The Household Guide to Dying

In Amethyst, his home town, nothing was imaginary. Young motherhood was palpable, at times painfully real. From time to time I’d thought about moving south, back to the inner city, where it was common for children to have no fathers, no mothers, serial fathers or even two mothers. Or back to the suburbs, to be near my mother. But although I had written to Jean to let her know where I was, and again after Sonny was born, I made it clear I wanted nothing from her. Jean being right about Van made it harder. As Sonny grew I sent her the occasional photo along with a note. I was independent and capable, and yet so painfully young. The truth was I didn’t know what I wanted from Jean, didn’t feel I owed her any apology, yet knew in my heart she didn’t owe me one either. She and Van had met rarely, as he hated coming to my place, and the first time I invited her to the bar to see him perform she left early and refused to come again. She hated his recreational drug use, his vague ambitions, his nocturnal lifestyle, even his diet. She was suspicious of his past, contemptuous of his unconventional family, scathing about his musical talents. At sixteen, seventeen, I embraced everything my mother loathed. I left Sydney and travelled north, towards the town from which Van had come. There had been no fight, no scene, nothing to suggest he was going to leave. And so I didn’t believe it. He would have gone back home to Amethyst. I believed that. I needed to. He was from the circus, and circus stays in the blood, calls you back home. That’s what he’d told me. And it was getting on for winter then. I would go north too, it would be warm there. I would find Van and convince him we were meant to be together and to have this baby. When I arrived I found that the place was stamped with his absence, the circus empty of him and all his family, probably the only circus family ever to leave for good. But after some weeks, after settling into the caravan, I felt like staying. And was unwilling to go back and face my failures, which were several. My friends going on to university without me. Jean being right again, then being too reasonable, to make me feel better for being so wrong. Me being scoured by my own gratitude when she helped me out, as she would. Me being bitten raw by my pride.

Once I’d settled in Amethyst, I discovered I had no real attachment to the city where I’d lived my short life, and I was still ripe for adventure, burning with a thirst for independence that I felt would sustain me wherever I would go, whatever I did. In a few months I would give birth, and I would be the best mother ever. I would more than make up for my baby’s lack of a father. My child would be born there, and it would belong there and if its father never returned at least it would be in its home.

For a long time I was filled with that arrogant confidence of youth, the conviction that you are desired as much as you desire: Van would want me and his child sooner or later, and would find the prospect of coming home irresistible. For years, part of me believed that, though there was not the slightest scrap of evidence for it. Van’s parents had moved further north, and his great-aunt had recently gone to a convalescent hospital by the coast. The only remains of his family in town were underground. All I had were Sonny and a fierce determination to make everything as right as I could.

Eleven (#ulink_fa93d8f7-abdc-59de-a642-7549b3866ac6)

Dear Delia

Okay, I’ll forget about the wedding cake, but I’d like your advice on another matter. My daughter will wear my old white silk veil, edged in lace. But it is spotted with brown stains and has yellowed around the creases. Should I bleach it?

Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

Never use bleach on silk! Buy some old-fashioned yellow laundry soap. Wash the veil in a tub, preferably outdoors one fine day. Rinse it with half a cup of white vinegar in the water, and roll it up in a towel. Spread it on the lawn to dry, where it will look beautiful as it soaks up the day. Let the light do the rest.

Spring meant that Mr Lambert next door commenced a rigorous routine of lawn maintenance. He devoted every Monday morning to front-lawn weeding. I didn’t need to go out and look over the fence to know what he would be doing: lying prone on the lawn and digging out feral vegetation with an old paring knife. Dandelions, bindi-eyes and other unidentified weeds were ritually extracted this way. Mr Lambert was a retired tax accountant, and I was sure he treated his lawn with the same humourless precision as he would have a column of figures. The lawn remained the blue-green shade of the fairest couch all summer until it turned brown in winter. He must have had his reasons, but I did wonder why he selected wintergreen couch for his front lawn, with its tendency to fade in the cooler months. Maybe because it was a more compliant grass, less inclined to provide asylum to refugee weeds that drifted in with the birds and the breezes. Soon after Mr Lambert moved here several years ago, he embarked on a clearing of the property environs that allowed no resistance. Palms, prone to messy explosions of seeds that banked in drifts and rotted odorously. Fence-hugging vines: morning glory, star jasmine and potato. Shrubs and grevilleas. The one large camphor laurel tree out the back. All were hewn, chopped away, chipped, mulched, removed.

