She used to sit in darkness. I think it was so that she could watch all the comings and goings in the house, with none of us ever realising she was there. She'd been born in nineteen-hundred, and despite marrying at age twenty, she was thirty-seven before my own mother was born.
My grandmother, whose name is Mary-Ellen, had been widowed with a six month old baby, in England, Christmas of thirty-seven. Her husband, the grandfather I never met, was killed by a horse kick to the head, stumbling around drunk on Christmas Day. Whenever my grandmother wanted to say something ironic, whilst spitting acid at the rest of us, she would wait for an opportunity to say "Well! Ain't that a kick in the head." She would chuckle into her handkerchief, shooting looks at the rest of us, staring back at her uncomfortably. It was like watching someone view the crime scene photos of their dead husband and shovelling handfuls of popcorn into their mouths.
I wondered, in the pulsating black hole that was the aftermath of my own husband's death, whether my unseen grandfather, Reginald, had actually been killed by that horse. Or, at least if it had been an accident. Gran never said anything nice about him, and she had inherited his money when he died, his head a bloody pulp on the hard-packed dirt of the stables. It smelled to me like she had waited for a baby, so that her parents might be dissuaded from making her marry again, then had killed off the alcoholic husband she had been saddled with.
And it felt fair to me. Perhaps this emotional vinegar among the women in my family is inherited, pickled blood passing down from generation to generation. Gran arrived in Australia in nineteen forty-four, dragging my seven year old mum behind her. Maybe my mother can't be blamed for her own emotional failures. Gran didn't give her much to work with. And when my mum was nineteen, Gran pushed her at a young English immigrant, from Bournemouth, just like her. He was four years older than her, and they married only months after meeting. From the mathematics, it would appear that Thomas was conceived on their wedding night, as he screamed into the world almost exactly forty weeks later, in nineteen-fifty-four, when my mother was all of 17 years old.
Three weeks after Greg died, I brought all my children with me, to my childhood home, to face my father and grandmother. My mother had already dropped into my life like the Sword of Damocles before I'd even had the chance to tell my children their father was a slab of cold meat in the morgue at the hospital. Despite my orders to her to leave us be until I was ready for her to come, she had appeared at my house the same day that Greg's body had been collected from the creek. I hadn't let her past the door.
As we walked into the ostensibly nice house occupied by my parents and my frail, ninety-three year old grandmother, my stomach turned. I'd been too ambitious in my eating the last few days and my breakfast sank in my stomach like a stone. I found myself starving all the time, cramming food into my mouth as a means of keeping my hands busy, and keeping my energy up. I drank coffee and smoked whenever I could sneak outside. I'd taken my children to see the doctor, to ask him about counseling for them, and when they should return to school. He told me to give them the first week, to take them to see other relatives, to make sure they ate and slept, and got fresh air. Normal life, he wagged a finger at me. It won't help them to soften it too much.
So here we were. I had knocked, but no one answered, and so I pushed the door open gently, ushering the reluctant children inside.
"Mum" hissed Trevor, "Gran is just going to be nasty."
He was right. They called my Gran 'Gran', just as I did, and called my mother Nanna. I knew they were both going to be less than ideal, but I also felt like a visit to their ancestors, with the normal levels of aggravation would be good to ground the children in reality. If you're too angry to speak, perhaps you can forget your sadness for a moment.
