Up and down, up and down – waiting. It’s probably what’s meant by Purgatory. You’re purged of your will to live, purged of happiness, of want, of decent, ordered, thematic thought. You live in the atmosphere of Unknowingness, where you can hear what might be the atoms knocking on your cochlea, where you breathe them up and they invade your nose and lungs, inspecting your interior for its breath-worthiness. You’re just an accidental form in the scheme of things in a waiting-room Purgatory. The woman in the hijab is staring into space now, breathing heavily. I come face to face with a framed picture of a pink lotus and a green lily pad on a blue pond – is it supposed to be my compensation? I don’t suppose it’s meant to remind me of a job-lot interior designer buying up bulk crap for hospital interiors. Perhaps if I brought my sketchbook in here, I could sketch away while I waited and nobody would be adversely affected…the woman catches my eye; I smile at her; she crunches her mouth on one side in peremptory recognition. She has terrific hands, long-fingered and strong. She catches me staring at them and grimaces again.
I could talk to her, I suppose. Might be better for both of us if I talked to her.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Where are you from?’
She frowns. ‘Australia,’ she says, crossly.
‘Oh dear, sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry? You’re an Australian. You have nothing to be sorry about.’
‘Didn’t you just say you were an Australian, too?’
‘I am an Australian citizen, same as you.’
‘Same as me,’ I say. ‘But, although my mother won’t admit it, some of my forebears came in chains. I’m guessing you or your family has resettled here from somewhere else.’
‘I don’t like it when people ask me where I’m from,’ she says. ‘I’m an Australian citizen.’
‘But you came here from somewhere else. We all did. Except for the Aboriginal people.’
‘That’s true.’
‘When I was a child – I was born just after the war – we were taught to ask people where they came from as a sign of friendship. We were the receiving culture and we were welcoming newcomers. That’s just how it was.’
‘I suppose…’ she says, flaring her fingers and looking into her palms. Then she says, in dull resignation, ‘In Asia they ask you how old you are.’
‘That’d be considered rude here. In many parts of Asia, I believe they revere age.’
‘Yes. They do. Old people are looked after by their families. Not like here.’
I don’t feel like telling her that my mother lives in a home, so I sit down beside her and say, ‘You have lovely hands.’ And I hold out my hands for one of hers, which she gives me. ‘Beautiful. So strong.’
‘They have to do a lot of work,’ she says, her eyes sad.
‘Are you waiting on news of a relative?’ I ask.
‘My mother. She is very old. She has broken her wrist.’
‘Mine’s broken her elbow,’ I say. ‘She’s about to turn ninety-nine.’
‘Mine is ninety-four.’
‘Well, there. We have more in common than our Australianness, whatever that is. Do you look after your mother at home?’
‘Yes, I do. She is hard work. She is a very strong woman. It takes three people to hold her when she gets going.’
‘Do you have anyone to help you?’
‘Sometimes.’ And I can tell by the way she says it that help is as enthusiastically given to her as it has been to me.
‘Family?’
‘Oh yes, I have family.’
‘I suppose you have to look after them as well?’
‘Yes. I am housekeeper and cook.’
‘Do the Aged Services people come to help out?’
‘I get four hours a week. It’s not enough.’
‘I know the story. My mother lived on her own until she was ninety-four. I lived close by.’
‘It wouldn’t work with my mother.’
‘I see. You seem depressed.’
‘I’m very depressed.’
‘Because of your mother?’
‘It’s hard enough to look after her when she doesn’t have a broken bone.’
‘Will she be in hospital for a while?’
‘I don’t know. It’s only her wrist. When I broke my wrist, they didn’t keep me in at all; they discharged me straight after they set it. I just had to go home and keep on working.’
‘I gather you’d prefer it if they kept her in for a while?’
‘Maybe I can do some work! I have a husband and sons to look after. I need to go to the doctor myself. Something wrong inside from lifting. I need to get help.’
I’ve been holding her hand since she gave it to me and tears are beginning to well in her eyes. ‘I know what it’s like,’ I say. ‘I’ve been there. In fact, I am there, though not quite as badly as you at the moment. If my mother comes through the operation, she will be discharged to aged care. And she’ll have convalescence first.’
‘You think your mother will die?’
‘She might. Anaesthetics can kill old people.’
‘I don’t want my mother to die.’
‘No. I don’t want mine to die, either. It’s hard, isn’t it?’ We sit back, contemplating, still holding hands. ‘My name’s Isobel,’ I say at length.
‘Mahanoz,’ she says.
‘Ma-ha-noz,’ I say. ‘How do you spell that?’
‘M, a, h, n, a, z.’
‘What kind of name is that?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Guess not, Mahnaz. Have you been in Australia long?’
‘Twenty years. All my family here now. I have boys in high school. You?’
‘Oh, I’ve been here all my life. I have a grown-up son and I brought up my sister’s girl. My sister’s girl has a little boy.’
‘She’s married then?
‘She has a partner.’
‘Not married?’
‘No.’
She lets go of my hand. ‘It’s different here in Australia to where I come from. Every woman married where I come from. Except one my sister. She not married, just work, work, work all the time.’
