by Rosalie Ham
Cheryl had also told Anita about Mrs Parsons, that she could just let herself in, if needed, since Mrs Parsons would be waiting in her chair, and since the blind was up, Anita declared she would pop in and ‘say g’day’.
‘No you won’t. You’ll give her a fright.’
‘That’s okay, she’ll be sitting down when she sees me.’
‘You don’t know what to do.’
‘Tie her laces. I’ll tell her you’ll be in later, as usual, okay? I need to meet her, introduce myself. Cheryl always popped in to see her, didn’t she?’ She left Margery to finish dressing, arriving back just in time to help her comb up what was left of her set and rinse. Then she buckled Margery into her car and drove to her own doctor, Doctor Kosztadinov.
‘What sort of a doctor has a name like that?’ Margery sniffed.
‘What’s his name got to do with his ability?’
‘Nothing, I suppose, since they’re all sorcerers and thimbleriggers.’
‘Didn’t you work for one for forty years?’
‘Forty-four, but I never imagined he’d be able to cure me of anything.’
Doctor Kosztadinov studied Margery’s skin tear through the Tegaderm, gave her a routine examination and asked a lot of questions.
‘When was the last time you needed to see a doctor?’
‘Fifteen years ago, I had a little turn.’
Doctor Kosztadinov prescribed new medications, told her she’d feel so much better she wouldn’t know herself, said Anita would put her tablets in a dosette and all she had to do was take the tablets according to the day of the week. Anita would show her. Then he asked how long she’d lived alone.
‘My husband was killed twenty years ago.’
‘How was he killed?’
‘He was careless,’ Margery said.
‘Was it a happy marriage?’
‘I raised three children. Of course I was happy,’ she snapped.
On the way home, Anita stopped at Union Square, and while the chemist filled Margery’s prescriptions Anita smoked a cigarette, watching across to Margery, a small, unhappy woman sitting low in the front seat, scowling at the world outside. It was Anita’s first week on the job, and she’d already had one near miss with Mrs Razic. This was the first job she’d ever had that didn’t involve serving beer or taking orders, and she understood from her brief, accidental brush with incarceration that life was not a practice run; she was halfway through her only chance at it, and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her time cleaning other people’s houses, nor did she want to end up alone, a cantankerous nuisance, or in a nursing home. It was now certain that she didn’t want to get to eighty and wish she’d done things another way, better.
She found her bankcard, slid it into the ATM and checked her savings account. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark, she told herself. Then she resolved to give up smoking, save eighty dollars a week, travel – a trip to Disneyland with a stopover in Hawaii. If Skye, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, could save enough for a deposit on a house just from working in a bank, she could start a business, her own business. She knew about cleaning houses; she would set up a business cleaning other people’s houses, branch out to offices, schools. Then she remembered her criminal record.
She ground out her last cigarette, paid for Margery’s prescription and bought a packet of Nicorette patches. At Gold Street, she put Margery into bed, made a nice poached egg on toast and, while Margery ate it, she sat propped against the other end of the bed and filled the complimentary dosette with tablets. Monday–Sunday; Breakfast – Somac for reflux, two Panadol Osteo for arthritis pain, Coversyl anti-hypertensive, Frusemide diuretic and half an asprin. Lunch – two Panadol Osteo, Frusemide, a multivitamin and potassium. Dinner – Temazepam to sleep and Panadol Osteo. Then she made a list of things that would make life for Margery safer, a ‘Plan for Independence List’.
1. New glasses
2. Portable phone – push-button, big numbers
3. Take the bath out and put a shower base and chair in, OR, put a bench across the bath temporarily. New taps + washers
4. Move the handrails next to the shower so M can reach them
5. Replace all floor mats in the house with non-slip ones
6. Adjust the doors so that they are secure
7. Get new solid shoes with grip and better insoles
8. Smoke detectors put in
Anita studied the list then drew a line from the bottom to the top, making the smoke detectors number one. She tried to sell Margery the idea of getting a SCEM – a Safe Call Emergency Monitor telephone. ‘You hang a monitor around your neck so that when you fall, you just push the button and the council comes.’ But in Margery’s mind she saw three council workers with reflector jackets and Stop/Slow signs standing over her as she lay naked in the bath.
