by Tracy Farr
Back soon, see you then,
Love
Iris
90. Eight years ago
From here, I can see myself reflected in the mirror on the dressing table. Not that I need a dressing table. Or a mirror. My room has all the things a person would need if they hadn’t lost their mind. That’s what Iris says when she thinks I can’t hear: my mother’s lost her mind, poor thing.
All I really need in this room is a bed and a chair. The nurses, or whatever they are, bring me food, and feed me, and take the food away, and take me to the toilet, and dress me, and put me in the chair, then take me out of the chair and get me back to bed. And I just sit here, sprawl there, not even bothering to hold myself up in the chair, not even bothering to smile at them for their small gestures of care. Sometimes my mouth moves, as if it’s trying to say something. Sometimes my hand scratches on the arm of the chair, or in the air, though I do not bid it do so. Sometimes I claw at Iris, or at Little Kurt. I imagine my touch like paper, or pins.
My eyes wander around the room without fixing on anything, without watching, or even really seeing.
89. Ten years ago
So, that’s it. It’s decided. I’ll stay here.
They don’t know what’s wrong with me. I am old, is all. So I’ll stay here in this room they’ve moved me to, in the High Care Facility of Dorothy Hill Retirement Village, sentient but silent. Until I get better, that’s what they say, but reading between the lines it’ll be forever and ever amen. Though how long can it be? Ninety is a good innings, by anyone’s accounting.
Iris talks to the person in charge. There they are, in a huddle by the door. Kurt sits in the chair by the window, hunched over a thing in his hands. The thing: a shape, plastic, noise, his fingers moving and toggling and switching, face getting closer and closer to it, light from it shining up to his face.
Iris says: Kurt, for chrissake, at least turn the sound off!
And his face looks up at her, his eyes frown, then the sounds go away, and he hunches back. The person in charge puts her hand on Iris’s shoulder, and her eyes crinkle in professional sympathy. How many times she must have done this. She leaves Iris in the doorway. Iris leans there, watches me. Her eyes flick to her beautiful boy.
I can see all of this from my place in the bed. I want to tell her it’s alright. I understand. I’ll stay here. Don’t worry, my girl. I need looking after now, finally, after so many years of only looking after myself. But not by you. You have your own looking after to do.
I cannot speak, but my gap-ridden brain, the strange mass of cells and synapses in my head, still makes connections, sees the light (or the absence of light) behind the eyes of my dear ones, my girl, her dear boy. Imagine it, my brain, my poor brain, the electricity sparking through it. With all its failures and misfirings, it can still read the shape of humanity. It can read the sad unshaping of my daughter’s family.
And that makes me think what a marvel it is that all the life in this room came from me: not from my brain, not my thinking brain; a deeper, lower, animal mind that connects me still to Iris and Kurt; my child, and the child of my child.
88. Ten years ago
Iris cries today, just sits by my bed and cries and cries, tears of shame and sadness and self-pity and rage.
I couldn’t tell you before, Mum, not while they were doing the tests, but now that you’re stable, I thought I’ d better. Tell you. Paul’s been screwing the fucking crew. A student. A Norwegian student. Kerstin. Or Kristin. Something. Young and blonde and foreign and gorgeous, like a walking fucking cliché. Oh Mum, I feel so stupid. Ugly and old and stupid. The bastard. The fucking bastard. How dare he.
She whispers that, as if anyone here is likely to object to juicy gossip, spicy language.
Her face is blotched red with rage, indignation. Her hands clutch tight around endless tissues, discarded into the rubbish bin by the bed. You’ll be fine, I would tell her if I could. I try to tell her with my eyes. I hold her hand with my hand, hold her as tightly as I can. I let her rage.
Kurt, she whispers, is handling it. We’ve been honest with him, as far as it goes, but how much can you tell an eleven-year-old? I don’t think he realises that this is it. This is it, Mum, I’ve had it with the bastard.
