Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  She slips off her coat and shakes it lightly over the doormat before hanging it on the hallstand. Then she sits down on the mustard velvet upholstery of the chair in the corner and, using a buttonhook that she keeps here for the purpose, she begins to undo the buttons that run up the sides of her crimson leather boots. Each time she does this she marvels that she is still wearing the boots which are nearly as old as she is and once belonged to her mother. They’ve been repaired of course, resoled and heeled many times, and ten years ago she had to have some of the buttons and hooks replaced. It was hard to find a shoemaker able to do the job, but when she did find one, down a narrow laneway in Balaclava, he’d been so delighted to see such a beautiful old pair of boots that he’d also done some expert polishing on the toe leather, and fitted some arch supports. That is the point of quality, she thinks, things last, and if you also buy good design it never goes out of fashion.

  She puts the boots down beside the chair, wiggles her toes and rotates both ankles. The downside of the boots is their discomfort, but they make her feel glamorous which is important at her age, especially on her birthday. Leaving the boots in the hall to dry, Vinka slips on the black satin slippers that Patrick brought back for her from a trip to Beijing five years ago, pads through to the lounge and stands for a moment by the French windows looking out across the rooftops to the tall buildings of the city.

  It is still raining but not cold, and she opens the narrow wooden framed doors onto the black and white tiles, and leans against the balustrade that encloses the balcony, thinking, just thinking. It is a frustrating sort of thinking because she doesn’t really know what to think, her mind just keeps churning over what has happened. Suppose Beate had been there – what then? What would she have done, what would she be saying now, what might happen next? But of the four people sitting around the table she, Vinka, had been the only one that had any idea of the true situation. She was the only one of the four of them who had done anything more than have a delicious lunch, in a small Polish restaurant in Carlton, in very pleasant company. But for Vinka everything changed when those two women walked in. Maybe it won’t matter, she thinks, maybe this secret knowledge will remain a secret – after all, why shouldn’t it, why worry? Perhaps there will be no uncomfortable decisions, no consequences, but on the other hand …

  In the shocking moment of recognition Vinka had thought she might faint. She remembers staring at that face, so familiar from newspaper photographs, and asking Patrick how he had found her. He’d looked completely taken aback.

  ‘Find her? Dot, d’you mean? I tracked her down online actually.’

  ‘He’s very pushy. In the nicest possible way of course,’ Dot had added then, reaching out to shake hands. ‘We had a wonderful conversation about the things we’re both interested in, media, writing, politics, all that sort of thing. And I bored him stiff with stories from the past.’

  ‘And I said please come to lunch and meet my aunty.’

  ‘He said a few other things as well,’ Dot had said, sliding into the chair Patrick was holding out for her. ‘He asked me to go and give a talk to his students, and since then it’s grown to two talks. He’s very pushy your nephew. Anyway, Win, I’m delighted to meet you. Happy birthday!’ And she had handed her a small parcel wrapped in silver tissue. ‘Something for your collection. Patrick says you collect decoupage.’

  As Vinka replays the last few hours in her mind it’s hard to recall the conversations. Something was said about Dot’s friend Margot and why she was there, and then Patrick had poured some very good French champagne, they had drunk to her health and Vinka had opened the parcel. It was an exquisite black lacquered wooden bangle with a decoupage design of gold and orange flowers and unusual symbols.

  ‘But it’s beautiful,’ she’d said, ‘and too much. I mean, I hardly know you … well … I feel I know you from reading everything you wrote – my sister and I, we followed you always – but a gift like this … too much.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Dot said. ‘I brought it back from India. A friend there makes them.’

  By this time Vinka had more or less recovered, although she was still thinking of Beate – suppose she had been here, what would have happened then? What a disaster that could have been. But the two women were so nice, so easy to talk to, and Patrick was so obviously delighted with the result of his birthday secret that she slowly began to relax and enjoy the company and the fuss they were all making of her birthday.

  ‘Eighty!’ Margot had said. ‘I don’t believe it, you look so young. Have you always lived in Melbourne?’

