All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  She saw Nick Draper in the corridors now and then, and he nodded to her in passing, as though trying to remember who she was.

  The next time Belinda saw her, Carla said, ‘So did you know Nick’s having an affair with Frances, after all?’ She said this in a pleased way, as if she wanted to knock a bit of stuffing out of Belinda. She’d been trying to avoid Carla, guessing that she was bitter that Belinda was now inside the studio and Daniel was not.

  They bumped into each other again at the library. Carla was trundling along with a trolley-load of books and Belinda thought she looked tired, her blonde hair tucked behind her ears. ‘You know Nick’s gone back to his wife and kids, do you?’

  Belinda was sure Carla knew perfectly well that she didn’t know, and she didn’t like the way Carla wanted her to care. The sisterhood was on shaky ground.

  After some time had passed, Belinda was offered some work in the documentary unit, and her eye for remarkable detail in the most harrowing stories was noted.

  7

  Walking the line

  1981

  THE DOOR CLOSES, THE LOCK IS TURNED, the cold floor of the cell confronts them. But they are many and have one another’s warmth for comfort. They have chants in their throats that the police cannot stop because there are so many of them, handcuffed and bloody but still unbowed.

  It is a late winter’s day in 1981, as the Springbok tour grinds on and on. Belinda Anderson and her friends are part of the protest marches trying to stop the games. How long, oh Lord, how long, a newspaper headline asks, and it is what they ask each other every day: How long can this unrest go on in a country that prides itself on harmony and peaceful green fields? The streets are running with blood, the police are marching on the people. They’re using their batons to smash in heads, the hospitals are overflowing, children are turning against their parents, and parents against their children. It is so nearly spring and the front gardens of narrow Wellington houses tucked cheek by jowl next to each other are illuminated by kowhai in flower. Such a nice afternoon, full of pale sunshine, to have gone walking through the streets. Although Seth is against the tour he is at home because someone must stay with the children.

  Amandla, Amandla! Ngawethu! Power to the people. The whole world’s watching — the chants going up, words bouncing around the concrete walls, the mists of their breaths rising and mixing with the smell of piss and old vomit. Belinda’s eyes travel around the initials scratched in the walls. Even though it’s still happening, she knows that it is history in the making, that outside there are cameras rolling capturing the chaos, the citizens at war. When she gets out she will report on it from the very heart of chaos.

  ‘Where’s Frances?’ she asks Daniel. The friends have been trying to stay together on these demonstrations, so that they can help if any of them get hurt. ‘Is she all right? I didn’t see her. We haven’t left her behind, have we?’

  Daniel rolls his eyes. ‘She didn’t come today. She hasn’t marched for a while.’

  Carla makes a fingers-down-her-throat gesture. ‘Not since the night of the Charles and Diana wedding party, when we were out on Molesworth Street. They all got dressed up in tiaras and big hats and drank champagne while they watched the wedding on telly in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Belinda says, because even though she has never liked Frances as much as the others, she still has the capacity for astonishment when she discovers someone she thinks she knows well is so out of tune with her own views. Still it’s hard to reconcile the image of a fancy dress party with what had happened to them in Molesworth Street right outside Parliament, the night the police launched their baton attack on the peaceful crowd, and blood ran on the pavements. That was a while ago now, when the tour had barely begun, this civil war barely declared. ‘Frances couldn’t have known what would happen that night,’ she said, hoping to sound charitable.

  ‘Oh, Belinda,’ Daniel says, ‘really, at heart you’re the original naïf, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t condescend, Daniel, it doesn’t suit you,’ she says crossly. ‘Anyone would think you knew what was going to happen.’

  Things have been tense between Daniel and Belinda since she turned down a job he was offering her with his fledgling independent company, but that’s how it is. You can’t be sure with Daniel that any job will last for long, and why would she risk the very good one she already has? She had been sent on a production course and was beginning to learn more about the industry. It was whispered in the corridors that she was a rising star.

