All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  THE HOUSE IN BRIGHTON STREET had stood empty for two years when Grant and his sister Belinda Anderson came to clear it out and make ready for sale. He had rung and asked her to come down from Auckland to help him. Their father, who had spent the last part of his life in a secure dementia ward, had died five years earlier, although, as Grant remarked, he might as well have been dead for the last ten.

  ‘Make that forever as far as I’m concerned,’ Belinda said. Although she was a small woman, she had a way of standing that made her seem taller, her dark hair showing its first threads of grey. She cut an elegant figure, quite different from the last times he had seen her, wearing tight jeans over firm buttocks, and a colourful tunic picked up in a market in Paris. That city, he learned, was her destination of choice when she and her husband Seth travelled, although she managed trips on her own when her work took her there. When she travelled alone, she told him, she felt like someone who’d made it out of a falling-down house on the far edge of the world, overlooking a narrow but often stormy sea. Or, words to that effect.

  Although there had been an exchange of phone calls, Grant had only met with his sister once since they’d encountered each other in the cell. He remembered that distant night, the way he’d walked home and turned the shower on full, sluicing himself down as he did when he was a boy, after a shift on the rubbish trucks, expunging the smell of filth. Afterwards, shocked, he realised there was something missing. He opened his hands and they were empty: the number Belinda had written on the palm of his hand had disappeared. It felt like an omen. For a long time, Grant couldn’t bring himself to look her up in the phone book. She’d have decided he didn’t want to be in touch, or, perhaps, that she really wouldn’t want to see him again, like their father had said; that their chance meeting had been just that.

  When he did find the number and dial it, she was away for her work, Seth said. His voice was cool. The husband, as Grant thought of him, someone he knew nothing about and couldn’t visualise. In the end, she tracked him down. He was working for a law firm on The Terrace, not far from where he lived, and they met at a café. He sensed that her mind was on other things; there was something edgy and distracted about her, as she dissected a club sandwich with her fingers without eating, and let her coffee grow cold. There were things he’d wanted to talk about, but the moment didn’t seem right for intimate conversation. After they’d asked each other about Janice, and neither had any answers, Belinda had announced abruptly that she and Seth were moving north to Auckland. It had been a sudden decision on Seth’s part, but she was sure it would be good for her career. She said this without conviction, staring out into the street as if watching for someone. So the meeting was really about hello and goodbye, and how she must fly.

  He’d had hopes for that meeting, but it seemed he was as much on his own as ever. The next time he called her was to tell her Jock had died. ‘Oh goodness,’ she had said, after a pause, ‘I should come down, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘It’s done and dusted,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I had him cremated this morning.’ He didn’t tell her that he’d had practice at disposing of people without fuss. ‘It seemed the best thing,’ he added, to soften what he’d just said.

  ‘Are you okay? I mean, are you feeling awful? I’ll come if you want.’

  He hesitated again. ‘The house is rented out, so there’s nothing to be done really.’ He heard her sigh of relief. ‘Well then, thank goodness, and thank you, Grant. I’m off to New Caledonia tomorrow. I’d have put it off if you needed me.’ Her voice was breezy. Whatever had troubled her when he last saw her must be in the past. In the background, one of her children called out that he was waiting for a lift into town.

  He’d left it at that. His busy, bright sister with her family and successes.

  The house had been rented out since then, until the last lot of people left when it had been too run-down for anyone to want it. A few pieces of furniture remained from their childhood, a couch with broken springs and rotted fabric covered with dog hairs, a gate-legged table where Belinda could still see her mother sitting with a book propped up in front of her while she peeled the potatoes. She often missed the eyes in the potatoes.

  Grant’s eyes followed hers. As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘I visit her grave now and then. I was up at the cemetery the other day.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ Belinda said. ‘To be honest, I don’t know if I could find it. Well, the fact is, I haven’t been back since she died. And now that we’re in Auckland …’ Her voice trailed away. She shrugged. ‘I’ve been busy, Grant, my work and three kids. I still remember her, though. I thought about her so much at the time it’s probably why I got sent away. I set out to make Charm’s life hell, you know that. Was she as bad as I thought or was I just in a funk because we didn’t have our real mother to tell us what to do?’

