There Should Be More Dancing (23 page)

At the time, there were things I didn't pick up on, but I see them now, as I sit here going over things. I've made myself another cup of tea, and I ate the complimentary biscuits. They're tough. Cheap. They mean well here, but they skimp. Most people these days seem to be well-intentioned on the surface . . . like that bloke called Ray, Anita's flatmate, whom I suspect has a shady past, like Anita. She said to me, ‘I've organised a man called Ray to come around to install a modern telephone. It'll be free!'

Walter said, ‘Consider it a gift from the tax payers and shareholders of the nation in partnership with our magnificent Prime Minister.' He said the job would be right and that Ray sounded like a top bloke.

Ray didn't look like a top bloke. In fact, I got a fright when he turned up the next day. For a start he was black from head to toe. Black tracksuit, some sort of Maori or Hawaiian or something, and he was completely bald, the shiniest scalp you've ever seen with a helix tattooed on it. When he turned, it was like his skull whorled and lifted. He handed me a big box from the telephone shop and said
he'd put the phone wire out through the side window. I explained I'd lost the key to the lock, but Ray didn't need the key. It was very evident that he had a substantial amount of agility and ability. He got that window unlocked with just a small piece of wire, and he climbed up onto the roof like a baby monkey, just used the wheelie bin and the drainpipe. When I made him a cup of tea – and here's the biggest surprise – it was also evident he possessed very nice table manners. He took the food to his mouth, not his mouth to the food, used his serviette and placed his knife and fork on his plate while he chewed . . . with his mouth closed. The only issue I really had was that he dunked his Scotch Finger, but he did it in a very considerate way.

‘If you want to know about people, watch them eat.' That's what Dad said the night Lance first came to tea. I taught my children table manners but Lance always sawed his food with his elbows out, gesticulated with his knife and leaned over his plate.

I said, ‘You gave me a fright at first, Ray,' and he said, ‘You look a bit of a fright yourself. How'd you get your shiners?'

I explained about the fall at the letterbox, and the one in the bath, and the other one at the telephone table, and the motorcycle incident.

‘Met your new neighbours yet?'

‘As a matter of fact, yes, I have met them.'

‘Their alarms gone off yet?'

‘Twice,' I said. The very night before, Wednesday night, I was telling Ray, the place lit up like cracker night. Then there were bells and wailing horns and sirens and flashing lights. Gave me a terrific fright! Then Tyson and his mates were running from the place, scattering left right and centre, dropping tools and boxes of things all over the front street. A security van arrived, rushing up the street with its lights flashing. Of course, Tyson and his mates were nowhere
to be seen by then, but Kevin would have told them what happened because he was there, in the middle of the street, with a torch and his phone. The workmen didn't seem to be inconvenienced the next day. As sure as I'm alive, there they were again at six o'clock that morning, as usual, the whole army of immigrant men grinding, banging and hammering away.

Ray said he was familiar with Tony and his work. Anyrate, he screwed smoke detectors all over the house, and then he set about installing my phone. ‘The old one's an antique,' he said. ‘Worth a few quid.' Then he implanted the telephone numbers from my address book into the telephone. Phones remember things these days, Cecily, they've got a little TV screen on them that tells you who's ringing. It's all done by a thing called electric technologics. Mind you, most of the numbers in my address book are crossed out now. Really, I've only got Walter's and Judith's numbers left. Shirley as well, though I think she moved up to Queensland a long time ago, well before Lance died. It just seems wrong to cross her out when she could be still alive, somewhere. As you know, the rest of them – Clarry, Willy and Terrence – are dead . . . from the drink, actually, if I'm absolutely honest with myself.

‘Play that piano, do you, Mrs Blandon?'

‘No, Raymond,' I said and explained that the louts from across the road threw rocks on my roof whenever I played. Mind you, it used to give me great pleasure to do scales at seven o'clock in the morning when Mrs Bist was at church after they'd kept me awake all night with their music going
boom boom boom
over and over. ‘They're a nuisance, those boys,' I said, and I told him how they burned my fence to cook toast, how they stole my water and often ran an extension cord from the outlet where the sleep-out was to their place.

Ray said, ‘I think you'll find your new neighbour, Tony, will sort
them out, Mrs Blandon.'

And he did.

He was right, that Ray. That very night Tyson's house was raided, and it turns out it was Tony. Revenge, apparently, because Tyson tried to break into his cellar. Dreadful noises came out of Tyson's, though it was all over fairly quickly. Kevin's light went on and, not long after, I saw the police and then the ambulance come. The ambulance carried two of them off. I'm pretty sure one of them was Tyson.

