Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.
But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was finding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.
A
THIN
stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.
‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t
talk
. It’s not one of those modern relationships.’
His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artificial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed
low and high care facilities
, and entered into agreements with suitable establishments. ‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’
What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.
How was Tom to convey—to Nelly, to anyone—the muffled dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel
with
.
When she had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.
Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.
‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’
She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.
Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down her face but still she didn’t reply.
He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’
After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.
He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as
sounding
Indian
, was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.
He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’
When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.
Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’
Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.
Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.
Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.
Other men came up with strategies that rendered their mothers harmless. Neglect was one solution; so was marrying a woman with a capacity for ruthlessness. There was also comedy. There was Vernon, who had reconfigured his mother as a monstrous buffoon. Her prying, her avarice, her vanity, her pile creams, the satisfaction the old despot derived from making children cry: farce drew the poison from it all. Now and then, even as he was laughing, Tom detected a familiar flutter of frustration or despair in Vernon’s anecdotes; but it twitched uselessly in a web of comic invention.
Tom had always thought of himself as siding with the defenceless; as most people do, when the risk of personal inconvenience is small. But Iris grated on his sensibilities. He thought of abrasions his soul would endure if they were to live together. There would be questions: where are you going, what time are you coming back, who is that friend of yours? There would be ritual conversations, stupefying banalities. Laugh-tracks crashed through his concentration. His mother inspected the crustless salmon sandwiches he had prepared for her and said, ‘That’s wrong. You’ve cut them wrong.’
Forebodings rushed to fill the future he might share with her. His best intentions would sour. The example of Audrey was before him. Having risen to the occasion, he would swiftly descend. He heard himself enumerating, for Iris’s edification, the sacrifices her presence entailed, and the virtues he imagined himself to be displaying.
When he was fourteen, he had turned the corner of a street and seen a figure hesitate at a pedestrian crossing. From the protection of a curved tin awning, he beheld a brassy perm and hectic rouge perched on the body of a slack-bellied sprite. It placed its thumb between its teeth, and peered into the traffic from the prudent kerb. The gesture brought recognition without dispelling estrangement: the queerest sensation. It was his first glimpse of his mother as left over from another time. He studied her as though she were a page in an anthropological text, taking in the knowledge that she was no longer essential to him.
At the same time, he was aware of an impulse to dash out diagonally through streaming cars and gather her up in his arms. He would carry her to a place of safety. But where, where?
The sky was solid Australian blue, lightly laminated with cloud near the horizon. Nelly was waiting for him at the top of the track. Lines from a poem about hope came into Tom’s mind:
With that I gave a viall full of tears: / But he a few green eares
. He didn’t speak them, for poetry can be alarming. His fingers sought and found the leaves crushed in his pocket.
W
HEN THE
man first appeared, Iris had been afraid. It was true that he was a long way away—beyond grey palings, beyond trees and tiled roofs—and that he did not seem to be coming closer. Still: a man floating in the sky. In all but the most jaded civilisation it was a vision to arouse trepidation and wonder.
He was large and shiny, with rounded limbs. When the sun was out, as it was that afternoon, his body ran with light. Then he was dazzling; Iris had to look away. Dull skies enabled her to see him whole, golden against his backdrop of lead.
She was waiting for her electric jug to boil. The teabag and two spoons of sugar were in the mug, the carton of milk was on the counter. This modest state of affairs took time to engineer.
That was, in its way, a blessing. Time is the great wealth of the elderly, and the spending of it, as with any fortune, poses a quandary.
The jug was too heavy for Iris to fill directly. She had to position a plastic beaker under the tap, lift it out of the sink when it held a cupful of water, ease it along the counter, then lift it again to tip its contents into the jug. All manner of daily acts called for guile. Iris lived by contrivance. There were gadgets, provided by her son, designed to twist the lids off jars or manipulate taps. Elsewhere she had arrived at her own arrangements, a cord looped over a handle enabling a drawer to slide open, bras renounced in favour of mercifully hookless vests. Certain objects defeated her: buttons, nail clippers. At the hairdresser’s, a hot helmet clamped to her skull, she looked into a mirror and saw a girl draw a rosy brush over a client’s splayed fingers. Iris would have liked a manicure herself, but Audrey could not be kept waiting. There was also the expense.
When her son was small, he had loved to sit beside her whenever she painted her nails at her dressing table. The instant her little finger was done, Tommy would lean forward, lips pursed. Iris made a fan of her hand. The child blew on her nails, moving his head this way and that. His eyes were turned sideways, to the fifteen fingers fluttering in Iris’s triple mirror. He called it
doing butterflies
: their private game.
