Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  She didn’t see Robin again either. But at least Robin was alive.

  Part Three: The Puzzle

  6

  It is the letter that has begun it all, all this long night of happenings.

  There is the sound inside the Puzzle and the sound outside. The children’s voices penetrate most sharply. It is school holiday time and there seems to be no end to children milling around. When Ma Hollis, who lives across the passage from Clara, looks out her window she can see them three storeys below her on the pavement. They scream all day beneath the windows of the chocolate factory, with their demanding cry for ‘choc-lit’, until at last the workers throw gobs of the stuff down onto the street, and then their shrieks mount even higher as they scuffle over each other, fighting and brawling to get to the steaming mounds, and some of the little ones get trampled when they lick the pavement. Their yells seem to go on for hours and often their mothers join in too, sticking up for one or other of them and starting their own fights among themselves.

  Not that anyone blames them, at least not round these streets, though someone coming from the outside might be less tolerant. But if you live in Paddy’s Puzzle it is different, and it matters too, what happens to one another.

  Ma Hollis opens her door and goes a little way down the passage, cocking her head from side to side, stopping to listen.

  ‘They’re something dreadful today,’ Biddy Chisholm says. She stands at the end of the passage trying to decide whether to go down to the street or not. Under her mop of streaky blonde hair, one eye glows with a blue and purple venom.

  ‘Did you put an onion on that eye like I told you?’ Ma Hollis asks.

  ‘That’s for bee stings,’ says Biddy.

  ‘Same difference. Draws it either way.’

  ‘I couldn’t put an onion near my eye. Hurt like a bastard as it was. I oughter go down and see if Kathie’s with that mob again.’

  ‘I’d stay away if I was you,’ advises Ma Hollis. ‘They landed you that lot yesterday.’ She indicates Biddy’s eye.

  ‘I know. But I can’t go letting her get herself knocked around, now can I?’

  ‘I reckon as that kid of yours can take care of herself, if she wants to get herself in it again.’

  ‘Oh damn her,’ says Biddy with sudden conviction. ‘You’re right. I’ve got enough to put up with as it is. I could have killed her last night, I can tell you. I was too sore to see anybody, but I’ll have to tonight. I mean, I will won’t I, I’ll go broke at this rate. I’ll have to take my customers in the dark. Thank Gawd for the blackout, heh?’

  ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Don’t do it with your eye.’

  ‘Some of ’em want an eyeful first, that’s the trouble.’ She draws on her cigarette, coughing on a lungful of smoke, and pulls her frayed green robe around her. Now that she has decided to leave her daughter to the mob below, the effort to move seems more than she can bear to contemplate. She shivers and looks up and down the passage in a disconnected fashion as if she is not entirely sure why she is there. Outside another shriek rents the air, but either Biddy doesn’t hear it or can distinguish that it is not Kathie for she doesn’t flinch this time, even though Ma Hollis shifts uneasily.

  ‘It’s not the kids’ fault, the noise they make,’ she says. ‘When you can’t buy chocolate for love nor money in the city, and there’s a whole factory full of it right next door, and the way it smells, you can’t blame ’em can yuz? ’S’enuff to darn near drive me crazy let alone them kids.’

  ‘Clara used to get it out to them when she worked there. There was nobody like Clara for getting the stuff out to them.’

  ‘Janice does her best.’

  ‘But not like she did when she lived here. Makes a difference.’

  ‘Clara’s a good kid,’ says Ma Hollis.

  ‘Yes,’ says Biddy sombrely. The air is thick and slow between them.

  ‘I better get along the wharves,’ says May. ‘You want fish heads?’

  ‘I should shouldn’t I? But I don’t know that Kathie’ll eat them again tonight.’

  ‘Reckon she should take what’s offered.’

  ‘I reckon we’ll have sausages. I could do with a sausage. Ta, anyway.’

