Last Days of Ava Langdon Read online

  ‘Comfy, dear?’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘It won’t take long.’

  The process is repeated. They take a few more snaps. They shift the zinc plate and replace it under her head.

  ‘It says here that you bumped your head.’

  They’re reading her chart, noses wrinkling at the stench of corruption.

  ‘Not badly,’ says Ava, feeling the lump on her noggin.

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s protocol.’

  That is what makes her feel the worst, the machine with its red light gazing into her mind. She is jelly. Click and whirr. After a while the first nurse returns and rolls her off the table.

  ‘Righto, Oscar, you can get dressed now.’

  ‘My name’s Ava,’ says Ava softly.

  ‘Is it? It says Oscar on the form, which is a funny sort of name for a woman, although I’ve seen funnier. I thought it must have been Polish.’

  ‘Polish? No, I was born in Coonabarabran.’

  The nurse prefers to believe the form. They busy themselves with the machine and the development of the pictures. Ava dislikes the feel of the air on her legs. She knows she has to get out of here before the photos are developed and her secrets are revealed and they keep her here forever.

  She sits back in the wheelchair, but no one comes for her. She stares at the antiseptic colour scheme on the walls. A kind of wan lavender.

  ‘One of us has got to go,’ she says to herself.

  Peering through the window she sees the nurses’ heads together behind the screen with the technician examining the negatives, writing their judgements on the chart. Perhaps they are laughing at her bones. Ava casually wheels herself around the table to the door.

  ‘Just wait outside for me, dear,’ the nurse calls, poking her head around the partition. ‘We need to do a few more tests. Then we’ll see about organising a bed for you.’

  ‘A bed?’ Ava’s voice squeaks in a moment of panic.

  ‘Yes, you’re malnourished, dear. It’s protocol.’

  Ava struggles to open the door. She has to wrestle with the pneumatic cushion, but manages to wheel herself out into the hallway. The chair also is an awkward machine. Between them both it is like trying to put on a shirt under water. However, once she’s outside and the door sighs shut she jumps up and scampers off down the corridor to the first corner. She glances back. No one’s after her. Left, right, left again. Her leg feels good. Hearing voices in the distance she ducks into an office, door unlocked, and waits until they pass, her eye at the crack. The farcical thing would be to have the approaching voices follow her into the office for a tryst or a confabulation or a what-have-you, and Ava ducking under the desk having to endure the clunky love-making overhead. Oh, the comic possibilities. Her mind toys briefly with that idea, but it does not happen. The voices pass. Her heart is racing, surely the excitement of the chase.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Ava spins around to see a man, a doctor by the looks of the white coat, sitting at a desk, a wry expression on his dial. She didn’t see him at first, the devil incarnate, surrounded by paperwork.

  ‘And you are?’ he asks.

  ‘Dr Langdon,’ she says, introducing herself. ‘Western Area Health. Splendid job you’re doing. Particularly in obstetrics. Keep up the good work. Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  ‘Dr Wilde, I think is the name.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Oh dear. Wasted trip then.’

  She ducks back out the door, pulling it behind her, and runs as best she is able down the corridor, passing other offices and clinics. The doctor, she imagines, jumps up and follows her to the door, but she’s disappeared. Which way did she go? She has tricked the devil up to his elbows in bureaucracy. Ava hurries on. She wonders if it is beyond the realm of possibility to come by some morphine. Surely in a place like this, but where would one begin to look? What she needs is a white coat; that would help. It’s the archetypal disguise. Then she could just walk into someone’s office, or a pharmacy, and demand: Give me an opiate. It’s for an emergency.

  And they would.

  And she’d be happy.

  Nice little dream. Morphine is all very well, but her greater need is to escape. She still has the other bottle of sherry in her calico bag if only she can find her way back to Emergency.

  Find a bed for her! – Lock her up, more likely. Inter her without trial. Strap her down and swab her temples. Time for your clyster, dear. She glances down other empty linoleum corridors. Peers around corners. The coast is clear. She makes a semi-run for it to the next corner, her feet slapping at the floor. By now she’s quite lost. She almost meets a trolley head on, returning from the wards with empty packets of underappreciated sandwiches. The orderly stares at her but Ava keeps her face averted.

  ‘Are you lost?’

  ‘No.’

  Ava does not stop. Keep moving; the predator targets the hesitant. Around the next corner – it’s like Pitt Street – the cleaner with his orbital polisher, buffing the shiny floor to within an inch of its mortal days, the fluorescent light glinting off the surface of it like – the current of the Yangtze has moved on – like the coruscations of the afternoon sun off the beachside shallows, the dead soldiers rolling in the water. Ava slows to a walk, avoiding the machine’s wide arc. The cleaner does not even look at her, his head down like a minesweeper in no-man’s-land, and then she’s off again.

