All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  As he pulled on his leather driving gloves, Annabel said, ‘So what if it’s Coleman’s boy that’s providing the drugs? Have you thought about that?’

  He gave her a long, cool stare. ‘You’re getting emotionally involved, Annabel,’ he said. ‘It never pays.’

  ‘SO,’ BELINDA TOLD DYLAN, ‘you need to clean out that room of yours because your aunt will be sleeping in there very shortly. Don’t argue, you have a room of your own in another house.’

  ‘She can have my room,’ Simone said. ‘I’m moving out.’

  Belinda appealed to Seth. ‘You know it’s the right thing to do, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Seth said, ‘but I’m resigned. If you think it’s worth our kids leaving home on account of a whole bunch of people they don’t know, you go right ahead.’

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Belinda repeated. ‘Why don’t you come to the prison and meet her? I can arrange it.’

  ‘I can wait,’ Seth said. He shut his study door. Seth, who was never angry. Or was he? Sometimes, these days, Belinda didn’t know. A simmering vein of resentment surfaced at unexpected moments. Did he look back and think he could have done better? she wondered now and then. The thought terrified her.

  Contemplating the whole thing this way and that, lying awake dry-eyed with exhaustion, Belinda found herself agreeing with Annabel Rose, that truth itself was a slippery customer — an interesting concept. Janice had no doubt used a few drugs in her time. Possession, for sure. Dealing? Could it be true after all? Belinda’s head hurt when she thought about it too much. It wasn’t something she wanted to talk about to Seth or the children.

  The atmosphere at home was cool. Simone was looking for a place of her own, but the rents were high. This was the hardest part for Belinda, Simone not really talking to her. Doing the ‘pass the butter stuff’, the dialogue the scriptwriters struck out. Mothers and daughters — it was tricky, according to her friends, but it had never been that way with her and Simone. Simone was like a friend who happened to live with her, and now there was a horrible distance between them. Dylan hadn’t been home for a month. Seth said he supposed they were all going to appear in a ‘happy families welcoming the prodigal sister back’ documentary. He’d been invited to a conference in San Francisco and he’d be out of it for a month, so that let him off.

  ‘It’s not an experiment,’ Belinda said. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’

  Janice was still in prison a month later. Probation had been to visit the house to make sure that it was satisfactory: it had to be within range of their monitoring systems for Janice’s ankle bracelet when she was released. On the sentencing day, their report hadn’t arrived at the court.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Belinda asked Annabel Rose. ‘Has the judge got something against Janice?’

  ‘The judge is neutral, he doesn’t have feelings for or against the accused. This is routine.’ Her voice was stiff, her face puffy, as if she’d been crying. Belinda wondered if there was something the woman wasn’t telling her.

  ‘I SO WANT MUM TO BE OUT,’ Heaven said to Belinda. They were sitting at a café on the lakefront, surrounded by a busload of tourists. On the water, wild black swans circled for remnants of food, arching their necks, their beaks flaring. Small vents of steam escaped along the waterline. ‘I’ve got to get out of this town.’ There was desperation in her voice. Patariki had already left, gone up north to stay with his grandmother.

  ‘Annabel said you had a boyfriend here.’

  ‘I want out. He won’t let me go.’ Heaven had created a perfect origami bird from her paper napkin. She was wearing a crimson top made of soft material that hugged her breasts, gold studs in her ears, a spiral tattoo on her inner arm.

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you, surely? I’ll take you back to my place if you need a place to stay.’

  ‘I can’t. Rob, that’s my boyfriend, or he used to be, he’s like my dad, real controlling. My counsellor says girls like me go after people like their dad, it’s a cycle you have to break — you know the shit they talk. So how would I know? I never lived with him since I was little.’

  ‘But you remember him?’

  ‘Well, of course I remember. He’s been in our faces all the time, except for those years we lived in the Hokianga. You should have seen the things he’s done to Mum. First thing I remember about him is fire. Fire burning in front of our house in Turangi. I was just a little kid. He’s like a devil.’

