So now the night is over and we go home. Because it has been an occasion, we take a cab for which we have to wait until ten in the evening because of the weather alert. Louise-who-wants also wanted to share our cab but, blessedly, the beautiful Marian walked out into the road and hailed her another one. Eli is to leave for Afghanistan early in the morning from a mate’s flat in town, so there were hugs and kisses at the door. Nin did not come tonight but there was a big bunch of flowers on my doorstep and a card with love and kisses.
The weather alert that was tipped to sweep us away, and was probably phoned in to the bureau by Checkie to blight the occasion, has done little harm, beyond slowing everything down. I have sold one painting and there is a reservation on another, thankfully a large one. Mick is jubilant.
I had a phone call from Louise-who-wants this morning, asking me to tell her sister, if she rang me, that she’d stayed the night but gone out early. ‘I stayed in a hotel in town overnight in the end,’ she said, as if she was explaining something to me.
‘Did you? Oh. Well, actually I’m just on my way out, Louise. I have to go and visit my mother in the old people’s home. There’s some kind of party on there. So if your sister rings, I won’t be here.’
‘Oh. Oh well, I gave her your number. I told her I was staying over with you so I wouldn’t have to stay over with her.’
‘I see.’
‘Well, it’s just a family thing. You understand, don’t you?’
‘Um…’
‘I was so frightened that storm was going to happen.’
‘Yes, it was all a bit of an anti-climax, wasn’t it?’
‘You looked fabulous!’
‘Did I? Well thank you.’
‘When’s it going to air?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Oh it’ll probably be tonight, do you think?’
‘Well, I guess it’ll be soon, since it’s topical.’
‘Did you realise they were out filming the guests while you were getting your make-up done?’
‘Were they?’
‘Yes, I spoke to the interviewer myself, dear! Me! I told her you were the best painter I knew.’
‘Well, thank you, but how many painters do you know, Louise?’
‘Oh God you’re funny. I actually know lots of painters, my dear. Even some men. I even came close to getting off with your brother-in-law once; did you realise that?’
‘With David?’
‘With David. We were at an opening at Siècle…can’t remember whose…whose was it? Anyway, your sister Cecilia introduced us…’
‘Um, Louise?’
‘Yes, my pet?’
‘I really have to go. My partner’s at the front door in the car waiting for me.’
‘Where did you find him?’
‘Under a bridge, Louise, with his bottle wrapped discreetly in a brown paper bag.’
‘God you’re a scream! Anyway, darling, see you at the next class.’
‘Yes,’ and I put the phone down and swore that I will never again hold a workshop in my living life.
Mick was still in the shower – but it was true that we were off to my mother’s old folks’ home for a party.
The silhouette of my mother’s head before she has seen me, a tattered old cat on a cushion of whatever she happens to be wearing, always evinces a primal love and joy in me – which is quickly shown the wings by a grand chorus of conflicting emotions. When Mick and I walked down the path of Broadlea this morning, the tattered old cat was sitting there just above the first-floor windowsill, facing away from the window into the breezeway. My heart leapt, as it always, always leaps – my mother.
She was having morning tea, a dip in the row of her companions’ backs because she is as short as a sparrow. If I come earlier than this and she’s only just taking her chair, she’ll invariably catch sight of me with that mother’s knack for sensing the presence of a child, and she’ll start pulling faces and waggling her hands about: but once in her seat, her head no longer swivels on its neck. Dadda used to say, long ago in the days when he still loved her, that he’d clap her in irons if she didn’t stop fidgeting.
Nobody’s neck swivelled this morning: I suspect it’s because their cervical vertebrae have fused, or then again, perhaps that’s the way you’re expected to sit in a Protestant hostel.
