The Seamstress Read online

  I wonder what Mary is doing right now. No time to do more than give her a passing thought. No energy, either. My walks are fewer. All thought is going to Willa.

  A friend called Rita, my age, wants to visit Willa with me. Perhaps to show solidarity, I have told her about the place; she knows what’s happening but wishes to be there for me, as people now say.

  It is a misjudged act of kindness and I might have known better than to take her. More than anything, I believe it’s the smell that hits you as you enter.

  She visibly wrinkles her nose as soon as we go through the double set of security doors where you have to ring a bell and wait. More than irritation, I feel almost angry. This woman has had children; isn’t she familiar with bodily functions and the inevitable malodorous atmosphere afterwards? People here are not in complete control.

  Then Willa appears, looking more or less normal, wandering through the common room as residents do in such places. She and Rita come face to face and Willa doesn’t recognise her, of course. I have forewarned Rita of this. She holds out her hand to shake; Willa looks at her hand, perplexed, then Rita embraces her, which is even more puzzling to Willa. She hasn’t been interested in hugs for a long time. I have learned not to interfere, explain. I certainly do not apologise for anything.

  ‘How are you, Willa?’ says Rita.

  Willa smiles and says in a worried sort of way, ‘They don’t bring trees into the cellar without a face cloth and the wee rogue lowers it…’ She clearly has several scenarios in mind and as usual these days has insurmountable obstacles to be overcome.

  ‘That’s all right, Mum, dear,’ I say, ‘we’ll help you figure it out. It won’t take long, either.’

  Willa’s look tells me she’ll keep me to my word on this. Rita is fidgeting, looking around for escape. The lady who likes to sing and has a super-high soprano scales up to a high E for Sì, mi chiamano Mimi!—magnificent, ear-splitting sounds.

  ‘Hello, Glenys,’ I mouth—no one could have heard me. ‘You’re in good form.’

  Glenys smiles at me, chuffed at the effect. She has decided this week not to wear her teeth any more. The staff don’t insist on it.

  ‘Jo,’ says Rita, ‘I think I’ll just go out for a cigarette.’

  We have to find someone to let her out. It isn’t always easy to do, and after all we have only been here five minutes. Coward. I put a good face on it but vow not to take anyone to see Willa again. I want complete acceptance of my mother and of the hostel and its inmates, without any nose twitching and looking away, and without any need for a drag on cigarettes. It isn’t that bad here. But perhaps it is.

  There’s no getting out of the way of smells. Luckily they’re often pleasurable, but those that aren’t assail you in daily life and stay in your head to be recalled, importunately. I remember the smell outside a local pub. When I was seven I sat in a car—my father’s, I suppose—outside the Beechboro Arms, waiting for a glass of lemonade, which I hated, brought to me by a well-meaning ‘uncle’.

  ‘Say hello to Uncle Sam, Jo,’ said Ben. ‘Give him a kiss.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to kiss anyone she doesn’t want to,’ said Willa, with such promptness and conviction that even the brave stepped back.

  This staying outside hotels in cars didn’t happen often, because, after all, we lived just two doors down from Dad’s favourite watering hole. But what was disturbing to a child’s nose was that smell. And not just the smell of the pub, with its hops, its male I-don’t-know-what rough trade nature—no, not that. It was afterwards, when we went home, and Willa was—how would you say?—skittish when she put me to bed. Not her usual serious way or quietly humorous, but silly, for she had decided not to hold out but to go to the pub with Ben, striving for a bit of household peace. And I did not like the smell of beer on her breath.

  ‘Today one of them brought me in a sort of long flat thing, and when I looked at it I, I don’t know, I thought it was Tom but, then she put the whatsisname along and I thought Oh God, how do I get rid of it but they slid it on with the, you know, thing for the, what I get to give me the other one with her, you know, but I just kept thinking God, how do I get rid of this but it didn’t matter, really.’

  ‘Was it a tray of food?’ I say.

  ‘Mm, well, that sort of thing.’

