by Rosalie Ham
For years Margery only ever encountered Pat at the supermarket or in the street, where they clashed openly, then moved on again from their brief but nasty spats, and every week, Margery watched her neighbour walking to and from the pub, laughing and talking with all her less-than-respectable accomplices.
On Tuesday Margery found she was nauseous again, and too dizzy to carry her pot to empty it, so she crept down the back steps sideways then lurched to the clothesline for safe harbour. She made it to the lavatory and sat clasping the sides of the toilet seat with the door open, held upright by watching the almost-level back steps.
‘It’s my shin,’ she said. ‘I’ve got septicaemia, Cecily.’
She made it back to her chair and slept soundly over her cross-stitch but spent most of the night on her commode pot, humming tunes, willing her pulse to throb rhythmically, urging her bladder to stop summoning her, wishing sleep would come. She stayed in bed day and night, staring at the window ledge, a surface she was sure was straight, stationary, the sides of the pillow bunched against her ears to block the dreadful waterfall outside, though the cascade was actually blood pumping past her ears. Next door, the builders – more than any she’d ever seen – nailed sheets of plywood to the frame while others laid bricks.
Every now and then she started in her bed, thinking she must check Mrs Parsons’ blind, then she remembered and settled back to watch the comings and goings next door. When someone arrived in a van and rolled out a clothes rack with a chandelier hanging from it, Margery said, ‘I bet that’s not crystal,’ and when Tony wheeled in two white lions, seated like guard dogs at a gate, she said, ‘Sculpture. Nice.’
Another van pulled up – ‘Your Security is Our Business’ – and four men spent the entire day installing wiring for a security alarm system. Margery watched them screw cameras to the eaves, and they left many, many bunches of white, blue and red wires hung from the timber frame. Miriana arrived in a see-through maternity top and shorts, her pregnant belly sticking out like a football stuck to a banana. She carried a tray that Margery assumed – rightly – was food. Behind her, an older woman, perhaps her mother, carried two more trays. Then a four-wheel drive zoomed into the gap at the kerb, and Margery’s interest was captured by the driver, a girl, a cigarette between her fingers on the steering wheel and her other hand holding a mobile phone to her ear. Her head and shoulders were covered by a firmly tied shayla, but when she got out of the car – still smoking, still talking on her phone – Margery noted her tight jeans and high-heeled sandals and said, ‘Goodness me.’ Two dark-eyed, curly-haired girls, identically dressed like flower girls, climbed from the back seat and followed their mother, who also carried a plastic container filled with food, into Tony and Miriana’s.
‘At least they can cook.’ More cars arrived, more women with food, and men, lots of men, not carrying anything. Miriana conducted a tour of the almost-complete structure, up and down the stairs, trailed by her dark-eyed girlfriends, some wearing headscarves, others with striped hair, and all wearing what Margery considered unsuitably high shoes. Miriana made squares and circles with her hands where tables, mirrors and cupboards would be placed, and out on the balcony she pointed to the brickworks’ chimneys on the skyline and said, ‘Noice, eh?’
The afternoon wore on, and Margery watched the gathering next door, noting that while the women worked at serving food and caring for the kids, the men did nothing. ‘They’re the same all over the world,’ Margery sniffed. She scowled at the young men – more swarthy types – crawling all over the house and sitting in Tony’s Ferrari, beeping the horn, having their photo taken standing next to it. Tony even drove some of the men and kids around the block.
At one point, Kevin wandered over from his house, his hands in his shorts, baggy about his thin, bald legs. He stood close to the group surrounding the Ferrari, bouncing on the balls of his feet in his socks and sandals, and eventually moved to merge with them. They didn’t acknowledge him, but he fixed his smile and circled the crowd anyway, trying to get close to the beautiful red machine. But he was still ignored, so he finally looked sideways, pretended to see something he needed to attend to and left.
By late afternoon, Margery felt better and was able to get up and eat some bread and butter with jam.