A Mrs Lambert once existed but had passed away. He was never inclined to tell me more than that, except to mention that there was a son, and grandchildren, and I knew visits were few. I wondered if, had his wife not died some years before, his attitude towards the garden might have been more benevolent. But knowing nothing about her, it was impossible to say. Over the years Mr Lambert and I had only a few conversations, and in recent times none. But at one point he told me that he disliked trees. Too untidy. He replaced the front wattle tree with the murraya, and permitted a lone clump of agapanthus to loiter meekly by his front doorstep. His final act of garden cleansing was to dig up the front lawn and replace it with the wintergreen couch. He lovingly sowed it by hand and watered it obsessively, first with a fine mist spray gun so as not to disturb the seeds, then with a watering can. Within weeks it grew into a grey-green velvet carpet.

Archie, the lawn specialist, observed all this with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Lawn was a fine thing if you intended making use of it. Finer if you had the water resources to maintain it – but who had these days? Children playing, summer backyard meals, or just sitting by gazing at something soothingly green. But Mr Lambert’s lawn, huge in proportion to his small house, barely received a passing glance from its owner, except of course when he was tending it. The front window roller shutters remained securely shut most of the time. He never sat on the tiny front porch, never rested on his lawn. And yet he was forever watering it – by hand, during restrictions, making endless trips to the tap and back to drench every centimetre. He fed it liquid fertiliser. He aerated it with a fancy rolling spike. He lay on it and dug out every suspect growth. He rolled it as if it were a bowling green. It was seven by nine metres of perhaps the most perfect lawn Archie and I had ever seen, but which the owner otherwise ignored. I never saw anything so necessary, but so irrelevant, to a person’s life.

I assumed Mr Lambert’s backyard was still a small wasteland of pebblecrete punctuated by a set of plastic furniture, which he kept tilted forward and covered in plastic sheeting. I wasn’t certain, as it was no longer possible to see over the fence since he’d attached sheets of Colorbond steel to frustrate voyeurs. He even uprooted the rotary washing line, replacing it with a fence line that could be neatly folded down. Recently he sliced the necks of all our monstera deliciosa leaves that perched audaciously above the fence. Archie found them thrown onto our side and I pleaded with him not to throw them back. He couldn’t contain his anger at this outrage inflicted upon an innocent plant, and not so long ago I would have flung them over myself, with fury directing my swing. He settled for sticking the stalks back up against the fence so that their withering leaves would at least reproach our neighbour.

It was a beautiful day to be outside idling in the garden instead of trying to remember how to make a fruit cake I once could have made in my sleep. To write it down I needed to remember the ingredients and the method, which was hard when I had always made it from instinct. Never before had I written the recipe down, let alone thought about exact weights and measurements. I had made this cake so many times, but how many kilos of dried fruit did I use? What proportion of raisins, currants, peel and nuts? Did I include cherries? Two bottles of brandy, or one of brandy and one of rum? The thinking would be exhausting even for a well person. Putting off work I tidied my office instead, then walked over to the window, and opened it as wide as it would go. I breathed in the glorious scent. My lungs swelled with the delicate warmth of new jasmine frothing along the side fence and the peppery odour of the council’s wattle, already well into bloom. The wisteria pouring copiously from the vine.

Wisteria. Of course. I found the writing pad on which I’d been jotting down ideas for the wedding, and under Venue added Botanical Gardens. The wisteria would be glorious there. Daisy would look like an angel. Her Botticelli hair against a pale frock – pink or lemon or lavender. The lawn alive with colour, the sky a sharp blue, the whole a brilliant contrast for her Renaissance beauty.

