Pinkie
Ruth heard the bone break — not with her ears, but with every cell in her body — 42 billion of which said, “Ooo. That’s not right.” They said it quietly. Inarticulately. And no other sound escaped her as she bent over to hear if they were going to say anything else.
She’d been half-hearted about playing football tonight. Somewhere between her period and the flu, she would have preferred to wrap up on the couch with a packet of Peter Styvesants and a novel. Instead, she’d found herself on the receiving end of one of Sean’s particularly difficult throws which come in like a torpedo. She wasn’t concentrating and took the ball with a girlie indolence — just sort of shown her hands to it as though that might relieve her of any obligation to actually catch it. Instead, the ball caught the knuckle of her little finger and the pain was excruciating.
Sean came over and looked at her curiously. He’d feel more comfortable if she’d swear, or blaspheme, or do anything other than hold her breath and look at her muddied, spiked shoes.
Ruth didn’t like this football field. It was barren and unlovely the way it opened to the westerly — a nasty, irritable wind, that was now blowing through her. How was she supposed to hear anything subtle with that mean breeze in her ears?
They hadn’t always played here. The first game was on a field near the submarine base — but there weren’t any lights there, which was hopeless in winter — so everyone moved to pretty Forsyth Park, and played in the neon penumbra of the North Shore high-rise offices. Over time, that game petered out, and was eventually taken over by a more professional, more athletic team that excluded the original players — some of whom combined with a rag-tag group of guys playing on yet another oval (this one).
For the original members, this Monday night football game wasn’t casual exercise, it was a weekly ritual that embraced immediate family, extended family, ex-family, and acquired bits of just-like-family-in-as-much-as-you-can’t-kill-them-even-though-you-really-want-to-because-somewhere-along-the-way-you’ve-come-to-love-them-as-family.
The game was started by Tony — Ruth’s sister Hattie’s boyfriend. No-one in the family liked Tony at first because he was too young, too energetic and too cocky. Ruth and Tony were the same age. She nicknamed him Tony Two Planks after he declared he didn’t read because he learned everything he needed from television. But Hattie was crazy about him. She left her husband for him and that was that. Tony became family, and everyone, even Ruth, stopped trying to like him and got on with loving him — TV warts and all.
So Tony Two Planks was the one who wanted to play football. First he talked Hattie into playing with him on Monday nights. Then their brother Mac, his wife Cassie, and her brother Chris (who turned out to be a good player.)
When Ruth broke up with her husband Simon, she was inveigled into the game to meet new people. Later, after she took up with Sean, she brought him along. He was the first one who could actually catch Tony. But by then, Hattie and Tony had split up. Hattie had gone to America, and Cassie stopped playing to have babies. New friends took their places until Ruth was often the only woman playing. Even Tony drifted away when the new players took violent exception to his hogging the ball.
The pain in Ruth’s hand was subsiding. She was starting to think that her 42 billion cells may have been exaggerating as she straightened up and looked at Sean.
“You ok?” His face puckered with concern, or maybe guilt.
Ruth felt fine. All she needed was to curl under a doona. “Sure, why don’t I just have a little nap?”
She could see that Sean would rather she did something else, but what would he know? He couldn’t even make a decent pass. Ok, let’s replay that memory and see just how close to the ground the ball really is.
“Mullygrubber.”
Ruth sank to the ground: pulled the grass over her head, and had a little nap.
God it’s good having Hattie back. All our adult life she’s drifted in and out like a movie star fitting us in between glamorous assignments. Sometimes she comes for days, sometimes years. Always with an air of drama, a sense of occasion, an eye for the ridiculous.
This time she’s coming for spiritual renewal. That’s a typically poetic interpretation of ‘ran out of money’. But Mum’s pixilated to have her home, under her very own roof for an indefinite amount of time. It would be churlish to be anything but excited.
And here’s a grain of truth — Hattie still gets the best rise out of Mum. Their relationship has more laughs, more anger, more wild adventure than the rest of us. Also, Mum’s going in for a cataract operation this Thursday, so I’m glad Hattie’s around.
On top of that, I know this is ridiculous, but the newspapers say that someone is bashing old ladies in Mum’s neighbourhood — three dead so far. Mum’s feisty and younger than the women in the paper, but I’m relieved that Hattie is living there to make it look like people care about Mum. It takes the pressure off me.
The look on Sean’s face was one of distilled fear. The English in him had it under control, but for Ruth, any expression on Sean was exponential to his feelings. “I’d feel a lot better if you got up and moved around.”
