There Should Be More Dancing

by Rosalie Ham

‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You can go every week to the senior citizens’ centre, Marge. You can do the planned activity program, like the weekly trivia competition, the musical get-togethers, nostalgia sessions, ball games, craft and cooking at the day centre.’

  ‘I can do that here.’

  ‘You can play cards or go to the dances or the sing-a-longs.’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘What about swimming? You can ease your old bones in the nice, warm spa bath.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get me in one of them,’ Florence said. ‘Everyone over fifty leaks a bit.’

  Judith looked at Florence. ‘Who are you?’

  Florence said, ‘You look buggered, love. Have a seat.’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  Florence creased her eyebrows together and tried to think, and Margery said, ‘This is Florence, my new flatmate.’

  ‘Call me Flossy.’

  It seemed the air evaporated from the lounge room. Walter started washing the dishes.

  Judith stared at Margery, shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘Flatmate?’

  ‘So I won’t have to go to the home,’ Margery said.

  ‘It’ll be good for a while,’ Anita said. ‘Could be just the thing for Margery.’

  Judith just nodded and said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and sat on the couch. ‘Fate,’ she said, looking across at her wedding photo on top of the television. ‘I’ll leave it all to fate.’ She was a lovely bride, twenty years younger, slim and glowing with happiness. Barry had hair, and she was nestled in the crook of his arm, his other arm above his head, fist clenched like a winner.

  In the backyard, Anita tore off her Nicorette and lit a cigarette. ‘I’ll give it up next year.’

  Ruby asked, ‘What about Disneyland?’

  ‘You can see it on the telly, for free.’

  A bare bulb hung from the ceiling of the tiny second bedroom, the wardrobe was a half-sized kiddies’ cupboard, its doors hanging ajar, the bedside table adequate, but the little room was mean despite the softening taint from the cross-stitch curtains and floor mat, the bedspread, pillow cases . . . and the wall hanging: Deceit always returns to its master.

  At the end of the bed was a large cardboard box filled with wooden embroidery frames, bunches of thread and cloth offcuts. The corners of Florence’s mouth turned down as she studied the thin bed. It was just an abused hammock slung between two bedheads really. ‘That bed doesn’t even look like it’s fit to die in.’

  As it happened, it was the place Norma Blandon, Margery’s mother-in-law, had taken her final breath. One shuddering, thunderous Saturday night in 1950, with little Walter and Morris tucked up in bed and Lance at the pub, Margery shoved the last of the mashed potato and gravy into the limp, whisker-ringed orifice that was Norma’s mouth and settled with her sewing by the gas stove to listen to the radio. While Margery hummed and lightening cracked in the boiling blue-black sky, a vegetable bolus broke from between Norma’s gums and her slack cheek and slid to lodge in her trachea. Because she lacked a cough reflex due to an undiagnosed stroke, the old woman’s eyes quietly bulged and cried; she turned red, crimson, purple then blue, and, finally, deathly white.

  Before she went to bed, Margery switched off her mother-in-law’s bedside lamp and noticed she was unusually peaceful, dead to the world, in fact. ‘Bother,’ she said, sighing. A roll of thunder passed overhead, and the rain stampeded across the roof. Margery pushed out onto her small front verandah, gathering in her dressing gown, and looked down towards the pub, but the storm swelled and her feet turned cold, her slippers made tight and heavy by lashing rain. She stepped into the sleep-out, noted the small mounds under the blankets in the bunks and knew she wouldn’t go for help. How could she leave her two small sons huddled in their bunks while a storm pushed and sucked at their thin door and rattled the glass louvres in their window frames?

  She slept six hours straight that night, knowing she didn’t have to get up in the night to turn her mother-in-law and change sodden bedsheets, and at breakfast she refilled Lance’s cup of tea and said, ‘When I went in this morning your mother was dead.’

  Little Walter, who was seven at the time, said, ‘Can we sleep in her room? It’s scary in the sleep-out.’

  Anita came into the bedroom and looked at her mother, a fixed smile on her face. ‘Won’t take much to fix it up for you, Floss,’ she said cheerfully, and Florence looked about the shabby little room and said shakily, ‘I never imagined I’d end up here.’

