The Household Guide to Dying

Three

Dear Delia

My kids won’t eat vegetables apart from potato chips. And my husband hates salad. Do you have any hints to get them eating greens and other vegetables? I get sick of cooking meals they hardly eat.

Fed Up.

Dear Fed Up

Mrs Beeton declared, ‘As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment.’ Assert yourself, Fed Up. You’re the cook, so take command and cook what you think they should eat. In fact, you should cook what you want to eat, even if your favourite dish is sardines on toast or tripe curry. Take your meals alone if you have to. Let them sort it out. Remember, you’re the boss.

What are the cockles of the heart anyway?

The oddest thoughts come to you when you’re standing at a graveside. And at a graveside a dictionary is probably the last thing you have to hand. I knew all about the heart, but when I got home I would have to look up the cockles.

Meanwhile, it was a chilly but clear late winter day, and I was roaming through Rookwood cemetery searching for a grave. The one I was standing before, in that silent city, had a leaning tombstone that said:

Arthur Edward Proudfoot

Late of the Parish

Underneath which had been added:

Also Alice Elizabeth

Wife of the Above

And in smaller lettering the saddest inscription of them all:

Henry James Proudfoot

Stillborn.

And then, under all that:

Died 1875

Gone but Never Forgotten

Always in the Cockles of Our Heart

An entire family history, in one brief and savage year, captured on one tombstone, erected by a family member now probably themselves unknown. There was something inescapably Dickensian about it. Especially when the largest and blackest crow I had ever seen alighted on the headstone two rows down and fixed me with a challenging look.

Let’s check the map, I said to the girls, still thinking about the cockles of the heart.

Archie had walked way ahead, taking photos of the enormous monuments to the dead built by the Italians. There were vaults out here larger than inner-city flats, and probably more expensive. Entire streets devoted to housing the dead. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see some black-scarfed woman emerge from a vault doorway and start sweeping down the pathway in front, or a few old men sitting at a corner smoking and playing cards.

There was nothing extraordinary about the dead, I had already accepted that. But it was extraordinary that I had lived most of my life without visiting them. Now I was doing research for my book. And I was also looking for my father, Frank, who died after a sudden heart attack some thirty-five years ago. His grave was a place I’d never visited. Now that I knew I was dying I needed to come.

I’m bored. This is so boring. When are we leaving?

I told you to bring a book or something.

But Daisy’s complaint was fair. It was tedious for a child of eight to be trailing behind an adult around a cemetery. I knew that Estelle was bored too but she understood why it was important for us to come to Rookwood, and anyway she’d brought her Nintendo DS.

I, on the other hand, was delighted. I hadn’t found my father yet, despite the maps posted all around as well as my mother’s directions, but was happy to wander past the rows and rows of family vaults. We had seen vaults perched like caravans on temporary-looking bases. Maybe they were temporary, maybe some families planned to take their dead relatives with them if they ever moved interstate or overseas. I’d gazed at the Lithuanian monument and peered closely at the sample of Lithuanian soil preserved behind a panel of glass. It looked more like something from a biology experiment than a handful of dirt.

Over here, called Archie, and so I followed and finally came to the place where my father was buried. The headstone was plain, as I knew it would be, Jean being the practical person that she was. It was grey granite, low and modest, with a brass plate inscribed with his name. It said:

Frank (Francis) Bennet

(not even In Loving Memory Of: that wasn’t Jean’s style)

Husband of Jean

Father of Delia

Sadly Missed

And that was it. No other details. No date. At the foot of the grave, Jean had planted some sort of groundcover which required maintenance once every five years, which was about all she visited now.

Hibbertia, said Archie. It’ll outlast a nuclear war.

I leaned over and examined it more closely. This end of winter, the weather was mild and buds were just forming. Soon it would be covered in flat yellow flowers.