  Somehow she finds her way back to Emergency. She slows to a stroll. There’s her bag and coat and her trousers and boots just where she left them in the Bedouin tent. She flings the white gown to the floor. Quickly pulls on her trousers and adjusts the braces. Snap, that gives her some confidence. She pulls on her boots. The machete has gone. She looks frantically for it, under the seat, under the bed. She looks up, aghast, at the broken and maimed residents of Hades. One of these treacherous, machete-stealing opportunists … She realises she’s drawing attention to herself. She coolly puts the coat on, so what if it stinks, then saunters through the casualty ward. She is Oscar Wilde passing among the ravaged hordes. See Oscar saunter, dispensing perfume from the kerchief at his wrist. Don’t panic, she tells herself. Act natural. They’ll mistake her for a visitor. The automatic doors wheeze open and no one notices anything out of the ordinary as she passes through.

  Outside the rain has stopped, the sky still grey as old feathers. Don’t celebrate too soon. She decides to avoid the trap of the highway. That’s where they’ll be looking for her when the alarm is raised. She walks in the unexpected direction, down quiet Woodlands Road, very sneaky, past the old folks’ retirement home and the rugby oval towards the cemetery. It’s not far to the gate. Should she enumerate the steps? Christ, no! That’s what started all this. Her leg aches, but not so badly. Walking is loosening it up, getting the humours flowing. Wounded in action, Red, just give me a Bible to bite on. Walking is the only thing that warms her. The fact that it’s starting to burn is a healing sign. She walks fast at first; however, no one is after her, so she slows down. She’s done it. She knows the short cut through the cemetery to the returned soldiers’ cricket oval and the back streets of Queens Road. They’ll never find her there. Ava does not feel superstitious about cemeteries the way Greeks do. Well, perhaps only a little. As she enters at the driveway gates the air immediately seems a little warmer, but that’s probably because her heart is working and she’s warming up with all the exertion.

  She wanders down the hill past the Anglican section. Every denomination with its own select suburb. The Catholics, Methodists, Jews, Presbyterians, Church of England, Greek Orthodox – all segregated as if they might still do a violence to each other. How come, she wonders, there is no Communist section? Or Rotarian? Slowly it dawns on her that she has to stop. The blood in her temples pounds savagely. Deciding to give her leg a rest she
slows, and finds a suitable gravestone on which to catch her breath. Here’s a clean, fresh one. Theodore Albert Whitaker. It’s just like visiting him in hospital. Poor old Theodore, just let him sleep. Who were you, old sport? Next door, the lichen-splashed dates of his neighbour’s great adventure, a much older rock of ages. In the distance, looking east, the hills roll to the next ridge. It’s the children’s graves she finds the saddest, but then they’re in Heaven now, right, if there is a Heaven. Why not? If there is a devil in a white coat in an office behind her, why not a Heaven? (But then, she wonders, what if he wasn’t a devil? What if he was only a man?) For Ava, Heaven is a big, warm room with sunshine slanting through the stained-glass windows and a fully functioning typewriter with a return carriage that works. And a bottle of plonk. (Why not? It is Heaven, after all.) And Red. And a halfway decent conversation with someone who’ll listen. Forget about the angels flapping about like pigeons in the town square; let’s have a little dancing.

  Her breath is coming back to her. Next in the hierarchy of sad things are the graves with wooden crosses already rotting in the rain, decorated by plastic flowers which are faded and brittle with exposure to the elements. Then one or two unmarked graves, cracked and hollowed, full of recent rainwater, nothing to mark them but a sunken blanket of white quartz. Couldn’t even afford a stone to stop them wandering. Who weeds them? No one. No one to remember them either, she thinks, as she shall be remembered. Ava will remember. This is Ava remembering. She pats the black stone fondly, as if there’s a plaster cast around a fractured limb under a blanket. There, there, better soon.

  ‘Hello again.’

  The voice startles Ava from her reverie. They’ve tracked her down. She spins around on her marble perch to see an old graveyard witch standing behind her. No, hardly a witch – Ava isn’t superstitious, remember. She has to blink two or three times before she recognises the old woman from this morning. The woman at the fence. And hardly old either, now that Ava looks. They are about the same age, still spring chickens.

  Poppy stares at Ava. Ava can just imagine what she is seeing. A strange woman dressed as a man, sitting on, sitting on – ah, Ava sees it all, sitting on her husband’s gravestone. Furthermore, she can almost imagine what Poppy is thinking. Poppy almost laughs at the idea of it. Theo and anyone. Theo would run a mile if anyone even placed a friendly hand on his arm. Even his sister-in-law made him blush. Theo only had eyes for Poppy, and she for him. What a world, thinks Ava.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Poppy asks, clutching an umbrella in one hand and a posy of flowers in the other (kangaroo paw), not a wreath.

  ‘Well might I ask you the same question, my dear.’

  ‘I came to visit my husband.’

  She indicates the grave that Ava adorns like something from the Weimar Republic. Ava jumps up (ouch) and they both examine the inscription on the stone.

  ‘Very poetic,’ says Ava.

  ‘Denise, my daughter, chose it.’

  ‘I am so dreadfully sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Poppy passes a finger under her eye. ‘I don’t think he would have minded.’

  ‘No, I mean the metre is awful. Who makes up this stuff? Where’s the Miss you, old trooper, where’s the Ride on, stranger? It’s all lambs’ tails and fingerprints of the everlasting.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Never mind. Just thinking out loud … Only last week, you were saying.’

