Momento Mori

Evelyn settled into a velvet armchair and listened to the night. Windblown rain pulsed in waves across the garden, arrhythmic like a failing heart.

Amorphous containers loomed towards her in the gloom, compelling her to sort the family memorabilia.

She chose the closest box. Her nails scratched at the edge of the sticky tape. She plucked and tugged. Rip. One flap of cardboard sprang open. Air molecules sealed for twenty years in the corrugation escaped like resinous scented ghosts.

She must unwrap, sort the contents for her children and children’s children before nibbling vermin, mould and decay ruined them. Memories could recompose; strands of historical fact tangle into folklore.

There were so many boxes. They began to spin. Vertigo, no, probably the flickering fluorescent tube in the kitchen needed attention. Then it occurred to her that the bedsheets required a change. She should unclog the washing machine filters. She helped herself up. The box flap lifted in the vacuum she left behind.

Alone tonight, the glistening dark in the window comforted her, the keepsakes in the box unnerved her.

Evelyn checked the washing machine inlets. The outlets required a wrench; rheumatic hands wouldn’t manage the task, she’d purchase one in a hardware store in the morning. She changed the bedding and reorganised the spare bedroom. The faulty fluorescent tube dropped out in half a revolution. She leaned it in a corner near the front door so as not to forget to replace it. Hungry. She ate left-over apple crumble and ice cream, checked her emails and social media. There was nothing of interest.

The box gaped.

With a cup of tea in hand and a pen for notes, the velvet chair drew her back into its comfortable embrace. The rain continued to pour. Steadier, kinder with the dying wind.

The first item was a small rug no, a wall hanging. Unrolled there on Evelyn’s lap the patterns spoke a kind of poetry, too precious for treading underfoot. She remembered her mother forking out lira in a Turkish Bazaar, uncertain if she was ‘diddled’, subject The Tree of Life. Mother stored it in her camphor-wood box. Evelyn pressed the silk to her lips. Soft as a child’s kiss. Camphor still lingered.

‘It’s the work of child labour, it makes me sad,’ her mother said regretting the purchase.

Evelyn’s mother preferred “Mummy”. It was difficult for Evelyn to mouth that endearment. Was it her mother’s craving for love or an affectation? Evelyn struggled with it even now. Her mother was too strong, too domineering, to be a “Mummy”.

Only tiny fingers could tie such delicate knots. The threads would unravel without careful handling. Evelyn smiled at the irony of boiling silk worms alive to unwind their thread and weave them into The Tree of Life. Absurd. To expect little children to go blind with long hours of close work horrified Mummy. Evelyn rolled up The Tree of Life hiding the lyrical iridescent greens and blues.

What to do?

Evelyn might as well hang an elephant tusk, tortoiseshell or a sword decorated with a swastika on her wall. Sell and donate the money to a charity? Yes, that’s a good idea. Her mother would approve.

Next, she pulled out a manila folder. Within lay ragged typed papers, yellowing with age — her father’s story. Veronica leafed through the pages and sorted them by number and tucked them back into the folder. The story ended with the start of the war. Daddy — now that came easily, never spoke of the war and never wrote about it either. In these pages was half a life. Attached was a photograph of him in his Naval uniform looking thin and wan but handsome. He and his guerrillas held thousands of Japanese at bay for years on a Pacific Island. But that was nothing compared to managing Mummy. She put the papers aside. Post them online for the rest of the family to enjoy.

Here, a picture of Mummy at the old beach house. Young. Sixteen? Depression years. Mummy always stood in profile in photographs, because of her blind, upturned eye. She tied herself to the bed most nights in summer holidays afraid she might sleepwalk into the ocean and drown. She had read Virginia Woolf’s biography. Evelyn wrote on the back of the photograph “Evelyn’s mother at the beach house 1930s”. Post that photo too. She placed it with the papers.

Next Evelyn pulled out a tiny object swaddled in bubble wrap. Evelyn sighed. Unwrapped was a kitsch porcelain container, the lid decorated with rosebuds and Love Conquers All in black cursive.

The last time she saw this, the miniature held a wispy curl, her parents’ stillborn baby’s hair. After her mother died, Evelyn combed strands of her mother’s grey and added them to the newborn hair, clinging to the crazy idea that technology might move so fast that if she kept her mother’s DNA, scientists would restore mother and child like woolly mammoths. Did the Victorians think like this? With early photography, the dead were so much clearer than the living because they were still. Did they, too, consider the dead only a ‘whisker’ from being brought back to life?

She lifted the lid. No hair. Someone must have cleaned up and tossed out the contents. Never mind, quantum physics might reverse time one day. All humanity might get a second chance. Magical thinking runs deep she mused. She rose stiffly and placed Love Conquers All on the mantelpiece.

