Next, she phoned the theatre manager and apologised that she’d be a few minutes late, then gathered the tape and her notebook, flicked through her research notes and took off down the stairs and out into the street for a fast walk to the Court Theatre.
Her mind should have been on the writer of the next play the theatre was producing; usually she was much better prepared, would have studied the bio in detail and looked him up in the station’s archive. But all she could think about was the baby she was carrying and why David hadn’t been more enthusiastic. Was it because he didn’t want his colleagues to know? Or was it because he was scared she’d lose it again? She couldn’t blame him for that; she was worried too. But she had to block it from her mind. The doctor had told her to try to relax, not to get stressed or anxious, to think positive thoughts.
Kate made herself think about the job she was about to do. Rick Davidson was acting in his own play A Trap for Young Players and was apparently an engaging and lively interviewee, full of quotable quotes and one-liners. He’d be sure to come up with an ideal sound-bite, the news boss had said.
The fast walk to the Arts Centre made her breathless but she continued into the foyer where Jeff Farnsworth, the play’s director, was waiting at one of the café tables. She waved; she’d met Jeff many times. He stood up as she approached.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, trying to breathe normally without much success.
‘Don’t worry about it. Rick’s running late too. He must’ve known.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Would you like to do the interview here?’
‘It’s a bit noisy, with people at the ticket office.’
‘Right. We can go backstage. It’s quiet there. Would you like me to show you through? The box office will tell me when he’s here.’
‘Okay, I’ll . . .’
‘Sorry I’m late Jeff,’ said a deep theatrical voice right behind her.
Kate turned around. The voice belonged to a man a few years younger than her and not much taller. His beard was as neatly trimmed as his manner, clipped and impeccably polite, but there was a warmth to his smile, as if he were teasing her ever so gently.
‘You must be Kate Stewart. Please excuse me for keeping you waiting. I didn’t realise the theatre was so far from my digs.’
‘That’s no excuse at all, you slack bastard.’ Jeff clapped him on the back. ‘You’ll be late for your own funeral.’
Kate laughed. ‘It’s okay. I was late myself.’
‘Don’t let him get away with it. Make him suffer.’
‘Just don’t ask me any tough questions. I don’t know any tough answers.’
‘I hear you’re an old hand at radio interviews?’
‘It’s those rounded vowels. He picked them up at Radio New Zealand.’ Jeff imitated Rick’s speech.
‘No?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Rick said, putting on an upper-crust accent. ‘All that training in received pronunciation – that’s what people used to expect on public radio. Of course, anything goes now.’ Here he imitated a broad Kiwi twang.
Kate adjusted the heavy tape recorder strapped to her shoulder, turned it on and held out the microphone while her subject was on a roll. ‘How did you make the move to the theatre?’
Rick adjusted his features into a suitably serious expression. ‘How did I move to theatre? Very gradually. I don’t like being poor. But after I got a lucky break on Gloss I had to give up radio. I miss it terribly of course.’ He pulled a face.
Smiling at his wry humour, she put the heavy tape recorder down on the theatre café’s table and sat down beside it, inviting Rick to join her.
‘You sure you’re okay to do it out here?’ Jeff looked around the foyer. The box office queue had died down; it was comparatively quiet.
Kate nodded. ‘I’d hate to stop him now he’s warmed up.’
‘Warmed up? You make me sound like a corpse coming to life.’ He imitated a ghost spooking her, holding his arms high in front of him.
She laughed then continued on, asking him about his career, his family, his play. The interview lasted for nearly twenty minutes and revealed he had a partner but no children and was involved in writing for and acting at a new experimental theatre in Wellington. At weekends he earned the rent by doing DJ filler-stints on Radio Windy. His play, A Trap for Young Players, was semi-autobiographical, he said, in that it followed a group of young actors rehearsing Macbeth who were plagued with bad luck. ‘The curse of Macbeth comes to play in every sense,’ Rick laughed. ‘It’s more of a comedy than a tragedy.’
She had more than enough for a short item for local news and for a longer piece for the weekend arts programme. As he answered her questions, cracked jokes and continually put himself down, she had a feeling she’d met him before.
‘How are rehearsals going?’
‘Gangbusters,’ Jeff said.
‘Terrible,’ Rick said at the same time.
Jeff laughed. ‘You’re way too sensitive for your own good.’
‘It’s no fun watching your lines disappear. You spend hours thinking them up and getting them down on paper and – phht! – Jeff dispenses with them at the stroke of a cheap Biro.’ Rick was looking pained. ‘I know a lot of writers who’ve died in the aisle when their play goes into its first rehearsal.’
