Bright Objects - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruby Todd is a Melbourne-based writer with a PhD in writing and literature. She is the recipient of the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest Award for Fiction and the inaugural 2020 Furphy Literary Award, among others. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Overland, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Bright Objects, was shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award. She is a 2023 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow.

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Chapter 1

1.

SOME MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT IT unhealthy for a new widow to begin work in a funeral home, especially the same one that just months before had sent off her husband in a premium rosewood casket. But Jericho was a small town, and I was suited to the business. I grew fond of the ritual chores, the somber quiet, the tight-lipped atmosphere of wood polish and plush carpet and heavy drapes. I enjoyed the feeling of marshaling the stricken troops to church, and the soothing sound of a casket closing. I knew the tone to take with the bereaved, knew how to slide around details as if by way of a network of delicate balustrades, to deflect death. But neither was I afraid of allowing the Reaper into the reception room as I served tea to those customers I liked best, who announced themselves with a look that was naked and steely at once, who wanted no part in a pantomime.

The work tired my body and stilled my brain, and offered at least some prospect of sleep at the end of the day. I often had the sense of moving through water, and imagined that if I could just accumulate enough days behind me as mindlessly as possible, I might at last look up to find I had gained distance from the horizon of all that had happened, and see the approach of some kind of shore.

I can still hear the voice of Clarence Bell, the director of Bell Funerals, bemoaning in his soft Midlands accent that another customer was late with their deposit, or intent on printing their own order of service booklets, or bringing their own roses. As soon as I appeared at reception in the mornings he would approach in his ambling wide-paced way, diminutive in his overlarge gray suit, and begin shaking his head a few steps from me, emitting little puffs of indignant disbelief as he spoke, half under his breath, as though obliged to relate a string of dirty jokes.

Clarence had a drawn, adenoidal look. His sharp dark eyes would dart around as if searching for escape, and sometimes if I spoke too suddenly, he would jump with the nervous quickness of a cornered marsupial. By the end of any service he always appeared deflated somehow, like he had puffed out too much air, at last resigned to facts which despite being routine appeared to wound him afresh each day.

I knew the morning debrief was over when Clarence drew out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, lowered his face into it and, with an equine flurry, blew his nose. I had learned early on that my role in this exchange was as a passive witness, and that after nodding and sighing a few times myself in sympathy, I should prepare his coffee without rejoinder or delay, which he would receive in his office in grateful silence. From my station behind the tall mahogany reception desk, I would then commence my review of the day’s appointments, peering out every so often through the shop windows at the wide Victorian-era street just waking up, and measure my smile for the first customer, as Clarence had instructed: sincere yet restrained, with a touch of thoughtful gravity.

That summer, Bell Funerals had been asked to oversee the grandest service in the recent memory of our town, and we were all feeling the pressure. Joseph Evans, the fifty-five-year-old eldest son of a once-prominent pastoralist family, and a man of exacting tastes in matters of ceremony, wanted a stately farewell for his mother, a farewell worthy of the woman she had been. Patricia Evans—who had died suddenly after a battle with vascular dementia—was remembered locally as a no-nonsense, capable woman who, despite her affluence and acumen in business, had cared more for others than she had for herself. Widowed in her prime, she had run the ancestral farm and raised her sons alone, while supporting numerous charitable causes and becoming revered for the pumpkin scones she baked for the Country Women’s Association.

In the days between Patricia’s death and her funeral, Joseph often turned up unannounced, asking for Clarence at reception, with a notebook in hand. He was by turns meditative and tense, but always polite, with a patrician voice and a taste for twill trousers paired with Craftsman boots, as might be expected of a genteel stockman, albeit one with a ponytail.

Because the time we had to plan the event was in no way relative to its grandeur—which seemed set to rival the send-off of King George VI—it was surprising how often Joseph would lapse unprompted into ruminations about floral symbolism or the transmigration of souls, just at the point when he needed to finalize his choice of rose spray or casket. At times when he spoke, his palms would float upward, like a saint presiding over a scene in which Clarence and I were the fallen.

I had seen it before of course, and it was natural, this seizing of the dead one’s funeral—with all its potential intricacy and pomp, to plan and to stage—as a means of sublimating the freshness of grief. Dead bodies can only be held in cool storage for so long, and it’s terrible, really, how quickly a service must be held. For grief is a kind of rational madness, and new grief an alien planet, and it is not therapeutic for all in its exile to be faced with the finer decisions of commemorative slideshows and casket sateens. The funeral of Patricia Evans, it was clear, was not just a means of distraction for Joseph, but an event burdened with the significance of a final gesture, a monument to his love and grief.

On the January afternoon I’ll mark as the beginning—although as always there were other beginnings, casting their cells into this one and declaring themselves only later—Joseph arrived for his first appointment an hour early, with a furtive-looking young brunette in tow. He stood at reception in a white oxford shirt and chinos, with what appeared to be a shark’s tooth on a cord around his throat, wearing a look of patient expectation. When, at the sound of the bell, I emerged from the storeroom, he summoned a smile and with a rueful sigh glanced at my name tag.

“Ah, hello, Sylvia,” he said, his voice mellifluous and warm, as though I were an old friend. His large eyes were almost a true cornflower blue, more striking for the fact that his skin—owing to the shock of loss, I supposed—had acquired a grayish pallor. As his gaze ranged around the room and the noonday sun lit his silver-blond ponytail, I noticed that even in obvious grief, his face had a childlike openness, as though the wonders and torments of life were still striking him as new.

“You’re a picture—like something out of a noir film, at this old desk,” he said a little nostalgically, before introducing himself and noting that he’d spoken with Clarence on the phone.

Patricia had been dead for only forty-eight hours, but as Joseph began explaining when Clarence appeared, it was especially important to decide on musical arrangements. Due to his appreciation for Clarence’s professional input, Joseph had invited his friend Zara, a trained soprano, to trial some recessional songs during their meeting in his office, and had taken the liberty of arriving early, to ensure there was time enough afterward to discuss the flowers.

Even before Joseph’s interruption, the day had been destined for chaos. Clarence had already held three consults with newly bereaved families without a break, workmen were laying new carpet in the Serenity Chapel, and I had just returned, clammy and flushed, after finding myself in a broken-down hearse among the wheat fields out of town, with the new apprentice and a casketed corpse due...