a Breed of Women

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Yes, if you like,’ Max shouted.

  The bowl of marigolds that had stood on the mantelpiece landed slightly to the right of his ear, hitting the lampshade. It smashed in a shower of fragments, splattered water and bruised flowers.

  ‘Was that difficult?’ asked Max.

  ‘Don’t stand there trying to be God,’ screamed Harriet. ‘No, it wasn’t hard. I’ll show you how easy it was.’

  She ran through to the kitchen and tore open a cupboard door. Her hands lit on a pile of cups, which she scooped up and hurled at the floor. She started to laugh, with tears running down her face, as they splintered upwards, the chips rebounding high. Max caught her arm as she hurled dinner plates through the glass panel of the back door. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted.

  ‘Not likely. I’m enjoying myself.’ She seized a bottle of tomato sauce and watched it explode on a wall, the contents splattering round the room like blood.

  She suddenly found herself pinned against the far wall, both hands held behind her back. Max was deliberately hitting her face.

  Shocked, she stood still. He didn’t seem to notice, but continued to hit her. She could distinguish him saying, ‘I’ve got to do it to you, Harriet, I’ve got to do it.’

  ‘No, you don’t, you’re enjoying it,’ she heard herself crying, in a voice coming out of some alien part of her.

  They both stopped, panting and out of breath. Harriet reached up and touched her face as he freed her hands. ‘I must be crying,’ she thought, feeling the wetness. But it was Max who was crying — she was bleeding.

  ‘I’ll put you to bed,’ said Max.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘And I’ll get the doctor in the morning.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘If I’ve marked you, I’ll tell him what happened. No lies.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone, though.’

  ‘It’ll be all right, then. We’ll keep looking after each other,’ he said, leading her, limp and bedraggled, to the bedroom. Her head was thumping and splitting.

  It was still aching in the morning, as if she had a hangover. Perhaps that’s what it was, she thought Maybe I was simply pissed out of my mind. But she hadn’t been, she was sure. She’d slowed down after those two drinks. Scared silly she’d do the wrong thing. No, it wasn’t alcohol. She went out to the bathroom.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ Max said, from the kitchen.

  ‘Just going to the loo.’ She put her head round the door. The kitchen was immaculate.

  ‘I’ll bring you your breakfast in when I’ve fixed the children’s. You’ll have to have your tea out of one of the best cups.’

  ‘Did I break all the breakfast cups?’ she enquired.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get some more today.’

  ‘You’ll be late for work.’

  ‘I’m having a day off.’

  The doctor examined her briefly, wrote out a prescription and went away to talk to Max. When he’d gone Max came in.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s given you a prescription for some sedatives.’

  ‘I don’t want sedatives. I’m not going to be a walking pillbox for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Steady on. He doesn’t want you to be, he just wants you to take something for a week or so. Then he thinks you should have a holiday.’

  ‘We can’t afford a holiday, and who’d look after the kids?’

  ‘I would. I’ll take my annual leave, and you can have the money I’d saved for all of us to go away.’

  ‘But that’s not fair.’

  ‘It is fair. I’d thought it out before the doctor came. It’s what I thought you needed, too. You’re probably right, I think it would be a disaster to take all the kids away at this stage. It’d be far better if we got out of this mess. What about going to Whangarei?’

  She shook her head. ‘I think father and I have seen enough of each other to be going on with.’

  ‘Your mother would enjoy making a fuss of you.’

  She shook her head again, determined.

  ‘Then will you go to my parents?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My sister?’

  Harriet was quiet for a moment, thinking. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, ‘I’ll go down to your parents if you don’t mind my stopping over in Wellington on the way. I’ve always wanted to go back.’

  ‘Where would you stay?’

  ‘There’s a girl there. Your sister would remember her, she wrote to me the other day. We were all at library school together. Helen, you met her.’

