Sixty Summers

by Amanda Hampson

  ‘Okay,’ began Maggie, sipping her coffee. ‘Now that I’ve confessed to not having looked at the itinerary …’

  ‘You want an executive summary, I suppose?’ guessed Rose. ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve told you where we are going.’

  ‘I just haven’t focused on it until now. So, I’m assuming we couldn’t possibly go everywhere we went before – for a start we drove, and now we’re going on the train. The first trip took over two months and we’ve got half that.’

  ‘Correct. The first trip we drove through France and Germany to Berlin and then down through Czechoslovakia – now Czech Republic – to Austria, Hungary, down through what was then Yugoslavia to Greece and then back up through Italy,’ recalled Rose. ‘This trip, as we have discussed, is the edited highlights.’

  ‘I don’t know how we managed all that. We obviously had a lot more energy back then,’ said Fran with a laugh.

  ‘I feel tired just thinking about it. In fact, I’m not sure I want to know the detail,’ said Maggie.

  Rose frowned. ‘It’s a bit ridiculous, not wanting to know where you’re going.’

  Maggie shrugged. She stared into her cup for a long minute. ‘I don’t know why, but coffee doesn’t taste of anything any more.’

  ‘Far out!’ Rose’s chair made a scraping sound as she stood up and marched out the door. Fran and Maggie watched her pace up and down on the pavement, her hands plunged deep into the pockets of her jacket.

  ‘What did I say?’ asked Maggie, bewildered. ‘She’s on a hair-trigger.’

  ‘I think what it is …’ Fran began carefully, ‘I think that Rose wants to try to emulate our younger selves, and that’s why —’

  ‘Well, that is completely ridiculous.’ Maggie looked out the window and Fran saw her expression soften as she watched Rose trying to get a grip on herself. ‘I’m sorry. I went on antidepressants recently. They obviously haven’t fully kicked in yet. I’m really not meaning to be negative.’

  ‘Look, she’ll be fine,’ said Fran. ‘We’ll just give her a moment.’

  Rose came back inside and sat down, only slightly less grumpy.

  Fran got in first. ‘Rose, does it really matter? We can just tell Maggie a day ahead. I can imagine it could seem a bit overwhelming …’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care. It’s fine,’ said Rose. ‘But please just stop complaining.’

  ‘It was just an observation,’ said Maggie soothingly.

  ‘If I can give up yodelling, which is an important part of my life, you can give up moaning.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘You better believe it,’ said Rose.

  Fran wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, or even what it was about, but when Maggie laughed, she joined in, and Rose did too. And, for the moment, all was well.

  Despite the blustery weather, they all agreed to push on and visit the Battersea flat they had once shared but, before that, Rose wanted to go back to the pub where she’d worked, which wasn’t far from the café.

  When Fran and Rose first arrived in London, Earl’s Court Road seemed wildly exciting with its exotic takeaways and posters advertising magic bus tickets to Greece, Kathmandu, Afghanistan and Morocco – the best-known hippy trails. Places they had never dreamed of going. There was a camaraderie among the restless community of Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans; pilgrims hungry for experiences and a good time. It was no wonder the place ended up with a dubious reputation.

  These days Earl’s Court was exactly like any other West London shopping strip, lined with clothing franchises, cafés and gastro-pubs. Nothing looked familiar. They walked back and forth searching for a landmark but, on asking in a shop, discovered the Marquis had been pulled down years ago. In its place was a convenience store and a shoe shop.

  ‘It seems incredible,’ said Rose, outraged. ‘That pub was a hundred and fifty years old! It’d be two hundred years old now.’

  ‘Everything here is two hundred years old, or older. It happens all the time, Rose,’ said Fran. ‘Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘There should be a blue plaque and a heritage order on the building. Rose McLean (née Avery) worked here,’ suggested Maggie as she turned away to hail a cab.

  ‘I expect business fell away after I left and it was all downhill from there. I just hate to see history demolished – for this,’ said Rose, gesturing dismissively at the nondescript shops that had replaced the pub.

