Agaat (78 page)

Perhaps I may yet get to see Jakkie.

Have we bought him a Christmas present?

I can't remember.

And what will Agaat think up for me for Christmas? Would she think of asking me? She'll press her finger on her help list. Tattered, worn it hangs there on the wall. I hope, I fear, I wish . . .

I wish I could bath.

Would I get it spelt out still? B•A•T•H? Request an immersion?

It's easier than P•R•A•Y.

The caress of hot water, the tingling. How I long for it! In the contracting circle of delight it was a last small treat. The sensation of weightlessness, of being immersed.

I could imagine that I was lying motionless in the bath just as always, before I got sick. With foam or oils or bath salts. Or mustard after a hard day's work.

Agaat always gave me a full hour for that invalid's bath, just came and added hot water every now and again. Saw to it that I didn't slide down, pulled the little rubber mat under me back a bit, put a bathing cap on my head so that my hair shouldn't get wet.

Usually the bath included a hairwash. I could lie back completely and almost float, with her strong arm under me, and the small mouse-paw with the fused fingers tilting my head back in the water to massage my scalp.

So pleasurable, the floating feeling, with my neck free of the chafing neckbrace.

It made me smile.

I could still smile then.

That's what it would be like, I thought then of death, a floating away on a lukewarm pond amongst bulrushes.

Once I looked up at her and saw we were thinking the same thought.

Or I thought it was the same.

I wanted to say something about it. I wanted to whisper, it is good. That we think it, that we dream it.

I could produce only a groan.

Don't fret, Ounooi, Agaat said, don't be scared, I'm holding you.

Had she misunderstood me?

Not that she always wanted to help me.

She often looked on passively at my struggle to get to the bathroom. It was the last of my exertions. I could exert myself.

Perhaps she thought it was good exercise.

If I wanted to bath at seven o'clock it took me ten minutes to the bathroom with the Viking Strider. With the four-prong stick, six months later, it already took much longer. The walking frame in the end meant half an hour of wrestling. When I started preparing myself and the first
stumbling sounded on the floorboards, Agaat started singing
Onward Christian soldiers
.

She didn't always feel like bathing me. She hoped that I'd give up halfway and hobble back to my room. The points of the walking sticks, the stilts and castors of the walking frame all kept snagging on everything. It exhausted me, the bumping and the getting stuck, the manoeuvring around corners.

The bathroom door was the last door that she'd unscrewed, as if there she'd wanted to retain a barricade to the very last.

Against my nakedness, I thought.

How did she think she was going to avert it all?

Keep nicely to the middle, or watch out for the telephone stool, Agaat called from the kitchen. And a while later, as if she didn't know exactly how I was getting on: Where have you got to now, Ounooi? Passage cupboard? Spare room? Growth rate?

As if I could shout a reply.

The ‘growth rate', the pencil marks just before the bathroom next to the door frame of the children's room. There where Agaat made Jakkie stand every August and with a pencil marked above his head how tall he was. Would it still be there? Or would she have scrubbed it off in the great scrub-lust that took hold of her when we'd cleared up the house? Scrub-lust and paint-lust. Sanitised for my sake.

Two rows of marks. The other was past the bathroom over the passage threshold, where the ceiling became lower, at the end of the passage, there where the light cast only a dim glow.

You could see it properly only when the light of the back room itself was on.

But nobody ever switched on a light there any more.

The door was shut.

No need to unscrew it either.

Nobody ever ventured there any more.

At one stage I used the closed door at the end of the passage as a lever. To help me negotiate the turn to the right at the bathroom door.

Then I focused on the copper letter-slot in the door.

Exactly at eye level.

It worked on me like a ray of fire.

It motivated my lame body. Eventually I had to turn my head away, and then my body, with a great lifting of one side of the walking frame, more than I had to lift it simply to move forward one pace with my dangling feet. I had to swing the frame through the air, at least a quarter of a turn, to position myself to enter by the bathroom door.

With the neckbrace I could no longer look back, but I knew that Agaat was leaning backwards on the kitchen table to look down the passage.

That's what she always did when I moved anywhere during that time.

I could feel what she was thinking.

When I'd almost made my way through the bathroom door, she came down the passage to the tune of
Oh ye'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road
. And brushed past me through the doorway to run the water. And then past me again to fetch the towels.

When the water was running, I had to see to it that I got myself into the bathroom in time because I had to ring the bell around my neck to signal that the bath was full. The bell that she'd hung there with the words: Give the cow a bell to keep her out of the ditch.

I had to lift one arm from the walking frame, or detach it from the elbow support, to ring the bell. One, two tinkles I could manage.

If the copper letter-slot caught my eye, if I stood there for too long facing the dead door before I could manage the great about-turn, Agaat marched past behind me, furious, on her heels, and opened the bath taps all the way and went out by the back door with a slamming of the screen door and stayed away as long as was necessary to create a situation.

A few times the bathtub overflowed, all over the bathroom floor and down the passage, and when at last I could turn away, the feet of the walking frame splashed in the water so that I lost my balance.

Twice I fell.

To the ringing of bells.

Both times she scolded me terribly.

Now see how everything's flooded here! You'll break a hip and then what are we going to do? It's because you stand there like a lizard staring at the sun, what for? There's nothing to be seen there. It's the end of the road.

On such evenings she brought the wheelchair and pushed me shhhirrr, through the water back to my room and left me right there while she mopped up the passage.

The bath I could write off.

The most difficult in the end was getting me into the tub itself.

With the new automatic wheelchair IBot, July 1995 I got it, the trip from my room to the bathroom took less than two minutes, but eventually it became impossible for Agaat to get me out of the chair onto the side of the bath. My back was too limp, I could no longer be of any use
with the holding or supporting. Only in one arm did I still have a little bit of grip.

