Tuesday 10 December 1974
Charlie
A funeral without a body seems supremely weird to me, but Donna says the ceremony will be a farewell, not a funeral. I don’t know how Dad will cope with being around other people. He barely has the energy to shower, and stands in the hallway in his pyjamas, confused about why he’s there.
‘She’s with me in the morning,’ he tells me. ‘When I wake up, I wait before I open my eyes because Skye is here. I smell her rosewater spray, see her moving around the room, casting a shadow on my lids. I feel her sitting on the bed.’
He moves from reverie to lists of chores, telling me straight after this that I need to call Ed. ‘Tell him not to drop the other chickens over after New Year like we’d said. I don’t want them now.’ I say I’m sure Ed will understand.
But Donna is adamant there will be a send-off here, so early Tuesday morning, two weeks before Christmas, thirty odd people gather in Dad’s backyard to farewell Skye.
I do mean thirty odd people, too. There are craggy farmers dressed in their best who’d sought Skye’s advice on painful corns and cuts, teary pregnant women sad she won’t be in the room on their big day, a quiet and spotty teenage boy. There are tanned men in polyester paisley shirts and wide ties, women in kaftans, and kids in all kinds of garb, from ironed shirts to tutus. It’s a motley crew. Donna and her friends are wearing nondescript dresses of apricot, turquoise and beige, with hats that seem, to my untrained eye, relics from the Second World War. Maybe the first one.
‘You look nice, dear.’ Donna squints in the bright sunshine, adjusts my collar. I’ve borrowed a short-sleeved mustard-brown shirt from Dad and combed my hair. ‘Not a cloud, is there? It’s weather for a wedding.’
And then she heads into the kitchen, where I know Abby will be, doing whatever it is that needs to be done. I’m sure my sister is feeling as churned up as I am today but we don’t discuss it.
‘Donna,’ Dad says, walking towards the house. She stands a few feet away from me now, accepting a plate of lamingtons from a recently arrived mourner. ‘I can’t. You’ll have to do it.’
She hands me the plate, takes my father’s hands and holds them in her own. ‘No one expects you to have prepared a speech. Say what’s in your heart.’
He shakes his head.
‘You listen to me, John. If you stay silent today you’ll regret it forever more. You don’t need to use fancy words or important quotes. You need to say goodbye.’
She leads him by the crook of his arm to a clearing under a gum tree, where she’s set up an altar of sorts: a fold-out picnic table covered by a white cloth and topped with a vase of lilies, a silver pen and an open book in which some guests have written their memories of Skye.
‘Excuse me.’ Donna claps her hands. ‘If I could have your attention. Before we plant the rosebush – thank you, Ned Darmody – John will offer a few words. If anyone would like to speak after him, come to the front.’
‘Is he all right?’ Abby whispers. She’s standing next to me now.
‘How could he be?’ I say.
‘Why are you –?’ She points at the lamingtons, frowns as she takes them from me and puts them on the food table. A currawong trills in the branches above us. Leaves crunch under Dad’s leather soles as he rocks from one foot to the other. A child burps and the people nearby laugh. Dad clears his throat. Donna stands by his side, her wrists folded across the pleats in her skirt.
‘Off you go,’ she whispers.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Dad says. He straightens his hat, and the crowd relaxes its stiff stance once he speaks. ‘I don’t know all of you, but I know you’re here because you cared about Skye. And I’m sure she cared about every one of you.’ He stops. ‘Skye loved working at the chemist and helping people. She loved bringing babies into the world. She was, you’d all know, about to have a baby of her own, our baby.’ He bends over as though he’s about to pick something up off the ground, then stays like that. He lets out a long awful howl.
Donna reaches down for his arm as Abby pushes through the crowd and takes Dad’s other side. I follow them as they right Dad and guide him into the house.
‘Stay with him,’ Donna says to me when we reach his bedroom.
‘I couldn’t do it.’ He drops facedown onto his bed and sobs.
‘It’s okay, Dad,’ Abby says. She is crying, too. I stand with my back to both of them, resting my forehead on the closed bedroom door.
At eight o’clock the next morning, once Dad has done the rounds of his house and property, and made phone calls to check that his animals and vegetable patch (and rosebush) will be properly cared for in his absence, I carry our gear out to the car. Abby says it’ll be recuperative for Dad to be in Brisbane, with the kids, out of this house. The truth is, she needs to be home, preparing for Christmas, and far away from where we abandoned Skye.
Maybe having Mark around will help Abby get herself together – she’s more terrible at dealing with Dad’s pain than I would’ve expected. I’ve told her to stop patronising him, to stop talking like she’s a nurse in a retirement home. But she can’t hit the right note, and I can see it’s irritating both of them. She flips between pity, compassion and disinterest, though I know her weirdness is coming partly from the sheer effort of keeping our secret locked behind her lips.
Partly.
