Small rooms concentrate the mind

On a mild summer morning when the birds were at their most cheerful I went for a walk back in time.   First I entered a museum, one I had visited many times before.  This museum once housed Phar Lap, the stuffed wonder horse, the bones of gigantic dinosaurs, and the skeletons of tiny marsupials.  But I had lost interest in these exhibits and longed to find a new room within this many roomed museum.  Then I looked up. 

On the ceiling was a man hole with a metal ladder held to the wall by brass bolts.  There was no one was around on this day in the museum of my mind so I decided to look further. 

They say you should not climb ladders once you have passed the age of fifty but in this museum age did not count.  Anything was possible.  Everything relied on luck and a certain state of mind that allowed the viewer to see things with fresh eyes.  I had not noticed this ladder before.  I had not looked up and seen the manhole in the ceiling before. 

As in any dream the ascent was easy. My feet did not falter even though in the outer world I was wary of heights.  The man hole lid lifted effortlessly at my touch.  I slid it to one side and poked my head through the opening into darkness.  Now was the time I should have turned back but something drove me onwards and upwards into the roof cavity. 

           

I knew from past experience to make my way along the rafters as if I were reading Braille.  I knew from past experience to avoid putting any weight on the plaster of the ceiling.  Like a trapeze artist I slid along the beams, wishing myself weightless, which was not so difficult in the roof well of my museum where anything was possible only everything remained in darkness.  The faintest light shone behind me from the man hole I had just entered but ahead of me black ink and no movement. 

           

I was blind.  I could not see those things around me whose shape might otherwise be visible to someone else with sharp vision, but I was so locked inside myself that I could only see things as I had seen them in the past.  No new images entered my field of vision.  I relied on my fingers and my sense of smell to continue along this narrow and splintery beam careful to avoid the rough bits that might pierce my skin. 

Something has to happen I said to myself.  But my optimism offered nothing in return.  Something good has to happen I reassured myself but still nothing.  That is when I decided I must wait.  It will come.  And when it does, I will know it by sense alone and I will pounce. 

What did I forget?

I tried to spilt one cortisone tablet into two this morning in order to take in a reduced dosage but the tablet crushed into tiny pieces. I trust it’s not a omen, a bad omen for the day ahead.

The day ahead makes me breathless, so much to do that even now settling down to write seems excessive. I have no time. I must clean out the kitchen in readiness for my third daughter’s birthday party tomorrow. I must wrap presents in readiness for my youngest daughter’s birthday dinner tonight.

Two daughters turn significant ages in the space of a week, one an eighteen year old at the end of her school life, the other a twenty five year old about to be admitted to practice as a lawyer. Both girls bright and capable, both eager to celebrate and be celebrated and only last week it was my turn.

Birthdays roll along. They are such indicators of the passage of time.

Foul tasting stuff cortisone. I just swallowed the crushed cortisone tablet and had to wash it down with a great gulp of tea and even now the bitter taste lingers at the back of my tongue. It’s hard to be rid of it.

Every so often I think about my thesis and whether someone is reading it and what they might think of it. Whether someone is rolling their eyes in disgust or whether someone else is getting pleasure out of it.

It’s a strange waiting time, not so bad at the moment because it is early in the wait. I imagine in a month or two or maybe more I will start to get anxious with the thought that any day now I will hear the news. But from here it seems too far away.

The sun streams into my writing room so fiercely that I can barely see the screen. Dust motes collect on the glass and even as I wipe them away new ones take their place.

When I am unsettled like this, when the lure of activity comes over me like a rash, all I want to do is get up and about and do all the jobs I have listed in my mind. I do not want to sit here at the computer typing words onto a screen. I do not want to engage with my thoughts. I am on the run, a cortisone induced run perhaps, though I think that may be fanciful.

I have kept the dosage to a minimum merely trying to avoid a recurrence of the dreadful rash that overtook me several weeks ago and appeared to be making a return only a few days ago.

It seems to have settled again as I wean myself off the cortisone.

You need to reduce the dose of cortisone gradually the doctor told me, in order to trick your body into believing that it needs to start producing its own again, otherwise it might shut up shop believing the rush will come from elsewhere.

That’s very much a layman’s way of describing a physiological process and the ways in which the introduction of chemicals can fool your body into believing it need not do its own work.

