Coda (14 page)

He couldn't do that to Kathleen.

Or could he?

Wouldn't it, in the
long run, he tried lying to himself, be better for everyone but mainly for her?

I have always wondered
, she had said to Daisy,
why the power of the fist has always laid down moral and aesthetic codes, to say nothing of the rules for everyday living
. (I'll beat dat ole sin outa you!)

My
, Daisy had said,
we are all high and intellectual today, aren't we? Remember you're talking to a beat-ee!

They had been sitting in the Botanic Gardens, their old legs tottered to a stop by one of the embankment seats overlooking the river. Two hundred yards away an elderly man was being mugged by three youths in windcheaters.

It's the boys
, Daisy had said.
The chaps. They assume muscle power means brain power, poor loves, and whether it does or not they make the rules
. She had begun humming.
Ferally, ferally, shall I live now, under the dole cheque that hangs from the bough
. Kathleen started to giggle.
I'm a happy burden
, Daisy said.

But not to be a burden was what Kathleen wanted.

Drop me
,
she had ordered Brain a few days later,
at the airport
. And then there had been that
you don't have to go
nonsense that drove her mad and went on for at least two limp minutes—five minutes being a very long time—and Brain had agreed while she explained that she wanted to see if the highway had gone through her living room yet.

Will you be okay, then?
he had asked in the terminal, his face concerned and too overtly relieved at the same time. She looked so small.
Will you? Will you be staying with Sham if anything goes wrong with the house?

God forbid!
she had said and they giggled guiltily together in the old way that had always made motherhood the very best thing.

‘I'll let you know as soon as I get in,' she said firmly. ‘I'll ring, dear.'

He feared what his sister might be planning, wasn't brave enough to face up to it, couldn't bear to have the ball, this grandma ball, bounce back into his court.

‘Don't wait,' she said. ‘I have to pee. Urgently.'

‘Well, you know what gate then?' He checked her boarding pass and watched her head for Ladies. Her luggage had already been checked in.

‘Okay Mum,' he said, running after her.
‘Okay. If you're sure. We've got a big dinner party coming tonight. I'd better get back.'

But he waited until she returned from the washroom and saw her through the security gate into the passenger lounge.

‘Hey!' he called after her. ‘Hey! Take care.'

The cab dropped her outside the house. It looked the same. It looked different. Perhaps fear, that emotional spousing of her and home, was reaching an apex of rejection. On either side.

The veranda stretched its shade above the steps. Creepers choking uprights and coiling about finials dripped flowers onto a lawn overgrown from her absence and filled with weeds. Yet hollowness fell from the air.

To her probing key the front door creaked open on a shocking emptiness of disturbed and resettled dust. She pressed a light switch but nothing happened, and fumbling her way down the shadowy hall she felt for other switches, each of which was snuffed.

Sunlight washed through the breakfast room windows at the back of the house. It
streamed over a void. Total. Tables, chairs, buffet had left only footprints on the linoleum. In the kitchen the space where the refrigerator had stood gaped its grimy outline. The stove had been wrenched from its cupboard fittings like an old tooth. Along the skirting board a cockroach moved disconsolately.

Shock therapy.

‘God,' Kathleen breathed. She could have been praying. ‘God God God.'

Dumping her bag on the floor and obliterating the cockroach, she went to her bedroom. Empty. The dining room. Empty. The living room. No cane loungers, leather easy chairs. No paraphernalia from the Pacific, its crystal blue now filled with the threat of storm. No television, mantel radio, clock. The telephone squatted on the floor, dead.

Room after room, empty. No beds, tables, chairs, pictures, mirrors, ornaments. Her mind played with the idea of crypts, of tombs. The built-in wardrobes were cleaned out except for two clothes hangers in one, huddling for comfort.

She wanted to cry but resentment was too strong to permit the slightest drip of moisture from her appalled eyes. Returning to the kitchen where not even a cup remained, curious, she turned on the tap over the sink but by the time
her cupping hand reached beneath, the rusty water had dribbled into silence. It was as she stared hopelessly through the window at Brutus's kennel, desolate beneath the poinciana trees at the bottom of the yard, that she heard the slamming of a car door out front and the stiletto sharp heels of someone full of business as they ran up the front steps and down the emptied hall. Shamrock's little pointed chin thrust into dusty sunlight.