  A cab pulled up and Maggie opened the door to get in. ‘This is just the beginning, Rosie. You need to pace yourself.’

  As the taxi headed down Beaufort Street and onto the Battersea Bridge, Rose bounced back. ‘Isn’t this fun? Just like the old days.’

  ‘Except we were on the bus,’ said Fran. ‘Not in a cab. We never took cabs.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Rose. ‘I remember getting sort of dodgy minicabs …’ As they pulled up outside the Battersea tower block, she fell silent. After a moment she asked, ‘Wow. Was it always that ugly?’

  Like the Hogarth Road B&B, the building was no more or less neglected than when they had lived there forty years earlier. The pebbledash cladding was just as grubby, the painted railings peeling as they had been then. As the cab drove away, the three of them crowded under the umbrella, dwarfed by the twenty-storey block. Fran had to admit it was much more brutal looking than even she remembered. The architectural style was post-war Eastern Bloc. It looked as though it had been designed by a public servant with a set square. There was another identical building on the estate but not a single tree or shrub to be seen, just cracked and blackened concrete everywhere.

  With some trepidation, they walked up the steps only to find the main entry door to the building now needed a card or pass-code. Fortunately, a young man was leaving the building and gallantly held the door open for them to enter. The foyer was smaller than Fran remembered.

  ‘I’m having an Alice in Wonderland moment,’ remarked Maggie. ‘Either we’ve grown or it’s shrunk.’

  ‘Were there always two lifts? I don’t remember that,’ said Rose as she pressed the lift button. The steel doors opened, she stepped inside and started to laugh.

  ‘What?’ asked Maggie, following her. ‘Oh no … why?!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Fran, holding her nose. ‘I always thought it was just one person who peed in the lift. He’s either still here or …’

  ‘Or there’s another generation of lift-pissers in the building,’ said Rose.

  It was a relief to escape the stale, acrid odour onto the seventeenth floor. Shared by four flats, the entry doors opened into a small lobby tiled in dark mustard and green, a legacy of its origins as public housing. To the right, a glass door led to the stairwell with views over the rooftops of Battersea to the Thames. To the left was a door that led to the incinerator hatch for rubbish disposal. Rose set off to inspect this and announced it was still in operation. Although she must have used it dozens of times, Fran’s strongest memory of this hatch was watching Maggie and Rose shove their hated winter coats down it when they were headed home to Sydney.

  Maggie stared wistfully at their old front door. ‘Shame we can’t get inside. It’s probably all been done up now.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could walk in and find it as you left it … if you could walk around your old life and see all the posters still on the walls …’ said Rose.

  ‘Pink Floyd … Siouxsie and the Banshees,’ remembered Fran. ‘That Queen one from the Hammersmith Odeon would probably be worth a few quid by now.’

  ‘All our old tea cups and chipped plates …’

  Fran laughed. ‘… still encrusted with food.’

  Rose made a face. ‘Probably congealed egg. How many eggs did we eat back then?!’

  ‘And risotto from a packet, ugh. Maybe I’d find my grandma’s butter knife I left here,’ said Maggie.

  Rose shook her head in disbelief. ‘Who, in God’s name, moves to another country with their own butter knife?’

 
‘I do,’ said Maggie with a smile. ‘Rose, do you remember that night when we’d done the grocery shopping and were laughing about something so much that we dropped a bottle of wine on these tiles?’

  ‘Oh, God. It smashed everywhere. It wasn’t funny but we kept laughing like idiots … and Fran came out and was really annoyed about the waste of the wine.’

  ‘Wine was such a treat …’ Maggie’s phone began to ring. ‘Sorry!’ She fumbled in her bag for it and rushed out into the stairwell to take the call.

  ‘It wasn’t that,’ said Fran, remembering the incident all too well and her sense of being on the periphery. She felt it now, remembering the two of them helpless with laughter, the wine that she had been looking forward to now a dirty puddle and broken glass all over the floor. ‘It was you two laughing without me.’

