by Fiona Kidman
‘Why us?’ Jason is shaking.
‘Because you look like the joker that we’ve pulled in, sunshine. We need a couple of male Caucasians, one ninety centimetres, medium build, fine hair. Does this alarm you a lot?’
‘Nah,’ Jason replies, too quickly. ‘Nothing to it.’ He wears a lime-green T-shirt with SHIT HAPPENS written across it.
‘Do we have to come?’ says Anthony. His eyes have a peculiar glassy look. ‘My hair’s kind of dark.’
‘No-o.’ The policeman, who isn’t much older than Anthony, speaks in a deliberate Mr Plod way. ‘No, you don’t have to come.’
The music cranks down while the proprietor twitches around them, wanting them out. He signals to the bar staff to start serving. The man on the table puts his pants back on.
‘Sure, I’ll come,’ says Anthony. ‘I don’t want to leave my sisters here on their own, that’s all.’
‘They can come with you,’ says the policeman.
‘Molly and I’ll follow in the car,’ Abbie says.
‘I want to go with them.’ Molly is fraught, barely in control.
Abbie grabs her arm. ‘You come with me.’
‘What’s the crime?’ she asks the policeman, as they peel out into the night towards the carpark.
‘Joker ran off with a fur coat in Auckland.’
‘I heard about that. Classic,’ says Abbie. ‘Has it turned up here?’
‘We’ve picked up a suspect that fits the identikit. Smooth young joker. It’s kind of difficult to get a line-up of guys like him,’ he says, with a touch of apology.
‘What if the witness fingers one of my bros?’
‘It doesn’t happen like that,’ says the policeman, full of confidence. ‘Anyway, these aren’t your brothers.’
‘How do you know?’ says Abbie.
MATT TRIES TO steer the conversation around to library charges. He is head of the Arts and Recreation Committee. ‘I think we should avoid user pays,’ he says.
‘Slap them on,’ snorts Jan. ‘Libraries are entertainment, just like swimming pools and zoos.’
‘We haven’t got a zoo,’ says Audrey.
‘Yes, we have, it’s here,’ Bethany says.
‘I think she’s telling us to shut up,’ Jan remarks to nobody in particular. Suddenly, she and Audrey are on the same side again.
‘God, you’re getting boring, Matt,’ says Audrey.
Somewhere in the house the phone rings.
‘I’ll get it,’ says Matt.
But it has been answered already. Stephen appears at the door, startling Bethany. ‘I thought you were out with the others,’ she says. He looks rumpled and tired, as if he has fallen asleep in his clothes.
‘Something wrong?’ Matt asks.
‘Everybody’s down at the police station. They’ve picked up the boys for something.’
PISS, SHIT, VOMIT and booze. The police station oozes with the smells. A filthy man in ragged clothes stands arguing at the desk. All he wants is a ticket to Ireland and they’ll never see him again.
‘Fuck off, you dirty old man,’ says the constable, behind the desk. A heavy, blowsy woman runs in ahead of them, weeping and showing her bruises.
No, they haven’t picked up the boys, the officer explains. They volunteered to come along and help them out — it’s all perfectly routine. Soon, they can have a nice cup of tea and all go home.
Bethany has brought Zoe along; the baby has been so upset by the departing guests that a feed is the only thing that will settle her. ‘I’m following the milk tanker,’ she says at the desk, trying to make light of it.
The constable tells them that the young ladies are down in the muster room, having a quiet fag, no doubt. Somebody will bring them along in a mo. Stephen stands nervously in the background. He has driven them down to the station. The constable’s eyes light on them.
‘Great,’ he says, ‘they’re one short for the parade, you’ll do.’
‘I don’t want to,’ says Stephen.
‘Don’t worry about it, Steve. Nobody would think of you in a white linen suit.’ It’s funny the way they know everyone’s names.
A policewoman appears with Molly and Abbie. Molly’s face is haggard and streaked with mascara.
‘They’ve got no right,’ says Molly, vaguely. She sits down on the bench beside Bethany and, opening her top, reaches for Zoe. Her nipple springs out, swollen and plump. Zoe purses her little sweet raspberry mouth and latches on with a voluptuous gulp.
