A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I can’t assume Lester’s dead,’ Patricia says quickly. She tells him then what Christmas means to her. Among all the shopping and wrapping and cooking and carol concerts and the children coming home with their friends, there is the advertisement in the newspaper that the Sallies put there every year. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Lester Nelson Cooper, please contact this number. His birth details, his last known place of abode. In Australia, people will be reading the same notice, hungry to make a connection, to become involved in the drama of someone else’s family. She doesn’t add the bits about collecting Os from the farm, and Dan’s mother from the rest home where Os is headed, and how they bicker and argue and the children roll their eyes while they drop food beside their plates. Nor does she say, in front of Dan, that there is a moment when he toasts them all, saying, ‘To our family’, and she thinks that there are two sides to families: the side you saw, apparently whole and complete, gathered around the Christmas table, and families like hers, lost and disintegrated. A moment of despair.

  ‘I think we can take care of that,’ says Matthew smoothly. ‘There’s an act to cover situations like this. It’s called the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act.’ He has thought this through long before they came; already he has negotiated with their old reluctant lawyer, regarding the contents of Os’s will. ‘You’ll need to apply to the court for a property manager to act on your father’s behalf and get the court to approve a new will. Presumably, as no one can find Lester, he’ll be excluded.’

  ‘Meaning Lester doesn’t exist?’ Patricia says, in a small voice.

  Matthew gives her a keen sad look. ‘From what you’ve told me, it seems he might not. I think you have to proceed on the assumption that he’s dead. If you’re wrong and he turns up, he can always make a claim which you can settle between you.’

  ‘I see,’ says Patricia. ‘Yes, I do see what you mean.’

  Ethel Miller doesn’t guess her life is going to change when she walks up to the Lotto counter one Monday morning. She’s called in to the supermarket for some tins of cat food and a loaf of bread and is on her way out when she realises she hadn’t checked her weekly Lotto ticket last Saturday night because it was her daughter’s twenty-first birthday. There’d been a few drinks and quite a crowd, even her ex-husband Dick had come over and been friendly, or at least about seven on a scale of one to ten, until he’d had one too many, but that was him all over. The ticket is in her handbag so she stops at the counter and has the attendant run it through the machine.

  ‘Mrs Miller, you’d better sit down,’ says the young woman.

  There isn’t anything to sit down on, so Ethel grabs the edge of the counter and feels a prickling sensation all over her body. Just like that, the lighted numbers flashing up on the little screen, she is a millionaire. Nearly twice over. She can have whatever she likes.

  Not that it’s that simple. There are some things that money can’t buy. Like putting her damaged son Adam back together again. At first she considers leaving Ramparts. As other people go there to get away from it all, Ethel thinks that she could leave all the old grief behind her if she leaves. But her sisters are here, and her children have started to settle around the town, and in the end she thinks it would be as well if she did too, for once and for all, with a touch of style. It hasn’t taken people long to work out the change in her fortunes, from the day she turned up in a dark green Mercedes, the car of her dreams, and one or two people might put two and two together on that score as well, although perhaps there’s not that many who would remember. The old tractor shop has been pulled down and there’s a liquor store going in there now.

  In the end, Ethel settles on buying the motel on the edge of town when it comes up for sale. It’s a bit seedy but she’s got some capital left for improvements and it will provide regular work for Adam, whom she can employ and keep an eye on. The motel was called Golden Glow, a remnant of the late seventies when it was built, but she renames it Summer Lodge. Adam says, reasonably enough, that people might think it’s only open in the summer, but she says she likes the ring of it. She has turned into a lucky woman and it has a lucky sound.

