‘I lived in New Zealand ever since I was nine,’ Mrs Smithson said. ‘I love it over there. Won’t be there ever again.’ The silence stretched.
Jeanie searched for something to say. ‘Tell me about it.’
Mrs Smithson was propped up on her bed that elevated her top half. Easier for her to breathe. Her neck was impossibly thin and her head was supported against pillows.
‘You’ve not been there?’
Jeanie shook her head. It was easy to talk to Mrs Smithson. ‘No, never. Never been out of Australia except when I was a baby and that doesn’t count.’ She paused in the dusting of the windowsill. ‘My husband had phobias. One of them was travel. So we never went far. And he didn’t want me to go on my own. Became agitated if I even suggested it. He always said we have everything in Queensland. Not true of course. Please tell me. What’s it like in New Zealand? You draw such wonderful verbal pictures. Take me there, please.’
‘It’s a green land. Green because of the rain. The whole winter long the sun plays hide and seek with rain clouds. Sunshine then a shower then the sun again. Over and over. Cool and damp. Not like this searing heat.’
‘Do you like the rain?’ Jeanie could take the heat like many others couldn’t. Along with most in Queensland, she appreciated some rain, but not too much of it.
‘It makes everything green. Bright, natural green for most of the year. You should see the gardens. Everyone is a gardener over there.’ Mrs Smithson sighed. ‘I read once about making a new hedge from hydrangea cuttings. It said when you had poked the bare sticks into the unprepared ground, don’t be surprised if every now and again one of them doesn’t strike properly.’ She glanced over at Jeanie who was tidying the magazines scattered along the windowsill. ‘Not every one would grow roots, would you believe! That says what New Zealand is all about. Everything grows there.’ She turned her head so she could look outside. ‘Winter and summer I bet these gardens are watered.’ The automatic sprinkling system had come on sending sprays of rainbow colours above the flowers. ‘In New Zealand, most of the time anyway, nature does this for you. Hate the rain? No way.’
‘Where did you live?’ Jeanie liked to hear Mrs Smithson’s stories. And telling tales seemed to help with her pain levels.
‘Auckland to start with when I was young. Then met and married Bill and we moved to his farm in the Waikato. Dairy. I did the vegetables. We did irrigate in the summer, of course. But we had fresh veggies all year long.’ Her voice was starting to weaken. Jeanie finished up and left her so she could have another nap. Such a lovely woman. The first person she had met since becoming Jeanie again whom she truly liked. Almost a friend.
That was the start of stories about New Zealand. About the trips she and Bill had taken, their holiday ‘bach’ on a lake near Rotorua, their canoeing on the Waikato River. She talked about living with cancer and how men couldn’t accept it. About selling the farm. About moving to Brisbane for some new treatment which maybe helped, maybe not. But Mrs Smithson made one thing clear; she would have much preferred to be in a Waikato hospice than a Queensland one.
Another patient who was rapidly becoming a favourite was Mr Jensen, of the grossly swollen abdomen. So swollen he could hardly move. His face was thinning, as were his limbs, but his abdomen was getting larger and larger. One day the medical staff came into his room to drain fluid from it. Jeanie was cleaning in there at the time.
‘I’ll just leave,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t hurt, Rebecca,’ Mr Jensen said. ‘Truly. Just a bit disconcerting. Could you hold my hand while they do it? Just a friendly hand-hold?’
Jeanie looked uncertainly into the face of the nurse in charge. The kind one.
‘You don’t have to,’ she started to say to Jeanie, misinterpreting. Jeanie shook her head and took Mr Jensen’s hand. Warm and dry like an old man’s in spite of his age. She grasped his hand firmly with her right hand and put her left over top. Mr Jensen smiled up at her.
‘A friendly touch. It means a lot you know,’ he said to the medical team.
They did their job. Jeanie didn’t look very often, but enough to know they had inserted a very large hypodermic needle into his abdomen enabling them to draw off a pale liquid that seemed to have bits in it. She kept her eyes mostly on Mr Jensen’s face, who in turn was watching what the team was doing. It seemed to take forever, and his hand became moist in hers.
