The Memory Tree (36 page)

Careful—madness and murder could run in the family.

Better take some tissues. He’ll probably blubber all over you.

‘We only have one girl available at the moment,’ the madam told him with her over-enunciated vowels. (The Garden, as the punters called it, prided itself on its class.) ‘Take it or leave it.’ She stood with her hands on her hips, hoping he would leave it.

But he was a model client. Colleen found him strangely detached at first. After a few visits they became comfortable with one another. It was easy work. Zav’s needs were basic and he was kind and generous, treating her with a kind of solemn courtesy she found quaint and quite endearing.

‘Thank you very much, Colleen,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll see you next week, if that’s okay.’

When she left to get married, he gave her a coffee pot. She gave him Chrissie, the nicest of the new girls.

Sealie checked the kitchen calendar as though it might differ from her own. Yes. It was the fourteenth. She counted backwards and frowned. Her cycles were so regular. On the other hand, she was only a few days late. And they always took precautions. Well, more or less. She jumped guiltily as Zav came in from the garden, and saw what she was doing.

‘It’s alright. I know it’s your birthday on Saturday.’ Brenda had organised a small dinner party and helped him choose a gift. He looked at his sister. She didn’t look at all well—she was what Mrs Mac used to call peaky. He didn’t often notice things like that. The depressed can be very self-absorbed.

‘Are you okay, Little Sis?’

Tears sprang to her eyes at this rare moment of kindness. ‘I’m fine. Just a bit tired.’

‘Good-oh.’ Zav was glad that he was not obliged to enquire further.

Two days later, on the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, there was still no sign of her period. What if she
was
pregnant? She couldn’t have a baby now. Later, when Zav was settled maybe. She picked up the photo of me with my fairy wings. Poor Aunt Sealie. She felt the familiar prick of tears as she studied my face.

I stared back at her, unable to help. She put down the photo, feeling a twinge of pain, low in her abdomen. Was that it? She checked hurriedly. Nothing.

At Will and Brenda’s the next night, she was pleased when the men offered to do the dishes.

‘No work for the birthday girl or the cook,’ said Will, kissing his wife on the top of her head. ‘We’ll even make the coffee.’

‘What is it, Sealie?’ Brenda had noticed her friend’s abstracted air at dinner. ‘Is it Zav?’

Sealie began to sniffle. ‘It’s me. I think I’m pregnant.’

Brenda hugged her. ‘That’s wonderful! Have you told Scottie yet?’

‘Not till I know for sure. I feel—I don’t know what I feel. It’s the wrong time.’

‘Would it be a total disaster if you are pregnant? Things have a way of working out.’

‘It’s too soon after Grace.’

‘Ten years!’

‘There’s a million reasons.’

Brenda signalled to her husband who had poked his head in from the kitchen. ‘Give us a few minutes, Will.’ She turned back to her friend. ‘You can’t live your life for Zav. He’ll come round. It might even be good for him. And Scottie—he adores you.’

Sealie hastily wiped her eyes as Scottie came in with a tray. ‘Secret women’s business?’

‘Top secret.’

Ten days after her period was due, Sealie felt the dragging pain and knew that this was no false alarm. Her flow was heavy, even for a first day, and she rang work to say she wasn’t well. Zav fussed clumsily and she accepted a cup of tea before sending him away.

Sealie lay on her bed, relief and regret warring for ascendancy. It was perfectly natural to be relieved. She was nowhere near ready for such a commitment. Hadn’t she spent the last ten days praying for her period to start? Of course she had. So where did that feeling of loss come from? Had she actually been pregnant and lost the child to early miscarriage? ‘I’m sorry,’ she told her phantom child. ‘I’m sorry for praying you into non-existence.’ Tears oozed from her closed eyes.
I would have been a good mother.
She saw herself wheeling a pram to the park, holding a toddler’s hand, waving a sturdy little boy off to school. Why did she see a boy? Had the cells she’d shed so carelessly been the beginnings of a son? For a moment she was tempted to ring Scottie. Accept the marriage he offered so regularly; but then she heard Zav pottering around in his room. It was no good. She already had a child to care for.

So instead of grabbing happiness with both hands, Sealie once again broke with Scottie. She had seen him with Will and Brenda’s children. He would be such a good father—a nice, normal, fun-loving dad of nice normal fun-loving kids. And that was a world away from what she and Zav had known.

After Nina, there were Trudy and Annette, then Susan, whom Scottie married. Sealie, while aware she was being unreasonable, felt betrayed by this marriage. Nevertheless, on the big day, she managed to outshine the bride by wearing a stunning cream lace dress. Brenda was furious. ‘That was so unkind,’ she told her friend. ‘Lace is for the bride.’

Mrs Mac shook her head. ‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ she said. ‘It’s Susan’s day.’

Sealie went home and cried. She wasn’t quite sure if the tears were to wash away grief or shame.

After an uncomfortable four years, Scottie and Susan divorced. Then there was Michelle. Then Amy. Another Susan, then Diana. He broke his engagement to Diana six weeks before the wedding. Between lovers, he and Sealie fell back into the familiar pattern.

