A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘And you never told anyone about this?’

  ‘I tried to talk to my father about your father, just in a general sort of way, but he said I should keep well away from the Cooper family. He said you were a mad lot. After what I’d seen, I couldn’t help agreeing. Not you, of course, Patricia. We were always friends.’

  ‘I think you’re crazy,’ Patricia says. ‘Why would you come here and tell me this now, after all these years? It’s monstrous. You’ve got no proof.’

  Kaye’s eyes are watery and shining with sincerity. ‘I saw that piece in the paper and I thought you’d want to know what happened to Lester. It’s been on my conscience for years. Don’t think I’m enjoying this.’

  ‘Somebody would have found him.’

  ‘If they were looking for him.’ Kaye closes her eyes briefly, pursing her lips, as if all of this is so obvious it doesn’t need saying. ‘Of course he could have been found. But he wasn’t.’

  ‘So what happens next?’ says Patricia, trying to keep her voice level.

  ‘Happens? Nothing happens. I don’t want any scandal, believe me, not at this stage of my career.’

  ‘Your career.’ Patricia can’t stop her lip curling, although at the same time her knees are trembling beneath the table and she has to hold her hands in her lap so that Kaye can’t see them shaking.

  ‘I guess it’s up to you, really, how you deal with this information.’

  ‘This is not information,’ said Patricia. She reaches up and brushes a crumb from the table, steadying herself. ‘This is a fabrication. This is something you think you saw, Kaye, but you didn’t.’

  ‘Then where did the hook come from? Whose was it?’

  ‘Do you think nobody’s asked me since that thing turned up? Of course they have. And then, when you remind them, they remember, after all, that there have been three men in this town with missing limbs, counting Lester. A man who came back from the war, and another old chap who lost his hand felling trees. A long time ago. They’re dead and nobody can ask them how many hooks they had or what happened to them.’ Patricia stands, reaching for her purse to pay the bill.

  ‘Why would I come here and tell you this if it weren’t true?’ Kaye is white and swaying on her feet, fumbling with her briefcase.

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got nothing better to do. Because your blood’s in this place, and you can’t keep away from it, can’t stop meddling and poking and looking for absurd clues. Take my advice: keep away or you might find more than you want to know.’

  Kaye has crumpled, is turning her head this way and that in distress. ‘You always wanted to be the boss of everything.’

  Boss. The word has a childish pathetic ring, as if they have moved on to trading insults.

  ‘And you always liked my brother, but he was mine,’ Patricia says.

  This is a cheap shot for which Patricia will later feel deeply ashamed. She is speaking, after all, to a grown woman who was, as she has said herself, only fourteen when all of this happened, or might have happened.

  And yet, in an odd sort of way, it seems to make Kaye happy. Her damp sorrowing eyes blaze with an absurd sudden triumph, as if she has won something. That, Patricia supposes, is how it goes, how victories are won and wrested away in Kaye’s world.

  The rest home in Ramparts is built on a hill. It looks across a valley full of native bush where birds flit endlessly among the branches of the trees.

  In the mornings when he is being given his daily bath, Os Cooper looks around the mirrors with a look of wonder and bafflement. One morning, when he has been dressed in his brown corduroy pants and woollen shirt, with the sleeves rolled up the way he likes them, he stands and straightens himself in front of his reflection and wags his finger at it. ‘I’m going straight,’ he says, ‘What about you?’

  Most mornings he shuffles backwards and forwards down the hallway of the secure unit, with a ceaseless steady tread. In the afternoon his frail body collapses in front of the television in the yellow and blue pretty dayroom and watches television.

  Just sometimes, on what the nurses describe as his good days, he can be persuaded to join in an activity. Patricia visits twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Some days he knows her, and others not at all, but he likes her company because she takes him outside the locked wing for walks in the garden, and sometimes for drives. The first thing Patricia asks the staff is whether or not he is having a good day. There are fewer and fewer of these and for this she is grateful. She does not want to see her father dancing around in circles waving scarves. Besides, there was a day when he first went to live in the home that had embarrassed her and the staff.

  What happened was this. Someone who described herself as a storyteller had come in for an activity session, to help the patients ‘reclaim their lives,’ as she put it. Her name was Sadie and she had long black hair that she wove around in her fingers while she chatted and encouraged them to write things down on big blank unruled sheets of paper. The patients were given coloured crayons which Sadie said would be easier for them to hold, and they could make bold headings for the milestone events in their lives: journeys or marriage or the birth of their children.

  ‘It’s very important,’ she said, ‘that you do this work for yourself.’

  ‘What work?’ asked Os. ‘I thought we were here to have a rest.’

  ‘Well,’ Sadie explained, ‘I mean that you have to think of these things for yourself, I can’t make them up for you.’

  ‘They have to be true?’

  ‘You can make things up if you like, Os, but I’m thinking about stories you might like to leave for your families. This is just a starting out point for perhaps recording some special memories that you can hand on to your children.’

  ‘Mr Cooper. Gunner Cooper, regimental number one two five.’ But his memory had left him behind and he could not finish the number. ‘Mr Cooper will do.’