Anita was scrubbing the laundry trough, and her companion and flatmate, Ray, was standing behind her, watching appreciatively. She was applying all her determination and frustration to the task of cleaning the trough, which was brand, sparkling new. Everything was new, just unwrapped and screwed or glued into place – most of the appliances were still on the factory floor just one week ago. Since the fire, the entire house had been gutted, rebuilt and refurbished. Outside, state-of-the-art surveillance cameras peeped out from under the eaves, so new that they weren’t even available in retail stores yet, and they were there especially for Brandon, Anita’s Corrective Services officer, and for Ray’s parole officer, should either decide to visit, unannounced. That’s why there was also a handy new side gate, cleverly disguised as a plain corrugated iron fence: an escape route.
Ray was tempted to sneak up and pinch Anita’s bottom, but he knew by the way her arm was moving so fiercely against the stainless steel that to do so would be to risk being struck by a wet glove. Then there would be a scene and she would cry and he would have to apologise again for the charge of handling stolen goods that she was lumbered with because of him, because of his stolen goods, so he crept back, stood at the front door and called, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home,’ in an exaggerated American accent.
Anita met him in the kitchen, her face glowing with perspiration. Ray kissed her cheek. ‘How’d it go with the Brunswick Steer?’
She pushed away from him. ‘Don’t call him that. He’s a nice guy.’
Ray shrugged. ‘Sorry.’
She nodded. ‘He said yes, he thinks a live-in companion’s a good idea. He can see the benefits to his mother of a boarder, and he seems to think Mrs Blandon will agree, but I don’t think she will.’ She bit her bottom lip.
‘It’s just temporary, anyway.’ He lifted the green shopping bag to the kitchen table and took out the box containing a new telephone.
Anita looked at the picture on the box and said, ‘Perfect,’ and Ray said he’d install it that afternoon. ‘I can get smoke detectors too, if you like. For free.’
She sighed, turned and went back to the trough.
‘Who’s gunna ask a little old lady for receipts? Just tell Walter to consider it a gift from the taxpayers and shareholders of the nation in partnership with our magnificent Prime Minister.’ She said nothing.
‘You are doing good things for them,’ he continued, following her back to the laundry. ‘It’s the right thing for Mrs Blandon to have some company for a while . . . and a decent phone. It means her daughter will back off, and the Brunswick Bull will renovate her house.’
She nodded, but it was the fact that she knew in her heart that Walter was keen on her, that he thought that he loved her, and she felt that at some level she must be encouraging him. It could only mean trouble.
‘Just make absolutely sure that he puts the smoke detectors in properly, and tell the guy across the road who looks like a tamperer to watch for smoke or flames.’
‘Kevin?’
‘Yeah.’
It wouldn’t have mattered to Pat that we didn’t speak for all those years – gosh, years and years it was. She had lots of friends, and her dancing. I know now she was very friendly with her, Florence, the thieving, lying adulteress. Like Pat, she was trouble from the start, that woman.
The first Sunday after her arrival, we were sitting out on the verandah when she turned to me and said, ‘Have we been to mass?’
My victory over how to drain knives and forks and the bin-liner issue still hung in the air, so I didn’t hesitate. ‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the day-by-day wisdom of learned m
en to guide me if I need them. All I have to do is consult my cross-stitch, though it’s perfectly obvious to me what’s right, wrong or otherwise.’
‘Whatever you think’s a fair thing,’ she said and gestured at the tree outside Tyson’s, my geranium bush and the lass walking past with her baby in an oversized pram. ‘But whoever’s responsible for all of this did a fair sort of a job, I reckon.’
There was nothing I could say to that since I’m a believer in Mother Nature.
Our next dispute, our third in three days, was over the issue of the toilet paper. She’d used almost a whole roll. I had to use a tissue from my sleeve when I got there, so I placed a notepad and pencil on the table to list things that we shared, like detergent and toothpaste, soap and talcum powder.
‘I never use talcum powder,’ she said. ‘It sticks in all the creases.’
I said there was no need to be crude; the point was that she used twice as much toilet paper as me.
