My skin wretches in relief and muscles relax in my arched back, as the scolding flow from the shower ceases as I twist the golden faucet tight. I stand still and heave a deep breath out as normal feeling returns to my near blistered and long-since worn-out body. I amble out of the recess that houses the shower – wet-room, they call it. Little do they realize that I’ve only just gotten completely used to the idea of a bathroom.
Bathroom. In Dakota (when it was just Dakota) you had a tin bath, and you shared it with your siblings - after your father. (But, most likely, he wasn’t around that particular evening, anyway.) This bathroom is bigger than the house I grew up in. And all this marble. How they forget - I’ve seen Napoleon’s tomb.
I lean hunched against one of the rails they insisted I install – because they think I am so very old, so brittle… so weak. I’m just tired.
I compose myself and dry off my body, which can take a while as daydreaming always comes to me at this point. I wince at the mirror as I catch sight of an old man grappling with one of my monogrammed towels. The wince is, of course, just for show; trying to mislead myself just like the snake oil man of my past misled hundreds of people out of hundreds of their dollars. It’s the hardest thing in the world to concede defeat to time.
I finish with the towel, hang it over the rack – and, naturally, it slides off, but it’s more than my spine’s worth to try and pick it up. They would chide me for a little humour like that. If, that is to say, they were listening.
I scoff. At something, or nothing. This stirs the attention of Dutch, my old bloodhound - as long in the tooth as his master and proving all too well the adage that dog and master grow alike; in temperament and appearance. I drape myself in the heavy toweled bathrobe, letting it absorb the remaining moisture on my skin.
He follows me out into the bedchamber, both of us making slow, weary progress. I sit myself down on the edge of the bed for a breather and Dutch nudges his muzzle against my knee, we share a look of mutual understanding.
Our moment is brought to an abrupt end as my negro valet, Pete, enters and I am filled with the energy that authority provides as necessity. “Mornin’, Mr. Burke,” he says with a familiar nod, I reply in kind. His youngest child has a fever. Nothing serious. His wife has taken her to the doctor.
I rise and Pete lays out the appropriate outfit for the day. He doesn’t dress me, I still reserve that luxury for myself. Pete leaves. Heavy Oxford cotton shirt, dark cords and a thick cardigan to resist the chill outdoors.
I leave my cane where it rests by the bedside. The hip isn’t so bad today. Dutch lays like a half-filled sack by the warmth of the fireplace embers, these days he comes when he pleases. As I leave the room I tap the glass covering a painting of my favourite horse for luck.
I tread down the stairs to commence the first of the rituals that have come to consume my last days. Hours? I wonder. Hope?
Breakfast is, at least, a fairly essential ritual as the quacks tell us it kick-starts the engines and stokes the fires of productivity. Or, at least, that’s what I would’ve told my boys back in the camps. On the other hand, for me personally, you could say it’s a fairly unessential ritual. To whit; what fires? What productivity?
Sal bustles in like a human dessert cart with my ritual breakfast. Porridge oats. Not the sweet ‘n’ creamed kind but salted so as you know you’re eating something. Sal has worked in this house since there was a house; she has fed her porridge, her biscuits and her peach cobbler to three generations of Burkes. Not that my grandchildren scuff the marble with their presence so much as I have to call a mason. But Sal, or so she would have us believe, enjoys no activity more than cooking and I have never been one to deny anyone the light of their days.
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