KEEPING AN EYE
Brendan held the phone away from his ear when his sister began shouting. ‘I’m not deaf, Susan,’ he said, raising his own voice slightly, but not in anger, not in the least. It was a bid for reason attempting to restore calm.
‘Yes you are,’ his sister told him. She breathed deeply, a sign he hoped that her anger was on hold. Then, ‘You are deaf,’ she said, ‘you are not listening to what I am telling you. You are simply not listening.’
‘I am not agreeing with you,’ he said. ‘That is quite another matter.’
Again, the breathing which her brother now knew was her infinite patience with him. ‘It is not a matter of agreeing, Brendan. There is nothing to agree about. It is a fact we are talking about and you cannot deny it. We’ve all got the shame of it.’
She waited, as she expected him to go on, go on with his absurd attempt at being level-headed as he would say, and was disappointed when he did not. Then ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘That’s all you have to say, is it?’
‘The line isn’t very good. There’s crackle on the line.’
‘It’s clear enough at this end.’ She waited again, placing the ball, as she was no doubt thinking, in his court. She was a great one for the telling image.
‘All right, then. I’ll drive across. Across to the Home.’
‘At once?’
‘In the morning.’
‘God!’ his sister said. ‘I thought you’d be more concerned.’
‘In the morning. If it is a problem it won’t go away before then.’
‘I’m disappointed,’ his sister said from the other end of the island. ‘I’m disappointed and disgusted that this is how casual you can be about it, but not surprised.’
‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’
He went back to the lounge, to the leather armchair facing his wife. It troubled him more than he revealed, his sister calling him within minutes of the call she had received herself, standing with her phone in what she grandly called the Conservatory, looking out at her sloping section of lemon trees and camellias crippled across wire-frames, the pergola with its dense web of passion vines, and beyond that the thin arm of the harbour, the pines black as in children’s drawings against the late evening sky.
‘That must have been important,’ Marion said. It was a rare thing for her sister-in-law to ring. She lowered the volume on the television, the figures of a British series on a grotesquely obese family appearing even more repellent without sound.
Brendan asked her, ‘Can you turn that bloody picture off?’
There was a click and it dwindled to a black dot. ‘It makes me sick just to look at them.’
‘Nothing that is human,’ she began to quote. A BA, as he liked to tease her, comes down to a box of quotes you can hand round like poppies.
‘What isn’t alien?’ he completed the tag for her. His raised hand thudded back on the chair’s broad arm. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s so hard to stay calm with that woman.’
His wife said, ‘If I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that.’
He told her what the call had been about. Marion, thank God, was as composed as he had tried to be himself while Susan carried on. There was the same ease and directness between them that there had been between Dad and his mother. Something Susan, he thought, with her ‘Importer of Rare Asian Antiques’ husband would never know, with their affectations, their terror that children might visit and the Visigoths run loose. It wasn’t just the antiques his brother-in-law liked travelling for, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work that one out, hadn’t he said that to Dad years back, before his mother had died? His father had laughed and said, ‘Mum spotted his number before any of us.’ It surprised Brendan it hadn’t bothered them more.
‘So what happens now?’ Marion bringing him back. She was as troubled as he was by what she heard.
‘Happens?’
‘What they rang Susan about.’
‘I suppose we’ll know tomorrow.’
Marion thought how wretched this must be for them, for Stan, for Brendan, for them all. ‘It just breaks my heart, hearing that.’
Brendan stood and went to the verandah door. ‘I’ll drive over first thing.’ He slid back the ranchslider and the coolness of the evening came in at him. He felt how his face was burning.
‘Why did they ring her, then?’ Marion said. ‘Instead of you?’
‘She’s the one who pays most, I suppose. She’s the eldest. It was going to the top.’ He stepped out onto the damp lawn.
‘Like me to stand out there with you?’ his wife asked. There was the cold glitter of stars above the line of hills.
No, he told her, making a joke of his wretchedness. ‘You go back to the fat people.’
The twins were arguing at breakfast the next morning.
‘It isn’t fair, Dad,’ Lexy said. ‘Luke was supposed to do our maths if I did his essay and what happens? He’s using the essay I wrote specially for him and he hasn’t done my maths. That stinks.’
Brendan said from the opened door of the fridge, ‘Isn’t it just better if you each do what you’re supposed to do? All of it? You’re not Siamese twins. You don’t share a brain.’
