The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Do you want to leave?’ Anna’s magnificent hair looked flattened against her skull.

  ‘Where would I go?’

  ‘You could come here.’

  ‘With your baby?’ Bethany had to strain to hear her, she spoke so quietly. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, straightening, ‘I have a great time there. I mean, I’m doing some paintings and drawings, I’ve always wanted to do stuff like that. Just a few hangers on, you know what I mean.’

  Bethany felt afraid. It had seemed to her for some time that Anna’s life was like a mounting illness, that was about to culminate in something deeply serious. If it had a name it was probably loss.

  Another time, Anna came on a foggy, wet afternoon, and sat on the verandah, staring moodily down the sodden garden. Bethany stood near the window, holding Abbie in her arms.

  ‘You need warming up,’ said Gerald. ‘Why don’t you bunk in with us for the night?’

  ‘You mean with you and Bethany?’ She held Gerald’s eye. Bethany felt herself stop breathing. ‘Have you asked Bethany about this?’

  Gerald looked up at the window. ‘You’re disgusting,’ Bethany said, and laughed as if he had been making a joke. They all laughed then.

  CINDY’S FATHER STARTED a petition. Cindy had left the commune and gone to work as a clerk in the police station. She helped her father circulate the petition, now that she had, as she said, seen the light.

  ‘It’s getting ugly,’ said Anna, on one of her visits.

  ‘Is that girl in danger?’ Bethany asked. ‘Are they going to do Cindy over?’

  Anna was evasive. ‘We believe in non-violence.’

  ‘Then what’s bugging you?’

  ‘There’s spooks around, you can tell.’

  ‘God, this is New Zealand, Anna, you’re getting crazy ideas out there.’

  ‘Don’t believe me then.’

  ‘I’m sorry. So what’s actually happening?’

  Anna’s face closed, then relented. ‘Look, why don’t you come over for the festival? You could bring the kids.’

  ‘They’ll get trampled,’ Gerald said, when Bethany mentioned it to him later.

  ‘So don’t you want to go?’

  Gerald looked evasive. ‘I have to work overtime that weekend.’

  ‘I thought I might go for a little while.’

  ‘What about Abbie?’

  Gerald was sounding as prejudiced as the townfolk. ‘You could look after her for a couple of hours, couldn’t you?’

  Gerald sighed. He had grown his hair long and tied it back in a ponytail. He wore baggy shorts and a red cardigan and jandals. It helps me to relate with the kids better, he explained to Bethany.

  It rained the weekend of the festival, like Woodstock. The mud along the unsealed road was ankle deep by the time the first hundred cars and motorbikes arrived. The stalls around the entrance to Freeways were waterlogged. It was just possible to make out the hand-painted signs, ‘Scarfs, $2’, ‘Macrame, $1’. The stall holders were vainly stretching plastic over their wares. Inside the gate some had begun to shed their wet clothes. Bethany saw Donna, bare-breasted with Lucky on her hip.

  ‘Some shit,’ said Donna.

  Bethany thought there might already be a thousand people milling around. The packing shed had been cleared to create a long market of food stalls and the smell of garlic and onion and cooking fires curled through the wet air towards her over the sweet smoke of marijuana. Under a covered stand a band of five had just finished a number.

  John jumped on the stage and grabbed the microphone. ‘It’s going to clear folks, forecast is for clearing weather, don’t go away, we’ve got some great numbers coming up, lots of hot food, somebody’s going down to town for a marquee, like we’re having a wedding here. Yee-hah.’

  ‘Yee-hah,’ chorused the crowd. ‘We’re going to be all right.’ ‘All right man.’ ‘Stay in peace, yeah?’ ‘Yeah.’

  But the rain wasn’t clearing and people kept on coming through the entrance where the rickety wooden gate was pulled back against the fence. Bethany found Anna working a hot dog chain, spreading mustard on slices of bread. She looked up from her task, her face smeared with soot.

  ‘You’re wet. Where’s the car?’

  ‘I left it parked, there’s people stuck in the mud already.’

