by Rosalie Ham
Nothing.
We never went to church again.
That first Sunday after you died we got up, dressed in our Sunday best, as usual, me and little Shirley in our patent leather shoes, white socks and white cardigans. Clarry combed Billy’s hair flat and put clean bandaids on his knees, and I tied Terry in his pram. Dad was in his Sunday suit, and we came into the kitchen after breakfast but Mum was still in her dressing gown. The breakfast bowls were piled in the sink. When she saw us she just turned and stared out the window at the clouds. Dad sat down at the kitchen table, rested his hat on his knee and looked at it, so we went back to our room and sat on our beds. When the church bells rang out across Moonee Ponds, Mother started moaning, like wind through telegraph wires.
Once bitten by a snake you’re always afraid of rope.
~
After Pat’s scene at the church we drove to Kevin’s place for a cuppa. My word he’s let the place go, Kevin has. The roses along the fence are positively dangerous. You could lose an eye going through his front gate because the rose arch is so overgrown.
Anyrate, Pat just walked in the front door, out the back door, down the side of the house and out the front gate again. We didn’t notice she’d gone for a few minutes, but I did notice her wigs are still there on their false heads, poking up from the top of the wardrobe like corpses in the cupboard, but all her sparkling net dancing dresses are gone. The entire second bedroom was always used exclusively for Pat’s ball dresses and shoes, and shelves full of dance trophies her and Bill had won. Poor old Kevin had to sleep on the back porch. The dancing trophies are in a box on the back porch now. They’ve turned black from lack of polishing.
Naturally, we found Pat at the pub. I’d been to the hotel on occasion with Lance when we were first married but I was never comfortable, and Lance always came home beered-up with a head full of all sorts of rot and nonsense. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘we’ll be absorbed into Asia and the black man will run the world.’
I hadn’t been inside that pub for at least forty years. It’s been completely rebuilt since the explosion, but it still stinks, and I’m telling the truth when I say there was a fight in progress when we stepped through the door, but Pat just moved through all the swinging pool cues and flying profanities to the bar as if she was invisible. But I will say I did find out things I didn’t know that day. My word I did. For one thing, I know why Tyson feels he can steal my water and run an extension cord across the street and burn my fence. He was there, still wearing Mrs Parsons’ kilt, with his flatmates, thirty-year-old teenagers who all look like they’ve just crawled out from under a greasy car. Anyrate, Tyson tried to pick a fight with Walter, bouncing around him with his fists up, but Walter just ignored him. But then he said, ‘If you hadn’t lost that fight my mum would still have her house.’
Kevin added something then: ‘It’s not Walter’s fault that your mother’s got a gambling addiction,’ and one of Tyson’s mates, a lad with a swastika sprayed onto his shaved head, stood on Kevin’s feet and put his fingers on his neat moustache and messed it up. I’ve never seen Kevin angry. He actually turned white.
Meantime, Tyson was still taking swings at Walter, so the barmaid grabbed him by the ear, led him to the door and shoved him out, but he bounced straight back in, so Walter lifted him by his waistband and collar and threw him out again like he was chucking water from a bucket.
Someone called out, ‘Ding-ding.’ Walter’s feet got into position and he bounced around as if he was just out of his corner again, a big smile on his face, and everyone clapped. They all seemed to know who we were and they all seemed to know who little Squigglehead was. Someone put money in the juke box but the noise that came out wasn’t exactly music. Pat sat perched up at the bar like she’d been sitting there for fifty years, and the barmaid put a glass of beer in front of her without even asking what she wanted. She had a wow of a time but I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying because of the jukebox, not that anyone was speaking to me. As I say, I was never invited to the pub, not that I’d have gone.
Walter and Kevin had a few laughs about when they were kids. They sang a song they’d made up: ‘Mrs Bist made poo stew, and put it in a pot, Mr Bist warmed it up, and ate it with hot green snot.’ I remember Lance gave them a clip over the ears for singing that.
Then I found out about Mrs Parsons’ stolen child.
