Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  Invisible – that’s what Dot had said. Is this what Dot feels? Is this the same feeling that drove Dot to the shopping centre with her padlock, her chains and her passionate but muddled protest? Margot is wearied by the servicing of other lives and the promise – always just out of reach – of a time and a place to examine and nourish her own. It is the gap between the potential of that young woman waiting at the bus stop all those years ago, and the reality of what she has become: an old woman who has, over decades, allowed other lives to erode the centrality of her own. Margot sighs, unfurls her umbrella, steps out into the rain and picks her way through the puddles to her car.

  Dot is rehearsing in front of the mirror when the doorbell rings. The date arranged for the talk to Patrick’s students is still a few weeks away but the idea of it is both exciting and daunting. Planning it – doing some research to refresh her memory, sorting out some of the pictures and clippings – has saved her from herself. There is so much she wants to say, but so much she has forgotten. The past is a ragged mess of bits and pieces, of events and people captured like tiny disconnected fragments of film. Each morning she wakes wondering where to start searching for shape to the story, worrying about tone, about the mix of history, memory and anecdote. It’s exciting but it’s also overhung with anxiety because it has become tremendously important to her that she gets it right, that she does well, that she doesn’t end up a laughing-stock or sending them all to sleep. Dot knows she’s her own fiercest critic and that she will have to live with that critic’s judgments for a very long time to come. But she knows too that this is when she can be at her best; she likes the creative tension of preparing something for an audience.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ she says aloud to the mirror, ‘you’re a shameless attention seeker, but at least you are doing it with some purpose.’

  Once again the doorbell is an annoyance. She wanted to do a bit more work on this before going out for lunch, and so she walks very softly to the front door and peers cautiously through the peephole. On the doorstep, sheltering from the rain, is Margot, and she is looking decidedly glum. Dot throws open the door in delight.

  ‘Am I interrupting anything?’ Margot asks, dripping onto the doormat. ‘I can go away if you like.’

  ‘No way!’ Dot says, drawing her in and down the hall. ‘This cold snap is such a shock. It’s usually another couple of months at least before I have to light the fire. My blood must be thinning with age because I succumbed this morning. Here, take your coat off and sit in front of the stove, you’re soaked.’

  Margot hands over her raincoat and, pinching the fabric of her trousers just above the knee, she shakes them gently away from her legs.

  ‘You’d better take them off,’ Dot says. ‘I’ll put them in the dryer.’

  Ten minutes later, Margot, minus her coat, trousers and socks, is sitting in front of the open door of the stove looking rather less glum, clutching a cup of tea, a blanket wrapped around her from the waist down, her bare feet resting on the warm bricks of the hearth.

  ‘So no change in Donald then?’ Dot says, sipping her own tea. ‘Poor sod, but more importantly poor Falada, she’s stuffed whether he recovers or not. But how did you get so wet if you’ve only been to the hospital?’

  ‘Standing outside in the rain thinking,’ Margot says sheepishly. ‘About the past mainly, about …’ she hesitates ‘… well, about how things have turned out. Your fault of course, turning up out of the blue again, stirring it all up.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Dot says. ‘I’ve agreed to talk to some students about it, the past – our past, the Push, the women’s movement, all that stuff. I agreed to do one session, and now somehow it’s grown into two, assuming that I don’t bore them to death the first time.’ And she goes on to tell Margot about Patrick. ‘My unfailing determination to grab the centre stage whenever possible,’ she says ruefully. ‘I’m enjoying getting ready for it all, but the events themselves are going to be another matter entirely.’

  ‘And what about the lunch with his aunty?’ Margot asks. Dot’s energy, the way she charges headlong into everything, has nudged her, as it always did, out of her dark mood. ‘Have you done that yet?’

  ‘Today!’ Dot says, glancing up at the kitchen clock. ‘In one hour’s time, in fact, in Carlton. Actually, Margot, you could come with me.’

  Margot laughs and splashes tea on the blanket. ‘No way! You got yourself into this, Dot, you’re on your own.’

