The Household Guide to Dying

The screen door was still swinging as I departed. Around me the birds were chirruping in their trees as if it was just another morning in May with the post delivery revving its way from up the road, with the honeysuckle still in need of trimming down by the letterbox and the white dog shit there on the nature strip along with the flattened drink can and the sodden pulp of the week before’s local paper which I’d clean away. One day.

Just not that day. Because that particular day I needed to leave while there was no one around to hold me back or ask why or talk sensibly or remind me of all that needed to be done in the next few weeks or months. Or tell me the most logical thing of all: that what I was rushing towards couldn’t be found. It was a journey I’d been putting off for years, yet now I was racing off as if it were an emergency.

As I swung out of the driveway in reverse, smooth and swift as a handshake, I waved to my neighbour over the road sweeping her front path, nodded to the postie as she puttered past, then accelerated up the street, which turned into the main street, and then into the highway, the one that would take me all the way north.

Music would be my companion. It would be so vital a presence it would almost drive the car itself. But mostly it would wash through my head, drowning the sound of my own thoughts and the details, the remorse, the despair, the pain that would persist in accompanying me on this escape. The soundtrack would charm the memories up, the ones I didn’t want but could no longer ignore. The ones that I had to take with me as I travelled back, and north. The memories, which were a soundtrack of their own.

I chose carefully. Nothing too gloomy. No Tom Waits, or I’d be driving off the road straight into the nearest tree that offered certain and complete annihilation. Bach was good but only for long unbroken stretches: the complex fugal pieces were incompatible with negotiating tricky routes or traffic in unfamiliar towns. I sorted through my box of music, most of them cassettes in cracked covers collected for car trips over the last fifteen years, most of them telling some sort of story, though none with any logic. The Willie Nelson tape with his version of ‘Graceland’ that I currently favoured (there was definitely a whole story in that). Tapes of assorted unrelated artists: Dusty Springfield, Georgie Fame, the Andrews Sisters, the Glenn Miller Band. The mindlessly cheeky George Formby, now so obscure a performer, I wondered how he ever made the transition from record to tape. Mahalia Jackson, if I was in the mood for august serenity. Country, all types. Hank Williams. Yodelling songs. Gillian Welch. Lyle Lovett. (Asleep at the Wheel I’d avoid, for obvious reasons.) It was a big collection, enough for my needs.

And there was always Elvis. I’d not played his albums for nearly fifteen years, never listened to a single song, if I could help it. But now I’d included the old cassettes in the box I was taking with me. It was time to start listening to Elvis again. But I’d wait a little longer before putting him into the player. It was going to be a long journey, and there was plenty of time for that.

So I drove north with songs like ‘Graceland’ urging me on, into the lush steamy warmth, to a place remote yet accessible, elusive yet as solid and immovable as a pyramid. There was chance here, a chance that had to be taken or it would slip away faster than a southern sunset. What was it exactly that I was taking a chance on?

I really didn’t know, even though I was bursting to get there, my heart accelerating ahead of my thoughts, and, while empty of understanding at that stage, I was still ripe with anticipation. The same feelings that had struck me when first I arrived, all those years back.

The town of Amethyst was off the map, but it was there all right, bordered by thick margins of rainforest and mountains that slowly narrowed out, stretching northward until they began to merge into the long triangle that eventually led to Cape York. The town was situated in the middle of the middle, about halfway north of the New South Wales border, and halfway west of the coast. I could get away from the south and head north without a map – anyone could, there were plenty of signs. But at a certain point, to get near the right place, I needed the map, though the name wasn’t marked. I read other names signposting the direction, and they were names that beckoned: Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby. Legendary riches.

Somewhere before the surfing nirvanas and the other lures of the coast I turned west. At some stage I turned off the soundtrack, let Hank and Frank and Mahalia and all the rest lie in their box on the floor of the car along with the tissues and takeaway wrappers and the mobile phone that I’d turn back on again when I could bear to. The cloud that had collected and settled like smog on my memories began to thin out, then lift altogether. And then I didn’t need the map. I knew without looking that a place in the middle of places with names like jewels was near where I needed to be. It wasn’t that far from Emerald, and not so far from the highway either.

Late in the afternoon on the fourth day of the journey, I glanced to my left and saw the signs and the three roadside businesses: a service station, a timber yard and, most oddly of all, a garden art place with gnomes in rows along the front fence, that indicated the turnoff to the last town on the route, Garnet, the last place before my destination. I was travelling on a rise when I saw jutting out of the trees beside the road the sign advertising Lazarus’s trailer and campervan business, three kilometres ahead. A sign about fifty years old, flaked and faded, and pitted with the usual rifle shots. After two kilometres I slowed down, keeping my eye out. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight, and I couldn’t remember passing one since the last town.

