In faded brown on the granite slab.
Good-bye old man! A lot went with you.
And only now can it be said
The old man’s dead, the baby’s dead.
I knew some of my parents’ stories. My father’s were all about farm life. The swaggies and Indian hawkers who called in to the property when Dad was a little kid. The silence in the shearing shed as the men sheared the stud rams with blades instead of electric shears, to avoid injuring them. The weekend rabbit drives, when the trappers gradually pushed the rabbits into nets in a corner of a paddock, getting over two thousand rabbits in a weekend. Drenching the sheep with bluestone-nicotine, and going out the next morning to see hundreds of huge white tapeworms all over the ground. The glut of cattle which led to well-bred Poll Hereford cows in good condition selling for ten, twenty, fifty cents each. And the fires and the floods. Always the fires and floods.
My mother’s stories ranged a bit wider. Some were about growing up in the city, some were about her trip overseas when she was eighteen. And some were about life with Dad on the farm. Her father was an accountant and her mother did a few different things, including catering and landscape design and radio production. And raising a daughter.
So my mother’s stories were about going to a private school where some girls were driven by chauffeurs each day, where Mum got caught putting a bra on a statue of the school’s first principal (who to make things worse was a guy), where she saw a teacher get run over by a drunk on a bicycle. And later, after she’d left school, helping her mother design a garden for Monica Duran, who insisted on having a huge photo of herself on a courtyard wall, going to a dance and finding a girl dead in one of the toilet cubicles, seeing the pandas in the Washington Zoo, and a soccer riot in Barcelona.
And, later, the fires and the floods.
I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don’t think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they’re born, and maybe before that, they start accumulating stories and it’s those stories that have the biggest effect on them.
Like the poem says, a thousand million memories. A thousand million stories. And then some.
I feel that in my short life I’ve already gone over the thousand million mark. Sometimes I have trouble believing that I’ve seen and done so much.
A week after the funeral Fi walked in through the kitchen door. I was at the table trying to show Gavin how to separate eggs, and I hadn’t heard her coming. Gavin certainly hadn’t heard her coming. He dropped the egg, shell and all, into the bowl with the whites and rushed to her like he’d been a calf on one side of the fence and she was his mum who’d been bellowing for him on the other side. Not that I’ve ever seen anyone less like a cow than Fi. She’s more deer, more antelope, more your young wallaby, the most naturally graceful person I know.
Gavin hugged her and hugged her. It was hard for me to get near her. I actually felt jealous of Gavin, no, not jealous, envious. Somehow I was getting too old for the Total, Give It Everything You’ve Got, No Holds Barred hugs. They were the best hugs of all. But when I was finally allowed access to Fi we held each other for a long time. She felt very warm.
Soon enough I got her a cup of coffee and we sat down at the table, Gavin squished up next to Fi on the same chair, holding his glass of cordial. (Another pang as I got the bottle of cordial from the pantry — Mum had made it less than two months ago and it had her own label on it, with a little sketch of fruit, and the words ‘Linton’s Lemon and Orange’ in cute printing.)
‘How have you been?’ she asked me.
‘OK.’
‘You looked terrible at the funeral.’
‘Were you at the funeral?’
‘You mean you don’t remember?’
‘No. I didn’t think you were there. I was a bit hurt about it actually.’
‘Oh my God, Ellie, we had a conversation, but you seemed so switched off that I didn’t know if you wanted me to stay away or what. So I thought I’d wait a bit, until the first rush of visitors had finished. ’Cos Mum said that you’d be overwhelmed by them at first and the true friends are the ones who are still around when the others have gone back to their normal daily lives.’
‘There’s a book from the funeral, that people signed apparently, but I haven’t been game to look at it yet.’
Fi continued. ‘So I’m here if you want me, and for as long as you want, whether it’s five minutes or a couple of weeks.’
‘Oh, Fi, I’d love you to stay, for as long as you can. For life if you want.’
‘Has it been terrible? Is that a stupid question?’
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. Finally I gulped: ‘Terrible.’
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘No. Not yet. Maybe later. I don’t know.’
There was a bit of silence. ‘Do you remember anything about the funeral?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes. Quite a bit.’ I laughed. ‘Even stupid things, like Mrs Mathers and Mrs Kristicevic wearing the same dress.’
‘Yes, I noticed that. Of course they weren’t actually wearing the same dress. That would have been a bit uncomfortable.’
It took me a minute to realise what she meant. Showed how slowly my brain was working. ‘Oh very funny,’ I said, when I did figure it out.
‘Did you notice Lee fainting?’
‘No! Are you serious? Was he there too?’
‘God, you poor thing, you really were out of it.’
‘Did he actually faint?’
‘Totally. My father was one of the men who helped carry him outside. I’ve been talking to him on the phone just about every day. He’s out of his mind. He’s written about four letters to you.’
Lee. It doesn’t seem right that someone with a one-syllable name of three letters could have caused me more than a year of complicated agonising confusing wonderful sensations, and what was worse, he was still doing it. He loved me, he loved me not, I loved him, I loved him not. Last time I’d seen him we’d made love. But then in my mind the relationship slowly died. But then in my mind the relationship flared back to life. Then it didn’t. Then it did. Didn’t. Did. Now… I don’t know. Yes, no, maybe, all of the above.
‘I guess Lee would know what it’s like.’
‘I guess he would, except he never saw his parents’ bodies. He just heard about it.’
I looked away and sighed. ‘I haven’t even opened the mail. There’s so much of it and I think it’s nearly all about Mum and Dad and I just think it’s going to be so depressing reading it. I don’t even answer the phone most of the time.’
‘Yeah I’ve noticed. Well, that’s one thing I can help with while I’m here. We can open the mail together and go through it and work out which ones you want to answer. If any.’
‘Oh, it’s going to be so good to have you here. I just don’t think I should let you read Lee’s letters.’
She grinned. ‘That’s better. You’re getting a bit of life back. Can I have another coffee?’
With my back to her as I poured the coffee I said slowly, ‘You see, Fi, what I keep wondering is, whether what’s happened is my fault.’
A lot of people would have jumped in right there with the comfort hugs, and said reassuring things like ‘Oh no, Ellie, whatever gave you that idea, of course it’s not your fault, you have to stop thinking like that’, and so on. Fi had more sense than that. She didn’t say anything.
I brought the coffee back to the table and sat down again. Without looking at her I said, ‘Why did they pick out this place? Of all the farms, all the properties, all the houses to choose, why this one?’
‘You’re close to the border.’
‘We’re on the border, more or less. Except for a bit of bush. But so are thousands of other people. There are plenty of places they could have gone for.’
‘So you’re saying this is deliberate revenge. That they picked you out because of what we did during the war.’
