The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  As she stood there, the elements rising around her, it occurred to her quite suddenly that she was out of it, this situation she had brought on herself, and that she was safe and free again. Some shift was occurring, like a boat slipping its anchor. There had been an expectation that Duncan would change her life, offer some prospect of enlightenment, evidence of things she had glimpsed but not recognised. But all that had really happened was that she was constantly afraid. She thought, I don’t even like him. In her head she said to herself, I’ve had a sheltered life and I’m ready to move back into it. She saw freedom of a different kind beckoning her. There was nothing to stop her doing things that might interest her: going to the theatre more often, learning a language, taking up charity work. She might even take a course in the arts. All of that had been there for the taking, and she hadn’t seen this.

  Out in Cook Strait a mountainous wave was lifting and rushing towards the shore, causing her to step backwards. A young man, hardly more than a boy, wearing a thin cotton hoodie, hurried along the sand with a stumbling gait. He seemed not to notice Geraldine, stopping close by her and lifting his arm, an object poised above his head. For a moment she thought he was throwing a stick to a dog, but she was close enough to see that it gleamed in the dull light.

  The object wheeled through the air, landing close to the edge of the water, and she saw that it was a knife. The young man ran towards the breakers to pick it up and in doing so almost banged against Geraldine. Water lapped over his trainers. After an instant’s hesitation he turned towards her, the knife raised again above his head, his expression frightened. His face was speckled with pimples and patchy stubble. There was a grey pallor around his mouth. She began to run, screaming as she breasted the rise leading to the road. She was faster and fitter than the boy. People who had been browsing in the gallery emerged, rushing towards her.

  Duncan arrived, too, at that same moment.

  ‘Duncan,’ Geraldine said, weeping as she collapsed against his shoulder. A man in an anorak who had been walking his dog wrestled her attacker to the ground, dragging the knife from him, using only one hand to break his grip because the young man was weak and pathetic, trying to flee when he saw all the people coming at him.

  And, in a short while, the police had arrived, and Geraldine and Duncan were both witnesses. More than that. Geraldine was now, as the newspaper described her, the victim of an attempted second murder with the same knife that had stabbed the man in the city.

  ‘It could have been worse. The boys weren’t here,’ Geraldine said. She knew how lame that sounded, but she had to say something, now that truth lay all around her in the silence of the apartment.

  ‘You think they won’t find out?’ her husband said with deep bitterness. ‘Oh, don’t be naïve. I don’t want their names or mine dragged through the newspapers. I’ll get on to a lawyer to get you name suppression. The best person money can buy.’

  ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Quite often, by the sound of it.’

  The lawyer came and spoke to her at length. He would support her all the way in court, he assured her. It was difficult to say whether he could have her name suppressed when she gave evidence — it was not as if it were a sexual violation — but he would do his best.

  ‘What about Duncan?’ she asked him.

  ‘What about him?’ the lawyer said. Geraldine’s husband was sitting opposite in a deep leather chair, observing her closely.

  ‘I thought,’ she began, in a faltering voice, ‘well, because he’s why I was there. It’ll come out. In court.’

  ‘How many people know about this … this friendship of yours?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, twisting a tissue in her lap. It was a long time since she had been a schoolgirl. Geraldine remembered her headmistress, blonde and elegant, who spoke with a refined and carefully modulated voice. She called the pupils her ‘gels’, but when they erred there was no avoiding her gaze. ‘The man in the bookshop. The woman at the guesthouse. Her name was Hazel. A man at Newtown.’

  ‘A man at Newtown? Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. We — well, that is, I — gave him some money to go away.’

  A look of dislike settled over her husband’s face, the long face with folds at the corners of the mouth, which she had once loved.

  Duncan’s wife appeared at their apartment. When she announced herself on the intercom, Geraldine said: ‘You can’t let her in.’

  ‘Why not?’ her husband said. ‘Don’t you want to see the competition?’

  ‘She’s not.’

  ‘Well, let’s take a look anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m curious.’

  The wife was much younger than Geraldine expected. She had a thin, lightly freckled face, and fair sticky hair pushed back behind her ears. ‘I knew,’ she said, ‘even before I found your soppy text. I do the accounts, I count every penny. I thought I was helping him, watching the money. His first wife left him over money. Well, I said, I’m a good bookkeeper, I can keep an eye on things. I noticed straight away when he started taking out cash.’ She said this in a light, breathy voice.

  ‘I didn’t know Duncan had been married before,’ said Geraldine. Only she did. She understood now.

  ‘I’ll make up the money to you,’ Geraldine’s husband said.

  ‘You will not,’ the woman said, lifting her chin. She might look stupid, she told him, but she wasn’t.

  Geraldine’s husband said that no, she didn’t look at all stupid to him, far from it. The woman said she came from Taita. She’d lived there all her life until she met Duncan when she went to work in his office. ‘I was good at school,’ she said, with defiance in her tone. ‘I was proxime accessit to the dux.’

  ‘I can see you’ve got what it takes,’ said Geraldine’s husband. ‘I think it’s very brave of you to come here like this. Although I’m not quite sure why you have.’

