All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  So this was progress. The girl had a surname he could check. ‘I’ll look her up in the phone book,’ he said, as if it were such an obvious thing to do that she might have suggested it.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find her in the phone book,’ the woman said with finality, finishing the conversation.

  ‘Do you happen to know a girl called Belinda Pawson?’ he asked Rebecca, that evening.

  ‘Belinda? Oh yeah, she was a year ahead of me at school.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Brain box. Top in everything. She left school early. The teachers were really wild — they said she was a scholarship girl, or that’s what I heard. My friend Gayleen’s mother was her English teacher. She lived with her auntie, old bat. Why, what do you want to know about Belinda? She got in trouble.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ But he knew already. He just knew.

  WELFARE SAID THAT SHEILA AND MONTY could keep Peter over the weekend and the social worker would pick him up on Monday. Monty said the child should just go because it was too hard on his wife, but Sheila begged for him to stay.

  ‘What did I do wrong?’ she asked Kaye Borrell when she came round to tell them the news. At first Sheila thought that she had come to check up on them, to see how well they were doing. Miss Borrell had been reticent when she rang to arrange a visit, but Sheila picked up something in her voice that told her they were not going to receive good news.

  She had made up six bottles of scalded milk and put them in the fridge, twenty-four hours of feed. Peter was a hungry little boy, but provided he had his bottle every four hours, regular as clockwork, he didn’t grizzle and, miraculously, didn’t cry through the night. He had been like that since they brought him home from the hospital in Palmerston North.

  Sheila said, after Miss Borrell had phoned, that she wondered if Monty should stay home from work. Peter was nearly three months and smiling every time they looked at him.

  ‘It’ll just be routine,’ Monty said.

  ‘They didn’t say they’d be checking up,’ Sheila said, her voice uneasy.

  ‘It’ll be like Plunket, I expect. You know, just seeing how we’re coping, all that sort of stuff. They’ll think you’re brilliant.’ He had a big job on at the factory, a run of joinery for a new building in town.

  Sheila was unconvinced. ‘She said she’d like to talk to us.’

  In the end, Monty agreed it made sense for him to stay home in the morning. If he could get away straight after lunch he could catch up, perhaps even do a bit of double-time tomorrow, it being Saturday. Miss Borrell was due at 10.30.

  Her knock came on the dot. Monty let her in. As soon as she entered the house, Sheila knew there really was something wrong. She was sitting in an armchair, Peter over her shoulder as she burped him after his bottle. A little spill tumbled from him, curds on her shoulder. Sheila gave an apologetic smile, but Kaye Borrell didn’t seem to notice. The social worker’s eyes swept around the immaculate sitting room with its cushions neatly squared on the sofa. It seemed to Sheila that she was taking an unusually long time to say what she had come for. When Monty offered her a cup of tea, she shook her head and spoke gravely.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He’s really well,’ Sheila said, a sudden knot of fear tightening in her stomach. ‘The Plunket nurse comes every week and she says he’s great. He’s put on weight. She said his milestones are good. I know he’s only three months, and it’s too early to tell us much, but she says he’s very alert for his age.’

  ‘It’s the mother,’ the other woman said, after a halting silence. ‘She wants him back.’

  ‘She can’t. I’m his mother,’ Sheila cried out.

  ‘I know, but his birth mother has the right to change her mind for the first six months. We explained that to you at the beginning.’

  ‘But she can’t look after him, you told us that.’ Monty’s voice was aggrieved.

  ‘Where’s this girl going to keep him?’ said Sheila. ‘In a garage somewhere?’

  Miss Borrell regarded her with genuine pity. ‘I’m sorry, we’ve gone into it very carefully. It seems she can look after him. She got married to the baby’s father last week. His family is very supportive. The couple have gone to live with his family for the time being.’

  ‘Where? Where do they live?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Sheila slowly, ‘that we won’t ever see him again.’

  The social worker nodded, picking an imaginary piece of fluff from her skirt as she did so.

  ‘Take him away,’ Monty said, his fury rising.