  Ma Hollis and Billy walk down past the gasworks to the wharves. She wears a cherry pink velvet dress that is stained with this and that, though neither she nor anyone else would be able to tell you what any of it was, the stains have been there so long. She takes little short steps on her fat ankles and her breathing is heavy. Beside her walks her grandson Billy, or rather, sometimes he walks and sometimes he breaks into a run, jogging on ahead of her, peering into people’s letterboxes, kneeling down and shouting hullo into them, and running before he is caught. Not that he is afraid of the consequences. Ma is near. She will take care of everything.

  He smiles over his shoulder at his grandmother and she smiles back, the warm vacant loving smile of an old woman enjoying the subtle hint of spring, still slightly acid, but there, hanging in pockets of air. She supposes she should be thinking of the war. That’s what everyone thinks about these days, but the war has been there forever, or so it seems, and it is too nice a day. Certainly it had started before Billy came to live with her, so it might as well be forever. She wonders briefly where his mother is now, not in the way that mothers usually think of their daughters, but rather with a vague fear that she might materialise. She pushes her fear away. Her daughter wouldn’t want Billy back anyway. She had never wanted him much in the first place.

  Billy’s head lolls slightly to one side as he stands in the street looking back at her. At least she thinks it does, just momentarily, but she dismisses that thought too, for fear that it is disloyal.

  Down by the gasworks the fishing boats are tied, heeling in a breeze that is keener now that they are close to the sea. Ma and Billy hold out their sack between them and a fisherman fills it with heads in exchange for a sixpenny bit. The round dead eyes glitter up at Ma. She looks with love at Billy.

  Clara is asleep when she takes her letter in to her. Billy had pulled it out of the letterbox when they got home and whooped at her, shouting that a letter had come from his father at the war. He’d raced down three flights of steps and out into the street to inform the kids before she could catch up and tell him not to be silly because he doesn’t have a father at the war — which makes him shout with rage — and that the letter is not for him; and that he shouldn’t even have opened the letterbox because it isn’t his. But they always look in Clara’s letterbox. Like theirs, there is so rarely anything in it that a single letter is reason enough for excitement.

  Clara has been dreaming. She often dreams these days, as she did in her childhood. There had been a time, somewhere in between, when she used to go to bed and fall into a deep and dreamless sleep and keep her dreaming for waking hours. Even in Hamilton, where the land stretched away in interminable flatness, where the dark river fogs melted the edge of morning in winter and the peatfires blotted out the sun in summer. She dreamed then of a time when she wouldn’t live there any more; of a time when she would wear tights covered with emerald-green sequins and sing in night clubs; and of eating fine foods, knowing only that fine food would mean that it wasn’t cabbages and mutton. She had dreamed of love, and of a time when there would not be talk of war ahead and the poverty of a depression so close behind that it leaned on the shoulders of everyone she knew and reminded them that having lived through it, it would never leave them all their lives.

  She had thought then that if she lived her dreams and believed in them, she could make them come true. It seemed to be unwise ever to turn her back on them or to commit them to the uncertainty of sleep.

  But now, in the middle of the day, the children’s noise has quietened while they go off to wheedle bread from their mothers for lunch, and she has dozed off.

  The dreams come again. She is still on a wide plain, but this time she does not know what country she is in. She is trying to decide whether or not
it is America when Ma Hollis comes in. At least she thinks that is when she comes in though she might have been standing at the end of the bed for longer, it is hard to tell. In her dream there is a perimeter of faces around her, only the ones she sees are black; then she hears singing as if in church and as she opens her eyes it is not a church at all but the children in the street below. They have come back and snatches of their song drifts up: ‘… mairzy doats and dozy doats; and liddle lamzey divey, kiddly divy too, wouldn’ you?’

  The plain recedes to a ghetto smelling of whisky and urine, and in the split-second before she knows exactly where she is, Ambrose’s face and hers float together across continents, and she knows that all places are one and the same.

  Like a choir, the kids come in with the refrain, ‘… if the words sound funny and queer, and maybe a little childish to your ear/ it’s mares eat oats and does eat oats/ and little lambs eat ivy/ and kids’ll eat ivy too/ wouldn’t you?’

