The Feel of Steel (19 page)

Into Thin Air

O
ur mother had been living in the nursing home for several months before we noticed that stuff was going missing.

First, the lavender mohair rug we gave her when she turned eighty. In the birthday photo the family clusters round the blank-faced ghost in the wheelchair, with the pretty rug displayed across her knees. Before long we were saying to each other, ‘Anyone seen the mohair rug?' One carer thought she might have seen it in the laundry, but a search yielded nothing. The rug had dematerialised. Mum's dementia, our panic and guilt and sorrow, crowded it out of our thoughts.

On a craft stall I bought her a new one, crocheted, with an unusual dark red border. I unwrapped it in front of her. She stared numbly past it. I stashed it in her cupboard and rushed back to work: I'd name-tag it
tomorrow. Famous last words. Within twenty-four hours that rug was gone. No label? No leg to stand on.

Who'd think of labelling spectacles? She only took them off to sleep. But she'd been stumbling around in a foreign pair of hideous, huge, thumb-smeared eighties bifocals for days before anybody noticed. Her own glasses – small, elegant, gold-rimmed? Gone with the wind. No owner was ever found for the ugly ones. Dad had a new pair made. Angrily he sticky-labelled their side-piece. That was the day a nurse asked him if Mum's false teeth were labelled. Then somebody knocked off her lambswool slippers, for God's sake – the only things her swollen feet would fit into. But always the intensifying trauma of Alzheimer's – her stupefied bewilderment, her hallucinations and her sobbing, paranoid rages – made us feel trivial for caring about these indignities.

Then one day my friend Penny told me that her mother had recently died. ‘She was demented,' she said. ‘We'd had to put her in a nursing home.' She named the institution.

‘That's where
my
Mum is,' I said. I took a breath, eager to compare notes on the variable nursing care, the fast turn-over of regular staff, the stream of agency fill-ins – but Penny turned to me, suddenly hot-faced, and blurted out: ‘Watch the jewellery!'

It had started small – a birthday present, left by Penny
for her sister on a high shelf of their mother's cupboard. Gone. When they reported it, the floor supervisor said that theft was ‘in the industry', and that worse things had happened – for example, an old lady on the same floor as Penny's mother had had a valuable ring replaced on her finger by a cheap substitute, which no one, least of all the suffering old woman, had noticed for some time.

Should they have taken this as a warning? ‘But my mother's rings,' said Penny, ‘were part of who she was. She loved them. It was unthinkable for us to take them off her.'

Two months later the old lady died in the nursing home. ‘Sitting by her body,' said Penny, ‘I thought I should take her rings off. I noticed that her sapphire engagement ring was out of shape at the back, and that it was yellow gold instead of white. But I was vague with grief – I thought, Perhaps it's just worn. Later, when we were putting her wedding ring back on her finger, I looked at the sapphire one properly. It wasn't her ring. It was a fake.

‘It had an oblong piece of blue glass and little chippy bits like diamonds. It wasn't a hasty job. Someone had time to do it properly – to have a really close look at the ring, and then to search for a replacement similar enough so that at a quick glance you wouldn't have noticed.

‘The most contemptible part is that it must have been someone who was pretending to care for her. Mum was confused, but she was never hopelessly irrational. They would have had to trick her – to say, “Let me wash them for you.” '

Penny told the supervisor that she was going to the police. The supervisor said that after the other old lady's ring was stolen, the police had fruitlessly interviewed all the staff. She declared that it was definitely not anyone on the inside.

‘It's drug addicts,' she stated. ‘They work in gangs.'

Junkies?
Organised?
Oh please. Penny almost laughed. ‘That defies belief.'

‘Well, you're welcome to take whatever measures you think necessary,' said the supervisor, ‘but it's no one on
my
staff.'

Penny hasn't been to the police yet. Why? ‘I don't know. It's just the unbearableness of it.'

I called Dad at his place. ‘Where are Mum's rings?'

‘In the strong box here. Why?'

‘Oh . . . just checking.'

