by Rosalie Ham
So I went to the dance, and I met Lance.
But I could never let you go, Cecily.
~
The week that Mrs Parsons died was shocking. Just shocking. But you’ve got to be stoic. My mind wouldn’t stop. Even my cross-stitch didn’t help. I was fretting about poor Mrs Parsons and stewing over Morris being in jail, Lance’s wake kept replaying in my head and everything seemed to be accumulating.
If only, I thought, Pat’s brain wasn’t riddled with rotten, beery holes . . . I could find out so many things. There’s so much that’s missing.
And now I’m thinking, as I sit here, if only I could explain things to someone, to my children, tell them what it was like living with the glass shard in my heart. Sometimes the days are very long, things I thought I’d sorted out jump around, making me feel . . . unsettled. Usually I can settle myself by doing something nice – cross-stitching some life wisdom or polishing Walter’s trophies.
When I think about our own mother, Cecily, well, she was never the same after you died. No one was, I suppose. Our mother sent me back to Lance when we found I was pregnant with Walter. I thought she was cruel, and I stayed away. I let them put her in a home. At the time there was no reason she couldn’t have come here, and Shirley wrote, saying she’d asked for me. Now that I think about it, I suspect she was sorry she sent me back to Lance. If I’d acted in less of a cruel way, we could have made up for all the heartache. I’ve come to understand that, at first, it hurt every time she looked at me, because there I was, just getting on with life, married and having a baby, and Cecily wasn’t.
And now, I’m ashamed to say that our own dear, respectable mother died alone in a home among strangers.
Behold, on wrong, swift vengeance waits, which brings me back to the subject of my children and, well, I may as well be down in the tight, damp dark with you. I’ll go out to the balcony soon, and if no one’s below I’ll drag that chair over there out and fling myself over the balustrade.
But just before I do, one more thing. I do regret that I never got to see my second-born again. Once, as a little boy, after he’d run away, I went to the police station to pick him up and I said, ‘It’s a worry to me when you vanish,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I didn’t think you’d notice.’ It’s dreadful to think that Morris thinks I would not be there for him in his time of need, that he doesn’t think that, as his mother, I will forgive him anything, even if he’s done the worst thing possible. Remember Pietà? The sculpture of Mary with Jesus on her lap? We did an assignment on balance and proportion for art at school. In those days we believed in God, and we chose Michelangelo and wrote a composition saying Jesus doesn’t look as if he’s about to slide off Mary’s lap because she had strong legs from riding donkeys, and that’s why she was able to balance a grown man on her knees. If Morris had come home I would have held him and balanced him on my knees like Mary holding her boy. It took me months to pay off the glazier after the funeral, but I just assumed emotions were high. Now, twenty years later, I learned why Walter punched the coffin. Not the sort of behaviour Morris would have been expecting – his brother walking in, KOing his father’s coffin, punching him in the head a few times, chucking him through a picture window and leaving. No wonder he went to Thailand the very next day. Walter says he was on his way back but someone planted the drugs in his suitcase, and he’s ashamed. He probably remembered how upset I was about his cigarette business at primary school. He was charging too much for just one cigarette. It wasn’t right. I love my second baby as much as I can love anything, and he doesn’t even know it.
I’m the one who feels ashamed.
It was a crisp, gold-edged morning. Morris was ten and Margery was out searching for him. She looked at the bedclothes, flung back as if he’d gotten up on a sudden impulse and fled. In the tree house behind the Earls’ place, Margery found only an empty packet of Craven A Turf Filter Tip and some used matches, and on the couch on the Dowdles’ front verandah she found only Bing, a black labrador renowned for his singing, and it seemed that this day she wouldn’t be able to find Morris in any of his usual spots, so she headed home.
