Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘You just have to do this till I get the hang of it,’ he mutters as she helps him manoeuvre into the shower.

  She ignores him, just goes on explaining. ‘Now you lower yourself onto the seat using the handrails and back out your walker because you’re not supposed to get it wet.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be right now.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just stay and turn on the taps. See, they’re low — they put them there specially.’

  ‘Be easier if I could stand up. Reach the bloody soap myself then.’

  ‘I’ll look out for one of those soap-on-a-rope things.’

  God, the flesh is hanging off him. His knuckles are white and waxy as they cling to the handles; he’s as scared and frail as an old, old man. Scared to turn his head or take one hand off the rail. One misstep away from a nursing home. His hair needs a cut and she decides she’ll do it later at the kitchen table.

  ‘That’s better,’ he says as she adjusts the hot tap.

  And she can hear that he’s about to say thank you, then stops and swallows. Even without the thanks, though, she thinks it’s probably the longest conversation they’ve had for months.

  ‘Now you need to put the brake locks on this every time you pull up, understand? Don’t forget — up with the handrails, step onto the rubber mat, both hands on the walker handles then release the brake.’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he mutters, but his eyes are following her every move, the pupils dilated.

  She gets him dressed and into the kitchen, cuts his hair and shaves him. One of the casseroles, defrosted, with rice — he can manage that. Then she tears a page off the pad and lays it down in front of him, places the cordless phone handset next to him.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Phone numbers. You’ve got some calls to make.’ She feels a surge of courage as she says it, there on the other side of the table. She taps the list. ‘People to ring and thank, now you’re home.’

  ‘Don’t bloody start that nonsense. I didn’t ask for any of those do-gooders to come around.’

  ‘Frank,’ she says. ‘I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you. If you ever want another favour done, and believe me you’re going to be calling in a few, ring and let people know how much you appreciate what they’ve done for you.’

  ‘Or what?’ He looks strange, fighting to maintain an attitude of derisive scorn as he sits there in pyjamas, his hair neatly combed and the muscles wasted on him after all these months on his back.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ she says, exasperated. ‘We go under. We sell up.’

  And when he looks at her with familiar, narrow contempt, she picks up the hand mirror, lying there next to the scissors on the table, and a steady exhilaration pumps through her as she deliberately angles it to face him.

  ‘Take a good look,’ she says, ‘and get on that phone.’

  In bed, already planning in her mind the tasks of the next day, she listens to the fan ticking over their heads and feels the forgotten, heavy presence of him lying beside her. She thinks about the physiotherapist at the hospital, lifting Frank’s legs and folding them against his body, turning him on his side and gently bending his arms from shoulder to hip. Flexion, she’d called it. Exercises to flex the muscles and keep the memory of limber movement alive in the body, to stop those ligaments and tendons tightening and atrophying away.

  ‘Just like this, Mr Slovak,’ she’d said, that calm and cheerful young woman. ‘You can do these yourself, just keep at it,’ and she’d taken Frank’s hand and made his arm describe a slow circle, then flexed the elbow to make it touch his chest. Down and back again, over and over; a gesture like a woodenly acted entreaty. ‘Do you want me to leave you this page of instructions on these movements, to jog your memory?’

  Frank, submitting hatchet-faced to the procedure, had given his head one slow, stiff shake. ‘If I need a set of instructions to remember that,’ he said tightly, ‘you may as well carry me out in a box right now.’

  The girl had just laughed indulgently at him, she remembers now. She must send those staff members a card and a present, thank them all for their forbearance.

  She hears Frank exhale, then silence before a ragged, hiccuping intake of breath. She glances over and makes out the shape of him in the moony dimness, flat on his back and still as a tree, arms at his sides like a soldier at attention, and crying soundlessly, eyes screwed shut and face contorted into a mask. His mouth is a black hole of terror. Glinting tears leak into the furrows of discontent etched around his eyes and nose, pour down to wet his freshly barbered hair. She’s never seen this, and it’s mortifying. They’d warned her about acute pain; she wonders about getting up and giving him some tablets, but she’s so shocked all she can do is turn her head back to look up at the ceiling and spare him the shame of her scrutiny. They lie rigidly side by side.