Kevin said, ‘Who do you think’ll end up with Mrs Parsons’ house?’ and that’s when Pat said, ‘Her son.’
No one said anything at first, but you could see Walter and Kevin thinking, the film winding back to their childhood. Then Kevin put down his glass of orange juice and said, ‘I’ve heard a story about that.’
Walter said, ‘I remember something . . .’
My memory started to rewind, though I’m sure I’d never heard anyone mention that Mrs Parsons had a son. ‘What son?’
‘Where is he, Mum?’
‘Who?’ said Pat.
‘Mrs Parsons’ son,’ but Pat just got up and went to the toilet.
‘They took him away,’ Walter said. ‘Something wrong with him,’ but Kevin said Pat never mentioned there was anything wrong with him. In fact, he seemed to think something was wrong with Mrs Parsons.
‘What son?’ I said, again.
‘He might be dead!’ Kevin said, his eyes narrowing shrewdly, but I remembered about the clothes Pud said were in Mrs Parsons’ second bedroom. ‘I never heard about any son,’ I said.
Kevin just said, ‘You didn’t hear a lot of things, Mrs B,’ but Walter reckoned, ‘You can find out anything at this pub, if you know who to ask’.
Oh! How true that turned out to be.
At the same time it was a shock to me, and I just assumed it was most likely Pat spreading rumours about a missing son, but no one ever said anything to me. Anyrate, the day ended when some man brought Pat out of the gents. ‘At least she didn’t squat on the carpet again,’ Kevin said, and he and Walter fell about laughing. Then Pat didn’t want to leave. Kevin and Walter had to carry her out on her stool because she wouldn’t let go of it. I saw him carrying it back the next morning.
It was like sitting in the middle of a toothache, the whole thing. We hadn’t seen Mrs Parsons off in the way she’d have wished at all, so I was glad I’d had a quiet moment with her on that little bed when I found her.
I felt uncharacteristically weary the whole day because I couldn’t sleep at night. It was the diuretics. I understand now that my tablets were sabotaged, that it was part of Judith’s plot to kill me, but at the time all I knew was that it was enormously distressing, up and down, up and down on the potty all night.
She was always very reserved, Mrs Parsons, and of course it’s none of my concern what she did or didn’t do, but a child? A son? It just simply never occurred to me. I knew she was lonely, but that’s to be expected for someone who doesn’t have anyone, and I never noticed anything.
Perhaps I should have.
At dusk, Margery crept across her porch and down the three back steps, crossed her tiny yard and went through her shed into the back lane. She stopped there on the bluestones to listen; it was quiet and there was no one in the Ahmeds’ backyard.
When Mrs Parsons’ creaky little back door swung open a swell of icy air pressed against Margery. She stood in the passage looking at the second bedroom. The bed was narrow, the pillow smoothed, ready. She tiptoed in and gently pulled back the blue bedspread. A pair of brand-new striped pyjamas were folded under the pillow and, as Pud had mentioned, piled neatly in the top drawer of the bedside chest was a set of clothes: shirt, socks, singlet, little Y-fronts, a pair of shorts, a small jumper with a donkey on the front and a neat stack of blue handkerchiefs.
Margery sat for some time, rubbing her thumb over the clean hanky folded in her palm. ‘Dear oh dear,’ she finally said. When she left, she backed out of the little ho
use, pulling the door firmly shut. She locked it and put the key in a new hiding spot . . . the cistern of her toilet.
She couldn’t sleep again that night, though she felt weary to the bones, and so she lay in her bed, eyes fixed on the street with the transistor fizzing in her ear. She played a story in her head, a film, her and Cecily playing at a dance hall, Cecily out front singing and Margery on piano, because Margery had kept up her piano study and Cecily had perfected her soprano, and Margery was there beside her, safe behind the piano. ‘And we would have married a nice man like Walter Pidgeon,’ she said to her dead sister, ‘and lived next door to each other . . . but that didn’t happen.’
