CHAPTER 6
“Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. You are seated at the right hand of the Father, receive our prayer. For you alone are the holy one, you alone are the Lord—”
“Remind me to tell you about water aerobics!”
“What?” Gemma bent her knees and dropped her head down to her grandmother’s height.
“Water aerobics!” hissed Nana Kettle into her ear. “I don’t want to forget!”
“O.K.” Gemma stifled a giggle and Nana gave her a naughty look.
When the Kettle girls were little, their grandmother used to take them to Sunday morning Mass and sit with a ramrod-straight back, monitoring their every move with flinty eyes. The stealthiest pinch of a sister’s thigh didn’t escape her. Now, Gemma took Nana to church every few weeks. Her grandmother still dressed as piously as ever—buttoned-up cardigan and skirt—but her standards of behavior seemed to have slipped. One Sunday the two of them got the giggles so bad, Gemma worried that Nana would choke to death right there in the pew.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” said Cat. “Why do you go? It’s not like you believe in God anymore, do you?”
“I don’t know,” said Gemma, which infuriated Cat.
“Do you have an opinion on anything?”
“Not really.”
It was true, in a way. Opinions were for other people. It was fascinating how upset they got about them.
“Please be seated.”
The congregation shuffled, coughed, and sighed as they settled themselves down for the sermon. Nana dropped her chin on to her chest for a nap.
Gemma watched the people in front of her. She loved secretly spying on people, observing their little dramas. There was a couple today with a tiny baby. At the beginning of Mass, their baby had cried and they both became cross and irritated, mouthing panicky instructions at each other. Now, the baby was sleeping, and Gemma watched the man’s hand reach across and pat the woman’s knee. The woman slid slightly on her seat so that her shoulder pressed forgivingly against his. Ah. Lovely.
The man had very thick brown hair. Marcus had had hair like that. Actually the back of his head was remarkably similar to Marcus’s.
Don’t, Gemma told herself sternly. He doesn’t look at all like Marcus. Think about Charlie’s head! Charlie’s adorable, balding head!
But it was too late. Marcus had elbowed Charlie right out of his way.
“What the f*ck are you doing?” was the last thing Marcus said before he dropped Gemma’s hand, stepped off the curb, and died instantly.
It was an unfortunate choice of last words. After all, he had said much nicer things to her in his lifetime. He’d said lovely things. Romantic things. Passionate things.
It was just that now, before Gemma could remember a single “I love you,” she first had to remember, “What the f*ck are you doing?”
What the f*ck she was doing was leaning over to pick up the wedding invitation that had mysteriously slithered out of the satisfying square bundle held firmly in her hand.
“Oh!” she said. Had she been shedding invitations the whole way from the car?
Marcus let go of her hand. Gemma reached down for the envelope. There was a shrieking squeal of brakes, like an animal’s frightened scream.
She looked up and saw Marcus flying. He was a big man, Marcus, and he was flying like a rag doll in the air, his limbs flailing loosely in a horribly undignified manner.
He didn’t fall like a rag doll. He collided violently with the road, slamming lumpily against the concrete.
Then he was still.
“Oh, Jesus.” Gemma heard a man’s voice.
Run. She knew she was meant to run to him.
Car doors were opening. People were pounding across the pavement, calling urgent, important instructions to one another.
Within seconds Marcus was surrounded by a group of people and still Gemma stood, with their wedding invitations in her hand.
This was something quite big. This was something for grown-ups to fix. This was something for strong, fatherly men and efficient, motherly women. Capable people.
Carefully, she put the pile of envelopes down in the gutter and stood with her hands hanging limp and heavy by her side, waiting for somebody to tell her to what to do.
Then her body started moving on its own, running across the road, and her hands were pushing rudely at people’s backs and shoulders to make them get out of the way. She could hear herself screaming “Marcus!” and his name sounded strange to her, as if she were making it up.
Two weeks after the funeral, she went back to work. It felt like she’d been away visiting a different planet. She was teaching second grade at the time and when she walked back into her classroom, she was greeted by an eerie sight—twenty-four seven-year-olds sitting upright in their seats, hands flat on their desks, big eyes watching her every move.
