by Rosalie Ham
‘I’m off,’ Pat yelled, and Bill looked up at her, his face beyond the green ventilator mask was cyanosed, the trim of his ears necrosis-white.
‘Don’t forget to turn that machine off when the Ventriloquin runs out.’ Her husband raised one finger, and Pat gathered her speech, purse and cardigan and left, stopping to check her hair one last time in the hall mirror.
‘I’ll just get ready,’ Margery said, and Pat told her to get a wriggle on.
She stood next to Lance, who was watching The Mike Walsh Show, his cigarettes and ashtray on the small imitation-teak table next to his oxygen cylinder, a longneck bottle of beer on the floor beside him.
Pat checked the oxygen level in his cylinder. Margery maintained them, changing them when Lance asked her to, easing the taps with generous amounts of oil when they were stiff, but it wasn’t uncommon for Margery to leave the tap loose or even attach him to an empty cylinder, so Lance would end up red-faced and twitching, breathing carbon dioxide. ‘One of these days you’ll blow us all to buggery,’ Pat shouted above the sound of the telly, which made Lance smile and cough. He worked a ball of phlegm into his mouth, pulled the oxygen tube in his nose to the side and expectorated into his mug.
‘A day out might do Marge good,’ she said, and Lance gave her the thumbs-up.
When Margery emerged a minute later wearing her good shoes, white cardigan, her precious pearls, a smear of pink on her lips and an armful of sheet music, Pat said, ‘Marge, there isn’t a person within earshot who doesn’t know you play the piano, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to hear you actually play the piano.’
‘Good,’ Margery lied. ‘I’d prefer not to have to play.’ She popped her sheet music back in the piano seat.
They’d been gone less than five minutes before Lance and Bill tottered down to the pub – Bill, short, round and breathless in a vinyl bomber jacket and Kmart jeans beside Lance, a tall and immaculately turned out man in a mustard-coloured cardigan and grey turn-up trousers. His mouth was open, sucking in air, a green tube reached to the oxygen cylinder rattling behind him, the little trolley wheels going tweet tweet tweet.
So Margery found herself at the top table, the Legacy leaders’ table, a dignitary to her right and Pat on her left, before her a sea of soft brown and blue curls, ample-bosomed ladies, floral and pastel with fleshy earlobes, wattle and dewlaps, all maintained by step-ins and various prosthetics.
Before her, propped against a saucer of geranium petals surrounding a floating Chrysanthemum, was a white card advising the day’s proceedings. First on the program was the local choir, who sang ‘God Save the Queen’. The assembled ladies then sat through number two, ‘Welcome Speech by the Chairwoman’. Number three, ‘The main meal will be served’, was either chicken or ham salad, followed by number four, the choir singing ‘Morning Has Broken’ while the ladies enjoyed a fruit compote with custard. For number five, a lass from St Joseph’s school read a composition titled ‘The Effects of War on Those Left Behind’. Her story was based on the life of her great-grandmother, who had grown her own vegetables and milked her cow and ploughed her own fields during the war with the help of the Land Army. And then it was Pat’s turn. The MC said, ‘I give you Pat Cruickshank and this month’s address, titled “The Unseen Effects of War on Women”.’
Pat bared her teeth to Margery and said, ‘Any fruit seeds stuck to my dentures?’
‘No,’ said Margery, and Pat turned to stand up. At that moment, Margery noticed the tag poking out the neck of Pat’s cardigan. ‘Hang on,’ she said and reached up to tuck it in, when the catch on her wristwatch caught one of Pat’s curls as she rose.
Margery had no idea Pat wore a wig, no idea her hair had snapped off and fallen out after years and years of peroxide and perming fluid, and so Pat stood frozen before the room of fellow legatees, her rival addressees, past and future, the thin tufts of her brittle hair flattened against her shiny, damp pate and her wig dangling from Margery’s wristwatch.
Finally, someone started clapping. Pat had turned deep, deep red and the audience, moved by her brave humility, started to applaud thunderously.
