A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  26

  The time lapse

  It was bright when Elsie woke, and later than she’d expected. After more than a year in this room, its brightness still surprised her. They’d caught her wandering—the trips of her mind; the trips that she took. They said they were going to move her to the building next door.

  ‘More secure, Mum,’ said Don, ‘and just one room.’

  A terrible sense of entrapment: she wouldn’t speak of it.

  She barely spoke again.

  She stretched, and stood, and went into the shower—where she slipped and fell. This time, she heard a crack.

  ‘Hello, Elsie?’ called the young girl who came by now each morning. Elsie could never remember her name. ‘Are you right? Big day today—you’re moving out.’

  And as she heard herself reply—‘I’m not here’—she felt the world move beneath her, tipping her into its blackness. In its dark silence, she realised, she could no longer hear Clem’s loud clock.

  When she woke, she was in a hospital room with the sheets too tight across her feet. Three young men in white coats were talking to her children.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Mrs Gormley,’ said one of them, noticing her gaze.

  And where else would I be? She smiled politely, trying to follow their sentences through words like ‘intracapsular’ and ‘hemiarthroplasty’. None of it sounded good.

  ‘You had a fall, Mum,’ said Don.

  ‘Broke your hip,’ said Elaine.

  Well, then, thought Elsie. The doctors looked so young standing there, smiling at her. ‘No more night-time flits.’ She closed her eyes, her whisper no more than a breath.

  ‘Sorry?’ The one standing closest to her—the one holding her chart—looked over the top of his glasses.

  ‘She doesn’t say much anymore,’ her son said softly.

  ‘Her mind wanders.’ Her daughter’s voice was crisp. ‘She was lucky not to break anything when she fell the first time, back at home.’

  ‘She’s doing well for her age,’ said her son, holding her hand and squeezing.

  His voice—all their voices, come to think of it—shook and shimmered, as though the room was a kind of echo chamber. Ah, reverb. Like Don’s grandson had said.

  Perhaps I’m not here, thought Elsie, the way they’re talking. When did Donny get so old?

  ‘We were due to fly out this evening,’ said Elaine then. ‘Flying to London, to see Gloria—for a big show of her pictures.’

  ‘You go,’ said Don. ‘Mum would want that. And tell Gloria to come home soon—if she can.’ Nodding at Elsie in the bed. ‘Thick as thieves they were, Mum and Glory. It would mean the world to her.’

  She could feel them watching her while she lay between them, very still, her eyes closed.

  ‘She looks so still—like a statue.’ Elaine’s voice was softer than usual; that was nice.

  She heard her son’s voice: ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was a painting,’ Elaine was saying. ‘We found that photo—remember? You thought it looked like Mum, but I said no.’

  And then she heard a woman sniff. Was Elaine crying?

  ‘But it was. It was a portrait Ida Lewis did of Mum.’

  Don’s voice now. ‘That painting? That was Mum?’

  ‘It was. By Ida Lewis. Gloria saw it in a magazine somewhere. She’s trying to find out where the painting is. I made a copy of the photo for you too.’

  The sound of paper being pulled clear of an envelope.

  ‘That’s a lovely thought, Elaine.’ Don’s voice was gentle. ‘It makes her look so grand, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘So much more than Mum.’ Elsie could feel some pressure against her other hand, and when she opened her eyes for a moment, she saw her daughter’s hand pressed lightly on her own. ‘Imagine, a glamorous secret like that.’

  Elsie blinked, and saw Elaine, skipping alone along a path while Donny walked beside his mother, held her hand.

  ‘Dad told me about it—not long before he died. But I didn’t think it was real. As if Mum would get to do a thing like that.’

  My daughter Elaine, thought Elsie clearly in the dimness of her mind. All the things she didn’t do. And as she settled to think about this, she caught the scent of roses, sweet and thick. Perhaps one of her children had brought them. Or perhaps it was the roses the new woman—Lucy, wasn’t it?—had planted. She could see them, too, as she lay here. She could almost taste their smell. Those roses. And the garden did look lovely: even Clem would be impressed.

