Rob slings his shirt and trousers over the rail in the bathroom, pulls off his socks and wanders out into the backyard in his striped boxer shorts. He admires his neatly edged lawn and pisses on the lemon tree, a tip he garnered from the advice column in the local paper. ‘To pee or not to pee?’ he’d called out to Miranda a couple of months ago, the newspaper spread out across his legs. She hadn’t answered and that had made his mind up. Since then it had become a daily ritual. The lemon tree had responded generously, producing lemons with wart-like growths, thickened pith and more seed than juice. If nothing else, the metaphor amuses him.
Rob rearranges himself and thinks about Bella, the girl next door. Specifically, he thinks about her docile eyes, her chapped lips and her black blouse with the buttons missing. Perhaps it is too early in the morning for these thoughts, but he can’t seem to stop himself from conjuring her image. Not just now, but in obscure moments throughout the day. During handover. When he’s giving Baz a sponge bath. When he’s scanning the festering track marks on Maggie White’s body, searching for a clear vein. Do all men think like this?
• • •
Dressed in thongs, stretched shorts and a sweatshirt, his oily black hair plastered under his cap, Rob wanders down the street. In the half-hour before he has to get showered and ready, he takes in the self-righteous fluorescent-sneakered runners. The flask-clutching fishermen on their disciplined trek to the bluff. And Valmai. He sees her almost every morning; most evenings too, though she is not aware of him then. In winter she wears a red puffer-vest and a black skivvy. Her hair is always styled and kept in place by a haughtily slanted beret. Valmai would not look out of place sitting at a Parisian cafe. At five in the morning she wears a full face of make-up. Her dog wears a puffer-vest too. It’s one of those dogs small enough to fit in a bag. Legs like wishbones. A loose fan-belt yelp that makes Rob want to garrotte it. Valmai lives up the road from Rob and Miranda and her dog sits out on her upstairs deck and yaps at every movement. Every passer-by, every falling leaf. Rob doesn’t know anything about Valmai except for her name and her neatness and her unfortunate taste in dogs. This morning, as he walks towards her, her dog squats and defecates. It sniffs the ground and then kicks out its back legs, spreading tufts of grass.
‘Who’s a good girl, then? Is Millie a good girl? Is she? Yes, Millie’s a very good girl,’ Valmai says.
Rob wonders what sort of praise Millie would get if she did something really remarkable. Perhaps if she fetched a ball or bit the tyre of an oncoming car mid-rotation. Valmai pulls out a plastic bag and masterfully collects the mess, flipping the bag inside out and double-knotting it. She pats the dog on the head, congratulates it again, then stands up and smiles. From a distance, with her trim body, Valmai looks about fifty; up close she has the stencilled eyebrows and knotty hands of someone much older.
‘Lovely day, Rob,’ Valmai says. She smiles at him with her blue-green eyes and her coiffed hair and her pincer grip on the bag of shit.
These are the only words that Valmai has ever said to him. He wants to grab lovely-day Valmai by the shoulders. He wants to tell her about his wife who sits inside all day pining for their stillborn baby. He wants to tell her that Miranda hates to touch or be touched. That he obsesses about the girl next door, about doing all sorts of things to her in the sand dunes (his cheek grazing her thigh) in the back shed (against the leg of the oil-stained bench) on the washing machine (the Heavy Duty spin cycle). The last one is a particularly unlikely scenario. The machine is one of those newfangled computerised ones; he doesn’t even know how to start it. He wants to tell Valmai that he drives down their street each night after work, but he doesn’t pull into his driveway, he keeps going until he reaches the bluff. With the windows wound up, he sits there alone listening to angsty music, watching the waves trek towards the shore and petrels hover just above the swell as though they’ve been slackly stitched to the sea. And then, when he loops around to the sheltered bay on his way home, he often sees her sitting there on the council-installed treated-pine table, with her checked tablecloth, her cheese and bickies, her chardonnay, and that precocious Millie propped up next to her. She looks so serene, her shoulders squarely facing the ocean, swilling away, that he doesn’t just want to throttle that fucking dog, but her too.
‘Rob?’