She’s bruised. It’s understandable Dad wouldn’t clock how the news of his engagement has affected Abby. But marriage is a big deal to my sister. And Dad not only committed to a woman who’s not our mother, he also didn’t talk to his family about it. I don’t care too much if I ever get married, and I figure after fifteen years Dad must be keen for some female company. Abby doesn’t see it that way.
‘He’s known her for two years,’ she’d whispered to me when we were in the kitchen at night after dinner, when Dad was in the bathroom.
‘Yeah, but they probably weren’t an item that whole time. Maybe he was waiting to see where it would go.’
‘She lived here.’
I gave her that. Skye is everywhere in this house. There’s no way Dad put dried flowers in the vase on the dining table, or hung the bamboo wind chime that sounds when the breeze blows through the laundry window. Skye’s name is on the watercolour of a sunrise that hangs above Dad’s bedroom chest of drawers. And the wooden slats in a pile next to his wardrobe – a cot waiting to be assembled. Skye’s past and future are right in front of us. She probably chose the plates Abby was washing, the bowl I was drying.
‘He proposed to her the night of – It’s not like he’d kept that a secret, Abby. He’d wanted us to meet her. Cut him a bit of slack.’
She’d frowned in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’ Then she lifted one wet hand up and gestured to the stove. ‘Have you not noticed all the things I’m doing?’
Like housework was the point. While my sister knows what it is to grieve, she’s in denial about the extent of Dad’s suffering, seems annoyed at him, somehow convinced this loss isn’t as serious as it was with Mum. As if there’s a scale of grief. As if time spent is related to pain felt. She wants to tell herself he’s mourning for a slip of smoke or a silhouette. Which we can both see is far from the truth.
I drop the last box into the boot of Abby’s car.
‘Be careful, there are breakables in there.’
‘I know, Abby. You know how I know? Because you’ve told me twice already.’ But I can’t get too cocky. I’d forgotten to call Ed, who only learned from Dad a few minutes ago that his poultry are no longer wanted. So now there’s a whole chicken thing for me to hear about on the drive.
‘When will you two grow up?’ Dad says before walking back inside, but there’s nothing left in there for him to check on or do. It’s all done – generator off, appliances unplugged, beds made. After Donna and Abby’s competitive cleaning yesterday afternoon, the house is in better order than before the funeral crowd arrived.
As I carry Dad’s suitcase to the car I offer a small salute to Lenny, the brush turkey I’ve been keeping an eye on. He’s strutting backwards across the driveway, using his long claws to flick bush litter behind him towards his huge nesting mound. His neck wattle wobbles as he increases his efforts. He’s the hardest worker I’ve ever seen. Yesterday, I tried to help him by raking a few leaves in the direction of his nest, but he scattered them across the earth in an outraged frenzy. Turkeys aren’t smart birds, but I respect Lenny’s insistence on doing things his own way.
Dad walks out of the house carrying a book that he hands to me, a copy of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. ‘Kids’ books.’ He snorts.
‘Narnia is for kids,’ I say in my defence.
‘Read it,’ he says, then takes the front seat.
As we pull away, I watch Lenny through the back window, running after another turkey. Dude owns the place.
Once we’re on the road to Brisbane, Dad says he wants to see where Skye’s car ran off the road. ‘Keep an eye out for the police ropes. They’ve cordoned off the area.’
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Abby asks.
‘Yeah, Dad, probably not.’ If it was up to me, Abby would drop the accelerator to the floor on that stretch of road. ‘I think we should head straight to Abby’s place.’
‘You’ll pull over when we see the ropes.’
When we arrive at the site of the accident, Abby stops as instructed. Dad climbs out and stands on the edge of the road, staring down into the ditch. I walk over and stand beside my father, feeling a rush of nausea and fear.
There are ragged wounds in the bark of the tree where the metal cut into the wood, and flecks of glass near the trunk, but the scrub is already closing in, obscuring the skid that led from the road to the tree. If not for the ropes and scarred tree I wouldn’t know this was the place. I wonder if the animals who live nearby remember that night? Do bandicoots and kangaroos stay clear, or is every day a fresh start for them?
I scan the surrounding bushland. There’s nowhere Skye could’ve pointed the car that would’ve left her unharmed. Had she hit a smaller tree or come towards this one at a different angle, she might’ve walked away with a head injury. Maybe.
I watch my father as he looks from the tree to the road and back again, pushes his hat a bit higher off his forehead. I pray he doesn’t go down there, into the ditch, down where Abby sat in the mud beside Skye, where the baby tumbled and died. I owe Dad this moment, but I can’t wait to get away from here.
‘She was a safe driver,’ he says. ‘Car was in good nick. Road’s not wide but she was on a straight. It hadn’t started raining if her window was down, so the road wouldn’t have been slippery. And she was used to watching for kangaroos.’ He frowns. ‘I don’t understand what went wrong.’
I shove my hands deep into my pockets. ‘Guess we’ll never know.’