  ‘Attar of Roses.’ Elsie’s voice was almost silent.

  ‘She got exactly the life that she wanted,’ Elaine said. ‘I spent all my life living it too.’

  Elaine, in the darkness, quite close by.

  •

  In the hospital at night, it was never truly dark. There were lights here and there, and bright buttons on machines. There were brilliant strips and tiny bulbs; globes and flashes and torches. In the smallest hours of the morning, someone was likely to wake you—to check something or measure something. To make sure, Elsie suspected, you were still alive.

  She didn’t sleep. There was too much noise, too much coming and going. And the pain in her hip was quite sharp. Instead, she floated on her own river of thought, in and out of different times, different rooms, different pieces of her life. Here was Clem. Here was Ida. Here was Glory.

  Such a long time since she’d left home, since she’d fallen on the green carpet and lain there, watching the day’s light move around the house.

  ‘You take your time in going,’ Clem had always said when they left a movie, left a party.

  Elsie said. ‘There’s always one more thing to say.’ This had to be the longest leave-taking of all. And he must be miles ahead now.

  How will I ever catch up?

  What would it be like, Elsie wondered, when she did come to the end? There’d been nothing to it for Clem—breathing, breathing, and then not. At least she trusted it to be calm. Almost forty years he’d been gone; she wished she believed she would see him again, in some other place, on some other side. But then she realised she had seen him daily these past years—as long as she’d been floating on this tidal, turning time. Here he was now, stepping up to the side of the tram—she leaned down and smiled at him as she caught his hand.

  ‘I’m going to marry you, Clem Gormley,’ she said.

  He smiled and said, ‘I know.’

  She pulled herself up a little higher in the bed and caught a glimpse of something moving in the window that gave onto the corridor—her reflection, she supposed, or maybe some other, more mobile version of herself. Once, in the middle of the night, she’d looked in the window of her old house and had the shock of seeing someone standing on the other side. Lucy: that was her name. Elsie had made Carol send those flowers and Elaine had been so cross at how much they cost.

  Now Elaine was strapped into the metal cylinder of an aeroplane and flying halfway around the world; Elaine, who for one moment had held her hand. And maybe Gloria would come home—Glory, who might find Elsie’s painting. Hang on; hang on.

  It all moved too quickly, like the lights flashing in her room right now. She could feel how terribly quickly the world turned. She could feel herself falling through space.

  She tried to move her thumb. There was no movement.

  And then she stopped. She wasn’t sure if her eyes were open or closed—but somehow, if she tipped her gaze a little to the left, to the right, the time lapse of her life was running from a different spot. Time lapse: that was a phrase that Glory had taught her. She’d shown Elsie some of her own sequences the last time she was home: plants blooming; the earth moving against the night sky; tides rushing in and out.

  ‘Time lapse photography, Nan,’ she’d said. ‘You compress time—take a single shot every couple of minutes, and then run it together like film.’ She had another project that showed dresses being made, the fabric seeming to leap through the stages from cutting to sewing to fitting to catwalk in
less than a minute.

  That was what life felt like now.

  Inside Elsie’s body, blood was not quite getting to where it needed to be. She wouldn’t walk again; she wouldn’t talk. She couldn’t press the button hard enough to tell anyone it was happening. So she shifted her gaze inside the night-sky dome of her mind and watched different parts of her life pass by. Through a window she watched people dance. She watched a tram move along a street. She watched a painter mix her colours. And the night spun into day and the rest of the time still to come.

  It wasn’t so bad, she supposed. She’d just lie here, quite quietly, and wait.

  Maybe this was how she’d finally get home.

  27

  Lucy’s house

  Ben was planting more trees in the yard when the car pulled up. Who’s this? he thought as he watched the woman in the driver’s seat check her reflection in the mirror, fuss about with something in her lap.

  Probably someone for the neighbours, and he shook some potting mix into the hole he’d dug for the tallest melaleuca, wetting it down before he eased in the plant. He’d lost count of how many they’d planted in the three years they’d been here. Paperbarks, honey myrtles, tea-trees, ficus, eucalypts, more. The trees made a crescent of different greens around the edge of the big corner block.

