The Party Line

by Sue Orr

  Nickie looked around the room. It was as though it was full of strangers, people who couldn’t see the weirdness. Not a single adult was taking any notice of Mrs Gilbert. Nickie’s eyes prickled as she remembered other evenings at the hall, when Mrs Gilbert danced on her own. How people had just ignored her, or smirked behind the back of the wife who was not quite the full quid.

  ‘It’s called a syndrome. Remember? When we met Yvonne? She said that women can get so traumatised by being beaten up that they do weird stuff. That’s what she said,’ whispered Gabrielle. ‘I reckon Mrs Gilbert was just so grateful that the bastard was dancing with her, she believed, truly believed she was happy.’

  ‘Which is why she had her eyes closed,’ Nickie said. ‘To make the pretending easier.’

  ‘Which is why she had her eyes closed,’ Gabrielle agreed.

  Nickie could feel Gabrielle’s leg jiggling, as though she was nervous about something. Which made Nickie nervous, too.

  ‘I’ve got a plan,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Next time they dance. I’m dancing, too. I’m going to dance next to them, and when it comes time to change partners, I’m going to cut in on them.’

  Gallons of lemonade swirled in Nickie’s stomach. Gabrielle’s chin was jutting out, like Mr Gilbert’s had been when he was waltzing.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ Nickie whispered. ‘Besides, he won’t dance with you. Not after Calf Club Day.’

  ‘Not him, stupid. I’m going to dance with Mrs Gilbert. Have a chat.’

  It was pointless to say to Gabrielle Baxter that the women only danced with each other at the very end of get-togethers, when all the men were too drunk. Nickie’s only hope was that Jack and Audrey Gilbert had finished their dancing for the night.

  The next time she checked her watch, it was eleven o’clock. An hour to get through, without Gabrielle causing problems with the Gilberts. Most of the adults were tipsy, even the mothers. You could tell by the way they weren’t shy to grab the arm of anyone’s husband and drag them out for a dance. The men did the exact opposite of the ladies. They clustered in close together, right next to the bar, kept their backs to the dance floor, protecting themselves from being picked off by hunting dancing women.

  Gabrielle nudged Nickie in the ribs.

  ‘Who’s that? The one in the middle with a face like a bird?’ She was pointing towards a group of women talking by the Supper Room door.

  ‘Mrs Shanks.’

  ‘Shanks wanks. So that’s what she looks like.’ Gabrielle smiled.

  That was a person you never saw dancing. Mr Shanks had one leg that didn’t work. When he walked, he sort of picked it up and dragged it along after him. The gammy leg was from polio, a disease that shrivelled up and wrecked a lot of people’s legs in the old days. Joy had told Nickie that Mr Shanks being crippled was the reason Mrs Shanks went out to work — she was the only married lady in the district who had a job and, although people could have looked down on her for that, they understood the situation so they didn’t.

  The Shanks always came to district get-togethers, even though dancing was off the menu for them. Nickie’s theory was that they came so Mrs Shanks could remind everyone that she, more than anyone else, knew exactly what was going on in Fenward. She’d buzz over to a group of ladies and stand there with her arms crossed, her Pimms in her hand, and smile as she listened to the chatter. Her little head would twitch this way and that, as the other ladies said something, then the talk would stop. All eyes would be on Mrs Shanks. And Mrs Shanks would smile the sort of annoying smile that said Well, I know the full story, and have a little sip of her Pimms, and she’d bow her head down, as though she might have spilled a drop of the drink onto her twinset. Twinsets were her thing, she had fancy ones with pearls sewn in them for get-togethers. She’d brush at her top with her free hand, then she’d look up. When she started to speak, all the ladies’ heads leaned, better to hear the full story. There’d be nodding and gasps and eyes wide open all over the show, and usually some head-shaking as well, as everyone agreed how terrible it was. Whatever it was. Next minute, Mrs Shanks was gone. You checked around the room and usually you’d find her in among another group of ladies, doing the same thing over again.