  Ma Hollis stands with her hands on her hips; a grubby apron stretches across her bulging stomach.

  ‘You needed that sleep,’ she remarks.

  ‘You can’t get any peace around here,’ Clara grumbles. ‘Those bloody kids.’

  ‘Yeah, well what d’you expect?’ She sighs. ‘I give little Billy a shillin’ to get me some kummy kum for dinner and some cig’rettes.’

  Clara guesses she has done it for her, because Billy is one of the ringleaders; but she knows it won’t keep him quiet for long because the shop is just across the road from the factory. She hopes he’ll be smart and steal some sweets the way he usually does. That will keep him quiet a bit longer. His grandmother has taught him to be quick with his hands.

  Ma holds out the letter to her. ‘For you.’ She squints at the envelope then and Clara guesses that she will have shown it to someone, Biddy Chisholm perhaps, for there is no way Ma could have read her name and address on her own.

  The sight of the letter scares her. At first she thinks it must be from Mumma who is the only person who writes to her, but it is not her writing.

  ‘You want me to go, heh?’ Ma blows out her cheeks and lets the air escape slowly through her teeth.

  ‘No.’

  The older woman looks relieved. She settles herself on the wooden chair beside the bed and watches the girl turn the letter over in her hands.

  ‘It’s from my sister,’ says Clara. She studies the handwriting, square and somehow upright, which is how she thinks of Winnie herself, and there is her name, Miss Clara Bentley, Flat 19, and the number in Cleveland Road which looks so unusual written down like that, because it suggests an address such as other people have, when really it is this strange dark web of concrete tunnels in the place they call Paddy’s Puzzle. She puts the letter down on the patchwork spread that covers the bed.

  Ma creaks in the chair, or the chair creaks with the weight of her, it is hard to tell which, because Ma’s bones might as easily shift in their sockets as lengths of wood fitted into each other.

  Clara wishes she had some more comfortable chairs. Everything in the room is upright and hard, wooden and straight. She thinks of the times when Ambrose sits up straight and uneasy beside her, for often now if he can, he will stay and watch over her through the night. On such nights she will wake from time to time and somehow divine his black face in the blacked-out night that the war has imposed upon them, his head rolling a little to one side, a gentle snore issuing from the wide flaring nostrils, and she is afraid then that he will fall and hurt himself on the floor.

  When he first started coming to see her it hadn’t mattered about the chairs, for then he shared her bed. But that is past now and she is rarely comfortable enough to have him stay in bed with her for long. Even though the weather is still cold she will be hot, sometimes dry, with skin like sandpaper; at other times she will be saturated with sweat.

  So that is all she has to offer him, the hard chairs, and she says to him that she’s sorry, and wonders why, when he is so good at getting so many other things, why he doesn’t try to get himself a big easy chair to sit in, but it doesn’t really seem to bother him. There is never anything that he seems to mind, at least not inside this room. It seems odd to her, for there is so much to mind; the iron bed, the stark furniture, the dirt creeping through the cracks despite both their efforts to keep it at bay; the crooked carpentry, the harsh unshaded glare of the gaslight, the peeling wallpaper, the appalling plumbing.

  ‘How’s your lav?’ Clara asks Ma Hollis.

  ‘Overflowed again. Gone right down May Abbott’s bath this morning. Serves her fuckin’ right.’

  There is a long-standing feud between May and Ma Hollis. Ma smiles and sucks her badly fitting teeth up and down round an ulcer on her tongue.

  ‘Sitting in the bath and up to her neck in shit,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘I suppose I’ll have the bleeding plumber in again though,’ she adds on a gloomier note. ‘Not that he ever finds nothing.’

