on New Year’s Eve.”
I don’t feel like an argument. The bed is sucking me in, wrapping me in its seduction, unconditionally promising me the sweetness of sleep. Tracy finds some skin-firming unguent or other and turns back to the mirror to rub the stuff onto her buttocks.
“Whatever,” I say.
Gabe: Don’t say “whatever”, Dad.
“So you were thinking about her?”
I lift myself up on my elbows even though I don’t want to. “Tracy, I was not thinking about her. I was chatting and laughing with the best of them. I had fun. And so did you, by the look of things.”
Tracy snorts quietly, puts on an old T-shirt of mine, gets into bed, switches off the light, turns her back to me. I automatically put my hand on her hip. She shakes her butt like a wet dog and wriggles to the far edge of the bed, out of reach. This strange woman, my once-wife, this lodger who shares my bed, who won’t share herself. I am furious with her, not because she is rejecting my advance – which in the first place wasn’t an advance, and in the second is used to being rejected – but because I hadn’t thought of Dalia until Tracy mentioned her name, and now I will probably be thinking about her all night.
“Thanks for doing that thing of yours,” I say, to show her that I am a bigger person than she might suspect.
There’s a silence. But then she can’t help herself.
“What thing?”
“That thing you do to distract people from trying not to look at my leg.”
“I didn’t know I did a thing like that.”
Sometimes an old person’s problems become a young person’s again.
New Year’s Day for the last five years has brought with it the ritual of going to visit my mother. Not that I don’t visit her during the year, which I do, as often as I can bear it, but the day used to carry with it the promise of new hope, and that’s why I started doing it.
I suppose professionals with couches and notepads would call it denial, but originally my hope was that it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, that her dilliness, once so endearing, was temporarily magnified by my father’s death, that everything would be okay again once she had mourned and accepted his passing.
And then, of course, there’s the guilt.
My mother – or Sylvia, as I now think of her, because she is no longer the mother who raised me, and because to her I am now a sometime nurse, a sometime doctor, her husband, the ghost of her own father or brother – Sylvia lived with us for almost a year after my father died. Towards the end of that time, Tracy and I began referring to her as The Poltergeist: taps left running, the fridge standing open, laundry in the garbage, dentures in the cutlery drawer, the gas cooker turned up high to heat an invisible pot. Then, one evening, The Poltergeist was replaced by a demon at once sublimely innocent and chillingly dangerous.
Tracy and I, as we used to do back then, had gone out for an evening together, leaving Gabriel in the bath while Sylvia supervised. We returned from dinner and a movie to find the boy still in the tub, shivering, turning blue, scrubbed pink, crying hysterically. Sylvia had not allowed him to get out, because she was certain that he’d just got in; every time he tried to climb out of the tub she forced him back again, forced him to wash himself, and when after the sixth or seventh wash he refused to do it again, she took the soap and the facecloth and scrubbed him down herself, kept on scrubbing until we came home. From the foot of the stairs we heard her shouting – and Sylvia never shouted – shouting that the child, who was barely ten, had to wash himself before he’d be allowed out of the water. And Gabriel, almost hypothermic, red from scouring himself in trying to appease his grandmother, flayed almost to bleeding where she had taken over and continued the scrubbing, crying in gasping sobs at a nightmare that had gone on for four endless hours. Tracy pulling Gabriel from the bath, wrapping him in a towel, also crying by now, screaming at me as though I had been the perpetrator. Me leading Sylvia to her room by an elbow, hating the dotty half-smile on her face as much for what it signified as for what it didn’t. Her words making the hair on my neck stand up as I ushered her into her bedroom: “Isn’t it time for Gabriel’s bath now?”
In the morning I feel as though I have cotton wool in my ears and cellophane over my eyes. A distant headache from the beer and Barry’s tequila. Fuzzy, not in my skin. I invite Tracy and Gabriel to come to the care home where Sylvia now lives, not because they’ll accept, but because I should. They are both still asleep: when I whisper in her ear, Tracy shakes her body beneath the duvet as though she is having a small fit, kicks her legs, moans, burrows deeper. Gabriel simply turns away from me, folds a pillow around his head, holds the sandwich together with his forearms.
It’s early and the roads are New-Year’s-morning quiet. One or two joggers are already up and at it, three cyclists swap slipstreams. Along De Waal Drive, the carcass of an abandoned car lies on its back in the grass that grows on the median. I slow the Audi. See skid marks, glass, stains of fluid on the road, yellow police tape. For auld lang syne.
The nurse behind the reception desk is short, plump, pink, her upturned nose a comical complement to her looks – the inadvertent humour of genetic splicing. Her breasts spill onto the counter as she works on some papers, and they stay there when she looks up to greet me.
“Hello, Mr Hayes. Happy New Year; so nice to see you after all this time.”
The devil in the unsaid bits.
She walks me down corridors that smell of old people, urine, carbolic. Fusty, funky. The dust in the shafts of summer sun tastes of aspirin. Withered people, husks from which the spiders of age have sucked the juices, leaving only thin skin with scabs that won’t grow over and thoughts that won’t connect. An outburst – anger, frustration? – from a tall man with a metal cane. Crumpled women in wheelchairs stare down the tunnels of time to worlds of porcelain dolls and tin soldiers, worlds before television or stereo FM broadcasts. The nurse warns me that Sylvia has deteriorated, and that the disease which broke her mind is now breaking her body. Lucid periods ever more infrequent, mere punctuations in full-blown dementia. She has forgotten how to walk, had done, a month ago. She has to be fed, diapered, cleaned. She fears many things, sees many others, most of which are not there. She rages at everything and nothing. And is raging, I see, as we walk into her room.
“Why don’t you fuck off and get me breakfast?” Sylvia growls at the nurse and snaps her head around to glare at the window.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to the nurse: an absurd apology, but Sylvia had never in her rational life spoken like that.
The nurse puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t apologise. It’s part of the whole thing, and believe me, we’re used to it.” She turns to Sylvia, goes down on her haunches beside the wheelchair. Knees turning from plump pink to anaemic white as the skin stretches over them. “You had breakfast not half an hour ago, darling. Remember – yoghurt, tea, some nice eggs?”
“Ali’s wife always brought the freshest eggs,” Sylvia says to the window, to the wind-polished sky beyond. “When she told me they were going to bulldoze District Six I told her to stop being silly, and then they did and I could do nothing to help.” She turns to the nurse, looks her up and down, raises her eyebrows. “My nurses do not squat on the floor. They stand proud. And look at your uniform, girl, good heavens, you only have half of it on! Not even tights, just bare legs! You leave me no choice but to report you to the duty sister.”
The nurse stands
