The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Where are you going?’ he calls, wondering if she’s dropping off on him.

  ‘To pick this,’ she says with delight, indicating the heather.

  ‘Weeds,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she calls, ignoring the disparaging tone of his voice. ‘It’s a sort of wild heather I think.’ She is breaking the flowers off with one hand and holding them close to her in a bundle with the other. ‘Come on — help me.’

  ‘Oh … all right,’ he says, humouring her. He wonders if any of the truckies will pass them. Be his luck if any of them recognised him. They break the stalks together for a few minutes. The air is sweeter as they move away from the road, as if the shallow pocket of land has captured and held some of the early morning air and is holding it in reserve for them, even though the sky is almost cobalt blue above them now. As she bends to the flowers, a sparrow, one in a cloud disturbed, lands fleetingly on her bent shoulder. Her body goes instantly rigid with concentration at keeping still so it will not fly away. Her lips hardly seem to move, she is like a ventriloquist yet still she manages to speak to him. ‘You could kill it,’ she says to Clarrie.

  ‘Then I would have to kill you,’ he replies and she measures him out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  The bitch, he does not get her game and straightens so that the bird flies away. There is a glint of triumph in her eyes. She continues to pick.

  ‘It’s nice here,’ she remarks.

  ‘What are you going to do with all this stuff?’ Their arms are full. ‘I don’t know. Don’t you have a place I can put it?’

  ‘What d’you mean, a place I can put it?’

  ‘Well wherever you live. I suppose you live somewhere.’

  ‘Supposing I don’t want it?’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘What’ll the wife and kids say?’

  ‘You haven’t got a wife and kids,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not important how I know. You haven’t, I’m right aren’t I?’

  He says nothing.

  ‘Look. Look Clarrie,’ and she points away into the edge of the scrub. ‘Rosehips.’ It’s true too, they glow like a bright torch amongst the dingy scrub.

  ‘You don’t want them things.’

  ‘Those things,’ she corrects him absently as she descends upon the rosebush.

  ‘Here, who are you?’ he says, uneasy, not for the first time this morning.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She flashes him a white enigmatic smile from out of the pointed tan face.

  ‘You’re mad,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, yes maybe I am.’

  ‘How d’you know I’m not married?’ he persists doggedly.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, are you or aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why go on about it? What’s the big deal? We’ll put the flowers in your room.’

  We. He is assailed with a blush. His vision is so perfect, so clear, so … intricate. She must be able to see it inside his head. It is hard to tell what she sees, she seems to see so much. So it follows that she has followed through one complete carnal manoeuvre with the same precise vision as he has. He waits to be rebuked. Nothing happens.

  ‘You’d come back to my room?’ he manages, sure that he is croaking.

  ‘Help me get the spikes off this branch,’ is all she says. ‘This rose bush must have been here forever.’

  ‘Would you?’

  She sucks her teeth at the exertion. ‘They’re tough … ah, there … but so beautiful. Oh Clarrie, just look at them. Strings of beads … Indian beads.’ She hollers at the sky. ‘Whaa-oo, I’m an Indian.’

  ‘Bloody nuts,’ he mutters.

  ‘Yeah, nuts, that’s me.’ She is childlike, holding the sprays of rosehips apart so that they do fall like beads, bright flowing orbs, the mellow autumn is beginning all right. They blur before his eyes, bright coral; it is so beautiful a day. He remembers that rosehips have something to do with babies, they are nourished by the juice, wonders if she knows, this girl-woman, a baby’s tender mouth suckling, he is fraught with images, why doesn’t she seem to understand?

  ‘Look, and bullrushes too,’ she cries.

  He sees that under the scrub there is squelchy oozing mud.

  ‘Watch out,’ he says sharply. ‘That’s swamp.’

  ‘It won’t hurt me. What do you think it is? Quicksand? I don’t disappear that easily. Not unless I want to of course,’ she adds, as a kind of obligatory warning. Her toes squelch with mud, she bends and rolls up the ends of her jeans.

