The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Oh, shut it, Les,’ she said, and swiped the side of his head, not hard enough to damage him, but enough to hurt.

  Blanche was like her name, pale as a little lily. When she was older, she and Ruth hunted for ferns in the swamp, their gumboots squelching through the mud, Ruth all the time keeping close to the child, holding her hand when they came to a ditch.

  ‘Just make sure you keep her away from the river,’ Mamie said to Ruth when the two of them set out on their expeditions. ‘And don’t go near the pa. No messing around with those Maori kids.’

  ‘And no mucking round near the drains,’ Les said. The winter had been particularly wet, and the ditches he had dug long before, when he first came to the farm, had filled up higher than in years. ‘In fact, I’ll have your guts for garters if I see you round them,’ he added.

  Apart from that, neither he nor Mamie appeared to notice much what the girls did. Now and then the fires flared up in the area, but didn’t return to Les Mullens’s farm. A prosperous farm. Percy George died, the property was sold, the farms along the road changed hands or were taken over by sons and their wives. Some called Mamie ‘mad Mamie’ because she was loud and bold and her husband never had much to say for himself. She went to the local dance hall on Saturday nights, bearing plates of apple shortbread for supper, and sat with the older women who didn’t dance, merely gossiped and kept time to the music by tapping their toes. Les went to the saleyards, a cigarette stuck to his lip like Percy used to when he first knew him. After the war finished and the men were back on the land, he and Mamie were married in the registry office in Auckland, without telling a soul.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be off before long,’ Les said to Ruth. ‘Like your mother.’ But it was Patricia who left first to become a dental nurse. She boarded the bus that went past the end of Hang Dog Road these days, with a toss of her curls, and without a backward glance.

  The child Blanche remained Ruth’s friend, the one member of the family who never referred to the mysteries of the past. One day Ruth and Blanche discovered a fernbird’s nest in the swamp, a deep hollow in some cutty grass, four spotted eggs lying in its cradle. They decided not to tell anyone. Ruth believed for a long time that she was bound to stay, not to abandon Blanche. As the two of them fossicked through the shrinking swamplands, they sometimes glimpsed tendrils of fire in the distance, wisps of smoke. But the days of summer were long, and as the grass flourished across the broad paddocks, the landscape was covered with gold mysterious light.

  Some Other Man

  The boy is falling and falling and Colin believes that their eyes lock for an instant and that the boy is trying to climb back through the air. But it is too late. Once begun, the step into the void is irretrievable. When he thinks about it, it is always in the present, it is always now. Colin knows in his heart that he hadn’t seen the boy’s eyes. What Colin heard was a different matter. He heard him land on the bonnet of his car, the sickening thud, before he bounced and rolled onto the tarmac.

  When he stepped out of his car, he saw what he saw, and never expected or wanted to see in his life. The boy on the road and, up above, the unbroken night air beneath the bridge. By the blue-yellow arc of light from a street lamp, he saw that the boy’s eyes were open but unseeing. Behind his car, the traffic had begun to pile up, drivers at the rear of the queue honking angrily for him to shift, drivers at the front jumping out of their cars and rushing towards him. A man said, ‘Stand aside, I’m a doctor’, just as it happened in stories. Someone helped him to the side of the road where he collapsed with his head in his arms, and vomited. The man said, ‘Not your fault, mate.’ A woman screamed hysterically. Soon sirens began to wail, and the night was full of flashing lights and rain began to fall, as fast and as unstoppable as the boy wheeling through space.

  At the coroner’s inquest, the boy was described as the victim of a tragedy, the kind that ‘happens too often’, the kind that is reported as a tragic accident until it is simply not mentioned at all. They did a terrible thing, these children who fell from the sky, who took pills, who hung suspended in their bedrooms, who slashed their wrists, who sat in cars filled with toxic gases, and nobody talked about it. But Colin wanted to talk. He felt as if he was a victim, too, an unwilling conspirator. Yet for all its horror, it didn’t seem like the worst thing that had happened to him, and this filled him with unreasonable guilt. The worst thing that had happened to him was the day his wife left him, and the thud he heard on the crumpling bonnet of his Ford saloon was like the thud he felt when he had come home and found her gone. As if, this time, the echoing pain from that night had a sound all its own.

