CHAPTER 28
Zoe typed her sister’s name into her phone and watched as the map slowly updated.
‘She’s still moping around the main street, more than likely thinking about how romantic and crestfallen she looks.’
Phinn had Zoe’s dark satin and polka-dotted skirt spread out in front of him while he frowned and studied the iron. He looked up at his older sister.
‘You can tell that from your phone?’
‘I’ve told you we should share locations. Claudia is the only one who will do it with me. I have Dad and Mum’s too and about eight of my friends.’
‘I’m not sharing my location with you. It’s incredibly psycho. Why do you need your sister’s location?’
‘So when she storms off in a huff on the day before her wedding you and I don’t have to waste time looking for her.’ Zoe pinched her two fingers together and zoomed in. ‘I can tell you the exact shop she is in. It’s Shabby Chic. I bet you that she is buying underwear. Crying and buying underwear. I would put a cheeky tenner on it.’
Phinn picked the skirt up by the waist and extended his arms in front of him while shaking it out. He examined it again and inspected the temperature gauge on the iron before pressing it cautiously on the material of the skirt.
‘This is an absolute bastard to iron.’
Zoe leaned back on the wall, using it to prop herself up as she stretched her legs out in front of her.
‘Thank you, Phinny, I appreciate it. I just can’t do it myself – you know ironing is not in my nature.’
The pair fell back into the silence they had learned more than twenty-seven years ago when Phinn first began to talk. It was a silence like an embrace, familiar and comforting and brimming with habit. They knew they were both thinking about their younger sister. Ensconced in their old battle lines, they had stuck with each other when Claudia had slammed the front door, ensuring everyone inside knew she was ignoring them. They were concerned for her from a distance, the way any family member should be. Claudia didn’t need their comforting words; she needed to sulk it out. While years ago they might have stealthily taken turns keeping an eye on her from behind street signs and trees, now they had a smartphone and moment of weakness when Claudia shared her location and then promptly forgot about it.
When the kids were nervous they returned to the same conversation topics: recounting blow-by-blow physical brawls from their proper childhood years (the teen brawls were still too emotionally fraught for exploration); how to divide $1 million between them (inevitably someone was cut out of a will); and death. Death was their absolute favourite: who had died, how they had died and the scenarios in which they themselves would die.
The kids loved any hypothetical life-altering situation – pregnancy, long-lost half-siblings, loss of limb, financial windfall; but the best one, the biggest treat, the one they returned to most often, and had done since they were all in primary school at the same time so could meet at lunchtime for earnest discussions, was death.
‘What would you do if Claudia was diagnosed with cancer next year?’ Zoe asked, glancing up from watching her sister move, as a blue dot, north from Shabby Chic.
Phinn warmed to the topic immediately. ‘Well, you earn the most money in whatever it is you do, so you would have to keep working to send us money. You’d be a useless-as-tits nurse as well. So I would take personal leave, unlimited, maybe even sublet the apartment.’
‘I could maybe negotiate nine-day fortnights, or working from home every second week, and then every second weekend I could come down on the Friday until the Sunday while she was resting from the chemo.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and it would obviously be best for Claudia to come home. She could come back here and sit up in Mum’s house. She would be too weak to shuttle between both so Dad would have to come here to see her. And she would get her treatment – you could pay for any extra drugs she needed – and I would stay with her so Mary didn’t drive her insane—’
Zoe interrupted, ‘Mary wouldn’t matter. Claudia would be dying, civility would be dead. No need to be civil, civility is absolutely the worst hangover from the twentieth century. Civility would be dead; we could just sit around and watch Claudia be rude to Mary all day every day.’
‘Right! Mary would be irrelevant. She fades away, not even a footnote in this story. I bet she would try to throw herself over Claudia, really work up some emotional capital. There’d always be one of us with Claudia, though. We’d do shifts, make sure she wasn’t by herself.’
Zoe skipped ahead to the most wrenching part, the best part. ‘And the funeral. It would be unbearable, little Claudie’s funeral. I almost would not want to go.’
Phinn picked the skirt up and ruffled it around the ironing board to expose the unironed back, looking at it mournfully.
‘It would be so hard. Almost unbearable, but we would have to go.’
‘For Mum and Dad,’ Zoe agreed.
‘We might even have to do a reading,’ Phinn continued. ‘I would want to wear black. A black shirt, a black tie – silk – with my black suit, maybe about five days’ worth of facial growth.’
‘I would wear pink, something really joyful, to celebrate our Clauds. I would read something eloquent about how nothing would be the same again. Something like W. H. Auden but not as well known.’
Phinn nodded. ‘It is a great poem, but every man and his dog has it read at their funeral. We’d be shattered. What music would she want?’
Zoe cocked her head. ‘Well, she liked tools of manipulation, so at the beginning something really over the top, something that just has the entire congregation sobbing. “Into My Arms” is a good one. “Into My Arms”, or maybe, maybe “Little Dreamer”.’
‘“Little Dreamer”?’
‘I’ve been listening to it every night, by Future Islands; it’s very haunting; it goes “I found you dreaming, I’m dreaming of you always”.’ Zoe began humming. ‘“And as we say goodnight, I hold you close and tight, No more raging suns, only waning ones, Like the waxing scar where my lonely heart, Once bloomed before I met you”.’
Phinn winced. ‘Ooft, that’s good. Please stop destroying it by trying to sing.’
Their intimate silence returned as they both thought about their lives minus Claudia. Poor, weak Claudia. A wisp in the wind after her brave endurance of cancer – not a battle, never a battle. One just endures. And then she would be gone and they would be three. Inconceivable.
One of the most addictive bits of hypothetical deaths was how much you could emotionally wring yourself out, get to places barely conceived of in your soul, be enveloped in sadness. Almost convince yourself the death had happened and get to stand thrillingly on the edge of the abyss of grief before returning safely to the land of the living and healthy.
What they both refused to factor into this comforting and twisted game of yore was that it would not be them at the centre of the funeral. It would not matter if they wore black or pink, really. They wouldn’t be at the forefront as they once would’ve been. They wouldn’t get to pick the music. They wouldn’t even get a couple of thousand dollars from Claudia’s superannuation.
Phinn and Zoe both looked at each other sadly.
It would be Dylan making the decisions.
Phinn pulled out the skirt and clipped it to a hanger before handing it to Zoe.
‘If you die I am leaving the family. Sorry Mum, you’re on your own; you have to deal with the girls and Dad for the rest of your life.’