‘Mrs Bist wasn’t able to push a button after she fell,’ Margery said defiantly. ‘She was unconscious.’
Anita tried guilt. ‘How would your family feel if you’d fallen and had to lie there for hours before Mrs Parsons decided she didn’t want to go to bed with her shoes on?’
‘They’d be happy and relieved,’ Margery replied.
Anita conceded defeat when she phoned the council and was told that, due to budget restraints, Margery’s name would be added to the bottom of a long, needs-based SCEM waiting list.
After she’d soaked and scrubbed Margery’s commode pot, cleaned the bath, dragged all the floor mats into the sun, put the chairs up then swept and mopped the floors, she stood in the bedroom doorway and asked if Margery had ever wanted to see the world.
‘Those sorts of things weren’t possible in our day,’ she said. ‘Anyrate, you can see it on the telly for free, and a lot of it isn’t much chop as far as I can tell.’
‘Right,’ Anita said, scratching in her basket for her cigarettes, ‘I’ll be off now. Give us a buzz if you need anything.’
Margery said again, almost tearfully, though she wasn’t sure why she felt so emotional about something she knew she wasn’t going to do, ‘I don’t want to go to a home.’
Anita said, ‘You don’t have to go to a home these days. The government prefers you to stay put. It’s cheaper.’
‘Judith will put me in a home.’
She put a cigarette in her mouth and continued rummaging in her basket for a lighter, a tattoo peeking down from her uniform sleeve, and though they were mostly hidden under her red fringe, Anita’s brilliant eyes were true when she said, ‘Not if I can help it.’
‘You know,’ Margery said, studying her new home help in her short uniform over black, skin-tight shorts, black ankle socks and runners, ‘I cleaned Doctor Woods’ rooms from nineteen sixty-two until two thousand and six, and I never looked like the type of cleaner you look like.’
Anita admired herself in Margery’s dressing table mirror, said, ‘Well, that’s a great relief to me,’ and sashayed out the front door. At her car she remembered she’d given up smoking so threw the cigarette in her basket and stuck a Nicorette patch on her arm.
Margery watched her get into a low, silver car with red trim. To Margery, it sounded like a tractor, but across the road Tyson said to his flatmate, ‘That’s a 1970 XY GT Falcon.’ Next door, both the surveyor and the bloke in the orange reflector jacket taking soil samples paused to watch the car drive away.
You can’t see anything from these windows, just treetops and buildings. And the windows don’t open. The colour scheme is very dull, and there’s only one picture of some fruit, but the towels are soft and the bed is comfortable. Nice crisp sheets, hospital corners. Very neat. In fact, it’s a bit impersonal, like the rooms at Pat’s nursing home. I’ll admit I was saved from the nursing home by Florence, and I suppose I’d have to include Anita in that as well, but as you can tell, a week living with Florence and I’v
e decided I’d rather die.
To go on living with her I’d have to go against every principle I’ve lived by. It’s beyond me how they ever expected I would do that.
As I sit here thinking about it I see there were signs. I should have woken up to those two. Like mother, like daughter. Florence and Anita Potter. Potter’s an Irish name. Remember we had that girl in our class called Evelyn Potter? Pixies lived at the bottom of her garden. We asked her mother about them and she said, ‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’
Anyrate, Anita’s far too old to wear skirts that short, and all that mascara and that great mess of bright red hair sticking out all over the place. Pat would say it had ‘natural body’, but I think it needs a good trim. And she’s a show-off: ‘You’ve injured your tibia.’ Tibia indeed. She isn’t even a nurse. She’s just a council worker, a house cleaner. Some call themselves home carers, but they don’t care at all, like that Kate. Kate was before Cheryl. She tricked me into going to church once, but it wasn’t really a church, just a bunch of babbling holyrollers running up and down like electrocuted budgerigars. And they had the hide to ask me for money. I told her, ‘God, if he exists, is a fraud!’ After that, I phoned the council and asked for a new carer, and that’s when I got Cheryl. Surprisingly, Cheryl had very good manners. I didn’t know what to expect when they said they were sending this Anita. She turned out to be something else, I tell you.
