‘Why we put Great Granma in the earf when she die?’
‘Well, when you die, your body can’t do living anymore, so you put it back in the earth to make more things for the plants and animals to eat.’
‘And the germs?’
‘Yes, the germs like to have a munch.’
‘Are germs bad?’
‘Well, they do work. They make the dirt for us. We wash our hands to get rid of them because we don’t want them to munch us up while we’re alive. Everyone’s got germs, but their own, friendly germs.’
‘In they tummy.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the bad germs in they poo?’
‘Yes, the old ones that aren’t doing good work anymore.’
‘Why we do poo?’
And so it goes for several kilometres. No wonder the Mummies are tired.
It is going to be stinking hot today, an El Niño shocker. You’ll soon be able to hear the asphalt ripping away from the road top as the wheels turn. Something that works in my car is the air-conditioning and I’m very glad of it.
I’ll never be wealthy. Let’s face it. I will never be wealthy.
I may never own another car. It is a toss-up as to whether it would be more expensive to buy a new car than a thirty-year-old replacement radiator for this one, but there is the air-conditioning – I can only hope that the heat dial doesn’t go into the red before we reach Redeemer…
Stella likes to feast her eyes on Daniel, who is a very good-looking little boy with blue-green eyes and masses of dark curly hair, like Allegra’s. Stella confuses Daniel with Eli. She remembers having Eli around as a little boy and having to think up how she came by this grandson from her nineteen-year-old daughter. When the dreaded Audra turned up wanting to be a long-lost cousin, Stella introduced me to her as Bel Gilchrist, borrowing her maternal grandparents’ name, until it occurred to her mid-introduction that if Audra were indeed a cousin, she could well know WHO THE GILCHRISTS WERE. OMG. So she claimed that my husband, Arnold Gilchrist, who was ‘away fighting the war in Vietnam’, was descended from the very same Gilchrist family that presented the world with her mother, Euphrosyne Isabella, née Gilchrist…now wasn’t that a mouthful! And would you look at the monogram on this spoon? Yes, that was right, G for Gilchrist…marvellous people, related to the Queen (like the Turners being related to the Trocadero). And so Arnie Russell, Eli’s true and natural father, was passed over in the nimble acquisition of more than adequate social status for the daughter who’d been fucking an associate of the firm Stella worked for.
Well, we made it just before the needle on the air-conditioning went into the red. Stella is sitting up in her room with her air-conditioning on full blast plus swivel facility, shredding a Kleenex by sticking her ancient thumb through it in front of the telly. Her anxiety melts to love in her face as Daniel and I come in. ‘My grandson,’ she chirrups. I sit down on the bed beside her, ‘Allegra’s grandson, actually,’ I chirrup back. She laughs as if that couldn’t possibly be true and runs the non-Kleenex forefinger adoringly down Daniel’s cheek.
No cat anywhere today, thank God.
‘I thought we might go and check out your little sitting room today, Mum? It’s nice and cool in there.’
‘My little sitting room?’
‘Yes, there’s a sweet little room just down the corridor with things to make tea and a little courtyard garden outside, where you can watch the birds through the windows.’
‘But I haven’t got a sitting room.’
Away goes my mouth again, explaining how the world works and how, even though she’s comfortable here in her chair, there’s not really enough room to entertain a child who likes to do more than sit on a bed. I tell myself she needs the exercise and, that being new here, it’s important that she finds companions. I suppose that her world has shrunk right down to the great efforts she has to make in getting herself from A to B; much of her mind is occupied by just putting one foot in front of the other and pushing the Wheelathon along.
But I might be wrong. Recent recitals of long-lost slabs of Tennyson and Scott hint at old pathways being opened up, of deep memory resurfacing, of enjoyment in losing herself in words, of savouring phrases and how one might say them. I’ve noticed Daniel learning like this, by turning the coinage of language over and over in his mind and in his mouth until sense and reason fall into place and are inculcated alongside commonplace understandings and the mind goes searching for more.
