Hard Word

by John Clanchy

  ‘It means …’ she starts again.

  ‘Look, Katie, I am trying to get these papers read. The less I do now, the more I’ll have to do at the office later. Why don’t you go and see if Grandma Vera’s awake, or would like some tea? Miriam … Mum will be home soon, and she’ll probably take you shopping and leave Laura to look after Grandma Vera.’

  ‘She’s taking such a long time,’ Katie says. And why does she have to go to the council if it’s Saturday?’

  ‘Counselling, Katie, not the council. She goes on Saturday because she’s too busy to go during the week, and normally I’m home then to look after things.’

  ‘What’s counselling?’

  ‘It’s where she talks with a friend. Someone who helps her sort out what she thinks, what she wants to do.’

  ‘About Grandma Vera?’

  ‘Yes, and other things.’

  ‘But I thought we decided that?’

  ‘Yes, well, we have.’

  ‘So, what’s she deciding then?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure.’

  ‘Doesn’t she tell you?’

  ‘Not everything. Some things are private.’

  ‘Like church, and confession and things?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘If Yogi doesn’t go to the home with Grandma, we’ll have to send him to the kennels or whatever it is for cats, because he’ll only make the baby religious.’

  ‘He’ll what?’

  ‘With all the cat hairs. They get up your nose and make you –’

  ‘Allergic, Katie, not religious.’

  ‘What does religious mean?’

  ‘Katie will you please go somewhere else and find something quiet to do until Miriam gets back?’

  I watch as she snatches up her paper and crayon and marches off towards Mother’s flat.

  ‘Thank you,’ I call after her. ‘Miriam will be back soon.’ Though not as soon as Katie.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I say. ‘You’re back.’

  ‘Grandma Vera won’t play. She says she’s cold.’

  ‘Cold? She can’t be, it’s nearly twenty degrees. Is she up?’

  ‘No, she’s in bed.’

  ‘And she said she was cold?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t say it, but I could tell.’

  ‘I’ll come down in a minute, Kat. But look, if she’s really cold, you could get another blanket for her from the cupboard. You know where they are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, go on, then.’

  ‘I don’t like to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cos her eyes are open.’

  ‘Well, of course her eyes’ll be open, if she’s saying she’s cold.’

  ‘I told you, she didn’t say it. I just knew.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because her hand’s cold, and she won’t move it even when I shake her. And she’s staring, and not saying anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say then, and stand up. ‘You stay here –’

  ‘I’m scared here. I want to come with you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I take her hand then, which is warm and sticky with life – or maybe it’s just crayon – and we go hand-in-hand towards Mother’s room.

  Miriam

  ‘I almost didn’t come this morning,’ I say, as soon as we sit.

  ‘Oh?’ says Jane, and watches my face. And I wonder if she can guess the cranky, combative mood I’m in.

  ‘Everything’s worked itself out,’ I say. Resenting the fact that I’m even here in the first place. Indulging myself. Wasting my time. In this cutesy little room, with its cutesy colours, its dinky little pots of blue and grey. When we’ve made the decision, and I should be past all this by now. Should be back at home with Philip and Katie. And Mother. Where I belong.

  ‘Everything’s resolved itself,’ I tell her again. Without much assistance from her, I suppose I’m saying. Implying, at least.

  ‘That’s often the way,’ is all she says, and I feel a small, sharp spurt of anger against her then. At the smugness of her words. Even the tiny yellow cushions on her chairs look suddenly plump and smug.

  ‘So why did you come?’ she says, still watching my face. ‘If it’s all resolved? Why didn’t you just ring and cancel –?’

  And that’s the point.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I’m forced to say. And as soon as I say it, I feel my anger leaking away, and something almost like shame seeping in to replace it. Why should I be so angry with Jane, for Christ’s sake? Who’s only tried to help. I’m behaving like a teenager. Like Laura on one of her worst hair days.

  ‘That’s if everything is resolved …’ Jane says. And waits.

