The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  As one, Sabrina and Elsa shake their heads. They know Jan doesn’t need them here.

  ‘We’ll see her at the funeral,’ they say.

  But Jan isn’t at the funeral, and they aren’t really surprised. Sabrina supposes that, even if she were allowed, Jan wouldn’t want her mother’s friends to see her tethered to a guard. The undertaker has told them that the viewing went very well, and that Jan’s escorts, as he described her guards, had allowed her to stay a long time. She had been able to bring a friend from the prison. They had spent some time with Leonie, then Jan stayed with her for a while by herself. She loved the dress on her mother, said it was exactly right. Sabrina thinks Jan would have said goodbye then; it would have been enough.

  For, after all, it’s not such a great occasion. Twenty or so people attend, hard-bitten older reporters for the most part, and some union people. Eddie makes a lugubrious speech to the effect that Leonie was a great laugh and tough as old boots with a heart of gold and his very good mate. All the old clichés, and bit of cover-up too. His wife, standing in the front pew, is a tiny woman with a nut of a face and knowing eyes.

  The undertaker hands them the dress, wrapped up in tissue paper, and they shake hands with him.

  Back at Elsa’s house, Sabrina gives Elsa the tag and Elsa, who is more adept at folding things, reattaches it. She is wearing her kitchen gloves. ‘You can’t be too sure,’ she says. It’s Sabrina’s job to return the dress. Elsa had picked it up; now her part is over, as she says. Done and dusted.

  The shop’s manager is indignant, although she tries to be polite. She studies the dress from every angle and finds it perfect. She asks if she can give Sabrina a cheque, given that she ‘doesn’t appear to have a credit card’, and when Sabrina says no, her friend paid for it with cash and that’s what she wants back, she has to wait for a long time while the woman goes to the bank along the street. The notes are counted out with crisp fury.

  In the days that follow, Sabrina frets about the dress. Perhaps it has been sold and now some other woman might be wearing it. There seems something deeply unpleasant about this possibility. In her lunch-hour she slopes up the street to the shop and takes a quick look round to see whether the manager is at the counter. When she see the coast is clear, she ducks in and looks on the rack, but the dress has gone. An attendant at the other end of the shop looks up and sees her. ‘If you’ve changed your mind, that dress is sold,’ she says.

  So Sabrina knows it’s not as easy as that: everyone in the shop knows who she is and remembers. She and Elsa meet so that Sabrina can give her her money back. She tells Elsa about her second trip to the shop. Elsa blanches a little, says they must forget it now, because there’s nothing they can do about it, and they don’t need to draw attention to themselves. Who knows, they might be on security cameras. Really, it’s not a crime. ‘You have to let it go, Sabby,’ she tells her. ‘Click click?’

  They talk about going to see Jan. Both of them have written to her and described the funeral. Sabrina has even tried to make her account a little comical, describing the way Eddie’s toupee had slid over his ear while he was giving the eulogy.

  Weeks pass and neither of them hears from her. They wonder about going to see her again, but it turns out to be complicated. They have to get permission to visit, and be on Jan’s list of people she wants to see and when they enquire it seems that Jan hasn’t asked for them again. Elsa is annoyed that after all the trouble they’ve been to, Jan hasn’t bothered to write.

  THERE IS A DINNER PARTY. There are dinner parties all over this city every night: diplomacy, solid silver cutlery and crystal; business, private rooms in restaurants, some talk, a deal cut and home by ten o’clock; culture, artists or writers or film dudes (but rarely a combination of the three) take over the whole restaurant and shout their way through a main and several bottles of wine. And there are the weekend dinner parties in old houses that have been elegantly refurbished, with dark wood panels and high ceilings, shelves full of books and a handful of good pictures on the walls, wine glasses that don’t always match, dress casual, six or eight people gathered round a table, gossip. Always gossip. These are the ones Sabrina and Daniel like most. They go to a dinner party given by an architect called Mark with whom Daniel often works in the construction business. Mark’s business partner is recently separated from his wife. He’s brought his new girlfriend, a tall rakish woman with tousled red curls, who works in television make-up. Mark’s wife doesn’t approve of Hortense, the make-up artiste (this is how she describes herself), and the atmosphere is cool until the third bottle of wine, when Daniel and Sabrina catch each other’s eye and they’re both thinking that they need to cut this woman some slack.