He looked up at Jeanie. ‘It feels better, you know. What they’re doing is releasing the pressure. Feels much, much better.’ She squeezed his hand and smiled at him. When the team had gathered up their equipment and cheerily left them alone once more, he said, ‘You have a good heart, Rebecca. Gentle. I could feel wonderful energy pouring into me while you held my hand. God bless you.’
One morning Mrs Smithson told Jeanie to call her ‘Mindi’.
‘I can’t, Mrs Smithson. One of the rules. Cleaners always use the formal address.’
‘Just while you are in here? Come on, Rebecca.’
Jeanie became upset. ‘I can’t. I need this job. Please don’t ask me to.’
Mrs Smithson waved her hand, shutting her eyes. ‘Of course. Silly of me. I wouldn’t get you into trouble for anything. Forget I even mentioned it.’
‘Tell me, please,’ Jeanie said to change the subject, ‘what particularly you loved about that farm of yours.’
Mrs Smithson looked out the window. ‘Everything. It’s natural over there. Oh, I suppose Auckland and Wellington are as artificial as Sydney and even London, but where we lived…’
Jeanie was wiping all the surfaces with antiseptic cleaner inside the little en suite bathroom. ‘I can hear you, Mrs Smithson. Do go on.’
‘Ours was rolling pastureland, for the most part. But we had a stream on the property. Drained down to the Waikato River eventually. It was in a dell. I guess it had been carved out over time by the stream itself. A wondrous dell.’ She reached over and sipped at the glass of water always on her nightstand. ‘From our farmhouse, you could see the tips of the trees. Looked like shrubs from afar, but when you walked over, they were the tops of gigantic trees reaching up to the light. It was a scramble down to the stream. I found the best route, made a pathway hopping from one root system to another, a path of my own. All dappled sunlight and quiet. Out of the wind. And the smells. Oh, Rebecca, you must go there. Maybe not that spot, but there are thousands like it all over New Zealand. Damp earth. I can smell it now if I close my eyes. I used to go down there when I wanted thinking time. Time for me. Promise me you’ll go one day and smell the earth for me.’
Just before she scurried from the room, Jeanie muttered, ‘Thank you,’ she paused then whispered, ‘Mindi’. Mrs Smithson laughed aloud.
Not long after that Mrs Smithson started to give away things. She wanted Jeanie to have her makeup case. It contained a beautiful set of jars of every lotion devised for a woman’s face, lipsticks, eye-shadows, foundation and finishing powders.
‘I couldn’t. It’s too much. Maybe one of your friends?’
‘Rebecca, I want you to have it. I know you like the natural look, but one day you’ll want to get a better job. And one day you’ll want to get gussied up to go out to dinner. One day you’ll start taking care of your skin too. It’s too fine to just ignore, especially in this Australian climate. Just tuck it away somewhere.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Jeanie said, touching the top of the case. ‘But there will be rules about this sort of thing.’
‘We just need to check it’s okay, then it’s yours.’
Jeanie nodded. She wasn’t sure she wanted the makeup, mainly because it was a bit too reminiscent of her Jeanette role, except Mrs Smithson wanted her to have it. Jeanie talked it over with the nurse in charge. She said this happened all the time. It probably meant Mrs Smithson had very little time left. Nevertheless, the next day the nurse said she had checked with Mrs Smithson’s mother, who was happy for Mrs Smithson to give away whatever she wanted.
‘Thank you very much,’ Jeanie said to her when Mrs Smithson pressed the makeup case on her once more. ‘Every time I use it I will think of you.’
‘And start saving your pennies for a trip over to New Zealand, Rebecca. I will make that a last request from me to you. That you start to save. Leave that husband to his own devices. You go over there and just breathe in the scents and smells of New Zealand and think of me.’ Jeanie thought but didn’t say that travel without a passport was impossible.
It was increasingly obvious Mrs Smithson was close to death. Her mother was now coming every afternoon, often while Mrs Smithson lay sleeping. But Jeanie had the best of her times. Late morning, medications all working, bathed, awake and talkative. Her voice was little more than a whisper now, but her spirit was bright.
‘Do you think death is the next big adventure, Rebecca? That was the phrase which stuck in my mind when I read it last week. The next big adventure. Sounds good, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Smithson. I’d like to think so.’
‘I like the idea of reincarnation. Coming back again. So it’s not just over.’
