Hard Word (21 page)

‘Home now,' Grandma Vera says.

‘And behaviourally?' Gerontics says. ‘Have you noticed much difference since the fall – when was it, last Friday? I can see she's a lot stiffer physically, but that goes with the overall loss of tone. But behaviourally?'

‘She lives more and more in the past,' Mum says. ‘Like this singing thing. Which comes from my childhood. It's like one door's popped open since the fall, and more and more of the ones in the present are being shut. And not only my childhood, but hers as well. The other day –'

‘Is that a bad thing – for her?' Gerontics says. ‘Living in the past?'

And that's the first sympathetic or smart thing I've heard Gerontics say, and I look at him with his frameless glasses, like he's trying to be modern or something, and I think – well, he's still smarmy and that – but if you look behind his glasses at his eyes, which are blue and actually quite friendly without being beautiful at all like Philip's, that's my Philip's, and you see he's listening to Mum like he really wants to know what she thinks, maybe he's not so bad after all, maybe he's even normal with kids and things of his own, but he just gets smarmy and can't help it when he puts his doctor's jacket on and remembers how big a room he's got and everybody goes
Yes, Doctor, No, Doctor
all the time, and he believes it. Maybe it's not even his fault, I think while he and Mum are talking. And, as we're getting our things, there's something
I
want to know this time, and I ask him. Mum looks a bit annoyed when she hears it, but he answers me quite seriously, like it was a really interesting question. Which it is, to me.

‘One grandparent, female line,' he says to himself, looking at the ceiling and working it out, like he was giving a quote for a new drain. ‘One in twelve,' he says to me. ‘Yes, about one in twelve.'

‘Or better,' Mum says and smiles at him with a tight mouth.

‘
Goodnight sweetheart,
Grandma Vera sings to him, while he's still working out what Mum's on about.
‘Sleep will banish sorrow
…'

Grandma Vera

We used to play school. She was clever, cunning. She watches all the time. It's the rule, she'd say. She knew all the rules. Cats aren't, cats aren't – Not in here. It's the rule. Emily! Stay, please stay. Don't run, Emily! Don't leave me! Please?

‘Mother?'

Emilyy –!

‘What are you looking for, Mother?'

That hurts, that hurts, you're breaking my arm. No, I don't want to, I don't want to. Let me go, let me go – Please? Can I go now? I won't say anything. I promise. Cross my heart, I promise.

‘Is there something in there you want, Mother? Something in the cupboards? Mother –?'

That's Miriam, now. Miriam. She's clever, Miriam. Cunning. She watches all the time.

‘Mother?' she says again. ‘Were you looking for something? Something from the cupboards?'

‘Bloodbath,' I say. You have to be cunning back with Miriam.

‘Jesus,' she says quietly, so I won't hear it. But I hear it.

‘She's the only real friend I've got now,' I say.

‘Now that's simply not true, Mother. When she was here, you never liked her. In fact you drove her away. And anyway, you have a whole new set of friends now. You got along well with Hafize, didn't you?'

‘Half these –?'

‘Hafize. The Turkish woman. With the head scarf, you remember?'

‘She was here before. I saw her.'

‘Yes, on Wednesday. She came to sit with you last Wednesday.'

‘She was in here. I saw her.'

‘In the cupboard? She was getting something from the cupboard?'

‘And Ruth Daley, with the ankles. She was a friend. You remember Ruth Daley?'

‘I'm not sure that I do, Mother …' Miriam says. She's pretending not to remember now.

‘With the ankles,' I say.

‘You don't mean old Mrs Daley? The woman who used to live next to us in Ryde? Is that the one? I don't remember there was anything wrong with her ankles, though. I suppose I was too young to notice.'

Always thinking, Miriam. Always. Always had the answers.

