Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  Each idle post-op girl, surrounded by hothouse flowers, watches me with the same bored, incurious gaze as I move about their rooms, spraying and wiping. I pump mist over the immaculate mirrors, catching sight of my own reflection there — my unreconstructed nose and studiously neutral face. Like these girls, I’m filling in my own allotment of time here, except that when I leave, it’ll be to buy that plane ticket to London, and be gone. My hand holding the yellow cloth rises and falls, cleaning pointlessly, searching for a splash of toothpaste or cup ring mark on the laminex’s spotless, glossy surface.

  ‘You know what I’ve found,’ Dot says as she passes me in the corridor, pointing to my blue spray bottle. ‘Don’t even use those commercial cleaners. Metho and newspaper, that’s the best thing for cleaning windows and mirrors.’

  ‘But, Dot,’ I say, ‘don’t you sell all those cleaning products?’

  ‘I do,’ she concedes. ‘But it’s the cosmetics I believe in.’

  That morning at tea-break, she slides a catalogue and an order form in front of me as if it’s already a done deal. ‘And have a look at the jewellery,’ she whispers, tapping the catalogue eagerly. ‘So reasonable.’

  Marie puts down her teacup and gives me a shrewd look. ‘Do you think you’re ready for more responsibility?’ she asks.

  I look up from the page of friendship rings. ‘Well, I guess so. Yes.’

  ‘Can you operate a floor polisher?’

  I’ve seen the ones she means — the massive hydraulic polishers in the storeroom.

  ‘What about Noeleen?’

  ‘Her back’s giving her trouble.’

  ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

  Dot’s looking at me hard, blinking. ‘If you could just fill in what you want before you go, I can get the order off in time for the Christmas discount,’ she says.

  I am caught in the high-beam of her earnest gratitude, the undiluted optimism of her pale blue eyes. Dot’s husband, Len, can’t take her home business seriously, she’s told me. He doesn’t think she’s got what it takes to sell enough jewellery and make-up to be eligible for a Christmas bonus gift.

  I’ve met Len. He often joins us at morning tea on his way home from the night shift at the printing works, and his coiffed ducktail matches his wife’s beehive in a way that makes me wonder where they met and in what year.

  ‘The corridor down to surgery,’ Marie says. She hands me a bundle of steel wool. ‘For all the wheel marks,’ she adds.

  The hand controls of the hydraulic polisher judder and jar out of my grasp as the spinning discs hit the floor and grab. It takes off like a bronco.

  ‘Use your hips, girl!’ says Noeleen, as I let it go in a panic and we lean against the wall, weak with laughter.

  She’s right. When I nudge the polisher along with my hips and keep my arms held tight at my sides, I can get the thing under control. I waltz the linoleum corridors in big sweeping arcs, walking backwards, making everything shine, singing top-forty songs to myself. There’s the good clean smell of metho where Dot’s polished the glass doors, and the deafening whine of the machine like white noise, erasing the tedium.

  Then I get down on my hands and knees and scrub with the steel wool at the black rubber streaks left by the wheels of the surgical trolleys. Sometimes, even as I’m scrubbing, a new trolley bangs through the doors, and I crawl out of the way to give it room to lay a new purposeful trail of black streaks for me.

  Six more weeks, I think to myself as I go, and I’ll be cashed up and out of here.

  I look up from the floor and smile briefly at the nice South African male nurse who takes the patients into surgery on the early shift. His uniform’s blue and mine’s an ugly mauve, clearly designating our status in the hospital pecking order, but he’s still asked me to the staff Christmas party. The other cleaners, when they hear this, behave as if it’s a doctor–nurse romance from Mills & Boon. They speculate on what table we’ll all sit on, what they’ll wear, whether there’ll be door prizes this year. When I say I’m not sure if I’ll go, they look at me flabbergasted.

  ‘But it’s free,’ Dot says, ‘and there’s a whole three-course meal!’

  ‘That nice young man asks you to go, I reckon you go,’ says Noeleen. ‘He’s from overseas somewhere, isn’t he? Play your cards right and you might get a trip OS!’