Mrs Parsons had gone on living too, waiting. ‘She lived for the past, I suppose you could say. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
The phone rang again that night. ‘Morris,’ she said, then decided it probably wasn’t Morris and stayed in bed. When the phone stopped ringing, she started going over her life, but had only got as far as the registry office with Lance before she was distracted by Kevin slinking across the street with a box in his arms. He stopped at Mrs Bist’s dump bin, glanced up and down the street, like a fox with someone’s pet rabbit, and dropped the box into the bin. Metal, Margery thought, recognising the sound as trophies clanging together. Pat’s passionate life of championship dancing so swiftly and noisily chucked into the bottom of a dump bin by her only offspring in the middle of the night. She smiled.
For dinner, Walter prepared, cooked and served three kilograms of grilled sausages, five kilograms of boiled potatoes, and a two-kilo bag of frozen mixed vegetables, which the lodgers ate hungrily. Then he sat at the large kitchen table with his hands over his ears to read Legislation, Codes and Responsibilities Relating to Food Hygiene, while a slimy-haired, medicated tenant, who went by the name of Judas, methodically collected the tomato sauce bottles from the tables and wiped them down, then washed and dried the dishes, stacking them precisely in equal piles at regular intervals along the table beside Walter.
Mrs Stapleton scraped in, nodded to Judas and stood in the open back doorway. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the gritty Collingwood sunset. ‘How’s it goin’, Wal?’
‘Job’s right,’ he said, but when Mrs Stapleton didn’t say anything further he confessed, ‘A bit confusing, actually.’
Mrs Stapleton ran her nose along her forearm and sniffed. She dragged on her cigarette and said, ‘Don’t sweat too much on it. I gotta get fire-escapes and smoke detectors yet, cost me a fortune.’
Walter jerked his head towards the dining room, where a few of the men still sat in their places, staring at the institution-green walls. ‘What happens to the blokes?’
Mrs Stapleton shrugged, dragged on her cigarette. ‘They’ll find somewhere.’
‘Under a bridge,’ Walter said. ‘If we change to backpackers we get the same fing: drugs and drunks.’
‘You can keep your job, Wal. You gotta finish the course, but.’
‘No worries,’ he said and put his hands over his ears again. Judas set about topping up the salt shakers on all the tables.
At times in the night, Margery slept quite soundly, but she still woke very early Monday, and she knew even before she raised her head from the pillow that things weren’t right. She was not at all reassured when the floorboards buckled, rising and sinking beneath her feet, as if she was walking on a mattress. Nor was she happy about the walls that shrunk back when she reached for them, or the chairs that cowered when she presented her bottom to them. The kitchen table moved back into the corner, and cascading water, somewhere close, drowned out the sound of the television. Eventually, she crawled back into her bed, and that was where she was when Judith’s little van pulled up outside. The specials were ‘Eyelash Tinting, Lip and Eyebrow Waxing, 25% Off’. Judith barged in and went straight to the lavatory, and when she got back she stood over her sick mother, red-faced and shaking, the pearls in her clenched fist. ‘Plastic. Your mother gave you fake pearls, Marge.’
‘My mother gave me Mikimotos.’
‘These are fake. Amanda showed me, and she’d know. This is how you tell.’ She ran them across her teeth, ‘Not rough. They have to be rough on your teeth.’ Then she scraped the paint off one with her artificial fingernail. ‘See?’ she said and ripped Margery’s gold watch from her wrist. ‘I bet this is fake as well.’ She threw the watch and the plastic necklace onto the bed.
‘The watch isn’t plastic, Judith. Keep it, dear, and I do have my mother’s Mikimotos.’
‘You’re nuts. I don’t want your bloody watch, or your pearls.’ Tears were streaming down her face. She left, slamming the door behind her. In the street she turned and screamed, ‘Fake!’
Mr Ahmed paused as he got into his taxi and frowned at Judith.
