The Household Guide to Dying

Nothing worked. Now I was playing my very last card. It was a mean trick, I knew. I felt its meanness myself. How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister’s wife – any prime minister’s wife – Nicole Kidman’s mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush senior and junior…they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional – all Dickens’ mothers were – but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every single rule and if I were Archie, I would have been outraged too. But that wasn’t going to change, and it certainly wasn’t my idea.

I wondered if my absence would make any real difference to the running of the household. As with the commander ofan army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Like Mrs Isabella Beeton I had applied a strategic approach to the household, its contents, its routines, and its warm and breathing occupants. And how had I forgotten that Isabella Beeton, that wise, visionary, wellread, innovative woman, that young woman, had died far too early? Isabella Beeton had left her two children – one just a baby – motherless. She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment.

But what once infuriated me about Archie I now admired. It hadn’t been his tendency to dally in flirtatious territory at dinners or parties featuring women with more impressive cleavage than I – and of course, more recently, with cleavage at all. Nor had it been his need to bond with members of the same gender and subspecies (semi-professional, rugby-loving) at the pub once a week. Nor his regular forgetting of birthdays and anniversaries. If this marriage were to have unravelled it would have been over something as trivial and tangible as a misplaced sock, or a forgotten school lunchbox. That indifference to the knitted fabric of the household. It might have been misshapen over time and ill-fitting but still, thanks to the one thread that was me, it all held together: the shopping, the bill-paying, the girls’ activities, their dental appointments, their swimming lessons, their need to dawdle in the park doing nothing at all.

However, I now saw a quality that I almost craved. Maybe Archie’s indifference to the household was restraint, a capacity for self-control and wide-gazing detachment. Something I couldn’t do, being forever focused on the crumbs on the kitchen bench in front of me, the emptying milk carton in the fridge, the multiplying dirty clothes in the basket.

I once heard a famous actor being interviewed on the radio about the breakdown of her marriage. When pressed to name its cause she replied succinctly: shirts. I knew instantly what she meant. The symbol of a married woman’s unscripted yet unavoidable role in the relationship. No clause in the contract stipulating the care and maintenance of the male shirt, yet somehow they took over, with their demands to be soaked, ironed, fresh and alert on hangers ready for the next excursion into the working world. It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt.

My particular argument had never been with shirts, since Archie’s work gear was casual. And even if it had been, I would never have left him over a shirt because, despite his domestic blindness, Archie had given me more than I deserved. But there had been times when I could see how it might have been possible to leave. I doubted he had ever understood how tight a thread I had been all these years. And now that one thread was about to be snipped. And if on the very edge of that scission, I was still unable to fall back, stop being the commander of the household, what did that say about me? Control freak, I guessed. Yet I suspected there was something more to it than that. Yet another thing for which I could not find the right words.

I wondered what happened when women disappeared from a family. Another woman enlisted to take their place? A paid housekeeper, or a wife? Despite his occasional flirtatiousness I couldn’t see Archie rushing into anything. That didn’t fit with the father in him. I knew he would be assisted by his mother and my mother, who between them would probably make life easier for him than I ever had. Then, after a while, depending on how Estelle and Daisy reacted, a new partner would come, followed possibly by marriage. Secretly I was hoping for Charlotte, Archie’s part-time bookkeeper, which seemed logical to me, although I’d tried and failed to discuss the subject with him. I liked Charlotte, I admired her. She was a serene young woman who was completing a diploma in business management. She worked with percentages and bottom lines and, I suspected, had never made a sponge cake or done French knitting in her life. She came one day a week and worked in the corner of Archie’s shed which was also his office, sending out invoices and settling accounts with suppliers, decoding then dispensing all the paperwork of the tax system that Archie found so mystifying. Estelle and Daisy adored her and only ever wanted her to mind them if Archie and I went out. If she married Archie it would be almost perfect.