Well, then I'll just have to piggy-back you, Agaat said, and crouched in front of the wheelchair.

I remember the evening, I was naked already on the leather seat, she'd taken off my white nightgown over my head, she'd removed my neckbrace so that my head lolled on my chest. Surrounded by the shiny black levers and control knobs and gear sticks I looked to myself like a rag doll, the chair like a rampant animal.

Willy-nilly I had to gaze at my own lap, at the meagre little tuft of hair there. I couldn't lift my head to avert my eyes.

Come on, press the forward tilt button and then you let yourself slide down onto my back. Hook that one little-bit-of-an-arm around my neck, I'm waiting!

Her voice sounded as if she were saying: Come, come, switch off the winch-axle, hook on the shallow-tooth harrow, or, get the mowing-snaffle into her mouth.

Farming as usual.

I groaned to signify, perhaps we should just give it up. In front of me the big white cross looked like a traffic sign.

Quarantine.

Beware.

Cripples crossing.

To the pool of healing? No, a fantasy of flight.

Agaat's arms were extended backwards to catch hold of me, the thin one and the thick in the black sleeves of the housedress, the cuffs white wing-tips. Her head was held high, the back of the cap peaked in the air, a crane taking off.

Press on the knob! Agaat called. Who dares, wins!

What next then once I'm on your back? I groaned, are you going to chuck me off with a hup from one shoulder like a sack into the water?

I wouldn't have groaned if I'd thought I could utter intelligible words, but an emotion I could then still express with my sounds.

I looked at the tub full of water. I saw it suddenly, in a flash, Agaat, the moment that she feels my full weight on her, jerking up her shoulder sideways and throwing me, against the wall, so that I fall down into the bath, a red veil in the water, bubbles.

Domestic help and nurse of years' standing maintains it was an accident.

What are you hanging there betwixt heaven and earth for, Ounooi? Are you seeing ghosts again? she said. Come now, I can't spend the rest
of my life squatting here on my haunches. Giddy up! I have a horse and a shiny dappled horse!

A fantasy of horse-riding.

Elevated Forward Slow Tilt. One finger can still find the little icon on the control panel. The IBot zoomed and reared up and whooshed. Agaat lifted her hindquarters to get to the right height to catch hold of me. The apron's bow around her middle a sharp white lily on a pool.

And I'm coming to fetch you yet, she sang.

My buttocks were sticking to the leather seat. She got hold of me by my thighs on both sides and pulled me off onto her back. Hup! she shook me up onto her back. My arms a slack harness on both sides of her head. Hup! over her hips, astride.

Oh, I have a horse!

Tighten your arms around my neck!

My head fell forward on her shoulder. Her hair against my cheek. Always softer than I thought. Her neck. The nine-star. The sinews as she strained. Lifebuoy. Mum. Whaleback. White crest on the forehead.

And then she came upright. Her strong hand under my buttocks so that I couldn't slide off her. Her clothes against my stomach and breast hard and coarse before I could feel the warmth of her body.

On my horse my shiny dappled ho-o-o-rse, with a brand-new saddle 'n bit! How now, she asked softly on the in-breath.

Had she cursed?

There was something by which I could feel the decision.

A ridge that gathered in the cloth of her dress.

And then something beyond the ridge, a boundary, a step, right through herself.

Then she got into the bath with me.

Shoes and all.

Squats with me lower and lower, arranges my legs on either side of her until we both can sit, with a plash, a splash, her dress a bladder of air around her, a black rampart against my stomach, the black blacker yet as far as the water is sucked up her back, the white bow wilted.

I could still hear the tap, plink-plink, in the water, could hear the bluegums siffling through the chink of the bathroom window, a plover flying up, the dog nosing its dish over the cement of the backyard.

How long did we sit like that? I felt her breath against me, a support under mine. Deep breaths with intervals between.

I must have fallen asleep like that with my head against her back.

I woke up when she opened the tap to add hot water. She stirred it with her hands on both sides to distribute it, closed the tap, still
remained sitting like that. The grandfather clock chimed. Quarter past eight. My time expired.

Then she straightened her legs and pushed back so that I could lean against the back of the tub. And she got up, with the dress clinging to her lower body. She pulled it away from her legs but the heavy cloth clung again, her thighs like two tree trunks.

Dripping out of the bath.

Sit just like that and don't go to sleep again I'm coming now, she signalled with her eyes. Without twitching a muscle. As if she got into the bath with me fully-clothed every day.

Schlup-thud, schlup-thump, slowly down the passage in the wet shoes.

Never have I heard her walk so slowly. Never so heavily, a horse under a coat marching two legs to a side through a drift, hearse and drummer following.

But that was my mother's funeral, her theatrical directions.

What will mine be like?

It's in Agaat's hands.

Does one wash a body before laying it out? With soap? With carbolic?

Agaat will wash me, I'm sure, pure I shall meet my Maker, whiter than snow before she crosses my hands for me.

Will she be able to resist straightening my fingers?

Perhaps she'll splint my hands.

Perhaps she'll break my fingers.

What will it be like when the funeral eaters have left?

I see her standing at the gate when the last guests have left, when Jakkie's gone back to Canada. The gate will hold her, its silver inner cross, the tensed wires and the pipes of which it's constructed.

She won't be able to turn back immediately.

She'll feel the hasp with the fingertips of the little hand, even though she knows it's in place, feel the black iron ring, the double wire hook over which it slides. Her other hand, the strong one, will enclose the upper pipe, let go and grasp again so that the knuckles show white.

It won't be the first time. So she stood every day when Jakkie went to school by bus, and every time after that when he went away after weekends or holidays. Then I had to go and fetch her there, or call her back from the stoep.