Cemetery Bed

Short Story

Nan died in the stinking heat of 1990. Our last forbear fell away watching cricket in the good room. I faced the new decade with no elders and I was turning seventeen. It was obvious I needed elders. My mother didn't laugh when I told her she was now an orphan. She got on the phone, talked to her sister, made excuses, delayed going up straight away, avoiding being with her sister in that place where she was born. She rang Dad and moaned she couldn't face the highway alone and couldn't go back to that town all by herself. She rushed around gathering her children together, ironing clothes that Nan would have liked, saying as she rushed past my room,

"Caitlin, for godsake. Hurry up and choose a dress from that putrid mess of yours."

Dad came back from work announcing he'd booked a family room hotel room in the town. "I want to stay with Aunt Jess on the farm," Tom moaned. I don't know why. He didn't even remember what she looked like.

"They don't have enough beds." Mum yelled from inside her wardrobe. It was crap. They had billions of beds. I prepared myself to be an accessory, handbag to Mum's obligations. The flower filled dress Mum picked out for me was a lie.

•

Driving out of the city onto the highway, we accompanied my newly orphaned mother to her family.  My brothers and me slept in the back seat because the drive was flat and long.

As soon as the car door opened my mother started to sweat. Blistering heat blew into the car as she left us and tiptoed across the dirt to her sister's rundown farmhouse. The dirt burnt her shoes. She didn't want to be walking on this ugly land. She disappeared into the house leaving us to find our own way through the mirage.

We climbed out of the back seat, taking our cosmopolitan bodies onto the flat, stark, fly-fucked dirt. Walking across the dust, we swatted flies and smelt shit under foot. The sun pierced and boiled the shit.

Following my mother's trail down the hall we stood lost in my aunt's kitchen which burst with people hiding from the heat. Dad shook some hands and said stupid things like, 'sorry' and 'good innings'. I wasn't sure whether he was talking about the cricket or Nan. My brothers looked at the lino and mumbled as flies played at the back door.

After awkward hellos, my brothers moved outside and wandered around the water tanks. Above the sink a tiny window tried to hold the horizon in its frame. It failed. Out there the earth wasn't round. It was flat as a tack and threatened to run up and suffocate me. Mum disappeared with Aunt Jess to another room and through the floorboards I heard Aunt Jess muttering lists at Mum. They sounded like spiders. I imagined Nan's handwriting on the odd birthday cards she sent me. Alphabet webs Mum had to translate for me that said flat things like many happy returns and yours sincerely. The words meant nothing but the writing was like ancient graffiti.

I couldn't find a place to put my arms so they held each other behind my back giving me some gait as I tried to talk to my cousins who sat at the laminex table feeding mush to toddlers. Families make small talk so I commented on heat and babies. It failed. Their tight eyes didn't even pretend to smile. It was obvious I didn't know them. My clothes were too loud, too conscious, and too black. They moved around the kitchen easily, grabbing tea towels to wipe squashed egg off the table and ordering bigger kids to make cups of tea. I didn't know how to be polite to these people. There were too many of them and I hated feeling like everyone was watching me, especially when they didn't even look at me.

Dad drank a beer with Uncle and he knew the right questions. They talked about who had rung, about who cared and who was involved in the funeral but I didn't know what they were talking about. I hadn't seen my Nan for five years. I hadn't been here in this town for ten. I didn't know its breath anymore.

I evacuated through the fly-wire door, pretending to check on my brothers as they wandered around the dust. All I could see was yellow. Last time I was there it was sea green.  Marcus groped a football he found by the side of the house, and picked at it, pretending to be at home like he always does. Tom crouched under the tank picking the legs off a dead spider and laughing like a lunatic.

•

There was a funeral to prepare. Mum stayed with Jess as they tried to scrape a chronology together on a thick writing pad and Dad took us to the hotel where we swam in a snotty pool and Marcus laughed at our cousin's alien looking children.  Dad's voice went deep as he shut himself up with the phone in the hotel room, trying not to lose touch with work and the world. Inside I was itchy, snobby, rude and a traitor, so I got dressed and got out of there.

Tom walked with me to see Nan's old house. She hadn't lived there for years and we hadn't been back since that awful Christmas when Mum told her brother-in-law he was narrow minded and threw a sausage at his head. That was when sprinklers were allowed; the grass was buffalo thick and the bougainvillea choked the jacarandas.  That was before they moved the river. Before the farmers had fights about it and the Kooris told them they were going to kill the place. That was before Aunt Jess told Mum she was a spoilt brat who didn't know how much she hurt people. That was when Mum started watching documentaries on what salty water does to dirt and shouting at the television about dumb country people. That was when Nan sold the family home and put all her money into saving the farm because Aunt Jess bribed her by taking her in and giving her the good room to sleep in. That was when Mum said Nan got a bitter tongue and blamed Mum for not caring about her. That was before Mum cut off the lot of them and told them they could fry in their own small stupid dust. So since Nan and the river had moved, we never returned. It took death to get Mum back up here.

