The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  She would apologise to Albert tomorrow, and explain that she was just tired.

  She wasn’t tired at all, but she was exhausted by her surname.

  One day she would like to tell Albert why she had stopped singing with her family, and explain that at least part of it had been the way she had to show all of herself, all of her skin, before she’d had the time to grow into it.

  It was not easy being a child star, she would tell him, and sometimes it was harder still being a former one.

  *

  When Florence woke up the next morning, it was to find Isolde asleep next to her, her sister’s limbs folded into hers, one arm flung over her stomach.

  Isolde had done this all their lives, when she was small, padding across the floor of their shared bedroom to fold herself in beside her, then settling back to sleep, her breath against Florence’s cheek.

  She didn’t mind, she never had.

  She had loved Issy since the day Amanda brought her home, cradling her in her arms, Isolde’s dark hair peeping out from the swaddling, Lucas smiling and laughing and saying, ‘Another member of the band!’

  She had watched her grow – and grow – into someone whose head towered over everyone else’s, even the boys in each year’s school photograph. She had watched her half folded in the back of vans travelling to gigs, or being told by photographers to ‘get to the back’ so they could all fit in the frame, and she had watched in wonder at how Issy seemed to notice none of it. She walked into doorways, then reversed her body vaguely back out again; she hit her head on overhanging branches and kept walking; she came in and out of conversations haphazardly; ‘What are we talking about?’ she’d suddenly say, looking around her family as if she had just that moment been teleported there.

  Isolde lived in a world inhabited by herself and those she vaguely let wander into it, and not everyone she allowed in was kind.

  Florence kept an eye on her, at kindy, at bus stops, in the playground, in the shops, and later in the clubs where her sister would jerk around the dance floor and people would step back from her flailing limbs.

  Men liked Isolde, but it always seemed to be a certain sort of man, the sort who said to Florence, ‘Your sister’s pretty wild, isn’t she?’

  And Isolde was wild, but not in the way they thought.

  Isolde’s wildness was only in the way there was nothing about her that could be contained, her body, her laughter, her way of never looking around a room first to see who was in it.

  She looked at her sleeping sister, her body still at last.

  If I could paint, Florence thought, I’d paint this and call it Isolde in Repose – Finally.

  Florence smiled as Isolde opened her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, couldn’t sleep again.’

  ‘It’s okay, how was the gig?’

  ‘Good, there was one idiot who kept heckling and shouting at us to play some “real music”, but Lance sorted him out.’

  Florence wondered when Isolde would stay still long enough to see that Lance Bueller, Mercy Jones’s long-term roadie and Puck’s only friend at high school, was in love with her.

  Florence liked Lance, but when she had mentioned to Isolde that she thought he liked her, Isolde had said, ‘Lance? I don’t think so. How old is he, seventeen?’

  That was Isolde, not noticing that Lance had left seventeen behind years ago. She didn’t notice dates, didn’t notice times; sometimes, Florence thought, Isolde didn’t notice bloody anything.

  *

  Walking to work on Monday, Florence was resolved.

  Resolved, she told herself.

  She would not let her own strangeness – and Florence knew she was strange in the particular way that only a former child star in a band whose leader had been mowed down by a milk truck could be – affect her relationship with Albert.

  Albert’s family, she was certain, was nothing like hers.

  She hadn’t met them formally but she had seen them at the library from time to time, his mother Georgina perennially wrapped in a floral dress, and his younger sister Addie wrapped in a similar version. Adelaide Flowers was part of a book club that met at the library once a month, clutching books and coffees and looking disproportionately relieved to be there, as if they’d all just escaped from prison.

  Albert had introduced them once, and Adelaide Flowers had nodded, distracted, then mistaken Florence for a librarian and asked if she could put a copy of She’s Come Undone on hold.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Florence had answered. Well, she couldn’t.

