by Fiona Kidman
Her sewing machine was a treadle, which meant she could keep both hands free to guide the material, while her feet pumped backwards and forwards down below, going really fast.
‘Look,’ said Pearl, ‘there’s a whole lot of men running down to the station.’
‘For goodness sake,’ said Esme, and it was at that minute, when emergency sirens were beginning to wail all over the town, that she ran her hand under the speeding needle; it snapped in two, the top shaft entering her thumb as it jerked free of the spindle that held it.
‘Oh,’ cried Esme, ‘oh, oh.’ Her hand was covered in a froth of bright blood.
Pearl was at the window, peering out. ‘There’s been an accident.’
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ All the same, she went to the door and opened it, with dread in the pit of her stomach. Men in heavy coats were dashing towards a jigger. ‘What is it?’ she called, but nobody heard her, and in a minute they had disappeared down the line.
‘Shut the door and come inside,’ she said at last. Her hand still ached where it had been struck by the needle. She was sure it had gone in, but as there was no sign of it she began to think she’d imagined it. The sharp end of the needle was lying on the floor where it had landed. Perhaps the other half had flown across the room, and landed in the wood box.
She set to work installing and threading a new needle. The pain in her hand persisted but when she pressed her thumb, and then her whole hand, she couldn’t locate the source of the pain. It occurred to her that the needle might have floated away in her veins.
‘Perhaps I should see the doctor,’ she said to Pearl.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It’s better now.’ Funny, but as soon as she thought about going to the doctor it stopped. She and Jim kept a guinea in a jar on the top shelf in the kitchen in case they needed the doctor, because that was what it cost, money up front, and you didn’t want to get caught short for emergencies. There might be other needs, more urgent than a stray sewing machine needle that she couldn’t see or find.
And now, some new knowledge entered her, a mysterious unravelling of something so obvious, so already known that she didn’t see how she hadn’t worked it out already.
‘How would you like to be an auntie?’ she said to Pearl.
Pearl screwed up her pale short little nose. ‘I am an auntie. I’m a great-auntie.’ Which was true. The children from both Joe’s and Mary’s families had already started on children of their own.
‘Well, you’re going to be one again.’
‘Are you and Jim having a baby?’
‘Yes, that’s right, we are too.’
‘I thought you couldn’t have babies.’
‘Who said that?’
‘My Mum told her friend. She said maybe Esme and Jim won’t have any kids.’
‘Well, you can tell her she’s doesn’t know much.’
‘Is Jim pleased?’
‘He doesn’t know yet.’
‘You mean you’ve told me first?’
‘Yes, it looks like it. Don’t tell him I told you.’
Pearl seemed more pleased about being an aunt then. She said she’d come down in the holidays and help Esme bath the baby and change its clothes.
‘I reckon you’ll be good at that,’ Esme said. ‘I’d like it if you did that.’
When they had had lunch, or rather Pearl had some sardines on toast, because Esme suddenly found she couldn’t eat a thing, they thought they would go over to the station and see if they could get some news of what was happening along the line. It would be just the worst thing if Jim had had an accident, the very day she’d found out about the baby, but she didn’t think this was a serious possibility. A tablet controller’s job was safe compared with most. Besides, someone would surely have come by now and told her if anything had happened to Jim.
The rain was clearing and the hooded mountain began to reveal itself, pointing its ice fingers through the clouds. Just looking at its snow-clad slopes made her shiver. A big knot of people was gathered on the platform, the women emptied out of the houses, waiting. Esme felt guilty that she hadn’t come over sooner.
The stationmaster, Alec Grimes, said yes, there’d been a collision on the line, a couple of goods trains. A man had been killed. The Daylight Limited pulled in and wasn’t allowed to go any further north, so that now passengers joined with locals, looking helpless and shaken, while the steam engines panted and hissed on the track.
That evening, very late, Jim came in, white round the mouth. There was a new man in the control hut, a man who was supposed to have finished his training. He hadn’t read the tablet right, taken out the wrong one. He was a Maori chap. Probably couldn’t read, if you wanted to get to the truth of it. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Jim said, ‘even if I was in charge. You can’t have eyes in the back of your head. They shouldn’t have let that Maori loose. He should never have been allowed the key to the tablets.’
Afterwards, he said he shouldn’t have said that.
She could see how he might have said it and not meant it. Or how he could have meant it and wished that he didn’t.
Jim didn’t lose his job, although the managers said it was touch and go. He was known as a good worker; perhaps the whole mistake couldn’t be laid at his feet. But his chances of promotion had gone for the time being. What irked him most was that the other man didn’t lose his job either.
When Esme and Jim’s son Neil was two years old, she saw Conrad Larsen and fell in love, for the first and only time in her life. All the rest were things, things that just happened, accommodations good and bad, but not love. He was leaning out of a locomotive window as it came into the station, his red cheeks alight from the glow of the firebox he’d been stoking, his navy blue cap pushed back on his head. Later she discovered the bald dome beneath the cap, saw the way his head shone in sunlight. His big gleaming teeth sparkled against the soot where he’d wiped his hand across his mouth.
