Marla moves over to the pot on the stove and shakes it. ‘Joyce,’ she says. ‘Come, Joyce, now you can put beans.’
Joyce steps up beside her. ‘Now you can add the beans,’ she says, automatically.
‘No, no, you put them, because you are make the dish.’
Joyce puts her hand on Marla’s arm. ‘I’m correcting your sentence, not discussing who is doing the cooking,’ she says.
‘Okay, but when we cook we must cook, this be done quickly. Then you correct sentence, now you put the beans.’
Joyce adds the beans to the pan and starts to stir. ‘You’re a tough teacher,’ she says.
‘Just like you I am,’ Marla says with a smile, and proceeds to lead her through the next steps of the recipe.
Joyce watches and listens, paying more attention to Marla than to the recipe. Her broad but somewhat shonky command of English works remarkably well and she has no fear of making mistakes. This woman, Joyce thinks, has the most indomitable spirit she has ever encountered. In the last few years murders and drownings have seared through the family’s long struggle to survive and reach a place of safety, and yet she keeps going. Marla is stoic; invaluable in the class, supporting the other women, encouraging them in their language learning, and chivvying them to venture out of the confines of their temporary accommodation and try new things. She and Joyce have become friends, and although Marla is almost ten years younger than her Joyce feels her presence as a wise, older woman, the same sort of presence that Stella has been in her life. Perhaps that’s a sign of my own ageing, she thinks, still stirring the beans. Perhaps as we get older it’s younger women who start to play that role.
In recent weeks the students have progressed rapidly and the rapport in the group is a delight. Joyce knows she has done a good job but that without Marla’s contribution they would not have made it this far. Last week the two of them managed to persuade several of the shyest members, whose meagre wardrobes were wearing thin, to risk a visit to some of the Fremantle op shops. They had spent a morning cautiously fingering fabric, choosing things and using their new language with the shop volunteers. Joyce had been moved by their obvious pride in what they’d learned, and their pleasure at finding bargains. She’d remembered the stack of boxes of Helen’s clothes, currently stored in their garage, and the two huge trunks of clothes, costumes and fabrics that they had discovered when they cleared Stella’s studio.
‘Of course you can have them,’ Dennis had said when asked about Helen’s clothes. ‘I just didn’t want them to be thrown away, but I can’t think of a better use for them. Helen would approve!’
Joyce thinks that when Polly gets back she’ll talk to her about Stella’s trunks. Maybe they can do another tour of the op shops and find a couple of sewing machines. If only Stella could be on hand with her skills at reshaping and repurposing striking combinations.
Now, as Marla orders her to add spices to the pan, she realises how much she’s enjoying all this, how important it is to have something new and growing in her life: work, new ideas, new friends alongside the old.
‘People was going in that house next door?’ Marla says as Joyce tosses in the last pinch of spice.
‘Really? I missed that. What sort of people?’
‘I see only the big van, this morning. Some furnitures on the pavement.’
‘Well it’s about time,’ Joyce says. ‘First the sign went up, then it was taken down again and nothing happened. It’s been empty for more than a year now.’ The aroma of the spices stings her eyes and she pats them with a tea towel, just as her iPad starts to beep.
‘It’s Gemma,’ Joyce says, ‘she said she’d call today.’ And she hands the wooden spoon to Marla, wipes her hands on a tea towel and clicks on the icon.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Gemma says, ‘what are you up to?’
‘I’m cooking with Marla.’ She beckons Marla over so she can introduce her. And the three of them talk briefly before Marla returns to the cooking.
‘Is everything still going well, Gem?’ Joyce asks now. ‘You and the baby, you’re both all right?’
‘We’re both fine, Mum,’ Gemma says, ‘terrific. I’ve just been for a final check-up . . . I had to get a certificate from the doctor in order to fly.’
‘Fly?’ Joyce feels her heart jump into her mouth. ‘Why are you flying, you’re pregnant, do you have to . . .?’
‘I’m fine to fly, Mum, and so is the baby. And I’m coming home.’
‘Home? What, here?’
‘Well that is my home,’ Gemma laughs.