And they both grew older. And neither of them grew any wiser.

Zav lost his job in the recession of the early nineties. Retrenched, they called it, and at fifty-four, with limited work experience, there was no real prospect of further employment. Having no motivation, he lay in bed until lunchtime when he got up and watched television.

Perhaps realising his need, Zav never missed a meeting with Scottie and Will. Apart from that, he rarely left the house. Will rang Sealie after their regular Saturday beer. ‘He’s depressed again. We need to get him to a doctor.’

Sealie hung up the phone. It wouldn’t be easy but she had to try. What if Zav broke down completely like their father? The psychiatrist had explained the difference between psychiatric illness and depression. Zav’s depression had external causes and as far as she understood, he was not psychotic. Nevertheless, she wasn’t ready to trust her own judgement. Not after last time.

An opportunity arose when her brother contracted shingles. The pain was such that he had to visit the family doctor in whom Sealie had confided. Dr Murray gave Zav an antiviral prescription and recommended codeine for the pain. He looked at his patient over his glasses.

‘And how are you otherwise?’

Zav glowered. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

‘Sleeping well?’

‘Could be better.’

‘Energy levels?’

‘Okay till I got these bloody shingles.’

‘Appetite?’

‘The same.’ Zav’s hands were in his pockets. Slouching in his chair, he looked past his interrogator.

The doctor cleared his throat. ‘You look a bit down to me. Not unusual with shingles. The loss of your job. Not to mention . . .’ Zav looked up sharply and the doctor ventured no further along that path. ‘Maybe you’d like to see someone to talk things over with.’

‘Are you saying I need a shrink?’

‘Just to get you over a bad patch.’

‘How can any patch . . .’ He emphasised the word
patch
to register his contempt. ‘How can any patch, as you call it, be worse than losing my family? Than going to Vietnam?’

Ignoring his patient’s petulant tone, the doctor began to write in his prescription pad. ‘Antidepressants,’ he said. ‘If you won’t see a specialist, at least take these.’ He anticipated the response and leaned forward, forcing Zav to meet his eyes. ‘Your choice, Zav, but I don’t want to see your sister broken by the strain. You can tell me it’s none of my business, but you owe Sealie, and the least you can do is try to make things easier for her sake if not your own.’

Zav snatched the prescription ungraciously. But the doctor’s words had stung. He knew that Sealie was worried about him. Understood that she feared their father’s insanity might be genetic. Momentarily facing his own, similar fears, he had the prescription filled. He wasn’t ready for a shrink— but he wasn’t going to take unnecessary risks.

‘He’s depressed, but not insane,’ Dr Murray assured Sealie. ‘I’ve consulted some colleagues. His depression is almost certainly non-melancholic—that means it’s caused by stressful events.’

‘He’s had more than his fair share of those.’

The doctor patted her arm. ‘The medication should help.’

Meanwhile, Hal was diligently building his castle in the clouds, his pie in the sky. His medication kept the worst of the voices at bay, but he remained firmly and politely delusional. He painstakingly laid each brick. Spent hours embellishing the cornices, months fitting the windows, years crafting the sweeping marble staircase. He lined a grand gallery with mirrors and laid a specially sprung floor. He stood at one end of his hall of mirrors and gazed with longing at a multiplicity of Paulinas dipping and swaying, immersed in pools of silver.

There was a room for me too; a cavern of pink, with rosebuds and teddies and fanciful mobiles, twirling above the cradle.

Poor Grandad. Inhabiting the past, dreaming of the future, he negotiated the present with suspicion and at times bewilderment. He obediently attended, but failed to engage with the various activities offered by the occupational therapist and in the end found his own niche when he made a fourth for canasta. He was asked to join by Mad Mollie, an octogenarian who had been admitted when she was seventeen and not at all mad. Well, she was boy-mad, but what seventeen-year-old girl isn’t? Her family, of august lineage, were at their wits’ end, trying to keep her under control. When she was found skinny-dipping in the family pool with the Minister for Customs and Excise and the auxiliary bishop of a regional diocese, it was obvious to her relieved family that she was mad as a hatter. That’s what they said—‘Mad as a hatter’—and had her locked away. She obligingly wept and ranted and tried to kill herself. ‘There,’ they said with relief: ‘Totally and utterly mad.’ She still enjoyed a game of strip poker, but over the years, that invitation had lost its appeal to prospective opponents, and she philosophically turned to canasta and self-gratification. She lived in hope and chose her companions carefully.

Apart from the distinguished looking Hal, there was Lennie, an autistic young man who never spoke, but had a phenomenal memory for cards. ‘Lucky Len’ would have been thrown out of any casino, so skilled was his card counting. The other member of the Canasta Crew, as they were called, was ‘Skeeter’ Bolan, a tousle-headed leprechaun with merry eyes and a murderous heart. Mollie always partnered Lennie. She may have been mad, but she was no fool. They sat in the dayroom when the weather was inclement and outside in the rotunda when they could, happily gambling away their pensions in the guise of matchsticks.