The Last Anniversary (41 page)

S
ophie stands at the doorway of Aunt Connie’s house and watches a paint-splattered Eddie Ripple loping up the footpath. He stops at the jasmine-covered archway and turns back to give her a funny, quizzical shrug. He looks very handsome and tall. Just like Prince Charming.

As he walks off there is a shriek of manic laughter from the kookaburra, sitting with his normal self-satisfied expression on the side fence. He is alone, so perhaps things aren’t working out so well with his lady friend. He doesn’t seem too fussed.

Sophie looks thoughtfully at her little finger. There
is
at least one very faint line there, she’s sure of it.

‘Well, here’s how it happened. Your dad and I used to be best friends when we were little, and one day we ran into each other again because he came over to paint my house and write a poem, you know, how he does. Anyway, I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time–and, umm, well, neither did your dad–but we both wanted a baby very, very much. It was exactly twenty-three minutes after one on a Saturday when I thought of the idea but it took me two weeks to get the courage up to ask him. Your dad was in the middle of dipping a paintbrush into a tin of duck-egg-blue paint (and maybe he’d just come up with a perfect line for a poem, I don’t know) when I said it. At first he thought I was out of my mind. He twitched. I blushed. But then he said he’d go away and think about it, and I was pretty sure he was going to say yes.’

‘So there,’ she says to the kookaburra, and she goes inside to ring up Claire and invite her to come over and meet her old friend Eddie Ripple. She’s pretty sure Claire will approve.

After that she’s going to read a regency romance and eat a Turkish delight in the bath.

Sometimes a girl has to stop waiting around and come up with her own fairytale ending.

‘H
i, it’s me, Rick.’

‘Hello, Rick. You left me with a festering cold sore.’

‘I’m sorry. Can I make it up to you by taking you out on the boat again tomorrow?’

‘Mmmm. What happened with your ex-girlfriend?’

‘It didn’t work out. She went back to her ex-boyfriend.’

‘Oh, too bad.’

‘So what do you say?’

‘H
i, it’s me, Ian.’

‘Hello Ian. I thought you would have been throwing yourself over rapids in New Zealand by now.’

‘They made me partner. It pays better than white-water rafting, and you don’t get so wet and cold.’

‘Well, congratulations partner-man.’

‘Thanks. Hey, I’ve got spare theatre tickets for Friday night if you’re interested?’

O
h my goodness.

My goodness
me.

I think I could…

I think I will…

Cook? Sew? Have a bath?

Dance a jig?

Rose slowly, sinuously unfurls her hands above her head like a flamenco dancer. She feels gloriously pain-free. She has got back her light and free ten-year-old body. It’s all thanks to Rick the Gardener.

When was it? Of course, it was the Anniversary Night–months ago now–before all the business with the Kook and Grace’s allergic reaction, when Rose got chatting with Rick while he was preparing his fire-eating equipment. He’d admitted he got terrible stage-fright before he performed and that his hands shook all day thinking about it. He’d noticed Rose rubbing her back and asked if she was OK, and because he’d been so honest with her about his stage-fright, Rose told him that sometimes the pain of her rheumatoid arthritis was so bad she wanted to lie on the ground like a two-year-old and cry, and if she’d been an old dog it would have been kinder to take her out the back and shoot her. Rick said he knew just the thing to help the pain and took out a fat, neatly rolled cigarette from his jeans pocket, and Rose asked, ‘Is this an illegal drug?’ and Rick had answered, well, yes, sort of, but it was just marijuana and they let cancer patients smoke it, so why shouldn’t she? She had put it in her jacket pocket and forgotten all about it, until tonight, when she was watching TV and saw a fire-eater being interviewed, and all of a sudden she remembered and thought, Why not? It would be better than having another chocolate biscuit.

So she sat at her kitchen table and found a match and lit it up. At first it had made her cough and splutter and burned the back of her throat, but then she had got the hang of it again. She and Connie had both smoked for years, but they gave up, at Connie’s insistence, when the Surgeon-General released his findings on smoking causing lung cancer in the Seventies. ‘Throw them all out right now!’ Connie had said, marching over, brandishing the newspaper. Of course, Connie had been the one to get Rose smoking in the first place. Smoke, don’t smoke; sun-dried tomatoes are far too fashionable for us, sun-dried tomatoes add quite a nice touch to an omelette, sun-dried tomatoes are old hat; no you can’t tell your daughter that you’re her mother, not until she’s forty and doesn’t really need a mother any more and is too old to make you a home-made Mother’s Day card, no you can’t be mother-of-the-bride at your daughter’s wedding, no you can’t stand up at Nat’s funeral and tell everybody that he was the most wonderful son-in-law you could have hoped to have, no your granddaughters won’t ever call you Grandma, this is business now, Rose, this is serious, this is about money.

No you can’t tell the world that you’re a mother and a grandmother and a great-grandmother, because where would that leave Connie? Not the family matriarch, just an elderly childless old aunt.