The little sitting room is just two doors away from Stella’s. Slowly I take her through the doorway and towards a group of chairs around an occasional table. Two nuns are watching the news on television, and a third, the bush sister, Sister Colleen, is busy at a laptop by a window under a light well that adjoins the courtyard garden. I’m comfortable with this slightly scholarly scene but I wonder if Stella is. I catch Sister Colleen’s eye and ask if it’s okay for us to take some biscuits from the tin in the kitchenette and to make a cup of tea. She says it’s there for everyone.
I know what Sister Colleen’s doing. She’s on a crusade. There is a considerable government contribution made to Redeemer over and beyond the contribution made by the church, but now the church’s contribution has come in, not earmarked for anything in particular, and Sister Colleen has set up a strong, flat-vowelled lobby for air-conditioning in the nursing home part of the building. It’s difficult to see why the whole building isn’t air-conditioned in this day and age, but I understand that the nursing home wing is badly in need of improvements. Sister Colleen’s letter is part of her campaign against the lobby that is for improvement of the group entertainment area rather than the nursing home. This second lobby wants new equipment for showing films. They want a giant flatscreen telly and video equipment so that they can watch films other than those that can be shown on a rickety pull-down screen with a projector. I think they’re a bit sick of Oklahoma! and Mary Poppins.
Daniel shoots into the kitchen and grabs the biscuit tin. ‘I think we’re only meant to have one each, Dan. Then we leave the tin for the others. This is a sharing place. Here, pop them on a plate.’ So he pops all the Monte Carlos on the plate, counting ‘one, two, three’ and delivering seven.
We are about to join Stella, when ‘Ewwww,’ comes a voice from above and I look up the length of an ebony stick into the prim smile of Reverend Mother Oldmeadow. ‘I see,’ she says and what she sees is probably the greed of a lapsed Anglican’s great-grandchild. ‘Yes, we do share our biscuits.’ And she turns her back on us, leaving me to work out for myself whether or not there is a kitty – or was it just that she was coveting a Monte Carlo? So I ask ‘Is there a kitty?’ And she just waves her free hand dismissively and breathes in audibly through very distinguished, elegantly flaring, vermicularly veined nostrils, making me feel that there probably is a kitty but not for parvenus like me.
I load a tray with tea for Stella, tea for me and milk for Daniel, which occasions another lingering of the superior eye and a swan-like turning of the head with mild fluttering of the upper lip as if to say, ‘Now you’ve used up all the milk.’
Well, I can’t be bothered with her and make my way to our little cosy corner, a table away from new arrivals and two tables from Sister Colleen, who is now sitting down with the receptionist from the hostel’s front desk, folding the letter she’s been writing, tapping it on four sides and putting it into an envelope with a look of pending victory on her face. ‘There, Ida,’ she croaks, ‘if that won’t do it, I don’t know what will.’
‘D’ya want me ter put a stamp on it, or’ve you got some yourself?’ asks Ida.
‘Doesn’t need a stamp. Put it in the internal courier bag. I’d like to see their faces when they open it.’
Ida laughs, throwing back her headful of spiked black hair. ‘I’d like to, too.’ She’s a plump, pleasant girl from Trieste. I met her outside where she goes for a smoke with other staff members on her break. Most of the staff smoke around here; there’s an offertory of butts to the
God of easy-going sinners in a scantily shaded nook beside the back car park.
Daniel has found a silver pedalling thing to play with, a bit like a bike crank. He’s curious to find the rest of the bike while Stella and I play guessing games as to what this piece of equipment might be.
‘There,’ I say to Stella, ‘this isn’t such a bad place.’
‘Nope,’ she says, having become jolly of a sudden. ‘It’s quite nice. Hey you…’ she says, pointing at the secretary.
‘Me?’ goes Ida.
‘Yes, you.’
‘What’ve I done?’
‘You turned up in my bedroom last night. How’d you know I was up? Were you spying on me?’
Sister Colleen goes, ‘Oh, she’s Redeemer’s guardian angel, aren’t you Ida? God told her you were up.’
‘God? What was he doing in my bedroom?’
‘He’s everywhere, love,’ goes Ida. Then to me, ‘Your mother’s a scream. It’s the pressure mats we’ve got in their rooms. A light goes on in the office and we go in to have a look.’
‘That man came in the night before!’
‘She means Kees.’