Jeanie remembered reading book after book about reincarnation when she was at university and she should have been studying. Having long discussions over coffee. Over bottles of South-East Australia’s vin du pays. ‘Life on earth is just one big school. Is that the idea?’
‘Yes, that’s the concept. We choose who we want to live with. Like I must have chosen my partner.’
Jeanie nodded. Mrs Smithson forgot things now.
‘But he needs someone. Someone practical to keep him on the straight and narrow. He won’t know what to do with himself.’ She looked over at Rebecca, slowly turning her head so she could focus on her face. ‘Interested, Rebecca? He’s tall and slim with a ridiculous long reddish ponytail. Wouldn’t cut his hair after he started to go bald. But he’s a great lover.’ She gave Jeanie an exaggerated wink. ‘I can recommend him. And he’s not afraid of cancer.’ She paused, sighed, lifted her hand slightly from the bed before letting it flop down again. ‘Not like Bill.’
‘Bill? I thought your husband was Bill.’
Mrs Smithson nodded. ‘He left me. Farm sold. I started a business. New partner. Caring. People caring.’ Her voice was wavering and her eyes were at half mast.
The next morning Jeanie asked her, ‘Don’t you believe in soul mates, Mrs Smithson? Life partners who will be reunited after death?’
‘I like that thought.’ Her voice faded and she awkwardly cleared her throat. ‘But I think the afterlife may be sort of sexless. Just friends over there. You given any thought about my partner? He really is a great lover.’
‘Don’t tease, Mindi.’ Jeanie had shut the door and risked using the woman’s first name.
‘I’m not. Not really.’ Her voice was noticeably weaker this morning. ‘I figure having another partner will help him. He’s sort of a weak character, all said and done.’
‘Not Bill. This is someone else.’ Jeanie was having a hard time with all this.
‘Not Bill. Nope. He couldn’t take my having cancer.’ Mrs Smithson closed her eyes. The times she was alert and aware were getting shorter. ‘I’ve had another thought too, Rebecca. Maybe we were friends in the afterlife. You and me.’ She giggled. ‘The “before” life. And we planned this.’
Jeanie was almost finished the room. ‘Anything else today?’
‘My drawer. Would you mind, Rebecca? Look in the makeup case. The compact has a cracked cake in it. I dropped it into my drawer. The powder went everywhere.’
Jeanie opened the drawer to find the mess. ‘Won’t take me a tick,’ she said. She carefully put everything onto a clean rag, wiping the box of chocolates, the book and the little pile of passports as she did so. The passports were bound by a rubber band which disintegrated in her hand.
‘Oops, sorry. Look, I’ll just get a new rubber band from the nursing station.’
But Mrs Smithson had fallen asleep. Quite a long conversation for her at this stage. Jeanie slipped the little pile of passports into the pocket of her smock and finished cleaning the drawer. She found a new rubber band after finishing the other rooms and returned to Mrs Smithson’s room. She was deeply asleep, and her breathing was long and slow. Frighteningly slow. Jeanie held her own breath and watched for the next breath from Mrs Smithson. It took a long while coming. Maybe this really was the beginning of the end.
There were quite a few passports. The oldest was a British one and was in her maiden name of Rhodes, as was the oldest of the New Zealand ones. The newer two were in the name of Smithson. So she was British born, had lived in New Zealand, married there. Then moved to Australia less than a year ago for this supposedly life-saving treatment. Jeanie put the heavy rubber band around the lot of them and put them back into the drawer. Then she stopped. Froze. She liked Mrs Smithson. Her favourite patient by far. Their conversation came back to her. Did she and Mrs Smithson plan meeting like this when they were both spirits? Were they friends on the other side? Was Mrs Smithson to be a part of her future, even though she was dying? Jeanie knew Mindi’s mythical lover was never going to be a part of her own life, in fact, didn’t seem a part of Mindi’s life as he had never come to visit. That left this uncomfortable thought. More than uncomfortable. Wicked. Wrong. Or was it so wrong? She reached in and brought out the bundle slipping the rubber band off again. She looked at the photos. Melinda Elizabeth Rhodes. Mindi. Young. Full lips, full cheeks, solemn. Melinda Elizabeth Smithson, née Rhodes, in her twenties in the old New Zealand photograph, blonder, thinner and with a small smile. She must have been in her mid-thirties in the newer of the New Zealand photos. Broad closed-lipped smile, a grin almost. Very blond hair teased into an untidy but fashionable mess. The latest photo was in an almost new British passport presumably taken when she was becoming ill. Much thinner, much older, hair sparse, dated earlier this year. Just in case she needed it, presumably, before she went back to New Zealand. She looked at the birth date. Mrs Smithson was younger than Jeanie, although she looked years older. Six years younger. Not quite forty. She glanced over at the sleeping woman, now looking like a survivor of Belsen. Jeanie slipped the four year old New Zealand passport into her smock pocket and bound the others with the rubber band.
