Tag: Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

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Making Cake

I feel like baking. I feel like creaming butter and sugar till the mixture is pale and fluffy. It is one of the wonders of the world that sugar and butter can turn to this. Of course it is easy to do in this in the Sunbeam. The butter is cubed; usually it is still too cold from the fridge and the sugar is measured into the glass bowl. The motor is switched on and at first the mixers have trouble because the butter is too hard and the bowl vibrates and it all feels like it will never come together. Like an old car starting on a cold morning. Another image hard to conjure these days when cars start no matter what the weather. I use a spatula to push the stuff down to the centre so the mixers can start churning the butter and really soften it. It starts to change colour to a paler yellow as the sugar is rubbed into it.  The granules of sugar, so clearly detectable before, are dissolving. It is turning to something other than butter and sugar.

I wonder who thought this could happen. Who was the first to discover that sugar and butter could do such a thing? And the end result of cake has no resemblance to its individual ingredients . When the people of France were starving during the French Revolution and there was no bread the French Queen was supposed to have said – Give them cake. She lost her head shortly after. My mother loved to tell us this whilst creaming.

When we were very little, before my mother had a mixer, and even after she had one, since she wasn’t very good at using machines, she made cakes by hand. This meant beating the sugar and butter together with a spoon. By forearm and wrist. It was aching stuff. Everyone got a turn at sitting with the bowl in their lap and having a good beat. Till their arm was so sore and it was handed over to someone else. You needed to sit down with a tea towel in your lap because you didn’t want to be the one to drop the bowl and you were too little to do it on the bench.

The necessary implement for this is a wooden spoon and the butter must be soft. The cake making must be known to be happening and the cake maker has had to get the butter out and put it on the sink well in advance of the need to use it. It cannot be a spur of the moment decision to make a cake where the butter and sugar must be creamed. And who would make a cake that didn’t need creaming. It is the only real cake after all. Easy quick cakes that just need melted butter and are whisked together are not cakes, proper cakes, my mother would say. And so later when she turned to the White Wings packet cakes this was what I thought. The thing did rise, it was still soft and cake-like, but it wasn’t a proper cake. After all the thing had come from a cardboard box and white sachets had been ripped open and poured into a bowl and a bit of milk or only water added. How did they turn eggs to powder. Mother didn’t know but she thought it was marvellous. Hardly any beating was required. Somehow all these dry powders made a cake that before had needed work, real work.

Back to the real cake; the arm is aching and the adversary – butter and sugar – seems unbeatable. Then it happens that the two have melded. Slowly they have transformed themselves from two things separate and different to one thing – magical and soft. Perhaps ten minutes has passed.

Then the eggs are added. One at a time. Some one might have to go down to the chook house for more. Cracked into the bowl and whisked into the beautifully smooth mixture. But oh the mixture looks ruined. It separates and yellows and curdles into bits. All that work creaming seems wasted by the adding of eggs. But a mother knows this is just a stage. It’ll be better when some flour is added. The sifted flour is sprinkled in. It binds and heals the curdled mixture. Another egg – more flour. Some milk too. Pale yellow and air light the mixture is scooped into a baking tin, already lined with parchment.

Then there are spoons to lick and a bowl too. One sibling gets the spoons and the other the bowl. Depends how fastidious a mother has been to get all the mixture into the bowl. Who will get the better deal?

Jasper shares the mixers with no one. Being a single child he has no siblings to squabble with over whose turn it is for the bowl. So sometimes the mixture is too much for him. I am left with the bowl. Pushing a finger around its rim. Like a child again I feel furtive, even though I am allowed. Something tells me it is greedy to keep licking. To keep poking a finger about till every morsel of mixture is gone. The bowl hardly needs washing.

But the mixture is so good. Almost better than the cake. Always.

 

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Inside the Chook House

Don’t go inside the chook house without your thongs. Chances are you will step on something squishy and it will make you wince, jerk, scream a little even. Because the floor of the chook house is dirt and chicken poop and bits of rotting vegetables. Your mum has asked you to empty the chook bin. It lives under the sink and all the scraps are thrown into it. The dog wishes he was so lucky. It is a soupy mix of rotting things that the chooks go nuts about.

You are before an awkward age. Maybe ten or eleven. You have no breasts. You haven’t even thought about that. You have yellow terry toweling shorts on with a string tie. They are super short and your legs are like two brown leather straps. When you stand your knees overextend so your legs bow a little and your mum tells you this is an ugly way to stand. But it feels right. If you bring your knees forward you feel like you will crumple.

You love that you can run fast. But your hair bothers you. It never does what you want it to.  So different from everyone else’s. Your mother said it went strange when the hair dresser used electric clippers on it and you believe her. In baby photos you have normal hair. Something happened after that. Each hair now like it has had the fright of its life.

You take the bucket down the back yard and the chooks see you coming. They pile up around the entrance to their yard like paper blown. Some cheeky chooks attempt to fly to get to the bucket scraps first but each has had one wing cut so they can only do a flutter. Like a stalling engine. Putt putt. Crash.

Dad does the wing cutting.  My sister and  I do the catching. Cornered they crouch in fear. Picked up they are light, filled with air. One at a time we hand them to him. As he takes each chook up he calls her darling. He holds a chook under his arm and extends one wing. With hand shears, freshly oiled,  he snips the wing feathers and they float off like snowflakes. One of us must rake them after the job is done.

You enter the yard pushing them away with your thong-clad foot. Even in thongs you feel something wet slide beneath it. Ooh. Like you are hard wired to worry over texture. Like the way you can’t eat gristle and scramble egg makes you gag.  Then you empty the bucket and their heads go down, their feet start scratching away madly. They’re in chook heaven. Even the ones in the boxes have clambered out and come running. They bust through. Look pumpkin seeds. The vegetable detritus can’t be eaten mostly and just turns old and grey on the soil. It decays. And then dad puts it back on the garden to make more vegies.

You duck your head to go inside their house and search the boxes for eggs. Some are still warm. They fit perfectly in your hand. One at a time. You steal them while they fossick.

