All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  Grant would remember this moment of clarity in the sky, when all the bad dreams that had pursued him since his mother died, made sense. He had long suspected that there was nobody you could trust. Nobody.

  HIS ATTENTION, HE WILL THINK, must have wandered for seconds rather than minutes, yet all of a sudden he was lost in the sky. He had no idea where he was. His altimeter told him he was three thousand feet up. He could barely see the ground.

  ‘Airport control, this is Piper Cub ZK DODO. I’m lost,’ he shouted.

  ‘Control to ZK DODO,’ Bob’s voice came back. ‘You’re not lost, I can see you. Turn left and prepare to land.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Grant said. He looked at the control panel. The controls made no sense to him. The plane began to fall towards the earth. ‘Mum,’ he shouted, ‘Mummy, I’m lost!’

  The plane roared, lurched, the ground raced towards him. He forced the nose up but it was too late.

  ‘Mum,’ he cried again. ‘Where are you?’

  There was a splintering thud, then silence, the scent of Joan Moody’s roses, and oblivion.

  TELL IVY, TELL JOAN, TEL-EPHONE. It was the standing joke among them. Ivy, with her wig because she suffered from alopecia, her sharp tongue, her unerring ear for a good story, was the one who got in with the news first. Joan wasn’t surprised when she called. She already knew what Ivy had heard, but she didn’t tell Ivy that straight away.

  ‘That boy’s up in court next week,’ Ivy said. She had a friend whose son was a court reporter. ‘You know, the one who turned up at the crash?’

  ‘Yes. We need to have a meeting about this,’ Joan said, as if getting together were a formal matter and there would be no argument. ‘Here. Tomorrow.’

  The four women, Joan and Ivy, Alice and Maureen, had all known each other for what seemed like forever. For yonks, as they said. They met when their children were just starting school, and they belonged to mothers’ groups. Now their children were parents, grown up and long gone. But they were still there, indestructible, as though the world would fall apart without them to keep an eye on it.

  When she had finished talking to Ivy, Joan put the phone down and contemplated the pretty room that she and Dugald had decorated together. The house had a vintage style, timber beams and beautiful rimu doors they had stripped down to bare wood and treated. The dining-room table seated ten, and when the family came to visit they could all gather round it. Only, Dugald was missing now. She wanted to remonstrate when one of the children took his chair at the head of the table, but she knew this was silly. Spaces were made to be filled, and this growing brood of her descendants was doing exactly that. He would have loved to see them there. It was the thing he would miss, he said when he knew he was dying, seeing how the little ones turned out. At nights she would lie in bed and, in her head, tell him, hoping that he would hear. She wished so much that he was here now.

  Joan looked around distractedly, trying to decide which room she would use to entertain her guests. Not the sitting room, it was too informal. Soon they would be lounging around and telling her which of the bottles of wine they had brought to open next and talking at the top of their voices, the way they always did.

  The dining room, she decided, where this nonsense had taken place. They would see themselves for what they were, a bunch of grotesque old women who had behaved badly, and must face what they would have to do next.

  On the day that Grant Pawson crash-landed in her garden, Joan had made pissaladière for her friends, swotting it up out of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, going to town the day before to buy the olives and anchovies. They were hard to come by, and she felt superior when she asked for them at the grocery store. She saw herself that morning, preparing the potato and flour dough for the pastry. It was Maureen’s turn to bring the desserts; she had made chocolate orange custards, quivering in their ramekins when she brought the container in from the car. They looked decadent, the dark chocolate wearing a cheerful frizz of orange zest.

  By the time everything was eaten, and three bottles of wine had been despatched, the atmosphere was mellow. Too mellow by far.

  Maureen was the youngest, a woman who had had aspirations to write short stories but had abandoned the idea after several classes and as many rejection slips. ‘It’s all this avant garde nonsense,’ she said when she finally gave up. ‘Who reads it? Not me, I can tell you.’ She was a round fair woman, with bright brown eyes. Joan suspected Maureen may have had affairs, but this was not something they talked about. They talked about other women who had gone off the rails, but not themselves.

  At lunch, Maureen gave a gentle burp. ‘If we’re going to be really modern, we should try pot.’

