Release Part 5
A novel in Parts By Michael Gray Griffith
A murder mystery, and love story, set in a nursing home. Is Owen a murderer or an Angel of Death? Regardless he has fallen in love with Vicky, a lonely nurse, who doesn't know.
Previous Chapters Here.
PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4
Chapter 9
Inside Grandview’s laundry, Channary started the industrial dryer and watched the clothes begin to spin. With the two washing machines groaning and gurgling, she returned to folding the worn-out kylies.
A survivor of the Cambodian killing fields, Channary had horror stories that could infect your heart, soul, and head. This was why she kept them to herself. To the staff at Grandview, she was just a middle-aged Asian woman who liked singing along to her pink radio cassette player, which was always tuned to SBS.
Channary meant "Full Moon."
This wasn’t her only job. After she finished here, she went to another nursing home, a Chinese-run home two suburbs away. There, she worked the afternoon shift, but as a carer. Alone, she was putting her granddaughter through university and was also sending money back to the few relatives she had left in Cambodia.
In the Vietnamese refugee camp, she had moved ahead on the Asylum seeker list because she had three children: a daughter and two sons. But one of the sons had not been hers. He had been one of her captors. But as the regime fell, he had stopped playing with guns and rediscovered, as the Vietnamese forces surged into the fields, that he was actually just a frightened little boy.
All three owed her their lives. Or at least two did. Her real son, unable to handle the nightmares, had taken his own. Her adopted son, though, had gone on to become a lawyer. Living in Sydney, he had his own family now and saw her a few times a year. The meetings were always polite, yet awkward, and he always brought her an expensive gift.
Channary’s daughter, who lived with Channary, had become a nurse. She and her daughter got on well, but the true sun of Channary’s life was her granddaughter, Lily, who was studying to become a doctor.
There came a clunking sound.
As soon as Channary heard it, she knew what it was. Switching off the larger washing machine, which was completing its spin cycle, she pulled up the sheets and hunted around.
The upper dentures were fine, but the lower ones had snapped in two.
Glancing at the door, she checked the embossed name. They were Jack’s.
“Shit,” she said. It was her favorite English word.
Grabbing Jack’s small plastic basket, which held his now washed and dried pajamas—the ones he’d soiled last night—she headed off.
Most of the staff were on a break, so bustling down the corridor without being noticed was easy.
Entering Jack’s room, she placed the pajamas in his top drawer, then shoved the upper dentures under his pillow.
The broken lower dentures, which weren’t marked with Jack’s name, she left in her pocket.
On the way to her next job, as she sang along to Celine Dion, whose CD she had playing in her car, she checked her rearview mirror for traffic. Finding no one close behind her, she wound down her window and dropped the lower set out.
As she drove on, she glanced in her rearview mirror and grimaced as she caught them bouncing separately over the road.
Chapter 10
The agency Owen previously worked for, ‘WRN’, had been swallowed up, along with several mid-size agencies, in the amalgamation that was currently called ‘Noble’. Originally, once Noble had signed you up, you were given a brand new uniform: a blue shirt and two pairs of darker blue slacks. You were also told that you would be invited back every six months for a ‘conversation’. During which you could raise any issues you had with Noble, and vice versa.
In the staff rooms, the agency workers who had switched began selling the benefits of being with Noble to others. And why wouldn’t they? Noble paid more than any other agency, and, astoundingly, you even got paid a ten-dollar parking allowance. This was unheard of in the nursing home industry. And since the hospitals and nursing homes thought the uniforms looked great, almost overnight, those agencies, who hadn’t amalgamated, all but disappeared.
And the nursing home corridors began to turn blue. As the aggressive marketing strategy hit full gear, bus stops and billboards around the country began showing smiling nurses content with their work. Noble even purchased the back of that year’s Yellow Pages.
But nursing home work is tough on clothes. The old residents, when scared, had a tendency to grab at clothes. Buttons popped, shirt pockets got torn. In the mornings, the showers soaked the pants’ hems, and because many agency workers did double shifts and/or split shifts, they didn’t get the time to wash the uniforms between shifts. Sometimes they didn’t get the chance to wash them for days.
Nursing homes, too, once they had done their sums, realized how much they were spending to employ a qualified agency worker. As a result, the smaller agencies, who paid their workers, usually new African, or Asian, or Eastern European migrants, less, began coming back.
As shifts for Noble employees became harder to find, the blue shirts became a rarer sight. In order to survive, those agency workers who had shifted to Noble now returned to their old agencies, only to find themselves working the same shifts for two to three dollars less an hour.