You can tell why the breezeway is called the breezeway because it is a long, double-storey corridor, flanked by windows, linking the bedroom wings to the circular hub of the home. On the ground floor of the hub, a dining room, kitchen and offices subtend the lift up to the next floor. On this floor, where my mother lives, there is an activities centre, a library and gym in the same kind of arrangement. I suppose a young architect thought the breezeway would be a nice idea, old folk sitting up comfortably, taking the breeze – and then thought, ‘I’ll put heaters under the windows for the winter time.’ Actually, I like the plan, but it’s quite evident that people either no longer know how to use a convivial space or they have never known, or then again, they just do not see this space as convivial at all. Or the age of conviviality has moved on, like one of the lands at the top of the Faraway Tree. Seems that Enid Blyton was onto something there, because that’s what history does, gets sick of standing in one place and moves on, bringing a changed set of circumstances with it: in the twenty-first century at Broadlea, the heaters never seem to be off and the windows are permanently shut, as if adaptability were foreign to the Protestant mind. And perhaps that’s a shortcoming of Protestants, really, they’ve always had to neaten things up in accordance with their own cast of mind. Old people fall over when they move, therefore keep them still; people who are still don’t generate much body heat, therefore keep as warm as you think they ought to be. Stella, though she’s ninetyseven, still suffers from hot flushes. She has been here over a year now – one day, when it was blazing hot, I made the mistake of opening a window at morning tea time to let in some air. It was one of the few times I drew signs of life from the assembled company. ‘Some people are selfish,’ said one prim old lady. ‘Some people don’t mind catching a chill,’ barked another.
‘Oh, so they’re alive,’ said Stella to me as an assistant nurse leaned over and slid the window shut again, saying to no one in particular, ‘They feel the cold.’
‘But I’m roasting,’ said my mother. And she was – she was bright red.
Everyone ignored her and resumed their separate silences. They rearranged the pleats in their tartan skirts and slacks and folded their hands in their laps. One of them had an ironed hankie tucked neatly into her belt. It’s a long time since my mother was able to wear a belt and in the days of hankies, she would shove them up her sleeve in a bundle – her legs, short as they are, were crossed over her stick and she jabbed the stick up and down in a temper so they kicked up in the air, ‘Broadlea!’ she scoffed. ‘Huh! Narrowlea, they mean.’ I was the only one who laughed and she went into paroxysms, too. Then the pair of us practically rolled off our chairs when old John, a retired mercer, wandered into the gathering, undid his fly and peed on the floor next to the table. No one else even cracked a smile and that made us laugh all the more.
This morning, although she’d smoothed down the bashed old cat on her shoulders with a wet comb so that it looked like a flattened chinchilla just waiting to go wiry again, she was still very much the odd old lady out in the row of mass-produced Elizabeth II hairdos. She would have liked to have her hair done, but she couldn’t because she couldn’t risk water getting in her ears. She has grommets – or it might be more accurate to say she had grommets, because she’s deaf all over again.
The ears are problematic and costly in more ways than money. Periodically she goes deaf. Is it wax; is it inner ear trouble; has she got her hearing aids in; are they suitable aids; have they been tuned; does she wear them enough? She says she doesn’t want to hear and then complains that she can’t. She says that we only go to see the audiometrist because he’s a nice-looking Indian and he sweet-talke
d me into believing she was deaf so I’d buy the most expensive aids for her. She isn’t deaf; it’s just that he plays tricks with her with that silly beeping machine of his.
Before we came down to the dining room for the party lunch we went to Stella’s room, where her hearing was going through the ‘I’m not deaf’ part of her cycle – she was very crabby and could hear the ‘spy’ in her clock radio again. The one who’s part of the surveillance. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘No, Mater, I don’t.’ She’s lived so long now I call her any variety of names that date back to Latin lessons in high school and beyond that to the cradle.
‘Well just you go and sit on the end of that bed and take a close look at the clock. It keeps on going “bip”. Go on,’ she said, ‘look at it.’
I tried, through look and gesture, remembering that Mick is a phlegmatic Yorkshireman, to send him a message to humour her. Meanwhile, I gestured that I would look, with problem-solving mien, at the clock while she went into a tizzy about her astronomical phone bill with its five pages of time calls. Mick, alas, misinterpreted my cues and when he tried to explain to her that the two instruments – clock and phone – were unrelated, she got short with him. Then, on reflection, she modified her story into a not-only-but-also tale of woe. Boys, apparently, come into her room on their way home from school and dial the time number every day. She’s spied upon and sick of being spied upon. It’s because Broadlea is in cahoots with a funeral home and when business is slack, they put them in the way of a few corpses. All one organisation. The food’s terrible, they don’t cook it on site as they say they do, they bring it in in big trucks, trucks that thunder past her windows in the middle of the night. In with the food, out with the corpses.