Even the naughty ones were quiet. Not a peep from Dean the Attention-Deficit Demon. Then one by one they began to walk up to her desk, to silently hand her gifts. Mars Bars. Bags of chips. Hand-drawn cards.
“It made me very sad that you were sad, Miss Kettle,” said Nathan Chipman, a trifle accusingly, as he handed her a soggy Banana Paddle Pop. He leaned over and whispered confidentially in her ear, his breath warm against her neck. “I even cried a little bit.”
Gemma put her head down on the desk and felt her whole body torn by wrenching sobs, as feet pattered across the room and dozens of little hands patted her consolingly on the back and stroked her hair.
“Don’t cry, Miss Kettle. Don’t cry.”
There’s something wrong with me, she thought. There’s something very badly wrong with me. She was twenty-two and she felt all used up, a dried-out old husk, a dirty old rag.
After school that day, she obeyed a sudden weird impulse and went to confession, fascinated by her own behavior. It had been so long, and she and her sisters had shrugged off their Catholic educations so effectively, it felt like she was taking part in a bizarre, cultish ritual.
But as soon as she knelt down in the dusty-smelling, terrifying little cupboard and the window slid across revealing the priest’s shadowy profile, she automatically crossed herself and chanted in that secret, trembly whisper of years ago, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been six years since my last confession. Here are my sins.”
And then she stopped and thought, Dear Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?
“Um. Here are my sins. Yes.”
Oh my. Now she was going to laugh.
“Take your time, my dear,” encouraged the priest, and she didn’t want to let him down because he sounded so nice and normal and she did want absolution and she thought about Marcus’s father at the funeral, sobbing so hard he could hardly stand, and there was an undigested lump of guilt lodged in her throat making it difficult to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry for taking up your time.”
She got up from her knees and walked straight from the confessional, and out of the church and into the sunshine.
After a year or two she stopped feeling guilty.
Sometimes she wondered if she stopped feeling anything at all.
After Mass, as per their routine, Gemma took Nana home for a cup of tea and a manicure.
The Kettle girls had inherited responsibility for Nana’s nails from their grandfather. Every Sunday night, for forty-three years, right up until the week before he died, he had given his wife a beautiful manicure, lining up nail polish, nail file, and polish remover on the dining room table with the same professional precision as the tools in his shed. “Oh don’t worry, love, that looks perfect,” Nana would say impatiently as he held up her little finger to the light and frowned critically. “If a job’s worth doing,” Pop would mutter.
Gemma doubted that Pop would have approved of Gemma’s work. Although she hunched with concentration over each finger, swearing under her breath and twisting around in her seat, the polish still formed peculiar ridges and lumps.
It didn’t seem to matter. Nana really just wanted an excuse to sit and chat. Today, she was telling the story of Pop’s promotion to supervisor and how he wore a tie to work for the first time.
“So off he went, proud as punch with his lovely striped tie!” Gemma put the nail brush back in the bottle and shook it with hopeful vigor while she listened.
“And when he came home that night I could see he was a little down but he didn’t say a word. The next morning, I said to him, Les, aren’t you wearing a tie today? And he said, Oh, Bob had a word with me. Said the men were having a bit of a joke about it and it wasn’t really necessary to dress so formal, seeing as he wasn’t one of the big managers. Oh, he was so hurt, Gemma, that they would laugh like that. He never wore a tie again.”
Gemma sniffed loudly. That particular story always made her ache with sadness. She thought about how Pop must have got that horrible feeling of embarrassment, that shoved-in-the-stomach feeling when Bob called him over to have his “word.”
“I hate Bob,” she said.
“Yes, well, he was a funny fellow. Long dead now of course. Prostate cancer.”
“Serves him right,” Gemma said with satisfaction, blowing on her grandmother’s fingers to dry them. “I hope it was painful.”
“You’ve got your pop’s lovely sweet nature,” said Nana, seemingly oblivious to all indications to the contrary.
