Barefoot Tango

By Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

What do you do when everything you cared about is gone?
For Patricia Wells, widowed at forty-two, the question is more than merely hypothetical.
From the lowest point of despair, through the loss of her freedom and everything familiar, Patricia must find a way to reinvent her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tabitha Ormiston-Smith
• Release date: Nov 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215025680

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith was born and continues to age. Dividing her time between her houses in Melbourne and the country, she is ably assisted in her editing business and her other endeavours by Ferret, the three-legged bandit.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Everything was done; there was nothing left to do. The washing was dry and put away, the ironing basket empty. Kitchen and bathroom were both scoured and gleaming, and all the linen was fresh. Yesterday, she’d mown the grass and weeded the garden, although it had never been her job, and she’d struggled for an hour to start the mower. On Friday she’d cleaned all the windows, cleared the gutters and washed the car.

The house was perfect.

Patricia sat, in the exact middle of her recently-vacuumed sofa, and stared at her hands. They were large hands, capable and used to work. Her rings caught the light: the engagement, wedding and eternity rings Harry had given her.

There would be no more gifts.

From the front hall came the gentle, shivering tones of the grandfather clock. Three, four, five… with a dull wonder, she realized she had been staring at her hands for two hours. It was almost time for Harry to get home; soon Borax would start pacing and whining, and then there’d be the scampering run to the front door, and he’d be sitting there, chest thrust out in his Good Dog Sit, when the key turned in the lock.

That wouldn’t be happening, either. She’d buried Borax three days ago. His basket sat empty in the bedroom, with a freshly-laundered cover on the futon, his squeaky beer can and his blue teddy flanking it. If she looked out the window, she’d see the bare mound of his grave in the corner of the back garden, in the shade of the pine tree where he had loved to lie.

They never told you about this. When people talked about bereavement, it was all shock, anger, denial, grief. No one mentioned this emptiness, this limbo of inertia. You were supposed to ‘work through’ your ‘grieving process’, and then you’d get on with your life and do something new. That was how it had been in every book she’d ever read, every film she’d seen, everything their friends had said. You ‘got over it’, and then you ‘went on’.

That was the problem. There was nowhere to go on to. And even if there had been, Patricia thought, she didn’t want to go there. She’d go back – oh yes indeed, with what alacrity she’d go back. But if she did, it would all be in her future again, waiting to drop on her out of the blue. The knock at the door. The two young police women. The dreadful words. The end of her world.

They’d been kind. They’d sat with her as she struggled to take in the unfamiliar phrases (‘there’s been an accident’, ‘died in the ambulance’, ‘sorry for your loss’). ‘Is there someone we can call?’ they had said. And ‘you shouldn’t be alone.’ She had almost laughed, a bitter, upside-down laugh, at that. Indeed, indeed she should not have been alone.

After they had gone, she had sat for hours, just as she was sitting now, staring at her hands as the light changed into evening. Borax had crept up and rested his shaggy head on her knee, and in the end it had been Borax who had got her up and moving. There had been his dinner to be got, and his walk to the off-lead park, the first of many walks where it was just the two of them.

He’d kept her going, had Borax. In those first, terrible weeks, his morning and evening walks had given a rudimentary structure to her day. The necessity of preparing his breakfast and dinner each day reminded her at least to attempt to eat something herself.

He’d been his usual bouncy self at first – a little subdued by her own mood, but essentially the big, scruffy clown he’d always been. But as weeks had given way to months, he had played less and less, and had started to spend most of his day lying in the front hall, one paw extended, his chin on his leg, watching the door.

Waiting for Harry.

By the time summer had given way to autumn, his appetite had begun to fail. Increasingly, he had left part of his dinner, and the bowl of kibble had had to be refilled less and less often. On their walks, he stayed close to her, pacing along, pressing against her leg even when he was off-lead. And then on Thursday, she’d woken early, before it was even light, and had seen that he wasn’t in his basket.

She’d found him at his post in front of the door, one paw stretched out, head resting on his leg, his unseeing gaze on the door. At some time during the night he had come down the hall to take up his position, and had quietly slipped away to join Harry.

She was the only one left behind.

It had taken her four hours to dig a grave of sufficient size, labouring with the unfamiliar tools, working at first by moonlight, then the cold light of dawn. She had carried him out and lowered him into the grave, her back screaming. There was no need to arrange him; rigor had set in, and he was locked forever in the teardrop shape of hound position, her good old lurcher. She had sat by the side of the grave in wordless communion until the sun was high, and her abused muscles had stiffened to the point where standing cost her a sharp gasp of agony. Then she’d returned to the house for Harry’s dressing gown.