  ‘I thought you might like him for the weekend. I need someone to come with me when we pick him up.’

  ‘No,’ Monty said, ‘we don’t want him.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Sheila said. ‘Please, please don’t take him now. Monty, don’t do this, just let him stay.’ Peter had begun to cry in her arms. She swaddled him and kissed his forehead, his little smooth-skinned face, until he calmed.

  The social worker looked at Monty, who shrugged and turned away. ‘He’ll be safe with you?’ she said, an edge in her tone, recovering some ground. ‘If you want another baby, we have to know the child is in good hands.’

  Monty glared at her as if she were mad. ‘Another baby?’ he said, and shook his head. ‘What do you think this is? The chocolate factory.’

  ‘I take it that’s a yes,’ Kaye Borrell said. ‘He’ll be all right with you, then?’

  As she stood to leave, Sheila said, ‘What about us? Doesn’t this girl care? She doesn’t sound fit to have a baby.’

  The social worker picked up her gloves and let herself out, down along the pathway edged with petunias.

  ‘So it seems we’re the fucking baby-sitters,’ Monty said, as he picked up the keys to his truck and walked out.

  Sheila thought he would refuse to look at Peter again. He didn’t ask after him when he came home. She could tell he had had a few beers.

  But when Peter cried during the night, one of the few times he had, it was Monty who got up and changed him. When he had done with that, he brought the baby back to bed and for a little while they lay there with him between them, before returning him to his bassinet, with all its mobiles dancing above. They did this again for the following two nights. Monty told him silly funny stories as if Peter could understand them, ones he had been saving up for when his son was older. Sheila recited some nursery rhymes and tickled his feet and played this little pig, but very gently, so as not to frighten him.

  Monty didn’t go into work on Monday, just waited for the social worker and her companion to arrive. When they had gone, when Peter had left them, he sat with his arm draped around Sheila’s shoulder and neither of them said anything.

  4

  Telling lies

  1972

  THE BELL SIGNALLING THE END of class shrilled so loudly through the school that Linda Morley put her head between her hands to shut out the noise. This cacophony disturbed the rhythm of each working day. Linda had been a guidance counsellor for the past ten years, and she had heard it a thousand times before, but today it seemed worse than usual, a clangour so piercing it felt as if her eardrums might burst. In a moment hundreds of feet would rush through the corridors, shoes scuffing on the high polish of linoleum, the voices of students, and that of teachers admonishing them to be quiet. Order, girls, order.

  Her day had started with a bad omen, not, she reminded herself with impatience, that she was superstitious. In the bathroom she had dropped her hand mirror, one given by her godmother as a twenty-first birthday present. The mirror had a pretty silver backing that matched the brush, her initials engraved on the surface. When she picked up the mirror and turned it over, her face was reflected back to her with a deep fissure, the glass cracked. A splinter fell out. Seven years’ bad luck. She tried to banish the thought. Still, the dressing-table set was a treasure, and it was spoiled. The twenty-first birthday was well in the past.
She was thirty-four, although she knew she could pass for younger. Her figure was tight and trim, her skin as flawless as that of many of the girls in the corridor.

  But her lover, Philip, had left early, as he did every Friday, as if to cram as much into the day as he could before getting out of town for the weekend. First he went to the gym and did fitness exercises for an hour. When he finished work at the university, where he was a lecturer in English, he would catch the train to the place he still referred to as home, where his wife Sylvia lived. Only, last night, she had felt him lying awake beside her, wired as if ready to get out of bed hours before the alarm went off.

  She cooked him an egg, soft-boiled the way he liked, and made toast with wholemeal bread, pale tea without milk. A man who was small but neatly packaged in his body, he wore blue cotton shirts, and woollen jerseys Sylvia had knitted for him, with moleskin trousers, nothing to indicate that he carried the weight of knowledge on his shoulders. Pretension in the lecture theatre was a thing of the past as far as he was concerned. So he said. He pushed his breakfast aside, barely touching it.

  ‘Oh, hon,’ she said, ‘just calm down. You know you always get het up when you’re going to Sylvia’s.’ She never said ‘going home’.

