Escape (31 page)

'Look, Mary—'

'Have you watched the DVD? He said he was looking forward to
meeting you. Have you really
looked
at him? Rachel?'

'Yes, yes—'

'Aren't you excited? You sound strange. What's wrong with you?'

'Well, actually it's difficult to—'

'Talk about drop-dead gorgeous! And he was so delightful on
the phone . . . So he said he would be available for dinner. Isn't that
wonderful?'

'Wonderful.'

'He's thinking about the nineteenth. That's not opening night, he
thinks that will be a bit frantic, he usually needs a few days to get used
to a time zone. He obviously wants to be at his best to meet you! So
you'll have dinner with him after the show? The nineteenth? Have you
got a pen?'

'Oh no, wait, look Mary, can I ring you back? Guido is about to set
fire to the house—'

'Okay, so he'll arrive here on the thirteenth, the gala press night is
on the seventeenth and you'll see him the nineteenth. He might have
had some rave reviews by then, and you can incorporate them into
your book. And we'll set up a photographer during that week too. It's
great, isn't it? Rachel?'

Guido is striding up the hall, a thin stream of smoke trailing
behind him like a scarf. He stops at the linen cupboard, plants the
cigarette between his lips and reaches up to the top shelf.

'Yes, well, it all sounds great!' He's hauling down something big
and bulky. My stomach drops like an elevator. 'Mary, I've got to go—'

'So you'll be available then? I'll tell them to set it up? He'll be at
the Park Hyatt , you know, in the city—'

It's the old brown suitcase he arrived with twenty-two years
ago. The one that Clara refused to take: 'You've gotta be kidding
me. That old thing, with no wheels? It'd be like lugging around a
dead cow.'

'Yes, fine! Bye, Mary!'

Guido is marching towards his room. I run after him and reach his
door just as he goes to slam it. 'What are you doing?'

'Leaving.' He's opening drawers, excavating underwear, socks, the
belt with the silver buckle I gave him for Christmas last year.

'What do you mean? Leaving? For how long? Like a holiday?'

He snorts. The cigarette he left on his desk drops on the floor. The
smell of scorched carpet. I bend to pick it up. 'Where are you going?
Why are you taking all your things?'

The phone rings again. On and on and on. The sound is as red as a
siren, the scream in my chest.

'The phone is ringing, Rachel.' Guido's voice has the detachment
of a narrator in a documentary, making mild observations on life in
the wild. 'Shouldn't you obey its command?'

I dig my toes into the shag-pile carpet. There is an ugly black scorch
mark where the cigarette dropped, the size of a five-cent piece.
What
kind of a mother are you?
says the voice. That
could be your daughter on
the phone
.

'Don't leave me,' I whisper.

'Pardon?'

The phone stops. And starts again. On and on and on. Whoever is
calling must be desperate. This must be a very important phone call.
Urgent. That sound is so terribly urgent.

Shirts, two pairs of jeans, papers from his desk, mobile phone,
suitcase snapped shut. He leaves it on the bed and pushes past me,
marching back down to the living room. Not the door. He's not
marching to the front door.

It's like a reprieve from the electric chair. 'Can I make you some
coffee? Or maybe a glass of wine, yes, let's have a drink, let's talk about
it. Please, please can we talk, I'll listen—'

'Too late. I'm just getting my jacket.'

When he picks it up, small feathers, light as dust, float out of the
inside pocket. He doesn't notice. He puts it on, doing up the second
button. He takes a long time with the button. The eyehole is smaller
than the rest because it tore once and I overstitched it, just like I
overdo everything.

I inch over and help him with the button. 'Can't we just sit together
for a bit and talk?' He looks down at me and sighs. Our eyes lock and
he looks beautiful to me all over again, new, possible, an unmapped
world. 'There are so many things I want to talk to you about . . . like,
I was just thinking today, we need to do more things together. We've
grown so distant, haven't we, sort of lost in parallel worlds. Imagine if
we could work together—'

'What? You help me with my script?'

