by Fiona Kidman
‘They’ll be grown up and off,’ he says. ‘On the other side of the world. That’s what children do.’ Reassuring her that they will be in each other’s futures, somehow, for ever, if not together. What he has said, will turn out not to be true. One of his children will die before him.
Were Liese and David so unhappy? Odd to consider this now, but things that seemed awful at the time have receded almost to vanishing point. Some of it was excellent, so damn fine, as her sons would say.
When they first meet David has a sea-washed blondness. This is partly the way he looks, but it is intensified by his long hours of research in the open, around rock pools, in the salt air. He’s such a catch, her girlfriends say. Their wedding picture is posted on the front of the local newspaper, not just in the bride of the week column. The caption reads: Local belle weds her sweetheart. Mr and Mrs David Sheehan made such a striking couple last weekend, we think they’re news. Mr Sheehan is a research scientist, specialising in marine biology. He hails from Auckland. Nothing about her job as a sales clerk at Toomey’s, the stationery and office supplies shop where she works.
It’s the year of Woodstock, but you wouldn’t tell it from looking at that picture. True, David has sideburns that look almost white and his suit trousers are flared, but Liese’s dress is hand sewn with seed pearls and about as pretty and traditional as wedding dresses get. She glows, a taller than average girl who is happy on her wedding day, with a very good looking man. She thinks she has never entirely forgiven David that — those astonishing even features, eyes the colour of African violets. Later, she will accuse him of being a Nazi. Not true at all, not even remotely. His mother was a Dutch woman with plain hair and even peg-shaped teeth that shone when she smiled. She had been more reserved about the picture than Liese’s mother who, on seeing it, said, ‘Oh I’m so proud of you, you’re both just gorgeous.’
David had snatched it out of her hands and torn it in half.
It’s such bullshit, he’d said, which at the time made Liese furious and sad, although now she thinks much the same way. Of their two sons who are married, one has had an open air ceremony in his and his wife’s pocket-sized garden in Newtown — that’s Robbie, the youngest — while James, the eldest, has married without telling either of them, in a registry office. Their middle son, Simon, lives with a man and says they’ll marry in time, by which he means, when it’s legal for gay men to marry. Liese is fine about this, in principle, but she wishes she liked her son’s lover better, as a person, she emphasises, and that her son didn’t break so many things when he was in a rage. But then, where had he got that from? For when all was said and done, Liese and David were just a couple who had mortgages and three sons, each roughly a year or a little more apart, and at some point, she began breaking things.
Fraser is much older than David, or so it seems when they first meet. He’s heading for forty, which seems a great age. (It seems less when Liese falls in love with him, and he has passed this milestone some years before.) Like David, he works at the Science Centre, part of a group of local scientists with varying disciplines. There is much to be studied in the area: earthquakes that have devastated the town in the past and soil and water cultures, which are important because the region is well known for its orchards and wine growing. David and Fraser, the two marine scientists, are something of a minority, part of a small group who work with the fisheries department. David doesn’t hold Fraser in great respect, although they get on well enough. In his view, his research is lackadaisical. There are changes in atmospheric conditions that are affecting sea life, and with it the livelihoods of fishermen. David complains to Liese that Fraser lives in scientific isolation.
‘He thinks it’s enough to study the life cycle of a starfish because he likes the look of it,’ he says, one Saturday afternoon. ‘He doesn’t consider its place in the scheme of things.’
‘Well, what is the place of a starfish?’ she asks him lazily.
‘You don’t understand, Liese. There are bigger issues here.’
‘But a starfish is still a starfish. Like Myrtle is a turtle.’
Myrtle lives in a terrarium in their sunroom, a rumpus room, as they call it then, with a desk in the corner where David works in the evenings. The children have to stay out of the room then. David expects them to be in bed early. ‘No rumping when Daddy’s busy,’ she tells them.
‘Rumping’s not a verb,’ David says.
‘No, but rumple is,’ she says. ‘It’s what you get when you try to work in the rumpus room.’ He looks at her then in a puzzled manner, as if she is someone he can never hope to understand.
