Playing Friends

by Marilyn Duckworth

  I wasn't sure how to take this. To be relied on is flattering. I might get it wrong sometimes but I'd always made an effort to see what other people were going through. Even Lester had accepted his share of the blame for the marriage rift. And yet I felt a sagging disappointment. I suppose I'd secretly hoped I might rely on Una instead of the other way around. At fifty-nine it would be nice to lean on another person. But cowardly, I guess, and childish.

  'I'll do your hair again, shall I?' Una suggested. 'I've come across this new product at work that helps the colour last. Okay? I'm good value in the beauty department. Trust me. Remember Cyclax Milk of Roses?' She'd whizzed through the beautician's course in weeks, soon after leaving school. Was I still the same kind of snob? Probably.

  That night I dreamt I'd died and no one had remembered to come to my funeral. In the church pews discarded items — a gaping old handbag, a watch, a crumpled school beret — decorated the wooden seating, but no people. When I woke myself up the wind was blowing, making an eerie noise behind the high window, like some breathy animal escaped from the zoo. The windows were placed high because on this side they looked out at nothing very much, only at other walls with equally high, businesslike windows. It didn't really matter in a bedroom, the place you go to in order to sleep, and dream. About funerals.

  I turned over and tried to climb into a warmer dream but couldn't make it. More church pews. Of course I didn't go to church as a rule, only for weddings and funerals. It still pained me to remember David's funeral at the crematorium. The minister had pronounced my name strangely so that I had a sense of being not fully present. It reinforced the aura of unreality that had carried me through the stunned days after he died. I was a figment of the other mourners' imagination, as spectral, as dead, for the time being, as my poor husband who lay there with his hands crossed under the coffin lilies. I moved among them at the wake like Hans Andersen's mermaid, every step a stab of pain, wearing a social smile that only tugged away from me occasionally.

  There had been plenty of people at David's 'celebration of life'. But at my own? A few forgotten bits and pieces in an empty church. So I lay there in my comfortable bed — no such thing as a Woolrest in a coffin — making a mental list of friends and acquaintances who were likely to go to my send-off. It didn't look too bad until I eliminated the ones close to my own age and a couple who were conspicuously unfit. Two of my women contemporaries had recently 'passed away', which was surely no more than bad luck, and by the law of averages increased my own chance of longer life, despite my mother's cancer. My children of course — my son, my daughter — would surely fly home from Sydney and Berlin. Perhaps I should have put something in my new will leaving the cost of return airfare over and above the money that would come to them from the sale of this place, which might take a long time. And Una could be a complication. Oh dear. But I hadn't died yet. It was a dream.

  'Wake up!' I told myself, shaking my head against the pillow. The wind made its funny noise again, teasing a piece of iron cladding. I'd never lived in an apartment block before. Safe as houses — the expression had to come from somewhere. A house represented solidity, happiness; it was a place where families lived and nurtured each other. Or that had been my experience until a few years ago when my second marriage dissolved. Lester had said it was my fault for making him compete with David.

  'You don't marry someone just to ward off loneliness!' he had shouted at me. 'I was lonely. That's why it had to happen.' He'd been excusing his affair, one of many apparently. Poor bugger. Perhaps I had let him down, in a way, wanting too much and expecting fidelity as well.

  'Oh God!' I sat up in bed and swung my cold feet to the floor. If I went out to make a cup of something hot — ginger tea to scour the dream out of my mouth? — would I run into Sheree sprawled on the sofa, spooning peanut butter from a jar, as I had the other day? The apartment was open plan and the bedrooms were the only private spaces. I tucked my toes back under the duvet.

