Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  The response to her online debut with the blog and on the social networking sites had amazed not only her but Alyssa and her CASE team. Hits on the campaign website had almost doubled but none of them had been prepared for what happened when a teenager called Katie Romano posted a video clip she’d taken in a Melbourne shopping centre while on holiday with her parents. In the first week that Aussie Granny’s Age Rage appeared on YouTube it attracted more than five thousand hits. Katie Romano was no cinematographer; the video was speeded up, and the distorted voices and jerky images of a small angry woman chaining herself to railings and declaiming about women being conned by the beauty business and then being tackled by guards with bolt cutters was soon among YouTube’s most viewed items. It was Patrick who spotted it first and immediately put up a link to Dot’s blog and the CASE site. Immediately the number of people signing up for the campaign surged, and Dot was right up there with kittens falling off windowsills, lions cuddling their keepers and child prodigies playing Mozart violin concertos. Aussie Granny was a water cooler topic and was being talked about in the mainstream media.

  ‘But I’m not a granny and I look ridiculous,’ Dot had wailed to Patrick, ‘demented!’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t go that far,’ he’d said cautiously, ‘but you must admit it’s pretty funny and well … rather quaint.’

  ‘Quaint! I’m quaint now, am I?’

  He’d shrugged. ‘It’s doing wonders for the campaign, and think of the value to Alyssa’s PhD.’

  ‘Don’t bother trying to appeal to my better nature,’ Dot had said. ‘I don’t have one. And I’m rather vain. Can’t you even slow the thing down?’

  But a week later she and Alyssa were guests on Channel 7’s Sunrise and Nine’s Morning Show. There were interviews with radio stations and newspapers, the hits on the blog and the website were doubling daily, and there was an invitation from the bank to discuss sponsorship. The video had attracted attention and through it CASE had touched a community nerve. Mothers concerned about their daughters, and older women worried about the younger generation and insulted by the messages about ageing, were quick to register their anger and concern. Even Dot had to admit that Aussie Granny had sent the campaign’s profile through the roof, and she managed to find sufficient traces of a better nature to laugh at it.

  ‘Imagine what we could do with really big money,’ Alyssa says as the lift rises to the ninth floor.

  ‘We’ll have to do more than imagine if they decide they’re really interested,’ Dot says. ‘They’ll want to see some sort of plan and we’ll have to be able to tell them how we’d spend the money down to the last cent. So if we do walk out of here with smiles on our faces we’ll also be walking out having made a commitment to get super organised and businesslike.’

  As the lift comes to a halt Alyssa is pale with anxiety. ‘It’s a huge responsibility, big money like that. I don’t know anything about that stuff, none of us does –’

  ‘Stop it,’ Dot cuts in, detecting a sudden loss of nerve. ‘Remember what I told you? Don’t let them see you’re intimidated. We’re going in there to convince them that this is worth doing, because it is, because we believe in it. You started it because you have a passion for it – let them see that passion. And don’t worry about the other stuff. We secure their interest first, and we’ll worry about the rest of it later.’

  But as they step out into the carpeted foyer and are ushered into a meeting room where the walls are hung with portraits of past directors of the bank, Dot’s stomach is churning with the old fear, a fear exacerbated by Aussie Granny’s success. Alyssa and the others had come to her for gravitas and to Dot it seems unlikely that she can convey that when what has attracted the bank’s attention is a video clip in which she looks entirely ridiculous.

  FOURTEEN

  Vinka has been shopping and cooking for two days; it’s so long since she has given a dinner party she had completely forgotten the amount of work involved – poppy seed cakes, pierogi, barszcz, the dried fruit compote and more. Christmas is still more than three months away but she is breaking with tradition and preparing a scaled down version of Wigilijna Kolacja, the traditional Polish dinner served on Christmas Eve. She needs to do this, to cook this special meal for Patrick and her friends, before she begins to pack her life into boxes.

  ‘Maybe it is the last time I can do it,’ she says to Stanislav, who has come early to help her move the table to make more space. ‘Maybe the place I go doesn’t have a kitchen that is good for cooking. Maybe I am dead before next Christmas.’

