The Elusive Language of Ducks (7 page)

The woman was bathing the duck in the handbasin one night. She was perched on the side of the bath, ruffling the warm water around him.

Ducko, she said, I've been thinking. I haven't given you a name.

He paddled across to her hand. That's all right, he replied, I've already got one. His leathery maple-leaf feet slithered over the basin. She ladled him out with her cupped hand and wrapped him in the waiting towel.

What do you mean, you've already got one? She felt indignant. Had Simon's aunt, Claire, named him? I don't think you understand, she said.

Of course I understand.

So? And don't say it's ‘Duck', because that's not who you are, it's
what
you are.

I am who I am, he said.

You are annoying, she said.

I might be annoying, but ‘Annoying' is not my name.

Well, go on, tell me.

Why do you want to know?

I might need to call you. One day we might be apart from each other and I might need to call you.

We won't ever be apart from each other.

I would like to know your name. Please, Ducko. Tell me.

The duckling didn't answer. He was making himself comfortable amongst the folds of the towel, his beak bobbing, his eyes closing.

Hannah wanted to think that she would recognise her duck amongst others of his kind. But would she? And would he recognise that he was one of them? Would he feel less lonely if he were with her, or as an outsider in the flock?

Recognition of others and by others was surely the key to feeling a part of a community, part of the flock. Recognition was the reference as to who you were. How unfair it was to place her mother, at that late stage, amongst strangers. She had quickly become an ‘old person', devoid of character or past. For the people who worked there, her life had begun when she was wheeled in from the ambulance on a stretcher. While no one from her past was with her, she was a stereotypical old woman. Sans everything.

The anonymity of old age was the transition towards, or preparation for, the annihilation that came with death.

Once Hannah had been visiting her mother in the Primrose Hill dining room when there was a sudden kerfuffle. A caregiver called out to Mina, the registered nurse on duty, to see to one of the old ladies having dinner.

Mina — the nurse who had once told Hannah how she hated her own mother back in Korea — peered at the old lady and quickly decided that there was nothing to worry about.

No, no, she all right. I saw her before, she all right. No problem.

The caregiver was left sitting with her, observing the old lady closely, obviously still worried.

Look at her! Look at her eyes, her lips, she said to no one in particular. Hannah made an excuse to wash her hands at the handbasin across the room, so she could observe for herself. It was the little bird, whose meek eyes peeked out at the world from her chair in the lounge. Hannah had often attempted to speak to her, but there was never much of a response, and for that reason couldn't remember her name. She'd rarely seen her with a visitor. When on occasion she'd played the balloon-patting game, the little bird had whacked the balloon with surprising fervour with her fist, her face still expressionless.

And now there she was, her tiny face still looking passively into the
middle distance. She appeared to be her usual timid self. But the caregiver was anxious, upset that no one was taking heed of her concern.

Then the vomiting started. From where Hannah sat, back with her mother, the noise sounded more like drowning. The caregiver called for help again, and Mina was forced to intervene.

Take her to her bed, she ordered. So off she went, pushed off in her wheelchair across the dining room to her bedroom.

When Mina went by, Hannah asked her what had been the matter.

Oh, she just trembling, trembling, that's all, she replied.

For some unfathomable reason, Hannah was certain she was dying. And she was. The next morning Mina brought the news to Hannah as she was feeding her mother outside in the sunshine.

The death notice was in the paper the following day. Gertrude Ethel Williams. She was ninety years old, and the notice listed children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. There were many. Hannah had never seen any of them. Perhaps they were all meek little birds scuttling quietly about in the back garden. A life was summed up in a death notice in the newspaper. Ninety years old and she'd hopped along to the end of a branch until there was nothing below her feet. No wind beneath her wings. And there she was, no more.

Like her mother, now, no more.

Let's go to the beach, said her mother.

Hannah had been working at the kitchen table. Her mother sat in her easy chair, looking out the window. She'd been trying to fold the facecloths and tea towels from the washing basket at her feet, then attempting to place them neatly on the coffee table alongside her. She couldn't do it. She couldn't fold them squarely; she couldn't stack them in alignment with each other.

There'd been a storm overnight, and now the deck was shiny wet, littered with leaves and sticks and brown flesh from the last of the magnolia flowers. The trees were hardly moving now — as if the earth was just daring to breathe, loath to bring attention to itself for fear of another onslaught.

It was a Monday and Hannah thought of the whole busy week sprawling ahead of her, with so much to fit in around looking after her mother. It wasn't just a matter of jumping into the car and whizzing off to the beach; it was the preparation. The toileting, the hauling on of layers of clothes, the searching for the carefully hidden handbag, the slow ponderous walk up the path, the struggle into the car, and getting out again at the other end.

Are you sure it's not too cold? she said.

It's so still and steamy, I just feel like being by the sea.

Hannah closed her laptop. It wasn't often that her mother made any requests of her.

