The Last Anniversary Page 4

  Today, the only full-time residents of the island are Harry Doughty's granddaughters, Connie and Rose, as well as Baby Enigma and her two daughters (Margaret and Laura) and their families.

  Scribbly Gum Island is the perfect location for a day out. There's just so much to do!

  Take the tour of Alice and Jack's intriguing house and learn more about the Munro Baby Mystery. This is a must! Only $15 for adults, $10 concession.

  Take a break at Connie's Cafe. Here you'll find the most delectable blueberry muffins and Devonshire teas in Australia!

  Treat the littlies to an exquisite face-painting by Rose Doughty. Just $10 per little face!

  Put some natural colour in your cheeks-walk the marked bush tracks which criss-cross the island. The most invigorating is the walk up to the top of Kingfisher Lookout. As you walk through the forest in the centre of the island you'll see so much beautiful plant life, including scribbly gum (of course!), banksia, blueberry ash and dwarf apple. Watch out for white-cheeked honeyeaters, pygmy possums, brush-tailed possums, sacred kingfishers and the red-bellied black snake! When you reach Kingfisher Lookout, catch your breath and enjoy your reward: breathtaking views of the island and the dramatic sandstone cliffs that line the Hawkesbury River, which sparkles like a sapphire in the sunshine.

  Enjoy a refreshing swim followed by a picnic lunch at glorious Sultana Rocks on the south side of the island. Prepacked picnic baskets available from Connie's Cafe.

  Don't forget to keep an eye out for Alice Munro's ghost. She is said to haunt the island at twilight, wearing a beautiful green dress. (Don't worry-she's friendly!)

  Camping is not permitted. All non-residents must leave Scribbly Gum Island by 8 p.m. This rule is strictly enforced.

  12

  Once, a long time ago, Grace left Callum a love letter in their microwave.

  Dear Callum,

  Here are five reasons why I love you.

  1. You dance with me even though I can't dance.

  2. You buy Fruit and Nut even though you prefer boring Dairy Milk.

  3. Your gigantic hairy-caveman feet.

  4. The way you always laugh at your mum's terrible jokes.

  5. The three little freckles in a triangle on the back of your left shoulder.

  Love from your Grace. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  PS. STOP! Avoid splattering. Put Gladwrap over whatever you're about to microwave!

  Sometimes she still leaves letters for him in the microwave, but now they consist of just one word written in capitals on a Post-it note:

  GLADWRAP!

  It is the day after Aunt Connie died and Grace's first day alone with the baby. Callum had taken two weeks off but today he is due back at work. It is time for their new lives playing Mummy and Daddy to begin.

  'I could extend it,' Callum offers as they sit down to breakfast. 'Death in the family.'

  'I'm fine,' says Grace.

  Actually, she has woken up with a headache unlike any other headache she has ever experienced. Her head feels like mashed potato. When she tentatively puts her fingertips to her scalp she is surprised that it still feels hard, not soft and pulpy.

  She remembers her horrible dream last night about Aunt Connie. Perhaps the headache is grief, but this seems unlikely considering that when Grace thinks about Connie dying she feels absolutely nothing. Grace loved Aunt Connie. She knows that as if it were a biographical fact about somebody else's life. It is just that there is no time to feel things any more. Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again.

  When will it all be over? When will she have time to think and feel again? Presumably not till the baby is a teenager and can safely fend for himself. Although, of course, teenagers need to be taught to drive and say no to drugs and wear condoms. She wants to say to Callum, What have we done? We must have been mad! We can't do this!

  Except that Callum can do it. He holds the baby nonchalantly in the crook of one arm and talks on the phone with the other. When they can't get the baby to sleep, Callum puts him over one shoulder and waltzes around the room, humming Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 2 to him.

  Callum is a high-school music teacher. He tells Grace all about something called the 'Mozart effect' and how classical music can develop Jake's 'spatial-temporal reasoning'. Whatever that is. Grace is pretty sure she lacks it. It is extremely unlikely that her own mother ever hummed Mozart to her.

