by Susan Duncan
The following day, I rang at opening time and hurriedly booked a bed, agreeing to pay the daily rate until my mother’s arrival. A few days at the most, according to the geriatrician. I told Esther the plans during a visit. A day later she took a turn for the worse. Two weeks later, still in the geriatric ward at Royal North Shore, she announced she’d really prefer the nursing home at the retirement village.
‘Ok,’ I said, as cunning as her, ‘I’ll raise the money somehow, but I won’t be able to visit very often. We’ll be at the farm most of the time.’ A day later, I found her coming out of the bathroom on her walker. It was the first time I’d seen her upright in four weeks. She’d always preferred the country, she said. It was a much healthier lifestyle. I should have been inured to the games, her ruthless determination to turn events to her advantage no matter the cost to others. But I wasn’t. I didn’t feel angry anymore, though. All I felt was tired.
Back at Pittwater I began the process of minimising Esther’s life once more. To be sure I wasn’t transgressing any unwritten rules of compassion and decency in the pursuit of practicality – and to give myself the chance of saying, Denise told me to do it this way, if Esther complained – I asked that good, common-sense woman for her advice.
‘Three of everything,’ she said flatly. ‘Shirts, skirts, nighties, bras. Shoes – one pair only – and one pair of slippers. One dressing gown. No trousers.’ The geriatrician had warned that Esther would be catheterised to the end.
I chose her room. Light, spacious, with a view of a garden, a private bathroom – it was lovely, and if by some miracle she became truly mobile, there was a spacious sitting room with tea- and coffee-making facilities right outside her door. With her gift for rearranging facts to suit her desires, she could pretend it was a swank hotel.
I went shopping. How often had I seen my mother hold a new garment up to her face, inhaling the scent of new with greedy pleasure? I put a photo of my brother on the bedside table. Another of her and Stefan smiling cheek to cheek. Another of her loyal friends from Wallacia, where she lived before the retirement village. Warm-hearted people who’d visited her regularly over the years. I bought expensive hand cream and make-up. Her favourite deodorant and a soft hairbrush. Lavender soap – I couldn’t find any Yardley’s April Violets, her favourite. They were small touches meant to console her for what I’d been warned over and over would be a short time. Her future laid down in packs of threes: three days, three weeks, but not more than three months. I lay the leopard-skin dressing gown on the end of the bed.
Esther was flown (for once, I was thrilled I’d kept paying her private medical insurance) from Sydney to Taree in the very early hours of the morning. So early, the thoughtful staff at Royal North Shore didn’t want to call and wake me. But I’d been waiting, staring out the bedroom windows at a rising dawn, anxious to be there when she arrived. I didn’t want her to feel frightened, lost or helpless. Pointless worry, as it turned out.
‘First time I’ve ever been in a helicopter,’ she told me as I walked through her door. She sounded as excited as a kid. ‘Wish I’d been able to see where we were going, but I was well looked after. A lovely young man took care of me. Not handsome but very kind. A woman, too. She was very thoughtful.’ And she launched into a detailed account of dealing with the embarrassing demands of an overflowing catheter bag mid-air, when once she’d pretended to have a heart attack to avoid mentioning her haemorrhoids.
I put this new lack of inhibition down to the sedation she’d been given for the trip. But it ramped up as time passed, with a fixation on her rear end: ‘A lovely man washed my bottom this morning. He was so thorough he polished every grape, one by one.’ And then: ‘They all love me, you know. This morning, when Fred [name changed] applied cream to my bottom – it’s red raw – he treated me as gently as a baby. Never thought I’d enjoy having a man wash my bottom. But he does it so efficiently.’
The day she ripped out the catheter, I knew she had a future even if I couldn’t guess how it might take shape. A day later, I arrived to find her still on the bed, lying at an angle that would cripple lesser women, but she was fully dressed.
‘There’s a hairdresser on the premises,’ I said, wheedling shamelessly, and I watched her eyes light up with pleasure.
‘I’d like a Friday appointment. Late morning.’
‘She only works on Mondays.’ Esther pouted. ‘Yes or no?’ I asked.
