Homemaking for the Down-At-Heart. Finuala Dowling

ion>

      

      FINUALA DOWLING

      Homemaking

      for the

      Down-at-Heart

      KWELA BOOKS

      For my mother, Eve Dowling (1921-2010), known to her radio fans as Eve van der Byl, homemaker par excellence.

OCTOBER 2006

      Margot stood beside the bed and looked down at her pillow. She was back – oh glory, she was back at the mattress. Time really did pass. It lifted heavy events and moved them away: a kind of temporal soil creep.

      Curtis was asleep. He’d folded the blanket so that it covered her side but not his – he needed only a sheet. She still felt astonished by his considerateness. She’d thought all men would turn out to be Leroy eventually. Margot lifted the bedclothes as quietly as she could. Even so, Curtis was immediately awake, reaching for his knife. He saw her and relaxed. Although the room was dark, she knew exactly the expression of self-deprecation on his face, the look that said: Forgive me, you know I am a fool.

      “Did you have a good show?” he asked as he eased back onto the pillow.

      “The usual,” she whispered. “The ones who don’t love me always phone first. One guy suggested that I kill myself on air.”

      “I’d like to kill him, the bastard,” murmured Curtis. He held her till she was warm, then reluctantly let her go.

      She curled up, desperate to hook her sleep onto this last hour of darkness. But the night’s programme insisted on replaying itself in her head. Why had she been so ungracious to her first callers? Why did she stoop to their level? I will if you will – that would come back to her as surely as acid reflux. Why didn’t she take the whole thing slower, easier; trust that Truman and the others would eventually phone in with something comical, absurd or philosophically acute? She was supposed to know how to broadcast, but in truth she felt quite unrelated to each successful programme. The duds, on the other hand, were unquestionably her spawn.

      Stop talking about yourself. Why not kill yourself on air? All she’d asked was what they thought it was all about, life. Why do we carry on? It was a valid question. Are we here merely as cheerleaders for our children? Pretending to our sons and daughters that their lives will turn out to be meaningful and satisfying, when in fact they’ll end up wishing their lives away in unrewarding jobs. And then, just when they have some modicum of success, they’ll be obliged to care for us, their parents, now in our dotage and needing our nappies changed, and there will be yet more wishing away of time.

      Of course the people who phoned in did not agree. They thought it a privilege to care for their sick and their dying. Daughters looked after their mothers for years and then, when their mothers finally died, their mothers-in-law. They felt bleak, yes, but also righteous.

      Driving home from New Century Media on the deserted freeway she’d thought about how – perhaps not in the mansions on the mountain slopes, but down on the vast flats, in the suburbs that clung to the railway line – every second, third or fourth home housed an invalid of some kind. These were modern-day monasteries, with soft-footed carers who sluiced out potties, puréed food and turned the bedridden at appointed hours.

      Even Truman, her stalwart, had his father living with him, or rather dying with him – it was bowel cancer, he’d told her tonight. Only dagga helped, said Truman, “and I’m not talking about the patient.”

      She’d thought about what waited for her at home. Even at that pre-dawn hour, her mother might be awake, wandering about the house, seeking the type of care Margot’s callers gave so selflessly. She could not do it. Margot did not have a vocation, and she lacked empathy. If only she could have her old self back, the one who tiptoed namelessly down sloping paths between beach grass, hating no one. Surely she’d had a self like that once? She didn’t want to be this full of spit, hiss and hit. From tomorrow (or rather, later today), she would practise being nice to people; she would speak in the elided language of obituaries. Lovely, she would be lovely.

      In the tall, narrow house, pain woke Zoe. It lodged in her hip and shot down her left leg. Bella licked the old woman’s hand sympathetically as she fumbled for the light switch and struggled out of bed. Among the cluttered objects on her bedside table – photographs of Pia and Margot, jars of pills she couldn’t open, her reading glasses – was a silver bell with a wooden handle. She did not know why it was there. She took small steps that propelled her unsteadily towards the door. At least there was not a vast surface area to cover before she reached something she could clasp for support. This bedroom was smaller than the one she’d had before, closer to the bathroom. But it wasn’t the bathroom that she needed; she’d already used her potty. With her palms against the walls, Zoe made her way up to the top landing, past the closed doors of her daughter’s and granddaughter’s bedrooms and into the enclosed balcony that served as TV room and general lookout. Mr Morland was asleep in his La-Z-Boy, an empty bottle of beer and his failed Lotto numbers beside him.

      Zoe stood staring over Mr Morland until he started awake. “I’m looking for a box of matches,” she said.

      “I don’t think so,” said Mr Morland. “Probably something else. Tissues? A blanket?”

      Zoe thought as hard as she could. The thing she wanted was a picture, but the matching word had gone away behind a hedgerow. The vessels in her brain were jammed with backed-up traffic. Some of the highways were narrowed with orange cones; other roads had become sinkholes, and no traffic could pass. But her mind was not easily defeated. It had marshals – disaster-management officers in high-visibility bibs – who redirected Zoe’s thought processes down little-known back roads, scenic detours with backdrops painted by Escher or Dali. These byways took her exhilaratingly close to her destination.

      “It is a little communion wafer that takes my leg away.”

      “Ah,” said Mr Morland. “Disprin.”

      “I could take a lot now and kill myself.”

      “I’ll give you one,” said Mr Morland.

      “Will that do the trick?”

      “Maybe,” said Mr Morland. “Just wait here while I fetch it.”

      He settled her into his La-Z-Boy and covered her with his blanket.

      Mr Morland stared into the bathroom cabinet. He could see people milling about on the other side of a river. They seemed to know Zoe and be ready for her. One of the cohort looked like his own mother. She beckoned Zoe, but then dropped her arm as if she accepted that her old friend was not coming immediately.

      He brought Zoe a painkiller.

      “You’re very kind – who are you?” asked Zoe, as Mr Morland handed her a plastic cup.

      “I’m Percy. Do you remember, your friend Esther’s boy?”

      “Ah. I inherited you. But your name is actually Mr Morland.”

      “Yes, you call me that.”

      “Esther used to wonder why you never married. Do you bat for the other side?”

      “No way! I’d like to marry. Maybe a Chinese girl.”

      He replaced the CD in his player with Tibetan meditation music and pressed play. Zoe closed her eyes. When she was asleep, he lifted her up and carried her back to her own bed. He was a burly man, and used to this pietà in reverse.

      Mr Morland was hungry now. Whenever he came back to his body after an encounter with the spirits, he needed fuel. He padded downstairs to the kitchen, took a wad of bread slices and spread them with butter. He stood in front of the open fridge door for a moment before locating his polony roll. Some with thickly cut polony and some with Marmite. The Marmite jar was down to its last eighth. Mr Morland preferred the look and taste of things in a newly opened jar. He found the new one in the grocery cupboard, unscrewed its lid and stuck his buttery knife into the glossy paste. He was never quite sure what to do with his knife afterwards, so he placed it gently on a clean tea towel that lay folded on the kitchen table.

      He liked the way the kitchen table looked now that