 

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At My Father’s Bedside

While I wait at my father’s bedside I read Cormac McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965, the year after I was born.  It is a bit of a vigil. There is something peaceful about watching the shadows change as the day progresses.  A yellowish glow tints the scene as the day goes on. All the while in the background the wind whooshes and whirs about the building. We are on the seventh floor of the hospital, up under the roof, and there is a view of sail boats on the Swan, like folded paper napkins. Another woman waits and watches too. She has the title  of PSA but I don’t know what it stands for. Her job is to sit and watch the demented, the wanderers, the ones who might decide to get out of bed and fall. She reads a thick book but she is close to finishing. I can tell it’s a romance from its cover; a damsel in the arms of an officer. The thin waisted beauty leans back but he traps her in his strong arms, moves his rock jaw close to her cheek.

My father is asleep. He has had a subdural bleed. Sandwiched between skull and brain there is blood. Now we wait. They check his eyes for light responses, lifting his lids like raising the morning blinds. He sleeps on.

Over pages the character from McCarthy’s book, Sylder, is in a physical fight for his life with a man he has given a lift to. It is 1933. They are fighting by the stationary Ford car on a dirt road. The man has struck the first blow, striking him with the car jack. The killing takes pages. One paragraph I read over;

“He was jerking at the man’s head but the man had both hands over it and seemed lost in speculation upon the pebbles on the road. Sylder let his hand relax and wander through the folds of the neck until they arrived at the throat. The man took that for a few minutes, then suddenly twisted sideways, spat in Sylder’s face, and tried to wrench himself free. Sylder rolled with him and had him then flat backward in the road and astride him, still the one arm swinging from his broken shoulder like a rope. He crept forward and placed one leg behind the man’s head, elevating it slightly, looking like some hulking nurse administering to the wounded. He pushed the head back into the crook of his leg, straightened his arm, and bore down upon the man’s neck with all his weight and strength. The boneless looking face twitched a few times but other than that showed no change of expression, only the same rubbery look of fear, speechless and uncomprehending, which Sylder felt was not his doing either but the everyday look of the man. And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter congealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose. Finally the man’s hands came up to rest on his arm, the puffy fingers trailing over his own hand and wrist reminding him of baby possums he had seen once, blind and pink.”

But still the man is not dead. He takes another page to finally succumb to the brutal force of Sylder. Finally extinguished the man relaxed “his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider.”

How hard he fights to hang onto life. How hard is it to die? Even old Dad seems to struggle on inwardly. Inside is he at war, dueling in hand to hand combat to hang on and not die? To emerge the victor.

The vivid richness of McCarthy gets me thinking about murder. I imagine bringing the pillow down, like in so many movies. I think of Francis. So many teenage tears shed watching Jessica Lang turn vegetable. Maybe the guard is here to protect Dad from me and what I might do faced with the diagnosis just given; “he might be starting to pass away.”

Lying in his hospital bed the nurse comes to clean his teeth, no matter that he is sleeping, or at least mimics it. No matter that clean teeth no longer seem a priority.  She asks him to open his mouth and he obeys. He has three teeth that she cleans with a bicarb swab rotating it around his mouth. When he’s had enough he bites down on it and attempts to draw it away from her. I think of a dog at tug of way. Ok you’ve had enough of that I see, she says. Give it up. The toothless gums hold the brush and then he lets go. He has won this fight. She retreats.

He sleeps on.

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Jasper and Goong Goong on Dying

When Jasper was about seven years old and his Goong Goong was already in his eighties we sat talking of death and dying. Jasper said the worst way to go would be wart failure. He qualifies the statement – you know covered in warts. He talks about this because he has one wart. A plantar wart. And it has bothered him.  Slowly it is going away, dabbed daily with some liquid. Jasper says the best way to die is as an old person – not sick or anything, just plain old. Goong Goong then talks about an old woman we all knew called Mary Nunn who died at the age of ninety when she was sitting in an armchair in her own flat holding some-one’s baby. A party went on around her and then someone realised she had passed away. Goong Goong says – that’s how he would like to go – holding Jasper’s baby.

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In the One Boat

One day when I visit Dad in hospital he asks me if Mum has divorced him. If not, why is she not here?

No communication, he says.

You’re not divorced Dad. She’s just up the street at the nursing home. You’re still married. Fifty years you’ve been married.

Because she might have a boyfriend up North somewhere. I seem to remember her going up that way to see someone when I wasn’t around.

What is the memory he has?

He looks confused. Like he is searching the back catalogue of his mind. Rifling through it.

I think she had a boyfriend once…

Or was that my mother?

He says mudda. His Dutch accent means that th sounds like d.

Dis and dat. Mudda and fudda and brudda.

She had boyfriends. Because my father was .. and he raises his fists, clenches and shakes them …always do this and do that.

But we didn’t know my brother and me. We were kept in the dark. All secret secret, hush, hush puppies.

Then he starts circling in on his parents’ marriage. But not penetrating deeper. Just that they separated. His mother strayed. His father was unkind. It is simple. In his face it looks like he wants to know more about why the separation happened. But he is still like the child he was then and there is no one to ask anymore. The time for asking has gone. And he missed it.

I can only guess how he might have felt. But I think it was bewilderment, abandonment.

Is my father dead? He asks.

Oh yes Dad, a long time ago,

I don’t remember the funeral, he says.

That’s because you didn’t go Dad.

And my mother?

Dead too.

You didn’t go to her funeral either Dad.

He wants me to explain to him why he didn’t go.

I don’t know Dad. Perhaps because it was a long way to go and in those days it cost too much money. Remember how you worried about money?

But I don’t know why he didn’t go. It was probably around 1976 and I would have been twelve. I don’t remember seeing him grieve.

When, as a child you see your father show no emotion at the loss of a parent, you wonder what’s wrong with him. Or perhaps he was parented so poorly that the grandparents warrant no tears.

