Smythe's Theory of Everything

by Robert Hollingworth

  And speaking of sexual matters, I was the recipient of a most unusual experience this morning. I was walking up a passage and as I passed a little sunroom to the side I saw one of the very elderly inmates. She was sprawled out in a lounge chair with her dress up and a hand inside her bloomers! I took off like a regal rocket! Imagine the elderly being interested in sex.

  Had some bad dreams last night and woke this morning to find the large and lumpy Jan Osborne looming over my bed, a nightmare in itself.

  ‘Up you get, Mr Smythe. Matron’s orders: a bath for everyone.’

  My eyes clear just enough to see the clock: 6 a.m.! It takes me a full minute to clear my head.

  ‘A bath? I don’t want a bath. The shower …’

  ‘Come on, up you get. Matron’s orders: a bath for everyone.’

  I suddenly recalled that at lunch yesterday word spread that there was an outbreak of scabies. I remember glancing at old MP Jim Southall. When he arrived he had the most horrible scabs, his skin redder than a fire-man’s nozzle. So now everyone is a potential risk.

  ‘Go pick on someone else,’ I tell her and draw the sheets tight. ‘As you well know I do not have scabies or nits or anything else.’

  Osborne holds out my dressing gown. ‘Come on, in the chair Mr Smythe, no arguments.’

  Next thing I know I’m wheeled into the steamed-up bathroom. The water stinks; God knows what they’ve put in the bath.

  ‘Come on,’ says Osborne, ‘hurry up, I don’t have all day.’

  ‘Well off you go,’ I say. ‘You don’t expect me to strip in front of you … do you?’

  ‘Mr Smythe; please get out of your pyjamas and into the bath. Matron Collier will not be pleased if you’re uncooperative. You want to lose your privileges?’

  ‘Privileges? What privileges?’

  ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to get in the bath or I’ll be obliged to call for assistance. Do I have to undress you myself ?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She moves in on me. ‘Get away,’ I yell. I stand up and disrobe, Osborne staring.

  ‘Can I help you get in the bath?’

  ‘Get away!’ I yell again. I take hold of the bath and gingerly step over the edge while Osborne casually observes all my particulars. No sooner do I lower myself in than she steps forward, slaps a wet flannel on me and begins lathering my hair!

  ‘I can do it!’ I scream.

  ‘We don’t have time for this nonsense, Smythe.’ She keeps slapping me with the flannel. ‘Matron’s orders, get you all shipshape. You’re not Robinson Crusoe.’

  ‘And you’re not Florence Nightingale!’ I scream.

  She pours water over my head and then I’m obliged to climb out. I snatch the towel to dry myself, the oversized Osborne staring the whole time - she must have got quite a shock to see that I do not have the white pubis that is no doubt common among the others.

  But no sooner am I back in my chair than that stand-over woman takes scissors and comb and gives me the worst haircut in history! She chops and chews my poor scone without mercy, patches and tufts everywhere. Now, it seems, I have joined the fashion around here: the geriatric look. And I never had the bloody scabies, nits, crabs, plague, pox or anything else!

  Have just had a visit from Christopher! He is back from India, having visited his guru and taken excursions into some of the lesser known regions, I think for his pho-tographic work. He brought me a gift, wrapped in red tissue - a wooden figurine from Mumbai. He was happy and smiling and his visit in here was a very welcome respite from the indignities, though I would not worry Chris with any of the details. He looks very good now, a lot better than he did a year ago, and I told him so.

  ‘You look healthy, son. You’ve lost weight.’

  Chris pats his stomach. ‘I have a totally different diet now. The Hindus understand the balance between body and mind.’ He looks around for a chair. Of course there isn’t one so he sits on the bed.

  ‘How’s that all going then?’

  ‘Very good, Dad, very satisfying. You should try it.’

  ‘Your Mum and I had all the Swami stuff we could handle in the sixties…’

  ‘It’s nothing like that. You learn about the deeper rhythms of life. Remember what I was like when Mum died? All that’s gone now, all in the past … or at least now I can put it on another plane …’

  ‘As long as you’re happy, son, that’s all that matters.’

