Huia Short Stories 10

by Tihema Baker

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Saturday,’ she replied. ‘Meet me at the park. Two o’clock,’ and she disappeared into the night.

  On Saturday morning, Mum asked me to hang a load of washing out, and I spent longer than usual, making sure the socks were hung in pairs and the towels and tea towels were pegged in neat, straight rows. In Waitapu’s winters the washing hung limp for days. If there was a frost, the clothes froze solid like stiff sheets of cardboard. The fog lingered sometimes until midday, and if the sun did eventually come out, it shone through the mist like a torch with half-charged batteries for an hour or two in the afternoon before the evening cold set in again. Winters were a constant juggle for my mother. Hanging washing out, bringing it in damp to dry around the living room on wooden clotheshorses, then finishing it off draped over the hot water cylinder.

  Afterwards, I went into my sister’s bedroom. Ruby was sitting cross-legged on her bed eating an apple, her schoolbooks fanned out around her on the bright orange candlewick bedspread.

  She looked up at me, took a bite of the apple and turned back to her books.

  ‘You can have my Elvis records,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you want them?’ she said, without taking her eyes off her books.

  A lump in my throat stopped me from answering at first, and for a moment I felt torn, but it was in that same single moment I knew I had to go. I felt guilty leaving Ruby, but going with Eva would be my only chance. There was no way I could have done it on my own.

  ‘No.’ I didn’t like Elvis’s music. I pretended to because everyone else did, but I could never work out what all the fuss was about.

  ‘Cool. Thanks, Ro.’

  I went into my bedroom and started stuffing a paisley duffel bag with clothing. I had no idea what to take. The bag was only big enough for a change of clothes and underwear, but it seemed important to take the poetry book my English teacher, Miss Barritt, had given me. I felt hot tears running down my cheeks and tried ignoring them. I crammed more clothes into the bag, but new tears coming made everything go blurry. I had to stop what I was doing to wipe them away with the cuffs of my jersey. Home had always been unpredictable, but everything about it was familiar, and I was scared. I had no idea what the future held.

  ‘Did you hang that washing out? Rowena?’ My mother’s voice was strained, tired from everything that was too much for her – the washing, the cleaning, the cooking, my father. Not only was I leaving Ruby, I was leaving her too.

  I went into the bathroom, wiped the tears away with a damp towel and blew my nose on a strip of toilet paper.

  ‘Rowena?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. It’s out, for God’s sake!’ I was agitated now, nervous, wanting to leave.

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that, young lady.’ Her voice rose above the banging of pots. Mum did her housework in the mornings and drank sherry in the afternoons. On her good days, she prepared the dinner vegetables before lunch and left them soaking in cold water in copper-bottomed pots on the stove.

  ‘I’m meeting Eva at the park.’

  ‘Don’t be late home,’ she replied. ‘Remember what happened last time.’

  How could I forget?

  We wore maroon rompers to phys-ed at college. No excuses. I tried to avoid wearing them that day, but without a note it was impossible. The red welts criss-crossing my legs and back were slowly turning into dark mottled bruises by then. Mrs Evans, the phys-ed teacher stopped what she was doing when she saw me. She stared at my legs over the rims of her pink-framed glasses, the silver whistle round her neck silent for once. For a moment, I thought she was going to speak, ask me a question perhaps or take me to one side, but in the end she turned away, pushed the whistle into her mouth and blew. Its ear-splitting shriek marked the start of another phys-ed period.

  ‘Long jump, people, line up over here!’ she shouted.

  I was ashamed of the marks on my body. I saw them as being my fault. I was the one who was late home, therefore I got what I deserved, but it was the act, too, that made me feel that way. The strap, the noise of it striking, my father yelling, me crying, Ruby sobbing in the background, my mother’s pleading. The hidings somehow made us different, inferior. That’s why I felt comfortable with Eva. I didn’t have to explain a thing.

  My mother had finished the vegetables and was outside at the clothesline pegging another load of washing out. Her fingers were red and stiff with the cold. She struggled to push wooden pegs over the doubled hems of billowing white sheets and the edges of heavy, sodden towels.