‘All I remember,' Miriam says, ‘is that when we lived there, you would never have anything to do with her. You always said her home was dirty, and Mrs Daley herself was a slattern …' Miriam's talking to herself again. When she says it's what
I
do. ‘I used to think,' she says, ‘that meant she was ethnic, a Russian or something. I could never work out why she was called
Mrs Daley.
Then one day I realized that, since she was married, it must have been
Mr
Daley who was a Slattern, and she became one when she married him. Like promising to bring your children up Catholic. Mrs Daley
was
a Catholic, wasn't she? Mother –?'

‘I always had friends.'

‘Of course you did. You still do.'

‘There was a pagoda on the house, do you remember? Right across the front.'

‘A pergola, Mother. Yes, there was. But not on the old house, not at Ryde. It was on the new house at St Leonards, remember? With the jasmine climbing over it at one end, and the wisteria at the other? Dad planted it just after we went there.'

‘No –'

‘All right, all right, Mother. Maybe it wasn't Dad at all. Maybe it was some other man. A gardener, or someone.'

‘Emily was my best friend.'

‘I don't think I ever knew any Emily.'

‘She stole the doll, I'm sure. She hid it.'

‘Oh, now I see what you're getting at. She hid the doll. Like in a cupboard?'

‘I never got it back. She came to play one afternoon, and after she went, the doll was missing.'

‘What was it like?'

‘It had one arm that was broken at the arm – it had been twisted till it broke – and I always had to dress it in long gloves or sleeves to the end thing – what's the end thing?' I ask Miriam.

‘Fingers?'

‘No, no –'

‘Hand? Wrist?'

‘To the wrist, wrist. What is to the wrist?'

‘The sleeve, Mother.'

‘Sleeve?'

‘On the doll.'

‘Where's the doll?'

‘Is that what you've been looking for, Mother? In the cupboard? An old doll?'

She's cunning, Miriam is. She watches, listens.

‘One of your old dolls?' Miriam says.

‘Emily took it when she ran. She ran away from the man. I couldn't.'

‘Well, whosever it was,' Miriam says, ‘it's not in these cupboards now, Mother.' She says this, but she goes on pretending to look anyway.

‘He broke her arm, he tried to anyway, the man who was building the pagoda. He twisted it. Twisted. That hurts, that hurts, she cried, but he wouldn't let her go. Emily got away. She ran. The man twisted the girl's arm more, she had to swallow his pipe thing. Please? she said. Can I go now? I won't say anything. I promise. Cross my heart, I promise. She always wore gloves after that, sleeves to the – What's the end thing?'

‘Wrist, Mother.'

‘It's broken.'

‘Broken or not, it's simply not in here. I'm sure I'd know if it was. We didn't bring any dolls when we moved you here.'

‘Bloodstock –'

‘Please don't start this again, Mother. Mrs Johnson was just trying to help you. She wouldn't have taken anything away from you.'

‘I sucked his pipe. He made me. Emily wouldn't. She ran away.'

‘Whose pipe, Mother? Dad never smoked a pipe.'

‘Sucked it. It tasted –'

‘It couldn't have been Dad's. You're thinking of someone else.'

‘Do I have any friends left at all?'

‘Oh, Mother, of course you do. There's me for a start, and there's Philip, and Laura and Katie …'

‘None?'

‘And now there's all my students as well. They want to become your friends.'

‘None at all?'

‘You know what it's like when people get old, Mother. Some of their friends get sick, some die, some move away with their families – like you've done. Some just get frightened and turn in on themselves.'

‘Emily got frightened. She ran away.'

‘Did she? I never knew her.'

‘Em's my special friend. I love her. Love Em.'

‘Do you? Who knows, perhaps she's even still here. In Sydney, I mean. Would you like me to try and find her for you, track her down?'

‘Oh, no, you mustn't do that. It's not allowed.'

‘Whatever you like.'

‘It's against the rules.'

‘There are no rules against it, Mother. You've only got to say, and I'll try.'

‘You mustn't.'

‘Who is this Em, Mother?'

‘Em?' I say. ‘I never said Em.'

‘Well, I think you did, Mother, but it doesn't matter. Not if you don't want me to try and find her.'

You see how careful you have to be with Miriam, how clever she is. Miriam always broke the rules. That was her trouble.

