by Fiona Kidman
When my mother heard about it, she said, ‘You won’t be doing that again.’ She was in a towering white-lipped rage, and didn’t speak to my father for nearly a week. Frank was banned for almost a fortnight.
‘She’s not a circus kid,’ she said, when she’d recovered.
‘I know,’ my father said, looking embarrassed. ‘But for that much money.’ Already there had been several offers for my services. He glanced sideways at me. ‘She could go away to school.’
‘No,’ said my mother so fiercely that my father and I jumped. ‘No, Mattie stays here. With me.’
Viv visited my mother unexpectedly one day. She said she had a special request. Just as a favour to her, could I look for water down at the Piles’ place. Annie and Kurt, the ones that had the strange baby.
My mother said, ‘She doesn’t do it for anybody.’
‘Well,’ Viv said, ‘Annie is in a bad way. That place is dried right up, and Kurt’s so busy looking after her and the baby, I don’t know what’s going to become of them. My husband bought them a tank of water because things were so dry they couldn’t so much as make a cup of tea. But we can’t afford to be doing that all the time. Anyway, Annie just takes baths — it’s not as if she knows how to save water, or anything, these days. It wouldn’t be so bad if she washed a few clothes now and then. The thing is, Kurt got all the pipes and everything a few years back, but they never decided where to put the bore down.’
‘We owe them a favour,’ my father said.
‘Well.’ My mother looked undecided. ‘If we kept it to ourselves.’
‘Of course,’ Viv said.
‘No money changes hands.’
My father looked disappointed, but seeing he was the one wanting to be helpful, he nodded in agreement.
Things were just as bad at the Piles’ house as Viv had described them. She led us into the house before Kurt had time to stop her. Perhaps she really did want my father to understand the situation, thought it best to let him know. Annie was surrounded by an indescribable chaos of unwashed clothing and dirty dishes. The forlorn baby, Jonathan, had grown into an unsteady overgrown toddler, with a filthy napkin falling from his waist. The beds were not just unmade; the mattresses were soiled and full of holes. The only thing of quality was a piano, a rosewood baby grand, that shone with a strange wild lustre among the squalor of the house. Viv told us Kurt played it in the evenings; depending on which way the wind was blowing, she heard the music spilling through the blue gums that divided their boundary lines. (No, this is fanciful; Viv didn’t speak like this, but it’s how I’ve come to hear the story, and that music, which was often spoken of in the district.) Annie was expecting another child. She appeared not to recognise me, and although she followed us out when we went to look for water, she wandered back inside almost straight away, looking distracted. Viv and Kurt and my father were my only audience.
Not that I found anything. I don’t know whether there was water there or not but while I walked around the place, the twig felt dead in my hands, as still and lifeless as if it were all a stupid game. Like Delia and Dr Paul. I wasn’t a miracle child after all.
Word got around, of course. My self-importance ebbed away. At school, people fell silent in my presence, as if I was some sort of charlatan, to be avoided at all costs. After I’d moved away from a group, I’d hear them starting to talk again. I stopped being Jocelyn’s friend and she had a birthday party to which I was not invited. I stayed home and watched the settlers’ daughters walking to the party carrying gifts. After the birthday, Jocelyn started talking to me again, and I was invited over as if nothing had happened, but I didn’t go.
Frank said I needed a manager and he could have told my parents the conditions weren’t right at that place. If he’d been there, he’d have advised against me going on a fool errand like that.
Annie Pile’s health got worse. Her sister, Petal, came from down south to stay for a while. Early one morning, Viv arrived at our house, and introduced Petal.
‘I was the baby of the family,’ Petal said, self-deprecatingly. ‘They’d kind of run out of names.’ There were eleven siblings: Annie was number eight, three above Petal, who was a bright-eyed woman in her late twenties. Short, not unshapely in a heavy-breasted, big-beamed way, she was so different from Annie that it was hard to think of them as related. She had lovely neat ankles beneath her cotton-flowered skirt. It was Viv, of course, who had sent for Petal, because somebody had to do something about Alice. Viv knew that Petal was a nurse. She was a single woman, good at her work; the hospital had agreed to take her back when she’d finished looking after her sister.
The purpose of this second visit soon emerged. Petal needed someone to help her clean up the Piles’ place — it was beyond her on her own, what with having to look after Annie and Jonathan at the same time. With the new baby due any day, she was working against the clock. Naturally, she would pay my mother.
‘I don’t do cleaning work,’ my mother said. I could see her glaring at Viv, as if to say, why can’t you do it? Surely this was charity again, of the worst kind.
‘I told Petal you’d done some housekeeping,’ Viv said apologetically.
My mother began to shape her refusal, then changed her mind. I guess she was thinking, as my father had before, that the Piles had helped out once. And there was the matter of the well that I had failed to deliver. Perhaps there was something, too, about Petal’s open friendly smile that my mother liked. She said she’d be right over.
Here is another dinner party. My mother and my father and me and Frank and Petal. My mother has cooked chicken in cider, with green capsicum and apples. She has made the cider herself. There is a dessert to follow, light sponge floating on lemon cream.
