The Household Guide to Dying
Debra Adelaide

Dedicated with love to the memory of Adam Wilton and Alison McCallum

Epigraph

Death, you’re more successful than America, even if we don’t choose to join you, we do

John Forbes ‘Death, an Ode’

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

The first thing I did this morning was visit the chickens. Archie had already given them the kitchen scraps, so I leaned over the fence and scattered handfuls of layer pellets. As always, they fussed and squabbled as if they’d never been fed before and never would be again. Then I opened the gate and went to the laying boxes, where they still crowded into one corner, even though there was plenty of room. There were three clean eggs: two brown, one white. Not so long ago I could tell which chicken had laid which egg. Now sometimes I couldn’t remember their names. I picked the eggs up carefully. One was still warm. But touch is extraordinary, how it triggers memory, and so then I did remember that the tea-coloured ones were from the brown chickens, and the smaller white one was Jane’s. I held it to my cheek for a moment, savouring its warmth, its wholesomeness. I wondered if this was something that poets would ever write about, because it was an experience I treasured. The comforting shape, the startling freshness. The idea that this egg, white and perfect in the palm of my hand, was a potential new life, requiring of the world nothing but warmth.

Ripeness is all. That was something a poet once said. Eliot, I think. Or Shakespeare. Perhaps both – it’s hard to remember now.

With the eggs in my pocket I made my way back up the garden. Inside the house, the phone was ringing again, but I didn’t bother rushing to answer it. It stopped after five rings. It had been doing that a bit lately. The air was rinsed clean from the rain earlier. I could hear the clipping of hand shears. That would be Mr Lambert next door at work maintaining his lawn, Mr Lambert for whom a heavy dew, rain, or even a snowfall – if such a thing were possible here in the temperate suburbs – never inhibited his devotion to the task. As if in his latter years, all his focus could only be directed down. I realised Mr Lambert had avoided my eye for years. I wondered if he thought about returning to the earth, now that retirement had gripped him and even his grandchildren no longer visited. Or was that just me, thinking about my own future?

Did I say future? I really wish there was the right word for all this, because irony doesn’t come close, is completely inadequate. For a start, I discovered that Eliot was right about the cruellest month – except for me it wasn’t April, but October. Spring was mocking me with its glorious signals that summer was on the way. The wisteria outside my window making the most splendid mess of the verandah. The driveway littered with papery blossoms. My car confettied with them. If I’d been driving this morning it would have been annoying, but instead I was free to admire the way the flowers had been tossed across the windscreen. The shabby old car was as radiant as a bride. And now the sun was out and the wind was warm, I could smell the wisteria. Or perhaps it was the jasmine, which was along the front fence, just out of sight. My sense of smell was becoming muffled.

What is it about mauve and purple flowers? I remembered now that Mr Eliot (my high school English teacher always referred to him with respect) also had a thing about them – lilacs and hyacinths – but for me it was wisteria, and now irises. Archie planted irises in an old concrete laundry tub he’d turned into a pond, and each year they were more crowded and abundant. I’d been watching them over the past week or two. Their great long spears. The subtle swell of the buds on the stems. On the way back from the chicken shed, I noticed that the first one was out. It was bent over – perhaps the rain earlier was stronger than I thought – but the bloom was unharmed. I cut it and placed it in a vase on the kitchen bench. It was beautiful in a frankly genital way. Dark purple with a lick of yellow up each petal. And no scent at all. I think the scent of lilacs would make me retch now.

I’d always thought that this soft margin between winter and summer could never be cruel. But here, although the hemisphere is inverted, I was as bitten by cruelty as the poet was. Spring is the time of hope. Of inspiring songs and rousing actions. Of possibility, of anticipation, of plans. People emerge from winter, after tolerating autumn’s capricious start to the season, and know that if spring has arrived then summer isn’t far away. Every spring our local community has a picnic in the park nearby. Children have outdoor birthday parties. Spring is the time of action, of cleaning, of revolution.

Revolution. I thought a lot about the precise meaning of words now. And their sounds. Revolution is like the word revulsion. Disgust. Rejection. This morning I hadn’t yet faced breakfast, which would only be half a slice of toast, no butter, (there was no question of eating one of those eggs in my pocket). The poets were right about one thing, ripeness is all, but I’d like to tell Mr T.S. Eliot at least that his spring represented an insipid kind of cruelty, compared to mine. A laughable cruelty. It didn’t get more cruel than this: the season of expectation, of hope, of growth; the season of the future, when there was none at all.

It was spring when I’d had the first operation, giving me just long enough to recover by the end of the year and face my Christmas responsibilities, instead of languishing in bed as I’d have liked. Spring again when I discovered the operation hadn’t arrested the cancer. Further removal of body parts and intensive chemical treatment represented a Scylla and Charybdis between which I was pounded for another six months or so. Really, I would have preferred to row backwards, but Archie begged me to keep trying, my mother persuaded me, the fact of my two young daughters reproached me, and so I pushed on. And up until the last operation, when my body was sliced, sawn and prised open (the head this time), I still retained a scrap of hope.

But now the cruellest season had arrived again with an unmistakable finality. At least Mr Eliot had his dry stones and handful of dust to look forward to.

Two

Dear Delia

Can you settle an argument I am having with my friend (we play golf together)? She says you should only do your grocery shopping with a list. That I waste time and spend more money without one. I always take my time and think about it, and it’s true I sometimes come home and forget that I needed light bulbs or rice flour. But then so does she.

Unsure.

PS We are both sixty-five years old.

Dear Unsure

I’m sure that the incomparable Mrs Isabella Beeton would have maintained that the efficient housewife should never undertake her grocery shopping without a list. It is said that impulse buying is curbed by taking a list. That a list prevents the unscrupulous vendor forcing unwanted goods on the customer. However life is short. There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity. You might occasionally forget the light bulbs but I bet you buy those dark chocolate cream biscuits when they’re on special, or extra tins of salmon when you already have stacks in the pantry. I bet your list-carrying friend does too. PS Mrs Beeton was only twenty-eight when she died. Your friend might want to think about that next time she’s writing her list.

Home Economics was promoted to a science some time in the 1970s. I never took the subject myself, already being domestically taught by my mother and grandmother. Both believed in the Deep-End School of home training. And so my grandmother, who cared for me when I was a preschooler, simply pointed me in the right direction and I started to scrub, soak, mop and sweep along with her. When I was a bit older, my mother, Jean, whose speciality was the kitchen, took over. I had to whip, fold and poach (later stir-fry) with barely a lesson. Their theory was that I’d simply pick it all up, that as a female I would learn all this by osmosis. A ludicrous idea, one might think, but there must have been something in the osmosis theory, for I learned without blinking. I understood sewing, cooking, cleaning and knitting. By the time I reached high school and was forced to take a term of cookery, I realised there was nothing more to discover. Learning a subject like domestic science seemed as elementary as learning how to catch a bus or post a letter. Didn’t everyone just do these things? And by then I liked movies, books and music and couldn’t see much scope for that down in Mrs Lord’s austere kitchens or Miss Grover’s sewing class.

Thirty years later, it was different. We women of the early twenty-first century knew we were poised somewhere between domestic freedom or servitude. The home was ripe for reinvention. Even the theorists were claiming it. Angels were out, they’d been expelled years back. Now you could be a goddess, a beautiful producer of lavish meals in magnificent kitchen temples. Or a domestic whore, audaciously serving store-bought risottos and oversized oysters and leaving the cleaning to others. Goddess or whore, both were acceptable.

For Isabella Beeton, on the other hand, home management was a matter of martial discipline and political strategy, with the mistress of the house both the commander of an army and leader of an enterprise. By the early twentieth century housework was a matter of economics. The housewife was the linchpin of an autonomous economic unit. Then it became a science, and all that occurred within the home was accountable to clear logic and linear process. Making a batch of cupcakes was the same as distilling a chemical formula. Children given the right quantities of affection and punishment could be raised as successfully as a batch of scones at exactly 170 degrees centigrade for fifteen minutes. Not that domestic science meant a woman was a domestic scientist. That could never be entered on forms under Occupation.

Finally the home became a site. Housework, like everything else from surfing to jelly wrestling, has now been hijacked by theory. Whatever the present name for the subject is in the secondary school system, I bet it doesn’t include the word home. No doubt there are numerous research projects and dissertations underway right now on the house as locus, the discourses of vacuuming and the multimodality of the food processor.

Though perhaps not. It is women’s work, after all.

One morning, I was contemplating a list which I’d retrieved from the kitchen bench. I was still in bed, the same bed in which I had cavorted with my husband for the last dozen or so years and had the most tender and exciting sex of my life though, I now realised, not nearly enough of it; conceived two children and borne one of them (the other came close, but stubbornly exerted her right to enter the world via hospital intervention); read innumerable books, many of them excellent, a lot of them trashy but wonderfully so; drunk countless cups of tea every Sunday morning while skimming the tabloid papers with an equal mix of cynicism and delight; and made notes on all sorts of things, including writing lists.

Lists were not essential to my life. Nothing would change now if I never wrote another and I suspected that without them I might still have got things done. But this particular morning’s list was not for me, and I’d written it late the night before.

Put on washing

Feed scraps to chickens

Feed fish/mice (pond & tank)

Get girls up

Make lunches (not peanut butter for E)

Feed girls (don’t let D have chocolate milk on cereal again)

Remind E re homework sheet

Check D has reader, library bag

Hang out washing

Empty/fill dishwasher

Girls to school half hr early (choir practice)

And also:

Have shower (if poss!)

Make coffee, drink while hot (ha!)

I had only been writing this sort of list for the last year or so, since it became clear that certain tasks would need to be delegated. Until things were sorted out. That was the term we adopted to describe the future that yawned like crocodile jaws, deep and daunting. Compiling it was hard because it represented things I had been doing intuitively for years. What to put in and leave out? I’d placed it strategically under the pepper grinder late in the night. When the girls came in to kiss me goodbye the next morning, I was too groggy to tell if their hair was properly tied up, teeth cleaned. I murmured goodbye and raised my head to brush their cheeks with my lips. When I woke later there was a feather on the sheet, a dark brown one. I presumed they didn’t take their chickens to school.

As I reread the list I considered how Archie must have felt earlier that morning: was he insulted or bemused, offended or grateful? I wondered if I should have stipulated the girls be dressed in their school uniforms, or reminded him about their hats. Then I wondered why I felt all that was so important. I got out of bed and threw it into the wastepaper bin. Archie probably hadn’t even noticed it.

I generally wake early, before the light has fully hatched. Just the day before, I had made a small pot of tea and taken a cup out into the garden. Some of the chickens were already quietly burbling to themselves. I went and sat in the cane chair under the umbrella tree nursing my tea and listening. I’d always found the sounds of chickens to be immensely pleasurable. The five of them fussed and bickered on their way out of the shed as the light grew. Lizzie – Elizabeth – the smallest and most beautiful, was the first out, leading the foray into the sun. She was a Light Sussex, wearing black feathers over her white plumage like a lacy shawl, and she was bossy, instructing the others on the order they should leave the shed. The last to emerge was Kitty, dark brown to almost black on the tips of her wings. As far as I knew, every morning Kitty greeted the day the same way: a pause at the shed door, scratching the earth, a quick dart out a foot or two, a retreat to the door, another few feet, another retreat, before finally making a line for the feed tray on the other side of the run. Halfway there, Lizzie would always turn and peck her back, whereupon the ritual began again until something distracted either of them. Kitty was the last I acquired, though not the youngest, and poultry protocol insisted that, no matter what, this chain of authority remained.