  ‘Bye, Mum.’

  She stopped what she was doing, a wooden peg clenched between her teeth and looked straight at me. We never said goodbye to each other. Her parting comments were usually orders – ‘Don’t be late’ or ‘Stay out of trouble’, but something felt different this time – it was as if she knew. I started to walk away.

  ‘Rowena.’

  I didn’t answer or turn around. I was scared that if I looked at her, I’d change my mind.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ she called out, ‘be home in time to mash the spuds for tea.’ We always had spuds. Always. Boiled or mashed and sometimes roasted. For my father, a meal wasn’t a meal without potatoes.

  I sat on a grassy bank at the park waiting for Eva. I found a stick and wrote my sister’s name in the dirt. Ruby. The enormity of what we were doing hit me then. We had nowhere to live and hardly any money between us. All we had was a vague idea of where Robbie lived. I felt tears coming again, but this time I wiped them away before they had a chance to fall. I didn’t want Eva to see I’d been crying.

  She arrived soon after, a bag slung over one shoulder, and was sipping on a bottle of Coke. We walked along the dusty pumice road towards the main turn-off, passing the Coke bottle back and forth, not talking much. The ranges were crystal clear in the winter sun, snow drizzling down their sloping sides like soft white icing. A thin wedge of misty cloud hovered lazily above the peaks and the river spread itself out in front, a sheet of moving, shimmering glass.

  Eva and I walked along the main road and stuck our thumbs out. Within minutes a truck laden with logs stopped and the driver offered to take us to the Plymouth turn-off. We looked at each other with stupid grins on our faces, threw our bags up into the cab and climbed in.

  The driver worked his way through the gears, manoeuvring the heavy truck away from the kerb. He wore a checked shirt and jeans and his skin was so tanned it looked like bronze leather. White laughter lines fanned out on either side of his sunglasses and when he took them off, his gaze drifted down our bodies and back up again. Another time, I knew Eva would have encouraged him, teasing him, playing with his ego. She was good at that, knowing just how far to go without getting into trouble, but this time she ignored the look, commented on the truck instead and the beautiful winter’s day. Before we knew it, he dropped us at the turn-off, heading out of Waitapu.

  When she climbed out of the truck, Eva winced and her shirt rode up, exposing the black and yellow bruises across her spine and lower back.

  ‘Eva,’ I said, moving towards her.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said, pulling her shirt down, tying its ends in a knot at her waist.

  We stood on the side of the road at the turn-off and stuck our thumbs out again. When no one stopped, we sat down on the grass verge and waited.

  ‘I’m going to marry someone rich,’ Eva said, lying back and using her bag as a pillow.

  ‘I’m not going to marry anyone,’ I told her. ‘I want to be famous. A singer – like Diana Ross, with a mansion and servants.’

  ‘The man I’m going to marry will be handsome and rich. Very rich. He’ll buy me expensive clothes, jewellery, take me round the world. Wanna come?’

  At that moment, lying back on the soft cushion of grass, looking up at the electric blue sky, winter white sunlight surrounding us, anything seemed possible. After a while Eva spoke again.

  ‘Remember those signals we worked out?’ she asked. ‘We might need to u
se them today.’

  Eva was the one who always made the risky decisions. She’d worked out the signals the day we’d planned to meet Robbie at the river. He always had smokes, but the swimming hole where everyone hung out was a fifteen-minute walk along the main road, and I had to be home by five o’clock to help with tea.

  ‘We’ll hitch,’ Eva said and she stuck her thumb out, like we’d seen other hitchhikers do. It wasn’t long before a black Mini stopped to pick us up. The two men inside looked different from anyone I’d ever seen. They were olive-skinned, with dark hair and deep brown, almost black eyes, but they weren’t Māori, because their features were sharper, their chins and noses almost pointed.

  When they opened their mouths, I knew they were French. I’d taken languages for a year in the third form. I recognised a few of the words they were saying but they spoke too quickly for me to understand anything they said. If they could speak any English, they didn’t let on. Eva tried to explain how we wanted to be let off by the swimming hole further down the main road, and they nodded as if they understood, but when we approached the turn-off, they drove straight past, ignoring Eva’s protests.

