by Mandy Hager
Other residents have visitors too — the lucky ones have families who come in most days. Even the Professor is entertaining guests in his room. But there are others who spend day after day, week after week, with no one. If they have family they never come. Their days and nights are lived in solitary confinement. I see the yearning in their eyes — they never give up hoping that the next visitor will be for them. It’s heart-breaking the way these people are discarded here, as though their whole lives count for nothing: children raised and gone; partners dead; or, worse, a family who simply can’t be arsed. Welcome to Twilight House: Death’s waiting room for the dispossessed. Will this one day be my lot? To die alone. Like Van.
By the time I bike back to the Professor’s house, I’m stuffed. I trigger a security light, which saves me fumbling to unlock the door, and find my paintings and easel neatly stacked inside. Johannes must have brought them in.
There’s a note on the kitchen bench, beside a Tupperware container of lentil soup. Mum left the freezer stocked with way too much food — I thought you might be hungry when you got home. Johannes’ handwriting is crimped and rushed. Very male. No doubt his grandfather put him up to this — it’s not the kind of thing a boy thinks of on his own. I’m a bit spooked he’s got a key, though. I hadn’t thought of that.
The soup is full of garlic and spices, with enough chilli to warm me from the inside out. I probably should thank him. But the past few nights are catching up on me. It takes the very last of my energy to stand under the shower and wash away the day. As soon as I have my pyjamas on, I crawl into bed.
I luxuriate in the heat of the electric blanket and wrap the pillow around my head to blunt the sharpness of the silence. No rest home snoring. No jagged gasps from Dad. I try to still my mind. Tomorrow is my one day off, the first I’ve really had in ages. I’m not sure what to do; it’s been a long time since I was left alone. Paint; of course I’ll paint.
But as the hours tick by sleep evades me and guilt nibbles at this uncharted freedom. Saturday’s the day I usually clean the house for Mum. Change the sheets. Dust out all the corners and attack the mould. She’ll be tired after work and all the worry of Dad — and even more pissed off.
When I finally get to sleep I dream of her prowling the house, pelting me with pots and pans, musty towels, brushes and brooms. You’ll be the death of me, she roars, her face melting before my eyes. I watch the skin peel off, the flesh drip from her bones — until all that’s left is her mouldering skull. I jolt awake, my heart thrumming as I flounder in a pool of sweat. Even in my dreams Mum takes control.
Somehow I manage to push the image far away enough to doze till dawn, when a thin accusing finger of light snakes in through the gaps between the curtains. I don’t feel rested and my head throbs in a bitchy pulse. If I was sensible I’d use this time to catch up on the set book for English … if I was sensible I’d not be here at all. I dress and head for the sun porch to set up my painting gear, trying not to think about my lack of breakfast, and by the time the sun floods the backyard I’m hard at work.
I’m tackling one of Vincent’s favourite paintings, The Potato Eaters. Working on it makes me smile. For years he considered this his finest work, though Theo and his arty friends complained it was too dark; too rough in every way. Too raw. His peasants were ugly, their faces crude, ‘uncivilised’, yet he painted this same family and their friends again and again. I think I recognise what he was striving for. He thought it noble that they’d toiled for their food. Said he didn’t want anyone to admire the painting or approve of it without understanding the background. My guess is that he hated being dependent on the one person he loved the most. He truly longed to earn his own keep, but lacked the mediocrity required to score a job. Much like Van. Van. Van. Van. Everything leads back to Van.
I sketch the five contorted figures around a table lit by one small overhanging lamp. But instead of Vincent’s peasant family I flesh in my own: my mother, father, Van and me … the fifth is Death. He sits at our table every night, waiting to claim us in his own good time.
In the wee small hours it had struck me how the Irish are Potato Eaters too. Most had no choice: the English confiscated great swathes of land. What was left was chopped into such small lots the Irish struggled to feed their kids. When the blight destroyed whole potato crops, the people starved. An Gorta Mór, Dad called it: the Great Hunger. Over a million dead — and even more forced to leave Ireland for good. He labelled it genocide; would spit on the ground, then pray for English deaths. When he’d had too much to drink he’d make me recite his favourite poem.
Weary men, what reap ye? — Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? — Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, Hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
There’s a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door?
They guard our master’s granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? — Would to God that we were dead —
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.
At first it was Van’s job to perform it when he had his mates around, the only party trick he’d let her share. But when I was old enough to memorise the poem, Dad ditched Van overnight. It didn’t stop her chanting it aloud to me: she loved that it was written by the mother of the man who wrote ‘The Happy Prince’. I wonder if that’s when Van started writing her own poems. Another fact about her I don’t know. Yet it’s funny how all these things are linked. Once you start digging, everything’s connected.
There’s a tapping on the door. Johannes, looking sheepish.
‘Hey.’ He’s wearing a sweatshirt with pink lettering that says I’m pink, therefore I’m spam. If it’s a joke I don’t get it.
‘Hey. Thanks for bringing in my gear — and for the soup.’
‘No problem.’ He nods towards the canvas on the easel. ‘Your paintings — they’re really intense.’ I stare down at my feet. He stumbles on. ‘I mean, they’re really good. Really good. Just … kind of … bleak.’
