There Should Be More Dancing (6 page)

‘Judith will put me in a home.'

She put a cigarette in her mouth and continued rummaging in her basket for a lighter, a tattoo peeking down from her uniform sleeve, and though they were mostly hidden under her red fringe, Anita's brilliant eyes were true when she said, ‘Not if I can help it.'

‘You know,' Margery said, studying her new home help in her short uniform over black, skin-tight shorts, black ankle socks and runners, ‘I cleaned Doctor Woods' rooms from nineteen sixty-two until two thousand and six, and I never looked like the type of cleaner you look like.'

Anita admired herself in Margery's dressing table mirror, said, ‘Well, that's a great relief to me,' and sashayed out the front door.
At her car she remembered she'd given up smoking so threw the cigarette in her basket and stuck a Nicorette patch on her arm.

Margery watched her get into a low, silver car with red trim. To Margery, it sounded like a tractor, but across the road Tyson said to his flatmate, ‘That's a 1970 XY GT Falcon.' Next door, both the surveyor and the bloke in the orange reflector jacket taking soil samples paused to watch the car drive away.

You can't see anything from these windows, just treetops and buildings. And the windows don't open. The colour scheme is very dull, and there's only one picture of some fruit, but the towels are soft and the bed is comfortable. Nice crisp sheets, hospital corners. Very neat. In fact, it's a bit impersonal, like the rooms at Pat's nursing home. I'll admit I was saved from the nursing home by Florence, and I suppose I'd have to include Anita in that as well, but as you can tell, a week living with Florence and I've decided I'd rather die.

To go on living with her I'd have to go against every principle I've lived by. It's beyond me how they ever expected I would do that.

As I sit here thinking about it I see there were signs. I should have woken up to those two. Like mother, like daughter. Florence and Anita Potter. Potter's an Irish name. Remember we had that girl in our class called Evelyn Potter? Pixies lived at the bottom of her garden. We asked her mother about them and she said, ‘Yes, I've
seen them.'

Anyrate, Anita's far too old to wear skirts that short, and all that mascara and that great mess of bright red hair sticking out all over the place. Pat would say it had ‘natural body', but I think it needs a good trim. And she's a show-off: ‘You've injured your
tibia
.' Tibia indeed. She isn't even a nurse. She's just a council worker, a
house
cleaner. Some call themselves home carers, but they don't care at all, like that Kate. Kate was before Cheryl. She tricked me into going to church once, but it wasn't really a church, just a bunch of babbling holyrollers running up and down like electrocuted budgerigars. And they had the hide to ask me for money. I told her, ‘God, if he exists, is a fraud!' After that, I phoned the council and asked for a new carer, and that's when I got Cheryl. Surprisingly, Cheryl had very good manners. I didn't know what to expect when they said they were sending this Anita. She turned out to be something else, I tell you.

In the week between Anita's first and second visit, my life began to really unravel. Wednesday, I rested, but as I say, I wasn't injured badly after my little slip in the bath. Mind you, I still have some bruising on my ribs, even now. That day a big backhoe dug a hole where Mrs Bist's laundry once stood, and what with all the shuddering and the noise of that thing and the workmen bellowing all day in other languages . . . Anyone could tell they were swearing.

I was able to get up Thursday, pension day, and do my shopping with Mrs Parsons. Pension week we do our Big Shop, so we take the car and go down to Barkly Square. Mrs Parsons always enjoyed her ride in the car, and I drive a mile or two out of our way but it means I can get all the way to the shopping centre with only one right turn against the traffic.

The first thing Mrs Parsons and I did was go to the ATM. You get money from a machine now, Cecily. Or from the lass at the cash register, and when I booked into this hotel I gave the receptionist the
same little plastic card and she just took money from my account. These days you put in a code or sign a little ticket to let authorised people take money out of your account. Cheryl said everyone is on a police checklist, so no one steals. The receptionist let me sit down while she did it all, and I told her my code because I was exhausted when I got to this hotel. Public transport takes a lot out of you as you get older.

