The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘What are you doing here?’ says Della, sharp as razorblades. She’s just about had enough for one night.

  ‘I thought I might pick up a hamburger,’ says Aileen carelessly.

  ‘And I thought you went on a truck passing by not long back.’

  ‘Did you? But I didn’t, did I?’

  ‘He thought so. Clarrie did,’ says Della.

  ‘He did?’ But it is feigned surprise.

  ‘You meant him to didn’t you?’

  The girl is quiet, measuring Della. ‘As a matter of fact … I did.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘He wasn’t ready to come with me. I thought he was, but then I heard him in here letting that guy ride him, and I knew he wasn’t ready to come.’

  ‘Mr Riddle has a business to run,’ says Della defensively.

  ‘I know that,’ says Aileen. ‘But it was more than that. It was like he’d learnt nothing.’

  Della doesn’t know what it is the girl has tried to teach Clarrie, yet something tells her Aileen could be right.

  ‘Perhaps some people never learn,’ she says.

  Aileen sighs. ‘I’ve thought of that. That’s what scared me.’

  ‘On the other hand he’s gone to look for you, surely that’s something.’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  ‘He left her,’ says Della, indicating Margie. ‘We won’t let him come back.’

  ‘Oh Margie,’ says Aileen softly. ‘Ah … but you wanted him to go away and leave her.’

  ‘You knew that?’ says Della in real surprise.

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘You talked to him about me?’ says Margie.

  ‘No. We didn’t mention your name once.’

  As they talk Della is quietly assembling food. She is looking at Aileen with wonder but something approaching approval as well. ‘And you, what will you do?’ she asks, draining some chips and putting them into a paper bag. She flips a steak on the grill and throws coleslaw on to a bun.

  ‘Oh — who knows,’ says Aileen. ‘Someday, travelling north or south, who can tell, maybe I’ll put up my hand, and a ute’ll draw into the side of the road and it’ll be him. Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘Here’s some food,’ says Della. ‘You better take it eh.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Aileen. ‘I could use it.’

  ‘Good travelling, lady,’ says Reuben as the door bangs like a trap behind her.

  Della turns to Margie. ‘Please Margie,’ she says. ‘Go now.’

  But again she hasn’t reckoned on Margie’s strength. ‘No. I’m staying right on here and doing my piece just like he always telled me to do.’ And her feet have new life as she moves, briskly donning her apron and pushing a cap down on her flowing mane of dyed hair.

  ‘Well then,’ says Reuben, ‘I reckon your kids’ll be wondering where you got to this evening Della.’ For the dark has descended and there is a night wind singing up the wires from the desert.

  ‘You’ll be all right then?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Reuben.

  ‘We’ll work out a new shift in the morning.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  Della takes off her apron and cap. Margie turns to her with a puzzled frown. ‘Tell me Della,’ she says, ‘when was it he went, what year … I forget …’

  ‘Your father?’ says Della carefully.

  ‘No … Clarrie … 1957 did you say?’

  ‘Oh, about then maybe … time passes so quickly Margie.’

  Margie reaches under her apron and picks out a coin from her skirt pocket. She walks around to the jukebox and selects a tune. The machine lights up, the arm lifts, the song begins. Margie walks back to the vat of fat and picks up a slice, expertly skimming the surface of potato particles. Helen Reddy is singing about ‘Delta Dawn’ again, ‘… and did I hear you say, you’d be a-meeting me here today …’ Margie’s face has a quiet smile playing over it, and nobody, but nobody in the world, could tell you what Margie is thinking.

  At the Lake so Blue

  WHEN I WAS ASKED if I would go in the bathing beauty contest I said I would think about it. To tell the truth I was flattered. It also seemed to be exactly the kind of thing my parents would disapprove of me doing.

  How it happened was like this. I had been going around with two girls called Linda and Sugar (Sugar’s real name was Janet) all summer. This was the end of 1958, turning 1959. Linda was a stocky blonde with a pert face. She was engaged but her fiancé was working in the South Island, because there was big money in the meatworks down there at the time, and he was saving to buy them a house; he wanted her to have everything in it right from the start. It was as if she was married, but not quite. Sugar was her old schoolfriend and was going to be her bridesmaid. I thought she was the prettiest girl I knew.

