Shantung Silk Messages
Psalm 90 Verse 10 In the Kings James Bible tells me that we are allocated 3 score and ten years in this life. But clearly that is a furphy. Maybe that was the perceived maximum thousands of years ago, but if it is the case I have 107 days from today to disprove that assertion.
GULP!
As a child I was immune to the concept of life ending. I had 1 set of grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. I didn’t think about Death or the greater existential question of
“What comes after the last breath?”
I was busy with Life! There was bike riding far and wide with friends, school, sport, and learning the eccentricities of the living, rather than the question marks that surrounded the dead.
However, when I was 11, Death sauntered into Sutton Street Blacktown, where I lived with my family. We lived in a white weatherboard 3 x 1 modest home, with an outside loo for many years. We were at #26.
Diagonal to us, at # 21 lived Mr and Mrs Raynor. I never presumed to know their names. They were adults, so Mr and Mrs Raynor they remained to me even to this day.
Mr Raynor used to catch to bus to the railways station on occasions, the same one I caught to begin my 1 hour bus, train, walk commute to my school.
Sometimes we sat together. Quietly or chatting. He would try to read his paper. Mum said Mr Raynor would only ever read the Sydney Morning Herald ( a decent paper) not like that rag the Daily Mirror!, she would say , nose wrinkled in disgust. I didn’t know why then, but as I got older I noted the scantily clad Page 3 girls!
I don’t remember what month it was, but it felt like Autumn. When the weather begins to shift, the wind blows to a different beat and there is a restlessness looming.
Sometimes, after school, I would get off the bus and go to Mr and Mrs Raynors for afternoon tea. It was a quiet and welcomed sanctuary. My own home was a home that comprised of a devoted and nurturing mother, and older and a younger sister, a couple of cats and a father who ruled the household. A man who worked very hard, but never achieved the financial stability he craved. Who sought solace in amber liquid and who, inadvertently, taught the rest of us how to be professional eggshell walkers.
So my very occasional respite at the Raynors, where it smelt of talcum powder, lilly of the valley perfume, Old Spice cologne and Mrs Raynors magnificently fragrant roses, was a sanctuary to a young girl who was yet to understand the wounds of her parents.
I recall that Mr Raynor had not been on the bus for a couple weeks and I said to Mum that I might pop over to see them. She looked at me with a curious expression and then said, ‘No love. Mr Raynor has been sick with the flu. Perhaps you should wait a while.”
The days rolled by and the wind and the leaves whispered to one another. I didn’t speak their language; I knew they were keeping secrets from me.
One Thursday as I was getting off the bus I saw Mum on the porch at the Raynors. I raised a hand to wave and began to walk in that direction. But Mum headed me off and I saw Mrs Raynor step back into her fragrant home and close the front door. It sighed in resignation.
That afternoon, with the wind howling and rattling our too loose front screen door, Mum sat me in the lounge room, and taking my hand said “ Cherrie , Mr Raynor’s flu got worse and 2 weeks ago he was admitted into Blacktown Hospital. He didn’t recover sweetheart and died 3 days ago. I am so sad to tell you this, I know how close you two were.”
As Mum was speaking the unspeakable I tried not to imagine the unimaginable. Mr Rayne was gone. As mum spoke I had been staring intently at our lounge room curtains. Cream shantung silk drops with a whimsical, abstract scattered pattern of orange and black lanterns!
My mum had fallen in love with the fabric when she had seen it in David Jones. It was awfully expensive but for just ONCE in her life she was determined to have something special. She lay-byed meters of it and religiously paid her weekly instalments .
She worked part-time as a cleaner at Blacktown Hospital, 3 hours a day 5 days a week. I imagine it was a meagre wage, but she loved the staff and the patients and it gave her some respite from her home duties….and some small financial independence.
Once paid off, the fabric was carefully wrapped and carried home on train and bus from Parramatta . She spend hours crafting those metres of fabric into beautiful curtains that covered the front west facing windows of our home and the east facing back windows. I don’t image Dad ever knew how expensive they truly were, but Mum loved them.
I do recall however, the look of abject despair on my mother’s face when a few years later, in a pique of drunken rage, my Dad threw his dinner plate, full of his food at the wall in the lounge room. Steak, potato mash, peas, carrots and gravy rained down the fabric and the shattered plate tore it.
He had no idea. Just continued to rage. He didn’t see the light in my mother’s eye dim. He couldn’t hear her heart breaking.
But for now those beautiful curtains are intact and I am staring at the lanterns on the silk. The westerly sun is hitting the glass of the front window. Its glow appears to lighting up the lanterns. I have never noticed that before. I am fascinated!
‘Cherrie, Cherrie” my mother’s voice interrupts my musings. “ Did you hear me love? Mr Raynor has passed away.
‘Ah ha” I manage to mumble. No tears, no sadness, just the twinkling of the lanterns.
We didn’t go the funeral. Not a place for children was the consensus, but Mum thought I might like to make Mrs Raynor a card.
I tried to draw some of her beautiful roses, but I was hopeless at drawing. Not like my two sisters who both had the knack! I thought I was better with words, so I penned what I hoped was ok.
About a month later a FOR SALE sign was outside Mr and Mrs Raynors house. Then a SOLD sticker, then a few weeks later a van packed up the house when I was at school and I thought it must have packed up Mrs Raynor too, because I never saw her again.
Mum told me they didn’t have children so Mrs Raynor had moved into a nursing home. I didn’t know what that was , but when mum described it I figured that Mrs Raynor had died too, just differently.
My perception of Death then, as an 11 year old , was like this
· Someone you like and can laugh with and talk to or sit quietly with leaves without saying goodbye
· No one knows where they go. My Catholic school said there is a place called Heaven and good people go there. Mr Raynor would DEFINITELY go there, but where is THERE?
· Don’t ask too many questions because its impolite and might make other people feel uncomfortable
· Death is not ONE thing. Mr Raynor had a physical Death. Mrs Raynor had a different death. She had to leave her sanctuary, where she made her memories with Mr Raynor and her rose garden
· Death meant I didn’t get to tell Mr Raynor that our netball team won the Grand Final or that I was in the school choir or so many things!
· I didn’t get to see him smile when he read something funny in the Sydney Morning Herald or frown and mumble….” Blasted pollies”
· Death means there are thousands of words left hanging that never touch our tongue or our lips. They remain suspended like stalactites in our mind.
But for me, the overwhelming experience was the twinkling of light in those lovingly created shantung silk curtain lanterns, blinking and shimmering and maybe Morse coding me a message from my friend.
