Blood Sunset

19



MUM LAY ON HER SIDE, eyes closed. Her face was distorted, a permanent frown etched on her forehead.
‘She had a fall,’ one of the paramedics said, ushering me to her side. ‘Landed badly. Nurse found her on the floor.’
‘Mum,’ I said, touching her shoulder. ‘It’s okay. These people are taking you to hospital.’
‘She knows that. Do it every fortnight,’ said the medic, moving around to the front of the ambulance while his colleague got the gurney ready for loading. I turned to the nurse, a thin woman about my own age, gaunt face. I’d met her when we’d first moved Mum into the nursing home but I couldn’t recall her name.
‘What does that mean, every fortnight?’
‘Check-ups. Hospital rehab. Rotating tests, sometimes X-rays, sometimes MRIs or cat scans. Your brother, Anthony, often comes up for them. Of course this one wasn’t scheduled. How’d you know to come so soon?’
‘I didn’t. I was just visiting,’ I said, watching the medics load the gurney into the back. One of them followed Mum in. ‘Where are you taking her?’
‘The usual.’
I looked at the nurse, embarrassed at not knowing what ‘the usual’ was.
‘Kyneton Private,’ she said.
‘Mind if I ride in the back?’
The medic on the inside clipped an oxygen mask to Mum and said, ‘You can ride up front. Not in the back.’
‘What about you?’ I asked the nurse as I opened the passenger door. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ve got forty-three other people to look after, plus there’s a whole swag coming in from Bright in case the bushfires hit there. Sorry.’
‘I keep odd hours,’ I called after her as she walked away. ‘Shiftwork makes it hard to visit.’
She nodded, sympathetic.
‘I’ve been off work a long time too. Only been back a month,’ I added, feeling stupid. Who was I justifying myself to? Her or me?
After I climbed in, the driver radioed through a status call to the hospital and we drove out of the nursing home.
‘A fall?’ I quizzed him. ‘What happened?’
‘Don’t know. Nurse says she must’ve fallen out of bed. Hurt her hip.’
I winced. ‘How bad?’
‘Don’t know that either. She’s not able to communicate that to us, so we’ll have to wait for the X-rays. Hopefully she’s just bruised.’
An overwhelming sadness hit me as I thought about Mum’s fragility, how old and defenceless she’d become. Driving along the town perimeter, we passed teenagers riding BMX bikes on a dirt path. As kids, Anthony and I had had bikes. I’d fallen once, leaving my arm lacerated and swollen. I remembered the pain and the shock, and my mother’s firm but caring hands washing the gravel and dirt out of the wound. I remembered her telling me to breathe slowly, ignore the sting of the Betadine. I remembered her patience, but most of all I remembered her always being there.
‘How could she have fallen out of bed?’ I asked.
‘Happens all the time. They get up, go to the toilet, slip. Sometimes they have nightmares, roll right out of bed. Sometimes they do it deliberately, like they want to hurt themselves. You know, for attention.’
‘Attention?’
‘They get lonely in there. We get a few at Christmas time, sometimes Easter.’
‘You mean when they miss out on important occasions?’
The driver nodded. ‘Wedding anniversaries and birthdays are big ones too.’
The light turned green and we drove the last few kilometres in silence. Mum had missed Christmas, and now Jonathan’s eighteenth birthday. But surely she wouldn’t do that to herself . . .
‘She’ll be okay,’ the driver said as we pulled into the hospital. ‘A fall’s never good for the elderly, but your mum’s a real fighter. They say she can’t speak, but I don’t believe that. She just looked at me, told me all I needed.’
I held Mum’s hand as they wheeled her into the hospital. The nurses were ready, but they waited patiently while I leant over her, looking into her slanted face. Her left eye drooped, and drool slithered from her lips. I wiped it away with a tissue. Her right eye twitched, looked up at me and her breathing began to stagger. Was this a reaction to my presence? I squeezed her hand and kissed her forehead, inhaling the aroma of soap and musty linen.
‘You’re in the wars again, Mum. Beds are for sleeping in, not surfing.’ I waited for a reaction but there was none. ‘They’re just going to do some tests, make sure you haven’t gone and broken anything. I told them that was impossible with bones like yours. They’re like steel, all that milk you drink.’
I smiled, but again there was no reaction. Her right eye closed, opened slowly. Not looking at me. After a few moments, I nodded to the nurses and they wheeled her away. I knew then why I’d avoided coming to see her and it had nothing to do with my job.
An hour later I was led to a room with two beds either side of a window that overlooked a courtyard. Mum was in one bed, ‘Mrs Isabella McCauley’ already written on the slot above. The other was empty. I pulled a curtain across for privacy and stood next to her. She wasn’t asleep, but the painkillers had left her drowsy.
‘Brought you some flowers,’ I said, arranging them on the bedside table. In my haste, I’d left the other flowers and the vanilla slice back in the Falcon and had to buy another bunch. ‘Got the results too. No breaks. Just like I said, bones of steel.’
Looking down at the mound beneath the sheets, I wondered how extensive the bruising was. The nurses said she’d been lucky, that she’d fallen the right way. What was the wrong way?
‘Dad’s on his way back up from Melbourne. Gonna stay the night here with you. Nurses even found a room with a spare bed in it. How good’s that?’ I said, sitting down and taking her hand. It was cold, so I rubbed it, trying to warm her skin. It was her left side and I wondered if she could actually feel me. The stroke had knocked out the entire right hemisphere of her brain. Left hemiplegia, the neurologists called it. Ischemic clot. For Mum it meant a near total loss of motor skills on the left-hand side of her body and acute aphasia. Speech paralysis.
