Last Day in the Dynamite Factory (2 page)

Faces gaze up at him expectantly. He clears his throat.

‘Good … ah … morning. Ben and I – our – our family would …'

Sweat springs beneath his shirt. He stands before the gathering, mute. The words have fled and will not return for at least five minutes – perhaps not even for five hours – depending on how well he can distract himself. Here on the podium he might be on hold for …?

A man extracts himself from the crowd and hurries up the aisle. Half his height and – Chris reckons – twice the man, ‘Judge' Baillieu, his best friend and business partner, nudges Chris aside and begins to speak. He sparkles with dark intensity, filling the chapel with the deep and genuine conviction that the world has lost one of its best. Chris wilts with relief. Everyone wilts with relief. Some shed tears, not only because of Judge's oral artistry but because what he says is true.

After the ceremony, Jo's frail carapace delivered to its fate, people gather outside and loiter in the breezeway, clumping like sheep, running fingers beneath collars and fanning faces with Jo's printed funeral service.

‘Hot for June, eh?'

From his shore of voiceless grief, Chris watches them mill, recognising their uncertainty about how soon they can decently get into their cars and go back to his house for funeral tea.

Diane comes to his side. ‘Are you all right? You haven't stuttered for such a long time.'

It's not a stutter, no woodpecker hammer at a consonant, but a total inability to speak. Sentences form sleekly inside his head but something goes haywire between his brain and his mouth and either nothing emerges at all, or it comes out garbled. The ‘condition' has been variously labelled Selective Mutism and Social Phobia but it's neither. It's a memory, a hand from the past that squeezes the air from his lungs just when he needs it most. For want of a better name, he and Diane have called it a stutter.

He nods to her question and swings his arms.

‘I'll drop you at the junction and you can walk from there.' Diane shepherds the family into Chris's old Rover and slips into the driver's seat. At the Ashgrove shopping centre she pulls over and lets him out.

He walks alone down the quiet, tree-lined streets, glasses misting, gut hollow. Fifteen minutes later when he reaches number 10 Appleby Street, his inclination is to continue on to the park and stay there until all the cars jamming his driveway and littering the street have gone. To be alone and remember.

But he doesn't. He couldn't. He is the one who holds the family together.

Besides, he could never do that to Ben again.

He stands outside their house, an old Queenslander, beautifully situated on a sloping double block he and Diane bought back in '74. A wreck of a place it was then, but as newlyweds and with Phoebe on the way it was all they could afford. Chris had not long returned from London where he'd spent two and a half years training with a firm of conservation architects.

Over the next three years he and Ben undertook extensive renovations: restumping, rewiring, opening up the three verandahs which had been enclosed during the 1940s, tiling and painting, and gradually revealing the house's original Edwardian charm.

There's an impressive staircase at the front which visitors stubbornly ignore in favour of the side stairs. At the top of these stairs is a landing, with one door leading left from it into the kitchen, another ahead into the toilet. Diane's nemesis, that toilet: an embarrassing 1950s eyesore that blocks the view and the breezes which would otherwise be enjoyed by the kitchen. Chris promised to demolish it as soon as they installed a second toilet inside but with the arrival of Phoebe, and Archie a few years later, work on the second toilet stalled. Twenty-four years later it's still stalled and a rare but persistent point of contention between them. The existing bathroom is too small to accommodate a toilet. They've already hijacked one bedroom for the ensuite and Chris's den. The next encroachment would have to be on the living room or another bedroom and does she want to finish up with a two-bedroom house? No, she doesn't, but he's the architect, for Pete's sake. Surely he can come up with something. So far he hasn't, but neither has he tried. He likes the dunny on the landing. It's peaceful.

The kitchen is packed. Chris pushes though the crowd into the living room, filled with the hum of mourners trying to transform the somehow shameful ceremony of death into a celebration of life. It's crap. A funeral is goodbye. Someone he loves is dead. He doesn't want a party, he wants to tell everyone to go home so he can turn on the TV and blot out the new painful reality, or surrender to it and bawl. But he doesn't, because – as Diane says – nobody wants to see him inside-out.

A woman touches his sleeve. ‘I'm sorry for your loss, Chris. You must be a great comfort to Ben.'

Chris vaguely recognises her from Jo's coterie of goodwoman volunteers but can't remember her name, so he nods politely and takes refuge in his inability to speak.

‘I mean,' she says, ‘you being his only child.'

Ah, but he wasn't always their only child. Once, forty years ago, there was another: Liam, Jo's and Ben's own flesh-and-blood son. But Liam died just before his sixth birthday, his body borne away by a rogue wave at the seaside and never recovered. Chris was just eight years old when it happened, and now most people have forgotten about Liam, if they ever knew.

Chris summons a smile and moves on through the crush. If there were a hundred and sixty at the crematorium there must be at least half that many here. Jo's friends from Meals on Wheels and Red Cross, nurses from the Buddhist palliative care centre and, from the oncology department, a clutch of scarfed, pale-faced friends who, with Jo, had traded jokes for smiles, nods of understanding, sighs of anguish and fillips of hope. For two years Jo ran up and down the scales of optimism and despair before abandoning that particular version of hope along with the scarf and letting her hair grow back in scattered tufts for whatever time she had left. Then this. The great collective sigh. The washing up, the tidying away and disposal of the corpse (God, what a maggoty word!) and afterwards, the loved one's memory preserved in well-placed photos and a shrine, maybe, for the ashes, and decreasing mention in conversation.

Chris returns to the kitchen, which is still seething with people.

Diane clutches his arm. ‘Will you
please
get them out of here? Look at it, for God's sake. I can't get anything done.'

‘People like hanging about in kitchens,' he says, suddenly re-voiced with his gravelly bass.

