by Ian Wedde
‘It was poor old Nigel,’ I say, daring Frankie to push her luck. ‘He had a heart attack. Along by the Aquarium.’ Frankie looks a bit crushed. ‘And Peter won’t be in today,’ I say. ‘He’s indisposed.’
‘Ah,’ says Frankie, and goes back to her computer. ‘Coffee’s hot,’ she adds, as if turning a switch to normal. And then, as if it doesn’t really matter, ‘Is the old faggot okay?’
‘No help required, apparently,’ I say, somehow associating that information with the little pink plastic watering-can at Reception.
I sit down to check my emails and there, like a row of spoiled brats, are no fewer than six red-flagged messages from my big brother Sandy. They’ll all be the same, each with a trying again sigh attached. I sit looking at them. Even the cigar taste on—I haven’t heard my inside voice say the name for a good long time. Even the cigar taste on Ulrich’s—Uli’s—mouth was nice, and so was the way he carefully inserted two of his perfectly manicured art conservator’s fingers in my cunt.
My cunt.
His nice jokes about handling works of art with care. I liked that.
I also liked it when there was little enough careful handling later on.
I open the first of Sandy’s emails and see the word MICK’S in capital letters. I go to the last one and there it is again, MICK’S. I know perfectly well that he wants Micky to move out so the house can be sold, and I know why, too.
I think MICK’S gone off the rails. He rang me.
MICK was never on rails, Sandy, you moron. Nor was Mick.
There’s nothing more from the bank.
‘I’m having lunch with Soph,’ I say to Frankie. ‘Something’s up.’
‘Never a dull moment,’ says Frankie, and waits.
‘Listen,’ I say.
‘It’s okay, Veronica,’ she says. ‘I can read the tea leaves, too.’
‘Can you let me know if the bank calls again?’
‘They won’t,’ she says. ‘They got the red-flag call in before the long weekend, then they all buggered off. You won’t hear again till the middle of next week. Plenty of time.’
My first thought is, How blessed I am to have someone like Frankie on the team.
My second thought is, But there’s never been plenty of time.
I hardly even notice that I’m walking around the block to the Middle Eastern restaurant.
‘Was I wanted, Mum?’ asks Soph. She’s got her grandfather’s acetylene eyes that just go on looking at you. But her grandmother’s lovely olive complexion. And her mad hair.
‘Oh, Soph!’ I say. ‘Don’t tell me!’
‘Are you nuts?’ she says, still looking. ‘Not me, for God’s sake. Angie, Mum. Wee Ange.’
So, we got there smartly. It’s what happens when you know each other as well as me and my daughter.
‘Bloody hell,’ I say. ‘How far?’
‘Three months.’
We’re eating falafels, which I don’t like, but I’m supporting Soph who’s gone vego in support of her daughter, my granddaughter, wee Ange, Angie, Angela, how could she be!
‘She’s asking, Mum. You know. Was I wanted.’
I push my falafels away. They seem at once oily and dry. Everything that’s happening today involves conflict of one kind or another. Sophie’s still looking at me without shifting her direction—it’s ‘the look’ all over again, the one that Dad used to freak us out with, though he didn’t know he was doing it.
‘As if it makes any difference,’ I say.
‘I know, Mum. But you try telling a seventeen-year-old that. Everything’s black and white.’ She pauses and smiles at me from under those eyes. She’s thirty-seven and we both know that for seventeen years it hasn’t mattered whether Angela was ‘wanted’ or not. There’s a line of grey along the lovely middle parting in the mad hair Sophie got from her grandmother, and the voice inside me that writes other people’s scripts for them says, Old enough to be a grandmother.
‘Back in the day we used to call them shotguns,’ I say. ‘I was out-to-here with you in my wedding dress. Pete was irresistible, he was the most fun of anyone I’d ever met, and to say you weren’t wanted would be like saying I never wanted him. Never wanted to root him. But I did, and no regrets.’
‘Settle down, Mum,’ says my daughter. ‘No need to get into the sordid details.’ Then, at last, she drops her eyes. ‘Can’t really say the same about Angie’s dad, the wanker.’