You worry about what love is and why he doesn’t feel it. You wonder how you will feel about your own parents and if they died how sad would you be? You make excuses for his lack of emotion. Well he’s an adult now – that’s why he’s not crying when his father has died. But you feel he is missing a bit of his heart. You love your dog more than he feels for a parent. You bury your face into the side of the animal, despite its greasy seborrhoea, and imagine its death. It hurts so much that you can’t stay with the thought too long. Why does a brown Dachshund with a smelly coat and bad teeth so easily absorb all the love you have to give? There is something about fur and tears; sobbing soothed by fingers buried deep in animal hide.

Now my sister and I had no living grandparents. My mother’s mother had died when I was two and she had had no contact with her father since she was herself a six year old child after her parents had separated.

As teenagers we knew there was a more interesting story but my mother never let it be discussed. Her father had abandoned them. She had a simple explanation for his badness – a gambler spurred on by the Chinese and a drunk.

Her mother, our maternal grandmother was, on the contrary, worshipped. Mummy as she was called by her daughter had never enabled her children to know or love their father after the separation and although he lived into his eighties he never saw his children again. He was demonised and his attempts later in life to reconnect were thwarted by their belief that to see him would be disloyal to Mummy.

Even now, as an eighty five year old, my mother won’t allow more than a few minutes talk of her father before cutting the conversation off at the knees.

As far as the Dutch grandparents went they too were little known to us. Our Grandpa visited in the summer because he was a keen cricket fan, but my memory of him is of pipe smoke and a scratchy walrus moustache. He wore a look of jowly disapproval. We spent three months in Holland, me as an eight year old and my sister ten. To us our paternal Granny was European summer, roastie potatoes, dining out. Neither of the Dutch grandparents knew how to play with children or engage them. Seen and not heard types.

We had no connection to them and it seems my Dad felt little warmth to them either. Around them he took on a scolded boy look. He became reticent in his speech, a bit tongue tied, awkward. Now though they keep coming back to him like the past has pushed forward into the space normally occupied by recent memory. His early life; with all its disappointments, his short comings made plain by a strict father, have taken on more significance. Like they just can’t be held down any longer. They bob to the surface, never lost in the first place.

It is as if recent memory is fine dust, grit and it is sieved out, leaving the heavier more solid rocks of the past caught in the mind’s mesh. He worries these pebbles, over and over. He holds them between his fingers, feeling their smooth surface, reclaiming them as known.

As teenagers we wondered if our parents were suited to one another. We were concerned for what look to us as unfulfilled lives. Lives that were tragically dull and filled with work and banality. I think now how naïve we were to think that we could see something they couldn’t. We gave them no credit for just getting by. For sticking together.

Long into the night my sister and I discussed from our beds how much better off they would be without one another, or if they just concentrated on their own betterment. We wanted our Dad to quit his job and find a passion. We felt deeply that his work was a grind, where Aussies looked down on him and even made fun of him. We bemoaned his acceptance of a poorly paid job that he just did for the pay check. Hiding out in the garden or the garage on the weekends he was perpetually nagged and hen pecked by our mother whose soul purpose appeared to be yelling at him from the back door. Occasionally he would explode back and she would burst into tears. Their weapons against one another were simple; his – swearing, hers – tears. During the week while we were at school she watched Another World and Days of Our Lives and organised luncheons with her girlfriends. She had no career, no car and an inclination for snobbishness. To us they looked like two people, one boat, two oars, both rowing for opposite shores.

 

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The French Photographer

I find myself studying her. I look at the way her eyebrows are carefully manicured. She is younger than me. That always hurts. She has an imperfect neck compared to mine. But a beautiful neck, what is that? She has very large brown eyes with lots of white. A vessel breaks its perfection. She has a few brown moles on either side of her nose, small. Like dabs of cocoa. She has nice hands with delicate thin fingers and practical nails. Clear varnish, another thing that shows she cares, like the eyebrows.

She went to the tsunami. In February, after the rest of the media was gone. To see what was left behind. Who was going to stay to help clean up? How do you clean up? What would it have been like to see that? She wouldn’t have been able to pluck or wax eyebrows there, in the tsunami affected land. Or could she? With tweezers and a small compact mirror? Perhaps being French you do these things wherever you are. In mud even.

I am wondering if he finds her attractive. I find her attractive, so I think he must do too. Because we are like-minded. We appreciate the same things. I find myself less and less attractive the more I speak. I find my voice grating and gnawing inside my head. Compared to her, with her rolling r’s. With that accent. Audrey Tatou. Juliet Binoche.

Her French skin holds moisture, like her voice. There is lushness to her. A field of green. There is a softness to her cheek when she brings her face to yours that is so un-Australian. There has not been sun beating down on this complexion. Not drought affected skin. Under grey sky this skin has lived its life. Has lived off Brie.

I don’t know what he thinks about her. Yes, he likes her. But I don’t know if he compares us; wishes I was her, she was me. Why am I torturing myself over her? But to pretend there is nothing is not real. Yes, there is something there. Now I have said it I feel a panic in my stomach. A million beating moths, making their home; my ribs their cage, my heart the bright filament.

More tea perhaps. Something to settle and soothe.

What does it take to feel inadequate? Is it because he sits next to her. Is it because of the way he smiles? Is it the way, when her hand is on her computer touch-pad, his hand is there too, and then there is a moment.  A touch.

I imagine it happening when I am at home feeding pasta to a child and he is out entertaining the foreign photographers. Because it is his job to be out till two in the morning.

I have had a hundred dreams before I hear his key in the door. The dog acknowledges him. I hear his movements in the kitchen. I think he has been smoking dope. He is reheating food. I hear the beep of the microwave, zapping left over chops. I imagine him standing at the sink to eat. No knife, no fork, just a bone held between fingers. His lips smeary with grease.

He comes to bed. There is no smell of her. Nothing but beer and lamb fat. The child is coughing in the night. In the background to my dream, a staccato kuh kuh. As annoying as the mosquito the night before. But the boy is ill. The man gets up to him to administer the puffers. For he has had asthma. Once he nearly died in a volcanic town filled with fine dust. He lay on a hotel room floor dreaming of being able to breathe. He can relate. I only think; take a sip of water.

