The paramedics allow me to sit in the front cab, and we race down the hill that leads to the main highway and then a twenty-minute drive to the new Perth hospital. The woman driving the ambulance is probably the same age as my mum. She has a tightly coiled energy; you can see it in the hands that grip the steering wheel and her army-style efficiency when changing lanes. Maybe she unravels at night with a bottle of wine after her shift has finished, but for now it’s all focus and restrained chitchat. She fires questions at me: what year am I in at school, what will I study next year, and has my mum done this before. I give the standard answers, I know the routine, and she gives a cursory nod, a sympathetic sound through her clamped teeth because she knows how much of herself she needs to reveal too. She is all professional on the radio, follows standard procedures as I stare out the window and pretend to be watching the traffic. What I am really doing is jumping over stuff. Anything: lamp posts, street signs, bus stops. In my mind’s eye I am running along the edge of the road and then I hurdle over things, and sometimes my stride is even and the jumps are well paced, and then other times there are too many things to go over and I start to stumble and lose control. I hate this feeling and try to run faster, lift my legs higher, but the rhythm is all wrong and I end up feeling out of kilter. I want to stop but I can’t.
We slow down at a set of traffic lights where drivers seem confused as to what to do. One lady attempts to swing her wheels onto the middle island to let us pass but there is not enough room, and I can see the flustered panic as she twists and strains to see her other options. This is the same set of traffic lights where Mum and I stopped on the way back from the drama showcase night at the beginning of the year. There wasn’t much traffic around, just two other cars in front of us waiting for the signal to turn green. Suddenly, two guys got out of their cars and started to dance in opposite directions, doing a slow, lilting jig around their vehicles, smiling like quixotic Irish pixies lost in their own private joke. Mum’s instinct was to press her locking device, begin to say druggies. But then she started to get the giggles, tiny tremors of happiness rocking her shoulders, and I couldn’t help but join in. So there were the two of us laughing; the car gently shaking, and us locked into this world of mild hysteria together.
I know it’s not appropriate to tell the paramedic this—she is too focused on getting the ambulance through the lights and past the minefield of after-school traffic—but I want to tell her that in drama class we have been studying the light and shades of a dramatic arc, and how in every play there is a moment of lightness, a certain levity that gives relief to the tragedy to come. A wedding waltz, a bawdy song, a country dance. And now as I watch the woman in front of us half stranded on her concrete island, with nowhere to go, I am frightened that Mum has used up her one and only jig.
* * *
The overweight male orderly leads me to the temporary locker room, which is really a cleaning storeroom. He apologises in a way that makes me think he has said it many times before. A new hospital, teething problems, an issue with burst pipes . He has a cheery cynicism that comes from working in mental health. I put my backpack in the locker, pocket the key, then follow him down the corridor where we are buzzed into another waiting room. Everything is new and shiny, and the art on the walls is too literal—a vase of flowers, a pastel seascape—with nothing abstract or religious, or likely to set off a new psychosis. I am not allowed to go into Mum’s room but must wait for her to come to me. I can see through the large glass window a private courtyard with a newly planted garden of natives, but I know the rules. It’s too dangerous for her to be anywhere but in her small room, drugged up and highly supervised.
Before Mum comes out, a young guy with a clipboard clicks opens the door. He is dressed as if going to a university lecture, and I am startled to hear a strong Dutch accent, which makes him sound like a backpacker. Is he really a psychiatrist? He asks, how old am I, where is my father, has my mother done this before, and I explain everything to him, weighing up the pros and cons of each answer, not worried about him reading too much into anything. His training is fixated on medications, not the art of body language. So, he asks me again, is there no-one else at home, no adult to care for Mum over the next forty-eight hours, and I say, no. He thinks it is an unsatisfactory outcome; I am secretly relieved.
As soon as I see Mum shuffle across the room, I know that she has been told she has to stay locked up. She slumps into the vinyl chair next to the coffee table, her head bowed low and hair forming a greasy barrier over her face. I wait for the apology, but I get nothing. Instead she is breathing thinly, as if through a narrow straw.
