by Fiona Kidman
The soft grey fur on her upper lip settles into line as she sucks her mouth back.
‘My older sister,’ says Clara. ‘Actually she’s twice as old as me. Just double my age.’
‘You don’t say,’ breathes Ma Hollis. ‘Your mother, she must have been a stayer.’
Clara smiles and reflects on that. The description doesn’t quite fit Mumma. Clara thinks of her more as accident-prone. She is someone to whom things just happen. In lots of ways Ma Hollis reminds her of Mumma. They have the same straggling grey hair cut straight round the bottom somewhere in line with the lowest chin, and they have the same indeterminate figures, witness to many children and bad eating habits.
But there are differences.
Whereas in Ma Hollis there is a kind of durability, in Clara’s mother there is, rather, an inept decision not to abandon the situation. It is to do with the business of existence. Clara wonders uneasily now if she might have contributed to her mother’s sense of purpose in the same way that Billy seems to make Ma’s life worthwhile. She shivers. The parallel is uncomfortable.
And there are other differences too. Ma Hollis is a big lady encased in vulgar strawberry-pink velvet with food spilled down her front, but Clara’s mother who, equally, has no dress sense, manages to make her unsuitable clothes look like a penance. No, Clara cannot think of Mumma as a stayer.
Rather than open Winnie’s letter, she wants to explain these things to her visitor, to talk about Mumma and Winnie and all of them in the place from which she has come. But she knows that she cannot postpone the moment any longer, that to open the letter is inevitable.
It occurs to her that this is significant in itself, the inevitability of Winnie, and supposes that it is because she too represents authority, just like hospitals and doctors and all the other people who might see fit to interfere with her life. In a flash of panic she wonders who has told Winnie that she is sick, but then she thinks that that is impossible. There is nothing Winnie could know about her now. Nothing. She has covered her traces too well. She has not, until that moment, told anyone in Paddy’s Puzzle of Winnie’s existence, though she has mentioned her in passing to Ambrose. She has told him none of the dark secrets that, in the end, divide her from Winnie.
‘I was a mistake,’ says Clara, as she tears the letter open. ‘Mum never really meant to have me, I guess.’
‘I’ll bet she didn’t. I’d have tied you in a sugar sack with the kittens,’ says Ma.
‘She might as well have. They get you sooner or later, don’t they? One way or another.’ And then she is crying and choking and there is bright blood on the pillow again. Ma Hollis cradles her against her shoulder. Her plump strong arms surround her; her stale breath rattles tobacco against her ear.
When the spasm is over she lays Clara back against the pillow and opens the window. The hot chocolate smell sweeps through the room again, as close as if she is standing over the vats. The children’s voices chant their hard incessant cry for chocolate. A little sweetness in their lives.
‘I’m sorry lovey,’ Ma says. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘No don’t go, please don’t go,’ she says, like a child. ‘It’s me. I’m being silly. It’s just Winnie, she makes me nervous. She sort of brought me up you see. I mean Mumma had given up on me. I guess she kind of got tired by the time I came along.’
Ma nods. ‘Figgers.’
‘Yes I know. But Winnie was bossy and she had her own little baby when I was three.’
‘Ah, you don’t say. She married?’
Clara almost smiles, for the first time that day. In Hamilton it would have been taken for granted. Nobody would have asked if she was married, they would have just said something like, ‘She must have got married young.’ It simply wouldn’t have occurred to them that she might not be married at all.
‘He was killed in the war, her husband. Nearly a year ago. He should never have gone. He was too old. He was like that though, Reg was. Took off to the goldfields in the depression, never told Winnie he was going. Nearly killed her.’
Or was it she who had nearly killed Winnie? It doesn’t pay to think about it.
‘When he made up his mind he just went,’ she says. ‘He was like that. She couldn’t have talked him out of the war. Jeannie, that’s the older of the girls, she’s sixteen. Actually Winnie’d been married two years when she came along.’
