The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  The other thing happened on Christmas Day itself. We had just come in from early milking, Dad and I, because of course Mum had things to do in the house on Christmas morning. We had hardly had time for a Merry Christmas to each other, when there was a knock at the door. On the doorstep stood a man, forty-ish, I would say, brisk and rather smooth-looking.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ my father said.

  ‘Uh huh, compliments of the season,’ said the stranger, a bit on the impatient side. ‘Got a phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I use it? I’m heading home for Auckland, but my car’s broken down outside your gate. I got held up yesterday and should have been home last night to the family. Took this short-cut through the hills and here I am, a pretty sort of mess. I’ll have to rustle up a garage.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dad equably. ‘Come right on in.’

  We all took ourselves off to another room, so as to look as if we were not listening, but of course we were. So would everybody else in the valley; there were ten on our line and they would all have seen him arrive in a cloud of red dust at our gate. We heard the man ring his family, reversing the charges, and tell them what had happened. There was a long silence after he had explained, and he sounded very unhappy when he said goodbye. Then he rang our local garage which Dad had told him to try. We heard him describe the problem with his car a couple of times over, very patiently, and then start cursing. Mum pursed her mouth up, but after a moment the man quietened down.

  In a few minutes he came out and told us that the garage refused point blank to come until after midday.

  ‘Can’t say I blame them,’ my father said. ‘It’s eleven miles out here, and not much of a road as you’ll know by now, and I expect Les wants his Christmas dinner too.’

  The man glared. ‘Look.’ My mother jumped into the breach. ‘You can’t sit in your car all day, Mr …?’

  ‘Dalgliesh.’

  ‘Mr Dalgliesh. Stop and have a bite of Christmas dinner with us.’

  ‘Well …’ He looked awkward: I could see it was difficult for him either way. He’d have looked dumb sitting in a hot car all morning while we watched him. ‘If it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Of course it’s not.’ My mother sounded quite excited by this sudden change of plans, although Dad gave her an odd look.

  Then we forgot about the stranger for a good half hour, because we had our presents to open. Well, nearly forgot, for first my mother had to take me into the kitchen to give me one of my presents; a book called Sex for Teenagers, which I could gladly have done without. When I had promised to read it, we went back in with Dad and Mr Dalgliesh, to see what was in the other parcels. A box of Evening in Paris face powder for me, my first, and a blouse my mother had made me while I was at school. It was a strange dark shade of green, which she said was the colour of my eyes when I was happy, and nothing would do but that I went into my room and changed into it there and then. Dad got a book he had been hankering after, ever since he had first borrowed it from the Country Library van. Mum had managed to pick it up in paperback on a trip to town. For her there was a set of glasses. I cannot think why we had chosen them, for they were whisky glasses — and I mean glass — and they never drank whisky, but you would have thought we had given her the Queen’s Crystal.

  I saw Mr Dalgliesh give us a funny look, not pity exactly, which was lucky for him. Rather, I’d have called it patronising, except that there was something kinder at the back of his eyes, and at the same time he glanced out the window at his car in the roadway. I didn’t think much about that until afterwards, when I was going down to the shed to collect some more cream which my mother was sure we would need, what with the extra, although I knew that there was already an abundance of good food in the house.

  As I came up the slope, which veered between the road and the house, Mr Dalgliesh was shutting up the big shiny black Buick and winding the windows down a little way, so that the crackling Northland sun would not be stored inside it while he ate with us. In the back of this classy car, I could see, piled right up to the back window, stacks of parcels wrapped in Christmas paper.

  ‘I guess your family will be awfully disappointed that you didn’t get home,’ I said, walking over to him. ‘I mean … no Christmas presents …’

  ‘There’ll be plenty without these,’ he said off-handedly. Then he looked at me and I could see his look softening. ‘How old are you Jeannie?’

  ‘Fifteen, nearly sixteen, and I’m going to business college this coming year.’

