'Hang in there, Nick,' said Theo. As he finished his coffee he wondered why the bikie had no tattoos and the gaze of a poet. Happy baccy maybe, and a middle-class upbringing.
The traffic on the main highway was a bore, but once Theo turned off to go up the Waitaki Valley the congestion eased, and he could set his own pace. It was a warm day with low, even cloud given a pearly luminosity by the sun behind it. Like Penny, he had a country upbringing, unlike her he hadn't come full circle. Yet these trips to Central gave him a certain lift, and he realised that despite all the subsequent years in cities, his natural inclination was still to drive away from them, and that such progress usually gave him a satisfaction quite unconnected with any intention, or destination. And both his Canterbury and her Central were rain shadow regions bleached to wheat colours in summer by drought and sun. The sociologists say people are naturally gregarious, but that doesn't mean you always feel at home in the great rat heaps that develop. There's a saturation point to fellowship, and after it the spirit aches to be alone.
On the second visit he seemed to come more quickly to Penny's old house in the Dunstan Range gully, dust from the gravel road a drifting plume behind him, and again no sign of life in either of the other two baches. A scatter of tattered willows followed the creek, and the flats were patched with gorse and broom through which stock forced a few narrow trails. Penny's blue hatchback was parked behind the overgrown macrocarpa hedge, but Ben's trike had gone. Absent also was the blazing sun of his first visit, though the temperature was high enough. 'It's supposed to blow,' said Penny at the door, 'and that'll soon get rid of the cloud.' He remembered looking through the window on his first visit to see both of them asleep: the absolute relaxation of their bodies, the peacefulness of the boy as he slept.
She looked different — of course she did, but somehow, illogically, the way someone is the first time you see them is a strong image, and only gradually do the subsequent and multiple exposures reconcile you to variation and complexity. She wore jeans, but perhaps the same pale top. Theo was struck again by the whiteness and symmetry of her teeth in a face free of any make-up. The teeth suggested an American emphasis on enhancement of appearance which she couldn't entirely put aside. Ben was beside her at the door, barefoot and clutching a pink plastic and chrome potato masher. 'You remember Theo, don't you?' Penny said, bending to encourage his attention. He said nothing, but he pointed the masher at Theo, who wished he'd thought to get a lolly for him to make the meeting a little easier.
'Theo's an unusual name, isn't it,' said Penny, as if to excuse her son's refusal to respond to it.
They went to the back of the house again, to the church pew and a kitchen chair carried out by Penny. That's where Ben's trike was, though the hillside sloped up so quickly from the house, and the grass was so rough, that he couldn't have pedalled far. Penny told Theo that Zack Heywood hadn't managed to get a stay of the Family Court warrant, but that the sustained publicity was making the case politically sensitive, and also putting pressure on Penny's husband. Theo said that the public interest would move on to someone else soon if nothing in her situation changed, that a certain amount of progression was necessary if a story was to remain newsworthy. Rape, murder, insolent fraud, deceit by the mighty, exaggerated protest by the marginalised, and the cancer scares of the famous, were as common as turnips.
'So you're not interested any more?' said Penny.
'It's not my interest that's driving it. I'm just saying that time does matter and, as Zack says, if you can reach some compromise with your husband, get some agreement to renegotiate, then the sooner the better. And the police could find you any time while the warrant's still in force.'
Penny didn't reply for a time. She sat looking up the slope beyond the stunted plum tree, then allowed her head to flop back in a brief revelation of helplessness. 'I know,' she said, 'and it's awful for Ben cooped up here with just me. Christ, sometimes we hardly know what day it is. We eat crap food and watch the occasional sheep.' The boy was playing on the small patch of ground worn bare of grass beside the back door. He seemed absorbed in squeezing toothpaste into the cab of a small, plastic truck.
'Crap food,' he said.
'Don't say that,' said Penny.
