by Rosalie Ham
‘A cellar,’ Margery said, pointing to the excavator.
Kevin smoothed his lustrous moustache with his finger and thumb. ‘Nar, it’ll be a hot spa, Mrs B. That’s their culture. They’ll build a house around it, you’ll find.’ He lowered his anti-pollution mask over his face and rode away.
‘It’s a cellar,’ Margery said.
Angela was combing her hair, dividing it into neat, pale-blue slices when Margery noticed something sparkling on the third finger of her left hand.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re not engaged, are you?’
‘Yes,’ Angela said, pausing to smile lovingly at the insubstantial diamond chips sprinkled across the thin gold band.
‘I should congratulate you then,’ Margery said. ‘I’ll have to train another hairdresser now.’
‘You’ll get Toula. She’s good.’
‘No doubt you’ll have a six-month honeymoon in Italy and come back pregnant.’
‘Hopefully.’
Margery dragged herself home again, limping slightly because of the raw tightness of her injured shin, her eyes on the footpath beneath her sensible shoes, her mind consumed by both Glen and Angela’s betrayal. She stopped briefly outside the pub to scowl at the door, and again in the park to stare hatefully at the young mothers, designer types, expensively dressed in badly finished inside-out clothes, chatting by the safety swings with their babies called Rupert or Maude. Golden retrievers and healer–kelpie crosses tore across the grass, yapping. At home she sat at the kitchen table staring at her good shoes, her cross-stitch and her sheet music in bags at her side, waiting for Kevin.
Kevin was spying on riders from behind a newspaper in the café opposite the Brunswick Touring Bicycle Club clubrooms. On occasion, he’d done the ‘hell ride’ with them to Mt Eliza, but a misunderstanding with the club saw him ostracised. After several mediation sessions, a quorum used rule 6.1c to declare that Kevin had ‘conducted himself in a manner which, in the opinion of the Committee, was prejudicial to the good order or name of the Association’, and although his natural state was that of outcast, he was still crushed. The dispute was over a lost reflector cuff. Kevin felt the club should replace it since it vanished during an exhibition ride as part of the Brunswick Street Festival, but the club didn’t agree. The same thing had happened when he was a member of the local tree planting club and lost a trowel during a Regeneration Day exercise.
The cyclists set off for Beach Road, a river of bobbing reflective green and yellow flashing red and white moving down Sydney Road, and Kevin set off for the three-block ride to take his elderly neighbour to see his demented mother.
At three-thirty, he arrived at Margery’s house, showered and shaved, with a bag of Pat’s clean washing, some cans of beer and Fifi, Pat’s Pomeranian – a small, decrepit dog, stained and matted, with flatulence, yellow teeth and halitosis. He took the car keys from the nail behind the kitchen door and went to the shed where he warmed up Margery’s car, an apple-green Hillman Minx that Lance bought brand-new in 1961. Margery ducked into the lavatory one last time then hopped into the back seat with Fifi, gathering her bags to her side – handbag, cross-stitch bag, the bag containing sheet music and her spare bag – fencing Pat’s putrid, rotting dog against the door.
As he backed out into the lane, Kevin said, ‘I’d like to borrow this car, Mrs B, join the vintage car society,’ but before he could conclude his request, Margery said, ‘This car belongs to Morris.’
‘It’s no use to him where he is, I assure you,’ Kevin said, eyeing her via the rear-vision mirror, but she kept her gaze straight ahead. It was Morris’s car, as written in Lance’s Last Will and Testament. Her second-born son was to inherit the car, and one day he would come home from Thailand, so that was that.
The nursing home was a modern square building surrounding a central garden. Kevin punched in the code, the doors slid open, and they were embraced by pastel-hued ambiance permeated by a faint humid stench of effervescent, urine-soaked carpet squares and perfumed oil burners. Margery presented her latest lot of cross-stitched pillow covers and face washers to the loud, cheery carers, then went to the day room to play piano for the residents, an assortment of distorted figures slumped in cushiony chairs like discarded frocks. Some men crowded around the fridge. They’d been there, asleep in their wheelchairs, since lunchtime because Happy Hour started at four o’clock and they longed for their one free glass of beer. If Nurse Graham or Nurse Garry was on, they always got two. Christmas and St Patrick’s Day, three.
