Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  'What? You help me with my script?'

  'No, I mean, well, performing, maybe just a couple of shows. You know, with my magic books, the schools are very keen and I've had much more experience now, maybe as your assistant, we could get big audiences—'

  'You are incredible! You really don listen to anything I say—'

  The phone starts again. I grind my teeth but I can't help glancing at it.

  'Oh, is impossible, I told you, I am going. Get the fucking phone if you want,' and he turns away.

  I clutch at the tail of his jacket. 'No, please don't go, I can't bear it, I'll die, you can't leave.' I'm sobbing and choking, dissolving, nothing to grab on to. 'Guido!'

  'No!' And he's gone, the door slamming bang behind him.

  I run back down the hall, into the kitchen and pick up the phone. 'Hello, hello!'

  The line's gone dead.

  I stand with the phone in my hand, looking at the hot plate and the gleaming tiles above and the glasses stacked neatly on the shelves above that. There's no point to any of these things. I push the star button on the phone, followed by 10, then hash, and listen for the number that just called. It was my parents trying to reach me. I dial their number and there is no answer.

  I lean my forehead against the tiles. My breath makes clouds on the cold surface. I feel the phone vibrate before it even rings. I pick it up.

  'Rachel?'

  'Dad? I just rang and you weren't—'

  'I'm on the mobile, in the ambulance.'

  'What?'

  'Your mother.'

  I can hear the phone screaming into the air, even though I hold it in my hand. Or is it the siren, or is it the wind in my head? Dead.

  'Is she—'

  'I'll call you again from the hospital.'

  'I'll come now – did you ring before?'

  'Yes, waiting for the ambulance, thought you could do CPR – I tried, damndest thing, I couldn't breathe.'

  'Are you all right?'

  'I'm fine. It's your mother.'

  'What? Is it a heart attack?'

  The phone is crackling, as if the wind in my head has escaped and it's howling all around.

  '. . . tunnel, breaking up, see you soon, drive . . . careful.'

  She mustn't be dead because he wouldn't be able to finish a sentence, or tell me about CPR, or remind me to be careful. 'Damndest thing.' My father couldn't breathe from shock while trying to resuscitate my mother and I didn't answer the phone.

  I find my shoes and handbag, hunt for my keys. Can't find them. There on the carpet are the feathers Guido dropped from his jacket. Two. One of them shines blue, although faded. I pick them up and stuff them in my purse. The feathers are forty years old, carried in that pocket from Guido's boyhood, gathered on hunting trips with his father. The feathers are from the forests of Tuscany; Guido and his father used to get up at dawn, walk all day, come home at nightfall. Guido enjoyed those trips. My mother is in an ambulance, unable to breathe by herself, on the way to hospital.

  Chapter 20

  I walk down the pale lino corridor of the hospital. My mother comes home today. There are flowers in her room, petals permed into tight blue curls like the hair of ladies gathered at church. Hydrangeas. The blue petals are hypnotic, pressed up close like the members of a religious cult. In her last email, Clara described cypresses that way, each branch closing over the next, covering the core like a hand over a secret. Dark monks, she called them. I liked that.

  My mother looks up as I enter the room but I'm not sure if she sees me. She doesn't smile. I bend and kiss Dad on the cheek, take one of Mum's blue-veined hands in mine. That's when she smiles, notices me. Maybe it's touch that changes things for her, otherwise I'm just part of her scenery, like the permed flowers, the loud smells. Her hand is cool and dry and sudden. It feels startling. We never hold hands, it's not something you do after you've grown up. I remember a busy street we once crossed, our fingers knitted together. Her hand feels strangely small in mine. I want to go on holding hers just a moment longer. There's something I want to understand about the separateness of her, what we have between us. But she stirs, her hand slipping away to cover a cough. It must hurt her to cough. I think this, but I can't feel it. I'm like those hydrangeas in the vase, lifeless inside.