In spite of my efforts to tempt Mick to an efficacious channel, he persisted with his explanations. He said, yes, the building was under surveillance, but not in the bedrooms, only on the main doors to stop the Alzheimer residents getting out and to stop unwanted people getting in. No, she insisted, the rooms were under surveillance, too, and she wielded her stick towards a tiny Christmas decoration we haven’t yet been able to get down from her pelmet. Somehow or other it’s become tangled in the curtaining and we can’t seem to remove it without hacking into the fixtures with scissors: it’s like a miniature disco ball and sometimes it glints in the light. No use saying, ‘It’s a Christmas decoration, you silly old moo,’ because she’s seen that sign over the front door when we’ve brought her back from an outing: ‘24 hour surveillance’, it says.
‘What do you think they do with the information they gather on you, Mum?’ My tone was induced by helpless irritation with Mick for not being able to anticipate the wily paranoia under the chinchilla hairdo.
‘Hand it to the funeral people. What do you think?’ she snapped.
‘Have they shown you any designs for caskets yet?’ When I’m irritable, I can’t stop myself from testing the waters of logic’s stockpot.
She gave me a fierce, tooth-grinding look. She only has one tooth to grind now and that’s in danger of going, which will be interesting because the entire denture is slung around it.
‘Well, if they’re really serious about it, they’d be up here badgering you about caskets and asking you for a deposit from the moment you walked into the place. And, Mater, if you really were under surveillance in your bedroom you wouldn’t have had to wait an hour for help to come that night your furniture went berserk and decked you. The night the Motte family vase rose up and hit you over the head and they found you stretched out on the flooring with the bookcase on top of you.’
‘They lost the key to my clock. It’s a proper case clock, that.’
‘Well, never mind, we got you another key and the furniture’s been behaving itself quite well since Mick made you a bookcase that actually fits in here.’
‘Yes. I’m going to see that that’s handed down with my bridge chairs when I go.’
‘Oh good,’ I said, and then to Mick, ‘well, there’s a point in your favour, my darling.’
‘Darling, huh!’ Stella snorted.
Stella has always pretended to be British and well bred, so the name Mater suits her. Here she is, ancient, her job of providing the Mottes with some badly needed heirs done – except that it was I who provided a male heir in the long run and that heir goes by the name of Coretti and, because I didn’t marry his father, isn’t, I think, the type the family was after. As if to fill the terrible gaps in her family tree, she’s been seeking out relatives, real and imagined, for six decades. She has found hundreds of them to beguile with the old tale she spun us when we were children, that her mother was descended from a lord. It’s cock and bull: her worthless descendants researched the family tree just in case they were entitled to a fortune but found only fraudsters and people escaping the bailiffs after shonky businesses went tits up.
To handle her, you have to be able to visualise the track she’s on and steer for it, or another, more useful one, close by. You might spend your time sitting down during visits, but they’re still as strenuous psychologically as a half marathon. She’ll never approve of Mick and she’s determined always to be more important to me than he is. That’s another side to her character – one I dislike intensely, one that makes me wish against my kindlier instincts that she would bloody well die.
Sometimes our lives descend to a game of who resents whom with the greater justification. What I least like about her is her need to assert herself over the men in my life. She does it all the time and will even do herself damage when she fears that she will lose me to a man. Once, when I was on the verge of going away for a lost weekend, she stuck her hand in a blender and got it mildly chopped and very bloody to reclaim my loyalty. I was scandalised, but at the same time full of pity for an act of such desperation. She is so afraid, and in the midst of all her relatives, sees me as the only one she can rely on. I’ve tried to steer her towards psychiatry, but she won’t condescend to it and she’s probably right in this instance: psychiatry would only open the doors to more self-depletion than she’s capable of bearing.
