Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  Even Margot, who is five years younger than Dot, finds herself suddenly sensitised to the challenges of being old and living alone. Should she get rid of loose rugs in case she trips? Dot had slipped on polished boards like these: maybe she should wear rubber soled shoes indoors. And what about the bathroom: wet tiles, getting in and out of the bath? And then there are the steps from the kitchen down into the living room, and at the back and front doors. Life seems suddenly fraught with potential hazards.

  ‘Perhaps we should all be planning for these situations,’ she says to Phyllida on the phone. ‘Dot’s going to have to go home in a wheelchair. She can use crutches to get into the shower and the toilet, and in a week or so start using them to walk. But her place is all on the same level. Imagine how I’d cope here if I had crutches or a wheelchair. I might have to go and stay with her.’

  ‘I am planning for the future,’ Phyllida says. ‘Not exactly for the things you mentioned, but I’ll bear it in mind.’

  Margot thinks her sister sounds different; stronger, perhaps, and rather more relaxed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve decided to sell the house,’ Phyllida says. ‘I’ve got a couple of agents coming to value it today and I’ll put it on the market straight after Christmas.’

  ‘Good lord,’ Margot says, ‘this is a turnaround. Are you sure it’s the right thing to do?’

  ‘Positive. Somewhere much smaller, cosy. Somewhere that’s all mine and has never been Donald’s. It’s very important to have something that is mine alone, no history, no overtones of the past.’

  ‘But you were so sure about staying there …’

  ‘Yes, and I was wrong,’ Phyllida says abruptly, ‘you know I was. It’s a ridiculous idea. What would I do in this great big place anyway? Emma won’t be here forever, then what?’

  ‘Well, well that’s good … have you thought about where you’ll go?’

  ‘I’m doing that right now,’ Phyllida says. ‘And when you see Dot, tell her that when they release her she can come here if she likes. She’d be fine in that ground floor visitor’s room with the ensuite. It’s all on one level and there’s a fridge, kettle, microwave and so on, or she can eat with Em and me. You need to get on with your writing and you won’t do it if you’re looking after Dot.’

  Margot is shocked into silence.

  ‘Are you still there, Margot?’

  ‘Yes. It’s … it’s very kind, Phyl, but Dot’s not exactly your favourite person.’

  ‘I was wrong about the house, and I may have been wrong about people too; women in particular. Dot is, quite possibly, one of those people. She’s been a friend of yours for long enough, that’s a good recommendation. We single women must stick together. And it’ll be the last Christmas I’ll spend here so I’d like to have a proper celebration to make it special.’

  ‘Right,’ Margot says, wondering if she really is hearing this. ‘That sounds lovely. And I’ll tell Dot when I go in to the hospital tomorrow.’ And as she replaces the receiver she sits down on the stool by the benchtop, wondering whether the conversation actually took place or whether she dreamt it.

  While Dot’s fall has others evaluating the risks to their own safety, Vinka is more preoccupied with what might have happened if Dot had died. The anxiety she had felt at that birthday lunch has returned to haunt her, but this time its possible solutions seem darker, more complicated. There is more hanging now on her silence than ever before – should she speak or stay silent? How is she to know? If Dot had died, what then? Too late, then, for truth. And what if she herself dies? Vinka paces her beloved fourth floor apartment, back and forth, in, out and around the boxes that are half packed with her possessions and which, like her, will soon be gone from this place. On the dresser a few of her favourite things remain ready for packing at the time when the boxes must finally be sealed and removed. Vinka picks up the framed photograph of her sister and carries it to the light of the window.

  ‘And you, Beate,’ she says aloud, ‘what about you? You decide. Do I speak or stay silent? Tell me what you would do.’ And holding the photograph she sinks down into her chair, sets the photograph on the table alongside it, reaches for a cigarette and stares long and hard at her sister’s picture. But she needs something that no amount of looking can give her, and eventually she lowers the frame into her lap, draws deeply on her cigarette, leans back and closes her eyes. Why, she wonders, does it always seem that the hardest, most risky course is also the right one?

  ‘You didn’t have to struggle all the way up here, Vinka,’ Dot says later that afternoon. ‘I’ll be back home in a day or two.’

  ‘I do not struggle, and I come because I want to see you, Dot.’ Vinka fishes in a large bag and brings out a thermos flask. ‘I have good Turkish coffee, and here, some poppyseed cake.’ She pours the coffee into the mug by Dot’s bed, and a small one for herself in the thermos cap.

  ‘Lifesaver!’ Dot says, gulping it so fast that she burns her mouth. ‘Vinka, you are a saint, this is so good.’ She reaches out to take Vinka’s hand. ‘You look tired; thank goodness the move will soon be over and done with. Do you really like the new place?’

  ‘It is small, but the light is good, and there are no stairs,’ Vinka says with a smile. ‘There is a feeling, you know, like I can make it seem like home. We saw many didn’t we, Dot, and I couldn’t feel right with them – this one is different.’

  ‘And you have a garden?’

  ‘Patrick says it is a courtyard more than a garden, but there are many plants all around, the sun shines through the green leaves and into the house. And this lady is very kind.’