“Yeah, well, I’d feel a lot better if you’d fuck off.” And she snuggled back down for another snooze, this time manoeuvring her head so that it could face ever so slightly down hill.
I’m glad Sean and I spent all that time getting the new linen for the spare room — made it nice for Hattie. Made it hers. Big floral doona cover, nipple pink sheets. Maybe she’ll stay longer. How does anyone end up with skin that white? So white, it’s almost blue. Almost see-through.
Buying the bedding had been a major operation, considering that she wouldn’t stay forever with Mum, but that Mum would want to keep it in the guest room afterwards. We had to buy something that was more Hattie than Mum, but Mum enough for the future.
“Maybe we should go and get you something to eat?” Sean crouched next to Ruth, brushing the hair on her forehead. A little way off she could see Mac stretching his hamstring, looking at his knee nonchalantly, then tilting his face towards her with the detached concern their family favoured in emergencies.
Ruth was still lying on the ground, her head still slightly down hill. She felt better. There was a throbbing pain in her hand, but her blood had warmed up.
“I think you fainted…” said Sean
“No, just sleepy.”
“Really? I’ve never seen anyone sleep with their eyes open before.”
Lying on the backseat of the car seemed familiar to Ruth. The smell of curry wasn’t part of it, but the cool, smooth leather-like quality was. An alien, non-couch sensation. And lying down was like a hundred trips as a child. Out late with the folks at dinner. Driving in the country with Poppa. Racing the moon while the black-etched trees clutched at it like luckless thieves.
Sean took Ruth to a nearby shopping centre for some frozen peas and a take away curry. The peas were for the swelling which had started at the base of her little finger, and the curry was for dinner.
Ruth didn’t want the curry or the fuss. The whole thing was embarrassing, like over acting. Eventually she talked Sean into resuming the game by agreeing to eat the food and to lie down in the car. She was glad to hear the greeting rise to him as he ran onto the field. Good man!
It was generally agreed by all those who know her that Ruth was stubborn. Stubborn like a large-family baby who knows that, with persistence, someone will give in to her demands. Even so, after four hours in Casualty her resolve was waning.
The waiting room had been designed to discourage the homeless from seeking shelter. So the green fluorescent lights and pitiful orange chairs tortured everyone. Bouquets of family and friends crowded in. An English detective series was seeping out of the television in a bucolic drizzle. A young man ate hot chips. A derro threaded himself through the arms of the chairs and went to sleep reeking of alcohol.
Ruth had been x-rayed some hours ago by a nurse who pressed her hand onto the lead plate with the pleasure of forgetting that x-rays are for bones which may be broken. As her hand was mangled into shape, Ruth felt the blood leave her head. It was all that stopped her from lifting the lead plate and slapping the nurse with it.
But that was hours ago. It was now passed midnight and Ruth was cold, tired, and defeated by the public health system. When another group of Monday night footballers brought in an injured hand, and then soon left with an x-ray and lots of laughter, Ruth finally conceded that she no longer cared if her finger was broken.
“Bring on the gangrene, Sean, we’re going home.”
All she had ever wanted from the hospital was some to know if her finger was broken and how to bandage it if it wasn’t. She also knew that that a sore pinky wasn’t an emergency, but it seemed a long way from that, to making her feel like a nuisance for wanting to know if she could go home or not.
“I understand that if I want anything done about my finger, I have to wait for a doctor to look at my x-ray, but since the doctor is too busy to look at the x-ray, is there anyone else who can show me how to bandage it until tomorrow?”
“As I explained,” said Nurse Ratched, “Everyone is very busy tonight. If you want to have it attended to, you have to wait, otherwise we’ll ring you tomorrow if there’s a problem.”
So Ruth and Sean left.
Ruth had been holding the frozen peas onto her finger all evening. Now they had thawed and squished and were making a soggy puddle in her lap.
Sean was at a loss to know how to respond. He was sore from the football, cold from the long wait in the medical wasteland, and his girlfriend was sitting next to him sobbing like a six year old.
So when they got home — and with all the love he could muster — he bandaged her finger himself. He used a piece of cardboard as a splint and one of her blue satin hair ribbons. The ribbon didn’t have much give in it, so he secured her pinkie to her ring finger. When he’d finished, he held her hand in his, admiring for the ten thousandth time how small and pretty it was. “Nobody, not even the rain has hands as small…” he quoted as he kissed her bandaged palm.
When they went to bed, he arranged her hand onto a pillow of its own. Ruth looked at it and knew she was lucky.
Ruth rang the hospital the next day for the result of her x-ray. Each time, a different person answered. Each time, they were vaguely reassuring, “We would have rung you if it was broken…” Each time she felt unsatisfied.
