The Seamstress Read online

  I find her in the ablutions block. She is cleaning the spotless sink. I look in the glass on the wall, seeing our heads together, curly heads on small necks, and search for other likenesses. Mouths? Perhaps. Hers is less full-lipped but more turned up at the sides, more tolerant. Eyes? Not really. Hers are grey and laughing; mine are green, by comparison small, and sometimes merry, more like my father’s. A lot of my time these days is spent looking in the mirror, comparing my face with his and hers, trying to discover clues. His side of the family is safe, as far as this is concerned, while hers is definitely unsafe, grey eyes turning vague around sixty. I have the vertical crease between the eyes like his.

  ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ I chant.

  But Willa has now gone on to folding paper towels most methodically, placing one wet one on top of the other, then another.

  ‘Come outside for a walk in the garden with me?’

  ‘What garden?’ Willa hasn’t looked at me, so intent is she.

  ‘The one at the back, the only one.’

  She hesitates and looks at her reflection: ‘Do you want to come?’ she asks, smiling at herself with great courtesy.

  ‘Yes, she’ll come with us, we’ll go ahead first.’ And I take her arm, neatly blocking from view her other self.

  A., who always faithfully remembers birthdays—and our friendship is thankfully still intact—is waiting for us in the sunny garden and has bought me a birthday present from Willa. Unknown to me, A. has somehow got her to sign a card.

  To the my only, from Willa love wobbles its way down the length of the card.

  ‘How lovely, to my one and only. Thanks, Willa. And you, A. dear.’ And I give them both a peck, which Willa accepts with some uncertainty. She’s not entirely sure what’s going on here, and why I look so happy, perhaps.

  ‘Do you know how old I am?’

  ‘No, no idea.’

  ‘Oh, go on, try to guess.’

  ‘Guess?’ She tries out this word for size.

  ‘Yes, see if you can guess how old I am.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be about…oh…about…let me think…about seventy?’

  ‘Not that much. Closer to fifty.’

  And A. is smiling but looking grave, so that Willa detects something. She is slightly perplexed. I’m ashamed of pushing it, the age-guessing. She’s trying very hard as she sits there, winnowing her thoughts as she discards, sorts through the scrambled messages and unfinished impulses. There was a time when I hoped she would forget my misdemeanours, my occasional meanness, my being caught, in childhood, playing hospitals with the boy down the road. God, I wish she’d forget it all, I’d think.

  It is an evening for conversations. There are things we have to know. Only days have passed since the funeral and we are, all six of us, talking about Fiona in the past tense. In itself this is outrageous.

  ‘How did you know Mum?’ asks Jill.

  The young woman and her husband sit straight in their chairs like the polite Europeans they are.

  ‘We met at the conference in Melbourne,’ says the young woman. ‘Like your mother, I wanted to attend the paper on expert witness. We got talking at breakfast on the first day.’

  ‘She would have liked you,’ says Jill. ‘I can see the way she’d have described you. She’d have liked your accent.’

  ‘Yes? We hit it off immediately,’ says the young woman, the idiom sounding comical from her lips. ‘For the two days I knew her we had lots of fun; all the meals we spent together. We laughed at some of the stuffy people there.’

  It seems we can’t get enough information from this person: When exactly did she die? Was she at the hospital? Had she appeared ill? And all questions are answered in tandem, with a bonus titbit. This stranger with a vast supply of understanding and tact has been sent to give us solace.

  ‘She had a dream the night before she died. At breakfast on the last day she said to me: “I was walking through a green field with blossom trees all around and feeling utterly content. After a while the meadows gave way to brown earth and there were pebbles strewn along the way. Still further on, the pebbles turned to larger stones, until the going got so heavy, I had boulders on the path ahead of me. Then I came to a precipice. I looked over it and thought: I might go over this. What do you think of that?”’

  ‘Did she say all this to you in that conversational tone, as you just did?’ I want to know. Because it was unthinkable to me that Fiona should weigh up such a decision so calmly, even in a dream.

  ‘Yes. I replied that, not knowing her well, and being neither a Jungian nor a Freudian, I could only guess. But it seemed to me that her life had become too hard in some way and she was accepting an end to a journey.’

  Jealousy, unpleasant attribute, is not the least of it when I look at the stranger who has been the last confidante of someone whose impact on me I can’t even begin to gauge. Someone who exasperated me and infuriated me. Yet I can barely consider Fiona not being around for me to ask her point of view. We drink more coffee and sit there talking until very late, in Fiona’s large sitting room, warmed by the pot-belly stove.

  ‘I had a bad time of it last night.’ Willa is looking at me as if it was the last straw.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They gave me two of them, but I didn’t say it was after the thing you know at the time, and there it was sort of hollow-looking.’

  ‘Was it a couple of pills?’

  ‘Yes, the white things.’

  ‘White tablets?’ She nods her head, then looks serenely out the window as though the matter is settled. I’ve brought my little dog to play in the garden courtyard. Juno, outside, is single-mindedly tackling the knucklebone I’ve brought with us; her backside is tense with concentration. Willa looks on lovingly, if briefly, before something else tries to take her attention.