  Georgina Flowers looked like many of the other mothers Florence saw around East Elm; they were like variegations on plants, she thought, only with a silk scarf here, a charm bracelet there. In the summer it was all shift dresses and slides; in the winter it was chambray shirts and dark blue jeans tucked into boots.

  ‘I see its gymkhana season again,’ Isolde said to Florence walking into school one morning, passing through a cluster of the mothers at the gates of Hilda Park.

  Her own mother was never among them, and Florence never minded because Amanda Saint Claire did not even attempt to blend in. She entered the schoolyard in long silk caftans and jewelled combs in her hair, earrings like glittering chandeliers swinging from her ears. Once, Florence shuddered, her mother had worn a red satin turban. On the rare occasions Amanda Saint Claire did enter the Hilda Park grounds, it was like a cruise ship arriving in the harbour with all its party lights on.

  Florence had met Albert’s father Laurence once at a service station, he and Albert entering as she was leaving, Florence feeling a strange jolt at seeing Albert out of his Green Team khakis and not in some sort of foliage.

  Laurence Flowers had held out his hand and Florence had shaken it, surprised at its smoothness, nothing like his son’s. Albert’s hands were rough, calluses on their pads, his fingers misshapen from years of mishaps with shovels, patterns of tiny red cuts and welts on his skin, brown from the sun. His father’s hands were white and oddly slippery, like river stones shaped by water.

  What did he do? Florence tried to remember: some sort of property developer, or real estate agent? Something to do with nothing his son did in any case.

  Laurence Flowers had given Florence a quick smile, then said, ‘We better get going, son, your mother’s Sunday roast waits for no man.’

  No, Albert’s family was nothing like her own.

  Lucas Saint Claire had never called Puck ‘son’ in his life, and Amanda Saint Claire had never made a Sunday roast, or on any other day of the week. Good for her, Florence thought.

  Albert was already making tea in the kitchen when she walked into the Green Team’s office, she could hear him chuckling at something Monty was saying, Monty’s hiccupping laugh beside it.

  Right, she thought to herself, digging the clipping out of her bag.

  When Albert walked in carrying his mug of tea, he smiled at her and Amanda’s voice slipped through: ‘Maximum wattage.’

  ‘Good morning, Albert,’ she smiled back, the two of them settling in behind their desks, Albert to read the paper, Florence to stare at the clipping, its contents a key part of her resolution.

  ‘I was reading this on the weekend,’ she said, holding it up, ‘about the Amorphophallus titanum flower, the one that only flowers once every two to three years . . .’

  Albert looked up from his paper.

  ‘The corpse flower,’ she continued. ‘You know, the one that stinks to high heaven, like rotting meat. Anyway, it’s supposed to flower this weekend at the Botanic Gardens, it’s a once every few years thing and I thought I’d go along and have a . . .’

  ‘Sniff?’ Albert smiled.

  ‘Yes, although they do say the smell is so disgusting that some people need to wear face masks, and the last time the Amorphophallus flowered at the Adelaide Botanic, one woman actually passed out. Would you like to come?’

  Oh yes, Florence said to herself, could you be any more enticing, luring him into your lair with the putrid scents of the
corpse flower?

  ‘I’d like to, Florence,’ Albert said, ‘but I’ve got to go to a funeral.’

  3

  It was not strictly true, Albert thought, walking beneath the jasmine arch at the entrance of Bougainvillea Gardens, listening to the low hum of the bees that danced within it.

  He wasn’t going to the funeral, thank God, he really couldn’t face that at all, but he was going to the wake.

  He hated these things, the family with faces caught in tightness, receiving guests who shook their hands, or embraced them, or the more dramatic ones lurching like felled trees into their arms.

  Later, as the drinks flowed, the stories would come out, and sometimes the singing. There would be laughter and crying and sometimes shouting, and it never felt to Albert that anyone ever got it right, this sending-off business.

  Albert squinted in the sunlight.

