There Should Be More Dancing (15 page)

Parts of life were just too hard. Most of the time Judith just wanted to kick back, succumb to stretchy clothes, treat herself to cheap pedicures and lunch at shopping-complex food halls, watch Ellen and Oprah or go to daytime movies. She always had to be so damned nice to everyone, when most of the time she was fighting an urge to eat cake or buy something to make herself feel better. And just at that moment she was trapped on Sydney Road with a full bowel and her stomach trying to process what felt like shattered windscreen. Her lunch – fermenting psyllium and grapefruit – was reacting gaseously with her new diet tablets. Just yesterday she'd felt a small, sticky
viscosity when she'd passed wind, and now she wanted to fart again but was afraid of her boiling lower abdomen. She wished she could drive to her mother's breezy outdoor toilet to let go, feel safe and empty, have a cup of tea and eat her mother's slightly stale Arnott's Assorted Creams. She pressed down on her buttocks, tooted and wound down the window. ‘For fuck's sake!'

Barry's shirt was discarded on the bare floor, his trousers bunched around his knees and his head rested on Charmaine's thin shoulder, his comb-over flipped like a wedge of cantaloupe on the side of his head. He was staring through the venetians at the back of the For Sale board attached to the front fence, and Charmaine was staring at the ceiling, her blouse and bra pushed up under her armpits and her small, strangled breasts pointing at the walls. Her pink skirt was gathered around her firm brown waist and her panties hung from one waxed, tanned ankle. Beneath them the mattress cover was ruched and their gluey, tenderly sore genitals throbbed faintly.

Barry looked lovingly up into Charmaine's nose, a straight nose that ended a little too pointedly. ‘I love you, Charmaine. You're warm and tender.'

‘And I own
two
houses now.'

Barry raised his head, looked around the bare room. ‘How much did you say you offered?'

‘Two seventy-five.' Her voice ran away to somewhere in the empty house.

He whistled, long and appreciatively. ‘Very smart.'

‘Warm, tender, smart and hungry,' she said, rolling away. She sat up, found her iPhone, summoned the internet, typed in
Pizza
and
Campbellfield
. ‘You don't have to be home?'

‘No.' He stood up, wiping his groin with the bottom of his singlet.

‘Hawaiian?'

‘Yep. And a can of coke. Two seventy-five. Wow, bargain.'

Brandon, the Corrective Services officer, was typing on his computer while Anita watched him, her arms crossed, chewing her cheek, legs jigging. The office window was slightly open, and the strident sounds of irritated Thursday-afternoon commuters spiked into the stuffy little office.

He nodded, typing. ‘How's the job?'

‘No worries.'

‘Ruby?'

‘Splendid.'

‘Still living with your mother in the flat?'

‘Yes,' she said, crossing her legs and her fingers.

He typed on. ‘Must be crowded.'

Please, God
, she prayed,
don't let him announce he needs to visit
. ‘We're moving soon,' she said cheerfully. ‘To a house. In fact, we're moving in a week or two, so we're in a bit of a mess at the moment.'

‘A house? That'll eat into your Disneyland savings.'

‘I've given up smoking, save fifty dollars a week.' His typing paused. ‘Alright then, eighty dollars a week.' She twisted her mouth to chew the inside of the other cheek.

He stopped typing, rested his arms on his desk, linked his fingers together and stared at her. She held his gaze, and he knew that if he looked at her long enough he could make her cry, but there was urgency in her eyes –
I'm doing my best
.

‘I'll let you know when we've moved, then you can drop in,' she said, her voice soft.

‘Keeping away from trouble?'

The question he was asking was to do with Raymond, her latest troublesome so-called flatmate. She laughed, grabbing the
armrests. ‘I'll be in trouble if I don't collect Ruby from school on time.'

He looked at his watch. Outside, a tram rang its bell,
ding ding
.

‘Sorry I was late.' She jerked her head to the road outside. ‘Traffic jam.'

‘I heard it. Traffic backed up as far as Coburg.' She started to reach for her handbag, but stopped herself.

‘See you next time,' he said, and Anita bolted from the chair. He watched her fire-truck-red hair flashing through the glass partitions as she ran for the stairs. From the window he watched her dart across Sydney Road, a cigarette in her mouth, feeling around in her work basket for a lighter. ‘Please don't get a speeding ticket,' he said.