  I had other friends but they were doing different things at the time. Some had just got married and others were away on overseas travel. I was a librarian and I wasn’t meant to be thinking about either of these activities because I had promised my father I would pass my library exams. I never meant to make a promise like that but I hadn’t kept my first two jobs and I supposed I should try hard at something. I was better at being a librarian than I expected, and before I knew where I was two years had slid past and my qualifications began to mount up. It would be a shame to throw the course away before you were finished, my father said. When you’ve gone so far.

  It was considered a brainy sort of job, and I thought of myself as having a brainy face, which was not a great comfort when I was with Linda and Sugar.

  They were great dancers though, and Linda had won a rock’n’roll jamboree once with her fiancé before he went south. Sugar was a brilliant water-skier. She said the club was looking for new members and she could get me in if I liked.

  You see, this was the other side of me to the librarian who was cultivating a slightly starchy manner behind my glasses. I loved to dance, and to swim. Rhythm at night, and the water by day. It was my idea of heaven. I believed, honestly believed, that if you went out after the best of all possible worlds, you could get everything you wanted.

  Lindas fiancé had said she wasn’t to give up dancing just because he wasn’t around, so long as she stayed with ‘the girls’. This was where Sugar came into it. She acted as a chaperone. And that was where I came into it, because Sugar said, it was all very well for her to go around with Linda but it cramped her style a bit always being with an engaged girl. Sugar said she wanted to have fun forever.

  We teamed up with three boys who were on holiday. They were called Smitty and Miles and Bozo. Smitty was a basketballer and he was off on a scholarship to the States in the New Year, and Miles and Bozo were both engaged to girls in the town from which they came. They were having a last good time together before they all got on with the serious business of life, although it was clear that the other two were worried about Smitty, as well as proud of him. It was hardly a job he was going into, they said, it takes some chaps longer to get things out of their systems than others.

  When they suggested we go around with them it was agreed that it was an ideal arrangement for everybody, nobody wanted commitments and, really, it was just laughs we were having; laughs for a summer. We were having fun.

  Nobody actually asked me what I thought about it but I trusted Linda and Sugar’s judgement. It bothered me a little that I spent most of my time with Bozo but in return for the good times it seemed churlish to complain. Besides, he owned the car in which we all travelled. This was considered a bonus for me, because I got to sit in the front. And I never got left behind.

  Miles and Smitty were very cool, and Smitty, as befitted a basketballer, was immensely tall. People noticed Sugar and Smitty and Linda and Miles, in couples, as they strolled through the carnival that ran all summer in town, whereas Bozo and I got lost in the crowd.

  No matter. We danced. We swam. We went to the Blue Lake. The Blue Lake is one of two beautiful lakes that lie in a basin beside each other close to the town.
The other is the Green Lake. The Green Lake is, as its name suggests, coloured like an emerald, and like the jewel, which is said to be unlucky, so is the water of that lake not to be touched for fear of retribution. It is a sacred lake.

  But the Blue Lake, only a narrow isthmus of land away, shines with perpetual blueness. The ski lanes are crowded, the beaches are clotted with children and their parents. Station-wagons sit side by side as far as the eye can see. There is a smell of barbecues and suntan lotion in the air. So it is now, so it was then.

  I swam, though I had trouble learning to water-ski. I was what they called a duck’s arse skier because although I could hang on to the tows all right I could never stand up. Nobody seemed to worry much, although they laughed. I got an even suntan while the rest of them streaked over the lake behind the boats with the water creaming up around them.

  What did I think about? I don’t remember. Summer days / summer daze.

  I always hesitate when it comes to describing my mother. She is alive still, a spry, if arthritic woman, who has lived half the time in the suburb where I live now, but knows twice as many people as I do. I think she was shy, in her way, of the brawny young men who occasionally wandered through the house. I say occasionally, because she and my father were more formal with my friends than their parents were with me, and I didn’t always ask them home.

