There Should Be More Dancing (17 page)

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.'

‘Boronia, DeeAndra, is not the outback. It is very nice out there. There's trees and birds and stuff.'

‘I'm having my hair done; I have my hair done every fortnight.' Margery looked at the watch on her daughter's arm –
her
watch. ‘What's the time?'

Judith sighed and pushed past her mother, heading towards Margery's front door. She found it locked, so she stood with her hand on the door, eyes filling with tears. ‘I need to use the toilet, and I can't see why you aren't just nice to me for once, Marge. I've given up my Saturday to try and help you.' Margery struggled back to her daughter with her shopping cart and handbags and unlocked the door for her.

‘I don't want to go to the home,' Margery said.

Judith hurried down the passage. ‘It's got air conditioning and heating in winter and carpet, Marge – and where are the new floor mats I bought?'

‘I'm not sure, Judith, perhaps they're out in the sun.'

‘They're not,' Judith called from the backyard. ‘It's that Anita, isn't it? You can't even trust the home help these days.'

Margery sat in her chair in the lounge room and had just eased her stocking off when Pudding came in and flopped down on the couch. Margery shoved her damp stocking into her coat pocket. ‘What are you up to today, Pud?'

‘Mum's sending me to the information day at the university while you're at the “new modern, comfortable, elder-age living and recreation facility with air-conditioning and heated carpet in the peaceful ambience of a rural setting”.'

‘I'm not going.'

‘Neither am I.'

‘Your mother never wanted to go to university either. Do you want to do beauty and hairdressing?'

Her phone played a tune. ‘God, no.'

‘What are you going to study?'

‘Event management. I'm going to be like Cynthia Plaster Caster.'

Margery noticed that Pud was wearing lace slacks, as though they'd been made from a crocheted tea cloth. ‘Education's a wonderful thing, Pudding. A privilege.'

‘It's just a normal, boring thing to do, Gran.'

‘I used to be good at composition,' Margery said. ‘I always got at least eighty per cent out of a hundred. I studied piano as well. As you know, I still play, in fact, just the other day –'

‘Shush, Gran.' Pudding put the phone to her ear, lay back on the couch and crossed her legs. It didn't look as though she had any panties on under her lace slacks.

When Judith came back she put her hand on Pud's knee and said, ‘My daughter's going to university next year. She's going to do medicine.'

‘I'm not. I'm going to be an entrepreneur.' She winked at her grandmother, though Margery wasn't sure why.

‘If she gets a degree in nursing, Marge, she can run our aged-care facility.'

‘I'm going on tour.'

‘If you go to medical school we'll buy you a car.'

‘Uncle Wally told me I'd get Gran's car.'

‘You can't have that car,' Margery said. ‘It's Morris's.'

‘Morris is never coming home,' Judith said. ‘If he comes home he'll go to jail. Come on, Marge, get cracking, we've got an appointment to keep.'

‘What about Pat?' Marge said, stalling.

‘We'll leave a note for Kevin. Now come on.'

‘She's in hospital, sick. Very sick.'

‘She's old, Marge.' She tugged her mother's coat sleeve. ‘Old people are sickly people.'

‘Gran wants to visit Pat,' Pudding said, holding the phone away from her ear. Margery could hear the thin scratching sound of the person on the other end.

‘I rescued Pat from dying of exposure in my car. She ran away from the home.'

Judith said, ‘Well, that's dis-gusting. You couldn't get out of our facility if you tried.'

Pud said, ‘It's not yours yet.'

‘It will be, DeeAndra. And Marge'll be safe and secure there.'

‘Sajida here will drug you and tie you to the bedrails, Gran.'

‘No I won't,' she said, looking at her watch again. ‘You're not allowed to do that anymore. Now come on, Marge, I need to drop DeeAndra at the university and get going.' She pulled Marge's sleeve collar, trying to get her to stand up, so Margery blurted, ‘Mrs Parsons died.'

‘What?' Pudding snapped her telephone closed and sat up straight.

‘
Dead
?' There was dry spittle in the corners of Judith's mouth.

Pud cupped her cheeks. ‘Ohmygod, that is
so
sad.'

Margery started to explain that Mrs Parsons looked as if she'd just slipped away peacefully, but Judith had her mobile phone out, acrylic fingernails dialling. ‘What's going to happen to her house?'

