All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  The day that he and Belinda found the picture of their young sister in the basement of the home where they had all once lived, he saw Lizzie’s face again, lost like Janice. Missing in some terrible private war.

  SO HERE IT WAS, 1992. The effects of Ruth Richardson’s Mother of all Budgets were described as Ruthanasia — killing people slowly. Designer-clad hosts and their guests talked about it at dinner parties in the capital city’s fringe suburbs. They had rural holiday homes and, yes, they could see that some of their neighbours in the countryside weren’t doing so well. But that was the way it was. You did what you could. You made policy. Grant found himself sitting down at the tables of Kit Kendall’s wealthier patrons. They believed that there would be a return to the left, that what was happening was an aberration. He thought they were dreaming, that there were more years of pain to come, but he sat silent. His views didn’t fit well with the drift of the conversation among the fluted champagne glasses, the white linen and silver, the lights of their chandeliers.

  Fifteen years had passed since Grant last saw Lizzie. Along the way, he’d got caught up in the anti-apartheid movement, marched against the Springbok tour, overseen from a distance the slow demise of his father, joined a chess club, worked out at a gymnasium five days a week and travelled once a year because he had money now, and nothing else to spend it on, hanging out in Florence, which he preferred to Rome, the Louvre in Paris, island-hopping through the Aegean Sea, or wandering through the British Museum. These distractions had carried him through the years. He had, too, begun his evening walks through the cemetery.

  Kit Kendall, whom Grant worked for in Parliament, knew that Lizzie was missing. A woman from the SIS, the security agency, came to see Kit, to do a check on his staff member whose wife had been listed as a missing person by her parents.

  ‘Why didn’t you report her missing?’ Kendall asked Grant.

  ‘She wasn’t missing, she left me,’ he said, stubbornly.

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  ‘There was a note.’ He had to produce the shameful message, the poem that proved nothing. During the interrogation he broke down in tears. They appeared to believe him. He thought.

  THERE WAS A WOMAN Grant met often at the cemetery, walking her spaniel. She allowed it to cock its leg and pee against headstones. Grant had found dog turds where she walked. He wanted to remonstrate with her. Maybe she hadn’t owned a dog for long, didn’t know the etiquette of dog walking or, indeed, was not very interested in it. It could be that she was minding it for someone. Every time he saw her, she was wearing the same light-coloured shower coat with a belt, a tweed skirt and sensible walking shoes. After several of these encounters, when she barely returned his greeting, he tried to avoid her, but in a few minutes she would reappear.

  These hide-and-seek meetings continued for some weeks, until it dawned on him that he was being followed. He supposed she was looking for some sign that Lizzie might be buried in the cemetery. But wouldn’t the records show that she was not? He had pored over burial records often enough. Perhaps she thought his victim might be buried under another name, that sooner or later some clue would give him away. People didn’t just vanish, as he had thought a thousand times.

  Or did they? For a long time Grant had been drawn to the notion of disappearance. If Lizzie could do this, perhaps he could, too. He might find her out there in space. Like the movies, the hero came to the rescue, snatching the lost woman from distress. Somewhere out there Lizzie might be in the badlands. He could no longer wait for her to come to him.

  After Belinda drove away from the Brighton Street house, he saw that nothing in his life had changed, and nothing would if he continued to live in his skin as the person he was. She’d confirmed his suspicion that his existence was of no consequence. He’d nurtured a small hope that their reunion would open some possibility of family life. His image of himself as the kindly uncle seemed belated and silly. It had vanished, along with everyone he’d ever cared for. He was on his own.

  One weekend, not long after this, he drove north towards the town where Kit Kendall had his electorate office, near the centre of the North Island. He’d been invited to join Kit and Amber, his latest wife, for golf and some fishing if the weather held. ‘Come for a long weekend,’ Kit had said. ‘We can brew up a few ideas to hit this damn government.’ When Grant said ‘Well, why not?’, Kit had offered a high‑five.

