Atrophy Wife (2078 AD)

Inside a Methodist chapel, where an elderly woman is being escorted to the pulpit by two pallbearers. She ascends the stairs, produces a folded piece of paper and clears her throat into the microphone.

“I would like to thank you all for being here this afternoon. My husband was many things to many people; father; friend; debtor; passing acquaintance and ongoing nuisance. However, above all, he was a man of principle.”

Silence from the mourners.

“You see, when one reaches old age, it is typical to begin exhibiting certain behaviours. Resistance to change. Bloody-mindedness. Erectile dysfunction. Misanthropy.”

A young girl shifts on her pew. Her mother chastens her under her breath, then pulls her closer.

“And indeed, these were all behaviours my husband displayed by his late teens.”

A muted cough from the rear of the chapel.

“His precociousness was evident from the night we met, at an EP launch for a no-wave band featuring four shelf stackers from Wembley City Farmers. After a heady evening of mispronouncing the names of Eastern Bloc dissidents and insulting each other’s syntax, we exited to the street, whereupon I lost sight of him. Five minutes later, he reappeared, screaming from the window of an idling cab that he made Nabokov read like Mem Fox. I was content to let him be – the meter would’ve been at around sixty dollars – and once the screed was over, I asked politely if this meant we were going to my place.”

The congregation are perplexed, but deferential.

“He mumbled ‘yes,’ then opened the door for me.”

The woman adjusts her glasses, then continues.

“And so it was for the rest of our time together: he would erupt in paroxysms of conceit that simmered into bashful affection, whilst I maintained both a quiet dignity and the bulk of my pay cheque. It was a formula that was to sustain our relationship over the decades to come.”

The woman’s daughter, seated to the side of the lectern, bows her head and begins to cry. Her elder brother – his noble, aquiline features recalling those of his father – places a hand on her thigh, which he squeezes gently.

“Undoubtedly, my husband’s greatest achievement in his time with us…”

The two adult children look up expectantly.

“…Was his successful campaign to have anti-personnel mines deployed in the City to Surf fun run.”

Crestfallen, the son counts the scratches in the floorboards.

“But, the ‘Prince of Prosthesis’ – as he insisted I call him during lovemaking – also played a hand in the creation of two remarkable human beings. I speak of course, of Anais Margaret, our darling little girl, and our son, Oscar Daniel – so named due to his father’s insistence that he bear at least one child with the initials ‘ODB’.”

An overweight, middle-aged woman in a blouse sobs loudly, then reaches backward, where her hand is accepted by a similarly rotund mourner on the pew behind her.

“You both held privileged position in your father’s heart – nestled between the atria and the plaque deposits that killed him – and I would venture that the inspiration and love you gave him focused his efforts to revive eurodance.”

Although not a religious man, a septuagenarian in rave pants makes the sign of the cross.

“Rest assured that while neither Descartes nor a succession of Dutch producers could ever answer the question: ‘What is love?’ your father spent the duration of your lives with something approaching an understanding.”

An extended pause. The woman returns her speech to her jacket pocket, then produces a second document.

“I am going to read you an excerpt from my husband’s will which I feel aptly summarizes the man he was and the man he strived to be. I have had to paraphrase some sections owing to the bloodstains and the repeated, deeply troubling references to the UWA Arts union and mineral turpentine, but the message is a fitting caveat to a …unique… life. “

A faint murmur; a kingfisher cackles once outside; the chapel is redolent of iron and tweed. Silence.

“It has taken me until well into the penultimate years of my life to appreciate that these years themselves are nothing for us to fear. Death is as inevitable and as constant as the days from which it plucks us, feeble and stupefied in the face of it all. Fear of ageing is fear of having lived middlingly and the realization that, as with all things ephemeral, we have exhausted the time in which we could have rectified the situation. Defining a successful life in itself is an entirely arbitrary and pointless exercise, and, to borrow from Celine:

To philosophise is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

Indeed, I have spent most of my life grappling with acute, formless terror. However, as I write this from upon one of a flotilla of dinghies loaded with barbiturates and table tennis paddles – the coastline before me unblemished save for the occasional smouldering heart rate monitor – I can say without reservation that I have led a life which bore some minor triumphs.  I can only hope  the people who have meant something to me along the way claim likewise when their time comes.”

The woman inhales sharply, as if to continue the speech. Her expression shifts from sombre to quizzical. She reads the next section under her breath, audible only to those in the front.

“Oscar, so help me God, if you ever sell the caravan…”

She shakes her head, sighs and scrunches the paper into a tight ball.

“Never mind.”

She steps back from the microphone as the restless little girl bites her bottom lip and kicks her legs back and forth against the seat in front of her. ‘Staying Alive’ plays for wholly ironic reasons. The girl’s mother turns to her husband and, through tears and smudged cosmetics, croaks

“He was the best, man. He did it.”