  ‘Tell us about your job,’ says Sabrina. ‘It sounds really interesting.’

  Hortense is a little drunk by then, and glad to have their attention. She tells them about some politicians she’s made up, and who has had work done on their faces. You’d be really surprised at some of the men who’ve had the cut, she tells them, and names a couple. Mind you, men are easier than the women. Some of the women she gets through are real bitches. Power bitches, she calls them, talking on their cellphones while she’s trying to do their blusher. How the hell do they expect her to keep it even? And then it’s all her fault. Unless they’re having a bad day and then they want all her attention, expect her to be Mother Teresa. Holy shit, she says, and Mark’s wife begins clearing away dishes, with a bit of a rattle and clatter, but Hortense doesn’t notice.

  ‘I mean shit,’ she says, ‘I had one in the other day, who’d got this new dress. She was a mess, had a rash on the back of her neck that she was trying to cover up. I said don’t worry, they can’t see your back on telly. She started to bawl. The rash was right around her neck and on her arms, and other bits of her, too, that she’d rather not mention. She told me she had a new dress that she paid major money for, and every time she wears it, the same thing happens, and she gets a fever as well. At first she thinks it’s all in her head, but the night before I saw her, she’d passed out at a dinner party at one of the embassies, face down in the dessert, and you know what everyone was thinking. Pissed. She said she’d never live it down.’

  ‘It must be in her head,’ says Mark’s wife. ‘How could a dress do that to you?’

  ‘Well, it seems it’s got feathers on it so she wondered if it was some kind of bird sickness.’

  ‘What sort of feathers were they?’ Sabrina asks carefully.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She was just one of those silly cows who get hysterical over nothing, I reckon. Who knows whether it was her dress.’ Hortense is looking for her glass to be refilled.

  ‘Like tui feathers? Or peacock’s or something?’ Sabrina is trying to keep her voice casual, even indifferent.

  ‘Oh, I’m blowed if I know,’ Hortense says. ‘I never thought to ask.’

  ‘So who was she?’ Sabrina persists.

  Hortense pulls up short, as if her head has cleared. ‘I can’t tell you things like that. It’d be more than my job’s worth.’

  ‘She sobered up fast enough when it suited her,’ Sabrina says on the way home.

  ‘Well, she’s right, she can’t talk about her clients.’

  ‘She mentioned those cabinet ministers.’

  ‘That’s different,’ Daniel says.

  ‘I don’t see that it is.’

  ‘How would you like it if it was you?’

  ‘She probably made up the part about doing that woman’s make-up,’ Sabrina says. ‘She probably just heard about her. I mean, she would have told us if she knew. You could tell she would.’

  ‘You’re making too much of it,’ he says in an injured way, as if she has just spoilt the evening. Of course it already is spoilt.

  Only, the next week he dines at a restaurant with some businessmen who are going to put money into a project he hopes to get involved in, and when he comes home he tells her he’s heard the story again. ‘Remember, the one about the woman who
passed out with her face in the lemon meringue.’

  ‘I don’t remember that it was lemon meringue.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Did they say who it was?’

  ‘I missed that.’

  ‘Daniel.’

  Somebody tells her the story over the water distiller at work. ‘Do you know who it was?’ Sabrina asks. She is desperate to know.

  The woman telling the story rolls her eyes. ‘Somebody well known, she goes on television. Well, that’s what I heard. She’s quite high up.’ Though what she is high up in is still not clear. The story has become more about the woman passing out than about the dress and the rashes, which Sabrina thinks is just as well.

  ‘I have to tell the shop,’ Sabrina says to Elsa on the phone. They have been in touch more often than in years.

  And Elsa says no, Sabby, don’t do it, or if she must, just leave her out. Sabrina says: ‘We could write the shop a note.’ Because by now she has looked up embalming fluid and knows that it contains formaldehyde, ethanol, ether — a proper cocktail of solvents. Leonie had been preserved in toxins.