  Anna put down her knife and drew Bethany aside. ‘Did you see anything, like funny, know what I mean?’

  ‘What sort of funny?’

  A man with a beard paused in passing to place his hand on Bethany’s thigh. ‘Hullo sweetheart,’ he said, his eyes unfocused.

  Anna pushed his hand away. ‘Fuzz. Spooks. We’ve heard there’s going to be a raid.’

  Chris came up to them, a bundle of mandolins he had taken off his stall in a sack. ‘There’s cops and people down the road. We’re going to sit outside to stop them. You with us?’

  ‘Bethany,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve got to get out there.’

  The crowd inside Freeways was melting out into the road, already sitting ten deep across the entrance. But there was a new smell, that of raw fear, like animals trapped. None of them had been in danger before. The rain fell, steady, vertical, wiping their faces clean. The more it rained, the younger the people from the commune looked, like children playing under hoses, the boys’ skinny ribs sticking out, the girls’ puppy fat rolled beneath their waists.

  Clad in sturdy plastic mackintoshes and slouch hats tied under their chins, shod with rubber gumboots, the people from town were armed, the women carrying tightly rolled umbrellas, the men sticks and garden forks. And the police were with them, their cars forming a phalanx behind the vigilantes, moving steadily, unhesitatingly on, giving the impression that, when they arrived, they would simply mow down the group seated on the ground. Someone began to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with quiet desperation and the rest of the group took it up. The words stuck in their throats. The police cars did stop, the police sitting and watching as mayhem was unleashed.

  The sisters stood up clinging to each other, Anna embracing Bethany.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna, ‘I never thought.’

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ said Bethany. She wished she could get it through her head that childhood was over, that she couldn’t take care of Anna any more.

  It was not all right. A man reached over the heads of the crowd, and half-lifted Anna above them, clearing a way through that Bethany followed.

  ‘Get in the car,’ he said, pushing them towards a heavy old Falcon parked close by the police cars. He opened the back door of the car and motioned them inside. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ He reversed the car at a speed that was terrifying, given the people who were now pushing from the rear as well as from the way they had come.

  The man drove without speaking, the two women holding each other.

  ‘I shouldn’t leave,’ said Anna. ‘There are kids back there. Some of them might be hurt.’

  The man merely grunted.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ Bethany asked. Near the town they were still passing groups of bedraggled festival goers walking towards Freeways, not knowing what was happening.

  ‘I should take you to the police station. You’ve been obstructing justice, you lot.’

  ‘I told you, Bethany,’ said Anna, ‘I told you the place was full of spooks.’

  ‘Name’s Des Callahan, security patrol.’

  ‘Who are you working for?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Nobody, ma’am. Just out seeing the fun.’

  They had reached the outskirts of town; Des pulled in to a neat brick house with concrete-edged gardens, dahlias heavy-headed in the rain. Aluminium window frames, venetian blinds, chrome-yellow trim.

  ‘You people didn’t have a permit.’

  ‘We did so,’ said Anna. ‘I helped write the application.’

  ‘Did you see the permit?’

  ‘John said it had come.’

  ‘I’d ask John about that next time you see him.’

  ‘I h
ave to go back,’ said Anna again.

  ‘And I’ve got to collect my car,’ said Bethany.

  ‘You’d better dry off.’ Des Callahan sat in the car without moving. It couldn’t be said, afterwards, that he had made them do anything they didn’t want to do.

  ‘Will you take us back, if we just come in for a minute?’ asked Bethany.

  ‘Spare me, I could’ve picked up some work back vere.’ They hadn’t noticed his speech impediment before. Bethany saw the way he looked in the rear vision mirror at Anna.

  ‘Why did you pick us up?’ demanded Anna.

  Des leaned over and opened the door for Anna, not quite touching her arm. ‘Ma’am, I couldn’t give a shit show in hell about people like you as a rule. You once did give my boy a good word at school. You don’t remember me? Parent teacher night. Well, I don’t expect you would. You’re a bloody waste of a teacher if you ask me. What are you, sick or somefing?’