As I say, things have changed. You can also gamble at the newsagent, which is usually a post office as well these days. Cheryl brought Mrs Parsons and me up to date. She taught us how to use the plastic card and the ATM. She wrote the instructions out for us, so now, every pension Thursday, we park the car and go straight to the ATM machine then pop into the newsagent to pay our bills. Then we do our shopping before taking advantage of the ‘Coffee and Cake for Five Dollars' special at the coffee shop. I order tea for Mrs Parsons because that's what she prefers, but the shop assistant knows us and always gives Mrs Parsons the five-dollar deal anyway. I bought cross-stitch thread from Kmart that day because I'd designed a cross-stitch for Anita's work basket, a William Blake. I remember reading it as I turned the desk calendar, and I thought it was very inspirational. It turned out to be one of my best, an upright cross-stitch, red thread of course, on a nice blue Aida, elastic-edged to fit snugly over the top of the basket. William Blake was a poet, so his sayings were very good, popular on the desk calendars year after year. Another of my favourites of his is,
As a man is, so he sees.

Anyrate,
then we used the public lavatory and set off for home. As usual, I said cheerio to Mrs Parsons, unpacked my groceries and had another cup of tea and a little rest. I suppose Mrs Parsons did the same. That was our last Big Shop before the Incident with the Motorcycle. But I'll get to that. The next disappointment was Glen, my podiatrist, and then Angela, my hairdresser. Very upsetting. Oh, and Pat made a nuisance of herself as well.

Every second Friday of the month Margery set off at nine o'clock for her permanent ten o'clock appointment with Glen, her podiatrist. When Glen's new shopfront opened on Dawson Street, Margery was the first to make an appointment, the first to sit on the new couch in the waiting room and one of the first to walk on the new carpet Glen put down a year later. Over the years she'd seen several pot plants live, thrive and die, and several receptionists start, get engaged, married, pregnant and disappear from behind the varnished chipboard counter. And when Glen married, she waited at the church fence, eager to see him emerge with his new bride. She knitted booties for his newborn son and even came to terms with his cheerless wife when she took command of the receptionist's chair. But it was still a shock that Friday to find Glen had gone. She placed a small wot-not jar – an empty jam jar with an embroidered pincushion lid – on top of the counter. ‘It's a koala,' she said. ‘Twenty-eight count linen.'

‘Thanks,' Glen's wife said, and popped it under the counter with the embroidered picture frames, handtowels, tea-cosies and soft-top trinket jars. ‘It's only half past nine, you're way too early.'

Margery took her cross-stitch from her bag, ‘
Great things are done when men and mountains meet
.'

‘May as well tell you, Glen's gone to Queensland.'

‘He didn't mention it to me,' Margery replied. ‘Why would he rush off like that?'

‘He didn't have much choice, really.' Glen's wife pointed to the couch with her pen. ‘Have a seat.'

‘Will he be back?'

‘Na,' she said, smiling.

It was upsetting, but Margery was entirely devastated when she met Glen's replacement. He was excessively young, nineteen if he was a day, it seemed.

‘My name is Blaine,' he said. ‘How are you today, Margery?'

‘Mrs Blandon to you, son.' Margery unlaced and kicked off her shoes, rolled her knee-high stockings down and draped them over the arm of the chair. ‘I wasn't told Glen was going to Queensland.'

‘Things change.' He came out from behind his computer. ‘What seems to be the problem with your feet?'

‘They're getting old,' Margery snapped, settling herself on the podiatrist's chair. ‘Up we go,' she said and pressed the button. The chair rose with a faint hum. She indicated the stool near her feet. ‘You sit there, Blaze.'

Regular monthly appointments meant Margery's feet were in relatively good condition, so Blaine trimmed her nails, checked her corn, scraped some skin off her bunion and suggested she get slip-on shoes ‘since you're pretty much past bending down to look after your feet'. He pressed the button to lower the chair, dropped his nail clippers into the steriliser and said, ‘You also need to get orthotic support insoles to stabilise your gait and help prevent falls.'

‘Glen never made me get them.'

Blaine removed his yellow gloves and chucked them in the bin, already puffed with discarded disposable gloves. ‘I can see that.'

‘How much do they cost?'

‘Four hundred dollars. They last a lifetime.'

‘I've just had my eightieth birthday party.'

