‘The issue is,’ the director of the nursing home was speaking now, a pale woman with pearls the size of eyeballs hanging around her neck, ‘the issue when both parties have dementia is that it is difficult to determine whether consent has been given. They might have forgotten. The aged care bodies realise that this is an issue and are drafting some guidelines for dementia patients and sexual behaviour, but at the moment we have nothing but our own sense of right and wrong to guide us. Jill, do you want to speak to this? As the head nurse on the dementia floor, do you think that this is a consensual situation?’
Jill took off her wire-rimmed spectacles and made a show of folding them beside her notebook before speaking. Deb knew her supervisor was loving this moment: being the expert. She tented her fingers and started in on the stages of dementia that Mrs Ciszek and Mr Abrahams were in, their vital stats, family situations. Deb wanted to scream. Everything they were saying, none of it touched on the most crucial part. The two patients – brain-riddled as they both were – wanted to be together. They sought one another out. They made one another happy. Something in this bleak place gave them joy.
They wrapped up deciding that Jill would speak to Mr Ciszek, and they would set up individual counselling sessions for Mrs Ciszek and Mr Abrahams. ‘We can’t keep them apart in communal areas,’ the director said, ‘but we’re going to make sure they are not alone in their rooms together. There are a whole raft of OH&S issues as well as ethical and moral, not to mention possible criminal, implications here. As a temporary measure, we are going to move Mr Abrahams to a different floor. That way we can mitigate the situation.’
The meeting wrapped up and the participants all shuffled their papers, clicked their pens, drained their mugs. The police officer replaced her hat and Deb saw a small wave of relief pass over her features. That was done. Jill came over and put her hand on Deb’s shoulder. Deb could smell the coffee on her breath. ‘I’d appreciate if you could alert Mrs Ciszek to the situation this morning, tell her that Mr Abrahams is moving, just don’t tell her where.’
Deb shook her head. ‘Why do we have to keep them apart? I think she’s going to be really upset, Jill.’
Jill closed her eyes and Deb could see where she had applied her taupe eye shadow unevenly that morning, more on the left eyelid than the right. She opened her eyes.
‘Were you just listening?’ she said. ‘Earth to Deb! You know why we have to separate them.’
Deb nodded and washed out her mug in the sink, scrubbed her hands and left to begin her shift. She filled the meds cart and pushed it down the hall, her mouth dry. She left Mrs Ciszek’s room for last.
*
Her phone vibrated in her pocket while she was giving Miss White insulin. She went to the toilet to put the needle into the sharps bin and checked the screen. It was from Luke, a text.
Goin to the pub after work, it’s Dan’s bday.
She swore under her breath. He had forgotten that her auntie was coming round for dinner. She was visiting from Canberra. Deb peeled off her latex gloves. Maybe he didn’t forget. Around her family Luke got nervous and talked about himself too much. On her birthday he’d been drunk and started telling the story about how his mum used to lock him in the outside dunny when he pissed her off. One time she forgot about him and he was out there all night, he’d unravelled the toilet roll on the cold concrete floor and fallen asleep on it. He was ten. Luke laughed at this but no one else did. He grew quiet and put his arm around Deb, taking a swig of his beer.
‘Who’s up for another round?’
Luke’s mum moved to Thailand when he turned seventeen. They visited her on their first trip overseas together – a few months after they started dating. Deb was nineteen; Luke was twenty-three. His mum had skin like leather from the sun and long fingernails with designs that changed weekly. Palm trees, leopard print, rainbows. They were often wrapped around a can of Tiger beer, or the arm of one of the middle-aged, sunburnt and balding tourists she met at the bar. The men never stayed around long, she confided to Deb one night. ‘They all come here for a young Thai girl with a tight pussy, not an old lady like me. I don’t know why I stay. Can’t imagine going back.’
