The Last Anniversary

They drive slowly up the winding paved road towards Kingfisher Lookout. Rose has a pleasant sense of anticipation, as if this ceremony will make everything OK, as if by following Connie’s instructions to the letter they’ll get her back.

At the top they light candles and place them around the edges of the picnic rug. The moon is a big yellow coin creating a floodlit path across the river.

‘Did you see that illustration in Grace’s last Gublet book?’ says Rose with pride. ‘I said to her, “That’s midnight at Kingfisher Lookout.” She said, “You’re right, Aunt Rose.” She’s a very talented girl. I knew it from when she was five years old.’

‘It is very pretty up here,’ says Enigma. ‘It only seems like last week that we came up here for my fortieth birthday. I remember, Connie said, “Enigma, you’re old enough to know the truth about Alice and Jack!” My word, I thought, this is a turn-up for the books! Old enough! I thought I was ancient!’

‘I didn’t think we should have waited that long,’ says Rose. ‘But Connie had that theory about forty being the “precise age where you’re old enough and young enough to handle a revelation”. It wasn’t a scientific theory. She just made it up! But she’s so certain about things, isn’t she? Whereas I’m uncertain about everything.’

Enigma is looking at her with a strange expression. The moon and stars on her face scrunch up with concern.

‘Are you losing your marbles, Rose? You’re starting to worry me. Some of the things you’ve been saying to Sophie! It will be awful if you lose your marbles.’

Rose thinks of marbles pouring from a jar in a clattering torrent of coloured glass.

‘I’m not losing my marbles,’ she says. ‘I’m just shook up by Connie dying.’ And as she says the words for the first time,

‘Connie dying’, she feels a new steely sensation.

She picks up the container of ashes and stands near the little fence that Jimmy built after the war.

‘We’ll do it together,’ she says to Enigma. ‘Come on.’

‘We’ve still got another twenty minutes before midnight.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! It won’t hurt her if we’re twenty minutes early. She was always so bossy!’

But now she can’t unscrew the lid on the container.

‘Oh sugar!’ she swears.

‘Give it to me,’ says Enigma. She taps around the edges of the lid with a knife from the picnic basket. ‘This is what Margie always does with the tomato sauce.’

‘That doesn’t do anything,’ says Rose.

Enigma grunts as the lid finally comes free and holds it towards Rose. ‘Here you go!’

They hold it together, their hands overlapping.

‘Shouldn’t we say something?’ says Enigma.

‘Goodbye, Connie,’ says Rose. ‘Thank you for the cinnamon pear pies. Thank you for always being so strong and so clever. We’ll miss you.’

‘We love you!’ Enigma starts to sob. ‘We’ll make sure everything stays the same!’

Together they shake the container and watch the fine grey ash stream down into the moonlit river below.

‘Goodness!’ says Enigma through her tears. ‘Connie’s ashes look exactly like the dust when I empty the vacuum cleaner.’

But Rose’s steely feeling has vanished and she’s crying for the first time since her big sister died.

28

Margie, wearing her black one-piece swimming costume, stands in front of the mirrored wardrobe in her bedroom with her eyes shut.

She has deliberately avoided actually looking at herself in a swimming costume for many years, quickly averting her eyes if she happens to pass her reflection. But now, even though it’s the middle of winter, she must, as they say, ‘face the music’.

Because tomorrow she is going to allow a man she barely knows to take a photograph of her in a swimming costume. ‘I have a proposal for you,’ the man from Weight Watchers had said to her, stirring Light and Low into his skim milk cappuccino. Margie still can’t believe she’d said yes. Immediately. Without even thinking about it. ‘Sure I will,’ she’d said. She hadn’t even sounded like herself. She’d sounded like a confident American. She might even have put on a bit of an American accent, as if she were on a TV show. It was very odd.

Margie takes a deep breath and opens her eyes. She squints. A shadowy figure squints back at her.

She sighs. Where are they this time? After a few minutes walking around the house talking through her previous movements–‘So, I came in the front door from visiting Rose and the phone was ringing and I was dying to go to the toilet’–she finally finds her glasses on top of her handbag, puts them on and once again stands in front of the mirror with her eyes shut.

Surely it won’t be that bad. Will it?

Whenever Ron sees her in a swimming costume he starts talking about beached whales. Oh, he doesn’t say, ‘You look like a beached whale, Margie.’ No, he just gets an innocent sly look on his face and starts telling a story related to whales. He has a whole selection of them. His favourite is about a beached whale in Oregon that the authorities tried to blow up with dy***ite. Apparently they thought it would turn into convenient bite-sized pieces for the seagulls. ‘Imagine it!’ Ron always says with enthusiasm. ‘Massive chunks of smelly whale blubber raining from the sky. Only the Yanks, eh?’

‘Why are you telling me this story?’ Margie always asks. ‘I hate this story! The poor whale!’

‘No reason,’ Ron says. ‘It just came into my head.’

When Ron and Margie were first married he used to hide her nightgowns so she’d sleep naked. When she put on her red crochet bikini in the Seventies he used to embarrass her by putting two fingers in his mouth and doing a loud wolf-whistle. He didn’t know any stories about beached whales back then.

‘One, two, three,’ says Margie out loud.

She opens her eyes.

‘Oh Lordie me.’

It is worse than she thought. All that crinkly white flesh like an uncooked chicken. Saggy, baggy upper arms. Thighs like pork sausages. The tummy. Oh, dear, the tummy! Like a big watermelon.

What happened to pretty petite little Margie McNabb and her twenty-three-inch waist? Always one inch smaller than her sister’s waist! No matter how hard Laura tried she couldn’t manage it. (The sweet, secret triumph!) Before Veronika was born Margie could still just squeeze into her wedding dress.