Mum’s bawling comes in big, guffawing sobs. Dad’s solemn – you couldn’t tell what he’s thinking; it might be about a horse race he’s bet on. Steph, my older sister, is inscrutable, although she’s like that a lot now. Uncles and aunts and cousins stand with heads bowed, some sobbing, others sniffling.
This is what Aunt Mena’s life comes to. Her family will go home tonight, and things will be different. Her kids will never be able to go to her again. She’ll never show up at our functions with that big, toothy smile and that laugh that trilled through every room.
She’s gone, and all that’s left is that emptiness wherever she used to be.
And the mourning.
And this funeral as a last goodbye.
Which prompts the question to jump into my head: Who’ll mourn for me?
This isn’t what a fifteen-year-old should be asking himself. My problems should be girls, school and keeping my parents happy. Not this. It doesn’t even make sense. I have plenty of family. I have friends. Plenty of people would mourn me, wouldn’t they? I tell myself they would but I can’t shake the cold feeling that I might mean nothing, that I’m alone.
The priest is a stocky man with a big, square beard and little round spectacles. He finishes his benedictions, firing off rapid Greek – the same way he prattled on at the church service for an hour – that’s indecipherable. We make the sign of the cross, then file in procession past the open grave.
As we pass it, we pick up a chunk of dirt and throw it in. I watch my clump hit the rosewood coffin and, for an instant, I see Aunt Mena lying in there, arms folded across her chest, eyes closed and now forever still. I think about myself in there and about my friends and family doing this for me.
The food comes out then, carried from the backs of station wagons – trays of flake, calamari, plates of chicken and bowls of salad, set up on picnic tables under the swaying willows that dot the cemetery. Eskies full of beer and soft drinks come next. The mood changes from funereal to picnic. Everybody mingles to talk about the nothings in life, except for my sister and me. We drift under one of the willows, like we’re using the overhanging branches to shut ourselves away from everything.
Steph folds her arms across her chest. She’s twenty-two, and while she might seem typically Greek – with her big, dark eyes, high cheekbones and dark hair drawn back – she does her best to hide it, or to at least try to deflect it into something exotic, like Italian.
‘The only time we all get together nowadays are weddings and funerals,’ she says.
‘And birthdays,’ I say.
‘Some birthdays. That was the last time I saw Aunt Mena outside of the hospital – my twenty-first. She asked me when I was gonna get married.’
That’s the eternal question when you’re Greek. Life’s about getting married and making a family.
‘You never know when it’s your time,’ Steph says.
Aunt Mena had cancer – six months from diagnosis to her death. We saw her a couple of weeks ago in palliative care. She’d grown thin and the skin hung from her face. Although she was in pain, she’d come to accept she was dying. I don’t get that. How do you just accept your life’s over?
‘You missing anything at school today?’ Steph asks.
‘Supposed to talk to the counsellor,’ I say.
‘The counsellor?’
This comes from my twenty-six-year-old cousin Jim, who’s bloated over to us – bloated, not floated, because Jim’s always been big and stocky, although hard work has turned it into muscle that could melt back into fat the moment he stops taking care of himself. His fiancée, Nicola, in a spotted black and white dress, hangs off his arm like a pair of fuzzy dice, while his teenage sister, Anthea, loiters behind him. Jim is the son of my Aunt Toula, Mum’s younger sister. He’s the family poster boy. He graduated high school with top marks, went to university to study medicine and is now interning at St Margaret’s Hospital. Whenever Mum or Dad remind me, Steph, or both of us together, what the benchmarks in life are, Jim’s trotted out. Look at what Jim’s doing. But that’s being Greek. You’re always compared to somebody.
Well, somebody good, at least.
‘You got problems?’ Jim says, almost belligerently – not really at me, I think, but at the prospect that a counsellor should know your problems. More typical Greek. You never reveal problems to outsiders. You hide them so they don’t cause embarrassment.
‘It’s about career’s counselling,’ I tell Jim.
‘You’re in what now? Year 11?’