Three years later, Noble was a spent force. The posters were gone, the back cover of the Yellow Pages was now owned by someone else, and to find someone wearing one of the blue shirts or the pants was like stumbling across the survivor of a defeated army.
But ironically, since the majority of employees had quit, those who had hung on were now benefiting. Since Noble had refused to lower its rates, the nursing homes only called them when all the other agencies had failed to provide a worker. And since new homes were going up everywhere, and since the work was of such a low social status and the pay dreadful, no matter how many new agencies set up to fill the gaps, there were always holes.
Noble may not have replaced uniforms, or called him in for conversation, but regardless, Owen, who had hung on, had as much work as he wanted, and at a higher rate of pay than those around him.
“Do you want anymore?” Owen asked.
Beverly didn’t reply. She’d eaten half her baked beans. Baked beans were one of the only things she ate. Her constant farting testified to that.
“Well, do you want another piece of toast?” he asked.
Beverly replied by getting up and moving into the lounge.
Owen watched her go, then glanced at his watch. If he was going to pull out of the shift, he’d have to do it soon.
He sat there, waiting to decide, then, undecided, he got up and washed their dishes.
Beverly’s Alzheimer’s had come on so aggressively that there had been no time to prepare, no time to discuss. In the first few weeks, as it became clear what was happening, they hadn’t spoken of it at all.
Owen had never seen Beverly as angry as she became then. His father had told him that during her menopause, she’d been all over the place, but in those years, Owen had been living in Tasmania. Married to a local Hobart girl, he’d worked in the casino’s hotel, where he’d been on a rotating roster, switching between restocking the rooms’ bar fridges and working the room service night shift. If his marriage had made it, he’d still be there, but Hobart wasn’t big enough for both the breaker and the broken-hearted.
Landing back in Melbourne, he moved back in here with a view to stay only until he found his feet and some bearings.
Until he started staying over at Vicky’s, he’d never left. Now, because of Vicky, he couldn’t stand staying here. He’d tried; put Beverly to bed, with the help of some temazepam hidden in chocolate, and watched some TV, or jacked off in his room to whatever he could find on the net. Then, emptied, he’d either sort through his photos and remember their faces, or lay on his bed and see no other face than Vicky’s.
Each time he’d done this, he’d tried his best to keep some distance between them; a buffer. He’d dressed, climbed into his car, and found himself knocking on her door, even though by then she’d given him the key. And Vicky never grumbled. With sleep in her hair and eyes half open but relieved, she’d lay those arms around his neck and whisper, as she pulled him closer:
“I knew you were coming.”
In the living room now, he sat on the opposite armchair and appraised Beverly as she watched the cricket.
She was smoking, and there was nothing he could do about that. If he took her fags away; hid them, she would turn the house upside down in her search, and if she didn’t find them, then she would go out and buy some more. If she did that, she’d get lost. Twice the neighbours had brought her back.
Doctor Anderson was right. He should stay.
Up again, he made her a cup of tea, then brought it out to her with three temazepam pressed into two Turkish delights—another of her favorites.
She looked up at him. He was wearing his white short-sleeved shirt and blue pants: his uniform.
She took the chocolates, chewed them briefly, her mouth open, then downed them in one go with a large swig of tea.
By four thirty, she was struggling to stay awake.
“Come on,” he said, and helped her to her bedroom.
After undressing her, he helped her into her nightie, then tucked her into bed. By the time he’d reached the point where he kissed her, she was already asleep.
Her sleeping face hid all that was breaking. She looked even younger than her years. She looked like she had before it had come.
As he studied her, as he lost his eyes in the relaxed folds of her face, he heard again, what he kept hearing every time he was here. Tonight, though, it was louder.
“Shush,” he said, but there was no chance of that. No chance at all.
Chapter 11
The initial duty for those working the five to ten short shift was to assist those residents who needed assistance with their dinner. Following this, you got your residents into bed.
Owen knew a few of the agency staff who were working the longer shift, he also knew the RN.
There were supposed to be two RNs on duty. One on each floor, but tonight they’d only managed to secure the services of one; Georgia.
Thanks to gossip everyone knew Georgia’s secret.
Two years previously, while working as a psyche nurse in a locked ward, she’d been attacked by a schizophrenic who had a history of sex attacks. While two more inmates had held back the other staff, this patient had done something to her. Just what wasn’t known for sure, but when it was hot gossip Chinese whispers filled this gap.
