A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  So that is where it starts, her interest in theatre, and her understanding, too. Just a peek under the curtain, but it turns out to lead her somewhere different, somewhere unexpected, even if it’s a long way ahead. While they have been talking she feels something hot and sticky uncurling itself from her body. Her period has started. She touches the faux leather seat of her chair furtively; drawing it away, she sees blood on her fingertips. She keeps on talking to Fraser because she feels the flood spreading in a pool between her legs. She thinks that if she just sits there and talks he will get fed up and go away. If it wasn’t for the blood, she would have stood up before this, so that he would know it was time to go.

  Only he keeps on sitting there and talking to her, until James bursts in through the back door. He’s come up the path from next door. ‘Mum,’ he says, ‘Myrt’s come alive, she’s crawling out of the ground.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Liese says, her voice sharp with disbelief, and embarrassment at her predicament.

  ‘But she is.’ And then Fraser gets up, and she has to, too, although she keeps her back away from him, hoping he won’t see the blood-soaked back of her dress. He walks on ahead of her.

  ‘She says, ‘I’ll be out in a moment.’ She thinks he hasn’t seen the blood but of course he has. One night, when they’ve been making love and she hasn’t quite finished her period, she asks him if he noticed anything that day, and he says yes. ‘I smelled you,’ he tells her. ‘Then why didn’t you go?’ she asks him. They are in a motel room together, in a town beside a river, years afterwards.

  ‘Because it was when I got to know you,’ he will tell her. ‘You had to talk to me, you couldn’t get up and leave, and I thought, here we are at the beginning of things, and I can smell her blood.’

  ‘That’s sick,’ she tells him. Their affair will be as good as over then. He will be desolated and half dead with an incalculable grief. They won’t realise that they are talking of their past, but they are, sooner than they think.

  Liese hastily cleans herself and puts on a fresh skirt, and follows Fraser and James out into the garden. Myrt’s head and front paw are sticking above the earth, as she heaves and pulls to free herself.

  ‘The resurrection,’ says Fraser. ‘It looks as if we were a bit quick off the mark.’

  One of Myrt’s legs is infected and has to be amputated on Monday. Apart from that, she is fine. Liese doesn’t mention to David that Fraser had been there when she re-emerged, and the children are so excited they forget to tell him. What is there to tell him, except that Myrt had come back from the grave?

  Liese and Fraser and Prue travel to Havelock North, while David stays home and minds the children. Liese and Fraser go to see Pinter’s The Homecoming, while Prue goes visiting. Prue is talkative and sharp during the drive. A new woman has moved into her neighbourhood on the hill. She is renting a little house at the end of their street, which Prue had thought due for demolition. The woman has billowy black hair and a dead pale face, and two children.

  ‘Cheap white trash,’ says Prue.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asks Liese.

  ‘You can tell,’ Prue says, dismissing the subject, and ready to move on to something else.

  ‘That seems a bit rough, old girl,’ says Fraser. His voice is mild, but Liese realises he is taking up the cudgels on her behalf, even though she hasn’t meant to create an argument.

  ‘Your trouble is, you can’t see some things for looking,’ says Prue. She lights a cigarette and smoke fills up the car. Liese sees the way she sucks her lungs full and blows it out of the corner of her mouth, so that it trickles between the seats, surrounding her in the back. The rest of the journey passes more or less in silence. Liese wishes she hadn’t come.

  She doesn’t understand much of the play, but she understands Fraser’s hand holding hers in the dark. At first she tries to pull away but then she thinks how much she likes his hand, which is large and warm, with a certain dryness about the skin. He pushes back the cuticle of one of her fingernails absently with his thumb. If she were asked to describe the play now, she would express a certain feeling of nihilism (she’s seen this and other Pinter plays since and has learnt how to express her thoughts about them). She was not sure then if she could see where things were going or why. She finds herself leaning slightly towards him, so that their shoulders touch.

  On the way home, Prue is animated and talkative again. Her cousin has given her a present, her silver-backed dressing table set, embossed with her initials, which she has had since she was a girl. Prue rubs the back of it with her sleeve and holds it up for them to admire, even though they can’t see it in the dark interior of the car, and Fraser has his eyes on the road ahead of them anyway. This time it is he and Liese who have little to say.

