This Has Been Absolutely Lovely Read online

  Half of Molly’s problem was her beauty. She got that from her father. They were both blessed — if that was how you chose to see it — with fine features, large eyes, thick, wavy golden hair that did whatever was fashionable, high cheekbones and generous, naturally pouting mouths that made them look like they spoke French. People had always turned to stare at their willowy frames and their dazzling smiles. After watching people fall at Paul’s feet for forty years, Annie wasn’t sure it was necessarily to Molly’s benefit that she moved through the world like that too, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  Annie wondered if Molly’s baby would look like its mother and grandfather, or if it might have Jack’s broader, slightly doughier features. She felt pretty sure it would be one or the other, as it was with her own children. The beautiful genes didn’t seem to mix. Annie’s first two children looked like her: attractive by ordinary standards — regular features, one chin each — but not when compared to the dazzling perfection of Molly and Paul.

  Regardless of what the child looked like, the idea of Molly as a mother didn’t sit easily with Annie. Molly had a tendency to get bored with things.

  She’d been very enthusiastic about the three different university degrees she had begun. Her podcast was clever and well liked — for the four episodes she released before she moved on to a volunteer position with a refugee aid organisation. Her interior design phase had followed that, and the small inner-city flat Molly and Jack had bought with a gigantic mortgage had almost been beautifully decorated, until Molly fell in love with stand-up comedy for six weeks. She could play the piano pretty well, and sing, like both her parents, but she’d never liked doing either for an audience.

  Her latest passion was home organising, and she had been putting sticky labels on people’s jars of dried kidney beans and consolidating all their open packets of Nurofen for a year, which was almost record-breaking for a Molly job. Annie wondered how close they were to the end of that phase.

  Annie chided herself: that was a silly way to think. Molly wouldn’t treat her baby like one of her jobs or hobbies, something to tire of like she had of her sewing machine, stand-up paddleboard and sourdough starter. Motherhood was different. It taught you to sustain interest. Just because Molly hadn’t chosen a solid career path didn’t mean she wouldn’t be a terrific mum.

  Honestly, Annie was a little surprised that Molly was happy to be pregnant at all, given that she had seemed almost violently unmaternal since the unfortunate afternoon when, at the age of six, she accidentally witnessed a classmate’s mother giving birth on the laundry floor. Annie remembered that like it was yesterday and she hadn’t even been there. Poor little Molly and her friend Catherine had watched in terror as Catherine’s baby brother entered the world as if shot out of a cannon onto a pile of freshly washed soccer shirts in a plastic clothes basket. The girls had called an ambulance, but it was all over well before the paramedics came.

  It had been a surprise, then, when, in winter, Jack and Molly had announced they were going to be parents. They were too young, by today’s middle-class standards. They’d only got married a year back, and none of their friends had even got that far. Annie supposed Jack had talked Molly into it. Or it wasn’t planned. Molly’s fear of missing out, her love of new adventures, would have overridden her fears of carrying on with the pregnancy.

  As always, Molly had been unsustainably enthusiastic to begin with. Blessed with a nausea-free first trimester, for the first twenty weeks she had taken daily photographs of her profile and stitched them together into a time lapse. She’d downloaded three baby growth apps on her phone and could and did tell you at any moment how many weeks and days pregnant she was.

  But nine months was a long time, and by the end of the second trimester the shine was off the pregnancy and Molly was just annoyed by all the things she wasn’t allowed to eat. Or do. Only the week before, she’d raged to Annie that tuna and tooth-whitening were forbidden.

  ‘Your teeth are white already,’ Annie had said, bemused. ‘And you hate tuna. You used to call it trick chicken when I gave it to you on sandwiches.’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ Molly told her, but Annie wasn’t sure Molly knew what her point was. ‘It’s like no one even remembers mothers are people too. Suddenly I’m just a vessel for a child. It’s obscene. What if I decided I did like tuna? Then what?’

