John Marsden - While I live

‘We haven’t got room for the others,’ they said. ‘We’ll pick them up in a couple of hours.’

Clutching myself around the stomach I nodded. I didn’t want the murderer’s body in the same vehicle as my parents so I made the man put him in with Mrs Mackenzie, which was totally gross of me.

Mrs Yannos, along with Mr and Mrs Sanderson, the people who were still farming part of our old property, starting cleaning the kitchen. I took a Chux thinking I would help them but instantly felt so sick at cleaning up my mother’s life blood and fragments of her body that I had to go outside and gulp in fresh air. Homer came after me and put his arm around me and I leaned into him but I couldn’t cry. On my other side Gavin was leaning into me and I suddenly thought, ‘These are about the two most important people left in my life,’ and I felt desperate at how alone I now was.

The next few days passed like some gruesome dream. Or a bad drug trip. Not that I’ve ever had a bad drug trip. Or a drug trip full-stop. A dozen times a day I felt revolted at finding yet another drop of blood or something worse in a corner or crevice or cranny of the kitchen. I couldn’t believe how far blood spreads, how it splatters. I’d already learned during the war how much blood there is in the human body but I’d never had to live with the results of that before. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen. I shuddered every time I went through the door, but I knew I had no choice. And every time I felt like I could see the bodies of my mother and Mrs Mackenzie, still lying on the floor.

Poor Mrs Mackenzie. In the middle of everything I found time to think about her and her family. It was almost easier to think about her than it was to think about my own parents. Mrs Mackenzie had lost her child, her husband, and now she had gone to join Corrie. It was like suddenly there was hardly any trace of her on the planet. I hoped for her sake, as well as for my sake, for everyone’s sake, that there is an after-life, and that she and Corrie had been reunited there.

Although I used the kitchen when I had to, I hardly ate anything. I picked up food and looked at it and felt sick and put it down. I had no appetite. At least I didn’t need to cook. People left food, lots of it. Mrs Yannos and Mrs Sanderson came in every day, bringing casseroles and cakes and soups and sandwiches. And Gavin kept eating, so he had to be fed. I used the kitchen to make his breakfast and to heat up the food the neighbours left and to microwave hot chocolates for him.

Homer and the Anglican priest from Wirrawee sat down with me and told me we had to work out the details of the funerals. I said I couldn’t do it but when they got up to go I changed my mind. I realised that if I didn’t do it, they would. And I knew I couldn’t live with myself if someone else made the arrangements. Homer probably would have started with The Vines, and finished with The Strokes.

So that evening I found it quite therapeutic to sit down and write out what I wanted. Father Berryman had left a bunch of poems and prayers, and there were a few that I liked. One of them started Everything slips away. The river goes to the ocean

And joins that great mystery.

Now I too. You cannot hold me,

Any more than you can hold water. Let me go…

The trouble was that although I liked this one I didn’t want to listen to it. Letting them go? I ached for them, hungered for them. My bones were sore with the pain of their not being here. I wanted to grip them to me.

I went looking in my mum’s books, and found a poem that she’d marked with a little cross. Somehow it seemed to fit better, and I knew Father Berryman wouldn’t mind. All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart. The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

Their deaths seemed to fit with ‘the wrong of unshapely things’.

As well as the poem I remembered all the times my mum had told me about ‘their song’, the song Dad and she had first danced to, the one that always got them smiling when they heard it again. It was pretty well known I think. Daisy, Daisy,

Give me your answer do!

I’m half crazy,

All for the love of you!

It won’t be a stylish marriage,

I can’t afford a carriage

But you’ll look sweet on the seat

Of a bicycle built for two!

I got on a bit of a roll then and stayed up till late, looking for music tracks. It was hard because my parents sure as hell didn’t have the same taste in music as I did. I didn’t want to choose stuff they didn’t like. But I didn’t want to choose stuff that I didn’t like either. So in the end I compromised, and went for ‘Take It In’ by The Waifs and ‘There is a Mountain’ by some old hippie called Donovan.

The day of the funeral started out wet and grey. Just like you’d expect. Just the way a funeral should be. I got Gavin into his best clothes, which was a big effort. In some ways it was a typical Gavin day, when you saw him at his best and worst. He took an hour and a half to get dressed, and he whinged and complained and cried and sulked pretty much the whole time. Did I have any sympathy for him, this little stray washed up to our doorstep by the war? Did I care that the only place in the world where he’d been able to find security had now been blown up in his face?

Well, yes I did. But after an hour and a half I was totally fed up with him. Although there had been people coming and going so much in the house ever since the shootings, at the end of each day it was still Gavin and me alone together, and I was finding that pretty hard to take. I guess he was too.

Then, the moment I’d at last got him into his clothes, he disappeared outside. I was furious but I couldn’t be bothered chasing him anymore. If he got muddy, or worse if he disappeared altogether and missed the funeral, that was his lookout. I’d done all I could.

Then the next thing he’s coming back into the kitchen with a bunch of flowers he’s picked from the garden and I realise he’s done it so he can take them to the funeral. There weren’t many flowers in the garden at that time of year; he must have taken pretty much everything. A few late roses, a lot of white azaleas, a hydrangea leached of colour but beautiful in its dry coat, and even some early wattle.

Like I say, it was a morning of Gavin at his best and worst. I smacked a kiss on his forehead, which he immediately wiped off before he could catch girl germs.

Seeing Gavin walk in the door with his bunch of flowers really got to me. I was finding everything so hard to take. In particular the way in which my parents were everywhere I turned, as though they were still alive. Their presence was in every corner. This’ll sound sick, but in the same way that my mother’s blood had spread to every corner of the kitchen, her life spread through every corner of the house. Same with my father. I picked up a cookbook and there was a note in my mother’s writing, with a recipe for beer bread; I opened a drawer and found my father’s messy old address book; on the table in the dining room was the last bunch of flowers my mother had arranged, starting to wilt now. I didn’t like going into their bedroom, couldn’t go into their bedroom, because it was too unbearable. Their presence filled the room so strongly that for the first time in my life I felt there was hardly room for me in there. Maybe it was their smell, because the room was laden with that. The first time I went in after the murders I tiptoed around as though they had dissolved and spread through the room like a heavy invisible mist. I was scared to touch anything.