  ‘I got pregnant with Duncan,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Straight off at the office Christmas party. I suppose that sounds real old-fashioned to you,’ she said, addressing Geraldine. ‘Anyway, I could have got rid of it but Duncan was all for getting married — it was quite a surprise, I can tell you. My mum said it might be for the best — he’s got a pretty good job, even if he does throw his money away on tarts.’

  ‘Please,’ said Geraldine’s husband.

  ‘You can have him,’ the wife said to Geraldine. ‘I don’t give a shit about him. I’ve got two kids now — well, perhaps you know that — and he’s got another one he’s still paying for. I’d rather go home to Mum.’

  ‘If I can help in any way,’ Geraldine’s husband said again.

  Another woman came to see them. It was difficult to see how she had found the address, because Geraldine still had name suppression. ‘The victim did not wish to be identified,’ the newspaper reported.

  This woman was overweight and missing some teeth. Her hair straggled over the neck of a red crepe blouse that had seen better days. The defendant in the coming court case was her son. They came from Taumarunui, she said, the centre of the island, near the railway lines. It was a good town; her boy never got in any trouble there, only when he came to the city. That’s the way it was with so many of the kids. ‘We told him, don’t you go away down there. You meet all sortsa rubbish in the city.’

  ‘He stabbed a man,’ said Geraldine’s husband.

  ‘They say he did but nobody knows that, eh. Now he’s up on this new case but how can he get a decent trial? Look at you,’ she said to Geraldine. ‘He never even touched you.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Geraldine said, much as her husband had to Duncan’s wife.

  ‘To get him a fair hearing. Drop this case. Someone else give him the knife. He was just getting rid of it for a mate.’

  ‘You should tell the police.’

  ‘Well I did, Madam Muck. They’re still doing the DNA — he might be all right if it wasn’t for you. You and your boyfriend know he
never laid a finger.’ The woman began to cry then, heavy tears sliding and gathering into the trail of snot forming beneath her nose. ‘He’s a good kid. You’ve got boys?’ Her eyes rested on a photograph, a family picture taken at a lake with their boat in the background. ‘The legal-aid man said he might get out on bail. You got no idea what it’s like in jail for boys.’

  Geraldine’s husband stood to show her out. ‘If you said something,’ the mother said. ‘Like he never touched you. He told me he just didn’t see you. It might give him a breather.’

  Shouting echoed from the lift lobby when Geraldine’s husband led the woman out.

  When he came back he dropped heavily into his chair.

  ‘Perhaps it’s true,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘The boy?’

  ‘He mightn’t be the killer.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Geraldine, he was disposing of a weapon.’

  ‘But we don’t know.’

  ‘Who cares?’ he said. When he had composed himself again he said, ‘I loved you. I really did. I gave you everything.’

  ‘Everything? Is that the answer? You just buy things?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s what I had.’

  They decided Geraldine would stay. Between them, she and her husband agreed that this was best for the boys. For them all. Things could be smoothed over, they would pass. For the moment her husband couldn’t bear the thought of touching her, but perhaps in time he might because, he said, he had always fancied her so much. This admission surprised and pleased her more than she might have supposed. A date had been set down for the boy’s trial. Her husband had a conference to attend in Stockholm and afterwards he would stay on and look at some new design trends in Europe, but he would be back in time to support her when she gave evidence. He was happy that he could travel and meet new people, his time occupied. When he returned, this would be just another matter to be dealt with. They could begin again after that.

  By the time he got back the young man had died in a prison fight and the trial was called off. The DNA results had come through and it seemed that someone else might well have used the knife on the night of the killing in the city.

  His weeping mother was pictured in the newspaper. ‘I don’t know how it all come about,’ she said. Geraldine believed she did, and wished it wasn’t so. The history of it all, the death of a boy. These things would haunt her.

  Preservation

  If you had known us when we were girls, Sabrina thinks, Jan is the last one you would have expected to land up in prison. With a name like hers, Sabrina was bad girl territory, or so people imagined, and for a time they were not entirely wrong. She and Elsa and Jan, always together, a clan of their own that others would have loved to join but never could. They hitched up their gym slips to the edge of their bums, and chewed gum in class and smoked on the boundary fence that divided their girls’ school from the boys’ one next door. Jan was the one who managed to stay out of trouble.

  Yet here Sabrina is, with her hair, wispy and greying, piled up on her head, glasses sliding down her nose, as she scans the newspaper for art-house movies, waiting in the prison car park for Elsa. Her grown-up son has gone away to university, so she and her second husband Daniel have time to devote to their jobs, Sabrina as a policy planner in a government department, Daniel as an engineer. (What policy does Sabrina plan? It varies as she moves around departments, edging up the career ladder. At the moment she is planning trade deals.) They have money and friends and time to live well. Why has she come here, she wonders.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Daniel had said at breakfast. ‘Well, look at the weather.’ Saturday morning is special time for them. A tall man, with riotous curls and an infectious grin, Daniel likes jokes and cult movies and making surprise breakfasts for her at the weekend. Later, they shop together: a ritual. He was disappointed that she ate in haste, distracted and about to go out. ‘It’s not as if you’re in touch with her very often.’

