‘Please keep it just as it is, it’s beautiful,’ Lila says, bouncing higher now. ‘Nice meeting you, Louise. Maybe I’ll see you here again one day.’
‘Maybe,’ Louise says, and waves, a quick, queenly dabble of her fingers in the air. ‘Life is full of unexpected things.’
Lila continues on her usual half-circle around the rose garden but before the bridge she suddenly swerves and finds her legs retracing her path. She runs back round to the front gate, then down the avenue. An Indigenous man in jeans is dancing under one of the trees. The boom-box on the grass beside him plays rock music—Oasis, maybe. From this distance, only the bass comes through. Lila approaches the azalea shrubbery at walking pace and stops at a distance from the bench, before the last turn in the path.
Through the glossy azalea leaves she sees Louise still there, bent forwards doing something with her bouquet. The flowers are placed in front of her on the path. Whatever the thing is that she is doing, her handbag impedes her. It hangs on her thin forearm beside her bangles and sways awkwardly. Finally she puts it down and sits back. She smiles down at her feet, the handiwork she has made.
Lila steps away out of sight. Somehow the scene reassures her. Louise will be OK, she thinks. It looks like she knows what she’s doing. Lila retraces her path in the opposite direction.
~
The next day the bench is empty, as always.
‘Same time, same place,’ Lila says to herself as she runs past, ‘running and rushing.’ She reminds herself not to pinch her lips or hold her cheeks so stiff.
She thinks of Louise’s colourful splash here on the bench, her full bouquet of roses and gerbera daisies, her lavender twin-set and blue-and-red make-up that didn’t chime. Unusual as she looked, though, she, Lila, had stopped for her. More than that, she had prompted her to laugh at herself, and that didn’t often happen, or anyway not since she moved out of home and started living on her own. It surprised her, the quietness of living on her own. She’d not expected it. That she could spend all evening in her nice flat on the top floor without saying a word, her lips quietly pressed together.
To make up for yesterday’s broken run Lila takes a longer path through the park, looping the grassy area and the rose garden several times before making her way to the exit. It’s later than normal now and the place is almost deserted. A couple walks hand in hand on the avenue. In the evening light the roses in the rose garden look glossier than usual.
Lila runs at speed, so she doesn’t at first spot the other roses, the long-stemmed, shop-bought roses lying scattered just beyond the rose garden—a few on the path, but most of them criss-crossed and awry in the gully amongst the black stubby reeds.
Who’d go tearing off the park’s roses? she begins to ask herself, skipping so as not to crush the petals, and then suddenly thinks, Louise, Louise’s roses. Did Louise drop the roses she was looking after?
Without breaking her stride, Lila makes to stretch down and pick up one of the roses but in the same instant sees that its petals are brown. She lets it lie. The scattering will have happened hours back, she thinks. Scattering—why did she think scattering? Scattering means dropping the roses here on purpose.
At the back gate her eye falls on the freshly laminated paper tied to the park fence, a new Missing notice alongside the other items that people hang here, the posters about the summertime kids’ tug-of-war, the carols in the park beside the bowling green, the faded colour photographs of lost pets looking expectant, ready to be found. The lost ginger cat answering to the name of George Grey, or was it Ginge Gray? Last seen—. That notice the other week about a missing goldfish, Tommy, with a picture. Lost here. Please return. A pet with no expression at all, lost beside a dry gully bed.
The purple border around this new notice makes it stand out from the others. Positioned top and bottom is a mugshot of a woman. Not Louise, Lila checks at once, peering across the flower bed in the half-light. Can’t be Louise. And then she sees, not sure if it’s important, the photos are different: one is of an older and one of a younger woman, a slip of a girl, her hair blowing about her face.
As she straightens up, she sees the same notice again, immediately behind, stuck on the gate-post, and then they seem to pop out at her all over, the same purple-lined notices shining in the luminous late light, frantically distributed, fastened to the open gate itself, two of them, with grip-ties, and to the fence on the other side, stuck to the green wheelie rubbish bins at the exit, before the road, one on each bin.