I decided that if I had another life I could just study chickens. Only that morning sitting there, and throwing the dregs of my tea over the fence (they all rushed to investigate: they were incorrigibly curious) I realised despite having chickens for several years, I knew very little about them. The problem was that they were so easy, so compliant, required minimal care. I had, I saw, taken them completely for granted. There were aspects of them I would never understand. Why, for instance, did Jane, an Australorp with magnificent black plumage, glossy and iridescent green in the sunlight, lay white eggs? Why, when I had reared most of them from chicks, did they still hesitate or even protest at being caught? Kitty would once cuddle contentedly in bed with Daisy, but then after five minutes struggle to be free. Realising that the hen preferred to roost at night, I finally had to coax Daisy into returning her to the rest of the flock, after which Kitty became pathologically timid. (And, as was the way with children, Daisy’s fierce desire to sleep with the hen every night evaporated. Some other animal obsession materialised. First the goldfish, and then, when she finally accepted that they weren’t amenable to cuddling, the mice: India, Africa and China. A few months back, Daisy was insisting that if she didn’t take China, her favourite, to school in her pocket every day, she or it would die.)

I tasted the smallest atoms of life in those few quiet minutes. Drinking tea and waiting by chickens before the rest of the world raised its head. I tossed them a handful of layer pellets. Kitty approached the fence and ate from my hand. The gentle prod of her beak in my palm. The contented cackling. Lizzie darted across and shoved her aside. I was gripped by a sudden urge to protect the smallest of my flock. I entered the shed. Despite the dust, the earthy pungency of the chicken manure, the remains of bones and shells and everything else they unearthed in their endless, restless scratching for vermicular treats, the shed and the run was a pleasant place. It offered tender moments that couldn’t be found anywhere else. The angled poles of light capturing swirls of golden dust. The feathers rising and settling on the ground. The clucking that sounded equally contented and distressed. Above all, the air of expectancy that emanated from every hen, no matter how silly. The pure optimism that kept her laying an egg day after day, when day after day that egg was taken away. Some might regard that as stupid, but I thought it almost unbearably generous. A laying hen was so full of integrity, with all that devotion and focus in her life. And then, the egg itself, sitting sometimes in dirt, sometimes crusted with chicken shit, sometimes as clean and unblemished as a new cake of soap. But inside, more than complete; stuffed, entirely, with possibilities.

It struck me that morning how I should have taken the opportunity more often to regard and wonder fully at this corner of the garden, this ordinary aspect of backyard life. Too late now.

In fact, it was too early, but I went in to Estelle and Daisy anyway. In sleep their forms assumed a softness and delicacy that would dissipate once they woke. For a minute or two I drank in their innocence and purity. Then I placed the chickens carefully beside each of them. Estelle’s hands curled automatically around Lizzie, Daisy sat up with a start when she felt the tickling warmth of Kitty on her cheek.

What’s up? she said.

It wasn’t much past six o’clock, but I figured my daughters would have to cope with a lot worse than being dragged early from their beds.

I need to show you something very important, I said.

Cuddling their chickens, they followed me into the kitchen where I made them a chocolate milk each and sat them on their stools at the opposite side of the bench. The chickens settled into each lap with a few muted chirps. Switching the kettle on again and taking down the tea canister, I began.

Making the perfect cup of tea is not something you’re necessarily going to learn by accident, I said. Although, as Mrs Beeton says, there is very little art in making good tea. If the water is boiling and there is no sparing of the fragrant leaf, the beverage will almost invariably be good.

Who’s Mrs Beeton? Daisy said.

Never mind, said Estelle, sensing the importance of the occasion.

I made the tea while talking them through the entire process, streamlined for the twenty-first century, and taking into account local conditions. I used the small brown pot which was perfect for two cups, Irish Breakfast tea, and one of the white cups. I explained they would hear of things like warming the pot and the milk-first-versus-milk-later debate, and the metal-versus-ceramic-pot argument, which divided purists into polarised camps of Swiftian proportions.

Swiftian? What’s that mean? Estelle asked.

Jonathan Swift. Wrote Gulliver’s Travels, remember?

She nodded. We’d read a children’s version of it together a couple of years back, when she was nine.

He wrote about people called Big-Endians and Little-Endians, I said. All about which end you sliced your boiled egg open. Or something like that. Don’t worry about that now. We’ll do eggs later.

They would only need to heat the pot on the coldest of days, I went on. Not much of a problem here, especially with global warming. Nor, I explained, did they need to worry about the one-for-each-person-and-one-for-the pot rule. It would all depend on how strong you liked your tea, and, as they knew, I happened to like mine quite weak (they nodded, yes, they knew this), whereas others, especially those who took their tea with milk (Jean, their grandmother) might like it strong.

When the tea was made and poured, I placed it under their noses and told them to inhale deeply. I knew they wouldn’t want to take a sip. They sniffed and nodded when I asked them if they could detect the malty aroma.

In my opinion, I added, Irish Breakfast is still the best tea to start the day. Failing that, a brand containing an Assam leaf. And you can forget about Billy Tea, these days it’s nothing like it used to be.

Then I poured it all away and started again, to be sure they’d got it. They drank the last of their chocolate milks and watched until their attention span expired and they wandered back to bed still holding their chickens.

Nowadays, I focused on small but significant things. These days, my daughters indulged me quite a lot. A year ago they would have resisted, whingeing. Refused to see the point of cups of tea, which only ancient people drank. Now they were more tolerant of my eccentric demands. Sometimes they looked at me quizzically, assessing if it was really me. I have, I thought, at least taught my daughters to make a perfect cup of tea. They might otherwise go through life thinking it was always done with teabags. Though I couldn’t explain to myself, really, why I felt this would be a bad thing.

Alone in the kitchen, I raised the cup to my mouth but the perfect cup of tea now tasted bitter and my throat tightened in resistance. I went back to bed, where Archie was just stirring awake.

Three

Dear Delia

My kids won’t eat vegetables apart from potato chips. And my husband hates salad. Do you have any hints to get them eating greens and other vegetables? I get sick of cooking meals they hardly eat.

Fed Up.

Dear Fed Up

Mrs Beeton declared, ‘As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment.’ Assert yourself, Fed Up. You’re the cook, so take command and cook what you think they should eat. In fact, you should cook what you want to eat, even if your favourite dish is sardines on toast or tripe curry. Take your meals alone if you have to. Let them sort it out. Remember, you’re the boss.

What are the cockles of the heart anyway?

The oddest thoughts come to you when you’re standing at a graveside. And at a graveside a dictionary is probably the last thing you have to hand. I knew all about the heart, but when I got home I would have to look up the cockles.

Meanwhile, it was a chilly but clear late winter day, and I was roaming through Rookwood cemetery searching for a grave. The one I was standing before, in that silent city, had a leaning tombstone that said:

Arthur Edward Proudfoot

Late of the Parish

Underneath which had been added:

Also Alice Elizabeth

Wife of the Above

And in smaller lettering the saddest inscription of them all:

Henry James Proudfoot

Stillborn.

And then, under all that:

Died 1875

Gone but Never Forgotten

Always in the Cockles of Our Heart

An entire family history, in one brief and savage year, captured on one tombstone, erected by a family member now probably themselves unknown. There was something inescapably Dickensian about it. Especially when the largest and blackest crow I had ever seen alighted on the headstone two rows down and fixed me with a challenging look.

Let’s check the map, I said to the girls, still thinking about the cockles of the heart.

Archie had walked way ahead, taking photos of the enormous monuments to the dead built by the Italians. There were vaults out here larger than inner-city flats, and probably more expensive. Entire streets devoted to housing the dead. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see some black-scarfed woman emerge from a vault doorway and start sweeping down the pathway in front, or a few old men sitting at a corner smoking and playing cards.

There was nothing extraordinary about the dead, I had already accepted that. But it was extraordinary that I had lived most of my life without visiting them. Now I was doing research for my book. And I was also looking for my father, Frank, who died after a sudden heart attack some thirty-five years ago. His grave was a place I’d never visited. Now that I knew I was dying I needed to come.

I’m bored. This is so boring. When are we leaving?

I told you to bring a book or something.

But Daisy’s complaint was fair. It was tedious for a child of eight to be trailing behind an adult around a cemetery. I knew that Estelle was bored too but she understood why it was important for us to come to Rookwood, and anyway she’d brought her Nintendo DS.

I, on the other hand, was delighted. I hadn’t found my father yet, despite the maps posted all around as well as my mother’s directions, but was happy to wander past the rows and rows of family vaults. We had seen vaults perched like caravans on temporary-looking bases. Maybe they were temporary, maybe some families planned to take their dead relatives with them if they ever moved interstate or overseas. I’d gazed at the Lithuanian monument and peered closely at the sample of Lithuanian soil preserved behind a panel of glass. It looked more like something from a biology experiment than a handful of dirt.

Over here, called Archie, and so I followed and finally came to the place where my father was buried. The headstone was plain, as I knew it would be, Jean being the practical person that she was. It was grey granite, low and modest, with a brass plate inscribed with his name. It said:

Frank (Francis) Bennet

(not even In Loving Memory Of: that wasn’t Jean’s style)

Husband of Jean

Father of Delia

Sadly Missed

And that was it. No other details. No date. At the foot of the grave, Jean had planted some sort of groundcover which required maintenance once every five years, which was about all she visited now.

Hibbertia, said Archie. It’ll outlast a nuclear war.

I leaned over and examined it more closely. This end of winter, the weather was mild and buds were just forming. Soon it would be covered in flat yellow flowers.

I was five when my father died and I wasn’t taken to the funeral. Those were the days when everything to do with death was silenced, hidden and guarded, like a rabid beast that a family was still obliged to keep. Children especially were kept well away, even from their dead parents, as if the bite of that beast would infect them forever. In the first few years after my father died, Jean would visit occasionally with a tin of Brasso and a fresh bunch of fake flowers, but she would never take me, and I don’t remember wanting to go. Now it was so different, it seemed normal that I was bringing my daughters here – complaining though they were – just as it was normal to be discussing with them aspects of the dying process, which, after all, they were watching month by month, week by week.

Had enough? Archie said after I’d stood for a bit longer at the grave of Frank Bennet. I barely remembered him. He was not much more than a tall shape from the past. I remembered him mainly in the study in the house where I grew up, which contained books that he would take from the shelves with such reverence they seemed to be fragile things. I was rarely allowed to touch them. He had a garden shed full of tools also forbidden to me. He would make me watch from a safe distance as he planed a piece of timber or sharpened the lawnmower blades. The strongest memories of my father involved images of me running to his study or shed with messages from my mother about phone calls or dinners, and the powerful sense of importance that gave me.

I had thought the moment might have been more emotionally charged, but it was not like that. I felt nothing much at all, standing there. But I was glad I came, to see him, and to say goodbye in a way. My father’s only heart attack had been sudden and final. He was in his study at his desk one minute, on the floor the next. I wondered what had happened to the cockles of his heart, if they’d just shattered or closed off, or if they’d been faulty all along.

As we drove out of Rookwood cemetery I noticed a huge warehouse on the left, with loading docks down one side. Surely there wasn’t that volume of the dead to be stored or processed like airline cargo. At the end of the building was a red and white sign. Australia Post.

It must be the mail processing centre, I said. Strange place to have it.

Maybe it’s the dead letter office, said Estelle after a second. Then we both screeched with laughter.

I don’t get it, said Daisy, looking aggrieved.

Never mind, sweetie, Archie said as he turned back onto the highway. Do you still want to go to Waverley?

I looked at my watch. It was just after midday.

Yeah, why not? Maybe we can get some lunch around there too.

It’ll still be boring, Daisy said. Why can’t we go on a different excursion, why can’t we go to the beach?

It is near the beach. We could go to Bondi afterwards and get an ice cream.

But I want to go swimming! I want to go to Manly beach.

No, I said, slipping a CD into the player, it’s not nearly warm enough to go swimming at the beach, or anywhere. Besides, I get to choose the excursions from now on.

The opening notes of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ filled the car.

Eww, not him again, Estelle said. Can’t we listen to something else?

No, I said. I get to choose the music from now on too.

Four

A few months before our visit to the cemetery, I had left on another excursion on my own, and I’d found it was also a matter of the right music.

There was a place I had to revisit before it was too late. Way up north, a place where I once lived. Where we’d both lived. But I knew if I told Archie, he would stop me. I knew if I tried to say goodbye to my daughters, I wouldn’t be able to leave. I had to choose the day carefully, a school day, a work day, a quiet suburban sort of day, when a drive to the local shops could casually extend into a long trip. I just had to get in the car and go. And of all the things I should have been attending to, the only thing I cared for was the accompaniment to my long drive north. Get the background music right, and everything else would slip into place. It was a soundtrack, this road movie of my life, this one-shot-at-it adventure to end all adventures, where my ears would become the organs I’d rely on more than any other, more than, at times, it seemed, my very heart.