  Nickie didn’t have to worry about the Gilberts having another dance. The lights came on and the Supper Room doors opened. She was starving — supper was much later than it would normally be; seeing as it was New Year’s Eve the do wouldn’t finish until after midnight. But when the time came to eat, the knots in her stomach gave all the food a strange flavour. She needed to know where Gabrielle was, that she wasn’t up to something, before she could eat. Nickie finally spotted her talking to one of the band guys, charming him with her Baxter-factor. She was pleased the music was over for the night; who knows what Gabrielle would have talked those old guys into playing.

  It was nearly midnight. Everyone moved out of the Supper Room, back into the hall. The countdown began. Nickie remembered what happened at zero and, with only two and one to go, slid next to her father. He planted a big sloppy kiss on her cheek.

  People crossed their arms and linked up in a circle. Nickie thought about Ian Baxter. He was probably outside, sitting in the dark in his ute, waiting for Gabrielle. If he’d been brave enough to come in, would anyone have broken the link and let him in?

  ‘Auld Lang Syne’ started, and everyone sang. Nickie tried to join in, but she knew only the first two lines, after that she just pretended. As parts of the circle started to move inwards, then out, she looked around for Gabrielle. She couldn’t see her. Nickie checked again, this time for the Gilberts. Mr Gilbert was shuffling around, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but Mrs Gilbert seemed to be missing. Next check was for Mrs Shanks. Absent.

  Nickie broke away and slipped out through the Supper Room. She pushed open the kitchen doors and stepped outside just as Gabrielle’s dad’s ute pulled out from the driveway and onto the road. It disappeared into the night.

  It was 1973. Nickie was starting it not knowing whether she had new things to worry about, on top of the horrible things left over from 1972. She shivered in the dark, wondering if it would have been better to have discovered some new terrible scene. Gabrielle and Mrs Gilbert. Gabrielle and Mrs Shanks. Gabrielle and Mrs Gilbert and Mrs Shanks. Nickie’s head hurt from the worry of not knowing what she should worry about.

  1973

  Joy Walker

  Joy’s summer holidays had always been two glorious weeks in Coromandel, in the caravan they owned with Eugene’s sister Beth. The families divided January between them, the Walkers taking the second half. Joy’s niece Heather, two months older than Nickie, stayed on as company for her.

  Languid days, mosquito nights, mussels spitting on a sheet of corrugated iron over a bonfire. Limp lettuce salad and sandflies dive-bombing the dressing. Yahtzee and Scrabble and fights over who got to be the Monopoly banker. Lost jandals and sunburn were the only upsets, and the sunburn didn’t really count — Nickie and Heather peeled themselves, then each other, then started browning all over again.

  Eugene and Joy slept in the caravan, the girls in the awning. Every night, the girls chatted and giggled until the early hours of the morning. Eugene bellowed at them to go to sleep before he fell into a deep slumber. Joy stayed awake, knowing they’d start again as soon as they heard his snores.

  Like an archaeologist sifting through dirt for signs of another age, Joy combed Nickie’s nightly conversations for the spirit of Gabrielle Baxter. She listened for furtive whispers of violence and sex because how could a young girl not roll them round inside her like a sweet all-day sucker, when she was on holiday? But the discussions were confined to fashion and food and boys, not men. The Nickie that Joy listened to was the girl she’d been before the arrival in Fenward of Gabrielle and Ian Baxter.

  At first, this was a good thing. But as the holiday wore on, anxiety refused to loosen its grip. Joy sat under the pohutukawa trees lining the beach and watched Eugene and the girls skylarking in
the water. She tried, but failed, to make sense of it all.

  On the last Sunday in January, Joy slipped into one of the empty church pews. It was only ten o’clock, but the day was already warm and the incense merged with the hybrid scent of the overheated, under-blessed congregation. Old Spice, the hateful 4711, other odours too — a shirt on its third, maybe fourth wear, Brylcreem, cow muck, unwashed underarms, blackball lollies, baby sick. Joy wondered what they would call this potent, rancid fragrance, if it could be captured in a bottle.

  Nickie sat next to her. She nudged Joy in the ribs with her elbow and pinched her nose with her fingers. She pointed to the stained collar — the source of the baby vomit — of the young woman directly in front of her. Joy smiled and screwed up her nose in sympathy.

