Out Walked Mel
Page 6
‘That’s not the point anyway. You can’t cope with my coming on to you. You’re shit scared – I saw your face. Okay, go back to your friends and smoke dope. Go back to Rochelle – that’s who you want to be with.’
‘What does that mean?’ He put his hands on his hips. ‘What the hell does that mean, Mel?’ He was standing over me. I wished I wasn’t bed-bound.
‘It means you’ve changed, Benny. You’re no different from Bob, with all your dumb winking and being Mr Beautiful. I know what’s going on here, Benny. I might only be seventeen but I’m not blind. You’re all over her.’
He’d gone red. What a dead giveaway. ‘Bullshit. You piss me off, Mel. You always want everything your own way.’ He walked to the door where he hopped from one foot to the other. I could tell he didn’t want to go through the door, but thought he’d lose face if he didn’t. Benny always likes to make up quickly, Wai told me that.
‘You’re crazy, lady, you know that?’ His voice almost cracked. ‘I never know where the hell I am with you! You’re crazy!’ He swung through the door and slammed it behind him.
The room was absolutely silent except for the tinny echo of the door slamming. I was cold and my legs were numb. I unfolded them, wincing. Damn Benny. One minute I’m an uptight prude and the next I’m a raving nymphomaniac. I reached over to his dresser drawer. You could open the drawer from the bed (I’d tested). I picked out the packet of condoms which I’d put carefully on the top and heaved them at the shut door. They hit with a dull thump and as I watched the photograph of Wai and me fell from the wall.
I picked my way across the room and found it on the floor. I got back into bed and looked at it. Wai knew me better than Benny did, better than anyone. I could never work out whether she reminded me of Benny or he reminded me of Wai. I looked at Wai’s warm, familiar eyes. If only I could talk to her; she’d know what to do. I hate photographs.
* * *
It was Mum. In her green raincoat – the one I’d last seen her in, smiling over her shoulder and pointing at something ahead. It was a bigger photo than the others and Davy and Helen liked it best. I was sitting on the floor of Helen’s room, and it suddenly seemed to me that Mum was there, really there in the photograph, smiling at me and pointing at something that I didn’t understand. I looked at it hard. I started talking to her, asking her things, but she stayed frozen, smiling the same smile.
Then I got this crazy idea that she was really in there, somewhere, trapped and whole. I ran my fingers over her face, around the outline of her hair, touched her lips. The slippery surface of the photo annoyed me.
I was seven, eight, not so young that I didn’t understand about photographs. But I began tearing it slowly, carefully, peering at the torn edge, trying to find more of Mum behind. I tore along her coat, then horizontally across her legs. There was nothing there but paper. Finally, knowing I wouldn’t find anything but unable to believe it, I tore right across that warm, familiar face. There had to be something behind it.
I held the paper close to my eyes, inspecting every minute detail, trying to find the edge between photograph and paper with my fingernail. There was nothing.
I smelt it. It smelt like old paper, musty. I ran my tongue along it like a baby, feeling the cold, shiny side and the dry thick side. Between them was nothing but a furry edge, which soon became gooey. I pulled the tiny piece of photograph away and examined the right half of the face. My mother. I put it in my mouth to let it melt, but it wouldn’t properly, so I chewed it ferociously and swallowed. When I looked at the floor I saw my mother’s body torn into tiny shreds around me. My throat erupted in great sobs of terror, as I backed away from the scene and ran.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I WOKE UP STILL ANGRY. The sun was streaming into the room although Benny’s clock said 6.15 am. It was going to be stinking hot and I was going to be stuck in a plane and then a tour bus for most of the day.
I had to be at the airport by 7.30 am. I quickly got dressed and crept around the flat getting ready. The last thing I wanted was to have to face Benny. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t know what to say. I hid in the red telephone box and rang a taxi, whispering my address, then sat out on the balcony watching for its arrival.