  This morning he had said, ‘Don’t fucking counsel me, Linda. Just don’t.’

  It rattled her, she had to admit it. Part of her wanted to crawl back under the bed covers for the day and just stare at her pale ceiling above the mezzanine floor where they slept. She had created what she described as a capsule of cool lemony light in her apartment, space that made no claims on personhood, where people could just find themselves. Philip didn’t entirely agree with this concept. A bit of a box, isn’t it? he’d said, the first time he visited her. You need a bit more colour in here, don’t you? She thought he’d become accustomed to it, but she added a turquoise bedspread because it reminded her of the sea. Although they could see Wellington Harbour through a slit window above the bed anyway, a line of blue-green light flecked with white caps.

  To calm herself, she had chosen her clothes with even more than her usual care. A cream mohair jersey with a paisley pattern, a straight blue skirt, platform heels — an outfit representing, she felt, both sensitivity and authority. She flicked the silverbacked brush through her big hair, streaked with gold lights.

  As if Philip’s moodiness was not enough, she had a particularly difficult case to deal with. She had been counselling a girl for the past two years and getting nowhere. Today, she hoped, would be her breakthrough day.

  Ed Carter, the physical education teacher, came into her office, without knocking. This irritated her, although she had the open sign on her door, so that any student seeking her advice would feel welcome. He brought with him a swelling surge not just of noise, but of the smell of girls en masse: the soggy odour of uniforms dampened with rain and dried again, some not cleaned from the beginning of one year to the end, muddy shoes, cheap perfume, armpit and crotch and menstruation smells. You could talk to girls a hundred times about hygiene yet some never got the message.

  ‘Shut it, Ed,’ Linda said, meaning the door.

  He took this as an invitation to perch on the edge of her desk.

  ‘TGIF.’ He meant Thank God It’s Friday, the day the staff would go to the pub after work and not go home till it shut at ten. Teachers needed time to relax, they told each other. Linda used to go, before she met Philip and Sylvia. She knew the conversations off by heart. They were all about what kid had done what to whom, and how this had been dealt with, and which parents had been called in and which kid was smarter than they thought, and so on, endless talk about the jobs they were supposed to be leaving behind for the weekend. Nobody talked about their families. Teachers were families of their own, speaking a language they didn’t want to take home.

  ‘What can I do for you, Ed?’ Younger than her, he looked pretty much how a gymnasium teacher should be — a tall, rangy man, big shoulders, an oblong jaw (lantern-jawed came to mind, but that sounded so Victorian romantic she dismissed it as unworthy). Girls fought for his attention. She remembered his wife had left him recently, taking the two children with her, and softened. Teachers, she often thought, needed counselling as much as their charges.

  He had shifted himself to a chair, straddling it back to front. ‘You stay at home on your own on Friday nights these days,’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t. I go to the movies.’

  ‘On your own.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘Liar. You’re fooling yourself, Linda.’

  ‘Life’s complicated. You should know that.’ She guessed there was an invitation in the offing and sought to stave it off. She picked up a folder. ‘Janice Pawson,’ she said. ‘You come across her?’ She knew he must have, because once a week he got to see every girl in the school.

  ‘Janice.’ He screwed up his cheek, then shrugged, as if to rebuke himself. Linda recognised the dent in the girl’s face that made it asymmetrical. Forceps delivery that had never straightened out. ‘Poor little kid,’ Ed was saying. ‘I made her cry doing handstands. I said, “Come on, you can do it, Jan.” And I kept on and on at her. I wanted to shake something out of her, make her do better than she thought she could. And then she started to cry. You know, just that dumb expression, and tears rolling down her face. I felt like an arsehole.’

  ‘Oh God, that’s awful, Ed. I know what you mean, though, there’s something there you just can’t reach.’

  Ed’s face brightened. ‘But you know what? All of a sudden, while she was still boo-hoo-ing, she stands there and does a perfect handstand. Just like that. And when she’d done it, she was proud of herself. You could see it in her face. If she never does another handstand in her life, she’s done that one.’