  ‘Since nineteen fifty-one,’ Vinka had explained. ‘I came here from Poland with my mother and my sister Beate. I was twenty-three and Beate just eighteen, postwar resettlement – many of us came then from Eastern Europe.’

  ‘But your name is English – Win, Winifred …’ Margot said.

  ‘It is Patrick calls me Win when he is just small,’ Vinka said, smiling at him. ‘I am Vinka, after my grandmother.’

  And then it felt, quite suddenly, as if they knew each other, as if they were old friends, as though it might be okay to relax and just enjoy her birthday after all, enjoy the conversation and the company. Vinka is usually inclined to keep herself to herself; there are a few old friends from the Polish club and a couple of women she worked with in the sixties, but these days they talk only about the price of things, the bad behaviour of young people, and about getting old – aches and pains, and funeral plans. But lunch was different; they talked about music, books and history, the sort of conversation she usually only ever has with Patrick. It had felt a little like the old days, when she and Beate had begun to make friends here, when there was so much to do, so many places to go and a whole new life seemed to stretch in front of them. And now here she is, back in her own little flat in this lovely old building which feels like a little piece of Europe, and she has promised to meet them, Dot and Margot, next week. They will have afternoon tea and go together to the art deco exhibition at the gallery.

  Vinka steps back inside from the balcony and takes a black Sobranie from the enamelled box on the table beside her, lights it, inhales deeply and sits down in her favourite chair. They are such an indulgence these cigarettes, so expensive, but she has smoked them for decades and rations herself now to two a day, although today’s events seem to merit this extra one. Leaning back, she watches as the smoke from her cigarette curls upwards and is captured by the breeze from the open balcony doors. Perhaps, after all, none of it matters, she thinks, perhaps it is all too long ago, perhaps there really is nothing to worry about. Why not enjoy this?

  ‘And what do you think, Beate?’ she asks aloud of the framed and faded photograph on the table. ‘What would you have me do?’ But Beate is gone, ten years gone, leaving her alone with the secret and its awful responsibility. ‘Perhaps I am just too old to worry about this,’ Vinka says. And she takes another long draw on her cigarette and closes her eyes, savouring the rich fullness of the flavour and the memories it always brings of a time when she was young and beautiful, and anything, absolutely anything, seemed possible.

  Emma is engaged in the search for the perfect handbag. It’s something she does frequently and she has a cupboard full of bags to prove it. It is, she thinks, a strange fact of life that you never have the right bag; it is either too large or too small, or it would be perfect if it had one handle instead of two, or two instead of one, or a shoulder strap you could clip on, or a cross strap that didn’t look weird where it crossed between your boobs, or would be perfect with more bling or less, or without the leather tassels that make it look like a Dolly Parton cast-off. It’s not just her, she knows that, there are thousands of women who understand the lure of the bag; it’s seduction with the promise that it will change your life. It’s the smell of the leather, the strength and softness of the feel, the subtlety or the richness of the colour and, like magic, credit cards self-eject from wallets into the hands of sales assistants.

  The
bag is wrapped in another bag, a cloth one with a drawstring and a logo, and placed inside a carrier bag made of thick, glossy card with silky cord handles. And Emma knows only too well the next stage: the race to the nearest coffee shop or toilet to transfer the contents of the old bag into the new one, stuffing the cast-off into the carrier bag. Transformation! It is always the bag, the one she has always wanted, always needed, the bag to end all bags. It says something elegant and sophisticated about any woman who carries it, and yet, so soon the love affair is over. The bag doesn’t work, it just isn’t quite right. Today’s quest is the triumph of hope over experience; in fact Emma’s belief that she will one day find the perfect bag is stronger than ever today because she is not in Melbourne but in Sydney: different shops, different feeling, different bags and she is here with her credit card and time to spare.