He wants to tell her that soon he’ll be starting his dayshift and caring for a man – a boy, really – named Baz. Baz has no feeling from his neck down. He’s been like that since he was eight after the tragic junction of a wet scaffold, a childhood game, and a treadless sneaker. He has a reflector stuck to the end of his nose so he can navigate his laptop. He puffs into a straw to right or left click. When the kid’s not doing his bookwork, or sleeping, he lies on a rubber mattress and watches Broadway musicals or slasher films. In a few days, Baz turns twenty-five. He’s still waiting to hear if the Supreme Court will let him be ‘switched off’ for his birthday.
‘Lovely day, Valmai,’ Rob says.
• • •
Rob runs past a stooped woman in a dressing gown, a kid with his arm in a sling, an old bloke hooked up to an IV pole puffing on a cigarette in the no-smoking zone. He slows to a stride through the automatic doors of the hospital’s entrance, and peers into the emergency ward full of howling kids and listless patients. He heads straight for the table covered in dog-eared romance novels, knitted booties and bonnets, and sealed bags of musk sticks, cobbers and jelly beans. The Pink Lady puts her knitting to one side. She wears a pink frock. Her skin is yellow and her hair is black. She reminds Rob of a liquorice allsort. He gets the feeling that she doesn’t miss a beat. She seems so measured, like someone you’d want to have around in a crisis, someone you’d want by your bedside. She takes his two dollars and hands him his bag of musk sticks, then picks up her knitting.
Rob legs it up the stairwell, scuttles past the ward desk, and shies away from eye contact with the Nursing Unit Manager who’s in a closed-door meeting in the ‘Code of Silence’ room. In Room 103, Baz is behind a curtain making concerted puffs on his laptop screen while Alyssa, a junior nurse with a sense of entitlement that grows weekly, checks his blood pressure. Cancer-riddled Arthur is doing Sudoku. Janice, the diabetic, is being fed bits of pineapple doughnut by a husband who thinks no-one can see what he’s doing. And then there’s thirty-year-old Maggie. In profile, her jaw juts out like a bulldog’s. Her head is lolling about. She keeps rearranging her arms as though she doesn’t know who they belong to. Anxiety pools in Rob’s gut as it does at the start of each shift. It’s been that way since the night he was in a room two floors up, with peach-coloured walls, Cat Stevens music playing in the background, and a lavender-infused birthing pool. It seemed surreal (the call to ICU, the frenzied midwife, the motionless baby). He’d never felt more useless.
‘Morning,’ he says to no-one in particular.
Alyssa taps her watch and shakes her head. ‘You missed handover,’ she says. She nods her head back towards Maggie and lowers her voice. ‘Maggie, aka pain-in-the-bloody-neck, hasn’t stopped going on about her Endone. All yours now you’ve bothered to show up.’
Rob doesn’t exactly encourage Alyssa’s world-weary nagging, but nor does he try to curtail it. If the truth be known, he takes some delight in the fact that over the next forty years she’ll morph into a dour-faced senior with varicose veins, tan-coloured orthopaedics and not enough superannuation. And she’ll make it her duty to ensure that the new grads are miserable. He doesn’t tell her that he almost didn’t make it in at all. That after his walk he ended up down at the beach, thinking about Baz, wondering if a determination had been reached, hurling himself into the tealy breakers as if it were some sort of punishment. He’d stroked out against the swell, changing from his usual sluggish strokes to something purposeful. He’d swum the whole length of the beach, lashing against the ocean’s rippled weight, carving it up with cupped hands. He didn’t normally allow himself to get close to his patients, but he felt close to Baz. For some re
ason having Baz alive took the edge off the loss of his own child. If anyone could understand what it was like to lose almost everything, it was that kid. He’d considered taking a sickie, but moping around with Miranda wasn’t exactly an alternative.
Rob pulls a musk stick from his top pocket and offers it to Alyssa, but she brushes him away. He moves between beds, scanning notes, checking dose rates. He winks at the clean-cut man trying to give his wife ketoacidosis, checks Maggie’s notes (hydromorphone, PICC) and heads towards Baz, scanning the kid’s eyes and feeling guilty for hoping the court case will drag on until Baz has lost the will to fight for his own death.
‘Rob, my favourite sponge-bather,’ Baz says, shifting his head to scroll down his computer screen.
