A hard-boiled metaphysical mystery set in 1990′s Brisbane
It was 7:30 on Wednesday morning when Mum SMS’ed me for the first time.
I was tying my Wednesday tie in the usual Half-Windsor knot when I heard the ‘new message’ alert on my mobile. The mellifluous rhythm of The Who’s I Don’t Even Know Myself was drifting through my studio flat. 1970, The Live at the Isle of White Album. Classic.
I thought the text was from Abbey, my part-time girlfriend, confirming our mid-week date. Abbey’s a Gemini, Scorp rising and I’m a Virgo…not the best match on paper but my Venus was in Cancer so the chemistry was right on.
…But, it wasn’t a text message from Abbey…
‘Can U pls redirect my mail to PO Box 76 Albany Creek 4305?…thnx, mum :-)’
Even as I was clutching my chest in cardiac-arrest I managed to text Mum back, thanking God for the tremendous smart-type function on my new Nokia Smartphone. ‘Who/where are you?’, I wrote.
Half an hour later I was in emergency hooked up to an ECG. The thing is, Mum was dead. Dead as a doornail…or so I thought.
Before Mum starting SMSing me from the ether, my life was pleasantly predictable.
I arrived at work at 9am sharp when I had my morning cup of tea in my favourite ‘Ken’ mug – with one Monte Carlo Cream biscuit from the Arnott’s selection. I was a solicitor in a small-time suburban practice – property settlements, conveyancing - nothing to set the heart racing.
I had a different tie for every day of the week and on Friday nights, I went to the Travelodge with co-workers where, like clock-work, after 2 to 3 gin and tonics, I took off my tie and did the white man’s overbite on the dance floor, imitating some aquatic non-vertebrate like a sea squirt, a jellyfish or possibly even a deep-fried calamari.
My life was very orderly, I liked it that way. I was content, I was even. Like Winnie the Pooh, I just was.
Until, that is, mum threw a spanner in the works with her irresponsible text messaging from the afterlife.
‘Can you pls re-direct my mail…’
‘Can you feed the cat pls?’
‘Have you got a good recipe for chicken wings?’
I scrolled through the paranormal texts that had darkened my inbox over the past week. Struggling to make sense of the non-sensical, I aqua-vacced the sofa then sat down with a cup of English Breakfast and a copy of Supernatural Phenomena Examined.
I had borrowed every book on ‘the paranormal’ from the library that I could get my hands on but there was nothing at all about getting short message services from dead people.
This tome promised more of the same. The front cover depicted a levitating lady, a spoon-bender, and a poltergeist who looked like my Uncle Roger after a heavy night on the ‘bundy’. A spooky triumvirate. Despondent, I flicked to the Chapter entitled “What happens to me when I die?”.
As though in answer to the question at hand, my mobile message alert beeped, sending my heart into temporary arrhythmia.
My fears were realised manifold. The message was from Mum alright, but this time she’d MMS’d me. My awe at Mum’s enervating handle on the hi-tech aside, this latest digital offering from the after-life left me mute. There she was, in the flesh, or so it would appear, standing at the front of a speeding City Cat on the Brisbane River and holding hands with a giant Bavarian vole.
Jesus. This was really getting out of hand. My dead mum was catching public transport with extinct species. I had to get to the bottom of it, or, at least, put an end to it…somehow.
I checked up on Mum’s remains. Her ashes were still there where I had left them, right behind the perishable condiments on the second shelf of the refrigerator, in a Tupperware container clearly labelled “MUM“.
Circumspect, I opened the lid.
Mum’s leftovers were, to all intents and purposes, behaving themselves. There’s no way they could have escaped the life-time guaranteed seal of Tupperware ™…or could they?
‘Ken, what are you doing here? It’s not Christmas’.
I had decided to pay a visit to my younger sister, Bronwyn, a bottle-blonde, life-of-the-party, single mother – my nemesis – and the custodian of the other half of Mum’s ashes. She looked about as shocked to see me on her door step as I was to receive digital correspondence from a dead octogenarian.
‘I need to talk to you about something’, I said, pushing my way into her small, untidy flat.
‘What’s with the tie?’
She was referring to my Thursday tie, one of my favourites featuring, infinitely repeated deer against a deciduous forest backdrop.
‘It’s Thursday’ I said. ‘Listen. Mum’s started text-messaging me.’
‘Shut-up Ken. When are you off to Bali?’
‘Bron, I’m not joking…’
I showed Bron Mum’s text messages, scrolling through them one by one on my Smartphone.