They stared at each other in the emptied kitchen, mother, daughter. Kathleen subsided gracelessly and deliberately to the floor.

‘I can explain,' Shamrock proclaimed, in a voice heightened by the need for self-justification. She wore an ingratiating smile. ‘Mother, do get up.'

‘There's nowhere else to sit.'

‘Oh Mother,' Shamrock said, full of her own outraged protest, ‘Len and I …' She veered away and began on another tack. ‘You can't possibly cope here. You know you can't. Len did it for the best. We were thinking of you. Truly. In any case the Department of Main Roads will be moving in any day.' She tried a girlish giggle. ‘We had to beat those bulldozers, hadn't we?'

Kathleen refused to play descant to that insincere mirth. She thrust her legs out in an ungainly way. ‘Had we?'

‘Oh Mother! Now! Be realistic.'

Shamrock bent down and attempted to lift her mother. There was a moment of wrestling.

‘Don't do that!' Kathleen said sharply. ‘I am quite capable.' She heaved her body up, turned her back on her daughter and through the kitchen window saw neighbours on one side hanging out washing and on the other edging a car down the drive.

‘I see no evidence of that. Not round me.' She could hear her words too high for utterance, it seemed, circling in uttermost space like wind-hovers. Her mouth opened but only gabble emerged.

Shamrock was shocked. ‘Mother, please. Please don't be like that. I know what you're saying. But Len and I have booked you in to the most wonderful place. Look, we've been through all this. You know you can't manage.'

‘I manage
very well.'

‘Oh you don't. You know you don't. You'll love the place we're taking you to. Really. You weren't meant, oh I know it's a shock, to come here and see all this. My bloody car broke down and by the time the service man came it was too late to reach you at the airport. Please, Mother, it's for the best. We've found this wonderful place.'

‘What wonderful place?'

‘Let's show you.'

Her daughter
was insisting, persistent as always.

‘You've taken all the chairs,' Kathleen heard herself complain, voice querulous and thin. ‘There's nowhere to sit.'

‘Come on. Come on out to the car.' Shamrock's not-so-gentle hand began steering her mother towards the front veranda.

‘Don't touch me,' Kathleen said bitterly. ‘What wonderful place?'

She planted herself on the veranda steps in the dead weight of her own resentment and looked up at Shamrock's self-seeking face, the ungenerous mouth, the too quick, too perceptive eyes.

‘A retirement—no, don't be like that—a retirement village. Listen. Will you just listen! You have your own flat and you can eat in the communal dining room or not, just as you like. You can cook for yourself if you want. They'll even bring meals to your room. It's really very up to the minute.'

Kathleen spat out her comment. ‘Flat, care, coffin. It's a money-grubbing racket. Meals brought to your room! At what cost, I wonder. Communal dining. Oh God Almighty, Sham I like to choose the faces that confront me over the cereal. For heaven's sake, what have you done?'

‘Please,
please, don't be like this.' Shamrock eased her mother up again and was attempting to direct her to the car.

‘Where are all my clothes, my books?'

‘They're packed and waiting for you.'

‘Where?'

‘At Passing Downs.'

‘
Where?
'

Shamrock blushed.

‘
Passing Downs?
' Kathleen was savage with emphasis. ‘Oh my God! And the furniture? Where's the furniture?'

‘Do get into the car, Mother. I'm afraid we've sold that.'

‘Sold? How on earth did you manage that? And the house? What about my house?'

‘It's listed for sale. Well, actually, it's been sold already to the Department of Main Roads.'

Kathleen heard hoarse shouts struggle from her throat that was already clotted with years of resentment.

‘You can't do that. Legally you can't do that.'

Shamrock opened the car door, forcing her mother into the passenger seat, and raced furiously around to slam her own way in. The two women sat staring straight before them along the baking road. At last Shamrock dredged up words.

