Mortal Sins

Mortal Sins appeared in Best Australian Stories 2013 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Her mother liked going to funerals. She never said as much, but Caitlin could tell. Like everyone else she knew, Caitlin dreaded them, but if Erin missed a service, she’d be cross for weeks. Most of Erin’s people were dead now: her husband died at sea when she was thirty, her two brothers lost to a heart attack and alcohol, her brothers’ wives – one dead, the other divorced for decades and as good as. Old friends devoured by cancer; even children of old friends had started dropping off. 

Caitlin first noticed her mother’s morbid delight one windy summer morning as they battled the weekend papers while her boys played cricket. 

‘Look!’ Erin had cried out, jabbing a funeral notice with her finger like she’d just won bingo. ‘Mister Melick. You remember, from the deli.’ 

Caitlin shook her head. Sure, she remembered old Johnnie Melick with his pervy stares. 

‘Of course you do. Cancer. His poor wife. Come back to mine after and we’ll send her a nice card.’ 

‘I’m busy later.’ Caitlin was surprised at how instantly purposeful her mother had become, as if she was planning an impromptu dinner party. 

‘It won’t take long. It’s just a card.’ 

Caitlin flicked the newspaper to the real estate section. It was her version of sticking her fingers in her ears. She had no intention of buying a flat, didn’t have the money even if she wanted to, but scouring the property section had become her hobby. She’d draw red biro circles around deceased-estate inspection times and spend the afternoon visiting them. She’d found comfort in seeing old people’s lives. She’d sat on the end of a single bed in a makeshift lean-to and imagined the old man still curled up in it. She’d stood on a tiny balcony crammed with terracotta pots and emptied her water bottle over the dried-up ferns. She’d found a quiet beauty in empty rooms with carpet pock-marked from years of bearing heavy furniture. She’d run her fingers along tobacco-stained wallpaper, tracing the oval-shaped echoes of framed photographs, now most likely at the council tip. And she’d choked up when she saw a pair of matching leather recliners, sitting side by side, one scuffed and indented with its footstool still angled, the other tidy as the day it was bought.

Caitlin could feel her mother glaring at her. She closed the deceased estates. ‘Okay, Ma.’

‘Good.’

‘We’ll stop by the newsagent and get a card there.’

‘No need. I have plenty.’

‘You do?’

Erin held her chin high like a puppy with its head out the car window. ‘Well, you never know.’

‘That’s a bit grim reaper.’ 

Erin looked at her with an all-knowing, mother-knows-best, full-stop smile. Caitlin went back to the deceased estates. 

After the match, the boys crawled in to the back seat of Caitlin’s white Toyota. She adjusted the rear-vision mirror to watch them buckle up as they played with her iPad. Her babies. Her twins. Her IVF miracles that came to her as she was giving up. Just turned nine, they could still entertain each other all day –she was grateful for that. Yet, she was nearly fifty, and felt panic for the years ahead. Short of amphetamines, how was she going to keep up when they became hairy and hormonal? How would she make sure they’d turn out to be good men, really decent men, the kind of men who respect women and are good to small animals? They’d already started ganging up on her in insignificant ways. She knew the numbers would always be in their favour: one of her and two of them. So she’d taught herself to be strict, the type of strict usually reserved for dads. She hated disciplining them, it made her feel fake, she hated how her voice sounded and the feeling in her stomach, but she consoled herself by thinking it’d make each one the type of man she still hoped to meet one day. 

Caitlin switched on the classical station, laughing, even before the boys had a chance to pull faces. When they arrived at Erin’s, the boys ran down the side of the bungalow to the back garden, hollering and jumping on the trampoline Caitlin had bought to lure them there when she needed free babysitting. From the kitchen window she watched them out-leap each other and had visions of four arms and legs in plaster. 

‘There you go,’ Erin rattled open the top drawer of her cabinet and pointed to a pile of sympathy cards stacked neatly in a corner. 

Caitlin sifted through the cards. An envelope with a severe black border fell to the floor. ‘This is creepy, Ma,’ she said, picking it up.

Each card was unique. Most in protective plastic sleeves. ‘Sorry for your loss’ was written in swirling cursive letters on one, a small card with rounded corners was simply embossed with RIP, and watercolour lilies had been hand-painted on another. As Caitlin laid the cards in rows across the cabinet – seventeen all up – Erin looked fondly at her collection. 

‘Which one’s for my funeral then?’ Caitlin asked in a faux-serious voice. Making light of her mother’s dark side had long been a survival strategy. 

Erin tsked. ‘Now, this’ll do nicely,’ she said, waving a card with a poem of Walt Whitman’s. 

A few weeks later, Caitlin’s mobile woke her just after dawn. The caller’s number was blocked, which either meant a cold call from someone trying to sell her something she didn’t want or her mother. ‘Ma,’ she answered on a punt. ‘What’s up?’