  ‘But you owe me,’ Dot says with a grin. ‘Who helped you find that purple and black outfit for Falada’s party?’

  Margot snorts with laughter. ‘You’re outrageous! Absolutely not! You’re a guest; you can’t just turn up with someone else in tow. And I’d look as though I was trying to bum a free lunch from a stranger.’

  ‘Sometimes, Margot, you are very middle class especially, as I remember it, when it comes to money. I plan to pay anyway. You know, slip the credit card to the waiter before I get to the table. Go on, Margot, it’ll be torture for me but fun if there’s two of us, and your trousers will be dry in time.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ Margot says. ‘I’m adamant. Patrick and Aunty Win are all yours and that’s my final word on the matter.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ Margot says almost an hour later, as they search for a parking space close to the restaurant, ‘while I was standing in the rain, about who we were then, you know, in the Push days, and later. I thought I was going somewhere then, I thought we all were. And you did. And Laurence did. And there I was flying high, scholarship student, literature prizes, I was supposed to be a writer, everyone said so – a literary star. But something happened, it all went pear-shaped, and I’m not just talking about my body.’

  Dot accelerates swiftly into a parking space immediately outside the restaurant and peers out through the rain. ‘This is it,’ she says, ‘at least it looks okay. I’m so glad I conned you into coming with me.’ She switches off the engine and turns around to face Margot. ‘Of course something happened,’ she says. ‘Laurence happened. A baby happened. Domesticity and another child happened, and then Laurence buggered off.’

  ‘I never thought it would be that way,’ Margot says, and there is a crack in her voice. ‘I thought I would do so much, and yet here I am almost seventy and I’ve done none of it. Nothing at all and now it’s too late.’

  SIX

  Phyllida has a pretty good idea of what is going on in Margot’s head, at least she thinks she does. She recognised the expression on her sister’s face as she left the ward; it was that bruised, aggrieved expression that Margot first wore as a teenager when she felt she was being overlooked. It had dropped out of service for a few years when she went to university and started hanging around with that tawdry Push mob. And then it appeared again when all the talk of libertarianism turned out to be just a lot of hot air. Phyllida shakes her head, libertarians indeed! All they ever did was hang out at the pub, drinking between parties, and slipping out to place bets on the races. And the women, well, Margot had told her once that women acquired prestige by sleeping with the men who were high up in the Push hierarchy. So much for free love and promiscuity in the sixties – it was still the men calling the tune and disappearing out the back door if the women got pregnant.

  Phyllida leans back in her chair, her back aching from sitting so long, and she fidgets around to find a more comfortable position. Margot had been eighteen, away in Sydney at university when she got involved, even though Phyllida, who had heard talk about the Push, had warned her to stay away from them.

  ‘They’re nothing but trouble,’ she’d told Margot when she came home in the holidays. ‘They’re anarchists, you know, and there’s a lot of … well, sex and debauchery. There’s another lot like that here – in Carlton. You don’t know what you’re getting into.’

  ‘But they’re cool,’ Margot had said, ‘and interesting. Better than your stuffy pretentious friends at the tennis club. Besides, it’s none of your business,’ and she’d flounced o
ff to some party and hadn’t come home that night, much to their parents’ dismay. The atmosphere at home was uncomfortably chilly and Phyllida had been glad when Margot caught the bus back to Sydney, to university and to the grotty little flat that she shared with a couple of other young women from the Push. Phyllida sighs and stretches her arms above her head; well, it’s no good Margot regretting it now, more than forty years later; she has no one to blame but herself.

  Phyllida, of course, has no cause for regret. Early in their relationship she had made it very clear to Donald that sex before marriage was not on the agenda, although she did relent once they were officially engaged. It was a reward for his staying power. They were engaged for three years before Donald had qualified and they got married, and even Phyllida would have thought it unreasonable to have held out all that time.