  The particular judder of a closing car door: Ben looked up towards the road again. He rarely heard that sound without the memory of Lucy slamming shut an orange taxi door late on a Sunday night and running across the grass to where he stood. ‘Here I am.’ Her voice light; her smile wide. ‘Here I am. I’ve come home.’

  He closed his eyes; it still made him smile.

  ‘Hello?’ The woman was standing on the kerb. Her dark red hair glowed bright, like Lucy’s, but her clothes were very stylish, very fine. ‘Excuse me—do you live here?’

  Ben wiped his hands and blinked. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Yes. Can I help you?’ She could have been one of the other Lucy Kisses, snuck through to this one’s world. Her vardøger.

  She took another step towards him. ‘It’s a strange thing to ask,’ she said, ‘but my nan lived here—and I—’

  ‘Elsie? You mean Elsie Gormley?’ He shaded his eyes. ‘We bought the house, three years ago, from her.’

  ‘Yes, Elsie Gormley. She died last week and I—’ And then the woman was crying, without trying to wipe at her tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Ben, unsure if he should offer a handkerchief or reach out a hand. He glanced back at the house, half expecting its shape to have changed with this news. ‘Would you like to come in? Could I get you some water? Some tea?’

  The woman smiled. ‘No, thanks. My uncle said you’d done wonders with the garden; I wanted to come by and see.’

  Ben nodded at the digging and the planting. ‘We’ve got a kind of forest out here now,’ he said.

  ‘There used to be a kookaburra Nan fed,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t suppose he still comes round?’

  ‘No—although I think he did, right at the beginning. We haven’t seen him for ages, though my wife’s always hopeful he’ll come back.’ Ben made another gesture towards the house. ‘You’re sure I can’t get you a drink?’

  The woman shook her head, and stepped into the shade. ‘But I wouldn’t mind just stopping for a while,’ she said. ‘I loved it here, when I was a kid. All the stories, things to do—there was a swamp at the back, you know, spotted with blue hyacinths. My grandfather used to take me foraging in there—plants, things that people had thrown away; I guess it was a bit of a dump. But I thought it was like having a treasure chest over the fence.’ She looked along the side of the house and down to the park that had replaced the swamp. ‘You were all right in the last flood?’

  ‘We were fine.’

  ‘It went under in seventy-four, you know,’ she said, and Ben nodded.

  A chocolate-coloured myna bird hopped across the grass, and the woman laughed. ‘When did they get here?’ she asked. ‘It was all the other kind of small grey noisy miners in my day.’

  ‘They’ve been coming the past year or so,’ said Ben. ‘Our boy’s been watching them move down from the hill.’

  ‘He was a baby when you moved in, wasn’t he? I remember Dad telling me that. I thought Nan would like it that the house had a new family.’

  ‘Yes. He’s four now,’ said Ben. She was very glamorous, standing there in her smart black clothes—the longer he looked, the less she seemed to look like Lucy. He was conscious of being grubby from the dirt.

  ‘Elsie lasted a long time,’ said the woman. ‘She was ninety-three. She had a stroke a couple of years ago, and wasn’t really with us since. I meant to come home more, you know—meant to bring her here and see if you’d mind if she had a look around. You never know if that’s a good idea.’

  They both shrugged.

  ‘We’d have been happy to see her,’ said Ben. ‘For a long time we thought of this as Elsie’s house. My wife used to imagine her coming back to visit in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have put it past her,’ said the woman.

  The myna bird hopped across the branches of one of the callistemons, roughing up the thicker bark with its beak, and balancing as the thinner twigs swayed beneath it. At the apex of the tree, it pushed off, and flew into the sky.

  ‘Wouldn’t you love to be able to do that?’ said the woman, as she watched its curving flight. ‘I know they’re pests, but they’re just so rich a colour. They’re part of the starling family—or that’s what we call mynas in England. I think starling is a much nicer name.’

