A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  He takes the children out to the movies, away from the carnage. One night his mother rings, and he carries the telephone, trailing its cord, into their bedroom and closes the door. Liese presses her head against the door. She stops when she smells a damp jersey and knows James is standing near. James is growing big, and doesn’t like her much. She hears David say, ‘I know I was brought up a Catholic, Mum. Can’t you just leave it?’ She walks away from the door. These are old arguments between him and his mother. What brings them on again? Perhaps they are talking about her. David might be thinking of leaving her.

  Fraser comes to town and she takes time off work. He is energetic and high-spirited. He is on his way south for a conference, the first he’s been to in years; he’s planning research that will take him south now and then. Liese worries about him and David running into each other, but their careers seem to have gone in different directions.

  They go to a hotel room, under the name of Mr and Mrs Black, and order room service, and watch the clock so that Liese will get back in time to pick up the children from school. This is the first of several meetings. They meet in coffee shops and art galleries. One day he kisses her for a long time behind a Toss Woollaston painting in Peter McLeavey’s gallery. ‘It’s funny,’ he tells her, ‘but you’ve kind of pushed me up the promotion ladder.’

  ‘Prue’ll be pleased.’

  ‘Oh yes, and she likes time to herself. Mind you,’ he adds, a gloomy note in his voice, ‘she doesn’t like sex much these days.’ Liese doesn’t know why this makes her so angry. She still sleeps with David. Somehow, though, she doesn’t expect Fraser to need this from Prue, now that he has her. Even though they live far apart and see each other only now and then, months apart, not weeks. Even though years are starting to pass since all this began between them.

  Her friend Brenda sends her the notice of Ivan’s death. She has remembered that Liese and David knew the family. Liese steels herself, and tells David, because it would be strange not to tell him, although, as a rule, she never mentions Fraser’s name to him, as if it’s tempting fate. But David already knows. ‘We should send flowers,’ she says, and he agrees, even though the funeral is over.

  Liese waits to hear from Fraser, but there is nothing but silence. Eventually, a printed card edged with black and bearing a small printed picture of Ivan arrives in the mail. Thank you folks is scrawled across the bottom. Prue’s handwriting, the same as Liese keeps pressed in the pages of her recipe book.

  In time, she thinks, she may have been delivered a gift: her freedom from Fraser. She supposes that he will see what has happened as a punishment. This is what happens when children die, no matter how: the parents don’t just grieve for the child, they grieve over their own lives, and how they might have shown the missing son or daughter a brief life that was better. They either settle down for the long haul or, quite soon, they go their separate ways.

  There are no letters at the post office and Liese stops going there, finds herself too busy to go out of her way, sees that it won’t do to get in the way of such pain, that it is nothing to do with her. This equilibrium will pass for a kind of happiness.

  She and David break fewer things. They start to save money. It seems to Liese that they are gaining a measure of control over their lives, a control she understands, even if David appears simply to accept it, without knowing why. She goes to the theatre, with new friends she’s made at the shop, including a couple of the customers who seem to think she’ll know all about the books she’s sold them. One of them suggests she take an English paper at university, and she enrols. It’s the eighties, and it’s nothing to be a mature student, studying Marvell and Donne and Katherine Mansfield. She loves the dusty smell of chalk in Von Zedlitz, the building that houses the English Department. Before she knows it, she’s hovering in the stairwells, exchanging marks with fellow students, a sort of delayed adolescence, while the world beyond the red brick walls is into aerobics and power dressing, and Ronald Reagan rules the world, but not her.

  And then he rings. A year or perhaps two have passed. Liese is rushing to catch a lecture, and she picks the phone up on the run. ‘No,’ she says, when she hears his voice. ‘No.’

  ‘I wanted to know how you were,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry I never got in touch with you, didn’t tell you at the time.’ His voice is slower and older than she remembers it.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s all right, I’m all right.’

  ‘How are those boys of yours?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do, though. We’re lucky, we still have the girls,’ he says.

  She tells him then how the boys are doing. How big they’re getting. Jamie is at intermediate school. Simon’s interested in art, Robbie likes cricket. She thinks they will be all right, they’re good kids. Barring accidents. She has begun to cry, whether for him and his loss or for herself, she isn’t sure. She worries about the boys. And yet, here she is on the end of the phone, betraying them, full of the old sharp longing, wanting to console him.

  He seems to know, choosing this moment to put his proposition. ‘I’ve got some work to do in Wanganui next week,’ he says. ‘Could you get there?’

  ‘No.’ She hesitates and hears him fill the silence with a sigh. ‘I don’t know.’ And then in a faint voice she finds herself saying yes.

  She is out of practice at telling lies. ‘I need a break,’ she says. ‘I’ve got this essay to finish. I thought I’d go away for a few days.’ This is not all untrue: lots of women she knows take some time out from their lives, and go away to secret locations to sort themselves out. One woman goes to a health resort, another to a spiritual retreat, and she’s met several writers who pitch their tents, as they say, away from distractions, in other people’s houses, in motels, in cottages rented far away in the country.

