LITMIR.BIZ

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these concepts were as foreign to Grafton as competing in the pole vault at the Olympics. Good Lord, he thought. This is going to take some doing.

      ‘So,’ said Angus, building slowly to the pay-off, ‘what I would think is we should formalise that role by creating a special ministry for which you would have sole responsibility.’

      ‘And what would that be?’ said Grafton, deeply concerned that there might be toil at the end of the answer.

      Angus glanced towards the Prime Minister, who took a deep breath and rolled his eyes as if the whole thing made him feel ill. Angus, clearly used to this reaction, turned back to Grafton who was also feeling slightly queasy. ‘It would be something like the Department of Wellbeing,’ he announced.

      This wasn’t as bad as Grafton had feared. ‘Well, I was the Professor of Life Skills and Wellbeing at University of Mangoland,’ said Grafton, warming tepidly to the idea.

      ‘Exactly,’ said Angus, shooting another glance at Scott, who replied with a headshake of disgust.

       *

      ‘So did you ask what the budget allocation would be for this department?’ asked Janet as she packed baking dishes into a carton while Grafton sat at the kitchen bench relating his conversation.

      ‘Should I have?’

      ‘I would have.’ Janet had a way of making a comment that seemed to be about herself but was really a comment about him. ‘What about staffing?’

      ‘Well, I imagine that would be related to the budget,’ said Grafton, only too late realising that this answer could lead to his being forced to admit he had not asked about that either. But then he recalled something. ‘Oh, I do know I get to appoint a head of the department,’ he stated, glad to have ascertained one tiny fact.

      ‘Who would that be?’ inquired Janet.

      Grafton’s demeanour fell as he realised he had not as yet given any thought to this issue nor even realised he ought to.

      ‘Um … I don’t know. I think there’s still a lot to be … sorted out,’ he muttered.

      ‘Indeed,’ said Janet, wrapping their plates in butcher’s paper.

      Grafton mused on how a single word such as ‘indeed’ could contain so much meaning.

      ‘Speaking of sorting things out, how are you going with the packing?’ asked Janet, changing subjects as fast as a Formula 1 driver changes gears.

      ‘I don’t know. It’s a nightmare. I hate moving.’

      ‘We all do, but we’re going to have to do it, my darling. We have to decide what we’re taking to Yarralumla, what we’re putting into storage and, most importantly, what we’re throwing out.’

      ‘Well, all my clothes can be thrown out. None of them fit me anymore.’ Grafton went to the fridge and opened it to find there was almost nothing in it.

      ‘Why is there nothing to eat?’ he asked.

      ‘Because we have to empty the fridge. No point in buying food when we won’t end up eating it.’

      Grafton felt it almost impossible to imagine any food in a house occupied by him not being eaten but he kept this to himself. Instead, he stood staring into the fridge, as he often did, hoping he could perhaps make food appear by a sheer act of will.

      ‘And remember Lee-Anne’s coming in a couple of days.’

      Grafton’s stomach lurched slightly. Janet had reminded him of The Other Thing – the Thing he had been trying to banish from his mind. Lee-Anne, their beloved daughter, their only child, was coming to visit. With her baby. It was not just that the thought of being a grandfather added even more to his sense of being geriatric but that the idea of his loving, gorgeous, creative, politically active and socially aware daughter raising a child was utterly terrifying.

      Lee-Anne was a classic upper middle-class only child who had graduated from Disney Princess to dizzy progressive. She had travelled to America to complete a Bachelor of Performance Art (Pole Dancing); had dated the head of an outlaw motorcycle gang; had become an environmental activist; had run a circus featuring disabled women acrobats; and had been married by a celebrant who was a clown subsequently calling for the abolition of films that portrayed clowns as serial killers and calling for people to stop calling clowns ‘clowns’ because it was disparaging. Now married to Wayne Singlet, an Australian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur, it was this Lee-Anne who was in the position of raising a small child.

      Just thinking about it made Grafton feel like he had been stabbed in the liver with an icicle. ‘When is she coming?’ he asked, trying to recall what he had deliberately put out of his mind.

      ‘The fifteenth,’ replied Janet.

      ‘What day is it now?’ asked Grafton.

      ‘The thirteenth,’ sighed Janet. ‘There’s a calendar on the fridge, you know.’

      Grafton abandoned his attempt at spontaneous generation and closed the fridge door on which the calendar hung with its small notations pencilled into several days.

      ‘The problem with calendars,’ he complained, ‘is they only work if you already know what day it is. If you know the date, a calendar will tell you what day of the week. If you know what day of the week it is, the calendar will tell you the date. And it can tell you what you’re doing today and what you’re doing tomorrow … but it can’t tell you anything if you don’t know what day it is today.’

      ‘Well, today is definitely the thirteenth which means you’d better get a move on.’ Janet sealed a carton with the quick screech of a tape dispenser like a cat going into a shredder.

      Grafton sighed and gave up on the Quest for Food. He stomped sulkily down the hall and climbed the stairs – which seemed to get steeper every day – wondering why life had to be so beastly.

      ‘And I’ve made an appointment at the ophthalmologist,’ called Janet after him.

       *

      The house in Greenfern was really absurdly big for them but Grafton liked it that way. He liked to know there were places he could hide should visitors ever be rude enough to drop in. Luckily they hardly ever did.

      Lee-Anne’s room had been kept just as it was when she left, in case she ever needed to move back home. Grafton had heard, on the few occasions when he had listened to people talk about their children, that it was common now for kids who had left home, having run out of money or split up from their partner, to come back again. While her room remained a museum display of a late twentieth-century girl’s bedroom with Harry Potter books, figurines of elfin princesses leading unicorns and a poster of some scowling, unwashed British rock band, Grafton thought the chances of its former occupant coming back home to live were slim. It was not that Lee-Anne was in any way self-sufficient or independent; it was just that she was married to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur worth at least a couple of billion dollars, so falling behind in the rent was unlikely. And Grafton was sure that if Lee-Anne and Wayne Singlet ever split up, she would be handsomely provided for in the settlement.

      ‘She’d take him to the cleaners,’ he mused and closed the door.

      The room next door was filled with boxes containing ‘The Almost Complete Collection of Grafton’s Life’s Work’. The reason it was an ‘Almost Complete’ collection was not because there was more material elsewhere or because there were still works he was yet to produce. It was because everything in the room was almost complete. There were two novels he had started to write but got stuck halfway and three more where he had written one chapter and then run out of ideas. There were at least a dozen that consisted no more than the title, the dedication and a first chapter heading.

      Then there were the plays he had begun and abandoned when he realised he didn’t really know how people talked because he never listened to them. And there were notebooks filled with jottings and ideas, none of which made any sense

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