Coda (15 page)

‘No pets, I'm afraid.'

‘Why
are you afraid? By the way, you look like a tart.' She paused and winked at the receptionist. ‘Some of my best friends are …'

‘Mother!'

The receptionist rolled her eyes at the ceiling and produced a key that she handed to Shamrock. ‘Suite 2 down this corridor, first turning to the left … I'll be with you in a moment.' She pressed a buzzer. ‘Sister,' she called into the intercom. ‘Sister. We have a new guest.'

Kathleen's lead-plugged feet trailed the white walls behind her daughter, remembering all those times when, the position reversed, Shamrock had whinged and dragged at museum visits, art gallery tours, dental procedures. ‘Acheron Lodge,' she kept muttering. ‘Styx Villas. Avernal Shades.'

‘Please,' Shamrock kept pleading. ‘Please.'

‘What room?' her mother asked. ‘Charnel number 5?'

‘Oh my God, not funny!' Shamrock cried, thrusting the key in a lock and flinging open a door.

The room was microscopic. At one end an idea of a kitchenette. At the other a door opened on to a lavatory and shower. There were grip-rails for the elderly, a discretion of beige paint and ash-coloured carpet, the colour of tears, two
plastic chairs beside a plastic table, a narrow bed. Did she imagine the beating of dark wings?

‘When you get a few of your things in, Mum,' Shamrock whispered, ‘it will be a lot better.'

‘But you've sold all my things. And WHY'—she suddenly raised her voice and began to shout—‘ARE YOU WHISPERING?'

Shamrock bit her lip.

A nurse appeared, a walloper of professional cheer. A matron joined them. They made quite a crowd in the tiny room. The smiles stiffened as Kathleen said, ‘It's like that Groucho Marx film,
A Night at the Opera
. If I hadn't known Shamrock I'd never have got this room.'

The matron nodded and nodded. She prided herself on her understanding of these difficult moments. Her smile became ossified. ‘Well,' she asked, her face assuming that spurious but rigid tolerance of a cabinet minister confronted by genuine grievance, ‘and what do you think of this, then? Quite a view, isn't it?' Even as they stared through glass across the four-foot wide balcony at the green lawns, they saw an elderly man topple sideways from his wheelchair.

‘I think,' Kathleen stated clearly but unemphatically, ‘it's fucking awful.'

Corpsed.

On
her unresisting bed Kathleen worked at the edges of sleep. She mourned Brutus, muddling him with Daisy from whom she had inherited him.
Never mind, Daise
, she said aloud in the coffin room of Passing Downs.
He's better off
.

When Daisy had failed to show that time, so long ago now, she had rung the number kept for emergencies. The neighbour told her Daisy was dead. In that choking noise-filled silence the man's voice kept coming through with questions.
Her things? Her dog? She hasn't any things
, she had told him.
Nothing that matters
. All the same she had taken a train down the bay and trudged up to the Shorncliffe headland, seeing the flat waters as Daisy must have seen them, day after day. It was true. Nothing. The cheap bits of crockery, the cut-out pictures from magazines tacked to the wall, the exhausted over-laundered bedding became now an ironic metaphor of the house she had just been wrenched from.

Brutus was a large elderly dog of untrackable
ancestry and a clumsy gentle temper. All he owned was a collar and a half-empty packet of dog food.

‘I'll take him,' she said to the neighbour.

The neighbour ran them both back to town, Brutus lying miserably in the tray of the van. Kathleen held back her tears until her front door closed and then she managed to wipe off the last of her grieving on Brutus's rough old coat. Within a week he had settled in, had the run of the house and slept on the front veranda. He now owned a new food bowl and a kennel which he rarely entered, but in the way of dogs he quickly re-established his loyalties, wagging as they watched television together, grunting, snoring, making appalling and uninhibited smells and putting up an elderly paw to be shaken.
He thinks I'm Daisy
, Kathleen admitted.
We smell the same. Both old
.

