by Tanya Moir
The jersey he’s left on the sofa puts a bit of a damper on things, and I have to add more pinecones. Chastened, I put his sports watch and trainers and sunglasses straight in the bin. Then I move upstairs.
I pick up all Greg’s clothes from the floor, the stray socks, the pile of buttoned-up shirts beside the clothes basket. And then I remember something he quoted at me once — life’s too short for sorting laundry, wasn’t that it? So I take the whole basket downstairs.
I have a very nice time for a while. But when everything’s gone, and I look around again, the house still seems off. A bit grubby and cardboard and used, like an empty takeaway box. And I realise that I’m looking for something else to burn.
The oil painting that Greg’s parents gave us for our wedding catches my eye. I’m pretty sure those fake fur cushions would flare up well. A minky faux sacrifice. I can almost feel them under my hands. Almost, but not quite.
I turn my back on the cushions and go back upstairs. I pack a bag. And I drive away from Otatara. Perhaps a little too fast.
I’m not sure where I’m going. A motel, probably. But none of the ones on North Road look quite right, so I keep on driving up SH6, past the freezing works, Winton, Greg’s parents’ place. Cemeteries and racetracks.
Distance seems important. Speed, too. Because my husband is leaving me — isn’t he? — and I need to get as far away as I can before he comes back.
Which he will — about six o’clock, probably. Walk in, throw his keys down somewhere — forgetting their location in mid-air — and ask, Hey, have I seen his sunglasses? His trainers, his watch, his socks?
Unless I’m not there. Not a bit, not even slightly. Because I have seen his condom and his receipt. And he has no one but himself to blame. No you never, I didn’t, she was.
I drive north. Towards William Biggs. Crossing the rivers high. The Oreti, unreported, at my side, a line to the left, until it veers away west and I keep going. Through country that rises and hardens and dries, and then closes behind me. Somewhere near Garston I hear it snick, snapping shut like an old Swiss watch. And I see I’m not going back.
Jake looks up from fixing a bolt in my new handrail. ‘I’ll be finished next week,’ he tells me.
Behind him, the Waitemata rolls and glints.
‘Fantastic,’ I say.
From the end of the jetty I look down into green water shot through with the light of the sun, the slow sparkle of silt. No deeper, surely, than Coldstream Pool. The coils of Jake’s mooring rope float just below the surface, turning gently.
It looks generous today, the sea. Warm and thick and buoyant, ready to hold you up, so that you don’t even have to kick, you can just lie on your back and float like I watched Jake do last summer. And if your head should slip under the water, it wouldn’t be dark. The noise in your ears gentle as a heartbeat. And after a second you’d tip up again without trying, and take a breath and look at the sky.
It’s easy to launch the dinghy at high tide. I don’t really need the winch Jake’s put in on the ramp, but he wanders down to give me a hand with it anyway.
‘Careful,’ he warns again, sticking his own right in to adjust the chain, ‘of your fingers.’
I’m only going into the city to pop my head into the monthly sales meeting. Stand behind Gillian and smile, shake hands with February’s Top Earner and be home before low tide.
So I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself in a 1920s apartment in Emily Place at four o’clock, listening to the evening traffic build through the broken glass. The listing agent, Krishnan, is new and plainly terrified — of me, or dirtying his nice Italian suit, it’s hard to say. Together, we look over eighty-two square metres of dust and debris. It smells of exhaust fumes and pigeons and mould. I walk out through the high doors from the living room onto the terrace, look down on the little park and take a deep breath. There’s a whiff of something else back there as well. I’m pretty sure it’s money.
‘So where did they find her?’ I ask Krishnan, when he steps outside.
He gestures at another set of french windows. ‘In there.’ The frames creak gently as the breeze of the CBD moves through their missing panes. ‘The police climbed round from the next-door terrace and broke in. Found the old girl tucked up in her bed.’
Something to aspire to.
Krishnan shakes his head. ‘Five years. Imagine that. Without anyone having missed her.’