  Annie hadn’t been able to summon a satisfactory answer. There was no point trying, really — when Molly got her knickers in a twist like this the best thing to do was nod and stand well back.

  She’d always been like that. Well, not always, Annie admitted to herself. Only since her dad left. Annie had heard once, or read, that sometimes when a young person has something monumental and catastrophic happen in their life, they remain emotionally the same age forever after. It sounded like nonsense, and obviously it was, but there was no denying that there was a touch of the eight year old, even now, about her daughter. Molly thought she had her whole life ahead of her, that the world owed her a happy ending, and that she could spend as much time and energy as she wanted making her own story just right. Becoming a parent would come as quite a shock.

  Annie shook her head and told herself Molly would be fine. She was bound to figure out motherhood. People did. Babies changed you, mostly for the better. They gave you a sense of your place in the world, in the circle of life and all that.

  In the warm evening air Annie breathed slowly and calmly. Her children were no longer her responsibility, her marriage had been over for nearly twenty years and now her parents were both gone. There really was a decent chance she was free.

  She let out a delighted whoop, and the magpie flapped off in alarm.

  Chapter 2

  Molly looked at the plate of finger sandwiches on her grandparents’ dining room table. They’d been made in stacks and a serrated knife had de-crusted them neatly before they’d been flipped on their sides and transferred all at once to the plate. Why did being at a funeral mean no one had to eat their crusts? The question tickled her and she briefly thought about writing it down in the notes app on her phone in case it was useful for something one day, but the urge passed and she didn’t bother.

  No one had taken a sandwich yet. They were chicken and mayonnaise on white bread, which was so compressed by the stacking and de-crusting process that it was hard to see where one sandwich ended and the next began. Maybe that was why no one was eating them. There was a real risk of taking the side of the next sandwich along with the one you wanted, leaving the filling of the neighbouring sandwich open to the air, and then no one would take that and the whole row of sandwiches would be shunned. It was all a bit fraught and probably, on balance, it would be better to have another piece of cake instead.

  Not that the cake was particularly nice. Pa had been ninety years old when he died, and Molly had attended enough funerals to have observed the inverse correlation between the age of the deceased and the quality of the food. Very old people meant very dry squares of cake — and no good ever came from cake cut in squares — and white-bread chicken sandwiches that always had bits of chopped cartilage in them.

  When she was in Year Five, her friend Ellen’s brother had died of leukaemia. He was only six. There had been little roast beef crostini at that funeral, and tiny chocolate eclairs. Caterers, she realised now. Ellen’s mother probably wouldn’t have been up to making sandwiches. A shudder ran through her. It was hard to tell if it originated in her shoulders or if the baby was shifting itself about in her abdomen. She hadn’t heard anyone else mention getting the shivers when their baby kicked, but hers shocked her on a regular basis. Thirty-six weeks, that’s how long her body had been getting used to this share-house situation, but it still wasn’t feeling any less weird.

  ‘All right, mate,’ she said. ‘It was only an observation about eclairs. I wasn’t saying it isn’t a very sad funeral. He was my grandfather.’ She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed her talking to her own bell
y.

  Seated on clusters of dining chairs, and some on the exhausted lounge suite in her grandparents’ living room, were old people drinking cups of tea, wishing it was whisky. They came in varying shades of aged — some were her parents’ vintage, sixty-ish, but a few were getting right up into their nineties. Not so many of the very old guard: hardly any of her grandfather’s friends were still alive. Most of the ancients were women: old acquaintances or distant relatives of her late grandmother. At least half of them were named Pat.

  One of the old women caught Molly’s eye and smiled, beckoning her over.

  Molly attempted to bend down to her, but there was nowhere for her belly in such a position, so she sat cross-legged on the floor instead.

  The old woman took her hand. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘You’re the youngest one. The one with the lovely voice.’

  ‘No,’ Molly said. ‘You’re thinking of my mum, Annie. I’m Molly. I don’t really sing.’

