The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  So instead she said, ‘What about you, what are you doing for Christmas?’

  ‘Just at Mum and Dad’s too,’ he answered, ‘with my sister Adelaide if she can be bothered turning up.’

  ‘I should introduce her to Isolde,’ Florence smiled, ‘then they can glide through life not showing up to things together.’

  Albert smiled. ‘And there’s all the usual silly season parties, of course,’ he said.

  ‘With the usual suspects?’ Florence asked, her smile stretched taut all the way to her earlobes.

  Albert nodded. ‘It’s all a bit exhausting, actually.’

  Florence nodded back to Albert Flowers, who had so many parties to go to he was tired just thinking about it.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I’m going to about,’ Florence plucked the number like a lemon snapping off its branch, ‘four or five already.’

  Albert, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he had a chance to catch them, said, ‘Really?’

  Florence met his eyes. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘Might run into you at one of them,’ her words a light soufflé.

  ‘Have you got much on this weekend?’ Albert asked.

  ‘Oh, a couple of things,’ Florence smiled. ‘You?’

  ‘A couple of things,’ he echoed. ‘And of course the non-negotiable dinner with my parents.’

  Ah, Florence thought, Georgina Flowers’s Sunday roast that waits for no man. Not even the exhausted-between-parties Albert Flowers.

  *

  Albert Flowers sat across from his sister Adelaide at the dining table, Georgina and Laurence Flowers at either head of it.

  Ridiculous for the four of them to be spread out like this, but this seating arrangement was how his mother liked it, probably, Albert thought, because that was how she imagined they might dine at Avalon.

  Addie kicked him under the table, harder than necessary, which Albert thought described his sister well. There was an edge to her, no trace left of the tiny girl who had followed him from room to room in the house, trailing a corner of a cut-off sheet behind her. This bit of fading flannelette was Addie’s best friend Boo, who was, she said, an elephant.

  But there was no trace of Adelaide Flowers and her imaginary elephant friend in the woman sitting across from him, kicking his shins in lazy, repetitive knocks for no other reason than she felt like it.

  Instead of making a fuss, Albert shifted his chair back so her swinging foot couldn’t reach his legs.

  Georgina Flowers hated fuss at her table, most particularly her Sunday roast table, which seemed to come around, Albert thought, more quickly every week.

  His phone would ring on Sunday morning and his father would say, ‘Dinner tonight, six o’clock,’ and sometimes add, ‘chicken’, or ‘lamb’ or ‘beef’ or whichever animal Georgina was going to slather in gravy and surround with her Italian herbed potatoes.

  He never wanted to go, and Addie hated it too, his mother fussing and hot in the kitchen, his father talking to him and Addie about real estate, and Addie sneaking out for a cigarette every half an hour. ‘God,’ she’d sigh when he joined her, telling his father he was just popping out for some fresh air, although the air gathering around Addie in grey, wispy smoke was anything but. ‘Why, why does she insist on keeping this bloody Sunday roast thing going?’

  But Adelaide knew exactly why, and so did Albert.

  His mother made the roast and his father carved it like clockwork every Sunday so that at least one thing in their lives remained the same when everything else had changed, and they could all pretend not to notice the empty place at the table were Hamish had once sat.

  Hamish should be here, home from university, and everything would be all right because Hamish was at the table and there was magic in that.

  He could have been a bastard, Hamish. He probably should have been a bastard. He was so fucking good at everything – school, sport, friends, girls – that he, by the laws of nature and school ovals, should have been a prick.

  But he wasn’t, he was great. Albert’s big brother Hamish was so fucking great that Albert never even thought to feel less than around him.