'No, I mean, well, performing, maybe just a couple of shows. You
know, with my magic books, the schools are very keen and I've had
much more experience now, maybe as your assistant, we could get big
audiences—'

'You are incredible! You really don listen to anything I say—'

The phone starts again. I grind my teeth but I can't help glancing at it.

'Oh, is impossible, I told you, I am going. Get the fucking phone if
you want,' and he turns away.

I clutch at the tail of his jacket. 'No, please don't go, I can't bear it,
I'll die, you can't leave.' I'm sobbing and choking, dissolving, nothing
to grab on to. 'Guido!'

'No!' And he's gone, the door slamming bang behind him.

I run back down the hall, into the kitchen and pick up the phone.
'Hello, hello!'

The line's gone dead.

I stand with the phone in my hand, looking at the hot plate and
the gleaming tiles above and the glasses stacked neatly on the shelves
above that. There's no point to any of these things. I push the star
button on the phone, followed by 10, then hash, and listen for the
number that just called. It was my parents trying to reach me. I dial
their number and there is no answer.

I lean my forehead against the tiles. My breath makes clouds on
the cold surface. I feel the phone vibrate before it even rings. I pick it
up.

'Rachel?'

'Dad? I just rang and you weren't—'

'I'm on the mobile, in the ambulance.'

'What?'

'Your mother.'

I can hear the phone screaming into the air, even though I hold it
in my hand. Or is it the siren, or is it the wind in my head? Dead.

'Is she—'

'I'll call you again from the hospital.'

'I'll come now – did you ring before?'

'Yes, waiting for the ambulance, thought you could do CPR – I
tried, damndest thing, I couldn't breathe.'

'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. It's your mother.'

'What? Is it a heart attack?'

The phone is crackling, as if the wind in my head has escaped and
it's howling all around.

'. . . tunnel, breaking up, see you soon, drive . . . careful.'

She mustn't be dead because he wouldn't be able to finish
a sentence, or tell me about CPR, or remind me to be careful.
'Damndest thing.' My father couldn't breathe from shock while trying
to resuscitate my mother and I didn't answer the phone.

I find my shoes and handbag, hunt for my keys. Can't find them.
There on the carpet are the feathers Guido dropped from his jacket.
Two. One of them shines blue, although faded. I pick them up and
stuff them in my purse. The feathers are forty years old, carried in that
pocket from Guido's boyhood, gathered on hunting trips with his
father. The feathers are from the forests of Tuscany; Guido and his
father used to get up at dawn, walk all day, come home at nightfall.
Guido enjoyed those trips. My mother is in an ambulance, unable to
breathe by herself, on the way to hospital.

I walk down the pale lino corridor of the hospital. My mother comes
home today. There are flowers in her room, petals permed into tight
blue curls like the hair of ladies gathered at church. Hydrangeas.
The blue petals are hypnotic, pressed up close like the members of
a religious cult. In her last email, Clara described cypresses that way,
each branch closing over the next, covering the core like a hand over a
secret.
Dark monks
, she called them. I liked that.

My mother looks up as I enter the room but I'm not sure if
she sees me. She doesn't smile. I bend and kiss Dad on the cheek,
take one of Mum's blue-veined hands in mine. That's when she
smiles, notices me. Maybe it's touch that changes things for her,
otherwise I'm just part of her scenery, like the permed flowers, the
loud smells. Her hand is cool and dry and sudden. It feels startling.
We never hold hands, it's not something you do after you've grown
up. I remember a busy street we once crossed, our fingers knitted
together. Her hand feels strangely small in mine. I want to go on
holding hers just a moment longer. There's something I want to
understand about the separateness of her, what we have between
us. But she stirs, her hand slipping away to cover a cough. It must
hurt her to cough. I think this, but I can't feel it. I'm like those
hydrangeas in the vase, lifeless inside.