Iris found herself thinking about a nail file she had owned. It was made of silver metal and shaped like a stockinged leg. The rough grain of the stocking’s weave provided a filing surface, while the smooth, pointed foot served to clean under nails. This object, once unobtrusively part of her days, had slipped from her mind for years. She couldn’t remember which part of her life it had belonged to, nor imagine what had become of it; why or how their trajectories had diverged.
In the lavatory, lacking the suppleness required to reach around behind herself, she had devised a method for wiping while holding onto her walking frame and keeping her trousers from collapsing about her ankles. It involved preparing wads of paper in advance. These, when soiled, were placed on her walker until she had adjusted her clothing, twisting her knickers around, and her hands were free to grip the frame and turn herself with it to face the bowl. It was a disgusting practice. But what was Iris to do? It was a question of balance: the need to remain upright measured against animal necessity. Every day on a stage fitted with baby-blue porcelain, she re-enacted civilisation’s elemental struggle.
Iris had raised the subject of the floating man with Audrey, referring to him with calculated nonchalance as ‘that thing’. Later she sought a second opinion from her son. He confirmed Audrey’s diagnosis: the man was connected to the car dealership that had opened on the highway. The name of the dealership was written across his chest, Tommy said, while Iris peered through her window. Her sight was much improved since she had had her cataracts done, but the man often had his back to her and she hadn’t noticed the lettering. He was ‘Like a balloon,’ said Tommy, and offered to drive her past the dealership one day. But he always forgot, making his usual left turn at the Dreamworld showroom instead.
Iris didn’t mind. Facts may reassure, even convince, and yet fall short of adequacy. Every time she saw the man her sense of his power was renewed. Now and then he disappeared for a day or two, which strengthened her impression that their association was not casual. Distance was integral to it. It was akin to her relations with talkback hosts: an intimacy predicated on detachment. Late afternoon sun, pouring into her kitchen, showed her a man touched with fire; caused her to fold her head, for she was mortal and might not look upon such splendour.
Brought up never to importune the Almighty on her own behalf, Iris sometimes asked him to heed the petitions of those striving to find a cure for arthritis. The safe return of a dog was a more straightforward matter. A dozen times between waking and sleeping she began, ‘O holy Saint Anthony, gentlest of saints, your love for God and charity for his creatures made you worthy when on earth to possess miraculous powers.’
This was the third day, and she knew the prayer by heart. It was a powerful incantation, to be used in extremis. Iris had never doubted its efficacy. Yet it was only now, in her kitchen with her eyes closed, that she
saw
. She had been granted a sign. Matthew Ho’s image had been hung in the sky to show that her prayers were heard in heaven.
T
OM SAID
, ‘I’m going to go see Jack. I haven’t thanked him for everything he’s done.’
‘Cool. I’ll come with you.’ Then, in response to his silence, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What about Denise?’
‘What
about
her?’
As they walked down the track, Nelly was talking about the terrain around her house being unsuited to mechanised farming. ‘Cows do fine. Machines tip over. That’s what finished off the McDermots. Like imagine trying to get a baler around those paddocks.’
The Feeneys, farming at the bottom of the hill, had fared better. ‘Also Jack got himself a licence to dig tree ferns from the bush and sell them to nurseries. He did pretty well out of that.’
Tom asked, ‘Do you think Denise married Mick just so there’d be someone to help Jack with the farm?’
‘Sounds complicated.’ Nelly said, ‘He’s sort of sexy, Mick.’
At the sight of Tom’s face she burst out laughing.
The scrape of the gate sent invisible dogs crazy. Nelly raised her voice: ‘No hatchback, see? Tuesday evenings she’s got clinic.’
‘We’ve had no funny buggers with sheep.’ Mick Corrigan said, ‘If your dog was alive, he’d be after a feed for sure, eh? Nah, tell you what: he copped it from that wallaby.’
‘He’s a city dog. He wouldn’t make the connection between a sheep and food.’
‘Dog’s a dog, mate.’
The scent of sausages hung in the room. Nelly and Jack were by the window, which left Tom with sexy Mick. There was soundless boxing on TV; Mick’s gaze never left the screen. Now and then he tensed as if anticipating a blow.
Tom caught snatches of farm talk from Jack: ‘. . . fatten them up in about four months’; ‘. . . picking out the dry ewes.’
Mick sat with his arms crossed over his chest. ‘Best just get a new one, eh?’
But Tom had seen this: as Jack passed his son-in-law’s chair on his way across the room, he had picked up the remote and pressed the Mute button. He addressed no word to Mick, who made no protest. It was a thirty-second silent film summarising what Mick Corrigan was up against.