Dying (8 page)

As Mum had predicted, we ate lunch in the kitchen, crammed into a corner breakfast
nook where Jan had set out a salad and a plate of sandwiches on a small Formica
table.
The talk was mainly about rain and the lack of it, and about the fortunes of friends
and neighbours who were doing it tough. My mother recognised some of the names and
joined in, catching up on news of clans she had known of since girlhood, friends
who had stayed behind when she left, and made their lives in the bush, while she
was busy inventing an entirely different life elsewhere. Soon she grew restless at
the table and excused herself.

‘I just want to take a wander on my own,' she said.

Later I found her lying flat on her back on the bare floorboards of the hallway
that bisected the house straight down the middle, or had done before all of the additions
and modifications had changed things around. At first I thought she had collapsed
there.

‘Are you okay?'

‘I couldn't take any more of that incestuous gossip,' she said. ‘Have you noticed
how they never ask any questions about us? It's like nothing exists beyond the boundary
fence.'

I sat down beside her on the cool boards.

‘Ril used to lie here on summer afternoons,' she said, ‘to catch whatever breeze
there was. She wouldn't speak, only to tell the nanny to keep us away.'

I was reminded of my father's sulks, sometimes lasting two or three days, when he
wouldn't say a word to
anyone. I knew the fear this kind of silence can induce. You
are convinced that it is your fault, that your very existence is a provocation.
At least that was the case with Dad. He never hid the fact that he resented family
life and found the demands of fatherhood intolerable. I gathered Ril had been the
same, saddled with four children before she was fully grown herself, appalled at
the sacrifice of her youth, and of any kind of autonomy, financial or emotional.
No wonder my mother harboured so much grief. She must have imbibed it from birth,
sucked it in with the very air. And here she was, back at the source, filling herself
up with it again, as she lay sprawled on the floor in the spot where her mother had
sulked and gone silent on all those blistering afternoons.

‘Time to go,' she said, hauling herself up to her feet. ‘I've seen enough.'

Peter and Jan could barely disguise their relief as we readied to leave. They herded
us to the gate and beamed as we piled into the car.

‘Give my love to Ranald,' they said, feigning politeness. I had the impression they
had private reservations about Ranald as well as about my mother, regarding them
both as disreputable, if for different reasons.

‘She'll be back inside in a minute,' said Mum, ‘mopping the kitchen floor to get
rid of all our crumbs.'

As we came to the dry creek she asked Jenny to pull over and stop the car.

‘This is where the old dump was,' she said.

I followed her around as she poked in the rubbish with a stick. It was slim pickings,
but she unearthed a few old medicine bottles made of coloured glass and a couple
of blue and white fragments of china encrusted in dirt.

‘There were Chinese market gardeners here when I was small,' she told me, ‘and one
or two Chinese cooks.'

More ghosts, I thought, more apparitions floating into the picture, then vanishing
again. This time they had left a faint trail, a few shards of a rice bowl, a piece
of a picture painted on a plate, depicting a tiny boat on a lake and part of a bridge.

Back in the car, she repeated the oft-told story of the Chinese cook my grandmother
had sacked just after she first moved to Beaconsfield as a new bride.

‘The cook had been working here for years,' she said, ‘with all the men, when the
house was just a shed and the kitchen was a lean-to on the side. She caught him dropping
cigarette ash into the stew and told him he could pack his things and go.'

‘No me go, Missy,' Jenny intervened, delivering the familiar punch line. ‘You go.'

They both laughed at the thought of their eighteen-year-old mother trying to exert
her non-existent authority
over the staff, although I sensed an underlying sadness
to this story, too. Jenny knew what it was like to be the sole woman in a household
of men. No matter how kind they were—and my grandfather was by all accounts very
kind—it must have been unspeakably lonely for my grandmother, and there must have
been times when she was afraid. And what about the cook, lost out here, so far from
anywhere he might have called home, his fate in the hands of a teenage girl.

We stopped again, just before the boundary gate of Beaconsfield, so that my mother
could get out and fill one of her medicine bottles with soil. I watched her walk
a few yards to where the dirt was fine and sandy. She went down on her haunches and
scooped up a handful or two until she had enough.

Back in the car, she stuffed a tissue into the neck of the bottle to stop the dirt
escaping. ‘A piece of home,' she said.

Mum kept her bottle of Beaconsfield dust for many years and through many moves, until
it was finally tossed out or lost, then forgotten along with everything else she
had ever held dear. I don't know if she had any concept of home by the time she died.
She talked obsessively about going there,
begging me to take her home every time
I saw her. But I wasn't sure where she meant. She had made so many homes by then,
more than twenty. Some she had loved and some she hadn't. She certainly didn't mean
the nursing home where she lived out her days.

‘This is your home now,' I'd tell her, trying to pacify her.

‘Liar.'

I wasn't with Mum when she died. Shin and I were living in Japan temporarily, trying
to figure out a way for him to establish a base back in his home country. Before
I left Brisbane, Sarah and I met up with a funeral director. We planned to arrange
for Mum's funeral in advance, given that she was so frail. We felt a simple cremation
was best, with a memorial service to be held later, at a time that suited the whole
family. We didn't want anything religious because Mum had long ago given up on the
church. Sarah suggested a party; Mum had always so loved a party.

‘If we do it this way,' my sister said, ‘you won't have to rush home if she dies.
What would be the point? You've been grieving for her all these years anyway.'

I was grateful to her for saying it, and for her sisterly concern.