  Alice, more ascetic in her appearance than the others, with her horn-rimmed glasses, and who travelled a lot, said in a crisp tone, ‘Don’t be silly, Maureen.’ Alice was married to a lawyer, the only one who still had a living husband.

  But Maureen was undaunted. She turned her flushed rosy face from one to another. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  She reached for her handbag under the table and opened it. ‘Voilà!’ She produced a roughly rolled cigarette, or that’s what it looked like to Joan.

  There was a silence.

  Maureen said, ‘Well, don’t act so stricken. It’s a joint.’

  ‘Marijuana? Where did you get it?’

  ‘I’ve got a lovely young gardener,’ Maureen said, airily. ‘He and I talk about all sorts of things. Oh, to be young.’

  ‘Maureen, put that thing away,’ Joan said, fighting her rising panic.

  ‘Oh, come on, Joan, you need to learn something new. We need to learn how to smoke a bit of dope. I’ll bet none of you have tried it.’

  ‘I have,’ said Alice.

  As Ivy had remarked more than once to Joan, Alice was a cool one, the way she dressed in grey silk blouses rather than sweaters like the rest of them. At times they wondered why she continued to bother with them. Ivy reckoned Alice was still having sex. ‘Can you imagine it, at our age?’

  Alice said, ‘It was in Mexico. That’s a bit different to smoking a joint here.’

  ‘But you did it?’ Maureen said, in a pleased voice.

  ‘Have you and the gardener been at it? Smoking, I mean,’ Ivy said. A whisker on her chin quivered. Joan, looking over at her, thought, Ivy hasn’t plucked. She would mention it to her perhaps. Ivy was letting go a little; she’d noticed it of late.

  ‘Well, I know what to do,’ Maureen said, evading the question.

  ‘Oh, give it here,’ Alice said. ‘If you must.’

  Maureen passed the joint over with a box of matches, and Alice lit up, as if it were nothing special. Just watching her do this, as an ordinary everyday activity, made everyone relax a little more. If Alice had smoked dope, perhaps it was all right. Joan just wished it wasn’t in her house.

  ‘Joan, you’re not inhaling,’ Maureen said, when the joint was passed to her.

  ‘I’ve never smoked anything,’ Joan said. She held it tentatively to her mouth, thinking how odd that she was tasting her friends’ lipsticks after all these years. The thought of it made her giggle a little.

  ‘You see,’ Maureen said triumphantly. ‘You’re getting the effect already. Everyone, Joan is getting stoned, isn’t she? Isn’t she getting high?’

  ‘I am not,’ Joan said, and it was true she hadn’t taken a drag like the others were doing, but this whole scene, with her friends solemnly passing the joint around her dining-room table, was funnier than she could have imagined.

  That was the moment of the crash, and a long subsiding whine. The house shuddered, like in an earthquake.

  IT WAS JUST A MILD CONCUSSION, the doctors said. Grant might not remember much. They’d given him morphine while they set his broken arm, a nasty break, needing a temporary pin. He slept until later the next day. When he woke up, the nurses treated him with a kind of amused compassion. One of them said, ‘It’s all right. They didn’t find any dope on you.’


  ‘I didn’t have any,’ Grant said.

  ‘Don’t get het up. They were searching for it, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you think I’m that dumb? It was my first solo.’

  The nurse bit her bottom lip as if to suppress a smile, but the corners of her mouth kept twitching. She tucked something soft in the bed beside him. ‘So you don’t lose it,’ she said. It was his mother’s fur collar. He pushed it down inside the bed, ashamed.

  His father turned up soon after that, a newspaper in his hand. The nurse who had been nice to him saw the paper and frowned. It was too late. Jock had already shown it to Grant. Grant read what was written there, the description of his last words on the flight, broadcast on a radio frequency heard by several in the town, including a cub reporter.

  ‘Mummy,’ Jock said. ‘What are you, boy?’

  Grant regarded his father with loathing. The next time the cleaners came around with their rubbish bags, he slipped the collar into one and rolled over, his face to the wall.

  WHEN THE POLICEMAN TOLD JOAN that they would all have to make a statement, and that might take a while, she said, ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going inside to start dinner.’

  She saw they were questioning the young man who had appeared around the side of the house. It looked as if there might be a fight about to start.

