Six Bedrooms

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

  This was enough for him, but I went on. ‘You just get older and older, and tireder and tireder and then you lie down, and then you die.’

  He’d already turned on his side, away from me. I leant over and put my face in the nape of his neck. I said, ‘Goodnight,’ and he reached a hand behind him to pat my head. I kissed him, and got up to switch off the light.

  Jimmy’s father, Tim, had come to see my mother in the hospital a few times. We had all been reasonable with each other; in better times my mother would be looking after Jimmy and then she would drop him at Tim’s, rather than at my house. Sometimes they’d met in the city to exchange him, adored gift.

  It was mostly my fault that we’d broken up. I didn’t learn fast enough that what I thought was the absolute end – right there, in the midst of the screaming, the undone washing-up, the cot never slept in – could have been the beginning of something new. So that when Tim said, of our relationship, ‘You don’t seem to know how to do this,’ I couldn’t hear him, or I couldn’t hear that there might be truth in what he said, and the possibility of change, too. Change – what a blessing it seems now, what a relief.

  Instead, I could only defend myself. I was too busy advancing the reasons why I was right, and in the defending lose myself, and lose him. We played that terrible game that all new parents play – who is more tired? – and in all the noise that followed I was left with the baby. For a time I thought that was all I wanted.

  Tim did not take Jimmy from me immediately. At first he came to our flat, every day, and the only cruel thing he did, or what felt like cruelty, was to ask me to leave so that he could be with Jimmy on his own. And then we began to share him, and that was when I started to understand that in all that screaming there had been some truth. In all the hours I had for reflection it started to become clear to me that if I was criticised, my opponent had to be beaten down with tears and tantrums until he admitted that he was wrong. That it was not just not getting on. And that I might have been harder to be with than I thought.

  Things were progressing at the hospital. The lull we had been in gave way to change, to the need for more medication, for pain, for sleeplessness, for anxiety. I found myself following nurses around, asking, when, when? My mother needed to be transferred to palliative care but no one could tell me the date that this would happen. I needed to make arrangements, phone calls: I needed to start marshalling myself for the end. Time looped out in front of me, elastic. I would be assailed by the sense that I was being rushed towards my mother’s death long before I was ready – and at the same time, that she was not dying fast enough, that I could not bear for it to go on a minute longer.

  I went back to the sea pool on my own. The first time the sea was high, rushing the walls, making the pool itself like a bath held by two gods, swung to and fro. I swam twenty laps in the swinging water and emerged feeling so euphoric it was frightening, as though I could live on sunlight and sea air and nothing else, as though I glittered as I walked.

  The second time, James was there. He sat in the same place he had before, with the same woman, still wearing her cowboy hat and big sunglasses. They were playing chess. They looked like actors between shoots: tanned, louche, untrustworthy.

  I took my own sunglasses off and walked up to their table, and when James turned round to look I said, ‘It’s me.’

  He gave what could only be described as a guilty start.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I said.

  ‘I was going to call,’ he said, and glanced across at the cowboy hat woman. ‘I haven’t been back long.’

  ‘From where?’ I said again.

  His tone was one of embarrassment, as though I might make a scene; as though he had been gone only a few months and had neglected to make a filial phone call; as though I was the one at fault.

  He introduced me to the cowboy hat woman, whose name was Natalie, but did not say if they were a couple. I told him that I had a son and asked him if he had any children, and he gave another glance at Natalie and said, ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Mum’s really sick,’ I said at last. The conversation was so slippery. I couldn’t find a foothold.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, fingering a chess piece.

  ‘She hasn’t got much longer to live,’ I went on.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ said Natalie, and gave me a sad look, like a dog on a calendar.

  ‘She’d like to see you. Could you come?’ I said to James, and found myself furiously blinking back tears.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Give me your number. I’ll call you.’

  ‘You give me yours,’ I said. I wiped the back of my hand over my eyes and nodded at his battered iPhone. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘We’ll come. For sure,’ said Natalie.

  I typed James’s number into my phone – Natalie dictated it – and then it was time to go. They had not invited me to sit down with them. I was wearing my swimmers, ready for my laps. I took a breath and said to James, ‘Weren’t you curious? To know what had happened to us?’