In the morning the boy is still coughing. He can’t finish his cereal. Rice bubbles at the back of his throat. At the chemist they ask questions when I want more Ventolin. Like I am a drug addict. Does he need it more than three times a week?

The child can’t take it without the spacer. He makes a fool of himself in the corner of the chemist shop trying to swallow a puff of spray. His shoulders are rounded, his chest a moist wheeze. I take him to the doctor’s to make an appointment. But it is after Easter and everyone must see the doctor. Just stop coughing. Don’t run. Don’t take big breaths if it hurts to breathe. Don’t laugh. Put a jumper on.

Should I buy Chesty cough or Dry cough?

Dry cough is just codeine really. It’ll make him sleep. Sleep. That’d be good.

What does the French woman think in her limestone converted stable apartment at the rear of the art gallery? With its steps and balcony that overlooks a rusted corrugated iron roof top. Does she think about him? His hairless Asian chest? Or is she interested in feral men. Ones with lots of hair. Ones that smell. Big feet, large noses.  For he is not this kind. This scent-less man. With small hands. An infectious laugh. A sleepy, harmless drunk.

He is my man, I think. Claim him as mine. For he is the father of the boy I love the most. He is the man that has brought me the son. A son is the honey, the home, the hurt. He is just that – to me and not to her. Don’t fear her, I tell myself. Bred from Brie. You from Gouda. You with the blue eyes not brown, with the skin too used to the sun, with the arms strong from obsessing with the sink, with the moles that need to be checked, with the breasts that have fed the child, felt his pull.

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Days with my Father

I had trouble with jobbies, he says. Even now as a woman in my late forties, my father using this word irks me. But there are no good words for it. Not my mother’s favoured expression inquiring about the opening of your bowels either. But definitely not jobbies.

So hard like a rock. I had to use my fingers and pull it out. He is showing me his hands, making an action like someone miming milking a cow.

Oh really.

Ooh yes. It was so hard.

A cleaner (she no doubt has a different title to this) tells me the toilet is blocked from too much paper. She keeps flushing despite this.

I relay the message. Dad don’t use too much paper.

Well of course I had to clean myself up after that. Maybe I used too much paper. I don’t know.

Well remember next time – use less paper. I think of saying “maybe not use your hand” but I don’t want to go there – to bring it up – to have to fully conjure the image.

Dignity is leaving him like fog lifting. Soon it’ll be gone completely.

I wander into the corridor to find a nurse. Two stand chatting beside a trolley. My dad, room 1226. I think he’s constipated. I don’t tell them how I know and they don’t ask. Normally, at the nursing home, he’d be given something for that.

She returns with a little plastic cup of vanilla syrup.

See Dad they have medication for that. You can ask the nurses.

I didn’t know that.

How’s the car? he says.

You don’t have a car anymore Dad. You can’t drive. I sold your car for you. Remember?

To be honest about it I don’t. I wouldn’t have a clue.

Where’s June? he says pointing to the ceiling with his thumb.

Lately he thinks she is upstairs in another part of the hospital, when he remembers he is in a hospital at all.

It’s a private hospital where nurses seem more akin to flight attendants than trained medical staff. You know it’s not vital that you get another gin and tonic, just be nice is all. But they’re busy. You can see that. Well that’s how it is here. Bells sounds. No one comes. Out of peanuts. Landing soon. Turbulence means we need to sit down and get our seatbelts on. They fuss with their charts, with their temperatures and blood pressure measurements making sure their pen marks are on the paper, the signature scrawled. But nursing, Nightingale-style takes time, takes talking. It means touching, using your senses; the real grit of nursing.

My father has had a partial penectomy. Perhaps you have to look that word up. Spell-check says there is no word but I know there is.

I’ll save you the trouble. It’s a penis amputation. Although he still has enough so that he can pee.

He needed this radical surgery because he had a squamous cell carcinoma on the head of his penis.

The cancer grew erosive and plaque like in a few weeks, shocking the staff at the nursing home with its rapid and seemingly malignant growth.

None of the staff at the nursing home had been faced with something like this before.

It was right before Christmas. My sister was in town with her daughter of five years old. Urologists, like most surgeons, take Christmas off. But we found one working through – not going the way of the Maldives. Infinitely practical, he saw little difficulty in the amputation surgery and excising the tumour.

We’ll leave enough length for you to hang on to he told Dad. So you can direct it down when you urinate. After all he just needs to be able to pee.

The doctor and my old dad are behind the curtain that does for privacy in the doctor’s rooms.

The receptionist has told me they have 7000 tracks on their i pod music selection. We’re all out of love, what am I without you … Air Supply takes me back to Countdown, Molly Meldrum. Dad loved ABBA, Blondie, Sheena Easton. If he heard a track now would it remind him? Would he remember being a Dad to teenage girls – hassling us at 5 o’clock on a Sunday night to clean up our rooms when Countdown was on and it was a matter of life and death to see who was Number one? .

I can’t see anything but I can hear my dad groaning. A pitiful sound. Unfamiliar. Animal. My sister and I wince together and raise eyebrows when we hear the doctor ask whether he is circumcised or not. We whisper to one another. Can’t he tell?

Why can’t he tell?

I have flash back of my father coming naked from the bathroom, sauntering down the hall to the laundry where he had his wardrobe. He never worried about modesty, till we were old enough to object strongly. He loved nudity, did my Dad. Maybe it’s a European thing, a Dutch thing. He cared little who saw him naked. He didn’t bother with the towel around the waist thing by the open car door at the beach. Just let it hang out. I remember the penis, elephant trunkish. Not circumcised.

The reason the surgeon can’t tell is because the tumour has pushed the foreskin back and the tumour has grown so that the prepuce can no longer move freely over the penis.

Dad can’t answer the question about circumcision. It’s equivalent to asking him the day of the week, the season of the year, what floor he is on.

I think back to the mini mental score chart. 13 out of 30 about six months ago. I wonder what he would get now.

Not circumcised, I pipe up.

Motherly.

The surgery went well. He seemed unaware that anything of such significance had happened to him. He said the nurses were taking his stuff and he was squirreling away sachets of jam and butter and mini boxes of cereal.