It was Boxing Day, she hisses. Fucking Boxing fucking Day, that’s when he told me. In Cassetown, after we got back down there, after we’ d had Christmas lunch with you. At least he spared me Christmas Day. The fucker. Fuck him.
I can smell the sour smell of last night’s wine on her breath, seeping from her pores. I hold her hand; that’s all I can do.
Thank god it’s school holidays. He’s moving out of the house. Kurt and I are staying down in Cassetown, I’ve just come up for the day. Marti came down last week, with Luce. The two of us, licking our wounds, making a nest with the kids, going to the beach, pretending everything’s alright, drinking too much. Oh Mum, it’s shit. It really is shit.
I’m sorry, Mum, I didn’t mean to dump this on you.
87. Ten years ago
The doctor is showing a sheet of film to Iris. The scan, she calls it. They point, they nod. They look back at me and smile with their mouths. After ‘the incident’ (the person in charge makes scratch marks in the air when she talks) they moved me to this room from the flat I was in. This little room, this little box, not much to it; there’s no kitchenette here, no sofa, just the bare basics. It’s like a hospital room; even the bed is a hospital bed, all metal and hydraulics and hospital corners. An attempt has been made to give a homely feel. Curtains. A dressing table with a mirror. A little built-in wardrobe. An utterly appalling, ugly ‘painting’ (I’ll give them scratch marks in the air) on the wall.
The doctor is holding the scan up against the window to let the light through it, to show the colours, like the cellophane they used to put on the windows, or coloured films over lights to shine on the walls; remember? My brain looks like a big coloured walnut in a half shell of head. I’ d fancy a walnut now; imagine it, with blue cheese and quince paste; imagine the taste! Imagine the crack of the shell! But I’m not allowed walnuts. No one here’s allowed nuts. The only nuts are the residents. Risk of choking dear, they yell in my ear, as if I can’t hear. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, though, that’s not what’s gone. My hearing is fine, I want to tell them. I can hear every little thing you say. I can hear you when you mutter under your breath, when you lift me and clean me. I can hear you when you complain about the smell and the dribbling and the eternal mundanity of it, when you’re standing outside my room and wheedling, trying to swap jobs, trying to avoid the stinking intimacy of old bodies. I can hear you.
I just can’t tell you so.
86. Ten years ago
Rosa?
Rosa?
Mrs Golden?
Rosa, we’ve spoken with your daughter. She’s on her way. Iris is coming. She’ll be here in three hours, if the holiday traffic doesn’t slow her down.
Mrs Golden? Rosa?
Rosa, you’ve had a bit of a turn, but you’re going to be fine.
85. Ten years ago
I listen to the radio when I cannot sleep.
Sometimes I hear stories of love: a book being read, a love letter written, a song played for a fiftieth wedding anniversary. When music plays, on occasion I sing. Sometimes I dance, holding myself, smiling at partners not there, leaning in to accept or prompt a kiss, to touch cheek to cheek. Can I have this dance, for the rest of my life?
Sometimes, though, they’re stories of hate, of war and politics and profit, of turning back the boats and no more and stay away. Voices raised or reasoned, bitter underneath, little lizard men with evil on their tongues and in their minds.
Today from the radio I have heard only sorrow, great waves of it, and horror, and shifting.
A great shifting quake under the ocean, walls of water breathing in, then out over the land. The radio numbers the dead, the numbers rising to meaninglessness, incomprehensibility: thousands, t
hen tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Imagine – so many people gone, disappeared, drowned. No. It is unimaginable.
Ah-chay, I heard. Ah-chay Province. Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand, islands. By mid-morning they are calling it the Boxing Day Tsunami, in capital letters that will define it, box it in: the when of it, the festive timing (like Christmas forever triggering Cyclone Tracy). Boxing Day becomes shorthand for hundreds of thousands dead, a million displaced. Imagine more than that though.
Or imagine fewer: imagine one, just one lost, one dear one. The horror of that, even, is unimaginable. (But I do not have to imagine. I remember.)
