Back to Broady Page 14

  ‘What is it Mum?’

  Has she swallowed too many tablets, a few extra Serepax or Mogadon to help her sleep? What if it’s also a couple of Valium to dull her pain? I begin to panic now and call the local doctor.

  It’s Sunday. The surgery is closed. I get a recording and a phone number for a locum service. I dial that number a few times and get no response.

  Am I overreacting? I wonder as I pace the house. There are plenty of sick people out there who need doctors more than Mum. I try making a cup of tea. I can’t find a clean cup amongst the dirty dishes on the sink. Matthew is still watching TV.

  ‘Come and help clean up this filthy mess,’ I call to him.

  ‘It’s not my mess.’

  ‘I don’t care. Mum’s sick.’

  ‘She’s always sick.’

  I mutter something but the TV drowns it out and I realise it’s better unsaid. ‘Don’t be so selfish,’ I want to scream. But who am I to talk? Matthew is still so young and so often the only one home with our mother. Older siblings are busy with lives that take them away from the stifling grief of the house. I understand this detachment masks his loneliness.

  ‘Matt,’ I say, quieter now, looking for his eyes under a heavy fringe, ‘I think it’s serious. I can’t get Mum to wake up. I’ll try the doctor again.’

  ‘She got up for a while last night, for dinner.’

  ‘Was she okay?’

  ‘Yeah, she just said she was tired and went back to bed.’

  Matthew picks up a cricket ball, walks outside with me following.

  ‘What are you doing for the holidays?’

  ‘Probably hang around here. Might go to a mate’s place.’

  ‘Let me know if you want a lift anywhere. Jon won’t mind taking you, or I can borrow his car.’

  Unopened cardboard boxes line the walls of the brick garage and I check one after the other, peering inside. Under books and picture frames and plates I’m looking for letters I had stuffed in a shoebox. It seemed like we were always living out of boxes, never unpacking properly since McIvor Street had been sold. Especially Mum. She was always on the move, unsettled, searching for something lost. Now I search the garage for those precious letters from my dad but I can’t find any of them. He wrote often to me when I was at boarding school. Clever, funny letters and I needed to see one now, just to hold a letter from him, to see his handwriting, to have a piece of him with me.

  ‘Dear Cally,’ he once wrote, ‘I’m sending you this article on cabbage. It says it’s good for the brain and for acne.’

  The brain food I could deal with, but the acne? Were my pimples that bad?

  It’s early afternoon now and the sun is high above the backyard and the temperature is soaring. I can’t wait any longer. When I go back inside, Mum’s groaning has become more intense, more desperate. I think she’s trying to talk. She opens her eyes, giving me hope, but she doesn’t focus on anything. I try the doctor again. The phone rings and rings but this time I won’t give up. I dial again and again. Finally, there’s a voice on the other end of the phone that tells me the doctor is busy but will get there when he can. The receptionist asks a few questions.

  ‘Has your mother hurt herself? Has she been vomiting? Bleeding?’

  ‘No.’ I’m angry now, afraid of her questions. ‘Fucking hurry up,’ I want to scream down the phone. But I don’t. It wouldn’t help. I need to be calm, to be nice so someone will come and help my mother.

  An hour later, still no doctor. Then three o’clock. No improvement. Now there are different noises from Mum, from her throat, more like groans from a sick cat. Groans… more intense. It scares me. I have never seen Mum like this before. I ring the locum service again and I call every half hour after that, telling them Mum needs a doctor now.

  The house is hot and stuffy. I keep busy, washing dishes, hanging clothes on the line. I race around opening windows, leave the front door open so I can hear the doctor arrive. Jesus Fucking Christ, how hard is it?

  Eighteen

  A doctor knocks on our front door. It’s almost four hours after I’ve called the surgery. He looks like he has just got out of bed. Blue shirt creased and hanging out of his brown corduroy pants, curly dark hair. He brushes past me into Mum’s room. Now, everything is urgent, rushed. Questions fly at me.

  ‘Is your mother on medication? Allergic to anything?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Has she taken something?’