Kurt has been invited to the meal but has chosen to stay home and play his lonely broken chords of Mozart, spilling them on the fragrant night air of Alderton City. Annie has gone away, probably for good. Their children, Jonathan and a new and wholesome baby called Derek, are being taken care of by another of the sisters, who will end up keeping them. Soon Kurt will move to Auckland where he and his wife and children will live under different roofs, but at least they will see each other from time to time, and then, slowly, less and less. My mother will know about all this, because Petal will tell her when they meet, which will be often in the years ahead.
Something has been decided before this meal takes place. I don’t know who, exactly, decided but an event is all set to happen. Frank and Petal are going away to be married. This dinner is their farewell. At the end of it, my father proposes a toast.
‘To Frank and Petal, good health.’ His voice quavers and, this time, it is he who has the burnish of tears in his eyes.
After Frank and Petal had gone, my mother fell ill for many months. She’d had boils, a sign of overwork and distress and perhaps something lacking in her diet. One erupted on the back of her head and turned into a carbuncle, a boil with several heads. She walked up and down all night, taking my father’s cigarettes and smoking incessantly. Sometimes she tried to lie down but that was worse than standing, keeping her swollen poisoned head upright. My father called the doctor, a man known for strong drink and occasional incoherence. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as if he didn’t believe what he saw, then reached inside his bag and took out a scalpel. Hold still, he told her, and lanced the thing open.
It got worse instead of better. By the time Viv came round and arranged for her to go to hospital the thing had thirteen heads, each like living putrid creatures with existences of their own. My mother nearly died in the hospital. I went south to live with my grandmother for a while. It was not unlike Annie Pile’s situation, only my mother did recover. In time, I went back home, changed and less wayward.
Frank and Petal visited as often as they could. They had four children in quick succession, and there were times when they couldn’t get away from the farm. Frank bought out the farm next door, and developed a big herd. Later, my parents shifted away from th
e north and lived closer to them, although that was a matter of chance rather than design. Sometimes they all went away for holidays together.
There was a particular day I remember, not long before I met my husband. I was working as an advertising copywriter for the radio station in the town where we lived. There was a lake near our house. My father had a row boat that I used to mess around in some weekends. I had gone on liking the outdoors, even though my head was absorbed with men. I had long since stopped divining water, as if a certain energy in me had been subverted.
I didn’t know that Frank and Petal had come for a visit. I had worked overtime at the station and, afterwards, I cycled straight to the lake, thinking that I would row out a little way, or perhaps along the shoreline. But when I got to the lake I found that the boat was already in use. My father was rowing Frank vigorously out away from the shore.
It was a calm golden afternoon, willows trailing in the lake, small fish leaping. There was a tart smell of autumn in the air. I watched the boat, and saw my father rest on the oars, in a patch of sunlight. He and Frank exchanged some banter. My father’s face wore a look of such sweet peace that it has stayed with me forever.
Later that afternoon, when everyone had returned to the house, they got me to take their photograph together on Frank’s camera. My mother doesn’t look like her old farm self; she has changed and become suburban, in a way she had wanted to be, all those years before. She wears a knee-length tweed skirt, a cream Viyella blouse, a jumper and scarf fixed with a brooch my father gave her one birthday, a little pearl on a spiralling gold wire, and sensible comfortable shoes. Her hair is grown longer, to cover an appalling scar. Petal wears an acrylic powder blue pantsuit with beige ankle socks and black slipons. The men wear jackets but their shirts are open at the neck. This is more or less how they will go on looking, for another thirty years, all of them growing stouter, except for my father, who will grow thinner, and fade away first.
There they are, the four of them: my mother and my father and Frank and Petal.
SOUP
A woman from Liese’s past calls her unexpectedly at the newspaper office where she works. Liese is a theatre critic, rumpled with tiredness after another late night. She wears a navy crewcut jumper with jeans, and her face isn’t made up. Later in the day she will change into something simple and black and put on subdued expensive lipstick, the sort that doesn’t come off when you eat and drink. For the moment, she’s struggling her way into a review of the new play at Circa, The Blue Room. Hare’s play has disturbed in a way she can’t explain to herself, and hasn’t had time to analyse. It’s based on the old idea of La Ronde, Schnitzler’s circle of characters who have sex with each other and work their way back through a dozen partners until they end up where they began, the connection of the first and the last. People take off their clothes in the play, one man representing all men who fuck around, his penis hanging in the strobe light in front of the audience, and it’s funny how the youngest women in the audience can’t take it, leave at half time. What is it they are afraid of? she has written in the first draft of her review. That it’s too like their own lives? Or are they afraid he might become aroused, and they will have to witness this in front of old men and women in the audience? On reflection, she thinks she won’t put that in — that it will say more about her, than it should. Liese has been a theatre critic for more than twenty years; she is used to interpreting what people see on stage, of articulating opinions. Let them ask the questions.