‘Thank you, Mindi,’ she murmured, lightly touching the woman’s hand lying on the bed. ‘I would love you to be right and we were friends before either of us was born. And I hope this was all planned and you want me to have this passport.’ She walked to the window, fighting tears. Was it okay? The right thing to do? She needed a passport. Mindi, quite obviously, didn’t. Jeanie shut her eyes and swayed. Damn, damn, damn. She had better ask if it would be alright. She waited for Mrs Smithson to give any indication of awakening but she slept on. Jeanie had to get on with her work. She would stop by later. She wiped her eyes and wheeled her cleaning cart out of the room.
In the afternoon, after Mrs Smithson’s mother had left, Jeanie entered the room.
‘Oh, sorry, doctor,’ she said when she saw who was by Mindi’s bed. ‘I’ll come back later.’ But when Jeanie’s shift ended, the charge nurse told Jeanie Mrs Smithson was gravely ill and only relatives and clinical staff were now allowed into her room. Jeanie put her hand into her smock pocket, fingering the passport.
In the caravan, Jeanie confirmed the passport was current but there was less than a year to go. If Mindi agreed she could have the passport, its use would have to be within the foreseeable future.
Jeanie looked at her image in the mirror, glancing from it to the photo on the passport. They didn’t look at all alike. For one thing, Mrs Smithson had been a good-looking woman with a pixie-like face and Jeanie considered herself to be on the plain side. Certainly the hair was all wrong. Mrs Smithson had worn a sophisticated hairdo for her photo with blonde hair and even more blonded ends. The just-out-of-bed look. She had a wide forehead and Jeanie’s was tall and narrow. Made a huge difference in their looks. Both of them had blue eyes, although Mrs Smithson had larger eyes. They didn’t show in this grinning portrait, though. Jeanie knew her nose was a lot longer than hers, but somehow this difference was not particularly illustrated in the passport photo either. Thank goodness it wasn’t a profile shot. Jeanie tried out the grin. Better. Ignoring the hair colour , and with a whole lot of eyebrow plucked out, and a thick fringe covering her forehead she might just get away with it. Along with loads of makeup. She practiced the small grin again. Jeanie was slimmer than the Mrs Smithson of the photo, hugely different from the way she was now. That probably didn’t matter; people’s weight shifted. The eyebrows, the forehead and the hair. Which gave her an idea.
Jeanie waited until after dark before fetching the plastic pouch. All was quiet except for the sounds of late carousers some distance away. The money was intact and undamaged. She withdrew another bundle of notes and slipped the passport inside the pouch before replacing it into her hidey-hole.
Inside once more, she counted the money. This would do as a start. With her two little jobs, her outgoings were about even. She thought about timing. A couple of months? Would she be ready by then? Only if she started right now. The first thing she needed to know was where Mrs Smithson bought her wig.
Then it hit her. She hadn’t asked Mindi yet and she was getting way ahead of herself. She told herself to calm down and take one step at a time. She hoped and prayed Mindi had rallied overnight. They had unfinished business.
But the next day, the room was empty. Mrs Smithson had passed away during the night with her mother holding her hand.
‘Was she wearing her wig?’ she asked the nurse-in-charge.
‘Yes, she was,’ the nurse replied. ‘How did you know?’
‘For her mother. So she died beautiful.’
‘Nice woman,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll be getting a Mrs Galbraith in later. But the room is done, so nothing for you to do there today.’ Jeanie nodded and carried on with her work, thoughts of Mrs Smithson uppermost in her mind. Not just a nice woman. A woman with soul, with depth, with compassion. Dying with her wig on. Tears pricked her eyelids.