by Rosalie Ham
Charmaine looked up at the fan in the lounge room and pointed her biro at the hole in the ceiling. ‘I bet the roof leaks.’
‘I catch it in a bucket. Tip it on my geranium bush.’
‘It’ll cost at least ten thousand dollars to have the house painted. When was the last time you had it done?’
‘Lance, my husband, said his parents painted it, but that was before I came to live here.’
‘The roof needs replacing and the house needs restumping.’ Charmaine opened her clipboard and removed a piece of paper.
‘I’m very comfortable in my home,’ Margery said, circling her arm to indicate her cross-stitch cocoon.
‘You’ll need to spend a hundred thousand dollars to renovate.’
‘As I say, you can start your duties as soon as you like, but we’ll start with how to make a pot of tea properly.’
‘I’m not actually the maid; I’m here to assess the house.’ She placed the sheet of paper in front of Margery.
‘Are you from the ACAT team?’
‘No.’ Then Charmaine became very crisp. ‘In its current state it’s an eyesore, especially now they’re rebuilding next door. You could ask the builders for a quote for repairs, which will be substantial, or, you won’t have to worry about anything like that if you sign this piece of paper.’ She handed Margery a biro and pointed with her glossy fingernail to the dotted line. ‘Just sign here, Mrs Blandon.’
Margery tried to pull the paper closer, but Charmaine held it fast with her spearhead finger. Her hair was very short, Margery thought, far too short for someone with such hard features.
‘I’ll keep it to read then post it to you,’ Margery said.
‘It’s very straightforward,’ Charmaine said, standing over her.
‘I’d just feel better if I read it closely,’ Margery said, and sipped her tea.
Charmaine sat down again and looked at her watch. ‘I’ll wait.’
Margery reached for her reading glasses but they were missing. ‘I put them on the table,’ she said. ‘You haven’t picked them up by mistake, have you?
Charmaine said, ‘There’s the dotted line there, see?’
‘I need my glasses.’
‘Just sign it.’
‘I have to speak to Walter first.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Do not.’
‘Do so.’ Margery sat on her hands. She’d had enough of smiling, fragrant estate agents telling her they’d do her a favour by selling her home from under her.
‘The new maid will be here soon,’ she said.
Charmaine held a biro up to Margery’s face. Next door, the excavator roared and timber clattered, glass shattered and the ceiling above the women vibrated. Charmaine rolled her eyes towards the demolition sounds, ‘Out with the old and in with the new.’ Fine black ceiling dust fell, powdering her pink cotton shoulders.
Margery said, ‘I’m happy to sit here until I die.’
Charmaine put the biro on the piece of paper next to the dotted line and said, ‘Well, I might not have to sit here for very long then.’ She crossed her arms and legs.
Next door, Mrs Bist’s walls groaned and folded in on each other. The roof collapsed on top, then the chimney imploded and bricks crashed down onto the metal heap.
‘That’ll send the rats scurrying,’ Margery said, lifting her feet and searching the floor for small furry creatures. Charmaine leapt up, snatched the piece of paper from the table and ran out of the house.
Margery remained where she was, calmly finishing her cup of tea, running her tongue across her teeth to remove the dust.
Judith was powdering her sliced grapefruit with artificial sweetener when Pudding strolled into the kitchen, tall and glossy in her school uniform, a backpack over her shoulder. Her mother was dressed in a plain, black shift, her hair loose and wavy. Pudding pressed her earplugs into her ears, picked up a banana, tub of yoghurt and a slice of toast with Vegemite waiting for her on the bench, kissed her mother’s cheeks, ‘You look very stylish today, mother,’ and wandered out the back door, eating her toast.
Judith said, ‘Love you, Pudding,’ and sat to eat her grapefruit. She spread a paper napkin on her lap, pushed back her sleeves, washed two Fatbuster diet tablets down with sweetened black coffee and said, ‘Day one, Judith. You can do this, just last three weeks without eating anything fattening and then you’re off and running. Just get obsessed! You are fat, Judith. You must get rid of the flab.’ She jabbed a wedge of grapefruit with her fork and popped it into her mouth, chewing slowly, making every bitter mouthful last.
