Stephen had arrived early, creeping into the ward and whispering to the duty nurse. He’d sat in the low light, holding his old man’s white hand, tilting his weight forward, setting the plastic chair rocking in a slow, deliberate tremor.
After a while he had stepped silently back across the floor to the nurse at her desk and asked, ‘Can I shave him?’
She’d raised her tired eyes. ‘Sure, I suppose. If I can find some stuff . . .’ and she trailed off across the ward, fiddling with a bunch of keys.
Shortly she presented Stephen with a bowl of hot water, a towel and soap and a razor on a tray. ‘We just have to be really careful with the tubes and stuff,’ she said, easing the grubby plastering off Geoff’s sweaty forehead, peeling it away and then taping the large ventilator tube to the pillow beside his face.
She stood beside the bed while Stephen took the washer and lathered his father’s face with soap, lifting the nostril tubing carefully, watching Geoff for any sign of discomfort, any reaction. The machines buzzed and beeped their arrhythmic melodies.
After a minute or two the nurse said, ‘You’ll be right,’ and left him.
Stephen bent over his father, smoothing the old skin and turning his face, drawing the razor across the skin—gently, gently—and dipping the razor in and out of the water. Eventually he took the bowl into the bathroom and tipped the soapy water out, rinsed the washer under the tap, then came back with a bowl of clean hot water. With the clean washer he wiped his father’s face again, lifting and setting the tubes back, sponging his cheeks, nostrils, the corners of his closed eyes, smoothing up into his hairline, into and behind each ear. The nurse came back, picking at a roll of tape, and repositioned the big white tube with a square of clean, unrumpled tape.
‘Much better,’ she said, and smiled at him.
He took the bowl once again to the bathroom, once again rinsed the washer under the hot tap. Then he drew it over his own face, pressing the steaming cloth into his eyes.
Now, as he sits beside Cathy and their father’s motionless body, the hospital is coming to life, there is the sound of people arriving and equipment moving. They hear talking rising from the corner near the desk. It’s a man’s voice, insistent about a tent he lent someone. ‘Worth two hundred and sixty-four bucks, and brand new. The prick.’
Another man murmurs in answer, but the first man cuts in.
‘Just for a week, he reckoned, the prick.’ He looks around, sniffs once. ‘Anyway, that solicitor, East Ward? He reckons he can write me a letter,’ he says.
Stephen sits, elbow on his knees, chin cupped in his hands.
‘Two hundred and sixty-four bucks,’ Tony is saying again, leaning against the wall while the other wardsman inspects a piece of paper in his hand. ‘But I reckon I could get more, because the arsehole said one week and now it’s been five months. When he gets out anyhow, that solicitor bloke reckons he can write me a letter.’
The other man folds his paper into a wedge and sticks it in his pocket.
‘We gotta get down to Recovery.’
Tony nods, trailing his gaze bed by bed around the ward. His colleague goes to the door but Tony, hands in his pockets, lifts an elbow at him and says, ‘Hang on a sec,’ as he moves toward Stephen and Cathy.
‘G’day,’ he says, standing at the end of the bed, feet apart, hands still in his pockets.
Stephen and Cathy murmur hello, smile. Tony looks down at the pile of books and magazines on the tray. ‘What’s that?’ he says, nodding at the book on top.
Stephen picks it up. ‘Kites. He used to make them.’
Tony nods as if listening, but then immediately says, a grin faint at his mouth, ‘Your sister still ’ere?’
They nod. ‘Yeah.’ Tony is about to speak again when the other wardsman yells out.
‘Tony! Come on!’ He motions from the door.
Tony hesitates—then seems to change his mind about something. He winks at Stephen and Cathy, then rolls his eyes, saying, ‘In trouble again. Checkya.’ He saunters off across the ward.
As they watch him leave, Stephen says, ‘Who’s that wally?’
Cathy says, ‘Tony someone. He’s a wardsman.’ Then she smirks. ‘Mandy thinks he’s creepy.’
Stephen snorts. ‘Of course she does,’ he says, widening his eyes, mocking the grim Mandy expression they know so well. He is about to add something else, but Cathy, instantly regretting what she’s said, butts in.