In the week between Anita’s first and second visit, my life began to really unravel. Wednesday, I rested, but as I say, I wasn’t injured badly after my little slip in the bath. Mind you, I still have some bruising on my ribs, even now. That day a big backhoe dug a hole where Mrs Bist’s laundry once stood, and what with all the shuddering and the noise of that thing and the workmen bellowing all day in other languages . . . Anyone could tell they were swearing.
I was able to get up Thursday, pension day, and do my shopping with Mrs Parsons. Pension week we do our Big Shop, so we take the car and go down to Barkly Square. Mrs Parsons always enjoyed her ride in the car, and I drive a mile or two out of our way but it means I can get all the way to the shopping centre with only one right turn against the traffic.
The first thing Mrs Parsons and I did was go to the ATM. You get money from a machine now, Cecily. Or from the lass at the cash register, and when I booked into this hotel I gave the receptionist the same little plastic card and she just took money from my account. These days you put in a code or sign a little ticket to let authorised people take money out of your account. Cheryl said everyone is on a police checklist, so no one steals. The receptionist let me sit down while she did it all, and I told her my code because I was exhausted when I got to this hotel. Public transport takes a lot out of you as you get older.
As I say, things have changed. You can also gamble at the newsagent, which is usually a post office as well these days. Cheryl brought Mrs Parsons and me up to date. She taught us how to use the plastic card and the ATM. She wrote the instructions out for us, so now, every pension Thursday, we park the car and go straight to the ATM machine then pop into the newsagent to pay our bills. Then we do our shopping before taking advantage of the ‘Coffee and Cake for Five Dollars’ special at the coffee shop. I order tea for Mrs Parsons because that’s what she prefers, but the shop assistant knows us and always gives Mrs Parsons the five-dollar deal anyway. I bought cross-stitch thread from Kmart that day because I’d designed a cross-stitch for Anita’s work basket, a William Blake. I remember reading it as I turned the desk calendar, and I thought it was very inspirational. It turned out to be one of my best, an upright cross-stitch, red thread of course, on a nice blue Aida, elastic-edged to fit snugly over the top of the basket. William Blake was a poet, so his sayings were very good, popular on the desk calendars year after year. Another of my favourites of his is, As a man is, so he sees.
Anyrate, then we used the public lavatory and set off for home. As usual, I said cheerio to Mrs Parsons, unpacked my groceries and had another cup of tea and a little rest. I suppose Mrs Parsons did the same. That was our last Big Shop before the Incident with the Motorcycle. But I’ll get to that. The next disappointment was Glen, my podiatrist, and then Angela, my hairdresser. Very upsetting. Oh, and Pat made a nuisance of herself as well.
Every second Friday of the month Margery set off at nine o’clock for her permanent ten o’clock appointment with Glen, her podiatrist. When Glen’s new shopfront opened on Dawson Street, Margery was the first to make an appointment, the first to sit on the new couch in the waiting room and one of the first to walk on the new carpet Glen put down a year later. Over the years she’d seen several pot plants live, thrive and die, and several receptionists start, get engaged, married, pregnant and disappear from behind the varnished chipboard counter. And when Glen married, she waited at the church fence, eager to see him emerge with his new bride. She knitted booties for his newborn son and even came to terms with his cheerless wife when she took command of the receptionist’s chair. But it was still a shock that Friday to find Glen had gone. She placed a small wot-not jar – an empty jam jar with an embroidered pincushion lid – on top of the counter. ‘It’s a koala,’ she said. ‘Twenty-eight count linen.’
