The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  Bethany sees the fruit, the golden berries inside their small, fragile, veined coats. ‘So I did.’

  ‘Six pounds of cape gooseberries. Boil sugar and water for ten minutes, add fruit and boil about thirty minutes until it responds to the test. What’s the test, Mum? How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, you just do,’ says Bethany. ‘The jam should be a good amber colour, it says. I can see all the pots lined up on our windowsill.’

  Bethany reaches for one of the books. Abbie cranes over her shoulder, as Bethany turns the stained, smudged pages: Pumpkin Honey, Lazy Daisy Cake, Sponge Lilies. Each recipe has a name beneath its title — Mrs Floyd, Mrs Ryan, Mrs Drewe. All married ladies, who knows, some of them may even have glowed. Some have small annotations, like, ‘Mrs Boyle, Member of Parliament’s wife, came for Ladies’ Day, remarked on my dress.’ Under Christmas cake, is written, ‘Mother’s cake. Watched Mother mix the cake, think she’s getting old, she dropped her brooch in the mixture, had to fish it out, lost a seed pearl, didn’t make any difference to the cake.’

  ‘My grandmother’s cake,’ Bethany says.

  ‘Will you make it?’

  ‘If you remember to take these home for me,’ Bethany replies, handing Abbie the books back. History, she thinks. Abbie knows. I have another history.

  FURS

  ABBIE FINDS AN avocado seed among the litter on the bench, and splits it open. It has sprouted in its centre, like a little pink fleur-de-lis. ‘Look, a baby tree,’ she says dreamily.

  ‘I wouldn’t have invited people to dinner if I’d known you were coming,’ Bethany says to her daughter. ‘I see so little of you. I can’t put them off, I’ve been promising Matt for months. He’s on the council now, you know.’

  Abbie pulls a face and turns up the transistor on the fridge. The Bee Gees are singing ‘To Love Somebody’ on Classic Rock. She hums along with it but the song is finishing for a news break. The lead item is about a man who has stolen a blue fox-fur coat in Auckland the night before. He had ducked into the shop wearing a white linen suit, white shirt, white shoes and a black bow tie, like a regular guy. Then he had raced out with the fur coat over his arm, into a waiting car.

  ‘Cool,’ said Abbie, and laughs. ‘Flash food, Ma,’ she says, tasting the borscht. Her fingers are all red from peeling beetroot.

  Bethany checks the Moosewood Cookbook propped on the bench and adjusts the seasonings. ‘I hope you get enough to eat in that flat of yours,’ she says.

  ‘You’d be amazed at how balanced our diets are,’ says Abbie. Abbie is home for the weekend. She wears a black wild silk singlet splattered with flowers over a black skivvy and red leggings, with black Doc Martens. Her skin looks creamy, her eyes luminous, her mouth softly red and pouting. The chestnut hair that reminds Bethany of her own, when young, flows from a straight central parting. She has been studying the Alexander Technique. Practise standing as if you are on the edge of a cliff that you don’t want to fall over, her instructor has told her. Her back is straight, her chin slightly tucked in. In Auckland, Abbie works as a production assistant for a film company. Her hours are erratic, she tells her mother, which is why she doesn’t get up until midday when she’s at home.

  Film work isn’t what Bethany expected Abbie to do, even if it is supposed to be glamorous. In her heart, she hopes that Abbie is just experimenting with life until she goes to university and gets qualified. Both her children are clever, but neither of them, she thinks, will admit it to themselves.

  Both? Well, to herself she says two, but there seem to be more and more children everywhere, all of whom appear to believe that they have some kind of claim on her.

  The radio announcer winds up the news with more talk of wars, and perished children, as if they were of less importance than the coat snatcher. Bethany doesn’t want to listen. There seem to be dead children everywhere. They have been shot and mutilated in Bosnia, starved to death in Somalia, and now they have been torched to death in a Texas town called Waco.

  As if she can read her, Abbie asks, ‘What was my brother like? The one who died.’

  ‘Ritchie?’ Bethany rests her hands on the edge of the stove. The gas licks the backs of her fingers and singes the hairs.

  ‘I was only four, remember.’