  ‘Wow, really? She did that for you? I’m full of admiration.’

  Ed looked modest. ‘Stick at it, you’ll find the spot. She wants to be a hairdresser.’

  Linda glanced at the open folder in front of her. ‘Yes, she told me. Might be a bit ambitious. It says she’s got siblings. A brother and two sisters. You must have come across the older girls?’ Although he was younger, Ed had been at this school longer than she had. She had held positions at other schools.

  ‘Well, there was Jessie, of course. Jessie Sandle, dux of the school. You must have seen her name on the honours board — 1962 or thereabouts.’

  ‘I didn’t make the connection. A half-sister?’

  ‘That’s right. Mind you, she wasn’t much good at handstands either. Well, there you go, Jessie wouldn’t take shit like that from me. She knew she was smart, in fact so smart she managed to avoid coming to phys ed most days. I doubt if she had much to do with Jan. She was, oh I reckon, ten years or so older. I heard she went to Oxford, and now she’s a journalist. Famous old girl. You see her by-line in the world news section.’

  ‘I have. Fancy that, Janice Pawson’s sister. What about the next sister?’

  ‘Didn’t come here. Some trouble at home I heard. She left to live with a relative in Masterton and went to school there. I think she’s had a baby.’

  ‘Trouble at home? I’ve asked her parents to come in; they never do.’

  ‘You’ll crack it. Gotta go. Don’t forget, TGIF.’ He stopped at the door. ‘What’s Janice been up to this time, anyway?’

  ‘Truanting. Again. Her specialty.’

  When Ed had gone, Linda sat and stared at her notes. Janice wasn’t due in for half an hour. Of course, she had supposed there was trouble at home. She thought Ed might know more than he’d said. Or he was guessing at something, but wasn’t sure enough to tell her. Linda couldn’t imagine how she might persuade Janice Pawson to stand on her hands for her.

  She had reports to write up. It was a matter of pride that she finished each week with her desk tidy and her work complete. Instead, she picked up the phone and rang Philip at his office. This was a rule she was breaking. Their working lives must be kept separate, he had told her. He needed space to think
. His train of thought before he gave a lecture must not be interrupted. There was an energy flow between him and his students, and getting ready for their interaction was like practising for an athletic event.

  Linda thought he might not pick up but he did. When she said, ‘It’s me, Linda,’ he asked quickly if there was an emergency, his voice brisk, a trifle sharp.

  ‘Please stay with me tonight. You don’t have to go to Sylvia’s.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Are you sick or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not pregnant?’ There was an edge of fear in his voice.

  ‘No.’ She guessed it was a competition now, to see who put the phone down first, and decided to win.

  PHILIP AND SYLVIA OWNED A cottage in Pinehaven. It was surrounded by a garden that wouldn’t be out of place in a magazine, wisteria round the verandah in spring, hollyhocks and roses blooming all through the summer. It was the herb garden that was truly impressive, overflowing with sage, parsley, rosemary, lavender, basil and borage and other plants Sylvia described as of the medieval variety, tansy and nettles. In her garden shed, which she called the factory, she concocted creams and potions, natural remedies of all kinds. The business was flourishing. Just recently Sylvia had taken on an assistant and was considering building larger premises. Linda knew all of this because she and Sylvia used to be friends. They first met at a weekend retreat devoted to pacifism, and Sylvia and she knew they were kindred spirits straight away. Sylvia said she must come home and meet her husband and all their friends. She was ample-breasted and broad in the bottom, but walked with a swaying grace. Her skin was unblemished, testimony to her products.

  Before things changed, Linda had visited the couple often. All of them, she, Sylvia and Philip, and friends of theirs, would sit in the conversation pit that Philip had created in the living room, a space heaped with big soft cushions, and talk until it was nearly morning, and drink wine, the Beatles playing in the background. They wore Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badges, recoiled with disgust from South African racial policies, always signed petitions to stop whatever they didn’t think was right with the world — aluminium smelters, the Vietnam War, although they hoped the tide was turning there.