‘You think I can’t hear, don’t you?’
‘Well, what did we say then, Mum?’
‘You’re talking about Bingo.’
‘Have you had your ears cleaned?’
Liz says, ‘Oh yes. We have a lady who comes in with a Jobson Horne and she does everyone’s ears.’
‘Jobson Horne?’
‘Yes, it’s a probe in the shape of a loop. It gets in under the mass of wax and lifts it out in one piece. It doesn’t seem to worry the old folk much. She just stands up beside them with a light and in she goes. And out…come some awful globs. Sometimes they’re black!’
‘You mean to say that all this time that Stella’s been deaf – I mean years – they could have just fished out the wax with one of these loops?’
‘Sure. Unless her ears were infected.’
‘Mine wasn’t black,’ says Stella. ‘Mine was golden.’
‘Oh, so the lady had the Midas touch, did she?’ I ask. ‘Or was it just that you had superior wax?’
‘It was your bloody Indian audiologist chap who had the Midas touch. How much did those hearing aids cost you?’
‘Oh, far too much…’
‘And I hate to say it,’ whispers Liz, ‘but I fished them out of her cup of tea a few days ago.’
‘Well, I can hear!’ goes Stella, crossly.
‘That doesn’t mean you can chuck your hearing aids into a cup of tea.’
‘I didn’t. I don’t know who did that.’
‘Probably the same boy who used to use your phone at Narrowlea on his way home from school.’
She looks up at Liz, her brow in a tangle. ‘Are you going to get those slippers on or not?’ she says crossly.
Liz laughs. ‘That’s more like the old Stella. Sister Colleen calls her Our Lady of Mischief.’
‘What’s so well-behaved about her?’ says Stella. ‘She says haitch. We were never allowed to say haitch. It was common.’
‘Sister Colleen comes in sometimes to sit and talk with her. And you’ll have noticed that Sister Colleen got her way with the bishops. We’ve had air-conditioning put into these wards. It’ll be great for the summer. ’
‘Well, hooray for the good old different.’
‘Different?’
‘Sister Colleen. I’m sure that’s the euphemism that Mother Oldmeadow uses for her.’
‘Oh, you’re a wag, just like your mother.’
‘No. I’ve just got ears. I have to say on Mum’s behalf, though, that I’m glad the plasma telly lobby failed.’
‘Conscience,’ says Liz. ‘At least the old folk here will be cool. It was terrible last summer, just terrible. And this summer it’s tipped to be even worse.’
‘PUT MY SLIPPERS ON, DAMN IT!’
‘Well, Liz is trying to, Mum, but your foot’s a funny shape.’
‘Huh,’ she says, disgusted. That’s a ‘huh’ that expresses a whole swag of sentiments. It’s the huh that delivers a knockout blow to good intentions. It’s the hardening up of resolve before a tantrum. It’s the whole mangled history of stuff about little feet being thought desirable among the Mottes, while big feet on a woman attracted ridicule. It’s the huh that scoffs at my generation being convinced in the long run that it’s better to have shoes that fit than to have small feet – to her generation it was a case of the smaller the feet, the closer the palanquin of privilege and serving girls whose feet were unimportant.
Her mouth comes shut in an ancient pout and the steam seems just about to start rising from that bashed-cat head of hers. ‘You remind me of an old bloke I saw fuming on TV in Afghanistan,’ I say.
‘Huh!’
I am about to comment that he’d just kicked his daughter in the guts but that might set off the leaping and the bounding of Righteous Indignation. Be patient, I tell myself as I’ve been telling myself for years. Surely, at my age, I ought to be over having my buttons pressed. She can’t still be capable of driving me crazy. All the same, it’s as if she’s the person who is at the controls – she will not let me be myself, I must be who she ‘knows’ me to be.
