All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  Phil needs to go to the toilet.

  ‘They’re not going to let you go to the little boys’ room,’ Matiu says.

  The nurse tells him just to lean forward and take deep breaths and the need might pass.

  ‘Our grandfather was a striker in ’51. The waterfront lockout. That’s thirty years ago. Things go in cycles, I guess,’ Grant says to Belinda.

  ‘Our grandfather? Our mother’s father? How did you know that? Did Dad tell you?’ She guesses as soon as she’s spoken that this is unlikely. Their father never spoke of their mother, as if she had never existed, as if they had come into the world like flotsam from the sea beneath the house where they grew up, washed up on the rocks. It wasn’t until she got married that she’d even found her mother’s maiden name on her birth certificate.

  ‘No, of course not. Our old man didn’t like the workers. He only pretended he did when he felt hard done by. I found our grandfather’s name when I was doing pols. I had an essay to write on the lockout and I was researching the men on the Wellington waterfront. I guess it’s in our blood, eh sis?’

  ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Matiu’s head bobs up from the doze he’d fallen into. ‘Anyway, you never did give me an answer. Was it you that grassed?’

  ‘No,’ says Grant, ‘it was not.’

  And Belinda believes him. She’s looking straight at him and his face is clean of guile. Yet still she senses the frisson of fear in the cell that she’d felt before, and she finds herself glancing at the faces all around her. Nobody has moved a muscle. Phil has pissed himself. Daniel is blinking rapidly, as though he wants to wipe something out of his eyes but doesn’t dare. And she knows. With a sense of weary, disgusted calm she knows who it is and wonders why on earth he would do it and if he is that broke that he’d take money, if that was what they were offering. Surely, it can’t be, that Daniel has gone over to the other side, that he’s a cop. She’s afraid for Daniel because she thinks Matiu knows, too.

  The door is being opened. They are being released. They are more trouble than they are worth.

  ‘Man,’ yells Matiu, when they’re in the night air, ‘I ought to be caged up with nice guys like you more often. They don’t let me off that easy as a rule.’ The last they hear of him, he is still singing ‘I Walk the Line’, the words echoing in the streets.

  Nick hums it as he walks alongside her. Everyone has dispersed, said goodnight or good morning or whatever the hell it is, calling, ‘See you next Saturday.’

  Carla and Daniel have left hurriedly. Does Carla know? Belinda thinks not. Daniel wouldn’t want her to. She decides not to tell Nick. There was a slight kerfuffle when a taxi came to pick up the nurse and the driver said if she was one of those scum-bag protestors he wasn’t having her in his cab, but there was another cab close behind and they piled her into that.

  When Belinda turns around to check, Grant is leaving. ‘Grant, wait,’ she says.

  He hesitates and walks back to her. Under the street light, his face is pale and drawn. He swallows and says, ‘Our father told us you didn’t want to see us again. When you got married.’

  ‘But that’s what he told my mother-in-law. That you didn’t want to see me. He told her I’d brought shame on the family.’ She rummages in her pocket for a ballpoint. ‘We should keep in touch. Here, give me your hand.’ She holds his fingers steady as she scribbles her phone number on his palm. ‘Ring me,’ she says. Her head is bursting with questions.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  Nick is waiting in the shadows. She drops a clumsy kiss on her brother’s cheek, and watches him as he disappears into the night.

  ‘It’s time we were all home,’ Nick says.

  They’re all walking some dark path, Belinda thinks. The marches have brought out the best and the worst in them all. ‘Are we really marching because black people in South Africa are oppressed by white people?’ she asks Nick. ‘Or are we doing it for ourselves because we have stuff and things and good lives and we feel bad about it?’

  ‘Is there any real answer to that? Why do I want to stop games of footy when I love them? I tell myself it’s just a game, and then it seems like we’re all in one big game, like kids. We’re in this rage but some of it’s fun, if we’re honest.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Belinda. ‘Not fun. I didn’t mean it that way. I believe in this. I mean, Nick, I believe.’

