There Should Be More Dancing (3 page)

Judith nodded emphatically. ‘My point is proven. She needs help, her memory's gone and her bad heart complicates her diminished mobility, and because of that she'll end up like Mrs Bist!'

‘I'm just a bit stiff in the mornings!'

Judith shouted, ‘That's what I mean, Marge. Diminished mobility!' And that's when Margery said quietly, ‘
I
can still get out of a chair.'

Mrs Parsons froze between the armrests. Walter stopped rocking. Everyone looked at Judith. She flushed deep red from her diamanté-trimmed décolletage to her cheeks.

‘That's not fair, Marge.'

Pudding said, ‘What does Gran mean about the chair, Mum?'

Margery examined a cross-stitch flower on the corner of her hanky, and Mrs Parsons put her arm up again. Barry pointed at the ceiling and said, ‘Pressed tin. Good selling point.'

Walter started rocking, again, raised his fists and dodged an invisible left jab. ‘This was s'posed to be a party, for Mumsy.'

Pudding asked again, ‘What chair is Gran talking about?' but Judith just clutched her sparkling bodice and wilted, as if her mother had stabbed her.

Barry looked at his watch. ‘It's time we were long gone.'

Pudding persisted, ‘What is it about a chair that's upsetting you, Sajida?'

‘Stop calling me that!'

‘Well, stop dressing like Saddam Hussein's wife!'

‘We'll go now,' Judith said, ‘Come on, Wally, we'll give you a lift.' Her voice caught in her throat.

Walter said he wasn't ready to go yet, so Judith pleaded, ‘We'll give you a lift,' and nudged Barry, who said with feigned nonchalance, ‘Sure. No trouble to drive all the way to Collingwood for you, Wally.'

Walter stopped dead. He lowered his fists and wound his head to loosen his neck. He stepped close to Barry, put his face close. ‘Job's right.'

Barry raised his hands in surrender, and Pudding prodded her mother – ‘Tell us about the chair?' – but Judith just played with her mother's watch on her wrist.

Mrs Parsons said, ‘I really should get going.'

Finally, Barry looked down at her, smiled gallantly, ‘We should all get going,' and offered her his arm. He prised her out of the sunken chair, then Walter helped her on with her coat and walked her down the side of the house to her back door. Mrs Ahmed, who lived on the other side of Mrs Parsons, stopped picking plums and turned, smiling at them from the tree, her brown face bordered by her bright headscarf, while Pudding's voice carried across the small, concrete and corrugated iron yards: ‘You started the story about the chair, Gran, now you should finish it.'

When he got back, Walter found Margery calmly cross-stitching while Judith ransacked the house. Pudding followed her mother, badgering as she searched for Margery's pearls, shaking boxes and cartons in the pantry, opening all the frozen vegetable packages in the freezer.

‘It's about time you gave up, Judif. You'll get the pearls when Mumsy's ready, you know that,' but Judith up-ended the peg
basket into the old copper then moved to the bathroom, where she opened old denture containers and drained every bottle from the cabinet into the bath – bleach, moisturiser, disinfectant – then went through the first-aid tin before tapping the walls in search of secret compartments.

Barry was pacing around the clothesline, talking on his BlackBerry. Walter paced the lounge room, counting back from ten over and over in his mind, clenching and unclenching his fists, ‘Calm like a canvas, Walter, calm like an empty venue.' He stopped, pressed his arms to his sides and said, ‘The pearls belong to Mumsy.'

Next door, Mrs Parsons sat on her bed in the front room, her hands over her ears, the sound of Judith bawling on and on – ‘Infirm. She's infirm!' – and Pudding screeching –‘The chair? Tell me!' – warbling over the back fences. Finally, the Boyles left. She watched them pile into their car, Barry saying, ‘Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I told you, Judith, there's money in these little workers' cottages,' but even Mrs Parsons knew six hundred thousand dollars was far too much to pay for a detached, two-bedroom weatherboard cottage with kitchen and bathroom tacked onto the back and outside lavatories, even if they were situated close to the park.

Judith's got no right to put me in a home, and no one's got the right to make me live with a so-called flatmate. They said she had nowhere to live after she came out of the hospital, but no wonder she fell and broke her hip. The heels! Open-toed wedges with flowers across front. She's a smoker as well. You can tell because her laugh ends in a frothy cough, and she holds her long, thin fingers as if she's still holding a cigarette. One of the first things I noticed was she wasn't wearing a wedding ring, though it's clear she was once attractive enough to be married. Very fine-boned, like an ivory hatpin. I thought to myself at the time,
She could have been a model if she wasn't the barmaid type
. People notice Florence. She's got
presence,
like you had, though not for the same reasons as you. Florence isn't refined. People noticed you and, though we were the same, somehow there was more of you. You could swim all the way to the other side of the Maribyrnong River. I was only game enough to go to the end of the jetty.