  Carla has completed an accountancy degree she started long ago, before she had children. Now she’s a public servant accountant, her first foot on the promotion ladder already. She hadn’t wanted to get caught today. Still, as she remarks, if they’re going to sack public servants for protesting, the country will close down. There are thousands of them out marching. Carla used to look faintly Bohemian but these days her fair hair is neatly tied up, her demeanour changed. She wears dark suits to work.

  As Belinda tries to make herself comfortable on the floor, she hears a man’s voice saying her name.

  In the paddy wagon that brought them to the police station, after they were dragged from the road, there were at least twenty people heaped together — writers, hippies wearing ponchos and jeans, a couple of gang members with tattoos on their faces, academics, businessmen who started the day wearing nicely cut Savile Row overcoats, and a woman in a lavender blue twinset and a pearl necklace. The smell of old tobacco, whiffs of marijuana, mingled with that of Chanel No. 5. They’ve been divided up and herded into holding cells, divided only by bars, that line a dimly lit corridor. Eight of them are crammed into the cell where Belinda finds herself. As she looks over her shoulder she sees an artist whose right hand has been trodden on holding up his fingers to examine them, a nurse with a bandage made from someone’s handkerchief, a man squinting through the remaining lens of his glasses.

  ‘Belinda,’ the voice says, more insistently.

  Belinda picks out a young man whose face she knows and doesn’t know, a pallor beneath his stubble, his cow-lick sticking up in a way she half remembers, a hint of fear in his eyes. ‘Grant,’ she says. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘It is, it’s me,’ and her brother’s voice is scared, just like when he was a little boy and used to get hidings from Charm.

  ‘My little brother,’ she tells Carla and Daniel, and Nick Draper, who has come with them, hanging in close with the group. He and Belinda are trying to sit back-to-back for support. Carla and Daniel pretend not to notice. Belinda and Nick, it is considered by the others, have a history.

  ‘Well, how about that?’ Carla says to Belinda. ‘Did you two plan to march together today?’

  Belinda and Grant hold each other’s eye for an instant. ‘Grant, are you okay? Have you been hurt?’

  Around them people are quietening down as the reality of being in a prison cell begins to sink in.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘You?’

  ‘Sore back, that’s all,’ Belinda says. The police who arrested her shoved a knee in her back, one on each side of her as they dragged her away. ‘It must be ten years,’ she says. ‘More than that. I wouldn’t have known you.’

  ‘I saw you once, but you didn’t see me,’ Grant says. ‘It was at Parliament when Kirk died. You were carrying a baby. You were with someone. Was that your husband? I was going to come over but I was afraid I’d lose my place in the queue. I was going for a mate who couldn’t go. Besides,’ his voice falters, ‘I didn’t know what to say.’

  Belinda sees that night in her mind’s eye, the queue stretching all the way across the forecourt and down the street, thousands of people waiting to pay their last respects in front of the flag-draped coffin.

  ‘Seven years. It’s seven years this week since Kirk died,’ Carla says, beside Belinda. ‘Big Norm would never have let this happen.’

  ‘So it’s seven years this week since we saw each other,’ Belinda says to Grant
.

  ‘No, since I saw you. You looked happy. Dad heard you had three kids. Someone told Aunt Agnes.’

  ‘It’s Rob Muldoon,’ Carla says, ‘even his mates won’t thank him for this. They wanted rugby, not riots.’

  ‘How is the old bastard?’ Belinda asks, and she and Grant both know it’s their father they are talking about, not prime ministers present or fallen, although loathing for Muldoon runs like a tidal wave through the country. Nobody had expected to be beaten for walking down the street on a sunny afternoon, or sitting down in the middle of the road. Nor at twilight, when people of conscience were going home from work, that a friendly stroll would turn violent outside the very place where they had stood and mourned Kirk.

  ‘Mad as a snake,’ Grant says. ‘They’ve locked him up and I hope they’ve thrown away the key. I left home as soon as I could. You know Charm died?’

  ‘I saw it in the death notices. Good riddance. What happened?’

  ‘Her liver crapped out.’

  ‘You don’t say. So, Grant, what about you? What have you been up to?’

