Somebody’s Baby
Jenni Mazaraki
H arry had a pain in the back of his head.
The nurses sent me in to talk to him because they
thought it was a psychological thing. It was so slow there. People moved at an entirely different pace to anything I had been used to. I was the new art therapist. I wasn’t meant to have favourites. But I did.
Harry was in his nineties and I sat opposite him in his tiny little room. This man who I pictured in a lovely big house. With a neatly manicured hedge and white picket fence. I imagined this old man as a young man with his beautiful young wife and their three young daughters. A strong, tanned arm around his wife’s waist. Her floral sundress swishing freely above her calves. Soft leather sandals. Brown.
Brylcream to slick his hair back. Even on weekends.
And now, in this room, with its adjoining ensuite. Stainless steel bar next to the toilet and in the shower. Exactly two metres from the place where he now slept every night.
In this space, I noticed the nightstand with a single picture. A large family in a garden. There were roses and freshly clipped grass. There were smiles and straw hats and arms around shoulders and in the middle of this group was the man and his wife and they were kissing. Eyes closed.
‘Hello you!’
Every morning, Harry would greet me with that wide smile. He still had his own teeth and they were good. I’d ask him what his plans were for the day.
‘Oh, I’m teaching myself Italian this morning!’
Harry liked to keep his body and mind active. He devised small challenges for himself, now that big challenges were no longer on the cards. His balance was shot. His heart was no good anymore, in his own words.
With his CD player and a small textbook, Harry learned a bit of Italian each day, to keep the old brain active, he said. He joined in activities like bocce and morning reading group. The women adored him. I watched as pale cheeks flushed slightly in his presence.
And he described the strange sensation in the back of his head and he was confused.
‘Is this something you’ve felt before, Harry?’ I asked, going through a checklist in my mind.
‘No, never.’
‘What does it feel like?’
‘Like angels fluttering with burning wings.’
He looked straight at me as though I was someone who could help with his pain. All day long I dealt with people’s feelings and self-expression and giving voice to internal turmoils. And I was terrified that something was very wrong.
Kevin drew hammers. And spanners. Bridges too. He came to art therapy every week with his shirt freshly ironed and his tie neatly knotted. Double Windsor. He stood up tall in a sea of wheelchairs and walking frames. He stood up whenever a lady joined us at the table. He held doors open; he offered seats.
Sometimes he drooled and didn’t notice. He couldn’t remember the word for ruler and became frustrated with himself and then everyone else at the table.
‘Well if you are all so clever, why don’t you tell me the name of this blasted thing?’ Kevin waved the ruler in his hand as proof that the thing existed even if his mind wouldn’t recognise it.
* * *
Sometimes I ate what the residents ate. Roast dinners were my favourite. In the staff room I sat with a magazine, while outside in the dining room, the residents sat at tables in groups of four and six, mimicking a time when they would have sat with their families for dinner. Now, they were on school camp forever, eating meals and sitting across from another old person who they might never have met, if it wasn’t for this place.
* * *
In his room, I saw Harry raise his hand over and over, as though rubbing the back of his head would ease some of his pain. I saw the wedding ring on his soft hands. It looked like it was made for a different man or for a different time. It hung on his finger. A reminder that he still felt married, even though she was gone.
Now Harry was regimented to a schedule not of his making. Living in a room smaller than his back shed. Sitting on seats in the shared lounge covered in fabric designed to repel urine.
A heat washed over my own head, then face, shoulders and my chest grew hot with a prickly fear. He wanted something from me, some kind of reassurance.
* * *
I started the job two weeks after my baby was scraped out of my womb. After the procedure, the nurse brought me a tray of food.
‘You can eat now.’
She smiled cheerfully, placing the hospital food within my reach as I lay in the bed. I stared at the red jelly with its tightly stretched foil lid. No, I can’t eat, I thought to myself as I smiled weakly and said, ‘Thanks.’
* * *
‘The fish stinks from the head down.’
Ezra was pointing his finger in the air, for emphasis. We sat at the café on the main road. He ordered a black coffee and I ordered a latte. I watched him reposition the salt and pepper shakers deftly. ‘You can guarantee that when a place is bad, it comes from the top.’ He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced before placing the cup back in its saucer.
Ezra was new. I met him in the foyer, twenty minutes after he had officially signed the papers to call that place home. I’d just finished facilitating an art therapy session. Walking down the corridor after I’d packed all of the art materials away, I heard an uncomfortable commotion.
