“Well, do you have any wise words for her?” she asks.
“No. No, with books I was self-taught. Self-taught.” He thinks for a moment. “Like a tortoise. Like a taught-oise.”
We laugh and my hands, clasping a cold cup of tea, shake.
It’s the day I’ll want to remember best—when he could still climb the stairs on his own—Jane’s there and we eat ginger kisses on the balcony. It’s finally warm after a week of summer rain and wind and someone has placed a potted plant on the edge of the railing. I wish I’d brought my camera with me. I want photos of his hands in the light and the shadows, his laugh, his bald head. I worry sometimes that all I’ll remember is that white bandage growing larger.
Jane plays with a leaf that has fallen onto the table we sit around. She folds it in half and cuts circles in it with her long red fingernails. When she lays it out flat it looks like a face. Grandma asks us if there’s anything we’d like to tell him. I open my mouth and then shut it again. The things I could say sit like bubbles in my lungs. Jane smiles and says, “We love you.” Which is enough and Grandma starts packing up the crumby plates and lipsticked water glasses. He doesn’t speak. Jane rips up the leaf face.
When the wind picks up again, I walk with him to his room and he pauses by the bookshelf I used to steal from as an angst-ridden pre-teen. He chatters about nothing for a while—authors I’ll forget the names of and things I should one day look up. Then he smiles and plucks out two books by Virginia Woolf—I’d told him I’m studying her this year at the university he pays for me to attend. They are small, yellow-paged paperbacks with those peeling plastic coverings that are so familiar to me as the granddaughter of an ex-librarian; withdrawn books made up most of my childhood shelves. At home, I try to picture him reading in his armchair in the upstairs office. He’d be wearing his brown slippers and grey zippered cardigan, frowning over the words the way I do too.
A couple days later my phone rings in my pocket while I’m washing a week's worth of dishes. The caller ID reads Janeeee! I wipe my hands on the back of my jeans and answer it.
“Hiya, what’s up?”
“Hey. Ah,” she hesitates, “they need to move him to the hospice today. It’s too hard on Gran right now and it’s getting impossible to keep his pain under control so, yeah.”
“Right. Well, makes sense. Do they need any help or...?”
“Not really. I thought I’d visit tomorrow.”
“I’ll come with you. Text me a time later?”
“Of course. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She hangs up and I sit down on our sticky lino floor. The bubbles from before feel like they’re popping. I run my hands along my unshaven legs and stand up. The dishes still need to be washed.
That night my flatmate Josie leaves to go on holiday for a week with her family.
“I’m fine. Really!” I say to a raised eyebrow. “Go have fun.”
“OK... I’m only a call away though!”
My smile seems to reassure her and she calls out “love you!” as her suitcase bumps its way down the steps and our front door bangs shut.
When I end up calling her crying a few days later I jokingly say I learned how to lie from him. But the truth is I didn’t know he lied till people started telling stories in the hospice lounge one afternoon. In my journal, I write that he used to give good hugs but his hugs have always reminded me that humans are made of bones. Even before he got sick and whispered to me, “I could’ve wept when I looked in the mirror today! It’s awful, isn’t it?” Even before I didn’t know what to say back.
The day Josie comes home a man jumps from the top of our building. As she steps from her taxi she sees policemen hosing down the road so we go to a rooftop bar with Max, her boyfriend. I get drunk to stop feeling like I’m falling too. Laughing, I say these last few months have felt, more than anything, “like being slapped in the face repeatedly with slimy fish!”
They take me home and tuck me into bed with a glass of water and marmite toast with the crusts cut off, shutting the door behind them. The light that seeps through the cracks between the door frame and door reminds me of going to bed as a little kid in summer. My parents sitting on the deck laughing and drinking wine. I listen to Josie and Max talk about me. I know she’s worried and I know he doesn’t care and just wants to have sex and for this day to be over. I eat my toast while lying on my back, the plate balanced on my chest so it touches my chin lightly. While I trace my name into the crumbs the front door slams and a few minutes later Josie plops herself onto my bed with our cat. She’s a little tabby we call Moni because we’d first bonded over our realisation that we both love to hate Monica from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I drink my water with Moni curled into a soft ball on my lap and Josie braids my hair.
“All OK?” I ask.
“Totally.” says Josie.
After a while it becomes habit for me and Jane to study up at the hospice. We sit and read and take notes while Grandma sleeps in the vinyl chair next to his bed. Sometimes a nurse will come along and lock our door which means someone has died. I guess the idea is so that while they’re being wheeled out the family won’t be confronted by strangers trying to make tea or a sandwich. You can hear them though and it’s the one thing that still feels utterly surreal.
Grandma fusses with the room every time it happens. Tidying books and cards and rearranging the bouquet of roses she keeps bringing him even though now he only sleeps. When they unlock the doors, I make coffee for Jane and tea for me and Gran and go back to my history textbook. It reminds me of Sunday mornings at their house when Jane was little and I’d go for sleepovers when it got too much for Mum. Standing on my tiptoes in the quiet of their tiny kitchen to make drinks for us. How flecks of cold water would fly up to land on my freckles after hitting the empty base of the kettle. Having to hold the milk bottle with two hands so that I’d only pour a splash and not a splosh. Followed by the dash across the damp lawn to the tattered red rose bush where I’d spend a full minute looking for an untainted bud. Pyjama pants pushed up round my thighs; knees pressed into the dirt and roots. Putting my eventual choice in an old cinnamon essence bottle on a tray with the three cups. It’s hard to not smile now at how stressful carrying that tray upstairs had been. Maybe because back then tea had felt like the pinnacle of adulthood. I couldn’t wait for the day that I wouldn’t let it turn cold. That blissful day I’d drink beyond one too hot sip and finally be as fabulous as Gran. The woman who knew when you’d sploshed and not splashed the milk and who would once a year would turn to me with one raised eyebrow, place the rose bud in her hair and half laugh as she said, “They’ve suggested bloody florals again for spring!”