  ‘What do you want to know about him?’ How like Abbie, she thinks, to ask her at this moment when the soup is simmering on the stove and guests are coming for dinner, and she still has the table to set. The unasked questions about Abbie’s half-brother have hovered for all these years, and now she doesn’t have time to answer them.

  ‘I’ll polish the cutlery for you,’ says Abbie, choosing a soft cloth from the cleaning drawer.

  ‘He was just a kid,’ Bethany says. ‘A bit of a swot, he belonged to the Scouts. He’d had his eyes tested, they thought he might need glasses later on.’

  ‘Do you think of him often?’ Abbie holds a knife up to the light to examine the shine.

  ‘Every day,’ replies Bethany, before she can stop herself. Her miniature roses are planted in clay pots on the window ledge, one is called ‘Puppy Love’ and the other ‘Sweet Raspberry’. They have sharp, fruity scents.

  Abbie regards her gravely. ‘Are you sad every time you think of him?’

  ‘No,’ says Bethany, ‘not now. I think of the times when he won his heat in swimming, or made me a cup of tea in bed for his Scout’s badge.’

  ‘Was he like his father?’

  Bethany can tell that she is thinking about Peter’s son Jason. She considers her answer carefully. ‘I think Ritchie would have been more like Peter than Stephen.’ They both understand this complicated reply. Abbie’s father, Gerald, has long since disappeared to Wellington, to the bureaucratic maze of arts administration. He scatters loud ‘kia ora’ greetings down corridors, like hail on ripe fruit, and rings Abbie once a year on his cellphone. Jason has appeared unexpectedly in their lives. Right now, he is staying here with Bethany and her husband, Matt. Bethany has been disconcerted by his likeness to her own sons, living and dead.

  ‘Peter’s a doll, isn’t he?’ Abbie says.

  ‘Abbie!’ Bethany is scandalised.

  ‘So what’s the matter? It’s not like we’re related — Peter’s not even my stepfather.’

  ‘No,’ says Bethany weakly, wondering how this momentous conversation has got away into this. ‘But he’s Stephen’s father.’

  ‘And Jason’s.’

  Bethany sighs, trying to explain the impropriety of Abbie’s comments, although she knows Abbie understands perfectly. ‘I was married to him.’

  ‘I dig older men,’ says Abbie. She picks a canape off the carefully prepared tray, and pops it into her mouth. ‘It’s Matt I’m not allowed to fancy.’ Her mouth is full of smoked salmon.

  MOLLY AMBUSHES BETHANY in the garden. Bethany is collecting chives from the herb patch when she sees her stepdaughter sitting on the wooden seat behind the lavatera. The first frost of autumn has nipped the bush. Molly is about the same colour as the flowers, blueish pink, which is hardly surprising. She wears an ill-fitting black top that shows her bare stomach, a tight black leather mini-skirt with steel studs, and fishnet stockings that go only halfway up her calves. She is eating chocolate monkey bread with banana chips. Her baby daughter, Zoe, lies in a carry-cot on the ground beside her.

  ‘She won’t catch cold,’ says Molly straightaway. ‘I’ve got a ground-sheet under her.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Bethany. She guesses Molly is waiting out here because Abbie is visiting. Molly and Abbie were best friends in high school, but now they don’t speak if they can avoid it. When Molly’s parents got their divorce, and her father married Bethany, Molly had switched off her friendship with Abbie overnight.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Abbie said once, in one of the endless screaming rows that started at the bathroom door each morning. ‘I didn’t ask them to do it. You’re supposed to be my friend.’

  ‘I only asked my friends to sleep over, not to move into my bedroom,’ M
olly said.

  In the end they both moved out, at more or less the same time. Abbie packed her bags and went to Auckland; Molly left to live with Ben, who wore a hat with toad’s eyes sewn on the front and a tiger’s tail on the seat of his pants. He had gone by the time Zoe was born.

  On the ground, Zoe begins to cry.

  ‘Can I pick her up?’ asks Bethany.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ says Molly, picking at a stud on her skirt. Zoe’s napkin squelches under Bethany’s touch.

  ‘Can you look after her tonight?’ Molly says.