Ah, yes. The perils of direct credit.
‘She didn’t have any family?’
‘Not that they could find. So sad, isn’t it?’
I look over the balcony again. It’s a pretty park. A steep tropical triangle that nonetheless exudes the charm of a West End garden square. I was there, walking through it, the day Maggie phoned. Over seven years ago, now. You could have seen me from up here, watched me pause, rest my coffee on that park bench under the pohutukawa trees and sit down to take the call.
‘I’ve got a type three spinocerebellar ataxia,’ my mother tells me, sounding rather proud. ‘It’s very rare.’ (No one else in Bradbury Street has one of those. But wait — it gets even better.) ‘I’m the first case in New Zealand, the specialist says. It’s a one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance.’
Unless you happen to be in our family, in which case the odds are roughly fifty-fifty. Maggie doesn’t mention that, which is strange, because surely the specialist must have told her. Maybe she wants to spare me the truth. It doesn’t seem like her.
It’s about a month since I left her waving, set-jawed, in the window of Bradbury Street the morning after we got back from Dunedin. Today, as soon as I saw the call come up, I knew she must have got the results — Maggie never rings my cellphone. She prefers to leave messages I don’t have time to return on my answering machine at home.
There’s not a lot she can tell me about SCA3 that my browsing history hasn’t already covered. But I listen carefully, phone held hard up against my ear, shutting out cicadas and mynah birds, echoing jackhammers and concrete trucks and the hum of Beach Road traffic. This is my mother’s moment, after all. It’s not every day you find out how you’re going to die.
When she hangs up, I call Sally. We meet at Quadro at five-thirty. There’s a guy in the bar whose name I won’t later recall, and after Sally leaves, we go upstairs to his room and prove to us both that I’m alive, all neurons firing. At some point, I turn my head and see he’s wearing a wedding ring. But it’s too late now. And if I’m honest, I don’t care.
I’m a veteran of betrayal. It doesn’t have much to do with actual sex — it’s what we imagine goes on around it. The little interruptions and asides, the smiles and mistakes and accommodations. That’s not what we’re about here. This night is a swift white scrawl on an empty slate that tomorrow will be wiped clean. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.
(Anyway. If you still think that sex is intimate, you’re lucky. You’ve never watched someone die.)
The next morning, I slip into the shower and out of the door before he’s awake, leave him forgetting my name (which I may have said was Susan Fisher). I put a plush maze of corridors between us. No one looks up as I stroll through reception, tip-tap, and behind me the plate glass doors slide shut, and I’m out into a new morning, warm and humid and euphoric.
All those nights, married to Greg, when I’d sit in the bathroom, forehead pressed to the wall, and long for a trapdoor to open up. An escape chute into a crisp white anonymous hotel world with a privacy bolt and Do Not Disturb on the door. I’ve finally found it. Slid right through to the other side. Outrun myself. And now I can saunter down dawn-soft Lorne Street, jacket off, because the sun’s coming up, and I’m only thirty-five and I can still show my arms, and anything can happen.
Are you sure you want to do this?’ says Jake.
Four floors above Emily Place, we look around in silence. A little draught from the chimney skitters a pile of dead flies along the hearth tiles.
‘I’ll get all this shit cleaned out,’ I say. ‘You
won’t have to deal with any of that, I promise.’ There must be some firm I can call.
Jake shakes his head. ‘It’s got great bones,’ he admits.
‘So, can you do it?’
He sighs. ‘I was going to go to Bali this winter. Mate of mine’s got a house over there. Ubud — you been there? It’s nice.’
‘Ubud’s not going anywhere.’ I nudge my shoulder against his arm. ‘It’ll still be there next year.’
‘Yep, I guess so.’ He prods at a patch of mould on the skirting board, glances up at the ceiling and smiles. ‘The question is, will I?’
‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’
Jake smiles again. He walks around the apartment again, testing floorboards, tapping walls. Stops in the bedroom doorway, leans on the frame. ‘Well, there is something about the place. It feels — I dunno, sort of —’
‘Happy,’ I say firmly.