‘You’ll thank me for it on opening night. Less is more, you know.’
‘At the rate you’re going, Jeff, there won’t be any lines left.’
‘Then we can mime it. The critics will love it.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Rick pulled a face. ‘I’m taking that red pen off you tomorrow.’
~ ~ ~
Back at the station, Kate quickly edited the tape and wrote the intro, filed it and started on the next story for the day. But she couldn’t take her mind off the visit to the specialist’s. She got up from her desk, crossed the newsroom to the corridor and headed for the tearoom. It was empty. Taking her time over the tea, lost in thought, she felt her tummy, wondering where the baby would be exactly, hidden away in there. She smiled for a moment. She was pleased, of course she was. But she was also terrified that it would happen again. Did miscarriage run in her genes? What else was she harbouring in her veins, what else was pumping through her heart and brain that could affect her babies’ lives?
Perhaps it was time she found out. Perhaps it was time she started another search – an official and entirely legal search this time – for her birth mother. What if she were prone to heart attacks, high blood pressure, varicose veins? Could her children inherit cancer genes, diabetes, arthritis? Maybe there was a thinness gene hidden away there if only she could release it.
She’d often wondered about her origins; she’d often tried to find out who she really was, where she came from. But because it was illegal to know the name of your birth parents, because it was a dark secret and anybody who wanted to unlock that secret was made to feel guilty, criminal even, she recalled resorting to almost criminal means.
She had just turned seventeen. Fuelled by an intense unhappiness of being constantly at war with her mother, she’d left home, got a job, gone flatting and gone to university all at the same time. Perpetually broke, she’d spent almost every waking minute working – at university or at her job – and failed miserably at both.
The job was a grinding thirty-seven-and-a-half hours a week at the Social Security Department, a forbidding, old, dirty cream stone building in Hereford Street. It was the only job she could find that allowed up to eight hours a week off to nip down the road to university for lectures.
After just a few months, she’d discovered that the Social Security Department, which was responsible for paying unemployment and sickness benefits to people who were mostly unemployable (in an age when unemployment was one per cent), held a whole basement full of records that would most probably include information on the origins of her birth.
She smiled at the memory of the callow fellow - a whole grade higher tha
n her on the public service scale – she’d fallen for, unrequitedly, who unwittingly showed her how to gain access to the basement files. As protocol demanded, she’d filed a requisition for permission to descend into the bowels of the building to conduct a search for some specific information. Permission was granted.
The ancient lift only went so far, jolting to a stop with a rebound so fierce she thought they’d hit the basement floor. Around the corner from the lift well, steep narrow concrete steps took her down to a long corridor, lit by three dim bunker lights housed in wire cages, as if they might try to escape and take the light with them.
Pulling the key out of her pocket, expecting a policeman to jump out any minute and arrest her for illegal entry, she cautiously approached the steel door, hesitating for a moment, thinking perhaps she should go back before she was found out.
She pushed the key in. It didn’t fit.
She’d been set up.
Then she noticed another key hanging lower down on the chain. She tried it in the lock. It fitted. She turned it, twisting it hard until she heard a click and the door swung open, its hinges creaking eerily, as if she were in a Zombie movie. The undead would be behind the door waiting to attack.
She could feel her blood pumping, could hear it rushing to her head. She froze: could move neither forward into the vault nor back up the stairs where the fusty departmental air was a lot easier to breathe.
Ahead were row upon row of steel-braced wooden shelving units containing stack upon stack of brown card-covered files, each with a number and a code.
Could she do it? Where to begin?
To the left, high up near the ceiling, a shaft of light was pouring through a tiny opaque window. To Kate, it was a beacon, pulling her forward, granting her entry. She stumbled forward, unsure of herself, puzzled by the codes on the files. John, the man she fancied, the man who’d revealed the secret of the departmental tomb, hadn’t told her the codes were this obscure.
She walked along the rows, checking the numbers, looking for something alphabetical, something with the year of her birth, something she might realise.
She hadn’t counted on the system being smarter than she was.
If her birth records were there, they weren’t in any recognisable format and there was no possibility of searching all the files – there were thousands and thousands of them.
She retrieved the file she had the code to then took off, her heart still thumping, hurriedly locking the door and returning to the stairs, riding the clanking scary lift to her floor, stopping by the toilets on the way to recover, to stand for a moment behind the locked door then to wash her hands, her face, get rid of the dust and the subterfuge that had held so much hope.
A day or two later, her supervisor called her into his office and asked what she thought she was doing down in the records where she had no need to be. The requisition, he said, had bypassed him, which was entirely against the rules. The file she’d used as a pretence for entry was superfluous to requirements.