‘Sorry darling, dreadful news. I’ve just found out your second cousin, Gabriel, on the Manetti side, was in an accident last week.’

‘Is he okay?’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Oh, Ma. I’m sorry.’

‘I know. I know. Funeral’s tomorrow. You’ll come won’t you?’ Erin had fine-tuned the art of the rhetorical question.

‘I don’t – I didn’t know him.’

‘Doesn’t matter. He’s family.’

‘Distant family.’

‘He’s your cousin Margaret’s son. You went to his christening.’

‘That must be twenty years ago.’

‘Twenty-three.’

“I’m not sure.’ Caitlin suspected her mother just wanted to make a grand entrance, flanked by one of her brood. 

‘We must go. We have to represent this side of the family. His poor mother.’ Erin suddenly sounded herself very much like a poor mother. 

‘It just feels weird to top and tail his life.’ 

‘You’re coming, then?’ 

‘Okay, okay.’ Caitlin cursed herself for letting her mother have her way again. 

The next morning Caitlin dropped the boys off before school peak hour started. Eight schools separated her from her mother’s house. There was no avoiding the forty-kilometre zones with the lollipop ladies shepherding their herds and bumper-to-bumper latest model SUVs doing the morning drop. Caitlin tried not to resent chauffeuring her boys around. She’d fret if she didn’t – it wasn’t safe like when she was a kid. Caitlin suddenly missed her rickety school-bus rides. Chugging along with no suspension, she’d monkey up to the back of the bus and sit on the high seat straddling the thrum of the wheel. She’d quietly look out the window, squeezing her thighs tightly together whenever the tyres lurched over a hump. 

Caitlin made sure she got to her mother’s early. As Erin aged, the more punctual she insisted everyone else become. When Caitlin was growing up, Erin was late for everything. She’d miss school concerts and sports carnivals, arriving towards the end of parent and teacher nights, making a grand entrance, perfumed and red-lipped and over-dressed, flirting with teachers of either sex as they packed up. Then she’d reluctantly go back home with Caitlin and her little sister, and the three of them would sit at the kitchen bench till way after midnight. Caitlin would pour her mother tall glasses of scotch and ice while she acted out Tennessee Williams or Beckett or Albee by heart, jumping from one role to the next, re-enacting whole arguments between characters. 

‘More, Ma, please!’ ‘Do another one,’ the girls would yell out if she threatened to stop. 

She always obliged. Erin would tie a tea towel around her head and then take it off to flick at an imaginary character. She’d demand more booze if her character was a drunk, though her drinks were never props. The girls would whoop and squeal and no one cared what time it was. Then she’d tell them she could’ve been a great actress if only her stupid, no-good husband hadn’t left her to bring them up all on her own, and the girls would wet the tea towel and wash her mascara-stained cheeks and put her to bed.

Erin sure liked a drink back then. But when she turned sixty, she gave up hard liquor and her timing reversed. She’d turn up to dinner parties early and became sullen if friends kept her waiting. 

Caitlin pulled in to the driveway. It wasn’t worth honking, she’d done it once before and they’d sat in silence for half an hour until Erin was satisfied her daughter had learned her lesson. Caitlin turned the engine off, but kept the radio on to listen to a scientist defending intelligent design.

Erin opened the front door and waved. Caitlin could tell she’d fussed and preened as if she were going to a wedding. She’d had her hair done and bought a new dress. Tiny and sharp-featured, the weight she’d suddenly put on after her husband died had just as suddenly slipped off again in her sixties, too late, she’d bemoaned, to make good use of it. Caitlin thought it suited her nature better. With her finicky ways, her mother had always had a controlling trimness about her.

‘This is going to be a sad funeral, dear,’ Erin announced, side-saddling her way in to the front seat. 

Caitlin switched the radio to a classical station. ‘Funerals are always sad, Ma.’

‘But this is going to be very, very sad,’ her mother’s voice punched the air for emphasis. Erin sucked in air between her teeth, then with a hissing sound, cussed ‘Ssssuicide.’ Her voice as shrill as scraping metal. 

Caitlin wanted to yell out ‘la-la-la-la-la-la’ over her mother’s voice. Here she was, a middle-aged woman with kids of her own, and she felt like a child.

‘But you said …’ Caitlin stopped. Years of gestalt and role-playing their mother–daughter relationship had made her adopt an artificial language, a controlling newspeak that removed blame words. 

‘I thought it was an accident.’

Erin turned squarely to face her. ‘The funeral notice said it’s an accident. His father is saying it’s an accident. The priest will say it’s an accident.’

‘Why?’

‘Because suicide is a mortal sin.’

‘So’s not having your seatbelt on. I meant why did he …’

‘Why does anyone?’

‘His poor mother.’ 

‘I called Margaret last night.’