  ‘It’s okay,’ David says. ‘We’ll manage.’ He passes his hand through his hair and sighs.

  ‘Just this once,’ she says. ‘I need to catch my breath, Term will be over soon and I can focus on home again.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he says. And he grins at her, gives her a playful slap. She is wearing a flowing crinkly pink skirt scattered with green leaves that look like marijuana at first glance, and a tight green blouse. She is growing her hair longer, down round her shoulders.

  ‘I love you,’ David says. ‘I love the way you look.’

  ‘Do you?’ she says, surprised.

  ‘I always have.’

  ‘Right from the beginning?’

  ‘Of course. That’s generally what men see first, the way a girl looks. The rest comes later.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so,’ Liese says restlessly, anxious to be on her way.

  ‘You just remember that,’ David says.

  ‘Even when I make it hard?’ She wishes she hadn’t said that, as soon as it’s out.

  ‘Even then,’ he says. ‘But it takes two. I know that.’

  A river town. Small, provincial, quaint, with historic old buildings lining the main street. Dickensian. That’s how she would describe it to friends in late-night café sessions when they tell each other all about their lives. A paddle steamer takes tourists sightseeing up river. Beyond the reach of the tour boats is the village of Jerusalem, where Baxter founded his commune, and Mother Aubert tended the sick. Since Fraser’s call she has been reading Baxter again. The river bent like a bright sabre. A different river, she thinks, but it doesn’t matter. It was Fraser who got her started, along with the theatre, though she’s gone long beyond those random beginnings. There are poems she thinks she will never understand, some make her weep uncontrollably. She supposes that that’s why she is here, because there’s something that’s not finished, that still makes her cry at unexpected moments. She remembers pictures she’s seen of Baxter, just before he died, a crumpled heap of tattered clothes and untidy beard, an old man in his forties. Perhaps that is the toll of a passionate life.

  She stays in the town for three days before Fra
ser comes, and finishes her essay; in a way this makes her feel better, as if Fraser is secondary to her presence in the town. As if she really does have a purpose of her own.

  When he arrives, she finds him much changed. She has expected this, but the reality is hard to manage and makes it difficult for her to be herself. Making allowances. Talking about Prue. They can’t avoid that. ‘We had to do it right, all the ceremony, you know. I’d have liked something more informal. The girls wanted to speak but Prue thought that wasn’t right, them speaking at their brother’s funeral.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do,’ she says, because thinking about it is intolerable, and she doesn’t want to appear to be taking sides with Fraser against Prue. This, in itself, seems odd.

  ‘Some day we’ll be able to sort it all out,’ he says. ‘I have to stay with her for now.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I don’t expect you to leave Prue. Anyway, I couldn’t come away with you, you do know that.’ In the dark, she silently acknowledges what a terrifying thought that’s become. It feels unfair that he is saying these things to her now, when it has all become so impossible. For both of them.

  ‘I thought that that’s what you wanted,’ he says, his voice tetchy.

  ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know any more. I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘But is that enough?’ he persists.

  ‘Hush,’ she says, ‘go to sleep.’ Later, she gets up to the toilet. Very quietly, so as not to disturb him, she lifts a slat of the venetian blind and looks outside. Dark shapes of trees roll away towards the river. It reminds her of the past. The air is very still and there appears to be a bank of mist over the town. A rose of flame in a room in a house by the rivermouth. Liese shivers, overtaken by a strong sense of things going horribly wrong. In the morning she will turn her back on this, for once and for all. She has no business in this room. No flames, nothing; she’s had a death of her own, here in this room.

  She lies down beside Fraser again, but the bed is very hot. He snores against her ear. She moves to the other bed in the unit. Sometime, in the middle of the night, she wakes up and sees that the room is illuminated by an outside light, a dismal fluorescent glow. There are footsteps. A voice at the door. An imperious rapping.

  ‘You come out of there, Fraser. I know you’re in there.’

  He sits up, startled and wide awake. ‘Prue,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t go out there,’ says Liese. ‘Please, Fraser. I’ll call reception, tell them there’s an intruder.’

  He says, ‘I think we’re in the soup, old thing.’

  Prue has called David before her raid. David has told her that he knew all along, there’s nothing new he couldn’t have told her, nothing he hadn’t known for years. Prue says his wife is a cunt and a whore and he is no better, letting her carry on the way she did.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ David has said, when Prue asks him to go on the raid to Wanganui with her.

  All of which Liese learns before she drives back to Wellington.

  Over the next few months, Liese stays at home. She gives up her studies and has dinner on the table every evening at six. On the weekends, she watches the boys and takes an interest in David’s work. When the house is empty, she plays tracks of some records over and again. ‘Don’t Hang Up’ drives her insane, won’t stop running through her head. Surprise surprise/There’s a hell of a well in your eyes.