  I remembered then what had made me dream that stuff. I'd gone to sleep puzzling over my decision to move in here with Una, wondering if I'd done it again, made a commitment to another person simply to ward off loneliness. For Una did seem to believe the move was a kind of commitment. Not surprisingly after all that legal documentation and initialling. But I confess I signed the papers with a different attitude. Una was quite right when she said I was ready to take risks. I'd seen the purchase and the move as almost certainly stopgap, until something like happiness came along — as it must one day — and took me away with it. Why not? I knew I was still reasonably attractive, as was Una, despite what she might say; it was entirely possible we could both ride new mounts into a new sunset. I'd spent most of my life spurred by hope and optimism and only that horrific once had life let me down. David's death had been a felling blow from left field, one I thought I might never recover from. But I had. Things did work out. Life did go on. So why had that image presented itself in the moment before sleep? The thought — This could be my last place. My last resting place. A narrow slot in a shared building with my name on one of the postboxes, like a plaque in the wall of a crematorium.

  Una was standing in her slippers at the rear window holding the sides of her head as if she were in pain. I went and stood beside her to see what she was looking at. The wall-length window had reinforced panes up to chest level with metal strands crisscrossing inside the murky glass, a reminder of when the apartment block was a factory and warehouse. Above chest level the view in yellowish tinted glass was to the east and someone's leafy garden, frilled with trees and blotchy with magnolia blooms. A statue with a broken buttock raised one hand in a tiny urban courtyard. The sun was shining. I could see nothing in this pleasant scene to give anyone a headache.

  'Are you okay?'

  'No.' Her neck muscles twitched but she didn't turn her head.

  'Does your neck hurt?' I was thinking of the nearby hospital's emergency department and the complaints of delays, the reports of verbal abuse cast at staff members since that poor woman had died of meningitis, perhaps unnecessarily. 'I don't want to mention meningitis.'

  'Yes you do. I'm not sick. Just piss off, please.'

  Sheree was elbows-on-the-table, sucking up breakfast cereal off what appeared to be a serving spoon. She had a very wide mouth, slimy with milk. 'Don't sweat it. She does this sometimes. Must be me. Or Jilly.'

  'Who?'

  A very skinny young person had appeared in the doorway of the small bedroom. She was dressed in a jean jacket and overalls that seemed to have stretched, unless she had been dieting; a half-full backpack sagged from her arm.

  'You off then?'

  'Yeah. Ta. I took . . .' the girl whispered, indicating a grey blanket folded under one arm. 'Is that okay? Just for a bit.'

  Una turned round. 'Oh, just take it! Okay?'

  'She didn't disturb anyone. Why are you so snaky?' Sheree wondered, when the visitor had gone. 'Sometimes you really piss me off. She was sleeping rough.'

  'Una's entitled,' I pointed out. 'You do exploit her kindness, Sheree.'

  'She's not kind. Not specially.'

  'No,' said Una, surprisingly. 'I'm not kind. I'm a fuckin' bitch. I don't know why anyone puts up with me, I really don't.' And she strode off to the bathroom where she slammed the door behind her. There was a groaning noise behind the door but it was only the cold tap being turned on hard.

  It was Sunday and down the road the carillon bells were ringing out a ponderous sacred melody. The day of rest and DIY. Cars were already parking on the street below, their occupants heading for No Name Building Recyclers along the road. From the Basin Reserve cheerful noises from some sporting event flew up like gulls. That year I was working only four short days a week as a receptionist for a private audiologist. It was a temporary job I'd snatched at wildly when I lost my PR position because the government sold us off; I knew I was lucky to have it. The salary was small but so were the corporate body fees on the apartment and although Lester had walked away
with more than his share after our marital split I still had money nervously invested from a modest sum David had left me. I wasn't what was referred to as comfortable — I was quite uncomfortable rather a lot of the time, when the bills came in — but I was okay. About normal. I knew very few people who didn't bitch about money — even my father, and he'd been well enough off when I was a child, or pretended to be. If I lost my job and couldn't find another I'd need to go on the dole for six years until I was sixty-five, which was scary. Sixty-five was scary on its own. Don't think about it.