Blaine picked up his little vacuum cleaner. ‘We don't want you to fall again, do we? Especially with that very nasty wound on your shin –'

‘If I fall again it'll be because of the footpaths, not because of me.'

‘With orthotics, you won't need to spend money on monthly appointments – you could leave it for six months, even longer.'

‘But I've got a regular appointment every month,' Margery said.

‘Well, now you can spend the money you save on sturdy shoes instead.' He turned the vacuum cleaner on and started running it over the carpet beneath the chair.

Just thinking about those lovely monthly foot massages made the follicles on Margery's arms rise, and she felt bereft knowing she'd never experience Glen's warm, assured grasp, that sleepy,
caressed
feeling again. But at least there was Angela, her fingers pressing into Margery's scalp as she lathered the shampoo, the comb slicing across her scalp, the nuzzling noise when she poked the cotton balls into her ears and the release on her scalp when Angela took the rollers out. She walked home despondent, her eyes on the footpath, her handbags hanging limply from her arm.

At home, she drank a cup of tea and took her tablets, then poured herself a nip of cooking sherry and turned on the television. The six-thirty shows always made her feel much better. Other people's battles with their obesity, brutal landlords or children kidnapped by angry fathers gave Margery licence to impart wisdom: ‘All he has to do is stop eating rubbish . . . Why don't they just find somewhere else to live . . . If she hadn't married the wrong man in the first place, silly girl . . .'

Because it was the Saturday after pension day, Margery set off at 9 again, this time for her usual ten o'clock appointment at the hairdresser. Every fortnight she had a wash, blue-tint and set. At her front gate she found Kevin perched on his flimsy racing pushbike, watching the excavator dig a hole. Saturday was his riding day, and at about 9 o'clock Kevin – dressed in his anatomically fitted lycra tri-suit, high-visibility vest, Lance Armstrong signature helmet and carbon-soled, caliper-buckled bike shoes – rode to the café opposite the Brunswick Touring Bicycle Club clubrooms.

‘A cellar,' Margery said, pointing to the excavator.

Kevin smoothed his lustrous moustache with his finger and thumb. ‘Nar, it'll be a hot spa, Mrs B. That's their culture. They'll build a house around it, you'll find.' He lowered his anti-pollution mask over his face and rode away.

‘It's a cellar,' Margery said.

Angela was combing her hair, dividing it into neat, pale-blue slices when Margery noticed something sparkling on the third finger of her left hand.

‘Oh, dear,' she said. ‘You're not engaged, are you?'

‘Yes,' Angela said, pausing to smile lovingly at the insubstantial diamond chips sprinkled across the thin gold band.

‘I should congratulate you then,' Margery said. ‘I'll have to train another hairdresser now.'

‘You'll get Toula. She's good.'

‘No doubt you'll have a six-month honeymoon in Italy and come back pregnant.'

‘Hopefully.'

Margery dragged herself home again, limping slightly because of the raw tightness of her injured shin, her eyes on the footpath beneath her sensible shoes, her mind consumed by both Glen and Angela's betrayal. She stopped briefly outside the pub to scowl at the door, and again in the park to stare hatefully at the young mothers, designer types, expensively dressed in badly finished inside-out clothes, chatting by the safety swings with their babies called Rupert or Maude. Golden retrievers and healer–kelpie crosses tore across the grass, yapping. At home she sat at the kitchen table staring at her good shoes, her cross-stitch and her sheet music in bags at her side, waiting for Kevin.

Kevin was spying on riders from behind a newspaper in the café opposite the Brunswick Touring Bicycle Club clubrooms. On occasion, he'd done the ‘hell ride' with them to Mt Eliza, but a misunderstanding with the club saw him ostracised. After several mediation sessions, a quorum used rule 6.1c to declare that Kevin had ‘conducted himself in a manner which, in the opinion of the Committee, was prejudicial to the good order or name of the Association', and although his natural state was that of outcast, he was still crushed. The dispute was over a lost reflector cuff. Kevin felt the club should replace it since it vanished during an exhibition ride as part of the Brunswick Street Festival, but the club didn't agree. The
same thing had happened when he was a member of the local tree planting club and lost a trowel during a Regeneration Day exercise.

