The story of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 7, 2013

It was his email that intrigued me:

‘You have no clue what really happens when you get old. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada.’

Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following day, on a whim, I drive out to the aged care home. It’s a secure facility. A cleaner notices me waiting expectantly on the visitor’s side of the door. She punches in the security code, then pads noiselessly away on her soft soles, leaving me to guess which of the deserted corridors to search first. I inhale that haunting scent – the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. It’s the same miasma I recall from the nursing home where my Nan died – the smell of confinement, unease and antiseptic.

I knock gently on the door of Room 19 and hear a chair scrape as someone gets up to open the door. “I told her you’d come!” Carl beams at me. “Come and meet my beauty.”

He still has his veteran’s pride: khaki trousers with a sharp crease up the thigh, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, shiny chestnut brogues. Only his hearing aid and the Velcro bandage gripping his wrist hint at any outward signs of decline.

His wife, Ada, is slumped awkwardly in the bed, a slip of a woman in a voluminous cream nightie dotted with cornflowers. Her spindly arms and papery skin stand out in relief against the fat, dimpled pillows stacked behind her. She’s breathing noisily, her lids drooped over cloudy eyes. Carl smooths a wayward wisp of her fairy floss hair.

“She’s not coming back to me is she?” We both know the answer. “Two of her brothers had Parkinsons” he continues, “and now she’s started with the tremors. I give her a kiss and she gives me ten in return!” We both smile.

A nurse rattles in with lunch and briskly suggests we wait outside. “Ada’s refusing to eat,” Carl explains, and leads me to two plastic chairs in the corridor.

He is surprisingly buoyant. “This is my world now. Sitting with her hour after hour, then going home to a cold bed. I want you to write what it’s like to grow old: always looking back at life over your shoulder.”

He points to an elderly gent leaning precariously forward in his wheelchair. “That’s Ray,” Carl says. The wheelchair’s foot rests are folded up and out of the way and Ray is using his slippered feet to inch along the carpet. “The week after he moved here to be with his wife, she passed away. He doesn’t realise she’s gone. He spends his whole day shuffling from room to room looking for her.” Ray looks searchingly at me as he edges his wheelchair past us: “Do you know where they’ve taken her?” I am moved to tears.

Carl stares at the burgundy leaf-pattern in the carpet while I collect myself. “I met Ada on the bus, you know,” he says. “I came to Fremantle after the war. I was a frontline interpreter. I’m Dutch, but I speak four languages so the Yanks wanted me.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out a small plastic sleeve. He tips a pebble into my hand. “Grenade” he tells me. “They took this shrapnel out of me leg. I howled like a baby. Ada always told me I was a big sook.”

“She tricked me into marrying her, you know,” he says. “I’m Catholic. My family back home didn’t want no Church of England girl. She says to me one day: Can you take me to Hehir street?”

“I know that street” I says to her. “Little church there.”

“We arrive at the church and the priest says to me: Know what you’re here for?”

“Ada had gone and got herself converted. We got married three weeks later.” He leans into me and says: “You girls got your ways of getting your man!”

We’re allowed back into Ada’s room. “She still won’t eat” the nurse tells Carl, as she pushes the lunch trolley out the door. He lifts Ada’s limp arm and nestles it in his. The veins at her wrist are ropey and tinged with green. The lingering remains of a soft-pink manicure stain her nails.

Carl reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a hand mirror with a long gilt handle. He holds it so Ada can see her reflection: “Look at those rosy cheeks!” he coos, but Ada doesn’t register.

“I just want my wife back,” he says. I see a tear slide down his cheek.

He leans in and plants a kiss on Ada’s slackened mouth. We sit in silence by her bedside. Ada shifts in the bed, swallows uncomfortably. Her eyes focus, settling on her husband. Her voice is trembly with the effort of speech but there’s no mistaking what she whispers: “I see a beautiful face.” And then she turns her head away and stares unblinkingly at the door.

Ada Caubo – 24/3/1928 – 13/11/13