  They offered cups of tea, and conversation. My father also believed that entertainment should be provided. Some of the things he came out with made me think I would die of embarrassment.

  On Saturday afternoon, in the last week of the year, the sky turned grey and drizzly at the lake, and a small chill wind played round our wet legs. We tried to resist the change in the weather. Linda sat and squashed pimples on Miles’ back, and Smitty and Sugar threw stones in the water. But it was useless; we weren’t having fun. Someone suggested that we all go to my house which was the nearest to the lake.

  My father was a patriotic man. The war was like yesterday to him. He admired valour. When he talked of brave deeds he got a strange high catch in his voice as if it would break with sorrow at any moment. I wished he wouldn’t be like that; now I hear my own voice at times, just the same, though from different causes. It is to do with being swept with emotion.

  He was, he said when we arrived that afternoon, about to play some records. I introduced him to my unsuitable friends. He cast an eye over them and decided to make the best of things. He played all of My Fair Lady. Linda and Miles went outside and smoked, even though it was raining quite hard by then.

  My father sang a few snatches of the ‘Ascot Gavotte’.

  When the record was finished, I called out brightly, ‘Rain stopped out there?’

  ‘It’s still going, can’t you hear it, duffer,’ my father said. ‘Now listen to this.’ And his eyes were shining and his voice caught, and I remember this with love, though I hated him for it then.

  He played both sides of the dramatisation of Paul Gallico’s novel The Snow Goose while I looked at my feet, and stole glances at the others; they were pulling faces at each other. At the end of side one Miles said politely, ‘D’you mind if I use the phone, sir?’

  I knew he was organising an alibi for them to get away.

  ‘No phone,’ said my father triumphantly.

  ‘There’s a wait with the Post Office,’ I said in quiet desperation. We had been living there for four years.

  ‘Who says?’ roared my father. ‘I don’t believe in ’em.’

  ‘It’s not actually raining any more,’ said Smitty, and everyone stood up at once.

  ‘D’you have to go?’ said my father. ‘We’ve had such a nice time.’

  As we rounded the hill above the lake in Bozo’s pink and silver Chewy, the sun shone, suddenly and mysteriously bright again. Nobody was saying much to me, and I knew that it was because they did not know what to say. I guessed they were wishing I had stayed at home.

  A few hardy individuals had stayed at the lake until the rain cleared. They sat in the sun, steaming as they dried out. Sugar’s friend Frank, who owned the boat used for towing the others when they were skiing, was still there. We sat around him, lighting up. Linda and Sugar and I slid our tops and shorts from over our bathing suits so we could lie in the sun while the action was decided. Our skins shone with a gloss like brown velvet. Sugar and Linda were stretching out close to each other, a little way away from me. I couldn’t find it in myself to blame them.

  ‘So who is going to be Miss Blue Lake?’ Frank was saying. New Year was approaching and after that would come the Queen Carnival, which raised money for worthy projects in the town each year. All sorts of groups put up a beauty candidate to contest the crown. Miss Blue Lake often won. There was an aura about Miss Blue Lake.

  ‘Why not you, Linda?’ I said, aware that I was currying favour.

  ‘I’m engaged,’ she said in a prim voice. But I could see she was not displeased.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘I’ve done that. It was boring.’

  ‘Why not you?’ asked Frank, and he turned to me.

  I thought he was sending me up. But he wasn’t.

  The others turned too and I could see them considering the matter.

  ‘Great fig-uah,’ said Miles.

  ‘I’m too short,’ I said.

  ‘Heels. Put you in stilettos,’ said Frank, his enthusiasm mounting.

  I saw Sugar and Linda glance at each other. They could see which way things were going.

  ‘What are your measurements?’ Linda asked.

  ‘Thirty-four, twenty-two, thirty-four.’

  Bozo whistled.

  But Linda said, ‘I could lend you my padded suit.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘Judges don’t like padding. They can always tell.’

  ‘The heels’ll push her forward a bit more,’ Sugar said. ‘We can teach you to walk. It’s easy’ She got to her feet and did a catwalk along the beach. Smitty rolled his eyes and yelled, ‘Whee-who-ah, steady there, girl,’ and everyone applauded.

