When Ibrahim turned to look at Mandy, his neat, trimmed beard seemed whiter than it had the day before. Behind his thick chemist’s glasses with their slightly bent frames, his eyes were swollen and rheumy. He stared at her for a long second before turning back again, gripping his hands together more tightly behind his back as he watched a stranger lifting and turning and soaping his ten-year-old boy’s beautiful, destroyed body.
In the stale recycled air of the plane, above the rows of seats the television screens flicker into life. The plane icons on the screens creep across the bright blue ocean towards the orange coastal frill of Australia.
Her father has fallen off the roof. In three hours she will be at Sydney airport, and Chris will be there waiting.
To be adult is to be alone.
CHAPTER THREE
Day one
MARGARET LEANS into Geoff’s doughy, swollen face.
‘The girls and Christopher are coming today,’ she says in a low voice. She pauses. ‘Mandy is coming home.’
Geoff lies there, unchanged. It feels futile to be talking to him, but all the nurses and the doctors have told her she should, so she does. It is three days since the accident. She supposes he still looks shocking, but she can’t tell anymore. Perhaps he looks much better. It seems she cannot now remember his face as it used to be—unblotched, unswollen, bare of the tubes, without the dreadful purple wound spreading its bruises across his face. She can stare at Geoff now without flinching, or crying. His eyelids are still the shiny, dark purple puffy slits, no lashes visible, but perhaps they are a little less swollen, less glossily tender, than yesterday? Margaret looks up for a nurse to ask, but the only two she can see are at the desk, bent together over the back of a computer, holding electrical cords in their hands.
There is the mechanical sound of Geoff’s breathing, the sound of the oxygen hissing gently around them. She takes off her jacket and fits it carefully over the back of the visitor’s chair, taking her time. Then she sits down, crossing her legs. She thinks now she should not have said that about Mandy coming home. In ordinary times it would mean something very special; someone’s wedding, a rare Christmas.
She doesn’t say anything about Stephen. There is nothing to say. She sees a nub of thread in her stocking and leans forward to run her fingertip over it, wondering if she will be able to nip it off with her fingernails, or whether that will only pull it and cause a ladder. She decides not to risk it. She remembers the varicose vein scalloping her thigh and uncrosses her legs. She sits back in the chair and watches Geoff breathing, being forced to breathe, by the ventilator. The machines around the ward bip and sing their lopsided notes. There is so much time in here.
One of the nurses has left the computer and stands holding a telephone receiver to her ear, still watching the other girl fiddling with the cords. ‘Well, how long will that take,’ the first one says into the phone, rolling her eyes at the other nurse.
The new ward, this Intensive Care Unit, has been opened only a week. Some of the machines are still covered in plastic wrapping, or have delivery stickers on them. The first day Margaret went to the bathroom, the toilet was covered in fine cement dust and there were plastic covers over the drains of the sinks. She is grateful that Geoff was not quite the first patient in the intensive care unit; the young man a few beds away appeared in a picture in the local newspaper, thin and groggy. He has had his leg amputated from diabetes. Margaret heard the doctor telling him the same thing she herself has been told, how lucky they are. That this unit has been opened, that the specialists are happy to come now, that the patients have not had to travel all the way to Sydney in an air ambulance.
She stands up and lifts the crumpled sheet, holding it above Geoff’s chest covered in its wires and white medical sticking tape. She lets the sheet billow down softly, and then spreads it lightly across his shoulders, stepping around to the other side of the bed to straighten it. She wonders if it might hurt him, this weight of the sheet. She wonders if he can feel. If he were conscious, would he feel the pain still? The sound he had made, the weird scuffling in the gravel and that terrible sound, a baby’s grizzling coming out of the man she had never heard cry. That sound she never wants to hear again.
She watches his face, all day, every day, for signs of the pain, or of waking. But there has been nothing. The nurses and the doctor say that the stillness is good, that he needs to be kept still, even though they take him off each day for some new test, some scan. The wardsman comes and wheels the bed away for a time, then wheels it back. She doesn’t go with them.