Oh, and it would be cruel. Another woman to usher the girls into their teenage years, into their adulthood. To be there for their first period, to buy the most expensive hair products, to offer advice on skin care, to tolerate teenagegirl cravings for Nutella or obsessions with vegan diets. To pretend to understand how vital MySpace was. To be there when their boyfriends abandoned them. Gasp at their mobile phone bills. Shake a head over their newest piercing. Tell them, every day, how beautiful they were. And how much they were loved.

Cruelty. What exactly did Eliot say again? I found my undergraduate copy of the Selected Poems, and prepared to torment myself further with his gloomy words. But when I read ‘The Wasteland’ again I had to admit that Mr Eliot was right: it was winter that had kept me warm, in a strange sort of way. Muffled me in its state of suspended animation, kept me from the cold steel of memory and desire before they sliced through my soul in the expectant warmth of spring.

An attack of wind shook the wisteria so furiously the petals rained onto the verandah. Opening the office window wide I took in its scent. I heard the clicking of Mr Lambert’s wheelbarrow next door. This time of year, he was more than particular about his garden: he was obsessive. He would be sweeping up the leaves and blown petals as they dropped, cursing my messy flowering vines and clipping every tendril that sneaked its way past the fence. Instead of shaving his front lawn today, he was probably pruning, the mock orange hedge being his chief target. I never smelled the mock orange during the day, but some nights the entire atmosphere was saturated with it. It could not be just from Mr Lambert’s abject specimens, which he trimmed into order every week in the warmer months.

Winter would soon be just a chill memory. The scent on the wind told me that. It might have been the freesias, planted around the letterbox. The fragrance always filled me with a strange distracted yearning, a restless and aching expectation. Perhaps because it contained the promise of summer, the season I loved the most. I remembered the freesias which grew along the railway embankments and in vacant lots all the way down the south coast. The ones that filled a room with a scent at once wild and comforting. They brought suggestions of many things: memories of rough childhood holidays on the south coast beaches; weekends away in holiday shacks with friends; the evidence of the first garden I ever helped plan, plant and nurture into life, when we first came to live here. The garden hadn’t existed then: the house perched disdainfully at the front of a long narrow stretch of buffalo grass. There was a Hills hoist rotary washing line, immobilised by age, and nothing else. We brought clumps of the wild freesias and, after hacking away at the grass to uncover cracked but serviceable paths and the faint outlines of former garden beds, planted them here and there.

For all the years I caught their first scent each spring, I experienced a small stab deep within. A distinct physical ache, and one that always made me feel momentarily emotional, though whether on the verge of tears or shouts or laughter, I could never say. This seasonal feeling was so common I had always registered it unthinkingly. Until now. For I would no longer smell these flowers, and it seemed important to define accurately what the scent meant. And it wasn’t only the freesias. All the spring flowers taunted me in their postcard perfection, as unwelcome as the memory and desire that now encroached on the day. They all seemed to have come out of the dead land, the garden that I once revelled in.

On the desk beside me the phone rang.

Hello?

There was no one at the other end but I sensed a presence. I suspected it was the same person who also hung up after a few rings, before I could answer it.

Hello? I repeated more loudly, but the presence was not to be provoked by shouting. I slammed the phone down. I had no idea who it was. The caller ID function told me it was a private number.

I closed Mr Eliot, more carefully than I otherwise might, adding him to the collection of books on the bedside table. They probably wouldn’t make their way back to the bookshelves in the hall.

Dear Delia

Don has been very good to me, and my husband has neglected me for years for his work. You still didn’t advise if I should bleach my lace tablecloth or not. And as well as the red wine it is smeared with green stains where Don knocked over his avocado and prawn entrée.

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

Don, Don, Don. It’s all about Don, isn’t it? And why is it that you are attracted to such clumsy men? I advise you to sever relations with Don and concentrate on your husband. Maybe he works too hard because you are the sort of person who uses lace cloths and makes avocado and prawn cocktails. What were you thinking? It’s not 1975 any more. Of course soaking an antique lace cloth in bleach would be crazy. Try lots of salt, cold water, then hang it out in the sun for a day. Let me know how you go.