  ‘I am, Dad, this time I am. All that other stuff is behind me now. I’m feeling what can only be called contentment … What about you?’

  ‘Contentment doesn’t belong in my vocabulary. How could you be content in a place like this?’ I wave my arm around, but I mean the establishment, not the room. Chris misunderstands and looks around him. I see his eyes catch my wall calendar, the old travel clock and ashtray, his own reflection in the wardrobe mirror. His eyes settle on me in the wheelchair.

  ‘This room isn’t much different to Grace House …’

  ‘The room might look the same but the atmosphere sure isn’t. Forced to take a bath this morning at 6 a.m. Forced. With a female staff member in the room!’

  Chris grins. ‘Pretty, was she?’

  ‘Pretty awful! ‘

  Then Chris says something like, ‘If I had to undress in front of a stranger I’d have some fun with it’. Like hell he would. He’s the conservative type, through and through. Likes to belong to large groups and get absorbed into the fold. He never decides anything all by himself; he could never make the big decisions like we did when we moved back to Melbourne. And because he was such a quiet boy I never said anything about my doubts regarding fatherhood. These days we could do a DNA test and have it resolved in a minute. But Chris wouldn’t want it, I know. It would affect him. Of course both he and Lisa know that she’s not mine but when we told Lisa, she just shrugged her shoulders and nothing more was said. She’s another kettle altogether.

  ‘Are you going to see your sister?’

  ‘Tomorrow night, she wants me to go to dinner.’

  ‘Good. Do you remember those Wahl electric hair clippers I had at home? They’re in one of the boxes at Lisa’s. Do you think you could dig them out for me? Also the comb and the professional scissors that your Mum gave me. I need to repair my own hair …’

  ‘Can’t Lisa bring them over? Why don’t you give her a call …’

  ‘She wouldn’t do it, or at least I’d wait for a month. I need them this week - look at my head!’

  ‘OK, I’ll get them Dad, although I can’t get back until about Friday …’

  ‘That’s OK as long as it’s this week. And the other thing, I want my petanque balls. Lisa says the boys are playing with them but I want them back.’

  ‘You think you’re up to petanque?’

  I stare at him.

  ‘What is it with you kids? That’s exactly what Lisa said. I’m not a geriatric, you know.’

  We change the subject and start talking about the weather, and the TV, and spring, and the big blue sky. And then it’s time for Chris to go. He says he meditates at 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and, at the last minute, gives me a little talk about the importance of discipline.

  ‘You want to know about discipline, have a chat to Jean Stinson,’ I tell him. ‘She has a PhD in it.’

  I wheel my chair to the door and wave to him as he heads down the passageway. Just then Jim Southall comes out from the room opposite.

  ‘Your son?’ he says.

  ‘Christopher.’

  ‘I’d have liked a son,’ he says. ‘Only God didn’t see fit.’

  Why do people think God makes all the bastard decisions, like denying old Jim a son? ‘It’s God’s will.’ ‘God took her.’ ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’ Pure madness. I put Chris’ carving of the Hindu deity on top of my wardrobe - it can ‘protect’ my unironed shirts.

  4

  Sometime after the mid-sixties the entire developed world lost its virginity. This was loosely described as the hippie moveme
nt and Heather and I dropped jazz and joined in. It made no difference that we had two little kids. Heather was about thirty then and I was in my late twenties. As if by osmosis, I suddenly had a thin moustache that trailed right under my chin, I wore a fur vest, a 5-inch wide belt and bellbottom trousers. When she wasn’t working, Heather went for Pocahontas headbands, suede, fringes, beads and no bra. Let it all hang out, we said. Yeah, cool, like, crazy man. You’d rather have two heads and one eye than be square.

  Of course, with every new movement there’s another one going in the opposite direction. The Mods wore miniskirts, medallions, tall boots and short, sharp hair. Even though Heather didn’t go for it, they were the ones who kept her salon alive, while I doubt she ever made a cent from the hippies. Kitty went more mod than hippie, though I don’t think she belonged in either camp, and on reflection, she probably created her own cross-style.