  She explained the letter she had had from Helen with the invitation to stay. There was no knowing what Helen would be like now, but if it was all right to stay on with her a day or two, why not? If they didn’t like each other, then she could go on to Christchurch. It was as simple as that. Provided his parents knew it was a flexible arrangement, she didn’t see that there was any problem.

  Max finally had to agree with her. Wellington was the place where they had met and if it seemed to be important to her, then maybe her visit there would be best for them all.

  ‘You won’t have had a holiday at all, though,’ said Harriet, when it had been decided. She was fighting guilt, hoping that he would reassure her.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Max said. ‘Perhaps I could take a couple of days fishing over Taupo way a bit later on. I haven’t done anything like that for a long time. Gives me a good excuse.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes, promise.’

  The following week, Harriet caught a bus bound for Wellington and was met by Helen Burnett, who hardly seemed to have changed at all. She was slightly younger than Harriet, and had red hair and quick pale-blue eyes. She was waiting at the bus station as slim as when they had last seen each other, dressed in a long flowery frock down to her ankles.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ exclaimed Harriet.

  ‘You have, but not all that much.’

  ‘Oh me, yes, three kids later, what d’you expect?’

  They stood uncertainly on the kerb while Harriet’s suitcase was unloaded. ‘Are we going to like each other?’ said Helen.

  ‘I think so. You must think I’m awfully idiotic or pushy, turning up like this so soon after you wrote to me.’

  ‘No. I thought it was a good sign.’

  ‘I’ve been a bit low. I just wanted a complete change of scene. I’ll try not to get in the way.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. I can tell it’s going to be all right. I’m glad you’ve come to us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘There’s a crowd of us live together. You’ll have to share a room with me, d’you mind?’

  Harriet felt stricken. The very thing she’d come for was to get away from people and making conversation, small talk, exchanges. What sort of people were they, and what sort of an effort would she have to make?

  The place was an old house on The Terrace. The two women walked, taking turns to carry Harriet’s suitcase, as Helen said it didn’t seem worth getting a taxi. She pointed the house out ahead of them as they rounded out of Bowen Street ‘D’you like it?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit far away to tell,’ said Harriet.

  Helen glanced at her. ‘Hey, you’re all in. Are you really ill?’

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said Harriet. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘But I will, can’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know how I can face your friends, that’s all. I thought it was just you. It was silly of me to come, I just needed to get away so desperately. I can’t describe the feeling. I don’t know, I suppose it’s a breakdown of some sort, only you’re not supposed to have those where I come from, you’re supposed to be all of a piece.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ said Helen thoughtfully.

  ‘I guess I’m not.’

  ‘Hey, look,’ said Helen. ‘Why don’t you just put yourself in our hands. I reckon it’ll be a change for you. Why don’t you go along with
us, see how you like what we’re doing, and if it doesn’t work, well take off. Will you try?’

  Harriet decided she had nothing much to lose. She wondered what Helen and her friends were involved in, and how profound a change was implied in Helen’s words.

  It turned out that only two young men were at home, whom Helen introduced as Rex and Stephen. Harriet gathered that there was another girl called Wanda who came and went The house was a high-ceilinged place full of white light, with bars of red and gold striped across it where the evening sun shone through high stained-glass windows. It was furnished simply but pleasantly, and Harriet felt her spirits lifting. Rex and Stephen were both bearded, and Stephen wore his hair long enough to tie back with a leather thong. He had a meal waiting for them, a big pot of fresh sweet corn, picked that morning at Otaki, he said. They had cold ham and slices of bread, with red wine to wash it down. They suggested she should sit on the floor with them on the big plaited mat in the front room, it was pleasanter than the kitchen and they could play some music.

  As she began to eat, holding the corn in her fingers as they used to on the farm at Ohaka, Bob Dylan sounds filled the room. She felt herself melting into these people.

  ‘I like your poetry,’ said Rex. ‘Helen showed it to us.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harriet She felt vulnerable again. The last time people had talked to her about her writing, she’d cracked up. Was this to be another attack?