She would have let the matter drop except for a nauseating feeling whenever she looked at her naked finger. It wiggled in an independent, not-really-part-of-the-world, kind of way. On the second morning she went back to Casualty to look at her x-ray herself.
As a small child, Ruth had displayed a spectacular, and by all accounts ferocious, temper. Hattie and Mac found it entertaining to tease her until she thumped away on her heals, spitting childish invective and marching her clenched fists up and down in the air to invoke as much Sturm und Drang as possible.
She discovered the only way to avoid being teased was to decline giving such florid performances. Over time she learned to break obstacles down into their smallest components and gnaw at each one until the problem was digested. The nurse on reception was testing her patients.
“…You need a Doctor’s referral to view an x-ray…”
Ruth proposed that since she had already spent four hours in Emergency, the Secretary could lend Ruth the x-ray — which Ruth would take to show a doctor — and then return along with the referral.
Deal. Smile. Shake. And swallow.
When she got to the orthopaedic rooms on the sixth floor, there were at least forty other people in front of her. The one nearest to Ruth looked like a joke patient in a full body cast with his arms and legs suspended on wires.
Ruth turned and walked back down the corridor, into the elevator, through the double doors, into the car park. She walked out into the street, through the nearby shopping centre, to a dinky little coffee shop — at which point she realised that she had stolen her x-ray. She probably could have looked at it right there on the footpath — but instead, she found a seat in the sun and ordered a cappuccino.
When her coffee arrived, she lit a cigarette and inhaled both in equal measures. She then took out the x-ray and looked at it. ‘Oh yeah. That’s broken’. We’re not talking about an ambiguous nick here. We’re talking severed all the way through. We’re talking, dangling off its little edges.
She showed it to the waitress who said, “Oh yeah. That’s broken”.
What Ruth couldn’t see was any point in going back to the hospital where forty orthopaedic patients would have already turned into fifty. Instead, she presented herself to a chipper receptionist in a nearby Sport Medicine Practice where she was told that The Hand Guy was out for the day. The receptionist suggested Ruth go next door to the Family Medicine Practice, get a referral — then come back and makes an appointment for the next day.
So Ruth went to the Family Medicine Practice. Under ‘Presenting Complaint’ she wrote ‘sore finger’. Pretty soon, the Family Doctor was pegging the x-ray to the x-ray do dah, flicking on the light and saying, “Oh yeah, that’s broken.”
The finger required a pin, she said, which required an operation to put it in, an operation to pull it out, and a scar for life. She stressed that Ruth needed to do something in the next 24 hours, or the damage would be permanent. “Your finger will be crooked. It will snag on stockings and be prone to breaking, nobbling and arthritis.”
Fabulous. Ruth had a stolen x-ray, a referral to a guy who wasn’t around and a self-setting finger that would snag on her underwear if she didn’t get it straightened immediately.
This problem called for Aunt Latitia, a resourceful woman who worked in a doctor’s surgery and was plugged into the nurses’ referral network.
Aunty Latitia knew everything. “There’s a medical conference in town, so all the Hand Guys are in seminars. I’ve made an appointment for you with a Knee Guy. His assistant squeezed you in at four fifteen. Don’t be late.”
This, as you appreciate, was a loving message.
The Knee Guy didn’t have a great sense of humour. What he did have was a great sense of profession. He looked at the referral with the Hand Guy’s name crossed out. He undid the pretty blue hair ribbon and removed the cardboard splint. He looked at Ruth’s pale face and purple finger. Finally, he looked at the stolen x-ray and said, “Oh yeah. That’s broken.”
By now, Ruth had had a fair amount of time to think about what she wanted to happen. Her mother, Hope was having a cataract operation the next day. Ruth wanted to be around for that. It’s true that her sister Hattie was in town and more than capable of looking after Hope, but Ruth’s sense of — what? Concern? Place? Responsibility? Control? All and none of it would let her be in hospital at the same time as her mother. She didn’t want the operation for the pin — or the scar. She didn’t want her little finger snagging on her undies. All this she put to the Knee Guy.
“Five out of six Hand Guys are going to tell you you need the pin. But I’m a Knee Guy. I see a lot of footballers — and when this happens to them, they just re-break it, re-set it and get on with it.”
“Ok,” said Ruth, holding out her hand as though for a dance. “Break it.”
He looked at her with the quizzical look men usually reserve for an offer of sex — with a vaguely amused, Are you sure?
“Do you faint easily?” He asked — expecting her to say no, because he’d already pulled out the local anaesthetic and was swabbing her hand.