I get up from the bed and pull back the curtains. I'd like to open
the window but I don't dare. The air in the hospital has an identity. It is
an opaque yellow, the colour of antiseptic, pasting over other aromas
more delicate, more threatening. The smell is loud and repellent and
repetitive, like somebody who wants to be centre stage, talking over
everyone else. The stainless steel of bed pans and trolleys and medical
equipment gleams in the fluorescent light. I think of the Van Gogh
painting The
Café
, with that acrid light blaring, turning people green.
Mum smiles again, at the hydrangeas.

'She's gone downhill in here,' whispers Dad, leaning towards me
across the starched white bed.

I imagine her huddled at the end of a slippery dip, caught at the
last minute by those relentless hospital corners.

For a moment, yesterday, I wondered if she knew who I was. She
hasn't said anything specific to me for a week. She seems very careful to
make only general statements. 'At our age the anaesthetic knocks your
brain about,' my father said. Yes, and she's been very ill, but her silence
still makes me feel guilty, as if I've done something unforgivable. Like
the tail-end of a dream, I can't remember what it was.

'So it's good we're taking her home,' says Dad. 'It must be
disorientating for her in here.' He talks as if she's asleep, or absent.

I nod. 'Have you been through it all with the doctor? The aftercare?
How to manage?'

Dad nods, tries to smile. His shoulders look defeated, his chin
tucked deep into his neck so he reminds me of an aged turtle. Giant
turtles can live to one hundred, Lena says. I'd rather think about turtles,
or elephants, or even hydrangeas, than what's happening in this room.
What is wrong with me? Here lies the woman who gave birth to me,
fed and looked after me and put up with me all those years. Where is
my empathy?
You have none, you're a heartless bitch
.

My mother's heart actually stopped. When she was lying on the
carpet, it stopped beating. Her heart was getting too tired, the doctor
said, pumping her blood around. So they put a pacemaker inside her
chest, and it ticks regularly now, like a good watch. 'No need to wind
her up though!' the doctor joked. It was quite a good pun, reminding
us in a gentle way to be careful with her, but my sense of humour is
still absent, vanished to the remotest parts of my sadness. It went
away with Guido's love and the collapse of my mother's heart, and my
infinite disappointment in myself. Looking down at my mother, at the
bowed shoulders of my father, I want to run, race down the lino floor
of the hospital, away, run with my arms pumping and my legs flung
out at all angles like a child. I want to run right out of my skin.

*

Dressed in a cream skirt and blue blouse, my mother sits in the
wheelchair with her hands folded in her lap. 'I'd rather walk,' she says,
but in a flat tone as if merely observing the weather. Her face is pale,
with no hint of make-up. Dad should have brought her lipstick, or I
should have. Without make-up her face is beige all over. I notice the
lines tracking into her lips, tiny dry creek beds.
You have them too
, says
the voice.

But I remember her lips glamorous, shiny with Rare Apricot from
Max Factor. In the mornings before work she'd put on lipstick in front
of the bathroom mirror, grunting with irritation when the glass fogged
up, smearing it away with her fist. She was always in a hurry, but
sometimes she flashed a private smile at herself in the mirror. Well,
once
I remember her doing that, when she was getting dressed to go
out at night. My mother and father didn't go out often after the boys
started arriving.

The night I remember my mother smiling, she'd emerged
steaming from the bath and was only barely dry, damp and pink.
She'd smothered herself in Johnson's body talc and I scuttled over to
stand beneath her so that I would be included in the white cloud that
enveloped her. My mother was so powerful, I thought, she even had
her own atmosphere.