  ‘When you stood up to run home and call the ambulance,’ he says, ‘I thought, well, now I’ve got ten minutes. Now would be the good time to die, while you weren’t there. That’s what I could give you.’

  Lying there, she has a sense of how it is, suddenly: willing your limbs to move but being unable to lift them. The terrible treasonous distance between them that must be traversed, the numbed heaviness of her arm.

  But she finally reaches over and takes his hand. It doesn’t even feel like his anymore; the working calluses vanished into soft smoothness like a beach after a stormy receding tide. She wouldn’t recognise this hand now, especially not the way the fingers grip hers. Squeeze my hand, the physio had said. That’s good, Mr Slovak.

  She lies there feeling the pulse in her husband’s pitifully thin wrist under her little finger. She understands better than anyone, she thinks, the painful stretch of sinew, the crack of dislocation. Remembers herself running back over the paddocks, flying barefoot over stones and earth, looking down distractedly in the ambulance later to notice the dried blood on her feet. How fast she’d run, and how much faster she’d run back. Now, in the dark bed, she raises her arm with Frank’s and gently flexes both their elbows together. She places his hand wordlessly, determinedly, over his heart, and holds it there.

  Ashes

  By the time they stop at a cafe for the obligatory morning tea, Chris is already feeling his staunch goodwill leaking away. Enervating, to be in her presence like this. Despite all his resolve to stay pleasant and attentive, today of all days, something has nevertheless turned a tap on inside him and his energy is draining away. Later he’ll feel the same guilt as ever, but right now, sitting with a coffee listening to his mother complaining about the fake whipped cream on her scones, he feels all that evaporating. Ten-thirty in the morning, and he’s already itching with it.

  He just has to keep his mood on the good side of surliness. And surely even his mother would forgive him a touch of melancholia today, considering the occasion. He sees her fastidiously scrape the cream off the scones, making sure the waitress is watching, and pile it distastefully on the side of her plate. She’s dressed up today, hair done, lipstick matching the red blazer. Black shoes with heels. He’d told her to dress in something easy to walk in, because he remembered there was some walking involved, but it was like talking to a brick wall. She’d be able to stop now on the walk, grimace and suffer. Talk about her blisters for weeks afterwards with her book club women.

  He thinks of them in formidable capitals: the Book Club Women. Women perennially sitting around modular lounge suites, criticising someone’s book. His mother keeps photos of the grandchildren of the Book Club Women on her own fridge, like a silently accusing rebuke every time he walks past.

  ‘Dear little Justin started his swimming lessons last week,’ she’ll say, smiling out at something through the screen door.

  ‘Sorry? I’m not sure I know who Justin is.’

  She’ll tut impatiently. ‘Oh, of course you do, Christopher.
Sandra’s grandson.’

  He’ll be struggling to place Sandra while she continues on another tangent.

  ‘Well, Caroline’s really in a tizz over this wedding. She wants Pam to go up there to help her, all the way to Brisbane. She’ll have to change her tune pretty quick smart once she marries that James fellow. Can’t be calling on her mother to be at her beck and call all the time.’ She’ll hesitate, as if reluctant to betray something confided in her, although Chris has heard this postscript every time Caroline is mentioned. ‘You know they had to get counselling when she was a teenager once. Ran right off the rails.’

  Chris will nod, follow her gaze out through the glass door to the leaf-littered garden. She’s talking about hiring a gardener now, to deal with it. His father’s rakes and brooms stand stiffly to attention beside the locked shed.