So, I forgot checking under the bonnet for oil and water levels, forgot the spare tyre. Forgot phoning ahead to see which places had motels and which didn’t, which places were indeed places, not just dots on the map, specks with only a petrol station, cafe and general store all in one, a pit stop for the loneliest drivers, the emptiest of tanks, a tenminute stop surrounded by bitumen and disappointment, and on a Sunday afternoon always shut.

I didn’t fill a Thermos, or even check I had sunglasses, packets of nuts and dried fruit, two bottles of water, one for me, one for the radiator. Just walked out that door with the barest of essentials in a small bag, a couple of books, and drove off leaving the house to its own rhythms and noises. The beds were roughly made, the dishes rinsed and left in the sink, the note was on the bench.

The screen door was still swinging as I departed. Around me the birds were chirruping in their trees as if it was just another morning in May with the post delivery revving its way from up the road, with the honeysuckle still in need of trimming down by the letterbox and the white dog shit there on the nature strip along with the flattened drink can and the sodden pulp of the week before’s local paper which I’d clean away. One day.

Just not that day. Because that particular day I needed to leave while there was no one around to hold me back or ask why or talk sensibly or remind me of all that needed to be done in the next few weeks or months. Or tell me the most logical thing of all: that what I was rushing towards couldn’t be found. It was a journey I’d been putting off for years, yet now I was racing off as if it were an emergency.

As I swung out of the driveway in reverse, smooth and swift as a handshake, I waved to my neighbour over the road sweeping her front path, nodded to the postie as she puttered past, then accelerated up the street, which turned into the main street, and then into the highway, the one that would take me all the way north.

Music would be my companion. It would be so vital a presence it would almost drive the car itself. But mostly it would wash through my head, drowning the sound of my own thoughts and the details, the remorse, the despair, the pain that would persist in accompanying me on this escape. The soundtrack would charm the memories up, the ones I didn’t want but could no longer ignore. The ones that I had to take with me as I travelled back, and north. The memories, which were a soundtrack of their own.

I chose carefully. Nothing too gloomy. No Tom Waits, or I’d be driving off the road straight into the nearest tree that offered certain and complete annihilation. Bach was good but only for long unbroken stretches: the complex fugal pieces were incompatible with negotiating tricky routes or traffic in unfamiliar towns. I sorted through my box of music, most of them cassettes in cracked covers collected for car trips over the last fifteen years, most of them telling some sort of story, though none with any logic. The Willie Nelson tape with his version of ‘Graceland’ that I currently favoured (there was definitely a whole story in that). Tapes of assorted unrelated artists: Dusty Springfield, Georgie Fame, the Andrews Sisters, the Glenn Miller Band. The mindlessly cheeky George Formby, now so obscure a performer, I wondered how he ever made the transition from record to tape. Mahalia Jackson, if I was in the mood for august serenity. Country, all types. Hank Williams. Yodelling songs. Gillian Welch. Lyle Lovett. (Asleep at the Wheel I’d avoid, for obvious reasons.) It was a big collection, enough for my needs.

And there was always Elvis. I’d not played his albums for nearly fifteen years, never listened to a single song, if I could help it. But now I’d included the old cassettes in the box I was taking with me. It was time to start listening to Elvis again. But I’d wait a little longer before putting him into the player. It was going to be a long journey, and there was plenty of time for that.

So I drove north with songs like ‘Graceland’ urging me on, into the lush steamy warmth, to a place remote yet accessible, elusive yet as solid and immovable as a pyramid. There was chance here, a chance that had to be taken or it would slip away faster than a southern sunset. What was it exactly that I was taking a chance on?

I really didn’t know, even though I was bursting to get there, my heart accelerating ahead of my thoughts, and, while empty of understanding at that stage, I was still ripe with anticipation. The same feelings that had struck me when first I arrived, all those years back.

The town of Amethyst was off the map, but it was there all right, bordered by thick margins of rainforest and mountains that slowly narrowed out, stretching northward until they began to merge into the long triangle that eventually led to Cape York. The town was situated in the middle of the middle, about halfway north of the New South Wales border, and halfway west of the coast. I could get away from the south and head north without a map – anyone could, there were plenty of signs. But at a certain point, to get near the right place, I needed the map, though the name wasn’t marked. I read other names signposting the direction, and they were names that beckoned: Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby. Legendary riches.

Somewhere before the surfing nirvanas and the other lures of the coast I turned west. At some stage I turned off the soundtrack, let Hank and Frank and Mahalia and all the rest lie in their box on the floor of the car along with the tissues and takeaway wrappers and the mobile phone that I’d turn back on again when I could bear to. The cloud that had collected and settled like smog on my memories began to thin out, then lift altogether. And then I didn’t need the map. I knew without looking that a place in the middle of places with names like jewels was near where I needed to be. It wasn’t that far from Emerald, and not so far from the highway either.

Late in the afternoon on the fourth day of the journey, I glanced to my left and saw the signs and the three roadside businesses: a service station, a timber yard and, most oddly of all, a garden art place with gnomes in rows along the front fence, that indicated the turnoff to the last town on the route, Garnet, the last place before my destination. I was travelling on a rise when I saw jutting out of the trees beside the road the sign advertising Lazarus’s trailer and campervan business, three kilometres ahead. A sign about fifty years old, flaked and faded, and pitted with the usual rifle shots. After two kilometres I slowed down, keeping my eye out. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight, and I couldn’t remember passing one since the last town.

I knew I was in the right place, or near enough. The sign had said nothing about where, exactly, but I drove slowly forward again until I spotted a break in the trees to my left, and I took the turnoff past Lazarus’s collection of elderly vehicles, knowing it was the right place to go. The road wound down for a bit then started to rise. Somewhere on the very outer reaches of the range I knew I’d entered that large section of valleys and hills and sluggish little creeks posing as rivers situated between Clermont, not far ahead of me, Emerald to the south, where I’d been, and Alpha to the west, where I didn’t intend to go. The road twisted pleasantly. The sun, low and intense, pokered my eyes. I had already dropped the map on the floor of the car.

When I’d first come here over twenty years ago, a bus had dropped me at the side of the road by Lazarus’s sign. I’d walked along the road towards Amethyst, not caring how long it would take. And there was barely another car, none that I recalled. It was like entering another time frame. Maybe it was the impression of the gums shooting so high they seemed like anchors for the sky. Maybe it was the cooler air, or the spotty variable light, light that also appeared partly dark. Maybe it was the leaves that drifted down from that dense canopy, slower and more dreamily than leaves normally drop. Or maybe the bird calls far above, musical and hidden. It was timeless, other worldly. It was uncharted, and so it seemed to be invested with a corresponding fairytale quality.

Of course, I was young then, I would think that. I was a walking cliché. Seventeen, pregnant, alone. I had fought with my mother yet again. I had not fought with my boyfriend, Van, since I’d been denied the opportunity when he simply disappeared, justifying all the doubts about him my mother had had ever since she first met him. The more she had tried to talk me into an abortion the more I resisted. She was motivated, I understood eventually, only by concern, and distress that I was throwing away my educational opportunities to strap down my life with a baby before I was barely grown myself. I was motivated instead by my ideals, my dreams, adoring Van and falling easily into his older, larger world of music and poetry and inner-city sophistication.

The morning I had woken in Van’s room in Newtown and noticed his romantically meagre belongings were gone, I had felt a sick stab of suspicion, soon confirmed when after days I heard and found out nothing. By then it was too late for an abortion, and definitely too late to admit my mother was right about him.

I couldn’t say at what point I became convinced that Van had returned north to the town where he grew up and where his talented performing family still lived. All I remembered was the aching conviction that north in Amethyst was where I would find him. Or he would find me, and our baby.

Five

Dear Delia

I’ve been reading your column for some years now and I reckon I could do just as well. Who needs to be qualified to write about dirty shirt collars and poultry stuffing anyway?

Yours

Cynical.

Dear Cynical

Perhaps you are unaware that books of household advice form an integral part of our literary heritage. They are cherished by readers the world over and have been particularly sought in times of distress and hardship. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was beloved by the most unlikely of readers: the conquerors of Mount Everest, the trench soldiers on the battlefields of France. Members of many journeys and expeditions have all drawn comfort from its practical advice and general historical knowledge infused with moral ardour and homely goodness. The members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition might have perished, but they did so with copies of Mrs Beeton in their hands.

The fact that generations of women managed without a single self-help guide is admirable and humbling. Now the number of books available on domestic advice, from specialist titles devoted entirely to stain removal to baby care books and handy manuals taking a novice through simple family meals step by step, is enormous. More than enough to stock several shelves in the average bookstore. A hundred and fifty years back there were approximately none. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was the first, and that did not appear until 1861. How ever did women manage before the likes of Mrs Beeton?

Unlike Isabella Beeton’s, my career as a household expert was accidental. The series of Household Guides had become mine and made my reputation, but the original idea belonged to Nancy Costello, a commercial publisher and my employer – if freelancers had employers – and also a friend, though in a limited sense. Nancy and I enjoyed a warily pleasant relationship, one in which neither of us was committed to remembering the other’s birthday or socialising regularly, but in which we could ring each other up any time about almost anything. There was no sense of obligation, and no occasion for confusion, resentment or hurt. I doubted I’d ever tell Nancy my best secrets or discuss with her my worst fears, but on the other hand I was always able to count on things like frank gossip, her best recipes (she was a great cook), or the loan of her car should I ever need it.

Nancy was pragmatic, efficient, opportunistic, ahead of her time. She understood, then knew how to address, the crises of confidence that saw intelligent people confounded by the prospect of hanging a painting, replacing a boot heel, or boiling a perfect soft egg. Her first great success was getting a free household magazine into millions of households. Her second was to develop a series of specialist self-help titles that even the vast self-help title industry had not yet thought of.

Nancy decided that the home was diminishing as the site of traditional folklore and knowledge, of mainly female authority. Whereas women had once known almost instinctively how to polish furniture or remove wine stains, now they were more likely to understand how to program a digital set top box, or complete their quarterly tax statement. While it was true that fewer men could now trim hedges or degrease driveways, the deficiency was more obvious in women, who were so traditionally bound to the home. Too many homes were now empty places, physically, psychically but also culturally, lacking the memories, knowledge and wisdom formerly accumulated like cherished crockery and handed down from generation to generation. Like an indigenous language that was no longer spoken, the lore of household life was rapidly becoming extinct, from descaling kettles to preserving peaches, from the uses for naphthalene to the best method for beer-battering fish.

At least, that was Nancy’s view and in some ways she was right. Although my own home, and the home that Jean maintained when I was growing up, was filled with the making of food, of clothes, of messes then of cleanliness, over and over, so regularly you almost never noticed it was there, Nancy represented another type of contemporary woman altogether: a woman who was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the household, but wasn’t personally interested in it. Nancy’s home was a lean and austere place, so tidy that it barely needed cleaning. I knew, without ever having opened any of her cupboards, that she didn’t possess a single bag of fabric scraps and wool oddments, nor a collection of reused Christmas wrapping paper, nor a drawer filled with old corks, bent skewers, rubber bands, chopsticks, stained tea strainers, undisposed disposable plastic spoons and an incomplete set of tin cookie cutters like other households, including mine, did.

Archie and I were starting out when I first met Nancy. Or here, in the city, we were starting out again. He was slowly lawnmowing his way into something we had begun to call a business, and I was working as an editorial assistant. Archie had supported my desire to take up the university place I’d rejected years before thanks to my unplanned pregnancy and naïve ideals. Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. I understood later the degree was more void-filling than vocationally satisfying. It was the wrapping, layers of it, around my grief. But I was happy enough to take on the only job I was qualified for – if being a good reader qualified you for anything – copyediting and proofreading for Academic Press. We published books by obscure academics, books as faded and dull as the authors themselves. They may as well have been bound in brown corduroy. Soon after I met Nancy, in her capacity as book marketing consultant, Academic Press closed its squeaking doors for good. By then I had Estelle, who was followed three years later by Daisy. After that I only freelanced, an arrangement that suited me with two small children.

