33
Meg stepped out of the car into the heat. They hadn’t moved from the spot where Patrick had pulled over, next to the cemetery.
‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ Patrick said as he unloaded her bag from the boot.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Meg said, taking the suitcase. ‘You should keep going, enjoy the beach.’
Patrick had offered countless times to drive her home, but Meg had politely refused. Even the most excruciating pain was preferable to another minute with him inside the car. If she saw a taxi or a tram she would catch it. Until then she would walk, resting at park benches and tram stops along the way. This was the route she had taken when she was working—and having sex—with Tim. Back then she had walked with long strides and proud shoulders—her neck tingling from the bristle of Tim’s kisses, her body alight with the memory of his touch. Meg wondered what her younger self would say to her now. What would she have made of this dramatic escape from a handsome man who wanted to be with her?
Her legs ached. The suitcase had wheels, but the handle dug into her palm. She was walking alongside the gates of the cemetery, and without thinking she wandered inside, searching for a spot to rest. Her father had brought her and Helen to the cemetery once—he’d said it would be a good lesson in history. Their mother had scolded him for taking them, describing it as creepy and morbid, but Meg and Helen had enjoyed the visit, reading the names on the tombstones and taking turns to scare each other with ghost stories about the dead.
Walking through the cemetery sixty years later, Meg couldn’t have had a more different experience. Death was something she thought about every day now. She didn’t look at tombstones and think of horror films; she thought of people—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, colleagues and friends. She took care to read the inscriptions, to whisper the names, to imagine these people and how they’d died. Even the oldest graves, their headstones rendered nameless by the wash of countless storms, captured her imagination.
Near the west gate she found the headstone of a woman who shared the same birthday as her. She sat down on the small square patch of weeds beside it. The woman’s name was Maria, and she’d died three years ago, aged seventy-two. She was Italian, buried with her husband beneath a grand, gold-flecked slab. It was one of the only graves with fresh flowers—a pretty bouquet of pink carnations and baby’s breath—laid upon it. Meg had had an Italian friend at high school called Cristina. She’d had five siblings and was always complaining about being dragged to family gatherings on the weekends—weddings and birthdays, christenings and confirmations.
Apart from Christmas, Meg and her family didn’t have get-togethers. Her mother’s family were scattered across New South Wales, South Australia and the UK, while her father had cut all ties with his relatives. Meg’s parents had brought her up to believe that extended family brought only problems—her mother’s anxiety in the lead-up to Christmas and her relief on seeing her aunt’s car recede into the distance after lunch only served to reinforce this. But now Meg wondered if she wouldn’t have been better off with European parents. A traditional mother and father who had forced her to marry into another large, loud European family. Maybe then she wouldn’t be sitting in a cemetery, alone, the only surviving member of her clan, staring at another woman’s gravestone.
The sun was high overhead. Meg looked at her watch. She’d lost more than an hour wandering through the cemetery. Above her a flock of rainbow lorikeets shrieked, a splash of colour across the grey clouds. She thought of Atticus. Perhaps Patrick was right. Perhaps he’d found happiness now. She’d always felt a pang of guilt when she hooked the latch on his cage. Surely human beings had always been jealous of birds’ ability to silently soar across the sky. She stood up, felt the pull of gravity on her bones.
Just before she reached the gate, she caught a glimpse of a headstone, broken in two, beneath her dusty feet. The earth had consumed most of it, but she could still make out the words of the faded engraving: Until the day breaks and the shadows flee.
As she left the cemetery, she was relieved to see a taxi dropping off a passenger a few metres from the gate.
The driver wound down the window. ‘You after a taxi?’
‘Yes, please,’ Meg said, feeling faint. She deposited the suitcase in the boot, climbed into the front seat and put on her seatbelt. She told the driver her address. There was a photo of him on the dashboard. His name was Ali.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
Meg leant back against the headrest and closed her eyes. ‘Better, now.’