  ‘We’ll get those bastards,’ Kit said, like an ebullient school boy.

  As Grant drove north, he remembered that earlier on his sister Janice had lived in the area. The school she attended in Wellington tracked her, after she ran away with her boyfriend. Not that she could be persuaded, or forced, to return. She’d reached both the age when she could leave school and the age of consent. But at least, for a time, they’d known where she was. He wondered what she’d made of the bare bones of the countryside, the dark red heart of the Desert Road. He hoped she’d been happy here, although he suspected not.

  Glancing at his watch, he realised that he was hours too early, so, on an impulse, he turned off, following empty roads. He slowed the car when he came across a woman walking beside a long stretch of the highway. She carried a child on her back and looked exhausted. He pulled over.

  ‘Do you want a lift somewhere?’ he said.

  The woman was perhaps thirty or so, dressed in jeans and a windbreaker. From the way she hunched over, bracing herself, he could see that her thin clothes didn’t protect her from the chill wind that blew off the mountains. She viewed him with suspicion.

  ‘I don’t take lifts from strangers,’ she said. The child on her back was no more than a year by the look of him, but a heavy boy.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

  The woman eyed him again and came to a sudden decision, abandoning caution.

  As she settled herself in the passenger seat of the Peugeot, sliding the boy onto her lap, she said, ‘I hitchhiked to town. It was benefit day yesterday. You know they’ve closed the post office, so I couldn’t draw any money. I hitched to town this morning but then I had to wait because the queue was so long, and I missed the bus home.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have taken the bus this morning?’ Grant asked.

  ‘I didn’t have any money,’ she said patiently, as if this were obvious. She had a pleasant fair face, chapped a little by the cold, no make-up. The child had fallen straight to sleep. ‘I had to collect the benefit before I had the fare.’

  He drove on, until he came to a small town. Or the remnants of one. He saw the boarded-up post office building. He knew what happened next, after the closures. One shop after another shut its doors: first the little dress shop that carried hosiery and underwear as a sideline, the hardware store, the bookshop, then one by one the food shops, the greengrocer’s first, then the butcher’s, and so on, until there was just a poky dairy with a few tins sitting on sparsely stocked shelves. The windows of shops like this, and of the liquor stores that survived, were laced with wire barriers that made them look caged.

  The woman pointed to a sign on the window of what appeared to have been a café. Happy Inn. ‘That was mine once,’ she said.

  He wanted to offer her money, but he understood that she would have refused.

  ‘Can you tell me the way to the cemetery?’ he asked. ‘If there is one.’

  ‘Oh yes, the dead don’t leave us,’ she said, as she got out of the car, her laughter wry.

  But she was wrong. A small headstone stood in the second row of ragged paspalum. The birth date of the child who had died coincided almost with his own. A boy, who had lived for just one week, in 1954. Alongside him, his parents lay buried. Joseph Higgs. Joe, the kid would have been called Joe.

  He was taking Joe with him. Soon Joe wouldn’t have a car, or an apartment on The Terrace or a membership to a gold card club, the way Grant Pawson did. But he would carry a new copy of his birth certificate.

  Joe would be the risen man.

>   Who could tell, but that Joe might meet Lizzie. Like in the movies.

  10

  Running in the dark

  2000

  THE HOKIANGA, THAT WAS WHERE Janice had had the best of times, the times she felt safe. It was a place that people called remote, although, as she would tell the women in the prison, it was only a four- or five-hour drive north of Auckland where a couple of million people lived. When they challenged her to describe it she found herself at a loss for words. She couldn’t explain the light in the sky, the gold of the rippling sand dunes, ancient trees like gods, the sense of mystery and the wild unknown. She understood it, but she didn’t have the language. ‘I’ll bet none of youse have ever taken the trouble to go up there’ was what she said, brushing it off. ‘You could get up there between breakfast and lunchtime. A late lunch. You ought to go.’ And then she and the women would laugh because at that point in their lives they weren’t going anywhere.

