There Should Be More Dancing Read Online Free PDF Page B

for most of those years. Her son, Kevin, takes me to see her in the home every Saturday. Mostly I go so I can play the piano for the old people.
    Like most people around here, Pat worked at the brickworks and drank at that pub, so no wonder she’s got beer dementia. A cold snap last winter followed by an unexpectedly high fatality rate from a new strain of influenza on top of rampant gastroenteritis meant there was room at the local nursing home, but it was actually getting her there that proved difficult. Kevin got her into my car by telling her we were all off to the races. Pat always loved a day at the races. We got her as far as the footpath before she suspected something. It was the suitcase. She attached herself to the lamppost and said, ‘Since when do we need a suitcase to go to the races?’
    â€˜We’ve been to the races,’ Kevin said. ‘The suitcase is full ofmoney.’
    She just gripped that pole harder and said, ‘I don’t remember that.’
    Kevin asked, ‘Do you know where you are now?’ and she said she knew exactly where she bloody was.
    â€˜Where?’
    She hugged the pole tighter, looked up and down the street and said, doubtfully, ‘At the races?’
    Kevin shook his head, so Pat said, ‘You’re right. I’d never invite Margery Blandon to the races.’
    I wouldn’t have gone anyway.
    Kevin said, ‘Mrs Blandon’s kindly driving us because we’ve got the suitcase.’
    â€˜Where to?’
    â€˜To the races.’
    Then it was like a light went on inside Pat’s mind and she said, ‘Liar,’ and grabbed the suitcase. ‘We’ve been to the races.’
    â€˜And now we’re going home,’ I said and smiled reassuringly.
    When we got to the nursing home, Pat said, ‘I can’t see any horses,’ and wedged herself into my car like an umbrella in a birdcage.
    She always said, ‘Kill me before you put me in one of those places.’
    The truth is, and I’m ashamed to say it, but I was secretly gleeful when Kevin put Pat in a home, but I’m eating humble pie now. I’m not demented, and I get home help from the council, so there’s absolutely no reason why I should I be locked up in a home, nor do I deserve to be forced by my very own children to live with that demented adulteress Florence. I used to feel sorry for Mrs Parsons, not having any children, but it seems to me at this point that they just cause you pain. Look at Mrs Bist; she had all those foster kiddies,hundreds of do-gooder friends and even a niece, though she moved to America. Fat lot of good they all were to Mrs Bist in the end. None of them went to her funeral. Then her so-called friends came, the ladies from the Catholic Opportunity Shop – packed up her house and shot through with the lot.
    And I didn’t want Cheryl to leave me either, but she said, ‘You’ll find the new home help, Anita, is actually nice, once you get used to her .’ I should have woken up that something was afoot, but I didn’t.
    There’s a lot of things I didn’t wake up to.

The morning after her so-called birthday party, Margery was woken by an explosion. She jolted awake thinking the pub had exploded again, expected to see dust billowing out over the park and the grass glinting with sprinkles of shattered glass. But it wasn’t the pub. It was a truck backing away from Mrs Bist’s precise little house, beep beep beep . A jogger bobbed out of the dust cloud rising around a large waste-removal bin settling on the street.
    Margery lay back again, her heart lurching. She watched another truck arrive and roll a small excavator off its back. It ground up the kerb, over the melaleuca sapling the council had planted and straight through Mrs Bist’s small brick fence. It stopped and waved its arm at the front verandah, scraping the posts from beneath the corrugated iron roof. A second later the front