Eight (#ulink_55bff7a1-b87a-5f60-a0fd-2fb34b8849c2)

By the time it was nearly dark and the families had come and gone in the late afternoon rush with their Happy Meals and movie-deal specials, I felt ready to drive off again.

I’d see if I could find Mitchell. If he was still around he would be at one of three places. The first was the café on the way back to Amethyst. It had a new name, and when I pulled up and saw the sign I assumed it was a facetious one. But when the waiter, dreadlocks flying, rollerbladed to my table with the menu, I understood it really was the Roadkill Café. She explained that they were out of wallaby.

We’ve got python instead, chargrilled. And the specials are rabbit casserole – or rat, if you like. In one movement she yawned slightly and shifted her chewing gum across to the other side of her mouth.

Rat?

Both types. Native and rattus rattus.

Oh.

I wondered if there was a difference. Only in price, she told me, scanning the rest of the room and chewing her gum. The native rat, antechinus, was five dollars more, and it wasn’t written down because Parks and Wildlife might be alerted and even though it was genuine roadkill, guaranteed one hundred per cent fresh…

Look, could you come back in a few minutes?

It had been a long day’s drive, and I had barely eaten, and should have been hungry. But the whole place and menu had changed. It used to be called Mitchell’s café, just like his place in town was Mitchell’s bar, though neither had a sign to explain that. People just knew. But it didn’t surprise me to find a marginal sort of dining experience here, this strange diner that fed its patrons off the very road that brought them to its doors. Amethyst had always been like that. Nothing ever conformed. It was one reason why I chose to stay all those years back.

I studied the menu again, hoping to spot a salad or soup. Apart from the thought of eating any rat, the threat of the Parks and Wildlife department was off-putting. Would they raid the café and confiscate my meal between mouthfuls, prosecute me for eating a national or state emblem? Or worse, a sports mascot? I thought about taking out my mobile phone and turning it on. It had been four days and I expected the message I’d written for Archie and the girls was by now insufficient. I took the phone out of my bag, stared at the blank unlit screen for a few moments, then replaced it. Not yet. Not until I was really there.

The waiter was getting annoyed.

Is Mitchell around? I asked. A foolish question. She was probably two years old when I was last here.

Mitchell? Never heard of him. Steve might know, he’s in charge.

Could you ask him?

Sure. Steve! She yelled so loudly I thought the gum would shoot from her mouth.

A man appeared through the fly strip curtain, wiping what looked like fresh blood from his hands onto a tea towel.

Hi. I was wondering if Mitchell was still around. I used to work for him.

I took over the place from him, Steve said. But that was over ten years ago. Not sure where he is now. I’m from Garnet, back down the highway. But he could still be in that bar in town.

Sure, I said. Thanks.

Are you ready to order yet? the waiter said.

No thanks, I said, getting up. Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.

I passed Lazarus’s Vehicles again. It had barely changed. The same collection of shabby trailers and caravans sitting at angles, having been left by their previous owners without the bricks to prop them up. Peeling reminders of holiday aspirations, plans and dreams that were never realised.

When the bus had dropped me off some twenty years ago, it wasn’t a scheduled stop. The driver had said he couldn’t take me any farther, but that I could get to where I wanted to go if I waited here by the side of the road. Someone would soon drive past and give me a lift for the final few kilometres into town. He’d seemed very confident of that.

I waited for an hour, then, hot and thirsty, started to walk. I eventually came to Lazarus’s yard. He agreed to take me into town when he shut up shop at five. He dropped me at the Kingfisher Boarding House, a block from the main shops and just shabby enough for someone of limited means.

Early the next morning I started looking for Van. Three days later I checked out and returned to Lazarus’s. This time I had a proper look, walking around the whole site, investigating cluttered corners of the yard and peering into vans and trailers I doubt he remembered he had. I spotted the most endearing caravan I had ever seen. A comic book caravan. Curved, aluminium, a dull sky blue. It was perched on tufts of grass amid the graveyard of vehicles, most of them decrepit. This was old, but it looked sound enough.

How much? I asked him.

That? Not much use to you, he said. It won’t travel, not far anyway.