  I nod, as much at a loss as she is to sort it out. I do see, though, as she does, that she has to wait it out, see it through, be of brave heart. This is one illness she’ll not recover from. But she’ll get to the end of it with stoicism and patience, making conversation the best way she can, out of a scrambled mess.

  I want to gather her in my arms but we’ve gone beyond that. She’s living in a different realm now. I want her back. I want my mother back. No, I want her to go. But she’s not ready yet.

  ‘Will you walk me to the door, Willa?’

  ‘Of course. I always do.’

  ‘Yes, you do. It’s time for your evening meal.’

  We walk along the carpeted hall.

  ‘What’s today?’ she asks.

  ‘Thursday. I’ll see you again Saturday; we’ll have lunch together.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow.’

  ‘What will that be?’

  ‘Saturday. I’ll pick you up.’

  ‘What’s today?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  She looks pleased, finally.

  ‘Right.’ She lets me kiss her cheek.

  ‘See you then, love,’ I say.

  She sees a flicker of misery cross my features before I smile.

  ‘Is there something I can do for you?’ she asks, kindly.

  I shake my head. ‘No, it’s my turn now.’

  ‘See you Saturday,’ she instructs me.

  My head gives quick, cheery little nods.

  By the front gate I can still see her in the common room. I wave to her but she doesn’t realise this.

  I can barely see as I walk away.

  I remember quiet, New Year’s Eve parties with just Willa, Fiona and me, sitting on the floor, seeing in the New Year together with a bottle of Scotch, talking, talking.

  Peta’s house is in a neat part of town and it somehow doesn’t fit with her. It has a blank and boring facade, the kind of house where people ‘keep to themselves’. Perhaps wild things are going on at the back but the front is giving nothing away.

  She lifts my head from behind and goes to town on it. I give myself up to the strong fingers, like it so much I have to make conversation, appearing nonchalant.

  ‘They’re painting that establishment across the road a sombre colour,’ I say.

  ‘You know what it is?’ says Peta. ‘It’s going to be a funeral parlour.’

  She is exasperated. Grabs some more oil and gets some of it down my face.

  ‘Urgh, steady on.’

  ‘Sorry, darlin’.’

  ‘A funeral parlour, hm?’

  ‘Disgosting, isn’t it? In a residential neighbourhood like this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s very bad feng shui for one thing.’

  Does no one speak normally any more?

  ‘And how would you like to have that across the way from you?’

  I thought about it a bit, then said: ‘I wouldn’t give a damn. At least it would be quiet; that’s all I crave.’

  My own place is in the inner city and there are second-hand bookshops, Barbarella’s, the Vincent de Paul. The prostitutes are not so prominent now. But there is in fact a funeral parlour around the corner.

  ‘What’s so bad about the dead?’ I want to know. I know people who are said to be alive but who walk around, some of them, with dragging feet, they might as well have snuffed it. And one acquaintance with eyes so dull her background is evidently painful to contemplate.

  We do exercises together, Peta and I. For the neck and back, for releasing stress. She’s all right. All contribu
tions of care are gratefully accepted.

  As I come through my favourite copse, paperbark that has a smell of cinnamon, I say to my dog, ‘Ouf, for goodness sake,’ and she seems to agree, urinating thoughtfully, then sitting by me in her companionable way. A young woman nearby is walking along, talking to herself, a sight one used to refer to as looniness or a kangaroo missing in the back paddock. But she’s making private utterances into thin air, it seems, on her mobile phone—a commonplace phenomenon now.

  They’re not always prosaic conversations, either, like the people in supermarket aisles checking with their partner at home that they’re getting the right cornflakes. A woman at the pet food section yesterday was giving grief counselling while taking down the Meaty-bites: ‘Look, you’ll get over it, it seems worse now because it’s fresh in your mind but as the weeks go by…’ And she replaced the packet for something else.