I couldn't bring myself to tell him. I didn't want to see the disgust on his face. My parents have always taken a sceptical view of human motivation. This is a story that would richly vindicate, once again, their suspicions about the ways of the world. The only thing I'm grateful for, ironically, is that Mum's already too far gone to know.

Baby Goes to the Movies

S
o the baby's father will be running a Groovathon up at the snow? But of
course
the baby's mother can still go to the opening night of the Melbourne Film Festival! Of course the nanna will babysit! Where else is the meaning, the joy of her life? And hey – didn't she bring up the baby's mother
with her own bare hands
, back in seventies Fitzroy when people slung their kids on the back of their pushbikes and zoomed away? Leave it to nanna! It'll be a breeze! The baby's mother can just express some milk, put on a wispy little dress and coat, pick up her friend and go!

The nanna arrives on the night with a journalist friend from Sydney, now an honorary auntie, in tow. Ah, look, the gorgeous little baby. How often does she have a feed? What? Which movie is opening the festival? It's not one of those bloody great four-hour extravaganzas, is it? You
mean this will be the baby's very first bottle feed? Is that the milk? That tiny little packet? Shouldn't it be tipped into a bottle right now? What was that screech in the bathroom? Is that milk, on the tiles behind the basin?

Brusque change of plan: the babysitters have to come along. Four women cram into the car with the baby and speed into the city. The baby starts to grizzle: the auntie furtively shoves a knuckle into her mouth. By Bourke Street, she's asleep.

In front of the cinema a limo has just pulled up at the roped-off red carpet. The onlookers include a tall, wolfish junkie in rags and beanie. His knees keep sagging and his eyelids sliding shut: only his curiosity about the stars in the limo is keeping him upright. The women push past him and rush up the stairs to the lobby, where they establish a beach-head against a wall. The baby sleeps in her capsule on the floor. Casting many a backward glance, the baby's mother and her friend disappear into the throng.

No public demeanour has so far been established for women in the position of the nanna and the honorary auntie. How are the mighty fallen! Critics who have kicked major butt in national publications, they now sit anonymous on the couch with their hands folded in their laps, waiting anxiously to be useful. They try to salvage some status by mocking in low tones the outfits of the passing festival-goers. The lobby clears fast. Now there's nobody out here, on the hectares of hideous carpet, but the sleeping baby and her two daggy bodyguards.

And the baby wakes up. She takes a look around the
vast empty lobby, opens her mouth wide and begins to scream, her pink tongue as curved and rigid as a spoon. The auntie inserts the knuckle. The nanna, suddenly amateur, dithers with the cold bottle.

Then out of the lollyshop and the bar pours a line of very young Village workers in name-tags. They head straight for the yelling baby and stand around her in a respectful curve, leaning forward from the waist. The boy behind the espresso machine runs up with a metal jug of hot water. In a flurry of collective activity, her guardians warm the milk and get some of it into her. She gulps crossly, then spits out the teat. The nanna takes her wet nappy off and she lies there on her back, bare-bummed and cheerful, kicking her legs and staring. The staff contemplate her in silence.

‘She's pretty cute,' says one of the boys. ‘Whose is she?'

‘I'm going to have kids,' says another boy, ‘definitely.'

‘If it wasn't for the pain,' says a girl, ‘I'd have a hundred.'

‘I have to finish my criminology degree first,' says a second girl.

‘Are you going to tell her when she grows up,' asks a third, ‘that she once lay in the Village lobby with no pants on?'

Two hours later, when the cinema door bursts open and the baby's mother rushes out with arms extended, the nanna and the auntie estimate that maybe twenty minutes have passed. All the way up Bourke Street to the carpark at 11 p.m., the baby lies alert in her capsule, her eyes glistening under the neon.

The ragged junkie from the limo crowd is leaning against a rubbish bin outside the video arcade. He sees them coming and steps forward.

‘C'n Oi've a look?'

The baby's mother is startled, but they pause.

The junkie bends his basilisk stare into the capsule, feasts his eyes, then sighs, and with a tormented smile goes ‘Aaaaaaaahh!'