The Best Australian Stories (17 page)

And that was when he sat her down on the wooden bench and told her he had something else very important to share with her. He had wanted to wait until she was older, he explained, at least until she was a teenager, but now seemed as good a time as any. Ginger crossed her ankles, unsure if she wanted him to continue or not. He put his hands behind his back and began pacing around the steel table, the lifeless body, staring at the concrete floor, as if following the path of a cockroach.

Finally he paused, looked up, and announced that if she wanted to see her mother again she should look not amongst the dead, but the living.

*

As the years passed, Ginger slowly became inured to her own sense of loss, and to the grief of the funeral mourners who filed through her home. She continued to accompany her father on his pick-ups, helped him fill out paperwork, and watched with practised nonchalance as he drained blood from bodies, powdered the faces of corpses, and stitched their lips together. Sometimes she helped with the rouge and eyeliner, though she never failed to be surprised by how cold the face of a cadaver could become.

What had begun as an introduction to the cycles of life and death gradually became a part of her daily routine, as normal and regular as brushing her teeth or watering the front garden. She gradually stopped fearing that her father would preside over a premature burial. Now that she knew that her mother and father weren't her real parents – that she'd been adopted at the age of eight weeks old – she no longer pined so much for the dead woman who'd raised her, but for the woman who'd given birth to her, the one who was still alive.

She looked for this woman in the faces of shop assistants, bus drivers and stallholders at the local market. She searched the glazed eyes of young mothers pushing strollers, the smiles of barmaids who worked in the pub across the road from where she lived. She listened to the soft voices of librarians and the banter of gossiping women at outdoor cafés, wondering if any one of them could be the one, the mysterious woman who'd made her.

Her father – for that is how she still referred to him – did not know many details about the identities of her birth parents, only that they had both been very young and that her mother had lived locally, having given birth at St Vincent's Hospital only two blocks away. For Ginger, the mixture of anonymity and close proximity was both tantalising and exasperating. Why, she could have walked past her own mother every day for many years, without even recognising her. She had learnt from her father that the name ‘Ginger' had been chosen specifically by the woman who'd given birth to her.

When Ginger asked why, her father merely smiled and touched her long ponytail of reddish-blonde hair. She smiled back, and the thought that her mother's hair might be the same colour as her own made her shiver. Her father had shown her a copy of her own birth certificate:
Mother: Sonia Darling. Father: Unknown.

By the time she was nine she realised that it was possible that she was no longer an only child. It occurred to her that she could have younger brothers and sisters who lived in the area, who maybe even went to her own school – children her mother had decided to keep instead of giving away to strangers.

This possibility caused her to study local families even closer. Each afternoon, she scrutinised every fair-haired mother who picked up her kids from school. There was a cheery woman in her early thirties who wore sequined gypsy skirts and red boots, who collected her five-year-old son on a bicycle that had a second seat on the back. One day, Ginger found herself running towards her, stopping just short of the bike's front wheel. ‘What's your name?' she blurted out, dropping her school case. Her son suddenly appeared and the woman put one arm around him and kissed him on the head. ‘Caroline,' she replied. ‘What's yours?'

*

There was also a very young, thin woman whose twin boy and girl never wore a uniform to school; every afternoon, she would stand at the gate, smiling, and holding two cones of strawberry ice-cream. Ginger didn't bother to ask what her name was: she wore a silver necklace with letters hanging from it that spelled out ‘KAREN'. And then there was a glamorous woman – quite a bit older – who wore her blonde hair pinned up into a lacquered beehive, and who picked up her first-grade daughter in a dark-blue convertible that she always double-parked. One afternoon, Ginger summoned the courage to ask the woman her name. But the woman merely looked away and pushed a button on the dashboard. The roof of the car began to rise, enclosing the woman, and she began to wind her window up. Her daughter climbed into the car and they drove away.

After a few months, this imaginary life – this pretend mother – no longer preoccupied her, and she began to resent the conventional families she witnessed each day, with their ice-creams, bicycles and easy laughter. She dreaded the usual questions from the kids at school: What does your dad do? How many brothers and sisters have you got? What's your mum baking for the annual fete? Often her reply was silence, or she disappeared into the toilet block.

She decided that not one of the mothers she saw at the school gate would have given her baby away. The love and tenderness they exuded was too obvious.

*

By her tenth birthday she'd realised that the dead were much easier to get to know than those who were still alive. In calloused hands she recognised a hard life spent labouring; in dark, leathery faces, permanently suntanned, she sensed years whiled away on a fishing boat; caesarian scars revealed the births of offspring; a thin and hairless body told stories of incurable cancer.

Ginger also grew to understand that you could learn a lot about a corpse from the kinds of mourners it attracted. For example, a few scruffy men with beards and oversized shoes usually meant that the deceased had been homeless and had probably died in a nearby lane. It was on these occasions that her father usually performed the ceremony alone, delivering a short, general eulogy, in lieu of the usual family members and friends.

Women in black suits and pearls, with matching handbags and shoes, usually mourned a corpse that had acquired some wealth, one who had lived in Double Bay or Vaucluse – probably a former socialite or the mistress of a CEO who'd died of leaking breast implants or too many sessions at a tanning salon.

One day, the parlour was packed with over 200 people – some with dreadlocks, others with shaved heads, teenagers with tattooed arms and hands. The air, she remembered, had been thick with the smell of incense. She'd even noticed a handcuffed female prisoner wearing an orange jumpsuit, flanked by two male guards, sitting in the back row, and a huge grey dog the size of a Shetland pony panting away beside the coffin. At the time, she sensed that the service would be for a local criminal. This was confirmed when, before the ceremony began, she walked down a side aisle, tripped on an outstretched foot, and bumped into a man wearing a dark suit. At once, she glimpsed the inside of his open jacket and the gun in a holster strapped to his chest. When she looked up she noticed he had a hooked nose and smelled strongly of a minty aftershave. He seemed like a man who would hunt down criminals, she thought, one of those policemen you can't recognise because they try to dress like ever yone else.