After a long period off she’d joined Global and now worked a couple of nursing home shifts a week. This was all she could manage. A thin, jumpy woman, she left the staff to it and concentrated on the dishing out of the pills, and answering the phone. Everyone knew that she wasn’t fond of problems, and when she worked here she preferred to work upstairs because not only were there fewer residents, but as a rule, all the visitors who had questions usually approached the downstairs RN.
She had not been responsible for both floors before. When she’d first been told she would be on her own, her initial instinct had been to leave, but despite her unstable constitution, her deep sense of responsibility saw her reluctantly choose to stay.
She’d started at three, by the time Owen turned up he could see that her hands were trembling, and she was speaking fast. Chances were he would hardly see her all shift. If this had been any other evening, it would have been perfect.
But this evening, with his mum trying to break out of his soul, Owen wanted to do nothing more than go through the motions, and then race home.
Norma Jean lived here. A woman with no family, at least none that turned up, she was built like a beanbag, who’d lost some of its beans, and didn’t seem to realise she had Marilyn Monroe’s birth name. Norma loved pressing the buzzer. As yet, she had not lost her marbles, and after ten years of living in this bed, she had realised that persistent belligerence acquired her wants. Out of the three women she shared this room with she was the only one who got showered when she wanted to be showered and got helped into bed when she wanted to go to bed. The price she paid for being the home’s loudest and most generally annoying resident was that she wasn’t very well liked. Owen liked her though. Norma Jean was one of his favourites. On his first shift here, she’d taken an immediate shine to him, and while he was changing her colostomy bag, she’d rolled over, pulled her bum cheek up and said:
‘Look, I’ve don’t have a poo hole.’
She was right. Where her anus should have been was a healed scar.
‘They stitched it up,’ she said.
There are three types of nursing home residents; the demented ones, who often had no idea where they were, and can be quite happy because of this. Then there are the ones who knew where they were, hated it, but were usually depressingly resigned to it because they knew they had no choice. These residents were victims of a stroke, Parkinson’s, MS or whatever it was that incapacitated them. Then there was the rarer group. These residents, not only knew where they were but had benefited or even blossomed because of it. Norma was one of these.
Owen was on his way to check on her now when a tray came flying out of what had been an empty, single room. As the tray and its contents slammed against the corridor’s wall, a young agency girl came running out. And she was screaming.
As Owen waited, a man came out of the room. Dressed in black he paused in the doorway.
Because Georgia had been so stressed she hadn’t been able to give Owen a handover. Therefore he was unaware that the Lutheran Church had found itself in a dilemma. One of their Reverends had come under attack from a form of Alzheimer’s that was even more aggressive than the one that was attacking Owen’s Mum. Obliged to care for him, but with no other bed free, they’d been forced to house him here.
The Reverend knew something was wrong with him, but he was
not sure what it was. The best he could make of his situation was that he had been wrongfully imprisoned. Confused and frightened, he was easily provoked into becoming violent. To make matters worse he was a large well-built man.
None of them knew it, not even the current DON, but in his younger days; years before he’d found and then decided to work for God, the Reverend had kept himself fit by lifting weights, and before that, he’d been an amateur heavy weight boxer, who’d only quit because of the severe headaches he started having.
‘Mildred?!’ the Reverend hollered now, and fear could clearly be discerned in his tone.
‘Mildred!’
The agency girl was already downstairs and trying to find Georgia. Georgia was hiding in one of the toilets, where, leaning against a wall, she was trying to breath her way out of one of her panic attacks: an attack that had nothing to do with the unfolding crisis upstairs. The rest of the upstairs staff excluding Ian, were clever enough to remain hidden.
‘Mildred!’ the Reverend roared again, but for all his size he wouldn’t leave the door of his room.
And then the Reverend caught sight of Owen.
‘Who are you?’ he said and he didn’t ask, he demanded to know.
‘I’m Doctor Owen,’ Owen said: ‘Is there a problem?’
‘You’re a Doctor?’ The Reverend went, and pulled a face as though he’d just licked a slice of lemon.
‘Yes,’ Owen replied and putting his arms behind him, to remove any physical shield, he calmly approached.
The fighter was still in the Reverend, Owen, who was oblivious to the man’s history, could see the aggression in the man’s narrowing eyes.
‘Where’s my wife?’
‘Mildred?’ Owen went.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s at home. She’s coming in tomorrow to pick you up. You’ve been staying here for a few days while we run some tests. Don’t you remember?’
‘Tests? What tests?’
In his peripheral vision Owen caught sight of the agency girl with a harried Georgia in tow, coming up the stairs. Surreptitiously, he waved them back. With no appetite for a conflict, both of them retreated to a spot where they could peer over the top step.