  Father Brindle swished past. Joy glanced at his profile, at the knobbled face, his neck oozing over the top of his collar like a generous muffin in a tin. He must feel the eyes on him, she thought, his own gaze fixed on the giant cross hanging behind the altar. One foot in front of the other, as though he was walking a tightrope. Maybe that’s how it felt, Joy thought. Maybe the knowledge of all the sin in the soul of the church was so heavy across the priest’s shoulders that he daren’t glance aside, risk losing his balance.

  As they sat down, Nickie nudged Joy again.

  ‘Look behind you, Mum. Look who’s there,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t look behind. You know it’s wrong.’

  ‘It’s Gabrielle. She’s by herself. We could squeeze over—’

  ‘It’s too late, Nickie. Turn around. Face the front.’

  Nickie glanced backwards one last time and grinned, flicking her fingers in a miniature wave.

  It was a Mass no different to any other. Joy would look back on it later and wonder whether she’d missed something, a subliminal message floating under the words of ritual. As the clock ticked over to eleven a.m., she knelt with everyone else and put her head in her hands and waited, motionless, for the words that ended the Mass. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. When she got to her feet she knew that after dropping the family off home, she would visit Audrey Gilbert and offer her help to escape her miserable life. If Audrey refused, Joy would sit there in the Gilberts’ kitchen, or living room, or wherever the two women happened to be, until Audrey changed her mind.

  All the way home from church Joy had worried. Not about the scene at the Gilberts, because in her mind that had already happened, but about how she was going to slip away from the family. But when the time came, it was as simple as picking up the car keys and walking out the door.

  She wound down the car window and smells rushed at her — grass and coconut-scented gorse and hot tar and cowshit — and noises, too, the screech of birds and dogs barking and, somewhere close by, a shrill of a shepherd’s whistle. Joy blinked at the fat crayon colours of the freshly crew-cut paddocks and the sky and red roofs and the black gloopy road and wondered if this was what it was like on drugs.

  She turned into the Gilberts’ gateway and turned off the engine. There was no sign of their car.

  Jack’s dogs were tied to the fence on lengths of chain. They snarled and lunged. Joy watched the fence buckle and sway under the pressure of their movement.

  The afternoon heat smothered her as she got out of the car. The dogs were just two or three feet away. Foamy threads swung from their snarling mouths and Joy found herself retreating. She slid her hand along the car behind her, finding the door handle, ready to get back in.

  A high-pitched sound came from the house and the dogs stopped barking. Joy expected to hear Jack’s voice, but it was Audrey in the doorway, a shepherd’s whistle in her mouth. Audrey made no move to take the whistle out. Like a baby, Joy thought. A baby with a dummy in its mouth.

  The dogs paced the fence line, growling.

  ‘Have you got a couple of minutes, Audrey?’ Joy held her hand up to her forehead, shading her eyes from the glare of the sun. Audrey said nothing. She turned and disappeared into the shadow of the house, leaving the door open.

  Joy hesitated, then started after her. The dogs sparked up again. She walked on.

  In the twelve, maybe fifteen years they had been neighbours, Joy had never been inside this house. Between Jack’s stinginess and Audrey’s … well, Audrey being Audrey, hospitality was not a word you associated with the Gilberts. When Joy thought about the house — if she ever thought about it, driving past maybe — she imagined darkness. Even at night, when the lights were on.

  She wasn’t ready for what she found. It was as if she’d stepped into a hospital ward. Everything was white — the walls, the floors — an old, tired white, but scrubbed clean. Her shoes squeaked on hallway lino. Joy looked down and saw a vague version of herself caught in old scuffmarks. Audrey, she noticed now, did not have shoes on. Joy slipped her own off and put them back at the door.

  She glanced into the bathroom as she followed Audrey towards the back of the house. No dirty clothes on the floor, no towels hanging on the rail under the medicine cabinet. Nothing. More than nothing — or less. No soap next to the taps on the handbasin, taps gleaming, as though no human hand had ever touched them. A high window so clean that Joy thought, for a moment, that there was no glass pane there at all. The smell of bleach strong enough to sting her eyes.

