A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘To talk to you, Dad.’

  ‘There’s nothing for you and me to say to each other.’

  ‘Then a ride out of town. Up the line a bit.’

  ‘Why me? Where are your mates?’

  ‘They’ve gone. I told them to go.’

  ‘Get in,’ said Os wearily. ‘For Chrissake, boy, get in.’

  Selwyn was so shaken when he got back from taking Ethel home that he told Wilma straight away about giving her a lift. It seemed like the safest course. He tried to tell her in a casual way, as if he was just filling her in on the day’s events.

  Wilma shouted at him then. She said everyone in town knew what he was up to with that little slut, and what sort of fool did he take her for. What she had had to put up with for years didn’t bear thinking about.

  He said then that she might have been lucky to get a bungalow in Kilbirnie if she’d stayed in Wellington and what more could he do for her than he had. He’d turned her into someone when actually she was a nobody.

  On and on, all night. Kaye put her head under the blankets in her pretty primrose yellow room, trying to shut out the sound of their rowing. She didn’t know much about affairs and what happened in them, only what she had heard at school, but there was no mistaking what Wilma said Selwyn was doing with Ethel Floyd.

  ‘Where do you take her in the lunch hours?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Yes, you do. I come in and neither of you is there.’

  ‘A coincidence.’

  ‘Go on, tell me where. It’s not as if I can’t ask someone. Down to the river, isn’t that where you go?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ Because, as it happened, it wasn’t true, although he wished it was. The discomforts of cramped office sex were beginning to tell on him.

  Wilma cried all night and said over and again, between gasps, and small screams, that she and her daughter had had terrible lives and she didn’t know what would happen to them next.

  Towards dawn, Kaye got up, because she couldn’t bear listening to it any more. In the kitchen, she took her father’s car keys off the hook, and went out to the garage where he kept his Mercedes, alongside her mother’s gleaming Ford sedan. Her father had given her some driving lessons in a paddock one day, on one of the rare times they spent time together. The Mercedes was so easy to drive.

  It served him right if she dented his car. Then she thought that it wasn’t fair, all the things her mother had said, because her father had never caused her any trouble. He’d never made her feel much of anything one way or another. There were times when she liked being with him, like in the car when he was showing her how to parallel park alongside a fence. She enjoyed his praise.

  On the way out to the river, she was alarmed at all the cars streaming towards town. She didn’t know where they could be coming from at that hour of the morning, until she remembered it was Anzac Day. Nobody appeared to notice her driving towards them, and she was glad she was tall. In less than a year she would be old enough to hold a licence anyway, which made her almost laugh when she thought of Patricia, who was the same age and would probably need cushions beneath her in order to see over the steering wheel.

  Kaye didn’t know what she should be looking for when she got to the river. What her mother had said in the night about her father and Ethel Floyd made a weird kind of sense, but she didn’t trust Wilma to be right. This was where Lester Cooper had taken her and Patricia to watch something forbidden, whatever it was.

  Kaye parked the car at the bend in the river, and set about looking for clues. She found some cigarette butts among trampled grass, but she was fairly sure Ethel Floyd didn’t smoke, especially not roll-your-own fags like these, and the remains of a fire, but that didn’t make much sense to her. There was a round cloth patch embroidered with a peace sign, which she fingered and slid into the pocket of her jeans. That didn’t look like anything that Ethel or her father would have left there either. Kaye sat at the side of the river, suddenly exhausted from her long sleepless night, feeling the enormity of what she had done: taking her father’s car out on the road.

  It’s your fault, she would say — you shouldn’t have argued. One or other of them would have to give in, say that it was all right, it was all their fault. Probably her mother, because her father would be incandescent with rage about the absence of the Mercedes. She was in love with this word, incandescent, which struck her as being like white fire.

  It was still not far past six in the morning, and she figured that if she went back now, it was just possible they might have gone to sleep, worn out with fighting, and she could take the car home and put it back in the garage. If she could be sure of finding reverse.

