The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  The next day an elderly woman came to see me. She was dressed in a pastel pink dress and a lace collar. Her manner was tentative. She gave me a pamphlet. ‘I’m with the pastoral care unit,’ she explained. I said, ‘You’re one of the Sisters of Charity?’ She was reluctant to sit down. I pressed her to stay and talk. She sat uncertainly on the edge of the bed and I asked her about her life. I felt her need for reassurance. She told me, ‘There used to be one of us to each floor in this hospital. We were a community.’ She stood up, ready to leave, unable to stay and talk. She looked at me. ‘I’m the last Sister of Charity,’ she said. I wished I could have done more to reassure her. I wished I could have done for her spirits what Robert had done for mine. But it wasn’t so easy. There was more to counselling than the simple desire to reassure.

  On my last day in the hospital I sat in a wheelchair dressed in a grey dressing-gown with a blanket over my knees. I had become an old man in a wheelchair, one of those people I’d been unable to offer comfort to. I felt the justice of my position. I was waiting in the cold basement for the CT scan that would either confirm the success of the operation or condemn me to more surgery. A nurse wheeled in a man on a bed and stood waiting with him beside me. I looked up at the man, intending to say hello, to make contact, to offer the precious human contact that Robert had offered me, like a beautiful gift of belief. I wanted to use the gift, to see if I really possessed it. The man in the bed beside me was young, in his early thirties. I saw at once that he was dying, that he did not have far to go. And I saw that he was thinking of his young family waiting for him at home. The young nurse was holding his hand. They were holding hands, the two of them, silent and together. Sensing my attention the nurse looked down and smiled at me. I didn’t speak. I didn’t break the sacred silence of their moment.

  Later that afternoon I walked out of the hospital with my wife. A few steps beyond the doors I stopped, the wind and the sun in my face, the touch of my wife’s hand on my arm. I couldn’t go any further. I stood there weeping. When I could speak I told her, ‘I’m not crying for myself. I haven’t had any suffering. I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m just moved by the beauty and the mystery of our lives.’ Then I told her with difficulty about Robert and the last Sister of Charity and the dying young man in the cold basement holding the nurse’s hand. When I’d finished we looked at each other. ‘There’s nothing to say,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to try to explain it.’ Arm in arm, we walked together to the car.

  2000

  The Rule of the First Prelude

  September of 1982 was an unusually brutal month for the unit. On the fifteenth, a Wednesday and the middle of what had been up until then a quiet week, a young client committed suicide at ten in the morning by slicing open her throat with a serrated Solingen bread knife (the policewoman said the detail was important). The young woman performed this gruesome operation on herself in the corridor between the waiting room and Marie’s office. The worst part about it for Marie Elder, who was first on the scene, was that the young woman died smiling, her lovely blue eyes gazing up at Marie for an eternity from the innocent linoleum of the hospital corridor.

  A trauma counsellor was called in for a session of group therapy for the members of the team on the Thursday afternoon. Then the following Monday, just when everyone was more or less getting back to normal, a deranged male drunk—a boner at the abattoirs when he was not incapacitated by drink, and a man well known to Marie and the team—felled the security officer on the door with the bronze nozzle of the fire hose and put him in the ICU, where the security officer clung to life for three days before giving up the ghost. The security officer, whom Marie and the other members of the team knew as Nick, was married with three young children. His father and mother had migrated from Greece thirty years earlier to give their children a better chance at life in the land of opportunity. When the police arrived on the scene the boner was kneeling in Nick’s blood, weeping.

  Marie felt the threat to herself deepened by these events. The threat, that was, to her ability to go on alone. She was sure that her colleagues in the unit, and even one or two of the more observant doctors, had noticed that she had taken these events personally. But she couldn’t help it. She felt knocked sideways by them. At least, she said to herself when she was alone in the canteen drinking a cappuccino and staring out the window at the car park, Nick had a family. At least he had been loved by his wife and children while he was alive. Nick had been a real man with a real wife and real children. A normal family man. One of them. Nick’s brutal death sickened her, but it also fired a shot into her heart that wounded her in a way that was deeply private. Supposing she were to be bludgeoned to death tomorrow by a crazy drunk, or to cut her own throat—who would be left to mourn her passing but one or two of those old friends with whom she had kept in contact over the years? Friends who themselves were married with families. She didn’t envy either Nick or her friends, but she did pity herself.

  Marie’s pity for herself arose from a complicated source. She would never speak of it. To whom could she speak? All this brutality and sudden death focused her fragile emotions on her own fragility and failure. Not on her failure to get married and have children—she had never wanted marriage and children—but her failure at the age of thirty-seven to have found the friend and lover she dreamed of finding; her failure to establish the meaningful life for herself that she had determined on as a senior girl at school. She didn’t have it. Despite everything. The friend, the man, with whom she might share her anguish and her joy. Her ideal friend. She saw him. He was tall and modest, as she was herself. He was an artist of some kind. A man who, unlike the husbands of her friends, insisted on a meaningful life for himself too. A loner, just as she was. Perhaps he was a musician or a writer or a painter. It didn’t matter which. In company he sat quietly and listened and observed and never attempted to dominate the conversation with the events of his own life and his accomplishments. But he was intelligent and reflective and curious nevertheless. And he was effective. A cultivated man who did not need a wife and a mother and children but who was deeply self-reliant. She had never met such a man. Never. None of the men she had met had ever come near to it. Now she was nearing forty and had begun to fear she never would meet this friend but would become the solitary professional woman, like Ellen Alworth, the senior social worker in charge of the unit.

