Gemmell Elayn - After

NIKKI GEMMELL is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, five works of non-fiction, and, as N.J. Gemmell, six childrens books. Her work has received international critical acclaim and her books have been translated into twenty-two languages. She is also a columnist for the Weekend Australian Magazine. She was born in Wollongong, New South Wales.

Shiver

Cleave

Love Song

The Bride Stripped Bare

Pleasure: An Almanac for the Heart

The Book of Rapture

Why You Are Australian

With My Body

I Take You

Honestly: Notes on Life

Personally: Further Notes on Life

As N.J. Gemmell

The Kensington Reptilarium

The Icicle Illuminarium

The Luna Laboratorium

Coco Banjo is Having a Yay Day

Coco Banjo Has Been Unfriended

Coco Banjo and the Super Wow Surprise

Lines from Sleepchains Anne Carson reproduced with kind permission by Aragi Inc.

Line from An Arundel Tomb Philip Larkin reproduced with kind permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Photograph on page 177 reproduced with kind permission of The Australian Womens Weekly / Bauer Media.

Fourth Estate

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2017

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Nikki Gemmell 2017

The right of Nikki Gemmell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA

978 1 4607 5305 7 (hardback)

978 1 4607 0769 2 (ebook)

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Gemmell, N.J., author.

After / Nikki Gemmell.

Gemmell, Elayn.

Suicide victims Biography.

Suicide victims Family relationships.

Mothers and daughters Biography.

Bereavement Psychological aspects.

Children of suicide victims Psychological aspects.

362.28092

Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover photograph by Sue Daniel

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.

Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Anne Carson

Have you ever done what you dread to do, identify someone close to you in a morgue, on that thin steel table? I did. Just now. And I have to write this out, to piece together what has happened into some kind of coherence. And because writing is my ballast through lifes toss.

Carry me in on a stretcher from this experience, carry me in.

*

Air from another world. In this concrete box of another world, an other-world, that is hushed and windowless. It is a morgue. It is too close to death. The mouth is always a shock, T, the coronial assistant, is warning us.

Eh? What?

Bird-like, half our age, a face marinated in kindness, T is doing her best to prepare my brother Paul and myself before we step into the viewing room where a body awaits us. A body that the police need identified urgently on this sunny weekend of too much life everywhere else. No ones ever prepared for, er, how the lips look, T adds.

Here, now, stopped of talk. My mouth a fistful of feathers. In this public service waiting room that is too public service for its task. Glarily new, foreign. Neither Paul nor myself have ever stepped inside such a place. Morgue. The very word a moan, a sullenness. And this building has seen too much life, in all its variety; has seen what it means to be deeply, vulnerably human, too much. You can feel it. The too many tears in this sparsely furnished room of strategically placed tissue boxes. Thats a lot of weeping. These walls, the collectors of tears.

Paul and I are bound together within the fresh shock of this world. It feels like us against everything else. It is all too new. Every conversation feels mined. Full of barbing surprises we do not want to know about. So we prefer not speaking, if at all possible. Cant. Much. Stopped. T seems to understand.

*

But so much. To ask here. In this public place of too much death. Unpicking the knot of whatever has gone on. Head burning. Yet my brother and I are treading carefully where we do not want to tread at all. And amid the weight of the un-knowing there are formalities to be carried out, fast. Like this. Identification of Body. Which we have seen in countless television police procedurals that are nothing like this. This pedestrian world, and our mouths, stopped.

A rupturing. As I wait for The Identification. So that matters can proceed. I feel like a child who has done something wrong. Called to the headmistresss office and not sure why. Something is peeling away. Within. It is monumental. It feels akin to great splinters of ice falling from an iceberg, it feels like a slipping into vulnerability I have never known. Huge walls of defence are crumbling here. I am forty-nine for Gods sake. Have never been this. Have never felt this.

So. Right. Not as strong as Ive assumed. Cannot contain the vulnerability flooding out yet no one knows it is there. A vulnerability Ive managed to contain my entire life and now, and now, cannot. I am hurtling into the unknown.

*

I look across at Paul. Just as stricken as myself. Does he, like me, know too much yet not enough with all this? Everything is too complex, messy, muddy. A longing right now for simplicity, that great medicine of life. For the fatness of normality. The restful quiet; all those nibbling little challenges of an everyday life, which are no challenges at all I now know.

Brain, flooded. With too much. With this death too close and branded suspicious. Which means police involvement. A likely autopsy. Endless questions beyond it. And Im the person who walks through Customs at an Australian airport blushing over the box of chocolates I do not have in my suitcase but am thinking about. Here we go on the shipless ocean, here we go.

The mouth is always a shock, T has said.

Paul and I do not understand. Need help here. Need help actually in more ways than one. A sympathetic smile warms her eyes; T is the coronial assistant to have. Can she speak for us too, talk to the cops, hold our hands?

Its slightly open, T adds.

Open. Oh. Right. A smile back at her. A nod. Crazed. This can be dealt with. Am I unhinged here? Great cleavings of ice, splitting from their iceberg. Need something to hold, to steady myself. No. This can be done. Yes of course Paul and I can handle it. Ive seen her mouth open before, too breezy, guilty as sin but not. Its how she sleeps sometimes.

T frowns. Perhaps I am coping too well, perhaps she can see right through me. No, this is different. Its the... set... of it. Oh. The thought of whatever that means hovers in the air. Paul and I are the amateurs at death and doesnt T know it. This woman with her background in counselling who is so gentle before us both. With the nest of hands at her stomach, with the expectant and compassionate face. She is here on this sunny Saturday for the countless reeling families before us and after us, here for the sudden, unhinging Friday and weekend deaths, for the bodies that have to be identified because the police demand it so they can begin their investigations and move the corpses on swiftly in this city morgue not built to purpose, and packed.