Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  It’s after nine when the women of the book club spill out onto the boardwalk. Their voices and laughter float out on the night air and a flock of seagulls gathered in a pool of light from the Boatshed take off as one, heading out across the inlet.

  ‘You go ahead,’ Phyllida says, ‘I won’t be long. Wait for me in the car.’

  Emma and Margot exchange a glance. ‘Are you sure?’ Emma asks. ‘Wouldn’t you rather we stayed?’

  Phyllida shakes her head. ‘I want to talk to her. Please, I’m fine, just give me a few minutes.’

  ‘We’ll be over there by the car then,’ Margot says. ‘I’ll drive you both home.’

  Phyllida watches them walking away, side-by-side, heads together, talking about her, she thinks, and she knows she’s right when they stop, turn back to look at her, wave, and then stand talking, obviously positioning themselves to keep an eye on her.

  ‘We can leave now if you like,’ Margot had whispered when Fran introduced May. ‘We’re right near the door, it’s easy.’

  And on Margot’s far side Phyllida could see Emma’s anxious face; she too was obviously ready to whisk her out of there in an instant. Part of Phyllida had wanted to flee, to disappear quietly out of the door onto the boardwalk and then into Margot’s car, putting as much distance as possible between herself and that room full of people. But she was also curious. If she stayed she could hear what May had to say about these two characters – the widow and the former lover – and their tentative moves to dissipate the hurt and resentment, and find common ground.

  ‘No. Thanks, but I’m okay,’ she’d whispered to Margot, ‘I want to stay.’ And she had dug herself down a little further into the corner of the settee and waited for May to begin.

  Now, as she stands at the bottom of the Boatshed steps, most of the women have left, strolling off along the footpath or, like Margot and Emma, across the grass to the car park. Phyllida wonders if she has missed May. Could she possibly have left through a different exit? But these steps are the only way out. She turns back towards the entrance and there she is. May is standing alone in the doorway, looking around. She seems cautious, nervous even, about stepping out, but finally she seems to decide that the coast is clear and she walks briskly out and along the boardwalk. It is only when she reaches the top of the steps that she sees Phyllida standing at the bottom and she hesitates, and then continues on quickly down the steps.

  ‘I saw you leave,’ she says. ‘I waited until I thought you’d be gone. I had no idea you’d be here. I’ve been coming since it started but I never saw you here before.’

  ‘No. My first time. I was as surprised as you. You know, May,’ she says as they start to walk towards the car park, ‘I liked what you said, about the women in the book.’

  ‘But you said nothing. I felt you had come because you wanted to say something.’

  ‘I came to test out my feelings against what other people said. I’m not used to talking about books, or even being with other women who talk about books or ideas. What I would have said though, if I’d been brave enough to speak, is that life is too short to hang on to misplaced pride. The women in the book recognised something in each other that they both needed at the time. I felt … that’s what happened that day at your flat; it seems to me to be something of value.’

  For the last two nights Vinka has barely slept. She had done what she thought was right – that, surely, was all she could do – and her greatest fear had been that Patrick would be devastated by what he learned. She had feared his anger and hurt and had prepared herself for isolation while he came to terms with the news. He had been stunned at first and then, she thought, intrigued. He had listened to everything she had told him. He had always known he was adopted but had never felt the need to search for his biological parents. She had poured him a drink and they had sat talking for a while and then he had looked again at the adoption agreement and this time he saw something that he had missed the first time.

  ‘What is it?’ Vinka had asked, watching as the colour drained from his face. ‘Tell me what you have found.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he’d said, standing up, and there was a wildness, a look of panic in his eyes. He slipped the paper back into its envelope and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘But I have to go now, right now. I need to talk to Dot tonight.’ He looked around distractedly. ‘My keys … where are my keys?’

  The shape of his body had changed. He was hunched now, and tense, his face set in a rigid white mask.

  ‘Tell me,’ Vinka had insisted, reaching her hand down the side of the chair and retrieving the keys. She held them up so he could see them, at the same time moving them away from his grasp. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You tell me what you have seen. You tell me now.’