  ‘But in what? You just said you didn’t know.’

  ‘That things are wrong. The government. Everything. That black people aren’t allowed to play the game with whites. Yeah, I do know what it’s about. We’re all so fucked in the head, that’s all.’

  Nick puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her towards him. They stand in the light of a street lamp. ‘Remember?’ he says. ‘That night?’

  Seth has never known about that night on the beach, and Belinda is sure that Esme doesn’t either. It’s not something you would tell your wife when you were in the midst of being reconciled with her. It’s not even that important in the scale of things.

  ‘Why can’t we, Berlinney?’ he says. ‘Just once?’

  ‘Because we can’t.’

  Another two days and it will officially be spring, but already the fragrance of new growth is around them in the dark, a magnolia blooming with its ghostly white cups in the shadows. They walk past the hospital, Nick still holding onto her, taking her hand as if they really were lovers, not just two people talking about it. Near the zoo a lion roars. This is what she and Nick do — they get lost at night and want each other and talk about it, but that’s all. One day it may happen, but she can’t imagine that far ahead.

  8

  In desert country

  1982

  THE HAIRDRESSING SALON that Nonie Shaw operates at the back of her house is closing for the day. Nonie has gone home to make dinner for her children because one of them has school choir practice and needs to get away early. She has left Janice in charge to sweep up and clean the basins.

  The town of Turangi huddles on the banks of the Tongariro River. The water sweeps down from the mountains, on towards the great lake of Taupo, a shining sheet of water stretching into the far distance, where rich people come to fish and play. Yet, although the town has been designed with a central hub of shops and curving streets with nice footpaths, it’s still what it is, a place where hard-up people live in small ordinary houses that all look much the same. The cul-de-sacs, designed by town planners, fill with mud and slush in the winter and dust in the summer, because they’re still to be completed. On the fringe of this newly arrived community, tracks curve through the bush to settlements nobody really sees — the camps, as they’re known, where the Italian people live. It is the Italians who are rich although they wear their wealth quietly, sending the money back home. They’ve come to build tunnels that snake kilometre after kilometre under the earth, in the hydro-electricity schemes.

  Janice knows the Italians well. Because of the fishing families she grew up with in Wellington, she knew without being told to say Ciao when the women came in and Grazie when they left and How are things going? in Italian, which they liked, because other people wanted them to say everything in English. Nonie says she brings business to the place, and now Janice has mastered some new phrases like Come vorrebbe il taglio? How do you like your hair cut?

  What Nonie doesn’t know is that Janice is seeing one of the Italian men. Nobody except her and Tommaso, who is also known as Tommy to the locals, know about this, and it has to stay a secret because she fears for her life if it gets out. Well, perhaps her friend Paola guesses, but if she does, she doesn’t say anything. It’s better not to know some things. Paola is Janice’s saviour and she doesn’t want to cause her trouble.

  Janice isn’t a hairdresser herself, although Nonie lets her put in rollers and do brush-throughs when the client comes out from under the drier, some blow-waving. She washes people’s hair, too; they like the way her fingers linger on their scalp, the pressure she exerts at certain points on their
head. They sigh and murmur things like This is bliss, their whole bodies relaxing as she releases them for a short while from their everyday lives. Once or twice she’s done trims for the kiddies and Nonie says, Well, you don’t really have to have a certificate to put on the wall, so long as the customer is happy, and she could probably teach her to do a few basic cuts. The way the business is growing she could do with the help.

  Janice doesn’t mind sweeping up other people’s hair. She likes the mixed fur of blonde and black, brown and grey that mats the linoleum. There’s something silky and still alive about it, people shedding themselves, transformed in front of the mirrors from frowziness to instant glamour, sleek or curled. People still want Afros and big fat perms. Janice’s hair is curly anyway: she’s been trying to straighten it for years without success. She knows girls who try to iron their hair to keep it flat, and now they have permission to be pretend radical, just like the sixties with their frizzy hairstyles, although mostly it’s girls home from holidays in the city who are having them. There are still plenty of short bobs and older women who want finger waves. Nonie has dyed Janice’s hair dark auburn, and changed its shape so it ripples in corrugated fashion almost to her shoulders, falling forward to hide the blemish on her face.