  What needed to be said, he thought, was none of that ‘I am only in another room’ stuff, nothing about being kissed by a snowflake on the cheek, or some other fucking palaver.

  People, Albert thought, kicking a pebble on the drive, should be let alone to howl.

  Walking into the Hibiscus Room, Albert saw that the trestle tables had been set up, and women – always the women – were putting down platters of sandwiches and cake, and that coffee and tea stations had been set up.

  This was not really a coffee and tea situation, Albert thought. No, sooner or later people would be requiring something a bit stronger.

  Eleanor would, for one.

  What to say to Eleanor Markson, mother of Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Markson, eleven years old and sharp as a paper cut, bright red freckles across the bridge of her nose, legs like sticks and hair like fire.

  Charlie Markson, a nice kid with a big future as a water polo player, if she did well at the state trials and if, Eleanor joked to her friends, her mother could keep up with the 5 am starts.

  What to say to Eleanor Markson when Charlie was now somewhere her mother couldn’t find her?

  What to say to Greg Markson, always in the stands to cheer his daughter on, to cup his mouth in his hands and yell, ‘Go Charlie!’ when she leapt out of the water, arm outstretched to block the ball, rising like a slippery mermaid shooting water from the sea.

  Eleanor had once told Albert that Charlie had dyslexia, not that she ever let it stop her. She still managed to get Cs in English, which just showed you what kind of girl Charlie was, Eleanor said.

  Eleanor also told Albert that Charlie sang in the choir, and had been best friends with a boy called Ollie since kindy and didn’t care what people thought about that. Eleanor thought Charlie maybe had a little crush on Ollie, and that maybe Ollie had a little crush on her.

  The last time they had met, Eleanor had told Albert everything she could think of about Charlie, except for the part when Charlie had gone out for a walk with their dog Beppo and a concrete wall under construction had collapsed as she passed.

  Everyone said it happened so fast she wouldn’t have known what had hit her.

  People actually said that to Eleanor Markson, that at least Charlotte Markson – sharp as a paper cut with legs like sticks who could have made the state team, who stared at the letters in her books hard until they made some sort of sense, who sang in the choir, and had a best friend called Ollie – wouldn’t have known what had hit her.

  Albert cleared his throat.

  This fucking world.

  People had started to enter the Hibiscus Room, men and women and children and babies, and a cluster of girls in navy blue West District Dolphins water polo shirts. They moved in a shifting blue rank around the room, a colony of floating bluebottles.

  Albert spoke to a few people here and there, surface stuff, the odd ‘How are you?’ and ‘Are you right for a drink?’ but mostly he kept to himself, finding he just didn’t have the stomach for it, to take on so much sadness.

  He had not seen the Marksons and wondered if they had come at all, and thought he wouldn’t blame them if they hadn’t.

  There were too many rules in death, he thought.

  Needing a break, he slipped outside through a back room off the main reception area and sat down on some steps, feeling the hot stillness of the air around him, his head in his hands.

  When he looked up, Eleanor and Greg Markson were standing just a few metres away, under a poinciana tree, Eleanor’s hands on her husband’s shoulders.

  Albert stood up quickly to turn back inside – whatever was happening beneath those green-lipped branches was not his to witness – but as he did Greg Markson motioned for him to come over.

  Albert walked over, the heat beating on his neck.

  ‘We can’t go back in there,’ Greg said simply.

  Albert nodded.

  ‘Eleanor is feeling the heat and she doesn’t want to go inside.’

  Albert looked at Eleanor Markson, head drooping like a bluebell’s.

  ‘Righto.’ Albert nodded. ‘You go where you need to, and I’ll make your excuses for you.’

  ‘We don’t have a car,’ Eleanor said, throwing up her hands. ‘We didn’t bring ours, people brought us, because everyone has been so kind, you see. People have been so kind,’ she repeated.

  Albert looked at the Marksons, pressing into each other.

  He reached into his pocket.

  ‘Take my van,’ he said. ‘It’s that one, just there.’

