Simmering Season Read online

  ‘Is he having a good one, Roslyn?’ Maggie asked the sister-in-charge at Saddleton Nursing Home.

  ‘Let’s just say your dad’s not too bad today, Maggie.’ The nurse squeezed out a cautious smile. ‘Give us a couple of minutes. He’s all fed. Beth is just getting him squeaky clean.’

  ‘He likes Beth.’ After eighteen months of visiting her father, Maggie knew all the nurses’ names. ‘It was nice to see her at the pub for her birthday last weekend.’

  Roslyn nodded. ‘I’m looking forward to getting out that way again myself. Let me know next time Ethne has that yummy kangaroo risotto on the specials board.’

  ‘I’ll do one better and put in a special request for the weekend.’

  ‘Deal.’

  While the hotel’s dining room menu featured the usual pre-prepared food items: frozen fish pieces, salt and pepper calamari, mince patties and crumbed schnitzels, Ethne enjoyed creating fresh weekly specials. A self-taught cook, she’d picked up most of what she knew from the procession of self-proclaimed chefs that had passed through the pub’s kitchen over the years. One of them, Luigi, was a stocky Italian whose favourite saying at the end of food service when he walked out, leaving a sink full of dirty dishes behind, was ‘Finito mosquito!’ The tricks Ethne had learned from Luigi were why her weekend pastas and risottos now brought diners from a hundred clicks or more away.

  ‘It’s not only the food, Maggie. Your pub has the nicest view. I can’t believe no one’s bought it yet.’

  It was true. After the food, the next best thing was the location. Positioned across from the bank of Calingarry Creek, the water view from the beer garden and adjacent dining room had always been a drawcard. Now the town was part of an official tourist drive, thanks to a push by locals, the hotel was busier than it had been in years. Why someone didn’t want to snap the business up for a bargain price baffled Maggie. She wished she had the money to jazz the place up a bit. The broker had suggested that a small renovation to ‘bring the place into the twenty-first century’ might attract more interest and ultimately a higher offer from buyers. The list of reno options was extensive. Some tasks, such as rust-proofing and repainting the lace ironwork on the top veranda, sanding and revarnishing the floors and wood bar tops, and landscaping the beer garden were not too difficult for a handy woman, but even if she had the money for the materials, Maggie lacked time and opportunity. There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day as it was to do front of house, kitchen and admin tasks while also visiting her dad. Even if Maggie found money, time and the required enthusiasm, given there’d been no offers and no genuine interest since listing the business with the broker, renovations remained out of the question.

  Had her father’s decline not been so swift, Maggie might have approached the sale of the hotel with a little less knee-jerk and a lot more planning, although no amount of research would have told her how long things would take, nor would any crystal ball have foretold how, with each passing month, Maggie would settle into the familiar comfort of country life. That was until she saw two things: the bills mounting up on the dresser in her room, and Noah’s face every time he asked when they were going back to Brian in Sydney, or when Brian was coming out to Calingarry Crossing.

  The aged-care home, a privately leased annexe of the hospital in Saddleton, was a little sad and worn out, much like its occupants. The rooms weren’t big, but each one had a glass sliding door leading to an enclosed porch where residents could get fresh air without wandering away. Some people kept outdoor pot plants. One kept a cat. Her father kept his one home comfort on the small slab of stained concrete—an old wooden rocker that had been around forever. Sometimes when she visited, her father would be sleeping and Maggie would sit outside on the rocker looking in, mostly to escape the strong scent of antiseptic barely masking the smell of musty carpet. As she rocked back and forth, Maggie would pretend she was still at home in the little fibro house—the Manse—waiting for the Reverend Lindeman to wake up from his afternoon nap and listening to her mother singing.

  This was now home for him, and not even the sprinkling of picture frames and family memories could disguise the very basic, easy-clean cocoon where people like her father waited for wings so they could fly away, finally freed from the pain and uncertainty.

  Her father’s room—number twelve—was at the end of the long corridor. The door was open and Beth was mopping up water. According to Roslyn, the Rev was becoming less enamoured with bath time.

  Maggie smiled apologetically at Beth as the young nurse in the disposable plastic pinny held open the door.