  She’s anxious to be away now, because it’s nearly time for her to pick up her five-year-old daughter Heaven from the minder. Janice called her Heaven because when she first arrived in desert country, it seemed like heaven after a childhood she wanted to put far away, with a man who, it seemed, would be good to her. She loves the country in the centre of the North Island where there is tussock and few trees, just snow-covered mountains, crystal bright, and roadsides crowded with wild flowers.

  For some time, after she left Wellington behind, she continued to believe in this heaven of hers. It wasn’t the first black eye that changed her mind, nor even the tenth, or both of them at once, it was the time her nose slid around her face, the knowing that she would never look quite the same again when it was mended. But still, in Heaven, she can hold onto the memory of the sweet good times she and Darrell had before it all went wrong.

  When Heaven was born she thought it might make him happy.

  ‘You useless cunt,’ he’d said at the hospital. ‘Why couldn’t you give me a son?’

  She knew from that day on that her life had a purpose, a mission to keep Heaven safe. In the evenings she would croon to her child ‘Heaven is in my arms tonight’. It had taken Paola to convince her that the only way to protect her was to leave.

  There’s an urgent tapping on the glass door, covered by the blind she has pulled down. Some people can’t read a sign that says CLOSED. She smiles wryly. She can’t read, or not very well. Janice stands quite still so that the person knocking will think there’s nobody there, but they must have glimpsed a movement, because the knocking gets louder.

  ‘Janice, open up,’ says an urgent voice. Janice recognises it as Paola’s, and calls out, ‘Coming — hold on a sec,’ as she hurriedly unlocks the door.

  Paola throws herself into the salon and bangs the door shut, glancing behind her, fearful someone might be following. She carries a big brown paper bag, as if she’s been shopping.

  PAOLA IS THE ITALIAN WOMAN who saved Janice’s life. It’s three years now since she walked into the salon and saw Janice so battered her face was all but unrecognisable. Nonie had told her to go home, but going home would have meant going back for another hiding.

  Paola had said, you have to come back with me. I take you home. Get your kid and leave. Now.

  Janice remembers the ride in the Land Rover, bumping over potholes, down a dirt road called Access 13, through the scrubby trees that skirted the desert, the sign at the gate, deep in the fast of the bush: Autisti Rallentare Attenzione Bambini Che Giocano — Drive Slowly, Children Playing. And the next thing she was in Paola’s kitchen of the tiny house she shared with her husband, Lorenzo, a red gingham cloth on the table and the gamey delicious smell of food cooking in the oven.

  ‘You like spezzatino? What you call it, casserole? Wild pork, lots of herbs. See, I grow rosemary and thyme and sage. Is good. Tomorrow we eat real spaghetti, the company brings us in the things we need to live like Italians, olives, proper tomatoes in tins. We live good here in the bush. I get you a skirt. Women not allowed to wear trousers in the camp.’ She gave Janice something to drink, a coffee made with sugar laced half-and-half with brandy. ‘Give you strength.’

  When Lorenzo returned he wasn’t pleased to have a guest, a New Zealand woman who looked like trouble, but as Paola pointed out, why not? He was at work day and night, and there was nobody else to share the house with her. She got lonely, remember? They might have the food and the wine and yes, Lorenzo, you have drunk more than your share of the red wine today, but the two of them, they do not have much company. Janice felt the air heavy with decision. She would learn that men made the rules at the camp. Paola pouted and wound a hand round his neck.

  ‘Per favore,’ Janice had said.

  Lorenzo appeared to soften a little, but he talked too quickly for her to follow what he said next, still not convinced. She thought it was about bringing a child there. Paola’s face had clouded. In the end Lorenzo had relented. Janice could stay for a while, but not for too long. He knew Darrell, who worked on the diggers in the town; he didn’t want fights from him.

