by Toni Jordan
Gemma: That is the most stupid concept I have ever heard. I would rather eat my own vomit than write greetings to a piece of paper.
Gary: There’s nothing wrong with eating your own vomit.
Francine: What?
Gary: Eating your own vomit isn’t actually disgusting. It’s quite sensible really, because the germs present in your vomit are your own germs and you are merely reclaiming them rather than releasing them to the environment to infect someone else.
Daria: Gary, you are an idiot.
Francine: Well. Yes. This is a little off the track of this afternoon’s session, which is journaling. Grace, would you like to read something from your journal?
Daria: Eating your own vomit is so absolutely disgusting, because obviously when you vomit it has to land somewhere unless you had a special kind of floating vomit, and once it lands it would then become contaminated from whatever it landed on, so if you eat it again you most certainly ingest considerably more than your own germs back again.
Francine: Grace? Anyone?
Gary: Actually dogs eat their own vomit all the time.
Francine: What?
Gary: Dogs eat their own vomit all the time because they regurgitate anything that doesn’t sit quite right in their stomach, but they don’t want to waste it so they eat it again to see if it’s any better the second time. And it usually is.
Gemma: It usually is what?
Gary: A substantial improvement. The second time.
Francine: Grace, can you read your journal please? Now?
Journal: Autumn is now officially half over. The tree outside my window has lost most of its leaves. In spring, new growth will bring new life.
Francine: Beautiful, Grace! What a touching analogy of your healing process!
Brain One: I knew that. Really. I did.
Brain Two: You are so full of crap.
Journal: Therapy is progressing well, but I haven’t yet received a bill. I know the bills will come, because I have filled out the forms. I know I can pay them, and I know my sister will help. Yet I still haven’t received a bill.
Francine: Oh Grace, dear Grace. Yes, you may not contribute very much to our group discussions but rest assured, you pay your bills every session! When you listen so attentively to your fellow group members speak. When you concentrate so hard on not counting. I’m glad you shared your fears, but please don’t think like that. Every day, you face your bills. And every day, brave, brave Grace, you pay them.
Brain One: Um…thanks.
Brain Two: I’m disgusted to be sharing a skull with you.
Journal: Before my therapy, each night I cooked chicken and vegetables. And I ate it. Alone. Now, although I am always hungry, I have lost the will to cook. Now I make cheese on toast, or dip with Saladas or chocolate biscuits. Or I buy a burger from the café.
Daria: I don’t believe you used to eat chicken.
Gemma: That is so disgusting. How can you live with yourself ?
Brain One: What’s wrong with chicken?
Daria: Don’t you read the papers?
Gemma: Haven’t you ever heard of bird flu?
Daria: I don’t even go out of the house if there’s a pigeon on the lawn.
Francine: Ladies, I think you’ll find that Grace is making an analogy about the changes she has experienced in the way she feeds her body—her psychic and emotional hunger for validation and acceptance.
Brain One: Absolutely.
Brain Two: I can’t take this any more. I’m having a nap. Wake me when it’s lunch time.
14
Seamus and I are almost living together now. He still has his room in the house he shares with Dermot and Brian, but it’s a bachelor pad—dirty dishes in the sink, dirty clothes on the floor and someone always sprawled on the couch watching sports. We end up spending most of our time at my place. Seamus keeps his running shoes and his toothbrush here, and I buy the kind of cereal he likes.
It’s much easier for me this way, because I’d worry about forgetting my medication if I wasn’t sure which house I was waking up in. Also it’s much easier for me to get to the professor’s office from my place than from Seamus’s. I catch the tram, by myself. I’m only seeing the professor once a month now to check how the medication and therapy are going. I miss him. I saw a furry caterpillar in the park last week and thought fondly of his eyebrows.
One morning I had a few jobs to do—drop off Seamus’s dry cleaning, take his shoes to be repaired, pay the electricity bill. Then there was a fascinating show on TV about gay men trapped in women’s bodies and lesbians trapped in men’s bodies. A psychologist (not mine) was saying it was very common; many men are lesbians on the inside. I’d never realised the pain these people go through— I’ve been horribly insensitive to male lesbians.