Bonita was there first thing the next morning. I told her it sounded like someone was torturing cows in the middle of the night.

‘What did you see, Mrs B? Was it Tony?'

‘I really can't say,' I said. ‘But you can always ask Kevin,' and so she went straight to his place.

I must say at this point, Cecily, that if what I heard at Mrs Parsons' wake was true, if Bonita Jarvis bet her house – the house her father built by hand – on Walter's last fight, well, no one asked her to. She did it on her own, and if Tyson's upset about it, there's no need to take it out on me by burning my fence. But he won't be doing that anymore.

I hardly heard a peep out of those boys after Tony raided their house that night.

I'm not sure Ray was very happy when he left my house that afternoon. It took him a long time to put the new wires in, and at one stage he was crawling around under the house. I could hear him swearing. I mentioned Lance had the telephone put on in about 1955.

‘No bloody kiddin',' he said, but he found about fifteen old teaspoons that went missing years and years ago, and a green shoe I'd lost in 1948. It was still brand-new.

‘You didn't find a cat?' I said. Pat's cat from across the road came
over and died under our house. It stank for weeks.

‘No dead cats,' he said and handed me dozens and dozens of buckled and dusty packets of Sudafed tablets. They were all empty. I wasn't sure what to make of them. ‘Where were they?'

‘Shoved down the gap between the verandah and the house. With the teaspoons.'

That was where the boys' bunk was. Walter was on the top bunk.

‘You used to be able to crack these old tablets in half,' he said, ‘get the amphetamines out in one tiny pill, but the pharmacists got smart and changed how they made them, if you know what I mean.'

I didn't. And I never found out. Walter said there was no point knowing things that didn't matter anymore.

It turned out to be a marvellous thing, that new telephone. The first phone call I got showed ‘Private Caller' on the little screen. It was Julien from the green environment society, so I've just sent off the last cheque to save the whales. They're on their own now. But when the new phone rang that night, I didn't even have to get out of bed. I just reached over and picked up the handset from my bedside table. I looked at the little screen, pushed the ‘talk' button and said, ‘Hello, Judith.'

She hung up.

This was the time everything was starting to come together, Cecily, and you'll understand why I'm here.

I have no trouble remembering that Sunday because I felt very unwell, again, when I woke up, and also because of the copulaters. You know, Dad visited me here once when I was first married, and he was pleased when we went to the park to talk. ‘Look, Margie,'
he said, ‘a place to sit where it's nice.' But he was appalled when he noticed the pub opposite, and that pub
has
ruined a lot of lives, not least of all mine, and as you know it ended Lance's life.
Boom
, just like that. Truth is stranger than fiction. That's a fact. But the pub has been entertaining, and you do learn how the other half lives.

Anyrate, that Saturday night when I looked out my bedroom window and saw the copulaters on my verandah I thought they were people wrestling, but then I recognised it was a white bottom, bobbing away. I saw who it was. It was that Russell from number two twenty-three, the chap who hit us on the motorbike and caused Mrs Parsons' death. He wasn't with the same lass, though.

As I say, I felt unwell around that time, but I usually felt better by lunchtime. In my mind I was resigned to the fact that I'd developed septicaemia of the shin, but it wasn't septicaemia. It was Judith. I'll admit that putting the tablets into my dosette back to front
could
have been a genuine mistake, I suppose. Goodness knows I've made one or two in my life . . . so it seems.

Anyrate, I made myself get out of bed and get on with things because you've got to be stoic, and it was Sunday. On my way out to greet Walter I saw the used condom draped over my geranium, so I got the tongs and moved it before Walter came. Then down the street he came, thongs clicking, the biggest grin on his face you've ever seen.

‘One thousand and eight days,' he said. ‘And I've never been better.'

‘You're a good boy.'

He kissed me at the gate and I put the frozen chook in the freezer for next week. That done, I turned the potatoes and pumpkin, and then he set the table and I turned the peas on. ‘Did you enjoy the pictures, Walter?'

‘Top job,' he said and winked at me.

‘Did you ask her out again?'

‘I don't want to overwhelm her.' He turned the page on his newspaper and said earnestly, ‘Patience gets us to the object, hurry speeds us to ruin.' That was a proverb I embroidered and stuck to the wall above the boys' bunk.