Rob waits for Baz to speak again. He’s used to the rhythm now. The sudden intensity. The echoing lapses like a long-distance call. ‘The numbers are great this week; you’re in the wrong game.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Your magic sponging hands could be put to good use. If I had any feeling in my body, your hairy, nail-bitten fingers would be welcome. I would enjoy them grinding into my slack skin.’
Baz owns a brothel, which seems so incongruous given his physical state that no-one on the ward actually believes that it’s true. He assures them that it is. At eighteen, when he was finally able to access his compensation funds, held in trust for a decade to ‘protect’ him, he settled on the relatively low operating costs and significant returns offered by The Fandango on Hill Street. In his words, he makes a killing. He’s told some of the nurses that he’ll offer them a part-time gig if they improve their manners and spend more time and money on their appearance. He says it to Alyssa now, while she’s changing his urine bag.
‘A little more blush and lippy,’ Baz says. His voice is suddenly louder.
Alyssa isn’t impressed. She stops smiling and looks down at her navy trousers and her white sneakers. She looks insulted. Not that he’s suggested she work as a prostitute, but that he doesn’t think she’s appealing enough. ‘You’re a pig,’ she says.
‘He is a pig, Alyssa. I think you’d make a lovely prostitute,’ Rob says.
Baz giggles and chokes, and Rob feels bad. Bad for making fun of Alyssa, who’ll no doubt debrief about it during her next performance appraisal. Bad because he knows how much it physically hurts Baz to laugh.
• • •
Valmai slides her arm up the banister as she negotiates the stairs to her apartment. She owns the lower level too, but it’s a complicated dual-occupancy arrangement where she’s above rather than adjacent to a family connected to her by a common driveway, clothesline, double-slotted letterbox and healthy slush fund. Downstairs lives a wife with sandy hair, a young girl always covered in pock-like sandfly bites, and a husband who’s apparently quite high up the food chain of the local Bandidos chapter. They rarely go out, sitting down there doing whatever they do. Cooking up methamphetamines for all she knows, but they are very quiet. The only time she hears the husband is when he kick-starts his Harley. They pay their rent in advance and for that she is grateful.
Valmai pours her leftover herbal tea onto a thriving Peace Lily, rinses toast crumbs off the intricate scrolls of a blue Staffordshire plate, and crosses another day off on the kitchen calendar that is opened at a photo of a bow-headed mountain gorilla with rain falling on his hulking steel-wool frame. She fluffs up Millie’s day bed, pours some milk mixed with cod-liver oil into a ceramic bowl and puts two pig-ears on a carpet square. The dog follows her around the apartment and arranges its limbs at each doorway. In the bathroom, Valmai sprays Meadows and Rain air freshener. She leans in to the mirror to reapply translucent powder, tweezes a single black hair from her chin, licks her fingers and smooths down the pesky wisps of hair that refuse to stay in place. By scientific measures, she knows she’s attractive, symmetrical anyway. She hasn’t, nor will she, let herself go. Her waist can still be neatly cinched with a belt, her figure is still desirable enough to accentuate with a body-hugging sweater.
She tries to overlook her crepey hands and neck. The latter she frequently conceals with a stylish scarf; the one her husband, George, bought her seven years ago on their final overseas trip together. The trip they’d spent floating on their backs in Grundlsee, photographing white peacocks in Schlosspark, sipping soda citrons, making love in the Hotel Turnerwirt, complete with creaking pipes and a shower made for small-statured people. Mid-afternoon naps, George’s forearm, strong from years of manipulating patients, resting against her bare back. And the strange toilets. She thought of them again now, with their little stage, presumably so one could examine one’s bowel movements. Back then George’s memory lapses were little more than a somewhat irritating inconvenience. He could never find his boarding pass, his train ticket. She’d always been the one to take care of his business paperwork and bookings anyway. His spontaneous wanderings, his repetitive stories – back then they were just peculiar endearments, really.