I’ve given up going to the café. With all the extra weight I’m carrying there was no way I could have orange cake and a hot chocolate everyday. Instead I make myself some carrot sticks and one and a half dates with tahini, which is much less nauseating now I’m used to it. A couple of days ago I phoned my mother and we had a lovely chat about housework. I’ve kept everything clean in the past, but I’d never really grasped the finer details. We talked about the best ways to fold fitted sheets (hold the sheet inside out by the two adjacent corners on the shortest end, then fold the corner in one hand over the corner in the other end until it envelopes it, then repeat with the other side), and the correct way to iron tea towels and shirts. I’ve never realised how clever she is. For example, when I iron Seamus’s shirts I always do the collar last. This inevitably leads to the front creasing. Instead I should iron the inside of the collar first. Genius! Then we talked about which TV chefs we liked the best. We both agreed that Ainsley gives us a headache, and Delia, while explaining things clearly in a charming accent, is a teeny bit annoying. Then my mother said that Jamie made her want to play hide the cannelloni. I felt suddenly nauseous so I said goodnight.
I’m glad my phone conversations are improving. It’s hard for the brains to concentrate on what the ears are hearing. For once I raised it as an issue in group therapy sessions, and felt so validated when two of the Germphobics nodded. Francine had a few helpful suggestions and I follow her advice to keep a box of index cards by the phone, filled with the details of the people I speak to. There are only four cards but when I get a job I’m sure there’ll be more. For example, card one:
Name: Seamus Joseph O’Reilly
Relationship: Boyfriend
DOB: 5 January 1969
Significant names: Declan, Dermot, Brian, Kylie
Comments: (space here for comments)
Under ‘Comments’ I write a sentence to remind me of our last phone call, like ‘picking me up 9 a.m. Saturday’. This has proved so helpful it’s a wonder I haven’t seen it on Oprah. I also keep an exercise book and when I have a few minutes spare I plan the next conversation I will have with someone. For example, under neighbours I have written ‘Comment on flowering azalea in front garden.’ Of course I don’t have the book with me when I run into the neighbours in the corridor, but it’s still helpful. I can’t imagine how I did without it all these years.
There is no good whatsoever to be had from a phone call in the middle of the night. At no time in the history of mankind has anyone rung at that hour, smiling. There are no lotteries drawn in foreign countries that you might have won. There are no exciting job offers made by insomniac managing directors of huge multinationals. Distant men do not propose at that hour. There is not even any so-so news. No telemarketer from Delhi desperate to talk about your phone contract. No partner asking you to pick up more juice.
The night the phone rings at some ungodly hour, I can’t seem to wake up. I can hear a distant pealing but it’s ingrained in my dream.
In the dream I’m relaxing at home in the early afternoon watching Oprah when the doorbell rings. This is, for some reason, alarming. I jump up almost screaming. Who is at the door? Have they come to get me? What will
Seamus think?
In a panic, I run to the window, which is somehow on the ground floor, and jump out. I try to run but my dressing gown keeps wrapping around my ankles and my slippers are flopping sideways. Whoever is at the door is chasing me, gaining on me, I can feel their breath on my neck; they are coming now and no matter how hard I try I can’t get away. I fall and am pounced upon by a midget policeman.
For his size, the midget policeman is strong and wiry. He has a red beard and wears a green police uniform. ‘We’ve got you now,’ he keeps yelling, and laughing in a high-pitched voice. He hauls me to my feet and twists my arms behind my back, fastening them in a pair of handcuffs. Then he attaches heavy iron manacles to my ankles. My limbs are thus pinned and as he drags me down the path I can only take tiny steps, but he walks faster and pulls me by my arm until I am walking on an angle so steep I feel I am falling. Perhaps this is all a dream, I think to myself, and I shut my eyes. But then I can’t open them again. They seem welded shut. Then I realise the sound of his laughter has morphed into the ringing of the phone.
