Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Emma says. ‘But I don’t understand why there wasn’t an enquiry.’

  May shrugs. ‘Again, I wasn’t there and I’m sorry to be so vague about it, but by the time I got back it was weeks later. There were a few whisperings in the hospital corridors but by then that nurse had resigned and gone.’

  Emma leans forward across the table. ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, but do you think that he, that Donald could have …’ She hesitates, unsure how May will take it. ‘Could he have covered it up?’

  May looks at her long and hard, and then leans back in her chair. ‘Once I would have said no,’ she says, ‘but now I know he lied to me for years. Our whole relationship was based on a lie about your aunt. So yes, I think he could. I wonder if perhaps he and Ron Jamieson, the director, decided together to hush it up. They were old friends.’

  Emma nods. ‘They were at medical school together. May, did Donald seem worried about it at any time after that? Sometime later maybe?’

  May takes a deep breath and shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t think – oh wait, yes, I remember. Some time, quite a long time later, he came in one evening. He seemed agitated. He said that he’d had a call from someone representing the nurse. He seemed concerned that it might all blow up again, but he never mentioned it after that. I suppose I thought he would have told me if anything else happened.’

  ‘Something else did happen,’ Emma says, ‘and it was happening up until the time he died. And the amazing thing is that Uncle Donald kept a detailed record of it, and he kept it along with the hospital file in a box in his study. And it cost him an awful lot of money.’

  Dot crumples yet another sheet of paper and throws it across the room. Nothing is going right; here she is, a journalist who has spent her life writing, and now she can’t write to save her life. It’s the speech that’s driving her insane. While she languished in hospital and at Phyllida’s house, the campaign team had been working their butts off getting together a campaign plan and organising the march. Now it seems to have crept up on her. Alyssa will speak first, then a retired former premier, and then it will be her turn. Dot remembers all too clearly how it feels to stand behind a microphone on the steps of Parliament House; to see that mass of expectant faces, the banners and placards, and the police on the lookout for troublemakers. She did it because she could, and because it mattered not just to her but to that mass of women who had turned up to protest. Fear of failure was a luxury she couldn’t afford; what she needed was the adrenaline rush that could make her stand and deliver. But that was then, Dot thinks now, as she bundles the fruits of her first attempts into the bin and more crumpled paper spills out across the floor. What about now?

  ‘I don’t think it has to be something new,’ Patrick says when he turns up to see how she’s getting on. ‘I think what you need to do is to find new ways of saying some of the things you’ve already said on the website and the blog. Just as long as it’s relevant.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s relevant anymore,’ Dot says. ‘I’m totally out of touch.’

  ‘You said that when I asked you to talk to the students, but you were terrific. You were relevant then. You’re relevant on the blog. If you weren’t we wouldn’t be doing this now.’

  ‘You’re not doing it!’ Dot says fiercely, rounding on him. ‘I’m doing it. I’m the one who has to stand up there and make a fool of myself in front of several hundred people. Me! This doddery old shell of a person who should have put up or shut up years ago.’ And in that moment, standing there in her study, waving a couple of sheets of notes and swaying perilously without her stick, she does something she hasn’t done in front of anyone else for years. She begins to sob.

  ‘Whoa!’ Patrick says. ‘Careful, Dot, come and sit down.’ And he takes her arm and steers her towards her chair. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, putting an arm around her shoulders, but she shakes him off. ‘Really, I didn’t mean it like it must have sounded. What I meant was that we’re all working on this protest, the legal requirements, the communications, the banners, the t-shirts, heaps of us. We’re doing that and we’re putting you up there because we believe in you, believe in what you can do, the way you can challenge and inspire people. It’s a vote of confidence from a whole lot of other people, Dot. That’s what I meant.’ He grabs a box of tissues off her desk and passes them to her. ‘Would you like me to get you a drink or a cup of tea or something?’