‘But it didn’t make any difference, did it?’ I say to the grandmother-to-be in front of me who has half a falafel on her fork and a dab of hummus in the corner of her mouth.
She shakes her head, still not looking. Then I see the tears plopping into her plate. ‘She’s only a little kid!’ she says, as if she’d rather be shouting.
I reach across the table with my serviette and dab the hummus away from her lips, which are shaking.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘No you’re not, Soph,’ I say. ‘Any more than you were when you saw Angie for the first time, mostly covered in white goo, with a face the colour of a radish. It was love at first sight. I’ll bet you weren’t thinking about the wanker then. And you were what, nineteen?’
‘Twenty,’ says Sophie. ‘Fully paid-up adult, eh.’ Then she heaves a great big sigh, mops her eyes with her paper table napkin and blows her nose into it. Then she puts it on her plate.
‘Are you quite finished?’ I say. ‘You’re disgusting.’
That nice crooked smile of hers. God almighty, we could all have had different lives, but what’s the point of wandering around in that ‘if only’ no-hoper paddock?
‘I know what you’re going to say, but you don’t need to say it. Just nod your head if I’m right,’ she says. I nod. ‘Not yet,’ snaps my daughter, whose sense of humour is only one of the things I love about her. ‘You’re going to say that of course Angie’s body’s her own and she’s got the right to make her own decisions about it and the life she’s going to live in it, but what I need to do is give her a reason to believe I’d like her to have the baby, even if I don’t, because that’s the only way she’ll give herself half a chance to accept that she does, if she does, and it’s only fear.’
There’s a pause while I unravel Soph’s blurt, which has all the marks of a thought that’s been going around and around in her head until it’s a complete tangle, like the hair that’s sitting on top of it.
‘Well?’ she says, boring in with the eyes.
I nod. It wouldn’t be fair for me to start crying now, so I don’t, though at this particular moment I’d like nothing better than to grab Sophie and give us both the excuse to have a bloody great big sooky hug-and-howl together.
‘You want to hear the good part?’
I nod again.
‘He’s a Frenchman in the vineyard supply business from, wait for it, Tonnellerie Rousseau Père et Fils.’ Sophie makes a point of giving the French words her best pouty pronunciation, which is legit. ‘The poor girl thinks she’ll go to France with him. She told me his joke about the vibrating sorting table. I wonder how many times he’s told that one. Oh, and he’s married. With kids. And he’s about forty.’
‘And you want to kill him,’ I say.
‘No, I don’t,’ says Soph. ‘I want my daughter to kick him in the nuts and tell him he’ll have to sell quite a few more fucking wine barrels for the next few years.’
‘Does she really believe this guy?’
‘Mum, she’s seventeen. So was I, once. So were you. That wasn’t the right question.’
‘None of us knew what that was, did we? The right question,’ I say. ‘But look—here we are.’
There’s a silence while we look at each other. The Pam part of Sampan was a solo mum too, not much older than me then. They’re always with us, the Pams—in fact, in some ways they are us. Sampan was almost adopted family, for a while.
‘Vibrating sorting table,’ I say. ‘It’s a more complex industry than I’d thought.’
‘Thanks, Mum.�
�� My daughter has a wonderful laugh that’s always finished with a gurgle at the back of her throat. She’s a toughie when it comes to it, and she’s been a great mother. ‘Well, all hands to the pump, probably.’
‘Or not,’ I say. ‘It’s not your hopes you need to be getting up.’
She gives me a grin. ‘Got the last word, as usual,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you know how it goes. Angie may want to have a wise old woman chat.’
‘Any time,’ I say. And here come those words again. ‘And you take care of yourself, too.’
‘You too, Mum.’ Her cellphone rings and she looks at her watch. She runs the office at Nelson Park Primary School. ‘Back to the front line.’ She waggles the phone at me.
‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘I should.’
She comes around the table and pushes her face into my neck. ‘Love you, Mum,’ she says, and I want to say, ‘Love you too, Soph,’ but I can’t without losing it, so I pull her face into my neck and hold it there. She lets me keep her for as long as I like while her warm breath puffs down the front of my blouse onto my breast.
