Nic wakes and knows she is in hospital. Her mouth and throat are dry but other than that nothing hurts, which is a good sign. Also, though, she can’t seem to sit up, which is not so good.
‘Good morning, Nic!’ A man’s voice, young and cheerful. ‘What a delight to finally see those pretty eyes of yours.’
‘I fell.’ The voice coming from her but not hers.
‘That’s what they tell me. Never mind. We’ll have you patched up in no time. Now I’m going to lift the top of your bed a touch and then we’ll see if we can’t get you a nice cool drink while we wait for the doctor.’
She begins to move upwards and for a terrible second thinks she’ll throw up, but then the motion stops and she is looking at the back of a small, dark-haired man murmuring into a blue wall phone. ‘Righto.’ He turns and smiles. He’s older than you’d think from his voice, maybe even as old as her. It’s mesmerising how easily he moves: gliding out the door and back in holding a white plastic cup, and across to her bed where he helps her sip it while chatting about the spooky bushfire sky and how many extra admissions they’re having down in A&E due to smoke inhalation.
‘Pharmacy downstairs sold a month’s worth of face masks in one day. They won’t help much—wrong kind for smoke particles—but people like to feel they’re doing something rather than nothing, don’t they? Now, as for you, gorgeous, a doc’ll be up to chat with you soon, and tomorrow or the next day you’ll have a visit with the social worker. But the absolute priority visitor is the lovely Miss Lena. I’m going to give her a call right now, if that’s okay with you?’
‘Lena knows I’m here?’
‘Lena has been living here, watching over you.’
‘How long have I been … ?’
‘Three nights, I believe. And though you probably don’t remember it, you’ve been working very hard the whole time. You are a healing machine, Nic.’
Do machines usually feel this tired? she wants to ask, but she can’t muster the energy. She hopes the nurse knows to wake her again when Lena comes.
She wakes to someone taking blood from her arm.
She wakes to someone telling her to swallow a pill with water.
She wakes and drinks some tea and a nurse tells her things she should probably care about but can’t.
She wakes and notices a TV at the end of the bed, finds the remote and switches it on, but there is no sound and her eyes close in protest at the tiny white subtitles.
She wakes and the silent TV is showing footage that could’ve been taken any summer in the past ten years: flame eating into a line of trees, a yellow-clad firey aiming a piddling stream at a wall of blazing bush, a helicopter dumping a swimming pool’s worth of water onto a cloud of smoke. The subtitles tell her it’s not like any other summer (not even summer yet, not for weeks). On the map they show the east coast as one long fire line, starting less than an hour’s drive from where Nic lies and extending all the way up to North Queensland. She tries to remember where Will is, if it’s far enough north to be out of harm’s way.
She wakes and her girl is right there, close enough to touch, looking like she’s swapped sleep for poking herself in the eyes, but still the sweetest sight in the world.
‘They told me you’d been mooching around here.’ Her voice still unfamiliar, husky. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’
‘Nah. Air con, free cups of tea, comfy little camp bed set-up down the hall. Hot doctors. It’s been tops.’ Lena sounding the same as ever.
‘Well, the fun stops now. I’m awake and on the mend. No reason for you to hang about.’
Lena’s fingertips on the back of her hand, a millimetre from the cannula. ‘You scared the crap out of me.’
‘Sorry, darlin’. A lot of fuss about nothing. A silly stumble.’
‘Nic, if I hadn’t found you, you woulda died.’
‘There’s my little drama queen. It was only a—’ A cough, dry and sharp, stops her speaking for a bit.
Lena pushes a plastic cup close to her face. ‘Here. Want me to get you some tea? Might be more soothing.’
Nic swallows some water, coughs again, sips and lets it settle. Whole time Lena watching her like she’s going to choke.
‘The nurse who was here earlier—little bloke …’
‘Kon, yeah, he’s the best.’
‘He said that there’d be a social worker in to see me. Does that sound right to you? A social worker?’
Lena nods. ‘Yeah, the doctor mentioned that. They need to do certain checks and stuff to make sure you’re not in danger.’
‘Isn’t that what the bloody nurses are poking at me ten times an hour for?’
‘Yeah, but this is … It’s to do with you not being in danger when you leave here. Because the police had to come and rescue you.’ Lena’s tone firm, like she’s dealing with a scummy customer claiming she hadn’t been given the right change. ‘They’ve reported or registered or whatever they call it … There needs to be this whole assessment process with a social worker and all that. For your own safety.’
So much heat all at once in her face and chest. ‘Bloody ridiculous. Talking about me like I’m a child. Or a geriatric! And to a kid, as if you’d know anything.’