She hadn’t washed it, had left it hanging on its hook, keeping his good Harry smell for a single, deep sniff every night before she went to bed. Her secret comfort, it had been. Now, she spread it over Borax, covering the sightless eyes, sheltering the grey fur from the rain of dirt.

Then she had taken the shovel and buried the remains of her life.

CHAPTER TWO

The clock was chiming again, its tones fainter than before. Seven o’clock. With faint, uncaring surprise, she realised she was no longer sitting on the sofa. She was standing in the bathroom, now, staring into the open medicine cabinet.

Everyone had been very kind, those first days. Every day someone had come round. That had lasted a couple of weeks. Marjorie Bennett had stuck it out the longest, had driven her to the funeral parlour, to the shops, and finally, after considerable nagging about weight loss and undereye bags, to the doctor, where a harried G. P. prescribed some sleeping pills and warned her never to take them three nights in a row.

She was holding the bottle now.

Patricia shook herself and closed the cabinet. Time to start thinking about dinner; it was already after seven.

In the kitchen she stood aimlessly for a time, then moved to the window to draw the blind against the encroaching night. Something banged against her leg as she moved, and she thrust a hand into the pocket of her skirt, and drew out the little bottle of pills.

In the gathering dark, her mind returned to the past, taking out memories, turning them over lovingly, as she might examine treasured possessions from a casket.

The day she’d met Harry. She’d been the boss’s secretary, he the new accountant. Richard had brought him around to meet all the staff; she’d been typing up his letters from the Dictaphone. How she’d hated that awful machine. Harry had blushed when they were introduced, and as he turned to follow Richard to the next office, he’d tripped over his own feet.

Her throat was dry. She got up to fetch a glass of water, and sat down again, in her time-honoured place at the kitchen table. She always sat in this chair, and Harry sat opposite, with Borax usually at his elbow to receive toast crusts.

Their first date. He’d invited her to a picnic at Yarra Bend, to watch the bats take off for the night. She’d been so impressed; no tired old dinner-and-a-movie, but a real new experience. They’d sat in the twilight, watching the bats as they began to awaken, their long, slow stretching and flapping, warming their muscles for flight. A few little squabbles broke out, but mostly they seemed so calm. And then, as the light faded, they started to take the sky, in ones and twos at first, then more and more until the sky was almost black with them and the air was filled with their skreeking cries. It had been a magical time.

The top was off the bottle. When had she done that?

It had taken him an hour to work up to proposing. He’d sat across from her all through lunch, clutching a ring box, having to eat with one hand because of it. It had driven her crazy, but she bit her tongue and didn’t ask. Finally, she insisted they return to the office; they were already twenty minutes late. He’d paused on the building steps and blurted it out, thrusting the box at her. ‘I love you. Please marry me.’ She smiled at the memory. Her poor Harry. Such a klutz.

The day she’d discovered she was pregnant, her joy had been complete. She’d made a special dinner and opened a bottle of champagne, but filled her own glass with sparkling apple juice. ‘To our baby,’ she’d said, raising her glass. Harry had dropped his glass, breaking the set of Venetian champagne glasses her mother had given them for a wedding present. But the happiness of him – not just his face, but his whole body had glowed with it.

Then when she’d lost the baby, he’d been such a comfort; all clumsiness set aside, he’d nursed her through it, taking days off work and waiting on her hand and foot, sponging her forehead with lavender water (he’d read about it in an historical novel), heating soup, sitting by her bed holding her hand in silent sympathy as she lay staring at the ceiling, the slow tears running.

Later, when the doctor told them there could be no more attempts, that there would never be a child, he’d held her and comforted her and talked soothingly about adoption.

She’d been devastated when the adoption people turned them down. They were too old, the woman had said, the patronising smirk overlaying her face like a lace veil. Too old and not rich enough.

The bottle was on its side, pills spilling out onto the clean tablecloth. Her water glass was empty. She got up to refill it at the tap, stumbling at a moment of dizziness.

The years had rolled by after that. There had been moments of great joy, and times of darkness and sorrow, but always there had been the quiet comfort of their shared bond, a slow river running beneath the hills and valleys of their lives, an undercurrent of deep happiness that never quite went away, even when she lost her parents.