She thinks how like a Hamilton matron she sounds herself, having worked to inform Ma Hollis that Winnie is respectable and had got married and had her children in the proper sequence.
Maybe, she reflects, she really is a bit proud of it. It’s like saying that your family has connections. My sister knows Clark Gable. My mother was spoken to by the Prince of Wales. Something like that. All would be equally remarkable. She has other thoughts about Winnie, but she pushes them aside.
In a way it calms her, talking about her. It makes her sister real and ordinary again and she starts to read the letter without any more fuss, avid for news of Mumma who, for all her fat sorrows and wrestling with life, is still a force to be reckoned with, particularly her fluttering futile adoration of Clara herself. Clara often thinks that Mumma’s love would be better directed towards Winnie who has always wanted it so much more badly than she did, or to Rita, who is to have yet another baby. She scans the page for news of Jeannie and Caroline too, because it is they who are always uppermost in Winnie’s mind, those two girls who are really talented and might do exciting and impossible things like getting educated. Clara thinks what a great relief it was to Winnie when her children offered so much more promise than their aunt.
But there is none of the news she seeks. The words blur on the page before her, then stand out in mocking relief.
‘She’s coming here,’ says Clara at last.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘She can’t though.’ Ma Hollis’ voice is flat and disbelieving, but emphatic at the same time.
They have no need to explain to each other why it is wrong — Clara has aired Winnie’s respectability.
‘Of course she can’t,’ says Clara. ‘It’s mad. She’ll try to take me away.’
Ma looks hard at her then, but her voice is gentle. ‘No way?’
‘Never. Why, are you sick of me being here?’ She is ashamed of her sharp irritable voice which she uses more often than not these days, but she doesn’t seem to have any control over how it comes out. Ma’s big old breasts rise and settle again. ‘I just asked, little Clara. I best go and see if young Billy got my things. He’s just as like gone spent the money on his self.’ She lumbers to her feet.
‘I’m sorry Ma.’
‘No. No, you don’t want to be sorry. You got no need to be sorry for nothing. I’m just …’ she stops. ‘So sorry too.’
Clara thinks that watching people being consumed with grief on one’s own account is hardly uplifting, but she knows what Ma Hollis means, and if she feels like crying some more for herself it’s in a different detached kind of way, a sadness for a condition over which she has no control. She thinks she vaguely understands about reversing the role of the comforter, the afflicted one taking care of the healthy. You learn about people very rapidly in Paddy’s Puzzle and she has set herself to learning so much in so short a time; she supposes it is the key to why she stays there. That, and Ambrose. Though it is hard not to see Ambrose as the reason on his own. But if she distances herself ever so slightly from the matter, then she can see that he has become part of the learning too, so she has to consider him alongside of everything else.
‘About your sister,’ Ma Hollis is saying. ‘What does she want?’
‘She’s got some business with the War Office. About Reg’s pension. She wants to come and stay.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I suppose she’ll have to come. If I say I’ve got no room … well, she’ll come anyway. Winnie’s like that. Can I borrow your camp stretcher do you think?’
Ma nods, but looks co
nfused.
Clara sees that it must seem odd, her turning back on what they have both agreed only a moment before. But then Ma really doesn’t know Winnie. ‘I can’t stop her,’ she says. ‘The thing is, she doesn’t have to know. About everything, anyway.’
She looks around the room and knows that there are some things that cannot be concealed.
‘She’ll know you’re sick,’ says Ma Hollis.
Clara is silent.
‘Is she dumb, this sister of yours?’
‘I’m not that bad. I’ll tell her I’ve got a cold.’
‘You said … well, I git the idea she’s not like some of us. She might be diff’rent.’ It is both a statement and a question.
‘She doesn’t need to know.’
‘You can’t take away Paddy’s Puzzle. You can’t turn it into a fairy castle.’
There is an inescapable logic about this. Clara sighs. ‘I’ll tell her it’s part of the war effort.’
Ma rolls her eyes then. ‘I’ll send the camp stretcher over. You want for Billy to put it up?’
‘If Ambrose doesn’t come. Thanks, Ma.’
‘Ambrose! You’ll tell her Ambrose is part of the war effort too?’
They laugh as she closes the door but Clara has an uneasy sick feeling which grows and burgeons into full-blown terror when she has gone. What if he doesn’t come tonight, and she can’t tell him that Winnie will be here tomorrow? And what about Janice? She will have to get in touch with Janice somehow and tell her not to bring the goods. On the other hand she needs money and food for Winnie’s arrival. She needs Ambrose to find Janice. She thinks of sending Billy but he’ll never get near Janice at the chocolate factory. Whereas they just might let a Marine through. They are so strict with the rationing and the factory is like a fortress; there is a great temptation for the corrupt going both in and out of that place. She knows. She’s been there.
*
She worked in the factory through ’42 and till the summer. She thought that it could have been the cold air when she walked out of that hot place that speeded up the consumption. The air was so thick in there and it had been a damp winter. Even though the Puzzle was directly across the road the cold hit you when you came out, and when you got inside it was not much better, what with the dripping plumbing and the seepage. You were never really bone-dry and warm. Nor were the two buildings well-placed for the winter.
There is a long road, Cleveland Road, which runs right down from the Rose Gardens, connecting with Garfield Street which runs on up to Parnell; almost in the heart of Auckland City, the suburb is a world in itself. Cleveland Road dips down into a steep gully while Garfield Street rises at the far end, thus trapping the smell of chocolate. Clara is not sure which end she prefers. The Rose Garden end has nobs living in it. Their tall elegant houses stand back from the road and it’s interesting to consider what it would be like to live in houses like that. It takes her back to possibilities now a world away. What might have been, had she chosen it so. And the summers in the Rose Gardens were unbelievable. She loves the colour and sees herself as a sumptuous romantic person in the presence of the flowers; she thinks they are as pretty a sight as any you could ever want to see. On the other side of them is the sea, and although you have to pick your way through the trenches and the air-raid shelters there is a path beneath the pohutukawas to Judge’s Bay where the water is very bright and clear and it is easy to forget that in the same stretch of sea, just around the corner, there are warships at anchor. She has included the seaside in those many coloured dreams all her life, for Hamilton is an inland town and until she came here to live she had hardly seen the sea at all. It is the river she knows.
At the end of Garfield Street there is a ramshackle slum which is Parnell: dilapidated shopfronts and higgledy-piggledy bungalows which house the oddly assorted people who live there. The Maori man with the club foot who sits in the sun all day waiting for the Americans to come and have their shoes shined. The woman with St Vitus’ dance whose face contorts into anguished grimaces and who still hopes to sell her twitching wreck of a body; she waits all day too. There are tired lonely women everywhere, fed up with trying to get enough food for the children and sick of standing in queues (how little things have changed, thinks Clara, only now we’re supposed to be pleased to be doing these things, for the war; now it is glorious to stand in line). There are workers who keep industry going, rolling out of the pubs, richer than they could ever have imagined now that there are Yanks everywhere demanding their services. At least their dreams have come true for nobody could have thought, ten years ago, that there could possibly be more work than there would be people to do it; there are women around too, who are, if not smart at least confident, now that they are in demand for their labour as well.
Then there is a woman dressed in robes telling fortunes and though Clara thinks, like most people, that she’s so loony she’s unbelievable, on good days there are kids in their teens sitting at her feet in the sun, listening to her. There is everybody and everything, and in a way that is the end of Parnell she has liked the best because so much happens there. If it’s not happening you can make it happen for yourself. That is what she has always liked about life, to have things happening.
