Something Special, Something Rare (2 page)

THE MEANING OF LIFE

MANDY SAYER

Each week, in Darlinghurst, there are more people dying than being born. They die from drive-by shootings and accidental overdoses, bar brawls and binges, bikie contracts and suicidal leaps from art deco buildings. Occasionally, they're the victims of more common causes: bowel cancer, heart attack, but rarely old age. By the time she was twelve, Ginger knew this – and more – because her father was the undertaker at the local funeral home.

An only child, she'd grown up in the four-storey Victorian terrace amid the smells of cosmetic powders and embalming fluid. The family residence was on the top two floors, filled with furniture and carpets from the century before, when her grandparents had run the business. From the time she could remember, Ginger had witnessed an average two or three funerals a week in the large candlelit parlour, just to the right of the entry foyer. She'd seen extravagant ceremonies involving string quartets and flocks of doves, floral wreaths the size of doors, digital slideshows on wide plasma screens. More often than not, however, the services were small and modest: a closed cardboard coffin, a clutch of weeping friends, maybe two or three relatives arguing in a corner about who was going to pay for the cremation.

The funeral of her mother had been an entirely different affair. Filling up the first rows of seating were the wives of members of the Australian Association of Funeral Directors – mostly stiff-backed women with serious faces who considered themselves modern because they no longer felt obliged to wear black at a funeral. Instead, they paraded their progressiveness with grey twin-sets, brown tweed – one even had the temerity to don a yellow hat. There were also women from the Parents and Teachers Association at Ginger's school, all dressed in various shades of charcoal, and her mother's two younger brothers and surviving uncles.

Ginger had been seven at the time of her mother's death. Her father had explained to her that she'd been transformed into an angel by God and now lived on the gabled roof of their house, between the two chimneys. For a short time afterwards, when she was walking home from school, she would gaze up at the roof, squinting through the afternoon glare, trying to catch a glimpse of her mother's long fair hair, and her fluffy white angel wings silhouetted against the sky.

At the time, Ginger didn't fully understand the concept of death and assumed her mother would one day return to their home after God no longer required her services. She'd been told her mother had passed away
from a stroke,
which hardly seemed serious, let alone terminal. Some afternoons, she'd creep into her parents' bedroom and try on the silk dresses and high-waisted skirts left hanging in the closet. She'd dab on musky perfume and parade around the room in high heels, impersonating her mother at the butcher shop, pointing at imaginary cuts of steak and ordering legs of lamb.

After her mother's funeral, her father had been so grief-stricken he'd stayed down in the basement for weeks, unable to work and eating very little. Ginger had always been forbidden to enter the basement and, following the loss of her mother, the strict rule continued to be enforced. During that time it felt as if she'd lost both her parents and the rooms of her home seemed larger and more ominous.

A housekeeper was engaged by a concerned relative to look after Ginger, and to monitor the funeral home's telephones and email. Most of the time Mrs Kite simply told prospective clients that Mr Moss was on an overseas holiday and operations at the home had been temporarily suspended. Each afternoon, before dinner, Ginger would stand at the top of the basement steps and call down to her father, telling him the details of her day at school. As usual, he would not allow her any closer than the top landing of the staircase – and sometimes, when he didn't respond to her daily reports, she wondered if he was still down there at all.

When he did finally emerge from the basement, after a month or so, he was so thin and pale he looked positively cadaverous. Ginger had always been conscious of the fact that her father and mother (when she'd been alive) seemed to be so much older than the parents of her friends. At the school gate she'd noticed women with glossy hair and apple-smooth skin picking up their kids and chasing them towards parked four-wheel drives, while her own mother, her ash-blonde hair flecked with grey, her face deeply lined, leaned on the fence to ease her arthritis. Her father was tall and thin, with pewter-coloured hair, and a long solemn face that suggested he was in constant pain, though she had never once heard him complain of an ailment. Strangers meeting the family for the first time had often assumed that her mother and father were, in fact, her grandparents, which was a frequent source of social embarrassment. After having lived in the basement for weeks, her father was sporting a white beard, and thick strands of tobacco-coloured hair were sprouting from his nose.

Not previously a man of many words, the bearded father before her now babbled incessantly, about his childhood, his first love, the toxicity of formaldehyde, as if he'd suddenly forgotten she was merely a little girl who'd recently lost her mother and was too young to fully understand his ramblings. Gulping down mouthfuls of absinthe, he talked of his travels through Western Europe, his English parents, the first time he'd seen a sunset and a full moon on opposite horizons of the same sky. At night, by the open fire in the sitting room, he began to tell her wild tales of exploding crypts, stolen corpses and premature burials.

The story that haunted her the most was the one about a heavily pregnant woman in the nineteenth century, who, after having suffered a bout of scarlet fever, was pronounced dead by the local priest. Following the woman's burial, the attending nurse voiced her doubts about the possibility of the woman's death, and the shocked and panicking husband promptly had the body exhumed. Not only did they discover the corpse lying on her stomach, clutching a fistful of hair, they also found that, after she'd been buried, the woman had given birth to a baby girl, who was lying between her legs in a pool of dried blood and still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord.

