Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  Audra-not-Audrey had to be bodily prevented from putting Stella in a cab and returning her to the Rats’ Nest – as Nin and I began to call Stella’s house, when we discovered rat poo in a couple of neat piles at a companionable distance from the television. Fortunately, I did not have to do the bodily prevention; that was down to the nurses, who then rang me and suggested a family conference which Audra-not-Audrey might like to attend.

  Dutifully, we had a family conference, which Audra left in a flap to seek legal advice to prevent me from removing my mother from the rehab into a home for the elderly. The point she missed was that the council helpers who had been helping Stella for years were beginning to experience what I experienced, too much frailty – in her mid-nineties – to be left on her own. Audra wouldn’t hear of it, she was going to repeat an exercise she undertook once before when the home threatened. She was going to move in with Stella to protect her from the evil designs of her close relatives, notwithstanding the catastrophe of her previous trial of this remedy, when I received a frantic phone call from Stella within twenty-four hours of the moving-in to come and rescue her as Audra was planning to pare her toenails. A day that had begun with furious scissors brandishment in the name of paying phone bills rather than pedicurists and ended in an inexpensive and kindly pedicure at a local nailery, brandy and banishment of Audra by phoning first and saying we weren’t coming home until she’d gone – but it was a banishment that didn’t work, as Cousin Audra, whose cousinhood is at a third or fourth remove, has no one else in her life who can stand her ministrations except Stella and Stella kept inviting Audra back for more.

  Stella is incapable of saying no.

  Cousin Audra wasn’t the only one against the hostelisation. I dropped in on the GP when she came back from her travels to let her know that Stella was soon to be placed in Broadlea hostel nearby and she said, ‘What!’ grabbed her phone and started dialling. ‘We’ll see about that!’ she cried and showed me the door. The GP, a seventies feminist, thought Stella was a marvellous old woman, a bit untidy, brave as Buffalo Bill and sane as a doormat. Stella thought the GP gave the worst flu shots on the planet, handed out cholesterol remedies you wouldn’t feed a dog and had misread the fabulous ‘lymphoma’ she had in her hand as a ganglion. I’d had to help her change GPs a number of times, but there were certain advantages in sticking with this one – this one made home visits, and, most important as far as Stella was concerned, this one stuck up for her against her relatives.

  When she was unable to reverse the hostelisation, the GP was down at Broadlea the moment Stella moved in, registering herself as the visiting doctor – so our communication difficulties not only continue but have proliferated to include Broadlea’s manager. The manager looks at me with a jaundiced eye. I have to find out for myself what’s happening about Stella’s hearing. Is it that the GP won’t try to persuade Stella that she’d be better placed if she could hear? I know that Stella says, ‘I’d rather be deaf than listen to the twaddle people go on with here,’ but hardly anyone speaks around here except the staff and the visitors; the old folk keep almost completely to themselves. It’s a shame, because Stella generally perks up when she can hear and participate and that makes others join in, too. The GP doesn’t take my phone queries, never phones back and won’t say whether or not she’s managed to clear any wax from Stella’s ears. I have to ask the manager if I can see the notes. The notes say things like ‘chirpy’. But are the grommets we had put in last year still in place? Not a word about grommets. Drops? She can’t have drops if she has grommets. It took an eternity to get a referral to the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital to get the grommets in and it will be months more before they can see us just to check what ought to be checkable by a GP with an ear light. Meanwhile I’ll go mad from having to say things over and over and over again at top throat. The audiometrist thinks her inner ears are quite okay but can’t speak for the grommets because he’s not an ear, nose and throat specialist

  People should be taken out and shot. En masse. Shot.

  Well, here we are at Broadlea’s thirty-seventh birthday party, four or five to a little round table in the dining room where, according to Stella, they have put her in charge of Evelyn. Evelyn used to be a pharmacist and now can’t remember anything: she is chicken-shouldered, withered and thin and today, her pleasant, rubicund son is sitting up beside her adjusting her cardigan as we sit down. ‘God your mother’s funny,’ he says to me. ‘She calls this place “Narrowlea”.’

  ‘I know. That’s not all she calls it.’

  ‘She’s really on the ball.’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  Relatives and carers are yelling to make themselves heard all over the dining room. ‘Eh?’ say the old people to right and left. ‘Eh?’ ‘Whawozza?’ Amanda, who is here for reasons that have more to do with not being able to find hostel care for people with intellectual disabilities than with her age, says, ‘Eh?’ and ‘Whazzat?’ for herself and the four others at her table whose relatives haven’t been able to come to the gathering. They’re all deaf. When I grow up I’m going to vote for regular ear inspection, a regime for wax removal and auditory testing among the aged and jail for anyone who overcharges on hearing aids.