  The old eyes were sharp and the grip on Molly’s hand tightened. ‘I know who you are. And you certainly do have a lovely voice. Whether or not you choose to sing.’

  Molly looked around for someone to rescue her from whoever the creepy Macbethian creature was. She had to be one of Pa’s cousins. Or Granny’s. When had this woman heard her sing? Molly hadn’t played or sung for years.

  The only other person under sixty in the room, Naomi, was excellent at this sort of thing — sitting and talking to old people. Molly couldn’t bear it. Very old ladies smelled like forgotten toast and she was always distracted by the wiry chin hairs poking out of their crumpled faces. But not Naomi. She seemed unbothered by their prickly kisses and the way they held you tightly with their claws, as if they feared Death would drag them away before they had bored you senseless with a story about a war, or some trams.

  Naomi was holding a plate of delicious-smelling cheese triangles and Molly desperately wanted one, but not desperately enough to stay in this room with the contents of the municipal courtesy bus. She stood up and muttered something about the bathroom, pulling her hand free from the woman’s clutches, and retreated back to the dining room, hiding behind the return where she couldn’t be easily seen.

  It was all right for Naomi. She probably had some witchy Byron Bay spell she could perform afterwards to slough off the pall of mortality Molly could feel descending on the room. Naomi probably liked being close to people who were almost dead. She was always going on about what a privilege it was to be in the company of community elders.

  ‘We have so much to learn from them, Molly,’ she’d said that afternoon at the crematorium when she’d found her sister behind the hearse, hiding from two hobbling crones who wouldn’t stop trying to touch her belly. ‘Babies and the very elderly — they’re on the threshold of another world. They inhabit a liminal space. That’s a very sacred thing.’ Molly also inhabited a liminal space — between being able and unable to cope with her sister’s Northern Rivers pseudo-mystic bullshit.

  Even Naomi’s daughter, Sunny, seemed relaxed around old people and she was only six. Maybe because she was still young enough to be hanging out in this liminal space Naomi was so obsessed with. Earlier Molly had seen her standing patiently beside Great Aunt Enid, whom the child had never met before, as the old woman squeezed her hand and stroked her little face. If anyone tried that on Molly — today, let alone when she was six — she would kick them in their papery shins and be off on her bike before anyone could stop her.

  Molly didn’t know where Sunny was now. Probably in the garden with Felix. The cousins had only met a few times, but they’d hit it off. Simon had taken them out to the garden and shown them the old treehouse.

  Molly looked out the back window and past her mother, who was sitting alone in a chair on the grass, which seemed an odd choice of activity for a person in the middle of hosting a wake. She saw the children’s legs, dangling over the edge of the treehouse platform, swinging back and forth.

  It was hard to believe the treehouse could still be safe, but her grandfather had been a build-it-once, build-it-very-slowly, build-it-properly type of man.

  She and Naomi and Simon thought of the treehouse as their own, but it was there long before them. Pa built it for Annie, when she was a little girl. Pa had loved Annie like crazy, probably because she was his only child. Molly wondered if her dad would have felt like that about her, if Simon and Naomi hadn’t been born first. Or at all.

  Simon had been up the tree that morning to give it his developer’s seal of approval, knocking away spiderwebs and stomping about on the floorboards, shaking the sides to see if they were likely to give way. The rope ladder needed replacing, but for now they were making do with the aluminium one from the garage.

  When was the last time Molly had been up in the treehouse? Years and years back. You don’t always notice the last time you do things. The treehouse was beautiful: a miniature cottage, with a sloping shingle roof, windows on two sides, and a balcony with a rail running around it. Certainly more to her taste than her grandparents’ actual house. As a kid she had found this heavy Victorian style of architecture pleasing: it reminded her of the houses in the books she liked — Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Callie’s Castle — but her taste had matured and it wasn’t her thing at all now. The blood-coloured brick was ugly, the wide verandah — with all the frilly iron lace — on the front and the enclosed porch on one side kept the main rooms cool but very dark, and the furniture was unfashionably heavy wood, with turned legs and the sort of mahogany tinge her hair had taken on when she first tried to dye it at the age of fourteen. She’d been trying to look like Lindsay Lohan.

