Tag: parents

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Neighbours

We live on a dead-end. At the end of the road is a park. Three federation workers cottages, built-in 1905, border the grassy reserve where the council has planted paper barks, and then tried to kill them repeatedly by ring barking their base with rampant whipper snippering. They struggle on. The houses have seen many young lives grow within. The wide jarrah boards of the hallways have been indoor cricket pitches. The verandahs have been taken off and put back on again. There is a limestone wall and beyond that the playing fields. There are drunks and homeless, dog walkers and legitimate park users. Over the years the park has seen a lot too – a murder even and much fornication. But we have the mown lawn in front of our houses mostly to ourselves. It is the playground of our children and our hounds. Murphy snorts amongst the fallen fig tree leaves. In the winter I find the last of the sun and sit in it while Jasper kicks the football to himself. The paper barks are his goal posts. He is Ablett, Ballantyne, Betts. Always kicking the winning goal in the dying seconds of the game.

We are awaiting the arrival of other children back from school. Keep a look out Mum, Jasper suggests to me. They will be meandering slowly down the hill.

For the children of our neighbours have become a tribe. Three boys and three girls, including a baby who knows not what she is in for yet.

We are the neighbours. Four couples. Some are nudging forty, others closer to fifty. We all work but some like it less, and do as little as possible. There seems a lot of time for ukulele, banjo, Mad Men, coffee bean roasting, Breaking Bad, foreign language lessons, Pilates class, cervical disc extrusion surgery, banana bread making, vegetable growing and the deep and discerning discussion of the pros and cons of all of the above. At the end of the weekend we converge in the shared space of the red cement driveway. The last house on Shuffrey is part of our tribe. In its front yard it grows the vegetables. Corn has been replaced by Broad Beans. In the summer the large Lemon Scented gum provides shade. Now we seek out the winter sun and try to stay out of the wind. Men are pulled away from their cleaning car meditation and women emerge from the house. No-knead bread has been left to rise. A thermomix is making the béchamel sauce, without the need for stirring. School clothes are flapping on the lines. The mini has been detailed with stickers since her paint job. She now has her Mayfair title back above her bumper. The late seventies BMW 635 is being prettied for sale. The dogs are let out. Stan and Murph have some rambunctious play-fighting to do. I have returned from work in a strikingly unpolished and dirty Subaru. Sometimes there is tea and cake. More often there is beer and wine. A high chair in the driveway; and the baby can be fed spag bog here too.

Sally is arriving home after the young girls’ ballet class. From the cavernous insides of a Prado peel two giggling soft pink prima ballerinas. They have ballet flats and leotards and each has a sparkle on their cheek for their good pas de deux today. Marshmallow pink tutus. Their different shades of blonde are pulled back into identical pony tails. Boys erupt from around the side of the house. They have shooting equipment. Numerous Nerfs. Jasper is the eldest of the tribe, at ten years old, and the ages flow down from there. It is as if he has five younger siblings. He has a younger brother, three years below, and then the twin sisters and another younger brother and finally the baby, crawling. Jasper is the one making up the games, climbing the walls, jettisoning the missiles, putting the tennis racket on the car port roof. The next boy is not far behind. The girls form a tight bond. They like to draw and create. They like to change outfits and help their mothers. The boys are busy spying on them, hiding from them, escaping from them, teasing them, making them cry. The smallest boy, finger nails painted sky blue, would like to keep up with the bigger boys, but they are often too fast for him and sometimes he is left standing in the driveway, wondering which way they went, holding his well loved Tiger and pondering if perhaps he should play with the girls, who after all, are closer in age and not as quick. It is his dilemma.

For us – the parents of the single, oldest boy, we are gifted a bigger family. Jasper has siblings. Almost. He has someone to kick with, to boss, to look out for, to take care of, to be bossed by, to trade with, to be burdened by. He has someone under the duvet with him on the couch as they all watch Robots into the night. Someone snuggling up, someone pushing a bare foot into his ribs. It helps assuage the guilt over not providing him with siblings of his own. He has the neighbours…and the very best of dogs.

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Maurice Sendak on ageing…

In the New Yorker May 21, 2012 Mariana Cook writes of her photographic session and interview some years later with the elderly writer Maurice. Looking at the photo of him and his dog he says,

“I am in my bathrobe in the forest with my dog, Herman, who is a German shepherd of unknowable age, because I refused to ever find out. I don’t want to know. I wish I didn’t know how old I was. This is far more than I expected, far more than I need, far more than I desire. I didn’t think I’d live this long.”

 

Thinking of ageing, I read a tweet by Alain de Botton. A parent with their child: ‘it will take at least 40 years till you’ll understand what I am feeling for you now.‘ How true is that! It has taken me this long to really know what it might have been like for my mother and father to be parents. It requires the experience of parenting your own child. I have much more empathy for my parents now and the choices they made. When I was a child I thought their decisions were unfair, that they didn’t understand me, that they didn’t let me do, or have, the things I wanted out of some kind of spite or mean-spiritedness. To think they were merely trying to do what I do now. And sometimes struggling.