  The kitchen was small, just the stove and cupboards and a fridge in the corner. Everything looked new, gleaming, even the stainless-steel teapot, though Joy could see the appliances weren’t the latest models. Older than her own, by a long stretch.

  Audrey had put the kettle on the stove and was staring out the window, her arms folded in front of her, her back turned to Joy. When Joy put her handbag down on the bench, Audrey didn’t move. Joy wondered if she’d forgotten she had company.

  ‘This is a lovely kitchen, Audrey. It’s the first time I’ve seen it.’ Saying both these things made Joy feel stupid. As though she was accusing Audrey of inhospitality. ‘Funny, isn’t it, after all these years of just living down the road from you …’

  Audrey wore an old cotton dress, sleeveless, shapeless, loose. It was dark blue with the tiniest white dots on it. It came down to her knees. The zip was broken, a big, buckled safety pin held everything together at the top.

  Joy tried, at first, to avoid looking at the bruises. But it was as though they were part of the outfit — designed, somehow, to complement the midnight blue of the dress. Or did it work the other way around — did Audrey get up in the morning and pick a frock that worked nicely with her current injuries? The bruises were everywhere. The biggest started on Audrey’s bicep and smeared up, like the scuff of a muddy shoe, to her neck and into her hair. It swallowed her ear, which was swollen plump. Cauliflower ear, it would be called, if Audrey were an All Black lock.

  On the bench were two teacups, each on a saucer. Joy wondered, with a sickening start, whether Jack might be just outside that window.

  ‘Is Jack home, Audrey?’

  Audrey shook her head. ‘He’s gone to Hamilton. His mother’s sick.’

  The kettle whistled on the stove.

  ‘That’s a big drive. Is he staying the night?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said he’d ring. But he hasn’t.’

  They said nothing for a moment. A blowfly flew into the kitchen. It crashed heavily against a window before landing on the white plastic shade of the light hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Audrey started, a frown passing over her face, and she pulled open a drawer. Joy stared as Audrey sprung into life, flicking a fly swat at the blowfly, killing it first swipe. It hit the floor with a blick.

  Audrey bent down and scooped the corpse up with the swat. In one swift motion, she opened the kitchen window and catapulted the dead insect outside. Joy marvelled at her grace, at how this wreck of a human somehow performed the simple task of dispatching of a blowfly as if she was performing a macabre, sick ballet. After the marvel, horror. As Audrey had executed that move, her hair had fallen forward over her face. It revealed the patch of bare,
enflamed scalp. The patch met the bruise on Audrey’s neck like the sea meeting land on a map in an atlas.

  Joy steadied herself against the kitchen bench, but Audrey didn’t seem to notice. Audrey was busy now. Joy stared. Audrey opened the cupboard below the kitchen sink and reached for a bottle of Handy Andy.

  ‘Oh, Lordy,’ said Joy. ‘You’re well stocked up, Audrey. With the cleaning products, I mean.’

  There were rows of bottles under the sink. Joy saw brands she knew, and brands she didn’t. In her own laundry there were two, the Handy Andy, of course, and methylated spirits.

  There was a stack of folded rags next to the army of bottles. Audrey took one and soaked it in cleaner. She dabbed at the lightshade from atop a stool she dragged over from the corner of the room. Joy looked away, queasy at the deep purple of the skin at the back of Audrey’s knees, on her thighs.

  How could she have not noticed before? It was because she’d never visited Audrey inside her home, she thought. She’d caught her on the hop today, Audrey had had no time to cover her injuries. That’s not true. You always knew they were there. The hard little voice inside her head made her blush in shame.

  Audrey climbed down. She took the rag and disappeared along the hallway. Joy heard water running.

  ‘I’ve just put that in to soak,’ Audrey said, returning. ‘How do you take your tea?’

  Joy suggested they sit outside on the steps and enjoy the sunshine. The heat was too much for her, really, but it was better to see Jack arriving than to risk him entering the house quietly, overhearing what she had to say. And there was less for Audrey to clean outside.