Later I found her lying flat on her back on the bare floorboards of the hallway that bisected the house straight down the middle, or had done before all of the additions and modifications had changed things around. At first I thought she had collapsed there.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I couldn’t take any more of that incestuous gossip,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed how they never ask any questions about us? It’s like nothing exists beyond the boundary fence.’
I sat down beside her on the cool boards.
‘Ril used to lie here on summer afternoons,’ she said, ‘to catch whatever breeze there was. She wouldn’t speak, only to tell the nanny to keep us away.’
I was reminded of my father’s sulks, sometimes lasting two or three days, when he wouldn’t say a word to anyone. I knew the fear this kind of silence can induce. You are convinced that it is your fault, that your very existence is a provocation. At least that was the case with Dad. He never hid the fact that he resented family life and found the demands of fatherhood intolerable. I gathered Ril had been the same, saddled with four children before she was fully grown herself, appalled at the sacrifice of her youth, and of any kind of autonomy, financial or emotional. No wonder my mother harboured so much grief. She must have imbibed it from birth, sucked it in with the very air. And here she was, back at the source, filling herself up with it again, as she lay sprawled on the floor in the spot where her mother had sulked and gone silent on all those blistering afternoons.
‘Time to go,’ she said, hauling herself up to her feet. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
Peter and Jan could barely disguise their relief as we readied to leave. They herded us to the gate and beamed as we piled into the car.
‘Give my love to Ranald,’ they said, feigning politeness. I had the impression they had private reservations about Ranald as well as about my mother, regarding them both as disreputable, if for different reasons.
‘She’ll be back inside in a minute,’ said Mum, ‘mopping the kitchen floor to get rid of all our crumbs.’
As we came to the dry creek she asked Jenny to pull over and stop the car.
‘This is where the old dump was,’ she said.
I followed her around as she poked in the rubbish with a stick. It was slim pickings, but she unearthed a few old medicine bottles made of coloured glass and a couple of blue and white fragments of china encrusted in dirt.
‘There were Chinese market gardeners here when I was small,’ she told me, ‘and one or two Chinese cooks.’
More ghosts, I thought, more apparitions floating into the picture, then vanishing again. This time they had left a faint trail, a few shards of a rice bowl, a piece of a picture painted on a plate, depicting a tiny boat on a lake and part of a bridge.
Back in the car, she repeated the oft-told story of the Chinese cook my grandmother had sacked just after she first moved to Beaconsfield as a new bride.
‘The cook had been working here for years,’ she said, ‘with all the men, when the house was just a shed and the kitchen was a lean-to on the side. She caught him dropping cigarette ash into the stew and told him he could pack his things and go.’
‘No me go, Missy,’ Jenny intervened, delivering the familiar punch line. ‘You go.’
They both laughed at the thought of their eighteen-year-old mother trying to exert her non-existent authority over the staff, although I sensed an underlying sadness to this story, too. Jenny knew what it was like to be the sole woman in a household of men. No matter how kind they were—and my grandfather was by all accounts very kind—it must have been unspeakably lonely for my grandmother, and there must have been times when she was afraid. And what about the cook, lost out here, so far from anywhere he might have called home, his fate in the hands of a teenage girl.
We stopped again, just before the boundary gate of Beaconsfield, so that my mother could get out and fill one of her medicine bottles with soil. I watched her walk a few yards to where the dirt was fine and sandy. She went down on her haunches and scooped up a handful or two until she had enough.
Back in the car, she stuffed a tissue into the neck of the bottle to stop the dirt escaping. ‘A piece of home,’ she said.
Mum kept her bottle of Beaconsfield dust for many years and through many moves, until it was finally tossed out or lost, then forgotten along with everything else she had ever held dear. I don’t know if she had any concept of home by the time she died. She talked obsessively about going there, begging me to take her home every time I saw her. But I wasn’t sure where she meant. She had made so many homes by then, more than twenty. Some she had loved and some she hadn’t. She certainly didn’t mean the nursing home where she lived out her days.
‘This is your home now,’ I’d tell her, trying to pacify her.
‘Liar.’
I wasn’t with Mum when she died. Shin and I were living in Japan temporarily, trying to figure out a way for him to establish a base back in his home country. Before I left Brisbane, Sarah and I met up with a funeral director. We planned to arrange for Mum’s funeral in advance, given that she was so frail. We felt a simple cremation was best, with a memorial service to be held later, at a time that suited the whole family. We didn’t want anything religious because Mum had long ago given up on the church. Sarah suggested a party; Mum had always so loved a party.
‘If we do it this way,’ my sister said, ‘you won’t have to rush home if she dies. What would be the point? You’ve been grieving for her all these years anyway.’
I was grateful to her for saying it, and for her sisterly concern.
What we didn’t do was discuss our thoughts with Eliot. I can’t say exactly why communications with our brother were so poor. The simplest answer is that we all lived separate lives in different cities—me in Brisbane, Sarah in Newcastle, and Eliot in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The more complex explanation is that the fractured way we grew up had left us leery of each other. This was especially true after our parents’ marriage started to fray. My sister and I could at least have a conversation, swap news on the phone about our kids, comfort each other about our mother’s devastating decline, but my brother was much harder to talk to. I called him perhaps twice a year to update him on Mum’s health. Apart from that, we never spoke.
According to Sarah, as Mum was dying, Eliot was the one she wanted to see, only Eliot. He came to sit with her, keeping a vigil at her bedside, holding her hand.
‘He was very good,’ my sister said, ‘and very helpful when we had to clean up her room, get rid of all her stuff. But then he blew up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he thought it was selfish not to have a proper funeral. He thought we were just thinking about ourselves.’
‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe we were.’
For whatever reason, Eliot went ahead and arranged a funeral service in the chapel of the Catholic nursing home where Mum had spent the last miserable years of her life. Sarah didn’t go.
‘I never wanted to set foot in that place again,’ she said.
Given our lack of practice, it isn’t surprising that my brother and sister and I failed so miserably to bury our mother’s ashes properly. Up to this point I, for one, had never experienced the death of someone close to me. And we were, all three of us, without any religious belief, all of us clueless about standard rituals and rites. With no guidelines, Sarah and I were happy to improvise, but this did not suit Eliot, and he decided to act without us. Even to this day I wish he could have waited. At the same time, I understand why he didn’t. If Sarah and I were acting selfishly, then so was he. We all were. We didn’t know what else to do.