The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘What are you on about?’ Samson said. His mate was half cut. It was his week off, and he often went on the piss around lunchtime. Samson thought him a fool because piss took the edge off things, blurred your vision. He worried sometimes that his mate might not spot a fire the way he would.

  ‘I heard she took a truck ride up the line with Joe Blake.’

  ‘Oh yeah, she mentioned something about that.’

  ‘Oh, did she now?’

  ‘What about Joe?’ Samson said at last. An image of Joe Paki in his logging truck swam before him, a big man with a barrel chest covered in thick black hair, copper skin, a gold tooth in the corner of his mouth. ‘Mate, you got yourself a girl’s job up there in the trees, I reckon,’ he’d said to Samson one time when he saw him. He never had liked the bastard, even when they were at school.

  ‘Yeah, well, mate,’ the other man said. ‘Forget I said it.’

  ‘No way, man. What about Joe?’ Samson said each of these last three words with slow emphasis.

  ‘Nothing to it, mate. She and Joe are pals, aren’t they? I guess he was just giving her a lift.’

  Samson downed his beer and walked outside. The air was clear and crisp. Soon the day would be closing in. He glanced down at his bandaged hands. He no longer felt any pain.

  He got in the ute, and drove to the bakery. Mary Isaacs was behind the counter, standing in for Doreen. ‘Tell Doreen I hope her lump is all right now,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’ve gone up the tower.’

  ‘IT’S ALL RIGHT, I’M LEAVING,’ Rachel said, the afternoon Joshua turned up, although she would think later that neither of them meant what they were saying, that somehow they could have made up the quarrel and their lives could have carried on, if not in the same way, at least with understanding for each other. Her mother had had a shock.

  ‘I told you, I’m going to Wellington,’ Rachel said.

  ‘I can give you a lift,’ Joshua said. ‘It’s on my way.’ As though it was just a trip to the shops.

  When her mother said nothing, Rachel turned and followed him out. He was already in his car, the motor idling. She hesitated.

  ‘You’ll need some clothes,’ he said. ‘I can wait.’

  This was how she found herself travelling south with a man she barely knew. She had gone back inside without speaking to her mother and thrown some clothes in a suitcase. As she put the bag in the back of his car, she looked around at the garden and the wide verandah of her parents’ home. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. If only her father was there, he might put a stop to it, but he was away in Auckland on a case.

  Joshua kept driving until they came to Taihape, where he pulled in to buy food. It was too late to get anything but hamburgers and milkshakes. They sat in the car in a side street, and when they’d eaten, Joshua closed his eyes and leant over to kiss her. His breath smelt of vanilla, and he didn’t open his mouth. When she poked her tongue out experimentally to push between his lips, he took her wrist and shook his head.

  ‘We should get married,’ he said.

  Rachel was shocked. She only wanted to marry Mark, but she couldn’t think of anything else except to agree.

  A pastor conducted their small wedding in a church hall that looked like a schoolroom. Daddy was very disappointed, her mother said on the phone. Rachel could see the way her lips would be tightening. She wondered what he had been told. Could Rachel imagine how difficult this would be for Penelope to explain to her friends? When Rachel didn’t respond, Penelope told her anyway. She would say that Rachel always was different and now she had committed her life to God and to Joshua, and that she had been thinking for a long time about doing missionary work, and she and her new husband would be off soon to New Guinea. This was, in fact, what Joshua said when he phoned Penelope to discuss the marriage. Only first he had to give up selling typewriters and become an elder in his church. They would practise abstinence during this time so that when they became one person, Rachel would be as chaste as a virgin. This last part wasn’t mentioned to Penelope.

