by Alison Theresa Gibson

I go to the gallery because it’s what I think grownups do in a foreign city. Like a spoilt tourist, I presume there will be English captions, but there aren’t. The man who sold me the ticket didn’t tell me that.

***

The phone call with home last night was not the best. Phone call with home, as though my phone connected to those bricks and windows and carpets, and it was the inanimate objects that told me my aunt’s cancer is growing stronger. It grows strong like a tomato plant twisting towards the sun. My mother has dropped her working days from full-time to four days a week, then three. Her boss is understanding, but no one is that understanding. Money worries slip about in dad’s voice but he doesn’t question the sisters’ connection.

***

There’s a painting of a woman. She’s old. Elderly even, with a kerchief tied around her head as though protecting delicate strands from dust. Her hand is on a young woman’s shoulder. The young woman has her face in her hands. They are surrounded by dust. Out the window is the sea. Comfort and despair. This is what a gallery is for, I think.

***

My mother doesn’t mention the foreign city I’m in when we’re on the phone. Instead she says aloud all the thoughts that usually take up space in her head. All the medications and nurses’ names and dates for tests and tests for progress when progress is not what is wanted. I think of the cancer like a precocious schoolchild being told to slow down. It’s not your turn yet, my mother whispers to the cancer when my aunt is sleeping.

***

My mother and her sister visited this city when they were my age, but my mother has forgotten that. She has forgotten that my feet are walking streets she knows. All she knows now is that I’m far away. When they were here it was for a freedom desperately clawed out of a closeted way of life they were expected to appreciate. But I have all the freedoms they dreamed about, which means I had no excuse to leave.

***

Are you sure you won’t come back soon? My father says when I phone home. The bricks snuffle behind him.

Soon, I say. It is a word that never makes a liar of me.

***

The elderly woman stares fixedly at the younger woman’s pained face. But the younger woman is barely conscious of her companion. Pain makes us blind to others’ needs, I think. That’s what the caption that’s not in English probably says. We need to be kind to each other, even when other people aren’t kind to us. The pressure rests on ourselves, the only person whose reactions we can control. It must be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t see others’ pain.

***

My father wants me home to help him handle my mother. She doesn’t notice that I’m not there. Not really. Her pain creates blinkers. Focus. Endless lists. I could tell her I’ll be home for the funeral, that would cut through the pain, and she would be hurt in a whole new way. She wouldn’t understand that I only hurt her because I too am hurting. Would she forgive my cruelty like I forgive her blinkers? Or is her pain the summit, while mine scrabbles around at base camp?

***

There are schoolgirls behind me. They are laughing behind their hands. One of them inches forward, and points to a wrinkle on the elderly woman’s face that makes it look as though she has a moustache. Their giggles are uncontrolled.

I think about my mother and her sister standing here, awed by the world. Alive with freedom they’d never dreamed they could hold. I’ve lived this freedom daily, for decades, and all I dream of is companionship. Freedom, for me, has the scent of loneliness. That would not make any sense to my mother, if she had the brain space to hear me explain.

I step out of the gallery. The air is cold. I’m in the wrong hemisphere, but I take a deep breath of this precious, fought for freedom. And I call home, because I want to hear the bricks shuffling behind my father’s voice, the carpets sighing under his feet, the windows begging my mother to look outside, just once, while there is still light in the sky. My mother answers and launches into today’s list. It’s getting longer. Her days at work have stopped altogether.

When I get to the station I tell her I have to go, that I’ll lose the signal on the train. There is a pause, and I think I’ve lost her already. And then she says, your father needs you to come home. She says, he needs someone to keep him company.

And I feel something descending over my head with a weight heavier than the old woman’s kerchief. Expectation, perhaps. To share someone’s pain.

Of course, I say because she asked. The choice has been taken away from me by the asking and there is relief in the tightening of my freedom. Tell him I’ll be home soon, I say. It’s what grownups do.

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