While the kettle boiled, Mrs Parsons unpacked her shopping, then took two asprin and her cup of tea to her lounge room, where she sat under her standard lamp, running her magnifying glass over the lines in her historical romance,
The Unlocking of a Lady
. Eventually, the sound of the motorcycle colliding with the car and the scrape of metal on bitumen faded, and she was able to immerse herself in the intense passions of the free-spirited Countess Augustine Scarlette and her efforts to save her childhood friend, Lady Louisa, from a loveless marriage in a far-off county, many, many days' ride by coach from her distant home and large, loving family. Mrs Parsons read all the chapters on Lady Louisa's anguish at not being able to get home to see her dying father, and Countess Augustine's unexpected feelings of intense passion when she fell hopelessly, unexpectedly in love with Bede, the Earl of faraway Berkenshire, Lady Louisa's betrothed. Then she put her book aside, rolled her creaky little shoulders and moved carefully to the side window and pulled the blind down. When her neighbour came, Margery apologised again for the
motorcyclist, and Mrs Parsons said, 'Sometimes there's nothing you can do about how things turn out.'

Margery untied her laces. ‘Are you sure you're not hurt?'

‘Quite sure,' she said, and to reassure her she followed Margery to the front gate, shuffling along as effortlessly as she could. It was a lovely evening, the sun low, huge and orange in the sky. ‘God's provided a lovely sunset,' she said, and Margery agreed it was a lovely evening.

‘Thank you for all you've done,' Mrs Parsons said. ‘You're very kind.'

She watched Margery walk home, a bent old lady, careful-footed, reaching for the fence posts for reassurance, the hem of her floral shift lifted because of her stoop, like Mrs Parsons' own stoop. For an instant Mrs Parsons wanted to say she appreciated Margery being there, appreciated being included but not asked questions, not pried at like nosey Pat always did, but it might cause Margery concern, so she let the impulse go. At her kitchen table she opened her handbag and took the birthday card from her purse. After a minute sitting there with her biro poised over the card, she put it down and sat back, looking down at her folded hands in her lap. Some time later, she had a few bites from a slice of bread with jam and butter before dropping it in the backyard for the birds.

On her return from her yard, Mrs Parsons opened the grate on her stove and placed her purse in the thin layer of grey ash next to a little tin of her precious memorabilia, then made her way slowly towards her bedroom. It was then that she heard her front gate squeak open. She stopped, her eyes wide, then, like falling rocks –
bang, bang, bang
– three sharp strikes of the doorknocker, the thud of metal on wood rattling the windows and shaking the landscape print on her passage wall. She hurried to the front door, her laces clicking on the linoleum, stumbling to fall against the wall on her
way. When she finally wrenched the door open, there was no one there, so she hurried across her narrow verandah, eased herself down her front steps and tottered out through her gate, but there was no one. The street was empty, quiet except for Fifi yapping hoarsely in Kevin's arms across the street.

‘It's kids from the commission flats,' he called. ‘They were in the park earlier. I've phoned the police.'

Mrs Parsons went back inside, leaned against the door, her breath shaky and inadequate, tears wetting the soft brown crinkles under her eyes. It was her second fright of the day. From the wireless, Dame Janet Baker sang to her, ‘
Yes, press my eyelids close, 'tis well, Yes, press my eyelids close, 'tis well, But far the rapid fancies fly, The rolling worlds of wave and shell,  And all the lands where corals lie
,' and Mrs Parsons sighed again, and saw in her mind a palm tree reaching across a white beach towards rolling green waves and her family as they were when she left them more than sixty years ago; a staircase of brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, uncles and nieces, nephews and neighbours, and her parents, gathered together at the edge of the airstrip, their brown arms waving goodbye. With the birthday card in her hand, she dismissed any hopes of a visitor and turned instead into the second bedroom where she sat on the narrow, blue bedspread. In the kitchen Janet Baker sang, ‘
Thy lips are like a sunset glow, Thy smile is like a morning sky, Yet leave me, leave me, let me go, And see the land where corals lie
.'

At nine-thirty that night Pud rounded the corner to see her mother's van – Free Skin Biology Test to Every New Customer – alone at the kerb. In front was a vacant space where her father's Mercedes should be. Blue television light flickered behind the curtain, and she knew that inside, her mother was lying on the couch with a glass of wine in one hand, the almost-empty bottle on the floor beside
her, and the remote control in the other, weeping into a wad of damp tissues.

‘Hello, darling. How was the film?'

‘Good.'

‘Did your friends like it?'

‘Johnny Depp was in it. What's to eat?'

‘On the stove.'