  ‘She’s always in a good mood, that one,’ I say, indicating the dog, as we make our way out of the room towards the garden.

  ‘Mm. She’s got the…wife…’

  ‘The life of Riley?’

  ‘The life of Riley.’

  The autumn sunshine is glimmering through the season’s splendid decay. It has a soothing effect. Mrs Watkins walks past briskly, handbag over her arm. She nods at us as she talks to herself and makes her way around the gazebo, along the lawn, down to the big tree and back again, through to the activities room, where she is handed a cup of tea. There they all are, visible from here: the frail proud and the frail endearing, the lovable and the vain and the once-humorous.

  I look at the new skirt, the one I bought her only three weeks ago. At the time she didn’t seem happy with it. It has been hacked with scissors.

  ‘Did you try to fix your hem?’

  ‘No, I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘It’s in ruins.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in disarray, it’s kaput, gone to hell in a handbasket.’

  It doesn’t matter, I think, I’m trying to amuse myself. Willa looks at me.

  ‘Oh, you silly girl,’ she says, in quite a fond way.

  ‘Would you like to see the spring flowers?’

  ‘Mm…’ She’s only slightly interested.

  ‘We could go for a drive to Kings Park?’ I wait. ‘Would that be nice?’

  She nods. ‘Anywhere,’ she says. I smile but don’t want to take it further because that would be colluding with her, and I can’t possibly admit that this isn’t the best place for her to be. Nevertheless, I keep rhyming it off for my own benefit: good food; pretty surroundings; kindly, compassionate people all around. To a rational person that is an ideal situation. But Willa is not a rational person, merely an independent and passionate one.

  When speech fails her, the expressive face gives clues. She flicks her eyes, to give a message. It’s often a sardonic look at her fellow-residents.

  ‘Mrs Jarvis is on the floor! Mrs Jarvis is on the floor!’

  The warning cry coming from a staff member is not so much alarm as a cal
l for practical help. Willa looks to me in surprise, then in amusement, as though we are at the movies. But this isn’t Laurel and Hardy; someone is getting from A to B by crawling instead of walking and this is taboo.

  ‘There were…boys here yesterday.’ Willa’s clear today.

  ‘Schoolboys?’

  ‘Not…that young.’

  ‘Were they nice?’

  ‘Yes, nice boys,’ she nods.

  These are two of the care-givers, aged about thirty-five. She is, with an abrupt change, looking at me with full knowledge.

  ‘What are you thinking, right this minute, Willa?’

  ‘I’m thinking…what a fool I am.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘For…letting myself…get this far along.’

  She has enough shafts of light to warrant my continued attention. She knows certain things, without having any understanding about them. Like all of us.

  This week the hose stopped working, the vegetable seedlings got eaten by birds and I had great difficulty fixing the locks I was installing on the windows. When these things used to go wrong I always rang Willa. She, with the insight of the born engineer, would advise and make right. Our talk now goes in any direction. I don’t mind how crazy our conversations are, as long as her face shows some kind of resolute plan, as she had before.

  Yesterday she had a fall. They think that’s what happened; like many things now it’s something of a mystery. Her nose is swollen like a great vegetable. Doctor says there is no concussion and Willa says her face is not sore. Seems she was found rubbing her face into the carpet. I sit down with her in a quiet corner.

  ‘You look like Karl Malden.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cop in The Streets of San Francisco.’

  Willa smiles, a wan little gesture.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, darling?’

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  ‘Of course, but look at you. Your poor nose looks a lot like a turnip. What happened?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You’re tired?’

  She sighs as she starts to pleat her skirt.

  ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies, Willa,’ I tell her. ‘Bette Davis said that.’

  Willa looks into infinity, across the length of her days.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ The question is a complete throwback to clarity, sanity.

  ‘You’ve got a serious memory problem,’ I say, wanting it to sound like Asian flu—not too grave, certainly not irreversible. Though it is. But Willa has already lost interest.

  It’s quite possible I’ll go down this path myself, considering her family. The sly monster may be lying in wait, inside my head, my blood, wherever it takes up residence: killer of brain cells, killer of people’s dignity, of motivation, inspiration, perception and response. It’s a killer, people say. So it is.

  I remember a party with an artistic theme where I went dressed as a tart—perhaps I thought I was some kind of artist’s model— with a black, tight miniskirt so short it could go no further, Diamond Lil net stockings, a red off-the-shoulder blouse, huge red lips, long black false eyelashes and eyeshadow. No one recognised me. A heterosexual woman told me in tones of wonder that I looked simply stunning and she was thinking of ‘turning’. Fiona, I remember, was outrageous plus, in a violet-coloured long dress and a bushman’s hat. She had bought a packet of tampons, dipped them in blue dye, attached them as corks to the hat and went as Picasso’s blue period.

  To visit her—and it’s every second day now—I walk along a pleasant garden path, ring the bell at the most ordinary door in the world and enter the realm of the demented.

  There’s the smell, some days worse than others. Mr Rossi has quietly gone over to the window area. Minding his own business, he solemnly takes out his cock and pees on to the dining-room floor. A carer sees this and scoots off for mop and bucket.