There was something dislocating about the place and the situation, some quality of latent significance that threatened realism despite it being so closely bound to nature. The half sod house with a large front hedge, and little visible boundary besides, the dry hills rising up, the church pew at the door and Penny sitting on a kitchen chair in the rough grass with her head tilted back again. There was a metal plaque on the back of the pew to record its donation by Randall and Elizabeth Nottage 'Of This Parish'.
'Everything gets so mixed up, doesn't it,' Penny said.
'You think you've got a handle on stuff, you're set up nicely in life, and then it all turns to crap.'
'Crap,' said Ben with satisfaction. The toothpaste on his fingers had picked up dirt and tufts of dry grass and thistledown.
'Don't say crap,' said Penny.
'How long were you in the States?' Theo asked.
'Six years.'
'How did you end up in that television thing?'
'Erskine had some business connection with the guy who was producing the show, or co-producing it anyway.
It was about ordinary couples hosting a dinner party for celebrities and being judged on how well they handled it.'
'Who did it?'
'Did what?' she asked.
'Did the judging?' Ben came over and wanted him to get the toothpaste out of his toy. It was a messy job, but Theo didn't like to refuse.
'Oh, the live audience did. They were there throughout the dinner, on tiered seating. The dining table was on a sort of stage. You did all the preparations, and then were on camera for fifteen minutes serving the meal and making conversation with the celebrities and the series host Saul Vries. You wouldn't know him, or any of the celebrities, here. We lasted only two episodes. The audience the second time didn't like the choice of dessert, or our views on Californian politics.'
'Jesus.'
'I think we did it as an attempt to keep the marriage going, but we never admitted that to each other. Erskine hated it. You make decisions which seem sensible at the time, don't you, and then later you wonder what the hell you were thinking. It's so easy to see how other people bugger up their lives, but you're sure you yourself always act for the best.'
Ben wanted to sit on the pew and he watched as Theo worked on the truck with a handkerchief. 'He likes you,' said Penny. Poor little bugger would probably have taken to the devil himself for variety. He had no sense of changed circumstances, of course, of having come down in the world from an expensive home in Sacramento to a gold miner's hut in Central Otago. Probably the only thing he missed was his father. That was something Theo hadn't got into much in the newspaper articles, or with Penny: why she thought her husband wasn't fit to have custody of their son. Even after years of journalism he didn't like asking a woman about the details of a relationship. Going on a television show to help your marriage sounded very American.
'He needs more people, more kids, around him,' Penny said.
'I thought the phone message you left me sounded a bit odd,' Theo said.
'Well there's probably a bug on your phone. I'm hardly likely to say anything that gives this place away, or anything about my intentions.'
'I suppose not.'
'You're making sure you're not followed, I hope?'
'Sure.' Theo had kept a casual lookout because of the parson. Penny could be quite sharp, almost dismissive, but he let it pass. 'Is any cloak and dagger stuff really likely do you think?' he said. Why add to Penny's concern?
'I'd say Erskine's almost certainly got someone looking for us. He'll be pissed off the police here haven't been able to find me. He won't want to rely on just them: he'll be trying to find us.'
'He loves the boy a lot, I suppose.'
Penny just looked at him. She looked at him
as if he wasn't on her side, then folded her arms and watched Ben go up the slope a bit through the rough, cropped grass.
'The thing is,' Theo said, 'I'd like to be able to give some better reasons in my articles why you're so determined to have Ben with you — why the little guy should live with you, and why you've done all this to evade the decision of the Californian court. People will be sympathetic if they think the boy's in some sort of jeopardy, and that it's not just you being bloody-minded to punish your husband. Does that make sense?'
'You've been married. Could you make any sense of it to a few thousand strangers?'
It wasn't the same, though, was it? Once you decide to use publicity to strengthen your case, there's a sort of contract formed by which you provide a confessional feast, and hope to receive sympathy and support in return. Nicholas had a saying — publicity is the bear: sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. Theo could see that Penny wasn't going to say any more about her marriage than she had to, and he could understand that. Maybe, too, she didn't want to tell him, didn't feel easy enough.