  ‘The manager?’

  ‘Yes, her name is Julie, she laughs a lot. And still I can walk to the places I walk to now. I am very fortunate.’

  Dot squeezes her hand. ‘I’m dying to see it. When will you move?’

  ‘Two weeks after Christmas,’ Vinka says. ‘They will decorate it first, new paint. I choose it to be off-white, for the light and the space.’

  ‘Excellent! Well now you must take care of yourself and rest up, get your strength up for the move.’

  ‘You are a fine one for talking,’ Vinka says. ‘You do not take care and you are in the hospital.’

  Dot nods. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t say this to anyone else, Vinka, but something like this makes you realise how easily it could have turned out different. Everyone’s telling me, take care, do this with your house, get this support service, but in the end it is the things you can’t plan for or foresee that get you. Life is always full of risks but we don’t even think about them, and at our age every day is a bonus. So – we must make the most we can of it, even if it increases the risk.’

  ‘I have to take a risk,’ Vinka ventures cautiously. ‘It is not a risk with safety – not the sort of safety you talk about. It will be the breaking of a trust with my sister, and telling the truth to people whom I love. Perhaps it makes them very sad or angry, perhaps it hurts, but then perhaps also it makes them happy and brings love. What am I to do?’

  ‘You know why I am single and live alone?’ Dot says, leaning forward to take her hand. ‘Because I’ve spent my life being too scared of taking emotional risks. Oh, I can spend a night in jail, or bouncing around in the police van. I’ll stand on a soapbox and rave on about something that puts me at risk of having rocks thrown at me. But I am, always have been, just too scared of letting anyone in really close.’ She looks up at Vinka, who is nodding. ‘You’re not so foolish as me. Don’t leave it too long, Vinka, take the risk and bet on the love, on the happiness. At our age we have no time left for caution.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Margot sees it as a scene. A table groaning with food on a warm December afternoon; the characters seated around it, paper hats at odd angles, faces flushed from one too many glasses of champagne. The family Christmas: the parents who are also grandparents, the adult children – the elder daughter with her lover, the younger with her own daughter and, at the other end
of the table, her ex-husband and his sister. And then there are the ageing aunts – one recently bereaved, the other alongside her beloved nephew – and the family friend in a wheelchair. A family group; snap goes the camera and captures the image, and somewhere, sometime in the future, someone looks at it, reads into it their own story, speculates on what they were to each other, and what happened next. But the truth is subtle, complex and constantly shifting. This simple scene is a map of intersecting stories, of old loves and old deceptions, of new loves and new beginnings, of broken hearts and broken promises, of new discoveries and passionate inner journeys. She can make something of this, she thinks, and in the same moment that her skin prickles with the birth of an idea, a stab of guilt brings her back into the moment.

  Lexie leans gently against Patrick, who slips his arm around her shoulders, and Emma buries her face in Rosie’s hair as she sucks melted ice cream through a fat straw. Christmas, Margot thinks, how strange and wonderful that they are all here and each one of them has changed in some remarkable way since this time last year. Dot in an orange paper hat is twisting a chocolate wrapper into the shape of a wineglass for Rosie. Vinka, listening to Wendy, laughs and claps her hands together and Laurence, watching quietly, his arm stretched along the back of Emma’s chair – what is he thinking? Is he regretting those lost Christmases without his daughters, and those he will never have with Bernard? And Phyllida, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with the effect of the wine, doing Christmas in her own way for perhaps the first time ever.

  From the other side of the table Laurence catches her eye and smiles. It’s a conspiratorial smile, the sort that speaks volumes, the sort of smile exchanged by people who have their own private language born in intimacy and going back years. And for a moment Margot feels she might dissolve once more into the past, into the longing that for decades she has fought so valiantly to suppress.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ Laurence says, and she half hears and half reads his lips. And she wonders if he has any idea at all how much she still loves him and how hopeless and helpless it sometimes makes her feel.

  Lexie looks up at Patrick and he slips his arm around her shoulders. She still can’t quite believe that for the first time in her life she has fallen in love with someone who loves her for who she is rather than for what she might be able to do for him.

  ‘Nothing would change if we moved in together, Lex,’ he whispers now, as though reading her mind. ‘I’m not going to turn into a hopeless couch potato and expect you to start running around after me.’

  ‘Can you put that in a signed, sworn and witnessed affidavit,’ she says. It is the second time he has suggested it.

  He leans back a little to see her better. ‘If that’s what you need, no problem. Or I could just write a statement on this paper napkin and get your parents and Vinka to witness it.’

  But it’s not a lack of trust in Patrick that is holding Lexie back, but in herself. She likes the version of herself that she has become in this relationship and she’s not ready to risk losing it in her own confusing responses to domesticity.

  ‘Just think of it,’ Patrick says. ‘It would dramatically reduce your living expenses, and when you start uni you could be the only student with a live-in academic supervisor.’

  ‘And that would be good for me?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Mightn’t it mean I would rely on you too much, make you a safety net when I’m struggling?’

  ‘You might still do that from separate houses,’ Patrick says. ‘But if we lived together I would make you coffee in bed in the morning. I would pour wine and cook dinner while you study.’