‘Well, you called him a wally,’ she says, looking towards the empty doorway. Then, brightening, she says: ‘I reckon we should have a drink at the pub this afternoon. Don’t you think? And tomorrow night Mum wants to take us to the new restaurant at the club. It’s called Ciphers.’
They grin, then Cathy turns to the magazine in her lap, Stephen to the book in his. The earliest kites consisted of a huge leaf attached to a long string, he reads. He turns the pages, looking at all those kites, stamped bright into all the skies around the world, each one suspended there like a held breath.
JUST BEFORE Stephen turned seventeen—as he has told a girlfriend once or twice over the years—his father threw him out of home. Just for coming home drunk—once, Stephen says—in the early darkened hours.
Stephen has never known that his father lay awake, listening to his motorbike roaring too fast into the driveway, hearing the lurching brakes and Stephen’s long, noisy dismount while he struggled to keep the bike upright. Geoff had heard Stephen’s unsteady footsteps, and then a pause, and then heard him vomiting on the front stairs, before stumbling through the house to bed.
In the morning Geoff raged into Stephen’s room, shouting, ‘Get UP, you filthy pig. UP!’
Margaret had already cleaned up the vomit, standing on the verandah and hosing it off the stairs into the garden with a hard jet of water, sprinkling the concrete with disinfectant and boiling water, and then tipping leaves from the compost over the patch in the garden. The vomit was invisible now, there was none of its sour smell. But earlier Geoff had had to step over the pale smatter of it, its horrifying little lumps, when he went to collect the newspapers from the driveway.
In Stephen’s doorway he shouted, ‘You’re disGUSTING!’ and lunged at Stephen in the bed, ripping the blankets away. Margaret was in the hallway, calling after Geoff to stop. From behind her husband she saw Stephen lying there on his brown polycotton sheets, naked except for blue under pants, still a small boy despite his long pale legs and his motorbike boots on the floor. He yelped, squinting at his father’s looming form, wiping his grey, sleepy face with his hand and drawing his legs up.
‘Geoff!’ Margaret called. But he was still shouting, and Stephen was yelling back, shocked and awake, his hair matted on one side of his head, scuttling across the room and pulling on his jeans, shouting, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’
Geoff had lunged again then, grabbing up Stephen’s motorbike boots and his helmet and jacket that had cost too much, and marching through the house to the front door, white with rage. He stood on the verandah and hurled the things from his arms. The helmet bounced twice, cracking, down the stairs. The boots and the jacket fell in loose, dark humps over the lawn. Geoff turned, rigid with fury, and let his son stride barefoot past him, pulling on a t-shirt and muttering, ‘You’re fucking insane, old man.’
Geoff stood inside the door, paralysed, breathing heavily through his nose, while Margaret pushed past him, tears spilling, calling to Stephen to wait. Halfway down the stairs he had stopped, looking wildly back for his mother. He looked up, his face full of hurt and headache, hands tucked beneath his armpits, taking small side-to-side steps with his bare feet on the freezing concrete.
‘What did I even do?’ he shouted, his voice breaking into tears. Then immediately he crouched to pick up his helmet, checking the damage, then lurched around the lawn for his boots and the jacket.
Margaret turned back to Geoff. ‘Go and talk to him!’
But Geoff couldn’t. He looked at his wife, his eyes all fear and tears and fury. ‘I hat
e that bloody bike,’ he whispered.
Margaret ran down the stairs to Stephen. He was on his motorbike, about to jump on the starter pedal.
‘Don’t, love,’ she said, peering into his helmet. ‘He was worried.’
Stephen’s red eyes looked out at her. She couldn’t hear what he said.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, holding on to the waxy canvas of his sleeve. He took his helmet off. She wanted to smooth down his sticking-out hair. But he said, ‘I don’t want to see that bastard ever again.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Stephen,’ Margaret called as he jammed his helmet back on and jumped heavily on the pedal. He backed the bike slowly out of the drive and then roared off again down the Saturday morning street.
Geoff stood silent with shock in the hallway as Margaret went back in. She took his hand. ‘He’ll come back,’ she said. But Geoff shook her hand away, walked down the hallway to the bathroom, and closed the door behind him.