They drove into a small parking bay that served as a boat ramp and also led easily to a man-made rocky headland jutting out into the sea, still choppy after the storm. Hannah had prepared a thermos of tea with a couple of pieces of cake and was hoping her mother would be happy sitting in the car. The sea was like a fire on a cold night . . . a live, comforting thing to watch, triggering nostalgic thoughts and memories. She'd brought old bread for the gulls.

But they staggered out from the car, onto the rock. Her mother refused the walker.

I'll just hold on to you, dear.

Hannah helped her shuffle to a small concrete wall and suggested they sit there, but her mother insisted they go further, to the point where the rock dropped in a series of sharp ledges down to the sea. The tide was high, slurping around the rock. Her mother unravelled her arm from Hannah's and stepped away, flicking with irritation at Hannah's response to steady her.

Just let me breathe the sea air, she said. Look at those blues, and that sky . . .

She took another step forward, then toppled. Hannah, shrieking, seized her, enough to stop her tumbling into the sea but not to stop her crunching onto the rock, landing with a guttural grunt, lying there, blood already oozing from a gash in her head, her arm twisted beneath her.

Hannah threaded an arm along the rock under her mother's head, and tried to lift her, but she was a dead weight. A jogger came rushing to help.

When the ambulance arrived, her mother was just flickering back into awareness.

Am I dead yet? she said.

And after recuperating in hospital, it was decided by the doctors that she must move into the Primrose Hill Rest Home, where every day she asked that same question, in one way or another, until one day she got the answer she was looking for.

Chapter 5

Hannah was propped against a tree in dappled shade, trawling through a manuscript resting against her knees. The heat was homogenising her thoughts. A couple of tui were making a fluttering clatter above. The duckling was lying nearby with one of his feet splayed out behind him, and the underside looked remarkably like the soft pink palm of a hand. Spongy. He was revealing to her that there were elements of him that were human in character. His sole was human. She thought of the Michelangelo painting of the creation of Adam — hand reaching out to hand — but when she touched the foot he quickly withdrew it.

Excuse me, he said. Why are you poking me?

I'm sorry, she said. It's just . . . your legs . . . and your feet. They used to be so tiny.

Now the legs looked like separate entities, big, reptilian. They were the foundation blocks for something much larger than he was now. Each web-cloaked finger a claw, a pin-sharp nail, although these were not as lethal as they had been, now that he was running around more.

Simon had told her about the flexor tendon in birds. He'd explained how it ran from the muscle in the thigh, over the knee (which she knew bent backwards, not forwards), down the leg, around the ankle and under the toes. When a bird was resting, its body weight made the knee bend, and this in turn drew the tendon taut and so closed the claws. He added that birds had been discovered dead with their claws still clamped around their perches, so effective it was.

Even though every day she stared closely into the terrain of the duck's body, the ongoing changes happened magically, a sleight of hand, no doubt with help from the overnight educator. It was difficult to remember what he'd once been like. For example, when did these transformations occur?

• the extravagant fresh ruff of feathers frothing up along his sides

• the real feathers growing in his fat and wobbling tail

• the tiny symmetrical shoots and the triangular borders before the fill-ins

• the dense down replacing the yellow body fluff

• his number-one blond crewcut

• the new tufts growing across the black holes that were his ears

• not to mention his legs.

It was a dissolving thing, the details of the past duck soon forgotten. She knew he used to be a little fluffy thing, but couldn't relate that form to the present duck. His baby self was a dream fading with the new day, the past swirling into oblivion. Over and out.

Yesterday, she discovered that one of his claws was cracked, and, when she examined it further, a tiny curl of claw fell off in her hand. A white comma, reminding her to have pause, for breath. A little comma of an unborn child swimming through underground pipes beneath the city, and into the sea, and for how long did it bob through the waves until it was reduced to its elements?

It was five weeks after the tramping club do. Hannah and Simon were lying in bed, a single bed with green sheets, three woollen blankets and an eiderdown he'd brought over from Australia, which used to belong to his grandmother. In the room was a desk under a steamy window that she knew looked out onto a wet wooden fence and the path that ran from the gate around the house to the landlord's entrance above. Today the curtains, also green, were drawn closed. At one end of the room was a sliding door to a built-in wardrobe. Hanging on a wall there was a square framed print of a tree on a hill (not his). Above the desk was pinned a clipped Leunig cartoon (his), and some complex engineering design (his). The toilet and bathroom were in the hallway outside the room, where carpeted stairs ran up to a locked door to the interior of the house. There was enough space in the room for two people to get undressed, but only just. Their clothes were thrown over the chair that stood out from the desk.

Hannah remembered this scene as if it were yesterday. She could still hear the dull thuds of running steps as the landlord's children played in the sitting room above. She could hear muffled voices and a distant radio or television. She could hear the rain against the window. Without getting out of bed, they were able to turn the light on and off by pulling a plastic bobble on a string that hung from the ceiling.