The Seamstress Read online

  ‘All we need now is a knock at the door,’ I said.

  There was a knock at the door. We all looked at each other in our precarious stances.

  ‘Bags not going,’ said Willa, poised midair in a balletic attitude.

  ‘I’ll go, I’m closest,’ I said. ‘Stand in the middle, doll.’

  Willa obeyed.

  Two elderly friends wearing pretty frocks were standing on the doorstep, clearly expecting afternoon tea.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’

  ‘No, I did say call round. Just take us as you find us.’

  At that moment it started to rain.

  ‘There’s not much room to sit. Goodness, you both look so clean,’ I said foolishly. The elder of the two gave the trace of a sniff and swept the interior with a look of something that could have been incomprehension. She had clearly never painted a room in her life, or perhaps not in such chaos.

  Remnants of our lunch, cheese sandwiches and mugs of tea, stood on one of the boxes. I fussed around this and made noises about boiling the billy. Fiona, as always, made easy conversation with our guests and Willa went about clambering down from her perch to be hospitable. She was intent on placing her feet on the rung and misjudged the angle of her paint tin. Down it came tumbling, on her shoulder, several litres of Moroccan Beige, dreamily cascading down her right side. Fiona and my guests saw it, and at a strangled expletive from Willa so then did I turn round. Fiona was saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to do that!’ And I covered my mouth to stop laughing. I caught Willa’s eye and then she started. Our guests were transfixed, wondering when tea would be served.

  Later, when they had gone, Willa, now changed into even worse gear, said, ‘Some people just don’t seem able to read it, do they?’

  It was late April, and I was sitting watching her watching the Anzac Day parade on television. Some years ago, not long after I started, I stopped making cracks about old soldiers wallowing in King and country and sacrifice. I stopped because they were unfair remarks and because of the hurt in her eye. He didn’t glorify war, or anything else. The young Scot went to fight for Australia because he thought he ought to and it was expected of him. And he liked this warm country. That’s not to say there wouldn’t have been just a touch of the braggadocio about him.

  ‘That looks like him, there,’ said Willa.

  ‘But it can’t be,’ I said, incredulous. ‘He died a few years ago—remember?’

  ‘That’s right. Of course.’ She laughed a little. ‘I know that.’

  Jock didn’t take part in the parade for a long time—about twenty years. But later in his life he took it up, this one-day-of-the-year meeting with old ex–prisoners of war. He’d have a moderate couple of beers with his mates afterwards.

  It was Willa’s custom to view Anzac Day in all its mixture of sentiment and patriotism and sorrow. She knew the name of Jock’s regiment and of Ken’s from the First World War. Her allegiance to the day was to do with her place in this country and what she called her gratitude for it.

  ‘Well, anyway, if he were here, he’d have marched,’ she said.

  ‘Sure he would have. He had a good straight way of walking.’

  ‘He did. And he was a perfect gentleman, though God knows he didn’t have an easy upbringing. They were hard on him.’

  I nodded, and we watched the parade of all the wars, the ninety-somethings with medals on their scrawny chests, tottering along, the formerly despised Vietnam veterans, the nursing sisters.

  ‘He was such a gentleman.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said on a sigh, ‘so you’ve remarked, many times.’

  She said nothing more. There was the possibility of there being more to her insistence than I knew about.

  I lost her somewhere between 1980 and 1985. Or was it before that? She was taking her leave while I was not paying attention. But when exactly did I say ‘Give us a hug’ and she, hardly caring to lift her arms, merely looked preoccupied? I thought she was simply tired of my failed love affairs, my struggles.

  It must have started when she was living in that upstairs flat, after we sold the house.

  ‘Let’s go to a movie,’ I’d say. ‘You know, Willa, something execrable like The Exorcist—remember when we went to that and I was appalled? You thought it was so far-fetched it was funny.’

  But no, she didn’t want to see any film.

  ‘Please, what’s wrong,’ I asked, one day in 1980 or 1979.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ she answered, patting my shoulder as she moved past me.