I have to put a stop to this. I am a painter, not a fucking research fellow. Being a painter is what is important to me. I’ve striven hard to put good shows on gallery walls for years. She remembers the names of the shows that did well and pretends to be able to plumb the depths of individual works and has claimed paintings for me that she’s seen hanging here or there that I haven’t had anything to do with at all – and wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with. I suppose it’s just the behaviour of a proud mother and I should be thankful and titter at her mistakes but she hasn’t any grasp on art and in her habit of putting it down reveals to me a genealogical history of rock-solid ignorance. I can hear fucking Audra’s voice, saying, ‘Why don’t you paint something people would want to have on their walls, Bel? What’s the point of spending months and months and months doing all this stuff if no one wants to buy it?’
But why should I let Audra’s opinions oppress me? Audra isn’t someone I’d bother to trample in a stampede.
The old claw is pointing at me again and she is saying to Liz with a special note in her voice, ‘She dabbles, you know. Like her father. You must have heard of Henry Coretti?’
‘Stop breaking my heart!’
‘Well, it’s true. He was famous for his dabbling.’ Then to Liz, ‘You must have heard his name?’
‘Lots of times,’ says Liz, smiling, ‘but I have to admit I hadn’t heard it before I met you.’
‘Coretti, everybody knows the name Coretti. Or they ought to.’
‘Well, it’s your name,’ says Liz, who can’t feel the sharpness of that surname and its existence like a perilous needle of coral in the sea onto which all Stella’s psychic coracles founder.
‘You know I’m Rh positive,’ she says to Liz.
‘Well, I’m Rh positive,’ says Liz. ‘Most people are.’
‘What have you been up to? It’s a disease of homosexuals. It’s terminal. Her father gave it to me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’
But Liz is splitting her sides, ‘Do you mean AIDS, Stella? You haven’t got AIDS!’
It’s time to take a stroll. I can feel my inadequate guile being sucked in by the mighty tide of doom.
‘Are you going?’ she croaks, suddenly frantic.
‘Not yet,’ I manage. Although Dadda has been dead for thirty years or more, she still thinks he’s capable of spiriting me away. That’s why the tide about her is so strong. She is in need of endless reassurance.
I head out of the ward for the common room to see that playful wind again. I need inspiriting.
Dadda, why couldn’t you have lasted? Why were you so brief and transient? Why couldn’t you be doing what I have to do now so that I could get on with my life?
In the common room, the windows are large and you get the feel of being on a cruise. Outside I can see palm trees, their crowns caught in sunlight, waving their fronds as if it were the Riviera we were cruising along. When I first saw Redeemer, the palm trees and the big tank of reef fish by the window made me think of Matisse, wheelchair-bound in his last years but still scissoring shapely colours from the exhalations of the Mediterranean gods at his shutters.
Would that I were as certain of my talent and as singleminded as Matisse. He wanted to paint pictures that charmed and heartened people and he did just that – his was as true a gift as was ever bestowed – he was the right person and his genius was sufficient unto itself. Whatever the griefs of his private life and his slice of history, he lived his talent right through to the end. How seldom we can say that of somebody.
The closest I can get to Matisse in my baby-boomer middleclass milieu is to look at fair reproductions of his work and mentally paint the interior of Mick’s house in his colours – my own house is too encumbered with everybody else’s junk to think of painting it without spraining my brain and I have to move the junk into spaces that won’t obstruct my view through rooms into other room
s so I don’t go mad with claustrophobia. Down at Mick’s I’ve done the imaginary paint job on the house so thoroughly I’m trying to extend it to the outside so that shots of yellow daisies with dark foliage can be framed in aquamarine and grey when you look through the windows in autumn – but autumn is over so quickly and then it’s winter and I want to have crepe myrtles making snaky skeletons where once I wanted daisies and then I want tremendously promising green shoots of flowers to come up and bud purple and orange and blessed fresh white and blue. Matisse did it all so fluently and I don’t suppose he had to do more than adjust his jalousie for the inspiration right there in front of him.
Ah, Matisse, give me strength. She is ninety-nine, I am sixtythree: I might have thirty-six years ahead of me.
When I walk back into the room, having taken in a good draft of genius at the windows, Stella is muttering curses about cheap footwear.