‘I asked him what he was doing in my room in the middle of the night and he said, “What do you think?” He wanted to come into the bathroom with me. Don’t tell me God sent him!’
Sister Colleen roars with laughter and shoofties Ida out into the corridor ahead of her.
A little Mount of Piety is developing around Mother Oldmeadow. Young nuns apparently come in for instruction in the ways of Catholic decorum. Mother Oldmeadow is seated at the summit on a commode-like chair, the kind of chair you might have for the Pope if his bowels were a tad shaky, and the younger nuns, four of them are gathered at her knee on pouffes and footrests so that the whole tableau takes on the shape of Mary with Jesus’ corpse athwart her knees, or then again, the leg of one of Picasso’s gueridon tables without the top. I can visualise the painting Picasso would have made of the scene – he would have put a top on the table and on it, he would have placed religious paraphernalia so that the lowly nuns, in their subtending scrolls under the instruction of Herself at the leg bulge, would be trying to guess what was up there – just as Picasso’s mistresses waited under their gueridons unable to guess that the tops were littered with secret allusions to women who weren’t them.
‘Where’s the wheels, Sibella?’ asks Daniel apropos of the pedal device.
‘Oh, is that child touching my stepper? Tell him to stop. It’s for my use only,’ goes Mother Oldmeadow, ruining my trance.
‘Sorry Dan, not ours I’m afraid.’ I lean down and pull it away from him.
‘Awww!’ he says.
‘Leave it! Leave it right there where it is! Don’t you touch what isn’t yours.’
The rebel is rising in me and I have to count to ten to stop myself rising to my full short height and hurling the bloody thing at her.
‘Aww,’ says Stella. ‘Never mind darling, I’ll buy you one for Christmas.’
‘It’s not a Christmas gift. It’s an aid for strengthening my muscles!’
‘Christmas is over,’ says Dan.
‘I’ll just put it over here out of the road, Mother Oldmeadow,’ I say and go to put it beside the wall.
‘Don’t. Touch. It. Leave it right where it is!’
‘But we’re sitting here.’ And there’s no Sister Colleen just now to defend us.
‘It’s where I sit to do my exercise. I like it left there, just where it was before that boy started fiddling.’
‘Oh well, come on Dan, let’s turn Great Gran’s chair around so we can sit at the next table,’ I say and stop myself from chucking the thing on the floor just any old how, because after all my mother has to live here and she doesn’t need me to make enemies for her. I put it down carefully in the place where old blue-rinse wants it and she says, ‘That’s better,’ grandly and turns her attention back to her flock.
Is it because I resort to explaining things that I get caught up with dictators like Mother Oldmeadow? Why is it that I immediately want to explain the situation to her so that she’ll get it and calm down? So that she’ll know who Daniel is, who my mother is and will make up her mind that they’re inoffensive and that it won’t do any harm if Daniel has a little fiddle with her muscle-strengthener? Why is she so aggressive and why am I so meek? It’s certainly not because I’ll inherit the earth. All I’ll inherit is debt. Passive-aggressive, maybe that’s it – I’m passive-aggressive, like Stella, who pulled her erstwhile GP’s nose for saying so. There used to be this word ‘sensitive’ to cope with chaps like me – ‘It’s all right,’ they’d say, ‘she’s just sensitive.’ And it would be all right. I was allowed to be sensitive, like Allegra was allowed to have ‘a Latin temper’ along with her ‘Byzantine face’.
I shove another Monte Carlo into my mother’s mouth before she can get terse with Mother Oldmeadow only to be spoiled by Daniel, who asks, ‘Why you teeth slippy Great Gran? My teeth are stuck. Are you teeth stuck, Sibella?’
‘Yep, mine are stuck.’
‘What means stuck, Sibella?’ he asks, suddenly uncertain of the word.
‘Opposite of slippy, Dan. Things that stay in one place are stuck, things that move around are slippy.’
‘Why Great Gran’s teeth are slippy?’ Stella, insulted to the quick, taps him sharply over the head. ‘One of these days yours will be slippy too, kiddo.’
‘I not kiddo. I’n Daniel.’
He doesn’t cry.