  The first time she ever saw Callum he was dancing. They were at a mutual friend's wedding and Grace was sitting at a table drinking champagne to take away the taste of the worst creme brulee she had ever eaten in her life, when she caught sight of a guy walking onto the dance floor. In spite of his perfectly nice suit there was something strangely loutish about him. His shoulders were a bit too big, his arms a bit too long. But oh my word, as her Grandma Enigma would have said, could that man dance! He danced as naturally as if he were walking. There was no self-conscious 'Yes, yes, we all know I'm the best dancer in the room' smirk. Grace quickly put down her champagne glass, wondering if she was drunk because she had never felt so instantly attracted to a stranger in her life. That big dancing gorilla made her insides go as soft as butter.

  She had been thirty years old and she'd never fallen in love so hard or so fast or, well, at all. She had always thought she just wasn't the type to fall in love, not in that abandoned way that other people could: she was too uptight, too hard-headed, too tall. Romantic scenes in films made her toes curl; she wanted to avert her eyes from heartfelt looks the way other women looked away when there was too much blood. When men started to get those sappy expressions on their faces she always felt an inexplicable desire to sneeze.

  So when Callum came to pick her up to take her to the movies on their third date, and she opened her front door and her heart fluttered and her legs trembled, it was such a foreign sensation that she genuinely thought, Oh dear, I must be coming down with the flu. When it finally dawned on her that the reason love songs on the radio were starting to sound so poignant was because she was in love herself, it was like discovering a hidden talent, like waking up one day and finding you could sing. So she wasn't a Cold Unfeeling Frigid Bitch after all (the last words of an ex-boyfriend before he slammed down the phone). She was a real, red-blooded woman in love with a high-school music teacher who looked like a labourer but played the cello with his eyes closed, a man with size twelve feet and a secret stash of ballroom-dancing trophies, a man who ate spaghetti straight out of the can while listening to symphonies, a man who seemed fascinated by her every thought and feeling and memory, a man who never kissed her hello or goodbye without whirling her around in a waltz or making her go all weak and giggly with a dramatic cheek-to-cheek tango. He never actually danced with her because she couldn't. 'Wouldn't,' Callum said. 'Move, woman!' But then he'd dip her to the floor and kiss her and she'd think, Oh God, I'm so happy it's embarrassing.

  Of course, now, four years later, it turns out they are just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill married couple. She is fine with that. She is so fine with that. After all, she's a realist. Callum doesn't dance her around the room quite so often, but that is to be expected after all this time. You have to expect the passion to wane. You have to expect these hot flares of irritation, like lit matches.

  They are having one of those flares now, at the breakfast table.

  'Are you sure you're OK for me to go back to work?' Callum asks. He is eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and his spoon clinks against his teeth with each mouthful. When Grace watches television she apparently jiggles her knee up and down. He clinks, she jiggles. One annoying habit cancels out the other.

  'I said I was sure.'

  'OK. I'm just asking.'

  'What, do you think I'll drop him without you here to monitor me?' Grace's terror that she will do exactly that makes her voice sound its meanest and mos
t sarcastic.

  Callum once asked her why she sometimes spoke to him as if she hated him. 'I do not!' she'd said, surprised and guilty.

  'I do not think you'll drop him,' he says now, in a resigned, I'll-be-the-mature-one voice. 'I do think you're looking a bit pale.'

  'Thank you, but I'm fine.' She doesn't tell him about her headache. She wants him to go back to work. Maybe it will be easier without him there. She can stop worrying that he might notice she is all wrong as a mother. Perhaps the problem is just that she feels self-conscious.

  'I'll make sure I can get the afternoon off for the funeral,' says Callum.

  'Good,' says Grace vaguely. She watches him stand up, stretch and go to leave the room, with his breakfast bowl still sitting on the table.

  'I'd better get dressed for work.'

  'Do you think you could put your plate in the sink?'

  'Sorry.' He turns around and puts the bowl in the sink and conscientiously fills it with water.