‘As I said to Kevin, I expect she'll give it to the nuns.'

Judith headed out the back, grabbing Mrs Parsons' key from behind the door as she passed. ‘Or the State Trustees. I'll contact the State Trustees.'

Pudding got up to follow her mother, so Margery said, ‘It's sacred, that place. It's her privacy . . .' but they had gone, so Margery heaved herself out of her chair, following as fast as she could, reaching for firm objects to steady herself, gripping the handrail on the back stairs and carefully negotiating the steps.

Judith had her phone to her ear, talking to Barry. ‘Mrs Parsons died, and Kevin's already trying to buy her place . . . I'm in her house now.' She pushed through the shed door then into the lane and Mrs Parsons' backyard, like a wombat through thick grass, Margery tottering along behind. Inside, Margery's phone started to ring, and she paused, but she could see Mrs Ahmed over in her backyard draping a floor mat over her clothesline. She glanced across to Judith from behind her hijab, nodded hello, but Judith ignored her, so Margery said good morning, again, and called, ‘It's not our place to be in there, Judith.'

Mrs Ahmed started thumping the carpet with a broom handle.

‘Then don't come in, Marge,' Judith said, but Pudding was already opening Mrs Parsons' back door. With relief, Margery noticed the dark outline of panties under Pud's lace slacks. In her hallway, Margery's phone rang and rang, so finally she turned and hurried up her back steps, but it stopped ringing.

Standing in Mrs Parsons' austere little kitchen, tears welled in Pudding's eyes. ‘It's so sad. Poor Mrs Parsons. She must have been so lonely!'

‘Walter gave her a tin of shortbread every Christmas,' Judith said, pointing to the biscuit tins lining the walls. ‘I wonder if she ate them.' She took one and shook it. ‘Empty,' she said, picking up another. Pudding crept into the lounge room, her arms tight around her chest. The floor was linoleum, and either side of a standard lamp there were two vinyl lounge chairs with a small mat in front. Margery's cross-stitched cushions were placed neatly on each chair –
An undutiful daughter will prove an unmanageable wife
and
You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours
. A small coffee table supported an even stack of romance novels, and opposite the chairs was an old radiogram and wireless, but there were no records in the record compartment next to the turntable.

Pudding wept. ‘Mrs Parsons was so sweet and gentle.'

‘And poor.' Judith was sitting in Mrs Parsons' rocking chair, an open biscuit tin on her lap, flicking through some old savings account passbooks. The lid featuring a Scottish terrier and a West Highland terrier looking from behind a stone fence propped against the table leg at her ankles. She discarded the tin and passbooks and went to the fridge, holding the door open and staring at the contents – a full jar of honey and some opened packets of dehydrated peas and carrots, No Name Brand cheese slices, Jatz crackers, small jar Vegemite. She grabbed the Vegemite, unscrewed the lid, smelled the contents and put it on the table.

Pud walked carefully up to the front bedroom, and when she saw Mrs Parsons' bed she gasped, her hands going to her heart. It was a double bed, with two pillows, but just one small dam in one side of the mattress where Mrs Parsons had slept alone for all those decades. A scrap of paper marked her place, just a few pages from the end, in a
romance novel on the bedside table. Pud opened the wardrobe door, but there was only one tiny nylon shift and a wool coat hanging there in the naphthalene air, the box of mothballs sitting on the bottom of the wardrobe next to Mrs Parsons' handbag.

Pud opened the handbag but found only the pastry from Margery's birthday lunch, solid as a teacup, and a mouldy half of a muffin in rolled-up tissues. She fell to her knees in dramatic grief, clutching the muffin, ‘Oh my god! It's so, like,
sad
.' Then she remembered the second bedroom, stood up and rushed to the small room. Like the rest of the house, it was scrupulously dust-free and precise, the sheet on the narrow single bed was folded back, ready for someone. In the top drawer of the bedside bureau she poked at a folded stack of small, boy-sized singlets and underpants, and took a hanky from the square stack of washed and ironed handkerchiefs. Her phone beeped, so she blew her nose and wandered out into the kitchen, reading the message. It was Tyson. ‘Wot's in there?' She typed, ‘It's frozen in time.'