All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  Back in Dunedin, his mother had died, his father was struggling to pay his suppliers. You’re still working for the bosses, his father said, bitter at how things had gone. That was when Jock got his ticket to become a mining inspector, helping his father by day, studying at night. Next time he went down the mines it would be on his own terms. It wasn’t just the workers he could tell what to do, but the bosses, too.

  He went down all the mines in the south — Seddon, Blackball, Roa — over the years he inspected the lot, donning his helmet, pulling his beard, pointing out equipment faults, his senses attuned for the smell of gas, the drip of water on the rocks. Jock made ten quid a week and he felt rich. He put money in the bank, week after week, compounding interest; soon he had a thousand and money seemed to grow after that. He loved it, never spent a penny more than he could help. At nights, instead of going in search of women, he would take out his bank statements and read them to check there were no errors, no missed entries. On pay days he would take his pound notes out and count them, their texture silk beneath his fingertips. His job was essential work, and he wasn’t drafted. There was a shortage of men during the war. He thought he might find a woman then, but he didn’t. It was the mines that did it, he decided. He still had the smell of soot on him.

  Like the dark man who had emerged from the bus, he needed a change. He mightn’t know much about women but he knew what made workers tick. There was money to be made in the tobacco fields.

  The night the woman came with the child, he felt an excitement, something that announced itself as a churning in his stomach, almost like a sickness.

  WHEN IRENE WOKE, COLD AND STIFF, night had fallen. Jessie slept quietly beside her. Irene stumbled in the dark, feeling the wall near the door for a switch. By the weak light from the bare bulb she found the two blankets she had folded in the bottom of one of the suitcases and placed one over her sleeping child. Jessie resembled Andrew. He’d been a scrawny kid when they first met at school, his straight hair spiky where the barber had shorn it. He was never a looker, she’d be the first to admit it, but he made her laugh, right from the beginning. And he knew all sorts of things from the reading he did; they were two of a kind. One day we’ll travel the world together, he’d said. We’ll go to the Taj Mahal and to Egypt to see the Pyramids, and to Canada to see the Niagara Falls.

  There was nothing in the room except the mess she had made on the dirty bench where her groceries were still stacked, and the spilled-open suitcases. Even though it was summer there was a chill in the air, but she couldn’t see any wood to make a fire in the range. Perhaps there was some stacked near the door, she couldn’t remember. As she stood, hesitating, there was a light tap at the door. At first she thought she had imagined it. But it happened a second time, a soft insistent knock. ‘Who is it?’ she called.

  The silence was unbroken. After a minute or so, Irene pulled the door open with a sweeping motion as if preparing to stand up to whoever was there, pulling herself up to her full height, though she had barely come up to Andrew’s shoulder. There was no one to be seen. On the step stood a pot of steaming stew.

  The silence held fast. ‘Thank you,’ she called into the rustling night. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Dixie when she saw her the next morning. It was Sunday. They had one day to get settled in before work began. After this there would be no let-up. Can you work seven days a week? the advertisement had asked.

  Dixie looked at her blankly. ‘Thank you for what?’

  ‘The stew. I thought it was from you.’

  Dixie put her hands up. ‘I’m not the fairy godmother. You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘You look all wrung out. I’ll make us a brew.’

  The inside of her bach appeared comfortable, with a white coverlet on the bed, some photos of children propped on a gate-leg table, a couple of chairs, each with a cushion. ‘I leave my stuff here year to year,’ she explained. ‘I’ve told Jock to keep an eye on it for me. Old stick in the mud that he is.’

  ‘Perhaps it was Mr Pawson.’

  ‘What? Brought you the stew up from the cookhouse? I’d have heard him. Anyway, I can’t see him bringing you a feed if he didn’t drop by with one for me.’ She glanced sideways at Irene. Something shifted in her eyes.