  Did it have to be one or the other? Did she have to stake her happiness and her fulfilment in life either on love or on her work? Couldn’t there be this other choice? The friend and lover of her girlhood dreams? The intelligent sensitive man who was her friend? The amorous friendship, the French called it, with the emphasis on amorous. But it wasn’t that. Her emphasis was on friendship, not on love or sex. Marriage was easy. Everyone did it. Staying single and giving your all to your job like Ellen Alworth was evidently just as easy. Why must her own choice be so difficult? To wake up in the morning with something exciting to look forward to in her life, instead of another trip to the hospital on the tram. She didn’t want to go on doing it alone. She was tired of it. Sick to her heart with it. When she looked in the mirror she saw how suddenly aged her eyes had become. She knew she was closer to the edge than she had ever been.

  She couldn’t help thinking of poor Nick. It was all so meaningless. So empty. So pointless. The voice within her cried out to her its despairing appeal, for which she had no answer: What about me?

  At home in the kitchen on her own that weekend she abandoned her plans for a small roast chicken and she wept. She felt so desperate sitting there on her own in the kitchen that she decided to call one of her friends. But when she wiped her eyes and pulled herself together she realised she didn’t want to hear her friend’s voice, bright and cheerful and busy with her kids’ weekend sports and her own frenzy of activity.

  Marie went back into the kitchen. There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be said. She stood at the back door looking out into the tiny yard with its single camellia bush.
All she wanted was to come out of this lonely darkness into the sunlight with him and to laugh and be the woman she knew she was.

  Marie is looking out the window of the tram at the passing street. The sun is low and is glaring off the dome of the great railway station. The crowd of humanity is going in one direction, making for hearth and home, or for a rendezvous in a bar. The novel in her lap is unopened, her left shoulder is pressed painfully against the hard lip of the window. The air-conditioning has failed and the tram is hot and sweaty and smelly.

  The woman squeezed in next to Marie sneezes again. The convulsive thrust of the woman’s shoulder presses Marie’s tender upper arm against the jutting lip of the window and she winces. There is a rancid smell of rotten meat. It is the smell of wretched humanity. Marie feels the touch of a hot needle at the back of her throat and fears she will also begin to sneeze. Her past is rushing away behind her. The tram dings its bell rapidly several times, angrily, the driver stomping on the bell pedal, and the tram stops abruptly. The standing passengers lurch forward and recoil, like a wave hitting a sea wall. A man flings a curse into the ears of those pressed against him. He has borne enough and the curse escapes him. The tram dings its bell twice and moves on again. A young woman laughs and is answered by the laugh of another young woman. The press of them, swaying and sweating, tortured, the man’s curse falling through their minds. He might as well have wept. Perhaps someone would have been kind to him. Now he has irritated them. But they are stuck with him. The woman beside Marie sneezes again, then again. She murmurs a choked apology.

  Marie closes her eyes then opens them. The world has shouted, has laughed, has sneezed and has moved on, churning the wild waters around her stillness. There had been men, plenty of them, when she was as young as those women who just laughed, men who would happily have married her. She had had her chances. They had not interested her.

  The tram waits, ticking and creaking, its iron wheels gripped in the jaws of the brake dogs.

  Marie’s face at the window looking out as the dogs release their grip and the tram glides on over the river. She is sweating. A long boat of tourists passing beneath the old bridge in stately isolation. The tram rocking, leaving the slow brown river behind, accelerating along the fine boulevard of trees and parks, soft green of elm leaves translucent in the last of the golden sunlight.

  Marie’s hands tremble. Her fine fingers cling to the book in her lap. But the tremor is within. Something has given. Refused the solemn oath of calm. It leaps back, flashing again into her unshielded gaze, her blue eyes wide.

  Marie stands a moment on the footpath and looks at the tram going away from her, locked to its rails, the sudden smell of the sea in the air, freshening towards her, seaweed and fish from the bay carried on the light southerly. Mrs Snee is leaning on the railings at the front of her house watching Marie approach. Marie greets her and stands with her to watch the frenzied Scotty frolicking with a silken greyhound in the triangle of park opposite. At her own gate Marie collects her mail from the box, the iron gate clacking against its broken hasp. A last faded cluster of blossoms on her rose. There is one more bud. Fragrance in the air at her door as she inserts her key into the lock and passes from the outer world into the stillness of her home.

  Marie sets the novel and the mail beside her bag on the table in the hall and climbs the stairs to her bedroom. She stands at the window and watches as the Scotty and the greyhound leap around each other, a sharp bark of sudden fear from the Scotty that the game will go too far, will become violent. She stands looking out for a minute or two then takes off her clothes and crosses to the bathroom. She leaves the bathroom door open while she stands under the shower.