  ‘Sure. Fine. Mr Cooper. We can do this another day if you like.’

  ‘You mean we can all stop?’

  ‘No. I mean, everyone else who’s interested in doing this can keep going, but you don’t have to, not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I’ll do what they do. I do what I’m told.’ Os searched through the crayons and picked up a purple one. Looking from side to side to check what others were doing, he hesitated and wrote in large letters the word DEATH. He sat back and stared at what he had written.

  ‘Who died, Mr Cooper?’ Sadie’s voice was soft and insistent at his elbow.

  When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘Your wife? Didn’t she die?’

  ‘Not wife.’ He chose a black crayon and wrote with angry strokes:

  MY SON. I killed My Son. I killed him with my little bow and arrow. He got what he deserved.

  Sadie said, ‘I think we’ve done enough for today, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘All that bullshit,’ he said, beginning to cry. ‘All that trouble he caused.’

  ‘It’s nearly time for lunch now.’ She picked up the paper and folded it so that other people couldn’t read it.

  When Patricia arrived in the afternoon, she asked, as would become her habit, ‘Is he having a good day?’ This was when the nurse showed her what Os had written. Sadie had said that she felt she ought to give it to someone: she knew a man in his condition could imagine things, and she thought perhaps her style of working with this group was a bit too intense, that perhaps she wouldn’t come back too soon, but there it was, she felt responsible.

  Patricia took the piece of paper from her and studied it. ‘Poor old boy,’ she said finally. ‘He’s just so deluded, isn’t he?’

  ‘It’s so sad,’ the nurse said. ‘It must have really preyed on his mind, losing your brother like that. Young people don’t know what they’re doing to their families. It sounds as if he’d made up his mind to go missing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Patricia said, thinking about what the lawyer had said to her and Dan. ‘He’s lost, all right. We’ve given up on him coming home.�
�� When Kaye Swanson drives out of town, Patricia feels as if she has been holding in her breath for a very long time, and that now she can release it.

  On her birthday, Dan and Patricia charter a hot air balloon from an out-of-town company to take them for a ride over Ramparts. This is what Patricia has chosen for her gift. Afterwards, the family will join them and they will drink champagne and have breakfast together.

  The best time of day for balloon riding is dawn when the air is most still. First the pilot, a short nut-coloured man, releases a black balloon into the air to test the wind. This is the crucial moment, when the decision is made as to whether the flight will proceed.

  He tells them it’s all go, and as soon as the balloon is inflated they will be away. The slow filling of the giant blue orb makes a monstrous noise, like the Wall of Death. Patricia has not been prepared for this, only for the perfect silence that has been promised her when she is airborne.

  The flame that ignites the gas rushes up in huge sighing gusts and then the balloon rises gently into the air and, with only a frail basket between them and the ground far below, they are hovering high above Ramparts, high above the paddocks, and the farms, and the river. Dan exclaims, wants to point things out to her, but Patricia puts her fingers to her lips to hush him, so that she can experience every moment of this, without distraction. She sees where the river is joined by tributaries and how it rushes headlong to the sea. There is silence then, broken only by the waking cries of birds and the first bark of the dogs as they greet the rising sun.

  She doesn’t speak, doesn’t say goodbye, not aloud anyway. From far below she can smell, coming up to meet her, fragrances that she recognises, hadn’t expected to detect this far from the ground: the dazzling scent of a honeysuckle hedge which for a moment makes her think she is going to faint; a bank of old Windrush roses that she planted on the Matheson farm soon after she was married and still a teenager. From here, the bank looks like one of the tablecloths she threads and stitches, thrown carelessly across the landscape. She inhales the smell of fresh bread from the bakery in town, then she is hit by the sharp malodorous smell of cowshit in the yards. The flames leap up beside her. A swooning hawk flies alongside them. They seem to be racing its shadow on the ground.

  She believes she can see pretty well everything that has happened here.

  MISTER BLUE SATIN

  The waiting room outside the High Court is not the kind of place anyone should have to sit around in for hours. Tania thinks she could just get up and go, without waiting to hear a verdict. She’s only a witness when all’s said and done; it’s not as if she’s on trial. But that’s the way it feels. She’d stood up in the witness stand and said, ‘That’s him, that’s the one that did it. He’s the man I went off with that night, but he was just supposed to be giving me a lift home.’ Twelve pairs of eyes watching her from the jury benches. She couldn’t raise her eyes to look at one of those faces. They have all looked at photographs of her body. Perhaps they know her better than she knows herself. Point at him, the lawyer had said, show us the man. And, when she couldn’t raise her arm because it felt as if a lead weight was tying it to the edge of the stand, the judge had repeated it: Point. Not nastily, but she could tell he was impatient; it had all gone on long enough. Memory is a fine thing, you own yourself if you’ve got memory, but there were some things she couldn’t remember; her whole mind had blanked out now about that night. She’d lifted her arm anyway, her own tired dissociated limb, and said, ‘That’s him, that’s the fella. That’s Ruka.’