At the Seaside Sanctuary, Valmai eases her blue sedan into the far corner of the parking lot under the swamp mahogany with its striated bark and beaked buds. She walks past the landscaped gardens full of purple-spiked turf lilies and grey-green agaves. She remembers the same plants featuring in the Seaside Sanctuary’s promotional brochure, in soft focus, along with a woman with a severe dowager’s hump smiling euphorically at a piano and, even more obscurely, an elderly man straddling a pool noodle in front of the ocean. She’d kept the leaflet in her handbag for months before broaching George’s decline, from forgetful to hazardous, with their only son, Peter.
Peter had responded exactly as she’d anticipated. Since he’d moved to the city for work, he’d become more and more absent from her life. He called infrequently, and when she called him, he was inattentive. She could hear him moving about his house, stacking the dishwasher or tapping away on his keyboard. When she asked if it was a bad time he became defensive. He said there would never be a good time for his generation because the Boomers were so damn intent on sucking the economy dry. Their most recent conversation had ended with outright hostility. Peter had said if it was all too hard for her he would take his father into his own home. He would have to quit his job. It would no doubt put a strain on his marriage, but it was what family did. Valmai was stung by his comments, but she also knew they were all talk, a way to take the edge off his own guilt. She had mollycoddled him as a child, she knew that. As a teenager he had resorted to embarrassing displays of hysteria, slamming doors and ranting when things didn’t go his way. George had sometimes described their son as all foam and no beer.
Clutching the phone, she went along with Peter’s admirable rhetoric and then she went into the specifics. The anxiety-riddled evenings. George’s ever-increasing insomnia. His habit, lately, of wandering down to the beach in his underwear, sitting there in the sand, building castles with moats. And then, in the time it took her to drive to the shop to get the paper, his escapades. The last straw was when she found him at the local playground holding onto a pig-tailed girl, telling the terrified mother that inversion was a well-researched treatment. With his assistance the child’s poor posture and back troubles would greatly improve. Valmai had run down the grass embankment just as George had started to fumble around in his undies for God-knows what, a business card probably. He’d looked at Valmai and said, ‘Hey, kiddo. Grab my prescription pad. A coffee wouldn’t go astray either.’ Kiddo. His latest term of affection for her. It was what he used to call his assistant when he had his own practice. He hadn’t worked as a chiropractor for years.
‘It’s the facility … the residence, or locking him up in the house, Peter,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not just that, for Christ’s sake. If you want me to spell it out for you … some days … some days I have to take your father to the toilet. Are you up for that, my love?’
Valmai walks past the lounge area, nods at the receptionist and heads through the automatic doors. Her heels make a determined clopping sound down the hallway. As is
her habit, she stops at the cooler and pours herself a plastic cup of icy water. She peers in at the woman in the room next to George’s. Today she’s on the floor gnawing on the rose-red box-pleated curtain, moaning. Valmai almost turns around and walks back out again, but then she sees George’s specialist, Dr Bunt, walking towards her, his pen in his pocket, his clipboard in hand, his usual grim expression that instantly and curiously transforms into a close-lipped smile.
‘Good morning, Valmai.’
‘Lovely day,’ she says.
‘Yes, well I wouldn’t know about that,’ he replies. ‘Valmai, before you go in to see George, we should have a little chat.’
Her heart skips in her chest. She automatically thinks the worst. ‘Has he had some kind of fall?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that. Actually, look, it’s just something Sandra brought to my attention. Maybe. Yes. Maybe it would be better if she talked to you about it. You know, another female.’
Valmai swaps her black-quilted Chanel handbag, a gift from George when they were in Paris, from one shoulder to the other, and tugs on her earlobe. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, well, as I said, it’s not uncommon and it’s nothing really. He isn’t hurt in any way. In fact he’s perhaps happier than he’s been in days. In weeks.’
‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?’ she says. And then she thinks of what she’s had to deal with lately. Her new lot in life. The every-other-day visits. George’s sudden flashes of aggression. His senseless demands for a shredder and a photocopier. Calling her kiddo. She feels tears coming on.
‘It’s fine. I think. You know, Valmai, it’s fine for George. It will actually get easier from his point of view. Though harder for you.’ Dr Bunt lifts his head as though he’s scanning a crowd. ‘Well look, here comes Sandra now.’
Valmai turns to see him gaze at Sandra with a bright smile. She’s never seen him smile properly before. He has misshapen teeth that fold in on each other like poorly stacked plates. She clicks her porcelain veneers together.
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