  Paola explained later to Janice that Lorenzo lived with a sadness she could not change. ‘He wants a bambino but I don’t make babies, I cannot.’ They had married in Northern Italy some years before, and he had brought her to the camp as a young bride. ‘He think the babies will come straight away, but so far nothing, you understand?’ Paola wonders if it is him that cannot have babies, but this is not a thing you can discuss with a man. He had taken to drinking far too much of the Valpolicella that the company provides. Two litres at the end of every shift. Paola had shivered, wrapping her arms around her body. As if that wasn’t enough, he drank still more when he got home.

  Janice considered Paola beautiful — eyebrows like the wings of a little bird, sweeping black hair that fell to her waist when she loosened it, full breasts that Janice sometimes glimpsed when she ran from her bedroom to the shower, dark nipples tilted upwards, a tiny waist. Her visits to the hairdresser were just to get her ends trimmed, to have her hair washed by Janice, and to practise her English, which was better than that of most of the women at the camp. She had gone to a good school, she told Janice. Some women in the camp weren’t so friendly with her because they were from rural villages and she wasn’t. And because she couldn’t have children. They’d found something to criticise. She knew the men did, too.

  It was in the camp that Janice met Tommaso, a single man, his body packed with sinew, covered with hair like a pelt when he took off his clothes, eyes like the bottom of a dark well. They shared cigarettes now and then in the big camp kitchen where the single men ate. He touched Heaven’s head gently. The Italians liked children. Heaven was a cute kid, the women said, small for her age but strong, with hair that would be curly like Janice’s own, and freckles on her pale pointed face. She was free to roam within the confines of the camp, although Janice was warned not to let her go too far away. There was a prison for dangerous criminals next door. Who knew when one of them might escape? That was their fear. They looked out for one another.

  ‘You want to watch it with Tommaso,’ Paola said anxiously, one evening when Janice had loitered too long over at the kitchen.

  Janice said that she’d just been collecting Heaven, who ran after Tommaso, and he seemed like a nice guy.

  ‘Tommaso would steal your eyeballs if he thought he could take your eyelashes,’ Paola said.

  ‘I don’t get that,’ said Janice. ‘I’ve got nothing to steal.’

  ‘You have a heart,’ her friend replied. ‘You should be careful.’

  Nothing happened with Tommy while she was at the camp, but she knew he liked her. She wasn’t a woman a man could safely go with.


  Since then Janice’s face has healed, she’s returned to the town, though she would have liked to have stayed. Darrell has gone away, sending a message that he will kill her if he gets his hands on her again, but as the police were onto him, she’d got lucky for now. He hated her, the bitch, but she belonged to him so she better watch out.

  Because Janice has nowhere else to go she stays in the company house where she and Darrell have lived since soon after Heaven was born. Before that they lived in cabins in camping grounds and for a year they rented an empty caravan when the owners got too old for the life. She’s come to believe that she’s safe, that because she and Heaven haven’t heard from Darrell since the day she first went to the Italian camp, that he’s gone for good.

  Tommaso comes to the house some nights when Heaven is asleep. Janice dreams that he will marry her, but knows it won’t happen. Already there’s trouble for some of the wives the men have taken back to Italy. The families don’t understand why they should take women from another country. It’s worse for the Maori women who marry the Italians. Word travels when one of them comes back to New Zealand, unwanted in Italy. She comes home to her family, who live near the lake. Janice is white, but she has a child, and she isn’t a widow. It wouldn’t do. Some of the men are talking about staying behind in New Zealand when their contracts end, but Tommaso has a mother and father waiting for him to return. He doesn’t say so, but she knows he won’t let them down. He is their son, their first born.

  ‘WHAT IS IT, PAOLA?’ JANICE ASKS, when she lets her friend into the salon.

  ‘There is nobody else to trust. You will help me.’

  ‘With what? Has Lorenzo given you a hiding?’ She thinks this is unlikely because Lorenzo is a man who sulks rather than beats, has a glowering hostility that has slid into contempt for Paola.