The phone rings and it’s my mother. Her accent thick over the line.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she says. She sounds breathless. ‘What did I forget? Oh yes, I think I forgot your birthday. I’m sorry. I forget everything.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘You’re so good to me and then I forget your birthday.’
I try again to reassure my mother, to let her know I understand. ‘It’s hard to remember one day from the next.’
‘I’m alright,’ my mother says but her voice sounds broken. It’s just that it comes back to me all of a sudden.’
The conversation ends here after I promise to visit the next day.
‘You’re busy, I know’ my mother says. Now it’s her turn to understand.

My mother when she was beginning to develop a memory circa 1919.

A childhood fantasy

We take the yellow bus to Camberwell. It smells of shoe polish. It smells of leather. I sit beside my mother near the front. Today there are only the two of us, my mother and me and we are taking the bus to Camberwell to shop.

I am angry with my mother. I want to complain about her plans to buy my sister pantyhose. I am older than my sister and I am still in socks. Why should she have stockings before me? But I do not want stockings. They are too adult.

My mother is humming. She must be nervous. The bus turns the corners too fast and I slide across the seat right up against my mother. Her body is hard and soft all at the same time.

An ambulance screeches past. Its siren splits the air. My mother hums on as though she has not heard it. I watch the driver’s neck. It has uneven black stubbly bits that run down and hide under his collar. The bus driver has fat stubby fingers that work the gears whenever we slow down to stop. My mother is looking ahead, still humming. Her nose juts out hooked. She is proud of it. Aquiline she says, like an eagle. A sign of aristocracy.

My mother is proud but she sits hunched over in her old green coat with her handbag on her lap. She does not wear pantyhose. She wears stockings held up with her girdle. The girdle is pink, skin coloured. She wears it to hold in her stomach muscles.

My mother is fat and frumpy and I am pleased about this. I would not want a mother who looked young and was pretty. Mothers should look like mothers. She fiddles in her handbag for her compact. It opens with a puff of powder; sweet and tacky to smell, like Lux Soap. My mother dabs the powder on her nose. She does not like her nose to shine. She squints into the compact’s tiny mirror and smears on a line of lipstick. Glossy red.

My mother was beautiful once. We have a photograph. In it she looks like a movie star. She gazes out from the photo with movie star eyes and a wistful look. Performing for the camera.

The top of the bus brushes against the branches of street trees as we turn corners. At Stanhope Street it stops for an old man who fumbles in his pocket for change and nearly falls over when the bus starts up again.
‘Pull the cord,’ my mother says. ‘We mustn’t miss our stop.’
I am taller than my mother. The cord like a skipping rope is taut till I pull on it. A loud buzz and the driver slows down. We walk towards the shops along an alleyway that leads to the railway station.

My father will kill us all. The thought pops into my mind and I want to push it away but it will not go away. He will kill us all one by one. He will start with my mother move onto my sister and then it will be my turn. He will work through the girls and then start on the boys. I have not yet worked out how he will do it, but he will. A train rattles through the cutting nearby.

Haunted by Photos of the Dead 2

I am haunted by my memory of the picture of my dead baby sister.

As a child I took it to school one day. I had peeled out the photo from the corners of the grey family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind.

‘She’s dead,’ I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My grubby fingers had smeared the photo’s shiny surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one of them had seen a dead body before, and not one of them had been able to imagine the stillness of the photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground that spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old.

I did not show my teacher. Even at the time I thought there was something wrong in this method of gaining currency, this way of getting attention from my classmates, attention I would not normally receive. I hid it from my sisters and brothers, as well.

I have the photograoh still – my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep.

If this dead sister had lived then none of what happened to my older sister would have happened, or so I imagine. In that sense it would have been different for me too, the third rather than the second daughter. I would not have my mother’s name, the name given to the second daughter and my living sister would not have had her maternal grandmother’s name, the privilege of the first born girl. Everything would have been topsy-turvy. And my mother’s sad story of her ‘lost little angel’ would not be etched in my memory.

It started during the Honger winter of 1945; well after the Germans had invaded Holland and stopped supplies. The people in the cities were starving. My mother had two children by then, a son named after his paternal grandfather, Jan Christiaan and a daughter, named after her maternal grandmother, Gertrudis Maria.

The boy at eighteen months was healthy enough though thin, with a constant cough that bothered my mother but there was little she could do. The girl on the other hand was thin beyond belief. My mother’s milk had dried up along with her menstrual blood. There would be no more babies during this war.

