The Starlings Read online

  ‘Only Pippa,’ said my father, knee-jerk style. ‘Nicky’s too young.’

  ‘I am not,’ I said, knee-jerk style. I was an apt pupil in some things.

  ‘You don’t know what a viewing is,’ observed Pippa.

  ‘I do too,’ I said.

  ‘For goodness sake,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t squabble about it. It’s not something to be fought over. Pippa, what do you think?’

  Pippa played with the fork on her empty plate. ‘I will if you say I ought to,’ she said in a hesitant tone which was most unlike her. ‘But I don’t want to, and I don’t think you should let Nicky.’

  My mother looked mulish, and I could tell she was going to be on my side.

  ‘He’s far too young,’ said my father with decision.

  ‘I think Dad would like him to.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘He just said he would, Frank. He said, to the undertaker, you know, he wanted a viewing, and I said, did he want the children to come, and he said yes, he did.’

  ‘But why?’ asked my father, with that particular tone he did so well, the tone of Why-am-I-being-driven-so-utterly-mad-by-this-drivel?

  ‘He thinks Didie would like it.’

  ‘But that’s hardly the point, Jenny.’

  ‘Well, I think it is the point, really.’

  ‘God save me,’ muttered my father, standing up.

  ‘I need help here, Frank,’ cried my mother, in a suddenly wounded voice.

  Pippa, who had been studying the table, glanced up at her, and at him, and then looked down again.

  He sat down. ‘I’m trying to help,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me you’re not listening to what I’m saying.’

  My mother clasped her hands and stared at them. Having jerked my father back into a participatory role, she did not know where to turn. The discussion petered out, and when Tuesday arrived I was still unsure of what a viewing was, or whether I was to be allowed to attend it.

  As it happened we were driving towards the funeral parlour before this was clarified for me. I asked from the back seat whether there would be lollies. I suppose I was making some kind of a connection, suggested by the concept of viewing, with the cinema.

  ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ said Pippa, not altogether unkindly.

  ‘Nicky, darling,’ said my mother. ‘We’re not going to a movie. We’re going to see Didie.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, defensively and untruthfully.

  ‘He’s too young,’ muttered my father, who was driving.

  ‘Don’t say that, please, Frank,’ murmured my mother. She turned to me. ‘Nicky, this is just a way of saying goodbye to Didie. She’ll be in her coffin, and she’ll look pretty much the same, and she’ll be dressed the way Didie is always dressed. All we’re doing is saying goodbye to her. There’s nothing to be worried about.’

  Until then I hadn’t been much worried, and now revised that attitude.

  When we arrived, we were shown into a small room swagged and tasselled by many velvet curtains in some dark rich colour—burgundy, I think. Recorded organ music was playing, groaning and heavy. In the centre of the room there was a long box which (I realised) must be a coffin. It was polished and dark and narrow, and there was no lid. Inside, on a pale pink satin lining, lay something which both was and was not Didie. Her sharp old eyes were closed and her hands were folded on her chest; she was dressed in the pigeony, mushroomy colours to which she was accustomed. Somehow her face looked doll-like: it had been powdered, and her eyelashes were strikingly black.

  ‘I asked them not to put on mascara,’ my mother whispered, to nobody in particular.

  We all stood around the coffin, eyeing its occupant. After the first glance, I no longer wanted to look at her. I tried to look at the carpet, at the flower vases at the head and foot of the coffin, at the mournful curtains. But my eyes were dragged back to Didie, who seemed to be occupying some different dimension from the rest of us.

  My mother put her arm around me. ‘See, Nicky, darling?’ she said. ‘It’s as if Didie’s asleep, isn’t it?’

  ‘Except she’s dead,’ said Pippa, in a high-pitched voice which sounded on the unthinkable edge of a giggle.

  My father scowled at her.

  ‘Pippa, darling,’ said my mother in remonstrance.

  ‘Please can we go now?’ I asked. I didn’t know how long a viewing should take. It was already long enough for me.

  ‘You’re here now; you might as well stay,’ said my father, just as my mother said, ‘You can pop out to the foyer and wait for us there, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Pippa.

