EVERYTHING
PRECIOUS
ANNA FUNDER
Copyright © Anna Funder, 2014.
All rights reserved.
Published in collaboration with: PASPALEY
First Edition.
First published by Paspaley 2014.
2 Martin Place, Sydney NSW.
paspaley.com
Design by Special Group.
Ebook formatting by ebooklaunch.com
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
About The Author
This story is a unique collaboration between Paspaley,
acclaimed author Anna Funder, photographer
Derek Henderson and award-winning actress Teresa Palmer.
It's an original story of love, self and all things precious,
featuring the most beautiful pearls in the world.
CHAPTER ONE
It is a skinny terrace in a reasonably fashionable area, though for the price of it they could have moved out to the suburbs and had a pool and ensuites with his and hers sinks like the children wanted.
It is late and the day—like most of them now—has been both long, and not nearly long enough to get everything done. Tess and Dan are getting ready for bed. They can hear Charlotte, their eldest, still talking on her phone in her room so they keep their voices down. Dan is propped up on the pillows with the iPad. You could never know, Tess thinks, what he is reading or buying or who he is talking to on that thing. At least in the olden days you could distinguish between a book and a shop and a telephone. Tess works in legal publishing but on the editing, rather than the online side of it.
'Weird thing happened today,' Dan says, tapping his tablet. 'I got Facebooked by Sukie.'
'Sukie—?' Tess says, though she knows full well. He ignores this, quite rightly. How many Sukies does anyone know?
'Yep. Weird. She said, "Looks like everything's going great in your life. So glad for you." I feel like she wants me to confess some marital misery and come cry on her shoulder.' Dan looks up at his wife and shudders in an exaggerated way. 'I haven't heard from her in...,' he glances at the ceiling, 'must be 18 years.'
Sukie had been his first long-term girlfriend. She turned out to be Completely Not Right, but then again, how 'completely' could that be if it took him four years to figure it out? Like most couples Tess knows, she and Dan don't talk about each other's sexual history before they got together, except as some kind of joke involving mistakes, apprenticeships and witches. Or that's how she deals with it. Dan is more loyal to his past in a way she both respects and wishes he would abandon. She would like him, just once, to rain vitriol on his exes, but then again that would take away from the very tolerance and fairness she loves him for, bla, bla. It's infuriating.
'Did you message her back?' Tess doesn't know whether she wants him to have or not.
'Yes,' he leans over on one elbow towards her side of the bed. The light catches the creases at the corners of his eyes. 'I told her about my lovely life, and my lovely, lovely wife.'
'You didn't.'
'No, that would have been mean. I just said we're fine thanks, and told her about the children.'
She looks past his stubbly chin and sees he's been reading an online medical journal.
'If you wanted to stalk someone you used to have to act crazy in reality and park your car outside their house,' she says. 'Now it's just click click click and you're indistinguishable from all the other crazies on the internet.'
'You're the crazy woman,' Dan says, placing the tablet on the nightstand and turning back to her. And possibly it is true.
CHAPTER TWO
Breakfast time.
The twins are six, Tom and Lorna. Charlotte is thirteen. There has been plenty of time—years and years, Tess thinks—to institute routines of breakfast and lunch-making but still every day is different and unpredictable, despite having half the lunches prepared the night before (not the sandwiches, or the kids won't eat them for sogginess). Tess has no idea when it began—probably at weaning—but each child has exactly what he or she wants, every single item, for breakfast and for lunch. In her more capable moments this seems like modern, considerate family life. In the other, rattier times it feels like indulgent insanity, the revenge-parenting her generation is quietly, effortfully taking on its Baby Boomer parents, those people who'd grunted with their chins over the newspaper at the cereal cupboard and felt their job was done. She finishes wiping yoghurt out of her hair with a damp tea towel (Tom had been making a point with his spoon). She turns back to the chopping board.
'Is it Fuji?' Lorna's little legs are swinging from the kitchen barstool. Lorna will only eat Fuji apples.'Is it Fuji?' She's been interrogating the crescents on her plate since she was four. Tess always says yes no matter what kind of apple it is. This is exactly the kind of mothering dishonesty she wants to avoid, but there it is already. Unavoidable.
They hear the rise and fall of voices arguing upstairs: Charlotte and her father having the usual run-in about whatever boundary Charlotte is pushing today. Tess and Dan unofficially take turns dealing with these battles, much as a general rotates troops in a long war, so as not to send the recently wounded back to the front. Though they don't discuss troop placement explicitly; after seventeen years together, there are certain rhythms of fairness in the 'war' part of 'love and war' that go without saying.
Tom has picked the raisins out of a swaying sea of milky cereal and is threading them onto a fork.
'Is metal stronger than steel or steel stronger than metal?' he asks.
Tess takes the fork out of his hand and substitutes a spoon, giving her time to think.
'Steel is a kind of metal,' she says.
'Is grey hair older than white hair or white hair older than grey hair?'
Tess draws breath. Every day there are questions that are tests. She tries to answer them both truthfully and without making reality too shocking. ('We eat baby lambs? And the pigs—do we eat their babies too? What kind of monsters are we?') But sometimes comfort and truth are not compatible, or the truth is complicated in ways that lose the attention of a six year old. Her father Howard had been a judge, and his father a surgeon. Every time anything difficult needed to be answered, for instance about sex or cancer, her father had done it legally accurately (preferably with Latin) and using obscure medical terms ('lesion' for tumor, 'procedure' for operation). So although he could never be accused of lying, he could also never quite be understood. Nothing tragic or human could inhere in his words; everything was reduced to a step-by-step process of unquestionable normality.