She was tired now. She’d think about the things she had to do later. She rested her head on her arms and felt sleep rise up like those imagined childhood pavement bears, to drag her down to its underground lair.

CHAPTER THREE

Someone was shouting, far away. ‘I can’t wake her,’ came the voice. It seemed familiar, but Patricia was warm and comfortable; she let the voice go, and it swam away in the dark...

She felt movement and a sharp pain in her chest. She moaned faintly and the pain stopped.

‘GCS Two,’ said someone, close to her ear. ‘Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?’ said another voice. They were bothering her. She slipped away, hiding in the comforting dark…

The light was very bright. It hurt her eyes, even though they were closed. She felt movement. Don’t jostle me, she thought. There were voices, too, but she couldn’t make out the words. There was a sharp smell in her nostrils; it made her think of laundry. Her head felt fuzzy and unfamiliar. She was lying on her back, she realised, but could not muster any interest, and presently she slipped back into the dark pool of forgetting.

Someone was shaking her shoulder. ‘Can you hear me,’ he kept saying. ‘What’s your name?’ There seemed to be a lot going on in the background; she had a great sense of bustle. Voices rose and fell just below the threshold of comprehension, and there were beeping sounds, like some machinery.

Someone was holding her hand. ‘It’s alright,’ said a voice, a woman this time. ‘You’re going to be okay. We just need to know what you took.’

‘No, no, we’ve got that,’ interposed a second voice. ‘The lady who found her grabbed the bottle, here you go.’

The hand holding hers disappeared, and there was a muttered confabulation. Her hand, suddenly freed, felt damp and a little sticky. She turned her head away from the voices and sighed. If only the light weren’t so bright. She could almost slide back into that warm, comfortable absence…

The light was bright, it hurt her eyes and she squinched them closed against the glare. Everything hurt… she became aware of hands on her face, forcing her mouth open, something going into her mouth. She gagged, choking for a moment, then the relentless pressure of whatever it was forced something, a long something, down her throat. It hurts, she wanted to cry, stop it. There was a slishing and a sloshing, and a sensation of pressure in her stomach, and a strange, unpleasant odour. The object in her throat seemed to pulse; it hurt, hurt terribly, like the worst sore throat she could imagine, as if the thing, whatever it was, had been a cheese grater, shredding delicate membranes with its passage. Sensations crystallised into a now, and she opened her eyes, flailing with her hands, pushing away, away, leave me alone…

Someone was speaking close by her ear, very loudly, almost shouting. ‘Open your mouth. Swallow, you have to swallow it.’

She tried to clench her teeth shut against the invasion of her throat, but there was something between her back teeth now, preventing her from closing. The voice continued, relentless. It had an unpleasant, whiny tone. ‘Don’t fight it. Swallow,’ it kept repeating.

She was surrounded by people in dark uniforms, police, were they, no not police, they had funny little caps on their heads… what… a hospital, she was in a hospital, and these people were nurses. ‘Please,’ she tried to say, ‘please, what’s going on,’ but the tube, she now saw, going into her mouth stopped her speech and all that came out was a blurred moan.

One of the nurses leaned in. ‘Patricia? We’re pumping your stomach. Just hold on, try to relax, it’ll soon be over.’

‘How do you know my name,’ she wanted to ask. ‘How did I get here? What’s going on?’ But the tube defeated her efforts at speech, and she sought in her mind that place of dark respite, but the lights and the noise and the pain drove her away from it, and she sank back passive against the bed, waiting for it all to be over.

There followed a time of utter misery, of vile discomfort, of heaving so strong that her stomach muscles felt as if they were being ripped open and she wondered if it were possible to disembowel oneself by prolonged vomiting. She lay on the hospital bed and panted, and tried to summon her strength to ask for water, but when they helped her to sit up again, it was not a cool, soothing sip but the tube again, and it hurt even more the second time, but not as much as it did the third time, or the fourth. By that time she was hardly conscious of anything beyond pain, and the battling needs of her body, to rest her abused muscles and to void her stomach.

They let her rest for a while after it was over, although a nurse remained at her side, and in a remote corner of her mind she registered soothing talk and more hand-holding. She wished they wouldn’t; she didn’t want to be pawed and cooed at, she wanted to be left alone, but she hadn’t the energy to object, so she lay passive, her eyes closed against the fierce overhead lights, and drifted.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Patricia? They said I could see you for a minute. I’ve got to get home, but are you going to be alright? Is there anything you need from home?’