  I see my foreign friend—I think he’s Slav. He bails me up as usual to give me a bulletin on his unhappy life since his wife left him, taking the child. Whom he adores. I am sympathetic at each of these talks, and we stand on the street corner with tears in our eyes, with me (me!) giving him advice—my dog patiently sitting at my feet—on how to conduct yourself when love goes out of your life.

  Such a nice stamp of a fellow, Willa might have said, assigning full marks to good-looking people with healthy hair and correct manners. He has taken up running and looks quite fit. After all, he’d only be about, oh, thirty-five? It’s obvious he sees me as the Older Woman who is past preoccupations with lost sex.

  But I can feel the laughter in my own eyes that others respond to, can feel the quickening in the blood that still tells me I’m young, oh, yes. However, what you miss, once you’re alone again, is not so much the sex as the random, taken-for-granted caress, the confiding of daily inconsequential acts that seem so important at the time.

  He is utterly perplexed at his wife’s walking out on him. I want to tell him, though his English is perhaps not good enough yet, that it’s only when you free yourself of the longing, almost when you no longer care, that something unexpected comes your way. The perversity of fate, you could say.

  ‘And think of it like this, too,’ I suggest. ‘It’s better to be suffering than not to have any feeling at all in you. Imagine not caring whether you answer the telephone or not—not having a stake in any call whatsoever!’ He doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  I can’t tell him I’m unbearably sad myself. But then, I’m lucky in that I don’t have to bail up neighbours on street corners to tell them my woes.

  Where I live the sun goes down over the sea. People sit on seats or on rocks to watch it, even young people. Oh Christ, said the artist Donald Friend, not another perfect sunset. He must have been glutted with beauty. Isn’t what holds us in thrall for those few brief minutes not so much the beauty but the rapid loss of it? These are my thoughts as I try to absorb the news.

  Fiona died last night.

  There’s no point in telling Willa because she’ll say, ‘Who’s Fiona?’ And that will be almost unendurable.

  Fiona’s charter might have been: So much to enjoy, so little time. She never appeared busy, her gait was not particularly hurried. But she packed in three university degrees, a hypnosis course, brought up four children, went to too many parties, took too many of the wrong men to bed, played fast and loose with her health and only gave up smoking in her fifties. She died aged sixty-seven, with several projects on the go. Emily Dickinson’s poem applies:

  Because I could not stop for Death—

  He kindly stopped for me—

  It’s unimaginable that we’ll all have to carry on without her.

  I put on a black skirt, black and white top, eat quickly and leave the house. For once the car starts without being coaxed, so I get to the funeral parlour in good time. I can feel my face straining, eyes narrowing as I look for the others. Instead I find Richard, whom I nearly ignore, then catch myself. This is no time for ancient rancour. His face is set in sorrow as his burly frame approaches me. We are both weeping as we embrace.

  ‘They’ve booked the jazz band. Hope they turn up,’ I say, ever the worrier.

  Willa was below par, they told me. The doctor has been to see her.

  ‘He came in and prodded me on the heels and poked me in the lentils,’ says Willa, indicating her shoulders.

  ‘In the lentils, eh?’

  My saying it makes her laugh. We walk all round the pleasant corridors with the resident cat on the best chair, the pot plants, the bird in a cage, through the dining room, and stop in front of the glassed-in little garden of ferns, palms and rocks. There is a statue.

  ‘What do you think of the courtyard, Willa?’

  ‘Oh God, it’s hellish.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’ She’s always had better taste than I have.

  ‘No.’ A vigorous shake of the head.

  ‘Why not?’

  I am very curious after all about this matter of perception and how some people seem to have a gene for style, or class, whatever you want to call it.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She’s trying to figure it out. Why can’t she stand this pretty place, I wonder.

  ‘Is it too untidy for you?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  Searching, searching, sifting. Maybe she’s not even thinking of the courtyard any more.

  One visitor goes to see her mother at mealtimes only, and looks on it as helping to feed an old lady who is not her mother: ‘My mother was not like that,’ she says, disowning her. I’ve heard even stronger reaction: ‘That is not my mother!’ Melodramatic, and as though the woman in front of her is inanimate.