Its weariness, she tells herself, three late nights in a row. She’s going to let the phone ring, then picks it up because it might be her husband Ned. Ned, her second husband. Only it’s not, it’s a woman called Prue, who lives in a dark part of her life.
Prue’s voice sends a shock down her spine. ‘Fraser’s gone,’ Prue says. ‘He went sometime in the night.’ Liese understands that she means Fraser’s dead. ‘It wasn’t unexpected. He’d been sick for a little while. I thought you’d like to know.’
Once, a long time ago, Liese and Prue were friends. They lived in a small port town up north, on a sweeping coastline, where their husbands were both scientists. Prue was a beautiful woman then, with large eyes, and cheekbones like carving blades. A famous portrait painter had painted her before he was well known. Not that this seemed important when they first knew each other, although later it would seem more significant. Prue ran her household much as other women Liese knew. She had more money than most, and probably more than her husband, Fraser, but that was because she came from wealth. ‘I brought the money and the breeding to this marriage, he brought the brains,’ she’d been heard to say, after a few drinks. She was older, and belonged to the wives’ club that arranged social functions for the staff at the Science Centre, and, in the beginning, she had been kind to Liese, appearing to like her and her husband, David.
After a pause, Liese says how sorry she is. She knows something more is expected of her, but she is unable to fill the silence, as she sits there, tucking a strand of frothy greying hair behind her ear.
‘He’d have wanted you to come,’ Prue says.
‘Can I get back to you on this?’
‘Oh. Of course, I hear you’re a busy person these days.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Liese says yet again, and puts the receiver down. Instantly she regrets this, but really, perhaps, that’s all she can do.
She sits, absorbing the news she’s just heard. At this time of her life, just past fifty, she feels sometimes that she’s in a state of grace, even of redemption, although perhaps that’s extravagant. Some women she knows don’t look back, still leave their lipsticks under other women’s pillows when they sleep with their husbands, but Liese has gone beyond that, not asking to be forgiven but at least to be allowed to forget.
‘It’s such a staid town,’ Fraser and Liese say to each other, as if they are the first people in the history of the town to fall out of love with the people they are married to, and in love with each other. They are contemptuous, these two, of those who live here, because they don’t believe others experience love the way they do. They do silly things, advertising the remarkable quality of their love, like pulling leaves off citrus trees and rubbing them on each other’s skins. Oranges and lemons. They go home with sharp citrus scents on their bodies that are as telling as sex. Liese takes that home with her as well, intentionally careless, because if she is found out, she won’t have to be the first to tell, to get them all in trouble; she won’t need to tell lies any more. She thinks they have discovered something nobody else knows, the piquancy of an affair.
They walk where it seems they are less likely to be recognised — near the seafront, along the Marine Parade, away from town, towards railway houses that crouch by the cutting. When she looks back on those years, she thinks of the white wings of gannets and the languorous taste of wine, and of art deco houses and shops and the feeling that the shivery earth might open up again and consume its inhabitants, and of Fraser and his wife Prue. On this day, when they walk together, both afraid and defiant, Fraser is talking about poetry, something she knows very little about, but she’s eager to soak it up. He knew the poet Jim Baxter, the one who died young, after founding a commune. Liese’s fair flyaway hair blows around her collar. She is going to leave the town soon. Her husband David has a new job down south.
‘I sometimes wonder,’ she says, ‘if he does know. If maybe he’s taking me away to punish me.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Fraser says. ‘Your husband’s no actor. I’d know.’
‘Why don’t we tell him? Tell both of them?’
‘You know that’s not what we decided,’ he says.
Of course, she is waiting for him to say to her, don’t go away. Stay here and it will be all right. She has a plan worked out in her head, if he will only say this to her. ‘Go on ahead,’ she will say to David. ‘I’ll follow with the children in a little while, when you’ve got a new house for us, then we’ll come down.’
But she wo
n’t go; she’ll stay on in her L-shaped house angled towards the sun, with ranchsliders opening to the verandah, and the magnolia tree on the front lawn. She will start burning incense and leave books of poetry lying open around the house, and Fraser will come and stay with her, and say never leave me, never abandon me, I can’t live without you. He will have to be brave and tell Prue. She will send a short regretful note to David. In the holidays, David will take care of their children, their three boys. He will meet someone else and get married and be happy.
Instead, as she walks along the seafront with Fraser, and practises saying goodbye, a hearse travels past, loaded with a coffin and flowers. She puts her hand in his duffel coat pocket, pinching the rough woollen seam with her fingers, and after a few minutes, with a quick backward glance, he puts his hand inside the pocket with hers, and they talk about death.
‘I don’t think I’d want a funeral as such,’ he says. ‘Just you and Prue there, just the two of you.’ Fraser has had his second wind, he has had the time to panic. As men often do. He is afraid but he can’t give her up. Perhaps he does feel like dying right there and then.
‘What about your children? They’d have to be there,’ Liese says, taken aback, as if he were planning something that might happen quite soon. Besides which, he is talking as if he loves her and Prue equally. Equally, but not the same, perhaps.