Deb actually felt sorry for her then, in spite of everything. But she also wanted to get out of there, away from the smells of burning rubbish and fish sauce and tiger balm; away from Luke’s mum. Luke was sweet about it: he changed the flights so they could leave early. He let her drag him away.
Deb pushed her cart to Room 17. She knocked and swung the door open. Mrs Ciszek sat on her vinyl-covered armchair. The telly was on high volume with one of those American talk shows – The View – where highly groomed women gather and peck at the news like a pack of crows.
‘Good morning Mrs Ciszek,’ Deb shouted. She walked over, grabbed the remote and turned the telly off. Mrs Ciszek looked at her and her face lit up. ‘Good morning!’ she said. ‘You look tired, dear.’
Deb pulled up a chair beside the vinyl armchair. ‘I’m okay, how about you? How are you feeling?’
‘Good, good,’ Mrs Ciszek said. She leaned over towards Deb as though to tell her a secret. ‘I might go ice skating today.’
Deb smiled. ‘I don’t think so, it’s 30 degrees outside. Did you used to ice skate, when you were a girl?’
‘I grew up in Mazury, Poland,’ Mrs Ciszek said, ‘where the lakes freeze every winter. On ice I go very, very fast.’
‘Is that where you met Rob?’ Deb asks. ‘In Poland? Or did you meet him here?’
Mrs Ciszek looks at her, tilting her head. ‘Who?’
‘Your husband. Mr Ciszek.’
She shrugged. Deb passed her the white paper cup of pills. The cup of water.
‘Say ahhhh.’
‘La la laaaa.’
Deb took the cups and stood to carry them to the bin. She sat back down and put her hand on Mrs Ciszek’s arm. There was the buzz of the air conditioner and disembodied voices from the TV from the next room.
‘Do you know who Mr Abrahams is?’
Mrs Ciszek looked confused.
Deb tried again: ‘Abe?’
She smiled. ‘Yes.’ Deb felt a shiver of something – joy? – pass through Mrs Ciszek’s small, shrivelled body. She wanted to rip a chunk out of her own thumbnail.
‘The head nurse, Jill, is moving Abe to another floor. You can’t keep going off into one another’s rooms, sleeping together. It’s dangerous, in your state. And I’m afraid it’s just not allowed.’
Mrs Ciszek looked at her. Her mouth hung open, and Deb could see the place where her false teeth ended and her real teeth began. She blinked, her eyes watering.
‘Why would you keep us apart?’
Deb thought about Luke. About how, after sex, he always turned his back to her. He didn’t like to be touched while he fell asleep.
‘Mrs Ciszek, you’re still married to Rob. You forget this; you have dementia, so it’s complicated. We’re trying to come up with a better solution. But for now, please don’t be upset. Just for a while, you can see Abe in the dining hall, in the common rooms, but you can’t go off alone into one another’s rooms.’
Mrs Ciszek worked her jaw. She pulled up her dressing gown, which had fallen off one of her shoulders, showing a thick, beige bra strap. Deb had no idea whether she understood anything. She felt that familiar lethargy again. She wasn’t suited for any of this. None of her training prepared her for this task.
‘Why not your husband? Why not Rob?’ Deb said, as much to herself as to Mrs Ciszek, not expecting the old woman to respond. She stood, her keys jangling as she did, and walked towards the cart. She pushed it to the door. She almost didn’t hear Mrs Ciszek’s response, which came just before the TV was switched back on, a creak before an onslaught of sound.
*
Deb sat at home in front of the TV, flicking through channels. A figure skater popped up on the screen – clad in tan tights and a sparkling leotard – spinning and leaping through the air. It was the Winter Olympics and this skate
r from Romania wore heavy makeup and a fierce look in her eyes as she leapt and scraped, glided and lowered, rose across the ice. Deb had never been on ice, but watching this small figure skater she could imagine how Mrs Ciszek must have felt. The wind rushing past her ears, the cold air on her cheeks.