‘Yes!’
For a few weeks, I visited every day. Stepping through a weighty, cathedral-like timber door into a thick, gagging fog of floral air-freshener, determined to do my duty, or, more accurately, alleviate my guilt for plucking her out of Sydney against her wishes and being selfishly thrilled I didn’t have to sell my house.
‘Morning, Teena,’ I’d say with a wave to the receptionist before marching on. Past the kitchen and two dining rooms. Then through a doorway and across a vast expanse of an always morbidly vacant sitting room with gold brocade chairs scattered around like a formal drawing room.
I always found her stretched on her side, resting on her elbow, head in her hand. Clean clothes the sole signal of a brand-new day.
‘Still breathing, then,’ I’d say automatically. And, automatically, she would thumb her nose in my direction. Then she’d run her hands along the smooth, unwrinkled, unblemished skin of her legs, drawing attention to them. ‘Not bad legs for an old girl,’ she’d say if I forgot to comment.
My own legs were scribbled with broken veins. My feet a mess of crooked toes broken on docks and in boats. ‘Oh, you were born with hammer toes,’ she said dismissively when I lifted a foot to make a comparison I thought she’d relish. ‘Like your father. I wanted the doctor – Vern, do you remember Vern? He took your tonsils out and you haemorrhaged – to break and straighten them when you were a baby, but he said no. We thought we might lose you over those tonsils.’
These are the bonds, I thought, that knotted us forever. These are the bonds that overrode all else. ‘I’m tough. Like you.’
‘I’m not afraid of dying, you know. Never have been.’ I resigned myself to a familiar monologue, but she surprised me. In a piping, childish voice, she said, ‘It’s just … well, I’ll never be ready to die.’
‘I’m not sure anyone ever is,’ I replied after a moment, unsure whether to feel happy or sad for her, even more unsure of my own response in her circumstances.
‘You’re stuck with me, kid,’ she said, smiling, patting the bed to emphasise the point.
I recalled a harried nurse in the emergency ward at Mona Vale Hospital, dealing with a violent, roaring old man determined to cheat death. ‘The ones who won’t give in have the worst deaths,’ she’d said. ‘There’s nothing peaceful about them, that’s for sure.’
Esther, fully dressed, stayed on that bed for a long, long time. Months. Most days she spun around so her feet rested on the pillow. It bamboozled the staff for a while, but I knew it gave her a view of the comings and goings of medication trolleys, laundry deliveries and meals. And the surprising number of visiting family and friends who rolled up regularly, as though they were having a fun day out. In Esther’s former home, the crowds appeared on Mother’s Day and Christmas. Otherwise, the streets were eerily empty beyond the residents and the staff.
For lunch or dinner, Esther steadfastly refused to join her comrades in wheelchairs, open-mouthed and prone on stretchers, or glued to walkers. ‘I’ll dine in my room,’ I heard her say over and over, as if she was ordering room service in a hotel or on a cruise ship. She snapped at any suggestion by the patient and good-humoured staff that she join activities for the day (sing-alongs, bingo, storytelling), and remained prone on her bed. I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t think it was good for her either.
‘You’ve always loved singing,’ I said, trying to sound jolly.
‘I don’t know any of the songs.’
‘Of course you do – even I know most of them. Learned them when we had the pub. Remember the Saturday night sing
-alongs with Old Gil? How she pounded the keyboard with her twisted fingers?’
‘Will you come with me?’ I almost choked.
‘Hah!’ she said, spitting out the word in triumph.
It had been, and still was, a complicated time emotionally. But there were subtle shifts in our relationship. Driven more by dependency, probably, than our reconstructed personalities. The fight went out of her. And me. She became kinder, less critical. I found patience. Every so often, she thanked me. Every so often, I thanked her.
‘You gave me a great education. It set me up for life. I’ll always be grateful,’ I said.
‘I had to fight your father every step of the way. We made a lot of sacrifices for you two kids, you know.’
‘I know.’
They were unexpected turning points.