  But she had to admit the feel of the house was precious. She hadn’t ever lived there permanently, but every summer, as soon as school broke up for Christmas, her mum and dad had crammed children, suitcases, guitars, books, board games and bikes into the Mitsubishi Nimbus, handed over the keys to their cramped narrow Glebe terrace to whichever family of tourists had rented it through an analogue holiday rental service run by the local real estate agent, and headed up to Granny and Pa’s.

  The hour-long drive didn’t take them terribly far, as the crow flies, but it was a world away from their inner-city life. Molly hated the idea of someone else sleeping in her bed, but being able to ride her bike to the beach at Granny and Pa’s had been pretty consoling.

  She and her siblings had effectively been handed off to their grandparents for the next six weeks while Annie and Paul ran school-holiday music workshops for eight- to sixteen-year-olds in the local bowling club. Once or twice the three of them had joined in, but ultimately the awkwardness of treating their parents with the same degree of respect they would show to a teacher proved too problematic — not to mention having to listen to them sing — and they elected instead to stay at home with their grandparents, doing whichever thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle had been selected for that summer, playing days-long Monopoly tournaments, watching the box set of All Creatures Great and Small, going to the beach, and arguing over the sole Game Boy.

  Besides, the popularity of her parents’ music workshops relied to an embarrassing degree on their fleeting moment of fame, back in the early 1980s. Their band, Love Triangle — even the name had made Molly cringe — had been sort of famous, briefly. If fame were on a spectrum from one to ten, one being a busker outside the supermarket in a country town with under a thousand inhabitants and ten being Taylor Swift, Molly reckoned Love Triangle had peaked at six: Trivial Pursuit answer level. It had been excruciating to watch parents dropping off their kids and trying to make them care that these middle-aged music teachers were once all the rage. Even their use of the term ‘all the rage’ had only served to give Molly, quite literally, all the rage.

  The only part of her parents’ previous life she was ever prepared to indulge was the existence of the third member of their band, Brian. Brian lived in England, but for a long time he had come back each Christmas and stayed with his old mother, who’d lived two streets from Pa�
��s house on Baskerville Road, further from the beach than they were.

  Back then, Molly had felt a bit sorry for Brian. He’d been the third wheel in the band after her parents coupled up, and he’d clearly still carried a torch for the old days. So many nights she had lain in her bed upstairs at her grandparents’ house, drifting through the place between sleep and wake, and hearing the adults’ laughter as they drank red wine out on the back patio. Brian was always trying to get her parents to move back to England, to give the band another shot.

  Sometimes they would get their guitars out and play their old songs. Annie was always shushing Paul and Brian, telling them they’d wake the children. Molly didn’t hate their old songs. They were horribly uncool, obviously, and the sort of stupid pop music she had absolutely never been into, but sometimes, in the dark of night, if Brian was playing along too, she’d let herself like them a tiny bit.

  Brian was all right because he didn’t hassle Molly about music. Her parents couldn’t help themselves. They’d made her learn the piano until she was in Year Eight, which was fine — piano wasn’t hard. But it wasn’t fun. They seemed to think that just because she could do it she must like doing it and they couldn’t have been more wrong. Molly could do it, she thought, because she was genetically predisposed to be able to play music and she’d been absorbing it her whole life. She had long fingers and a wide reach, and the structures and chords — the language of the piano — made inherent sense to her. What she didn’t have was the slightest desire to be a musician. She didn’t particularly care if people looked at her. She didn’t burn with untold stories and unexpressed emotions. And she certainly didn’t have the commitment.

  Her parents mustn’t have had it either: the drive to succeed in music. Otherwise they wouldn’t have chucked it in as early in their career as they had. From what Molly could tell of her parents’ musical past, the enthusiasm had belonged to her dad and Brian, and her mother had possessed the talent.