‘There’s not a problem, Mum,’ says Abbie, when she sees Matt and Bethany. ‘I just thought you ought to know where we were.’
‘We didn’t know what had happened,’ replies Bethany.
‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Abbie’s tone is grown up and tiredly patient.
Bethany suddenly laughs. ‘It was a relief. I can tell you it was a relief.’
Audrey’s face appears at the door.
‘Jesus,’ mutters Matt.
‘We just called in to see if everything was all hunky-dory,’ Audrey calls out. She stretches her head to see if she can see anyone behind him.
‘No you didn’t,’ says Matt, ‘you came in to see how many of our kids were in the nick. Three of them, at the last count. Now bugger off, Aud.’
The constable begins again. ‘None of them’re in the nick, sir.’
‘I want to see them,’ says Matt. ‘I’m Councillor Hawkins, all right?’
A sergeant looms behind the constable. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘all right, Councillor, sure, come along and join the party. You and the wife can come down. Just no comments, eh.’
THE PASSAGE BETWEEN the cells is narrow. Inside the cells there are more men throwing up, more shouting. A hand rattles a door as Bethany passes. She has taken blood samples from murderers in the laboratory where she works, but these, she thinks, are criminals in the wild and she is unprepared for what she sees. She wonders what they have done. You never know with criminals. Last week it was a man up for exploding shit out of a live chicken into the face of another man, the week before it was mutilation and rape, this week it is stealing fox furs. The room they emerge into is bare and ugly, with harsh light and cigarette burns on the furniture.
Seven young and beautiful men face them. Some of them know each other and are already chatting among themselves. Any one of them, she imagines, might be capable of throwing a silvery-blue fox fur over his arm to present with a flourish to a lovely, lithe-limbed girl. Three of them are her sons. Or other mothers’ sons. Oh, who are they?
‘Take us the foxes,’ she murmurs.
‘What?’ says Matt.
‘The little foxes, that spoil the vine,’ she says. Her eyes fill with tears. Matt puts his hand under her elbow.
‘It’s just the booze,’ she says, straightening up.
But she can’t meet their eyes. Lined up, like rats waiting for beheading. With a start, she realises that she has no idea where any of them were last night. Don’t ask, they say, if she ever wants to know where they are going. We’re grown ups. She wants to embrace each one of them, all that they mean. They represent her past. The present. What about the future? She hasn’t got round to that yet. Yet here they are, a line-up of her life, fragments and splinters, revealed under the harsh fluorescent glare of a police station’s light.
Jason looks at her with an unwavering gaze. She knows now what he wants. He wants to be hers too.
Bethany finally returns his look. She has enough children, enough histories. How will she tell him this? As she looks at him, something else occurs to her. He, too, is capable of taking the fur, but, of all the young men in the room, he is the one who would be least likely to give it to a girl. He winks at her.
The prisoner is led in. He isn’t wearing a white suit, just stone-washed jeans and a red sweater. Bethany half-expects him to be carrying the beautiful blue fox coat over his arm, a shimmering thing that could transform its wearer into a creature leaping through shadows and across snow. But while the other young men
are curious, by now almost amused, this one is gaunt-eyed and terrified. The smell of his fear follows him into the room. A constable gives him gives him a small shove, and leaves him wavering on the spot between Jason and Anthony. None of the young men gives a flicker of recognition when he walks in, telling Bethany that he is not a local. He is on the run from somewhere.
The witness, a woman who had been shopping for a coat when the theft happened, arrives. She is an older person with a heavy scarlet mouth.
‘I’d know him straightaway,’ she says.
‘Well, take your time, madam,’ says the officer.
The woman steps forward in narrow, high-heeled shoes, clattering along the bare floor with quick, mincing little steps. She stops in front of Anthony.
‘That’s him,’ she says, pointing a scarlet talon towards his face. Beside her, Bethany feels Matt flinch.
‘Bullshit,’ says Jason.
‘Shut up, you,’ says the sergeant.