When Nancy began the household guides I wasn’t her first choice of author. That was a man by the name of Wesley Andrews, an enterprising person who was known as a bright spark, someone who had great contacts, who got things done. Who seemed to have a hand in all sorts of books and literary ventures. Who’d written perfectly competent novels as well as ghostwritten mediocre but bestselling memoirs of sporting personalities. He had seemed in every way the right person to put his name and imprimatur on the inaugural guide: The Household Guide to Home Maintenance. Correctly understanding that the first book in the series should capture both male and female readers, Nancy felt a male author was necessary. But until the writing ground to a halt somewhere between chapter eight (Roofing and Guttering) and chapter nine (Windows and Flyscreens), no one had any idea that Wesley’s chief literary driving force, if not navigator and mechanic, had been his wife – who, by chapter seven (Patching and Painting) had left him for good. Which perhaps explained why the opinions and recommendations on Simple Plumbing Repairs and Basic Electrics in chapters five and six were so very simple and basic. That is where I came in.

I had already been working for Nancy, first as a casual proofreader, then writing the advice column that appeared in her free publication – advertisements and advertorials disguised as a magazine – which she called Household Words, a joke that I suspected only she and I shared. Her idea for the column had arrived one afternoon when she was looking at a blank space on page five of Household Words and facing a deadline the next day. She phoned me, interrupting a dull editing job, or whatever it was I did then as a freelancer fitting in work between supermarket visits and nappy changes.

I need a dummy column for this issue, then we’ll get real letters. Can you knock something up quickly, on polishing silver, or whatever?

Nancy, no one polishes silver these days. They don’t even use it.

What about stains, then? You’ve got two kids, you’d know a lot about stains.

I guess I do.

I’ll set up the layout now, she said, and you can email me the copy later. I’ll call it Dear Delia. Lucky you’ve got the right name for it.

Nancy paid promptly and generously for a few hundred words of tame advice which I extracted from my non-creative side between the hours of nine and eleven on a Sunday evening while Archie was watching the Channel Ten movie and the girls were in bed. For months I doubted anyone read it, as Household Words was pushed into letter-boxes all over the suburbs along with advertising brochures for Coles Liquor, Woolworths supermarket specials and the Good Guys Electrics catalogue and was hardly distinguishable in content from them anyway. But evidence of its readership emerged when my advice column started to receive more and more emails.

They came regularly, forwarded to me by Nancy’s assistant, and for a while I responded easily enough. Nancy seemed happy, and the extra income helped with the mortgage. But then one day, bored for some reason, I amused myself by winding up the reader. It was such fun, I did it again, then again, never intending to send the replies off, until accidentally and in haste (a dish overcooking? a child left too long in the bath?) I attached the wrong file, hit the send key. If I’d assumed my copy was checked, I was proven wrong a week or two later when my mother rang to say she’d been amused by my unusual responses in that week’s issue. I sat around waiting for Nancy to phone and complain. Instead I was flooded with letters, and more requests than I could deal with. Nancy congratulated me on the initiative, and insisted I go in a bit harder. As a result the advice column developed a cult following.

Dear Delia was only a version of me, a slightly feral one. A more fearless one. But readers seemed to like being insulted, treated with disdain or having their requests dismissed, and so the column continued.

Dear Delia

Last night I had several people over to dinner, including my old friend who is still single despite her divorce coming through a good year ago, and my husband’s new assistant. During the dinner my husband managed to fling his arm across the table and knock over a carafe of red wine onto my best cotton lace tablecloth. He was arguing with Don, our neighbour, and they both got a bit carried away. If I bleach it, it might fall apart, or go white or patchy. What should I do?

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

What I will advise you, Uncertain, is to examine your guilt about your relationship with Don. Are you sure your feelings for him are as hidden as you believe? For you can be sure if I worked it out from just one letter, your unnamed husband will have worked it out by now too. Don’t fool yourself for a minute that your attempt to introduce Don to your divorced and still-single friend will work as a cover for your real feelings about him and the relationship you two are conducting on the sly. In fact this will almost certainly backfire: your friend and Don will end up hitting it off in all sorts of ways. They might even be out at a matinee screening of the latest Hugh Grant movie right now. I’d suggest that next time you want to have dinners where arguments occur you use a more appropriate tablecloth. Perhaps seersucker. Or one of those wipe-down vinyl ones.

Six

But before I reached Amethyst there was the Garnet turnoff. And this took me back to where it all started. Back to McDonald’s. How appropriate. McDonald’s, that temple which was the meeting point of modern consumerism, efficiency and cleanliness. Those cold disinfected surfaces, those quickly dispensed drinks, those tightly wrapped parcels of burgers and cardboard-clad chips (for Australians still, after thirty years’ indoctrination, called them chips, not ‘fries’). All that order and control, all those precisely measured, weighed and timed burgers, buns, nuggets, fillets. All those smug rows of junior burgers, Big Macs and apple pies, slipping hygienically down their stainless steel chutes. All those obligingly happy Happy Meals.

The McDonald’s in Garnet had changed. The playground had been rebuilt, and was bigger, brighter. There was now a drive-through facility. The palms were taller but still didn’t obscure the all-important signs. After I parked I thought about going in, but then I might have had to eat something, and even for Sonny’s sake I couldn’t do that. It was enough just to sit in the car, thinking.

When I was last here, Sonny was eight. I thought he would have grown out of the place. But eight was a deceptive age, especially for a boy who also happened to be tall. Eight was past little-kid stage. Eight was when you attained a certain level of coolness, when style began to assert itself. You were no longer in the infants’ department at school, you did Real Sport (in Sonny’s case, soccer), and you were allowed the heady freedom of using a pen instead of a pencil in class.

Eight was the beginning of the end of things like favourite cuddly toys at night, ritual comfort foods like hot chocolate before bed, special plastic cartoon cups, flotation aids in the swimming pool (becoming contemptible) or vests (despicable, even in the middle of winter, none of your friends wore them…). But eight was also, still, a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

There was no McDonald’s in Amethyst. For some reason the town had banned all chain stores, franchises and commercial fast food outlets. But there was television. And therefore advertisements. And a neighbouring town twenty minutes away by bus, less if we got a lift with someone. I was a young single mother, equal parts guilt and indulgence, prepared to stand on my principles for only so long. So there we were, sitting over our Happy Meal. And Sonny was happy – I admit it – happy fiddling with the purple and green toy monster. Happy chewing his cardboard chips. Happy alternately sucking then blowing into his Coke, with furtive glances at me.

It was possible that within three or four years he’d come either to hate the food or be bored by it. By the age of twelve he’d probably be into something cool and trendy, like only eating at places offering noisy electronic games, places with names like Radical Zone or the Shooting Arrow. Or he’d simply be able to go out on his own, or with friends. That is, without me. Without his mother. And at twelve, he could be left safely at home for hours at a time. Then I could consider Going Out. Like a date, a real date, as opposed to spending the odd evening after work at Mitchell’s bar, listening to the drifters and dreamers sucking up the oxygen while I parried their vague boozy requests for sex.

Sonny looked up at me, cutting into my thoughts. He dropped the goofy toy, frowned, and asked me what was wrong.

Nothing, I said. Why?

You look sad.

Sad?

Or angry. This last was in a plaintive sort of tone. Maybe I was still angry, maybe just a bit resentful, after what had happened earlier.

My heart twisted. Vital to bury your frustration, to put it behind you, to live in the moment, which is what children generally did. I told him I wasn’t angry, or sad, patted his free hand, the one that wasn’t now fiddling with the toy again, then took it in mine. A bold move. Eight was also when holding hands with your mother in a public place became pretty well verboten.

Then it was my turn to pay attention. He looked pale. Was I just imagining a touch of grey under his eyes? Then I noticed he hadn’t eaten his burger, apart from one bite, and was only halfway through the chips.

Hey, I said, are you feeling okay?

He shrugged. That could mean anything in eight-year-old code. Really good or exceptionally bad. I already knew that kids weren’t always aware of feeling sick, somehow just didn’t have the words to articulate what, exactly, was wrong. Could be nearly comatose with something or other but drive their mothers up the wall with unrelieved whingeing or, even more bizarrely, excessive hyperactivity.

Do you feel sick?

No.

Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.

He snatched his hand back. No way!

Go on, open your mouth, I’ll see if your tonsils are up.

He folded his arms and sat back, glancing around as if every single member of his class was waiting to leap from the corners and tease him. Being sick was not cool. Being seen to be sick, less cool. Being seen to submit to a mother’s ministrations, downright fiery.

I asked what was wrong then. That shrug again. I asked if he wasn’t hungry after all. He shook his head, pushed the food aside, looked at me, then away, then said,

Are you sure Archie isn’t my dad? Can’t he be?

Oh, that. That little big question. Guilt. Dismay. Bitterness. Helplessness. And the thousand other negative emotions the single mother was so familiar with, the reason she gave in and took her kid to McDonald’s, though it went against every principle she had.

I risked a prod at his burger. It didn’t respond. Typical. It sulked dumpily on the tray, not a bit happy. The bright orange cheese that dribbled out one side had already set into a hard blob. Just out of spite, since I was wound up and guilty over Sonny’s undeniable lack of a father, I decided to mutilate it.

He got into the spirit of the act. Children are great like that, adaptable, prone to quick changes in mood. Together we poured scorn on the thing, prising apart the dry yoyo halves of the bun, extracting the lone slice of pickled cucumber to deride it in the time-honoured tradition of every single Australian child – perhaps every child on the planet – and sniffing with exaggerated suspicion at the remaining contents, which by now bore less resemblance to a real burger than the gimmicky magnet I used to attach his latest drawings to the fridge. He suggested we take it home and glue a magnet to it and use that instead. I agreed. And it wouldn’t go mouldy, not with all the preservatives.

Our laughter lightened things, but by the time Sonny picked up the burger between thumb and forefinger and minced over to the bin with his other hand holding his nose, we were attracting dark looks from the staff, and I knew it was time to leave.

But there are worse things than McDonald’s. Had I known what was to come I would have stayed. I would have eaten there every day. I would have turned away from the dusty afternoon light in my eyes as we pushed through the door onto the highway, as sluggishly crowded as it got at what passed for peak hour in these parts, and marched straight back to the counter and ordered dozens of Big Macs, litres of Coke. And ten kilos of cardboard chips.

Seven

Dear Delia

I’ve consulted numerous cookbooks but despite many attempts I still can’t manage to boil a soft egg. Can you help? I wonder if I should Google it?

A Bachelor.

Dear A Bachelor

You are asking me to impart one of my best secrets. Go Google all you like. I worked it out, I’m sure you can too.

I’d started another list. I should have been concentrating on the real work, but I felt an irrational urgency about this. I would finish it then put it in one of the boxes I was preparing for the girls.

Guests (needs separate list: obviously can’t be done now)

Invitations: suggest professional printers

Cake: refer to recipe (but maybe Jean?)

Dress: David Jones’s best?

Photographer: god knows. Maybe digital cameras will be obsolete by now?

Catering: Benny’s the obvious choice. But Cater Queen if not poss.

Venue: depends on time of year. Back garden perfect if summer/spring.

Musicians: string trio (students from college?)

Ideally this list wouldn’t be needed for another twenty years. Ideally, if it were entirely up to me, it would never be needed, since I was beginning to sense the redundancy of marriage. But as I didn’t feel it was right to impose my views on anyone else, even my own daughters – especially my own daughters – then it would be better than no list.

Along with everything else it offers (a chance for relatives to catch up, a good excuse for a booze-up), a wedding is a means for a certain level of bonding between mother and daughter. Fraught bonding at times (I remembered it well), but a rite of passage that should not be denied at any cost, no matter the jaded views of the older generation. No matter that the mother would not be there.