‘Yeah, well, Vincent’s work was always bleak. That’s how he saw the world.’ A dead flower in amongst the live ones. A flock of crows. A coarseness to remind us life is hard.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘Vincent?’
‘Van Gogh. They’re adapted from his. It’s for Scholarship art.’
‘Oh, okay. That makes more sense.’ He stands in front of the easel, eyeing my sketch. ‘You know I’ve seen some of his originals. They blew my mind.’
‘You’re kidding? Where?’ Jealousy stirs.
‘Paris. I went there on the way back from Vienna with Mum and Opa this time last year.’
‘My god! Did you go to the Musée d’Orsay? The Impressionist museum?’
He laughs, embarrassed. ‘Probably! I just went where I was told.’
‘What was Paris like?’
‘Incredible. You feel like you’re in one of the time travel episodes of Dr Who. Vienna too. They have the most amazing buildings. It’s completely overwhelming. You can see why going back there breaks poor Opa’s heart.’
‘It must be hard for him.’
‘It is. He says it’s like walking back into a past life, except everyone he knew and loved is dead.’
I shudder. ‘He told me he’d lost a lot of family.’
Johannes perches on the window sill and nods. ‘His father was Jewish, and though he’d converted to Catholicism that wasn’t going to guarantee they’d be safe from Hitler. It turns out he was right. He sent Opa and his mother ahead to London, to ask for help from the Red Cross. By the time Opa’s father was due to follow them, he and the whole extended family had been rounded up. They all died in the camps, and when Opa and his mother came to New Zealand as refugees she died within a year. Opa was only seventeen. He says his mother died from a broken heart.’
; Seventeen. My age. The age that Van was when she died.
I think how scary it would have been: arriving in a country where they spoke a different language; in a culture as removed from Austria as they could get. They must’ve felt like they’d landed in a backwater of Hell. Mum and Dad complained that even in 1990 when they arrived we were way behind the ‘real’ world — though their idea of culture solely consisted of steak-and-Guinness pies, and Top of the Pops.
‘Actually,’ Johannes says, ‘it’s because of Opa that I’m here. I’m going to take him for a drive around the bays. He wondered if you’d like to come and then join us for lunch. His shout.’
‘Thanks, but I’d—’ Are you kidding, Miss T? You’re free to do exactly as you like. ‘Yeah, okay. Why not? That would be nice.’
‘Cool. I’m going to pick him up at ten thirty, so if you can be ready by quarter past, that should be sweet.’ He gallops up the outside stairs, climbing two with each long-legged stride.
I STILL HAVE TIME to finish the rough sketching in before I try to make myself a little more presentable. I don’t know what to wear. All my clothes are ancient, most are second-hand. In the end I have no choice: I wriggle into my tidiest jeans and choose a coral pink sweatshirt with a black cardy over the top. My hair refuses to behave. I look a mess. The bruise I gave myself is now a rotting yellow, which clashes with the purple rings under my eyes. Impressionist colour matches they may be, but it’s not a good look in the flesh.
At quarter past ten I’m lurking around the front door. Johannes reverses a small silver car out of the garage, a wheelchair rack attached to its back. I climb in beside him and buckle up, ridiculously nervous.
He drives through the busy Saturday morning streets while I wrack my brain for something to say. ‘So, what’s with the words on your shirt?’
He glances down, snorting as if surprised by what he sees. ‘It’s a Monty Python play on words. You know, Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum … I think, therefore I am.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It’s one of the fundamental foundations of Western philosophy. If we can wonder whether we exist then it proves that something — the “I” in our head — exists to do the thinking. The thought can’t be separate from the “I”. You see?’
I shrug, not sure enough to commit myself. ‘So he’s talking about consciousness?’
‘Exactly. He called thought cogitation. He gives an example of a piece of wax.’ His hand conducts his words. ‘We look at it and our senses give us all this information, like its size, shape, texture, colour, smell — and we give it the name wax. But if we hold the wax up to a flame all those things change, yet we still know that it’s the same piece of wax, just in a form that’s different to our senses.’
He meets my eye for a second, then carries on. ‘So, you see, it’s best we put our senses aside. Something that we thought we were seeing with our eyes is, in fact, grasped solely by the faculty of judgement that is in our mind.’ Now he sounds as if he’s quoting from a textbook.
I can’t tell if he’s pretentious, genuinely caught up in it or trying to impress me. Whichever, I’m still not sure I understand. My brain’s not firing today. ‘But how do emotions fit? How does he explain being moved to tears by a piece of art, or music — or grief. That’s not logical, yet it controls us all the time.’ Especially me.
‘I think that’s where he’d say the mind and body interact — he talks about this sort of stuff when he explains the concept of the soul.’
I shake my head and groan. ‘I haven’t had enough sleep to take this in!’
‘Ask Opa. He’ll explain it better than me.’
‘Are you taking philosophy because of him?’
‘I guess. We’ve always lived upstairs from him. He talked me through this stuff until I understood. Now I can’t shake it off.’
‘You’d want to?’