  ‘We weren’t laughing about you, sweetie.’ Rose began to take photos of the foyer and front door with her phone.

  ‘Rose, don’t patronise me, please.’

  ‘I’m not patronising you. You’re being super-sensitive. It was forty years ago.’

  In light of the journey ahead, Fran felt disturbed by the memory, and Rose’s dismissive attitude wasn’t helping.

  ‘Sorry, Fran. I’m not meaning to negate whatever you felt.’ Rose opened the door to the stairway. ‘Come on, let’s take the stairs. I cannot get back in that lift.’

  Fran hesitated. ‘You go. I’ll be down in a few minutes.’

  Rose looked ready to dissuade her but then turned away and set off down the stairs, and Maggie, still on the phone, followed her.

  Alone in the silence of the foyer, Fran tried to calm the ruffling irritation of Rose’s impatience. Rose was incapable of simply waiting in the moment to see what might reveal itself. She expected memories to leap out and announce themselves, epiphanies to arrive in a great shaft of light from the heavens without unnecessary delays.

  Fran closed her eyes and gently coaxed her thoughts back into that past. She would never again have this opportunity to be right here and focus on that time. She waited, opening herself to the memories, resisting the urge to order them as they tumbled over each other in a confusion of images and sounds.

  There was nothing they didn’t know about each other in this tiny flat where everything became chaotically communal: clothes, tampons, makeup, perfume. They had lent each other money and shoulders to cry on, and books they loved. It was here that Fran had discovered Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Beryl Bainbridge – the list went on – a generation of female authors who had entered her life like friends and confidantes.

  This flat was full of music. She remembered how Rose had spent a whole day up Tottenham Court Road selecting a hi-fi system that played cassettes and records. She even remembered the first album they bought to play on that stereo was Pink Floyd’s Animals. From their window, they could see Battersea Power Station, which was featured on the cover, and felt they had some secret inside knowledge. They had become a part of music culture.

  She smiled remembering the New Year’s Eve party they had here to mark the start of 1979. It was Rose’s idea to have a party, even though they didn’t have all that many friends. Maggie agreed to invite her cousin and a few select dentists. Rose knew a few people through her pub gigs but Fran wasn’t confident that anyone she knew could be counted on to come.

  Rose smuggled a bottle of Galliano and one of vodka out of the pub to make Harvey Wallbangers. Fran threaded cocktail onions and cheese cubes onto toothpicks. Maggie made dozens of sausage rolls. It was freezing outside and, with the kerosene heater going all day, the windows streamed with moisture, making the crepe paper streamers limp.

  It was after eight when the first knock on the door came, and Rose, who was already quite drunk, threw the door open wide to find Maggie’s cousin and his date, Natalie. ‘Come in! Come in!’ Rose shouted unnecessarily, looking past them for concealed guests. But it was just the two of them.

  Fran took their coats, Rose made them a couple of cocktails and Maggie plied them with food. The music was turned up and they filled the tiny living room with their dancing. Rose kept disappearing to check outside the front door, in case there was anyone else lurking out there. There was no one. She ordered them all to dance near the windows, so anyone arriving in the car park below could look up and see how much fun they were having. She flicked the light switch on and off to get a disco vibe happening but Natalie said it made her feel sick and she wanted to go home. And they left.

  ‘Well, this is shit,’ said Rose, slamming the door behind them.

  Maggie began to laugh. ‘No, it’s not. We don’t need them.’ She put her new Supertramp album on the record player and the next thing they were bopping around the living room bellowing ‘The Logical Song’ at the top of their voices, leaning in to sing together into sausage roll microphones.

  Another cocktail or two and the room became unbearably hot. They stripped off to their underwear and leapt about, singing and jumping over the furniture. There was a brief food fight and then, in quick succession, Fran vomited – she’d eaten so much cheese, it looked like fondue – Rose slipped over on a saus age roll and twisted her ankle and a neighbour hammered on the door to complain about the racket. It was barely midnight, the evening was over and the hangovers still to come.