Ginger was so rattled by the tale she began to suspect her own mother might have suffered a similar fate, that she was not in fact a winged angel hovering above their home, but a living woman trapped in a wooden box two metres beneath the earth. Why, at her funeral, only weeks before, she'd lain in her open coffin, smiling serenely, her cheeks aglow, as if she were only asleep and having a pleasant dream. And could her father have accidentally buried other people alive, without anyone realising his fatal mistakes? If a priest – a man of God – could make such a serious error, surely so could the old man before her.

One night, sitting at his feet, she grew teary and breathless and pressed her face into his lap. He rested his hand on her head and stroked her hair, asking over and over what was wrong with his little girl. She trembled and hiccupped and wiped her eyes, trying to find the words to describe her despair.

Finally, she voiced her fears: the premature burials, her visions of babies being born in deep graves, the possibility that her mother might still be alive beneath the buffalo grass in Waverly Cemetery.

It was then that she heard him swallow hard. He took her face in his hands and lifted it from his lap, so they faced one another directly and she could smell the chemical whiff of alcohol on his breath.

‘Now,' he whispered, ‘I've got something important to share with you. You must promise not to tell anyone. It will be our secret.'

*

The calls usually came at night, from hospitals, hostels and private homes. If the telephone didn't wake her, the creak of her bedroom door would, and by the time her father had bundled her up in her flannel dressing gown, she'd be rubbing crust from the corners of her eyes. It generally took two adults to lift and transport a corpse, but since her mother had died, her father preferred to work alone or, rather, he preferred to work in the sole company of his daughter.

The inside of the hearse always smelled of leather and wilting flowers. On hot evenings, a faint stench would rise, like stagnant water left sitting too long in a vase. She found it strangely alluring to be out so late, without anyone else knowing – not even Mrs Kite, who always slept soundly each night until dawn.

She never accompanied her father into the mortuaries and hospitals, but remained in the front seat of the hearse, breathing on the windscreen and writing her name over and over with her index finger. Eventually, he would appear, pushing a gurney, with a corpse inside a canvas bag, which he loaded into the back. On the way home, she would listen for any signs of life from the body that lay behind her – a cough, a cry, a timid sigh – so that her father wouldn't be like that man in the story who'd mistakenly buried a person alive.

The purpose of these trips, her father explained, was to help her to understand the difference between the living and the dead, between a human being and a corpse. Unlike the nineteenth century, he continued, today a body had to be examined by a raft of experts – a medical examiner, a coroner, a mortician like himself – before being declared officially dead.

The problem, Ginger soon realised, was that even a genuine corpse often refused to remain silent. Once, on their way home from a pick-up, she was startled to hear a sound, like a distant, faulty vacuum cleaner, whistling from the rear of the hearse. Another time, she heard a moan, as if the body was having a nightmare. Yet another time, she heard what sounded like a brief explosion, and her father explained to her that the dead are full of stale air and wind desperate to escape back into the atmosphere of the living.

One morning, when she admitted to him that she was still confused, that she still feared her mother had been buried alive, her father began chewing on the inside of his cheeks. He glanced around the room for what seemed like a long time, as if someone might appear to give him some advice on what to do.

Eventually, he cleared his throat, as if preparing to make a speech.

‘Trust me,' he said. ‘Your mother has not been buried alive.'

She sniffed and looked away, shaking her head.

Her father tugged on his beard several times and sighed. She glanced up into his eyes and to her they seemed watery and unusually grey. And then he did something he'd never done before: he took her hand firmly and began leading her down four flights of stairs, to the basement. His hand around hers was warm and reassuring – as it had been when he'd walked her to her first day at school. And, with every step she took with him – she couldn't tell why – she felt her anxiety diminishing.

*

The sandstone walls were lined with wooden cabinets, painted white, with glass doors through which she could see various bottles and jars of what looked like pale yellow powder. Surgical instruments were lined up beside a double sink: needles, scalpels, tubes and forceps.

In the centre of the room was a steel table with a narrow drainage gutter running around the sides. Lying on the table was a body – one she and her father had collected the night before from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Until that moment, she hadn't seen the corpse, a young woman with matted green hair whose collarbones and ribcage jutted through her skin. Her eyes were closed and her skin had a bluish sheen to it, like the early swelling of a bruise. Her father lit a candle and held it over the body. She flinched as she watched him lower it towards the woman's arm and held the flame against her wrist. Ginger smelled a hint of singed hair but, as she watched the woman's skin redden, she heard no cry of pain, not even a whimper.

Her father explained that, in the olden days, there were other ways of proving that a body was no longer alive: cutting off fingers, rigging bells to limbs, placing pennies on eyelids for three days before burial. Now, what with the advances in modern science, the chances of such an accident occurring were virtually impossible.

Ginger frowned. She grasped a hank of the woman's green hair and pulled on it. The woman didn't make a sound, nor did she move. ‘Can we dig up Mum?' she asked. ‘Just to be sure?'

Her father pursed his lips and shook his head. When she asked why they couldn't, he explained that exhuming bodies, without consent from the authorities, was against the law.

‘What if we don't get caught?' she persisted. ‘We could do it in the middle of the night, when everyone's asleep.'

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 not look among 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.