I found the more I did for her, the more my rage about the past resolved. It also took the edge off guilt, which I realised was often the trigger for flaring up over what boiled down to nothing at all. She was who she was. Me too. If vanity and self-absorption drove her, did it really matter? If believing she was special and loved by one and all gave her a reason to open her eyes each morning, could anyone deny her that? It was time to stop holding up as prima facie evidence of failure what I so effortlessly forgave in myself. Most of all, she was consistently stoic in a situation that would have broken most spirits, and I admired that above all else. She’d made her bed, as she and my grandmother used to say, and she was damn well lying on it. Even if it meant being imprisoned in a facility where rational conversations were rare, where she was confined to a room no matter how well-appointed, where television became her closest soulmate and the staff her substitute family.
‘It’s TV or the clickers,’ she said.
‘Clickers?’
‘The ones who have had strokes. They click their tongues. Makes sense once you get the hang of it.’ I filled the third drawer in her room with chocolates and sweets to tempt the staff into making extra visits and talking to her in plain English.
‘I’ve realised there’s a lot for me to do here,’ she said earnestly one day. ‘There are quite a lot of very ill people, so I’m going to read to them. I can manage that. I’ve always been a good reader, so they tell me.’ I knew it would never happen. But see, she seemed to be saying, I’m going to make myself useful. The pacemaker was worthwhile. It was the right decision.
‘Of course, that’s the first-class end,’ she said one day, pointing to the far end of the corridor, implying I’d stuck her in the bargain basement. A comment like that would have made me furious once. But how many people lay under blocks of marble in cemeteries, exhausted to death by their bitterness?
‘That’s the dementia wing, Esther. Be happy you’re nowhere near it.’
‘I’m not complaining. Have you ever heard me complain? I’m well looked after.’
‘Yes, you are. You’re a very lucky woman.’
‘Haven’t I always said that?’
‘You’ve always been a model mother.’
‘Don’t go too far, kid.’
On another visit, she said, ‘They put me in dead people’s nighties every night.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said, alarmed that it signalled an irretrievable mental shift.
‘I don’t mind. It’s rather funny.’
‘What makes you think that’s happening?’
‘Well, they’re not my nighties. I assume they’re passed on to me because their former owners don’t need them anymore.’
‘But you’ve got plenty of nighties.’
‘No. They’ve all disappeared.’ She made a poof motion with her hands.
‘I’ll check it out,’ I said, not sure what to think. The front desk called the laundry, laundry sent me to a lost clothes cupboard. I rummaged around. Found two shirts, a pair of trousers. No nighties. Name tags were missing, explained laundry.
‘Ah.’ I told Esther I’d buy some new stuff anyway. ‘You’re a bit short in the clothes department. None of us expected you to live this long.’
‘Hah! There’s plenty of life in the old girl yet.’
By now, she was ninety-three years old and I was sixty-three. Both of us firmly aware of the impact of time and the inescapable end result of living. The point, I thought, of her long survival, was the time it gave me – not her – to reach détente. Admittedly wobbly, but a state of mind nevertheless.
30
ESTHER SEEMED WELL ENOUGH ONE DAY to attempt taking her out. I wasn’t sure of protocol, so I lined up behind a nurse at the front counter to check the routine.
‘I need some sticky tape,’ said the nurse.
‘What’s it for?’ Teena asked.
‘Mr Smith’s blow-up doll has sprung a leak.’
‘You need something stronger than I’ve got,’ Teena said, unfazed. ‘Speak to maintenance.’
‘Blow-up doll?’ I spluttered, butting in, incredulous.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it; whatever brings comfort in this life,’ said the nurse firmly, daring me to disagree with her.
‘Yes, no,’ I mumbled, embarrassed.
‘Mr Smith’s a lovely old man,’ Teena said.