A few days ago, after I went to see the therapist, the one Rita
recommended, I wrote in lipstick on the bathroom mirror:
I like
myself
. 'Don't write love,' the therapist said, 'because you won't believe
it.' She has a wry, cheeky smile, one corner of her mouth tweaked up
higher than the other. I blushed at the writing when I went into the
bathroom later that day. While I peed, and glanced at the mirror, the
blush grew and I writhed about on the seat.
How ridiculous can you
get?
said the voice.
What's there to like? What if someone sees
? When I
washed my hands I thought suddenly, no one will. I can leave it there
and no one will know. There's no one here to read it. Is that a good
thing or bad?

In the wheelchair, the maroon plastic torn at her back, my mother
seems stripped, a person robbed of herself. She doesn't look right
without the use of her legs. She was always rushing somewhere,
carrying burdens, books, groceries, laundry. For a moment I see
her as someone unrelated to me, like a person in a documentary – a
woman in a wheelchair with blue-green eyes, curly white hair cut
functionally short, coping with a new machine in her body. It is an
odd feeling, almost liberating, this detachment, like being in a dark
room when the door is opened a little – there's a shaft of light as well
as an uncomfortable draught. Then the sliding feeling moves across
my brain and flips it over, spangling the air.

'I don't
want
a wheelchair,' my mother mutters. 'I can walk.'

'Just till we get out of the hospital,' says Dad reassuringly, and
he helps her into the car. 'When we get home you can walk as far as
you like. The doctor said you'll have more energy now, just you wait
and see.' He turns to me, his chin lifting. 'That Dr Ajmir, he was very
encouraging, wasn't he? Said these pacemakers were great, make you
feel at least ten years younger, you can get a whole new lease of life.'

My mother looks up at me and winks. 'A whole new
leash
of life,'
and she puts up her hands in front of her like paws, and pants. Her
smile is ironic and self-deprecating and sharply conscious and as I
laugh with her something breaks and slides inside me and I put my
arm around her.

'It wasn't that funny,' she says, frowning.

'Be careful of your mother's wound,' says Dad.

I take a bunch of hydrangeas home with me. Dad pressed them to
my chest, still dripping from the vase, and a wet cold hollow seeped
into the middle of me, making an island on my shirt. I didn't want
them, but I knew he needed to give me something.

At home I leave them on the sink and cross back down the hall
to get a vase. Passing the hall mirror, I look in as if through a window.
I never used to pause at that mirror but since Guido left I do quite
regularly. It's become a habit, like a tic, to make sure that I still exist. I
read once that the only way to tell if a person is a vampire is to put them
in front of a mirror. If there is no reflection in the glass, then you are
looking at one. It's reassuring to see my frazzled rabbit face frowning
back at me. The mirror tells me I'm not a dead person walking, which
is the definition of a vampire, and my body is still here. It's just my
mind that has floated far away. At my age you have to pass the mirror
quickly. If you linger, unattractive details emerge and, like regular
news bulletins, there is always some fresh horror of age occurring on
your face.

In the silence since everyone has left this house, I lie on the
couch, a luxury previously unavailable to me. But I can't appreciate
my new position. I think about my mother lying on the floor the
night Guido left . My mind keeps returning to that place, over and
over, like the tongue to a sore tooth. She had tried to get out of
bed, panicked by the pains in her chest and a 'strange, underwater
sensation' but she'd fallen to the floor. I can see my father bent
over, trying to swallow enough oxygen to give to her. Sometimes
this image in my head is more real to me than the sofa beneath my
bottom or the book lying on my lap. I am here, in this house, but I
am not inside my body.

My mind wanders over landscapes I haven't seen for years. There's
the small, grey portable radio we won at the Easter Show, propped
up on the kitchen bench. Mum is adjusting it to get the ABC news as
she chops potatoes. She still has her coat on, only five minutes home
from work. She slices the potatoes thinly so they'll cook 'quicksticks'.
She plops them into the saucepan only barely covered with water. I'm
mesmerised by the white slime, like eggwhite, that begins to form as
the water boils away. She isn't watching the potatoes because she has
turned to peel the carrots, wash the spinach. If you don't wash spinach
seven times you can get hepatitis or malaria like the children in Africa.
'I'm starving,' I whine. 'Can't I have a snack before dinner?' Danny is
hovering at my back, picking up things on the sink, rinsing them. He's
trying to help but my mother keeps glancing at him, quick, irritated
flashes bunching into a sigh.