  Empty prescription boxes, with Valerie Egan printed on them, are scattered on the bedside table. Take two at night, or as needed, typed in black on the front of the packet. Half-empty sheets of foil with holes pushed through them lay on the table. There are tablets to reduce Mum’s anxiety and tablets to help her sleep. More tablets to stop those tablets making her sick.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whisper, but suspect Mum has taken too many of something, but what that is I don’t know. Should I mention she has been a bit down lately? I try to stop my whirlpool brain imagining what I don’t know.

  ‘I need to call an ambulance,’ Dr No Name says and I take him to the phone on the table inside the front door. ‘Why an ambulance,’ I want to ask him.

  Matt and I wait together at the front door, waiting and watching.

  I can hardly speak when the two paramedics arrive. The tall one with ginger hair like my Great Uncle Alf is friendly and gentle as he speaks to Mum. ‘Valerie, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?’

  Mum only manages a groan as the men lift her from the mattress. That’s when I see the blood, dark red stains on the sheet and her nightdress. Is it her period? Something else?

  ‘Can I change her before you go?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The blood.’

  ‘Oh, that’s okay. We have to get your mum to the hospital.’

  It’s then I remember the accident, the car crash from the week before Christmas. I mention it to the doctor as he speaks with the paramedic Mum would have called Ginger. I tell him how Mum had crashed into a fence in Brunswick about ten days ago.

  ‘Did she go to hospital?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she hurt? Anyone else involved?’

  ‘No. She was on her own and she caught a cab home. She sat down and ate dinner with us.’

  I remember Mum smothering the steak we cooked her with salt and pepper and tomato sauce.

  ‘Doesn’t seem related,’ the doctor says.

  Still I wonder about the bleeding. I want them to wait so I can clean her up, to change her nightdress. But they tell me there’s no time. Time? I want to scream. Well, why did we wait five hours for a doctor?

  I ride in the ambulance with Mum. I’m in the front seat next to the younger of the men, his black curls almost covering his eyes. I look over my shoulder through the plastic divide but I see nothing. I hear Ginger in the back, talking to Mum.

  ‘Valerie. We’re taking you to the hospital,’ he tells her. ‘Can you hear me Valerie? Do you know what’s happening Valerie?’

  Mum moans, like she has all day; only now it doesn’t sound like her, more like an injured animal. Curly is driving fast up Mount Alexander Road, over Puckle Street towards the city. Ginger in the back calls to the driver, ‘Better put your foot down, George.’

  The siren goes on. We’re moving much faster now. Speeding through the red lights where the Tullamarine Freeway ends. We’re in Flemington Road, edging closer to the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

  Panic overwhelms me and the pain in my head is a ten. I’m feeling sick as the ambulance swerves the corners. The siren has gone up a notch. I wish I had taken Mum to hospital myself, earlier. But there was no car. Mum’s was still at the panelbeaters and my old Volkswagen was with Margie at her shared house in Carlton.

  Why didn’t you call someone earlier? I can hear the family asking questions, blaming me. And yet I know if I did call and it turned out to be nothing I would just be the drama queen, the worry wart. You know what Mum’s like I could hear th
em say, she’ll be okay.

  Swerving hard at the corner into Grattan Street my stomach churns. Please, Dad, I pray. Make Mum okay, I whisper as if he is beside me in the ambulance.

  The hospital’s emergency entrance in Royal Parade is familiar from our visits there with Dad.

  The doctors will fix Mum, a voice in my head reassures. They know what they are doing, it soothes as I wait in triage. I stare at the other patients to take my mind from Mum’s groans. I can hear her, from the other side of a thin pink curtain, above the creaking of the trolley where she tosses. Oblivious. I need to get away. I call Jon and Matthew who have waited at the house, ask them to let my brothers know. I call Margie. She’s not home.

  Back in the air-conditioned foyer of the hospital I wait with all the others. There’s a father holding a small baby with its head wrapped in bloodied bandages. A pregnant teenager, bent over her stomach, crying into a young boy’s chest. He looks no older than my brother Matthew.

  And fear fills me, pricks at my chest like needles so that I can’t breathe.

