She holds my eyes while she drinks her tea, two hands steadying the cup, and then she looks down at the saucer. Finally, she exhales a gust of warm breath.

Well now, quinie, why would ye want to do that?

December 1974

December 1974

Christmas Day, and you have left us, lambsie. Whyever you picked this day to fly away, I canna imagine, but your mother has been grumbling ever since you surprised us with your plans. I have a wee suspicion, though. I don’t think Kathryn is so very sad to be spared chickens and ovens and gravy on this breathless hot day.

A Christmas you will always remember, this one. You woke up in the skin you have had all your life and grew a brand new one. In one day, the old and the new. I have known days like this.

I watched you, lambsie, as we sat drinking tea with the air all around full of ‘Silent Night’ and cigarettes, boards clacking with times and destinations, jangle-voices coming from airport speakers. You in that long cheesecloth dress, forever pushing your hair from your eyes, those thin tinkly bracelets running up and down your arm like music. You were fit to burst, bubbling away like a little girl all grown up but a little girl still. Trying not to show it in front of your university friends.

Clementina and I share a glance. Proud of our granddaughters, fearless and brave. We can read that look on your faces, yours and Wendy’s, both of you about to cut your moorings. Clear as a Fremantle sky, it is, what’s in your eyes:

The wide world!

Look at this crowd come to see you off, missing their Christmas pudding to do it. Jessie and your mother deep in talk, Kathryn dabbing at her eyes, a flash of white cotton scrunched up in her hand. Your Unty Jessie is probably trying to soothe her: Wendy’s a bit older, Wendy will look after her. And wouldn’t you squirm to hear that ! I look at Jessie’s lined face and think, as always, of Hal, forever thirty-four. You never knew him, lambsie. Sweet, funny Hal, your Unty Jessie’s twin, a life wasted in the second war as his da’s was in the first. Ach, so cruel on Clementina.

You introduce your friends, lovely young people, and that boy with the droopy moustache, a charmer, him. Forgive me, lambsie, I canna remember so many names, all of them clattering together. Look at Clementina, her generous self squashed into a hard plastic chair, a big snorting laugh at something one of the girls is telling her.

They are all here for you and Wendy, here to bid you a happy goodbye.