1
The note sat against the fruit bowl on the kitchen bench. It looked insignificant, but as she picked it up she was almost certain of what it contained. She took a slow deep breath as she took the little hand written note out of the unsealed envelope and opened it out.
Dear Veronica,
I've gone. This is probably not a surprise to you, and if it is, then it won't take you long to realise that it shouldn't be. Over the last five years, you have been my anchor, but when the ship sinks an anchor is of no use. I just couldn't stay. I had to get away. The irony is that I really need to get away from myself. I know how ridiculous that sounds but it's the way I feel. If only I could leave myself behind. Losing Cinnamon set me on this course. To lose a wife and daughter to a pot of boiling water is the craziest blow. I've been horrible to you since her death; inconsolable, distant, self-possessed, depressed. For this I am very sorry. This is not a suicide note; I'm not that brave. Not like her. It’s a sweet pain I feel; she was such a strong human being that I’m proud of her character as well as being hurt at her leaving me. I wasn’t strong enough for her. I'm just going away, limping away. No parent deserves to outlive their child. Don't worry about the house. The mortgage is paid; live in it as you will. I would like you to. I know there must be paperwork, and I will deal with it but not now. Please stay. I'm even self-deluded enough to think that I would like to know where you are when I toss this black rock off my heart. I'm so very sorry.
Ben.
"To lose a wife and daughter to a pot of boiling water..." sounded a wrong note: the rhythmic rhyme lent a tone of unexpected and inappropriate humour to the tragic contents but it was the kind of note where proof-reading was really unnecessary: who would check a note like this?
She read the note again. She did this not that she didn’t understand the contents but she was aware that this was a turning point in her life; her life was back totally in her control. So by reading it again, almost memorising it, she was marking the moment. She had let her life slip a bit from her grasp over the last five years; well, why wouldn’t she? Her life had become a part of his life; they lived it together. She and Ben, Cinnamon, and Jack on weekends, with Sally the doting grandma across town. Now that was over. She felt sad, a little let down, but also determined. She was conscious of her breath moving in and out of her body slowly but surely. She would be OK. The hurt, the sense of loss, and disappointment played minor roles in the feelings she was aware of, and already, they were fading; but she was aware of a niggling thought that she hadn’t been enough for him. She’d been a lover and partner, but she hadn’t been, she had to admit ... wasn’t that good at being a friend.
Ben’s daughter Cinnamon had walked into the Pacific Ocean and breathed in the brine like air, just like Jack London’s anti-hero, Martin Eden, had done, and described in detail, in the book that Cinnamon had just finished reading. Her ravished skin from the childhood accident - boiling water all over her - caused her so much pain, anguish, resentment, and fear of the future. It became an inflexible prison that needed multiple surgical operations to allow her to grow; mingled with the nihilism of a fifteen year old pushed her towards her final decision leaving her father inconsolable. It took two weeks to find her body. That’s when Ben had really left, back then seven months ago when they turned her scalded, now ocean ravished body to ash. It just took that long for him to realise it.
So now a new start, Veronica. I’m not forty yet; almost, but not yet. She had a son who was fifteen in a minute, not living with her, but with his father, but the thought of getting him back (getting him back!) made her breathe that little bit deeper, and made her stand that little bit taller: it’s all up to me. Me.
2
Returning home to Newtown had the feel of a backward step about it but Veronica pushed the thought aside as she parked her car outside the little semi-detached. She sat in the car and stared at the frowning roof over the little verandah, the single window – her room, and the single door into the hallway; a single room-wide house, just four rooms deep, with a back shed where, Sally, her mother lived. Yes, she was coming back but she was coming back home. This was hers. Yes, this was home and the niggling thought about a backward step faded and disappeared.
She carried suitcases, bags, and boxes from the car into her house and into her room and thought about the simple but effective language Ben had used in his note to her; and thoughts about language led her to thoughts about a client that she was due to meet in a few hours which would interrupt her moving-back-in. Language played a very important part in her work with her female clients; and most predominately the language of sex.
Valda Mirabella, a thirty two year old retrenched bank executive, decided to stop worrying about being unemployed - the constant rejections were humiliating - and to have a go at the jobs that her husband, Andrew, had always wanted her to do: being a wife and mother. She had never thought of those jobs as employment, she thought of them as most men thought of them: as things one did while waiting for a job. Like everything she did, Valda Mirabella, gave it her all. She worked hard at her job at the bank and when that disappeared she worked hard at being unemployed, which was really the problem; but then she realised that the house was a mess, the routines were unworkable, her two daughters were perpetually disorganised and angry, and something had to be done. Her first thought was to give a local unemployed woman a financial helping-hand and hire a housekeeper but during one of her daughter’s vitriolic tantrums, Valda was informed in language crude and hurtful that SHE was an unemployed woman and more ‘local’ than anyone. After slapping her daughter’s face, which only made things worse, she had to face a few realities, and one of those realities was the possible immense satisfaction she knew could be gained by doing a job well. Does that still apply when the jobs are “wife and mother”? She hated the word ‘housewife’. It didn’t take long. In fact, she was a little surprised at the ease with which the words ‘home-maker’ slipped into her vocabulary of things called ‘work’; and life, like everything she did, she did with gusto.
Within three months she had the ‘mother’ part under control. She took an unusually lenient path in the wrangling of her wayward daughters. She opted for a supporting role rather than an authoritarian one. This outraged Andrew but Valda convinced him to let her have her head but warned him that it was going to be rough. It was. Valda, with Andrew’s silent support, allowed her daughters, Michelle and Lucy, to do, or not do, whatever they wanted but with only one limitation: that they could not move out of home. The girls took to the new arrangement like foxes in a fowl house. The ensuing months included incidents involving the police, a shop detective, several truant officers, three headmasters, a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, a less-than-happy family welfare mediation, and four social workers. It is not an exaggeration to say that after six months the girls were exhausted and fully believed that their messy lives were due entirely to other people, especially their parents, and had little to do with their own choices. Their parents could not be faulted: they had been rock-solid in their love and support. The climax, or as the family would latter affectionately refer to it - their ‘major plot point’, came when the patient parents had to bail them out of jail but, calculatingly, allowing them to spend a night in separate cells, without light or a bed off the ground. When Valda and Andrew arrived at the police station, late, the following morning the girls saw them as guardian angels and liberators. The girls were more than happy to let their parents continue, well, begin really, their parenting. Calm and sanity were restored to the Mirabella household.
So much for the ‘mother’ part; the ‘wife’ part was another thing entirely.
Determined not to leave a job only half done, Valda, a social acquaintance of Alison Killcare, the wife of a one-time client of Veronica’s, finally sent an email to “The Blue Site”, Veronica’s new online portal. It took only two interviews for Veronica to understand that the way forward involved sex, it’s expression, and particularly language.
Valda, a stickler for procedure, was easily convinced to give Veronica’s method a try. A solution is what she wanted and it was the need of a solution that had urged her to contact ‘Susan’ (Veronica’s working name) in the first place. It took a little more convincing for Valda to understand that language, or the lack of it, was at the heart of the solution.