I knew I was in the right place, or near enough. The sign had said nothing about where, exactly, but I drove slowly forward again until I spotted a break in the trees to my left, and I took the turnoff past Lazarus’s collection of elderly vehicles, knowing it was the right place to go. The road wound down for a bit then started to rise. Somewhere on the very outer reaches of the range I knew I’d entered that large section of valleys and hills and sluggish little creeks posing as rivers situated between Clermont, not far ahead of me, Emerald to the south, where I’d been, and Alpha to the west, where I didn’t intend to go. The road twisted pleasantly. The sun, low and intense, pokered my eyes. I had already dropped the map on the floor of the car.

When I’d first come here over twenty years ago, a bus had dropped me at the side of the road by Lazarus’s sign. I’d walked along the road towards Amethyst, not caring how long it would take. And there was barely another car, none that I recalled. It was like entering another time frame. Maybe it was the impression of the gums shooting so high they seemed like anchors for the sky. Maybe it was the cooler air, or the spotty variable light, light that also appeared partly dark. Maybe it was the leaves that drifted down from that dense canopy, slower and more dreamily than leaves normally drop. Or maybe the bird calls far above, musical and hidden. It was timeless, other worldly. It was uncharted, and so it seemed to be invested with a corresponding fairytale quality.

Of course, I was young then, I would think that. I was a walking cliché. Seventeen, pregnant, alone. I had fought with my mother yet again. I had not fought with my boyfriend, Van, since I’d been denied the opportunity when he simply disappeared, justifying all the doubts about him my mother had had ever since she first met him. The more she had tried to talk me into an abortion the more I resisted. She was motivated, I understood eventually, only by concern, and distress that I was throwing away my educational opportunities to strap down my life with a baby before I was barely grown myself. I was motivated instead by my ideals, my dreams, adoring Van and falling easily into his older, larger world of music and poetry and inner-city sophistication.

The morning I had woken in Van’s room in Newtown and noticed his romantically meagre belongings were gone, I had felt a sick stab of suspicion, soon confirmed when after days I heard and found out nothing. By then it was too late for an abortion, and definitely too late to admit my mother was right about him.

I couldn’t say at what point I became convinced that Van had returned north to the town where he grew up and where his talented performing family still lived. All I remembered was the aching conviction that north in Amethyst was where I would find him. Or he would find me, and our baby.

Five (#ulink_83062a15-d0be-5242-a80a-d6e1f244ea94)

Dear Delia

I’ve been reading your column for some years now and I reckon I could do just as well. Who needs to be qualified to write about dirty shirt collars and poultry stuffing anyway?

Yours

Cynical.

Dear Cynical

Perhaps you are unaware that books of household advice form an integral part of our literary heritage. They are cherished by readers the world over and have been particularly sought in times of distress and hardship. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was beloved by the most unlikely of readers: the conquerors of Mount Everest, the trench soldiers on the battlefields of France. Members of many journeys and expeditions have all drawn comfort from its practical advice and general historical knowledge infused with moral ardour and homely goodness. The members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition might have perished, but they did so with copies of Mrs Beeton in their hands.

The fact that generations of women managed without a single self-help guide is admirable and humbling. Now the number of books available on domestic advice, from specialist titles devoted entirely to stain removal to baby care books and handy manuals taking a novice through simple family meals step by step, is enormous. More than enough to stock several shelves in the average bookstore. A hundred and fifty years back there were approximately none. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was the first, and that did not appear until 1861. How ever did women manage before the likes of Mrs Beeton?

Unlike Isabella Beeton’s, my career as a household expert was accidental. The series of Household Guides had become mine and made my reputation, but the original idea belonged to Nancy Costello, a commercial publisher and my employer – if freelancers had employers – and also a friend, though in a limited sense. Nancy and I enjoyed a warily pleasant relationship, one in which neither of us was committed to remembering the other’s birthday or socialising regularly, but in which we could ring each other up any time about almost anything. There was no sense of obligation, and no occasion for confusion, resentment or hurt. I doubted I’d ever tell Nancy my best secrets or discuss with her my worst fears, but on the other hand I was always able to count on things like frank gossip, her best recipes (she was a great cook), or the loan of her car should I ever need it.

Nancy was pragmatic, efficient, opportunistic, ahead of her time. She understood, then knew how to address, the crises of confidence that saw intelligent people confounded by the prospect of hanging a painting, replacing a boot heel, or boiling a perfect soft egg. Her first great success was getting a free household magazine into millions of households. Her second was to develop a series of specialist self-help titles that even the vast self-help title industry had not yet thought of.