“Yes,” she said, looking like she was about to faint.
Ruth never much went in for coincidence. For two or more events to have unintentional relevance it was necessary for a person to find it. The act of observing a coincidence was intentional, and therefore not coincidental. Even wondering whether something was a coincidence was so loaded with significance that it made two unrelated events seem premeditated. Was it coincidental that Ruth broke her finger on this particular Monday night? Was it coincidental that she broke her finger the same week her mother was to have her first full anaesthetic? Was it coincidental that she broke her little finger when she herself was the youngest in a family of five? Was it coincidental that she broke her finger at a time when she was needed? But when there were other people who wanted to be needed too?
Hattie was delighted to show Hope that she loved and cared for her. She was already starching her Florence Nightingale wimple and warming a thermometer. For the first time in ten years Ruth was not needed by her mother. It was completely up to her whether she turned up or passed out.
The Knee Guy burbled sweetly about his family while he arranged himself around her hands and fingers. “I once nail-gunned my hand to a piece of wood, he said. “I asked my wife to lever it out, but she was too squeamish. You ever tried pulling a nail out of your own hand? Jesus Christ. I mean, literally.”
Finally he took a firmish grip on the little finger and said, “Ok, on the count of three”. Ruth knew it would come on the count of two.
“One.” Crack. She heard it with her ears this time. But like the first time, nothing escaped her. Just her legs running on the spot. On tiptoe.
“Breathe,” said the Knee Guy.
Ruth nodded agreement, but didn’t breathe. Finally she looked at him. A sidelong, angry stare. “Ow,” She said, right to his face.
He laughed and took her hand again. He looked at it. Sort of pulled the little finger forward, then shoved it back in its place. For the first time Ruth looked down at what he was doing. The mind is tricky. As he wiggled the bone into place, it was like she could hear the two edges grind together. “Oh God,” she said, “that’s disgusting.”
The Knee Guy looked at her, “You’re not going to faint are you?”
“No. I’m fine. But how can you do that?”
He looked at the hand and sort of showed it to her. “Look. Isn’t it pretty? Much straighter now.” And the finger did look straighter, in a fat, wiener sausage kind of way. Maybe everything would be ok after all.
With the finger straightened to his satisfaction, he sticky taped an aluminium splint to it and bandaged her hand. He wrote a prescription for pain killers. And as she was leaving he handed back her the stolen x-rays. “We have a policy about those. I’d like you to return it.”
Ruth and Latitia sat in the Irish pub around the corner from the hospital. It was too late to fill the prescription, whisky would have to do the trick. Ruth was running on adrenaline and rye. Her whole family was like some sort of rowdy Irish mess of broken bones and homemade remedies.
“Praise to God,” said her aunty. “What will Sean be making of us all?”
Sean!
Ruth sheepishly pulled out her mobile phone. Turned it on. Four messages of increasing alarm. “You left the house at nine o’clock to go to the hospital. Then left the office at 12 with a broken finger. What was I supposed to think?”
“Oh sweetheart, the Doctor said you did a perfect splint and bandage for a broken finger. Why don’t you come and pick me up at the pub, and I’ll tell you all about it?”
Ruth arrived at Hope’s house promptly at 9 am. She knew her mother had factored in an extra half hour because Ruth is always late
Hope opened the door wearing a white Kabuki mask. “Oh God, you’re early. Mind the cat.”
Actually, Hope never so much opened her door, as merely unlatched it— just enough for Ruth to slip her foot in. It was to do with Hope’s two cats whose ambitions in life lay beyond the front door in the alleyways of the city’s east side. Ruth squeezed in dragging one leg behind as an extra blockade. She then turned and locked the fly-screen door.
Ruth’s mother was waiting (left hand holding right) as though someone else had miraculously opened. She was flustered. “I don’t know what’s worse, when you’re late or on time.”
Ruth pecked her mother on the cheek. It was covered in Elizabeth Arden face cream. “Well Ma, if I was predictable, it wouldn’t be annoying.” She wiped her mouth. “What happened? You forget and put your face on?”
“You know how it is. I have a routine…” She resumed pottering around her tiny kitchen. “You had breakfast? I can fix you a boiled egg and some tea.”
Hope’s morning ritual had changed little over the years. The radio stations moved further right. There was more grain in the bread. Sometimes the grapefruit were bananas.
“You haven’t eaten, have you?” Asked Ruth.
“No. I remembered about the food, but I forgot about the makeup and nail polish…”
Ruth waved her bandaged hand at her mother as though she were showing off an engagement ring, “Hey, look what I got.”