  Belatedly, Ava notices the newness of the grave, the absence of weeds. Not even time to let the dust settle.

  ‘Yes,’ Poppy sighs. ‘Very recently.’

  ‘Again, I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s all over now. Did you know Theo?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My husband.’ Poppy nods her head to the stone. ‘I didn’t see you at the funeral.’

  ‘Sadly I never had that pleasure. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.’

  A pause to acknowledge the whole solemnity of the situation.

  ‘Yes. This is the first time I’ve come here. Since the burial. It’s quite lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I suppose so.’

  They look at the grave. Ava staggers slightly.

  ‘Poppy is my name.’

  ‘Ava.’

  They shake hands lightly, the trees swaying all around them like kelp.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Ava … Are you feeling quite well? You seem to be hobbling.’

  ‘I hurt my leg. But it’s all right now. I was knocked down by a Sunday driver.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Truly.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Fine and dandy, thanks.’

  ‘Have you been to the hospital?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about that place.’

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  Silence for a while, apart from the trees.

  ‘Tell me, Poppy, did you feel the air get warmer when you came through the gate?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I think your old hubby might be partially responsible for that.’

  ‘Do you think so? That’s a nice thought.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘He always used to tell me to put a jumper on.’

  ‘Men.’

  Poppy looks around at the cemetery.

  ‘I didn’t notice it before. At the funeral. How pretty it is.’

  ‘Your mind on other things,’ says Ava. ‘That’s understandable.’

  Poppy steps forward, her own foot still slightly tender, and places her bouquet of flowers on the stone.

  ‘He didn’t care for flowers, really. I couldn’t think what else to bring.’

  Ava dismisses this, abruptly connecting the dots that have drifted off somewhere through the day only to return to her now.

  ‘I see you didn’t jump.’

  ‘No,’ says Poppy, recalling the morning. ‘No, you talked me out of it.’

  ‘Did I? Well, the day hasn’t been a total waste, then. It’s not really the right course of action, is it, Poppy, for a couple of grand dames like us to seriously consider.’

  ‘No. What would the children say?’

  ‘Let nature take its course. For me it’s been a great day, an auspicious day, apart from being run over. Can’t you feel it in the ether?’

  Poppy considers this, her powdered nose to the wind: ‘What?’

  ‘Greatness.’

  Ava lets the word levitate between them.

  ‘Perhaps not the same as you. Tell me, is your husband buried here too?’

  ‘Good God, no. I hope not,’ Ava scoffs. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten the phrase … something French … à la mode to mean I couldn’t give a stuff.’

  ‘I see. I think. And are there any children?’

  Ava gives a small shrug.

  ‘I don’t feel the same way about Theo. I miss him terribly.’

  ‘I’m sure. Did he have a beard, your Theo?’

  ‘Just towards the end. When he couldn’t shave. It was quite white. Imagine that. I’m not ready to let that image go yet. Has anyone dear to you passed away?’

  It must be the grief that’s making the old girl speak so forwardly. Ava looks at Poppy and there is a moment when the brimming tears in each other’s eyes are of equal measure.

  ‘Only everyone,’ says Ava, then steeling herself: ‘It depends in what sense you mean passed away.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Poppy. ‘In the normal sense … Is that what you meant by the stone foetus?’

  ‘Who told you about that?’

  ‘You did. This morning.’

  ‘Yes. All dead. At least in my heart, they may as well be. And they never leave you. They sit there cold and hungry in you
r gut, and they roll over when you sleep, letting you know they’re there, and it’s your job to keep their memory alive, in the past, where they were happy.’

  ‘So they’re alive?’

  Again the small shrug.

  The two of them are quiet for a time, staring at Theo Whitaker’s grave, and the other graves surrounding it.

  ‘I hope Theo never leaves me. The memory of him, I mean.’

  ‘No fear of that.’

  ‘I must go,’ says Poppy. ‘I only meant to drop by some flowers and see how he was getting on. On his own. After that first night here he wouldn’t have known where he was.’

  ‘No choice but to get on with it,’ says Ava. ‘But please, I’ll go. I’m sure you must have lots to talk about. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’ Poppy asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Can I drop you anywhere?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t walk?’

  ‘No. It’s too far. That’s why I drove. I have a car.’

  ‘Blow me down. No, thank you all the same, old stick. I live just over there.’

  She waves her hand vaguely towards the bush at the bottom of the cemetery, where there doesn’t appear to be much of anything.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘Well, it’s been very nice to see you again,’ says Poppy.

  ‘Yes, it has.’

  ‘Perhaps our paths will cross?’

  The trees wash their hands overhead.

  ‘Perhaps … Tell me, how long have you lived here, Poppy?’

  ‘Here in Katoomba?’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘About fifteen years. We came here after Theo retired.’

  ‘Me too! We’ve both lived here in the same town all these years and yet we’ve never met. What are the chances? Just think of the other people in town we don’t know. I’d say, on the strength of that, the odds of us meeting again are pretty slim, but nevertheless I’m a great believer in challenging the odds.’