‘What does she do?’
‘University.’
‘Oh?’ But Mahnaz isn’t inclined to elaborate, so I imagine her sister might be a cleaner or a secretary or a canteen worker.
She turns to me suddenly and says, ‘You nice. You want to come and have some tea with me sometime?’
So I say, ‘Yes, yes, I’d like that very much. We have something to share, don’t we – old mothers.’
So we exchange addresses and phone numbers and I see that she lives out near Monash…
‘Ms Coretti?’ A nurse is calling me to go to Stella.
‘Goodbye, Mahnaz. I’ll give you a call to see how you get on and we’ll make a date, okay?’
‘Okay. Maybe we see each other, Isobel.’
Stella’s operation was complicated and she was under the knife for more than an hour, but afterwards, she was well enough to go into a ward. Her bones are so weak they can’t take screws and so everything has had to be set with great care and fingers crossed.
She shares her ward with a dreadful young bloke who stinks of cigarettes and is constantly nicking out for another. He’s covered in tattoos and wearing shortie pyjamas that ride up to afford unwanted glimpses of his wherewithal. He is next to the window and Stella is next to the door. There’s not much to look at outside; there are excavations going on that rattle the windows but blessedly don’t penetrate any further into the space. Stella’s eyes have opened a few times, her colour is good; she is a funny little heap in pale blue with an oxygen mask and a drip taped into her frail old arm. Once or twice her mouth has flickered into her dear old smile. She has the Motte family smile that glides out and shines with sweetness. I’m glad it has survived the crush of genes down through the centuries. Too few people can smile as she does.
Look at her.
Year before last, she was the tottering mistress o
f her indescribably cluttered Victorian terrace in Hawthorn. It was a strip of council-created cleanliness from front door to back becoming narrower and narrower, the piles of rubbish higher and higher, until she lived in a corridor of muck subtended by little islets of habitation budding off through the doors.
Nin and I used to clean things up a bit before the council help came. We’d have to spirit her rubbish away because if we put it in her garbage tin, she would retrieve it – even put it back in her fridge. She was certain we couldn’t be trusted to throw anything out. We would choose the wrong things and we wouldn’t do it according to the law. ‘They’, the mysterious ‘they’ who feature in so many people’s lives, were always watching, always promulgating some arcane law that meant she had to wash up her tins, soak the labels off and throw the labels and the tins out separately, or what? Go to jail, go directly to jail, Stella Coretti née Motte, and forfeit your pension to your jailer. I could just picture her, rattling the bars of her cell, howling out, ‘Injustice!’ until one of her legal Motte relatives came calling and avenged her on television in the sight of the nation.
The drains could be clogged with fat and tea-leaves and old bits of tuna, but water had to be run into the sink for the label soaking. She would store the labels in the upper basket of a shopping trolley and we were not allowed to touch them until there were enough to fill a large cereal packet, but we were always waiting on the packet, because every time she went to the shops (which was every weekday) she’d buy two for the price of one and open both. She would leave them open on the benchtops in her kitchen because, she said, it was easier to find them that way – her kitchen was laid out how you wanted it and no one was going to interfere – after all, in the years of her madness, she had to do without a kitchen – she, the only decent cook in the country.
Nin and I would have to smuggle some of the packages into a garbage bag and divert her attention while Nin shoved in a pile of other stuff, to which I’d give her clues when we were coming in at the front door, tied up the neck and chucked it over the fence into the lane behind the house. Then, as Stella set about pushing me up ladders and testing fire alarms (she would ring me up in the middle of the night to tell me, admonishingly, that her fire alarms weren’t working) or stood by criticising my ironing, or ordered me to ring up and get proof that certain of her bills had been paid, I would adjust the blind of the kitchen window so that she couldn’t see Nin diving over the back fence and racing down to the park to dump her rubbish in the nearest bin or skip. When she’d finished her tirade, she would say, ‘Who keeps doing that to my kitchen blind?’ and giving it a yank that sometimes brought it down into the horrendous sink.
I’m afraid that Nin and I fed her companionable, TV-watching rats with Ratsak in the end, but when we saw them sitting up, swaying side to side with illness and waiting to die in front of The Price Is Right with her, both of us shuddered like weaklings and phoned Eli, who happened to be home, so that he would come and dispatch them. So great an act of courage on his part was this that Nin and I forgave him for not doing one single other thing to help in her relocation to a home.
Oh Stella, you used to have flair! You had a feel for colour, shape and disposition. Periodically you would ‘tart up’ the house where Allegra and I lived as children. You would have it looking accommodating and full of welcome. We would feel we were going to have a good time just by crossing the threshold. If only I could reward you for that – but these days the sentiments behind cosy, loving appearances aren’t cosy and loving, they’re based on envy, competition and greed like that fake fireplace at the home that turned us down.