Hope groaned. “Oh how did you do that? It wasn’t that stupid football was it?” She moved over and took the hand like it was a frightened bird. “I was worried Hattie was going on Monday — she still talks about Tony, you know…”
This had been the big subject for conversation before Hattie’s return. “Don’t Ma. Tony’s living with someone else now. If Hattie and he can be friends…”
“I know. I know. That’s what she says. But she’s so, crazy about him…”
“Anyway, he doesn’t play any more so it doesn’t matter.” Hope squared her piggy green eyes onto her daughter. Ruth had tried to lie to those eyes once before when she was a teenager but had to recant because Hope’s irises had this way of closing down when the questioning got intense. “What?”
“What, what?” asked Hope, the black part of her eyes resuming their normal size.
“What are the pinholes for? Tony doesn’t play any more. He had a huge blue with another player over hogging the ball, and now he plays somewhere else…”
Hope finally removed all her makeup and sat at the small kitchen table to take off her nail polish as well. “Whatever. It makes me nervous when she talks about him.”
“Fair enough.” A comfortable silence evolved around Hope as she rubbed at her nails. Ruth got up to fix herself some tea. “So is she coming with us or what?”
“Yes she’s coming — but she’s got to meditate first.”
“She hasn’t showered?”
“Not even the didgeridoo.”
Ruth groaned. “She’ll be hours.”
“Well, I’ve decided. We leave in forty minutes. She can catch us up when she’s ready.”
Hattie was a striking looking woman, particularly walking towards Ruth and Hope as they sat in the grey waiting room. Around them were the morning’s operating list. Twenty or so elderly patients in varying states of nervousness. Hattie swanned in like a sunbeam. “Hey goils,” she called out across the room in her distinctive voice — 50/50 hay fever and deep throat with an unmistakable edge of buzzsaw.
Everyone turned to look at her. She was wearing a red velvet hat with an enormous sunflower attached to it. Her hat was pulled low over her forehead and from it flowed shining acres of rich, red hair. This sea of red and yellow was framing an alabaster face. And in the middle of it all shone pale blue eyes that went mauve when she was happy. They hadn’t been mauve for a while, not since Tony, but if they weren’t the colour of joy, they did have a certain mischievous hue about them.
She looked beautiful — an Italian clown in a Russian landscape, and it made Ruth wild. To her, she looked irresponsible. She looked selfish. She looked pampered and precious and flamboyant. But worst of all, she looked at Hope and her mother’s face lit with delight. “Ah well, that was worth the wait.” It wasn’t Hope’s usual, delicious sarcasm. It was childish, girlish, motherly joy.
Ruth bumped along the row of seats so that Hattie could sit next to her. But instead, Hope lent forward and patted the plastic chair facing them, “All the better to see you, my dear.”
As Hattie sat down, she revealed a thigh high split in her skirt, through which poked long red legs with a sort of flocking design on them, tapering off into a pair of matching red court shoes decorated with enormous yellow diamantes — the same colour as her sunflower. Van Gogh could have painted her and everyone would have thought she was a vision of sunstroke. The effect was pure Hattie, and she wore it all with such infectious good humour that it almost seemed scandalous in the hospital waiting room.
“Look what your sister’s done,” said Hope indicating Ruth’s hand. “Couldn’t stand letting me have all the attention.”
“Oh God Strewthie, you didn’t break it did you?” Like her mother had done earlier, Hattie leant forward and took Ruth’s hand in both of hers. That’s all it took for Ruth to give up her irritation.
The morning melted into midday and dribbled into early afternoon. The three women traipsed from doctor to doctor while Hope’s eye was peered into, her blood pressure marvelled at, her vital statistics taken and repeated. Eventually they found themselves looking at some American soap opera in a sun-streamed ward waiting for an anaesthetist to come and tell them what would happen next. Ruth bought a newspaper so they could do the crossword and when it was crossed she nipped outside for a cigarette.
Sitting in the late autumn sun, she found herself looking at her hands. It was curious the way her little finger curled to hug the one next to it. The way her whole hand, all the fingers, lay together like kids in a bed. Mrs Palm and her five daughters.
She dragged on her cigarette, closed her eyes and blew smoke towards the sky. When she opened them again, Ruth could see into the first floor where Hope and Hattie were still talking.
By the expression of near incredulous alarm on her mother’s face, Ruth thought at first that Hattie was telling her something distressing . Hope turned out of view and returned with a hankie she had taken from her purse. Ruth realised her mother was laughing. Laughing so hard she was crying. Hattie seemed to be telling a complicated and increasingly wild story — her hands forming into a cupping gesture. Ruth stared at Hope. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother laugh so raucously. Not since she was a teenager, not like this. Not with her girlfriends. Not with Ruth.