  The sales and marketing meeting had not figured largely in Emma’s plans until the Monday morning after Donald’s collapse. As soon as she had called the journalist at the Sunday paper to deal with the debacle over the mad woman with the chains, Emma had gone straight to the director of marketing and public relations and announced that she would like to take seven days’ annual leave and stay on in Sydney when the conference finished. The promise of escape, although still weeks away, had kept her going through the harrowing visits to the hospital, the tedium of watching her aunt’s knitting grow (knitting, for god’s sake – what was that about?), and then the shock of Donald’s heart attack and the subsequent gloom and anxiety. Emma found it all too much; Phyllida was off the planet and Margot was being both noble and resentful at the same time. The whole scene in the hospital room was weird and suffocating and there appeared to be no end in sight.

  Emma knows that both her mother and her aunt have rumbled her on the duration of the sales conference, and in consequence the edges of her blessed escape are now singed with guilt and embarrassment. But here she is, a week later, searching for a bag and with no frantic calls for a mercy dash back to Melbourne. Time is still on her side, which is a good thing because right now Emma needs time – time to recover, because she is not looking her best. She is, in fact, looking dreadful: hiding behind an oversized pair of fake Christian Dior sunglasses, much too big for her small face, her lips swollen in a trout pout. She just knows that everyone is staring at her right now, thinking how weird she looks, until fleetingly she glimpses her reflection as she passes a shop window. Do the scarf and sunglasses along with the pout actually make her look like a celebrity in disguise? But no; she just looks … well, odd – or as though she is hiding a huge hangover and a bad haircut. Normally Emma wouldn’t dream of going anywhere but to her usual beauty therapist in South Yarra, but getting some treatments had seemed like a good way to use her time in Sydney. The concierge had recommended a salon which was a favourite with the hotel’s clients and so she’d booked in for a Botox top-up on her frown lines, and a permanent lip liner tattoo and colour.

  As she had settled back into the reclining chair to the soothing background music of pan pipes and harp mixed with the sounds of a waterfall, Emma thought she had died and gone to heaven. In a couple of hours, less even, she would be transformed; full, sculpted lips filled with rich colour would make her look so much younger.

  ‘Have you considered the permanent eyeliner?’ Rachelle, the beauty technician, asked, drawing on a pair of latex gloves. ‘You see, the lip treatments will give your mouth greater definition, terrific definition in fact, but that might make your eyes sort of, well … you know, disappear. They are rather small.’ Rachelle handed her a mirror. ‘Imagine your face with full, colourful, well-defined lips, but with these rather small eyes. Is that a look you want? How about I just show you the eyeliner tattoo colours?’

  Five minutes later Emma had signed up for the eye treatment as well, and she leaned back again, wishing she’d brought some Valium with her. Lips were supposed to be painful but eyes even worse. She took several very deep breaths and closed her eyes. ‘Okay,’ she said, swallowing hard, ‘ready when you are.’

  ‘Makeover here we come,’ Rachelle said, and she sank the first needle into Emma’s top lip. The pain was excruciating and Emma flinched and gasped.

  ‘Oops! You must keep very still,’ Rachelle warned, her own artificially plumped and flawless face half hidden behind a surgical mask. ‘We don’t want an irregular line, do we?’

  ‘I don’t think the anaesthetic is working,’ Emma said, dabbing her streaming eyes with a tissue and settling back again.

  ‘We don’t guarantee it to be a painless process,’ Rachelle said curtly, and she plunged the needle in again.

  Emma gritted her teeth, gripped the arms of the chair and tried to concentrate on the moment when she would walk out of the salon with gorgeous full and glossy lips and huge, seductive eyes.

  ‘No pain without gain,’ Rachelle said. Emma resisted the temptation to point out the error; an offended Rachelle with a needle in her hand was not an appealing prospect.

  ‘The swelling does take a few days to go down,’ the girl on the desk said later as Emma signed the credit card slip for almost three times what her usual therapist would have charged her. ‘You’ll love it though.’ She leaned forward and looked at Emma’s pout. ‘Rachelle did a really good job. She only started today, you know, you’re her first client.’