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An Old Diary…Part 1

Two women in their forties are in the house of their childhood. Once they shared a bedroom. They made a cubby between the Jacarandas with jarrah pickets and hessian wheat sacks. They are sorting for a garage sale. Already so much has been dumped in a skip and thrown on the verge. They are hoping gold bars may be unearthed. Instead they find dried apricots, turned black. Neither of them wears much makeup. Both need glasses to read. One chews her nails. One has the start of grey streaking her brown hair. They both have wrinkles, but they have congratulated each other on their flawless necks.

They find old school reports. They find christmas decorations, made in kindergarten, when children were still permitted to use toilet rolls for craft activity. Of course the house feels shrunken, or else they feel giant-sized. So much of it is unchanged. The smell of their parents bedroom…

***

I hear my sister walking up the hallway, taking the steps in an easy stride. She is wearing corduroys. We are both practical, sensible people. Or so we like to think. Neither of us is too sentimental. We don’t wear high heels. We are going to sell the house. The one thing we hope is that they keep the tree. A hundred foot tall Lemon Scented Gum in the backyard. She is enormous and gracious. Her trunk is grey and smooth with muscular branches stretching out from her sides. She can been seen from streets away. She is scary during storms when she hurls her canopy like a mad woman shaking out her long locks. Both my father and mother loved the tree. After all it was living.

I am in the front of the house. We sisters can call to one another. Oh God look at this! My mother has kept her wedding dress. The once white lace is yellowing. We find hand embroidered baby dresses wrapped in tissue paper. Who would have thought our mother had the patience and skill for smocking? On high shelves, where they could no longer reach or see, we bring down all sorts of decaying and rotten matter. Moths have gone to work. The remnants just paper away. We come across the diaries of my mother. She is still living. It is wrong to read someone’s diary, right? Not until they are dead. But my mother is not a detailer of emotions. It is not a journal. It is more a list of what happened when. She would not have written down something she wanted hidden. She is also the type who stops herself thinking, to make it not so. I think she believes that pain and death can be erased by the not speaking of them; a child only seeing a smidgen between the fence of fingers that hide a face.

She read aloud from her diary at night, to my father – trying to get him to remember their holidays; in an attempt to will away his dementia. On finding the box of diaries neither of us hesitate to open them. We don’t ask her, perhaps believing we know she won’t mind. Or else feeling some kind of ownership over them. We think they are about us, after all. We are interested most in the oldest diaries. The ones from when she was more our age. When perhaps we shared the same fears and anxieties. What did she think as a mother with toddlers? We look for a version of ourselves in her. Will we end up the same? What’s in store? Perhaps an understanding of the past will make her more knowable to us…

My sister takes ownership of the one from the year of her birth and I have the one from mine, 1964. So much of it is blank. I have to make up my own imaginings of her daily life. She tells so little in it. She plants ranunculi. Her mother is ill. That much I can tell.

January 13, 1964: 28 days since last period. 2nd babe on the way. How do I tell if she was happy? I know she miscarried many times. Perhaps she doesn’t expect the baby to stick. Why write that you are excited when it could be swept away from you all too soon? Growing up we heard the stories of her driving herself to the hospital, blood running down her inside thighs, a boy baby delivered, formed enough to have a sex, but never given a name.

Then about my sister, who is about 15 months old, she writes; January 31st 1964: Lisa’s eye teeth at last through. Will be 14 teeth. Trying to stand.

Then on February 25th she writes again about her pregnancy with me – told Mama and Aunt. Again I will never know what they thought. Maybe they thought it was too soon. Maybe they feared the pregnancy would slip away.

On March 5th 1964 she writes; Leila killed accident-road. Alice F died. Nothing more. I think about my own accident. In a diary somewhere has a sister written; Nicole car accident – paralysed. A mother written; Nicole accident-road – might die. What tears are hidden beneath the blue fountain pen scrawl? Who was Leila?

March is a bad month. On the 12th and 13th there are entries; Alex heard bad news re job. Gone to see Spencer re job. Alex lost job. Terrible blow – but may get one with Dept Agriculture. Alex v.brave. Terrible blow – it means more because it says so little. Dad struck like the pin belted by a bowling ball. Topple. Fall.

On Easter Sunday March 29th Lisa walked by herself.

9th April 1964 she writes; To Safety Bay, one week’s holiday. Yummee! Lovely cottage all mod cons and we are v happy. Is yummee a code to herself? A word she reads and knows the true meaning of.

On Friday 24th of April they saw Lawrence of Arabia. Wonderful! Peter O’Toole really memorable. And then on Anzac day Baby’s movements, felt quickening. Lisa walking well. But she must have been concerned about my sister’s walking since the next day she visits her doctor at the nurse’s suggestion and she writes; Dr thinks she is alright but she would have to be xrayed for surety. He will see her later.

The following day there is lunch with her mother; Mama lunch. She seemed tired and hectic, to say the least. To say the most, did she argue with her mother?