‘Marjorie? What are you…’ her voice croaked into silence. She took a sip of water from the paper cup at her bedside and tried again. ‘What are you doing here? What happened?’

‘I thought I’d better stay, until you were… well, anyway. Can I bring you anything? It’s nearly nine, I need to get going, but I’ll come back tomorrow. Do you want anything from home? A nightie or anything? Your toothbrush and things?’

Patricia struggled to sit up, and Marjorie, ever helpful, arranged pillows behind her, and started fussing about with the sheets; Patricia grabbed her wrist to stop her.

‘Marjorie. Just tell me what happened?’

Marjorie developed a cornered look, like someone trapped by the Party Bore. ‘Um, what do you mean, what happened?’

Patricia sighed. ‘Well, look, here I am in hospital, last thing I remember I was at home, thinking about dinner, so something happened. And you’re here, so I suppose you’re part of it, so tell me, what?’

Marjorie’s face took on a familiar expression, the Being Patient one. It was the most common, and also the most irritating, of her expressions. Patricia knew it like a brother. Don’t be so intolerant, she chided herself. Marjorie’s kind, she means well, she always wants to help.

‘Sweetie, you took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I found you passed out at the kitchen table. I’d popped round to see if you wanted to go to the market tomorrow, and you didn’t answer the door, so I went round the back and looked in the window, and there you were. And I couldn’t wake you, so I called the ambulance. And here you are,’ she finished, rather lamely. ‘Thank God I was in time.’

Patricia nodded numbly, and acquiesced to Marjorie’s coming back tomorrow with nightgowns and toothbrushes and things, just as she had always acquiesced to Marjorie’s suggestions. It was just too much trouble not to. Presently, Marjorie departed, in a conscious aura of Doing Good. Patricia lay back and closed her eyes.

The respite was brief, however. Presently, the clicking of heels announced another visitor.

‘Patricia? I’m Doctor Bowen. I’ll be giving you a psychiatric assessment.’

‘A what?’ Why, she was about to say, but it was all too clear why. Somehow, she’d swallowed a bottle of pills. Or they thought she had. Marjorie thought so, and she’d told the ambulance people, and now it was an established fact as far as the hospital was concerned, despite the fact she couldn’t remember any of it.

The doctor pushed the visitor’s chair around to face her. She opened a clipboard and looked expectantly at Patricia. ‘I need to ask you some questions, alright? Nothing hard.’ Her voice had that bright, overly cheerful sound that people often use when speaking to small children or the elderly. I’m only forty-two, Patricia thought. You don’t need to talk to me as if I’m senile. She said nothing.

‘Alright! Now, has anything stressful happened in your life recently?’

Was she insane? Patricia had spent the last two hours having plastic tubes forced down her throat, in between bouts of vomiting violently. She’d woken in a strange place surrounded by strange people, with no memory of how she’d got there. As far as stress was concerned, she reckoned she was operating at capacity. It must be a rhetorical question, she decided, so she didn’t answer it.

‘Patricia, I need you to talk to me. Now, did anything stressful happen recently?’

Patricia sighed. She just didn’t know what to tell the woman. If she didn’t think the experiences of the last few hours had been stressful, what would she consider was?’

‘Ah, when you say stressful…’ she trailed off invitingly, eyebrows raised.

‘Anything that upset you particularly?’

Patricia sighed again, a long, mournful exhalation. She felt tears starting, and turned her head away. What could she tell this crisp, buttoned-up person, with her clipboard? Nothing stressful had happened. Patricia understood ‘stressful’, if it wasn’t plain physical distress like the events of the last few hours, to mean something that induced fear, or worry. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling anxious or worried again. Everything bad had already happened.

‘No…’ she breathed.

‘Okay. Now, have you ever thought about harming yourself?’

Was she talking about self-harm? Patricia had read about troubled teenagers who sliced themselves with razor blades. She supposed that was what it meant.

‘No, never,’ she said, her voice gaining a little strength. ‘Of course not.’

The doctor frowned and wrote something on her clipboard. Patricia couldn’t see what it was, but then she wasn’t really interested. She didn’t want to know. If she wanted anything at all, it was to be left alone, and even that was only the shadow of a desire. There just wasn’t energy for more.

‘Are you able to wait for further assessment and treatment?’

What kind of question was that? When did people in hospitals and doctors’ offices ever do anything but wait, and wait, and wait? Ridiculous, she thought. She shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Good!’ The doctor’s tone was bright, artificially so. She’ll be giving me a pat on the head and a jellybean next, Patricia