Then she’s going out the door into the sunshine. She moves just like my Sophie. She still has the same forward momentum as the kid who took her first steps at Tangoio beach and fell flat on her face in the sand and looked up laughing through her crazy sandy curls and her mouthful of grit. The kid who wouldn’t be told no when she was learning to swim and ended up swallowing so much water she chucked up a whole lot of carrots and stuff and they had to evacuate the kids’ pool and drain it. The high-school kid who stormed out when Pete told her she wasn’t to, though he always went off and charmed his way into whatever dodgy situation she needed to be fished out of at two in the morning, and probably had a couple of drinks or a joint while he was there, to give him credit. The girl who looked me in the eye and said she was pregnant to ‘some dick’. The one who’s turning left and is marching with quick strides to where her car’s parked. She’s my best friend, she’s my baby, she’s my big girl, she’s probably a grandmother-in-waiting. How could anyone be so fucked up—Fucked. Up.—as to have any use for a term like ‘past its use-by date’?
The sunshine looks good out there, bright enough to show up the rhythmic smears of glass-cleaning on the street-front window, and I think it might be nice to go over to the Promenade and see what colour the water is now, and what colour sound it’s making, but I’m not quite ready to stand up.
The restaurant owner comes over to clear our plates away, and asks a bit anxiously if we’re finished. Neither of us has eaten much.
‘Yes thank you, George,’ I say. ‘It was very nice, thank you.’ Then I say, ‘I’d like a glass of wine, please.’
Soph and I have lunch here quite often, couple of times a week—I’m familiar with the thumbed menus, the fly-spotted tourism posters of the Roman ruins at Baalbeck, and the sound of George’s wife alternately complaining and singing in the background, it’s hard to tell the difference and it probably doesn’t matter. But I’ve never asked for a glass of wine before, let alone after finishing my lunch.
The man looks at me with a little smile. He’s got a lot of black hair growing out of his ears and nostrils, and Soph’s joke about it is that his bum must look like a curry-combed stallion’s.
‘Something to celebrate?’ he asks.
‘Oh Yes,’ I say, with a capital Y, and mean it.
‘You’re an old hippie,’ Soph had said over her shoulder as she left, and I know she intended it as a compliment of sorts. But really, does what I’m feeling belong anywhere or at any time in particular? Or to anyone? I know George’s name because we’ve chatted, I know he’s Palestinian and an Orthodox Christian, and I know both his and his wife’s families were originally from Galilee, which I associate with the Christmas crèche Micky used to vandalise enthusiastically on our atheist father’s behalf when we were at Clyde Quay Primary School in Wellington, but I realise I don’t know if he and his wife have kids or grandchildren, let alone great-grandchildren, or if they like living in Napier, or even why they’re here.
‘Would you like to try a glass of Lebanese wine, or would you prefer Hawke’s Bay?’ asks George in his polite way, but the impression I’m getting is that he thinks the situation calls for something special.
‘Lebanese,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure. A red wine, if possible.’
‘Chateau Musar,’ says George. ‘They also make a good arak.’
What pisses me off about Sandy is that his work at the university up in Auckland’s all about different cultures and what makes them tick, as he never tires of reminding us, but the furthest he ever gets with that in the real world is the scenic bits of his female foreign students. And, just lately, how he can buy one of them by booting Mick out of the house, unless I’m much mistaken.
George brings me the glass of wine, and I see his wife standing between the kitchen and the counter with a big smile on her face. She gives me a wave.
‘My wife thinks you will have a new grandchild,’ says George. ‘Is it true?’
‘Yes,’ I say, raising the glass to her. ‘Maybe.’ I have to pause for a second before I correct myself. ‘Great-grandchild,’ I say, almost not believing it myself.
‘We have six,’ says George, who looks about fifty, max. ‘Only grandchildren! But the parents don’t want to cook.’
‘In that case, George,’ I say, ‘you don’t have the inheritance thing to worry about.’
‘They already have all of it,’ he says, as if what I’d just said wasn’t a joke. And maybe it wasn’t.
There’s only one lunch table still in action. George’s wife is hovering, and I don’t know her name.
‘Why don’t you both have a glass of wine with me,’ I say. ‘I feel a bit strange sitting here drinking all by myself, and anyway.’
