Foot, school cough, rashes, bruises from Foot Foot, tonsillitis, boils, nits, warts on hands.
Driving in to work at Acacia Court, Betty often sees two little boys playing on a billycart in front of their house – the newsagent’s twins. She waves and looks back at them in her rear-vision mirror as they drag bits of wood and tin across the gutter to make ramps and bridges. Their padded faces are flushed with effort and concentration. The boys are so busy they barely notice the passing car. And they are too young to recognise the routine – that Betty passes at this same time every day of the working week.
She can see the car park from all of the windows in Lilac ward and from the kitchen and the office. There are three crows on the edge of the incinerator and another on the rail of the mortuary ramp. The night girl has written ‘all quite’ in the record book. It is not easy to hold the cheeks of Bert’s arse apart – the muscles have slackened like spent tyre tubes. She looks out of the window. A crow hops onto the bonnet of her car with a piece of rubbish in its beak. Bert has a faecal impaction; a hard mass of faeces in the rectum is obstructing the neck of his bladder. Lately, small amounts of liquid faeces have leaked around the bolus, giving the false impression of diarrhoea. Remove the bolus, restore continence. Bert’s shit has the consistency of tar. She edges her finger between the mass and the bowel wall. It’s the same technique as getting a burnt cake out of a tin. She extracts her finger and keeping her gloved hands well up in the air takes two steps to the window and hits it with her elbow to shoo the crow away. ‘Hang on, sweetie,’ she says to Bert. ‘I’ll be back with some Vaseline.’
Stan Ebersole, Reg Healy, Ern Lillee, Dennis Popp, Harold Carton, Mervyn Whipp, Bert Plimeroll, Magnus, Pinky Giddings, Bill Sickle, Jack McGordon, Donald Arbuthnot, Cliff Heaslip, Arthur Springgay. They have the new linoleum, easy-clean and as cool as glass. They have the Brumly geriatric chair, non-tippable and posturally appropriate. They have a round table to play cards at and plastic spout cups to drink from. Betty has her favourites in the same way a mother has a favourite child. Cliff with his poet’s face, Jack’s hands – she imagines them on her sometimes as she cleans his nails. Ern has something, in his confusion. Bill who came in with blue marks all over his body – his wife never gave up sleeping next to him, despite his incontinence. For three years she wore her blue plastic raincoat to bed each night and then she died.
Mervyn says, ‘At night I hear the train coming. It says, home, home, home. But it isn’t stopping anywhere near here and there’s nobody on it for me.’
Reg says, ‘I saw an ant on my cupboard and I put some biscuit there, so it makes it through the winter.’
Stan says, ‘A proper cup. Don’t put that dick spout in my mouth.’
Ern says, ‘Sat around bubba then but tits tea go poor mopey it boil bud shilling vanished she’s what sore brown it fence was billy pecked.’ Because he’s had three strokes and along the way his words have come uncoupled from their meaning.
Cliff says, ‘I’m as mad as a wet bee.’
Betty moves from station to station wiping each bedside cabinet. She removes the water glass and fills it; rinses and replaces the expectoration mug. She disposes of hidden food, straightens the racing guide, removes lumps of ear wax smeared on bed rails and closes the matchbox where Des Feely has his collection of chewed-off fingernails. She works around the precious things – a handkerchief with a pet name, a well-fingered lingerie advertisement, a German coin. Cliff has a notebook for his memoirs – most of the pages are blank but a few feature the same drawing of an erect cock and balls shooting semen straight out like bullets from a gun. A ten-year-old boy would draw this on a toilet wall. Whose fault is it that their bodies are crumbling when their feelings are still ripe?
There are three women in the day room looking at the linoleum. It’s the new no-wax in high-sheen apple green. The purchase and installation of the linoleum was written up in the local paper and now several times a week a group of