  Dot shakes her head, and blows her nose. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, it’s okay. Sorry, I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that. I’m so self-centred and childish. It’s just that although I’ve done it many times before, right now it seems such a huge thing …’ She hesitates as her eyes fill with tears again. ‘Look, don’t say this to anyone else, I don’t even know why I’m telling you – just because you’re here, I suppose. But since that fall I’ve been feeling incredibly nervous about everything. Even going to the shop seems risky and dangerous. A couple of days ago, when they said I could start driving again, I went over to see Vinka’s new place, and you know, Patrick, I was scared; scared of the traffic, scared of getting lost, scared every time I had to make a decision on the road.’ She stops, pats her eyes with more tissues and leans back with a sigh. ‘I’ve lost my confidence. All I can think of now is that I’ve always taken all sorts of risks without any thought for my own safety. And then I fell, and lay here for hours and came to in the ambulance on the way to hospital, and everything changed. Now I see danger everywhere, even in the things I do every day.’

  She holds up her left hand which has a large sticking plaster across the base of her thumb. ‘I was cutting up some pumpkin and my knife was blunt so I got out the sharpener, and all the time I was sharpening it I kept thinking, “Better not make it too sharp, Dot, or you’ll cut yourself, and you could get an infection, or you could faint and bleed, lose a lot of blood and be unconscious on the floor for days.” And sure enough, what did I do? I went back to cutting the pumpkin and I cut myself.’

  Patrick smiles at her. ‘And did you faint?’

  ‘No. I went to the bathroom and put my hand in cold water and wrapped it in a towel until it stopped bleeding. Then I dried it, put antiseptic on it and then a plaster.’

  ‘And it’s not infected?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you dealt with it just the same way you would have done before the accident?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is the fear, the anxiety, it’s there all the time, stalking me, looking over my shoulder. I’m never going to be free of it now.’

  Patrick sits still, watching her as she bundles the tissues and tosses them into the bin. ‘Look, I don’t want to tell you how to suck eggs, Dot; I don’t know what it’s like to be your age and to suddenly feel vulnerable in all sorts of ways. But I do know that most people feel vulnerable when something major disrupts their lives. Physically you got off lightly and recovered quickly but it was hugely disrupting to the way you feel about yourself. But you’re tough, incredibly tough, and determined, and you will get through this.’

  Dot leans forward, arms on her knees, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Really I don’t. I think I may not be tough anymore. Maybe I just used up the allocation of tough that was given to me at birth. Maybe it just ran out.’

  ‘Maybe you’re tired, shaken and under pressure to perform.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Do you want us to cancel? It’s not too late, we could find another speaker, you know.’

  The prospect of someone else taking her place was like a knife to Dot’s ego. ‘No! Certainly not! This is my gig. Don’t you dare get someone else; you don’t cancel anything for me until I’m dead.’

  Patrick claps his hands, laughing. ‘Ah, Dot! You are such a woman of contradictions and I love you for it.’

  Dot smiles and has the grace to blush. ‘You mean I am so egotistical. You won’t tell anyone about … well, about this, will you, Patrick, especially not a
bout the crying bit?’

  He hesitates. ‘Not even Lexie?’

  ‘Especially not Lexie, or Margot. They’ll worry and be watching out for me all the time, and I’ll get annoyed. God I’m difficult, I don’t deserve such wonderful friends. But if I am going to beat this fear I’ll have to do it alone.’

  ‘Okay,’ Patrick says, standing up. ‘I won’t tell anyone, but only if you promise you’ll call me if you’re in any trouble or need anything, even just to talk about it, even if it’s the middle of the night. Is that a deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ she says, holding out her hand to him. ‘Now let’s go and make a cup of tea – that, after all, is what old women do when the going gets tough.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘I thought they went straight for the gin bottle, or bought a new hat.’

  ‘Don’t be so cheeky.’ Dot grins. ‘Put the kettle on while I go and put cold water on my face.’

  TWENTYSIX

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Phyllida says. ‘Are you telling me that Donald then covered up this death by stealing the file?’