And then a raspy plea. ‘Can you ring Dad? You know I can’t stay here.’
‘No, I am not ringing Dad. Dad isn’t an option.’
We sit in silence. I have nothing to say to her. The minutes drag by, and I can only imagine that if this was a test, if the hospital staff working on the other side of the glass partition were watching this scene play out, their pens would be frantically scribbling observations like ‘hard-faced bitch of a daughter’, ‘as cold as ice’.
There’s no point in staying so I leave, and I end up walking along the main road where there are patches of the original bushland in the grey, lifeless soil. I look for the Christmas trees but it’s too early for the display of gaudy orange flowers. Last year Mum was obsessed with these trees. It made her happy to spot them on the side of the road and in pockets of bushland, or dotted around playgrounds in the suburbs. We even joined a treasure hunt put on by the Wildflower Society to find the Christmas trees in the bush with the special tags. Mum said she liked the idea of a prize. An elderly woman wearing Bermuda shorts walked beside us, explaining that Nuytsia floribunda was a type of native mistletoe, a semi-parasite that sends its roots out to sucker onto another plant’s source of nutrients. I could tell that Mum was disappointed in hearing the word ‘parasite’, but she lightened up when she heard how the Noongar people believed that the spirits of the dead passed through these trees. Like a transit lounge to a better place, said Mum. And now looking back at the hospital, which dominates the sky like a small city, I wonder how many spirits are slipping out of stiff white corpses and winging their way to the branches of this tree, waiting for the final flare of iridescent colour.
And then my phone rings and it is the psychiatrist telling me in his strange clipped vowels that Mum’s friend Derrick is signing her out.
* * *
The hair comes off in one hit. Mum plaited it down her back like a horse’s tail prepared for dressage to make it easier for the hairdresser at the mall to cut, and now it is swaddled in tissue paper. She hands it to me and I am worried that she wants me to store it as a keepsake in my undies drawer. The transformation is immediate. Her face looks less dragged down and tired; she doesn’t look like a crazy old cat-hoarder any more. A whirlwind of life-force instantly rushes to her brain, like when you prune rose hips off a bush. It’s as if all her energy was being sapped by that long lank hair. Once home, she can’t stop cleaning, she can’t stop baking. Each day when I return home from school there is the next batch of scones cooling off under a tea towel on the sink. She is obsessed with their height and researches on the Internet how to get more rise factor from each batch. Don’t overwork the dough, baste with milk, only twist once using a metal cutter. How can I tell her I don’t care if they’re flat and disappointing—I am sick of the aftertaste of baking soda and crave vegetables for dinner. And then it is a week of pikelets, either gooey in the middle or burnt on the outside. Maybe I want the other version of Mum back, the one still in her terry towelling dressing-gown at three o’clock in the afternoon, flicking through the shopping channels.
Derrick doesn’t seem to mind. He eats whatever is put in front of him, bits of crumb and cream flecking his already greying beard. Mum met him during her first stint in hospital, and they bonded over their mutual dislike of Lyn, the night nurse from hell. Derrick is a big man who moves about restlessly on our small k
itchen chairs, forever trying to work out what to do with his legs. He seems like any normal guy except there is something weird about his forehead—a massive indent as if someone has spent a lifetime pressing a thumb into the bony ridge between his eyebrows. Mum and Derrick spread out their wellness recovery action plans across the kitchen table, taking up all the space with the pieces of paper and their elbows. It keeps them energised—that plus pots of stewed black tea, and the jargon that they like to use, which makes them sound like jaunty health professionals. Mum’s latest expression is ‘disorderly eating’—as opposed to eating disorder—and she repeats the different permutations as if the very order of the words gives more meaning to her life. She writes down her daily goals and long-term goals, but I notice on her Pinterest account she has posted them as her bucket list: Swim with the whale sharks at Ningaloo, See Cirque du Soleil, Finish redecorating the spare room, Walk the Bibbulmun Track, Read War and Peace, Make a ceramic birdbath. I see she has fifteen followers and knowing that Derrick is her only friend, how everyone else in her life has slowly dropped away, I wonder how many are random women from the American Midwest unaware they are liking the erratic wish list of a crazy lady on the other side of the world.