  Bethany had expected Molly to dislike her as much as she did Abbie. She was the one who had replaced her mother. But Jill is far away and seems beyond them all. From time to time she writes them letters in a heavy, leaning hand. Whereas, once she wrote with bitterness, now, she says, she is glad Matt has found Bethany, glad she doesn’t have to worry about her children any more, pleased that she can look at grass and clouds all day and nobody minds, glad she doesn’t have to do anything else; she knows God.

  ‘I can’t, I’m sorry,’ Bethany says. ‘We’re having people over for dinner.’

  Molly looks desperate. ‘Please. I need to get out of the flat for an evening.’

  Bethany feels herself weakening. The baby clings to her finger. Her granddaughter. Well, that’s what Matt calls her, although Bethany doesn’t push the point with Molly. ‘Any night this week,’ she says. ‘Just not tonight.’

  Molly takes the baby back from Bethany. ‘I was just going to change her.’

  ‘What’s on?’ Bethany asks. There is no reason why the guests can’t nurse Zoe, she supposes. Once she’s been cleaned up.

  ‘Nothing much. The boys asked me to go the club, that’s all. Well, Anthony’s going.’

  Anthony is Molly’s brother. He, too, had been a friend of the family before he became their brother. Stephen and Anthony had been close school friends. Although they have maintained a better friendship than the girls, their lives have sheared apart. Secretly, Bethany thinks that Anthony was bad for Stephen; he could always do with ease what Stephen tried hard to achieve, and in the end Stephen got fed up. Anthony has been to university, become a chemist and come back to the town to work in a local pharmacy. He wears ties with his shirts during the week and smart casuals at the weekends. Stephen simply wears newer and older versions of tartan shirts and jeans. His fingernails are always grubby.

  ‘Is Jason going?’ Bethany asks.

  ‘Probably. It’s his last weekend.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ says Bethany, and she’s not sorry. Jason is the wild card, the uninvited guest. Something has gone wrong between Jason and his mother — Bethany doesn’t know what. One day he simply turned up on the doorstep, a disingenuous smile hovering around his mouth, and asked if he could stay.

  The moment she opened the door she knew who he was. She knew by the way he was so certain she would have him. Somewhere along the way, she thinks, Peter and I have seen the same thing, and Peter has told him. Jason looks as she imagines Ritchie would have done, had he lived. Fairer perhaps, but otherwise, you can see it there. He has stayed through summer. In the evenings he works in a takeaway bar. In the daytime he watches television and goes shopping for Bethany, which she likes. Bethany still works part-time at the hospital laboratory. He hasn’t told her what it is he has come for. Bethany isn’t sure whether he knows himself.

  So there it is. Bethany and the reconstituted family, with endless permutations, the kind that film-makers make documentaries about (who knows, maybe Abbie has come home for the weekend to do research — PAs get to do everything, she says), the kind that give people a glazed look in their eyes when you start to explain, the kind nobody writes stories about because the proliferation of connections is too difficult to handle and the numbers of people add up so quickly. Abbie and Stephen and Molly (and Zoe) (and sometimes Ben) and Anthony (not to mention Warren, Molly and Anthony’s older brother, who is backpacking in Europe) and now Jason. Jason has hovered round the edges of her life for months, smiling, bringing home hamburgers to share, this boy who is nothing to do with her, and everything, and more than she wants.

  ‘He’s a laugh,’ Molly has remarked, and Bethany was pleased when the pinched look disappeared from her face for a while. Presumably, this gloom that has descended again is to do with his leaving.

  ‘All right then, I’ll have Zoe,’ says Bethany. Glancing down at Molly, she is shocked to see what she had missed before, distracted by the baby. Vertical welts of love bites start at Molly’s hairline and extend down to her collarbone all around her neck, so tidily done they might have been measured. Somebody has been having very creative sex with Molly.

  CANDLES FLICKER AND glow on the refectory dining table. The dinner party is going all right … not so good, yes, it would be all right if they could keep Audrey and Jan off each other’s backs, Bethany and Matt agree in the kitchen. The borscht has already been spilled on the tablecloth. It reminds Bethany of Christmas Day when she was a child. There was always sliced beetroot for lunch and inevitably it got spilt.

  Audrey and Jan are fellow town councillors of Matt’s. Their husbands cluck and commiserate with each other about the rise of women’s liberation. Look at Matt, they say, he has a wife. Who ever thought we would end up becoming wives for a couple of women?