He started to talk of buying land at Leeman, a small fishing town north of Perth and somewhere I don’t think he has ever been. But the town name took hold.

But now after only two months back in the nursing home he is back in the ward again.

The remaining few centimetres of the penis has become woody the surgeon says. He thinks it is thrombosis after an ultrasound helps rule out recurrence of the tumour or infarction.

I can tell he’s not all that sure himself about why it has happened and what might happen from here. A hand rises to stroke the stubble on his shaven head. But he admits him for investigation and so I guess there is relief that something is being done or will be done or will be thought of being done.

I wonder how demystified the penis must be for this man who pokes and pulls and prods at them all day.

Because for a week before this the nursing staff at the old people’s home were wondering why the irritation, why the blood spots on the sheets and why the reluctance by him to let them clean up down there.

****************

I am sitting in his empty room. The bed has been made up but not with clean linen because I can see his breakfast stains, canary yellow egg and smeary cereal, on the white cotton blanket. Why do I think this means they don’t care about him?

Odd bits of clothing are about the room. I picture him getting them off and on unaided. Not really knowing what to put where. It’s not like the nursing home where the carers are really carers – deeply committed to his welfare. Cajoling and coaxing to get him to do it their way. Here the nurses are young, I sense they can’t be bothered with him. I hear my disdain for them in my writing. My contempt for their smooth skin. Give me an old nurse any day.

So I sit waiting. He shouldn’t be long I am told. Another ultrasound.

I’m new here, smooth skin says, I don’t know how long it takes.

The room is right by the desk, the nurses station they call it. Behind nurses gather, all chinking with their keys and badges and tags hanging off their belts and on bum bags about their waists. Beneath their Polly cotton tops and pants are detectable rolls of fat around their middles. Proof they don’t work hard enough I think or else is just everyone fat these days.

There’s lot of inane chatter. A nursing assistant says her husband thinks he deserves a medal for hanging up some washing. Another makes a phonecall to her own doctor requesting an appointment. Someone else is wanted but she’s at tea. Mrs So and So in room 14 has a temperature of 38.7 but is refusing Panadol.

A navy blue cardigan hangs over the back of a swivel chair like a cormorant hanging its wings out to dry on a pylon. But there’s no sea here. No wildlife. It’s decidedly hospitillian; low ceilings, the sounds of nurses moving – keys and tags rattling, trolleys, clanging pans, lift bells. There’s a whiff of meths, antiseptic, a chesty cough, old heart patient shuffles, a doctor’s voice – see you tomorrow.

In the end I leave without seeing him this day. There’s a limit to how long I can look at thin Venetians, count terracotta tiles on the roof opposite, read his chart.

But I still feel guilty leaving. If someone asks me I will say I have a school thing to do. And I have a life, or at least I want one.

It’s the time of the year that corellas come in large flocks. They hang from their toes on olive trees and harvest the fruit, staining their feathers with oil. They waddle on the grass with their seemingly over large heads and heavy beaks but then take to the air as a gang, squawking and marauding. Not a pretty bird song. A truly Australian sound. The Bikies of the bird world.

******************

He is going home. Back to the nursing home where he has lived for nearly a year. But he has no memory of it as a place he knows when I talk of it.

To be honest I haven’t the faintest clue, he says time after time when I ask him if he can picture the place.

When I arrive on the ward to take him home he is lying corpse like on his back, his mouth open, eyes closed. Lately his cheeks have begun to sag inwards and the shape of his skull is more noticeable. I think about the way old dogs lose their temporal muscles on their heads as they get really old, sometimes when they have cancer that seems to strip them of their meat. When you place a hand on their heads there is just bone beneath skin. Dad’s skin too seems draped over the bones, falling with gravity towards the hospital floor. Again I notice the stained bed linen.

He has his nightshirt on over his polo shirt, socks on, but no underwear. He doesn’t know whether he’s been to the toilet when questioned about his bowels.

There are little bits of dried blood on his face where he has nicked himself dry shaving.

You’re going home today Dad.

Is it a big place?

Your room is bigger than this.

It’s a nice place, Dad. Mum is there. She’s waiting for you.

Mum is having her hair done. Each time the in-house hairdresser is mentioned my mother tells me how she is a breast cancer survivor. Lost a bosie, Mum says. Another cringing word uttered by your mother.

My mother has a love hate relationship with the hairdresser. The hairdresser wants her to come more often but my mother doesn’t like to sit there while the set takes and the hair dries and the colour is put in. It is a test of patience that my mother fails. Waiting isn’t something she is good at.

The carers are putting Dad in the room and I go and find Mum to tell her he is back. She sits in a wheelchair, hair tightly set and teaky, waiting for someone to take her back to her room. She is happy to hear that he is back but worried too.

Last time he went to hospital he came back very confused, wanting to go to Leeman and convinced he was not staying in the home.

This time he shows he recognises some of the staff and their room.

But who knows really. He doesn’t want to disappoint either. Something somewhere tells him he ought to know. He ought to remember.

When Mum gets back to the room and she exclaims Darling you’re back he throws his arms in the air and says Ah Nicole. It is my name. But she doesn’t mind. She knows he recognises her. Just as he calls me June when he sees me in the hospital, he also calls her Nicole. We are the two lone moons circling his planet. The names are interchangeable.

From her wheelchair and him from his chair they reach for one another, tottering forward awkwardly and give each other a peck. The bony hands grasp each others.

It is lunch time in the home and together everyone decides to eat in the dining room. He hasn’t had much company in hospital and we all think it is a good idea. Using the frame and with Carol the carer beside him, gripping the back of his trackie pants, we head towards the dining room.

Other residents comment on Mum’s hair. She looks tidy.

Alex is struggling. He is stooping and might not make the table. Carol gets someone to bring a chair and he seems to collapse into it, almost passing out. He has gone a poor colour. The sagginess of the checks seems exaggerated. Three carers are about him as he closes his eyes. One has her hand on his pulse and Carol is behind him holding him into the chair that otherwise he might slip out of.

They keep asking him his name. And he says yes. Still here, he says.