‘Not the ideas, no. But I’m frustrated as all hell at uni. It’s not really my thing.’
‘What does your dad do? Is he an academic too?’
He frowns at the road ahead. ‘I don’t really see him.’ His voice is tight now. ‘Do you always ask so many questions?’
As usual I’ve overstepped the mark. I’m too intense — no wonder I have no friends. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’ We drive the rest of the way in silence, both leaping from the car the moment we pull up. I wait outside while he goes in to fetch the Professor. I wish I hadn’t come.
Except that the Professor seems pleased to see me. ‘Tara, my dear! I’m glad this grandson of mine convinced you to join us!’
‘Thanks for inviting me.’ I gesture from his wheelchair to the car. ‘Do you want me to help you in?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Johannes says, angling himself so I have to move. ‘I do it all the time.’
I watch him pick his grandfather up with expert care and place him in the seat. It’s dawning on me that Johannes and his mother must do all the caregiving for the Professor back at home. They’d have to lift him out of bed. Help him shower. Maybe even haul him on and off the loo. We’re not so different, Johannes and I. Except for the fact he clearly cares for the Professor out of love.
We head towards the coast, the Professor filling Johannes in on all his visitors’ news. I don’t join in. They parry back and forth, sharing philosophy jokes that sail across the surface of my brain without sinking in. I pick at a dry patch of skin on my thumb, trying to get a hold of myself. One tiny push is all I’d need right now to fall to bits. I feel it welling up.
We’re halfway around the waterfront when the Professor exclaims: ‘Johannes, look!’ He points to a crowd of people milling around a temporary ice-skating rink in one of the parks. ‘Why don’t you and Tara work up an appetite before lunch?’ He glances back at me. ‘I was a whizz when I was young. I taught him all my best moves.’
Johannes finds a car park and the three of us make our way over to the rink where the better skaters are gliding past the learners, who flail around like newborn giraffes.
‘I’ve never tried,’ I say.
‘Then you must have a go,’ the Professor says. ‘You’ve no idea how magical it feels to master it.’ He pulls out his wallet and hands Johannes his card. ‘My treat.’
Johannes inclines his head towards me, watchful. ‘Is this okay with you?’
It’s impossible to refuse. ‘All right — but I’m totally uncoordinated.’
He laughs. ‘That’ll make two of us!’
While the Professor settles down to watch, I follow Johannes over to the makeshift office and swap my shoes for skates. He has his on before I’ve even laced mine up and stands waiting, his hand outstretched, as I attempt to rise. It’s like trying to balance on a knife edge, my ankles seemingly devoid of bone.
I pull a silly face to cover my embarrassment. ‘Is it too late to back out now?’
‘Absolutely!’ He nods towards his grandfather. ‘Rule Number One in Opa’s world: what Opa wants he usually gets.’
I grin. ‘Okay, got that. What else should I know?’
‘Just to keep an eye on him. He thinks he’s irresistible to pretty girls!’
Is that a compliment? He’s shuffling on his skates and doesn’t meet my eye. Say something. Move along. ‘So …’ I gesture towards the rink. ‘Shall we?’
He helps me onto the ice and I focus on staying upright as he shows me how to move my feet. By way of explanation he pushes off and glides out into the middle of the rink before circling back to where I stand. Not exactly elegant, his long arms and legs a little splayed and his backside sticking out, but he doesn’t fall.
I narrow my eyes at him. ‘If that’s your idea of unco, can I go home now?’
‘No. Come on.’ He offers both his hands, arms braced to hold me firm. ‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘I haven’t killed anyone yet!’
His hands are warm, his fingers bony as they encircle mine. He tows me forwards while his feet weave in and out to give him backwards momentum. I will my ankles to hol
d firm as we start a tentative circuit of the rink, and I’m concentrating so hard I nearly jump into his arms when some little smartarse hurtles past at alarming speed.
‘Watch where you going!’ Johannes snarls at the kid.
‘Sorry. I said I was crap,’ I say.
He watches the other skaters for a moment, then his face lights up. ‘Hey, I know. What if you imagine the skates are filled with paint and the ice is a blank canvas! Every time you move your feet you’re building up a picture — the goal is to get the paint as smooth and even as you can.’ He smiles at me, clearly pleased with his analogy.
I close my eyes to visualise what he’s described and see at once where I’ve been going wrong, pressing all my weight into the ice when what I need to do is brush across the surface in fluid strokes. Think myself weightless. I take a deep breath, as if I am about to start a painting, and actually manage to propel myself forwards under my own steam.
‘That’s great!’ He drops one of my hands and sweeps around beside me so we’re skating hand in hand. ‘Just trust your body to find its balance on its own.’
From the sidelines the Professor clasps his hands triumphantly above his head as I wobble past. ‘Put your arm around her waist,’ he calls to Johannes. ‘Give the small of her back a little more support.’
‘Would that help?’ His cheekbones flush pink and his embarrassment is contagious.
‘Sure.’ I say it like it doesn’t matter one way or the other, but when he wraps his arm around I feel every point at which our bodies touch.
‘Now speed it up a little. Move your feet in time with mine.’