‘You had a fall, remember?’ Owen went. ‘You were cleaning your gutters when you fell off the ladder and knocked yourself unconscious. We’ve been keeping you here just to make sure you were okay. This is Orangebrook hospital. You do know that. Don’t you?’
Not only had the Reverend backed up as all this information failed to find a reference point, but he now looked as though he’d eaten the entire lemon, slice by slice.
Owen reached him. Laying a hand on the Reverend’s forearm, Owen felt his entire being burst and tighten. The man was so big, Owen could have hidden inside of him without leaving a trace.
‘This is your room,’ Owen said, and with his other hand he directed the Reverend’s attention that way.
On the floor was a suitcase and all of its contents were strewn around the room. The door of the single wardrobe was also open and the few clothes that had been hung up in there were also strewn.
On the bed though was a photograph of the Reverend and an old woman.
Owen picked it up and showed it to the Reverend.
‘Here she is,’ he said.
The Reverend took the picture from Owen and studied it.
‘Mildred,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Owen said as Georgia came to the door with two pills in a plastic dispenser cup and a cup of water.
‘Here, would you take these? ’ Owen asked.
Photo in hand the Reverend looked at the pills Owen had taken from Georgia’s hand.
‘Why?! What are they?’ he went.
‘Your antibiotics of course,’ Owen went.
This take-it-for-granted tone worked. Inside the Reverend’s head the word antibiotics made sense.
Without another word of protest he took the pills.
Georgia and Owen left him then. The next time Owen came in the Reverend, thanks to the pills, was docile and obedient.
In the toilet Owen undressed him and found him caked in shit and soaked through. He also found a younger man’s body. Muscles that still held their form, below the layer of fat good living had wrapped him in.
To see him naked was to be standing next to a shaved bear.
‘Thanks,’ Georgia said, as Owen prepared to leave. Her eyes calmer and almost glazed due to the tranquillizer she’d stolen.
Chapter 12
Owen knocked but no one answered. He hadn’t talked to her since this morning, maybe she’d been forced to do a double.
He used his key.
The flat was dark. Closing the door he switched on the light and; She was on him. Under her weight he collapsed to the floor. Shuddering, more than screaming, he went to lash out, because he couldn’t see it was her.
‘Shit!’ he went, as he found her face and heard her laugh.
Lips followed, hugs and more kisses and again that laugh.
'What did you do that for?’ he went.
‘I wanted to see you jump.’
‘Yes well, I can’t stay. All right? I’d love to but I have to get back to check on mum’
‘Oh,’ she went: ‘Okay. Sure.’ And she lifted off of him. ‘Off you go then.’
‘I didn’t mean straight away. I can stay for a while.’
‘No no, that’s fine. If you have to go, go,’ she went and entered the kitchen. ‘I’ve only been waiting to see you all afternoon,’ she said, under her breath, but loud enough to make sure he heard.
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘Like what?’
He pulled a trapped face and she laughed.
‘Oh come on. I can’t help it if I feel annoyed. It’d be different if we were younger, but you’re in your forties and I’m still having to share you with your mother.’
He didn’t reply.
She didn’t add.
A quiet moment became a few and then she said: ‘Are you hungry?’
‘I’d rather have a shower,’ he said.
The water was hot and he used her loofa. He scrubbed hard, he always did, it was the only way to remove the smells of the homes from his skin. In the water he found his mother, then hid her as Vicky came in.
He watched her get undressed via the misting mirror. And then she was with him, her arms around his neck, her face up close to his and full of those elfish qualities that her wrinkles couldn’t corrupt, especially now that she was happy.
‘Hi,’ she went and then they kissed.
‘Why didn’t you tell me Hilda had died?’ she pushed him back to ask. ‘You knew she was my favourite.’
The water was hot. Owen suddenly felt cold.
‘I thought they were all your favourites?’ he replied.
‘They are. But she was special. She’d been there since before I started,’ Vicky said and interlocked her wrists around Owen’s neck. ‘She used to walk down the halls, like Jack. And every so often she’d spin like this,’ and stepping out of the shower, Vicky performed a naked pirouette.
As the light shimmered on her wet skin, Owen guessed that no one had seen her do this before. At least not as an adult. This memory was his, and his alone.
‘What?’ she went as she found his warm eyes.
‘Perhaps I can stay,’ he whispered: ‘At least for a little while.
