by Fiona Kidman
‘That’s actually such a gross idea,’ said Petra, stabbing the air with her cigarette.
Then an actor called Mel wanted to tell them about the most gross experience of her life, which was about going to Indonesia and being felt up by a tame orangutan. ‘He knew I was a woman,’ she said, ‘Honestly, can you imagine having a large shaggy ape with his arms around you getting an erection?’
‘Easily,’ Petra said and everyone laughed.
‘So what’s your weird story, Petra?’ asked Mel.
‘Um.’ Petra took a draw on her cigarette and pondered. Somebody had produced a bottle of cognac which was being passed around. A fire had been lit in the grate using Bleu de Bresse tubs for kindling. Philip felt his stomach turning over as he waited.
‘Philip’s mother has a needle floating around in her body that you can actually feel when it gets into her arm.’
‘Oh yuck. How could that be possible? She’d be dead.’
‘No,’ said Petra, ‘apparently it can happen. I checked it out when Philip told me about it. It’s like bits of shrapnel that soldiers who’ve been shot at might carry inside of them. If it’s blunt and it doesn’t get into a vein a piece of metal can float around in someone’s body for their whole life. It usually builds up a bit of fibroid tissue round it over time.’
‘Couldn’t it go through your heart?’
‘It could but it wouldn’t necessarily kill you — it might just pass through it. Could stuff up your lung though. You can feel it in her arm, can’t you, Philip? You can wriggle it around.’
Philip stood up; he felt his face burning with shame.
‘Haven’t you actually seen it?’ asked Mel.
‘No, I’ve never met the woman.’
‘What? Philip, is this true?’
Petra looked up and saw the space where he’d been standing. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.
Their bed had a big crocheted quilt over it, made with very fine yarn. It had come in the mail after their wedding. Philip said it was old-fashioned, that it wouldn’t fit in with their new furniture and the modern decor. Petra left it in a cupboard for a few years and then brought it out. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I want to use it.’
‘That was my mother you were talking about last night,’ Philip said. They were lying under the quilt, around ten o’clock in the morning. The children had made themselves breakfast and switched on television.
‘So what? I mean, Philip, really, so what? I’ve asked you about her often enough and you just turn your back on it.’
‘I told you that. What you said last night. And look at you, making a big drama out of it. A joke.’
‘There are some things I don’t get,’ she said.
‘There are some things I don’t get either.’
‘It’s not fair to our kids. Not knowing anything.’
‘Fairness doesn’t come into it,’ he said, drawing her closer to him. ‘I never knew anything that was fair until I met you.’
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Philip, I’m tired. Help me.’
‘What are you tired of?’ he said, ashamed to hear the panic in his voice.
‘Of being directed. Being told what to do.’
‘I don’t tell you what to do.’
‘I didn’t mean you.’
‘Your work? You could stop.’
‘But I don’t want to. Sometimes I just don’t know what you want, that’s all.’
‘I want you to stay with me,’ he said. Simple as that. That was all he wanted.
‘Oh,’ Petra said. ‘That. Well, of course.’
When Uncle Joe died, his son, one of Philip’s first cousins, rang to tell him.
‘Do you want to come to the funeral with me?’ Philip asked Petra.
‘You mean you’ll go?’ There had been other calls like this, over the years, which he had ignored.
‘Yes. We can drive up tonight, stay with your folks.’ He’d come to like her family well enough, had forgiven them for buying him. It could have been worse, he thought sometimes. Much worse. ‘So will you come?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course.’
‘Will she be there?’
‘My mother? I don’t know. Perhaps.’
‘Did you like your Uncle Joe?’ she asked on the drive north.
Philip shrugged. ‘He was a rough bastard, no worse than the rest of them. I’d rather have stayed with him than Mary, but it didn’t work out. Besides, my mother didn’t seem to like me staying there. As if she had the right to choose.’
Petra saw her first, at the other side of the cemetery. ‘Who is that woman? I know her face.’ She was looking at a plump and rolling woman, with pink-framed glasses and tinted hair.
‘That’s her. That’s my mother,’ he said.
‘She was at our wedding.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Yes, she was. I saw her outside the church.’
Everyone was there. Neil and Leonie; Janet and her husband Darren, a boisterous man who kept shaking hands two or three times whenever he met someone; Marlene, who introduced herself to Petra as her sister-in-law, and her husband, Wayne, and all their children. Philip and Petra had left Jesse and Marigold at home in Wellington with Debbie who was happy to stay over and had asked if her boyfriend could spend the night.
They went back to Joe and Bunty’s place for the wake. There were sponge cakes and sandwiches and cups of tea and beer laid out for them on the back lawn, under the trees.
‘Is it true you’re a lawyer?’ the cousins kept saying to Philip, in a kind of astonished wonder. ‘Well, we’ll know where to go next time we land ourselves a speeding ticket.’ They laughed awkwardly at their own jokes.
‘Aren’t you on the telly?’ Marlene asked Petra. ‘Where are your children? You haven’t left them at home, surely to goodness?’