  She is still eating her toast. He puts one hand on her shoulder and she tilts her head and presses her cheek against his hand.

  Jab, jab, truce! This, it seems, is marriage-or their marriage, anyway.

  She has regained the high ground with the cereal bowl. He'd felt guilty, she can tell. He has been making a huge effort since the baby was born.

  'I'm Callum Tidyman,' he had told her at the wedding, much later in the night, when they were all waiting outside the reception place for the bride and groom to hurry up and leave on their honeymoon. They just happened to be standing next to each other, thanks to some careful shuffling on Grace's part. He was sweaty and messy from his dancing, his shirt coming out the back of his trousers.

  He continued, 'And I'm not.'

  'A tidy man?'

  'That's right. I'm a slob. I've rebelled against my name.'

  'Yes, well that's nothing to be proud of,' she said sternly and flirtatiously, already noticing with interest that she was behaving differently than she did with other men.

  Back then, she would never have believed it possible that they would one day have an operatic fight over a wet towel left on the bed, or that the sight of a breakfast bowl with a concrete-hard ring of leftover cereal could make her want to bash her head against a wall. Now, when she hears Callum perform his 'tidy man' joke for other people, her smile is a stiff grimace. Oh, ha, ha.

  Of course, this whole tidiness issue has got out of hand since they moved into her mother's house-her childhood home-on Scribbly Gum Island.

  Even though her mother Laura is thousands of miles away, on a meticulously planned world trip, Grace can feel her presence in every domestic move that she makes. She finds herself holding glasses up to the light, squintily inspecting them for streaks. Every third day she pulls on long, yellow rubber gloves and gets down on her hands and knees to violently scrub the kitchen floor. 'Feet,' she says sharply to Callum whenever he walks in the door, and then waits for him to kick off his shoes with a bemused expression.

  'Do you think she'll ground you if we leave a mark on the place?' he asked her once, before the baby was born.

  'Oh, we're leaving marks,' said Grace. 'I'll be hearing about them for years to come.'

  He said, 'We don't have to live here, you know. If it makes you unhappy.'

  'Don't be silly.' Grace made herself laugh. 'It would be stupid to pay rent when this place is sitting here.'

  Grace and Callum are building their dream home in the Blue Mountains. 'Building your dream home is a fast-track to divorce,' one friend helpfully told them, just after they'd signed all the contracts. When Laura had offered her home on the island while she was away for a year it had been too good an offer to refuse. Grace was pregnant and she and Callum had been spending a lot of time at the kitchen table with a calculator, calculating how far they were in over their heads. It would have been madness to turn down Laura's offer. It was such a normal, everyday thing for a mother to offer and a daughter to accept.

  'Fantastic,' Callum had said.

  'Scribbly Gum isn't the most convenient place to live,' offered Grace.

  'Yes, but free,' he'd said cheerfully. Things to do with family are simple and straightforward to Callum. There are no murky depths of unexplained feeling.

  Grace can't even explain to herself her resistance to accepting favours from her mother. After all, they are perfectly civil with each other these days. Sometimes they even laugh together, just for a few seconds, and then there is always an awkward silence-but still. In fact, they'd become so close to normal that at the airport seeing her off, Grace had almost said, 'I'll miss you', but then she had a disconcerting memory of her mother's face looking right through her, smiling slightly, humming a tune while thirteen-year-old Grace beat the insides of her wrists on the edge of the dining-room table and begged, 'Please, Mum, can we please, please stop it now?' So Grace hadn't said, 'I'll miss you', and her mother hadn't said it either.

  Callum, of course, had thought that living on Scribbly Gum Island would be a wonderful adventure, but then Callum thinks that anything new is a wonderful adventure, from trying a new brand of tomato sauce to having a baby.

  'Sleeping like a baby,' he reports now when he comes back into the kitchen, looking unfamiliar and grown up, wearing a shirt and tie for the first time in two weeks. 'You won't hear from him for another two hours at least, I'd say.'