  A young registrar approaches me, rushing, mumbling at me as if I’m nothing more than a nuisance to him. Like the locum doctor, he doesn’t have time to introduce himself.

  ‘Are you Valerie Egan’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes. I’m Caroline,’ I say, looking into his squinting grey eyes behind large rectangular glasses. ‘Is she going to be okay?’

  ‘Can’t say.’ His voice is bland, distracted, as he looks past me at the clock. Maybe he just wants to go home too.

  ‘When will she see a doctor?’

  ‘Not sure. We’ll try to make her more comfortable.’

  His mouth hardly opens, all pinched up like he’s been sucking lemons.

  ‘Will she be okay?’ I press for more details.

  ‘We can’t say. For all we know she might be going upstairs.’

  I want to slap him across the face. What a stupid thing to say. Did he mean they were moving my mother upstairs? To a room of her own? Were they going to operate? Or did he mean that other upstairs? The upstairs some called Heaven?

  Before I can ask him to explain he’s gone. I’m frightened now. Alone. Where are the doctors? A nurse? What’s going on? Jesus, why can’t they just hurry up?

  I go back to the triage desk, ask when someone is going to see my mother.

  ‘It’s been three hours. She’s in pain. I can hear her from here,’ I tell Trudy, the nurse behind the desk. ‘Listen. That’s her.’

  The moaning is hoarse now, like a foot is pushing on her throat.

  ‘I know it must be hard,’ Trudy says and punches numbers and letters into a keyboard. ‘But it is a public holiday and we are short staffed. Someone will see her as soon as they can. Take a seat and wait.’

  But waiting is torture. Patience is not one of my virtues. I want this day to be over. The holiday season surrounds me. A decorated Christmas tree with lots of silver and gold, colourful gift boxes and bright name tags. A ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ sign draped across the nurses’ station. Red and green streamers remind me that the rest of Melbourne is still celebrating.

  In the small, crowded waiting room I work hard to still my mind. I have a few tricks that help, ways to keep the chattering monkey quiet. Distraction is best. I erase the image of Mum wheeled on the trolley from the ambulance. Her blonde hair messed up, her naked face pale with drooping dark rings under her eyes, as if bruised. I replace it with my favourite childhood memory of her getting dressed up for the Irish Ball.

  Acknowledge the fear, I tell myself, then push it away, lock it all in a box and throw the box into the ocean. A woman in the hospital waiting room catches my eye. We nod at each other. If someone is nice to me I know I will cry.

  The stranger’s quiet smile brings me undone and I’m no longer rational. I close my eyes and images cram my head. Empty boxes of pills scattered on Mum’s bedside table, on the floor by the bed. Did she take too many? Did she lose count? Or did she just not care? Had she really stopped wanting to live? Or did she long for that woozy warm flow of relaxant from her beloved Valium? Did she love those pills more than us?

  I need to talk to someone. The phone in the hospital foyer chews up my twenty-cent pieces. I still can’t get a dial tone to call Margie or the boys. Out on the street I search for a phone box that works. Grattan Street is alive for the new year and the cafes in nearby Lygon Street fill with people enjoying the holidays. The sun is still hot and the heat from the concrete and buildings is suffocating. I move out of the sun and walk away from the hospital. I’m going to be sick, my legs are wobbly and I can’t think straight. Was this how Mum felt? It seemed my mother spent her life wishing she were somewhere else, not physically, but mentally, trying to escape the things in her head. Valium, I knew, was often her only relief. Mother’s little helper. And when the side effects of that insidious drug wore off, she needed more and then more. Tranquillisers and sleepers, like Serepax and Normison, provided quick-fix solutions. But they too were always short-term.

  What was my mother escaping? How could I ever know? Over the years I had gained snapshots of her early life and I had tried to piece it together like a jigsaw. At school, I sometimes wrote short stories about her life and I changed the endings. Everything about Mum seemed too sad to be true. I wondered if the terrible grief of losing her mother was part of her depression. A mother herself at eighteen, and eight kids before she was thirty-one was sure to take its toll too. Add to that the money worries and Dad’s drinking…life can’t have been easy for her.

