by Greg Fleet
‘Listen, James,’ said Sophie, ‘I see these people going through the same things, the same emptiness every day. I honestly believe that we can do something about it, to make it better. But if you don’t want to or can’t go through with this, I fully understand.’
‘No. I want to do it. I just want to be sure, as sure as we can be, that it will work.’
Sophie leaned across the table and smiled reassuringly at James. And a small part of him, the part that usually stopped him from falling in love, even just a little bit, with medical professionals, quivered.
The next morning, after James had finished cleaning the cinema and was locking the place up, he stopped to read a large sign in the window that had caught his eye when he first went in. It was offering the Majestic for sale to the highest bidder. To James, reading this was like reading a text message sent from your partner in which they break off your relationship. James was single and he spent more time with the Majestic than he did with anyone or anything else. This proves that the use of the girlfriend–cinema metaphor is more than simple laziness on the part of your narrator.
With a heavy heart James cycled his way to the Peggy Day Home to meet Sophie as planned. It had not been an ideal start to the day, but, although he didn’t know it as he chained up his bike, things were about to improve. On greeting Sophie in her office, he was met with the news that his application to be the facility’s new care assistant had been approved. This was an exciting development, especially as he had never applied for any such job. James started to feel like he was in a spy movie. Most men have at some point had that feeling, or at least wanted to have it. A self-less spy working for the greater good. James loved it, possibly a little too much.
‘So that’s my cover story,’ he said to Sophie. ‘This is the eye of the needle, and I’m going in deep. Tell the chaps at MI6 that I’m all over this like treacle on porridge.’
‘Maybe stop talking now, James,’ Sophie said gently.
‘Fair call.’ James was a man who, if nothing else, was fairly good at admitting when he was being annoying.
James filled out some forms, had his photo taken and was issued with a laminated identity card. For the rest of that day, and for the few days following, every time he saw Sophie he flashed his ID at her as though he was a cop. He would then say something like ‘James Rogers, Care Assistant’, ‘James Rogers, CA. Gumshoe for hire’ or ‘James Rogers, Care Assistant. Can I have another chamomile tea? I’m developing a taste for it’. Unlike the patients at the home, it just never got old.
Over the next couple of weeks, James spent a few hours every day at the Peggy Day Home, and, for want of anything else to do, he actually started behaving like a care assistant: helping out around the place, sometimes cleaning, sometimes doing laundry or assisting with meals. It was a way of getting to know the place and learn how things operated, while, for the most part, not being seen by the patients. Sophie began pointing out various people to James and giving him a brief run-down on who they were and why they either were or were not suitable candidates for Operation Meet Your Son.
Obviously some of the people at the home were not suitable because, while they may have been lonely and would have loved a visit from family, they remembered their children all too well. Their pain was amplified by clarity; their heartbreak was not going anywhere soon. There were also people who didn’t remember their children because they didn’t remember anything at all. People like Mrs Sylvia Jameson, an elegant woman of ninety. Each morning Sophie and the other staff would reintroduce themselves to her and each morning she would meet them, again, for the very first time. For James to visit Mrs Jameson as her son, someone would first have to explain to her that she had a son. That she had been married. That she had once had a life before the single day that was now her eternity. Instead James would sometimes go to Mrs Jameson as himself, and they would sit in her room and he would read to her from books and magazines. She very much enjoyed the sound of his voice, and that was enough.
A possible option, though, was Mr Angus Hill, a 92-year-old retired policeman. He had two living sons who he had not seen for many years. Unfortunately for Sophie and James, both of his sons were now in their late fifties, but – in an unforeseen turn of events that excited Sophie – it turned out that he also had three grandsons who ranged in age from twenty-seven to thirty-six.
‘Maybe we should start with someone who isn’t a retired cop,’ said James as they watched the old man from the office window.
Then there was Madeline Ames, an 89-year-old woman who had at one time been perhaps the most respected agricultural scientist in the world. Thirty years earlier she had been a joint winner of a Nobel prize for her discovery of a mutative gene that affected domesticated but not wild pigs. Now, though, she was almost completely blind and suffering from a particularly voracious kind of Alzheimer’s. Sophie told James that she often mentioned that her son Gary was coming to visit her. Gary would have been quite a few years older than James but, taking into account Professor Ames’ almost total blindness and her advanced memory loss, James thought that he could pull this off.
‘She’s the one. It’s almost too perfect,’ said James.
‘It is,’ said Sophie. ‘It won’t work. You can’t be Professor Ames’ son.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘Because she doesn’t have a son. She never had any children. As she is getting older and falling away from the light, she seems to have just made Gary up. Perhaps to fill a hole, I don’t know.’
‘So what?’ said James. ‘I don’t care if he’s real or not. I can do this. The main thing is she believes he’s real, and if she believes he’s real, he is real.’
‘No. That’s not how this works, if it works at all,’ said Sophie. ‘You pretending to be real people is going to be hard enough. But you pretending to be pretend people? That could just open up Pandora’s box, and we don’t want that.’
‘I guess not . . . What exactly is Pandora’s box?’ asked James.
‘I’m not exactly sure,’ said Sophie. ‘But it’s not good. Especially when opened.’