By that time I'd accepted Anita, feeling that she couldn't help being born the way she was, especially having a mother like hers, and she seemed marginally better than some of those card tarts with their matted beehives and revealing outfits that followed Walter about.

I asked if the Boyles were coming that Sunday and Walter stopped buttering his bread, ‘You do not have to go to a home. Understand?'

‘Don't point with your knife, Walter.'

‘Understand?'

‘I understand. I do not have to go to a home. Thank you, Walter.'

‘The job will be right. Anita's the best carer you've ever had.'

I believed he was on my side at the time. And he was, but for his own reasons.

Walter and I did the crossword, then Walter made the gravy and we said how sad it was without Mrs Parsons. Just as we sat down to eat, the Boyles arrived.

It turned out to be another dreadful Sunday. For one thing, Kevin broke his ankle. At the time I felt Judith had spilled the fat so that I would slip on it. All I'd done was tell her she looked awful, because she did. Her rash was all up and down her arms and behind her knees, and she looked as withered as a Christmas balloon in June.

Kevin was only in hospital for a night, but a fall down those steps would have killed me.

When Judith started to cry, Barry said, ‘Judith hasn't been herself lately, have you, old girl?'

‘I'm not old.'

Pud muttered, ‘You're almost fifty.'

Barry patted his weeping wife's shoulder. ‘Don't get so upset. I'll buy you some pearls.'

‘That's not the point,' Judith sobbed. ‘I don't know why I even care, no one else ever did.'

Margery said, again, ‘I want you to have the watch, Judith. It's yours anyway,' but her daughter was working up to something, she could tell, she was organising the words in her mind, battling to bring them to her lips, speak them through her tears, and then she finally blurted, ‘I feel . . . that you never really cared.'

Pud rolled her eyes. ‘You should never have started that counsellor's course, Mum,' but Judith took a cross-stitched tea towel from the cupboard knob –
A tidy house is a tidy mind
– and stood in front of her mother, preparing to recite the rest of the words she'd rehearsed. ‘You cared about cross-stitch! Affection, connection
and bonding begins at birth and must be present from the first moment.'

‘You were in the humidicrib and I was unwell and –'

‘Parenting practices, particularly low levels of warmth and affection, poor supervision and monitoring are strongly related to issues to do with self-esteem, criminal behaviour and lack of success in relationships.'

Margery put her cutlery down and clutched the table. She focussed on the windowsill, which seemed to be tipping sideways.

Pud said, ‘Look, Mum, so Gran wasn't a perfect parent –'

‘If you tell me I'm a not a loving, caring mother, DeeAndra, you may as well tear my heart from my chest right now and smash it into a million pieces on the ground –'

‘Despite what Gran did or didn't do, you're an
excellent
mother, okay? Just look at me, I'm perfect, aren't I? Gran can't fix anything now. You're fifty. Get over it!'

Everyone remained still except Margery, who put one hand over her eye and shepherded some peas to the lip of her plate.

Judith gazed, open-mouthed at her daughter. Then she closed her mouth, blew her nose on the tea towel, threw it in the bin and plopped down in Mrs Parsons' chair.

Margery pushed her glass of sherry across the table to her daughter, and Walter started eating again. Pud got her grandmother another glass and Barry plonked the sherry bottle in front of her, saying, ‘I, for one, am very glad Judith's said what she needed to say, and so now, Marge, you might feel a little more well-disposed towards your daughter and her wishes.' He rubbed his hands together, ‘See, there's a vacant room at the retirement village, ready and waiting for you anytime you want over the next day or so. Beautiful room, air-conditioned, heated in winter. Got your own window, nice and secure,
safe
.' Margery remained focussed on shepherding peas onto
her fork, so Barry pointed towards the almost-complete new home next door. ‘Did you notice, Wally, that they've installed a very, very sophisticated security system?' He whistled and shook his head, ‘Computerised. Surveillance cameras, alarms, intercom, sensor lights . . . The area obviously requires a superior level of protection,
but
, we could provide that protection for your mother in our elder-age facility.'

Pud said, ‘You don't have to go to that retirement place, Gran.'

‘She can't manage here on her own,' Judith said calmly, taking a roast potato from her mother's plate. ‘It's clearly dangerous.'

‘She's alright,' Pud said, refilling their sherry glasses.

Judith gestured at her mother's multicoloured, bloated face and said with a mouthful of potato, ‘Call that alright?'

Margery hid her leg under the table.

‘If her shin gets infected she will need a skin graft,' Walter declared, repeating Anita's wise words with great authority. ‘And you're the one that's not alright, Judif.'