‘But you said after the baby was born . . .’
‘But I changed my mind, I want the baby to be born at home. I’ll be back in Perth next Wednesday. So do you think you’ll be able to find a space for me and your new grandchild in your busy new life?’
*
Mac draws back his arm and hurls the ball, sending it far and fast above the waterline to drop into the shallows where Charlie, thrilled by the chase, plunges to retrieve it. He stands there watching, massaging his bowling shoulder with his left hand; it’s been giving him a bit of trouble recently, old age probably, and he’s decided against trying to finish the painting this visit. Maybe Dennis will come down and help him with it sometime in winter. They can spend a few more days here together, breaking open a few cans, watching the footy, putting the world to rights. Dennis is doing fine, Mac reckons; he has his own place now and spends a lot of time at the wheelchair workshop. He also has a friend – just a friend, he has been at pains to assure them – who lives nearby. They go dancing twice a week. Helen, he’d reminded Mac, never wanted to go dancing but he’d won some ballroom dancing awards in his youth. Margaret, he says, has also lost her husband of thirty-six years within the last twelve months in similarly sudden and dramatic circumstances and this, above all else, has drawn them together.
The summer has raced away from Mac; they never managed the planned break down here with Ben and Vanessa. Joyce’s work has taken more time than he had imagined, and now he too has been drawn into the support group in a small way, moving their meagre possessions into often grim accommodation, where his skill with a drill, a sander, a few planks of wood and some nails is appreciated. Sometimes he drives people to medical appointments or interviews, helps them to deal with the required form filling. He is humbled by their stoicism and determination.
It is just over a year since he and Joyce began their year of living dangerously, and none of it has been as he had predicted. He can admit now that he has become an old man, doing the things old men do in an old man’s way – more slowly, more carefully, and often more thoughtfully than sometimes in the past. Savouring time, making hours and days matter. Even his grandchildren are old now; they have cars and boyfriends and live in shared houses with people he’s never met. A few years ago he had feared all this, closed his eyes to reality, trying to hold off this stage of life. He had worked on beyond retirement age, believed he would want to go on doing that forever. But now he takes pleasure in other things, savouring this last gift of time, which he had once struggled to hold at bay.
Charlie bounds up to him, soaking Mac’s legs with salty spray, smiling his joyful doggy smile as he drops the ball at his feet. ‘Okay okay,’ Mac says, bending to pick up the ball just as his phone begins to ring. ‘Let me take this call first.’
‘Mac, I need you to come home,’ Joyce says. Her voice is strangely high-pitched and anxiety prickles through his veins.
‘Why, what’s happened? Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Joyce says. ‘Totally fine, wonderful in fact. It’s Gemma; she’s coming home! She’ll be here on Wednesday; she’s going to have the baby here. And she’s coming home to stay.’
Charlie barks impatiently, nudging the hand holding the ball with his hard, wet nose. Mac reaches up and throws it far enough for Charlie’s temporary satisfaction. His daughter is coming home. His heart soars and he longs to hug Joyce, to jump up and down with excitement like a kid.
‘But is that okay though?’ he asks, suddenly anxious as he pictures Gemma squeezing into an airline seat. ‘I mean, she’s not got long to go, is it safe for her to fly?’
‘Apparently it is, she’s just within the restriction if she comes now,’ Joyce says. ‘The doctor has signed her off, she and the baby are fit as fiddles. We need to organise her old room, Mac, maybe we have time to paint it? Get some baby things and . . .’
‘I’ll be on my way in a couple of hours,’ he says. ‘And I’ll call Dennis, we’re a great painting team.’
And he stuffs his phone into his pocket, whistles to Charlie, and strides rapidly across the beach. Being old is fine, he thinks, and it will be even better because he will have real time to spend with this new grandchild, time he missed with the others as he struggled to hold the future at bay. Charlie jumps up onto his old rug on the front seat.
‘Good man,’ Mac says as he starts the engine. Charlie is smiling again, panting, eager as ever for a ride in the car.
‘We’re going home, mate,’ Mac tells him. ‘We’re going home and we’re having a baby.’