  ‘I think that would be a really good idea, Mrs Moody,’ the young policeman said. ‘Just try and keep everyone calm.’ Her beautiful garden was covered with a foamy substance. He made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m afraid the plane’ll be here a day or so. Air accident people will have to come up from Wellington and investigate before it can be moved.’

  Yet another man appeared, whom she recognised as a local flying instructor. A bit of a lady’s man, Ivy had said once. He fancies himself, that one. He seemed to be lunging at the young man who was being questioned.

  ‘Come along, ladies,’ Joan said, taking charge.

  She remembered shepherding them inside like errant schoolchildren. ‘Go to the bathroom and use my toothbrush. All of you. Then go into the sitting room, and sit down.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Maureen asked, in a small frightened voice.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I’m going to start dinner.’

  She walked into the dining room, opening all the windows as she went. She stopped to collect up the evidence from among the dirty dishes on her lovely table. In the adjoining kitchen, she put a pan on the stove to heat, added oil and sliced an onion before dropping it into the pan. In a few moments, the smell of frying onion filled the kitchen, drifting through the dining and sitting rooms. She didn’t turn on the fan.

  ‘You got us out of it,’ Maureen said, when they gathered for the arranged meeting. A month had passed. ‘You’re a heroine, Joan. Who would have thought you had it in you?’

  ‘You could write a short story about it, couldn’t you, Maureen?’ Ivy said, a bit of the old acid coming back.

  ‘They arrested that young man, the pilot’s friend,’ Joan said. ‘It’s not funny. He’s up on drug charges and it’s our fault.’

  ‘Well, they must have found something on him,’ Ivy said. ‘I mean, if they didn’t have something to go on, they wouldn’t have charged him.’

  ‘If my house hadn’t smelled like Woodstock, they wouldn’t have picked on him,’ Joan said. She felt tears prickle behind her eyelids. Since the accident she had been so tired, lying awake at nights, racked with guilt. ‘That was his friend in the plane. He was worried sick — didn’t you see him crying? He’s just a kid. We need to tell the police it was us.’

  The silence around the room was thick, palpable. You could bend it, Joan thought. Ivy still hadn’t plucked, but she couldn’t be bothered mentioning it to her now.

  Alice spoke up then, her voice languid; Alice who knew things because of her lawyer husband, but didn’t always tell them. Client confidentiality and all that, she would murmur. ‘He had a half-smoked joint in his pocket. He’d been smoking it all right,’ she said. ‘He’s been charged with possession. Nothing to do with us at all.’

  ‘Perhaps it was planted on him,’ Joan said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Alice said. ‘You know our cops, they’re decent men. He said it wasn’t his, someone had given it to him. Some woman. But really, it doesn’t make any difference whose it was, he was the one who had it in his pocket.’

  ‘So that’s it?’ Joan said.

  Her friends shrugged.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Alice, ‘if you want to make proper fools of yourselves, go down to the police station. I know a good lawyer who might help you.’

  ‘No need to be sarcastic,’ Maureen said. ‘We get the message, don’t we, Joan?’

  Joan shook her head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘You don’t think you’re being a bit of a prig about all this, Joan?’ Alice asked.

  Maureen was the first to nod in agreement. Ivy simply seemed bewildered for a moment or so. Then she said, ‘Alice is right, we should let it go.’

  After they had gone, Joan’s tears began to spill. Such happy years, the four of them. She wasn’t sure how she would fill her days without them.

  GRANT WENT TO SEE ALLAN in prison. His arm was still in plaster. He caught the bus up to Mount Crawford jail, high above the harbour on a point jutting out into the sea. Only the inmates couldn’t see the ocean. It was winter. The night before, he had stood in a queue that snaked all the way down Molesworth Street, waiting to enter Parliament and pay his respects at the coffin of Norman Kirk. There was weeping in the chill late winter wind, the sound of a karanga, people looking desolate, as if everything had changed. Big Norm had gone. The scent of lilies in the high-vaulted foyer said it all.

  ‘I went to say goodbye,’ Grant said. ‘I said it for you, too.’

  Allan looked at him across the table that separated them, his eyes already dead.

  ‘They shouldn’t have banged you up,’ Grant said. ‘Didn’t you tell them it was Mandy’s dope?’

  ‘They didn’t want to know. I’ve got a record.’