Then she curled and teased her hair, spraying it into a firm round helmet over her head. She spread thick, creamy make-up over her face, glued on her eyelashes and ringed her eyes with black kohl, then she pinned a gold brooch to her frock, strung three gold chains around her neck, put three gold rings on three separate fingers and clipped on a pair of gold-mounted, cutglass earrings. Then she sat down at her computer, two rice crackers and two diet mints beside the desk. She logged on. The computer screen read, ‘Welcome to the Diploma of Counselling. Please select your subject.’
Barry arrived bringing currents of cologne, jangling his keys. ‘So, as we discussed –’
‘Yes, Barry, as always, I’ll do my best for you but you know Marge. She’s not the most approachable or cooperative person on the planet, never has been.’
She clicked ‘Parenting and Family Care’.
The front door opened. Barry called, ‘See ya.’
‘Will you be home for tea?’ But Barry was gone and the screen had captured her interest. She studied the words, pondering what they meant. ‘Aspects of child temperament and parenting style most likely to be associated with observed behavioural problems caused by possible combinations, including negative reactions with low parental warmth, low inductive reasoning, can cause low inhibition. Behavioural problems include evidence of the child hurting others, damaging objects, disobeying instructions and having temper tantrums . . .’
She highlighted the words and moved the cursor to ‘Copy’ then pasted it in the document titled ‘Judith’s Diary, A Lifetime of Negative Enrichment’ then read the words aloud: ‘Negative reactions with low parental warmth and low inductive reasoning, and low inhibition, behavioural problem measures include evidence of the child hurting others, damaging objects, disobeying instructions . . .’ ‘My God,’ she cried. ‘This is my life!’
Sitting with her hands loose in her lap, the flurry travelling around the screen, the memories came. She was standing behind her mother, her shoulders high above in a blue cardigan. ‘Mum,’ she said, but the shoulders didn’t turn, her mother just kept washing dishes, stacking plates neatly on the draining board. Then there was her mother’s lap, a wooden frame holding her at bay, a haven that was out-of-bounds, an exclusive place only for cloth and thread, needles and scissors, yet Judith’s scalp crawled deliciously as she remembered the feel of a brush pulling through her hair, the bristles scraping across her scalp. She felt a comb slice down the back of her head, the tug of her mother’s firm hands parting and plaiting. ‘Now go and tie your ribbons for school.’
Judith moved the cursor to iPhoto and looked at images of Pudding’s happy, loving and carefully photographed life. As she sat back to eat her rice crackers, she felt reassured.
Margery rinsed her cup under the tap, left it to drain on the sink and sat in her chair with her cross-stitch. By the time Mrs Parsons’ blind went up, she had come to terms with Charmaine’s visit and felt calmer, so she set out for next door. On her front path, just beneath the letterbox, were her glasses. One lens was cracked and lay in three neat triangles in the rim. Next door, in the bright morning sunshine the excavator roared, Mrs Bist’s carefully painted walls splintering under its iron tracks. Margery stepped cautio
usly towards Mrs Parsons’ place and pushed the squeaky little gate open. She made her way down the side of the house to the back door, knocked, called ‘Yoo-hoo,’ and let herself into her neighbour’s kitchen. Mrs Parsons waited in her rocking chair near the wood stove, though there had been no fire in the grate since electric heaters started appearing in summer sales catalogues in the 1950s. Only the winter before, Cheryl had replaced her two-bar electric wall heater with an upright electric oil heater on wheels. Mrs Parsons also used it to dry her rinsed cottontails and wool stockings of an evening.
Margery sat down opposite her neighbour. From the wireless, a soprano with a warm, lyrical voice sang,
Shepherd, the meadows are in bloom.
You should graze your flock on this side,
Sing baïlèro lèrô.
Shepherd, the water divides us and I can’t cross it,
Sing baïlèro lèrô.
‘Good morning, how are you today, Mrs Parsons?’ Mrs Parsons said she was as well as could be expected, thank you. Margery reached down and lifted Mrs Parsons’ right foot, rocking the old lady’s chair back. She tied her neighbour’s lace, gently lowered her stiff leg and, as she picked up Mrs Parsons’ left foot, apologised again, ‘Sorry about the argument yesterday.’ Again, Mrs Parsons said, ‘Never mind.’