Chapter 12
They had met on an evening shift. Owen had been coming to Grandview for two weeks, but Vicky, in that time, had been on holiday. He had no idea she existed until he noticed her sitting in the corner of the day room. She was with John. John had MS and was talking about Aboriginal rights. There had been a discussion on the radio about it that morning. Because his eyesight was faulty, John loved listening to the radio.
Initially, Owen had taken it for granted that she was a visitor and so had not given her much thought.
While waiting in the staff room for handover, he discovered he’d be working with Rongo. Rongo was a strong, Maori boy who had a bubbling spring for a soul. Despite his threatening physicality, he was nearly always laughing and had a way with the old people that left you believing he was born to do this job. His powerful hands turned them gently, his smiles melted their fears, and his erupting laughter saw them warm to him immediately. He was the only male many of them requested.
Owen and Rongo got on famously. Together they joked and worked hard. With the help of a short shift, they always finished an hour or so before home time and spent the rest talking and smoking out the back. Owen rarely smoked, but with Rongo, he made an exception.
Then, at the start of handover, Vicky came in and went rigid as she realized she would be working with two men. One of them, an agency she didn’t know, all day she’d been fighting a migraine. Now the migraine had fuel.
For the entire shift, she kept appearing, suddenly, as if trying to catch them slouching. It had put Owen on edge; every time she’d arrived, he’d immediately fallen quiet, then was sure he’d appeared guilty because of this.
Out the back, while he and Rongo were having their first smoko, she’d turned up again. Then, after asking Rongo about a bruise she’d found on Mary Bell’s arm, she’d turned to Owen and said:
“Are you an SEN?” She meant a state enrolled nurse; one rung below a registered nurse.
“No.”
“So you’re a PCA?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m a nursing assistant.”
Nursing Assistants had no qualifications. Most had been in the job for years, yet had remained unqualified because they knew, or hoped, that they weren’t going to do this job forever. Working in nursing homes was something to do while working towards an actual dream. It paid the bills. This was also why, when the government decreed that all the staff had to attain the minimum qualifications—a certificate three, PCA—a lot of them never got around to it.
Plus, it would cost them money, and paying to earn a qualification to do the job you’d already been doing for years was a bit hard to swallow.
The official line was that after a nominated date, anyone who was not qualified could no longer be employed. But that date passed, and with many of these newly qualified workers quitting in their first few weeks (mainly because during their training, their lecturers had neglected to tell them just how much shit and piss they’d be cleaning up, or how much abuse they’d be receiving), the homes simply couldn’t find enough qualified staff to fill their positions. With no other choice, they and the official line looked the other way and left these nursing assistants, most of whom had years of experience, alone.
“Oh,” she went. “So you’re studying then?”
“No,” he went, and drank his coffee.
“Then what are you doing?” she asked.
“Being interrogated,” Rongo suggested and laughed.
Vicky didn’t laugh; she left.
“What a bitch,” Owen grumbled.
“Relax,” Rongo went. “It’s not just you; she doesn’t like any agency staff. Especially if they’re men.”
At this point, Owen couldn’t stand her. Every time she came near, he felt himself getting ready to explode. Whenever the agency sent him back here, he prayed she wouldn’t be on, but more often than not, she was.
But then, as he used the company of whomever he was working with to hide from her, he discovered something odd. To stave off boredom, nursing homes were rife with gossip. Perpetually, staffrooms buzzed with the latest snippets and scandals. And if the truth wasn’t known, or wasn’t juicy enough, another truth was made up. But at Grandview, Owen realized that no one talked about Vicky. Curious, he began to carefully enquire, but for all of his questions, he discovered that no one knew anything about her, except that she was single.
She was a stranger in the system: a successful secret in a place where secrets were ritually hunted down. Owen only knew of one other person like that.
And then one day, she smiled. It wasn’t at him. It was at something Rongo said, but with this smile on her face, she looked at Owen. That was it. Even though she didn’t show any acknowledgment, in his mind, thanks to this smile, she remained. And it wasn’t her features that stuck, but the brief view of another secret Victoria hiding underneath.
If he didn’t get called into Grandview, he was disappointed. If he got called in and she wasn’t on, he found he was disappointed. But when she was there, she continued to treat him with suspicion.
Confused, he did the only thing he could think of: he applied to join Grandview Garden’s casual pool. Because he knew the residents, he was snapped up. Now he worked there all the time. It was less pay, but he didn’t mind.
A month later, he was draining John’s urine bag when Vicky came in to change the bandage on John’s bedsore.
“You are supposed to wear gloves while you’re doing that,” she told Owen.
Owen didn’t reply.
“So why aren’t you wearing gloves?” she said.