‘Oh my God!’, Bron rasped, ‘Who was the one who visited her everyday in hospital, watered her bloody gardenias?….she doesn’t txt me!’.
‘Bron…’
‘I’m well pissed off actually!’ she exclaimed as though being harassed with text messages from your dead mother was something to be envious of.
‘Get a grip Bron. I just wanted to check if you’d heard from her, seen anything unusual?’ I said.
‘Nup, nothing… bitch.’ Bron mumbled like a moody, pubescent teen.
‘Where’s your half of her ashes?’ I asked.
‘I scattered them …why?’
‘Good one!’
‘What!?’
‘Well you’ve done it now…now she’s out there!…out on the ran-tan!…’
‘Well, what did you do with yours?
‘They’re in Tupperware’, I replied truthfully.
‘Typical. A chip off the old block’, Bron said, pushing all the right buttons.
She was, of course, referring to Dad. I was peeved by the comparison but, unable to think of a decent come-back, I stormed off with a grunt, flicking my Thursday tie over my left shoulder for effect.
Officer Higgins’s office was musty and drab. But I wasn’t there for an interior decorating high.
Higgins read my missing person’s report in silence, then looked me square in the eye, with textbook ‘Eye Contact Techniques for the Fuzz’ precision.
‘A-ha’, he began, ‘so your mother’s been sending you text-messages….from…’, he hesitated, gesticulating in aerial, circular motions that made him look like the Karate Kid 20 years on…a bit rusty.
‘From… outer space?’…he clarified.
‘No, not out of space…’ I corrected him, ‘different places around town…the mall, Kodak beach, the city cat, sometimes with a giant vole, sometimes without…’.
‘A-ha’. Let me get this straight. You’re mum passed away 2 months ago?’
‘A-huh’, I replied nonchalantly, ‘and I’d like you to find her…’.
‘Ken?’
‘…but I’m sure you’ll agree Officer Higgins…’
‘Ken?’
‘…that she’ll be a hard one to pin down..’
‘KEN!’, Officer Higgins exploded, slamming his fist on the desk with textbook, ‘Fist Slamming as Intimidation for the Fuzz’ charm.
‘Yes officer’, I replied, chastened as a high-school virgin.
‘Let me level with you….your Mum’s dead. Sad, ai! But what can you do? Now Constable Norris at the desk can recommend a good counselor for you. These things can take a while’.
Officer Higgins showed me the door.
I shuffled out into the blistering 38-degree noon, a disquieting possibility broiling in my brain like split-pea soup. Maybe Officer Higgins was right. Maybe I was a drummer short of Dr Hook.
Meanwhile, Mum was becoming a supernatural pest for which there was no repellent.
The texts were coming thick and fast -‘Me and Vole at Starbucks‘, ‘Have you taken Kitty to the vet yet?‘ – and what’s more, Mum’s timing was always superlatively atrocious.
I was making love to Abbey one night when Mum texted me with, ‘What’s a five letter word for excrement? :) Mum’.
Jesus, she’d started using ‘smilies’. I took a deep, calming breath as I withdrew from Abbey, soft as a cotton sock.
My world was starting to fall apart at the seams. I wore my Friday tie on Thursday because I forgot to pick up my dry-cleaning and I hadn’t vacuumed for a week. Something had to give.
I decided to take my three weeks leave early. There would be no Bali this year, no souvenir pencil sharpeners for colleagues but all in all, management was pretty understanding.
I arrived home from work to find a parcel on my doorstep. I recognised Mum’s handwriting immediately. She was coming at me from all angles. Mine would be a death by supernatural correspondence.
I opened the parcel, being careful to preserve the envelope for recycling. It was vintage Mum – 6 pairs of new undies, five bucks and a note which read: some new undies for Bali and some spending money – buy a nice shirt or something. love mum x.
Even in the afterlife, Mum refused to acknowledge inflation.
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I would hunt her down, make her face up to the fact that she was dead and then maybe, just maybe she would be able to move on and my life would return to normal.
So, like Derek, the no-nonsense, schnitzel-happy cop from the German TV crime show, I started right at the beginning, with the facts, the hard facts and nothing but the facts.
I plotted Mum’s movements over the past two weeks, piecing bytes of information together from her messages. I posted a map on the wall of my flat and pin-pointed all of the locations that Mum had appeared, listing the time and date against each one, to see if I could uncover some sort of pattern.
