Read Online There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham - Free Book Online Page B

when Margery noticed something sparkling on the third finger of her left hand.
    â€˜Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re not engaged, are you?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Angela said, pausing to smile lovingly at the insubstantial diamond chips sprinkled across the thin gold band.
    â€˜I should congratulate you then,’ Margery said. ‘I’ll have to train another hairdresser now.’
    â€˜You’ll get Toula. She’s good.’
    â€˜No doubt you’ll have a six-month honeymoon in Italy and come back pregnant.’
    â€˜Hopefully.’
    Margery dragged herself home again, limping slightly because of the raw tightness of her injured shin, her eyes on the footpath beneath her sensible shoes, her mind consumed by both Glen and Angela’s betrayal. She stopped briefly outside the pub to scowl at the door, and again in the park to stare hatefully at the young mothers, designer types, expensively dressed in badly finished inside-out clothes, chatting by the safety swings with their babies called Rupert or Maude. Golden retrievers and healer–kelpie crosses tore across the grass, yapping. At home she sat at the kitchen table staring at her good shoes, her cross-stitch and her sheet music in bags at her side, waiting for Kevin.
    Kevin was spying on riders from behind a newspaper in the café opposite the Brunswick Touring Bicycle Club clubrooms. On occasion, he’d done the ‘hell ride’ with them to Mt Eliza, but a misunderstanding with the club saw him ostracised. After several mediation sessions, a quorum used rule 6.1c to declare that Kevin had ‘conducted himself in a manner which, in the opinion of the Committee, was prejudicial to the good order or name of the Association’, and although his natural state was that of outcast, he was still crushed. The dispute was over a lost reflector cuff. Kevin felt the club should replace it since it vanished during an exhibition ride as part of the Brunswick Street Festival, but the club didn’t agree. Thesame thing had happened when he was a member of the local tree planting club and lost a trowel during a Regeneration Day exercise.
    The cyclists set off for Beach Road, a river of bobbing reflective green and yellow flashing red and white moving down Sydney Road, and Kevin set off for the three-block ride to take his elderly neighbour to see his demented mother.
    At three-thirty, he arrived at Margery’s house, showered and shaved, with a bag of Pat’s clean washing, some cans of beer and Fifi, Pat’s Pomeranian – a small, decrepit dog, stained and matted, with flatulence, yellow teeth and halitosis. He took the car keys from the nail behind the kitchen door and went to the shed where he warmed up Margery’s car, an apple-green Hillman Minx that Lance bought brand-new in 1961. Margery ducked into the lavatory one last time then hopped into the back seat with Fifi, gathering her bags to her side – handbag, cross-stitch bag, the bag containing sheet music and her spare bag – fencing Pat’s putrid, rotting dog against the door.
    As he backed out into the lane, Kevin said, ‘I’d like to borrow this car, Mrs B, join the vintage car society,’ but before he could conclude his request, Margery said, ‘This car belongs to Morris.’
    â€˜It’s no use to him where he is, I assure you,’ Kevin said, eyeing her via the rear-vision mirror, but she kept her gaze straight ahead. It was Morris’s car, as written in Lance’s Last Will and Testament. Her second-born son was to inherit the car, and one day he would come home from Thailand, so that was that.
    The nursing home was a modern square building surrounding a central garden. Kevin punched in the code, the doors slid open, and they were embraced by pastel-hued ambiance permeated by a faint humid stench of effervescent, urine-soaked carpet squares and perfumed oil burners. Margery presented her latest lot of