  ‘You find somewhere nice to live,Vinka,’ Stan says. ‘I know this, you don’t worry about it. There is still plenty of time.’

  Vinka snorts in disgust and stalks off to the kitchen. She thinks him a traitor, because the problem of his own future is already solved. He is to share a house with a man whose wife died a couple of years ago. They have been friends for twenty years and Stan seems to have no problem with the prospect of sharing a home. She can just see them, two old men together, walking to the pub, sitting side by side on a park bench putting the world to rights, living in a mess, making beans on toast and forgetting to wash up. ‘You probably find a place you like better,’ Stan says, following her, watching as she lifts a saucepan from the stove.

  ‘Typical,’ Vinka says. ‘When it is you who will be homeless it is the big drama. Now it is only me you think everything becomes fine. You are what they call throwback, Stan, a man from the past, who cannot see beyond himself.’

  But Vinka knows that it is not just Stan who is affecting her mood tonight. For the first time since his marriage broke up three years ago, Patrick is bringing a woman to meet her.

  ‘Could I bring a friend?’ he had asked when Vinka told him about her dinner. ‘You’ll really like her.’

  And she knew from the tone of his voice that this was serious. Vinka believes in love, and although she has never married, she has had long and passionate love affairs, the last of which lasted into her early seventies and ended only with her lover’s death. Now, more than anything, she wants love for Patrick. She wants to know that someone else in the world loves him, that there is someone for whom he comes first, someone who will be there when she is gone. But her happiness for him has a darker side of selfish anxiety. This new woman has the power to change things, to draw him away from her. Vinka is not too old to remember what it is like to be in love, nor to understand how intrusive it could be to have a homeless old aunt to consider.

  ‘Dear god,’ she says aloud as she stirs the soup and lowers the temperature of the oven. ‘Please let her be beautiful and intelligent and loving and let us be friends and let me not get under their feet.’

  ‘Of course you don’t get in the feet, Vinka,’ Stan says. ‘Patrick loves you, he doesn’t forget that because he also loves someone else.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Vinka says, shrugging. ‘Everything is changing – maybe this too.’

  As Laurence puffs up the last but one flight of stairs, a double poinsettia in a pot in one hand, a bottle of Polish vodka in the other, the aroma of dinner wafts down to meet him and he stops to savour it. Leaning back against the wall he closes his eyes and recalls struggling up an equally steep flight of stairs for the promise of barszcz, vodka and sex with the volatile Maria, and he wonders fleetingly if Dot was right. Had he really been the cause of all those tears and tantrums? Well, there will be no tears and tantrums tonight, and no sex, but he anticipates a more generous menu, good wine and interesting conversation. He hasn’t seen Margot since the day he called in and caught her in her pyjamas, but he’s confident the writing will fizzle out as it always has in the past, and very soon she will be back to normal. That will be a relief, because he’s really getting nowhere with Emma and needs Margot to get involved. He leans heavily on the doorbell.

  ‘Dobry wieczór,’ he says when Vinka opens the door, and he thrusts the poinsettia into her hands. ‘The dinner smells wonderful.’

  ‘Ha, you speak Polish now?’ V
inka smiles and kisses his cheek.

  ‘No! A dozen words only and those were two of them. I’ll save the other ten for later.’

  ‘This I look forward to,’ Vinka says. ‘So witaj – welcome. Now you know thirteen words. Come in and Stanislav will pour you a glass of wine.’

  ‘I think the minor media personality will really need to be changed to major,’ Margot says, gasping for breath as they stop for a rest at the third floor landing. ‘How the hell does Vinka manage these stairs? She’s older than both of us.’

  ‘Frightful, aren’t they?’ Dot gasps. ‘You’d think she might be glad of the move, but it doesn’t seem that way. How about medium instead of major?’

  ‘If you want, but I don’t think it’ll be for long,’ Margot says. ‘Besides, it would be better to have my book launched by a major than a medium.’