Perhaps the most fascinating person at the Peggy Day Aged
Care Home was Mrs Jean Murphy, a kind and intelligent woman in her seventies. Each morning, she stood alone next to a huge oak tree down by the fence that separated the home from the main road. She would wait there patiently for a couple of hours, then return solemnly to her room. James found her consistent routine mildly amusing until Sophie told him her story.
At the age of thirty Mrs Murphy had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, before suffering what we now call postnatal depression. Her husband had her committed to an asylum (perfectly acceptable spousal abuse back then). The asylum had stood on the grounds of what was now the Peggy Day Home and Mrs Murphy had moved straight from one to the other. She had never caused the doctors any problems at all but by that time she was an ageing woman with no family ties who had grown reliant on the care of others for her daily life.
‘Jesus,’ said James. ‘Poor Mrs Murphy.’
‘Oh, you have no idea.’
Sophie went on to tell James that after Mr Murphy had dumped his wife at a lunatic asylum for the heinous crime of finding it difficult to deal with twin babies, Mrs Murphy had given him a note for her children and asked that he pass it on to them when they turned eighteen. In it she told the twins that she loved them very much, and that she was sorry for not being stronger, and that all she lived for was the hope of one day seeing them again and hopefully having them back in her life. She told them that she would wait by the big oak tree in the grounds of the hospital – now the home – every day between the hours of ten and twelve, from the day of their eighteenth birthday until the day that they came to see her.
One thing that Sophie didn’t know, and therefore didn’t tell James, was that Mrs Murphy’s husband had never given the letter to the twins. He hadn’t seen the point. He remarried. He got on with his life.
These things happen.
We will return to this story.
Outside of his time at the Peggy Day Aged Care Home, James’ life went on much as it had before. He still rode his bike around and saw his friends; he still had his much-loved job at the cinema, the one that actually paid him an income, although cleaning the cinema at times now felt like a detour from his primary mission.
The only person James told about his and Sophie’s plan was Cash Driveway, and Cash loved the idea. He saw it as a kind of performance art, with James as Isadora Duncan (sans sports car, long scarf and getting strangled) and Sophie as some benevolent svengali. Cash also noticed that James was talking about Sophie more and more, and that pleased him. Perhaps this would end up being more than just a working relationship. Perhaps not. Guess we’ll find out.
One Tuesday afternoon as he prepared to leave the home, Sophie ushered James into her office and, smiling, handed him a thin blue cardboard file.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Congratulations, Mr Rogers. Your training is over. What you are holding is your first assignment. Tomorrow morning Margaret Harrison’s “son” Steve is going to pay her a visit.’
‘Holy shit . . .’
‘I know! It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?’
‘Holy shit. Holy fucking . . . fuck!’ blurted James, displaying his advanced linguistic skills.
‘This is where we see if we have lost our minds, or if we are, in fact, visionaries. Take the file home and learn all you can about Mrs Harrison, Steve and the rest of the family. How do you feel?’
‘I feel great. I feel like James Bond. Should I destroy this after I’ve memorised its contents?’
‘No. You should bring it back in the morning. It’s Mrs Harrison’s file.’
As the two of them got up and reached the door, James paused.
‘This is the right thing to do, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘I think so . . . I don’t really know. It feels right to me.’
‘Yeah, it does. It feels right,’ replied James with an easy smile.
And so they decided to carry on with the plan, knowing that in the past more important people than them had based much more crucial decisions on far flimsier premises.
That night James stopped at the Thai place on the corner of his block and bought a takeaway beef rendang. The place was called Thai-tanic and was owned and run by a man called Graham. When he got home, he took the rendang and the blue file on Mrs Harrison to his favourite place in his apartment: his king-sized, memory-foam-clad bed. It had been a gift from his art-school friends when he announced that he and his Spanish girlfriend, Renée, were getting married. When three weeks later Renée announced that she was leaving him for a visiting American installation artist and moving to New York City, his friends worried that the huge bed would serve as a constant reminder of how all alone he now was. It didn’t. Instead, James told them, it served as a constant reminder that he now had a really excellent bed. James Rogers was certainly a glass-half-full kind of guy.
As he lay on the bed holding Mrs Harrison’s file he thought again about the ethics of what he and Sophie were embarking on. The fact that he now worked at the home certainly lessened the illegality of the venture, and the fact that the two of them genuinely wanted to make the old people happy seemed to legitimise their actions beyond any kind of moral examination. His main concern was causing trouble for Sophie, having their actions make her lose her job. A job she clearly loved. But in the end he decided that they would be okay. They were doing this because they cared and sometime, somewhere, someone had written something about the pure of heart and how good things came to them. Well in this case James and Sophie were the pure of heart, and that meant that everything was going to be all right. He opened the file and started reading.
The first few pages were medical records, from which James gleaned that Margaret June Harrison was eighty and, aside from Alzheimer’s disease, she was suffering from the various ailments that can afflict a woman of her years, including badly failing sight and hearing.