Thinking back, it has occurred to me that perhaps I was being selfish about the pearls, the real ones I mean, since I really don’t go out anywhere to wear them. If I knew I’d run into Pat somewhere I’d wear them, but she’s demented now, so there’s no need to show them off. When I did go out I was usually with Judith – I never wore pearls, the real ones or the plastic ones. Judith would’ve taken them. I should have given the Mikimotos to her and been done with them, but I truly valued those pearls. Dad gave them to Mother. I remember the very day. Do you? We were hanging out the washing, and he snuck up behind her and hung them on the line. When she hung his shirts up she came across them dangling from a peg. There they were. They were the only thing I had left of my mother.
I realise now it must have been upsetting for Judith to be told the pearls were fake by her new friend, but she’s got the real ones now, so she’s happy. The watch brought Pat back to me, or, more accurately, her revenge after the Public Scalping Incident. I’ll admit now, as I’m sitting here, that I quite enjoyed the Public Scalping Incident, and I’m not terribly upset that the passenger car door rattles or that the handle gets stuck either – it was her revenge that was the thing that really split our neighbourly relations, if you could call them that.
I didn’t speak to her for decades.
Following the Public Scalping Incident, no one saw Pat for a week. She paced the worn carpet behind her nylon net curtains, smoking cigarettes, watching through her front window to Margery’s peeling front door. Fortified by the shelves of shining dancing trophies and the rack of twinkling sequinned dresses behind her, she festered with loathing for the uptight, up-herself old wowser across the road. ‘You’re always there, watching; you’re like a splinter in my heel. We can’t be free because of you! Who do you think you are? Sneering at us from behind your champion son’s silver trophies and your linen napkins and your bloody Ascot Vale non-drinking family and their superior opinions. If only you knew, Princess Margery, if only you knew!’
What Margery did know was that across the road, Pat was seething in a cloud of smoky hate, and so only when she had seen the postie actually put a letter in her letterbox did Margery leave the house. She was careful not to hurry, careful to pause and feign casual interest in her neglected geranium even though her heart was racing. For the rest of the time, Margery sat on her bed, rubbing Walter’s trophies with flannel rags, waiting.
Finally, Pat came, travelling rapidly towards Margery, her eyes squinting with the intensity of her savage intentions, menacing vengeance propelling her so that the stiff curls across her forehead parted, the large, plastic aqua loops in her ears swung back and her nylon aqua stretch slacks and paisley, psychedelic tank top pressed against her thin body. She flung the screen door back, slapping it against the wall, and stood over her nemesis on her bed. Margery looked back at her, her sense of defiance soaring at the sight of Pat – pale, perspiring and shaking with tearful humiliation.
Her voice wavering, Pat said, ‘What would you say if I told you your husband’s having an affair?’ to which Margery replied, calmly, ‘You’re not Lance’s type: he says you dress as if you’
re off to open day at the local rub and tug.’
Pat was speechless, but only for a second. ‘You don’t know, do you? How could you not know?’
‘Well,’ Margery said, ‘I didn’t know you were bald.’
Pat’s head jerked back, as if to avoid a passing hornet, then she said, ‘You’ve got no reason on God’s earth to think you’re so smart, Margery Blandon!’
‘I’m smart enough to know that there’s no such thing as God, and I’m not stupid enough to believe that he made the earth in six ruddy days.’
‘It’s called faith, Marge. It’s about hope.’
‘False hope.’
‘Hope and faith, and you’ve got neither.’ Pat left, satisfied but not triumphant. ‘Let her mull it over for a day or two, then she’ll come asking.’
But she never did. A few days later, Margery was digging Lance’s singlets and long johns from the writhing, soapy water of her agitating washing machine and feeding them into the wringer when she said, ‘Oh, bother!’ It was time to face up to things, something she dreaded more than life itself. She went to the second bedroom and stood in the doorway staring at her husband, who was, like his mother before him, supine in the spare bed, wheezing away, eyeing the little red ball hovering at number five in the gauge on the side of his oxygen bottle. Margery poked him with the laundry stick. ‘Pat told me you’re having an affair.’
He didn’t even look at her. He just reached over and held up a cross-stitched bed cushion. No sword bites so fiercely as an evil tongue, and Margery turned on her heel and left. The matter was never mentioned again.