  At that moment Christianity took a dive and people began to look elsewhere for meaning. It was our own Aunty Deb and her Tarot who seemed to preempt it all - she was a pioneer of the paranormal. And from the late sixties on, you weren’t alive if you didn’t believe in something supernatural: Ouija boards, seances, polter-geists, levitation, auras, ESP, telekinesis. The Secret Life of Plants was published announcing that indoor greenery could read your mind and that putting headphones on a pumpkin would make it grow twice the size. Erich von Daniken explained UFOs, Lobsang Rampa had his third eye opened and Carlos Castaneda visited strange realms with the help of a shaman and a lot of peyote.

  The United States government began to examine telepathy as a way to communicate with submarines and spacecraft - which caused the USSR to immediately set up departments to train psychic abilities and, in controlled environments, people practised using their minds to move solid objects. Each country wanted the upper hand in the race to harness psychic powers for military use.

  People may laugh now, even wonder how it could have happened. But which person today isn’t a little supersti-tious? We still believe that if we do good, good will befall us. Some read their horoscope, some believe in feng shui, others believe in luck, angels, signs, totems - even God. Some believe everything will turn out alright, in the end. I hardly need say it’s not a reliable assumption to make. Back then I would never have imagined that so much excreta would eventually rain down in my own life - disasters are for other people.

  Jeff and I were hired to do a psychic’s window: Clairvoyant. Let me see your future. I painted the words myself. Clairvoyant. If the English language was ever confiscated and I was allowed just one word, that would be it; even as it leaves your lips it suggests something requiring special expertise, knowledge not available to ordinary people. From the French clair, clear; voir, to see. Oxford p. 142.

  It was that word alone that made me want to meet the practitioner - a thin woman whose small grey eyes could not be found within dark pools of mascara; whose long, hennaed hair really did fly free around her; whose bony clavicles seemed to jut above the low V of her faded caftan. She introduced herself as Charlotta and, despite her scary look, she spoke gently and throatily, like a middle-aged smoker, and she insisted on examining my future.

  ‘Give me something personal,’ she said, the day I painted her window. ‘Something I can hold that’s important to you.’

  I handed her one of my signwriting brushes.

  ‘That’s personal?’

  ‘Well, it’s important,’ I said. ‘To me.’

  She held my No. 5 angled fitch like an artefact and closed her blackened eyes.

  I remember very little of her advice - I was more interested in the scenario than her actual words and I only recall the gentle drone through which my past, present and future took many turns and twists, up one dead end then back the other way until finally a decent freeway loomed.

  ‘This is very good,’ Charlotta said finally. ‘You have nothing to fear at all. Though I see a woman in your life other than your wife.’ We both glanced at the gold band on my finger.

  ‘That’d be Kitty,’ I said, smiling. She looked up at me.

  ‘Maybe. And there’s also another message coming loud and strong. You have healing abilities, skills you haven’t harnessed.’

  ‘Maybe I’m going to be a surgeon,’ I said and smiled. Charlotta gave me a stern look.

  ‘My foretellings aren’t for fun, young man. Listen carefully to the signs. Read them into your life - or ignore them if you like, but it won’t change the messages I’m getting.’ She passed my brush back to me.

  ‘I once told a client that in three months she would visit an island and meet her husband-to-be. She scoffed and chose to ignore it. Two years later she was in Tasmania when she met a man and married him. She told me that she’d been thinking about my prediction.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘She’d at last allowed the signs to enter her consciousness.’

  I stared at her some more.

  ‘I was just wondering if there’s any travel for me.’

  ‘Very much so!’ she said. ‘And quite unexpected as well. But first we have to work out how you can become a healer.’

  She took my hands and turned them face upwards.

  ‘See that?’ She pointed to a crease across my palm. ‘That’s your lifeline. See how it isn’t crossed? See that deviation? And here; you’ve got several fine intersections.’

