Late Saturday morning I was switching on the computer to blog about an extraordinary Friday night with an extraordinary friend, when the phone rang. It was Dad, with bad news.
Granny, my mother’s mother, who turns 88 this year on the first day of spring, has broken her hip in a fall getting out of bed, and is in Hornsby Hospital, unaccompanied. Grandad, 94 next month and ailing but fiercely independent, is at home in a well-supported village across the gorge. He can no longer drive, so will need help to visit her.
Suddenly the landline rings. Dad holds. It is Grandad. I say to Dad goodbye and keep-you-posted, and go into shock. At least that’s what it felt like. I think I babbled and Grandad hung up on me. I wailed once, groaned a bit, pulled it together, rang him back and said I’m on my way.
Granny is my second mother; I’m her first grandchild. She looked after me when Mum went back to part-time teaching. I was six weeks old, and Granny was a little younger than I am now. “Why, Mrs Whitelaw,” her acquaintances would say, “I didn’t know you’d started again.” “This is my granddaughter,” she’d say proudly, and pronounce my name as my parents decreed, the old-fashioned Anglicised way with three syllables and a soft qu. Mum is sturdy of build and temperament like Grandad, but I’m like Granny, more finely boned and highly strung.
As a girl she — Beth — loved to dance, at school with other girls who had learned steps and taught them to her — despite a prohibition by her fond but stern father who thought it vulgar and wouldn’t allow lessons. Later she drove me to and from many ballet classes and eisteddfods. She’s sharp and psychic and doesn’t miss much, but she’s undereducated for her capacity and humble with it, and they are of the wartime, stiffen-your-spine-and-push-it-all-down generation, pillars of society and conservative voters. Our contact these days is fond and supportive but relentlessly superficial, since they cannot begin to understand where I have gone or how I have got there, nor most of all why I had to take so many lovers along the way.
But Grandad is relieved I’m taking charge now, and so there I am standing in my trackpants and woolly socks thinking, shower, dress, train; be there early afternoon. I packed my toothbrush and considered, Granny likes to see me dressed up… so I put on a long cherry-red and black hand-painted silk skirt, a deep red skivvy of fancy cut, burgundy patent leather boots and a dramatic shawl and my calf-length mock mink. Cherry red gloss lips. Overnight bag.
Set off down to Redfern station, gave a dollar to my favourite beggar (who has excellent taste in clothes herself and was well impressed with how I scrub up) and bought a ticket. No trains up the North Shore; buses from Wynyard. Silently cursed RailCorp, the NSW government and Michael Costa (because he has a hand in everything), did my calculations and figured a taxi to Hornsby was probably about $50 and worth it. Scored a Silver Service ride with a deft, polite and quietly companionable Indian at the wheel, who was dismayed for me when he realised I didn’t have cash, which — take note — as of recently means a 10% surcharge. I felt myself abandoned to fate by this point and simply rued it with him, shrugged and payed.
Granny was pleased to see me, and I was enormously glad I went. I sat with her all afternoon and left for Galston in the evening while Bill, a gentlemanly ex-minister who lives in the village, was visiting. Before I left he politely asked if I’d join them in prayer, which I did, and he performed a very capable and soothing improvised blessing and intercession based on a biblical verse on which Christians lean heavily despite its regrettably patent impossibility: Matthew 18:19-20. Granny seemed reassured. I walked to Hornsby station, still looking like a million dollars, and grabbed a falafel in a shop where the Leb lad looked at me like I was some kind of Establishment bitch… I could hardly blame him and had to bite my tongue. Hurried out laughing. Another luxury cab took me through the gorge to spend the night with Grandad.
I made myself reasonably useful there, mostly as tolerable distraction though I insisted on cooking lunch, our main meal. Grandad is lucid and often sharp though pretty deaf, can still do most things for himself but moves like a tortoise. I slept in Granny’s bed (after 67 years together they remain a devoted couple but they’ve always kept separate beds because Grandad’s war trauma makes him kick in his sleep) and awoke at 4.20am hearing my own voice distinctly in my head saying ‘ow!’ — though I checked, and wherever/whatever the pain was, it wasn’t in me. I remembered Granny wincing when they tried, against her protestations, to sit her up.