‘Lady your age shouldn’t be walking on such a hot day.’
‘I know.’ Meg felt like a child being scolded. Ali must have sensed this, because when he spoke again his voice was softer.
‘Were you visiting someone?’ he said, and when Meg seemed confused, he added, ‘At the cemetery?’ He whispered the word as if it was a curse.
‘Oh, no,’ Meg said, and shook her head. She supposed he must have thought it strange for an old woman to be wandering aimlessly through a cemetery. ‘I just needed somewhere to rest my feet.’
‘Would you like some water?’ Ali asked. ‘You look like you need some water. I think I have a bottle in the back.’ He alternated his gaze between her and the road.
‘I’m fine.’ Meg stopped short of explaining that this was just how she looked—wrinkled and desiccated. No amount of water was going to help her. ‘How old do you think I am?’
Ali waved his finger in the air and smiled. ‘I know this is a trick question!’
‘No, really, I want to know.’
Ali shook his head. ‘The only correct answer to that question is twenty-one. The most beautiful age for everyone.’
Meg thought of Andy with his acne scars and sad eyes. She wondered if he knew he’d never be more beautiful than he was now.
Meg said goodbye to Ali and walked the few steps to her house with a proud, taut back, conscious of him watching her with concern in his big brown eyes. When he had driven off, she surrendered to the pain and leant against the front door, her legs burning. The pounding in her head eased as her key found the lock, but it started up again at the sound of a high-pitched shriek from behind the door. Atticus? But how had he got inside? Had she left a window open? Or had she only imagined the noise?
She left the suitcase by the door and followed the white patches of poo like tiny stepping stones across the floorboards. They led her to the kitchen, where she found Atticus on the table, preening himself amid the spilt contents of a cornflakes box. He stopped his grooming to look at her. Meg felt all the emotion of the day’s events suddenly seize her. She collapsed in a chair, in a fit of tears. Atticus fluffed his feathers, and she held out her arm to him.
‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall! Humpty Dumpty had a great fall!’ the parrot sang, before making a long whistling noise.
Meg recalled a newspaper article she’d read once about a prisoner who was so accustomed to jail he’d committed crime after crime to be locked up again. She wondered if that was why Atticus had come back to her—he’d grown so used to living in a cage he didn’t know how to do anything else. She hoped not. She prayed he was just an introvert like her—overwhelmed by the big, brutal, beautiful world.
Meg tidied up the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She should feel relieved, or happy, but if anything she felt uneasy. It didn’t help that Atticus wouldn’t stop singing ‘Humpty Dumpty’. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she put him in his cage and threw the sheet over him. Perhaps he was sleep-deprived or over-stimulated after his recent adventure, like a child.
She retreated to the bedroom. It was afternoon, and a yolky light oozed through a gap between the curtains, bathing everything in an orange glow. She rested on her bed for ten minutes before getting up to use the toilet. Through the half-open bathroom door she saw that the cabinet above the sink was open and her medicine bottles were strewn across the floor. She thought of Atticus and opened the door.
Meg didn’t
see Andy straight away. He’d fallen into the space between the toilet and the bath, his arms sticking out at awkward angles. On seeing him, she fell to her knees. A million thoughts raced through her head. Andy’s mother and father—she had no way of contacting them. Would the agency blame her for leaving her medications within easy reach? Andy was officially an adult, but with his hairless skin and beseeching eyes, he often looked more like a child. She should have taken greater care with him!
She could hardly see his face, slouched behind the toilet. She thought for sure he must be dead, but when she touched his arm it was still warm, and if she listened carefully she could hear a quiet gurgle coming from his mouth. She tried to remember what she’d been taught at a first-aid class she’d attended years ago. The ABCs, they’d called it, but God knew what they stood for. Instinct told her she should extricate him from between the toilet and the bath. It was hard work, but somehow she managed to pull him out. Every few seconds Meg heard the reassuring warble of his breath, but in between times his chest barely seemed to rise. Finally it occurred to her to call for help. She found her purse and dialled 000 on her phone.
