The Seamstress Page 12

  I remember a 1960s Kensington fog one November, dense as smoke—though not swirling, I noted with interest, like the miasma manufactured for Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. People with weak lungs didn’t survive it.

  I am looking at Mary and am in two minds. One is noticing that she is a woman who has never learned to make the best of herself. No clothes sense, as Willa might have said. Yet she’s a lovely-looking girl; could have been a model.

  ‘Her doctors are evasive,’ I tell Mary.

  She nods. ‘They are in a difficult position,’ she says. ‘Even a specialist can’t yet make any assumptions about your mother’s condition. There’s no diagnostic test at the moment. What we do know is that she is suffering from some form of dementia.’

  ‘Well, of course she is, but what am I to do? Her whole personality is altered.’

  ‘Yes. These latest drugs will make a big difference, you’ll find. I know it’s hard, Joanna, and you’re dealing with it well.’

  I look around her office for inspiration.

  ‘She won’t see reason.’

  ‘No, that’s because she can’t. You have to build your reason around her reality.’

  ‘Her reality is skewed.’

  ‘But it’s hers. That’s the way it is.’

  If I knew something about medicine it wouldn’t be hard. I’ve had the idea often lately; I’m not even ashamed of it any more. I couldn’t broach this with Mary; she wouldn’t countenance the notion. So it’s as well that that will go nowhere. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we’re ideologically opposed.

  ‘I see.’ I move on my chair awkwardly. I’m thinking of my operation ten years ago, my major surgery, the nursing staff called it. The sister in charge bore an uncanny resemblance to Mary, whom I hadn’t yet met. Small wonder I’m making far too much of Mary.

  It was a hysterectomy that came about as the result of a miscarriage. I drank too much wine one night with a nice boy—and he was a boy, much younger than I—then took him to bed because I couldn’t think of how to continue the connection with yet another woman I’d fallen in love with.

  I remember feeling that I had been gutted, like the chickens Willa had taught me to pluck and clean out for giblet soup, aeons ago. With doctors, they don’t really want to know the poetry of it, however raw the images, just the fleshly fact of your healing tissue, blood sugar levels, white cells count, weight and cholesterol.

  My operation had gone brilliantly because I was perfect weight, a little under. I had already started my walking regime. I was pleased with the neat, short scar along the top of my triangle they’d obliged me with.

  I am thinking of this, with satisfaction, suspecting that Mary takes no one to bed at all. She is looking at me, and surely can’t be reading my mind? I blush and look back at her with determination, and do I see the reddening of neck in her as well? But I always imagine things.

  ‘Three letters. Endeavour. I think I’ve got it.’ I wait and Willa ponders. We are sitting in her room at the hostel.

  ‘Remember how you taught me to do the cryptics?’

  ‘Mm. I can’t do them now.’

  ‘Never mind. These are more fun. Here’s one. Six letters: unmarried.’

  Willa shakes her head and I put it to one side. Something is bothering her. She is fiddling with her clothes.

  ‘Is it your skirt? Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Is it mine?’

  ‘Yes, I bought it for you last week. I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘I do but…’ She fingers the hem.

  ‘It’s too long, I think. Would you like me to take up the hem?’

  ‘I can take it up.’

  ‘All right, here is your sewing kit. Everything you need should be here.’

  ‘I thought it would be something,’ she says ‘and it was nothing.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I say. Rueful, but she doesn’t get it.

  The room she has here is tasteful and private. I check that her clothes are in order and take away the ones that need to be drycleaned.

  It’s the weekend. We are having a drive around and I show her my new house.

  ‘See,’ I say, ‘it’s almost in town, close to everything. Here’s Wellington Street.’

  Willa looks, and contemplates a little.

  ‘What happens in Wellington Street?’ she asks, reasonably enough.

  ‘What happens? Well…nothing much, really. I just meant, I’m almost in the heart of the city.’