‘Thursday 3:15 pm w/o vole’. I pinned the last of my post-its on Albany creek. It’s where her PO box was and as good a place as any to start the legwork.
Albany Creek, 2033. 9am.
I questioned a rotund young postal worker with glasses and frizzy hair.
‘Can you tell me who PO Box 76 is registered to please?’
‘No’, she replied and left it at that.
I blinked nervously in quick succession then pulled myself together.
‘What would Derek do?’ I asked myself, unperturbed.
‘Can you tell me if mail box 76 is vacant please?’ I asked, trying a different line of questioning.
‘Let me see’, the postal worker began, running a plump index finger down her mail box register. ‘It’s vacant at the moment Sir…’.
‘Are you absolutely sure of that?’ I queried, ramping up the pressure.
‘Yes…it’s available. Would you like to rent it…?’
It was just the first of a string of investigative cul-de-sacs, dead-ends and one-way streets to nowhere.
I ran off missing person flyers with Mum’s picture and questioned staff at all her favourite haunts but no-one remembered seeing Mum, or, for that matter, a giant Bavarian vole…
Then she turned up on SBS during the world cup final, and that’s when I really hit the roof.
I was on the phone to Abbey, canceling our mid-week date. It was the first time in three years that I hadn’t seen her on a Wednesday. I really could have used some sensual massage but my mo-jo had reached record lows. Abbey was infuriatingly cool about the cancellation. ‘No problemo’ she’d said, as breezy as hell, before winding up the communiqué.
By the time I turned back to the tele, Mum had taken over the airwaves, her mouth flapping wildly. She could have at least waited until half-time.
‘…did you get my parcel?’ she said, clear as a bell.
‘Yes Mum…’ I said, ‘now where the heck are you? We need to talk!’.
‘Here, there and everywhere Kenny!’ Mum replied. ‘…I’ve never felt so free’.
‘And what’s with that vole character?’ I queried, ‘Do you really think it’s appropriate company for an 80 year old woman to be keeping?’
‘Don’t tell me what to do Ken!…I had that all my life from Brian, now I’ve finally found my own identity…’ Mum replied, gravely, as though a dark shadow had passed over her.
‘Mum…’
‘…I was a blank, a vacuum, a puff of smoke…’
‘Mum, this caper’s got to stop right now!’
‘…and I certainly don’t miss your father’s lambastings…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad never laid a hand on you…’ I said, outraged by Mum’s posthumous accusations.
‘Didn’t he?…’ Mum replied, with a foreboding tremour.
And with that, Mum disappeared from the TV set with a flash and the soccer coverage returned to the screen. 1-0 Brazil. I’d missed a screamer.
I went to see my father in the RSL nursing home the next day.
Dad was an arsehole of the highest order, an ex-army bully with a bad case of short man syndrome. I’ll never forget the embarrassment I’d felt when, during the first ever sleep-over that I hosted in grade 4, Dad short-sheeted all of my friends beds and woke us up in the middle of the night for training drills.
Nevertheless, all of the early morning chin-presses and competitive bed-making that Dad subjected us to had left a deep impression, and with me, it stuck. Regimen gave an otherwise shapeless life some form.
The door to Dad’s room was wide open.
He was standing by the window in his kimono. Even in his 2 inch kiri-geta clogs, he stood no taller than five foot three. He turned around swiftly as though sensing my presence and executed a shallow bow.
‘Kenji-san! It’s not Christmas, what are you doing here?’ he said, offering me a tic-tac with a pair of chopsticks.
Dad had acquired a dubious taste for the east during his time as a Japanese P.O.W. in Burma.
‘Have you heard from Mum?’ I asked, cutting to the chase like a prize greyhound.
‘Don’t be stupid…’
‘If I ask you one question’, I said, ‘will you promise to give a truthful answer?’.
‘I never tell a lie…don’t worry, you’re not adopted Kenji, although it would explain why you’re such a winner…and I’m being sarcastic’.
‘Did you ever hit Mum?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Yes or no?’, I persisted.
‘…she was a nitwit Kenji’ Dad stammered, ‘brain like a bird’s nest…enough to drive a man to extreme disciplinary measures. If there’s one thing I learnt from the yellow peril, it was never let your enemy get the better of you…treacherous old bat!’.
‘Right. That’s that then’ I said, although I can’t be sure whether I said it out loud or not.
Driving back from the nursing home I cried a thousand tears.