‘No,' I tell her. ‘Thank you anyway. It's too long ago now,' I say. I can be cunning too. I'll just wait till she's gone, and then I'll look again.

Miriam

‘I'm glad you've come back,' Jane says.

This is only my second visit, but already I've come to love this room, its subdued colours, its greys and muted blues, its flashes of yellow, its stillness in a still house. I guess it's that, its stillness – isn't that what Eleni said she desired most of all, Stillness –
esychia
– even above Love?

‘Why?' I say. ‘Did you think I wouldn't come back?'

‘It's always hard to tell, after a first visit,' she says. ‘Counsellors get anxious too, you know. Like anyone else.'

‘You anxious? I don't believe it.'

‘You don't believe I'm anxious, or you don't believe I'm human like everyone else?'

‘I just can't imagine you as being anxious. What would someone like you ever get anxious about?'

‘Whether I've understood for a start. About what a client's come for, I mean – let alone whether I've supplied it. The first session's always a bit … You're always feeling one another out, searching for a focus. You'd be amazed at the number of people who come for one session, and then never reappear.'

‘Really?' I say. ‘I thought that was only in language teaching. People appear with us too, then disappear. You wonder whether it was you, or the course, or something else – and you're nearly always wrong. You assume it's you and then – if you do ever find out – it usually turns out to be something much simpler, something neither you nor they have any control over. Like the husband's been shifted in his work, the family's had to move interstate, or a child falls ill, or something … totally normal.'

‘That's true,' Jane says. ‘But unless you actually know, there's always this tiny, nagging feeling of rejection.'

‘Yes,' I say, with surprise. ‘But I still find it difficult to see you as anxious.'

‘I'll take that as a compliment,' she says. ‘But you haven't come here to listen to my anxieties.'

‘No,' I say.

‘So?' she says.

‘You asked me last time to think about some things – about what I'd want to say to Mother if I could.'

‘And have you – thought about it, I mean?'

‘Yes.'

‘And have you reached any conclusions?'

‘No.'

‘Good,' she laughs. ‘I always suspect quick resolutions. Would you like some tea?'

We make it together. In one corner of her room by her morning window, there's an electric kettle, a tea-pot, cups. In her colours. We stand side by side in the soft filtered light while she boils the jug, prepares the cups. I watch her hands as she does this. Her hands are heavy, square-ish, her fingers thick, but they are also precise and capable. Unhurried. She turns her head and smiles at me, without speaking, just looks at me as though she's wondering what I'm thinking.

‘You look different somehow,' she says, though this time without looking. As she pours.

‘Do I?'

‘More … I don't know,' she says. ‘Self-possessed maybe. Less edgy?'

‘Perhaps it's just that I'm not wearing any make-up.'

‘Ah,' she says. ‘Is that it? It suits you.'

I blush when she says this, suddenly a child again beside this confident, mature woman. Whom I want so much to like me, to approve of me. ‘Shall we take our tea back to our chairs?' she says, and lets me go in front of her. Which is wise. It allows me the space to recover, and the face I present to her as we sit is composed once again, our relationship more equal. Perhaps, I think, she knows all this, and I'm just relaxing into this thought when she says:

‘So. Tell me about your crises of the moment.'

As I speak, I focus on Mother. I tell her about the students offering to sit and maybe, in the telling, I give myself more credit for this than I deserve.

‘That's wonderful,' she says, ‘that's brilliant, Miriam,' and I find myself not blushing this time but glowing, with simple pleasure. ‘You could create a whole new paradigm of geriatric care,' she says, smiling. ‘Think of your mother, with all those bright, alive women. The stimulation for her.'

‘Philip says she thinks they're all the same person.'

‘No comment,' Jane says.

‘He
was
joking.'

‘But it must take some pressure off you.'

‘It does – for the moment anyway. But I've actually been thinking …'

‘You have time for that as well?'

We smile.