There is so much time.
At home in the mornings she finds herself rushing, guiltily, to get ready. When she wakes up—usually after a long, urgent dream about some mundane, unfinished task like clearing out the laundry cupboard, but over which she must nevertheless face some brutal public judgement—she lies there in the bed, so tired. Then she turns over and sees the clock and it is already seven. How can it be so late when the last time she looked, just a minute ago, it was five-thirty? So she sits up, panic rising in her, and then scurries to the shower, the breakfast table, ironing board. Ticking off lists and remembering to stuff into a plastic shopping bag the cards that have begun to arrive, and some magazines, and the library books she must return, and then clopping in her good shoes down the driveway.
But once she has arrived, at nine o’clock at the latest, and set down her bag of things and taken off her jacket, the day yawns ahead, each hour a long ribbon into the future. And she is suddenly so heavily tired again, sunk there in the squishy wide chair with its new vinyl smell, a magazine resting on her stomach.
At the far end of the ward a twosome of doctors is doing the rounds. The nurse from the computer has left the desk and follows the doctors, slinging the stark blue curtains closed along their railings around each bed, cloaking the patient and the doctors inside. Margaret pictures them in there, arms folded, asking questions of the person in the bed, waiting for answers, nodding. When they get to Geoff, will they have anything to say? She tries to think of questions of her own to ask. The children will ask her things, and she must be able to answer them. But there is only one question. After her first irritated moment of confusion on the phone—‘What do you mean, Mum?’—Cathy had made Margaret repeat what she had said. She could not believe her own words. Then Cathy had said, the same disbelief in her voice, ‘Well—is he going to be all right?’
Margaret keeps returning to the moment, three days ago, that she heard the scuffling thunder of Geoff’s falling body overhead. It seems like three years ago. And now it has begun to seem to her that at the moment Geoff fell, she fell too, began spinning back through her marriage. It is as if his skidding boot, his body as he tumbled, has knocked loose a stone in a wall and made a small irregular gap through which her life comes pouring, dry as sand. She cannot stop it. The pouring sand is made of decades-old glimpses of memory—of her mother folding an unopened letter into a small concertina and pushing it deep into the darkness of a hedge. It is herself, an exhausted young mother, lying on her back in a garden. It is standing with an axe held above her head, too scared to kill a snake even to protect her children. And then the sand is more recent: her eldest daughter sending her weary-sounding postcards from godforsaken places in the world never heard of except on the news, and Margaret’s knowing that between the front of the postcard and the back lies the truth—that these are places Mandy knows her parents will never go; that she has chosen a life in which her mother can’t come after her.
In the dry, almost silent rustle of the pouring sand, Margaret thinks, I was going to be an air hostess. When she was nineteen she wrote away to Ansett from Brisbane, saying nothing to her parents. But she never got a reply, so she married Geoff instead. Except that years later, as she lay in hospital with a new baby in her arms, her father told her what he had spied one day while clipping the hedge, the glimpse of mouldy folded envelope, long after she’d written away. ‘Good thing your mother hid that letter fro
m Ansett, after all!’ He’d said it almost by accident, grinning and googling into the baby’s tiny face.
Margaret remembered the moment, all the hurtling shock and hatred. She’d gathered the baby’s, Mandy’s, little knitted jacket around her and held her close, away from the proud grandfather. The room had begun breathing and swelling. Years later Cathy took her to an art exhibition, and there was a big tunnel thing that made Margaret sick to walk through, the walls pressing in. She understood that thing, never mind what the notices said on the gallery wall. That white breathing corridor was a missed life, and you clinging to a tiny, hungry baby for protection, and being shown your other future, pushed deep into the dark of the hedge, speckled with bird dirt and mildew.