‘Pathetic,’ Lexy said.
Luke said, in his new cool voice whose effect was sometimes ruined with an unexpected sudden piping, ‘Siamese twins do not and never did share a brain, if you don’t mind my telling you that, Dad. To introduce a false argument has nothing—.’
‘Shut up will you, Luke!’ Brendan surprised himself. He and the twins hit it off so well together those who saw them only casually sometimes thought it must be an act. Where was teenage angst? Where was parental misunderstanding? Teenagers and their father were meant—were ordained—to be at odds.
Lexy caught her brother’s eye and puckered her forehead, her signalling to watch it, bro, as she had begun saying recently, an expression that irritated her mother. Mum, as the twins well knew, had a shorter fuse than Dad. ‘I’ve noticed for years,’ Marion said, ‘the more your education costs the less at ease you are with your mother tongue. By the time you get to university I expect you’ll be totally inarticulate.’
‘That’s called sarcasm, do you know that, Mum? You know what they say about that?’ she had come back.
Luke said, ‘Our mother was once a radio announcer, you’ve no idea how we skite about that, don’t we, Lexy? A DJ for people who can spell Mendelssohn, wow!’
The twins were good at having her on. Brendan would warn them about pushing their luck. ‘Parents have walked out on children for less than that.’ They were quick to take the hint. ‘Sorry, Mum, for going too far,’ they would say, but in unison, in comic twin-talk. Marion was easy enough to win round, for their occasional spats to blow over. So Dad saying that now and meaning it, telling Luke he could be a right pain in the arse, pulled them up. When he left the house ten minutes later without calling through to them from the carport, as he always did, ‘Make the most of it, you two,’ they knew something was going on. Mum too had come in and made her coffee and hardly spoken a word.
Luke said, ‘I think something’s up with Granddad. They stopped when I came in last night after squash but I know it was him they were talking about. Even Auntie Susan had been on the phone.’
‘The world must be ending then,’ Lexy said. And then, ‘Do you think he’s sick? Granddad?’
‘I think they’re kicking him out of the Home.’
‘You can’t kick oldies out. Can you?’
They both liked their grandfather as much as he liked them. They called him Slim for some reason they never comprehended. They just always had. It was a joke simply because it was what they had always done, and he called them his gnomes. It was what they always wrote on cards for his birthday and at Christmas. When he saw them now, ‘Good God,’ he’d say, ‘just look at the size of the gnomes, will you?’
Lexy said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if Slim came here, would you? If we built another room on
?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t mind,’ Luke said. He sounded suddenly angry with her, as if she expected him to mind. And then, ‘But he didn’t much want to, though, remember that? After Gran died? Dad tried to talk him round and he said in case he got sick or something. The Home would know what to do.’
‘Well, it might be different now. Whatever it is.’
‘And you reckon it was Susan started it?’
‘Don’t know about started it. But told him. Told Dad about it.’ And then he grinned at his sister and said, ‘You know when Dad starts on her homo husband she’s really pissed him off.’
‘Got a serve last night then, did he, Uncle Maurice?’
Luke said, ‘That’s what he was on about when I came in. You should have heard it. Rancid. Dad was cagey, though, when I tried to find out more.’
Brendan was struck, as he often was when he drove down the hill to the tight sweep of the bay, at how much smaller it always seemed than what he remembered as a child. How long it had been from one end to the other, how big the rocks and the little island were in those days, the hills on the harbour’s other side as high as you could imagine, blue one day and green the next, one layer of ranges behind the other, and the sun sometimes through the late broken sky running along the ridges like a torch being shone, until the shadow suddenly shut it off. It was always Dad he came with down to the beach. ‘You two go off,’ his mother said, ‘my head’s killing me.’ You put your feet up then, Dad would say. That was the phrase Brendan remembered he was always saying. It had all seemed so strange, that time, the big house on the hill that the wind shook. Dad said like it was playing dice, yet so natural too, that was how life was, where heads were killing, feet were put up, where talk helped make bad things better.