“Because there aren’t any,” he replied.
“Yes there are,” she went, and headed out to get him some.
“Vicky,”
“Yes?”
“Are you married?”
“What?... Why?”
“Are you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Well, are you seeing anyone?” he asked.
“Excuse me,” she went, and despite a great section of her trying to leave, another part wouldn’t let her walk out of the door.
“Because if you’re not,” Owen said, and stood up to say it. “I was wondering if we could meet up sometime? Outside of work.”
“No,” she went.
“Oh,” he went, and feeling tiny, Owen turned back to John’s urine.
“Oh go on, Vicky?” John went. “You know you like him. He’s all you ever talk about.”
Owen turned back to this. He’d had no idea. If there had been signs, he’d missed them.
At the door, Vicky was in an awkward disarray. Her shields briefly down, even John could see she both wanted to leave and couldn’t because something else, something stronger, was forcing her to stay.
“There’s a café down the road,” Owen said. “We could go there.”
Vicky didn’t reply. Her big eyes looked away and looked back.
“I’m only talking about a coffee,” Owen went. “I’m not talking about dinner.”
“A coffee?”
“Do you drink coffee?”
And after a pause, that big-eyed, elfish head nodded so quickly that if Owen or John had blinked, they would have missed it.
When they had first slept together, they had done so like friends. But as the nights passed, and with the lights always off, her arms rushed to enwrap him, and her lips, which had not kissed in years, forgot words and spoke in a language he found he could speak too. It was a gentle, nurturing language: a sailing boat on a fine day, with your fingers in the water and the sun like a third lover celebrating your skin. In this language, they forgot the world that was living and dying around her flat. They didn’t need it anymore, and as her legs, which she’d taken for granted wouldn’t open again, opened, they began creating a new world. One so privately precious that when they were apart, each secretly worried that they were both delusional. But they weren’t deluded; they were intoxicated, and by the end of the first month, each had become the other’s addict.
“Do that thing,” she whispered, as she rushed to a climax.
“What thing?” he toyed.
“You know,” she went, and this whisper was softer still, despite her body twisting and turning to the pleasure.
“You have to ask,” he said, and in the darkness, grinned at the fun.
“I don’t want to,” she went.
“Say it.”
“Stick your finger in my bum,” she went, and as he’d done a few nights before, he did again, and again she climaxed and couldn’t stop. It was like there was an androgenous switch down there that Vicky had lived her life, totally unaware of.
In the afterglow, as that lone streetlight found its way through her blinds and exposed the hunger for sleep in their faces, he jerked as she rolled on top of him and, tail wagging, said:
“Promise me something?”
“What?”
“Whatever you do, just don’t leave.”
There was a pause, a deliberate waiting, then he answered in their still-forming language, and wrapped and glowing, she fell asleep, unaware, as she did, that for him, she had now made sleep impossible.
Awake, he lay on his back and studied the darkness.
Chapter 13
Before Mavis decided to marry Les Lavis, she was simultaneously in love with another man: Leopold Avis. She could see the irony in that, too. But it wasn’t the choice of her new surname that saw her decide, nor a greater love. She chose Les because Leopold was a bus driver, and Les was the manager of a Caulfield shoe store. Les had goals and the energy to reach them.
She couldn’t remember what those goals were now, except to know that they hadn’t reached any of them. Les now owned a Jim’s Gardening franchise, and Mavis was a retired mail sorter. Leopold, though, whose broken heart was driven to prove her wrong, had set up a chauffeur business, and now, a retired millionaire, he’d moved up to Queensland and lived on the coast.
Les and Mavis had paid off their Springvale house, but after years of struggling, they hadn’t yet summoned the courage to speculate with their equity.
With their two kids still at home, the thought of something happening to Mary was awful, and yet, out of the eyes of everyone, Mavis often found herself checking the prices of houses in and around her mother’s suburb.
“Mary,” Doctor Gnananpragesam told his patient, “you have experienced a cerebral hemorrhage on the left side of your brain, and this has brought on a right hemiplegia.”
“You’ve had a stroke, Mum,” Mavis said.
The doctor straightened his lips. “Your daughter is right, Mary.”
“But you’ll be fine, Mum, won’t she, Doctor Gnananpra...”
“Gnananpragesam,” the doctor corrected. “And no. You see, I’m afraid that while there is a chance of some improvement, considering your age, Mary, and the extent of the damage, I think it would be unwise to be too optimistic.”
Mavis and Les fell quiet.
“Another thing,” Doctor Gnananpragesam continued. “Since there is very little we can do for Mary at the moment, I’m wondering whether you have made any other plans regarding her accommodation?”