  Maybe money was getting Una down, or was it simply Sheree? I still didn't know exactly why she was saddled with the girl, but I'd given up suggesting she talk about it. It disappointed me that she was so secretive. Sometimes she could say stuff that shocked and surprised me, so her hidden flip side was unexpected. I wasn't used to such guarded behaviour. My recent relationships might have been a bit shallow, certainly in my new job, but at least there'd been plenty of talking and easy opening of cupboards and closets, and I'd hoped for more of the same. I remembered the earlier talk of depression and Una's insistence that she was the expert on this subject and I should keep my nose out. There was something possessive in her attitude, as if she were jealous of sharing her knowledge. It seemed she was behaving in a similar way now, deliberately holding me at a distance. Was this a manifestation of her depression?

  I reminded myself of all the years in Una's life when I hadn't seen her and hadn't known who she was trying to be. Who had she become? All I knew was that after her first marriage she went to live in Mangakino, a construction town miles from Wellington. I knew that from back in the sixties. Never mind. I felt fairly sure she would tell me more when the time was right.

  I was loading lunch dishes into the dishwasher when her voice erupted behind me. 'You didn't like the way I spoke to that girl, did you? I saw the look on your face.'

  'There was no look on my face!'

  'There's always a look on your face. You're so judgemental, I can't lift a finger without your nose going up. As if you've done any better in your sweet life. I know you think I'm unreasonable. I can see you working out what I've got wrong every minute of the day. Sheree and her goings-on are my responsibility, not yours. And, by the way, I don't let her exploit me. If anyone exploits me it's you!'

  I stood stock still; I think my mouth had fallen open and then a small word slipped out. 'Pardon?' But I certainly didn't want Una to go through it all over again, throw that mess of words, snarled like an old fishing line, into my face a second time. I slammed my mouth shut. 'I have to go.' I dropped the last mug carelessly into the dishwasher and carried myself off to the silence of my room.

  My door was shut and I'd had been sitting on the unmade bed, quivering, for minutes. I was trying to hold up the skein of Una's hot words, to untangle them so I could lift out the sense of what precisely had upset her. The 'look' on my face. I went to the mirror and pulled my hair back, searching. My face was empty, eyebrows still hoisted slightly in a floating question. I hadn't put on any make-up yet so freckles stood out on my cheekbones and the nobbly point of my nose.

  I stretched out a foot, worrying it into one of the shoes beside the bed. I needed to walk somewhere. 'Shut up,' I said but quite mildly, to the carillon bells, and reached for my shoulder bag.

  As I walked I was shedding Una behind me, lingering for a moment at the window of a closed antique shop and coming to a halt at a Lebanese coffee shop where I treated myself to a soothing baklava and 'cappuchina'. I decided I'd keep walking, as far as the zoo where I hadn't been since I was taken there as a kid. The lions' cage had shocked me then with its smell, its confining cruelty, the lioness pacing with what looked like a kind of suppressed anger — or was it hunger? I'd wanted to know and peered to learn the feeding times but Mother had been anxious to get home for a wireless programme. Today the zoo was transformed: there were exotic species, more humanely cared for. I was aware of this from the Telecom meerkat ads on TV. But how many single Wellingtonians would choose to spend an afternoon at the silly old zoo? I congratulated myself on my originality at least.

  When I bought my ticket a woman just inside the zoo entrance was talking to an otter which was swimming busily, sleek as a bullet. I nodded at the grey-haired woman because she looked vaguely familiar and walked on towards the nocturnal house which I'd read about in a brochure. I was looking for the kiwi, a bird I would be ashamed to admit I'd never seen. The sun was shining and there were more zoo visitors than I'd expected. In the nocturnal house I was clumsily tall in the company of a stream of children. They chattered in subdued tones probably brought on by the warning notices and the blue lighting. When I emerged into the light a very black spider was spread out on the white wall alongside my shoulder and I jumped violently. Someone laughed and I saw it was that woman again, who'd appeared on the path outside the building as though stalking me.

  'Hello,' I said and laughed with her to be polite. 'Big one, isn't he?'

  'I can't stand spiders. I think I'll give that place a miss.' The woman moved ahead of me on the path toward the tiger enclosure so that we were walking more or less together.

  'You were at school,' I remembered. 'It just came to me. You were a prefect or something.'

  'No — never a prefect.'