The new slippers I’ve brought in still won’t fit over the bunch of bunions and hammertoes that masquerade as her foot. Liz has twisted the felt every which way and there’s nothing for it now but to widen them with scissors. Her last slippers were smart, expensive and made of purple plush: they were bought by a Motte relative, whose husband, before she killed him off, sold luxury cars, which somehow made the slippers worth boasting about. Unfortunately, they were lost in transit from hostel to nursing home. I suppose it’s easy to lose things in a place like this, but when she went into Narrowlea, she was convinced her belongings were being stolen and, for all I know, they were. I asked around, but although other things turned up, like somebody else’s nightie or old cardigan, her ‘disappeared’ articles, generally new, never seemed to resurface. I got so sick of asking about them that eventually I doubted my own memory. One of the losses, sadly, was a little golden ring with two love knots on it. It was given her by Geoffrey Latimer, her lover, who went off to the war and was killed. He loved the name Isobel, and that is how it became my name. Stella always said that Dadda didn’t call me Isobel because another man had chosen it, but I don’t think the reason was that at all; being Italian he couldn’t make his tongue stop at a final L, so called me Sibella, which, after all, is close to Isobel in sound.
There’ve been one or two mix-ups here at Redeemer but I think there was a thief at Narrowlea. Here, they’re a bit more conscientious about what they do. It may be the fact that most of them are Catholic and Catholics are against euthanasia, so you’re alive and owning stuff until you’re dead. What’s more, thieves are accountable in Catholicism, though not as accountable as they are in Islam: no one cuts off their hands. Liz is certainly no thief. She has what they call ‘a vocation’ for aged care. A calling. God is calling Liz to look after the likes of Stella. The organ through which He calls is the Christian church, Catholic branch. Why, of all possible outcomes, was this the one that landed face up for a pleasant patient woman like Liz?
Jesus and his bloody cross! Why couldn’t he have done something else for a living? You think of him being hauled down with the Last Supper still being gobbled up by enteric bacteria in his belly – unless, that is, the Last Supper already lay in a squalid mess somewhere in Gethsemane. You think of the one true cross being prey to the degrading organisms: slugs, snails, slaters, centipedes, millipedes, mites, spiders, worms, fungi and bacteria and you know that wood disintegrates when left to their depredations. Yet, there are all these people and institutions who swear they have a piece of the one true cross intact. You think of Veronica’s veil and Christ’s shroud and moths and myriad things that feed on cloth and the lengths folk go to to ‘prove’ that the bit of fragile warp and weft they are in possession of once touched Christ’s body and it makes you wonder why people cling so hard to the resurrection of the particular, when resurrection goes on around them all the time: the earth regenerates, things grow, combine with one another and everything born dines on something else, has its day and becomes again the earth, the air, the fire, the water.
How bizarre to think of the expenditure of effort and life in the name of a mangled corpse. Just one. When you think of the endless millions: the good, the bad, young, old, innocent and corrupt: the fresh and decrepit; prey, predator, furred, feathered, shelled or slimy. A weird world indeed in which for two millennia people have been ignoring soil organisms in favour of arguing about whether Heaven is selective when it comes to souls and whether the wine through which they believe they commune with God is the blood from that one corpse or just the symbol of that blood.
Or is it that the body and the blood are the fruits of the earth and that’s what Christ meant by resurrection all along?
‘I know what you’re thin-king,’ sings my mother.
‘Do you?’
‘You’re thinking, “How can I get rid of her?”, aren’t you?’
‘And how can I get rid of you, Mum?’
‘There, I said that’s what you were thinking!’
‘No one can get rid of their mother. You’re built in. I’ve got your rib cage. I’ve got your knees. I’ve got the same age spots on my hands as you have. You’re unget-riddable of.’
‘He, he, he! Heard any good stories lately? I need a good story to cheer me up.’
‘David threw a stone at my window and broke it in such a beautiful shape I can’t bear to have it mended.’