Today when I walk in around midday she’s lying next to him in his bed. Talking while rubbing a thumb over and over the same spot on his arm. Sometimes I forget they’re in love. I forget that they would have had a first kiss and a first fight and a first heartbreak too. I forget that lying in the safety of arms that belong to the person you love isn’t a unique experience. It’s so fucking shit that someone dying is what makes us remember those things. So. Fucking. Shit.
The arrival of autumn has given me an excuse for busing home from uni late at night. Before the number 18 arrives, I tell myself I’ll use this time to read but after paying the $2.50 to the driver and finding a seat at the back I pull out my phone and aimlessly scroll through Instagram. While I’m looking at picture of two old friends before a night out (captioned with a tiny skull emoji) my phone rings.
“Mum?”
She cries down the phone so I say, “Okay.”
“Janie’s going to drive you up.”
“Ah, sure. I’m on the bus right now, I’ll be home in ten.”
“Oh OK. I thought you’d be at school still. Um. I’ll text her.”
“Cool.’
“I love you.”
I say it back and we hang up. I stare at my phone and the silly photo blinks back. This is the second time I’ve cried openly on public transport. The first time was about a failed music exam though and the tears were quiet. This second time I’m a spectacle, my sobs snotty and loud. Two school kids behind me giggle and the elderly man beside me looks horrified. I hide my face under my scarf and try to do the breathing exercises Jane told me helped her. They work enough for me to get off at the right stop and I run the rest of the way home, arriving on my street as Jane is parking the family car.
“Hey hun,” she says tentatively.
“Hi.” I lean across the handbrake and gear box to hug her. When we pull away we both have wet patches on our shoulders. She turns the car back on and starts to drive. She’d been listening to music and a song leaps back on at full volume.
“... be so depressive. Is there life after breakfast? Yes, there is, after breakfas-’
She turns it off.
“They want to play it at the memorial service. Or he wanted us to. I dunno. Sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
We drive in silence for a while. Past our old primary school and the park that we’d had class picnics at.
“It’s a very him song.” I say
Jane laughs, “Yeah. Yeah it really is.”
The night after the cremation, the air that drifts into the apartment smells of hot sand and gritty lunches on the beach; apples, sandwiches and dust. In the morning, I wake up a hollow kind of sad from dreams of pounding veins climbing down his temples. I sip at the tea I forgot to drink when it was warm. As the milky film that floats on the surface slips down my throat, I remember Jane told me once, at the hospice he woke up and, taking a gulp of his three-hour old cup, whispered, “it’s fucking cold.”
On another afternoon there, procrastinating from studying, Jane sat with me in the chapel. It was peaceful, brick next to stained glass depictions of Jesus slowly dying.
“Reminds me of going to midnight mass with Dad,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied.
But really, I’d been remembering a road trip we took the summer after his first post-divorce girlfriend moved to New York. We stopped at every small-town church and graveyard. Explored through the wildflowers and sat in silence in the sun. Midnight masses had come later. A different girlfriend.
“Should we light a candle?”
“Mm. Sure, why not?”
Except neither of our lighters would work and on the eleventh try Jane muttered, “Jesus Christ!”
And I said, “For God’s sake!”
And Jane whispered, “Shut the hell up!”
And all at once we were collapsing into each other. Laughing, crying, and laughing again. Gripping our candles so hard I could feel the wax starting the melt into my palm lines.
Perhaps because she can’t help but do the opposite of what we expect, Jane has become the one pulling me out of the house. We go to the art galleries and the gardens I used to drag her to when we were at high school. I laugh sometimes and so does she. It doesn’t feel wrong and I wonder if the books that told me it would knew what they were talking about. I stand in my kitchen and throw a plate against the wall and feel nothing. I slam doors and do countless inaccurate Buzzfeed quizzes. Max walks in on me one morning, sitting in the middle of the kitchen eating cake. I offer him a slice and he laughs and joins me on the floor.
The kettle refuses to boil. Old people I’ve never seen before keep asking me how study is going and I think my heart is dancing on my ribs and my stomach is kissing my brain. I wonder if this is how Jane felt when she lay on the ground of her old baby blue room, clenched her eyes shut and refused to move. They laughed then and called her a starfish but it was less funny when she said it’s more like there’s a starfish suctioned to your lungs. So, I walk out of Grandpa’s memorial service and Jane runs after me. It’s such a cliché but my legs don’t stop until I find myself in the cafe he took us to as kids. We used to have fluffies that tasted like heaven and the waitress would sneak us extra Jaffas. One of us could easily be that waitress now. I sit at our old table and Jane orders us tea so hot it numbs our tongues. We talk about living and I start to cry when Jane pauses and quietly says, “He would have said the whole thing was ‘bloody ridiculous’ anyway.”