‘How is she?’

‘Devastated, dear. Dev-a-stated.’

‘Of course.’

‘I said, well it’s a good thing he wasn’t a Hindu, otherwise he’d come back as a cockroach.’

Caitlin slammed the brake. ‘You said what?’

‘If you take your own life, you get reincarnated as …’

‘What possessed you to say that?’

‘It’s not what I say, it’s what the Hare Krishnas say.’

‘Who cares what the Hare Krishnas say? We’re Catholic. Margaret’s husband, what’s-his-name?’

‘Joe.’

‘Right. Joe. He’s Italian, old school, pope-loving Roman-Catholic Catholic. Jesus, Ma. Cockroaches.’

‘Don’t get worked up, dear.’

‘Put your seatbelt on.’

They drove in silence to the church. Caitlin parked behind the rectory. She knew St Jude’s well. It was their church. A blond brick edifice relieved only by a high row of small stained-glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross. It was characterless, built quickly in the late fifties to service local Catholic families like her mother’s, Irish and British citizens who had come to Australia as Ten-Pound Poms. St Jude’s was too new and too big to have the charm of an old sandstone church, and too insignificant to have manicured grounds or a copper steeple. But it was and would always be where her family had its rituals, where their babies got christened, first confessions were heard and bodies of loved ones sent off to be buried. As much as she would have liked a more charming church, once you have a family church, you can’t go changing it. 

‘We should have a permanent room here,’ Caitlin said, letting Erin know the cockroach stand-off was officially over. She leaned across her and pulled out a travel pack of tissues from the glove box. 

‘Here, take these.’

‘No thanks, I’ll be fine dear.’ 

Caitlin stuffed the tissues in her bag and they walked to the front of the church where the empty hearse was waiting. 

‘He’s already in, then.’

The people milling around the church looked like uni students, too young to be burying one of their own. Erin and Caitlin signed the guest book and were given a hastily folded pamphlet with a handsome boy-man’s face and birth and death dates on the front. 

They took turns hugging Joe and Margaret, who seemed to have also forgiven Erin for the cockroach comment, and took a seat in a pew halfway up on the family side. The coffin was sealed and huge: black lacquered wood punctuated with brass handles. 

‘Don’t waste good money on one of those for me.’ Erin’s voice was loud in the hushed space. A little boy in the pew in front turned around. His mother bristled and pulled him to her.

‘Shhh,’ whispered Caitlin. ‘Why? Do you want to be cremated?’ 

‘No. I want you to put me in a cave.’ Whenever Erin spoke of her death, she put on a haughty tone as if her funeral was going to be a big posh event like having a private box at the races. 

‘A cave, huh? To be eaten by vultures, like a Tibetan sky-burial?’

‘No, dear. In case I resurrect.’

Their family was conventionally buried in a graveyard nearby. It was still the proper option for Catholics. No matter how expensive real estate had become, people would take out a second mortgage to finance a plot. Caitlin’s family couldn’t afford to keep buying them, so they were stacked up, one on top of the other. Heaven’s sandwich, they called it. Caitlin’s paternal grandfather was there with her grandmother, side by side at the bottom of the pile, then her uncle on top of her grandpa. Her dad was meant to be there, but he wasn’t. She was only knee-high when he disappeared at sea. But his name was etched in the stone as if he was there and she tried to believe he was, somewhere in the sandwich. Her mother’s people were buried back in Ireland. Erin was meant to be laid out on top of her mother-in-law, a thought which horrified her so much she bought weekly Lotto tickets in the hope she could afford something more appropriate for her afterlife. Caitlin knew that even with her mother’s resurrection plans, Erin would join the sandwich one day and there wouldn’t be any room left after that, so she’d quietly planned to install a chute next to the gravestone and slide future dead relatives’ ashes down it.

‘Great. A cave.’

‘I could go anytime, you know.’

‘Fine, I’ll start looking tomorrow.’ Caitlin squared the corners of the pamphlet together to correct the fold. 

‘You know dear, I don’t believe suicide is a sin.’ 

‘I don’t either.’ 

‘Sometimes people are better off being free. Sometimes the fear of not dying is worse.’ 

‘I guess.’

‘You know, I’ve wanted to die most of my life.’

‘I know, Ma.’

‘It’s all your father’s fault.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re what’s kept me here. You and your sister.’

Caitlin looked at her. ‘You tried to drown us.’

‘Lucky your school taught you to swim.’ Erin smiled.

‘Still.’

‘I didn’t really want to drown you. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to grieve back then, I just wanted to follow your father into the sea.’

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t.’

‘So am I.’ Erin’s voice was a barely-there whisper. ‘So am I.’

The congregation stood instinctively as the monsignor entered the back of the church. 

Erin squeezed Caitlin’s hand. ‘Would you pass me the tissues, darling?’

***