She screams with laughter. ‘He would!’
‘Did Nin tell you, Mum? He’s angry because he has cancer. He thinks you’re going to outlive him.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, if you call a crowd of Irishmen Paddies and a crowd of Welshmen Taffies and a crowd of Englishmen Poms, what do you call a crowd of Australians?’
‘I don’t know, what?’
‘A vacant lot.’
And she laughs so much her top teeth flop down and make her dribble.
‘But wait a minute, wait a minute, what did you say about David?’ she drools. ‘Didn’t you say something about David?’
‘He has cancer, Mum.’
‘Cancer? Poo! Audra’s always getting cancer. What makes him think he’s got cancer?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. Perhaps it was the operation on his lung.’
‘But you’re a research fellow.’
‘That doesn’t mean I know everything. David used to smoke a lot, that’s probably where it came from.’
‘Did you say he broke your window?’
‘It doesn’t matter, you know what David’s like. Can’t even throw a stone without creating a work of art.’
She thinks that’s hilarious and her entire body gives over to laughing. She pauses in between spasms to wipe the tip of her nose with a Kleenex.
Meanwhile, over the other beds in the room, there are signs that Mary is on the watch for the hour of death. Christ has just one corner of a photo shelf to desiccate further upon. There was none of this stuff in Narrowlea, where inmates displayed their football colours and digital clocks – Stella insisted on keeping her clock upside down because it interfered with her television reception when it sat the right way up. And, after all, time was standing on its head. Just like her furniture when it rose up and punched her lights out. It was all that’s left of Stella’s ‘Mottean’ inheritance, a conjunction of peculiar items that has accumulated over the generations going back to the Maori Wars to which a Motte Forebear ran away when threatened with life in the church – the Church of England, of course – although the Forebear scarpered from Beyond the Pale in Catholic Ireland. There are letters in the family from his absentee landlord of a father in Leicester.
Dear Son,
We last heard of you on board the X, engaged in the battle of so and so, and since then, no word. We pray that you have made landfall and that this letter will find you safe…and so on, including the death of Dear Mother, at whose bedside the scarperer was missed. He was here, buying up a cattle run and siring enough long-lived children to make me related to half the original British settlers.
The laughing spasms have stopped. ‘Do you want to go and
play Bingo?’ I ask. ‘There’s a game starting up in the common room shortly.’
‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘I can’t be bothered.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Bingo, what’s bloody Bingo? I didn’t win anything last time. I used to win all the chocolate frogs.’
‘Yes, you’ve been hoarding them. Let’s polish some of them off, eh?’
‘Well…if there’s a Caramello Koala I might have a nibble.’
And I rootle around in her jar for a Caramello Koala. ‘There,’ I say and settle down with a peppermint frog myself.
Liz is off doing the medications and finding a decent pair of scissors for the slipper enlargement and another nurse trundles by. Stella raises her claw as far as she can (not far) and calls out around her mouthful, ‘Hey!’ The nurse looks around. ‘This is my daughter,’ and she points at me vigorously, ‘Isobel. She’s a research fellow!’
‘Gosh, Mum, that’ll keep disaster from the door – a research fellow.’ And I say to the nurse, ‘Fall on your knees at once; prostrate yourself before me and have a chocolate frog.’
The nurse, an Asian girl called Melissa, who also loves her, comes up, waggling her finger at Stella’s nose. ‘You’re so funny, aren’t you, Numpa One?’ She calls herself Number One because she’s in bed 1A, a Distinguished Destiny. It has a dip in the middle so she doesn’t fall out at night.
She is living proof that we are nothing but mountains of genetic material that keep on idly coordinating for no reason at all. If in the past we were wont to provide continuity with our ancestors by embellished storytelling, what in the world to come will carry the memory of before into the future now that word of mouth has proven so faulty?
Richard Dawkins thinks it will be ‘memes’ – replicable pellets of social practice. Presumably these pellets, however organised, will make a coherent, if plastic, whole.
Window Gods Page 37
