Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Just leave it. Can’t you leave things Winnie?’

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong with you Clara?’

  Clara feels anger rising like bile in her mouth, and tries to stem it the same way she tried to stem her cough. ‘I’ve got bronchitis a bit this winter, that’s all,’ she says. ‘This place leaks a bit. My cold’s brought it on again.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that before.’

  ‘Why should I? I hate people who go on about being sick.’

  ‘Then you are sick?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not.’ Like the cough she can’t suppress her anger, but the way it overwhelms her surprises even her. It is like illness itself, a boiling over, and it comes from deep inside her, as if some old pain has suddenly been thrust to the surface. ‘You put that down Winnie,’ she hears herself say. ‘You hear me? This is my place. I’m on my own now. I don’t come nosing down to Hamilton to see what you’re doing. I keep out of your place, you’d have fixed me all right if I hadn’t minded my own business in your place wouldn’t you? Eh? Well I’m grown up now, this is my place, and I don’t want you into my things.’

  She couldn’t get off the bed even if she tried. She sits, half-collapsed, panting, and can’t believe that she has said what she has. Winnie stands there looking at her.

  ‘I see.’ She puts the bottle back in the cupboard and closes the door.

  ‘No you don’t. You come barging in here like it’s your place, like I’m still your kid sister, but it’s not like that any more.’ There is little fight left in her but she knows she can’t give in now. She’s gone this far and she won’t make it there again.

  ‘Why don’t you have a bit of a rest if your bronchitis is troubling you and I’ll hot up the pot,’ says Winnie quietly.

  It is over. Clara leans back against the wall, and closes her eyes. There is a hot line of pain behind them. Why is she so angry with her, she wonders. Guilt? Regrets? She is too tired to try and work it out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Things sort of get to you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The war … everything.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I blow my stack too.’

  ‘You? I can’t imagine that. You were always so calm.’ Had she been, Clara wonders. From this distance it seems that she had, but she could have been wrong. Though somewhere far in the past, before memory had properly formed, she remembers something.

  ‘Not now. Not any more,’ Winnie says.

  Clara is breathing deeply again. It is all right. Winnie talks as if nothing had happened and her own anger, trapped like an angry wasp in the room, has gone, as though she had opened a window and let it out. She wonders if she has exaggerated what has happened between them. Perhaps she has suffered more from the outburst than Winnie.

  Winnie goes to the window, lifts the curtain and looks out. The hot heavy smell of chocolate floods the room. She sniffs the air.

  ‘Nobody can afford stuff like that nowadays.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘How could they? It’s black-market stuff in Hamilton. I suppose they feed the Yanks on it. D’you know we haven’t been allowed pork in Hamilton this year? No bacon, no nothing, and there it is being produced right on our back doorsteps. Frank was going to bring some in to Mumma a few weeks back but it was more than his life was worth to get caught. Not that Mumma would have told anyone, but they have to account for their production, you know.’

  ‘Will things ever come right again?’ Clara asks. ‘For people I mean? Not just — food.’ It makes her uneasy, Winnie looking out at the chocolate factory like that and talking about black marketeering. It actually makes her sweat again, and it isn’t fever this time.

  ‘I don’t know, Clara.’ She lets the curtain drop. ‘Before the war — after Reg had come back from the goldfields … he was a good sort, you know. Well I know you didn’t see much of him, but he was a good sort.’

  Clara nods.

  ‘I tried to shut out the world, just make a little space for him and me to live in. Him and me and the kids. It was harder than you might think.’

  To which Clara thinks ‘amen to that’, but she lets her go on.

  ‘We tried to keep up with the Labour movement at first but it didn’t seem worth it after a while. I mean things are changing in Hamilton. Times aren’t as hard like they were, and we had things. You know, things. We could buy things. It changed us. Well I suppose that was what changed us, I don’t know.’ She is quiet. Clara thinks, it’s strange, she really hasn’t seen me as a sister, just as a kid, she really thinks I never saw anything. ‘It’s easy to let things drift,’ Winnie says. ‘Easy to fool yourself.’