  ‘You remember that tiger grin?’ I find myself saying. ‘It turned out it was only a muscle control thing after all.’ I don’t know why I’m telling her this. Perhaps it’s simply my way of making up. Of offering a kind of apology. ‘So all that time I assumed she was baring her teeth at me …’

  ‘She was actually just trying to smile?’

  ‘If I massage her lip for a second or two, the spasm or whatever it is goes away, and then there’s just this normal, pleasant smile. And …’

  ‘And what –?’

  It’s partly this I’m resisting, this dialectic that the two of us, Jane and I, lock into. So easily. And yet at the same time I want it. So that in a strange way it’s actually myself I’m fighting.

  ‘I’ve begun to remember it,’ I tell her.

  ‘The smiling?’

  ‘I’ve begun to remember there was more of it than I thought, but that it was always sad somehow.’

  ‘Could that be why you don’t remember it?’

  ‘You mean I’ve preferred to remember her as oppressive, as overbearing? Rather than sad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus, Jane, you can be so smug sometimes.’

  There I’ve said it.

  Though I might just as well not have bothered.

  ‘This decision you’ve made,’ she says, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘To get more intensive care for her … ?’

  ‘To put her in a home,’ I say. ‘Let’s not beat around the bush.’

  ‘If you like,’ she says calmly. ‘Though putting her in a home has such a punitive feel about it. It sounds like you’re still blaming yourself.’

  ‘And you sound,’ I say, ‘just like Laura, my daughter. That’s what she said to me: ‘‘You’ll find some way of punishing yourself, Mum.’’ ’

  ‘Breathe, Miriam,’ she says then.

  ‘What –?’

  ‘You’re holding your breath.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Let it go,’ she says. ‘You swim, don’t you? Then imagine you’re swimming.’

  ‘This is crazy –’

  ‘Don’t talk. Just breathe,’ she says. ‘Swim.’

  I take a breath. Another. Deliberately look around. Not just to calm myself. But to break her gaze. And after a moment or two, my eyes stop sparking, and the room starts to exert its spell again. Through the softness of its colours. The fineness of Jane’s things. Her pottery. Books. Wildflowers. My eyes rest on the dark, polished wood of her shelves, the picture rail that runs on all sides of the room. Such an old room. Such an old house. Everything in it so fine, so well cared for. And I have a sudden intuition then. About Jane. About something impossibly sad. Some intuition that tells me that she’s been through the storm. And that at the time this space was her shelter, the eye of it for her.

  And I want to ask her so much then. But again she’s too quick, cutting me off before I can begin.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘You’ve chosen a nursing home that you’re satisfied with?’

  ‘It’s just ten minutes from home. It’s on the same bus route as the girls’ schools, so they can visit whenever they like.’

  ‘That’s great. So when …?’

  ‘Soon,’ I say.

  While she looks.

  ‘Soon,’ I
say again.

  ‘Have you told her? Told Mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Does she say anything?’

  ‘Just the same old thing. ‘‘Home, now,’’ she says. ‘‘Home, now.’’ But it doesn’t mean what Laura thinks it means.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That she’s giving us permission in some way. But it’s not. It’s just a ritual phrase, like others she’s got. Like That’s a good idea or Good girl, good girl when she’s with Katie or Bad girl, bad girl for herself …’

  ‘And these, you think, have no meaning for her?’

  ‘Well, not the meaning we attach, that we’d like to see in them.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jane says. ‘So let me get this clear. You’ve made the decision to … put your mother in a home, you’ve found a home that’s satisfactory, you’ve told her, but you haven’t decided when?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jane waits.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘there’s no need to look at me like that. It’ll be soon, I’ve said that, a week perhaps.’ Jane sits without speaking. ‘A matter of days,’ I say. And then I can’t stand her smartarse expression a second longer. ‘It’s my fucking mother,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is your fucking mother. So what’s stopping you from putting her in a home?’

  I’m set back on my heels by this. The sudden, unambiguous toughness of this.

  ‘She’s not well,’ I say. ‘I told you about the barbecue, about what happened after the barbecue – she’s not recovered from that. I just want to see her recover first. Get a little stronger.’