At five months of age, the girl was the size of a newborn, with a head of wavy black hair, black like her mother’s, only finer. You could see through it to the pink of her scalp.

The baby had been listless all day long, my mother told me. She lay in her bassinet staring vacantly above her head, seeming not to notice the green of the trees when my mother took her out for a stroll, not to notice the blue of the sky, or the light from an overhead lamp, or the red of her mother’s lips.

The baby smiled feebly at times when my mother made a great show to rouse her from her lethargy but she could not sustain these smiles for long and then resumed a dull expression, as if something inside had switched off and she had moved over to the other side of life, the other side with the angels.

‘Take her to Heilo,’ the doctor had said to my mother after she told him that a cousin who lived there had asked a neighboring family in possession of a milking cow whether they might help this family from the city with their sickly baby.

The neighbors agreed and my mother traveled the 35 kilometers on foot, pushing her baby in the pram. By then the baby had lapsed into a coma.

The local doctor came in the morning and told my mother that the baby might come out of it and if she did then my mother was to offer a little warm boiled water, nothing more and call for him.

My mother was alone in the house – the children of the house were away at school, and their parents were away at work. My mother sat with her baby from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, watching her. She had boiled water in readiness and had waited for it to cool. She tested it with the tip of her elbow, eased it in, that sensitive part, then tried it on the inside of her wrist, the place that people choose when life becomes too much and they want to hack their body open and drain out the blood.

The water’s temperature was perfect. My mother filled the bottle to the three quarter mark and waited for her baby to wake from the coma. Her baby stared at the ceiling, not in the direction of the light from the window, but directly up at the ceiling that was marked only by a bare bulb hanging there. Her eyes were fixed.

My mother half dozed, and saw the baby flutter her lashes and then lift her head from the pillow.
‘She recognised me, I’m sure of it,’ my mother told me later. ‘And I thought, oh now she comes out of it. But, no. She slumped back and I knew she was gone’.

My mother lifted her baby from the crib and took her into her arms. On her lap the baby felt light, like a feather pillow, only angular and sharp. She could feel the ridge of her baby’s backbone, the tiny elbows, almost without flesh, almost a skeleton. She knew she was dead but held out false hope in her baby's last flicker of recognition.

My mother has repeated this detail to me again and again. At the time, that sudden surge of life in her baby’s face almost discounted the possibility of her death. My mother told me that even as she knew her baby was dead, she could not believe it.

She swept up her daughter in her arms and ran next door to her cousin’s house.
Her cousin took one look.

‘The poor little one has gone,’ she said and then urged my mother to sit down while she washed the baby and dressed her in a white christening gown. My dead baby sister wears this gown today day – an infant Miss Haversham in photographic form.

The neighbours’ children came home from school at the end of the day and brought the flowers still visible in the photograph. They spread them around the baby. In the photo these flowers look almost translucent, their whiteness a match to the baby’s pale skin.

The undertaker headed the funeral procession. He walked with the small coffin under his arm. My father and mother followed. They walked slowly through the town of Heilo. There was no traffic and everywhere people stopped, the women with bowed heads. Men took off their caps.

In the church there were white flowers on the altar and a white cloth draped over the coffin. The schoolchildren sang the Mass of the Angels.

My mother cannot remember the burial and did not return home to Haarlem, immediately, though my father went back to the war.

'I had dysentery,' my mother said, 'and had to stay with my cousin and her husband.' After she had recovered, she walked home, she told me, 'all the way to Haarlem with an empty pram and an empty place in my heart.'

Haunted by Photos of the Dead 1.

In order to spare people great lumps of text I've broken the following into smaller sections which I shall eventually post in full but in pieces.


My mother, now in her ninetieth year, told me yesterday that she had hurt her hand. She had been walking through the hallway to her bedroom when she accidentally knocked it against the doorknob. She must have hit it hard because the top layer of skin came off and it was bleeding. When she looked at it more closely she realised that not only had she knocked off the top layer of skin but also the wound was deep. She could see her tendons down to the bone. She took herself to the office in the home where she lives in the hope that a nurse would be on duty.

The staff took one look at my mother’s hand and called an ambulance. My mother thought this unnecessary. She would have happily called a taxi. Still the ambulance came and took her to the clinic where they patched her up. They could not give her stitches because the skin on her hand was too thin. ‘It would tear,’ they said. Instead they pulled a series of tiny strips across the wound, and then bandaged it tight.