‘Do you want something? Drink of water maybe?’
She pointed her right arm towards the bedside table, hand curled into a ball.
‘The roses; you want to see the roses?’ I said, following the line of her arm.
She mumbled what seemed like a yes. I carried the flowers to the bed and held them close to her face. She breathed, closed her eyes and for a second the frown disappeared.
‘Nice, huh? They’re Alexanders. Your favourite. Could’ve got you anything though. Everything’s in season these days. Even tulips. Guess they just grow everything indoors. Doesn’t matter about the weather. That’s plain cheating, if you ask me.’
Watching her with the flowers reminded me of the many times she’d led me through her garden, pointing out her new roses. In spring the previous year, I’d watched her churn the soil and add mulch to a dry garden bed. Her hands were muddy and she’d looked clumsy with the shovel, knee pads strapped around her overalls. But it was a beautiful garden, lush with colour and fragrance. Somehow she always managed to plant species that survived the drought. There were Alexanders and Icebergs and Blue Moons, even a Penny Lane that climbed an archway.
‘Grown this one from a cutting,’ she’d said proudly, handing me a pot with a stem protruding. ‘It’s a Silver Jubilee. It’ll look good on your balcony, but don’t let the pot get too hot. And don’t water at night, only in the morning.’
‘Or what? Will it turn into a Gremlin?’ I’d said, smiling.
She’d laughed. ‘It’ll get black spot, silly. Lovely to see you, Ruby. Bring Ella up next time?’
‘Sure thing, Mum.’ I hugged her. ‘Next time.’
That was two days before the stroke.
I put the flowers back, sat down and held her hand again. This time she faced me.
‘My shoulder’s getting better,’ I said. ‘Anthony’s working miracles. Says I’ll be lifting weights again soon. Soon as he’s finished with me, we’ll get him to go to work on you. You’ll be out in the rose garden again in no time.’
I squeezed her hand but she looked away. She was beyond bullshit, and I no longer knew what to say. I didn’t want to talk about the birthday party and she probably didn’t want to hear about it either.
‘Want to hear a joke, Mum?’
She groaned a yes.
‘The Prime Minister is on the election trail and he needs to increase the senior vote, so he goes to a nursing home to make friends with the residents.’ She gave a weak smile, even though I was certain I’d told her the joke before. ‘Anyway, the PM walks up to a little old lady and says to her, “Good morning, ma’am, do you know who I am?” To which the little old lady replies, “No, dear, but if you ask the young chap at the reception desk, he’ll be able to tell you.” ’
I laughed at my own joke and was sure Mum did too. I felt the sadness rise up inside me and had to draw a deep breath to keep myself from losing it in front of her.
‘I spent the night with Ella,’ I said after a long break. ‘At the flat in Carlton. Things are going well between us, I think.’
Her right hand came up, touched my arm and squeezed. She groaned and the right side of her lips pulled to a smile. I hugged her then and almost lost it again, choked with pain and guilt.
‘I love you,’ I whispered in her ear. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around for you lately. That’s going to change.’
A tear slid down her cheek. As I wiped it away, I decided I didn’t want to be here when Dad and Anthony arrived. I was ashamed and angry and couldn’t face them. What was I going to do – tell them I was sorry? Tell them I’d do more, visit every chance I got? It would mean nothing, not without action.
For a long while I sat beside her, stroking her cheek and waiting for the painkillers and sedatives to take effect. Soon her breathing slowed and I had the strange sensation that this was what it would be like to euthanise a person. I shook off the morbid thought and remembered a question Mum had asked me not long after my return from hospital. Why do you do it? It was about a month before the stroke, and the only time she’d ever questioned my career direction. Sometimes I thought she knew something was on the horizon; that her body was preparing to shut down.
A marriage counsellor had once asked me the exact same question – albeit for different reasons – and instructed me to list my responses, a task I failed to accomplish. Even now, I still couldn’t articulate it. Some detectives I knew – Cassie, for example – described it as a calling, but I wasn’t sure about that. I only knew that if you had a skill, something you were naturally good at doing, then that was a gift, and if you didn’t pursue it then your skill was wasted and so was the gift. To me, that transformed skill into purpose. It was like an ecosystem, in that if everyone ignored their skill, their gift, the world would be worse off. People who depended on you would suffer. People like Dallas Boyd and his sister, Rachel. People like my elderly neighbour, Edgar Burns. People like Chloe. And people like Jacko.
Yet even as I thought all this, I knew I wasn’t being honest. Ella had depended on me too, and I’d let that world fall apart. I’d let her down. What about the rest of my family? Mum was in a nursing home, Dad was a shadow of his former self, and now Anthony needed me. Surely our purpose in life extended well beyond our careers.
I squeezed Mum’s hand and wished I could ask her advice. What would she say to me, I wondered. Give up and go home? Quit and spend all day on the couch? Tell Edgar Burns you’re too tired for it? Tell Anthony you can’t help him? Forget about Dallas Boyd and his little sister? No, I knew what she would say. I knew because she had said it all her life. To get what you want, you have to know what you want.
Right then I made a choice. I would go back to Melbourne and hunt down whoever had killed Dallas Boyd and see to it that both he and Rachel received the justice they deserved. I would embrace my purpose and I would follow it to the end.