  ‘Look,’ says Elsa, ‘the woman won’t wear the dress again. She’d be a fool to.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure. She might think it was a coincidence.’

  ‘A dress like that? Well, you wouldn’t want to wear it too often anyway. It’s not one you’d forget.’

  But Sabrina can’t let it rest. At night she lies awake, flooded with what she supposes is deep moral panic. When she was a child she used to have sleepless nights, thinking, Please God, let me off this time and I’ll never do it again. She is thinking exactly the same thing now, with a variation that goes something like, Give me another chance, and I’ll grow up. She has decided she will go in and tell the shop manager, although first she must tell Daniel, and then goodness knows who else. Her lawyer, perhaps. It could be a crime, after all. Inflicting a noxious substance on an unsuspecting victim. She must tell, because at heart she doesn’t think she’s a bad person.

  When Daniel comes home in the evening, she can’t find the right words. While she’s getting dinner he pours a glass of wine for each of them and sits on a kitchen stool.

  ‘What’s new?’ she asks.

  He looks so happy and at ease with his day, that she thinks another time might do to tell him. All the same, she begins: ‘That woman with the dress that freaks her out. You know the one I mean? It makes her faint at dinner.’

  ‘Oh that,’ says Daniel. ‘The story gets worse. I meant to tell you, someone told me at work yesterday. The woman told a friend who was an industrial chemist and he offered to test the fabric. Turns out the dress had been on a corpse. How gross can you get?’

  Sabrina agrees that yes, it’s about the worst story she’s ever heard, and how did it happen, and what did the woman do about it, and is she all right?

  But Daniel doesn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Presumably she returned it to the shop, he says.

  ‘It would be covered by insurance,’ Sabrina says. She has to believe that part. And she sits there thinking, Saved, saved. At least the woman won’t wear the dress again.

  This is what she says to Elsa the next morning, and, as it happens, that day they both receive letters from Jan. They are written on cheap lined paper, with the address care of the prison on the back and they say much the same thing. Thanks for everything, they’re a couple of dolls. She and her friend hope to get out about the same time. If probation will let them, they will get a place together. That would be the best thing of all.

  Friend, says Elsa, what does she mean by friend? And then she goes quiet at the end of the line. She hadn’t realised.

  ‘I guess we should have,’ Sabrina says.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve got it wrong,’ Elsa says doubtfully.

  ‘She sounds okay, that’s the main thing,’ Sabrina says. Relief floods her, fills her nostrils, makes her hands tremble. Relief and release. And yes, redemption, there’s that, too. Love, so various, has discovered them all.

  ‘We should get together,’ Elsa says, her voice vague. ‘After the school holidays, perhaps.’

  ‘Soon,’ Sabrina replies. ‘When I’ve done my annual report.’ She is preparing to leave trade behind. With luck, she’ll get an arts job next.

  Yes, they agree, yes, soon.

  Extremes

  There was every reason Rachel could think of not to have a baby and none in favour, although the small lump of tissue growing inside her was already a presence she knew she could come to like. She wished that the baby’s father was someone with whom she could live happily ever after. She wished that he wasn’t married to someone else already, and only last year, in a ceremony that the newspaper had dubbed ‘our town’s wedding of the year’. His wife had worn a sleek satin gown, and had five bridesmaids, some of whom were Rachel’s friends, too. Most of all, she wished that when he’d had his hand between her thighs at the bank’s office party, she’d had the strength to say no, that she’d screamed for help. Except she didn’t want help, she wanted Mark’s length sliding inside her, and it wasn’t as if she was a virgin and didn’t know what was happening, as they whimpered and shuddered among a pile of ledgers in the back room behind the staff cafeteria. ‘We must be mad,’ Mark had muttered in her ear. ‘Thanks, kid, I really needed that.’ His wife was seven months gone and he was so frustrated it was killing him.