  ‘I told you he was too young,’ my father said, as we left the room.

  The funeral was to be on Wednesday, the following day. My mother would have preferred it to be delayed, as there were various relatives to come from interstate. Easter loomed, however: apparently no funeral could be held on Holy Thursday or Good Friday. The parish priest had been firm about Wednesday, and my grandfather said he wanted it over and done with. Wednesday it was.

  Didie was a Catholic. The question now was whether there was to be a full requiem mass.

  I was never sure whether we were Catholics or not. My mother was, in a manner of speaking: she had been baptised and sporadically attended church, usually at Christmas or Easter. Every now and again she was beset by guilt that her religious observations were imperfect, yet somehow she never altered her habits. My father was not a Catholic: he was not to be drawn on the subject of religion except occasionally to mutter something about mumbo jumbo. Pippa had been baptised, and therefore had some kind of nominal status; she sometimes accompanied our mother to church (as did I), but she had no interest in religion and she seldom expressed guilt about anything. I had gathered—probably from disconnected rueful exclamations of my mother’s—that to be a Catholic was to feel guilty. Unlike Pippa, I had never been baptised; but I felt guilty in a creeping unspecific sort of way most of the time, so I thought I probably was a Catholic. I hated mass, though. I hated it when the priest said Peace be with you and we all had to shake hands or (worse) be kissed by the people around us, whom we usually did not know. I tried always to sit between my mother and Pippa, so that I was less exposed to the ghastliness of this ritual; but Pippa also sought this more protected position, so to my mother’s annoyance we used to spend time circling and ducking when we entered the pew.

  Would Didie, a devout Catholic, have wanted the entire mass (the full catastrophe, as my father called it), or a briefer ceremony? She had expressed no preference. Grandpa was also a Catholic, but he seemed neither to know nor care what would be best to do. The argument swayed one way and then another, my mother, in mounting despair, at its heart. The decision couldn’t wait.

  ‘Jen, does it really matter so much?’ I heard my father ask after the viewing. He was using his patient voice.

  ‘Of course it matters.’

  ‘But why? If Didie didn’t say what she wanted, she probably didn’t care. And she’s not going to care now.’

  I could hear my mother sucking her breath in. ‘Frank, you’ve never understood the first thing about Catholicism, and now isn’t a good time for you to start trying.’

  There was a pause, during which I strained my ears.

  ‘I’m trying to help,’ my father said.

  ‘Don’t,’ returned my mother, in her crispest voice.

  At last it was decided that the service would be brief.

  The funeral was easier to endure than the viewing. To begin with, there was the sense of privilege in being with the family in the front row: I was a figure of consequence (something absent from my everyday life) and tried to behave with proper sobriety. And it was easier to cope with the coffin: when the lid was on, you were less compelled to contemplate its contents. Grandpa cried openly, which unsettled me: how often had my father told me such behaviour was unmanly? But nobody seemed to be perturbed: the circumstances, after all, were unusual. I
supposed he had a right to be dolorous (a word I had recently discovered). I did not cry, and wondered if my father noticed this, and approved of my self-control. I noticed that Gina Hunter and her family had come, and was glad nobody from my class was there. Rose was in the congregation, sitting well back in the church. At the end of the service, as we filed out, I saw her there, her bright hair scarfed and her face showing snail-trails of tears. She hugged me, outside the church, and I was conscious of the warm and bouncy comfort of her body, and the tangy, faintly antiseptic smell of her. I thought it was nice of Rose to cry for Didie, who had not always been kind to her.

  ‘Will I still see you, Rose?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I’ll visit your grandpa, of course I will.’

  ‘You don’t look the same,’ I said.

  She was wearing black, as was my mother. Normally Rose wore navy pants with a white shirt, and sometimes a navy cardigan.

  ‘I’m not wearing my uniform, today. You don’t usually wear a uniform to a funeral.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. I was wearing my school uniform.

  ‘Well, but nurses don’t.’

  I couldn’t see why this might be so, but someone had accosted her and she was moving away from me already.