Kevin pulled a chair up next to his mother’s armchair and put Fifi in her lap. Pat screwed her nose up and said, ‘That dog stinks,’ so he put her on someone else’s lap. Generally the old ladies loved to goo at her and pet her, though Fifi preferred to lick the carpet squares. Kevin looked sideways along the line of frayed grey hair standing out from the wing-back chairs, and said, ‘Hello ladies,’ switching the TV to the sports channel.
‘Mrs Bist’s place sold for $650,000,’ he said to his mother. Kevin had desperately wanted to buy Mrs Bist’s house. He’d haunted the estate agent and lobbied Mrs Bist’s fellow volunteers at the opportunity shop, but Mrs Bist’s niece sent word from America that the house was to go to auction. So Kevin was first at the auction, eyeballing the auctioneer, his raised hand visible from the very back of the crowd. As soon as the bidding started, a surly bloke – Tony, as it turns out – and his substantial accomplice, Dennis, a short, thick man with stiff white hair and colourless skin, arrived to flank him. ‘I’ve got nine hundred thousand dollars to spend on this place, mate. Cash. But I’d prefer not to spend that much, if you know what I mean.’
Kevin’s bidding paused, and Dennis took up the lull. But Kevin tentatively raised his hand for six hundred and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred dollars. Then Tony leaned in and said in his ear, ‘You live over the road, don’t you, Kevin? Ride a pushbike to the city every day, eh?’
Kevin looked into Tony’s eyes, and brought his hand swiftly down.
Suddenly, Pat turned her dull, blue eyes to Kevin and said, ‘Mrs Bist? She got a prolapse from all those babies.’
Margery said, ‘Mrs Bist didn’t have any babies.’
Pat focussed on Margery, her expression defiant. ‘Well, who did all those children belong to?’
‘She got them from St Joseph’s,’ Kevin said.
She turned on Kevin, ‘You’re not suggesting that the priests –’
‘No!’ he said. ‘St Joseph’s . . . the orphanage.’
Kevin brought the conversation back to Mrs Bist’s house. ‘They knocked Mrs Bist’s house down, Mum. They’re building a new one – architect-designed. I wish I could have bought that house. I could renovate it, put a tenant in, retire. It’s my greatest wish to retire, Mum.’ Forty-five years as a salesman at a menswear store in the city had taken its toll on Kevin, especially since he had never possessed a name tag declaring anything more important than ‘Relieving Manager’.
Pat wasn’t listening, so Margery filled the silence with an old English proverb, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ just as a kitchen attendant, a long-nosed woman with prominent teeth, her dark hair caught up in a ponytail, wheeled the tea trolley in and started up-ending cups and sploshing milk into them from the two-litre carton. Then she spooned two sugars into each cup, held a giant teapot over the lines of cups and ran it up and down without lifting the spout. Tea ran off the side of the cart and disappeared into the carpet squares.
Pat pointed to the trolley and said, ‘There’s a horse.’
The attendant, rattling the spoon around the teacups, rolled her eyes and said in a broad Irish accent, ‘There’s no horse here, Pat.’
‘Yes there is,’ Pat said. ‘I can see it.’
The attendant dumped an arrowroot biscuit and a plastic cup half-filled with beige tea on the table in front Pat. ‘There’s no ho
rse in this room.’
Margery, thinking of pixies in Irish gardens, imaginary gods on clouds in the sky, and acknowledging her habit of talking to Cecily, said, ‘It might be an invisible horse.’
The attendant said, ‘Then its poo is invisible, so no one will see it and they’ll walk it all over and I’d be all day cleaning it up.’
The male nurse who was pouring the beer for Mr McNickle checked the soles of his shoes and winked at Margery.
Margery declined an offer of a cup of tea and played a few tunes. A couple of nurses got one or two of the residents up onto their feet for a dance, and just when everyone was having a lovely time, Kevin said it was time they were off, and they left.
The last time Margery saw her, Pat was busy shoving the tea-soaked paper serviette down the spout of her feeding mug with a plastic straw.