‘I’m not … You’ve been asleep and I’m the only one here. Who else were they meant to talk to?’
‘It’s degrading!’
‘Mum said she can fly down if—’
‘If I want to be further degraded? Yeah, that’s all I need. God.’
‘Okay. Is there someone else then? If you don’t want me here, I mean? Is there someone else you want me to call?’ Tears running down Lena’s face and, ah, this is pain right here. Broken bones are nothing. Suck it up, woman. Suck it up.
‘No. No. Sorry. Thank you for being here,’ she manages to say.
‘It’s going to be all right. You’ll see the social worker, tell them you’ll clean the place up, go on your way. This is a blip.’
That last phrase something she has said to Lena many a time. A bad fight with a friend, rejection by a boy she’d been crushing on, the failure to get the marks for uni at the end of year twelve. This is a blip, Leen. In a coupla months you’ll look back and see it in perspective. Your life is going to be so big, and this—this is just the tiniest little blip.
Lena leaves after a while, telling her to get some sleep. Nic knows she’s been doing nothing but, yet she can’t imagine how, here, in this room with its cold green floor stretching stretching stretching out between the metal beds, six of them but each smaller than even a single bed should be, not nearly substantial enough to hold their own against that greedy floor, the ravenous space. Even with the various machines and stands and bits and pieces around each bed there is too much nothing, and nothing is loud. The corridor leading off in each direction for what sounded like a very, very long way makes it worse. Every word spoken or cried, shoe slapping tile, piss hitting toilet, needle piercing skin is happening right into her ear. The noises burrow deep, gnaw at her bones.
And the bed itself, back to that. Too small for the room, too big for a woman alone. She longs for her pillows and books, her photo albums and soft toys and cardigans and coats and all the other things that have made their home in her endlessly generous and stalwart queen over the years. How long has it been since she’d spent the night in a different bed? Fifteen years? More. The last one she could remember belonged to a bloke she’d gone out with on and off in the early 2000s. Murray. Yes. He was nice, that man. It hadn’t ended badly or really, when she thinks about it, at all. That is, there had never been a decision to finish whatever it was they were doing. It just hadn’t continued. The eating dinner and sharing a six pack and conversation and then bumping bits together in his bed and waking up in the morning and saying sweet things in embarrassed voices had all been nice. But not nice enough to make an active effort to keep doing it. There had been a last time which she didn’t know was a last time. He just didn’t call for a while and neither did she, and eventually she realised—as he must have, as well—that too much time had passed for a call to be the easy thing it had once been.
There had been a couple of attempts at finding love since then. None went particularly well nor particularly badly. Just never enough feeling to make it worth the trouble. Beds had been rolled about on but not slept in, not all night, since Murray. She didn’t know why. And no men had slept in hers. No men, no anyone, had crossed her doorstep in years.
Until the fall. The uniformed strangers. Lena, crying.
Stop. It’s not a thing that needs thinking of right now. The thing that she is thinking of is the experience of sleeping in a strange bed, a strange room, strange building. Not even considering how disturbing it is to be surrounded by all these people: nurses constantly grabbing at you to check this, adjust that; and the other patients, all of them seemingly on different schedules so that the minute after one finally stops the yapping or moaning another starts; and then the visitors who cry or laugh or drone on and bloody on about the most banal bullshit. An hour or so ago there was an old fella somewhere out of her line of sight who would not shut up about a book he was reading. Napoleon this and Nelson that and in between ten different lectures about ten different warships. Normally she’d have yelled at him to pipe down and give ’em all some peace but the fall has knocked the boldness out of her. She feels too small and exposed as it is. A newborn kitten, defenceless against the loud, bright, hugeness of the world.
‘That’s hospitals for you,’ the nice nurse—Kon—says breezily when she complains about the racket. She realises that not only has she not slept away from home in over fifteen years but she has never had a hospital stay. When she was born, she supposes, but not in her recallable life.
Miraculous that she never ended up here as a kid, when you think of all the out-of-date food, car rides with drunk drivers and no seatbelts, scavenged bikes without helmets, cigarettes left to burn out in the living room ashtray, father with a temper enough to kill a man. Lucky, but not so surprising, to have avoided it since. Or unlucky and quite surprising if you consider the reason most women her age had at least one stay in hospital.
Michelle had been in those two times, at least: Will, a tough little sweetheart from the first. Barely cried or fussed from the minute he popped out. Once, when he was a couple of months old, Michelle had come around for a cuppa with Nic and Mum. Will was such a good sleeper, they slid his carrier under the table while they drank tea and chatted. When it was time for Michelle to leave, none of them remembered the new fella, left him sleeping out of sight. Poor Michelle had been in a mad panic, roaring back in after ten minutes to find Nic and Mum watching telly, oblivious to the little bub, awake but silently smiling away under the table still. God, they’d laughed about it later, when Will was old enough to laugh along with them. No trouble at all, this one. You’d forget he was even there. Literally!
