The Beloved Read online

  Dirty. Germs. Inefficiency. Matron’s favourite words. Disinfectant. Matron’s favourite fix. Disinfectant was slopped on everything – mops, toilets, my face. Her ward was the Most Efficient in the hospital. Bedpans clattered, floor polishers whined and the smells of pee, gravy and Dettol hung in the air. Matron’s ship was so tight it made Mama’s look like a playpen.

  Timetable ruled the day.

  Six o’clock: Wake up!

  Six thirty: Wash. Scrub those hands, that face, those feet and that secret place between your legs.

  Seven o’clock: Breakfast.

  Eight o’clock: Cold tin potty shoved under your bum.

  Nine o’clock: Exercise and needles.

  Midday: Fish paste or Vegemite sandwiches.

  One o’clock: Nap.

  Two o’clock: Exercise and more needles.

  Five o’clock: Soup, mash, droopy beans, mushy carrots and gravy.

  Seven thirty: Bed.

  The bed next to mine didn’t stay empty for long. Another girl was brought in, small and thin as an autumn leaf. Her arms lay on the bed as if they didn’t belong to her, fingers curled like the claws of a tiny dead bird. When she wasn’t having therapy she stared at the ceiling. Therapy hurt: hot poultices, exercises and needles. If you cried, Matron called you a sook and said your parents would be upset. Didn’t you want to get better? Therapy would make you walk again. But it didn’t. A week went by. Two weeks. I forgot to count the days. Around me, kids were wobbling to their feet and taking steps and the girl next to me began to uncurl her fingers.

  ‘Why can’t I walk?’ I asked Nurse Molly.

  She slid a lolly into my hand. ‘I don’t know, Bertie. Polio’s like that. Some people escape with just flu but others, well, you know. Legs, arms, the whole lot. Life in a wheelchair.’

  Life in a wheelchair? Would that be me? I tried not to think about it. Or the iron lung. At the end of the ward there was a big metal tank with a pump that made your lungs work. It looked like a coffin. One day they shut a little boy in there with just his head poking out. Every night I went to sleep feeling its hands around my neck and I’d wake up coughing and gasping for air.

  One day Orderly came in with a wheelchair. ‘Three weeks, kiddie. You’re out of Isolation. Your parents are waiting to see you.’

  My parents!

  Down a corridor, around the corner and there . . . Mama and Dad! Tall and shining and there.

  Mama leaned forward and kissed my forehead. ‘How’s my baby girl?’

  Tears stung my eyes. I blinked them away. But they stuck like a lump in my throat and when Dad scooped me against his chest I thought the lump might burst. Dad unzipped his jacket. ‘Look who’s here, CP. Flight Sergeant Moose.’ I grabbed my bear and straightened his ear and Dad stroked my head. ‘What happened to your beautiful hair?’

  ‘They had to cut it,’ said Mama as she pulled something from her handbag. ‘Look what I made for you, Bertie.’ She held out a doll, a dear little rag doll with orange woolly hair, round black eyes and a smile wide enough to melt even Matron’s heart.

  ‘Her name’s Raggedy Ann,’ said Mama.

  ‘Why?’

  Mama shrugged. ‘I made her; it gives me naming rights.’

  ‘I don’t like it. She’s not raggedy. She’s Molly.’

  ‘Molly?’

  ‘My favourite nurse in the whole world.’

  ‘Oh . . . okay, but I’m your favourite mama. Yes?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Mama visited me every day. I still couldn’t move my leg and I knew from the tight grey band that appeared around her chest that she was worried. One morning she marched in and tossed my overalls on the bed. A doctor flapped along behind.

  ‘I only said, might not walk, Mrs Lightfoot. If you take her now she definitely won’t. The child needs continuing treatment.’

  ‘That child, Doctor, is my daughter, and your treatment’s done nothing. My brother walked after polio; Roberta will too. I’ll make it happen.’

  At home, Mama laid me between sheets as soft as clouds and smelling of mown grass and sunshine. She sat beside me and took my hand.

  ‘Roberta Lindsay Lightfoot, listen to me.’

  Roberta Lindsay Lightfoot. That was me.

  Lindsay for my mother, Lightfoot for my father and Roberta all for myself. Tim got his name from Grandpa Timothy but Roberta was mine.

  ‘Listen.’

