by Susan Duncan
‘Did she scratch you? Are you bleeding?’ I went around to the other side of the car to help Esther.
She sat without moving, just looking. ‘This isn’t what I expected,’ she said in a critical tone I recognised from the old days.
‘Well, you don’t have to live here – we do,’ I replied, bristling.
‘It’s different. I’ll give you that,’ she said, trying to nullify any hint of disapproval. ‘I wouldn’t call this a farmhouse, though.’ She paused, making no attempt to move. ‘How many bedrooms are there?’
‘Just one,’ I lied, because I knew immediately where she was headed.
‘The shed would do me.’ I caught the glint in her eye.
‘It’s yours anytime you like,’ I said, calling her bluff.
‘No, I’m well looked after where I am. They really love me, you know.’
‘Would you like a whisky when we get inside?’
‘Well, perhaps just a small one.’ I left Bob to sort her out. Went to put on the kettle.
Later, still curious, I asked her again: ‘Have I ever dumped you anywhere awful? Ever?’
‘Not yet.’
After the success of our first outing, Esther came to the farm for prawns on a fresh bread roll, or eggs from our new brood of chooks boiled and served with toast cut into soldiers – a new favourite – at least once and often twice a week. She sat in one of the red leather chairs we’d brought from her unit and breathed in the hills and valleys, as though they were life-giving.
Once, I said, ‘It’s a view that reminds me of Donvale.’
She shook her head: ‘This is much more beautiful.’ And we said nothing more about her childhood or mine.
If the weather was too wild and wet to tackle our dirt track with confidence, I took her to a funky little restaurant and old wares shop on the edge of the great Manning River in Taree. There, the shopkeepers treated her like a fragile treasure and made the kind of fuss she loved. She always had a story for anyone game enough to listen. The little toe-tapper dancing for pennies on the pavement will never die in her.
On one occasion, I discovered she’d whispered that she was on the verge of her hundredth birthday.
‘You’re ninety-four,’ I said, insisting on the truth, as always.
She shot back: ‘Well, today I feel at least a hundred. Even older.’ And we all cracked up.
‘You never admit defeat,’ I said, driving her back to the nursing home.
‘Defeat never gets you anywhere,’ she retorted.
As a joke, during the drought, I told her to make herself useful. ‘Get on your knees and pray for rain,’ I said.
Now, whenever water falls from the sky, she takes the credit. ‘I have a direct line to God, you know,’ she said.
‘That’s handy. I’ll keep it in mind.’
‘Don’t get too greedy, kid. I don’t want to wear out my welcome.’
But by the tail end of winter, 2015, her mind was wandering more and more. She left sentences unfinished. Broke off mid-thought as if she’d become knotted in a tight tangle. I knew something was seriously out of kilter the day – running late – I rushed to pick her up straight from mowing a paddock. I was stinky, dusty and my clothes were filthy.
In her room, Esther smiled sweetly. ‘You look quite lovely today,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t, and you know it.’ But her eyes shone with hurt.
The official diagnosis was Stage One dementia. The happy stage, I was told. And although my mother had already softened, it changed her personality to such an extent I had no idea how to handle her. I felt wrong-footed by kindness, lost my moral compass for a minute or two and floundered – uncertain whether to laugh, cry or applaud. Sometimes I felt I could have been talking to a stranger. But there were just enough days when she reverted to form and I’d breathe a sigh of relief.
One day she looked at me with dull eyes and said, ‘My mind is going wonky, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, as though it was no big deal.
‘Didn’t think you’d noticed.’
‘I’ve always kept a close eye on you.’
She nodded in acknowledgement but had nothing to say for a while. ‘It feels like there are big black holes,’ she said.
‘Any pain?’
‘No. But I don’t think I’ve got long to go.’
‘You’ll be right.’
‘You never could tell a decent lie.’