  She dresses and goes down to the kitchen at the back of the house and turns the radio to the classical music program. She ties the strings of the blue and white apron she brought back from China last year and gets the chicken breast from the refrigerator. She takes her sharpest kitchen knife from the block and slices the yielding flesh of the chicken as easily as the young girl sliced open her tender throat. She thinks of the girl’s parents. Their lives destroyed. It is all so pointless. Her tears fall onto the bloodless meat.

  There is a handwritten note from her boss on her desk when she gets back to her office after lunch the next day. Drop by and see me when you have a chance, Marie. The note, folded for discretion, is written in blue ink with a fountain pen and signed, E. Alworth.

  From behind her desk she examines Marie over the rims of her glasses for a considerable time, a thin absent smile on her wooden lips (unpainted), as if her thoughts are elsewhere, entangled in the endless administrative problems and tasks that beset her in her position as leader of the Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Unit. Recollecting herself with a sudden awkward abruptness, Ms Alworth says, ‘Yes, I really think you should consider taking the first half of next year off on half-pay, Marie.’

  Marie is not altogether surprised by the suggestion. She thanks Ms Alworth for her concern. ‘I’m okay. Honestly. I just need a long weekend.’

  But Ms Alworth is done with smiling. ‘Consider the matter over the weekend, Marie, and see me first thing Monday morning with your decision.’ Ms Alworth resumes writing in the file on her desk, her old-fashioned fountain pen in her right hand, her head bent to the task before her.

  Marie has seen Mrs Allen and the Black Cowboy sitting on the bench in the corridor outside her office, shivering and trembling, nursing their resentments at the delay she is making them bear, the world conspiring to defeat them, the high threatening whine of Mrs Allen’s pit-saw voice berating anyone incautious enough to catch her eye, the Black Cowboy studying his hands, shaking his head slowly from side to side, knowing what a man has to do but never being able to do it, his worn features lit suddenly by a thought, and there for an instant the bright jewel of a youthful smile, a glimpse of the lost boy inside him, before the shutters come down again. The way he shakes his head, his dreams of vengeance never enacted with those hands.

  Instead of going back to her office and seeing these people of hers (Marie refuses to call them her clients), after she leaves Ms Alworth’s office she walks down the passage to the hospital canteen and joins the coffee queue. Is six months off on half-pay a prelude to dismissal? Everything, after all, is a prelude to something. Standing in the queue she says to herself, I once found satisfaction in my job and would find it again if I had my friend and lover.

  But there was something else, something even deeper than this. Ms Alworth’s suggestion that she take time off has reduced the gap between where Marie stands and where she will fall. She is thinking of the nightmare of her father’s last days. She was seventeen and a boarder at Ascham School in Sydney, studying for her fifth-form exams, in love with her literature teacher, Miss Wendell, and secretly writing love poetry of her own. In the middle of a clear spring day, lying on the grass with her friend Betty Arnold, Marie was called to the headmistress’s office and informed with the keenest sorrow that her father had been taken seriously ill. She left for home at once. And suddenly she was at home with her father. He was fifty-seven. Within weeks this loving kindly man, her friend and confidant since childhood, was transformed into a grotesque stranger bound to his familiar old cedar bed by sickness, the carved bedhead with its row of koalas among the gum nuts mocking his disaster, his limbs and head swollen with oedema. Blind, paranoid, moaning and weeping, her loving father was a man abandoned by his failing body and swept by panic. The sanest of men had become mad, lost in a black whirl of horror—until that final terrible night when he emerged from his delirium in the early hours and clasped her hands in his own icy grip and with sobs confessed to her his unspeakable betrayal.

  Everything, she thinks in her loneliness, everything is ineradicably connected. If you touch one thread of the web, the entire web trembles and then the black spider of despair is roused and it rushes out and clasps you to itself and sucks out your life and leaves you old and dry. She laughs. The whole delicate construction—of he
r life, that is—is tremulously interconnected. She carries her coffee to an unoccupied table by the window and sits down. She sips the hot sweet coffee and stares out the window at the rain falling steadily on the central compound, an open space originally intended by the architects as a treed recreation area for staff and ambulant patients, but commandeered by the hospital management for use as a temporary car park. She could do with something stronger than the cappuccino. She finishes the coffee and gets up. People whose lives are seriously out of control are waiting for her. People who believe themselves marked by fate for defeat, no matter what they do. People who believe the hospital owes them something because they have set out on a path of self-destruction. Marie does her best. It is not enough.

  She loves them and she hates them. They repel her. They are everything that human beings are. She longs to help them and knows there is no help for them. Their defeat is her own defeat. They tell her not to worry. Don’t get upset, they say when they see she is moved to pity by their state. She will never be a real professional, a truly objective social worker like Ms Alworth. She despairs for them, her patients. They will not leave her at night when she is alone and sleepless in her bed. They are part of her problem. It has taken years for this to happen but it has happened. It is they who are her company. Her companions of the night.