In the ground there’s not just less time, there’s no time. No meetings that run late or birthday parties you were early for, no twiddling of thumbs or chasing the last bus home. You will never think about the past or the future and right now is always. Pat gave me some roses to throw into the grave but I dropped some potatoes down instead. We used to dig up Dutch creams and kipflers, boil them, spread a knife full of butter down the middle and pile on the salt. I smiled at that memory even though it didn’t seem right, standing over the top of my dead mother. I wanted to jump in and lie down with her—just one more time.
That was eleven days ago and here we are again like it was yesterday. I wanted to get fake orchids because we wouldn’t be back for a while and they would last a lifetime, but Pat said that was crass. So we got yellow petunias from the petrol station. They were a few days old and already starting to droop. I put them down where I thought her arms might be, one bunch in each hand. Pat’s silhouette moved so close to mine we merged into one big shadow, large and wide. When death has come and gone some people say ‘How can I keep going?’ Even when friends bring a beef casserole, do the ironing and gossip about poor Shirley and Geoff who got food poisoning in Bali, that person just can’t start again. One day they lie down for a nap while the 5 pm news is on the radio, and they die too.
‘Pat, who am I now?’ When life mucks you about, sometimes it’s hard to know.
‘You’re the same always…same as…before,’ he says with eyes to the ground. But that was a lie. Dirt talkin’ is always a lie.
‘Am I still real? Do you see me?’ Here in this moment I’m losing it all: my words, this place, the past.
Pat’s hand reaches out but stops before he can touch my cheek. Maybe I’ve just gone and disappeared. How could I be real without Mum? When the world was too noisy, she would put a finger to her lips and slow it all down. Taught the wind how to hold its breath. Now everything is sliding backwards and I want to throw up. I leg it through the cemetery, run halfway across the normal Christians, through the Jews and Greek Orthodox. Keep going past the heathens who shouldn’t have been there at all, and only stop when I see the tiny crosses. There are headstones too, some with pictures of those babies before they became angels. Why does God gift them to Earth only to snatch them back so quick? I am angry for all of us left behind. God is a selfish man and grief makes you unwhole. My dad once said he would punch Jesus in the face if he had the nerve to come back another time.
I look up into the cloudless sky. ‘Make me real!’ I scream.
Pat’s arms wrap tight around me. I try to get out but he won’t let go and after a while I don’t want him to. I wonder if those angel babies can still hear their parents whispering—wishing, hoping, praying they’ll come back. I wonder if those babies blow birthday kisses to their brothers and sisters; watching as they get older even though angels never can. I wonder if they are watching me right now, telling me it is okay to go and find Mum’s spirit.
And do you know what? I stare into that picture of two-year-old Therese Boylan with the rosy cheeks and the curly mop of blonde hair and I hear her say: ‘Be it metal or wood, go find the boat.’ I think Pat hears it too because he turns to me and nods.
‘Let’s go.’
3 Hand in hand
We’re driving back through town and a semi hurtles past taking up more than its fair share of the road. It’s so long it might as well have been a train. The line through Beyen stopped years ago when people forgot what there was to see so far out. The town is slowly waking up now. I see the corner shop with Tran sweeping dust back and forth on the footpath. Alan taking his pug Jojo for a poo, back legs quivering so much she might fall over with the strain. There’s Mr Reeler the-hands-on-feeler sitting on a bench in Cullen Park, three-piece St Vinnies grey suit and no socks. People keep throwing bricks into his window ’cause he’s a nasty piece of work and isn’t allowed into the public swimming pool.
We pass by Miriam’s spicy chicken and chips takeaway where we had dinner the night before. Jesus had a last supper. People in jail in America also get a special meal before they die. This one lady who buried all her ex-husbands in the backyard, she ate some cornbread, beans and rice, McDonalds Big Mac meal deal, a chocolate milkshake, and cherry vanilla ice-cream with hot apple pie. It’s not good to sleep on such a full stomach. Even if you’re gonna wake up in hell.
My last meal was eight chicken nuggets, chips and gravy. I drank a sip of Pat’s beer and he said my face looked like a ferret’s fart. When we laughed some beer came out of my nose and we laughed some more. Good times like that are rare with me and Pat. Almost endangered. I’d been sleeping at his place for the past few nights on account of my house being totally empty. Salvos van had come and gone and I was living out of a suitcase. I saw Mrs Lupido riding down the street in Mum’s favourite summer dress. I just can’t scratch that memory out of my eyes.
It’s never easy to sleep at the beginning of the end. My last night in Beyen was an oven-hot scorcher. Every time I heard a bump outside I reckoned it was a possum keeling over ’cause they can’t take their fur coats off. And even though it couldn’t be true I swear I heard a train in the distance. Thumpety thumpety thump. In my dream I crawled out of bed and flew into the tree outside. There were no clouds to scare me or make me fall. Just a purple-blue night where bats flew across the full moon. I watched myself as I got onto that train, turned around and waved goodbye. If I am going, then who is left behind? The train was so small in the distance now it looked like a toy. That girl—me, myself—she’d gone. Running as far away from her dirty blackness as she could. Only trouble is, wherever you go, there you are.
Making our way down the main drag I see no one’s bothered to organise a ticker-tape parade. Doesn’t seem proper to leave with no fanfare at all. When we turn onto Harmony Street I see the town statue, that big old metal hand with its palm facing towards me, and it’s saying STOP! WAIT! STAY! I grab hold of the steering wheel and we screech to a halt in the middle of the road.
‘What-the-hellsmatta-with-ya??!!’ Pat clutches his chest like his heart’s trying to escape.
‘It’s a sign!’
‘It’s not a sign, it’s just a big bloody hand!’
Well that wasn’t true. It was the BIGGEST hand in the southern hemisphere, made in honour of the town’s founder. Lambert Beyen was from Antwerp, which is a town in Belgium. And Belgium is a little country that was swallowed up by other countries fighting around it until someone said, ‘Okay let’s find a king and draw lines in the dirt and put up stop signs and make this our own place.’ So they did and then Belgium became a real country on the map. There used to be a giant called Antigoon who lived by the river in Antwerp. If you wanted to cross you had to give him all your pocket money otherwise he would cut your hand clean off! Then a Roman warrior came and cut off the giant’s own hand and threw it in the river. There’s a statue of him right in front of the town hall. You can buy little chocolate hands in Antwerp to eat. I thought that sounded nice, but Mum said it was awful because it was from another story about the Belgian king who used to cut real people’s hands off in the Congo. She said the Belgians hadn’t fully ‘reconciled their pasts’. Like going to Pizza Hut, chucking everyone out, eating all the food and then leaving without paying for your meal.