The Last Anniversary

They’d caught the train and then the ferry from Glass Bay, and are full of praise for the weather, the scenery, the island and the hot chocolates down at the wharf.

‘It’s the most beautiful island! Have you lived here long, love?’

‘I grew up here,’ says Grace. ‘But I only just moved back about six weeks ago, before my baby was born.’

‘Are you a model, sweetheart?’

‘No, no, I’m a graphic designer.’

‘Well, you could be a model. Couldn’t she, Shirl?’

Jake is passed around from Shirley to Shirley and looks perfectly content in each expert pair of arms. Grace wonders if she should be worried about letting so many strangers hold him, but decides it’s worth it. He is being topped up with all the proper motherly love he is missing out on. Besides which, these energetic women are far too cleanly scrubbed to harbour germs.

She stands on the front porch and begins the speech she, Thomas and Veronika were all taught to give when they turned sixteen and were considered old enough to take their turns at the Alice and Jack tours.

‘Welcome to the home of my great-grandparents, Alice and Jack Munro. Some of you may have heard of a famous, mysterious ship called the Mary Celeste. It was found adrift in 1872, sailing itself across the Atlantic Ocean. The crew and passengers had vanished. There were no signs of struggle and the ship was in perfect condition, with plenty of food and water. Well, this house is similar to the Mary Celeste. When Connie and Rose Doughty visited this house in 1932, there were no immediate signs that anything was amiss, yet Alice and Jack had vanished into thin air. The difference is that in this case there was one survivor. A tiny baby was just waking for her feed. That baby was my grandmother.’

And pause, one, two, three.

Aunt Connie had told them to always pause at that moment for dramatic effect. Grace considered herself quite good at the pause, unlike Veronika, who spoke much too fast and added too many of her own peculiar opinions to Aunt Connie’s carefully drafted script, and Thomas, who was painfully shy at sixteen and delivered his tours in a barely audible monotone.

Jake gives a little whimper and the Shirleys all cluck. ‘Imagine! A tiny baby like you! Your mummy wouldn’t leave you on your own even for a minute, would she!’

Grace looks at her son, his face blissfully squished against a Shirley’s large purple-T-shirted breast. He seems very content.

‘I’ll invite you all now to enter the house. Please remember that the house has not been disturbed in over seventy years, so we do ask that you refrain from touching anything.’

She opens the front door of the house and in they troop, all bright-eyed beams and exclamations, while Grace mentally checks off the list of things she needs to cover:

Cake.

Kettle.

Blood stains.

Connie and Rose.

Alice’s diary.

Jack’s love letter.

Theories.

Questions.

Souvenirs.

She’d never been very good at the souvenirs part. That was where Veronika excelled. She could bully anyone into buying anything.

After the tour is finished, Grace stands on the veranda of Alice and Jack’s house and waves the Shirley Club goodbye, a colourful gaggle of women winding their way back down the hill towards the ferry, arms swinging, energy unflagging, going back home to cook their husbands’ dinners.

Jake is sound asleep in his pram, a smudge of a Shirley’s lipstick over one eyebrow.

I should have asked them to adopt you, thinks Grace. Fifteen no-nonsense, happy, laughing, loving mums. What a perfect life. But your daddy would miss you.

She doesn’t allow herself to think about whether she would miss him too.

13

‘Don’t tell me! Salmon and salad on multigrain. No butter, no beetroot, no onion!’

‘You got it!’ shouts Sophie across the crowd of people at the sandwich shop. She is actually a little bored with salmon and salad sandwiches, but Al, the man who owns the shop, takes such professional pride in remembering her lunch order that she doesn’t feel she can change it. Once she’d said, ‘I think I might have ham and cheese today,’ and he’d said, ‘Oh, feel like something a bit different, eh?’ and looked hurt, his tongs hovering uncertainly over the sandwich fillings. After all, salmon and salad is a delicious combination. Sometimes she does go to other places for lunch, but then, the next day, Al cries, ‘We missed you yesterday! Where were you?’ and Sophie thinks, This is ridiculous. Why don’t I just admit I had won ton soup at the Chinese takeaway? But Al seems so convinced she is in a monogamous relationship with his sandwich shop that she has to pretend to sneeze to cover up her guilty blush. ‘Ah, you had the flu!’ Al says kindly. As a result, he has decided she is a rather sickly sort.

‘Keeping up that vitamin C, Sally?’ he asks today as he expertly compiles her sandwich. That’s the other problem with Al. He thinks her name is Sally. Sophie is sure she must have tried to correct him at least once but now the moment for setting him straight has long passed. He has been calling her Sally for three years. Once, he confided to her that was how he remembered her sandwich order. ‘I just think to myself, here comes Sally Salmon!’

That had given her such a bad attack of the giggles she’d had to pretend to sneeze six times in a row, causing Al to worriedly suggest garlic tablets.

‘Actually, you’re looking well today, Sally,’ he says now. He nudges his wife who is chopping up boiled eggs. ‘Look. Sally is glowing today. She looks even prettier than usual.’

‘Hmmph,’ says his wife, who doesn’t seem to like working in a sandwich shop or being married to Al.

‘Is love in the air, perhaps, Sally?’ asks Al. He flutters a hygienically gloved hand like a butterfly.

‘Perhaps,’ says Sophie. ‘Oh, well, not really.’ She feels her heart lift as she thinks about Aunt Connie’s letter, sitting safely in the zippered pocket of her handbag. ‘But I got some good news.’

‘Did you now,’ says Al, and then his eyes flicker to another regular in the crowd. ‘Don’t tell me! Avocado and salami!’

‘You got it,’ says a resigned voice.

Sophie picks up her brown paper bag, gives avocado and salami a sympathetic smile and pushes her way through the crowd and out onto the streets of Sydney. She walks down into the Domain to her usual spot to eat her lunch under a Moreton Bay fig, where she can read her book and watch the sporty types from nearby offices playing netball and soccer in their lunch breaks. It is the middle of winter and the air is frosty cold but the sun is hot and summery. The sporty types are red-faced and sweaty.