  There seemed some sort of urgency in this birthday invitation and suggestions of a special announcement. The usually quite spacious dining room is full up to the double doorways that flank the lift vestibule. There’s not enough room for Stella to display her characteristic bossiness. Poor old Evelyn usually gets herded up to the table at meal times and others are shunted aside without ceremony, along with their wheelie frames, but there isn’t enough room today. Stella isn’t the only strong personality here – Rhoda, who shares the table under normal circumstances, is not behindhand in calling attention to Stella’s push-me-pull-you antics. ‘You’re a bully!’ she’ll hiss, causing Stella to stand on her dignity and deliver a list of responsibilities she has around the home. Even now, a small distance away, Rhoda is pointing Stella out to her carer and whispering maledictions. An old Lithuanian chap at another table thinks this dining room battle is hilarious: there he goes, left, right and centre, arms shooting, lurching with laughter on his seat, like a hot-air man outside a sale at a tyre shop.

  The administrators are here as well as the carers and all of us are wearing jolly crepe-paper party hats. The festive streamers are up and the physios are suspiciously merry. A lady none of us knows in a navy-blue suit is pulling the microphone towards her – people never smiled as heartily as this in the days before tooth veneer.

  ‘Happy birthday everybody!’

  Everyone shuts up. Knitting Neridda in her customary chair beside the entrance, where she counts the guests as they come in to lunch, goes on making covers for coathangers, her mouth poised to go one way or the other – it might fly open with glee, then again, it might clamp shut, making the whisker bristles stand out on her double chin. Either way, she’ll keep right on knitting.

  ‘Today is the thirty-seventh birthday party of our wonderful home, Broadlea. It’s hard to believe that it’s thirty-seven years ago today that the foundation stone was laid for this wonderful facility that has taken care of so many people.’

  No shouts of joy.

  ‘We have some great news for you that I’m sure you’ll all be delighted to hear.’ The navy-blue lady seems to be having trouble with the static in her skirt. More tooth veneer, widely displayed. ‘Broadlea is about to add to its community.’

  That’s interesting. An amalgamation, perhaps?

  ‘We’re not only going to be a hostel, but we have received a special grant from the government to upgrade and add a hospital facility, as I’m sure you’re all delighted to hear.’

  Well, that is good news. They’ll continue on seeing their residents through to the end, only now they’ll have proper nursing hospital facilities to do it. Neridda’s mouth fails to come open with glee; perhaps she hasn’t understood. She pulls her lips into a gusset around her teeth under which
her tongue does a circuit.

  ‘Of course, it’s going to mean some changes,’ says the navyblue lady. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, the alterations can’t be carried out with the current residents still living here.’

  Oh. Actually I don’t appreciate that…

  ‘But don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time to relocate everybody and settle them comfortably elsewhere.’

  Neridda’s mouth gapes. ‘Eh?’ she says.

  There is a lot of leaning forward, eyes agoggle and, ‘Eh?’ and ‘Wosshee say?’ and ‘Oi can’t hear.’

  ‘We’re not gunna ’ave to shift, are we?’ says Marj, the hankie lady, solid in her views. ‘We doen wanna ’ave to shift. Oi’m not shiftin.’ On weekends Marj puts on a little pair of gumboots and weeds the courtyard garden. You hear the scrape…scrape…scrape of her weed pail along the concrete when you go to sit under the trees. She’s got a nifty little weeder, brought down from the country for her by her daughter, Sharon, who’s married to a farmer. Sharon and I have chatted a few times. I haven’t told Stella, but I arranged with Sharon to take Marj’s emergency calls from Broadlea – so far there haven’t been any. Marj didn’t learn her stoicism at Sunday School – she learned it in a grocer’s at Yallourn, but that didn’t stop ‘them’ from moving her family on when it came to knocking the town down to flood it for a power station. ‘Oi’ve ’ad enough of movin’,’ she says.

  ‘Just think,’ says the navy lady, ‘our own hospital. That’ll mean residents will be able to stay on even when they become too infirm to live in the hostel!’

  ‘Eh?’ ‘What?’ Woshesay?’

  And I find my mouth saying, loudly, atop my standing, if rather short, body, ‘What you’re saying is we have to relocate our relatives pronto.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a couple of homes with places, Isobel,’ pipes up the manager from her seat behind the navy lady. The manager regards me as a pest to be put up with. ‘There are places available.’

  ‘And everyone will have to be reassessed by Social Security to see if they still qualify for hostel care…’

  ‘Well, there are some people here, Isobel who are…’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say – too frail. And what it means is that into the too frail basket, the “too old” will also fall.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t. But I’m saying it.’

  ‘Sit down, lovey.’ Mick paws my arm, I’m embarrassing him. So I do sink into my chair.

  ‘Good on you,’ says Evelyn’s son. ‘They’ll just hive a lot of these guys off into nursing homes because they haven’t got hostel places.’

  ‘Oi’m not goin’,’ says Marj again. Stella is a good fifteen years older than Marj and looks down on her for her Ya-lawn origins. I like Marj because she plays life with a straight bat and has been known to laugh once or twice. I had fond thoughts of taking her out sometimes with Stella, but they don’t socialise and Marj says she likes to keep herself to herself. But suddenly Stella says, ‘Nor am Oi.’

  I wish it was as comradely a statement as it sounds, but Stella is fond of distributing graces and favours among uncomplicated souls. She adheres to the mores of her mother, Euphrosyne Motte, who was born in the eighteen-sixties and classified people by shibboleth, as in ‘new-monia’.