  Fran’s memories of Maggie and Rose were larger than life, and she began to wonder where she was in all this – an innocent bystander? She saw herself as Nick in The Great Gatsby, Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, the observer–narrator who lived in the shadows of her more interesting and outgoing friends.

  It occurred to her in a rush that she hadn’t lived in their shadows – quite the opposite. She had lived in their radiant light, and a deep, visceral longing for those days overtook her like nausea. She would give anything to feel, even for a brief moment, that charge of the energy, optimism and lightness she had felt back then, a time when she believed that her life had finally begun. She’d felt free and brave and strong. This flat was her stronghold, Maggie and Rose were her family – the centre of everything. It was as if she had been trying to replicate that experience ever since; trying to find a relationship that would be everything they had been to her. How could she have known that that time would always remain the happiest, least complicated era of her life?

  She left the foyer and hurried to the stairwell, almost in tears, feeling she couldn’t stand to be there a moment longer. As she descended the stairs, she began to wonder if she had the strength for this trip. It already felt as though it was too testing for her emotionally, being forced to face up to how little she had achieved in her life.

  Tomorrow they would be on the Eurostar bound for Paris, a place she had visited only twice, neither with any of the pleasure others seemed to derive from the city. The first time was with Maggie and Rose, a trial run in the Kombi van for the weekend. They had parked in the Bois de Boulogne, believing they were in the countryside outside Paris. They were not aware that the park was a favourite procurement spot for Parisian prostitutes and were frightened by men tapping on the windows in the night. A decade later she had visited with a lover who had marked the occasion by breaking the news that, despite his love for Fran, he had decided to reunite with his wife.

  Perhaps this would be her last trip to Paris. It wasn’t as though she was going to be more flush with money in the future. Yet she sensed a deepening reluctance for the entire endeavour, already anticipating how she would feel when it was over and she would have to say goodbye to Rose and Maggie. And they would go back to their lives in Sydney and leave her behind. She recognised a response in herself that sometimes sabotaged relationships early on to insure against later pain.

  As she walked downstairs, flight after flight, Rose and Maggie’s voices echoed further down the stairwell and she felt more alone than ever. Rose called her name. Maggie joined in. Now she heard the familiar strains of an Abba song echoing up the stairwell. As she got closer, she could make out the words they were
singing: ‘Can you hear the drums, Francesca?’

  She laughed and hurried down the stairs, calling, ‘Coming! I’m coming!’

  Chapter Eight

  As they sped past the green fields and picturesque villages of France’s countryside at 300 kilometres an hour, Maggie looked across at her travelling companions and had a vivid memory of her first impression of the two awkward Aussie chicks trying to act the part. Wearing floppy muslin dresses, with deep frills around the hems, they could have been mistaken for missionaries – apart from Rose’s hair, which looked like a wig thrown on sideways. Even if she hadn’t been told, Maggie could have guessed Rose was originally a country girl – there was something in her stride that suggested gumboots. Maggie had liked her immediately. Her energy, good humour and lack of self-consciousness were a charming combination.

  The same age as Rose and Fran, Maggie had also been a teen of the sixties, but her sensibilities were still those of her parents’ generation, and she remembered being shocked that Rose identified as a feminist, and a radical one at that. Even back then, Rose always had strong opinions. When they’d lived together she used to bang on about unions and socialism and women’s lib, insisting everyone read Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. Fran had embraced these ideas more readily than Maggie, who found it hard to shake off her conservative upbringing. Back then, she accepted that men were in charge and there was no way they were ever going to let women muscle in on their territory. Forty years later, that was still the case. Maggie’s attitudes may have evolved, but it didn’t change the reality of the situation. Rose was still fighting the feminist fight, and good luck to her. But then, over the years, Rose had identified with a lot of movements and, depending on the day, had wanted to sing in a band or travel the world. When she met another Aussie who worked as a burlesque dancer in the Monte Carlo Casino, she was ready to sign up for that. It was lucky that Rose had gone home when she did. There was so much more trouble she could have got into.