‘Thanks,’ Glen’s wife said, and popped it under the counter with the embroidered picture frames, handtowels, tea-cosies and soft-top trinket jars. ‘It’s only half past nine, you’re way too early.’
Margery took her cross-stitch from her bag, ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet.’
‘May as well tell you, Glen’s gone to Queensland.’
‘He didn’t mention it to me,’ Margery replied. ‘Why would he rush off like that?’
‘He didn’t have much choice, really.’ Glen’s wife pointed to the couch with her pen. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Will he be back?’
‘Na,’ she said, smiling.
It was upsetting, but Margery was entirely devastated when she met Glen’s replacement. He was excessively young, nineteen if he was a day, it seemed.
‘My name is Blaine,’ he said. ‘How are you today, Margery?’
‘Mrs Blandon to you, son.’ Margery unlaced and kicked off her shoes, rolled her knee-high stockings down and draped them over the arm of the chair. ‘I wasn’t told Glen was going to Queensland.’
‘Things change.’ He came out from behind his computer. ‘What seems to be the problem with your feet?’
‘They’re getting old,’ Margery snapped, settling herself on the podiatrist’s chair. ‘Up we go,’ she said and pressed the button. The chair rose with a faint hum. She indicated the stool near her feet. ‘You sit there, Blaze.’
Regular monthly appointments meant Margery’s feet were in relatively good condition, so Blaine trimmed her nails, checked her corn, scraped some skin off her bunion and suggested she get slip-on shoes ‘since you’re pretty much past bending down to look after your feet’. He pressed the button to lower the chair, dropped his nail clippers into the steriliser and said, ‘You also need to get orthotic support insoles to stabilise your gait and help prevent falls.’
‘Glen never made me get them.’
Blaine removed his yellow gloves and chucked them in the bin, already puffed with discarded disposable gloves. ‘I can see that.’
‘How much do they cost?’
‘Four hundred dollars. They last a lifetime.’
‘I’ve just had my eightieth birthday party.’
Blaine picked up his little vacuum cleaner. ‘We don’t want you to fall again, do we? Especially with that very nasty wound on your shin –’
‘If I fall again it’ll be because of the footpaths, not because of me.’
‘With orthotics, you won’t need to spend money on monthly appointments – you could leave it for six months, even longer.’
‘But I’ve got a regular appointment every month,’ Margery said.
‘Well
, now you can spend the money you save on sturdy shoes instead.’ He turned the vacuum cleaner on and started running it over the carpet beneath the chair.
Just thinking about those lovely monthly foot massages made the follicles on Margery’s arms rise, and she felt bereft knowing she’d never experience Glen’s warm, assured grasp, that sleepy, caressed feeling again. But at least there was Angela, her fingers pressing into Margery’s scalp as she lathered the shampoo, the comb slicing across her scalp, the nuzzling noise when she poked the cotton balls into her ears and the release on her scalp when Angela took the rollers out. She walked home despondent, her eyes on the footpath, her handbags hanging limply from her arm.
At home, she drank a cup of tea and took her tablets, then poured herself a nip of cooking sherry and turned on the television. The six-thirty shows always made her feel much better. Other people’s battles with their obesity, brutal landlords or children kidnapped by angry fathers gave Margery licence to impart wisdom: ‘All he has to do is stop eating rubbish . . . Why don’t they just find somewhere else to live . . . If she hadn’t married the wrong man in the first place, silly girl . . .’
Because it was the Saturday after pension day, Margery set off at 9 again, this time for her usual ten o’clock appointment at the hairdresser. Every fortnight she had a wash, blue-tint and set. At her front gate she found Kevin perched on his flimsy racing pushbike, watching the excavator dig a hole. Saturday was his riding day, and at about 9 o’clock Kevin – dressed in his anatomically fitted lycra tri-suit, high-visibility vest, Lance Armstrong signature helmet and carbon-soled, caliper-buckled bike shoes – rode to the café opposite the Brunswick Touring Bicycle Club clubrooms.