  I get up from the bed and pull back the curtains. I'd like to open the window but I don't dare. The air in the hospital has an identity. It is an opaque yellow, the colour of antiseptic, pasting over other aromas more delicate, more threatening. The smell is loud and repellent and repetitive, like somebody who wants to be centre stage, talking over everyone else. The stainless steel of bed pans and trolleys and medical equipment gleams in the fluorescent light. I think of the Van Gogh painting The Café, with that acrid light blaring, turning people green. Mum smiles again, at the hydrangeas.

  'She's gone downhill in here,' whispers Dad, leaning towards me across the starched white bed.

  I imagine her huddled at the end of a slippery dip, caught at the last minute by those relentless hospital corners.

  For a moment, yesterday, I wondered if she knew who I was. She hasn't said anything specific to me for a week. She seems very careful to make only general statements. 'At our age the anaesthetic knocks your brain about,' my father said. Yes, and she's been very ill, but her silence still makes me feel guilty, as if I've done something unforgivable. Like the tail-end of a dream, I can't remember what it was.

  'So it's good we're taking her home,' says Dad. 'It must be disorientating for her in here.' He talks as if she's asleep, or absent.

  I nod. 'Have you been through it all with the doctor? The aftercare? How to manage?'

  Dad nods, tries to smile. His shoulders look defeated, his chin tucked deep into his neck so he reminds me of an aged turtle. Giant turtles can live to one hundred, Lena says. I'd rather think about turtles, or elephants, or even hydrangeas, than what's happening in this room. What is wrong with me? Here lies the woman who gave birth to me, fed and looked after me and put up with me all those years. Where is my empathy? You have none, you're a heartless bitch.

  My mother's heart actually stopped. When she was lying on the carpet, it stopped beating. Her heart was getting too tired, the doctor said, pumping her blood around. So they put a pacemaker inside her chest, and it ticks regularly now, like a good watch. 'No need to wind her up though!' the doctor joked. It was quite a good pun, reminding us in a gentle way to be careful with her, but my sense of humour is still absent, vanished to the remotest parts of my sadness. It went away with Guido's love and the collapse of my mother's heart, and my infinite disappointment in myself. Looking down at my mother, at the bowed shoulders of my father, I want to run, race down the lino floor of the hospital, away, run with my arms pumping and my legs flung out at all angles like a child. I want to run right out of my skin.

  *

  Dressed in a cream skirt and blue blouse, my mother sits in the wheelchair with her hands folded in her lap. 'I'd rather walk,' she says, but in a flat tone as if merely observing the weather. Her face is pale, with no hint of make-up. Dad should have brought her lipstick, or I should have. Without make-up her face is beige all over. I notice the lines tracking into her lips, tiny dry creek beds. You have them too, says the voice.

  But I remember her lips glamorous, shiny with Rare Apricot from Max Factor. In the mornings before work she'd put on lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror, grunting with irritation when the glass fogged up, smearing it away with her fist. She was always in a hurry, but sometimes she flashed a private smile at herself in the mirror. Well, once I remember her doing that, when she was getting dressed to go out at night. My mother and father didn't go out often after the boys started arriving.

  The night I remember my mother smiling, she'd emerged steaming from the bath and was only barely dry, damp and pink. She'd smothered herself in Johnson's body talc and I scuttled over to stand beneath her so that I would be included in the white cloud that enveloped her. My mother was so powerful, I
thought, she even had her own atmosphere.

  A few days ago, after I went to see the therapist, the one Rita recommended, I wrote in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: I like myself. 'Don't write love,' the therapist said, 'because you won't believe it.' She has a wry, cheeky smile, one corner of her mouth tweaked up higher than the other. I blushed at the writing when I went into the bathroom later that day. While I peed, and glanced at the mirror, the blush grew and I writhed about on the seat. How ridiculous can you get? said the voice. What's there to like? What if someone sees? When I washed my hands I thought suddenly, no one will. I can leave it there and no one will know. There's no one here to read it. Is that a good thing or bad?