  ‘Yeah. I know how easy it is.’ Why has she said that, Clara wonders; she feels the treacherous rattle in her chest and wills it away. This time it obeys her.

  ‘You? You haven’t even begun to live yet.’

  This is where we should leave it, she thinks. They have said enough to each other. Later Winnie will regret that she has not said more, but for her part she is sure that they need go no further.

  Later in the afternoon Winnie goes for a walk on Clara’s urging to look at the gardens, though there is precious little to see at this time of year. Clara thinks Winnie might like a glimpse of the sea down at Judge’s Bay. It is a still kind of day and she has warm clothes. Clara had wanted her to go very much so that she could rest a while before she prepared a meal; and so that she could perform that task, at least in part, without Winnie watching.

  She is gone for a long time, and when she returns the meal is ready and her cheeks are brighter and fresher than when she arrived. She looks more like the Winnie of old.

  They eat and their conversation is more companionable, gossip less barbed. They both skirt dangerous topics, although Winnie asks about Clara’s work, not that she is to know what an unwelcome subject that is. But Clara is able to look suitably hazy, and Winnie obviously believes, as Clara intends to convey, that what she does is secret. She respects that, even though she says she has had enough of war. It is strange in a way, because although Winnie is older, and conservative, and from Hamilton, Clara realises that she is the one who cares more about the war effort and winning. She can see Winnie’s point of view, that enough is enough, and of course she knows too that her own interests in the war are different. Her man is still alive and Winnie’s is not. It’s still going on for her; for Winnie it is all over. But she can’t tell her that.

  They manage to skate over the surface of things until bedtime and Clara is grateful that it is a quiet night. With all the M.P.’s and the carry-on of the previous night and this morning, it looks as if everyone is keeping a low profile. To be sure, round ten there is one of the usual scuffles and some shouting but it changes to singing and the argument falls apart in a few minutes. She turns off the gas and the room splutters into darkness.

  As she is on the edge of sleep she thinks to ask Winnie how Mumma’s glasshouse is these days, and if she still keeps her blooms in order.

  ‘She kept them right up to the end,’ she says. ‘Though they’d got pretty run down. I think the new people’ll probably demolish the glasshouse. They don’t look the types anyway.’ She sniffs.

  ‘What d’you mean, the end?’

  ‘I told you didn’t I, she went into the old people’s home last week, same one as Mrs Hoggard. Now there’s a laugh for you.’

  Only she hadn’t told her. Of course she thinks she has. Clara can see that people do believe they have told you things, and if they are very close to events and caught up in them as they happen, they forget that other people don’t know. Clara listens to her sister’s quiet breathing. She feels the wooden ribs of the camp stretcher under her shoulders. She lies and thinks about Mumma. She badly needs to sleep but again she lies wide-eyed, with grainy lids.

  11

  It costs Clara something in the morning, getting up to make Winnie a cup of tea. She has slept badly on the stretcher and for a long time she had lain awake continuing to
think not only about Mumma, but about Reg and Robin and all the people from the past who have come crowding back into her life, with the presence of Winnie.

  There were so many ifs and buts about it all. If she had been older. If there had been no war. If Reg and Winnie had stayed happy together and he had not sought his consolation with her. If the past was not so full of regrets and she had gone home to see them again.

  If all these things had been so, her life, even now, might be different. She might not be here in Paddy’s Puzzle, wishing away her sister and lying in wait for the black soldier who is her last love.

  To think that Robin is back and he could love her again. But that is not so. He could never love her again, nor she him. That is some fond figment of Winnie’s imagination.

  Her mind would run on and on if she let it but she is determined to get some sleep; the night before has been such a bad one and she is no good without sleep. She listens to Winnie’s even breathing and tries to match hers alongside of it, a trick that has often worked when she has been with Ambrose. In the end it succeeds, though it takes longer for she does not have Winnie so close. Nor are they sharing the rhythm of their bodies. But at least there is the sound to measure herself by and remind her that she is still alive. Again she imagines letting go of her breath, so that it just stops. Of course it is not that simple. When it comes to the point she finds she cannot let go like that and the next breath is still more difficult and painful; yet in spite of herself she has to go through with it. So it is important all the time to keep on going, in and out, slow and easy, easy, but not stopping. That is the secret.