  He stood facing her, his expression a mix of panic and despair. ‘There was someone with Dot when I was born,’ he said. ‘Someone witnessed her signature.’

  Vinka nodded. ‘Who? I don’t understand.’

  He shakes his head and takes a deep breath. ‘It was Laurence, he was there – Laurence was the witness.’

  Vinka stared at him in disbelief, steadying herself against the table.

  Patrick ran his hand through his hair. ‘So I must ask Dot …’

  ‘You think that means that he … that Laurence … ?’ Vinka stops. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he is a witness only.’

  ‘Then why was he with her? Why was he up there with her in Byron Bay when I was born? By that time he and Margot were married and Lexie was five. Why would he be there with Dot unless the baby she was having was his? It would mean that Lexie and I …’

  ‘No!’ Vinka said. ‘No, it can’t be, and if it is …’ She’d stopped herself. She had been about to say that it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered except that he could cling to his new-found happiness – the love she had wanted for him for so long. She wanted to tell him that no one need ever know; destroy the paper, she wanted to say, burn it, forget you ever saw it. But he couldn’t of course, he would never be able to live with that and nor, she knew, would she.

  ‘I’m going there now,’ he’d said. ‘I have to know.’

  And he had hugged her, holding on to her as though his life depended on it. ‘I’ll come straight back when I’ve talked to her, however late, I’ll come back.’

  And of course, when he did get back, there was the relief about Laurence, but also the frustration of Dot’s refusal to identify his father. She’d been shocked, he’d said, at least he thought it was shock. It was hard to tell what was happening for her – she said very little other than to reassure him about Laurence.

  ‘I thought we were doing okay until I asked about my father,’ Patrick had told her. ‘But then it was as though she didn’t expect me to ask that question, as though knowing that it wasn’t Laurence ought to be enough. She asked me to leave; she was almost pushing me out of the door by then. I told her that I felt I had a right to know. Nothing. She just kept shaking her head. Then she said, “I can’t talk about this now. You have to let me get through the weekend, then we can talk.” By then I was outside the door and she just went back inside and closed the door behind her.’ He sat quietly for a few minutes, clasping and unclasping his hands in his lap. ‘You know, Aunty Win, I really thought it was going to be okay until I asked about my father and then she just flipped. I suppose I can only wait now, and be thankful that I didn’t turn out to be Laurence’s son.’

  Now, two days later, Vinka is not only exhausted, she is angry and frustrated. Why won’t Dot simply tell Patrick the truth about his father? Is it that she had so many lovers that there are several possibilities? Or does she feel she must tell the father about Patrick before she tells Patrick about him? The questions plague Vinka all through the morning and now it’s midday. It’s all too much. Dot has no right to do this, she tells herself, and what if she keeps it up, keeps avoiding Patrick’s questions?

  ‘So,’ she says, grinding out her cigarette. ‘Enough.’ And she picks up the te
lephone and calls a cab.

  Lexie emerges from her lecture blinking in the sunlight, and heads for a seat in the shade of some trees where she has arranged to meet Patrick. Her first weeks as a student haven’t been easy. The campus is huge, confusing and not very well signposted, and she feels entirely out of place surrounded by people in their late teens and early twenties. Wendy was right, there are two older people in one of her classes, and one in another, but she hasn’t managed to connect with them yet, and the younger ones seem so much faster and smarter that it is hard to feel that she will ever be able to keep pace with them. But it’s not only uni that is hard to handle right now. The final weeks leading up to the march this coming weekend have been hectic, volunteers are less biddable than staff and some are proving unreliable. And then there is Patrick, wonderful, stable, calm and supportive Patrick, whose life has suddenly been thrown into chaos.

  On the night of the campaign meeting she hadn’t expected to see him, but as she was letting herself in to the house his car drew up outside.

  ‘This is a nice surprise,’ she said as he came up the steps. ‘How was Vinka?’