  Rachel took a job filing invoices in a government department in Wellington, travelling into town on the train each day. She and Joshua lived in a complex of houses in Lower Hutt, occupied by members of his church. On Sundays, they attended church meetings in a hall and sang and clapped their hands above their heads, shouting ‘Praise the Lord’. The women wore headscarves and did as they were told, at least in public, but in private they had their own ritual tasks set apart as women’s work. One of these was examining each other for signs of fertility. Rachel knew her bed had been turned back some nights when she got into it. She sensed their floury domestic hands in her sheets, believed she could smell the rank thickets of their armpits. Rachel hated being near these women. They suggested she was not trying hard enough. Was she really submitting to her husband, or was she wayward? Perhaps it was time she stopped going in to work among those heathens. Rachel thought, If you only knew. She and Joshua had not consummated their marriage, although he had begun to fumble wordlessly around her legs at nights. Some days she thought about dying, about some way out.

  One night, he said, ‘Help me.’ She rolled to the far side of the bed, feeling sick from his touch.

  A letter arrived for her at work the following day, readdressed in Penelope’s handwriting. Her mother had written to her once or twice in the two years since she married Joshua, impersonal little letters with accounts of the garden, a picture of her older sister’s wedding and another of her younger sister receiving a prize. No mention of her father. It was strange to see her maiden name crossed out, alongside her married name. She felt as if that part of life had ceased to exist.

  The letter was from Doreen. A picture of a chubby dark child with a mass of curls fell out of the envelope. Doreen had written: I often think about you. I hope everything turned out good for you. As you probably guessed, I kept my baby. I guess I got lucky cos she turned out a girl which I always wanted. I thought Samson, that’s my husband, might kill me, but he never said one single word. He is a fire spotter and he stayed up the mountain in the tower for six weeks after I got back. There was a wildfire in the forest that day I went to Australia, which is how Samson found out that I’d gone, cos he came home when he wasn’t expected. When he came back down for Christmas, he was calm and never said boo, not even when his kid wasn’t blond, like the others. Her other dad isn’t around to say anything. He got killed when a log slipped off the cradle on his truck not long after the baby. I’m real sad about that but perhaps it’s all for the best. I called my little girl Sydney, by the way. Some people say, how come you gave your girl a boy’s name but that’s what I wanted to call her, you even get film actresses named after cities these days.

  Anyway, kid, take care of yourself. I guess we both got what we wanted that day. Funny the way things work out. Love Doreen.

  Rachel gathered up her bag and coat and left the office. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said, although it was against the rules to leave the building. She walked quickly along Lambton Quay. Students were heading for university. They didn’t all look happy or careless; in fact some of them looked tired and poor, as if they had been up at all-night jobs, or preparing for exams. But they looked freer than she felt. They looked to her as if they had got what they wanted. She closed her eyes and the ugly scene in her mother’s kitchen swam into focus.

  Instead of returning to the office, she took the cable car up the hill to the university and enrolled to do her science degree. She didn’t go home that night. She phoned Joshua and told him she wasn’t committed to him at all. She had also seen a lawyer about having their marriage annulled.

  Later, she met Elliot, an architect, and when she was thirty-five they had their first son, although it had been difficult for her to conceive, and then a second, who arrived with ease the following year. She and Elliot hadn’t married. Rachel had decided she would never marry anyone again, and this didn’t bother Elliot.

  AND HERE IS A WOMAN called Sydney in the sitting r
oom of Rachel and Elliot’s house, one that had featured in House and Garden magazine. More years have passed. Rachel is a lean sinewy woman, a marine biologist, lightly tanned from working outdoors. In her spare time she gardens and helps refugee teenagers learn to read and write in English. She and Elliot travel all over the world, looking at beautiful buildings in cities as diverse as Chicago and Kuala Lumpur and Paris. They have holidays in the south of France and drink wine and hang about in cafés and watch people going about their lives. Their sons are tall and slim. The first one is in his third year of law, the second just beginning a degree in building sciences.

  Sydney sits on the edge of a leather couch, looking at her feet, then glancing around her with what Rachel thinks is a feral look. Her copper-toned skin is devoid of make-up, her hair caught in a trail of dreadlocks that fan from an elastic band across her shoulders, as if she is a teenager, although Rachel knows she must be in her mid-thirties. She is dressed in baggy jeans and an old T-shirt. Circlets of tattoos embroider her arms.