‘The war’s over,’ she informed me. ‘Rationing’s finished.’
So I reminded her about the trees, and what Julien says about recycling paper, but she cut me off. ‘You leave a drip on the seat,’ she said. I had a saucepan in my hand, you know. I nearly crowned her, but instead I told her that the sooner she found somewhere else to live, the better.
‘You’re darn right,’ she said, but I didn’t see her stand up and rush to pack.
She was also contrary about the butter. Butter must be kept in the fridge so it doesn’t go rancid. ‘You call that butter?’ she said. ‘It’s margarine, kerosene and yellow paint.’
‘It’s easy to spread,’ I said. I’d raised the matter of a cooking roster on the first day, but she said I should cook unless I wanted to eat eggs on toast three times a day.
‘It’s quite understandable that no one ever wanted marry you,’ I said. Little wonder she was left like a used beer glass on the bar at closing time.
‘Someone did want to marry me,’ she spat, ‘but his mingy wife wouldn’t give him a divorce.’
So. There you have it, I thought to myself. Not only is she a barmaid, but she’s a smoker, a drinker, a thief, an adulteress and slovenly to boot, as well as a promiscuous home-wrecker.
When she woke on Wednesday, Margery’s head was thudding, like the noise Tyson’s car radio made of a Saturday night, and the waterfall and roaring wind were there too. Yet outside, the trees drooped contentedly in the summer sun. Though the radio from next door barked, only the plasterers were at work, so the noise level was lower than usual.
Getting out of bed was disconcerting, an effort, but Margery managed to creep out to the lavatory. She was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing her bloomers when she thought she heard Walter’s thongs come clicking down her passage. She turned and there he was, his suit over one arm and supermarket bag with some tools and a bunch of carnations in it over the other. ‘Is it Sunday?’ she asked.
‘Wednesday,’ Walter said and kissed her cheek. He hung his suit on the door, put his toolbox in the bathroom and the carnations in a jar of water.
‘How are you, Walter dear?’
‘One thousand and four days,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Job’s right.’
‘You look lovely, son.’
‘Yep-see-dep-see.’ Walter was wearing brand-new football shorts. He’d been shaved so close that his cheeks appeared varnished, and he’d been trimmed – hair, sideburns, eyebrows, nose and ears, throat, neck and shoulders. The kitchen filled with fumes – Old Spice.
‘You’ve been to the barber,’ Margery said, wringing the water out of her undies. She draped them over the tap and then lifted her breakfast dishes from the sink and left them to drain.
‘And I never looked better.’ In the bathroom he plugged his electric power drill into the outlet and revved it at the ceiling, bouncing on his toes. ‘Got a date. With Anita.’ He did a little to-fro on his toes. ‘We’re going to the pictures.’
Margery reached for the kitchen table and lowered herself cautiously onto the chair, keeping her eye on the windowsill for balance. Walter checked his forelock in the bathroom mirror. Satisfied, he straightened his left leg and pulled the hem of his shorts.
‘What are you going to see?’
‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ he said, and did a little duck and weave.
‘My favourite film is –’
‘Mrs. Miniver, I know, but Anita picked Pirates of the Caribbean,’ Walter said, unpacking more tools from his bag, being very important. ‘I’m meeting her here first.’ He measured Margery’s arm with a tape measure. ‘Anita Potter is the best home help and carer you’ll ever have. The kind of girl a bloke could marry.’
‘“Caution is the eldest child of wisdom”, Walter dear.’
Walter went back to the bathroom, humming as he unscrewed the handrails over the bath.
‘At least she can make tea,’ Margery said, glancing at her shining crystal cabinet and her gleaming doorknobs, ‘though she’s yet to show an interest in polishing.’ She levered herself to her feet, flicked the kettle on then took a very long time to get two cups and saucers safely to the table.
Walter pointed at Margery with his electric drill. ‘I’m going to replace the shower rose, install a hand-held one for you.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ Margery asked him how the food safety hygiene course was going.