  ‘Would you like a brandy?’ she asked.

  Yes, I would, and we settled down to our customary aperitif. All the same, there was now a distance here, a constraint.

  I am standing by her bedside. Two doctors and a nurse are in attendance. Dr Mary Sinclair nods gravely to me, all white-coated clinician. The younger doctor asks Willa where she originally comes from. Scotland, she tells him.

  ‘Ah,’ says the young doctor, ‘I spent some months there last year; I’ve never said “I beg your pardon?” so many times in one day, every day. Say ninety-nine.’

  The patient looks incredulous. Was the man insane?

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say ninety-nine, please.’

  ‘Why?’ And Willa laughs.

  ‘So we can check your lungs.’

  ‘Ninety-nine.’

  ‘Again.’

  Like Professor Higgins.

  ‘Ninety-nine.’ Might as well humour him, Willa’s eyes are saying. Such a nice stamp of a fellow.

  ‘Silly, isn’t it?’ The young doctor entirely sees the funny side. ‘You can say another number if you’d rather, like forty-three.’

  Mary is watching over it all, smiling encouragement at Willa, glancing at me, then goes on to talk to her male colleagues about streptococcus in the bloodstream, and the male doctor wonders whether the vaccine needed here is the ninety per cent proof or the forty per cent variety.

  ‘You know the one I mean,’ he says engagingly to Mary. ‘I can’t think of the name of it.’

  Before Mary can answer Willa says, ‘I can’t think of it either; it’s on the tip of my tongue.’

  She’s nothing if not helpful.

  Willa gave me a present. I suspect someone reminded her that that’s the thing you do when it’s your daughter’s birthday. Gifts had become more and more outlandish for the past two years: a tiny box of handkerchiefs that you’d buy in the children’s department; a large, illustrated book called Waltzing Matilda with a man in an Akubra hat on the cover. Each time I had said, ‘How lovely, Willa,’ and could only roll my eyes once my back was turned.

  But this was remarkable; it was a grey, wooden elephant—a doorstop.

  ‘Hey! Thank you, Willa,’ I said. ‘I love him madly! Or her.’

  She smiled and chuckled, and I thought: Fiona, that’s it.

  The years unrolled and there we were at the zoo, Fee and I. Willa, plagued with a headache, had begged off.

  In a smallish concrete cage a bear paced backwards and forwards, nearly crazed with boredom.

  ‘Just a couple of toys there,’ I said. ‘No mate; well, no space for one, anyway.’

  ‘Let’s move on,’ said Fiona, shaking her head. ‘I can’t stand to see his suffering. He’s catatonic.’

  We moved on to see Patricia, the zoo’s sole elephant. I looked at the printed square on the enclosure wall.

  Asiatic elephants are found in the forests and rainforests of Asia. They are very social animals. The basic family unit is a mature female, her current offspring and juvenile offspring. This unit may number about six and with other related family units they form a herd. Mature males leave the family unit when they reach puberty. They may be solitary or form temporary bull groups. Mature males have a brief association with the family units when mating with mature cows. The herd is led by a dominant female called the matriarch.

  Still alone after all these years except for her keeper, her unsuitable partner, puny protector, doing his best for h
er, looking after her feet and hosing her down every day, playing games with the water, games she understood, perhaps.

  She was housed in a sort of arena—again, concrete. It wasn’t so much a lack of space that was her lot, but lack of company. Little eyes, big hearts they have, and my own was heavy as the creature herself, as I regarded her stolid walk, which looked as patient and enduring as infinity.

  The main threats to the survival of elephants are habitat destruction for the timber industry, farming and poaching for the ivory and related product trade.

  Us, generally, the human species, they might as well have added.

  Yesterday, twenty years on, I revisited the zoo and headed for Patricia’s arena, not believing she could still be there. What joy! She is there, and what’s more has several others—on the distaff side—with her. There is a bull, quite ferocious, banging against the stockades, kept in a separate enclosure. And a good thing, too.