  ‘Come on in. All squeaky clean, aren’t we?’ she said in a booming voice, as though Joe were hard of hearing. It was one thing he wasn’t—unless it suited him.

  Maggie walked over to the bed, leaned down and pressed her lips to her father’s forehead. ‘You do smell good.’ His eyes fluttered open, confusion crinkling his brow. ‘How you doing, Dad?’

  No time for reminiscing today. While she would have liked to stay for a while, sit later in that rocker watching her father sleep, there were things to do and never enough hours in her day to do them. When she wasn’t doing physical chores, she was mentally jogging through a to-do list or buried in accounts—both business and personal—watching the dwindling funds in her bank account.

  ‘Clean PJs,’ Maggie announced with verve, as though doing her father’s laundry was the highlight of her day.

  She shook the plastic shopping bag and freshly laundered clothes fell onto her father’s bed. After refolding the pile of lemon-scented pyjamas, she gathered up the dirty ones from the bottom drawer of his bedside table. The in-house linen service could take care of such things, but it was an added weekly expense Maggie could avoid. Besides, it wasn’t a new chore. She’d done the family laundry since she could reach the dials on the old machine.

  Without warning, her father’s hand strangled her wrist with such surprising strength Maggie flinched.

  ‘Get away from that. What are you doing?’ he growled before making a sudden grab for the shopping bag. ‘Mine!’

  ‘It’s okay, Dad.’ Maggie jerked away, startled. ‘I’m taking your dirties. The clean ones are right here. In the bottom drawer. See?’ She promptly dangled the once-folded pants in the air hoping to calm him.

  Her father blinked and screwed up his face. ‘Mary?’

  ‘No, it’s me. Maggie.’

  ‘My little Magpie? Wonderful. You just missed your mother.’

  ‘Did I?’ she said patiently, propping a pillow behind his back as her father struggled to lift his own weight. By about twenty-seven years, she wanted to add.

  According to her father these days, Mary Lindeman was visiting at least once a week. When Maggie had mentioned her father’s hallucinations to nursing staff, they’d nodded and flashed hurried, empathetic expressions, reminding Maggie that even the experts didn’t understand the cruelty of dementia on a sufferer’s mind.

  At first she had tried explaining that Mary was dead—that she’d died a long time ago—but to have her father relive the same anguish repeatedly broke both their hearts. Now Maggie let herself believe her mother really was visiting Joe, reminding him that it had been a long time and urging him to join her, and Mike too, there with her already—wherever there was. Yes, these days even Maggie, the minister’s daughter, questioned God and heaven and everything else.

  ‘I have your scratchies, Dad,’ she said, plucking the two-dollar scratch ’n’ win lottery tickets from her pants pocket and waving them around, a strategy that had proven to be the perfect distraction when she didn’t know how else to deal with his irrational outbursts.

  It worked today.

  ‘And, oh, you remember Amber Bailey don’t you, Dad?’ Maggie chatted as she pressed her father’s thumb and index finger around a ten-cent piece.

  ‘Trouble,’ he muttered as his brain struggled to coordinate his grip on the small cardboard square and coin.

  ‘Yes, well, you’d probably say t
he same thing about her daughter, Fiona. She’s staying at the pub with me.’

  ‘Amber?’

  ‘No, not Amber, Dad. Amber’s daughter. Fiona. She’s decided to take over her mother’s role on the centenary committee. Do you want to sit outside for a bit, Dad?’

  Joe seemed to be having one of his close-to-coherent moments and Maggie wanted to make the most of it by getting him out of bed, so that for a short time he would look like the old Joe, the happy Joe, the healthy Joe. Something about the stark whiteness of linen made his skin look grey, except for his nose, now a bulbous reddish-purple beacon due to broken capillaries and a few too many drinks over the years. A quick stop in the beautiful gardens, even in the shade, would put some colour back into the rest of him. Maybe the red nose would stand out a little less.

  Beth responded quickly to the call button and helped Maggie get Joe into his wheelchair. They left his room and passed through the common lounge area with the hypnotic TV screen. A man sat in a wheelchair at one of the dining tables, his head hanging limp, drool escaping his mouth to form a dark wet spot on the pale blue seersucker cloth, while the withered body of a frail, grey-haired lady—one who Maggie determined would have once been a real beauty—sat hunched in a recliner where she sobbed uncontrollably.