Stephen did not come back that day, or the next.
On the third evening, as Geoff sat watching Four Corners, the front door opened and Stephen walked through it. He did not look at his father but marched past him into the kitchen, and only when Geoff heard Margaret’s voice from the next room did he allow his body to slump with relief into the soft upholstery of his armchair.
Margaret had wheeled around from the sink where she was drying the last of the dinner dishes, her face thin with anxiety and exhaustion. But before she could speak Stephen held out a finger before him and said, ‘I’m only here because of you.’ And he whipped around, walking from the kitchen in his lean stride.
Margaret went into the living room and sat down in the chair beside Geoff, putting out a hand. He let her hand rest in his cool one for a tender moment, and they glanced at one another without needing to speak, and then Margaret withdrew her hand in the soft new calm of the room’s air, and on the television screen they watched some colourfully dressed Africans scooping muddy water from a puddle.
After this Stephen came and went between home, the technical college and his mechanic apprentice’s job at the Toyota dealership with an aloof woodenness. He stopped eating with his parents and Cathy, and no longer wrestled with her or Mandy, on her visits home from university, over a packet of chips or the remote control.
And over slow time, the story of Stephen’s three runaway days became instead the story he carried inside himself, against which no-one in the family had the strength or sense to argue: that when Stephen turned seventeen his father had cast him out. If his determination to have only the coolest, most formal relations with his father sometimes faltered, he needed only to remember this fact and hold it fast, and soon enough it grew over any softer, more complicated feelings for his family like the smooth new skin of a scar.
Now and then, during these years, Mandy or Cathy would tease him about his clothes, or a girl, and there would be a flicker of his old ease as he stuck two fingers up at them or suddenly flicked a tea towel at one to make her screech. But mostly, with habit, his expression remained guarded and he would yield information only when absolutely necessary, in grudging little pieces.
Once, when Mandy was home from uni, she drove her lime-green Gemini to his work to ask him to look at the clutch. As she pulled into the concrete yard she saw him squatting on his haunches, leaning back against the white corrugated-tin wall, smoking and sulking. It was exactly the look he had so often had during childhood when she beat him at a game. Mandy sat in her car for a moment and watched. An older mechanic stood in front of Stephen, hands on his hips. Mandy could tell from the way Stephen held his own body that he was tearful with fury as he talked, spitting out the words. She was astonished at the power of her urge to run and stand between him and the other man, to put her hands on her own hips and square up to the older man. Instead, she nosed her car forward into a parking spot, not looking at Stephen but knowing he would see her. And then, watching in the rear-vision mirror, she let him stand and throw his cigarette butt down in a gentle arc, and turn away into the cool dark of the workshop before she got out of the car.
That evening as they were spread over the couch watching television Mandy said, ‘How’s work?’
Stephen moved his jaw sideways a little, working his tongue into a tooth. He didn’t take his gaze from the television. ‘Fine,’ he said.
Mandy offered him her half-eaten bowl of ice cream, and said mildly, ‘I reckon that’s bullshit.’
He took the bowl, still not looking at her.
‘Whatever you say, Mand,’ he said, and licked the spoon, holding it over his tongue for a long cool moment. ‘You’re the investigative reporter.’ And then he threw her a menacing look and whispered the 60 Minutes clock’s chk chk chk chk chk, as he scooped the last of the ice cream from the bowl.
Nobody could remember the year that he eventually stopped talking to them altogether.
THE YOUNG woman in the bed at the far end of the ward wears a green and blue cotton scarf in awkward, baggy folds around her head. A friend arrives, and the young woman’s tall shaggy boyfriend hauls himself up from his chair, offers it to the visitor, says he’ll get a coffee. As he walks past her Mandy sees his smile drop away; he is exhausted. Back at the bed the woman’s friend clutches plastic bags of offerings; a shrink-wrapped jigsaw puzzle is clamped under one arm. She glances around the ward, lowers her voice to murmur, ‘Why are you in here?’ She doesn’t want her friend in this ward, infected by the old and the lifeless.