  Since his father died, Chris keeps coming across small reminders everywhere, set like mousetraps ready to snap, like little buried landmines. Today, for instance, they’re in his father’s car, which his mother says she can’t bear to sell. It smells so characteristically, still, of shoe polish and peppermints, and in the back seat lies the woollen tartan scarf his father had worn for years. Each detail had assailed Chris as he’d opened the door, reaching over to stow the box in its calico bag on the back seat.

  ‘Here, here,’ his mother had remonstrated. ‘At my feet.’

  Where else? he’d thought sourly, finding the right key for the ignition, as the lifetime habit of keeping his responses to himself closed his mouth in a firm and well-worn line. A line that suggested nothing, broached nothing, gave nothing away.

  ‘Five dollars for those scones,’ his mother says as they walk out of the cafe. ‘Honestly.’ The Book Club Women, Chris thinks, will hear about this. Back at the car, as he waits for her to catch up, he fumbles for the self-locking device on the key ring, finding the one for the boot so he can take the bag out again. His mother had insisted they park the car in view of the cafe so she could watch it for potential theft. ‘It’s bad enough leaving him there in the boot like that,’ she’d said, digging in her bag for a tissue, ‘without risking someone stealing him.’

  ‘Take the bag in with us, then,’ he’d suggested.

  She’d glared, aghast. ‘I couldn’t possibly.’

  He’s noticed she can hardly bring herself to touch the box. It’s like some huge supernatural power emanates from it.

  When they’d gone to get it from the crematorium, she’d stood silent, locking her hands tightly together, leaving it to him to pick it up, sign for it, and ask for a carry bag. It wasn’t until they were outside that she’d burst out with a tirade about how disrespectful it was not to provide families with an urn, or something appropriate. A box, she’d hissed all the way home, fuelled by the outrage of it, nothing but a box. He expected tears, but there were none. Instead, once home, she’d led the way to her antique cabinet, unlocked it, and stood back while he pushed the box inside, in there among the gold-leaf dinner service he remembered so well from his parents’ dinner parties when he was a child. As he’d straightened up after putting his father’s ashes inside the cabinet, he longed so much to be with Scott that it almost hurt.

  It hit him still sometimes when he least expected it, even after three years: moments when he missed him with an intensity almost like an electric shock; something searing that flashed and left a lingering ache. Scott would have known exactly what to do — pour them both a whisky, probably, and then sit him on the verandah talking till they’d killed the whole bottle. Chris wouldn’t have been standing here now, either, feeling useless and tongue-tied, embarrassed by the floundering pause between his mother and himself, like two strangers observing someone else’s ritual. Scott would have known how to give the moment some ceremony.

  He stands beside the car dangling the bag, waiting for her as she pauses by a craft shop and browses through things outside in a rustic barrow. Chris can see what’s piled there — miniature teddies, lavender sachets, fabrics. She has a wardrobe full of unfinished craft projects at home, although, thank Christ, he suspects she’s finally given up and stopped knitting baby clothes. Totally absorbed, she picks up a bag of bath salts and examines it with all the time in the world.

  ‘Your mother could shop in a service station,’ his father used to say, poker-faced. He’d wait outside countless shops for her in an attitude just like Chris’s now, leaning resignedly against the car. She’ll want something to commemorate the trip, Chris knows, a souvenir she can store on a shelf and refer to bravely, and sure enough she gets back in the car with a paper bag.

  ‘Lovely silver frame,’ she murmurs. ‘Half price. There were a few of them too. I wonder if I should have got one for Pam.’ She sighs, comforted by her purchase, the slight of the fake cream forgotten.

  Chris is looking for the turn-off. He thinks he’ll know it when he sees it, although he hasn’t been up here for twenty-five years. Then another twenty kilometres or so to get to the lake. As far as he can remember there’s a little jetty there, past the campsites — a good spot to stand and do it, rather than the muddy shore. He’s got the digital camera all charged up.