I don’t see what Derrick has written. He is circumspect and private, and cups his hands around his bits of paper. All I know about him is that without the medication he hears three different voices, one telling him to write his manifesto, and the other two, nasty bullies constantly putting him down. I also know that when he was ten years old he was molested by a family friend, and refers to paedophiles as kiddie fiddlers, and it is this expression, the way it sounds more like children’s party entertainers, that disturbs me more than my mother’s bucket list.
* * *
We drive through the treeless valley of shops with their sun-peeled signs and crumbling bitumen driveways, past the Toys “R” Us, Cash Converters and then the vacant shops with the For Lease signs taped across acres of dark glass. Mystical Rainbows, says an old shop front, and I wonder who named it and who owned it and whether they sold shimmering useless things that broke in a strong wind.
Mum and I are off to Carousel to buy some black leggings for my final drama performance, and to check out the sales, says Mum, but it’s easy to tell she is only half committed to this outing. She looks washed out, and there are dark smudges under her eyes as if she hasn’t removed her eye makeup for over a week. I know she is having trouble sleeping at night. I hear her muffled sobs at two o’clock in the morning through my bedroom door and the thin whistle of the kettle letting out a nervous here-we-go-again sigh.
When we arrive the car park is full, and it takes Mum three circuits of the shopping centre to finally find a parking bay. As soon as we enter the food hall, the fried smells hit me hard and I realise how ravenous I really am. I want to ask Mum to stop for lunch but know that it is better to keep her moving, so we walk around the packed, chattering tables, and past the central pop-up shops. A young, pushy guy is spruiking organic moisturiser samples. He has the acumen of a car salesperson, and one quick glance at Mum makes him hesitate, wait instead for the woman walking directly behind us. As we pass each store, see the children still dressed in their Saturday sports gear, and the mothers all hassled and yelling at Dylans and Jordans to hurry up, it dawns on me that we have made a grave error in shopping on the Saturday before Father’s Day.
‘Let’s try in here, Mum,’ I say, pulling her into the relative safety of Lorna Jane.
I flick through the sales items, knowing they’re still beyond our price range, and Mum stands at the entrance, hugging her handbag to her chest and blankly staring at the posters of beautiful women dressed in lycra. I take a pair of bike shorts off the rack, not really wanting them but doing anything to keep the momentum going. I leave Mum standing there while I quickly try them on, not caring if they are any good, just turning around in circles and different angles to check out my butt. I see the curtain rustle a little to the side and expect it to be Mum, but instead it is the shop assistant saying, ‘I think there’s something wrong with your mother.’
My heart does a nervous leap and I feel the sensation rise to my throat like vomit as I race out, and there is Mum talking with the other assistant, a tall blonde girl who bends like a primary school teacher to meet her face to face. And Mum is trying to communicate something, but her jaw is stalling and seizing like it has a faulty hinge, not able to release the caged words with the right timing. And I can see how the girl is transfixed by my mum’s mouth, watching with a kind of fascination and then horror as she sees the tongue agitate and bob like a cocky’s. Seeing something bluish-black and truncated, as if God or evolutionary forces have played a heartless trick on her.
* * *
My mobile rings and I recognise the number as being Dad’s sister, Aunty Helen, so out of respect for Mum I take the call in the garden. I can picture Aunty Helen sitting on the French wicker stools at her polished marble kitchen counter, brushing away some imaginary crumbs, her back annoyingly erect like a Pilates instructor’s. Her voice hurts my ear when she tells me that I need to leave immediately and go stay with Dad.
‘Not yet,’ I say, explaining that it is too close to my final exams and how the move will complicate things.