Tom and I walked slowly through the town where even the wind hid away.   The wide street seemed vacant but in the distance, through the slippery reflection on the concrete, people moved. Their gait was slumped, their eyes wrinkled from staring at the sun, their hair toasted and their skin crackled - like mine. Their ugliness was mine. Despite years in the metropolis the sun found my skin and wrecked it; splattering freckles over its surface. Time pulled my shoulders into a curl and, straining to see the people move the mirage, I felt sick. There, with no grace, goes me. I squint, they squint, I curl, they curl, my hair fizzes, their hair fizzes. But these people were quiet, and I was nearly seventeen. Inside me a fuse-box spat white noise at my ribs.

We went into a dead shop to buy a drink. A little bell announced us as we slid around the sticker-covered door. Rat poison and crusty pastry hung in the air. The lady behind the counter talked through her nose asking us small questions. Her slow tongue was irritatingly lazy and her concern invaded us. She said she knew Nan and was sorry, but we didn't know her or how she recognised us but she knew my people better than me.

"You Marie's kids? From Melbourne?"

She sneered at us like someone had betrayed someone so I didn't ask any questions and left the shop as fast as I could.  Tom wandered young behind me; his hair black and sleek and his face clean from living like a baby mushroom in the inner city. He drank his orange junk loudly on the pavement.

The town curled around the railway tracks and we kicked at dried mud stuck on the sleepers. Around a flat corner, by the fire station, we found the street.  Her crumbling house under the peppercorns was razed and the block bulged with brick veneer city flats hanging in the blue sky. I swore they laughed at me. I couldn't explain to Tom, I tried, but he didn't remember. He sucked the last of his juice and complained that he was hungry.  I saw some trees in the distance that looked like they might be over the river. I was too scared to go look just in case Mum was right.

We walked back through deserted streets to the racket of air conditioners and crying cicadas. The hotel stuck in the sky in the same way the flats did, with rude, economical brown brick. Dad and Marcus ate pizza by the pool.  I dropped my feet in the green water and watched the sun surrender to orange just as Mum dropped out of my cousin's car at the hotel reception. She was stressed; soaked by the effort of being polite in a dark room with her sister. Mum lay on the chenille bedspread and stared at the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling while Dad returned to the phone, checking on her in between calls to important people in Canberra and Brisbane. Marcus and Tom sprawled over the floor watching a bad American movie about gridiron and girls in short skirts.

•

The funeral went on forever. I couldn't cry and Mum didn't either. None of us did. It's hard to cry when you are dressed like a stranger, in someone else's town and following the weird rituals of a Reverend while a fat lady in a housedress plays the synthesizer.  Even the locals were drought eyed. After the sunburnt boys laid the coffin in the hearse and it crawled off, locals shook our hands and hugged Aunt Jess. I stood on the concrete, the north wind spiking up my dress, and stared at my cousins. I told Mum her family were full on repressed and she looked down at me, turned away and I thought I saw something like Greek tears on her cheek.

•

After cups of tea and cut sandwiches, we were back in the hotel but Mum disappeared. When she came back she was blotched and steam faced. She'd been back to the river she said. It was gone: the red gums had fallen onto the clay pan ditch like the two century war was over; 'Desiccated,' she said. 'Bone dry and full of skeletons,' she said. Dad took her hand and they walked somewhere out in that town that was too hot, too dusty and too familiar for me.

It was the end of day. Nan was forever silent, powdered and dressed, ready for the worms. She lay waiting for us to go back home to the city so she could disappear into her dry land. I stood at the window and looked out at the flat land behind the town. It didn't look pickled like Mum said. Pickled was wet. This place was dry. Salt preserves. I wondered if the dirt would let Nan decompose. Maybe all that salt would keep her body intact and the worms had suffocated. It seemed funny but kind of sad at the same time. I took off my dress and braved a swim in the pool.

•

I was reading a magazine about television on my bed and mustn't have heard the start of the conversation. All I knew my mother was drinking gin in the middle of the room and yelling at my dad that he never knew her and would never know her and now no-one would know her. Her hands flew over the fluorescent air and she screeched at him.  He sat on the bed with open arms.

"Come on Marie. It's just grief talking."

"Why didn't we come back more often? Your parents are dead. Why didn't you tell me it would feel like this? What is wrong with you? Didn't you feel anything? You let me act like an ungrateful child and didn't push me to come back when all I needed was support to make that first move. And she was right. Now all I have is my own ungrateful children and its hell."