  ‘I see — I think,’ Belinda said, although she knew that her camera’s eye failed her here. Heaven had seen things she hadn’t, and they were terrible. The girl looked tired, almost old, or perhaps it was just her expression. ‘So what about Rob?’

  ‘Yeah. What about Rob? He keeps saying if I leave he’ll tell his dad about more stuff my mother’s supposed to have done. Like that she was growing stuff up north. And if he did that, they’d send people up there to search for dope.’

  ‘Would they find any?’

  The girl shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘Not that I know of. There’s dope everywhere, Auntie.’ Avoiding the question. ‘You’ve got kids, you must know that.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Belinda said. ‘Have you talked to Annabel about this?’

  Heaven took a deep breath. ‘If I tell you something, you promise you won’t tell?’

  ‘Well,’ Belinda said uncertainly. But she saw she was about to lose the girl if she didn’t agree. ‘All right, I promise.’

  ‘It’s Darrell, my father, who’s giving Rob the shit. You know, the drugs. All sorts of junk.’

  Belinda took a deep breath. ‘Then why haven’t you told Annabel that?’

  ‘Because the judge would just say it was us.’

  ‘But, Heaven, you don’t know what the judge would say. This needs to be sorted.’

  ‘No, you don’t get it. The judge will do what the cop wants him to do, which is to get rid of us. The judge owes Rob’s dad. His missus, Fleur, got pissed when she was driving. The judge talked Rob’s dad out of charging her. And Annabel, well she’s the judge’s girlfriend.’

  Belinda felt herself quivering with rage. ‘This is monstrous. It’s a total injustice. We have to do something about it. I’ll see a lawyer in Auckland.’

  ‘Auntie, nobody would believe a word of it. Basically, you could say this family’s stuffed.’

  ‘I need to talk to your mother about this.’

  ‘She knows enough. You promised me, Auntie.’

  ‘JAN, IT’LL BE ALL RIGHT,’ Belinda said, on her next visit to her sister. ‘They can’t keep you in here forever.’

  Janice shook her head. She looked exhausted. She had a fat lip and a bruise on her forehead. The murderer was in an animated conversation with a woman with a shaven head. The woman called Nance whom Belinda had seen in the court down south was now on remand. She was talking to a grey-haired woman who wept. Belinda thought it was probably her mother. It turned her heart over.

  ‘Jan, who’s done this to you?’

  ‘Nobody. I fell over,’ Janice said.

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Belinda.’

  Belinda guessed then that Janice would always keep her mouth shut — it was what she’d been doing for most of her life. She couldn’t wait to take Janice home, introduce her to new beginnings, get her family back together. They would be proper sisters.

  ‘Whatever happens to me,’ Janice was saying, ‘you’ll look out for Heaven, won’t you? She told me you’ve been good to her. I’m allowed to talk to her on the phone twice a week.’

  ‘You’ll be able to look after her yourself soon,’ Belinda said.

  ‘Will I? Oh I don’t know, sis. I could have done better. She’s got brains, but I didn’t even make her go to school up north. I’m so dumb, I didn’t think it was worth bothering about.’

  ‘Jan, stop talking like that. Heaven’s crazy about you, she thinks about you all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s a good kid. You know, I had two convictions be
fore this. They were both for pinching clothes for her. I wanted her to look nice.’

  Belinda said then that she knew what it was like, to have a daughter you loved so much it was like pain. Janice would be able to buy nice things for Heaven with the money put away for her, get a decent place to rent, stuff like that.

  ‘The money. Yeah, I meant to tell you about that. I don’t want it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not. You know where it came from.’

  ‘Our father.’

  Janice gave Belinda a long sideways look. ‘He was Grant’s and my father. He mightn’t have been yours. Perhaps you got luckier than you know.’

  ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’

  ‘Well, you never know, do you? It might have just been something he made up. One of the sweet nothings he whispered in my ear. I said to him one time, Why me, why not Belinda? And he said, ’Cause you’re mine, all mine, and she’s not, same as Jessie. He said our mother was a dumb slut.’

  ‘I can’t think about this now.’ Belinda felt sick.

  ‘You should be happy. Anyway, it’s dirt money. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.’