  When Patricia clears the farmhouse out, in the wake of Os’s departure, her daughter Victoria offers to help. They leave Lester’s room until last. They have never been inside it since he left. It is clear that Patricia’s mother must have been in at some stage before she died, because everything is neat and orderly. And yet the room is frozen in time, as if, while tidying up, Vonnie had been loathe to give the impression that she had disturbed his belongings. Patricia realises that the secret side of Lester’s life, the part she never knew after he went to Auckland, had actually begun before he left home. There are Rolling Stones and Beatles posters stuck on the walls, a copy of a magazine called Rip It Up, a collection of Leonard Cohen’s poems lying on the bed with a hen feather marking the place at ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’. Some lines have been marked with a red pen squiggle in the margin. They’re about Jesus being a sailor, walking on water, watching drowning men from a lonely tower, and thinking that all men will be sailors when they’re freed by the sea.

  ‘Morbid,’ says Victoria, with a shudder. As well, there are several exercise books with LIFE SUX written inside the covers, like a mantra, and SHIT HAPPENS YEAH MAN on another one. ‘Did people really say stuff like this?’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Kind of historic. Did you ever think,’ Victoria asks her mother, ‘that your brother might have killed himself?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Patricia. ‘D’you think I’m stupid?’

  ‘No, Mum,’ says Victoria. Patricia sees how much, now, her daughter wants her life to be normal and wholesome, how this proximity to her vanished uncle, who seems like a family ghost, is unsettling her. ‘I wonder sometimes if you’ve got much imagination, that’s all,’ she says finally.

  ‘Probably not,’ says Patricia mildly. Her imagination has always been her own business, especially when it comes to thinking about Lester. It’s best, perhaps, if Victoria is like her — or, at least, thinks she is.

  An elderly man, a retired electrician, and his wife who used to help him in the shop, stay at Ethel’s Summer Lodge. The couple, Lou and Shirley Mackintosh, have taken up conservation as an interest. They travel round the countryside staying at inexpensive motels and studying local rivers. They are looking for rubbish, of which there is a great deal. They have read about a young man in America who spends his whole life cleaning out rivers of all the filth and degradation that clog waterways, and though they are past diving and going down beneath the surface themselves, they feel they have a mission in life.

  Their method is simple. To begin with, they investigate the banks of rivers, collecting all the rubbish they can find. They stack it in pile number one. Then, armed with rakes and buckets, they patrol the edges of the rivers, as far as they can reach, hooking out their prey and stacking it on the second pile. They find all sort of things, besides condoms and old farm machinery. They find eggbeaters and electrical appliances, lots of old toasters and electric frying pans and hair dryers — naturally, Lou has a very good nose for these — and broken china, just occasionally some rare whole piece that’s been abandoned to the waters, and tyre wrenches and complete bicycles and buckets and, of course, lots of plastic, which is the stuff they are passionately seeking and railing against. When all this mess has been piled up, they call in the local newspaper and get them to do a story that will arouse public conscience. It works every time. The great clean-up begins.

  They are a little disappointed by Ethel Miller’s place. They had thought they would be getting more for less at a lodge, as it’s advertised, but it’s just an ordinary block-walled unit like most that they stay in, and there is a strange young man who whacks the door with the newspaper when he delivers it, instead of sliding past and leaving it without a whisper, as is the way of most motel proprietors. Still, it’s clean and roomy, and the air is fresh and from their room they can se
e right down to the river that runs through Ramparts.

  What they find in the river, among the general debris, is a hook, one of those old-fashioned ones that hand amputees used to wear, before modern prosthetics became available.

  It was worth winning Lotto just to see Kaye Swanson walk into her motel, and come face to face with mine hostess, as Ethel describes herself on the swinging sign with her name emblazoned on it.

  ‘What did she say when she rang?’ Ethel asks Adam when she sees the reservations book.

  ‘She just asked if she could have a room.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘One night. Thursday.’

  ‘So she didn’t ask who was in charge, nothing like that? Come on, Adam, think.’ It bothers her how she wants to shake the boy sometimes when he gets that vacant look in his eye. Not that she could shake him, he’s too big and he’s twenty-six years old now.

  ‘She didn’t say nothing. Why do you want to know?’

  She gives him an odd quizzical look. ‘No reason,’ she says, finally.