Meg stood in the hallway with her back to the wall, watching the paramedics at work. Atticus, who had refused to settle in his cage, watched them too. She felt envious of their knowledge of the human body—the way they reduced flesh and blood to simple mechanics. She watched them flash lights into Andy’s eyes and inspect his arms for needle marks. There was something beautiful about the way they moved around his body in a perfectly coordinated dance, not once bumping hands or reaching for the same instrument, not once getting in each other’s way. For the most part they even managed to ignore Atticus’s calls for attention—only exchanging a smile when the exasperated bird screamed, ‘How rude!’
Meg understood that Andy was alive, but only just. The medicine had made his airway floppy and he was at risk of choking on his own tongue. She’d heard the lady paramedic say that if Meg had arrived ten minutes later, they might not have been able to save him. As the paramedic spoke, Meg recalled that the A in ABC stood for airway. It had taken her over half an hour to remember this—fat lot of good she was in an emergency.
The house was quiet, eerily so. Atticus, sick of being ignored, had gone back to his cage in a huff. At one point, the lady paramedic forgot the brakes on the stretcher and it momentarily rolled away from her. She said, ‘Sorry, Max,’ and Max said, ‘No worries,’ as if they were in a café and she’d accidentally bumped his coffee.
When ambulance officers had first visited the house, on the day of Helen’s accident, the place hadn’t been nearly so quiet. The air had resonated for what seemed like days with her mother’s screams and Helen’s unanswered questions: ‘Why can’t I feel my legs? Why can’t I wriggle my toes?’
‘Would you like to travel with him? In the back of the ambulance?’ the lady paramedic asked Meg.
Meg imagined Andy waking up along the way, a plastic mask over his face and a plastic tube hanging from his arm. The lady paramedic was pretty, angelic even, but she was still a stranger. Meg and Andy might not be friends, but they were definitely more than strangers.
The ambulance officers helped Meg into the back of the vehicle, which sat surprisingly high above the ground. As they drove, the lady paramedic, who introduced herself as Sharon, told Meg she could hold Andy’s hand. Meg looked at Andy, his skin sallow, his cheeks sunken. She was quite sure he wouldn’t know if she was holding his hand or not, but she didn’t want Sharon to think her unkind. She placed her fingers lightly on his arm and felt the thrill of his pulse beneath his skin.
34
It’s hot. The air conditioner is broken. Andy’s mother is sitting in front of the only fan in the house, watching Cantonese soap operas. Andy has been banished to his bedroom for calling his mother a smelly cunt. Really it was the voice in his mother’s head that swore at her, but she’s so deep into her sickness that facts have become irrelevant. Andy’s father is in China—a rich man in Shenzhen is interested in investing in his cleaning business. Before he left, he gave Andy a list of emergency phone numbers, but Andy is locked in his bedroom and the phone is in the lounge room.
He writes a note—My mum is hearing voices and she’s locked me in my room—and throws it through the bars of the bedroom window. He watches it float down and come to rest on top of an air-conditioning unit. A pigeon pecks at it briefly before flying away. It’s at times like this that Andy wishes he had a sibling—someone to reassure him that it is in fact his mother, and not him, who is unwell. His granddad was good at doing this before he died, but now, alone with his thoughts, Andy starts to wonder if perhaps he did call his mother a smelly cunt—God knows he’s thought the words in his head enough times.
He looks at the Astro Boy figurine on his desk—a recent present from his father. In the Japanese manga series, Astro Boy was created by a scientist to replace his dead son, Tobio. The scientist eventually rejected the robot on realising that, while the android looked like his son, and had all of Tobio’s memories, he was incapable of expressing emotion like a normal human child.