  ‘She was bad,’ Grant said. ‘But partly she was just thick, and we weren’t. We scared the tripe out of her.’

  ‘Put you off marriage, did it, Grant?’

  ‘I got married.’

  ‘You did? You dark horse. Are you still?’

  ‘It lasted a year. Her name was Lizzie. I wasn’t much of a husband.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Does it matter? I wasn’t the man she thought I was.’

  ‘Meaning?’ A tense silence fell between them until Grant looked away. ‘Okay, I’m sorry I asked. Where are you working?’

  ‘At Parliament.’ He’d brought a thermos of coffee and handed her a plastic cup. ‘I hope you don’t mind it black.’

  ‘That’s how I take it.’ She gestured to the door where sun gleamed on the step. The morning was calm and the navy blue sea lay before them, the small huddled island of Tapu te Ranga standing in the bay, and beyond, on this glass-sharp morning, the snow-tipped mountain peaks of the South Island appeared on the horizon. Only a flock of gulls screeching with excitement as they swooped on a school of fish broke the silent day. Belinda sank down on the step, wiping perspiration off her forehead.

  ‘So you’re not practising law any more?’

  Grant saw she wasn’t going to leave it alone, the subject of his life. Her skills in asking questions were as good as his.

  ‘I never did have a taste for courtrooms.’

  ‘You were doing conveyancing work the last time I saw you. That’s hardly Twelve Angry Men.’

  ‘I had the chance to work for the Labour government. It was exciting at first. Now that they’re out, I’ve finished up advising a broken-down politician from up north. Kendall, he was lucky he had a safe seat in the landslide.’

  ‘Kit Kendall? He’s to the right of Genghis Khan.’

  ‘In a left-wing party. Don’t start, I know.’

  ‘I know his ex-wife Rose, she’s got a little film company.’

  ‘So I heard. She makes dramas, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She tries, but the money’s so hard to come by in drama.’

  ‘Not your field?’

  ‘I’d love to.’ For a moment Belinda’s voice was wistful. ‘But, you know, I’m good at what I do. You can get finance for documentaries. My stuff actually gets made and goes to air. Rose Kendall might make it, she’s smart and persistent, smarter than he ever was. He went off with an air hostess. She’s probably smarter than him, too.’

  ‘Not any more, she didn’t have enough money for his tastes. He’s off with another one now, or make that two or three. He does a great line with the ladies, I’ll give him that. You should see his florists’ bills.’

  ‘And I suppose I’m paying for that with my taxes. Lordy, I do miss the Wellington gossip. But honestly, Grant, he turned into a lackey for neo-liberalism. Surely you don’t like working for him?’

  ‘Not really. I’m probably just addicted to politics. Lately I find myself asking, what’s the point?’

  ‘Seth’s joined the Green Party. He’s an environmentalist.’

  ‘Good for him. The Greens
have got a future, I reckon.’

  ‘So, Grant, what about the people who’re getting kicked out of state houses because they can’t pay market rents? Kids are going hungry. What’re you doing for them?’

  ‘I don’t make a blind bit of difference, Belinda. It’s the free market. Of course I know what’s happening, I see the letters that come across Kit’s desk. Sometimes his constituents turn up at Parliament with their kids. They haven’t eaten for days. I have to arrange for them to see him. You can’t just walk up to Parliament and knock on the door any more. Not since the tour.’

  ‘What does Kendall do?’

  ‘He puts his head in his hands and says he’s sorry it’s so tough out there.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Take them over to the railway station, buy them a feed of pies and chips and put them on a bus back up north, or wherever they’ve come from.’