  Those times up there in the Hokianga were what she liked to remember when she lay awake in the dark of her prison cell. Wiremu came from there, though she’d met him in Auckland, where he’d gone looking for work. At that time she was in hiding, but in the street where she lived nobody took much notice of you if you kept your head down. The apartment she and Heaven occupied was on the ground floor of a housing block owned by the state. It was a dirty hole when she moved in, with torn curtains and cockroaches in the bath. She assumed they’d crawled up through the plug hole. It took her two days of scrubbing and mending to make it fit for her daughter, but when it was done it didn’t look half bad. It was on the damp side of the complex, and that was what she didn’t like, that the sun rarely entered the rooms. The neighbours were all right. The social worker had told her she needed to take people as they came, there were Maori people next door on one side and Asians on the other, and did she have any objection to that, because if she did, she’d better get used to it.

  ‘I reckon I’ve seen it all,’ she told the woman. She went by another name then, calling herself Janice Smith. ‘Ha, ha, that’s really original, isn’t it?’ she said, but she couldn’t think of anything else.

  ‘It’ll do,’ the woman said, ‘so long as we know where to find you.’

  Wiremu lived with relatives in a house next door. The first time she saw him she was hanging out washing, while Heaven played in a little sand pit left by some previous tenants. They didn’t speak that time. But he’d taken off his shirt, revealing a torso like that of a sportsman, though, as she would learn, he’d never played anything other than a bit of touch rugby at high school.

  She saw him again the following Saturday afternoon, sitting on the doorstep. The light played on his body, as if it had had furniture polish applied to it. She felt the stirring of something she thought she’d left behind. The last man she’d had sex with was Tommaso, and that had been doomed to failure from the start. Tommaso could touch her buttons in all the right places and drive her crazy-as, but he was far away in Italy, and she was here. When she looked at Wiremu she shivered. Tommaso had given her a taste for dark nuggety men with hard muscles.

  Wiremu said, ‘So how’s it going? You getting settled in there okay?’

  ‘Not bad. Bit cold. How come you stole the sun?’

  ‘Come on over. It’s free.’ He held up a pack of cigarettes and grinned, a big white flashing smile.

  Janice hesitated. Heaven was sheltering behind her, pulling her cardigan around her. Since they left Turangi and all the trouble, the child was nervous of strangers.

  ‘What you reckon, kid? You want to hang out next door for a bit?’

  Janice squatted on the step beside him, while he cupped his hand round the flame of his cigarette lighter, lighting up for her. She drew in a long lungful of smoke and let it go, closing her eyes and turning to let the sun rest on her face. Heavy cooking smells drifted from the window of the house, meaty and rich.

  ‘Nice kid you’ve got there,’ he said, after he’d introduced himself. ‘She looks smart.’

  ‘She’s nearly six. She knows all her letters,’ Janice said. Heaven’s fair hair had curled into short ringlets. People remarked, when they went to the shops, what a pretty little girl she was. Janice liked tracing her eyebrows with the tip of her finger.

  ‘You come from round these parts?’ he asked.

  ‘Just come here. I’m from Wellington, but that was a bit back. I’ve been here and there.’

  ‘You like it here?’

  ‘It’s kinda lonely,’ she said, throwing caution to the winds. She knew it sounded like an invitation. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh yeah. The cuzzies are good, but I gotta shit job. Not what I come for. No work up north, eh.’

  His job was at the freezing works but he hated it, didn’t like the smell, didn’t like all the dead bodies of animals, and the sound of the railway that made his head hurt. He stood under the shower so long at the end of every shift to get the smell off him that there was no hot water left for the family. Besides, the works were laying off staff. He wanted to go back north, back to the Hokianga, only he reckoned it would make him a loser. They had hopes for him. He’d got his School Certificate, all that shit.

  ‘You clever or something?’

  ‘Nah, don’t hold it against me. Look where it’s got me. I had a job at the post office for a bit but the boss had it in for me. Black and white, you know what I mean? What about you?’