  He shrugged. I don’t know why I asked him. I had not got the reunion that I now knew I’d hoped for. His whole self was not going to split like an apple before me. He was going to stay all skin, impenetrable, and I was going to have to live with that, come what might.

  I rang Judy. Judy had seen James once herself, shouldering past her on a street in Paris. At least that was what she’d thought. She had not been able to catch him, losing him in the tide of people as he crossed the street.

  Judy was living in Berlin, eight months’ pregnant to her sixty-year-old conductor husband. She’d brought him home for a visit when they married. We’d taken him to the beach; his first time in the surf. I’d never thought about the way I’d learnt to dive through the waves, to come up with water streaming from me, to be ready to do it again. The waves hit him like blows, making him stagger. Jimmy was appalled when one took his shorts down to his knees and we saw his bony white bum.

  But Jens didn’t care, and Judy didn’t care. She sat on the sand, shrouded as usual from the sun, and when he collapsed on to his towel next to her, his skinny legs shaking, she kissed him and sea water dripped from him on to her face, down her chest. He was smiling. Their lips met again and again. Jimmy and I stared.

  ‘Try to forgive him,’ said Judy.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. There was a pause, during which I could hear her breathing pregnantly. ‘Come home,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, but I could hear her smiling. It sustains us, to be needed.

  I arrived at the hospital, came up in the lift, and walked along the corridor to find a little cloud of staff outside my mother’s ward. The registrar who seemed about to burst into tears every time she spoke to me. The four students, all young men, who never could meet my eye. Two nurses. No specialist today.

  The registrar came forward with her clipboard, the little group around her parting.

  ‘Have you got a moment?’ she said to me.

  I could feel myself becoming breathless. Whatever she had to tell me frightened her so much that we were going to have trouble with it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and she stepped to one side, so that I had to follow her in order to hear her. The nurses and student doctors sidled past us.

  ‘A bed has become available,’ the registrar said, and pivoted her body slightly towards the end of the corridor, where the single rooms were.

  ‘What kind of bed,’ I said as she said, ‘An end of life bed.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘We think your mother is ready to be moved,’ she went on, her big bright eyes framed by trembling eyelashes.

  ‘I don’t know if she can walk that far,’ I said stupidly, looking up the corridor.

  ‘We don’t have to – she doesn’t have to get out of her bed. It has wheels. We can just swap.’ She looked down at her clipboard. ‘There’s some new medication charted,’ she said. ‘I thought – would you mind clearing her cupboard? And I’m sure she’ll feel mor
e comfortable if you’re here when we move her.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said again. ‘When do you want to do this?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Before the shift finishes. Half an hour.’

  At the other end of the corridor, some fifty metres from my mother’s single room, were the lifts, and some comfortable chairs, and a deep bank of windows looking north-west, out to the suburbs. Sometimes patients came here to experience the slightly different air and light; mostly it was visitors, turned out of wards while procedures took place or showers were taken or beds were made. It was a Tuesday, three days after the Saturday on which my mother had been moved to the single room. It was lunchtime and I was going to buy some yoghurt. I was still trying to make her eat; I had run through every food she had once loved and to please me, or to make me stop, she had chosen yoghurt.

  As I walked towards the chairs, I saw him; the same feeling of recognition at the back of his head. It was James, bent over a newspaper that he had folded into the size and shape of a paperback. He looked up at me as I approached, and got quickly to his feet.

  ‘I didn’t know you were here,’ I said.

  ‘Just doing the crossword,’ he said.

  I felt like a glass of water, tipped one way and then the other. My mother had promised me she would eat. I could not let James out of my sight. ‘Do you want to come with me to the shop? I’m getting something for Mum.’

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll finish this.’ He waved the paper at me. He was wearing a grandfather shirt, the kind that had been fashionable when I was a teenager, and now was fashionable again, and skinny jeans, as though he was twenty instead of fifty. He was as handsome as our father had been, except that he had a kind of preserved look, his skin hard as a lizard’s. The look of someone who has seen a lot of sun, but not enough of life.

  ‘I’ll be five minutes,’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’ He was still on his feet.

  ‘Wait here.’

  He nodded again.

