Coda

by Thea Astley

  The veranda stretched its shade above the steps. Creepers choking uprights and coiling about finials dripped flowers onto a lawn overgrown from her absence and filled with weeds. Yet hollowness fell from the air.

  To her probing key the front door creaked open on a shocking emptiness of disturbed and resettled dust. She pressed a light switch but nothing happened, and fumbling her way down the shadowy hall she felt for other switches, each of which was snuffed.

  Sunlight washed through the breakfast room windows at the back of the house. It streamed over a void. Total. Tables, chairs, buffet had left only footprints on the linoleum. In the kitchen the space where the refrigerator had stood gaped its grimy outline. The stove had been wrenched from its cupboard fittings like an old tooth. Along the skirting board a cockroach moved disconsolately.

  Shock therapy.

  ‘God,’ Kathleen breathed. She could have been praying. ‘God God God.’

  Dumping her bag on the floor and obliterating the cockroach, she went to her bedroom. Empty. The dining room. Empty. The living room. No cane loungers, leather easy chairs. No paraphernalia from the Pacific, its crystal blue now filled with the threat of storm. No television, mantel radio, clock. The telephone squatted on the floor, dead.

  Room after room, empty. No beds, tables, chairs, pictures, mirrors, ornaments. Her mind played with the idea of crypts, of tombs. The built-in wardrobes were cleaned out except for two clothes hangers in one, huddling for comfort.

  She wanted to cry but resentment was too strong to permit the slightest drip of moisture from her appalled eyes. Returning to the kitchen where not even a cup remained, curious, she turned on the tap over the sink but by the time her cupping hand reached beneath, the rusty water had dribbled into silence. It was as she stared hopelessly through the window at Brutus’s kennel, desolate beneath the poinciana trees at the bottom of the yard, that she heard the slamming of a car door out front and the stiletto sharp heels of someone full of business as they ran up the front steps and down the emptied hall. Shamrock’s little pointed chin thrust into dusty sunlight.

  They stared at each other in the emptied kitchen, mother, daughter. Kathleen subsided gracelessly and deliberately to the floor.

  ‘I can explain,’ Shamrock proclaimed, in a voice heightened by the need for self-justification. She wore an ingratiating smile. ‘Mother, do get up.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else to sit.’

  ‘Oh Mother,’ Shamrock said, full of her own outraged protest, ‘Len and I …’ She veered away and began on another tack. ‘You can’t possibly cope here. You know you can’t. Len did it for the best. We were thinking of you. Truly. In any case the Department of Main Roads will be moving in any day.’ She tried a girlish giggle. ‘We had to beat those bulldozers, hadn’t we?’

  Kathleen refused to play descant to that insincere mirth. She thrust her legs out in an ungainly way. ‘Had we?’

  ‘Oh Mother! Now! Be realistic.’

  Shamrock bent down and attempted to lift her mother. There was a moment of wrestling.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Kathleen said sharply. ‘I am quite capable.’ She heaved her body up, turned her back on her daughter and through the kitchen window saw neighbours on one side hanging out washing and on the other edging a car down the drive.

  ‘I see no evidence of that. Not round me.’ She could hear her words too high for utterance, it seemed, circling in uttermost space like wind-hovers. Her mouth opened but only gabble emerged.

  Shamrock was shocked. ‘Mother, please. Please don’t be like that. I know what you’re saying. But Len and I have booked you in to the most wonderful place. Look, we’ve been through all this. You know you can’t manage.’

  ‘I manage very well.’

  ‘Oh you don’t. You know you don’t. You’ll love the place we’re taking you to. Really. You weren’t meant, oh I know it’s a shock, to come here and see all this. My bloody car broke down and by the time the service man came it was too late to reach you at the airport. Please, Mother, it’s for the best. We’ve found this wonderful place.’

  ‘What wonderful place?’

  ‘Let’s show you.’

  Her daughter was insisting, persistent as always.

  ‘You’ve taken all the chairs,’ Kathleen heard herself complain, voice querulous and thin. ‘There’s nowhere to sit.’

  ‘Come on. Come on out to the car.’ Shamrock’s not-so-gentle hand began steering her mother towards the front veranda.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Kathleen said bitterly. ‘What wonderful place?’