  Hamish wouldn’t let him. When Albert, so big in his skin but so lost in it, fell over his own feet, Hamish covered each stumble quickly and easily. When his mother grew morose about her lot – she actually called it her lot sometimes – that she wasn’t Natalie Bishop snipping away at her roses with a pair of garden shears with a ribbon on them, Hamish would tease her until she laugh-snorted out of her nose. When his father began to bore whole rooms to death about real estate – even people who actually cared about it – Hamish would change the subject or say, ‘Give it a rest, Dad,’ in a way that made everyone, including Laurence, smile. When Addie was younger, and someone hurt her feelings, Hamish would say, ‘What’s the girl’s name?’ and then pretend to report her to the police saying, ‘Hello, I’d like you to go around to Melanie Exton’s house and arrest her immediately for crimes against fresh breath,’ and Addie would stop crying and start laughing and ask for a piggyback. Or he would tease her about which boy she liked, calling out names alphabetically. ‘Archie . . . no? Barnaby? Okay, Callum? Derek? Engelbert? No, no, anyone but Engelbert,’ and Adelaide would blush and squirm and almost die from laughter.

  And when Albert wasn’t sure of himself – and Albert was a kid who was never entirely sure of himself – Hamish never pushed him like his mother did (‘What about joining the photography club?’); instead he made him feel like it was entirely all right to not be entirely sure of himself. ‘You’ll be right, mate,’ he’d say in their room, blowing cigarette smoke out the window while Albert watched wide-eyed from his lookout position from the door. ‘Don’t worry about the olds – you just do your own thing, yeah?’

  When Albert, awkward and uneasy in social situations, standing just outside the periphery of a group, hesitated to say anything, Hamish would throw in, ‘What do you reckon, Albert?’ as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Hamish, and therefore everybody, valued his opinion.

  Diversion was Hamish’s greatest skill, Albert thought.

  If Albert stammered out his reply, or didn’t have one at all, Hamish would find a way to take the heat off him, suddenly remembering they had to go somewhere, looking at his watch and saying, ‘Mate, we better get going, we’ve got that thing at Mum’s,’ then tossing to the semicircle of boys around them, ‘You know how the olds get.’ They would all nod their heads and agree that yes, they knew how the olds got, and Hamish and Albert would head off, Hamish’s arm loosely around his little brother’s shoulder.

  As a child Albert had understood very clearly, from an early age, that Hamish – if he’d been like other big brothers he had seen in action . . . Willy McIntyre’s made him shudder – could have made his life hell. He could have pinched him, or kicked him, or taken his things, or mocked him in front of his friends, or frozen him out of every single thing he did, but instead he let him in. At school Hamish walked him to his locker in the mornings, laughing and joking and drawing an invisible line around Albert, so that everyone knew and understood he was not to be touched. He was not to be teased about spending his lunch hours looking up botanical books in the library, or his general crapness at every single sport, or his startled eyes when someone addressed him directly, or his utter uselessness around girls.

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ Hamish told him, ‘you’ll come good, you’re just a bit shy, who gives a fuck, mate, you’ll get there . . . big, strapping lad like you, the girls will be lining up for you, mate, you just wait and see, I’ll have to get a baseball bat to fend them off.’

  And Albert had believed him, because Hamish might only have been seventeen, just four years older than Albert, but he knew absolutely everything there was to know in the world. Hamish had access to information other people didn’t. Hamish knew some code that other people couldn’t decipher, some way of understanding how the world worked and how to gain entry into it. Hamish knew, Albert thought
as a thirteen-year-old boy, what was what. If Hamish said it was so, it was so, and if Hamish was around, it meant that everything, absolutely everything, would turn out all right.

  So when the lump under Hamish’s arm wasn’t just a lump and his big brother became lost in a world of specialist rooms and clinical studies and treatments that worked and then didn’t; when time slipped past and no one cared any more if there was roast dinner on the table because Hamish couldn’t eat it; when Hamish himself slipped past them just after his twenty-first birthday and there would be no party and no Hamish bringing home some wonderful girl he had met at university who they would all fall in love with, after that there would be no more absolutely everything turning out all right again.

  Albert raised his fork to his mouth. ‘Lovely dinner, Mum,’ he said.

  Georgina smiled brightly at him. ‘Thank you, Albert. I know roast chicken is your favourite.’

  It wasn’t his favourite, it was Hamish’s.

  Albert wondered if his mother’s mistake was forgetfulness or wishful thinking.