  While she was studying the car’s controls, she was aware of a movement to her left, further upstream, near the bridge that crossed the river to the Coopers’ farm.

  3

  When Patricia was eighteen, her mother died of lung cancer. Patricia nursed her through that final awful illness.

  What troubled her about that period in her life was not so much the decay of her mother’s body — the bloody sputum and the wracking spasms of coughing — although that was bad enough. Rather, it was the way her mother pleaded with her to find Lester for her, so that she could see him just one last time.

  ‘I know he’s out there somewhere,’ she said. ‘You know your father saw him and talked to him, that Anzac Day. Oh, I was going to go into the service with him that morning, but I just didn’t feel like getting out of bed.’

  ‘You had a cough, even then,’ Patricia said.

  ‘If your dad hadn’t seen him and talked to him, I might have given up on it. But it wasn’t that long ago, was it?’

  ‘It was four years ago. And you know what Dad told you. Lester said he was going overseas.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ Vonnie had cried then. ‘He was clever. Wasn’t he clever, your brother?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Patricia, ‘I reckon he was.’

  ‘He started off to go to university. He sent me his results that first year away. That’s what I can’t get over — that he never gets in touch at all. I think sometimes something must have happened. You know, something else. If it hadn’t been for the accident he might still be here,’ Vonnie fretted.

  ‘Well,’ said Patricia, sensibly, ‘he mightn’t have been cut out for farming anyway, so he still might have left.’

  ‘I think it was the shock of the accident. He never got over the shock. Can you imagine what it would be like?’

  ‘No,’ Patricia said, as truthfully as she could. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘Do you think it was something your dad said? Something Les couldn’t forgive?’

  ‘You know what Dad told you. He took him to the turn-off, he gave him a lift. You know he put ads in the paper and how he got in touch with the Salvation Army people. If they can’t find him, then I don’t know who can.’

  ‘You’ll keep looking for him, won’t you? You promise me that you will.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Patricia, ‘I promise. Why don’t you get some rest now?’ She pushed her mother’s hair back off her face and sponged her brow, as the best nurses do in all the movies. The difference was, this was real, and her mother was dying.

  It got worse when her mother started to see little dogs with rats’ heads crawling over her bed. Os took turns sitting beside her and holding her hand and making soothing hushing sounds, so that Patricia could get some rest. It wasn’t fair, he said, not fair that now things were coming up roses on the farm, Vonnie wasn’t going to see the benefit of the good times. All the things he had promised her and now that he could give them to her, it was too late. He rocked backwards and forwards, his voice caught between choking sobs. Patricia felt old before her time, having to look after both of them.

  The next year she married Dan Matheson, who had been a few years ahead of her at school. His family farmed on the south side of Ramparts. You drove
through an avenue of elm trees that his great-grandfather had planted to get to the house. People said she was fortunate to be so well settled. A cousin called Isabel, on her mother’s side, was her bridesmaid. She would have liked a second maid so she wrote to Kaye Swanson, who was at teachers’ training college in Auckland. Although she hoped Kaye might come back for old times’ sake, she wasn’t really surprised when she got a note on green deckle-edged notepaper, in a neat composed hand, to say that it was lovely to be remembered with such fondness, and how honoured Kaye was, but she couldn’t get away from her studies. I wish you all happiness, Kaye wrote.

  4

  New people have come to Ramparts. Moneyed people from town have bought up farms and subdivided them into lifestyle blocks, and on-sold them to stressed executives and lawyers who in turn have hired architects to build homes that appear in house and garden magazines, or to restore derelict cottages, which they visit once or twice a month. They put stock on their properties that wander off and block the highway, because the fences aren’t properly built, or the owners’ kids leave gates open when they bring their friends up for parties. The local farmers have to round them up and phone the owners in their legal and accounting firm offices where they are put on hold to listen to symphony orchestras or rock bands until they are put through to voice mail. In a week or so, someone will ring and say, ‘Sorry about that, old man. Can you just send the bill if there are any damages?’ Then the vineyards were planted and now there are weekend trippers following wine-tasting trails.