Pud lifted the lid to the pot. ‘Yum, chicken stew.'

Her mother blew her nose, sat up and sighed. Pud came in with her bowl of
coq au vin
and sat next to her. ‘Lovely stew, Mum.'

‘I had two rice cakes with vegemite and a half a grapefruit.' She wiped the tears from her eyes and fanned her hot, itchy throat with the hanky.

‘Let's go for a drive.'

‘You just want a driving lesson, that's all.'

‘So? No, you're right, it's better to sit here and watch TV than go to St Kilda and eat a low-fat yoghurt while we watch the try-hards and the dying.'

‘No,
you're
right,' Judith said weakly. ‘I'd actually love that.'

‘You'll fit right in. You look just like a drag queen.'

‘It's my Sophia Loren look, DeeAndra.'

‘Same thing.'

Barry's headlights swung across the windows. They watched him come in, drop his keys in the bowl on the hall table and go through his mail. ‘Kevin tells me your mum knocked a motorcyclist off his bike in Sydney Road today.'

‘Big Shop day,' Pud said.

Judith tried to smile sweetly for her husband, ‘Is the car alright?'

‘Apparently. Marge and Mrs P are alright as well, in case you were wondering.'

‘She would have only been driving at about two kilometres an hour, Dad.'

‘She is a worry,' Judith said. ‘Should see all the tablets she has to take, and all those falls and bruises. What if she kills someone in that car?'

‘You can't padlock her in the house, Judith.'

‘I made your favourite, Barry,
coq au vin
,' she said, still smiling, being there, warm and welcoming.

Barry said, ‘I've eaten, had pizza.'

Pudding put her empty plate on the carpet beside her chair and said, ‘Let's go, Mum.'

‘Where are youse two going?'

Pud shrugged, ‘Spend money, take drugs,
meet our lovers
.'

Barry just walked to his office, tearing open an envelope.

The next morning, Friday, Walter was counting off smoked cod fillets and laying them carefully side by side in an oven dish when Mrs Stapleton screamed from her office, ‘Wally, ya mum's on tha' phone.'

Walter looked at the fish in the tray, then at the defrosted packets of fish on the table and said, ‘Right, I'll finish this when I get back.' He wiped his hands on his apron and went to the phone, slightly rattled by the intrusion to his routine. He assumed, rightly so, that his mother was upset. ‘Now, Mumsy, I told you, there's no point worrying about Morris, he's out of jail now, safe and sound. Did you and Mrs Parsons have a lovely day shopping yesterday?'

‘Not especially,' Margery said and started crying.

Of course I phoned Walter straightaway after I found her. He said, ‘Go over to Kevin's. I'll call the cops,' but Fifi barked and barked when I knocked so it was clear Kevin was out on his pushbike.

I would have gone to Mrs Calabria's if she was still there, and I would even have gone to sit with Mrs Bist, though I doubt she'd be home, even if she was alive. As for Mrs Ahmed, well, she's from somewhere in Africa, so I just went back in and sat on the edge of the bed with Mrs Parsons until the police came. One young policeman stayed with Mrs Parsons and the other one, a young constable with fair hair and green eyes, walked me home. He was the same one who came when we eventually found Mrs Bist, though he didn't make me a cup of tea that time.

‘It was very sudden,' I said. He was understanding, saying, ‘It can be at that age,' and put the kettle on.

I said Mrs Parsons had been quite well the evening before, and I asked if the chap on the motorcycle might have caused
her death.

‘Is that where you got your injuries?' he asked, so I explained about the little tumble at the letterbox, my shin getting grazed, then the bath being slippery with spilt shampoo, and how my glasses got dropped, how the door caught my eye in the night, and though we were only going slowly when the motorcycle hit us, I still managed to bump my forehead – that's why the other eye was black now.

The constable said he'd heard about the traffic jam the day before; he asked if he could inspect my car. ‘It's an old green car, isn't it?'

‘No,' I said. ‘It's hardly used. Lance bought it brand-new in nineteen sixty-one, but he never drove it anywhere further than Festival Hall.' I made a point of saying that it's a good car. ‘We attract quite a bit of attention in that car,' I said. ‘Lots of people wave and toot.'

‘I can imagine,' he said.