His father’s hands beneath his armpits lifted the boy up as the waves banged in, then up again, bang, as the next surge rolled at them, the huge arcing like cloudy glass that tumbled them both and the fun of it, the exhilaration. His father would laugh. That’s nothing, he said, that’s nothing, when the bitter salty slap of water flew into his eyes and his mouth and he knew if it wasn’t for Dad holding him he’d sweep away. Until there he was one morning, moving through the quieter waves by himself, his arms lifting and bent close against his ears, his legs beating the proper way he had tried for ages to get right, his feet tilted right out flat from his ankles, that moment of suddenly knowing yes, I am swimming by myself.
One day though was different, with a line of people just black shapes on the beach where they had gone to swim. His father’s hand was on his shoulder turning him from where the sand was wet and sloping down more steeply, and he knew without really seeing it there was somebody lying there inside the circle the big people made. ‘We needn’t go over,’ Dad had said, and he had tugged at his father’s hand and said but I want to, I have to see. He thought of it now as he drove past the small empty bay, not even the few walkers and dogs who were there most mornings, but the same tumble of waves, their frothing drawing back, as there had been that morning. Then for whatever reason he had never understood, Dad’s hand relaxed and he was running with another boy from his class, and they saw the lady lying there in a yellow dress, and two men bending over her, arranging her arms. The lady’s face was a colour he had never seen before, not like a real face at all. Her hair was long and black against her neck. This is dead, the boy had thought. As they drove back home without their swim Dad had said better not to mention it to Mum, did he think? It would make her sad, he said, we don’t want to do that. Brendan remembered—believed he remembered—Dad in those days as so tall, his hair nearly as far as his shoulders, his hand ruffling his own hair as they walked back across the sand. Yes, he said, when Brendan asked him, sometimes there’s accidents like that, the sea’s not always your friend. There were so many other days though that were ordinary, when nothing special happened. Dad would put a towel across his shoulders to stop him shivering on the way back up to the car and tell him to put his jersey on as soon as they got to it. It was only five minutes until they were home, and Mum telling him, you’ll be swimming in no time, Bren. And Dad saying to her, his arm around her shoulder, grinning down at him, ‘What do you mean, no time? You should have seen him today.’
The Home was on the other side of the city, the early traffic making it longer to get there than he planned. Mrs McLintock was Australian, a woman with teased-out blondish hair, and a surprisingly short neck one may not have noticed had she not worn long copper earrings that brushed across her shoulders. She was intelligent and sensitive and deeply cared for ‘her people’. That was the phrase she used for the forty or more residents who were in her charge. She reminded her staff that they worked in the homes of the old people they tended, the old were not simply figures in their workplace. Susan had shouted down the phone about her last evening, ‘That woman who runs the place. I can’t tell you how she disgusts me. As if it isn’t a crisis, for God’s sake!’ Brendan had said to her, mildly enough he thought, that he had a high regard for her, for Mrs McLintock. His sister had cut across him. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else for him, that’s all there is to it. Definitely find somewhere else. We’re not leaving him there.’ Then adding weight to her argument, ‘Maurice thinks so too. He insists.’
Brendan had poured himself a scotch, and a gin for Marion. ‘That little wanker,’ he said, ‘who’s he even to have an opinion? Whose father is it?’ Then they had laughed hollowly enough together as Marion told him, ‘She winds you up like a toy.’
‘It’s just so bloody awful though, isn’t it? All this about Dad?’
He said as much the next morning, to Mrs McLintock. Her earrings swished as she walked ahead of him to the room where they faced each other from comfortable chairs. He had followed her from the small office in the reception area and across the broad lounge where several of the patients, inmates—the word ‘residents’ never quite rang true for him—sat watching the last hour of Breakfast, a group of young gymnasts being interviewed by an inanely chuckling announcer—host?—he was no more sure about the right word there either. He had said, as they crossed the lounge, ‘Last time I was here it was an old musical.’ The irony of it could not have come more thickly, he remembered that, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly singing to each other above the drooping heads, a thin beating hand on the wooden arm of a chair, the smell of cottage pie for later in the day coming through from the kitchens. Mrs McLintock said, rather gently mocking him he imagined, ‘Oh, I’m sure it does wonders for them.’ She asked him, ‘You’re sure you’d not like a coffee?’, then she had said, as directly as if it were a casual matter they needed to speak of, ‘I thought once you’d talked with your sister you’d want to pop in.’
‘Como,’ Marie Condon said.
‘Como?’
‘It was late summer. Early autumn even. The leaves and all.’