What followed was, to James Rogers, pure gold: Mrs Harrison’s life history forms, or her ‘LAGS’ as the staff mysteriously called them. LAGS were standard information that the Peggy Day Home kept on every patient. The families usually filled them out and they could vary in length from a few sentences to thirty-three pages (the length of the longest, describing Franz Camera, ninety-one, whose son was, not surprisingly, an unpublished writer). Mrs Harrison’s LAGS were twelve pages long, and to James each of those pages was another part of her. Like twelve photographs taken at various crucial moments in her life. Whoever wrote this, thought James, took a lot of time in its construction. They obviously cared deeply for Mrs Harrison. So where were they now?
Margaret Harrison and her husband, Sam (deceased), had raised three children, Kate, Tegan and Steven. By all accounts they were a loving, happy unit. But the only one of the Harrison children that the home had any contact with was Kate, fifty-six, who now lived in Singapore with her own family. Kate was a good daughter who paid her mother’s bills on time and sent monthly emails to check on her condition, but she had only made the trip back to Melbourne twice in the past decade.
Steven (who James was going to become the next day) was something of a mystery. He was forty-two years old and had worked in various countries as an engineer in the energy sector, mostly on offshore oil rigs. The Peggy Day Aged Care Home had never had any dealings with Steven and Sophie had no idea what he looked like. He was, as far as they could tell, just a name and a job.
There was a photo of Kate, though. James looked at it for a few minutes and decided that he could convincingly pass as her brother. James had the same colouring as the woman in the picture and even similar features. He was starting to feel confident. Thinking further, he decided that Steven was probably about 187 centimetres tall. There will be no prizes given to anyone who has worked out that 187 centimetres is exactly how tall James was.
Glass half full.
After reading the rest of Mrs Harrison’s LAGS, James put down the blue folder and felt good about the whole plan. Next to his bed was a picture of a dog and he turned to it with a smile. It was Charlie Girl, the Jack Russell–dachshund cross who had been James’ constant companion from his early twenties until the previous summer when she had died. James used to talk to Charlie Girl as though she was a person and he now treated her picture the same way.
‘Charlie Girl, I reckon this is going to go like clockwork. Don’t you? I mean, I can act, a bit. Gravedigger in Hamlet in Year Eleven? I smashed that, so I can do this. I’ve read Mrs Harrison’s LAGS, I look quite a bit like her daughter, so unless Steven was adopted I will be absolu— Holy shit! What if he was adopted? What if he was adopted from a Chinese family? How am I going to explain my total lack of Chineseness? He won’t have been Chinese . . . Will he, Charlie Girl?’
In the picture, Charlie Girl was standing on a beach in Torquay with a ball in her mouth, looking at the camera. She was as happy as a clam, a brown-and-white, long-haired, four-legged clam. James had loved her so much and, for twelve great years, she had loved him right back. He picked up her picture, took a deep breath and smiled.
‘Yeah, Charlie Girl, you’re right, Steve’s probably not Chinese. I know. I’m just being paranoid – and now I’m taking life advice from a photograph. I miss you, crazy pup.’
James thought about going online and learning as much as possible about Chinese adoption laws but instead he put down the picture of his dog and drifted off into dreams of himself, Sophie and Charlie Girl all working on an oil rig somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.
For James, the actual meeting with Mrs Harrison was, like many ‘first times’, far overshadowed by the anticipation. That build-up was like the ticking of a clock on an old-school bomb.
James had rarely felt more present or focused than he did on the walk from Sophie’s office, down two corridors, to Mrs Harrison’s room. He never wore a uniform, so the sight of him and Soph
ie walking the halls of the Peggy Day Home, him in street clothes, was quite normal. The fact that he was dressed slightly more ‘mining engineer’ than usual went unnoticed.
Outside Mrs Harrison’s door, Sophie stood in front of James, looked deep into his eyes and said, rather seriously, ‘You can do this.’
Then Sophie opened the door to the room and announced, ‘Hello, Mrs Harrison. Your son Steven is here to see you!’
Mrs Harrison sat propped up in bed, frailty wrapped in anticipation. ‘Steven,’ she said, her smile almost forcing her back to her youth. ‘You look wonderful!’
‘So do you, Mum!’ James’ voice came out more like a squeak than he had intended, and quite suddenly he realised that he was far more nervous than he had thought he would be.
He leaned down and kissed Mrs Harrison on the cheek.
‘No, I don’t. I look terrible,’ she said, glancing over to where Sophie stood tingling with how well it was going. ‘Steven was always a very kind boy, but an appalling liar. I once tried to teach him to lie, but sadly he just couldn’t do it.’
‘Oh, stop it, Mum. I can lie; I just don’t.’ James was easing into being Steven, the put-upon son. The loving but petulant child. Sophie wondered how much of this was acting and how much of it was just James being a man-child and simply not wanting to be told what to do by his mother. Any mother. But whatever he was doing it was certainly working and it took all of Sophie’s self-control not to start applauding.
James stood at the side of Mrs Harrison’s bed. She took his hands in hers. ‘Well, sit down, Steven. I haven’t seen you in months, and you’re not going to spend this visit standing to attention like last time!’ Sophie and James shot each other a concerned glance. Mrs Harrison hadn’t seen Steven for years, and he’d certainly never been to the home. Not once.
