I scanned and filed in my head the relative prices on an artist's palette of dips — olive green, orange, warm cream — and transferred a large discount camembert to my basket. Well, you don't need a party for cheese. Perhaps it would produce at least a camera-width smile in Una. While I walked home past the snarl of trolley buses and cars in Adelaide Road I was making a list of people I planned to invite and came up against a familiar dilemma — broken marriages. Secret liaisons I was supposed to know nothing of. People told me things because, I suppose, I was known to be discreet. But there was almost too much in the way of secrets to remember and handle discreetly when you got to my age. And which spouse to invite when both were your good friends? Who was speaking to whom? Who was now Lester's friend rather than mine? Presumably Una would have friends too, which could be interesting. She hadn't mentioned anyone particular yet.
'And we can ask the other people in the building,' I reminded her.
'Can we? We haven't met any of them. They could be awful. They might not want to know us.'
'Of course they will. We're nice.'
'You may be. I turn people off,' Una said. 'I say the wrong things.'
'You're right — you do talk some bullshit. You're at least as nice as I am.' I caught myself glancing towards the closed door of Sheree's room. 'I don't imagine it'll be quite her thing, will it?'
'You mean there's going to be no food? Nothing to drink? She'll be here, no worries. I'll tell her to behave.'
So the party was on.
It seemed Una might have been half right about turning people off. Apart from neighbours in the building very few of the people she invited had put in an appearance; in fact I can remember only one — a mauve-pated man who, I learned, had taken early retirement from the menswear department and now stood alongside Una's yellow packet sponge-cake with a dreadful smile on his face. Are You Being Served?, I thought. He was wearing new sky-blue trainers and leaned into them first on one hip, then the other; a tired old horse, refusing to sit down. If he was waiting to be entertained he might be waiting some time. One of my friends from my old workplace — where I'd once earned a measure of respect — was making loud, careful conversation with the second receptionist from the audiology rooms, as if he believed deafness might be catching. Una was being burbled at greedily by a middle-aged woman from an upstairs floor. As I approached she brightened rather obviously and made a clumsy attempt at an introduction, preparing to escape.
'Marge,' the woman corrected her. 'But I'm made of the best butter actually.' And moved all over again by her wit she shook inside red silk, a beautiful raspberry jelly. 'I don't see Kevin about. You did invite darling Kevin? The downstairs gentleman? He's a special friend of mine.'
'Yes,' I said, holding firmly onto Una's elbow so she couldn't get away. 'Didn't we, Una?' We were both well aware that the only unattached personable male in the building had been invited. He had been invited twice, a note under his door as well as in his letterbox.
Our front door was propped open with a footstool and now a black streak rippled across the carpet and into my room where the wide bed was heaped with an opulent mound of coats. I thought of the otter at the zoo.
'Only my little dog,' Marge gurgled. 'India! Out of there! I named her after one of my bedrooms, but it does suit her perfectly, don't you think? It's a fancy of mine, doing out rooms to match places I've visited. I've done India and Bali and now I can't decide on France or Spain. Then I've run out of rooms, so I'll just have to stay home, won't I? The living room's England, of course, so it's a little bit dull. God save the Queen. And the kitchen I call Greece.' She giggled. 'Naturally. I never could spell. Oh I'm sorry about the dog, dear. Shall I take him back upstairs?'
Una's lips were already stained purple with the cheap wine — quaffable, she called it — and she was beginning to lurch and laugh at unfunny remarks, some of them her own. When a tall man in his thirties with a stuffy banker's tie briefly interrupted an exchange we were having about supper preparations, she smiled widely and announced, 'I do like your son, Clarice. He's a real charmer!'
My head went back like whiplash. 'He's not my son. I told you — Stuart's in Sydney. Jack's a friend of his. I don't have any family in New Zealand at the moment. I told you.'
'Isn't that often the way? We get left behind, abandoned.'
The conversation chugged ahead, onto grandchildren, then globalisation. I was still stunned that Una could make such a mistake. I thought of the occasions when I'd discussed my family circumstances with her at length — unnecessary length perhaps — and yet so little of it seemed to have sunk in. I could as usefully have poured it down the wastemaster and leant on the switch. It was insulting and hurtful. Unless Una was suffering from premature aging — but she was only fifty-seven, younger than me.
