by Cowley, Joy
‘You were lucky to have Francis,’ she says.
‘He was. Beautiful. Such a lovely baby. I only wish.’
‘That’s another thing about the church,’ she says. ‘There’s this assumption that if you’re female, you’re maternal.’ She stops and wipes the perspiration off her face with the tail of her shirt. ‘Some women are not mothers, just as some men are not warriors and hunters.’
I look back at the sheep which is still under the willows, still drinking. It’s the same willow tree. All those years ago, Erueti and I in a mixture of light and shade, with water in the hollows where the cattle had trod and dragonflies electric blue on the watercress. He was so young and full of a knowing that burst through his innocence in an instant of loving. And we lived that summer by the river and no one ever discovered. And I never told. Never gave the memory away. I undo the backpack and take out the bottle of water which feels almost as warm as a teapot. There were buttercups there, too. He picked some for my hair.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I say, handing the bottle to Diddy.
‘I find the nurturing image of women to be quite archaic,’ she says. She drinks and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘It’s disturbing to think that people still subscribe to it.’
Erueti is pleased about the ewe. He gets some cold beer from the fridge and we sit in the kitchen, eating egg sandwiches and Afghan biscuits, drinking beer straight from the can although Donna has put out glasses.
‘Where are you from, Donna?’ asks Diddy.
‘Ngapuhi,’ Donna says.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Diddy, it’s not a place,’ I tell her. ‘Ngapuhi is Donna’s tribe.’
‘The Hokianga area,’ Donna says. ‘I go back two or three times a year, when I need it to get renewed. Did the shoes fit you all right?’
Erueti says, ‘Donna calls my iwi Ngati Hau e Wha, tribe of the four winds. That’s because I’m all mixed up, Ngati Arawa, Ngai Tahu, Ngati Porou.’
‘And Italian,’ says Donna.
‘Sure,’ says Erueti. ‘And Italian.’
Diddy eats five egg sandwiches, straight off. She has always done this, fills up like a camel on some food that takes her fancy and then doesn’t eat for the rest of the day.
‘Where do you go next?’ Donna asks.
‘Wellington,’ I tell her. ‘Diddy and I need to spend some time going through the furniture and personal effects.’
Erueti nods slowly. ‘Frank was a good man. They were both good people. I got used to thinking about them like they were another set of parents.’
Donna says, ‘It was a nice tangi, wasn’t it?’ She looks at Diddy. ‘Funeral,’ she says.
Diddy smiles. ‘I know what a tangi is.’
‘They are like our own people,’ says Erueti. ‘They will always be here with us.’
She did ask me if she could hear the tape I played for Dad the night before he died. I have it in my purse and on the drive to Wellington, I put it in the cassette player. She listens for a while, leaning forward in her seat. We don’t talk. It’s just the music, piano pieces with little clicks in between where I’ve taped. Got them from different. Well I think she’s interested but then she puts her jacket against the door and her head. And she closes her eyes. I keep glancing at her. She looks young. It’s her expressions that make her old, sort of monkey-faced. Asleep her face is. Dad looked like that in the funeral home. Years younger. She’s thin. Her hair’s grey. Apart from that she could be eighteen. I turn the music down.
‘Leave it,’ she says, without opening her eyes.
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘No. I was listening.’
At the end of the tape she sits up and says, ‘Well, what’s the next topic of conversation? The Kiwiana restaurant?’
‘You said you would tell me about your dressing gown.’
She frowns. ‘I did?’
‘I think it was Italian.’
Her face clears and she laughs. ‘The story of my beautiful Venetian robe. That’s some tale. You know how Dad was with money and possessions? I’m a little that way. I’m not profligate in spending but what I have means something. Right? Right. So the summer I went to Italy I bought just one thing for myself. It was a brocade robe that shimmered like a peacock’s tail and I spent every cent I had on it. Oh, it was just gorgeous. For me it was the culmination of an Italian experience which had begun, I guess, with listening to Erueti’s mother. Remember how she used to talk about Venice?’
‘She’d clasp her hands and say it was the most beautiful city in the world.’