'Have you washed your hands?' she asks him finally, which I
think is silly. Of course he has, he's Danny isn't he? Someone else is
standing near him at the sink, that boy with the sandy hair. Maybe
Mum was asking
him
, because the boy is copying Danny, handling the
coffee mugs, putting his fingers all over them. I can see black under
his nails, like the mould that grows on the shower wall no matter
how much Mum scrubs it. He takes up so much space for a skinny
boy, with his sharp elbows and awkward knees that bang against the
kitchen cupboards even while he's standing still. Danny is glancing at
the sandy boy and sighing just like Mum when the boy puts down the
saucer he's rinsing to pick his nose.

I glance at my mother to check if she's seen but she's busy with
the spinach and then there's a scream and the sandy-haired boy is
crying, burrowing into Mum's coat, rubbing at the red mark forming
on his neck. Danny's face is tight with fury but he goes on washing
and rinsing even when Mum reaches round to talk to him. I'm inching
away, still starving, wanting to open the fridge and mooch inside when
there is a wail, a grown-up mother-sound like the end of the world and
she shouts '
Damn!
' which is a bad swearword for my mother, usually
it's 'Bother!', and she lift s the smoking saucepan with the potatoes all
black and burnt and slimed and she bangs it down hard on the hotplate.
You never put enough water in the pan!
she hisses at herself in a pinched
nasty voice and then another wail, louder and more helpless than the
first, rises up from her like steam and condenses all over the smattered
bench and cluttered sink, over the boys and me at the fridge.

I don't like thinking about that scene so I get up and wander into
Guido's room. Probably I should call it something else now – the
spare room. Spare. A cold windless place on top of a cliff . Something
preserved, like a body during
shivah
. I sit on his bed and look at the
empty desk. There's a dark, clean rectangle carved out of the dust where
his computer used to be. On the east wall is the built-in wardrobe with
the sliding door. I push it back to look at his clothes. Three shirts still
hang there, white like ghosts. In the top drawer there is nothing, a few
dried leaves of lavender from the potpourri I put there years ago. In
the second drawer is an old singlet, torn at the shoulder. I take it out
and sniff . Lavender, washing powder, cigarettes, cinnamon maybe. I
put it over my head and lie down on his bed. I am in the spare room.

'At last!' Doreen exclaims when I tell her about Guido. She even claps
her hands, as if I've won an award. We are at Lena's place, two weeks
after my mother's heart attack.

'This calls for champagne!' cries Lena and leaps up to go to the
fridge. 'Did you know that men live longer in marriage but women live
longer
alone
?' She snorts. 'We all know why.'

'Now you won't have to cut short your phone calls—'

'Invent excuses when you meet us for lunch—'

'Be insulted, diminished, treated like a servant—'

'You won't have to shut up—'

'Placate—'

'Lose yourself!'

I finish my glass before anyone.

'It's hard at first, though,' Rita whispers next to me on the couch,
'being alone.'

'Mmm,' I whisper back gratefully. I wonder if this is how she felt
when her husband left . Louis had always been so encouraging about
her having her own life, but as it turned out, he was busy having his
too, with other women. I want to know if Rita has felt the terror. The
knowledge that you might be alone forever. That no one will ever touch
you again, or hold you. It's true Guido didn't ever do a lot of that, but
now he
never
will, and the idea of living without hope, without even
a
potential
lover in the next room, breathing the same air, makes me
panic. Guido is what I know. He defined me for twenty years, he was
my outline. Without him I might seep everywhere. Did Rita feel what
I felt? Did anyone?