Stephanie Buckle
A new resident is moving in. Room 17 has stood vacant for a week, stripped down to its essentials. Even the steel-framed bed that Mr Karamantzis had occupied was gone. I had ventured in at last, and was having a little poke around, just in case there was anything left of Mr K; but there was nothing, not even a bit of soap. Then Nina came in.
‘You’re not allowed in here, Lillian, we have a new resident coming.’ She shooed me out with her little bustling steps, the spikes of her hair bristling like armour.
I watch them moving the new resident’s furniture in – a rocking chair, a queen-size bed. A woman then; men don’t have rocking chairs.
But I miss her arrival because the hairdresser chooses that moment to come and cut my hair.
‘Oo, you want a bit taken off here, don’t you, dear?’ she says, craning towards my reflection in the mirror and twisting a fistful of my hair into the nape of my neck.
She tells me she’s seen the new arrival in the foyer.
‘She’s in a wheelchair,’ she says, ‘a very fancy one. Apparently, she’s been in one all her life, can’t walk at all. Would that be better or worse than losing your mobility late in life, do you think?’
I watch the tufts of my grey hair falling under the deft snips of her scissors.
‘Mr Chesterton gave her a lovely welcome,’ she goes on. Mr Chesterton is the manager. He’s a dapper little man who likes to treat everyone like a film star. He kisses my face when he greets me, holding my hand as a lover would.
‘What is her name?’ I venture. A kindergarten question.
‘Meredith,’ she says. ‘She asked them if she could have the newspaper delivered to her room every morning!’
Meredith. Able-minded and fresh from the world.
I stand in the empty dining room, watching the two Indian girls setting the tables. They have sleek black hair and big fleshy red mouths. The knives and forks and spoons clatter onto the formica table tops. The glasses follow; they fling each one into position as if daring them to break.
‘You’re too early for tea, Lillian,’ one of them shouts to me.
Nina comes and moves a chair away from the table nearest the door. I take hold of her arm, although I know she won’t like it.
‘What is it?’ she says, frowning and peering into my face, as if I might be hiding something.
I must be quick and not think about the words. ‘I would like to move to a table closer to the door,’ I manage.
‘Really?’ she says. ‘Any particular reason?’
I try for an expression that conveys, ‘It’s a bit embarrassing to talk about.’
‘Well, that shouldn’t be a problem,’ she says, pulling her arm away. ‘There’s a space next to our new resident.’
*
Meredith has short, thick, white hair, but her eyebrows are black, and jut across her face like two deft strokes of a Japanese artist’s paintbrush. She must be old, to be in here, and yet the skin of her face is extraordinarily smooth. She has the direct and curious expression of someone who is in complete possession of all her marbles.
She eats her dinner with gusto, and between mouthfuls, asks me a lot of questions. How long have I been here? Where did I live before? Why did I come here? (In a blessed surge of spontaneity and whimsy, I tell her it was because I couldn’t be bothered to cook any more, which is at least partly true, although Suzie said I should take the bed while it was offered, even if I didn’t need it yet, as no one could say how rapid my deterioration might be.) She is intensely interested in everything I say, no matter how odd.
In return, she tells me she lived on a farm out west somewhere, and it got too much for her. I want to ask her how she managed a farm by herself in a wheelchair, but my question is too urgent and too complicated, and slips from my grasp. She smiles though, as if I have asked it.
‘I never married, and never had children,’ she says. ‘Never looked after anyone except myself and my animals.’
‘I, too, have been an independent woman,’ I say, ‘though there have been—’ The words scatter in all directions. Is it, friends who shared certain things? – no, too complicated to remember or explain. Is it, moments of terror? – ha, plenty of those.
‘Yes?’ Meredith says, encouraging.
‘There have been times when I wished I’d taken my mother’s advice!’ Meredith laughs as if she understands perfectly, and explanations are unnecessary.
Pushing her wheelchair, I feel stronger straight away. My legs steady, my feet become firm. Only the question of direction remains difficult, as all the corridors look exactly the same, and seem always to return to the same vases of flowers and rows of chairs. But Meredith points confidently ahead, and I follow, all down the winding way to her room.