Grandad made us breakfast of fruit and porridge and the morning went by peaceably. After lunch I went for a walk, still frightfully fabulously dressed. Bumped into Bill the ex-minister, who introduced me to several villagers. Then Grandad and I got the car out and I drove us through the gorge to see Granny, post-surgery.
The way in to Intensive Care was up an agonisingly long ramp. Grandad pushes a walker and has got quite deft with it, in a slow-motion way. The nurses in the high dependency unit seemed to suffer no less than the ward nurses from those hard invisible veils of compassion fatigue that afflict so many nurses. Granny lay like an ancient pixie in a big cot bed and we leaned on the rail either side. I’d never seen her without her teeth before. Last time I saw Grandad in hospital was the first time I saw him without his teeth, too — he pulled them out and brushed them in front of me. Granny was distressed at not having hers. She knew us but couldn’t grasp where she was. In the ICU there were bells going off around us all the time, doors and things clunking, machines and gauges everywhere, and she was constantly sending us to answer the doorbell, check the phone, talk to the housekeeper. But she babbled repartee and asked and answered questions; her tongue was swollen, her short term memory was a bit foggy but she was still generally coherent, and is reportedly better today.
I drove Grandad home, planning to get a taxi to Pennant Hills and a train from there. But at 6 o’clock on a Sunday night in Galston there were no cabs in the area and none coming anywhere near. By seven I was starting to feel tired and longing to get home; I’d left two days’ work undone. After a while Grandad called a man who runs a small hire car company whose client Grandad has been for several years. Grandad paid and I went home in even higher style than I arrived.
But by the time I walk up my Redfern stairs I’m shivering inside my fur, and though I haven’t started out loud, my brain is beginning to rave. My grandmother is throwing herself out of bed, my mother has cancer, my cousin has just had nastiness burned off the wall of her uterus, my sister’s doctors can’t find the reason for her abdominal pain. My partner is moving out and I think my lover is psychotic. I need to unpack, and I’m not talking about my overnight bag. It’s just after 9.30, Sunday: I ring a friend on whom I know I can impose — the one, in fact, with whom I spent the extraordinary Friday night.
She’s a girl, a woman about Eugene’s age; a psychologist working as Inclusional Officer for Sydney City Council. That’s bureaucratese for the person that deals with accessibility issues; Jo’s in a wheelchair. I met her at my sister’s wedding; she grew up with the groom. She has cerebral palsy, which basically means that despite her considerable smarts there are dark spots in her brain that interfere with the transmission of messages through the wiring of her nervous system, which therefore doesn’t work right and messages don’t travel effectively from her brain to her limbs. She gets bank-ups, which cause spasms, which range from small twitches to major seizure-like cataclysms. Sometimes, to break an acute spasm, she uses a disconcertingly hard right jab on her own chin.
Friday night was long and loud and luxurious and frequently uproarious, and deserved a blog all its own, but it got kind of wiped off the map by the rest of the weekend. I remember toasting the rediscovery of women friends, which Jo and I have both been doing lately. I remember the way she works in her kitchen, and the ingenious boards she’s devised for one-handed chopping and slicing. I remember I Stonehenged well. You have to ask her what that means.
But I think I’m conflating the Friday and the Sunday; it’s all a bit of a blur now. I know Friday I was relaxed and Sunday I was manic, but beyond that the details are shrouded in mystery… which, for discretion’s sake, might be just as well. Who knows what we said? There will be more of this, anyway. Jo takes delivery of her new superchair soon, the one that costs almost as much as a car and has hydraulics that enable her to stand up. She’ll be the city council’s first cyborg employee.
To cap off a truly surreal weekend, walking home from Jo’s place some time after midnight I found two green molded plastic chairs, good quality, good condition — exactly what I need for the terrace garden. They were stacked for collection, mine for the taking and only five minutes from home. I didn’t hesitate long — mock mink notwithstanding. I’d thrown the fur back on, along with a cute-gimp Nepalese beanie, when I changed into jeans, jumper and No Sweat pink hightops to walk to Jo’s. Wearing this get-up and carrying two large chairs, looking not merely weird but downright obviously lawless, I passed two police patrols on my way back but strode on with innocent purposefulness. Maybe it was the coat, maybe they were just indifferent, but they didn’t stop me. The chairs are great. It’s been a long weekend, but I’m ahead.