Mandy had said the same thing this morning, to a nurse named Jenny. ‘She shouldn’t be in intensive care, surely?’
The nurse was blasé. ‘Not enough beds in the other wards,’ she said, flicking at one of Geoff’s tubes with her clean pink fingernails. ‘She’s the healthiest person in the place,’ she said then, smiling firmly. A hint of get over it. Then she strode away.
The healthy are so obvious here, Mandy thinks. Their quickness, their life.
She shifts on the plastic chair, turns the novel she’s been reading face down, pages open, in her lap. She bends side ways to stretch her neck one way, then the other. Two hours have gone by since she arrived and the others left; Chris has gone off with her mother to help choose some bathroom paint. Mandy had frowned as her mother discussed this with Chris, and said, ‘We’re not on holidays, Mum.’ Her mother looked guilty, but Chris put his hand on her arm and said, ‘It’s fine, Marg,’ and glared back at Mandy.
She picks up her book again, but this grey ward, this moment, the girl with leukaemia and her faded boyfriend won’t fuse with the book’s tone. It’s a new Australian novel her mother bought her, all landscape and imagery and symbols and no plot, the kind Mandy herself half-heartedly sends sometimes to friends in Europe.
She hears a voice, the sound of small wheels, and flicks her gaze quickly into concentration on the page. But she knows the wardsman is coming over to her again: she can smell him, the overscented men’s deodorant and cigarettes.
In her ears she hears the click of her own swallowed saliva, and the wet clicking of maggots comes to her, the millions of maggots in a vast clay grave. A rubbish-tip of clothes, that one boot with the slender bone sticking cleanly out. The sudden pearly wash of nausea, the hurtling vomit.
‘Remember yet?’ his voice says.
She must look up. Tony stands there, his fingers curled around the upright rod of a quivering drip stand. On the fourth finger he wears a slim silver ring in the shape of a snake. It curls twice around his finger, the small head separating itself at the end. Around his wrist is a thick silver bracelet, its links flat and smooth. Like a reptile’s scales, thinks Mandy. In a repelled way, she would like to touch it, to stroke its links one way, and then the reverse, to feel the scales’ abrasive edges.
She meets his eyes. He is waiting for an answer. That expectant grin. Does she remember something? But the only image that comes to her from years ago is a rotting bird, its matted feathers, wedged between rocks at the river.
She i
s aware that she has stood up and moved to place herself between the wardsman and her father in the bed. She glances behind her at Geoff, and then smiles in Tony’s direction. She can’t bring herself to meet his eyes again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, shaking her head, staring at the chair. ‘I’ve been away such a long time—’
‘Yeah, doesn’t matter,’ he cuts in, nodding. ‘I knew you wouldn’t.’ But when she looks at him again his face is mournful.
Mandy sees that in his other hand he carries a plastic shopping bag. She keeps her smile stiff. Through the hours of sitting here yesterday, she made a methodical search of her memory, sifting through categories for one that could contain this man—the school years, or more probably her year on the local paper, some netball- or soccer- or golf-club function photograph she’d taken once, twenty years ago; or some sheepdog trial or Rundle Show or cattle sale. When he tells her she will raise her eyebrows, pretend recognition, say Ahhh, of course.
But Tony is staring at Geoff now, at the deep dark wound on his head. He steps nearer the bed, dumps the plastic bag and its contents on the tray table, still peering at the wound.
Mandy wants him to stop. There is something in the way he is entranced by her father’s injury that makes her want to splay out her hands, hide the damage from his gaze.
She stretches her arms along the rail of the bed each side of her, trying to take up space. ‘So what is it,’ she says in a rush, ‘that I should remember?’
Tony turns to face her again with a rueful smile. He exhales a brief, single sigh—as if they both know she’s being untruthful; as if, in a disappointed way, he understands why. As if something is a matter of time.
He points to the plastic bag.
‘That’s for your mum. Said I’d bring it.’ He’s still gazing at her in that sorrowful way. ‘Derris dust. For her tomatoes.’
Mandy is aware she is licking her own lips now. She is careful to keep her fingers curled around the bars of Geoff’s bed; she cannot be certain there would be no tremor if she lifted her hands.
The Children Page 10