  ‘I’m not dying, am I?’ I smiled again.

  She looked at me solemnly without releasing my hand. ‘It’s nothing to do with your lifespan; it’s more to do with your character and your potential. Yours isn’t challenged.’

  She talked on for some time and before I left, she loaned me two books, A Primer Guide to Palmistry and W G Benham’s The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading. By the end of that month I felt I had the entire concept mastered. I’m not sure why it interested me. Perhaps, as Benham suggested, it was a predictive means that was to some degree, scientific. Even numerology relied on birth dates and had no real connection to the physical body: if people are born on the same day in the same hospital in the same hour, they’d have to be leading parallel lives. Whereas palmistry was specific to the individual - as unique as a fingerprint - and, like iridology, it seemed to connect meaningfully to the life of the person. At least it did to me.

  I had intended to write a theory, a theory of everything, but at that time all I wanted was a way forward. For the first time I began to think about the lifetime in front of me, the great big wobbly mass of mysterious something that had already begun taking shape, even before I’d entered it. The whole thing seemed half-formed and I’d orchestrated none of it. Was this how the future should be? I knew what Kitty would say - shape it yourself - but how could that be done? How could I put meaning in my life - if I discounted religion? Charlotta insisted that it came by ‘healing’ others. And that’s why I settled on palmistry.

  Kitty was amused. She thought I’d gone slightly mad - and she was partly right. It was a craze; this was the era of crazes; crazes ruled at the end of the sixties. Meanwhile Kitty went up in the world. She was put in control of a chain of bars. One of the big brewers was buying up pubs and upgrading them - at least upgrading them to their own brand of beer. Kitty was appointed to facilitate the changeover.

  And I began to read palms on Saturday mornings.

  Just had a truly awful experience, frightened the shit out of me. Jim asked me about my grandsons - Lisa’s kids - and for the life of me I couldn’t remember their names! I can now of course, Joseph and Trent. Joseph and Trent; how could I forget that? They live thirty minutes away. Some sort of tiny neurological block or momentary lapse of memory. Is it the start of the rot? It’s happened a few times now; something I should know very well suddenly escapes me. My memory has been excellent but every now and then some ordinary thing disappears - poof ! Is that how it is for all these dementia patients? Did they get the same scare which gradually took them over? Joseph and Trent - how could I forget my own flesh and blood?

  Charlotta’s
business was jammed between a bank building and a hardware shop on Ferrars Street. And when she felt I had an adequate grasp of my subject, she offered a little room that I could use on weekends. I wore a caftan like hers except it was blue, a faded indigo; a garment that a monastic prophet might wear. I did not like sandals - rudimentary sand traps - and preferred suede shoes with crepe soles. On Saturdays I’d just sit in the room in my blue caftan and wait for someone to knock. I never professed to be an expert; I never advertised or put my name on a sign. When someone arrived hoping for the clairvoyant I’d explain that she didn’t work weekends; however, if they wanted their palm read - I called it hand analysis - I’d be pleased to help. It was as simple as that. I practised on people’s palms, pink and sweaty, cracked and calloused, some hands firm and strong, others with skin that slipped like a scrotum. Occasionally I’d get a man, or couples, but mostly it was women - nervous loners, brides to be, jilted lovers or just curious tourists. I charged them all moderately.

  ‘Is Charlotta in?’

  I looked up to see a figure standing in the doorway. I copped her perfume first, one of those overpriced brands that lines the nostrils and forever imprints somewhere in the Old Brain region. Perhaps it’s a branding strategy.

  ‘She’s not in today,’ I said mechanically. ‘I’m the Palmist.’

  She looked me over, assessing the likelihood: a skinny twenty-something with a drooping moustache and long, lank hair crimped to the head with a towelling headband.

  ‘Can you do me? It’s urgent.’

  ‘Come through,’ I said and led her into the small darkened room. She sat down immediately and I took my chair on the other side of the little card table.

  ‘It’s ten dollars.’

  ‘OK, what do I have to do?’