Oh, that the earth could do this! That the ground shifts, rifts, rips apart under the ocean, and throws that wall of muddy water. One man on the radio said: an earthquake of this magnitude can cause the earth to vibrate measurably.
This big globe, spinning here, cracking and shattering and shifting beneath us. So strong; so fragile. It’s more than I can bear.
And in the face of this, what can I say? What can anyone say?
I can find no words.
84. Ten years ago
Postcard from Cassetown
Dear Mum,
It feels so strange to be sending you a postcard from Cassetown, but here we are here, and there you are up there. Because you won’t be coming down here this summer, I thought I’ d send you a postcard of the bay. You can think of the sound of the waves (and how bloody annoying you find it!).
It’s Christmas Day afternoon. We got back safely, before the traffic got too bad.
Thanks for coming to lunch at Marti’s. She’s not too miserable, poor love. I guess Luce was missing her dad, but she’s coping pretty well with them splitting up.
Kurt won’t leave the bloody Game Boy alone. He’s as happy as a clam. He says to tell you he’s got a great game to show you when we come up on New Year’s Day. I’m going to bring you some stones from the bay. Remember, at home, for years you kept those stones lined up on the kitchen windowsill? I’ll bring you some, for your new flat.
We’ll see you next year! Enjoy the rest of this one.
Love
Iris, Paul and Kurt
83. Ten years ago
My first week at Dorothy Hill Retirement Village hasn’t been bad.
Iris and Paul helped me move in. I couldn’t bring much – this little flat is barely bigger than a hotel room. I brought a small sofa, a side table; my little dining table with its leaves removed, so it’s just a small circle, four chairs tucked in around it. I brought just one small bookcase, and only as many books as fill it. The rest – furniture, books, and all – has gone down south to the house in Cassetown, where there is space to store it. Iris says that it can stay there as long as it needs to. She says she can sort things. She says she’ll check things with me. But I think, now, I have what I need here. I’ll leave the rest for her to do with as she will.
Summer almost goes unnoticed here, with the air-conditioned closed-in-ness of it all. In a way, it’s a relief, after all those baked hot summers I’ve spent in my house. I walked out the door yesterday, to explore the garden, and realised that it was the first time I had breathed fresh air, felt sun and breeze, in a week. It’s mostly paved and tamed, with awful pink old-lady flowers, and agapanthus, and lavender. There are rose beds, of course (these places always have roses). But I followed my nose and found a stand of eucalypts, right in the middle of the place. A sign said POSSUM SANCTUARY: THIS RESERVE OF BUSHLAND HAS BEEN PRESERVED AS HABITAT FOR POSSUMS. A bench at the edge of the trees was in shade, so I sat there a while, resting, breathing. I bent and picked up leaves, their surfaces scribbled by insects, infestations leaving notes I could not decipher, maps to places I will never now go. I crushed the leaves in my hand, breathed lemon, eucalypt, home.
I am in the Independent Living Apartments. It’s all very Capital Letters. The other Residents are pleasant enough, and I can keep to myself, or not, as I wish. There is a High Care Facility here should you ever need it, the person in charge said as she showed Iris and me around the (Upper Case) Facilities that first day, and she put her hand on my arm as she said it, as she has said it to all of us, all the Residents here at the Biding Time Village for Old Buggers.
Oh, it’s a sensible move. I know that. It’s time, if not long-past time. I’m ninety years old, for godsakes. I’m not getting any younger.
82. Fifteen years ago
Iris and Paul have moved house. Close to school, close to the city, near the university; yes it’s a good move, yes it’s time, but moving the week that Little Kurt starts school? Moving in the stinking heat of February? Not very clever. Still, it’s neither my problem nor my decision.
It’s a dark house they’re moving into, good in the summer heat with its great thick double-brick walls, limestone foundations sitting up off the ground, a solid old pre-war bungalow. Iris took me there the day she picked up the keys, last week. The house was empty, echoing. It smelled of industrial cleaning products on old carpet. It was a deceased estate sale. Of course, she died in a hospice, the estate agent had told Iris. Well, they would say that.
