There Should Be More Dancing Read Online Free PDF Page A

love?’ Then she pointed her red toenail at my piano and said, ‘How about a song?’
    I said, ‘You think life’s all about singing and dancing, don’t you?’
    â€˜To be truthful,’ she said, ‘I’m not much of a singer. Not many people are. Dancing’s a different matter, it’s something everyone can do.’ After a while she pushed her frame out to the front verandah. I heard her harassing the innocent passers-by: ‘Ya haven’t got a cigarette, have ya, love?’
    She got one in the end. Tyson gave her one. Then she came in and plopped down in Lance’s chair, stinking like a pub, like Lance.
    All night I heard her wheelie frame, heading out to the lav, tweet-tweet-tweet , and then back again, tweet-tweet-tweet , and when I got up, I found she’d strung a ball of my cross-stitch thread from the back door out to the lav. ‘It’ll guide me in the night,’ she said, so I complained about her squeaky wheels.
    â€˜No worries,’ she said, ‘I’ll get Walter to put a drop of oil onthem.’
    Then she sees me standing there with my pot to empty, so she says, ‘Better still, I’ll get him to get me a commode. What’s his phone number?’
    I said I didn’t know, and I put a notepad and pencil next to the phone so she could record her phone calls but, in the week she was there, she never did.
    The other thing was, while she was living with me I wasn’t able to talk to you.
    Walter was on Florence’s side from the start. ‘Think of her as a refugee,’ he said. ‘Mrs Bist’d be kind enough to have her.’ I must say, he did have a point. You should always try and do the right thing.
    â€˜Just fink about a flatmate, Mumsy,’ he said.
    Just how long had they been finking about it, I wonder.
    Anyrate, I thought about it for a few seconds and decided she couldn’t stay, but then I looked down the hall and saw Judith pull up, and, well . . . five weeks later it’s come to this . . .
    But I’m getting ahead of the story of my treacherous children and their betrayal.
    You know, just last week, Judith said to me, ‘You never really cared.’
    How could I not care? She’s my daughter.
    Now that I think about it, as I sit here, perhaps it was a bit mean to mention the Incident with the Chair at the cinema, and perhaps I should have let her keep the pearls after her twenty-first, but I didn’t want to give them up just then. They were our mother’s. Our sister, Shirley, got the matching earrings when Mum died. She got your watch as well. I got your hair ribbons. As I say, Judith has mywatch. Stole it sixty-six years to the day after Dad gave them to us. Mind you, that watch did remind me of Pat and the Public Scalping Incident, so I really didn’t mind letting it go. That’s a story for another time. The Chair Incident happened during pensioners’ week.
    Mrs Bist popped in one day with her basket over her arm and her cardigan sleeves pressed to a straight, sharp line. She always stood over me as I sat stitching in my chair, and she always smelled like warm lavender talcum powder. ‘It’s pension week,’ she said all hoity-toity. ‘I insist you go to cinema on the council bus.’
    I said I wasn’t interested in going on a bus but she patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You’ve got to seize all opportunities in life, move with the times. You’ll find it very liberating.’
    But I know now I’ve got to be careful about advice from people who should know better. Frankly, I find cross-stitch the most liberating thing to do. It’s a solitary adventure filled with nice colours and lines, but there’s absolutely no danger, no risk. You can’t get hurt. There’s no room to think of anything else when I have that needle in my fingers. I know exactly where I’m going, how I’ll get there and what will be