A hoist is brought out to elevate him and get him from the armchair to the wheelchair. He is scooped up like a baby bird. His skin is like the unfeathered bird’s, showing the architecture beneath. A carer has a hand on his chest. Can she feel the baby bird’s heart beating within the thin rib cage?

Back in the room the hoist is used again, lifting him from the wheelchair and over towards the bed. I think of harnesses for Para gliders and kite surfers. I think of the daredevils whipping over the ocean at Leighton and then see Dad’s hands clinging to the metal as he hovers between chair and bed.

His blood pressure is low and the nurse thinks he has lost weight in hospital. She thinks maybe he didn’t eat. Maybe he didn’t. I ticked the boxes. I ordered the food, but I was not there at meals and I wouldn’t know if it sat untouched. Just as they ignored his bowels I wonder if they checked under the lid of the plate.

I leave him as he is falling asleep again, spittle snail-trailing down his chin. I exit through the dining room passing Mum on the way out while she works her way through meat and gravy. All of them at their plates like herd animals with their heads in a feed trough.

He’s okay I reassure her, just low blood pressure. Needs a rest.

When will you be back?

Tomorrow.

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How to not get in trouble

Jasper is at cricket. It is his third day of five hours per day at an expensive boys’ school.

A man not right in the head asked if he could feel his hair. What kind of man? We are on the bed together while I quiz him. I am getting dressed because when you are paralysed dressing means rolling around on the bed, moving the lifeless legs like they belong to someone else. The dog is with us. Jasper is rolling with the dog. I am rolling with my trousers. Occupied by movement he often comes out with stuff. The other place to talk is in the car when there is no eye contact. The worst place to talk is the kitchen table.

The man wished he was playing cricket in the under nine’s, Jasper says. My mind goes to paedophile. What was this man doing there I ask, not wanting to sound alarmed, alarming. He knows I am worried. I am always a dead give away. Did you let him feel it I ask? Well kind of. I got away from him pretty quick because he was kind of weird. The man spoke like a kid but he was an adult says Jasper.

In my head I am asking Was this man a pervert? Or was he an innocent keen on the blonde, messiness of a small dude’s hair.

I don’t spend too long on these thoughts. I can extrapolate. I can delve beyond.

When I was in primary school I took sweets from a man as I walked home. He was an old man; I think he wore a large coat. He handed out sweets from a crumpled paper bag and I took them. Boiled lollies; the type that take ages to suck down to nothing, so I had to dawdle to avoid getting home before the sweet had dissolved to nothing. Till the evidence was gone. My tongue worrying the indents of my molars where the stickiness stuck. The only bad thing about it, I thought, was that it could rot your teeth.

Then in Assembly, the entire school sitting crosslegged on the verandah, the dusty boards dirtying our school tunics, we listened to the head master talk about not taking sweets from strangers. Had I been seen? Told on? There had been reports and it was dangerous. How so, I wondered. But nobody said how so. I thought maybe the sweets were poisoned. I thought of the old man who gave the sweets and how sad he looked and how much sadder he would have been if I had said no to the sweets. I wanted to defend the old man and say the sweets were good, really good.  And taking the sweets had made him smile. But I didn’t want to get into trouble for having taken the sweets in the first place.

When asked in assembly if anyone had taken sweets from the old man no hands went up. Heads swung round and we all looked at oneanother, but no hands went up.

There was a cemetery near where we lived as kids and my sister and I spent many hours in its unkempt bushland.  It was a wild, hot place. Its bush rang with cicadas and the earth was dry and cracked under our feet. Gravestones were lopsided, flowers were old or plastic and weeds grew. Large black crows picked their way over headstones cawing. Dead leaves and twigs underfoot rustled with the movement of disturbed reptiles. For suburban kids it was our wildnerness.

Only the soldiers’ graveyard was well kept with green spongy lawns and rose gardens. Here we were solemn. This part we visited with our parents, walking peacefully, reading plaques. Marvelling at young death. Imagine dying at 18. Our parents had taught us to respect this part of the cemetery. We weren’t permitted to rush around it or make a noise. Just like church, but outdoors.

But the remainder was a playground.  When our parents banished us from the house on a hot summer’s afternoon, when they couldn’t bare more Monopoly, we rode off on our bikes to the cemetery, dropped them in the gravel and played on fallen tree trunks and behind grave stones. We were nearly always alone. Sometimes people passing through, or walking their dog looked at us askance and we would still ourselves till they passed on.

Here we came upon a man who turned and opened a coat to show us his erect penis. We skedaddled. On bikes, we could get away fast. Gravel crunching beneath black rubber. Back to the pavement, outside a house with a picket fence. Safety. We were surprised. What would he want to show us that for we asked one another? No pleasure could be gained from that sore and swollen thing, surely. We knew it was weird. And children have an instinct to run and avoid weirdness. We thought we were somehow to blame for what we had seen. We instinctively knew that we would be in trouble for having seen it. So we told no one. Telling no one means you stay out of trouble. Just like taking the sweets. No one but the old man who gave them to me knew I took them. Then how could I get in trouble.

Because when your nine you just don’t want to get in trouble.

You want to play fair. You don’t like people who cheat. Jasper gets out in cricket first ball and the coach, the nineteen year old, tells him it is up to him if he is out or not. But he was stumped fair and square so he says he is out. Otherwise it is cheating he tells me. No one wants to cheat like the English.

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Waiting for the Miracle

 

In the foyer of the hotel I meet a man. After drinks he is braver and asks what he has wanted to know from the moment he saw me in a wheelchair. Always the story of how. But really the story of after, the story of before, or the story of why goes unsaid, unpicked. It is there in the picture if you know how to look.

 

A car hits a tree. Fast hits hard. Wood is unforgiving. Aged carbon is as solid as stone. Bone is weak. Honeycomb really. The things I tell him are; that I was not the driver. I don’t want him to think it was my fault. Somehow that makes it better for me. Yes I was wearing a seatbelt. The driver fell asleep. Nothing more sinister than that. We were all tired.  She was just doing what the rest of us had already succumbed to. The sleep that comes after surf and sun.