What we didn't do was discuss our thoughts with Eliot. I can't say exactly why communications
with our
brother were so poor. The simplest answer is that we all lived separate
lives in different cities—me in Brisbane, Sarah in Newcastle, and Eliot in the Blue
Mountains, west of Sydney. The more complex explanation is that the fractured way
we grew up had left us leery of each other. This was especially true after our parents'
marriage started to fray. My sister and I could at least have a conversation, swap
news on the phone about our kids, comfort each other about our mother's devastating
decline, but my brother was much harder to talk to. I called him perhaps twice a
year to update him on Mum's health. Apart from that, we never spoke.

According to Sarah, as Mum was dying, Eliot was the one she wanted to see, only Eliot.
He came to sit with her, keeping a vigil at her bedside, holding her hand.

‘He was very good,' my sister said, ‘and very helpful when we had to clean up her
room, get rid of all her stuff. But then he blew up.'

‘Why?'

‘Because he thought it was selfish not to have a proper funeral. He thought we were
just thinking about ourselves.'

‘Maybe he's right. Maybe we were.'

For whatever reason, Eliot went ahead and arranged a funeral service in the chapel
of the Catholic nursing
home where Mum had spent the last miserable years of her
life. Sarah didn't go.

‘I never wanted to set foot in that place again,' she said.

Given our lack of practice, it isn't surprising that my brother and sister and I
failed so miserably to bury our mother's ashes properly. Up to this point I, for
one, had never experienced the death of someone close to me. And we were, all three
of us, without any religious belief, all of us clueless about standard rituals and
rites. With no guidelines, Sarah and I were happy to improvise, but this did not
suit Eliot, and he decided to act without us. Even to this day I wish he could have
waited. At the same time, I understand why he didn't. If Sarah and I were acting
selfishly, then so was he. We all were. We didn't know what else to do.

And so that's where things stood for a while. Eliot kept our mother's ashes with
him in the Blue Mountains. The idea of a party-like memorial service faded away.
I spent time in Japan thinking about other things. It wasn't until I returned to
Brisbane a few months later that the question came up of where her ashes were to
be permanently placed. I knew the answer. She wanted her remains to join those of
her parents and grandparents in Brisbane's
Toowong Cemetery. She wanted her name
added to the others on the big pink granite plinth dedicated to the Murrays. She
had taken me there some years beforehand to show me. We had packed a picnic and
had sat on a nearby bench enjoying the spectacular view over the city.

‘Bury me here,' she said.

‘Happily,' I said.

At that stage I was still brushing off any premature death talk. Mum wasn't sick
then, or not that I could tell. It's only now, looking back, that I think she suspected
something was wrong, or else why start choosing burial sites?

About a year later, I rang my sister to suggest a plan.

‘I was thinking we could all meet up in Sydney next weekend,' I said, ‘have lunch
together, drink a toast to Mum, then Eliot could hand over her ashes and I could
bring them back here to do the deed.'

‘Where do you want to meet?'

‘Chinatown. BBQ King. We could get one of the rooms upstairs. Mum loved that place.'

‘Who's going to call Eliot?' she said.

‘I was hoping you might.'

The fact is I was scared of my brother. He was too like my father for me to feel
comfortable with him. I had
been frightened of him ever since we were children together.

Sarah, being the oldest, was less easily awed.

‘Chicken,' she said.

Eliot arrived at the BBQ King a little later than the rest of us. Everyone was there:
his son Ben, then in his mid-twenties, who had been a favourite of my mother's, Shin
and me and our two boys, Sarah, her daughter and two grandsons. Unfortunately Sarah's
son wasn't with us because he wasn't speaking to his mother at the time.

‘Mum adored him,' I told my sister. ‘He should have been here.'

‘I tried,' she said.

She stood up when Eliot came into the room and went around to kiss him. I preferred
to remain seated. In his hand he had a large paper carry bag with Bulgari emblazoned
on the side, which he placed on an empty seat.

‘Is that her?' said Ben, peering inside. ‘What an ugly box.'

He removed the box from the bag and placed it on the table. It was beige plastic,
the size of a small shoebox, with Mum's name written on the front in marker pen.

‘Put it back,' said Eliot.

Ben did as he was told, carefully settling the bag back on the seat so it wouldn't
fall.

‘It's so small,' said Sarah.

The talk went badly after that. There was a long argument about what we were going
to order. It was the grandchildren who saved us from ourselves. Ben and the others
regularly steered the conversation back to Mum, making sure the occasion was about
her, and what she had meant to them growing up, and how they still missed her. And
the great-grandchildren provided a useful distraction. There was always the topic
of how they were doing in school, and what their favourite subjects were, and what
they thought they might like to do when they grew up.

‘Gamer,' said the older one.

‘Oh God,' said his mother, her head in her hands.

After an hour or so there was nothing left to say. Everyone had trains to catch,
or planes, in the case of Shin and me, and Eliot said he had another appointment
somewhere else. In our rush to get away we almost forgot the ashes, sitting in the
beige plastic box inside the Bulgari bag, until Ben remembered and went back for
them. He handed them to my brother, who passed them to me.

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘Nothing to thank me for,' he said.

‘It's what she wanted,' I said.

‘If you say so. I thought I might have taken them up
to Beaconsfield and scattered
them there.'

‘I thought of that too,' I said. ‘But I don't think she belongs there.'

‘How would you know where she belongs?'

I couldn't think of a reply before my brother was out the door and down the stairs,
leaving the question hanging in the air, unresolved. That was how it was with him
and me. Every conversation was an argument, every encounter another chance to raise
some point of disagreement, then leave before it could be settled. We were combatants
before we were brother and sister. I was ashamed for us. A different family might
have managed to put all of this history behind them and say goodbye to their mother
in style. As for us, all we could manage was an hour of faked good fellowship followed
by a hasty retreat. I was glad Mum wasn't there to see it. She would have been inconsolable.