I couldn’t stop thinking about last night. Maybe I hadn’t done it right and maybe it wasn’t surprising that Benny felt confused but I couldn’t forget his face when I came on to him. He’d really hated that. Every time I thought of it something grabbed in my stomach and I went cold. Guys come on to girls all the time and that’s meant to be fine, but they can’t handle it the other way round. Benny’d rather have a quick fumble in the morning with half our clothes still on. Creep.
The taxi came crawling down the street. I waved to it and went quietly out of the flat. In the downstairs hall was all the band’s gear; guitars, amps, keyboards – and drums. I put down my bag and went over to them. Pearl Export, my favourite. I hadn’t even noticed that last night. I smiled to myself. Why not? The set wasn’t complete but there were a couple of tomtoms and the snare drum attached. I pulled over two cymbals and found the drumsticks. I sat down. The house was heavy with silence as I raised the sticks high into the air and then launched into the meanest drum roll I could manage. The whole house reverberated, the sound volleying around the walls as I belted the drums as ferociously as I could. I crashed the cymbals one final time and laughed out loud.
* * *
The flight in the little plane to Kaitaia was bumpy, which I liked and the sky was clear, so I should have enjoyed it except that the woman beside me was seriously scared. She wasn’t doing anything, just looking thin and almost transparent. It ruins flying you know – nervousness fills the air with a kind of metallic quality, amplifying every sound and making it impossible to get warm. I tried talking to her but she answered in these staccato bursts as if every second she wasn’t concentrating left the plane unattended.
When we landed she let out a long sigh and said, ‘Well, that’s over.’ She started looking a better colour and more solid. In fact when she stood up, I noticed she had a big bottom which somehow made her a completely different person.
In town I found a motel easily and had time to have a shower and some breakfast before joining the tour to the Cape. It was called ‘Overland Tours’ and the big silver bus was about three quarters full. Most of the others on the trip were middle-aged tourist couples carrying bundles of brochures, sweets and about four coats each. They took ages to get organised. The driver and tour guide was a short, suave Maori called Rewi.
Just as we were about to leave, Rewi opened the door and in leapt a very agile old lady wearing acid washed jeans, a denim jacket and cap over very white hair. She was talking loudly in an English accent.
‘Oh, thank god, frightfully sorry. I’m always late you know, pathological – on my father’s side. Here’s all my guff.’ She handed him her ticket. ‘I shan’t be a moment, sorry to hold you all up.’ She was heading straight for my seat. ‘Push off, then. I shan’t collapse if we move you know.’ The bus slid out of the park and she tucked her one small bag between her feet.
‘I am sorry. I suppose you were just congratulating yourself on having kept this seat free,’ she leaned towards me, ‘and then this dreadful old bat comes along and claims it.’ She looked as put out as if she were me and I didn’t know how to reply. She looked at me hard.
‘You were on the plane. You sat beside that irritatingly nervous woman.’
‘Yes.’ I was surprised I hadn’t noticed her.
‘There’s nothing worse than nervousness. Shows a lack of breeding you know. They’re so frightfully self-centered, nervous people.’ I laughed. She looked surprised. ‘It’s true. They think they hold the plane up by sheer force of will. Damn lot of money to pay for some singularly unqualified, ill-bred creature to keep you in the air, I say. I never fly normally but my husband knocked himself off so I’ve absolute pots of money.’ She smiled at the ceiling of the bus then turned to me suddenly. ‘
I’m Florence,’ she introduced herself. ‘Not of the Nightingale sort.’
‘Mel. Not of the Melissa sort.’
‘You don’t suit Melissa,’ she agreed.
Between Kaitaia and the Cape, Florence and I became firm friends. She told me about her late husband: ‘Horrid little man, forty years of utter tedium,’ her son Harold: ‘Bit of a milk-sop boy but grew up to a sweet-natured, good man. Bent as a hairpin of course, but he’ll never admit it,’ Harold’s wife: ‘Waspish woman, terribly clever, mind you,’ and herself: ‘Absolutely impossible to live with – opinionated, overbearing and dangerously outspoken. But I’m nearly always right.’