The thought occurs to her: perhaps her father aimed to spare her, as well as himself, the trauma of the world? Tess wishes she could ask him, but that question would be too complicated for him now.
Lorna is ignoring her breakfast, sifting instead through the eternal tide of detritus that washes up on the end of the bench—currently including homeless puzzle pieces, subscription renewal forms, propelling pencils with no leads and a green rubber ball designed to be spat out by a one-eyed foam monster no one has seen for weeks. Lorna finds a pair of 3D movie glasses and puts them on.
'Mu-um?' Tom bleats.
Tess looks at him as if she can't remember how he got there.
'Sorry, honey,' she says. 'Well. Sometimes quite young people get grey or white hair. And sometimes old people don't go either grey or white. But you're right: grey and white are both old people's hair colours.'
She can't tell from Tom's face if this is satisfactory or not.
Tess hears a miniature version of Dr Preston her therapist on her right shoulder: 'Watch those thought patterns, Tess: can you see them becoming grim and circular? Try to be fully present with your children.' But on her left shoulder squats the Evil Imp of Anxiety, snubbing its snub little nose at Dr P and continuing its endless, wicked work of list-making. Today hers is:
— make breakfasts
— pack lunches
— meet real estate agent (poor Lizzie)
— visit Dad
— possible leg/chin/bikini wax
— postpone Charlotte's parent-teacher interview
— pack for work trip
— find passport
She is leaving for the London conference ('Innovative Legal Publishing in the Digital Age') tomorrow. Twenty-two hours in a pressurized can with 399 other people—a plight which seems, from this moment in the kitchen, a barely conceivable luxury of solitude.
A pair of familiar—though also strange—legs in ankle socks and school shoes starts down the stairs. Tess thinks of the Verfremdungseffekt she learned of studying Brecht's plays at university: making things that are commonplace strange to you, so you see them anew, for what they are. And here it is— enter stage left: estranged legs. Charlotte's school uniform is hoiked up to reveal most of her thighs, unnaturally mottled from fake tan, and she has painted eyeliner on flamboyantly, like an Italian film star from the 1960s, or a dead soul-punk chanteuse. But instead of 'Amy Winehouse' it's the words 'Agent Orange' that spring to mind when Tess looks at her daughter. Dan follows, deliberately unhurried.
'Not sure they let raccoons into school,' he says to the room at large. Dan is head of epidemiology in the State Health Department. He has a knack, honed in endless intra-agency meetings, for opening out a conflict from the parties involved to treat it as a matter for all to discuss. Charlotte rolls her eyes in their huge, black-rimmed sockets and starts stuffing books into her backpack.
'Though they might think you're a new exchange student,' Dan smiles. There had been some Pacific Islander girls at school last term.
'That's racist,' Charlotte snaps.
'I'm kidding,' he says.
'Still racist.'
'I think you're pretty,' Lorna says, gazing at her sister through the oversized plastic frames. For her, Charlotte is a goddess—one who can turn mean at any second, but then, that is the way of goddesses.
Tess leans in to Lorna across the bench.
'Are they magic glasses, then?'
Dan shoots her a look: down, girl. Charlotte turns away.
Dan moves around to face his elder daughter.
'You're beautiful, my Charlie girl,' he says, daring to touch her shoulder. 'Especially without all that,' he gestures to her, top to toe.
'You must be blind!' Charlotte cries. Tears spring up in her eyes.
Why a compliment or sympathy should make us cry Tess has never understood, but it does. She can see that Charlotte is battling something dark and undermining inside. Every woman she knows has a secret list of faults she keeps in her heart, unnecessary and malign. How did it get there? Tess wants, more than anything, to save her daughters from this.
Charlotte goes into the bathroom, removes the eyeliner and pulls down her skirt. Tess zips up Tom and Lorna's backpacks, and gets to the final thing: sunscreen.
Tom turns up his face and closes his eyes tight. His mouth makes a scrunched-up star, ready for the smear.
'When are you going to die, Mum?' He is matter-of-fact. Death doesn't apply to him, and in any case it's not necessarily all that debilitating. Things in his world—Power Rangers, Ninjagos, Red Riding Hood from inside the wolf's stomach—come back to life all the time.
'But I don't have any grey hair or white hair.'
'But when?' he insists.
'Not for a very long time,' Tess says, casually as possible, smoothing cream over the tiny nostrils. She looks about for something wooden, spies the handle of the breadknife and taps it quickly. Then places her fingers back under his chin. Tom opens his eyes.
'Before me or after me?'
Tess knows this little soul. He doesn't want to be left alone, not in the dark, not on the first day at school, and not in the end. Who does? There's no Latin, no legalese for this.
She takes a deep breath.
'Before you,' she says, hoping this is true, and also, as she holds his perfect, shiny face, not true at all. 'You'll be an old man with a family of your own to look after you,' she adds, 'and I'll be a very old lady, all done.'
All done? What on earth—? That is taking list-thinking way, way too far. She will never, ever be all done here.