  Awful things will happen to Liese and Fraser. Already she knows this, and is determining that nothing will prevent them from happening. He knows it too and believes he can avert them with reason and persuasion. The best of both worlds. Eating his cake and having it too. The whole old ragbag of clichés that Prue will employ before it is all said and done. He might think he knows a lot, but he has no idea how strong Liese’s hunger for him will be, how unlimited her capacity for desire. She has the first warnings, the beginning of a catastrophe, and she is doing nothing to avert it.

  There are days when he should be at work, but he comes to visit her instead. In the morning the house is often empty, the children off at school or kindergarten. They have become adept at meeting in the evenings, under cover of dark, leaving their houses under one pretext or another, trips to the library, visits to Brenda (whom she sees only fleetingly), committee meetings — all the ways and means that lovers employ. They have made swift rough love in a locked bathroom at a party. When he visits her at home, they just talk; even she can see it’s still her and David’s house. When he talks, she thinks he should never have taken up the line of work he’s in; he’s more interested in poetry and books. Or was he just wooing her, she wonders when she is older. Perhaps he saw something that had been overlooked in her life, a capacity to think and learn, a mind worth flattering with information.

  On these days, when he visits her at the house, she asks David idly, while serving him dinner, ‘How was Fraser today?’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ David says, reading the newspaper, as if she isn’t there.

  ‘Goodness, wasn’t he at work?’ She can’t stop herself.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he was. I don’t see him every day.’

  ‘Okay, I was just interested. I thought you took coffee breaks together.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t today,’ he says one evening, with particular irritability.

  Which she knows, because that morning Fraser had helped her to pick peaches off the tree in their garden.

  The tree is laden with oozing ripe fruit that must be dealt with. When he arrives she is arming herself with a bucket. Months have passed, and David has announced the move south. She phones him, to ask if he has remembered to take the antibiotic he’s been prescribed for a virus. It’s her way of checking he’s at work, isn’t likely to duck home. He hesitates and says, yes, he has taken it, is there anything wrong?

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ she says. ‘I love you,’ she adds, and hangs up.

  Fraser has already gone down the garden to the tree. He climbs up on to the lower branch and picks peaches, throwing them down for her. His face appears between the leaves, sticky with juice.

  ‘Catch,’ he says, tossing her the fruit. When she bends over he aims one at her back. After that, he comes down and helps her fill the clothes basket with fruit like hot balls of fur.

  ‘You should make jam,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t want to.’ The whole neighbourhood is full of women bending over huge pans of preserves at this time of year, boasting about how many bottles they’ve put down. She thinks it will be different when she moves away, and for the first time, the idea of the shift seems almost a relief. If she can’t stay
, perhaps she can change herself in the new place, have a career, ignore women who do bottling.

  ‘Prue will use them,’ he says.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, if you want to pick peaches for Prue, that’s fine. I thought you were helping me.’

  He puts his arms around her and licks juice off her face. She pushes him away. ‘Stop it.’ She thinks the neighbours will see her standing in the yellow morning light in the circle of his embrace.

  ‘Please.’

  Inside the house, he pulls her against him, his hands lifting her skirt as he flattens her against the wall of the hallway. He cups the washing board ripple of stretch marks between her navel and pubic hair in his hand. She opens herself up to him, her ragged breath panting, lets herself be carried to the bedroom. ‘I love you,’ she says, for the second time in half an hour.

  In the afternoon, when Robbie and Simon are home from crèche, she puts them in the car, and they drive over to Prue and Fraser’s place, the boys holding the bucket of bruised peaches between them in the back seat.

  ‘I wondered if you might like some fruit to make jam,’ Liese says artlessly, when Prue opens the door.

  ‘Well, look at that,’ says Prue. ‘I’ll bet you’ve been having a busy time.’

  ‘I haven’t done many bottles,’ Liese says.

  ‘Come in,’ Prue says, ‘that’s really thoughtful of you.’

