'OK, no Tim.'
'Good lad. Steven, I should have seen it coming.'
'Seen what?'
'I'd found references in some books, though I never believed-'
The phone dies, there's nothing down the end. I smack it with the palm of my hand.
'That's not going to do anything,' Lissa says.
'Makes me feel better.' I jut out my lower lip, and scowl. Just how petulant can I be? My face reddens again but Lissa's ignoring the show, considering the problem like I should be. After all, I'm the living one here.
'Is there some drift?' she asks.
I shake my head. 'No, the signal's strong.' I show her the phone. 'The under and upper worlds are in sync. They're almost rubbing up against each other.'
'Maybe that's why all this is happening. All this death. All these murdered Pomps.'
'It's not murder,' I say. 'It's assassination.'
And then I have a terrible thought.
Something so obvious that the realization hits me hard and cold.
'Gotta call Mom and Dad.'
'Too late, Steve,' says a voice at my ear.
It's Dad, and Mom is with him.
'Been too late for at least half an hour,' he says.
6
This is the moment I've dreaded all my life. I'd always imagined it differently. But here it is, as it is for civilians: unexpected, sudden and utterly terrible.
Dad's in his usual attire-pants, and a light tan sports jacket. All of it crumpled. He's even wearing his favorite fedora, hiding his thinning hair. Pomps are well dressed in the main. Most of the time we're in a suit, black, of course; comes from going to so many funerals. But Dad could get away with wearing a pink Hawaiian shirt to a funeral. Charisma, I guess. He dresses sloppy, but it's charming sloppy. I've never really understood it but people tell me it's there. Everybody loves my dad.
'It's not your fault, Steve,' Dad says. His face is lined, but those lines were drawn by smiles. It's a generous face, though he's already losing that-the emotions are slipping away to the One Tree. He frowns. 'Did you have a big night last night? You sounded like it on the phone.'
I shrug: avoid eye contact. Standard guilty son response. 'I may have… indulged.' Parents, even dead ones, know how to push the right buttons.
'Look at me, boy. That's better. Son of mine, I worry about you.' And he does, it's in his face, even if it is fading. It shames me a little.
I want to hold him. I want to hold Mom. But I can't. The moment I do, they will go. 'Dad… What happened? How?'
He coughs. The spirit clings to these old habits. 'It was fast, didn't even suspect, until it was over. We hadn't even finished breakfast. Just don't go over to our place. Promise me that.'
I nod my head, feeling sick to the stomach.
'Same happened to me,' Lissa says, and Dad turns toward her.
'This is Lissa,' I say.
'Ah, Melbourne isn't it? The Joneses?' Dad asks, and then he catches me looking at him. 'Never forget a face.'
'Particularly a young woman's,' Mom says. She's as I remember her, in a sensible woolen jumper and pants, both mauve, both as neat as Dad's are crumpled. She's wearing (technically projecting) her favorite brooch: a piece of Wedgwood. There's a clarity and a calmness about her that she'd never had in life. That's over for her now, only the One Tree waits. There's still enough life left, though, to bring up these age-old arguments.
Lissa turns a remarkable beetroot red.
'Now, that's not exactly fair,' Dad says, hands raised placatingly. 'The Joneses are an old pomping family. Hardly any Black Sheep, too, I might add.'
'Not that old,' Mom says. She looks at Lissa. 'I was very sorry about your loss last year. Both parents, and so quickly.'
'It's all right,' Lissa says. 'We of all people know that.'
'Still-'
'Leave off, Annie,' Dad says. 'She obviously doesn't want to talk about it.'
'I'm trying to be compassionate here, and you start on this. You're just uncomfortable talking about your feelings. And look at what that did to your son.'
'Please,' I say wearily, though I really don't want an end to this. Mom and Dad can argue for as long as they want if it means I can still have them here. 'This isn't the time or place.'
But there's no time, and only one place for them, and we all know it.
'Sorry,' Dad says.
Mom nods. 'Yes, he's sorry.'
Yet again, I'm waiting for the lights to change, on the corner of George and Ann Streets, the edge of the CBD. I can't move. Dead people who no one else can see, though their presence must be raising some hackles, surround me. I don't care. I don't want to share this space with anyone. There's a huge black dog barking madly across the road, its eyes firmly fixed on my posse and me. It strains on its leash, the dog's owner shaking her head with embarrassment, doing her best to stop it pulling her across the road.
The living are stepping around us as though I'm stinking of urine and praising some cruel deity at the top of my voice, a vengeful one, obviously.
The lights have changed a half-dozen times at least, but I'm not ready.
I'm dazed.
Various cousins and aunts and uncles, well their spirits at any rate, keep dropping by. Uncle Blake dressed in his golf clothes shocks me with how calm he is, dead or not. There's none of the bluster, the fire that made a lot of the de Selby Christmas parties so interesting. He just seems resigned. Aunty May grabs my arm, perhaps in shock at her death, and is pomped at once. There can't be that many Pomps left in Brisbane. The conversations are mainly like this.
'Steve, oh, they're-'
'Did you?'
'Boyo, be careful.'
'Who's that? Oh-the Jones girl.' (Am I the only one who doesn't know this girl and her family?)
'Love, be careful.'
It's my younger cousins that hurt me the most. Too young, all of them. Too young. They sigh and moan as they pass through me.
My Aunt Gloria looks at me sadly. 'Just call Tim, will you? Promise me that. Let him know that Blake and I love him and that we always will.'
I think about what Morrigan told me. Maybe calling Tim isn't such a good idea. But I can't keep this from him. 'He knows that already, Aunty G. He knows how much you love him.'
She gives me a look-the family look-a mixture of stern disapproval and dismay that only someone who truly loves you is capable of, and that engenders a kind of cold, chemical, panicky reaction in my stomach.
'I'll call him. Once I sort this out.' That last bit has become something of a refrain. But I don't think I'm ever going to sort this out. Then she pomps through me, and is gone.
The lights change but I hover on the corner. All of this is really starting to sink in. I'm in serious trouble, half the Pomps I know are dead, and most of those are family. Now my entire living family consists of poor Tim and an aunt in the UK.
'Are you all right?' I ask Mom, and she's looking at me with the eyes of a dead person. There's love there, but