Nancy decided that the home was diminishing as the site of traditional folklore and knowledge, of mainly female authority. Whereas women had once known almost instinctively how to polish furniture or remove wine stains, now they were more likely to understand how to program a digital set top box, or complete their quarterly tax statement. While it was true that fewer men could now trim hedges or degrease driveways, the deficiency was more obvious in women, who were so traditionally bound to the home. Too many homes were now empty places, physically, psychically but also culturally, lacking the memories, knowledge and wisdom formerly accumulated like cherished crockery and handed down from generation to generation. Like an indigenous language that was no longer spoken, the lore of household life was rapidly becoming extinct, from descaling kettles to preserving peaches, from the uses for naphthalene to the best method for beer-battering fish.

At least, that was Nancy’s view and in some ways she was right. Although my own home, and the home that Jean maintained when I was growing up, was filled with the making of food, of clothes, of messes then of cleanliness, over and over, so regularly you almost never noticed it was there, Nancy represented another type of contemporary woman altogether: a woman who was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the household, but wasn’t personally interested in it. Nancy’s home was a lean and austere place, so tidy that it barely needed cleaning. I knew, without ever having opened any of her cupboards, that she didn’t possess a single bag of fabric scraps and wool oddments, nor a collection of reused Christmas wrapping paper, nor a drawer filled with old corks, bent skewers, rubber bands, chopsticks, stained tea strainers, undisposed disposable plastic spoons and an incomplete set of tin cookie cutters like other households, including mine, did.

Archie and I were starting out when I first met Nancy. Or here, in the city, we were starting out again. He was slowly lawnmowing his way into something we had begun to call a business, and I was working as an editorial assistant. Archie had supported my desire to take up the university place I’d rejected years before thanks to my unplanned pregnancy and naïve ideals. Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. I understood later the degree was more void-filling than vocationally satisfying. It was the wrapping, layers of it, around my grief. But I was happy enough to take on the only job I was qualified for – if being a good reader qualified you for anything – copyediting and proofreading for Academic Press. We published books by obscure academics, books as faded and dull as the authors themselves. They may as well have been bound in brown corduroy. Soon after I met Nancy, in her capacity as book marketing consultant, Academic Press closed its squeaking doors for good. By then I had Estelle, who was followed three years later by Daisy. After that I only freelanced, an arrangement that suited me with two small children.

When Nancy began the household guides I wasn’t her first choice of author. That was a man by the name of Wesley Andrews, an enterprising person who was known as a bright spark, someone who had great contacts, who got things done. Who seemed to have a hand in all sorts of books and literary ventures. Who’d written perfectly competent novels as well as ghostwritten mediocre but bestselling memoirs of sporting personalities. He had seemed in every way the right person to put his name and imprimatur on the inaugural guide: The Household Guide to Home Maintenance. Correctly understanding that the first book in the series should capture both male and female readers, Nancy felt a male author was necessary. But until the writing ground to a halt somewhere between chapter eight (Roofing and Guttering) and chapter nine (Windows and Flyscreens), no one had any idea that Wesley’s chief literary driving force, if not navigator and mechanic, had been his wife – who, by chapter seven (Patching and Painting) had left him for good. Which perhaps explained why the opinions and recommendations on Simple Plumbing Repairs and Basic Electrics in chapters five and six were so very simple and basic. That is where I came in.

I had already been working for Nancy, first as a casual proofreader, then writing the advice column that appeared in her free publication – advertisements and advertorials disguised as a magazine – which she called Household Words, a joke that I suspected only she and I shared. Her idea for the column had arrived one afternoon when she was looking at a blank space on page five of Household Words and facing a deadline the next day. She phoned me, interrupting a dull editing job, or whatever it was I did then as a freelancer fitting in work between supermarket visits and nappy changes.

I need a dummy column for this issue, then we’ll get real letters. Can you knock something up quickly, on polishing silver, or whatever?

Nancy, no one polishes silver these days. They don’t even use it.

What about stains, then? You’ve got two kids, you’d know a lot about stains.

I guess I do.

I’ll set up the layout now, she said, and you can email me the copy later. I’ll call it Dear Delia. Lucky you’ve got the right name for it.