  ‘I think you should go back to university,’ David says. ‘We need to be constructive about this.’ This has become one of his favourite lines. Ever since he has been in charge of their emotional lives. No scenes. No tears. He knows she loves him. It was a mistake. They can work it out.

  ‘You don’t care about this,’ she says childishly.

  ‘Only as much as you make me,’ he says. ‘Really, you should get back to your work, get over it.’

  ‘D’you mean, get over him?’

  ‘There wasn’t much to get over, was there?’ he says, which as near as he gets to being nasty. She hates him for this niceness, this unfailing kindness about all the silly ruinous things she’s done. When the barman said, ‘What’re you drinking?’ /I said marriage on the rocks. Damn song. Over and over.

  She does what he says, goes back to study, but she’s slow. It feels as if she’ll never finish her degree. She does some work at the bookshop, and reconnects, as they all say.

  Surprise, surprise. One day she comes home and there’s an atmosphere in the house she can’t make out straight away. It’s as if the place has been burgled, but everything is orderly and in place. She opens the wardrobe to put away her coat and all his clothes have gone. The boys have got home from school ahead of her.

  ‘Have you seen your father?’ she asks.

  None of them have. She doesn’t tell them immediately that he’s removed all trace of himself from the bedroom and the bathroom. This happens two years after the night she and Fraser were caught. David is in love with a woman called Marina. She is a thin tanned woman with electric frizzy hair and startling blue eyes, that make her and David look more like siblings than lovers.

  ‘You bitch,’ James says. ‘It’s your fault.’ He is fourteen at the time. That is the hardest part, the very worst moment. Why James? she has wondered aloud to her friends. It’s the old thing of the first born, they say, offering comfort. You know, the one who is there in the beginning, the one who knows everything and never lets you go. But he was always outside, playing in the garden, she will say.

  Liese’s pad is scribbled with hieroglyphics from her note-taking at the play. Coincidences are not a great way to resolve a play, or anything in literature for that matter, but perhaps, she thinks, it’s the way life often resolves itself. Here she is, wondering how to review Hare’s play, and here she is, trapped in the circle of her own past. Her deadline is upon her. The young are afraid of the dark, she writes. They know what’s out there waiting for them, more than we did when we were young. You could say The Blue Room is a touchingly moral play, or a very scary one, depending on whether you’ve touched bottom yet, or are still treading water.

  When Liese and Ned were still students, eking out and making do, up there at the university, he’d asked her a question she’s never answered. It was one night when there was a party at the end of term (no, not a party — come round for drinks, was what they said now), at one of her lecturer’s houses. She’d just finished her degree and was thinking about going on to a masters. ‘You write so well,’ the lecturer said, a woman she liked, about her own age, with a lean face and owlish spectacles. Later, her lecturer is less impressed with her career as a journo, thinks she could have tried something more literary, but Liese tells her she’s not given to haiku or sonnets. She remembers being a bit tipsy, and not wanting it to show, thinking her transformation complete.

  She was standing outside on a balcony, overlooking the harbour, and Ned had come out and stood beside her. ‘Did your marriage break up because of anyone else?’ he’d asked, as if it was something he must know.

  She could have brought up the obvious matter of Marina, but this seemed like a lie she didn’t want to tell. Sometimes, to this day, she looks up at family occasions, and sees David looking across at her with a startled puzzled look, as if reaching for something just beyond his grasp, before he sighs and settles back into his new life, the one he took up after he left her, with his new wife and their daughters. She could have told Ned, David left me for Marina; instead, she said nothing, kissed him on the mouth, and found herself being kissed in return. Somewhere, in that still space, she has held on to the truth which so far she hasn’t shared with anyone.

  If she hurries, she’ll just make the supermarket, plus a task that she’s set herself at home, before she goes to the concert. She checks her list, making sure it’s current. All these lists drive her crazy, sometimes she finds she’s shopping from last week’s, and she doesn’t need what she finds herself buying. What would anyone make of her list for the weekend, she wonders. How would one be judged by
such a list? That she keeps stocked up, stays prepared? That she nests, perhaps, and is content. That she will come home at the end of the day. She and Ned have given each other constancy.

  This is her list:

  toothpaste olive oil mushrooms

  tom. paste chicken stock(Tetrapak) 3 tins whole tomatoes

  limes wine 2 coconut milk

  spinach basil eggs

  Mex. chili powder new potatoes

  chicken thigh cutlets (check whether Si and Keith are coming for

  dinner 6 or 8?)

  cereal granny smiths cheese

  6 pack yoghurt jar pasta sauce macaroni

  Not much to be gleaned except, perhaps, a particular culinary domestic trail of a working woman somewhere early in the 21st century. She adds 12 lbs tomatoes, 7 onions to the list. It’s not the best time of year to lay hands on a case of beefsteaks but she thinks the tomatoes she buys will do. She has the rest of the makings for soup at home. Liese makes Prue’s soup every year, choosing a weekend late in summer. This weekend has chosen itself. The warm homeliness of the finished jars is her annual bow to domesticity.