I don’t know if this is significant, but I remember I had a great deal of difficulty pinning my brooch to my blouse that morning. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to manage it. I have worn that brooch every single day of my life for thirty years. I’ve pinned and unpinned that brooch on thousands of occasions. I’ve pinned it to good silk and cheap cotton, to denim and linen and wool and a whole lot of polyester. Before that day, I had done it every morning when I got dressed, without thinking, like cleaning my teeth.
Imagine if you suddenly found you couldn’t clean your teeth. It might upset you too.
I have just now recalled that my grandmother lost the dexterity in her hands and used an elastic band to keep her toothbrush attached to her hand when she cleaned her teeth.
I’m not keen on that happening to me.
“What the heck?” I said out loud, to try to make it seem as though I were lightly amused, not wildly infuriated, by my predicament, as if it were something inconsequential like a jar lid that won’t be opened, although in truth that can be quite consequential depending on your dinner plans. My voice, in the empty house, sounded hoarse, like a smoker’s voice. I thought, Who’s that? She sounded like my auntie Pat, who was a lifelong smoker, although the “ciggies” didn’t kill her. She died of kidney disease caused by the large doses of phenacetin in the Bex Powders she took every day for her headaches. She worked at a dressmaking factory in Redfern and said all the girls took Bex. You might recognize their iconic advertisement aimed at women: Have a cup of tea, a Bex, and a good lie-down. It’s an amusing pop culture reference but it wasn’t so amusing for all those women who died of kidney disease.
Anyhow.
That was the first time my own voice had surprised me, although my face surprises me every day. There is always that one startled millisecond before I adjust: Oh, yes, that’s right, I forgot, this is you, this is how you look now. I don’t expect to see my twenty-year-old face. I think I expect to see my forty-five- or even fifty-five-year-old face looking back at me. It feels like an error, but I’m not disappointed. I have never been vain.
Correction: I have felt vanity regarding my professional abilities.
Correction: There have been times in my life where I felt beautiful and enjoyed feeling beautiful. For example, I once owned a flattering, slim-fitting, emerald-green crocheted dress. I was always wolf-whistled when I wore that dress, and a man referred to me as a “bombshell.” I liked that very much. It’s possible I was, and remain, somewhat vain about how good I looked in that dress. Wolf-whistling is no longer acceptable, and I think it may also be unacceptable to admit you once liked it, presumably because it belongs to the same category of behavior as the common, cheerful exhortation from a building site, “Show us your tits!” which nobody likes. Or perhaps some people do, I don’t know. Each to their own.
I am also a little vain about my hair.
Anyhow. I finally placed my brooch on my dressing table and walked out onto my back veranda to calm myself down.
I live in Battery Point in a one-bedroom “workers’ cottage” that was built in 1895. I had only recently purchased the property at the time of the flight. It didn’t yet feel like home. It felt like a grave error.
I can see Mount Wellington from my back veranda if I turn sideways. If I look straight ahead I can see the foreshore and right across the River Derwent. I can see yacht clubs and the marina, and if I look directly below I can see slivers of the backyards and back decks of the homes on the street that runs parallel to mine but farther down the hill.
There was snow on the mountain that morning. Hobart had just had its coldest Easter in eighty years. The white of the snow against the blue of the sky made me think of the whitewashed houses with bright blue roofs on the Greek islands.
The air was as crisp as a crunchy apple.
I do not care for apples.
I opened and closed my stiff hands, trying to loosen them.
Something caught my eye as I looked at my hands and I saw a woman on her back deck waving enthusiastically up at me. She’d misinterpreted my hand movements. She thought I was waving at her. I would never have waved at her! I think the polite thing is to pretend you can’t see anyone else in the privacy of their own homes.
I could not properly see the features of her face, but she had fashionable dark hair and she wore a white silk dressing gown.
Look, there was no way for me to know if the fabric was silk or her hair fashionable. It was just something to do with the way she moved; she moved like a fashionably haired woman wearing a silk dressing gown. I could see some kind of earth-moving equipment in her backyard. So in addition to waving, she was renovating. There would be noise and dust. Wonderful, I thought.
At that point a younger man came out onto the back deck and handed her a coffee cup. (Could have been tea, but it seemed more likely to be coffee.) He looked up and I think he may even have lifted a hand to wave, too, but I quickly stepped back inside. That was quite enough waving for one morning.
I tried once more to pin my brooch to my blouse, and by now I was feeling extremely tetchy, and once again I couldn’t seem to get a grip on the tiny sharp pin. I felt so frustrated! What was I doing differently? I remember meeting my eyes in my dressing-table mirror and snarling at myself. I remember the strange duality of it: me being so aggressively angry with me.
My reaction was oversized and unexpected. I threw the brooch in a fit of anger, as if it were the brooch’s fault. It’s not behavior you would expect from my personality type. Supposedly, the late Queen Elizabeth and I share the same personality type although I’m sure she wasn’t actually required to take the Myers-Briggs personality test for her position. I assume somebody decided her personality type based on observation.
You can probably guess what happened after I threw that brooch across the room.
Exactly.
I couldn’t find it. It’s a very small, delicate piece of jewelry. I knew logically that it had to be somewhere in the room, but it felt like it had vanished into thin air.
I got systematic. I knelt down on my hands and knees. I started from the far corner of the room and divided the bedroom into imaginary grids of approximately thirty by thirty centimeters, and then I went grid by grid across the room, running my hands across the floorboards and the gray wool blend of my non-slip rug.
It took fourteen grids before I found it.
It was near the bed. Nowhere near where I thought it would be. I stood back up and calmly pinned the brooch to my blouse, no problem at all, just the way I’d always done those eleven thousand times or so before.
I then sat in the armchair in my study, my packed bag at my feet, until it was time for my taxi.
That would have been at least four hours, which is a long time to sit without moving, without thinking a single thought. I didn’t eat breakfast. Or morning tea. Or lunch. I did not have a glass of water or even a cup of tea. I did not eat a Monte Carlo biscuit.
There was something not right with me that day.
But I guess you already knew that.
Chapter 18
Ethan Chang already has death on his mind when the Death Lady approaches his row.
So that’s ironic, or coincidental, or possibly it’s evidence he’s living in a simulation.
He isn’t just casually thinking about death, either. He’s fixated on the topic. He’s been thinking about nothing else all day.
One of the flight attendants on this morning’s flight out of Sydney had asked if he were “off to Hobart for work or pleasure?” with a big friendly smile.
“Funeral,” Ethan had answered, and the poor woman didn’t know where to put her smile.
It was his first-ever funeral. At the age of twenty-nine. His flatmate, Jasmine, talked him through funeral etiquette. She said he should dress like it’s a job interview, don’t be late, don’t chew gum, turn your phone to silent, and open every conversation with “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She said his broken wrist was not an excuse to get out of a funeral. She said funerals weren’t like birthdays. He wouldn’t get another chance next year.