*
Now that Meredith is here, I have no need of my own room. I sit in her wooden rocking chair quietly, my hands folded in my lap, but I don’t rock. I want no distraction. Sometimes, Meredith reclines on her bed, propped by many cushions, her bright eyes settled on me. Sometimes, she sits in front of me in the wheelchair. She has the air of a benign doctor, who is prepared to take the time to get to know her patient. She asks me questions, as if there is a great deal that she needs to understand. Was I ever married? Did I ever have children? What was my career? Did I travel? Did I ever live overseas?
Even if I had the words, my answers wouldn’t matter. There is nothing to know about me that has any relevance. I laugh at some of her questions, and shake my head. I say, ‘Ah well!’ and ‘I can tell you one thing for certain!’ and she hangs on my words, waiting, and the silence stretches, balloons, mutates around us, changing its meaning a dozen times, until we are done with it, me with trying to find the words, and she with wanting to know the answers, and we just sit, nodding and smiling together, as two elderly women will do.
‘Come on, Lillian, go back to your own room now!’ Nina says, flicking her purple nails at me. ‘You’re disturbing Meredith.’
Meredith has fallen asleep on the bed. Her head has lolled to one side, and her lips are slightly apart.
‘Come on!’ Nina says again, so loudly I am afraid she will wake Meredith, so I follow her out of the room. On the way, I take the little wooden horse from the top of Meredith’s chest of drawers so that I can look at it more closely back in my own room.
‘It’s afternoon tea down in the dining room!’ Nina calls after me. ‘Go down and have a cuppa!’
Is she going towards the dining room or away from it? I walk slowly to the end of the corridor where it branches three ways. There is a large fabric collage hanging on the wall here, of a midnight blue sky and bright yellow, gauzy stars. I gaze at it, holding the little horse deep inside my jacket pocket, and I think of the glittering stars in the black bowl of night above Meredith’s farm.
‘Has the plumber arrived yet?’ an ancient gentleman enquires of me, passing slowly through this junction.
‘I can’t help you, I’m sorry,’ I say. Meredith’s corridor is empty again, so I turn and go back to her room. I close the door quietly behind me, and settle again in the rocking chair to wait for her to wake. Peace settles round me like an old shawl.
*
I’m in love, of course. It’s unmistakeable, that flood of exhilaration and relief, which washes everything else away. It’s like returning to a landscape I thought I’d never see again.
But as soon as I have it, I begin to dread that it will be taken away. I’ll lose Meredith, she will leave again, or someone else will claim her. I can’t risk a single moment away from her.
‘Leave Meredith alone while she’s got her visitor,’ Nina says, hauling me from the chair, pulling me from the room. I am a house torn apart by a tornado and the wind howls through me. I must be with her. I stand outside the door, where I can just see the visitor, sitting in the rocking chair where I was sitting. She is a coarse-skinned woman with cropped orange hair. Nina opens a door into the courtyard, and taking my hand leads me through it and shuts the door behind me.
I lie on top of my bed, staring at the dark. If I had stood up to Suzie, and refused to be bullied into coming here, I would never have met Meredith. But if one idle day, out of so many indecisive weeks and desultory years, I had said to myself firmly, ‘Come on, Lillian, what you need is a good old fashioned walk in the country,’ I could have chosen the road to her farm, I could have seen her, by the pig pen perhaps, struggling with a bucket of kitchen peelings, and offered to help her. My arms would have been strong, my flesh young and firm, I could have lifted her from her wheelchair then.
Suzie rings me, but I have nothing to say.
‘Who is Meredith?’ she asks.
‘I want you to know ... I want you to know ...’ is all I can say, because my words have taken instant fright at the phone.
*
‘Would you like to walk over to the park?’ says Suzie.
‘Ah!’ I say, and I think of trees, and the wide empty spaces between them.
‘Mum! Where are you going?’ She stops me, blocks me rather. Her hand is on my arm. ‘You’ve got everything you need, we don’t need to go back to your room.’ She scratches at the pumpkin-soup stain on my jacket with her fingernail.
In the absence of words and reason, I find my will, and it strengthens my body as nothing ever has before.
‘Come on, Mum!’ Suzie says, taking my hand. ‘I don’t have all afternoon.’ Then she puts her arms around my resisting body. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that,’ she says.
‘Meredith,’ I manage.
‘Mum, for goodness sake, forget Meredith. Can’t you just come for a walk with me for half an hour?’ But she follows me down the corridor, rummaging in her bag for her phone and pressing the keys rapidly with her thumb. She always hated to walk slowly.