  They all looked at his work van, the logo on its side, a few metres away.

  ‘Go on,’ Albert said, giving Greg the keys. ‘I’ll sort everything out inside.’

  He smiled at Eleanor. ‘It’s air conditioned,’ he said, then to Greg, ‘You okay with a manual?’

  Greg Markson nodded, then slipped his arm around the small of his wife’s back, but neither of them moved.

  ‘I’ll walk you over,’ Albert said, realising that the Marksons had become stuck and needed to be set in motion.

  He put his arm across the back of Greg Markson’s shoulders and guided them both towards the van.

  He opened the passenger door for Eleanor, then the driver’s side for Greg.

  ‘I can drive if you like,’ Albert offered, but Greg put the key in the ignition and shook his head.

  ‘I’ll be right,’ he said. ‘You go back inside – and thank you.’

  Albert nodded, then turned back towards the Hibiscus Room as the Marksons slipped away from their daughter’s wake, Greg Markson spinning the van’s wheels on the gravelled driveway as they left, a bat out of what was surely hell.

  Walking home later, after he’d gone back inside and explained that the Marksons had left the wake to a man who seemed loosely in charge (Greg’s brother, he thought, who looked only mildly surprised at the information), it occurred to Albert that the Marksons probably didn’t know where he lived.

  Albert shrugged, they’d work it out. They were hardly going to flee the state in his van, although he wouldn’t blame them if they did.

  It also occurred to him that the gardens were much further out of town than the drive there had suggested, the walk seeming to take forever in the early November heat, the soles of his shoes sticking to the hot paths.

  He also realised he had never been inside the Bougainvillea Gardens’ faux Spanish walls before, despite countless dances and weddings and parties being held there.

  For a time, before its stucco walls had begun to peel and its bright pink and orange bougainvillea flowers had begun to sink the front fence under their weight, it had been the place to go.

  His own high school formal had been held there, but he hadn’t gone to that either.

  He had driven there that night, though, taking the car all the way up the driveway where he could see the girls in their taffeta dresses with enormous bows at their shoulders, and the boys in their hired suits dancing past the open windows. Then he’d turned around and driven straight back down again.

  Why had he done that, Albert thought, remembering the seventeen-year-old boy in a T-shirt and
jeans, sitting low in the front seat, the thump of a bass line vibrating through the car’s windows. Why did you do that, mate?

  Why would you get in the car and drive past a school dance you had no intention of going to, no desire to go to, and where it was entirely possible that no-one would notice that you weren’t there?

  Why would you do that, mate? he asked again, and the answer shimmered in his steps in the heat.

  So he could feel the satisfaction of spraying the gravel in the driveway and taking off, like Greg Markson, like a bat out of hell.

  The Marksons would find him, or he would find them later, he was sure, when they had got enough of the howl out.

  They had much harder things to look for than his house.

  *

  Florence hadn’t gone to see the corpse flower, finding she didn’t have the stomach for it, and not just because of its infamous stench. Instead she had gone for a hike in the hills behind East Elm, striding up the Kingfisher Track and scowling at anybody coming down.

  Why did hikers have to smile so much, she thought, jabbing her stick into the ground with each step, they were so . . . jaunty. She preferred the runners, who ran past with their hydration backpacks and their wrap-around sunglasses, their mouths set in lines of grim determination. Florence liked them because they left her alone and sped by completely uninterested, whereas the hikers felt compelled to say something to every person they encountered on the track. ‘Morning,’ they’d say in their checked shirts and khaki shorts. ‘Beautiful day’, or ‘Hot enough for you?’ and sometimes Florence would answer, and sometimes Florence would scowl, depending on how prickly she was feeling in the heat.

  Florence kept up her pace until she rounded the last bend and then ran all the way up to the lookout, thinking that somewhere down there Albert Flowers was probably telling Jeremy and Lydia about the woman he worked with who asked him to go and smell a cadaver flower.