Seamus leans over me in bed and answers it, making serious, capable noises into the receiver. Noises that betray nothing. Seamus has the ability to be instantly alert at any time of the day or night; I seem to be sleepy all the time lately, and now I can’t wake up properly. My eyelids are fused together, and I can only open one at a time and then only a little bit. My brains aren’t helping—you would think the two of them could make each other a cup of coffee or something. By the time Brain One asks Brain Two to open my right eye or lift my left arm and put it through the sleeve, Brain Two has slumped to the floor of the red padded room and nodded off. When it doesn’t receive a reply, Brain One becomes so disgruntled it also falls straight back to sleep.
Before I know it Seamus is up, changed into jeans and a sweat shirt. He gathers my tracksuit and lifts my jammies (mauve baby-doll type that were probably sexy when he bought them but are now, well, a little tight) up over my outstretched arms and dresses me. He practically carries me to the car. When I wake up we are in a carpark.
It isn’t until we are in the hospital waiting room that I really comprehend what has happened. Jill is there, also in a tracksuit, although hers is a crushed cranberry velour instead of a stained and stretched pastel blue like mine. Still, I never imagined she would even own a tracksuit. She certainly would never sweat. I’ve never seen her hair like this either—dead straight instead of her usual curls. Obviously the result of a silk pillow slip. I must get one. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes look tiny and pale like pig eyes, and she has brown spots along her jaw line.
Harry is there too, wearing a pin-striped navy suit and turquoise tie, as if it was early afternoon. Perhaps he’s just arrived home from a midnight board meeting. Or perhaps he sleeps in his suit for improved efficiency. Or it isn’t a suit, but jammies designed to look like a suit, sold by mail order from Suitland. Or (my preferred explanation) perhaps he has no option because the suit has been surgically attached to his skin as part of a bizarre initiation ceremony at the bank involving donkeys and paddles.
Hospitals have a unearthly feeling at that hour. This is a public hospital, not far from our mother’s house, the one we grew up in, the one that we moved to when I was at primary school. The waiting room has plastic orange chairs against the walls and in an island in the middle. The chairs are in rows, joined together to prevent people moving, throwing or stealing them. The chairs hold an assortment of people waiting to be seen, though some of them are lying down and groaning. The Germphobics would be spraying each other with disinfectant and praying for levitation.
Jill and Harry haven’t met Seamus before and, except for the obviously horrible circumstances, it is an ideal occasion for a first meeting. No diffidence. No awkwardness. Plenty to talk about— three take-charge kind of people discussing options and possibilities. I sit next to a nice Somali boy who can’t move his storm-cloud coloured sausage-shaped fingers after drunkenly punching an automatic teller machine that swallowed his card. I have a little doze on his other shoulder.
Seamus wakes me. There’s a nurse, saying something.
She is all right, the nurse says. She has some smoke inhalation and some minor burns and was distressed when the ambulance brought her in, but they’ve given her a mild sedative and she’s sleeping now. They’ll keep her in for observation and to check her lung function during the night, but overall she is very lucky. Sophie the nextdoor neighbour saw the smoke, and her son put out the fire with the garden hose before the brigade even arrived. The fireman told the nurse that the damage to the house is also minimal and with some fast work from a few tradesmen it will be functional at least when she gets out of hospital. Sophie was most insistent mother be told that Mr Parker is okay.
Jill storms across to the far side of the waiting room and back again. She rifles in her handbag for some gum, and throws her bag on the chair, and says she blames herself and that mother shouldn’t be living alone in that big house and should have moved in with them long ago. Harry clears his throat and fiddles with his tie, pulling it away slightly from his reddening, chicken-skin throat. (If his suit is attached to his body, the stitches obviously aren’t at the neck. Are they at the groin?)
