Coda

by Thea Astley

  A small history of forgetfulness started. She was locked after hours in a gallery, a cemetery, two large city stores, and overslept in several cinemas. ‘She talks to herself a lot,’ Sham had replied to his concerned phone calls. ‘I’ve heard her out in the yard admonishing plants. God, Brain, I can’t handle it.’

  Beaten. He was forced to yield.

  ‘She’s bloody lonely,’ he said. ‘You could do something about that.’

  ‘So could you,’ snapped his sister tartly.

  Part Three

  Investigations are still under way to discover the identity of an elderly couple found seated late last night in the departure lounge of a Sydney domestic air terminal.

  Police were alerted by staff long after all local flights had ceased.

  Both people, who are estimated to be in their late seventies or early eighties, appeared dazed and incoherent. They had no identification on them and medical reports indicate each is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The woman, who is slightly more lucid than the man assumed to be her husband, insisted they were waiting for the return of their daughter who had gone to check luggage.

  At present they are being looked after in temporary hostel care.

  Anyone who can identify the couple from the above photograph is asked to contact Sydney metropolitan police.

  Sydney Star, 15 December 1990

  IT WAS A NEW SOULSCAPE, this once-familiar home town with its highrise hotels and plethora of shopping ritz. But the rock remained immutable, its ugliness and scarred eastern face racing her so fast into the past, she felt choked for air, still standing on those lower slopes where once the traveller in electrical goods had kissed her stupid.

  They drove by former landmarks—her childhood home, the rented house on Stanton Hill with Ronald gloomily surveying the coast. Flinders Street had been transformed into a lengthy walking mall of trees and cafes, the esplanade a relentless string of motels. It was only when the car moved north from town, threading back-streets to the highway, past still-remembered gardens and verandas hiding behind mango trees, that she became aware they were actually leaving those lost, secret but open places of her youth.

  ‘I’d somehow thought,’ she ventured, her eyes stuck fast on slipping scenery, ‘that the island … that you …’

  Brain sighed. ‘But I told you. I did tell you. We decided against that. I’m running you north. Not too far. We’re up in the hills. You’ll like that.’

  But even after they had reached the restaurant and its tiny cottage and Nina had welcomed and helped her unpack and she had been settled on the lounger on the veranda with a cool drink, Kathleen persisted. Why now? Why never before?

  ‘I’ve been wanting,’ she said, ‘to go there. I really thought that was where you were, you know. Sentimental rubbish, I suppose.’

  ‘But which island?’ Brain couldn’t resist asking.

  ‘The first. One’s first island is very like …’

  ‘Like what?’

  Kathleen began humming. ‘I’ve forgotten, my dear,’ she said cunningly.

  But she wouldn’t let go of it. As if compelled she worried the matter over the next few days. ‘I must go,’ she kept saying as she lay back under the flickering patterns of the vine screens, her eyes drifting beyond to the almost indistinguishable line between sea and sky, teasing her into awareness of the almost but never quite forgotten things that prowled the margins of memory. It was as if some membrane between here and there and now and then were ruptured by the keenness of time’s edge. ‘I’ll have to go back.’ She wasn’t aware she had said it aloud.

  ‘It’s all changed,’ Brain insisted. He swirled his glass and listened to the ice cubes crack. ‘You won’t find it the same place at all.’

  ‘But the old pub? Where your father and I?’

  ‘Gone. Blew down in a cyclone twenty years back.’

  ‘You mean there’s nothing there? I’d still like to see.’

  ‘There’s too much there,’ he said, brutal with her wistfulness. ‘One of these days,’ he had promised, ‘we’ll take a run over. Lots of houses now. Motels. Pools. Shops. I don’t think you’ll recognise it, Mum.’

  You don’t know about islands, Ronald had accused on the hot sands of the little bay.

  Oh I know now, she explained to her son and Daisy and maybe Ronald. They enclose, they are their own world.

  ‘Ah well,’ she said to Brain. And took his words for their smooth surface. ‘It’d be nice if I had Daisy with me.’

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘I’ve told you about Daisy.’