  ‘I can’t say you look like the sort of person who’d have written things like that,’ said Rex.

  ‘What do I look like?’

  ‘A suburban matron. Very proper.’

  So it was an attack. ‘Do you always put people in categories?’ said Harriet.

  ‘You don’t need to, mostly they put themselves into them. I guess there’re exceptions. Who knows,’ he said shrugging, ‘maybe you’re one of them. What d’you think about the war?’

  ‘The war? You mean Vietnam?’

  Rex looked long-suffering. ‘You really are an ostrich, aren’t you? I thought as much.’

  Helen looked at him warningly. ‘Quit it, Rex,’ she said. ‘Harriet’s been having a rough time.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll bet. Provincial smugness — don’t see a thing, don’t let it bug you, she’ll be right.’

  ‘How can you be so sure you know so much about me?’

  ‘Because I’ve been there, that’s why. God, take Hamilton, where I come from, you wouldn’t read about it I was brought up there, my mother, my mother, for God’s sake, wears twinsets like yours. And she says what war, too.’

  Stephen had been sitting quiet while this exchange took place. Harriet’s eyes were full of tears that she was fighting to hold back. She wondered where she could go tonight Why was nothing ever easy?

  ‘Come on Rex, stop it,’ Stephen said. ‘Why don’t we help Harriet relax a little. So you left your scene behind, so she’s left hers, maybe for just a little while, but your only contribution is to force her into defending her position.’

  ‘I wasn’t even going to do that,’ said Harriet in a small voice. She was searching through her mental pictures. Were Weyville and Camelot really as bad as they made out? She hated Rex for making her so defenceless. She was in poor enough shape to start with.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Nobody briefed me that where I lived or what I looked like was a condition of your liking me.’

  ‘I don’t like or dislike you,’ said Rex. ‘I simply don’t care about you.’

  ‘That’s a lie. You’re very hostile.’

  ‘Oh I am, am I?’ said Rex, sitting up a bit straighten

  ‘You’re a very hostile personality. Oedipus complex. Mother hatred. You only get on with women who aren’t like your mother. Helen, do you have a dress like yours I can put on, so we can calm your friend?’

  Rex pushed. ‘Okay, okay, so you’ve got a tongue. Truce?’

  ‘Was there a war?’ said Harriet. ‘What war?’

  ‘Aaa-h. Funny lady.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re doing,’ Harriet said. ‘I know I’m ignorant, but I don’t have to stay that way. You could try telling me.’

  ‘Virgin soil,’ said Rex.

  ‘I don’t know about that. I kind of forget what that was like, just a few bare patches.’

  Stephen then started to tell her about the war in Vietnam, about kids who went off and got killed because people had persuaded them it was a good thing to do. They were being hoodwinked because the West’s prosperity depended on keeping the war going, and the Yanks were backing a corrupt government. New Zealand was feeding living people into a war machine.

  Rex interrupted and told her about the villagers and how innocent people were suffering, and how the guys who went over there lost their sense of humanity.

  Harriet knew vaguely that what they were talking about made sense. She had read newspapers, she’d seen these things on television, but had felt detached. It was like Kennedy’s assassination, when she’d been carrying Genevieve. They heard about it on the eight o’clock news, and it was a shock, kind of scary, but it didn’t mean anything.

  At first she had thought that it meant something, that the assassination would change the world, and that the people who lived in Camelot — either the Kennedy Camelot or her own — would never be the same again. But it wasn’t like that. She went out into the garden and called out to her neighbours and asked if they had heard the news. They had said yes, that chap Kennedy was shot, wasn’t he? Funny business that, and then they asked her how she was. All day she’d wandered round, saying to people, ‘Did you hear about Kennedy?’ and most of them had. ‘Never liked him much,’ one of them had said, ‘showed too much of the whites of his eyes.’ And gradually, even as the shocking picture had started to fill the newspapers, she realised that her world hadn’t changed at all. Newspapers changed nothing.

