LUCE
Luce did not believe Bang when he told her that was his name. But if someone says that is what he is called, even if you think he is telling a lie, it is still the only thing you know to call him, so you have to. So she called him that. Although she did tell him, ‘That’s a funny sort of name.’
The boy said, ‘It’s what I’m always called.’ He picked up one of the red clay marbles from his side of the board and moved it across the other pieces. ‘Yep,’ he said. He was not very good at the game but he kept making out he was. When it was his turn again he at once picked up the clay marble that looked like a nearly black Jaffa. But before he put it down again on one of the holes on the board he fiddled it between his fingers, as though he was thinking hard about where to place it, as though he had these different choices of what he might do next. Luce had thought when they first played that he would beat her easily. Then after two games she knew she was better than he was and Bang knew that too. Although he still did this thing with the marble moving between his fingers.
Luce’s mum thought that if they were playing checkers together then they would have to become friends. Luce had asked, ‘How long is he staying with us?’
Her mother said, ‘Until things are sorted out.’
That was the kind of answer the seven-year-old hated. It was another way not to tell her a thing. So she had said, ‘Until they know about Lola?’
Her mother ran her hands back through her long hair, smoothing and lifting it at the same time, so for once Luce could see the back of her neck, so white it was like she had put chalk on it. Then she said while she made out she straightened Luce’s collar, ‘You have to be nice to him, remember? Things are so sad for him at home we have to be nice to him.’
Luce said, ‘I don’t always have to win.’
And Luce’s dad said from where he sat at the table with the newspaper spread out in front of him, ‘No need to lay it on, Janice.’ That was the way her dad talked when he didn’t want her to know. But Luce did. She knew something very bad had happened to Lola. Bang was Lola’s brother but was at another school along at Carterton because his mum and dad didn’t live together. And Bang’s father was the man the police wanted to talk to about it. The whole school knew that. Bang was staying with them now because her dad and his dad were friends.
Bang didn’t like it that once the light was put out they had to go to sleep. It was never like that at home. But since he had come to stay with these people it was hard to know what was going on. He knew, though, he had to try. He had promised when he was getting into the back of the big car with another man, and his dad had leaned down and put his mouth on his head so he had felt how hot his breath was, and he had said quietly so no one else could hear, ‘Be good as you can now, won’t you, mate? Whatever Janice tells you.’ Janice who was Luce’s mum and had stood with her hands on his shoulders until he had moved away while his dad got into the back of the car and the other man closed the door. He had squeezed his dad’s hand when he leaned over and said that to him. Then the second time Luce’s mother drew him back in against her and crossed her arms over his chest he just let her do it. He was watching the car move slowly to the corner, where it turned into the bigger road and the cars that were always going fast along it, on the way to the big town across the hill. The windows were dark in the car his dad was in. As soon as it turned at the corner and flickered away behind the trees the boy took her wrists and moved them away. Luce’s mother called him Thomas though she must have heard the last thing his dad said to him when he leaned from the lowered window just before the car had left, when he raised a thumb and pointed two fingers and said, his mouth moving quietly so only the two of them would know when he said it, ‘Bang.’
Luce would have liked him to be her friend, but you can’t just make people want to be nice to you. Mrs Kavanagh had told them that when the Corby twins first came to the school, the girls who were so pretty with long hair you wanted to run your hand down, so different too the way they talked and everyone wanted to be their friend. But the twins only wanted to be left to themselves and sat together at lunchtime and held hands. You just can’t do that, Mrs Kavanagh said. If friends were real it was like a tree growing carefully and slowly, you don’t say ‘I want to be a tree’, ‘I want to be a friend’, straight off like that. So Luce knew she and Bang played checkers together only because her mum told them to, and he told her, ‘I could be good at this game if it wasn’t dumb,’ and asked her had she ever killed a rabbit. When she said no, not really, he said he had been out shooting with his dad so many times he couldn’t remember how many he must have killed. But if they weren’t really friends there was one thing Luce did without anyone knowing about it, she could keep a secret for him. When he first went with her to school and their teacher said he was coming here for a while rather than his own school in Featherston, Janey Baker of course who asked everybody everything said, ‘What’s his real other name? It’s not just Thomas.’ Luce said, well that was his name most of the time, but there were other secret names his father called him, although she was sorry, she couldn’t tell Jane what they were, Thomas had asked her not to. She knew that was a good thing to do, to tell it like that. Bang would have liked her saying it like that. Only by the end of the week he had to stop going to school because everyone knew, everyone said, ‘His father killed her, killed Lola, who doesn’t know that?’, the way they pretended too they had been friends with Lola, who was in one of the big classes and Luce bet she wouldn’t even have known their names.