  I listened. All I could hear was Mama’s breath coming in and out, whooshhhh, like waves on the shore.

  ‘Look at me.’

  I looked at her shiny black hair and owl-steady eyes and I waited . . . and waited, until I was sure I could hear the whole world holding its breath.

  ‘You are going to get well. You are going to walk. I will make it happen. Do you understand?’

  I didn’t understand, but I believed her.

  ‘And the day you walk, you can have my locket.’

  Her locket! ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  She cut up old army blankets into strips, dunked them in boiling water and put them through the wringer. Then she laid them, ouch-hot, on my leg, covered them with towels and rubber sheets and every half hour she took it all off and did it again. She pulled my leg up and down and rubbed till I howled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to get this leg moving.’ She put a box at the end of the bed and told me to press my foot against it. ‘Push, Bertie, push!’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Harder. Come on, sugar, I know it’s tough but you can do it. We’re in this together and you are going walk. You must. Thank God it’s only one leg.’

  Only one leg.

  When she wasn’t pushing and pulling Mama gave me lessons so I didn’t fall behind at school. We played cards and puzzles and I listened to ‘The Argonauts’ on the radio. Tim put on Dad’s air force jacket and pretended to be Biggles, or dressed up in Mama’s hat and high heels and tottered around pretending to be a lady. Dad brought me paper from his office and a box of six colouring pencils which made me forget – more than anything else – that I couldn’t walk. He built me a bed table with folding legs.

  ‘What colour do you want it, CP?’

  ‘Blue. Forget-me-not blue.’ Locket blue.

  ‘Borget-me-not flue,’ he said.

  I giggled. Dad and his silly spoonerisms. Piddle-Lot for Little Pot, Hate-and-Dunny for Date and Honey, Farting-the-Stire for Starting the Fire. He was full of stories, too. How the American president, Franklin D Roosevelt, got polio and still ran the world’s mightiest nation from a wheelchair; how the famous pilot, Douglas Bader, lost both his legs and still flew. But my favourite story was how he met Mama.

  ‘Winter. Nineteen forty-three. The Air Force sent me to Canada to fly reconnaissance.’ He leaped to his feet and saluted. ‘Atten-shun! I was on leave in New York and one morning when I got on the train to go back to base, there – sitting in my seat – was . . .’

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Lovely Mama. Even in her medic’s uniform she was a real good sort, her figure just like that egg-timer your grandma keeps on her scullery bench, you know?’ Dad brought his hands into a V-shape and then out again. ‘Curves in all the right places. I told her she was in my seat and she went to move but I stuck out my hand. Don’t go, I said. But then I put my foot in it.’

  ‘In your hand?’ I cackled.

  ‘No, you twit. In my mouth. You must be Snow White, I said. Snow White? she scoffed. Beans, then, I said. Coffee beans. She scowled at me. What I mean is you’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen. That fixed it. We got talking, anyhow.’

  Dad had to carry me everywhere: to the toilet, the kitchen, the living room. Our living room wasn’t like Grandma’s, stuffed with embroideries, figurines, painted plates and Daddy’s shoes from when he was a little boy. There were no knick-knacks or shoes on our mantelpiece.

  ‘They got drowned,’ said Mama.

  ‘Or they’re still swimming,’ said Dad.
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br />   When she landed in Australia Mama had nothing with her but a small suitcase and a very large belly, full of Tim. All her trunks had gone on another ship which had been sunk by a mine. She had fat-clothes, photos, her camera, that locket and that box. No knick-knacks. She and Daddy had to live with Grandma and Grandad for two years before they got their own house and Mama said if she ever saw another doily or knick-knack again she’d be sick. So all that stood on our mantelpiece was a brass bowl of roses, camellias or forget-me-nots and photos: Uncle Bill, Mama’s parents, Timmy and me. Every day I sat by the fire looking at the pictures of Uncle Bill and my grandparents, wondering what they were like. Some days I just stared at the dancing flames and made my own pictures, or watched Tim building barnyards with his Meccano set and filling them with toy animals. He wanted to be a vet when he grew up. He was nine and top of grade four, which is where Mama wanted me to be – top of my class. Tim went to Vic Grammar, the best boys’ school in the state, Mama said. He’d been enrolled there since he was a baby. Mama said I would go to the best girls’ school in the state when I was bigger. She said I had to work harder than Tim to get what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted but Mama said I should be like Tim and aim to do something important. I thought Tim would make a good vet. There was a bubble of pink on his throat that got bigger whenever he saw animals. He couldn’t see the pink, he couldn’t see any colours, and neither could Mama and Dad which was a shame because colours were very helpful. They told you the truth about people no matter what they said. Words were like clothes; colours were what you looked like without them.