That my daughters would not need this list for many years was irrelevant. All that mattered was that they’d know I’d made the effort. And if by then they happened to be capable of organising a wedding without my assistance, then even better. In fact, I’d regard it as a significant sign that the mothering I’d managed to squeeze into the years available was successful.

Archie had recently called me a control freak. I think it was the day after I’d written that late-night list to help him get the girls to school. As I sat at my desk with the preliminary list for the wedding of my youngest daughter, who was just eight, a wedding that might never occur, and which I certainly wouldn’t be attending, I confronted this accusation. If all this wasn’t the work of a control freak, then what was? I tapped my lips with the pen and gazed out the window at the wisteria. I decided that Estelle was probably in no need of any such list, being supremely organised herself. Also of firm opinions, already, regarding matrimony. It was Daisy I was planning for, though with built-in flexibility if Estelle should turn out to surprise us all.

Them all.

I wondered if these lists said more about me or Archie. I’d spent too many mornings, more than I cared to remember, explaining to him what needed to be done: instructing, directing, losing my temper, becoming impatient, before finally doing it all myself. As if I’d been at the control centre of a military exercise, a full-scale war, instead of a partner in a marriage that included two young children. Occasionally, the children had been dressed and fed (if you counted crisps as food) and otherwise organised out of the house and off to childcare, lately school, without my help. But the fallout had never been worth it:

Daisy: I didn’t get a merit star today because I forgot my home reader.

Estelle: Miss Blake says if I don’t take my permission note back I won’t get to see the

Dreamtime storyteller.

D: I was cold, why didn’t you pack my jumper?

E: You know I hate blueberry muffins!

And so on. I tried every method available to the reasonable woman. Pointing out the lapses in a kind way (‘Darling, don’t you think Daisy should have her shoelaces tied?’). Barking out orders like a sergeant-major (‘If you don’t take them NOW they’ll be marked late!’). Saying nothing. Saying everything. Standing by pretending to be preoccupied with another task but internally writhing as Archie tried to brush hair that was still plaited or failed to understand that children needed reminding to wear sweaters even in the middle of winter. Writing lists. Not writing lists. Doing none of the tasks. Doing half the tasks, like lining up the contents of a lunchbox so that he only had to place them inside, close the lid and grab the juice bottle from the fridge. Daddy packed my lunch today.

Nothing worked. Now I was playing my very last card. It was a mean trick, I knew. I felt its meanness myself. How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister’s wife – any prime minister’s wife – Nicole Kidman’s mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush senior and junior…they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional – all Dickens’ mothers were – but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every single rule and if I were Archie, I would have been outraged too. But that wasn’t going to change, and it certainly wasn’t my idea.

I wondered if my absence would make any real difference to the running of the household. As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Like Mrs Isabella Beeton I had applied a strategic approach to the household, its contents, its routines, and its warm and breathing occupants. And how had I forgotten that Isabella Beeton, that wise, visionary, wellread, innovative woman, that young woman, had died far too early? Isabella Beeton had left her two children – one just a baby – motherless. She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment.

But what once infuriated me about Archie I now admired. It hadn’t been his tendency to dally in flirtatious territory at dinners or parties featuring women with more impressive cleavage than I – and of course, more recently, with cleavage at all. Nor had it been his need to bond with members of the same gender and subspecies (semi-professional, rugby-loving) at the pub once a week. Nor his regular forgetting of birthdays and anniversaries. If this marriage were to have unravelled it would have been over something as trivial and tangible as a misplaced sock, or a forgotten school lunchbox. That indifference to the knitted fabric of the household. It might have been misshapen over time and ill-fitting but still, thanks to the one thread that was me, it all held together: the shopping, the bill-paying, the girls’ activities, their dental appointments, their swimming lessons, their need to dawdle in the park doing nothing at all.

However, I now saw a quality that I almost craved. Maybe Archie’s indifference to the household was restraint, a capacity for self-control and wide-gazing detachment. Something I couldn’t do, being forever focused on the crumbs on the kitchen bench in front of me, the emptying milk carton in the fridge, the multiplying dirty clothes in the basket.

I once heard a famous actor being interviewed on the radio about the breakdown of her marriage. When pressed to name its cause she replied succinctly: shirts. I knew instantly what she meant. The symbol of a married woman’s unscripted yet unavoidable role in the relationship. No clause in the contract stipulating the care and maintenance of the male shirt, yet somehow they took over, with their demands to be soaked, ironed, fresh and alert on hangers ready for the next excursion into the working world. It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt.

My particular argument had never been with shirts, since Archie’s work gear was casual. And even if it had been, I would never have left him over a shirt because, despite his domestic blindness, Archie had given me more than I deserved. But there had been times when I could see how it might have been possible to leave. I doubted he had ever understood how tight a thread I had been all these years. And now that one thread was about to be snipped. And if on the very edge of that scission, I was still unable to fall back, stop being the commander of the household, what did that say about me? Control freak, I guessed. Yet I suspected there was something more to it than that. Yet another thing for which I could not find the right words.

I wondered what happened when women disappeared from a family. Another woman enlisted to take their place? A paid housekeeper, or a wife? Despite his occasional flirtatiousness I couldn’t see Archie rushing into anything. That didn’t fit with the father in him. I knew he would be assisted by his mother and my mother, who between them would probably make life easier for him than I ever had. Then, after a while, depending on how Estelle and Daisy reacted, a new partner would come, followed possibly by marriage. Secretly I was hoping for Charlotte, Archie’s part-time bookkeeper, which seemed logical to me, although I’d tried and failed to discuss the subject with him. I liked Charlotte, I admired her. She was a serene young woman who was completing a diploma in business management. She worked with percentages and bottom lines and, I suspected, had never made a sponge cake or done French knitting in her life. She came one day a week and worked in the corner of Archie’s shed which was also his office, sending out invoices and settling accounts with suppliers, decoding then dispensing all the paperwork of the tax system that Archie found so mystifying. Estelle and Daisy adored her and only ever wanted her to mind them if Archie and I went out. If she married Archie it would be almost perfect.

Oh, and it would be cruel. Another woman to usher the girls into their teenage years, into their adulthood. To be there for their first period, to buy the most expensive hair products, to offer advice on skin care, to tolerate teenagegirl cravings for Nutella or obsessions with vegan diets. To pretend to understand how vital MySpace was. To be there when their boyfriends abandoned them. Gasp at their mobile phone bills. Shake a head over their newest piercing. Tell them, every day, how beautiful they were. And how much they were loved.

Cruelty. What exactly did Eliot say again? I found my undergraduate copy of the Selected Poems, and prepared to torment myself further with his gloomy words. But when I read ‘The Wasteland’ again I had to admit that Mr Eliot was right: it was winter that had kept me warm, in a strange sort of way. Muffled me in its state of suspended animation, kept me from the cold steel of memory and desire before they sliced through my soul in the expectant warmth of spring.

An attack of wind shook the wisteria so furiously the petals rained onto the verandah. Opening the office window wide I took in its scent. I heard the clicking of Mr Lambert’s wheelbarrow next door. This time of year, he was more than particular about his garden: he was obsessive. He would be sweeping up the leaves and blown petals as they dropped, cursing my messy flowering vines and clipping every tendril that sneaked its way past the fence. Instead of shaving his front lawn today, he was probably pruning, the mock orange hedge being his chief target. I never smelled the mock orange during the day, but some nights the entire atmosphere was saturated with it. It could not be just from Mr Lambert’s abject specimens, which he trimmed into order every week in the warmer months.

Winter would soon be just a chill memory. The scent on the wind told me that. It might have been the freesias, planted around the letterbox. The fragrance always filled me with a strange distracted yearning, a restless and aching expectation. Perhaps because it contained the promise of summer, the season I loved the most. I remembered the freesias which grew along the railway embankments and in vacant lots all the way down the south coast. The ones that filled a room with a scent at once wild and comforting. They brought suggestions of many things: memories of rough childhood holidays on the south coast beaches; weekends away in holiday shacks with friends; the evidence of the first garden I ever helped plan, plant and nurture into life, when we first came to live here. The garden hadn’t existed then: the house perched disdainfully at the front of a long narrow stretch of buffalo grass. There was a Hills hoist rotary washing line, immobilised by age, and nothing else. We brought clumps of the wild freesias and, after hacking away at the grass to uncover cracked but serviceable paths and the faint outlines of former garden beds, planted them here and there.

For all the years I caught their first scent each spring, I experienced a small stab deep within. A distinct physical ache, and one that always made me feel momentarily emotional, though whether on the verge of tears or shouts or laughter, I could never say. This seasonal feeling was so common I had always registered it unthinkingly. Until now. For I would no longer smell these flowers, and it seemed important to define accurately what the scent meant. And it wasn’t only the freesias. All the spring flowers taunted me in their postcard perfection, as unwelcome as the memory and desire that now encroached on the day. They all seemed to have come out of the dead land, the garden that I once revelled in.

On the desk beside me the phone rang.

Hello?

There was no one at the other end but I sensed a presence. I suspected it was the same person who also hung up after a few rings, before I could answer it.

Hello? I repeated more loudly, but the presence was not to be provoked by shouting. I slammed the phone down. I had no idea who it was. The caller ID function told me it was a private number.

I closed Mr Eliot, more carefully than I otherwise might, adding him to the collection of books on the bedside table. They probably wouldn’t make their way back to the bookshelves in the hall.

Dear Delia

Don has been very good to me, and my husband has neglected me for years for his work. You still didn’t advise if I should bleach my lace tablecloth or not. And as well as the red wine it is smeared with green stains where Don knocked over his avocado and prawn entrée.

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

Don, Don, Don. It’s all about Don, isn’t it? And why is it that you are attracted to such clumsy men? I advise you to sever relations with Don and concentrate on your husband. Maybe he works too hard because you are the sort of person who uses lace cloths and makes avocado and prawn cocktails. What were you thinking? It’s not 1975 any more. Of course soaking an antique lace cloth in bleach would be crazy. Try lots of salt, cold water, then hang it out in the sun for a day. Let me know how you go.

Eight

By the time it was nearly dark and the families had come and gone in the late afternoon rush with their Happy Meals and movie-deal specials, I felt ready to drive off again.

I’d see if I could find Mitchell. If he was still around he would be at one of three places. The first was the café on the way back to Amethyst. It had a new name, and when I pulled up and saw the sign I assumed it was a facetious one. But when the waiter, dreadlocks flying, rollerbladed to my table with the menu, I understood it really was the Roadkill Café. She explained that they were out of wallaby.

We’ve got python instead, chargrilled. And the specials are rabbit casserole – or rat, if you like. In one movement she yawned slightly and shifted her chewing gum across to the other side of her mouth.

Rat?

Both types. Native and rattus rattus.

Oh.

I wondered if there was a difference. Only in price, she told me, scanning the rest of the room and chewing her gum. The native rat, antechinus, was five dollars more, and it wasn’t written down because Parks and Wildlife might be alerted and even though it was genuine roadkill, guaranteed one hundred per cent fresh…

Look, could you come back in a few minutes?

It had been a long day’s drive, and I had barely eaten, and should have been hungry. But the whole place and menu had changed. It used to be called Mitchell’s café, just like his place in town was Mitchell’s bar, though neither had a sign to explain that. People just knew. But it didn’t surprise me to find a marginal sort of dining experience here, this strange diner that fed its patrons off the very road that brought them to its doors. Amethyst had always been like that. Nothing ever conformed. It was one reason why I chose to stay all those years back.

I studied the menu again, hoping to spot a salad or soup. Apart from the thought of eating any rat, the threat of the Parks and Wildlife department was off-putting. Would they raid the café and confiscate my meal between mouthfuls, prosecute me for eating a national or state emblem? Or worse, a sports mascot? I thought about taking out my mobile phone and turning it on. It had been four days and I expected the message I’d written for Archie and the girls was by now insufficient. I took the phone out of my bag, stared at the blank unlit screen for a few moments, then replaced it. Not yet. Not until I was really there.

The waiter was getting annoyed.

Is Mitchell around? I asked. A foolish question. She was probably two years old when I was last here.

Mitchell? Never heard of him. Steve might know, he’s in charge.