  It is true. The plumbing in Paddy’s Puzzle is one of the marvels of the Western world. Experts have come from England to look at the plumbing, just for the novelty of it. The building is a vast sprawling seven-storey place made of concrete, its walls packed with waste metal and old railway lines. Between them snake metal pipes, connecting into each other. It took so long to build, seven years to be exact, that the plumber who joined it all together often forgot where he’d put one or other of the pipes and so they came out in odd places with no apparent rhyme or reason. Ma Hollis has been known to say that the inhabitants (May Abbott, who considered herself a cut above Ma, said ‘residents’ but that made anybody who overheard her in the Puzzle laugh) shared so much shit of one sort or another that a bit more made no difference, as long as it didn’t come from strangers. It was, she said, like the people themselves. They don’t take shit from anyone outside the walls, but if you are on the inside it is all right. That is in her mellower moments.

  ‘Perhaps the plumber’ll put the Condy’s down again,’ Clara says.

  It is Condy’s Crystals that the plumber uses to try to trace where one pipe goes into another in the building. They turn the water all on and then watch to see where it comes out coloured.

  Ma nods, ‘Crystals got in Biddy’s wash last time. She wasn’t that pleased.’

  ‘She could get worse.’

  Sometimes they use ink, there is one particular plumber that does, and in his wake there is strife over bad drinking water and ruined clothes.

  ‘You going to open that letter?’

  Clara knows that it is what she has been waiting for. She is still afraid.

  It is hard to say why. She thinks it might be to do with authority which she has always mistrusted. She is not certain whether or not she is entitled to a benefit. Several of the people who live in the Puzzle say she is, but the thought of going through the formalities of getting one intimidates her. She is sure that the authorities will ask her questions, and try to direct her life. She is sure too, that they will find some way to make her leave Paddy’s Puzzle, and that if she tells them that that is her home, and that she wants to stay there, they will not be impressed. She thinks they will find a way to send her back to Hamilton, or, worse, to place her in a hospital or an institution of some kind. Biddy’s sister and the mother of her friend Janice have been in sanitoriums, and both Biddy and Janice have told her there is nothing to it, that they are good places to go. You can even have a bit of a laugh in the sans, they say. Janice has related how her mother had gone up the back of the boiler room with some of the lads one New Year’s Eve, and had a bit of sly grog and a cigarette or two and some slap and tickle. Her old lady had been quite chuffed about it, seeing as how she had never stepped out of line in her life before, and they all got caught and nearly expelled just like at a boarding school, can you imagine that?

  Clara had no wish to be convinced. It doesn’t make sense, what they say. Janice’s mother died in the end, and Biddy’s sister is still inside.

  Once, maybe, Clara thinks, b
ut she has left it too late now.

  Sometimes she thinks that if there was some point, some future, she could still be persuaded; but it seems more likely that they would talk her into it and the worst might still happen and she has no wish, she has told them, to die alone, away from them all, and away from Ambrose. Biddy argues with her that this would not be so, that she is being stubborn, and points out that whatever has happened to Janice’s mother, her sister is going to be all right. She is down in Christchurch, and Biddy says she’ll be back working the Wigram base in no time.

  There are times when they nearly talk her round, but then something will happen to stop her going along with them. She will intercept a glance between them, she will catch herself listening to the sound of her own body and believe that she hears the flesh shift under the skin. She will look at Janice then, and Janice will say nothing. Janice misses her mother.

  But there could be another element to Biddy’s concern and it is one that might be shared by other mothers in the Puzzle. If Biddy cares deeply about anything or anyone, it’s about Kathie. Clara thinks she would understand if Biddy wanted her to go because she is a health hazard. But she also thinks that, if you look around this place, there are plenty of health hazards without being too concerned about her. Kathie will get tuberculosis if she is meant to and that is all there is to it.

  Still, it’s another reason to fear the appearance of a letter of any kind. Nobody shops anyone else in the Puzzle, except, just possibly, for that one reason, that they are afraid for a child. The children may run wild, do what they like, see sights which are not for the eyes of the nice well-dressed children up at the other end of Cleveland Road towards the Rose Gardens; but if there is a mortal danger the mothers are like wild animals. They might even shop a friend.

  She knows it is nothing like that. It is from Winnie.

  ‘My sister Winnie,’ Clara says again to Ma Hollis.