by Rosalie Ham
I tried again because Walter was practically dribbling. ‘Now listen, Anita, Walter’s got something to say about that list, haven’t you, Walter?’
She wriggled her hand out of his, smiling like a female trapdoor spider with her mate cornered, rubbing her fangs together. ‘Just a few alterations around the house will help keep your mum at home. Hope you don’t mind.’
Walter reached for my notepad on the table, letting his supermarket bag thud onto the floor. ‘Just explain to me, Anita, precisely, exactly what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you want.’
‘I’ll show you,’ she said and led him all over the house, telling him things that needed doing: organise an electrician to replace the broken light switches, get someone to set up a seat in the shower, reposition the handrails over the bath so I could actually reach them. ‘Margery’s privacy and safety will be assured if you adjust all the doors, specially the front, back and bathroom doors so that they close properly,’ she said, as if she was some sort of expert, and Walter, sounding like a love-struck teenager, said, ‘I’ll even put locks on them, and I’ll patch up the hole in the lounge room ceiling.’
She smiled up into his handsome face. ‘Margery’s heating bills will fall in winter.’
‘You’re wonderful,’ he said and straightened his left leg, tugging the hem of his shorts, which is a quirk of his when he’s nervous or excited. I made some sort of rude noise then. I had to – I was starting to feel nauseous – and he regained his emotions. She kept on at him, told him he had to put new taps on every tap, put non-slip tread on the back step and, most importantly, smoke detectors. ‘I can get an electrician if you like,’ she offered, but Walter said the job was right. But it wasn’t. He can’t read or write very well anymore, so there were just scribbles all over my shopping list, and his memory’s about as concrete as chicken wire.
‘I can do all of this next week, after my uni course.’
‘That right? Which uni?’
‘Council of Adult Education.’
‘I’ve been there, did tap dancing.’
‘I’m doing food hygiene. The place where I work’s changing to a hotel for international travellers.’
‘A backpackers?’
‘Yep-see-dep-see.’
‘What’s going to happen to the residents?’
Walter’s proud smile fell way and he looked at the ceiling, thinking. ‘I guess they’ll find somewhere else to stay.’
‘Under a bridge,’ Anita said. ‘If you change to a backpackers you still get drugs and drunks, and those poor old men end up in a dump bin or a doorway somewhere.’ She left Walter standing in the kitchen, frowning at the ceiling. She put a little torch next to my bed, saying, ‘Make sure you mind your shin.’
‘She’s real nice. Smart too,’ Walter said dreamily, but, knowing what I know now, I bet she got into her loud, striped car, rubbed her hands together and said, ‘That solves everything.’
But little did she know Barry and Judith were brewing a separate conspiracy.
Wednesday dawned bright and crisp to drag in another hot day. The joggers and power-walkers were up and about early, and so was Margery. She took her second cup of tea back to her bed to rest her aching shin. The wound, a hard, shiny gash, burned and pulled the taut, red skin around it, throbbing dully as she watched commuters hurrying in their sharp suits, square bags hanging from their shoulders. Vespas zoomed past, school kids ambled, and at exactly eight o’clock Kevin pedalled off to work. Next door, Tony supervised the installation of a stainless-steel sink that four men struggled to carry across the concrete slab, stepping over stacks of timber planks. They had a great deal more trouble fitting it into the staircase leading down to the cellar, but worse was to come. A huge stove proved too much for them, so the entire workforce – about fifteen men – were ordered to down tools, abandoning their work with plaster and plywood, insulation foil and timber planks, bricks and cement, and the neighbourhood fell silent. It filled again with shouting as the men bullied the stove through the cellar door and down the stairs. They had all just disappeared down the staircase, shadowed by a large plumber carrying a tool case and blow torch, when Barry’s tall, sleek Mercedes slid into the kerb. Cars like Barry’s often cruised the kerbs of Brunswick, wheels polished to a silver gleam, windows tinted dark. At least once a week there was note in Margery’s letterbox: ‘I may have a buyer interested in your house’.