  His hand strayed uncertainly towards the parcels and I knew he was going to offer me one, so I started to run. He caught me up near the house, and gave me a rueful little smile of apology, and after that we all seemed to get along fine. He talked to us on our terms, and didn’t blink an eye when Dad offered him some of our sherry out of the new whisky glasses. By dinner time we were all laughing at his clever stories of business life, and he could turn a joke on himself as well as the next.

  And dinner, even without Rufus, was excellent. Our visitor didn’t have to pretend to enjoy it, because he really did. The peas were as young and tender as Mum had hoped, the potatoes sweet melting white marbles that exploded between our teeth, and she had done us proud with the trifle and masses of clotted cream.

  My parents always became nostalgic at Christmas time, it was a matter of form. Mum’s eyes would go big and shiny, and together they would remember people and events before I was born, or contort memory into the shape of my early childhood. It was a world that shut me out, and sometimes embarrassed me, but this year I had an ally. Mr Dalgliesh and I caught each other’s eye like silent conspirators, sitting in opposition, till the spell broke and the conversation flowed pleasantly between us again. Nevertheless, the strain began to show by the end of the meal, as he glanced uneasily at his watch. As one o’clock drew near, he could hardly keep his eyes from the road.

  About one thirty, Les, the mechanic, did come out from the garage, and by two Mr Dalgliesh’s car was ready for the road. We were glad for his family’s sake that he was on his way home, but we were sorry to see him go.

  We waved and waved until the big gleaming car had disappeared in the dust.

  ‘There,’ my father said. ‘If there’s one way I like to spend Christmas, it’s helping some lame duck on his way.’ I smiled to myself, thinking of Rufus. He put his arm around my mother, and she nodded happily.

  While they stood there dispensing charity from the middle of a dusty road, I crept inside. Like children of the war, who all their lives see God as militant man in a soldier’s uniform, so, too, as hard-up children do, I saw Father Christmas saving the world, as the rich man at the feast.

  Of course I didn’t really expect to find money on the mantelpiece, and when I did put my hand on five pounds, it shocked me. I opened my mouth to shout, started to run, and then I saw them walking towards me, faces still alight.

  ‘What is it Jeannie?’ called my father. As I came closer to them, I felt foolish, wanting to throw at their feet good things and treasure, and knowing all the time that they would be hurt by the stranger’s gesture, and would give it back to me for my ‘start in the world’. So I slid my hand, holding the starchy note, into my pocket.

  ‘It was a lovely Christmas,’ I said.

  But that was a long time ago, and now every Christmas I see lame ducks lurking under big shiny exteriors and wish that I were as good as my parents were, or that my life, like theirs, was simple enough to contain all that I saw.

  But instead I flap my wings with futile little gestures and, like Rufus, head off into sunsets which turn to night before I am there.

  Flower Man

  THE MAGNOLIA TREE towered high above the church hall casting skeleton shadows in the winter, and providing deep green shade in the summer. In the late spring foliage, blooms could just be seen, heavy and exotic, the colour of sour whipped cream.

  From where we lay in the coarse kikuyu grass at the end of the school playing fields, we cou
ld glimpse the tree. It was November, the air stripped clean ready for a Northland summer, and the sea not far away, sang promise.

  There were four of us, Phyllis, Geoff, David and myself, whom they call Magog, though my name is Marguerite. The nickname is apt though, for I have a peculiar mockery of a face, Grock-like, but it’s never been the hindrance it should have been.

  Geoff smiled at me and I rolled over to hide my face in the scratchy claws of the grass. I adored his pale, ugly face with its receding forehead and stubbly red eyelashes. Perhaps it was because neither of us were beautiful, but I thought he was brilliant too. I was right. Now a well-known surgeon, he is a clever and extraordinary man.