It happened on a day when she’d had what amounted to a quarrel with her friend Norma. Since Neil was born, she and Norma had gone past a business relationship and visited each other in their homes, although mostly Esme visited Norma, in her big house with its verandah and trim, on the other side of the railway tracks. Neil was just at that stage when he was into things and opening cupboards. She had to watch out for him, because Norma had cream and green Irish Belleek china that you could almost see through, and fancy figurines in her cabinet. Norma had blue eyes and reddish hair that she wore in tight curls, and a way of flicking her head back over her shoulder when she spoke, as if there was somebody behind her. At first Esme thought that Norma was afraid someone was following her but then she decided that it was a nervous tic, something she couldn’t help. Norma seemed like a lonely woman. Her daughters had already left home. She liked looking after Neil, and it suited Esme. Jim wasn’t sure she should leave him with someone else, even for a little while, but what harm could it do, while she walked down to the shops for their meat and a few groceries. She didn’t tell him about the times when she just went for walks along the paths that led towards the mountain or along the banks of the stream that led to the waterfall. Some days she wondered whether she was cut out for motherhood.
It was high summer and the mountain was stripped of all but its crown of snow and surrounded by a blue haze, the day Esme fell out with Norma. The heat inside the houses had been building since the sun came up.
When they’d had a cup of tea, Norma said not to go, that she felt like company. She stood at her bench mincing leftovers from the night before’s roast to make into rissoles. Her eyes were on Neil, seated at the table eating a biscuit. He was a quiet child with a narrow face and slender curved eyebrows. ‘If you like, you could go down and see your mother for the day. Take the morning train down and back on the night train. We’d like that, wouldn’t we, little man?’
‘I couldn’t do that, he’d miss his feed.’
Norma stopped what she was doing. ‘Yo
u haven’t still got that kid on the tit, have you?’
‘Just a couple of times a day.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ Norma said, dusting flour off her hands. ‘A big boy like that. What does your husband think of that?’
‘We’ll go and meet your dad,’ Esme said, lifting Neil down from the chair, not looking at Norma. ‘It’ll do us both good, a breath of fresh air.’
‘Not that it’s any of my business.’
‘No,’ said Esme, ‘not really.’ She fled from the house, gathering up Neil and his toys, as if she had been caught out. Her breasts felt heavy and ripe and shameful. The image of her mother’s exposed flesh flashed before her.
‘You’ll be back,’ Norma said, as she paused to open the door. Esme knew, then, that Norma saw into her, understood that Esme was not really happy in her life, yearned for some kind of freedom that, in a small measure, she offered her.
It was too early for Jim to come home but she and Neil waited on the platform all the same. Esme heard a train’s warning whistle and, as it arrived, the sound she loved — the steam belching up while the brakes of the massive machines ground to a halt, the big engine straining like a horse in its stall.
Jim wasn’t on the train, but Conrad was.
When she remembers, she thinks how unlikely it was that he would look at her twice. Already she had adopted the ways of an older woman: wore her hair up in a bun, and had taken to cheap glasses because she couldn’t thread a needle without them.
Still, it was she who saw him first. One of the things she liked was that this time she chose him. When he looked down she had already said yes.
‘Could you look after Neil for an hour?’ she asked Norma the next day. She knew what time his train came in. She knew that if she waited on the station he would follow her.
Just like that.
Not, is this all right? Are you sure about this? Nothing of that. Just the two of them on her and Jim’s bed. Her hair falling down around her face, her glasses left behind on the kitchen bench, him carrying her through the house holding her legs around his waist until he could put her down and they could do their business. He had a sweet oily smell on his skin that she wore on her all that day.
His hands reached up for her cone-shaped breasts when she swung them above him.
‘Steady on,’ he said, ‘I can’t pull out like this.’
‘I’m still feeding the baby. I can’t get pregnant while I’m breast-feeding.’
His mouth then, everywhere.
His chest and arms bulged with muscles. On the river ascents when the trains climbed from Waiouru to Tangiwai, through the Junction and on towards Raurimu and the great central plateau of the island, from Taumarunui up to Frankton Junction, he threw three, perhaps four tons of coal through the firehole, placing the fuel from corner to corner along the near end of the grate. His wrists were swivelling steel. The sinewy arms that held her were like a high fence around her body.
She thought, fleetingly, of the needle that wandered around in her body. Somewhere, drifting among her blood, the thick red soup of herself, the needle had moved, perhaps entered her heart.
Norma said she’d have Neil at the same time the day after that, but Esme could see she looked at her oddly. She thought, I look different already.
All through the summer, the geraniums were in a red hot heat around the house, and he kept coming to see her. After the first few days she stopped asking Norma to mind Neil. She put him to bed in his cot and hoped he wouldn’t wake up. In moments when she tried to behave like a normal person — a person who wasn’t frantic with love, a person who mashed potatoes and made gravy and said here you are, here’s your tea, dear, and hung out the washing and snapped the napkins when they were dry — she thought that her son would wake and know what she did.
