Nine Days (23 page)

I’m coming. Grandpa is nearly here. I’m not cutting off my nose despite my face.

I wish I was a writer. If I immortalised people in words instead of paint and pencil and digital images, I could sit quiet in the corner jotting away and no one would be the wiser. But drawing is a public business.
What are you doing, Alec? Oh, isn’t that lovely? What’s it supposed to be?
Ad. Frikkin. Nauseam.

So I don’t sketch. Instead I concentrate on the scene in front of me so I can remember it later. Which wouldn’t be necessary if I had a phone with a camera in it instead of an actual camera, an ancient relic which does nothing except take photos.

Speaking of relics: we are all sitting around the dining table. Grandpa is at one end, Uncle Frank is at the other. They look the same but different, the way Charlotte and Stanzi do. On the other side of the table, Libby is sitting between Charlotte and Stanzi. Grandma is sitting next to me.

‘This is lovely, Charlotte,’ says Grandma, around a mouthful of Charlotte’s casserole, which looks like newspaper soaked in milk. She is wearing her pale blue dress, the one with the matching shoes and handbag that make her look like the Queen Mother. ‘I’d almost think it was meat, if I didn’t know better.’

‘It’s not meat?’ says Uncle Frank. ‘What is it then? I don’t eat anything green, Charlotte. Vegetables are too hard on my colon.’

‘Don’t complain.’ Grandpa, always dapper, is wearing a blue cravat that matches Grandma’s dress. ‘A tofu has given up its life for this meal.’ He’s smiling, but he doesn’t eat much. Nothing like Charlotte’s cooking to curve your appetite.

Now Uncle Frank is talking to Libby, which serves her right for being such a suck. He’s telling her stories of the old days: about how they all used to live here. How it was our great-grandparent’s house and then Uncle Frank’s until I was born, and then he gave it to Charlotte and Stanzi and moved into the nursing home because by then the firm had let him go and he wanted to be around other people his own age. He loves it in the nursing home. Bowls, bingo. You name it. Libby’s eyes are glazing over. Soon he’ll get on to how tiny this house used to be before Grandma and Grandpa paid for the upstairs extension where me and Lib’s rooms are.

How lame are Charlotte and Stanzi. There’s no way I’m living in the family house when I’m grown up. I’m going to get the hell out of here and live in a loft in New York. Or India. I could backpack around India and speak Indian and do paintings of temples and the colours of saris and smiling babies.

Listening to Uncle Frank, Libby looks like she’s about to lapse into a coma. Before they arrived she came up to me in the hall and she was all
this is so lame. Mission Impossible 3 is having advance screenings,
at which I almost laughed out loud. I was all
introducing the current Australian lame champion, MB being rank Hollywood commercialism featuring formulaic storytelling with pathetic CGI I want to see Scary Movie 4
and she nods, but it’s out of the question because Charlotte will never let her. She’s too much of a baby. She has nightmares.

The actual meal winds up early because if old people eat after 8pm and you get them wet they turn into gremlins. After we’ve cleared the plates, Grandpa stands up and clinks his fork against his glass and says, ‘Ahem. I’d like to say a few words.’

Here we go. I love Grandpa and everything, but this will be an all-points Bore. Dom. Alert.

He starts to say how fifty years ago today was the best day in his long and happy life, because that was when he married
that beautiful girl sitting right there. Annabel Crouch.
Grandma blushes and raises her glass to him. Charlotte says
hear hear.
She has had two glasses of wine and is actually smiling.

‘You’ve always been the lucky one, Kip,’ says Uncle Frank. ‘Midas touch.’

‘And it means everything to me to have my brother here, and our two beautiful girls, and our two wonderful grandchildren.’

Yep. So far, so boring.

‘You’re wearing your mother’s pendant Charlotte, I see.’

She smiles and opens her collar a little wider. Sure enough, there it is: the purple necklace she loves so much. ‘Only for special occasions, Dad.’

‘It has always disturbed me, though,’ he says, ‘that we had only one pendant and two daughters.’

‘I took the money, Dad,’ Stanzi says. ‘You bought my first car. Remember?’

‘Still. Your mother and I have decided that, although it’s our anniversary, you two girls should get the presents.’ Grandma rivals in her bag and pulls out an envelope and a small parcel and hands them to him. ‘Here.’

The envelope is for Mum. There’s cash in it, I can see from here. Enough to make Mum cry. She hugs everyone, even Uncle Frank. The parcel is for Stanzi: inside is an old-fashioned coin, dull silver, with a king’s head on one side. It has a silver chain threaded through a hole in the middle. Stanzi looks like she’s about to cry too.

‘I loved looking at it, framed in my study,’ says Grandpa. ‘But I’m getting on. It’s more important that it goes to you. It’s a fine old coin, isn’t it Stanzi? Let me have a last look.’