Gemma snorted and used her thumbnail to try and scratch paint away from her grandmother’s cuticles. “I do not. None of us take after Pop. We’re all bad-tempered, like Mum, and competitive, like Dad. Actually, now I think about it, we’re quite awful.”
“Oh, don’t talk such silly talk! You do all drive too fast, I must say. You get that from your father.”
Gemma chortled. “Lyn has got the most tickets at the moment.”
“That’s because she’s always rushing around. Mathew should help her more.”
“Michael, Nana.”
“Yes, Michael. That’s what I’m saying, darling. He doesn’t help enough with those breakfast trucks. She seems to have to do it all herself.”
“Well, of course she does. That’s because it’s her business.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Nana vaguely. “Now tell me about this new young man. He’s a locksmith, is he? Your grandfather would have liked that, he would have been so interested!”
Gemma bundled up the bottles and cotton buds from the table and walked toward the bathroom. “He’s lovely,” she began.
“Your grandfather never liked Marcus, you know,” said her grandmother suddenly. “He said, I don’t like that bloke!” Gemma stopped at the doorway. She couldn’t believe it. “Nana?”
“Mmmm?” Nana was admiring her nails, holding them up to the light.
“Didn’t Pop like Marcus?”
Her grandmother put her hands back on the table in front of her and began to push herself up to a standing position. “I do hope Maddie doesn’t grow up looking too Italian,” she said, with one of her baffling leaps to a new topic of conversation.
“Nana! For one thing Michael is Greek, not Italian, and what if Maddie did grow up looking Italian? What have you got against Italians? Charlie is Italian!”
“Charlie,” said Nana thoughtfully. “Your mother had a boyfriend called Charlie. Frank used to make terrible fun of his teeth. I don’t think he was Italian, though.”
Gemma groaned with frustration and went into the bathroom. She opened the mirrored cabinet to see shimmering clean shelves instead of the normal overflowing jumble of ancient bottles and jars.
“I see Lyn’s been here!” she called out.
Pop never had a bad word to say about anybody. It couldn’t be true.
She walked back into the dining room. “Pop liked Marcus didn’t he, Nana?”
Her grandmother beamed. “Oh yes! Your grandfather had a lot of time for Mathew. They used to talk about computers.”
Gemma sighed. Perhaps Mum was right. It was best to take Nana Kettle in small doses.
The Ferry
When I was nine, my parents took me on holiday to Australia. I loved it! I can even remember the exact moment when I decided, yep, this is where I’m going to live one day.
We were on the Manly Ferry after a day at the beach. It had been one of those long, hot, typical Aussie summer days, the sky at sunset looked like pink cotton wool and the cicadas were screeching. We were sitting on the wharf side of the ferry and the guy had already hauled in the little walkway, when my mother said, “Look at these people, they’ll never make it!” It was a man and three little girls about my age, and they were running like mad, yelling out, “Wait for us!” One of the girls was ahead of the others. She was running so fast, arms pumping, looking back over her shoulder at the others. I saw the man swoop the other two girls up by their waists, one under each arm, like sacks. The girls were giggling their heads off, legs dangling, and the man’s face was bright red with effort.
I think the ferry guy would have ignored them, but passengers started calling out, Wait, wait! So he rolled his eyes and put the walkway back out again and they all came clattering on, laughing and panting. Some of the passengers even cheered them. It looked like they’d just come straight out of the ocean. The little girls all had dripping wet ponytails sticking out of the back of baseball caps and bare feet caked in sand. The father had their beach towels over one shoulder and he said, “Thanks, mate!” and slapped the guy on the shoulder.
They walked right by us and I could hear them saying, “That was so funny, Dad!” “Let’s have an ice cream now, Daddy!” I realized they must have been sisters. Well, being only an only child living in sad, sodden old Manchester, it seemed to me that they led dream lives.
I thought, I bet you girls have no idea how lucky you are.
That’s when I decided I was going to come and live here when I grew up. It felt like the first grown-up decision I’d ever made. I remember looking at my parents and feeling sorry for them, because they’d miss me when I moved all the way to Australia.
They do too.