She went into the kitchen. She had rung her auntie earlier, cancelling dinner, saying she was tired. Auntie said she understood but Deb heard the tightness in her voice. It wasn’t often that she came to visit. Deb ate three Weet-Bix for dinner and made a cup of peppermint tea. She took it to bed, flipping through a magazine of Luke’s, a copy of Tracks where all the guys wore wetsuits and all the girls were taking theirs off. She woke in the middle of the night again, the screen flickering in the next room.
Luke was home. He was on the couch, asleep. The remote had fallen to the floor and she switched the TV off, put the throw over him and watched him cough and turn in his sleep. As he coughed she could smell what he’d taken in: stale cigarettes, rum and Coke, a late-night kebab. His face was creased from the corduroy of the couch, marked with narrow red stripes.
Deb grabbed her keys and walked out into the still night. There were hardly any stars, and the air was jasmine-heavy and humid, as though it might rain. She started her car and backed out of the driveway, drove out of the cul-de-sac and down the street. She didn’t know where she was going, she just had to go, to steer something in a direction she chose.
She thought of Mrs Ciszek’s words, as she had opened the door to walk out of Room 17 that morning.
After she had asked – ‘Why not your husband? Why not Rob?’
‘I don’t know him, so how can I love him?’ Mrs Ciszek had asked, not turning in her chair to watch Deb go.
‘Maybe I forget. Maybe I never did.’
Kill Your Darlings
The Level Playing Field
Julie Koh
On the Level Playing Field, the eternal game is afoot.
No-one can remember the exact date the match began, but most people agree it was at four o’clock in the afternoon, Coordinated Universal Time, when the crowd started to roar.
The cheering began as a supermodel and the Chairman of the Board of the Level Playing Field strode out onto the grass. They carried an LV travel case between them.
‘Welcome to the levellest playing field in existence,’ the Chairman said, leaning into the microphone. ‘On the Level Playing Field, everyone plays by the same rules.’
The crowd continued to roar. Bulbs flashed from the sidelines.
The model and the Chairman opened the case, revealing a shining golden trophy to the world.
‘This trophy is a symbol of boundless opportunity and freedom,’ said the Chairman, his words echoing throughout the stadium. ‘On the Level Playing Field, each player pursues his own interest for the good of all. The Level Playing Field is a showcase of the pure artistry of each man.’
Close-ups of the competitors appeared on the big screens around the stadium, showing them jumping up and down in the tunnel, then running onto the Field. The cameras tracked past their faces as they stood in lines on the grass, singing their individual anthems simultaneously.
The players’ shirts were plastered with logos. Ads in every language – for fast food, light beers, electronics and credit cards – flicked up on rotation on the perimeter advertising displays.
The players were fired up. They shook their thighs and rolled their heads from side to side.
The referee spoke into his mic and signalled that it was time for kick-off.
*
This is what my friend Paul tells me about the Level Playing Field. He says the game has been going on for so long that people in the crowd have gotten married in the stands, reproduced, and taught their offspring how to roar too.
Just the thought of the Level Playing Field makes my eyes shine.
Paul and I are installation slash performance artists. We work as a duo called Duo. Our most recent artwork was a movement piece involving a troupe of dancers dressed up as pigs dressed up as swans. The only problem is that no-one likes our art, so we don’t have any money. Paul says we don’t have a market for our work because we’re ahead of our time. People just don’t get us yet, he says.
‘How do you know?’ I always ask him. ‘What if it’s because we’re behind our time?’
We’re really struggling. I threw out my toothbrush the other day then realised I couldn’t afford another. Paul reckons that we could maybe find a way to get to the Level Playing Field and compete. Maybe then we would earn enough money to live, and even send some cash back to our families.
Paul’s friend knows a guy who’s doing recruitment for the Level Playing Field. We arrange to meet him.
‘Essentially, you’ll be contractors,’ the guy says. ‘No-one in the crowd is interested in doing this sort of work.’
The guy tells us there’ll definitely be opportunities for us to progress up the chain and ultimately play on the Level Playing Field.