I was five when my father died and I wasn’t taken to the funeral. Those were the days when everything to do with death was silenced, hidden and guarded, like a rabid beast that a family was still obliged to keep. Children especially were kept well away, even from their dead parents, as if the bite of that beast would infect them forever. In the first few years after my father died, Jean would visit occasionally with a tin of Brasso and a fresh bunch of fake flowers, but she would never take me, and I don’t remember wanting to go. Now it was so different, it seemed normal that I was bringing my daughters here – complaining though they were – just as it was normal to be discussing with them aspects of the dying process, which, after all, they were watching month by month, week by week.

Had enough? Archie said after I’d stood for a bit longer at the grave of Frank Bennet. I barely remembered him. He was not much more than a tall shape from the past. I remembered him mainly in the study in the house where I grew up, which contained books that he would take from the shelves with such reverence they seemed to be fragile things. I was rarely allowed to touch them. He had a garden shed full of tools also forbidden to me. He would make me watch from a safe distance as he planed a piece of timber or sharpened the lawnmower blades. The strongest memories of my father involved images of me running to his study or shed with messages from my mother about phone calls or dinners, and the powerful sense of importance that gave me.

I had thought the moment might have been more emotionally charged, but it was not like that. I felt nothing much at all, standing there. But I was glad I came, to see him, and to say goodbye in a way. My father’s only heart attack had been sudden and final. He was in his study at his desk one minute, on the floor the next. I wondered what had happened to the cockles of his heart, if they’d just shattered or closed off, or if they’d been faulty all along.

As we drove out of Rookwood cemetery I noticed a huge warehouse on the left, with loading docks down one side. Surely there wasn’t that volume of the dead to be stored or processed like airline cargo. At the end of the building was a red and white sign. Australia Post.

It must be the mail processing centre, I said. Strange place to have it.

Maybe it’s the dead letter office, said Estelle after a second. Then we both screeched with laughter.

I don’t get it, said Daisy, looking aggrieved.

Never mind, sweetie, Archie said as he turned back onto the highway. Do you still want to go to Waverley?

I looked at my watch. It was just after midday.

Yeah, why not? Maybe we can get some lunch around there too.

It’ll still be boring, Daisy said. Why can’t we go on a different excursion, why can’t we go to the beach?

It is near the beach. We could go to Bondi afterwards and get an ice cream.

But I want to go swimming! I want to go to Manly beach.

No, I said, slipping a CD into the player, it’s not nearly warm enough to go swimming at the beach, or anywhere. Besides, I get to choose the excursions from now on.

The opening notes of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ filled the car.

Eww, not him again, Estelle said. Can’t we listen to something else?

No, I said. I get to choose the music from now on too.

Four

A few months before our visit to the cemetery, I had left on another excursion on my own, and I’d found it was also a matter of the right music.

There was a place I had to revisit before it was too late. Way up north, a place where I once lived. Where we’d both lived. But I knew if I told Archie, he would stop me. I knew if I tried to say goodbye to my daughters, I wouldn’t be able to leave. I had to choose the day carefully, a school day, a work day, a quiet suburban sort of day, when a drive to the local shops could casually extend into a long trip. I just had to get in the car and go. And of all the things I should have been attending to, the only thing I cared for was the accompaniment to my long drive north. Get the background music right, and everything else would slip into place. It was a soundtrack, this road movie of my life, this one-shot-at-it adventure to end all adventures, where my ears would become the organs I’d rely on more than any other, more than, at times, it seemed, my very heart.

So, I forgot checking under the bonnet for oil and water levels, forgot the spare tyre. Forgot phoning ahead to see which places had motels and which didn’t, which places were indeed places, not just dots on the map, specks with only a petrol station, cafe and general store all in one, a pit stop for the loneliest drivers, the emptiest of tanks, a tenminute stop surrounded by bitumen and disappointment, and on a Sunday afternoon always shut.