  ‘So you’re not putting your mother in a nursing home until she’s well? She’s too sick to go into a nursing home?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ I shout at her. ‘We’ve made the decision. It’s made.’

  ‘Is it time for some tea?’ she says.

  * *

  ‘What frightens me most …’ I say. And somehow over tea, through the simple ritual of tea, of pouring, and then of waiting and offering, without speaking, Jane and I have found touch again. ‘Is seeing her vanish.’

  ‘Her memory, you mean? Watching the slate being wiped clean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And part of you with it?’

  ‘It’s terrifying,’ I say ‘I know in one sense memory’s just a storehouse – what did you call it, a lumber room? Bits of this and that, most of it of no importance. But what if you didn’t have it? What if I were Mother’s age, and didn’t know who Laura was, or Katie, didn’t remember their names, their births? Not remembering them being born? I don’t think I could bear that.’

  ‘Some people might say that, in your mother’s condition, it scarcely matters.’

  ‘That’s what Laura thinks,’ I say ‘But she also thinks that Mother knows, that she knows what’s wrong with her, and she’s as terrified in knowing it as I am looking on. I mean, it’s not just things, names or events, it’s your whole identity. We are our memories, aren’t we? And if that’s taken away – what are we then, but some sort of animal? I’d never want to be like that …’

  ‘Because you’d know, or because you wouldn’t want others to see you like her? To pity you? To feel disgusted perhaps? Terrified, did you say?’

  ‘All of that, I suppose. Just the thought of vanishing like that. It’s a kind of death in life, isn’t it?’

  ‘And part of you is going too? In her forgetting, part of your identity is vanishing too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Greeks have a comforting way of thinking about it.’ ‘The Greeks – ?’

  And I know from the reassuring way she smiles at me, just how startled I must have sounded.

  ‘Oh, not the modern ones,’ she says. ‘They’re just as puzzled by it all as the rest of us. But some of their forebears …’

  ‘Classical Greece?’

  ‘They believed it was at birth that our minds were washed clean, stripped of memory, made empty and forgetful.’

  ‘And this life is an illusion?’

  ‘Yes. And at death we re-enter the fields of memory. It’s rather a lovely way of looking at things, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even if one can’t believe it …’

  We sit then, and think for a moment about this. Both of us knowing that this is the last time we’ll meet.

  Laura

  Grandma Vera did get to church after all – only it wasn’t a church really but more a chapel at the crematorium but with crosses and flowers and things and an altar with Grandma Vera on it in a coffin – except she didn’t know she got there. Or she might, depending if you believe in an afterlife, but I’m not sure I do. And the prayers and hymns and that – they were all done by Reverend Moysten who Mum wasn’t going to have at all at first because he was mealy-mouthed and hardly knew Grandma Vera anyway, and that was only to stop during his sermon and look at her when she went up to the rail for communion at the wrong time, and Mum thought it wasn’t Christian to make a spectacle of her that way and he should have just ignored her and got on with his platitudes. But Philip said, ‘Well, darling, it’s not really a matter of whether you or I want Moysten or not, but whether Mother would have wanted him,’ and she looked at him for a moment, and then went all soppy at the edges like the pavlova she forgot to put in the fridge after the barbecue, and said, ‘Oh, Philip,’ and kissed him, and Katie and I were forced to throw up in the sink.

  And the service was nice and all that, especially for me, because Philip was there, my Philip, and he didn’t have to come but he said he wanted to be there with me and he’d only met Grandma Vera once but he liked her and he was sad she was dead but he wouldn’t say he was really upset because that wouldn’t be true and it was only because I was upset, and that was actually when I cried most, because it was such a romantic thing to say, and at the service he was in a black suit that was really his father’s and was too short in the sleeves and his wrists were showing and they looked so thin and everything I wanted to kiss him there and then, but we’d promised each other we wouldn’t, and wouldn’t even touch for the whole day out of respect for Grandma Vera, but now I wished I hadn’t, and I thought I’d just die looking at his hands and wrists while Reverend Moysten was inviting us to think about meeting Grandma Vera in the life to come.