  He didn’t answer at first, just shook his head, and in the light of the hallway she could see that his face was tense and pale.

  ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’ she asked.

  But he simply let out a huge sigh and, shaking his head again, put his arms around her and stood there holding her for what seemed a very long time, apparently unable to speak.

  Later, much later that night, when they had talked for hours and finally fallen exhausted into bed, Patrick had sunk quickly into what seemed like troubled sleep. As he twisted himself in the sheet, mumbling and thrashing his arms, Lexie had got up and gone downstairs to make herself some tea. While Patrick had related his conversations with Vinka and Dot, telling her of his shock and confusion and the horror of discovering Laurence’s name on the adoption agreement, all of Lexie’s attention had been focused on him and on her desire to help him through this, to step into his emotional space and be there with him. At the time she had been aware that she did so willingly, because she wanted to, unlike those many occasions in past relationships where she had stepped into the other’s space with resentment, knowing she would be sucked dry. While they talked, while he wept, and they talked again, through the questions they asked and failed to answer, and alongside Patrick’s hurt and frustration over Dot’s refusal to talk about his father, Lexie had known she wanted to be there with him, to be there until the end. She had known that in the worst possible scenario what had become the precious part of her life would have been ripped away from her. Being alone, being single, was okay, good even, satisfying in its freedom, but that was only before she had met Patrick. Now it held no attraction at all.

  It was only then, as she sat alone looking out at the moonlit garden while Patrick slept upstairs, that Lexie started to think about Laurence, and inevitably about Margot and Dot. Why was he there with Dot in Byron Bay? Why not Margot? Did Dot and Laurence have some history together that made him the person she called upon to help? Did Margot know? In the same way that Lexie had felt her eyes opened to Margot and Dot the night at the candlelit dinner table, she now saw other dimensions to these three people who had been part of her life for so long. It wasn’t so unusual, she supposed, it was easy to take one’s parents and their past for granted. You grew up with them, they shaped how you knew them and the past was simply there, possibly interesting but not interesting enough to delve into. Only now it was; now it seemed vital and fascinating.

  A couple of years ago Lexie had gone with Emma and Margot to Grant and Wendy’s mother’s funeral.

  ‘The saddest thing,’ Wendy had told her tearfully at the wake, ‘is that it’s only when it’s too late that you realise how little you know about them. All these questions come rushing into your head when it’s too late to ask.’

  Sitting here now under the trees, watching with relief as Patrick emerges from his lecture chatting with a couple of students before he turns to walk towards her, Lexie knows that whatever his quest to know Dot and to learn the truth of his father may bring, she too has a part in that. She too needs to strip away the layers of time to discover what lies beneath.

  ‘How was it this morning?’ Patrick asks, dropping down onto the seat beside her. ‘Good lecture?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nods, handing him the sandwiches she has bought from the café. ‘Yes, really interesting. Once the weekend is over I think things are going to get a whole lot easier.’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ he says, biting into a tuna sandwich. ‘Easier in more ways than one.’

  ‘Was your lecture okay? Were you wonderful and inspiring?’

  ‘Naturally!’ he says, smiling at her, but she can see the signs of strain in his face. ‘Yeah, it went okay despite the usual performance anxiety, but it was a bit hard to concentrate. I kept thinking about how easily we are separated from the past, and how extraordinary it feels when we bump into it. And in all my present frustration and confusion about Dot and the mystery father, the thing I need to tell you, Lex, and I’ll probably be telling you this for the rest of my life, is that I’m awfully glad you’re not my sister.’

  Dot, sitting in her study, hears the sound of the gate and sees Vinka making her way up the path. She sits absolutely still, fearing that even the smallest movement may create a flicker of shadow against the window and reveal her presence. Even stooped a little with age, Vinka is an impressive figure, taller than Dot and solidly built, but it’s not this physical superiority that Dot fears. What she senses in Vinka’s step is what she saw the first time they met: a strength and determination, a steeliness of character. On that first day, as she and Margot had walked into the restaurant, Dot had seen shock, and confusion. ‘How did you find her?’ Vinka had demanded of Patrick, and Dot had assumed that it was just the awkwardness of Vinka’s English. Surely she had meant ‘How did you two meet?’ There had been a moment of awkwardness, and then Vinka’s expression had changed to relief and cautious pleasure. Right now, that glimpse of steel is apparent on Vinka’s face.