‘Mrs Bist’s house has gone.’
‘Is that what all the noise is?’
‘It was a perfectly good house.’ Margery stood up, smoothed her skirt and, as she did every morning, asked, ‘Are you alright then, Mrs Parsons?’ and, as always, Mrs Parsons replied, ‘Yes, thank you. You’re very kind.’
‘You didn’t get a bossy lass called Charmaine bothering you?’
‘Not today.’
At her gate, Margery paused to take in the vast space above the pile of splintered weatherboards, twisted iron, smashed window frames and blackened chimney bricks where Mrs Bist’s house had stood, just an hour ago. The excavator sat bludgeoning its way through the back shed, the arms of Mrs Bist’s Hills Hoist poking out from under its tracks. Feeling threatened by the destruction of certainties she had known for sixty years, Margery went inside her little house, snibbed her screen door and pulled shut the front door. She tried to close the back porch door, but it wouldn’t go past a bulge where the sunken stumps had buckled a floorboard, so she closed and bolted the kitchen door instead. While the kettle boiled again, she sticky-taped her glasses together, gluing the glass triangles to the frame, and secured them with the ends of a blue bandaid. Then she flicked on her wireless. Andy Williams was just finishing ‘Moon River’ and the announcer on Magic Radio Best Tunes of All Time told her it was ten fifteen.
She tipped the still-warm pot of tea down the gully trap, took two slices of bread from the freezer and popped them into the toaster. While they toasted she warmed the pot again with boiling water, tipped it out, put two teaspoons of tea in, filled it with boiling water and covered the pot with a cross-stitched cosy. She opened the side doors of her little toaster, turned the bread and got the butter, marmalade, plate, knife and tea strainer organised. She took the toast from the toaster, propped it in a steeple to cool, turned the toaster off, put the strainer over her cup, turned the pot three times, poured her tea then carefully buttered her toast, making sure the butter went all the way to the crusts. She spread the marmalade sparingly and sat enjoying her breakfast while Rod Stewart sang ‘Maggie May’ and the excavator next door shovelled Mrs Bist’s house into the dump bin, fine dust raining down from her vibrating ceiling. Then Margery removed her slippers and went back to bed until Tuesday morning.
From her bed Margery could see her new neighbours, Tony and Miriana, standing on the razed block next door, Miriana’s burnt-orange belly protruding from the gap between her small singlet and tracksuit pants. ‘Tsk, just look at them,’ Margery scoffed. ‘They spray a suntan from a can these days, so everyone’s the colour of a raw saveloy. And he’s got hair like an echidna.’
Tony wandered to the middle of the street, mobile phone to his ear, watching down to the corner, waiting for something. ‘He’s probably waiting for some thunderous machine to rattle my house all day.’
Over at Tyson’s, the curtains billowed through the smashed front windows. Next door, Kevin’s dark, leafy house was, as usual, quiet.
‘Well, I’d better get up now, Cecily. I’ll have a shower, though I only just had one Sunday for my birthday party.’ She reached for her dressing gown. Nat King Cole sang ‘Rambling Rose’ while she ate her tea and toast. In the bathroom she undressed, hanging her gown and nightie on the back of the door, then carefully covered what was left of her set with a shower cap. She removed an old shampoo bottle from the bottom of the bath, took hold of the shower taps and swung her right leg in, and was alarmed when she found she wasn’t able to gain purchase. She started to slide, clinging to the taps, sinking. Her crotch came to rest on the edge of the bath, stabilising her temporarily, but her left leg lost its faint hold on the floor and she sank to lie along the edge of the bath, clinging on with her knees like a caterpillar to a stem. Then her left knee lost its hold and she rolled into the bath, tearing the bandaid from the wound on her shin. Water from the cold tap shot from the rose and, feeling her twisted arms being dragged from their sockets, Margery let go of the taps and flipped over like a sausage in hot water.