Mavis and Les failed to grasp the hint.
Realizing this, the doctor discreetly motioned the pair away from the bed, until they were in the hall, just out of sight of Mary.
As they moved away, they all gave Mary a reassuring smile.
Mary was still unable to move half her body. She tried constantly, but the connections were severed.
She was also dying to see Ben but had been unable to make this known.
Trying to raise her head but failing, she struggled to listen to what the three were saying.
And then she heard Les.
“With us?” he said, and it was almost a shout.
Chapter 14
The hospital’s cafeteria was busy with life; some of it sick, some of it visiting, some of it using the close contact to jump from one human to another.
Mavis and Les were sitting at a table, which had the previous occupant’s coffees and cake plates piled in one corner. With their own, two cappuccinos cooling before them, Les was busy chomping his way through the triangle of sandwiches.
“She can’t even bloody walk,” Les said, a sliver of lettuce between his teeth.
Mavis wasn’t listening because she was feverishly scrawling on the back of a napkin.
“And I don’t know about you,” Les continued, his mouth full, “but I’m not picking her up every time she needs to go to the loo. And when you’re her age, you want to go all the time! Are you listening to me?”
“Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars,” Mavis said.
“Huh?”
“You heard what Doctor Ganaver-whatever said...”
“Mahatma Gandhi.”
Nodding, Mavis was having trouble sitting still. “Chances are Mum won’t get any better, therefore she won’t be able to manage her affairs.”
“So?”
“So,” Mavis shook her head, as she often did when Les spoke. “If she can’t manage her affairs, she will need guardians. Financial guardians. Her house, Les. Her house is ours.”
Les stopped chewing, and as he did, Mavis held up the napkin. One of the many figures scrawled upon it was underlined.
“Half of it to my useless brother, half of it to us. That’s two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, at least. And that’s in its current condition. If we clean it up, paint it, who knows.”
“Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars?”
Nodding, Mavis smiled a smile she hadn’t worn in years. “And all we have to do is find a nice nursing home for her. How hard could that be?”
Chapter 15
Vicky’s mother, Helen, had a huntsman caught in an empty coffee jar. She always kept jars. She’d caught it yesterday afternoon, and after sliding a piece of paper between the jar’s mouth and the wall, she turned it upright, then waited for the spider to rest on the bottom before quickly screwing on the lid. She’d then punctured a few breathing holes in the lid, and now the jar was positioned in the middle of the dining table. Helen had done this before, and with much bigger spiders; some had been so big she’d cut the tips of their legs off as she’d brought down the jar.
This one was a juvenile, and sulking at the bottom of the jar, it left Vicky wondering what it was making of the world, seeing how its view was blurred by the thick base of the jar.
Vicky was a cleaner, but nowhere near as fastidious as Helen. Helen’s newest trick was soaking her plugs in a solution of bleach.
“I saw a thing about it on Ray Martin,” she said, as Vicky heard the cows calling to each other in the field next door.
“They had this scientist run a test on this woman’s plug, and her kitchen was spotless, anyway, a few days later that swab had produced over a hundred million bacteria. How disgusting is that. And here’s me, I’ve been using the same plug for years.”
This was Ararat. It took Vicky four hours to drive here, and usually the drive to this town, where she’d grown up, was a relief. A break from all the stress of Grandview and the loneliness. As the road rose and fell to the moderate undulations, she’d lose her eyes in the often brown fields while Joni Mitchell played on repeat and she sang every word. Since leaving her childhood, the interior of this car was the only thing that had heard her sing.
She sang this time, but stopped the closer she got to her mum’s.
Her mum’s house looked out of place. Built with four others around the roundabout of a no-through road, they looked as though they should be lost in the suburbs rather than challenging the paddocks that came right to their decaying fences.
In Vicky’s bedroom, Vicky had positioned her single bed against her window, and in her holidays, when she’d hidden out here, she’d often woken in the day to find a cow up against the fence, its eye, the only eye bigger than hers, watching.
She liked cows. It was why she’d become and remained a vegetarian. She’d once loved Nietzsche too, but at the same time had remained a devout Catholic. Finally, with Nietzsche failing to give her anything, she tried to leave him behind, but his books were still in her wardrobe, and a year before she met Owen, she had also, gradually stopped attending mass.
Helen had no time for philosophy or the church either. How could she when all her time was taken up keeping these rooms, that only she occupied now, free of the dust that perpetually rose from the country around her, that was not quite ready to surrender.
Inside the jar, the spider had not moved.