  I’m already going overseas, I want to say to them. I’m saving up and I might never come back. But they’re all smiling so brightly, so encouragingly, that I nod and tell them I’ll be there.

  And I say yes to Tony, the nurse, because of the way he holds the hands of the sore and sorry nose-job girls and tells them, ‘Look at you! You’re going to look gorgeous!’ He turns them to blink hopefully at their woebegone, bruised reflections in their mirrors, smiling warmly over their shoulders at the transformed vision they long to see.

  ‘Honestly,’ he says, ‘in a week or two you won’t know yourself,’ and I watch them smile back, tremulously optimistic again, under this small kindness.

  Mr Moreton asks me every morning about the cigarettes.

  ‘Please, darl,’ he says. ‘I’m gasping for one.’

  I look at him, sitting sleeplessly in bed in his stiff new pyjamas, racked with coughing that threatens to squeeze the life out of him. He tells me the specialist has been to see him and given him the bad news, as he calls it.

  ‘Weeks or possibly a month or two,’ he says. ‘You know what these fellas are like. I told him, they used to give us smokes in the army. They were regulation issue back then.’

  I don’t know what to say. ‘It seems pretty ironic, doesn’t it?’

  ‘These things happen,’ he says. He surveys his empty hands bleakly. ‘I marched, last Anzac Day,’ he adds. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’ He looks morosely out through the sealed window to the courtyard garden, where the five iceberg rosebushes struggle to survive their pruning. His fingers move restlessly against the bedsheets and each other. ‘Anyhow, me daughter’s coming down to see me. Bringing the grandkids.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great. When are they arriving?’

  ‘Not sure. Tuesday, maybe. After this round of tests, anyway.’

  ‘Mr Moreton, I’d smuggle you a cigarette — really, I would if I could. But I’m only here as a casual and they’d sack me in a minute.’

  ‘Saving up for something, are ya?’

  ‘To go overseas.’

  ‘Yeah, I didn’t think you were the kind of girl looking for a lifetime career cleaning tables. Not that there’s anything wrong with cleaning. It’s all work, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it is.’

  He coughs again, and I hear the rattling undercurrent in it, like an old engine that won’t turn over, a battery that’s nearly flat.

  ‘I’d kill for a smoke, though,’ he says when he can speak again. ‘Seriously. It’s not as if they can hurt me now.’

  I’m remembering my directive about fraternising, but I hate standing here beside his bed, like some official. I sit down and peel off my glove, pick up his hand. It’s like a bundle of twigs. That hand, I tell myself, held a rifle, tried to stop itself trembling with terror, worked all its life.

  ‘Are you right for everything else?’ I say.

  ‘Yep, I am. I’m right. Don’t mind me.’ The fingers squeeze mine.

  Suddenly Marie’s at the door. ‘Can I see you, please?’ she says, her tone like permafrost.

  I stand up quickly. ‘Sure,’ I say breezily, smiling at Mr Moreton as I leave.

  Marie’s furious. The matron’s seen me lingering in here and has sought her out and spoken to her.

  ‘You clearly haven’t got enough to do if you’ve got time to sit around annoying the patients. Here.’ She thrusts a canister of cleaning powder at me, a scrubbing brush. ‘You can go down and clean the old bathroom out from top to t
oe.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The bathroom in the Menzies wing.’

  I stare at her stupidly. ‘But it’s about to be demolished.’

  ‘Next week,’ she snaps. She has her chin up, outraged at my inexcusable lapse, my insolence. ‘Now get down there and do it and stay out of Matron’s way.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘She came and found me,’ she says in an enraged whisper.

  What, slacking off in the storeroom? I want to say, but instead meekly take the Ajax and brush from her and traipse down to the old bathroom. I have to step over builders’ scaffolding and drop sheets to get in there, and someone’s already disconnected the sinks and levered some broken tiles off the wall with a crowbar. It’s ridiculous — I’m cleaning equipment that will be in the skip next week. Still, I take a deep breath and turn on the old tap to rinse out the first bath, which is so deep I have to climb into it to really scrub it clean.