'I'm drunk,' she said. 'Forgive me but I need to lie down. I'll do it in Sheree's room. Feel free to use mine.' This was just as well since her room had been set up to serve as the bar. It was the biggest bedroom and had ribbed glass doors opening off it into the living room. When we moved in I'd been content to choose the smaller double room which was further away from Sheree's little back bedroom and from kitchen noises.
'I reckon they ought to whip the whole thing out and be done. That's what Mrs Fulham's in for, isn't it? It's no use to you now, is it?'
'I'd rather have hung onto . . .'
'No, no! Being a woman — honestly! My cousin had hers out last year. Touch and go that was. She lost three pints over what you're meant to. Couldn't get blood into her fast enough — she nearly went. Her husband almost had a heart attack over it. That would have been the whole family. The daughter'd died just before — she had a heart as well. Awful.'
The party was at a rolling boil now and I was left in sole charge of the supper, frighteningly more ambitious than I would have chosen without Una's insistence. I checked to see if any bottles needed opening or replacing.
Multicoloured scarves and heirloom jewellery wafted in and out of Una's room, visiting the bar; sunworn faces on tired shoulders, boggy eyes hiding behind mini spectacles that resembled cobblers' glasses. The wrinklies, as the teenager called them, were busy looking after themselves and there was nothing much for me to do except enjoy myself. I had nearly forgotten how.
Sheree had commandeered the best burgundy armchair as usual and hung upside down with her pale ankles hooked over the high back, Walkman trailing wires on the floor. 'Here comes tomorrow, going down, going cheap . She wrapped the babydoll for the trash heap.' Stuart's friend, Jack, couldn't take his eyes off her belly button, which strained at the lime green T-shirt she had chosen to wear. She had worked out in advance that no one close to her age would be at the party and had accepted money to go catch a movie at Mid City but for the time being she seemed reluctant to turn herself right side up and leave. Her face upside-down was comical but somehow more acceptable, her short plaits wagged as she moved to a hidden rhythm. She wasn't listening to the chatter I was stuck with.
'They're dismantling me. My breast, my womb. It's my teeth next month!' Hysterical giggles. 'I told my doctor — you pay more and you get less.'
'I lost my nest egg in the crash. All gone.'
'Humpty Dumpty, eh? Fell off the wall!' 'Can't write a script without looking it up in some book. My old doctor didn't have to do that.'
'It'll be the water next. Watch this space!'
Stirring tabbouleh with my back to the guests I noticed how the bleakness of the dialogue didn't match the cheerfulness of delivery. The subject was now war and death — what else? — but the voices were raised, bright with glee. I was at something like a stage play where the director didn't understand the mood of the writer. Of course gloom is rude at a party.
If there was an earthquake now and all these people were to be swallowed up how much would it matter to me? I knew some of them too well and others not well enough but I couldn't see anyone I wanted to know better. I had felt sure that funny Beryl would want to come, but even she had di
thered when we encountered her outside the supermarket car park, laden with our party supplies, excusing herself on the grounds that she'd have to ask Greg. Greg — her husband presumably — sounded the old-fashioned sort, a control freak. He didn't like parties apparently.
Beryl
On the night of the party she wasn't prepared to attend, Beryl woke in fright, smelling Donald's beery breath on her pillow. She sat up in the dark, reaching for the light switch with a sweaty palm and gulping breaths of good air, for the smell was gone now. Her rapid heartbeat slowed. Not a ghost — her husband wasn't dead — but only one of her dreams, and she wasn't even sure how it could frighten her. She had slept with that breath often enough in the past and it wasn't as if he was ever abusive to his wife, even when she'd taken herself off to her own bed. She'd had to buy a new mattress for the double bed after he had left her for Michelle, because there was a lumpy hollow on one side that was a rude reminder of his absence as well as an ordinary discomfort. His absence, surprisingly, was the most frightening thing of all. She had gone back to his bed nostalgically, as soon as it was empty of him. The feminist literature she had progressed to after she burned her Mills & Boons supplied no answers for this behaviour. Her lack of understanding was as despicable as her reading of formula romances earlier, but there was nothing else to do except read. There wasn't much she wanted to watch on TV these days — it was all about real life and real life had so little to do with Beryl. She glanced hopefully at the paperback lying open under the lamplight, but it wouldn't do. She switched off the light instead and turned over.