Nancy paid promptly and generously for a few hundred words of tame advice which I extracted from my non-creative side between the hours of nine and eleven on a Sunday evening while Archie was watching the Channel Ten movie and the girls were in bed. For months I doubted anyone read it, as Household Words was pushed into letter-boxes all over the suburbs along with advertising brochures for Coles Liquor, Woolworths supermarket specials and the Good Guys Electrics catalogue and was hardly distinguishable in content from them anyway. But evidence of its readership emerged when my advice column started to receive more and more emails.

They came regularly, forwarded to me by Nancy’s assistant, and for a while I responded easily enough. Nancy seemed happy, and the extra income helped with the mortgage. But then one day, bored for some reason, I amused myself by winding up the reader. It was such fun, I did it again, then again, never intending to send the replies off, until accidentally and in haste (a dish overcooking? a child left too long in the bath?) I attached the wrong file, hit the send key. If I’d assumed my copy was checked, I was proven wrong a week or two later when my mother rang to say she’d been amused by my unusual responses in that week’s issue. I sat around waiting for Nancy to phone and complain. Instead I was flooded with letters, and more requests than I could deal with. Nancy congratulated me on the initiative, and insisted I go in a bit harder. As a result the advice column developed a cult following.

Dear Delia was only a version of me, a slightly feral one. A more fearless one. But readers seemed to like being insulted, treated with disdain or having their requests dismissed, and so the column continued.

Dear Delia

Last night I had several people over to dinner, including my old friend who is still single despite her divorce coming through a good year ago, and my husband’s new assistant. During the dinner my husband managed to fling his arm across the table and knock over a carafe of red wine onto my best cotton lace tablecloth. He was arguing with Don, our neighbour, and they both got a bit carried away. If I bleach it, it might fall apart, or go white or patchy. What should I do?

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

What I will advise you, Uncertain, is to examine your guilt about your relationship with Don. Are you sure your feelings for him are as hidden as you believe? For you can be sure if I worked it out from just one letter, your unnamed husband will have worked it out by now too. Don’t fool yourself for a minute that your attempt to introduce Don to your divorced and still-single friend will work as a cover for your real feelings about him and the relationship you two are conducting on the sly. In fact this will almost certainly backfire: your friend and Don will end up hittingit off in all sorts of ways. They might even be out at a matinee screening of the latest Hugh Grant movie right now. I’d suggest that next time you want to have dinners where arguments occur you use a more appropriate tablecloth. Perhaps seersucker. Or one of those wipe-down vinyl ones.

Six (#ulink_32560a74-3a1f-5e91-8f51-bd6d0dfbc007)

But before I reached Amethyst there was the Garnet turnoff. And this took me back to where it all started. Back to McDonald’s. How appropriate. McDonald’s, that temple which was the meeting point of modern consumerism, efficiency and cleanliness. Those cold disinfected surfaces, those quickly dispensed drinks, those tightly wrapped parcels of burgers and cardboard-clad chips (for Australians still, after thirty years’ indoctrination, called them chips, not ‘fries’). All that order and control, all those precisely measured, weighed and timed burgers, buns, nuggets, fillets. All those smug rows of junior burgers, Big Macs and apple pies, slipping hygienically down their stainless steel chutes. All those obligingly happy Happy Meals.

The McDonald’s in Garnet had changed. The playground had been rebuilt, and was bigger, brighter. There was now a drive-through facility. The palms were taller but still didn’t obscure the all-important signs. After I parked I thought about going in, but then I might have had to eat something, and even for Sonny’s sake I couldn’t do that. It was enough just to sit in the car, thinking.

When I was last here, Sonny was eight. I thought he would have grown out of the place. But eight was a deceptive age, especially for a boy who also happened to be tall. Eight was past little-kid stage. Eight was when you attained a certain level of coolness, when style began to assert itself. You were no longer in the infants’ department at school, you did Real Sport (in Sonny’s case, soccer), and you were allowed the heady freedom of using a pen instead of a pencil in class.

Eight was the beginning of the end of things like favourite cuddly toys at night, ritual comfort foods like hot chocolate before bed, special plastic cartoon cups, flotation aids in the swimming pool (becoming contemptible) or vests (despicable, even in the middle of winter, none of your friends wore them…). But eight was also, still, a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

There was no McDonald’s in Amethyst. For some reason the town had banned all chain stores, franchises and commercial fast food outlets. But there was television. And therefore advertisements. And a neighbouring town twenty minutes away by bus, less if we got a lift with someone. I was a young single mother, equal parts guilt and indulgence, prepared to stand on my principles for only so long. So there we were, sitting over our Happy Meal. And Sonny was happy – I admit it – happy fiddling with the purple and green toy monster. Happy chewing his cardboard chips. Happy alternately sucking then blowing into his Coke, with furtive glances at me.