The note on the table.

She had left a hand-written note on the kitchen table. Inscribed on a paper napkin, cream, one of the more robust ones, embossed, that you could put around at a dinner party.

‘Dear family ….’

Cursive handwriting. Baroque Ks and Ms and Ts, all curlicues and loops and tails like little wedding dress trains. 

‘Going on bus to Llandysil …’

Telegram style. You never lose it. The style disappeared after the telegram’s demise; returned for the SMS and text. No-one had to relearn it, it just reappeared, with a few acronyms and affectations. 

‘ … to visit Laurie. He must be lonely.’

It was signed off with another heavily curlicued three-letter word: ‘Mum’. The curlicues probably haven’t changed much since the 1960s; maybe just a little flatter and slightly out of line.

Visiting Laurie would be difficult. He has been dead 32 years and two months. He no longer resides at Llandisyl, the nursing home, which in any case fell to the wrecker’s ball, or whatever they demolish with these days, two decades ago. He is sleeping the big sleep under whispering pines at the peaceful old graveyard at Bulla, far from the madding Melbourne crowd; although it is directly under the Tullamarine flight path, and when landing aeroplanes pass they disturb the air; and following a twelve second delay, a ghostly trembling sound can be heard in the upper branches of the pines. 

That’s his resting place. 

The funeral had been held at St Teresa’s, the old red brick church built somewhat ostentatiously on the diagonal at the corner of Lincoln Road and Florence Street. I had delivered the eulogy, and had been careful to avoid oversentimentality or inappropriate anecdotes, following a warning from the priest that the church was a place for reverentiality and that the place for the latter would be the wake. Nevertheless I had impressed friends who later, on condolence cards and in letters, had praised my delivery, which I had driven through the narrow bends of sentimentality and acceptable grief-laden remembrances. 

My mother, his wife, had been stoic, and businesslike. It had been noticed. No tears. And life went on. 

*

‘I heard him coming up the drive,’ she told me yesterday. ‘Why doesn’t he come inside?’