1966, Sydney.
Philip’s death shunted his parents’ ages forward a decade or more. Bernadette’s fingers gnarled into the twisted uselessness of broken twigs. Her once straight back diminished to a stricken stoop. She seemed perplexed when asked a question. Bewildered by mundane tasks. She’d start and stop. Or finish then start over again. She’d leave the broom, brush end up and colonised by spiders, parked up against the mantle piece in the living room for days. Or abandon a bucket of dirty water in the middle of the kitchen until Edward would kick it over and step wet grime through the house. She’d sit in the tin bath, knees up, arms wrapped around her legs in cold shallow water until Eric, prompted by Edward, would remember to rescue her before her skin wrinkled to a shrivel.
Eric’s thick dark hair moulted into a thin white cap. He became a man with only two moods – melancholy or fury. The moods flipped as probabilistically as a spun coin. Heads for melancholy. Tails for fury. Or heads for fury. Tails for melancholy. Janet came to predict her father’s mood by the feel of the old house as it pre-empted Eric’s emotional status. It sighed and settled in sorrow. Or it was taut and crackling in anger. Even in his absence, in the long hours that Eric was out at work, the house kept the dark sentiments going.
Edward went to school, came back, and went to school. He was alone, then in a pair, and finally promoted to the most popular group of boys in the school. His leather satchel developed an uneasy rash of stickers. His skin oxidised, his hair bleached and he extended upwards beyond his father. He patted his mother’s arm, nodded to his father, and cleaned his rugby boots on the back step. He was never in the same room as Janet. He ate his meals in the back garden, or stood, tapping his foot at the kitchen door, until Janet got up to leave. On Saturdays he disappeared with a rolled up towel, a packed lunch, and his bus money, returning late in the evening with salt-slicked hair and grazes on his shins. Sharp lines separated brown skin from pale, denoting the length of both his shorts and his sleeves. One evening he turned up with a black coral necklace scooped around his neck. No one said a word.
Janet enrolled at the University of Sydney in the school of law. She would start in the following February. Neither of her parents noticed the accolade that this should have brought upon the family. Nor did they notice Janet’s sudden switch in interest from English literature to the legal profession. In the meantime Janet searched through the classified ads for an admin job in a criminal law office. Two months after her arrival in Sydney, she would pull on a smart blue skirt, tie her hair back into a sharp tight pony-tail, and start her new role for Mr Shepherd LL.B.
The new arrivals had, like all new arrivals, attracted attention in Macaulay Road. Did the neighbours know about the Waters’ bereavement? If so, they kept schtoom. And if so, they behaved magnanimously. (Or they held a dark fascination for the horror the family was suffering and they wanted to get in closer to have a dig around in the misery.) Grief is not a social butterfly. It isn’t invited to dinner parties or trips to the zoo, or a family day out to Manly Beach. And if, on occasion, grief is invited to these events, it declines through reticence or silence.
So the neighbours in Macaulay Road, despite their unswerving and collective efforts, didn’t manage to get over the Waters’ doorstep for months. Instead they left entreaties just inside the garden gate. A passion fruit pavlova in a Tupperware box. A small rubber plant in a large hand-painted terracotta pot. Pretty white crocheted doilies with dinky weights on the corners to keep the flies off food. Handwritten cards in smudged ink with telephone numbers and invitations to barbecues. Janet would rescue these offerings and dump them on the kitchen table. A day or two later her father would caress the objects with both hands before standing up and dropping them silently into the bin.
The Inspector was the only person to visit the family in its first season of mourning. His visits were initially regular, and greeted with angry questions from Eric and pleas for further investigation from Bernadette. Did the Inspector obfuscate? Perhaps. He mentioned the coroner. The lack of a body. The complexities of the law of the sea. Maybe there’d be an inquest. Maybe not. He was working on it. He’d wipe his brow down with a cotton handkerchief and Janet would bring him a glass of cold water. Sometimes she let her hand brush over his. And sometimes his pinky would move just enough for Janet to pinken in the cool glum of the kitchen and hold out hope that something more than the rub of a finger would be forthcoming.
To be continued.
SANDERLINGS 