April 29th 1964; Lisa walking a lot more and going down steps by herself. Looks like rain.

May 5th 1964; 9st 6lbs, 2lbs gain. Dr Pixley, all clear, no wait at all. Fundus correct position. Lisa walking v.well. Seedlings planted. Sweet peas by garage. So in a time before ultrasound a simple measurement of the uterine fundus height suggests the baby was in a normal position. A mother is relieved enough to spend time on her knees in the garden.

May 7th 1964; Alex has job Agriculture Dept. Starts 25th May South Perth. It is a relief. Salary 1011 pounds per annum. He stayed in this job till he retired. His superannuation still funds my mother’s nursing home fees.

June 10th 1964; Dr Linton Lisa eye appoint. Lisa’s eye good. Hooray!

I imagine my mother, pregnant with me, worrying about her toddler who has a funny eye and is slow to walk. Her husband has been out of work and he is earning money doing odd jobs for neighbours, like cement edging for Mrs Elliott. She writes when they receive a hundred pounds from a Dutch relative, Aunty Zus. She visits her mother and her Aunt and plants annuals in the garden. She takes the toddler to the doctor and waits for me to arrive…..

1964 To be continued….

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Doing Tax…

My tax return is late. Horrendously so. And so the later it gets the more I want to put it off. My desk is a mountain of papers and receipts. Looking through the bank statements that I have printed off the computer I am seeing entries that remind me of a year ago. In my head I have trouble trying to recall whether my father was alive before or after the end of the financial year. And does it matter? I have my father’s deceased estate stuff to consider too. I have a file of his papers where he made notations in a demented way on bills. Squiggly question marks near amounts owing. PAID writ-large with a flourish beneath it. Success at the post office. Everything paid through the post office. The old person’s only way to pay.

I imagine him in the queue, socks to his knees, pants too high. He is an impatient man and the queue bothers him. Waiting has never been easy for him. Like Blackboard in Mr squiggle. Muttering beneath his breath Hurry up. Not that he has other errands to run on a shopping day. This is the big one. The paying of bills. Finally at the counter, he softens because he needs the assistant’s help. He could easily be screwed. But they know him. He has been coming since the post office became the place where old people pay their bills. When they no longer sent cheques.

He forgets to pay the HBF bill and the health insurance is unpaid. This means that when my mother ends up in hospital because of a turn (she simply sank to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut in the very same Post Office) and she is asked whether she has private insurance and she answers yes and they divert her to the private hospital, she is turned around again because they are Not Financial. When I attempt to sort this fiasco out, over the phone, the insurance company will not tell me how much they owe because of privacy concerns. When I tell the I am a day away, down South on holidays, they are unmoved. I just want to pay their bill with my credit card over the phone but they cannot release the information I need.

My father is driving to the wrong hospital to visit my mother. He is eating pan-fried fish with sliced banana for dinner. The neighbours are looking in on him. He is still in the garden till the sun is going down.

My mother yo-yos between the hospitals till her insurance is sorted out. The private hospital won’t take her if she’s not insured and the public hospital wants her to go to the private hospital if she has insurance as she claims to have. Daddy’s been a member for fifty years, she says.

I hate the insurance company and tell them so when they inquire at the end of our heated phone conversation as to how well they have helped me today. They promise to pass on my complaint but I never hear from them. I hate you, do you hear me. Hate you.

Back in the city, I realise it is time to be their nominee and take in the form to prove I am their enduring power of attorney. Child becomes Parent.

While my mother is in the hospital the neighbours begin a roster system whereby the evening meals are delivered to my father. He is eating well and loves the attention. Evey afternoon he drives to see her. On one of these occasions he rams another car in the hospital car park but ignores it. A bystander sees the white Subaru Forrester crawl away and takes his number down. He gives it to the owner of the damaged car. Later Dad gets a summons about the accident and it becomes clear that he no longer even has a current licence. It too has been unpaid.

Sometimes he stood in the queue and then when he neared the front of it he turned around and walked out.

Now I am doing his tax. In the blue folder with all its pockets I push out the rectangles of paper with his handwriting on them and replace them with my own headings. I notice the poor spelling. The new labels make more sense to me. The last folder has a pocket I label Death. In it I put his funeral bill and wonder if he can tax deduct it. I think of the more expensive Enviro coffin we got him, knowing he was a believer in recycling. But a tax deduction; now that would really please him.

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from “Reading by Moonlight” by Brenda Walker

“The novelist E.M Forster writes: ‘a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents.’  He imagines the possibilities  ‘if we could answer their love not with gratitude but equal love.’ The entrancement, the concern, the intuition of a parent can’t be neatly returned. But I don’t think it’s lost…..

It seems to me that for Forster, we humans stand in a column, loving the child in front of us, who will grow with their back to us and will in time love the child in front of them, who turns their back to love their own, and so on. But is he right? Am I taking the time to write this, I ask myself, with my back to my father?”

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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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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.