Margery watched her son-in-law wipe his palm across his comb-over, get out of his flash car and check his comb-over again in the tinted side window. He scratched deeply in the cleft of his bottom, then straightened his green suit and rubbed his beige slip-ons against the back of each calf. He stood in the middle of the road, watching expectantly towards the corner. A couple soon arrived in a low, grey car, parked and joined him on the footpath. They were fashionable and affluent in a casino sort of way, their soft flesh pressing against the seams of their somewhat garish attire, ready to pop through like pink beads along the seams.
Barry, all big smiles and expansive gestures, indicated the busy worksite that was once Mrs Bist’s house and then turned their attention to Margery’s home. He swaggered down the narrow side path, the podgy strangers trailing. Margery scrambled off the bed, wincing in pain from her sore leg. She limped down the hall to the kitchen, where she listened to them as they stood under her rusting Hills Hoist. ‘A real boom,’ Barry said, and expanded on the wonders of the modern yet substantial cliff-like homes that were shooting up from postage-stamp sized blocks all over Brunswick. Then he ushered the strangers towards Margery’s back porch, and by the time she had assumed a natural, nonchalant position in her chair, they were inside. The woman called, ‘Knock knock.’
Barry tried to open the window over the kitchen sink. ‘Architects can do anything with these little places.’
Margery stabbed the blue Aida with her needle and said, ‘As if having an architect was as special as screw-top jars. A house is a house no matter how nifty the windows are.’
Barry jerked his thumb at Margery. ‘That’s Mrs Blandon,’ he said, then they circled Margery’s tiny kitchen and bathroom. In the cramped lounge room, they paused to take in the splendid cross-stitched landscapes, seascapes and snow-capped mountains, rural scenes and Pietà above the gas heater in the fireplace. The woman turned her attention to the old lady in her grubby dressing gown cross-stitching something on a square embroidery frame in her sunken chair. Margery was working on the word When of Anita’s basket cover.
‘I’m Amanda and that’s my husband, Theo . . . hope you don’t mind . . .’ and they wandered into Margery’s small second bedroom, paused again to absorb the cross-stitched bedspread, pillowcase and curtains. The adequate front bedroom was also over-decorated with cross-stitched bedspreads, pillowcases and curtains, the dressing table scattered with embroidered soft-backed brushes and wot-not jars. Amanda, Margery observed with great pleasure, pointed to the shiny doorknobs and fittings. ‘Brass,’ she said.
‘Another good selling point,’ Barry said and drew their attention to the pressed-tin ceilings.
‘I’m not going,’ Margery called as they closed the front door behind them.
Later, as she tied Mrs Parsons’ left shoelace, Margery mentioned that Barry had showed a fat bloke in leather pants and his flaccid wife around her house. ‘She was pretty, but those kind of looks don’t age well.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Parsons. Margery eased her foot to the floor and Mrs Parsons tilted forward in her rocking chair.
‘Do you ever get the real estate agents bothering you?’ Margery lifted the right foot.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Parsons said, adding apologetically, ‘but I don’t let them in – not even Barry when he comes.’
‘I see,’ Margery said. ‘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, and Margery left her in her chair, the window glow lighting her hair and fading her brown skin yellow, her stockings and cottontails draped over the oil heater. Harpsichord music tinkled from the radio on the bench.
In the afternoon, Margery’s indignation over Barry and his podgy accomplices was compounded by the activity next door. Two delivery trucks double-parked outside her house and started unloading bricks and timber, lifting plastic-wrapped squares of bricks with a clawed crane and placing them on the nature strip where the melaleuca once grew. The swarthy builders swarmed all over them, slicing open the protective plastic and leaving it to waft down to the park. The noise pollution amplified, the site trembled to the sound of electric nail gun – shishthunk, shishthunk – and the radio shouting out across the neighbourhood. Then Tony and Dennis returned in a big, white van and reversed up onto the kerb. Though the postie didn’t come until at least three that afternoon, Margery went out to check her letterbox. The weekly specials leaflet from the local supermarket advertised ice-cream topping on special, two for one. She stayed at the letterbox, watching Tony and Dennis unload a big stainless-steel table, a large box with ‘Glass’ written on the side, some plastic drums and various small boxes and supermarket bags. Carefully, they carted them down into the cellar.