‘I was never there,’ Stan said. ‘But I’ve seen photos.’
‘It’s lovely. It’s like people imagine.’
‘It looks lovely all right.’
‘We were there, though, remember?’
‘You were there with George,’ he said.
‘I know that, Stan. You’d have loved it.’
The sun was out at last; it was warm enough to sit outside. The light through the leaves moved over them, the shade and brightness flowing across them. One of the senior staff watched them from the dayroom window. ‘Can’t get up to much out there,’ she said.
‘Give them a break,’ a younger woman who stood beside her said.
‘You always need to keep an eye out,’ Daphne told her. ‘You’ve hardly been here long enough to know.’
‘Can’t have them being happy, can we?’ Though laughing as she said it, not wanting to push her luck. The older woman already was thinking, knows it all already, does she? She’d seen her sort before. But she said, ‘It’s like a zoo in this place, remember that. If you don’t keep your eyes open it would be a shambles.’
The younger woman
’s name was Hannah. She disliked the blunt, watchful senior whose place it was to instruct her, to train her. It took some getting used to, as she told her partner. They had worked as sharemilkers near Stratford but it hadn’t worked out. Neither had wanted to move down here but what choice was there? Len had been looking for work but without much luck, she’d say, but there were those worse off than them. At least when she came home, dog-tired some evenings, he had bathed their little girl and there was spaghetti to die for. She wanted to be good at it, this job she had taken on. It made her feel right when she did it properly, and she knew they liked her, the old ones. ‘It’s a vocation,’ she had said to Dean, ‘it really is, if you do it right.’
Then the sun went in as abruptly as half an hour before it had broken through the cloud that again poured down across the hills. Stan crooked his arm in that way the older woman snorted at and Hannah thought was really nice, and Marie Condon held it firmly as she drew herself up. They tried to spend as much time together as they could. The women sat at one long table, of course, in the dining room, and the men at another; it would have been good if they could eat together but it wasn’t like that in here. There had to be rules, everyone knew that, rules and a timetable or where would they be? Mrs McLintock, who was liked by everybody, explained that when you arrived. ‘A happy team,’ that’s what she said, that’s what she would like them to be. But anyone could sit together in the lounge, and in the dayroom, as much as they liked. Through the news. Through the film every second afternoon, when the movies were carefully chosen to be upbeat, nostalgic, leaving those who watched with a sense of things being as they should, the certainties still there that they remembered. You watched an old movie and for a while you were young again.
Through the movies Stan would place his hand on Marie’s and their fingers would lace together, and the good things in the stories seeped into them. When the picture was over sometimes Marie was crying but glad Stan was there beside her, and his enjoyment really was for her sake, that she was smiling, and her hand tightening against his. He was the one who had worked out the best time for them to be alone. After morning tea, when the first visitors sometimes came for those whose families made the effort, and the staff were busy, that was a good time. And in the late afternoons, you could tell when there was a hush across the home, people putting their feet up before dinner at six-thirty, radios on in some of the bedrooms, a remote sadness even at that time, Stan thought, the light fading, the quiet music. People talked quieter too, he had noticed that, the light grey and sifting until someone puts the lights on. ‘How you can see in here?’ The best time though was when the cheerful women from different clubs or churches came in and everything was jolly while they were there, sing-songs some days or making decorations or someone giving a talk, someone who had been to China, say, and told you about it, how ordinary people lived their lives there, or an All Black whose auntie was in the Home would visit when a test match was coming up. Stan was smart at spotting the good times to get away, to close the door in the Emergency Room, which in fact was hardly ever used. They could kiss. He could put his hand inside her dress. She could tell him, Yes, Stan, I do like that. They were Marie and Stan together and not like actors who used their names, who had learned the rules and knew what must never be done, they must never turn and look back into that other country where they once had lived, and would like to be. Marie Condon said to him, ‘I know I forget sometimes. I know they want me to forget.’ But she put her hand on him at those times and leaned her head into his shoulder and he would raise his hand and stroke her neck, and she smiled against the wool of his pullover that she said smelled of eucalyptus, that best of all smells to remember, she told him, nothing took you back like that. It didn’t bother Stan if sometimes she said another name, nor that they had to hide like this and be afraid, because she was happy, she would tell him that, and he would say it back to her, after her, that he was too, that he was happy.
The Families Page 13