We’re going to live in it for a while before we do anything, Iris said.
It’s nice enough, and better than the place they’ve been in, but a little too far from the beach for me. I’ d miss the sea breeze.
That beautiful boy, ready to start school! He could walk from the new house, but Iris says she’ll drive him.
He’s only six, Mum.
You walked to school when you were his age, I tell her, and she gives me one of those looks.
81. Sixteen years ago
I am minding the boy tonight. Iris and Paul are off to a film, or a dinner, something to do with the university. I have come to their house. It seems easier, saves them bringing his things. Saves me making a bed for him. Saves them feeling one of them has to stay sober to pick him up and drive him home.
He babbles on in the bath, about kindy and cartoons. I tuck him into bed, all clean, smelling of powder and soap and toothpaste. He asks me to read to him. He brings me the book – my book! Nonsense, I say, you don’t want to read that old rubbish. But my mum is reading it to me, he says. She reads me all the stories. My best story is the one about the baby, he says, the baby and the colour of blue.
Oh, is that so?
Yes, he says. I love that baby.
Then he says: I’m going to have a baby of my own soon. He is all smiles. It turns out, on further subtle questioning, that Paul’s sister is pregnant, so the baby will be a cousin for Kurt, not a sib as I thought he’ d meant. Ah well. Paul and Iris are so close to Marti and Mark that it will be like a sibling, this baby, handed from one to the next, not quite sure who it belongs to, but belonging to them all. That’s the thing with Paul and Martina, the twin thing, that strange closeness. I think Iris thrives on it. I suppose it makes up for her solitary childhood.
Well, enough about babies, I think we’ll have something a bit different tonight, I tell him. There is a book about trains, and another about dogs on a beach, and another about a horse, and I read those, do some voices, and he seems happy enough. I don’t know what Iris is thinking, reading him those old stories of mine. They’re so – I don’t know. I did not write them for children.
He’ll be at school next year. He’ll grow before we know it, grow tall, become a man. Impossible to imagine, when they’re little like this, but he will. He can read all he likes when he’s a man. I doubt he’ll want to read my stories then. Miss Fortune’s Faery Tales – that preposterous, affected spelling. What was I thinking?
He’s sleeping now. All children are lovely when they sleep. Iris and Paul will be back soon, and I can drive home. I have a book with me, but I’ve turned the radio on to keep me company. I have the volume down low, just murmuring, so I can’t really hear detail, just the up and down lilt of voices and music, the pips, then the quiet ta-daah! of the fanfare announcing the news on the hour.
80. Eighteen years ago
; Postcard from Vancouver
Dear Mum,
This is the market (produce market they call it over here, proh-doose, but it sounds so silly when I say it like that) close to our apartment (no one says flat). Such a treat to be able to just put Kurt in the stroller (that’s pusher to you!) and walk there – we walk along the waterfront if it’s not raining – or hop on the bus. Kurt loves it all – the walking, the bus, the stroller. He loves the market – looks around taking everything in, claps his hands at the buskers. We do counting, and colours, and names of the different fruit and veges. Fun times, just doing the shopping!
Paul’s so busy at the university. Ridiculous that it’s called a sabbatical, with the rest that implies. I’m keeping busy enough with Kurt, and I’ve lined up a few little bits of work to keep me from going kiddy-mad – I’ll be cataloguing at the museum a few mornings a week. There’s a crêche there for K. Will six months be long enough for him to come home with a Canadian accent, do you think?
Hope the house is holding together for you. It’s the Goldilocks time of the year to be down in Cassetown – not too hot, not too cold, just right. Are those waves keeping you awake, as always?! We’re so pleased to have you staying there while we’re away, keeping an eye on everything.
Out of room! Postcards, eh!
Love
K, P & I
xxx
79. Eighteen years ago
I like being here in Cassetown while Iris and Paul and Kurt are away. I spread myself out in the rooms of the house. I take it over, pretend it is mine.