  ‘You look great, Mum,’ he said, and Georgina Flowers did look great – pressed linen blouse, floral skirt, her hair pinned back by tortoiseshell combs, a pair of milky pearl earrings at her lobes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered. ‘So how is everything with you, Albert?’

  ‘It’s pretty shit, Mum,’ he wanted to answer, ‘it’s pretty shit because I am doing a job that no one except the people who do it really care about, and there’s about five of us trying to keep a whole forest alive, for a wage you and Dad would be appalled by; I keep putting my great big fucking feet in my mouth when I speak to this girl at work who I think I might like quite a bit and who thinks I’m a tosser; and I know that if you had a choice, if you really had a choice, it would be Hamish sitting here having dinner with you not me. How’s tricks with you?’

  Albert swallowed.

  ‘Good thanks,’ he answered, and she gave him her bright smile again.

  He felt uncomfortable around her, he always had in that way of children who see between the blink-and-you’d-miss-it look of disappointment, or worse, distaste, from parents who’d wanted so much more than you turned out to be. How many of us are there, he wondered to himself, how many of us not-quite-good-enoughs?

  ‘Your father thinks we should go on a cruise,’ Georgina said so suddenly it sounded like she was making an admission.

  ‘A cruise . . . where to?’ Addie asked, jumping on Georgina’s words like a gambolling labrador and thinking, Albert knew, of having the house to herself.

  Addie had temporarily moved back home. She was between flatmates, between jobs, between boyfriends, and between here, at the Sunday dinner table, and whatever came next. Albert knew he should ask his sister to move in with him, but he didn’t think he could stand being around all that brittleness.

  ‘Oh, some group of islands in the Pacific,’ Georgina answered Addie vaguely. ‘Tonga, I think, and some other one.’

  ‘Vanuatu,’ Laurence threw in from across the table.

  ‘You don’t sound terribly interested, Mum,’ Adelaide said.

  ‘Don’t I? Well, I expect I’ll enjoy it.’

  Albert expected she wouldn’t. Albert expected she would, instead, endure it, as she did everything since Hamish had died.

  Albert’s mother had perfected the art of going through the motions, just as she was doing now, fussing around the table, clearing the dishes and insisting on doing the washing-up herself.

  Laurence started talking to Adelaide about negative gearing, and Albert, seeing an opening said, ‘I’m just going to make a quick phone call,’ and headed up the stairs to Hamish’s old room.

  There was nothing left of his brother’s belongings in there. Thank God his parents hadn’t, as he knew some people did when they lost someone they loved, kept their rooms exactly as he or she (oh Charlie Markson, Albert’s heart murmured in his chest) had left it.

  The Flowers hadn’t done that. Instead they had turned Hamish’s room into an office. Where Hamish’s bed had been, there was a desk, his Farrah Fawcett posters had been replaced with framed prints of wooden sailboats tied up together somewhere in Greece, and his bedside table, once stacked with books, was now a side table with a telephone on it.

  But Hamish? Hamish was still there. Hamish was there right now, lying on the floor, wearing his white tennis shirt and shorts, his hands locked behind his head, caught in time, like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  Hamish didn’t change; he didn’t put on weight or lose it; he didn’t grow a beard or start wearing suits. He appeared to Albert just as he always had, and they had the same conversations over and over, in a loop.

  Now he was grinning up at Albert, saying, ‘Had to get away did you, mate?’

  Albert nodded.

  ‘You okay?’

  Albert shook his head, as Hamish began singing the same old song.

  ‘Albert, you’ve just got to get out more, you know, you’ve just got to get out and see what happens. You can’t wait for things, mate, you could spend your whole life waiting.’

  Hamish lay back down again, looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘I do go out all the time now, Hamish,’ he told his brother, trapped in time in his tennis whites, ‘I go out all the bloody time.’

  But Hamish was no longer there, the floor smooth and empty, his brother as much of a phantom as the phone call Albert was pretending to make.

  He waited a few more minutes and then went back downstairs to Georgina Flowers, who told him she had made apple strudel for dessert, his favourite.