She dragged on her cigarette, watching the two women talking, their conversation hiccoughing along as they tried to restrain their laughter. Two naughty schoolgirls. It looked like fun.
Ruth looked at her watch and wondered what was happening at her office. She hadn’t got very much done this week. Hadn’t got much done last week either, worrying about Hope, getting her to various appointments.
Ruth once believed all you had to do was love. That’s what she thought when she married Simon — and she had loved him. Still loved him. Was with Sean now. Loved him all shiny brand new. Loved her mother. Loved Hattie. Loved Mac even though she hardly ever said anything to him. Loved them whether they were there or not.
Ruth thought about this for a moment before stubbing her cigarette out. ‘If you love someone set them free. If they come back they’re yours, if not — hunt them down and kill them.’
Ruth brushed the flecks of ash from her lap.
“Where’s Mum?” Ruth came back to the ward with a cup of hot tea for Hattie who was sitting by herself reading the paper.
“They took her about five minutes ago.”
“She’s gone?” A shot of panic went through Ruth. She hadn’t said goodbye to Hope. Not properly. Not lovingly. Not like you could remember if something bad happened. What were her last words — exactly? A vaguely guilty ‘Oh Mum’ in response to Hope’s vaguely accusing glance when Ruth left to have the cigarette.
“Come on Strewthie, they won’t be doing the operation for about 20 minutes. Let’s get something to eat before I pass out.”
Ruth and Hattie chose the coffee shop in the park where Ruth had smoked her cigarette. Ruth was trying to look casual while her mind whirled in a spin cycle of annoyance. She was thinking that she shouldn’t have had the cigarette, that she could have spent the time better. That she hadn’t paid enough attention to what was going on. That she had let her mother down.
“What were you telling mum about?”
“When?”
“When I was out having a smoke.” Ruth nodded towards the ward window. “I could see you both. Mum was laughing so much, I wondered what you were telling her.”
“Oh I was telling her why it took me so long to get to the hospital. One of the cats shat in my shoes.”
Ruth choked on the cigarette she had just lit. Hattie was pleased with the response, and patted her comfortingly on the back. “I know. It’s shocking. I told Mummy we should have them put down but she seems awfully attached to them.”
Hope was fine. She came out of the anaesthetic disoriented, sleepy and freezing cold, but otherwise well and coherent. Too coherent. In minute detail she told the girls everything that happened to her in the operation. She told them how she’d been unconscious for a few seconds while they anaesthetised the area around her eye and cut out the lens. Then they woke her up, but she couldn’t see anything except lovely swirly colours, which in retrospect must have been the doctors’ gowns and instruments phaffing around her eyeball. Hope didn’t say or remember what happened when they put the new lens in, other than they kept asking her if ‘she was still with them.’
Ooh, disgusting.
Eventually Hope stayed awake long enough to eat a sandwich and drink a cup of tea. The hospital took this as a good sign and sent her home.
Ruth shared the taxi as far as Hope’s front door and was pleased to be relieved of further duty by Hattie, who let her keep the taxi on the promise that she would return in the morning to get Hope to the doctor’s rooms by 8am.
Sean was driving Ruth because of her hand. They arrived at 7.45 to pick up Hope who was already dressed and starting to get anxious, “Another five minutes and I would have taken the bus.”
“Oh Mum. I’m not late.” She kissed her mother, “We’ve got fifteen minutes, and Sean’s driving us.”
“Oh Sean…” She leant forward to kiss him. “Don’t we all look like we’ve been in a terrible bust up?” She was referring to her enormous plastic eye patch and Ruth’s broken finger. “Maybe you should take a photo..?”
Hattie’s head appeared at the top of the stairs, checking out who had arrived. Seeing it was family, she came down wearing a sleepy expression, flannelette pyjamas covered in tartan checks, and large fluffy slippers.
“Come on Hattie,” said her mother. “Be in a photo.”
They posed for silly pictures full of bandages and tartan flannelette.
Here is Ruth threatening Hope, with Hattie between them.
Here is Ruth’s fist flashing passed Hope’s startled face.
Here is Hattie, stepping in to keep everyone apart.
Here are the three women, their arms linked, laughing.
Waiting for the doctor in the consultation room, Ruth was appraising her mother with a forming concern. Something was very not right about Hope. She was sitting in the large examination chair, using her hanky to wave at the beads of sweat forming on her upper lip.