  On the whole, Patricia has not minded this as much as her husband Dan. Their own house is something of a decorator’s dream, full of wicker chairs and rustic wooden furniture, old pretty china and intensely coloured Turkish rugs, French doors with original bevelled glass leading out on to patios and gardens. The difference is that there is nothing new about this; it has been like this all along. Dan thinks the new people are pretentious. No, he’s more specific than this, he says they’re a bunch of wankers.

  Dan is nearly fifty now, tall, becoming a trifle gaunt and very weathered, with coppery hair that is thinning but not grey. He is perennially attractive to the women in their circle. Patricia believes he is faithful to her, as she is to him. Once she thought about having an affair, just to try someone else. It’s not as if she didn’t have offers, but when she thought seriously about it, it seemed that it might blow her life apart, and one explosion in a lifetime was enough, as far as she was concerned. In the years when she was having children she watched the way women’s lives unfolded all around her as if in a dream, as her father had once viewed the moon landing. ‘Of course I’m not a feminist,’ she would say with a cheery laugh, when asked. ‘I don’t know what the word means.’

  Special market days are held in the town square when local produce is sold, and arts and crafts and other handmade goods, such as notepaper and lace and pressed floral pictures, are on display. Patricia enjoys these days. It’s a chance to meet the people who live here now and she has developed a specialty of her own, a line of fine linen embroidered tablecloths, made from imported materials. She always knew there was a reason for her preferring sewing to science at school. Her linen sells privately but it’s fun to be part of the larger gatherings of the town. She is a handsome self-assured woman who wears camel-coloured trousers and cotton blouses tucked in at the waist, and clumps of old gold and diamond rings on her fingers. Her children are called Victoria, Alice, Nicholas and Benjamin. Except for Benjamin, they are away at university and school. The district high school closed long ago, because of falling rolls, and the local high-school students face the choice of a long bus journey each day to the area school, or boarding school, which, mercifully, Dan was able to afford. There was a brief time when Patricia had been really worried about Victoria, who was clever but didn’t settle well to study. She ran wild in the holidays when she was home and there was a dreadful summer when she was seventeen and got in tow with one of Ethel Miller’s boys, who was already in his twenties. Ethel had been one of the Floyd girls and this boy Adam was her oldest, the one who’d been born before Ethel got married to Dick Miller. Adam was a troublemaker if ever she saw one. And yet, there was something about him that reminded her of her brother Lester, some yearning quality, which almost made her relent and say, oh bring the boy home.

  She sees Lester if she lets herself. When she is driving out to the farm to see her muddled old father. Certain places in town, like the local swimming pool, and the old milkbar that still keeps going down a side street. And in dreams, he is a restless force, one she cannot quell, who will never go away even though she wills him to leave when she is on the brink of sleep. He is there in the morning, a school boy still. She listens to him bicker with their father. When she wakes up, it’s still happening.

  Lester did better at school than Os ever anticipated, but although Vonnie was pleased, he seemed fed up, as if Lester were showing off. Lester, who was both clever at mathematics and imaginative when it came to English, could recite poetry. His teacher commented favourably on this in his reports.

  ‘Poetry, eh?’ Os said with a mixture of veiled animosity and curiosity. ‘What poem do you know then?’

  ‘The boy stood on the burning bridge, picking his nose and spitting it out,’ Lester would say, not looking up. They were hosing down in the cowshed at the time, as Patricia remembers it in her dreams. They have to raise their voices to hear one another. Patricia is sitting on the railing, hearing this exchange. If she had been older she might have worked out that Lester was having her father on. He used to take the piss out of the old man, she will tell her husband. But when she hears Lester say this, she just thinks how weird that he recites this silly poem when she has heard others he knows. Like the one she loves, which he speaks as they walk along the path to the school bus stop. It’s called ‘The Passing of Arthur’.