  ‘Ah come on, get out of that muck,’ he says.

  ‘See the mud oozing up through my toes. Darkness, there’s darkness down there.’

  ‘Come on,’ he repeats, frightened.

  ‘We should be getting back to the road. I left the ute unlocked.’

  ‘Ah, there I’ve got one.’ She crawls out of the bushes, triumphant. Although he hasn’t got much of an eye for flowers he has to admit that her bouquet is assuming proportions of splendour. Here comes. Here she comes. Here I come. Oh beautiful Aileen. Oh Aileen small brown paws silver nose doggy crutch oh Aileen …

  ‘Let’s sit a while,’ she says.

  ‘Sit?’

  ‘Oh of course, you have to lock the ute. I’ll wait.’ And she squats in the rough grass.

  ‘Lock it,’ she commands, and stretches out like a cat arching to the sun.

  He’s worried about the ute. It took him a long time to come by it. It’s a good one, it only had forty thou on the clock when he bought it, he cleans it till it sparkles every week and sometimes gives it an extra brush around the chrome; he wouldn’t exactly call the ute a religion but it is, yes, significant. He recalls how they walked everywhere when he was a child. And a walking target is a slow target, an easy target. He finds himself scrambling up the bank, frantic to check that all is well with his machine.

  It is standing there, immaculate, shining as when he left the Roadhouse, the aerial standing proud, lovely oh lovely vehicle oh lovely woman let us ride together down the desert.

  Will he find her when he goes back? Does he deserve to? He slips the key into the locks, makes it all as tight as a drum and much safer. And leans against his vehicle for a moment. Is he mad? This whole thing could be a strange madness. He could get into the ute now, this minute, and start driving away.

  But of course he goes back to her, and she’s just sitting there cross-legged on the straggly harsh grass, staring away into space.

  ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asks, sitting down heavily beside her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replies, quite still. There is mud on the ends of her jeans, it is drying out nicely in the sun.

  So he sits beside her quietly, not trying to touch her, though he wants to get through to her, to communicate with her. He is not sure whether or not he might have missed the opportunity. ‘They’re nice flowers,’ he says tentatively. She nods, non-committal. ‘Autumn tones,’ he tries again. It’s a term he has heard used in his mother’s sitting room. Later of course, when a term of uneasy respectability set in to his home. He reflects on that, almost but not quite missing a flash of distaste across her face as if he has said something ill-bred. Imagination. It’s very hot here in this gully, and there seems to be nothing she wants to do or say. But something has stirred in him.

  ‘How did you know?’ he says sharply.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About me. You’re too young to have known people like my family. There’s hundreds of people with names like me who never went through what my folks did.’

  ‘Pure coincidence. I knew someone like you.’

  ‘You could have been wrong.’

  ‘I know,’ she says lazily, and smiles under heavy lids at the scramble of colour lying on the ground beside her. ‘It was a guess I suppose. An educated guess though, wouldn’t you say.’

  ‘Where did you meet — this person?
Like me?’

  She reacts badly and is not sure how to cover it. ‘Let’s go,’ she says abruptly, and jumps to her feet.

  He is annoyed, he wants to sit on with her, and worse, he has failed to make contact. They drag themselves, glistening with sweat, up the bank and silently he unlocks the ute for her. She climbs in and pulls the door shut, and sits almost cowering in the corner. He is afraid when he sees her like that, and does not know what he has done, afraid too that if he tries to comfort her he will do more damage. They drive off picking up speed quickly, he opens the window to let out some of the stored-up heat in the vehicle. There is nothing to say and he turns on the radio looking for music. In a minute the cab is full of rock and he glances at her and she returns the look, appreciative, his silence has won her back. They pass the great tunnelling system that the Italians have come to New Zealand to build.

  ‘I wonder what it is like down there in the dark,’ she says.

