by Ella Baxter
The cruelty of it all is that we could have had this years ago, if everyone had agreed to puncture their own ego for the sake of the family. We could have had holidays together, spoken on the phone in the same room. Vincent and Jack could each have added the other to their small circle of friends. It is a bitter shame that it took her dying for them to be like this, with me.
Vincent lifts his arms, letting the wind cool him.
‘She would love this,’ says Vincent.
‘It’s very alchemical,’ says Jack.
‘I …’ My voice fails me.
‘Go again,’ says Jack.
‘I am glad she was mine. My mother. I’m glad.’
As the frogs and cicadas echo around us, I join them, letting out a long shriek into the night. Vincent swiftly joins in with a screech, which makes the frogs stop altogether. Jack comes in with a sorrow-filled wail. When I get to the end of one breath, I take another, continuing the cycle of bellowing on the lawn in the darkness, all three of us louder than everything else in the night. I finish with a long howl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘We’ve got an unusual case for your first shift in the prep room,’ Shell says, licking the side of her cup to catch a drop of tea. She’s got one leg up on the arrangements desk and is reading through the morning news on her iPad as I tidy a shelf of urns, making sure each one faces out. Barbara has kindly made me a foamy coffee from the new machine and I sip on it after finishing each row. So far, my favourite urn is the porcelain rococo one. I consider buying it for my mother.
‘The client today is a stillborn.’ Shell puts down her iPad and coffee and gazes at me. ‘We would usually give a case like this to one of our older staff members, but Susan has called in sick and Maria is on her honeymoon, and I never got the hang of the make-up part. I’ve always used freelancers.’ She swings her leg off the desk. ‘How do you think you’ll go with it?’
‘I’ve worked on children before,’ I say. ‘I know what to expect—please don’t worry.’
She nods, looking relieved. ‘I really appreciate this.’
‘All good,’ I say. ‘It’s part of the job.’
‘And what do you think of the coffee? Any thoughts?’ she asks, tapping her nail against her cup.
‘Cafe quality for sure,’ I say. ‘Money well spent.’
‘Did you hear that, Barbara?’ Shell leans back in her chair and calls towards the foyer: ‘Cafe quality!’
Outside I can see the clouds gathering overhead, blanketing the sky through the long window that frames the walkway to the prep room. Shell follows me, walking over the carpet in her sockettes as she’s kicked off her shoes somewhere and now can’t find them.
‘You’ll be working alone today, so I’ve already set her up for you. I know this isn’t ideal, and please just say if we’re throwing you in the deep end.’
‘Not at all. Happy to help.’
‘It’s good to have you on board. Yell out if you need anything. This is our only service today, so there’s no rush.’
At the door to the prep room, she wishes me luck, before pivoting gracefully on the spot and heading back to the front of the building. I watch her as she walks away, her suit grey against the speckled blue of the carpet, and I feel an overwhelming reverence for everyone drawn to this industry. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to escort the deceased through their final transitions. There is an Ancient Greek word, psychopomp. It means a guide for the souls to the place of the dead, and the role of the guide is to stay with them until they are comfortable before leaving. In every funeral parlour in this country, people like Shell wait to accompany our loved ones to another place. It’s possible to find great beauty in this job. I knew it when I started and I know it even more so now. It is an honour to work with the dead.
I enter the prep room and slip the waiting apron over my head. I glance around, noting the small covered shape on the bench, as I open both doors to the supply cupboard to survey the materials on offer. I gather up some tubes of colour and tubs of brushes and place them on a trolley, then wheel it over to the bench.
It feels like a lifetime since I’ve been with someone this still. I slowly uncover her, and there she is, perfectly laid out like a tiny Buddha on the steel bench. Her face is no bigger than the palm of my hand, and she has the lightest line of a monobrow, like a feathered trail across her forehead. I can even see the minuscule web of capillaries that rests just under the surface of her skin, like a topographic map of estuaries and lakes. She is a compact landscape, a three-dimensional map of one corner of this universe. I look at her file, which has some handwritten notes from Shell at the bottom. She left her body on entry, and who could blame her for feeling a little frightened of this plane, this existence?
I brush the tips of my fingers across the crown of her head, touching the loose swirl of hair above her forehead. How would she like to be right now? A body will tell you; you can feel where they want to go, what position they will hold comfortably.
She wants to be wrapped.
I look around the room for any of her things from home, artefacts that the parents have gathered together during the saddest hunt of their lives. There’s a bag on a chair near the door, and I find a square of yellow fleece inside. I don’t want to look at what else has been packed just yet; the careful folding of this blanket is enough for now.
I pick her up, and find that she is both light and heavy; a harmony of contradictions. I keep my body close to hers as I arrange the cloth in a diamond on the bench, before placing her back down onto it. I fold one wing in, then pull the bottom corner up over her feet all the way up to her shoulder, then fold the other wing, until only her tiny face is visible. This is what her body wants.
I think of the photo Jack had of my mother swaddling me, and I feel an immeasurable heartache for this mother. The woman who carried her for months, and who would have waved away alcohol and soft cheeses. The one who felt this growing baby through their shared wall. The woman who was unable to sleep because of all the hormones that danced through her, as she was being pulverised by energetic kicking. She would have looked in the mirror each morning and noticed her skin expanding to the point of translucence. And then the birth, that strong pull down inside her, a rapid series of seismic shifts. I imagine the mother frozen, feeling excitement and fear before launching into action. Rushing to hospital, and scrawling her way through irritating forms. Watching as wires were wrapped around her circumference, their length a measure of how much she had stretched. And her partner might be looking ready to vomit, and the grandmother would take a few quick photos, and the excitement would be extreme, because they all were on the cusp of meeting the newest human of that very moment in time.
