Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  Lexie puts the phone down and stares at it. One thing about her father, she thinks, is that his reactions are entirely predictable, and while that’s irritating it’s also reassuring. There is no risk of him rushing to her side with bowls of nourishing chicken soup. No risk that he is sitting wringing his hands wondering whether his failure as a parent has driven her to this. No sense that she might not be meeting his expectations, because he has none. He loves her just as she is, there is nothing to live up to, and while she has sometimes resented his inability to make the leap of imagination into her emotional space, right now that detachment is just what she needs. There is too much to think about, too much that she has been putting off for too long. Instead of trying to pretend that she could save the practice Lexie knows now that she should have been looking out for herself, making plans for the future, just as all the other staff had done. A couple of Dr Faraday’s friends had sounded her out about working for them, and the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company with which she’d dealt for most of her time at the practice had offered her a management position, but she had convinced herself that there was still a chance to rebuild. So she has no one but herself to blame for not having grasped the moment and made plans. But it’s not her professional life that is on Lexie’s mind right now.

  Wandering out onto the balcony she thinks about Ross coming home from his fishing trip to find her gone – his irritation, his confusion, his slight sense of panic that things are not as he expects them to be, the niggle of guilt about what he’s been up to. How simple it would be, Lexie thinks, if Ross took this opportunity to gather up his possessions and go. If he just got into his car and drove off to this ‘other woman’, probably Carole, the estate agent with too much lipstick and a skirt that’s not much larger than a belt. Lexie imagines going home, opening the door and finding no trace of him, no odd socks, no computer magazines scattered across the coffee table, no real estate brochures on the bench top, no pile of washing, no stubbies in the fridge, no bland eighties disco music to numb her brain. It’s a liberating prospect; bliss in fact. The relationship had fizzled out like a damp squib and for months she’s been playing the game of not knowing, not seeing, punctuated by moments when she tells him she does know, and he insists that she’s imagining it. But it’s different now, she’s done with games, done with the caution that has made her hang on at home as she hung on at work. She wants it to be over. Ross is not a bad person, just the wrong person, and he doesn’t do decisions, so Lexie knows that if someone is going to call time it will have to be her. What better time than this?

  On that Sunday afternoon, three days ago, she had sent a hasty email to the practice listing the tasks that needed to be done and directing them to the location of various files. It was the first time in her life she had ever walked out on her responsibilities and she found it surprisingly easy. She threw a random selection of clothes into a suitcase, packed her laptop and a couple of books into her computer bag, and took a taxi to the airport with no idea of where she was going. The next flight with seats available was to Sydney and she’d handed over her credit card and was airborne in less than an hour. This wasn’t a matter of choice about where to go, just a means of escape. Since then she has been suspended in a state of shock, half expecting someone – her mother, perhaps, the practice solicitor or one of the doctors, but definitely not Ross – to arrive at the door of her hotel room and insist she come home immediately. Now her conversation with Laurence has changed something. Telling someone else has shown her the enormity of what she has done. She has run away from home, only in a very minor sort of way – indeed, some people would think it a pathetic effort – but for her it is a big, important step. Lexie knows that she has cracked open something within herself that she doesn’t yet understand, something that won’t be complete unless she acts now.

  Turning back into her room she collects her laptop, carries it out to the balcony and sits at the table looking out at the lights of the city reflected in the waters of the harbour, the curving sails of the Opera House white against the darkening sky. A couple of weeks ago, stuck in traffic, she’d been listening to talkback about whether it was acceptable to dump one’s partner by email.

  ‘Can’t see the problem myself,’ one man had said. ‘People have been dumping each other by snail mail for centuries – what’s the difference?’

  ‘No, you gotta tell them face to face,’ a woman had protested. ‘It’s only fair. You’ve gotta give them that respect.’

  Lexie remembers laughing at this, thinking that if she were to end it with Ross he’d much prefer email because it would mean he wouldn’t have to respond, protest, argue, act hurt. She would be giving him permission to leave. After all, they’re not married, the house is hers, they have very few shared possessions, he had moved into her life and now it’s time for him to move out. But it’s harder to write the email than she anticipated, and she reads it through over and over again, choosing each word to avoid ambiguity, to control how he will read it, trying to acknowledge the good things and not dwell on the rest of it, attempting to convey determination rather than hostility, finality without castration.

  Once she’s sent it she leans back in her chair and stretches her arms above her head, unwinding the tension from her shoulders, feeling the slackening of her muscles. Relief. Sadness, much more sadness than she imagined for the loss of what might have been, for their failure to make it work. With this final stroke she has slashed the ropes of her own safety net. The ultimate planner has no plan, not for tomorrow, next week, next year. She can choose anything and the choice is terrifying.

  FIVE

  The trouble with Donald, Margot thinks, is that there is so much of him. His body, his ego, his opinions, the noise he makes, his sense of entitlement and authority, all create a field of energy which, like quicksand, draws the unwary into its depths. Once there you become, willingly or otherwise, subject to his authority. Margot has always clung doggedly to her foothold on firm ground at the outer edge. Sitting now at one side of Donald’s bed, she finds she is confused; despite years of dislike, hostility and active resistance, she feels almost fond of him. There is something immensely sad about all that commanding energy, arrogance and authority and, to be fair, all that brilliance, reduced to a huge comatose mound attached to a battery of tubes and wires.