  ‘So you have.’ Brain had brought his drink out to the veranda and settled beside her. ‘Good old Daisy. What happened to her?’

  Kathleen refused to answer. She’s still around, she whispered.

  She kept staring over at the sea, peering for the humped shadow of the island, knowing it there and drawn towards rediscovery.

  ‘Why all the brooches, Daisy?’ she had asked.

  Daisy had poured herself another cup of tea before answering. ‘The kids. Each time the kids were born he gave me a brooch.’

  ‘But Daisy, you only had six kids.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re wearing seven. What’s the seventh?’

  She had given a sly smile, old Daisy, and an almost forgotten pink crept over the wrinkled cheeks. Kathleen looked at the cheap collection of trinkets pinned to Daisy’s summer floral. ‘Mother’ brooches, junk blue and red bits of glass surrounded by yellowing curlicues of metal. High on her shoulder sat a single pearl on a silver bar.

  ‘That’s a nice one. When did he give you that?’

  Daisy grinned her old cheeky smile that rejuvenated the worn face, the thinning thatch. ‘That wasn’t him, Kath. That was a lugger man from up the Gulf, down in Charco for a breather. Cost me a broken nose, that did, and a couple of blackened eyes. But I kept it, despite the old bastard. Hid it and only brought it out when he was away on runs. Wonder what happened to him, old lugger-bugger I mean. Jimmy. That was his name. Wanted me to run away with him, but how could I with all those kids, eh?’

  How could she?

  Poor Daisy! It seemed that if she weren’t in hospital giving birth, she was back there with broken ribs, snapped wrist, suspected concussion. Despite the brooches.

  ‘Oh Daisy!’ Kathleen had wanted to cry.

  Daisy reached across for another cream bun.

  ‘Dropped dead in the bar of the Sovereign not long after Bibby, she’s the sixth.’

  ‘But how did you manage?’

  ‘People were kind. You’d be surprised. We managed. And then the older kids moved out looking for jobs and the two younger ones and I moved into a caravan. We coped. You always cope.’

  Don’t you ever! Kathleen mused, sprawled on a settee on the restaurant veranda.

  She felt awkward perched up on this ridge, as awkward as she had felt on the ridge at Lengakiki, her son an almost stranger in a stranger’s arms in the too thin-walled room next to her own. Years of living informed her that they, too, were strangers with each other despite the arms, the nearness of flesh, the insistence of mouths. But there were communal moments for the three of them during the busying for lunch, bemoaning the rarity of guests, and on occasional night-times watching Nina Waterman sashay between cash register and tables, her splendidly rounded hips sustaining and embroidering rhythms pumped out by the stereo system. Such sensual confidence blinded her mind. I was never like you, Nina, she admitted, watching the bend and sway of body—but never lubricious! nothing gross!—always retaining a hint of stimulating reserve as she sang in early arrivals.

  The two of them didn’t want her to do too much. They kept telling her this. She was there to rest. They took dishes from her hand, tea towels, serving spoons, vegetable knives.

  ‘Take it easy, Mum,’ Brain urged. His big kindly face creased with concern on her behalf. ‘Go look at the views. I’ll bring you a drink. What’ll it be? Campari? Brandy cruster? Blue Sunday? That’s my spe
cial, the house special, hey? I’m becoming a cocktail buff.’

  Beyond them both the stunning view to the coast folding down into the purple greys of a pleated evening and Billie Holiday breaking her heart and voice-box over a gloomier version of the cocktail. In the dining room Nina was torturing arrangements of hibiscus and allamanda.

  ‘I think you want to knock this old girl out,’ Kathleen had accused.

  A week had gone by. They wouldn’t let her drive. She had always hated driving, anyway, in Brisbane’s blazing car-jammed streets. On the only occasion she had borrowed Brain’s car during her last visit north, she had lost her way on a tableland back road and tipped the car into a culvert.

  Now she felt trapped. Was it second-hand kindness?

  They had stacked her bedroom with paperbacks but her eyes tired easily these days and within ten minutes of opening a book a bestial languor closed her lids and she lolled inelegantly between dozing and waking, gasping in air through the wooden louvres of her room.