I was fantasising on a grand scale. Daisy at twenty-five or so would probably have her hair cropped short and dyed indigo and wear nothing but black cargo pants and strategically ripped shirts. My sweet darling youngest daughter who was forever preoccupied with dolls and pets and everything fluffy, who would sleep with Kitty if I still let her, who played happy families with her three mice and kept one of them all day in her pocket, who begged for real ducklings but settled for the collection of floating ones she still kept for the bath. Doubtless by then she would have found her true sexuality and be in love with an Irish woman, sharing her passion for body piercing, dog shows and one-day cricket. The more the list burgeoned with details of table decorations and seating arrangements, the more I felt convinced this event was never going to happen. It was more likely to be a commitment ceremony, probably in an ironic location like the old Mortuary Station, or Hungry Jack’s at Darling Harbour, with the dogs (they’d be staffies) wearing purple bows. But if a wedding did take place, there’d be the rudiments of a list to follow. On the off-chance that Daisy would want one, I would have done my bit.

I considered making the cake (and then I remembered, it was half a bottle each of brandy and rum), which would last the years. But apart from the effort involved in shopping for the ingredients, then mixing and icing the thing, I thought doing so would actually confirm Archie’s view of me as a control freak. I would instead leave them the wedding fruit cake recipe, draw it somehow out of my head and write it up properly. I might even give it to Mother of the Bride.

I put the list aside and got on with the real work. Apart from Mother of the Bride’s request, there were ten more emails waiting for replies.

Dear Delia

Remember I wrote some time back inquiring about shopping lists? My golfing friend and I consulted that Mrs Beeton book you mentioned, and now we are wondering if it would be a good idea to write inventories of our households. Linen and crockery, plus our jewellery and stuff. For the children, and grandchildren. And insurance too, of course. Unsure.

Dear Unsure

If I remember rightly, you also told me you were both sixty-five. At this age do you really want to clutter up your lives with more paperwork?

Twelve (#ulink_9cf551f0-983e-569b-b21b-530c8507d798)

On the second day in Amethyst I stayed in the motel room. Outside, the day was sweet and inviting, the far north autumn being so kind. But I spent a long time having a bath, using up the inadequate mini-bottles of shampoo and body wash. I dried off with two of the bathtowels, draping the third around me instead of a robe. I lay down on the bed to read through the local brochures and leaflets for drycleaners, Chinese takeaways and day trips to gemstone mines. I raided the mini-bar for its mini-chocolates and made a cup of teabag tea, then a cup of instant coffee with long-life milk, pouring each down the bathroom sink when they tasted as bad as I expected. Finally I got dressed and took a mineral water out to the balcony, which overlooked a lily pond and the fenced-in pool. Close by was the run and kennel of the sleepy labrador.

I had to think about returning to my old caravan in Mitchell’s camping park, but I could only do it step by step. Sitting there, I mentally traced through the route to the home I’d lived in for eight years but not seen for fourteen. I would drive out of this motel, turn left, then right, then left again. Straight up, it would take less than five minutes to get there. There would be a sign, Amethyst Caravan Park, probably faded now. Then past the front fence, along the gravel path, past the shed that Mitchell once used as an office, I’d skirt the stand of palms to pass the laundry.

I kept getting to the laundry. No further.

I fetched another drink and the two-pack of chocolate chip biscuits. I ate one and tossed the other down to the dog.

When I lived there I loved that laundry, ancient though it was. The other residents included an elderly couple who had installed a Hoover twin tub behind their van, a retired council worker who took his washing into the town laundromat every fortnight, and an ever-circulating collection of young men who spilled over from the circus, and who slept at the caravan park but tended to use the circus’s facilities. So apart from the visitors and tourists, I was the only person to use the laundry regularly and I made it my domain. I would soak my clothes and linen in one of the tubs, poke it all about with the old wooden spoon, then rinse and squeeze it out by hand. For really dirty things, I would light the copper, feeding it with scraps of timber and wads of old newspaper until the place took on the feel and smell of some sort of laboratory, bubbling with potent liquids and thick with a chemical mist. I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Left to my own devices, who knew what I would produce?