 

He goes to his room. I go to mine. I suspect he wears a toupee. These are the kind I attract. He walks soundlessly on carpet to the stairs in shoes that have never seen the dirt. I point to the lift. I remember climbing stairs, barely.

 

****

 

The things I don’t tell him.

 

Through the car windows the sun streams in slats made by trees and branches. Like interlaced fingers across your face. Ribbing the road. There is the hum of tyres. A melody of sleeping notes. The sand is still between my toes and in the dip of my belly button. Salt has dried in my hair, so it is like tendrils of thin stripy seaweed. I suck a strand of it like a baby does a finger.

 

I wear a second hand dress from an op shop from a country town run by old biddies and not gone through like the second hand shops in the city. It is synthetic and sweaty but beautifully cut. It makes my armpits moist and saltier still. It is cream with black flowers. Who would have thought of black flowers? As they slice it from my body in the hospital it is binned in a disposable bag. It is just a $2 frock but I miss it still.

 

My boyfriend comes to see me in the hospital. All brown and surfy. His hair stiff with sea. It is a cruelty he can’t imagine. I can smell the salt on him, worse than any perfume. He is more than a boyfriend. We live together. We’ve left other people so as to entwine ourselves more completely than vine and post.

 

She comes too, the girl who seems beside him a lot these days. She was in our lives before all this happened. Before the tree and the car collided as if they were magnetised to each other.

 

******

 

 

The Story of Before;

 

She is blonde, but so am I, so that is not the reason. She is young, but so am I, so that is not the reason. She is bright, but so am I, so that is not the reason. She wants him and so do I, so that is not the reason. She is her, and I am I, so that is the reason.

 

When I enter the uni social club, where I meet him after lectures, he is there and so is she. Always these days their schedules are the same. And they are doing this or that project together. This assignment is due tomorrow; they will need to work late. I can see their faces are too close together to be talking of study. Is his skin touching hers? They are magnified to me. I analyse every movement she and he makes. This is Anita, he introduces her.

 

What kind of man is he? Sinewy but stooped. He needs Yoga. I already know the bends, the postures. He copies me but never learns. His body won’t soften, his spine stays curved.

 

After an argument, heated and passionate, there is no making up. A touch from me is rejected. Don’t. Our bodies, like shop dummies, lie apart in the bed wishing it could cleave itself in two.  I lie on my side looking out to the wardrobe, seeing my reflection in the grey-spotted glass. Then I am pushed from the bed by his feet in the middle of my back. Boof. On the floor. Like a child who has rolled out in their sleep. But no one is there to cradle and soothe and place me back under the covers. So on hands and knees I make my way to another room and curl asleep on a chair.

 

He is so clever with words. Was that the reason? He writes reams and reams. He fills yellow pads with scrawling epic poems. He wants me to read it. To praise him. Always about love, he writes, and God.  If I take too long to read it, because I have my own study to do, he is offended. It means more than I am busy too. It means I do not care about him. It means I do not care for the things that are important to him. Of course it means I do not love him.

 

I must convince him of my love.

 

But his need for love is fathomless. Like the open cut mine it is deep and ugly and scarred. I fill it time and time again but it is a piddling attempt to pack the gaping hole. It is turning into something else between him and me. He is making me compete with her and I am losing.

 

She is more capable.

 

We are living together in a student house. We eat eggplant and beans. We heat the house with a fire. We collect wood from vacant blocks. We can’t afford a trailer of mallee roots. The landlord has many cats that he comes daily to feed. Like bats they appear at dusk when his car pulls up outside. He leaves the diesel motor running and it beckons the strays. From under old car bodies and out from under limestone foundations cats pour like liquid fur. He stands beside the boot, dishing out the entrails and carcasses he has brought. There is the odd hiss and claw as they saunter back to their hideaways with their bounty.

 

Inside the house we are two people at war over scraps. Scraps of love that are torn at like rags. He wants to go to her. She is a fresh thing, he has yet to tread on and make soiled with sadness.

 

 

******

 

The Story of After;

 

Now I am injured he has remorse. But it is also an escape for him. He can be injured too. How dreadful to have a girlfriend so handicapped, such a burden. He must make daily trips into hospital and sit by my bedside. He must drive past the surf.  He must leave his trail of sand on the lino for someone to sweep.

 

Sometimes she is with him and she is sweet and kind. I cannot believe that I like her. I want to be her friend. She starts to come without him. We both wear no makeup. Her skin burns in the sun. Mine tans. But in hospital there is no sun, just harsh buzzing fluorescence. Our skins have the same milkiness. I am fading into the sheets. When I wake up from another surgery her hand holds mine.

 

She unburdens herself and tells me she was with him, entangled, coiled beneath cotton, as the car hit the tree. She was warm and wrapped in flesh while my bones bent and broke like twigs.

 

Her confessions are tearful. We both weep. She is crying for her own self and me for mine. Again we are the same. She doesn’t want him anymore. I can have him. I can.

 

He talks about garden paths and pushing me in my wheelchair through the forest. He can make this and that. He can convert, he can carry up stairs. Beside the hospital bed beneath the cotton of his boxers I give him a hand job.

 

Back in the house of cats we have ramps and an open bathroom. Men friends with tools have converted the kitchen and bathroom so that a wheelchair can manoeuvre and a hand control is put in the car, and it all sounds so easy to just convert and rearrange, but inside the house the house is different. I see it from the height of a seven year old. There is a clunking to movement, a sound of wheels and squeaky rubber tyres on floorboards. No one says you will miss the sound of bare feet.

 

I can get into an armchair and remember my legs. I can close my eyes and when the phone rings go to get out of the chair to answer it before my mind registers there is a new way to do this that involves no legs. Getting up without legs. All arms. Hauling around legs that are weighty in their uselessness but as good as amputated.

 

Burn me and cut me and still they do nothing. I wish them gone for all the good they are. Separated by him, so he can still call what we do love making.

 

More girls. This time they are different from me. They walk. They can feel their vaginas. I can’t compete. I don’t want to compete. He has made me a non competitor.

It is not enough to love someone with all your might. To squeeze every ounce of love you have into it, so that you are a husk after all the wringing is done.