  Willa looks at me with soft eyes, the way people look at idiots.

  I remember parties in Sydney full of theatrical people, sailors and barmaids and fortune-tellers, in the thick of town. And parties in Bondi with Hungarians drinking brandy, arguing deep into the dawn. And parties in the sixties with a new group of Spanish friends playing flamenco music at our house, with Willa looking on, laughing, and Fiona drinking, singing and dancing, doing all three at once. That Fiona.

  I remember parties in Rome with guests striving to be witty, clever, elegant, and certainly not displaying any outright rudeness if annoyed. This upholding of the bella figura, everything for show, to have oneself well thought of, had the overall effect for me of viewing extras on a film set. These affairs, unlike our early family parties, which were better described as bashes, I suppose, seemed wholly staged and lacking in real-life spontaneity. Being an onlooker to such soirées caused me bemusement and delight.

  In her youth she had an eye for style, a natural sense of design. The work she turned out, people said, was exquisite.

  I can only guess at the amount of changing she does now: possibly half the day taking dresses off and putting others on, as if she’s in a loony fashion parade. Her wardrobe is still full of once-beautiful clothes of her own making. Now they are all bundled in a haphazard way. And they no longer fit, for the medication given to ‘normalise’ her—make her less angry, less paranoid—has blown her up.

  ‘You look nice!’ I say, noting that it looks all right today, her dress. But wait a minute; she has on two light jumpers underneath a frock, then the dress, and a tight blue skivvy over that. The temperature today is thirty-eight degrees Celsius. She doesn’t want to remove any of it. But I persuade her. Or she lets me. The pretext is to look at her back and apply cream to the heat rash.

  Outside her bedroom she has access to a small courtyard garden. It’s pleasant enough; not the profusion of flowers she once had.

  Her garden was a special passion, and wherever she lived, sweet peas and petunias and gerberas blazed in the sunshine. More discreet ground covers and ferns had their place in the half-shade. I brought her a gardening fork, rake and a couple of odds and ends. They said at the hostel she was welcome to do some work there, in the courtyard. But gardening now meant, for her, cleaning up, pruning things to oblivion, sweeping the path, maintaining law and order in the rosebuds and shrubs. And when she said that she was, you know, combing the brown things, I understood perfectly that she’d been raking the fallen leaves.

  A relative occasionally visited, a chain-smoker.

  ‘She eats a pile of them,’ said Willa. I gave myself up to a picture of my cousin sitting with Willa in front of a pile of cigarettes, gorging herself.

  The hostel dining room might have been right out of Fellini’s Amarcord, with well-dressed folk talking across each other. Willa annoyed Mrs Turner by pouring the tea into the bowl of sugar. She did this conscientiously, the same way she put salt on her ice-cream.

  ‘That can’t taste very nice, Willa?’ one of the carers suggested. But Willa merely gave a disdainful look. She often complained about another resident with bad bronchitis who had a cough like cellophane being crushed. Willa would wince and say to me later: ‘That woman smashes me with that noise. Right near my food.’

  ‘I know it’s hard to bear; shall I ask for you to be given another table?’

  ‘No! They’re worse, some of the others. They use those big metal things.’

  And she made a deliberat
ely clumsy movement of arms and legs.

  ‘Yes, walking frames. Aren’t you lucky you don’t have to use one?’

  ‘Hoh! They don’t need to use them.’

  ‘No, they’re just attention-seekers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s all right, Willa, love,’ I relented. ‘Let’s go into the garden.’

  I remember the theme parties of the eighties that Fiona embraced with utter enthusiasm. In one episode she was dressed as a sort of harpy vampire, with fangs and a fright wig, rouge that reached her temples and a toy creature that she’d fastened to the front of her chest and which appeared to be suckling at the breast.

  On the way to the party she was stopped by the police, tested and charged for drink driving.

  ‘Not charged with bad taste?’ I asked.