  ‘I went to uni.’

  ‘So did I. I never saw you there.’

  They are interrupted by the opening of the cell door. All eyes swivel around, an involuntary movement ripples through them as they half rise in anticipation of release. A policeman beckons the artist with the broken hand; the nurse is left behind. The door clangs shut again. A murmuring swell begins to fill the air as a Maori man in the cell next door begins a karakia, then someone starts to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and Belinda finds herself praying along with everyone, even though she doesn’t believe in God.

  ‘I have to get out of here,’ Daniel says, his voice feverish. ‘They let that other bloke go.’ His greying curls are sticky and a film of sweat has gathered beneath his eyes.

  ‘All in good time.’ Carla lays her hand on his shirt sleeve to calm him, but he jerks it away. She doesn’t get it, he tells her, he has to get out of this fucking place. Now.

  Nick looks worried. ‘Cool it, man, they’ve started processing people now, they’ll let us out of here soon.’ Belinda had come on the march with Nick. He had stopped by her house that morning so they could walk into town together. ‘Take care of her, won’t you?’ Seth had said at the doorway. ‘I’m the one who should be going but nothing’s going to stop Belinda. You know what she’s like.’

  When she glanced back, Seth was watching after them, a wistful expression on his face. She thinks he felt guilty. He is a scientist and has a paper to finish for another conference. It is about coastal and estuarine processes, and the effects of certain tides on marine life. Belinda loves him so much that her heart breaks when she sees him alone like this, except for Simone, who is standing close to her father and doesn’t understand why her mother is going out again. Belinda is often going out. Really, she is the one who feels guilty, but although there are many things she can do, she can’t write his paper. She thinks of herself more as the eye of a camera, someone who can see things that others cannot and translates them into film. This was what she had seen that morning: that Seth is afraid of losing her. She is afraid of it too, because she has discovered that it is possible to love two men at once. No, worse than afraid, she is terrified.

  Nick and his wife, Esme, and Belinda and Seth go to restaurants together and to movies and plays. They have a season ticket at Downstage theatre, and they pool child-minding resources now and then. This is something that bothers Daniel and Carla because they’ve known Nick and Esme much longer and, as they say, have seen them through some rough patches. There are things they could say, but they wouldn’t dream of it, of course. Esme and Nick have a toddler, a late surprise baby, who Carla says brought Nick back into the fold when he’d been straying. She didn’t say who with but that’s Carla, she likes to tell stories that are suggestive rather than precise. The other word for it is gossiping.

  One of their number in the cell is a gang member, who introduces himself as Matiu. He offers to shake hands with them all and rubs his wrists where the handcuffs have been. At least they’d been on his wrists: in the melee Belinda’s wrist had been handcuffed to Nick’s ankle so that she had to crouch like an animal in the paddy wagon.

  ‘Someone told the cops which way we were heading today,’ Matiu says. ‘The marshals had a plan to take us up a side street. They didn’t tell us until we were heading off. But the cops were waiting for us. They knew.’

  ‘You mean somebody narked?’ Nick said.

  ‘I reckon so.’

  ‘Well, they must have buggered off when we got arrested.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have,’ Matiu says. ‘They’d have got arrested with us so they could keep going the next time.’ He speaks with the authority of someone who knows the ways of the police and their informers.

  ‘You reckon they might be in one of the cells?’ Nick sounds alarmed. The cell contains Matiu, the four friends and Grant, the nurse with the head wound who hasn’t been saying anything, and a man called Phil, perhaps in his late twenties, wearing a green pullover, hand-knitted in cable stitch.

  ‘Nick,’ Belinda says, laying her hand on her friend’s arm, ‘we don’t know that. There’s enough trouble in here as it is.’

  ‘Okay, Berlinney. You’re right, kiddo.’ Nick sounds tired. The little girl, Sarah, has kept him and Esme up in the night with a cough. He shouldn’t be here. It’s what they’re all thinking: we shouldn’t be here, look at us, arrested.