  When she had said it, she’d looked up for him, Mr Blue Satin, the boy man with the shirt that whirled around him like blue cream, but they’d taken him off where she couldn’t see him. So now what am I supposed to do, she wondered. Whose big fat stupid idea is it that I’ve come here?

  And now she waits. Among sly little hussies like Dixie who’s supposed to be her friend, and her mother, and Gene, Mr Blue Satin himself, in a dirty waiting room, filled with overflowing ashtrays, and scuffed carpet and magazines that are ten years old and have had all the recipes cut out and the women in the celebrity pics have moustaches drawn on their faces, and rude words scrawled on their crotches.

  ‘They’ll put the bastard away,’ says Gene confidently. But Tania’s not that sure. She looked up just as she was finishing her evidence, finally dragging her eyes back to her surroundings, and she’d seen something on the faces of a couple of the jurors: a look of shock, or pity. It wasn’t that they didn’t like her — she could pretty well tell — it was just that they just didn’t believe her.

  ‘They’ll be out to get a rapist,’ Gene says. Tania sees that he is looking at the jury through different eyes. ‘You see if they don’t nail this joker.’ The week before there had been another story all over the papers. A girl left to rot, the way some men take and use children and then discard them. Disposable kids. There’d been street marches and lynch signs, threatening to castrate rapists. Women who were used to staying at home and peeling potatoes were out on the streets, shouting kill, kill, kill.

  ‘Ah, shut it, Gene,’ says Tania’s mother. Her thick black hair is tied up in a high pony-tail; her features are sculptured like a bone carving. Except when she’s driving her battered Mazda, she’s always got her sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, even when she’s sitting in a court waiting room at night and the jury’s been out for eight hours.

  ‘It couldn’t have happened at a better time,’ Gene says, smoke curling out of the side of his mouth. It’s a little trick of his: you can’t see the opening in the corner of his lips where he lets it trickle out. ‘They’re not going to go soft on a joker who goes round attacking women. They’ll bring him down.’

  The laundrette is situated down a short side street off the main drag in Newtown, a kind of alleyway, lined nearly all the way down one side with car repair places, quick fix it up and make them go outfits: Automotive Wizards, Rust Repairs, Spray Painting — you can bargain for a price at most of them. There’s a row of terrace houses with green pointy roofs, as if they’ve all been bought by the same landlord. The lawns have been replaced with bark over black polythene that’s cracking up and letting the weeds grow through. Round the corner on Constable Street there’s a giant block of flats, and at the other end, as you turn left and go on up towards the zoo, there’s the biggest block of council flats in the city. At night you hear the lions roar and the monkeys scream, and from the flats themselves, the fighting and swearing, the occasional shout in the night, a dozen languages called from one balcony to another and a trainee opera singer at practice. Howls like blues in the night.

  Tania likes living there, or she did when she first moved in from the Hutt. You can feel the joint jumping, not like Taita, where she grew up, and where the streets are wide and empty at night, and the houses are spaced out, so that when you talk after dark you hear your own voice echoing. Its a funny thing about these flats in Newtown — you can take a stroll and find yourself in a sweet pretty neighbourhood with magnolias in front of the fences, or go on up the hill and you’re in the town belt with the sea melting beneath you, so it’s like you’ve got everything. But most of all, there’s the life of the city, the pubs and the cafs, the juice of the place running through your veins. There’s shops, and fruit markets and stalls, and crazy people wandering up and down, wearing hand-me-down caftans and beads and turbans, militant For Christ guys on the corners and addicts and brown and black people, and the smell of herbs and spices and Vietnamese mint mixed with backyard hangis and behind the curtain curries, the whole lot mixed up together.

  Tania went to the laundrette the first week after she moved in. You don’t have to be rich to be clean. ‘You’ve got the gift of looks,’ her mother said, ‘just make sure you’re always pressed and spotless and you’ll make your way in this world.’

  Tania’s mother feels she’s done all right, despite one of her boys being a permanent truant, and her husband being what’s generally described as an absent father. She wea
rs denim overalls with three-quarter legs, faded with the constant assault of cleanliness, and overbright slinky skivvies. Tania dresses in much the same way, except when she’s going out dancing. Then she puts on her best jeans and a red and black beaded top with a fringed hem that swings when she moves her hips. You could say she shares the same taste as her mother, not that she’d admit it for the world.

  Pretty well every Tuesday night two sheets and one pillow slip and her three towels and a face flannel with a picture of a teddy bear, and one pair of jeans go into a plastic bag. She chooses Tuesday because she can only get one channel on television and who wants to watch Coronation Street, and there’s not much doing in town at the beginning of the week, and anyway she’s skint after the weekend, and pay day’s not until Thursday. Her work is cleaning offices, six o’clock in the morning start, so she doesn’t do too much night life during the week. She’s got computer skills: her teacher at college said she shouldn’t have much trouble getting an office job, and sure enough she works in an office but they don’t seem to be hiring caramel colours on reception at the moment. She did leave some notes out on some desks one night, saying hire me, I’m a nice girl, here’s my phone number, and she got fired from that job. It was just lucky that her mother knew somebody who knew somebody else from another firm who was hiring at the time.