No, that’s not the way it is, either. Rather, he is coming to the view that she will never understand him. When she sees him looking at her like that, she thinks it is to do with her being the uneducated one in the family, that perhaps he wishes he had married someone cleverer than she thinks she is, who had stayed at school longer, one of those bright Baradene girls back in Auckland who went to university. (David was brought up a Roman Catholic and renounced the church for his twenty-first birthday, before he met her.) She doesn’t say any of this to him. If she voices these thoughts aloud, he might some day agree with her.
There are pets Liese would have preferred to a turtle, but David is allergic to cats and she doesn’t see how she can fit in the time to walk a dog. In the afternoons, after their naps, she and the boys take Myrtle for a walk in the garden. The turtle is patterned brown and pale caramel on its shell, with a frilly yellow underside, and light stripes down her head and legs. Liese doesn’t like the feel of the dry fleshy belly as she lifts her out for her walk, but the boys don’t seem to mind. They want to pick her up and nurse her.
‘You can’t do that with turtles,’ David explains to them. ‘It’s bad for turtles to be cuddled.’
She buys the children extra fluffy toys and James, the eldest, sleeps with his panda bear until he starts school. During the winter months, when the sun goes off the house in the afternoons, a thermostatically controlled heater switches on in Myrtle’s terrarium.
David is away on a field trip in a fishing boat when the heater breaks. Myrtle has been lying across it, and the glass suddenly shatters. Simon, the second boy, comes racing into the kitchen where Liese is making meat loaf. She hears his howls before he reaches her.
‘Myr’le’s upside down,’ he yells. He is having speech therapy to help him learn to say his t’s.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Liese says. ‘I expect she’s just having a sleep.’ The way mothers do, when they are distracted and their heads are away in some fairy tale of their own.
‘No,’ wails Simon, ‘Something big hi’ her, and me too.’
She sees he is as pale as milk, and suddenly understands. Robbie, the baby, is making his way to the terrarium when she catches him. Myrtle really is upside down. The miracle is that Simon isn’t dead like Myrtle, and Robbie too. If James had been there, not playing outside with the children from next door, he would have wanted to rescue Myrtle, would certainly have been electrocuted. He is the bossiest and most self-contained of the boys. She sees each of her children, as if in some slow-motion horror movie, dying, one by one, in front of her, the expression snuffed out of their bright faces.
Liese gathers Simon and Robbie around her, and turns off the electricity at the mains. She rings the doctor to see whether she should bring Simon in, after the shock, although his pulse is steady and his colour has returned. It’s Saturday afternoon, and she gets the doctor’s wife. ‘Just keep an eye on him,’ the woman says, because the doctor is out watching rugby and she is just taking calls and passing them on to the duty doctor.
She thinks she should get an electrician, but doesn’t know where she will find one at the weekend. Does she imagine it or is there a crackle and pop about the thermostat? Myrtle seems to be hissing, as if the air is being released out of her. The heater is a sealed unit, with a wire leading through the wall behind it, connecting it to something else. Something David has do
ne, perhaps an illegal connection.
First, she rings Brenda, who she worked with in the office supplies shop. Brenda is a booming competent woman, who says ‘And how are we today?’ when she sees you and ‘toodle pip’ when she’s saying goodbye. She has answers for most things, but she isn’t home when Liese phones. That is when she thinks of ringing Prue, who has been so kind. Prue’s tongue is said to be sharp, but so far Liese hasn’t experienced this.
Prue gives a theatrical sigh when Liese calls. Liese has a feeling that Prue will tell her friends she’s the kind of woman who can’t change a light bulb.
Prue says, after a pause, ‘I’ll put you on to Fraser. He’s not doing anything, as usual.’
Fraser was supposed to have gone on the fishing boat expedition with David, but he’s told David he’s had enough weekend work to last him a lifetime. He comes on the line, and says, in a comforting, chortling way, ‘Don’t touch anything. I’ll be over in ten minutes or so to disconnect the heater.’