  WHEN THE BOY FELL TO his death, Patricia was the person Colin wanted to see. He wanted her to hold him, and stroke the back of his head, and tell him that it was all right, not his fault. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knew, of course, that this wouldn’t have happened, because Patricia wasn’t like that. And yet, surely, this once, it might have. It was what he had longed for when he was still married to her.

  Instead he went to visit the family of the boy who had died. They lived on a road that snaked between the hills above Aro Valley. Although it was evening when he knocked at the door, he could tell it was a house that didn’t get much sunlight. The ground was damp underfoot, last season’s sodden leaves on the path. He had waited until after the funeral, for he didn’t want to appear to be taking advantage of their grief. In his hand he carried flowers, a bunch of yellow tulips. His parents owned a shoe shop in a small town south of Auckland. Trade. Never upset the customers, his mother would say, a phrase he would use to his friends, and, later, his wife, by way of explanation for his own reserve, a humility that could irritate some. When he thought of his mother, he saw her tender hands, the way she eased the feet of strangers into new shoes.

  He rang the bell twice, and waited. The door was opened by a sad dark young woman, who introduced herself as Eleanor. From the death notice, which he had memorised by heart, he understood that this was the sister of Roy, the boy who had died. A narrow passage opened into a small sitting room. On one wall hung pictures in heavy frames, but on another, he was immediately struck by a group of tiny pictures, not more than five centimetres by perhaps three, delicately framed in threadlike gold on pale backgrounds.

  ‘Aquarelles,’ she said, as he moved forward to look at them. She had taken his coat, accepted the flowers, apologised because her parents weren’t there. They had not, she said, been able to face meeting him. Already they knew more than they wished to. She knew that he, too, would be suffering, that it wouldn’t make it easier if there was nobody there to receive him. She hoped he understood. Her air of resigned sorrow came as a relief. He had feared her anger, for people at work had told him that families who had experienced a suicide often raged at each other, or outsiders.

  The watercolour miniatures on the wall showed scenes of Wellington, and of the countryside. There were some portraits, too. She pointed to a picture of a young man. ‘That was Roy.’

  He had to look closely to see the youth’s shock of bright hair, the green eyes that he had seen in death, the full mouth. Yet in this minute space, he saw his face more acutely than in more conventional pictures she would show him later.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. He felt futile, not knowing where to stand, given that she hadn’t invited him to sit down, but he was fascinated by the pictures, and in a way it didn’t matter.

  ‘You did these?’

  She nodded.

  ‘My wife does portraits. Photography,’

  ‘I know. She’s Pattie Mullens, isn’t she?’

  So she had done her homework. ‘Was. Did. I mean, she was my wife. She’s gone back to her maiden name. She doesn’t do many portraits now, I believe.’

  ‘Well, I guess she’s very busy,’ said Eleanor. ‘Running all those galleries. She’s an important person in the art world these days.’

  ‘She still takes some photographs,’ he said, as if apologising for Pa
tricia.

  ‘Of course,’ said Eleanor quietly. ‘I know how famous she is.’

  ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, WHEN his marriage to Patricia began, Colin loved her with a fieriness that astonished even him. At school, he was a sandy-haired youth, in the top stream. The yearbook entry, in his final year, described his career ambition as ‘airline pilot’ (which it was), his likely career as ‘pen pusher’. His eyesight let him down. He needed glasses when he was sixteen and he wore them still. The astigmatism, once it was diagnosed, meant he didn’t get into the air force. Instead, he went south, took a masters degree in geography, and went into the public service as a cadet. First he worked for the housing department in Wellington, although what relevance that had to his degree he couldn’t fathom. But, before long, he was marked out as a career public servant and moved to a department that managed conservation programmes, which suited him very well. He found the work rewarding. This was around the time he met Seymour, the same age and, like him, apparently in a job for life. Seymour was working in a department that dealt in overseas trade. Only he had grown up in Wellington and came from a family that ‘knew people’. His family held weekend parties and had friends around who worked in music and theatre. Seymour got given tickets to plays and took Colin along to the St James and the Opera House. They hung out in the Espresso Bar drinking coffee and nipped along the road to risqué films at the Roxy. To Colin, Seymour was a revelation, coming from what seemed an urbane way of life. He was handsome, Colin supposed, in a clean-cut smooth-shaven way, though he wasn’t good at evaluating the looks of other men. Girls liked to talk to Seymour but, to Colin’s delight, he preferred his company to that of the young women who interrupted their conversations. Seymour would smile absently, say a round of hellos and continue his conversation with Colin as if he had hardly noticed their presence. They were girls from ‘good’ families round Kelburn way, where Seymour had lived: it was an expensive suburb filled with rimu-panelled villas and leadlight windows and rooms spacious enough to hold cocktail parties. He had to be polite to these girls, or it would get back to his mother. Colin supposed Seymour must be a good catch, for all the good it did the girls. Every now and then he would sigh and say that his mother had persuaded him to do his duty and escort one of them to a ball. Sometimes Colin wondered whether Seymour really liked girls at all. Once he asked Colin to come along and make up a foursome.

  This meant Colin had to learn to dance. It was while he was taking lessons at the Majestic Cabaret in Willis Street that he met Patricia. She seemed a wild girl to him, all flying curly hair and rhythmic feet. He couldn’t see why she needed lessons, but she said she’d left home before she was allowed to go to dances and she had some catching up to do. The age of enlightenment, as they would laugh and call it later, was fast approaching.

  ‘I’ve found a girl,’ he told Seymour. For some reason, he had to summon courage to tell his friend this.

  ‘What girl?’ Seymour said, his face blank.

  ‘Someone to take to the dance.’

  ‘But you’ve got a partner. The girl I’m taking has a friend, don’t you remember? It’s all arranged.’

  Colin stammered, said he seemed to have made a mistake.

  ‘I think so. What am I going to tell Mama? She was counting on you.’

  ‘I can put her off. This girl. Her name’s Pat.’ Inside, though, he was panicking. If he did this, he was sure he would never see her again.

  ‘Well,’ Seymour said, relenting, ‘if you’ve made an arrangement, I suppose it’s all right. I’ve got a friend from school who can take this other girl. We can have six in the party.’

  On the night of the ball, Colin could see Patricia didn’t really fit in.

  ‘So what do you do for a crust?’ Seymour asked her, and Colin knew instinctively that he was being rude. People like Seymour didn’t ask questions like this.

  She told him she worked for a photographer, taking family portraits.

  ‘You always done that?’ he asked. For Patricia was a couple of years older than Colin and Seymour, and she looked experienced about life.

  ‘I was a dental nurse after I left school,’ she said in a cheerful even voice.

  ‘Country girl, eh?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Well, one wouldn’t want to do that for long, I suppose,’ Seymour said, sounding sympathetic.

  ‘Brats,’ she said. ‘I used to tie the screaming monsters to the chair with my cardigan. The department didn’t supply chains.’

  The other girls in the party shuddered in mock horror, and raised their eyebrows at each other behind Patricia’s back.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘that’s in the past. I’m studying photography at night school. I don’t plan to take portraits forever.’

  ‘I remember you now,’ one of the girls said. ‘You took some snaps at Government House when Daddy got his medal.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Patricia, brisk and no nonsense now. ‘But you don’t remember those grandstanders, when they’re lined up against a wall. Or wait, were you the girl I shot in the conservatory?’

  ‘Shot,’ said Seymour laughing. ‘Oh, that’s very good. Shot in the conservatory.’

  ‘I want to dance, Colin,’ Patricia said. And they were off again, waltzing in the Majestic Cabaret, moving like well-oiled machines. Colin discovered, all of a sudden, that if he listened to the music and let his feet move in time, he would stop tripping over himself. Once or twice Patricia seemed to be gazing over his shoulder and smiling, but he thought she was simply happy.