Lena, though, she was a different kind of kid altogether. Centre of attention from day dot. Couldn’t even wait to get to the birthing suite if it meant missing out on a party. She heard music and laughing and hurled herself into the middle of it all, immediately became the focus, the purpose of everything.
The tea lady had been in earlier. ‘Shall I leave a couple of extra bickies for your daughter?’ she’d asked, and Nic had shaken her head to say no, because Lena didn’t eat sugar or wheat or anything processed, and because, no, she wasn’t coming back in today, and, no, she wasn’t her daughter.
‘Well, I’ll leave them in case you want them yourself then, love.’
Love, which is what people called the elderly and infirm. Love, coming from someone fifty if she was a day.
At least she’d guessed Lena as Nic’s daughter rather than granddaughter, like one of the nurses’ aides did the other night. Not that a woman her age couldn’t be a grandmother; she knew plenty who were. But their grandkids were in nappies, their strollers pushed by kids of Lena’s age or younger. Either Nic looked sixty or she looked like the type to have had a baby in her early teens and raised that baby to herself pop one out soon after her body was able. She’d prefer the latter. Women who’d had their kids while kids themselves tended to be both fun and practical (except her sister who was un-fun and practical). Mostly they were the kinds of women who would get smashed and sing karaoke with you at 4 a.m. but who also knew how to change a tyre, fight a parking fine and hem a pair of dress pants. So, yeah, not so bad to be in their gang, but Nic knows it isn’t what the young aide had been thinking. She hadn’t been thinking at all; just looked at the crumpled old lady in the bed compared with the fresh-faced kid on the chair by her side and leapt to the obvious.
Daughter, though, that was nice if people thought that. For a long while she did assume she’d end up a mum. It was just what happened at some point as you grew into an adult. Except if you didn’t have a husband or steady bloke and you were getting on, your eggs drying up, biological clock running out of tick, as the breakfast shows said; then it wasn’t something that just happened, it was something you had to decide on doing and then spend a bunch of money and time on trying to make happen. That or screw every bloke who looks at you sideways, lying that you’re on the pill or stabbing pinholes in the condoms. She’s heard of women who went about it that way. It was a nasty approach, for sure, but she understood it. People with thousands of dollars for donor implantations and all the rest could afford to be honest and ethical. The likes of Nic needed to be sneaky sometimes.
Anyway, she’d thought about it on and off. Then noticed she only thought about it when one of those segments came on the telly or one of the mags ran a story telling her she should be thinking about it. If she clicked the channel over or flipped the page the thought dissolved. So it didn’t happen and she didn’t make it happen and here she is, old enough to be a grandmother (to a baby, thanks very much) and without much prospect of that ever happening.
When Lena has kids (if, Nic corrects herself, while still believing when) they would practically be her grandchildren, wouldn’t they? Just as Lena is practically her daughter, has been from the minute she was born right through to this week, when she’d sat in the hospital with such dedication and care that onlookers like the tea lady assumed they must once have been of the same flesh. The flesh was irrelevant. Lena was her own child in every way that mattered.
Yeah, bullshit, you sad old cow. If that were true, Michelle wouldn’t have been able to take her away for all those years.
Her store manager calls in the afternoon. (Is it afternoon? She keeps dozing off and when she wakes the light and noise are the same as when she fell asleep.) Lena has apparently spoken to him already and explained Nic’s condition, and he’s calling to tell her not to give work a second thought until she’s back on her feet. She’s hardly taken a sick day in all these years and has a bunch of annual leave accrued, if it comes to that. They can talk about putting her on reduced duties when she’s ready.
She thanks him, says she’ll be back as soon as she can, doesn’t tell him she misses the damn place almost as much as she misses her house. For all the frustration and agitation the shop causes her, it is still the place—apart from home—where she feels most relaxed, most in control. She has her locker in the back, her mug in the kitchen, her own checkout—number 5—which the night and weekend girls know to return to her settings when they are finished. She has seniority and, more importantly, the respect of her co-workers. She is the one they come to first if their register isn’t reconciling or they need to change a shift or ask for time off. She can’t solve any of that stuff directly, but she knows which manager is the best to approach for which problem and what turn of phrase or explanation will be most likely to get a good result.
She wishes this lot here could see how she is at work, how important and respected. Then they might speak to her properly, let her know what she has to do to get home.