When she eats burnt toast for breakfast, there’s a trace left on her fingers that smells like cigarettes. She sniffs them with her eyes closed and remembers her smoking days. Those days were filled with angst, but calmed by nicotine.
For ten years now, ever since she moved back west, she’s had a job cleaning in the women’s hospital in town. On days when there’s no one around at the end of her shift, she takes things from the medical waste bins and brings them home to wash. Scrubbed-clean tongue depressers lie drying in the sun on her back verandah. Rows of white bandages flutter from the clothesline, like streamers on a cruise ship. The rubber gloves and swabs are packed away and labelled. The thought of wastage makes her ill.
She lives alone now since her mother died. She sees a psychoanalyst once a week about her ‘lack of self-regard’. He’s losing patience, like all the others have. That’s fine. Next week she won’t turn up, that’s all. She’ll call the one below him in the yellow pages. That’s all there is to do, she’s found.
One Sunday night in winter she plans to kill herself. She’s found out you can do it with a plastic bag and helium. She drives her car to a dirt road where there used to be a pony club and Girl Guide hall when she was young. She turns on the car’s interior light to read the instructions her new friend ‘Jane’ has given her. Outside there are no streetlights and when she tries to look through the window, she can’t see past her own reflection. It’s yellow-skinned and grim-shadowed under the eyes, like a mad woman peering in. For several minutes she sits and stares, and it’s like looking into the face of a person you’ve ceased to love. She feels such pity for that woman that she drives her car back home and puts herself to bed.
On the weekend she cleans a neighbour’s house for cash. When she dusts the shelves she stops to look at the photographs and thinks about what it’s like to raise a child, how it feels to make another human being. There’s just so much that can go wrong.
She vacuums in the bedroom. There’s a book on the bedside table with a dedication: To Ann-Marie, the love of my life. What must it be like to have a love of my life? she thinks.
She cleans bathrooms, bedrooms, benchtops. It takes her half a day. In quiet moments, when she’s pulling on a pillowcase or waiting for the sink to fill, she thinks about her life. She can’t quite see the whole from all the bits. Her mother used to say it’s never too late to make something of yourself. That’s not what she believes. There is a point of no return. She knows perfectly well she’s been a waste of everybody’s time.