  Maggie quickened her pace.

  Why was life so cruel? Why make some people wait so long to die all alone, while others—like Amber—were snatched away far too soon? Joe didn’t want to be here. None of these people wanted to be here. Was it any wonder visiting three or four times a week exhausted Maggie, both physically and emotionally? The monotony of repeated conversations, trying to remain upbeat and pretending everything was fine when it sometimes felt like life could not get any suckier—as Noah would say—was draining. Of course, there was also the confounding combination of both sadness and amusement Maggie felt at her father’s increasingly bizarre behaviour.

  A blast of the predicted thirty-four degree heat was a shock against the cool temperature-controlled atmosphere behind them in the hospital corridor. Once settled in the shade of the leafy camphor laurel tree—Maggie on a white plastic chair and Joe in the wheelchair—the heat was less intense.

  ‘I’m having Cheryl Bailey over for dinner. I figure it will help break the ice with her granddaughter.’

  ‘Terrible shame. Terrible.’ Joe’s head wobbled a little more than for his usual dementia tick, letting Maggie know he remembered what Cheryl had silently endured for years before her husband ran off, taking their daughter, Amber—pregnant and sixteen at the time—away to Sydney.

  ‘Did I tell you Noah’s playing in a band at the fair on Sunday? And of course on Saturday it’s the big party to celebrate the school’s one hundred years. I found out today that someone called Charlotte Gilbertson is coming. At ninety-two she’s possibly the oldest living ex-student. Can you believe it?’

  ‘That boy’ll be there.’

  Maggie’s shoulders slumped as she sighed, knowing her father was referring to the one so many townsfolk had thought of as Calingarry Crossing’s bad boy. ‘I don’t know if he’ll be there, Dad. I doubt it.’

  How was it Joe sometimes failed to recognise his own grandson, while never failing to remember Dan Ireland?

  To her knowledge, Dan had never come back home. He had no reason to. The only thing he’d left in Calingarry Crossing was a father who’d abandoned him in the worst way a father could—by siding with the town that ostracised his son. Accident or not, some folk believed blame had to be levelled at the living, not the dead—even though in Maggie’s heart she knew better.

  ‘My boy!’ Pain tempered her father’s words, the weight of remorse dragging his shoulders down and the small spark of aggression that had lit his eyes seconds earlier dulled.

  Maggie jerked her chair closer, rested a hand on his knee and gazed into eyes pooling with tears. She knew he was reliving that night.

  ‘Please, Daddy,’ Maggie cajoled, reaching for his hand while the other stroked his arm, hoping to help him even out his breathing. ‘Please try not to go there. Michael’s been with Mum a long time.’

  ‘That boy killed him.’ Joe snatched his hand away. ‘His own father thought so, didn’t he?’

  To his eternal detriment, Maggie wanted to say.

  She saw old Charlie Ireland from time to time. For all his She’ll-be-right-mate sanguineness, when Maggie looked close she could see it was the old man who looked forsaken nowadays. She even felt sorry for him.

  Her father’s continued agitation, or the heat, had turned Joe’s face as red as his nose.

  ‘Okay, okay, let’s get you back inside. Noah should be here any minute. He had a twenty-dollar voucher to spend from Bingo last month. I left him at Hartford’s Co-Op. He should’ve found something to spend it on by now.’

  As predicted, Noah was leaning against the wall outside his grandfather’s room as Maggie pushed the wheelchair along the corridor, the old Rev already starting to drift off under the gentle motion of the chair. Applying the foot brake, Maggie tapped Joe’s hands where they rested on the small pot of his belly, exaggerating the rise and fall of each breath.

  ‘Hey, look who’s here, Dad.’ Maggie’s glance at Noah was enough of a nudge to scoot her son to his grandfather’s side. As always, it broke her heart to think Noah hadn’t known him when he was strong and funny and wise. ‘Say hello,’ she instructed Noah, hoping today Joe would remain alert enough to enjoy the visit.

  ‘Hi, Pops.’

  Joe Lindeman’s head bobbed up and he peered through the all-too-familiar squint of confusion. ‘Is that our boy?’