‘I tell you, it’s bullshit,’ shouts Jason. ‘He and I were at ten pin bowling, you can ask anybody.’
The woman darts her head around, like a nervous, elderly lizard.
‘Maybe it was him,’ she says, pointing at Stephen.
‘He was at home,’ Bethany retorts, as if they were engaged in a conversation.
‘Cut it out,’ says the sergeant. ‘Can you get your wife out of here, Councillor?’
‘What’s going to happen?’ asks Matt.
‘Nothing’, says the sergeant.
Back at the desk, Bethany hears the constable say, ‘Old bat probably took it herself.’ She doesn’t for one second think he believes this. But she half-wishes he did. They know who the culprit is and sooner or later they will find a way to prove it.
Molly has fallen asleep, Zoe clutched in her lap. Abbie has her hand under the baby to stop her from falling. It is one o’clock on Sunday morning.
‘Cool crime?’ says Bethany.
‘Don’t be self-righteous, Ma,’ says Abbie.
Bethany can feel the excitement vibrating in her voice. Ah yes, she thinks, she’s lived a little tonight.
ON TUESDAY, BETHANY comes home early from work. Jason is going back to Australia the next day. ‘You don’t need to do anything special,’ he says.
‘I could help you with your washing.’
‘Fuss, fuss,’ he says. ‘I’ve only got two pairs of jeans and three tees. God, that’s why I’m going. If I stay here any longer I’ll have to buy jerseys.’
All the same, she feels there is something she should do, some way to say goodbye. She wants to ask him about Molly. Molly and the baby had stayed over on Sunday night after they got back from the police station. She and Abbie had left at lunchtime, Molly to return to the flat, and Abbie to drive to Auckland in the smart electric-blue Toyota her boss had lent her for the weekend. After they leave, the room smells of caramels and marijuana and breast milk. One of them has left the wrappings of a pregnancy testing kit in the rubbish basket.
‘I’ll be back,’ Jason says, lounging in the doorway of the kitchen.
‘Will you? Why?’
He looks at her sideways.
‘You’ve got a mother,’ she says.
‘I don’t have brothers and sisters.’
‘Have you been in trouble?’ she asks. She wonders if he fancies both girls and boys. On the other hand, it could be Abbie’s kit. Her heart does a cartwheel.
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘No wonder my father left you. You look at the down side of everything.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ she says.
‘No, I don’t. Look, what do you want? Fucking tears? Beg you to keep me, all that stuff. I don’t need that. You’re so full of shit, Bethany.’
He has been watching Eden on Sky television with the others. Imitating the pose of a lover, he stands behind her and puts his hands on her hips. ‘You want to be big Momma to everyone.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she says. ‘I didn’t ask you to come. Move the problem where it belongs.’
He flicks his hair out of his eyes. ‘Why don’t I go and get a bottle of champagne for us? We can drink it this evening. Will you lend me your car?’
‘You’re impossible,’ she says, and gives him the keys.
When he has gone, the house should feel empty but it doesn’t.
Upstairs, something stirs, and she hears laughter. For a moment she thinks there must be a burglar in the house, but she knows it isn’t that. Still, when Stephen appears a few minutes later, she knows that a theft or treachery of some kind has occurred. He looks sleepy and content. From the bedroom, she hears Zoe’s cry.
She thinks that, when Jason leaves, there will be more things missing. A fur coat, a ring, an identity, the shadow of Ritchie, a blur in the margins — she doesn’t know what.
LEMON HONEY
FINALLY, BETHANY WAS the one who left. She had been left more than once, she knew how it was done. One day her clothes were in the wardrobe besides Matt’s and the next day they were not. Like most partings that look like spontaneous combustions to other people, it was well thought out.
The people who rented the house she still owned since her first marriage had been given notice. She moved back one morning at the end of a winter, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and hired builders to tear out features that no longer pleased her. She repotted her herb garden, had trees trimmed into shape, brought out old furniture from storage at the back of the garage, and chose deeply textured fabrics to recover the chairs; her favourite is now sprinkled with pale pink clover and mauve thistleheads. Subtle new rugs cover her floors. Houses have always held meaning for her, places where life is sustained and the histories of lives are developed. She is glad to come home.