Bougainvillea bushes burned on the verandahs of the houses edging the park, the dewy air smelled of jasmine, and Mr Calabria’s fat grapes hung through the trellis over his front path. Magpies chortled from the gums, and little blue-and-brown jenny wrens skipped low past Margery’s hem. Cecily was there, as ever, beside her in her school dress, her pale hair held back and to the side with a white ribbon. All around her tiny insects buzzed, their wings alight. She turned and said, ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning,’ but it wasn’t Cecily. It was Morris, a freckle-faced lad in shorts and a hand-knitted jumper. Margery’s knees went from under her and she folded like wet cardboard and lay in the green palm of the soft grass, gazing up. Somewhere far off, a million tiny bells were ringing, and above her streaks of faint white clouds reached across the pale morning sky, and something inside her cramped. Her body wouldn’t respond to her thoughts: stand up, walk on . . .
Then Morris’s face hung over hers. ‘Get up, before anyone comes,’ and when she wouldn’t, he went across to the other side of the park to wait, smoking cigarettes on a bench while his mother lay on the ground nearby, keening, the dewy breeze scrooping through the trees.
Later, alone on her bed with the bells echoing in her head, her chest thick with the weight of her labouring heart and a pain like tearing flesh, she finally knew Cecily could not be found in a room or a street, that these places were vacant. She knew Cecily was just white bones lying neatly on a rotten, satin mattress in a damp, black coffin, and everything in Margery’s life was faded and of no consequence because Cecily had only ever had nothing. There was nothing, and everything was for nothing, and the truth pushed against the soft, sad walls of her dry, sluggish heart, and that was when Margery left her dream.
She looked at her children, waiting at the bedroom door, as if seeing them for the first time. She knew that they had not really been present to her. They were already quite independent, distant from her.
‘I’ll be alright now,’ she said, but Morris said, ‘It’s too late.’
I daresay Morris liked her, the floozy, since he fought for her over Lance’s funeral, said she could sit up the front. She’d be in bed by now, that Florence, with her earplugs and face mask. At least I can die knowing Lance’s last will had been seen to. I tried to do the right thing by her, for a whole week, but she was a nuisance from the start. The very first morning after she moved in, she came out of the bathroom with her towel and sponge bag resting on the seat of her walker. ‘I like your shower curtain,’ she said. How can you possibly like anything that’s orange with purple flowers?
She jerked her head at the wireless, ‘What’s this you’re listening to?’
‘Magic Radio Hits of All Time.’
‘It’s real good.’ She jigged a bit in time to the music, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ it was, as if she was very modern and up with things. ‘What’s for brekky?’
I was ready to pour my tea. ‘I always make myself toast and a cup of tea.’
‘Got any more eggs?’
I pointed to the fridge.
‘I’ll make do with toast,’ she said and sat down. She pinched a slice of toast from my plate then turned the teapot three times. She was about to pour herself a cup of tea when she stopped. ‘Got any milk?’
I said, ‘I use the powdered.’
‘I won’t bother then.’
‘You should, at your age. The calcium’s good for your bones.’
‘There’s calcium in beer,’ she said. ‘From the hops.’
I suppose all beer drinkers say that. Lance used to say beer was good for you, and Judith told me for years there was calcium in cream, ‘From the grass,’ she’d say, and up-end the bottle all over her Coco Pops.
In the interest of cooperation, I reminded Florence again
that she had to do the dishes. Well, you’d have thought I’d asked her to paint the house. She did them, grudgingly, then I noticed she stacked the knives blade-up, so I explained about skin tears and how dangerous it is to stack the knives with the blades up. ‘Look what a skin tear did to my shin.’
She pointed to the dish rack on the sink and said, ‘Pretty slim chance I’ll trip over up there,’ and we had our first argument. She asserted that you get a smear on the tip of the blade if you drain knives blade down and suggested we just dry the knives and pop them in the drawer, but Walter told me that tea towels harbour bacteria.
‘It’s a miracle we’re still alive.’ She sniffed, and threw her tissue into the kitchen tidy, which provided a perfect opportunity to bring up the topic of housework.
I said, ‘Feel free to empty the kitchen tidy any time you like,’ but she argued about that as well.