  ‘I hear it’s pretty tidy, not like coalmines or anything like that.’

  ‘But still, there can be slips and falls can’t there?’ she says.

  ‘Yes. It’s not for me.’

  She shivers and wraps her arms around herself, pulling an imaginary cloak about her. They roll on through the heart of the North Island. The countryside has given way to mile after mile of dry tussockland, dotted with stunted weed-like pine trees. Sudden winds even in this bright day whip banks of dirt into dust whorling into the air. It is a barren land strung together with mile after mile of telegraph wires. They take the long hairpin bend and then start to climb. They are travelling in a true centre of the earth; away to their right, across an arid waste, rear the mountains, Ruapehu touching a blue sky with the smallest cap of snow like the hat that the Pope wears. Aileen has relaxed now, and she turns the radio off without asking but it is all right for Clarrie who has had enough of the noise too. So they travel on, mile after mile in utter silence, and her silence has become a peace to him. He has no idea where they are travelling to, but he expects that he will know when they arrive at the place they are going to, that it has been predetermined for them. He believes, simply, that they are going somewhere.

  The day is now well advanced, somewhere towards midday judging by the sun, the air very clear. There is a long dip into hills and they ride down into these, and it’s when they start to climb again that they see that there is something odd, some change coming. A car coming over the crest of the hill has its headlights on full.

  Clarrie flicks his lights on to indicate to the motorist that he has his lights on and the man at the wheel waggles his hands, thank you.

  ‘Idiot,’ says Clarrie, breaking their silence. ‘Wonder how long he’s had those on?’ But then another car appears and it has its lights on too.

  ‘Perhaps there’s a traffic cop ahead. Radar,’ says Aileen.

  ‘They’d have just flicked them on and off in that case.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

  And now they are at the top of the hill themselves and ahead of them there is a strange burnished light. Within moments the image of the sun has blurred. Clarrie and Aileen glance at each other anxiously.

  ‘How dark it’s getting,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a bit queer.’

  ‘Sort of a — storm cloud d’you think?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he says trying to assess it. ‘Spreads a long way, looks more like smoke.’ He sniffs the wind, leaning his head at the open window. ‘Yeah, that’s what it smells like.’

  The world is blocking out around them. ‘How strange now,’ says Aileen, her voice strained, yet excited. ‘How total. The sun’s nearly disappeared.’

  ‘I expect it’s just the desert fires,’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean? What are the desert fires?’

  ‘Well they have burn-offs, see.’ He is relaxed now that he knows what it is, can explain things rationally. For a moment he has been frightened. It is just the unknown, everybody is scared of the unknown, he tells himself.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What for what?’ he says easily.

  ‘That they burn things. Why do they do it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Must be things in the way. Look, shall we go back? It’s not much fun driving into this.’

  ‘I want to go further,’ she says in a fierce tight voice.

  ‘But it’s getting darker and look, all the cars have their lights on now.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re close to the flames.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I do. Ah look, there they are. Pull up Clarrie. Oh please Clarrie pull up.’

  He pulls into a cutting at the side of the road, and the flames are indeed close to them, bright darting tongues, apparently unruly yet seeming to know where they are going. An army truck lumbers by and doesn’t attempt to shift the travellers on. Clarrie supposes that if they are in any danger they would have been told to move. But the intensity in the air is unnerving. He felt good a moment ago, but now he’s not so sure. And he has a curious feeling that maybe this is the unknown destination. He looks at Aileen and her face is strange, set, yet somehow glad.

  ‘Now we’re here,’ she says. ‘In the very heart of darkness.’

  ‘That sounds weird.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of the heart of darkness?’

  Now he knows he is afraid and he tells her. ‘Who are you? You scare me. You’re not what you seem to be at all are you?’

  ‘What do I seem to be Clarrie?’

  ‘I — I dunno exactly. But it’s something, not like anyone else I know.’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘You said I was, back there.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Am I like you?’