As Andy thinks these things he feels the soles of his feet begin to burn. When he sits down on his bed to inspect them, he sees they’re glowing red like hot coals. The noises from the street, twenty storeys below, grow louder. He can hear pigeons’ coos as if the birds are right next to his ear. He walks to the bedroom door and turns the knob. There’s a slight resistance before it swings open. His mother turns to look at him, a wet face towel on her forehead. She smiles and suddenly she isn’t his mother anymore, she’s Kiko—kind, gentle Kiko. Andy feels her soft fingers on his arm before the apartment block that has been his home since he was born unfolds like a piece of origami. Then the floor, too, falls away, leaving Andy suspended. Flames shoot from the soles of his feet. He is flying.
35
There were no lights or sirens when Helen was taken to hospital for the last time. In the weeks leading up to her death, she’d been battling an infected pressure sore and everybody had just assumed her fever was caused by her wound. In fact she’d developed pneumonia from lying in bed for so long. By the time it was picked up, Helen had a lung full of pus. The doctor, a straightforward fellow, had said she might not last the night. When Helen was transferred to hospital, Meg had followed the ambulance in her car. The paramedics had driven slowly, or so it felt to Meg, and it had upset her, because every minute on the road was a minute less spent at Helen’s bedside.
Today the paramedics weaved their way across tramlines to get to the emergency department in good time. When they arrived, there were people in blue scrubs and gloves waiting to greet them. Sharon barked numbers at the doctors in an urgent way that reminded Meg of the doctor shows she watched sometimes on TV. It made Meg wonder whether young people’s lives were held more dear because they had more life to lose. She recalled a nurse at the hospital telling her that Helen had had a good innings. At the time Meg had wanted to ask what defined a good innings. Was a good innings for an able-bodied mother of five different from that for a paraplegic woman with no kids? Nothing annoyed Meg more than platitudes—the funeral had been rife with them. She’s at peace now. It was her time. God needed another angel. As far as Meg could tell, people only said these things to fill the silence and make themselves feel better. The truth was, Helen had loved life and was terrified of dying. Meg knew this because Helen had told her so, almost every day.
The doctors asked Meg to fill out Andy’s forms. There were a lot of questions she couldn’t answer. Things like emergency contacts and next of kin. She would, she knew, have to notify the agency—it was only a matter of time—but she wanted to wait until she had a better idea of Andy’s prognosis. She wanted to be able to temper any anger or disapproval with reassurance that Andy was going to be okay. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a young man in a red T-shirt smiling at her. He had brown skin and brown eyes and his shirt said Ask Me. When Meg made eye contact he immediately walked towards her.
Meg shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Something to drink perhaps?’ He spoke in a deliberate and thoughtful way, not rushing or swallowing his words like a native English speaker.
‘Really?’ Some of the other patients in the waiting room looked over in their direction with surprised faces.
‘Water, orange juice, tea…’
‘I’d love a cup of tea.’
Ash disappeared and re-emerged a few minutes later with a polystyrene cup. Meg took it from him. She looked at the label on the tea bag that simply read black tea. When she held the cup to her nose the hot liquid had no smell.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘No thank you,’ Meg replied, but Ash sat down on the plastic seat beside her.
‘Have you been waiting long?’
She realised he’d mistaken her for a patient. ‘I’m not sick. I’m here with someone.’ Meg looked at the boy’s smooth face. He couldn’t be much older than Andy. She wondered why he spent his spare time doing this, what he got out of it.
‘A relative?’
‘Yes,’ she lied, not wanting to explain her relationship to Andy.
‘They will take good care of him,’ Ash said, and then paused as if something had occurred to him. ‘Is it a him?’
Meg nodded. She knew the boy would assume she was waiting for her husband. ‘And what about you?’ she said, keen to change the subject. ‘What brings you to volunteer in an emergency department?’
‘I like talking to people.’
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes after that. Meg surveyed the waiting room. Some people were sleeping on beds created from jackets thrown over plastic seats. Others were staring blankly at the floor. Most were occupied with their phones, swiping their fingers across the screens in a mechanical fashion.
Room for a Stranger Page 11