I told her about Davy and Stef (she adored Stef immediately) about BLZ, school, Wai, Bob and a little about Benny. Apart from Wai, I don’t think I’ve been that honest with anyone before. She listened hard, roaring with laughter at the Minister of Education story and snorting a few times through the Bob bit. She fixed her blue eyes on me and made me explain exactly about the fainting business, nodding seriously as I told her about the tunnel of white and Wai. She was understanding about everything except school.
‘It’s no use pretending that you don’t need it. You haven’t got a donkey’s chance out there without an education today. All those other things I expect you’ll work out given time, but if you throw away your education, you’re a damn fool.’
‘I haven’t got any choice –’
‘Choice? It’s about all you do have at your age. Of course you’ve got a choice. Grovel! Squirm on your belly, god knows you’d better get used to it. Do whatever you have to do girl, but get an education. Otherwise those bastards have won. Anyway, that wasn’t why you left school, was it? You left because you fell out with your best friend. You made the grand gesture and she wasn’t grateful.’ I turned to her, startled. ‘Oh, you believed in what you said and did and that’s all very well. But would you have run away if whatshername – Wai – had been on your side? I don’t think so. I think you’d have stuck it out. Seems to me you left school because of a minor disagreement with Wai.’
‘But Wai and I are still friends. We’ll always be best friends.’
‘And does she know that? After you’ve taken off?’
‘Of course she does.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re so sure.’
‘I’ll sort it out as soon as I get back to Dunedin.’
She frowned at me. ‘Don’t wait till then. You’ll feel better if you heal that wound now. Write to her, ring her up. Don’t let little misunderstandings hang. It’s a dreadful habit.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay, if you say so.’
‘I do say so. And I’m nearly always right. And while you’re at it you can write to your school and test the water. Now don’t argue with me, I’m older and wiser than you and I’m a ghastly companion if irritated.’
She appeared to think that the matter was settled and took out a book and sat back. The sun streamed through the bus and I relaxed in the warmth with my feet against the seat in front. Maybe I would write to Wai tonight.
Florence’s book was The Clan of the Cave Bear and every now and then she would exclaim, ‘Oh, pooh!’ but continue reading.
I watched the countryside through the window and remembered my conversation with Steve last night. The North Island was different from the South, but this bit reminded me of the Otago Peninsula with its green knobbly hills and tatty farms, with its hidden coves and bays and the wide high mouth of the sky yawning above. I felt free.
Florence was busy arguing with the man behind us about his singing as we hit Ninety Mile Beach. ‘It’s bad enough that moron playing the dreary little tune’ (it was ‘Mull of Kintyre’) ‘without having you mooning away off key as well.’ The man muttered something unintelligible and caught the eye of another man who had been directed to put out ‘that filthy cigarette’ by Florence earlier. We were really popular.
The spray hissed under our wheels as we sped along the flat, wet sand. Everyone was getting excited as we approached the far end of the spit and then Rewi stopped the bus and we filed off into the clear, warm sun and salt-tanged air. As we climbed the headland Rewi was delivering his patter about the ‘clash of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean’ How corny.
There was this quaint red and white lighthouse at the highest point and the others gathered around it, listening to Rewi’s history of the Cape. I followed the path forward and found it ran down beyond the lighthouse to an area with a railing. Below was a small beach and the very last edge of the rocky headland, jutting into the water. Down the slope a pohutukawa tree was in early bloom. I knew the legend – that souls cross over to this western side of Spirits Bay, descend the steep slope in front of me to the gnarled old pohutukawa and plunge into the sea. As I stood there buffeted by the sea wind, I realised that Rewi was right; you could tell where the two seas met ahead – it looked like an enormous uneven seam, stretching to the horizon.
The top of the world. I knew it was only the top of New Zealand, that in fact I was facing northwest towards the Pacific Islands, that to my left across the miles was the great landmass of Australia, but the map in my mind had nothing to do with what I saw or felt. In the midst of the sea, the one point of land I stood on seemed the oldest, strongest thing in the world. I had the image of a giant hand holding the land out of the water and I was standing on the very tip of its forefinger as it pointed to something beyond. I felt warm, despite the wind, and – what? Released, as if I’d let something go, finally. And I felt cared for, by something or someone present.