One morning, when we’d returned to Pittwater, Bob opened the courtyard gate and Spot dashed past him, ran off to the boatshed. It was very early on a Sunday when no one was about. Somehow she got her pretty little head stuck in an empty crisp bag, fell in the water and drowned. Bob was gutted. I couldn’t leave the bedroom for three days. It took me a week to find the will to get out of my pyjamas.
‘No more dogs,’ I said to Bob vehemently. ‘No more dogs. Ever.’
When I told Esther about the tragedy on a visit to her room, she shot me a gimlet-eyed look and, in a voice sharp with blame, said, ‘You let her die, did you? That beautiful little dog.’ I stood up and walked out. ‘I was only joking,’ she called after me.
It will always be like this, I thought. Expect nothing more.
A few days later, on the drive to the farm, she suddenly sounded quite lucid and asked, ‘Are you going to write about my sins?’
‘They were not your sins, Esther,’ I replied. ‘Never think that for a moment. You didn’t stand a chance against your father.’
‘He was a bad man, wasn’t he?’
‘The worst.’
‘And yet everybody loved him. I’ll never understand it.’
‘The only thing you have to understand is that none of it was your doing.’ And because I know she believes in God and heaven and hell, I added, ‘You carry no sin. None at all. Remember that.’
‘So you don’t blame me?’
‘No. Never again.’ A small sob escaped on the back of a deep, shuddery sigh.
‘I know I haven’t got long to go,’ she said, and I couldn’t catch a whiff of manipulation. ‘Your father and John are waiting for me. God knows, they’ve waited a long time. Mum, too.’
‘Don’t worry about your father. He’ll be in the other place.’
‘Maybe. But God is all-forgiving, isn’t he?’ She sounded hopeful when I’d expected her to feel angry or at least bitter, and I understood at that moment that she’d loved him deeply. The men who followed were simply transactions. A means to an end.
‘It’s your birthday in a couple of months. We’re planning a party for you. Ninety-five. Not a bad innings, eh? You’d better hang around for that.’
She made a fluttering motion with her hand. Non-committal.
When it became clear my mother would live to celebrate another Christmas, Bob and I began discussing options. To take her to Pittwater was out of the question – she would never physically cope. Should we swap our traditional family, waifs and strays celebration for a quiet one at the farm? Or should we decide in favour of the pleasure of the majority? Either way, there would be losers.
While we agonised over the dilemma, I decorated her room, making sure to put a wreath on her door. Without a wreath, she once instructed me after I’d failed to hang one, you couldn’t call it Christmas.
‘You don’t have to bother,’ she murmured as I strung baubles along walls, placed poinsettias and small fake fir trees where she couldn’t knock them over.
‘But you love Christmas,’ I said firmly.
‘I’m well looked after here. Everyone spoils me, you know.’
On another visit, she said, ‘The staff needed the decorations for the rest of the building. I gave them away.’ That’s when I knew she’d sensed we were going to abandon her. Powerless, she struck out in the only way left to her. For once, instead of throwing up my hands in angry resignation, I found some red-and-gold floral fabric in a shop. Eric’s wife, Robyn, a skilled seamstress who’d made dust covers for our furniture, sewed a vibrantly gay quilt.
‘Don’t give that away,’ I ordered, ‘we can use it again next year.’
‘I won’t be around next year,’ she responded.
‘We’re having an early Christmas dinner for you at the farm,’ I told her, trying to make amends. Adding, as a blatant bribe, ‘Would you like me to find a new outfit for you to wear?’
She remained hunched and small. ‘No. What’s the point? Nothing matters anymore.’
‘You love red. How about a red dress?’
Her eyes lost their dullness. ‘Well, not too bright. Perhaps something green to go with it.’ And the battle was over.
‘Of course.’ I smiled inwardly. We invited neighbours to lunch on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t find a red dress so I bought her a pair of green trousers and a bright red, flowing shirt.
‘How do I look?’ she asked when I picked her up.
‘Fabulous.’
‘Will you be wearing what you’ve got on? Or will you change?’