‘Yes. For a few minutes anyway,' I say, ‘just before I pass out each night. I've been thinking I might stop teaching for a while. Or formal teaching at least. I feel so … I don't know, hamstrung by things, I suppose. The courses, the restrictions on teaching, the whole atmosphere of the college is pretty sour at the moment.'

‘But you do mean to
do
something else, don't you? Professionally?'

‘Oh God, yes,' I say. ‘Full-time care of Mother would be death for me, and torture for her. She
thinks
that that's what she wants. That's why Bloodbath had to go –'

‘Bloodbath?'

‘Mother's name for Mrs Johnson, the previous sitter. Alongside Bloodstock and Bloodgum.'

‘Why so much Blood?'

‘I have no idea. She gets stuck on certain words, but what the original association is, is usually beyond me. Katie can often work them out. She says Grandma Vera's thoughts are like fish in the river.'

‘Fish?'

‘There's a river at the back of our house – across a park actually. And a little lake. If I get a chance, I walk with Mother there. Katie comes along too. Mother's thoughts are like the fish below the surface, Katie says. They flash about all over the place – it looks random – but all the time there's a pattern, the way they move, the way they communicate, you just have to be able to see it. It's all still there, I think Katie's saying, it's just a different way of thinking from us.'

‘Like a child's in some ways?'

‘Yes, I suppose. Anyway, the two of them seem to be able to communicate in ways that are beyond me.'

‘Interesting, isn't it,' Jane says, and reflects for a moment. Then brings me back to where we were. With Bloodbath, Bloodstock,
et al.

‘Though Mother,' I tell her, ‘also throws in the odd
Fatso
from time to time.'

‘That must be a relief for both of them,' Jane says. And how about you?'

‘Me?'

‘Names for your mother. Apart from
Mother.
Tender names – do you have some?
Mum
even?'

‘Never. I could never bring myself to say that. I couldn't get it out. I've even tried once or twice in the past months, but I'd go to say it and catch myself with this absurd, immovable stone on my tongue. I could never spit it out, get it out past my teeth. It made me feel so –'

‘So what?'

‘So fake, Laura would call it. So much in bad faith. If I were to turn around now and suddenly start calling her M – See? Even now the word won't come out.'

‘If you were to turn round now and suddenly start calling her
Mum
– what then, Miriam? What would happen?'

‘I … I don't know. I only know it'd be wrong.'

‘Fake?'

‘Yes.
Fake –
I say. ‘God, what an undiscriminating word. I sound like a typical teenager, don't I?'

‘Fake
will do for the moment,' Jane says. ‘But fake to what? The life you've already lived with her?'

‘Yes.'

‘Would it be different perhaps if you'd been able to express the anger you feel towards her in a way she could understand?'

‘It might, I suppose. But it's too late now.'

‘Oh?'

‘I couldn't do it now. I couldn't say to her now,
I hated you
.'

‘The real enemy's escaped? Slipped away into the forest?'

‘Yes.'

Jane's house itself is like a forest, I think. Its silence is so deep. You could lose yourself, just sitting and listening, in it. If you were allowed.

‘You hated your mother at times?' Jane says. ‘Hated her for what? Think of something specific.'

‘I can't. I've put all that away now. I've locked it away.'

‘So it's secure, it'll stay there forever? Even after she's gone.'

‘I suppose.'

‘What will you do with it then?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Miriam, you have an attic, a lumber room of anger, just sitting there. Anger's energy, isn't it? It's hard to contain for very long. Where's your anger going to go, Miriam?'

‘That's what Philip's afraid of.'

‘Is he?'

‘That's why he won't enter into any decisions about Mother. He leaves it all to me. I know what he thinks – at least I'm guessing I do because he'll never come out and tell me – but he's afraid, if we discuss it, we'll have almighty rows, tear ourselves apart over it.'

‘Because he thinks your position is fixed? Non-negotiable?'

‘I suppose.'

‘So he supports you, he says he'll support anything you do, any decision you make?'

‘Yes.'

‘Does it feel like support?'

‘Sometimes it makes me so angry.'

‘You must be like a tinderbox some days.'

‘I try not to show it.'