  Every now and then Win gives a disconcerting old woman’s snuffle, or something approaching a snore; indrawn oinks, and that doesn’t help either. She seems deep under though, and still is when morning comes round again.

  The weather has turned and a slow Auckland rain is falling. Not teeming or lashing at the windows, just steady, solid rain. Clara doesn’t think Winnie will have much of a day in the city. She forces herself out of bed. Uncomfortable as it is, she wouldn’t mind staying there. It is a day for staying in bed.

  She wakes Winnie with tea, comforted by the ordinariness of her face on the pillow, pleased in an odd way that she is there, but at the same time thinking that she has been there long enough.

  Winnie opens her eyes almost immediately and smiles. ‘Doing quite well for my kid sister, aren’t you?’

  ‘You sleep well,’ Clara says by way of reply.

  ‘Not bad, but you know what it’s like in a strange bed.’ Her face does look crumpled too, now that she is awake. She pulls herself up and lumbers out of bed, pulling on her wrap. She goes to the window and looks out.

  ‘It’s just as well I brought spare shoes.’

  ‘You’ll need them.’

  ‘You were restless,’ she says, without turning.

  ‘Ma Hollis’s camp stretcher. You would have been too.’ Clara is annoyed. It means that Winnie has been awake while she was asleep at some stage. It is like being spied upon.

  ‘You coughed.’

  ‘I told you …’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s all right.’

  ‘It’s been a lousy winter.’

  ‘I can see.’

  She sips her tea. Clara sees she is being careful and doesn’t want another row.

  ‘The chocolate smells strong doesn’t it? You’d think in the rain … you’d think it wouldn’t be so strong.’

  ‘There’s no wind so it’s just the same either way.’

  ‘It gets to you. Doesn’t it get to you?’

  ‘I can take it or leave it. You get used to it.’

  ‘Strange. You’d think it’d lift.’

  ‘Smells can hang on in this gully for weeks. They say when the stables burnt down, up there at Craig’s where the wool stores are now, they say you could smell burnt horseflesh for weeks. That’s what they say.’

  She looks shocked, as Clara had intended.

  ‘That’s horrible.’ She turns back to the window. Clara doesn’t know whether she is thinking about the horses or what. Clara often thinks about them, for though it had been years before, people still talk about it as if it had happened yesterday, the beautiful animals screaming and screaming and the terrible stench which came and would not go away. One of the crazy old women round Parnell still gives away vegetables in the street to anyone who will take them, rather than have them go home and cook meat. Nobody should ever have to live with the smell of burnt flesh again, she says. Clara thinks that if she had lived here then, when the fire happened, then maybe she would take her vegetables too.

  ‘Why don’t you come home with me, Clara,’ says Winnie quietly. ‘I reckon you’re run down.’

  It is what she has expected.

  ‘And lose my job? Not likely.’

  ‘I can afford to look after you now,’ she says. ‘Nothing marvellous, but we get by all right these days. It’d just be till you were stronger.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Clara tries to sound matter-of-fact, casual even, but it doesn’t work. It comes out tense and edgy.

  ‘It’s all right about Robin. I’m sorry I said what I did. Truly. It’s your business. I didn’t realise you’d grown up. I mean, I suppose I just hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘It had to happen some day.’ She tries to be flippant but Winnie will go on in this serious awkward way.

  ‘I know. At least I do now. But growing up’s something that happens to other people. Not baby sisters. Please Clara, can’t you see I’m trying really hard not to tell you what to do. I know that’s what you think I’m doing but I’m not. I’ve got to make you understand that or I can’t help.’

  ‘I don’t want help Winnie. I don’t need it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  They stand looking at each other. Clara turns to the sink. She thinks that she will have to get the top of it fixed if she is going to be here much longer. It is getting so cracked and worn; it can’t be very healthy like that. She wonders if Ambrose might be able to find a piece of red lino somewhere and they could lay that over it. It would polish up nicely.

  And that is her answer she supposes, because just for a moment there she had been tempted. It had flicked through her mind that it would be sweet and easy not to have to get up in the mornings at all, just to have things brought in to her on a tray and have a bedjacket tucked round her shoulders when she got cold, and her sheets changed when she had a fever. Only of course it wouldn’t be like that. Winnie would see her illness for what it really was and she would have her out of her germ-free Hamilton house, away from her healthy spruced-up daughters with their brains and their promise of university, within a week. She would wake up one morning and find herself in a sanatorium on some high and windy hill where the frightful fresh air would sweep through and make some last-ditch desperate attempt to clean out her diseased lungs. Of course it might work, but did she want it to? And if it didn’t, what might she miss in the meantime?

  ‘I reckon I’ve got a duty to the war effort,’ she says. She looks Winnie straight in the eye and doesn’t waver.

  After a moment or so, Winnie says, ‘Think about it then. If you change your mind … you just have to say.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.’

  Winnie leaves soon after, with her spare shoes wrapped in newspaper and tucked in her shopping bag. Neat methodical Winnie. As Clara watches her trudging off up Cleveland Road in search of a tram she almost thinks she loves her again. If she was in Hamilton, where she belonged, it might even be true.

  Clara had come to Auckland to grow, and to learn about things. Also to change her life. She had done all of those.

  Sometimes it seemed like a long way from Hamilton to Ambrose. She didn’t see it that way.

  When she got sick some of the girls from the factory, Janice in particular, started taking care of her. They covered for her for a while. Then Janice, who lived across in the Puzzle then, got the chance of a better flat up in Newmarke
t and she took it. She said the rats were getting to her. She offered Clara her place in the Puzzle because it was so close to work and she might be able to keep going a bit longer. She said that in one way she felt like a rat herself, offering it to her, but it made good sense if you looked at it the other way. The place Clara was living in wasn’t up to much so she was pleased to take it.

  All the time they were at her to go to a doctor. She hadn’t had much luck with doctors and she kept putting it off. She didn’t really believe she was ill anyway. She was having too good a time. The pink silk dress had done its turn so many times that she had had to get some more dresses to give it a rest some Saturday nights. One of the girls at the factory gave her her old diaphragm when she got pregnant, and she swore it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with it, just that she’d been careless. Clara washed it out carefully and let it dry on the window-sill and took to poking it up. Janice said she was mad, that you had to have them properly fitted, which Clara said was all very well for her, because she went to doctors about that sort of thing and had a record of babies, but they weren’t likely to give her one if she wasn’t married. Janice got a bit impatient with her then, and pointed out that that could be arranged. If she had a ring no doctor was going to ask many questions these days, but Clara thought of Doctor Mawson’s long bony fingers prodding around inside her and decided to take a chance.

  Not that she slept out often anyway. It was the dancing she went for and getting hepped on music. The laughter of guys, kids like Robin on their last leaves. She wondered if he’d done Auckland over, the way some of them did, after she had told him they weren’t going to get married. Sometimes though, after a taxi-ride home on a wet night, or if she got a particularly sweet young chap (the scared ones really brought out the worst — or was it the best? — in her) she couldn’t say no.

  Being sick caught up with her. One of the supervisors had his eye on her and he saw her coughing one day and demanded to see her handkerchief. She had just brought up a whole lot of rubbish out of her chest. He held the handkerchief away from him with a disgusted look, but afterwards he and the boss were very nice when they took her into the office. They gave her the name of a doctor, told her what benefits she was entitled to and gave her three weeks’ pay which they didn’t have to. She asked if she could come back when she was better. She saw them glance sideways at each other. The supervisor shrugged. ‘If you get a clean bill of health,’ he said. There was nothing else he could say, she supposed.