Nothing more than clean clothes, of course. After Sonny came along I would settle him in his basket by the doorway so he could have his face kissed by the sun while I stirred and rubbed and squeezed. Back then I could spend hours washing if I wanted, pegging sheets and baby blankets out on the old rope line propped behind the laundry, gathering in the loads of sweet-smelling clothes before the sun started to go down, setting out the ironing board in the annexe and performing the unnecessary task of ironing sheets and tea towels. I knew it was pointless – as if a baby cared how well-ironed his things were – but I always did it. I pressed Sonny’s cotton bibs and lawn wraps with more care than I’d ever ironed a silk shirt or a pair of trousers. Somehow it seemed important to do this. Just as later it became vital not to let him go out barefoot. I was never going to be mistaken for trailer trash and no one was ever going to pity me or my circumstances. Maybe it was observing this dedication to the task that made Mitchell offer me the job of cleaner and manager and all-round caretaker, as he’d started up a new business in town which was keeping him away for long hours. Or maybe he was more observant than that.

It must be hard, managing on a single mother’s pension, he’d said a few months after the birth.

The payments had only just started coming through, thanks to my recent move interstate and the usual bureaucratic inertia. By that stage I was waiting at the post office in town every second Thursday, was first in the queue at the bank. I didn’t dare to think what it would cost when Sonny needed more than breast milk and baby clothes.

I could do with the help, he said, allowing us both to pretend it wasn’t charity.

Mitchell didn’t tell me there was a man contracted to mow the caravan park grounds. One morning I was on my knees by the front gate, Sonny parked in his pram beside me, and hacking at runners of grass that had snaked across the path almost overnight in the warm moist weather. I was using a pair of stiff secateurs I’d found in the laundry, and after ten minutes I was already sweaty and hand sore, when a man pulled up in a utility. He got out and looked at me for a moment, then brought out a pair of long-handled shears.

These’ll do a much better job, he said, offering them to me.

Fine, I said, tossing the old secateurs onto the grass. Feel free to take over. Turning my back on him, I wheeled the baby away.

Nice to meet you too, he called after me. The name’s Archie, by the way.

My rudeness didn’t seem to have bothered him, for the times I saw him after that he just waved or said hello and continued mowing or clipping. Mitchell only wanted me to keep things in order, so I retreated to the back of the grounds. I could tidy the gardens there and leave Archie to do the more professional jobs around the front. One steaming afternoon I wheeled the pram in from the street, hot and tired, aching for a cold beer, one luxury I kept in my tiny fridge. I found Archie dripping with the effort of lopping the huge fig that grew at the front gate. It was too hot for hostilities. I fetched us both a beer and we sat in the shade admiring his work. After that it became a bit of a ritual. Soon I started to look forward to it, in a wary sort of way. He never mentioned a girlfriend. In fact, while we chatted amiably enough, neither of us discussed personal matters, not then. Later on he told me about a woman he sort of saw, but that it was difficult, on again and off again. Really difficult.

How do you mean, difficult? I asked.

Put it this way, he said. There’s competition.

You mean she has someone else?

Something like that.

So why doesn’t she make a choice, him or you?

When Archie laughed I first thought that her other person might have been a woman. And how obtuse and smallminded I must have sounded.

Well, that’s not really possible. She’s in love with a dead man, as far as I can tell. And I’m getting a bit sick of it.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and sighed. I felt like poking him to explain more, until he started to hum tunelessly, Love me tender, love me blue…

Not Pearl? I said.

Do you know her?

Of course. Mitchell sent me to her soon after I arrived. Half the books I’ve got are from her place.

Pearl was dark, beautiful, dreadlocked. Her book exchange shop – her day job – was in the front room of her house, which was a mini Graceland. Her night job was president of the Amethyst and District Elvis Fan Club, and the district was so vast it took her away a lot, organising talent quests and commemorative shows and memorabilia swap meets and whatever else Elvis fans did. I felt I owed Pearl a great deal, since she gave me complete freedom with her odd collection of books – mostly picked up from country town fêtes, street markets and car boot sales – and charged me almost nothing. If she and Archie…well, if it came to that, it would not even be a competition.

That was when I told him about Van – though, as Van was something of a notorious figure, he already knew most of what there was to know – and that was also when I made it clear that no man was ever going to get into the pores of my soul like that again.