  On the other side of the bed Phyllida, body slumped, head thrown back, lips parted, is fast asleep, snoring in gentle unison with Donald’s breathing. To Margot this posture, the open mouth, the snoring, the vulnerability of her sister asleep in daytime in a place where she might be seen by strangers or, worse still, by people she knows, is what’s really disturbing. For decades Phyllida has exercised meticulous control over the way she is seen by others; firm, upright, controlling, even sometimes intimidating are the words that people use to describe her, and her tall, slim figure always immaculately if unimaginatively dressed confirms it.

  Even as a teenager she had had an authoritative, bossy manner, but in those days it went with authority on the sports field along with cups for tennis and running, and captaincy of the school hockey team during which she berated the younger, less enthusiastic players (Margot among them – actually, Margot in particular) for their incompetence. From sports champion to sports mistress to senior mistress of the upper school – extraordinary, really, at a time when teachers had to resign when they married. But the nuns who ran this small Catholic school were proud and fond of Phyllida, one of only a few lay teachers at the convent, and they ignored the regulations of the wider world. Phyllida had stayed on, the small community of the school and her unassailable position within it carrying her through the years of waiting for a pregnancy that never materialised, and then beyond that into a time when it was no longer a possibility. She had retired at fifty but even today Phyllida is still in charge – chairing committees, organising charity collections and fundraisers.

  Margot shifts in her seat, leaning forward to look at her sister more closely and wondering, as she doe
s so, how Phyl will cope if Donald dies as it appears to everyone except her that he surely will. Almost three weeks have passed since the aneurysm and the subsequent surgery, and in that time he has also suffered a stroke; nineteen days as an unconscious body in a bed and, Margot muses, commanding as much or possibly more attention than when he was conscious and vertical. If, on the other hand, he does pull through, how will Phyl and everyone else cope? His medical and surgical colleagues cannot predict how much of Donald might emerge from the darkness, only that it will be a very limited edition of his former self. Margot’s surprising flash of fondness is mingled with a less admirable sense of relief.

  When Phyllida had first brought him home to tea Margot had been a plump and irritatingly brainy teenager with two huge, angry spots erupting on her chin. Donald, then in his twenties with a repertoire of crude jokes and the noisy insensitivity of a rugby playing medical student, had named her as a rare species – ‘the greater spotted Margot’. It was a very bad start, although to Margot’s annoyance Donald seemed totally unaware of it. Through the intervening decades he continued to treat her with the rough and condescending affection appropriate to inconvenient but harmless younger sisters. In youth she had felt impotent rage; now, in old age, just defensive hostility and boredom. But Phyllida without Donald is a worryingly unknown quantity and more worrying still is the prospect of her devoting every waking moment to his care. Margot, overcome with anxiety at the thought, gets up and thrusts her arms into her coat in a sudden desperate need to escape from the sterile atmosphere of the hospital. But her movement disturbs Phyllida, who jerks awake and sits up blinking, fiercely alert.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened? Oh it’s you, Margot.’ She rubs her eyes and stretches. ‘Sorry, I must have fallen asleep. How long have you been here?’

  ‘About half an hour,’ Margot says. ‘It seemed a shame to wake you. You ought to go home, Phyl, there’s nothing you can do. Why don’t you come and have lunch with me? Central Park perhaps? A bit of retail therapy always cheers you up.’

  Phyllida’s eyes light up at the prospect of shopping, but then she looks at the unconscious Donald and shakes her head. ‘I really can’t. He might wake up. I’ll stay until tonight.’

  ‘I don’t think day and night mean anything to Donald at the moment. If he’s going to wake up it could just as easily be at three in the morning. You’ve got your mobile and we can be back here very quickly if there’s any change.’

  Phyllida leans over the side of her chair and retrieves the knitting that has slipped from her knees to the floor. ‘I can’t,’ she says firmly, ‘I really can’t.’ And she inserts the needle into the first stitch.

  ‘But it’s ridiculous your sitting here day after day,’ Margot begins. ‘Donald doesn’t know, and you need to look after yourself, conserve your energy for when he does come round or when, well if …’

  ‘No!’ Phyllida says. ‘I shall stay until eight as usual and I shall be back here at nine in the morning.’

  Margot shrugs. ‘Okay, if that’s want you want.’ She walks around to her sister’s side of the bed. ‘I brought you some Turkish Delight.’

  Phyllida’s face breaks into a smile and she puts down her knitting. ‘Bless you,’ she says, levering the lid off the plastic box. ‘Goodness – it’s huge, I’ll be as fat as a pig. Any news of Lexie?’

  ‘Not a word. Well, that’s not quite true, I did get a text the day before yesterday, assuring me that she’s fine. But she can’t be reading her messages because I let her know about Donald and if she knew she’d have got in touch or come home.’