‘You know it's not the kitchen that bothers me. It's everybody traipsing through it, where food is being prepared, to get to that godforsaken toilet.'

Judge's wife, Karen, juggling plates of club sandwiches, catches his eye. ‘Take these to the dining room, Chris.' She thrusts the plates at him. ‘I'll sort out the crowd.'

The neat circles of bread remind him of the sandwiches Jo made with a round cookie-cutter when he was little. After he bit into them the remaining piece looked like a smile. He sighs, takes the cucumber, roast beef, egg and whatever offerings to the dining table – immediately magnetising a flurry of mourners – and goes to the corner by the French doors that lead to the verandah. Taller than most, he can see Ben moving through the crowd like a sleepwalker, daughter Phoebe offering plump, wholegrain asparagus rolls and small damp cakes that can be consumed without an excess of crumbs and Diane, honey-toned with silky brown hair that cups her cheek, dispensing tea and whisky with seamless efficiency. As she approaches, she shoots him a look that suggests he needs to circulate; this is not the time for self-absorption. Chris has no energy for circulation and remains where he is. Normally he would oblige; he has such a reputation for co-operation that Tabitha, their office assistant, once approached him with a small bottle.

‘Take this, Mr B.'

He opened it and sniffed. ‘Brandy?'

‘It's a homeopathic remedy for people with an over-concern for the welfare of others. You need it. Trust me.'

‘Will I grow horns?' he asked hopefully as he placed four drops, as instructed, under his tongue. The idea of transforming into Lucifer, the angel hell-bent on having his own way, was not entirely unwelcome.

He assumes a look of what he hopes is stubborn refusal and holds out his whisky glass for topping-up. Diane hands him a cup of tea. He looks between the tea and the thimbleful of Scotch remaining in his glass and wonders which to drink first.

People begin to drift out, murmuring condolences and escaping to the day. Chris goes to the table where the food is, or was; where Judge is gouging holes in the remains of a cake that might have been Chris's birthday cake if Jo hadn't died. It was a sumptuous-looking thing that Diane had knifed carefully, slicing through its quivering layers to expose varying grades of vulnerability – icing, sponge, cream, jelly.

Judge crams a monstrous piece into his mouth. ‘Happy birthday, Wren,' he mumbles, alluding to Chris's seventeenth-century architectural namesake. He snatches a glass of Scotch someone has left on the table and lubricates the cake's journey, his dark eyes boring into Chris's.

‘Thanks,' says Chris.

‘You going to take time off work?'

‘No. The old theatre starts next week.'

‘I could take care of it.'

Chris huffs.

‘Don't be elitist,' says Judge.

‘I'm not. Everything you know about heritage architecture would fit on the end of my—'

‘That small, eh?'

‘—pencil.'

‘Thanks,' says Judge, whose real name, Peter, few people know. His nickname derives from his reputation for evenhandedness. Judge insists he isn't nice, he's simply too busy to be a prick. ‘All the same,' he says, ‘you look like crap. When was the last time you took a holiday?'

Chris shrugs. ‘Must be more than a year since Diane and I were in the UK. April, I think.'

‘I haven't been back since you and I were there,' Judge says gloomily, as if he misses bachelorhood, which Chris knows he doesn't. He and Karen are like trees whose roots have intertwined, strengthening and supporting each other, no matter how hard the wind blows.

‘Have some of your cake,' says Judge, scraping a mound onto a plate. He hands it to Chris who dips his finger into the icing, tastes it, and decides he isn't hungry.

‘Go on, Wren, eat. You cannot lick the icing and claim to have eaten the cake.'

‘Who said that?'

‘Me. Just now. Brilliant, huh?'

Chris cocks a cynical brow. ‘I guess I should circulate.'

By two thirty, most people have gone. By four, only a dozen or so remain; Ben's ex work cronies mostly, retired widowers like himself for whom Diane's spread of food beats the hell out of a can of baked beans in an empty house. But they too eventually edge towards the door.

Ben stands on the verandah facing a dense lace of trees, his arms dangling forlornly by his sides.

‘Shall I take you home?' Chris asks.

‘No,' Diane calls from the table where she is gathering up plates. ‘Stay, Ben. The spare bed is made up. Why spend the night in an empty house?'

Because, Chris suspects, it's not empty. Everywhere Ben turns in the home he and Jo made together, in the house where Chris grew up, will be filled with echoes of his dead wife. In the worst lonely hours she'll slide beside him into their bed and each day there will be at least one small miracle testifying to her invisible presence. Her African violets on the kitchen window sill will be watered. Her wedding ring will disappear from his bedside table and reappear on the bathroom vanity unit. Her dressing gown on the back of the door will ripple when there's no wind.

‘Stay,' Diane urges.

Ben looks at his shoes, so highly polished they're like patent leather. He'd have spent half an hour on them that morning up in his shed at the back of the house. His special place, the shed – home to his pool table, work benches, tools, ancient radio and even more ancient fridge for his beer and Jo's gin when she came up for a game of snooker. Ben dressed for her today in the shirt she bought him last Christmas. He'll go on wearing that shirt – washing and ironing it – as if she can see him and he wants her to know he really does like it.

When Chris's eyes meet the wavy line where Ben's hair springs from his forehead something tugs at his memory. It happens now and again, a nagging sense that there's something he's supposed to remember, but can't. As usual, the impression flees the moment he reaches for it. At seventy-one, Ben Bright is still handsome. Though not tall, he carries himself with quiet dignity, has a full head of grey – once black – hair, and dark liquid eyes. At 188 centimetres, Chris dwarfs him, but today Ben looks even shorter. Today, his knees have buckled.

Diane takes his arm and leads him to a leather chair in front of the TV. ‘Come on, Ben. Stay tonight. Jo wouldn't want you to be on your own.'