MISSING.
Woman (82).
Last seen near the park wearing grey trousers.
Lucille is on Alzheimer’s medication and may be confused.
She answers to several names. Lucille. Lulu. Lucy.
Along the bottom are some telephone numbers. Take a poster home, Lila thinks. She begins with the one on the fence, but the grip-ties hold firm. She has no better luck with the others she tries. The lamination is thick. The posters on the bins are stuck on with glue.
Crouching at the bins she memorises the top telephone number. She should take her mobile on runs, she thinks, in case of this kind of thing. Then she gives up. There’s really no point. She checks the photos again. She doesn’t recognise this woman and she can’t help. It can’t be Louise. That’s not the shape of Louise’s face, not in the top picture nor in the bottom. Phoning would set a false trail. Louise wasn’t confused.
She turns from the posters and darts back into the park. She will pick up some of the dropped roses after all, the better ones, and take them home for the nice rose-bowl vase her family gave her, a housewarming present. She can cut off the stems and have them float, like housekeeping does with the flower arrangements in the hotel lobby.
She chooses two, then three roses, drops the ones with thorns. Holding the flowers upright by the stem, she takes the path back to the exit.
The park attendant in green overalls is standing at the gate, ready to lock up. She’s seen him around before though never at the gate. She holds out her flowers for inspection—see, they’re not rose-garden flowers, she hasn’t been damaging anything—but he is looking at the posters.
‘You seen anything?’ he asks, pushing at the left leaf of the gate.
She shakes her head.
‘Poor lady,’ says the attendant.
‘Yes, poor lady,’ Lila makes to go past him.
‘Normally I’d be cross about all these notices but this looks like a special case. If she hasn’t been found she’ll be very mixed up by now, this lady. Her people will be very worried. I’ve looked everywhere though, under all the bushes, even in the long grass. I took my hoe and poked around.’
‘Did you phone the number?’ Lila asks, now outside the park, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Suddenly she wants to make sure. ‘Did you tell them you looked everywhere?’
‘No, not yet,’ the attendant swings closed the second leaf of the gate. ‘Like I said, there’s nothing to report. Sure, she could still be in the park, hiding in some corner, but I don’t think so. I’ll check again tomorrow, I’ll keep on checking. I can only imagine what it must be like for the family, for whoever put up these notices. Anyhow, you enjoy your roses.’
‘I found them on the path. It’s OK to take them?’
‘Flowers get left. People come here to have wedding pictures done, they like the rose garden especially. They scatter rose petals, they scatter roses. I tell them off only for paper confetti. Confetti gets on to everything and stains the ground. Sometimes they leave flowers behind, teddies, other tributes. Sometimes they bring ash, you know, of dead people. The Indigenous mob don’t like that so I ask people not to. But mostly I turn a blind eye. So, yes, fine, I’d have swept those roses up tomorrow.’
‘If you talk to them, to Lucille’s family, Lulu’s family,’ Lila says, still bouncing, ‘If you do phone, tell them she can’t have gone far. She’ll be around here somewhere, I’m sure, enjoying her visit to the park, her first visit in ages. It’s warm in the evening
s now. It’s a lovely place to take an evening walk.’
‘Tomorrow, yes,’ says the park attendant. ‘Sure. It’s kind of you to take an interest. I’ll tell them that.’
Lila begins to run.
Then she hears the park attendant begin to shout. ‘Hey,’ he calls, ‘Hey, stop. Why—How did you—?’
The sound of her feet on the gravel drowns out the rest.
Nothing she can say, she thinks to herself, no point stopping. She generally doesn’t stop to talk to people on her run. Yesterday was an exception. Today was also an exception. Her job on reception means she meets strangers all day long. Her quiet time running in the park is something she needs like air. She needs it to relax her neck and empty her thoughts.