‘I don’t want to put you out,’ Liese says. Prue and Fraser live on the hill, the smart part of town where better off people have houses that overlook the sea. Their house, at the end of a cul de sac, has a whitewashed Mediterranean look, and vines around courtyard walls.
‘No trouble. Leave the mains off. See you soon.’
‘Thank you,’ says Liese faintly.
When she hangs up, she thinks that Prue’s annoyance is not with her, but something between her and Fraser. She and the children huddle in the kitchen as if some large natural disaster has overtaken them.
He arrives, wearing a thick plaid jacket and a black woollen hat pulled down over his ears, his horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up on his nose. He’s a sandy-complexioned man, his head coated with crinkly receding hair that’s brushed back, so that his brow looks high and domed. He has freckles sprinkled over his eyelids and even his broad flat lips, and a small neat mole on his left cheek.
‘By Jove,’ he says. ‘What have we got here?’
Liese is on the verge of tears. She explains how casual the doctor’s wife seemed. He nods his head and inspects Simon in a way that reassures her, as if he knows what he’s doing. ‘He’s all right, Liese,’ he says. ‘That heater’s about the same as an electric fence, nasty but not deadly.’ He expresses his surprise that Myrtle has ‘turned turtle’. He laughs at his own joke and disconnects the heater in the terrarium, making sure the socket is safe.
‘Perhaps you could put the jug on,’ he says. ‘That’s if you’ve nothing stronger.’
‘I have,’ she says. ‘There’s been some brandy in the cupboard ever since Christmas.’ She and David have started drinking wine because spirits make her dizzy and David thinks beer is common, although it’s what everyone drank when she was young and going to her first parties.
‘Get it,’ he says firmly, opening her kitchen cupboard as if he’s in charge, and taking out two tumblers. He takes the bottle from her and splashes in the brandy. They stand there, she leaning against the table, and he against the bench, alongside the sausage meat and mince for the abandoned meat loaf, and drink brandy on a Saturday afternoon, talking about what to do with upside-down Myrtle.
‘We should have a funeral for her,’ Fraser says. ‘That’s what we did for our kids when their pets died. Where does David keep his spade?’
‘You mean now? We’re going to bury Myrtle now?’
‘Well, you can’t keep a dead animal in the house for very long. Suit yourself.’
Simon has become tearful, perhaps in the aftermath of his shock, but he is patting Myrtle. ‘Make her live, Mummy,’ he says.
‘I can’t,’ Liese tells him. ‘We’ll do it,’ she says to Fraser.
She calls the neighbour and asks her to send James home, and then she explains to him what has happened, and lets him pat the dead turtle. James is blond, like his father, and, also like his father, restrained in his manner. Sometimes, when Liese looks at him, she thinks a time is coming when she will not know him as well as she would want, as if all the wiping up and feeding him and reading his favourite stories at bedtime will count for nothing.
‘Shall we sing a hymn?’ James asks. He has been to his grandfather’s funeral, David’s father, the year before. He knows what ought to be done.
Fraser collects the spade from the garden shed and digs a hole in the ground, beneath the peach tree. A weak sun struggles through the clouds where he works, casting a pattern of shadows through the branches. ‘I’m not sure about a hymn,’ she says, and finds herself wondering what Fraser would think appropriate. Did he sing hymns with the children when the cat died?
‘I think Myrt would have just liked you to sing a song we all know,’ she suggests. She has found an old pillow slip to wrap the turtle in.
‘How about “Row, row, row your boat?”’ says James.
‘That would be perfect.’
So that’s what they do, the sun filtering through, and the clouds flicking shadows across the sky. The children sing:
Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream.
Fraser picks up the children’s melody and starts the rondo again while he heaps dirt over Myrtle. He whacks it down with the back of the spade and invites the two bigger boys to jump on it and flatten it down further. They jump up and down and say loudly, ‘Goodbye, goodbye, Myrt.’
‘Do you think she can hear us, Mummy?’ says Simon.