  ‘I’m dumb as stink,’ Janice said, lowering her head on her knees. ‘I ran away from school.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, you don’t seem dumb. Look at that kid of yours.’

  ‘I’m a hairdresser. Sort of. I can cut, but I can’t do perms.’ There was more she could tell him but she had learned to keep her counsel. There were some things you didn’t tell people. Ever. She told him he could take some showers at her place; there was just her and Heaven. She was supposed to call Heaven Paula, but the kid never answered to the name anyway; it was a problem at school sometimes.

  At first he was shy when he came over. He covered himself with his towel even before he got undressed, as if she hadn’t seen him with his shirt off. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen a bloke’s bits and pieces before.’

  He laughed then, said he figured she might have. Janice guessed he’d had girlfriends, but there were none in evidence now. Perhaps there was someone up north. She wasn’t rushing it, although when he’d gone she felt clammy with heat. Heaven liked him, you could tell. She kept pictures she drew at school to show him.

  The family put down a hangi most Sundays, and they’d ask her over. She got used to the taste of puha and pork, that’s where she started to put on the beef, or should that be pork, she told the women in the prison. Never lost it really.

  On one of those Sunday afternoons, the sky a bit overcast and grey, the family was talking about going inside, although that would mean it was time to start thinking about Monday and the working week. They’d downed a few beers, someone was playing a guitar and there was singing. Janice can see and hear it all even now —Blue smoke goes drifting by, the voices of neighbours along the street picking up on the words, beginning to harmonise, remembering the happiness she felt, a sense that things could still turn out all right.

  That was the moment when she saw an aged blue Holden cruising slowly by and felt the sick jolt of fear. This was nothing new, old cars cruised around these streets day and night. But she got it, this one was looking for someone. Before she could duck or call out a warning — because the words froze in her throat — Darrell was among them, swinging an axe, catching her on the arm, blows falling on Wiremu’s auntie as she tried to shield Janice and Heaven, Wiremu launching himself onto Darrell, one of the uncles taking the axe, the scream of sirens.

  I thought they’d hate me ’cause of that, Janice told her new inescapable friends. A group of them sat in a circle, with a woman called Bev who described herself as a facilitator leading the discussion. What the discussion amounted to was them telling their life stories
to each other. Spilling their guts, in other words.

  Bev wore big black-rimmed glasses, a burnt-orange cardigan with a wide colourful scarf. Her hair was iron grey, as if she didn’t mind that she was getting old. She was a nice enough woman, Janice thought, though she’d held back until the last to tell her story, hoping she could avoid speaking. Too much grief in the past, too much she didn’t want to say. But when it came to her turn, the other women glared at her, as though she were a coward, a cop out.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Bev said, ‘you’re among friends.’

  Janice wasn’t sure about that. There were some mean bitches in here. But once she began, she felt compelled to go on. ‘Next day, when everyone’s been stitched up, Wiremu comes over and says, You can’t stay here, and I’m ready to leave. Come with me, up home to the Hokianga.’

  The Hokianga was where Janice lived for eight or so years, she lost count exactly, tucked away in the wilderness to the north of the harbour, a place reached by winding gravel roads, ravines falling away at either side, a settlement where the sun shone hard and hot day after day in summer, and mist closed in when it rained in the winter, so that you couldn’t see your hand when you held it in front of your face. It was like the time when she lived in the bush with the Italians in the south, only there were no frills, no fancy Italian food, no doctors on hand.

  When Janice arrived, Wiremu’s mother, Mere, looked her up and down. Her eyes were full of reproach for Wiremu. ‘So is this my hunaonga? Plenty of others you could have had.’ Wiremu shook his head.

  Janice wasn’t meant to understand but she got the drift.

  ‘You been married before, girl?’ Mere said. He’d warned Janice that his family were Catholics.

  When Janice said, no, not married, Mere looked as unhappy as if she’d said yes. ‘You’ve been living with men.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  Wiremu said, ‘She’s taking some time out. You can see she’s had some damage done.’