Could you ask him?

Sure. Steve! She yelled so loudly I thought the gum would shoot from her mouth.

A man appeared through the fly strip curtain, wiping what looked like fresh blood from his hands onto a tea towel.

Hi. I was wondering if Mitchell was still around. I used to work for him.

I took over the place from him, Steve said. But that was over ten years ago. Not sure where he is now. I’m from Garnet, back down the highway. But he could still be in that bar in town.

Sure, I said. Thanks.

Are you ready to order yet? the waiter said.

No thanks, I said, getting up. Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.

I passed Lazarus’s Vehicles again. It had barely changed. The same collection of shabby trailers and caravans sitting at angles, having been left by their previous owners without the bricks to prop them up. Peeling reminders of holiday aspirations, plans and dreams that were never realised.

When the bus had dropped me off some twenty years ago, it wasn’t a scheduled stop. The driver had said he couldn’t take me any farther, but that I could get to where I wanted to go if I waited here by the side of the road. Someone would soon drive past and give me a lift for the final few kilometres into town. He’d seemed very confident of that.

I waited for an hour, then, hot and thirsty, started to walk. I eventually came to Lazarus’s yard. He agreed to take me into town when he shut up shop at five. He dropped me at the Kingfisher Boarding House, a block from the main shops and just shabby enough for someone of limited means.

Early the next morning I started looking for Van. Three days later I checked out and returned to Lazarus’s. This time I had a proper look, walking around the whole site, investigating cluttered corners of the yard and peering into vans and trailers I doubt he remembered he had. I spotted the most endearing caravan I had ever seen. A comic book caravan. Curved, aluminium, a dull sky blue. It was perched on tufts of grass amid the graveyard of vehicles, most of them decrepit. This was old, but it looked sound enough.

How much? I asked him.

That? Not much use to you, he said. It won’t travel, not far anyway.

What about into town?

Well. He scratched under his bandanna. There is a caravan and camping park, a few people live there. Some holiday units, a couple of old-timers in vans. A guy called Mitchell runs it.

I’m staying on for a while, I said. I’ll need a place to live.

He looked from me to the caravan, then back to me again.

He’s a decent guy, he said, I reckon he wouldn’t charge you too much to rent a site.

I gazed at the van. The modest curves, the unrelieved shabbiness, the air of simple hope. I asked him again how much, and it was a matter of moments before he told me I could have it for one hundred dollars. I’d be doing him a favour.

I could tow it in for you, he said.

So, that very evening, I had become a caravan owner. For one hundred dollars it was empty, apart from a thin mattress on the bed, but I made do without a blanket or towel until the next day. Inside it was not nearly as dirty as I’d expected, having been shut up tightly for years. The stale air vanished soon after I opened the door and prised apart the doll’s house windows on each side. Over the following weekend I walked into the centre of town and back, gradually stocking up on the essentials, which, I discovered, were few when you stripped life down to the most important things. What I needed, more than anything, were books, and by the time I was ready to have the baby, the second-hand bookshops had supplied enough to line the caravan. It was like living inside a cubby house. Surrounded by books, I felt safe, secure.

Nine

Dear Delia

Do you have a good recipe for a wedding cake? I’ve tried several but found them dry and tasteless.

Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

Dried fruit, obviously. Raisins, sultanas, mixed peel. Preserved ginger if you like. Brown sugar, flour, spices…Oh, for god’s sake, do I need to list everything? Surely you can work it out. And don’t ask for weights and measurements. That is tedious in the extreme. In fact it’s probably why your cakes have always failed. By the way, several cakes? How many weddings have you had?

Modern mothering was a snap.

Here I was agonising over my daughter’s wedding at least twenty years too early and trying to decide between linen napkins (more stylish, but more laundering) or paper ones in shades matching her outfit (it would be palest pink, more cream than pink, like the flesh of a white peach) that would be much less stylish but more efficient (no ironing), and then I recalled Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet.

I often thought of Mrs Bennet when the going got tough in the blood sport that the game of raising daughters had become. Mrs Bennet’s daughters might have displayed more respect for their mama, might not have spent hours in their bedrooms plastering their faces with gooey make-up, rereading the same Girlfriend or Total Girl magazines over and over, or listening to obscure punk bands; they might not have insisted on dressing like child prostitutes from the moment they could do up buttons on their own, refused to eat meat from the age of eight and made prepubescent demands to have their navels pierced. But I had to admit there was a plus side to my experiences.

First, she had five daughters, and I only had two. And poor Mrs Bennet’s entire commission in life was, after raising them, to marry them off to suitable husbands. I might have been planning a wedding, but it was in an age where husband hunting had long dropped off the agenda. Daisy could get married or not as she pleased. Not so Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and silly little Lydia. Oh yes, Jane and Elizabeth might have had an element of choice, and Elizabeth may well have exercised her right to reject the absurd advances of Mr Collins and the first astonishing proposal of Mr Darcy without a single reference to her mother’s wishes, but neither she nor any other Austen heroine was going to slum it with the love of her life in an artist’s studio in the East End of London (a place of such unredeemed vulgarity it was, I suspected, never once mentioned in the entire Austen oeuvre), or marry a man she’d met on the bus or down the pub on a Friday night.

True, Mrs Bennet had household help, and I had none. But Mrs Bennet’s obligations far outstripped mine. I didn’t have to run our lives to a rigid social and domestic schedule. We didn’t have to make tedious calls upon parish spinsters or endure visits from patronising social superiors. We could, and did, spend our evenings lingering over any book we wanted, reading The Wind in the Willows or Where The Wild Things Are, again and again whether they or I had grown out of them or not. True, it was important to feed my daughters with nutritionally balanced foods, monitor their homework, supply a few extracurricular activities, such as Estelle’s netball or Daisy’s recorder lessons, and ensure they didn’t watch too much television. When the time came, caution them against the more unsanitary forms of body piercing and advise on the use of condoms (if I were there, but perhaps I could expect Charlotte to do that – they wouldn’t listen to Jean).

But poor Mrs Bennet had the responsibility of making all her daughters proficient in dancing, card games and needlework. At least one – Mary – had a workable grasp of pianoforte, Italian songs and Scottish airs. They all had to demonstrate parlour and drawing-room etiquette, and have a familiarity with the historical epic poems of Sir Walter Scott. She had to ensure that every daughter’s complexion remained clear and fine and fair, that the circumferences of their waists remained within an acceptable twenty-four inches, that their hair stayed dressed in coils and ringlets (Lydia, for sure, would have wanted to shave, spike, streak or do all three to hers). Mrs Bennet was responsible for their deportment, posture, manners when in church or at table, behaviour while strolling down to the village haberdashery (Lydia would have had tattoos, and belly piercings too). She had to foster polite and appropriate discourse in a variety of contexts from the vicar to the scullery maid. She had to teach them about bowel movements (without stooping to vulgar terms), menstruation (without so much as mentioning blood), sexual relations between husbands and wives (without being able to refer to the intimate physical act, let alone uttering, let alone thinking of, words like penis or vagina), and then initiate and oversee the vast, all-consuming business of finding the appropriate man attached to the end of the unmentionable organ – the whole reason, culmination, justification, of a woman’s life. Poor Mrs Bennet. The task was gargantuan. And she did indeed fail in many of her duties. I don’t think even Jane, of all the daughters, managed decent piano playing (though I imagined Lydia taking up drums). Not one of the Bennet girls was schooled and, as there had never been a governess, the level of education had clearly been hit and miss. But Mrs Bennet did her absolute best, and one of the worst difficulties she encountered was the benign indifference and sarcastic humour of her library-closeted husband.

When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.

I honestly couldn’t claim that taking Daisy to recorder lessons for half an hour once a week was onerous, compared with Mrs Bennet’s commitments. Readers might have been tricked into thinking that she was a silly shallow woman and that her husband, with all his dry sarcasm. was a self-effacing, long-suffering man, but Mrs Bennet was a champion among women, among mothers, a pearl of great price. I was going dizzy at the thought of linen versus paper napkins, but she – strong, determined and single-minded – was faced with the entire box of dice from the cradle on. Times five.

So why was I thinking about marriage? Did I really desire that my daughters had husbands? My present obsession with Daisy’s wedding no doubt had a lot to do with my own. Archie and I were married, certainly, but in the austere political and secular correctness of a registry office. Here we banished all suggestion of offensive sexist symbolism such as white veils or floral bouquets. There were no demeaning vows involving words like obedience. And yet, without an audience beyond our witnesses, there were no obligations to quote mystical Lebanese poets or play chamber music.

I began to question if I was not unhealthily fixated on an entirely imaginary husband, the sort of husband who, if he existed, you wouldn’t want for a husband anyway. I could admit now that the perfect husband resembled a wife. I often yearned for a wife. I yearned for one right at that moment, a wife who would bring me a cup of tea, then go and hang out the washing that I knew would be creasing itself after the centrifugal force of the washing machine had plastered it to the insides of the drum. A wife who was me. That person who was, right now, tired. And, I admitted, weary of the housework, which had never really bothered me, which I’d never found difficult or mysterious.

But whether or not it was now too many years of loads put on or hung out or gathered in, wrinkled and all, or if it was an increasing resentment that flowed like the toxic chemicals that I tried to flush out of my system, or just a simple matter of being too tired and too busy all at once, I could no longer tell. All I knew was, today I would be leaving the washing there in the machine while I wrote my list.

Dear Delia

About the wedding cake. I’m afraid I need more precise ingredients than that. And how long would you recommend I cook it for? Hopefully you will be able to help me. Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

As with the wedding itself, hope is the chief ingredient of a wedding cake. You are right to be hopeful. Hope will keep a marriage going for a long, long time. Have a go. I’m sure you can manage it.

Ten

The centre of Amethyst was in a hollow, streets angling down towards the main roads, the clusters of shops. The streets were full of enormous trees and then, on the west of town, there were large open spaces like natural parklands along which sauntered a lazy river, bordered with willows and reeds. In autumn, the place was enchanting. In the cooler months it was perfect, and in summer it was shady enough to give the illusion of coolness. Along the main street into town the palms were enormous, dense, and in the late afternoon crammed with brightly coloured parakeets monstering the fruits in a cacophony of greed. They shot back and forth across the road boldly, forcing me to steer the car from side to side to avoid them.

The Paradise Reach Motel, a small family business, was still there. It had quiet, spacious rooms, a palm-crowded front garden with a pool, and a friendly watchdog, whom I noticed as soon as I pulled up. Surely it wasn’t the same one from years back – he’d have been well over sixteen by now: did labradors live that long? The woman at the desk wasn’t familiar, but she told me the motel was still in the same hands.

You’re from Sydney?

Somehow, up north, people always knew.

Yes, I said. But I lived here once, years ago.

Oh, and are you on holidays now? Visiting relatives?

Something like that.

I checked into my room, threw my bag in the corner and myself on the bed. I lay there for a long time, resting, thinking. Until it became dark enough that I had to get up and turn on the lights.

I found Mitchell upstairs in his bar. He appeared to be interviewing a new pianist. I started to tiptoe out again when I realised what was going on, but he waved to me to stay, and without asking what I wanted, fixed me a drink.

This is Chris. He nodded to the man sitting at the bar. He might be playing here.

Chris held out his hand and shook mine. In profile he revealed a lean tanned face, but as he turned, I glimpsed the other side, a mottled mess of dark birthmark, more raspberry than strawberry, spreading from his nose to his ear and disappearing under his hair, which was black and curly. He continued talking.

I’ll do requests, but there are certain tunes I won’t play.

Fair enough, Mitchell said.

‘You Must Remember This’.

Okay.

‘Candle in the Wind’.

Yep, fine.

And especially ‘Piano Man’. Come to think of it, nothing by Billy Joel. Not a note. Or I walk out that door right there and never come back.

Sure. Okay.

I glanced at Mitchell, who was sounding oddly acquiescent, though he didn’t look it. He looked, with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, polishing wineglasses which he periodically held up to the light for exaggerated inspection, like a man with more important matters on his mind than what a temperamental pianist might condescend to play.