  ‘Awful. Do you have to keep working for him? You’ve got all those quals.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard about the desks that have been cleared in Wellington lately? If you’re a public servant, you go to work in the morning and somewhere round lunchtime someone comes around with a slip of paper that says you’ve lost your job, and gives you a green plastic rubbish sack. The rubbish sack isn’t to be sick in, it’s for your belongings. You’ve got twenty minutes to clear your desk and be out of the building. If you don’t, you’ll be trespassing. I know people it’s happened to, and it’s like their lives are over. This is the real world, Belinda.’ His voice was bitter. ‘I had hopes when I went to work for the Labour government. As it was then. I watched it fall apart. I worked for a good bloke but he lost his seat like most of the left when National came back. Kendall’s been there for years, he doesn’t deserve his seat.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Peter got his degree paid for, but Dylan’s got to take out a student loan. Or rather we pay, because it’s not fair that one didn’t have to pay and the other does. And we’ve still got Simone to come yet. I should be working on something like this, a doco about what poverty’s doing to the country. But I buy into making money like everyone who can.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any of your films.’

  ‘Probably not. This and that. Mostly whatever pays the bills. I did take a doco our company made about coastal ecosystems to Europe last year. Seth helped me with that. That was pretty cool — very local, very ethnic. I love mangroves, those smoky grey plants with their feet in the water and their heads in the sky. They’re art forms.’

  Grant found himself chuckling.

  ‘So what’s funny? It was a real coup getting into Cinéma du Réel. Before that I just went to see how other people did that sort of stuff.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d spend all day at the movies watching those kinds of things. But good on you.’

  ‘So what would you watch? Is that what you do, Grant, spend all day at the movies?’

  ‘We should get this junk in the skip before we start on the basement,’ Grant said, standing and collecting up their cups.

  ‘It scares me, what we might find down there.’

  ‘Just ordinary old junk, I guess. You didn’t manage to track down Janice, I take it?’ Grant thought of her as the wayward one, although all his sisters had skipped off into the distance, one way or another. There was Jessie, the eldest, the famous foreign correspondent in London who reported from exotic danger zones and never communicated with any of them. But that seemed to be what this family was like. He still couldn’t think about Jan, though, without anguish, a sense of his own failure. She wasn’t like the rest of them, just clever enough to get out to save herself. He was glad that the others had left, that they’d got out sooner. And here was Belinda, the middle one who had tried to protect them when they were kids, and had got banished. He felt a rush of warmth and unexpected camaraderie with her, as they worked together.

  ‘Tried everything,’ Belinda was saying, still talking about Janice. ‘I even went to the Sallies. I’m sure she’s alive — somebody would have told us if she wasn’t. It’s not as if either of us are hard to find. You’ve checked all the electoral rolls?’

  ‘Of course. Perhaps Jan’s not the voting type. I reckon we should do the basement first, get it over and done with.’ He wiped his hands on his jeans, noting the grime with distaste. He saw the look on Belinda’s face. ‘She’s alive, Belinda, I know for sure.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I went to the police. They told me she was not deceased, that was the term they used, but they couldn’t tell me where she was. Classified information.’

  ‘Some sort of protection order?’

  ‘I think so.’ He didn’t explain to her that he was used to doing searches for missing people, that he had spent many years in the pursuit of one particular woman, and it had become second nature.

  The basement door swung on a rusty hinge. They had to crouch in order to enter the rancid space beneath the house. There were cartons of old newspapers, tins of dried-up paint, some rusted gardening tools, a lawnmower with the frame and some threads of a canvas catcher attached to it. They worked methodically, carrying the stuff to the door and stacking it outside so that it could all be taken to the skip at once. At the back of the basement, Belinda came across some cartons. One was filled with clothes falling apart with mould. She pulled out a disintegrating skirt. ‘That was our mother’s,’ she said. ‘I remember it, those taffeta roses. She thought it was romantic. Charm must have missed these.’

  ‘Past saving.’

