Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Em!’ Lexie says, ‘I thought it was you but whatever happened to your face?’

  ‘It lasts forever … well, a few years at least,’ Emma explains later as they sit on a bench seat near the fountain in Hyde Park, she with another bottle of water and straw, Lexie with a cheese and tomato sandwich and a takeaway latte.

  ‘Mmm,’ says Lexie, peering more closely at her sister’s lips. ‘And what if you don’t like it?’

  ‘I will. Of course I will. Don’t be so negative, Lex, and anyway, where the hell have you been all this time? Someone from Faraday’s said the practice had been wound up – I knew things were bad there, but not that bad.’

  ‘I was hiding,’ Lexie says, biting into her sandwich. ‘Time out. Aren’t you hungry? I could break little bits off it and feed you if you like. You know, like a baby.’

  Emma shakes her head and yelps with pain as she catches the drink straw on a particularly sore area of her lower lip. ‘Ow! That really hurt.’ She presses the chilled water bottle against her lip. ‘I’m sorry about the job, Lex, it must be awful. You’d been there forever.’

  Lexie sighs. She hadn’t expected that it would be Emma with whom she’d have the first conversation about this. ‘Ah well. I saw it coming at me but foolishly I pretended I didn’t, and along it came and ran me over. So I … well, I lost it really … couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone and cope with their reaction. Most of all I knew everyone would be asking what I was going to do and I would feel ridiculous because I hadn’t a clue… so I ran away.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t run far.’

  ‘I’d have gone much further but once I got here and started thinking about somewhere lovely to go I realised that in my lightning dash from the house I’d forgotten my passport! Hopeless runaway, aren’t I?’

  ‘Oh well, p’raps you weren’t meant to go further. But what about Ross? Grant ran into him in the supermarket and he said he was moving out.’

  Lexie nods. ‘I ended it – by email, actually. Modern, aren’t I? Should have done it long ago, it’s been over for ages really, but neither of us did anything about it. Well actually, he did something about it. He started seeing that woman he works with, Carole, you know, with –’

  ‘Yes, I know her, thunder thighs with very short skirts?’

  ‘That’s her. Anyway I emailed Ross and told him it was over. I asked him to move out so he’s probably gone by now.’

  Emma has turned on the seat to look more closely at her sister. ‘So are you okay? I mean, Ross was hardly Captain Excitement, but it’s a big step just the same.’

  ‘It is; but it’s the right step.’ Lexie pauses. Emma’s apparently genuine concern for her is a side of her sister that she hasn’t seen for a very long time and she wonders briefly if it’s because of where they are – away from everyone else in the family.

  ‘The night I sent the email I felt this enormous sense of relief,’ she says. ‘I even opened half a bottle of champagne that was in the mini-bar. And then when I got into bed I started crying and couldn’t stop. I felt like a complete failure. My life so far has been a series of relationships that never really made it and fizzled out. I just never get it right. I don’t know what it is because everyone else seems to manage it.’

  ‘Not me,’ Emma says. ‘I made a complete mess of it.’

  They sit for a moment in silence. ‘Not at first, though,’ Lexie says, turning to her. ‘For quite a long time you and Grant were going really well. Or at least that’s how it looked.’

  ‘We were, until we decided we could make it perfect by having a baby and … well, you know what happened.’

  ‘So do you think you and Grant might still be together if you hadn’t got pregnant?’

  Emma drains the last of her water through the straw and screws the cap back on the bottle. ‘Maybe … probably. I can’t really see why not. It was motherhood I couldn’t cope with, not Grant.’

  Lexie struggles for the right thing to say, fails to find it and the silence settles on them again, more heavily this time.

  ‘So,’ Emma says eventually, ‘are you any closer to knowing what you’re going to do?’

  Lexie shrugs. ‘I haven’t worked that out yet, although I’ve been thinking about going back to uni.’

  ‘What, pick up where you left off?’

  ‘No, start again. Something different, but don’t say anything at home. I haven’t made up my mind. Anyway, what about you, apart from the face disaster?’