And then there was Esme, who came to the edge of the lawn and stood looking at the gathering and turned away.
‘Poor old Mum,’ said Marlene. Petra could feel Philip pulling himself away from the woman. ‘It’s hard for her since Dad’s been gone.’
‘You mean Kevin’s dead?’
Marlene looked at him with loathing. ‘My dad. What’s it to you?’
‘I’m going over to say hullo,’ Petra said to Philip. After a moment, he turned and followed her.
‘Hullo,’ Esme said. ‘I was just going.’
‘So are we,’ said Petra. ‘Can we walk with you?’
On the way home, Philip cried, wiping his face with the back of one hand while he drove. ‘I don’t want to think about her,’ he said.
‘But you do,’ Petra said. ‘You never stop. You never have.’
Dear Petra, Esme wrote. I feel as if I have known you forever. I’m sure lots of people say this to you, because your face is so well known, but although I’m proud that my son is married to a person like you, this is more than about you being on the television. It is something that comes from inside me. It’s something that understands why he would have looked towards you for his wife. I was once touched by a magician when I was a girl, and it changed my life forever. There is good magic and bad magic and this man brought some of both kinds to me, but I was never the same afterwards. I know about spells and how they are cast. Some spells can’t be broken. I hope I hear from you some time. Yours, with love, Esme.
‘I told you she was a liar,’ Philip said. ‘That’s an old yarn of my grandmother’s about the magician, it’s not her story at all. Something to do with my Auntie Pearl. The one who died. My grandmother told me she had my auntie after the magician had been to town, even though she was old. A kind of a miracle. You see, she takes everything as if its her own.’
‘Yes,’ said Petra. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ At the time she was working on another film. Budgets were leaner and filming schedules tighter to save money. As soon as the film was over she had a major role in a television series. She meant to write back to Esme straight away but it took her ages to get round to it. When she did s
he enclosed pictures of the children. Later, Esme sent her a brooch, a tangled old gold piece of jewellery that needed fixing.
Philip held it in his hand when he saw it, as if weighing it. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I never knew she had this. I remember my grandmother wearing it. Well, you are a hit. I’d have thought she’d have given it to Janet.’
‘I must write to her.’
‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’
Esme knew he would come. She knew if she waited long enough, lived long enough, that he would come to her. The girl (for that is how she thought of Petra) had her own life. She didn’t begrudge her that at all. She was pleased to get a postcard from her to say thank you for the brooch. I’ll always treasure it, Petra wrote. The postcard showed racks of brightly coloured preserved fruit in jars standing at a roadside in front of a farmhouse. It had been sent from Australia where Petra was on tour. Petra was like her, but she’d got lucky: she’d married the right one, at the beginning. She’d make his life hell, but she wouldn’t leave him.
Esme’s apartment was in the second storey of a block of council flats. She had to climb stairs that were bare and had been pissed on, and she was afraid of some of the young people who hung round there after dark, but the view across rolling country hills was just what she liked to see and she had no great need to go out at night. Her name was down on the waiting list for a ground-floor place but she didn’t care if it didn’t happen. Anyone stepping inside her door quickly forgot the ascent through the graffiti in the stairwell. She had turned it into a magic cave, the chairs covered with peggy square quilts, the shelves laden with bits and pieces of other peoples’ lives: a silver vase from a farmhouse in Taranaki, a ruby red glass from another, a blue and white ashet from a house where the wife died, a collection of shells that she and Janet and Marlene had collected one holiday at the Mount, pot plants and photographs galore.
‘I can get you somewhere better,’ Philip said, when he came to visit. He had turned up unexpectedly with Jesse and Marigold.
‘I wish you’d given me some warning,’ she said. ‘I’d have liked to have food in for them.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’ve sussed out the fish and chip shop. They’re going down the road to get some lunch, aren’t you kids?’
‘You tell them to be careful,’ she said anxiously.
‘Oh, there’s worse places in Wellington,’ he said. ‘They’ll be okay.’
So that they were alone in the flat together.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘So handsome and tall for their age. So full of self-confidence.’
‘They take after their mother.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘About another place for you. I can afford it, you know.’
‘I don’t need another place. I like it here.’
‘You can’t.’ He gestured helplessly.
‘What’s wrong with this?’ She looked around the room and then her eye travelled to the hills beyond the window. It was spring at the time, bare trees in the distance were flushed with sweet unfolding buds. ‘Pretty as a picture. I wish you children would stop nagging me.’
‘Did you ever care for my father?’ he said, his back to her, as if contemplating what she saw outside. She could tell he knew that he sounded banal, even a bit silly. That he couldn’t help himself asking this question, and didn’t know of a better way of putting it. ‘You know, did you love him?’
‘Of course,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. She steadied herself. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
He passed his hand over his head. His hair was trimmed neatly these days; in the centre of his forehead a triangle of hair grew down to a point, his scalp gleaming on either side.
‘About Pearl.’
‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘A sister.’ Not my sister, or your sister. But that old needle, the jostling bit of pain. She wondered if he would understand. About the old days, and the magic that wasn’t so mysterious after all, about how Pearl had come into her life when she was still a child herself and nothing had ever healed that — and the way her mother tried to make things all right, but they never could be fixed.
‘What about her?’ he said. ‘You left when she died.’
‘Do you remember her?’ Not answering him.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Never mind. Look, that’s her in the photograph with her boyfriend. I think he was killed at the war.’
‘She was pretty.’
‘Pretty enough. A bit flighty. She could sing. You wouldn’t believe how long she could hold a high note.’
‘I see.’ From the way he said it, she wondered what he knew, what he had already worked out for himself. There was a stamping of feet on the stairs leading up to the apartment as his children returned.
After they had all gone, she lay down on the bed, overtaken by a kind of dizziness. It wasn’t new to her. It amazed her that so far she had survived death’s steady rhythm, that she had out-lived so many people. She heard a car start below. Somewhere in her old aching bitten heart, she thought, there he is, there he goes, my clever boy.
He would, she believed, have some secrets of his own.
SILVER-TONGUED
A few years ago, I met a young man who, had I been a younger woman, I might have considered to be romantically inclined towards me. As it was, he was looking for someone to listen to his troubles. He chose me because I had told him a dramatic story in a bar in Banff, about a night when I raced across a darkened countryside in a state of blind panic, totally lost in a place I knew well, looking for and continually missing the road that would lead me to the side of a woman I loved, who was dying. Although this happened on the other side of the world from Canada, I think he was struck by the immediacy of the way I told the story.
‘You tell this as if it happened quite recently,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s ten days ago now.’
‘Ten days.’ He looked as if he’d been stung, as if something had brushed past that was too close for comfort — all the intimations of mortality that people entertain when they are in some sort of difficulties of their own. I was with a group of writers who had just swum under the stars at an elegant spa resort where the sudden presence of a noisy uninhibited group was clearly viewed by the other bathers as an intrusion. We were hot and rosy and flushed with steam and the conversations that happen when new friendships are developing. Let’s have a drink, we all said to each other, but by the time we found a bar open we’d gone off the idea and drank coffee instead, knowing we would keep ourselves awake, but needing to be alert, because we had so many revelations to make to each other. Much later in the evening, the young man and I walked back to where we were staying, arm in arm in the starlight, peeling away from the others in the group. He was dark with crinkly hair and stealthy fingers that rested on my inner arm. We had been told to watch out for rutting elks which might charge us if they were disturbed. Elks have rights over humans in Banff. They walk down the middle of the streets while motorists wait, and stalk through gardens and backyards.
The previous week, I had been on another tour, back home, in New Zealand. In case this sounds like coincidence, I should say that this is how writers earn much of their keep: they go from one place to another, talking about their work to whoever will listen, while booksellers stand behind a little table and exhort the audience to buy books. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Some of the best days of my life have been spent in halls and libraries and rooms set aside in old country pubs, talking to people who love books the way I do. I would go even if it were not a necessity, although, that once, I would rather have just sat with my aunt. I had been sent a message that she was ill and didn’t have long to live.
This was no ordinary aunt, if such a person exists. I mean, she wasn’t someone else’s mother — she had no children of her own — and I’ve often thought of her as another mother of my own. That’s what I would call her when I spoke at her fun
eral. Of course, I felt the pull of needing to be in two places at once. But I had a new book out and I’d promised my publishers I would go on this tour. And there was a real coincidence, one of those elements of random chance that seem so significant they are like an omen, an instruction in themselves. The tour was of the Waikato, where Flo had lived for most of her life, and when I, from time to time, had lived too. That green heart of dairy country, full of pastel-coloured cows with contemplative eyes. All the venues, except one at the end, were within driving distance of the cottage hospital where my aunt was being nursed. It had been arranged that I would drive a rented car from one place to another, before flying on to the last town. There was a serendipity about all of this, and the idea of calling off the tour didn’t really arise.
I began with a visit to the hospital. As I arrived, I heard Flo’s voice, frail and yet fierce, echoing down the corridor. She cried come and get me, come and get me in an incessant high drone. Her cloudy eyes didn’t recognise me straight away, although there was a hint of their old blackness beneath the cataracts.
When she did, she said, more calmly, ‘You’ve come for me then.’
‘I’ve come to see you.’
‘Just to see me?’
‘Hush,’ I said, ‘it’ll be all right. I love you.’
She turned her head the other way. ‘Love. Don’t talk to me about love,’ she said.
I thought, then, that I had always just been coming and going in my aunt’s life, I was never permanent. Yet for as long as I could remember, she had been waiting for me. But at least I came back, whenever I could. In those last days before she died, she would wake with a start, from bouts of laboured breathing, and I would say ‘I’m here.’
‘I’m here,’ she would mimic, and yet there was something easier about her breathing every time she realised I really was there beside her.