She eyed the gun, frowning. ‘What are you doing here?' she asked, before she could stop herself.

He buttoned his jacket, concealing the gun. ‘Just wanna make sure the bastard's really dead.'

When she thought about it, she understood that she could easily learn more about the background of a corpse than she could about her own. The deceased always came with a death certificate, stating its date and place of birth, its parents and grandparents, and of course the cause and date of death. A corpse usually attracted a big family of close and distant relatives, best friends and casual acquaintances, those who were inconsolable and others who feigned grief by bowing their heads and clutching tissues and handkerchiefs. Death gave a person a complete identity of a kind that it probably hadn't achieved in life. The dead knew who they were.

She now flitted between the embalming room and the funeral parlour, between mourners and flower arrangers, with a detached, almost world-weary air. She thought she'd seen everything: bullet wounds the size of saucers, gangrenous legs, and once – on Christmas Day – a complete decapitation, with the woman's head in a separate plastic bag from the one in which her body was stored.

Then, late one night, in the first month of winter, her father received a summons from the morgue at St Vincent's Hospital. Even though it was only a hundred metres up the road, her father insisted that Ginger accompany him. The last time he'd left the hearse unattended outside the hospital, in order to sign paperwork, a man had jumped into the driver's seat and driven off on a joyride, with the corpse still in the back.

Wearing her flannelette pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, she waited in the front passenger seat, watching a patient wearing only a thin green hospital gown standing in the icy wind, hooked up to an IV, smoking a cigarette. She looked at his sunken face, his rounded, almost collapsed shoulders, and knew the next time she'd see this man would probably be in the basement of her home. She was surprised to realise these thoughts no longer disturbed her.

She was further surprised when her father walked through the automatic sliding doors without pushing the usual gurney or stretcher. At first, she thought there'd been some mistake, that the body they were to collect had been stored at another hospital. As her father drew closer, however, and as he moved briefly through a pool of yellow light from a passing car, she noticed he was carrying a tiny package in his arm – no bigger than a loaf of bread. He was lurching slightly and seemed to be finding it hard to breathe.

*

The organist played ‘Amazing Grace', slower than usual, as downcast people – some dressed casually in jeans, others in dark wool and pearls – filed into the candlelit parlour. Mrs Kite was arranging some flowers beside the front dais and Ginger was passing out the Order of Service cards. Earlier, her father had handed her a pair of old-fashioned dressmaking scissors, which had once belonged to his mother. He'd whispered instructions about what she was to do with them following the ceremony, and she'd nodded and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.

In the back row sat a group of men whom Ginger recognised immediately from the beer garden across the road, clutching caps in their fists, wearing overalls and work boots covered in dried concrete. The local shopkeeper, who was always dressed in black, sat alone in the corner – an Italian woman who sometimes had to have her teenage son translate for customers. There were a few pale-faced women in a middle row cradling gurgling babies and softly berating their restless toddlers. Then the Lord Mayor swept through the door with a photographer and two suited men; Ginger had seen her picture in the paper many times. She was wearing a grey pinstripe suit and her neck was ringed with her usual leather choker dotted with silver studs. By now, it was standing-room only and some fold-out chairs had to be wedged against the wall.

Standing an arm's length away from Ginger was a tall man in a blue suit, studying the crowd. It was only when she caught a whiff of mint aftershave, and glimpsed the hook nose, that she recognised him. She could just make out the impression that his gun made through his jacket.

She frowned and glanced about, wondering why he was attending the service. After a minute or so, she recognised another man, similarly suited and groomed, standing closer to the front, his eyes roving like spotlights across the crowd of teary mourners. Ginger glanced back at the hooked-nosed one, at the slight lump protruding from the left side of his jacket, and wondered if he planned to shoot one of the mourners. It seemed strange to have detectives attend such a ceremony, as if her father were about to commit an act of terrorism rather than conduct a short funeral.

She handed out the last of the Order of Service cards and tiptoed up the middle aisle, between rows of bowed heads, through whispered prayers in what sounded like several different languages. She sat in the front row between an Aboriginal woman and a young man taking notes. The organist was now playing ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee'. On the front dais sat the usual wooden rectangular stand, but instead of supporting a two-metre casket, half-open for viewing, it presented a tiny white coffin, no longer than her own arm, surrounded by fragrant lilies

It was only when her father appeared from behind the curtains, when he assumed his place behind the lectern and began his eulogy, that she began to understand why this funeral seemed so different from the others.

‘No doubt you've all read about this tragedy in the press,' her father announced in an unusually quiet voice. ‘And I thank you sincerely for gathering here today, to mourn this anonymous soul, this tiny angel, whose presence on earth was such a brief flicker.'

Even though she had her eyes on her father, standing tall behind the lectern, she could hear people softly weeping, the rustle of tissues, a deep cough. The detective at the front of the room uncrossed his arms and raised one hand to his face.

Her father turned a page on the lectern and seemed to be reading from his notes.

‘The poor child,' he continued, ‘did not even have a name by which we can farewell her.' He also added she had no accurate date of birth, no known address.

Ginger slid to the edge of her chair and crossed her ankles, confused. In her experience, just about every corpse had been accompanied by a name and date of birth. It was customary, at the very least, for some tattered pension card, dole form or ATM receipt to identify a body. She had seen her own birth certificate, though it was incomplete.

Her father shifted and cleared his throat. ‘This nameless newborn,' he continued, ‘deserves our prayers and greatest sympathy, for her few days of life here on earth were no doubt filled with suffering and pain.'