Sequelae

I walk through the hospice like a voyeur. Each room is filled with the light clop of conversation. Family members mill about in ritualised distraction.

Some perch on the edge of their loved one’s bed, hands folded in laps, shoulders slightly stooped. Others, animated by discomfort, squint intently at charts or pace invisible circuits along the linoleum floor.

I feel something prickle the side of my face as I pass each open door; amid the density of bodies, heat escapes.

In one room, a blonde woman with horned, pink-rimmed glasses is massaging a disembodied pair of feet. That’s nice, isn’t it, she says as she kneads a bunion with both thumbs.

I place my palm on the wooden door, to push it further open, and then remember myself.  I wheel away from the door in a kind of drunkard’s pirouette and, in my fugue, walk into a medicine trolley. Its contents chime and clatter. A nurse looks over her shoulder at me. I walk on, noticing the sweaty, familiar aroma of baked fish and asparagus.

The worst thing about this place is the piss, my brother once said to me.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, they feed them all these nutrients and pureed shit, it makes their piss smell like rot.

Maybe it smells like that because they’re dying, I responded.

I approach the nurses’ desk, which is beside my father’s room. I like to linger here and pretend I have questions for the nurses and concern for the minutiae of my father’s care. Truthfully, they do a good job and, if they didn’t, I wouldn’t know. My father never complains. He mostly spends our time together marvelling at the detritus of his body with performative disgust.

Today, the nurses’ desk is vacant and I shift my body weight from foot to foot.

When I eventually find my way to my father’s door, I feel weighed down, as if my clothes are wet and my limbs are caked in mud. The door is open but the blue medical curtain is pulled. I stare at the curtain, imagining I am staring through it, that I can see my father’s silhouette in the bed. His body clarifies and now I can see him, head lulled to one side on the pillow, a gentle trickle of saliva pooling in one side of his mouth. I satisfy myself that I should not wake him, and decide to leave. A nurse pauses in the hallway behind me and I reflexively step from the grey mottled carpet onto the speckled linoleum of my father’s room. My shoes make a soft tack on the floor and I wonder if he has heard me, if he is even there.

Maybe he has gone for a walk.

Michael? He calls for my brother.

No, Dad. It’s me, Luca, I say, drawing the curtain.

He is lying there, just as I hoped he wouldn’t be. His olive skin is wet and waxen, as if he has just broken a fever. His eyes are vivid and searching, his body has atrophied, even since I last visited. Plump fat and muscle has hollowed into thin, loose skin, hanging around the bones of his arms and legs.

Luca, he says, shifting to sit upright. Even sitting in the bed, he is almost taller than me. He looks at me expectantly and I raise my palms to show him I am without news, empty-handed.

Despite this, he begins asking me questions to which he knows all the answers.

It is part of our ritual. I come to him with meagre offerings from the outside world and he drinks them down gratefully. Even when my cup is empty, he will raise it to his mouth with gusto and pretend he is satiated. This room is his theatre, who am I not to play my role?

Is your mother working today?

Yeah, she went in to finish her lesson plans before school goes back.

He nods.

Yiayiá will come tonight to bring you dinner, I think yemistá and patátes?

My father’s last round of chemo had bleached his tastebuds. Since being readmitted to the hospice, homecooked meals could be found adorning his room like ornaments; tightly wrapped bundles of alfoil, untouched, slowly losing heat. Not even my yiayiá’s signature dish of baked tomato stuffed with spiced rice could resurrect his appetite.

He gives a great yawn, interlacing his fingers and stretching his hands high above his head.

Tell her not to worry, I think I’ll have an early night.

My eyes flutter with irritation. But you hate the food here, you always leave it to go cold.

I had a big lunch.

You never ate the shit here even before you lost your appetite.

A nurse draws the curtain. His pigeon-grey hair is shaved to a buzzcut. His eyes are the same washed blue as his starch-stiffened shirt. Carrying a plastic thimble of pills, he looks at my father and seems to shake his head slightly.

My father gives the nurse a conspiratorial wink and then flashes me a big, stupid grin. How much longer for this thing? He asks, flicking the transfusion bag hanging above his head like floating viscera. We need to get your iron levels up before your next round of chemo, the nurse says. I can tell from how tightly his mouth wraps around each word that he has had this conversation with my father before.

Palliative chemotherapy. I remember the derision with which my father uttered those words when my mother first suggested it. Now, he sits in his bed, purses his lips and nods idly.

Chemo, chemo, che-mo, he says to himself, stretching the syllables out as if practising elocution.

Is that still the plan, Pat? The nurse’s voice rises slightly as he asks this.

Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

The nurse furrows his brow and looks at me apologetically. I realise he has likely spent more time with my father in the last month than I have and will spend more of his remaining time with him than I will.

I notice his nametag, ‘Jarrah.’

I wonder how well they have gotten to know each other. Whether terminal illness has eroded my father’s pretence, or if he is just the booming fabulist in Room 6B. I wonder whether he has confided in Jarrah that he never wanted treatment, and had preferred instead to buy a boat and dock from port to port along the Ionian coast, alone. How Michael, so appalled by his father’s dereliction, had gradually ceased visiting him.

Jarrah leaves, drawing the curtain. The room has grown cold.

I stare at the speckled linoleum floor, at my scuffed sneakers. There is an opaque, clotting anger emanating from the bed and I do not dare look up. 

Outside the window, a bougainvillea shivers in the wind, its foliage gently tapping the glass. It’s just like Greece, my mother cooed when she first saw it as if approving the ambience.

On the bed, my father stares ahead, spectral and unblinking. A ghost conjured against his will.

I put my hands on my knees and force myself to my feet with a sigh.

No, he says. Stay.

I lower myself back into the chair, as my father stares ahead.

Mikele Prestia is a writer and refugee lawyer living in Naarm/Melbourne.