  ‘They are matrilineal,’ said one of the young keepers. ‘Even in the wild the bulls live apart, once their job is done.’

  ‘Is she still, ah…’ I was overcome with delicacy.

  ‘Still sexually active?’ said the keeper briskly. ‘Oh yes.’ And he gave her some biscuits and patted her front flanks.

  Did Patricia recall all her lonely years in a concrete compound before life took on a new meaning?

  ‘Can I touch her?’ I was permitted to place lilliputian mitts on her wrinkled hide. It means nothing, physicality. Her beauty is indefinable, but more in the eye, in the heart, than in the touch. Touching is redundant.

  Enough of this walking. It’s time to sit still and make plans for the 4.00 pm session, to stay upright for at least one hour without sinking into the post-prandial torpor that lies in wait, after the red wine.

  Choose a mantra and focus it first on the body, letting all the cares and fears fall away while you think of breathing, in and out, in and out, thinking only of the breath and how it’s helping your body to relax. Let nothing intrude. This is how I’ll get into the mind, which is the place to be. Forget bodily needs, put lust to one side, slough off that anger, listen to the voice within advising health, happiness, peace, over again. The mantra has to be directed to oneself, to someone you love, then someone you least favour. I concentrate on Mary, wishing her these gifts. The one I least favour is the man sitting behind me, sniffing.

  But I’m new to this and it’s not easy. Other thoughts impinge: thoughts of Willa, of work with its slings and arrows. The main thing about that is: it does not matter. That’s what we are being taught by the Buddhist nun. The insults and injury do not matter. It’s only the ego objecting to the objectionable and it has to be cast aside, for it’s time to shed distrust and envy, relegate resentment and stale antagonisms to some other place in the past. The monk tells us that such things do not belong here and they don’t work. We are looking for the rational, the down-to-earth, the cause and effect, the morality with laughter. Out with unwholesome clinging and with defilement. Now, defilement? This last has to be investigated with one of the teachers to see exactly what is meant. Are they talking about sex? Are they against it? No, silly. They are not against anything except that which hurts other beings.

  The advice is that you can be a two per cent Buddhist if that’s all you want. I’ll try for a higher percentage because I might be on a winner here, getting rid of these burdens of suffering.

  I woke up from the anaesthetic, swimming in a pleasant, warm pool.

  ‘When does it start?’ I asked someone in white.

  ‘It’s finished, all over,’ they said.

  It was all over, painless and timeless, and you can’t ask for more than that. Seconds later, back in the ward, I started to rave, just like Jock at the end, imagining spiders crawling everywhere. ‘Can’t be helped,’ I told the empty room, being conversational, then gained lucidity and coughed, embarrassed.

  ‘It’s the effect of the drug,’ said the sister. ‘It makes some people hallucinate.’

  The morning after, I needed a bedpan. Slowly, slowly, helped off the bed, onto a chair that held the waiting pan. ‘They ought to heat them nowadays,’ I said, and knew in that moment, wanting a luxury, I was going to get better. The sister who helped me, the one I’d thought so formidable, now encouraged me with endless patience, supporting me.

  ‘I can’t go,’ I said, miserable as a child.

  ‘I’m probably putting you off,’ she said. ‘Will I come back?’

  Needed elsewhere, she did then leave me to pee in peace, the upper part of my body face-down on the bed. When she returned, minutes later, I had fainted, with backside exposed, white and vulnerable on the pan. Still half delirious, talking nonsense, and the two of us laughing in joint efforts to get me back into bed.

  I groped to get everything into the proper sequence. Once I woke up, teeth chattering, and reached for the sister’s hand. Mumbling about imaginary visitors. But it wasn’t imaginary, it was Fiona, telling me that people had been phoning the hospital. I was not to worry about getting my trembling mouth under control; it would stop wobbling.

  To pass the time I did what I always do: counted the holes in the ventilation squares on the wall, greatly relieved that it worked out to multiples of four. It could be I was going mad.