  ‘You might still do that in separate houses,’ Lexie says. ‘Can I get a rain check?’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘Ask me again at Easter.’

  ‘Why Easter?’

  ‘By then I’ll have survived some weeks as a student, and I’ll be weak, defenceless and desperate for someone to look after me.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Patrick says, holding out a Christmas cracker. ‘Easter it is, I’m putting it in my diary.’

  Dot is sitting alongside Phyllida, and Emma watches as she puts a hand on her arm.

  ‘Thank you,’ she hears Dot say. ‘I usually hate Christmas but I’m having a wonderful time.’

  ‘Me too,’ Phyllida says. ‘Strange, isn’t it, you and me here like this, dismantling the barbed wire fence.’

  ‘Strange but good. One of the delights of growing old is that you learn it’s never too late to mend the fences.’

  Phyllida nods and pours them both some more champagne. ‘And it’s never too late to get drunk together.’ She raises her glass.

  Emma has been surprised to discover that she too is developing a cautious liking for Dot. As a child she had been scared of her, and had resented her for diverting Margot’s attention away from her to all those meetings, campaigns and protests. But Dot aged seventy-five and confined to a wheelchair seems harmless by comparison, and now all Emma feels, like grit in her shoe, is that Dot’s presence takes Phyllida’s attention away from her, just as it had diverted Margot’s attention all those years ago. Emma wonders if she has never quite grown up. Is this like the Barbie factor, as Lexie had called it when Emma had told her what Phyllida had said.

  ‘It’s just a bandaid solution, Em,’ Lexie had said, ‘constantly fixing the way you look. Real change comes from within, just like the real beauty. The problem is that everything around us tells us that the answer lies in cosmetics or clothes or treatments; instant gratification – quicker and so much more fun than learning to be different.’

  Rosie slides off her chair and goes walkabout, examining everyone’s loot from the crackers, and Grant moves along to sit beside Emma. ‘She’s an absolute carpetbagger, our daughter,’ he says fondly, watching as Rosie slowly acquires one useless plastic trinket after another. ‘She may grow up to be a con woman.’

  Emma looks at him steadily. ‘I doubt it,’ she says. ‘You and Wendy are raising her far too well for that.’

  Grant takes a deep breath. ‘Thanks for that, but you do your bit too. I thought maybe it was getting better for you.’

  Emma hesitates, twisting the stem of her wine glass, staring down at the tablecloth. Not so long ago she was furious with him, furious for months, years in fact. His apparent ease in parenting Rosie had been a constant painful reminder of her own failure to master even the basic rudiments of motherhood. But somehow it doesn’t haunt her in quite the way it once did, and although her guilt over her own shortcomings does flare up as anger and resentment against him from time to time, it soon fades away. Since the day they made their first cake together, Emma has felt more confident and has actually enjoyed spending time with Rosie. She has, she realises, discovered the ability to connect with her daughter. It’s an ability Wendy has in spades, but which Emma thought had been omitted from her own makeup. Mothering comes easily to Wendy, Emma thinks; she may not have wanted to take on the shared parenting of her brother’s child, but there’s no doubt she’s doing it well and while she knows how valuable this is for Rosie, for them all, Emma can’t quite forgive Wendy for that.

  ‘It is getting a bit better,’ she says to Grant now. ‘I used to be so frightened of the responsibility. Now Rosie’s a real little person – I think we’re getting to know each other better.’ She looks up, surprised that she’s actually told him this, although of course he already knew it. It must be the champagne that’s loosening her tongue and her emotions.

  ‘She loves you to bits, you know,’ Grant says. ‘Her mum is the bee’s knees, you really must remember that.’

  Emma swallows hard, struggling to hold back tears. ‘Then I’m a very lucky woman,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Back in a minute,’ and she walks away from the table and once inside the house runs quickly up the stairs into her bathroom and locks the door. Grabbing a towel from the railing she buries her face in it and sinks down onto the lid of the toilet. Crying
alone in the bathroom on Christmas Day. She remembers reading about this in a magazine – a couple of pages of stories from women of all ages and in all sorts of situations, hiding from the festivities and from the people they loved, and weeping with frustration or despair, sobbing from loneliness or the need to be alone, drenching bundles of tissues with tears for disappointed love, absent children or the bleakness in their hearts, yearning for something they can’t quite define. Emma had found traces of herself in those pages and now, as she stands up and crosses to the basin, she imagines them – the women in bathrooms all over the country, splashing water on their faces, repairing their makeup, smoothing down their hair in an attempt to return to the party and be once again the wives and mothers, the daughters, aunts, nieces, grandmothers and friends they are supposed to be. Perhaps, she thinks now, she is not so different after all. Perhaps the world is full of women dancing as fast as they can to simply keep their heads above water and a smile on their faces, attempting to mask the chaos within. And as she studies her reflection Emma knows that she doesn’t want to do this again. She doesn’t want to be crying in the bathroom next Christmas, something has to change. Somehow she just has to take the little nugget of wonder she found that day with Rosie and learn to make it grow, and maybe, just maybe, she needs to sort some other stuff out in order to do that, and for that she might need some help.