  ‘Do you live there?’ There was something round and polished in the sound of her voice—it reminded him of what he remembered of his own mother’s.

  ‘For years,’ said the woman. ‘I left Brisbane as soon as I could—never really got on with my mother. But I felt very sad to leave Nan.’

  There was a clattering inside the house, and a great shout, and Lucy and Tom came down the front steps, each with a rocket and each making the crackling sounds their rockets needed to blast off.

  ‘Tom, Lu,’ called Ben. ‘Come here a minute. This is Elsie’s granddaughter.’ They dropped their arms and their game, their blast-off, paused.

  ‘You’ve got some lovely rockets there,’ said the woman, nodding at the toys. She crouched down next to Tom, holding her hand out towards the dark green spaceship he held, a tube of cardboard with a plastic funnel on the top. ‘Would you mind if I had a look at this? I’ve always fancied making a rocket, and you look like you’ve done a good job.’

  Tom passed it to her. ‘This one can go all the way past the end of the last universe,’ he said proudly. ‘Mum and me tested it the other day.’

  ‘That sounds like an impossible mission.’ The woman laughed. ‘Are you good at impossible things?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Tom with the certainty of being four. ‘Mum and me see impossible things all the time. We saw a pitch drop thing that had taken thousands of years—’

  ‘Well, not thousands—thirteen or so,’ said Lucy, resting her hand on his head.

  ‘We saw it slowly in real life, and then we saw it speedy on Mum’s phone. We saw a whole year in ten seconds.’ Tom’s voice was rising and his face was one great smile.

  ‘Ah, time lapse,’ said the woman. ‘That’s one of my favourite things. You know, my grandfather saw one of those drops of pitch fall—imagine that: the right place, the right time.’

  ‘Mum says maybe when I’m finishing school, I can maybe see the next one.’ His face clouded. ‘I’m not even at big school yet.’

  ‘Well, it’s good that you’ve got rockets to keep you busy while you wait.’ The woman smiled. ‘I met a boy once in this very city who told me he was building a rocket, and I mean a real one. I used to wonder how that voyage went.’

  Ben brushed at his face as if something had landed on his skin; he had the sense of having tripped and stumbled, although he stood stock still in his own yard.

  ‘
Ours are always highly successful voyages,’ said Lucy, looping her arm through her husband’s. ‘But will you come inside and have a cup of tea or something? It would be lovely to hear more about your nan. I used to talk to her—I mean, pretend to—when we first came.’ She blushed. ‘We had a run-in in the end.’

  ‘Is that why she sent you those roses? My mother was appalled by how much they cost.’

  The woman laughed as she handed the rocket back to Tom, but Lucy and Ben stood suddenly silent and still. Ben shivered, and some great silence chilled the world. He felt Lucy’s fingers tighten on his arm.

  ‘I won’t come in, thanks. I’m on my way out to the airport—flying back to London today,’ Elsie’s granddaughter said, her voice breaking the pause. ‘I just wanted to see the place before I went. I was so relieved you hadn’t demolished it—little cottages like this, they turn them into concrete monsters these days.’

  ‘Concrete monsters?’ Tom’s eyes blazed out to wideness. ‘Real monsters? Like the real rocket you talked about?’

  ‘Not really,’ said his dad, pulling him in against his legs. ‘It’s just an expression. There are no monsters around here.’

  Then the silence widened around them again, and the sun shone hot and bright.

  ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ The woman spoke after a moment. ‘Would you mind if I take a quick picture of the house, just to keep, before I go?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ben. ‘I can take it for you if you like, so you’re in it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lucy felt in her empty pocket for a phone. ‘And if you could take one of the three of us too—we don’t have many of us three here together. Ben? Have you got your phone?’

  He nodded, holding out the small device to their guest.

  The woman smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said. She pulled a phone from her own pocket, fiddling with the switch. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s my nan’s phone—Mum says it’s got some of Nan’s photos, stuff that everyone thought had been lost. Sorry,’ she said again as she fumbled with another button. ‘I’m still figuring out how it works.’