The Lives of Women (19 page)

Human voices sometimes intruded. All night voices: talking, laughing, disagreeing – in that slightly whiney, reasoning tone that I would come to recognise as a New York argument.

Or foreign accents – usually drunk – that would sometimes break into a song of homesickness and longing. Mostly, it was a general late night chatter: friends, lovers, work colleagues, cops, night porters, junkies. Accents I'd only ever heard on the television.
In fact, I sometimes woke in the night and for a moment imagined I was back on my mother's sofa, where I'd fallen asleep with the television set still on.

 

We stayed at that hotel while Serena searched for, and found, one apartment after another, before finally getting the go-ahead from her ex-husband. She explained to me, ‘Well, you know how it is – don't you, honey? He who pay gets to say.'

She was talking to me as much as ever; talking and forever explaining herself – a habit I was finding increasingly wearing as well as irritating. I had long stopped being interested in what Serena – or anyone else, for that matter – had to say. I wanted nothing to do with words or the commerce of words required for a conversation. Words were heavy, cumbersome things to me then.

‘You need to talk, sweetie, you need to let it out,' Serena would say.

‘We're here for you now – you know that, don't you? If you think I'm too old to understand, then you can always talk to Patty.'

But Patty wasn't talking to me – except to remind me, every now and then, that she was never going to speak to me again.

She took up a sulk the minute we got on the plane and has pretty much stayed in it ever since. She was civil enough in front of others – or at least no ruder to me than to anyone else. But right from the start, Patty made it clear that I was there only because my father was paying her mother to be my caretaker. I was not welcome in her life: not in the room we shared in that midtown
hotel, not the apartment we would later move to, not the neighbourhood we were living in and certainly not in New York. At first I felt the weight of her resentment; later I learned to ignore it and, to be honest, I was grateful too, for the solitude it allowed me.

 

They had an argument in the lobby of our hotel, Serena and her ex-husband. They didn't scream at each other; there were no tears or slammed doors like the rows I had heard several times coming from the Ryan house or the Shillmans'. Not like the half-drunken snipes I had witnessed in the hallway of the Jacksons' while I waited to be paid for a babysitting job after they'd come home from yet another unsuccessful night on the tiles. Nor was it one of those bitter, impenetrable silences such as I'd known in my own house.

They just spoke very loudly to each other: loudly and slowly, as though each believed the other was deaf and maybe a little slow off the mark.

It was a small, respectable hotel – the reception desk on one side and on the other, in an alcove, a half-moon bar counter and sitting area where people on leather sofas read newspapers and drank coffee. Everyone around listened in on the argument – the bartender, the bellboy, the woman on the desk, two businessmen having a meeting at a nearby table. I couldn't get over that, the way Patty's parents, and even Patty herself, didn't seem to care that people could hear every word. Nor did the onlookers even try to disguise their interest. One man sitting at the counter turned his stool right around so he could get a better view – as if he'd paid for a ticket to the event.

It was the first time I'd met Serena's father. The first American man I'd seen up close and in action. He was not a handsome man; he was stocky and his feet seemed a little small for his body. His movements were abrupt. But I do remember being struck by his physical confidence, his startling masculinity. The way he looked right into your eyes when he spoke or turned his head to follow the sway of a woman's backside as it moved through the lobby. And the way he stood up suddenly as if about to make an announcement, and then did: ‘I don't have time for this, so let me just say again – I don't want Patty having her head turned by a load of phoney arty types: you better find some place else.'

Serena said, ‘Oh, come on now! You're being a little unreasonable – don't you think? It's not
in
the village as such, it's more…'

He said, ‘I'm not paying for it. You wanna live with pigs. You pay for the stye.'

She said, ‘What are you
talking
about – pigs? You know, this is why we divorced – your intolerance, your blatant disregard for my feelings…'

‘I'm not here to talk about my intolerance and I got no interest in your feelings. I don't want my daughter living there. Look what happened to you, for Christ's sake, mixing with all those phoney assholes.'

Then he flicked a slice of money off a wad and threw it on the table. He leaned down to Patty, cupped his two hands around her face, kissed her and said, ‘Call me if you need anything, sweetheart – okay?'

‘Nice meeting you,' he said right into my eyes and I felt my face steam up and my heart give a disturbing little pop. Then he
turned on his dainty heel and was whipped out of sight by the revolving door.

 

She settled on an apartment in the mid-fifties. It was on the sixth floor and had a working elevator. It was close to a secretarial college where Patty would enrol in October. There was a doorman who would whistle you a taxi. You could walk a couple of blocks before coming across a destitute person sleeping in a bin or a door -way. There was a committee that made sure all the residents behaved nicely and that the public areas were maintained. Every -one knew one another: Mrs Rose across the hallway; Doctor Philips down the way. A retired college professor lived on the floor above; an art gallery owner on the floor below. In the building there were five small dogs and two Persian blue cats. The apartment itself was large; the kitchen had a huge oven. It allowed us a bedroom each. Large and quiet and entirely respectable.

‘I hate this apartment,' Serena said. ‘I hate the neighbourhood. I hate the walls, I hate the windows, I hate him.'

Now, when I wake each morning, it's to a sense of unease. I keep my eyes shut until I find the wherewithal to let in the light. I am always wary, if not exactly afraid. It's this silence, I think, this hard, intransigent silence.