I wonder how much she really knows, and if anyone has told her that Mum hasn’t left the house in days and that Derrick has checked himself into hospital again. The conversation looks like it will go on forever, stuck in the same old loop, so I find a sunny spot on the ground and lie down with the long blades of grass scratching at my bare legs. From this angle I can see across to the neglected garden beds, and the weeds sending up their tapered yellow heads. Or is it the Nuytsia floribunda? So I get up to take a closer look at the small sapling we planted last year, but it is flowerless; the plant looks barely alive. We never won the Christmas tree treasure hunt, but afterwards the old lady in the Bermuda shorts came looking for us, held out one of the potted prizes as a gift.
Here, she said, smiling mainly at me. They are tricky to keep alive, but if they can latch onto the right plant—get the nutrients they need, well, you never know...
And I thanked her, because I guess that is the polite thing to do.
THE EGG
Even in his sleep, Bryant knew there was something wrong. The children’s voices were more pitchy than usual, and where before he could allow a certain amount of light and noise to pulse in and out of his shallow dream life, now it had penetrated too deeply. Shit. He pulled on his jeans, which still held the loose, slack shape from when he had worn them hours earlier, and went looking for his eldest son.
‘Casey, what’s going on?’ The boy was in the lounge room with his younger brother and the neighbour’s kid who drifted in and out of their driveway, but whose name he never bothered to learn.
‘Dad.’
There was no need for Casey to say anything else. There in the middle of the room stood an enormous egg.
‘What the...’
‘We found it in the dunes.’
‘And we’re keeping it,’ added his youngest son, Ben, who laid his hand on the top of the egg as if he had just scaled its giddy heights.
‘It’s a dinosaur egg.’ It was the first time Bryant had ever heard the neighbour’s kid speak, and his voice sounded high and nasal.
‘What the hell.’ Bryant bent down to examine the specimen closer, and saw that, although ovoid in shape, its outer casing was hard and grainy in appearance, making it look more like a World War II relic. Ben tapped the surface with a fingernail.
‘Get away from it!’ Bryant didn’t mean to yell, but he had visions of his wife coming home from work to a house smouldering in ash. If it was a bomb, it would need to be defused or removed with care.
‘Dad, it’s fine. We carried it from the dunes, didn’t we?’ Casey patted the egg. ‘We love it and we’re keeping it.’
Casey was probably right but that didn’t stop Bryant from lightly pressing his ear against the egg to
listen for a series of faint ticks.
‘Is it going to hatch?’ cried his youngest. ‘Is it alive, Dad?’ But all Bryant could hear were the children’s shallow breaths and the dull thrum of his own ear against the egg’s cool surface.
‘Let’s get it into the garage. We’ll work out what it is later.’
Bryant carried the egg outside, and placed it carefully in the corner of the garage. He didn’t know quite why, but he fetched a large white sheet from the laundry cupboard and draped it over the egg. Then he went back inside the house to try and get some more shut-eye, banning the children from going anywhere near the garage.
It was impossible to sleep. He lay on the bed, listening to the muffled sounds of excitement and, in the distance, a mower neatening a plot of green. And every time he changed position in the bed, he could smell the unwashed sheets and the stink of his armpits. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. Soon his wife would be home, and there would be the clatter of pans, the cutlery drawer opening and closing, the sizzle and spit of oil and then a stir-fry would appear moments before he had to hop into his car for the forty-five-minute drive to the airport. A long drive where he could make plans, pay bills in his head and give a bit more consideration to things like that egg.
* * *
Night shift at Perth Airport seemed to consist of two states of being. First, there was the hit-the-road-running part, where flights would arrive back to back, the arrivals hall would swell with a line of weary, rumpled travellers snaking all the way back to the escalators, and you only had forty seconds to process and stamp each passport. And then there was the hanging-around ‘doing time’ part in between flights, where the officers would lounge in their bunker, kick back on the lumpy couches and rummage for food in their bags, or grab salty snacks from the vending machine.
Fabulous Lives Page 7