  But for some of their number prison is more familiar. Matiu says: ‘If I figure out who it is, I’ll poke their eyes out.’ He jabs the air with the first two fingers of his right hand, a sharp menacing motion that you’d be crazy not to believe.

  Belinda senses fear somewhere in her vicinity, some small startled movement like an animal that has been caught in headlights. She thinks, that person is in here, near to me. She closes her eyes. Not Grant, please let it not be her brother. Down the corridor, in another cell, a woman begins to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, but Matiu yells out that they’ve sung that smarmy one too many times today, they’ll never overcome the fucking pigs and can’t they change the tune? Then, with a sudden movement, he clambers to his feet and, out of nowhere, his voice swells into Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’, and for a few minutes the group is united in belting out the words they know. Because you’re mine, Nick sings in Belinda’s ear, and up and down the row of cells other voices join in. I walk the line.

  Daniel tries to stand up but his legs give way on him. I’m on fire, he warbles, while Carla is clapping her hands in time. ‘C’mon, everyone,’ she calls out, ‘that’s more like it.’

  The song seems to restore them for a few minutes, but again the group subsides into silence, broken by coughs and sighs, the clearing of throats. Matiu says, ‘Well, we better get to the bottom of this. I reckon it’s somebody in here. Who grassed?’

  ‘I thought we’d moved on from that,’ Nick says. ‘What’s the point? We’re banged-up anyway.’

  ‘Nah, mate, somebody needs a lesson in here. I’m just the person to give it out. Was it you, mate? Is that your problem, eh? Fuckin’ nice windbreaker, fancy walking shoes — you one of those undercover blokes?’

  ‘He works in television,’ Belinda says. ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Nuts, eh? You his missus?’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ Belinda says. ‘I’m just telling you where he works. I see him every day.’

  ‘Leave my sister out of it,’ Grant says, his voice going up a note. He’s managed to find a pair of black-rimmed glasses in his pocket that make him owlish. Matiu mutters something to himself, but he lapses into silence.

  ‘What did you do at uni?’ she asks Grant, as quietly as she can because it’s their business, but everyone can hear everyone else in the silences between. People are putting their heads on their arms as if willing themselves to sleep.

  ‘Law and pols.’

  ‘I can’t see how I missed you.’

  ‘I mucked ro
und for a year or two. Did some labouring jobs. When did you finish?’

  ‘End of ’74. I was in a rush, with the kids. I went back later and did Honours, never have got round to my Master’s.’

  ‘I started later. I guess we just kept missing each other.’

  Belinda sits thinking for a moment. She’s been so busy that the years have melted away. He’s seen her, he’s walked past her and not known what to say, and she feels ashamed. ‘So you’re a clever bunny,’ she says. ‘Political science and a lawyer. You through?’

  ‘Yep. Done and dusted.’

  ‘A lawyer? You say you’re a lawyer?’ Matiu says. His tattoos are carved on the backs of his hands and in deep gouge-like marks on his cheeks. He pulls at the frayed edges of his denim sleeves, his arms crossed. ‘A lawyer who works for the cops, are you, mate?’

  Grant seems to edge closer to Belinda, just like when they were little and she was his big sister.

  ‘Grant’s not that kind,’ Belinda says.

  ‘You’re a bit of a fancy-pants know-all yourself, aren’t you, lady? Well, what’s to say it wasn’t you? It doesn’t have to be a man.’ He nods his head in a knowing way. He smells of stale marijuana. ‘Yeah, bloody clever theory that.’

  The nurse says quietly, ‘This woman was beside me all the way on the march. She couldn’t have talked to the police.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Belinda touches the woman’s hand, trying to express solidarity. ‘Do you need a doctor?’ she asks. The nurse shakes her head. She knows what she’s doing; it’s not serious.

  It’s past midnight. The cells are still full; people aren’t being processed. It’s as if they’ve been forgotten. Or, Belinda wonders, are they being taught a lesson? What will they be charged with? Disorderly behaviour, perhaps. But it was a peaceful protest, civil disobedience in the spirit of Gandhi — though, let’s face it, they’d said some things to the cops that Gandhi wouldn’t have said.