The Last Anniversary

I knew. I knew the moment we sat in the cab and your father shook my hand. It was five to noon on Thursday the second of…

‘I’m Callum,’ he says. ‘Callum Tidyman. Grace’s husband.’

20

Rose sits right at the end of the front pew of the church next to the aisle, with her walking stick propped up beside her. The seat offers no support for the lower back and already she can feel a stabbing pain. Oh, sugar! It hurts. It really hurts. She has to stop herself from crying out, that’s how much it hurts. If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

People are murmuring to each other, or sitting silently, hands clasped carefully on their laps, looking self-consciously solemn. Occasionally there is a hollow-sounding cough. Funerals all have the same smells and sounds. The cloying, nose-twitching scent of lilies. That muted rustling. Sometimes, a sudden, shocking, uncontrollable sobbing. Although there is not much sobbing at the funerals Rose seems to spend so much of her time attending these days. People would consider it excessive and rather Italian if you started wailing at the death of an elderly person. Instead, you say things like, ‘Well, he had a good innings, didn’t he!’

No surprise you’re in pain, no surprise you’re dead. You’re old. That’s what is meant to happen. We don’t care that you forget you’re old. We know you’re old.

Rose thinks of that poem she used to like and is pleased with herself when she can remember the first few lines.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That’s right, she thinks. We should all be raging and raving and brandishing our walking sticks: We don’t want to go! And by the way, we want our legs and arms and backs to stop HURTING!!

She will ask Thomas to find the rest of that poem on the Internet for her. He can find anything on his lap computer. He’s a sweet boy, Thomas. Such a pity it didn’t work out with Sophie. They’d all liked Sophie.

‘What’s the hold-up? It’s so chilly in here!’

Enigma is sitting on Rose’s left, jiggling around in her bright red outfit. Her feet don’t quite touch the ground. When Rose looks straight ahead she can almost believe that it’s still a little girl sitting next to her, not a seventy-two-year-old Enigma.

‘Rose? Isn’t it cold! You’d think they’d have a heater. No need to make us feel like we’re in a morgue just because we’re at a funeral, eh? Rose?’

Rose ignores her. She doesn’t feel like talking. Enigma makes an offended sound and turns to talk to Margie, who is sitting on her other side and never ignores her mother.

Rose and Connie had chuckled, just last week it was, about how funerals had become their new hobby. Throughout their lives they’d taken up various convivial pastimes together–tennis, art classes, lawn bowls. Now they’d taken up funerals.

Their friends had got so old that whenever Connie bought a get-well card she also bought a sympathy card at the same time, to save herself the trouble of going back to the newsagent when they didn’t ‘get well’. Rose had thought that was just terrible, but Connie always liked to be the practical one.

The light inside the church is like twilight, shadowy and strange, making it hard for Rose’s eyes to distinguish anything except the giant stained glass picture at the front, which makes her flinch with its assault of colour: ruby, emerald and sapphire. The picture features a handsome, melancholy Jesus stretching out an imperious, drooping hand to his poor mother, who kneels distraught at his feet. Both Jesus and Mary have glowing circles around their heads, like psychedelic motorcycle helmets, and they’re surrounded by macabre baby-faced angels.

Why did you want a church, Connie? Is this your last shot at pretending we’re good Catholic girls?

It is unbearable to think that she won’t ever hear Connie’s acerbic response.

Above the stained glass there is a window revealing a square of pale blue sky and a wispy cloud. The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.

A lifetime of ordinary moments crowd her head. Teenagers, sitting in a train station, picking at the green peeling paint of their chair and bickering desultorily over something to do with a pair of shoes. In their forties, driving somewhere, running late, looking for a parking spot. ‘There! On your right! Too late, you ninny!’ Little girls, fishing off Sultana Rocks: Connie holding a frenzied flapping slimy-silver fish trapped with her foot, while Rose crouched down to remove the hook, saying ‘I’m sorry!’ to the begging-for-mercy eye. Whole afternoons with baby Enigma on that old red checked rug in the backyard when the jacaranda tree was in full purple bloom. They didn’t have the slightest inkling of how to look after a baby. They made it up as they went along and played with her like two children with a doll.

Thousands of cups of tea. Thousands of conversations about what to eat and what to wear and how to get there. Thousands of shopping trips. Thousands of circuits of the island: running when they were children, strolling languidly when they were teenagers, power-walking with hand-weights when they were middle-aged and worried about cholesterol and osteoporosis, and then slower and benter and even slower, until they bought their ‘hotted-up’ bikes, the best thing they ever did, and once again they were children again, with the air skimming their cheeks as they soared around the new unfurling sandstone footpaths that always reminded Rose of the yellow-brick road in The Wizard of Oz.

I didn’t properly appreciate one damned moment.

Someone starts a CD and music begins to play. ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong. It must be Connie’s choice. According to Margie, Connie has specified every tiny detail for her funeral.

Rose didn’t even know she liked this song.

People turn their heads towards the back of the church, keeping their faces blank, reminding themselves that they’re here to see a coffin, not a bride. Rose twists slightly in her seat and her back shrieks in pain. There is no surprise about Connie’s choice of pallbearers: Jimmy’s four nephews who used to come and stay on the island for school holidays.