‘This lumber room of yours must be getting pretty crowded, mustn't it? Boxes of gelignite and semtex all over the floor …' We take a moment and laugh. Drink tea. ‘Brian,' she says then, apropos of nothing. ‘Your brother. You felt he was always favoured –'

‘I was never good enough,' I hear myself suddenly blurting over the top of her. ‘Whatever I did, it was never enough. It never satisfied, it just set up more tasks, more hurdles.'

‘Give me an example.'

‘An example?'

‘A voice, then. What would she say?'

‘Well, I was really good at sport. I was strong, I loved to run – is that surprising?'

‘No. Not with a figure like yours.'

‘We had the school sports, and I trained with a friend, a boy, secretly, on an oval halfway between school and home, often missing music and other things, and on the day of the sports – this was in the senior grade of primary – I won nearly everything, sprints, jumps, the lot. I had cups and medals and ribbons, and I knew this was the way I wanted to live – in my body as much as my mind. I loved it, the exertion, the struggle, the exhaustion – the pleasure of it all.'

‘Pleasure?'

‘Excitement. Pleasure.'

‘And when you got home and told your mother, and showed her the ribbons, the cups –?'

‘She said, ‘‘That's nice, Miriam.'' She barely glanced at any of the prizes. ‘‘You mustn't neglect your piano, you know.'' '

‘Okay, that's disappointing, but it's not …'

‘Savagery? Child abuse? No, but day after day, in everything she wanted me to do, I knew I'd never be good enough. I'd never meet whatever it was she had in mind for me, some vision she had –'

‘Which you would always fail? In her eyes, and therefore in yours?'

‘Yes.'

‘And that meant … ?'

‘I could never …'

‘Never what?'

‘Never …'

‘Okay, take a moment. We can come back to it.'

‘To what?'

‘To what you can't say. The hard word. There's a box of Kleenex on the shelf just beside you.'

I snatch at a tissue. Use it. Them. The minutes pass. Humidly. With sniffling, ashamed glances, tea. Jane sits, offering nothing. But her hands are open, I notice, in her lap.

‘You okay?' she says finally.

‘Yes, I'm –' I say. And am about to say
sorry
, but choke it off. She smiles.

‘You can be abstract now,' she says. ‘It's a lot safer.'

‘It's just that everything I do,' I say, ‘is reactive to her. Still. Isn't that crazy?'

‘No. Not crazy.'

‘Even now. I'm thirty-nine, I've got two girls of my own to bring up, and when I do something, especially if I think it's good, something for them perhaps, or even for myself – a new marriage for Christ's sake, after a disastrous first attempt – or something at work, something simple like a successful class or a new program, the first thing I think of is not them, or my students, or Philip, it's running off to her with it, showing her, saying, Look there, isn't that good, isn't that enough –
Being something, Making something of myself
for you? Isn't that
enough
?'

‘Enough for what?'

‘For …'

‘Enough for what, Miriam?'

‘Enough to make you …'

‘Say it.'

‘Love me. Oh, fuck –'

‘Can I ask you a question, Miriam?'

‘You must be joking,' I say.

‘Can I put a proposition to you, then? It's all right, it's abstract – something to think about.'

‘I'll try.'

‘Anger. Do you think it's ever possible to give anger away?' ‘That sounds like a question to me.'

‘There's a proposition behind it.'

‘You mean, give it away like a present? Here's some anger. I know how much you like it, so when I realized your birthday was coming up, I –'

‘Unlocked the lumber room.'

‘I don't think so,' I say. ‘It sounds impossible to me. Just to give it away like that.'

‘Oh, it may take some effort.'

‘Wrapping it up, you mean? The paper, the ribbon, the bow. Writing the card?'

‘Writing's possible. Some people give away their anger that way.'

‘You mean stories, poetry, journals, that sort of thing?'

‘For some it works.'

‘Jane, I simply don't have the time or energy for that. Coming here is about the only thing I do for myself now. I don't even swim any more. If I were to sit down and write, something else would have to go. The family, Mother, Philip –'