Rita is still standing by the front gate staring out across the paddocks that are slowly swaying in moonlight and shadow. The three men standing on the dry lawn near the house are slowly becoming muttering drunks. She doesn’t speak to them, they don’t speak to her. Past the houses, the low grassy paddocks go on forever. If only there were some trees. Something to break the flat lines of the paddocks, the dirt streets and the square houses that sit on them. But there aren’t. The trees have all been swept away to make room for the square houses.
The music of the party is not inviting. She’d like to dance. In her new dress, she’d like to be dancing. The way she used to. The way they used to. There are times when she thinks she was never so happy as when she was dancing. But Vic has started drinking and already she can tell there’ll be no dancing tonight.
He can dance, all right. He’s one of the best. When he wants to be. Not that he ever dances with me any more. The only dancing he ever does at home these days is when he comes to bed drunk and he’s trying to get his trousers off. He does this little jig, hopping from one foot to the other. Sometimes he does a low whistle to accompany himself, and it could even be funny, but it’s not. It happens too often, this little jig of his. Then, when he stops hopping from foot to foot, and he finally gets his trousers off, he flops into bed on his back and snores all night. He starts off low, but then he gets into his rhythm. Pretty soon the snores rattle the venetians and the room stinks of grog. Like the stink of a public bar. Not that I’ve been in one for years, not since I was a child and my mother dragged me through some pub in Prahran one afternoon looking for my papa. But sometimes I’m passing a pub in the city, the door flies open and the stink pours out like bad breath from a drunk’s mouth. And that’s the smell that fills the bedroom in minutes. Along with the snores. He’s on his back with his nose in the air. And sometimes, sometimes the snores come out of him like steam from a train’s stack. He’s getting a real hooter on him these days. And it’s getting bigger and fleshier with the years and the booze. Pretty soon we’ll be able to stand him in the hallway and use him as a hat stand, ’cause he’s getting the kind of hooter you could hang your hat on. And just when he’s sleeping quietly he snorts, wakes himself for a few minutes and mumbles something in the dark. Then he bounces around on the bed like there’s nobody else in it, before he’s snoring again and filling the room with all the grog he’s just filled himself up with. So there’s no more dancing in our house. Just a drunken jig as he takes his pants off before bed and a night of snoring.
That was the end of the double bed. Even as I said it to him one morning, after he’d snored his way through the night and I’d lain there beside him trying to sleep in between the snores. Even as I said it, even as I opened my mouth and my speech crossed the kitchen table towards him, I could hear my mama’s words in my ears saying once the double bed is gone the marriage is gone.
But I didn’t care, and that old, dark, stained, barge of a bed, that took up half the room anyway, was taken apart and carried out the front door in bits. I hated it anyway. It reeked of old rooms. Old people. Old bones, old skin and old breath. I’d watched my mother slowly dying in a bed like that, and now I felt like I was doing the same thing. Going the same way. We bought it second hand and even when we bought it the thought occurred to me that people died in beds like that. And some nights, I swear, I could still see the ghosts of all the old things who’d ever slept and died in that bed, sitting up in it, white-faced and white-haired with their potties in their hands and their doyleys over their potties, just like mama. No, I was glad to see the ugly thing go. It gave me the creeps.
So the old bed went out in bits, and in came two single beds of clear, varnished pine. As soon as they were assembled they lit the room up. I picked them because I knew they would. And I could see them with clean sheets and blankets, and the bright new quilts I’d bought the week before.
I had my own bed again. My own bedside lamp. My own corner of the room.
Rita’s eyes leave the vacant paddocks and turn back to the party. She can see the silhouettes of the guests through the windows of the house as they dance and move about from room to room. There’s an old song playing and she can hear Bedser’s English friends singing along the way the English do when they all get together and an old song is played.
This makes her smile, and as she’s smiling Evie opens the screen door and steps back on to the front path. She has a brown bottle of chilled beer in her hand and smiles at Rita as she walks towards the front gate.
‘No luck’, she says. ‘I’ll try him again when we’ve drunk this. I know where he is and he doesn’t look like he’s moving.’
Evie tilts the bottle and pours the chilled beer into Rita’s glass. And as Rita listens to the sing-along inside, and as she watches the dancing bubbles in her glass rise to the surface, she’s glad of the company. And the beer tastes good. She might even have another. Not that she can keep up with Evie, because Evie is throwing them back a bit.