  More and more profoundly she understood the mortality sentence, a fact she had avoided confronting for a lifetime.

  One week became two, became three. Her cockahoop plumage sagged, depressed by her own presence, by Nina’s studiously attentive manners and by Brain’s fits of glumness.

  What was happening to her house, she kept wondering aloud.

  ‘When that compensation comes,’ she informed her son, ‘I’ll be able to buy a small flat somewhere. I won’t be such a nuisance.’

  It could be years, Brain forbore telling her, for a government department to move its sluggish fingers towards writing a cheque; could be years before his mother found that suitable apartment.

  He gritted his teeth at the thought of those longueurs. In the rough-hewn way of children he loved her, but he didn’t want to live with her. No one, he told himself over and over, wanted to live with their parents on into the children’s middle and later age while the parents struggled back into a drooling dotage. Anyway, he imagined chauvinistically, shouldn’t a daughter?

  He rang Sham.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said nastily and finally. ‘We gave it a couple of months some years back. To be honest she was minding Bridgie for us part of the time. It just wouldn’t work out. Not with Bridgie, anyway. She’s at her most difficult. Sullen. Disobedient. Boys. God knows what else.’

  ‘I thought Bridgie and mother got on. I thought they were buddies.’

  ‘Well, that’s their story. I know otherwise. Anyway, I’ve done my bit, Brain. It’s up to you. Sometimes, I feel like getting a divorce from Bridgie, frankly.’

  Frankly, Brain wanted to say, remembering the urgings and hormonal shovings of adolescence, you should. It was time. Time for Bridgie.

  Instead he asked, ‘Can’t your bloody husband do anything about speeding up the compo payout, for God’s sake?’ and slammed the receiver down.

  The landscape outside was saturated in blue beneath the unrelenting heat and damp and windlessness which resolved every leaf along the restaurant veranda into a glittering plastic version of itself. For a moment he felt he was walking a tightrope of leaves. Through the open doorway he could see Nina looping bougainvillea fronds along overhead supports. His mother was lying in the bamboo recliner farther along, a book dropped from hands to lap, her glasses slipped from bridge of nose to tip. Elegant repetition. Briefly he wondered about Bimbo and Chaps, who were still chasing notions of jobs and ideas of accreditation in lost courses and causes in Brisbane. Really, mother would slot into one of their sporadic forays into communal living better than here. Her oddities were increasing with age, her indifference to convention running counter to the refinements and pretentiousness of her children’s lifestyles. Would Bimbo and Chaps have a solution? Would they even bother considering the idea? Should he invite them up to help out? The sight of Nina meticulous with tendrils and plant tie made him scuttle that notion at the moment of launching. Childless, she had a distanced and almost icy irony with post-adolescents, treating them as if they were some recent archaeological find. She would listen and nod and comment and nod in a process of seduction—I’m hanging on your every word!—that burst in their faces as she delivered a pithy coup de grâce in the gentlest of voices, her lovely eyes warm with sympathy and concern.

  Oh Nina! He had rocked with amusement on first observing her technique. Now?

  ‘Oh shit!’ he cried aloud, shocking his landscape with figures. ‘Oh shit shit shit!’

  It was all too much.

  It had happened again.

  Kathleen in the lounger at the southern end of the veranda woke from her half-sleep to the awareness of a warm puddling beneath her. She shoved an investigating paw down. Pants, shirt-tail and the water-resistant plastic cushions were soaked with urine. Guiltily she eased herself out of the settee, glancing quickly at the dining-room doors to see if Brain or Nina were likely to come out, aware of voices arguing in the kitchen. Confused and soggy and snivelling, she gave the cushions a shake onto the veranda boards thanking God that in that temperature the stains would dry in minutes and slopped down the stairs to take a side path to her bedroom in the cottage. She was trembling with the humiliation of it. Daisy, did it ever happen to you? Did it? Safe inside she dragged off the wet clothes and changed. But when she was putting the soiled garments to soak in the laundry tub, Nina came in with a pile of luncheon cloths ready for washing. Kathleen ran the taps vigorously, beating the detergent into a lather of concealment. ‘A little accident,’ she said. There was a compulsion to admit.