  'Well, someone senior to me.'

  'That would be right.' We exchanged names. 'You were in the lower school. And now I'm a senior citizen, discount rate at the pictures. Time does fugit.'

  'You took Latin? So did I. We're dinosaurs today.'

  Was I really at school with this old woman? But then I recalled she was one of those at the reunion whose faces I'd filed rudely under the crone heading. Could I be this old in five years' time?

  'I don't live too far from here,' Beryl explained herself.

  I was searching unsuccessfully for as good a reason for being at the zoo on my own.

  'And you?'

  'What? No, not really.' I waved a hand vaguely toward the city. 'We're near the Basin. An apartment. I just needed some time out.' Too much information. Beryl didn't need to know what had driven me out of my bedroom that afternoon. If I wasn't careful this woman would be asking me home for afternoon tea. So what was wrong with that? Perhaps after all Una was right — I was a not very nice person with a 'look' on my face.

  Beryl

  Sunday was winding down in Wellington. The valleys were wreathed in a greasy late-afternoon shadow, as if some large hand had poured gravy over the inner city. But in Beryl's street the sun was still smiling and smells of cooking, faintly ethnic, wafted across the back fence to where she stood by the rubbish bin, dreaming. The chugging of next door's two-stroke motor mower had petered out now and the neighbour had retreated inside. Beryl was standing with a hand on the small of her back, looking up into the sky where she thought she could see a grey-blue lounge suite settling in the clouds. She could do with a new lounge suite — how nice if it chose at this moment to drop down out of the sky and arrange itself on the rockery at the high point of her garden. She could entertain that woman from the zoo who had been so friendly. Clarice. Beryl shaded her eyes, boring into the cloud formation.

  'She didn't want to know you,' Greg said behind her.

  'She did. She did. She said we were both dinosaurs. Or did I say it? She agreed with me anyway.'

  'The zoo didn't have any dinosaurs,' Greg noted, talking in his tight nasal tones with teeth lightly clenched. There was a laugh at the back of his throat. 'You need to watch out. They might find a cage for the two of you.'

  'Oh, pfuh!' She studied Greg who today was wearing his navy duffel coat with that black peaked cap like the Dutch boy who put his finger in the dyke. It was an image that needed to be revised but somehow she couldn't get him to take that coat off whenever he appeared outside like this, even in summer. One of them was getting stuck in their ways. She was moved now to go back inside the house where at least he sometimes removed his hat.

  The living room with its speckled c
arpet had been Donald's place where he would read the Evening Post, cover to cover, quite hidden inside its rustling cave of pages, waiting for his tea so that he could get away and hide at the pub, as red-blooded husbands did after the licence laws changed. These days there was no pressure on Beryl to hasten or procrastinate over meal preparations. Greg propped himself on Donald's chair, poised, attentive in a way Don never had been, while she stepped down into her tight little kitchen and reached towards the scantily stocked pantry. Greg wasn't above calling out to her with observations that might interest her. In the alcove her stove, her aging fridge, the coloured benchtops, were close at hand. She had only to swivel in her Hush Puppies to put herself in touch with all that she needed. And she needed so little. It was some time since she had used the paint-spattered stepladder to stretch up to the higher shelves; she had nearly forgotten what was up there. Look out, she said, more to herself than to Greg. That's how it begins, old age, forgetting what's in your own cupboards. But Greg was taller than Beryl: she could leave it to Greg to remember the high shelves.

  When I strolled in the city supermarket, browsing the deli section, I was planning a belated housewarming party to cheer Una up — a daft idea perhaps but I'd had a dull day at work and needed cheer of my own. I was reminded of similar impulses to brighten the mood of my Sophie or Stuart, following a poor school report or a failure to make the rugby team. Lester, when he'd inherited these two as teenage stepchildren, was more inclined at such moments to criticise than cheer them, but I was their mother and vulnerable, protective as mothers had to be. Was I still stuck in some sort of mother role? To Una? Certainly not. Her mood affected my own when we lived so close and shared the open-plan kitchen, the same front door; it was no more than that.