  Having finally lost her virginity she had wondered what all the fuss was about. Sex seemed pretty tedious and offered small reward for women, but at least it kept Donald happy. Now, sitting here, watching the steady rise and fall of her husband’s chest, Phyllida wonders what she might have missed by only ever having had sex with one man. Not much probably, she thinks, and there’s a certain comfort in knowing that your entire sexual history is the property of just one person. Margot had grown somewhat smug in the early days of her sexual freedom, sneaking around with a Cheshire cat smile that implied knowledge of secret pleasures. She seemed to think that being younger and more sexually experienced made her an object of envy. Phyllida assumed that it was a phase from which Margot would eventually emerge. She had never asked her sister at that time, nor any time since, how many men were included in her sexual history, although she had often wished she could; purely out of curiosity, of course, because as far as she was concerned sex was a waste of time and not worth the risk unless it was with someone you were going to marry.

  ‘How are we doing here?’ says a voice from the doorway.

  A different nurse – an Asian woman, probably in her fifties, Chinese, Phyllida guesses – crosses the room and fiddles with Donald’s tubes. Phyllida, who is by now familiar with most of the nursing staff, is disturbed by the arrival of a stranger. Donald has been head of surgery here for more years than she can remember, so she has been comfortably at ease with familiar faces since the panic of their arrival in the ambulance abated.

  ‘We’re fine, thank you,’ she replies stiffly. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Sister May Wong,’ the woman says, lifting Donald’s chart from its rack and noting something down on it. She looks closely into Donald’s face, takes his hand in hers, lifting it and then putting it gently back again on top of the bedspread.

  Phyllida, who is used to being treated with a degree of deference by the staff, is now riled by the lack of it. ‘I sense that he’s making very good progress,’ she says in her haughty voice.

  Sister Wong looks down at her and then back to the chart. ‘Really?’ she asks. ‘Has there been any change since Dr Phillips saw him at ten o’clock?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Phyllida says, ‘but I feel it in my bones. He’s definitely on the mend. When you have lived so long with someone you can feel these things, you know.’

  The nurse gives her a chilly look and replaces the chart in its rack. ‘Mmm. Well I’d rather trust the vital signs than your bones, Mrs Shepperd,’ she says. ‘And sadly the vital signs show no change.’

  Phyllida, who is an expert when it comes to chilly stares, directs one at the woman on the other side of the bed. ‘I think I can be trusted to detect things about my husband’s condition which might not be apparent to anyone else. The physical signs are not the be-all and end-all, you know, May.’ The use of the first name is, she feels, a masterstroke which makes it clear who’s in charge here.

  ‘They’re a pretty good indicator of the patient’s progress towards either recovery or deterioration,’ the nurse says. ‘And Sister Wong will do nicely, thank you.’ And she turns on her heel and heads off out of Donald’s room and up the corridor.

  ‘Well really, how rude,’ Phyllida says aloud. ‘How very rude and uncalled-for. When it comes to bedside manner she’d make a good parking inspector. Don’t you think so, Don? Who does she think she is?’ She turns to him and pats the arm that is lying heavily on the blanket. ‘She won’t be talking to me like that once you’re awake.’ She is trembling with a mixture of anger and anxiety, the stress is getting to her, no doubt about that. Surely there will be a sign of change soon and she feels her anger directed now at Donald, lying there in the bed, sleeping peacefully while she must sit here worrying herself sick about the future.

  That’s the thing about Margot, of course, she is wearing her injured expression because she is picking up the slack of Phyllida and Donald’s life, at present. Phyllida understands that it must be frustrating for Margot that she herself has chosen to opt out of everything except keeping vigil, that she won’t engage in conversations designed to plan for a range of different outcomes. She knows Margot thinks that she is just not facing the fact that Donald may die, or may end up in residential care, or that he might need difficult and complicated home nursing. But of course she knows, of course she’s thinking about it. What else would she be thinking about, sitting here knitting, something she hasn’t done for years. It’s simply that she cannot possibly talk about it, not to Margot, not to anyone. All she can do is sound and appear optimistic in the hope that she might, in the performance of it, manage to convince herself as well as everyone else.