  And it was all a bit sad as well because there were only two rows of people and they’re called mourners, and they were mostly cousins and things of Grandma Vera’s who were all about a hundred and ten and we’d never met before and even Mum hardly knew them, plus some of Grandma Vera’s neighbours when she used to live over the other side of the Harbour, and Mum asked them to come back to the house for morning tea after the service, which is what you do, and a few of them did and we had to put extra cushions on the chairs and things so they wouldn’t break any bones when they reached for their cups of tea, but most of them had to rush off afterwards back to their nursing homes or hospitals or wherever they lived, and Philip – Mum’s Philip, I mean – whispered to me that one or two looked as though they might as well have stayed out there at the chapel and saved the extra trips. But the one person who didn’t come was Uncle Brian, even though Mum left message after message for him and was even going to fly to Ballina to fetch him because he’d regret it later, but Philip said, ‘No, if he doesn’t want to hear, he doesn’t want to hear,’ and Mum said she supposed he was right and how wise he was – Philip? Wise? Joke! – and she was so glad to have him there with her, supporting her, and all that vomit. And she seemed to have forgotten all about his comment to Katie about the barbecue.

  Actually Katie was the one who got most upset at the service because I think that was the first time she understood what was really happening. She’d cried before at home when Dr Lazenby came and certified Grandma Vera was dead and then when the people came to take Grandma Vera away and fix her up at the funeral parlour for the service, but I think
she was only crying like I was because we thought we ought to for Mum’s sake – or anyway I did, because I’d said goodbye to Grandma Vera a long time ago when she was still Grandma Vera – but maybe it was realer for Katie than me cos Philip said Katie had been asking why Grandma Vera hadn’t gone in a nursing home already just before she died and so she was feeling guilty as if she’d wished Grandma’s death on her. But I don’t think that was true because at that stage she didn’t really understand she was dead at all.

  I think she thought when they wheeled Grandma Vera out on this trolley that she was just going to the home, because that was when she put some of her treasures on the trolley, even Teddy, and Mum said, ‘Darling, are you sure you want to do this?’ and she looked really worried, but Katie said, ‘Yes, otherwise Grandma Vera will be lonely,’ and Mum didn’t know what to think and looked at the funeral people and they said it was fine, it happened a lot actually, and Mum gave in and said, ‘All right, darling, if that’s what you really want,’ and she was getting soppy for about the fiftieth time in six minutes and kissing Katie, and that’s when Philip really put his foot in it because Katie rushed away from Mum and disappeared for a second and came back with Yogi, and Mum said ‘No –’ and looked at Philip and said, ‘I don’t think she understands,’ and Katie was trying to get Yogi on the trolley and Yogi was spitting and trying to get as far away from Grandma Vera as he could and climbing over Katie’s shoulder, and Philip – instead of being supportive and sensitive and making us all throw up again and explaining to Katie what was going on in words she could understand – said: ‘It’s a cremation, Katie, not a barbecue.’ And Mum didn’t speak to him after that until Fowler-call-me-Ian, the undertaker, arrived in the afternoon.

  Anyway at the service, after we’d had prayers from Reverend Moysten and reflections and compassion and things, and we’d all sung the Twenty-Third Psalm, and Fowler-call-me-Ian pressed the button cos Mum wouldn’t and thought that was what he was getting paid for, and the coffin started to go down into the furnace, that was the first point, I think, that Katie understood because she was next to me and she grabbed my hand and I looked at her face and her eyes were stark wide, and she was staring at the coffin and, as it started to disappear, and there was this roaring noise – which must have been the furnace starting up under the altar – and as Grandma Vera slowly went down, so too did Katie. She was kind of keeping her eyes level with the top of the coffin and at first she just pulled her jaw in and her neck down, and then that wasn’t enough and she had to bend at the knees, and by the time only the top of the coffin was visible over the altar, all you could see of Katie was this pair of huge eyes over the top of the pew, and at that moment she must have understood because she screamed: