Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

Father, which is what they always called him, beat Mumma. He beat her regularly and thoroughly. He was not much of a drinker but he was a womaniser; he had at least two women a week and after he had taken a woman he would beat Mumma till she could hardly stand up. He beat her in a methodical and deliberate way so that where he hit her the bruises could not be seen; avoiding her face and her arms and her legs, he would beat her just enough so that she could still walk around and cook and clean for him when it was over. And the other thing, which Clara didn’t know then but worked out later, was that he would make love to her too, when he had done with beating her, down on the kitchen floor after she had put Clara to bed. She would whimper away softly down inside her throat, believing that the child could not hear. She never screamed, not once, but in her throat there would be this animal sound and she would hear it always, as long as she thought of Mumma. It would be a relief not to think of Mumma any more, for then she would not have to hear her in her head.

  She never told anyone, and Clara supposed that he didn’t either. Yet somehow, out there at Frankton Junction, they knew. She didn’t know how they knew, but she could understand that they would. In that respect it was like the Puzzle.

  The Military Police will not leave the Puzzle alone. They have come back to take measurements of the pavement where the man fell to his death. They do not seem to care that they are disturbing the residents with their loud voices. Somebody shouts at them and is ignored. It is, after all, Paddy’s Puzzle.

  And Charlie Ambler is curled up on the sofa in May Abbott’s room. When he arrived she told him that on no account could he stay, but in his gummy terror she had taken pity on him, though what it was that had frightened him so badly she cannot discover. He has seen something in the night and he is afraid. She supposes she is beholden to him for all the chores he has done for her this evening, running backwards and forwards looking for a woman for the captain.

  Before climbing into bed she pours him a shot of her precious whisky and offers him a quilt. He smiles up at her. ‘You’re a real lady May. You ever had a man?’

  ‘Had a man? Why Charlie Ambler, I was never even engaged to anyone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  May blinks, trying to remember. ‘My father was an admiral,’ she says. Her voice is faraway and half asleep. ‘Such a handsome man. They don’t make many like that.’

  In the furtive dark, she slides a chocolate under her tongue. There is an explosion of pain in her mouth. It has cost her something to keep her own teeth. With care she moves the offending morsel to the other side of her mouth.

  There are two things that still make Clara angry. One is that even though he did this awful thing, the people at the Junction still thought Mumma was somehow to blame. She knew they thought that, and she knew that in their heart of hearts they believed that she drove him to it.

  They would look at her in her little glasshouse, pottering around talking to her flowering plants, in her dowdy, beribboned but absolutely spotless dresses, peering round from behind her thick spectacles, and they would think that she was odd, and because of that that it had to be her fault. She was odd too, but Clara thought that she had grown that way and that it was giving birth to her that probably made it all happen, though she wasn’t quite sure why she believed this. It was a heavy thing to believe about oneself, but she did. It didn’t bear thinking about too much, and so she tried not to in order to avoid being hurt.

  The other thing was that Mumma loved Father. Clara was not angry because of the love in itself, but because although Mumma loved him he still did this to her.

  Then there were times when she thought that he might have been angry with himself too. Again, she wasn’t sure why she thought this, except that once or twice, no more, she had caught him standing looking down the railway tracks from the bridge with a look of such sorrow that she would never forget it. One of those days she especially remembered was a Saturday afternoon and there was a big game at Rugby Park. He had had his ticket for a month. In Hamilton they went wild over football. Nothing would keep him away from a game like that. Or so Clara thought. But on the Friday night he had beaten Mumma up worse than usual, and Clara had watched him, and he saw her watching, and he didn’t go to the game.

  That was the time she particularly remembered him standing on the bridge. His face, and its pain, had stayed with her, like Mumma’s unspoken cries.

  It was because of these matters that she had started going to stay with Winnie so often when she was small. She knew that now, although she didn’t then.

  But there was more to it than that. Clara’s belief that the beatings started when she was born stemmed from a suspicion that none of the others knew what was happening, and that it had not occurred when they lived at home. She thought Mumma had only told Winnie because she needed somewhere to send her away from this violence, and she thought too that Mumma hated Winnie having to know, that in this endless seamless web she was angry with her, as people are when they owe something to someone. That was probably the hardest part of all, because Winnie, her firstborn, had been her favourite child and this had come between them. It occured to Clara that Winnie too had secretly wondered what Mumma had done to make their father as he was. Although she didn’t know it when she was small, Clara realised later that, even if the violence had begun after her birth, Father’s women had begun much earlier, and looking back she could not see how Winnie could really blame Mumma.

  Seven was the number of children to whom Mumma had given birth. Father had several more, so that she and Winnie and the others had half-brothers and sisters in Frankton Junction. Perhaps, after all, it was not so hard to understand why the Hoggards were stuffy about Reg’s marriage to Winnie. Perhaps, Clara thought, you can expect too much of people. But even so she sometimes thought that Winnie looked at Mumma with cool critical eyes and wondered what it was all really about.

  Until Winnie met Albie.

  Then Clara never heard her mention their father again and in time she almost forgot that he had existed. But she supposed that it must have weighed heavily on Winnie, a father like that. Perhaps it was not so surprising that poor Albie never consummated his love. Winnie lived with the guilt of others’ sins lying heavily on her. No wonder she was, as they said, a good woman.

  The Yanks are still there. Clara has been shivering but now the sweat breaks out on her skin. It is an old companion, though that could be too friendly a description for the fever that stalks her in the nights. An enemy she cannot shake. She wishes Ambrose was there. She knows she could shut the window but she does not have enough strength for the task. From experience she is certain that if she lies quietly the fever will go. She hears singing:

  Show me the way to go home

  I’m tired an’ I wanna go to bed

  Had a little drink about an hour ago

  And it’s gone right to my head.

  Wherever I may roam,

  On land or sea or foam,

  You can always hear me singing this song …

  Show me … the way to go … home …

  Winding down, like her gramophone running out of steam. The police detain the singer. Something to show that they are doing their job. They will know that it was not he who killed their officer. But it is important of course, to do one’s job.

  In the Rose Gardens a man with a body like a black seal that has emerged from the bay lurks beneath the trees. He is stiff and cold, for he has been crouching under the bank for a long time. Now he unfolds himself and paces backwards and forwards, restoring the circulation in his cramped limbs. He waits for something to happen, as he has waited through the past hours. Nothing does. He flexes his fingers, testing them one by one. He moves his head from side to side. He is in good working order.

  Along the path there is a tap of feet. He sniffs the wind, alert for danger, but there is none. It is a girl. She comes close to the spreading pohutukawa where the man stands. He sees her plainly in the moonlight, and in the same moment she sees him. She has gleaming fair h
air, down to her shoulders.

  ‘Hullo beautiful,’ says Ambrose, out of the corner of his mouth.

  There was the way, too, that Clara replaced Winnie in Mumma’s affections. That must have been particularly difficult to understand, how Mumma seemed to love her more. It should have been the other way round, one of them the firstborn and wanted, the other the lastborn and not exactly welcomed.

  But for all Mumma’s strange ways — and Clara, who knew more about those than anyone, recognised that they really were strange — there was some antique strain of wisdom, some knowledge which Clara could not have explained if she had tried to, but was aware of its presence. Whatever it was, Mumma had prepared for the worst.

  She loved her man, her engine driver. Yet at the same time she knew she could not have him to herself and so she set up her own defences. Long before he died, and long before Clara was born, she had retreated into her world of flowers.

  He had put up the glasshouse for her when she was young, maybe when it still seemed a pretty thing for her to do, and as the years passed she had come to spend more and more of her time out there. It was beautiful. Cool in summer, warm in winter, and always the radiant, icy glow of the cyclamen, so intense and yet so delicate, perfect statements of flowers.

  Clara had watched Mumma with her flowers and heard what she had to say about them. Now the scent of roses lay heavily around her. She loved them but it reminded her that Mumma thought roses rather fat and excessive sorts of flowers, greedy in their glory. She liked chrysanthemums, because they were untidy, uncontained creatures, observing no rules in their magnificence. That appealed to her, but it was not enough. She was fond of geraniums and Clara had actually placed one in a pot on her windowsill, because Mumma had recommended them once. Until Billy came in one day and knocked it off (she thought he might have been aiming for Andrew Gourlay’s head, for he’d been tormenting Billy all morning about being fat). That was a nice enough flower, and some of the colours were close to those of the cyclamen; but she had to admit that they smelt like cat piss, and that there was a slight flouriness in their texture which put them in a different class.

  No, it was the transparency, the absolute perfection of shape, that strange heart that had to be studied if it was to be seen properly, that placed the cyclamen apart and so absorbed Mumma. Clara believed that it said something about Mumma herself. In a way they described her, for they demanded not to be held or touched too closely, held a secret within themselves unless they were examined carefully.

  Clara did not think that Mumma was mad, or ever had been. Those flowers had been the expression of a beauty inside someone who longed to be seen as more than her myopic eyes and plain face. If she cultivated flowers that were unruffled by any wind that blew, that sat in a glasshouse, that is how she had decided to present herself to the world.

  Yet Clara knew that there was a side of her that would have liked to have got up at the railway socials and danced the feet off all those wild laughing women who thronged around her father.

  And she knew this because Mumma danced with her. She had learned to dance a tango with Mumma when she was three.

  She touches her pulse. The rate goes up at night. According to her book, it might reach one hundred and twenty beats in the minute, ‘performed with a jerk, as if the result of a weakened heart’. She has no way of knowing how long a minute is unless she turns on the gaslight and watches the clock. She does not have the strength to do it so instead she lies there, holding her wrist and counting. One hundred and twenty beats seem to pass very rapidly, yet time itself has slowed right down. Out there, the night is heavy with stars. Ambrose, we share the same sky.

  His body is as hard and unyielding as dark obsidian now.

  ‘Move under me, move,’ he commands. He is like steel through her core, pinning her to the earth. She moans and seeks to please him, and in doing so, pleases herself.

  ‘White cunt,’ he snarls, as the first wave of her response carries them along.

  Below, in the bay, the sea breaks on the shoreline. He thinks he will drown.

  When she was tiny they would be alone in the house together and Mumma would sing to her, not much of a voice, but fair enough, and the rhythm was there, and they would dance round and around the kitchen. When Clara was very small she would hold her in her arms and swing her this way and that; when she grew a little she would invite her to totter after her, trying to follow her footwork. At first the steps would be careful and correct, then more and more frenzied, dancing, dancing until they both collapsed.

  And all the time she would have one ear tuned to the railway line. She knew each engine that passed, the ‘K’, the De Glehn, the 1274, each had an individual clack of the wheels and her hearing was very sharp; she could hear them far off in the flat frosty Waikato night, and if it was her husband coming home they would stop their dancing and she would hurry Clara off to bed, so that when he came in she would be sitting at the kitchen table with her sewing box out. What happened after that could never be predicted.

  Clara supposed it was things like this about Mumma that made her seem mad. But she didn’t believe it the way other people did. And she thought that she knew her mother better than other people.

  She had never told anyone about her and Mumma, at least not until she met Ambrose. One wet afternoon, not long after she met him, he asked her about her life. For all that he would tell her so little of himself, his past still seemed colourful and strange. Hers was ordinary and lacking in incident by comparison and so she told him of Mumma. She thought he would find it peculiar and was put out when he seemed to find it unexceptional. What he found odd were the things she found the most everyday. He could not understand the quiet town that she tried to describe to him, the farmers coming in to shop, the ordered way of life. It was a happening like Mumma that made sense to him. The rest would choke him to death, he said. In a way she knew what he meant, for in the end it had nearly choked her too, as surely as the damp smoke from the burning land had all but smothered Reg, and all of them, in the wake of what had happened.

  Lying very still in Paddy’s Puzzle, she remembers the sensation so vividly that the smoke and fog could be around her now. The fever abating. She is afraid that the chill will begin soon. She knows that she must move to close the window. She is even more afraid that when she does she will begin to cough. Easier perhaps to let herself go, for it all to be over in the morning. Then she would not have to see Winnie at all.

  But then neither would she see Ambrose, ever again.

  ‘Move cunt, move,’ he says, between his teeth. His lips are stretched back over them. They shine above the girl’s face. Her pleasure is turning to fear.

  After her father died, the dancing stopped. It had been all but over before that. Mumma appeared to have decided that it was dangerous for her, or both of them, to continue their wild gambols. It was that, and her determination to leave her with Winnie as often as she could, that made Clara so certain that her mother had always had a sense of the order of things, whatever might be said of her. In the end she protected Clara simply by sending her away. Clara thought that it must have been hard on her that she turned so avidly to Winnie, treating her as a mother; none of them really got what they wanted; not her, not Mumma, not Winnie.

  She has set out to fill the gaps in her memory about her father. Instead she has ended up thinking about Mumma.

  She tries to think back to her father’s death; to the pall of gloom which settled over Frankton Junction; to the funeral on a day so dense with river fog that the mourners had to stand right at the edge of the grave to see the coffin lowered; to Mumma shutting the door of the glasshouse firmly between herself and the people outside.

  The glasshouse became the centre of her life. Clara was shut out, even if she had wanted to come in. Mumma had tried love and found it wanting. Or perhaps she had tried all there was to try and there was nothing left. Only potting mix and the sprouting plants.

  If she missed him, she did not say so. L
ater she would drink gin. It was not all the time, or even often, but when she did it was a great deal all at once and she wouldn’t wake up properly for two or three days afterwards. Clara was frightened the first few times, and then it didn’t matter. As with Winnie, she became more interested in herself than in Mumma.

  Perhaps her mother noticed things, but if she did she gave little indication. In the evenings she crocheted mats to go around the house; she dusted on Saturdays and if Clara thought about it she would help her; they ate regularly, and she remembered the grandchildren’s birthdays; she continued to tuck and pleat her old clothes as she had always done and she scrubbed her solid false teeth like sound railway crockery every other night, and she shaved regularly the little black moustache which had developed on her upper lip. Except for the gin, it might be said that things were more normal than they had ever been. Only none of these activities absorbed her. Her heart’s ease was behind the glass door, beyond where any of them could touch her.

  Clara supposes she could try to imagine her father’s life as a whole, all those years in the belching huffing engines, pulling the trains along through the green centre of the North Island, over the viaducts, through the tunnels, round the spiral at the very heart of the island. But she can’t. He had taken her as far as Ohakune once, and back. Her memory, and with it her imagination, stopped there. She could try to think of him with the women, and living here in the Puzzle it is not as difficult to understand him as it had been before. But they are her friends in the Puzzle, while those women of his were people who had disturbed and distressed their lives. She cannot really relate to them.