‘It is, too. And this was the most beautiful robe in the world. I took it back to New York in my hand luggage as though I was carrying the Holy Grail. Now, at this time, Lal and his partner Byron were running the bookbinding venture from the apartment and we had –’
‘Wait!’ I put my hand out to stop her. I think I. The fragments of information and why she doesn’t. ‘Do you mean a business partnership? Or do you mean?’
‘Both,’ she says.
I don’t know what to. Oh, that sun. It’s low on the horizon and I need to adjust the visor. Just a bit. She is looking at me.
‘Bea, I thought you knew. Lal is gay.’
‘Well you said. About wine you said. When he drank more than one glass. You told me he snored.’
‘He does, too.’
‘So I assumed. It’s natural to assume.’
‘Yes, we sometimes do sleep together. You know – sleep?’
‘I don’t understand.’
She draws her feet up under her and curls up in the seat smiling. Then she pats me on the arm. ‘Oh Bea, you should know by now. The only thing to understand in life is that there is no such thing as normal.’
9
1953
That Saturday morning, Delia was set to go to the skating rink with Celia Upton whose parents had a large tent in the camping ground behind the beach store. Celia was thirteen and she had breasts. Delia hoped that when she turned thirteen her chest would grow although there were no signs yet. Bea told her that Mum had met Aunty Em in town and Aunty Em had said, ‘Is Delia developing?’ According to Bea, Mum had replied, ‘No. Flat as an ironing board.’ Ironing board! Huh! Well, at least she didn’t have really big ones that flopped when she ran. That looked disgusting. There was a joke whispered at school when the nuns weren’t listening. ‘What’s the difference between a sweater girl and a Singer sewing machine? The sewing machine has got only one bobbin.’ Anyway, Delia didn’t care what people said about her flatness. Uncle Jack had told her she was already smashingly beautiful and all she needed was a few years to round her out.
Celia Upton had already rounded out. Celia Upton wore low-cut peasant blouses and gipsy hoop earrings and full skirts with ruffled petticoats. She had a short blue skating dress with matching gorgeous gussie pants and wooden Hamaco skates on white competition boots. Celia Upton was worldly. That’s what Mum said. Worldly. The word thrilled Delia. It covered a huge range of possibilities, some known, most unknown. It reminded Delia of the True Romance magazines where a man kissed a woman and took her into the back seat of the car, then, ten minutes later, they were driving home. The word ‘worldly’ was like that ten minutes, a deep crevasse that filled her with fascination and fear.
It was not possible for Delia to tell her mother that she had arranged to go skating with Celia Upton, so her excuse sounded weak. ‘I hate surfing,’ she said. ‘I want to skate.’
‘Bea can’t go surfing on her own,’ her mother said.
‘Well, I’m not taking her.’
In the background Bea was blubbering, ‘It’s not fair! She always goes skating.’
‘You’re going surfing,’ Mum said to Delia.
Delia went outside and sat at the picnic table, ready to develop a headache or a pain in her stomach. It was Uncle Jack who sorted things out. ‘I’m in a spot of bother, kiddo,’ he said. ‘The tide is right for flounder. But you see, I half-pie promised to
take young Bea surfing. I can’t be helping your Dad with the net and watching out for Bea at the same time. I need a stand-in.’ He put one of his stinky cigarettes in his mouth and struck a match. The blue in the flame was like the blue of his eyes. ‘You reckon you can manage the deep end of the net?’ he said.
‘I’ll take Bea surfing,’ she said.
With so much to carry, they decided to take the car, putting the net in the boot and fastening the surfboards on the roof with ropes that went inside through the windows. Delia sat in the car, watching Uncle Jack reach up to tie knots in the ropes on the roof. His chest was a sandy brown colour with freckles and ginger hairs. If she moved her hand six inches she could tickle him under the arm. She said, ‘Uncle Jack, will you take me skating this afternoon?’
He put his head down in the window space. ‘Can’t skate,’ he said. ‘But I’ll come and watch my chick-a-biddy.’
‘And me!’ cried Bea, leaning across Delia. ‘Watch me too, Uncle Jack!’