  In the wheelchair, the maroon plastic torn at her back, my mother seems stripped, a person robbed of herself. She doesn't look right without the use of her legs. She was always rushing somewhere, carrying burdens, books, groceries, laundry. For a moment I see her as someone unrelated to me, like a person in a documentary – a woman in a wheelchair with blue-green eyes, curly white hair cut functionally short, coping with a new machine in her body. It is an odd feeling, almost liberating, this detachment, like being in a dark room when the door is opened a little – there's a shaft of light as well as an uncomfortable draught. Then the sliding feeling moves across my brain and flips it over, spangling the air.

  'I don't want a wheelchair,' my mother mutters. 'I can walk.'

  'Just till we get out of the hospital,' says Dad reassuringly, and he helps her into the car. 'When we get home you can walk as far as you like. The doctor said you'll have more energy now, just you wait and see.' He turns to me, his chin lifting. 'That Dr Ajmir, he was very encouraging, wasn't he? Said these pacemakers were great, make you feel at least ten years younger, you can get a whole new lease of life.'

  My mother looks up at me and winks. 'A whole new leash of life,' and she puts up her hands in front of her like paws, and pants. Her smile is ironic and self-deprecating and sharply conscious and as I laugh with her something breaks and slides inside me and I put my arm around her.

  'It wasn't that funny,' she says, frowning.

  'Be careful of your mother's wound,' says Dad.

  I take a bunch of hydrangeas home with me. Dad pressed them to my chest, still dripping from the vase, and a wet cold hollow seeped into the middle of me, making an island on my shirt. I didn't want them, but I knew he needed to give me something.

  At home I leave them on the sink and cross back down the hall to get a vase. Passing the hall mirror, I look in as if through a window. I never used to pause at that mirror but since Guido left I do quite regularly. It's become a habit, like a tic, to make sure that I still exist. I read once that the only way to tell if a person is a vampire is to put them in front of a mirror. If there is no reflection in the glass, then you are looking at one. It's reassuring to see my frazzled rabbit face frowning back at me. The mirror tells me I'm not a dead person walking, which is the definition of a vampire, and my body is still here. It's just my mind that has floated far away. At my age you have to pass the mirror quickly. If you linger, unattractive details emerge and, like regular news bulletins, there is always some fresh horror of age occurring on your face.

  In the silence since everyone has left this house, I lie on the couch, a luxury previously unavailable to me. But I can't appreciate my new position. I think about my mother lying on the floor the night Guido left . My mind keeps returning to that place, over and over, like the tongue to a sore tooth. She had tried to get out of bed, panicked by the pains in her chest and a 'strange, underwater sensation' but she'd fallen to the floor. I can see my father bent over, trying to swallow enough oxygen to give to her. Sometimes this image in my head is more real to me than the sofa beneath my bottom or the book lying on my lap. I am here, in this house, but I am not inside my body.

  My mind wanders over landscapes I haven't seen for years. There's the small, grey portable radio we won at the Easter Show, propped up on the kitchen bench. Mum is adjusting it to get the ABC news as she chops potatoes. She still has her coat on, only five minutes home from work. She slices the potatoes thinly so they'll cook 'quicksticks'. She plops them into the saucepan only barely covered with water. I'm mesmerised by the white slime, like eggwhite, that begins to form as the water boils away. She isn't watching the potatoes because she has turned to peel the carrots, wash the spinach. If you don't wash spinach seven times you can get hepatitis or malaria like the children in Africa. 'I'm starving,' I whine. 'Can't I have a snack before dinner?' Danny is hovering at my back, picking up things on the sink, rinsing them. He's trying to help but my mother keeps glancing at him, quick, irritated flashes bunching into a sigh.

  'Have you washed your hands?' she asks him finally, which I think is silly. Of course he has, he's Danny isn't he? Someone else is standing near him at the sink, that boy with the sandy hair. Maybe Mum was asking him, because the boy is copying Danny, handling the coffee mugs, putting his fingers all over them. I can see black under his nails, like the mould that grows on the shower wall no matter how much Mum scrubs it. He takes up so much space for a skinny boy, with his sharp elbows and awkward knees that bang against the kitchen cupboards even while he's standing still. Danny is glancing at the sandy boy and sighing just like Mum when the boy puts down the saucer he's rinsing to pick his nose.