  We had the wake (another new and confusing term) at our house. Rose came back with us and helped my mother to pour tea and coffee. For a while I watched her doing this: I watched her pretty hands setting out the cups and saucers, balancing the large teapot. Then Pippa and I were conscripted to hand around plates. I did not recognise many people there. Didie seemed to have had a life quite separate from the one I was familiar with. Grandpa was no longer crying, and I was relieved by this. He moved among the guests (referred to by the man from the funeral parlour—why a parlour, I wondered—as the mourners, a term that struck me as strange and sinister), wearing his charcoal suit and a snowy shirt my mother had bought for the occasion. But he was the same friendly Grandpa, with time to speak to everyone, and a hug for me as well.

  ‘Come round and see me soon, old chap,’ he said. ‘I could do with the company. Come and we’ll play trains or Scrabble or something.’

  ‘Or a jigsaw?’ I said.

  ‘Or a jigsaw. There might be a new jigsaw, in fact.’

  ‘A biggie?’

  ‘Definitely a biggie.’

  ‘Will Rose be there?’

  ‘Maybe. But I will. Will I do?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, thinking it was a serious question.

  ‘Good boy,’ he said.

  I circulated through the mourners, feeling conspicuous in my school uniform, offering cakes and sandwiches and party pies and paper napkins, ducking from the occasional elderly lady wanting to kiss me, nodding sadly when people said to me that I would miss my grandmother. I dipped in on a number of conversations. My father was talking with Keith, a cousin of my mother’s. Although Keith supported St Kilda, my father respected his knowledge of the game.

  ‘Considine and Judge are injured,’ said Keith.

  My father nodded. ‘They’ll bring back Dipper,’ he said.

  Keith ruffled my hair. This was something I detested, especially from people I didn’t know well.

  ‘Know who Dipper is, hey, young Nick?’ he said.

  ‘Robert DiPierdomenico,’ I said. ‘Number 9. Party pie, Uncle Keith?’

  ‘Also Wallace,’ said my father, gloomily. ‘They’ll have to pick Wallace. Not a bad thing, of course.’

  ‘Chip off the old block, hey, Frank,’ remarked Keith, selecting a pie and dunking it in tomato sauce.

  My father half-smiled in his wounded way. ‘Afraid not,’ he said. ‘No, Nicky’s not much interested in footy, are you, Nick? More of a Starling than a Hawk.’

  It was such an old joke, even for me.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, weaving off with my pies. I passed Pippa, trapped by an elderly great-aunt, and heard Grandpa saying, ‘We were together forty-six years. Forty-six good years.’

  My mother was talking about Didie’s illness to a woman I didn’t know. ‘It was a mercy,’ she was saying. ‘They didn’t catch it in time, you see. Ovarian cancer is hard to diagnose. It was a shock, a terrible shock. But for her to slip away quietly like that—it saved her so much agony. It was a merciful end.’

  Rolling this around in my mind, I circled back near my father and Uncle Keith. ‘I’ve always thought Ablett was overrated,’ my father was saying. I escaped. The women were talking about Didie and the men were talking about football, except for Grandpa, who presumably had more reason than other men to discuss Didie. Even Grandpa, I noticed, was being drawn into football conversations.

  ‘What d’you reckon, Dan?’ asked a fellow who had last worn his funeral suit when he was thinner. ‘Will Flower play on Saturday? Or are his chances dead?’

  I knew, as part of my education, that Robbie Flower was the captain of Melbourne, Grandpa’s team. Sometimes I think there was never a child who cared less about football, never a child who knew more. Sponge-like, I absorbed the facts and figures fed to me by my father. I knew all the Hawthorn players’ numbers and lots from other teams. Flower was number 2; Ablett was number 5; Tuck was number 17; DiPierdomenico number 9, though he had started off as 53; Lethal Leigh Matthews, the captain of Hawthorn, number 3. I could go on.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Grandpa, but dubiously. ‘That was a nasty knock he got.’

  ‘But only on the thumb,’ said the fat man.

  ‘A thumb matters, Bill,’ said Grandpa. ‘You’ve got to have a working thumb.’