Poor old thing.
Poor old me, being stuck with such a poor old thing.
As we made our way slowly out of her room, down the corridor and through the breezeway to the lift, she hung back. ‘What is it now?’ I asked. ‘Do you want to go to the toilet?’
‘No. It’s that Henderson woman, dreary minx. I don’t want to go in the lift with her.’
‘Oh, I thought Mrs Henderson was quite nice. Isn’t she the one who reads the paper to you all?’
‘She’s only here because her husband is.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Well, we pay. The rest of us pay for it. You can’t tell me she pays for it.’ And she looked up at me with her fierce expression, as if I should somehow know these things.
‘I’m sure she’s had to pay the same as everyone else.’
‘She still owns a house.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They told me.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Maybe it’s just gossip, Mum. And anyway, there are some exemptions made to selling your house, like if other relatives live in it.’
I wished I hadn’t said that because Mick started reciting the Social Security regulations, thinking he was giving me loyal support, and she ground her dentures even more and barrelled doggedly into the furniture with her walker. The lift doors closed on Mrs Henderson. ‘Anyway!’ shrieked Stella. ‘I’d rather stay in my room watching television than listen to the minx. She doesn’t know anything. She says “mischeevious”. If anyone said “mischeevious” in our home, they weren’t invited back. My mother insisted that our friends had correct pronunciation. People never got “num-onya” they got “new-monia”. That minx says “num-onya”.’
This was a dig at Mick, who’s inclined to say ‘n’monia’.
We have been invited, along with all the other rela
tives and carers, to celebrate Broadlea’s thirty-seventh birthday. It seems odd that we should be celebrating this birthday. There wasn’t a thirty-sixth one last year or a thirty-fifth the year before when Stella went into care.
She went in under duress. Although she had had one bout of prolonged dementia after Allegra’s suicide when we lived for a while at Reg Sorby’s retreat, she recovered from that once we moved back to Melbourne: it could have been the proximity of shops, for nothing brightens her life more than a spendathon. Whatever the cause of her return to health, she was well enough to live alone in her own home until she became acutely ill with the pneumonia that Mick didn’t pronounce properly. At the time, her doctor, who’d sent her home with a cough, had set off on a world tour. Mick and I called on her and found her still in bed – she who would thunder out of bed each dawn to defy another day to wipe her out. She was too ill to move. We called an ambulance. She went into intensive care at the local hospital, stayed there three weeks and then was assessed by an old-age team, who sent her to a rehab hospital for further assessment. She was there for a couple of months.
I did all the usual things you do when your aged parent goes into hospital – I’m quite used to it as Stella has fallen over and broken her leg up a back lane, dislocated her hip after she forgot her key and tried to get in the kitchen window, had two hip replacements, broken her collarbone when skittled from her buggy by neighbours backing out of their drive, had a ganglion removed from her hand, had both eyes dis-en-cataracted and has otherwise qualified for casualty by busting open various bits and pieces and being covered in blood. And if that sounds like a list, that’s only some of it. I’ve learned that if you have an aged parent and they damage themselves occasioning outpourings of blood, by far the best thing to do is not to clean them up, because if you bathe wounds before presentation, the casualty staff will tell you that you are wasting their time with someone who ought to be in a nursing home, whereas an old person covered in blood arouses even the toughest casualty sister’s sympathy. When the crisis is over, even if you’re feeling faint yourself, what you do is ring everyone. If you don’t ring there will be a round of scolding and disjointed nosiness which it is better to avert. So, on this last occasion, the occasion of the pneumonia, I rang Stella’s friends and relations – and, by gosh, there are a lot of them. I rang Cousin Audra (not Audrey) – the cousin mentioned at my do the other night – and Audra-not-Audrey went thundering down to the rehab hospital on the tram (which, I was told, clicked and clacked particularly loudly, I gather because I didn’t offer to drive her), found ‘Cousin Stella’ in a state, asking to be taken home to her cottage, dialled my number and told me she’d organise to bring Stella home at once.
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