  ‘Do you know her or something?’

  ‘Something,’ she agrees. ‘She used to live round here when she was a girl.’

  It is no surprise then for Ethel when Kaye walks in the door, rattling the bell as she comes. Ethel takes a long look at her, thin as a crisp, beginning to dry up, a briefcase clutched in one hand, an overnight bag in the other. Her hair is like a silver helmet. She wears an olive green silk suit with a matt-finished silver brooch on her lapel. The skirt just skims her knees.

  Kaye doesn’t know Ethel straight away.

  Ethel says, ‘It’s Ms, is it Kaye? Ms Swanson?’

  Kaye glances up then from where she is signing the booking slip, about to make a sharp retort, and stops, her features freezing into an expression of startled recognition. Ethel is a size eighteen these days, but she carries her weight with a hauteur that makes her imposing. Her eyes are still black but they have grown shrewd with time.

  ‘Back for old times’ sake, are we?’

  ‘Something like that,’ says Kaye, regaining her composure.

  ‘I was sad to hear your parents passed away,’ says Ethel. ‘Very sad about that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kaye says.

  ‘Adam here will bring your milk to the unit, it’s number seven, up the ramp. You can park the car in the space out the front. Adam will show you. You got any kids, Kaye?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ Ethel blows a speck off a manicured pearly pink fingernail.

  Kaye is the senior manager in a government department. She expects she will be a CEO, a chief executive officer. She spells out the acronym for Patricia, as if she would be unlikely to know this. They are sitting face to face in the old tearooms. Kaye didn’t know that places like this still existed. It has a floral frieze around the walls and a joky sign up above the counter that says ‘YOU CAN’T FIRE ME DAMMIT, SLAVES HAVE TO BE SOLD.’

  ‘Your job sounds pretty important, Kaye,’ she says. ‘What’s your field?’

  ‘Public administration.’

  ‘But don’t you have to specialise in something? I mean, you were a teacher, weren’t you? I thought it might be in education.’

  ‘Oh, I left that light years ago,’ says Kaye. Patricia sees that her fingers are like threads and the way her glasses perch on the bridge of her spiny nose. She remembers how her hair used to stand out in that light-coloured halo and is surprised at how sleekly it falls now. She touches her own bouncy fair mane of hair and thinks, we are only forty-five. How can it be that Kaye already looks like a woman of sixty?

  ‘I got my degree in policy,’ Kaye explains. ‘You can manage anything when you’ve got that behind you. I can’t tell what might come up, right now. Transport, education, the arts — who knows?’

  ‘I see,’ says Patricia doubtfully. She looks round to see if their tea is coming. When Kaye had rung the night before, she had tried to hide her astonishment. ‘Come out to the farm and have a meal,’ she had said, immediately. ‘Or stay the night. We’ve got oodles of room.’

  ‘No,’ Kaye had said stiffly, explaining that she was booked into a local motel.

  And Patricia had said, ‘Not Ethel’s place?’ It was as good as telling Kaye she knew all the Swansons’ family secrets. So then Patricia had suggested that if they were going to meet, which seemed to be what Kaye was suggesting, they have a meal in town at one of the cafés on the main street.

  But Kaye said no to that too. It was only a brief meeting she was suggesting, so if there was somewhere reasonably private they could have a chat, that would be a help. Patricia guessed that, before Kaye walked in and found Ethel Miller sitting behind the reception desk in the Summer Lodge, she might have asked Patricia to meet her there. Not that she would have gone. She thinks Kaye can see that too, that some territory is being established.

  ‘It’s just that it hasn’t changed,’ she says, her eyes flicking around. Patricia senses she is nervous, but then she feels an unease of her own. She has been tempted to tell Dan about this meeting but something about the way Kaye had spoken to her has cautioned her against this. Being here, buried in the back of the old tearooms feels, if not wicked, certainly challenging. Girls used to have assignments here with boys. Girls like Ethel. Only they would have been girls who met boys their own age, she reminds herself. She imagines that this meeting is about the past.