‘Don't
you remember? Oh Mother, don't you remember anything? You gave Len power of attorney. Can't you recall signing those papers he brought out just before you went north to stay with Brain? Please Mother, try to remember. You really did sign them when you heard what the DMR was about to do.'

‘Oh God.' Kathleen wept hopelessly. Her eyes and nose streamed and she wiped carelessly at her melting face with the sleeve of her worn cotton jacket. ‘Oh God. I don't want to leave. I don't want to.'

‘You've got no choice, Mum.'

‘Don't Mum me, Shamrock. You've got the empathy of a piranha. And what about Brutus? How will Brutus fit in with this elegant retirement privateer?' She began wrestling the car door open and stepped groggily onto the kerb.

‘Look Mother, get back in the car will you? For God's sake sit down at least.'

‘I don't want to sit. I want you to drive me to the kennels to pick up Brutus.'

Her daughter's lips snapped shut briefly on resentment, impatience, and now the blood pressure of rage. She clutched the steering wheel, fighting for control.

‘Just get in the car.'

‘Where's Brutus?'

Jaw clamped in its pretty stubborn lines,
tongue tensing on the horrible confession she would have to make, Shamrock flung open the car door once more and stalked her fury round the car.

‘There,' she said, half shoving her mother back into the Mercedes. She locked the door. ‘Now.' Neighbours in the next house had paused in their gardening and were moving closer to listen. One of them waved. Ignoring this, Shamrock stomped back to the driving seat and started the motor before her mother could make further desperate moves. The air conditioner worked busily at filtering Quelques Fleurs and the more pungent stench of selfishness and the car rapidly left Ascot behind.

‘I said where's Brutus?'

‘Len had him put down.' The young woman had decided on brutality in the maze of traffic.

‘What?'

‘There was nothing else for it.' She snapped on the car radio to a burst of metal rock. Her mother leaned over and snapped it off.

‘What do you mean nothing else? Oh God you obnoxious rotten pair. Oh Christ! How could you do this?' Kathleen turned her distraught face to observe her daughter's frozen profile and looked hard and long. ‘You know,' she said, ‘you're becoming quite ugly.'

The
dried-out heart dried out the eyes. There was nothing left to shed, neither tears nor hurt, only shock at betrayal so basic and so swift and unexpected, it was as if the body were stunned by electrodes. She would be excised from the world's grief. In this shabby, beautiful existence coincidences were the concomitants of chaos and she recalled with satisfaction Bridgie's story of Len and the secretary. Sham had allowed the wrong animal to be put down, she thought, and began to giggle at the admitted irony.

Muted, she allowed herself to be taken. The car was an enclosed loony bin with its dark tinted windows racing along the blistered tarmac of Brisbane streets, over bubbling asphalt transcriptions of hell pavements to some outer bayside suburb and the horror of gardened-to-death villas in their box-like, coffin-like rows. In the shade of newly planted shrubberies she would and did discover when they arrived, various old bodies slumped on plastic chairs or staggering on walking frames. There was no conversation. There was a mummified indifference, each remnant-being concerned solely with
its own privations, which it was desperate to prolong, and the suffering inflicted by corporately conceived comfort.

The silent scream.

In a foyer related more to a hotel chain than a caring system, a pretence of efficiency came with starched uniform and impeccable makeup.

‘They'll look after you here, Mum. You'll be right here. Len has shares in the place.'

What a foolish child she had bred, Kathleen decided, hearing those idiot Judas words.

With elaborate modulation, she said to the receptionist, alert over a poised ballpoint and admission form, ‘I have no intention of staying in this place.'

‘Come now, Mrs Hackendorf,' the receptionist said, all smiles and warmth, ‘just let us show you to your room. I'm sure when you see it you'll change your mind.'

‘You're wearing too much mascara. No.'

‘Really, Mrs Hackendorf!' The receptionist was used to dealing with addle-heads.

‘But Mother,' Shamrock hissed, dutiful daughter, ‘your clothes, everything, they're all set up here.'

‘Do you take dogs?' Kathleen asked, leaning towards the receptionist.