There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham Page B

she’d given up smoking so threw the cigarette in her basket and stuck a Nicorette patch on her arm.
    Margery watched her get into a low, silver car with red trim. To Margery, it sounded like a tractor, but across the road Tyson said to his flatmate, ‘That’s a 1970 XY GT Falcon.’ Next door, both the surveyor and the bloke in the orange reflector jacket taking soil samples paused to watch the car drive away.

You can’t see anything from these windows, just treetops and buildings. And the windows don’t open. The colour scheme is very dull, and there’s only one picture of some fruit, but the towels are soft and the bed is comfortable. Nice crisp sheets, hospital corners. Very neat. In fact, it’s a bit impersonal, like the rooms at Pat’s nursing home. I’ll admit I was saved from the nursing home by Florence, and I suppose I’d have to include Anita in that as well, but as you can tell, a week living with Florence and I’ve decided I’d rather die.
    To go on living with her I’d have to go against every principle I’ve lived by. It’s beyond me how they ever expected I would do that.
    As I sit here thinking about it I see there were signs. I should have woken up to those two. Like mother, like daughter. Florence and Anita Potter. Potter’s an Irish name. Remember we had that girl in our class called Evelyn Potter? Pixies lived at the bottom of her garden. We asked her mother about them and she said, ‘Yes, I’veseen them.’
    Anyrate, Anita’s far too old to wear skirts that short, and all that mascara and that great mess of bright red hair sticking out all over the place. Pat would say it had ‘natural body’, but I think it needs a good trim. And she’s a show-off: ‘You’ve injured your tibia .’ Tibia indeed. She isn’t even a nurse. She’s just a council worker, a house cleaner. Some call themselves home carers, but they don’t care at all, like that Kate. Kate was before Cheryl. She tricked me into going to church once, but it wasn’t really a church, just a bunch of babbling holyrollers running up and down like electrocuted budgerigars. And they had the hide to ask me for money. I told her, ‘God, if he exists, is a fraud!’ After that, I phoned the council and asked for a new carer, and that’s when I got Cheryl. Surprisingly, Cheryl had very good manners. I didn’t know what to expect when they said they were sending this Anita. She turned out to be something else, I tell you.
    In the week between Anita’s first and second visit, my life began to really unravel. Wednesday, I rested, but as I say, I wasn’t injured badly after my little slip in the bath. Mind you, I still have some bruising on my ribs, even now. That day a big backhoe dug a hole where Mrs Bist’s laundry once stood, and what with all the shuddering and the noise of that thing and the workmen bellowing all day in other languages . . . Anyone could tell they were swearing.
    I was able to get up Thursday, pension day, and do my shopping with Mrs Parsons. Pension week we do our Big Shop, so we take the car and go down to Barkly Square. Mrs Parsons always enjoyed her ride in the car, and I drive a mile or two out of our way but it means I can get all the way to the shopping centre with only one right turn against the traffic.
    The first thing Mrs Parsons and I did was go to the ATM. You get money from a machine now, Cecily. Or from the lass at the cash register, and when I booked into this hotel I gave the receptionist thesame little plastic card and she just took money from my account. These days you put in a code or sign a little ticket to let authorised people take money out of your account. Cheryl said everyone is on a police checklist, so no one steals. The receptionist let me sit down while she did it all, and I told her my code because I was exhausted when I got to this hotel. Public transport