  In fact, she told me, she made a pretty convincing job of being the dignified older woman, but was booked just the same and had to hail a cab when they let her go, still resplendent in full fig.

  Ordinary little suburban street. What is her name again? Something to do with cigarettes. God, I’m whacked. If I were a smoker, I’d have one. I’ve taken my anti-depressant; now I need some anti-sadness. Up the anti!

  It is a nice big room, with all the soft surfaces you see in such places: plenty of clean towels piled up, a narrow couch thingy, aromatic bottles, lots of them, and a desk.

  She has a most businesslike manner about her. Sits me down, puts on her specs and asks me in an Irish voice what is the matter, though I’ve explained on the phone.

  ‘It’s my neck, on the left.’

  ‘Pain in the neck.’ She writes it down. ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Here.’ I point to the side of my neck, right up towards my hairline. ‘The GP says it’s the second cervical, is that the word?’

  For answer she looks at me, narrowing her eyes, extends her arm towards me, palm downwards and fingers stretched, like a bishop inviting you to kiss his ring.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask after a while.

  ‘I’m scanning you. It’s not your second cervical,’ she says, throwing ordinary medicine out the window, and now her eyes are closed. ‘It’s your second…third…and fourth.’ She writes this down, then folds her hands in her lap, addressing me. ‘You’re deficient in minerals, especially magnesium. You’ve got a gut problem, your digestion is poor.’

  ‘Well, not really…’

  ‘Can I look into your eyes?’

  I nod and she gets her little torch.

  ‘I don’t remember your name?’ I ask.

  She puts down the torch and gives me a big smile.

  ‘Peta.’

  ‘Your last name?’

  ‘Jackson. But you’ve got a strong constitution.’

  She takes up the consultation again. ‘Were you brought up on a farm?’ she continues.

  ‘No.’

  She looks deep into the other one.

  ‘Were your parents exposed to chemicals?’

  ‘No. Listen, Peta, I’m only here for the massage. To relax me.’

  ‘I’m not just a masseuse,’ she says. ‘I’m a fully qualified homeopath. You have to look at the whole body. But we’ll do the massage in a minute, don’t worry. Take this in your right hand.’ She gives me a bottle of pills to hold, then dangles a crystal on a string in front of me. I glance at the bottle and put it down.

  ‘Hold it!’ she orders.

  I snatch it up again, assuming a courtroom posture.

  ‘They are what you need for your deficiencies,’ she says, then goes into a monologue on endorphins and how they work, about free radicals, anti-oxidants, the adrenal glands and the lymphatic system.

  ‘You see, Jo, I had my education and training in both Ireland and England, where me and my husband lived for fifteen years. But it’s here I did my homeopathy training.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say firmly, putting down the pills.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m not pressuring you. When does your neck hurt most?’

  ‘In the morning. I wake up with the pain every morning, as though I’m sleeping awkwardly. But I’ve tried several pillows, one pillow…’

  ‘You need these special pillows,’ she says, showing me a picture. ‘They’re $87 including GST. I can order you one if you like.’

  ‘What’s in them?’ I ask.

  Perchance the down from a thousand month-old white goslings?

  ‘Polyester/cotton, anti-allergy.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘All right, pet, hop up onto the couch.’

  ‘You see,’ she says, as I lie with just my pants on, face down, ‘it’s not a matter of what you put into your body. It’s what you absorb. You’re not absorbing.’

  ‘Uh huh. Right there, yes.’

  ‘I’m just pulling your pants down here to get to your buttocks.’ She kneads away at my bum. It’s very pleasant, though a bit too hard.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart. You see, Jo, I’ve done everything. I’m a registered nurse, I’ve worked as a midwife, in palliative care, in emergency theatre. But conventional nursing is not for me any more.’

  She moves up and down my back. Really, she is very good.

  ‘I do reiki, too,’ she says. And flicks her fingers off my skin, exorcist-like, ridding me of evil karma.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Have you got a partner?’ she asks.