 

 

******

 

The Story of Why;

 

I will go from him. To my own place. I will worship things like monumental rocks that the indigenous people prefer you don’t climb. In their magnificence I will seem small. I will wake up at dawn so I can look out to the sunrise and watch it slowly make its way upward and in its rising feel my own self soar. I know I look sad, but it is not sadness you see in my face. It is the face of someone who knows loss, and knows that in losing there are great gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rottnest

There are six adults and six children under nine. It is a military style operation to get there; to make sure we all have our beach gear, Italian coffee maker, global knife, parmesan grater.This year we didn’t take the eggshell foam mattress to put atop the hard bed with its slippy vinyl cover. Later we regret that, when we wake stiff and feeling our middle age. It is a half hour ferry ride across choppy water. There are the women at the accomodation office to get past. Each year the scrutiny of the Rottnest Island Board gets more intense. Soon they’ll be retinal screening.

There are three boys who are between eight and nine years old. Two are blonde (one has never washed his hair) and one is dark. The dark haired boy is the elder, freckled and takes the lead. They become specks on the beach. What can they be talking about as they amble, the three of them, towards a large sand dune with a boogie board to send down the slope. They love to ride their bikes and go to the shops unattended by an adult. This is the first year that they have seemed mature enough to do it. They must buy white sugar for the morning pancakes. They get sugar cubes by mistake and I am reminded of sucking a sugar cube, feeling it dissolve between tongue and roof of mouth.

Soon they are angling for a yoyo each. They are counting up their coins. They ask for paper and a pen so to do the maths. Hugo The Brave is the one to ask the adults for the extra cash required. At first it is four dollars then it is ten. No is the answer.

But there are rocks to climb, quokkas to count and the West End to reach and seals to see that loll like fat women on lilos. Their flippers poke from the water, warming themselves in the midday heat.

At Longreach the dunes are irridescently white. The weather is fine. So fine that the water is a relief. Its coolness can be a shock. Ears ache after a big swim. The bay’s seaweed is a deterrent. Pete and I swim out to the green buoy and beneath us swims a ray, bigger than our arm span. A Steve Irwin ray. We watch the water. Its rhythm and its beat.

The boys catch inedible fish from Fay’s bay, but on  Baboo’s boat they manage to catch skippy to eat. On the jetty they catchbug eyed squid and, dropped on the boards, the squid gives a fluorescent light show. Into the inky bucket they bring back to the cottage Emma reaches and pulls out the squid. She prepares and shallow fries its sweet flesh and we all eat the entree the boys have caught.

Rottnest is about the beach and the sun and the hunger for large lunches. Masses of bacon for nine BLTs. Wine in the afternoon on the verandah watching the sky change colour. Sitting on the couch that has been manouevred outside with my feet up I read William Maxwell. Music is discussed endlessly. 1001 songs to hear before you die. The Rolling Stone mag is bought – a Beatles tribute. We can see the mainland in its haze of heat and smog.

We have a dinner at the pub and fend off the seagulls that threatened to steal the kids’ food. The littlies bring cups of seashells from the beach to tip on the verandah. To the right of the blip on the horizon that is Perth smoke can be seen. The next day we discover it is the Claremont council chambers that have been lost to fire. Riding back to Longreach Bay at night the boys must avoid the quokkas that poke from the road like furry rocks.

The boys take sand into their beds at night and scrunch up their sheets. They climb in and out of their bedroom window and leave wet board shorts on the floor. They wear the same t shirt for days and their skin begins to brown. Jack gets sunburnt under his eyes.

Camilla has the youngest children and she is curtailed by the timetabling of naps. The toddler and the baby fight over the beach equipment. Afterall it is new and shiny and the green beach watering can is a very fine thing. The bucket wars. The wear your hat war. Wars over sunscreen and wearing your rashy. There are treats handed out and eaten with a coating of fine white beach sand. Raff is three and desperate to be included in the games of the big boys. Hi guys, where are the boys? He does his bit in the construction of the beach pyramids and the lining of the river Nile with beach grass trees.

Pete, Graham and Troy use the skim ball till their middle-aged shoulders are aching. They switch to their non preferred arms and laugh at their girly throws. Beach cricket  gets too competitive and the small boys have wandered off and left the Dads to it.

In William Maxwell’s So Long See you Tomorrow I read “My father was all but undone by my mother’s death” and I love the use of undone. The idea of the man unravelling, of him never being whole in the first place. In my head there is an image of the man, the heart of him threaded as if by a shoelace and then it is gone and he has spilled out.

Yoyos are bought. One is dodgey. Jack has the dodgey one. It pivots and fails to come up its string. Donk it hits the ground. They are for ever winding them up. Hugo’s is working and Jasper’s too. Graham can still Walk the dog and Round the world and Baby’s cradle. Remember Coke vs Fanta.

When Hugo, the nine year old, must go home to the big smoke of Sydney the two eight year olds are without their rudder. The two blonde boys  are undone. They go into a slump, saying Rottnest is no longer fun without Hugo, and it takes them a day to rediscover their own spirit. Jack gets a new Yoyo. It works better. Monopoly deal around the table, but Pete feels the need to get outside and ride. Otherwise children could end up embedded with crazy bones.

Jo and Steven’s kids turn feral after dinner. There are four screaming children in a mosh pit on the floor by the sink. Louder than loud. Pete suggests no holidays with children under five. Tom Tom is forced to give  beetroot a go and proceeds to vomit over the verandah rail.  A bucket of water is sloshed across the concrete. Emma can’t stand it any longer. I’m done, she says, retreating to her cottage. Steve and Pete argue the virtues of the calender ap vs the To do list ap of their Iphones. Neither will back down.

The boats in the bay turn to signal a change in the breeze. Near the shop the sound of the large wind energy vane; whoosh whoosh.  Monotonous and beautiful. Ducks on the ocean. The wind sings through the Rottnest island pines. A family stands outside their unit while a metre long Dugite snake slithers around their yard, tongue flicking. It slips around their bike wheels and through a helmet that lies on its side.