Her family thinks her job is a cinch, but in fact it takes a lot to get it right. It takes it out of her, keeping her voice steady, her face expectant, her make-up smooth, her hands neatly folded on the counter even when there’s nothing much going on, when she’d rather be catching up with phone messages than watching the overhead light refracting through the glass vase that holds the floating roses paint spirals and dots and ovals and star shapes on to her skin.
Lila looks down at the roses in her hand. All the way along from the park gate the roses have been shedding their petals. What was she thinking? There’s no way they’ll float in water. Whoever dropped them knew they were nearly dead.
She turns in her tracks, feels that twinge again in her hamstring. She runs back. At a distance from the park gate she pauses, checks for the park attendant’s green uniform. He is nowhere to be seen. The Indigenous man with the boom-box is sitting on the grassy verge in front of the gate, his back to the park. The boom-box is in his lap, silent. His eyes are closed. She approaches at walking pace. The white notices hang thickly all over the gate, flapping like prayer flags in the light breeze.
She throws the flowers over the gate and they scatter on the path. In the half-light she looks at the two photographs of the missing woman: the younger one with the hair blown about her face, the older one. For the first time she notices that the older woman is seated on a park bench that bears a small brass plaque in memory of someone. Behind the bench is a bed of azaleas in bloom. Lila looks closer but there is nothing more to be seen. The older woman could be anyone. She is almost sure she is not Louise, almost one-hundred-per-cent sure.
The Mood that I’m In
THEIR EYES MET—Paul’s, Anne’s—across a crowded room at the Crosskeys Retirement Home Christmas party. There were fairy lights in the plane trees over the colonnaded entrance. Their eyes locked and stayed locked. The song playing was ‘The mood that I’m in’, Billie Holiday singing it—the one and only version. He had it on a cassette tape that he’d made himself and played every summer driving to the beach, the children squawking in the back.
And she remembered it from—Oh, she couldn’t remember, but it was her favourite song too, as they found out chatting over a scrambled-egg breakfast the following day.
Yes, it’s my favourite, exactly the same, she assured him, and that’s my favourite version, the one and only Billie Holiday singing it.
It was his first night out after his wife Enid’s death back in the dark of the winter. They had been married fifty years and he still missed her. The kids had coaxed him to go out. Try it for an hour, Dad, have a beer and a natter. It’s Christmas, after all.
As for Anne, she was there with her stepdaughter Pam, her late second husband’s only child. She had been in the middle of a box-set, a thriller, good and gloomy, and hadn’t wanted to come out. But then something had pushed her to the cupboard and nudged her to take out this red dress with the lace trimmings that still fitted her like a glove. In the mirror she saw she looked good in it, that the colour suited her new red hair. Also, it was festive.
Dan, her first husband, always said, you kept your teenage hipbones, Anne my love, you sexy thing. Pure sweet sixteen, even from the front.
Never dared to have your arms around me, Billie sang, and Anne got up, stretching up smoothly from the knee. She put her head to one side, and her hip pushed out the other way, turning her body into an S. Paul began to make his way towards her, striding. Making a beeline, Enid used to say. He never dropped his gaze. Left, right, he had to push aside the swinging silver Christmas lanterns tacked to the ceiling to keep his head steady, his eyes on hers.
Her first words were, ‘I’ve been waiting for you all my life.’
He could only repeat, ‘Me too, all my life.’
‘I have seen your eyes before, somewhere,’ she said.
He nearly said, ‘Your eyes only’, or some such line from some other song, but the words that came were, ‘Shall we dance?’
She moved into his arms as though she had practised it. The music shifted to ‘I just called to say I love you’, Lionel Ritchie. Her cheek was against his, and his hand was clammy on the small of her back, her best place. Already she could feel him pressing against her. Not bad for a man of his age, she let herself think.
In the shower the next day, his shower cubicle, she was still humming the song.