I had closed my eyes into the wind. Now I opened them and caught, briefly, something in the sky – a splash of red, tossed by the wind above me. Cloud, I thought, like a hangover from sunrise, only it was a darker red than that – more the red of the pohutukawa flower. It was gone the instant my eyes registered it, so I closed them again and its shape stayed a moment in a vivid reverse image of green.
‘Watch you don’t fall, Lillian, this path’s uneven.’
The rest of the group were coming. Damn.
‘Ugh, it’s cold here,’ said Lillian, gathering her Le Coq Sportif jacket around her.
I found myself smiling at them as I passed; at these over-tanned, over-dressed couples waddling down the path. I wasn’t feeling myself at all.
I picked my way back along the headland and down the path to the beach. All the colours seemed brighter than usual – the green of the hillside, the blue of the sea, and the white, white sand. But overpoweringly, I was aware of red, as if I was looking out at all these colours from a dark red room.
And so I wasn’t surprised when I saw Florence and Rewi sitting on the steps of the silver bus looking concerned. The last few minutes had been peaceful but too full of meaning to be safe. I was suddenly filled with dread. Florence lifted her head as I approached and the shade that ran across her face told me what I already partly knew.
‘What’s happened?’ I had stopped walking. Rewi’s head snapped up at the sound of my voice. Florence stood up, looking at me evenly, and came forward.
‘Rewi’s just had a message on his radio. It appears Benny’s been trying to get hold of you –’
‘– Benny?’ I interrupted. I needed to interrupt, I desperately needed to stop her careful, steady voice. Rewi coughed and stood up, but didn’t move. Florence nodded at me and continued.
‘He’s got some very bad news. Mel, my dear, I’m afraid it’s your friend Wai. She was killed last night in a car accident.’
CHAPTER NINE
BLUR. PANIC, THEN PAIN, then more of a blur. Blue through the window, salt in the air, salt in my mouth. Silence in the bus, except for the solid drone of the engine and the sound of someone crying, weeping in a monotonous, childlike way.
I searched my mind for the image, the vivid red which I’d known was Wai. It was fading even now, and I panicked, trying frantically to hold it, but couldn’t. I closed my eyes tightly, to conjure up the reverse green image I’d seen before. But that was lost, too.
‘You knew!’ I accused her and her blue eyes turned to meet mine. The crying had stopped. ‘You knew, before – you said don’t wait till I get back…’
She wiped something from my face and said gently, ‘No, my dear, I didn’t know.’
The crying started again and I saw Rewi’s eyes in the rear-vision mirror meet mine. I thought of Riff and the driver watching me in the car that night – when was it? Last week? It seemed eons ago.
The bus journey went on and on and I had only one overwhelming wish – that we would crash. I wanted to go headlong over a bank and crash into the sea. I wanted something or someone to knock me out. I wanted to faint or to sleep, and I wanted that bloody crying to stop.
I remember Auckland. I don’t recall how I got there, except for Florence bundling me in and out of endless doors. I remember coming into the city and feeling better having all the buildings and cars and people around. And then I remember pulling into the bus station and seeing Benny’s torn-looking face and knowing it was all true.
‘What happened?’ I said, and ‘Why? Why?’ I said, and ‘I can’t believe it,’ and everything I said, I’d heard before and it was all meaningless. Wai was dead. My very best friend, the person I loved most in the world outside of my family, was dead.
‘I’ve booked a flight to Dunedin.’ Benny’s voice sounded thick. ‘Will you come down with me?’
‘Yes.’
I remember seeing him talking to Florence and her writing on something. I didn’t want her to go and I tried to say something to her, but all my words were mixed up and she said, ‘My dear, you can’t possibly ask so much of your poor brain. Go home with Benny. I’ll write to you – I promise.’
And then I was trying to stuff Benny’s bag into some locker; Benny’s beautiful leather bag with gold buckles and I stopped and thought, ‘Every time I see this bag, I’ll remember today, I’ll remember this pain.’