ON THE HALL table, a scrawled note: 'BYE BYE MR RAYMENT. I'VE LEFT SOME STUFF, I'LL PICK IT UP TOMORROW. THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, DRAGO. PS PHOTOGRAPHS ALL IN ORDER.'
The 'stuff' Drago refers to turns out to be a garbage bag full of clothing, to which he adds a pair of underpants he finds among the bedclothes. Otherwise no trace of the Jokics, mother or son. They come, they go, they do not explain themselves: he had better get used to it.
Yet what a relief to be by himself again! One thing to live with a woman; quite another to share one's home with an untidy and imperfectly considerate young man. Always tension, always unease when two males occupy the same territory.
He spends the afternoon tidying his study, putting things where they used to be; then he takes a shower. In the shower he by accident drops the flask of shampoo. As he bends to pick it up, the Zimmer frame, which he always brings into the cubicle with him, slips sideways. He loses his footing and falls, slamming his head against the wall.
Let nothing be broken: that is his first prayer. Tangled in the frame, he tries to move his limbs. A flicker of exquisite pain runs from his back down his good leg. He takes a slow, deep breath. Be calm, he tells himself. A slip in the bathroom, nothing to be alarmed about, it happens to many people, all may yet be well. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to set things right.
Setting things right (he tries to be calm and clear) will mean, one, disengaging himself from the frame; two, manoeuvring himself out of the cubicle; then, three, assessing what he has done to his back; and, four, proceeding to whatever comes next.
The problem lies between one and two. He cannot disengage himself from the Zimmer frame without sitting up; and he cannot sit up without a gasp of pain.
No one bothered to inform him, and he did not think to ask, who the Zimmer is or was who has come to play such a role in his life. For his own convenience he has imagined Zimmer as a thin-faced, tight-lipped figure of a man, dressed in the high collar and stock of the 1830s. Johann August Zimmer, son of Austrian peasants, determined to escape the drudgery of the family farm, toils by candlelight over his anatomy books while in the byre behind the house the milch-cow moans in her sleep. After scraping through his examinations (he is not a gifted student), he finds a posting as an army surgeon. The next twenty yean he spends dressing wounds and cutting off limbs in the name of His Serene Imperial Majesty Carl Joseph August, nicknamed The Good. Then he retires from the service and after several wrong turns lands up at Bad Schwanensee, one of the lesser spas in Bohemia, prescribing for gentlewomen with arthritis. There he has the brainwave of adapting for the more frail among his patients the apparatus that back in Carinthia has for centuries been used to teach children to walk, thereby earning for himself a modest immortality.
Now here he is on the tiled floor, naked, immobile, with Zimmer's invention on top of him blocking the cubicle door, while water continues to pour down and leaking shampoo rises in a froth all around and the stump, which has taken a knock on its tender end, begins to throb with its own, unique variety of pain. What a mess! he thinks. Thank God Drago does not have to witness it! And thank God the Costello woman is not here to make jokes!
There are drawbacks, however, to having neither Drago nor the Costello woman nor anyone else within calling distance. One is that, as the supply of warm water runs out, he finds himself being douched with cold. The controls are beyond his reach. He is certainly free to lie here all night without risk of being laughed at; but by dawn he will have frozen to death.
It takes him a full thirty minutes to escape the prison he has made for himself. Unable to lift himself, unable to push Zimmer's frame out of the way, he finally grits his teeth and forces the door of the cubicle back until the hinges snap.
All shame is gone by now. He crawls across the floor to the telephone, calls Marijana's number, gets a child's voice. 'Mrs Jokic, please,' he says through chattering teeth; and then, 'Marijana, I have had an accident. I am OK but can you come at once?'
'What is accident?'
'I had a fall. I have done something to my back. I can't move.'
'I come.'
He drags the bedclothes down and huddles under them, but he cannot get warm. Not only his hands and foot, not only his scalp and his nose, but his very belly and heart are gripped with cold; spasms overtake him during which he grows too rigid even to shiver. He yawns until he is light-headed with yawning. Old blood, cold blood: the words drum in his brain. Not enough heat in the veins.