  As Walter was leaving, he looked wistfully at his mother’s geranium bush, straightened his leg, pulled the hem of his shorts and said, ‘Mumsy, I love Anita, she’s easy to be around. Comfortable.’

  Margery said, ‘Love is like a mutton chop, sometimes cold and sometimes hot.’

  ‘I’d like to marry her,’ he said. ‘Adopt Ruby.’

  ‘You can have my wedding ring,’ she said, ‘though I’m not sure where it is.’ She then went inside and picked up the cross-stitch basket cover she was sewing for Anita: Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

  When Anita had pulled up with Florence in the back of her car, Bonita and Tyson were sitting on their couch in the ruined house opposite, watching Tony and Miriana supervise removalists lugging boxes and furniture into their new, almost-complete, architect-designed house. Tyson was still bandaged, nursing the effects of Tony’s revenge attack some nights previously.

  ‘That house went up real fast,’ Bonita said.

  ‘Tony and his missus are fascist tyrants.’

  ‘I’m not believing what I’m seeing now, and I’m watching it happen,’ Bonita said, flicking her ash onto the floor. Across the road, Ruby helped Florence out of the car while Anita carried her possessions – one medium-sized red, blue and white striped bag, a pillow and a sponge bag – into Margery’s flaking little cottage.

  ‘What?’ Tyson asked, then winced, feeling his bruised ribs and dislocated fingers.

  ‘I could tell you a story,’ Bonita said, ‘but I won’t because secrets kill, and you’d tell Pudding.’

  ‘No I won’t, tell me.’

  She dragged on her cigarette, exhaled. ‘For a start, the skinny one, Flossy, was the most notorious publican west of Sydney Road, just loved a party. But she’s a pyromaniac. Burned down two houses, as far as I know.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Tyson sat bolt upright, winced again, but his pain turned to pleasure picturing Margery’s house aflame, the old lady crawling from the boiling inferno, her nose and mouth ringed in soot, her nightie melting and her hair burned on her grilled scalp, while Tony and Miriana banged noiselessly on their translucent windows as their electronic house filled with acrid chemical smoke under a smouldering roof.

  ‘Don’t start fantasising,’ his mother said.

  ‘No,’ Tyson said, ‘the Brunswick Bull lost . . . the Brunswick Bullshitter.’

  ‘I’ve told you, it was me who bet the house, me who lost the house, alright? It’s not Mrs Blandon’s fault, just get a life, alright?’

  Tyson ignored her, stared over to Margery’s house.

  Bonita looked at the old, oval-faced, pink-gold watch on her wrist and asked, ‘You sure Mrs Parsons threw this out?’ though she had seen the initials – R.B. – engraved on the back.

  ‘Yeah!’ Tyson lied. ‘It was in the bag with the kilt.’

  His mother shrugged. Ruth Bist and Mrs Parsons were both gone anyway. ‘Gotta go,’ she said. ‘Tracy’s doing my roots.’ She ambled up the middle of the street towards the commission flats, a plume of cigarette smoke billowing in the air behind her.

  Later, when he saw Florence on the front verandah, a skinny old dear with bright red lips and motley legs, he crossed the road, leaned on the letterbox and lit a cigarette.

  ‘You haven’t got a smoke, have
ya, love?’

  He handed her a cigarette and brand-new box of matches.

  You must remember that, at this point, I had an infected shin and the possibility of hospital, and therefore death, ahead of me. My normally respectable appearance was besmirched by black eyes and abrasions, which were no fault of mine, and it had been impossible for me to get a wash, tint and set. My podiatrist had deserted me, I was facing eviction and a future in a home for incontinent lunatics, and I’d been goaded by real estate agents as well as my very own children. Then I found myself between a rock and a very hard place.

  Incredibly, worse was to come.