  And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:

  ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

  And God fulfils himself in many ways,

  Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

  His voice rises with a sweet melancholy, caressing the words, as if they are filled with special meaning for him.

  She has noticed that her children don’t seem to be taught this poem at school. Perhaps she was, she can’t remember, but then so many things were a blur to her when she went to high school. She knows that she has come to think of it as Lester’s anthem, what he believed in.

  She remembers the way Lester took her hand and led her to the bus every day when she first started school.

  What was it about Adam that reminded her of Lester that summer he was seeing Victoria? Dan would have been so angry with her, with both of them, had he known what was happening. He would have been angry with Victoria for her wilful misbehaviour, and with Patricia for letting it happen and not telling him. Adam was known as a wild child in the town by the time he was fifteen. He drank too much, and fought and drove cars fast before he had a licence. He had a fine slender ascetic quality about his looks, not like his younger brothers and sisters, who were black-eyed and heavy like their mother, though he was supposed to have been Dick Miller’s boy.

  And yet, when Victoria comes home with flowers in her hair, something silences her objections. One night, Victoria stays up and plays Under Milkwood on a scratchy vinyl record, three times all the way through. Somewhere round three o’clock in the morning, Patricia gets out of bed to fetch a glass of water and hears Victoria talking fast and low on the phone, and knows it’s Adam. Her midnight cowboy, Patricia thinks, her heart bunched up with fear.

  ‘Adam won’t stay in Ramparts,’ Victoria tells her. ‘He’s just getting some money together, and then he’ll be out of it.’

  ‘What will he do?’ Patricia asks.

  ‘Do? Oh, that’s all you think of, isn’t it? What people will do? As if it matters.’

  Then, when Victoria went back for her last year at school, he’d pranged a car up on the bridge across the rive
r. A young architect’s son who had started hanging out with him was killed and Adam has a permanent head injury, so that she is grateful Victoria isn’t more deeply involved with him, that the time for them to go off together hadn’t arrived. Though she thinks Victoria might have given her virginity to Adam (she says given to herself, rather than lost, because she wants to think of her daughter as a woman like herself, who has known only virtue) and what greater involvement does a woman have with a man: he must surely be the one you never forget. It’s hard to be certain, because Dan has been the only man in her life, but this is what she imagines.

  Victoria is engaged to marry a town planner from Wellington, and Patricia, who has been helping Dan lay new lawns for the wedding, hopes that that particular incident and time in Victoria’s life are far behind her. She thinks that it is her role to protect her children from pain and loss and disfigurement. She has saved Victoria from her father’s wrath and the knowledge of Adam’s stain. The idea of Adam being like Lester hasn’t gone away. If anything, his injury has reinforced that view. And yet, when she thinks about Adam, she knows it is more than that, it is about words and about love; she finds herself wondering whether Lester ever knew what it was like to be touched by a lover, whether his clumsy left hand ever stroked a girl’s hair.

  When Os Cooper gets too strange and wandery in the head to stay on the farm, a lawyer tells Patricia and Dan that it’s so run down it’s in no fit state to lease to anyone. They would be better to put it on the market. Patricia reminds him that her father still owns the farm and that her brother Lester is entitled to his share.

  ‘Your brother’s share is going to cause problems,’ says the lawyer, who is called Matthew Templeton. A man with a soft mop of girlish grey curls and a strong Roman nose, he lifts one side of his face when he smiles while the other seems to stay quite still. His voice is laid back and slightly sardonic, his passion, Celtic music. He is the owner of one of the lifestyle blocks but he likes Ramparts so much that he comes there more often than many of the absentee owners. He has set up a two-day-a-week branch in the town that is doing better business than the old established family firm that has been in Ramparts for seventy years. The waiting room of his office has been remodelled to be light and airy and open, with potted palms in the foyer. A stunning Gretchen Albrecht painting hangs in the entrance way, an abstract with a strong sensual curve. Patricia, for perhaps the first time in her life, feels more than curiosity when she looks at this man and compares him with her husband, a stirring of something very like longing. He insists they call him Matthew.