So long, Brutus
, she said in the sleepless dark and fumbled for a lamp switch. There was none. Easing herself out of bed she went to the bathroom and groped through her toilet bag for a pill, a blinder, a knockout drop.

Ah!

She stayed two nights, caused havoc at mealtimes by insisting on smoking, refused to join in the parlour games of scrabble or punt balls through croquet hoops on the lawn, packed
an overnight bag and left on the morning of the third day.

The taxi dropped her at the shell of her house and she told the driver to wait while she went inside. Her own pain had settled along with the dust on window ledges and the sun-scoured strips of floor. Shamrock had removed the last of the curtains. Even the mud-scraper mat was gone. No one had mentioned the results of the sale which, she imagined as she looked about, could not have amounted to much. The minister for transports must have done a private deal with the Department of Main Roads. Where was her money?

She went back to the taxi, her heart pumping faster with anger, and asked to be driven to the city. Her lawyer had rooms above a bookstore in Alice Street and her irruption was a compounded flurry of bile and absent-mindedness that overcame her suddenly as she sat in the waiting room. Her bladder was making demands. Why was she there? She was used to meeting Daisy near the washrooms in Adelaide Street.

‘The lavatory?' she managed to ask the girl behind the desk, who stared at this crazy bag lady in distaste.

‘It's for staff only,' she said primly. (
Go wet yourself!)

‘Tell
me,' Kathleen heard this old girl shout, ‘or I'll piss the floor.'

‘Why, Kathleen,' exclaimed a tortoise head poked round the opened office door. ‘After all this time! Show Mrs Hackendorf the conveniences, dear, and then bring us two coffees.'

To her horror Kathleen found herself weeping, weeping as she rinsed her hands in the basin, weeping as she straightened her dowdy hat and came back into the outer office. Behind her the cistern flushed uncontrollably. The irritated receptionist went off with little mutterings to flick faulty levers. But Kathleen had remembered now why she had come, and even the luke-warm coffee and the client-geared easy chair failed to reassure her.

The tortoise was telling her that the house had indeed been sold to a government department. (A screwed hanky dabbed at fury.) She had been foolish to sign away power of attorney. As far as he could see—and there was much paper shifting and pen fiddling—it was a private arrangement between her son-in-law and a state authority.

‘I want the money.'

The solicitor smiled. ‘We can send a letter of demand.' He smiled more widely. He loathed the minister, whose rudeness and self-complacency were of a glittering impregnability.
‘If you could prove force, that you were unaware of what you were signing. These things are difficult. Were you aware?'

Kathleen could only shake her head. ‘I can't remember.'

The solicitor leaned across his desk and pinned her with his eyes. ‘You don't know any journalists, do you? They could whip this up. The papers would love to get hold of something like this.' Kathleen saw him momentarily licking his lips. ‘“State member renders mother-in-law homeless”.' He tried a headline or two and Kathleen, drawn abruptly from resentment, found herself laughing.

‘I like that.'

‘Do you? Well, we can work on it. I must say that if the letter of demand brings no response, you can sue, but it's such a lengthy business. I strongly suggest you get in touch with your friendly neighbourhood press.' He smirked. ‘By the way, where are you staying?'

She hesitated. He appeared sympathetic. She hoped he was that in a world she now saw as full of deceit. But the oily glister to his bald pate might be even more synthetic than the easy surface of his words. ‘Oh,' she replied. ‘Oh my daughter took me out to this terrible retirement village. Ghastly. I simply can't stay.'

‘What's the name of the place?'

Caution
rode her smile. ‘Spent Forces. Twigdroppers. I really can't remember. I've no intention of going back.'