  Every morning while Mama worked on my leg she told me about life in Canada. How she and Uncle Bill used to make snowmen and have snowball fights, how they raked up piles of fiery autumn leaves and fell in them, toasted marshmallows on forks and made faces out of pumpkins. When she was twelve, all the kids in her town got a Box Brownie camera from Kodak – the very one that escaped drowning. I often saw colours on Mama while she talked – raspberry and orange, and deep gold. Sometimes, though, she was mauve-grey. I knew my mother’s face better than anything else in the world; her dusky skin and the little heart-shaped cowlick on her forehead. I knew her moods – her half-smiles, her frown and her getting-on-with-it look. I knew her faraway face, but I didn’t know what they all meant. Even colours couldn’t tell you that. They could tell you what, but not why.

  One day a present arrived from Uncle Bill in Canada: a brass tube with a bubble at the end.

  Tim jammed it up against his eye. ‘A kaleidoscope, Bertie. Look.’

  I put my eye to the tube and a fantastic world sprang to life. Every movement of the tube changed the designs and colours over and over. A note came with the present.

  Dear Nice Niece, Mama read.

  I’m sending you this gizmo to drive you nuts while you’re in the sack. Hope you like it. Are you giving that nasty old polio a good licking? I hope so, because if I can lick polio, you can too. Get strong soon, huh?

  Love from your Uncle Bill

  ‘If I lick my leg, will it get better?’

  Mama snorted. ‘Licking a thing means beating it.’

  Beating it? Well, if that’s what it took . . .

  She folded the blankets and the rubber mats and piled them in the corner. For tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Then she dropped a Milly-Molly-Mandy book in my lap and went to get supper. I pulled the blankets over my head, curled up my fist and rammed it into my calf as hard as I could. My ankle next, my foot, up and down, beating and beating until the pain got so bad I had to stop. I tossed off the bedclothes and lay waiting for my leg to move. Nothing. Above me, I heard Tim pattering across the floor, his singsong voice, and Mama’s voice echoing in my head . . . You are going to get well. You are going to walk. I will make it happen.

  Would she? In two months I hadn’t got any better. I stared out the window at the darkening sky. Winter lay over the vegie patch and the tree I used to climb stretched bare arms out to the air. Mama hurried to the clothesline to gather washing in a bucket. I remembered that bucket, remembered sitting in it, though I wasn’t even three. Mama had wanted to take my photo.

  ‘Stick Bertie in the bucket,’ she’d said to Dad. ‘She’ll look cute.’

  The air was full of sunshine, the grass cushy beneath my feet. Dad hoisted me into the bucket and I folded my legs, thinking how silly it was. While Mama fiddled with the camera I leaned to one side, felt the bucket tipping and leaned further until I toppled over, just as she snapped the picture.

  ‘Little bugger. Put her back in, Ed.’

  Dad righted the bucket but this time I refused to fold my legs. The photo shows me dangling from his hands, legs blurring as they pedalled the air, a big smile beneath a dome of black hair.

  In my dreams, I pedalled the air still, I walked and ran. Every morning I woke and reached for the edge of the bed and wondered if I’d ever walk again.

  One Saturday when Mama was out and Dad and I were in the kitchen working on my leg, the knocker on the front door banged. Dad wiped his hands on his overalls. ‘Tighter than the ruddy fan belt on the Vauxhall, those muscles, CP. Who’s that, do you reckon?’

  Grandma swept in. She was short and stocky and had fire in her eyes. She tilted up her cheek for Dad’s kiss.

  He bent over and pecked it. ‘Hello, Ma.’

  ‘Edric.’ Grandma was the only person in the world who called Dad Edric. Everyone else called him Ed. Mama said Edric sounded like he was supposed to be called Edward but Grandma hiccupped at the wrong moment and it came out Edric. Tim and I laughed our heads off but Grandma didn’t. She unpinned her black straw hat and smiled at me. Then she saw my leg.

  ‘Lord in heaven, I could put my finger and thumb around that stick. The child will never walk on that.’

