Debra Adelaide - The Household Guide to Dying

I had already been working for Nancy, first as a casual proofreader, then writing the advice column that appeared in her free publication – advertisements and advertorials disguised as a magazine – which she called Household Words, a joke that I suspected only she and I shared. Her idea for the column had arrived one afternoon when she was looking at a blank space on page five of Household Words and facing a deadline the next day. She phoned me, interrupting a dull editing job, or whatever it was I did then as a freelancer fitting in work between supermarket visits and nappy changes.

I need a dummy column for this issue, then we’ll get real letters. Can you knock something up quickly, on polishing silver, or whatever?

Nancy, no one polishes silver these days. They don’t even use it.

What about stains, then? You’ve got two kids, you’d know a lot about stains.

I guess I do.

I’ll set up the layout now, she said, and you can email me the copy later. I’ll call it Dear Delia. Lucky you’ve got the right name for it.

Nancy paid promptly and generously for a few hundred words of tame advice which I extracted from my non-creative side between the hours of nine and eleven on a Sunday evening while Archie was watching the Channel Ten movie and the girls were in bed. For months I doubted anyone read it, as Household Words was pushed into letter-boxes all over the suburbs along with advertising brochures for Coles Liquor, Woolworths supermarket specials and the Good Guys Electrics catalogue and was hardly distinguishable in content from them anyway. But evidence of its readership emerged when my advice column started to receive more and more emails.

They came regularly, forwarded to me by Nancy’s assistant, and for a while I responded easily enough. Nancy seemed happy, and the extra income helped with the mortgage. But then one day, bored for some reason, I amused myself by winding up the reader. It was such fun, I did it again, then again, never intending to send the replies off, until accidentally and in haste (a dish overcooking? a child left too long in the bath?) I attached the wrong file, hit the send key. If I’d assumed my copy was checked, I was proven wrong a week or two later when my mother rang to say she’d been amused by my unusual responses in that week’s issue. I sat around waiting for Nancy to phone and complain. Instead I was flooded with letters, and more requests than I could deal with. Nancy congratulated me on the initiative, and insisted I go in a bit harder. As a result the advice column developed a cult following.

Dear Delia was only a version of me, a slightly feral one. A more fearless one. But readers seemed to like being insulted, treated with disdain or having their requests dismissed, and so the column continued.

Dear Delia

Last night I had several people over to dinner, including my old friend who is still single despite her divorce coming through a good year ago, and my husband’s new assistant. During the dinner my husband managed to fling his arm across the table and knock over a carafe of red wine onto my best cotton lace tablecloth. He was arguing with Don, our neighbour, and they both got a bit carried away. If I bleach it, it might fall apart, or go white or patchy. What should I do?

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

What I will advise you, Uncertain, is to examine your guilt about your relationship with Don. Are you sure your feelings for him are as hidden as you believe? For you can be sure if I worked it out from just one letter, your unnamed husband will have worked it out by now too. Don’t fool yourself for a minute that your attempt to introduce Don to your divorced and still-single friend will work as a cover for your real feelings about him and the relationship you two are conducting on the sly. In fact this will almost certainly backfire: your friend and Don will end up hitting it off in all sorts of ways. They might even be out at a matinee screening of the latest Hugh Grant movie right now. I’d suggest that next time you want to have dinners where arguments occur you use a more appropriate tablecloth. Perhaps seersucker. Or one of those wipe-down vinyl ones.

But before I reached Amethyst there was the Garnet turnoff. And this took me back to where it all started. Back to McDonald’s. How appropriate. McDonald’s, that temple which was the meeting point of modern consumerism, efficiency and cleanliness. Those cold disinfected surfaces, those quickly dispensed drinks, those tightly wrapped parcels of burgers and cardboard-clad chips (for Australians still, after thirty years’ indoctrination, called them chips, not ‘fries’). All that order and control, all those precisely measured, weighed and timed burgers, buns, nuggets, fillets. All those smug rows of junior burgers, Big Macs and apple pies, slipping hygienically down their stainless steel chutes. All those obligingly happy Happy Meals.

The McDonald’s in Garnet had changed. The playground had been rebuilt, and was bigger, brighter. There was now a drive-through facility. The palms were taller but still didn’t obscure the all-important signs. After I parked I thought about going in, but then I might have had to eat something, and even for Sonny’s sake I couldn’t do that. It was enough just to sit in the car, thinking.

When I was last here, Sonny was eight. I thought he would have grown out of the place. But eight was a deceptive age, especially for a boy who also happened to be tall. Eight was past little-kid stage. Eight was when you attained a certain level of coolness, when style began to assert itself. You were no longer in the infants’ department at school, you did Real Sport (in Sonny’s case, soccer), and you were allowed the heady freedom of using a pen instead of a pencil in class.

Eight was the beginning of the end of things like favourite cuddly toys at night, ritual comfort foods like hot chocolate before bed, special plastic cartoon cups, flotation aids in the swimming pool (becoming contemptible) or vests (despicable, even in the middle of winter, none of your friends wore them…). But eight was also, still, a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

There was no McDonald’s in Amethyst. For some reason the town had banned all chain stores, franchises and commercial fast food outlets. But there was television. And therefore advertisements. And a neighbouring town twenty minutes away by bus, less if we got a lift with someone. I was a young single mother, equal parts guilt and indulgence, prepared to stand on my principles for only so long. So there we were, sitting over our Happy Meal. And Sonny was happy – I admit it – happy fiddling with the purple and green toy monster. Happy chewing his cardboard chips. Happy alternately sucking then blowing into his Coke, with furtive glances at me.

It was possible that within three or four years he’d come either to hate the food or be bored by it. By the age of twelve he’d probably be into something cool and trendy, like only eating at places offering noisy electronic games, places with names like Radical Zone or the Shooting Arrow. Or he’d simply be able to go out on his own, or with friends. That is, without me. Without his mother. And at twelve, he could be left safely at home for hours at a time. Then I could consider Going Out. Like a date, a real date, as opposed to spending the odd evening after work at Mitchell’s bar, listening to the drifters and dreamers sucking up the oxygen while I parried their vague boozy requests for sex.

Sonny looked up at me, cutting into my thoughts. He dropped the goofy toy, frowned, and asked me what was wrong.

Nothing, I said. Why?

You look sad.

Sad?

Or angry. This last was in a plaintive sort of tone. Maybe I was still angry, maybe just a bit resentful, after what had happened earlier.