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Authors: Peter Goldsworthy
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with you.’
On the last evening the smaller family ate together at the nearby Pizza Hut, a favourite of the childrens. Unwilling to carry Emma, increasingly frail, past a hundred staring faces, Rick had rung the manager; they were permitted to arrive and eat early, half an hour before opening time. If this approached the dimensions of a Last Wish, it was never mentioned — and if the ride home would be by tumbril, it would at least be a short trip.
At home afterwards the four played Monopoly — both children as engrossed as always, both parents unable to concentrate, but doing their best, buying and selling properties on autopilot. Apart from the care with which the fragile Emma had been set down on a sheepskin rug and soft pillows, they might have been one of the idealised families pictured on the boxes of other board-games stacked in their shelves, sprawled on carpet in family rooms, with a board between them. Reminders of their life together surrounded them: gift books, home videos, souvenirs of family holidays, framed paintings done by the children at school or kindergarten or home, family photographs. If the big open space at the back of the house was more family shrine or chapel than family room, these photographs were its icons: small framed group portraits of the four, a smattering of older ancestors, but above all, everywhere the glowing photographs of Ben and Emma, at various ages.
As the game finished, it occurred to Rick that this room had always been their true place of worship, not Church — and that these three people, his family, his ideal of Family, had always been the core of whatever he believed in.
Later, sitting at his desk in his study, listening to Mozart, he finished a long letter to his parents, asking for forgiveness, hoping for understanding. He also tore open the last letter he had written to Ben, to be read on his eighteenth birthday, and added several more words of love. Perhaps it was the Mozart, perhaps it was the sedative leaching into his veins, but with these tasks completed he found himself facing events if not with equanimity, at least once again with certainty.
Linda appeared in the door, agitated, trembling: ‘We can’t go through with this. It’s absurd.’
He led her into the bedroom, they lay down together on the bed, and held each other tightly. They had planned to make love one last time, but the act suddenly seemed irrelevant, and meaningless. She was still trembling; he rose and fossicked a Bible from the bookshelves, and for a time they read alternately: the poetry of Isaiah, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, St Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, various Psalms. The texts held only a minimal promise for Rick — ‘we’ll see,’ he joked grimly to himself — but some deeper music in the words had a soothing effect on both of them, like the drug he had swallowed, or the Mozart itself:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …
He might believe in little beyond family love, but these words seemed the culmination of all their nights of book-readings, as if those thick books — Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray — had been a preparation for this moment, this last distillation of the written word.
In the next room Ben landed on Mayfair, with hotels; the children abandoned their game and joined their parents in bed. Linda slipped a small butterfly-needle into Rick’s veins, and taped it in place, despite shaking hands; she then repeated the procedure on Emma, finding the task surprisingly easy: the girl’s veins were more prominent than her father’s, her skin far more delicate than any thick-skinned navel orange. Emma flinched, momentarily, then watched solemnly as two syringes were loaded with morphine. Her wide owl-eyes seemed to be looking at everything simultaneously, taking everything in. They lay together on the bed, all four of them — just as they had been together at
On the last evening the smaller family ate together at the nearby Pizza Hut, a favourite of the childrens. Unwilling to carry Emma, increasingly frail, past a hundred staring faces, Rick had rung the manager; they were permitted to arrive and eat early, half an hour before opening time. If this approached the dimensions of a Last Wish, it was never mentioned — and if the ride home would be by tumbril, it would at least be a short trip.
At home afterwards the four played Monopoly — both children as engrossed as always, both parents unable to concentrate, but doing their best, buying and selling properties on autopilot. Apart from the care with which the fragile Emma had been set down on a sheepskin rug and soft pillows, they might have been one of the idealised families pictured on the boxes of other board-games stacked in their shelves, sprawled on carpet in family rooms, with a board between them. Reminders of their life together surrounded them: gift books, home videos, souvenirs of family holidays, framed paintings done by the children at school or kindergarten or home, family photographs. If the big open space at the back of the house was more family shrine or chapel than family room, these photographs were its icons: small framed group portraits of the four, a smattering of older ancestors, but above all, everywhere the glowing photographs of Ben and Emma, at various ages.
As the game finished, it occurred to Rick that this room had always been their true place of worship, not Church — and that these three people, his family, his ideal of Family, had always been the core of whatever he believed in.
Later, sitting at his desk in his study, listening to Mozart, he finished a long letter to his parents, asking for forgiveness, hoping for understanding. He also tore open the last letter he had written to Ben, to be read on his eighteenth birthday, and added several more words of love. Perhaps it was the Mozart, perhaps it was the sedative leaching into his veins, but with these tasks completed he found himself facing events if not with equanimity, at least once again with certainty.
Linda appeared in the door, agitated, trembling: ‘We can’t go through with this. It’s absurd.’
He led her into the bedroom, they lay down together on the bed, and held each other tightly. They had planned to make love one last time, but the act suddenly seemed irrelevant, and meaningless. She was still trembling; he rose and fossicked a Bible from the bookshelves, and for a time they read alternately: the poetry of Isaiah, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, St Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, various Psalms. The texts held only a minimal promise for Rick — ‘we’ll see,’ he joked grimly to himself — but some deeper music in the words had a soothing effect on both of them, like the drug he had swallowed, or the Mozart itself:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …
He might believe in little beyond family love, but these words seemed the culmination of all their nights of book-readings, as if those thick books — Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray — had been a preparation for this moment, this last distillation of the written word.
In the next room Ben landed on Mayfair, with hotels; the children abandoned their game and joined their parents in bed. Linda slipped a small butterfly-needle into Rick’s veins, and taped it in place, despite shaking hands; she then repeated the procedure on Emma, finding the task surprisingly easy: the girl’s veins were more prominent than her father’s, her skin far more delicate than any thick-skinned navel orange. Emma flinched, momentarily, then watched solemnly as two syringes were loaded with morphine. Her wide owl-eyes seemed to be looking at everything simultaneously, taking everything in. They lay together on the bed, all four of them — just as they had been together at
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