Back in the womb of her cosseted fabric-and-cotton walls, Margery took the frozen chicken from the freezer and left it to thaw in the sink. She had just flicked on the television and settled with her Sao biscuits with cheese and sliced tomato to watch David Attenborough’s Tiger – Spy in the Jungle program when Kevin came striding down her passage, his helmet light flashing and his bicycle shoes clattering on her linoleum. He walked straight past her, down her back steps and into the shed. Margery made a mental note to remember to keep the screen door snibbed. He came back and stood in her lounge room, the exaggerated crotch of his reflective orange lycra bodysuit blocking Margery’s view of the tigers on the television. ‘Mum’s gone. She ran away just after dinner.’
Margery said, ‘At least she’d had something to eat. She’ll have her strength.’
‘Well, that’s just it,’ Kevin said. ‘She’ll have enough strength to walk straight under a tram.’ He tugged his cycling gloves on and said, ‘She’s not in your yard, or the shed. I’m going to search for her,’ and clacked down the passage again. David Attenborough said he was going to use elephants equipped with cameras to enter the world of the tiger for an intimate look into their lives.
‘Fancy . . .’ said Margery, and bit into her Sao biscuit.
Saturday night passed like any other Saturday night at 253 Gold Street. Margery ate her dinner, took her tablets, careful to drop the sleeping pill down the plughole, and went to bed early with her transistor radio on Magic Radio Best Tunes of All Time. She reclined in the dark, watching out to the street, the streetlight opposite illuminating the passers-by. She dozed and woke, dozed and woke, and through the disjointed night she saw Tyson and his mates kicking a football up and down the street. It bounced onto Kevin’s front verandah and broke his wind chime. He burst through the front door, objecting strongly, so the boys kicked it through his front window. Waves of harmonica and you-done-me-wrong music floated to her from the pub, and then she heard the patrons singing as they spilled onto the street and lurched past her front window. A slip of a girl stood swaying outside her gate, her dress, the smallest dress Margery had ever seen, sparkled in the lamplight while her friend, a smart-looking chap in a striped suit, tried to break into a car. The girl looked up and down the footpath, then she opened her little purse and was about to vomit into it when she saw Margery’s letterbox, so she flipped up the top and vomited into it instead.
‘Got it,’ her friend said, opening the car door, then he grabbed her and kissed her passionately.
‘Tsk,’ said Margery and hopped out of bed to bang on her front window, but it was too late. The hoodlums drove off, scraping the side of Mr Ahmed’s parked taxi. Kevin’s light went on and a little while later a police car cruised by.
Margery woke early Sunday morning to that particular stillness streets have after a busy Saturday night, and more palings from her front fence were missing. ‘Wretched so-and-sos,’ she snarled. Tyson and his flatmates used her fence to light fires. They also tore branches from the trees in the park to cook sausages on sticks or to burn.
She moved her legs to the edge of her bed, sat while her blood oriented itself to her upright position and, when she felt stable, she stood. Again, she paused while her feet adjusted to the weight of her body, and her tarsals and phalanges clicked into position. She rotated her shoulders, loosening her vertebrae, and then rolled her head as much as she could to free her neck. Blood had found its way to her feet; her fingers started to tingle and her heart seemed to be coping so she moved off, best foot first – in this case, her left foot, because her right foot supported a particularly sensitive bunion – sliding her feet into her slippers.
She gathered her dressing gown about her and made her way cautiously out to the lav with her commode pot, and that’s when she found Pat. The noise, a snort, drew her to the shed. It went through her mind to phone the police, or go to Mrs Parsons’, but Mrs Parsons’ blind wasn’t up. She told herself it must be a sick pussycat or a possum and went to investigate, arming herself with the copper stick from the laundry. She shuffled to the shed door and opened it – ‘Here, kitty-kitty-kitty’ – but then she noticed that the travelling rug was not folded on the back dash of Morris’s car, and the passenger door was slightly open, the small yellow ceiling light burning. Someone was in the car. Margery tightened the belt of her dressing gown, secured her feet in her old slippers and approached the car, squint-eyed and determined. The snoring person was under the travelling rug on the back seat, a hand poking out, and gathered across the knotty, speckled fingers were dress rings, familiar dress rings – a fake black pearl on a silver-coloured band, a plastic cameo, an apex of glass diamonds. And the fingernails – Pat’s signature burnt-orange – lit by a shaft of morning light from the gap between the iron roof and the wall. It was definitely her. Margery gasped, her hands went to her cheeks and she said gleefully, ‘She’s dead!’