  When Judith was standing over me, saying, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and Florence was there imploring me with her homeless eyes, and Walter and Anita looking so fraught, well, I looked up and on my wall was a quote from Doctor Woods’ desk calendar: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when? When Mrs Miniver found the weakened enemy soldier in her garden, she remained calm. And when she was in her kitchen getting food for him, and he was, I might add, aiming a gun at her, she remained calm. You could see she even pitied the poor, starving beggar, despite the fact that her husband was out risking his life to fight the Germans somewhere in a sea of enemy submarines at that very moment. In the circumstances, assisting the enemy was the right thing to do. Inevitably, the enemy weakened and fell, and Mrs Miniver, being the type that she was, seized control. Grabbed his gun. Slapped his face . . . beat him and won, thus saving herself, and others, from harm. Mrs Miniver did the right thing, and so I said to Judith, ‘This is Florence, my new flatmate.’

  ‘Job’s right, then,’ Walter said, but you could see the blood draining from Judith’s face, leaving just her eczema, like dried jam. She just sort of melted onto my couch then, wiped the sweat from her face with one of my cross-stitched cushions, while Florence started a long explanation about how she’d been unwell, and while she was in hospital they put her rent up but she’d spent all her savings on her medical bills and her pension didn’t cover what was left of them as well as her rent, so she was forced out of her flat, but Ruby interrupted to explain that that wasn’t quite right – Florence actually got kicked out of her flat because even though she’d given up smoking she’d still managed to set it alight because she boiled her egg dry and set the smoke alarms off and other peoples lives were put at risk.

  ‘The department wanted to put her away,’ Walter said.

  ‘The ACAT team!’ Ruby leapt from the couch to stab the invisible ACAT team with her pirate sword.

  Then Anita was in the doorway, a cloth soaked with bleach in her hand. She pinched a strand of hair in her fingers and ran the bleach cloth over it and watched it to see if it turned yellow. Judith used to do the same thing to her fringe as a teenager.

  ‘It’ll be good,’ Anita said, ‘could be just the thing Margery needs.’

  ‘Could be,’ Judith said, smiling.

  I thought at the time, Judith’s seen the sense of it; she’s decided it’d be foolish to put me in a home. At last! She’s given up on the whole idea of buying into a nursing home, then she said, ‘But what if Florence wants to make a cup of tea or light the gas heater? She’ll have to have matches.’

  No! I thought. It suits her! She wants Florence to set the house alight with us in it!

  It’s reasonable then to imagine that when we had the so-called ‘accident’ with Tony’s red car my suspicions about the unscrewed brake hose rose because it was Judith who urged us take the car out! ‘It’s Big Shop week, Marge, and there’s two of you – you should go and buy everything you need, have a nice trip out together.’

  ‘To the supermarket?’ Florence said, as if Judith had suggested we go to Werribee Sewage Farm for the day. ‘There’s no need for me to go.’

  I remember Judith said, ‘You need to split the cost of the groceries.’ Then she smiled, ‘It’s best if you go together.’

  It’s best if you go together.

  So the very next day off we went, together, and we had the accident.

  It just goes to show, even if you do something right you still get punched in the heart.

  Judith could easily have sabotaged my car, but I can’t be certain. And as I sit here now, it is conceivable to me that perhaps she thought she had good reason to harm me. No mother is perfect, after all.

  After the accident I told Walter. I said, ‘It was tampered with. Judith’s trying to kill me.’ He said that couldn’t be true, but at the time I thought, Walter’s in on it! He and Anita have planted Florence here to upset me! They’re trying to irritate me to death! It was a reasonable conclusion. As I’ve told you earlier, those first few days Florence argued with me over everything – the dishes, drying the knives and forks, the toilet paper and the bin-liners – and she also broke my signed photo of the Honourable John Howard! You know, I asked and asked but that Anita never turned that photograph back up the right way. Anyrate, what happened was, Florence went out to the front verandah, left the door wide open behind her and, naturally, it slammed. Bang, tinkle-tinkle, and the photo of our Honourable ex-Prime Minister was in a hundred pieces all over my lounge room floor. I rushed out to tell her but she just said, ‘Good riddance. He was a mean-spirited old wowser.’ Then she looked right at me and said, ‘And there’s far too many of them around the place.’