  ‘What’s the matter, Magog?’ he said. ‘Is it maths again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘Poor old Mag-nag,’ he said, twisting my name still further, so that I ached, because I loved the way he said it so much. Phyllis and David would be smiling indulgently, I knew, even though they liked each other a lot, so I kept my face down and let them think what they like. Phyllis has always been like that, rather cynical, but now a superior sort of woman, who men like because of her brains and her dry intelligent humour, and thin, magazine cover looks. But she never gets involved. Yesterday she came to see me, with a present for my latest baby, and seeing her is what brought me to thinking about all this. I felt a mess when she came, because I was dripping milk through my blouse like a fat animal, but she looked at me intensely over a cup of coffee which she had brewed for herself in my impossible kitchen, and said through the smoke between us, ‘God you’re lucky, Magog. Bloody lucky, bloody lucky, lucky, lucky,’ repeating everything as she always had.

  ‘Why not you?’ I said, and she had muttered something which was supposed to be sharp and modern, but didn’t quite come off, about always wanting to talk business when she was supposed to be doing bed drill. That about sums Phyllis up though, and neither of us laughed because it was awful for her, us both knowing it was true.

  ‘You should quit worrying about maths,’ said David. This was his way, quieter than the rest of us, and reassuring. He had deep-set eyes and crinkly hair, from his mother, the woman they called ‘the mad Dally’. I never thought of her that way. Once I called on David on a Saturday morning to collect some homework, and she was sitting by the fire, rocking gently, her great bulk heaving and sighing, and her black moustache rippling over a smile every time David turned to speak to her. When he passed by her chair her hands would reach out to touch him, his arm, his hand, his body, with love. A big, broken-hearted Yugoslav who had never been accepted by her husband’s solid, third-generation New Zealand people, and rejected by her own. No wonder she loved David.

  I sat up and we all stared at each other gloomily. To quit worrying about maths was so clearly ridiculous, despite the soothing nature of David’s remark, that we did not bother discussing it.

  It was, of course, an unending dilemma for us. No students had ever been so haunted by the desire to pass exams, or so we thought. We were at a district high school which served a small farming community on a northern reach of sea coast. Little talent flowered in Waituna, certainly not academic, nor, to any great extent, pastoral. The area had been established by pioneers whose descendants saw small value in change and, latterly, inadequately financed dreamers had moved in with them, occupying small pockets of land which the others had considered too rough to bother about. David’s parents, as I have said, belonged more or less to the first category; mine wholly, and Phyllis’s to the second, while Geoff’s father ran a wayside store outback, between the village and the next major shopping centre. They had a few cows as well, which Geoff milked before and after school, putting out a billy of cream each day, which annoyed the truck driver and brought little return.

  The four of us believed, with the immense satisfaction of the young, that we were special. Although the school had prepared University Entrance candidates for many years, no one had ever passed the examination, nor had anyone ever hoped that they would do so. This year, the four of us were thought to be good, and we were nurtured and cherished by our teachers like beings apart. It was this feeling of being different from the rest of the school which threw us so constantly together. Our conversation became too precious to share with other people, and I think we were passably disagreeable.

  But we were also unusually high-spirited, and this was not surprising either. We believed in ourselves, and longing to leave this indifferent countryside, we saw too, within ourselves, the means of our escape.

  Each morning we left from homes between the hills, places of love without aspiration, sometimes, as with Phyllis’s parents, inhabited at first with hope, later with despair. A few of the young people had had the internal resources to leave, a hard-won School Certificate, almost inevitably allowing them to pass thankfully into the shelter of teachers’ hostels, where they hung indifferent careers upon this convenient refuge. But University Entrance offered more, the bigger chance, the better prospect, and we thought we had it made. Well, most of the time, unless afflicted by the doubts produced by mathematical formulae or French verbs.

  Until the advent of Rad Barclay, that is, who had solved many things.