He has a vision of himself hung by the ankles in a cold chamber amid a forest of frozen carcases. Not by fire but by ice.
He falls into some kind of slumber. Then suddenly Marijana is bending over him. He tries to form his frozen lips into a smile, into words. 'My back,' he croaks. 'Careful.' No need, thank God, to explain how it happened. How it happened must be all too clear from the chaos in the bathroom, the hiss of the cold shower.
There is no tea left, but Marijana makes coffee, puts a pill between his lips, helps him to drink, then with surprising strength raises him bodily from the floor onto the bed. 'You get scare, eh?' she says. 'Now maybe you stop this shower business all alone.'
He nods obediently, closes his eyes. Under the ministrations of this excellent woman and superlative nurse, he can feel the ice within him begin to thaw. No bones broken, no being reprimanded by Mrs Putts, no being laughed at by Mrs Costello. Instead, the soothing presence of an angel who has put aside all else to come to his aid.
No doubt for an ageing cripple the future holds further mishaps, further falls, further humiliating calls for help. What he needs at this moment, however, is not that dismaying and depressing prospect but this soft, consoling, and eminently feminine presence. There, there, be calm, it is all over: that is what he wants to hear. Also: I will stay by your side while you sleep.
So when Marijana rises and briskly dons her coat and picks up her keys, he has a quite childish sense of aggrievement. 'Can't you stay a while longer?' he says. 'Can't you spend the night?'
She sits down again on the bedside. 'OK if I smoke?' she says. 'Just one time?' She lights a cigarette, puffs, blows the smoke away from him. 'We have talk, Mr Rayment, fix up things. What you want from me? You want I must do my job, come back, be nurse for you? Then you don't say these things, like' – she waves the cigarette – 'you know what I mean.'
'I must not speak of my feelings for you.'
'You go through bad time, you lose your leg and all that, I understand. You have feelings, man's feelings, I understand, is OK.'
Though the pain seems to be dwindling, he cannot yet sit up. 'Yes, I have feelings,' he says, flat on his back.
'You have feelings, you say things, is natural, is OK. But.'
'Labile. That is the word you are hunting for. I am too labile for your taste. Too much at the mercy of the feelings you refer to. I speak my heart too openly. I say too much.'
'Mercy. What is mercy of feelings?'
'Never mind. I believe I understand you. I have an accident and am shaken to the core. My spirits rise, my spirits fall, they are no longer under my control. As a result I become attached to the first woman to cross my path, the first sympathetic woman. I fall, excuse the word, in love with her; I fall in love with her children too, in a different way. I, who have been childless, suddenly want children of my own. Hence the present friction between us, between you and me. And it can all be traced back to my brush with death on Magill Road. Magill Road shook me up so much that even today I let my feelings pour out without reckoning the consequences. Is that not what you are telling me?'
She shrugs but does not contradict him. Instead, drawing in the smoke luxuriously, blowing it out, she lets him run on. For the first time he sees what sensual pleasure there can be in smoking.
'Well, you are wrong, Marijana. It is not like that at all. I am not in a confused state. I may be labile, but being labile is not an aberration. We should all be more labile, all of us. That is my new, revised opinion. We should shake ourselves up more often. We should also brace ourselves and take a look in the mirror, even if we dislike what we will see there. I am not referring to the ravages of time. I am referring to the creature trapped behind the glass whose stare we are normally so careful to avoid. Behold this being who eats with me, spends nights with me, says "I" on my behalf. If you find me labile, Marijana, it is not just because I suffered a knock. It is because every now and then the stranger who says "I" breaks through the glass and speaks in me. Through me. Speaks tonight. Speaks now. Speaks love.'
He halts. What a torrent of words! How unlike him! Marijana must be surprised. Is there indeed at this moment some stranger speaking through a mirror, taking over his voice (but which mirror?), or is the present outpouring just another bout of lability, the aftershock of the latest accident – the bump on the head, the strained back, the aching stump, the icy shower, and so forth – rising in his throat like bile, like vomit? In fact, might it simply be an effect of the pill Marijana gave him (what could the pill have been?), or even of the coffee? He should not have taken the coffee. He is not used to coffee in the evenings.