I told him that the passenger's side door rattles and the handle gets stuck, but that's not my fault, it's Pat's fault. And now it's got the dent. ‘Another bad incident in a bad week,' I said and explained that Angela got engaged and the new podiatrist had upset me. ‘He's a handsome young man,' I said, ‘and he wears aftershave, but Glen gave good service.' I started to tell him I was also upset about Morris, and Judith wanting to put me in a home, but it must have seemed trivial compared to Mrs Parsons' situation, so he said, ‘Just tell me as briefly as you can all about the Incident with the Motorcycle.'

‘We take the car out on Thursday because the Sydney Road footpath is narrow and you can get stuck behind a crowd of old people. Or you can get held up by a swarm of Arab women. You can't pass three Arabs abreast if you're pulling a shopping cart, and they yabber away. They can't hear because they've got the full jihad covering their head and body. The Italians are slow too because they know everyone, so they stop to chat and fling their arms about. The Asians are fastest.'

‘We all have different ways,' he said. ‘Now, about the accident?'

‘Well, this motorcycle just shot out of nowhere, then,
bang
! Frightened the living daylights out of me. There's a fan of black marks across my driver's side fender from the tyre. Terrible scraping noise across the bitumen. If only people would take intersections seriously.'

The constable reminded me, very nicely, that I'm supposed to give way to my right, but I explained I didn't notice anyone on my right, and that's when it occurred to me that
I
might have caused Mrs Parsons to die, but he said no, that wasn't the case. And anyway, he said, she was pretty old, ‘as was Mrs Bist when she died'.

‘What do you think of the fortress your new neighbours are constructing next door?' he asked.

‘They seem like a nice young couple,' I said, ‘though I think putting the kitchen in the cellar is unusual, but people have different ways.'

He opened the fridge and asked where the milk was. I said I don't always take milk. I only buy the little cartons because the milk in the bigger ones goes off before you get to the bottom. Apparently his grandmother gave up milk because she couldn't get through the carton before it went off either, but then she started mixing up the powdered milk, and he said she did very well on it. She's dead now. As he poured my tea he said, ‘Tell me all about the neighbour's kitchen in the cellar,' so I did. He was very interested. Then he gave me a bit of a talk on the importance of calcium. He meant well, I suppose, but he can't make tea.

It's funny, you know, but when I untied Mrs Parsons' laces after shopping, the setting sun was shining through her fuzzy-wuzzy hair, making a halo. It occurred to me then that she looked just like a little brown angel. In all the years I've sat on the bed watching out that
front window, I never saw or heard anyone except for estate agents and nuns pass through Mrs Parsons' squeaky front gate. When her fingers went stiff and buckled up she stopped going to church – I don't suppose she could get her purse open for the collection plate. Her feet weren't real good either, and she never waited for the postie like me. When there was a letter in her box I never denied her the pleasure of taking it out and bringing it in to open, even if it was just an electricity bill. She got a letter only last month. ‘You've got a letter,' I said, and her little face lit up, so I told her it was just from an accountant, and she looked very disappointed. You wouldn't think Mrs Parsons needed an accountant. She was always keen to look at my picture postcards from Morris, I imagine because it was usually a nice photo of an exotic location with palm trees. ‘
Dear Mummy, I hope you are well. All well here, weather good, lots of love, your son, Morris.
' Then a kiss. No address.

And all that time I thought Morris was having an enjoyable time.

I
might
have heard something on the wireless about Morris Lancelot Blandon being in jail in Thailand, now that I think about it, but I didn't for a second imagine it was
my
Morris Lancelot Blandon. And no one said anything to me.

I wonder now if Mrs Parsons knew. She might have heard it on the radio. If she did she never treated me any differently despite Morris being a prisoner, which I now understand was very magnanimous of her.

Like me, Mrs Parsons was content. She didn't need to fill up her life with good deeds. We never belonged to clubs or drank at the pub. Pat decided once that we needed ‘more fun' in our lives, so she dragged us off to her Saturday-night dance. Pat was always big on the Town Hall dances. Every Saturday night, off she went, all
dressed up, twirling down her front path in her net skirts like a merry-go-round. It was long before the Public Scalping Incident, but it was still a disaster. Pat just wanted us to admire her arching about the dance floor in her net dress of fifty-seven petticoats, her bare shoulders glinting with glitter dust and her silver shoes flashing. Mrs Parsons declined to dance with Pat's husband, Bill, because she was happy sitting along the side, the glitter ball lights swirling through her hair, though it looked like she'd had an electric shock. Then the piano player had a turn right there on the stage, fell sideways off his stool onto the stage, but the oldies just kept on, chugging around and around under the lights, like rainbow soup. They'd only just carted the old bloke out on a stretcher, his sheet music balanced on top of his body, when they asked for a replacement over the loudspeaker. Pat nominated me. I wasn't pleased, and I let her know.

