You never saw a worse day for a funeral. Sydney bunged on a heatwave, so by nine o’clock it was over a hundred degrees, with a gale blowing from the west like a giant fan across the hobs of Hell. There were bushfires all over the Blue Mountains, so the air was brown, reeked of smoke, rained cinders. All of which petrified the minister, who was convinced that the Devil was laying on a grand reception for one of his most important earthly imps. The hearse left the funeral parlour without incident, followed by the mourners in two big black Fords—Pappy, Toby, Jim and Bob, Klaus, Lerner Chusovich and Joe Dwyer from the Piccadilly pub bottle department. And me, of course. Flo didn’t turn up, though we’d notified the Child Welfare. The Mesdames Fugue and Toccata and friends tacked themselves onto the cortege in a huge black Rolls they must have borrowed from a client; when we got to the graveside Norm and Merv were waiting, their police car parked ten yards away between a fallen angel and a rusty iron cross. When the Rolls pulled up, it disgorged Lady Richard on Martin’s arm, stunningly gowned in plain black shantung with a cheeky little black pillbox on his mauve hair, face webbed by a wisp of black net. Perfect! Everybody the old girl would have wanted there was there. Except for Flo.

We buried her in Rookwood, surely the world’s biggest, most neglected graveyard, literal square miles of it plonked in the middle of the Western Suburbs. Overgrown with weeds and long rank grass, dotted with scrubby bush, a few she-okes, gums and stringy-barks between sparse graves whose ruined headstones leaned at all angles except the vertical.

Toby, Klaus, Merv, Norm, Joe and Martin acted as pallbearers, heaved and shoved and grunted and groaned until they got the gigantic coffin onto their shoulders, then staggered under its enormous weight—it had to be lead-lined, of course, after such a long interlude in a morgue drawer—to the newly dug grave, where they lowered it amid “Shits!” and “Jesus Christs!” onto three four-by-twos laid across the cavity. The minister, who hadn’t really seen the coffin until now, stood there gaping while the undertaker had a muttered talk with the grave diggers to make sure they’d followed orders and had excavated a roomy enough final resting place.

The women stood on one side and the men on the other—it was an Australian funeral, after all. Jim stood with the men. Very brave we women looked, me in shocking pink, Pappy in an emerald cheong-sam, Bob in blue eyelet-embroidered organdie, Lady Richard in his shantung number, and the Mesdames dolled up to the nines in skin-tight black satin, black patent stilettos and dense black veils à la the House of Windsor. The men had all managed to find a tie somewhere (Martin’s looked like pea-and-carrot puke), though they’d had the sense to ditch their coats. They did wear black armbands.

How she must have wallowed in it! Just as the minister stood at the head of the grave to commence his obsequies, a hideously hot gust of wind shrieked down like a satanic huff, whipped his skirts up around his face and knocked his glasses off. He nearly landed on the coffin, a plain affair without a flower, let alone a wreath. We had agreed that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz would not appreciate such traditional trappings as flowers, since apparently she had not yet properly Passed Over. The nightly gallops down the hall and booms of laughter had lost their novelty by the time we buried her. Nowanights we sort of rouse a bit, sigh, grin, and go back to sleep.

The six men put the straps under the coffin, lifted it enough for the terrified undertaker to slide the four-by-twos out, then lowered it with more “Shits!” and “Jesus Christs!” into the grave. Once it hit bottom, I stepped forward and dropped the wooden box on top of it. We’d decided that she’d want to have the blue bunny rug, the huge mauve crystal, the marble hand and arm, and the seven cut glass tumblers with her. No one tossed a clod of Rookwood’s dismal soil in; we just walked away and left the rest to the grave diggers, who had been standing by in awe.

“Me bloody back’s gone on me!” Merv whimpered.

“Heavier in death than in life,” Klaus said solemnly.

“Oh, potties! I’ve laddered my stocking!” Lady Richard moaned.

“At least she’s in the shade,” Toby said, pointing to a gum.

“Memorable!” Joe Dwyer said, wiping away tears. “Memorable!”

We all went home and had a party in Toby’s attic.

I wonder who’ll bury Harold? Ask me do I care.

Saturday,

January 14th, 1961

I’m having a blue day. Understandable after yesterday. It strikes me as peculiar, that things should have worked out in such a way that we could bury Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz on a Friday the Thirteenth. The last one was May, and the next one isn’t until October. A sort of an omen, not unlike the appearance of Marceline in my life. Are events really random? I wish I knew.

Toby has disappeared to see if his shack at Wentworth Falls is in the middle of a bushfire, Jim and Bob have tooled off on the Harley Davidson, and Klaus has gone to Bowral with Lerner Chusovich, who felt a bit left out of things because they wouldn’t let him be a pallbearer. Such a thin, reedy man. Very shadowy and shy.

Pappy was home, so we had dinner together. This Monday she starts with the rest of the probationers at Vinnie’s. Thank God that Stockton has been removed from her equation. Or rather, thank Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz the phantasm. Pappy honestly does believe that the old horror materialises and talks to her, though I can’t believe it. Yes, I hear the gallops and the laughs, but I still think they’re something Flo is generating.

“Have you taken the Glass and the cards out?” Pappy asked.

“Good lord, no! They’re in the Tilsiter cupboard.”

“Harriet, she wouldn’t like that. The Glass and the cards have to be handled, otherwise they’ll lose their power.” And nothing would do but that I dragged them out, put them on the table in their dirty silk covers, though I refused to scry or spread.

“I’ll handle them occasionally, but no more,” I said firmly. “She told me it was a racket, and all those books in her room tell me it is a racket.”

“Once upon a time it was,” said Pappy, unimpressed. “But that was years ago, before she realised she had the power. The books are still there because she couldn’t throw anything out.”

“The books were up to date—it’s Flo who has the power.”

“Perhaps she kept them up to date as part of Flo’s inheritance,” Pappy said. “Even a Flo has to crawl before she can walk. They’re there for Flo to study later.”

“What utter rubbish! I’m sure that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz knew as well as I do that Flo will never read any more than she can talk,” I said. “As to the medium business, I’m hoping you can tell me how Flo and her mother worked.”

But Pappy says she can’t tell me because she doesn’t know, has never seen one of their sessions with a client. Nor, she added in haste (seeing the expression on my face), would any of the clients discuss the sessions. We’ve had Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s phone disconnected, and after several notes of desperate appeal from the clients were gathered off the floor in the front hall, we tacked a small note to the outside of the door saying that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had Passed Over. Which is the end of it. How ghastly, to think of one of those expensive ladies from Point Piper, Vaucluse, Killara and Pymble encountering someone from the Child Welfare or the Public Trustee on The House’s doorstep!

Pappy looks well, tranquil. She’s regained the lost weight, is up to the hard labour of nursing training. Though a part of me wishes that she’d mention the lost baby or Ezra, if only to start unburdening herself, another part of me is very glad that she has apparently decided to consign the past to limbo.