Speaks love. He cannot be sure, he is not wearing his glasses, but a flush seems to be creeping up from Marijana's throat. Marijana says she wants him to curb himself, but that is nonsense, she cannot really mean it. What woman would not want a torrent of love-words poured out on her every now and again, however questionable their origin? Marijana is blushing, and for the simple reason that she too is labile. And therefore? What comes next? And therefore it does indeed all cohere! Therefore behind the chaos of appearance a divine logic is indeed at work! Wayne Blight comes out of nowhere to smash his leg to a pulp, therefore months later he collapses in the shower, therefore this scene becomes possible: a man of sixty caught more or less rigid in bed, shivering intermittently, spouting philosophy to his nurse, spouting love. And the blood moves in her, responding!
Exulting, he stretches out (Ignore the pain, who cares for pain!) and places his large and (he notices) rather unattractively livid hand over Marijana's smaller, warmer hand with the tapering fingers that, according to his grandmother in Toulouse, signify a sensual temperament.
For a moment Marijana lets her hand rest under his. Then she frees herself, stubs out the cigarette, rises, and begins to button her coat again.
'Marijana,' he says, 'I make no demands, neither now nor in the future.'
'Yes?' She cocks her head, gives him a quizzical look. 'No demand? You think I know nothing about men? Men is always demand. I want, I want, I want. Me, I want to do my job, that is my demand. My job in Australia is nurse.'
She pauses. Never before has she addressed him with such force, such (it seems to him) fury.
'You telephone, and is good you telephone, I don't say you must not telephone. Emergency, you telephone, OK. But this' – she waves a hand – 'this shower business is not emergency, not medical emergency. You fall in bathroom, you call some friend. "I get scared, please come," that is what you say.' She takes out a fresh cigarette, changes her mind, puts it back in the pack. ' Elizabeth,' she says. 'You call Elizabeth, or you call other lady friend, I don't know your friends. "I get scared, please come hold my hand. No medical emergency, just please come hold my hand."'
'I was not just scared. I have injured myself. I cannot move. You can see that.'
'Spasm. Is just spasm. I leave you pills for it. Back spasm is not emergency.' She pauses. 'Or else you want more, not just hold hand, you want, like you call it, the real thing, then maybe you join club for lonely hearts. If you got lonely heart.'
She draws a breath, eyes him reflectively. 'You think you know how it is to be nurse, Mr Rayment? Every day I nurse old ladies, old men, clean them, clean their dirt, I don't need to say it, change sheets, change clothes. Always I am hearing Do this, do that, bring this, bring that, not feeling good, bring pills, bring glass of water, bring cup of tea, bring blanket, take off blanket, open window, close window, don't like this, don't like that. I come home tired in my bone, telephone rings, any time, mornings, nights: Is emergency, can you come…'
Minutes ago she was blushing. Now he is the one who ought to blush. An emergency… can you come? Of course, in the language of the caring professions, this would not count as an emergency. One does not perish of cold in an air-conditioned flat on Coniston Terrace, North Adelaide. Even in the act of dialling the Jokic number he knew that. Yet he called anyhow. Come, save me! he called across the South Australian space.
'You were the first I thought of,' he says. 'Your name came to me first. Your name, your face. Do you think that is of no account – being first?'
She shrugs. There is silence between them. Of course it is a big word, an overbearing word to have hurled at one: first. But that is not the word that gives him pause. Your name. Your name came to me. You came to me. Words that rose in him without thought, came to him. Is this how it is when one is labile: words just come?
'I always thought,' he presses on, 'that nursing was a vocation. I thought that was what set it apart, what justified the long hours and the poor pay and the ingratitude and the indignities too, such as those you mentioned: that you were following a calling. Well, when a nurse is called, a proper nurse, she doesn't ask questions, she comes. Even if it is not a real emergency. Even if it is just distress, human distress, what you call a scare.' He has not lectured Marijana before, but perhaps the lecture is the mode in which, on this particular night, the truth will choose to reveal itself. 'Even if it is just love.'