Chris seemed to relax. He paused, took a sip of his drink, then added,

Beyond that, I’ll play just about anything. Swing, jazz, honky tonk, country, blues, you name it. Bach, Liberace, Mrs Mills, anyone you like.

Mitchell stopped polishing to ask, Trucking songs?

Sure, why not? I’ll work any nights you like, within reason of course. Might want the occasional night off for Christmas or something. But no days.

I don’t open much before four or five anyway, Mitchell said. Except for functions.

Yeah, well, that’s the other thing. No weddings, no engagements, no twenty-firsts, you know? I can’t stand those crowds. They expect you to know every tune on the planet and get the shits when you won’t play those Burt Bacharach numbers for hours at a time.

Mitchell shrugged and said, They usually bring their own sound. What about funerals, though? I get the occasional one. Usually small crowds. Except the Irish and Islander funerals tend to go on for a while.

Now, funerals I can do. Chopin, no problem. Drunken Irish songs, ‘Danny Boy’, that’s all fine by me. I love funerals. Chris rose, glancing at his watch. He eased into his jacket then held out his hand to Mitchell.

Tomorrow night, see you about…Mitchell began.

Around seven. Might manage it by then. Chris said goodbye to me and departed.

I raised my drink while gazing at Mitchell. A direct or indirect question to him was a certain way to complete and eternal ignorance. The only way people could find anything out was by waiting, listening, watching. Unfortunately, Mitchell being such a generous host, that also meant hours spent drinking many drinks, all of them pretty potent. I could sit on one of his margaritas for an hour now and then, but I couldn’t sustain the pace over the length of a night. If he noticed you drinking too slowly he simply reached out for the remains of your drink, tossed it into the sink, and made you something different and more solvent. A pineapple daiquiri, three times the normal strength. The only advantage was that these sessions had the effect of making your tongue numb but his loose, as if he was the one drinking, though I never saw him with anything other than a bitter lemon. So you got to hear information about all sorts of people, in and out of town. Fascinating, if you could remember any of it the next day.

It was a quiet evening, only half a dozen patrons clustered at a few tables over by the windows. On the bar a canary fluted sleepily in his cage. Behind Mitchell, on the back wall, the row of mirrors reflected the semi-precious gem colours of the exotic and rarely dispensed liqueurs and mixers – crème de menthe, grenadine, Galliano – while behind me on the open windows the gauzy curtains waved in the warm breeze, sucking and billowing out to embrace the potted palms then gently and noiselessly dropping again.

At times like this I could understand what had kept generations of men seated at bars sipping beers with only the drone of a television in the background. It was a sanctuary, where nothing was required of you, nothing asked. An enclosed and protective place that was also a public space with company and conversation should you require it. A place that made few demands, allowed a person to float without care or deadline, timetable or commitment. And drove their women mad with frustration.

I remained quiet, briefly catching Mitchell’s eye in the bar mirror as he turned to the shelf to stack glasses or smooth out towels. Then, after he served a beer to someone, I spoke.

So, what’s Chris’s story, where’s he from?

But Mitchell reached down to one of the fridges, then slowly stood up again before asking,

What brings you back after all these years?

He asked it in a way that implied he wasn’t interested in the answer, didn’t need an answer. He knew why I was back.

Have you been to the caravan? he continued.

Not yet. Going there tomorrow, I said.

About time, don’t you think?

I know that.

His curls had greyed beneath the Greek fisherman’s cap, and the lines in his face were deeper, but I still would have known him in an instant, anywhere.

Apart from sending on those boxes of yours, I haven’t known what to do about the place for bloody years. By the way, he added, you look like shit.

I know, I said. Bilateral mastectomy tends to do that to you. Especially followed up by secondaries. Liver. Tumours. The works, really. I’m just in the queue now for the upsized deal, the mega meal. You know, the one you can never finish eating.

Mitchell finally registered surprise. He put down the glass he was polishing, tossed aside the towel.

Oh, Delia. I always knew you’d return. Not with that, though.

Who would?

He gazed at me for a few moments, as if drawing out all the years in between.

And you’ve still never found Sonny’s father, I suppose?

No, never.

I became entranced by Van the night I first met him. He was playing guitar in a three-man band, singing and entertaining the small gathering with extemporised anecdotes and jokes. It was just an undergraduate trio – on reflection more audacious than sophisticated, making up in energy what it lacked in polish – but then, I was sixteen and suburban. He was twenty-two, and so much more charming and confident than the teenage boys I knew, who functioned via grunts and jerky movements, and who, if you went out with them, thought it was generous to buy you a bottle of Island Cooler then ignore you for the rest of the night.

It was a café and bar, where I shouldn’t have been, but I’d escaped from an evening football match that my school’s team was playing at the university grounds, and wandered up to Newtown. The venue was a dark place, with lava lamps on the bar and candles on the tables. I listened to the music for a set then ventured to the bar. I was ordering a glass of wine and handing over a dollar to the barman, who looked stoned, when someone whispered into my ear from behind,

Are you sure you’re eighteen?

I turned to see the guitarist. Up close he was all silky locks and neat beard: his eyes seemed to burn brighter among the dark blond hair. My first thought was that he looked like Jesus Christ, my second thought was how stupid that was, since no one knew how Jesus looked.

Of course, I lied.

I was delighted at the attention. He followed me back to my table with a drink and sat down uninvited while a thrill travelled through me. He introduced himself.

Van, I said. That’s an unusual name.

Oh, I changed it.

Changed it? Could one change one’s own name? Awesome.

My parents called me Ivan, so I just changed it to Van a few years ago. After Van Morrison. It reflects my personality more, you know.

Oh. Yeah, I said, pretending to know who Van Morrison was.

What are you drinking? he asked, although it was obvious.

Moselle. I took a sip. It was too sweet, but Jean drank Lindemans Ben Ean at home and it was all I could think of to order.

Old ladies’ drink, he said. You should try some of this.

He was drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke. I watched him as he chatted, envious and far too admiring to notice that he talked only about himself. When he told me that he was a music student but had been dragging out his degree for several years, that he found the lecturers conservative and boring, the work a complete pain, and the program designed to stifle real talent, and when he confided that playing his own style of music was so much more creatively fulfilling, I couldn’t have agreed more.

I returned the next Friday night, and afterwards we went back to the terrace house he shared near the university. I didn’t go home for the rest of the weekend. Jean was furious.

Van’s mystique only deepened. He laughed at her job as a hairdresser, my vague ideas about becoming a teacher or librarian when I left school. His parents were circus performers, living up north in a town that had a personality of its own, a town that was famous for its circus. That sounded exotic to me, but he insisted that the place was just another small town. And he felt confined by the circus: he was a musician and singer, not a novelty performer. He’d left when he was sixteen.

My dull sense of inferiority, of having missed out – on something, I wasn’t sure what – only sharpened. I began to spend more time with him. I was too keen to be his girl. Too eager to embrace his creatively fulfilling world.

It took me years to understand that it had all been veils and mirrors, the stuff of tinsel and papier-mâché and smoke machines. What he’d come from, a circus background. What he did, pretending to be an artist of the calibre of Van Morrison. Illusions that were necessary for performing, dangerous in real life.

In Amethyst, his home town, nothing was imaginary. Young motherhood was palpable, at times painfully real. From time to time I’d thought about moving south, back to the inner city, where it was common for children to have no fathers, no mothers, serial fathers or even two mothers. Or back to the suburbs, to be near my mother. But although I had written to Jean to let her know where I was, and again after Sonny was born, I made it clear I wanted nothing from her. Jean being right about Van made it harder. As Sonny grew I sent her the occasional photo along with a note. I was independent and capable, and yet so painfully young. The truth was I didn’t know what I wanted from Jean, didn’t feel I owed her any apology, yet knew in my heart she didn’t owe me one either. She and Van had met rarely, as he hated coming to my place, and the first time I invited her to the bar to see him perform she left early and refused to come again. She hated his recreational drug use, his vague ambitions, his nocturnal lifestyle, even his diet. She was suspicious of his past, contemptuous of his unconventional family, scathing about his musical talents. At sixteen, seventeen, I embraced everything my mother loathed. I left Sydney and travelled north, towards the town from which Van had come. There had been no fight, no scene, nothing to suggest he was going to leave. And so I didn’t believe it. He would have gone back home to Amethyst. I believed that. I needed to. He was from the circus, and circus stays in the blood, calls you back home. That’s what he’d told me. And it was getting on for winter then. I would go north too, it would be warm there. I would find Van and convince him we were meant to be together and to have this baby. When I arrived I found that the place was stamped with his absence, the circus empty of him and all his family, probably the only circus family ever to leave for good. But after some weeks, after settling into the caravan, I felt like staying. And was unwilling to go back and face my failures, which were several. My friends going on to university without me. Jean being right again, then being too reasonable, to make me feel better for being so wrong. Me being scoured by my own gratitude when she helped me out, as she would. Me being bitten raw by my pride.

Once I’d settled in Amethyst, I discovered I had no real attachment to the city where I’d lived my short life, and I was still ripe for adventure, burning with a thirst for independence that I felt would sustain me wherever I would go, whatever I did. In a few months I would give birth, and I would be the best mother ever. I would more than make up for my baby’s lack of a father. My child would be born there, and it would belong there and if its father never returned at least it would be in its home.

For a long time I was filled with that arrogant confidence of youth, the conviction that you are desired as much as you desire: Van would want me and his child sooner or later, and would find the prospect of coming home irresistible. For years, part of me believed that, though there was not the slightest scrap of evidence for it. Van’s parents had moved further north, and his great-aunt had recently gone to a convalescent hospital by the coast. The only remains of his family in town were underground. All I had were Sonny and a fierce determination to make everything as right as I could.

Eleven

Dear Delia

Okay, I’ll forget about the wedding cake, but I’d like your advice on another matter. My daughter will wear my old white silk veil, edged in lace. But it is spotted with brown stains and has yellowed around the creases. Should I bleach it?

Mother of the Bride.

Dear Mother of the Bride

Never use bleach on silk! Buy some old-fashioned yellow laundry soap. Wash the veil in a tub, preferably outdoors one fine day. Rinse it with half a cup of white vinegar in the water, and roll it up in a towel. Spread it on the lawn to dry, where it will look beautiful as it soaks up the day. Let the light do the rest.

Spring meant that Mr Lambert next door commenced a rigorous routine of lawn maintenance. He devoted every Monday morning to front-lawn weeding. I didn’t need to go out and look over the fence to know what he would be doing: lying prone on the lawn and digging out feral vegetation with an old paring knife. Dandelions, bindi-eyes and other unidentified weeds were ritually extracted this way. Mr Lambert was a retired tax accountant, and I was sure he treated his lawn with the same humourless precision as he would have a column of figures. The lawn remained the blue-green shade of the fairest couch all summer until it turned brown in winter. He must have had his reasons, but I did wonder why he selected wintergreen couch for his front lawn, with its tendency to fade in the cooler months. Maybe because it was a more compliant grass, less inclined to provide asylum to refugee weeds that drifted in with the birds and the breezes. Soon after Mr Lambert moved here several years ago, he embarked on a clearing of the property environs that allowed no resistance. Palms, prone to messy explosions of seeds that banked in drifts and rotted odorously. Fence-hugging vines: morning glory, star jasmine and potato. Shrubs and grevilleas. The one large camphor laurel tree out the back. All were hewn, chopped away, chipped, mulched, removed.

A Mrs Lambert once existed but had passed away. He was never inclined to tell me more than that, except to mention that there was a son, and grandchildren, and I knew visits were few. I wondered if, had his wife not died some years before, his attitude towards the garden might have been more benevolent. But knowing nothing about her, it was impossible to say. Over the years Mr Lambert and I had only a few conversations, and in recent times none. But at one point he told me that he disliked trees. Too untidy. He replaced the front wattle tree with the murraya, and permitted a lone clump of agapanthus to loiter meekly by his front doorstep. His final act of garden cleansing was to dig up the front lawn and replace it with the wintergreen couch. He lovingly sowed it by hand and watered it obsessively, first with a fine mist spray gun so as not to disturb the seeds, then with a watering can. Within weeks it grew into a grey-green velvet carpet.