The nurse says it’s nobody’s fault. These things happen with older people and there’s not much you can do. Jill says what on earth did happen? The nurse says, from what I could gather before your Mother became too drowsy to speak, apparently she couldn’t sleep and she was hungry and decided to make herself a midnight snack. A frozen chicken Kiev. She read the instructions on the packet very carefully. It said medium oven, forty minutes. And she only put it on for thirty. But she didn’t want to go to all the trouble of lighting the oven so she popped the whole thing, chicken, foil tray, cardboard box and all, in the microwave.
A little later they let us in to see Mother. She is in a large room with four beds, but hers is the only one occupied. We aren’t to stay long. We aren’t to disturb her. She is sleeping so we stand around her bed, looking down at her, not quite knowing what to say to each other.
Her face is the same colour as the sheets, a dingy grey; her hair is pushed straight back and one hand is bandaged above the wrist. She looks deflated. Normally she is like a fat-faced bird, a cross between Celine Dion and a galah: a body like a broom handle and round cheeks full of seeds. Now it’s like the seeds have all fallen out. It’s strange to see her face so immobile—not speaking, grimacing or sucking her teeth, which she does when she’s concentrating or telling a cheerful story about dying in an unexpected and painful way.
For some reason I think of the birthday presents she gave me as a child. She was the most wonderful gift giver when I was small— it seemed that whatever my most secret wish, there it was, beautifully wrapped at the end of my bed on the morning of my birthday. Once she gave me a huge cardboard box covered in brown paper with a stiff iridescent gold bow. The box was so large and heavy she left it in the middle of the living room where she wrapped it the night before. In the morning when I tore the paper away, it was full of books. She isn’t much of a reader except for true crime, gothic horror and (probably the most gruesome of the three) tabloid newspapers, but, on advice from a confident and superior sales assistant, she chose my first Austen and Conan Doyle, my first Poe and Wilde.
Another year she promised me a new bedspread and took me to choose it the week before, but then told me the store had sold out so it wouldn’t be ready for my birthday. I don’t recall being upset, but perhaps my memory is being kind. I think I was only a little disappointed for her: it wasn’t her fault the shop was out of stock and I had to wait. So that birthday morning there was no gift from my parents, only a beaded bracelet from Jill.
When I got home from school, not only was the bedspread on my bed, but she had taken a day off work and now my room, the walls, even the ceiling, were repainted my favourite colour: the orange I always called tan, an exact match for Cuisenaire rod number 10. There was a new tan c
hair, a new bed and a shiny tan lampshade that cast the whole room in a rosy orange glow. I still don’t know how she found that perfect colour. That day, standing in the hall next to my mother, her pudgy arms shaking from painting the ceiling and her face speckled tan, was possibly the happiest of my life.
Now Jill, Seamus and Harry are murmuring, and I force myself to pay attention. It’ll be much better for her, Harry says. These stubborn old people, they never think of anyone but themselves. Jill says, anything could happen to her she could take a fall and lie there all day and all night. My granny loved it, Seamus says, once we got her settled she made lots of new friends now someone comes in to do her hair and they play bingo. Good man, Harry says. You’re absolutely right it’s for her own good and she can always watch TV besides she’ll be happier among other old people.
Then he says, there’s safety in numbers.
Somewhere inside me something stirs. I can’t explain it. A little voice speaks. It isn’t Brain One or Brain Two. Perhaps it’s me.
‘A home,’ I say. ‘You’re talking about putting her in a nursing home.’
Harry laughs and Jill says yes Grace yes we’re talking about putting her in a home it’s obvious she can’t live alone any more.
‘Mother would hate that.’
Jill walks over to me and picks up my hand and holds it and says, we don’t have many options Grace think of how we’d feel if she stayed at home and had an accident think how you’d feel then.
‘But she loves her neighbours and the church and her garden.
You know how much that house means to her.’
It happens to the best of us, Harry says, it’ll happen to us one day too, hey Jilly besides Grace you heard what Seamus said they have hairdressers and bingo.
Bingo. Those little cards. Those funny press-down pens.