An extract from HEAT 19

Each week, in Darlinghurst, there are more people dying than being born. They die from drive-by shootings and accidental overdoses, bar brawls and binges, bikie contracts and suicidal leaps from art deco buildings. Occasionally, they’re the victims of more common causes: bowel cancer, heart attack, but rarely old age. By the time she was twelve, Ginger knew this – and more –because her father was the undertaker at the local funeral home.

An only child, she’d grown up in the four-storey Victorian terrace amidst the smells of cosmetic powders and embalming fluid. The family residence was on the top two floors, filled with furniture and carpets from the century before, when her grandparents had run the business. From the time she could remember, Ginger had witnessed on average two or three funerals a week in the large candlelit parlour, just to the right of the entry foyer. She’d seen extravagant ceremonies involving string quartets and flocks of doves, floral wreaths the size of doors, digital slide shows on wide plasma screens. More often than not, however, the services were small and modest: a closed cardboard coffin, a clutch of weeping friends, maybe two or three relatives arguing in a corner about who was going to pay for the cremation.

The funeral of her mother had been an entirely different affair. Filling up the first rows of seating were the wives of members of the Australian Association of Funeral Directors – mostly stiff-backed women with serious faces who considered themselves modern because they no longer felt obliged to wear black at a funeral. Instead, they paraded their progressiveness with grey twin-sets, brown tweed – one even had the temerity to don a yellow hat. There were also women from the Parents and Teachers Association at Ginger’s school, all dressed in various shades of charcoal, and her mother’s two younger brothers and surviving uncles. 

Ginger had been seven at the time of her mother’s death. Her father had explained to her that she’d been transformed into an angel by God and now lived on the gabled roof of their house, between the two chimneys. For a short time afterwards, when she was walking home from school, she would gaze up at the roof, squinting through the afternoon glare, trying to catch a glimpse of her mother’s long fair hair, and her fluffy white angel wings silhouetted against the sky…