“You didn’t bring him with you then?” Helen said as she pulled up a chair and joined Vicky at the table.
Vicky shook her head, and inside it Owen shook too, because he was everywhere inside her. She was unaware that with every glance or frown, with each reply, whether she spoke it or not, more of him fell out. This was why when Helen picked up the jar and, while looking closely at the spider, said:
“So it’s pretty serious between you and him?”
Owen, honey, ran out of Vicky’s mouth and caught the light as it did.
“Why don’t you let that one go?” Vicky said.
Helen nodded, then shrugged, then placed the jar back on the table. Inside the jar, the spider lifted its front legs.
Helen had won the house in the divorce. They had two cars, so she’d got to keep hers as well. That was a while ago when she had a job at the local Safeway. She was retired now.
“I suppose you’ve introduced him to John?” John was Vicky’s dad.
Vicky shook her head.
“Why not? Is there something wrong with him?”
“No!”
Helen smiled.
“No!” Vicky said, and then Helen said:
“I’m only asking.”
Vicky was already up and fuming in the kitchen. “No you weren’t,” she snapped. “You were implying that there must be something wrong with him otherwise what would he be doing with me.”
“Oh calm down, I never said any such thing.”
“I might go,” Vicky said.
“Why? You just got here.”
Vicky moved to the sink and found herself wishing that there was something to clean.
Out the window, the Clarksons, next door, were having a barbecue. She could smell the snags and the cooking, and adults gasbagging as the children ran around the yard making up the rules for new games as they went. Soon they would either move out to the road to start kicking the footy around or set up a cricket game.
She’d been pregnant once. Unplanned, she’d spent six weeks wondering what to do, for the guy wasn’t much chop. Then, on the day she was coming to terms with the gift and began looking forward to the new direction life had taken, she had a miscarriage that had started while she was sitting in church.
She’d taken it as a sign that she would never have a family, and as the years progressed towards the cutoff date, it seemed that sign was right. But now Owen was here, and he was in love with her, and even though they had spoken about it, she often found herself wondering who their child would look like. Would sound like. Would feel like to pick up and hold, and how they’d look while they slept, their arms out and open, like she knew babies slept.
“Has he got any kids?”
“You know he hasn’t,” Vicky replied.
“How would I know what he does and doesn’t have? I’ve never even met him. All I know is what you’ve told me, and you’re gaga over him, so it’s not like you’re gonna see anything clearly. He hasn’t been in jail, has he?”
“Oh stop it will you,” Vicky said. “He’s just normal.”
“Normal,” and Helen laughed to herself, condescendingly, which was her right considering her age. “Well, there must be something wrong with him. Like it or not, if you’re single in your forties, you’re shopping in the used car market. So he may be normal,” and she made quotation marks, “but there will be something wrong with him.”
“How many spiders do you have now?” Vicky asked, hoping this would hurt, despite knowing it wouldn’t.
“Four,” she replied. “Look for yourself, they’re in the cupboard above the plates.”
This was odd. Helen usually kept them on a shelf in the shed. Sometimes, in the past, Vicky had gone in and let some of them go.
There they were, four jars in a row, and all of their occupants still and quiet. Two of them were curled up like autumn leaves.
“Don’t you touch them,” Helen said.
Back in her room, Vicky sat on her bed and watched the field, which had no cows in it presently, bringing its tough grassy earth to here, and the only sound it made was the sound of a tap running and the voices of the people next door socializing.
“I’m going to the shops,” Helen came to Vicky’s door and said. “You wanna come?”
“No.”
“Vicky, this is silly. You can’t get all sulky for nothing.”
Vicky went to reply, but then kept it in and continued to watch the field, or something past the field that wasn’t there to see.
“Suit yourself,” Helen said, then after a pause added, “There is something wrong with him, though.”
“Oh, how would you know?” Vicky swung back. “You said yourself that you haven’t even met him.”
Helen shrugged, and there was something else in her face now: a concern. “I can just feel it,” she said. “You know how I’m sensitive like that.”
Scoffing, Vicky turned back to the window.
“Just be careful,” Helen said. “The last thing you need is another Paul.”
And that was it. After a few more awkward moments, she left. With her leaving, Vicky carried her unpacked bag back to her car, then in her car remembered.
Back in the dining room, she looked for the jar, but it was gone. Coming to the cupboard, she found only the four lost ones. Then she noticed the sink; it was full, and under the clear-as-crystal water, the jar lay on the stainless steel bottom, its passenger a tight, unmoving grey ball.
Part 6 Soon