‘It’s not full,’ she said.
I said it’d start to smell, and she said it was a waste of bin-liners. Faye and Joye were like that. They took me to task over everything I did or said. I complained to Lance and he told me to dodge them. ‘Think like a yabbie,’ he said. In the end I turned into a yabbie, burrowed away for years and years beneath the murky water until conditions improved. That wasn’t going to happen again because I had the trump card.
‘I get plastic bags for free from the supermarket,’ I said. ‘Recycling.’ Shut her up well and truly. Recyling’s all the go now, Cecily. You have to do it or you get frowned on.
Florence, Pat and Anita. They’re all the same. Argumentative. And seductresses.
Mind you, all things considered now, Florence could have had Lance. Once, I told Lance to give the boys a talk on the birds and the bees, and all he said was, ‘A man needs a wife.’ He said the same about a shifting spanner.
All the plots started to come together as soon as Anita got her clutches into Walter. Everyone had a plot – Anita and Walter, Judith and Barry.
I’d already started to get suspicious of them, and then we had a second so-called ‘accident’. That’s right. Not a motorcycle this time, but a car. Tony’s low red car, in fact. And not long before that, Judith had said to me, ‘You never really cared about me.’
So, you can’t really blame me for thinking that Judith was actually the criminal in the family. It’s going to take a bit more thought to come to terms with my daughter before I go. In the past I’ve blamed the Blandons because Judith possessed their character traits, but I’d never have imagined any daughter of mine would actually try to kill anyone. Not in a million years. Mind you, now that I think about it, Sylvia’s mother said Judith and Kevin pushed Sylvia too high on the swing and that’s why she landed so hard. But they were just kiddies, swore they weren’t pushing her when she fell, and as I said at the time, ‘If you didn’t trust them you shouldn’t have let them take her to the park.’
Mind you, there was that incident with the mice.
Judith didn’t want to start school. Morris and Walter ran ahead while all the way to school their little sister clung to Margery’s knees, bellowing, ‘Please don’t send me away, Mummy, I promise I’ll be good . . .’ But when she got there she kicked Miss Fingly, who was trying to appease her by offering her a dried apricot. Judith had only been at school a few weeks when the principal’s secretary phoned and asked Margery to come to collect her because there had been ‘an incident.’ The incident happened during ‘pet week’. Little Kevin Cruickshank had kindly lent his pet mice to the class for the week so the kiddies could learn all about caring for animals, feeding them, making sure they had clean water, fresh straw and were safe from predators . . . like pet cats.
The principal’s office was spare and beige. He didn’t look at Margery when she arrived; he stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back and directed his speech to the trees outside. ‘We suspect your daughter, Judith, has behavioural problems.’
Margery said, ‘She doesn’t misbehave at home.’
The principal explained that Miss Fingly had given the kiddies coloured cardboard, pencils and animal stencils, and told them to trace around the edge of the stencils. When they had done that, she gave them each a pair of scissors and told them to cut the shapes from the cardboard, keeping the blades as close to the pencil line as they could. ‘Cut them as neatly as you can,’ she said. But Judith somehow got her wires mixed up. She went to the big cardboard box at the back of the room, took Kevin’s pet mice out and cut them up. Then she neatly lined up all their tails from the longest to the shortest.
‘Well,’ Margery explained, ‘she’s watched me slaughter a chook every Sunday for the whole of her life.’
‘You must explain to her the difference between that and cruelty,’ the principal said and took Margery to the storeroom beside Judith’s classroom where Judith waited, a wide little girl with thick glasses and prominent teeth, her legs swinging under the tall chair. The front of her little uniform was bloodied, and there was a little bit of fur stuck to her glasses.
Pat was at her gate, hand on the letterbox, watching Margery coming down the street – chin high, handbag over her arm, gloves matching her hat and her square, blank daughter lolloping along behind her.
‘That kid of yours has got problems,’ she cried, but Margery ignored her.
