved it too, but I have to warn you: if you let yourself get any wilder, you’re probably not going to come back from it.’

  She rolls her hair into a bun. ‘I’m saying this as one wild woman to another.’

  I put my belt on, signifying that I’m ready to go, and she complies, starting the car and heading back down the road. I am grateful for Judy’s advice but there is something like a tap about her, in that she just keeps going, past the point of anyone needing a drink. People can be very prescriptive with emotions. I should have seen this coming.

  Judy drops me off in front of the house, and I give her a rare hug as thanks, which she almost ruins by refusing to let go after an appropriate amount of time. I wave her off, and then jump the gate to the bungalow, ignoring the main house entirely. Inside, I pack a suitcase full of clothes I don’t hate and place it next to the door.