  Irene caught her own reflection in a mirror tacked on the wall. Beneath it a plank was supported by two stacks of bricks, serving as a dressing table for a row of cosmetics. She saw the dark wave of her hair, the eyes that Andrew had said were green although she would have described them as hazel, sunken a little in the pallor of her complexion. In his letters home, he would tell her that she was the prettiest girl in the class and the smartest, too. He saw her the way others didn’t. You will still be beautiful when we are old, he had written to her. That was in his last letter, after he had gone back to the Pacific, the one that arrived when she had just started throwing up with Jessie, and wondering what she had eaten. She was twenty-eight now, but she thought she looked older. Beside her Jessie had picked up a lipstick.

  ‘Don’t touch,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dixie said, seeming to relax. ‘Here, I’ll put a bit on you, make you a pretty girl, eh? My kids used to love it when I dollied them up.’ She was drawing a red mouth on Jessie, tweaking her hair up with a comb. ‘Bit of powder on your nose, you like that, don’t you? You need a pretty bow in your hair, that’s what. You get Mummy to buy one next time you’re in town.’

  Irene felt powerless to complain. Jessie looked like a clown, but the child was delighted with herself, jumping up and down to view herself in Dixie’s mirror.

  ‘There, see, she likes it. A little bit of powder and a little bit of paint, makes a girl just what we ain’t. Didn’t you say that in school? Boys used to write it in your autograph book.’

  Jessie had become excited by all the attention. ‘I’ll take her out to play,’ Irene said.

  ‘She’ll have to learn how to look after herself, with you in the fields. Don’t worry, it’s safe as houses round here. What brought you anyway?’

  Irene shrugged, not knowing where to begin. ‘My father’s a wharfie,’ she said, as if that explained it all. The waterfront lockout that had brought the country to a standstill had ended only months earlier.

  ‘Oh, one of the Commies,’ Dixie said. ‘You’ll have seen it all.’

  ‘We had pretty good times after the war,’ Irene said. ‘Dad’s wages were good.’ She described the old-fashioned house in Kilbirnie where she and her brother Ray had grown up. It had space to spare when they were kids. There were high ceilings and stained-glass windows that made dancing lights. But after the war every room began to fill, first with her and Jessie, because she was a widow, then Ray, who’d been injured, so he and his wife came to live with them while he had rehab, and then they had a baby, too. Irene’s mother said if Irene was living with them, it was only fair that her brother did as well, so they all stayed.

  ‘Whenever I said I’d find somewhere for me and Jessie to live, Mum went on about the kind of places I might be able to find in Wellington on my pension. Rat-infested dumps over the Courtenay Place shops, was what she said. Besides, if I could get a job, who did I expect was going to look after Jessie? But there, she’s at school now.’

  Dixie was curious. ‘So Sid Holland wins the election and you’re all on the bones of your backsides?’

  ‘Something like that. They’d taken Ray on at the wharves, too. They wanted the wharfies to work longer hours. Well, you’ll have heard about all of that. Things were getting really dangerous for the men. Next thing they were on strike, and Dad and Ray were out demonstrating or else holed up at home. The only money coming in was my pension.’ Irene shivered, pulling her cardigan around her, not sure whether the woman would sympathise or not. There were plenty who didn’t. A hundred and fifty days of no wages and a simmering rage in the house. How did you explain that to people who weren’t part of it? Each day in that house had turned into a battlefield. Irene’s mother was goi
ng through the change, and she said that one more night of Ray’s baby grizzling or Jessie running up and down the passageway would drive her insane. The smallest sound was really too much for her to bear, that’s what she said. She’d had years of kids living in the house, helping bring them up.

  When the strike was finally over, Irene said she really was going, she’d find a place for her and Jessie to live. Somewhere with fresh air and freedom under the wide open skies. You always were one for being romantic, her mother said, but she seemed pleased. Though this wasn’t true either; Irene wasn’t romantic these days, not since the telegram came to say that Andrew Sandle wasn’t coming home.

  ‘You don’t want to let the boss know you’re a Commie,’ Dixie said.

  ‘I didn’t say I was.’