  ‘Hey, dickhead, we want to get off here,’ she said. The man in the passenger seat smiled, pointing ahead. Eva leaned towards me then, cupping her hand in front of my ear.

  ‘We could be in deep shit here, Ro,’ she whispered. ‘We need to work out a code.’ Her lips touched my ear lobe as she talked. I could feel her breath, hot and damp inside my ear. ‘If they ask us to do anything dodgy this means “no”, OK?’ She rubbed at the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, ‘and if we agree to anything this means “yes”, not that we will,’ and she pulled at her right ear lobe. ‘Got it?’

  ‘I think so,’ I whispered back, wishing I was at home with Mum, mashing the spuds.

  ‘If I do both, it means “not sure, but we’ll give it a go”, OK?’

  We didn’t use the signals that day, because the Frenchmen drove to the petrol station, just past the swimming hole, and let us off.

  ‘Too dangerous,’ the driver said in English. ‘Stop here. Safer.’ We walked back towards the river and Eva swore the whole time.

  ‘Bastards,’ she said. ‘Bloody dickheads.’ Eva always swore when she was nervous.

  We were almost asleep on the side of the road when a car finally stopped, a small rusty beige station wagon. A middle-aged man with glasses sat at the wheel, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Hello, girlies,’ he said. ‘Going far?’ He had one of those mouths with deep creases at the corners that veer downwards, and when he smiled they dipped even further towards his chin. It was hard to know where he was coming from, with his voice all smiley like that but his mouth telling you something different.

  ‘Hop in,’ he almost sang, pushing clothes and papers off the bench seat beside him onto the floor. Eva pulled at her right ear lobe and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. He patted the seat beside him, but we ignored him and climbed into the back seat, pushing aside empty beer bottles and cardboard boxes to make room.

  ‘Suit yourselves,’ he said, turning to us with that weird smile again.

  He started the car on the second go and drove up over the hill leading out of Waitapu. A few kilometres further on he flicked the indicator on and turned into the pub on the outskirts of town.

  ‘Just need to stock up,’ he said. ‘Won’t be long.’ Half an hour later we were still waiting for him. We couldn’t risk going in to look for him. Everybody knew everybody in Waitapu. Someone in there was sure to know us and ask what we were up to. Eventually he came out, carrying a wooden crate of DB and smelling of beer. He pulled a bottle out of the crate, took the lid off with his teeth and sucked on it as we drove towards Plymouth.

  It took us half an hour to get to the next pub, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, its car park full of stock and logging trucks. Dirty plate glass windows on one side of the building framed the restaurant and the truck drivers seated inside, wearing their checked shirts and jeans like some sort of uniform. This time we did get out, the smell of fried food too hard to resist. A haze of cigarette smoke hit us as soon as we walked in and the whole place felt like a B-rated cowboy movie.

  Our driver bought us a shandy each and two scoops of greasy chips drowned in tomato sauce. We watched him play pool in the public bar, missing almost every shot he played, guzzling on his bottle of beer the whole time.

  Eva rolled her eyes at me. She started speaking to the truck drivers while we waited.

  ‘Any of you going to Plymouth?’ she asked, leaning with her back against the bar, one arm stretched along its length as though posing for a photograph. When Eva smiled her whole face lit up. Her long, brown, sun-bleached hair hung over one eye and her shirt gaped in places it probably shouldn’t have. I’d seen this before with Eva, the effect she had on men without even trying. The combination of her knowing smile, the one that made her look as though she had a secret she might or might not tell, and those jade-green eyes surrounded by long dark lashes had them hooked straight away. The men at the bar couldn’t help themselves, but there was a reluctance too in their glances as though they knew they might be out of their depth. Eva was young enough to be the daughter of some of those men.

  ‘No. Sorry, love. Going in the other direction.’

  Some of the drivers were sleeping the night in their truck cabs or had rooms booked, wanting an early start in the morning. Others were heading back towards Waitapu.

  Our driver wandered over from time to time to check on us, and Eva kept dropping hints.

  ‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she said. ‘How long does it take to get to Plymouth from here?’