  So Liese sits on a high stool at the divider between the kitchen and the breakfast room in Prue’s house, which is painted several shades of pretty blue in each room — water blue, sky blue, and one shocking room the colour of cinnerarias — and talks to Prue, who is surrounded by glowing red jars of bottled tomato soup. The children have gone out to play on an abandoned swing in the garden. Prue smokes a cigarette while they drink some coffee and seems to have forgotten the night when she and Liese and Fraser went to the play. While they are talking, the phone rings. Prue picks it up — too quickly, Liese thinks, on reflection.

  After a pause, Prue says, ‘I’ve got someone with me, I’ll call you back later. Will you be at home or the office?’

  It’s the ‘at home’ that Liese remembers, as she constructs and reconstructs that conversation, on and off over the years. It isn’t Fraser at his office. Not a woman, because Prue would have told her. Someone she knows well enough to phone at home or work. For a moment, she almost wonders if it’s David.

  ‘I’d better be getting along,’ Prue says, although it is Liese who is visiting. Liese understands that this is an invitation for her to leave. She puts her cup down slowly, as if to say she’s in no hurry.

  ‘I’ll give you my tomato soup recipe,’ says Prue. ‘You really should try it.’ She has recovered herself, is no longer trying to hurry Liese out.

  ‘Thanks, I’d really like that.’ She remembers Prue sending over jars of the delicious soup when Robbie was born. She waits, as if that’s what’s expected of her.

  ‘Right,’ says Prue, with startling fierce coldness. She pulls a recipe book off the shelf above the stove with odd jerky movements. Grabbing a shopping pad, she hurriedly jots down a list of ingredients and instructions. The recipe on the curling page will survive long after the letters her husband writes to Liese:

  Tomato Soup

  12 lbs tomatoes

  7 onions

  1 oz celery salt

  7 cloves

  1 cup sugar

  2 tblsp salt

  2 tsps pepper

  1 tblsp parsley

  1 lb butter

  8 tblsp flour

  Quarter tomatoes and onions. Add the celery salt, cloves, sugar, salt, pepper & parsley and boil a half hour. Strain through a mouli. Melt butter, stir in the flour carefully. Add the sieved pulp & boil 5 mins. Bottle & seal at once.

  Prue’s flourishing hurried scrawl, her abbreviations.

  ‘I’ll get some tomatoes on the way home,’ says Liese. ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘You do that,’ Prue says.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I was talking to my lawyer,’ says Prue, as if to frighten her, and then seeming to regret it straight away. She bites her lip and fiddles with her cigarette packet.

  ‘Oh. Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ Liese says, knowing she can’t outstay her welcome any longer.

  ‘Do you know any good lawyers?’ she asks Fraser, a few days later.

  ‘Not really,’ he says, but she notices a change in his voice, something alert and wary. ‘Why do you want a lawyer?’

  ‘Idle curiosity. We really ought to have one, David and I should make a will.’ (This is misleading, of course they have made wills and appointed guardians to their children in the event of their deaths; David is far too careful not to have taken all the necessary precautions to make them safe in the future. At least, as safe as he knows how.)

  ‘You can get someone when you go south. Not much point in having one here when you’re leaving.’

  ‘What if David should change his mind and stay?’

  ‘You know he won’t do that. His transfer’s already gone through.’ Yet again, later, she will catch herself thinking that this is what he’s known all along: the certainty that she and David will be gone, the safety of having begun an affair with her.

  ‘I might stay for a while.’ Voicing this thought aloud, at last.

  ‘No you won’t,’ he says.

  ‘So who is your lawyer, anyway?’

  Fraser shrugs. ‘Prue does all of that. There’s a lawyer up north we used to know when I was at university.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Prue’s friend. He talks a lot.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’ Some chime is ringing in her head, a surprising yet familiar ring.

  ‘Look, what is this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  Not Prue, she thinks. Prue is not a woman who dallies. Prue is a woman of virtue who starts her housework at seven o’clock sharp and washes her long silky hair at nine, after she’s finished the chores, and everyone’s gone off to school or work. Between nine and midday she prepares the evening meal, her hair flowing around her shoulders as it dries. At noon she winds it up into its customary loop on top of her head and spears it in place with invisible pins. Prue plays tennis with her women friends and they have lunches. She serves on a school committee. Her children bring home glowing report cards.