“Did you have any breakfast?” Ask Ruth, annoyed she hadn’t thought of this earlier. “You look awfully pale…” Hope dropped her hanky. Then stooped and retrieved it.
“Mum! Let me do that.”
The doctor came in and saw Hope and Ruth both bent double, squabbling over a hankie. “Oh I say,” he said to Hope, picking up the hankie himself. “We’d prefer you didn’t bend over until the swelling goes down.”
The two women righted themselves. Hope returning to her chair with the accused air of Joan of Arc. Ruth cocked her head towards the doctor, “Does she look alright to you?”
This doctor was a kind man. A young man. A busy man. Ruth’s question had the intimate tone of a family tiff, and a brief shadow crossed his face, “She looks very well, I’m delighted there’s no bruising.”
“So she doesn’t seem cockeyed to you?”
Hope shifted in her chair, as though turning to the doctor, but neither her body nor her gaze made it that far, “You know, I do feel very sleepy.”
The doctor looked to Ruth for reassurance. She could offer him none. This was not like her mother at all, so he left again, to find somewhere for her to lie down.
Ruth stood up and moved towards her mother. It was as though Hope had escaped from body which an abstract, startled expression on her open, vacant eyes.
“Mum?” Asked Ruth quietly. “Mum.” A little more emphatically.
Hope started sliding down the chair. Within a few seconds her body would be bumping all the way down to the floor, her head hitting the armrest, the seat, the footrest and the linoleum tiles. Ruth lunged to stop her, but as she put her hands out to catch Hope, a shooting pain went up her arm.
‘Oh God,’ she thought, ‘This is it. This is the worst moment of my life.’ Hope was dead and all Ruth could do was put her good hand on her mother’s chest to stop her sinking further to the ground.
She couldn’t check for a pulse. Couldn’t start pulmonary resuscitation. She couldn’t even shout out with any intensity.
The doctor came back in, “Is this bad?” He asked with infinite reasonableness.
“Oh yes,” said Ruth. “It’s very bad.”
“She’s fainted,” he said, as he eased Hope to the floor.
Ruth crouched beside her mother, and stroked her hair. Hope began to come around looking startled, frightened like a trapped animal. “It’s alright Mum. It’s me. Ruthie,” she said. “You fainted. You’re in the doctor’s surgery and you’re all right.” Hope was struggling to get up. Ruth continued to talk as reassuringly as she could. “You’re alright darling. You just fainted. But you had an operation on your eye yesterday, and we all want you to lie still for a minute.”
The house was quiet when Ruth finally got Hope into her own bed. Hattie had gone out, which suited Hope, because she wanted to sleep. Ruth only conceded to let her mother be, after negotiating a large cup of Bonox and 2 pieces of toast into her.
Once Hope was asleep, Ruth sat downstairs waiting for Hattie to return. Waiting. Listening to her own heart thumping. Wanting it to calm down. Wanting to believe that Hope was alright, but not feeling it in her self.
Eventually she crawled on all fours up the stairs to look in on her mother, to make sure that Hope was still breathing. When she poked her head around the door, all she could see was Hope’s hair sticking out over the top of the doona. As Ruth stood up to get a better look, her movement startled Hope in her sleep and she sat bolt upright in the bed saying, “What? What is it Ruth?”
Ruth slumped. “I’m sorry Mum. I wanted to know if you’re alright.”
Hope fell back into the bed, “Oh for goodness sake. Get me the other one.”
Ruth waited till Hattie got back. Hattie thought the story of fainting was funny. She laughed. She didn’t want to go upstairs to see if Hope was still alive, “Of course she’s alive.” Instead she suggested that Ruth go out for a nice long walk, and maybe fill the prescriptions for Hope.
Ruth was relieved and jealous that her sister could be responsible and detached at the same time. But mostly she was relieved of the responsibility to keep her mother alive.
Some days seem more portentous than others. That’s what Ruth concluded when the English tourist came into the chemist with blood pouring down her face. She’d fallen off a bus and broken her glasses. Apart from the cut on her head, she looked like she would also get a black eye and some concussion. The chemist was encouraging her husband to take her to the hospital, but they were anxious to fly home later that day. With patience, the pharmacist explained, ‘If a doctor doesn’t thinks you shouldn’t fly — you probably shouldn’t fly.’
Ruth paid for the medicine and walked up the street towards her office. In the next block, she passed an old woman sitting at a bus stop. A young man with a bald head wearing army fatigues was shouting at her. Screaming in terrifying rage. Ruth’s instinct was to intervene, but saw that two gym-issue gay men had the situation in hand. One was sitting with the old lady reassuring her that they wouldn’t leave until her bus came. The other was trying to reason with the skinhead, trying to encourage him to walk away.