  His father’s car has some kind of cruise-control check that beeps at him every time he inadvertently goes above the set limit, and he keeps jumping when he hears it, feeling a ludicrous start of guilt. The late-morning heat in the car is making the familiar smell of his father even stronger. When was the last time he’d stood close enough to his father to inhale the real thing? Not at the hospital; nothing there but the smell of antiseptic and drugs. He punches a CD into the player and another little memory-bomb goes off in the back of his head — it’s the Three Tenors, the CD he bought for his parents two Christmases ago. That would have been the last time: a fraternal, quick arm-squeeze and back-slap, both glad to have it over.

  There’s a headache starting behind his eyes. He can feel what’s coming: his mother wants to talk, and he must pay attention to divert her in time from dangerous territory.

  ‘People said the service was so lovely and dignified,’ she begins. ‘Graham and Laura were asking me whether I was going to have a memorial plaque for your father at the crematorium gardens. Well, I went out with Neil and Shirley to have a look, because that’s what Elaine did when John died, but Laura told me it cost her thousands. And they don’t even inter the ashes, just scatter them. It’s all just garden beds, you know; it’s not as if there’s even an actual plot.’

  Chris waits for the next bit, about the lake. He can’t help it, this roiling, sneering intolerance. She’s grieving, he knows; vulnerable, needing contact, prone to these banal litanies of repetition, but he just can’t help it. He clenches his jaw.

  ‘I told them we’d just be going to the lake, just the family. It’s better to do something that’s meaningful to Chris and me, that Alan would have wanted, I said.’

  She pauses. Here it comes.

  ‘Those trips to the lake with you were very special to your father, Chris.’

  He grunts his assent. He can’t bring himself to answer, in case he gets some detail wrong.

  ‘I told Shirley, that’s where he’d rather be laid to rest, in the place where he shared such precious times with his son. He had lots of happy memories of all those fishing trips.’

  All those fishing trips. They’d been twice. Once at the Easter break, and once for the first week of the September school holidays. After that his father had given up. Both trips are still etched vividly in Chris’s mind, like so many of the powerless indignities of childhood. His father’s attempts at blokey conversation puttering out like the dinghy’s outboard, sighing as it gave up the ghost in a bank of weeds, Chris feeling sick with the stink of petrol, his father’s barely concealed disgust when he unwisely asked if he could take his book out on the boat with them the next day. At night they’d sit in front of their tent, waiting for it to get dark, both of them with
out a thing to say beyond their usual wary exchanges. His father’s forced cheeriness slowly evaporating into his usual taciturnity as he got tired of trying. Chris coughing in the acrid smoke. Trying not to move too much in the stuffy sleeping bag at night. Then the packing of the car on the last day, the esky empty and leaking melted ice, and his obscure sense that he’d failed some test.

  ‘I don’t know what’s bloody wrong with you,’ his father had muttered as they drove back down this very road after the second trip. Chris had wanted to say something, some retort that would salvage some pride, but his mouth had felt dry, scorched somehow. He was eleven … no, twelve, and starting to get a glimmer that there was something deeply dissatisfying about him, something that baffled his father and pinned a strained, mortified smile on his mother’s face when they had visitors. Neither of them, not his father nor his mother, had any idea how to name what the thing was. He’d just look up sometimes and catch it in their faces; something like fear. It wasn’t till uni that what was wrong with him had hit him square in the face at last, with a flash of realisation that was so clichéd it was almost comical. He’d expected commiseration when he’d related the father–son trips to Scott one time, but Scott had collapsed with mirth instead.

  ‘Jesus, that’s priceless,’ he’d said. ‘What a hoot.’

  ‘It wasn’t a hoot, it was bloody excruciating. Like a punishment.’

  ‘Lighten up. You’re not the first gay man whose parents didn’t understand him.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, it’s all part of the journey,’ Chris had said.

  Scott had waved his bitterness off, like it wasn’t worth rising to the bait for. ‘Well, yeah,’ he’d said mildly. ‘It is. No point blaming them. Move on. That’s what I say.’