And the mother would push, bearing down on her core, and she would feel the small being shift lower and lower. She would feel herself turn inside out with effort, and everyone would be saying things to her like, You can do it, and, Good job, but she might also be aware of a surge of energy and urgency among the nurses. She, like all people lost at sea, would only let herself feel confusion, but not understanding, because that would be too much right now.
And this baby would break her in so many ways. Her baby, who was loved right from the start, would squeeze out of her with every effort, while the room filled with more people checking everything except her. But there would be one old midwife, the one who still wore a pocket watch, and that midwife wouldn’t need to say anything, because the ending at that point was already so clear. And the midwife with the pocket watch would hold on to her forearms in a vice-like grip, and they would breathe into the gap between them, making a calmer space where they could both focus, while the room around them crumbled. The mother listened only to this midwife, focusing on her words, keep breathing, keep breathing, and she knew, even then, that she was talking about afterwards. And then, and then.
Then the mother would have slapped everyone else away to reach down and pull her baby out, and the tininess of her perfection w
ould have burst open her frightened heart. And she would have known that she had birthed a whole person that had already bypassed this life. The grandmother would cling to her, scared of what she might do, and her partner would implode with feelings. And then she would have lain there, an open portal to another world, holding her baby, looking at her hands, and her feet, and realising that her baby would never have a chance to fall, or swallow, or cry. And if you tore open the warriors from all of history and looked at what they were made of, none would be as strong as this mother. None would have entered a battle so unprepared for the horror. None would have had to fight to live more than her.
I’m so close to the tiny face that it is all I can see, and before I am aware of what I’m doing, I’m giving her the softest kiss right between her eyes. The lightest touch I have ever laid on another human being, and in that kiss I feel all the broken parts of me shift in recognition. Love. I’ve laid love on her tiny self. The kiss lands right above where she would have done all her thinking, and when I pull back, I see that my tears are now falling down the corners of her eyes.
And maybe, if time is eternal, and reality can be fractured into many versions, she will be somewhere else, growing and learning in another dimension. And I believe, more than anything, that I was always going to have lived a life that would cross paths with her. She was the lighthouse for me. My guide home.
And maybe, in an alternative universe, things would have been different. We all know that. You and I both. Perhaps my mother wouldn’t have cascaded down the stairs, and I wouldn’t have moved to an island and been broken apart by grief and other people. Maybe my existence would have rippled on for years being the same. I would have made manager, or partner, or started my own branch of Aurelia’s. I like to imagine that line, that stream of living, would have stretched out before me like a luminous white tablecloth. I also like to think I would have stopped having casual sex with men I met online—but we all wish that, don’t we? It takes time; I’m sure in dog years it takes aeons.
And what becomes of all our musings? All the wounds? All the pain and confusion? Well, I’ll tell you. You reabsorb them. You’re like a mechanical ocean recycling its own salt. You are the same size as a pool that houses one lone killer whale. That’s you. That’s the reach of a human being. A pool precisely that big. That’s your aura: your energy field.
Every person was once joined to another, upside down in the belly. Only ultrasounds and the gods can see you in there. Precious cargo inside precious cargo. That’s human. That’s us all. Grey hairs sprouting and spirals for fingerprints. We sigh even after we’ve gone. I wish you knew how loyal your casing is. How your body happily trots everywhere with you like an indebted lover. And it’s you who lays your body out under sweethearts and foes. You. You did that. Because sometimes you need to feel another person’s weight in order to feel your own.
But your body. Your beautiful, beautiful body. It clings to you through it all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some ideas leave you better than they found you, and I realise that (for many reasons) I owe a great deal of good in my life to this book being published.
I would like to acknowledge the ACT Writers Centre Hardcopy Program, especially Nigel Featherstone and Benjamin Stevenson. Someone once told me that you only need to be lucky once, and I owe my first wave of luck to Nigel and Ben.
I would also like to thank the City of Melbourne for awarding me a grant so that I could afford to receive mentoring from Nadine Davidoff, who taught me how to write honestly while keeping the reader very close to my heart.
Thank you to my agent, Grace Heifetz, the rarest, most electric creature of all. To my publisher and editor, Jane Palfreyman, a raven once literally fell to the ground at your feet, and now so do I. To the rest of the wonderful team at Allen & Unwin, including Angela Handley for sculpting this beast alongside me, Christa Munns for reading my work so closely, and Ali Lavau for your discerning eye and enthusiasm. All of you have worked so hard to help me to develop as a writer, and I am deeply grateful. To cover designer Akiko Chan for enshrouding it beautifully.
Thank you to people I have connected with from the funeral industry and the kink community. To Sarah and Michael for showing me what true power can look like. To Annie for teaching me that fear is always temporary, however large, however furious.
To Anne O’Keefe for Alchemy, and for introducing me to the concept of a beautiful, beautiful body. To Ambika for insisting I find a guru in a place not a person. To Bellingen, maybe it was you all along. To my beloved Natalie for almost a decade of bleak humour. To my small-town boy Jordan for nights spent across the dance floor, in the blow-up pool, on the front step. To Candice for being a revolution in a body and a spiritual cosmonaut. To Ben for unfaltering support and back-up plans. To Natasha for earthy love, good advice, biscuits. To Leena for teaching me to be confident, or if that’s not possible, to be brave. To Nellie for teaching me to take up space even if there doesn’t seem to be room.
The deepest thanks go to my mother, Nicky, for model-ling how to live a life filled with creativity and spirituality in equal measure—you have singlehandedly paved the way ahead with love.
Finally, to my peach, my mountain, my darling Keith. Wherever you are is where I always want to be.