Anyrate, when she showed up last week I took one look at her
and thought,
I don't want you sitting on my toilet seat or washing your body in my bath any more than I want to go to a home and use towels thousands of strangers have rubbed all over their bits.
As I say, I tried to live with Florence, gave it a whole week, but we argued from the first day. Firstly, she ate the last chocolate in the box – my birthday present from Walter. Didn't ask, just took it and popped it in her mouth. ‘I don't usually like sweets,' she said, ‘but these are nice.'

Then she refused to do the dishes. While I eat my tea I like to watch the news on the television. So at six o'clock I sit in my chair with my cold ham salad on my stable table to watch the news. She came and sat in Lance's chair. Being hospitable, I offered her something to eat and she asked for poached egg on toast, which she ate standing at the kitchen bench. ‘I ate a steak sandwich standing at the bar for fifty years,' she said. Quite reasonably, I suggested she do the dishes since I cooked her tea, but she just said, ‘We'll do the dishes in the morning, eh, love?' Then she pointed her red toenail at my piano and said, ‘How about a song?'

I said, ‘You think life's all about singing and dancing, don't you?'

‘To be truthful,' she said, ‘I'm not much of a singer. Not many people are. Dancing's a different matter, it's something everyone can do.' After a while she pushed her frame out to the front verandah. I heard her harassing the innocent passers-by: ‘Ya haven't got a cigarette, have ya, love?'

She got one in the end. Tyson gave her one. Then she came in and plopped down in Lance's chair, stinking like a pub, like Lance.

All night I heard her wheelie frame, heading out to the lav,
tweet-tweet-tweet
, and then back again,
tweet-tweet-tweet
, and when I got up, I found she'd strung a ball of my cross-stitch thread from the back door out to the lav. ‘It'll guide me in the night,' she said, so I complained about her squeaky wheels.

‘No worries,' she said, ‘I'll get Walter to put a drop of oil on
them.'

Then she sees me standing there with my pot to empty, so she says, ‘Better still, I'll get him to get me a commode. What's his phone number?'

I said I didn't know, and I put a notepad and pencil next to the phone so she could record her phone calls but, in the week she was there, she never did.

The other thing was, while she was living with me I wasn't able to talk to you.

Walter was on Florence's side from the start. ‘Think of her as a refugee,' he said. ‘Mrs Bist'd be kind enough to have her.' I must say, he did have a point. You should always try and do the right thing.

‘Just fink about a flatmate, Mumsy,' he said.

Just how long had they been finking about it, I wonder.

Anyrate, I thought about it for a few seconds and decided she couldn't stay, but then I looked down the hall and saw Judith pull up, and, well . . . five weeks later it's come to this . . .

But I'm getting ahead of the story of my treacherous children and their betrayal.

You know, just last week, Judith said to me, ‘You never really cared.'

How could I not care? She's my daughter.

Now that I think about it, as I sit here, perhaps it was a bit mean to mention the Incident with the Chair at the cinema, and perhaps I should have let her keep the pearls after her twenty-first, but I didn't want to give them up just then. They were our mother's. Our sister, Shirley, got the matching earrings when Mum died. She got your watch as well. I got your hair ribbons. As I say, Judith has my
watch. Stole it sixty-six years to the day after Dad gave them to us. Mind you, that watch did remind me of Pat and the Public Scalping Incident, so I really didn't mind letting it go. That's a story for another time. The Chair Incident happened during pensioners' week.

Mrs Bist popped in one day with her basket over her arm and her cardigan sleeves pressed to a straight, sharp line. She always stood over me as I sat stitching in my chair, and she always smelled like warm lavender talcum powder. ‘It's pension week,' she said all hoity-toity. ‘I insist you go to cinema on the council bus.'

I said I wasn't interested in going on a bus but she patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You've got to seize all opportunities in life, move with the times. You'll find it very liberating.'

But I know now I've got to be careful about advice from people who should know better. Frankly, I find cross-stitch the most liberating thing to do. It's a solitary adventure filled with nice colours and lines, but there's absolutely no danger, no risk. You can't get hurt. There's no room to think of anything else when I have that needle in my fingers. I know exactly where I'm going, how I'll get there and what will be there at the end, and if I'm careful to choose the needle that suits, it'll be a contenting and comfortable experience.

So at the time I said, ‘Mrs Parsons prefers to stay at home, like me,' but Mrs Bist just sucked in her chin and heaved her bust up and declared, ‘You can't pass an opportunity like this up. It'll be a nice day out for us all.' In the end she phoned Judith, who made us go. The thing was, Judith wanted to come as a volunteer helper because then it would be free for her too, and she got to hand out her business cards to all the ladies: ‘Judith Boyle – mobile beauty, finesse and panache in all your needs for skin, nails and hair.'

So off we went for the first – and last – time, as it turned out.

You'll never guess, Cecily, but the film was our all-time favourite. Yes, that's right,
Mrs. Miniver
. It was still lovely. Just lovely. Greer
Garson and Walter Pidgeon, a perfect couple happily married with lovely children and so stoic through all their tragic circumstances. We loved that film, didn't we? But I can say now, Cecily, it's not like that in real life. It most certainly isn't. As far as I'm concerned, there was no happy marriage or lovely children, just tragedy.