‘Yeah, maybe that’s it. I can see what you see in it.’
Happiness and clean bones.
‘So if I buy it, you’ll take it on?’
There’s a long pause. No looms large between us. I’m surprised at how nervous I feel.
‘How about,’ says Jake carefully, ‘we do it together? Split the profit. You and me.’
Interesting. I bring my eyebrows back down, play for time. ‘Yeah? Those sorts of deals can get tricky. There’d be a lot of sorting out to do. You know, contracts, lawyers — who’s liable for what, and all that.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Jake nods. ‘There’d be all that to go through.’
He watches me for a second or two.
‘Or we could just shake hands.’
I laugh. ‘On what, exactly?’
‘I put up half the cash, and we split everything down the middle. Fifty-fifty. Profit and expenses.’ He straightens up, takes a step forward, dusts his hands on his jeans and holds the right out to me. And I’m reminded, for some reason, of the kayak instructor at fourth form camp, his extended paddle arresting my drift downstream.
‘Fifty-fifty?’ Always the odds, if you think about it. Yes or no. You will or you won’t.
‘Straight down the line,’ Jake says firmly.
I take his hand. An oddly intimate meeting of palms. Fingers closing. Our first premeditated touch. We stand there in the midday light, agreeing, waiting for someone to let go.
It’s a slow-moving disease, SCA3. It won’t kill Maggie for six to twenty-nine years, so it’s okay if I can’t get back down south for a while. There isn’t any hurry.
It’s an awkward time for me. Gillian and I have just bought the business, and suddenly I’m up to my ears in accountants and printing bills and complaints and receptionist applications. Meanwhile I’m putting together commercial deals on the side to pay for it all, because I can’t be seen to compete with the rest of the agents in the office. There is no I in team.
When I do manage to get away for a couple of days, I find, to my surprise, that Maggie is much better. Physio three times a week has improved her walk, and drugs have almost stopped the shaking. Bradbury Street has changed a bit too. It’s not that it’s shrunk and grown more ordinary — I saw all that last time I was here. But from the moment my taxi crunches up the drive I can sense an alteration. Perhaps it’s a shift in tense. My past coasting down to a full stop. This is where my mother lived all my life — the part that she was there for.
The first thing I notice, when we sit down in the eighties-tribute lounge, is that Maggie’s knitting bag is gone. For as long as I can remember it’s lain on or beside the sofa, squishy and fat and needle-spiky, the closest thing we had to a family pet, and its absence leaves quite a hole. That wrap-over cable cardie will never be finished now. My mother has purled her last row.
She doesn’t seem too sad. ‘I don’t have much time,’ she explains, ‘for knitting anyway.’
Looking at the hospital appointments calendar stuck to the fridge, I can see what she means.
‘What did you do with it?’ I ask. ‘The knitting bag?’
‘I gave it to Jeannie from Institute.’ Maggie looks at me sharply. ‘Why? You didn’t want it, did you?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘It’s not as if you’d ever use it.’ She smooths a fold in her skirt. ‘You were always such a clumsy knitter.’
It’s not just the bag. My old bed, I discover, is missing as well. In its place is a brand new queen-size mattress and base with lofty sham pillows and brand-name sheets in a surprisingly tasteful pattern. I have to admit, once I get over the shock, that it’s comfortable. I lie back in its scented depths, watch the moon climb over Queens Park and wonder whom Maggie plans to impress — I can’t imagine anyone coming to stay here.
It’s a shame I don’t go straight to sleep, it turns out, because Maggie has a busy morning planned for us, and if I was going to make a dent in her to-do list I should have been up with the neighbour’s rooster and the bright white southern dawn.
First of all, we have to go to the supermarket, because even though she gives her helper Lorraine a list of things to pick up every week, it’s not the same as going yourself, and Maggie can really get around quite well as long as she doesn’t have to push the trolley. Next, we go to the other supermarket — the one that has the nice bacon — and the bottle store for whisky and wine, which she can’t ask Lorraine to buy because Lorraine is a member of one of those fierce new churches that have sprung up all over town, and we also need printer ink and begonias on special at three for ten dollars.