I look across the street and can't tell who lives in the Hanley house now, who owns the Townsends'. Elbow-height hedges have
been replaced by tall trees. Gates, solid and high, are electronically operated. Cars come and go. From the upstairs rooms, specks of electric light show through the sparse winter foliage but I couldn't say whose hand has turned on the switch. I can't tell if the Hanleys' garden room is still in place, or if Doctor Townsend's surgery still exists – it could be a computer room now, or maybe a home gym; it could be completely razed. I don't know if Agatha's old room is still there – her glass prison. The walls are too high and I can't see over. When visitors call, they speak into an intercom built into the pillar, then the gates cautiously part and a car is slowly sucked in.

Other houses in the neighbourhood have cut themselves off to a lesser degree: no house seems to be without a burglar alarm and a few have electronic gates – there is a general security awareness around here that didn't exist when I was a child. But the Hanley and Townsend houses are different: both gates are identical and look pretty old, as if they were put up at the same time – while the Hanleys and Townsends were still living there, most likely. In which case the reason for the gates would not be to keep out intruders, but to keep themselves in.

Since I've been back, I've hardly seen any of the old neighbours. Apart from those faces I found on the memorial cards in my mother's shoebox, I don't know for certain who has died or who has moved away, who has gone into a retirement home.

I drive past some doddery old guy and he could be anyone. Sexpot Jackson or fussy little Tansey. I see a car parked outside the local hairdresser's, a zimmer frame protruding like an overbite from its open passenger door, and I wonder who owns the fading
blue rinse on the other end of it – Mrs Preston or Jackson or Owens?

 

Mrs Ryan is my only real contact from the old days, the only person around here that I could come close to calling a friend – although I'm not sure she would care to return the compliment.

Sometimes I think I see it in her face when we sit opposite each other at her pinewood kitchen table. We don't talk about the past as a rule, or at least we have learned how to skate around the edges. But it's there, like a leaked fart in the room that we both pretend not to notice.

The first time I called in to see her was a couple of days after my return, when I arrived with my excuses warm in my pocket.

She said, ‘Elaine – my goodness!' and stepped aside to let me in, then proceeded to fill up every minute of the visit with other subjects: the recent government cuts; the ridiculous amount of new television channels; the price of electricity; her garden; her hip surgery. Anything. In between she asked me questions about New York – simple, narrow things that could just as easily have been applied to any small town in almost any country: the cost of living, the size of apartments, the transport system, the food.

She was still going on about New York over an hour later as she showed me out.

‘Tell me,' she said, ‘is it as cold there in winter as it looks on the news?'

‘Colder,' I said, which seemed to make her happy.

*

My ears were ringing after that first visit, but I was grateful too that she hadn't given me the smallest opportunity to lie about my mother's funeral.

Almost four months ago, in New York, the phone woke me up just before dawn and not long after I'd gone to bed.

A voice on the end of it told me that my mother was dying in hospital and that if I wanted to see her I should get on a plane.

‘Does she want to see me?' I asked the voice.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Let me put it this way, Nurse,' I began, ‘has she
asked
to see me? Actually asked? Because otherwise…'

‘Elaine, dear, it's Sally Ryan.'

‘Sally Ryan?'

‘Yes – you know? Sally Ryan from next door.'

‘Oh God, I'm so sorry, of course, Mrs Ryan. How are you? I presumed you were a—'

‘I hope you don't mind but you see your phone number was in a little book in the drawer in the hall and I just thought well I thought I'd better what with your father after his cancer – you know about his cancer – of course you do oh he's recovered in almost every way except of course he can't
walk
… and there's the oh now what do you call it yes colostomy bag and the wheelchair I've been helping out since your mother went into hospital but Mrs Larkin well she's going to Australia at the end of next week and will be gone for quite a while and he needs to find a nurse now wouldn't you say and a housekeeper I suppose too a temporary one though because Mrs Larkin swears she'll be back in a couple of months and I wouldn't like to think of her out of a job she's been
saving so long for this trip her son you see and there's a grandchild now as well as other relatives all over Australia and New Zealand too I believe I've been doing what I can a bit of shopping and that but I've just had my hip done you see and… and I think he's a bit awkward with me in the house to be honest you know how it is and in any case I'm not sure how to go about getting a nurse that might suit him and well your mother God help her is so bad now that the doctors are saying it's only a matter of… Elaine? Elaine – are you still there?'

‘What? Yes, yes, Mrs Ryan, thank you for letting me know. Of course I'll come. I'll come right away.'

I put down the phone and opened the blinds. Then I stood for a while watching the dawn spit orange fizz all over New York. And all I could think was I never even asked about Jilly – that is, if Jilly was even still alive.

 

And so I got in a taxi and got on a plane and then got off it again. Anything in between was a Xanax-blurred, vodka-tinged muddle of colours and queues and shrill overhead voices. I was in a different airport then, standing at a car hire desk and wondering what I was doing hiring a car when my parents' house was probably only a twenty minute taxi ride away. I decided maybe it would be as well to have a car in case things got awkward and I needed to stay in a hotel. Or even if things didn't get awkward and I needed to make myself useful. My father, now wheelchair bound, probably no longer had a car. There would be errands to run, arrangements to make. Yes, much better off with a car.

And so, glowing with my own efficiency and all round good sense, I got in the car and began to negotiate my way out of the airport. A road sign appeared in front of me – at the next roundabout I would need to turn right and stay southbound to get to my parents' house. I circled the entire roundabout once then I circled it a second time. Third time round, I turned left and headed due north.