  ‘Can you please not use that word,’ Emma says, and she explains about the sales conference. ‘And so I thought I’d duck out of hospital duty for a while, it was really freaking me out and –’

  ‘Hospital?’ Lexie asks through a mouthful of sandwich. ‘Who’s in hospital?’

  ‘Well, Uncle Donald of course … the aneurysm, at the party … you mean you didn’t know? Mum emailed you.’

  Lexie has gone white with shock. ‘An aneurysm?’

  Emma nods. ‘He collapsed at the party. Went to hospital in an ambulance and they did a craniotomy, and he’s still unconscious, and then last week he had a heart attack.’

  Lexie stares at her sister. ‘And he’s still unconscious?’

  ‘Yep. Aunty Phyl is sitting by his bedside knitting, twelve hours a day, like those women sitting by the guillotine. And Mum’s … well, you know what she’s like, being noble, taking responsibility for everything and looking martyred, cancelling their holiday, trying to organise Phyl into some sort of plan for if he dies, or if he doesn’t. But she emailed you with all this.’

  ‘I stopped reading email,’ Lexie says quietly, rolling her sandwich wrapping into a ball and tossing it into a nearby bin. ‘Come on, we’d better get a taxi.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Your hotel and then mine. I’ll call the airport while you pack, then we’ll pick up my stuff and get the next available flight home.’

  ‘No, Lex!’ Emma protests. ‘No, please. I can’t cope with all that stuff. It freaks me out all that illness and mess and everything.’

  ‘Emma,’ Lexie says firmly, gripping her sister’s arm and dragging her down the steps to the pavement. ‘We are going and we are going now. Both of us.’ She steps out to hail a taxi. ‘We can’t leave Mum to cope with this on her own. Even Dad’s away. But we are going. You are so bloody selfish –’

  ‘Me!’ Emma shrieks. ‘Me selfish? You’re the one who disappeared for weeks.’

  ‘Shut up and get in,’ Lexie says, pushing her into the back seat of the cab. ‘There’s selfish and selfish, and mine is different from yours.’ And she climbs into the taxi behind her sister, switches her phone on and dials Margot’s number.

  EIGHT

  The lecture theatre is small but packed, the tiered seating full, and those who have arrived at the last minute are sitting on the steps. Dot, who had imagined a classroom with perhaps twenty people in it, is gobsmacked. She had planned for a casual, interactive session, but the smart little lecture theatre and the sizeable audience suggest an expectation of something rather more formal. Her stomach does a somersault; it is more years than she can remember since she spoke in public, unless you count shouting slogans while chained up at the shopping centre.

  ‘Did you call rent-a-crowd?’ she asks with a nervous laugh.

  ‘I just made up a little poster and put it on a few notice-boards,’ Patrick says, glancing around the lecture theatre. ‘There’s been a lot of interest – staff as well as students. When you’re ready just give me the nod and I’ll introduce you.’

  Dot takes a deep breath and nods, and Patrick switches on the microphone and begins his introduction by telling them that she was seventeen when she quit her first job in a record shop after just a couple of months and ran off to Sydney to get a job as a copy girl on the Sydney Morning Herald. He mentions the sixties and the Push, the anti-war protests and then the seventies and the women’s movement, and he goes on to talk about her as a journalist, a columnist and a broadcaster who began making femi
nist programs when so much women’s radio was still focused on the domestic.

  ‘Dot Grainger’s name may be new to you,’ he says, ‘but tell your mother or your grandmother that you met her here today and they will either be fascinated or horrified. They may tell you how they discovered the women’s movement through her, that she is their hero and role model, or they may tell you that she is a ratbag troublemaker and a meddlesome woman who never shut up. But one thing’s for sure, they’ll know her name and one way or the other they’ll have an opinion about her.’

  Dot’s heart thunders against her ribs, her mouth is dry, her throat closing over. This is infinitely worse than she expected; the rows of faces, the heat of the room, the healthy welcoming applause and now expectant silence. Grasping her notes she steps up to the lectern. Way up at the back she can see Margot and Vinka, who have insisted on coming with her. An hour ago she was more than grateful for the moral support, now she is horrified at the prospect of making a fool of herself not only in front of strangers, but in front of an old friend and someone who seems like an important new one. But there is no escape. She rests her notes on the lectern and goes to take her glasses from the chain around her neck, but neither the chain nor the glasses are there. Frantically she pats her pockets, but both are empty and in a dizzying moment of absolute clarity she sees them sitting on the kitchen bench as she walked out of the door.