  ‘I told you, you’re not like anyone I know.’

  ‘But how well do you know yourself?’

  ‘You are mad,’ he says savagely.

  ‘Ah yes, but then so are you.’ It comes out as a flat statement of fact.

  ‘Here, what the heck —?’

  ‘You’re afraid aren’t you? But it doesn’t matter any more. Only you can’t accept that so you just keep running.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be me. Always a bad time.’

  ‘I know what it’s like to keep on running.’

  ‘Oh yes, and where did you run from?’

  ‘People who were cold and distant … self seeking, they only noticed me when they played spiteful games against each other.’

  ‘Who was that then?’

  ‘Are. My parents.’

  ‘I see. So you ran away from your posh boarding school or something and took to the roads.’

  ‘It wasn’t as simple as that. Oh yes there was that too, but that wasn’t where I went when I first started to run. No, I ran away into hospitals for mad people. Places where they lock you up. Mental institutions. But you see at least people take notice of you then. Parents and things.’

  Clarrie feels his hair start to crawl down the back of his neck. ‘You pretended to be mad?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh no. I was. I am.’

  ‘Then why did they let you out? Or are you on the run from them?’

  ‘No. They let me out because I pretended to be sane.’

  ‘And then?’ He looks around them. Perhaps the fire will engulf them in a moment, but it continues to march in tidy lines across the earth. He has a momentary vision of it catching them and the petrol tank exploding. Yes, he would be noticed. He would go to the sky in harness with the sun.

  ‘They forgot about me again.’ Her voice is desolate. ‘So I ran. And I’m still running. But it’s good to find someone who’s mad too.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘This morning I looked at you and I saw a running man. A mad man. Mad. You were mad.’

  ‘Yeah, so you made me mad …’

  ‘No, not like that. Not like being mad at someone, but someone who was mad. Is mad.’

  ‘I reckon we
should be getting back. This smoke’s getting to me.’

  ‘We are in the bowels of the earth. You can only come to the darkest place before you start coming back to the light.’

  ‘Look at your eyes streaming with all this damn’ smoke.’ He starts to cough.

  ‘Why don’t you say it?’ she says softly.

  ‘I’ve never been in no nuthouse,’ he says roughly.

  She bursts out laughing but he looks at her angrily. He believes they have gone beyond laughter. ‘You’re in the world,’ she says. ‘That’s the biggest nuthouse in the universe.’

  ‘I’m scared of you,’ he whispers.

  ‘Are you? Are you Clarrie?’ Her voice has become an insistent little chord again, getting at him, pushing him. The flames are fanned by a gust of wind, they flare up in an unruly flash, forgetting that they are supposed to be under control, that there is an order designed for their progress. ‘No,’ says Clarrie wildly. ‘No, for Christ’s sake no. I’m scared of myself. There, are you satisfied, I’ve said it.’

  There is a pause. The flames are retreating as suddenly as they appeared. The dense pall of smoke is lifting its ceiling higher above them. ‘Yeah, I said it,’ he says quietly, wonderingly. ‘I’m scared and as nutty as hell.’

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful? The first time you say it.’

  ‘I dunno. Dunno what to think.’

  ‘The smoke’s hurting my eyes,’ says Aileen. ‘Let’s go.’

  Before, this sudden reversal would have made him angry, but he is not angry. He starts to say that that is what he has been trying to tell her but there doesn’t seem any point. He turns the ute around. For a moment he wonders how Margie’s getting along without him.

  The day has aged Margie. She is limping in her high heels. Her appearance suggests that she has walked all day and her smell is stale with sweat and cheap perfume. She sits out the back of the caf waiting. When she walked in Della had asked her what she thought she was doing, as if she didn’t know and Margie said, well it was nearly time for her to come on again and what was wrong with being early. Then dropping her defiance she says, ‘Isn’t he here yet?’