Bang didn’t go to school after that and Luce’s father said, ‘You know, Tom, I think it would be more fun if you helped me round the farm for a bit, don’t you? Rather than school?’ They were all sitting having breakfast. Luce thought, he’s got the fluffiest hair I’ve ever seen on anyone. The sun came in through the window behind him and his hair was frothy, that was what it made her think of, all light and thin and shiny where the sun touched the edges.
‘Yes,’ Dad said, ‘this time of year I can always do with a bit of help.’
‘That’s all right,’ Bang told him. ‘I’m good at different things.’
Then there was her own surprise the day after Bang began to stay away from school to help round the farm. ‘Fencing,’ Dad had said that night while they were having tea, ‘never got that much done in a day before, know that? Comes from having someone to help who knows what he’s doing.’
‘Sort of,’ Bang said, very quietly, bursting with what Dad had said. Someone at school had told Luce he only lived in a box sort of house in Featherston, right in the dark bit under the hill, so no wonder being a farmer was such fun. He didn’t ever look straight at Luce when he said anything. But she knew he liked it when Dad touched his head for a moment while he walked across the kitchen to take another tinny from the fridge. He didn’t move away like he did if her mother touched him. ‘So,’ Dad said when he came back and sat down and ripped the top of the tinny with its little ring you had to flip up first, ‘done your packing, have you, Luce?’ She went to make sure again, although she knew everything was there in the suitcase on the bed. She had checked it three times already.
Because that was the surprise. That morning her mother had said to her when Bang and Dad had gone out to the shed, said it as though there was nothing so special about it, ‘I think you’d enjoy having a holiday with your Auntie Lois, what do you think of that?’ Lois was her mother’s sister but Luce could think of no one who was more different. Auntie Lois didn’t care that there were grey streaks in her hair and wore long dresses that were so light they lifted when the wind came up and then stuck against her as if they were wet, so you could see what she had on underneath. She walked round the house without any shoes, just her bare feet slap-slap on the lino. Her father said hardly anything when Lois stayed with them, that’s how Luce knew he didn’t like her. But she liked Lois because her auntie laughed and sang bits of songs, started and stopped singing just because she felt like it, and said words her mother and
father would never say. Last time she was here she had said ‘Fuck that for a joke’ when uncle Tim had phoned and said would they like to go across to see him in Greytown, and Mum had put her hand across the phone so he wouldn’t hear.
‘Yes,’ Mum said now, ‘I thought you might like to go right down to the South Island to stay with her, wouldn’t you, Luce? Now it’s nearly holidays anyway?’
Luce said, ‘But isn’t it so far? That’s why we’ve never been there.’
‘If you fly it isn’t far,’ her mother said, as if she had only thought of it. Because that was something Dad used to say a lot, when her mother talked about Lois, ‘We’ll get round to it one of these days.’ But now Mum was saying it was a nice idea, for her to go to Auntie Lois’s where there was snow in winter and now when it was getting on for summer it was hotter than you’d ever credit if you hadn’t already been there.
‘How old’s my cousin?’ Luce asked.
‘Thirteen,’ her mother said. ‘She’s very nice. She’ll look after you.’
Feilding was sitting in the car when Luce arrived. The mountains had come in so very close when the plane turned to land she had closed her eyes. The nice man in the seat next to her put on his ‘specially for telling children’ voice that made her feel prickly and wish that he wouldn’t as he told her when the plane gets too close to them, the mountains always manage to get out of the way.
Her cousin didn’t like her, she could tell that right away, although Lois gave her a big hug when she came through the door to where people were waiting. She felt herself folded into her aunt as though she was the biggest cushion. She held her hand after they had waited and taken her suitcase from the piece of black floor that kept moving around and went out to the big car that was like half a bus and looked like it had never been cleaned. It was hard to tell what colour it was beneath all the mud. There were pictures and bits of writing drawn in the dirt. And there was a man high up in the driver’s seat, his hair pulled back into a black ribbon and then falling in a ponytail like a girl’s. Lois said, ‘This is Gentry.’ He touched the side of his hat with his finger. He nodded his head sort of on one side and told her, ‘Don’t expect everyone to be as nice as me.’ Then he laughed and coughed at the same time, his voice like something was being dragged over bumpy tin. But Feilding didn’t say anything when she climbed up into the back seat and sat beside her, and Lois said, ‘Fee, honey, this is your cousin Luce.’