For sixty-one years Margery had watched her neighbour skipping off to Saturday-night ballroom dancing in her stiff, twinkling skirts of many petticoats, and several times a week Pat passed on her way to the pub to have the time of her life with all her hilarious good-fun friends, over-dressed and over-happy. Often Pat would just pose in her front garden in her nylon slacks and matching colour-coded blouses, pressing her nose to her precious ruddy Baronne Prévost rose. Year after year Margery had endured Pat’s backhanded compliments about her knitting and sewing, her love of polishing and her colourful cross-stitching; ‘I suppose it’s nice . . . if you like that sort of thing.’
Once, back in the 1960s, Pat had said to her, ‘You’d learn a lot if you ever bothered to get off your bed and participate rather than watching the world pass by your front window, Margery Blandon.’ But Margery had gathered in her irritation and replied, ‘You’ve never been much further than the pub yourself! You think life’s just one big party, that you’re here just to make a spectacle of yourself.’
‘Life’s too short to go unnoticed,’ Pat retorted, lifting her apron and shaking it like a cancan dancer in the street. ‘I know exactly what you need, Margery. I bet you’ve never had an orgasm.’
Margery was indignant. ‘Certainly not,’ she said, knowing she was telling a lie, that she and her children had been victim of organisms – nits – from school.
And so Margery felt a sort of soaring disappointment as she noticed the rug rise and fall, felt her stomach turn with churlish malice when the rug fell away to reveal Pat, alive and breathing, crunched up on the back seat, clutching the street directory. There were twigs in her hair, or what was left of it, and she looked like she’d been eating dirt. But she was alive. She opened her eyes, looked at Margery and said, ‘Are we there yet?’
Margery was wondering what to do when she sensed her toe was unusually cold. Looking down, she saw a dark circle in the dirt. A puddle. Pat had emptied her bladder, and Margery’s big toe, protruding from a hole at the tip of her worn slipper, was resting in it.
‘You always said to kill you rather than put you in a home, Pat,’ Margery said, calculating that it was a full twelve days until she’d need to
use the car again, twelve full days until the next pension Thursday, the day she and Mrs Parsons would do their Big Shop.
She bolted the shed door behind her, dropped her slippers in hot, soapy water in the laundry trough and went inside for breakfast.
After tea and toast Margery reluctantly decided to do the right thing. Kevin seemed concerned, so she would tell him. Then Mrs Parsons’ blind went up, so she made her way up to her room and got her new slippers out of their box. Walter gave her a brand-new pair every Christmas, but as she squeezed her right foot into one slipper she found it antagonised her bunion. The other slipper crushed her corn. Her indignation growing, Margery carefully negotiated the undulating cement squares of her garden path in the stiff-soled slippers, holding the front fence as she travelled over the unrelenting footpath to Mrs Parsons. She knocked and called ‘Yoo-hoo’, and let herself in to Mrs Parsons’ kitchen. Her neighbour was waiting in her old rocking chair, tending the rinsed cottontails and wool stockings draped over the upright electric oil heater. Margery sat opposite her, said, ‘Good morning, how are you today, Mrs Parsons?’ and Mrs Parsons said she was as well as could be expected, thank you. Margery reached down and lifted her right foot, and as Mrs Parsons rocked back in her chair, Margery said, ‘Sorry I took so long. I had trouble getting my feet into these new slippers. The trip here today was quite painful.’
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault. You haven’t seen Pat, have you?’
‘No. Kevin’s been in to ask.’
‘Are you alright then, Mrs Parsons?’
‘Yes, thank you, you’re very kind.’
‘See you later.’
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ Mrs Parsons said.
Back in her own kitchen, Margery kicked off her painful slippers, put her apron on over her dressing gown and turned up the radio. Buddy Holly was singing, ‘My lonely heart grows cold and old.’ She stuffed her thawed chicken and popped it in the oven, peeled the potatoes and carrots and put them in with the chook. She washed, dressed, dabbed some face powder on her nose and chin, admired her fresh blue set in the mirror, then sluiced out the letterbox. The lass in the small sparkly dress had obviously been drinking something with orange juice. Over at Tyson’s, noise thumped through the front window. She stayed waiting at the gate, and soon Walter came striding down the street, thick and hairy in his shorts and black-and-white guernsey, waving like a super star. Under one arm he carried a frozen chook and a newspaper, and his thongs flicked at his imaginary rhinestone cuffs.