Months later—long after he had soldered together the single beds in the bedroom he’d shared with Enid so they could lie entwined; long after he had given her Enid’s pearl earrings, despite his daughter’s clamour, because they looked so lovely against her tiny shell-like ears; long after they had spoken vows of dedication to each other in the Crosskeys Retirement Home garden, under the plane trees in full green leaf, the Korean but Baptist vicar presiding, she in the pearl earrings, his four children wearing fixed smiles; even after she had locked the door of his flat against the bothersome nurses and so-called health professionals who wanted to interfere with her loving care of him when he fell ill and began stuttering over his words; after the candle-lit dinners à deux in her flatlet, with dancing, and the nights watching box-sets and drinking box-wine at his place (he who had never touched wine before and had no patience with television)—they still liked to go over that first greeting at the Christmas party.
They liked to kiss and relive the electricity, Billie crooning, Let the rhapsody of life begin, and he would say, ‘You know, my lovely loving Anne, my best love, I meant to say that night when I asked you to dance, Your eyes only, Drink to me only, all my life. I want your arms around me, all my life.’
And she would say, mouth to his ear, ‘I knew you did. The words were on my lips also. Your eyes only. All my life, all our lives.’
~
In the crematorium garden after Paul’s funeral Anne stands by herself at the end of the covered walkway beside the grassy remembrance garden, manoeuvring so that she is screened by the brick pillars. She watches the rest of the small party file out of the chapel. She’s glad she managed to sit at the back and get away quickly. People shouldn’t feel they have to talk to her. She wanted at least to spare them that.
The day is close and her green dress unfortunately shows the perspiration. It’s her first time wearing it, which is more than can be said for the grim weeds of her fellow mourners there by the chapel door. From the straining jacket backs, not to mention the scuffed white patches on their knees and elbows, she can tell that these black clothes don’t come out too often. And certainly no one bucks the trend by wearing green.
Thank goodness, though, she is calm and she will, if all goes well, stay this way. She will head straight home after this, to a hot bath and few more valerian pills chased down with a large g-and-t. She used the same combination after the other two funerals.
Beyond that, she will treat herself to a browse through the photos of her time with Paul—the album she put together after their last holiday, that long weekend in Blue Mountain with the big pines dropping cones on to their bungalow roof.
No one has yet made an attempt to come over, but that’s fine. Most of the people are friends of Paul and Enid’s from the years of their long marriage. She understands that they want to share their memories, talk about the dead. She respects that, as
the young people say, jutting out their chins. Respect.
Even a bridesmaid of Enid’s is here somewhere, the children said, the pretty one from the photos. Anne looked around the chapel but found no one to match the description. No doubt the woman is now as wrinkled and unrecognisable as the rest. In his last months, Paul barely saw any of these friends—perhaps occasionally Wilf and Stan on the bowling-green. And then he’d come home and complain how slow and creaky they were now.
That was how it was between them, herself and Paul, her great love, her greatest love. They were always busy together, busy and vital, busy in their togetherness, vital in their rhapsody.
A whole lifetime of loving, dancing and talking to catch up on, he used to say, and squirt more box-wine into Enid’s crystal wine glasses, untouched throughout their years of marriage, and put on Anne’s Billie Holiday CD, the one he ordered for her specially, the first thing he’d ever ordered online. Then he’d pull her into his arms and touch the small of her back, her best place, as he knew from that first night together.
Remembering, she smiles to herself and passes a hand across her perspiring lower back. An odd new dizziness places wispy fingers on her forehead.
She makes her way to the concrete bench closest by, avoiding the thicker clumps of grass, where her suede heels would sink away and get stained. She sees Paul’s daughter approaching—Beryl, is it? Beri, the only girl, divorced, a big-hipped woman, taciturn but frank. The former husband was equally taciturn, Paul said. Of the four children, Anne knows where she stands with Beri.
‘I can see you do love him,’ she said, very upfront, the day they exchanged vows under the plane trees. But when Anne shut the door on the busy-body doctors Beri clammed up. These days she is, if anything, colder than her brothers.
‘Sorry, Anne,’ is all she now says, ‘I know you will miss him terribly.’
Anne nods, tries to smile again, doesn’t quite manage it. It might be the dizziness.
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