  I remember picking our distinguished ex-Prime Minister up off the floor and placing him gently on top of the television, but to be honest, at the time I didn’t notice Lance was missing. The gap where his photo usually sat didn’t actually catch my attention at that precise time.

  Then, in the middle of that very night, Florence set the smoke detectors off because she was puffing away in her room! Kevin’s light went on, but it was Tony from next door who came in and turned them off with a broom. We still didn’t get much sleep though, because when he went back to his house, his alarms went off.

  But getting back to the story. The argument we had that Thursday, Big Shop day, the day of the accident with Tony’s car, started because it was recycling day as well, and my new flatmate failed to get up in time for the recycling truck. So, I knocked on her door and called, ‘You have to put your stubbies in the recycling bin.’ She didn’t answer. I could hear the truck coming, so I knocked again. No response. Mrs Bist’s and Mrs Parsons’ deaths came to mind, so I opened the door and there she was, flat on her back in bed, dead, just like Lance’s mother that stormy night, only Florence is thin, of course. At least I thought she was dead, lying there on her back with her cotton gloves, if you please, folded across her chest, her eyes covered by a sleeping mask like Zorro, and her face smothered in white cream. Why? I wondered. Why bother at her age? I poked her to make sure she really was dead, but she wasn’t. She slid her eye mask back and pulled her earplugs out by the tassels, reached over to one of my best teacups on the bedside table and picked her teeth out of it, and that’s when I saw the photograph. Lance, my husband, on her bedside table.

  She just flicked the water off her dentures and said, ‘I like a man in uniform,’ and popped her teeth in.

  Still, I didn’t suspect a thing. For a start, I’m the first to admit Lance was very handsome in his uniform, and he wasn’t damaged from the war like some of them who came back, poor things. He only got the oxygen bottle later because of the cigarettes. Pat’s Bill from across the road had bad lungs as well, but his was from the brick dust. That’s one thing Pat’s never expressed gratitude for, the fact that Bill’s life ended suddenly and unexpectedly. In fact, she once said to me, ‘I hope you’re happy now you’ve killed my husband,’ and I said, ‘Nonsense, Lance killed him, and anyrate, it’s better than suffering through a slow, painful death from brick-dust poisoning.’ Mind you, Bill smoked cigarettes as well and they never did establish which one of them struck the match that blew up the pub.

  Anyrate, I took Lance’s photo, p
ut it back on top of the telly and emptied the stubbies. That afternoon, as I said earlier, off we went – the thieving adulteress and I – to do our Big Shop and Tony ran into us at the corner. Ruined Morris’s car entirely. When he looked under the hood, Tony said right away that the little hose had come away from the brake fluid cylinder.

  He asked if I had insurance.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said.

  We were alright though. Florence got a bit of a bump on her head, and my nose hit the steering wheel. But it was definitely not my fault. I put my foot on the brake pedal and it went straight to the floor, and the low red sports car came floating along the road towards us like a magic carpet, and then bang! There was a crunch and Tony’s car stopped dead in the middle of the road, glass sprinkled all over the bitumen, and we ended up in the hedge at the end of the lane.

  Frightened the living daylights out of us.

  Tony’s car was Italian, which made it very, very expensive to fix, but that’s his fault. Australian cars are perfectly adequate. After all, if these foreigners want to assimilate they should drive our cars.

  Under that black tracksuit of his Tony was like boiling poison, but at the same time he was reluctant to phone the police, so Florence got him to phone Anita.

  I appreciated her doing that.

  When Anita and Walter got there, Tony said, ‘I’ve got a grandmother too, but we don’t let her out.’

  You get that sort of thing in Brunswick, different customs.

  He had his finger right in Walter’s face, ‘Fifty thousand dollars At least, Bud. Start saving.’

  Walter stayed calm, but his twitching fists have a mind of their own.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve left red paint all over my bumper bar.’

  Then Tony says to Walter, ‘I know you. You were that boxer.’

  Now he’ll back off, I thought, now that he knows he’s got the Middleweight Champion of Victoria to contend with.

  Walter’s fists clenched and he shifted his weight, but he just said, ‘I know you too.’