  She planted herself on the veranda steps in the dead weight of her own resentment and looked up at Shamrock’s self-seeking face, the ungenerous mouth, the too quick, too perceptive eyes.

  ‘A retirement—no, don’t be like that—a retirement village. Listen. Will you just listen! You have your own flat and you can eat in the communal dining room or not, just as you like. You can cook for yourself if you want. They’ll even bring meals to your room. It’s really very up to the minute.’

  Kathleen spat out her comment. ‘Flat, care, coffin. It’s a money-grubbing racket. Meals brought to your room! At what cost, I wonder. Communal dining. Oh God Almighty, Sham I like to choose the faces that confront me over the cereal. For heaven’s sake, what have you done?’

  ‘Please, please, don’t be like this.’ Shamrock eased her mother up again and was attempting to direct her to the car.

  ‘Where are all my clothes, my books?’

  ‘They’re packed and waiting for you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Passing Downs.’

  ‘Where?’

  Shamrock blushed.

  ‘Passing Downs?’ Kathleen was savage with emphasis. ‘Oh my God! And the furniture? Where’s the furniture?’

  ‘Do get into the car, Mother. I’m afraid we’ve sold that.’

  ‘Sold? How on earth did you manage that? And the house? What about my house?’

  ‘It’s listed for sale. Well, actually, it’s been sold already to the Department of Main Roads.’

  Kathleen heard hoarse shouts struggle from her throat that was already clotted with years of resentment.

  ‘You can’t do that. Legally you can’t do that.’

  Shamrock opened the car door, forcing her mother into the passenger seat, and raced furiously around to slam her own way in. The two women sat staring straight before them along the baking road. At last Shamrock dredged up words.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Oh Mother, don’t you remember anything? You gave Len power of attorney. Can’t you recall signing those papers he brought out just before you went north to stay with Brain? Please Mother, try to remember. You really did sign them when you heard what the DMR was about to do.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Kathleen wept hopelessly. Her eyes and nose streamed and she wiped carelessly at her melting face with the sleeve of her worn cotton jacket. ‘Oh God. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to.’

  ‘You’ve got no choice, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t Mum me, Shamrock. You’ve got the empathy of a piranha. And what about Brutus? How will Brutus fit in with this elegant retirement privateer?’ She began wrestling the car door open and stepped groggily onto the kerb.

  ‘Look Mother, get back in the car will you? For God’s sake sit down at least.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit. I want you to drive me to the kennels to pick up Brutus.’

  Her daughter’s lips snapped shut briefly on resentment, impatience, and now the blood pressure of rage. She clutched the steering wheel, fighting for control.

  ‘Just get in the car.’

  ‘Where’s Brutus?’

  Jaw clamped in its pretty stubborn lines, tongue tensing on the horrible confession she would have to make, Shamrock flung open the car door once more and stalked her fury round the car.

  ‘There,’ she said, half shoving her mother back into the Mercedes. She locked the door. ‘Now.’ Neighbours in the next house had paused in their gardening
and were moving closer to listen. One of them waved. Ignoring this, Shamrock stomped back to the driving seat and started the motor before her mother could make further desperate moves. The air conditioner worked busily at filtering Quelques Fleurs and the more pungent stench of selfishness and the car rapidly left Ascot behind.

  ‘I said where’s Brutus?’

  ‘Len had him put down.’ The young woman had decided on brutality in the maze of traffic.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was nothing else for it.’ She snapped on the car radio to a burst of metal rock. Her mother leaned over and snapped it off.

  ‘What do you mean nothing else? Oh God you obnoxious rotten pair. Oh Christ! How could you do this?’ Kathleen turned her distraught face to observe her daughter’s frozen profile and looked hard and long. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’re becoming quite ugly.’

  The dried-out heart dried out the eyes. There was nothing left to shed, neither tears nor hurt, only shock at betrayal so basic and so swift and unexpected, it was as if the body were stunned by electrodes. She would be excised from the world’s grief. In this shabby, beautiful existence coincidences were the concomitants of chaos and she recalled with satisfaction Bridgie’s story of Len and the secretary. Sham had allowed the wrong animal to be put down, she thought, and began to giggle at the admitted irony.