‘Tomatoes,’ Margery informed Cecily. ‘Mrs Calabria bottled her tomatoes every summer. It’s what ethnic people do.’
While a builder set about installing a hatch door over the cellar, Tony and Dennis ambled across the site, watching, exuding a mixture of authority and menace. The workers ignored them, or tried to, and went on carting bricks in wheelbarrows, stacking bags of cement, shovelling sand, checking doorframes, measuring, drilling and nailing. At the end of the day, the beginnings of a frame for a two-storey house was in place.
Walter preferred caramel topping to any other flavour, so on Thursday, when the workers arrived well before seven, Margery was already washed and standing at her dressing table wearing a blue linen shift with white neck-to-hem buttons, the ‘specials’ pamphlet folded in her purse, ready for her walk to the supermarket. Because it wasn’t pension week it wasn’t a Big Shop day, so Margery didn’t drive. Like every morning since Charmaine’s visit, when she put her glasses on Margery was reminded again of the provisional nature of her life and the threats she faced from her family and an advancing modern society. She said to her reflection, ‘I don’t care what I have to do, but I am not going to a home.’
While she ate her breakfast she kept one eye on the builders next door and the other on Mrs Parsons’ blind. When it was time to go, the trip next door meant travelling through howling ethnic music and the fumes of idling trucks, men shouting in a language she didn’t recognise. She mentioned the caramel topping as she tied Mrs Parsons’ laces and they discussed cheese slices. Mrs Parsons no longer risked the fractured asphalt footpaths under the native tea trees and feral figs, and remained safely at home. She gave Margery five dollars and her list: four small tins of plain tuna in brine, one packet of Sao biscuits and one packet of cheese slices.
Back inside, Margery poked a comb at the thin blue curls under the rim of her hat and set off. Next door, Tony turned to study the concave old woman stepping cautiously off the footpath and into the path of a slow-moving truck loaded with bracing ply. The truck driver braked, and while the pensioner passed he bit into a bacon and egg roll, chewing as the old lady – clothed for winter, a dressing pad bulging under her stockings, blue bandaids holding her spectacles together, carrying three handbags and dragging a tartan shopping cart – passed in front of his idling truck, oblivious to everything except the ruptured road between her sensible white lace-ups.
At the supermarket Margery carefully selected Mrs Parsons’ groceries, then her own: four bottles of caramel topping and a packet of no-brand cheese slices. She took advantage of the ‘Special Offer Coffee and Cake for $5.00’ at the Union Square Café before setting off home with her groceries rattling around in the bottom of her cart.
From as far away as the park she recognised the pink bag on the footpath outside Mrs Parsons’. It was a clothes recycling bag from St Vincent’s, and the slippers Cheryl had so generously purchased for Mrs Parsons three years ago were sitting on top. She stopped, picked up the slippers and turned them over. The soles were pristine, not a scratch or smudge of dirt.
Inside, Margery double-checked Mrs Parsons’ shopping receipt with her, adding up the figures on the back of an old envelope, as they always did. Then Mrs Parsons turned in her rocking chair, opened the grate on her disused wood stove, reached in and retrieved her purse from the dusty, black interior. She counted out an extra four dollars and fifteen cents for Margery. As Margery left, Mrs Parsons said, ‘Thank you, you’re very kind.’ Margery usually said, ‘That’s alright, I had some shopping to do anyway,’ but instead she said, ‘I see you’ve cleared out your wardrobe.’
Mrs Parsons said, ‘It’s time.’
‘I never needed slip-ons,’ Margery declared, ‘and neither did you.’ And Mrs Parsons said, so quietly that Margery didn’t hear, ‘You always came to do my laces.’
All day Margery watched passers-by stop and sort through the clothes in the pink recycling bag, but everything was too small. People held Mrs Parsons’ beige button-through blouse with inset sleeves and broderie anglaise on the collar against themselves, then looked at the label inside the collar and dropped it back in the bag. Finally, Tyson came and took the bag away. Half an hour later Margery saw him march off down the street in a torn T-shirt and Mrs Parsons’ red tartan kilt.