Pat replaced her wig to present her speech, her nasal, bandsaw timbre uncharacteristically subdued, and the chairwoman then gave a moving address about being brave and the silent effects of war, relating how, because there were no dentists and no money, a lot of women lost their teeth, and a lot of women suffered back injuries and prolapses from labouring work, and this, coupled with nervous conditions caused by the hardships of war, meant they had fertility and hormonal problems, which of course, in many cases, led to hair loss. She asked for a show of hands from everyone in the room who’d lost hair because of the war. No one owned up to hair loss but everyone put their hand up for loss of teeth, most owned up to nervous complaints, one for a bowel prolapse and two for uterine prolapse.
Afterwards, Margery pulled up outside Pat’s house and turned to apologise again, but Pat slammed the passenger door so hard the window popped out of its runners and fell into the door. Lance had the window fixed, but it was never the same. Even after so many years had passed, each Saturday and every second Thursday, at every bump the window rattled and Margery grinned at Pat’s bittersweet humiliation.
But Pat had her revenge. At the time Margery outwardly dismissed the spiteful words Pat delivered to her as just that – vengeful – yet they caused a chasm that took two decades to bridge. In those twenty years there were further minor rifts – short, violent skirmishes that took place in the supermarket or at Mrs Bist’s front gate over principles and opinions. But eventually the vitality in the women began to wane with waxing age, and they found themselves one day watching despondently as yet another strange couple moved in and demolished a perfectly good home that had taken someone they had known well a lifetime to build. Margery shook her head and said, ‘Tsk,’ and Pat said, ‘What’s past help should be past grief,’ and this signalled a start to breach the chasm.
You’ll come to understand why I have good reason to dislike Anita, but at the time I was impressed that she took an interest in me. On that second visit, she was dusting the photos on top of the telly when she got to the personal questions. ‘How old are the kids?’
‘Walter Miniver Blandon is my first-born. He’s sixty now,’ I said. ‘The talented one. A champion athlete and very musical. Then there’s Morris Lancelot Blandon who’s fifty-eight, and Judith’s fifty in November, though she tends to celebrate six weeks later because she was premature. You can’t tell now. She looks quite normal, though she’s overweight.’ I was working on a tapestry at the time for Pat, and I remember starting the second ‘gossip’ in Who gossips to you will gossip of you and saying to Anita as I threaded the needle – it was double thread, one of my favourite reds, number 817 – ‘My husband worked at the brickworks for thirty-five years, but my children have all done wonderfully well.’ At the time I truly believed they were all successful. They all had jobs, and if you passed them in the street you’d see they were neat and clean. But cast in the glare of betrayal, I see now that they’re not much chop at all, and I’m really trying to understand why.
I bet Pat would have something to say on the subject.
I know for sure Walter’s a sweet boy at heart, easily led, especially by loose women, but you don’t want to upset him these days. He was always an affable sort of chap but after that last fight Morris started saying, ‘His fists’ll go up and you’ll go down.’ He’s broken a jaw or two over the years, but only when he’s provoked.
‘Judith, well, she wasn’t planned,’ I continued. ‘She bawled every day until she went to school. Lance used to put beer in her bottle to shut her up. She and Kevin from over the road were friends with little Sylvia in the wheelchair from around the corner. Sadly, she’s dead now. They used to take her to the park, and one day she fell off the swings and landed awkwardly over on the cement path. Kevin and Judith told the poli
ceman they were playing on the slippery-dip at the time and didn’t see it happen. The family moved to Queensland after the funeral. These days Judith’s very successful. She has a mobile business, a beauty shop.’
Anita stopped dusting then and looked closely at the photo of Judith. ‘She’s a beautician?’
‘And she’s expanding into psychiatric counselling as well,’ I said. ‘At the moment, though, she drives to people’s places and does their hair and make-up. She got top marks for nail enhancement at the beauty school and her little pink-and-green van says “Judith Boyle – mobile beauty, finesse and panache in all your needs for skin, nails and hair”. Walter says it looks like it’s advertising a knackery. When Walter retired from boxing he became a manager of a lodging house and now he’s studying as well. He’s going to be a chef. And Morris, my second boy, runs a big hotel in Thailand. He lives there. Morris was a boxer as well but Walter was the one with talent, so Lance stopped Morris doing the boxing. ‘Better to find something you can do,’ he said, so Morris decided to be a businessman and that decision has taken him to where he is today.’