  Michael, the older of Rachel’s sons, wanders through the sitting room. ‘Right there, Ma?’ he says, trying to disguise his curiosity.

  ‘This is my son Michael. Michael, Sydney.’

  ‘Hi there, you doing the ESOL course?’

  Sydney’s expression darkens. ‘I’m not some nigger,’ she says.

  ‘Of course not,’ Rachel says, flustered. ‘I do help some people with their English.’

  Rachel wonders whether she should try to explain her refugee work, but she suspects that that would make it worse. She sees how far apart her and Doreen’s children are, that the gap between them is extreme. And a phrase comes back to her, from that day when she and Doreen went to look at the shops in Wellington. Mothers. One extreme to another. Rachel no longer knows what extreme really means. That’s a bit extreme, Ma, her boys might say to her, but extreme is a place inhabited by other people, like refugees who have been through the hell of war, or like kids who are lost in their lives and can’t find their way back. Rachel has found her way back.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought Doreen would know where to find me these days. It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Mum? She died when I was twelve. She got cancer.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Rachel says, apologising again. ‘How on earth did you find me?’

  ‘Easy as. Your sister still lives in Rotorua. It wasn’t that hard. You used to write to Mum,’ Sydney says.

  ‘Did I? Well, I might have written to her once. It was years ago.’ But immediately she finds herself remembering all her girlish outpourings in the letter she had written in reply to Doreen’s, telling her about Joshua, how things had gone so wrong since their trip to Australia, and how she was trying to get her life back on track. And yes, the letter would have carried her maiden name on the back of it, the one she still uses, as does her younger sister, who never married. She and this sister see each other from time to time. They are friends now, reconciled in late middle age.

  ‘Samson gave me some of Mum’s stuff before he died, bits of paper and junk. The boys got the good stuff, her dishes and her mum’s china cabinet, but that was Samson for you. Why would he give me anything?’

  ‘Didn’t you get on with him?’

  Sydney’s lip curls. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘So how can I help you?’ Rachel says. The conversation isn’t going well, she can tell from Sydney’s expression, and she feels herself floundering.

  ‘Just lately I’ve been thinking why am I keeping all Mum’s old shit. I was going to throw it out. Then I found this letter you’d written to her and I figured perhaps you knew who my father was.’

  ‘Oh.’ It’s all Rachel can think of saying. From the wide window, she sees Michael at the far end of the garden, collecting up branches from a tree that’s been pruned, something he’d promised his father he would do. She still has Doreen’s letter. It’s sitting in a box in her wardrobe with her important documents, like her will and her passport, her birth certificate and divorce papers. She’s not sure why she has kept it.

  ‘So do you know?’ Sydney says insistently. ‘Look, I’ve got a kid of my own. She’s ten. Her name’s Gloria. I wanted her to have a real pretty name, not like mine. And do you know what she brings home from school? A flipping project about genealogy. Genealogy.’ She repeats the word syllable by syllable, as if making sure that Rachel appreciates her understanding of the English language. ‘Who are your parents? Well, that’s a laugh, half the kids in the class can’t tell you who their dad is. I keep in touch with hers.’ She rolls her forearm over, so Rachel can read one of the tattoos. Rachel understands it represents a gang, although she’s not sure which one and doesn’t like to ask. ‘So then they want to know about your grandparents. And I thought, What a load of crap. She’s not dumb, she’s seen the pictures of my mum and Samson, she knows we’re a different colour.’

  ‘Did Gloria ever meet Samson?’

  The woman glowers, and shakes her head. ‘I wouldn’t have let her near him.’

  ‘Doreen told me he accepted you when you were born, treated you as his own.’

  Sydney laughs then, a disjointed unpleasant sound, as if ripped from deep down in her lungs. ‘You know what Samson used to call me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fire bug. Bloody little fire-bug baby.’