‘But I just want to go for a walk!’ Three staff surrounded him, blocking his path to the door. Even if Ezra had managed to get past them, the doors wouldn’t have budged anyway. The button behind the desk released the locks.
‘No, Mr Jacobs, you are a falls risk, you can’t go outside by yourself. A staff member needs to go with you and we are all busy right now.’
Ezra wasn’t having a bar of it.
‘Excuse me, but I am a grown man, and if I want to go for a walk, then I will most certainly go for a walk.’
I guessed that he was the sort of person whose language became increasingly polite the angrier he became. His power was his words. I could tell he didn’t think much of the place or the people who worked there.
‘Why don’t you go and settle into your room and then someone will go out with you later? Hmmm?’
Sandra was trying to placate him but it came out all wrong. She had a knack for that.
‘No, I will go for a walk now.’
* * *
I told Harry that I would check in on him later, but for now, to take it easy and not do anything too strenuous.
I walked to the nurse’s station and told the nurse in charge that something was wrong with Harry and that I didn’t think it was emotional.
His CT scan showed a brain tumour. Inoperable. He had a large mass in his brain and I had sat there talking to him about his feelings and memories and was there something that had upset him recently, would you like to talk, I’m here if you want to talk . . .
I felt his bones. That day in hospital. I don’t think he recognised me. There was none of that cheerful, ‘Well, hello you,’ as I entered his room with a small, unscented bouquet. I had laboured over my choice. What to choose for a man who is dying, who has slipped into a state of otherness and who is unlikely to return? The nurses told me in hushed tones. When the nurses speak like that, you know it’s bad.
The hospital corridors were covered in green paint. On the walls and ceilings and pipes and air vents, layers and layers of the stuff. The sickly light bounced off the glossy walls and into my face. In his room, I gasped as I watched him writhe in pain.
‘Hi Harry, it’s me, Emma. How are you?’ I held the bouquet out to him, childlike.
‘Help me, it hurts, I’m in so much pain.’ Harry’s eyes were open but he did not see me. I was warned before visiting that he wasn’t the same. I was warned.
‘Oh Harry, I’m so sorry you’re in so much pain.’ My spare hand reached out to him and placed itself gently on his shoulder. He immediately winced and pulled away from my light touch. Tears streamed down the side of his temples and landed on the hospital pillow. I quickly clutched my coat collar in my hand, keen to replace the feel of his stiff hospital gown and his bones.
He wailed for his mother and my body split in two. We are all somebody’s baby. Held with tenderness by someone at some time.
‘I’ll go get the nurse.’ It was all I could offer him. With the nurse in the room, I felt too big and too colourful with my red jacket on. I said goodbye as Harry was soothed by the nurse’s attention and the drugs. I turned around to see Harry’s face relax and counted the bunches of flowers on the shelf in the room. Seven.
* * *
It was my job to encourage the residents to attend group activities. I couldn’t manage to get some of them to go to group activities. A group of women sat in the shared lounge near the large painting with the gilded frame and refused to budge. Nola sat near them, but not with them and I caught them making fun of her as I walked past one morning.
‘Off with the fairies, that one,’ Bertha sniggered and the other three laughed in unison.
They knew I had to get them involved or it looked bad for me and for the facility. It would look bad at the audit. So every time I asked them to join in, they sat on their seats and laughed right in my face with their shared joke that I was not privy to.
I saw the women who didn’t have kids. Some of them didn’t have visitors. Others had cardigans with holes and long chin hairs curling. They had strangers or distant nephews act as power of attorney.
* * *
‘It all works out in the end, doesn’t it?’
I sat in the back of the church at Harry’s funeral. I felt so small amongst his tall family with their broad shoulders and long legs. They looked like sensible people who never got too worked up about anything. His daughter with impossibly shiny hair read the eulogy.
‘Those were his last words before he took one last breath, looked over at us and passed away.’
* * *
My baby had died inside my body and I walked the hallways of the aged care facility like I was immune to death. I wasn’t going to be a mother. Not this year. Maybe never. When the heartbeat in my womb stopped, my own heart began a new uncomfortable pace. Staccato.
It had been too early to tell anyone and so, no one knew. Sonya the music therapist announced at morning tea that she was pregnant and we all congratulated her with happy chatter. Days after her announcement, I was in the storeroom sorting art supplies when Sonya entered and it all poured out. I lost a baby, I said. She patted me on the shoulder and said kindly, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I tried not to look at her pregnant belly.
