Drybread: A Novel (5 page)

'Because he'll gradually take Ben away from me,' Penny
said.

'He'll grow up to be his own man anyway. That's what
you want for him, don't you? Someone who's strong.'

'I want him to love me. I want him to be happy as a kid,
and not have the sort of time I did.'

The little boy was almost to the plum tree and still
holding the truck in one hand. He stood looking up at the
tree, wide-eyed because the cloud kept the dazzle of the
sun from him. Maybe he knew they were talking about
him, but it didn't matter. He was so young that he would
never remember any of it — not the bach in the gully, not
his mother talking to the journalist at the back step or
crying in the morning, not even that he was the reason for
a good deal of sadness and anger and bewilderment, and
the object of much love from two people who now had
little for each other.

Penny brought out some of her lukewarm cans of beer
and she and Theo drank as they talked. She showed him
recent articles from American publications concerning
custody issues, particularly what was termed father backlash.
One singled out the Californian judge who had decided
her case as a known supporter of non-sexist rulings. 'You
become part of a larger agenda,' Penny said. 'They're not
necessarily on about individual justice.' Theo would make
that the angle for his next article.

He felt a sexual curiosity about her for the second time.
Her jeans were nipped in at the waist and tight on her
thighs; her hair was more free than on his first visit. Because
she was animated, she lost for the moment the expression
of unhappiness that drew her face down. Naked, she would
have an agile, loose-limbed body, good to look at even
if her breasts were small. He imagined that, even as he
nodded in agreement with her views on parental custody:
he imagined her hair fallen back from her face, her mouth
open to show those Californian teeth, the arch of her taut
throat as he had seen it on his first visit while she slept.

Ben had grown tired of the plum tree's uncommunicative
company so he came back and stood between
Penny and Theo, between the pew of this parish and the
kitchen chair. The truck remained in one hand; in the other
he clasped a few pellets of sheep dung.

'Yuck, dirty. Throw it away,' Penny said.

'Yuck, dirty,' he said, and knew to retain his toy while
dropping the dry shit away.

'He loves to repeat things, doesn't he,' Theo said.

'It's a natural stage,' she said sharply.

Theo had written about him as a three-year-old kid, but
not from any personal experience of children. He was black
and white — dark, soft hair, pale skin, though the Central
Otago summer was beginning to tan him. Theo's car keys
were beside him on the pew, and Ben picked them up and
rattled them, turning round and round as he did so. Not
only had Theo no children, but he retained little memory
of infancy apart from the bright, open spaces of the North
Canterbury downs, and the occasional family incident
rendered dramatic at the time because of trivial eccentricity:
a visiting minister fainting in the hallway and the glint of
his clerical collar like a tusk as he lay there, the gorse fire by
his father's truck yard, the soft thrush that broke its neck in
sudden impact with the glass of the French doors as Theo
stood watching his mother put the washing out.

'I've got something to ask you,' said Penny when they
had been quiet a while. 'I feel a bit silly about it.'

'Ask away,' Theo said.

'I wonder if you'd visit my mother — she's in the
retirement home in Alex. I can't go, because that's sure
to be one of the places the police will be keeping an eye
on. I don't mean they'll be standing in the corridors or
anything, but I suppose the staff will have been asked to
look out for me.'

'You haven't seen her at all since you've been back?'

'No.'

'Won't they wonder about me? Your mother won't
have a clue who I am.'

'She hasn't got a clue who anybody is,' said Penny. 'Well
no one who's alive anyway. She's got dementia. She's in
full care. She's not seventy-five yet, but seems like ninety.'

What else could be fucked up for Penny? All the
marriage and custody worries, on the run from the court
order, and then her mother close at hand, but out of reach
in more ways than one. At some time in our lives each of
us seems to be singled out as the whipping boy, and the
reasons beyond comprehension.

Penny suggested that Theo say he was a cousin from the
North Island if anyone bothered to ask. She said there were
cousins called Booth there. She told him she just wanted
to be sure that her mother was okay, to know how she was
looking: whether the people at the home were doing her
hair and bothering to get her out of bed. Maybe the ones
without visitors were neglected.

'So what's her name?' Theo asked.

'Oh Jesus, yes. You're right. She's Mrs Bell. You expect
everyone to know the things you know yourself, don't
you.'

