Meatloaf in Manhattan by Robert Power Read Free Book Online Page A

came from, but that’s about the sum of all that’s left. Mother, I’m not sure what I’ll do now. I’m on my own I suppose.
    There’s some music coming from the building. Through one of the long windows in the hallway I can see a couple dancing, a nurse playing the piano, an old man on the accordion. The couple turn round slowly, a man and a woman, both in stockinged feet. Some others join them. In ones and twos, circling around to the strains of the music. Hypnotised. Caught in the moment.
    My mother is tapping me on the arm.
    â€˜Mine,’ she says, offering the handbag for my inspection. ‘My things.’
    I take it from her. I release the clasp and the bag yawns open.
    â€˜My things,’ repeats my mother, nodding her head, urging me to delve into the bag. I look inside. It is full to the brim with silver paper wrappers from chocolate bars, squeezed into tiny balls. I pick one out and roll it around the palm of my hand.
    â€˜Lovely,’ I say, ‘like jewels.’
    She smiles, her face relaxes and I can see a trace of the mother I once held so dear. Then the twist of her mouth turns to a scowl. She stares intently into my face. So close I can feel the breath murmuring from her lips.
    â€˜Thief,’ she screams. ‘Thief … this strange man steals. He’s taken everything from me. He takes all my things.’
    She grabs the ball of silver paper from my hand and puts it in her mouth. She takes a handful of balls from the bag, knocking it to the floor, the rest of the balls spilling across the paving stones like mercury. I lean down to retrieve the bag. When I look up again she has stuffed all the silver paper into her mouth, chomping and chewing. Behind her a lilac tree hangs blossom like bunches of purple grapes. I feel numbed and detached, almost separate from the scene. An image from the flood comes to me. Not the tumult and swollen bodies bobbing in the water, nor the thunderous sounds of the wind and waves. It was the morning after, when things had quietened down, a flock of birds, cormorants I think they were, flying in a perfect arrow overhead. They cut through the sky as if to signal the contrariness of it all; the shape of normalcy as a reminder that all would return to how it was, how it would be. I followed the line of their flight, shielding my eyes with my hand from the brightness of the sun. They squawked at me and I watched them as they settled in the upper branches of a huge ghost gum up on the hill.
    It was a glorious blue-skied morning after the storm. I was standing on the railway platform after another sleepless night in the makeshift tent, where the cries and coughs of my companions had rasped through the long hours of darkness. There was a little rivulet of mucky water dribbling along the tracks. When I looked down I could see a baby’s cardigan caught up in the railway sleeper. I picked it up. It was bedraggled and stretched, but I could make out the carefully crocheted stitching. One tiny heart button hung from a thread as if torn from an infant chest. At that moment I had felt as if something had been lost from my life. Now, standing here in the shade of a lilac tree the feeling returns. In my numbness nothing seems strange to me. Nothing is unusual. Not even my own mother, blood and lipstick running down her chin. I try to hold her hand but she pulls away.
    â€˜Poisoner,’ she screams, blood and silver paper falling from her mouth. ‘I am being poisoned by this poisoner,’ she shouts at the top of her voice.
    Someone hears our drama. A door opens and shuts and the nurse appears, running across the lawn.
    â€˜Mrs Daly,’ she says gently, sitting down beside my mother. ‘Open your mouth.’
    My mother grips her jaws closed, the blood forming a two-tier line of lipstick. She swallows hard, choking and spluttering, suffocating on blood and silver foil. The nurse slaps her hard on the back. An explosion of fiery,