Archie, the lawn specialist, observed all this with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Lawn was a fine thing if you intended making use of it. Finer if you had the water resources to maintain it – but who had these days? Children playing, summer backyard meals, or just sitting by gazing at something soothingly green. But Mr Lambert’s lawn, huge in proportion to his small house, barely received a passing glance from its owner, except of course when he was tending it. The front window roller shutters remained securely shut most of the time. He never sat on the tiny front porch, never rested on his lawn. And yet he was forever watering it – by hand, during restrictions, making endless trips to the tap and back to drench every centimetre. He fed it liquid fertiliser. He aerated it with a fancy rolling spike. He lay on it and dug out every suspect growth. He rolled it as if it were a bowling green. It was seven by nine metres of perhaps the most perfect lawn Archie and I had ever seen, but which the owner otherwise ignored. I never saw anything so necessary, but so irrelevant, to a person’s life.

I assumed Mr Lambert’s backyard was still a small wasteland of pebblecrete punctuated by a set of plastic furniture, which he kept tilted forward and covered in plastic sheeting. I wasn’t certain, as it was no longer possible to see over the fence since he’d attached sheets of Colorbond steel to frustrate voyeurs. He even uprooted the rotary washing line, replacing it with a fence line that could be neatly folded down. Recently he sliced the necks of all our monstera deliciosa leaves that perched audaciously above the fence. Archie found them thrown onto our side and I pleaded with him not to throw them back. He couldn’t contain his anger at this outrage inflicted upon an innocent plant, and not so long ago I would have flung them over myself, with fury directing my swing. He settled for sticking the stalks back up against the fence so that their withering leaves would at least reproach our neighbour.

It was a beautiful day to be outside idling in the garden instead of trying to remember how to make a fruit cake I once could have made in my sleep. To write it down I needed to remember the ingredients and the method, which was hard when I had always made it from instinct. Never before had I written the recipe down, let alone thought about exact weights and measurements. I had made this cake so many times, but how many kilos of dried fruit did I use? What proportion of raisins, currants, peel and nuts? Did I include cherries? Two bottles of brandy, or one of brandy and one of rum? The thinking would be exhausting even for a well person. Putting off work I tidied my office instead, then walked over to the window, and opened it as wide as it would go. I breathed in the glorious scent. My lungs swelled with the delicate warmth of new jasmine frothing along the side fence and the peppery odour of the council’s wattle, already well into bloom. The wisteria pouring copiously from the vine.

Wisteria. Of course. I found the writing pad on which I’d been jotting down ideas for the wedding, and under Venue added Botanical Gardens. The wisteria would be glorious there. Daisy would look like an angel. Her Botticelli hair against a pale frock – pink or lemon or lavender. The lawn alive with colour, the sky a sharp blue, the whole a brilliant contrast for her Renaissance beauty.

I was fantasising on a grand scale. Daisy at twenty-five or so would probably have her hair cropped short and dyed indigo and wear nothing but black cargo pants and strategically ripped shirts. My sweet darling youngest daughter who was forever preoccupied with dolls and pets and everything fluffy, who would sleep with Kitty if I still let her, who played happy families with her three mice and kept one of them all day in her pocket, who begged for real ducklings but settled for the collection of floating ones she still kept for the bath. Doubtless by then she would have found her true sexuality and be in love with an Irish woman, sharing her passion for body piercing, dog shows and one-day cricket. The more the list burgeoned with details of table decorations and seating arrangements, the more I felt convinced this event was never going to happen. It was more likely to be a commitment ceremony, probably in an ironic location like the old Mortuary Station, or Hungry Jack’s at Darling Harbour, with the dogs (they’d be staffies) wearing purple bows. But if a wedding did take place, there’d be the rudiments of a list to follow. On the off-chance that Daisy would want one, I would have done my bit.

I considered making the cake (and then I remembered, it was half a bottle each of brandy and rum), which would last the years. But apart from the effort involved in shopping for the ingredients, then mixing and icing the thing, I thought doing so would actually confirm Archie’s view of me as a control freak. I would instead leave them the wedding fruit cake recipe, draw it somehow out of my head and write it up properly. I might even give it to Mother of the Bride.

I put the list aside and got on with the real work. Apart from Mother of the Bride’s request, there were ten more emails waiting for replies.

Dear Delia

Remember I wrote some time back inquiring about shopping lists? My golfing friend and I consulted that Mrs Beeton book you mentioned, and now we are wondering if it would be a good idea to write inventories of our households. Linen and crockery, plus our jewellery and stuff. For the children, and grandchildren. And insurance too, of course. Unsure.

Dear Unsure

If I remember rightly, you also told me you were both sixty-five. At this age do you really want to clutter up your lives with more paperwork?

Twelve

On the second day in Amethyst I stayed in the motel room. Outside, the day was sweet and inviting, the far north autumn being so kind. But I spent a long time having a bath, using up the inadequate mini-bottles of shampoo and body wash. I dried off with two of the bathtowels, draping the third around me instead of a robe. I lay down on the bed to read through the local brochures and leaflets for drycleaners, Chinese takeaways and day trips to gemstone mines. I raided the mini-bar for its mini-chocolates and made a cup of teabag tea, then a cup of instant coffee with long-life milk, pouring each down the bathroom sink when they tasted as bad as I expected. Finally I got dressed and took a mineral water out to the balcony, which overlooked a lily pond and the fenced-in pool. Close by was the run and kennel of the sleepy labrador.

I had to think about returning to my old caravan in Mitchell’s camping park, but I could only do it step by step. Sitting there, I mentally traced through the route to the home I’d lived in for eight years but not seen for fourteen. I would drive out of this motel, turn left, then right, then left again. Straight up, it would take less than five minutes to get there. There would be a sign, Amethyst Caravan Park, probably faded now. Then past the front fence, along the gravel path, past the shed that Mitchell once used as an office, I’d skirt the stand of palms to pass the laundry.

I kept getting to the laundry. No further.

I fetched another drink and the two-pack of chocolate chip biscuits. I ate one and tossed the other down to the dog.

When I lived there I loved that laundry, ancient though it was. The other residents included an elderly couple who had installed a Hoover twin tub behind their van, a retired council worker who took his washing into the town laundromat every fortnight, and an ever-circulating collection of young men who spilled over from the circus, and who slept at the caravan park but tended to use the circus’s facilities. So apart from the visitors and tourists, I was the only person to use the laundry regularly and I made it my domain. I would soak my clothes and linen in one of the tubs, poke it all about with the old wooden spoon, then rinse and squeeze it out by hand. For really dirty things, I would light the copper, feeding it with scraps of timber and wads of old newspaper until the place took on the feel and smell of some sort of laboratory, bubbling with potent liquids and thick with a chemical mist. I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Left to my own devices, who knew what I would produce?

Nothing more than clean clothes, of course. After Sonny came along I would settle him in his basket by the doorway so he could have his face kissed by the sun while I stirred and rubbed and squeezed. Back then I could spend hours washing if I wanted, pegging sheets and baby blankets out on the old rope line propped behind the laundry, gathering in the loads of sweet-smelling clothes before the sun started to go down, setting out the ironing board in the annexe and performing the unnecessary task of ironing sheets and tea towels. I knew it was pointless – as if a baby cared how well-ironed his things were – but I always did it. I pressed Sonny’s cotton bibs and lawn wraps with more care than I’d ever ironed a silk shirt or a pair of trousers. Somehow it seemed important to do this. Just as later it became vital not to let him go out barefoot. I was never going to be mistaken for trailer trash and no one was ever going to pity me or my circumstances. Maybe it was observing this dedication to the task that made Mitchell offer me the job of cleaner and manager and all-round caretaker, as he’d started up a new business in town which was keeping him away for long hours. Or maybe he was more observant than that.

It must be hard, managing on a single mother’s pension, he’d said a few months after the birth.

The payments had only just started coming through, thanks to my recent move interstate and the usual bureaucratic inertia. By that stage I was waiting at the post office in town every second Thursday, was first in the queue at the bank. I didn’t dare to think what it would cost when Sonny needed more than breast milk and baby clothes.

I could do with the help, he said, allowing us both to pretend it wasn’t charity.

Mitchell didn’t tell me there was a man contracted to mow the caravan park grounds. One morning I was on my knees by the front gate, Sonny parked in his pram beside me, and hacking at runners of grass that had snaked across the path almost overnight in the warm moist weather. I was using a pair of stiff secateurs I’d found in the laundry, and after ten minutes I was already sweaty and hand sore, when a man pulled up in a utility. He got out and looked at me for a moment, then brought out a pair of long-handled shears.

These’ll do a much better job, he said, offering them to me.

Fine, I said, tossing the old secateurs onto the grass. Feel free to take over. Turning my back on him, I wheeled the baby away.

Nice to meet you too, he called after me. The name’s Archie, by the way.

My rudeness didn’t seem to have bothered him, for the times I saw him after that he just waved or said hello and continued mowing or clipping. Mitchell only wanted me to keep things in order, so I retreated to the back of the grounds. I could tidy the gardens there and leave Archie to do the more professional jobs around the front. One steaming afternoon I wheeled the pram in from the street, hot and tired, aching for a cold beer, one luxury I kept in my tiny fridge. I found Archie dripping with the effort of lopping the huge fig that grew at the front gate. It was too hot for hostilities. I fetched us both a beer and we sat in the shade admiring his work. After that it became a bit of a ritual. Soon I started to look forward to it, in a wary sort of way. He never mentioned a girlfriend. In fact, while we chatted amiably enough, neither of us discussed personal matters, not then. Later on he told me about a woman he sort of saw, but that it was difficult, on again and off again. Really difficult.

How do you mean, difficult? I asked.

Put it this way, he said. There’s competition.

You mean she has someone else?

Something like that.

So why doesn’t she make a choice, him or you?

When Archie laughed I first thought that her other person might have been a woman. And how obtuse and smallminded I must have sounded.

Well, that’s not really possible. She’s in love with a dead man, as far as I can tell. And I’m getting a bit sick of it.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and sighed. I felt like poking him to explain more, until he started to hum tunelessly, Love me tender, love me blue…

Not Pearl? I said.

Do you know her?

Of course. Mitchell sent me to her soon after I arrived. Half the books I’ve got are from her place.

Pearl was dark, beautiful, dreadlocked. Her book exchange shop – her day job – was in the front room of her house, which was a mini Graceland. Her night job was president of the Amethyst and District Elvis Fan Club, and the district was so vast it took her away a lot, organising talent quests and commemorative shows and memorabilia swap meets and whatever else Elvis fans did. I felt I owed Pearl a great deal, since she gave me complete freedom with her odd collection of books – mostly picked up from country town fêtes, street markets and car boot sales – and charged me almost nothing. If she and Archie…well, if it came to that, it would not even be a competition.

That was when I told him about Van – though, as Van was something of a notorious figure, he already knew most of what there was to know – and that was also when I made it clear that no man was ever going to get into the pores of my soul like that again.

Much later, when Sonny grew so fond of Archie, it became harder. I seesawed for a few years between thinking Archie and I could be a real couple, and thinking that maybe I only thought that because it would make it easier for me and Sonny. Thinking that if I agreed to move in with Archie it might only be because it would suit me, with Sonny growing and the caravan becoming increasingly impossible, not because I wanted him for his sake alone. Thinking that I didn’t really know what I was thinking. The thinking revolved around and around in my mind like a mouse on a wheel. Strangely, it didn’t seem to bother Archie. Which was why I read so much. Easier to enter someone else’s dilemmas or questions or nightmares than confront or solve my own.

I told Sonny only what I judged he needed to know, since complete honesty, I’d found, was not always the best option with children. One day, his goldfish, the best pet a caravanliving mother could manage for a child, floated to the top of its bowl and commenced putrefying. Sonny seemed to cope with the fact of Jaffa dying, but the idea that the fish’s body then laid solemnly in the good earth – in a patch adjacent to the caravan and marked by a banana tree I had recently planted – would be prone to worms, bacteria and other elemental onslaughts made him sob for hours.

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