  The thing is, this diminished woman looks at me and smiles and she is my mother all right. She sits with me now and lets me hold her hand. I press it to my cheek. I suppose I wouldn’t feel this well of tenderness for her—or would I?—if she were ranting and incontinent. Perhaps this is still to come. One must be strong. What was it? The situation is hopeless; we must take the next step. Pablo Casals.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s been a madhouse around here. The girl who came in to see me this morning, a nice girl, had me down to where the place is, and when they go around there, you can’t sort of see how that one gets it going, because it’s all sort of a-tumble in the way they go. He’s always in the way for, only two or three types of, you know, handles in the best part of taking the pyte. But in any case you can’t get a hold of enough to join it, one way or the other, so I just think well, they’ll have to get on with it, even though she tries to bring it down.’

  ‘Were you trying to help someone?’

  ‘Yes, but the thing across the hook was not really long enough in the round, so there’s nothing to be done because it’s in the way of all the mess over the way, and I don’t like to say keep it for yourself over the whole width of it.’

  And she is looking at me.

  ‘Was it down in the dining room this happened?’

  ‘No, it was when I went with her.’

  ‘In the bus?’

  ‘No, after that.’

  ‘I see.’

  She is sitting, legs crossed, slender ankles swinging slightly, like a woman who has always known her worth. She is still her own self, in charge, by all appearances. And she’s clear-eyed and voluble. I search for a thread.

  ‘It’s so long,’ she continues, ‘since I’ve had anyone who belongs to me around.’

  ‘Me too,’ I offer. Irony passes her by. It seems we’re both lonely for each other.

  Family members and I, close friend, are in the black car behind the hearse. Fiona’s older sister Madge gives Fiona’s daughter Jill a lace handkerchief doused with smelling salts.

  ‘This will make you feel better, dear. Sniff it.’

  Jill takes a deep whiff. Her face turns puce, her eyeballs grow wet and bulbous and I’m looking at her and thinking of Madge having a supply of this stuff from Victorian En
gland on her. Gaby, Jill’s sister, who has a cold, splutters a bit and someone distractedly clucks with sympathy and calls it a graveyard cough. Everyone is thinking unsuitable thoughts, uttering wrong phrases. Looking past Jill’s bloated face, I regard the congregation, the crowd of three hundred: white people and black, men and women, straights and gays, doctors and plumbers and not a few criminals. Music fills the air and to the slow strains of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ they begin the send-off for Fiona, the sedate walk up to the chapel, the entire company linking arms as though about to swing their legs one across the other in high kicks, part of a chorus line. I say it, and we all start falling about with rolling guffaws in the mourning car, slapping our knees, tears streaming. The funeral directors, from their vantage point, turn shocked faces towards us. But Fiona would have laughed harder than anyone, holding her side, that way she had.

  Two weeks before she died, four of us were sitting in my lounge room, having pre-dinner drinks before a birthday celebration, and she was talking of one of her ‘clients’—one had to dignify every criminal and ruffian she saw as a client.

  ‘I’ve wanted to coin this phrase for years,’ she said, ‘but the listener needs to know a bit of French: “One man’s pain is another man’s pain.” It has often bothered me that as a psychologist I earn my living from a fellow mortal’s distress.’

  ‘But then,’ offered Gaby, ‘you need to know that bread equals money in the old hippy vernacular.’

  We decided that only a few people would get it.

  So many jokes we’ve had: dirty jokes and sick jokes that are no longer correct or funny. And the quarrels we’ve had: I found some of her indiscretions impossible to forget. But today when I called in to her house to see her granddaughter clearing up, I looked around at her books and pictures and, to the girl’s consternation, my face fell apart in a grimace of suffering. I thought: They’re packing up Fiona’s life and putting it away. I’d been counting on her being a permanent fixture. In my head, a chorus from somewhere slowly chants to the knell: Gone, gone, gone.