  My heart crumpled.

  ‘She’ll walk,’ Dad said, carrying me to the couch in the living room, ‘or Lily May will die trying.’

  Grandma snorted. ‘Trying? Where is she? Leaving you to do women’s work.’ She dropped into a chair and her brown wool skirt pulled tightly over her legs. My eyes sneaked past the top of the lisle stockings that sat in rolls over her knees, into the fleshy dark cavern beyond.

  ‘Well, child, it is not for us to question God’s will.’

  God gave me polio?

  ‘Grandma . . .’

  ‘Quiet now, dear. I’ll read you a story.’ She pulled a Bible from her bag. It had pictures in it. She pointed to one with a fingernail made strong by rubbing cream into it from the milk bottle tops. ‘This is Moses.’ Moses was a wild-looking man with hair down to his waist, a long dress and a big stick. ‘Moses believed!’ Grandma hoisted a finger into the air. ‘And his faith was rewarded. Faith!’

  ‘Who’s Faith?’ I asked Dad after Grandma had gone. There was a girl in my class called Faith but I didn’t think Grandma meant her.

  ‘Not who, CP. What. Faith is believing something we can’t see, like faith in God or faith that you’ll walk again.’

  Faith I’d walk again. Dad might have faith I’d walk again but Grandma said I’d never walk on my stick. What if she was right?

  That night I lay in bed hammering my leg. ‘Come on you rotten, horrible leg! Move.’

  Mama hurried in. ‘Bertie! What is it?’

  ‘Grandma said I’ll never walk on my stick.’

  ‘Oh, did she? Listen to me, Grandma knows nothing. You’ll walk.’

  ‘She scared me, Mama.’

  ‘She scared me too, sugar.’ Mama put her arm around me. I wanted to bury my face in her chest but I didn’t. She didn’t like being mushy. ‘She was an utter . . . She made my life a misery when we lived with her and Grandad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nobody was good enough for your dad, especially not a woman with a career and an accent. She criticised everything I did. I was a hopeless mother, a useless housekeeper and a lousy cook.’

  ‘What about your macaroni cheese?’

  ‘Foreign muck. And s
he was wrong about you not walking, Bertie. You’ll walk. You wait, we’ll spit in her eye! Now, go to sleep, and be kind to that leg. It has a long way to go.’

  Our bathroom was green. Gum-green tiles and eau de nil walls. I sat in the bathtub, squeezing my old yellow rubber duck and making it blow farty bubbles. Mama squatted beside me, pushing my leg through the water. It was hot and I felt dopey, mesmerised by the little waves that slopped up the side of the tub. Mama rubbed soap over my back, a stack of four left-over pieces pressed together – blue Neko, white Lux, pink Lifebuoy and green Palmolive. ‘Give me your palm, Olive,’ Dad would say, and Mama had to say back: ‘Not on your life, boy!’ I gazed at a drop of water gathering in the spout, watched it glisten, grow larger, heavier, and begin to wobble. I lifted my foot to shove a toe in the spout and catch the drop before it fell.

  Mama gasped. I snapped from my daze. Plop! The drop fell.

  ‘You moved, Bertie. You moved your foot. Do it again! Do it again!’

  My knee shuddered.

  Mama toppled backwards on the floor, all shades of pink and gold rippling from her outstretched arms like butterfly wings.

  ‘I did it.’ She lifted her head and smiled at me, a chocolaty smile, and my heart rolled with happiness. ‘We did it.’ She scrambled up, her dark hair swinging, and took my face in her hands. ‘My beloved child, you’re going to walk. You’re going to walk and everything’s going to be fine.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘But I can’t walk!’

  ‘Not yet. You will. Hydrotherapy will move it along.’

  Twice a week, now, Grandad came in his car to take Mama and me to the hydrotherapy pool at the hospital. I loved the water; it eased the cramps in my leg and let me pretend I was just like anyone else. I wanted to swim beyond grown-up hands and forget about polio for a while but one little boy made it impossible. Every time we went to the pool he was there, lying in a nurse’s arms, looking at the world with hopeless eyes. His body was scrunched up on one side and his spine curved like a snail. Mama was right, I was lucky. But sometimes I wondered if I was so lucky, how come I had polio at all?

  Grandma came back again to see for herself how I was getting on. She sat on the end of the sofa, huffing like a bull. ‘Where’s this improvement?’