Free Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe

everyone. She’ll be there before the service, studying the photo board. Her fingers tracing the jawline and cheekbones in mid air, conjuring. Perhaps remembering her hand on their face.
    A portrait artist with face blindness. Prosopagnosia. We thought she was joking. Then when we knew she wasn’t joking, we thought her heart must be an empty room with a mud floor that anybody could walk through. We were wrong about that too. But she would sometimes mistake Ruth for me, foxed by the sharp elbows and wide Macedonian mouth, and by the loose-fitting shifts we both wore to hide our skinniness.
    When Robin dies, it is my sister who drives me across the border, our funeral clothes lying flat across the back seat as she speeds past the water towers and granite war memorials of small country towns. World War II artillery mounted in front of public pools, tiny crooked cemeteries where we stop to stretch our legs, where sun has taken the colour out of everything. Fresh flowers on baby graves with headstones from 1958, 1974. Lived ten days, lived six days. The kind of loyalty to grief to which I could never relate. But I know that Ruth is thinking of Adeline – how can she not be? – of the jars of coffee and passata smashed against the bitumen, the trolley boys who came running. She was only thirty-three, the same age Ruth had been on the day she came running in from the pottery to throw up in the kitchen sink and reluctantly declare herself pregnant.
    At Euroa I offer to drive, and Ruth laughs me off. Esther, she says. Dearheart. You know you can’t. They took your licence away how long ago?
    Ruth’s left arm rests against the steering wheel in a blue Velcro brace. She got carpal tunnel towards the end of the ’80s, and has worn the brace intermittently in the decades since. Mostly out of habit, if you ask me, though I’d never come right out and say so. At first we had all been a little bit jealous of the brace and what it stood for: that Ruth had wrecked herself a fraction for the sake of her art. It made the rest of us feel like we weren’t working hard enough. I secretly hoped to catch up with her, being three years younger, but it never came about. Dabbing a brush to a canvas yields different results from throwing clay at a wheel. In any case, the rest of us eventually weakened in our varied and less enviable fashions.
    By the time we reach Holbrook it’s nearing midday. Seventy kilometres until Tarcutta, and three hours until we need to be there. Ruth pulls into a motel and we pay for a twin room that smells of stale smoke and mouse shit, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She sinks gratefully onto the bed farthest from the window.
    Just a couple of hours here, Es. Then we’ll be fresh for the wake.
    Fresh for the wake. We shed our driving clothes in crumpled, sweaty heaps beside the twin beds. Ruth has already taken off her brace and nestled it beside her pillow. She looks more vulnerable without it, the skin of her left arm a pale sleeve. She curls up to face the wall, and her spine showing through her white slip reminds me of the skeletons of swans, their rickety necks bereft of muscle and feather.
    This is how I’ve come to measure my own fragility. There was a time when I believed Ruth to be ageing independently of me; that I was somehow fixed in place, standing on the dock waving while she drifted off towards some bleak horizon. Now I know better. I watch her sleep: one of Edward Hopper’s girls that nobody ever came for.
    From the motel window I can see the hull of the decommissioned submarine looming over the park, schoolchildren clambering over it like yellow ticks on a dead black beast. I once watched this same sub dive and surface in Sydney Harbour before a crowd of onlookers. Ruth had been standing next to me, holding on to Adeline’s little hand. I have seen the rise and fall of so many things.
    Time is not the longest distance, despite what Tennessee Williams