Last Chance Café

by Liz Byrski

  Patrick takes a deep breath. ‘So, later, you … you …’

  ‘Yes, I discovered I was pregnant.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  Dot’s head is spinning and she closes her eyes. The sweet scent of the frangipani makes her nauseous and her heart thumps furiously; fleetingly she wonders if she might be going to faint.

  ‘Are you okay, Dot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says eventually, opening her eyes. ‘Yes, I’m okay. Yes, I told him. I found out where he worked and I called him. I thought he had a right to know. I told him I’d decided to have the baby … well … have you, and that I would arrange an adoption. He was shocked and frantic about his wife finding out. But I promised that she’d never find out from me.’ Dot shifts her position. ‘I really didn’t expect to hear from him again, I was resigned to that. And then, a few days later he turned up at my flat. He’d driven up from Melbourne overnight. And I fell into that madness again – I thought he’d left his wife to be with me and his child. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience. But he hadn’t come back for me, Patrick; he’d come back for you.’

  ‘For me?’ Patrick says. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He came to ask me to give you to him. He and his wife wanted a child but she couldn’t conceive. They were trying to adopt but there were problems. He saw this chance to keep his own child, he thought we could do it in secret. He knew someone who could fabricate a birth certificate, with just my name and the father’s name as ‘unknown’. So he had told his wife that there was a chance that someone he knew could arrange a private adoption, bypassing the authorities. It wasn’t so unusual in those days – lots of single and desperate pregnant women, lots of couples equally desperate for a child. He had convinced her that it would be safe, and she agreed they should try, but she wanted a signed statement from the mother waiving her rights to the child. Not an unreasonable request of course. It was an agonising decision, Patrick, harder even than letting you go to strangers; someone else – another woman – would have both him and you. And yet it seemed the right thing to do. I trusted him to care for you, something I knew I couldn’t do alone.’ She stops abruptly; her throat is dry and tight and she feels she is shaking from within.

  ‘Patrick, I knew that man as George Kelly, the son of a Polish mother and an Irish father, but you knew him as Jerzey, the name used by his wife and her sister who so badly wanted him to claim his Polish roots.’

  The garden is entirely still and Dot sighs and shifts in her seat. ‘So now you know the deception at the heart of your family. The man who adopted you was your real father, and the woman who raised you as her own was deceived about your relationship to him. I wonder if you can believe that at the time both your father and I thought we were doing the right thing? I abandoned you, Patrick, but your father didn’t. I hope that you can, at least, find some comfort in that.’

  Patrick is silent, leaning forward, arms resting on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees, looking down at the ground. Dot gets to her feet, swaying with exhaustion, aching to touch him, to tell him not just what happened in the past, but how it has haunted her all her life. She wants to tell him how many times she has resolved to find him and then held back; to tell him how she feels now after all these years and how, in this moment, as she anticipates his contempt, she feels her heart is being torn out.

  ‘I’ll leave you in peace now,’ she says quietly. ‘You need time to think.’ And resisting the urge to put a hand on his shoulder, she begins to walk away.

  ‘Dot,’ Patrick says suddenly. ‘Don’t go.’

  He too is on his feet now, walking towards her. He is holding out his hands, and she pauses, then steps back towards him and he takes her hands in his. In the shaft of light from the house she can see that there are tears in his eyes.

  ‘He was a wonderful father,’ he says. ‘I loved him dearly and miss him so much. And my mother, Beate, she loved us both; her family was everything to her. I wish I had known this while he was alive. This makes sense to me in ways that I can’t explain even to you. But it’s not too late for us, Dot, for you and me. We know each other now but there is so much more to know. Please don’t walk away from me again.’

  There are just four of them left at the table now that everyone else has gone home, or five counting Rosie, who has slept through all the clearing up and the farewells. The rubbish is packed into the bins, a box of empty bottles stands by the door, and from the kitchen the sound of the dishwasher is all that disturbs the silence.

  ‘I’m glad Lexie and Patrick took Dot home with them,’ Phyllida says. ‘It seems the right way to end the day.’