Greg, of course, would smell of whisky, never beer, but he had lain down on her bed, only once or twice, when she was especially lonely or afraid. Like the time she had to go to the hospital for a scan, but it had turned out to be a false alarm, as he had predicted. He was kind then. And he hadn't lain too close ever, not close enough to touch or smell, just near enough to keep the bad stuff at bay, so that she could go on breathing.
Tonight she knew he wasn't close at hand or she wouldn't have smelled Donald. She slipped into her chenille dressing gown and went to sit with a cup of milky tea in the back sunporch where she could look at the night garden. In the moonlight the house on the rise and to the left transformed itself into a stone country mansion somewhere in England. Her mother had obsessed about her childhood home in the English Midlands but her words had flared unnaturally with fairytale repetition while this country scene conjured itself into view as easily as opening a window. If she sniffed hard she could smell odours of chaff and dung and she knew that in that dark corner near the compost there was a three-legged stool where Greg sometimes sat milking one of the farm cows.
Beryl had been born and bred in Wellington, like her father before her. It wasn't very patriotic of her to be friends with a man so very English, but Greg had just happened to her at the right time, talking to her from the TV screen in 1976. You couldn't summon up friends at will any more than you could deliberately fall in love. Looking back she saw how she had kept herself proudly aloof, a self-contained unit without silly small talk, when she worked at the library. It was how she was, how her mother had been, not her fault. It hadn't occurred to her when she was younger that pride could leave her alone in an empty house. Quite alone. She shivered as reality reached out clammy fingers and touched her. There was always the radio, but even that had its limits. And Greg?
She couldn't be blamed for needing Greg, just as she couldn't be blamed for taking the odd paracetamol. 'I know you're mad at me,' she said. 'And I know why.'
'So tell me,' Greg answered, moving out of the shadows.
A swelling wave of relief built up in her and broke so that she couldn't help a couple of sobs and had to wipe her dressing gown sleeve under her nose. She sniffed. 'I shouldn't have used your name to get out of the party. But what else was I to do?'
'Go. You could have gone.'
'I couldn't. I would have panicked before I got to the front door. All on my own. I never go to parties on my own. And what would I wear?'
'The dress you bought for the reunion. You were okay to go to the reunion.'
'That was different. No one had partners with them at the reunion, everyone was alone. It was like school.'
'So you're never going to wear that dress again? What did it cost you — remind me?'
The moon slid behind a cloud and for a moment she could hardly see Greg's face. 'Anyway I've done it now,' she said. 'The party is probably over.'
'You've done it all right. How are you going to ask Clarice back to visit when she'll expect to meet your partner in the flesh? You can't, can you? Unless you want to be seen as a liar. Or a nutter. You've blown it.'
As if to echo his words Beryl reached in her dressing gown pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. When she looked up she found she had extinguished him like a candle.
Sunday again, and the kitchen window was streaming with rain that squittered sideways when there was a gust of wind.
'I'm suffering from post-traumatic party syndrome,' Una said, leaning on the open dishwasher as if it were a walking frame.
'Not a hangover?'
'Okay — that too. What about you?'
'There's a lot of cleaning up to do. Was it worth it?'
'I'm not crawling round the floor after corks and glasses and stuff. My head would fall off. If you want to do it today I'll vacuum tomorrow. Sheree!' Una bellowed at the closed door, then held her head with both hands. 'I told Sheree she could help you. I'll give her some money. What am I saying? I've already given her the money.'
'She's gone out. She borrowed your jacket.'
'Oh. Damn. Well, she'll be back. Has that jug boiled? We need a cuppa.' Una was wearing a loose nightie that was escaping off one soft shoulder. Without her clever make-up and her tight skirt she looked far nicer, I thought.
'Plenty of people came, anyway.'