  ‘I’m not that sentimental. Ugh.’ She dropped it back in the box, then picked it up again, looking at something beneath. ‘Strange.’ She was picking up a damp shoebox that fell apart in her hands. Some objects fell out, a button, a man’s pipe. ‘I don’t remember our father smoking a pipe.’

  ‘It might have been her father’s.’

  ‘The wharfie we never met?’

  ‘They lived in Kilbirnie, not far from us. Our grandparents.’

  ‘All that time? That’s so sad, Grant. I just never thought.’

  Grant took the pipe from her and turned it over. ‘Or perhaps it was her first husband’s. Jessie’s father.’

  ‘Maybe. But this leather button, it’s been in a fire. It’s weird. I’ve got another one just like it in my button tin, not as burnt. I mean, it was Mum’s special button.’ She laughed uncertainly. ‘It sounds silly. But I can see it now, me with the rows of buttons spread out on the floor. I remember Mum picking it up once. “Don’t lose this one.” That’s what she said.’

  ‘Junk now, I guess.’ He held out a bag for her to throw them in.

  ‘I might keep them,’ Belinda said. ‘Perhaps they mean something.’ She hesitated over the pipe, then stuffed it into the pocket of her tunic, along with the button. She grimaced at the sight of her filthy clothes.

  Grant shrugged. ‘Our mother’s secret life.’

  They’d come to the last cartons. Belinda pulled the lid off another. ‘Photographs.’ Most of the pictures had glued together with the damp but in the middle of the bundle were some that had been preserved. She carried them into the light.

  ‘Our dad took up nature photography. It got him out of the house and away from Charm.’

  ‘They’re not bad, some of these. Nice leaves and plants. A good eye for light.’

  ‘They’re all yours.’

  Belinda was beginning to gather them up and say that no, thanks, interesting as they were she really didn’t want any of these, when she stopped. Grant could see her face pale, her hand go to the edge of the door to steady herself. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘No.’

  Grant stepped over, curious. Even as he glanced down he tried to cover what was revealed, repulsed, his hand slamming down outspread. But Belinda had seen it. A picture of his sister Janice, as a teenager. She was naked, legs slightly parted, her face dour, eyes turned away from the camera.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, his voice sharp.

  ‘Did you know?’ she said. ‘Grant, did you?’


  ‘Some bad things happened in this house.’

  ‘You didn’t do anything?’

  ‘I swear to God I haven’t seen these pictures. I didn’t know they existed.’

  ‘But something was going on. You knew that, I can tell.’

  ‘I was a teenager. He was a bully, a demented old bully. It started before I left home.’ He touched his head. ‘Besides, he had a wife. How could I be sure? It didn’t go on, as you put it, while I was in the house.’

  ‘That could have been me,’ Belinda said, as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why not? Was I being spared, getting sent away from home?’

  Grant gave a weary sigh. ‘He wouldn’t have fancied you. You’re too much like our mother.’

  ‘That is so disgusting.’ Belinda was storming around, grabbing rubbish to take to the gate, her shoulders beginning to shake.

  ‘All families are tragedies, aren’t they?’ Grant said.

  ‘How very Tolstoy.’

  ‘No, that’s not the way the book begins.’

  ‘I fucking know how Anna Karenina begins, Grant. I’ve got a degree in literature. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  He hoped she would calm down, speak to him again, pick up where they had been during the morning, but her face remained set and closed. They carried the last pieces of furniture along the path in silence. She went back to the house to pick up her handbag and car keys.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll have the lawyers get in touch when it’s sold. I don’t expect we’ll get much for it.’

  Her eyes travelled around the house, the bareness, the peeling wallpaper, the sordid secret walls. He saw her blink away tears, and for a moment he thought she would relent. This wasn’t the way the day was supposed to end.

  ‘Do what you can. We’ll be well shot of it.’

  He watched her walk back down the path and climb into her car, draw her seatbelt into position, and switch on the engine, without looking back.

  As she pulled away, he shouted, ‘You got lucky. You just don’t know.’ He knew she couldn’t hear him.