Parting Words by Cass Moriarty

Author:Cass Moriarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2017-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Every few weeks, while tidying the house, Evonne would find one of the printouts from her father’s memorial service, as if they were multiplying. On the front was a formal shot of him taken at a studio about ten years earlier. Their parents had sat for a photographer, together and separately, and Evonne wondered now whether this had been the purpose they’d had in mind. Below that was a shot taken last Christmas – her and Kelly on one side, Richard on the other, all with their arms entwined, and smiling. A rare, light-hearted moment: Evonne vaguely recalled Eden and the twins performing an amusing parody of the manger scene from the nativity. Their father looked frail though, the expression on his face forced and unnatural. In the year before his death, he seemed less able to take pleasure from their silly antics. On the back was a montage of shots from when he was younger – with Aunt Mary by a creek bed; standing proudly outside his real estate office; a sepia photograph of her parents’ wedding day; her father cradling one of his swaddled children. Evonne had dug out that one from a box of loose black-and-whites; they hadn’t been able to agree on which sibling it featured.

In the pit of her stomach, she still harboured a knot of resentment towards her father. And yet those feelings were tangled up with warmth, and tenderness, as she saw his need to make amends, to connect. As she looked at the photos on the printout again, tiny, unrelated details gnawed at the edge of her memory. Holding tight to her father’s arms as she walked up his bended knees and somersaulted backwards onto the floor. The times he had got up in the night and soothed her sore throat with knobs of butter rolled in white sugar. The loud buzz of the lawnmower on the weekend; the pungent smell of the manure and compost he dug into the soil. His one attempt to create a kite from paper and bamboo rods; her embarrassment at his acute disappointment that it refused to lift off the ground and fly. She remembered shutting the door to her bedroom on the pretext of homework, while she listened to the top-forty countdown on her bedside clock-radio, straining her ears for the sound of her father’s footsteps in the hallway.

She had been so young then, too. Photographs and memories now all that remained as proof of that time.

…

Evonne had finally managed to track down the correct Michael Adamson. He was buried under six feet of earth at Resthaven Memorial Park – A Place To Calmly Be, its motto claimed. Evonne thought that surely all those interred had no choice other than to ‘calmly be’ – and what was so great about ‘calmly being’, anyway?

Had Michael Adamson not been residing at Resthaven, he would have been approaching the age of one hundred and thirty. Evonne had found the dates of his birth and death, and that of his marriage to Ellen Wandsworth, of Adelaide.

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