  Phyllida picks up her knitting again and begins work on the small sleeve, while outside in the corridor feet pad back and forth, their rubber soled shoes squeaking on the vinyl tiles, and the stop-start progress of the lunch trolley grows slowly closer.

  ‘Hello, Aunty Phyl,’ says a voice from the doorway. ‘Goodness, you’re knitting. I didn’t know you could knit.’

  Emma, immaculate in a tight fitting crimson suit with a very short skirt, teeters across the room on perilously high heels and plants a kiss on her cheek. ‘I suppose it’s that crisis thing, back to wartime and knitting socks for soldiers. This brings it all back.’

  Phyllida sighs and shakes her head. ‘I was four when the war broke out, Emma, and ten when it finished. I have never knitted a sock for a soldier in my life, not that I have anything against socks or soldiers. The trouble with you young people is that you have no sense of history. Anything before nineteen sixty is a backward blur until you get to a Jane Austen adaptation.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Emma says, ‘silly of me, I wasn’t thinking. What exactly is it that you’re knitting?’

  Phyllida held up her needles. ‘A jumper for Rosie.’

  Emma stares at the knitting and swallows. ‘Lovely, but the colour – it’s a bit …’

  ‘Olive green and gold are the new school colours,’ Phyllida says triumphantly. ‘Grant brought her in yesterday afternoon. He said it was magic that I’d got the right colour purely by chance.’

  ‘Really? Oh well … yes, well done, you. How’s Uncle Donald doing?’

  Phyllida, counting stitches, continues to the end of the row. ‘No change, so they tell me, but I sense improvement. You do, I think, when you know someone really well. You can sense what’s happening to them rather better than strangers can, despite all their medical qualifications. I can tell he’s on the mend.’

  ‘That’s good then,’ Emma says, perching on the edge of a chair. ‘Very good, I’m so glad, because I have to go away in a couple of days. It’s the annual sales and marketing conference in Sydney, I’m so sorry. Of course if … if anything sort of, well,’ she takes a deep breath ‘… sort of happened, then just a phone call and I could be back within hours. Otherwise I’ll be away about ten days.’

  Phyllida sees Emma as the daughter she never had. It’s a delight to her that they are so alike in many ways, but she is not blind to her shortcomings. ‘Ten days for a sales conference?’ Phyllida says now. ‘Amazing, I never knew they took so long.’ And she looks quizzically at her niece.
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br />   Emma blushes. ‘It’s not just the conference, there’s team building too, so I really have to be there.’ She is the most transparent of liars.

  ‘Team building? I hope it’s not the dangerous orienteering sort, Em. Somehow I can’t see you hurling yourself across raging waters on a flying fox, or finding your way back to camp with a compass. But of course you must go. There’s nothing you can do here anyway, and he’s making progress. By the time you get back he might even be home with me.’

  It is at that moment that Donald’s arm shoots suddenly upwards in a Nazi-like salute and his body jerks violently in the bed. The monitors which have been calmly measuring his vital signs are now a mass of flashing red lights, and a chilling single tone replaces the previous steady beeps. Within seconds the door is thrown open and Sister Wong and two other nurses burst through the door with a trolley, closely followed by two doctors, white coats flapping open, stethoscopes bouncing against their chests, yelling instructions.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Phyllida says as she and Emma sit out in the corridor, while behind the door of Donald’s room the fight for his life goes noisily on. ‘Whatever will it be next? I don’t think I can take much more of this.’ And despite their shared distaste for adults who cry in public, she tips sideways and clings to her niece and her tears make a dark, damp patch on the lapel of Emma’s soft cashmere jacket.

  SEVEN

  Vinka closes the door of her apartment behind her and leans back against it. On the floor her slippers are neatly lined up in front of the hallstand. It seems weird that they can still be there waiting, unmoved, unchanged, just where she left them when she went out. When something extraordinary happens as it has today, she thinks, you expect everything to be changed by it, but of course it’s not, everything is just the same, at least on the surface.