She replied, ‘But there's no pleasing you, is there Princess Margery?'

I imagine Mrs Parsons would have danced at some point in her life, even if it was in her kitchen on her own. As we know, ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.' That's a German saying.

I'd known Mrs Parsons for sixty years and she died alone on a summer evening, sitting on the edge of a single bed in her spare room with a hanky in one hand and a birthday card with a small boy and a kite in the other, only the classical radio playing on the kitchen bench next to the toaster for comfort. When her blind didn't go up that Friday morning I waited and waited, but in the end I had to go in, and as soon as I stepped into her house a shudder passed over me. Her rocking chair was empty, frozen. I called, ‘Yoo-hoo,'
but I knew. The kitchen air was right-to-the-bone chilly, stagnant, as if no one had passed through it in decades, and it put its cold hand around me and pressed. I knew straightaway, because it felt like it did that morning when I woke up and you had died. The underside of my arm across you was numb.

She was sitting on that little bed in the second bedroom. It was made up with blue sheets and a blue pillowcase. Of course I had no reason to look in the drawers that time, I just looked up into her lovely green eyes, staring down at the birthday card in her hand, and thought about how she'd slipped away. All by herself, just sitting there with her laces undone, Tyson's car radio pounding across the street and the builder's music blaring, their electric saws screaming. She'd been sitting there all night, suspended, just went to sit there after I untied her laces. And then she died.

A lovely tune was playing on her kitchen radio, like the sad music in
Mrs. Miniver
when Carol dies. I touched her hair. It was soft, like a tangle of satin thread, and I stroked her poor old dowager's hump. I know that hump gave her jip, especially on cold days, because mine gives me jip. I suppose we should have had more milk in our diet.

Poor Mrs Parsons lived and died all her lonely, lonely days in that house.

Then I had to go and summon the strangers to her private little world.

As I say, it was a bad week, but it got worse. Next thing, to top everything off, Ron died. The phone rang that evening, just as I sat down with my cheese and tomato sandwich. Someone said, ‘Ron died.'

You know, I've watched the world pass by my front window for years, and all that's happened is that Bonita Jarvis sold her house to
the Calabrias and moved to the commission flats, then Mrs Calabria went to live with one of her daughters in the suburbs. Tyson grew up to be a lout and rented his mother's house back from Mrs Calabria then proceeded to wreck it, then Kevin moved Pat out and moved back in, but in these last couple of weeks, everything's happened.

I couldn't think who Ron was. I had to ask, ‘Ron who?'

‘Faye's husband.'

It was Joye, one of Lance's sisters. His sisters were Faye and Joye, and when Faye married Ron and moved to his place, Joye went too. I can't abide either of them. If my memory serves me right, Ron left Faye in about nineteen forty-six, a year or so after they got married.

As I say, things had started to go downhill and, as fate would have it, the news about Ron came. At the time I didn't know it, but that phone call is one of the reasons I'm here on this balcony.

I said to Joye, ‘I'm sorry to hear about Ron,' and, just to be polite, asked her where the funeral was going to be.

‘Western Australia,' she said, ‘so you'd better leave now if you want to get there in time.' Then she shrieked laughing.

I thought to myself,
The best reply to unseemly behaviour is patience and moderation
, and so I said, ‘Where can I send a card?' She gave me an address in Reservoir and said, ‘But don't send a card, send Lance's last will and testimony.'

As I said before, Pat's got that will somewhere. I remember the day Lance wrote it out. He licked the seal on the envelope and said to me, ‘Judith gets the pearls, Morris gets the car, Walter gets the piano and the house is to go to the blood children of Lance Morris Blandon's loins, the blood offspring from my loins who rightfully should inherit an equal share each, and if anyone wants to fight
about what's in this envelope, they can pay for the bloody lawyers.' He wrote on the front of it, ‘To be opened at the death of Mrs Lance Blandon,' and gave it to Pat to keep safe. Fat lot of good that is since she's got a beer-soaked bar mat where her memory used to be.

It's getting late, and there aren't as many people on the street below, but all the lights are still flickering in the buildings. I imagine people are still about down in the foyer, still coming back from the theatre or wherever it is they've been, so I won't go out just yet. As I say, I'm not confident about being able to get back in with the plastic card they have instead of keys, so once I go out that door there's no coming back.