Not much happened on Friday. Margery sat on her bed in the front room hemming the wall hanging for Pat, one eye on the builders, the whir and tink-tink of the circular saw and the relentless shishthunk-shishthunk, shishthunk-shishthunk of the nail gun challenging her transistor radio. Things picked up briefly when Kevin rode out of his front gate on his thin, silver bike, like some phosphorescent, nocturnal creature. He stopped and took off his pollution mask and shouted at a driver to turn off his idling truck. ‘There’s a big enough hole in the ozone layer as it is, not to mention the carcinogenic elements of carbon monoxide saturating the air.’ The driver wound his window up and turned back to his newspaper. Kevin shook his head and rode away through the dark clouds of gritty diesel exhaust. At lunchtime, the workers settled along the path on brick stacks and boxes of tiles and nails, and opened their lunch boxes. Margery listened to an Australian bloke with a serviette dangling from the bib of his overalls describe how a co-worker fell from a great height on a building site. ‘Died instantly. His head and hands blew off,’ he said. ‘Pressure.’ Then he dug his spoon into his leftover spaghetti bolognaise.
His friend added, ‘At least it was quick.’
One of Tyson’s mates – a glassy-eyed adolescent of obscure gender with a bleached complexion – hobbled over in bare feet and took the last of Margery’s fence pickets. A short time later smoke billowed from their chimney and the smell of burnt toast wafted across the narrow street. Later, they gathered at the car embedded in the front lawn, the buffalo grass coiling around the wheels and seizing the bumper bars. For the rest of the day the car stereo doof-doofed, cigarette smoke wafted in the afternoon air and the lads settled all over the hood and roof, watching the construction over at Mrs Bist’s.
At four o’clock precisely, the builders started packing up, winding extension cords and shoving power tools into milk crates, ready to start the weekend. Then the roof trusses arrived. The driver asked for help unloading them, but the workers kept their backs to him, loading their power tools and milk crates into their station wagons and utilities. The heated discussion between the driver and the foreman prompted the driver to yell, ‘Right, I’m phonin’ Tony.’ He started dialling on his mobile phone; the foreman dropped his foam esky and everyone came back to work. Once they had safely guided th
e swinging trusses to the ground and the crane folded itself into a neat bend on the back of the truck, the workers headed to the pub, but then another truck arrived. This time they took no notice. Margery watched, intrigued, as the driver unloaded the roofing tiles without even getting out of his truck, the crane placing the pallets neatly on the nature strip. By the time Tony eased his low, red car to the kerb, the worksite was deserted. He walked all over the concrete slab, Dennis following. They circled, wandering through the doorframes, stepping through the timber wall frames as if they might encounter a hard-working builder somewhere.
Over the road, Tyson and his mates imitated them, loping around in circles, stepping up to walls and bouncing off, making noises like apes. Margery’s delinquent neighbours partied into the night, shouting, laughing and singing, cigarette smoke and the sound of the odd smashing bottle keeping her alert. At one stage, Kevin came out of his house, phone in hand, and stood looking at the hoodlums before going back inside, the phone to his ear. A short time later, headlights moving slowly down the street signalled the arrival of the police. The noise stopped and Margery’s young neighbours scattered, vanishing into the shadows, Mrs Parsons’ kilt kicking across Tyson’s pale knees as he flashed past towards Margery’s backyard. It was all quite entertaining, but Margery was relieved to wake up Saturday to a peaceful street – no loud music, no revving trucks, no builders. She said to Mrs Parsons as she tied her laces, ‘The builders are a nuisance, aren’t they?’
‘They’re noisy,’ Mrs Parsons murmured.
At the door Margery said, ‘I hope today will be uneventful.’
But it wasn’t.
When she got to the nursing home, Margery made her way straight to the nurses’ station, proudly handing a nurse the wall hanging – Who gossips to you will gossip of you – instructing her to hang it over Pat’s bed. As she passed Pat on her way to the piano, she said hello.