She stopped going to the post office, didn’t see Norma any more.
Queenie sent word that Pearl was coming to stay. She’d seen Jim at the Taumarunui station when he’d gone relieving on a job down there, and told him to pass the message on to Esme.
‘She can’t come now,’ Esme cried.
‘I thought you liked having her.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want her to come, of course,’ Esme said carefully. ‘It’s just that, well, you know, I’m busy with Neil.’
‘One baby’s not that much work.’
‘Oh, what do you know about housework?’ This was what love did to her, it made her bold and reckless in the way she spoke.
‘There’s no need for that,’ Jim said. For an instant, she expected to be hit. And yet, she thought, he couldn’t do that, not Jim from Birmingham with his good manners and his kindness. Because, even though he wasn’t always happy in himself, and he complained about little things, he never did her any harm. Something about his look silenced her. She thought he must be able to sense the permanent swollen ache between her legs that he only made worse when he touched her.
‘I guess Pearl could come for a few days.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ he said.
The day before Pearl arrived, she wrapped her legs tightly round Conrad’s waist. ‘I love you,’ she said, running her tongue in the inside of his ear.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that all right.’ He didn’t say I love you back to her but he pulled her in closer to him so that she didn’t know where he began and she left off.
Pearl was nearly thirteen. She had grown bosoms and a head taller since Esme last saw her. She was rounded and plump and her fair hair had spun into ringlets that she wore down round her face. She’d sung in the end of the year concert at school.
‘Would you like me to sing my solo?’ she asked on the first afternoon of her visit.
‘Yes, please,’ said Esme fervently. It was twelve thirty. The train was due in at one.
Pearl sang
Early one morning,
just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maid sing in the valley below,
oh don’t deceive me,
oh never leave me …
At any other time such pure clarity would have wrung Esme’s heart but before Pearl had finished singing, she said, absently, ‘Could you mind Neil for me, d’you think? Just for half an hour.’
‘You weren’t listening,’ Pearl cried.
‘Yes, yes I was. Did you get that song off the radio?’
‘I hate you. It’s true what they say about you, isn’t it?’
Esme snatched her wrist and held on to it. ‘What do they say about me? What? You just tell me who says what about me. You hear me.’
‘Nothing,’ said Pearl in a sullen voice. Esme let her arm drop. There was an angry mark where she had twisted Pearl’s delicate flesh. ‘All right then, I’ll look after your rotten baby.’
‘Thank you,’ Esme said, and walked out, shutting the door behind her. She shivered as she hurried to the railway station, wishing she had brought her cardigan. It was autumn now and all week there had been a hint of frost in the morning. In the blue shadow of the mountain, the cold started early. She stood at the station, as she had that first time, only now she felt that people on the platform looked sideways at her, wondering what to expect next. She thought she was like Norma, flicking her head back and forth.
In fact, nothing much happened. The train came and Conrad wasn’t on it, and as soon as she saw that, she understood what she’d known all along: that he wouldn’t be there. She would never see him again. There was no real way of knowing this, just the feeling that things had gone too far and something had to change. She glimpsed her reflection in the murky painted window of the station waiting room, dishevelled and clutching her arms around herself.
Blindly, she turned and walked away from the station and through the town. Past the butcher’s shop where she should be going to buy some liver and bacon for Jim’s tea, and perhaps a sausage for Pearl who wouldn’t eat liver. On past the greengrocer’s shop where a patient quiet Chinese woman put apples and oranges and spinach in the front window. O
n beyond the tobacconist’s shop where a group of men looked at her in silence as she hurried on by.
Nobody greeted her. So it was true then. They knew about her, knew why she stood so brazenly, in full sight of everyone, waiting for him.
She set off at a run, along the track beside the Mangawhero, where she used to walk before all this madness began. Further along the stream bed there was a rocky incline that dropped to a pool. She wanted to lie down in the water and let it freeze her, until she dropped like a stone to the bottom. Would Jim think to look for her there? He might, but she hoped that if he did he would simply leave her there. As winter closed in perhaps she would float to the surface and be rolled by boulders and glacial ice further down, out to sea or to one of the great lakes in the centre of the North Island, wherever it was the river went. She didn’t really care.
Nothing like that’s ever going to happen again, she said to herself, and it felt as if she had had an amputation of some kind. She found herself looking at her body as if she could see something missing. But it was all there, all of it. She thought about Neil, home alone with Pearl, and how, after a while, the boy would cry for her. Her breasts were leaking milk; she touched herself where her dress was wet and saw herself alone in the bush, a crazy woman with streaming hair, falling blindly across tree stumps and the dry grass of summer that was dying away as the cold weather set in. The river bubbled over the stones, shining where the water and the falling light touched them. She saw clouds, and bodies and floating, waving arms and the star faces of babies in them. Perhaps Pearl could look after her baby; she would soon get into the way of keeping house, the way Esme had. Then she thought that if that happened, Pearl would be with Jim, and that wouldn’t be right.