“I’m so sorry,” he says, and he hears tears in his voice. “I just…forgot. For a moment I forgot. I can’t believe I did that. I felt like talking to him.”
“Don’t worry about it. It happens to me all the time.”
“I remember meeting you,” says Ethan. “Hi, Lila. I really can’t believe I did that.”
“I’ve got his phone,” says Lila. “Some people text. I mean, not accidentally, they know he’s dead, but they text him. One guy texted: Sorry about the hundred bucks, miss you, mate.”
“Deano,” says Ethan. “Tosser. Harvey wasn’t going to let that go.”
“I should get him to pay it to Harvey’s estate,” says Lila.
“You should.” Ethan wipes his sweaty forehead, looks up at a cloud-scudded blue sky. How is it he still gets to be here in this solar system, is still allowed to stand on this planet as it orbits around the sun, when Harvey is in some other dimension? Or simply no longer exists? “How are you…managing?”
“You know what, I just can’t believe it,” says Lila. “It’s nearly two months since the funeral and I still…I still can’t get my head around it.”
“I know,” says Ethan. “I know.”
“Harvey never seemed the type to die young,” says Lila. “He’s been middle-aged since he was ten. He should have got to be middle-aged.”
Ethan laughs. “I know exactly what you mean.”
A seagull squawks raucously and someone honks their horn. Ethan presses the phone to his ear. Is she crying? Please don’t let her be crying.
“I should let you go,” says Ethan. “I’m sorry, again—”
“Call him—call me—any time you feel like it. It’s nice for me to know people are out there thinking of Harvey. Missing him too. Bye, Ethan.”
She hangs up and Ethan walks toward the beach, past the couple who don’t stop their rabid kissing. He feels better. Surely Carter won’t be around for long, and if Jasmine falls for a guy like that, then she’s not the girl for Ethan.
He catches sight of a quietly perched kookaburra, sitting regally on the branch of a white gum, almost completely camouflaged against the trunk. The bird’s coolly calculating eyes meet his, and a childhood memory comes to him. Their next-door neighbors invited Ethan and his sister over to admire their fancy new pond filled with shimmery goldfish. The very next afternoon, as Ethan got changed out of his uniform, he looked out his bedroom window to see a kookaburra with something large, shimmery-gold and helpless in its mouth, which it was hitting, over and over, against the trunk of a tree.
Death and brutality in his own front yard.
He’s never forgotten it.
Chapter 50
The Monte Carlo remains my favorite biscuit. I always think of statistical independence when I eat one. I pull the two layers of biscuit apart, so as to enjoy the creamy jam filling. I thought everyone ate Monte Carlos that way, so I was shocked, last year, to see my good friend, Bert, bite heedlessly through both layers at once. Crumbs flying. He winked at me and said, “I like to live dangerously, Cherry.”
Chapter 51
For the rest of her life my mother believed she’d foreseen Dad’s death.
She said that day when she and Dad were arguing about the pointlessness of life insurance and Dad made his comment “if I’m struck by lightning,” she had felt his death in her chest. She knew right at that moment that he was going to die, and if Dad had just listened to her, if she’d been more insistent, if he’d closed the door on Jiminy Cricket’s oily face, it would never have happened.
She said, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”
“You’re not making any sense, Mae,” said Auntie Pat.
Dad had also said, “If I’m hit by a bus,” and he was not hit by a bus. These are just common colloquial phrases to indicate unlikely but possible events.
When I was an angry teenager I once shouted at my mother, “It meant nothing, you knew nothing!”
“I know what I knew! I know what I felt!” My mother banged her chest with her fist. By then my mother had become Madame Mae and foreseeing my father’s death had become her origin story.
I was sixteen at the time, so I thought she was an idiot.
Chapter 52
Eve folds the credit card bill up tight and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans, as if she’s hiding it from her mum. She goes into their bedroom and hops into bed. She always puts herself to bed whenever she is upset. Apparently she did this when she was a toddler. Back then it was Aww, Evie, so adorable. Now it probably means she has an actual disorder.
She has to wrench on the top sheet with all her strength just to get in. Dom always makes their bed and he does a great job. He pulls the sheets super tight, as though he’s a soldier, although he also carefully positions the throw cushions just so, which is very cute. It was his dad who taught him to make a bed like this.
Dom is an only child brought up by a single father, and Eve is an only child brought up by a single mother. They discovered this in that fateful French lesson back in Year 10. In pairs, they had to get up and describe the other person’s living situation in French. “Dom lives with his dad. He has no sisters or brothers. He has a dog called Tilly.” “Eve lives with her mum. She has no sisters or brothers. She has a cat called Tilly.” Oh my God, they were so bad at French, their French teacher hated them, but it was obvious, to, like, everyone in that class, except the teacher, because she had no soul, that Eve and Dom were two halves of a whole, two matching jigsaw pieces, two people whose pets, although different species, shared the SAME NAME, who were clearly destined to be together forever.
And now, here they are, married, living happily ever after.
They’re so, so happy!
And then, bizarrely, a cruel, malicious thought appears in her head without her permission: But, Eve, there is nothing to look forward to in your life.
For the last eighteen months it has been nothing but wedding, wedding, wedding. Lists and appointments, so much to do, and a constant feeling of momentum, as if she has been sliding toward something, faster and faster, the wedding is a month away, it’s a week away, it’s tomorrow! And then: it’s happening! She’s walking down the aisle, she’s doing the wedding dance, toasts, speeches, photos, and her face is aching from smiling so hard. And then the flight from Hobart to Sydney. No, let’s not think about the flight. Think about the honeymoon: sex and cocktails and swimming. Coming home to their new apartment! Opening all those beautifully wrapped gifts and finding places to put them and going to the shops to exchange gifts from guests with crappy taste. Writing the thank-you cards: not quite so fun, but still, another task that needed to be done. And then picking up the photos, staring at themselves, feeling kind of pleased at how good they looked, watching the video with their friends!
Now what?
Now, nothing.
Nothing as big and glamorous as her wedding will ever happen again in her whole life. She’ll just go to other people’s weddings and, yes, she will hopefully have babies, but how will they ever afford babies? And what if she can’t train them not to cry like that awful baby on the plane? She’ll have to work two jobs and make her kids dinner and do their laundry and get old and die and what is the actual point of her whole life?
