What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.
How was Tom to convey-to Nelly, to anyone-the muffl ed dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel with.
When she had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.
Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.
‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’
She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.
Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down
her face but still she didn’t reply.
He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’
After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.
He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as sounding Indian, was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.
He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’
When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.
Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’
Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.
Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.
Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.
Other men came up with strategies that rendered their mothers harmless. Neglect was one solution; so was marrying a woman with a capacity for ruthlessness. There was also comedy. There was Vernon, who had reconfigured his mother as a monstrous buffoon. Her prying, her avarice, her vanity, her pile creams, the satisfaction the old despot derived from making children cry: farce drew the poison from it all. Now and then, even as he was laughing, Tom detected a familiar flutter of frustration or despair in Vernon ’s anecdotes; but it twitched uselessly in a web of comic invention.
Tom had always thought of himself as siding with the defenceless; as most people do, when the risk of personal inconvenience is small. But Iris grated on his sensibilities. He thought of abrasions his soul would endure if they were to live together. There would be questions: where are you going, what time are you coming back, who is that friend of yours? There would be ritual conversations, stupefying banalities. Laugh-tracks crashed through his concentration. His mother inspected the crustless salmon sandwiches he had prepared for her and said, ‘That’s wrong. You’ve cut them wrong.’
Forebodings rushed to fill the future he might share with her. His best intentions would sour. The example of Audrey was before him. Having risen to the occasion, he would swiftly descend. He heard himself enumerating, for Iris’s edifi cation, the sacrifices her presence entailed, and the virtues he imagined himself to be displaying.
When he was fourteen, he had turned the corner of a street and seen a figure hesitate at a pedestrian crossing. From the protection of a curved tin awning, he beheld a brassy perm and hectic rouge perched on the body of a slack-bellied sprite. It placed its thumb between its teeth, and peered into the traffi c from the prudent kerb. The gesture brought recognition without dispelling estrangement: the queerest sensation. It was his fi rst glimpse of his mother as left over from another time. He studied her as though she were a page in an anthropological text, taking in the knowledge that she was no longer essential to him.
At the same time, he was aware of an impulse to dash out diagonally through streaming cars and gather her up in his arms. He would carry her to a place of safety. But where, where?
The sky was solid Australian blue, lightly laminated with cloud near the horizon. Nelly was waiting for him at the top of the track. Lines from a poem about hope came into Tom’s mind: With that I gave a viall full of tears: / But he a few green eares. He didn’t speak them, for poetry can be alarming. His fi ngers sought and found the leaves crushed in his pocket.
When the man first appeared, Iris had been afraid. It was true that he was a long way away-beyond grey palings, beyond trees and tiled roofs-and that he did not seem to be coming closer. Still: a man floating in the sky. In all but the most jaded civilisation it was a vision to arouse trepidation and wonder.
He was large and shiny, with rounded limbs. When the sun was out, as it was that afternoon, his body ran with light. Then he was dazzling; Iris had to look away. Dull skies enabled her to see him whole, golden against his backdrop of lead.
She was waiting for her electric jug to boil. The teabag and two spoons of sugar were in the mug, the carton of milk was on the counter. This modest state of affairs took time to engineer.
That was, in its way, a blessing. Time is the great wealth of the elderly, and the spending of it, as with any fortune, poses a quandary.
The jug was too heavy for Iris to fill directly. She had to position a plastic beaker under the tap, lift it out of the sink when it held a cupful of water, ease it along the counter, then lift it again to tip its contents into the jug. All manner of daily acts called for guile. Iris lived by contrivance. There were gadgets, provided by her son, designed to twist the lids off jars or manipulate taps. Elsewhere she had arrived at her own arrangements, a cord looped over a handle enabling a drawer to slide open, bras renounced in favour of mercifully hookless vests. Certain objects defeated her: buttons, nail clippers. At the hairdresser’s, a hot helmet clamped to her skull, she looked into a mirror and saw a girl draw a rosy brush over a client’s splayed fingers. Iris would have liked a manicure herself, but Audrey could not be kept waiting. There was also the expense.
When her son was small, he had loved to sit beside her whenever she painted her nails at her dressing table. The instant her little finger was done, Tommy would lean forward, lips pursed. Iris made a fan of her hand. The child blew on her nails, moving his head this way and that. His eyes were turned sideways, to the fi fteen fi ngers fluttering in Iris’s triple mirror. He called it doing butterfl ies: their private game.
Iris found herself thinking about a nail file she had owned. It was made of silver metal and shaped like a stockinged leg. The rough grain of the stocking’s weave provided a fi ling surface, while the smooth, pointed foot served to clean under nails. This object, once unobtrusively part of her days, had slipped from her mind for years. She couldn’t remember which part of her life it had belonged to, nor imagine what had become of it; why or how their trajectories had diverged.
In the lavatory, lacking the suppleness required to reach around behind herself, she had devised a method for wiping while holding onto her walking frame and keeping her trousers from collapsing about her ankles. It involved preparing wads of paper in advance. These, when soiled, were placed on her walker until she had adjusted her clothing, twisting her knickers around, and her hands were free to grip the frame and turn herself with it to face the bowl. It was a disgusting practice. But what was Iris to do? It was a question of balance: the need to remain upright measured against animal necessity. Every day on a stage fitted with baby-blue porcelain, she re-enacted civilisation’s elemental struggle.