  When their tea arrives, with a plate of brightly coloured cakes, Kaye takes a sip and fiddles with the clasp on her briefcase. Then she opens the lid and peers in. Perhaps she has found an old birth certificate, something like that. But it is a photocopied newspaper clipping she passes over to Patricia, crisp and recent. She clasps her hands in front of her, leans her forehead against them for a moment, before straightening up as Patricia scans the article.

  ‘The piece about the hook in the river,’ Patricia says. ‘It was in our local paper.’

  ‘It was run in a side bar of the Evening Post, the part about the hook. I went to the library and looked up the original story.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Patricia. She is thinking about the way Kaye’s family had left town so suddenly, and put managers into the shop, how someone had told her at the time that Kaye had gone to boarding school. She had hated the way Kaye left without saying goodbye to her, although when she looks back it was clear they had stopped being friends by then. It embarrasses her to recall the way she had kept trying to get in touch with her. After the bridesmaid episode, she had chosen to forget Kaye. And yet, when she rang, it had given her an initial shock of pleasure, as if, after all, there was something between them that might be recaptured.

  ‘Your brother, Lester. He had a hook. Well, someone must have made the connection, surely? You must have.’ Kaye’s colour is very high and she has trouble keeping her voice down.

  ‘Yes,’ says Patricia patiently. ‘I thought of my brother, and I thought that it had nothing to do with him, or with me.’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ Kaye shoots back, regaining some of her composure.

  ‘And even less with you,’ says Patricia, feeling herself overtaken by an active dislike for the woman.

  ‘Then I think you should consider what I have to tell you. I saw your brother the day he went missing.’

  ‘You don’t know what day he went missing. None of us know that.’

  ‘All right. The last time he was seen in Ramparts. Oh come on, that was well known. Everyone was talking about it. The whole town was in an uproar over Lester and his mates turning up that Anzac Day. I knew what was going on. You don’t have a monopoly on the rustic history of this place. My father ran a tractor sales and service, for God’s sake.’

  ‘All right,’ says Patricia. ‘There was an incident. Something happened.’

  ‘Of course it happened. Now, I’ve got something to tell you.’ She hesitates, choosing her words with care. ‘At that time, my own life wasn’t great — my parents were going through some bad times.
I took off in my father’s car early that morning.’

  ‘You did? We were only fourteen at the time.’

  ‘Well, I took it anyway. I drove it down to the river bank. I stayed there for a while and then I thought that what I was doing would only make things worse, and I had no idea why I’d gone there. I was down river from the bend by the bridge and I was trying to put the car into reverse when I looked up and I saw, in the distance, your father and your brother.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Patricia, ‘my father gave him a ride out of town. He told us.’ She feels her flesh creep, wants to stop the other woman talking, force a doughnut into her mouth, anything at all to shut her up.

  ‘Your father got out of his ute and came round and opened the passenger door and then Lester got out. At first I didn’t recognise him with all that long hair. I thought he was a girl. They stood there for a moment. Your father was waving his arms around and Lester was shaking his head, and then your father pushed him and he fell into the river below.’

  ‘No,’ says Patricia, ‘none of this happened.’

  ‘And then,’ Kaye goes on relentlessly, ‘your father got back in the truck and drove towards me. I couldn’t get the car into reverse. He saw me there, and stopped. He asked me what was wrong, what was I doing there, and I said I was in trouble and I didn’t know what to do, and so he put the car in reverse for me and backed it on to the road. He said to me, “Girlie, you could get into trouble doing something like this. You could roll down that bank if you weren’t careful.” He made sure I had my back to the river all the time. I put the accelerator down and drove home very slowly. I was surprised how easy it was. Once I got the hang of it. I drive a lot these days.’ She smiles with self-deprecation, as if driving is particularly clever, not that she would want to say so. ‘When I got back, I just parked the car in the garage and that was that.’