  Doctors assured me that after this operation one’s life was of infinitely higher quality. No importunate menses, and sexual activity not affected except that it was better, if anything. And of course there were no consequences, meaning no babies. But what if I’d wanted the baby, my face said. But their looks replied: We’ve been through this, it was doomed from the start. You have no boyfriend—this was just one of those things, as Cole Porter would have said. No family to speak of. You’ve missed the boat; you’re getting on.

  No doubt it was for the best. What then, after such sweet reason, was this anguish? And why all these tears, unbidden?

  Six days later they let me go home, with stern advice. I was able to walk very slowly but fairly straight around the paved courtyard in my back garden. Being careful not to step on the cracks.

  Willa volunteered to come and look after me. I languished on pillows and asked her from my bed that first day if she’d close the window. She couldn’t find it and kept fidgeting with the flyscreen. ‘No, the window, love,’ I said, ‘not the flyscreen.’ She mastered the task, finally, muttering what a fool she was. When she asked me what I’d like to eat, I suggested a cup of tea and scrambled eggs.

  Much later, with unbelieving hands, I took the plate of burnt mess she brought me, keeping my eyes down.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. Panic was rising in me.

  I rang Willa’s doctor and asked for some explanations about her. He blocked me at every turn, in gentle, unmoved tones, each sentence wrenched from him. No, he thought she was doing ‘quite well’. As for the symptoms of dementia I was raising, if that were true then there was nothing to be done about the condition.

  I started making phone calls to my office, dictating letters, demanding this, denouncing that. My staff were exquisitely tactful. I became short with Willa and she, in a frightful huff, left my house.

  My eyes swam as I sank back slowly on my pillows. After a while I dozed. She rang me from her place that evening, repentant at leaving me to it. We made it up, but both knew her defection was necessary.

  Later, I walked laboriously down the hall to my kitchen and made myself a cup of bracing tea and a biscuit. Fiona would call by tomorrow after work if I rang her. Or even if I didn’t, probably. She once described Willa as the sanest person she knew.

  We were independent of each other. I’d be in my back garden at dusk, and across town Willa would be seated in her flat, at the window, looking at the evening sun over the treetops. She had a quiet smoke with a brandy at that time of day, while her meal was on the stove. Her way of smoking was classy, not a desperate sucking action you see in some, like my father, but a thoughtful inhaling, long pause on breathing out, lips relaxed and pink, a sip from her gla
ss, her legs crossed like a mannequin, all unhurried.

  I went over twice a week to help with any shopping. I always asked whether Willa had enough vegetables. You’d think I had invented vegies and clean laundry, the way I asked the obvious.

  ‘Thanks, doll,’ she said. ‘You bet I got vegetables.’ The way Humphrey Bogart might say it.

  We liked Bogey’s style of talk, and the gangster lingo of the old Eliot Ness series. ‘Hey, punk! Hi, doll!’ we’d say to each other, until I looked up punk in the huge dictionary Willa had bought me as a present after many not very subtle hints. I found that it meant fungus. But ‘Hey, fungus!’? Didn’t have the same authority, we thought.

  On the phone Willa said she wanted me to look at something she’d got from the electricity people. She couldn’t make head or pail out of it.

  ‘Head or pale?’ I asked.

  ‘Head or tail,’ she replied.

  It was commendable, I thought, that she bothered to cook a meal for herself when she’d never enjoyed preparing food. She’d tried, for my father’s sake, when she was first married. But he’d get home only after the pub closed.

  ‘Your dinner’s spoiled,’ she’d say, and you heard the bitterness in her.

  ‘Ah, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘People in India would be grateful for it!’

  ‘Then bloody send it to them!’

  The arguments. The fights. No wonder her head ached. But not any more.

  ‘I made the best of it,’ she said the other day, thinking of her defunct marriage, ‘and I made the worst of it.’

  It made me think of Dickens, of course, but what made her say that?

  ‘He had epilepsy, you know.’ She was clear on this.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I pinched a tablet of his one day and took it to the doctor. Your father used to rip the labels off.’