  ‘No. That’s the spot, right there.’

  ‘Sometimes, you know,’ she says, fishing, ‘if people are left on their own they miss the old relationship more than they know. They suffer from touch deprivation. We all need it, you know, all animals do.’

  ‘Mm.’

  It’s years since I’ve been touched by a woman. The night of bliss with my young man—and how long ago was that?—doesn’t count because, what with his youthful ways and gender, it wasn’t so much touching as thrust and parry. That’s why I am here. She can do all the theorising she wants. But I know what I’m deprived of, and it isn’t lust-induced; it is a pair of female hands, and even a clinical situation will do.

  ‘I went into St John of God’s hospital last week with a friend to visit her husband who is terminally ill. Jo, I was appalled at the treatment.’ Peta is panting with the exertion and thinking of her friend.

  ‘The young nurse, university-trained—and we all know you can’t learn nursing at university—just said: “Oh well, I can’t give him any more morphine till Doctor comes.” But Jo, he wasn’t even comfortable. So I turned him over a bit and massaged his feet gently. I was appalled.’ Uphold, she pronounces it.

  On she prattles. What a talker. She is about to go on a home visit, to treat a young man with diabetes. I give little grunts every now and then.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she thinks to ask.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘You should write your problems down, you know. Sometimes that helps. Don’t bottle them up. I have a pal, me and her talk every day on the phone. We tell each other all the trivia. You know?’

  ‘Yes, I do know. One needs a confidante.’

  ‘Yes, but not just a confidante. You need someone you can talk about spiritual things with.’

  When she is finished, she takes great care to instruct me on how to breathe before I get up, then how to get up and sit for a minute.

  Once dressed, I pay her and go to shake her hand. ‘You’ve done me a lot of good.’

  She holds out her arms. ‘No one gets out of here without a hug. You look much better! How do you feel now? You were a bit fearful, weren’t you.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I laugh, leaving.

  I want to start reading this new book; the anticipation is delicious. Thinking about starting it creates a little glow of happiness in my chest. I will build a log fire tonight, put the feet up on the sofa and acquaint myself with this new friend, this writer. But the daily visit must come first.

  ‘Have you sunk into your new house?’

  ‘Yes, I’v
e settled in.’

  She’s speaking well today.

  ‘How’s your little guardian?’ And Willa is smiling her greyeyed smile, asking a wonderfully phrased question.

  ‘Good-oh. I gave her a bath yesterday. She had a few fleas.’

  ‘I hope you remember to flash the stuff.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I always squirt her food. With the heartworm syrup.’

  ‘I hate it here,’ she says, one week later, without warning. It is said without heat, with a dreamy air, in fact. Then she repeats it in a Scots accent, driving the point home. This time I have brought the dog to visit her.

  ‘Lifewel soddie.’ She fondles Juno’s head. Was this Gaelic? Would I have to learn a new code to add to two foreign languages, shorthand and Unispeak, all mastered well enough but with enormous effort?

  ‘Wee loddie?’ I try for size.

  ‘Eh?’ Willa might have been staring at a lunatic.

  ‘Wee lassie. She’s a girl.’

  ‘WHO?’

  ‘My dog,’ I say feebly.

  Willa’s mouth is twitching and it’s as though she too is recalling our history of crossed signals. Whenever I was abroad, our letters were peppered with rigmarole, accusations and denial of unanswered questions. But now it was worse. And it wasn’t funny any more. Well, it was, a bit.

  ‘Help yourself to these…bulbs, love.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, taking a large black grape.

  I draw her attention to the stocks.

  ‘Smell them, Willa,’ I say. ‘You used to grow these outside your bedroom window.’

  She has no sense of smell, however, and doesn’t notice their beauty any more. The penumbra she’s gradually becoming enveloped in excludes scent. I think of the dozens of great smells there are in the world.