Dad’s 80th birthday party was held late last century in his favourite restaurant, a cavernous space in a middle-class Melbourne suburb with a tiled floor for easy cleaning, possibly even hosing down, and little in the way of warmth, charm or decoration. Clearly, you were here to eat until you were full.
Waiters balanced huge platters of food on their shoulders – grilled meats and fish and salads and dips and bread, bread, bread – delivering them to long tables of grandparents and their grandchildren, their daughters and sons-in-law, sons and daughters-in-law, and second and third cousins and their partners. The place forbade people from bringing their own drinks- instead you got them at the bar, or had them delivered to the table after a lengthy delay- and each time the waiters ventured down the aisles they were accosted by 10 burly customers, hands grabbing their shirts and threatening to unbalance the heaped trays. My water! Where’s my Diet Coke? I asked for a cappuccino! It’s been 10 minutes already and I’m dying of thirst!
Dad, on this, his day, had smuggled in orange juice and mineral water in a string bag. He’d stashed the bottles under his chair, from where he sneaked them out in full view of his grandchildren, his dark-brown eyes winking loudly: for if there can be such a thing as a winking noise, Dad had it in his repertoire. He was playing the big man, as my mother might have put it, a big shot with a string bag - as if this would fool anybody.
My mother’s voice was in my ear, but not because she was sitting beside me. Her voice lived in my head. She had been dead for 21 years. She didn’t make it to her 50th birthday, much less her 80th. Each time Dad reached a new milestone I did the calculation. Why couldn’t it be she who was celebrating, and he who was lying dead in the ground?