‘S for Smart Walter,’ he said and winked as he wrenched the old shower rose off the pipe. Unfortunately, some residual water plopped out and dislodged his sculpted, careful forelock. He downed tools, whipped a small comb out of his shorts and resurrected his hair, carefully scraping as much as he could over his bald patch. He attached a rose on a pliable metal hose to the pipe and screwed the rose holder next to the taps. Then he changed the taps in Margery’s kitchen. ‘There you go,’ he said, proudly.
‘I won’t have to use the shifting spanner to turn them now, will I?’ Margery asked.
Anita came down the passage, singing, ‘Anyone home?’
Walter put his finger to his lips, sshhh, and winked at Margery.
She arrived in the kitchen wearing shorts – very short – and a singlet cut off at her midriff. Walter was far too captivated by the fact that she was probably only wearing three (possibly two) items of clothing, plus her thongs, to notice that behind her was a brown-skinned little girl with a mass of wild, black, cork-screw hair. Anita put her bag on the kitchen table next to the teacups and said, ‘How was the funeral?’
‘Bail up, your money or your life,’ Walter said from behind her, aiming the power drill and the shifting spanner at her like two six-shooters.
‘Aren’t you a wag,’ she said and drew the little girl out from behind her. ‘This is Ruby. Ruby, say hello to Mrs Blandon and Walter.’
‘Hello.’
Finally, Walter shifted his gaze from Anita to the little girl, who was dressed in blue tights and a red, webbed T-shirt. ‘Hello, Supergirl.’
‘I’m Spiderman,’ Ruby said.
‘Have you got a dolly at home?’ Margery asked.
Ruby said, very patiently, ‘No, Mrs Blandon. Spiderman doesn’t have dolls.’
Anita opened a soy milk carob drink for Ruby and she sat up at the table next to Margery sucking through a straw. Margery was captivated by Ruby’s curls, waving at her like kelp in a sea swell. She put one hand over one eye, but it didn’t help – the walls still sagged, the floor still rose and fell, and the curls still spiralled.
Ruby told Margery matter-of-factly that she had a web that was fail-safe and eight eyes and that they were going to see Pirates of the Caribbean.
Margery mentioned she’d always admired Walter Pidgeon. ‘He was very dependable, a good provider and a considerate husband. Loyal.’ Since Walter was in the second bedroom changing into his suit, Margery told Anita, ‘Walter’s always
been very loyal and dependable.’
‘How do you get wrinkles?’
‘Ruby!’ Anita said and put her finger to her lips.
‘You get them as you get older,’ Margery said. ‘For free.’
‘You’re just like a real grandma.’
‘I am a real grandma.’
‘My grandma drinks beer and smokes cigarettes.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ said Anita.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I know, but she hasn’t got blue curls and sensible shoes like this old lady.’ Then she crawled onto Margery’s knee and Anita reminded her that Mrs Blandon had a sore shin, so Ruby asked how she’d fallen over.
Margery wrapped her arms around Ruby and gently explained how she got her shiners, so Ruby told her that her grandmother had fallen off her stilettos and broken her hip.
‘That’s a shame,’ Margery said, but Anita quickly assured them Nanna was alright and would be coming out of rehabilitation soon.
Ruby poked her drinking straw through one of Margery’s curls, ‘We use to live with my Grandma but she had to move out because she set the flat alight.’
‘Shush, Ruby,’ Anita said.
‘She got her own flat then, but she has to move out because she’s set it alight twice and everyone else in the flats hates her now.’
‘Nan’s got lots of other friends,’ Anita scolded.
‘They’re all dead.’
‘Right. That’s enough about Nanna.’
She cupped her sticky little hand over Margery’s ear and said, ‘Is your invisible friend here?’
‘Mind your business!’ Anita snapped, but Margery just said, ‘She’s here,’ and tapped her heart.
Walter appeared, resplendent in his purple suit, and as he’d anticipated, the three girls in the kitchen looked up at him posing in the doorway, back-lit by the open front door, his purple silhouette fringed in rays of sparkling daylight.