  ‘He’s growing up, isn’t he?’ Maggie stopped straightening the bed sheets to fluff up with pride, knowing she and Brian had done a good job, despite everything. She nudged Noah again, this time with her elbow, muttering, ‘Hug. Now.’

  ‘That’s my Michael,’ the old man said, his stranglehold tightening from the look of Noah’s squirming.

  ‘It’s not Michael,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s Noah, Dad.’

  ‘My boy.’ Old Joe persisted, holding Noah at arms’ length. ‘Look at you and your mother. Where’s my other little angel today? Where’s my Magdalene?’

  Noah looked to his mother, uncertainty clouding his eyes. In her father’s face Maggie saw confusion shift to frustration, then anger.

  ‘Okay, so how was lunch today then, Dad?’ she said, shooing away one persistent fly that must have hitched a ride in on one of their backs. It settled on the half-eaten meal still on the tray-table.

  ‘Damn chicken. Always chicken. Chicken, chicken, chicken. Any more chicken and I’ll damn-well be layin’ eggs. Bwark. Bwark. Bwark.’ He flapped his arms like a crazed bird.

  Maggie eyed the leftover fish and rice on the plate, trying to ignore Noah’s indiscriminate flicking through TV channels with the remote and her father’s continued clucking like a chicken.

  Someone save me!

  ‘That was weird,’ Noah said on the drive home. ‘He thought I was Uncle Mike.’

  ‘He gets a bit mixed up. Some days are better than others. You don’t visit enough. We’ll do this again next week—without the twenty-dollar shopping spree, I’m afraid, buddy.’

  ‘Do you still think about Uncle Mike, too?’

  ‘Of course I do. All the time.’ Maggie wondered how much to say. Sometimes Noah seemed so grown up that the idea of burdening him with her concerns was acceptable. Other times he was her baby boy, the one she wanted to protect from everything hard, or sad, or painful. ‘It’s difficult to not miss someone like Michael. The bigger the personality, the bigger the hole they leave behind … in here.’ Maggie flattened a palm over her heart. ‘The night your uncle died left such a gaping hole. But then—’

  ‘You met Dad, right?’

  Suddenly he was that eager boy needing her protection again. ‘Yes, buddy, I met Dad. Better still, you came along.’

  ‘You miss Dad all the time, too? I do.’

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly, g
rateful he hadn’t waited for her response to his question. ‘He misses you, too.’

  ‘We don’t talk about him. You hardly said anything about seeing him in Sydney. You don’t even tell me when he calls. I hear you on the phone sometimes late at night and I know it’s Dad.’

  Maggie’s heart skipped, her hands tightening around the steering wheel.

  What did he hear?

  Yelling?

  His mother’s exasperation?

  The slamming down of the phone on the dresser?

  ‘You tell me I have to spend more time with Pops. What about Dad? When’s he coming out? Each time I ring he says the same thing. “Not long now.” ’

  ‘He’s a busy guy these days,’ she said, staring at the road ahead, trying to sound convincing and craving those years where the answer to every ‘But why?’ could simply be ‘Because I said so’.

  ‘Are you and Dad breaking up or something?’

  Maggie clamped her mouth shut so the short, sharp gasp didn’t escape. ‘What would make you say that?’ she asked, letting the perfect opportunity to prepare her son pass—maybe because Maggie was struggling to accept the truth; that the family unit she’d worked so hard to build was falling apart.

  Noah shrugged. ‘Just checking.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make of point of pinning Dad down to a date next time he calls.’

  ‘Good.’

  In the sanctuary of her bedroom, Maggie slumped onto the bed, her legs giving in under the weight of Noah’s perceptiveness. Were they …? Breaking up? How would she know? Dan Ireland had been the only other person in her life to whom she could apply such an experience. Maggie knew what it felt like to fall in love—all those nerve-tingling, body-shuddering, scream-it-from-the-rooftop moments. Why was it she hadn’t noticed falling out of love with Brian? Was it because falling out of love was so excruciatingly slow? Or was it because she didn’t feel much of anything any more, merely existing, numb from years of disappointment. To fall out of love sounded insufferable—a gradual, awkward and agonising end.