Like Walter, Morris had some lost years. I’ve only just found that out, but I’ll get to that.
I didn’t tell Anita that selling cigarettes at school was Morris’s first business venture, nor did I say that I hadn’t actually set eyes on my second-born son since his father’s funeral twenty years ago, but at the time I wasn’t about to share the family secrets with the likes of someone of her calibre. Nor did I tell her that, if the truth be known, Judith’s never really had friends since little Sylvia. There were no bridesmaids at her wedding. Nor mine, now that I think about it . . .
You know, Cecily, I was so excited when I saw I’d given birth to a little girl that I gave her your name, Cecily Judith. Then it became apparent that Judith wasn’t going to be anything like you, so I swapped her name to Judith Cecily. When she left school and got a job as the driveway attendant at the local garage, she said, ‘I’m the face of the petrol station,’ and Morris called from the sleep-out, ‘That’s because you look like a petrol pump.’
Morris was always a bit cheeky, always had a gang of kids following him. He was the first to move out of home, my most independent child. Now that I think about it, I hardly noticed him. Even so, twenty-four years is a long time to hold a grudge over one little fight. I’m talking about the fight he had with Walter at Lance’s funeral service. It took me years to pay off the funeral director. They broke the leadlight picture window of Mary with dead Jesus on her lap, Pietà, and a few chairs, which may seem remarkable since the entire skirmish was over in less than two minutes, but Morris had been drinking and Walter still held the Middleweight Champion title, though he was not long out of rehab. Poor Walter. He took up the drink around the time of the funeral. I didn’t see him for almost ten years and I haven’t seen Morris since, and it pains me. At first I thought, ‘It’s normal, they grow up and move away,’ but twenty-four years is a long time to be away.
I know why now. Everything’s fallen into place.
I nearly lost Walter completely because of the Incident in the Ring, and as I understand it I may never see Morris again, but somehow I’ve managed to hold on to you.
Nothing was the way I thought it would be, like we planned.
Walter’s final championship opponent happened to be a southpaw, which suited Walter’s explosive right. But this southpaw, Rocky Wrecker, was five pounds heavier. Even worse, he had a longer reach.
The trainer held Walter’s face in his hands, looked him in the eyes. ‘He’ll torment you, Walter.’
‘I’m the bull,’ Walter said.
‘His right glove is a red rag, he’s tryin’ to make you fight dirty, lose points. Stay clean, stay calm.’
‘I’m a bull, I’m strong.’
Walter stayed strong. He won the first three rounds on points, though his opponent held him with his beady, unwavering gaze, dancing around him, reaching out to the Brunswick Bull, gently touching Walter’s brilliant black coiffure.
‘Steady as she goes,’ Lance called, hoping his warning words would reach his son through the din.
The corner man pleaded, ‘Ignore the left . . . He’s teasing.’
‘Bull, Bull, Brunswick Bull,’ the crowd chanted. It was early in round four when Walter was distracted by the right glove hovering at his carefully curled forelock. Rage erased the fight plan in his brain and his explosive right shot out, his left shoulder dropped, and Rocky Wrecker’s hair-trigger left swung, catching him hard in the right temple. Walter fell flat, unconscious before he hit the canvas, landing like a dead man on the side of his head. The ringside crowd erupted – booing, hissing, women screaming – and Festival Hall sounded like the inside of a bass drum on Saturday night.
At the pub, the crowd craning up at the TV above the bar fell silent when they witnessed Rocky Wrecker’s first KO, and Walter’s last. A sinking dread filled Pat, as though she had swallowed a shoebox-sized iceblock. Things would never be as good again. The scene before her in the pub was like a photograph from a National Geographic, everyone so still, so captured. She left her bar stool and went straight to Margery, whom she still hated with a burning fury, hoping she had not yet turned on her wireless.