‘Too right!’ said Uncle Jack, going back to his rope.
That’ll be the day, thought Delia and she stuck her elbow into Bea.
‘Ow! Dad? Diddy punched me with her elbow.’
‘You were squashing me,’ said Delia.
There was a wind on the beach matching the energy of the waves which rose like green glass where the light caught them and then toppled into whiteness, bits of foam tossed back into the air. There was a fullness of noise too, the boom of the breakers, the rush against the beach, the raking back over white shells. Dad and Uncle Jack were making jokes about who would be on the deep end of the net but everyone knew it would be Uncle Jack because he was the tallest. ‘What a bugger!’ he said. ‘I’ll end up back in bloody Australia.’
Mum stayed in the car with the windows open to keep cool. She dressed for the beach the way she dressed for town, except that she didn’t wear stockings. Her pink frock and bolero were newly ironed and the white sandals were the ones she had bought at Christmas. She wore lipstick and little pats of rouge on each cheek and 4711 eau de Cologne on her handkerchief tucked down her brassiere. As Dad often reminded the girls, their mother was a nifty dresser. When she came to the beach she brought a book with her. It was always the same book about the history of the Marists in the South Pacific and Delia was sure that her mother never read more than a few lines at a time. The book was simply there so that she didn’t have to talk to people who walked past with their children or dogs.
Delia and Bea helped Uncle Jack and Dad to lay the long string net out on the beach. There were floats on the top of the net, lead weights at the bottom and poles that had to be put in each end. When you were dragging the net through the sea, you had to keep the bottom end of the pole firmly on the sand or the fish would escape. It was hard work and Delia was glad she wasn’t doing it.
Dad and Uncle Jack were always joking around and having pretend fights. Before they even got the net into the water. Uncle Jack was having Dad on about not getting wet on the shallow end and next thing they were splashing each other and rolling around in the waves, shouting. Bea rushed in and jumped on top of them. Typical Bea. Delia yelled at her to help with the surfboards.
The wooden boards were really heavy. Dad had cut them from pine eighteen inches wide and five feet long, with a rounded shape at one end and a groove at the other to fit your waist. If the board got away from you on a breaker and you crashed into it, you could get blue bruises on your ribs. You had to be careful. Delia told Bea how important it was to hang on tight and not to go out too deep. Bea already knew those things but sometimes she forgot and then it was Delia who got into trouble.
They went into the sea behind the men, so the boards wouldn’t scare the fish or get caught in the net, and Delia helped Bea catch her first wave. They were only knee deep and the wave had broken way out, but it still came rushing in with a lot of push. Delia held Bea against the board until the little white wall was at Bea’s heels, then she let her go. The foam arched around Bea’s shoulders and drove her before it, right up the beach, then left her, screaming with pleasure on the wet sand.
It was Delia’s turn. She fitted the groove of the board just above her hip bones and as a wave broke behind her, she poised to leap. It was a fizzer. The board rose up and fell again, and the wave went on without her.
‘I went farther than you!’ Bea cried, as she dragged her board back.
‘I’m not used to surfing in shallow water,’ said Delia. ‘But with you here, I don’t have much choice, do I?’
‘I went right up the beach,’ said Bea.
‘That was a fluke,’ Delia said. ‘Out deep just about every wave is a good wave. These are just stupid little waves for kids who can’t swim.’ She saw Bea’s face get that blubbery look and she said, ‘You did a good job holding the board.’
The men were moving away from them and now at a distance. Dad was in water that went from his waist to his knees. Uncle Jack, much deeper, had to rise up in a swell which meant that he was bringing the bottom of the net pole off the sand. Dad always said you let the fish out when you did that. Did he tell Uncle Jack?
‘Have a race,’ said Bea, her board ready.
There were several cars on the beach now, all in a line on the firm sand by the high-tide mark. One man was putting driftwood into a trailer. Further along, there were three children and a dog digging in the sand at the water’s edge. The wind made the view in every direction misty with spray.
‘Here’s one!’ Bea shouted.
‘No! That’s no good either. Wait!’
