After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.
Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.
But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was fi nding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.
A thin stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.
‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t talk. It’s not one of those modern relationships.’
His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artifi cial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed low and high care facilities, and entered into agreements with suitable establishments.‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’
What about deathstyle options, Tom had enquired privately of Karen. ‘Have they given you the go-ahead to switch off the machines?’ He was electric with derision and envy. It was all so sensible; so sanitary. It was emotional hygiene and it was unavailable to him. He was a giant child engulfed by the unfairness of life’s arrangements.
How was Tom to convey-to Nelly, to anyone-the muffl ed dependencies that weighted his relations with Iris? He was unable to shake off the image of that powder-puff head. His mother’s claim on him was mute, elemental; the animal invitation to feel with.
When she had worked as a cleaner, she would tiptoe past Tom before sunrise, her breath pinched so he could sleep undisturbed. At night she went to bed early. Tom sat at the fold-up table in the living room, his books and papers spread before him. His sleeve, moving across a page, produced a soft swishing. Later he lay in bed reading, or watched TV with the sound down. During the unwelcome intimacies imposed by school, by the annexe, he looked forward to these solitary hours.
Iris had been cleaning offices for a few months when Tom, working through a page of calculus one evening, became aware of a noise that had being going on for some time. He listened. Then he knocked. Then he went in.
‘Ma? Ma, what’s wrong?’
She didn’t answer but went on with her soft keening.
Tom switched on the bedside lamp. Iris’s eyes were closed but she was plainly not asleep. Again he asked what was wrong; roughly, because he was afraid. Tears went on slipping down
her face but still she didn’t reply.
He asked, ‘Do you want Audrey?’
After a little while, she said that her back hurt. Rather, she said it was paining.
He corrected her mechanically. But in fact it was he who was mistaken. Her locution, which had struck him as sounding Indian, was not after all geographical but historical. Years later he would come across it in a book of good Edwardian prose.
He asked, ‘Shall I get an Aspro?’
When he returned, she was propped up against her pillows.
Tom said, ‘I can leave school. Get a job. You don’t have to do it.’
Her mouth was full of water and aspirin but her head shook vigorously.
Later she said, ‘What’s to be done.’ It was not a question.
Her gown of quilted pink nylon lay across the bed. Its spiritual twin was suspended on a hanger hooked over the wardrobe door: an unlined grey coat trimmed with fake fur, ready for the morning.
Other men came up with strategies that rendered their mothers harmless. Neglect was one solution; so was marrying a woman with a capacity for ruthlessness. There was also comedy. There was Vernon, who had reconfigured his mother as a monstrous buffoon. Her prying, her avarice, her vanity, her pile creams, the satisfaction the old despot derived from making children cry: farce drew the poison from it all. Now and then, even as he was laughing, Tom detected a familiar flutter of frustration or despair in Vernon ’s anecdotes; but it twitched uselessly in a web of comic invention.
Tom had always thought of himself as siding with the defenceless; as most people do, when the risk of personal inconvenience is small. But Iris grated on his sensibilities. He thought of abrasions his soul would endure if they were to live together. There would be questions: where are you going, what time are you coming back, who is that friend of yours? There would be ritual conversations, stupefying banalities. Laugh-tracks crashed through his concentration. His mother inspected the crustless salmon sandwiches he had prepared for her and said, ‘That’s wrong. You’ve cut them wrong.’
Forebodings rushed to fill the future he might share with her. His best intentions would sour. The example of Audrey was before him. Having risen to the occasion, he would swiftly descend. He heard himself enumerating, for Iris’s edifi cation, the sacrifices her presence entailed, and the virtues he imagined himself to be displaying.
When he was fourteen, he had turned the corner of a street and seen a figure hesitate at a pedestrian crossing. From the protection of a curved tin awning, he beheld a brassy perm and hectic rouge perched on the body of a slack-bellied sprite. It placed its thumb between its teeth, and peered into the traffi c from the prudent kerb. The gesture brought recognition without dispelling estrangement: the queerest sensation. It was his fi rst glimpse of his mother as left over from another time. He studied her as though she were a page in an anthropological text, taking in the knowledge that she was no longer essential to him.
At the same time, he was aware of an impulse to dash out diagonally through streaming cars and gather her up in his arms. He would carry her to a place of safety. But where, where?
The sky was solid Australian blue, lightly laminated with cloud near the horizon. Nelly was waiting for him at the top of the track. Lines from a poem about hope came into Tom’s mind: With that I gave a viall full of tears: / But he a few green eares. He didn’t speak them, for poetry can be alarming. His fi ngers sought and found the leaves crushed in his pocket.