He turns the page and points to a photo of my mother swaddling me in a crocheted blanket. She is gazing into my smiling face as she folds one corner of it over my body.
‘You loved being swaddled, couldn’t stand having your arms and legs flailing about. If you were wrapped, you would be happy enough to lie on the floor near my feet when I wrote, but I could never get the tension right. Your mum was the expert: she knew just how to wrap you so you felt nice and held but not too squeezed.’
He continues flicking through the album and speaking about various photos, and it takes all my willpower to keep still and listen, because this is very, very uncomfortable. I want to shake Jack and tell him that nostalgia is not an antidote to grief. Nothing will stop us from enduring this for the rest of our lives, and there’s plenty more to come. He will die. Simon will die. Judy will die. There are five ways you can be thrown out of your body, and they drum like a marching beat inside me. Accident. Suicide. Homicide. Natural. Un-de-ter-mined! Accident. Suicide. Homicide. Natural. Un-de-ter-mined! Accident. Suicide. Homicide. Natural. Un-de-ter-mined! They will be divided up between us all.
He turns to the next page, where there is a photo of my mother squeezing a wet sponge into the kitchen sink. It was before she had us, and she has a scarf tied around her head and is wearing an old sarong. She’s smiling at the camera, but I get the sense that the photo was taken after she had spent a whole day cleaning.
‘She was sick of all the dust in the house. It was filthy when we moved in here. I sneezed dust, it was that bad. Even now, I worry that the dust might have made its way up to my brain. I asked your mum at the time if she thought the dust went that high, and you know what she said? Probably. She said it with that smile of hers that acted more like a frown. She was so bossy. I loved it. I loved it. I used to suggest things just to rile her up.’
I let my eyes blur, wondering if I’d ever truly understood grief before, even though I worked in a funeral home. I knew it was the catalyst for books and songs. People wax lyrical about grief and death. People win regional arts grants for their essays on watching people die. I never read or listened to any of it, because I thought I knew it already. Every day, every single day, I would lecture someone about grief. It’s profound. It’s necessary. It’s human. I would repeat these words that I had heard other people say, with no personal experience of them. Which part of grief do you want to know about? The developmental? Physiological? Emotional? I’ve got facts; I’m full of facts. It’s profound. It’s necessary. It’s human. Nobody tells you that it drips like dye into your life, slowly colouring everything. Nobody tells you how unhelpful people can be, or how unfriendly the world can seem. Nobody tells you the hours involved in processing all the feelings and memories. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody tells you any of this.
I sit at the table and implode while looking at photos of my dead mother. I would rather fly to Abu Dhabi and bury myself alive and alone in the boiling sand, because it would still feel better than this. I am so mad that I could hit Jack with my fists to make him understand that it is unforgivable to make a grieving woman sit at a table and look at photos of her mother, who is right now being burnt to pieces, to specks, to dust. Unthinkable. This is more uncomfortable than painting a man in my menstrual blood, more uncomfortable than being flayed alive in front of a crowd. It is so uncomfortable that I need to feel something else of equal intensity. If anyone ever asks why I went back to the Widow Maker, I will tell them it’s because Jack pulled out photo albums of my mother, and I saw the face of the woman I loved—not radiating happiness or joy, but enduring a marriage that didn’t suit her. If anyone ever asks me how I dealt with this grief, I will tell them honestly: by killing the light of everything else around me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Vlad turns the aquarium until she is face to face with the fighting fish. She holds the tank between both of her hands, and touches her nose to the glass.
‘Are you alright in there?’ she asks softly.
She’s changed clothes since I saw her this afternoon, and now wears a lace teddy with a baggy sweatshirt over the top, and thigh-high patent leather boots. I feel conservative by comparison, in a loose floral dress. I had no other options really; my Marquis costume is torn and dirty, and I haven’t wanted to wear my black outfit since the experience with Leo. Tanya doesn’t like the horse mask and I don’t know I can be bothered trying to get a different body by squeezing myself into something tighter or shinier. It doesn’t work for me. I just feel even more uncomfortable.
‘I’ve told Bronwyn and Tanya that he’s not thriving, but they don’t listen.’ Vlad picks up a small plastic container and picks out a couple of freeze-dried worms, dropping them into the water, where they sink to the bottom, unnoticed.
‘He’s usually a deep red but he’s faded a lot lately, and he’s not feeding readily, which is what all the websites say he should be doing.’
‘He’s probably bored,’ I say, looking at the small square tank.
‘I actually can’t stand it.’ She looks around the room. ‘Is there anything we can give him to look at?’
‘We could put