  ‘Don’t panic. One more game,’ he said and wandered off again.

  ‘Can’t wait to find Robbie,’ she said to me. ‘I think I know the name of the street he lives in. We could knock on all the doors.’

  Our driver disappeared into the toilets at one stage for what seemed like hours, but eventually came out again, pulling at his fly.

  ‘Come on, girlies, we’re outa here.’

  A few heads turned as we followed him out of the public bar to the car park. It was starting to get dark. His car looked much older and rustier in the dusky light parked way out here in the middle of nowhere. I doubted it would ever get us to Plymouth.

  He drove on, the headlights picking out flattened possums in the middle of the road. Sinister black clumps of gorse and broom rushed into view on the corners and disappeared again. The hills surrounded us, like menacing animals crouched beneath a dirty grey sky, waiting to pounce. He turned the car lights on and cat’s-eyes on white posts at the side of the road lit up like neon flares as we passed. Eva leaned forward, watching the road like a hawk.

  ‘We want to get there in one piece, mate,’ she said whenever the car started veering towards the ditch or across the white centre lines.

  ‘Watch the frickin’ road!’ she yelled at him more than once, poking him in the ribs from behind. Further on, a roadworks sign gleamed in the headlights and just past that, barriers had been erected with iridescent strips blocking entry to an unopened section of new road. He pulled over, stopped the car and got out. We watched him remove two of the barriers, then climb back in to drive us through.

  ‘Need a piss,’ he said. He opened the car door, stood outside for a moment, then leaned back in. ‘Want to come and hold it for me?’ he said, smiling that weird smile again. Eva rubbed hard at the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said.

  ‘No thanks,’ I blurted out at the same time.

  ‘Bloody ungrateful bitches,’ he spat, and stumbled into the darkness.

  We waited, staring at the looming darkness through the windscreen, not talking. It wasn’t meant to be like this. We had plans, big plans, and he didn’t feature in any of them. Ages later he came back, opened the car door and turned on the interior light. The dull yellow glow was enough to show up his round flushed cheeks, his bushy eyebrows, the dampness abov
e his top lip and the bloodshot eyes behind his glasses. He sat for a while in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, both hands resting on the steering wheel.

  ‘This is the deal,’ he said after a while, turning to look at us. ‘You two girlies come up the front and give me a kiss, or I’m dropping you off here.’ From inside the car, everything outside looked pitch black – scrub and hills for miles, no house lights anywhere, and we hadn’t seen another car since leaving the last pub.

  I waited for Eva to give me a signal, but for a while she just sat there. I could almost see her thinking, working out what she would have said if we hadn’t been stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ she might have said, then maybe, ‘Sleazy old bastard,’ for good measure. My mother said she had the mouth of a gutter tramp but that was one of the things I liked about Eva, the way she swore. I felt exhilarated when she used words I only ever thought about but never had the guts to say.

  She slowly pulled at her right ear lobe with one hand then rubbed the bridge of her nose with the other.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but after this you take us straight to Plymouth.’

  I knew all she wanted to do was find her brother and get us back on the road to Plymouth.

  He leaned across the bench seat of the car to open the front passenger door.

  ‘That’s more like it. Come on girlies,’ he said. ‘Up here by me.’

  We climbed out of the back seat. Eva sat next to him on the bench seat, and I sat squashed up against the passenger door. As soon as we were in the car he took off his glasses and started pushing his face towards Eva, but she beat him to it and leaned up to kiss him lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Not good enough,’ he said. ‘On the kisser, here.’ He pointed to his drooping mouth. Eva looked at him as though he were a pile of dog turd, the same stuff we tried to avoid while walking to school in Rata Street, back in Waitapu, where all the stray collarless dogs roamed. She leaned across anyway and pecked him quickly on the lips.

  ‘That’s better,’ he smiled that creepy smile again. ‘You too girlie, come on.’ I leaned across Eva in the front seat, closed my eyes – anything to get us out of there. I could smell his stale, beery breath, feel the bristles of his chin, his damp lips searching for mine, and I started to gag. It was then I felt his hand come up and slide inside my shirt, but Eva was too quick.