The cyclists set off for Beach Road, a river of bobbing reflective green and yellow flashing red and white moving down Sydney Road, and Kevin set off for the three-block ride to take his elderly neighbour to see his demented mother.

At three-thirty, he arrived at Margery's house, showered and shaved, with a bag of Pat's clean washing, some cans of beer and Fifi, Pat's Pomeranian – a small, decrepit dog, stained and matted, with flatulence, yellow teeth and halitosis. He took the car keys from the nail behind the kitchen door and went to the shed where he warmed up Margery's car, an apple-green Hillman Minx that Lance bought brand-new in 1961. Margery ducked into the lavatory one last time then hopped into the back seat with Fifi, gathering her bags to her side – handbag, cross-stitch bag, the bag containing sheet music and her spare bag – fencing Pat's putrid, rotting dog against the door.

As he backed out into the lane, Kevin said, ‘I'd like to borrow this car, Mrs B, join the vintage car society,' but before he could conclude his request, Margery said, ‘This car belongs to Morris.'

‘It's no use to him where he is, I assure you,' Kevin said, eyeing her via the rear-vision mirror, but she kept her gaze straight ahead. It was Morris's car, as written in Lance's Last Will and Testament. Her second-born son was to inherit the car, and one day he would come home from Thailand, so that was that.

The nursing home was a modern square building surrounding a central garden. Kevin punched in the code, the doors slid open, and they were embraced by pastel-hued ambiance permeated by a faint humid stench of effervescent, urine-soaked carpet squares and perfumed oil burners. Margery presented her latest lot of cross-stitched pillow covers and face washers to the loud, cheery
carers, then went to the day room to play piano for the residents, an assortment of distorted figures slumped in cushiony chairs like discarded frocks. Some men crowded around the fridge. They'd been there, asleep in their wheelchairs, since lunchtime because Happy Hour started at four o'clock and they longed for their one free glass of beer. If Nurse Graham or Nurse Garry was on, they always got two. Christmas and St Patrick's Day, three.

Kevin pulled a chair up next to his mother's armchair and put Fifi in her lap. Pat screwed her nose up and said, ‘That dog stinks,' so he put her on someone else's lap. Generally the old ladies loved to goo at her and pet her, though Fifi preferred to lick the carpet squares. Kevin looked sideways along the line of frayed grey hair standing out from the wing-back chairs, and said, ‘Hello ladies,' switching the TV to the sports channel.

‘Mrs Bist's place sold for $650,000,' he said to his mother. Kevin had desperately wanted to buy Mrs Bist's house. He'd haunted the estate agent and lobbied Mrs Bist's fellow volunteers at the opportunity shop, but Mrs Bist's niece sent word from America that the house was to go to auction. So Kevin was first at the auction, eyeballing the auctioneer, his raised hand visible from the very back of the crowd. As soon as the bidding started, a surly bloke – Tony, as it turns out – and his substantial accomplice, Dennis, a short, thick man with stiff white hair and colourless skin, arrived to flank him. ‘I've got nine hundred thousand dollars to spend on this place, mate. Cash. But I'd prefer not to spend that much, if you know what I mean.'

Kevin's bidding paused, and Dennis took up the lull. But Kevin tentatively raised his hand for six hundred and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred dollars. Then Tony leaned in and said in his ear, ‘You live over the road, don't you,
Kevin
? Ride a
pushbike
to the city every day, eh?'

Kevin looked into Tony's eyes, and brought his hand swiftly down.

Suddenly, Pat turned her dull, blue eyes to Kevin and said, ‘Mrs Bist? She got a prolapse from all those babies.'

Margery said, ‘Mrs Bist didn't have any babies.'

Pat focussed on Margery, her expression defiant. ‘Well, who did all those children belong to?'

‘She got them from St Joseph's,' Kevin said.

She turned on Kevin, ‘You're not suggesting that the priests –'

‘No!' he said. ‘St Joseph's . . . the orphanage.'

Kevin brought the conversation back to Mrs Bist's house. ‘They knocked Mrs Bist's house down, Mum. They're building a new one – architect-designed. I wish I could have bought that house. I could renovate it, put a tenant in, retire. It's my greatest wish to retire, Mum.' Forty-five years as a salesman at a menswear store in the city had taken its toll on Kevin, especially since he had never possessed a name tag declaring anything more important than ‘Relieving Manager'.