  I’ll look back on this and laugh, I think grimly as I scour away at the rust stains. I don’t owe these people anything. I can just finish in January and walk away with my three thousand dollars and my passport and get out of here.

  There’s a big high-pressure shower hose on the wall, and when I’m finished I swill it over the ceramic surfaces of the baths till they’re gleaming, ready for the wreckers to tear out and dump. Then this wing will be rebuilt into shining private rooms, fitted out with the moulded seamless shower recesses Dot mops every day, all laminex and mirrors, all reflective surfaces everywhere. After this, I think idly, I’ll go down to the function hall and polish the parquetry floor there until it’s so buffed and shining that Marie will be called to account if someone takes a tumble on it at the staff Christmas party. Perhaps someone could sue her.

  ‘I’m getting close now,’ Dot tells me, waving the order form gaily at morning tea, after Noeleen’s bought two bath-oil-and-moisturiser pamper packs from her catalogue.

  It’s a week till Christmas and I’ve been up a ladder, dustily hanging festive green and red bunting along the corridors and suspending plastic holly decorations in the doorways with sticky tape.

  ‘A dab of eucalyptus oil on cotton wool,’ Dot advised in passing, ‘will get that off later.’

  ‘Have you asked the scholar if she’s seen anything she likes?’ Noeleen says to her jokingly now, fishing in her handbag for her purse.

  That’s their nickname for me now, the scholar, ever since Dot saw me at the bus stop after work one day last week, reading a novel.

  ‘I thought you’d finished school,’ she’d said, and I’d answered, ‘Yeah, I have,’ and she’d stood looking at my book with a perplexed air.

  ‘Oh,’ she’d said abruptly, ‘right!’ almost flinching with shy goodwill.

  Now I watch her carefully counting change for Noeleen out of her purse, and until this moment I’ve felt annoyed at this nickname and the thought of them discussing me — impatient to be in a world, instead, where reading a novel in public isn’t a cause for comment.

  But I suddenly change my mind. It’s the purse that does it; it’s so worn and well used compared to the elegant grey wallet I got for my eighteenth. That, and the care with which the two of them handle those coins.

  I pull the catalogue towards me and tick boxes on the order form, adding up as I go. I reach the total which entitles Dot to the Christmas Gift Bonus. I keep ticking, until she’s eligible for the coveted Gold Seller twenty-four-carat stickpin. That’s two shifts’ worth of salary I pull from my grey wallet, as she holds out an envelope, speechless. Ten hours of spraying and wiping, crawling on hands and knees scrubbing at rubber streaks, upending ash bins and gagging, mopping chlorine into shower recesses, mindlessly buffing laminex. That’s a lot to pay for some tacky jewellery and April Violets body lotion, and we both know it as I hand over the money.

  I wait around to see the look on Len’s face when she tells him. His expression, I think to myself, will be worth it. Here’s another mistake I make: I think Len will be chastened, satisfyingly disconcerted, forced to eat his words. When he hears, though, he is radiant with pride. As he congratulates his wife it strikes me for the first time that, with their odd shifts, this fifteen-minute tea-break is one of the few times the two of them see each other all day.

  ‘All things going well those earrings will be here in time for you to wear them to the Christmas party,’ Dot assures me.

  ‘Terrific,’ I say.

  She and Len glance at each other again and grin, and I’ve got my money’s worth, after all.

  I work backwards today, from the elective-surgery ward down to the nurses’ station and recreation room, because I don’t want to run into the matron unless I have to.

  ‘There you are!’ says Mr Moreton when I get to his room.

  ‘Well, at least someone’s happy to see me.’

  ‘Get a telling-off, did ya? Just for talking to an old man?’

  I shrug, like it means nothing, like I’m a nonchalant girl on her way to Europe and real life.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I hate the way I’m keeping my voice low and furtive as I tidy up his newspaper and spray the table. ‘Heard any news about your daughter coming with her kids?’

  ‘Yeah. Tomorrow, they reckon.’ He sighs, takes a quavering breath.