  When they stopped to fan themselves, Seymour said, in a voice that Colin would later remember as cool, that perhaps it was time they were all getting along. His goodwill seemed to have dissipated.

  All the same, he agreed to be best man when Colin and Patricia were married. He had been transferred to Foreign Affairs and was off on his first posting, in Washington. They would see him perhaps once a year over the next decade or so. Each time he returned, he would look much the same, perhaps smoother still, more sharply dressed if that were possible, his figure lean, thick hair crisply styled. Colin and Patricia, or Pattie as their friends called her now, grew their hair longer. Patricia’s had been long to begin with, but now it fell in an untrammelled mane to her waist; Colin, out of deference for his job, didn’t let his grow past his shoulders, but he did have long ginger sideburns and a droopy moustache. He pretended that the bald patch inching its way round the top of his head wasn’t there. Patricia’s ears were so laden with hoops and studs that her lobes were stretched. They built a house surrounded by native bush in Ngaio. Patricia had a studio for her photography built at the end of the garden. By this time, she was working on her own and holding exhibitions. Some of her work sold for fabulous sums. She hardly ever took portrait photographs now. Their children, a boy and girl, played in a paddling pool wearing only sunhats, even when friends came for a party, and everyone was drinking wine. Sometimes Patricia lazily aimed her camera in their direction. Stunning pictures, as the catalogues said.

  Patricia held parties every few weeks. She loved organising events. At some point, Colin realised that several of the women who came to their house didn’t particularly like her. The couples came because Colin was now the head of his section at work, and the husbands didn’t want to offend him. They came with their children who were put to bed when the party grew late, altogether in one bedroom, draped with odd blankets and their parents’ coats. ‘Time for a smoke,’ Patricia would cry, and a joint would begin to make its way around the room.

  Some of the women didn’t want to smoke, or they were pregnant and thought they shouldn’t. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Patricia would cry. ‘What are you? This is a party, for goodness’ sake.’ Colin sensed their anxiety.

  After they had all gone home one night, he said, ‘Perhaps we should be careful, Pattie. You can’t necessarily trust those women. Perhaps you need to let them make up their own minds.’

  ‘Careful,’ Patricia said, in a
slow stoned voice. ‘What does being careful do for you? I’ve been careful all my life, and where has it got me?’

  ‘Here,’ said Colin, ‘here with me.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than where I came from, I suppose.’

  WHERE SHE CAME FROM. HE had been there only once or twice. Where she came from was a Waikato farm on a wide rolling plain, with a river running beside it. When they married, she had agreed with reluctance to a wedding at a church near the farm. Her mother, Mamie, a big untidy woman who rattled on about nothing much, had wanted it.

  Before the wedding, Colin had to visit and meet Patricia’s family. The ramshackle farmhouse looked as if it had had bits added on over the years. It stood at the end of a very long road dotted with letterboxes standing in front of houses surrounded by roses on trellises. There were no roses around Patricia’s old family home: it felt neglected rather than poor. The pasture beyond looked lush and green, but inside the house there was an atmosphere, not exactly of squalor, but of a deep-seated untidiness that felt incurable. Newspapers had been pushed into the corners of rooms, as if some effort had been made to tidy up. A slightly rancid smell pervaded the rooms. Mamie said she was glad there was going to be a wedding, because there could be a bit of dancing in the hall, which she liked to watch. She displayed little interest in Colin or his family. Patricia’s sister Ruth had arrived and would stay for the wedding that was to take place a few days later. She had short brown wavy hair and a large birthmark on the side of her neck and face. Throughout most of the meal she sat with a book held straight up in front of her face, except when she stopped to eat. The effect was disturbing. Colin supposed it must be because of her birthmark.

  ‘Ruth is a librarian, can’t you tell?’ Patricia said. ‘She drives a truck.’

  ‘It’s a Country Library Service van,’ Ruth said, from behind the book.