  ‘Would she?’ Phyllida asks, straightening her shoulders. ‘I’m not sure we can assume we know what Lexie would do anymore. She didn’t turn up to help with the preparations for the party, nor to the party itself, and she took off to god knows where and doesn’t even tell her own mother where she is. I find that all very strange and … well, hurtful … especially in view of what’s happened. I’ve always considered Lexie to be a very responsible and reliable person, but apparently I was wrong.’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake get off your high horse, Phyl,’ Margot says. ‘Lexie is a very responsible and reliable person and you know it – sometimes I think she’s too responsible. This is totally out of character, she obviously needed to get away. But I am a bit worried about why, and why now. You know, some time ago Laurence told me he had a feeling Ross was seeing someone else.’

  ‘Well her going off like this won’t help to sort that out,’ Phyllida says. ‘It’s giving him carte blanche to do what he wants if you ask me.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you,’ Margot says. ‘And frankly I don’t know why they’re still together, neither of them has their heart in it anymore. I think Lexie would be a lot happier on her own.’

  ‘Being alone doesn’t suit everyone, Margot. Me, for example, it wouldn’t suit me.’

  She stops suddenly, darts a look at Donald in the bed and takes a deep breath and Margot feels the chill of her sister’s fear. It is as though every possible outcome of this situation is flashing through Phyllida’s mind on fast forward.

  ‘Well you’re not, are you?’ she says, clearing her throat. ‘You’re not alone. Now, is there anything you want me to do? I’ve cooked some meals and frozen them for you, and I’ll put them in your freezer on my way home.’

  Phyllida shakes her head. ‘No, thanks. The meals will be a godsend though. I sit here all day doing nothing and get home too exhausted to cook.’

  Margot nods and leans down to kiss her. ‘I’ll see you sometime tomorrow. Ring me if you need anything.’

  Outside the hospital rain is falling in tanker loads from a gunmetal sky and Margot pauses beneath the canopy at the entrance breathing the damp air with relief. The stifling atmosphere of Donald’s room and Phyl’s insistence on staying there, hour after hour, day after day, make her want to scream. How long is this to go on, and what is she, Margot, supposed to do about it? It’s not that she doesn’t want to support her sister, but the responsibility for managing the varying strands of her and Donald’s lives seems to have been allocated to her, and she has no idea what she ought to be doing; preparing people and arrangements for death, or for a very different life? Margot wonders whether perhaps the hospital has an advisor one can talk to in these situations, although that person is unlikely to be able to help her manage her resentment about being lumbered with this. She has gathered in the unravelling strands of other people’s lives for so long that it’s now taken for granted and she doesn’t know how to stop it. Now it seems that her own life has been put on hold by Donald’s illness and its attendant uncertainty. Margot has always struggled with the idea of uncertainty. When they were younger Laurence often talked about its creative advantages, but Margot craved certainty, preferring to live with its illusion.

  The wind is driving torrential rain horizontally under the canopy and Margot is almost as wet as if she were standing out in the open. This sudden spell of unseasonal bad weather has taken the city by surprise. Water gushes down the slope of the hospital driveway and a car sweeps into a puddle, drawing to a halt and drenching her legs in a wave of water. The driver leans across to open the passenger door and a young woman darts out of the building and leaps the puddle into the front seat. As the door slams shut the driver spins the wheels and pulls away, churning up another wave. Margot feels the soaking fabric of her trousers clinging to her legs but she doesn’t move. The weather, the car, the girl’s swift, youthful flight from kerb to car has galvanised her memory.

  A Sydney bus stop almost fifty years ago; she is standing in the rain when a car draws up. The passenger door swings open and he is gesturing her to get in; there is a micro-second of hesitation before she jumps the puddle, and as he reaches across her to close the door she feels the heat of his body and his breath brushes her cheek. How sharp the memory is, how intensely it revives the moment, the thrill of the unknown, the heat of desire. Odd, really, Margot thinks now as she watches rain pounding into surging pu
ddles, how certain moments are etched with clarity while so much else is vague and blurred. Is it just the turning points that remain like the scratch of diamonds on glass; the moments when something profound was happening, when you were making a choice that would determine the future and you didn’t even know it? What if she had stayed at the bus stop? What if she had remained out there in the rain until he drove away – what then? Who, what and where would she be now?

  It seems to Margot that this need to understand the past is increasing with age, as though by understanding she might have one last chance to remake it. In the sixties and seventies, as she had juggled being a wife and mother and later a sole parent with a full time job and the battle for women’s rights, she had envied and admired the older women around her. They seemed wise, confident, sometimes even serene; she had imagined herself becoming like that, an elder in the tribe of women. But there is no longer any tribe. The heat and dust of that movement of women has cooled and settled and those who were part of it have become irrelevant. What are they supposed to do with all that experience, with all that history? She had believed it was leading her somewhere but now it feels as though time is running out and somewhere has become nowhere. She feels, as she has often felt, a crushing resentment that she has spent her life responding to other people’s needs, soaking up their problems, dispensing love and care, and all it has done is drain her energy and make her invisible.