  I feel for all the people in this room. They’re just people who had the luck, or lack of it, to stumble upon this place. Some, like Amanda, have been here for years. There’s Mrs Henderson, the minx, who opted in to keep her husband company; June, whose feet are like a mermaid’s tail, flapping after her walker – she wanted to live out the last few months of her cancer here; and there’s the pair of old ladies who weren’t related, but wanted to be together in the one room and no other home would accommodate them – they’ve only been here a few weeks. It’s hell looking for a hostel.

  I feel like mounting a campaign. There’s a hardening in my chest at the thought.

  I feel like bringing down a government. I feel like shit.

  I feel like the woman on the front of the French currency. I feel weak.

  The days when people drank and smoked themselves to death have moved on – now it’s ‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?’ even if you’re one hundred and ten and as good as dead already.

  Nobody does protests anymore. They tell us it’s because we’re so much more prosperous now that there’s nothing to protest about. But there is; there is. All that’s happened is the rhetoric’s moved on. The weak aren’t dead; they’re just not part of the stock exchange. When Allegra and I were young we mounted the barricades, we shrieked against injustice. We were heard. Those in charge met us halfway. Freeways ended up not as wide as the traffic visionaries had predicted. When we opened Mad Meg, painters, like me, had wall space to call our own and critics to write us up, first in feminist magazines and later, by degrees, alongside the boys in the circulating art mags.

  I’m going to fight this, but I don’t know how.

  In fact I know I won’t be able to fight this because these days a new ethos rules. Nobody fights for the poor and oppressed anymore because there aren’t supposed to be any. Standards are on the rise – like me. To my feet. I’m on the rise and I’m furious, but Mick is pulling me down by the sleeve and hissing, ‘Don’t.’ And he’s right, standing up and haranguing the meeting isn’t going to help. I’m going to have to count to ten before I say another word. I’ve spent years having my personality changed by psychiatry as a person on a low income, learning not to sound off at the first salvo. Once Margaret Thatcher had declared ‘There’s no such thing as society’, society was off and those of us who would change it had nothing to change. We had to do something else, just as I’m going to have to do something else now.

  It’s called Assertiveness.

  The assertive are polite and get their way. They use techniques, like ‘broken record’, which is saying the same thing over and over again until you get your way. They say, ‘You have your opinion and I respect you for it, but this is mine’ and they say what their opinion is. They return broken purchases to shops and insist, politely and firmly, on repairs being done – and, if not repairs, then replacement – and if not replacement, then compensation. Checkie wants to replace the world with my absence from it.

  I’m going to have to push in and bully a place in a hostel for Stella so that she won’t be thrown into the last ditch of nursing home before her mind is total porridge. There’s grit in the rolled oats yet.

  Two women, who are going to supervise the relocations, calling themselves Safe and Sound Seniors, take their turns, one after the other, at the mike. They are called Janelle and Tahlia and they’ve obviously had the same Assertiveness Training as I have. They’ve dealt before with people like me. At least, Janelle has. She puts me to one side very nicely by saying that some people are determined to make things difficult, but they needn’t be difficult.

  Alas, I find I’ve sprung to my feet after all. ‘Have you ever tried to find appropriate accommodation for your mother?’

  ‘I find appropriate accommodation for older people every day.’

  ‘Lovey…’ hisses Mick.

  So I sit down, shaking with rage.

  ‘Everyone here is affected,’ continues Janelle. ‘But we have time on our hands and everyone will be found a place.’

  I’m on my feet again, ‘Equivalent to this place?’

  ‘Yes. If you’ll only be patient.’

  ‘And live long enough!’

  ‘Lovey!’

  I pass my eye over the staff and I realise they all have their heads bowed. There’s no escape from this room, every passage between the tables is blocked by walking frames and there’s no open back door to slip through. Mick tugs me down again. But I’ve already had to do this once – phoning around, assessments (is she nuts or competent?), set-tos with undertrained assessors and children given jobs that are beyond their capabilities. I don’t want Stella to end up mumbling into her bosom be
side a bed from which she hardly ever moves at a place so far away from the city that it takes hours to reach.

  Janelle and Tahlia are not setting up to relocate until next week. I shall get busy on the phone at once. I shall have her ridiculous doctor come and assess her as fit for hostel accommodation. I shall book an appointment at the other nearby Uniting Church home and I shall get her through the door first so she will still be up and bullying beautifully in no time at all.

  But one of her bright hazel eyes is blind and the ophthalmologist doesn’t know if it’s going to right itself. She’s almost stone deaf in spite of all the trouble, time and expense. It will all count against her when it comes to requalifying for hostel care.

  I hate what lies ahead.

  Poor Mick! I’m in such a tizzy when we get home that I’m practically ready to beat him up with frustration.

  I call my house Defenestration, the cramped quarters you end up in once the window of opportunity has slammed shut. I hate myself clopping down its skinny hallway with big Mick squishing after me in his elephantine sneakers.