I didn’t fill a Thermos, or even check I had sunglasses, packets of nuts and dried fruit, two bottles of water, one for me, one for the radiator. Just walked out that door with the barest of essentials in a small bag, a couple of books, and drove off leaving the house to its own rhythms and noises. The beds were roughly made, the dishes rinsed and left in the sink, the note was on the bench.

The screen door was still swinging as I departed. Around me the birds were chirruping in their trees as if it was just another morning in May with the post delivery revving its way from up the road, with the honeysuckle still in need of trimming down by the letterbox and the white dog shit there on the nature strip along with the flattened drink can and the sodden pulp of the week before’s local paper which I’d clean away. One day.

Just not that day. Because that particular day I needed to leave while there was no one around to hold me back or ask why or talk sensibly or remind me of all that needed to be done in the next few weeks or months. Or tell me the most logical thing of all: that what I was rushing towards couldn’t be found. It was a journey I’d been putting off for years, yet now I was racing off as if it were an emergency.

As I swung out of the driveway in reverse, smooth and swift as a handshake, I waved to my neighbour over the road sweeping her front path, nodded to the postie as she puttered past, then accelerated up the street, which turned into the main street, and then into the highway, the one that would take me all the way north.

Music would be my companion. It would be so vital a presence it would almost drive the car itself. But mostly it would wash through my head, drowning the sound of my own thoughts and the details, the remorse, the despair, the pain that would persist in accompanying me on this escape. The soundtrack would charm the memories up, the ones I didn’t want but could no longer ignore. The ones that I had to take with me as I travelled back, and north. The memories, which were a soundtrack of their own.

I chose carefully. Nothing too gloomy. No Tom Waits, or I’d be driving off the road straight into the nearest tree that offered certain and complete annihilation. Bach was good but only for long unbroken stretches: the complex fugal pieces were incompatible with negotiating tricky routes or traffic in unfamiliar towns. I sorted through my box of music, most of them cassettes in cracked covers collected for car trips over the last fifteen years, most of them telling some sort of story, though none with any logic. The Willie Nelson tape with his version of ‘Graceland’ that I currently favoured (there was definitely a whole story in that). Tapes of assorted unrelated artists: Dusty Springfield, Georgie Fame, the Andrews Sisters, the Glenn Miller Band. The mindlessly cheeky George Formby, now so obscure a performer, I wondered how he ever made the transition from record to tape. Mahalia Jackson, if I was in the mood for august serenity. Country, all types. Hank Williams. Yodelling songs. Gillian Welch. Lyle Lovett. (Asleep at the Wheel I’d avoid, for obvious reasons.) It was a big collection, enough for my needs.

And there was always Elvis. I’d not played his albums for nearly fifteen years, never listened to a single song, if I could help it. But now I’d included the old cassettes in the box I was taking with me. It was time to start listening to Elvis again. But I’d wait a little longer before putting him into the player. It was going to be a long journey, and there was plenty of time for that.

So I drove north with songs like ‘Graceland’ urging me on, into the lush steamy warmth, to a place remote yet accessible, elusive yet as solid and immovable as a pyramid. There was chance here, a chance that had to be taken or it would slip away faster than a southern sunset. What was it exactly that I was taking a chance on?

I really didn’t know, even though I was bursting to get there, my heart accelerating ahead of my thoughts, and, while empty of understanding at that stage, I was still ripe with anticipation. The same feelings that had struck me when first I arrived, all those years back.

The town of Amethyst was off the map, but it was there all right, bordered by thick margins of rainforest and mountains that slowly narrowed out, stretching northward until they began to merge into the long triangle that eventually led to Cape York. The town was situated in the middle of the middle, about halfway north of the New South Wales border, and halfway west of the coast. I could get away from the south and head north without a map – anyone could, there were plenty of signs. But at a certain point, to get near the right place, I needed the map, though the name wasn’t marked. I read other names signposting the direction, and they were names that beckoned: Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby. Legendary riches.

