He lets go of my shoulders and lifts the front of his shirt to his face, wiping tears from his eyes and cheeks. ‘Oh dear, oh my,’ he says, wringing his hands, then shaking them out. ‘I’ve been reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead quite a bit since you rang.’
I pick my bags up, ready to go, but instead of making our way to the car, he crosses his arms instead.
‘Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected,’ he says. ‘It’s an utterly radical idea, isn’t it? Just drips with meaning.’
The raven flaps its wings and lets out a deep croak, and we both turn to look at it.
‘A symbol from her,’ Jack says to himself, or to me—I can’t really be sure.
It’s been a year since I last saw him, and months since I forgot to reply to his email, which was a picture of him holding an empty nest that he found by the river that winds through his property. There’s a whole shelf in his house dedicated to objects he’s come across. Ancient hammerstones, smooth chunks of sandblasted glass, a possum’s skull which he keeps in a sealed jar (Because it fucking stinks, he said). Simon once found a dead kangaroo between two logs by the river, and we checked on it daily for a whole summer, watching as it morphed from a rosette of fur to a small patch of scattered bones. By the end of the holidays the understorey had knitted back together over its place, and when we told Jack, he said that the river is a channel where the new and the decrepit can touch hands.
Simon and I would arrive every school holiday, an inch taller than the last visit, and the whole property would be a time capsule to how we had left it months earlier. Our shovels still stuck in the sand hill. Paint pots dried to the easel. Half-made shelters from wood offcuts. One spring we planted butter beans, and when we returned, the vines had grown like hair over the sides of the planter boxes, and there were dried beans as long as my finger still attached to the vine. I told Jack that it was a waste, and he should have picked and eaten them. I couldn’t without you, was all he managed to say about it, emotional about feeling abandoned at the harvest and forced to leave the beans to rot.
He pulls out of the car park as soon as he hears the click of my seatbelt.
‘How’s Simon?’ he asks, then adds, ‘And Vincent?’ There’s tension in his voice as he pronounces Vincent’s name, which comes from keeping his teeth together as he says it.
‘They’re managing. Simon’s got Hugh and Carmen, and Judy is looking after Vincent.’ I don’t state the obvious: that there’s no one to care for me.
We drive in silence for a while, then he says, ‘You can stay as long as you like. You know it’s just me in the big house.’ He glances over at me. ‘And don’t be surprised if you don’t feel like yourself for a while,’ he says.
We pass the golf club, and I count one magpie, two wombats and a large wallaby, all dead by the side of the road.
‘There’s a mortuary here—maybe you can get some work. And you’ll be near the river, near the forests, near me.’
He overtakes a ute towing a campervan, and they give each other the two-finger country wave, and I keep looking out the window, silent, because I’m not sure where I belong at the moment.
‘I know how it feels to lose Josephine; after the divorce I fell apart.’
‘I remember.’
‘I was in pieces until quite recently, actually.’
‘Oh.’
‘But now … well, now I have to keep it together because you and Simon need me. I’m the last one standing.’ His fingers tighten on the wheel. ‘It’s all down to me now.’
My mother was still married to Jack when she met Vincent. She had a stand at the local produce market in town, and every Sunday morning he would come to her stall. He never actually bought anything; he just lingered there, making conversation—complimenting her on her parenting skills as Simon and I ran riot among the market stalls, terrorising the woman who sold ducklings and generally making a nuisance of ourselves. At some point, she pushed him to buy something, anything—a single peach or some sweet cherries—but he refused. I haven’t eaten fruit since the eighties, he said while slipping her his business card.
Jack was my mother’s high school sweetheart and she loved him, but she was also too young to know there were a multitude of other options available. When Vincent began actively pursuing her, he seemed accomplished and urbane by comparison. He had taught mortuary studies in Sydney and had aspirations to open his own funeral business somewhere warmer, whereas Jack could spend a whole morning re-reading a Penguin classic on the deck. There was an unfortunate period of time where she was with both men, and it hurt everyone in the end. She had no money of her own and two young children. When she agreed to an interstate move with Vincent, on the proviso that Vincent made her a partner in the business, Jack raged at her for leaving him, and when she finally went, he made the divorce take up the first three years of her new relationship.
‘You look well,’ I say to Jack, trying to lighten the conversation.
‘I’m old, Lia. I feel one hundred some days.’ He leans across and opens the glove box, pulling out an open bag of lollies, which he rests in my lap. ‘But let’s not break with tradition. It’s time to reacquaint you with the island.’ He holds out his hand, and I shake some lollies into it for him.
I take a yellow snake and tie it in a knot
