Great Reads for Great Readers

 

All the Words We Know, by Bruce Nash.

           

  
          Rose has dementia.  She is in her eighties and lives in a Rest Home – sorry, Aged Care Facility and spends her days on her walker, patrolling the corridors of the building checking on the other occupants.  And the staff, particularly the Angry Nurse (so named, when Rose can remember, because she seems to have a very short fuse where other staff members are concerned) and the Care Manager, who seems in Rose’s more lucid moments, anything but.  In fact he seems to spend a lot of time in his office talking ‘finance’ with Rose’s son, who seems to be ‘Resetting’ and ‘Retrenching’ Rose’s Rest Home affairs, for he has her Power of Eternal, though she confesses to her wheelchair-bound friend in the room next door that she has no idea what he does with it.

            And speaking of her friend, why is she sprawled on her back in the carpark, two floors down?  How could she have gotten out of her chair, let alone onto the windowsill, then launched herself into space?  And by the looks on the faces of the gathering crowd below, they are all wondering the same thing:  Did she fall, or was she pushed?  Which is exactly what Rose is asking herself whenever that phrase enters her mind only to depart just as quickly, especially as she ends up being shifted from her lovely room with a view of the garden (so many memories, if only she can keep hold of them!) to her friend’s room with nothing to look at but the carpark.

            Things have to change, thinks Rose, before the thought skitters away, but she has to enlist help from others whose memories are more reliable, like the Nice Trans Boy Who Mops the Floors, and the other resident Who Doesn’t Live Here, before she becomes the next victim.  (That’ll teach her to say ‘Im not afraid of you!’ to the Angry Nurse, for Rose is afraid, very afraid).

            And when Rose is not frightened, she reflects on her son and daughter, dutifully visiting day after day with her granddaughters who have the fastest cell-phone thumbs in the universe;  what good children they are to care about an old lame-brain like her, and how she wished she’d been a better mum when it counted, instead of the selfish cow that she actually was.

            Life is full of regrets, but Paul Nash has given us a gem of a character with which to explore them and the wrong end of life – and she cheats shamelessly at Scrabble:  Zbtosmty.  That is really a word - Rose will swear to it!  FIVE STARS.