Somewhere before the surfing nirvanas and the other lures of the coast I turned west. At some stage I turned off the soundtrack, let Hank and Frank and Mahalia and all the rest lie in their box on the floor of the car along with the tissues and takeaway wrappers and the mobile phone that I’d turn back on again when I could bear to. The cloud that had collected and settled like smog on my memories began to thin out, then lift altogether. And then I didn’t need the map. I knew without looking that a place in the middle of places with names like jewels was near where I needed to be. It wasn’t that far from Emerald, and not so far from the highway either.

Late in the afternoon on the fourth day of the journey, I glanced to my left and saw the signs and the three roadside businesses: a service station, a timber yard and, most oddly of all, a garden art place with gnomes in rows along the front fence, that indicated the turnoff to the last town on the route, Garnet, the last place before my destination. I was travelling on a rise when I saw jutting out of the trees beside the road the sign advertising Lazarus’s trailer and campervan business, three kilometres ahead. A sign about fifty years old, flaked and faded, and pitted with the usual rifle shots. After two kilometres I slowed down, keeping my eye out. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight, and I couldn’t remember passing one since the last town.

I knew I was in the right place, or near enough. The sign had said nothing about where, exactly, but I drove slowly forward again until I spotted a break in the trees to my left, and I took the turnoff past Lazarus’s collection of elderly vehicles, knowing it was the right place to go. The road wound down for a bit then started to rise. Somewhere on the very outer reaches of the range I knew I’d entered that large section of valleys and hills and sluggish little creeks posing as rivers situated between Clermont, not far ahead of me, Emerald to the south, where I’d been, and Alpha to the west, where I didn’t intend to go. The road twisted pleasantly. The sun, low and intense, pokered my eyes. I had already dropped the map on the floor of the car.

When I’d first come here over twenty years ago, a bus had dropped me at the side of the road by Lazarus’s sign. I’d walked along the road towards Amethyst, not caring how long it would take. And there was barely another car, none that I recalled. It was like entering another time frame. Maybe it was the impression of the gums shooting so high they seemed like anchors for the sky. Maybe it was the cooler air, or the spotty variable light, light that also appeared partly dark. Maybe it was the leaves that drifted down from that dense canopy, slower and more dreamily than leaves normally drop. Or maybe the bird calls far above, musical and hidden. It was timeless, other worldly. It was uncharted, and so it seemed to be invested with a corresponding fairytale quality.

Of course, I was young then, I would think that. I was a walking cliché. Seventeen, pregnant, alone. I had fought with my mother yet again. I had not fought with my boyfriend, Van, since I’d been denied the opportunity when he simply disappeared, justifying all the doubts about him my mother had had ever since she first met him. The more she had tried to talk me into an abortion the more I resisted. She was motivated, I understood eventually, only by concern, and distress that I was throwing away my educational opportunities to strap down my life with a baby before I was barely grown myself. I was motivated instead by my ideals, my dreams, adoring Van and falling easily into his older, larger world of music and poetry and inner-city sophistication.

The morning I had woken in Van’s room in Newtown and noticed his romantically meagre belongings were gone, I had felt a sick stab of suspicion, soon confirmed when after days I heard and found out nothing. By then it was too late for an abortion, and definitely too late to admit my mother was right about him.

I couldn’t say at what point I became convinced that Van had returned north to the town where he grew up and where his talented performing family still lived. All I remembered was the aching conviction that north in Amethyst was where I would find him. Or he would find me, and our baby.

Five

Dear Delia

I’ve been reading your column for some years now and I reckon I could do just as well. Who needs to be qualified to write about dirty shirt collars and poultry stuffing anyway?

Yours

Cynical.

Dear Cynical

Perhaps you are unaware that books of household advice form an integral part of our literary heritage. They are cherished by readers the world over and have been particularly sought in times of distress and hardship. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was beloved by the most unlikely of readers: the conquerors of Mount Everest, the trench soldiers on the battlefields of France. Members of many journeys and expeditions have all drawn comfort from its practical advice and general historical knowledge infused with moral ardour and homely goodness. The members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition might have perished, but they did so with copies of Mrs Beeton in their hands.