Paul gets out his fountain pen and signs his contract with a flourish. I borrow the pen and scratch in my name where the little red and yellow sticky tab arrow says to sign.
*
On the day we’re due to travel to the Level Playing Field, Paul turns up in hot pink overalls and a tweed flat cap.
‘We’re going all the way on the LPF,’ he says, ‘and we’re gonna do it in style.’
The recruiter ticks us off a list and herds us into a shipping container.
I ask if this is normal but he doesn’t reply and disappears.
We talk to the other guys already crouched in the container, smoking cigarettes. They’re all artists too. Everyone has had the same bright idea about playing on the Level Playing Field.
I complain to Paul about the heat and how it’s hard to breathe in here.
‘Disregard it!’ Paul says. ‘The artist must disregard every limitation!’
*
We arrive at the Field in the backs of trucks. A Manager in a suit walks out to meet us. He gets us to jump out in single file and directs us down a manhole.
We climb down into the sewers and tunnel networks below the stadium, where the Manager tells us we’re going to live.
I look around. There are thousands of people already living here. It’s hard to believe there’ll be enough room on the Field for all of us to compete.
The Manager tells us that the rent for the sewers will come straight out of our pay. He says we have to stay invisible and underground during the day when the match is being played.
‘Your presence makes the crowd uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘Apparently, you’ve all got haunted stares.’
‘How rude!’ says Paul. ‘I’m not haunted, and I certainly don’t stare.’
The Manager puts us to work in the tunnels.
We sit underground in long rows, sewing the uniforms of the players and weaving their knee-high socks. All the uniforms we make start off identical but then we pass them down the line so they can be embroidered with different logos before being folded and inserted into clear plastic packets and sent up to the Field.
In the sewer creche, children stitch fluoro yellow sneakers by hand, and thread fluoro yellow laces onto them. The sneakers are sent up with the uniforms, so they can be worn by the players and ball boys.
While we are sewing, we hear the crowd go wild. A player has run to the sideline and has kneeled to tie up the fluoro yellow shoelace of the youngest ball boy. The crowd approves.
The Level Playing Field takes care of all.
*
The Manager tells us that to keep the stadium in tiptop condition, we need to maintain and upgrade it on a continuous basis.
We’re only allowed to do this work at night. We listen until the crowd is gone, and emerge from the manhole, blinking under the stadium lights.
To keep the Field level, we trim the blades of the grass with scissors. We form a line on our hands and knees at one end of the Field, and work our way over to the other side.
We test the perimeter ads and the big screens to check they’re in good working order. We sweep and hose the stands and keep working on the stadium roof, which is still incomplete.
*
We work every waking hour, seven days a week, but we barely earn any money. The Manager says we’re in the process of paying our debt to the Board of the Level Playing Field for bringing us to the Field in the first place. He says this is written in our individually negotiated contracts. None of us has a copy.
In our section of the sewer, an oil painter keels over from overwork and malnutrition. We try to revive him, to no avail. His debt hasn’t been paid, so his sixteen-year-old son is brought in to replace him.
The painter’s death was inevitable – there’s barely any food underground to sustain us.
Paul pokes me a lot and laughs about how hungry we are.
‘I can see your ribs,’ he says. ‘Get some pork belly in you, pronto!’
He’s the sort of guy who cracks jokes when he’s sad.
*
We figure out ways to get food. At night, we gorge ourselves on half-eaten hot dogs and abandoned cups of chips from the stands. During the day, at half-time, we wait for the players to sit down and eat lunch at a long table on the sidelines. Paul and I stretch out our fingers to see what crumbs we can catch through the drain underneath the table.
It’s still not enough, and I despair that we’re never going to progress to positions at ground level.
‘Disregard it all!’ says Paul. ‘The artist overcomes! The artist must die rather than surrender!’
‘I’m not ready to disregard,’ I say.
The Best Australian Stories 2015 Page 10