I hadn’t cried since Dad told me I was a loser for the first of many times. I’d failed to hit a willy-wagtail at 10 paces with a tennis ball. I was 3. He was right, but at least I had a different tie for everyday of the week…
…and I wasn’t a wife-beater.
An entire week passed without contact from Mum, and for a while I immersed myself in blissful denial. I vacuumed, I ironed, I listened to my favourite records, but it was all just an illusion.
I was folding my socks in time to Santana’s Black Magic Woman when the phone shattered my fool’s paradise like an attention deficient step-brother.
The fitting rooms in the ladies wear department were cordoned off with police tape. It was the same department that I had visited just days earlier looking for Mum.
Inside, the sales assistant was giving the investigating officer the run down while a junior officer dusted for prints.
‘She went in with a Vivian Westwood evening gown and never came out’, the sales assistant explained.
The officer turned to me.
‘Is this your Mother, Mr Perry?’, he asked holding up the missing person’s flyer that I had left with the sales assistant a few days earlier.
‘Yes officer’, I replied. ‘That’s her alright’.
‘It seems your mother has ah, how shall I put it…disappeared without trace…wearing a very expensive designer evening gown…do you recognise these?’ he queried, holding up two plastic evidence bags.
One contained a beige brassiere, the kind that women are never wearing in your erotic fantasies, and in the other, a voluminous pair of floral undies.
I buried my head in my hands.
‘Do you know what this means Mr Perry?’ the Officer asked.
‘Yes…she’s not wearing any underwear.’, I stammered, traumatised.
‘Technically this is grand theft. If I were you, I’d ask your mother to give me a bell” he said, passing me his card.
I had no idea that police officers had business cards.
I arrived home and masturbated to Queen when my mobile’s ‘new message’ alert disrupted me, just moments before the climactic chorus.
It was a pxt from Mum – a photo of herself and the vole doing the foxtrot at some sort of function. She was wearing the evening gown that she’d shoplifted that morning.
Then the land-line rang.
‘Mum?’ I answered automatically, up to speed with her modus operandi
‘Hello darling…
‘Where are you!?’
‘I’m at the Lord Mayor’s dinner and I’m not wearing any undies!’.
‘Mum, this has got to stop! I hate to break this to you but you’re dead! Dead as a dodo’.
‘Don’t be silly Kenny Koala, I’ve never felt more alive!’
‘No. You’re completely dead Mum!…why are you doing this to me?’
‘I need to show you how to live…how to be free…….”
‘…I was perfectly happy until you started harassing me from the other side! I’m giving you an ultimatum…you either stop this roustabout and move on with your…’
‘Yes Kenny, or what?’
‘Or I’ll….’
But what could I threaten her with? She was dead.
I did the only thing I knew how. I turned to the comforting black and white of my profession. I put a restraining order on Mum, with a slight amendment to the proforma:
“Clause 2.1
This order prevents the person, spirit, or other entity listed in recital A …”
I slipped the contract into an envelope with a Smith & Foong ‘With Compliment’s’ slip on which I wrote,
“Mum, please find enclosed herewith a legally-binding order preventing you from contacting me by any means. F.Y.I, I have also enclosed a photograph of the Tupperware containing your ashes which is in my deep freeze for safe keeping. Hope this clears up any confusion about your status, namely, your being dead.
Regards
Ken
P.S. I’m sorry about Dad…I love you. Good-bye X”
I posted it to Mum’s P.O. Box address and hoped for the best.
Uninterrupted days segued into seamless weeks.
Mum’s messages stopped just as soon as they had begun. The restraining order must have worked.
At first there was relief but Mum’s words buzzed around inside my head like a fly trapped in a loaf of bread.
She was right – I was a slave to the rhythm of a monotonous tune, possibly Day Dream Believer. I was Kenji, a cartoon character of my Dad’s perverse creation…I had no idea what the real essence of ‘Ken-ness’ was. I was a text book, anxiety-prone Virgo-Cap ascendant, of that I had no doubt, but now I finally understood what my sister had meant when she told me I was an oxygen bandit.
So, I started to make some changes….small changes at first.
For a start, I crossed my Dad off my Christmas card list.
A few days later, I tried sushi for the first time and changed my brand of deodorant. Lynx Total FX. Not bad and it didn’t give me dermatitis as I’d anticipated.
After a couple of months I liberated my ties from their relentless schedule, even retiring some completely. Some days, mostly on Fridays, I didn’t wear a tie at all.
And little by little, teaspoon by teaspoon, I began to release Mum’s ashes into the cosmos.
THE END.