  ‘Well that’s settled,’ said Frank.

  ‘I’m not a blonde,’ I said.

  Frank’s stomach had an unfortunate way of rolling over the top of his swim shorts. He tucked it into place. ‘Neither was Sugar,’ he said.

  There was a brief prickly silence. Sugar said she was Spanish; I’d heard she was a closet Maori. That’s what my father said.

  Sugar smiled then, as if there was nothing wrong. ‘What would your parents say?’ she said, addressing me.

  Bozo giggled.

  It was Smitty who spoke to me kindly. ‘D’you want to do it?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you want?’

  Later that night we went dancing. We started at the Ritz Ballroom. The Ritz had a vast glossy floor: the hall doubled for the A & P machinery show in winter. The band sat above the floor on a stage. The Master of Ceremonies (we called him the Emcee) announced the dances: Gentlemen, take your partners for a foxtrot. A valeta. The supper waltz (keep the supper waltz for me; it meant you got to sit with a boy for the interval). Ballin’ the Jack. A maxina. All the way through to the last waltz (keep the last dance for me).

  The Ritz. It was the place where nice girls told their mothers they were going, and did. Or the place not so nice girls told their mothers they were going to, and left and went down to Tama.

  After two foxtrots, I said to the others, ‘Let’s go to Tama. Shall we? Why don’t we go down to Tama?’

  I saw Sugar and Linda glance at each other, uncertain. I thought, you bitches. I knew they went to Tama. But they didn’t know for sure what Miles and Smitty and Bozo would think.

  But, ‘Let’s go,’ they said, and we went to Tama.

  Tamatekapua. I sat beside a cabinet minister who came from the same town at dinner the other night. ‘I used to go to Tama,’ I said, giving him a sly look between dessert and coffee. ‘So did I,’ he said. ‘Yes, do you remember the steak and eggs for supper? Oh yes, those were the days.’

  We took off our shoes to en
ter the meeting house. Outside, the air was thick with sulphur fumes, inside the smoke was so thick you could hardly see the other end from the door. The lights were always low in Tama. Sometimes they jerked and died altogether. Bodies flew beside the tukutuku panels, feet stamped out a rhythm, the blind saxophone player Tai Paul’s music rippled up and down at the front of the small platform where the band played. To one side of Tai Paul, a young man with his hair slicked back was singing his heart out; his name was Howard Morrison.

  ‘Heavenly shades of night are falling/It’s twilight time/Deep in the dark your kiss will thrill me/It’s twilight time …’ Yes, Howard baby, now that’s a song. And over in the corner, I get to see Johnnie Gin and her man who is also called Howie: he tosses her around his waist, his hand flips her over, her legs swing straight out, feet connect with the ground, his feet slide apart, her body shoots through them like an arrow, his fingers release her as she springs back up again, they weave apart, she waggles her fingers in the air, holds them to the corner of her eyes, and pulls them out straight at him, although they are very round and wide.

  I went over to her. She didn’t smile. ‘How’re you going?’ I asked her.

  ‘Okay. You having a good time then?’ She flicked her head in the direction of the others.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  ‘Hear you’re going to be a beauty queen?’

  ‘Eh? Oh I dunno.’

  I offered her a smoke. She took it but she didn’t look as if she was enjoymg our conversation.

  The others seemed to be just standing around. I can hear those men now, Miles and Bozo anyway. I’ll bet they say, that place had atmosphere.

  After a while Smitty began to dance with me. He danced as if he was playing basketball. Then the others started dancing, and soon I was with Bozo again.

  The summer streets of our small provincial town. It is a city now but when I pass through it I see the same things I saw then, even if some of them are gone. It is a town that has been full of hotels as long as living memory. Prince’s Gate still stands but the Grand has gone, an immense, elegant, pale grey building, now burned to the ground. The Palace was bright pink, it is ‘tidied up’ now. The railway station used to be approached by an avenue of trees; now no trains come and the buildings are concrete block afflicted by graffiti.