A Hundred Small Lessons: A Novel - Hardcover

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Ashley Hay is the internationally acclaimed author of the novels A Hundred Small Lessons, The Body in the Clouds, and The Railwayman’s Wife, which was honored with the Colin Roderick Award by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, among numerous other accolades. She has also written four nonfiction books. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.

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A Hundred Small Lessons

1

Elsie’s house

IT WAS early on a winter’s morning when she fell—the shortest day of 2010, the woman on the radio said. From where Elsie lay, quite still and curled comfortably on the thick green carpet between the sofa and the sideboard, she could see how the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. The light caught the pattern on the linoleum and touched the little nests of dust that her broom had missed under the lip of the kitchen cupboards.

The bright triangle changed as the minutes passed, disappearing from the kitchen to pop up first in the back bedroom, then across the busy pattern of Nile green and white tiles in the bathroom. Later, in her own bedroom, it reached almost all the way across the floor to the thick rose-colored chenille of her bedspread, before it swung around further towards the west in search of the sunroom. The pile of the carpet, from where she lay, looked like neatly sheared blades of grass, the tidy job of mowing that Clem would have done.

There was something comforting about being this close to the topography of the house. She knew this place so well. She wasn’t sure if it was an extension of her, or she of it. So this was a new kind of exploration, noticing the way the floor sloped a little into the spare room, and how the beading sagged slightly on one segment of the ceiling.

Topography: she counted through the letters—ten. Geography; landscape. The answer to fourteen down in that morning’s crossword, where she’d been trying to make “projection” fit. She was losing her touch.

From outside, she could hear the kookaburra; he’d be looking for his food. You could set your watch by him, she thought. There were cars on the road, the squeak of the swing in the park, the rich buzz of aeroplanes climbing up from the airport, the chatter of lorikeets, corellas. All that activity; it was nice to lie still among it—although the kookaburra would be disappointed she’d put nothing out today. And then the house muttered a little too, its boards creaking and stretching as the day warmed.

It was a consoling sound.

They’d had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband’s, her children’s, and now their children’s in turn—echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.

“Reverb,” one of Don’s young boys had told her—Don’s own grandson, she supposed: her great-grandson then. The one with the noisy guitar. “Imagine it like this, Nan: layers of echoes arranged to make it sound like you’re in a great big space.”

Well, ‘reverb,’ she thought clearly. A nice word. She liked to keep abreast of what they knew, how they lived—their magic gadgets, their shiny new phones. Like this, Nan: one swipe and it turns on.

She swiped her fingers now against the thick green carpet. Yes, she could almost hear it. All those voices; all those years.

It was lunchtime, and then afternoon, and as the sun sank lower, she wondered how cold it might get, there on the floor, overnight. She was eighty-nine years old, and her bones were brittle and tired.

The neighbors came then, one to the front door, one to the back. “Elsie,” they called, “are you there, love? Are you right?”

“I’m not here,” she said, and lay still, wondering if she could turn her head far enough to see the fiery clouds of the sunset through the windows at the front of the house.

There were sirens in the street—she could see the reflections of blue and red flashing lights on the wallpaper above her head—and then a policeman broke in through the door. By whose authority, she thought she said, but no one seemed to hear and she was onto a stretcher and into an ambulance before she had time to realize she didn’t have her shoes.

Imagine leaving home without your shoes.

It was cold in the back of the ambulance and too bright. She wanted her cardigan. She wanted to sleep. If she could move her head slightly, she might see the steps, the porch, the battered front door. If she could lever herself up a bit more. But she couldn’t.

“Rightio, love.” The uniformed man was far too cheerful for his job.

Elsie closed her eyes. “I don’t think I’m ready to go.” Her voice, this time, quite loud and clear.

In the hospital, a fortnight later on, she thought they said she was going home, but it wasn’t her home they took her to. Some other place, with a bright new apartment for her, a view down to the river, a bell she could press for attention, and meals, if she preferred it, in a hall. She had her shoes now, and her cardigan—they were bringing her mountains of stuff for such a short stay.

“What’s that word? ‘Respite?’?” she said to Donny when he came one day at lunch.

“Sort of, Mum,” he said. “In a way.”

She’d signed some papers about some people she’d never heard of, a pair called Ben Carter and Lucy Kiss. Donny’s wife Carol said they had a little boy. But what was that to do with her? Were they tenants for her house while she was here?

“Sort of, Mum,” said Don again. “Yes. In a way.”

“Well, make sure they keep up the garden. Your father will never forgive me if that rockery goes wrong.”

Clem Gormley. Now, where was he? When did they say he’d be here?

“Ben Carter,” said Don, squaring the papers. “Lucy Kiss. I think we’ve made the right choice.”

Of course, she knew what was happening; she knew where she was. The facility, she’d always called it, with its apartments for the well ones, and rooms—then wards—for those who weren’t. It was just a stop or so on the bus along from her place, and its back fence butted the sports fields where Donny’s grandkids played. She could walk home from here, she thought. Be back in no time.

She’d lived in that house more than sixty years—nearly sixty-three, she worked out as she lay the first night in her new room in her old bed and her old, cold sheets. She could remember the day they moved in, the size of their loan so cripplingly vast that she never dared to speak of it to Clem. To even put it into words. Back when the house was fresh and new. The house whose lawns her husband had so carefully tended. Rest his soul: yes. That was it.

And yet in spite of so many years, the day she fell, the day she lay there on the floor, was the first time she’d seen the way the light moved from one room to another, tracking from the back of the house to the front, calling into corners, illuminating space.

Such a lovely thing to have seen, she thought. Such a lovely day to have spent.



The modest house was sold, as the real estate agent had promised, in next to no time. “A big block like this, with the park at the back, and the shops, and so close to the city—no trouble at all,” the agent had said.

Elsie’s children, the twins, Don and Elaine, came to empty the...