  Take French. Before he came, we had sat in a long room, with an ageing French mistress, a relic of some long-ago girls’ school, who made us sing Claire de Lune each morning before the lesson began. Geoff’s and David’s voices had broken and Phyllis and I would weep helplessly with uncontrolled laughter, and the old mistress, teaching only to supplement her pension in seaside retirement, would suck her false teeth so that they clattered on her gums. At the beginning of winter she left to tend her geraniums through the cold, and in her place came Rad, bringing with him visions not of a gaunt moon in an echoing room but a France of wine, sun, indelible blue skies and Scott Fitzgerald. Verbs became our catch tunes.

  He was always in our thoughts, and when we thought about him he usually appeared, which meant that he was usually with us.

  So that while we sat there, looking at each other, he did appear. I lifted my head and saw his trousered leg.

  ‘What’s the matter, Magog?’ he asked me, too.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, hugging my breasts, and my body full of spring fever, and longing and the need for everything to be over and I on my way, yet confused with wanting them all to be with me for always.

  ‘There is,’ said Phyllis. ‘She’s worried about maths, and she’s mad, mad, mad.’

  Rad knelt beside me. ‘Poor Magog,’ he said. ‘You want a cloudburst, and much colour, and a palette and easel upon which to express it all, and instead you see rows and rows of figures, and little three-sided boxes, and spotted algebraics. It’s not fair.’

  This was his appeal to us, a kind of multi-hued way of talking, and a capitalisation of the most obvious parts of our natures. He was very clever.

  It didn’t seem fair either. As he knelt beside me, he ran his fingers on the ground, his flesh digging through the grass to brittle dirt, scratching his nails against jagged pebbles. His hand looked oddly out of place there, against the earth, he was not of our place, or our origins. He might stand against a curved horizon, and walk on salt-soaked marshland near the sea shore with us; he might go to the sea, and peer at the violet smudges of the islands on the edge of distance, but in doing so, he reminded us rather, that he was not at home here.

  He was from the city, a student teacher, which made him very young, maybe not many years older than any of us. His skin was pale sepia, and his lips, warm and full, betrayed his beginnings, or some of them. He hated them bitterly, deeply, believing that to be neither one nor the other, was a sin of parents against children. Yet his Maori ancestry was very slight, and it was to it that he owed his looks. Of all of us it might have been expected that he and David would be the closest, sharing a bond of mixed race. It was not so. David, the quiet one, trusted him less than the rest of us. Well, neither Geoff, nor Phyllis, nor I mistrusted him at all. With our French at his command, and our En
glish splendid but orderly, we had much to thank him for. Teachers had to be versatile at Waituna District High, and so he taught us history as well. We thrived and that pleased the Head, and relieved him, for though bright, and precious in our hopes, we were also a burden on the system.

  So we saw a great deal of him, and he, being lonely, turned more and more to us, talking, always talking, full of ideas, and hate too. Hate for systems, hate for tradition and, quickly, hate for the rural class strait-laced little township, trailing through the valley towards the hills where the farmlands lay.

  It was hot enough to swim at Labour Day that year, and all five of us had gone to the sea. On the sand, by sunlit feathers of the silver spinifex, we lay, and Rad gave us coconut oil to rub on his back, then we rubbed it on each other and the liquid turned to golden globules in the midday sun. Rad talked about girls he had been with, and books he had read which were banned and should not be.

  We listened, peeling oranges, sucking the pips, and Geoff flung peel on to the sand. I jumped to retrieve it, and Rad said sharply, ‘Leave it.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, stopping on my knees to look at him. ‘It’s untidy here.’

  ‘I know. Leave it.’

  ‘It spoils the beach,’ I argued.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, beginning to be angry. ‘It will rot, or the gulls will take it away. Tonight, tomorrow, a week, it will be gone.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So you jump up when we sit talking, enjoying ourselves, thinking naughty, naughty, someone is spoiling the view. You expend energy on things that don’t matter.’

  I had picked up the peel and, wrapping it, placed it back in my bike satchel. He watched me, coldly, and turned on his stomach, away from us, silent. The others looked at me, then him, not knowing which one of us to resent.

  That was when it really began, the continual tug between us, between the things that we had been taught to believe did matter, and that which Rad said did not.