I picked Mother up at 9 am and took her to 8A at the Royal Hobart Hospital, the day oncology ward. JC was right. Mother was doing her best to avoid dying. Phillip had been busy for hours getting her ready. Today she was in a Doris Day wig with a pink gingham shirt, three-quarter white pants and a little orange scarf tied about her neck. Her make-up was perfect and her nails were done. I loved his dedication. Nurses are almost, without exception, the most generous people. Max had met Phillip when he was a student. Then she’d come across him again a few years back and offered him this job. He was a godsend.
It was strange visiting the old family home in Taroona, the suburb downriver from Sandy Bay. Pulling into the driveway, I was suddenly sixteen again, trying to sneak back into the house at four in the morning after going out drinking and fornicating with my boyfriend. Or I was eighteen and wondering if I could make it all the way down the hall without Mother appearing from the kitchen with a drink in her hand to say something suitably disparaging about my appearance. ‘You look like a psychedelic giraffe’, had been one of her favourites.
Phillip opened the door and said she would be ready in five minutes. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘Sorry,’ he corrected. ‘It is your home, of course.’
‘Was,’ I said, and smiled. ‘A very long time ago now.’
I hadn’t been able to get away fast enough after year twelve. I got three jobs once I knew I had a place at NYU and six months to save up. I worked a checkout at the supermarket through the week, pulled beers at a pub in town Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and all day Saturday I worked at Salamanca market selling second-hand books for a friend of Dad’s.
The furniture in the house was exactly the same. The same sofas, the same paintings on the walls. The liquidambar now shaded the entire deck. Granny’s flat was still there, closed up now. The tyre swing was gone, as was the bald patch we’d rubbed into the earth beneath it. Now it was all smooth clipped lawn and nothing to indicate children had ever lived here. The pink tiles in the bathroom were still the same, and my old room was as it had been the last time I was here. Homogenised white linen, cream walls and a wicker chair with a cushion bearing an image of the Eiffel Tower. No hint of the girl I had been, which was a relief. I didn’t need her back.
Everything smelled as if it had been polished with lemon verbena. Perhaps it had. There were silver-framed photos of us all on the hall sideboard, but we were ghosts, somehow, in that house. JC’s bad moods, Max and her bushwalking friends laying out their wet tents to dry on the back lawn, me with my world map on the wall and pins in all the places I was going to go. Gone too were all the nights when Mother and Dad argued, Mother working her way up into a fever pitch of rage at whatever she felt was unfair right then. So many dinners where she said not a word. And all the while, through our teenage years, this feeling that she wasn’t really there. Her secret life of lovers and drinking and spending money—all of which I only pieced together later, but it made sense of it all. I remember Max ringing me on my twentieth birthday and saying, ‘Well, now Mother is the only teenager left in the family.’ Some women aren’t meant to get married. Or be mothers. I don’t know why we place that expectation on them, our daughters. It’s a huge job and we all know that it takes everything to do it well. Not everyone has everything to give. And we expect them to keep doing it all their lives. I think my mother only ever wanted her freedom. Born in the wrong generation. I didn’t make things easy for her. And then I left.
Mother was looking more like a ghost every day. She’d exhausted all her options. She’d had two rounds of chemo and it had shrunk the tumours, but then new ones appeared in her lungs. An experimental treatment had worked for a few months, but not anymore. Her last chance was this next round of whatever it was that came in a drip over the course of an hour once a week for six more weeks, a new drug, expensive, with tough side effects. It was unlikely she’d ever taste food again.
On the drive to the hospital she told me that it was very nice to be taken for treatment by her daughter because so many other daughters took their mothers. I mentioned that other people’s daughters were not the leader of the Opposition, but she assured me that other daughters, even very important ones like Maxine, found time to take days off to be with their mothers.
‘Verity has come with me a few times,’ she said. I had discovered that Mother slightly despised her friend Verity because Verity could use the internet. Usually it was Phillip, my boy, who took her.
A nurse welcomed her and settled her into a reclining chair. There were at least a dozen patients all being set up, each with the gaunt, slightly flushed look of the deeply unwell.
‘The staff seem very nice,’ I said.
‘They know who I am,’ said Mother. ‘One day they left me waiting in reception. I was not impressed. I rang Max and told her it wasn’t good enough. It hasn’t been a problem since. When you’re waiting to die, any other sort of waiting becomes intolerable.’
I wondered about the book I’d brought in my bag. At what point would I be able to bury myself in it? We waited for the drip to be fitted and treatment to begin.
Mother looked at all the other patients in their blue vinyl recliners, their drips and trays, several of them hairless. One woman was in a blue cap.
‘Oh, she’s got the freezer bag on,’ said Mother, a little too loudly.
The other woman looked up from her magazine.
‘It’s designed to stop your hair falling out,’ Mother said to me. ‘They tried it on me. Hideously painful. The most excruciating headache. And fine lot of good it did.’
‘It won’t work,’ Mother said to the other woman. ‘You may as well save yourself the pain.’
