The Voices of the Magpies - by Laura McPhee-Browne
ISLAND | ISSUE 153
For Elizabeth Jolley
I am in the sick bed four days before a visitor. There have been trips to the toilet, and watery meals eaten whilst a tiny television sounds in the far corner of the room, dangling as if a puppet. But no one has come to see if I have settled in, if my leg is healing, if I like the nurses.
I am near the end and I mostly know it.
The visitor is Samuel. He is barely a son, never has been. Shuffling next to the bed in his sand shoes, murmuring something about his daughter Josephine’s first birthday that I fail to hear. He is scared of me, for reasons I cannot remember. It is funny as you get older how little you remember of when your children were young. I have a big appetite after he leaves, perhaps from the time spent lifting my neck o the pillow and feigning interest. I eat all of my dinner; four slices of damp roast pork the colour of a morning tongue, cold peas, boiled carrot slices cut out like Christmas biscuits. Afterwards I doze, and think about what I have left behind – now that I am very old.
A nurse tells me the next morning that I will be moved to my room this afternoon, if my leg continues on its way. She is a tall, broad-shouldered woman with the smell of tea-tree oil about her, as if she is petrified of infection. I imagine her pouring the oil over her naked, apologetic body each morning, coating invisible wounds. She talks more than I can listen, about what to expect in the nursing home.
Sometimes in the moment I forget that people expect me to pretend.
I see my new room as they wheel me in. Someone has put my framed photo of Paul on the bedside table – facing the wrong way, smaller than I remember. The blanket Helen knitted for me that is too scratchy to use alone is folded at the end of my bed, and my slippers are sat together below. It is something, I must admit, to see familiar objects. The room has off-white walls.
There is another nurse I see often. She encourages me, in a tone I suspect she reserves for old people and dogs. She suggests I have my dinner in the dining room with the other residents, and pretends not to hear when I tell her I would rather eat dirt with the worms in the garden. I joke that at least I can squish the worms with my feet if they bother me. She starts whistling then, loudly and with a tunelessness that suits her dull brass haircut and the cleavage she pretends she cannot hide under her uniform by wearing a size too small. She tells me her name is Lotta. I wonder who Lotta has at home, in her brassy house full of fake flowers.
Mostly I am not happy or unhappy here, like I was not happy or unhappy in my flat before Samuel and Margaret decided they couldn’t keep feeling they had to pop in and check on me in case I put the cat in the oven thinking she was a tray of potatoes. I have dreams in the afternoon that feel like memories come real – Paul stands next to me with his small, brown hand at my waist, we kick around the kitchen after beer and nuts, I can smell his aftershave like dried sage and feel spoiled hydrangeas open in my chest. It takes me some time to wake from these memories. Sometimes I have to cry a little to bring myself back to the off-white room and the idea of dinner: heated twice over. To sleeping early because there is no one I want to watch or touch.
“I have dreams in the afternoon that feel like memories come real – Paul stands next to me with his small, brown hand at my waist, we kick around the kitchen after beer and nuts, I can smell his aftershave like dried sage and feel spoiled hydrangeas open in my chest.”
Samuel visits again with Margaret and Josephine, and Margaret comments on my room and pats her neck. She makes sure her neck is still there, Samuel’s Margaret, when she is nervous. Josephine looks more like Samuel this time, and less like Paul with eyelashes. I wonder if Margaret knows that her daughter bears her no resemblance. Lotta interrupts us enough for me to finally appreciate her, asking if we all want lunch in the dining room, or if a walk in the garden would be our idea of a fun time. Of course it wouldn’t, and we don’t. Lotta potters around the back of the room while I try to listen to my family. I wonder what she is doing there always; tidying, snooping. When she leaves I ask Samuel to get my purse from the suitcase in the cupboard.
Dreams come up like sickness, they spike me in this new bed. All day, all night, he won’t leave me. Paul inside a car driving away, Paul inside a tree, Paul inside me like we are the same person except his feet stretch mine out like gloves and his sweat is in my nose. I wet the bed, and Lotta doesn’t even look at me in the morning when she prompts me up so she can change the sheets. She probably thinks she is being kind. It makes me want to scream and pummel my fists that I am again a baby.
“Dreams come up like sickness, they spike me in this new bed. All day, all night, he won’t leave me. Paul inside a car driving away, Paul inside a tree, Paul inside me like we are the same person except his feet stretch mine out like gloves and his sweat is in my nose.”
Paul tells me in a dream I have at night that I must embrace my new world. When I wake, I remember that he was always the one seeing the things around us. I hear the magpies this morning, for the first time, though logic tells me they must have been talking to me every day since I arrived. I won’t embrace this place – I can’t, without him. But I will perhaps try to see it and hear it. The worms in the garden are calling and I suppose I could save a few from the beaks of birds.
When Samuel arrives that afternoon, on his own and with untidy hair as if he has been sleeping or swimming with a bathing cap, I remember how Paul always saw him as a child, even when he was twenty, or thirty, or when he made Margaret pregnant and she brought her big belly to dinner. I remember how Paul saw him and I almost see it myself: for surely he and I had happy times, when his hair was always untidy unless I combed it? He is a good boy, surely. Though he doesn’t appeal to me, with his large ears and eyes that beg like seagulls. He helps me eat my lunch which I had forgotten about until my stomach started to argue. The creamed corn is sweet and looks like vomit.
Samuel asks me, are you comfortable, Gwen?
He has called me Gwen since the day I asked him to. Obedient boy that he is.
I answer, softer than I would ever hope to speak, as comfortable as the magpies, Samuel. ▼
Image: Annie Spratt
This story appeared in Island 153 in 2018. Order a print issue here.
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