'My life must seem a mess,' she said. 'It is a fucking mess,' she continued more emphatically, 'and I can hardly believe it myself. I wake up some mornings feeling okay, and then I look around this place, realise what's happened and start crying. Christ, I've gone from corporate cocktail parties, shopping trips to Europe, to this dump in just a few crap months. I used to come here sometimes as a kid, and I didn't much like it then either.'
'What's actually at Drybread? It's even marked on the map.'
'Nothing,' said Penny.
'Nothing at all?'
'Well, there's a graveyard sitting in the paddocks, with a few huge macrocarpa, or pines. That's about it. All vanished with the gold. I feel like some bloody relic myself.'
'How did the name come about?'
'They say a disappointed miner cursed it as a place of dry bread only.' Theo told her she was at the bottom of the swing, and things would improve, that transitions in life were often especially painful and yet essential. Such stuff is true, but very little consolation when the ground is breaking up around you. They should go for one more hard-hitting article and then sound out the court, and her husband. He asked her why she wouldn't share custody and let Ben live mainly with his father.
'Because he'll gradually take Ben away from me,' Penny said.
'He'll grow up to be his own man anyway. That's what you want for him, don't you? Someone who's strong.'
'I want him to love me. I want him to be happy as a kid, and not have the sort of time I did.'
The little boy was almost to the plum tree and still holding the truck in one hand. He stood looking up at the tree, wide-eyed because the cloud kept the dazzle of the sun from him. Maybe he knew they were talking about him, but it didn't matter. He was so young that he would never remember any of it — not the bach in the gully, not his mother talking to the journalist at the back step or crying in the morning, not even that he was the reason for a good deal of sadness and anger and bewilderment, and the object of much love from two people who now had little for each other.
Penny brought out some of her lukewarm cans of beer and she and Theo drank as they talked. She showed him recent articles from American publications concerning custody issues, particularly what was termed father backlash. One singled out the Californian judge who had decided her case as a known supporter of non-sexist rulings. 'You become part of a larger agenda,' Penny said. 'They're not necessarily on about individual justice.' Theo would make that the angle for his next article.
He felt a sexual curiosity about her for the second time. Her jeans were nipped in at the waist and tight on her thighs; her hair was more free than on his first visit. Because she was animated, she lost for the moment the expression of unhappiness that drew her face down. Naked, she would have an agile, loose-limbed body, good to look at even if her breasts were small. He imagined that, even as he nodded in agreement with her views on parental custody: he imagined her hair fallen back from her face, her mouth open to show those Californian teeth, the arch of her taut throat as he had seen it on his first visit while she slept.
Ben had grown tired of the plum tree's uncommunicative company so he came back and stood between Penny and Theo, between the pew of this parish and the kitchen chair. The truck remained in one hand; in the other he clasped a few pellets of sheep dung.
'Yuck, dirty. Throw it away,' Penny said.
'Yuck, dirty,' he said, and knew to retain his toy while dropping the dry shit away.
'He loves to repeat things, doesn't he,' Theo said.
'It's a natural stage,' she said sharply.
Theo had written about him as a three-year-old kid, but not from any personal experience of children. He was black and white — dark, soft hair, pale skin, though the Central Otago summer was beginning to tan him. Theo's car keys were beside him on the pew, and Ben picked them up and rattled them, turning round and round as he did so. Not only had Theo no children, but he retained little memory of infancy apart from the bright, open spaces of the North Canterbury downs, and the occasional family incident rendered dramatic at the time because of trivial eccentricity: a visiting minister fainting in the hallway and the glint of his clerical collar like a tusk as he lay there, the gorse fire by his father's truck yard, the soft thrush that broke its neck in sudden impact with the glass of the French doors as Theo stood watching his mother put the washing out.
'I've got something to ask you,' said Penny when they had been quiet a while. 'I feel a bit silly about it.'
'Ask away,' Theo said.
'I wonder if you'd visit my mother — she's in the retirement home in Alex. I can't go, because that's sure to be one of the places the police will be keeping an eye on. I don't mean they'll be standing in the corridors or anything, but I suppose the staff will have been asked to look out for me.'