  The couples have brought wine and presents for Bethany. Jan has brought a pot of marmalade with a gingham cover and Audrey has given her a pair of novelty rubber dishwashing gloves called Kitchen Slinks, with fancy designs on their backs. The pattern on this pair is called Lord Muck because they look like part of a black and white tuxedo outfit. The guests are drunk enough by the second course for Audrey to demand that Bethany wears the gloves to serve them. Bethany refuses. A part of her brain is coldly sober as she listens out for Zoe, waiting for the laughter and talk in the house to break the wafer-thin quality of her sleep. Over drinks before dinner she had brought Zoe out, bathed and smelling of Johnson’s talc, and asked Audrey and Jan who would like to give the baby her bottle.

  Neither of them. They roared with laughter, they had given up on all that years ago. Give them to our husbands, they said. Harry and Jack looked suitably sheepish, and Jack had a go at shoving the teat in Zoe’s mouth. Matt ended up doing it, so that Bethany had to serve the drinks as well as hand around food.

  ‘Look at Granddad,’ cooed Audrey. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  But now the drink is taking them close to danger. Audrey picks at her food with an elaborate display of not being hungry. She weighs over a hundred kilos. In public, nobody sees Audrey eating much, although she has been found in bathrooms and bedrooms at parties licking plates. Jan is a pert still-pretty blonde who ran for council because the zoning for her hairdressing salon was threatened and surprised herself by getting elected. The two women describe themselves as go-getters but they are far from sisters under the skin. Their grudges travel back thirty years to high school days.

  ‘I don’t really like Audrey,’ says Jan, turning to Bethany. ‘Do you like her?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Bethany hurriedly.

  ‘I don’t like her or Jack. Do you know we all went out to a restaurant the other night, and they walked out and left me and Harry with the bill?’

  ‘I didn’t eat anything,’ says Audrey.

  ‘Oh yes you did,’ says Jan. ‘You know, I feel good about paying for someone’s dinner when I offer to, but when I have to it’s different.’

  ‘Why bother coming over tonight? You knew I was coming,’ says Audrey, her eyes glittering from the mounds of her cheeks.

  ‘Because I wanted to see how Matt was making out with Bethany. He’s on my menu,’ says Jan.

  Matt’s beautiful jeweller’s hands tighten around his knife and fork. Harry takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose loudly. He has loose, thick lips that are trembling.

  ‘You’re a tight bitch,’ says Audrey. ‘You always were.’

  Bethany stands up and walks out to the kitchen.


  Zoe begins to cry. Matt follows Bethany as she leans down to pick up the baby from the cot that now stands permanently in their bedroom.

  ‘Love you,’ he says.

  Bethany presses gently on the baby’s side, like a masseur at the end of a rub down. Zoe relaxes back to sleep.

  ‘Are you?’ she asks. ‘On Jan’s menu?’

  He runs his finger over her arm and up to her throat. She wears a pendant that he has made for her. ‘When are you going to start trusting me?’

  Ice settles in the pit of her stomach. ‘You’d better do something about that mob,’ she tells him.

  THERE IS ONLY one nightclub in town. It has laser lights and bouncers like the clubs in the city. The bartender is mixing Margaritas, lots of gin and tequila, they’re a favourite with the oldies. Puts them on their ear, he says, they’re hilarious. Try one.

  ‘He’s got Aids,’ says Jason.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Abbie mutters. ‘You can’t catch it from the drink.’

  ‘Anyway, who cares?’ Molly says.

  Abbie shrugs and moves off to dance with Anthony. She has been drinking fruit juice because she has offered to drive them all home. She’s not sure why she has come. Nobody had said that Molly was coming. A young man stands on a table top taking down his jeans. Suddenly, a commotion breaks out at the door. The pigs are here, someone yells. The music keeps on, but people pause in whatever they are doing. The police walk in, two of them moving through the room, looking intently into faces as they pass.

  ‘You,’ one says, pointing to Anthony. ‘And you.’ He points to Jason. ‘That should be enough.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ says Molly, grabbing the policeman’s arm.

  ‘Keep calm, ladybird.’

  The second policeman is talking to Jason and Anthony. ‘I want you to come down to the police station to make up the numbers in an ID parade. Any objections?’