Next out of the box came a brooch. Old, the 1800s? Jewels once nestled in this skeleton of gold. Why was this kept? The gold might have value. What happened to the gems? Were they prised from the gold clasps in hard times? Or was it as when her mother lay in Aged Care after her strokes, and a nurse moisturised her arthritic hands and slipped off her diamond and ruby rings and dropped them into her uniform pocket? Or the Lalique treasure a cleaner never confessed to chipping or coins collected for her grandchildren, stolen? How could anyone deceive a frail, blind old lady? How cruel. Then she stopped short.

She was cruel too.

Evelyn didn’t speak to her mother for years denying the old lady contact with her grandchildren. True her abusive husband lay obstacles in her way until the day she discovered him molesting her daughter. The most secure prisons are the ones we build for ourselves. The door was always open. There was no excuse.

Evelyn envisioned Mummy sitting on that sausage colour carpet they both loathed, her back resting against the seat of the armchair in her creamy silk pyjamas, following the mastectomy. It was the only time she ever remembered her mother speaking to her as an equal, eighty-three and so young at that moment. She looked like a Pierrot.

‘Medical Benefits offered me a double mastectomy, two for the price of one! How could I resist such a bargain?’ Mummy laughed. They were both quiet for a moment. ‘It’s over in the blink of an eye. Life. I dream often of being stalked and caught in the jaws of a tiger. Do you know who the tiger is?’ she asked. ‘Death.’

Back to the box Evelyn pulled out one unidentified photograph after another; the mounting pile overwhelming. Oh! One of herself. Seventeen, or eighteen curled up with her arms around her knees, head buried, a foetal position on this mahogany spoon-backed purple velvet chair. The very chair in which she sat.

A student, John, was studying law at Sydney Uni. He invited her to a party. Her mother had asked her to attend another occasion with her matron friends. Evelyn forgot the commitment. When John came to the door flowers in his hand, her mother ordered her to sit in the chair and scolded her in his presence like a toddler. Somewhat bemused, he didn’t stay.

Eighteen! Why so passive under those circumstances? Yes, humiliation and control were constants in their relationship. A practice Evelyn perpetuated on her children.

A weight lodged deep inside. Bile rose. Sour and bitter.

There was a reconciliation between them before Mummy, died. They shared stories of childhood sexual abuse — her mother by her elder brother, Evelyn by a stranger, Evelyn’s daughters by their stepfather. Mummy, told Evelyn her mother lay a pillow between her and her father to prevent physical contact when he read bedtime stories. A tear welled in the Pierrot’s upturned eye and slipped down the pale cheek.

A psychiatrist during the trial said one in three men find children arousing but only the dysfunctional act on their desires. How good most men are.

Evelyn reprimanded herself for being self-obsessed and absent as a parent. Panic and bile resurged. She reached into the recesses of her mind for the pistol with a pearl grip. There was a bullet ready in the barrel. She would pull the trigger and visualise a smoking hole between his grey eyes moist with desire. Evelyn’s breathing settled, tightening around her fluttering heart relaxed. Shooting her husband always made her feel better.

The boxes were too much. Where was the joy in this half-blind box? Exhausted, she decided there were too many photographs to sort tonight — just one more item and then to bed. Evelyn pulled out a note in her mother’s spidery handwriting.

Anguish over separation from her grandchildren, a suicide note. She found it too hard to complete the task. ‘How hard it is, to die’, she wrote.

Mummy always had the last word.

Was this message punishment? Was it left for Evelyn to find? She ripped the note into pieces. She would burn it. Even the vermin couldn’t have this fragment of their miserable history.

Evelyn’s last memory of her mother was of both eyes rolling, blood pooling into blue beneath the skin, death imminent. She sang her mother Brahms lullaby. Mummy had often sung the same to comfort her.

Following her mother’s death nights were full of vivid dreams. In one, a box wasn’t cardboard. It was an old metal trunk secreted in a storeroom covered in moss and mould. Within she had hidden a frail old body, swathed in blankets. Seeping fluids it smelled of decomposing rat. Her terror was of being discovered and accused of packing the body away alive.

Yes, ‘dying is difficult’. Broken now, she closed the box too despondent for more, rain bucketing down, beat at the window.

Was Mummy there waiting?

Evelyn would invite her in, run a warm bath, show her the comfortable bed and fresh towels, offer her tea and toast. Evelyn would boast of her children’s successes, and there were many. Their grandmother would glow with pride, and they would speak of love and forgiveness. Everything would be all right.

Evelyn switched off the lights and made her way down the dark corridor to face the tiger. It was her turn.