Death Rituals

Death Rituals

Eloise sighed and walked towards the unframed portrait standing for all the world like a stick insect on its easel in the middle of the functions centre. She hated functions centres. These empty, soulless spaces swooped on for weddings, funerals, baby showers, political hob-nobbery and product displays. What was Henry’s portrait doing in a functions centre, for pete’s sake!?

Dazzling Henry, the creative love of her life, the hilarious, outrageous, popping cork of an ideas bottle, the genie that appeared miraculously and smokily and granted her three wishes. Oh God, she missed him: the ragged and perennial laugh, the cigarette glued to his left hand that spun and spiralled elaborately in animated artist speak, the rusted vocal cords that had partied too much, inhaled too much, gone crazy too much. Give me a dream, give me happiness, and give me love – yes, everything in fact – she’d said this to him. And damn it, he had! He’d given her everything and now he was dead, and they were remembering Henry in a functions centre.

‘Burn my body and blow my ashes up into the night sky on the back of a flourish of fireworks from the middle of Sydney Harbour. And play Puccini’s Tosca’s Vissi d’arte … I lived for art. Blast it out full volume and have it echo through the heads and out to sea and let there be copious wine flowing.’ His final instructions.

Eloise breathed in the fluorescent and air-conditioned air and reached out to the acrylic painted board to touch his cheek. She appreciated the pixie glint of his eyes in the crevassed cheeks, the long wispy grey hair that formed a waterfall on either side of his face. Her hands were worn, she noticed and featured age spots, but she’d been twenty when he’d first descended upon her world.

‘Let’s go to London,’ he’d suggested, ‘Let me take you away from all this!’

‘Nah,’ she’d said, who did he think he was anyway, but she’d gone … and what a whirl of world she’d encountered: I Pagliacci, La Fille mal Gardee, Covent Garden, the Albert Hall, The Mouse Trap, Stratford upon Avon, the Globe Theatre. She listed them in her head as the Sydney Harbour Bridge lights came on and picked out the steel arch of the Coat hanger.

Always make an entrance, he’d said with eyes twinkling. Eloise felt hot as she remembered the Design conference Henry had MCed, back in the day, at the Intercontinental. She was still getting used to him in his space and the thrill of the large glittering events that he fluttered around – a sequin-coated moth, shining in the night lights.

As she waited for him in the wings of the stage, Eloise remembered his hilarious summary of the three days of proceedings. One final joke about fonts and types and the lights went out. A soundtrack of Simple Minds boomed out of the Bose speakers along with the sudden descent of a disco ball and a shock of midnight blue and silver stage lighting. Eloise had had to blink to adjust her eyes to her crazy boyfriend mid-stage as he proceeded to peel off his jacket, unzip his fly, whisk off his T shirt and toss them aside to stand naked as the day he was born, disco lights stabbing and shadowing around him like a kaleidoscope.

‘Oh, God, quickly someone, get a bathrobe or a blanket – something!’ she’d shrieked.

He’d laughed himself silly once she’d realised, he was enveloped in a flesh covered bodysuit. But he’d made his entrance, and that memory wasn’t going anywhere. Always make an exit was also implicit in his motto, she thought, and here was his portrait in a functions centre, prefacing the final act. Eloise blinked away something fluid and unannounced behind her eyelids.

An epoch passed while an assortment of young, vocabulary-challenged folk slurred their way through Henry stories of alcohol fuelled parties. Exclusionary in-jokes weren’t that funny, she thought.

What had happened to her warm, kind, generous love? The one who’d supported her career on the stage? Who had given himself to her happiness and future as only he could? Why was this nightmare of a send-off happening in a functions centre? She was remembering a Henry that no one else seemed to. It was certainly him in the portrait, but these people were talking about a different man, weren’t they? Was there a mistake? Were they sending off a different guy? The one they were talking about was clearly some kind of washed-up inebriate who could certainly not have run a business, could he?

Perplexity furrowed her brow as Eloise stood, pinot noir in hand, listening with increasing scepticism. OK, she had not had contact with him recently … all right, a couple of decades, he could have changed … monumentally, couldn’t he? People did. Not very often though, she concluded, as the gaggle of speakers came to a blissful end.

Right, onto the balcony, time for a breath of fresh air and a solitary moment to contemplate. Maybe she should just leave. She didn’t seem to recognise anyone here. Maybe we’ve all changed; changed beyond recognition, she thought with a hot flash of horror.

Shark Island glowed suddenly; two lotus shapes prepared themselves in a glimmer of movement reflected in the harbour water. Then, sure enough, to the first strains of Puccini’s opera, a charge of shattered pink light blasted its way up towards the Southern Cross, mirrored in inky water below. More blossoms and spiders of green and purple shrieked upwards and disintegrated outwards.

Were his ashes in there somewhere about to fall into the gathering crowds’ eyes? she wondered.

More golden fountains and candles, more silver sparklers and palms bombed and exploded towards Point Piper and rained and finally dripped their way down towards Vaucluse. A wind fanned out from the Parramatta River and pushed its way through the steel girders and arches of the bridge and eastwards toward North Head and out to sea.

“Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore Non feci mai male ad anima viva Con man furtiva Quante miserie conobbi, aiutai.”

“I lived for my art; I lived for love I never did harm to a living soul with a secret hand I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of”

Yes, yes this was Henry! It really was! Whatever he had become, this was the quintessential Henry she had nestled within herself.

An enormous flesh coloured and grey-hair coloured balloon in the shape of Henry’s portrait pumped its way out of the side of the functions centre bathed in city light and bobbing cheerfully on the crest of sea and night sky waves.

‘Ah Henry,’ she whispered, longing for a revisit, a reconnect and a touch- you-again feeling with him, ‘Amy Winehouse, Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas struggled with it too, you know, if that’s how it went … but spirits aside, mine is up there with yours right now.’

and she watched him floating up and then down and then out into the low pressured space of the harbour, moving out to sea.