Ruth looked at the young psycho and figured him for the lunatic who had been beating old women to death. She walked on by.
When she reached her office, she rang the local police and told them what she had seen (the young man harassing the old lady) and what she thought she’d seen (they psycho they were chasing.)
She then went outside and sat on the front stoop to smoke. She thought about the past few days for the full three minutes it took to consume the cigarette. When she stubbed it out, she concluded then that some things simply don’t make sense.
Hope’s recovery was less of a convalescence, and more of a party. The traffic through her tiny, sandstone cottage seemed to be all women bearing white wine and sweet biscuits. They flowed through the front door and up the spiral staircase to form large eddies on Hope’s enormous bed. It look like the final outpost of a Byzantine court. The conversation rode the ranges of modern life; over Microsoft and herpes, smart phones and politics. Cat, diets, gossip, and why sulphur dioxide makes acid rain. The conversation turned to personal theories about the cause of illness — the underlying metaphor of malady. What was it that Hope couldn’t see? What was it she was now prepared to face?
Hattie found a book which proffered all sorts of psychological subtext for different diseases. Breaking the left proximal bone in the little finger was about “pretending in the family”.
What constituted pretending in a family? Pretending to be the parent? Pretending everything was ok? As the argument escalated, the opinion of another book was sought. The left proximal bone int little finger in this book, was a ‘person’s place in the family.’
This one rang true to Ruth. The last two weeks had tested her place in the family — and the last two weeks had won. At least, that’s what she concluded as she curled under her mother’s right wing — thirty-something and still the baby in her family.
It seemed to Ruth that all these events, and all these relationships formed the loving guy ropes which tied the dirigible of her life to firm terrain. The conditional, forgiving, all embracing twine was made from time and love and experience. Ruth had felt those ropes grow — sometimes supple, sometimes brittle. Some wore so thin stretching over time and space that they frayed into invisibility — small tattered fragments of which clung to her as the only reminder of friends that had once influenced the stability of her life. Others were thicker, more enduring, like those woven by her husband, her father and her grandparents. The breaking of these ties was unnerving, leaving Ruth tossed on the winds of change.
Ruth’s life settled back into a busy routine. Aside from her job, she was also nearing the end of her part-time honours degree. As the deadline drew near for her to deliver her thesis (on the confluence of neoclassic architecture and social revolution — go figure) she found herself charged with the adrenalin of an achievable goal.
Sometimes in the late afternoon, Hattie would stop by Ruth’s office for a drink on her way home from an interview, or the gym, or whatever Hattie did to fill her time. Often Ruth was too busy to do much more than swing back in her chair and make another time to see her. So one of the worst things for Ruth, was this sense that she’d been looking the wrong way in the last few weeks with Hattie. That she hadn’t said goodbye. Not properly. Not lovingly. Not like you could remember if something bad happened.
In the end, all that was left for Ruth was a mental snapshot of Hattie in the door way. It’s an image of Hattie’s head poking into Ruth’s office, looking into Ruth, looking into the camera. Her face is smiling. Ruth’s feeling, what? Anxious? Distracted? Wants to make time. Doesn’t have time — not today. Plenty of time in the future. Plenty of time already. “Couple of days. We’ll do it in a couple of days.” And Hattie is smiling. A good smile. A happy smile that Ruth is busy, doing well. A sad smile that they can’t do whatever it is together. A wistful, wishful look that some of what she sees could be hers. Pride and desire. Frozen without exit. A last look and gone.
Ruth got a call at work. From the police. They were at her mother’s house, and needed Ruth to come over urgently.
“Is Mum alright? Is she hurt?”
They were non-specific. Her mother needed her. That’s all they’d say.
So she drove to Hope’s house. They’d caught the guy who was killing the old ladies the day after Ruth had rung to say she thought she’d seen him. But that was the thought that came to her mind. An intruder. A fall down the stairs. Tripped on a cat…
It was horrible to see the police car outside. Bad. Very bad.
The door was already open, and Ruth could see Hope inside. She was still dressed for work, but looked small and trampled. There was still the stupid palaver about the door, “Mind the cat.” Ruth always minded the cat. “What is it Mum? What’s happened?”
Hattie had been killed in an accident. Instantly. Dead.
It didn’t make sense to Ruth. Didn’t even touch the sides of her mind. She held her mother and looked over her shoulder to the Police to ask them, stupidly, “Is that true?”