‘Year 10.’
Jim waves away Year 10 with a flick of his hand. Year 10’s nothing. He has this big head, like a carved Halloween pumpkin that sits under a mop of curly black hair. He gets it from his dad. They should be in the line of heads on Easter Island.
‘What’re you going to do when you finish school?’ he asks.
I shrug.
‘You don’t know?’
‘I’m in Year 10.’
‘Should have an idea.’
‘He writes stories,’ Steph says.
‘Stories? What stories?’
‘Just stories,’ I say.
‘What’re they about?’
I shrug once more. This will be my blanket defence.
‘You don’t know?’
‘Mostly, they’re about this kid–’
‘Kid? What kid?’
‘This teenager, Jean Razor.’
‘John Razor?’
‘Jean.’
‘It’s a girl?’
‘So, he’s French?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why’s he French?’
I think it’s because Star Trek: The Next Generation started on TV not too long ago. The captain of the ship is Jean-Luc Picard. It sounded exotic and cool. But I can’t explain that to Jim. Or that I like science fiction. He won’t get any of it.
‘The name sounded good,’ I say.
‘And what’s he do?’
‘He can travel through dimensions the–’
‘Dimensions.’ Jim waves it all away, annoyed, the way he might wave away a fly that keeps flying around in his face. ‘Writing. Where’s that going to get you?’
‘He’s fifteen,’ Steph says. ‘Not everybody has it worked out so young.’
‘I knew when I was fourteen.’
‘Not everybody’s as cluey as you, Jim.’
Jim tries to puzzle out if that’s an insult or not – it is; Steph’s telling him how full of himself he is. Steph doesn’t care about this shit. Posturing, she calls it. And I can see that – a way to build yourself up through comparing. But Jim doesn’t see it. He might be book-smart, but I don’t think he’s people-smart. He’ll have terrible bedside manner. But he nods, deciding she’s recognising how precocious he was.
‘How’s Furniture Warehouse going?’ Nicola says. She flutters her long, curled eyelashes. There’s a greasiness about her. I bet she’s slimy to kiss, although kissing Jim would be like kissing a black hole. Even the way she asks the question is greasy, like it’s meant to slide under Steph’s defences.
‘It’s a job,’ Steph says.
‘A job,’ Jim scoffs – Steph’s story is legendary around our family circles. ‘You got that fellowship prize in high school, that…what was it called?’
‘The Boland Fellowship.’
‘You graduated with better marks than anybody–’
Anybody includes Jim. But he’s not going to point that out.
‘–and then after two-and-a-half years at university, you dropped out,’ Jim finishes. If he were a lawyer, he’d be preaching the defendant’s guilt to the jury. ‘And for what?’
‘It wasn’t for me.’
‘Bet your parents went nuts,’ Nicola says.
‘They were okay,’ Steph says.
They weren’t. Everybody knows they weren’t. Nicola’s just point-scoring. Mum and Dad blew up. You’d have thought Steph had held up a bank. She should’ve. She would’ve gotten off easier. And a public defender in the process.
‘I can’t wait to get to university,’ Anthea says.
Anthea’s fortunate enough to miss the hereditary big head; she wears too much make-up and is always finding ways to be sultry – even now, in boots, tight black pants and sweater, and the sort of jacket that only buttons at the bottom and shows off that she’s disproportionately bigboobed. She might’ve been dressing for a club, rather than to bury her aunt.
‘I was thinking of studying law,’ she says.
She won’t. She’s an idiot.
Jim grins, trying to inspire a familiarity between us that we’ve never had. ‘You need to think about the future,’ he tells me. He slides an arm around Nicola’s waist and pulls her close. ‘We should get going. But we’ll see you at our wedding in December, huh?’
‘Can’t wait,’ Steph says, with an eagerness you’d use for dental appointments.
Jim points at me as he leads Nicola and Anthea away. ‘And I’m going to ask you again then – trust me!’
I force a smile and watch them pack into Jim’s shiny new Ford.