We took it in turns to go to the funerals. Always had to be a staff member to represent the facility. I couldn’t go to another one after Harry’s.
His picture was still up in the foyer from when we asked residents to show us your baby photos! Except Harry didn’t have any, so he gave us the photo of himself and his mate at a dance. He was about twenty-two and wearing a tuxedo, for crying out loud. He was all Fred Astaire and Gregory Peck rolled into one. That smile, beaming out from the photo at me every time I walked past. His arm around his friend’s shoulder. Jovial.
After the funeral, I shook hands gently with Harry’s family and left. Around the corner from the church, I leaned against a cold red brick wall and sobbed. The instant coffee from earlier still bitter in my mouth. I suppressed the urge to vomit.
I wanted to make things better. I wanted to make things right.
I started spending my lunch breaks in the unused section of the building. Amongst piled up furniture, abandoned objects and stale air, I sat on the dirty carpet and ate my sandwiches and cried.
Gathering the objects from the other building became a distraction from the signs that my job was falling apart. Or rather, that I was falling apart. I found embroideries shoved in the back of cupboards and hung them up in the new dining room. I gathered small ornaments of porcelain children and animals, books with the bookmark still left in, unfinished. I redistributed these objects like little ghosts around the new building.
I asked the residents if they’d like an event to mark Anzac Day. Ada gently took me aside and told me quietly that most people would rather forget.
It became a ritual. Sit, eat my sandwich, cry, gather objects, return to work. Call bingo, read the news, play bocce, go for a walk with a resident in the garden, pack the art materials away.
Jodie nudged Paula with her elbow and pointed in my direction. I locked eyes with Paula for a moment before looking down at the armful of dusty objects I was holding. I’d forgotten to re-do my eye makeup.
With my womb prickling at me all day, my emotions were raw and spilling out, uncontainable.
I longed to hold my own baby. In my arms they would feel warm and safe and protected. I could not tolerate my life without a child. I wanted my body to produce life. I’d had enough of death.
* * *
I became used to the smell of urine. I hardly even noticed it anymore. Out of respect for the residents, I trained myself not to react to the smell and then finally, I was immune.
We had an education session on handwashing. A group of us were asked into a small room and with the lights off, the health and safety officer used a black light to show us the germs on our hands.
‘Look, the art therapist has the cleanest hands,’ she said, incredulous that it could be true, and she flicked on the light and asked me to show everyone how I washed my hands. She watched as I took my time to wash each finger individually before I finally turned off the tap with a piece of paper towel in my hand.
‘Is that really how you wash your hands or are you just putting it on for us?’ She was laughing, trying to get everyone else to laugh too.
She didn’t know that I had developed an insatiable desire to wash my hands at work. But no amount of washing my hands got the death off me.
That place was all things and nothing. It was a home and a workplace and an entertainment centre. It was a medical centre, a hairdresser’s salon, a restaurant. It was a place for therapy—but not too much. The dementia unit could only do so much, I was told. The moment a resident became unmanageable, they were shipped off to the geriatric dementia unit, a mental health service and that’s where they stayed until their behaviours became, well, manageable again.
One day I entered the dementia ward and Kevin wasn’t there.
‘Gone to psych,’ said Jo, without even looking up from her notes. When I asked why, Jo told me that he became disoriented and wandered around the unit at night, yelling at anyone who came near him.
Kevin never became ‘manageable’. I never saw him again.
* * *
Everything was locked and bolted at the aged care facility. No fresh air. It bugged me. I opened windows whenever I could during groups. I had a set of keys that I wore around my neck like a warden.
Three staff barricaded the door as Ezra moved towards it. They clearly didn’t have their next move planned.
‘I wouldn’t mind going for a walk,’ I said, smiling at Ezra like a co-conspirator. I wanted to get out of that place just as much as Ezra.
Sandra rolled her eyes. ‘OK, fine, Emma will take you for a walk.’ Take him for a walk. Like a puppy on a leash.
The cars on the main road rushed past, engines roaring. One after another, they shot through, some hurtling towards the city, others heading back to the suburbs.
We walked and found a crappy café and Ezra spoke.
‘I ran businesses, you know, I’m not an idiot, but that place . . . I can’t live in that place, it’s run by idiots.’
I offered a restrained smile.
‘I’m so sorry Ezra, I can see you are a man with a lot of pride. This must be terrible for you.’
We drank our coffee in silence watching the cars quickly drive past on their way to somewhere.
We are all somebody’s baby. Held with tenderness by someone at some time.