  ‘I see.’ In her agitation, Rachel stands up. ‘I don’t know who your father was.’ She walks to the window. ‘Didn’t your mother have a friend called Mary Isaacs?’ she asks, turning back to the room.

  ‘Long gone. So you do know something?’

  Rachel pauses again, troubled by the woman’s ferocity, her strangeness.

  ‘Samson hated me,’ Sydney says, as if this will shake Rachel into some revelation. ‘He never said it, because he wanted to keep her, but it was in his eyes, you could tell. And when she couldn’t hear, he’d say it real mean and quiet. Fire bug.’

  Rachel wishes Michael would finish his task and come inside. Sydney’s eyes travel down the garden, following hers.

  ‘Well, no secrets in his cupboard, eh? I’ll bet he doesn’t know what his old lady got up to once upon a time.’

  Rachel feels her anger flaring. ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘You’ve got a pretty nice life here.’ Sydney’s voice has become bitter.

  ‘You don’t know what it was like.’ Rachel stops herself, incapable of explaining, and why should she? None of it matters any more. She is where she is, burnt but not destroyed. ‘I don’t know your father’s name,’ she says, ‘but I think he drove a logging truck. Doreen told me he was dead.’

  Sydney has jumped up, her eyes widening. ‘When? When did this happen?’

  ‘It must have been when you were little.’

  ‘Did the bastard kill him?’ She is digging in her pocket for cigarettes and a lighter.

  Rachel had been about to fetch Doreen’s letter but stops in her tracks. She understands that Sydney is talking about Samson.

  ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ she says. ‘Really.’

  Sydney’s face is full of rage. She lights her cigarette and inhales, then blows a long stream of smoke towards Rachel. Rachel steps back and Sydney flicks the lighter on and off. Some of Elliot’s drawings lie on the table beside them. Rachel has to restrain herself from snatching them away to safety. Sydney catches her glance and rolls her eyes. She drops the lighter in her pocket. ‘Scared you, eh?’

  ‘This isn’t about me,’ Rachel says.

  ‘Nah. Fair enough.’ Sydney’s shoulders slump, the anger draining away. ‘I’d just hoped, you know, there might have been something you could tell me. I guess that’s a start.’

  Rachel is struggling to find the right words. ‘I can see it must be hard on your own. With your daughter.’ There is an almost imperceptible change in Sydney’s expression. Rachel takes a deep breath. ‘I couldn’t have managed.’

  Sydney throws Rachel a look of surprise. ‘Times have changed,’ she says.
>
  ‘Yes,’ says Rachel quietly. ‘Thank goodness.’

  ‘I’m on email,’ Sydney says. ‘I can leave you my address. If you think of anything.’ Rachel hands her a piece of desk jotter, and she scribbles on it.

  And then Sydney’s gone, light and fleet of foot.

  Her son walks through the garden towards her. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right.’ She has a sudden urge to hold him that she resists. Instead, she gives him a playful cuff.

  ‘What did she want? That woman?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Information. Peace of mind, I suppose.’

  He gives her an odd look. ‘Did you give it to her?’ He’s treating her words as a joke.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You mean she’ll be back?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She will keep the letter for now. You did what you could.

  Heaven Freezes

  Simon and his daughter Kate are on their way to the supermarket when the sky changes from its ordinary cloud-strewn breezy Wellington look to a blue of such extraordinary radiance that for a moment he feels his heart freeze with the strange icy beauty of it.

  This light has all the appearance of a blue rainbow. Beneath it, the surface of the harbour has become illuminated in such a way that a band of waves seems to lift from the ocean, as if moving towards them.

  When the car is parked, father and daughter stand for some minutes absorbing what — it is clear now — is some optical illusion, a phenomenon of light, one they have never seen before. Around them in the car park, others are also staring. Perfect strangers call out to one another, saying, ‘D’you see that? What do you make of that?’

  A woman laughs nervously. ‘Perhaps it’s a plane falling,’ she says.

  There is a nervous twitch of shoulders. The supermarket is close to the flight path of planes. But there is no sign of things falling, no wreckage, no bangs.