Eventually they got a wave that took them into the shallows, where they grounded together, their knees scraping on bits of shell, and sand filling the legs of their swimsuits. ‘I’m so good at surfing!’ Bea screamed towards the beach, but there was no one to hear her.
They caught several more waves and then Delia noticed that the men were dragging the net in a big half-moon towards the shore. Uncle Jack had come around into shallow water and even from this distance, they could make out the top of the net moving up and down with the swell.
‘I bet they got lots of flounder,’ said Bea.
Delia put her hands on her hips. ‘I bet they didn’t get any. I saw Uncle Jack lifting his pole off the bottom. When you do that, all the fish swim out under the net.’
‘No, they don’t,’ said Bea.
‘Yes, they do.’
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t.’
‘Do, do, do, do, do, do!’
The men were now out of the water, backs bent over the poles that were furrowing the wet sand. The net ropes pulled against them and behind the line of floats that curved in the shallow water, Delia saw splashing.
‘We’ve got some!’ she cried, and she waded, trailing her board. She dropped the board on the damp sand and ran, yelling, ‘We’ve got some fish! We’ve got some fish!’
By the time she got to Dad and Uncle Jack, several people had stopped to look at the net coming out of the sea. It was alive with flapping. You could hear the slap, slap, slap of flounder tails above the noise of the wind and waves and voices.
Dad and Uncle Jack didn’t make a big fuss the way they had the day before when they got just two flounder. Maybe it was because there were people watching. They dropped the poles and walked along the net. Delia went with them, touching her foot on the dark grey fish which were jumping about, coating themselves with sand.
‘What do you reckon, Jack?’ Dad said.
‘About three dozen, I’d say, Frank,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to put them in.’
‘There’s the sack we keep the net in,’ said Dad.
Uncle Jack scratched his head. ‘You think it’s bloody big enough?’
They were talking like that when they all heard the screaming. Mum was half way down the beach, running towards them, waving her arms and shrieking something that Delia first thought was excitement over the fish. Uncle Jack looked quickly at Delia and said, ‘Where’s Bea?’
&nbs
p; Where was Bea? Delia turned, expecting her sister to be behind her. She wasn’t. Nor was she in the water where they had been surfing. That meant she had to be on the beach. Somewhere.
Mum was closer, pointing and screaming, ‘Bea! Bea!’ and Uncle Jack was running with high steps through the water. Then he dived into a wave.
Delia ran back to the place where she had left her surfboard, and shaded her eyes. She was bewildered by the fuss. Bea was all right. Bea was always all right. She just did things to get attention.
Uncle Jack was out there swimming, his arms making fast triangles through the water. Much closer, in the shallows, Bea’s surfboard was bobbing up and down by itself. Delia waited for Bea to appear beside it.
There was no one at the net. The group of people had moved and now were gathered around Delia, some on the shore, others wading out into the water. Mum was crying, high-pitched sobs, and Dad was holding onto her.
‘There she is!’ someone yelled.
For an instant Delia saw her sister rising on a wave, face down, her arms and legs spread like a starfish.
A man and a woman waded deeper into the water, yelling and pointing but when a big wave came towards them, they walked backwards.
‘He’s got her,’ the man said.
Delia saw Uncle Jack, then she didn’t see him. He was swimming on his side with his upper arm tucked around Bea’s chin. They would go through the top of a wave, down the other side and then disappear until the next wave bore them up. Dad left Mum and walked out to his shoulders, his arms held up to Uncle Jack. In a moment they were wading in with Bea held face down between them. She was all right. Her mouth had gone a blue colour but she was coughing up trickles of water and beginning to cry.
‘Praise God!’ Mum said.
Delia thought they would lie Bea on the sand and pump out her chest the way lifesavers did, but Uncle Jack just grabbed her around the middle and tipped her upside down. A lot more water came out of her mouth and nose and she struggled, making choking noises. Uncle Jack was gasping himself, but he carried her like that up the beach, followed by Mum and Dad. Then Uncle Jack sat on the sand and laid Bea, face down over his knees. He put one hand under her chin and neck while he stroked her wet hair with the other.