From the look the other woman gave her, she thought Mother was referring to the cancer, not the hair loss.
‘Look at us. A bunch of drug addicts!’ Mother announced loudly to the other patients, who all looked a little startled to be addressed in this way. I could see most of them knew exactly who she was—mother of both the premier and the leader of the Opposition. One younger woman smiled as if a show was about to begin. The room was set up to allow a collegial feeling among the patients, the chairs all facing inwards, as if this was a meeting of sorts.
‘Did you see that young girl in the paper the other day?’ Mother said to me. ‘The one that held up that corner store—for a tin of baby formula! What’s the world coming to?’
I’d read about it. The ever-reliable Mercury newspaper—a mix of bad puns, skewed facts and small-town stories.
‘I thought she had a pretty good reason,’ I said. ‘Not for armed robbery as such. But she was clearly desperate.’
‘But the tattoos. No wonder she can’t get a job.’
‘I don’t think she was wanting a job, Mum,’ I said. ‘She’s a new mother. That is a job.’
‘I know that, Astrid. I’ve got cancer, not stupidity. I mean that she wouldn’t need to point a gun at some unsuspecting boy, even if he was a Muslim, if she had a job.’
‘I don’t think him being a Muslim was the point.’
‘It’s not like they’re not pulling guns on us these days.’
‘Well, not here in Tasmania,’ I said quietly, glancing at the nearby patients. ‘Not that particular young man or his family.’
‘Oh, you can’t be sure about his family. They just fly off and become radicals. Then they come home on their Australian passports and the next thing you know you have another mass shooting. Or more stabbings of perfectly innocent bystanders. It’s no different to the communists in the fifties. They infiltrate, these people, and before you know it, they’re in parliament, making changes to the rules. And then it’s too late. And we’re all having to get down on our knees and pray to Allah.’
‘So you think the girl was probably right to use a gun, seeing he was a Muslim?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m not saying she was right, Astrid. I’m just saying that if you were needing to steal from a store run by a Muslim, I can understand that young girl taking a gun, just in case.’
‘Like the Australian who took a gun and killed all those New Zealanders in a mosque?’
‘Oh, you still have to make every conversation an argument, don’t you?’
I said nothing. Sometimes it was the only way. After a few moments, my mother said, ‘I mean, what’s going on when mothers can’t afford milk for their babies?’
I thought we would leave it at that, until my mother said, ‘Mind you, that sort of girl, they don’t like to breastfeed. Probably a smoker too.’
‘But you didn’t breastfeed, Mum, did you?’ Sometimes going over old wounds is strangely cathartic. Like scratching a mosquito bite long after it has scabbed.
‘When Maxine was born, they completely understood that I didn’t want to breastfeed. Gave me tablets and my milk dried up in a few days. But that was Sydney. Down here … goodness, you’d think they were in charge of my body. As soon as I got home, I put you both on the bottle. I mean you didn’t want to feed at the same time, or sleep at the same time.’
‘Until Dad discovered we’d sleep if we were put to bed together,’ I said.
‘Oh, I think it was his mother who sorted that out.’
This was a blatant lie. It was one of Dad’s stories. How on a bad night, when we were only a few weeks old, he’d wrapped me and JC up together as if we were back in the womb, and it had worked. We didn’t sleep apart until we were five. Squashed into the same cot, then the same bed. Apparently, JC wouldn’t fall asleep until he had my hand in his.
‘Your grandmother,’ said Mother. ‘She was a help with you all.’
This was an extraordinary compliment coming from my mother. You are mellowing, I thought. Death is working on you.
‘I loved Granny,’ I said. ‘I missed her so much after she died.’
‘I can’t imagine you’ll miss me. I doubt you’ll even come home for my funeral.’
‘Don’t say that, Mum. Anyway, I’m here now.’
‘Yes, but I’m not dead. I know you, Astrid. You only do something if it suits you.’
Maybe not mellowing after all.
‘Cup of tea, Mum?’ I asked, getting up.
‘That would be nice. Ask a nurse.’
‘I’ll sort it,’ I said.
Outside in the corridor, I rested my forehead against the wall. Then I texted Max. With mother in chemo. Where can I find the fentanyl? Need to hook myself up.
Max sent back the crying with laughter emoji and the halo face emoji.
I had wondered, as children of unhappy marriages do, why my parents stayed together. I’d asked my father on one of his trips to New York when my children were small and I was beginning to realise how hard marriage was.
‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘As soon as I saw her, I thought, I have to take care of you.’
I’d asked Mother too. It was after yet another fight where Mother had said something needlessly insulting and Dad had left the dinner table. She’d had the decency, on that night, to appear a little remorseful.
‘Why does Dad stay with you, Mum?’ I’d asked. I was eighteen. Granny was dead. I had my scholarship in the US. I was almost out of there.
‘Oh, Astrid, can’t you see? The poor man loves me.’
I had tried to become only my father’s daughter. But my mother taught me everything I know about manipulation.