Pat wasn't listening, so Margery filled the silence with an old English proverb, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,' just as a kitchen attendant, a long-nosed woman with prominent teeth, her dark hair caught up in a ponytail, wheeled the tea trolley in and started up-ending cups and sploshing milk into them from the two-litre carton. Then she spooned two sugars into each cup, held a giant teapot over the lines of cups and ran it up and down without lifting the spout. Tea ran off the side of the cart and disappeared into the carpet squares.

Pat pointed to the trolley and said, ‘There's a horse.'

The attendant, rattling the spoon around the teacups, rolled her eyes and said in a broad Irish accent, ‘There's no horse here, Pat.'

‘Yes there is,' Pat said. ‘I can see it.'

The attendant dumped an arrowroot biscuit and a plastic cup half-filled with beige tea on the table in front Pat. ‘There's no horse in this room.'

Margery, thinking of pixies in Irish gardens, imaginary gods on clouds in the sky, and acknowledging her habit of talking to Cecily, said, ‘It might be an invisible horse.'

The attendant said, ‘Then its poo is invisible, so no one will see it and they'll walk it all over and I'd be all day cleaning it up.'

The male nurse who was pouring the beer for Mr McNickle checked the soles of his shoes and winked at Margery.

Margery declined an offer of a cup of tea and played a few tunes. A couple of nurses got one or two of the residents up onto their feet for a dance, and just when everyone was having a lovely time, Kevin said it was time they were off, and they left.

The last time Margery saw her, Pat was busy shoving the tea-soaked paper serviette down the spout of her feeding mug with a plastic straw.

Back in the womb of her cosseted fabric-and-cotton walls, Margery took the frozen chicken from the freezer and left it to thaw in the sink. She had just flicked on the television and settled with her Sao biscuits with cheese and sliced tomato to watch David Attenborough's
Tiger – Spy in the Jungle
program when Kevin came striding down her passage, his helmet light flashing and his bicycle shoes clattering on her linoleum. He walked straight past her, down her back steps and into the shed. Margery made a mental note to remember to keep the screen door snibbed. He came back and stood in her lounge room, the exaggerated crotch of his reflective orange lycra bodysuit blocking Margery's view of the tigers on the television. ‘Mum's gone. She ran away just after dinner.'

Margery said, ‘At least she'd had something to eat. She'll have her strength.'

‘Well, that's just it,' Kevin said. ‘She'll have enough strength to walk straight under a tram.' He tugged his cycling gloves on and said, ‘She's not in your yard, or the shed. I'm going to search for her,' and clacked down the passage again. David Attenborough said he was going to use elephants equipped with cameras to enter the world of the tiger for an intimate look into their lives.

‘Fancy . . .' said Margery, and bit into her Sao biscuit.

Saturday night passed like any other Saturday night at 253 Gold Street. Margery ate her dinner, took her tablets, careful to drop the sleeping pill down the plughole, and went to bed early with her transistor radio on Magic Radio Best Tunes of All Time. She reclined in the dark, watching out to the street, the streetlight opposite illuminating the passers-by. She dozed and woke, dozed and woke, and through the disjointed night she saw Tyson and his mates kicking a football up and down the street. It bounced onto Kevin's front verandah and broke his wind chime. He burst through the front door, objecting strongly, so the boys kicked it through his front window. Waves of harmonica and you-done-me-wrong music floated to her from the pub, and then she heard the patrons singing as they spilled onto the street and lurched past her front window. A slip of a girl stood swaying outside her gate, her dress, the smallest dress Margery had ever seen, sparkled in the lamplight while her friend, a smart-looking chap in a striped suit, tried to break into a car. The girl looked up and down the footpath, then she opened her little purse and was about to vomit into it when she saw Margery's letterbox, so she flipped up the top and vomited into it instead.

‘Got it,' her friend said, opening the car door, then he grabbed her and kissed her passionately.

‘
Tsk
,' said Margery and hopped out of bed to bang on her front window, but it was too late. The hoodlums drove off, scraping the side of Mr Ahmed's parked taxi. Kevin's light went on and a little while later a police car cruised by.