‘Haven’t decided yet.’
‘You might want to find something more festive.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’ She made her way down the corridor of the nursing home, supported by her walker, stopping every few steps to rest. A look of such agony and distress on her face that I wondered if the effort might kill her. She didn’t even come alive at the party, and an hour and a half later, her face pinched with exhaustion, I drove her back to the room.
‘Do you realise,’ she said accusingly on the way, ‘you didn’t invite a single soul I knew?’
I let it slide through to the keeper. Said not a word. Wondered if she would ever understand that being ungrateful made it easier to leave her.
‘Just so you know,’ I said, ‘if you die before me, I will not have a twinge of guilt. I have always done the best I can for you.’
Her face went slack with shock, as though I’d whipped the scaffolding from under her and left her hanging. Then a few days before we quit our high, quiet hill for our high, rough hill, I went to take her to lunch to say farewell, to tell her we’d return in a couple of weeks. I found her lying on her side, curled into snail tightness.
‘Sit down,’ she said, pointing at a chair.
‘Why?’
‘Because I think I’m dying.’
‘Think? Or know?’
‘You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.’
‘Are we going out or not?’
‘No. I want to know where I’m going to be buried.’
I gave in. Sat down. This was such familiar ground, I didn’t even have to think. ‘With Wally. Where else?’
‘There’s not enough room now you’ve put Spot next to him.’
‘There’s heaps of space. You’ll be beyond worrying by then anyway.’
She rolled on her back, unwinding until her legs extended like two swollen stumps. I helped her struggle upright, shoved a pillow behind her head. ‘Give me a minute and I’ll be back,’ I said.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the front desk to top up your hairdressing account,’ I lied.
‘Don’t be long.’
I went looking for my white-haired neighbour to get at the truth. Margaret barely reached my shoulders but kept large mad men under control using laughter as a tool and, as a kindness, kept me updated on my mother’s condition.
‘Esther reckons she’s dying,’ I said when I located her in the dementia wing, doling out medication.
‘Rubbish, her pulse is strong as an ox,’ she said. I swallowed in relief, for once happy it was a quintessential Esther con, and waited while Margaret finished pill duty. I followed her back to Esther’s room. At the doorway, she whispered, ‘Stay out here and listen.’
‘What’s this I hear about you dying?’ Margaret said in a no-nonsense voice.
‘Oh, I’m alright.’
‘I know that. So I might as well tell you, you’re not good enough for up there, and not bad enough for down there. So forget all this dying business until you’ve racked up a few more credits to get through heaven’s gate.’
‘All I want to know is where I’ll be buried,’ Esther said, her voice turning small and childlike, seeking sympathy.
‘Where do you want to be buried?’ Margaret asked, her voice still firm.
‘On that big hill at the farm. I’d have a wonderful view and I’d be able to haunt Susan forever.’
‘You won’t be haunting anyone for a long time yet,’ Margaret said. ‘Now pull yourself together and go out with your daughter. The drive will do you good.’
Outside Esther’s bedroom, Margaret gave me a firm talking to. ‘Your mother’s got you wrapped around her little finger. It’s time you stopped letting her get away with it.’
‘Yeah. Thanks, Margaret.’ But I knew it was way, way too late for either of us to change.
When I told Bob about her desire to haunt me, instead of laughing, as I thought he would, he said, ‘There’s no way her ashes are going anywhere near the farm.’
‘Ah, what does it matter?’
‘Trust me. No way.’
‘We could put her way over in the back paddock, couldn’t we?’
‘Still too close.’
I never thought I would be capable of leaving my mother to eat institutional food in a nursing home on a day when everyone was supposed to be wrapped in the joy, angst, fury, rivalry, boredom – whatever – of their families. But I did.
We ate Christmas dinner on the lawn on a perfect day. ‘Where’s Esther?’ one guest after another asked. ‘Too hard to get her here,’ I explained.