It was a depressed skull fracture. Walter was kept in hospital almost a year and the pictures he retains from that time remain vivid: the dust building on the air-conditioning vent above his bed, the light around him made pale green by the bedside curtains, and the screeching sound that wrenched him from uneasy slumber every morning when the nurse ripped them back. He liked to see how many millilitres of water the domestic put in the plastic jug on his bedside table each day before she came back the next and threw it out. The repetitive, tortuous beeping of machines made him tense and combative, as did the whine of the floor polishers and the noises made by pain. Before he could speak he longed for someone to throw a doona over him; he cried inside from the cold, antiseptic air. Every evening he gagged when the smell of hot soup in plastic warmed the ward and the stench of infection stayed in his nostrils, along with the acrid odour of cigarette-saturated nurses, the nicotine on their fingers made stale by cold night air. He bristled at their hollow encouragement; their bright, cheerless voices; the upward, nasal inflection at the end of a statement: ‘We’re just going to give you a little injection for the pain, all-roioioiot?’ He disliked the carping voices and advertising jingles trilling through the corridors from TVs and radios, but his heart lifted every time he heard the ting of the lift. Sometimes it was his mother. He depended on her voice, day in, day out, low and guiding. His mother’s face was the only one he recognised when it appeared over him in the cold, white ward – ‘I wasn’t prepared to let you go, son, especially on your own’ – but he knew things were missing from his mind. But what? Occasionally, in the physiotherapy ward, stretching and flexing on the low vinyl mattress, a wall of lights, flashbulbs and microphones suddenly appeared. He remembered skipping and sparring, sweat and noise, ding-ding, roaring crowds, thwack, thwack. Thwack-thwack.
The rehabilitation centre was better, things were more straightforward, though at times he found people holding him, tying him down – ‘Steady, steady, calm down’ – but he knew he hadn’t finished the fight, it was only round four. His bedroom was comfortable and he had a bedspread that seemed familiar. He recognised hot taps from cold, came to understand that doors could swing in or out, remembered green meant go and red meant stop, knew to cut up his own food and, once his legs kicked in with the command centre in his head, he was fast enough to get to the toilet in time. He stayed at the rehab centre for a further year, learned to count, learned the value of money, learned to read, care for his personal hygiene and health, establish a routine to live by, a system to fathom the tram timetables. By the time he got to the community house his mind and body were rebuilding, seemingly alone, and he was cooking simple meals, easing his way back into lif
e. Alcohol was forbidden, but he’d been a boxer since he was ten, so he’d never been a drinker anyway.
Then, in 1986, when he was forty years old and finally living the independent life of a pensioner (with the help of weekly visits to therapists), the pub exploded and everything changed again.
As usual, Lance was at the pub that day, propped at the bar, his neighbour Bill next to him, Lance’s oxygen cylinder tucked in close to his bar stools, a beer and an ashtray each in front of them. Morris was there that day as well, sitting where he always sat – within speaking distance of Lance, close to the rear exit with a clear view to the front door, his back to the wall, a muscly, glint-eyed lout either side of him. Lance called Morris’s mates ‘Dubious One’ and ‘Dubious Two’, and he called his second son ‘Dodgy Morry’, but father and son had a trusting relationship – they both trusted each other to keep secrets from the rest of the family.
Morris was in the toilet, handing over a package to an addled customer with Dubious One on watch near the door; the barmaid had just put a fresh beer in front of Lance and Bill before descending to the cellar beneath the bar. Then both Lance and Bill reached for a cigarette. No one’s sure which, but one of the men struck a match. First, there was a flash, and the pub and all its contents jumped. Lance’s oxygen cylinder rocketed through the ceiling, a gas wall heater popped off its brackets, leaving a live gas hose exposed. Then the windows burst from their frames like splashed water; the glasses over the bar exploded from their shelves, splintering the air with razor-edged fragments. The walls popped out and stood an inch away from their foundations, and all the eddying ashtrays, coasters, bar mats, trinkets, trophies, stuffed animals, framed photos, TVs, chips, peanuts, light fittings, bar stools, tables, chairs and patrons were slammed against the walls or thrown through the empty doorways and windows, landing in the street, on the cars or in the park opposite, and for a moment a cloud-burst of flames filled the cavity that was once the main bar.