I started. That was me.

"Stop being so melodramatic Mum."

Dad frowned and put his hand up to stop me but she was annoying and weak and pathetic so I persisted.

"I missed two parties to be with your boring family. You don't even like them yourself. You're the ungrateful one." I didn't want to hurt her but I really wanted to hurt her.

"See. Hear that." Mum pointed her glass at me. Alcohol spilt onto the chenille bedspread and dripped down onto the bland carpet. "She laughed at me when I was crying at Mum's funeral. The look on her face when one of Jess's kids talked to her was so rude and awful. She tells Mrs. Collins that her shop stinks of ratshit and this town is a backward place that kills rivers." Her throat must have been full of snot. Her words curdled as they came out. "What do you know Caitlin? You just thrive on being a bitch. You know nothing about this place."

I didn't like knowing nothing about this place and a sneer must have crossed my face. She was using my words, my language. She had forgotten her own.

She took a big step towards my bed.

"I can't be around you anymore. Get out Caitlin. Get your own room."

I pulled back. Then moved forwards to say something better than her. He had to stop us.

"That's enough both of you. Listen Marie. It's late and you're tired and delirious. Have a shower."

She didn't wash. She collapsed onto the floor and curled into a ball. The gin tipped out of her glass and ran down her bare legs. I stared at her. She was tiny but her attempt to leave us took over the whole room.

•

When the boys came up from the games room she was in the bed at the edge of the room sleeping. Dad stood over me.

"Caitlin."

"Yeah."

"Back off Marie for a few days please. She just lost her mother."

"Seems I lost mine too."

"What kind of drivel is that? You've been a pain ever since you got in the car. Sometimes your selfishness astounds me."

"I'm just honest."

"Where on earth did you come from? Snap out of it. Your mother needs us and you just pick and pick at her until she breaks."

•

I didn't know where I came from. I was nearly seventeen.

•

Going home, we slowly drove down the main street of the town. Mum pointed to the spot near the theatre where her grandfather used to sit and smoke on the sidewalk, his hat cocked against the sun as he exchanged news with other men. Looking through the tinted windows it was hard to imagine the plastic shopping strip, filled with American take-aways and hardware stores, was once a noisy village with horses and conversation. In our local Plaza in the city the old Italian men sat for hours. I always imagined they talked of far off lands and times gone by. Maybe my forebears also passed the day with stories of weather and war with a foreign nasal tongue.

"Grand-dad Brown used to spend hours walking up and down. He knew everyone and everyone loved him. He was warm and open just like Mum," Mum's voice dribbled, got wet and a wail flooded the car. Dad put his arm over her shoulders, not lifting his eyes from the road. "It's alright," he muttered.

"No it's not. Mum never wanted me to leave but I thought I was too big for this place. Mum used to ring me every week after I left to tell me I wasn't too small for Melbourne. I have missed her for so long and now its too late," Mum said, wiping her eyes with her fist and staring away from us, out to where more red gums would be slain by the salt and fall hollow onto the cemetery bed.

Tears found me and I don't know how. Even though I never knew it, I wanted the river back.

As we picked up speed and blended into the highway, I knew my grandmother wouldn't haunt me. Preserved or decayed didn't matter. She was too relieved to be resting to bother anyone, but I wished she would. The last take-away shop dripped from view in the back window, and we escaped down the artery to home. Squeezed between my bored brothers, I looked at my parents in the front seat. One looked straight ahead at the road and tapped his fingers against the wheel in time to music. The other rested her head to the side staring out the window at the flipping view. I think we all wanted to sleep forever.

When I awoke Melbourne boiled in the distance. A soup of smog and fumes. I sat up and watched it steam. This was where the world was round - where people were on the run from the flat salinated centre. I opened the window to welcome smog flinging itself up the highway. The heat had followed us home and from behind I watched microscopic sweat drops on the back of Mum's neck dry into her old skin with the dirty wind. Would they preserve or decay her? Either way they vanished too fast for me, and this time the thought wasn't funny.

"Could you shut your window please Caitlin? I can't stand the smell," my mother groaned from the front seat.

I went to say no. I went to say that if she loved Melbourne so much why was she being so fussy about the ugly bits but it was too late to hurt her. I was nearly seventeen. Even before Dad frowned at me in the rear-view mirror I wound the window up. Mum turned on the air conditioner and her head slumped against the seat like sleep was all she wanted. From the back seat her skin looked crackled, her hair sun-fucked, and her old freckles eternal. Inside me something went quiet and I could have cried but my brothers starting wailing about being thirsty.