Meredith is sitting up in her wheelchair. She brightens when we come in, and invites Suzie to pull up a chair. Her good manners transform room 17 into a gracious lounge. When we go back to her farmhouse, this is what it will be like. She will preside over the arrangements, courteous and hospitable; she will make everything comfortable.
After Suzie has gone, with a promise to be back on Sunday, the room settles again. Meredith pulls the curtains shut and closes the door.
‘I’m going to have a rest,’ she says, ‘but you are welcome to stay.’
I watch her manoeuvre herself onto the bed, and pull the bedcover over herself. She faces away from me, the shape of her body like rolling dunes under the cover. I go to the bed and touch her shoulder.
‘It’s alright,’ she says, ‘I’m still here.’
Gently, I climb onto the bed beside her, and lie down with my chest against her back. I reach my arm around her and feel for her hand. We breathe together, still and warm. There is no other place that I would wish death to take me from but here.
*
Meredith has had some money go missing from her room.
‘You don’t know anything about it?’ she asks me.
‘I would never ... I would never ...’ The urgency of my denial sticks in my throat like rising dough, thick and claggy. Tears wet my cheeks. She reaches for my hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I had to ask.’
She says she is going to inform the authorities.
Anxiety billows down the corridors and into every room, like an epidemic. No one is spared. There are whisperings; there are agitated flutterings of hands. Those who normally pace have sat down in unlikely spots; those who normally sit have stood up with shaky purpose. Mr Chesterton, accompanied by Nina and the little Thai nurse, advance methodically. They shut each door behind them, there is a dark silence for about five minutes, then they emerge again. Poor old Mr Evans is brought from his nook in the garden, his mouth a shining purple hole in his head. They take him into his room and it’s the same routine – five minutes’ silence, then they emerge again.
I have been sat on the couch in the courtyard window, the ancient Greek crone with the hooked nose on one side of me, weaving her fingers together and moaning, and creamy fat Nora on the other side, sighing, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’
Then it is my turn.
‘It won’t take long,’ Nina says. ‘We just need to check your room to make sure there is nothing there that shouldn’t be there.’
I sit on the edge of my armchair and watch them. Mr Chesterton stands in the middle of the room, nodding, ‘Just a formality, just a formality.’ They open my drawers, they look through my handbag, they open my wardrobe and check the pockets of my jacket and slacks. Then Nina lifts the pillow on my bed and finds Meredith’s horse.
She hands it to Mr Chesterton, who looks bemused. ‘It belongs to Meredith,’ she says to him. ‘I knew it! We could have come straight here and saved ourselves the trouble.’
All three face me; the Thai nurse has her arms folded.
‘Have you been taking things from Meredith’s room?’ says Mr Chesterton unhappily.
‘Have you taken any money?’ Nina asks, very loudly. ‘Come on, Lillian, where have you put it? We know you’ve taken it.’
‘Well,’ says Mr Chesterton.
I am speechless, of course.
‘We’re going to find it,’ says Nina, and pushes the mattress right off the bed. There, of course, is the brown envelope with the five hundred dollars, selotaped to the bed, where it always is.
I watch them counting the money, my hands fluttering up and back again like foolish little flags. They talk softly to each other, but then Mr Chesterton turns to me and says, ‘Lillian, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stay in your room now while we decide what we’re going to do about this. You’re not to go into Meredith’s room again, do you understand?’
‘We could just lock her door,’ says Nina.
‘We can’t do that,’ says Mr Chesterton. ‘We will just have to keep a watch.’
‘We haven’t got the staff,’ says Nina. ‘Anyway, this is just the icing on the cake. She’s very inappropriate and disinhibited around Meredith, it’s a really unhealthy relationship, and it’s upsetting the other residents.’
They leave at last. ‘Don’t come out until I say you can!’ is Nina’s parting shot.
*
Suzie has brought boxes, and squats on the floor, packing my things.
‘They can’t look after you properly here, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ve had to find another place for you.’ She is holding back her tears.
I don’t even try to stop her. My will has dwindled to a memory, and my belly seems full of stones.
‘Can’t you just say one thing, Mum?’ she pleads. ‘Anything?’
If I could, I’d tell Meredith I’d have given her all my money. I’d tell her that if ever I’d known that she was in the world, I’d have taken the road west and found her. I’d tell her I can’t bear to lose the sight of her.