  Emma shakes her head. ‘I’m not sure. I think he and Ron Jamieson covered it up together at the time. Whether they decided to lose the file at the same time or later, I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Phyllida says, nodding, ‘that makes sense. I can just imagine the two of them putting their heads together and deciding to make it all disappear. I wonder how they managed to shut the nurse up. The old boys’ club at work again!’

  ‘My guess is that they intimidated her, attacked her professionalism. She saw she couldn’t win and went of her own accord,’ Emma says.

  They are sitting outside at the big table where they all ate Christmas lunch, a table now littered with the contents of the file and pages of Donald’s notes, and Phyllida feels as though she has walked into the script of some unfolding crime series. What Emma has just told her seems incredible, and yet she finds it unpleasantly believable.

  ‘It would have been easy enough,’ Emma goes on. ‘Tony Stiles appeared to have no relatives, no one was asking about him, and no one responded to the police or the Salvation Army, who were looking for people who knew him.’

  ‘So what could have happened to make Donald take the file later? And how much later?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Emma. ‘This is where it gets very interesting.’

  ‘Stop trying to be enigmatic, Em,’ Phyllida says, impatient for answers. ‘Just give me the facts.’

  ‘Well, a couple of years later the nurse shows up again. Only not in person, mind you, but in the shape of someone we both know and love – one Trevor Pargeter.’

  ‘Trevor? You can’t mean it.’

  Emma nods. ‘Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said when she fell down the rabbit hole.’

  ‘Actually I think that bit comes later in the book,’ Phyllida said, ‘but I could be wrong. Go on.’

  ‘From this messy pile of notes that Donald left, it seems that Trevor turned up one day and told him that the nurse was going to sell her story to the media. It seems that she was going out with a mate of Trevor’s. Donald’s notes indicate that he thought the woman must have visited Trevor’s place with her boyfriend, and realised who lived next door. Maybe she caught sight of Donald, or she could have known where he lived, and she seems to have told Trevor about what happened in the operating theatre.’

  ‘So Trevor demanded money to keep her quiet and I suppose Donald coughed up?’ Phyllida sighs, closes her eyes briefly and imagines Donald pacing nervously back and forth behind the door of his study, weighing up the costs of acquiescence or refusal.

  ‘Yes, and more fool him, because then they kept on demanding more,’ Emma says, shuffling through Donald’s notes. ‘Although I’m not sure that it was ‘they’ or whether it was just Trevor. Those two first payments of five thousand dollars were transferred into an account that Trevor probably set up for the purpose. Did he take his share and give the rest to the nurse, or did she even know he was doing it? I guess we’re never going to know the answer to that. But Donald says that sometime later Trevor came back for more, and he wanted cash, and so he paid up and he kept paying, mostly in cash, once by cheque and a couple of times online. It’s all recorded here, although it’s really hard to read, his writing is awful. I suppose he must have been terrified he’d wake up one Sunday morning and find he was front page news. The scandal would have finished him.’

  Phyllida takes a long breath and leans back in her chair, glass in hand, wondering how he could have let it go on so long. How or when did he imagine it might end? Did he really believe that the truth would never come out if he just kept paying? ‘What a debacle,’ she says. ‘I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him, although it does sound as though he was responsible. He told me once – oh, a couple of years after all this must have happened – that he’d had a very close shave some time earlier. He’d thought he might have to resign, but he wouldn’t give me any details. Pride, I suppose. But why did he write it all down?’

  ‘Perhaps he did it just so he’d have a record of the blackmail,’ Emma says. ‘Or he may have done it for you, in case a time came when you needed to know.’

  ‘Maybe, who knows? And I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Does he actually say he was responsible?’

  Emma shuffles pages again. ‘Not exactly, but he does say somewhere … ah, here it is: “Bloody unfortunate business, fortunate for me there were no relatives asking questions and demanding enquiries”.’