  I knew that this sort of discussion never needed to end. On and on it would wind, speculating, censuring, wishing, always wishing. The teams wouldn’t be announced until Thursday evening, and so far as I could see half the fun of football inhered in the conjecture, which was over as soon as the teams were made public. On Friday mornings my father would fall on the sport pages. Who had Hawthorn picked? It was never right. Someone was being played in the centre when he should have been forward; someone hopeless had been chosen; someone who clearly needed a spell in the reserves was foolishly forced into service; someone who was ready to come back from injury was unaccountably overlooked. He occasionally wrote letters of remonstrance to Allan Jeans, Hawthorn’s coach: these inexplicably remained unanswered. In his fantasy universe Hawthorn always picked his players and won every match.

  ‘So grateful,’ whispered my mother, her voice breaking as she put her arms around Rose at the end of the day. ‘So very grateful, my dear. Bless you.’

  They embraced with affection—perhaps more affection than was customary between them. I knew my mother liked Rose, because she had made Didie’s life easier, but I had never before seen them kissing or touching each other. At first I thought that my mother was saying she was grateful because Rose had poured so many cups of tea at the wake; I thought she might have been a bit more grateful to me, since I’d handed around so many pies. But then I realised she had been expressing thanks for the way Rose had looked after Didie and also Grandpa.

  Our dinner was leftovers from the wake. I can’t say our family often had animated conversations over the dinner table, but that night we were even less communicative than usual. My mother must have been exhausted; Pippa and my father said little. I was relieved it was all over, and pleased that nobody seemed to care how many party pies I ate.

  In bed I thought about the day. Now I knew what dead meant. It meant Rossini, scraped off the road and tipped into a dirt hole. It meant the knights of the Round Table smiting off each other’s heads, and also the end of Hamlet, where there were a good many corpses. It meant Didie lying on pink satin in a polished box. It meant Grandpa crying, and people wearing clothes too small for them, and lots of talk about footy.

  Two days later my mother announced at breakfast that she would go to the Good Friday services.

  ‘But why?’ my father asked.

  She spread marmalade on her toast. ‘It’s Easter. It’s Good Friday.
I often go to church at Easter.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said my father. ‘You have flurries of conscience at Christmas, and occasionally on Easter Sunday. I’ve never known you to go to the Friday stuff before.’

  ‘Please, Frank, don’t refer to it as the Friday stuff. Pippa, would you like to come with me? Nicky?’

  We stared at her in horror.

  ‘Well, of course I wouldn’t force you,’ she said, untruthfully.

  My father gave one of his emphatic snorts. For once, I was grateful to him.

  My mother munched on her toast. ‘If nobody wants to come to church with me, could somebody drop in to see Grandpa this afternoon?’

  My father grunted.

  That afternoon, when she had gone, I was on the floor of my room with Zarlok and the others, working out a little drama. I was beginning to use my reading to build up the performances I acted out with my Heroes of the Cosmos figures. Until now, most of my plots involved Fleshbane kidnapping Rose, and Zarlok rescuing her. I assume that the kidnap/rescue dynamic had started to wear thin, but in retrospect I can see that Didie’s death was shaping these new developments. Given that much of my imaginative life centred on abridged versions of Shakespeare and the Arthuriad, I had extensive theoretical experience of death. Knights were always galloping off on quests which involved murder of various kinds: there was much smiting and decapitation. But magic cloaked the knights and death could be exotic: when Gawain struck the head off the Green Man the latter tucked it under his arm and rode off, which in the ancient realm of Logres was not entirely surprising. But until I saw Didie in her coffin (mascara blurring her eyelashes), I had not made any link between the sort of death that happened in stories and the sort that might happen in Hawthorn, home of the mighty Hawks.

  I decided to make a play around the narrative of the Knight of the Dolorous Stroke. This phrase—The Knight of the Dolorous Stroke—fascinated me, so that I whispered it under my breath from time to time. The Knight of the Dolorous Stroke was Balyn, and although he was a good knight he was under a curse which caused him accidentally to murder his brother Balan. (Why give one’s children such similar names? The possibilities for confusion were endless. Would the parents have named a third son Balon? These questions troubled me.)