  Muted, she allowed herself to be taken. The car was an enclosed loony bin with its dark tinted windows racing along the blistered tarmac of Brisbane streets, over bubbling asphalt transcriptions of hell pavements to some outer bayside suburb and the horror of gardened-to-death villas in their box-like, coffin-like rows. In the shade of newly planted shrubberies she would and did discover when they arrived, various old bodies slumped on plastic chairs or staggering on walking frames. There was no conversation. There was a mummified indifference, each remnant-being concerned solely with its own privations, which it was desperate to prolong, and the suffering inflicted by corporately conceived comfort.

  The silent scream.

  In a foyer related more to a hotel chain than a caring system, a pretence of efficiency came with starched uniform and impeccable makeup.

  ‘They’ll look after you here, Mum. You’ll be right here. Len has shares in the place.’

  What a foolish child she had bred, Kathleen decided, hearing those idiot Judas words.

  With elaborate modulation, she said to the receptionist, alert over a poised ballpoint and admission form, ‘I have no intention of staying in this place.’

  ‘Come now, Mrs Hackendorf,’ the receptionist said, all smiles and warmth, ‘just let us show you to your room. I’m sure when you see it you’ll change your mind.’

  ‘You’re wearing too much mascara. No.’

  ‘Really, Mrs Hackendorf!’ The receptionist was used to dealing with addle-heads.

  ‘But Mother,’ Shamrock hissed, dutiful daughter, ‘your clothes, everything, they’re all set up here.’

  ‘Do you take dogs?’ Kathleen asked, leaning towards the receptionist.

  ‘No pets, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why are you afraid? By the way, you look like a tart.’ She paused and winked at the receptionist. ‘Some of my best friends are …’

  ‘Mother!’

  The receptionist rolled her eyes at the ceiling and produced a key that she handed to Shamrock. ‘Suite 2 down this corridor, first turning to the left … I’ll be with you in a moment.’ She pressed a buzzer. ‘Sister,’ she called into the intercom. ‘Sister. We have a new guest.’

  Kathleen’s lead-plugged feet trailed the white walls behind her daughter, remembering all those times when, the position reversed, Shamrock had whinged and dragged at museum visits, art gallery tours, dental procedures. ‘Acheron Lodge,’ she kept muttering. ‘Styx Villas. Avernal Shades.’

  ‘Please,’ Shamrock kept pleading. ‘Please.’

  ‘What room?’ her mother asked. ‘Charnel number 5?’

  ‘Oh my God, not funny!’ Shamrock cried, thrusting the key in a lock and flinging open a door.

  The room was microscopic. At one end an idea of a kitchenette. At the other a door opened on to a lavatory and shower. There were grip-rails for the elderly, a discretion of beige paint and ash-coloured carpet, the colour of tears, two plastic chairs beside a plastic table, a narrow bed. Did she imagine the beating of dark wings?

  ‘When you get a few of your things in, Mum,’ Shamrock whispered, ‘it will be a lot better.’

  ‘But you’ve sold all my things. And WHY’—she suddenly raised her voice and began to shout—‘ARE YOU WHISPERING?’

  Shamrock bit her lip.

  A nurse appeared, a walloper of professional cheer. A matron joined them. They made quite a crowd in the tiny room. The smiles stiffened as Kathleen said, ‘It’s like that Groucho Marx film, A Night at the Opera. If I hadn’t known Shamrock I’d never have got this room.’

  The matron nodded and nodded. She prided herself on her understanding of these difficult moments. Her smile became ossified. ‘Well,’ she asked, her face assuming that spurious but rigid tolerance of a cabinet minister confronted by genuine grievance, ‘and what do you think of this, then? Quite a view, isn’t it?’ Even as they stared through glass across the four-foot wide balcony at the green lawns, they saw an elderly man topple sideways from his wheelchair.

  ‘I think,’ Kathleen stated clearly but unemphatically, ‘it’s fucking awful.’

  Corpsed.

  On her unresisting bed Kathleen worked at the edges of sleep. She mourned Brutus, muddling him with Daisy from whom she had inherited him. Never mind, Daise, she said aloud in the coffin room of Passing Downs. He’s better off.