  I glance at my mother to check if she's seen but she's busy with the spinach and then there's a scream and the sandy-haired boy is crying, burrowing into Mum's coat, rubbing at the red mark forming on his neck. Danny's face is tight with fury but he goes on washing and rinsing even when Mum reaches round to talk to him. I'm inching away, still starving, wanting to open the fridge and mooch inside when there is a wail, a grown-up mother-sound like the end of the world and she shouts 'Damn!' which is a bad swearword for my mother, usually it's 'Bother!', and she lift s the smoking saucepan with the potatoes all black and burnt and slimed and she bangs it down hard on the hotplate. You never put enough water in the pan! she hisses at herself in a pinched nasty voice and then another wail, louder and more helpless than the first, rises up from her like steam and condenses all over the smattered bench and cluttered sink, over the boys and me at the fridge.

  I don't like thinking about that scene so I get up and wander into Guido's room. Probably I should call it something else now – the spare room. Spare. A cold windless place on top of a cliff . Something preserved, like a body during shivah. I sit on his bed and look at the empty desk. There's a dark, clean rectangle carved out of the dust where his computer used to be. On the east wall is the built-in wardrobe with the sliding door. I push it back to look at his clothes. Three shirts still hang there, white like ghosts. In the top drawer there is nothing, a few dried leaves of lavender from the potpourri I put there years ago. In the second drawer is an old singlet, torn at the shoulder. I take it out and sniff . Lavender, washing powder, cigarettes, cinnamon maybe. I put it over my head and lie down on his bed. I am in the spare room.

  'At last!' Doreen exclaims when I tell her about Guido. She even claps her hands, as if I've won an award. We are at Lena's place, two weeks after my mother's heart attack.

  'This calls for champagne!' cries Lena and leaps up to go to the fridge. 'Did you know that men live longer in marriage but women live longer alone?' She snorts. 'We all know why.'

  'Now you won't have to cut short your phone calls—'

  'Invent excuses when you meet us for lunch—'

  'Be insulted, diminished, treated like a servant—'

  'You won't have to shut up—'

  'Placate—'

  'Lose yourself!'

  I finish my glass before anyone.

  'It's hard at first, though,' Rita whispers next to me on the couch, 'being alone.'

  'Mmm,' I whisper back gratefully. I wonder if this is how she felt when her husband left . Louis had always been so encouraging about her having her own life, but as it turned out, he was busy having his too, with other women. I want to know if Rita has fe
lt the terror. The knowledge that you might be alone forever. That no one will ever touch you again, or hold you. It's true Guido didn't ever do a lot of that, but now he never will, and the idea of living without hope, without even a potential lover in the next room, breathing the same air, makes me panic. Guido is what I know. He defined me for twenty years, he was my outline. Without him I might seep everywhere. Did Rita feel what I felt? Did anyone?

  Rita takes my hand and holds it. Her eyes are brimming. She gives me a squeeze and warmth steals into me.

  'Jesus Christ,' explodes Doreen, shaking her head at us, 'this is like a funeral! How many years have I watched you being squished like a bug under his shoe!'

  'Well, but I miss—'

  'You don't miss him, you feel free! You're just scared of it, like someone who's been in an institution for twenty years. You'll soon find out how good it is. Look at me – I go out when I like, grab Thai takeaway and eat it in front of a DVD, pour myself a good red wine. Now Saraah's moved out, I don't have to cook at all unless I feel like it. The other night I went out with some women from work, it was Angela's fortieth – we went to Retro—'

  'What's that?' asks Lena.

  'A nightclub, and the dancing was great! We danced for three hours non-stop, we went wild! It's that place in the city with sixties, seventies, eighties music on three different floors and a pole up the centre like the one in Fireman Sam. We used to watch that show with the kids, remember? You can slide down to get to each—'

  'But that wouldn't work, surely,' says Lena. 'Structurally, if there's a hole in the middle, the entire building would collapse.'

  'Oh, always with the details,' Doreen waves her hand. 'It's not real, the pole, it's just there to give the idea. An atmosphere. That's all you need. And anyway, you'll never believe this, but I actually met someone!'