  Dot grips the corners of the lectern and looks at the expectant faces; her notes are useless and her memory is a blank. From the second row a vaguely familiar face looks up at her – a beautiful face with glowing skin and eyes that seem at first blue and then green. The girl breaks into a smile and gives Dot an almost imperceptible nod, and a thumbs up. Dot hesitates – who is she? But it doesn’t matter because the smile and the thumb work their magic. Someone out there is rooting for her. She pushes the notes aside, tilts the microphone slightly so she doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe and leans in to it.

  ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘It’s good to be here – or at least it was until a moment ago when I realised I’d forgotten my glasses, so now it’s pretty scary.’

  A frisson of amusement moves through the audience like a Mexican wave and the warmth of it seems to dissolve her fear and she is back in her comfort zone, connecting with an audience. And with the ease of a conversation among friends she begins with the day when one of the reporters at the Herald, now a distinguished and retired political correspondent, took her for a drink at the Royal George in downtown Sydney, home of the libertarians who called themselves the Push.

  ‘It wasn’t the most attractive of places,’ she says with a laugh, ‘thick with cigarette smoke, dense with people and the smell of tobacco, sweat and beer. It was noisy too, loud voices, mostly male, mostly opinionated – even in the Sydney Push it was still very much a man’s world. But it was exciting. Ideas, arguments, fierce conversations bounced off the walls. That night I felt I was standing on the threshold of a great adventure. I had wanted to stay on at school and go to university but there was no money, so I was frustrated by a feeling of missing out. That night I saw an alternative route, an escape from ignorance and exclusion. Back in the fifties and sixties, if you wanted to learn you had to grasp every opportunity and try to hang on to it in case it slipped through your fingers, and there I was in Aladdin’s cave …’

  Leaning back in her seat Margot draws a deep breath of relief and rests her head against the carpeted wall. Her own involvement with the Push had begun later than Dot’s and her disillusionment had arrived somewhat sooner, but even she feels a shiver of nostalgia as she listens. It is a part of her life that she looks back on, sometimes with pleasure, but more often with ambivalence and sometimes even with distaste. It had certainly been exciting at the start, and it had formed her social conscience, but much of her present discontent seems to stem from that time and place.

  On the other side of the lecture theatre Margot sees Grant’s sister, Wendy, and discreetly lifts a hand in greeting. Margot likes Wendy, she thinks she is very good for Rosie. Emma had once accused Margot of thinking that Wendy was a better mother to Rosie than she was. Margot had denied it forcefully, more forcefully than she might have done had it not been true.

  Dot is talking now about how things worked in the Push, how people wrote and delivered papers, the discussions that followed and those endless debates that went on day after day. ‘Intellectual wankery,’ Laurence had called it once, years later, when they had all fallen into various states of disenchantment. At the time it had seemed as though they were at the cutting edge of social change; those conversations in smoky bars, or the coffee house, were the beginning of a new world. But for Margot, whose dreams failed to materialise, the memories are tempered with disappointment. It is easier for her now to remember the seedier side of the sexual life of the Push, the arrogance, the intellectual bullying and the frustration of so much talk and so little action.

  ‘In the early postwar years people were exploring ideas of society and democracy,’ Dot is saying now. ‘They were moving from passivity and acquiescence to questioning the authenticity of what they were told by institutions like the government and the church, rejecting established ideas that seemed to entrench privilege. This,’ she says, ‘is the climate that gave birth to the Push.’

  ‘She is very good, yes?’ Vinka whispers, leaning closer so that the scent of Russian tobacco tickles Margot’s nostrils. ‘I am impressed. She is like she is being a lecturer all her life. This I am finding most interesting.’

  ‘Yes, she’s very good,’ Margot whispers back. ‘I’d forgotten how good, and I think she had too.’