Love: biggest of the big words. Nevertheless, let him sock her with it.
She takes the blow well this time, hardly blinking. The buttons of her coat are all done now, from bottom to top.
'Just love,' he repeats with some bitterness.
'Time to go,' she says. 'Long drive to Munno Para. See you.'
With considerable effort he quells a new bout of shivers. 'Not yet, Marijana,' he says. 'Five minutes. Three minutes. Please. Let's have a drink together and simmer down and be ordinary. I don't want to feel I can never call you again, for shame. Yes?'
'OK. Three minutes. But no drink for me, I must drive, and no drink for you, alcohol and pills is not good.'
Somewhat stiffly she resumes her seat. One of the three minutes passes.
'What exactly does your husband know?' he asks out of the blue.
She gets up. 'Now I go,' she says.
Distressed, remorseful, aching, uncomfortable, he lies awake all night. The pills that Marijana said she would leave are nowhere to be seen.
Dawn comes. Needing to go to the toilet, he gingerly tries to crawl out of the bed. Halfway to the floor the pain strikes again, immobilising him.
A sore back is not an emergency, says Marijana, whom he hired to save him from degradations of precisely this kind. Does being unable to control one's bladder count as an emergency? No, clearly not. It is just part of life, part of growing old. Miserably he surrenders and urinates on the floor.
That is the posture in which Drago – who ought to be at school but for reasons of his own seems not to be – finds him when he arrives to pick up his bag of stuff: half in bed, half out, his leg caught in the twisted bedclothes, stalled, frozen.
If he no longer hides anything from Marijana, it is because he cannot be more abject before her than he has already been. With Drago it is a different story. Thus far he has done his best not to make a spectacle of himself before Drago. Now here he is, a helpless old man in urinous pyjamas trailing an obscene pink stump behind him from which the sodden bandages are slipping. If he were not so cold he would blush.
And Drago does not waver! Does it run in the family, this matter-of-factness about the body? As Drago's mother had helped him into bed, so now Drago helps him out; and when he tries to explain himself, to excuse his weakness, it is Drago who shushes him – 'No worries, Mr Rayment, just relax and we'll have you fixed up in a minute' – and then strips the bed and turns the mattress and (somewhat clumsily, he is after all just a boy) spreads fresh sheets; it is Drago who finds a fresh pair of pyjamas and patiently, averting his eyes as decency requires, helps him on with them.
'Thank you, son, good of you,' he says at the end of it all. There is more he would like to say, for his heart is full, such as: Your mother has abandoned me; Mrs Costello, who jabbers on and on about care but takes care not to be around when care is needed, has abandoned me; everyone has abandoned me, even the son I never had; then you came, you! But he holds his peace.
He has a passage of crying, old-man's crying which does not count because it comes too easily, and which he hides behind his hands because it embarrasses both of them.
Drago makes a phone call, comes back. 'My mum says I should get you some pills for the pain. I've got the name here. She says she meant to leave you some but she forgot. I can go down to the pharmacy; but…'
'There is money in my wallet, in my desk drawer.'
'Thanks. You got a mop somewhere?'
'Behind the kitchen door. But don't…'
'It's nothing, Mr Rayment. It will take a minute.'
The magic pills turn out to be nothing but Ibuprofen. 'Mum says take one every four hours. And you should eat first. Shall I get you something from the kitchen?'
'Get me an apple or a banana if there is one. Drago?'
'Yes?'
'I'll be all right now. You don't have to stay. Thanks for everything.'
'That's OK.'
To complete the passage, Drago ought to say: That's OK, you would do the same for me. And it is true! If some cataclysm were to befall Drago, if some reckless stranger were to crash into him on his motorcycle, he, Paul Rayment, would move heaven and earth, spend every penny he had, to save him. He would give the world a lesson in how to take care of a beloved child. He would be everything to him, father and mother. All day, all night he would watch at his bedside. If only!
At the door Drago turns, waves, and flashes him one of the angelic smiles that must have the girls swooning. 'See you!'