  Emma would not normally be seen dead in fake designer sunglasses, but as she left the salon, eyes bloodshot and burning, lips swollen and throbbing, the display stand at the corner of the street seemed like the answer to her prayer. For fifteen bucks she got the huge black pair with diamante initials on the wide arms. From there she fled to a dark corner of a small café and ordered a bottle of water and a straw. There was no way she could manoeuvre her lips around the rim of a coffee cup, and the thought of hot liquid anywhere near them made her toes curl. Even her forehead felt unusually stiff and painful from the Botox. She considered going back to the hotel to watch movies on the TV but as she got up to leave she was reminded of her irritation with the bag she had bought last month. The prospect of finding a new bag was like swallowing a Valium, incredibly soothing but rich with promise. Peace, calm and a sense of purpose enveloped her and that’s when she finished her water and stepped out across the street to David Jones.

  Now, almost an hour later, just as she is about to leave the store having exhausted its handbag possibilities, Emma spots a display of cute dolly bags. ‘For Little Big Girls’ the sign above them reads, ‘gorgeous bags for your gorgeous little girl.’ The bags are pink and purple velvet, some with fake ostrich trim, sequins and embroidery. In a sudden and uncharacteristic surge of maternal feeling Emma gets out her iPhone and dials Grant’s number. It infuriates her that he won’t allow Rosie to have a mobile phone; he has even confiscated the pink and silver Nokia that Emma bought her.

  ‘She’s too young, it’s unnecessary, Em,’ he’d said. ‘She’s only just eight. Stop trying to make her into a teenager. She’s just a little girl.’

  It is Wendy’s influence of course, Emma is sure of that – Wendy with her PhD in political science, and her endless voluntary work for causes from refugees to Chinese black bears, and her collection of healthy sprouting foods and organic vegies. Wendy who, despite the fact that she seems to spend her life in jeans (admittedly well-fitting designer ones), black boots and a selection of black jumpers and t-shirts just like all the other uncool people in the university, still manages to exude style. Emma reckons Grant takes far too much notice of his sister when it comes to Rosie, and Rosie adores her.

  ‘I’ll get her for you, Emma,’ Wendy says when she answers the phone. And Emma hears her calling Rosie in from the garden.

  ‘I’m making a funeral for a dead bird,’ Rosie announces breathlessly, ‘so I can’t talk to you for a long time.’

  ‘Okay, honey-bun, but I just saw some lovely little bags with sequins and some with feathers. I thought I’d see which you’d like me to bring back for you – you can have pink or purple.’


  ‘Actually, Mummy,’ Rosie says, ‘I’d rather have a compass, you can get them in the Australian Geographic shop, I saw one the –’

  ‘A compass?’

  ‘Yes, it’s how you find directions.’

  ‘I know what a compass is,’ Emma says. ‘But if I get you one of these bags it’ll go beautifully with the dress Aunty Phyl bought you the other week.’

  ‘But I don’t like that dress,’ Rosie wails. ‘It’s babyish, it has bows on it. Mum, do you know Daddy and I went to see Uncle Donald again and he’s still asleep, he’s been asleep for ages, and he had water running out of his mouth, like spit and stuff, it kept dribbling onto his pyjamas.’

  Emma shivers with revulsion. ‘Oh dear … well, Rosie, sometimes when people are ill they can’t –’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Rosie cuts in. ‘Grandma told me all that stuff. So can I have a compass? Grandma and I are going to do like an exploration of the Botanic Gardens and draw a map, so I really need it. When are you coming home?’

  ‘Thursday evening,’ Emma says, picking up the pink bag. ‘So we can do something on Saturday if you like.’

  ‘Why are you talking funny?’

  ‘I’ve had … I’ve got a bit of a sore lip and it hurts when I talk. It’ll be better by the weekend. Anyway, darling, you’d best get back to the bird funeral. I’ll pick you up on Saturday.’ And she blows a kiss down the phone, hangs up and heads for the pay desk. The bag plus a compass should win her some maternal brownie points.

  Catching sight of herself in a long mirror she stops and quickly takes off the sunglasses to look more closely at her face; it is a mess – livid, swollen, horrible. Thank goodness no one she knows will see her like this. The delicate skin surrounding her eyes looks bruised and she is about to lean in closer to the mirror to touch it with her finger when, to her horror, she sees another face behind hers in the mirror.