Rose inhales deeply and watches the smoke curling from her nostrils like a dragon’s. She is ten years old and she is in big trouble from her mother, for something to do with Connie. ‘Don’t you know your big sister adored you from the moment you were born? She’d do anything for you! Anything!’ She is twenty-five years old and she has walked in on Connie crying in her kitchen–she says it’s because she’s chopping onions, but nobody cries so hard from chopping onions that their eyes are all swollen, and finally Connie says that she had been a few days late, and she’d allowed herself a glimmer of hope, so stupid of her. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Jimmy, and then this morning–well, she just had to bloody well accept it wasn’t going to happen, didn’t she, and for heaven’s sake, don’t just sit there, Rose, you may as well chop the carrots.

If it wasn’t for Connie they would have taken Enigma away and she would never have seen her again and there would have been no Laura and Margie, no Grace and Veronika and Thomas, no Lily, no Jake. No Sophie. No children holding their faces up to be painted. No money for beautiful fabric or Christmas presents for the children or a dishwasher that left the glasses sparkling.

Rose breathes in Rick’s lovely home-grown marijuana and feels a sweet melting sensation, as if she’s just bitten into a chocolate truffle, as if she
is
a chocolate truffle. What will she do now? All at once she knows exactly the right thing to do. She wants to paint. Not face-painting. She wants to paint a huge canvas of big brave splashes of gorgeous colour. Grace is right! What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she try some form of art
other
than face-painting?

She floats around the kitchen and finds her paint-kit. But where will she paint? Where is her easel? She must buy herself an easel! She and her beautiful great-granddaughter Grace will paint together, and while they paint she’ll tell her what she couldn’t tell her before. She’ll tell her to stop tying herself up in knots worrying about whether she loves Jake like a proper mother. She’ll say that she didn’t love Enigma like a proper mother either; she felt nothing at all, not a thing, but then one day it came–a rush of love so powerful, so raging and dangerous, it nearly swept her off her feet.

Rose sways slightly, remembering exactly how it had felt that day, how it had come from nowhere, flaring like a gas flame. She frowns and bites her lip. Of course, she won’t tell Grace what happened next. It was such a long time ago and she has never regretted it, not once, but still, she wouldn’t want to give Grace nightmares. Not like some of the nightmares Rose has had over the years that have left her weak and sweaty and sick in the stomach.

She looks down at the glimmering white tiles of her kitchen floor, paid for by the shadowy, mythical figures of Alice and Jack Munro, who also paid for the nice girl Kerrie to come and mop them once a fortnight. The perfect canvas!

She takes one of the cushions from the kitchen chairs and puts it down on the floor, so she can kneel on it without hurting her knees. Sensible, says Connie in her head. The paintbrush in her hand feels like it’s part of her body, an extra-long alien finger.

She begins to paint, tentatively at first and then wildly. Her paintbrush moving on its own. She lies down and puts the pillow under her stomach and uses it to sort of scoot across the floor as she paints. This is fun! Funny! She imagines her daughter’s face if she were to come in and see her now, lying on her kitchen floor, painting her memories. Enigma would say she had the Alzheimer’s for sure.

She paints a memory of Enigma when she was a baby and learning to walk. She had such a conceited expression on her little face, as though she were the first person in the universe to crack this walking business. She tottered towards Rose’s arms and Rose said, very quietly, under her breath, so Connie wouldn’t hear in the next room, ‘Come to Mummy. Walk to your Mummy!’

Enigma has forgiven Rose for going public about Alice and Jack. After the immense glory of her seven-minute television appearance with Ray Martin she has discovered a new career as a guest speaker. She goes around to Senior Citizens’ Clubs and Rotary Clubs and Bowling Clubs and gives them the inside story on the Munro Baby Mystery. She likes to wear one of those ‘hands-free’ microphones so she can walk around the audience, sometimes patting her more handsome fans on the shoulder, or even the head, which they don’t seem to mind. She has an appointment book and a new mobile phone, and Rose adores the expression on her face when she speaks to her ‘clients’–it’s exactly the same as her conceited toddler face.

She paints Laura and Margie when they were ten and twelve, showing off their diving skills to her at Sultana Rocks, screaming, ‘Look at this one, Aunt Rose! We’re like swans!’ and then diving in with their skinny arms stretched wide.

Margie is somewhere in Central Australia at the moment. She emails Thomas photos, which he shows to Rose on his computer, photos of red rippled landscapes that stretch on forever and Margie looking relaxed and tanned and in need of a shower, standing in front of a dusty four-wheel drive. It doesn’t look like she’s coming home anytime soon. She made everyone promise not to cook for Ron while she’s away, but of course everybody still does. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him, moping around, doing projects around the house that Margie asked him to do years ago. Rose turned up the other day with a chilli beef casserole to find Thomas there, patiently cooking his father a pepper steak, while Lily crawled around his feet. Meanwhile Laura has moved back into her house on the island and is studying philosophy at the university. Laura is the least philosophical person that Rose knows, so she’s a bit worried she’s not going to get very good marks. Laura is also officially dating the Kook and they all have to pretend to have forgotten that the first time they met him he was trying to blackmail them with an urn full of vacuum-cleaner dust. He’s a pleasant, chatty sort of fellow, but he does have a gambling problem apparently, so you have to be careful. The other day there was a discussion about the star of an old movie and Rose had said to him, ‘I bet you ten dollars it was Katharine Hepburn!’ and was mortified in case he should take her up on the bet and set off his problem again.