  Margot leans back in her chair with a cup of tea, watching Emma, who is watching Rosie. Watching is what she’s been doing these last few months: watching rather than trying to intervene, suggest, counsel. Watching rather than fixing or sending out waves of worry and frustration. And now, as she sits here watching her daughter, a catalogue of several years of her own useless attempts to fix Emma runs through her head, alongside the more torturous list of Emma’s own attempts to fix herself. Long after Margot had caught on to the fact that her efforts to reach her daughter weren’t working, she had still burned with the maternal longing to take on the burden of Emma’s distress.

  Emma shifts in her chair. ‘I don’t understand how she didn’t work it all out herself before now,’ she says. ‘All the clues were there: the Polish wife, the surname. It’s weird.’

  ‘She did know the surname,’ Laurence says, ‘but Kelly is a very common name.’

  ‘And she didn’t know his wife was Polish,’ Margot adds, ‘nor even that Patrick was adopted.’

  ‘It’s an incredible thing to face, your past life unravelling like that, especially at our age,’ Phyllida says.

  Emma finishes her tea and pushes the cup away. ‘It’s all so weird,’ she says. ‘Like being a minor character in a soap opera or a saga – one of those books about families and friends that stretches out over years and weird things keep getting revealed. Only in this case they’re all crammed into just over a year.’

  ‘Not such a minor character, Em,’ Margot says.

  ‘Yes, but your lives are so complicated. Families are complicated, I suppose, and we just take it all for granted, until something happens to make us start asking questions.’

  ‘Or until you read the novel,’ Laurence says, glancing across at Margot with a grin, ‘in which family history masquerades as fiction, and characters act out the roles of parents, children, aunts, uncles, old friends and new lovers.’

  ‘You haven’t, Margot!’ Phyllida says. ‘You haven’t written about us?’

  Rosie stirs in her chair, rubs her eyes and looks around her, blinking at the light.

  ‘Oh, Mum, no!’ Emma says. ‘Please say it’s not about us. Tell me I’m not in it.’

  Laurence throws back his head and laughs. ‘Who knows what Margot’s written? She’s being very cagey about it. Does it include a gay husband or the dark secrets of a dead brother-in-law?’

  ‘Mum,’ Rosie says, grabbing Emma’s arm, ‘I want to sit with you. Mum, pleeeease.’

  Emma gets up and slides down into the big chair with Rosie, pulling her across her lap, putting her arms around her. Rosie snuggles up, bleary eyed.

  ‘Is there any juice?’ she asks, and Phyllida pours some into a glass and hands it to her.

  ‘Shall I take you up to bed, darling?’

  Rosie gulps the juice and shakes her head. ‘I want to stay with Mum,’ she says, shifting around to find a comfortable position.

  ‘Come on then, Margot,’ Laurence says. ‘Own up.’

  Margot shakes her head. ‘You all amaze me,’ she says. ‘Do you think I have nothing to write about, nothing to say, that doesn’t need you lot as its focus? Haven’t you heard of fiction, or imagination?’

  ‘But does it have a happy ending?’ Emma asks.

  Margot hesitates. ‘I think … I hope it has a satisfying resolution,’ she says.
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br />   The early morning sun is kinder than the scorching heat of the last week, but even so, as she sits in her little garden with coffee and a croissant, Vinka wishes it would rain. Her plants are barely holding out against the endless summer heat. Still, this morning she feels pleasure in the very ordinary things, the brush of a leaf against her arm, the sound of a neighbour talking to her cat, the comforting knowledge of her proximity to the city. A weight has lifted and although it has left her with some sadness, there is also satisfaction.

  Vinka has long had questions about Patrick’s biological father, questions she has never been able to ask. Only once had she come close to voicing them and then it was to Beate in a gentle attempt to nudge the subject open, to see if Beate saw what she saw. Patrick was eighteen at the time, nineteen perhaps, studying at university. He was in the garden, helping Jerzey to build a chicken coop, while Vinka was inside the house with her sister. As she watched them from the window, the similarities she had noticed in the past seemed more marked than ever.