  When Daisy had failed to show that time, so long ago now, she had rung the number kept for emergencies. The neighbour told her Daisy was dead. In that choking noise-filled silence the man’s voice kept coming through with questions. Her things? Her dog? She hasn’t any things, she had told him. Nothing that matters. All the same she had taken a train down the bay and trudged up to the Shorncliffe headland, seeing the flat waters as Daisy must have seen them, day after day. It was true. Nothing. The cheap bits of crockery, the cut-out pictures from magazines tacked to the wall, the exhausted over-laundered bedding became now an ironic metaphor of the house she had just been wrenched from.

  Brutus was a large elderly dog of untrackable ancestry and a clumsy gentle temper. All he owned was a collar and a half-empty packet of dog food.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ she said to the neighbour.

  The neighbour ran them both back to town, Brutus lying miserably in the tray of the van. Kathleen held back her tears until her front door closed and then she managed to wipe off the last of her grieving on Brutus’s rough old coat. Within a week he had settled in, had the run of the house and slept on the front veranda. He now owned a new food bowl and a kennel which he rarely entered, but in the way of dogs he quickly re-established his loyalties, wagging as they watched television together, grunting, snoring, making appalling and uninhibited smells and putting up an elderly paw to be shaken. He thinks I’m Daisy, Kathleen admitted. We smell the same. Both old.

  So long, Brutus, she said in the sleepless dark and fumbled for a lamp switch. There was none. Easing herself out of bed she went to the bathroom and groped through her toilet bag for a pill, a blinder, a knockout drop.

  Ah!

  She stayed two nights, caused havoc at mealtimes by insisting on smoking, refused to join in the parlour games of scrabble or punt balls through croquet hoops on the lawn, packed an overnight bag and left on the morning of the third day.

  The taxi dropped her at the shell of her house and she told the driver to wait while she went inside. Her own pain had settled along with the dust on window ledges and the sun-scoured strips of floor. Shamrock had removed the last of the curtains. Even the mud-scraper mat was gone. No one had mentioned the results of the sale which, she imagined as she looked about, could not have amounted to much. The minister for transports must have
done a private deal with the Department of Main Roads. Where was her money?

  She went back to the taxi, her heart pumping faster with anger, and asked to be driven to the city. Her lawyer had rooms above a bookstore in Alice Street and her irruption was a compounded flurry of bile and absent-mindedness that overcame her suddenly as she sat in the waiting room. Her bladder was making demands. Why was she there? She was used to meeting Daisy near the washrooms in Adelaide Street.

  ‘The lavatory?’ she managed to ask the girl behind the desk, who stared at this crazy bag lady in distaste.

  ‘It’s for staff only,’ she said primly. (Go wet yourself!)

  ‘Tell me,’ Kathleen heard this old girl shout, ‘or I’ll piss the floor.’

  ‘Why, Kathleen,’ exclaimed a tortoise head poked round the opened office door. ‘After all this time! Show Mrs Hackendorf the conveniences, dear, and then bring us two coffees.’

  To her horror Kathleen found herself weeping, weeping as she rinsed her hands in the basin, weeping as she straightened her dowdy hat and came back into the outer office. Behind her the cistern flushed uncontrollably. The irritated receptionist went off with little mutterings to flick faulty levers. But Kathleen had remembered now why she had come, and even the luke-warm coffee and the client-geared easy chair failed to reassure her.

  The tortoise was telling her that the house had indeed been sold to a government department. (A screwed hanky dabbed at fury.) She had been foolish to sign away power of attorney. As far as he could see—and there was much paper shifting and pen fiddling—it was a private arrangement between her son-in-law and a state authority.

  ‘I want the money.’

  The solicitor smiled. ‘We can send a letter of demand.’ He smiled more widely. He loathed the minister, whose rudeness and self-complacency were of a glittering impregnability. ‘If you could prove force, that you were unaware of what you were signing. These things are difficult. Were you aware?’

  Kathleen could only shake her head. ‘I can’t remember.’

  The solicitor leaned across his desk and pinned her with his eyes. ‘You don’t know any journalists, do you? They could whip this up. The papers would love to get hold of something like this.’ Kathleen saw him momentarily licking his lips. ‘“State member renders mother-in-law homeless”.’ He tried a headline or two and Kathleen, drawn abruptly from resentment, found herself laughing.