  ‘You’ll get over this,’ Belinda said. ‘You’ll come out of here, and live with me until you get the bracelet off, and you and the kids can start over.’

  Janice’s voice was dreamy. ‘Up north, we had these tin roofs. I remember one night me and Wiremu were laying awake, just chatting you know, holding hands under the blanket. It started to rain real hard, the way it does up there. I said to him it sounds like a movie. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I saw that in Wellington, a long time back.’

  ‘A soundtrack to a movie,’ Belinda said. ‘“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” — I can hear it.’

  ‘They were good times. We didn’t have nothing and if you saw the way we lived, rusty old cars and junk and just surviving, you mightn’t have thought it. But it was good.’

  ‘It’ll be good again. Promise.’

  ‘I just don’t know how much longer I can do this. Anyway, thanks for coming.’

  ‘I’ve put the money in for the phone card,’ Belinda said. When she left she turned, as had become her habit, to look at her sister. Janice stared after her, her face not tough at all, just wistful.

  JANICE DIDN’T KILL HERSELF. It wasn’t like that. The call from the prison came late at night. She was in hospital with pneumonia and was asking for Belinda. When she arrived, Janice was hooked up to tubes and drips, her face ashen. She’d had the flu, a nurse told her, and it had got onto her lungs. They were doing all they could.

  ‘Heaven’s on the way,’ Belinda said, squeezing Janice’s hand.

  ‘I know,’ Janice said. ‘I can see her.’ She opened her eyes once, blinked and she was gone.

  Her little sister.

  Looks like she just gave up, the nurse said.

  11

  Home truths

  2012

  BELINDA IS SEARCHING for a recipe her daughter wants. It’s more years than she can remember since she’s made her mother-in-law’s fudge pudding, the one with cake floating on chocolate sauce. The children said it was their favourite dessert when they were little, but then it was Maisie, their grandmother, who made it for them. Whenever Belinda speaks of her mother-in-law she gets a catch in her throat. Maisie had stood beside her, loved her, helped her to care for the children who appeared with alarming regularity — three in the first four or so years. They were careless then, she and Seth, their lovemaking tumultuous and frequent, and when it was over, as often as not, they would look at each other and say, We didn’t use anything. Oh my God, you don’t think there’ll be another baby? And there would be. Though Seth urged her to persevere, the pill didn’t suit Belinda; it took them a long time to get birth control sorted out.

  And now Maisie is dead, has been for many years, and Belinda is a grandmother. One day her daughter Simone had come home and announced that she was marrying a stockbroker, a man from the city. This shocked Belinda and Seth, although it was hard for either of them to express, even to each other, just why the idea of a money man in the family should unsettle them so much. They supposed, they said, when they were on their own and the big old house was silent, that it was just that most of those people were right-wing. They said ‘those people’ in ways that others spoke about people of different races or religions. We’re being prejudiced, Seth said, he mightn’t be like that at all. Besides, we’re being hypocrites, aren’t we? We’re hardly poor. When Belinda thought about it, Seth never had been. All the same, Belinda had said, we should watch out for landmines.

  Simone married Vaughan beside a lake in a vineyard on a gentle summer evening. She wore a satin dress that glided over her spiky hip bones. Every table was decorated with bunches of cornflowers, as if a whole field of them had been stripped. The guests danced by the light of flaring lanterns until moonlight took over. Simone is in her thirties now, and the mother of two sons, although she still looks like a model. Politics are never mentioned when the family meets, which is enough to tell her parents all they need to know. Their son-in-law always greets them with perfect courtesy, a certain gaiety in his manner as if they’re old people who need to be humoured a little. This bothers Belinda, who is about to turn sixty and as busy as ever, and Seth is only five years older. Their conversation is about the children, what private schools they can gain admission to, the traffic, always the traffic, and, of course, the showing of digital images of their travels. Vaughan and Simone spent three years in Paris before the children were born. Simone’s voice has developed a texture with slight French inflections.