  Perhaps it was more complicated than that, I wondered as I waited in the cool foyer of the hospital, as the sun lingered longer on that first day of the new year. Was there some other underlying cause? Could an unresolved grief, untreated depression, cause madness? Could it cause someone to go crazy with the pain? Could it make someone want to die?

  I sit still now. I know how to be still, and quiet. All those years hiding behind closed doors, pretending not to be there.

  Maurice and Nick had taught me to see with my ears, to close my eyes and be still, to become invisible. As I wait, on the hard plastic chair, I watch people come and go, rolling in on trolleys and in wheelchairs. It’s a busy area inside the emergency doors where the ambulances pull up. I wait for one of my older brothers to join me; maybe they can make something happen, make someone do something.

  As I sit and wait I let my mind wander. I shiver as I think back to one of the darkest periods of Mum’s life since Dad died. A time when I thought she might not make it through another day. Mum wanted to escape the craziness of the hotel for a while and rented a small flat in West Brunswick. It was her third move in the two years since we sold McIvor Street. The flats were ugly, a big block of brown, brick veneer rooms, more like a jail; reminiscent of nearby Pentridge Prison. Mum’s flat was on the top floor with a narrow concrete path leading to her door from the stairs. It was small with two bedrooms and Matthew lived there with her. He went to the nearby Christian Brothers College.

  Those were dark days for Mum and for Matthew. A time when her addiction to prescription medication became more serious. It seemed she was trying to ease the relentless grief with a cocktail of tranquilisers, painkillers and benzodiazepines. I tried to talk to her doctors about it to no avail. Matthew didn’t talk about it but rather kept it inside. Sometimes he withdrew from everyone.

  I remember visiting Mum at the flat one day and found her heavily drugged and dazed. Fresh cigarette burns on the small bedside table, dangerously close to overhanging blankets. I begged her to get help and finally she agreed. Together we went to see our friend, Dr Helen, in her Carlton clinic, near the hotel. Helen suggested a Melbourne clinic for rehabilitation. Andrew was the only one who could convince her to go. Give it a try Mum, nothing to lose.

  And in she went, into a small private hospital, Pleasant Hill, that looked more like a suburban home. She shared a dormitory-style bedroom with four other women. ‘They’re all drug addicts and alcoholics,’
she protested. ‘I’m not staying.’

  She didn’t last the night. Caught a cab back to the flat in De Carle Street. It was never mentioned again.

  I snap back into the hospital surrounds but nothing has changed. Finally, I find a public phone box that isn’t vandalised. I scrounge around the bottom of my bag and find a few coins and call home.

  ‘Any news?’ Paul asks before the phone has had time to register one ring. He’s home from his hotel work, waiting with Matthew and John, trying to contact Seamus. ‘Tom’s heading into the hospital now,’ he says. ‘And I’ve left a message for Andrew too.’

  ‘We’re still waiting for a doctor,’ I tell him.

  ‘Bloody hopeless.’

  ‘I know. There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘Do you want me to come in? Margaret’s here now and she’ll stay here with the boys.’

  ‘Yeah. That would be good. Thanks.’

  I need a cigarette. A couple of quick smokes would be good right now. Hypocrite, a voice says. Well, it’s that or a Valium.

  How could you? The voice is relentless. Your dad is dead from lung cancer and your mum is fighting addiction.

  My brothers arrive and save me. Paul and Tom are with me when a different doctor, older and slower, finds us in the waiting room.

  ‘Your mother is very sick,’ he says. ‘We have taken her to intensive care.’

  ‘Can we see her?’

  ‘Not just yet, we need to do some tests.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ I say.

  ‘It’ll be a while before we’ve finished,’ the doctor says. ‘I think you should go home. We’ll call if we need you.’

  The tram is empty and the day warming up when I make my way back to the Royal Melbourne Hospital early the next morning. Sweat drips from the back of my neck and I dab at the drops on my forehead and above my lip. The light cotton sundress I brought home from Greece feels cool against my hot skin. I find relief inside the air-conditioned lift that takes me to the third floor.