Stanzi passes him the coin on the chain and Grandpa goes through an extended rigamarole of looking for his glasses: checking his pockets and Grandma’s bag. Eventually they decide he’s left them in Stanzi’s car.

‘Alec,’ he says. ‘Can you run and get them? I think I left them under the front seat.’

‘Of course he can,’ Charlotte says. She hands me Stanzi’s keys.

Outside, I take a minute to lean against the fence. I don’t mind running errands for Grandpa. I mean, he’s eighty. What am I supposed to do? Tell him to go get his own glasses?

It’s dark now. Must be well past eight. It’s weird to think of a different lot of Westaways living in this house. I try to imagine it as a 3D painting: Escher-style, one layer on top of another, different times, different people. I think about these other people with their old-fashioned clothes and hair, walking down hallways sleeping in beds. Ghosts walking among us.

Inside, around that table, everyone knows who they are. They know every drop of blood in their veins. Where they’ve come from, the features and gestures and traits that have been passed down. They take it for granted. Me and Libby, we’re half Westaways. We don’t know what belongs to the other side. All this looking backwards, it’s a complete crock. Grandpa can track his blood. Uncle Frank’s right: he’s the lucky one.

I open the car door and kneel. The glasses are right where he said they’d be, but next to them is a parcel wrapped in bright blue paper, with a little card in an envelope. The envelope says:
Alec.
I open it. The card says, in a shaky old-person hand:
Tonight everyone gets a present! Though it’s best to keep this just between us! All our love, Grandma and Grandpa.
I open the parcel and almost die of shock. Inside is a brand new Nintendo DS, still in the box.

I don’t know how they knew the exact right thing to get, the perfect thing that would blow my mind, but they managed it. You, Grandma and Grandpa, officially, totally, rock. And
Just between us
is right. It won’t last two minutes up in my bedroom with Libby and Mum around. I’ve got to hide it somewhere, and fast. They’ll be expecting me back any second.

The front yard is so tiny, there’s nowhere. I can’t bury it, it’ll get dirty. I open the gate and walk down the side of the house. There are some loose pavers stacked against the fence: I think about this for a bit, even move one, but it’s all spiders and shit. I kneel down and run my hands along the bricks of the foundations. One of them looks a little loose, so I push a bit and—hey pesto! I lift the brick out and there’s a decent space behind it. It looks about the right size, but the Nintendo won’t go in. I drop my head for a good look and—hang on, there’s already something in here. Carefully, I slide my hand inside. I lift it out.

Back inside, I give Grandpa his glasses. Then I sit at the table, a little awkwardly. The Nintendo is in the letter box: I’ll move it later, after everyone’s gone. But I found this wicked thing and I have to show them.

‘Get a load of this,’ I say. ‘I found it outside.’

In the middle of the table I place the tin. It’s got a parrot eating a biscuit on the front and it’s covered in tarnish and rust.

‘Will you take a look at that,’ says Grandma.

‘God, it’s filthy,’ says Libby.

‘Open it, Alec,’ says Charlotte. ‘You found it.’

So I do. I have to get my nails under the lid, it’s a good tight fit, but inside, in a brown envelope, is a photograph. An old one, black and white, but the tones are vivid and crisp. There’s a crush of people. A bunch of them are soldiers. In the middle is one particular soldier. He’s leaning out of a train, out the window. You can see him really well: crew cut, uniform. He’s stretching to kiss a girl. The girl is sitting on someone’s shoulder and she’s stretching up to him. You can’t see her so good, just her old-fashioned wavy hair and her shape.

‘Dad,’ says Charlotte. ‘Are you all right?’

First, he stared at the photo. He said nothing. There was just this look on his face, like his skin was melting. Then he stood, he made this weird noise. Then he fell.

For twenty minutes now, we’ve all been still. Grandpa is lying on the couch. Mum wanted to call an ambulance but he said no.
Don’t fuss, Charlotte,
he said.

‘If your father says he’s fine, he’s fine.’ Grandma stirs his tea, clinks the spoon on the side.

‘You collapsed. That doesn’t sound fine to me,’ says Charlotte.

‘Stood up too quickly, that’s all. Blood pressure,’ says Uncle Frank.

Grandpa makes a face. ‘Blood pressure? What rot.’

‘Mum. What is it? What’s going on?’ says Libby.

‘Don’t, Kip. Not right to speak ill of the dead,’ says Uncle Frank.

Grandpa sits up and pulls Libby half on to his lap. ‘It’s a love letter, sweetie. Except it’s a photograph.’ He says that in the olden days, things were different.
No one expected a grand passion, you see.
He squeezes Grandma’s hand.
We aimed for smaller things: the health of our family, being warm, being safe.

‘I remember Ma saying that when Dad was alive we were so rich, it didn’t matter how thickly she peeled the potatoes,’ says Uncle Frank.