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 up, strokes Sylvia’s shoulder, pats it.
“She used to be a nurse herself,” I say. “A sister, actually. So.” Again, an absurd apology.
“I know. She’s always carrying on about our uniforms. I suppose they were kind of different in her day.” She smoothes the blanket over Sylvia’s knees, adjusts the curtain to shade the old woman’s eyes from the morning sun.
“Just ring the bell if you need help,” she says to me.
“Hi, Mom,” I say once the nurse has left us alone. Sylvia turns towards me; perhaps it is the unexpected tone of a male voice that catches her attention.
“Doctor, these people never feed me and my hip hurts. Why all the hiking when my hip hurts? I lost my boots on Sunday.”
“Sylvia – Mom, it’s me, Chris.”
“Chris, Chris . . . rhymes with piss.”
“Chris, your son.”
She grunts as though I am lying. “Never had a son. Borrowed one once. And when I lost the library card, well, you should have heard the . . .”
I turn her wheelchair towards the bed, sit on the floral cover, look into her faraway blue eyes and tell her my news. Gabriel – yes, your grandson – blossoming into a tall and handsome young man. So clever. Draws like Frank Lloyd Wright, like Raphael. Sends his love. So does Tracy – you remember Tracy, of course you do, she’s fine, as pretty and sweet as ever. We have squirrels in the roof, can you believe that? Old houses and their maintenance – it’s not the money, you know, Mom, it’s the complications of it all, the effort, it’s the knowledge that you’ll just have to fix it all over again soon. Same for everything, all the stuff in the house, the cars, the business. You work so hard to get it, then you have to work twice as hard to keep it together, to keep it meaning something. As Dad used to say, it’s like trying to put an octopus into a string bag. Keep fixing, doing, forgetting to be. Who wrote “the centre cannot hold”? I don’t remember. Barry played his guitar at the New Year’s party. It was awful, he really shouldn’t have. Sorry, Ma. I shouldn’t whine so much – it’s small stuff, really. A big new contract for the firm, a mixed-use centre in the middle of town, exciting project, progressive client, great budget.
There’s nothing there. She’s staring at the sky through the window again, so I try a different tack.
You wouldn’t believe how much Tracy’s changed. Been going to gym so much she could probably do a full triathlon with a millstone around her neck. Like biltong now, though. And had her boobs done six months ago. Biltong with breasts, well. I never minded her real ones, but she insisted, said she wanted it for her, not for me. Now she’s got tits like a porn star, which is ironic because we hardly have sex any more. Never, actually. Hardly talk, either, unless it’s to bitch. She uses her new tits like an assault weapon, blam – or should that be blam-blam? – in your face. Even a gay guy couldn’t help gaping.
Still nothing.
And to tell you the truth, Gabriel is so different, difficult, I don’t know what to do with him. I’m struggling to keep up with the changes in him. The body and the brain and the emotions of him all growing at different rates, in different directions. It’s not what he does, it’s what he doesn’t do. I’m scared for him – scared that he’ll grow up into a non-person, because non-people get sucked into non-lives. He’s sixteen now – how is he possibly going to live to seventy? He can barely cross the street on his own, can’t hold a conversation unless it’s to beg for something or whine. Yes, he has problems – but we all do, don’t we? I mean, look at you. Look at me. Just look. Just look at the two of us.
Nothing. No thing. No. Thing.
Do