It is almost eighteen hours earlier, well before the dawn of the same day, when the widow wakes at 5:17 a.m. Neither the exhaustion of eight days’ grief nor benzodiazepines have been able to break this forty-year habit. Connie welcomes the first murmur of the day, the metronomic thrum of the ceiling fan and its breaths of cooling air.
It’s already too warm outside, though the kookaburras don’t seem to mind; they’re making their hilarious racket in the gum by her window. Connie listens for the smaller, less bombastic birds and is rewarded with the Morse code soprano of the eastern spinebills that shelter in the low thicket she’s cultivated for them.
She has to think: this will be the ninth day? Yes. It’s Friday, so yesterday was her eighth complete day alone, if she counts Thursday last week. It was the longest day, after all. That morning, Connie had been stirred from sleep about this time, not by the birds but by the routine departure of her husband of forty-two years, Ted McCall, for nearby Bondi Beach. As always, she felt Ted’s lips on her forehead. Way down in the Congo land, he sang, as he had on any given day, lived a happy chimpanzee. She loved a monkey with a long tail (Lordy, how she loved him!) Ted was a creature of the chirpiest habits.
‘Hooroo,’ Connie would sigh, then roll over and occupy his side of their king-size bed, what they liked to call its western suburbs.
She’d hear him skipping down the stairs, in fuller voice by now, w tune, his reveille … Baba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab / Said the monkey to the chimp … Then she’d doze for five minutes – fifteen on drowsier days.
This morning Connie has woken to find herself already on Ted’s side, burrowed into his pillow, ingesting his sweet saltiness. Or is it his salty sweetness? She’ll change their sheets this morning, once and for all, but she has a little time now. The smell of him is so vital he could walk in from the ensuite bathroom, in his uniform for his morning drill: his Speedos, and not a stitch more than those budgie smugglers. She loiters here to imbibe the last draughts of Ted…
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