He’s not a sook, thank God. Nevertheless, our little outing is turning sour. I suppose we could take a trot past the goldfish tank, or push past the tableau vivant over there to have a look at the books in the library, but the energy to do so has left me. My imagination has deserted me. My will has deserted me.
I can’t be bloody bothered.
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last week.
There’s rioting in Pakistan.
Nobody knows if Eli’s there or in Afghanistan or not.
They haven’t been able to trace his departure and think he must have taken a connecting flight because they can’t find his name on any passenger lists. I’m tired. Bereft. Almost frantic in my inner self. Perhaps it was his blood someone tried to expunge from that floor.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. A little boy needs his great aunt to take him to visit his great-grandmother so he can deliver a little handmade gift to her: a boat made out of a matchbox with a piece of notepaper for a sail. He wanted to do it. He thought Great Gran would like to go sailing, that it would make her feel better. I’m the one who has to negotiate this exchange and make sure it brings about the desired result – a smiling Great Gran and a pleased Daniel.
Now we have to steer past an intemperately hard tap on Daniel’s head by Great Gran.
Daniel rubs his head looking to me. I mime a kiss. He asks me if I think the sea is alive? He is sailing the boat across the tea tray. What a good kid he is! But ‘What a silly question!’ says Stella, still in a self-righteous grump.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s a good question. The sea moves around as if it’s alive.’
‘Is it?’ asks Dan.
‘Depends on how you look at it, Dan,’ I answer, but Stella cuts in. ‘It’s made of water, how could it be alive?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I say to Dan. And I will. It will be one of those long, loopy explanations about imagination and nature and different ways of thinking and we’ll go in and out of all the little undersea coves and visit all the creatures there and we’ll swim through reeds as stealthily as fish.
‘Will the sea die?’ he asks.
‘Gee…we couldn’t have it stuffed if it died, could we?’ I answer. ‘The stuffing stuff would get all wet…’
‘That would be funny!’ laughs Dan. ‘What’s stuffing stuff?’
‘Like inside your teddy bear.’
‘Kind of ’terially?’
‘Yeah. Material.’
‘There’s sea in the aquarium.�
�
‘So there is. And sharks.’
‘And stingrays. Sibella, can we go to the aquarium… Pleee-ase!’
My mother is bored. Dan is bored. We can’t get to the garden window because Mother Fucking Oldmeadow’s contraption is in the way. Dear God, how am I to make an ethical decision here? It seems that we are to be the victims of Mother Oldmeadow’s decisions. I could saw through the legs of her chair in revenge, but I think we’ll return to my mother’s room if we can get enough air into her lungs to get her there. It’s just I can’t be bothered to get up yet.
Why am I thinking of a rambling old mansion in the Blue Mountains with a great veranda and a glorious view and several generations living there and an old person dying day by day peacefully in a nice big comfy room inside with random visitors and extemporaneous snacks and meals?
Mother Oldmeadow, in superior tones, is urging her flock of followers to bear with Difference for God has ordained it. Mother Oldmeadow hasn’t said so in so many words, but it is clear she is not in favour of the air-conditioning lobby. The Difference she is coyly alluding to appears to be Sister Colleen. Only collective prayer will lead the Different back to Christ’s true course. When one sister, a visitor from outside, younger than the rest, is having especial difficulty with the Different, she’s told it’s not a matter for individual action but for group entreaty in the presence of the plaster intermediary which represents the female parent of the divine in the chapel by the front door. And there was I, impiously thinking that group prayer was a very cunning way of shrugging off responsibility for a stoush.
‘Thank you for your advice, Mother,’ says the visiting sister, sitting back on her heels.
‘Take a little vice and add,’ snorts Stella, loudly – the miracle worker has obviously been at Stella’s ears. Steel beams of sight come boring our way from Mother Oldmeadow.
Sister Colleen re-enters the room, hands on hips. She bowls up to the laptop on the desk under the skylight, saying to no one in particular, ‘My Mother House taught me to speak up. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If it’s good enough for the masculine hierarchy to have air-conditioning as well as all the creature comforts, then it’s good enough for the old folk – four to a room – in the nursing home here.’
Window Gods Page 20