Cornered, she’d confessed.
She’d been so embarrassed she couldn’t remember what happened next; the following day she received a memo to say she’d received ‘a note’ on her employment file and warning her not to try anything like that again.
Within six months, she’d left for the illustrations department of The Press where the files were almost as dusty and inaccessible as in the public service and where she was still allowed time off for lectures.
Chapter 2.
Wellington. Mid-1988
Kate strode along the Oriental Bay promenade trying to walk off the remains of the Ansett omelette anchored in her tummy like a paperweight. She was in no state to contemplate lunch. Yet she wanted to make a good impression. How pernickety would she look if she refused anything to eat? She could see her mother feeling obliged to pick away at her lunch, embarrassed to be eating when her daughter wasn’t; or worse, her mother would feel she should go without too. And what sort of a lunch would that be?
Poor Mum. She’d made it perfectly clear that she didn’t want Kate to see her birth mother; that she was scared of losing her, that was what had happened to other adoptive mothers she knew. Better to wait until the meeting was over, see how it went and maybe then tell her. Or maybe not.
She watched two seagulls fighting over a piece of bread, screeching at each other as if their life depended on it. Would she be caught in the middle like that? Tugged at by two women who didn’t know each other, probably never would, each claiming sole right to her affections? The fat seagull won. The smaller one ran to the water’s edge and pecked at a piece of seaweed as if he didn’t care then ruffled his feathers. The sun glinted off the water behind him, making Kate shade her eyes.
Her mobile phone rang loudly in her bag. Dragging it out by its stiff little aerial, she lifted it to her ear, stretching her hands to reach around its girth and looking up and down the esplanade, hoping not to draw attention to herself. She hadn’t quite become used to it yet, it was so obtrusive, shouting ‘Look at me’ to anyone in the vicinity, but it had cost her boss $5000 and he’d given her a list of instructions to look after it and ensure nobody tried to run off with it.
‘I’m only giving it to you so you can track down those MAF scientists you need to film,’ Larry had said. Larry was the producer on Science Express, the TVNZ programme Kate was reporting for. ‘It’s been like herding cats to sort out who’s who there. I don’t want you to miss out. But don’t you dare lose it.’
How anyone could lose something so big and heavy she didn’t know, but she was as conscious of the programme’s budget as Larry was, and so she treated the new-fangled gadget with the respect such an expensive high-tech brick deserved.
The call was from David.
‘How did it go with your mother?’ he asked after they said hello.
‘I haven’t met her yet. I’m just about to go into the café now.’
‘Oh, sorry, I thought you were meeting at twelve.’
‘No, one.’ Of course David would forget the meeting time; he was lucky to remember what day it was sometimes. Just like Dad. He was so wrapped up in his job at National Business Review chasing people he called ‘commercial hazards’.
‘Did James go off to day-care without kicking up a fuss today?’
‘Yes. Like a lamb.’
She laughed. ‘Typical. It’s only me he plays up for.’
‘I’ll have to work on that. We don’t want him to become a Mummy’s boy.’
‘Not much chance of that.’ She laughed. ‘Look, I’d better go. These calls cost a fortune and the battery runs out in no time.’
‘I bet you feel as cool as Madonna with such a fancy piece of technology to play with.’
‘I feel like a dick, actually. People are staring at me. I’ve got to go.’
Kate took one last look at the waterfront – across to the tall concrete buildings climbing from the harbour up the hill, around past the port to the big white ferry docked at its berth and back again to the stony beach, the sentinel Norfolk pines, the row of houses and cafes along Oriental Parade. Nerves were making her heart race.
Now or never.
She plunged across the road, ducking traffic, and entered the café before she could change her mind. It was she who’d asked for this meeting, who’d written the first letter, who’d been crying out to meet her mother. And now she was tempted to run back out the door and forget about the whole thing.
There was nobody in the café matching her mother’s description of herself: short, wavy brown hair, not exactly slim, wearing a navy jacket and a cornflower blue scarf. Her own looks, her favourite colours.
She went in further and scanned the far corners. Not there. Perhaps her mother had chickened out?
Steeling herself, she slid into a seat near the window, picked up the menu and studied it closely. Salads. Quiche. Fish and chips. Fancy burgers. Toasted sandwiches. Too much choice. No appetite. She put it down and stared out the window. That’s when she
noticed a woman in a blue blazer and pale blue scarf hesitate outside, turn back the way she’d come, pause, and return to the café, stopping in the doorway then continuing on in.
This must be her mother. The mother she’d dreamed about all her life, the first grown-up she’d ever seen who shared her DNA.
In Her Mothers' Shoes Page 27