  I bought three yoghurts, and a drink with a lot of caffeine in it, my hands shaking as I took the money out of my purse. I caught the lift back up, lunging past people to close the doors at every floor. When I got out of the lift James was not there.

  Heart thumping, I walked down the corridor towards our mother’s room. I had not warned her that he might come. I’d said nothing, in fact, nothing about the sea pool and Natalie and the phone calls I’d made.

  I put my head around the door. Our mother was lying with her face turned towards the view, her hands meeting across the sheet. She felt each fingertip in turn, then changed hands and felt the other fingertips. She turned when she heard me.

  ‘No visitors?’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘No.’

  ‘Not –?’ I stepped back out and glanced down the corridor. Only nurses.

  ‘I thought I saw someone come in here,’ I said, setting down the yoghurts.

  ‘Just you.’

  Just me. Later, when I called James’s number, his answering service had been switched off. And when I called it again the next day, a female voice told me that the number was no longer available.

  One morning, I didn’t get up. I lay on my bed and looked at the pattern on the plaster ceiling. I looked out the window at the rain-starred leaves of a Geraldton wax.

  When Jimmy was a very young baby, before everything went wrong, I’d fed him in bed. He used to lie in my arms with his legs braced against his father, who lay next to me. When Tim left, Jimmy’s feet pointed and flexed and braced themselves against nothing. I did not tell this to anyone. The loss seemed both too small and too big.

  I lay on my bed all day, and at the day’s very end, Tim brought Jimmy home, letting them in with his key. They called to me through the silences of the house, where dust rained down through rooms I hadn’t cleaned in weeks. I sat up as Jimmy came in, and all the tears I’d successfully been able to store away came at once. Jimmy knocked me flat, rushing at me, and lay on my chest as I wept. And Tim sat on the edge of the bed and took one of my bare feet in his hand.

  I stand in the kitchen with a knife and the body of a chicken. I can hear Jimmy and his father in the living room. My mother used to bone a chicken, and then sew it together again to cook it. She used scissors as well as a knife. It took effort to separate bones from flesh, but keep the flesh together. Cutting, sometimes ripping. The bones coming away, and then the chicken collapsed, itself but no longer itself. I can feel that effort in my own flesh, the pulling, the ripping, the resistances of my body as my mother is removed from me.

  SOME of the stories in this collection were previously published in the following: ‘Like a virgin’ in New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe, ed. Aviva Tuffield), ‘Other animals’ in Meanjin, ‘Chemotherapy Bay’ in Best Australian Stories 2002 (Black Inc., ed. Peter Craven), ‘Firebugs’ in Griffith Review, ‘Trouble’ in Brothers and Sisters (Allen & Unwin, ed. Charlotte Wood), ‘The bridge’ (as ‘Love is a stranger’) in Island, and ‘J’aime Rose’ in Review of Australian Fiction, Best Australian Stories 2013 (Black Inc., ed. Kim Scott) and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Stories by Australian Women (Black Inc.).

  The line quoted in ‘The bridge’ is from Hart Crane’s poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’, 1933.

  With love and thanks: Meredith Curnow, Jenny Darling, Russell Daylight, Elena Gomez, Vicki Hastrich, Lucinda Holdforth, Eileen Naseby, Aaron Seymour, Jacqui Taffel, Geordie Williamson, Vikki Willmott-Sharp, Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood.

  TEGAN Bennett Daylight is a teacher, critic and fiction writer. She is the author of several books for children and teenagers, and the novels Bombora, What Falls Away and Safety. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and two children.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Six Bedrooms

  ePub 9780857989147

  First published by Vintage in 2015

  Copyright © Tegan Bennett Daylight, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Random House Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Bennett Daylight, Tegan, 1969– author.

  Six bedrooms/Tegan Bennett Daylight.

  ISBN 978 0 85798 914 7 (ebook)

  Short stories.

  Bildungsromans.

  A823.4

  Cover image © Ana Zaragoza/Getty Images

  Cover design by bookdesignbysaso.com.au

  Caption, ‘That’s my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs. Harris’ from ‘The Lady on the Bookcase’ in the book The Beast in Me and Other Animals by James Thurber. Copyright ©1948 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

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