  ‘Do you think,’ Vinka had asked, taking Beate’s arm and drawing her over to the window, ‘that it is possible for a child who is adopted to be so close to his father that he grows to look like him? Is that scientifically possible?’

  ‘Children copy things,’ Beate had said. ‘Sometimes I see that Patrick has the same gestures as Jerzey, sometimes he sounds a little the same. But he cannot grow to resemble him physically.’

  ‘But look,’ Vinka had persisted. ‘The two of them together. They’re so alike they could almost be father and son.’ She was so sure she was right that she had almost convinced herself that Beate knew something that she did not. Had she and Jerzey arranged for him to father a child with someone else so that they could adopt it? These things happened, people found all sorts of ways to get what they wanted.

  ‘You think so?’ Beate had asked, tilting her head to one side, screwing up her eyes as she watched them. ‘I can’t see it. The height is the same, yes, but they are not much alike in other ways.’

  Now Vinka wonders if Beate lied to her. Had she known the truth and pretended that she couldn’t see it because she wanted it hidden? When Dot’s name and photograph started to appear in the papers, had she gone back to that waiver, looked again at the signature? Had she started asking questions? Had Jerzey told her? If he had it would further explain Beate’s interest in Dot and her unfolding career. Was that her way of coming to terms with Jerzey’s past? By getting to know Dot through her writing was Beate defusing her own fear of the woman who had loved her husband and whose child she had adopted? Vinka favours this explanation. She favours it over the one which says that Beate was deceived all her life. She prefers it for the reasons Dot gave her in the hospital.

  ‘Take the risk,’ she had said, ‘bet on the love, on the happiness, at our age we have no time left for caution.’

  And so Vinka chooses her truth, she makes it her truth, her bet on love, a truth which is life-enhancing and with which she can be a part of Patrick’s future with the people both he and she have come to love.

  THIRTY-TWO

  It’s April and still it feels as though the summer will never end. They walk together along the paved pathways between banks of scorched grass that have fallen short of the reticulation, and alongside the greener surrounds of graves where even the freshest of flowers are wilting in the heat.

  ‘It’s this way, I think,’ Phyllida says, taking off her sunglasses. ‘This place is enormous and the signs aren’t very good, are they?’

  ‘There’s a seat there in the shade,’ May says. ‘We could sit down for a minute and try to locate ourselves on the map.’

  Phyllida pulls a water bottle from her bag and gulps some. ‘Excellent idea. This heat is awful – will we ever get some rain? I should have suggested early morning or late in the afternoon.’

  ‘Well we’re here,’ May says, ‘that’s what matters. I’ve been in here before to a funeral but not from this direction.’

  ‘Same here. I’ve always parked over on the other side because it’s nearer the chapel.’ Phyllida holds out the water bottle. ‘Want some?’

  ‘I’ve got some here, thanks,’ May says, rummaging in her bag. ‘When are you moving house?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ Phyllida says, patting her forehead with a tissue. ‘I can’t believe how much there is to do, but at least I’ve found a place. It’s much smaller of course, but rather sweet, with a really lovely garden, not far from the golf club, and on the bus route.’

  ‘Bus?’ May raises her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you were a bus person, Phyllida.’

  ‘I’m not, or at least I haven’t been. I’m wedded to my car, but I’m trying to think ahead. An old friend of Margot’s, now a friend of mine, stayed with me over Christmas because she’d had a fall. It made me think that I’m approaching a time when, unlikely as it seems right now, I may not be able to drive.’

  ‘It certainly does seem unlikely,’ May says. ‘Will your niece go with you?’

  ‘Initially,’ Phyllida says. ‘I’ve asked her to – I’ve loved having her with me and I do rather dread moving in somewhere strange on my own. So Emma said she’d stay for a month or so and then look around for a place of her own.’

  ‘Donald talked about her a lot,’ May says.

  And Phyllida can’t help noticing that May refers to him far more frequently than she herself does.

  ‘He was very fond of her – well, both the girls, but particularly Emma,’ she says. ‘We had both very much wanted a child of our own.’

  ‘I have a daughter,’ May says, taking off her sunglasses and polishing them on the tail of her white shirt. ‘She’ll be thirty-two next month.’

