‘Leave it alone, you prick,’ she said.
I should have known she’d take a fancy to it. That’s my little sister, afraid of nothing and ready to defend anything or anyone if she deems them to be taking it up the … well you get the point. Me, I couldn’t give a rat’s backside and that morning I just wanted to do that spider an injury. I just wanted to kill the fucking thing, make it suffer for being a big crawly, stalking around in our bedroom with eight fucking legs all moving in the same order the world over. And living behind my poster, happily, because Kitty would have killed me if I’d harmed just one of its estimated two million body hairs. Haley the huntsman she called it. And in time, it actually became our one and only friend.
Forty-five years ago that was. What happened to those four and a half decades, approximately 2,342 weeks, 16,440 days? And how did I come to end up in this fuck ing nursing home? ‘Eden’ they call it - can you believe it? Fucking Eden! As though it’s the original Paradise - abundance, beauty and innocence. This place is as innocent as the glass tube they shove up your backside. Fourteen days I’ve been here. Fourteen days in which to push my wheelchair through the smell of the dying, a heady mix of body wastes and Nilodor. They think the latter rectifies the former but it only provides another layer of unpleasant complexity. ‘Who is “they”?’ you may ask. Uncharitable, marble-hearted pseudo-nurses who will bite your head off if you dare smoke in your room. I don’t exaggerate. And the food! It must be seen to be believed. If a fridge magnet fell in the pot it could only improve the taste. Why am I here in this house of the dying? You may well ask.
It would be an understatement to say I’m feeling down. First chance I get I’m leaving. Pack my bags and just march right out the front door. I already know the exit code (the postcode plus ‘e’). A fool could observe the staff using those numbers yet not a geriatric in residence takes any notice. Press those digits into the pad, shove open the big wooden doors and just march right out into the sunlight. First I have to work on my legs. They’ve got worse. But in here at least I’ve got time to work on them, get them pumping up and down like they used to. And then I’m going to dump the wheelchair and walk right out of this poor excuse of a bedroom, straight up the passage and I’m gone.
Week three begins today. Fortunately I’ve found my little Oxford dictionary wrapped in a plastic bag; a very pleasing discovery and it gives me plenty to do. I never cease to be amazed by the English language and how little we know of it. You only have to read a half a dozen pages of that little navy blue book to realise we only using about 25 per cent of all possible words. For instance, who knows what a coprologist is? A writer of obscene books; a painter of indecent pictures. Gk kopros: dung, logos: discourse. Coprology is therefore, shitty language. Oxford p. 179.
As long as I am forced to endure a month or so in this Godforsaken camp, I think I might write the remarkable story of Kitty. ‘Always write about what you know’ is the advice of the bards. Therefore I’ll put down what I remember as well as I can. Kitty deserves it; the most beautiful person I have ever known. Without her I would be nothing at all, not even worthy to be sitting here in a hole like this. Eden. Can you believe it? The room here no bigger than the one we had at home.
Some time in the early fifties, my mother, Kitty and I moved into a one-bedroom flat. And Kitty and I slept in that one bedroom while our mother took over the lounge. She lived in that lounge, the double bed jammed between the wall and the couch, and any old time of the day you’d find her stretched out, legs spread so she could see the big TV looming up at the foot of the bed. When I say big TV, I mean big box - the screen itself was small and oval and black-and-white. It was an Admiral, one of the best brands and by far the most expensive item in the flat. Mum bought it with what was left of our father’s cash just so she could watch the Melbourne Olympics - it was the first time the games had ever been televised. After that she was hooked.
When 1957 came all the new programs started: I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best, the latter a concept which seemed ludicrous to us. Mum protected that TV with her life and we were not allowed to switch it on or off or adjust the channels. We watched it when she was out, which was most nights, and we had to sit on her bed to do it. But we’d always make sure we returned it to the channel she left it on and be out of there by the time she got home. We’d hear her come in, click on the set, collapse on the bed and be snoring in minutes.
During the day that big Admiral went all hours and the room would fill with smoke, the big glass ashtray so full of butts they fell onto the carpet. Then it was time for Mum to go to the pub. It would be fair to say that she was resigned to a life of nothingness - she worked at the pub, drank at the pub, watched TV, smoked and slept. Needless to say, it didn’t worry us at all.
In our room we had a wireless which picked up most of the shows we wanted: Biggles, The Goons, No Holiday for Halliday. We had a bed each against opposite walls and some nights we’d reach out in the dark and touch fingers. Other nights Kit would come over and get in with me and we’d curl up together like a relationship. Though nothing funny happened. Only when I was about fourteen did we do a bit of exploring; we were fascinated with our changing bodies and maturity coming on and it was as much an education as anything else. There was no sex education then. I’m talking the 1950s. As far as sex went all we knew was what we learned from each other. She knew about erections and what goes with it and I watched her body grow into a lovely young woman with all that it entails. My only venture into crime involved knocking off packets of Tampax at the chemist.
On hot weekends while my mother was out we used to lie around our room naked. But it was all innocent. There was such a thing in those days - innocence - a concept that just isn’t available to the young now. Back then it was perfectly natural that we should share our private lives and intimacy; we were close in age and grew up side by side like Siamese twins. We were virtually inseparable.
Our father cleared out about five years earlier. Going to work in Real Estate up north, he said. But we were at school the day he went and after that we never heard from him again. I cannot say I ever knew him; even less as I would find out in years to come. At that time I never thought of him as a bad man. Sure he could get awful angry but he never hit us, never raised a hand to our mother even when she came home so bad she couldn’t get out of her clothes.
I hardly remember much about him at all. Except that he once told me he’d always hoped he’d have an excep-tional son rather than an ordinary one. And I remember his constant refrain from the age of about five, You got no intestinal fortitude, Jack. No intestinal fortitude. At that time I imagined I’d been born with some part of my anatomy missing and I had high hopes it would eventually grow back.
Apart from that my father hardly paid me any attention at all and I just went into my teens assuming he was skilled at particular things but parenting just wasn’t one of them. I created a simple logic for it and I remember explaining it to my little sister: you can be good at one thing - say ‘gardening’ - but unable to play tennis to save yourself. Our father could produce great tomatoes but when it came to being a Dad he couldn’t even manage the ball toss. But that’s all I ever thought about it and it would be another thirty-odd years before I would discover the awful truth and see the man for what he really was.
That day of my sixteenth was just like any other and being a Saturday we just stayed in our room, Kitty staring at the ceiling, me staring at my planets poster. I did not foresee how that simple poster would one day play an important part in my future.
Suddenly Kitty said, ‘Happy birthday’.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said and then we just lay there listening to the bell on the railway crossing. We used to count the dings on that boom gate bell. I’d say, I got seventy-four and Kit would say, I got seventy-eight. Then one night that bell just wouldn’t stop. It just went on and on and on. After that we never bothered counting the dings again. It was 1957, the year TV really kicked in.
Suddenly