  ‘It’s only three months,’ Grant said. He couldn’t think what else to say.

  ‘It’s a lifetime,’ Allan said.

  At first, Grant didn’t understand what his friend meant. But as the bus descended the hill through the swirling mist, heading for the city, he thought that he did. It scared him.

  6

  Staying up late

  1977

  ‘GOOD TASTE,’ BELINDA WAS SAYING. ‘I mean why doesn’t someone do something tasteless on television? Or better still, why don’t they have a bit of bad taste? It’s probably better than no taste.’

  ‘Because the licence holders wouldn’t pay their fees,’ Daniel said.

  Six of them were crammed around a table in a cubicle at The Woolshed, built to imitate a barn with wooden rafters and timber-topped tables, up steep steps from Lambton Quay. They were eating moussaka and drinking red wine.

  ‘They’d soon come back,’ Belinda said. ‘They’d stop watching sheep-dog trials and Close to Home if they had a bit of real gutsy drama. Life and death and all that stuff. Pain and misery and a bit of suicide thrown in. The BBC could do it. But nobody risks anything.’

  ‘The dear old Beeb. So that’s your yardstick of bad taste. Oh Belinda, Berlinney, they’re tame, really they are,’ Daniel said. Daniel was a television producer, although none of his projects had got the green light lately. He was leaning against his wife Carla, raising his voice above the noise of businessmen shouting at each other at the end of the week (‘ze zoots’, Daniel called them, in a phoney Italian accent), a few politicians, a group of writers, some who knew Daniel and waved matey greetings from the far end of the room, so that he could speak to Belinda above the noise. Daniel had intense liquid-brown eyes, shaggy grey hair held back by a headband, a gold filling in one of his front teeth. He was wearing a floral shirt and tight pants. ‘So what would you put in a script if the drama department gave you the chance?’
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  ‘I’d write something about women’s lives, their real lives.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Daniel sighed. He signalled to Nick at the other end of the table. Nick was a director. Belinda hadn’t learned the distinction between producers and directors, but she thought Daniel had more power than Nick. ‘You see what women’s liberation has done? They’ve dreamed up all these scenarios at the Women’s Convention and now they want us to direct kitchen sink dramas. Girls, it won’t do.’

  ‘Don’t say “girls” to me,’ Belinda said.

  ‘Because basically,’ Carla said, ‘you’re all a bunch of wankers out there at Avalon.’ She pushed a strand of her long dead-straight blonde hair behind her ear. She was dressed in a black sweater, pants and red beads. ‘Belinda is absolutely right. Look at Talking to a Stranger, that was revolutionary drama.’

  ‘But darling, six hours, six hours long,’ Daniel said. ‘It was more like a novel. You have to be Eugene O’Neill to hold an audience for that long, and this is television you’re talking about. Besides, one-off dramas are over.’

  ‘It played in four parts. It was wonderful,’ Belinda chimed in. ‘That young actress, Judi Dench, she was brilliant. Oh go on, tell me we don’t have actresses like that in New Zealand.’

  ‘Women actors, darling,’ Letitia said, and for some reason she was laughing. Belinda thought it was aimed at her.

  Letitia was the only one of the four women who were not already friends when the meal started. She was older by at least twenty years, a woman with a broad Yorkshire accent, her figure turning stout, blood-red fingernails, and make-up like pink cement. She had experience, darlings, more ITV than the Beeb, which was why she’d been brought out to New Zealand to show the locals how to do things.

  She had tagged along behind Daniel and Nick when they said they were heading off for a meal. It was supposed to be a women’s night out. Carla had sighed with embarrassment when Daniel insisted on turning up with his colleagues. He whispered something in Carla’s ear, and her eyes flicked from Frances, another of the friends, to Nick. Belinda guessed he was trying to arrange a hook-up for Nick. Frances had just broken up with her boyfriend. Belinda thought men must find Frances sexy; she wore wispy diaphanous dresses that showed her curves, and there was something about her wide mouth and curious almost flat teeth that was perhaps inviting. And there was no doubt that Nick was good-looking, with chiselled features and deep-set bright blue eyes. His close-cut hair revealed a beautiful curve to the shape of his head. Belinda guessed he was in his late thirties. He was directing documentaries but, like them all, he was just waiting for a drama, preferably a series, to come up.