  Dot holds her breath, waiting for the knock, but there is silence. Has Vinka changed her mind, gone away? Dot leans cautiously forward, trying to see if she is on the step, and is greeted with a sudden sharp rap on the window that makes her almost leap out of her skin. Vinka is looking straight at her through the glass.

  ‘You want that I knock when I know you see me coming?’ she demands. ‘You want that I sit on the doorstep to shame you to letting me in?’

  Dot sighs and runs her hands through her hair. In the course of her life she has played all sorts of power games, but she’s always known that in Vinka she has more than met her match – she’d just never thought there would be a time when it would matter. Taking a deep breath she goes out to the hall and opens the door.

  ‘So,’ says Vinka, once installed in an armchair, waiting as Dot pours her a glass of Polish vodka. ‘This is the last time I am asking advice from you, Dot.’

  ‘Advice?’

  Vinka nods. ‘In the hospital I am asking you. Dot, I have to take a risk and you tell me, take the risk, Vinka, you say, at our age we have so little chance to change things, you must risk love. But now you don’t like it. Now you sulk and stamp your feet.’

  ‘You were asking me about this?’

  ‘Of course, who else would I ask? And you turn on, like they say, the green light.’

  ‘But you would have told him anyway, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ she shrugs. ‘I am thinking about it a long time and more since the day we met. Then I think of it many times every day. It is a very big responsibility, a legacy from my sister, one I do not want.’

  ‘I’m not sulking,’ Dot says, sitting down opposite her. ‘Do you see me stamping my feet?’

  Vinka hesitates. ‘You speak to no one. You lock doors, you behave like the naughty child. You think of no one but yourself.’

  ‘
And why not? This is about me. I have been alone all my life, Vinka. Who else am I to think about?’

  ‘Ha!’ Vinka slams down her glass. ‘And so this is enough, to think about yourself? Don’t you want something for your son, for Patrick? This is more important than just one selfish bloody-minded old woman who is frightened to be hurt.’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘No!’ Vinka says, silencing her with a look. ‘Listen to me, Dot, I am not so clever like you, but I know some things about you. You are alone because it suits you, because it keeps you always at the safe distance. You think you can replace love with fighting some battle for strangers, for people you don’t know? The battle is good, it is important, but you do it for the wrong reason. You think I don’t know, Dot? Even your friends you keep just so close, no closer. Well now the responsibility is right into your face. Now you feel it, and whatever you do now you will live with it every day until you die. So! You want to be the miserable spider spinning yourself into your own web? Or you want to risk that he might care about you, or maybe risk that you care about him?’

  Dot is transfixed, bottle in one hand, glass in the other; her throat is dry, her chest tight enough to burst. All her life she has lived with questions about her child, his safety, his happiness, his whereabouts. Who might he have become? What would he think of her? Could he ever understand and forgive? And on the worst of those many dark and lonely nights of the soul, she has returned always to the hardest questions of all – is it possible for me to love and be loved? When, two nights ago, Patrick sat here in the chair where Vinka now sits, he rewrote those abstract questions in a profoundly personal way. She was cornered, unable to respond, unable to imagine the effect of revealing yet another level of the deception that surrounded his birth all those years ago.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she says to Vinka now, ‘I’m just frightened.’ She pours vodka into her glass and sets the bottle down on the side table. Vinka says nothing, she simply sits, watching and waiting. ‘I’m frightened of him,’ Dot continues, ‘of Patrick. He was my friend, he understood me, and now he is so much more and I will lose him. And you have become my friend too and I will lose you. What does he want from me? I’m not capable of being a mother, Vinka, I don’t know how.’