  Again, it was Hamish’s favourite. Again, Albert ate it anyway and pronounced it Georgina’s ‘best yet’.

  *

  If Richard Miller had been allowed, he would have hired a sky-writer to announce the return of the Swingers on New Year’s Eve writ large across the skies.

  Richard would have taken out full-page press ads, booked radio and television spots and arranged a series of thoughtful, sit-down interviews with Amanda.

  But he wasn’t allowed, and he wasn’t happy about it.

  At the first meeting with the Hello 2000! producers, held in what appeared to be an abandoned car dealership on the outer fringes of East Elm, a man called Kip with curated face stubble told Richard the producers wanted to keep the final act of the evening a surprise.

  It was what was known in the industry, Kip explained to Richard, whom he called ‘Rich’, as a ‘moment’.

  Then he said: ‘I expect you’ve had a few of those in your time, Amanda?’ and his team, also dressed in head to toe black, laughed appreciatively, a murder of crows on a telegraph wire.

  Florence laughed too, because she knew what was coming.

  She had been watching her mother’s face throughout the meeting, her eyes flicking between Richard and the Hello 2000! team who were treating Amanda’s long-time manager like a drink-spilling uncle at a wedding, smiling politely at his words but not paying any attention to what he was saying and looking over his shoulder for an exit.

  When Richard spoke of logistics or the Saint Claire technical requirements, or brought up sound checks or the terms of the contract, Kip waved his hand lazily through the air and said: ‘Taken care of, Rich,’ or ‘We’ve got this,’ and Florence wondered how long it would take her mother to tell them that they didn’t have it at all.

  Florence met Isolde’s eyes, her sister making a quick chopping motion across her neck; then Florence looked at Puck, who was looking at the floor, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. You wouldn’t have caught the movement at all, she thought, unless you knew him very well. You wouldn’t have caught any of the signals between the Saint Claire family unless you were in it yourself or, like Richard, an honorary member.

  You wouldn’t, for example, know from Amanda’s enraptured expression while listening to Kip’s plans for the ‘big reveal’ – at one stage her mother had even clapped her hands delightedly and said, ‘Oh bravo, Kip!’ – that Lamanda was
about to emerge from that charming smile and smooth, porcelain skin to flick at him with her lovely tongue.

  Amanda stood up.

  Here it is, thought Florence, wishing she had brought some sort of snack along. Buttered popcorn, for example.

  ‘Thank you, Kip,’ Amanda said, lightly touching his arm, ‘it’s been so interesting listening to you, hasn’t it, Richard? If only someone had explained all of this to us when Barbra last came to Australia and we sang “Evergreen” together with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House. Was that what you might call a “moment”, Kip?’

  As she spoke Richard was picking up his briefcase, Isolde was putting on her cardigan and Puck was already walking towards the door.

  Florence dipped her head to loop her handbag across her shoulders. The meeting was over, they all knew, even if the Hello 2000! team hadn’t quite grasped the silent ballet that was going on before their eyes.

  Amanda lifted her hand from Kip’s arm.

  ‘We won’t be available to play at your concert, I’m sorry to ruin your surprise – perhaps you could provide one by shaving properly.’

  Then she, Richard, Florence, Isolde and Puck walked out the door and into the waiting mini-van, the driver looking up from his paper as Amanda slid into the front seat beside him.

  ‘I’m not scheduled to take you home for another hour,’ he said.

  ‘Change of plan,’ Amanda smiled at him, then turned to face the passengers in the back. Nestled in her hand was a familiar gold packet. ‘Caramel?’ she said.

  Sometimes, Florence thought, she really loved Lamanda.

  In the van on the way home, Amanda engaged the driver in conversation, finding out about his eldest daughter who was nursing in Cambodia, and his son who was doing not much at all, as far as he could tell. When they pulled up at Kinsey, the driver passed Amanda his business card and was gifted with maximum wattage.

  It wasn’t until they were inside that they spoke about the meeting, everyone scattered like cushions on the lounge room’s couches.