The fact that generations of women managed without a single self-help guide is admirable and humbling. Now the number of books available on domestic advice, from specialist titles devoted entirely to stain removal to baby care books and handy manuals taking a novice through simple family meals step by step, is enormous. More than enough to stock several shelves in the average bookstore. A hundred and fifty years back there were approximately none. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was the first, and that did not appear until 1861. How ever did women manage before the likes of Mrs Beeton?

Unlike Isabella Beeton’s, my career as a household expert was accidental. The series of Household Guides had become mine and made my reputation, but the original idea belonged to Nancy Costello, a commercial publisher and my employer – if freelancers had employers – and also a friend, though in a limited sense. Nancy and I enjoyed a warily pleasant relationship, one in which neither of us was committed to remembering the other’s birthday or socialising regularly, but in which we could ring each other up any time about almost anything. There was no sense of obligation, and no occasion for confusion, resentment or hurt. I doubted I’d ever tell Nancy my best secrets or discuss with her my worst fears, but on the other hand I was always able to count on things like frank gossip, her best recipes (she was a great cook), or the loan of her car should I ever need it.

Nancy was pragmatic, efficient, opportunistic, ahead of her time. She understood, then knew how to address, the crises of confidence that saw intelligent people confounded by the prospect of hanging a painting, replacing a boot heel, or boiling a perfect soft egg. Her first great success was getting a free household magazine into millions of households. Her second was to develop a series of specialist self-help titles that even the vast self-help title industry had not yet thought of.

Nancy decided that the home was diminishing as the site of traditional folklore and knowledge, of mainly female authority. Whereas women had once known almost instinctively how to polish furniture or remove wine stains, now they were more likely to understand how to program a digital set top box, or complete their quarterly tax statement. While it was true that fewer men could now trim hedges or degrease driveways, the deficiency was more obvious in women, who were so traditionally bound to the home. Too many homes were now empty places, physically, psychically but also culturally, lacking the memories, knowledge and wisdom formerly accumulated like cherished crockery and handed down from generation to generation. Like an indigenous language that was no longer spoken, the lore of household life was rapidly becoming extinct, from descaling kettles to preserving peaches, from the uses for naphthalene to the best method for beer-battering fish.

At least, that was Nancy’s view and in some ways she was right. Although my own home, and the home that Jean maintained when I was growing up, was filled with the making of food, of clothes, of messes then of cleanliness, over and over, so regularly you almost never noticed it was there, Nancy represented another type of contemporary woman altogether: a woman who was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the household, but wasn’t personally interested in it. Nancy’s home was a lean and austere place, so tidy that it barely needed cleaning. I knew, without ever having opened any of her cupboards, that she didn’t possess a single bag of fabric scraps and wool oddments, nor a collection of reused Christmas wrapping paper, nor a drawer filled with old corks, bent skewers, rubber bands, chopsticks, stained tea strainers, undisposed disposable plastic spoons and an incomplete set of tin cookie cutters like other households, including mine, did.

Archie and I were starting out when I first met Nancy. Or here, in the city, we were starting out again. He was slowly lawnmowing his way into something we had begun to call a business, and I was working as an editorial assistant. Archie had supported my desire to take up the university place I’d rejected years before thanks to my unplanned pregnancy and naïve ideals. Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. I understood later the degree was more void-filling than vocationally satisfying. It was the wrapping, layers of it, around my grief. But I was happy enough to take on the only job I was qualified for – if being a good reader qualified you for anything – copyediting and proofreading for Academic Press. We published books by obscure academics, books as faded and dull as the authors themselves. They may as well have been bound in brown corduroy. Soon after I met Nancy, in her capacity as book marketing consultant, Academic Press closed its squeaking doors for good. By then I had Estelle, who was followed three years later by Daisy. After that I only freelanced, an arrangement that suited me with two small children.