Sometimes when the children were small she had let herself daydream about the air hostess she would have been. She daydreamed herself in Monaco, or lying on her back on perfect green grass, staring up at the vast struts of the Eiffel Tower—that would be on a day off—or just handing out those little parcels of neat dinners and simply a slot to put the trays back into. No sinks, no nappies. Only little squares of food and drink with their neat covers on little trays, and quiet people sitting belted into their seats while she would stroll up and down, and sometimes go and check her lipstick and stockings and re-pin her chignon.
Margaret had always known that this was stupid.
She knew it would not really have been like that, but she liked to think of it that way all the same. It is the same now, when every so often she makes a visit to the ‘clairvoyant’ in Armidale that her friend Yvonne told her about. She knows it is stupid, but she only goes these days when there is something bad in the news about a place where Mandy is, and when she has not been in contact. But that happens nearly every day now, and Margaret only goes to the psychic—Marilyn—a few times a year now. Psychics are only pocket-emptiers, she knows, and anyway the woman never tells her anything really, except ‘Mandy knows you’re with her, and she loves you.’ It is stupid, but Marilyn’s certainty is comforting; like when a doctor tells you firmly, You will get better. So it is enough to be told that her daughter loves her, by a complete stranger wearing too much eye makeup, and who has a yappy little pug dog that she pushes by the face into a tiny cage with a blue plastic door whenever Margaret arrives. The room always smells of dog, and she can see its angry little eyes from behind the plastic net of its cage whenever she lets her gaze wander from Marilyn’s eye shadow. At tennis, she doesn’t mention going to see Marilyn, even when Yvonne talks about her own ‘readings’, and Yvonne doesn’t seem to know. At least Marilyn is clairvoyant enough to keep her mouth shut.
Margaret sniffs now at her own joke. The doctors are standing at the far bed of the young woman with a scarf wrapped around her head. The young woman’s face is pale as the sheet, and she stares up at the doctors out of her sunken eyes, answering their questions only with a slow blink, or a tiny shift of her head.
Margaret looks at her watch. Mandy should be getting off the plane now. Chris said he would take her home for a shower and breakfast, and then they would leave at noon at the latest, collecting Cathy on the way. He said that nobody has yet heard from Stephen, but that they would keep trying.
Sometimes Margaret realises it is a little strange that it is her daughter’s husband, not Mandy herself, who rings her up, who organises things. Who says, in a tender voice, ‘You take it easy, Marg.’ But men are different now than they used to be. Some men.
She is aware, too, that in the back of her mind she has begun to think of Geoff as if he is back at work again, or off on a Rotary trip. Not this ruined mess before her. When she looks at that face again now she feels the shock forcing breath into her lungs once more, and she must breathe it out, in two hard pushes, to stop herself from crying. ‘Just calm bloody down,’ that’s what he would say to her now. If he could speak. He would say it kindly, she thinks. But with a firm hand on her shoulder. She breathes out again, more steadily this time.
After she was married and they moved to Rundle, Geoff would go off to work and Margaret would sit on a rug in the garden with the children. Sometimes she would lie down there in the sun and let the children wander about. Sometimes she fell asleep, out of tiredness, out of boredom. Nobody said anything about depression back then. She wonders if that’s what it has been, her whole adult life. Depression. Or anxiety, the way everything is explained now, on the radio, on the television. Politicians even, having bipolar disorder. Names for everything.
Margaret was never given Valium like her friends, although once a doctor offered it to her when she went to him with an itchy scalp. In the seventies. ‘Isn’t Valium a dirty word these days?’ she’d said without thinking, smiling a little. The doctor had stared at her for a second then, and put his pen down, and said coolly that perhaps she needed to change her shampoo instead, and stood up for her to leave the room. Afterwards she wished she had kept quiet, let him write it down for her. Perhaps it would be nice to live for a while in the glazed, pretty world that her friend Judy seemed to inhabit. Geoff said that dancing with Judy at the P&F ball was like dancing with a tin can. Plenty of tinkling noise and light as a feather. Margaret thought at first he meant it as an insult, but later she wasn’t sure.