‘But Mrs Hackendorf—Kathleen—probably that is where the money went. On buying you a place there. A villa, I think they call them. Remember, I handled only the actual sale of your house in the most minimal way. Your son-in-law told me nothing. It was the barest formality—sighting signatures and so on. Of course that's what happened! A unit, villa, whatever. If that's the case it would be even harder to get your money back. Most of those places have very tight fine print. It's all their way. Frankly, I think that taking your son-in-law to court as well as the retirement village, to say nothing, my dear, of a government authority, would be expensive and useless. You'd lose and you would be worse off than you are now. I'm sorry.'

‘You're sorry!'

She walked slowly back to the Queen Street walking-place, a madhouse of tent-topped eateries and truant schoolkids rampaging past shop fronts. She was buffeted by racing hoons on roller blades and shoving teenagers, rendered invisible to them by her very age. Someone snatched at her overnight bag, dragging her off her feet while she clung and clung, the paving
stripping skin from knuckles and elbows. A cluster of other ancients had gathered then and she was being helped up, her bag with its broken strap still at her feet. A woman—Daisy?—shoved it into her shaking hand.

‘Bloody louts,' the old geezer with the paunch commented. His anxious sun-battered face looked hard at her. ‘You've hurt your arm, lady. It's these damn pupil-free days they're all having. And no bloody police when you want them. You all right, then?'

Her noddle see-sawed, but not with agreement—in a kind of frenzied waggle she couldn't control. On the grubby shirt-front close to her eyes there were friendly food stains, the stigmata of decline and its ultimate indifference; a sheen of sweat greased the wrinkled neck above. Babble words about her seemed to clatter with concern.

‘A cab,' she mumbled. ‘I need a cab.'

‘Come on, then, love, I'll get you there. Just a bit of a way down here on your left.' The little knot of curious watchers loosened, untied and drifted away. ‘Hang on to me, missus, and I'll take you all right. Bloody louts. There ought to be a law.'

This is nice, Kathleen thought, this warmth of strangers. Support from that beefy slab of arm helped her forget the needle-sting
of her torn elbow while he reined in his strides to equate with her own stumbling feet.

‘There you go.'

Calvary over. The cab door opened and she felt arms lever her onto a seat where, dazed, she sat mindless of destinations.

Where?

Stranger comfort had vanished and the driver was impatiently repeating his question, head half-turned, eyes rolling in mock despair at this stupid biddy. ‘I said where to, lady.'

‘Airport,' she said. The impulse that had lain there all day awaiting her recognition was grabbed with a tired delight, a sense of solution.

‘Domestic or international?'

Was there irony? This crumpled old bat was spattered with blood, her bag strap dangled torn, her hat sat cock-eyed.

‘Domestic,' she whispered.

He turned the cab radio up full onto some talentless screamer and Brisbane laid out its steaming spaces for them, flattened under its own muggy effusions as they drove too fast through the headache that was threatening to split her skull open.

Limbo.

This is the magic hall of mirrors.
Just stand in front of the glass displaying your number and boy, are you ever in for a surprise!

There goes Ronald on a windjammer, beating before the Trades, looking for landfalls that ultimately he does not want. Or if he glides into an unencumbered harbour, he soon tires, sets sail (gifts of breadfruit, papayas heaped on the deck, chanting and weeping natives watching his departure from the shoreline growing smaller and smaller as his ship swings with the tides) and, cursed (a blast of trumpets!) like Vanderdecken, is doomed to never-ending arrivals and embarkations.

Watching that wind-tousled young man
at the tiller, he can only smile. He's never thought far beyond weighing anchor.

Like me, Brain supposes, seeing a distorted self screeching out numbers on the floor of Wall Street stock exchange, waving at the guys on the rostrum, begging to buy, sell, make it this time. He has always dreamed of millions, the exquisiteness of zeros. But hey, wait a minute! Wait a minute, bud! He's not dabbling in shares. He's singing, for Chrissake! The guy's letting them have it, full voice. He can see his mouth making the sound hit the front of his palate, even the strainings of his diaphragm. But what are the words? What are the goddam words? Not Tosti, not shanty, not
Lied
. He's urging these bulls and bears of the pit to take a pair of sparkling eyes.