Inside, she said to her daughter, ‘If you’ve got any problems, Judith, you know you can always tell me about them.’
For years, time after time, Judith came to her mother and told her that the boys had chased her with scissors and cut off her pigtail again, but her mother always said, ‘Well, let’s cut your hair short.’ But Judith wanted long hair, she wanted Margery to plait it every morning like Elizabeth Taylor’s hair in National Velvet, and whenever Margery complained to Pat about Judith’s bladed pursuers, citing Kevin as one of the tormentors, Pat said, ‘Look on the bright side, she’s getting a bit attention for a change.’
The day after she found Mrs Parsons, Margery couldn’t gather the strength to throw back the covers. Outside, life proceeded: the builders were hard at work, Kevin rode off on his bike and smoke wafted from the fire in Tyson’s front yard. She’d watched the boys toast sausages and bread at three in the morning, using timber off-cuts from the building site next door.
The tightness around her eyes had eased but her face throbbed, and her shin bit when she wriggled her toes, as though she’d walked into barbed wire. ‘I may as well stay here,’ she said, but it was the last Saturday of the month; there was a hair appointment to keep and an engagement card to take to Angela, so she struggled out of bed to face the day. After tea and toast, she washed, dusted some powder on her forehead, nose, across her cheeks and chin, then dabbed a lot around her bruised, purpled and yellow-ringed eyes. Her cracked glasses hid a lot of the damage, and she felt better when she spread a little pink lippy across her tessellated lips and dressed in her nice shopping frock. She dragged her shopping cart from the laundry and gathered her handbags. As she closed the front door she caught herself wondering what Mrs Parsons had on her shopping list. Taking a deep, shaky breath she paused momentarily to steady herself using the busted cane divan on the verandah, then stepped carefully down to the buckled paving squares. The Ahmeds were unfolding from Mr Ahmed’s taxi, their lovely robes falling around them in coloured scoops. Margery smiled and waved. They stared at her, pointing, and she realised why. ‘I’m a duffer for falling, aren’t I?’ They smiled shyly.
Margery focussed on her feet, let go of the verandah post, assured herself she’d be at the front gate soon and set off along the uneven footpath. Someone tooted, loud and long, frightening the living daylights out of her. She wavered, lunged for the gatepost to steady herself, blood thudding in her temples. The oxygen content in her breath was somehow depleted and, to her horror, Margery felt the contents of her bladder – not much because she’d been to the toilet just before she’d put on her coat – flood the gusset
of her panties. That second cup of tea, she thought, the warm trickle moving down the inside of her thigh. The car horn tooted again. It was Judith, and Pudding sat next to her in the passenger seat of the little van, her fingers moving over the keypad of her mobile phone. This week’s specials: Bridal make-up 50% off up until Easter.
‘Hop in the car, Marge. We’re going for a drive.’
‘I’ve got a hair appointment.’
‘You’ve had an accident.’
‘Just a small one,’ she said, glancing down at the tell-tale wet line running past her dressing.
‘You’ll kill someone in that car one day.’ Judith got out of the van and walked around to open the passenger’s side door. ‘Hop in, Marge.’
‘It was the motorcycle,’ Margery said, fanning herself with her gloved hand. ‘Just shot out from a side street.’
‘Marge, you simply cannot drive anymore, you’ve got a bad leg, and imagine what people must think when they see you behind the wheel. You’ve got blue hair, a black eye and your glasses are held together with bandaids.’
‘You don’t look so great yourself,’ said Pudding. Judith’s hand went to the rash on her throat, and the spots of raised red flesh in the crook of her arm started itching.
Margery squinted at her. ‘You’re eating something you shouldn’t.’
‘You’ve forgotten again. I told you I’m on a diet.’
‘The rash –’
‘I’ve done skin care, Marge. I know more than you about rashes. Now hop in, you’re coming with me today. I want to show you our elder-age living and recreation facility.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a home, Gran, a big brick building in the middle of the outback.’