‘Oh, that’s sad. Not the same without her. Who’s going to snaffle the table decorations this year?’ But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel relieved – freed – by her absence.
Early in the evening, a fierce storm blew up out of nowhere with gale-force winds and torrential rain. Our last hangers-on scurried to the far end of the verandah where Bob and I slept in summer. We dropped the awnings, filled our glasses and hunkered down to sit out the deluge, too replete to make the effort to shout above the bedlam, mesmerised by the sight of towering spotted gums rocking back and forth, as though at any moment they might come loose from the earth and crash down. Then Boatshed Michael called to say someone’s tinny was about to sink and everyone took off at a gallop.
There was a brief moment when I stood alone in the hallway and picked up the phone to call my mother. I put it down. No matter what either of us said, it wouldn’t sound right.
On our return to Benbulla, Esther came to lunch at the farm.
‘How was your Christmas?’ I asked.
‘Best I ever had. By a mile.’
‘Good to hear. I was afraid you might miss us.’
She smiled smugly. ‘Oh, I know you think about me all the time.’
‘So what did you do? Lunch in the dining room? A few crackers and party hats?’
‘I woke up on my own, ate lunch on my own and went to bed on my own. It was the most peaceful Christmas I’ve ever had.’
‘I’ll try to do better next year,’ I said.
‘I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it. I didn’t have to worry about a thing.’
I had no idea if it was a knife being thrust in my gut or a gesture of extraordinary graciousness. It was ever thus.
I still wake occasionally in the dead of night and wonder if my mother was complicit in what happened to me as a child. Surely the signals, signs, operandi had to be as familiar to her as getting dressed each morning to go to school. Then I remembered Cousin Jayne’s anecdote: ‘Your mother coped [with the distress, shame, trauma of being unmarried and pregnant] by making up a mad story about rushing home to help June recover from an abortion. When June heard, she wanted to rip out Esther’s hair.’ By the time I was born, plucking one or two words out of a conversation and reinventing the facts around them, or taking refuge in phantasmagorical denial, was a skill she’d mastered. Without it she’d probably have been felled by grief and disappointment decades ago.
At some poin
t, I can’t remember exactly when, I realised Cousin Jayne had a right to know about the material in this book. Felix was also her grandfather. She has children and a grandchild who are his descendants. But I also had a deeper, underlying motive. She’d lived within arm’s reach from her birth to her marriage. Had he done to her what he’d done to my mother and me?
I phoned to tell her Bob and I were driving to Melbourne, and on the way we’d like to meet for lunch in Wangaratta. I had a couple of things I wanted to talk to her about. On the due date, I rang to confirm a time and place.
‘I have no idea what this is about, but I’ve just had a check-up and all this secrecy has sent my blood pressure sky-high,’ she said. ‘You’d better tell me what’s going on now so I can let go of a thousand nightmare scenarios that are currently rocketing through my head, not least of which is that your cancer is back and you’re dying.’
So in the end I blurted out the reason for our visit over the phone.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t believe a word your mother says,’ she said without taking a moment to think.
‘It wasn’t just her,’ I said. ‘It was me, too.’
‘Oh god, oh no, oh god, that’s different. That’s entirely different.’ She paused. I heard her breathing heavily. ‘You know, I always thought Auntie Jean and Susie were the goody-two-shoes in the family and never understood why. I’m glad I was the bad egg now.’
Half an hour later, we sat across from each other in the restaurant. I couldn’t look her in the eye. Even now, when we have both lived the greater part of our lives and are comfortable in our skins, I wondered if this new knowledge would come between us and skew her attitude towards me forever. A fear, I suspect, that lies firmly at the core of the long silences of abused children. Would revealing our damaged history result in standing forever isolated with the word victim tattooed invisibly on our foreheads? Deeply different from every other child through no fault of our own?
‘What about you?’ I asked, once again failing to meet her eyes.
‘He never put a foot wrong. Not once. God, all those years and none of us saw what was happening.’ She shook her head in disbelief.