  All of that will change. Ivan, her and Fraser’s first born, will die of meningitis in a student flat in Auckland one Sunday afternoon when his friends think he is suffering from a hangover. Prue will become a woman who, for a long time afterwards, sits listlessly through one day after another, while things come undone around her.

  But not yet. That is still to come.

  Liese wants to get home to Ned, to start dinner so that he has something to eat before the concert. He is a musician, a man with infinite patience and sinewy beautiful hands, used to drawing a bow. He surprises her how careless he seems about these hands of his; he likes doing woodwork in his spare time. ‘I was considered good with my hands,’ he says mockingly of himself. ‘I was expected to be a carpenter.’

  ‘Like Jesus,’ she says, kissing his fingers where they touch her. He is the kind of man who will do for her the things she most hates — like cleaning the oven — as well as what she loves. He’s playing some Handel in a new series with the Sinfonia. Ned reminds her of a blackbird, or Tom Conti. She met him when she was in the last year of her degree in English, and he was a music student. They ate their sandwiches together on the Mount Street cemetery at the edge of the campus, huddled against the wind, on the edge of tombstones. Both of them were desperate for money, but at least she had a place to live. She offered him a room in her little house in Aro Valley, and he’s never left. She is ten years older than him, and it still surprises her that he loves her, has not wanted children of his own, was prepared to put up with the rudeness of her own while they were growing up.

  Liese has become a woman who plans and organises to good purpose. Although she gets tired
some days, she doesn’t seem to need as much sleep as she did when she was young. In the early mornings, while the sweet notes of Ned’s practising fill the house, she rises and prepares her days. She makes lists. She believes she loves Ned, but sometimes feels herself retreating to a place where he can’t follow. There is a stillness in her centre that sometimes frightens her. She calls it her critical self, but that’s an excuse. He says, in rare moments of exasperation, I don’t get it, because sometimes she holds back, doesn’t always understand the music. You would think, he says, that a woman so acutely aware of the theatre and all its nuances, would hear music with greater sensibility. I like it all around me, she tells him, isn’t that enough?

  David. Fraser. Ned. Three men in her entire life. It doesn’t seem like too many. Some women are taken up by a lot more. About a dozen, says one of her friends when they have been drinking wine. I don’t know, who counts? Her friend is an ordinary outgoing woman who specialises in lighting design, a woman strong from hefting equipment, the mother of daughters. The idea of so many men between her muscular legs shocks Liese. About average, says another woman, agreeing with the first. You remember your best.

  Fraser had not said stay.

  After the move, she writes to him every day. He writes twice a week and she collects his letters from a post office address. Like a poste restante. She knows which days to expect his letters but she goes every day, just in case. His letters are addressed to her under a different name, so that she feels as if she has begun a different life, living under the alias of Mrs Black. She lives in fear that she will be asked for identification but it never happens. Probably there are hundreds of Mrs Blacks like her, haunting post office counters.

  She and David find it hard making ends meet in the city. They buy a huge rambling house in Khandallah with a spiralling staircase which has sold them the house, but is rotten at its core. There are breathtaking views of the harbour, and big rooms with high studs. The mortgage is colossal. Liese takes a part-time job in a bookshop, which interests her, but doesn’t pay very well, and she’s on her feet for hours on end. In the weekends, they spend their time stripping down varnish and staining floors, restoring leadlights. She’s not sure why she’s doing this — it’s not what she wants to be doing — but the fact is, they’ve got three children and the habit of marriage. Often they quarrel as they go about their self-imposed tasks. David likes his new job down near the waterfront, but the business of working and raising the boys and fixing up the house leaves them exhausted. Liese throws things at David, heavy objects, like hammers and spirit levels, that miss, but one afternoon, she catches him on the ear with a potted cyclamen. The pot, glancing off him, shatters on the wall behind, spilling earth and plant and red clay shards.