She lay in the bottom of the bath, gasping under the cold downpour, the clean water gushing down the plug hole, her water bill rising second by second. She ripped the shower curtain down, the plastic rings pinging onto the ceiling and bouncing to the floor, and she pulled it up over her head. She was still there, shivering under the torturous roar of water, when she heard someone calling, ‘Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?’ Then the water stopped and the shower curtain pulled back. Margery looked up into the painted face of a pantomime actress. The woman looking down at her had startling blue eyes edged with black kohl in a pale face rimmed with wild, letterbox-red hair. The actress turned the taps off.
‘I’m Anita, your new carer.’
‘You don’t look like a carer.’
‘I don’t want to look like a carer. You’d be Margery.’
‘Mrs Blandon to you.’
‘You’re alright then?’
‘I’m stuck. You can help me out, if you wouldn’t mind.’
Anita said, ‘There might be something broken.’
‘I’d certainly know if I’d a broken bone, don’t you think?’
‘We’d better call an ambulance just the same.’
Cheryl had warned her that the old lady could be cantankerous, but Anita saw terror in her eyes. ‘Mrs Blandon, it’s okay. You don’t necessarily die if you go to hospital these days.’
‘Now listen here, I’d know if there was anything broken, and I tell you there isn’t. Just help me out.’
‘You’re bleeding.’ Anita carefully peeled the bandaids from Margery’s papery shin. ‘Ouch. That’s nasty. Right on your tibia.’
‘Do you always state the obvious?’
‘Stay there,’ Anita said and winked. In the kitchen she flicked the kettle on, then collected pillows and a blanket. She propped Margery up in the bath and tucked the blanket around her. While Margery drank a cup of sweet black tea Anita sat on the back step smoking a cigarette. ‘Tell me what happened, Mrs Blandon.’
‘I slid, very gracefully I must say, on spilled shampoo.’
‘You’re real lucky, you know. One of my other ladies, Mrs Razic down the street, slipped in the bath but she wasn’t holding on. She’s got stitches.’
Margery said, ‘I’m perfectly alright and you can tell my daughter, Judith, that I am not going to a nursing home.’
‘You should get a flatmate, an international student since you’re so close to the uni. You could have been there for days.’
‘A flatmate’s not going to stop me from falling.’
‘No, but they help around the house and they’d help you out of the bath.’
‘This is the last time I’ll fall in the bath, I assure you.’
‘We’d better get you checked out by your doctor.’
Margery panicked. ‘As I’ve said, I’m quite alright!’
‘Okay, okay, don’t give yourself a stroke. But what if something goes wrong with you later because of this fall and I get thrown in jail? I can’t afford to have any sort of trouble.’ Any sort of trouble was a very real threat to Anita, since she held her job on a probationary basis through her Corrective Services officer.
‘That’s right,’ Margery said, ‘just thinking of yourself. I thought you were here to help me.’
‘I am,’ Anita said, sitting on the edge of the bath. ‘And you do need to see a doctor.’
‘If you tell Judith,’ Margery said, ‘I’ll phone the council and tell them you stole my pearls.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Anita said, ‘and I’ll phone the ACAT team and tell them you need to go to a home.’
‘You’re an appalling person.’
‘You started it.’ Anita got a kitchen chair and put it beside the bath, dug around in her work basket and found dressings. She tenderly cleaned Margery’s bleeding shin, creased the skin back into place and covered it with a clear plastic dressing, then she got into the bath behind Margery and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘I’m going to lift you up, alright? Trust me.’ She knew that Margery had never felt so vulnerable or useless, knew that she wanted to cry but was too furious, afraid of slipping again, and didn’t really trust someone the size of Anita to bear her weight. She also knew she no longer had a choice.
‘One, two, three,’ Anita said and felt Margery’s slight body stiffen against her, but she eased her up, rested her on the edge of the bath then slid her over to the chair. Anita was probably the only other person on the planet apart from Margery’s husband who had seen Margery naked, and even then he might not have actually seen her completely naked. She felt humiliated sitting there like a thawing chicken, a stranger patting her bottom dry and holding panties for her to step into while she steadied herself on the handbasin like a drunk. But Margery let Anita sponge her down with warm water, and as Anita eased her knee-high stockings over her dressing, Margery said, ‘Just have a look and see if Mrs Parsons’ blind is up, will you? You can see through the lounge room window.’