  There is my Willa with the white hair and the sweet expression, sitting at a table, looking as though she really has nothing to do with these people—the trace of an uppity look about her.

  ‘Oy, oy, oy,’ the lady beside her intones, rocking backwards and forwards.

  I catch Willa’s eye and whisper, ‘A Jewish lament?’

  Willa raises her eyebrows and wobbles her eyes, getting the drift. Though you can never be sure.

  Recently when I arrived she was again earnestly talking to her reflection in a window and nothing would budge her from this meeting. No, she was sorry but she couldn’t come with me because she had to give some advice to this person.

  Will the true Willa please come out of there? I wish to ask.

  Today she is in my world for at least a little while.

  ‘I’ve had some bad times lately,’ she says.

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Well, he was you know up there and I knew the things were about face…’

  ‘I see.’

  How much longer, I ask the wire fence as I light her cigarette, which she holds in steady fingers. We are tranquil.

  ‘Your hair is lovely,’ she says.

  A less tenacious mortal would have been quite gaga long before this.

  ‘Your hair is lovely.’ She is eyeing me.

  I look at her and can feel the full force of love on my face, am thinking of those neurons atrophying in their millions even as we sit there. Yet she is still managing to compose sentences.

  ‘Your hair’s nice,’ she laughs, ‘in fact, it’s lovely.’ She’s making a little gag, as if she’d just invented the word.

  ‘I think you said that before, doll.’ I place my hand on her knee and start to sing an old number, ‘I’ve Heard that Song Before’.

  And Willa pushes her shoulders forward, first one, then the other, keeping the rhythm. We’ve sung ourselves into a particularly good mood. She looks past me for a few minutes, searching, searching.

  ‘What are you thinking, Willa?’

  ‘Just looking and seeing which one I’ll go through.’

  It must be like being in a maze or a tunnel, looking for that exit, that glimpse of a clearer view.

  ‘I’ll go that way,’ she continues, ‘…you go the best way you can.’

  I nod. Her grasp of a situation has always been admirable; now, in her befuddlement, I find it formidable.

  It’s her birthday and I tell her how old she is. She looks astonished. As usual, I can’t resist the guessing game.

  ‘Do you know how old I am?’

  ‘About…ooh, you’re…about five?’

  ‘A bit more. Forty-nine.’

  ‘What!’

  I laugh outright and she joins in because she thinks I’m pulling her leg.

  Now. When precisely did I wake up and know that life was a battleground? It was into the fray each day, taking up the cudgels, arming myself against would-be oppressors, defending, and holding that line. Am I Joan of Arc in my suit of armour? Even housework has to be attacked, striking a blow.

  My job is certainly enemy territory. Conspiracies leading to a stab in the back, probably for me. The pimping, snitching idiocy of the place is wearing me out. Eighteenth-century Venice couldn’t have been more plot-ridden.

  But warfare is tiring. This is the lesson. Opposing everything, everyone, constantly, is a weakening experience. Whereas being for something is strengthening. It’s not so much Willa’s illness that is sapping my strength (though it’s helping) but my own combative nature. And the delusion of wanting. This is at the core of suffering.

  Let others live the way they must, advise the bald-headed nuns and monks. Try to see them with loving kindness. This is what the Buddha taught. The practice is hard. Theory has always been easier for me. But one step at a time. However, I’ve decided that enemies will have to wait. First I’ll be compassionate towards myself, then to my friends, then to strangers. I’m not geared for enemies yet.

  The techniques can be applied anywhere, the breathing into calm. In the park, where the grass has just been cut, a breeze brushes past
, soft as a feather. The couple coming towards us smile. Autumnal blessings, I murmur to my dog. She clinks along beside me on her lead, ever the optimist, feeling the harmony on this pink evening as she is now deaf.

  It’s been years and I’m tired from working, visiting Willa in the hostel across the way from my office, three days a week. I’ve told Rita not to come to the nursing home any more—a relief for us both, and Willa doesn’t notice.

  Medical seminars are to be scheduled by me on a regular basis, for a variety of diseases. Real diseases, that is, not the stuff of pharmaceutical hype, such as ‘premature’ balding or erectile dysfunction and other symptoms of simply growing older before you know it. The determination of pharmaceutical companies to strike fear into our hearts so that we’ll give them a lavish livelihood is for me only mildly offset by the knowledge that Willa has benefited to some degree from the drugs for psychosis that have restored, to some small extent, her former optimistic and tolerant personality.

  Here we are at departmental drinks and She is there, the object of my desire not so long ago, the unmistakable back of her. She starts to turn round and I pause, intending to look the other way, then decide to walk straight towards her. Someone has just told me I look terrific.

  She is smiling and even puts out a hand to half encircle me. Slightly perplexed, I greet her and wait, all calmness. No ego, no embarrassment, no offence at not hearing back from my last call.

  ‘How is your mother? I haven’t forgotten the dementia workshop,’ she says.

  The workshop, in which I had a personal interest, of course, as well as a work-related commitment, had almost not occurred because of her lack of response. Without saying as much, for this is the new me, unrighteous and tolerant, I tell her it can wait for another six months—other seminars are in place that will fulfil the same function, for the same audience.