  ‘I keep promising the boys Nana Maze’s fudge pud,’ Simone says. ‘You must have the recipe somewhere.’ Her shoulder-length hair is coloured a delicious toffee shade. She is wearing layered clothes in pale and dark grey shades, black sneakers with white laces and no socks, showing her sexy ankles.

  ‘I can’t think offhand where I might have the recipe,’ Belinda says. ‘You can probably find one on the internet.’

  ‘Oh yes, but that’s not the real thing, is it? Didn’t she leave you her recipe book?’

  Belinda remembers then that, indeed, Maisie had given her the book, in the days when she knew the end was near. Her husband, Don, had died, the house in Masterton with the big garden had been sold. Maisie lived alone in a small apartment in Wellington so that she could be nearer to her daughters. She was pensive when she explained this to people. Belinda and Seth had moved away and she would have liked to be near them, too, but she couldn’t be in two places at once. It was, as it turned out, Belinda who stayed with her in the last weeks, when Maisie didn’t want to go to the hospice, not yet. Belinda was free at the time, and Seth’s sisters had busy lives, full-time jobs.

  ‘I threw out so much stuff,’ Maisie had said, ‘but I wondered if you might like this? The girls thought it a bit tatty. I think they meant grubby.’ She had laughed as she said it, but the book was fingermarked with what might be butter smears or golden syrup, crackling with crumbs of brown sugar, smudged with vanilla. ‘You know, if ever the children want some of the things I used to make.’

  To please her mother-in-law, Belinda had said that yes, she would love to have the book, that she would make something from it when she got home. Maisie had put her head on Belinda’s shoulder then and wept. ‘I’m not ready to leave everybody just yet,’ she said. It was just that her heart was failing her and it was a matter of time. ‘Just like Don’s,’ she said, ‘and I never climbed on any roofs.’

  It came sooner than any of them expected, days later.

  After the funeral, when Belinda returned home with Seth, there was the usual pile of mail waiting, bills, fliers from land agents offering to sell her house and a letter with vaguely familiar handwriting. She’d been away for longer than she expected. There were voice messages to be answered and shooting schedules to arrange. Someone wanted her to go to Thailand to an award ceremony the following week and she ha
d tickets to book, the usual whirl.

  ‘I think I’ve still got Nana Maze’s book,’ Belinda says. She knows it’s not with her other recipe books because she uses them often. Maisie Anderson doesn’t figure among Julia Childs and Elizabeth David, or the new healthy Asian lifestyle recipe books. There’s a drawer in a spare bedroom where Belinda has stuffed things she still feels sentimental about — the children’s reports, their first drawings, things like that. She rummages around beneath piles of paper, and there it is, Maisie’s book.

  She carries it in triumph to the kitchen.

  ‘Voilà!’ Simone cries.

  As Belinda relinquishes the book, she feels a pang of guilt. She wants to hold onto it, to make some of those old sludgy recipes the kids loved, like a real grandmother.

  Simone flicks through the pages. ‘There’s some old letters here, Mum,’ she says. ‘Naughty, who didn’t pay their bills? You didn’t even open them.’

  Belinda picks up the spilled mail and shuffles through it, stopping at the letter with her name on the envelope. She knows the writing. Why didn’t she recognise it when she poked these envelopes inside Maisie’s book? She tries to stop her hands from shaking. ‘You can have the book,’ she tells Simone. ‘Nana Maze would have liked that.’

  After Simone has left to pick up the boys from school, she sits at the table and opens the letter.

  Darling beautiful very married Berlinney,

  How are you? I’m writing to tell you that I’m now an unmarried man. Believe me, I tried to stay married, to do the right thing, but it has never worked. I was on a plane that nearly crashed not that long ago, or that’s what the passengers thought. Everyone was screaming and calling out the names of the people they loved. And I found myself saying yours. Berlinney, if I was going to die you’re the person I’d want to see last. I knew, even before the plane landed and the pilot had made all those calm reassuring noises that everything was normal, I knew it wasn’t, or not for me. I was overcome by the most overpowering feeling that I must set myself free from Esme (and perhaps set her free from me). This isn’t a mid-life crisis — I’m almost past the middle already.