  ‘How’s it going?’ Dot asks, setting foot on the bottom step of the final flight.

  ‘Patchy. Some days it swings along and I struggle to keep up, others it’s like wading uphill through treacle.’

  ‘That’s an occupational hazard,’ Dot says. ‘I can remember days when words and ideas seemed to spin out of me like magic, and others when absolutely nothing seemed to work and it was just a case of sticking with it until things improved. It’s weird and it takes over your life if you let it.’

  ‘A bit like marriage, really,’ Margot says, and they both have to stop and lean against the wall as the laughter grasps at their breath.

  ‘Wow, can you smell that?’ Dot says. ‘It must be our dinner. Woohoo, delicious! Laurence will be in heaven. Maybe we have him to thank for this. The night we went to that Polish club he kept telling Vinka about his favourite Polish dishes.’

  ‘Maria,’ Margot says, ‘remember her? She started him on Polish food. It’s very labour intensive. I once tried to make a poppyseed cake and ended up in tears with all the kneading and trying to make the seeds into a paste. Anyway, how’s the campaign going? What did the bank say?’

  ‘They were very encouraging, but we have to get more organised, get a business plan, and offer them some alternatives for the ways we’d use the money. Frankly, despite the wonderful publicity and all the public interest, the whole thing’s a bit of a shambles. None of us has a great head for business. I’m hoping Patrick will help.’

  ‘He may be too busy,’ Margot says, panting up the last two steps. ‘According to Vinka he’s in love and the woman in question will make her debut at dinner.’

  ‘Really?’ Dot says. ‘How interesting. What sort of woman would Patrick go for, I wonder? Intelligent, obviously, serious but sexy without being showy, I think.’

  ‘Probably, but I’ve only met him a couple of times, so for all I know he might go for one of those blondes with long straight hair and perfect teeth and lots of matching bouncy breasts.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Dot says, pressing Vinka’s doorbell. ‘I think he’s more discerning than that. And I think they only have two breasts each – it’s just that it seems like a lot more because they’re so sort of in your face.’

  Vinka’s flat is glowing with flickering candles; the table is covered in a white linen cloth decorated with twists of dark green leaves, and, on the kitchen bench and in the oven, what looks like enough food for an army. And Stan, in a dark suit that has seen rather better days, is filling glasses with champagne.

  ‘I am the man of all work,’ he says, handing one to Margot. ‘Vinka asks me to help her move the table and now she makes me the wine waiter.’

  ‘Well you’re doing a great job,’ Margot says indulgently, thinking that the task is hardly onerous. She can’t help feeling a little resentful that she’s been dragged away from her keyboard.

  ‘Is it a book for girls?’ Rosie had asked when Margot explained her reason for not being quite as available as usual. ‘Will I be able to read it?’

  ‘Well you’ll certainly be able to,’ Margot had told her. ‘But you might not want to. I think you might find it a bit boring.’

  ‘But if you write a boring book no one will want to read it,’ Rosie said. ‘Perhaps you should write a different book.’

  ‘I’m afraid I just have to write this one. And of course there may be no one who wants to publish it anyway, in which case no one will get the chance to read it and be bored.’

  Rosie had given her a resigned smile. ‘Perhaps you’re not really a writer, Grandma,’ she said. ‘You might be too old.’

  ‘Mmm, I’ve been thinking that myself,’ Margot said. ‘But I mustn’t forget Mary Wesley.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘A writer who was older than me when she started writing,’ Margot said.

  ‘Wow, that’s really old,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m thinking of writing a book about bird funerals. I’m very good at it, I’ve written special bird prayers. Selena Murphy has asked me to do one for her canary. She let it out of the cage and it flew round and round and bumped into the window very hard and died. Selena’s keeping him in a shoe box, but her mum says he’s starting to smell.’

  Margot had smothered a smile and agreed that a book on bird funerals would be a very useful thing to have. Indeed, in view of the way she was feeling about her own book that particular afternoon, she thought Rosie’s might have a rather better chance of publication.

  Vinka, her face flushed from investigating the contents of the oven, joins Margot on the sofa.