  Watching him, Grace realises that Callum will actually miss the baby while he is at work. All his Daddy instincts have clicked so neatly into place, unlike her missing Mummy instincts.

  'Are you taking Vic?' she asks.

  'You bet. It's the only fun part of going back to work.'

  When they first moved onto the island, Grace had shown Callum Laura's little outboard motor boat.

  'What's she called?' he'd asked.

  'It's just called the tinny,' said Grace. 'It's not like a sailing boat.'

  Callum had replied, 'You can't just call her the tinny, like she's a can of beer. At least call her Victoria Bitter, after the world's best beer. Vic for short.'

  So now the old tinny was called Vic, and Grace feels an obscure sense of failure that she'd never thought to give it a name. It looks perkier now it has a name.

  'Get the ferry back if it's raining,' she tells him.

  'It'll be fun in the rain.'

  'I can assure you it won't.'

  'OK, Island Girl.' He kisses her goodbye. 'I'll be home early.'

  'It's OK,' says Grace. 'I've got lots to do.'

  The first thing she does is spend an hour and a half staring at a milk carton.

  It isn't her intention to spend an hour and a half staring at a milk carton. It is an accident. After Callum leaves, it is as though a leaden blanket of silence shrouds the house. The silence is like a sound: a hollow, shrieking sound.

  'Right,' Grace thinks, loudly in her head, busily, pretending not to notice the silence. 'Lots to do before the baby wakes. First thing: marble cake.'

  Living on the island means performing certain duties for the family business, and this afternoon Grace is giving a tour of the Alice and Jack house. Aunt Connie always insisted that the tours be given by someone who could claim a personal connection to the Munro Baby Mystery. She and Aunt Rose were the sisters who first discovered the Munro Baby, Grandma Enigma was the baby herself, Aunt Margie and Grace's mother Laura were the Munro Baby's daughters, while Grace and her cousins Veronika and Thomas were the grandchildren.

  It's been years since Grace has given a tour and she hopes she'll remember her lines. She'll have Jake with her, she remembers with a start. A real live baby. Before Aunt Connie had died, she'd suggested to Grace that she pop Jake in Enigma's crib to give the tour an authentic touch. 'You can bet your bottom dollar some silly ninny will ask if it's the same baby,' Connie had snorted, and slapped her thigh with a withered hand.

  One of the responsibilities of giving the tour is making the marble cake to be left cooling on the kitchen table. It's meant to be made to Alice's original recipe,
but every member of the Scribbly Gum family bakes a slightly different version. Grandma Enigma puts in two tablespoons of honey, while Aunt Rose likes half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg. Thomas uses one egg, Veronika uses two, and Grace uses three. Nobody, not even Laura, would ever dare to use a packet mix.

  Marble cake, thinks Grace. You need to start the marble cake, now. But she just keeps sitting there, staring at the carton of milk that Callum used for his breakfast cereal and, of course, left sitting on the table.

  She thinks through exactly what she needs to do:

  Stand up.

  Pick up the milk.

  Walk to the fridge.

  Open the fridge.

  Place the milk in the fridge.

  Close the fridge door.

  But to do all that she needs her brain to send electrical impulses to her legs, her arms and her hands, and it seems that her brain is refusing to cooperate. She knows about electrical impulses from a science teacher from her school days who once set up an elaborate display of dominoes on the classroom floor in the shape of a human body. The idea was to demonstrate how your brain transmitted electrical impulses through your nerve cells. That's how you moved.

  Instead of toppling like dominoes, Grace's nerves are rigid, waiting for electrical impulses that aren't forthcoming. Her brain is having a black-out. It is quite possible that she has a brain tumour.

  She needs to pick up that milk carton. She has things to do. She is very busy. Mr Callahan. That was the science teacher's name. In her memory it was always winter when Mr Callahan taught science. He wore brightly coloured jumpers and often had a phlegmy, hacking cough that repelled the girls in his class. 'Mr Callahan, maybe you could take some sort of medicine because that's so disgusting!'