It’s a beautiful day, with a clear blue sky and a wind like a knife. I navigate the wide empty streets in my mother’s Yaris, braking too late, missing crucial turns, indicating with my windscreen wipers. Apparently I don’t know the back of my hand all that well. Maggie is tight-lipped in the passenger seat. She never did like me driving.
It’s a bit like taking a theme park ride through my derelict life — tootling through the haunted mine, knowing that any second now, some ghost from the past will leap out, the jaunty confronting bones of abandoned friendships. Invercargill isn’t that small a town. There’s no reason why we should bump into anyone I know. But of course we do.
There they are in the garden centre, Greg and Cheryl, choosing a potted rose bush. I can still pick the back of his head out of a crowd. Which is lucky, since it gives me time to duck into the hedging section before they turn their trolley around. Through a stack of leylandii, I watch them walk up the aisle.
Cheryl, I see, is pregnant. They wheel past me, Greg’s face above a mass of salmon-pink blooms, and I realise that we’re strangers.
Maggie emerges from Evergreen Shrubs and gives me a look, but doesn’t say a word, and I’m sufficiently moved to buy a bunch of sunflowers for her on our way out.
Back at Bradbury Street, I make us a cup of tea. A temporary respite, because my tasks are far from over. There are the begonias to plant. And it’s such a shame all the plums off our tree are going to waste, just lying there on the ground.
Inside, Maggie’s had nice new curtains made (a first for this DIY house) for my bedroom, which need hanging. And Jodie the cleaner can only do two hours a week and has a shoulder injury, so while I’ve got the stepladder out, the high-up things need dusting. There’s a speech recognition programme to install on Maggie’s computer, and since she isn’t too good with scissors these days, a daunting pile of ‘Dear Dinahs’ is waiting to be scrapbooked.
The secret to good embroidery, I read, pausing to rub my arms, is tension. It is vital to ensure that each stitch lies against its ground just so, neither loose nor tight, before proceeding to the next. This is especially true when embroidering silks, because an ill-judged stitch cannot be undone — the mark of the needle, once made, is indelible.
Ah, the nimble-fingered Hardings. I cut the column out and paste it into 2004, trying not to smudge the soft ink.
Unless you alter the pattern, your mistake will always show.
On Monday, I drive Maggie across town to her appointments, and
it’s just like old times, except the waiting rooms are bigger.
Her presence in the hospital creates quite a buzz, my one-in-a-hundred-thousand mother — around here, everybody knows our name. The nurses are charming and chatty. Hurrying doctors pause to say Hi, how are you, which is nice, even if they don’t have quite enough time to wait for a reply. And a few minutes after we arrive, it’s as if a fire drill’s been called, because children in scrubs are coming from everywhere, cupboards and corridors, and they all pile into the exam room we’re waiting for and then our name is called.
The students look and listen very hard. One gets to hammer Maggie’s knees, and one shines a light in her eyes. They’re all very sweet, but behind their concern you can see that they’re excited. Even Dr Singh, who’s in charge, has a glint in his eye. I don’t begrudge it to them — what triumph doesn’t stem from someone else’s misfortune?
‘Lily and James are doing a paper on me,’ Maggie explains, as the rest of the crowd moves off, leaving two of the students behind.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ says James, flashing me a smile.
He’ll be really quite handsome when he grows up. I’m tempted to say I do mind, just to see what he does. ‘Not at all,’ I tell him.
You can always count on us Hardings to do our bit for science.
When we get home, Maggie and I talk about the students for a while. Then we watch TV and wait for the dark. I’m getting used to my bed.
FOUR
In Emily Place, the apartment is down to a bare shell now, its old bones scraped — rearranged a little, here and there — and ready to take on whatever new form we decide to give it. A do-over, as the Americans say. A chance to rethink old choices.