  She tried to tell Helen and her friends something of this, to communicate what it was like in the vacuum, how her life was full and yet empty of reality. They listened; what she was saying made sense.

  Did she want to commit herself? Did she want to stay empty? Would she be too frightened to fill in the blanks a little? She told them no, no, she would like to know more. What should she do?

  There was to be a demonstration the following day. They expected two or three thousand people to march through the city to the American Embassy. It could be violent, and there were sure to be a lot of arrests. The arrests could be indiscriminate if there was a scuffle, and if she got in the way it could just as easily be her — was she prepared to take that risk?

  An urgency was being generated among them all. More people drifted in; some had been posting bills around the city, then a crowd turned up to complete some banners. She was afraid in one sense, but it didn’t seem to be a deterrent. The fear was a strange emotion and it stayed with her for days — an emotion she could neither isolate nor recognise. She supposed at first that it must be fear of the consequences if Max found out she was doing these things, but on closer examination she knew that this was not so.

  Whatever it was, she pushed it deep down inside her. She was talking again. They had released the springs inside her that had slowly been drying up in Weyville. The shutters were off and she could say things that nobody had wanted to hear for a long, long time. Some of them listened, others had private conversations of their own. Now she could tell people about things that were important to her, how she’d made herself stop caring and hidden her poetry and the story of her marriage to Denny — shameful secrets, yet they were so much a part of her that they made her what she was. She had been hiding them because people were afraid of being told things that might disturb the image of where they lived, of what they were building for themselves. Talking was healing.

  Stephen said to her at last, ‘Don’t go too far too soon.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she said.

  ‘You think you’re healing yourself, don’t you?’

  ‘I am, I am,’ she said vehemently.
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  ‘But before you heal you have to open up the old wounds and clean them out. That’s what you’re doing now. You mustn’t open up too many all at once, because you’ll go away from here with some of them still open and we won’t be able to help.’

  She nodded, an eager disciple, ready to listen to whatever he said.

  ‘I think you should go to bed now,’ he said. ‘There’ll be tomorrow. You can explore further tomorrow.’

  The day dawned, bright, sharp, crystal clear, the way Harriet remembered Wellington at its best. She woke expecting to feel hung over, but she was not — it was as if some energy source had been trapped in her body, urging her on. Helen was already up, and came through with a cup of coffee for her as she was dressing.

  ‘You okay?’ she said.

  ‘Feel marvellous,’ said Harriet. ‘I wasn’t too idiotic last night, was I?’

  ‘You were great. We all felt very close to you.’

  Nobody had ever said that to her after she’d talked too much at a party. If only this nameless dread would lift. She did feel fine, but then it would surge up. She had to resist it and part of her energy must be diverted into suppressing it.

  Helen asked her what she was going to do until eleven-thirty, which was the rallying time for the demonstration. She herself had to go to work, but she was taking the rest of the day off. Harriet had wondered how they lived. Helen said she was still doing library work, she was in a government department, and she had leave owing to her. It seemed that she tried to avoid taking long stretches of holidays, and instead kept time up her sleeve, so she could apply for leave when there was something on. She’d meant to take the whole day off, and maybe the following day too, but she’d promised to finish a cataloguing job so that some urgent material could be released. This responsible public servant aspect of her hadn’t appeared the night before. It made what they were about seem all the more reasonable.

  The others did various odd jobs. Rex was still a part-time student and several of the people who’d been in the night before were students. Stephen was one of the leaders of the protest movement, and had given up a promising career in law to devote all his time to it. He worked when he had to, but a lot of his time was spent looking after people who were suffering because of their political beliefs. People stayed with them if they got the sack, for instance, and there could be a big crowd through tonight Stephen had been up north the day before and got in large supplies of cheap food, using a borrowed truck. This was the practical side of the movement. It wasn’t all ideology and preaching and demonstrating.