  Nina smiled her archaic smile, lips curved into a sprightly crescent. ‘Darling, don’t worry. So long as you haven’t done it in the presidential suite at the Casino. Still, on reflection, they could do with that. I hear it’s Japanese owned now so perhaps we should say the imperial suite.’

  Kathleen heard herself gabble apologies, her face blotched with embarrassment. ‘If you could just lend me a cloth I’ll wipe off the lounger.’

  ‘Been there done that!’ Nina said brightly. Oh bitch!

  ‘It’s age,’ her aged Brisbane doctor had explained the first time it had happened. ‘Your sphincter muscles are getting tired. They’re losing elasticity.’

  ‘But it was on a bus. A long-distance bus. They wouldn’t turn the radio off.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘What a critic!’ he said admiringly. ‘Now what I recommend …’

  Brain ran her down to the local doctor for a renewal of various scripts. He had waited in the car, mulling over, in that sweatbox, thoughts of retirement homes and villages, those profiteering death camps with advertisements of smiling well-groomed gents piloting blue-rinsed freshly coiffured wives with such attentive hands they might still be in love. He wanted to spew. Beyond those idly sauntering couples seen through breeze-filled windows (tease the curtain a little, buster!), there were always rolling greens of mini golf courses, croquet lawns, the impossibly blue waters of a micro pool (the body corporate fees were tremendous) and the high-netted perimeters of a half tennis court (could the poor buggers actually play?), from whose delights the wallet’s ear might catch the sound of inaccurately struck balls. Ah Christ!

  He couldn’t do that to Kathleen.

  Or could he?

  Wouldn’t it, in the long run, he tried lying to himself, be better for everyone but mainly for her?

  I have always wondered, she had said to Daisy, why the power of the fist has always laid down moral and aesthetic codes, to say nothing of the rules for everyday living. (I’ll beat dat ole sin outa you!)

  My, Daisy had said, we are all high and intellectual today, aren’t we? Remember you’re talking to a beat-ee!

  They had been sitting in the Botanic Gardens, their old legs tottered to a stop by one of the embankment seats overlooking the river. Two hundred yards away an elderly man was being mugged by three youths in windcheaters.

  It’s the boys, Daisy had said. The chaps. They assume muscle power means brain power, poor loves, and whether it does or not they mak
e the rules. She had begun humming. Ferally, ferally, shall I live now, under the dole cheque that hangs from the bough. Kathleen started to giggle. I’m a happy burden, Daisy said.

  But not to be a burden was what Kathleen wanted.

  Drop me, she had ordered Brain a few days later, at the airport. And then there had been that you don’t have to go nonsense that drove her mad and went on for at least two limp minutes—five minutes being a very long time—and Brain had agreed while she explained that she wanted to see if the highway had gone through her living room yet.

  Will you be okay, then? he had asked in the terminal, his face concerned and too overtly relieved at the same time. She looked so small. Will you? Will you be staying with Sham if anything goes wrong with the house?

  God forbid! she had said and they giggled guiltily together in the old way that had always made motherhood the very best thing.

  ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I get in,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll ring, dear.’

  He feared what his sister might be planning, wasn’t brave enough to face up to it, couldn’t bear to have the ball, this grandma ball, bounce back into his court.

  ‘Don’t wait,’ she said. ‘I have to pee. Urgently.’

  ‘Well, you know what gate then?’ He checked her boarding pass and watched her head for Ladies. Her luggage had already been checked in.

  ‘Okay Mum,’ he said, running after her. ‘Okay. If you’re sure. We’ve got a big dinner party coming tonight. I’d better get back.’

  But he waited until she returned from the washroom and saw her through the security gate into the passenger lounge.

  ‘Hey!’ he called after her. ‘Hey! Take care.’

  The cab dropped her outside the house. It looked the same. It looked different. Perhaps fear, that emotional spousing of her and home, was reaching an apex of rejection. On either side.