‘It hurts a little when I move it in particular ways,’ my mother said, ‘but I can tell it’s healing.’

I had rung to ask my mother a question about the past. I wanted to ask her about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Honger winter of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about.

My curiosity has been flamed by two books, Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and the other, Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography in America, which includes several photos of dead people. A friend recommended the first book; the second, I found by accident in a used books shop. I could not leave the photographs behind.

Gordon is interested in the notion of the things behind things, the things that lie beneath. She takes notice of the thoughts that haunt her even as she is trying as a sociologist to do research on something concrete and ostensibly evident. Whereas Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world that we no longer take photos of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we do take photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish. (Ruby, 1995, p. 161)

I struggle to understand why so many things have become unspeakable, that it gets harder and harder to remember. But these days my mother’s memory for certain past events has a sharpness and clarity it never had before. My mother’s thin skin is a sign to me that soon she will be gone and with it her voice, I must catch her memories before it is too late, even as her memories are full of gaps and shadows. I will hitch her memories to mine and look for signs in between, look for the haunting to uncover something of her past.

I follow in Gordon’s direction. She describes how one day she was on her way to a conference to present a paper. She does not spell out the topic but how she had found herself distracted away from her topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered as ‘missing’ from the photo of a conference group in Berlin several years ago. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein should have been present in that photo, but she was not there. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst from Freud’s day, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct.

My mother is describing her wounded hand and I cringe at the thought that her skin is so thin it cannot withstand a simple knock, the sort of knock that would leave most of us with a red mark, at best; a bruise, at worst.

‘They peeled the skin back over the hole,’ my mother said. ‘It had rolled itself up and they dragged it back over the wound.’ The image left me squeamish. Why do we wince when people describe their injuries, their own or another’s injuries in graphic detail?

In time I asked my mother the question that had prompted my phone call. She could not remember who took the photo, but she suspected it was the neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had been staying. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that she could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on living.

‘It is harder’, my mother said in this most recent conversation to lose an older child. ‘When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes far less time to get over it.’

For my mother, memories keep the idea of her lost child alive but given that this baby was only five months old, her life so short, there are few memories attached to her.

Still there was a catch in my mother’s voice as she spoke to me over the phone, as if she were re-remembering the feeling of her loss all that time back.

As long as I can remember my mother has checked herself; kept her tears to herself; put a full stop onto her feelings by offering some trite homily, some staving-off comment:
‘Well, that was that. No use dwelling on these things.’

I remember you.

I have a partial denture, not all of my teeth are my own. I write these words and the thought floats around the back of my mind. Not for publication this, not for the audience. I don’t want anyone to know. I am too ashamed.

A while ago my mother visited. She came with her much younger cousin Jo and Jo’s husband Arnold. They’d been out for lunch and my mother decided, or so she told me over the telephone when she made arrangements for the visit that it would be good for Josephine and Arnold to meet some of their younger relatives in Australia. They emigrated here a couple of years ago.
‘I’m an old lady, my mother said, what would they want to spend time with me for?’
I thought it was also a pretext to spend time with me.

I suggested my mother come after four as I had a dentist appointment earlier that day.
‘Oh, I remember you.' She said. 'You were so frightened for the dentist. You had to have an anesthetic.’
‘I was only little,’ I said. I was about seven and they needed to take out several teeth.’
What do I remember of that day?

My mother and I sit on a long wooden bench in a room that reminds me of a church for all its austerity, but there are magazines on a pile in one corner and no crosses to be seen. We are in the Dental Hospital and I am alone with my mother. In so many memories of my mother I am alone. She is sitting very close to me. I can feel the mold of her hip against mine even through the thick layers of her woolen skirt and coat. I am wearing my older brother's black duffel coat. One of the wooden buttons is loose so the coat gapes in the middle.

I have come for extractions. I do not want to think too much about this word but my mother says I will not feel a thing. I will be put to sleep and when I wake up it will all be over.

I look down at my feet. I am wearing my first Holy Communion black patents. I have worn them for a long time now, every Sunday, and they are beginning to wear out. There are holes in the middle of the soles of each shoe, but no one can see this, no one knows but me. Only when I kneel down for Holy Communion at the front of the church do I worry that other people will see the holes in my shoes. Then I try very hard to curl my toes up while I’m kneeling to keep as much of the heel concealed as possible.