'I'll go today,' said Theo. 'I'll go now, and send an email
when I'm home to let you know how she is.'

'I feel bad about asking, but it would be one less thing
eating away. You know? Here I am living reasonably close,
and I can't even visit my own mother. Jesus, it's a fucking
mess.'

'Ben's very lucky you care about him so much,' said
Theo.

'You haven't got any children?'

'No,' said Theo.

'It's a special thing,' Penny said. She had one hand
over her son's fist as she gently took Theo's car keys from
him. Neither spoke, but the boy gave them up with little
resistance.

'It's the only love I know that doesn't need anything at all
in return, but then, Christ, I've gotten pretty cynical about
love, I guess.' Penny seemed to think she had disclosed
too much. 'And of course, kids can be a right pain in the
bum at times. Can't they, Ben, eh?' The boy just smiled,
responding to the tone, rather than the words.

'You really don't mind checking on Mum?' she said
when it was time for Theo to leave. 'It's going to make a
hell of a long trip for you. I feel bad about that.'
'That's okay.'

'That's great. Thank you. I've been worried about her.

I feel so useless sometimes, but maybe I can hold on a bit
longer. You don't think I'm just some crazy, off-the-wall
bitch, do you?'

The cloud was breaking up, and Penny and her son
came out to the macrocarpa hedge to see Theo go. In the
bare crucible of the hills they made a lonely pair.

His earliest recollection was of sitting on a large post in the
stockyards of a Canterbury farm, aware of dry hills twitching
in the distance and cattle immediately before him. A black
steer had thrust its warm, snot-flowing nose onto his leg,
and he'd been too afraid to move or call out. He began
to cry only afterwards, and his father came and lifted him
down, asking what the matter was, but he'd said nothing.
It was the unsought surprise of it, rather than threat, which
had unnerved him, and when he thought of it he had again
the exact animal smell of the dusty stockyard, the great
dark head looming, the folded, dun hills beyond.

It was an anomaly of childhood: its experiences had a
vividness never afterwards attained, yet the very early years
were resistant to memory, with just a few tableaux of surreal
and lasting power in the time before a continuous recall.

The Malahide Eventide Home was close to one of the
schist outcrops typical of the higher part of Alexandra. A
modern, sprawling sort of place with long-run steel roofing,
covered walkways and wide, wheelchair-friendly doors.
There were a lot of reflections from the strong evening sun
and the woman at reception wore a loose, green T-shirt and
black shorts. 'Mrs Bell?' she said. 'Mrs Bell is in the full care
unit, but she may be having her meal. Have you visited
before?' Theo explained that he hadn't, that he was just
passing through, calling on the off chance. 'It's not always
convenient for full care people,' the receptionist said, but
not unkindly. She spoke on the phone to a colleague, then
turned to ask him if he could possibly come another time.
Theo told her probably not. 'Probably not. He's a cousin
from the North Island,' she said. She was a solid, middleaged
woman with brown knees like steamed puddings and
fair hair glinting on her bare arms. 'I'll let him come on
down then,' she said, after a pause.

She got off her swivel office chair, yet barely increased
in height: one of those wide-bodied, short-legged women
with a spreading bosom that guaranteed a certain amount
of personal distance. She came into the corridor and gave
Theo cheerful directions, pointing through a large window
into the sunlit grounds. 'You're very welcome,' she said
when he thanked her. There was something childlike about
her, not a lack of maturity, or understanding, perhaps just
the way she had to lift her face up to him. Theo couldn't
imagine her vigilantly keeping a record of Mrs Bell's visitors
for the law, but rather saw her involved in neighbourly
domesticity — at a barbecue with home-made chutneys and
stocky kids bouncing on a trampoline.

Despite her guidance Theo lost his way and hoped she
didn't see him consult a lugubrious man in a walking frame.
The population of the Malahide Home moved with caution,
with difficulty, or both. Theo found himself repressing his
own agility in case it became a superiority too apparent. In
the small-town summer the staff didn't bother with uniforms,
but there was a man about Theo's age at the entrance to full
care, so he assumed him to be an employee. He was talking
with three women whom old age had reduced to a sisterly
uniformity of stick limbs, forward curvature, anemone
mouths and hair as lifeless as that of dolls. They stood,
absolutely silent, while the carer gave Theo final directions
to Mrs Bell's room. 'I'm afraid you can't expect a great deal
of recognition,' the man said. He wasn't to know that aspect
of her affliction was a comfort for Theo.