Just then, a sparrow of a woman strode up purposefully in a neat pink tracksuit. I stood aside. ‘You’re a wonderful employee, Teena,’ she said, writing out a cheque in perfect lettering. ‘The best worker I’ve ever had. I think you deserve a raise.’ She tore off the cheque carefully, placed it on the counter. Teena smiled kindly but didn’t move. Odd, I thought. The woman turned, took a few steps, then spun back, her face riddled with rage. ‘You’re fired!’ she spat out. ‘You’re no good. You’re a lazy girl, Teena. You’re fired.’ She snatched back the cheque, stomped off furiously.
‘Hell. What was that all about?’ I asked, shocked.
‘Mrs Jones used to run her own business. She thinks she’s still in charge.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you? The abuse?’
Teena – young, beautiful, impeccably groomed and dressed, clever and competent – shrugged. ‘She’s not too bad. You get used to it. It’s not her fault, really. It’s just age and illness.’
‘Yes. I see. Ha-ha. I bet you’ve got a thousand stories to tell.’ I gave another stupid sort of laugh, feeling way out of my depth. ‘I was wondering, would it be ok to take Esther out?’
‘Of course! The staff love it when people are taken out.’
‘Right. Good. Thank you.’ And I marched off. Head reeling. Blow-up dolls? I held back a roar, swallowed it whole. Bob always said the last thing in a man to die … well, why spell it out?
‘Esther!’ I boomed from her doorway. ‘You’ve always wanted to see the farm. Today’s the day. Get up off that bed and put on your shoes – we’re heading out.’
‘Give me a minute, kid.’
It took almost an hour, but she struggled along the hallway on her walker, puffing and panting, stopping every few feet, closing her eyes, opening them, giving herself a shake, plodding on.
‘You’re doing well,’ I said, when once I’d been impatient, convinced it was an act. Well, once it was an act. ‘We’re nearly to the front door. Turn left just ahead. I’ll go and get the car and bring it to the entrance.’ I took off at a fast walk.
In the dining room, people with baby-fluff white hair, vacuous faces and bibs were being spoonfed by staff. Others, still able to lift a fork slowly to their mouths, ate sparingly. Cutlery clicking on china echoed loudly. I quickly looked away. I’d never leave my room either, I thought.
‘Bum first,’ I told Esther, holding the car door with one hand, removing her walker with the other.
‘I know, I know.’ And snap – we fell back into a well-worn routine like a couple of old vaudeville players. ‘How far to the farm?’ she asked.
I leaned across and buckled her into her seat. ‘About half an hour.’
‘You don’t want to waste time with me.’
‘Nope, but I’m prepared to do it anyway.’
‘Just as well.’
‘I’ll buy fresh prawns for lunch.’
‘The food is very good where I am. But they don’t serve oysters or lobsters. They should address that problem.’
‘Ok, ok, I’ve got the message. You’d prefer oysters, but lobster would be even better.’
‘Prawns will do very well,’ she said primly. She looked out the window: ‘This is a big town, isn’t it? And such pretty houses. I thought you were dumping me in a cold, old hollow when they brought me here.’
Two shocking facts hit me at the same time: My mother’s world had reduced to a single room, and it could have been in Timbuktu for all she knew. And she thought I was capable of doing truly dreadful things to her. I scrolled back through history, searching for the basis for her distrust. I may not have been a perfect daughter – or even a barely adequate daughter – but, as far as I could tell, I had always responded to genuine need.
‘Why would you think I’d dump you somewhere awful? Or even more important, have I ever dumped you anywhere awful?’
She ignored the question. ‘Look at all these beautiful trees. Aren’t trees beautiful?’ And in my new state of being, I let her comments slide off when once I would have held them hard up against my chest. Used them as an excuse to skive off doing my duty for a while.
‘Here we are,’ I said a while later. I turned into our gate, began the climb up the Bottom Hill in first gear. Waved to Bob as we passed the shed. Perhaps beckoned desperately is nearer the truth. Opened the car door. Spot, a ball of brown and white fur, bounded into the car, scrabbling across my legs, landing in Esther’s lap. Licking her face, her hands. Tail wagging madly.
‘Oh, she’s beautiful,’ Esther said, laughing.
‘Out, Spot,’ I said. ‘C’mon, out, out damned Spot.’ I grabbed the dog, chucked her through the door.