It is chilling to think that she stays exactly in the middle now, in Paddy’s Puzzle, because she can no longer walk to either extreme of Parnell. So really there are no choices; but at least, in a sense, things go on happening. If she were to move to either side of that centre-line, it would be the end of her. In one direction there would be no protection from the hurly-burly, on the other there would be too much protection and a quiet death amongst muted footfalls. She cannot bear to contemplate it.
And so she stays, waiting for Ambrose and her friend Janice who works in the chocolate factory.
Suddenly she’s missing the factory. That’s really strange. Nobody could believe what the inside of the factory is like unless they had seen it, and once they had, they wouldn’t want to know. Yet it’s true, she does miss it.
Every inch of the inside is painted dark chocolate-brown. That way no one can see where the chocolate has splashed. Everybody wears brown overalls so that you can’t see chocolate spilled on them either, and on their heads the workers wear little biscuit-coloured hats. The only parts that aren’t this dark sludgy brown are the floors and they are brick — rather nice if they were anywhere else — and very slippery; you have to be careful how you walk. And then there are the huge vats that go day and night, and the vast copper mixing bowls shining in the gloom, mixing and dispensing the sweet liquid through miles of tubes and pipes until, at the end, the final product, the slow trickling stream which becomes a chocolate waterfall, rains down onto the sweet fillings, covering them as they slide past on trays.
The vats had been Clara’s job, down in the bowels of the factory where the heat was high, a sullen ongoing atmosphere of humidity. Janice’s job was better. She got to sit down at the machine where the chocolates were covered with foil, popping chocolate after chocolate into the little hole lined with coloured paper, smoothing it, ejecting it, thousands of them day after day; but clean, and she was able to sit. Janice said it was monotonous, but if she could have got onto that, Clara thought, it mightn’t have been so bad. She might have been working still.
Would she? She doesn’t know. What difference does it make now? She’s not, and that’s that.
But it was fun in there, for all its darkness and strangeness, all of them having to make their own light and laughter. You got to know everybody, there was so much talk; you knew what everyone did in the evenings, who the girls had gone out with, whose sons had written home from the front, and if anybody had a death, a telegram from the War Office, the whole factory was in mourning. You knew whose kids had done what and what girls had taken up with a Yank — even some of the women whose men were away fighting had too — and everybody, even the really straight ones, had learned to stop criticising. These were just the facts.
Janic
e and Clara were the only ones who had lived in the Puzzle. In a way they were scarlet; marked, because of all the brawling and fighting, the carry-ons, the military police making raids, the strange garments that flapped in rows drying across the roof of the building, the never-ending stream of taxis disgorging clients onto the footpath. But in the factory, their friends were more entertained than critical, and mildly curious as well. In those days while Clara was still working, they were just girls who wanted a good time, like everybody else; if they had been the real pros like some of the girls in the Puzzle, they wouldn’t bother to work in the factory anyway. Clara didn’t know any Yanks then; not to speak of, just to dance with, sometimes when she was out with Janice or the other girls. That was what she liked. To dance till she collapsed with exhaustion, till her lightning feet gave out on her. It was all as exciting as she had dreamed it might be.
In the evenings the workers would spill out into the soft evenings as the night shift was coming on. If the day shift workers were suspicious of anyone it would be the night shift for they were another world with a separate set of secrets and conversations which had nothing to do with them. In a sense, they were simply moving into their vacant rooms. They actually knew the crowd coming along from Mason’s next door where they made hand grenades better than they knew the night shift.
That was hardly surprising, for there was a constant war waged mutually by the two factories against the rats which streamed backwards and forwards between them, rats as large as cats with long soft fur, sheltering in the fennel which covered the wasteland; they were bound to see more of each other.
Clara walked out with one of the Mason’s boys for a while until he got called up. He had stayed back a bit because his father was dead and there were a lot of little kids at home. He’d been ashamed until he got the job at Mason’s but then he felt better because it seemed as if he was helping the war effort making hand grenades, almost like being in munitions; then they called him up when the last of the children went off to school and his mother was able to take his job. He was happy then.