'You haven't seen her at all since you've been back?'
'No.'
'Won't they wonder about me? Your mother won't have a clue who I am.'
'She hasn't got a clue who anybody is,' said Penny. 'Well no one who's alive anyway. She's got dementia. She's in full care. She's not seventy-five yet, but seems like ninety.'
What else could be fucked up for Penny? All the marriage and custody worries, on the run from the court order, and then her mother close at hand, but out of reach in more ways than one. At some time in our lives each of us seems to be singled out as the whipping boy, and the reasons beyond comprehension.
Penny suggested that Theo say he was a cousin from the North Island if anyone bothered to ask. She said there were cousins called Booth there. She told him she just wanted to be sure that her mother was okay, to know how she was looking: whether the people at the home were doing her hair and bothering to get her out of bed. Maybe the ones without visitors were neglected.
'So what's her name?' Theo asked.
'Oh Jesus, yes. You're right. She's Mrs Bell. You expect everyone to know the things you know yourself, don't you.'
'I'll go today,' said Theo. 'I'll go now, and send an email when I'm home to let you know how she is.'
'I feel bad about asking, but it would be one less thing eating away. You know? Here I am living reasonably close, and I can't even visit my own mother. Jesus, it's a fucking mess.'
'Ben's very lucky you care about him so much,' said Theo.
'You haven't got any children?'
'No,' said Theo.
'It's a special thing,' Penny said. She had one hand over her son's fist as she gently took Theo's car keys from him. Neither spoke, but the boy gave them up with little resistance.
'It's the only love I know that doesn't need anything at all in return, but then, Christ, I've gotten pretty cynical about love, I guess.' Penny seemed to think she had disclosed too much. 'And of course, kids can be a right pain in the bum at times. Can't they, Ben, eh?' The boy just smiled, responding to the tone, rather than the words.
'You really don't mind chec
king on Mum?' she said when it was time for Theo to leave. 'It's going to make a hell of a long trip for you. I feel bad about that.' 'That's okay.'
'That's great. Thank you. I've been worried about her.
I feel so useless sometimes, but maybe I can hold on a bit longer. You don't think I'm just some crazy, off-the-wall bitch, do you?'
The cloud was breaking up, and Penny and her son came out to the macrocarpa hedge to see Theo go. In the bare crucible of the hills they made a lonely pair.
7
His earliest recollection was of sitting on a large post in the stockyards of a Canterbury farm, aware of dry hills twitching in the distance and cattle immediately before him. A black steer had thrust its warm, snot-flowing nose onto his leg, and he'd been too afraid to move or call out. He began to cry only afterwards, and his father came and lifted him down, asking what the matter was, but he'd said nothing. It was the unsought surprise of it, rather than threat, which had unnerved him, and when he thought of it he had again the exact animal smell of the dusty stockyard, the great dark head looming, the folded, dun hills beyond.
It was an anomaly of childhood: its experiences had a vividness never afterwards attained, yet the very early years were resistant to memory, with just a few tableaux of surreal and lasting power in the time before a continuous recall.
The Malahide Eventide Home was close to one of the schist outcrops typical of the higher part of Alexandra. A modern, sprawling sort of place with long-run steel roofing, covered walkways and wide, wheelchair-friendly doors. There were a lot of reflections from the strong evening sun and the woman at reception wore a loose, green T-shirt and black shorts. 'Mrs Bell?' she said. 'Mrs Bell is in the full care unit, but she may be having her meal. Have you visited before?' Theo explained that he hadn't, that he was just passing through, calling on the off chance. 'It's not always convenient for full care people,' the receptionist said, but not unkindly. She spoke on the phone to a colleague, then turned to ask him if he could possibly come another time. Theo told her probably not. 'Probably not. He's a cousin from the North Island,' she said. She was a solid, middleaged woman with brown knees like steamed puddings and fair hair glinting on her bare arms. 'I'll let him come on down then,' she said, after a pause.
Drybread: A Novel Page 5