  ‘Jock’s not a union man. He only puts up with them because he has to.’ She flicked out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to Irene. ‘Tailor-mades. Enjoy them while they last. It’ll be all home brew from here on, and the boss only lets us have so much of that. It’s the rules. Mind you,’ and here she leaned forward in a conspiratorial way, ‘Jock smokes tailor-mades. If he’s in a good mood he’ll drop me off a couple. You want to get on his good side.’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Irene said. ‘Asthma,’ she added hurriedly, seeing the look on Dixie’s face. ‘When I was a child. I just don’t want it to come back.’ All her family smoked. The house in Kilbirnie was always choked with smoke. And here she was, coming to pick tobacco, the weed she’d inhaled since her childhood. It wasn’t lost on her.

  Dixie shrugged. ‘People like you that put us out of a job.’

  Outside, Jessie had climbed an apple tree that grew near the huts, and was swinging from a branch.

  ‘Come down, monkey,’ Irene called, excusing herself.

  Dixie blew a perfect smoke ring, watched it drift towards the ceiling.

  When she got back to her place, Irene considered the pot left at the door the night before. She had washed it, ready to return to its owner. The best thing, she decided, was simply to leave it where she had found it on the step. That night, after dark, somebody put a stack of wood at her front door. She must have been asleep because she didn’t hear a thing. If they had knocked, she had slept through it.

  ‘I’ll start you on topping the flower heads,’ Jock told Irene. He showed her how they formed at the top as the tobacco plants matured. The petals had to be picked out so they wouldn’t fall and scorch the leaf below. At the junction of each plant, between leaf and stalk, suckers had to be nipped out, too, to increase the leaf size. She was surprised how patient he was with her. He often shouted at other workers who were slow or not catching on fast enough, but not at her. All the same, she was in agony at the end of each day, her arms covered in a tar-like substance that itched, even when she had washed herself down. Her hands swelled, the backs of her legs ached and her face burned in the sun.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ Jock told her. When she had been there for a week, he got her picking. She learned the different types of leaf; the leaves nearest the ground were called lugs, above them the best leaves were cutters, all the way up to the tips. He would come often and stand near to her, giving a running commentary on the different stages of the whole process. She longed to tell him that she understood the work, that if he would just leave her to it, she would manage. When he was watching, she felt clumsy and made more mistakes, often mixing one leaf type with another. It must be that he was pushing her to work harder, she thought. When he moved on, she would catch her breath, falter for a moment before resuming the endless motion of picking the leaves ready to be taken away and dried, then cured.

  The dark quiet man, Bert, who had been on the bus the day she arrived, came and worked alongside her one day. She had hardly seen him since she had come to the tobacco fields. She knew he worked in a shed gang, feeding the kilns. This was dangerous work. The furnaces, fuelled with coke and coal, sent tremendous heat up through flue pipes. A cure took five days, and during that time there was no rest for the people who worked in the kilns. On this day a cure had just finished and preparations were starting for the next one. She thought he must be weary, but his movements were very quick and sure as he moved steadily through the row she was working on. He stood close to her and said, ‘You need to rest.’ His breath near her cheek smelt smoky and intense.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m slower than everyone else now. They’ll notice.’

  ‘I’ll finish this row for you,’ he said. Again she heard that slight inflection in his voice and she didn’t think it was Maori. A foreign mother, perhaps? His dark eyes were hooded, set deep in his head. She allowed herself to be propelled to the end of the row.

  Jock was watching, and somehow she had known that he would be.

  ‘Mr Butcher,’ he said, a false note of civility in his manner, ‘you’re needed in the kiln shed.’

  IRENE CALLED IN SICK for a day. It was up to her to decide whether she stayed, knowing she wasn’t really strong enough for this work. There was, too, an atmosphere she didn’t like. It was hard to define, especially in the evenings when some of the workers who had brought guitars began to sing, harmonising in the blue fading light, old melodies that people had sung through the war. It looked and sounded like a country idyll, something Chekhov might have written about. How to explain her unease? She told herself it was just her, the misery her body was experiencing, the lack of people to talk to about things that interested her.

