And then she stopped and thought, Dear Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?
“Um. Here are my sins. Yes.”
Oh my. Now she was going to laugh.
“Take your time, my dear,” encouraged the priest, and she didn’t want to let him down because he sounded so nice and normal and she did want absolution and she thought about Marcus’s father at the funeral, sobbing so hard he could hardly stand, and there was an undigested lump of guilt lodged in her throat making it difficult to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry for taking up your time.”
She got up from her knees and walked straight from the confessional, and out of the church and into the sunshine.
After a year or two she stopped feeling guilty.
Sometimes she wondered if she stopped feeling anything at all.
After Mass, as per their routine, Gemma took Nana home for a cup of tea and a manicure.
The Kettle girls had inherited responsibility for Nana’s nails from their grandfather. Every Sunday night, for forty-three years, right up until the week before he died, he had given his wife a beautiful manicure, lining up nail polish, nail file, and polish remover on the dining room table with the same professional precision as the tools in his shed. “Oh don’t worry, love, that looks perfect,” Nana would say impatiently as he held up her little finger to the light and frowned critically. “If a job’s worth doing,” Pop would mutter.
Gemma doubted that Pop would have approved of Gemma’s work. Although she hunched with concentration over each finger, swearing under her breath and twisting around in her seat, the polish still formed peculiar ridges and lumps.
It didn’t seem to matter. Nana really just wanted an excuse to sit and chat. Today, she was telling the story of Pop’s promotion to supervisor and how he wore a tie to work for the first time.
“So off he went, proud as punch with his lovely striped tie!” Gemma put the nail brush back in the bottle and shook it with hopeful vigor while she listened.
“And when he came home that night I could see he was a little down but he didn’t say a word. The next morning, I said to him, Les, aren’t you wearing a tie today? And he said, Oh, Bob had a word with me. Said the men were having a bit of a joke about it and it wasn’t really necessary to dress so formal, seeing as he wasn’t one of the big managers. Oh, he was so hurt, Gemma, that they would laugh like that. He never wore a tie again.”
Gemma sniffed loudly. That particular story always made her ache with sadness. She thought about how Pop must have got that horrible feeling of embarrassment, that shoved-in-the-stomach feeling when Bob called him over to have his “word.”
“I hate Bob,” she said.
“Yes, well, he was a funny fellow. Long dead now of course. Prostate cancer.”
“Serves him right,” Gemma said with satisfaction, blowing on her grandmother’s fingers to dry them. “I hope it was painful.”
“You’ve got your pop’s lovely sweet nature,” said Nana, seemingly oblivious to all indications to the contrary.
Gemma snorted and used her thumbnail to try and scratch paint away from her grandmother’s cuticles. “I do not. None of us take after Pop. We’re all bad-tempered, like Mum, and competitive, like Dad. Actually, now I think about it, we’re quite awful.”
“Oh, don’t talk such silly talk! You do all drive too fast, I must say. You get that from your father.”
Gemma chortled. “Lyn has got the most tickets at the moment.”
“That’s because she’s always rushing around. Mathew should help her more.”
“Michael, Nana.”
“Yes, Michael. That’s what I’m saying, darling. He doesn’t help enough with those breakfast trucks. She seems to have to do it all herself.”
“Well, of course she does. That’s because it’s her business.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Nana vaguely. “Now tell me about this new young man. He’s a locksmith, is he? Your grandfather would have liked that, he would have been so interested!”
Gemma bundled up the bottles and cotton buds from the table and walked toward the bathroom. “He’s lovely,” she began.
“Your grandfather never liked Marcus, you know,” said her grandmother suddenly. “He said, I don’t like that bloke!” Gemma stopped at the doorway. She couldn’t believe it. “Nana?”
“Mmmm?” Nana was admiring her nails, holding them up to the light.
“Didn’t Pop like Marcus?”
Her grandmother put her hands back on the table in front of her and began to push herself up to a standing position. “I do hope Maddie doesn’t grow up looking too Italian,” she said, with one of her baffling leaps to a new topic of conversation.
“Nana! For one thing Michael is Greek, not Italian, and what if Maddie did grow up looking Italian? What have you got against Italians? Charlie is Italian!”
“Charlie,” said Nana thoughtfully. “Your mother had a boyfriend called Charlie. Frank used to make terrible fun of his teeth. I don’t think he was Italian, though.”
Gemma groaned with frustration and went into the bathroom. She opened the mirrored cabinet to see shimmering clean shelves instead of the normal overflowing jumble of ancient bottles and jars.
“I see Lyn’s been here!” she called out.
Pop never had a bad word to say about anybody. It couldn’t be true.
She walked back into the dining room. “Pop liked Marcus didn’t he, Nana?”
Her grandmother beamed. “Oh yes! Your grandfather had a lot of time for Mathew. They used to talk about computers.”
Gemma sighed. Perhaps Mum was right. It was best to take Nana Kettle in small doses.
The Ferry
When I was nine, my parents took me on holiday to Australia. I loved it! I can even remember the exact moment when I decided, yep, this is where I’m going to live one day.
We were on the Manly Ferry after a day at the beach. It had been one of those long, hot, typical Aussie summer days, the sky at sunset looked like pink cotton wool and the cicadas were screeching. We were sitting on the wharf side of the ferry and the guy had already hauled in the little walkway, when my mother said, “Look at these people, they’ll never make it!” It was a man and three little girls about my age, and they were running like mad, yelling out, “Wait for us!” One of the girls was ahead of the others. She was running so fast, arms pumping, looking back over her shoulder at the others. I saw the man swoop the other two girls up by their waists, one under each arm, like sacks. The girls were giggling their heads off, legs dangling, and the man’s face was bright red with effort.