Fresh Dead Skin

A beige brick building. Planted in concrete. Carefully dressed up with unnaturally square hedges. Fenced off from the busy suburban roadside with a barrier of green iron and spikes. All beige and green. Garnished with a tall Aussie flag whipping in sharp wind and a sign that reads Maurice Zeffert Nursing Home in large, affable font. I skip my way along the concrete path that leads to a large automatic door, my knockoff IPad being my overwhelming focus. Mum fiddles with the immobiliser and awkwardly grapevines her way over to me. The entry room is immediately warm and slightly musty just as I remembered. I haven't visited here since I was eight when I saw my great auntie getting spoon fed; slumpy, shaky and comatose.

Down a corridor and around a corner. Edith's room was small and she shared it with another woman, I'll call her Agnes, who complained a lot. Edith's bed directly faced the door. When she lay on it she could look left and see Agnes complaining or look right and see a large analogue clock on her bedside table. Sometimes she would look underneath herself and see white bedsheets but mostly she just stared at the fluoro light above her bed. Her eyes were too sore to read. There was no artwork on the walls, no flowers or greenery in fine vases, just white cupboards containing gauzes, bedpans and other contraptions for the clumsy and illness inclined residents. Thankfully Agnes wasn't there that day. Edith had, had enough of hearing her complain about how the last three people had died in the bed she was lying in. I showed her Angry birds on my IPad, then a nurse came in. "We have to change your dressings now darling, m'kay.", Said the potato sack bellied nurse. Edith braced herself and nodded tautly, lying flat against the bed and stared hard at the fluoro.

The nurse unwound the stretchy bandage from the back of Edith's right heel. Then she carefully peeled the fluffy cotton pad away from the edges of the bare, sinewy wound. A few small cotton tangles sticking and then slowly sliding free from her flesh. Wincing, I grab my grandma's hands. After that I saw a neatly packed cluster of purple cotton balls. I stared while a cotton ball was removed from the heel, then another and then four more. Eight new cotton balls were soaked in iodine while I stared at the crater. I expected an ulceration, I didn't expect bone. I embrace her tight rigour grip, her warm fatty fingers around mine so thin. Her eyebrows trying to knit themselves together with sharp needles. Fresh iodine deep against her bone, mushing her stinging flesh. It's only my hands that stopped her from thrashing, that kept her legs in place. Only her head seemed to try and inch her body away from the iodine. Constantly whipping from left to right against her soft pillow. Her guttural wails felt jarring in the small nursery room. Never had I heard a more honest sound.

Afterwards, I kneeled next to her bed feeling the hard, white laminate against the nobbles of my knees. All my energy is focused on her quickly moving chest, small wheezy pants and very knitted brow. I grab her soft plump hands and feel them tug and twitch at random intervals. She slowly turns her head towards me and settles for a moment. Probing me with her raisin like eyes. The unmistakeable glint of a smile settles on her face. Her hand twitches and I twitch back. Naturally I look up hard into the blaring fluoro. In my mind I say, "Dear God, please stop my grandma from feeling pain or let her die. Amen."

The phone call came from my mother's bedroom. It was very late that night and I was swaddled in my doona, fast asleep. The noise woke me immediately. I took wobbly steps down the pitch-black, book-lined hallway and felt my way around the wooden doorframe of my mother's bedroom. Mum's face was lit by her phone in the otherwise black room. I already knew what the phone call was about. It's three in the morning. "Did she die?", she exclaimed. Then she sobbed.

I lay with mum, she cried a bit. I didn't feel anything identifiable and I wondered if I was a psychopath. I told her I was happy she had died. Then I said that came out wrong. She said she knew what I meant. Forty-five minutes later we drove to the nursing home. I watched all the new grey houses blur past. I tripped on the curb next to the parking space but caught myself. My legs followed mum inside. I planted myself on the entry room bench and saw that my uncle took my mum to see the body. My hands clutched the wood, hard. The middle-aged woman at the desk with the wiry auburn bob said, "I'm so sorry". I cried into her expression, then I stared at an indoor plant and tried to work out if it was plastic.

My eyes refocus on a passing dust particle. It's tiny, white and flaky and floating gently upwards into a shaft of light coming from a small high-up window. Then I notice just how many tiny, white flakes are in view. If dust is dead skin, I'm showering in it.

My uncle came out from the hidden room. It would be good for you to see her." I shake my head, my eyebrows furrowed. "I don't want to see her." He leans in for what seems like a hug ... "Come on now." He says as he drags me off the bench. All my fear made me claw the air. Only a corridor and around a corner. A body. Not Edith. "NO! It won't help me. I don't need to. Let me go. I won't regret it." My face contorted, my limbs cycling. Suddenly I'm struck with a kind of fear, as I realise she may still be in the room with me. That possibly anywhere I'll ever be in the future, there will be a bit of dust, a bit of dead person floating past. That each time I breathe, I'm breathing in a little bit of death.

*****

I shake my head and relax back into the settee: Downing another wine and watching the dust float past. I take a deep breath, and accept to my body: another round of fresh dead skin.