  Yet Jessie was happy. The child had never looked so healthy. When she wasn’t at school she played in the apple trees with other children who had arrived at the field, climbed, ran races, and was teaching herself to read way ahead of her class. She had read all the books Irene had brought with her, intending to read to her every night just like at home, not that she ever did because she was dead on her feet at the end of each shift. When Jessie dropped off to sleep, Irene sat beside her, absorbing her child’s face, wanting to touch the delicate veins in her eyelids, greedy for these moments when she possessed her. Already she had money in her bank account, and a dream was beginning to shape itself, of going back to Wellington and setting up on her own with Jessie. Sooner or later, she believed she would get her job back in the library. She wouldn’t have to excuse herself to her mother who said that reading books all the time was bad for a girl. There was that girl Iris who wrote books and had babies when she wasn’t married and her life was just all sorrow, mental hospitals and … but her mother couldn’t bring herself to say the word suicide. In the end, dead, anyway. Irene’s mother had known Mrs Wilkinson, the mother of Iris, although she called herself something else, and it had been a terrible thing for her to have to lose a daughter to books. And, Irene’s mother had said, she hoped that Irene wasn’t thinking of writing books. It brought disgrace on a family.

  Irene reflected on this, on her idle day, while she lay on the lumpy mattress. Her mother wouldn’t like what was going through her head right now. She had, in fact, had the idea for some time that she might write a book. Here, in the tobacco fields, was the perfect setting. She hadn’t read Caldwell and Steinbeck for nothing. Perhaps she needed to stay a little longer, get to know the people better. She should go into town to the dance where the workers went. Dixie always did, and she said it would do Irene the world of good to let loose a bit. The kids went along, too; they could always have a sleep on the cushions out the back of the hall.

  She was dozing, half asleep, half thinking about how she might start her novel, when a figure appeared in the doorway.

  ‘You got the cramps today?’ Jock Pawson said.

  Irene sat bolt upright, pulling the blanket over herself, aware that the buttons of her blouse were partly undone. Jock came in without being invited and sat on the rickety chair near the bed.

  ‘Well, some women get them worse than others,’ he said. ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose so,’ she said, her face prickling with shame. She wasn’t bleeding, it was just that she
was so tired but she didn’t want to tell him that. ‘I’ll be all right in the morning. I always am.’ It was hard to tell what was worse, concocting this lie, or having to talk to the man about her periods. To her horror, he was stretching out his hand to stroke her bare arm.

  ‘You sure you haven’t come down with a fever? We can’t have someone infectious around here. The workers can’t afford to let up.’

  ‘It’s just what you said, Mr Pawson,’ she said, her voice strangling in her throat.

  ‘You don’t have to be formal with me, Irene. The name’s Jock.’ Still the persistent finger touched her arm. ‘You must get lonely, a widow like yourself.’

  ‘Yes, yes I do.’ Anything to appease him, and where was Jessie when she needed her? She was due home on the school bus very soon.

  ‘I can understand that. I’m a man who gets lonely, too.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s not going to be easy for you, with a kiddie and all. The men can take their pick of the girls these days, they’ve been so long without fellows around. No doubt you’ll be thinking about a father for her again.’

  ‘No,’ Irene said. ‘No, I’m not.’ And it was true, she had never had the faintest stirring of desire for another man since Andrew. She hadn’t even tried to imagine another man’s body. Yet here was this man, sitting beside her, touching her, and she knew that he was asking her to think about sex. Worse than that, by the sound of it, marriage. She gave a long shudder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing up, his manner abrupt. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I hope you’re well enough to work in the morning.’ At the doorway he paused. ‘There are plenty of workers out there who’d be glad of a place.’

  In the evening, she heard a soft knock on the door, the same as she had heard on the first night she arrived. As before, there was nobody to be seen outside, although she thought she detected a shadow. In the distance, someone was playing a guitar, and men were singing ‘My Foolish Heart’, something about the moon. From their voices, she guessed they were the Maori workers who had come from way up north. And, as if all that were not enough, there was a full moon rising, seemingly providing inspiration for the singers. On the step stood a pot of tomato soup that had a delicate, herbal scent, suggesting it had been cooked with care. In a flash, she guessed where it had come from, and wondered why she hadn’t worked it out before. Somewhere inside her, despite the day’s events, she recognised an old lost chime. The delicious food, the flickering lights of kerosene lanterns, the singing in the distance were arousing and unsettling. It wasn’t Jock Pawson her thoughts were turning to.