Anyrate, Judith couldn't get out of the seat when the picture ended. She was stuck. The manager was called, then a boy was sent out to buy a shifting spanner to remove the armrest. She held up the whole bus. I apologised and explained to everyone that she'd always golloped her food, but that she couldn't really help it because Lance's sisters, Faye and Joye, were big. So was his mother. Lance once said, ‘You could steam-press a suit in their armpits.' I told them how Lance's mother got sugar – nowadays they call it diabetes – because she was so big, and how she lay in the second bedroom for years, fermenting to death. I had to look after her, and all I ever got for it was her commode. Lance would only ever stand at the door and wave. Said he couldn't look at her. ‘She's got a face like a bunch of haemorrhoids,' he used to say.

Faye and Joye will go rotten with the diabetes, if they haven't already got it. Unfortunately, Judith takes after the Blandon side of the family.

But getting back to the day this last dreadful month started. After the Boyles left, Walter paced back and forth, back and forth, so I made us a pot of tea.

‘I might lose my job, Mumsy,' he said. He was in the same anxious state that time he lost his weekend rates. Some workplaces don't have weekends, as such, anymore, Cecily. They make all the days in the week the same. And they've changed the hours in the day as well. They took one hour from the end of the day and put it at the start so the sun comes up earlier. Things are very different these days. They
can even grow grapes without seeds.

Anyrate, Walter told me the council had been to his lodging house to inspect it. They made a list of changes Mrs Stapleton has to make so they come up to standard to be a hostel for international students.

‘Your standards are very high,' I said, but his main concern was that he didn't have a ticket that qualified him to do the cooking and cleaning. ‘Mrs Stapleton says I have to pass a food hygiene course,' he said.

Since that last bout, Walter can't hold some things in his mind for a long time. I said, ‘The spare room here is yours anytime you want. This will always be your home, Walter, and you'll always have me.'

‘Always be my home,' he repeated, but I know he wants to live in Collingwood with his friends. He's a man of the world, after all.

Then he settled down and we talked about Pat. We like to have a bit of a giggle about Pat. Pat Cruickshank lived opposite me for sixty years, but as I say, I've just found out she's been lying to me for most of those years. Her son, Kevin, takes me to see her in the home every Saturday. Mostly I go so I can play the piano for the old people.

Like most people around here, Pat worked at the brickworks and drank at that pub, so no wonder she's got beer dementia. A cold snap last winter followed by an unexpectedly high fatality rate from a new strain of influenza on top of rampant gastroenteritis meant there was room at the local nursing home, but it was actually getting her there that proved difficult. Kevin got her into my car by telling her we were all off to the races. Pat always loved a day at the races. We got her as far as the footpath before she suspected something. It was the suitcase. She attached herself to the lamppost and said, ‘Since when do we need a suitcase to go to the races?'

‘We've
been
to the races,' Kevin said. ‘The suitcase is full of
money.'

She just gripped that pole harder and said, ‘I don't remember that.'

Kevin asked, ‘Do you know where you are now?' and she said she knew exactly where she bloody was.

‘Where?'

She hugged the pole tighter, looked up and down the street and said, doubtfully, ‘At the races?'

Kevin shook his head, so Pat said, ‘You're right. I'd never invite Margery Blandon to the races.'

I wouldn't have gone anyway.

Kevin said, ‘Mrs Blandon's kindly driving us because we've got the suitcase.'

‘Where to?'

‘To the races.'

Then it was like a light went on inside Pat's mind and she said, ‘Liar,' and grabbed the suitcase. ‘We've
been
to the races.'

‘And now we're going home,' I said and smiled reassuringly.

When we got to the nursing home, Pat said, ‘I can't see any horses,' and wedged herself into my car like an umbrella in a birdcage.

She always said, ‘Kill me before you put me in one of those places.'

The truth is, and I'm ashamed to say it, but I was secretly gleeful when Kevin put Pat in a home, but I'm eating humble pie now. I'm not demented, and I get home help from the council, so there's absolutely no reason why I should I be locked up in a home, nor do I deserve to be forced by my very own children to live with that demented adulteress Florence. I used to feel sorry for Mrs Parsons, not having any children, but it seems to me at this point that they just cause you pain. Look at Mrs Bist; she had all those foster kiddies,
hundreds of do-gooder friends and even a niece, though she moved to America. Fat lot of good they all were to Mrs Bist in the end. None of them went to her funeral. Then her so-called friends came, the ladies from the Catholic Opportunity Shop – packed up her house and shot through with the lot.

And I didn't want Cheryl to leave me either, but she said, ‘You'll find the new home help, Anita, is actually nice,
once you get used to her
.' I should have woken up that something was afoot, but I didn't.

There's a lot of things I didn't wake up to.