  ‘I do have to go,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ She realised that he had never met Jan, understood that he was worried about this expedition of hers.

  Outside, it was a grey April morning and, indeed, the sharp chill of winter had already descended on Wellington. In the night a southerly wind had blown leaves from the copper beech in the garden. The wind had bowled her along the motorway, and now a sleety rain is falling on the asphalt of the parking lot beside her. She shivers and pulls her mohair jacket closer, glancing up at the stark building, the steel bars of the prison. Perhaps Elsa won’t come.

  But even as Sabrina is thinking this, Elsa’s smart yellow Citroën pulls alongside.

  Elsa, like her, has turned out to be respectable, only more matronly. Elsa stays home and minds grandchildren, and cooks endless meals, though, as she says, she does like to keep herself ‘looking nice’. She goes to her hairdresser in the city every other week, and shops in boutiques. It’s quarter of a century since she taught school. I guess I got lucky, she will say whenever they meet. Fortunate to have a husband with a good income, his job as steady as a rock even in a town like this, where for so many people it’s in one office door and out the other. An accountant is worth his weight in … though herself she wouldn’t wear gold, she prefers silver. It’s not that Sabrina sees herself or her life reflected in the way Elsa lives hers now, but there is a history from the days of sleepovers and fat scones and hot chocolate, of ballet practice in tutus, of Girl Guides and music practice, of regular bedtimes and cut lunches, of homework schedules and summer holidays, a history that has traced itself in their own domesticity, however varied it may look on the surface. Their rebellion was temporary, a rite of passage on the way to their grown-up lives. Our mothers will go ape-shit, they had said, and when it happened, they’d move onto something else. Like university, eventually. Their mothers uncrossed their fingers behind their backs.

  Jan was different in almost every way, and Sabrina has wondered since how it took her so long to see this. Jan was simply there. At school she passed exams without seeming to notice what happened in class, or without reading her textbooks. While everyone else was deep in study, Jan would sit as if in a trance. It was only later she revealed what they should have noticed, that she had a photographic memory. All the same, it seemed Jan was part of all that they did, only, looking back, Sabrina sees this wasn’t so. Rather, she was the person who gave them permission to get up to their pranks, the one who listened to them plan their misdemeanours, dared them when their courage faltered and, later, covered their tracks. Sabrina smiles at herself when she uses the phrase ‘gave them permission’, as if she is some latter-day counsellor, a jargon freak like Jan’s mother, Leonie. She was weird, not like other mothers. She and Elsa never said this to Jan, but they knew she thought so, too, noticing how she liked to stay over at her friends’ houses but never asked them back to her place.

  They did meet Leonie once a year while they were in high school. When it was Jan’s birthday, they were summoned to gather at a Chinese restaurant, the same one in Courtenay Place every year. ‘My mother wants you to come,’ Jan would say, her face rigid with embarrassment. They said yes, of course, and thanks, that would be fine. When Jan wasn’t there, they would say ‘Le-Oh-nie, oh my God’ and raise their eyebrows. It was the only time they were unkind to Jan, and she would never know, and, after all, they did turn up. How could they not, because if they didn’t Jan would have to do it on her own.

  Leonie was one of those women who liked to party hard, wore platform shoes and maxis, and talked about women’s liberation. She worked as a reporter, a media-hen she called it, and cackled at herself, her toughness, her fearlessness in tackling the big stories. Each year she would have a different man with her, although the uniform didn’t change much — flared trousers, sideburns. They had names like Eddie and Norm and Ted, and they all worked for one or other of the unions. They smoked over dinner, because you could do that then, and drank red wine, and complained that they couldn’t order spirits.r />
  The year Jan turned fifteen, Leonie brought along a photograph of Jan as a baby. Jan was blonde and dimpled, and the dimple in one cheek had stayed with her. In the photograph, Leonie had straight hair dangling to her waist, and wore a poncho over a long flowery dress. How we change, she had said, passing the picture around for everyone to admire. That was the sixties, you know. Jan would hunch down in her chair and look as if she wished her mother would die. Jan was dux of the school in her year, the first of them to graduate, the first to get a real job, as a flight attendant it turned out.

  ‘My daughter, a trolley dolly,’ Leonie said to Sabrina when she chanced upon her in the street one day. Her hair was permed in a very big Afro and she wore round spectacles.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Sabrina said, although she thought anyone as pretty as Jan, and as clever, could do much as she liked.

  ‘She says she doesn’t have to use her brains. It figures — she was always lazy.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Sabrina said, thinking that, after all her talk about women’s liberation, Leonie was being sexist. She, herself, had an appreciation of feminism, now that she went to university and suffered jokes about her name. Her parents had named her after a British pin-up star with enormous breasts. They had done it as a kind of a joke, they told her, shamefaced. Sabrina, the pin-up one, had visited the town where her mother grew up, and she’d thought it great that someone got so much attention. They were sorry. They would understand if she changed it; they were only young themselves when they had her. As acts of contrition, they gave her brothers plain staid names. But Sabrina has hung onto her name as if it’s a lucky charm.