  ‘I am so nervous tonight, Margot,’ she says. ‘It is like I am the mother who waits to meet the person who is perhaps to be a daughter-in-law. I want to like her, and her to like me, or at least that she doesn’t hate me.’

  Margot nods. ‘Remember we all know each other but she’s walking into a group of complete strangers, so she’s probably feeling much worse than you,’ she says. But she remembers how it feels to wait in nervous anticipation for first meetings with the men her daughters brought home. Lexie had produced a few safe but dull candidates, of which Ross was perhaps the dullest. As for Emma, there had been various inarticulate youths heavily studded with metal, and then a couple of older men. Margot could hardly believe her luck when Grant not only turned up but demonstrated staying power. Now, Margot feels for Vinka; she grips her hand, recalling the old clench of anxiety, the arrow prayers offered up in case intervention is needed to turn a frog into a prince, or in this case, a princess.

  The doorbell rings and Vinka freezes.

  ‘Would you like me to go?’ Margot asks.

  ‘No, no,’ Vinka says, ‘it is not polite for me not to answer the door.’ She holds up crossed fingers, pats her hair and hurries to the door.

  Margot wanders across the room to where Dot and Laurence are talking by the open window.

  ‘Vinka looks really anxious. Is something worrying her?’ Laurence asks.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Margot says. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how daunting it is to have so much invested in someone else’s happiness and to be faced with the prospect of a stranger who might change everything?’

  ‘I see – no I haven’t forgotten,’ Laurence says, looking over her shoulder. ‘And if I had I’d be about to receive a timely reminder. Turn around, Margot, Patrick’s girlfriend seems to be someone we know rather well.’

  And Margot turns and watches as Patrick hugs Vinka and then introduces her to Lexie.

  It was Lexie’s decision and she’s very happy with it – turning up together at Vinka’s dinner was the solution to who should be told about their being together or whether anyone should be told at all.

  ‘I think it went really well,’ she says later, as they walk back to the car. ‘Mum might have been a bit miffed that she didn’t find out before everyone else, but she soon got over it.’

  ‘Yes, and dear old Win, wasn’t she thrilled to find I’d found a good woman with first rate connections?’

  ‘Mmm. Well I liked her too, a lot. And I’m relieved they all know now.’ She slips her arm through his.

  They’ve been spending quite a lot of time to
gether over the last few weeks and Lexie is slowly discovering a different sort of relationship from those she’s had in the past. She had felt at ease with him from the moment they met in the campus café. He’d seemed genuinely interested in her plan to return to study, although there was little more that he could tell her than she had already learned from Wendy.

  ‘I was pacing up and down trying to come up with a convincing reason to call,’ he’d said on the phone that same evening. ‘You know, some information about enrolment that you don’t already have, but I couldn’t think of anything even remotely convincing, so I have to opt for honesty. I just wanted to call, to ask if we could meet again.’

  And Lexie, who had also been pacing up and down trying to find a reason to call him, responded immediately by telling him so.

  ‘Then dinner tomorrow?’ he’d said. ‘I could pick you up around seven. And we won’t talk about enrolment at all.’

  And they didn’t. But they did talk about art and politics, about books and music, about a shared lack of interest in football but a liking for cricket, and a secret passion for the manufactured romance of figure skating and an addiction to cooking programs.

  ‘Love ’em,’ Patrick had said. ‘And I collect cookery books.’

  ‘Me too,’ Lexie had said, ‘but I never actually cook – well, I mean only when I have to. I only like to look at the pictures or watch other people doing it.’

  ‘No!’ Patrick had said with an expression of mock horror. ‘What sort of woman doesn’t cook?’

  ‘A very happy one with time to spare,’ she’d replied, and they’d both laughed longer and harder than it deserved.

  ‘I like your dad,’ Patrick says now, reaching into his pocket for his car keys. ‘And Margot was lovely to me tonight. She apologised for being a bit distracted, said she’s very caught up in the book and it takes her time to readjust to socialising.’

  ‘Book? What book?’