The room was more a cubicle, though with bright
colours and a window view of a pebble garden courtyard
with lots of empty seats, and frogs and lizards petrified
among the cacti. One high, narrow bed and one chair. One
bedside table and one silver-framed photograph of a young
woman in a dress no longer in fashion. Mrs Bell on the
rise, Theo assumed. It had the emotional ambiguity that
all such photographs have — on one hand the proof of
vivacious youth, on the other the sadness of embalmment.
We are gone, silent, dispossessed, is the message seen on all
the faces. The more permanent the photographic record,
the greater the sense of life's transience.

Penny's mother hadn't answered his tap on the door, or
his false and cousinly introduction as he sat down in the
one chair. She was a sister to the women clustered at the unit
entrance: He could see nothing of Penny in her appearance
whatsoever. She half sat, half lay back, clasped within the
bulky fabric arms of one of those convalescent pillows.

'So how have you been keeping, Mrs Bell?' Her eyes
slid past him almost with disdain. 'Penny sends love,' he
said conspiratorially, but there was no catch in her even
breathing. 'She'd like to come herself and bring Ben, but
you know what the circumstances are.' He realised she
didn't, of course: she had no idea what the circumstances
were. 'Well anyway,' he said, 'they seem to look after
you well here. It's a bigger place than I thought.' He tried to
think of the information Penny would find most comforting
from the visit. Her mother's doll-like hair looked tidy, the
bedjacket was clean, the room also. No outward signs of
neglect, or distress; no access to the inner world. There were
no flowers, and Theo wished he'd brought some.

Mrs Bell gave a sigh from time to time, not of any heartfelt
sorrow, but as if expressing some slight exasperation. 'I'd
better be on my way,' Theo said. 'I'll be able to tell Penny
you're fine. That old church pew is still there at the back
door of the bach, you know.' He could think of no reason
for giving such trivial information, except that it was
something they both knew. 'Is there anything you want
me to pass on to her?' No reply, and although her eyes met
his, there was only a mild enquiry there. She had some
longish hairs on her lower face, like the whiskers on the
soft lip of a horse, and her loosely knuckled hands showed
a deep, multi-hued pattern of veins and arteries in semitranslucent
tissue.

How little distinction there seemed between the
internal and outside scene, both bright, hot, immobile,
with Penny's mother almost as generic and indifferent as
the lizards and frogs of the courtyard. Theo half expected
the arrival of a nurse, or a gardener, to check up on him, but
he exaggerated the interest in his petty espionage. No one
came, no one challenged him as he walked back through
the corridors and then the grounds of the Malahide Home,
and the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back was induced
by heat alone, not suspense. The temperature inside the
car was even greater, though he hadn't quite wound up
the windows. He opened two of the doors and stood there
in the carpark for a while, flexing his muscles. Despite the
heat he wished he had his running gear, so that he could
set off and prove his body still a willing mule for the mind
within. Isn't it our secret belief that senility is a form of
contagion: that its sufferers are best kept in quarantine?
Old age never comes alone, his grandfather Esler used to
say. What could he tell Penny in his email except that her
mother was kept clean, the room had therapeutic blue and
yellow on its walls, there was that one photograph of her
as a young woman: that she was alive. But of course you
haven't completely grown up until you realise that death is
not the worst thing that can happen.

It was late before Theo reached home. The email he sent
to Penny in paradise read — 'Your mother is well cared for
so put your mind at rest about that. I had no trouble getting
in to see her, and wasn't quizzed in any way. Enjoyed the
time with you today and I'll keep in touch.'

It was fundamentally inadequate. But even to her
face, especially to her face, Theo couldn't have said that
he wished he was still at Drybread in her direct gaze, still
seeing her slim hand stroking the hair forward on her son's
head, aware of her full thigh beneath the denim.

There was a strength and resilience to her, but also a
contained hurt and bewilderment. Theo had only platitudes
and a knowledge of print media to offer her when he wished
for a consolation which would be swiftly practical, but also
have some nobility of compassionate understanding.