The Household Guide to Dying

How do you mean, difficult? I asked.

Put it this way, he said. There’s competition.

You mean she has someone else?

Something like that.

So why doesn’t she make a choice, him or you?

When Archie laughed I first thought that her other person might have been a woman. And how obtuse and smallminded I must have sounded.

Well, that’s not really possible. She’s in love with a dead man, as far as I can tell. And I’m getting a bit sick of it.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and sighed. I felt like poking him to explain more, until he started to hum tunelessly, Love me tender, love me blue…

Not Pearl? I said.

Do you know her?

Of course. Mitchell sent me to her soon after I arrived. Half the books I’ve got are from her place.

Pearl was dark, beautiful, dreadlocked. Her book exchange shop – her day job – was in the front room of her house, which was a mini Graceland. Her night job was president of the Amethyst and District Elvis Fan Club, and the district was so vast it took her away a lot, organising talent quests and commemorative shows and memorabilia swap meets and whatever else Elvis fans did. I felt I owed Pearl a great deal, since she gave me complete freedom with her odd collection of books – mostly picked up from country town fêtes, street markets and car boot sales – and charged me almost nothing. If she and Archie…well, if it came to that, it would not even be a competition.

That was when I told him about Van – though, as Van was something of a notorious figure, he already knew most of what there was to know – and that was also when I made it clear that no man was ever going to get into the pores of my soul like that again.

Much later, when Sonny grew so fond of Archie, it became harder. I seesawed for a few years between thinking Archie and I could be a real couple, and thinking that maybe I only thought that because it would make it easier for me and Sonny. Thinking that if I agreed to move in with Archie it might only be because it would suit me, with Sonny growing and the caravan becoming increasingly impossible, not because I wanted him for his sake alone. Thinking that I didn’t really know what I was thinking. The thinking revolved around and around in my mind like a mouse on a wheel. Strangely, it didn’t seem to bother Archie. Which was why I read so much. Easier to enter someone else’s dilemmas or questions or nightmares than confront or solve my own.

I told Sonny only what I judged he needed to know, since complete honesty, I’d found, was not always the best option with children. One day, his goldfish, the best pet a caravanliving mother could manage for a child, floated to the top of its bowl and commenced putrefying. Sonny seemed to cope with the fact of Jaffa dying, but the idea that the fish’s body then laid solemnly in the good earth – in a patch adjacent to the caravan and marked by a banana tree I had recently planted – would be prone to worms, bacteria and other elemental onslaughts made him sob for hours.

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