  He walked ahead, producing a key out of his oilskin pocket, a man in early middle age whose hard chin gave the appearance of tilting slightly upwards like a gnome’s, eyes deep set beneath a low forehead. Inside, the house was clean, sparsely furnished. A cross (his wife’s, as it turned out) hung on the wall of the plain living room, a boy’s bike stood inside the doorway of the kitchen. There was a lack of texture in the house. Everything was smooth and unyielding — the floor coverings, mostly linoleum, even the chairs upholstered in a plastic material. This was the house of Des, the widower.

  IT TOOK DAYS for the mud to dry out. The weather was erratic, spells of hot, steaming sunshine followed by fresh, hard showers. The festival had been called off but people still swarmed all over the place. The Health Department and welfare came down and removed some children. Anna told Bethany this, some weeks later, after she had left. Anna had gone back to Freeways the same night the riot broke out, passing Bethany’s overturned Beetle on the way. People on both sides had been arrested. The police turned back newly arriving festival goers; buses and military jeeps were called in to clear out others, but still, some managed to stay. Anna found Chris and Donna sheltering in one of the cars with Lucky.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked.

  Someone moved into their room, they told her, while they hid in the orchard. ‘They’re spoiling, really pissed,’ Chris reported, after he had unsuccessfully tried to regain possession of the room. Anna’s room had been broken into but whoever had been there must have been bused out. All their things had gone; only the candles remained. Sheryl had gone too. Someone said she had decided to go south, down round Punakaiki way.

  ‘You’d better move in with me,’ Anna told them. ‘You can’t keep Lucky out here in the cold.’

  The room was too small for the four of them. Lucky began to cough, a dry, retching kind of cough from his chest. They all stayed awake. The group in the next room banged on the walls to shut them up. In the morning Lucky was pallid and clammy.

  ‘We should get him to a doctor,’ Anna insisted.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Donna. She had smoked a joint and drunk some wine during the night, trying to get to sleep but it only made her high.

  Lucky seemed better during the day. ‘His cough’ll break, for sure,’ said Chris. ‘I used to get colds.’

  But by the middle of the second night Lucky, panting between bursts of his croupy cough, didn’t recognise them.

  ‘I can’t stand this,’ said Donna. ‘We’ll take it in turns to get some sleep.’ Donna gathered up Lucky in her arms. ‘I’ve got a blanket.’

  The moon was struggling between the patchy clouds over the abandoned cars.

  ‘You can’t,’ cried Anna. ‘I reckon he’s got pneumonia.’

  ‘For Chrissake, Anna. Mind your own fucken business,’ Donna said.

  Anna sat by the window while Chris dozed. She heard Lucky coughing. As she described it, Anna recalled the way everything seemed to have come to a head: the smell of the latrines in the dark, the faint scent of wild geranium, the eerie, distant crackle of thunder in the hills in the wake of the storm, forks of sudden garish lightning, the feeling that she was on her own, the possibility that she could make some difference, if she did try, this once.

  ‘Chris,’ she said, when it was their turn, ‘We’ve got to get a doctor.’ Chris blinked in the candlelight. ‘I’ll go up to the main house and call one.’

  ‘John won’t let you use the phone.’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘He’ll kill you, Anna,’ said Chris, his eyes big and frightened. ‘John’s been very very fucken unhappy about the way all this has turned out. He had a bottle of bourbon round afternoon tea time and he’s not seeing things very straight at all.’

  ‘Lucky’s going to die.’

  ‘The gods are just,’ muttered Chris.

  ‘Chris, Shakespeare’s not going to fucking save him.’ Her language had acquired the flavour of theirs, as if cursing might get through to them.

  But Chris had passed out cold on Anna’s mattress.

  ‘I’ve got a knife, John,’ Anna said, when she woke him. More than that. It was a machete, bought the previous weekend for cleaving watermelons. The unused blade was bright and mean in the red lamps. She didn’t have to cut John’s throat, though that was what she promised. She took the tousled hair of his unconscious head and wrapped it round her hand, like Judith holding the head of Holofernes, after it has been parted from his body, and held the machete beneath his chin. He opened his eyes and promised whatever she asked.

