Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

“I hope you slept well,” says Wilma.

“I had such a dream!” says Tobias. “Purple. Maroon. It was very sexual, with music.”

His dreams are frequently very sexual, with music. “It ended well, I hope?” she says. She’s overusing the word hope today.

“Not very well,” says Tobias. “I committed a murder. It woke me up. What shall we have today? The oat creations, or the bran ones?” He never pronounces the actual names of the dry breakfast cereals in Wilma’s repertoire: he finds them banal. Soon he will make a remark about the absence of good croissants in this place, or indeed of any croissants whatsoever.

“You choose,” she says. “I’ll have a mixture.” Bran for the bowels, oats for the cholesterol, though the experts keep changing their minds about that. She hears him rummaging: he’s familiar with her small kitchenette, he knows where the packages are kept. Here at the Manor, lunch and dinner are served in the dining room, but they have their breakfasts in their own apartments; those of them in the Early Assisted Living wing, that is. In the Advanced Living wing, things are different. She hasn’t wished to imagine exactly how different.

There’s a clanking of plates, a rattle of cutlery: Tobias is setting out their breakfast on the small table over by the window. He’s a dark shape silhouetted against the bright glaring square of daylight.

“I’ll get the milk,” says Wilma. She can do that much, at least: open the mini-fridge door, locate the cool plasti-coated cardboard oblong, carry it to the table without spilling.

“It’s done,” says Tobias. Now he’s grinding the coffee, a miniature buzz-saw whirr. He doesn’t tell the story today about how much better it would be to grind the coffee in a hand grinder, a red one with a brass handle, as was the custom in his youth, or possibly in the youth of his mother. In somebody’s youth. Wilma is familiar with this red, brass-handled coffee grinder. It’s as if she once owned it herself, though she never did. Yet she feels its loss; it’s become part of her inventory, it’s joined the other objects that she has in fact lost.

“We should have eggs,” says Tobias. Sometimes they do, though the last occasion was a minor disaster. Tobias boiled the eggs but not enough, so Wilma made a shambles of hers, and it squirted all over her front. Taking the top off the shell is a precise operation: she can no longer aim the spoon with accuracy. Next time she’ll suggest an omelette, though that may be beyond the culinary skills of Tobias. Maybe if she directs him, step by step? No, too hazardous: she wouldn’t want him to get burned. Something in the microwave, perhaps; some baked French toast affair. A cheese strata; she used to make those, when she had a family. But how to find a recipe? And then follow it. Maybe there are audio recipes?

They sit at the table, munching their cereals, which are brittle and cindery and take a lot of chewing. The sound inside her head, thinks Wilma, is of crisp snow underfoot, or of Styrofoam packing peanuts. Maybe she should switch to a softer cereal option, like instant porridge. But Tobias might disdain her for even mentioning such a thing: he scorns anything instant. Bananas: she’ll try for bananas. They grow on trees, or plants, or bushes. He can’t possibly object to bananas.

“Why do they make them into circles?” Tobias says, not for the first time. “These oat things.”

“It’s the shape of an O,” Wilma says. “O for oat. It’s a sort of pun.” Tobias shakes his blobby head against the light.

“A croissant would be preferable,” he says. “These also are made in a shape, a crescent, from when the Moors almost captured Vienna. I do not see why. .” But he breaks off. “Something is happening at the gate.”

Wilma has binoculars, sent to her by her Alyson for viewing birds, though the birds she had managed to view were mainly starlings and the binoculars aren’t of use to her any more. Her other daughter sends mostly slippers; Wilma has a glut of slippers. Her son sends postcards. He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that she can no longer read his handwriting.

She keeps the binoculars on the windowsill, and Tobias wields them to survey the grounds: the curved driveway; the lawn with its clipped shrubs — she remembers those from when she first came here, three years ago — the fountain with a replica of a famous Belgian statue, a naked angel-faced boy urinating into a stone basin; the high brick wall; the imposing gateway with its overhead arch and its two ostentatious, depressed-looking stone lions. The Manor was once a mansion in the countryside, back when people built mansions, back when there was a countryside. Hence the lions, most likely.

Sometimes there’s nothing to be seen by Tobias except the usual comings and goings. Every day there will be visitors — “civilians,” Tobias calls them — marching briskly from the guest car park towards the main door, bearing a potted begonia or geranium, hauling a young, reluctant grandchild, summoning up false cheer, hoping to get this rich-old-relative thing over with as fast as possible. There will be staff, both medical and cooking/cleaning, who drive in through the gate and then around to the staff parking and the side doors. There will be snazzily painted delivery vans bringing groceries and washed linens, and sometimes flower arrangements ordered up by guilty family members. The less dapper vehicles, such as the garbage collection trucks, have an ignominious back-entrance gate of their own.

Every once in a while there’s a drama. An inhabitant of the Advanced Living wing will escape despite all precautions, and will be seen wandering aimlessly, in pyjamas or partly clothed, peeing here and there — an activity welcome in a cherubic fountain ornament but not acceptable in a decrepit human being — and there will be a mild-mannered but efficient chase to surround the errant one and lead him back inside. Or her: sometimes it’s a her, though the men seem to take more initiative in escaping.

Or an ambulance will arrive and a brace of paramedics will hurry in, carrying their equipment — “like the war,” Tobias once remarked, though he must have been referring to films because he hasn’t been in any wars that Wilma is aware of — and then after a while they will exit at a more leisurely pace, wheeling a shape on a gurney. You can’t tell from here, says Tobias as he peers through the binoculars, whether the body is alive or dead. “Maybe you can’t even tell from down there,” he’s been known to add as a sepulchral joke.

“What is it?” Wilma asks now. “Is it an ambulance?” There haven’t been sirens: she’s sure of that, she still hears quite well. It’s at times like this that her disability is most discouraging to her. She’d rather see for herself; she doesn’t trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back. Protecting her, he’d call it. But she doesn’t want to be protected in that way.

Perhaps in response to her frustration, a phalanx of little men forms up on the windowsill. No women this time, it’s more like a march-past. The society of the tiny folk is socially conservative: they don’t let women into their marches. Their clothing is still green, but a darker green, not so festive. Those in the front rows have practical metal helmets. In the ranks behind them the costumes are more ceremonial, with gold-hemmed capes and green fur hats. Will there be miniature horses later on in the parade? It’s been known to happen.

Tobias doesn’t answer at once. Then he says, “Not an ambulance. Some sort of picketing. It looks organized.”

“Maybe there’s a strike,” says Wilma. But who among the workers at Ambrosia Manor would be striking? The cleaners would have the most reason, they’re underpaid; but they’re also the least likely, being illegal at worst, and at best in strong need of the money.