Elizabeth Jolley
Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007) was a British-born writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was fifty-three when her first book was published, and went on to write fifteen novels, four short story collections and three works of non-fiction.
These days I live with the need to have something lined up to do next. The way in which I live reminds me of a joke; there are two goldfish swimming round and round in a goldfish bowl and one fish is telling the other fish that there’s no time to chat as it’s one of those ‘get things done’ days.
I make little lists because I might forget what I am doing, or more importantly, what I am going to do. Like going to the doctor’s to see if my moles are cancer, like throwing away left-over food, old clothes, letters and other papers, especially receipts and bank statements saved over a great many years in case of a possible taxation audit (random).
It’s when I am sitting in waiting rooms that I take stock of the way things are, of the way I’m living and of the way I used to live. I compare my life with other people’s lives in a rather superficial way. Not comparisons about money but rather on the quality of roof beams, joists, floor boards and the sizes and shapes of windows.
I go back in my thoughts quite often. One time I actually try to remember all the names of the hospitals in the city where I lived for years in the English Midlands. There was, at that time, the Hospital for the Diseases of Women, the Sick Children’s, the Ear, Nose and Throat, the Skin Hospital, the Fever, the Cancer, the General, the Accident (Queens) and the Queen Elizabeth. The QE was Maternity as well. I manage to stop the litany before going on to the names of streets, churches, schools and shops, though the names of houses come to mind – Sans Souci, Barclay, The Hollies, Padua, St Cloud and Prenton. Naturally, the hedges follow, the closely watched hedges, the laurel and the privet, the rhododendrons and the holly, evergreens in a series of repetitive quartets.
Those hedges from another country have given way to the honeysuckle, the hibiscus, the oleander, the plumbago, the white and pink climbing roses, the wistaria and the geraniums. There are too the street lawns, the box trees, the plane trees, the peppermints and the cape lilacs. But perhaps it is the blue metal, the smooth and the rough, which I notice the most when we are walking. The habit of closely watching the hedges is not lost, if anything it is more intense, and intensely, too, the roads. The roads are closely watched; Harold Hammond Goldsworthy Bernard the park Thompson Koeppe Princess Caxton Warwick and Queen and back Queen Warwick Caxton…
I need a shrink, I say to myself, and go on to say that shrink is not a word I use. The use of it, even if not said aloud, is an indication that I need someone with specialist training.
Really this place! All I seem able to do here is to stare at the other people. We all seem stupid sitting here with a conventional obedience which is expected of us.
The chairs here are all joined together, fixed, making a square space in the middle where children can play. There are some little chairs and a low table for the children. I forget about myself for a bit, when I see a small child staggering about with a big plastic bucket. He has thick dark curls and a pale face and I pity him throwing up so much that he has to take a bucket around.
What’s the matter with me, I think then, because ‘throwing up’ is a phrase I never use; neither do I say ‘around’ instead of round. I dismiss all this immediately when I see that the child is loading up the bucket with all the toys, the building blocks and farm animals, provided for all the children to play with, and is hauling them off to the safe harbour between his squatting mother’s possessive spread-out legs.
A man sitting diagonally opposite gives his urine specimen to his wife to hold and she takes it and goes on reading her magazine holding the thing as if she was a specimen-glass holder, as if it is meant that she should just sit there, holding this specimen glass while he sits back stroking his chin and raising his eyebrows in every direction in turn round the waiting room; see here everybody, meet the wife, my specimen-glass holder.
The receptionist behind the curved desk has a commanding view of the whole room. When I look at her it is clear to me that she would prefer a dress shop in a not too classy department store. A place in which she could peek round the fitting-room curtains saying with emphasis, ‘it’s you dear’ either for a dress, a blouse or a hat. It is probable that the pay is better in the Outpatients’ Clinic and the hours less barbaric, especially since the decision not to have the clinic open at all on Fridays. I notice every time, without really meaning to, that she wears mostly red dresses or blouses with low V-neck lines exposing the healthy unworried skin of a woman approaching middle age and a suggestion of a similarly healthy and unworried bosom, more or less out of sight.
Certain days are set aside for walking sticks, crutches and wheelchairs. On these days I remind myself often to count my blessings and to remember that there are people worse off etc. For one thing I am only accompanying a patient and am not a patient myself. Without meaning to, against my will, I notice that some of the patients have a perpetually grieved look and some seem actually to be parading their disability. They exaggerate a grieved way of walking with one shoulder higher than the other, the body turned inwards on itself and the head tilted to one side. They seem to have the special skill of taking up the whole width of any place and then there’s no way of getting round them like when you’re waiting to go down in the small elevator to the Lab for blood tests. Sometimes people, like these people and unfortunates, will take up all the room in the aisles in the supermarket. Walking on two sticks, lurching first to one side and then the other, they make it impossible for anyone else to pass or even reach round for a tin of dog food, a cereal or some soap powder.
I suppose all this sounds cruel and without sympathy. It is not meant to. I might be on two sticks myself one day. Such thoughts, like everything else at present, are very out of character. Like this morning when there are no oranges to squeeze I am shaken to discover how much the disappearance of a small ritual can disturb me and cause an inability to go on to the next thing – just because one insignificant part of the morning routine is missing.
When I ask Mr George what he had for lunch he does not remember and when I ask was it nice, what he had for lunch, he says that it was very nice and, because it was nice, it is a pity that he does not remember what it was.
It is a pity, he says, to forget something nice.
An occupational therapist, with knitting needles pushed into her hair which is dressed in a firm grey bun, approaches. She has cut, she tells me, some pieces, squares and circles, of foam cushion material. She gives them to me saying that she knows relatives and friends enjoy being involved. She says that making little chintzy covers for these is a nice way of spending the long afternoons. She calls her pieces soft splints for pressure areas. She smiles with real pleasure.
I want to tell her that I don’t have long afternoons except in my consulting rooms and I am not able to sew there. I nearly explain that I can’t sew, it’s a bit like not being able to dance, I mean ballroom dancing, it is always an embarrassment to say, ‘I can’t dance.’ It is the same with sewing.
I can imagine all too easily the sense of futility which would all too quickly obliterate the hopefulness accompanying the giving of these chintz covers to some of my afternoon appointments who do, indeed, need occupation and direction but who have, at the same time, the ability in the face of offered activity to make the activity seem useless and unnecessary. This attribute is of course a symptom of the cause which might not be cured by the covering of soft splints with fragments of a cheerful material.