Looking over at him in the bed, she is suddenly seized by a thought—Where are his hands? She jumps up, leans over and searches for his left hand under the sheet. She finds it and peels away the sheet so she can lift it out, hold its cool weight in both her hands for a moment. She strokes her thumb over the familiar sun-blotched, veiny skin. She lowers her face for a second, holds her cheek against the soft skin of his hand. Then she lifts the sheet and lays his hand back down, carefully, on the narrow strip of mattress at his side. She strokes his forearm and then leans over to find his other arm; it is there, straight by his side, plastered and tubed. She lowers the sheet again and tucks it back in.
She sees across the beds that the doctors have disappeared again. They are not coming to speak to her after all. It is always like this: the waiting, the expectation, then nothing. Then they will suddenly appear and blurt things at her when she’s not ready, and then take him away, then reappear. She smooths her trousers beneath her bottom and sits down again. She tries not to feel relieved that the doctors have gone.
In a moment she hears a noise. The tea lady is coming with her trolley. The trolley is old, battered stainless steel, out of place among all the muted new colours and spot-less surfaces. The tea lady’s murky green uniform looks old and out of place too. She wheels her trolley along the speckled linoleum, raising her eyebrows at Margaret as she approaches. Margaret smiles and shakes her head; later she will walk to Sidewalks on the corner for a proper cup of tea.
She sees the tea lady make a brief, furtive glance at Geoff’s leaden face before she moves away. And Margaret understands suddenly, like a heavy punch to the stomach, that it is clear to strangers that Geoff will soon be dead.
THESE PAST few days, driving to and from the hospital, Margaret has had the odd feeling that there’s a small animal somewhere inside her car. She catches glimpses sometimes, at the corner of her vision, of something dark and quick. She has cleaned out the car, poking the vacuum hose as far under the seats as possible. But tiny creatures—like mice, or big cockroaches, little birds even—can flatten themselves against surfaces, and lurk there, undetected.
When the children were small they bought a kitten at a school fête, and it escaped in the car. All the children’s little hands grasping at it, and it screeched and yowled and in the rear-vision mirror Margaret saw the furry thing backflipping and then the children all diving for it. They could hear it miaowing all the way home, hidden somewhere beneath the seats. When they pulled into the driveway, though, and the children were all standing on the grass, Margaret could not find the kitten under any seat. They pulled everything from the car—jumpers, old exercise books, soft-drink bottles, cricket pads and a cordial-stained picnic blanket. Eventually they opened all the car doors and went inside,
hoping the kitten would sneak out when they weren’t there. Early the next morning Margaret stole out to the car to listen. Still the kitten was faintly miaowing. Eventually, with the children all banned from coming out of the house, Geoff tracked the sound to the door. The animal had somehow squashed itself in between the inner and outer panels of the door. It took a crowbar to jimmy the upholstered vinyl panel off, and the exhausted kitten fell, wet and heavy, to the ground on the driveway.
Margaret thinks of this now, as she drives home from the hospital. She knows there can be no animal. There is no sound. With the kitten they could hear it crying. But now, stopped here at Rundle’s one set of traffic lights outside the supermarket, there it is again, this time at the shoulder of the passenger seat near the window: a tiny grey darting.
The kitten, all those years ago, had lasted a few months in her family’s care before it shot across the road to escape a tennis ball, and was run over.
She knows there is no kitten; that there is probably nothing at all. She must ask Geoff about it. And then for the umpteenth time she feels the stab, as if she has just been woken by a loud noise and for an instant doesn’t recognise the room she has slept in for forty years.
Outside Woolworths, Pauline Newberry is standing at the corner, talking to a woman Margaret doesn’t recognise, wearing a green dress. The woman has her hand up, shielding her eyes from the sun.
Margaret knows she must somehow accommodate herself to this recurring bolt of understanding. And to these strange thoughts that have come tumbling in since Geoff fell down—the creature in the car, the futile remembrances of old hurts that her own parents inflicted—things long-ago accepted, now suddenly lurching. The air hostess she might have been. Wondering, again, why she has no grandchildren.
The Children Page 2