'Anyway,' Una repeated. 'Right. It was a flop.'
'What do you mean? The supper was great, by the way. And if you go by the noise level . . .'
'I'm glad you had a nice time. As for that Marge! And Kevin didn't come, like I said he wouldn't. Probably terrified of our beauty.' She snorted sarcastically.
'He's nudging sixty himself.'
'Possibly. So he'll need a forty-year-old at least.'
'I didn't think you had any real plans for him.'
'Why not? I'm desperate.'
'Are you? I think I've had enough of men.' I meant it. 'It's such a chore unless they're absolutely fascinating. Their minds, I mean. But even their minds go mushy. I tried to talk to that man with the bald head — your friend . . .'
'Not really a friend. And he's losing it. That's why he's retired early. Boring old sod.'
I wanted to ask why she'd invited boring old sods to her party, but I thought I knew the answer.
'You're right,' she said. 'I'm not worth knowing. I'm a worthless piece of shit. Don't talk to me. You'll only tell lies.'
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I launched myself from the comfortable chair and returned to scraping plates and stacking the dishwasher. Una was sitting with her hands around a steaming mug, holding on as if she needed to warm herself. Her chin crumpled and tears leaked into the cracks around her nostrils.
I said, 'You told me not to talk to you.'
'That's right. Get on with your work. I'm not going to help you. I'm a shit, I told you I was a shit.'
As I planted dirty glasses in the rack I was thinking, I listen to you. I remember the stuff you say to me. But you don't remember things I say to you. Important things like where my son is living. Yes, you're a shit. Sometimes.
The dishwasher hissed as it began to fill with water. I moved away, straightening my back to confront the living-room chaos that I'd had been purposely keeping outside my line of vision. Una had already wheeled the big tea trolley laden with bottles and discarded glasses out of her bedroom and cast a mess of scrumpled tea-towels and paper napkins after it. There was a trail of pean
uts that looked deliberate, leading towards Sheree's bedroom door. I skidded on a plastic cork and saved myself by clutching at Una's ornamental skinny giraffe. I discovered the top part was detachable and had come away in my hand.
'Look out!' Una blurted, unfairly.
'It's okay — see?' I reattached the head and gave it a mollifying pat. The red eyes stared at us, unblinking. It wasn't something I would have chosen for myself but this was one of the adjustments you had to agree to when you shared your living space. It occurred to me then that I was doing something like flatting, an exercise I'd had to observe in Sophie and Stuart before they'd taken the next step and married, one after the other. It wasn't so different in fact from marriage. I'd secretly nurtured a peculiar dislike for some of Lester's treasured possessions, in particular a Chinese carved fish with bulging eyes. It had been a gift from his old maths teacher and hardly his fault.
Una had retreated to her bedroom and closed the glass doors by the time Sheree got back, shaking the rain from her outdoor clothes like a dog. I stepped clear of this and frowned at her.
'Why don't you hang those in the bathroom?'
'Uh?'
'Una says you're going to help me get this place in order. She gave you some money for it.' When Sheree merely raised her eyebrows and put her head on one side I went on, 'I could really do with some help. And don't think being pregnant is some sort of excuse to laze about and get out of shape, because that's the worst thing for you and your baby. All that loud music won't teach you anything about life.'
Sheree's head was still cocked to one side. 'Anything else?'
For an answer I thrust a cloth into her hand.
'What am I supposed to do with this?'
'Use your imagination. The kitchen bench might be an idea, and after that the stove top. Use plenty of Jif.'
Sheree laid the cloth down. 'Okay, but I'm allowed to go to the loo first. You don't want me pissing on your nice clean floor.' When she said 'clean' she erupted into a sarcastic bubble of mirth and stirred a scattering of potato chips with a toe of her Reeboks. I resisted picking up the cloth again, even though a greasy smear on the fridge leered at me seductively. Sometimes I was an obsessive wiper. The bathroom door remained closed for an unlikely space of time. When I leaned my ear against the saucy French 'Lavabo' sign I'd hung there myself before the party, I could hear running water. It went on running. 'Sheree? Are you all right?'
Playing Friends Page 4