The older girl was texting on her mobile. She didn’t look at her cousin, not once, although it was nearly the longest car ride Luce had ever been on to get to where she would stay until Mum rang up and told her it was all right now, it was time to come back. There was a lake on one side of the car that was big as going to the beach. And on the other side a mountain with snow near the top that made her think of spread-out sheets. Feilding kept looking at her mobile and moving both her thumbs very fast. When Luce asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Feilding said, ‘Knitting. Isn’t that what it looks like?’ and Lois said from the front seat, ‘You can be nicer than that now, can’t you?’ They were all quiet then for a long time and drove on and on. Once Gentry put his arm across her auntie’s shoulder and pressed his fingers into the top of her arm and Lois put her own hand up to his to stop them moving. Then she lit a cigarette and smoked it herself before she passed it across to him. When he sucked on it Luce saw part of his face in the little mirror turn orange from the bright light it made. She was asleep when they came to the house and the shed beside it that was even bigger than the house. When she stepped down from the car and waited for Gentry to get her suitcase from the boot it was so cold her teeth were knocking together. At the edge of the sky it looked as though someone was burning something, but too low down for you to really see.
Luce could not believe how messy the house was. Some of the cupboards didn’t even have doors on them and everything just jumbled up on the shelves, bottles of sauce and things lying on their sides, or if they were standing up they sometimes didn’t have tops. Mixed-up clothes and things were just piled up on a sofa, and the vacuum cleaner was still there in the middle of the room, not even put away. But when Lois did things she moved so quickly and there was dinner on the table before Gentry had lit the big stove that he lifted lumps of wood into. ‘But better see where you’re sleeping first,’ her auntie said.
There were two beds in her cousin’s bedroom. Luce stood at the door and said to Feilding, ‘What bed is yours?’
The bigger girl told her without really looking at her that sometimes it was one bed and sometimes the other. ‘Like what I feel like. I never know until last thing.’ But Lois was standing behind them and said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Feilding. You’ll sleep on the floor if you talk like that.’ But said it without being angry. Then, ‘That’s yours there, Luce,’ she said, ‘the one with the big duvet to keep you warm.’
When they were sitting at the table that didn’t have a tablecloth on it, and the knives and spoons were put down jumbled in the middle of the table and people reached out and took them, Gentry looked at her and asked her, well, did she have any news from up home or was she just going to say nothing the way Feilding did, entertain them with her silence?
‘Don’t tease,’ Lois told him.
‘It’s not teasing, is it,’ Gentry said, ‘us just having a conversation together like this?’ He picked up this strange-looking loaf of bread and held it right against his jersey while he cut slices from it so when he put it down he had to brush the crumbs off his clothes. He held out a thick slice on the end of the knife towards Luce.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘I’ll butter it for you if you like. I’ve seen visitors in this house lose an arm trying to butter bread. That’s how sharp our knives are.’
Lois said again, ‘Don’t tease, Gentry,’ and when Feilding made this rude noise with her tongue Gentry said what Luce had never heard a grown-up say on purpose, ‘No idea how delicate that cousin of yours is, Luce. Even breathing pisses her off.’ But he laughed as he said it and Lois smiled across at her and Luce said, remembering what Mum had told her about being polite, ‘I’m not scared being here, you know.’
‘That’s very good, then,’ he told her. And she couldn’t believe it happened when he raised his hands and unwound the band that held his ponytail tight and flicked his head so the hair flung out and spread over his shoulders. ‘It’s longer,’ Luce said, ‘than a lady’s is.’
He was ladling out soup from a big bowl into the plates he leaned across and put in front of each of them. ‘Yes,’ he told her, ‘I hate the way men have no hair, half of them. I had to make people see how good I look.’
‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ Luce said. She moved her big spoon around in the soup the same colour as mud and the steam from it came up into her face. She did not look up when she said that but she laughed so he would know she liked him, liked him because she had never seen anyone who looked like Gentry or talked to her the way he did, like he already was her friend. Auntie Lois came then and stood behind him and put her arms round his middle so her arms were like another belt. Yes, she liked being here, Luce decided, and her auntie said tomorrow or the next day they might go and look at some real mountains. But when the morning came they didn’t go because it was so cold, and the rain beat against the window not like ordinary rain but thick globs of ice in the middle of it that slid slowly down the glass. At breakfast Gentry said when he came and sat at the table and Lois put this mix of stuff in her bowl, all sorts of bits stirred up together, ‘Looks like we’re in the cage for the day, doesn’t it, crumpet? Mountains’ll be there tomorrow, mind.’
Some days there were nice things to do and Lois and Gentry were fun. They joked a lot more with her than Mum and her father ever did at home. It was awful, though, sitting in the bedroom with Feilding when there was nothing else to do, and they weren’t allowed in the picture room because some of the paint was still drying. Her cousin kept flicking her thumbs across
her phone or talking very quietly into it so Luce wouldn’t hear. ‘You must have lots of friends, Feilding,’ she told her, but the older girl just looked across from her own bed where she still wore her pyjamas and said, ‘God!’
But then one morning the sun came out after Gentry had decided the weather was bad enough to go to work, and Feilding came and sat on Luce’s bed. She said, her voice all changed and friendly, ‘You want to go somewhere for a walk?’
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