‘Probably,’ says Liese, her head spinning with the brandy, and the sight of Fraser standing there among her children, chuckling and singing. It’s late August and she sees that the lilacs are coming, the faint flushed spears of buds pointing skywards. Maybe she could get up a petition to get the trees across the road trimmed so that they could all get more sunlight. At least, spring is just around the corner. Something will change, something will happen, of that she is certain.
‘You could have put her in the shed and waited for me,’ David shouts, the next night, when he comes home.
‘Why?’ says Liese. ‘The children were upset.’
‘She was my turtle.’
‘I thought she was the children’s,’ she says.
‘I bought her for the children. But she was my pet too.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ says Liese icily. ‘What am I supposed to do when you’re not here?’
He shrugs and goes on eating his dinner. She’s made the mince into spaghetti instead. Spaghetti bolognaise à la Burbville. Mince again. A strand of pasta trickles down his chin. It isn’t bad, as mince goes, but perhaps she’s in a rut.
‘I’m sorry,’ Liese says.
‘Me too,’ he says, his eyes watering. They cling to each other when they go to bed. She cradles his head on her shoulder as he dissolves into sleep, exhausted from his weekend at sea. When she is sure he’s sleeping deeply, she gets up and looks out the window. The trees outside look like a dark mountain range. She walks around the house barefooted, looking at her children and pulling the covers up over them.
‘Liese.’ He calls out to her in his sleep. She hurries back and climbs back into bed, curling her cold feet close to the heat of his body.
Fraser just turns up the next time David is away at sea.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
He says he’s come to pick up a reference book from David that he’d meant to collect on Friday. He runs his hand over his head, and smiles disarmingly. ‘Working at home this weekend — I’ve got a paper to write. Anyway,’ he says, ‘I’m the boss, remember?’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t know he was away.’
‘I could use a cup of tea,’ he says, as if she hasn’t been rude.
She bites her lip. ‘Of course.’ Her period is due: her breasts are swollen and heavy and her head has ached all day. ‘Thank you for helping out with the turtle. David really appreciated you coming over,’ she says, as she fills the kettle.
He sits down at the kitchen table
and waits for her to bring him tea in mugs. Simon and Robbie are having a nap and James has gone to the neighbour’s place again, where they’re allowed to watch television in the afternoon. Sometimes she lets them switch it on in the middle of the day, but always with a feeling of guilt, because she and David have talked about it years ago, when they got their first set. We won’t let it rule our lives, they swore at the time.
She tells Fraser this, for something to say, and he laughs. ‘We’ve got a second set in the bedroom,’ he says. ‘There are some good plays on television.’
‘I saw a play on television last week,’ she admits. ‘I think it was a repeat. With Judi Dench. It was one of a quartet about a family. Gladly My Cross-Eyed Bear. But it wasn’t about a bear.’
‘Of course not. It’s a line about Jesus carrying the cross. Those are called mondogreens, running words together like that.’ He shifts the subject sideways. ‘Do you go to the theatre at all?’
‘My friend and I won some tickets to the Little Theatre last year,’ she says. ‘The Killing of Sister George, all about a woman in broadcasting who had a girlfriend. It was pretty weird.’
‘But so interesting,’ he enthuses, ‘such challenging ideas.’
‘Brenda said she didn’t really want to go again.’ Brenda had actually wanted her to walk out at half-time, and there’s been a coolness between them since then, because Liese wanted to stay. She doesn’t tell Fraser how disgusted Brenda was; she decides she won’t even tell him who her friend is.
‘Perhaps you and David could go. I’m sure Ivan would babysit.’
‘Oh, perhaps,’ she says, without enthusiasm. She can’t see David going to plays.
‘Or, why don’t you come to a play with me?’
‘Me? Go out with you?’ Her voice is scandalised.
‘I didn’t mean go out,’ he says, as if she’s a preposterous child. ‘What a virtuous woman you are, Mrs Sheehan. Look, I’m going to see a play the local Repertory’s doing down in Havelock North on Friday night. Prue’s cousin’s been sick, so she’s going down to see her, and I’m sloping off to the play. You’d be coming with us.’