‘Maybe the cards will … Maybe the Tarot … You know, if you tried again …’ But I wasn’t sure what to add and Debbie wasn’t listening.
As usual, Kitty jumped right in; she knew exactly what to do. She just went over and put her arms around her. I just stood there and with nothing to offer I had the disturbing feeling that somehow I was the root of the problem. Why didn’t I do something? But what? Suddenly I was five years old and I heard my father saying, No intestinal fortitude son, that’s your problem: no intestinal fortitude. I was in my teens before I finally learned what those words meant. A teacher at school used the phrase on the class. ‘In other words,’ he shouted, ‘you all lack guts!’ The rev-elation hit me like a time-bomb. Immediately I joined the football team. My father was wrong and I knew it.
But I only played about three games. One Saturday on a cold muddy field I found myself on the mark of a boy who was lining up for a goal. Somehow I’d given away a free kick. I jumped and waved my skinny arms and the ball slid off the boy’s boot and hit me square in the face. Blood streamed but at least I stopped that goal. Where was my father then!
The day after Debbie cried, Kitty was walking the streets, asking about work in every restaurant and cafe in the neighbourhood - she’d turned sixteen by then and I’d be eighteen in October. Kitty made little leaflets and stuck them up: Able and willing girl to do any kind of job. Good worker. I never knew she had it in her. In no time she had a job in an Indian restaurant. That left me.
Just back from ‘church service’ in the common room. I had no intention of going but at the last minute, in came Nurse Stinson to round up the ones who were sitting it out. She’s a size, that Nurse Stinson. If she sat on the likes of me it would be the end of it - you could fold me up like a newspaper. It’s not healthy all that weight, her heart would be no bigger than mine but dealing with a 50 per cent higher workload, 40 per cent at least.
‘Come on Mr Smythe,’ she says. ‘Join the group.’
‘I’m not religious,’ I tell her. ‘And I have no intention singing holy praises to some imaginary bloke in the sky.’
‘Come on, hurry up,’ she says again, as though I haven’t spoken. ‘Come join the others.’
I go, more out of curiosity than anything else, and to give my skills with the wheelchair a bit of practice. I do not want to use the frame, and certainly not my unaided legs. It’s the same wheelchair that Lisa hired after the gall bladder op. When the hire term ran out they offered the chair for sale as a second-hand item so I got a good deal. Not that I intend using it much longer. One look at the other chair-bound inmates and you can see the curtains are drawn on what might have been a very interesting life. I’m not saying my life is interesting or even worth preserving, but once they get you permanently in the chair you’re theirs for keeps. Shove you all up against one another in the common room, lock up your wheels and leave you parked for the duration. You are easy to manage then, controlled in the same way that the furniture and flowers are. All neat and organised.
I parked near the back for the ‘Church Service’ and, as I was forced to be a part of it, I thought I might as well use it as an opportunity to learn something. There had to be something there to do. And sure enough, 112 greeting cards strung along the left wall, all made by the inmates. Three rows, containing thirty-six, thirty-two and forty-four cards, though the row of forty-four did not look any more crowded than the others. Predominant colour used was red and easily outclassed the second main colour, a royal blue. That could mean several things. 1. Red catches the eye first. 2. Choosing red requires the least amount of imagination. 3. There is more red paint and paper available. 4. The craft nurse directs the senile to red paint and paper. I’m favouring 2.
The attendees: nineteen women in total, seven men, eleven wheelchairs. Of the nineteen women about four seem very lucid, another four reasonably so, the rest far away in the land of the oblivious. Dooley was there, poised to bellow out whatever hymn they selected. Old Clem in the chair was staring straight at me. What was he looking at? I’m sure he knows something. Treated like he’s gone just like the others but I don’t believe it. Nothing I can do about it. Also ‘Skeleton Joe’ staring at his lap. Couldn’t look at the ceiling if you said there was a nude picture up there of Jacqueline Bisset. Two new men I haven’t seen. One is a young fellow probably in his early forties stretched out in a bed-cum-chair arrangement. He has some serious intellectual disability, unable to control his movements and a loud but incoherent voice. Nurse stuck him in the front where he couldn’t see anyone else - as far as he knew he might have been the only one in the room. The other new bloke is ancient but he seems to have his marbles. In a wheelchair but sitting very upright and alert and taking as little interest in the proceedings as I was.
Sat through What a friend we have in Jesus and other equally absurd rubbish, Dooley booming like a foghorn with not an ounce of decency. Apparently in an uncommon gesture, we were blessed by the presence of a Church of England Minister which all the carers seem to feel is a great honour. Should have heard the man rave - I looked around thinking that perhaps God was sitting with us in the audience. The word unctuous suddenly came to mind. Later I checked on my remembered use of the word and I was right. As per Oxford Dictionary p. 936 - Full of ‘unction’ i.e. affected gush or enthusiasm. Glad to be back in my room where I can have a quiet smoke and get on with my story.
One hot day I was wandering down Arthurton Street thinking of nothing in particular when I saw an old man painting signs on a shop window. He was standing on a wooden stool close to the pane. He wore dark sunglasses beneath a battered peaked cap from which bushy white sideboards extended to well below his earlobes. His white overalls were streaked with different colours and his paint-spattered boots had long lost their shine. His old hands held a pot of paint, a long knobbed stick and a brush and all three were in motion as he flowed on the white paint.
I stood and watched the big cursive sweeps and I was transfixed - it was all freehand but it had a sense of precision that I knew could easily be calculated. I must have stood there a full ten minutes and the old man eventually stepped back from the stool and lit a smoke. I saw him glance at me but he never said a word. He had parallel lines marked right across the two windows of the shopfront and now he stepped forward and sketched ‘Manchester’ very roughly between them, sat down and started painting the letters. That’s when I stepped up.
‘It won’t fit,’ I said.
He looked at me through his dark lenses and then continued painting.
‘There’s not enough room on the glass.’
‘You must be an expert,’ he said, gruffly. Flies buzzed around our heads and I wanted to stand in the shade.
‘Not really, but unless you’re going to start using smaller letters, it won’t fit in.’
But he was not going to get up and check; there was no chance he would let that young, skinny eighteen-year-old with the Elvis hairstyle tell him how to write a sign. That was the year The Beatles came to Australia, their one and only visit, but I was a rocker and as Deb and I both knew, this new fad wouldn’t last.
The old bloke just kept right on going with his sign until he got to ‘S’ and it was then that my prediction was roundly confirmed. He got around it by doing a ‘T’ apostrophe ‘R’ - that is MANCHEST’R. He looked at me through his plastic paint-specked sunglasses.
‘Don’t have a bad eye, kid. You should put that to something useful.’
I didn’t think there was anything in it at all.
‘I
