The Last Anniversary

Love,

Mum

PS. I hope you’re well, Callum! Laura.

‘Your mother seems to be doing a lot of reflecting while she’s away,’ comments Callum, putting the postcard back down on the coffee table.

‘Yes. She’s become bizarrely chatty.’ Grace is ironing while Callum watches Australian Idol on television. (Grace hates Australian Idol. Sophie loves it and has animated discussions with Callum about who they think should win, as if it actually matters.) ‘Relax,’ Callum had said when he saw Grace setting up the ironing board. ‘Or let me do it!’ He is a terrible ironer, energetically ironing in wrinklier wrinkles and missing whole sections. Besides which, Grace doesn’t want to sit down and watch television. It makes her anxious to think of sitting still. Her heart pumps and her hands tremble as if she’s had too much coffee. Move, move, move. Get this done. Get that done. Soon it will be over.

‘All these anecdotes about my childhood,’ she says to Callum. ‘It’s infuriating.’

‘Really? Why? I thought it was sort of nice.’

‘She’s putting on an act. Playing the Mother role.’

‘That seems a bit harsh.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘Well, I’m hardly likely to know anything about my mother-in-law, am I, when I don’t know anything about my wife.’ He keeps making clumsy, nervy digs like this, trying to pretend their argument the other day had been over something trivial. Except he can’t carry it off. The inflections of his voice are all wrong and his eyes are still bruised and hurt.

To distract him, she says, ‘When I was ten my mother didn’t say a single word to me for twenty-one days.’

Callum turns his head away from the television and speaks in his normal voice. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘It was her special brand of discipline. She would just look right through me as if I literally wasn’t there. She was very good at it. Sometimes I’d be begging her to stop it, crying, yelling at her, anything just to get her to talk to me again, and she’d just be humming this little tune to herself. I became invisible. It was quite a performance. If it was just a small offence she’d stop talking to me for a day–but if it was something really bad she might not talk to me for weeks. That was the longest. Twenty-one days. I ticked them off in my diary.’

‘But that’s terrible!’

‘Well, she never laid a finger on me. Uncle Ron used to give Veronika and Thomas terrible beltings.’

‘I’d take the beltings any day.’

Grace shrugs. As she bends over to lift another one of Callum’s shirts from the ironing basket a great weight of tiredness makes her knees buckle.

Callum has turned down the sound on the television. He is far more interested in this topic of conversation than she had intended.

‘What had you done when she didn’t talk to you for twenty-one days?’

‘I left a banana at the bottom of my school bag. It turned into black pulp and Mum was just disgusted. I can still see the expression on her face when she saw it. It was like she’d found a body.’

‘A banana! Every kid does that!’

‘I never did it again.’

Callum is all spluttering fascination. ‘I can’t believe your mother didn’t speak to you for three weeks because you left a banana in your bag. So–what–you’d come home from school and she wouldn’t even say hello? What if you said sorry? If you tried to talk to her?’

‘It didn’t make any difference what I did. She was like the guards at Buckingham Palace. She looked right through me. Until all of a sudden one day it would be over and she’d be talking to me normally again.’

Grace flips Callum’s shirt and runs the iron across the collar. She remembers how on the fifth day after the banana incident she’d forgotten her mother wasn’t speaking and went running into the house and started telling her the amazing, goose-bumpy news that her painting of Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose swimming at Sultana Rocks had come first in an inter-school competition. Her mother was sitting on the sofa reading a copy of Vogue and Grace was chatting, bubbling over with her story, when she realised Laura hadn’t even lifted her head. She just flipped the page and kept right on reading her article, while Grace’s words trailed humiliatingly away.

‘I think that’s a terrible thing to do to a child.’ Callum looks at her seriously, almost pleadingly, as if he wants something of her. What? She can’t give it to him, whatever it is.

She says, ‘It’s hardly the worst thing that a mother can do.’

‘Well, what if you’d hurt yourself?’

Grace buttons the freshly ironed shirt onto a coat-hanger. ‘Actually, sometimes I thought about purposely hurting myself to get a reaction, but…’ She really can’t be bothered finishing the sentence. She really can’t be bothered having this conversation. Why doesn’t he just turn the television back up and stop tiring her?

‘But what?’

It was when Grace was thirteen and her mother wasn’t talking to her because she’d got hot-pink nail polish on the dining-room table. Grace decided to prove that Silent Time could be shattered, that it wasn’t something real, that she really did exist, even during those times when her mother pretended she didn’t. She bought a sesame bar. She didn’t buy it at the school because all the ladies in the tuck shop knew about her nut allergy, and if she’d asked for a sesame bar they would have clutched their hearts in horror. If Grace ate a sesame bar she would DIE, a fact that kids and grown-ups alike seemed to relish. Grace’s plan was to sit down at the dinner table and say, ‘Mum, I’m going to eat this whole sesame bar unless you say something to me,’ and then she was going to open it and slowly take a bite–very slowly, to give Laura time to react, to scream, ‘No, Grace! Stop!’

The procedure during Silent Time was that her mother made enough dinner for the two of them but Grace had to serve herself. She didn’t need to eat at the table during Silent Time. She could eat in her room, or in front of the television, or sitting cross-legged on the laundry floor. In fact, it didn’t even make any difference whether Grace took the plate of food and upended it on the kitchen floor. She knew this because she’d tried it once and her mother didn’t even flinch, which was terrifying because it must have been torture for her. But surely she wouldn’t let her daughter kill herself?