  Nobody was going to come to Freeways in the middle of the night. Not doctors. Not taxi drivers. Anna opened her wallet and took out a number, the last she could think of. Why didn’t you ring me, Bethany would say. I don’t know, Anna would say, and she didn’t. Although there was the ruined Beetle on the side of the road to consider.

  ‘I need help,’ she told Des. ‘Please, please come.’

  Please God, she said, as they rode into town in the Falcon. Don’t let this kid die. Des offered to give him the last rites in the hospital parking lot.

  ‘Don’t waste time,’ she said. ‘Just don’t muck about.’ And ran. As hard as she could, Lucky in her arms, to the emergency entrance.

  THERE WAS A small embarrassing scene when the head teacher asked her to visit. ‘I was going to say no,’ Anna told Bethany, ‘but I do need the money. Well, I thought it was worth half an hour of squirming, just to check it out.’ Her best friend from her old days on the staff, a woman called Marjorie, had put in a good word for her. Marjorie Ross was a solid country woman who had gone teaching just in order to leave home, as she put it. Anything, rather than stay home on the farm. She presided over Home Economics; they don’t know anything, these kids, she complained in the staffroom. D’you know, the other day one of them described toast as burned bread. Did you ever? Nothing like Anna at all. For those who didn’t know better, Marjorie might have been described as complacent. Anna listed loyalty as one of Marjorie’s shining virtues and left it at that.

  ‘We really need someone like you round the place,’ the headmaster said when Anna appeared in his office. She hadn’t bothered to dress for the interview; she wore a cotton T-shirt with COUNTRY BRATS written on the back, and rumpled slacks. ‘A lot of kids are dropping out of school, they need someone who understands them.’

  Anna knew about the wave of baby boom kids growing up who were poor, come in from the country, violent, frightened children with only television English. And, since the commune had been abandoned, there were families living in condemned railway houses, people who had moved out but hadn’t moved on. A couple had kids in school. The parents were remote, untidy people who straggled along the main street on benefit day. There had been a court case over John, dope of course, as well as an illegal transaction over the land at the commune. If you caught them in an unguarded moment, their eyes were bitter and disappointed.

  ‘You think I’m respectable again?’ said Anna to the headmaster. ‘Couldn’t you do better than me?’

  ‘I�
��m sorry about what happened,’ he said, uncomfortable in the role of having to ask her. ‘We advertised the position.’

  ‘Nobody wanted the job?’

  ‘We had some applications.’

  ‘And?’ Anna knew she was entitled to extract the price of his humility.

  ‘Nobody was as good as you.’

  ‘Did Marjorie Ross tell you that?’

  He was silent. It wasn’t until later Anna discovered, by accident, that Marjorie had threatened to resign if he didn’t give her the job.

  ‘I’m getting married soon,’ Anna told him, ‘to one of the boys’ fathers.’

  He brightened. ‘So I heard.’

  ‘My old salary scale?’ Her face scarlet.

  ‘Assistant head of English — you’ll get a lot more.’

  Anna sat back then, her knees slightly apart, hands behind her head and smiled at him.

  NOW SHE HAD money, Anna wanted clothes. Armfuls and armfuls, she said. If I’m going to get married I might as well look good. She and Bethany scoured the shops but there was nothing Anna liked. In the fabric store she bought soft leathers and silk, her hands greedy when she felt them. ‘I’ll get it all made up,’ said Anna, when Bethany remonstrated at the amount and the extravagance. ‘I could get something made up for you as well.’

  ‘It’s okay, thanks. If you don’t mind, I’ve got to get back to the sitter.’

  Anna caught her up in the street. ‘Don’t huff off on me. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bethany.

  ‘Why don’t you and Gerald get married?’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You and Des. Don’t marry him, Anna. Honey, don’t do it.’

  ‘Don’t give me crap, Bethany, what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I CAN HEAR you eating,’ Gerald said. ‘Have you thought of going on a diet?’

  Bethany thought about it all the time. ‘I hardly eat a thing,’ she said. What she meant was, she was just hungry all the time.