  ‘Heaps of concern for the patient, I see!’ Phyllida says dryly. ‘In fact a total lack of concern or respect for that young man on everyone’s part. This whole thing would look very different if Tony Stiles had come from Donald’s side of the tracks.’

  ‘Could he have been drunk?’

  ‘Possibly. Quite often when he came home it was obvious he’d had a few drinks. I thought he was stopping off on the way home, but of course he could have been drinking in his office at the hospital. I thought I knew everything about him, Em – his strengths, his weaknesses, what motivated him, what he wanted from life, what he was scared of. And I did, I knew all that, and yet I knew nothing. I lived with him for fifty years, but I didn’t know him at all.’ She stops, thinking for a moment, swallows hard and goes on. ‘And I don’t think I ever let him know me either. What a waste, what a terrible waste.’

  ‘Trevor also knew about May,’ Emma says, looking up cautiously. ‘Donald brought the VW from him and put it in her name. That seems a really stupid thing to have done but who knows what was going on between him and Trevor at the time.’

  Phyllida nods. ‘May told me Trevor had found out. But how did you know that?’

  ‘May told me too. I met her. I was trying to find out if she knew anything more about this.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘Only a little, but it helped me to put it all together.’ ‘And what did you think of her?’

  Emma hesitates. ‘Well actually I liked her – in fact I liked her quite a lot.’

  Phyllida nods and says nothing, holding the stem of her empty glass and tilting it gently from side to side. ‘Mmm,’ she says thoughtfully, ‘so now we just have to decide how to handle the weasel next door.’

  Emma is exhausted. She had been dreading the day when she would have to lay out the facts about Donald to Phyllida and she had used a lot of time and energy trying to work out how best to do it. At first she had decided, it would be best to have someone there with her to share the awfulness – Margot, probably, or possibly Lexie. But she had eventually come to the conclusion that while that would be best for her it was probably not what was best for Phyllida. It was hard to know how her aunt would respond to the news but the possibility of her being overtaken once more by that paralysing sense of shame, or an outburst of emotion, would be doubly painful if witnessed by someone else. Emma knew she had gained Phyllida’s trust and her respect and she had finally come to the conclusion that this was something she must deal with alone. Now, as she climbs into bed,
the relief is enormous and her fears of a painful emotional reaction have been put to rest. There is no doubt that Phyllida was deeply distressed by what she had learned this evening, but there was no outburst, just sadness, some disgust, and a really practical conversation about what to do next. It is, Emma thinks, the very best she could have hoped for and with any luck Phyllida will get a good night’s sleep and won’t slide into the grip of shame or depression.

  Emma sinks down into her pillows and closes her eyes, enjoying the feeling of unwinding, letting go of the tension, being entirely in the present. It’s something she’s been practising recently, as a way of dealing with some of her own problems, and so far it seems to be working. She is drifting comfortably towards sleep when a tap at the door jerks her awake. She knew Phyllida was still up from the faint murmur of the television in her room, and then the sound of running water, and now she is outside the door. Emma freezes, stares at the door and wonders if she dares to feign sleep. The prospect of going back over the Donald stuff yet again is not something she relishes.

  ‘Em,’ Phyllida says, tapping again. ‘Em, are you awake? There’s something I need to tell you.’

  She sounds calm, Emma thinks, but it’s hard to tell. Emma takes a deep breath. ‘No,’ she calls, ‘I’m still awake, Phyl, come on in.’

  Phyllida, in her dressing gown, opens the door and tiptoes across the carpet as though fearful of waking someone else.

  ‘So sorry to disturb you,’ she whispers, and then laughs. ‘Silly me, what am I whispering for? No risk of waking anyone else,’ and she sits down on the edge of Emma’s bed.

  It’s a warm night but Emma’s exhaustion and the effect of being pulled back from the warmth and comfort of approaching sleep make her shiver, and she pulls the quilt up to shoulder height. There is something oddly secretive or perhaps embarrassed about her aunt’s manner that, despite the calm exterior, leads Emma to expect the worst.