None of this is to say that Bethany left Matt without pain. ‘I don’t have much of a record,’ she said to her friend Marjorie when she was considering the separation. Broad-breasted Marjorie, with her frosted curls, is a person whom Bethany still describes as loyal. Marjorie never misses a beat, as if every change in her friend’s life is perfectly normal.
‘That’s not a good reason for being miserable,’ Marjorie said, in a practical way. She has been married for thirty-five years and wouldn’t dream of leaving her husband. ‘You’re the only one who can change it. Unless you want to drift along like one of Margaret Drabble’s heroines, waiting for someone to rescue you.’
This, Bethany thought at the time, was a low blow, and closer to the truth than she cared to admit. As a woman who reads novels, she is sometimes depressed by the erudite achievements of their central characters; she knows that women in the best fiction are no longer described as heroines, but they still have that element about them, because she sees that the people who write the books (other women, like her, until they become writers, when, it seems, they are transformed into media personalities with opinions and lifestyles) feel the need to establish their characters as survivors, ultimate achievers. What would they make of her? There were days, during that last winter with her and Matt, when Bethany felt as if she were on a tightrope, positioning herself as she decided which way to go, thinking that if she were more like one thing or another, she would make her marriage work, and this in itself would be her achievement. There were other days when she saw walking out on it as the action she had for so long avoided. Matt’s absences were familiar to her, a man who was no longer involved with his marriage.
‘You got yourself into it,’ Marjorie said, but not unkindly.
Bethany supposes this is true, although it didn’t feel as if she was getting herself into anything at the beginning.
SHE STILL REMEMBERS the day Matt first came around. After her son Ritchie died, she sat and stared into spaces for a long time. Her lover, Gerald, had left her once and for all.
‘Good riddance,’ said Jill, a woman who she supposed was a friend. ‘He thought he pissed lavender water, that guy of yours.’ Jill wore plain good girl blouses and skirts with side pleats that showed the bulge of her stomach. Her sour green
ish eyes glittered in slits.
One afternoon, Abbie came home wearing her new dun-brown dress, belted at the waist, for which Bethany had just paid Jill, whose passion was Girl Guides and Scouts. Abbie put her hand up in a two-finger salute, with her thumb and third and fourth fingers tucked into the palm of her hand.
‘We’re the Brownies, here’s our aim, Lend a hand and play the game,’ she sang. Pleased with herself.
‘Where did you get that from?’ said Stephen, a flash of rage darkening his face.
‘I’m a Brownie now,’ Abbie said.
‘Why did you let her?’ Stephen shouted, turning on his mother.
Bethany shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’
But she knew what he was thinking, and in a way she agreed. Ritchie had worn his Scout uniform the night he died. If he hadn’t been going to Scouts… Well, she has told herself a thousand times, he could have been going anywhere.
She turned back to the bench, while Abbie changed her clothes and came into the living room to watch television.
‘Did you have a good time then?’ she asked Abbie.
‘Neat.’
Stephen had disappeared into another part of the house. Later that evening, Abbie went back to her room and discovered the havoc Stephen had wrought. Her Brownie dress was slashed in three places. As if a weirdo had got into it.
‘Why?’ Bethany asked her son.
When he didn’t answer, she phoned Jill. She can’t remember now why she chose Jill; perhaps nobody else she phoned was at home. More likely, she felt the need to explain immediately to Jill what had happened to the uniform. Bethany remembers that she was crying hysterically when she rang, that she said things like, I can’t go on, I can’t, I can’t, and she really felt that she could not.
It was not Jill who came, but her husband, Matt, whom Bethany didn’t know very well. His marriage was surprising to her. Whereas Jill was at once colourless yet loud in her manner, Matt was a charming man, who wore nicely cut suits and expensive socks and ties. His hair was razor cut, turning grey. In some ways he reminded her of Peter. Jewellery was his line of business, the shaping and polishing of gemstones. His manner was like a doctor’s, you could hear him recommending diamonds to lovers.