  ‘We shouldn’t have,’ she’d said, and she was crying already, partly from the wine she’d drunk, and partly in the sweet aftermath of having come so perfectly with him. And that was something new, something she hadn’t done with anyone else.

  ‘Steady on,’ he’d said. ‘Hey, steady on. It wasn’t that big a deal, was it?’

  And when she’d said that yes, it was, couldn’t he tell, he’d said perhaps he could see her home, and they could get another one on, but they mustn’t make a habit of it, as if it was her fault that it had happened, and that they needed to make sure that nobody saw them leaving together.

  In the end, he’d pecked her cheek before she got out of his car, without anything happening, sour reserve seemingly descended upon him. Lying in bed, she had thought how he was wasted on his wife, and touched herself where he had been. It was a month or so before she began wishing all those things that couldn’t be reversed. She wept in her bedroom, not daring to sob in case her mother or sisters heard her.

  Her mother was a tall blonde called Penelope, who Rachel resembled, or so people said. Penelope came from old money in the south, she intimated, as if she had a farming background, although there was no farm and it was actually trade. Not that Rachel thought of any of this as she was growing up; that would come later. Her father was the one whose family farmed, in Taranaki; the son who had made his escape. My parents bred children in order to have more hands to milk cows, he would say — not the life for me. In photographs of him when he was young, he was a dark crafty-looking child. He had never looked back, a lawyer who was always winning his cases and making headlines in the local paper, bulky now, his iron grey hair settled on his head like a finger perm, only of course it wasn’t. The house where they all lived, Rachel and her parents and two sisters, was a low ranch-style place surrounded by gardens and a grass tennis court. Penelope had her work cut out keeping things ticking over, as she would tell people, especially with a trio of daughters to keep in order. ‘A bit of a burden, three clever girls,’ she would say, as she poured cold lemonade into tall glasses, between games of tennis. It varied, who was in and who was out at Penelope’s gatherings. There were some, like Lesley, who had simply been uninvited after her daughter vanished. ‘An office party baby,’ Penelope said, raising her eyebrows in a knowing way. ‘Poor Lesley. I don’t suppose she ever saw it.’

  It. An office party baby. (Not even the Christmas party, just a party for a retiring accountant, who Mark had now replaced.) Rachel had had her pregnancy confirmed by the family doctor, the same doctor who had delivered her and her sisters, the one he
r mother claimed had gasped with pleasure when he first examined her breasts. ‘Oh I had nice knockers then,’ she said, ‘a pretty good pair.’

  ‘Well, young lady, you’re going to have to do something about this,’ the doctor said to Rachel. ‘Will the fellow marry you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rachel said. Only of course she did.

  ‘Your mother know you’ve skipped your period?’

  ‘Not yet. You won’t tell her?’

  The doctor said that no, he wouldn’t, but she’d better not leave it too long. Her mother was a sharp woman. He smiled then, a gentle affable smile.

  The girls’ bedrooms opened onto a low verandah that ran the whole length of the house. On clear nights, her father would go outside and smoke there, a glass of wine in hand, waiting for Penelope to join him. Perfect. They had perfect lives, Penelope said, but you had to work at perfection. Rachel knew her mother worried about her. Her older sister was engaged to a doctor she had met at university; she was coming home in the holidays to plan the wedding. Her younger sister was always coming top of the class. Dark-haired girls, like their father. Working in a bank wasn’t really what Penelope expected of her daughters, a service industry, however you looked at it, unless you were a manager, which of course was unlikely if you were a woman. The job was only meant to last a year while Rachel worked out what she really wanted to do, but it had stretched into nearly three. Rachel shone at maths when she was at school but in Penelope’s view, counting out other people’s money in a red brick bank on the corner of the main street was hardly the best application of her talents.

  In the spring evenings that year, Rachel put her head under the blankets and tried to hold her breath so that her parents wouldn’t catch a hint of her erratic breathing, her crazy heart beating, as she held her hands over her belly. The air in Rotorua was very still, heavy with volcanic sulphur, the moon like floodlights on the garden, that chemical smell and the scent of the nearby pine forests piercingly, achingly sharp.