Rose sits back up on her knees and takes another deep, satisfying puff on the cigarette. She must tell her friend Marie, who also suffers from horribly painful arthritis, about this new solution. She could invite her over for a cup of tea and some marijuana.

She lies back down on the floor and paints a memory of the children when they were little. Thomas was five, Veronika and Grace were four, and they’d all got very, very dirty playing goodness knows where on the island, and Margie had put them all in a big bubble bath together and Rose helped them make beards and moustaches out of the bubble foam, and their giggles of glee bounced around the bathroom, and Rose had thought, If only we could always keep you this happy just by popping you in a bath! Then again, lately the three of them seem to be about as happy as adults can be, or at least as these particularly prickly adults can be. Veronika has moved in with her new special friend, and sometimes at family events, Rose has observed her just sitting quietly, not saying a word! Of course, it doesn’t last long, but it seems as though Veronika isn’t wrestling with her life like it’s an out-of-control crocodile any more. Thomas will always be a worrier, but he and Debbie are worried at the moment about what sort of pavers they should choose for their new in-ground swimming pool (who would have thought there was so much to say on the subject?) and this seems to be a fairly pleasant problem to worry about, and Lily seems to be a good-natured little thing, who will keep her parents under control. Rose can tell that Thomas will always be somewhat in love with Sophie, but that’s life, isn’t it. Sophie seems to have a few different fellows calling on her at the moment, but more often than not she’s laughing her head off with that nice tall friend of Callum’s, Ed Ripple. Everybody assures Rose that no, they won’t be getting married because Ed isn’t interested in girls, but as far as Rose can see he’s
very
interested in Sophie and he makes her happy, so who knows what’s going to happen there! Grace, Callum and Jake have moved into their beautiful new home in the mountains, and Grace has finished her next Gublet book, and Rose can see that it’s going to be the most beautiful one yet, and when she went over there for dinner the other night, Grace asked if she’d like to see the dedication, and Rose said, yes, of course, and it said, ‘
For Rose, my great-grandmother
.’ For all the world to see.

She paints Connie, tall and thin and worried, jabbing away with her stick in the sand as she came up with the idea about Alice and Jack, while Rose lay back and closed her eyes and let her take care of everything. ‘One day,’ Connie had said, ‘we’ll be sweet little old ladies and we’ll forget it didn’t happen the way we said it did.’

She paints her mother, before she got sick, in a beautiful silk dress, with a bell-shaped skirt and an embroidered neckline, the sort of dress she could never afford to wear, the sort of dress Rose would have bought for her from David Jones in the expensive designer part if she could have her back for one day, to show her how lovely life can be when you’ve got enough money.

She paints the river, green and still and mysterious and unrolling into a ribbon of lustrous turquoise crêpe de Chine. She paints the shoes she was wearing the day she went to visit Mr Egg Head to show him their baby. Connie would have had an absolute fit if she’d known her plan. Rose had told her she would take the baby for a walk around the city while she looked in the shop windows, and Connie had wanted to go to the pictures with Jimmy, so she never knew about Rose’s idea to catch a train to his house in Annandale, where Mr Egg Head was at home alone while his wife was out cleaning houses. He’d been retrenched from his job at the department store and he was unshaven and unsmiling, his trouser braces dangling over his shoulders, a stained white collar. It was a bit of a shock after his dapper appearance at the store. Rose followed him into his unpleasant-smelling kitchen and he sat back down and kept shovelling spoonfuls of horrible sludgy porridge into his mouth, and Rose said, ‘I just wanted you to see your daughter,’ and held her up under her armpits. Rose had dressed Enigma in her very best outfit and curled up her hair around her fingertips. The baby gazed around with placid interest, while Mr Egg Head flicked her a sneering glance, snorted, and said with his mouth full, ‘Bloody ugly thing, isn’t she?’

Rage hit her knees so hard and so unexpectedly it was as if she’d been crash-tackled. She put Enigma back into her pram and then she turned to the messy bench-top and she didn’t even look at what she was picking up with both hands until after she’d swung it against the back of his head. It made a loud ‘thwack’ and he tipped forward face-first into his porridge and then there was silence, except for the sharp high hum of a blowfly.

‘She’s a
beautiful
baby,’ said Rose, to the back of his head. She’d put the bread board back down and pushed the pram out onto the street and caught the train back into the city and met Jimmy and Connie after their movie, and said she and the baby had had a lovely time walking around the city, and in all the years to come whenever people talked about the Bread Board Murder Mystery, all Rose could hear was the hum of that fly.