Will I miss you when you die, Stella? I miss you now. Aspects of you – your lovely, sauntering walk, your twinkling hazels, your deft little hands, unencumbered by arthritis – although nervousness made you clumsy, made you fail to get the tops off sauce bottles so that all our doorjambs were dented with crushed lid marks… God, you didn’t know much, did you? How come you didn’t know that you can wind a rubber band around a sauce bottle top and it will magnify the strength of your grip several fold; you can run a metal cap under hot water to loosen it; you can tap it all around smartly but gently with a knife handle to let air in and it will loosen quite soon – instead, you wrecked all the nice old lintels as you inserted your bottles, rapier-like, into the jambs, brought the door back smartly and crunched your way to misshapen lids and splintered necks. You silly old moo! You used to pour the sauce out through a tea strainer to make sure you weren’t putting glass on our plates. Will I miss that? No, I won’t miss that – that worry, that despair, is just part of your ingrained character, the barrier against a reasonable life.
So full of bitterness are you, so full of strife and anger. We didn’t take your brothers from you, Mother. We didn’t take your lover, and yet, you’d often treat us as if we were to blame for a war that happened before we were born. What kind of thinking is that? Do you imagine we carry the prehistory of ourselves? That we can consult it and agree with you that things were bad? New bad succeeds old, Old Lady. The uneven wheel rolls on. It takes you and me away and leaves the world to Eli and Nin. The weight is redistributed, made new by altered circumstances.
Nevertheless, I love you, old lady who bore me.
The remnant of your loving glance, the dearness of your crippled hand.
I love you even though you can be a high-pitched pain.
You poor old thing, living on and on and on because the past says you must.
If life were just and I were in charge, we’d do death differently. Once we felt replete, we’d be able to say, ‘it’s time to go’. We’d be able to go in style. It would be as significant an occasion as a birth. Nobody would be allowed to make that decision for us and only in exceptional circumstances, like crippling illness or pain, would we be able to decide to die before reaching, say, the age of eighty-six – because that’s the age that women reach. Yeah, eighty-six would be the age of consent for death; we might lower it to eighty-four for men, since they don’t live as long. Today it isn’t rare to reach eighty-six and if you’re already sixty, chances are you’ll get to eighty-six. At sixty you’re usually still quite savvy. If you were in good health and could look at twenty-six years with optimism, then eighty-six seems to me to be a good age to say you’d like to die if you feel replete with life.
By the time Dan’s sixty, he might be looking at thirty to forty more years with optimism. There’s a lot you can do in that time if you’re sharp enough and well enough and live in an age-tolerant society – so much, in fact, that by the time you reached the age of consent, you might find yourself choosing to live on in good spirit. You might well be socially productive into the bargain.
I don’t especially want you to die, old lady, but if it had been the norm for your age group to choose, then you might have gone easily at eighty-six. In comfort. Except you would have been afraid. Because you believe in that superhero, God, and his disapproving Anglican heaven where you’d be expected to sit still and look pretty, even though there’s an exploding girl inside you, a fidgeter waiting to be set loose on she knows not what.
A doctor comes by. It’s as I thought. She will be here for quite a long time, knitting.
We used to call her the Midnight Knitter when she lost her mind after Allegra’s death. She would knit endlessly, not to any pattern, but part pattern – a cuff here, a heel-turn there, purl and plain, cable stitch, window stitch. We just supplied her with ball after ball of bright wool, and away she went, needles in, needles out, clickety clack, clickety clack, counting off the sorrow and the years.
I stayed most of the night at the hospital, just in case there was a turn for the worse. I went home about four a.m. and slept for an hour or two, showered, breakfasted and came back to sit beside her this morning. She’s awake.
She tells me that the man outside on the building site who rides the load on the crane came swinging into her bedroom last night.
‘What, like Errol Flynn?’
; ‘Oh, he didn’t look like Errol Flynn.’
‘Was he nice?
‘No, he wasn’t,’ she says.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry. It’s not your fault.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I ain’t got no feelin’s, Dorty.’ It’s what my grandfather used to say to her – only he used to say, ‘I ain’t got no teef.’
Over in the other patient’s territory, above which the crane rider would have had to go surfing for his tryst with Stella, one of the smoker’s friends is visiting him.
‘Didya fucken ring ’er?’ the smoker begins.
‘Why don’t you ring ’er yer fucken self?’ answers a scraggy man with tattoos joining the bottoms of his baggy shorts to the sock tops rolled down over boots.
‘She’d put the fucken phone down in me ear.’
‘Shoon’t a fucken hit’er.’
‘I never fucken ’it ’er.’
‘Ya fucken did, man. It’s why yer in ’ere.’
‘I fucken never. She just rammed me with the fucken car…’
Stella whispers, ‘Noice.’ And she winks at me.
The smoker has had his shins scraped off. ‘You fucken hit ’er first, ya fucker. Yer’ve gotta go to court fer grievous.’
‘That’s a fucken lie. Just because she’s yer fucken sister ya believe every fucken thing she says.’
‘Ya busted ’er nose, ya fucker.’
‘Did ya fucken ring ’er?’
‘No. I never. An I’m not fucken gunner, either. Ring ’er yer fucken self.’
‘Aw. I just wanna know about me fucken kids! I want ’er to bring the fucken kids to see me. Get the wheelchair, will ya? I wanna go out for a smoke.’ And he winks at me, but I’ve already been winked at by Stella and the conspiracy’s against him.
Window Gods Page 25
