Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

In your experience.

I’m sure I would have remembered one.

Dodge was incontinent.

I think it was her porcelain bladder. It pressed in on her. Towards the end she rarely even left the flat, and if she ever had to she was so relieved to get back she usually sank into the sofa and stayed there until I came home from school and took away whatever it was she’d bought rum, tobacco, some flowers, a bolt of fabric. A hatchet. No only on Fridays. She didn’t go out other days. Once she did but I wouldn’t clear up the shopping dumped by the sofa on my entrall. Fuk this shit I said I hav rites. One evening I found her sitting at her desk by the window, her fingers gripping her pencil to a shopping list. She wore her hat and her gloves already. Her hounds tooth coat had slipped down from the arm of the sofa and her bladder had gone. I opened my mouth but stopped there. Above her hand, clamped shut forever, her pearls winked with the motes turning briefly in the levelling sun. All those years she had been like a mother to me.

When I was older I didn’t ask her where I came from anymore but then she had a nauseating habit of telling stories. She would dredge up all the people who ever came or went from the flat and the more often she told a story the more they slid around. By the time exhaustion took over and even the words began to loosen from her sentences the only thing that was staying where it started was the furniture. Even the photo albums were too many. It became harder to tell apart those that had been inherited. You could find a pair of neatly creased serge trousers in every one but together they covered at least a hundred years and some had been taken on the Riviera and some came from cities we had never known. Dodge was a collector. Photo albums were cheap and her favourites.

I used to leaf through them myself during the brief periods she called for silence. One afternoon in the school holidays I lay beneath a window in the living room with an album whose scribble of blue ink spelled Summer 2. Under it flew an embossed bow as slim as infinity. Dodge was out. I was turning the pages slowly in the glassed heat when I saw something I had seen before, come unstuck from the grey cardboard mount and slipped down to the spine of the album. Not the photo but that blur of hooped skirts in the sand, a loosened fist by a clutter of soiled plates and tumblers and those spots in the ocean. I had been here. Where the sand is hot but you have to take off your socks and walk on it. And, oh the wind in your face, the salt wind that massive breath that smacks you up as the grains rise between your toes like yeast. Warm glass powder that stars your feet on the way to the water. Obliterated conches. Voices glance over the surface from the boys in the deep. They used to look awkward dandled by the unbroken waves but now they can dive and when they turn their shoulders to the water their blades wink in the sun. And the sand burns your feet. You are in the water and it’s good to float in the fold between the sky and the sea. The sea! Whose hand was that. You are lifted in the belly of a wave, held by an upward weight then hurled through stinging stuff up all the holes in your face over feet over face in the white water. It carries you into the sand. You struggle up to your knees and vomit. I felt sick in the flat. The carpet seemed to be slipping me out so I sat up against the mullions. When I closed my eyes I could see the whole dead day again. It happened more than once.

Eliza looked at her watch. What have you been living on this past week.

On the cash left over in the house. Dodge went to the bank every month and she kept what she withdrew in that tin box over there. With the coroner’s fee and the funeral costs it’s almost empty now. I was waiting for you to arrive before we went to the bank. Eliza looked me up and down again and bit her lip.

Are they Dodge’s clothes.

At this I could not avoid tucking the faded skirt of a gabardine pinafore between my knees. It had been royal blue once apparently. Dodge had kept everything bought for her since she was a girl so if I ripped my stockings climbing over the sandstone crenulations of the school steps she just opened a drawer in her dresser rolled away the mothballs and shook out a new pair, like the last glimpse of a disturbed octopus beige turning coral pink. There were even shoes wrapped in oilcloth tucked away on the mother of pearl paper with the gloves and scarfs. You had to be careful of those mothballs though, a new stocking might contain a painful grain. Indeed the versicles were there from the beginning, between her howling and my own, I will always have that to fall back on when I run out of connecting words. I also inherited hats, and bloomers with slugs of thread where the silk had rotted off. We were economical.

Where did Dodge get her money. Do you know.

I shook my head. Some kind of pension I guess. She never worked. But like I said we didn’t spend much. That is. I raised my hand as if I might have pointed at something in the room but it fell in a limp arc at my side. There wasn’t much need. She only ever went to the hospital once as far as I remember despite the things that were wrong with her. There was no expensive treatment. The money she put in the tin box was never any more or less than it was at the beginning. I had no real pocket money, I thought it worth underlining. I didn’t mind dressing like this. I liked the clothes.

Over the pinafore provided it isn’t only more natural lard to cover up what has long since beaten a retreat, I had on a rib knitted cardigan if you can believe it, orphinon, with one, elliptic celadon wafer button; celadon yes, it fell between my margins of error, for the other I go by the gardener’s method, if it’s possible to use such an expression without foundations, plunging the first stake into my own hearth. Should have been born in Carrefour. Eliza eyed them in all seriousness and said they look good. I wondered if I dressed like her mother. She said no her mother didn’t wear anything anymore. Slept like a baby. Of course Eliza still dressed like a cowgirl, a plaid shirt rolled above her elbows, football socks.

What exactly was wrong with her.

At first it was just incontinence. Then the bladder cancer. It can be difficult to treat once you find it because by then it’s usually advanced. Sometimes there are no symptoms, and anyway Dodge was so acrazed she might not have noticed if there had been. Maybe she did notice and she was just scrimping.

Something almost like a smile had been curling up in Eliza’s face for some time and it broke then in a ripple of hilarious twitches. So you think she lived on a pension.

What else.

Heritance you never heard of.

I shook my head.

When the older Roses died they left everything to their daughters. I guess Mum settled with Dodge before she left for the farm and maybe she took more because Dodge stayed behind in the flat but it can’t have been a lot more when everything was weighed in the balance and she’s bought land and a fifty thousand head of sheep with her bit and has got them through the drought so far without using it up.

How much.

I don’t know. That’s two million dollars’ worth of sheep though.

I trust I am remembering that number correctly. As it was, until our time together I had handled only a very small amount of cash (some inescapable expenses carried in coins in the pocket of my school dress but everything else Dodge saw to herself, writing cheques wherever she could with an ostensive if incomprehensible scruple apparent in absolutely nothing else) and so it must have been from lack of contact that this information was absorbed by me as with the infamously immediate and arresting force of pure theory. Her words came and went as a revelation, everything in the wake of that great property expanding into so many impalpable and inadequate dividers, being at first just a vague tergiversation and then as if the same abstract shades that had clabbered every particle in the flat turned for a moment as full and fleeting as a rush of oxygen into a spumous surplus, leaving me floating in their airy mould, surprised. I had never made plans, being by nurture far from pleonectic. I made some.