  ‘What’s wrong? That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, hesitating like it’s my feelings that should be spared. He glances up at me, and I’m struck by the sharp blueness of his eyes. ‘It is and it isn’t. It’ll be because they’ve given her the word.’

  I wait, thick-headed and confused.

  ‘She’s interstate,’ he says softly. ‘She wouldn’t come unless I was on me last legs.’

  I look at him, and his bony, carved-thin shoulders rise and fall. ‘I’m not complainin’,’ he says, his eyes on the empty garden outside. ‘That’s just the way it goes.’

  It’s easy to start work half an hour early the next day. The night staff give me tired, vague smiles as I head to the staffroom to change into my uniform, and I can just see the rim of the sun rising on the horizon like a burnished disc as I slip into Mr Moreton’s room.

  ‘What’s this?’ he says, blinking at his watch in the gloom when he sees me. ‘It’s only just gone five.’

  ‘First cab off the rank today,’ I say, and nudge the door shut with my foot. ‘Man with important family visitors. Do you reckon you can get into your wheelchair?’

  He looks at me. ‘Of course I can.’

  I feel the sinewy old muscle in his arm as he lowers himself, and the remnant strength as he leans over, hauling his breath in, to put on his own slippers. Then he sits back up, and I stow his towel and toilet bag, and we’re ready.

  Nobody stops us as we wheel down to the deserted Menzies wing, nobody even notices us. Mr Moreton whistles when I steer him around the scaffolding and through the door.

  ‘Now that,’ he says, ‘is what I call a bath.’

  I just smile as I turn on the taps and let the water thunder into the tub. Back in his room by six, I’m thinking, and no one the wiser.

  ‘And it’s so clean,’ he says, shaking his head.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I cleaned it.’

  ‘You little champion.’

  There’s an awkward silence as we both look at the steam curling off the deep, waiting water.

  ‘I can wait outside if you’d rather, and leave you to it with the stepladder there,’ I say, ‘or I can give you a hand in.’

  ‘Up to you. Don’t want to embarrass you.’

  ‘Let me give you a hand then.’

  There’s nothing to it in the end, just a steadying grip to help lift him up and over the rim.

  In the water, he cautiously releases his hold on the sides and lets himself float outstretched, eyes closed
against the rising steam. I stand there, holding his pyjamas and dressing-gown, terrified he’ll have a coughing fit, or that someone will burst in.

  ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I haven’t had a bath in I don’t know how long. Used to having to sit on a plastic chair in the shower. Or stand there clutching those bloody grab rails. Haven’t been like this for years.’

  ‘Like what?’ I say. My heart is jumping into the back of my throat.

  ‘Weightless,’ he says finally. ‘Completely weightless.’

  I keep my face neutral and preoccupied as I hurry him back along the corridors to his room. He’s pink-faced and loose-limbed in his fresh pyjamas and comb-ploughed damp hair.

  ‘The doctor never puts his head in till 8 a.m. at least,’ he says. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘It’s 6.25,’ I answer. I see a nurse passing at the end of the corridor and look down. Shouldn’t have worn my mauve uniform. Should have worn my own shirt and pretended to be a relative. But nobody stops us. It’s still too early.

  In his room I hold the mirror while he runs his electric razor over his cheeks and chin, putting a hand to his chest to pull the slack skin on his neck taut, observing his own reflection critically as he finishes.

  ‘You know, I never wanted to live past seventy-five,’ he says, ‘till the day I turned seventy-four.’

  As I put away his shaver in his toilet bag I see an unopened bottle of aftershave with a sticker saying Happy Christmas, Grandad! still on the box. I raise my eyebrows enquiringly.

  ‘Why not,’ he says when he sees me holding it up. ‘Pass it over here!’

  It’s the recklessness in his voice that decides me.

  I help him change his pyjama top for the shirt and sweater he has hanging in his cupboard, and I hold out my hand to help him into his wheelchair again.

  He looks at me shrewdly. ‘Where are we going?’ Looking great in his shirt and jumper, like anyone’s grandfather, like someone who’ll be checking out of this hospital any day now.