My black patent shoes shine. My mother has told me I must not worry. I do not want to think about why I should worry, but the smell of chemicals, the smell of toilet cleaner, the mothball smell of this place makes my stomach hurt. I try to breathe through my mouth and I run my tongue over my teeth. They are scratchy to feel.

‘Seven baby teeth have to go.’ I hear the dentist tell my mother as his big hands prod my mouth open. He scrapes against my teeth with a sharp metal stick.
‘Normally we await till they fall out of their own accord,’ he says ‘ but these seven are too far gone.’
She’s not doing a good job of brushing her teeth, is she?’ he asks my mother as though I am not there.
‘I tell her to brush them every day,' my mother says.

It’s true. My mother tells me every night when I go into the lounge to say good night to my father and he brushes my forehead with his yellow thumb, his thumb that is yellow from smoking, He brushes my forehead in a sign of the cross and my mother calls out after me, after us, my sister and I, ‘Brush your teeth now.’

My sister goes to the bathroom and brushes her teeth. I go to the bedroom and get ready for bed. When I am in bed, I remember to brush my teeth but I cannot be bothered. Later when my mother comes to say good night she asks again.
‘Did you brush your teeth?’
I say ‘Yes’. And she is happy. Easy as that.

My teeth feel furry most of the time. But not today. Today they have a shiny feel in the places where they are not broken. They have a shiny feel because I brushed and brushed them because I know the dentist will look at my teeth and he must not know that I have not told the truth.

I tell the truth in confession. Every week I tell the priest that I have been telling lies once. Telling lies. He never asks what lies. Telling lies once, stealing once, he never asks what I have stolen. And being disobedient, I add. That one feels like a lie because I am never disobedient.

Not brushing my teeth when my mother tells me cannot be a sin of disobedience because I have included it in my telling lies. A sin only counts once. At least for me it does. Though my mother tells me that my grandmother suffered from scruples. She went to the priest and confessed her sins and even after he gave her absolution and said she could go off and say a prayer she was not happy. She came back to the same pries again and again. ‘
You do not understand, Father’ she said. “You do not understand how badly I have sinned.’

I know it’s easy to wash your soul clean. One visit to confession and everything is washed away and my soul, which is just under my stomach right down close to my bottom is clean and white again. I know my soul is near my bottom because it is harder to keep it clean there when it is so close to all the poo in my body. I know this because the nuns tells us about the soul within and how hard we must work to keep it clean and spotless.

But my teeth are not spotless. They are full of holes, ‘cavities’ the dentist says. A nurse in a white uniform with a tight bun on top of her head calls out my name and my mother and I walk into a cubicle where my mother helps me take off all my clothes. Then she dresses me in a thin white dress which has big holes for sleeves and no buttons. My mother ties the cords all the way up the back but the hospital gown gapes even worse than my coat and I am scared that people will see my bottom. But as soon as I am out of the cubicle the nurse tells me to lie down on a long bed with metal sides and she pushes me through slamming doors that snap shut behind, down a long corridor of bright lights.

I am lying on top of this trolley bed like a dead person. I feel numb the way I think a dead person feels but my mind is still ticking over. My hands are cold. My stomach aches from the smell. A man in a mask leans over my arm and sticks in a needle. I watch the silver shine of the needle as it pierces my skin and the feeling of sharpness that comes with it is not my feeling anymore and then I am really dead.

When I wake up my mouth is full of the metal taste of blood. I try to spit it out. I am too scared to run my tongue along my teeth. My mouth has become a bloody hole. I can see myself in a mirror on one of the walls and I have shrunk. I do not look the same as I remember me. My face is white, and flat as a plate. My lips are bright red.

My mother and I stand outside the big green dental hospital and wait for my father. He pulls the grey Holden into the curb and my mother bundles me into the back. Her hands are gentle as they brush back my fringe from my forehead.

My soul feels black today as though all the times of not brushing my teeth have been lined up together for punishment.
‘You can have some ice cream when we get home,’ my mother says. My father pulls the car into the traffic. I have never been in a car alone with my parents ever. Where are my sisters and brothers? Where are the others? I hope my mother has not told them. I hope they will never know about my teeth, the holes and my bad ways. There are still four days before Friday’s confession.