Judith turned on him. ‘How would you know, Wally? You've been off in a
Wal-terior
universe ever since you were lying in the hospital with a dent in your skull and your eyes fixed and staring and the machine going
beep-beep-beep
. In fact,
nothing's
been alright for years.' She snatched one of Walter's roast potatoes. He put his spoonful of peas and gravy down next to his plate –
Calm like a canvas, Walter. Calm like an empty venue –
and said evenly, ‘Anita says she can stay here and get services free from the council.'

‘That's just plain irresponsible.' Judith got up, grabbed the baking dish and headed outside with it, picking the hard, oven-baked remnants of chicken and vegetables from the base of it.

Margery said she needed the dripping for next week, but Judith was already outside, pouring the fat down the gully trap.

Walter yelled, ‘That'll block the drain and it's unhygienic,' but she just came back in licking her fingers and dumped the roasting dish into the sink.

Then Barry reached to take a roast spud from Walter's plate, and Walter stabbed him with his knife.

Barry squealed, grabbing his hand, blood oozing between his fingers. Pud rolled her eyes and went to get the first-aid kit from the bathroom, and then Kevin appeared in the kitchen with Fifi in his arms. ‘Saw your car, Judith. How did the meeting with the new partners go?'

‘They're not partners yet,' Pud said, sticking a bandaid to her father's hand.

Judith tore a strip of chicken from the carcass and shoved it in her mouth. ‘Marge has to go, Walter, for the good of everyone. I can't keep ringing and calling in day after day to make sure she's not lying dead, or sick from a leg infection.' She grabbed Margery's leg and held it up. ‘See? She should be in a hospital.'

Kevin said, ‘You'll get septicaemia, Mrs B. It'll go to your heart and kill you.' Judith dropped her mother's leg and Margery bit her lip, her hand on her heart, the pain shooting up her leg.

Barry put his hand on Kevin's shoulder. ‘Found out any more about Mrs Parsons' house?'

‘We think her son will get it.'

Judith said, ‘I reckon he'd be dead by now. He was taken away well before Marge got here,' and Walter said he seemed to remember hearing that there was something wrong with him, but Kevin said, ‘It was
her
, it was Mrs Parsons. They took him away from her.'

‘Think what you like about my neighbour,' Margery said, ‘but when all is said and done, Mrs Parsons was respectable.'

Kevin stepped towards Margery, ‘There was something wrong, though. Bonita Jarvis said her mother told her there definitely was a
Mr
Parsons, that he owned the house she lived in, then he was gone and so was the baby.'

‘Gossip,' Margery said, but Pudding said, ‘No, Gran, there's evidence,' and that's when Kevin, Judith and Barry decided they'd go next door to see the clothes in the drawer, and that's when Kevin slipped on the fat dripping all down the back steps. The sound was shocking,
bang bang bang
then
crack
, like someone snapped an enormous raw carrot. Fifi yelped and lay stunned where she landed, and Kevin bayed like a wounded mule, which brought the neighbours out. Miriana put her head over the fence and called, ‘Ohmygawd, ohmygawdwhatishappenink?' and all the Ahmeds came out of their house to peer across the fence tops.

‘Looks like it's broken,' Barry said. ‘Better phone the ambulance, Pud,' and he continued towards Mrs Parsons' house, but it was locked and the key wasn't hanging behind the door.

Pudding looked at Kevin's skewed ankle, which was starting to look like jellied plums, and said, ‘That's disgusting.' Then she turned on her mother, ‘You spilled the fat, Sajida.'

‘It was an accident,' Judith sighed.

Walter put a packet of frozen peas on Kevin's ankle, and Kevin started crying, ‘I was training for the Great Victorian Bike Ride along the Great Ocean Road.'

Margery said, ‘You can still see it on the telly.'

Later, when the sun had all but set, and knowing Kevin was unconscious in hospital, when the smell of burning satay chicken and char-grilled lean beef hung thick over the Brunswick barbecues, when the bins were overflowing with empty boutique beer and wine bottles, and dip containers rolled across the deserted park, Margery struggled, like an ant wading through detergent, across to Pat's. With her secateurs she decapitated the stabbing roses hanging from the
arch over the gate and fought her way to Pat's precious Barronne Prèvost rose bush, drooping and bountiful in the middle of the unkempt front lawn. She cut a dozen or so soft, fat blooms, gently up-ending them into a supermarket bag, and when the bag was bulging with perfumed stems, she made her way cautiously back across the narrow street.