  Phyllida swings around to face her. ‘Really? You never mentioned her before.’

  May shrugs. ‘We haven’t talked much, except about Donald and this situation.’

  Phyllida hesitates. ‘Did Donald ever meet her?’

  ‘No. Alice lives in Hong Kong and when she did visit here she always refused to meet him. She disapproved of us,’ May says with a wry smile. ‘She lectured me at length about the relationship.’

  ‘How sad for you. So you had no one to confide in?’

  ‘No one at all,’ May says. ‘You’re right, it wasn’t easy. Shall I have a look at the map?’

  Together they pore over the crumpled photocopy, finally locating themselves and the place they are heading.

  ‘We should have saved some water for the flowers,’ Phyllida says, dropping her own empty bottle into a nearby bin. And they walk on, and fortunately there is a path they can take through shade, to a far corner of the cemetery and a line of small bare graves close to an old peppermint tree.

  ‘It’s one of those, it must be,’ Phyllida says. And side-by-side they move slowly along, stopping eventually at a narrow plot with a modest, white headstone.

  ‘There,’ May says, ‘there it is. Look … Tony Stiles died 3 August 2002, age unknown.’

  The tapering leaves of the peppermint, moved by a sudden breeze, brush Phyllida’s hair but she stays as though fixed to the spot, swamped by a surge of sadness and anger.

  ‘The Salvation Army looked after the funeral and put up the headstone,’ she says eventually. ‘After he died, when the police were trying to trace relatives, someone from the Salvos’ hostel recognised the photograph. He’d stayed there on a couple of occasions, but no one seems to have known anything about him. He’d been living on the streets for years. He was so young, the file said sixteen or seventeen years. He was just a kid who fell through the cracks.’

  May bends down to pick up an empty glass jar that has been left on the grass between the graves. She takes it to the nearby tap and fills it with water, unwraps the flowers they have brought with them and sets the jar close to the headstone.

  ‘Next time we should bring a vase,’ she says, stepping back.

  ‘Next time?’

  ‘We will come again, won’t we?’

  Phyllida pauses, looking a
t her. ‘I was intending to come again, yes.’

  ‘So perhaps … I mean, if you would like to we could come …’

  ‘Together? Yes, I’d like that. You know, May, someone somewhere must have known this boy. A parent, a friend, a social worker. No one seems to have searched for long – too many other priorities, I suppose – but I want to try. It’s a long time ago but somewhere someone might be waiting for him …’

  ‘Yes, hoping he’ll come back, or even just waiting to know why he doesn’t.’

  ‘I think so,’ Phyllida says. ‘And I’d like to find them, to tell them. It seems like a very small way of paying him some respect. Would you … could we … ?’

  ‘Yes,’ May says. ‘I would like to do that.’

  ‘Then we’ll do it together,’ Phyllida says. ‘It seems the right thing to do.’

  Lexie rings the bell and stands on the step holding a large cardboard box, waiting for Patrick to open the door.

  ‘Oh! It’s you,’ he says, opening it and taking the box from her. ‘Where’s your key?’

  ‘Forgot it,’ she says.

  ‘Okay, what’s in the box? Oops, it rattles.’

  ‘Yes, careful, it’s crockery.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It’s the first box. There are more in the car.’

  ‘But what … ?’

  ‘I’m moving in,’ she says.

  Patrick puts the box on the kitchen table. ‘But I haven’t asked you yet.’

  ‘You asked me in November and then again at Christmas.’

  ‘Yes, and you said ask again at Easter. It’s not Easter yet.’

  ‘It’s only another week, so I decided not to wait,’ Lexie says.

  ‘What if I’ve changed my mind?’ he says.

  ‘Too late, I’m here, and so is my best tableware, and in the car there’s more and some bed linen and a couple of suitcases of clothes.’ She drops her bag on the table and puts her arms around his neck. ‘Just try changing your mind now and see what happens.’

  ‘I actually think I’m onto a really good thing,’ he says. ‘Your tableware is much nicer than mine. But why? Why so suddenly? Why not wait until Easter so that you could torture me a bit longer?’