  Watching Dot now, Margot knows that she is not watching the Dot of the Push years but of the seventies onward, when her fierce energy and rhetoric found its purpose in the women’s movement. The Push had been her training ground; there she had been a sponge, soaking up knowledge and ideas. She remembers Dot as she first saw her, huddled in a smoky corner of the Royal George, deep in conversation with two men whose names she can’t now remember. The intensity of her concentration was so obvious that it was intimidating. Later that same evening she saw her again, this time at a party, dancing with Laurence. It was before Margot and Laurence had met but she had seen him several times and felt then a sharp jolt of jealousy to see him so deeply involved with this small eccentric woman with her dyed burgundy hair and fierce expression. They were dancing close, wrapped around each other, and later, sitting on the stairs together, they smoked and argued with the force of intimacy.

  It was later, almost ten years later, by which time Margot was having her own intimate arguments with Laurence, that Dot emerged as one of the leaders of the women’s movement, writing her column, organising marches and demonstrations, speaking out on women’s rights from the steps of Parliament House, and taking on politicians in radio debates. Before that, as the Push was fading, she had disappeared in much the same way as she had recently, first to some unspecified job up near Byron Bay and then apparently travelling, making her way as a freelancer, her stories sometimes popping up in the newspapers from unexpected places. It was in 1970 when Margot met up with her again. Laurence had been offered a lectureship in Melbourne, and they moved from the flat in Sydney to a small terrace house in Richmond. Lexie was almost nine by then and Emma a toddler. There had been another pregnancy before Emma but it had ended in a late and painful miscarriage and now the move back to her home town had made Margot feel that her life was back on track again, but she missed the friends she had made in Sydney, women who were talking politics and wanting action.

  ‘Can you ask around at uni or look on the notice boards?’ she’d asked Laurence. ‘There must be a women’s group I could go to.’ A week later he came home one evening with a name and a phone number. A few days later, with Emma in a pusher, Margot walked into a consciousness-raising group in Carlton and found herself face to face with Dot once again.

  ‘You’re back!’ she’d said in delight. ‘And you’re here – i
n Melbourne.’

  ‘The bad penny always turns up,’ Dot had said, hugging her. ‘I thought you two were still in Sydney. And who’s this?’ she’d asked, bending over the pusher.

  Emma had taken one look at Dot and immediately burst into tears.

  ‘These are very famous people she talks of,’ Vinka whispers now. ‘I know of them but until now I don’t know of this Push club. All these years in Australia and I am still so ignorant.’

  Margot shakes her head, leaning closer. ‘No, not at all. It was very much a Sydney thing and the people Dot’s talking about now – Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes – those people made names for themselves later. The Push may have motivated them but their success was individual. That’s true of Dot too, it was some years later that she made a name for herself.’

  ‘We were libertarians,’ Dot is explaining, ‘and anarchists. People assume that the word anarchist describes someone who is not only socially and politically disruptive but also violent, rather like a terrorist, and of course history is full of examples of anarchists who were just like that. But the Push had a code of non-violence. We were intellectual anarchists and that’s a very attractive thing to be when you’re young. It means you don’t have to be responsible for anything. You’re a free thinker, you advocate freedom for everyone, and you live your life as freely as possible. In the fifties and sixties this was the only intellectual social life to be found in Sydney. It was diametrically opposed to everything we’d been brought up with; it was vivid colour after the drab greyness of the postwar years. It was intellectual and sexual freedom and it was very seductive.’

  A hand was raised in the audience and Dot nodded.

  ‘But what did the Push actually do?’

  ‘Well, sadly, not a lot,’ Dot says slowly, looking out across the room. ‘By the late sixties I had abandoned the Push due to disenchantment. I was tired of talk and wanted action. On reflection I think its value lay in what followed – what individual people did post-Push. We took what we’d learned there to other areas, to academia, government, social reform. I took mine to journalism and the women’s movement. It’s hard to measure something like that – it was an education and education finds its way into all areas of your life, and to others through you. I like to think that it was valuable, that in this way, at least, we did something worthwhile.’