‘And anyway!’ says George—I notice back rows of gold teeth. He waves to his wife, a beckoning sign with two fingers together.
It’s the first time I’ve seen the woman this side of the counter, and my first thought is, what an amazing beauty she must have been. She has a long face and, though the skin around her eyes is hatched with fine lines, there’s no grey in the dark hair that’s pulled back behind her ears. She walks towards me with the stoop of someone who’s worked long hours, but then straightens after she puts two more glasses on the table, and holds out her arms. She’s tall, and her invitation to embrace is made with her arms in a semi-circle, gracefully, like a ballet dancer, with her head on one side. Then I see how very beautiful she is. I stand up, and she kisses me on both cheeks and says something like ma-brook. There’s a hint of thyme on her breath.
‘I’m Ruth,’ she says.
‘I’m Veronica.’
‘Veron-ica.’ She repeats the name carefully, nodding her head. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’ She pauses, and seems to try a smile, a question-smile, unlike the one from the kitchen door. ‘Like the saint. With the wiping.’
So—filling in the outlines. Little bit odd. I neither agree nor disagree about the saintliness.
Sometimes it’s impossible to tell the difference between manners and feeling, and maybe sometimes there isn’t any.
Then we sit and clink glasses. A great-grandchild? My day seems to have piled up behind me and the pressure of it’s pushing a babble of words out, goodness knows how many are making sense. And yes, they know of Nigel, and their children were all born in the old hospital before it closed, will he be all right?
But a great-grandchild! The only one?
I step around the possibility that wee Ange may make up her own mind about that. Both George and Ruth have tiny gold crosses around their necks, and there was the Catholicky Saint Veronica moment.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Incredible.’ We all take another sip. I try to manufacture a laugh around ‘great grandmother’, but it doesn’t work, not naturally, anyway. George gets up and sorts out the last lunch bill. Then he swings the ‘closed’ sign around on the restaurant’s door.
>
‘It’s okay,’ he says, ‘you are not a hostage!’—and I see his wife wince. Not just my attempted jokes, then.
‘And you?’ I say. ‘Six? Grandchildren?’ We go on stumbling over the generation thing. ‘How is that possible? Two young people like you.’
‘But you know, the present is very short,’ says Ruth. She holds up her wine glass—only a half, barely sipped. ‘We have wine in Lebanon three thousand years before Jesus Christ. So, maybe five thousand years now. Here only since Mission—what, maybe one hundred years?’
Her husband is shaking his head, and I’m shaking mine too, but on the inside, without moving it. I’m waiting to see where this is going. With any luck, not far.
Ruth puts her hand on mine. It’s warm, and dry, and just a little rough. There’s a fresh sticking-plaster around her little finger. The nails are trimmed short, and she has a very thin gold wedding band on her marriage finger.
‘Here, everybody is young, like the wine,’ she says. ‘Even the beautiful old people, like us.’ Her mouth makes a small, twisting grimace on the word ‘old’. Then it smiles again, but with irony, or sadness. She takes a decent mouthful of her wine. As the swallow flexes her long throat, she tips her head back and closes her eyes. Her eyelashes quiver against her cheeks. Then she opens her eyes very wide and gives my hand a pat. ‘And thank you for the help. For the Nablus.’
I’m thinking Ruth may be a bit crazy.
The Nablus Middle Eastern Restaurant is one of the recommendeds on Bay Tours brochures (‘Good value for money, authentic Middle Eastern, vegetarian dishes a speciality’), and I’m getting that, as well as being crazy, Ruth may be the brains and George the gold-filled smile here. But the brochure’s not why we’re having the glass of wine, and it’s not entirely why she’s thanking me, of all people.
‘So why Nablus?’ I ask, hoping to steer us away from time and age, and the quiver in Ruth’s eyelashes.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘both our families came to Lebanon in 1948. From Palestine.’ George makes a tisk-tisk sound and puts his hand on her cheek, which she matches with a hand against his neck—those long fingers, pushing up into his hair. Their touching is intimate but as if they hardly know they’re doing it. ‘From Nablus,’ she says, turning her mouth against his palm.